The Black Queen (Book 6) (10 page)

“If I hear of it, I will destroy not only you but your family. Is that clear?”

The boy swallowed again. He was full of more nervous ticks than a prisoner. “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now get out of here.”

The boy yanked his hand from Lyndred’s and ran for the door, not pausing to look back. Lyndred watched him go, a stricken expression on her face. Then she rose, slowly, to face her father.

In the last year, his youngest child had grown as tall as he was. Eighteen and beautiful. And smart. He couldn’t tell her how proud he was of her, not now, when she stood before him, her powerful eyes flashing with an anger that matched his own.

“You have no right to do that,” she said. “I will marry him whether you let me or not.”

“You could,” Bridge said. “If you wanted to marry a coward.”

“He’s no coward.”

“Then why did he run?”

“You told him to leave.”

“Would you have left if his father had ordered it at that moment?”

Her jaw worked, but it took her a moment to say anything. Her anger was shifting from him to the boy. Good.

“No,” she said. “I would not.”

She sank back onto the wooden chair. It creaked beneath her weight. Bridge put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. She hadn’t loved the boy, but she didn’t know that. She had only felt infatuation, flattery, pleased that someone had courted her so formally and in such a romantic way. One day she would thank him for this. But not now.

He took the boy’s chair, and turned it so that it faced her. “You convinced me of one thing today,” he said.

She raised her head. She wasn’t crying, and she should have been, if the boy had been her true love. But she didn’t know that either. Bridge remembered how he had felt when her mother died. Loss like that tore a man from the inside out. That was love. The belief that you could not live without the other person, and when other person left and you did live, that you were no longer living as you had before.

“What?” she asked.

He almost smiled at the anger in her voice. Perhaps that had been her problem. He had not gotten her angry often enough.

“You’ve convinced me that you need to leave Nye. You’ve taken on too many of this country’s ways.”

“I know there are other places. You’ve made me go all over Galinas.”

He had too. He had even made her spend a summer in an Infantry training unit run by her oldest brother, Rugan. She had been an able student, Rugan had said, but she had no fire.

Bridge did not know how to give her fire.

“Yes,” he said. “You’ve seen Galinas, and all of its countries. But you have never been to a place completely different from Nye, a place where there are no Nyeians at all.”

She crossed her arms. “I do not think you have to send me away because I fell in love.”

“I’m not.” He folded his arms on the back of the chair, and then he rested his chin on them. “I hadn’t realized until today how much of the Nyeian culture you had accepted as the way things should be. No Fey raised as I was would have seen love poetry from a boy like that as anything more than a joke.”

“It was no joke,” she snapped.

“Not to you.” His voice was gentle. “But it should have been. You come from a long line of warriors, Lyndred. You are named for one of the most ruthless generals of all the Fey. If a warrior wrote you love poetry, I would be the first to tell you to treasure it. But that boy was no warrior.”

“That’s why I liked him.”

“You wouldn’t have liked it after a year of marriage. He also had no backbone. You would have bent him to your considerable will and when he did not fight you, you would have snapped him in half. I saw your face. You were surprised just now when he ran off instead of defending your love.”

“You said it.” She raised her chin in an unconscious imitation of Bridge. “He’s no warrior.”

“And you need one,” Bridge said. “If you’re ever to marry.”

“What do you mean ‘ever’?” she asked.

“It is not a requirement, as long as you have children.”

“Arianna has no children.”

Ah, the mysterious cousin. The competition that Bridge had felt with his own sister, he sometimes felt he had passed on to his daughter. She seemed focused on Arianna, determined to be better.

“That’s right,” he said. “Arianna has no children. And neither does her brother. That’s a serious mistake. If they were killed tomorrow, the Black Throne comes to us. If they never have children, it will be our branch of the family that will rule the Fey, not theirs.”

She was frowning slightly. He had never said this to her before, and he wished he had. It would have saved her from the debacle with the Nyeian Poet of Good Family.

“Now do you see why it’s important to learn what your mate will bring to our family?”

Her chin went up one more notch. If it went any higher, he thought with amusement, she would be looking at the ceiling. “I think poetry is a fine thing to bring to this family.”

“I agree,” he said. “As long as it is not the only thing.”

The edges of her mouth twitched. He knew the look. She was trying to fight a smile, trying to hold onto the anger she felt. She had done that since she was a little girl, tried to contain the smiles that he could always create within her. But it rarely worked.

He wasn’t going to push it now. She had a right to be mad at him, and he wasn’t going to jolly her into forgetting that. He wanted her to set this whole incident aside.

“So,” she said, “where are you sending me this time?”

“I’m not sending you anywhere,” he said. “I’m accompanying you.”

“Where?”

He stood abruptly and walked over to his desk. This time he needed the buffer. “We’re going to pay our respects to the Black Queen.”

“What?” Lyndred stood too. “Daddy, we haven’t been invited.”

“I know,” he said. “Not once in fifteen years. She hasn’t asked to see any of her uncles, and why should she, really? All of us were passed by. None of us were deemed worthy of the Black Throne.”

He couldn’t quite keep the bitterness from his voice. When he had been a boy, his grandfather had groomed him for the Black Throne, saying that if something happened to Jewel, he would get it. But he had made too many mistakes in the Nye campaign. He had led an Infantry unit and had not seen the trap they were walking into. He had managed to save them—if he was good at anything it was recovering from his own mistakes—but a true Black King, his grandfather said, would never have led them there in the first place.

Bridge knew the truth of that statement, just as he knew he didn’t have the tactical genius needed to sit on the Black Throne. But if Arianna had tactical genius, she wasn’t showing it. She was doing no more and no less than Bridge would have done in her place.

“So why are we going?” Lyndred said.

“Because you need to get out of Nye.” He tapped his fingers against the polished mahogany. He didn’t say that he needed to get out as well, but he did. He had almost forgotten what it was like to travel. He had been here too long, and he had grown as accustomed to the place as Lyndred. “And because I would like to talk to my niece about her plans for our people.”

“You don’t like how she’s ruling us.”

He sat in the leather chair behind his desk. “I hate it. This not how the Fey live.”

“Will she listen to you?”

“She might. Perhaps she hasn’t had real Fey advice. Perhaps I should have gone long ago.”

“Why didn’t you?”

How could he explain to his daughter the effect of that Scribe, coming into this very office, repeating Arianna’s message word for word? Lyndred didn’t remember it. She had been three years old. Her mother had been alive, and had been relieved at the message. But Bridge had seen it for what it was. An insult from a girl, a girl who had not even been raised Fey. At the time, Arianna had been younger than Lyndred was now.

We would like you to continue your good work on Nye. We need a ruler of your abilities to maintain the most important port city on Galinas, and to keep the peace within its home country. We shall resume trade, of course, and begin contact with all parts of the Fey Empire. We appreciate your support in all ways.

The veiled threat, the veiled insult. A ruler of his ability. She had already known where he belonged, and she kept him there. She had probably known that, before he learned of his grandfather’s death, he was preparing his own battle fleet to come to Blue Isle. If Bridge had timed it better, he would have arrived to support his grandfather, and if his niece had died by accident in the struggle, then Blood against Blood would not have happened. But from the moment his grandfather died, Bridge lost his opportunity to seize the Black Throne by accident. He lost his opportunity to be anything more than the man who maintained the most important port city on Galinas.

“Your mother didn’t want me to go,” he said. It was true enough. And it seemed to be enough to satisfy his daughter. “Besides, Arianna needed to establish power on her own. If I had arrived within a year of her ascent, she might have thought that I threatened her rule. She might have initiated the Blood against Blood.”

“Surely she wouldn’t have,” Lyndred said. “She knows about that.”

“She wasn’t raised Fey,” he said. “I couldn’t be sure of anything.”

Except that she was a Shape-Shifter, the first in the Black Family, and a powerful Visionary. He wasn’t much of a Visionary at all, and that stopped him too. He respected his own people enough to know that they needed a Visionary Leader if there was one available. A man who ruled by hunch and instinct always failed.

As if reading his thoughts, his daughter asked, “Have you Seen something?”

He shook his head, feeling a sad smile cross his face. “All I have Seen, baby, are small things. Hints of trouble that make no sense to me. Two hands holding a scepter as if they wanted to pull it apart. A Fey man whom I do not know drowning. Two hearts pierced by a single sword.”

She was quiet for a moment, her eyes downcast. And suddenly he realized what a fool he’d been. She’d come into her Vision a year ago, and he had never asked her what she’d Seen. He only listened to what she had volunteered.

“What have you Seen?” he asked her.

When she raised her eyes, they were filled with tears. “I don’t want to go to Blue Isle, Daddy,” she said.

His heart started pounding, hard. “Why not?”

“There’s a Golem that will try to kill me,” she said. “And a blond man who will give me a child I do not want.”

Bridge felt his breath catch. “What else?”

“You’ll die, Daddy. It must have been yourself you Saw in the water. Because you’ll drown. On the way to Leut. You’ll die.”

She was protecting him. He ran a hand over his face. No wonder she wasn’t upset about this Rupert. She hadn’t loved him. She had been using him as an excuse to stay on Nye. If she didn’t go, she probably assumed, Bridge wouldn’t go either.

“Is that all?” he asked.

“The Black Queen,” she said, “has a very cruel face.”

All day long he had had the sense that Arianna needed him, that he should go to Blue Isle. Had he been wrong? Had the feeling simply been a wish from his own heart? A wish that he were more important than he was?

“Have you spoken to a Shaman about these Visions?” he asked.

She nodded. “Last week, when I went to see Rugan, I stopped in L’Nacin and saw the Shaman there.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said that we never see complete Visions, that we can try to prevent them, but we won’t know if we succeed until the moment passes, and sometimes not even then.” Her voice shook. “He also said that I cannot prevent your death. You are my father, and it is the way of things that children outlive their parents.”

Those words may not have calmed her, but they calmed Bridge. It
was
the way of things. And the Fey were not supposed to be afraid of their futures.

“So you would keep me in this place for the next hundred years?” he asked.

She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. The Fey were long-lived and the Black Family particularly so, if they weren’t killed in battle. She knew that asking him to live forever in Nye was asking him to spend the rest of his life in a place he hated.

“She didn’t ask you to come,” Lyndred said. It sounded like a final attempt at getting him to change his mind, an attempt she didn’t seem to think would work.

“No, she didn’t,” he said. “But all day I’ve had a feeling I should go. That’s like a minor Vision, isn’t it?”

He was asking his youngest child, a girl barely in adulthood, whether a feeling was a Vision. He was as pathetic as his grandfather had said he was. At his age, Bridge should know the difference between a feeling and a Vision.

“Maybe you should see the Shaman,” she said.

“Maybe.” Then he might find out if the Shaman had Visions about this trip as well. Of course if he had a Vision that he felt could be prevented, it was his duty to tell Bridge. No one had spoken to him.

“You won’t, will you?”

Bridge shook his head. “If I stay in Nye much longer, I’ll be little better than your Rupert. And if you stay here, you’ll lose touch with all things that are important. I am going to deliver you to the Queen’s court, so that you learn how the Black Throne works. That way, if Arianna dies without issue, you or your children can take over.”