<If you had killed the Mongrel and you intended to cart her frozen body around to prove it … > Eofar tailed off as he drew his knife and chipped away near the face, bit by bit, until he could reach in and pull chunks away. Her flesh had stuck in places and came away with the ice. <Why would you,>—he slashed through the cord of the eye-patch and slowly peeled it back, as if he was paring the loose skin from a piece of ripe fruit—<leave her eye-patch on?>
Two silver eyes, both the same. Eofar slammed down the axe into the block of ice one final time and left it there.
<What did I tell you, Captain Vrinna?> said Emperor Gannon, slapping the woman on the back and radiating a sense of triumph as hot and bright as a burning bridge. <My witch hasn’t been wrong yet, has she?>
<No, your Majesty,> said Vrinna.
The guards at the front of the cart moved out of the way for the emperor as he circled around it. The dogs paced behind their master, panting and slobbering, but no one else moved. Suddenly Gannon put his shoulder under the shaft and tipped the front of the cart up. The wood creaked and the ice-block slid off and crashed to the floor, scattering people out of its way as it shot forward like a runaway sledge. It finally smashed into the doorframe and the ice cracked in half along the fault Eofar had already made. The imposter’s frozen flesh cracked along with it, splitting apart until bone and muscle came poking out.
<That’s that, then,> said the emperor, sweeping them all up in his churning, grasping eagerness as he pulled the axe from the ice. <Some cut-rate cut-throat thought he could cheat me out of my legacy.> He brought the blade down with more force than Eofar had been able to put behind it and dug another cleft into the unknown woman’s torso. Jellied blood stuck to the axe when he pulled it back. He brought it down again, and again, until he had hacked the body in half, and then he turned his attention to the head and neck, striking over and over again until he had mashed them to a pulp. Finally sated, he threw the axe aside and the ear-splitting clang of the heavy blade striking the stone floor startled the crowd as if from a trance.
The guards pushed them back and out of the throne room until they were able to close the doors on them.
<I told you, my day of glory is here; the army of the cursed is on its way,> the emperor told the captain, sending ice shards spinning away over the floor as he stalked back to her. <I want Eowara’s tomb opened tomorrow. Tomorrow, understand? Arrest anyone who tries to interfere. The gods want me to take Valor’s Storm. I must have it before Valrig rises. Rho Arregador.> The imperial notice swung at last to Rho, as heavy as the axe he had just wielded. <You’re back from the Shadar.>
<Your Majesty.>
<You look more like your brother than I remembered. What do you think, Kira?> he asked as another figure swept forward out of the darkness. <Looks like Trey, doesn’t he?>
<Very like, your Majesty,> Kira answered. <So alike, I didn’t even recognize him.>
Kira.
Rho’s memory had been kinder to her than she deserved. Her eyes sat further apart than he preferred, and her neck wasn’t nearly as long or as graceful as painted by his imagination.
<Shame Trey had to die like that,> said Gannon.
Rho bit back his first thought: that it was a shame they’d never know if Trey would have lived if they’d brought him to a physic. The emperor’s attention had already turned to Eofar anyway.
<I don’t know that sword. Who are you?>
<Eofar Eotan, your Majesty.>
<Eonar’s son? From the Shadar?> Gannon studied him. <You have the Eotan face, all right.>
Rho watched the white fur of Kira’s robe move softly against her arms and throat as she drifted toward him. The torchlight lent a warm glow to her deep-colored jewels. She looked different, but that wasn’t all; the more startling change was the hollow core where her heart had been. She was like green-glass, glittering and prettily wrought, but with nothing at the center; put her close to a flame and she would melt into nothing. He pushed deeper, trying to peel back that shiny veneer of affectation and found nothing but more of the same.
<What’s that furry thing you’re hiding behind you?> Kira asked, referring to Dramash, who was still squashed up against the back of Rho’s legs. <Is it a person, or an animal? Oh, it’s a boy. At least, I think it is. That coat makes him look like he’s been swallowed by an ursa. Oh, this can’t be the boy who destroyed the Shadar, can it? But he’s no bigger than a mouse!>
Her knowledge of events caught Rho off-guard, as did her flippancy. <You already heard what happened in the Shadar?>
<Deserters from your garrison,> the emperor informed him. <Why did you bring the boy here?>
Rho waited with his heart pounding, hoping that Eofar had worked out what he wanted to say. They would never get a better opportunity than this one.
<A gift, your Majesty,> said Eofar. <He’s my gift, to you.>
<What? What are you doing?> Rho asked Eofar in dismay, only to have a mental door slammed when he reached into his friend’s mind to find out what he was thinking.
Eofar went on with hardly a pause. <I came to ask for troops to retake the Shadar from the rebels who killed my sister Frea and burned down half their own city. I won’t need very many. The Shadari are a cowardly people for the most part, and very poorly armed. All they really had was the boy.>
Rho felt like he was going mad. He must have hit his head somewhere; or this was another nightmare and he would wake up to the sound of his hammock scraping against the iron rings.
<Let’s see him,> said the emperor, rubbing his hands together like he had just been served a meal. <Make him do something.>
Eofar came and knelt down beside Dramash. “That man is the emperor, Dramash. Just stay quiet and calm and do what I tell you.”
<What are you doing?> asked Rho.
<Trust me,> said Eofar, drawing his sword and laying it on the ground in front of Dramash. “Move the sword.”
“No.” The boy looked up over his shoulder at Rho. “I can’t.”
Rho swallowed. “You only need to move it a very little.”
“No,” Dramash said again, shaking his head at Eofar. “I don’t want to. You can’t make me.”
<Problems?> asked Gannon, and motioned two of his guards forward.
<Eofar,> Rho warned as he grabbed the back of Dramash’s coat. He wanted to draw, but Fortune’s Blight would be no good against a dozen or more imperial swords. <Eofar, do something.>
The first guard flew thirty feet across the room and smashed into the wall. Then the sword ripped out of the second guard’s hand and fired straight up to the ceiling as if shot from a bow. Rho pulled Dramash back as everyone else jumped to avoid the tumbling blade. The rest of the guards darted forward to surround them, but Dramash ripped every one of their swords away the moment they came close. The guards shook their stinging hands in shock and watched speechlessly as their weapons slid out of their reach.
Captain Vrinna charged forward, but her sword pulled her hand down as if its weight had increased ten times. She managed to force herself forward a few more steps before falling to the ground along with her weapon.
“Dramash,” Rho said, but he wasn’t sure the boy could even hear him. Tears were running down his cheeks, wetting the fur into clumps. Rho dropped to his knees and raised his voice until he could feel the burn in his throat. “Stop, Dramash. Stop now.”
Emperor Gannon drew his own sword, only to have it whip his arm around in the opposite direction. He hung on doggedly, but he looked like he was trying to drag a lagramor out of its hole by its tail.
“Dramash,” said Rho, “it’s all right. No one’s going to hurt you. You can stop now.” Then he saw two guards armed with steel swords—not imperial swords—rushing toward them.
<No! Stop!> Rho shouted to them, but of course they weren’t listening to him; their only purpose was to protect the emperor at all cost. Rho did the only thing that he could think of. He stripped off one glove and pressed his bare hand down on Dramash’s neck.
The boy screamed in pain and Rho felt it like a spike straight through his head: a single, sharp pitch that made every Norlander in the room double over and clap their hands over their ears. He kept his hand on Dramash’s skin, telling himself that the flesh of his palm was not singeing and peeling away—which was how it felt—and that the pain would stop when he finally pulled his hand back.
Dramash slumped to the floor in a dead faint and Rho staggered back with his stomach heaving and his hand on fire, struggling to keep from joining him on the floor.
<Get that boy out of here,> the emperor ordered. He sheathed his sword while the stunned guards scrambled to retrieve their own weapons. <Send him to the tower with the witch. Tell her to get him under control, or I’ll make her sorry.>
Rho did nothing to stop the guards as they picked up Dramash and took him away. He didn’t even watch them go, and he couldn’t look at Eofar either. Instead, he bent down to pick up the glove he had dropped and carefully pulled it back on. Kira had taken shelter on the far side of the cart. Despite her heaving chest, the emotions he sensed from her still had no depth; she remained the same shallow, reflective puddle she had been from the start.
<Your Majesty,> Rho said to Emperor Gannon, <if you don’t need me any longer, I’d like to see my brother’s tomb.>
<You can go,> he said, waving a hand, already turning away. His coat—hundreds of lagramor pelts, like a whole swarm of the vicious little beasts—billowed out behind him as he headed for the doors to the throne room. The dogs were summoned back from where they had been chewing on the mangled body, clicking into step behind their master’s heels. <Come with me, Eofar. You can tell me more about how you lost my most important colony to a bunch of sweaty miners.>
Rho pulled up his hood and went back out into the gallery, down the steps and outside, drawing no attention at all from the crowds still lingering there. He had expected to be followed, and he had expected someone to call to him as he headed down the steps to the Front, but he did not expect the hand now on his shoulder to belong to Eofar.
<What have you done?> Rho asked him, seizing the front of Eofar’s coat.
<I had to—you saw the way Gannon hacked up that body. You heard him talk about fighting the cursed. He thinks he’s the new Eowara. The Shadari’s powers won’t stop someone like that from trying to get back the colony; he’ll just want to fight them that much more.>
<All right, so maybe that wasn’t so stupid,> Rho admitted, releasing him. He walked down a few more steps, then stopped and asked Eofar, <So, what now, then?>
<I’m going to be Eofar Eotan for a while. I want to find out more about this prophecy before we go any further. I’ll find a way to get Dramash back.>
<You’re going to talk to Gannon and the other Eotans?> Rho asked. <Without me?>
<Yes,> said Eofar, raising himself up. Now he was more like the haughty governor’s son Rho had known in the old days and less like a used bar towel. <I am still an Eotan and you’re merely an Arregador. Plus, I don’t think our new emperor likes you very much. Is there a problem?>
<No,> said Rho, even though he did have a problem; he just couldn’t articulate it.
<Is there some place you can go?>
<Arregador House,> said Rho. <They’ll give me a room—and enjoy adding it to the bill I left unpaid when I went to the Shadar.>
<I’ll come and find you there,> said Eofar. <Just promise me you won’t do anything stupid in the meantime, like trying to rescue Dramash.>
Rho looked out over the black Front, at the cracks in the rock glowing faintly from the mists far below. <I won’t. I wouldn’t even know how.>
<Just trust me,> said Eofar, before he trotted up a nearby set of steps and strolled into Eotan Castle as coolly as if he had been walking in and out of those iron-banded doors every day of his life.
Rho realized his biggest problem was the degree to which he trusted Eofar. Which was not at all.
Chapter 14
Kira found Aline waiting in the gallery, holding her cloak.
<It isn’t,> said Kira, pulling her gloves straight as they headed back through the crowded streets toward Arregador House. <Josten Drey lied, or was tricked. He’s probably dead by now; I would guarantee Vrinna saw to it personally.>
<Then there really is going to be a war with the cursed?> Aline blanched. <Our cursed?>
<I don’t know. I can’t make myself believe the cursed are really going to rise out of the ground like a bunch of raggedy mummers.> She stopped at a crossing to let a cart rumble past. <If it does have something to do with our people, I can’t warn them now. Vrinna will be watching me even more now that Rho’s back. I don’t know what to do next.>
<Why would Lord Rho change things?> asked Aline, shivering under her wool cloak.
<That sounds like the beginning of a riddle,> said Kira. <Well, for someone who can’t be bothered about anything, he has an uncanny knack for turning up at exactly the wrong time, blundering into the middle of things that have nothing to do with him and blithely ruining everything for everyone. But the real reason is that if he starts hanging around me, Vrinna will undoubtedly try to make Gannon think that Rho and I are lovers. Come to think of it, I do know what to do next. We’re going to Trey’s crypt. We’re going to rid ourselves of Rho Arregador, and right now.>
They walked down the curve of Vine Street and through a series of little courts where the green-glass casters, book-binders, goldsmiths, stonemasons and other artisans occupied themselves adorning and amusing those of her station. People gathered inside and in front of the workshops, but few were working, or even pretending to work. Kira lifted her chin as she felt them staring at her and added a little sashay of unconcern to her walk. She needed Rho to meet the same person he had just met in the throne-room: the emperor’s empty-headed mistress, unconcerned in anything outside of her own shallow interests. She had played her role well enough to fool these people; after three years without a word from him, she was certain she could fool him as well.
The green-glass statue of Arregador, complete with pine-bough wreath and an armful of drooping branches, watched them approach from a niche above the entrance of the crypt. Kira glided up the steps behind Aline, her feet already numbed with cold. A supply of tapers waited just inside the entrance, but a light was already flickering far back in the corner, near Trey’s tomb. The crypt wasn’t very large—the building itself dated from just after the Stonewood Treaty, like most of the buildings in Ravindal, and had been intended only for those few Arregadors who, for whatever reason, could not be buried in the crypts on their family estates. Even so, the Arregadors couldn’t stop jostling each other out of the way in the service of their ambitions, and in angling for the most prominent positions, the placement of their tombs made it look as if someone had dropped them in this haphazard way and then forgotten to come back and arrange them properly.
They made their way inside, winding slowly around pillars, tombs and sarcophagi, breathing in the smell of cold stone, frost and lamp-oil. Kira let her fingers slide over a stone arm here, a carved cheek there, noticing how the decorated lids became less and less ornate the further back they went.
<Wait here,> she told Aline as she stopped next to a plain, square tomb where a husband and wife slumbered sweetly with their arms around each other’s waists. She went on alone until she walked into the circle of light from Rho’s lamp, which he had set down on the crossed hands of the effigy on the next tomb over.
<Did you have a funeral?> he asked her, without lifting his eyes from the face of the effigy on his brother’s tomb.
<Oh, yes. Gannon paid for it, and for the tomb, too.> Kira took off her gloves and hood and tossed them down by the lamp. <We had a procession all the way up from Ravinsur. Everyone came out. Well, nearly everyone. You know how some people just can’t be bothered, don’t you?>
<It’s a rotten likeness,> said Rho.
<Well, the sculptor did the best he could,> Kira said, loosening her coat at her throat, even though cold bled from the stone all around her. <I’ve never been much good at describing things. Now if you had been there, you could have done it much better. You would have remembered what Trey looked like before the accident. I could only imagine how he looked the last time I saw him.>
<It doesn’t matter, since it’s empty anyway,> said Rho. He leaned against the lid and dug out a bit of dirt from a crevice with his fingernail. He was pretending to be the same old Rho and was apparently unaware of how miserably he was failing. She had already noticed the circles under his eyes in the throne-room, and the sag of his shoulders looked more like fatigue than his former indifference. <I know we both have regrets about what we did, but—>
<How perceptive of you, to know my regrets.> Kira walked toward the wall past the foot of Trey’s tomb and looked up at a blackened torch in an icicle-bejeweled bracket. <I had to guess at yours, but since you were already on a ship heading to the other side of the world by the time I woke up the next morning, it wasn’t too difficult. Unless you discovered them through my letters? You did receive my letters, didn’t you? I’m sure you did, though I expect your weighty duties in the Shadar kept you from answering them.>
<Did you tell Trey?> asked Rho. She could feel him shrinking behind her until he was little more than a floating point, like a beacon in the far distance.
<No. I didn’t think it was important,> said Kira, still facing the wall. <We didn’t exactly invent infidelity, did we? It happened. It was over. You were gone.>
<Then Trey never knew why I left Norland?>
<I said I didn’t tell him,> said Kira. Trey’s words came back to her, slippery with his wet blood: I think you owe me that much. <I didn’t say he didn’t know.>