The Cedna (Tales of Blood & Light Book 2) (21 page)

M
y
arrows flew
straight and true; anger fed my precision. Sterling huffed in annoyance as hers went wide of the target.

“Pull all the way back before you release,” I advised.

She nodded, but before she notched her next arrow, she asked quietly, “Do you think he liked me?”

“Who?”

“Taran Iverian, from last night.”

“That silly boy?” I said. “You can do much better than him.”

“Stesi said he couldn’t bear to look at me.”

“Don’t listen to your sister! When she says hurtful words to you, hold your head up and show no weakness.” I nocked my arrow and let fly in one fluid sweep. The arrow snapped perfectly into the center of the target.

“Well said, Miseliq.”

I turned at the deep voice. Xander Ricknagel stood behind us. “Nice shot, too.”

I almost dropped my bow.

“Papa,” Sterling squeaked.

“Show me, Starry,” he said.

“You—you want me to shoot?”

He nodded. Sterling nocked, lifted her bow, drew, and let fly. Her arrow sang true, hitting the target just left of center. A grin cracked my anxious face.

“Well done, Starry!” exclaimed Ricknagel.

She beamed as she set her bow down and inched in her father’s direction. Ricknagel lifted an arm, and Sterling tucked herself under it. He caressed the flyaway wisps of her hair.

“You’re not angry, Papa?”

“Of course not. Ricknagels are warriors. Why shouldn’t you be too?” He kissed her head and let his hands fall to her shoulders. “But your mother wishes to see you. She has important news. Run along to her. You know better than to tell her about ... this.” He gestured at the archery gear.

“Thank you, Papa.” Sterling skipped across the yard in the direction of the house, enlivened by her father’s praise.

I headed towards the target to pull the arrows free. Ricknagel waited for me, Sterling’s bow in hand, one broad, square palm outreached for the arrows I had collected.

“You are a surprising woman, Miseliq.”

I placed the arrows into his hand. “Sterling told me she wanted to learn,” I explained. “I asked your men to teach me. After I’d learned the basics, I taught Sterling. You needn’t worry. We are discreet.”

“I am not worried. If anything, I’m glad. Sterling…”

I glanced up when he did not finish. “Sterling needs this,” I concluded.

“She does. Thank you,”

“No thanks are required. I need this, too.”

“I meant, thank you for seeing my daughter. Few people do.”

We placed the bows in the racks and the arrows in their quiver in the storeroom east of the shooting range. Ricknagel stopped me before we could leave the dark confines of the place. “Why do you care about her?”

“I know what it is like to have people look at you and whisper behind their hands.”

“But you are not—you have no blemish.”

“There are many kinds of blemishes,” I said. “Those you cannot see are usually worse than those you can.”

Ricknagel digested my words. “You mean your magic? You were treated differently because of it?”

I nodded.

He gazed at me searchingly, as if to scry my secrets with his eyes. “I’m going north to Queenstown in a few days with Jenesis and the girls. After that we travel directly to Galantia for the royal Marriage Brokering. I would like you to come.”

“Why?” I blurted, startled. I had no fond memories of Queenstown.

“Sterling likes you. She needs a companion, a handmaiden. More, she needs a friend. Lady Malvyna has a son, you know. We are considering a match for Sterling. This trip is to see if they suit. Stesi will make a match at the Prince’s Brokering, but Sterling … is different. I’d prefer to have someone who understands my Sterling as her chaperone. Moreover, Malvyna’s mages are known to be unscrupulous. I’d feel better knowing someone with powerful magic was chaperoning my daughter at all times.”

Blood pounded a warning in my ears, but I wanted this; I wanted to face Malvyna, to hurt her as she had hurt me. Our unfinished business had lingered too long. It wasn’t only the House Entila mages who were unscrupulous; it was Malvyna herself.

“What about Stesichore?” It struck me as odd that the younger daughter would be paired off before the elder, and that Xander sought only Sterling’s protection.

He took my question differently than I meant it. “We’ve set our sights higher for Stesi. Culan Entila, Malvyna’s son, is only a bastard.” Ricknagel leaned forward and lowered his voice. “If all goes well, Stesi will marry Costas Galatien himself.”

Of course. No bastard for his precious Stesichore. “I see.”

“So, will you do it? Will you serve as my daughter’s companion?”

I considered. What if Malvyna recognized me? True, I had only been in her household for one day, but I had recognizable, unusual hair, and none of it had greyed while I bided in Vorisipor.

“I am not sure that is a good idea,” I hedged.

“But you and Sterling get along so well. It would ... give her confidence, if you would.”

I sighed. “When I first left Gante, I was shipwrecked on the Entilan coast and one of Lady Entila’s men found me. I was not treated well in her household.”

“You
know
Malvyna Entila?” Ricknagel’s voice held disbelief as much as surprise.

I laughed darkly. If he only knew. “When I arrived at her house, I possessed nothing but the clothes on my back. She wanted to claim me as a slave, but I escaped before—”

“Good gods! She’s always had a vendetta against Ganteans—one can understand, after what they did to her father.” Ricknagel paused before we stepped into the shadow of the house. “This encounter you had with Malvyna—it must have happened years ago.”

“Oh, yes, but—”

“I doubt she will remember you. She will never even know you are Gantean if we dress you in Lethemian attire. I’m asking you, as a friend to my daughter, even perhaps, as a friend to me. Will you accompany Sterling?”

A friend to Xander Ricknagel? Here was something new. Interest pricked. “I’d need a new name. Miseliq is unmistakably Gantean.”

“Sterling can pick you a name. She’s good at that sort of thing.” His clear blue eyes gazed at me with a hint of admiration. “Though I worry about your hair.” Ricknagel hovered a hand above the mess of my auburn braids.

“I can cover it like an eastern woman,” I said. “I often wore headscarves in Vorisipor.”

“Very good,” Ricknagel said, nodding. “Then I shall arrange for you to accompany us.”

S
terling stood
before the looking glass in the room we’d been given in Malvyna’s house, frowning.

“I do not care for him much,” she said as she fiddled with necklaces, trying on one after another.

“Culan Entila?” I was trying to decide how best to avenge myself on my half-sister. How could I hurt her for how she had hurt my people—and me? I was woefully underprepared. I’d never imagined such a chance as this.

“He’s cruel.”

“Oh?” I glanced up at Sterling. She looked all wrong, again. None of her dresses suited her.

“I saw him kick his mother’s lap dog.” She threw down a necklace. “I look terrible.”

“That color washes you out.”

“What does it matter? I have a giant red smear across my face. Stesi’s right. No one wants a disfigured wife. Papa’s tried so hard, setting up this meeting here before the Brokering. It’s because he knows I will have no success getting a husband in Galantia.”

I opened Sterling’s trunk, ignoring her frustration. Sterling looked best in blue. Her eyes were like her father’s, cool and crisp as the Gantean sky in spring, and the cool tones set off her unusual pale hair.

“Try this one,” I said.

Sterling wriggled out of the green dress and into the blue. I laced the back and gathered all her hair onto her head in a high style.

“What about my eardrops?” Sterling reached for a set of tiny pearls. She had only a little jewelry, and she wore those pearl eardrops all the time.

“Those gems are useless,” I scoffed. “I’d prefer a blade at my waist any day.”

“A—a blade?” Sterling stammered.

“A knife.” I wished I had an ulio. The governor’s ung-aneraq still itched against my inner chest, though it had withered in the moons since I had left Vorisipor. Someday, since neither his nor my bloodlight continued to feed it, it would dissipate entirely. That couldn’t happen soon enough for me.

“Oh, yes, a women’s knife! But I haven’t got a—a paramour to give me one!” She giggled. “Papa isn’t the type to let his daughters use them, anyway. Mama says they are only for loose women. I’ll wear the eardrops.”

W
hile Sterling
and her family ate an intimate dinner with the Entila family, I walked through the vaguely familiar halls of my half-sister’s ancestral home—a ponderous stone mansion, old and drafty. I stepped from the eastern hall into a wide meadow. The grounds were open and overgrown, divided by a dusty trail leading through the meadow and up a hill. Evening had fallen, but a small building at the top of the knoll spread soft light across the path.

I climbed to the building, where I entered a room full of birdcages. Onatos had told me about falconry when I’d stayed at the Alcazar. His family had excelled at it; he’d boasted about his birds and his mews, but he had never taken me to see them, always fearing his wife’s reaction if he spent any time with me in public.

I rubbed at my chest where, even after so many years, I could still feel the ghostly tug of the ung-aneraq that had once bound me to Onatos. Even had I not cut it in two with my ulio, the bind should have wilted and dissolved long ago. Impossibly, it continued to pull.

I passed by the birds and followed the light down a hall, where a door stood slightly ajar. Peeking through the crack, I caught my breath. Perhaps because I had just thought of Onatos, I mistook the man before me, with his inky black hair. “Onatos?” I gasped.

The man whirled. The hair was right, but the face was off, too narrow, the lips too thin, the brows too heavy, the nose too sharp. And yet from behind I could have sworn I saw Onatos.

“What—” the man froze, staring at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said, stepping backwards. “I mistook you—”

“You thought I was Lord Amar.” His dark brows furrowed.

“I—I—”

“I often leave the ladies speechless,” he teased. “You knew the former Lord Amar?”

“I—yes. I’m sorry,” I repeated lamely. And then, “Former?”
What
had happened to Onatos?

The man smirked, throwing the book he’d been holding onto his desk behind him. “You must have had quite a shock just now. Did you imagine you were the one to have found the long-lost man?”

“Long-lost man?” I echoed, my heart pounding in my chest. I pressed a hand over it unconsciously, feeling that old pull, exactly as I had when I’d first seen Onatos on the street in Hemicyclix.

“Lord Amar. Your Onatos, my lady.”

“I don’t understand.” Gods, his eyes! Indigo, deep, and burning tracks over my body. Inappropriate tears spiked my eyes.

“Your Lord Onatos,” the man repeated, taking a step towards me. “He disappeared, without a trace, oh, it must be over sixteen years ago, now.” He kissed his fingertips and blew the air. “Vanished.”

A terrible dread unfolded in my innards. Sixteen years? Had sixteen years truly passed while I’d waned in Vorisipor? And what had happened to Onatos? Had he gone to Gante, as he’d planned? Had he tried to find Leila after I’d left him gripping that bag of jhass on the Queenstown dock? How could he have been so foolish? An image of my mother, holding Ronin Entila as blood poured from his throat into the snow-laced land, flashed through my head. Gante would have eaten him alive.
Please, no.

I could not fool myself, not after the degradations of living in the Governor of Vorisipor’s harem. I had loved Onatos. Without my dreams of him, I’d not have survived there. For those dreams alone—those memories—I still did love him. No matter that he had betrayed me with Malvyna. No matter that I had sliced the ung-aneraq that bound us. Somehow it remained, indestructible even to a blackstone edge, even occluded by the hateful bind that I’d been forced to make with the governor.

The man walked to my side, offering an arm. “Are you all right?”

I clutched at his arm like a drowning woman to a lifeboat. “I—I knew him. Onatos. I knew him long ago. I didn’t know.” I lifted my gaze to meet his, once again startled by the likeness, and the wrongness, of this man’s face. My confusion grew. “I didn’t know he was missing.”

“I find that hard to believe. Why, King Mydon spent the better part of two years with half his army engaged in a manhunt. How did you miss it ... my lady?”

His voice rang with a bitter tang. I removed my hand from his arm and pulled myself together. “I have been away from Lethemia for a long time. What happened?”

The man leaned against his desk, crossing his arms. “Some Amarians say he ran off with the Cedna of Gante. She was his lover, you know.”

I frowned. Whatever else had happened to Onatos, he had not run off with me.

“Oh,” the man went on, lifting a brow at my scowl. “I hope that didn’t hurt your feelings? He was quite the womanizer. Did you not know he had other lovers than you?” His sarcasm dripped from him like rain, and his glare nearly matched mine.

“Who are you?” I snapped. My bloodlight insisted he was Onatos, but my eyes told me he could not be.

“I thought you’d never ask. You may call me Tiercel, and I am Lady Malvyna’s austringer.”

“But you’re Amarian,” I said. “You must be.”

“Most austringers are. It’s the traditional art of our province.”

“And you once knew Onatos?”

“I falconed in the Alcazar’s mews as a youth.”

“You knew him well?”

He did not answer, instead taking my arm and bringing me deeper into his room, furnished only by the desk, a magelight lamp, lit, and a narrow bed, neatly made.

“Now, my lady, tell me what brings you here?”

“I—I serve in the Ricknagel party. I’m Sterling Ricknagel’s handmaiden.”

“But you say you have been away from Lethemia for these many years? Where were you that you never heard of your Onatos’s disappearance?”