Soulwoven (6 page)

Ryse’s eyes lingered at the bottom of the hill, on the fog-drenched slums she’d grown up in. “I don’t know,” she said. She couldn’t suppress a shiver. “I don’t have anywhere to go.”

“You could stay with me.”

“I can’t.” She looked up at him, as he stood there with the moon over his head and the wind in his face offering her something she could never take. He’d done the same thing more than once, when they’d been kids.

“They would find me.” She sighed. “And they might find you too. You and Cole will have to be careful,
Lit
. Maybe go with your father out to the country or something.”

Litnig frowned, and Ryse stood up. She could already feel the soreness of the climb mounting in her legs.

“Come on,” she said as she started up the path again. “The cave isn’t far ahead.”

She needed to rest, and she needed to think.

Because if the Temple wasn’t going to take the destruction of the heart dragons seriously, she had no idea who would.

SIX

Just after dawn, Quay Eldani squatted beneath the vaulted ceiling of his solar and stuffed an old leather backpack with clothing that didn’t belong to him.

Miniature paintings by great Eldanian masters hung from the walls, alive in swirls of color and thick-textured paint. Doors to his apartments stood ajar to his right and his left. The glass-paned entrance to his balcony was open, and through it, he saw dark reds, oranges, and purples splashed across the bottom of a thickening band of cloud to the west.

The clothing at his fingertips was drab, thick, woolen. It felt coarse against his skin compared to the silk and cotton to which he was accustomed.

Next to Quay, a red-haired, freckle-faced five-year-old stood and watched him pack.

“You can help, if you want,” Quay said, and little Colin Galeni, wearing the green doublet of his house, knelt on the tiled floor and started stuffing white shirts and brown trousers into the pack. Two short swords in worn, frayed sheaths lay next to the clothes. So did a wooden case full of maps and a purse stuffed with coins.

“Did the washerwomen ask you why you needed the clothes?” Quay asked.

Colin nodded.

“And what did you tell them?”

The boy didn’t look up from his task. His eyes gleamed green in the low light. “That I wanted to play slum man.”

“And what will you say if they ask for them back?”

“I lost them.”

Quay smiled and tousled his cousin’s hair. “Good man,” he said, and Colin beamed.

Quay sat back and let his cousin stuff the clothes into the pack. His stomach was unsettled.
Had been since he’d woken up that morning.

He was the Prince of Eldan, and he had seen the dragon in his dreams.

He rubbed his chest and grimaced. Not just seen it,
felt
it—a darkness that had sat on his heart and smothered him until he’d woken gasping for air.

“Quay?”

The prince looked down and found Colin sitting cross-legged on the floor, the clothes forgotten.

“Why are you leaving?”

Quay rubbed his cousin’s head again. “Who told you I was leaving?”

“I’m not
stupid
.”

The prince smiled and stood. “Come here,” he said. He walked to a stone table in the center of the solar, upon which rested a charcoal drawing of two dragons eating one another’s tails. Quay lifted Colin up by the armpits and set him on a chair.

“You see those?” the prince asked.

Colin nodded.

“They’re called the heart dragons, and last night they were broken.”

“Who broke them?” Colin had fixed his eyes on the dragons. He did that, sometimes, when he saw something new.

“Necromancers.”
Or so Aegelden Elpioni tells us.

“Why?”

Quay frowned. It was a good question. “They’re crazy, or they think they can control the dragon and use it for something.”

Colin turned half-around in his chair. “My father says the dragon isn’t real.”

Quay rolled up the drawing and slipped it into the map case near the pack.

“He said he heard it from Yenor’s Highest himself,” Colin continued. The boy climbed down from his chair and walked toward the two swords by the pack.

“Don’t touch those,” Quay said, but Colin didn’t listen. He had one halfway out of its sheath before Quay reached him and slid it gently back in.

“When you’re older,” the prince said quietly.

Colin nodded and walked toward a tall shelf of books and maps. A small, green volume, probably Cantani’s
Wilderlengs and the Second River of Souls,
had fallen out of place. The boy straightened it up against its neighbors.

“Your father is a smart man,” Quay said. “If Yenor’s Highest says the dragon isn’t real, then it’s not.”

Colin was squinting at the spine of another book. Its title, inked in wide gold letters, read,
A History of the Dragon Sherduan and the Fall of Mennennar.

“Can you read that?” Quay asked.

The boy shook his head.

“When you can, I’ll lend it to you.”

Colin nodded again, and Quay went back to the pack.

“Quay?”
Colin was looking at the swords again. “You didn’t tell me why you’re leaving yet.”

With one hand on a scratchy set of trousers, the prince stopped and frowned.

I cannot send you,
his father had said.

The walls in the palace had ears. It was all he could have said. But Quay had felt the brief goodbye in the touch on his shoulder, read the rest in his father’s eyes:

I cannot send you, but you must go.

“Grown-up things,” Quay said.

Colin screwed his face up and stamped his feet. Quay shook his head and went back to packing, but when he looked back a moment later, the boy was still pouting.

“Tell you what,” Quay said. He squatted so he was eye-to-eye with his cousin. “You tell Misha everything I said to you today, and don’t forget a thing, and maybe she’ll tell you why I have to go.”

He wanted to take Misha Galeni with him. His wiry, sharp-eyed cousin was clever. She was loyal. She would understand what he was doing, and she could help him.

But her father would never let her go, and if Quay took her without permission he would be followed. So he would have to rely upon others instead.

Colin’s face lit up.
“Really?”

Quay nodded. His cousin bounced in place for a second, then frowned again.

“How will she know?”

“She’s your big sister. She knows a lot of things.”

The prince looked out at the sun again. It was rising toward the clouds. His friend would already be on his way, or close to it. Quay carried the pack, the purse, and the swords into his bedroom and set them down behind the door, where no one would be able to see them from the solar.

“Time to go,” he said to Colin when he returned. The boy kicked a chair by the stone table petulantly, and Quay dropped down to his level again. “You promised,” he reminded him. “What did you promise?”

Colin looked at the floor. “That I would leave when you told me to.”

“And?”

“And not a word to anyone.”

“Except for Misha,” Quay said. “Off you go then, and tell Thomas and Bors that they’re dismissed.”

Colin nodded and walked to the door. When he reached it, he paused, fingering the handle and scuffing his feet on the floor.

“Quay?” he asked again, and the prince raised an eyebrow in response. “Be careful.”

The door opened and shut, and then little Colin Galeni
was
gone and Quay took a deep breath.

Careful,
he thought.
As if it’s all that simple.

His father was going off to the isle of the necromancers to die. The only reason for Aegelden Elpioni and the temple he controlled to lie about the history of the dragon was to provoke a confrontation with the necromancers and use it to make a play for the throne.

Quay didn’t often feel afraid. Coolness was his birthright.
The strength of the line of Eld for generations.
It had led them through rebellion, infighting, war. When his enemies grew emotional and made mistakes, the blood turned to ice in an Eldani’s veins. It had to. There was no other way to rule.

But Quay didn’t have a better word than fear to describe the uncertainty gnawing at his stomach.

The solar door opened, and a white-mustached man wearing a plumed helmet stuck his veiny nose through it. “Beg your pardon, my prince, but Master Galeni said…”

Thomas.
Of course it was Thomas.
Tall, wiry, ancient Thomas Palaceborn, who’d been sworn to Quay’s service on the day of his birth.
Who’d held Quay’s hand while his mother had died and slipped him candies and pastries when his father had punished him
unnecessarily.
Who’d once struck an official of House Pendilon square in the face on his behalf and suffered twenty lashes and a night in the stocks as punishment.
Thomas who was ever so much smarter than he was supposed to be.
Thomas who wouldn’t want to leave him on a morning like this one.

“I know,” said Quay. He crossed the solar and laid a hand on his guardian’s black-clad shoulder. “I asked him to. My father needs you more than I do.”

Thomas’s mustache drooped into a frown. He reached up with one gloved hand and twirled an end of it, as though carefully considering what he ought to do next.

Quay couldn’t take Thomas with him. The palace had rarely been more dangerous, and he would sleep better knowing his father had Thomas, at least, to confide in and trust. And Thomas was old, long overdue to put down his halberd and take up a steward’s platter and carafe.

What Quay had in mind was a task for the young.

Thomas released his mustache. His blue eyes narrowed. “My prince—”

“I’ll be fine,” Quay said. He gave Thomas’s shoulder a shake. “Trust me.”

Thomas stared at him for a moment longer. He closed his eyes. He sighed.

And then he bowed.

“Yes, my prince,” he said.

Thomas withdrew, and Quay heard him talking to Bors as their footsteps moved down the hall.

Yes, my prince,
he’d said. He always did.

Quay’s father had been caught in a trap ten years in the making. The alliances that kept him on the throne had been unraveling since the Eyeless Plague had taken Quay’s mother and brother and the riots that followed had taken most of the king’s friends amongst the Seven. White-haired Aegelden Elpioni and black-hearted Aesith Lord Pendilon had come to power during the blood of those riots, and they’d never forgiven Molte II Eldani for letting them happen. Quay couldn’t save his father, and he couldn’t save Quay.

But Quay could save Eldan.

The memory of his dream filled his mind. He’d seen Eldan City in flames, smelled soot and blood and fire, heard his people wailing in terror and pain. A ribbon of black shadow with a mane of fire had hung in clouds of smoke above the carnage, smiled a tiger’s grin, and
whispered,
I am coming
.

He had woken to the news of the heart dragons’ destruction.

Quay stood with his hand on the door, breathing slowly. A ring of silver and white jade hung from a chain around his neck, cool and slick against the skin of his chest. It had been a gift from his mother in a time long past, when the world had been simple and bright, and the title of Prince of Eldan had sat on his brother’s broad shoulders. Quay had a portrait of the two of them on his wall. The artist had captured the atmosphere around their deaths as well as their likenesses; they sat on red velvet chairs, sad-eyed and wearing cloth of silver, strong and regal.

Watch over me,
he asked them.

A semicircular balcony of gray stone hung from his rooms over the river valley that had nurtured his family for generations. For one last time, he strode through the airy curtains that covered it and gazed down Palace Hill. The wide, white-walled complexes of his cousins in the Seven Houses bustled in the predawn light. The homes and shops of well-to-do merchants and craftsmen packed between belched
smoke
from tall chimneys. The blue-gray streak of the Eldwater was hidden at the heart of a long snake of lingering fog beyond, and the crooked hang of Sentinel Hill fought the rising sun on the river’s far side with the slums stretched hopelessly below it.

A curtain of rain swept toward him across the river.
Fresh, clean rain.
Not too heavy, not yet. He welcomed the first drops as they hit his skin, and then he retreated to the shelter of the balcony arch. He stood, and he watched, and he waited.

What he was about to do would be difficult. The kindness in him, the warmth, would have to be kept under lock and key to serve a greater good. It wouldn’t be pleasant, but he would be strong. He would be cold. He would be hard.

Yes, my prince,
his people would say when he pushed them, even if not in as many words. It was what they’d been taught for their whole lives to do.

It was the first day of Openmonth. Soon, his closest friend would be coming to see him. Then the journey would begin.

He was Quay Eldani, and he would do what no one else could.

SEVEN

Cole woke to the hard leather poke of a boot in his rib cage and pulled his blankets above his head. He could hear the hiss of rain outside, but it was warm under the blankets, soft and warm and nice and comfortable…

“Up, Cole.
Now.
I’ll
be needing
your help with the levy again.”

The boot dug into his torso just below his bottom rib, where it hurt enough to make him lose his breath. He coughed, and it was removed.

Grumbling and rubbing his side, Cole rolled out of bed and found himself staring at the stubble-covered, unshaven face of his father. His nose throbbed dully.

One of these days,
he thought.
One of these days I’ll leave for good, and you’ll miss me when I do. I swear it.

Cole’s father frowned and left the
bedroom,
and Cole lay back on his bed and let out a heavy sigh. The thatch above him was starting to break and hang down. It would need replacing soon, and the job would probably fall to him and his brother.