Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (7 page)
Read Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) Online
Authors: Evie Manieri
They turned another corner and suddenly, right in front of them, was the archway leading into the stables. Through it Isa could see triffons lumbering across the floor, others lounging in their tomb-like berths. The rustling of their wings sounded like a swarm of insects massing in the dark. Then the smell of damp hides, dirty straw and spoiled meat hit her. She drew back and reached her hand out to steady herself against the wall.
Frea turned to her, her silver-green eyes glittering in the darkness behind the visor. she said.
Isa snatched her hand away from the wall. She could do this – she
had
to do this.
Isa stopped and looked around. She’d lost her. All around her were uniformed soldiers, meek slaves and triffons, but her sister had disappeared. Sweat crawled underneath her shirt. She could not see the way back to the archway they’d just come through. Worse, she couldn’t see any of the other entrances either. And people were beginning to notice her. She could tell the Norlanders were gossiping about her precisely by what she couldn’t hear them saying. And the Shadari: she could feel them staring at her, and whenever she looked they turned away with a particular expression on their changeable faces. The heat and the smell were stifling. It was getting harder to breathe … harder to think.
Then across the room she saw Daryan. He had been looking at her, she could tell, but when she looked towards him he turned away just like the others. She saw him touch another slave on the shoulder, perhaps asking him a question, but she knew by the way he clutched briefly at the curls straggling over the back of his neck that he was well aware of her gaze. A warm, unpleasant flush travelled down her arms and into her fingertips. Disgusted with herself, she turned sharply away.
And there was Frea again, standing beside her triffon, Trakkar, while the slaves finished buckling on his saddle. Her silver helmet turned slowly as she surveyed the preparations in the stables.
Frea suggested with a trill of cruel merriment.
Even though the sun was already down, she had donned her white cape and now began pulling on her long riding gloves. Isa could feel her sister’s enjoyment of the moment. She had made sure to speak so that the other Norlanders around her could understand every word.
This was usually the point where Eofar would step in and tell Frea to leave her alone, but Eofar wasn’t there.
Isa whirled around and addressed the first slave she saw. ‘Get my sword,’ she commanded. The words scratched and clawed at her throat and fell heavily onto the voiceless silence of the room. Then she picked another slave. ‘You. Saddle Aeda.’
Frea was right. What good would it do her to carry her mother’s sword if she couldn’t fly? She could do this. Eofar wasn’t here to stop her, and anyway, she wasn’t a little girl
any more, relying on him for everything. No, this was possibly her last chance to prove that she was just as much a Norlander as anyone else here. Her mind was made up: this time would be different.
There was a subtle movement from the crowd around her and then Daryan was suddenly there, right in front of her. His eyes were wide, but his usually soft, mobile mouth was as hard as stone. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he whispered to her. ‘You know you can’t—’
Frea clouted him from behind: a tremendous, sweeping blow with her forearm that snapped his head around with terrible force and dropped him to his knees on the hard stone floor. Then she thrust her stiff boot into his back, sending him sprawling onto his face in the dirty straw. The other Shadari gasped: a harsh, involuntary sound that rent the silence.
The Shadari stared stupidly at Daryan, their tasks forgotten. Isa had the sense that they would have rushed to him if they hadn’t been too afraid of Frea. She saw him roll over on to his side, breathing hard. Blood – red Shadari blood – smeared the side of his mouth and his face was creased with pain. He kept his eyes fixed on the floor in front of him.
Isa walked forward. Trakkar swung his big head around and she saw his slippery black eyes, like weedy, bottomless pools. she told Frea.
Isa hooked her left foot into the near stirrup, just over the point where the tough ridge of cartilage joined Trakkar’s wing to his body, and then reached up and grabbed the pommel of the saddle. In one smooth motion, she lifted herself up and straddled her right leg over, then searched with her foot until she found the other stirrup. The floor of the stables looked much further away than it should have been. Frea’s saddle felt hard and uncompromising, as if it knew she didn’t belong there. In front of her was the harness, a complicated framework of tough leather straps and burnished brass buckles.
She saw that Daryan was sitting up now, wiping at the blood trickling from his mouth. He was not looking at her, but everyone else was. She could feel their eyes on her, Norlander and Shadari alike. She reached out for the harness, but when her fingers touched it, she felt nothing. Her hands had gone numb. She shook out her wrists and flexed her fingers but the tightness had started in her chest and the next breath she took lodged somewhere in her throat. She reached down and gripped the side of the saddle with both hands as her head began to swim. A drowsy blackness rolled through her and she felt herself listing. She was going to fall. Blindly she kicked her right foot out of the stirrup and brought her leg up over the saddle. She was trying to get down, but her left boot caught on the stirrup on the other side. She clung to the pommel, swinging crazily,
until her foot finally came free and she crashed backwards down on to the floor.
She didn’t think about anything then. She just got up and ran away.
Daryan raced past the refectory without stopping; his master’s breakfast could wait, especially since he never ate it anyway. He dragged his fingers along the wall as he rushed through the corridors, a habit left over from childhood when the bad light and blank walls had made him dizzy; when he reached Eofar’s room he found the curtain over the doorway still pulled shut. He halted before it, rolling his stiff jaw and calling softly, ‘Lord Eofar?’ When no answer came he called again, a little louder; then, with a sour feeling in his stomach, he brushed past the curtain and into the room.
Sure enough there was his master, just as Daryan found him most evenings now: sprawled across his bed, half-dressed, sleeping off the wine he’d drunk the night before. It had been the same for three months now, ever since Governor Eonar had transferred command of the garrison to Frea instead of Eofar. The shift had begun even earlier than that, though. It had started a few weeks after Harotha’s death, only Daryan had been too numbed by his own grief to notice or care that after twelve years of easy companionship, Eofar had suddenly shut him out completely. Now Daryan spent most of his time
staring at the wall in the corridor outside while his master drank alone, envying even a servant’s drudgery over the nights of mind-numbing boredom.
You’re his slave – not his friend. He’s lonely, that’s all,
Harotha had told him when she’d first come to the temple, refusing to listen to his explanations about why Eofar wasn’t like the other Dead Ones. It had taken three years to prove her right. He only wished he could hear her say she’d told him so.
He walked up to the dais, trying to think of some way to rouse Eofar out of this lethargy, for Isa’s sake, but just as he was about to call his master’s name more loudly, he noticed that there were no emptied jugs of wine or puddled dregs on the table, and that although his master appeared to be sleeping face-down on the bed, his hands were clutching the bedlinen so hard that Daryan could see the blue veins throbbing in his wrists.
‘Lord Eofar!’ he cried, leaping up to the dais. The Dead One’s shoulders jerked at the sound of Daryan’s voice and he twisted his neck around. His eyes were fixed and cloudy, as if he’d been blinded. ‘My gods, what’s wrong?’ Daryan gasped. ‘I’ll get the physic—’
As he turned to jump down from the dais, Eofar reached out as if to grab his robe. ‘No!’ he moaned, but his hand fell away and he pitched over onto his back, throwing an arm across his face as if the dim light hurt his eyes. Strands of his pale hair had come loose from the leather binding and stuck to his forehead. His skin was a sickly greyish colour and his lips were no longer blue but nearly black.
‘You’re ill, my Lord. You need help,’ Daryan said anxiously, trying to remember to keep his voice low.
‘No,’ Eofar said again, this time with a little more strength, ‘not ill—’ His left hand scratched among the bedlinen as if he was looking for something. Suddenly, Daryan saw a small, shiny object roll off the bed. It landed on the stone dais with a musical ping and he scooped it up before it could roll down the steps. It was a tiny bottle, stopped with a cork, containing a few drops of some thick, dark liquid.
‘What is this?’ he asked slowly, tipping the bottle from side to side, watching the syrupy stuff slide back and forth. He stared at Eofar with the bottle cradled loosely in his hand. ‘It looks like poison,’ he said thickly. ‘Is it poison?’
Eofar coughed and rolled onto his side away from him. ‘I don’t know yet.’ He clawed his way to the edge of the bed, coughing hard enough to make him retch, though he did not. He tried to sit up, but instead slid off the bed and fell heavily down on to the stone step, shutting his eyes and resting his forehead against the wooden bed-frame.
Daryan watched while his breathing gradually slowed, at a loss for any way to help him. Finally Eofar’s silver-grey eyes slid open again. ‘Water, please,’ he requested thinly, followed by a long, relieved exhalation.
Daryan put the bottle back down on the bed, filled a cup from the cistern in the corner and set it down on the floor next to his master. Eofar’s hand shook as he lifted the cup to his lips, but the water appeared to revive him. After a long moment, the Dead One picked up the bottle again. ‘You don’t recognise it?’
‘No, my Lord.’
‘This is made by your own people, to see the future.’
Daryan stared at the little bottle in shock. ‘Divining elixir, my Lord?’
‘You’ve heard of it?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t think there was any still around. I remember Har—’ but he stopped himself there.
‘Why did you think it was poison?’ Eofar asked softly, slipping the bottle into his pocket.
Daryan swallowed. ‘I don’t know, my Lord.’
‘I’ve had— There are things—’ the Dead One started, but he couldn’t seem to go any further. He looked past Daryan at the curtain still swinging gently in the doorway. ‘I’m surprised you think I’d do something like that.’
‘I don’t think I would have,’ Daryan said carefully, ‘before.’
‘Before what?’ Eofar asked in his expressionless voice.
‘My lord, it’s not for me to—’
‘Speak.’
‘You’ve hardly left your room in months. You barely eat. You drink too much. You’ve stopped training. Why did you let your father give control of the mines to Lady Frea instead of you? And Lady Isa— I rushed here to tell you that she tried to fly out on Trakkar tonight, by herself.’ Eofar straightened up quickly. ‘Don’t worry, my Lord,’ he reassured his master bitterly, ‘she didn’t get off the ground – but you know her: she’ll try again. I’m begging you, please do something before she gets hurt.’
Eofar stared back at him, his face as smooth and immobile as a slab of marble. ‘You have more to say.’
‘No.’ He stared down at his sandals. ‘That’s all, my Lord.’
‘Say it.’
‘I’ve already said more than I should have, my Lord.’
‘Daryan,’ Eofar said, even more quietly; he watched his own clasped fingers for a long moment, then slowly wet his lips and whispered, ‘why won’t you say her name?’
For a moment, Daryan stood there, feeling the hurt pressing down on his chest. Then, speaking as quietly as his master, he said, ‘She’s been dead for five months and you’ve never mentioned her – not once. We served you together for three years, and when she died, it was like you didn’t even notice, like she was just another slave who didn’t matter at all. She did matter. She was
special
.’ His throat felt swollen and his eyes stung. ‘I
know
people die, but nothing feels right without her. Nothing feels … finished.’
He fixed his eyes on the ground, feeling his nerves singing.
‘The elixir,’ said Eofar. ‘Do you want to know why I took it?’
Heart beating fast, he answered, ‘Yes, my Lord.’
‘I need to show you what I saw.’ Eofar stepped down from the dais and started towards his trunk, but his strength deserted him again and he sank down into the heavy wooden chair, shutting his eyes and holding on to the carved armrests.