A knife of oblivion, p.7
A Knife of Oblivion, page 7
part #8 of The Kingmakers' War Series
Jehn stared at her palm as if she held a knife.
“Let me see your hand,” she said. “The injured one.”
He reached out with reluctance. She pulled off his glove, and he couldn’t suppress a shudder as the cool air hit his skin. The nub where the finger had been severed looked garish to him in the darkness, but she put her hands over it without reaction. She applied light, even pressure to his knuckle, and a cool tingle slipped down to his wrist.
“Curious,” he murmured as his hand relaxed slightly under her probing fingers. The knotted, pain-besieged muscles tingled lightly, feeling almost cold, but in a most pleasant way.
They were silent for a moment as she bent over his hand, her long hair brushing his wrist, the scent of her in his nostrils.
“The Eisean diplomat has made a deal with us,” the queen said in a conversational tone. “She says she is willing to talk in exchange for her life, and protection on a remote part of Nyr. I’ve decided to place her under guard next to your refugee exiles on their remote island.”
Her fingers found a painful knot, and she pressed hard on it. Jehn winced.
“That seems foolhardy,” he said.
The queen lifted her head. Her eyes pinned him with a stare. “I wasn’t asking your blessing, prince.”
“Then why tell me at all?” he shot back, irritated at how quickly she’d clapped back at him.
“Is that the only way you see to proceed?” She lifted one eyebrow, a casual gesture, but he knew she was angry from the sparks in her eyes. “Me telling you all of my plans for ruling my own country, and you giving me the nod before I issue orders? That is how you see us forming a less adversarial relationship?”
Jehn considered his words. “When it comes to the safety of my people—”
“Refugees who are housed on my lands, might I remind you. As are all of you.”
“You are the one who forced me into marriage,” he snapped. “That was your doing. Your arrangement. If you don’t like it—”
She put a finger to his lips, shocking him. Her other hand still curled around his.
“We are supposed to be resisting attempts to pit us against each other,” she said. “Even if those attempts come from ourselves.”
“You don’t seem to be resisting very hard,” Jehn muttered around her finger.
She curled her hand around his chin instead. “Forgive me,” she said. “I am not used to, ah, submitting to the will of another.”
“I’m not asking you to submit,” he said.
Her mouth parted. “No? Not on the matter of the Eisean diplomat? Pray tell, what do you call it, then?”
“I merely want you to see the wisdom of my side,” he grumbled, but he was smiling.
The queen smiled too, a quirk at the edge of her lips. “I’m still angry,” she said, but she was not convincing. “You make me furious all the time, Jehn.”
He liked the way his name sounded in her mouth. He liked the way she was looking at him right then, as if she half wanted to hit him with the vase to her left. His blood sang and his pulse jumped. Her hand under his chin was hot, her fingers shooting sparks into his skin. “You make me angry too,” he said. “In fact. I think you are the most infuriating—”
The queen leaned forward and kissed him before he could continue, and Jehn forgot what he was about to say. Her hair made a soft curtain between them and the rest of the world. He brought up his hand to cup her jaw, and she pushed him back against the pillows.
A pounding came from the door to his chamber. Jehn sat up; the queen rolled away. She scowled in the near-darkness. “Are you expecting someone?”
“No,” Jehn said. He stood and reached for a robe. “What?” he called.
“Your Grace,” came a muffled voice from the other side of the door. “Urgent news from Austrisia. Your council wants to meet with you at once.”
“At least they bothered to include me in their emergency meeting,” he muttered.
It was always urgent news for the council. Urgent news that they were losing ground with Cahan’s army, or that they had no money left in the court coffers. Information he’d already possessed for days thanks to his spies, information anyone powerful enough on the council had already known for days as well, and still, they wanted to chatter and argue about it at all hours. As if the arguing did anything useful at all.
The queen watched him, not rising from where she lounged on the bed, as he found clothing fit to wear for a council meeting in the middle of the night. Her expression was bemused. Shuttered. She reached out to smooth a crease in the bedsheet with her fingers as she watched Jehn dress.
“Your council,” she said. “They are quite the thorn in your side.”
“They are a necessary evil,” Jehn replied as he reached for a sash. “They are financing my war.”
“To their own advantage, of course,” she murmured.
“Of course.”
“And you have other nobles who are not on the council, do you not? You have a whole court here.”
“Yes,” Jehn said. “Only those with the most monetary investment sit on the council. It is mostly land and credit now. Coffers are low.” He might have felt uneasy discussing such things with her previously, but something had changed. And the queen’s expression was intent, but not malicious. She seemed to be asking questions to a particular end.
“What are you getting at?” he asked.
The queen paused. Considered her words.
“We enjoy making war with each other,” she said finally. “But it is to both our advantage to succeed, Jehn of Austrisia, do you not agree?”
“I agree,” he said. He finished dressing and looked at himself in the mirror. He’d donned one of the ridiculous tunics that showed too much chest and made him look like a mindless pleasure-seeker. This particular tunic tormented Lord Falor for some reason, and that thought gave Jehn the strength he needed to endure a meeting at this hour.
“You want them to think you a fool,” the queen said. She sounded almost indignant for a moment.
“Powerful princes are more threatening,” he replied. “Surely you have your own experience with this, Nara.”
The queen’s eyebrows raised slightly at his use of the name she’d given him to call her. “My advisors,” she began, “do not always respect me—”
“And you do not discourage it.”
She tipped her chin in a way that was neither agreement nor disagreement. “It is not the same.”
“You play the same game,” Jehn accused. “Yet you dislike that I do it.”
“Perhaps I want my husband to be less of a jest.”
“Or perhaps you do not want me to succeed in my strategies,” he suggested. “Perhaps you want to keep me on a leash.”
“Is that what you think?” Her eyes glittered in the dimness of the room.
He departed to meet his council without answering.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE COUNCIL OF Austrisian nobles was in an uproar when Jehn reached the room where they had assembled. The hum of their voices spilled into the hall as the guards opened the door to admit him inside. Half of the nobles didn’t even notice he’d arrived. They were too busy shouting at each other.
“Silence!” Lord Halescorn cried.
“Thank you, Lord Halescorn,” Jehn said mildly in the hush that followed.
The council’s attention swung to where he stood in the doorway.
“Now,” Jehn said, “does anyone want to tell me why we’ve assembled at this hour of the night?”
“Your wife—” one of the nobles began.
“The Eisean troops are—” another shouted.
Halescorn held up his hands, and all was silent again.
Jehn noted this with annoyance. But he smiled, because he did not want Halescorn to see how he really felt.
“One at a time, please,” he said.
“We have just received word,” Lady Haona reported, “and shamefully much later than the Nyrian ministers and advisors, I might add, that it was Cahan who funded the Eisean attack against Nyr.”
Jehn paused before his seat. The smile on his face froze, splintered.
The queen had to have known.
And yet.
She did not tell him.
He felt a hollow place open in the middle of his stomach. He’d been a fool to think they were sharing secrets now. She was still the same person as before.
“There is more,” Halescorn said. “Many in the Nyrian court have been calling for our eviction. And your wife,” he said, emphasizing the last bit with particular wrath, “has entertained these insistences.”
Jehn felt the beginnings of a headache at the back of his head, at the place where his skull and neck met. “They cannot turn us out,” he assured his nobles. “We have an agreement. We are funding the rebuilding of their city.”
“With what?” Lord Halescorn’s son, Jacob, interjected with a look of fury directed at the prince. “The coffers are empty.”
Beside him, Jacob’s new wife, the Lady Valora, tipped her head to the side thoughtfully. Jehn noticed her expression and shared a glance with her.
“I move that we find a new place for the court in exile,” Lord Visha cried. “Before we are turned out like beggars!”
“I think we should wait,” Lady Valora said. Her voice was strong and clear. Her new husband looked at her, and his expression was one of mingled irritation and admiration. It was a look that Jehn could understand quite well.
“We aren’t going to make a decision tonight,” Jehn said.
Grumbles and arguments rose, filling the air.
“Tomorrow,” Jehn said, a note of anger touching his voice. “Now, what else is on the agenda?”
~
When Jehn returned to his chambers, he stood in the center of the room, breathing slowly to clear his head and calm his pulse, because his skull ached with a tension headache and his hand had begun to throb again.
He remained there for a moment, deliberating, and then he crossed back to the window and opened it.
A figure stirred on the ledge outside. Nath, one of Kael’s men, with an ugly creature that looked like a hairless cat curled on his knee.
“Your Grace,” Nath said, climbing to his feet and bowing. “Do you need something?”
“I was going out,” Jehn said.
“Let me accompany you, sir,” Nath said.
“Did Kael put you up to this?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Jehn sighed. “Come with me, then. And then I need you to send word to him. We need to speak as soon as possible.”
With Nath moving silently beside him, Jehn left his chambers and entered the queen’s garden, which was forbidden to him, but he didn’t care about that right now. Anger pulsed in his chest, pushing out all other feelings.
Well, almost all other feelings.
He wanted to shout at her. And kiss her.
This could not be healthy or sane.
He stalked through the darkness of the queen’s garden, not bothering to be stealthy. Nath kept pace with him, sword drawn.
They were met halfway through the paths by a figure as slim and silent as a shadow. A woman with dark, curly hair, dressed in black. One of the shadow guard.
“Prince Jehn,” the woman said, standing with one hand on the weapon at her hip. “Why do you disturb the queen’s private garden at this hour?”
“I want to speak with her, and she knows why,” Jehn snapped.
The woman didn’t blink despite his tone. “The queen has already retired to her bed—”
“I will speak with my wife!” Jehn shouted.
“Husband,” the queen said coolly from somewhere to his left. “Lower your voice.”
Jehn turned his head to look up in the direction from which the queen had spoken. He saw her sitting in a tree, her legs dangling, her head leaning back against the trunk.
“What are you doing?” he demanded.
“I like to sit in this tree,” she said. “It’s a good place to think. And it affords me a good view of the garden when I am expecting visitors to storm the paths.”
She’d been expecting him, then.
“What are you doing with the council and your advisors? You knew, and you didn’t say anything.” The betrayal of it felt like a knife wound. They’d come to an understanding. They’d been treating each other differently. He’d almost—almost—trusted her.
This hurt.
The queen gazed down at him. Her face was in shadow, and if she had any regret in her eyes, he couldn’t see it. “Go to bed, Jehn,” she said.
“No. I want an answer from you.” He knew he must look like a petulant child before their audience of guards, but he didn’t care.
“My advisors are concerned that your court’s presence in Nyr is attracting the ire of Cahan’s allies, and they have a point,” she said.
He seethed. “You knew my court and I had targets on our backs when you married me—”
“If you want to placate my advisors,” the queen interrupted, “I suggest you offer them something that might outweigh the risks of continuing to harbor such dangerous allies.”
Jehn exhaled between his clenched teeth. Usually, he thrilled at such political labyrinths, but his hand was throbbing and his headache threatening to become blinding. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want? Rather than hold the proverbial knife to my throat and taunt me with it?”
“I want to sit in my tree in peace,” the queen replied archly. “Go to bed, Jehn. We can talk about this in the morning, with my advisors—”
“I want to talk about it now!”
The queen leaned forward, her hair hanging around her face like a curtain. Her eyes sparked like falling stars. Her neck was a slender column lit by moonlight.
“I will not discuss this now,” she said, bringing the full weight of her queenly voice into the words.
Jehn knew when he was dealing with an immovable object. He stepped back, his head ringing with pain and unspoken words and the half-formed beginning of an idea.
His fury began to abate, leaving musings in its wake like curious sea treasures washed up on the shore after a storm.
The queen was still watching him, waiting for him to speak. They were all watching him. Nath. The shadow guard with the curly hair. Another pair of guards who must have come at the sound of voices in the queen’s garden at this hour of the night.
“Fine,” Jehn said after another deafening pause, making it sound like he was angrier that he was, and stalked back toward his chambers with Nath trailing him.
As he walked, he thought.
She’d expected him to come. She’d been waiting. And she’d said what she needed to say to stoke his temper, hadn’t she?
What game was she playing?
They weren’t supposed to be playing games with each other. Perhaps a sand cat could not change the tufts on its ears, as the saying went. But yet…
Yet, he was thoughtful. Something stuck in the back of his mind like a grain of grit, and he worried it with his sleepy ruminations as he rounded the corner for his wing of the palace. The moonlight glinted on the marble of the walls, making them look like bone, and all the shadows were as deep and imponderable as the mouths of monsters. Jehn felt alone, and yet he was not frightened. He was intrigued.
She had managed to be a puzzle for him yet again, and his anger aside, he was eager to figure her motivations out.
When he reached his rooms, his body was heavy with fatigue, and all his bones and ligaments were protesting his midnight excursion, particularly those in his injured hand. He collapsed upon his silken bed, utterly exhausted, but his mind refused to quiet.
He wanted that damnable tincture. But he was stubborn, and not stupid. He knew he needed to wean himself from it. He needed sharpness to his mind, not liquid pleasure. He needed the raw edge of the pain over the soft comforts of drugs. His people and his political ambitions depended on it. He could sense that before him loomed a challenge, the outcome of which might determine more than one major turn in the war.
And he must think.
So, he did think. All night, sleep be damned, Prince Jehn sat on his bed, swathed in blankets, the long fingers of his good hand pressed to his forehead as he sifted through the things he knew and the things he suspected, teasing out patterns, finding and discarding connections and possibilities. The shadows crawled across the ceiling with the moon’s journey, and Nath sneezed once outside, reminding Jehn that he was still there, and Jehn put together ideas and tore them apart with the fervor of a tailor in the grip of creating a masterpiece on an impossible deadline.
And when dawn brightened the corners of his room, Jehn lay back against the pillows, exhausted but smiling tightly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IN THE MORNING, after a fitful night of tossing and turning—and what little sleep he’d gotten dreamless yet again—Auberon was rudely roused by a pounding on his door.
He rose, itching to put his fist in the face of the traitor—no, he wasn’t calling him that anymore, seven levels of hell—itching to put his fist in the face of Kael.
But it was Nath who stood outside the door, his ugly face twisted with a smile that made Auberon instantly suspicious. Few smiled around him, and when they did, it was never good.
“What?” he demanded. “I haven’t dreamed of her, if that’s what you’re here to ask.”
“Oh,” Nath said, “that’s not why I’m here.”
“Then why—?”
“Get dressed,” the man said. “Wear something you can get dirty.”
Scoffing at the insinuation that he dressed fastidiously and avoided working up a sweat, Auberon passed over his telltale Seeker robes and threw on a pair of gray trousers and a simple linen shirt that he discovered in the closet of his room. He felt curiously naked without his Seeker robes to envelope him like a shield from the eyes of his enemies, but he was not stupid enough to parade about in them to some unknown location, escorted by an alarmingly pleased-looking Nath. Trousers and shirt it was.
He checked to see that the pounding had not disturbed Jade. She lay in her bed, swathed in blankets like a body bound for a funeral pyre. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t appear to see him as he approached.
