Dragonoak: Gall and Wormwood, page 12
Their village was upon us in little more than an hour. One side edged onto the forest and the other backed onto what might’ve been a hill, centuries ago. Half of it had collapsed into the dirt, leaving one side jagged and rough. Almost vertical. At a glance, there were some eighty or ninety buildings, gathered on both sides of a narrow but nurturing river.
It was nothing like my village.
Everything was neat, uniform. The few streets didn’t meander or curve, instead turning at sharp angles as they intersected one another. Each building fit the next, perfectly placed, unlike the houses in my village that had been carelessly wedged in between one another. As we drew closer, I saw that the houses were built from the same dark wood the forests were made of, with polished stone columns for support.
There was money, plain to see, and it was nothing more than a small village. It was far from the capital, cut off from larger trade routes, and lost amongst the forests. These people were far from suffering under a nameless, faceless, undying King.
We were taken straight to a tavern. We gathered plenty of interest in the streets from children and adults alike, and as we took our places in the warmly-lit tavern, the seats around us began to fill. Half of the village’s men must’ve been there, and a scattering of women hurried to fill the glasses and plates as orders were placed.
One of the lacklustre hunters who’d led us there said something, disappeared, and after a moment spent staring at Kidira, she said, “He claims to know someone who speaks Mesomium.”
I hoped he did. It was strange, being stared at but being unable to diminish the weight of their gazes by giving myself a voice. I did not want to have to rely on Kidira and her translations all the way.
We were given food and drink, but my stomach clenched at the sight of it. I did my best to nod my thanks to the woman who’d brought it over, and Eden sat far too rigidly next to me, hands hovering over the cutlery but not committing to taking it.
Kidira ate the leg of lamb with her hands. One of the hunters cleared his throat awkwardly and another tried to laugh.
“Ah!” came a voice across the din. “So the lad was right. There are visitors from across the wall.”
It wasn’t difficult to mark us as foreigners. Not only was our manner of dress different in ways I couldn’t pinpoint – it was the colour and shape, I think; their clothes did not flow, while ours were not as neat around the edges – but unlike the rest of Asar, where cultures had come together across thousands of years, and Canth, where people from across Bosma made port and roots, I could mark little variation in the people before us.
They were like Akela: their skin was the same warm brown, and though not as striking as hers, their eyes were just as dark.
“There are indeed,” Eden said, rising to her feet and offering out a hand. I was relieved she’d taken the lead. “We’re most grateful for your hospitality.”
The rest of the Agadians weren’t as thrilled by the development as we were. They tilted their heads to the side, thinking a better angle might help them understand Mesomium.
The man, old and wrinkled but far from frail, took Eden’s hand and shook it heartily.
“Hah! You’d think they’d never seen a woman shake hands before,” he said, gesturing to the onlookers. Eden withdrew her hand, brow furrowed. “Not many here are versed in Kastelirian social conduct, and even fewer have actually heard of Felheim. Please, sit, sit. My name is Ayil. A former soldier, but now elder to this humble village.”
I saw too much of his teeth when he smiled.
“Hence the Mesomium,” Kidira said.
“Hence the Mesomium,” he agreed. “It’s a rare day we see outsiders in Agados. What brings you here?”
“Political matters,” Kidira said, taking another bite of the lamb. “Nothing that you ought to concern yourselves with.”
Ayil raised his brow.
“I shouldn’t concern myself with the political matters of my own country?” he asked. There was no bite behind it, no unspoken threat. Only a gentle sort of amusement.
“We’re here for conversation, really,” Eden said. “There are a few things we need clarified by your King.”
“And who are we?” Ayil asked, leaning back comfortably in his chair.
“Kidira Nyarko,” Kidira said. She tore more meat off the bone and it took Ayil a moment to realise where he’d heard the name. A few others evidentially recognised it too, and a murmur rushed through the tavern.
“Queen Kidira,” Ayil said, and repeated the title in Agadian. The murmur whipped itself up into a confused chatter, only falling quiet when Ayil raised a hand. “It would be an easy thing for any foreign woman to claim.”
“It would,” she agreed. “And I have no desire to prove anything to you. You asked for my name and I gave it. That is all.”
Ayil hummed, and turned to Eden and me.
“Eden Hawthorne,” she said a little too chirpily, and almost reached for his hand again. “Of Felheim. Just a representative of Queen Aren.”
When he looked expectantly at me, I said, “Rowan,” not wanting to give any more than that away.
“I have heard much that troubles me of your respective Kingdoms, these past few years,” Ayil said, rubbing his chin.
“And I have heard much that troubles me of your Kingdom, these past few decades,” Kidira said.
Laughing, Ayil said, “Yes, yes. There are always rumours. Sometimes, it is as though they are the only things that penetrate the wall. But I hope it is not all as bad as I have been led to believe, Kidira. I heard Isin took quite the hit.”
“It did,” she replied. “And here I am.”
Ayil laughed again and translated something back to the crowd. Kidira moved onto the potatoes she’d been served. She made absolutely no effort to impress or appeal to anyone, and held Ayil’s attention more steadily for it.
“Tell me about the King,” I said. “We’ve got all kinds of official letters and seals and Kidira, but I know we won’t get close to him. We won’t even see him. Because no one does, right?”
“Is that what they say about him in Felheim, hm?” Ayil asked. “They go on and on about how he is all smoke and mirrors, keeping us poor Agadians under his yoke, oblivious and obedient. Is that it?”
“I, well—”
“Every man here has a different theory. My neighbour believes there is no King, merely an ever-changing circle of officials who each tend to a different aspect of rule. There are plenty who believe a necromancer is involved, one who thinks the King is a necromancer, and then there are those who believe there is no conspiracy at all. There is no singular King. Plenty of Kings have come and gone, passing the crown to one another, and they all appreciate their privacy. It’s as simple as that.”
I sunk into my chair. Of course it’d been ridiculous to believe the Agadians were all of one mind, all born and bred to be effortlessly compliant, never questioning how they were ruled.
“Whatever the case may be, it doesn’t matter,” Ayil said, waving a hand. “The King, or Kings, or the men behind the throne, keep Agados running. They keep us from poverty, keep the citizens safe and happy and our stomachs full. Do you think it really matters who rules? Do you think the commoners in Felheim, dozens of miles from the capital, are affected by their King as an individual?”
I had been one of those commoners. When it came down to the bones of it, I still was. Part of me could’ve answered no, because for the first twenty-three years of my life, the King of Felheim had been a distant concept. Something out of Michael’s stories. I knew nothing of the man beyond his title, barely remembered his name at the best of times, and knew he had as little understanding of my life as I did his.
But the answer was yes. It mattered who sat on the throne, and how they used that power. It mattered to the commoners of Felheim when dragon fire rained down upon their homes.
I didn’t want to argue with Ayil. I didn’t want to hinder our chances of continuing safely on our way.
And so I said, “I heard you have horses. What do you want for them? We’d return them on our way back to Felheim.”
Ayil swivelled in his seat to share a handful of words with the man who presumably owned the horses. Kidira, understanding every word of it, stopped chewing in favour of staring blankly at the pair of them.
“He’d like to know if you’re certain you wish to take horses,” Ayil explained to Eden and me when Kidira didn’t. “He is happy to set up some sort of carriage for you, along with a driver.”
Why would he make such an offer? Horses would have a far easier time navigating the terrain without a carriage strapped to them, and they wouldn’t be restricted to the roads. Not to mention how much faster it’d be on horseback. It wasn’t until I saw the concern mingled with Ayil’s expression that I understood he wasn’t merely translating. He shared the horse owner’s sentiments, as did everyone there.
I remembered what I had been told about Agados, about the way they put people into boxes, how they decided what people were worth and what they would be before they could even talk, and finally understood why I had been so unnerved in the face of their hospitality. The room was divided between people sitting, talking, eating and engaging, and those standing, serving, and waiting. It was not necessarily a divide between genders, either, as the strife that had torn through Canth was; rather, it was between one sort of body and another.
“We’re all seasoned riders, I assure you,” Eden said.
“If you’re certain,” Ayil said with a wince he couldn’t smother.
When we were offered a room above the tavern for the night, I was relieved to be excused from the centre of attention.
The village was not accustomed to visitors, and when Ayil said there was a room we could use, he really did mean a room. There were two narrow beds on either side with a basin between them, and before any sort of decision could be debated over, I grabbed a few of the blankets, dropped them on the floor, and sat myself down. It was a warm evening, and I’d expected to be sleeping outside, anyway. A few blankets on a carpeted floor were a luxury.
Kidira and Eden set a bag on their respective beds, silently claiming them.
“They seem… friendly,” Eden said, frowning over her choice of wording.
“They are friendly,” Kidira said, but said it as though she was correcting her. “Insofar as they mean us no harm, and genuinely wish to help us. But in personality, they are as grating as the officials who would visit the castle whenever it pleased them, and treat the Queen of Kastelir as less than the Kings.”
“Your, ah… partner, Akela, doesn’t appear to hold Agados in very high regard.”
“Girlfriend. Do not flounder over words. Partner sounds too stiff,” Kidira said, snapping not because of Eden’s phrasing, but because Akela had been brought up at all. “And she does not. She had the misfortune of being raised here.”
“Oh,” Eden said, thinking it wise to drop the topic “Oh, yes. I apologise. I wasn’t certain whether you were married or not.”
Kidira, in the middle of unpacking a change of clothing from her bag, paused, furrowed her brow, and said, “I suppose that legally, I am still married to Kouris,” as though she had not taken the time to consider it before.
Eden, who knew the story of the Queens of Kastelir as well as anyone and had met them both, said, “That sounds like more of a technicality than anything else.”
“Hm. Kastelir is no more, along with any paperwork it issued, or ceremonies it oversaw. Does that null and void it?”
“I couldn’t say,” Eden said. “I have only ever almost been married. But since you were Queen of Kastelir while it stood, I believe your word on the matter would be final.”
After a pause, Kidira said, “I suppose that technically, I am still married to Kouris.”
In the morning, we were given breakfast and horses. Kidira left a small mountain of gold as a deposit, easily more than the horses were worth, and the hunters came to see us off. One tried to help Eden onto her horse before she had a foot in the stirrups, but backed away after a few sharp words from Kidira. When Kidira requested a map, she was given wary looks, and one of the hunters hastily wrote down the best directions towards Soldato.
We headed deeper into Agados, pockets lighter, armed with a compass and a scrap of paper.
When I’d had my fill of forests, craggy, open plains, and villages in the distance, I steered my horse towards Eden’s. He wasn’t Charley, but he had a sweet temperament, and thanks to a little bitterwillow, we were covering a lot of ground.
Eden smiled at my approach, strands of hair breaking free of the ponytail she’d hastily pulled it into.
“I was thinking about something you said to Claire,” I began. “About growing up in the bad parts of Thule. Is that true?”
“Indeed it is! I wasn’t always Lady Hawthorne, you realise,” she said. “I grew up in what the snootier of the nobles might call the slums of Thule, though I always thought of it as home. I lived with my fathers in a tiny apartment, so small that we had to divide it into separate rooms using blankets hung from the ceiling. There was barely enough room to turn around!
“My fathers were, and are, actors. Not the most profitable of careers, as the first fifteen years of theirs went to prove, but they loved what they did, and I wasn’t terrible at altering and designing costumes and the sort. And so we made it work. We all had several jobs and often didn’t see one another for days on end, but they assured me that they’d been through tougher, leaner times, and that they’d survive.
“But goodness, they did a little more than that! King Garland happened upon one of their performances one Winter’s End, and demanded that they join his troupe within the castle. It all happened so quickly after that. One moment we were working ourselves to exhaustion to have enough to eat, and the next I had entire chambers to myself, as well as servants bowing and scraping to me. It took a lot of getting used to!”
“It’s amazing that you’ve come so far. That your life is so different, now,” I said, meaning it.
“So says you,” Eden said. “Going from one part of Thule to another is hardly so impressive as going from a southern village to Isin to Canth to Thule, with plenty of stops along the way.”
I wondered how much Claire had told Eden about me, and wasn’t certain whether I was embarrassed or delighted. Before I could form any sort of response, Kidira, who was always listening even if she wasn’t interested, saw fit to join in the conversation.
“And how did you meet Claire?” she asked.
Hesitating, Eden glanced my way. I did what I could to offer up an encouraging nod, choosing to believe that Kidira’s regard for Claire spread to curiosity, and that her question had nothing to do with my being there.
“At a ball. A terribly clichéd answer, when it comes to these things, I’m afraid,” she said. “She had just returned from her time in the mountains with the pane, and there was an awful lot of fuss being made about it. And no wonder! The Princess of Thule had been gone for almost three years. I had been in the castle for long enough to know the ins and outs of decorum and the sort, but when I met her, I thought she shared the same sentiment that many of the nobles did: I was not born into money, and so did not belong in the castle. She shook my hand, said hello, how did I do, and moved onto the next person.
“It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I ran into her in one of the castle libraries. It took her a moment to recognise me, and when she did, she was most apologetic. She explained that it had all been rather overwhelming for her at the time, and that there was no end of people vying for her attention. Plus, being introduced to me by her father did not make her overly eager to spend much time with me.
“She recommended a book to me and asked that I tell her what I thought of it, once I was done,” Eden said. “Funny to think that was over twelve years ago, now.”
Claire wouldn’t have been a Knight, back then. She would’ve been younger than I was when I first met her. Eden’s smile was distant but not entirely sad, and when Kidira spoke, I didn’t catch what she said.
We rode through Agados for days. The capital was in the eastern part of the Kingdom, but not so close to the border that we didn’t have to stop in plenty of villages, or sleep on the road. Wherever we went, it was the same: even the smallest villages had wealth to share, and on the surface, if not content with them, the Agadians had found a way to grow into their roles.
We avoided larger towns, and Kidira learnt what she could from the locals. I didn’t need to speak Agadian to know she was intent on getting to the heart of less conversational matters. The Agadians would shrug or stutter or strain their minds to find an answer, but with each village we left, we had better directions to Soldato.
“It’s weird,” I said to Kidira one evening. “The people here are just people. They’re getting on with their lives. They don’t want to invade us, or lend Rylan their army.”
“That’s why we would never think to invade them. Our issue is with those in power and the beliefs they sow upon their people. King or no King, you cannot deny that no one seems to be putting a foot out of line, in the same way that they want for nothing,” Kidira said as she served up dinner. “In fact, they are living beyond their means. They have more than the average citizen’s daily routines ought to produce.”
Things weren’t as clear-cut as they’d been in Canth. I had lived there, had become one of them. I had seen death and destruction first hand, had spoken with the Queen, and could list a thousand problems, starting with plundering and ending with the limited land the people had to grow their crops on.
Everything in Agados lurked beneath the surface. Everyone wore a mask of one sort of another, collectively sharing a secret, and they would not be able to relieve the tension of keeping it until we were gone from their lands.
One thing I understood was what Kidira had said about living beyond their means. Every village we passed through was wealthy, and there was barely any bustle; the people moved leisurely, as though time wasn’t working against them. If it was one village or a few scattered towns I could’ve understood it, but I barely saw anyone labouring. The work that was undertaken almost seemed to be done for the sake of something to do.
