Retribution, p.32
Retribution, page 32
Despite hoping for a few reunions, I was still surprised by the approaching figures, all of whom stopped when they saw me.
Vincent Helstea looked strange in his leather armor and helm. He had aged since I’d last seen him, and added some weight around the middle, and there was a haggard weariness behind his once playful eyes.
Beside him, his daughter, Lilia, was a grown woman, fierce and beautiful even covered in blood. She was pale, and there were tears clinging to the corners of her eyes as she stared at me in shock.
And behind both of them was Vanesy Glory, unmarred by the battles outside.
While Vincent was looking at me with a kind of delirious bemusement, like he wasn’t quite sure if this was all a dream or not, Lilia simmered with a furious intensity, her eyes moving quickly over the lines of my face, except when they would meet my own and catch there.
Behind them, Vanesy Glory had stopped and was standing at attention with one hand behind her back, the other on her blade, its point down, resting on the granite. Her bright eyes were shining, and her lips were pressed together so tightly that they’d turned white.
“Art, my boy, is that really you?” Vincent asked from the doorway.
I tried to flash him a warm smile, but it felt more melancholy resting on my face. “Surprise.”
Lilia let out a whimpering breath, her body tensed like a pulled bowstring, and she sprang forward and wrapped her arms around me. “Arthur…I—I can’t believe you’re alive!”
I accepted the embrace gratefully. She pressed her face into my chest, her body shaking with suppressed sobs. “What about Ellie? Alice? There’s been no word for so long…”
“Fine,” I said consolingly, my bloody hand softly caressing her hair. “They’re both fine, Lilia.”
She pulled free and wiped her eyes, grimacing with embarrassment. “So much for being a stoic leader of the rebellion,” she said wryly. “But I suppose that is more Commander Glory’s thing, anyway.”
“Never be ashamed of your emotions, dear,” Vincent said, automatically slipping into a fatherly tone. “You cannot control how you feel, and those who love and respect you will not judge you for expressing yourself.”
Smiling, I slipped past Vincent and extended a hand to Vanesy. She let go of the rigid stance she’d been holding and took my hand firmly. When I’d first met Vanesy Glory as a professor at Xyrus Academy, there had been a youthful exuberance to all her actions. Just after the war started, I found her to be steadfast and serious in her role, with much of that lighthearted air subdued, but on the whole, unchanged.
Now, she’d been tempered by years of conflict. Unlike Vincent, the war hadn’t aged her physically; the same Vanesy still stood before me, with her brown hair pulled back and tied, as usual. But the easy smile was gone, as was the amused squint that normally wrinkled the corners of her eyes.
“I’m sorry there won’t be more time for a proper reunion,” I said, “but the situation here rests upon the edge of a blade. I need to get these Alacryans out of Xyrus as soon as possible.”
She squeezed my hand, then let me go and took a step back. “Of course, Arthur.” She hesitated. “I…everyone thought you were dead.” She looked at the ground, her jaw tightening.
“Well, I’m not,” I said lightly. “I promise I’ll tell you everything, but for now, we need eyes across the city. Can you send out patrols? We need a presence in the streets to make sure the Alacryan soldiers don’t have a lapse of judgment.”
Vanesy was frowning, and it only deepened as I spoke. “I don’t understand. Why are we allowing them to just—”
I couldn’t help the deep sigh that came unbidden from my lips. She stopped speaking, and her jaw began working back and forth in agitation.
This is something I need to remember, I thought. While I was on the other continent learning to see the Alacryans as people, those here in Dicathen witnessed only the most monstrous of their actions. I can’t fault my allies for not being eager to simply wave as their oppressors march to freedom.
“I know many of these Alacryans have committed crimes worth punishing. War is war, and that is hard enough to forgive. I won’t pretend to know everything they’ve done to you and yours since the war’s end. But please, right now is not the time to exercise whatever rage is inside you.”
I held her gaze for a long moment. Her gloves creaked against the handle of her sword. Then she bent at the waist and gave me a shallow bow. “Of course. General.”
401
HIGHBLOODS IN LOW PLACES
CAERA DENOIR
Heavy black clouds had turned day to night, pouring down thick sheets of rain that pummeled the streets of Aensgar on the Redwater. The city was eerily quiet under the blanket of rainfall, broken only by the rattle of carriage wheels over wet cobbles or the rare shout from an unlucky soul caught out in the storm as they rushed furtively toward their destinations.
I'd had nearly a week to come to terms with the events in Sehz-Clar, but the rushed pace of Seris’s maneuvering had left little time for contemplative thought. Still, I knew what was at stake. In truth, I almost found myself enjoying the subterfuge, despite the danger of being outside the shields.
Finding the street I was looking for, I pulled the hood of my cloak further down over my face and shrouded my mana signature before cautiously edging around the exterior of a large three-story inn. Dim light filtered through yellowed panes of glass, the low rumble of drunken laughter and conversation spilling into the street from the open door.
I scanned the alleyway behind the inn, but it was empty aside from the usual collection of rubbish that had been tossed out by the too-busy staff.
Slipping along the rear wall of the building, I tucked myself into the narrow alcove the backdoor provided and waited, watching the street. No one breached the mouth of the alley, and the street beyond remained empty except for the splashing rain. Confident that no one was following me, I eased open the door and ducked into the dim interior.
I found myself in a narrow corridor. To one side, the cacophonous din of the bar vibrated through the thin boards, and a handful of doors opened into storage rooms and the proprietor's private quarters on the other.
Once I had passed these, the susurrus of quiet voices edged into my perception, subtle beneath the louder volume of the barroom. The voices were coming from a room at the end of the hall.
I cautiously approached the last door, and the voices grew slowly louder until I could make out the words over the rest of the general clamor. A thin blade of light was issuing from a space between two planks in the wall, and when I put my eye to the spot, I could see a slice of the room beyond, including several of the speakers.
I could have laughed.
Each of the men visible from my angle was dressed more ostentatiously than the last. It was a wonder they hadn’t arrived accompanied by a parade of blood members, servants, and captured mana beasts. One might have been forgiven for thinking that a clandestine meeting such as this would be a good time to dress down, but apparently these highbloods couldn’t resist the opportunity to flaunt their wealth, even if only to each other.
Although, to give them some credit, there was a row of plain, rain-soaked cloaks hanging from hooks on the back wall.
“Scythe Seris Vritra’s emissary is late,” an older man said. His bushy blond goatee had faded nearly to white, but there was steel in his eyes, and he stared around the room. Lord Uriel of Highblood Frost, I thought, recognizing him immediately.
A much younger man, dark haired and barrel chested, laughed low and dangerous. “Highlord Frost, this is a Scythe we’re discussing.” He drummed his fingers across the scarred table that dominated the back room. “Although, I suppose such a title is no longer appropriate. At any rate, her representative will arrive, and when they do, they will consider themselves exactly on time. The real question is why they chose such an unruly, meager sort of place to meet.”
Highlord Frost’s thick brows rose as he considered the younger man. “I suppose you are correct, Lord Exeter. Although, if Scythe…ah, Lady Seris expects to win our goodwill, perhaps she should start by treating us better than her previous compatriots have.”
A cool female voice belonging to someone not visible from my current vantage cut in, saying, “Oh really, Uriel. When have you ever been treated poorly in your life? Born a highblood and heir to the title of highlord, your success and authority were very nearly predestined. You’ve heard the parable of the silver spoon, I assume?”
There were several scandalized scoffs from the men in front of me.
Highlord Frost scowled, a look that would have frozen the blood of most Alacryans. “Some of us have had the good fortune to be born into our position, while others have fought and bled to scrape their way up from the dregs of the unblooded.” His tone was mild, with the barest cutting edge just audible in the undertones. “But we are all highbloods now, Matron Tremblay. And all here for a shared purpose. I suspect if your blood’s interactions with the Scythes and Sovereigns had been positive, you would not have answered Seris’s invitation.”
“Well said, Uriel,” said one of the others, a younger man whose back was to me so all I could see was his tight ponytail.
“Oh, indeed,” Matron Tremblay answered teasingly. “An absolute paragon of facundity.”
I pulled back from the crack in the wall and headed toward the door, deciding to make myself known before things escalated further.
“If you have some grievance against me or my blood, Maylis, air it,” Highlord Frost’s voice rumbled through the shabby wall.
“Pay her no mind, Highlord Frost. These new bloods have no appreciation for those who came before,” Lord Exeter said.
I opened the door to the sight of a tall athletic woman rising to her feet. She had one finger extended toward the men at the other end of the table and her mouth open to hurl what was no doubt to be a well-practiced insult. But her burgundy eyes shifted to me, bright and overlarge in her sun-kissed face, and she stopped.
“Caera?” she asked uncertainly.
I focused on the short horns that grew from her forehead to curve back close atop her lustrous blue-black hair, which she had pulled into a tail. She was Vritra-blooded. But her blood name, Tremblay, wasn’t familiar. Then, belatedly, I realized I’d heard her first name as well.
“Maylis…” I had a flash of a much younger version of the fierce young woman now standing in front of me, a skin-and-bones teenager with blue-black hair down to the back of her knees. “I see your blood has manifested.”
She nodded vigorously, clearly excited and eager to speak, but the men were all on their feet now, and we both seemed to realize this wasn’t the time for a reunion at the same moment. Biting back her smile, she sat back down.
On the other side of the room, a couple of the men offered me perfunctory bows, but most were staring warily.
Only Lord Exeter approached, moving quickly and offering his hand. I went to shake it, but he turned my hand and pulled it toward him. I could only watch, surprised, bemused, and mildly annoyed, as he pressed his lips to the back of my glove.
Maylis snorted.
“By the Sovereigns’ grace, Lady Caera of Highblood Denoir, what are you doing here?” he asked, moon-eyed and ogling.
“Isn’t it obvious?” a wheezing voice said, drawing my eye to a puffy balding highblood in purple and silver battlerobes. “This is some kind of setup! The Denoirs have already spoken out vocally against the situation in Sehz-Clar—”
A bark of laughter from Highlord Frost cut off the wheezing man. “Which, I imagine, Highlord Seabrook, is why this girl is here, instead of the heir, Lauden, or Highlord Denoir himself. Playing both sides I would imagine.”
I leveled a cold, unblinking gaze at the room. “This girl is here because Seris herself has chosen me to share her message. I’m the emissary you’ve been waiting on.” I focused on the plum of a man I now knew was Highlord Sebastien Seabrook. “And Highlord, if this were some kind of trap, you lot would have already thoroughly incriminated yourselves with your startling absence of prudence.”
Next to me, Lord Exeter had gone pale as a ghost. He took a halting step back, bumped up against the table, sputtered something incoherent, then finally managed, “Wait, what?”
Maylis was grinning fiendishly. “What’s the matter, Zachian? You were so eager to present yourself as a vacuous, self-indulgent blowhard only a moment ago.”
This seemed to snap him out of his surprise. He straightened his jacket and turned his nose up. “Forgive me, Lady Denoir. I’ve disrupted the meeting. Please,” he said, waving me into the room. He then shot a withering glare at Maylis before returning to his seat.
“Indeed, we seem to have gotten somewhat off from our purpose,” Highlord Frost said into the silence that followed. “If you have truly come on behalf of Lady Seris, pray tell, what exactly does she hope to accomplish with this act of rebellion?”
This question, I knew, was intended more to usher us into a conversation than seek an actual answer. Each of these highbloods had received a number of missives already, which offered explanation for Seris’s purpose. They knew what she was trying to do, but what they really wanted to gauge was if there would even be a chance that she could be successful. And, perhaps more importantly to them, what it would cost the highbloods to align with her against Agrona.
“Seat yourselves and I’ll answer any sensible questions you might have,” I said firmly. I kept my physical presence poised and confident but not rigid.
Normally, in a room with so many other highbloods, the practiced courtly demeanor my foster parents had drilled into me would have taken over, but I wasn’t here to move through the typical machinations of noble politics. If they saw me as their lesser—or even their equal—then it would be all but impossible to accomplish my goal.
I was here as Seris’s emissary, and she had high expectations.
Moving in a delicate dance of who would sit first and in which seats, the highbloods filled the long, stained table. There were eight people representing various highbloods that had shown cautious interest in Seris’s message. I stayed on my feet with my hands clasped behind my back and let the faint impression of impatience bleed into my expression.
Lord Exeter was quick to take a seat halfway down the table. His gaze kept twitching toward Maylis, and although he presented himself as outwardly calm, I could sense his temper simmering below the surface. I hadn’t heard of Highblood Exeter, but by the way he had sneered at Maylis about being a “new blood,” I doubted he himself was newly raised up. More likely, his was some middling blood from Sehz-Clar or Etril, raised up due to the amount of land they’d managed to acquire rather than strength in war or success as ascenders.
Highlord Frost took the seat at the head of the table opposite me. I’d met several of his blood at Central Academy, and the Frosts did occasional business with the Denoirs. I’d been quite impressed with his great-granddaughter, Enola, who had won her event at the Victoriad.
Highlord Seabrook, the puffy purple man with the wheezing voice, sat to Frost’s left. He was staring at me and chewing on his cheek in a distracted sort of way.
To his left was the second son of Highblood Umburter, whose given name I couldn’t recall. His brother, I knew, was off in Dicathen managing the blood’s affairs. The fact that he was here instead of his father, Highlord Gracian Umburter, suggested that they were simply testing the waters. At least the Exeters had sent their heir.
Still, the Umburter boy was a step above the aging man next to him. Chamberlain to Matron Clarvelle, I thought his name was Geoffrey. The Clarvelle Highblood had been close to the Denoirs when I was a child, but some falling out between my adoptive mother and Matron Clarvelle resulted in the two bloods drifting apart. As chamberlain, Geoffrey was a trusted member of the household, but to send him to such a meeting as this was almost deliberately insulting.
We’d have to be careful with the Clarvelles.
On the other side of the table, Highlord Ector Ainsworth sat to Highlord Frost’s right. In his sixties, Ector still had dark black hair, except for a slight lightening at his temples and down either side of his carefully groomed goatee. He had been quiet so far, both before the meeting and since my arrival, but his clever gray eyes seemed to be trying to look through me from across the room.
Beside him, a twitching, nervous-looking man was fiddling with the cuffs of his robes. He kept glancing at Highlord Frost like he was trying to catch his eye. His back had been to me as I watched from the hallway, but now I recognized the hawkish downturn of his nose and his unusual eyes: one was bright scarlet, the other a muddy brown.
“Lady Caera…” he said softly when he realized I was looking at him, although his eyes focused on the table and not me.
“Lord Redwater,” I said in return, nodding politely.
Wolfrum of Highblood Redwater was a Vritra-blooded foster like me. His own adopted siblings—four brothers and a sister—had all perished tragically in the Relictombs. As his Vritra blood never manifested, the Redwaters were allowed to name him heir so the highblood—a very old blood that took its name from the river running not half a mile from the inn—would live on.
I’d met him, like Maylis, at the gatherings of young Vritra-blooded foster children I’d been forced to attend when I was young. I remembered him as an awkward antisocial boy who stood out among the self-important Vritra-bloods.
“Before we begin,” I said when I’d finished scanning the room, “there are two points I must make clear immediately. First, this is not a battle to replace one overlord with another. Seris does not seek to make herself High Sovereign over Alacrya, or even to rule at all.”
Highlord Seabrook made a show of rolling his eyes and looking across the table at Highlord Ainsworth with a foolish grin on his face.
