The Broken Realm Page 22

  “What do you mean, awakened?”

  Yseult’s hawk sounded like a cry.

  “The Four Sorcerers have anticipated this moment for hundreds of years. The subjugation of the Saleen is but one sign of this. Placing the boy king upon the throne is another.”

  “We didn’t know about Lord Quinlanden’s treachery, I swear to you.”

  “We know you did not. But you have strayed from what matters. It is your turn to ask a question, and there is only one that matters.”

  Lisbet’s heart threatened to jump from her chest. She wanted to place both hands over it, for it seemed to her everyone in the room could see its erratic jumps against her flesh. “Who are the four sorcerers?”

  Yseult placed a hand upon her brow. It was almost loving. “No, that is not the question. For now, enough. More, when ready.” She’d returned to her more natural speech, as if extinguishing a light and returning Lisbet to darkness.

  Yseult left the dark room, and Kael followed. Kian lingered to escort her, and when Lisbet was sure the others were far away, she asked him, “What was that? What happened?”

  Kian smiled. “You at last answered her with your truth, and now we can begin.”

  17

  The One Beating Most Swiftly Toward your Destruction

  Jesse grasped for his clothes, tripping over the chair and the bedpost in the process. His head was a mess of moments from his latest dream, moments he needed to be well rid of. Esmerelda’s draught had bought him precious sleep these past nights, but once there he’d been trapped by these images of Ravenna, these enticements he hadn’t asked for and didn’t want.

  If only that were true. He wanted her well enough. But it went no further than a physical response to her undeniably enchanting presence. Whatever relief it would offer him wouldn’t be worth the cost.

  Anything you want, it’s yours, she’d repeated as she gazed down upon him. As she moved in steady, torturous rhythm.

  Ravenna’s voice, this time real, cut through the morning fog. “You’ve been having more interesting dreams.”

  Jesse tugged his pants up over his hips. The leather of his belt stung his hand as it whipped inward from the force of his efforts. “And you think it’s acceptable to violate the thoughts of others where you come from?”

  “Mind reading isn’t always intentional. Sometimes it’s inadvertent.”

  Jesse pulled his vest over his shirt. “This isnae the first time you were standing here when I woke, wearing that same smile, so it seems rather intentional to me.”

  “And you’re rather defensive about your own thoughts. You seem to spend a lot of time running from them, and not just the ones of me.”

  He searched around for his sword belt. “They are not my thoughts. I have no control over my dreams.”

  “Dreams can be a way of working out our greatest desires and fears.”

  Jesse stopped fumbling with his sword and looked at her. “I neither desire you nor fear you.”

  Ravenna looked down and laughed. “Now that isn’t true.”

  “What I fear,” he said as he finished dressing, “is that I’ve brought Esmerelda to a place that has become a danger to her and her bairn. I fear the Westerlanders cannae come to an agreement on what to do, and that will be the end of them. Those are fears, Ravenna. Real fears. I donnae fear some rogue dreams of you that will never be naught but.”

  “Your care for Esmerelda is inspiring.”

  “She’s my sister. My brother’s wife, if not yet in the eyes of the law. I’ve a duty to her, one I take to heart.”

  “It’s more than that. I can sense it.”

  Jesse scoffed at the suggestion she seemed to be making. “Your intuition needs some adjusting. I’ve never touched her.”

  “The way she looks at you, I don’t think she’d mind if you did.”

  “And which is it, then? Am I in love with you, or in love with her?” Jesse shook his head and brushed past her, into the hall. “Only a fool would suggest such a thing. She isnae mine.”

  “She’s not Ryan’s either. Wasn’t that the point of leaving? So she can belong to herself?” Ravenna called after him.

  He ignored her. Jesse needed a word with Easlan James in private, without the other bannermen present, but first he needed something else more.

  * * *

  Brandyn gave Storm the slip.

  They shared chambers at the inn. Easlan James had fallen all over himself, concerned Brandyn wouldn’t find the rooms there up to his standards—but equally unwilling to let him stay elsewhere, where someone could do to him in the night what they’d done to his father—but it was better than the accommodations on the road and he didn’t care about that the way they all thought he would. He was a Blackwood, yes, but he was also a Warwick.

  What he cared about was not having had time alone with his thoughts. Storm was his friend, and his self-proclaimed bodyguard, but there were things he had to do for himself. Hardly twelve, he’d been thrust into leading both a Reach and a rebellion, and he’d had no time to settle into either role. There were men counting on him. Families. Futures.

  Storm had insisted, with the backing of the James men and the other men they were calling his Blackwood Banners, that he could never be left without protection. As she trusted no one else as much as herself, that meant she slept little, and when she did need it, she’d built a trap against the door designed to wake her with any fussing.

  Brandyn carefully deconstructed the trap from the inside, lifting and moving the piles of wood to the rise and fall of her snores, and when it was done, he whispered a wordless apology and left.

  He peered over the balcony, down into the empty, open room of the tavern. It was here he’d seen the first crack appear in the resolve of the men sworn to protect the Westerlands. It didn’t fracture his own trust in them, though. Even Jesse, who wasn’t one of them but had just as much passion as the others for seeing the end to Quinlanden’s power grab.

  But that was the problem. Passion. He, too, had that passion, and it came to him mostly in the latest hours of the evening, when he fantasized of taking his blade to Aiden and a thousand of his men, one by one, as he commanded them to remember the face of Byrne Warwick while the blood left their traitorous bodies. As he spat on them for daring to even step one filthy foot upon their lands. He dangled their wives and children on ropes, payment for what they’d done to the women and children of the Westerlands.

  He knew these fantasies would be his undoing if he indulged them too long.

  They’d all lost, and had more to lose. Few more than Brandyn himself, who had neither blood nor home anymore. But he didn’t trust his capacity for making decisions when he couldn’t shake those losses, and this was true also of his men.

  All save one.

  As Brandyn descended the steps, the corner of the pub came into view. As expected, so did the hunched figure of the man he’d come to see.

  “Lord Blackwood.” Joran straightened, brushing stringy silver hair back. He ran his fingers down his robe as if wrinkled, though they both knew the silken strands that crafted them could never be defiled in such a way. “It is quite early. We didn’t expect you for another two ticks or so.”

  Brandyn looked around the empty room. “We?”

  Joran chuckled. One fist tapped the table in nervous staccato. “Steward James rises with the sun, his son too. I suspect Blackfen never sleeps at all, and Tyndall has probably made a deal with his precious Guardians exchanging rest for fealty.”

  Brandyn pulled out a chair and sat across from him. “You really don’t like the Reliquary, do you?”

  Joran sucked in a breath with a guilty, harried look. “Oh, I suppose it would seem that way to you, wouldn’t it? You, still so fresh an Adherent. Would that the Sepulchre and the Reliquary could live in harmony, for we are not so different. But they see us as cheap tricksmen, and we see them as too high upon their thrones to understand us, or the kingdom, at all.”

  “Do you believe in the Gua
rdians, Enchanter Joran?”

  “I very much do. It’s their earthly agents I have little trust for.”

  “And you? Do you sleep anymore?” Brandyn studied the old man’s face, wondering if it was only his imagination that there were now more lines than before. More darkness in the deep crescents under his eyes. “Or is it coincidence you know the patterns of others?”

  Joran looked down at his hands. “Your men would bring ruin to the Reach, and they’d do it with love, my lord.” He again looked up. “For they all love you, as they love your mother.”

  Brandyn slowly nodded. “That’s why I’ve come to see you, Joran. No one knows my mother as you do, and her counsel right now is what I most need.”

  Joran brightened. “It would be an honor if that were true, but it is your father who knew her best. The light to her darkness, I called him, though never when he was around.”

  “My father is dead.”

  Joran sighed. “Yes, Guardians bless him.”

  “I need you to tell me what you saw that made my mother hand herself over to the king.”

  The sorcerer shrugged. “Nothing you would not already know, Lord Blackwood. I saw the Warwick and Dereham boys in chains, and though you were not with them in that vision, your mother believed you could be, if not protected. I saw also the cruel display the king made upon the dais with his new Quinlanden wife, the young Assana, and your mother did not want that fate for your sisters. Thus, she went to Ember and told her what she needed to do.”

  “So it’s true. It was my mother who sent us away. It wasn’t Ember’s idea at all.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why not just tell us that? Why not send us off with proper goodbyes at least?”

  Joran ran his finger along the old wood. “Well, I suppose she was afraid of knowing where you’d go, that someone might pull it from her mind, the way she can from others. She was clear with Ember, that Ember was to decide where you all would go, Ember alone who would know until she delivered your orders to you. There was no better way of protecting all of you than her complete ignorance of your whereabouts.”

  Brandyn nodded. He didn’t have to like it to understand it. “But why would she want to fall into the hands of the king? That’s what you told the men. That it was part of her plan.”

  “I’m afraid that part has less clarity. Your mother and I had the same vision, though we equally saw very little. We both saw the dark halls of Duncarrow, your mother moving through them, freely but not free. We both felt her secret thrill as she discovered something that would bring the king to his knees and restore our kingdom to what it should be.”

  “But what? What was she sent to discover?”

  Joran, arms upon the table, lifted his palms in a sort of shrug. “That was our dilemma. Neither of us saw more than that. But your mother was convinced that it was no happenstance we’d both seen this same thing. And so, I can only believe, Lord Blackwood, that she found what she went to Duncarrow for, and this is why she left, to protect it.”

  Brandyn leaned back in his chair, looking up into the metal candelabra above. “We need to know what she knows.”

  “Impossible, until she returns to us. Or unless the magic sees fit to gift us with more visions on the matter. I would wager money on neither of these things happening quickly.”

  “Then I need to know what to do, Joran. Here. With these men. I need to know what my mother would do.” He rocked forward again. “I say again, that no one living knows my mother as you do. What would she do?”

  “Oh, well, this is hard to say for sure, you know your mother, she—”

  Brandyn leaned in. “Joran. I am asking you. What would my mother do, if she were me? Right now? How would she guide these men?”

  The expression on Joran’s face shifted. He was no longer the blubbering old man whose mind was half gone. “Your mother was never one for war. She knew that even a war won was a war lost. For can it be called a victory if the cost is the loss of the men and lands we so love? No, your mother was a mistress of subtlety, dispatching those who would trouble her quietly, in the shadows. Tidy dealings. What they said about the heart was not wrong. But they were wrong about the identity of that heart.”

  “The heart isn’t Lord Aiden, you mean.”

  Joran shook his head. “No, Lord Blackwood. Aiden is only a hand. He is the face the heart wants you to see. And there are other hands, other faces. There are even more hearts, equally dangerous. But without the heart, there can be no faces, no hands. There can be none of this.”

  “If he isn’t the heart, then who is? The king?”

  Joran dropped his voice. “The king is nothing compared to the heart. The king is yet another pawn, another hand. The king’s father understood this, and he imprisoned one half of the heart, for he was incapable of killing him.”

  “You mean... the sorcerers? The Rhiagain sorcerers?”

  “Yes, but they are no Rhiagains. And where they come from, it was Rhiagains who served the sorcerers. Where they come from, Rhiagains were nothing.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Before I served your mother, I was an Elder Magi.”

  “Why would you give that up? That’s an even greater honor than serving in the kingdom, even in a great house like my mother’s.”

  Joran nodded. “I went to the Head Magus with my concern about the great sorcerers of Ilynglass. Yes, that’s where they come from, though none have successfully found its location or returned to it, that we know of. They don’t realize we know even that much about him, but a name matters not, only what a name means. I told the Head Magus that they were few, but they were powerful, and they were patient. I told him they were waiting for their moment, and by the time we realized it, it would be too late.”

  Brandyn’s jaw went slack. “Wow.”

  “And for that, he said I had overstayed my time at the Sepulchre and would find my honor in service.”

  “He didn’t share your concerns?”

  “He thought me a foolish old man nearing expiration.” Joran looked down at the thin layer of skin covering his bones, rolling his hands in the dim light. “He is not wrong. But nor was I.”

  “How many are there? Sorcerers?”

  “I know of four. One is in the sky dungeon at Duncarrow, imprisoned by Khain when he was still living. Two disappeared from our knowledge before you were born. The last...” Joran sighed. “The last was given as a gift to Lord Aiden when he laid Rowanwen at the king’s feet.”

  Brandyn gasped inwardly. “The heart.”

  Joran nodded. “The one beating most swiftly toward your destruction, anyway.”

  * * *

  Ravenna watched him leave the small keep, headed not for town but the river that ran through the forest. She had a strange urge to grin, but the weighted sadness within her overpowered it. She was almost used to this now, existing in these strange polarities. Good. Bad. Night. Day.

  She didn’t recognize the woman sparring with him about his dreams and desires. She didn’t think she’d changed so much since leaving her home, but even if she had, did it have to be to this, to someone who was all cunning, no heart? If she were Jesse, she would’ve asked herself to leave long before this morning, but now there was little chance he wasn’t thinking this very thing, and searching for the way to see it done while still maintaining his honor. She’d disrupted their delicate balance. Not once, nor even twice.

  Honor is a creation of man. Only men would need their own word to compel them to do the right thing. Her mother’s words. She’d said them without irony, though there was plenty to be found in them just the same. Honor. Duty. They could call it anything they wished, but there was no other way to live as a Ravenwood without embracing their way of life. There was no other way at all.

  If she’d only stayed and done her duty. Lain with the eligible male sorcerers by the greenlight fires, one by one, kept her mouth shut and her eyes to the future she was destined for. Counted her blessings, even if she did not see th
em as such.

  But she wasn’t destined for that future. Not anymore. There was no going back to Midnight Crest, even if she didn’t have the child of a man growing within her. Now she had to do all she could to ensure it was not the wrong man assumed to be the father, and she had little time remaining to her, if any at all, to grasp firmly to this deception and make it work. It was the last gift she could give Drystan, though he would likely never know it.

  As for Jesse, she’d ask nothing of him once her child was born. This careful veil of deceit was more than she deserved.

  Even as Ravenna opened the door and made her way down to the river, it felt like it was someone else’s hands pulling the old wood, someone else’s feet making the steps. She could neither explain her actions nor put halt to them.

  She saw Jesse’s clothes scattered on the bank before she saw him. He burst through the water’s surface, shaking his head as he whistled through the shocking cold. While his back was turned, Ravenna eased out of her own dress and then slipped into the icy waters.

  “Guardians! Ravenna, you cannae just sneak up on a man like that,” he cried when she swam up to his side. “If I’d had my sword—”

  “Here? In the water?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Does it matter why I’m here, or that I am?”

  “Ravenna, I donnae have the mind for—”

  Ravenna wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him. His lips stiffened, but she felt his soft groan vibrate against her mouth, and she knew she could have him, then, there, that very morning, if she only had the courage to see it through. The dark, not the light, guiding.

  Jesse gently pushed her off. “No matter what you’ve seen in my head, in my dreams, this isnae going to be the way of things between us. I don’t have... I’ve other priorities. You’re beautiful. You know you are, you donnae need me telling you. But there’s a war brewing just beyond this forest, and I need to sort myself out, sort out what to do about my brother’s bairn.”