Wicked Throne, page 12
Nyrene’s fluttering, rain-colored fins cut above the floor without disturbing the silt. She pulls me after her into vulnerable darkness. Sweet, soft light rays penetrate the gloom, lantern light on the surface thrusting into narrow slits in the cave’s ceiling.
Nyrene swims into a side passage and up a rock face blanketed in supple, tender seaweed. The ocean brightens. We surface in a quiet pool open to hot night air, and I clamber up onto a rocky ledge two feet below the ocean. I strip off the breath mask. Nyrene glides through the water toward me. She kicks upright on her tail so we’re about the same level.
Tension fizzes between us. The air’s charged somehow. “That was fun,” I say.
“I’m glad you like my crazy.” She sounds out of breath.
“Your crazy’s my kind of crazy.”
Droplets wind down her chest over the silk bodice sticking to her skin. Her eyes flick shut. She tilts her face toward me, and her mouth is a summoning charm. I lean forward.
“Your Highness!” A torch spell blasts yellow white into our pool. “He’s here,” Razanhi’s idiot guard calls. More guards lope toward us over the shoreline. The man enchanting a light beam in my face lowers his aim, turning the pool into a glowing cauldron. “Sir. I beg your pardon. We lost sight of you in the water.” The three men running after him fan out to secure our private cove. If one of them is Constane, he’s fired.
Nyrene drops under the surface. She splashes to the rocks in her land aspect and climbs onto the beach, legs trailing water. The guard sweeps his light spell across her and up the cliffs, then marches off to ruin someone else’s night. “Thank you. Good job,” she mutters. Nyrene crosses her arms over her breasts. She puts her back to me and gazes after them.
If I’m not about to be assassinated, they’re all fired.
Fireworks explode in the sky behind us. I turn around to see red and blue sparks fountaining into a butterfly above Almathea, filling the sky with glitter. Thunderous booms echo across the water. The butterfly melts and a hibiscus flower takes its place with another boom and artillery crackle.
“We should go back to the theater,” Nyrene says. Her shoulders bunch around a deep breath and fall flat. “Do you know a drying spell?”
I cast the charm over her. Nyrene’s gown poofs into an airy bell, her peacock feathers shake themselves free, and her back’s still pointed at me. I climb out and charm myself so my moth costume ripples warm and dry.
“Thank you, Azan.” Her back’s still pointed at me.
We walk together along the rocky beach back to the drift house. The guards follow us. Nyrene walks fast so she’s ahead, and I’m behind with the light-conjuring guard. He has a wrapper from the chocolatier hanging from his breast pocket. It crackles while he walks.
I don’t know where Razanhi is. I lured him away from Almathea by telling him about the madman wanting to conjure a dragon, but he was only supposed to be gone long enough for me to rob him. Why hasn’t he come back? I don’t know whether he met the Shade, if he’s even alive. If he’s heard about his father’s assassination. If he’s heard that he’s made alliances with the goblins and elves.
When we climb aboard for the journey home, Nyrene touches her mouth with the back of a hand. She drops her hand like she’s only brushing wet hair from her cheek.
I hope he’s dead.
13
LADY YGRAINE SHOWS UP to Razanhi’s suite at seven in the morning, which is too Nab-blessed early. She lays a thaumograph on his desk. I stifle a yawn and pull the five-by-seven color hologram toward me.
“This picture was taken by your security system,” she says.
“My—?”
“Outside your workshop.” Ygraine tilts her head like a wolf.
“Right.”
In the hologram, a hooded figure raises his hands and blasts Razanhi’s sentinel network. I shudder. He’s a sorcerer, all right.
“We’ve been calling him the Shade,” I say. “Nyrene and I.”
“Why?”
Shit. I’d forgotten. He’s supposed to be me, right? It’s too early. I was up too late last night. No, my mind’s on other things.
Nyrene.
I stare as the Shade blasts Razanhi’s security apart, again. “Uh—never mind. You had news. We know he broke into my workshop.”
Ygraine taps the thaumograph with an olive finger. The moving picture slows down until the Shade’s Tai Chi-ing his way through Razanhi’s wards. Ygraine taps again. The hologram freezes. Collapsing magic lights up half the Shade’s face under his black hood. Yellow sparks pick out the sorcerer’s soft, angelic jaw and fine cheekbones, his straight nose, and blue eyes.
I push back in Razanhi’s chair. “No.”
“We knew Ivar de Ryeleth stole the Ash Womb. Now we have proof.”
It’s impossible. They have the wrong day’s security feed—only, no. I broke into the workshop wearing my glamour.
The hologram has my face.
The Shade has my face.
I put my hands on the crystal plate. My frowning blue eyes stare up at us from the cold quartz between Razanhi’s thumbs. “How do we know it’s not a glamour?”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand, sir,” Ygraine says quietly. The spymaster’s intent gaze shifts from the image to me.
Cold fog plunges into my stomach. I smile. Make an effort to relax. “Because that would be enjoyably ironic. Thank you, Lady Ygraine. Is there anything else?”
“We are doing our best to follow every lead. At the moment, we don’t think the marquess had help.” Her bright-hazel eyes linger on my face. She inclines her head and retreats into the hallway. Her chair squeaks as it floats above the red-and-white-checkered tile.
I let out a painful breath. My pulse shakes into my throat. I drop my eyes to the man in the picture.
It’s a good likeness. No, it’s a great likeness. He even managed to get the divot that pushes between my eyebrows when I’m concentrating. Who the hell knows me well enough to make a glamour so convincing it fooled my own former spymaster? I used to work under Ygraine.
Well, to be fair, she probably wasn’t looking very hard to confirm the image. I turn over the thaumograph. It’s amazing work. Perhaps a little too amazing. What if it isn’t a glamour at all?
My breath catches.
What if it’s me? What if someone grabbed old footage of me at some Imperial event and pasted my face under the Shade’s hood?
I brush my thumb across my double.
That’s a much bigger problem than a tricky glamour. That means someone in the Black Tower falsified evidence.
So, I’m right. The Shade used to live in Almathea. He worked in the Black Tower. That’s how he got Vorsmad’s coordinates. That’s how he knew what was in Razanhi’s vault and that it could help him open a portal to the Dreamland. And if he had access to this image before Ygraine saw it, that means he’s still here.
He works in the Black Tower.
He knows about the invasion.
I exhale. Count to ten. Pick up Razanhi’s scrying mirror. Call Lady Trold. Summon her to an emergency intelligence meeting. Call Gwynnestri. Summon her to an emergency meeting with War Leader Trold. Call Mother Sigeld. Tell her secretary code Shadow Mark. Critical mole in the Black Tower’s military arm. The tower’s compromised. I’m locking it down for our invasion’s duration. I’m giving all wartime magical control to the elves. Elf wizards will recalculate the portal entry point to Vorsmad. Elf wizards will perform overwatch duties, under my command.
I put down the mirror. Exhale. Count to ten.
Spend the rest of the morning and afternoon in meetings trying to piece together another invasion strategy using new times and counter-coordinates with one day to launch.
Trold pulls her top analysts. We hole up in a dark room under a maintenance hallway in the Red Tower crunching numbers. Running projections. Gwynnestri seems to think the whole situation’s annoying, as usual, but allows Almathea to borrow her wizards. The elves arrive an hour later. Trold allocates them a room beside ours to go over launch protocol. She brings them all tea, brings her analysts tea, brings me tea. By suppertime, we have an ugly, haphazard, terrifying, but functional new plan.
I give the go-ahead. Trold runs the paperwork up to Chieftain Beurnock for approval. Numb decompression sinks in. The intelligence room shivers like refugees in the eye of a hurricane. Blank eyes, bleary faces, tense gray mouths look up from their screens. Now we wait. Tomorrow’s a success or a failure, depending on the twelve people in this cramped, dark room.
Trold’s wife appears with supper catered from the best restaurant in the city. Unexpected food draws the refugees from their desks. Trold comes back from up above with the council’s seal.
Yeah, Razanhi just saved the day.
Yeah, Razanhi just helped plan an invasion commencing in fourteen hours.
Trold says, “Your support really motivated the analysts, sir,” which is code-speak to a royal for: go home, sir.
“Go home, Trold,” I say.
She swallows a smile. “I’m afraid I’m going to stay awhile longer. I need to oversee a few more details before launch.”
“Don’t stay too long. We need you tomorrow.”
“Yes, sir.”
I trek through silent halls to Razanhi’s suite, but as soon as I step through into Silence, I realize I don’t want to deal with another sleepless night right now. More fear, more pounding heart, more struggling to breathe pacing around and around to get rid of the shadow following me—that’s too much after today.
I can’t do it.
I head for the healing tower.
“Tell me what’s wrong?” says Elaina, the royal family’s severe, starch-haired healer.
“I need a sleeping draught.”
She beckons me off the private intake room’s bench. We stroll down a sea-green hall past butterfly murals and a painted row of smiling faerie faces, around a corner, into a pastel-pink room awash in harsh white light. A noiseless enchanted fountain bubbles in the corner under a plastine maidenhair fern. Elaina closes the door behind me. “How long have you experienced these symptoms?”
“Uh. A long time. The past few nights have gotten worse.”
“Worse how?” Her deft fingers poke the quartz crystal hanging around her neck, ready to key my answer into Razanhi’s file.
“If you don’t mind,” I say, “I need something that will make me sleep and stay asleep.”
Elaina’s ice-green eyes sweep my face. “Normally when people have trouble sleeping, it’s due to stress or chemical changes that last a few days or a week. If this is a longer-term problem, there might be something else going on. Please stand under the multiscope.” She casts a spell to wake the pulsing effervescent star in the ceiling. The multiscope hums alive. Elaina lifts a hand toward the scope, and its roiling surface extends a prismatic flare that coils around her fingers like a loving pet. Brilliant flame-colored embers descend from the multiscope, rippling into a holograph above the table that charts first Elaina’s wake spell, then the invisible magic residue evaporating from her palm.
I step back. One look at me, and it’ll tell her I’m a goblin wearing a faerie glamour.
Elaina glances over. “Please stand under the multiscope. When you’re ready.”
“I just want a sleeping draught.”
“Have you noticed any weight loss, or gain? Problems concentrating? Loss of interest in activities?”
“I can order you to give me a sleeping draught.”
She says, “I can prescribe you a potion, but you’ll have to take it every night and it won’t fix anything. Or, I can try to understand the root problem that’s keeping you awake and give you a potion to fix it.”
I hesitate. “I’m. . . . My neck hurts when I wake up. The muscles in my neck. My heart starts pounding. I feel like I can’t breathe. Thinking about not being able to breathe makes it happen. I have to not think about it so it won’t happen. I can’t let my heartbeat pick up or it’ll happen.”
She says, “How long have you—”
“About eighteen months. It slowly went away, then it came back.”
“Hm.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“No, you’re not crazy.” Sympathy in her voice. I don’t know if I like that, or hate that. “It sounds like you’re having a natural reaction to something bad that happened in the past couple of years. Is that right?”
“Sure.”
“You work with dangerous monsters sometimes. Is that right?”
Yeah, he does. I try to remember any mercy missions Razanhi might have gone on in the past few years—of course, I can’t. I wasn’t here. “I . . . went to Blue Mountain a few weeks ago. The Marquess of Basheelk told me he’d been taken prisoner by a mad sorcerer trying to conjure a dragon. I met a weirghast hive.”
“What are weirghasts?”
“Dangerous monsters.” I smile.
Razanhi wouldn’t smile. Or play word games. I scowl.
Elaina brushes her hand along the multiscope, and its star flickers dark. The humming stops. Cool relief washes over me.
“I can give you a prescription for psytrane,” she says. “You only have to take it a few times, under guidance. I can set up a session with a mediator for as early as tomorrow, if you like.”
“Mediator.”
“A trained specialist to guide you through the experience. The medicine induces a vision quest where you must face and overcome your fears in a dream state. Many find the ordeal harrowing, so a mediator is required to ease any anxiety during your journey.”
That sounds like a great idea. Nab knows what I might blurt out in a heightened state that could get me caught. And executed. “What about a potion I can take by myself? Tonight?”
Elaina shakes her head.
“Fine. Just the sleeping draught.”
“Are you sure? Psytrane’s very effective—”
I make Razanhi snap, “I’m in the middle of a war. In case you haven’t noticed. I don’t have time for vision quests.”
Elaina’s flat, unimpressed look fails to cut me down. She shakes her head again and wakes the multiscope. “I’ll need you to step under the—”
“I order you to give me a sleeping potion. That’s a direct command from your Imperial prince.”
She says, “And if you’re under any enchantments, my Imperial prince, a potion could mix with the magic in dangerous ways.”
“I’m not under any enchantments.”
“You may not sleep at all, or it could mix up the line between waking and sleeping.”
I cross Razanhi’s arms.
Elaina closes her eyes for a brief moment. If she allowed herself unprofessional emotions, I get the sense she’s rolling her eyes. She beckons me into the chair opposite hers.
I sit.
She says, “I am concerned about prescribing you a sleeping potion with the symptoms you’re experiencing. You may find yourself trapped in a frightening dream unable to wake. I’d rather give you something to treat the episodes, even if it won’t be as effective as psytrane. I could prescribe you a potion to cauterize your mind, which I don’t recommend, or a potion to numb the memories responsible for your sleeping troubles. Your other symptoms should stop, either way.”
“What does cauterizing my mind mean?”
“You’ll take a small dose of something to erase harmful memories.”
“No.”
“Do you want to try the numbing potion?”
“Yes. And the sleeping draught.”
She keys my decision into her quartz necklace. “Someone will deliver your medication to your suite in an hour. Is that all right with you?”
“Sure.”
“You should limit yourself tonight to a quarter dose of the sleeping potion, and take it no later than midnight if you want to be alert for battle in the morning.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She eyeballs me. Taps the quartz. Studies a response flickering in its depths. “Patients aren’t normally allowed to visit each other, but I’ll take you to see your wife if you wish.”
My heart drops to the floor. “Nyrene?”
Elaina sweeps a hasty curtsy. “She’s fine. It’s a routine examination.”
“Is she all right?” I just saw her last night. She seemed all right. How could she be all right, and not all right? Was she hiding some horrible illness? Cancer? Of course, she’d hide her illness, she wouldn’t want anyone to look at her differently—
Elaina curtsies lower. “She’s fine. She wanted it done before the war begins. We’re very healthy. About fourteen weeks along.”
“Fourt—” Delayed sickness punches my eardrums, and my brain catches up to my mouth. “A . . . child?”
“They’re both fine.” Elaina sweeps to the door, beckons me to follow. “Come and see. I can show you the render. You can see your son.”
His son.
A poisonous stone drops into my chest and expands. A child. Razanhi’s beloved heir. I need to sit down, but there’s no place to do that except on the table under the multiscope.
Elaina holds the door. “Coming?”
“No,” I breathe.
She crosses her big arms and frowns.
Razanhi’s behaving like a lunatic, but I don’t care. She can think whatever she wants. I say, “Does Deercat know?”
Hell, does Razanhi know? I’m sure he does. How many months is fourteen weeks? I can’t think straight. How many weeks in a month?
Elaina says, “I’m going to prescribe you a potion for stress. I need you to take it three times a day with food.” Her fingers drum staccato on her crystal.
I don’t need a potion for stress. I need to know if Razanhi knows. Is it possible—a warm rush sweeps up my spine—is it possible Nyrene didn’t tell him?
If she didn’t tell him, that could mean only one thing: she’s planning to escape Almathea. Once Razanhi found out about her pregnancy, the empire would never let her out of sight again. If she’s going to escape, she has to do it soon.
I walk back to the prince’s suite buzzing hot and cold inside. Nyrene’s always been a solitary bubble rising above the roaring, ignorant masses. Now they’ve pierced her bubble. They’ll drag her from the inside out into the carnage. If she stays in Almathea, they’ll crush her into shape around Razanhi’s whelp, as a prisoner chained to his son. The future king.
