Blood Ties

  “I merely informed him that I had punched people, though now that I think about it, I don’t know if I’ve brutalized anyone on your behalf. I remember trying to step in with those Fifth Dragon thugs that kidnapped us, but you punched them first.”

  “Do you want me to hold back next time?”

  “Would you? So I’m not proven to be a liar?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  He bumped his shoulder against hers, smiling again, and they strode into their new office.

  4

  “I’m not going back down to see her.” Jev sipped calmly from his wineglass, though he was ready to get steely if Cutter pushed it.

  “But you said she liked you. She flirted with you and wanted to have sex with you.”

  “She wanted to add another zyndar notch to her bedpost.” Jev looked out the double doors of the tasting room, open to the setting sun, warm rays bathing the lush rows of green vines outside. From their vantage point at a booth in the back, they couldn’t see the city, though the winery wasn’t far outside of it. Jev had agreed to the meeting place because it was easier for Lornysh not to have to travel through the city.

  He hadn’t arrived yet, but they expected him soon. Cutter had been the one to request the meeting, but Jev didn’t mind. He didn’t want to ignore his comrades because he was busy with his new job, especially since they were still relative strangers to Korvann. And since Korvann didn’t have any love for strangers right now.

  “Isn’t it desirable for humans to have sex with many women? I’ve observed your kind aren’t as monogamous as dwarves.”

  “I prefer monogamy myself. Leads to fewer hard feelings. Weren’t you just this morning arguing for me to make something for Zenia?”

  “Yes.”

  “She might not like my spice rack as much if she learns I’ve been having sex with many women.” Jev shuddered at the idea of going back into the warren of tunnels underneath the city to seek out Iridium for sex or anything else.

  “Have you started constructing it?”

  “No, it was a busy day.”

  “Don’t forget a slot for tarragon. Some people leave that one out. Here’s what I wanted you to look at.” Cutter pulled a folded paper from his pack. He’d been carrying all his belongings around since arriving in the kingdom despite having the use of a room in Dharrow Castle.

  Maybe he didn’t trust Jev’s father not to throw him out. Or burn all his belongings. The old man’s venom was directed more at elves than dwarves, but he had taken on a xenophobic streak in his old age. Or since his wife had left him for an elf. Only to be killed by her own mother who had wanted to stop it…

  Jev rubbed his temple. His head still throbbed whenever he thought of the insanity he’d unearthed in his own household. He wished his brother Vastiun had never gotten caught up with that elf princess and her quest. If he hadn’t, he never would have sailed off and joined the army only to die in the war. Of course, Mother would still be dead, by Grandmother’s hand.

  “This map,” Cutter said. “It’s of the sewers and aqueducts for your city. I paid some kid who said he’d worked for the Fifth Dragon to fill in some of the extra tunnels that none of the maps in the library mention.” He scowled at Jev as if this was his fault. “But I know it’s far from complete. A dozen dwarves mining a lifetime couldn’t have made all the tunnels under your city.”

  Glad for the excuse not to think of his family—and that he’d agreed to go to dinner at the castle later that night—he leaned forward to examine the paper. “You hope mapping the underworld lairs will help you find Master Grindmor's missing tools?”

  “I do. If they’re underground in that guild’s lair somewhere, and I’ve got a map, I could tunnel in from the side, avoid dealing with criminals. Not that I’m afraid of them, mind you.”

  “Has anyone delivered any threats to Arkura? Or suggested she trade her services for information again?” Even though Jev’s mind was on his case, he would do his best to offer helpful comments on Cutter’s problem.

  “Not since Iridium tricked Master Grindmor—” Cutter frowned at Jev’s audacity at calling her by her first name, “—into carving a dragon tear for her. And raising golems. And lots of other things.”

  Jev nodded. “I was there for their meeting.”

  “The master is positive now that Iridium had the tools all along and has hidden them someplace new. I wouldn’t have a chance at convincing a human to tell me anything.” He tapped his hook on his chest. “But maybe you could convince her. You’re good at talking people into things.”

  “Thanks, I think.”

  “Remember when you convinced that elf warden to surrender?”

  “He had eight rifles pointed at him from all sides. I didn’t have to do much convincing.”

  “Yes, you did. He was going to cut his own throat so he couldn’t be interrogated by us.”

  “True.” Jev sipped his wine.

  “And then instead of interrogating him, you played chips with him while chatting with him in Elvish and getting him drunk. I seem to remember he told us quite a bit.” Cutter grinned as if he missed those good old days.

  Jev couldn’t claim to miss the war, a war he’d never believed in, but he had felt… competent there. He’d known his job and how to do it. Here, in this new position for the king, he worried he wouldn’t be sufficient for the task. He wished he had some of Zenia’s confidence.

  “Will one of you move over, or do I have to stand here all day?”

  Jev turned to find Lornysh waiting by the head of the table. How long had he been there? In his green woodland clothing, he blended in with the fake vines twining all over the walls and ceiling of the tasting room.

  “If you stood more loudly, people would notice you,” Cutter grumbled, sliding over while keeping a hand on the open map.

  “That wouldn’t be good for my health.” Lornysh took the seat beside him.

  He wore a cloak, the hood pulled up, but even so, Jev worried someone in the busy tasting room would glimpse the pointed ears thrusting out of his silver hair. Fortunately, most of the people here had been tasting all afternoon on this last official day of the coronation celebration before the city returned to normalcy. Some of them had likely been drinking all three days of the affair.

  “I’m seeking to fill in this map,” Cutter informed Lornysh, “but Jev won’t go sleep with a criminal for me.”

  “That’s selfish of him.”

  “Exactly. Jev, what if I help you make a gift for Zenia? Something good that she’d like. Then will you sleep with this Iridium?”

  Jev leaned back, draping his arm over the back of his booth, and noticed Lornysh’s eyebrows arching.

  “Is that logic strange to elves too?” Jev asked.

  “Most of what comes out of Cutter’s mouth is strange to elves.”

  Cutter scowled at him. “I’m regretting sharing my bench with you.”

  A waitress wandered past, and Jev held up a finger to preemptively order a drink for Lornysh, more because he didn’t want the woman coming over to engage him and his ears in conversation than because he thought Lornysh would enjoy it. His friend had snooty tastes when it came to alcohol. And food. And art. And everything else.

  “Do you have a pencil or charcoal?” Lornysh asked.

  “Yes…” Cutter squinted at him but dug into his pack again and pulled out a charcoal stick.

  Lornysh wordlessly took it and bent over the map.

  “What’re you doing?” Cutter gripped his forearm. “I had to pay a grubby overcharging human for that map.”

  Lornysh looked coolly at the hand on his arm before shifting his icy blue gaze to Cutter. “Filling in the missing tunnels for you.”

  “How would you know where they are?” Cutter asked, but he released his grip. “You haven’t been here any longer than I have.”

  “I have been using the underground passages to get into interesting places around the city since my hood is not typical of spring fashion here, it
seems, and has made many people suspicious.”

  “Imagine,” Jev murmured, leaning out to take a glass from the waitress before she came close enough to look at Lornysh. He laid a dragon-headed kron coin on her platter.

  She smiled shyly. “Thank you, Zyndar.”

  “What counts as an interesting place in a human city?” Jev set the glass in front of Lornysh, though he’d already bent his head to sketch tunnels on the map.

  Lornysh glanced at the glass, sniffed without reaching for it, then wrinkled his nose and returned to the map. “The Museum of Exotic Creatures, the orchestra hall, the Fourth Garden Amphitheater, and a business with a ceramics tour.”

  “We’ve been here less than a week.” Cutter leaned his elbows on the table, watching the drawing intently. “How have you had time to see all that?”

  “I don’t think Lornysh sleeps much,” Jev said, voicing a suspicion he’d long had.

  “I meditate.”

  “I don’t think Lornysh meditates much,” Jev amended.

  “It is sufficient for my needs.”

  “If I went to a theater of human plays, I’d certainly fall asleep,” Cutter said.

  “But not if you went on a ceramics tour?” Jev asked.

  “Ceramics can be interesting. It’s working with materials from the earth.”

  “Do you know anything about medicine, Lornysh?” Jev asked. He didn’t expect the answer to be yes, but he’d found in the past that Lornysh had an ecumenical education. It would be convenient if he could offer some insight into his case.

  “Human medicine? Little.”

  “Medicine in general. I imagine that what applies to elves applies to humans for the most part. We can’t be that dissimilar since we can have offspring together.”

  “We?” Lornysh lifted his eyes from the map.

  “Well, not we specifically. You and I would have trouble in that department. But our races. There are all manner of mixed human-elves wandering the world.”

  “Yes,” Lornysh said, his tone cooling.

  Did he not approve of such mixed bloods? Likely not. He did seem to be a purist. Jev had always been surprised he’d managed to talk Lornysh into joining Gryphon Company during the war—especially since his introduction to the army had been when soldiers captured and brutally interrogated him. And now, with the war over, Jev kept expecting him to offer a parting and return to his elven homeland. Or, if he wasn’t welcome there, head off on travels to parts of the world he hadn’t yet seen. Lornysh couldn’t find the ceramics museums of Korvann that exciting.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “Targyon has asked me to investigate how his cousins all came to die last month and to figure out if he could be in danger for the same ‘disease of the blood’ as it’s been called.”

  “As your kingdom’s new monarch, he’ll likely be in constant danger from many sides. I assume bodyguards and food testers flank him most of the day.”

  “From what I’ve seen, yes. But the princes must have had those things too. Dazron, the eldest, at least. He was all but running the castle and the kingdom while Abdor led us around Taziira.”

  Lornysh set down the charcoal and steepled his fingers. “I have only passing familiarity with the medical sciences, but I suppose even that’s more than what most humans have. I can offer a few thoughts, but I anticipate you’ll want to find a human expert.”

  “I do plan to visit an expert, but go ahead.” Jev had long since stopped being offended by Lornysh’s arrogance and belief in his own superiority.

  “As I’m sure you know, there are afflictions that affect some races and not others. Only dwarves, for instance, can contract mynoresta and get serious infections from it. It’s not that the fungus doesn’t get into all of our bodies when we inhale spores, but humans and elves aren’t bothered by it. It’s believed that dwarves, because they left the surface long ago and spent so much of their evolutionary history underground, didn’t need to develop an immunity to many of our above-ground microscopic nemeses. That can make dwarves more susceptible to illness when they travel among us. Meanwhile, they are unaffected by the methane that one often encounters underground, a gas that is deadly when elves and humans are exposed to too much of it. Presumably, it was so advantageous for dwarves to be immune to underground gases that those with a tolerance were more likely to live into adulthood and reproduce. Those without a tolerance may have died before having children. Thus, immunity became more prevalent than not in the species as a whole.”

  Jev nodded, though he was getting far more of a lesson on spores and gas than he had wanted. “That explains why one race might be more susceptible than another, but what about specific bloodlines within a race?”

  Cutter snapped his fingers to get Lornysh's attention while frowning at Jev. “You’re distracting my elf from what’s important here.”

  “Your elf?” Lornysh asked. “Did you not once say you wanted nothing to do with me until I learned to grow a decent beard?”

  “That was before you started drawing tunnels on a map for me.” Cutter picked up the charcoal stick and thrust it between Lornysh’s fingers.

  Lornysh sighed and accepted it, pulling the map closer so he could continue drawing. “Your people, Jev, spread out long ago from the jungles of Izstara where we all originally evolved from Grellan apes. Humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs all did, of course, but we grew into very different species hundreds of thousands of years ago.”

  Jev set his wineglass down with a clunk. Evolved from apes? What did that mean? That he shared ancestors with some furry primate? And was cousin to some tusk-mouthed orc?

  Was there any human science out there to back up what sounded like ridiculous claims to him? Jev would ask Targyon what his books said about this the next time he saw him. He knew not everyone believed the Order origin story that the dragon founders had hatched in the cosmos and been instructed by the universe to create this world and all its species, but he hadn’t heard any of this before. Zenia and all her Order friends would stomp up and down on Lornysh’s ears if he shared the ideas in public.

  “Your human ancestors traveled from their jungle origins in search of food and because of competition with the other species. They soon settled on other continents, even the already populated, and claimed Taziira.” Lornysh’s lips thinned, and he glanced up from his tunnel drawing, as if Jev was to blame.

  Cutter snapped his fingers again at the pause and pointed to the map.

  “Over countless generations,” Lornysh continued, “your people continued to evolve, adapting in small ways to better fit into their new environments. This didn’t occur uniformly to the whole species. Different clans and tribes changed depending on where they settled. Some of those changes were in the blood and were passed on to children and grandchildren and so on. Today, with the advent of steam power, it’s easier for humans to travel around the world and create vast kingdoms and empires, so many of the old clans have dissolved. But the quirks of their blood still exist, manifesting in their descendants.”

  “By the founders, I’m going to need a lot more alcohol if he’s going to keep talking.” Cutter groaned and eyed Lornysh’s untouched wineglass.

  “He’s drawing your map while he does it,” Jev said. “What’s the problem?”

  “When he lectures, it’s like having nails pounded into my skull.”

  “To sum up,” Lornysh said, “your king’s ancestors may have come from another continent or an area where they developed a mutation that allowed them to thrive there. Maybe it’s useful here, or maybe it isn’t, but it continues to exist, passed on from father to son through the generations. It’s possible that an intelligent doctor or scientist may have found a blood-borne pathogen that is deadly to humans with that specific mutation. I don’t believe anyone—human, elf, or otherwise—has the scientific understanding and tools to create such a thing, but to exploit something that exists in nature would be a possibility. Perhaps, if you were to pore over genealogy repor
ts, you would find that this happened to your royal family in the past.”

  “So, it’s possible that what they say is true, that there’s a disease that only affected the Alderoth family?”

  “Possible, though for it to be completely family-specific would be unlikely. It probably affects a small subset of the human population, and the Alderoths happen to belong to that subset.”

  “Could it have been an accident?” Jev asked. “Or do you think someone would have had to deliberately introduce the princes to this… pathogen?”

  “Unless there are others dying in the city after displaying the same symptoms, the latter seems likely.”

  Jev’s head was starting to hurt. This was a lot to take in. “Here’s the problem with your hypothesis. The Alderoths are a very old family, as old as my own, and they’ve been here on this land since before Kor was a kingdom.”

  “That doesn’t negate my hypothesis. It’s possible your Alderoth family has carried this mutation for millennia. Since your royal families are known for inbreeding—marrying cousins and such—it makes sense that such a mutation would have stuck around and remained dominant among them.”

  “So, I should be digging into their genealogical history, you say?” As if Jev didn’t have enough to do. At least what he’d expected to be a simple meeting for drinks had turned informative.

  “To see if this has happened to the family before and if premature deaths were the result. Perhaps someone even found a cure centuries ago.”

  Jev nodded. “If we had a cure, Targyon wouldn’t have to worry so much. Not about this specifically.”

  “Indeed. Though you might warn him not to marry any distant relatives, so he’s less likely to pass the trait along to his children. Inbreeding, as it’s taken humans a long time to realize, tends to cause a lot of trouble and mutations, not always advantageous ones. A greater diversity in the blood is ideal for health.”

  More science Jev had not heard about. As far as he knew, the royals and the zyndar had always believed their blood was superior and it was ideal to marry others from royal or zyndar families. Jev wondered what Zenia would think of all this. Perhaps that inbreeding was the reason for zyndar arrogance, a malfunction in the blood, no doubt.