The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala

The Twelve Kingdoms:
The Mark of the Tala

The Twelve Kingdoms:
Tears of the Rose
(coming December 2014)

The Twelve Kingdoms:
The Talon of the Hawk
(coming June 2015)

The Master of the Opera
*available as an eBook serial*
Act 1: Passionate Overture
Act 2: Ghost Aria
Act 3: Phantom Serenade
Act 4: Dark Interlude
Act 5: A Haunting Duet
Act 6: Crescendo

Published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

KENSINGTON BOOKS

www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

To David

Who puts up with so much

Many thanks to my agent, Pam van Hylckama Vlieg, who knew how to sell this story, and to my editor, Peter Senftleben, who knew to embrace it—and who came up with the perfect title.

As always, gratitude to my long-suffering critique partners: to Laura Bickle and Marcella Burnard, who helped me tease out this story from my tangled dreams, and to Carolyn Crane, Kristine Krantz, and Carien Ubink, who read fast and furiously at the exact moment I needed it most.

Thanks to the Kensington team, especially Rebecca Cremonese, for making this such a special book.

Finally, thanks to my family—especially my mom and stepdad, Dave—for all the love and support.

M
y version of the story goes all the way back to the once upon a time with the three princesses, each more beautiful than the last.

That’s me, there, in the middle.

Of course, the history books usually cite the Assault of Ordnung as the beginning of this story. Or the Siege at Windroven, with all the drama and glory of it. Everyone knows what the books say happened at Odfell’s Pass.

The smell of blood saturates my memories, the crimson circle widening in the snow around his body, just as I’d seen it, over and over in visions.

But the story I want to tell you starts with me and my sisters.

I suppose I’m lucky not to be the oldest and least beautiful. Ursula, however, is our father’s heir and couldn’t care a whit for things such as prettiness. Sharpening her sword, yes. Studying the law books, of course. Always planning her strategies.

I confess, I sometimes envied Ursula’s dedication to ruling. But even when she reminded me that something could happen to her—making me next in line—so I should learn my role like any good understudy, I didn’t do it. If something happened to both our father and Ursula, then the world would have fallen apart beyond repair. It would save nothing to stick my butt on a throne.

Then there’s Amelia. The youngest, breathtakingly beautiful. They called her Glorianna’s avatar when she was born and started composing sonnets to her by the time she turned twelve. Hair the color of sunrise, eyes like twilight, skin like moonbeams. Ursula used to have to shoot me mean looks and tap the cabochon jewel in the pommel of her sword to remind me not to roll my eyes.

The worst part: you couldn’t even hate her for it.

Amelia has always been the sunshine of our lives, inside and out. She’s not the fake-nice of the courtiers and the ladies-in-waiting, either, with that kind of happy chatter that grows louder and louder the more they’re trying to cover their motives. Lady Dulcinor, for example, yakking on every day about her flowers and whether or not last night’s chill will have frozen their petals. When I grumbled over dinner, for the umpteenth time, about her endless, empty-headed nonsense, I found the next morning that Amelia had taken Lady Dulcinor into her retinue and traded me the young Duchess of Gaignor.

When I thanked Amelia, she fluttered her red-gold lashes.

“I’m not martyring myself for you at all, Andi. Dulcinor is kind of sweet. I ignore the sillier things.” She hugged me with pure affection, violet eyes alight with humor. “Besides, it’s worth it to see you happy. Gaignor loves to ride almost as much as you do. I worry you don’t have enough friends.”

See how she is?

We grew up the cherished and protected daughters of the High King of the Twelve Kingdoms, our lives as carefully ordered as all of Uorsin’s lands.

Until the day Prince Hugh of Avonlidgh walked into court.

He was meant for Ursula. She would need an appropriate consort, our father declared, and she should choose one so that Uorsin could see him trained in the skills of government, also.

Hugh, naturally, fell head over heels in love with Amelia.

If Amelia’s strawberry-blond hair meant sunrise to the poets, then Hugh was blazing noon. He strode into the formal audience chamber that day like a prince out of the old stories. His chain mail, studded with rubies, glittered in the light pouring through the chamber’s clerestory windows. The velvet of his sleeves echoed his eyes, blue as the summer sky, and provided the perfect foil for his swept-back hair.

He bowed, low and deep, to Ursula. I swear to Moranu every female in the room sighed.

Ursula looked fine, too—make no mistake. Her ladies wouldn’t allow otherwise. She cleaned up well when she went to the trouble. But Ursula’s beauty is in the clear, firm lines of her jaw, the sharp eyes that miss nothing, her incisive intelligence. She sat at our father’s right hand, while I sat next to the queen’s empty chair on the other side, Amelia to my left. I’d spent pretty much my entire court life one chair divided from my father and older sister, ever since our mother died at Amelia’s birth. All told, I suppose it’s better to have an empty chair than to fill it with someone who might create a bigger rift in the kingdom’s rule than this aching hole of a reminder.

Not that High King Uorsin would marry again. Some said he kept the queen’s throne empty as a reminder that he didn’t need anyone’s help to keep his crown.

At any rate, my point is that Hugh had to look quite a ways over, away from Ursula, then across the King, another large throne, and invisible me, to see Amelia and fall in love. We were caught in the harp string that thrummed between them. Even as he brushed his lips over Ursula’s lean brown hand, strong from sword practice, Hugh’s eyes arrowed to Amelia, his head following with a snap.

The click reverberated through the foundation of our world.

Amelia gasped and clutched my hand.

I knew then we were in for it.

“Absolutely not!” Our father, in full king mode, stormed about his private office. We three stood in a row before his desk, Amelia still holding my hand as if she were the wounded party. Tears ran down her cheeks, likely more for Ursula’s pain than for her own heartbreak. “I cannot approve a marriage between Amelia and Hugh of Avonlidgh. Ursula—how can you suggest it? He’s
your
betrothed!”

“You would have me wed a man who longs in his heart for another?” Ursula’s face was composed, her profile clean and sharp, her clear eyes staring down our father. “You’d consign me to a fate of waking every morning to a husband who doesn’t love me? To watching a beloved sister pine for the man I took from her? My solution offers happiness to two people, while yours condemns three people to lifelong misery.”

“Love is a myth trumped up to make people feel better about themselves.” King Uorsin leaned his hands on his desk, returning Ursula’s challenge with his own hawkish gaze. “I don’t believe in it and neither should you.”

“It’s irrelevant at this point.” With an impatient sigh, Ursula pushed past me and laid her hands on Amelia’s shaking shoulders. “Look at her, Father.”

He did. Grave, King Uorsin examined his youngest. His favorite. We all knew it. Even with her face crumpled in sorrow, Amelia looked lovelier than the orchids in the hothouse.

“I’m so sorry,” she gasped. “I can go away. I could go to Glorianna’s temple—become one of the White Sisters.”

I couldn’t feel my fingers, she gripped my hand so hard.

Father raised his eyebrows. “You’d go study with the priests and priestesses of Glorianna? Take their vow of silence?”

“Yes.” Amelia firmed her soft lips. “I will. It’s just this face. Once he doesn’t see me, Hugh will love Ursula as is meant, and . . .”

“No.”

They all looked surprised that I spoke. I guess I tended not to. Frankly, with both Father and Ursula in the room, I seldom needed to—or
could
—slide a word between their fencing barbs, even if I had something to say. On the rare occasions I did, our father would give me that look, full of some unnamed distaste.

“No,” I repeated, tasting the word, surprised at my own certainty—and at the sudden pinprick headache. “Ursula is right. Rational or not, whatever ‘it’ is—love, infatuation, lust—it’s done. Pairing either of them with anyone else would be an exercise in futility. This is how it will be.”

Even Amelia’s tears stopped while they all considered me. I nearly checked my shoulder to see if I’d sprouted a second head.

The King opened his mouth to say something, reconsidered, and shook his head. He sat. Turned away from the sight of me to Ursula. “What of the alliance with Avonlidgh? The whole point was to throw Old Erich a bone, so he’ll stop his plotting.”

“Amelia is a Princess of the Realm—she can seal the alliance.”

“Erich wants his son—Avonlidgh’s heir—on a throne, not married to a third child.”

“His son would never sit on the throne as High King, even if he married me.”

“Erich doesn’t know that.”

“Better to disappoint him now. His heir married to the most beautiful woman in the Twelve Kingdoms might please him and the people of Avonlidgh sufficiently.”

“Poems and songs aren’t power.”

“Power isn’t the chair you sit in.”

Amelia and I stepped back, fading behind Ursula as she and our father engaged in their familiar back-and-forth. They could argue each other into the floor and frequently did, sitting at the high table into the wee hours, drinking wine and debating politics.

Some less discreet courtiers whispered that my father need never remarry because Ursula made a better queen than any other woman out there—and was the only woman likely to put up with him, despite his many, very temporary lovers. Watching Ursula delight in the debate over what Erich of Avonlidgh might or might not do with his wayward son, I understood that no man could match our father for her.

“This is serendipity, My Lord King,” Ursula insisted, stabbing the polished wood of his desk with a pointed finger. Still in her rose-colored court gown, made of brushed silk in the hopes that it would soften her sharp edges, she should have looked silly. Instead, she burned with magnificence. “Let Hugh and Amelia marry. Make it splendid. Commission an official
Ode to True Love
. We have our alliance. Old Erich will have something to chew on besides you. Hugh and Amelia get to be together. The people get to feel good about what a happy world we live in.”

“And you, my heir?”

Ursula smiled in a firm line. “I will decide for myself.”

The Royal Wedding was a magnificent event—it’s in the history books, too. Pretty much everyone in the Twelve Kingdoms took that entire seven-day off. It was the first Royal Wedding in the High King’s family, since Uorsin and our mother had married before he consolidated the Twelve Kingdoms and established his seat at Castle Ordnung in Mohraya. Besides, a party is a party.

The wedding also coincided with Glorianna’s Feast Day in the spring, which made the temple happy, as they’d always regarded Amelia as their own.

Father, determined to dissolve any hints that this might not be the wedding originally planned, threw treasure at the event. Delegations scoured the corners of the Twelve Kingdoms for the finest of everything. We wore nothing but velvet for the entire week—over-the-top even for the High King’s family.

Really, it all went blissfully. Flags, ribbons, trumpets. The horses smelled of roses and the goats of jasmine.

Amelia, of course, looked spectacularly lovely. Hugh nearly fell over himself when he saw her in all that white lace that a thousand women had crumpled their fingers to make, night after night. Ursula and I waited with our father and King Erich of Avonlidgh on the raised dais in Glorianna’s grand temple, which the High King had built along with Ordnung. Amelia’s ladies escorted her through the thronging crowd on either side of the aisle. Like little pastel fairies, they bustled about her, protecting the priceless lace that snagged on the least little thing. Ursula and I would not attend Amelia for this ceremony, King Uorsin decreed, to celebrate that Hugh and Amelia created a new era between them.

Ursula said that he sought to save our dignity. We might watch our baby sister wed before us, but at least we didn’t have to trail behind her down the aisle. Small mercies.

I doubted that was Uorsin’s motivation, however; rather he wanted to keep me out of sight as much as possible. Which was fine by me. Though Ursula brought it up again, later in the summer, when I mentioned how lovely the wedding had been.

“As if we hadn’t figured out we’ve always been in little Amelia’s shadow,” Ursula observed, taking a break to examine her sword—and giving me a chance to catch my breath. After years of trying to teach me to be a fighter, she’d given up on nagging me to spend more time in the practice yard and settled on weekly sessions to make me reasonably capable. Instead of getting better at it as I grew older, I seemed to do worse. Where Ursula was all strength and speed, I was a clumsy mess. But then, I just needed to keep myself from getting killed before a bodyguard could save me.

“You could never be in anyone’s shadow,” I told her, admiring the complicated parry, turn, and thrust she executed in the air, as if she danced with her sword.

She turned her gaze on me. Her nose might be too hawkish for beauty, her jaw too like Father’s, but those steel-gray eyes looked silver in some lights, keen as the edge of a blade.

“Whereas you’re twice shaded, Andi—is that what you think?”

I shrugged, sliding my sword into the ratty leather sheath, since it seemed Ursula had finished tormenting me for the day. “I don’t try to fool myself, Ursula. Amelia might be lovely, but you are . . .” I paused.

“Trying to choose an appropriate word?”

I wrinkled my nose at her. “So many to choose from. No, I was going to say ‘powerful,’ but that’s not right. Not yet. You have a way of mastering everything and making it fall into place for you, Ursula. I think you’ll be possibly the best monarch we’ve ever had.”

“Faint praise for Father.”

I shook my head. “No—Father brought lasting peace to the Twelve Kingdoms. He will always loom large in history, the first High King. You, though—” I squinted at Ursula, who watched me with a curious look on her tanned face. The sun blazed behind her, hot and bright, starting a headache behind my eyes. “Something tells me your reign will be extraordinary.”