54
Gileon, a Western guard Joslyn had promoted to shift captain some months earlier, was the one who let Joslyn into Tasia’s chambers. At first, the barricade comforted Joslyn – the tribesmen had never breached the inner keep, but out of an abundance of caution, Joslyn assumed, her guards had barricaded Tasia inside anyway. The expression on Gileon’s face, though, matched by the expressions of the three other guards behind the makeshift barricade, sent Joslyn’s heart into her throat.
“What happened?” she asked Gileon.
The man only pressed his lips into a grim line and shook his head. He gestured towards the door at the far end of the sitting room, the one that led into Tasia’s bedchamber, and said simply, “The ones in there can probably explain it better than I can, Commander.”
Joslyn rushed towards the bedchamber door, light-headed with fear. What would she find when she pushed that door open?
Four faces looked up as Joslyn entered the room – a Wise Man and a Brother, both hovering over a pale figure in the bed, and Akella and Linna, standing by the window with their heads bent together. Linna’s face was streaked with tears; the other three faces were pulled tight as drum skins.
Joslyn didn’t care that their relationship was supposed to be a secret, or that she was supposed to be the ever-stoic Commander of the Palace Guard. She ran to Tasia’s bedside, falling to her knees as she clasped Tasia’s hand in both of hers.
The hand was cool but not cold. Joslyn looked up, into the faces of the Brother and the Wise Man. The Wise Man’s smock was painted red with blood.
“Is she…?”
The Wise Man shook his head. “No, Commander.” He gestured at the Brother. “Brother Anthon reached her in time.” He hesitated. “The child, however, was beyond even his skills.”
The Wise Man’s eyes moved past Joslyn, and she glanced behind her. The wash basin had been removed from its stand, and in its place was a small bundle of cloth. Joslyn considered walking to it, opening the bundle, but she decided she didn’t want to look at what was inside.
“What happened?”
“You put your trust in bloody sorcerers is what happened,” said a voice from the other side of the room.
Akella. The pirate captain’s explanation was not the one Joslyn wanted to hear right now. She kept her eyes on Tasia’s face, which was ghostly pale from what had to be blood loss, and said as calmly as she could, “Linna, what happened?”
“It’s… Commander, it’s all –” The girl’s voice broke, hitching into a strangled sob. “It’s all my fault, Commander. I let him… he tricked me, and I should’ve – and now Ammanta’s dead, and – and it’s all my fault.”
Ammanta was dead?
Joslyn was about to tell Linna to pull herself together and say something that actually made sense, but to her surprise, the Brother across from her began to speak.
“Commander, it appears that Master Brother Rennus, along with roughly half of the other Brothers, have been in league with the tribesmen and likely the Kingdom of Persopos for sometime,” the Brother said. “Perhaps an hour after you and General Alric took your brigades from the city, the Brotherhood turned on the Empire, attacking soldiers and throwing openthe city gates to the enemy. Your apprentice believes Brother Rennus skinwalked into the body of Ammanta in an attempt to murder the Empress, which seems…” The Brother, who couldn’t have been older than thirty, swallowed nervously. His eyes drifted down to the unconscious Tasia as he cleared his throat. “Which seems to be the most likely explanation for how this happened.”
“But your little seagull figured it out,” Akella said. “By Preyla’s grace, we got back here just as the Fesulian – well, the sorcerer inside the Fesulian – barricaded himself in here with her Highness.”
Joslyn’s nostrils flared. Even now, with Tasia coming within inches of death, the blasted pirate couldn’t stop herself from injecting a hefty dose of sarcasm into her Highness.
Akella glanced at Linna, but the girl had her face in her hands and shook with silent sobs, clearly unable to speak. “Your apprentice killed your Fesulian before your Fesulian could kill your Empress. That’s the good news. And judging by the fact that you’re here, and that the soldiers have been cheering for the past ten minutes, and that you’re covered in gory mess, I’m going to guess that the additional good news is that you managed to survive the ambush the sorcerer set for you and put down the assault inside the castle before our blue-painted friends breached the inner keep?”
Joslyn gave a single nod.
“Very well.” Akella uncrossed her arms so that she could point out the window that she and Linna stood beside. “Has anyone told you about the bad news, though?”
Joslyn’s eyes followed Akella’s forefinger out the window. There, with the morning sun casting long shadows along the field, was an entire encampment of mountain men. She guessed there had to be at least ten or fifteen thousand of them.
And spaced throughout the field were monstrous trebuchets, trebuchets far larger than the one she’d destroyed on the stone bridge.
That was when she understood. The ambush she’d survived, the ambush Alric probably faced, the assault on Pellon and its castle from the west was all just the first wave. Just the distraction while this second, much larger force finished moving itself into place.
Pellon and its castle were doomed.
“Commander?” Linna said, voice small. “I think we should get the Empress out of here as soon as it’s safe to move her. Akella and I… we have a way.”
#
Tasia refused to flee. There was nothing Joslyn, Linna, or Akella could say to talk her into it. And, to make matters worse, she insisted upon parleying with Brother Rennus herself.
“He’s nearly succeeded in killing you twice now,” Joslyn argued.
Thanks to the tireless ministrations of Brother Anthon and the surgeon, Wise Man Jesker, throughout the course of the day, Tasia walked to her wardrobe with only the slightest trace of a limp. Tasia winced when she reached up to take one of her riding tunics from its hanger within the wardrobe, but other than that, there was no sign that she’d received a stab wound hours earlier that could have easily taken her life.
“Yes. And he’s failed twice, too,” Tasia said. She held the tunic out towards Joslyn. “Will you be a dear and help me into this? It still hurts to lift my arms.”
Joslyn’s eyes drifted to the long line of crisscrossing black stitches Jesker had sewn across Tasia’s abdomen. To save Anthon’s energy, the Wise Man and Brother explained, Anthon typically healed the hidden, internal wounds, while his Wise Man partner focused on the external. The stitches would stay for another day or two, until Anthon had a chance to recharge his abilities following the effort of saving the Empress’s life. Then he would finish the healing by knitting back together Tasia’s skin and the layer of muscles closest to the surface, after which stitches would no longer be necessary.
It was hard to trust Anthon, but Joslyn reasoned that he’d had plenty of opportunity to kill Tasia when he’d come to heal her. The fact that he hadn’t suggested he truly was one of the Brothers who had remained loyal to the Empire.
“Stop staring,” said Tasia. “You’re making me self-conscious.” She waved the tunic at Joslyn again and, reluctantly, Joslyn took it from her.
“Send me to parley instead. I’ll talk with the worm. Maybe I can manage to kill him while I’m there.” Joslyn put the tunic over Tasia’s head, then guided one arm at a time through the sleeves.
Tasia sucked her teeth. “At which point whatever invisible Brothers or tribesmen he’s brought with him would simply kill you.” She hobbled to the bed and perched on its edge, face filling with pain as she pulled on her thick brown breeches. Joslyn felt the pain it cost Tasia as though it were her own. “It has to be me, Joslyn. You know that as well as I do. I have to prove to Rennus that I’m still standing, but I also have to prove to the soldiers that I’m still standing, still whole.”
Are you whole, though? Joslyn wondered silently. She thought of the bundle that had been wrapped up on top of the wash basin stand, the bundle that Wise Man Jesker had discreetly taken away after Tasia had been given a chance to unwrap it and weep over it. But then Tasia had set the bundle down, dried her eyes, and studied the scene outside her window.
The note that came later hadn’t been addressed to Tasia but to Joslyn, which suggested, Joslyn hoped, that Rennus assumed he’d succeeded in eliminating the Empress.
Commander,the note read,
You are surrounded and outnumbered.Surrender yourself now, and we will deliver you to His Glorious Lordship and Majesty the Deathless King without slaughtering what remains of your pitiful army. Put up a fight, and we will destroy you to the last man.
Outside the window, the sun was setting over the encampment of tribesmen. Shadows that had stretched towards the castle walls in the morning now stretched away from them, reaching for the mountains in the distance. Somewhere far to the east of those mountains, so far east that the Empire’s cartographers were no longer precisely sure where it should be placed, was the Kingdom of Persopos. And there, the puppet master who had pulled the strings of the Cult’s Coup lay in wait.
Joslyn pictured him now, the frail-looking old man who haunted her dreams, imagined him laughing silently at her as he prepared for the curtain to rise above the final scene of his grand play.
His Glorious Lordship and Majesty the Deathless King.
Joslyn gritted her teeth. Get her close enough and they would see just how “deathless” he truly was.
“Besides,” Tasia said, grunting as she finished the task of putting on her breeches without asking for help, “you still get to go see Rennus, you just don’t get to talk to him. I’m better at talking than you are.”
“I’ll talk to him with my sword,” Joslyn growled.
Tasia rolled her eyes. “Have you ever heard of the common tongue saying, ‘when all you have is a blacksmith’s hammer, everything looks like a horseshoe’?”
“No.”
“The point is, I’m sure you will have a chance to use your sword later,” said Tasia. “For now, parleying buys us time to shore up our defenses. Has Alric returned yet?”
“No.”
Joslyn didn’t think Alric was going to return, but Tasia wasn’t going to listen to that. Tasia wouldn’t listen to anything right now; she had set her jaw in that stubborn way she did when she wasn’t going to be talked out of something. She’d declared that Castle Pellon would stand against the tribesmen, and their foes would break upon its walls like water against rock, and Tasia was determined to bend reality to make it fit that wish, regardless of how reality felt about being bent.
Joslyn sincerely doubted that the tribesmen would break upon anything. Perhaps parleying with Brother Rennus would convince her of that.
“Could you get my crown?” Tasia asked. “It’s at the back of the wardrobe, at the top.”
Obediently, Joslyn groped about on the top shelf of the wardrobe until her fingers found the black lacquered box that contained the simple steel crown with the black onyx in the front Tasia had brought with them from Port Lorsin. She handed it to Tasia.
Tasia took the crown from the box and, with another small wince of pain, reached up to settle it atop her freshly combed and braided blonde-red hair. She looked – and Joslyn was certain the resemblance was intentional – very much like a famous portrait of the Empress Adela as she set out upon a fox hunt.
Tasia examined herself in the mirror, which had been cracked diagonally during the fight with Ammanta, and nodded with satisfaction at her fragmented image.
“Alright. I’m ready.”