Empire of Dust (16 page)

Alex runs a hand through his sweaty hair. He just wants to feel muscle against muscle, strength against strength. And it's not happening. Kadmus is letting him win, Alex is sure.

Distrust radiates through Alex like pain. He demands honesty: on the battlefield, in the council chamber, and in the training arena.

“You don't need to coddle me,” Alex says, standing over the general and offering his hand to help him up. “You're not fighting me with all your ability.”

Kadmus pushes his dark hair out of his eyes as a slow grin breaks across his neat, lean face. He lunges at Alex, twisting away from Alex's outstretched hands and gripping him around the waist. His right foot curls around Alex's right leg, and suddenly Alex finds himself hurtling through the air and slamming hard into the ground.

Alex grins. “Better,” he says, rising and dusting the dirt from his tunic. The two circle each other, arms outstretched.

“My mind is elsewhere, my lord,” Kadmus says, feinting a lunge as Alex dodges back. “I've heard your people are upset that you have only one council member—me.”

“Go on.”

The two of them slam into each other as hard as battling bucks and pull quickly apart.

“They say Macedon cannot continue to be run by a sixteen-year-old, no matter how brilliant. Even Philip, an experienced general and king, had a full council.”

“They're right,” Alex says, throwing his arms around Kadmus. His neck smells like leather oil from the stables and citrons rubbed on skin for a pleasant scent. His long dark hair has its own fragrance: smoke, probably from the barracks kitchen fire.

“I need a council,” Alex agrees as they grapple, testing each other's strength and flexibility. Leonidas: dead in the fire. Hagnon: executed. Gordias: in prison. Theopompus: retired in anger to his country estate.

“Experienced people advising me with many voices,” he continues, “and then I can choose what is best for Macedon. As it stands, I am frustrated on all sides—even by my mother.”

Kadmus twists from Alex's grip and dances a couple of steps back. “Your mother?” he asks, raising his left eyebrow high. “That might be a tougher dilemma to solve than pirates or Persians. What has she done now?” He dives for Alex, puts one hand on his shoulder and the other behind his back, and tries to throw him backward. Alex resists him, aware of his tense muscles, sweaty tunic, and beating heart.

But Alex keeps his balance and knocks Kadmus's arms away. “Mother sent the Olympians out on personal business without asking me,” he says, catching his breath. “And insulted my education. She was the one who insisted I study at Mieza. My father says kings should wield swords, not quills, and fire missiles at the enemy, not pretty speeches.”

Kadmus lunges for Alex's left side, which Alex turns to protect, only to find it was a split-second feint. Kadmus now grips his right arm. He twists it, sending Alex to his knees. “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Kadmus asks while simultaneously pulling Alex into a tight headlock.

Alex relaxes completely, knowing his adversary will loosen his grip. Then, he twists with all his weight. One arm grabs Kadmus's right elbow; his other arm grips his back. Throwing his years of built-up strength into the move, Alexander lifts the struggling man and throws him face-first onto the ground. Then he straddles his back and pulls Kadmus's hair so that his face is off the ground.

Now he knows exactly what to do about his mother, the council, and all his problems. “Thank you, my friend,” he says. “You've given me an idea.”

“What's that?” Kadmus asks, spitting sand out of his mouth.

Alexander carefully climbs off Kadmus's back and lets the general stand. “As soon as the Aesarian Lords leave Macedon, my friend, you and I will have a journey to make.”

Chapter Sixteen

CYNANE HEARS THE
thundering of the horses' hooves first, a deep rumble that seems to come from the bowels of the earth. Then she hears the men's shouts and sees their torches advancing toward her. A cloud slides away from the three-quarter moon, and its silver-white light falls on the horns of their helmets, causing them to glow.

They cannot see her, curled up atop a tall, leafy tree. Nor can they see her tracks at night. But even if they don't find her tonight, if she stays in this tree, she is sure to fall from its branches from either exhaustion or starvation. She needs to get as far as she can before the sun comes up.

When the Aesarian Lords have dwindled into the distance, Cyn slowly climbs down. Every bone in her body aches. Every muscle is feeble. She realizes she must look like a wraith. A skeleton with matted hair. Her left shoulder and arm throb with pain where the bowlegged Scythian Lord tattooed a magical design of a stag deep into her skin with needles and lamp soot—to make her a real Amazon, he said. Her body emanates a fusty smell like a wool cloak left too long in a trunk. It's not the healthy sweat of fighting but the mustiness of going too long unwashed and unmoving.

The fact that Cyn is not hungry at all worries her. It's as if her body is giving up and food has no place inside it anymore. She needs to find safety, and soon.

She forces herself to put one foot in front of the other. It's dangerous to stick to the road, but she is too weak to climb over fallen trunks and push her way through bushes in the safety of the forest. And it's easier to walk on the road since she is barefoot. The best protection she has is the hope that she will hear the Lords' horses in enough time to duck into the woods.

The moon slides slowly across the arc of the sky, and Cyn wonders how many miles she has walked. Maybe not that many since she's going so slowly. Exhaustion hangs just as heavy as the metal chains Jacob melted from her. It had to have been Jacob who did it. If it had been her Smoke Blood, she would have done it sooner. And the smoke man who visited her in the cell—in her dreams—said he could not break shackles. Then again, if she has begun believing her dreams are real, can her own mind be trusted to decipher the truth?

Fingers of golden-pink light streak across the purple sky as if writing her death sentence. Morning. She has found no safe haven, and the Lords will be back soon. In fact...she hears the low rumble of horses' hooves coming toward her, growing louder, ever louder. She looks for a tree to climb, but she's moved too quickly and now dizziness slams down on her.

The world spins. Her knees collapse, hitting the rock-hard dirt, and they splay, sending her face forward. She puts out her hands to prevent her face from smacking the ground, but her legs are not as cooperative. They lie there, like dead things. Cursing them, she tries to drag herself to the nearest bushes, but her arms, too, have lost their last vestige of strength.

From the sound of the hooves, she knows a large troop of soldiers approaches. The Aesarian Lords have found her. They will take her back to the fortress, back to that hideous embalming. She won't allow it. She'll die first. Perhaps she can make them so mad they will kill her here, cleanly, in the clear rising dawn, not a bad death. Suddenly, the noise halts, and she doesn't know if they have left or have dismounted. She cannot see them clearly because gold sparks dance and pop before her eyes and dizziness holds her in its swaying grip.

“Princess Cynane!” She hears a voice call her name, sounding very far away. An enormous bulk surges toward her like a furious bear and as he gets closer, she makes out that it is a man. But friend or foe? He isn't wearing a helmet—horned or otherwise—so she can't be sure. But she was never one to take chances.

He bends over her and she punches him in the face. But her fist doesn't connect with flesh, only air. As he picks her up in strong arms, she tries to scratch him, kick him, bite him, but then realizes that she only fights in her mind. Her hands are flopping uselessly in the air, like two beached fish. She is still powerless. She is weak.

She is thrown on a horse, and before she can fall off the other side, her captor leaps up behind her, his huge muscular bulk preventing her from sliding.

With tremendous effort, she raises her head, and says, “May all three heads of Cerberus bite off your balls, you turd-eating, goat-humping sonofabitch.” Then she slips into a safe, black place without pain, and is glad.

Her mother, Audata, is waiting for her there, washing her burning forehead with cool mint water, telling her to be strong.

“Mother!” Cyn calls out. But when the woman opens her mouth, Audata doesn't sound like Audata. Almost ten years after her death, her mother's sharp features have faded in her memory like wax under water, but her mellifluous voice remains clear, like an insect preserved in amber. The voice coming from her mother now is deeper. More masculine.

“Remember your legacy,” Audata/not-Audata says. “You are a princess of Illyria.”

Finally, Cyn places the voice. It's the same as the one that spoke so often to her in captivity. Yes! It is back. She is not alone, captured again by the Aesarian Lords. This powerful spirit will protect her. Hope rekindles. This is—

Audata places a cool hand on the top of Cyn's head, and agony engulfs her, drowning her hope in a jagged embrace. Just when she thinks she will die from the torment, she feels the first whispers of relief. The intensity fades. She looks up at her mother, who smiles down at her and says, with the ghostly old man's voice, “Sleep now, child.”

* * *

Cyn wakes in her bedroom at the palace. Late-afternoon sun streams through the slatted shutters, making bars of golden light on the floor. She had been swept into a complex adventure by Morpheus himself, it seems. Her mother, the Lords, the disembodied voice, the melted chains—all explained by a dream.

She stretches, and as she does her left shoulder begins to ache and an earthy, pungent odor of healing herbs rises from a carefully wound bandage of fine linen strips. Her eyes fly open and she pulls off the bandage. There, beneath a thick smear of salve, is an intricate pattern of a Scythian stag with wild curling horns. Her time as a prisoner with the Aesarian Lords thunders back to her. No dream, then.

Carefully, she pulls back the sheets and examines her arms and legs. She is covered with insect bites, but someone has washed her and put her in a clean shift. Even as she looks at them, she can see her bruises fading. Returning health and strength pulse through her veins.

She doesn't understand. How can she
not
have Smoke Blood? But the man of smoke who'd appeared to her had said she did not. And the Aesarian Lords, too, proclaimed that whatever protected her was an enchantment—not something that came from Cyn herself but from something
other
. What, then, is she?

The question consumes her, driving away every ache and pain and shard of self-pity. Cynane needs to know. She cannot rest until she finds the answer.

As she starts to slide out of bed, there's a knock at her door, and a moment later Alex enters. His face lights up when he sees her, as if he's truly happy to have her back. They've never been close. She assumed, during her endless days and nights in Aesarian captivity, he would be glad she was gone. But now...

“Cyn, I can't tell you how happy I am you are safe,” he says, sitting on her bed and—great Zeus—he's actually hugging her. Her nose is buried in his pale gold hair, which smells of wind and grass and sunshine. Have they ever embraced before? She can't remember. He pulls away and looks at her, the sparkle in his eyes rapidly dulling. “What happened?” he asks, his voice as flat and hard as an anvil. “You're so thin. And what did they do to your arm?”

Haltingly, she tells him of her capture in the library and of her imprisonment and daily torture sessions in the fortress. She does not tell him about the extent of the torture, her miraculous healings, and the smoke man who visited her in the tower room. Alex's eyes grow wide when she embellishes her escape: she wrapped her chains around the guard's neck, strangled him, and took the keys off his belt. With each word, Alex seems to settle into himself more, growing hard and bright and fierce.

She finishes by adding the part she knows will matter most to Alexander: what she overheard the Lords saying about Supreme Lord Gulzar and his regiment of troops headed their way bringing not reparations money, but another, much stronger attack.

Alex nods, stands, and says, his voice tight with anger, “This changes everything. I had plans to bring Kadmus with me to...well, that doesn't matter just now. The Aesarian Lords lied to us in our treaty negotiations. I asked them repeatedly if they had you. I offered them a huge ransom. But they swore they did not have you. This means our treaty is null and void. And now they're awaiting reinforcements all the way from Nekrana? This means...”

He stands taller, straighter, and his strange-colored eyes burn with a preternatural fury.

“War.”

He turns on his heel and storms from her room.

War.
Cyn inhales her first true feeling of strength since her capture. She only hopes she has enough time to recuperate so she can join the battle. Surely Alex won't refuse her this time. She imagines cracking the skulls and slicing off the limbs of the men who tortured her. The tall Ethiopian with the soothing voice who oversaw her torment. The little laughing Scythian who stuck needles and hot soot in her arm. The enormous Celt with the blond braids who smashed her bones with an iron bar.

But right now Cyn has another task at hand. She wraps a robe around herself and slips into sandals. Silently she pads through the familiar corridors, encountering only Olympias's personal laundress, her head almost obscured by a pile of neatly folded towels. In the far corner of the residential section of the palace, she climbs the winding staircase and opens the door to the top tower room. Her mother's room.

It's dark in here, and musty. She flings open the window shutters, letting light and air into the circular room. Thick linen sheets drape the furniture. She plucks off the sheets covering the pigeonholes lining one wall and starts unrolling scrolls. They were part of Audata's dowry from Illyria, and her mother prized them above all her possessions.

Cynane unrolls maps of Illyria, histories of Illyria, drawings of Illyria. She's never been there, but her mother used to describe the seawater clear as rain, the round stone huts in mountain villages, the ancient songs—with the clapping of hands and the stomping of feet—and the spirited line dances of the people.

Audata would have become queen of Dardania—a kingdom within the Illyrian tribal lands—if she hadn't married Philip. When she did, her father made his grandson, Amyntas, his new heir. Cyn knows little of him, only that he is seventeen and somehow unfit to rule. And that if he died,
she
would become queen.

Queen. In her own right.

Not as a broodmare consort sitting decoratively on a small throne next to a husband with all the power on a big one. She looks up from the dusty scrolls, wondering what it would be like to rule a country. Lead armies to battle. Make life-or-death decisions. Gaze out over a sea of faces alight with fear and respect, envy and loyalty.

But right now she needs to keep looking for anything about the smoke man. She unrolls dozens more scrolls, sneezing and coughing as dust flies up her nose and tickles the back of her throat. Finally, Cyn finds a reference to a great magician whose name has been lost to time; one who could walk inside people's dreams. A man whose physical body dissolved slowly, fading day by day, until he was visible only as smoke.

Her heart skips a beat, then races with excitement. Goose bumps form along her arms. Yes, this is it! This is the spirit who visited her in the tower room of the fortress, who said he put a powerful protective spell on her the day her mother died. She didn't hallucinate it. It was real. The smoke spirit—

Cyn is so wrapped in thought she doesn't notice the door opening. When she sees movement out of the corner of her eye, she turns around to face a gliding, white-veiled figure. For an instant, she wonders if it is a ghost, her mother's ghost. When the figure raises its veil, she knows it's an apparition. The face is as white as an unpainted statue. Immediately, she reaches for the dagger she always keeps strapped to her thigh before she remembers that it's not there.

The apparition laughs, a tinkling, silvery little sound. A sound that makes Cyn grit her teeth. “Surely you're not thinking of stabbing your beloved stepmother?” it asks.

Olympias.
Cyn looks at her uncomprehendingly. Her face is sunken, her eyes huge, and she's swimming in an ocean of blue robes instead of the sleeveless, tightly belted gowns she usually wears. The veil she has tossed back from her snow-white face does little to hide thin, stringy hair still damp from a bath. Why would such a vain woman leave her chambers looking like this? And then Cyn knows. Her laundress must have told Olympias she had seen Cyn in the hall. And Olympias, without waiting to do her makeup or fix her hair, threw on a veil and raced after her.

“By the gods, I thought you were a ghost,” Cyn says rising. “Are you? What happened to you? You look horrible.”

“I could ask you the same thing,” Olympias says smoothly, and Cyn is annoyed by the queen's calm demeanor. “Have
you
looked in a mirror yet? When my guards brought you back, you were not even fit for the Augean stables. If you were an animal, I would have had you put down.”

She sighs, a condescending sound that makes Cyn bristle. “I can only imagine how difficult it will be for Philip to arrange your marriage. He's in negotiations this moment, you know. But between your looks, your unfeminine tastes, and your low-ranking status...” The queen wrinkles her nose. “Let's just say it's been difficult.”