The Queen's Weapons Page 27

  “Does Zoey know?” he asked.

  “She knows, but hasn’t seen her mother yet,” Garek replied. “We’d like Sheela to have some time to adjust to living in the world again before we talk to her about how much time she’s been away. Zoey was just a young girl when Sheela was lost.”

  He remembered that, just as he remembered his first encounter with Lady Zoela.

  “Song in the Darkness,” Zhara said suddenly. “Sheela said there was a song in the Darkness. Sometimes it sounded far away. Sometimes, when she thought it was nearby, a thread seemed to shine and she would follow it for a while, would see things, understand things. And then she would lose her way. Over and over, losing her way and finding it again when she heard the song. Until she found her way out.”

  Daemon said nothing. Didn’t dare say anything. He’d mentioned Zoey’s mother to Witch and Karla once, just once, centuries ago. He hadn’t asked either of them to intervene. Wasn’t even sure there was anything to be done. Witch had led Tersa to the border of the Twisted Kingdom and helped the broken Black Widow build a life that could mesh with the day-to-day rhythm of a small village. But his Queen had been among the living when she’d done that extraordinary bit of healing.

  He’d only mentioned Zoey’s mother once, and neither Witch nor Karla had responded at the time. Or maybe he hadn’t read the signs correctly.

  “Sheela isn’t the only one,” Zhara continued. “The Sisters who tend the witches who are mentally damaged said other Black Widows are more aware of the world than they’ve been in a long time, and all of them mention a song.”

  He squeezed her hands in warning. “Zhara.”

  “I heard that phrase once. It was at your daughter’s Birthright Ceremony. A song in the Darkness.” Zhara sniffed and looked him in the eyes. “It’s best, I think, not to ask about some things. Or call too much attention to some things. I also think you have a connection to Ebon Askavi that few others can claim.”

  “Be careful,” he said too softly.

  “What is said here today will not leave this room or be mentioned again.” Zhara nodded toward Garek, who quickly agreed. “I think that song in the Darkness healed you, too, when you fell ill shortly after your daughter’s Birthright Ceremony. And I think that song, somehow, still holds the leash of the most powerful men in Kaeleer.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “If a song can hear as well as be heard, please thank her for helping my daughter come home.”

  “Thank who?”

  Zhara smiled. “Perhaps it’s all just a dream.”

  Daemon studied the Queen of Amdarh and knew Zhara would keep her word and never speak of this again. Returning her smile, he said, “Perhaps it is.”

  Releasing her hands, he stood. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a nephew who will be landing on my doorstep in a few hours.”

  “Trouble?” Garek asked.

  Daemon raised one eyebrow and said dryly, “He’s Eyrien. Of course there’s trouble.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  Lucivar didn’t knock, didn’t give any warning. He just used Craft to blow the front door of Dorian’s eyrie off its hinges. As he walked in, he put an Ebon-gray shield around the eyrie. Then he called in a round-headed club—a useful weapon if a man wanted to break a lot of bones and turn a person into a bloody mess.

  Dorian and Orian rushed into the front room that was decorated like a Queen’s waiting room. They both appeared upset, but Orian had a look in her eyes that made him think she knew exactly why he was there.

  “Your son just threatened my daughter!” Dorian’s voice was filled with wrath.

  Ignoring Dorian, he turned to Orian and snarled, “Where is the Ring of Obedience?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Orian stammered. She tried to look haughty. She stank of fear.

  “You told a Warlord Prince that you have a Ring of Obedience. You threatened to use it on him. For that alone, I could drag you out of here and skin you alive. This is your only chance, Orian. Hand over the Ring or die.”

  “Orian said no such thing!” Dorian protested.

  “Were you there? Did you hear the words?” Lucivar demanded.

  “It’s his word against hers.”

  “Then let’s bring them both before a tribunal of Queens and have them open their inner barriers to reveal the truth.”

  Orian swayed. Dorian put her arms around her daughter.

  “I was just teasing,” Orian said. “I didn’t think Daemonar would take it seriously.”

  “Liar.”

  “How dare you! Orian is a Queen!” Dorian snapped.

  “Doesn’t make her any less of a liar.” Lucivar stared at Dorian. “You want your daughter to live? Tell me where you’ve hidden the Ring.”

  “I want you to leave,” Dorian said. “Right now!”

  He spun, swung the club—and turned a table into kindling.

  Orian let out a scream that was more like a squeak. Dorian stumbled away from him, pulling Orian with her.

  “Where is it?” he snarled.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Lie to me again, and I’ll use this club on your girl, and there won’t be much left of her when I’m done.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  He bared his teeth. “Tell that to all the Queens I killed.”

  Dorian glanced at a small round cabinet with a locked door.

  He’d seen that cabinet listed in a delivery of goods when it arrived in Ebon Rih. A year ago? Maybe two? Dorian had said it had come from her family home and had been patched up with Craft so many times it had no worth beyond sentimental value. Rothvar had inspected it carefully and hadn’t sensed anything that didn’t match Dorian’s claim—had, in fact, thought sending it to Dorian was her relatives’ way of pissing on her.

  But a man who had been exposed to the brilliance of Jaenelle Angelline and the coven would pay particular attention to the spells around the lock and the door. A man who had spent some time being tutored by Saetan would know that malicious spells could be hidden under benign ones.

  What he was sensing now wasn’t Dorian’s work. She didn’t have the power or the skill. But someone did. Was that someone here or still in Terreille?

  Wrapping Ebon-gray power around the club, he threw it at the cabinet. His power collided with the power in the various spells with enough force that, if he’d been holding the club, he could have lost the use of part of his arm—for good.

  Nothing benign about that.

  Lying in the cabinet’s ruins was a wooden box. No spells on it. No lock. Considering what had been around the cabinet, Dorian hadn’t needed anything else to protect whatever the box held. Still, he used Craft to float the box out of the debris, lift the lid, and riffle through the contents.

  No Ring of Obedience. Just letters. Lots of letters. Years’ worth of letters. Written in Eyrien.

  Dorian had shown him one of these letters from her family. The content was banal and made him wonder why someone would go to the trouble of paying the expense of sending it to Kaeleer. And he’d wondered why her smile had been so sly and satisfied when he’d shown no more than polite interest in her correspondence. Now he knew why.

  It looked like his power had smashed more than the spells on the cabinet and had revealed the real messages beneath the other ones.

  Lucivar swore silently. Most formal correspondence and business contracts were written in the common tongue used by every race in Kaeleer, and with Marian’s and Daemonar’s help, he’d gotten pretty good at reading such things. But this?

  He wouldn’t ask Marian to read these, and until he knew the contents, he didn’t dare go to Ebon Askavi and ask the Lady there who was fluent in Eyrien. The Darkness only knew how Jaenelle would respond when she found out about this. He want
ed to have an answer—and a decision—before he told her.

  There was one person.

  He wrapped an Ebon-gray shield around the box, in case he’d missed a trap. Then he looked at the woman and girl, who looked back with defiance.

  “When I know what these letters say, I’ll decide if the two of you are going to be exiled back to Terreille or executed and sent to Hell.”

  “You can’t do that,” Dorian said, her voice rising in panic. “Orian has no future in Terreille.”

  “I was just teasing,” Orian pleaded. “I didn’t know it was such a bad thing!”

  You knew, Lucivar thought, feeling a pang for the young family who had come to Kaeleer centuries ago to escape the very thing Orian now threatened to bring into his Territory.

  “Pack up your personal belongings,” he said. “Only what the two of you can carry using Craft. One way or another, I’ll be back at sunrise.”

  He walked out of Dorian’s eyrie, made sure his Ebon-gray shield was in place, and flew to the Healer’s eyrie.

  Still early enough in the morning that Jillian wasn’t quite ready to greet the day, but she let him in, then hurried to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee.

  “Help yourself to the coffee when it’s ready,” Jillian said. “I’ll just finish getting dressed.”

  “Take your time.” He waited until she dashed for her room before going into the kitchen.

  She was young, but he couldn’t talk to any of his men. Not yet. He knew how Rothvar, Zaranar, and the rest of them would respond to what might be in those letters—especially since they knew of the attempt to smuggle Rings of Obedience into Askavi. Jillian was young, but she was intelligent, she was family, and she could read the Eyrien language.

  She returned, fully dressed, with her hair up in a kind of messy knot that he found oddly appealing.

  He poured two mugs of coffee, filled her mug a third of the way with cream, then indicated the chairs at the kitchen table. “I need your help.”

  “Of course.”

  Not a daughter of his loins, but a daughter of his heart. She never called him Father, but she acted like a daughter—and anyone who tangled with Jillian swiftly learned how he felt about her.

  “It’s delicate,” he said once they were seated. He called in the box he’d taken from Dorian and set it on the table. “I need you to read these letters to me.”

  He huffed out a laugh at the look on her face. “Relax, witchling. They aren’t letters Marian has received from a secret lover.” All amusement fled. “If they are what I think they are, they’re much worse.”

  She looked alarmed. “Maybe Rothvar . . . ?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t talk to any of the men until I know what is in these letters.”

  Before he could say anything, she put a tight shield around herself, then a second shield on her hands and forearms. As she riffled through the letters, she said, “You would have kicked my ass if I didn’t shield before I picked up a potentially dangerous object that came from an unknown place.”

  “It’s good you learned the lesson,” he replied mildly.

  “Hell’s fire,” Jillian muttered a minute later. “Based on the dates, the letters in this box go back years. One or two a year in the beginning, then more frequent until it’s one a month now.”

  Did these letters from Terreille go back far enough to explain the change in Dorian and her ambitions for her daughter? Or had the earliest letters already been destroyed? The ones Jillian pulled out of the box had nothing more than an initial for the signature, but not all the letters were written by the same hand or signed with the same initial.

  “Read the past two years.”

  She pulled those letters out, put them in order from oldest to most recent, and then began to read them out loud. She tried to read them without her own feelings showing through, but with each letter her voice became sharper; her temper rose closer to the surface.

  One writer was sharp and critical of Dorian not doing more to help other members of the family settle in Kaeleer—and even more critical about the lack of money available to support those family members when they finally arrived. What was the point of having a Queen—of sorts—in the family if she couldn’t bring wealth to heel?

  The other writer sympathized with Dorian’s frustration over her daughter being an impoverished Queen. Wasn’t there some way to bring that young Warlord Prince to heel and gain access to his family’s fortune? Orian would never be able to achieve her full potential and rule a substantial part of Askavi without that kind of wealth.

  The first writer again—and a veiled reference to Dorian soon having access to a Ring of Obedience so that Orian could control the defiant cock and persuade him to give her everything she desired.

  Jillian dropped the last letter, drank the cold coffee, then thumped the mug on the table. Her eyes were so hot with anger, Lucivar tightened the leash on his own temper so that she could vent her feelings here and now.

  “Your thoughts?” he asked.

  “This is obscene,” Jillian snarled. She snatched up a letter and shook it at him. “This is what all of us left Terreille to escape. How dare that bitch threaten Daemonar with a Ring of Obedience? How dare she?”

  Well, Orian didn’t remember that he has an older sister with a sharp temper and a wicked roundhouse punch.

  “Where is she?”

  Oh, no. Unlike Titian, Jillian had wanted to learn how to fight and use Eyrien weapons—and she had learned well. After she and Khary went to Little Weeble the first time, she decided she didn’t want to be a guard or a warrior as such, but she trained hard during her visits home and wanted him and Rothvar to teach her more. She didn’t explain why she wanted that training and neither man had asked. But they gave her the training—and they gave her an Eyrien war blade made by Kohlvar, the weapons maker, that was specially balanced for her hand.

  He wasn’t letting Jillian anywhere near Orian and her mother.

  “She’s mine to deal with,” he said.

  She stared at him. “You’re going to let her live?”

  That question was exactly why he hadn’t wanted any of the men to know about the letters before he knew the contents.

  “How can you let her live?” she demanded in a tone that warned him that he’d damn well better be thinking of something else.

  Shit. If Jillian was this riled, Marian was going to . . .

  How long would his hearth witch refuse to sleep with him if he locked her in their eyrie to keep her from going after Dorian?

  “If I had found a Ring of Obedience, neither of them would be among the living right now,” he said carefully. “But—”

  “Did you search the whole eyrie?”

  No, he hadn’t. He wouldn’t have had the option of exile for those two if he’d found a Ring, so he wouldn’t do a thorough search until they were gone. That was as much mercy as he could give them.

  “The choice of punishment is mine, Lady Jillian.”

  “None of the other Eyrien men would let her live once they knew she’d threatened one of them with that obscenity.”

  “They have that luxury. As the ruler of Askavi, I don’t.” The truth was, if he’d still been in Terreille, he wouldn’t have hesitated to kill Orian for the threat. “Orian no longer has a future here. Exile will give her a second chance. If she shakes off these corrupt ideas, she has the potential to be a good Queen.”

  “And if she doesn’t shake off these ideas? Or more to the point, if Dorian and her family keep pushing these ideas?”

  “Then I doubt Orian will survive a year in Terreille.”

  “A stay of execution, then.”

  Would the Eyrien warriors who worked for him see it that way?

  He put the letters back in the box and vanished it. “Jillian . . .”

  “Yours to do. I know.” She sighed
. “I won’t say anything. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel exercised about the whole thing.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

  At least that made her smile. When he pushed away from the table, she rose up on her toes and kissed his cheek. And then was cheeky enough to say, “Was I a dress rehearsal?”

  “For . . . ?”

  “Explaining this to your son’s mother.”

  Jillian wasn’t wrong about that. After the first minutes of horrified silence, Marian raged—first at Dorian and then at him for, among other things, letting the bitch continue to draw breath when it was obvious that she had fully intended for Orian to use a Ring on their son.

  When she showed no sign of winding down, he ordered Andulvar to remain in his room, put an Ebon-gray shield around the front room, and handed Marian one of the sparring sticks to let her vent some of that temper by using him as an opponent.

  Rage seemed to sharpen her skill because she almost managed to hit him a couple of times. Under other circumstances, he would have been pleased about that and praised the skill. Now he just let her whack at him until the muscles in her arms shook so much she couldn’t lift the sparring stick.

  Not being a fool, he wasn’t careless about approaching her—and didn’t breathe easy until he pulled the sparring stick out of her hands and vanished both.

  He could deal with rage, but it ripped him when she started to cry.

  “Shh, sweetheart, shh. It will be all right.” He wrapped his arms around her.

  “Our boy, Lucivar. She threatened to do that to our boy.”

  “Daemonar is smart and he’s trained.”

  “So were you at his age, and Prythian and her bitches still managed to put one of those things on you.”

  Nothing he could say to that, so he just held her and waited for the storm to pass. Once she’d stopped crying and quieted enough to sniffle into a handkerchief, he said, “I think I understand now why Andulvar, the previous Demon Prince, stayed as long as he did after he became demon-dead.”

  Marian wiped the tears off her face and tucked the handkerchief into the pocket of her skirt. “He stayed to keep Saetan company, to help him maintain his balance.”