Taliesin Ascendant (The Children and the Blood) (8 page)

“But that was not his true purpose.

“Your father hated what happened to you. It tortured him inside. But it gave him the chance to protect you in a way that otherwise would never have been possible. The king believed that if he helped you remember what it was to be part of our world – and if you had access to all you could do – sooner or later you would insist on being involved in the war. You would want to help him. And that meant watching you fight. Kill. And possibly lose your life.

“He couldn’t stand the thought of you or your sister being part of this, because you were his children more than just heirs to his throne. He was protecting you, not out of disrespect, but love. So yes, he used what happened to you, but he believed that more than being to his advantage, it was to yours.

“His plan had always been to end the war, and then restore your magic to you. He wanted to introduce you to our world at peace, and teach you what you needed to know to rule. But until that could happen, his goal was to give you the best life possible, far from violence and bloodshed, even if he could not be there to share it with you.”

She looked away, remembering. Stress from his job had carved new lines on his face whenever he came home, and most nights found him pacing his room while clutching the phone.

Work calls, she thought distantly. Right.

“I don’t believe this,” she whispered. Her gaze darted around the room as though to encompass everything. “Any of it. It’s crazy. Crazier than wizards and cripples and I just… I don’t… ”

He paused. “You do not have a choice.”

She closed her eyes, wanting to tell him she did. She could leave. Run right now and just forget any of this ever happened.

Even though she knew it wasn’t really true.

“So what am I supposed to do?” she asked softly.

“Become the leader your father would have wanted you to be.”

A scoff escaped her.

“I mean it, Ashe.”

She looked up at him, seeing the quiet insistence in his eyes.

And she turned away, wishing more than anything for it to be the day before yesterday, when the world had still sucked, but not like this.

“You are not alone here,” Cornelius said. “You have the council. Almost as much as the royal family, we have guided our people through the past five hundred years. We are your allies. We can teach you what you need to know.”

She didn’t answer, knowing he wouldn’t understand anything she wanted to say. The whole mess of their world was psychotic, and acknowledging even a fraction of it just meant agreeing on some level that any of it was sane.

And that’d never been why she’d come here.

She took a breath, focusing back on the one measure of stability left in the world. “I’m still telling them about the Blood.”

“Your majesty–”

“Carter told me to,” she interrupted. “And yes, they’re real. They’re out there right now and you have to let me tell people the truth.” She paused. “They killed my dad, Cornelius.”

He closed his eyes. “It will not go well.”

She watched him. “But will you try to stop me?”

A heartbeat passed. “No.”

She hesitated at the reluctance in his voice. “Then when can I meet with them?”

Cornelius sighed. “Most of the council will continue to participate in the festivities for a few more hours,” he allowed. “If you would like, I can arrange for them to meet you after that time.”

She nodded.

“As you wish, your majesty,” he said, rising to his feet.

At the title, she grimaced.

He glanced back when he reached the door, catching sight of the expression. “It is who you are, Ashe,” he repeated.

The door closed as he left the room.

She shook her head. “No,” she whispered assuredly. “It’s not.”

With an arm curled beneath her head and her body propped up by a pile of pillows, she waited. The gun lay behind her, and through the walls, the distant noises of revelry filtered, the sounds occasionally drowned beneath a faint hum every time the air conditioner kicked on.

And finally, a knock came.

She pushed to her feet, and tucked the weapon into the back of her jeans as she crossed to the door. Cornelius stood outside.

“They are ready.”

She followed him down the hall.

Guards bowed as she passed, their murmured ‘your majesties’ trailing her. Partiers still filled the factory floor, and scattered cheers rose as she emerged onto the walkway. With her eyes locked on Cornelius’ back, she forced herself to keep breathing as she strode after him into the conference room.

Stepping to one side, he waited as she entered and then closed the door, his magic sealing out the sound from the factory.

The council watched her.

“You wished to speak with us, your majesty?” Darius asked.

Her gaze darted to the side as Cornelius slipped around her and circled the table to take his seat to the left of Darius. Keeping her face solidly expressionless, she nodded once and then took a chair as well.

“I wanted to talk to you about why I’m here,” she said.

A few people glanced to Cornelius in confusion, but he’d long since locked his eyes on a spot somewhere beyond the tabletop and didn’t look away.

“The Taliesin weren’t responsible for my father’s death,” she continued. “Or Lily’s. Not entirely. The man who ordered their deaths didn’t look like a Merlin wizard, or a Taliesin. And he didn’t have an absence of magic inside him like a cripple. He was something else. He looked human, but he had magic too.

“He was from a group that calls themselves the Blood.”

Around the table, grimaces twisted the faces of several council members. At Darius’ side, Sebastian looked away, nearly rolling his eyes with impatient disbelief.

Cornelius didn’t take his gaze from the table.

“I know you’ve heard of them before,” she said. “Josiah Carter tried to tell you about them eight years ago. But I’m here to confirm that they’re real. I’ve seen them. This man, Mason Brogan; he attacked me with magic two nights ago. And he nearly killed me with it before I took it from him.

“The cripples saw him for what he was. They recognized those like him from crowds that just seemed like regular people to me.”

She glanced at Cornelius, but he didn’t look up.

“Carter and the others weren’t lying. They weren’t delusional or insane. I’ve seen ferals. Wizards. Cripples. And I’m telling you, these monsters are something else. They hunted down my father and sister, and even though Brogan’s gone… the rest are still out there. They’re killing people with almost no chance of being stopped because the wizards who could help fight them don’t believe they’re real.

“So I’m here to ask you to change that. Go back to the cripples and work with them to stop these monsters. The Blood aren’t just a threat to the cripples; they’re a threat to all of us. But with your help, they don’t have to be anymore.”

Exhaling slowly, she fell silent, watching the council for their reactions.

For a minor eternity, none came. Gazes darted from one side of the table to the other, and beneath their imperious masks, hints of expressions surfaced too quickly to be identified. But no one said a word.

And then Katherine cleared her throat. “Your majesty…” she started delicately. “As you say, this information is not new. But… it is not quite as you describe.”

Ashe waited, barely breathing.

“Since the start of the war, there have been rumors. Weapons, designed by Taliesin, to aid those without magic in wielding powers like our own. It is understandable, given their binding for so many years, that wizards of Taliesin’s breed would have attempted such a thing.” She hesitated. “But it came to nothing, your majesty. What you describe cannot be done.”

Ashe shook her head. “I’m not saying they had weapons, and I’m not saying they were human. I’m saying they had magic. That they glow to the cripples. Visibly. Unmistakably. And they were leading Taliesin wizards, not working for them.”

Katherine grimaced, but before she could speak, another council member interrupted. “Your highness,” the portly man said in a tone edging toward condescension. “We know one another as wizards because we possess magical skill. Cripples have none, and thus are fortunate to be aware of us at all. Given the facts, it makes no sense for them to be able to perceive anything of magic that we cannot.”

“I watched them do it.”

“You watched them do something,” Sebastian cut in. “And most likely that thing was manipulate you.”

“Excuse me?”

From his position at Darius’ right hand, the suit-clad man glanced to the other councilors and then gave her a look tinged with pity. “With all due respect, your majesty, you’re young. Inexperienced. Your father bound your magic at age eight, and you haven’t grown up in this world. Everyone at this table knows the cripples could have told you any number of stories, and you would have had no reason to disbelieve them, because everything here is new to you anyway.” He shook his head at her. “You were an easy target, your highness. They saw a chance to convince a naïve young wizard to attack random humans on the street in an effort to corroborate their fantasies, and they took it. I’m not saying it’s your fault, but try to be reasonable now.”

She stared at him. “That’s not what happened.”

“That’s what they wanted you to believe,” he countered. “They’re
broken
, your majesty. And not simply because they don’t have magic. They want to be part of a world they can never have, and each one of them is more than willing to lie, cheat, and manipulate their way into it, if necessary. I’m sure they made themselves sound like victims. They always do. The whole world is after them, to their mind, when in reality, all the world wants is for them to accept their place.” He scoffed at her enraged expression. “And yet you still want to defend them as innocent. But did they tell you how they murder our kind too? Or did they justify it to you, with their imaginary crimes and vigilante heroes? Did you actually meet
Carter
and his little–”

“The Hunters?” she snapped. “Yeah, I met them. Who do you think kept me alive this past month?”

Breathing hard, she stared around the table. “Do you all even know what’s going on out there? Ferals are butchering people in the streets – the very people who can see the Blood wizards and help you take them out. There’s a whole other war going on, and while you were writing it off as rumor and mocking the cripples for their ‘fantasies’, it went out and killed my family!”

Sebastian gave her a wry look. “No disrespect, your majesty,” he said, his voice twisting the last word perilously close to an insult. “But in your one entire
month
of suffering from this war, I don’t believe you’ve earned the right to speak to the years of loss we’ve had to endure. And before you let a bunch of
defectives
convince you how to see the world, perhaps you’ll heed the advice of wizards who’ve been leading their people since before you were in diapers, and who actually know what wielding magic means.”

She blinked, struck speechless. Around the table, council members shifted, their expressions lost in a gradient of meticulous impassivity and discomfited agreement.

“That,” Darius said, razors edging his tone. “Will be
quite
enough, Councilman Monroe.”

Disgustedly, Sebastian looked away.

“My apologies, your highness,” Darius continued, glancing at the rest of the council before returning to Sebastian with a look that could have pierced steel. “For the opinions of some of our members. I assure you they are not shared by all.”

For a moment longer, he pinned the other man with his gaze, and then turned back to her as though dismissing Sebastian from relevance. “Will the cripples listen to you?” he continued.

She paused and then nodded, still shaking with residual fury.

Darius echoed the motion thoughtfully, his eyes moving occasionally to the wizards nearby. “Then you have done better than us.”

Her brow drew down.

“It is true that eight years ago, Josiah tried to tell us the same information you’re passing along now. And it is true that, at the time, we refused to believe him. It could even be said that we were, as you put it, mocking. But that disagreement sent Josiah from our midst, and we have not seen him since that day. He gathered his people and fled to the far corners of the country, and if we heard of him at all, it was only from the bodies he and his ‘Hunters’ left behind.

“I apologize that remnants of the bad feelings left by those realities have come back to show you such unparalleled disrespect.”

She said nothing.

“And yet,” he continued, “regardless of what happened later, I cannot help but wonder what it would have cost us to simply have verified Josiah’s story. Perhaps it would have proved to be nothing. Or perhaps…” his jaw tightened briefly, “perhaps King Patrick, your sister, and who knows how many others would still be alive.”

He fell silent. From the corners of her eyes, she could see the rest of the council, their gazes on the table with clear expressions of unwillingness to speak.

Darius drew a breath. “So I propose we do as you suggest. We invite the cripples back. We form a joint task force comprised of carefully selected wizards who will be open to what we’re asking–” his gaze landed sharply on Sebastian, “–and who will work alongside the cripples. If these ‘Blood wizards’ you describe prove to be fantasy, so be it. But if not…”

He met her eyes across the length of the table. “You may be young,” he said solemnly, “and you may have lived a life till recently that would leave some jealous. But that does not give us the right to deride your information or assume that, because you have not had the same experiences as us, you must be wrong.” He paused, regret flickering over his face. “We’ve burned enough bridges in this war.”

Darius glanced to the council. “I would take this to a vote,” he said, a touch coldly. “But as sole remaining heir of Merlin and ruler by right of the laws we have dedicated our lives to uphold, Queen Ashe unquestionably has the final word. If she asks this of us, we
will
see it done.”