Empire of Dust (12 page)

Chapter Eleven

IN AN ORB
of light cast by three tiny oil lamps, Jacob wraps a wet rawhide cord tightly around the junction of an iron arrowhead as he tries to ignore Princess Cynane's low moans. Keeping busy is the only way he can stay in the same room as her. Even now, asleep, she makes awful sounds—sounds that remind him of when his family's farm dog lost her litter in a sudden flood, and she whimpered for the lost pups for days.

He would never tell anyone, but when Cynane sleeps, he can't help but feel slightly sorry for the unloved princess. In her dreams, she calls out for her mother and sobs that blood is all around. He often wonders what cruelties she has witnessed.

Jacob dips his fingers into a pot of beeswax and massages the leather cord. When it dries, it will be both tight and supple. For a moment, he considers putting some of the beeswax into his own ears, but as an Aesarian Lord, he knows he needs to show more courage than that.

He sets the arrow in the finished stack and is reaching for another when he hears heavy boots tromping up the north tower stair. The door opens wide and High Lord Gideon enters holding a torch, followed by Bastian and two other Lords. Standing in the gloomy, dark little torture chamber with their horned helmets and black capes, they remind Jacob of the horned god Pan doing penance in the Underworld.

Gideon steps forward, and Jacob knows before he asks what the High Lord will say. It's the same question every night. “Has she told you anything?”

“No, High Lord,” Jacob replies. He knows Gideon doesn't want to hear about the curses she's hurled at him or her demands for water.

The High Lord goes over to the girl and, moving his torch over her tangle of limbs, bends to examine her pale face and her skin, unmarked other than the Scythian tattoo on her arm Turshu gave her yesterday as she shrieked. Finally, Gideon shakes his head. “Then there's truly nothing more we can learn from her,” he says.

Cynane's groan startles Jacob—he thought she was asleep—and he looks over to see her turn her head away.

“Are we all agreed,” Lord Gideon continues, “that she does
not
possess a Blood Magic?”

Bastian and the other Lords nod their assent, though one of them speaks: “She is protected by a powerful spell. A sorcerer's spell.”

“And if that is true,” Gideon says, tilting his head, “the Hunor will welcome her eagerly, regardless of whether the magic is hers or not.”

In two strides Bastian is leaning over Cynane, smiling like a lover, and for a moment Jacob wonders if he's going to kiss her. “Turshu and I can prepare the mixture,” Bastian says. He grabs a lock of Cynane's black hair, which, once as shiny as a river pebble, is now listless and dull. He gives it a tug, and she spits in his face.

Swearing, Bastian wipes off the saliva, and Jacob quickly looks away to hide his smirk. How many times he's wanted to spit at him. Watching Cyn do it was almost as good as doing it himself. But he must not have looked away quickly enough, as Bastian's eyes narrow at him.

“I think Lord Jacob is ready for the honor of applying it,” the scarred Lord says. Though Bastian grins, Jacob knows that any kind of honor that Bastian wants to bestow upon him is one that must be truly disgusting. Two hours later, Jacob knows that he was right.

Dipping his shovel into the cauldron of warm mud and ashes, Jacob stirs the slightly bubbling mixture. It smells of sulfur and something very ancient, like earth from a forgotten tomb. Once in a while he gets a whiff of something that reminds him of dead fish and human vomit and can hardly stop himself from retching. In Erissa there was a wise woman who healed people by applying mud mixed with herbs to injured or painful body parts. Two years ago, when he and Kat were hunting a deer, Jacob tripped in a rabbit hole and badly sprained his ankle. The wise woman slapped thick, hot mud infused with aromatic herbs on the ankle, and let it harden to rock. Three days later she chipped it off, and his ankle was as good as new.

But he knows this stinking brew can't be intended to heal Cynane, who is now chained to a wooden board on the floor. He is supposed to coat her with the mud up to her neck, let the mixture harden, then turn her over and coat the back of the board. Gideon will give her a drug to render her unconscious and then coat her face, leaving holes over the eyes, nose, and mouth.

Torchlight flickers in the derelict kitchen of the old fortress, and a sliver of moonlight slants through the smoke hole, silvering the fumes rising from the cauldron. Bastian and Turshu left him with a shovel and a warning that if he splashed the mixture on himself he mustn't let it dry or else they'd have to crack him open like a sculptor's plaster mold. Only then did Jacob realize the task at hand: he would be sealing her into a skintight tomb.

Cold sweat breaks out across his back. He doesn't want to do this, but he must follow orders if he's to rise in the ranks. Taking a deep breath, he dips his shovel into the cauldron and drops the mud on Cyn's abdomen. She throws her head back and screams.

“Does it hurt?” he asks, surprised. Bastian instructed him to make sure it was pleasantly warm, not burning hot, and he tested it.

“No,” she says, gasping. “But it will before they're done with me. I won't be able to move when you've finished.” She claws at Jacob's tunic with filthy manacled hands and stares straight into his eyes. He sees fear there for the first time. More than fear. Desperation.

“If they want to kill me, why can't they let me fight and die like a soldier?” she croaks. “I don't want to die like this. Not like the helpless prey of some evil spider.”

Jacob wrenches his gaze away from her, turns to the cauldron, and dips in his shovel. This time he doesn't look at her as he piles the mud on her thighs. It hardens quickly, he notices, becoming something like stone.

“I thought the victor of the Blood Tournament would be more noble than this,” she asks, her voice a jagged shard. “I thought you of all people would understand what it means to face death fighting.”

Her words pierce his heart as sharply as any sword. He remembers his mother's parting words to him as he left for Pella. “Do what you know is right, Jacob, and we will be proud of you whether you win or not. Act honorably, that's all that we ask.” He knows that she would hang her head in shame to see her son help kill a defenseless girl.

No, this is for them!
he tells himself fiercely. He has already sent back a large portion of his Blood Tournament winnings for his father to buy more land and improve the farm. But he wants to do more for them. He wants to earn more money so that Cleon can build a second kiln and hire an assistant. He wants to send his mother a finely woven red robe—a color they could never afford—and a pair of real gold earrings. And he wants to hire a private tutor for his younger brothers so that they can learn things Jacob didn't. His hands shake slightly as he dips the shovel into the cauldron again.

Cyn strains against her chains. “I'm a high-born princess with powers you can't even imagine. If you help me get out of here, I can get you whatever you want.”

Powers, yes
, Jacob thinks. The uncanny power to heal broken bones and burns, and resist drowning. Just to be tortured all over again. Sometimes the ability to die is the greatest gift of the gods.

“I don't want anything,” he says flatly, pouring the foul mixture on her knees and patting it gently with the shovel.

“Oh, but I think you do,” she says, her voice softening to a caress. “I think you want Katerina. I can make her fall in love with you. Marry you.”

As Jacob leans on his shovel, he has a fleeting image of Kat kissing him in the pond and again in her room at the palace. The feel of her slender yet muscular body against his, the sweet smell of her hair. The idea of having her, after everything that has happened, as his wife, jolts him with something fresh and powerful and also painful: hope.

But just as quickly as it soared with spread wings in his chest, he forces it back into oblivion. Because he wants Kat only if she wants him. And she's already told him no. He doesn't want this hard, bitter princess to interfere with Kat's feelings, doesn't want her to put some dark spell on Kat to be anything but herself. He pictures Kat, in an unblinking trance with a smile that doesn't reach her eyes, promising to marry him and love him always. He shudders.

No, he must forget her and concentrate on his new life and new goal—to become the best Aesarian Lord ever. To find Riel and...

Riel. Bastian told Gideon that Riel had been hiding in the Pellan palace. The girl in front of Jacob, so desperate to escape, has spent her entire life in the Pellan palace.

“I don't want you to make Kat love me,” he says slowly, crouching beside her. “But perhaps you could tell me something I want to know.”

Her eyes become uncertain. “What?” she asks.

Heart beating fast, he whispers, “In Pella, have you ever heard of anyone named Riel, someone protected by a member of the royal family?”

To his surprise, she flinches hard, almost as though she has been slapped. “Yes,” she breathes, and the way she clenches her lips shut immediately afterward tells Jacob that she didn't mean to give way so quickly.

Jacob's heart beats faster. “Tell me,” he urges.

Her mouth hardens. “Only if you swear by the Kindly Ones on all you hold dear, that if I tell you, you will help me get out of here.”

Jacob hesitates. Helping her escape would be treason. And yet...is it really treason if Cyn's information helps the Aesarian Lords capture Riel—a true god?

“I swear by the Kindly Ones...” he says, shuddering as he invokes the euphemism for the Furies, vicious winged goddesses of vengeance on all those who break oaths. For a second, the memory of bright green eyes and light brown hair flashes before his mind, but he forces himself to keep speaking “...and on all I hold dear.”

Cynane relaxes back onto the stretcher. “One evening when I was very young—five or six, I think—my mother asked me to borrow some embroidery thread from the queen. I even remember the color: green. When I went into her chambers, no one was there. At least, that's what I thought at first. Then I saw an open trap door, and a ladder going down into darkness. I heard someone moaning. I remember thinking the queen must have fallen and needed help. So I went down there, telling myself not to be afraid, that I was a royal daughter of Illyria, who is afraid of nothing. That's what my mother always told me, you see. May I have a little water, please.”

On pins and needles to hear the rest, Jacob hastily pours her a cup and holds her head up as she drinks greedily and then goes on. “At the bottom of the ladder was a little chamber with an altar where she kept her snakes. And there, on the floor, lay the queen, though I could barely see her as only one lamp was lit and its wick faltering. ‘Riel! Riel!' the queen cried, writhing on the floor. A large snake was wrapped around her. I thought it was killing her. I called out, ‘Stepmother! Are you all right? Should I try to kill it?'”

She pauses, squeezing her eyes tightly shut.

“Then what?” Jacob urges her, impatiently.

“All at once the queen was digging her nails into my arm so deeply, it bled, and holding a snake in my face, a large angry snake, its mouth open, venom dripping from sharp fangs. ‘If you tell anyone about this, girl,' she said, ‘I will send this snake to kill you in your bed.' I never did tell anyone. Not even my mother. But I have never forgotten.”

Jacob's heart beats fast with excitement. The queen knows where the god Riel is. Perhaps she hides him with her snakes in the altar beneath her bedroom. Did she tell Bastian because they are working together somehow? Or did he find out on his own? Is he planning on returning to find Riel and bring him back to High Lord Gideon? Maybe Jacob can beat him to it. Then he will be the best of the Aesarians and his name will be inscribed on the Wall of Honor in Nekrana.

“I've given you what you wanted,” Cyn says, her dark eyes glittering eerily orange and silver from fire pit flames and moonlight. “Now help me get out of here.”

Green eyes, long hair, soft lips.
Once so dear to him, but they cannot be anymore. His heart has been reforged in the dark by Aesarian fire. The Brotherhood has replaced all. How can he betray it by letting Cyn escape?

Yet he took an oath to her, the unloved princess who fulfilled her end of the bargain, giving him what he needed. How can he send her to a horrible death?

Seeing his hesitation, Cyn hisses, “You swore by the Kindly Ones to let me go free.”

“I did,” Jacob says. He forces himself to lock eyes with her, hating what he is about to say. “But when I joined the Lords, I swore to the Kindly Ones that I would never betray the Brotherhood. So you see, either way I will suffer their wrath.”

Jacob braces himself for Cynane's curses, but she stays as silent as a statue. Then she turns her head and stifles a sob. A bubble of sound comes from her, a plea...a prayer... No, he can't understand. “What was that?” He leans closer to hear her.

“I said,” she whispers, “that
I
am their wrath!”

He feels a tug on his tunic and suddenly his cheek burns with an all-consuming fire. Clutching his face, Jacob howls with pain. It's only then that he realizes what has happened: with her manacled hands, Cynane tugged the pin on his tunic free, then jabbed up at him with the long, iron pin on the back of the smooth green stone.

She laughs triumphantly, and his blood drips down from the pin onto her neck.

He found that stone long ago, next to the stream in the woods, and paid the village blacksmith to make it into a pin for Kat. For years she wore it proudly, but the night before he left for the Blood Tournament she gave it back to him. It would protect him, she said. He hadn't taken it off since, not even after swearing his oath to the Lords.