The Forsaken Throne, page 20
part #6 of Kingfountain Series
Owen pulled away from her, cocking his head slightly.
“What is it?” she asked, her hand going for her sword hilt.
“The king’s come back,” Owen said.
Moments later, the tent door ruffled and Dieyre stalked back inside, his face a mask of anger. He gazed at the guard sprawled on the ground, at Trynne standing beside her father, her hands free of bonds.
“What is the meaning of this?” he demanded, drawing his sword. “Where did the other one go? Are you helping them escape? Answer me, man!”
“This is my daughter,” Owen said evenly. “I must leave your service.”
“Impossible. You cannot leave me,” Dieyre said, shaking his head, stepping forward in a defensive stance. “I can’t win this fight without you, Stiev.”
“I’ve given you all that I can,” Owen said. “My mind has been in a fog. Now I know why.”
“I need you!” Dieyre shouted angrily. He looked at Trynne with resentment. “Where did you come from? What land do you hail from?”
“I am not from this land. And neither is my father,” Trynne answered. “We owe allegiance to another king.”
“Oh? And what king is that?” he spat. “The King of Comoros? His will has been twisted into knots by a hetaera. So have the others—even my own mind was corrupted until I met him,” he said, trembling with rage and pointing his sword at Owen. “Until he came. My mind has been cleared at last. He’s the only thing that has broken my wife’s grip on me. That scheming she-devil and the lost abbey she’s building! She cannot control me when he is near. So no, you aren’t going anywhere.” There was violence in his eyes.
Trynne drew her blades.
“You think I’m afraid to kill a girl?” Dieyre said with disdain. “I once had a girl thrown into a pit of flames. I’ve watched the innocent burn. I have no compunction against killing my enemies. I’m the best swordsman in all the realms. Even better than your father.” He glared at them both, his eyes cruel and dark.
Owen put his hand on Trynne’s shoulder. His other hand gripped the hilt of his own sword. He shook his head no.
“Trust me, Father,” she said, looking at his face. “Captain Staeli, the man you assigned to protect me, has trained me well.”
She knew Dieyre had a penchant for cheating—one of many flaws that assailed him. He relied not only on his reputation to instill fear in his opponents, but also on subtlety and deception. In other words, he cheated.
She stepped away from her father and invoked the ring to alter her appearance. She assumed the guise of the Maid of Donremy, whom she had seen in her visions of the Oath Maidens of the past. Dieyre looked at her in confusion. Then she shifted again, becoming the Painted Knight, half her face colored blue.
“What trickery is this?” Dieyre snarled, brandishing his sword.
Trynne shifted her appearance to that of Morwenna Argentine. Dieyre looked on in fascinated confusion, his eyes darting from her to her father, as if expecting the ruse to lead to a feint attack. He flourished his sword, but he did not attack her.
“You’ve disrespected women all your life,” Trynne said. “You think them beneath you.” She shifted again, invoking the face of the woman she’d seen in the king’s mind. The one he had loved and then lost.
Dieyre’s composure broke completely. “Ciana!” he hissed, as if seeing an apparition inside the tent. His arm started shaking. She saw his mind was completely overcome. She’d struck him at a primal level, and his body reacted despite his years of training.
Despite the fact that he knew it was a trick.
Dieyre lunged at her to try to stab the ghost image of his beloved to death. She’d been counting on that, for her power was always strongest when she was on the defense. The magic came to her aid. With reflexes faster than a snake strike, she stepped aside from the lunging thrust meant to skewer her and trapped his wrist against her body with her elbow. She stepped forward, twisting as she moved, and smashed him in the cheek with her forearm.
Dieyre tried to lever his boot around her, but she hooked his instead and suddenly he was falling backward on the ground. She released the trapped wrist and let him fall hard. His eyes were frantic, but he’d managed to keep his sword. He waved it in front of him on the ground, trying to deflect attacks that weren’t coming.
Trynne walked around him, and he scuttled backward.
“You will soon be the king of nothing,” she told him. She kept the image of his beloved on her face and taunted him with it. The flow of the Fountain came to her, the words gushing from her mouth. “You have refused to believe the warnings. You were given a chance to forsake your pride, but you denied it. If you survive the battle that is coming, you will rule over dead men’s bones. All your life you have sought something you could never obtain. And now your destruction is certain.”
His teeth were bared like an animal’s, his eyes flashing with mortal hatred. “Will your ilk never stop preaching at me! I would have submitted if I’d gotten her! If I’d gotten what I wanted! I would have given up everything, but no, the Medium wouldn’t give me what I wanted.”
“What you craved was unattainable. And even it would not have satisfied you,” Trynne said. “There is nothing you can do to stop the end now. Nothing.”
“Enough!” Dieyre snarled. He twisted his body, trying to lunge at her with his sword.
She stabbed her blade down and impaled his forearm with it, the blade buried deep in the earth beneath the tent. Dieyre stared at the weapon in horror, his cheeks twitching as the pain started to bloom inside him.
The agony had to be intense, but he did not cry out in pain. Instead, he opened his mouth to call for his guards.
Owen knelt and clubbed him on the temple with his dagger.
All went silent.
We have Staeli’s army surrounded, and yet he refuses to yield. Heralds between camps issue back and forth to press the negotiations. He says he will not surrender without direct orders from Trynne. She is nowhere to be found, of course. The king wishes to prevent needless bloodshed. How weak he is. Brythonica is without protection. I walked the shores of the beach of sea glass just last night. There was no one to stop me. No guardians save a small group of soldiers whom I easily deceived. I sensed magic coming from the caves along the rocky shore. If I still had the ring of the grove, I could have found out what was hidden there, but now I must wait until the tide goes out to discover Sinia’s secrets. There must be a reason she always strolled that beach. I’m determined to find out why.
Morwenna Argentine
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Prey
While Trynne bound up the King of Dahomey’s wrist wound, her father shackled and gagged him. They hoisted up his body and concealed it under a pile of fur blankets at the side of the tent, but before the last blanket settled atop him, the sound of ripping fabric filled the space. Trynne whirled around to find a dagger shearing through the back wall.
Fallon stuck his head through the hole, his eyes bright, his grin cocky and victorious. “I have it,” he said.
She wanted to hug him right then and there. Instead, she gripped her father’s arm and they hurried over to the tear in the tent wall and stepped into the darkness of the night. The soldiers were all gathered around cookfires for heat and their supper, so no one paid the three of them any mind as they tromped through the large camp.
“Where is Quivel?” Trynne asked as they passed through a veil of smoke that stung her eyes. A set of soldiers was roasting a serpent to supplement their meat.
“Over there,” Fallon answered with a gesture. “I knocked him out and took the Tay al-Ard and his kystrel.”
“This way,” Owen said, leading the way through the camp. “There are over twenty thousand soldiers camped here. It’ll take some time for us to cross the army and reach the woods. Dieyre will send hunters and maybe a kishion after us.”
“We just need to hold them off until daybreak,” Trynne said. “We have a magical device that can take us where we’re going. It just needs some more time to rest before we can use it again.”
“Should we try it now to be sure?” Fallon suggested.
“It wouldn’t hurt to try,” Trynne said.
“Touch my arms, then,” Fallon said. They did as he asked and he invoked the Tay al-Ard.
Nothing happened.
“Where are we going?” Owen asked.
“To the ruins of Muirwood Abbey,” Fallon said. “There’s a portal back to our world there.” He lifted a hand. “Quiet.”
A horn sounded behind them, and an instant hush descended on the camp. The soldiers stopped what they were doing and gazed back into the darkness as if waiting for something.
“That didn’t take long,” Owen muttered. “There’s more to come.” Three long blasts from the horn followed the first. “Three blasts. Enemies sighted. The captains will be gathering for orders and they will describe us. The whole camp will be on alert. No one will be able to enter or leave the camp until the truce sound is called.”
“We need to find an abandoned tent,” Trynne suggested.
“No, we won’t have any trouble leaving,” her father said. “Few guard the south of the camp, the area toward the mountains. I know all the patrol patterns and passwords. I established them,” he added, chuckling softly.
The moon was bright overhead as they continued to climb higher into the mountains, the trees growing sparser the higher they went. Trynne’s legs burned from the climb, but she was determined to keep going. The sound of hounds called in the distance, gaining ground.
They stopped to rest on the mountain trail, taking in huge gulps of air.
“The air . . . is getting thinner,” Fallon said, gasping. He mopped sweat from his brow. “How far behind us do you think they are?”
Owen folded his arms, leaning back against a rock, his breath whistling in his chest. “Closer than I’d like. They’ve been moving quickly now that they’re on our trail.”
Trynne spotted several points of light at the base of the mountain. “They’re carrying lamps or torches,” she said, gesturing to them.
“Best to keep going, then,” Owen said. “The torches will be at the rear, not the front. The dogs don’t need the light to hunt us.”
“That means they’re even closer than they look,” Fallon said.
“We were never going to make it very far,” Owen said with resignation. “Come on.”
They continued up the trail, the night air cold against their necks. Trynne was fatigued by both lack of sleep and the trials of their difficult journey, but she was relieved that her father was with them. Even without his memory, he seemed much the same to her, always plotting ahead, pinpointing enemies’ weaknesses.
Huge broken fragments of rock were jumbled around, making their progress slower and more arduous. As they moved higher into the pass, the smells changed. There was a minty scent to the air, and she noticed some long-leafed plants choking the scrub alongside the mountain trail. She bent and snapped off one of the leaves. It was soft as felt and gave off the pleasant odor.
Suddenly, Trynne sensed a pulse of Fountain magic at work on the trail below them. Owen stiffened at the same time, holding up his hand to halt them.
Lightning exploded from the cloudless sky and struck a tree to their left, turning it into a tower of flames. The noise of the thunder was deafening, and the air sizzled with heat and danger.
“That’s the power of the Dochte Mandar. We need shelter,” Owen said. The crackling noise of the burning tree filled the quiet that followed the clap of thunder.
“Aspis,” Trynne said, conjuring the word of power to form a shield around her and those near her. There was a risk that it would draw the Dochte Mandar to them, but the danger in not acting was greater. As if they were indeed summoned by her show of power, more bolts of lightning zigzagged across the sky—enough that it was soon as bright as day.
The shield drained Trynne’s store of magic, but she held it up to protect them as they climbed. More stabs of lightning continued to strike all around them, blasting trees and shattering stone, and the thunder ricocheted off the stone of the mountainside, magnifying the noise.
Trynne’s heart was hammering with fear, but she was grateful for her magic. She sensed it was their only protection against the Dochte Mandar.
Suddenly, she felt her shield rip away. Quivel was amongst those chasing them, she sensed, and he had just countermanded her word of power. They were vulnerable to the lightning strikes now.
“We need shelter!” Trynne cried out.
“A cave! Over there!” Fallon shouted over the tumult, pointing. Off the trail, through the gorse, they saw a place where the stones had fallen and created a small warren. They trampled through the green, hurrying to reach the safety of the cleft of rock.
Fallon reached it first and ducked his head inside. He nodded and then waved them forward as more lightning crackled through the sky. Owen ducked his head and entered the cave. Then Trynne. Then finally Fallon. His eyes were bright with fear and excitement as he moved deeper into the shallow cave. This time his height was no advantage—he had to duck very low to follow them inside.
Fallon lowered onto his haunches and gazed back out the cave entrance. The landscape was brightened every few moments by fresh displays of celestial power. The rocks thrummed with the pressure from the thunder. Trynne pressed her sweating palms against the stone. The cave was dark, but the sporadic lightning bursts helped them see each other. The air had a tang to it, the smell of dross from a smithy’s forge.
“It won’t take them long to find us now,” Fallon muttered, wiping his hand across his whiskers. “I should have killed Quivel. I was tempted to. He’s desperate to leave and he knows we have the Tay al-Ard. If he doesn’t catch us before dawn, he never will.”
A moment later, complete darkness fell.
“They’re coming,” Owen whispered after the stillness became prolonged.
They all quietly drew their swords in preparation.
The sound of hounds baying started up again, much closer this time.
“Do we run?” Fallon asked softly.
Trynne felt the seclusion of the cave would offer more protection. At least they would know no one was coming at them from behind. “I think we fight it out inside here,” she said. “The entrance isn’t very big. They won’t be able to charge us in large numbers. It’s as good a place as any to withstand a siege. We need time, that is all.”
“If the device you have can truly get us out of here,” Owen said, “then yes, this would be a good place to make a stand.”
“Just like Dundrennan,” Fallon said, glancing back at her with a smile of remembrance.
As he said the words, she recalled being on top of that tower with him, the stars glittering like jewels above them as he took her into his arms and kissed her. The memory of that kiss still haunted her. It made her yearn for what might have been. Was he remembering it as well?
“I can hear them,” Owen said. His sense of hearing had always been exquisitely sharp. As they quieted their breathing, soon they could all hear the noise of the dogs snuffling through the brush toward the cave. Within moments, the hounds reached the entrance and started barking fiercely.
Men shouted to each other. Then the bob of torches and light came nearer, revealing the menacing hounds outside the cave. The slavering noise, the scratching of claws against the gravel—all showed the beasts’ eagerness to attack.
“. . . the dogs, they can’t hear us. Silence them. Come on.” It was Quivel’s voice.
The hunters came and pulled the dogs away by their collars. The noise of tromping men filtered into the space.
“Can you hear me now?” Quivel asked. “Look, it’s not sunrise yet. Cannot we bargain? There is no magic I can use to force you to come out of there. I know that. But I’m content to kill you by other means if it prevents me from being trapped here. I have some poisonous leaves. If I make a fire and blow the smoke in there, you will all sicken and die. Then I can take back what you stole from me. But I cannot leave unless I know who is waiting for you on the other side. So can we not be civilized at—nnnnghh!”
An arrow struck Quivel in the breast, spinning him around and dropping him. The dogs started howling again as the whistle of arrows filled the air. The hunters began to shout in panic, and the hounds went into a frenzy of terror. They jerked free of their masters and fled.
Fallon craned his neck, expression full of surprise, trying to see what was going on, and Trynne couldn’t help but do the same. Arrows had rained down on the sentries outside the cave, dropping them one by one. The others began to flee in confusion, dropping their torches and scattering back toward the trail.
The commotion ended and darkness settled in once again. But there was a little glimmer in the sky, the faintest touch of dawn that brought Fallon’s face into the grayish light. His gaze was still fixed on the entrance to the cave.
The noise of boots scrambling down the rocks was followed by the thud of someone landing before the cave. Gravel crunched beneath the heavy steps. They heard the noise of a man hocking and spitting.
“By Cheshu, look at them run,” Martin said gruffly. He sniffed. They could see his boots and lower body. He stepped on Quivel’s chest and yanked the arrow out of the dead man. Then he ducked low, his frame filling the gap. “Come on out, my little ferrets. They’re on the run now. They’ll trouble you no more.”
Fallon smiled. He shuffled forward a few paces. “How many men did you bring, Martin?”
