The Seer - eARC (5 page)

While he was busy trying to keep her from hitting him she kicked him in the knee, quite a bit harder than he expected. He swore and stepped back.

Again she rushed him, lips pulled back, snapping her teeth. Instinctively he raised an arm, the way he would have with one of the fighting dogs, and cocked it back as if to hit her in the snout. He doubted it would even slow her down, though, not when she was like this.

Across the room his mother stood, holding her hands over her ears, and gave a piercing scream.

At this the door opened. In burst three palace guards, all of whom Innel knew. As he tried to make sense of this unlikely intrusion, Cahlen came at him again, and the three guards sprinted toward her.

This had gone far enough. He let Cahlen step in close and put his weight behind a full-force push to the middle of her chest, propelling her backward while the guards stumbled to the side to avoid her. Cahlen sprawled ass-first onto an open space on the carpeted floor. Now on her back, she stayed there, breathing hard, glaring up at him.

He turned his attention to the guards.

“What are you doing?”

He had never before seen palace guards break into a private residential room. Not for screaming, not for crashes of ceramic broken against walls. Not even for cries for help. Gossip would follow all that, certainly.

But guards? Never.

“Get out,” he told them. They hesitated, the two looking to the one clearly in command. Nalas, a man he knew. Then, with more force, he repeated: “Out. Now.” Nalas tilted his head toward the door, taking the other two outside.

Innel looked at his sister on the floor, still breathing hard, and wondered what was going on in her head. Cahlen could go from dead calm to bruising fury in an instant, then be over it in the next. A drenching rainstorm turned abruptly to blue skies. Once it had fully passed, the storm would be over. But had it?

Her expression shifted, mouth went slack, eyes unfocused. There it went, the storm. He waited a moment to be certain, then with a nod at his mother, who stood as if frozen, he left.

Outside the three guards waited.

“What in the seven hells was that about?” He stepped up close to Nalas, pushed him sharply with both hands, harder than he intended. Nalas stumbled back, tensed, and Innel found himself unreasonably hoping for a fight.

Nalas raised his hands in appeasement.

“His Majesty’s orders.”

At this Innel forced himself to calm. He wanted to hit something, but a fight here and now over this would be foolish.

“All right,” he said, breathing deeply. “Why?”

“Protecting you?” Nalas replied, a tinge of wry apology in his tone.

“From
Cahlen
?” Innel said, incredulous. “But she’s harmless.”

Nalas gave a shrug that said he didn’t disagree.

The king was guarding him? From what?

While he was formulating what he might sensibly ask Nalas, knowing that every word would get back to Restarn, Cahlen emerged. Behind her his mother’s face flashed a moment in the doorway and then vanished, the door slamming shut. She wanted nothing to do with this.

Well, neither did he.

As two guards stepped to intercept Cahlen, Nalas stepped back, a hand on the hilt of his sword.

Innel could see this playing out very badly indeed. He stepped into the middle, a hand out to stop Nalas from drawing his blade.

Oblivious, Cahlen walked directly to Innel. To the other two guards, he held up a closed fist in an abrupt motion. Everyone stopped but his sister.

“Cahlen,” he said sharply, to get her attention.

Innel could imagine the stories that would follow this: not only had Innel slain his brother, but the very day the king let him walk away from that, he had tried to kill his own sister in the hallway outside his mother’s apartment.

It wouldn’t matter that the king had ordered these guards, or that Innel had not drawn a blade; rumor had a way of following blood.

Untrained, unarmed, and half his weight, Cahlen was scarcely more dangerous to him than one of her messenger birds. But the guards were plenty dangerous; if she were seized by another tantrum now and came at him, they would take her down and hurt her, regardless of what Innel said or did.

He searched her face as she came close. Was she still angry?

Close enough to hit. Close enough to kiss. She did neither, standing scant inches from him, looking up at him, blinking rapidly.

“Cahlen?” he asked gently.

“Brother.” She gulped for air. She seemed upset, almost about to weep. He had not seen her cry since she was a baby. But this was not a typical day.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I need to fix the east tower dovecote,” she said, voice low. “The birds are too crowded. They don’t fly well. Will you ask for me? The king, the ministers, whoever it is that you must ask.”

When Innel and Pohut, five and seven, had been taken into the Cohort, the group had numbered nearly forty children, ten of them girls. Cahlen had been brought in two years later, but in weeks was sent back to live with their mother. Between the strange moods, insensible responses, and a tendency to become overly violent when confused, she was deemed unsuited.

Over the years Cahlen showed a strong talent with animals. Now she was an assistant bird-keeper, living in the tower-shaped dovecote, breeding doves, training them to carry messages back to the palace.

In this moment, her fury at their brother’s death mysteriously dissipated, all she demanded from him was a favor.

“I will,” he told her earnestly.

With that she turned wordlessly away, walking down the hall, only a small limp in her step to indicate anything had transpired besides conversation. As she went, she brushed her hand through her thick, short mass of hair. A bit of birdseed dropped onto the wooden flooring.

And now to Cern.

He waited a few days to let her fury ease, then visited her suites. Sachare came into the hallway to meet him.

Most of the girls of the Cohort had left early, somewhat less motivated by the often brutal competitions that so often comprised so much of Cohort life. Of those who had finished, Taba was now a navy ship’s captain and Larmna had been put in charge of House Nital’s amardide forests in the Kathorn province. Sachare had become Cern’s chamberlain.

His Cohort sister was a tall woman, her hands tucked into the pockets of her red robes trimmed in dark pinks and gold, marking her as one of the princess’s staff. A magenta sapphire glinted in her right ear. Cern’s color.

“No,” Sachare said, simply and clearly.

He hadn’t expected Cern to let him in easily, and it was no surprise to have Sachare sent to stand in his way, but he had thought to get into the antechamber, at least. Not to have the conversation in the hallway, in front of a tencount of royal guards who had no reason to keep it to themselves.

“Her words or yours?” he asked.

“Mine are less polite.”

“Oh?” He stepped toward her, too close, just short of what might have been considered threatening, a line his Cohort brothers and sisters knew well. “What would yours be?”

From her changing expression, he could see that she was weighing various answers. She shook her head.

“Again: no.”

“He was a traitor, Sachare.”

“So we’ve heard.” A small, bitter smile. “In any case, it’s not me you have to convince.”

“Then let me in.”

“She hasn’t given a new answer since I told you a moment ago.”

“I can change her mind. You know that.”

“You may not enter, Innel.”

That was clear enough. Cern would need more time.

Still he hesitated, wondering if he should give Sachare the gift he’d brought for Cern, a small book he’d been holding in reserve for such a need. Full-color drawings of birds of prey, their silhouettes, descriptions of their calls and hunting habits. The sort of thing that would appeal to the princess. Expensive.

“He was a good man,” Sachare said softly.

This caught Innel off guard. He looked away, the words echoing in his head. When he had his feelings again in hand, he looked back, meeting her stare. “So am I.”

“As you say.” A hard tone.

He held out the book to Sachare. “Give her this for me.”

Wordlessly she took it from him and returned to the princess’s rooms, the sound of the door shutting behind her echoing in the corridor. Her guards watched him silently.

A gentle touch
, his brother would have said of Cern now, so furious.
Close but not too close.

Like the rope game they’d all played in the Cohort, each holding an end to try to pull each other off-stance with sudden yanks and misdirection.

Hold solid to the rope. Keep the line alive, not too slack, not too tight.

And never look away.

Weeks went by. Cern kept a stony silence. When he approached she looked away, rebuffing him openly, and he knew better than to come close enough that she might signal her guards to intercept.

Appearances mattered. When rejected, he made sure to seem pained and conflicted, like a hurt lover pretending not to care. He set his gaze to linger on her when she was carefully not looking in his direction. He passed by her suites daily, slowing as he did.

When he and his brother used to fish together, they would find the underwater creature’s location from the eddies and ripples it caused across the surface. The palace was like a lake; even if Cern did not see his longing looks directly, the ripples would get back to her. He had to be patient.

But he did not feel patient. He lay awake past the midnight bells, mind circling around what he had done that day to draw her back to him, wondering if it was too much or too little.

Somehow he had to convince her that what he had done in Botaros made sense. The king would only wait so long before looking again at his second-best choices in the Cohort. He had given Innel an opening. He wanted Innel to win.

Innel needed to get Cern to choose him. Nothing could be more important.

Almost nothing. One afternoon, a casual comment from Restarn made it clear that Innel was expected to attend the next day’s trade council. Innel studied the trade ledgers deep into the night to arrive well-prepared, because the king did not make casual comments.

A few days later, he was woken at dawn by the unsmiling seneschal, who explained that Innel would oversee the rebuild of the burnt stable auxiliary. Yes, starting now. In his spare time, the seneschal added, Innel would provide the king an analysis of the ministerial council’s resolution on a stack of tangled and conflicting House petitions.

Without delay.

Still being tested, then. He thought he’d proved himself worthy already to the king, again and again, but apparently not.

So be it; he applied himself to every task, working as hard as ever. Before he quite realized it, he was spending hours a day with the king. At meals, answering challenges like Cohort drills, then pulled in for fast minutes between appointments to suggest courses of action. Even attending the king at his bath, where he couldn’t help but notice that the man was hale and healthy for near eighty.

And yet, near eighty he was. As the king aged, with only the one heir, who stubbornly refused to be wed—let alone impregnated—good wishes for the king’s health took on new tension. Everyone wanted to know who followed Cern on the succession list. Restarn would not say.

Traditionally, this list lived in a strongbox under the monarch’s bed and was thrice-sealed. A key, a press-trap, and one final means, unspecified, but quietly said to be mage-lock. If the monarch should die before Cern was queen and no mage came forward to liberate the succession list, there would be chaos among the king’s siblings and their offspring, and pushback from the Great Houses and the Cohort children.

The other Cohort children. Not the mutts.

How well Innel was now passing the king’s tests was not at all clear to him. The king showed neither approval nor disapproval, quite unlike the trials of Cohort childhood, when Innel’s mistakes were made clear with beatings and missed meals.

Now that he considered that from the vantage of an adult perspective, he was not at all sure he liked this better. There was a lot to be said for clarity.

One day, without warning, Restarn tossed him a captaincy. That seemed an answer of sorts.

Best of all, it came with an increase in pay. Since the trip to Botaros, he had been chronically short of funds.

Botaros. The girl who had set him on this course. A frayed, dangling thread, one he needed to cut before it unraveled the entire garment.

At least the king hadn’t charged him rent on the horse.

Again he went to see Cern. This time he was let into the antechamber.

“She liked the book,” Sachare told him.

“Excellent. Let me see her.”

“She still says no.”

With a bit of a flourish, he held out his hand and opened his fingers, revealing a dark square. Sachare took it, sniffed it.

“She can get candy any time she likes, Innel.”

“Not from me, she can’t.”

At that Sachare chuckled a little, put the piece in her pocket, and dismissed him.

Gentle persistence, he told himself as he walked away, knowing that his repeated rejection here was the subject of palace gossip.

So be it.

As winter froze the world outside the palace, Mulack, Dil, and, to his surprise, even Sutarnan came to see him, offering pleasantries that implied support, should things go well. As if the bloody, brutal Cohort fights across the years were merely playful roughhousing.

But Innel knew better than to reveal his grudges. If he succeeded with Cern, there would be time later to address those who had supported his cause only when the winds were in his favor. And if he failed, it wouldn’t matter. He could be tossed onto the street with nothing.

Or worse yet, with his mother and sister.

One morning, these dark possibilities churning in the back of his mind while he struggled with an accounting error he’d been set to resolve, there was a pounding on the door to his small room. A set of servants streamed in, directed by the seneschal’s second. Over Innel’s objections, they picked up everything of his that they could carry. While he watched in wordless astonishment, they marched his belongings down the hallway.