The Fire Prince (The Cursed Kingdoms Trilogy Book 2) (6 page)

Katlen bristled. “Where I come from—”

“And you speak with an accent, all of you.”

Katlen closed her mouth.

“You’re obviously fighters—and you’re obviously not from the Seven Kingdoms. So what does that make you? Mercenaries? Or witches?” The prince put the spoon in his bowl, and put both on the ground. “I’ve never heard of Sarkosians accepting women into their companies, so I’d pick witches.” His gaze was direct, challenging Katlen to deny this. “And why would witches be in Ankeny, a kingdom where witches are beheaded and burned? Why would you take such a risk?”

They all knew the answer to that question, but the prince said it anyway: “Because of the curse. Because of me.”

“You think they were waiting in Stanic for us?” Frane asked.

Prince Harkeld shrugged. “Maybe they were just there to try their luck. If we succeeded in Lundegaard, we had to cross into Ankeny somehow, somewhere. When they saw you, they must have thought the All-Mother was blessing them.”

Silence followed those words.

Petrus glanced at Innis. Her face was bleak. He wished he could reach out and take her hand, but he couldn’t, not while he was Justen.

“Do you think there’ll be more?” Frane asked.

Gerit snorted. “In Ankeny? Without a doubt. There’s a bounty on his head. They’ll be wanting a piece of it.”

Katlen turned to Cora. “But we need our swords! We need to be able to fight!”

“You’ve got fire magic,” Gerit said flatly. “That’s a better weapon than any sword.”

Katlen ignored him. “And as for skirts! They’re impractical! They’re—”

Petrus stopped listening. He stared down at his empty bowl.
If only
...

If only, what? There were so many
if onlies
. Dozens of them, hundreds. If only King Esger hadn’t placed the bounty on his son’s head. If only Dareus had survived the battle in the desert. If only Susa had ducked a second sooner.

Petrus grunted in disgust at himself. What was the point of
if onlies
? They made things neither better nor worse. A waste of time. A waste of emotion.

“Let’s see if we can mend that sword of yours,” Prince Harkeld said over the sound of Gerit and Katlen arguing.

Petrus looked at him. “Huh?”

“Your sword. I’ll get the whetstones.” The prince stood.

Petrus unsheathed his sword. The blade was notched. He glanced at Innis. She was staring down at her bowl.

“Innis...”

She looked at him. Tears shone in her eyes.

His heart seemed to turn over in his chest. He wanted to hug her, to comfort her. Instead, he held out the sword. “How did this happen?”

Innis blinked back the tears. “Throwing star.”

Prince Harkeld returned with two whetstones. “Here.”

Petrus set himself to trying to remove the nick. Alongside him, Prince Harkeld sharpened his own sword. Petrus sent him a sideways glance. The prince had to be afraid. He’d been the Fithians’ quarry, not Susa. But Prince Harkeld didn’t look afraid. His expression was the same one he’d worn for weeks: grim, remote, distancing himself from the mages around him.

Gerit and Katlen were still arguing.
Shut up!
Petrus wanted to yell at them.

“For pity’s sake,” Cora said. “You’re behaving like children.”

“But—”

“Enough.” Cora’s voice was sharper than he’d ever heard it. “We won’t discuss this any more tonight.”

Gerit growled, pushed to his feet, and left the campfire.

“How that man ever became a Sentinel—”

“Enough, Katlen.”

Prince Harkeld tested his blade with his thumb and sheathed it. He stood and walked to where their supplies lay piled.

Petrus worked on his sword, keeping an eye on the prince. He was going through one of the packsaddles. He was safe enough; Rand was near him, and Ebril flying overhead.

The prince came back carrying two swords in their scabbards. “You’re not going to get rid of that notch. Here. Take a look at these.”

Petrus laid Justen’s sword aside.

The first sword the prince held out had Lundegaard’s crest worked into the hilt. Petrus swiped it in the air a couple of times. The weight and balance were good. It must have belonged to one of the soldiers who’d died defending them in the desert.

The second sword... The weight and balance weren’t just good, they were perfect. He hefted the sword in his hand, cut the air.

“Like it?” Prince Harkeld asked.

Petrus nodded. He examined the hilt. No crest was worked into the metal. “Whose...” And then he understood. “It’s Fithian.” The taste of the assassin’s blood filled his mouth. He almost brought his dinner up.

“Crafted by a master, from its balance.”

Petrus turned the sword over in his hands. An assassin’s sword. How many men had it killed? He tested the blade with his thumb. It was razor sharp. “Well looked after.”

“Naturally.”

Petrus looked at the two swords. The Lundegaardan sword was perfectly serviceable, but the one he held...

“I’ll take this one.”

“Thought you might.” The prince grinned. “Why not kill the bastards with their own swords, eh?”

Petrus bared his teeth in an answering grin. “Why not?”

The prince took the Lundegaardan sword back to the pile of supplies. Petrus watched, his grin fading. For a moment there, he’d actually liked the prince. He slid the new sword into its scabbard, disconcerted. When he wasn’t being a surly mage-hating whoreson, Prince Harkeld was surprisingly pleasant.

But only to Justen, who he thought wasn’t a mage.
He treats the rest of us like vermin
.

He scowled briefly and looked around. A dark figure knelt at the assassins’ grave. Frane, using his magic to make the grass grow. Hew was no longer at the fire. He was at Susa’s grave.

Petrus walked across to him. Meadow grasses now thickly covered the mound of stony soil. Hew knelt with his hand on the grave. Did he think he was to blame for Susa’s death? Was he apologizing to her? Begging her forgiveness?

“It wasn’t your fault,” Petrus said.

Hew glanced at him. His lips pinched together in denial.

Petrus crouched alongside him, lowering his voice. “The first time Gerit and I fought Fithians, they were too smart for us, too fast.” He grimaced at the memory. Compared with the assassins, they’d been blundering fools. “By rights, they should have killed us. They very nearly did. It’s only by the All-Mother’s grace we survived.”

Hew’s expression eased slightly, became less bitter.

“Next time you’ll be faster.”

Hew’s lips pressed together again. He nodded.

Petrus stood and walked back to the fire. He sat down beside the prince, unsheathed his new sword, and began to hone the razor-sharp edge with a whetstone.

H
ARKELD DREAMED THAT
he sat in darkness. A breeze whispered over his face. Stars glittered in the sky. He wasn’t sure where he was sitting, or why, but he knew who sat alongside him without having to look. The witch, Innis.

They were close enough that her shoulder touched his upper arm, and through that point of contact he
felt
her. Not just the warmth of her body, but an awareness of her emotions. Tonight, grief was dominant.

In his dreams, he and the witch were friends. He’d given up trying to fight it. It simply
was
. Harkeld put his arm around her and pulled her closer. Innis leaned her head against his shoulder.

They sat without speaking. Hours drifted past, while the stars wheeled slowly overhead. There was something deeply comforting about being with Innis. He wasn’t certain exactly what it was—empathy, friendship.

“You would have liked Susa,” Innis said quietly, as the sky grayed towards dawn. “She would have made you laugh. She made everyone laugh.”

“I’m sorry she’s dead.”

How many people had died trying to protect him now?

He didn’t have to count. He knew the tally. Eighteen of Lundegaard’s soldiers. And two witches.

Twenty dead, for me.

It was too many.
I am worth only my own life
. And yet, because of his blood— Rutersvard blood, tainted with witch blood—he was also worth tens of thousands of lives.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
AULT SLOPED DOWN
to the Gulf of Hallas, the great ocean that stretched a thousand leagues to Lundegaard. It was cropping country. Barley nodded in the sea breezes. The roads were crowded, the hamlets eerily silent; the people of Sault had joined the flight from the curse. Nolt led his men between the teeming roads and the coast. Now and then a harvester, sweeping with a scythe, shouted angrily as the horses trampled his crop, but it didn’t matter. The barley still needed weeks to ripen. The farmers, the last to flee, were trying to fill carts with heads from which they might pick usable grains. Their shouts were the shouts of desperation.

Jaumé understood now the value of his pony. It could keep up its steady trot all day. The men’s horses drooped by nightfall, but the pony—he didn’t name it—drank at whatever stream Nolt chose to camp by, then fell to cropping grass. Another day done.

Sometimes Jaumé drooped like the horses, but a meal revived him, and then his excitement in learning took over—a hidden excitement. Although Bennick taught him cheerfully, and sometimes with laughter, nothing was a game. First Jaumé had to be useful. He gathered stones for the firepit and branches for Bennick to chop. He fetched water to be boiled for the pungent brew of dried leaves the men drank each night. It was bitter to Jaumé; he kept to plain water—water that would soon carry the curse. Only when the meal was over and his jobs were done could he practice with his knife.

It took him several nights to learn how to keep its edge sharp with a whetstone. Da had used a whetstone on the scythes he made and Jaumé knew the technique of drawing the coarse side down the blade and coming back lightly with the fine side. But this blade had to be sharper than a scythe, and each side equal to the other, and its point needle-like. Jaumé learned quickly. Bennick, taking the knife and testing it on his thumb—and not cutting himself—was satisfied.

“Can I throw it now?” Jaumé asked.

“An easy throw. You’ve earned that.” Bennick chose a tree with its near side illumined by the fire. He showed Jaumé how to stand, how to hold the knife. “By the handle when you’re this close to the target. When you’re further back you hold the blade and the knife flips over, but you’ll have to wait for that. I don’t want you cutting your fingers off.” He took the knife and flicked it at the tree. It happened so fast Jaumé scarcely saw it. The blade was buried so deep he struggled to pull it out.

Bennick taught him patiently after that, how to hold the heavy little knife, how to know the distance to his target without thinking and make the throw with no pause or calculation getting in the way. Jaumé was aware of Nolt watching, and knew he had to satisfy Nolt as well as Bennick. Again, as with the sharpening, he learned quickly. By the second night, the knife hit and stayed every time he threw.

“Can I make it flip now?”

“No. You’re doing well, lad, but there are steps. I’ll teach you when you’re ready.”

“So I can be a soldier like you?”

Bennick laughed. “A soldier, eh? I guess you could call me that.”

“Can you show me how you throw your big knife?”

“This one?” Bennick patted the knife sheathed on his belt. Suddenly he turned and Jaumé heard a whirr like a quail leaping from the grass and a thud in the dark where a white shape stood.

“Bennick,” Nolt said from his seat at the fire. It was a rebuke.

Bennick made a little bow of apology. “Nolt.” He strode into the dark. Jaumé trotted anxiously at his side. The shape was a young tree with a white trunk no thicker than Bennick’s arm. The knife had struck it at the height of Bennick’s chest and sliced through. Half the blade showed on the other side.

“I didn’t even know this tree was here.”