Sunstone - Dishonor's Bane (Book 2) (33 page)
Read Sunstone - Dishonor's Bane (Book 2) Online
Authors: Guy Antibes
~
Sallia followed in Unca’s footsteps. When she thought again that her parents were likely killed, her mind seemed to have seized up. Moments of lucidity seemed to come and go as she pushed herself to follow the wizard. When those came, the thoughts of her parents, dead, with their blood on the floors of the only home she had ever known brought fresh tears.
After continually running from the road at the sound of horses, Unca led her onto a footpath. What was she to do? An old man as her servant? Unca was hardly suited as a lady-in-waiting. She had to smile at the unprompted vision of Unca in a gown, his tall, lanky frame sticking out of an undersized dress.
Her father recently had started saying that it might be a kindness that the old man retire, but he still needed Unca’s advice and couldn’t yet let him go. Here he walked in front of her, the dim magical ball of light barely keeping them on the footpath. How could he serve her in any way remotely deserving of her station? Perhaps they would hide for a few weeks and then the populace would rise up and displace Histron the Usurper.
They still half-crept in the darkness. Sallia surprised by unbidden fits of sobbing, tried to keep her tears to herself. She felt like someone had ripped her chest open and removed everything except the ache of her parents’ loss. She stopped and again couldn’t resist the outstretched arms of the old man. Her crying seemed to be the only sounds in the forest. Unca just let her go on for awhile. The crying seemed to be the only way she could cope with the enormity of situation.
She stood up straighter and smoothed her cloak once she regained control of her feelings. She felt the dampness of her tears as she ran her hands along the collar. When Unca told her he had a cottage, she didn’t like her father’s advisors keeping secrets from the court. But then, her father might have known. She’d never find out that or anything from her father or mother again. The thought brought more sobs and the wizard let her cry for another few moments. A mournful moon parted from a cloud and turned the pathway into speckles of dark and darker when Unca told her that they must continue on.
Sallia complied and fought to keep up with the wizard, who proved to be more nimble on his feet than she. He stayed silent for long periods of time, only pausing to warn her about an overhanging branch or an exposed tree root. All she could see was the back of the man’s cloak and the long whitish hair turning wild as they rushed through the forest.
What could she do while she waited for the people to rise up? Perhaps Unca had a large cottage with servants who could care of her. He must have or he wouldn’t have thought of taking her into the northern wilds of the Red Kingdom. Perhaps he had a castle hidden in the forest with soldiers ready to take back her kingdom. Sallia shook her head to rid herself of the fantasies that plagued her as they continued their flight.
Their journey eventually became an unending process of putting one foot in front of the other. Sallia refused to complain. A princess must not show weakness. The thought made her chin lift in the night. On and on she vowed to continue without a call to rest. She even began to regain control of her emotions.
She sensed that she was losing control of her legs and her arms. She began to shake as the forest turned from moonlit darkness the the murky blue of the approaching dawn. She stumbled into the back of Unca.
“I can’t go on.” Even princesses had to rest, she admitted to herself, as she clutched the old man’s shoulders. He stopped and held Sallia up as her legs buckled.
“You should have said something earlier.” The look in his eyes seemed so sincere. She realized she’d never really known the old wizard even though they had talked to each other often enough. She noticed an unexpected softness in his eyes that generally pierced her along with his boring witticisms. Perhaps escaping with him would prove to be a successful exit from the horrors of the castle.
“I’m a princess and we don’t complain.” She tried to lift her chin again and assume that diffident look that had been drilled into her since she could talk.
Unca shook his head. “That doesn’t mean we don’t stop to rest before we collapse, Princess. There’s a clearing just ahead. Hopefully there is a brook close by to whet our parched throats. We can stop at an out of the way inn to eat breakfast in an hour or two. The innkeeper is an old friend from days long ago. We’ll get dressed in some less conspicuous clothes and maybe get a couple of horses. Wouldn’t that be better?”
Sallia barely had the energy to nod her head. “Better,” she said.
As they reached the clearing, Unca led her underneath a pine tree. He spread out his cloak. “Roll up in this and sleep for a bit. I’ll find some water.”
The ground looked so inviting as Unca helped her down onto his cloak. He threw the long end over her and the last thing she remembered was his face looking down.
~
“It’s time to go,” Unca said trying to gently shake the sleep from the Princess. The sun was midway to its zenith and the wizard let the girl sleep as long as she could. His stomach protested the fact that he had waited too long before proceeding, but Unca knew the rest would do her a world of good.
She stirred. Her normally sallow cheeks glowed red in the warm sun. “It’s nearly noon! I didn’t tell you to let me sleep in!”
Unca winced at the complaint. “You needed the sleep to rejuvenate your muscles, Princess. We’re still weeks away from the cottage and you can’t make it there if you waste all of your energy the first day. I do have some bad news.”
“Histron is on to us?”
Unca lifted an eyebrow. “The man won’t stop trying to find you and will continue to search until you’re captured.” He just caught himself from saying ‘dead’. “No. You will need to act the part of my daughter.”
Sallia snorted, “Grandaughter, you mean.”
The wizard sighed with the knowledge of the truth. The Princess turned twenty-one in two months. Much to the dead king’s chagrin, Sallia had spurned every suitor since she was sixteen. As the only child, she wanted to wed a prince her age plus have him meet her own personal specifications. Such a person couldn’t be found, for her specification changed with her moods.
“Perhaps my niece… Wait. You will be my grandniece. I will call you Sally and you may call me,” he cleared his throat, “Uncle.”
“Grand Uncle.” She nearly smiled.
Unca merely bowed. “The names are close enough to our own so if we make a mistake addressing one another it can be dismissed.”
“You’re a smart one,” Sallia said. She baited him as she had before at Foxhome. At least this time there weren’t a gaggle of courtiers to snicker at her words and provide her with an audience. Unca generally had the presence of mind to counter her barbs better than anyone else. That unfortunately made her perpetually angry with him.
“Here.” Unca reached into a pocket of his trousers and pulled out some globes the size of large grapes. “Water that I have spelled in such a way so that we can take a drink as we walk. Alas, my skills are not sufficient to catch game as we run.” He merely shrugged. That would be the extent of his apology.
Sallia grabbed three or four of the globes and plopped them in her mouth. “These are rather fun. Why didn’t you do this in court?”
“I’m not a jester, Your Highness,” Unca said, retaining his dignity. “At any rate, I don’t accumulate power like I did when younger. Some days I think I am magically impotent.”
“Does—“ Sallia halted and swallowed with her eyes welling up, “Did Father know about this?”
“The King was not a man to hide secrets from. Although, Duke Histron did a rather dishonorable, but effective, job doing so. I can still knock down trees and the like when needed, but only a few at a time. Then I need to recharge my magical power from the nexus.”
“Ah, the nexus.” Sallia knowingly nodded. “The source of all magical power in the world. I sometimes have a hard time believing that it exists.”
“You would. The talent to use the nexus has been bred out of the royal line of the Red Kingdom for centuries. Your light, nearly violet, eyes are a result of careful pairings through the generations. The lack of magical use has made the Bloodstone merely a symbol.”
“But it is just a symbol,” Sallia said.
“It is a symbol and more. I can feel its power, even through the leather pouch that protects it. Clutching it in my bare hand and I could recharge my powers in moments rather than days.”
Sallia just scoffed. “I don’t believe you.”
Unca shrugged. Her father had the same impression about the stone, but he never discounted the power of symbolism and the Bloodstone and the Red Kingdom were inseparable.
‘
The right to rule
,
’ the king had said often enough,
‘
is tied up with the ancient amule
t
.’
“Enough of this boring talk.” Unca helped her stand.
She picked up his cloak that had kept her warm and held it out for him. “Portable royal chambers. You may burden yourself with them, again.” Sallia had actually said something witty that didn’t require a reply. He smirked behind her back and followed her along the path.
A bit more than an hour later when the sun shone overhead, they exited the forest and took a track bordering the woods and tilled land stopping short of a ramshackle country inn. Four fancy horses stood at the hitching posts. Unca could see weapons and supplies tied to the steeds. Duke Histron had a faster reach than he thought.
~~~
Read the entire story in
Bloodstone | Power of Youth
Copyright ©2015 Guy Antibes All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the permission of the author.
~
This is a work of fiction. The locations, places and characters it depicts are products of the author’s imagination including the use of fictitious names, places, and situations. Any resemblances to actual persons, locations, or places are purely coincidental.
Published by CasiePress in Salt Lake City, UT, February, 2015.
www.casiepress.com
Cover & Book Design: Kenneth Cassell
~
Print ISBN
ISBN-13: 978-1506187976
ISBN-10: 1506187978
With a lifelong passion for speculative fiction, Guy Antibes found that he rather enjoyed writing fantasy as well as reading it. So a career was born and Guy anxiously engaged in adding his own flavor of writing to the world. Guy lives in the western part of the United States and is happily married with enough children to meet or exceed the human replacement rate.
You can contact Guy at his website: www.guyantibes.com.
If you could, please leave a review of Moonstone where you purchased this book.
†
Books by Guy Antibes
Quest of the Wizardess
Quest of the Wizardes
s
chronicles the travels and travails of young Bellia. After her wizard family is assassinated when she is fourteen, Bellia seeks anonymity as a blacksmith’s helper. When that doesn’t work out as expected, she flees to the army.
Her extraordinary physical and magical skills bring unwanted attention and she must escape again. After finding a too-placid refuge, she takes the opportunity to seek out her family’s killers. Revenge becomes her quest that takes her to a lost temple, unexpected alliances and a harrowing confrontation with her enemies.
FANTASY - EPIC/NEW ADULT-COLLEGE/COMING OF AGE
The Power Bearer
How Norra obtained the power and the extraordinary lengths she went through to rid herself of it.
What’s a girl to do when all of the wizards in her world are after her? She runs. But this girl runs towards the source of her power, not away from it. Along the way she picks up, among others, a wizard, a ghost, a highwaywoman and a sentient cloud. Through thick and thin, they help Norra towards her goal of finding a solution in a far off land that no one in her world has even heard of.
YOUNG ADULT EPIC FANTASY
Panix: Magician Spy
Panix has life by the tail. A new wife, a new job in a new land that has few magicians and none of his caliber. His ideal life takes some unexpected downturns and Panix finds himself employed as a spy. He has no training, but must make things up as he goes if he is to survive the politics, betrayal, war and, at the end, his own behavior.
FANTASY - ADVENTURE
The World of the Sword of Spells
Warrior Mage
The gods gave Brull a Sword of Spells and proclaimed him as the world’s only Warrior Mage. One big problem, there aren’t any wars. What’s a guy to do? Brull becomes a magician bounty hunter until the big day when he learns he not only has to fight a war with the magicians of his world, but fight the god that the magicians are all working to bring into being. He finds out if he has what it takes in Warrior Mage.
EPIC FANTASY
Sword of Spells
Read about Brull’s beginnings and earlier adventures as a bounty hunter of magicians in the Sword of Spells anthology.
EPIC FANTASY
The Sara Featherwood Adventures
Set in Shattuk Downs, a reclusive land in the kingdom of Parthy. Sara Featherwood could be a Jane Austen heroine with a sword in her hand. There are no magicians, wizards, dragons, elves or dwarves in Shattuk Downs, but there is intrigue, nobility, hidden secrets, plenty of adventure and romance with a bit of magic.
FANTASY ~ YOUNG ADULT/COLLEGE
FICTION ~ WOMEN’S ADVENTURE
Knife & Flame
When Sara Featherwood’s mother dies, her sixteen-year-old life is thrown into turmoil at Brightlings Manor in a remote district of Shattuk Downs. Life becomes worse when her father, the Squire, sets his roving eye on her best friend. Dreading her new life, Sara escapes to the Obridge Women’s School. Seeking solace in education doesn’t work as her world becomes embroiled with spies, revolution, and to top it all off, her best friend becomes her worst enemy.
Sword & Flame
If you were a young woman who had just saved the family’s estate from ruin, you’d think your father would be proud, wouldn’t you? Sara Featherwood is thrown out of her childhood home and now faces life on her own terms at age seventeen. She returns to the Tarrey Abbey Women’s School and is drafted to help with the establishment of the first Women’s College in the kingdom of Parthy. Now in the King’s capital of Parth, life confronts Sara as she learns about family secrets, which threaten to disrupt her life and about resurgent political turmoil back home that turns her scholarly pursuits upside down as she must take action and use her magic to save her family and her beloved Shattuk Downs.
Guns & Flame
At nineteen, Sara Featherwood has done all she can to help establish the first Women’s College in the kingdom of Parthy. That includes a pact with the kingdom’s Interior Minister, to go on a student exchange program as payment for eliminating opposition to the college. Little does Sara know that her trip to a rival country is not what it seems and as the secrets of the true purpose of her trip unravel, she utilizes her magic to escape through hostile territory with vital secrets, but as she does, she finds herself drawn back to Shattuk Downs and must confront awful truths about those close to her.
The Warstone Quartet
An ancient emperor creates four magical gems to take over and rule the entire world. The ancient empire crumbles and over millennia. Three stones are lost and one remains as an inert symbol for a single kingdom among many. The force that created the Warstones, now awakened, seeks to unite them all, bringing in a new reign of world domination—a rule of terror.
Four Warstones, four stories. The Warstone Quartet tells of heroism, magic, romance and war as the world must rise to fight the dark force that would enslave them all.
FANTASY - SWORD & SORCERY/EPIC
Book One
:
Moonstone | Magic That Binds
A jewel, found in the muck of a small village pond, transforms Lotto, the village fool, into an eager young man who is now linked to a princess through the Moonstone. The princess fights against the link while Lotto seeks to learn more about what happened to him. He finds a legacy and she finds the home in her father’s army that she has so desperately sought. As Lotto finds aptitude in magical and physical power, a dark force has risen from another land to sow the seeds of rebellion. It’s up to Lotto to save the princess and the kingdom amidst stunning betrayal fomented by the foreign enemy.
Book Two
:
Sunstone | Dishonor’s Bane
Shiro, a simple farmer, is discovered to possess stunning magical power and is involuntarily drafted into the Ropponi Sorcerer’s Guild. He attracts more enemies than friends and escapes with his life only to end up on a remote prison island. He flees with an enchanted sword containing the lost Sunstone. Trying to create a simple refuge for an outlawed band of women sorcerers, he is betrayed by the very women he has worked to save and exiled to a foreign land. There, he must battle for his freedom as he and his band become embroiled in a continent-wide conflict.
Book Three
:
Bloodstone | Power of Youth
When usurpers invade Foxhome Castle, Unca, the aging Court Wizard of the Red Kingdom, flees with the murdered king’s only daughter, taking the Bloodstone, an ancient amulet that is the symbol of Red Kingdom rule. Unca uses the Bloodstone to escape capture by an enemy and is transformed into a young man, but loses all of his wizardly powers. Unca must reinvent himself in order to return the princess to her throne. Along the way he falls in love with the young woman and must deal with the conflict between his duty and his heart, while keeping a terrible secret.
Book Four
:
Darkstone | An Evil Reborn
As the 22nd son of the Emperor of Dakkor, Vishan Daryaku grows from boy to man, learning that he must use his unique powers and prodigious knowledge to survive. He succeeds until his body is taken over by an evil power locked inside of the Darkstone. Now Emperor of Dakkor, Vishan is trapped inside, as the ancient force that rules his body devastates his homeland while attempting to recover all of the Warstones.
As the amulets are all exposed, the holders of the Moonstone, Sunstone, and Bloodstone combine to fight the Emperor’s relentless drive to reunite the Warstones and gain power over the entire world. The armies of Dakkor and the forces of those allied with the three other stones collide on a dead continent in the stunning conclusion of the Warstone Quartet.
The Guy Antibes 2014 Anthologies
The Alien Hand
An ancient artifact changes a young woman’s life forever. A glutton gladiator is marooned in a hostile desert. An investigator searches for magic on a ravaged world and finds something quite unexpected. A boy yearns for a special toy. A recent graduate has invented a unique tool for espionage. A member of a survey team must work with his ex-girlfriend in extremely dangerous circumstances. A doctor is exiled among the worst creatures he can imagine.
SCIENCE FICTION
The Purple Flames
A reject from a Magical Academy finds purpose. A detective works on a reservation in New Mexico, except the reservation is for ghouls, demons, ghosts, zombies, and the paranormal. A succubus hunts out the last known nest of vampires on earth. The grisly story about the origins of Tonsil Tommy. In a post-apocalyptic world, two mutants find out about themselves when their lives are in imminent peri
l.
STEAMPUNK & PARANORMAL FANTASY with a tinge of HORROR
Angel in Bronze
A statue comes to life and must come to terms with her sudden humanity. A wizard attempts to destroy a seven-hundred-year-old curse. A boy is appalled by the truth of his parents’ midnight disappearances. A captain’s coat is much more than it seems. A healer must decide if the maxim that he has held to his entire career is still valid. A fisherman must deal with the aftermath of the destruction of his village
.
FANTASY
~~~
Guy Antibes books are available at book retailers in print and e-book formats.