Crown of Crystal Flame (12 page)

In the otherwise empty hall, six King’s Guard stood on duty. Two near the hallway leading to the east wing, two by the hallway to the west, and another two at the top of the stairs. All six watched Sebourne and his men with unblinking eyes as they entered.

“You two, come with me,” Lord Sebourne said to his men in a carrying voice. “The rest of you stay here. I won’t be but a few chimes.”

Leaving four of his guard to wait in the main hall, he and the other two jogged up the stone steps to the second level and the hallway that led to the king’s chambers.

The four guards downstairs sat on a table near the guards on the right of the room. Three of Sebourne’s men started a game of toss blade with a sheathed dagger—an old Celierian warrior’s game fashioned after the Fey Cha Baruk, the Dance of Knives. The fourth man started an easy conversation with the closest guards.

“I don’t know about you two, but I’m starting to wish the flaming Eld would just attack already,” he said. “I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since we got here.”

A clatter made both the guards and Lord Sebourne’s man glance around to find two of Sebourne’s fellows chasing after the sheathed dagger, which had skittered across the hall towards the other two King’s Guard.

“Vern, you
dorn!”
one of Sebourne’s men complained in a loud whisper. “You’re the flaming worst at this game. You can’t throw worth a damn.” The two reached the fallen dagger the same time Lord Sebourne reached the top of the stair.

“I can throw better than you can
catch!”
The man called Vern raised his voice on the last word.

Lord Sebourne and his men sprang into action. The two men on the right of the hall sprang towards the two King’s Guard guarding the eastern corridor. The two chasing the dagger went for the west hall guards. Lord Sebourne and his two companions lunged for the pair at the top of the stairs. Daggers flew. Blades slashed. With their throats slit and chests pierced, the six King’s Guard died in a swift, near-soundless instant.

Sebourne and his two companions headed down the now-unguarded second-floor corridor while his other four men quickly dragged the limp corpses of the King’s Guard into an empty chamber.

Dorian sat at the small camp desk he’d unpacked and set up in his bedchamber. He would have used the larger desk in the adjoining chamber, but his valet, Marten, was sleeping on the chaise in there.

“Just think of me like a faithful hound, guarding his master’s door,” Marten had said with a smile when Dorian objected. Had there been a dressing room, Marten would have slept there on a cot, as he did in Celieria City; but Kreppes was an ancient castle, built for war, not fashionable living, and it lacked many of the amenities of newer abodes.

Dorian sanded the damp ink of his third letter to Annoura in as many days. She hadn’t answered him yet. Though some part of him had hoped she would, another part hadn’t really expected her to. Still, in the small bells of the night, when he couldn’t sleep, it comforted him to write to her, to pour out his heart to her as he so often had in their many years together, to imagine her face softening in a smile as she read his tender words.

When the ink was dry, he folded the letter and lit a stick of Celierian blue sealing wax off the flame of his candle lamp, holding it over the folded flap. As the drops of melted wax splashed on the folded vellum, forming a small pool of Celierian blue, he heard the bedroom door open.

“I’m sorry if I woke you, Marten,” he said without looking up. He pressed his letter seal into the pool of wax and held it for a moment to let the impression set. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“You didn’t.” The voice didn’t belong to Marten.

Dorian’s head whipped around. “Sebourne? What are you doing—” His words cut off abruptly. His hands clapped to his throat, found the small dart, plucked it free. Poison. Potent and fast-acting. Already his muscles were failing, and he couldn’t seem to take a breath.

“Avenging my son,” Sebourne hissed. He stared into his king’s stunned and disbelieving eyes and rammed his sword home, driving the blade up underneath Dorian’s ribs to pierce his heart. “Your kingdom belongs to Eld now. Before this week is out, your son will be as dead as mine. Your wife and the child she carries will be servants of the High Mage, and I will be Lord Governor of Celieria, the newest province in the Empire of Eld.”

Cannevar Barrial knew he should sleep. His body was aching. His eyes were raw and bleary. He would be no use to the king or the allies if the enemy struck when he was too tired to lift a blade. He knew that, but except for a few chimes of restless dozing, true, restful sleep had eluded him all night.

His mind was filled with too many memories of Talisa. He could hardly close his eyes without seeing her tear-stained face, her despair, without reliving the shocking moment of her death, when she’d leapt between her husband and a red Fey’cha blade to save her lover. Even now, Cann could feel the strike of the blade as if it had hit his own heart rather than his daughter’s back.

Ah, gods. He sat up and covered his face with his hands. He wanted to rail against her death. To believe it had never happened. But he was too much a man of the north. Too much a lord of the borders. He’d seen too much death—and worse—to wallow in grief-stricken denial.

He rose from the soft, feminine bed covered with plush, furlined silk comforters in shades of wintry blue and tender spring green. Severn and Parsis had thought him a fool for taking Talisa’s suite after offering his own to King Dorian, for torturing himself with her memory. Only Luce had understood. Luce, Cann’s wild, sweet, fey child, with eyes that saw more than most. Almost a man now, and so like his mother. Luce realized that his father needed these memories of Talisa’s life to make peace with the memory of her death.

He crossed the room to stand beside Talisa’s delicate carved dressing table. The table was all-girl, painted creamy white and laid out with brushes, combs, perfumes, and all manner of womanly mysteries. His hand closed around the pot of perfumed cream Parsis had given her for this past year’s Feast of Winter’s End. Cann unscrewed the lid and lifted the jar to his face, breathing in the delicate aroma of Talisa’s favorite flowers—the scent he would forever remember as hers. Bright, warm, sweeter than a spring morning. His eyes squeezed shut. His heart squeezed tight. But as he breathed the scent, he could see her face, alight with laughter, as she and the other maidens from Kreppes and the surrounding villages had danced around the Spring Tree, weaving brightly colored ribbons around the pine pole’s carved scenes of winter, trailing flowers in their wake as they went. Such a good day. Such a happy, happy day.

He breathed the perfume again, trying to fix that memory in his mind. When he thought of her, he wanted to remember that—not the other sight that hurt so much.

A sound filtered through the closed door of Talisa’s room. Cann didn’t even consciously recognize it, but a lifetime on the borders made his body go tense all the same.

In that one instant, his weariness evaporated, and his grief found itself tucked unceremoniously into a tight box, utterly removed from his current consciousness. Cann the grieving father gave way to Great Lord Barrial, the fierce and wily wolf of the borders. He set the perfume pot down, his hands automatically seeking the grip of his swords but finding only empty air in their stead.

“Krekk.”
His weapons lay atop a bedside table, next to the rack holding the armor he now cursed himself for removing. The studded leather he’d slept in would do precious little to stop an axe, pike, or arrow strike in a full-on battle.

“We’ll wake you at the first sign of trouble,” his sons had promised when they convinced him to shed the armor. But trouble was here, and they had not come.

And that was troubling in its own right.

Cann raced across the room in swift silence, grateful for the plush furs on Talisa’s floor that muffled the sound of his footsteps. The latch on the door began to lift just as he reached the bed. He dropped down behind the bed and slipped one of his daggers from its sheath. He wasn’t half as good with the throwing daggers as the Fey, but at a distance as short as the one between him and the door, he didn’t miss.

The door cracked opened.

A voice whispered, “Da?”

Parsis. Cann let out a breath. “Here, Parsi.” Wary habit kept him crouched where he was, dagger pulled back for a throw.

Parsis poked his head around the edge of the door. Once he saw his father, he stepped quickly inside. Severn came in on his heels, closing the door behind them.

Now sure it was his sons and no one else, Cann rose to his feet. Both of them here, fully armed and armored, could only mean one thing. “So, it’s begun?”

“The king is dead but not by Elden hands. The attack came from within.” Parsis’s eyes were dark. “It’s Sebourne, Da.” He moved swiftly across the room to his father’s side and reached for the armor hanging on the rack.

“Sebourne?” That was a shock Cann had not expected. He slipped into the chest plates Parsis held out. “You’re sure?”

“Luce saw Sebourne’s men kill some of the King’s Guard.”

“Where is Luce?”

“Gone to lower the shields and sound the alarm.” Sev knelt to fasten the greaves to his father’s legs.

With the night shields up, they couldn’t spin a weave to alert the allies. Sebourne would know that and take precautions to keep those shields up, which mean Luce was headed for danger. As his sons helped him into his armor, Cann sent up a quick prayer for Luce’s safety and a quick curse for Sebourne’s insanity.

“Grief must have driven Sebourne mad.” Arrogant, hottempered, and power-hungry though he was, Cann had never known Sebourne to harbor treasonous sentiments against the king. But grief could do strange things to a man. “Who the
jaffing
Hells let him close enough to the king to kill him?”

“I don’t think they let him, Da. Luce said all the guards in the main hall were dead. And Sebourne’s men were taking care to hide the bodies.”

The boys fastened the last of his armor in place and handed him his weapons. He buckled his sword belt, slung his quiver on his back, and settled the band of black Fey’cha across his chest. Sev handed him his Elfbow. He strung the bow quickly, curling his left ankle around one end, bending the long, recurved body of the bow across his back, and settling the loop on the end of the bowstring into place. Bow in hand, he nodded to his sons. “Let’s go.”

His sons pulled their swords, and together they slipped out into the hall.

*   *   *

The halls of the fortress’s central keep were eerily quiet. All of the King’s Guard stationed in the central tower were missing from their posts, with only a few drops of blood an occasional sign of disturbance to hint at their fate. Cann and his sons, followed by the King’s Guard who had been stationed in the east wing, padded through the silent corridors.

In the king’s suite they found the bodies of Dorian X and his valet, Marten, both unmistakably dead. Cann shared grim looks with the others. Even with the eyewitness accounts of his sons, this irrefutable proof of Sebourne’s treachery left him stunned.

“When we find him,” Cann growled softly, “he’s mine.”

His boys nodded. Together, they slipped back into the hallway and made their way to the stone steps leading to the central hall.

They found Sebourne and two of his men disposing of the body of a King’s Guard in the first hallway of the west wing.

Cann didn’t hesitate. With a speed that would have done his Elvish kin proud, he pulled an arrow from the quiver at his back, nocked it, aimed, and let fly. A second arrowed followed a split second later.

Sebourne’s two companions dropped without a sound. The Great Lord whirled, blade unsheathed and raised for battle. At the sight of Cann and his sons, Sebourne’s lip curled.

“You,” he spat. “I should have known.”

“Ta, me,” Cann snarled. “You miserable,
jaffing
traitor.” He thrust his bow at his son Severn. His hand dropped to the hilt of the blade sheathed at his hip, and he drew the shining blade from its scabbard.

“Traitor, am I?” Lord Sebourne snarled, baring teeth like a
lyrant
issuing challenge. “Because Great House Sebourne is finally standing up to that puling Fey-lover of a king?”

“Because Great Lord Sebourne is a spineless
rultshart
of an assassin, too cowardly to face his enemy in open battle.” Cann crossed the courtyard in a few long strides and took his battle stance, sword raised.

“I’ll face you—gladly.” Sebourne raised his sword. Torchlight glinted along the blade’s fine, gleaming length. “You killed my son. You and those Fey maggots—and that loose-legged slut you called a daughter.”

The insult to Talisa did not make Cann charge recklessly at his opponent as Sebourne had no doubt intended. Instead, all his anger, all his grief, shrank down into a hard, icy knot deep inside his core.

“Your son was a weak, spoiled bully,” he replied. “I should never have let my daughter waste herself on him. Even on his best day, he wasn’t worthy to kiss her hem.”

Satisfaction surged inside him as Sebourne’s nostrils flared. The Great Lord swung his blade with reckless force. Cann dodged the blow with ease and swung at Sebourne’s unprotected back. Dervas spun sharply, raising his shield in time to deflect Cann’s blow. He was no stranger to warfare and no easy kill, with reflexes honed by a lifetime of living in the wilds of the northern borders. Like Cann, there were few lords who could best him.

They flowed from one masterful form to another, attacking and counterattacking with blurring speed and steady, relentless prowess. Scissor Blades. Circle of Ice. Death Drop. Ring of Fire. Shield Strike. Helm Cleaver. Neither flinched or faltered.

Cann had appreciated Sebourne’s skill a time or two in the past, and they’d spent many a day sparring together in a friendly rivalry. Right now, he heartily regretted those days. Sebourne knew him too well, knew how he attacked, defended, which combinations came most naturally to him.

But, then, he knew Sebourne, too.

He watched for the patterns that inevitably appeared in Sebourne’s fighting. And eventually, it came. After a particularly savage series of attacks and parries, a panting, sweat-drenched Sebourne backed off into a lighter attack called Maiden’s Dance. The series of teasing blows, though swiftly delivered, carried much less strength behind them. They weren’t meant to kill, only to inflict numerous shallow wounds to weaken an opponent through blood loss and shake his confidence.