The Child Prince (The Artifactor) (61 page)

Firuz Adnan, the Sa Kaon king, looking impressively regal in full ceremonial robes, stood next to Sarsen and was peppering the other Artifactor with questions. Sevana didn’t quite understand the necessity of the formal clothing. Granted, even formal, it didn’t look uncomfortable to wear. The wrapped headband hid his balding head, with white shirt and trousers half-hidden under a purple mantel that wrapped around his shoulders and back. If not for the gilded embroidery and edging, it would look quite casual. He appeared in oddly high spirits, too, dark eyes shining with enthusiasm, and his wiry frame nearly bouncing. Sa Kao, for whatever reason, didn’t produce many magicians, so he might very well be this excited simply because he got to see so
much
magic in use today.

Sevana smirked in amusement as she realized that Mateus Navarro, King of Haixi, could be placed on the complete opposite side of the spectrum from Adnan. He kept stifling yawns behind his hand, and the bedhead look, sleepy eyes, and the slouch made it look as if he had rolled right out of bed. If not for the fact that his starched formal black uniform looked pristine, she would have actually believed he
had
just rolled out of bed for this meeting. He didn’t even pretend to listen as Sarsen explained and demonstrated some magic for Adnan.

The only kings taking this matter seriously were Doran Audenaert, King of Belen; Aren, of course; and Bronislav Vlatko. But those three kings shared tight borders with each other, and Audenaert had already tried combining his country with Windamere’s once. (And was foiled by Bel burning the betrothal contract. She had to wonder if Bel had fessed up to that yet.) More than anyone else, these three would be directly affected by what happened here tonight.

Audenaert knew it, too. A bear of a man, he seemed to loom over everyone else in the room, even though he actually stood a half-hand shorter than Aren. He had also dressed formally for tonight, with a thick fur mantel draped around his shoulders, chain-link armor over a midnight blue tunic, knee-high boots polished to a shine. His thick beard disguised his mouth as he spoke, but his words had enough volume to reach even her ears, and she stood on the opposite end of the room.

Bel and Hana, hand in hand, came up to stand at her side. She glanced at them, noting expressions. Hana looked almost sick with nerves, as she should be. The outcome of this night would determine her future, for better or worse. She had apparently taken great pains with her appearance, in a formal blue dress that bordered-lined extravagance, hair for once done up properly in a soft bun. Trying to give a good impression on the other kings? Pity it was foiled by her gnawing on her bottom lip.

Bel, on the other hand, looked unnaturally calm. For once, he dressed like a proper prince, from shiny boots to the velvet dark green tunic he wore. He had somehow managed to even tame that hair of his, so that he gave a very clean-cut impression. Strange he hadn’t been attacked by nerves, though. He typically did in these types of settings. She took a closer look at his expression and finally realized that his eyes scanned the room with the eyes of a predator, taking in and weighing everything.

Ah. Of course. In this situation, he wouldn’t be called upon to publicly speak, so no need to be nervous. Instead, he probably felt more like a hunter that had finally cornered his prey.

“Sevana,” he said in a quiet manner. “Thank you for bringing them all here.”

She shrugged off the thanks.

“I’m surprised you wore that to go get the kings, though,” Hana observed, frowning as she took Sevana in from head to toe.

Not fazed by royalty, she had worn her typical boots, trousers, and white shirt without a second’s thought. “I suppose in comparison to this crowd, I do seem a mite underdressed.” Not that she intended to apologize for that.

“Everyone, I think the council has assembled!” Sarsen called from near the wall.

Sevana started heading over with Bel and Hana when she realized the conspicuous absence of someone. “Where’s Pierpoint?”

“Father asked him to help people on the outlying regions get here,” Bel informed her in a low tone. “I imagine he’s outside and using some sort of spell so anyone outside the castle can hear what’s going on in the room.”

Ah. She hadn’t thought about them, but thankfully Aren had. Putting Pierpoint out there had been a good decision.

This room stretched quite some distance either way, as it had been designed to hold soirees and the like, giving everyone more than enough room to line up along the wall and get a perfectly clear view of the council. The Council room was identical in size and shape to this one, but with one massively long table that took up most of the available space, cushioned chairs arranged around the oval wood.

It took a few minutes for everyone to be settled, as people adjusted their chairs just so, and brought out papers and quills, some bending down to have a quick word with their neighbor before straightening again. Sevana had ample time to count heads. She couldn’t put names to faces on the councilmen, but she didn’t need to. A quick headcount said that they full council sat in the room.

Eventually the man in the head chair stood and cleared his throat. “Gentlemen, I believe we can begin. Let us start with the first issue: that of the Dragonmanovichs appearing in the Windamere public. Delhaye, what have you learned?”

A thin man with a very small chin stood, his eyes focused on the head chair as he responded, “I was able to put a man inside several of their meetings.”

Bel, next to her, hissed out a curse. “I was afraid they had managed that,” he muttered.

Hana hushed him as the councilman continued, “He couldn’t vouch for the young man, as we of course have very little idea of what the prince would look like if full-grown, but he said there’s no mistake that Aren was truly there. I do not believe these two are imposters.”

The chairman nodded, eyes perturbed. “Thank you, Delhaye. Very well, now that we have that matter cleared up, let’s discuss the next issue. How should we approach this? I’ve heard reports about what is said at these secret meetings, and how both men claim they were cursed for the past ten years. We know, of course, that Prince Bellomi truly was cursed. But for King Aren to claim the same is preposterous—”

“Why is it preposterous?” a heavyset man with a thick mustache and reclining hairline stood so fast that his chair rocked on its hind legs. “I said before, ten years ago, that King Aren was acting strangely! Especially after the prince was cursed, he should have been examined—”

“He
was
, by the Court Magician,” another man responded impatiently.

“—and not by that buffoon!” the mustached man retorted firmly. “That idiot can’t be trusted to tie his own shoes correctly. Whatever Pierpoint’s failure with the prince, he was ten levels above what currently serves as a Court Magician. If not him, then we should have contacted the Artifactor Prodigy that lives right within our borders!”

“Clasessens,” Bel whispered to answer Hana’s inquiry. “I’m not surprised he’s acting in our defense, as he’s always been loyal to us.”

“But we didn’t
know
he was cursed,” another man on this side of the table said, his back to the kings, obscuring his face. His smooth tone sounded almost idle, bored by the discussion. “How are we supposed to be blamed for any of this if we didn’t know his circumstances?”

“The situation was dodgy enough that we should have examined every possibility,” another man said in a loud, carrying voice.

“My Lord Goethals,” the chairman said in a tone of heavy exasperation. “We’ve been through this several times—”

“And I still disagree with you, Toussaint. But whatever your opinion about the king, the very least we should have done was taken the Child Prince directly to an Artifactor. Only the most greedy, arrogant of magicians came to see him, and they were all incompetent in my opinion. We should have sent him to an expert. Lernaire is quite right in this. We have a world famous Artifactor within our own borders. Why didn’t we ever use her? At the very least, we should have
tried
.”

“To what end?” a man with narrow shoulders and thick glasses asked wearily. “King Aren was still alive, it’s not as if the prince would have been able to rule. Or even known how to, as he didn’t have the necessary training for it.”

“And who’s responsible for that?” Clasessens demanded, face becoming ruddy with anger. “I’ll tell you! WE ARE. You’ve talked Goethals and I into changing one law after another, and sometimes you overruled us entirely, but what has it led to? The king and prince going out into the public, on their own, and doing everything in their power to strip us of our position! And you know what? Sweet mercy, but I can’t blame them. I sit in a den of vipers.”

“Clasessens, that is quite enough!” Toussaint thundered. “I will not sit here and be insulted like this! We are not at fault for any of this. Everything that we did was for the good of—”

“Ourselves!” Goethals overrode loudly. “Do not try to tell me otherwise. It was not for the good of Windamere, but for the sake of this Council. But the game is up, Toussaint. We shall not wiggle free of this. The Dragonmanovichs are free—free of the rooms we locked them into, free of their curses, and free of the supposed safety of this palace. They are even now doing everything in their power to wrest back their kingdom. If we are lucky, they will not call forth the power of the Council of Kings.”

A man that sat almost directly in front of Sevana chuckled in a darkly humorous way. “Really, gentlemen, this drama is unnecessary. So the king and prince have been scurrying about the countryside, stirring up the rabble. To what end? We can certainly re-instate them to their former positions, but they will no longer have the power they once did. The laws are changed, the procedures different. If they call in the Council of Kings, it will not affect us in any way. We have the perfect excuses in place: We tried to cure the Child Prince and failed. We had no knowledge of the king being cursed whatsoever, just thought him indifferent to the workings of his country. We changed the workings of the kingdom so that we could preserve it. Is this not all reasonable, given the facts of the situation?”

The very way he said it, with such mild good humor, made Sevana’s stomach twist in an ugly knot. “I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.”

“Same here,” Bel grimaced, expression a mix of revulsion and anger. Shaking his head, he turned to Aren, who stood nearby, and asked, “Is this enough? I cannot imagine that they need to hear more than this to know how corrupt the council is.”

Aren’s expression was fixated into marble stillness, not revealing anything, but his eyes shone with conflicting emotions. “It’s certainly enough for me. My brother kings, what say you?”

Sevana had been so engrossed in the discussion in the council room, and to what the kings around her were saying, that she paid scant regard to the crowd of citizens that hovered outside around the three floor to ceiling windows. This proved, in retrospect, to be a disastrously stupid thing to do.

The citizens had not listened calmly as the Councilmen talked, and they took in every word with growing outrage and disgust. As the Councilmen calmly laid out their excuses and plans to keep the Dragonmanovichs from regaining full power, the citizens started to speak to each other in louder and more fervent tones, their anger spreading like a contagion. It became so loud that even inside their stone walls, the men in the Council room could hear it, and they stopped mid-sentence to listen.

“What, in sweet mercy, is that?” one of them asked in bafflement. Standing, he took a look through the windows, eyebrows shooting up in surprise. “Heavens, there’s people out there! Now how did they get unto the ground unchallenged?”

“Why are they even here?” Toussaint asked, puzzled. “Some misguided attempt to support their king?”

“Ridiculous. Have the guard round them up and throw them in some cell.”

Sarsen swore, words almost too quick to be understood, and took an aborted step toward the outer wall. “No, don’t—”

From outside, the crowd became a mob of rage. They moved forward in an unrelenting tide, calling out words that could not be understood. They hardly needed to be, as tone relayed enough. These people were angry. Angry at what the Council had done to the ruling family, angry at being suppressed and mistreated for ten years just to satisfy these men’s ruthless ambitions, angry to be treated even now as little better than cattle. Their presence magnified and expanded, becoming just as threatening as a young mother dragon in search of her egg.

“Can’t understand what they think they’re doing,” Toussaint said, his naturally loud voice carrying at exactly the wrong time. “Solid stone walls between us and them. They think we’ll pay attention to a bit of rabble yelling at us?”

In that moment, the delicate balance of power cracked and broke open as one of the large windows exploded inward, glass shards spraying in every direction. No one could even formulate a response before several people shoved the glass shards further inside, giving them a way inside, and the first of the ‘rabble’ stepped through.

“Stone the crows!” Sevana took a step forward, hand automatically reaching for a wand, before she remembered that despite being see-through, she had a solid stone wall in front of her. She clenched her hand in aggravation, nails biting into the skin of her palms, and resisted the urge to swear. “They’re breaking through!”

“
What
do they think they’re doing?” Bel demanded at her side, eyes wide with incredulity. “I specifically told everyone that I didn’t want any fighting!”

From the other side, in the council room, the air of civility shattered with the windows. Several young men, of every possible age and size, forced their way past the shards of glass and the wooden trim, seemingly uncaring about the scratches they gained along the way. They had nothing more than daggers and lamps in their hands, but they didn’t seem to care about being properly armed either. They roared with anger, voices overlapping each other so much that no one could make sense of even a single word, and surged forward. In their wake, others swarmed inside, and not just the younger generation. Older men of every possible trade, middle aged matrons, and even a few old men brandishing canes all fought their way through, faces contorted with rage.