The Immortal Prince (21 page)

“Good afternoon, gentlemen. Sorry I'm late.”

“You have no need to apologise to us, my lady,” Warlock informed her gravely.

“Oh…I don't know,” Cayal disagreed. “I kind of like the idea myself.”

“You would,” the canine rumbled, retreating to the back of his cell.

Cayal turned his attention to Arkady. “So, what
is
your excuse for being late, then?”

She frowned at his impudence. “Don't push your luck.”

“I don't really care, anyway.” Cayal seemed distracted. “But I've been thinking.”

“How nice for you.”

“I think we should trade.”

“Trade for what, exactly?”

“The rest of my story, in return for a bit of fresh air. I'm going crazy locked up in here.”

“I thought that was the whole point of your claim to be immortal, Cayal? To prove you're crazy?”

He shrugged. “That's your idea, not mine. I want out of here. Even if only for a few hours a day. Tides! Even the gemang wants out of here. You arrange it for us, and I'll tell you anything you want to know.”

It seemed an unlikely offer, but she wasn't sure it was one she could refuse. It was hard to avoid the feeling this man was manipulating her. “Will you tell me who sent you here? Who you work for?”

“I'm a Tide Lord,” he reminded her. “I don't work for anybody.”

Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Very selfless of you to include Warlock in your request for fresh air and exercise.”

“Maybe I'm planning to escape and I need the gemang to help.”

“If you want to enlist my help to escape, suzerain,” Warlock remarked from the cell across the way, “not calling me gemang would be a good start.”

Arkady couldn't help but smile. “Your magically created race of adoring slaves really isn't performing to specifications, is it?”

“Wait 'til the Tide turns,” Cayal suggested. “Then you'll see.”

“I'm breathless with anticipation,” she assured him. “Tell me about Diala. In the Tarot she is the High Priestess.”

“Arryl was High Priestess.”

“What was Diala then?”

Cayal smiled sourly. “We used to call her the Minion Maker.”

“The
what
?”

“The Minion Maker,” he repeated. “That's what she did, Arkady. Diala sought out likely minions for the Tide Lords and then trapped them into an eternity of servitude.”

Arkady's brow furrowed. “Minions? I don't understand.”

He stared at her for a moment and then smiled. “You don't seriously think every one of those names in your pathetic Tarot was actually a Tide Lord, do you? How many cards have you got there? Twenty or more? No world could survive that many jaded lunatics looking for ways to entertain themselves.”

“Who are they then, if they're not immortal?”

“Oh, they're immortal,” he assured her. “They just can't manipulate the Tide very well. Mastery over the Tide is a skill only a few of us have.”

“You mean some of them have no magical power.”

“Some power. Not a lot. And it varies.”

“Will you tell me about them?”

“Will you speak to the Warden about us getting out of here for a bit each day?”

“That depends on how cooperative you are.”

Cayal smiled. “Then pull up a chair, Arkady. As I told you before, it's a very long story.”

Where were we? That's right—freezing to death in the meat locker at Dun Cinczi. The door had opened…

Squinting in the painfully bright light, I really began to worry when I realised the silhouette in the doorway was my sister, Planice, the Queen of Kordana.

You may wonder why I wasn't sighing with relief, thinking rescue was at hand, given I was the queen's brother. Planice was a good fifteen years older than me. We'd never been close. I think her resentment of me was because it was
my
birth that had finally killed our mother. She was only fifteen when our mother died and along with her title, Planice had inherited a clutch of nine siblings that included a newborn babe needing care and attention. As she lacked any real maternal instinct, I'd been a nuisance she was forced to deal with most of her life. And it wasn't as if I'd been a particularly easy child. In fact, my only real use had proved to be as a convenient groom for the daughter of a much-needed ally, once I'd grown.

Until now, that is. Until I'd unwittingly given her the excuse she was looking for to be rid of me, something that only just occurred to me as I warily stepped toward her.

“Planice…thank the Tides you've come…”

She responded by backhanding me, her royal signet tearing the frozen skin from my cheek. The blood was warm on my face as I fell backwards against the hanging carcasses, hurt more by her reaction to my plight than her blow.

“Idiot!”

I staggered to my feet, only just starting to appreciate the trouble I was in. It wasn't that I didn't understand the consequences of killing a man. And it wasn't as if I expected no cost for my actions. But to anger Thraxis was one thing. To annoy the Queen of Kordana was another thing entirely.

“I can explain…”

“You killed Thraxis's only son over some woman you've never laid
eyes
on before?” she screeched, almost as angry as Thraxis himself. “Two days before you're to marry the daughter of one of our most tenuous allies? Do you have any idea what you've
done
?”

“It was an accident…”

“I ought to hang you, you dangerous little fool!” she shouted, her face red with fury.

I
ought
to hang you, she said, giving me a glimmer of hope. Given the mood she was in, I'd been expecting her to say: I'm
going
to hang you.

“So why don't you?” I asked, dabbing at my bloody cheek.

“Because Thraxis is demanding it,” she informed me. “And I can't afford to have any dun lord in my kingdom telling me who I should and shouldn't kill.”

“But Planice…”

“Shut up, Cayal, I'm not interested in anything you have to say. Much as it grieves me, you'll get to live.” Before my relief at this reprieve had time to register, she added coldly, “But only because I'm making a point here, not because I care one scrap about you. And even if it
does
suit me to let you go on breathing, nothing says I have to put up with you at my hearth. You are banished, Cayal of Lakesh,” she decreed, assuming a formal air. “You may take the clothes on your back and a weapon to defend yourself and leave the borders of Kordana by sunset tomorrow. If you are still within my borders by then, or if you ever attempt to return, you will be hunted down, like the vermin you are, and killed without mercy. Do you understand?”

I nodded, too surprised by her decree to think about what it meant. I don't think, at that moment, I understood the emotional impact of exile. I just knew it meant I'd keep on breathing. That was something to be grateful for.

Planice stood back from the door. “Let him go.”

“What about Gabriella?” I asked.

Between my bouts of guilt and remorse over Orin, I'd spent much of the past three days clinging to the image of Gabriella. We used to joke about how life would be so much easier if I wasn't a prince, if the hopes and ambitions of Gabriella's father didn't rest so firmly on her shoulders. Always the optimist in those days, even after my sentence had been pronounced, I still dared to hope. Perhaps this would be our chance.

Perhaps, out of this nightmare, something good might happen.

Gabriella loved me, after all. I never doubted that for a moment. With her by my side, I had no fear of anything.

Planice seemed less sure of my fiancée's undying devotion. She even smiled at my naivety. “Even if she'd still have you after this fiasco, do you really think I'd still let the wedding go ahead?”

Her scorn worried me. “Don't you think that should be Gabriella's decision?”

Planice stared at me for a moment, as if debating something, and then she shrugged and stepped back from the door. “Fine. Ask her. Ask your beloved if she's willing to go into exile with you and become a pauper's wife.”

I emerged into the sunlight blinking, the snow's reflection hurting my eyes, which had grown used to the darkness of the meat store. Everyone had gathered in the dun's yard. Thraxis was there, glowering angrily. Several of my brothers were standing beside the dun lord; the two brothers who had arrived in Dun Cinczi were there, too, in addition to several others who must have accompanied Planice from Lakesh. They looked ready to hold Thraxis back if the need arose, although there was nothing sympathetic toward me in their demeanour.

And Gabriella was there, her face pale. I stepped toward her.

She spat on the ground in front of me.

“Gabriella?”

Her dark, devastating eyes blazed angrily. “Don't come any closer, you unfaithful cur!”

“What?”

“Was the child yours?”

I stared at her in confusion. “Child? What child?”

“She means the pregnant woman you claim you didn't know that you killed your best friend to defend,” Planice said behind me.

I glanced over my shoulder at my sister, as it dawned on me that somewhere between the young couple seeking shelter in Thraxis's hall a few nights ago and now, the child the pregnant young woman was carrying had apparently become mine.

“No!” I protested. “It wasn't like that…”

“I can't believe you had to gall to arrange for your whore to follow you to Lakesh for our wedding,” Gabriella spat. There was nothing in her eyes but hatred, nothing in her words but scorn.

“I swear on the Tide Star, Gabriella, I never saw her before—”

“So you killed the heir of Dun Cinczi over a perfect stranger?”

I realise now how it must have sounded, but what can you do when the truth is so unbelievable?

Gabriella's scorn was acidic. “How noble of you, Prince Cayal. Is this something you do often? Were you planning to tell me of your hobby of rescuing damsels in distress
after
the wedding?”

“Gabriella…”

“She doesn't want you anymore, Cayal,” Planice pointed out, taking more than a small degree of pleasure from my pain. I wasn't surprised. She'd set out to deliberately hurt me often enough when I was a small child for me to have no doubts on that score.

“Shut up, Planice.” I had no reason, any longer, to keep the peace with my sister. And at that moment, I couldn't have cared less what she thought.

I turned to look at Gabriella, unable to comprehend how easily she was abandoning me. I was young and naive enough to think love could conquer anything. In truth, even then, as she made a mockery of every whispered declaration of our undying devotion to each other, a part of me was looking for a sign, looking for some secret indication that this was an act put on for the benefit of our large audience.

If there was a sign, it was too subtle for me to find.

“Go, Cayal,” Planice advised behind me. “Before I change my mind.”

As if to emphasise the queen's rejection, Gabriella turned her back on me and walked the short distance to where Orin's mother stood off to the left with the other women of the dun, their eyes swollen and bloodshot from crying. A sea of faces surrounded me, all full of accusation, but the only one that still stands out clearly in my mind—after all this time—is Gabriella's.

There was no word for my hurt, no scale large enough to measure it, no vessel great enough to contain it.

One of my brothers drawing his sword prompted me to move. Blindly, numbly, I turned toward the gate. The crowd parted for me, leaving a corridor of muddy, trampled sludge pointing to the snow-bound countryside beyond the dun. I walked without thinking, my pain a gaping wound that should have left bloodstains on the snow, it felt so real. As I reached the open gates, a woman began to keen, the cry soon taken up by the other women of Dun Cinczi.

To the wail of unrelenting grief, my own as much as of the women of the dun, I stepped out onto the rutted road and turned to face the accusing audience who were watching my disgrace, several of them with a degree of malicious satisfaction. Of the young woman for whom I'd thrown away my entire life, there was no sign.

But
she
was there, witnessing my banishment with no more emotion than someone watching an ill-behaved dog being locked out of the hall on a stormy night.

Gabriella. My beautiful, magnificent, cruel Gabriella.

“Set foot in Kordana again,” Planice called after me, “and you'll be sorry, Cayal.”

“You're the one who's going to be sorry,” I shouted back. And then I added thoughtlessly, “Curse your wretched kingdom, Planice, and everyone in it!”

I said the words to Planice, but it was Gabriella I couldn't tear my eyes from.

Gabriella for whom I meant the curse.

She didn't seem to care. Spitting contemptuously into the mud again, Gabriella turned her back on me once more and put her arms around Orin's grieving mother.

It wasn't until later—after Tryan had laid waste to Kordana—that I would remember my unthinking curse and wonder if I wasn't to blame, after all.

 

I'll spare you the details of the next few months after I was thrown out of Kordana. Other than my complete and utter humiliation, not much happened, really. I was ill equipped for a life on the road. I'd no skills to speak of, other than my ability to hold a weapon competently and hunt well enough to keep myself fed, but those were skills owned by every man in Kordana and any of the score of nameless kingdoms that populated the land of my birth eight thousand years ago. Cayal, the Exiled Prince, had nothing with which he could barter. I had no trade or craft to fall back on, no money to speak of and no notion of how one went about earning a living.

After traipsing alone and friendless with my heart ripped to shreds by Gabriella's betrayal, across first Kordana and then north through Senestra, I grew weary of the continent of my birth, and the rumours that followed me. Rumours that lingered like a clinging fog and refused to go away. I heard in Harkendown that Gabriella was betrothed again—less than three months after I was banished—to Daryen, one of my older brothers. I was shattered by the news.

Love had little to do with marriage in Kordana. I understood that. The alliance my wedding to Gabriella would have brought was still important to Planice, I appreciated that, too. I tried to tell myself I couldn't have cared less. She was my past. She was my lesson hard learned. A memory turned sour by bitter reality.

I fled north, thinking distance would dull the pain.

 

It took me eight months to reach Magreth.

In hindsight, I suspect my journey northwest was prompted by the desire for warmth as much as any real yearning to visit the fabled country. In Magreth, at least sleeping outdoors didn't mean risking frostbite.

The truth was I was running away, trying to find somewhere my pain might be eased, but it's easier and so much more “manly” to blame the weather.

Survival demanded I move on, although my heart wasn't listening. No matter how much I told myself otherwise, I still missed Gabriella like an amputated limb. News of her betrothal simply drove home how badly I wanted my life back. I was hungry and desperate enough by then that I didn't care if Planice hated me. I just wanted to go home and the only way I could do that was to somehow redeem myself in my queen's eyes.

In my heart, I didn't accept Gabriella no longer loved me. I had turned her rejection of me into something far more noble and selfless. By then, I'd managed to convince myself she'd spoken so cruelly to protect my sister's holdings from her father's wrath. In my lovesick blindness, I began to imagine there was some hope for us.
Perhaps,
I lay awake at night telling myself,
if I can find a way to restore my reputation in Planice's eyes, I will be allowed home.

I'm sure a part of me realised I was clutching at straws. But desperation can blind a man better than a hot poker, which might have been less painful.

But my hopefulness meant I had begun to look for something noble to do; some great act of heroism to prove my worth to my heartless sister and my poor, misguided Gabriella.

Tides, what a naive fool I was in those days.

Such a quest wasn't easy to find. Delusion, misery and desperation brought me to Magreth. Being a hero without a cause is a depressing state of affairs. Magreth, on the other hand, was the home of the Eternal Flame. The High Priestess of the Tide resided there. Perhaps there was some task I could undertake for her. Perhaps the High Priestess of the Tide needed the services of a well-intentioned, albeit disenfranchised, prince.

I'm not sure who put the notion in my head to go to Magreth, or where I got the idea such a quest were even possible, but with nothing better to do with my time, it seemed as good a plan as any.

I managed to find a berth on an oared sailing galley making the perilous voyage across the Jade Ocean. As manning an oar required brute strength rather than any particular skill, I was able to play down my lack of experience with the ship's master and convince the man I could do the job. An hour out of port, my shoulders burning from the unaccustomed exercise, I was already regretting my decision. Two days later, so sick I could barely stand, my hands rubbed raw by the oars, I was ready to throw myself overboard.