The King's Blood (47 page)

Isa mumbled something, for once shrinking upon herself. Kynton began to chuckle, but looked away as the withering glare of royalty fell upon him. Finally, Taban pushed the two aside.

"Yolumdan, çocuk," he muttered in his foreign tongue as his fingers extracted a tiny red vial from his overstuffed coat's pocket. The assassin bent over the girl about six dwarves into her eternal fairytale. Scarred fingers worked open an old stopper, sealed in wax before any of their father's fathers learned to walk.
 

Carefully pulling open Ciara's jaw, which trembled from a new touch, he poured the entire contents down her throat. While his back was turned, the little pipsqueak finally made a grab for his sword and held the point against the assassin's back.

"What are you doing?" Aldrin demanded, stabbing the sword point into a rather bruised vertebra. Sleeping in the trees wasn't all that much fun at his age.

"Careful," the priest warned, "he's been asking that all day."

"I," Taban said smoothly, rising and turning to look the armed prince in the eye, "am saving her. With medicine that costs more than your entire kingdom, no less," His hand reached out, waiting for Aldrin to return the sword to its proper master.

But the boy didn't flinch. He should have backed down. With nothing but scoundrels, thieves, and Taban around, things could turn south very quickly for a prince who began to insist things go only his way. Despite himself, the assassin was impressed. He'd expected the Ostero blood to be as hard as melting snow.

"The sword, boy, before you hurt yourself."

"I can handle the blade just fine," Aldrin lied.

"Did I say you'd be doing the hurting?" the assassin responded, his glibness turning to ice as the child held his own weapon against him.

In the midst of the Waston standoff, a gasp broke from the ground. Aldrin's steel grip wavered as the only strength he needed in the world came back to life. Taban scooped up his sword before it hit the ground while pushing the prince off. He rolled back, subservient as a kicked dog once again.

Taban dropped to his knees and scooped the girl into his arms. She was lighter than he expected, as her social armor slipped away in the grips of the fever. Without looking back at the Prince he was ordered to keep alive, the assassin continued his trek into the safety of the wilds.

Kynton picked up the discarded medicine vial and sniffed it. A pungent scent of cloves, anise and ethanol tingled his nose. Shrugging, he pocketed it. Fill it with some raspberry jam, rewax it, and he could make a good five Eagles easy.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

C
onsciousness is a wonderful idea in theory, to be awake to experience the world as it shapes and molds around you. In practice, it's a reminder of every failure, a twisted knee for every missed step, a cry for every misplaced word, a pounding in your head for every poorly executed drinking session. Ciara approached consciousness as if it were a wounded animal, shivering in the corner.

Slowly one dark eye slid open, taking in her world. Nothing swooped out to attack her, but a burning from inside her brain suggested it might be best if she closed her eyes tight to forget the world. It felt like hours passed before she tried again, this time her morning punctuated with the all too familiar sounds of bickering in the distance. A grandfatherly hand came down upon her forehead and she tried to bolt upright. This threw her mending brain into her stomach and she staggered up into a sitting position; a familiar blanket slipping off her night gowned shoulders.

"She is awake," Medwin said calmly, belying the joy running through his soul at her unexpected movement.

The distant bickering continued for a moment, "...turn you into a frog!"

"I would give good coin to see that."

"And only a kiss would bring me back."

"Wag your face caterpillars at me once more and I shall singe them off!"

Medwin coughed and announced louder through the open window, "I say, she is awake."

The historian's words swept up through the open window to a surprisingly warm, late winter day. It was nice to finally get the musty smell of molding mittens and sweaty boots out of the caravans.

Ciara touched her forehead, no longer on fire but still slick with perspiration. She had no memory of traveling the days long journey back to the caravans. Or of who dressed her in the floor length gown she had to trade two tales of
Humphrey's Pet Dragon
for. That last thought drifted from her mind as Aldrin burst in, followed quickly by Isa. The boy's grin was in danger of claiming the entire territory on his face. He touched his recently sheared forelock, looking more the spawn of a king than the wandering vagabond of the past few months.

Isa; however, looked the exact same as she scowled and advanced on the patient struggling to piece together the days. "How does your liver feel? Have you seen any small birds or yellow stars floating about your head? Can you only speak in Elvish?"

"Oy!" Bits started to fall back into place as that priest appeared, still in his blue robe but with a pair of necessary pants added to the mix. An entire wardrobe change was hard to find in the woods. "Leave her be. The humors have to reset."

"I'm fine," Ciara tried to croak out but it became little more than the gasp of a rock rubbed against a washtub.
 

The patient forgotten, the witch rounded on her mortal enemy, "She could have vital information, it's been centuries since anyone has been administered an elven health potion. This..."

"Is a series of questions that can wait," Medwin said calmly, trying to take stock of the newest additions to their little family. "For now give the dear some space to recoup and revive."

Kynton lowered a small butter knife he pulled from one of his pockets and glanced sheepishly at the witch, who folded her arms. "After you, oh lumpy lotus of my heart."

Isa scowled, weary of the priest's near constant flirting. His freedom opened up not just the floodgate, but placed charges all around the religious dam, forcing anything with a XX chromosome into a courting flood. With Ciara out, that pretty much left the witch his only victim.

Isa pulled an ornamental robe closer to her shoulders, despising what still remained of the waning cold and stomped out of the smallest of the caravans, Kynton hot on her heels. Aldrin grinned at the patient struggling to sit fully up, and ran his hand through his cropped hair. A few stragglers from his "presentable to an army" haircut clung to his palm, which he then wiped across a weary jaw.

"I was, I didn't, you were..." he spent stolen moments, when not worrying, working on his speech upon her rejoining the living, typically while Isa shot sparks at the priest's ass (which only encouraged the man). There'd been flowery scripts, and heartfelt comparisons to just how accurately he couldn't survive without her.
³⁴

As the girl's bemused eyes, straining from the lingering coils of fever, fell upon him, all his hard work transformed into, "You got better."

Medwin snorted, but tried to pass it off as a cough, which was joined by a true one from Ciara complete with phlegm. "Boy," the chancellor said quietly, "it would be best if you join your colleagues, as well."

"Oh, yes, of course," his head nodded and he turned towards the door.

"Hey," Ciara called back hoarsely from her sick bed. As the prince glanced over his shoulder at her, she said sincerely, "Thanks, for not letting go."

The edges of her mouth picked up lightly, but it was enough to make Aldrin grin like a loon who found his favorite invisible spoon. With his eyes locked on the girl, the future king of Ostero walked right into the wall. Medwin rubbed his temples as the boy scrambled for the door, embarrassment burning up his freshly exposed neck.
 

With his home back to the acceptable two, Medwin clucked and rose, hunting for a pot of warm water, "For the entire time you were out, the prince hardly left your side."

"That's...nice?" Ciara said measuredly.
 

Medwin smiled as he handed the girl his patented anti-cough concoction, proud of her lukewarm reaction to such undying loyalty it'd cause most dogs to declare it "a bit much." Ciara drank down the liquid honey spiked with "the really good stuff we don't tell Mitrione about."

Her head felt like she rose too quickly after hanging it upside down over long. The edges of her vision were a little out of focus, but rubbing her encrusted eyes seemed to help. "What happened?"

The chancellor returned to his seat, worn deep from long nights as he'd pass his hand over her nose checking for breath. "That depends upon which tale you'd wish to hear."

"The truth?" Ciara suggested, "seems easier to start with that, then add the lies in later."

Medwin laughed a bit, "Ah, what is the truth but the faulty memories of the person telling the tale? We have a new addition to the caravan."

"The priest," memories of them fleeing from that insane dead city floated back, as well as a few nightmares involving a rotting woman dressed like a grandmother getting her undead head sliced off.

"He has proved an...interesting inclusion to the Historians."

"He joined your order?" Ciara knew almost nothing of Kynton, only exchanged a handful of words, but found it difficult to believe a man would give up one life devoted to an unseeable ideal for another.

"No, we are not bedfellows with the priests. Some of the brothers have expressed personal outrage that any such gods could exist."

"Sounds like a good way to test if you could survive a lightning strike," Ciara said.

Medwin nodded curtly. They'd had to pull more than a few of their fellow brothers from tall trees in the midst of a storm as they called upon a god, any god, to strike them dead. It mostly ended in soggy robes and a nasty case of pneumonia. "But he is a surprisingly learned man of letters, and in exchange for room and board, he has agreed to work for us."

"Oh," her voice fell a bit, a conflicting fear that she'd lost her only place in this entourage to a man she'd willingly dragged along.

"Kaltar's had him transcribing the lost poems of Sidar the Long Winded and his 9,000 stanza ode to Scepticar."

Ciara laughed through her bristly throat, "How's that going?"

"Made it past page three, I hear. Kaltar grumbles that if he doesn't get another 5,000 words before sundown, the priest will be towing the caravans."

"All of them by himself? I hope there is oxen in his bloodline," Ciara said.

Medwin's tone grew cold as he shifted the conversation to disappointment, "And we also seem to have an assassin in our midst."

"Ah, him," the girl looked away from her blind mentor, taking in the walkways cleared to her bed. Where once has been stacks of books, organized by author's favorite beverage, now rested actual floor, buffed and polished as if soft shoes had paced back and forth for hours across them.
 

"He deposited you into the arms of a bewildered Chance before vanishing back into the forest. Our prince said little about him, only that he was a dark protector." Medwin sighed, "I believe I should supervise the extra curricular reading the boy has been getting."

Ciara tried to form a logical explanation for the shadow man that had followed them since the very beginning of their mad dash into the wilds, but the best her brain could come up with was "Well, he hasn't killed us yet. So, knock on wood?" Instead, another ravaging cough gripped her and she sputtered into the bed, as her crushed nose seared with pain at the jolting.
 

Medwin clucked his own tongue upon himself, "I should excuse myself and let you rest as well. We are a few days journey to your Tumbler's End."

The girl smiled to herself. Her chest may rattle like a caravan that Mitrione secured, her nose be as tender as pulverized tartar, and a weakness infest all her marrow, but they were almost there. Almost back to her father and the adults who could solve all the problems of the world. She could sense victory in the air, and it tasted oddly of a very familiar chicken soup.

As she settled back into her bed, weary eyes slipping quietly shut, Medwin muttered under his breath, "Be careful who you put your trust in, little one. Everyone wants more than they deserve."