Daughters of Ruin (3 page)

“I'm Tasanese,” said Suki.

Hiram continued. “They seized the opportunity to rise up and steal the crops of the lowlands, belonging to Meridan, and the hill-country ranches belonging to Corent.”

“My daddy doesn't steal. He's king of the world,” said Suki.

Hiram laughed. “Ah, but he does invade and annex and put farmers who disagree into the trees.”

Suki didn't understand what execution by hanging meant.

“But the Corentine—” continued Hiram, rounding on Iren, “were the most devious. The ever-aloof Corentine, Meridan's only true allies, refused to honor our treaties and enter the fray. They holed themselves in their spires.”

Iren shrugged. She didn't particularly seem to care.

“Meridan was gravely wounded, without king or queen or heir—enemies in every direction and friends in none. So, Declan the Giver, a lowly noble, rose up and took back the country he loved.”

Rhea beamed with pride for her father.

“At the Battle of Crimson Fog, he survived an assassination attempt by the Tasanese, who sent their own princess to turn the coward's knife.”

“Tola,” whispered Suki.

“But Declan was too clever. And though it broke his heart, he sounded the battle horn that very night. Meridan charged the field. More soldiers died in the battle than at the siege of Blantyre, or even by Rotter's Plague. Most were Tasanese farmers, conscripted by the emperor to take up their sickles for war. The Findish supply lines were also caught unawares. When the sun rose that day, the chroniclers say the dew on the grass was bloodred. The ‘mourning fog,' they called it. Outside these walls, they say everyone was present at Crimson Fog, because everyone felt the loss of someone they knew.

“Only Declan could unite the kingdoms and make peace. He paid for the mass graves Findain caused. He sheltered the war orphans Tasan created, and Corent ignored. You three,” said Hiram, nodding at Cadis, Iren, and Suki, “are lucky you've been allowed to live under his protection, here in Meridan. And you're lucky to grow up alongside his own daughter.”

Hiram finished his account and put Suki down. Marta glared at him with open disgust. It had all been whispered before in the bathhouses and empty chambers of Meridan Keep, but it had never been said. And never to the girls—the future sister queens of the four empires.

A silence that follows thunder hung about them. None of the girls would look Rhea in the eye. Everything had shifted between them.

Suki looked from Cadis, who wiped a tear from her cheek as quickly as she could, to Iren, who clenched her jaw in silence, to Rhea, who finally understood why Marta was trying to stop her.

At that moment the little girl realized that all the pain in her short life—her sissy's death, her good-bye to her parents—the massive nightmare that she wished and wished she would wake from, all of it was supposedly her own fault.

A black shroud seemed to fall over Suki's vision.

The five-year-old shattered the silence.

“It's not our fault!”

She charged at Hiram, battering his legs with her useless fists.

Hiram didn't respond. Any response would have made it worse.

In the ensuing tumult, Rhea stood by and watched as Cadis and Iren ran up to grab Suki. She knew now they would never be truly sisters, the way her father wanted. They would never reign together and usher in a generation of peace among the four empires. His great dream of a Pax Regina—peace of the queens—would be a disappointment he would have to endure. And she would be to blame for it.

She watched Cadis, the natural leader, peel Suki away from Hiram's leg. And she saw Iren quietly sidle next to Hiram, reach into his robe, which had fallen open, and steal a roll of parchment full of the magister's notes.

When everything had finally settled:

The carriage reset and doused of its flames.

The horses calmed by Endrit's soothing words and bribed with his apples.

Two new soldiers called to play the bandits.

Only then did the servants return to cleaning the coliseum as if they had seen nothing.

Hiram's shinhound returned from delivering his message. The king's man nodded at Marta and bade the sister queens farewell.

So the four girls from four countries found themselves again in a new royal carriage, riding peaceably along, awaiting an attack.

Rhea wished desperately that they could go back to the first run and work it out among themselves. She had never had siblings before and didn't know how permanent the damage could be.

She tried to break the silence.

“Maybe we could do the same plan again?”

It was the best olive branch she could offer, admitting that Cadis's idea had worked for the most part. Though, of course, it was doling out tasks that caused their fight in the first place.

Cadis stared straight at a button in the upholstery. She shook from the intensity of her focus on that one point—a taut rope on a ship at storm.

Rhea added, “But this time I'll go on Iren's side, so we don't get in each other's way.”

Iren glanced up, nodded silently at Rhea, and then returned to picking her nails with her dagger. Suki sniffled. Her job was to stay in the coach until the bandits were fought off. Then she would crawl over the rigging and saddle one of the horses to bring them to a stop. She had been raised on horseback and could do the job even while pouting.

The very first unveiling of the hitherto queens would make a glorious climax to the festivities of King Declan's Revels. The entire coliseum would marvel at the martial skill and cunning of the future rulers of the world. But most of all, the people would find comfort in the fact that the heirs to the four thrones and four armies loved one another like sisters.

Rhea tried to intercept Cadis's stare by leaning into it. “Cadis? Does that sound good?”

It was Cadis's plan. Of course it sounded good. Rhea realized too late that making Cadis speak wasn't an olive branch, but just another kind of knife.

Cadis snapped her gaze to Rhea. Her eyes shimmered but held strong.

“Yes,” she said, unblinking. “That's fine.”

First from the others was Meridan's own

Lost a mother when she won a crown

Her daddy jumped up and defended the throne

Dance little queen, but don't . . . fall . . . down.

—Children's nursery rhyme

R
hea put up her hair as Endrit took off his shirt in the chamber below the private bedrooms of the castle.

Her maids were sent away.

The candles lit the room with warm halos floating a-pixie in the dark.

Rhea's thick black curls took dozens of jeweled floral pins, stabbed in every direction, to stay aloft in the formal style.

As she fumbled in front of the full-length mirror, Rhea glanced at Endrit's reflection. The years of assisting his mother in their training had made him the envy of all the noble sons at court, who seemed to be made of lesser mettle. Where the young lords would call for water and stop their coddled sword work at the first pain, Endrit had been the sparring partner—and punching bag—to the sisters, without the luxury of raising two fingers and storming off.

He was seventeen and looked like the flattering portraits hanging in the royal hall. Shoulders broad and tapering down across a barrel chest, and a taut abdomen. Rhea knew he kept his light brown hair a medium length because it looked soft and sandy when he lay under the trees in the orchards, regaling the swoony village girls with tales of castle comforts. And he knew it looked menacing when it hung wet over his obsidian eyes, in the heat of a fight.

After he pulled the linen tunic over his head, Endrit reached up and ran a hand through his wet hair. The third reason he kept it that length was to reach up and flex his arms and his abs and catch the princesses watching him in their mirrors.

Endrit smiled with mischief.

Rhea flushed and looked away. “Put your shirt back on,” she said.

“Excuse me, Princess, but it's stifling in here. Some of us aren't used to castle fineries.”

“Like clothing?” said Rhea.

“Like indoor heating,” said Endrit.

Rhea parried the jab with an unimpressed eyebrow. “Do you suffer a lot of cold nights, curled up with the old tabby cat?”

Endrit's romantic exploits were the subject of endless teasing from the sisters . . . and endless speculation.

“I don't know about that,” said Endrit. “Mrs. Wigglefoots never scratched so hard.”

Endrit turned to show a crosshatch of scars on his ribs stretching across the muscles of his back. Each was from Rhea, Cadis, Iren, or Suki missing their mark, swinging wildly, or losing control during their blade work over the years.

Rhea had no witty riposte.

The scars were deep and irregularly healed, as if some had been carved into already-scabbed tissue. Rhea remembered when she was first learning to throw her weighted knives, when she didn't know to aim at the smallest target possible and was easily distracted. Endrit provided the human prey.

And if he wasn't so skilled at diving clear, she would have skewered him a dozen times. As it was, she knew she was responsible for many of those graze marks along Endrit's ribs. “Don't feel bad, Princess,” said Endrit as he walked about the room, lifting the wooden dummies back onto their stands. “Some of these I remember fondly.” Endrit was the only one allowed to call the sisters “princess” in that puckish tone, and only in private. Rhea liked it when he did, because it made him feel like more than just the servant they had abused all these years so they could become masters of their arts. It made him feel like a friend.

Rhea finished with a last pin in her hair. Her head almost wobbled under the weight. Rhea didn't spend any more time in front of the glass, not to admire herself as Cadis did. She simply used the glass to make sure her hair was ready for a royal ball and turned away. Not in disgust. Though maybe when she was younger. No, not disgust. Duty. Drive.

She was too busy to fuss about her thick mane or her inelegant posture. She was beautiful enough—though not as lovely as Cadis. And elegant enough—though not as regal as Iren.

Rhea caught herself thinking such thoughts and asked herself,
And what about Suki? How do we measure against the youngest?
Her answer was a welcome joke. She was certainly brave enough, but she would
never
be as wild as Suki.

Rhea straightened her red silk ball gown and said, “Aren't you ready?”

“No,” said Endrit, lifting the last wooden dummy. “And neither are you.”

He threw a golden armband he had retrieved from the floor. Rhea caught it and clasped it around her left wrist.

It was a chunky piece of jewelry, made finer by delicate scrollwork patterns cut into the gold in the shape of a shining sun. It matched the elaborate necklace Rhea wore—the masterpiece of her family's crown jewels. The lavish necklace began as a black lacy choker, set with hundreds of white diamonds all around and a giant ruby the size of an apricot at its center. Radiating from the ruby's setting were long, thin, round black stones that tapered into impossibly sharp points.

When her father had first clasped the necklace around her neck on her thirteenth birthday, he'd told her they were the teeth of the crest-beast of their house—the onyx wyrm. It had been that evening after the shared birthday ceremony for all four sisters. Of course Rhea knew there were no dragons in the world, but she liked that her father told the tale as their ancestors would have, the way he had done when she was very young—before the war, before he had to treat her like her sisters, with no public sign of favor—like a bedtime story.

He looked at her in the mirror and she knew it must have been difficult for him, too. To pretend he had four daughters. To raise four queens—to pick up the burden their families had so recklessly dropped. She looked at him and saw a widower, a father, a great king. He was almost teary when he said, “You look a bit like your mother.”

As Rhea remembered the moment and stared into the same mirror as that evening, she touched the eight black diamond spikes that lay across her bare neck, reminding Rhea never to look down.

She was dressed for a coronation in full regalia. Nothing in the basement chamber shined as brightly as the crested sun-shaped ring on her right hand or the pointed dragon-shaped ring on her left.

Only Endrit and her father had seen her in ceremonial dress.

The wooden dummies stood around the open space in haphazard groups as if they were revelers at the grand ball. The walls of the basement space glimmered with weapon racks. A few punching bags hung in the corners. A replica of the throne of Meridan had been shoved to one side.

No windows.

No hearth.

Each of the sisters had her own private training room. It was Declan's gift, a secret entrance leading down into a chamber below each of their bedrooms. Among the only things they didn't share. Rhea was certain he had built the best room for her, though she couldn't be sure. The sisters kept their rooms private. But she knew. She just knew. The girls had all run up to be the first to hug Declan. And as he hugged them back, Rhea had looked up, and her father had winked a conspiratorial wink. A sly and warm expression that said,
We'll keep the little secret between us.
Of course, was it such a shocking secret that a father loved his daughter more than others? Rhea was sixteen now, and knew they were unlike any other father and daughter in the kingdom. And so, perhaps, their secrets were uncommon too.