King of Assassins: The Elven Ways: Book Three (9 page)

Nutmeg shifted one hip and felt the baby roll slightly inside her. She thought that the child would be like its father, tall and rangy. It was hard to think that any of her blood might show in the child’s heritage. She thought of it as Jeredon’s child, hardly ever just . . . hers. “Do you think Tressandre ild Fallyn sent the killers?”

“That bitch.”

Nutmeg’s jaw dropped as she whipped her head around to stare at Lily Farbranch. “Mother!”

Her mother’s mouth tightened momentarily. “I can think that. Say it, too.”

“City ways are rubbing off on you.”

“Is that not the truth?” Lily sat on the hitching post railing with a little bit of a hop. Her feet did not touch the ground once she perched her body on the precarious seat. “I weave fine fabrics for them and sew gracious tailoring and I hear what they say, some of it to my face but most of it behind my back. There are many who carry the venom of envy in their words. There are many who are as deceitful as any of our old tales would have them. Yet my daughters have befriended the Warrior Queen. What should I think, then? And what should I think when they send assassins?”

Nutmeg cradled her stomach for a moment.

Lily took a deep breath, as if to shake off her mood. She leaned down. “Do you wonder who it is you carry?”

“Boy or girl? Aye, of course, Mom! It’s strong and feisty, that I know.”

Lily laughed softly. “Shall I swing a ring for you?”

“Like we used to do when we were just villagers? Before we moved to this great city?”

Nutmeg sombered a bit. “I would, very much. I thought of asking you, but it seemed . . .”

“Meg. Never doubt that we love this baby as much as we love you. And we are not disappointed. Do you hear me?” Lily hid the glimmer of a tear in the corner of her eye as she roughly tugged off her wedding ring. “Let me get a bit of string.” She felt about in the pockets of her apron to come up with a long piece of embroidery thread. “This will do.” She affixed her ring to it and held the ring in the air over Nutmeg’s swollen belly. “Now. Both of us need to be quiet for this to work.”

“Tell the baby that,” Nutmeg muttered before pressing her lips together tightly.

They watched the ring hanging still from its thread. It did not stir, not even in the growing breeze that always came as the day moved toward evening. Nutmeg fidgeted one foot, and bit the corner of her lip. Long moments passed. Then . . . did it move? Just a tad? Before she could open her mouth to exclaim that it had, the ring began to swing back and forth in an undeniable arc. A circle would have foretold a girl, but this—most emphatically—heralded a boy.

“A boy!”

“So it seems.”

“Jeredon would have loved either.”

“And you?” Lily looked down at her with a gentle expression on her face.

“I fancied a boy. I wanted to see him, somehow, I guess.” She closed her eyes, briefly, seeing Jeredon and wondering how she’d see him in their child. And a lingering echo of Bistel’s “Pass it on to your sons.” He’d known then, somehow. She took a deep breath to watch Lily unfasten her ring and slip it back on her finger.

Nutmeg added, “I know I would see his blood in a girl, too. But a boy. This time I wanted a boy.”

“The ring isn’t always right.”

“It has been every time I’ve seen it swung,” Nutmeg said confidently. She rubbed one eye vigorously.

“You’re lonely. I know you miss him . . . but are you empty?”

Nutmeg looked up. Her face wrinkled a bit in thought. The two of them had never discussed all that her love for Jeredon had portended. Her parents had never questioned her, just as Rivergrace hadn’t till a day or so ago. She tilted her head slightly. “I never expected,” she began, “that I would have a long future with him. I never thought that far ahead. It was like a call to me, Mother, that I couldn’t ignore. I wanted to answer it. I gave him all that I could in hopes he would heal. And he did. Then the war took him, war and treachery.” Nutmeg inhaled sharply. “It hurt when he left me behind for Tressandre, but I knew what he was doing. I just wanted him for whatever moments we could have. I never thought it would be so short. Or that I would have this memory of him.”

Nutmeg inhaled again, this time deeper and slower. “This babe will need grounding and roots, as deep and solid as anything before the machinations of a Vaelinar can be grafted on it.”

Lily slipped her arm about Nutmeg’s shoulders. “Who would have thought orchard growers could have such wisdom, eh?”

Nutmeg rubbed her cheek on her mother’s arm, getting flour, no doubt, on her face. “I miss our orchards. I never thought there wouldn’t be a tall enough tree that I could climb so that I could see for leagues around, to get a clear view on things. But this.” She shook her head lightly. “There are no trees that reach to the heavens to give me a view now, are there?”

Lily kissed the top of her daughter’s head. “Not yet, dear. Not yet.”

They stayed like that for a very long time until Grace found them, and they told her of the ring’s findings, and they talked of many things, but avoided saying good-bye.

As Sevryn brought her horse out of the stables, Rivergrace turned the collar of her cloak against the brisk morning. The corner of it seemed damp. Tears, she thought. Hers or Nutmeg’s. Spring had failed that day, it seemed, and winter whispered down at them again. Her breath sent white gusts against the chilled air. Uneasiness tugged against her, far sharper than that of winter’s touch. She turned on one heel, scouting the landscape about her, trying to understand the strangeness that tugged at her. Threads seemed to fall through the air, multicolored, writhing aimlessly before fading abruptly away as if to tell her that somewhere, a weaving had gone awry. It left a foreboding coiled just under the edge of her rib cage. She couldn’t see anything amiss, but the sense of wrongness pricked and jabbed at her. She threw a hand up in warding.

He pressed her reins into the palm of her free hand before turning to go get his own mount and their pack animal. She caught his arm.

“What is it?”

She looked over her shoulder. “Can’t you feel it?”

“The cold? Do you want a coat under your cloak?”

“It’s not that.” She searched the courtyard and street beyond it, looking for threads among the threads again, meaning to catch them if she could. “There’s a gap, Sevryn. Something is wrong.” Her hands winged through the air. “A river of darkness moving against the natural rivers of shadows. Like I felt before.”

“Afraid?”

Her nose wrinkled a little as she frowned up at him. “No. I sense it. Can’t you? There is a tangle among the threads.”

Sevryn stood still for a moment, opening his mind. She could see his eyes harden and knew that it wasn’t as easy for him as others, his half-bloodedness blocking him sometimes, but Gilgarran had drilled him relentlessly when he was young, and he could use his Voice at will. Other perceptions were harder. He lifted a hand, as she had, to give a brusque nod as if he felt it. “Not a tangle, no. A rip.” The expression on his face chilled. “Grace—something is very wrong.”

“Nutmeg?”

“Not sure.” He took to his heels, horses behind him, running down the dirt lane, back toward the city, back to where she thought she felt the contradiction of universes twisting violently, beginning to rend . . .

“Sevryn!” Hosmer called behind them and began to run after. “What is it?”

“Trouble!” Sevryn pulled his sword. Rivergrace drew hers at the same time and knew that behind them, her brother, Hosmer Farbranch of the Calcort City Guard, did as well.

Hosmer passed them on the street, his Dweller feet fleet and without the burden of pulling horses behind. Dust flew from his boot heels. Grace felt the sky shiver overhead. Sevryn pulled to a stop. “Rivergrace, stay behind me!” She did. He dropped the horses’ reins and shooed them away.

The ground rumbled. She fell to one knee as buildings swayed, shutters flew open, and bricks tumbled down from a nearby structure. Sevryn’s gaze stayed fixed upward, where a brilliantly blue sky turned dark with storm clouds, swirling over and downward. Funnels surged to the earth before the clouds sucked them back up. He narrowed his vision, trying to pick through the chaos to see the threads of instability behind the unnatural storm. The force of the vision set him back on his heels, shocked for a heartbeat or two as his eyes locked with another’s.

Daravan.

Locked in the storm’s center, or perhaps he was its epicenter, power flaring about him, from the darkest of grays to silvery white, blinding and yet compelling. Looking into that sharp-paned face was like looking into a still water reflection of himself, but he had never felt that kind of power flowing through his own frame. Daravan’s strength rolled off him like tongues of flame that he could feel radiating hotly. He put a hand up to shade his eyes, uncertain of just what it was he was seeing.

“Sevryn . . . what are you seeing?”

“A vision. Perhaps.”

He was no more certain when Daravan’s eyes widened slightly and fixed upon him.

His father. Not a man he remembered in that position, because his mother had raised him alone until she left to follow, without telling him just who she went after. If Gilgarran had known whose son he adopted off the streets, he never mentioned it, nor had he stored the information away within his spymaster diaries. Gilgarran had either never known it or known it so well he had no need to write the truth down to remember it. Sevryn chose to believe that his own ignorance had been Gilgarran’s as well.

“Father.” Barely audible, yet filled with the power of his Voice, in case it might be heard.

Daravan’s focus stayed locked upon him, and then the figure stretched out his arm, hand extended. Instinctively, he reached back. Vision touched flesh, and Sevryn staggered as a force slammed into him and reached deep inside, grabbing his essence and shaking him like a dog shakes a seized prey. He fought for release, but the thing that was and was not Daravan towered over him. Time slowed to a near stop. He thought he heard a soft murmur of surprise at his back which would have come from Rivergrace, but he couldn’t be certain. An ice so cold it felt like fire encased his hand.

“Give me all that you are. Give me back the life I gave you.” An intense need accompanied Daravan’s demand, a need that shivered inside of Sevryn, icy and determined, splintering him from the inside out.

Sevryn could not speak his denial, but Daravan felt it and shook him harder. He clenched his teeth. “Don’t do this. You saved us at Ashenbrook.”

The scalding ice encasing his hand moved up his arm, burning through his clothes as though they weren’t there and perhaps in Daravan’s existence, they weren’t. Stormy gray eyes with all the shadows of darkness falling bored into him.

“You know nothing of what I did or why and the only good you can do me now is to surrender. All or nothing,” Daravan replied. “The aid I want is what I can take from your thin blood. I hold an army at bay. What is that worth to you and your precious Kerith?” He spat to one side as if the word befouled his mouth.

Sevryn realized coldly that the actions taken at Ashenbrook that he’d thought heroic had begun to unravel. Whatever Daravan intended, whatever he plotted, lay still in front of them and he meant no good. He could feel it in the bond that stretched unwillingly between them now. Daravan had done what he’d done to save his army of Raymy, to retreat and attack when he had the advantage, not when three armies joined to meet them. Sevryn struggled to free himself, his heartbeat thrumming in his ears, fire and ice devouring him, Daravan taking what he could. He could feel himself losing bit by bit.

And then Grace touched his shoulder. He heard her voice although he couldn’t discern her words. It didn’t matter. Her warmth flooded him. With a gut-wrenching twist, he tore his hand free from Daravan and dropped to his knees. Time caught up with a rush and a roar, punctuated by a voice laced with fury. It battered his hearing to numbness and then bled away to nothing.

Faintly, he heard Rivergrace say, “What is happening?”

“Daravan. He is either losing control, or he has far more control than we know and should fear.” He pulled himself to his feet. “Catastrophe lies in either instance.” He watched as rolling clouds closed in about them.

Lightning struck from boiling black to glistening darkness. And then . . . the sky opened and the enemy broke through.

R
AYMY RAINED FROM ABOVE. Twisted and tumbling to right themselves, hissing and stinking of saltwater and lizard slime, they hit the dirt mostly on their feet, still clad in battle gear. Gore splattered their green-and-gray bodies and weapon-filled hands as if no time had passed for them between the battle of Ashenbrook and now. Ravers fell with them, their carapaced bodies wrapped in sodden rags of dark cloth, once disguising them but now their likeness poking through with sticklike projections. Bred to ravage the pathway in front of the Raymy, they were also fodder. They rose on their oddly stilted legs, buffeted aside by their betters. The reptilian warriors stood like men, legs bent oddly, shoulders humped and spined, mouths sneering open to reveal nothing but sharp, shining teeth. An army which eats its dead. A bitterness rose in the back of Sevryn’s throat.

He threw an arm across Rivergrace to shield her; the only thing Sevryn could be thankful for was that it wasn’t the entire army. Maybe two to three dozen dropped down, but with only him and Hosmer on the ground to face them, and Rivergrace there as well, he didn’t like the odds. Raymy didn’t have central hearts where they might be expected, but the enemy certainly knew where
his
vulnerable spots were. “Grace, stay as far back as you can.”

She replied calmly, “I’ll be at your back.”

He heard her move into a guard position. She moved with him like his shadow as he stepped into his own defensive stance.

Hosmer did not hesitate, although his face had gone white with astonishment. He blew three sharp blasts on the whistle around his neck, the piercing noise bouncing down the lane and off the buildings. In the far distance, Sevryn could hear a two-blast answer. Backup, on the way. They could not arrive soon enough.

He remembered the days when it took himself, Jeredon, and Lariel combined to take down a charging Raymy warrior. Now he had a better idea of how to bring one down. Take them off at the legs, both Raymy and Raver, before they could leap. Then go for the head. Cripple them, if nothing else, step into the next and leave the wounded until you could return for the kill. A brutal way of fighting, but he wasn’t in it for honor. He had only to last until reinforcements arrived.

To Hosmer, he shouted, “Take their legs out first. Then their heads if you can.”

Not that the City Guard would be prepared to meet such as these, he thought as he stepped in, cutting low, ducking the blade swung at his face. He fought dirty. No legs, no warrior. At least, not a standing one. He could feel Grace moving at his flank, with the sense to imitate his actions. He could hear her faint grunts as she connected, her following gasp of dismay that she had, thinking that this was his Grace who ought never to have to swing a weapon. And yet, he knew that she had carried the Souldrinker, that immense broadsword Cerat, when no one else could have survived the burden. She had taken the weapon to destroy it when no one else could bear to take it up. He reminded himself, as a Raymy grinned fangs in his face and Sevryn stabbed him in the torso to double him over, then swept his ankles out from under the beast, that Rivergrace stood alone. The Raymy toppled. He had no time for satisfaction as two jumped him, one at his flank and the other at his back. He surged in the opposite direction, letting their momentum swing them off balance before kicking the weaker-looking one away, and burying his sword to the hilt in the guts of the remaining reptile. Warmish blood spilled over his hand. The color disconcerted him for a moment. Red yet with a green-and-black cast to it that reflected in the sun, like an oily sheen. He kneed the second one back, took off a leg, and left it to bleed out. He found it mildly disconcerting and distracting that the fallen appendage flopped and kicked a pace away from the body.

He heard a flurry behind him, followed by a triumphant noise from Rivergrace. Across from them, Hosmer also followed his lead and, to Sevryn’s relief, three more guards galloped up, jumping from their horses to join the fray. They drew weapons and shields and fell into formation, leaving no flank open as they attacked. Shrewdly assessing the handiwork, the guards flew on the Raymy with the same determination to cut them out from below and leave them fallen.

Overhead, the sky rumbled darkly and shuddered, and a drum of thunder rolled through him, shaking his very bones. With it, the sky split open a second time, and Raymy fell through as if poured from a bucket. The street and alley filled with their hissing forms.

Rivergrace uttered a small sound. Sevryn backed up and caught her by her free wrist.

“Run,” he told her. “I’ll hold them.”

“No one holds that many. I can’t leave you.” She tossed her head futilely to clear her hair from her brow, frowning. “And, look, there’s something . . . wrong . . . with them.” She pivoted him to his right.

One of the Raymy she had cut down lay curled in the dust, bleeding and panting, but his wound did not keep him down so much as the bubbling pustules that covered his already warty form, pustules that leaked a foul yellowish-green fluid to join his blood in the dirt. “They’re revolting, but I don’t remember this from Ashenbrook.”

The Raymy snarled at him, forked tongue slicking in and out of his jaw, swollen and blackening at the edges. He recoiled. Sevryn split his lungs open and stepped back a pace as foulness spilled out.

Recognition jolted him. “He’s sick.” Sevryn jerked her back, uselessly; they were both doused with the gore of battle, but he could not help himself. “Plague.” He looked at the others downed, writhing nearby. Disgusting blisters blanketed them, and the Raymy wheezed as if they could barely breathe, yet struggled to get to their feet, ready to fight and kill if they could. Wherever they had been, they had been contaminated, and now they carried it like a blanket wrapped tightly about them like a second skin. A deadly blanket. His hand closed tightly on her shoulder. “Stay away from them.”

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Rivergrace shook under his touch.

“No. Never. Whatever it is, it’s bad.” He stepped back and swung her around with him. A Raymy surged at them. Rivergrace jabbed to impale him, and Sevryn swept his head off as the beast stumbled to a stop. It bounced away from him, still spitting in hatred and battle fervor.

Hosmer looked at them from across the wide ring of enemies, readying to join them, as the force weakened down the center.

“Don’t touch the bodies!” Rivergrace cried to him. “Plague!” She threw Sevryn a wild look. “We have to stop this.”

“How?”

She dropped her sword and straightened, taking as deep a breath as she could, and with a short cry of defiance, she set the world on fire.

Flame shivered out of her, drawn from her slender form like a thread which expanded and burst into conflagration as it gained the air, and she aimed it to the blood-coated earth where it anchored itself into a river, a spiraling river, of fire. Sevryn reached to grasp her hand, but the heat shimmering off her drove him back.

Beyond Hosmer and his brace of guards, the sky still rained down Raymy, though the quantity had slowed to a mere handful or two at a time, filling the entire quarter of the city. Yet these fighters did not rise to battle. They lay in miserable heaps, sisssssing and gnashing their teeth in agony.

“Quarantine,” muttered Sevryn. He raised his voice and sent his Talent thundering toward Hosmer, as he repeated, “Quarantine!”

Hosmer raised his blade in knowledge.

Sevryn turned to Rivergrace. “How long will the fire hold here?” he asked as the thread snapped off and she stumbled back in weariness.

“Till dark, I think. I don’t . . . know.”

He caught her just before she fell.