Queen's Hunt (River of Souls 2)

“—if we hadn’t watched—”

One of the Osterling guards hauled Valara up from the floor and pinned her against the wall. The other flung a bucketful of water over her. She coughed and sputtered and cursed.

“Good enough,” the first guard said. He drew a knife and laid it against Valara’s throat. “I’ll stay with her. You go for the governor. He said to report anything.”

Valara struggled to speak. Not Joannis, she wanted to cry. Tell Joannis and you tell Khandarr. It was Khandarr she feared. Khandarr would rob her of the emerald and turn its magic against Morennioù. She knew it.

She had to summon the magic again. She had to call the spells laid down in the prison stones. It might give her a chance to escape. Ei rûf ane gôtter …

… ei rûf ane Lir unde Toc unde strôm unde mir.

The words rang in her skull like the great bells of the Morennioù castle. An unknown signature overwhelmed hers, and the scent of magic rolled through the air. A brilliant light exploded in the cell. Valara’s sight blurred into white and then shadows. Magic drenched her, and her skin burned. Pure magic—she would have one taste, and then it would consume her.

… a river of shadows. An inhuman voice. A burst of light. Nothingness …

She knew nothing except darkness at first. Moments trickled away, unnumbered. Then a change to the blankness surrounding her. It was like emerging from a deathlike sleep. Or even death itself, she thought. Perhaps a newly reborn soul had one moment of awareness such as this before the knowledge of all previous lives faded into nothing.

More slowly she became aware of her surroundings. She lay stretched out on a hard stone floor. Her skin felt hot and sensitive, as though she’d handled fire, and the wooden ring on her finger buzzed with magic. Groaning, she levered herself to sitting. Someone had hung a lantern on the cell wall. She blinked to clear her vision.

And sucked in a breath of surprise.

Both guards lay motionless, one inside the cell and one in the corridor. The open door swung on its hinges, creaking. The rest of the prison lay in deep and unnatural silence.

Valara released a shaky breath. What had happened back there? She had called on the magic current. It came and—

She stopped and sniffed. Her own signature hung in the air, like a fox slipping through the bracken. But another, much stronger and more vivid, overlaid it. A signature as bright as star showers. No, something far more alien. A signature that belonged in Autrevelye.

Was it you? she asked the emerald.

No answer. She crawled over to the nearest guard and touched his throat. His skin felt cold and stiff. His mouth, half open, looked dark and cavernous in the dim light. She bent closer and realized with a shock that his mouth was filled with blood. She examined the second guard. He was dead, too.

Unnerved, she ventured from her cell. Torches burned at the far end of the corridor. Their light cast a ruddy glare on the walls, sending rippling shadows over the stones, but nothing moved, and no voice broke the silence.

She peered into the cell next to hers. There was just enough light to make out three bodies. Two men lay motionless on their pallets. A third sprawled over the floor, as if felled in the act of standing. Valara’s throat tightened in dread. Had she killed them as well? She couldn’t tell if they breathed.

It didn’t matter. Here was her chance to escape. She hesitated a moment, then hurried back to her cell and rifled the guards’ pockets, thinking how she had always been a thief in all her lives, whether queen or prince or a common soldier in the service of Leos Dzavek. Her search yielded a handful of coins, two daggers with wrist sheaths, and an oversized tunic, which she wrestled off the smaller guard. She wanted shoes, too, but their boots were too big. In the end, she settled for what she had. She could steal shoes later.

Valara fastened the sheaths to her wrists, stowed the money in a knotted corner of the tunic. It wasn’t nearly enough to bribe a ship’s master to take her home, but it might feed and clothe her until she could get far enough beyond Osterling’s cursed magical guards. Then she wouldn’t need any ship. She could walk home through Autrevelye.

The scent of magic and a bright signature welled up around her. You must not go home. Not yet.

The great voice penetrated her bones. Now she recognized it. She’d heard it speaking on the ship just before the storm. She’d thought it a fever-dream from the magic used to subdue her. But now she understood. It was the emerald—Lir’s emerald. It was alive. She had not imagined it.

City bells rang the next hour. There was no time to question or explore. She ran.

* * *

GALENA HAD DREAMED of the bells long before she woke. Bells and more bells, the count leaping from one tower to the next, as though time chased itself through Osterling’s dark streets. Their voices rose in volume, until they became the shrieks of winged monsters, so high and pure her bones ached and terror gripped her stomach. Coward, Ranier Mazzo had whispered. Go fight them and die. Do you dare?

She woke to a single bell ringing the first hour past midnight. It was quiet in the garrison sleeping quarters. Moonlight slanted through the reed blinds, and a warm salt-fresh breez

e filtered through the room, carrying with it the scent of rain and the coming summer.

I am a coward, she thought, lying in her cot.

A coward without honor. Ranier had said that outright the day before. He’d stepped into her path as she trudged from harbor watch to cleaning duty. Tell me what that word on your face means, Alighero. I know you must.

She told him, in exactly the words given by Lord Joannis. It had been hard. Her voice choked, and the mark on her cheek buzzed with magic. Worse, much worse, was the sight of those she had called her friends. A few others from her file—Marelda, Tallo, Falco—averted their eyes, but she noticed that no one defended her, even when Ranier went on to mock her viciously in the low sweet voice that Aris had loved at first, then had come to hate.