“There goes a man eaten alive by guilt,” Serovek said, his gaze fastened on the spot where Andras had disappeared.
“I couldn’t halt the incantation. I wouldn’t, nor would I alter my decision if I had to do it again.” Brishen was as gut-strung by Megiddo’s fate as Andras. They all were, but he didn’t lie to himself or the others. Closing the breach trumped everything. Megiddo’s self-sacrifice had proved he understood that.
“We know,” Serovek replied. “So does the Gauri. He just needs time to accept it and to understand that no matter if he had double or triple the strength, he wasn’t going to pull Megiddo free. By the time they got that first claw around him, it was already too late.”
“He may not wish it, but I’ll confirm with Sangur the Lame that Andras Frantisek was instrumental in banishing the galla and deserves to have his lands reinstated to him. He may not accept my accolades, but I hope he will.”
“He will. You heard him when we first met. He has a daughter to dower, and if he was willing to face galla for the chance to do it, he’ll accept your accolades and the lands resulting from them.”
They lingered at the tor only long enough to build a simple sled and carefully transfer Megiddo onto it. His ensorcelled sword glowed brightly in the sun before Serovek wrapped it in layers of fur and leather before tying it to his saddle. He, Gaeres and the Quereci would start the trek home as soon as everyone was mounted and Megiddo secured to the sled.
“Are you sure you don’t want us to ride with you to Saggara? It isn’t that much of a detour.” Serovek, looking not at all troubled by his tenure as a Wraith King, wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “I’ll take any excuse to see the fair Anhuset again.”
Brishen chuckled. “You just saw her a day ago.”
“That doesn’t count. I was playing nanny to the dead and was too far away work my charm on her.”
“Your charm will get you killed.” Brishen shook his head. “I want to travel alone, see if I can enter Saggara without much notice or fanfare. That would be hard to do with an entourage of eight humans and a Wraith King in tow. Besides, you need to get Megiddo to High Salure for his safety and to tell his family.”
Serovek lost his jocular demeanor. “The worst of all tasks.”
Brishen parted company with the others under a cold winter sky. As he did with Andras, he bowed to Gaeres, professed his gratitude and promised any and all aid in the future if it were needed. He and Serovek clasped forearms. “Fair journey to you, friend. It seems I will be in your debt forever.”
The other man released his arm to punch him in the bicep. Brishen’s arm went numb for a moment, even through the double layers of chain mail and padded gambeson. “No debt,” Serovek said. “But I want an invitation to your next Kaherka festival, and I’ll claim a dance with the beautiful Ildiko.”
“I’ll make sure the kitchens prepare your own scarpatine pie.”
Serovek grinned. “You’ve always been an exceptional host, Brishen Khaskem.”
Brishen watched them ride away before turning his horse to Saggara. Unlike the vuhana, his earthly horse’s gait didn’t cover leagues in minutes, and he didn’t arrive outside Saggara’s gate until mid morning of the following day.
The grasslands that stretched from Saggara’s patch of young woodland was empty of tents and the vast multitude of Kai who had descended on them over the course of weeks. A few yurts hugged the tree line, and small knots of horses grazed on the short, brittle grass peeking through shallow snow drifts. While the Kai may have returned to their homes, they’d left behind a trampled swale littered with the remains of campfires and scattered animal bones. Brishen guessed two summers would pass before the grasslands reclaimed this patch of earth and wiped away any hint that half a kingdom had once huddled here.
His breath hung in the frigid air, a misty cloud, but he paid no mind to the cold. Saggara loomed ahead, with its walls and fortifications and its legions of soldiers who helped him guard territories. Once it had been the summer palace of an ancestor. It would be so again. Not nearly as grand as the royal seat in Haradis had once been, and not as haunted.
Ildiko waited behind those walls, and a niece to whom he would now surrender his crown. He grinned and nudged his horse into a faster gait.
Brishen hadn’t truly believed he might sneak into the fortress unnoticed, but the hue and cry raised the moment he was sighted made him flinch. He rode into the bailey, swung out of the saddle and tossed the reins to an open-mouthed stablehand. People bowed as he strode to the manor, some reaching out to touch his arm as he passed. He didn’t stop, didn’t linger to talk or greet those who called to him or begged him to wait.
His steward tripped and stumbled to his knees when he saw him. Brishen paused long enough to lift the man back up by his tunic and asked the most important question any man had ever asked of another. “Where’s my wife?”
Mesumenes had barely uttered the word “wild” before Brishen bolted down the hall, through the chaotic kitchens and out a back door that led to the wild orange groves. He slowed, though his breathing sped up to harsh pants.
Ildiko sat on a bench alone, pale face turned up to the sun, eyes closed. She hadn’t heard him approach. The bench had been one he ordered put in this particular spot. It hugged a stone wall near the secret alcove where he’d hidden his sister Anaknet’s mortem light from his mother years earlier.
He planned to one day send it to Emlek once Secmis was dead. Now that she was, he found himself reluctant to part with the light. Anaknet’s mortem light didn’t have any useful knowledge for future generations. Its importance lay strictly in the personal value Brishen placed on a connection to his sibling. It would remain here. While he might no longer have the ability call up that gentle spark and see her brief, indistinct memory, he held the image of her tiny face in his mind, as clear now as it was when he was eleven years old. How fitting that he find the person he treasured above all others sitting next to the treasure he’d defied a malevolent queen to save.
As eidolon, he’d been a fractured creature. Powerful, yes, but incomplete. United once more in both body and soul, he still hadn’t felt whole—until now, in the presence of his human wife, who sat wrapped in quiet dignity with her pale face tilted up to the sun.
Something alerted Ildiko she was no longer alone, maybe the sensation of being watched, or the hitch in his breath as he admired the proud lines of her profile limned in morning light. She opened her eyes but didn’t move except to slide her gaze askance. He didn’t even flinch. “Are you real?” she asked in a hesitant voice. “Or am I wishing too hard?”
A tree branch dragged across his pauldron as Brishen navigated the narrow path cut between the orange trees to reach her. He held out his hand, noting how it shook. Ildiko didn’t hesitate and clasped his fingers. She opened her mouth to say something else, but he stopped her with a finger pressed to his lips. He coaxed her off the bench, and immediately swept her into his arms.
She was light as thistledown and even softer. He carried her back to the house, through the kitchens and past the servants who gaped at them, up the stairwell and into the corridor where their bedchamber waited. Neither spoke, and Brishen tightened his hold when she buried her face against his neck.
He met Ildiko’s personal servant halfway down the hall. Sinhue’s eyes grew huge and her jaw dropped before she fled in the opposite direction, back to his bedchamber from which she emerged. By the time Brishen reached turned the corner, a small crowd had gathered outside his door and were striding toward him, Sinhue in the lead. This time she bowed as she passed him and grinned. Two soldiers followed her, and behind them a groggy young woman he didn’t recognize cuddling a baby he did. His niece. Two more soldiers flanked her and all bowed to Brishen as they trekked toward the stairs without comment.
Brishen broke the silence he had imposed on himself and Ildiko. “My gods, wife, how many people are sleeping in our room now?”
Her body shook with quiet laughter. “Just the nurse
and the queen, and that’s for my benefit more than anything.” She kissed his neck, a soft flutter that made him increase his pace. He kicked the door shut behind him and set her gently on her feet.
The world shrank to the candlelit room and the two of them. They had lapsed mute once more, and Brishen was glad for it. He don’t want to waste time or effort on words. He wanted nothing more than to relearn his wife, to assure himself that she wasn’t merely an apparition created from dreams dreamed in his bleakest hours.
She stood still under his gaze, and except for the occasional shiver, still under his touch. And Brishen touched her everywhere. Her slender neck and shoulders, the twin knolls of her collarbones and the hollow of her throat. She closed her eyes as his fingers glided over the curve of her breasts, pausing to cup them before moving onto the expanse of her belly and the curves of her waist.
Candlelight burnished her hair in a way the sun didn’t, softening the fiery red color so that it shimmered, instead of blazed. She wore it partially up, locks braided into a crown. Brishen released their ties, and the braids fell down her back. He took his time, unweaving each one until long waves flowed over her shoulders and chest. He reached to pull her against him and stopped.
His armor was a wall between them. He expertly shucked everything until he stood naked and scooped Ildiko into a tight embrace. Her fingers dug into his arms before flattening and her palms slid over the hard muscles of his shoulders and back. He buried his face in her hair and inhaled the scent of wild orange flower and mint.
She was life and hope and strength, and he drew on all three as he bent his head to kiss her deeply. Her simple gown soon lay abandoned at the foot of their bed. Brishen mapped the terrain of her body with his mouth and hands, rediscovering those places he had laid claim to many times since their marriage. It was never enough and never would be.
When Ildiko uttered his name in a breathy sigh and clamped her thighs against his hips, he forgot everything—kingdoms and fragile queens, lost monks and fallen cities—and found both solace and ecstasy in her loving embrace.
Afterwards, they lay curled around each other in the gathering gloom. Brishen remained quiet, doing nothing more than stroking Ildiko’s long hair as the first hot tears trickled down his neck and soon became a river. She sobbed softly, soaking his hair and pillow where she hid her face. Her arms and legs wrapped tightly around him, and she chanted his name over and over until the sobs faded, and she relaxed in his hold.
“I think I drowned you,” she said and hiccupped into his ear.
He leaned back to better see her face. She was a mess. Splotchy skin and eyes nearly swollen shut from her crying fit. She snatched up a corner of the blanket to wipe her nose. Brishen found her watery smile lovely and envied her the ability to weep. When he had a moment, he intended to escape into the orange grove where the trees grew wildest and thorniest and there keen his own grief in a dry-eyed, solitary requiem.
“I take it you missed me then,” he teased gently.
She hiccupped again and smacked him on the arm. “Only a little, and don’t let that puff up your pride.”
A comfortable silence grew between them until Ildiko cupped his cheek in her hand and stared at him for several moments. “What horrors you carry behind here,” she said and slid her thumb across his forehead. “I can see them in your face, in the changing shades of your eye. Will you not let me ease your burden, Brishen?”
He caught her hand and brought it to his mouth for a kiss. “You already are, wife. You’re my sanctuary, my refuge.” And when he could speak of it to her, he’d recount his time as a being of great power and unnatural existence, of his sense-fractured emptiness and the deep sorrow of losing an honorable man to a merciless fate. For now though, he’d simply savor the feel of his wife against him, in the bed they shared, in the fortress he ruled, in a kingdom not yet perished.
EPILOGUE
“Well?” Ildiko asked Sinhue. “Will I do?” She spun on her heel, the many folds of her layered skirts billowing out around her. The sleeveless coat she wore over her silk shirt weighted her shoulders with its opulent embroidery of gold thread and tiny jewels sewn into the design. It was a most important day for several reasons, and she’d chosen the finest, most formal outfit she owned, another gift from her generous husband.
Sinhue stepped back to eye her handiwork. She and Ildiko had closeted themselves in the chamber the Elsod had finally surrendered to her once she returned to Emlek with her masods and set to work preparing for the coronation. “You look very...regal, Hercegesé.”
Ildiko laughed aloud at her servant’s pause and diplomatic reply. She turned to the full length mirror, admiring the emerald skirts and tunic with its intricate lacings and knotwork designs that decorated the hems of coat, skirts and shirt cuffs. The shirt itself was a shade of pearl that caught the light and reflected back soft shades of pink, blue and peach.
The ensemble highlighted Ildiko’s red hair and bleached her fair skin an even paler shade. “A very respectable mollusk, even if I do say so myself,” she said and announced herself ready to receive visitors.
Brishen was the first to arrive, and he took her breath away. Unlike her own vibrant colors, he was garbed in black with accents of indigo at the collar and cuffs and silver in the clasps that closed his tunic. Except for the saffron-yellow eye that narrowed when he smiled at her, he was a study in lush darkness. “Hello, pretty hag,” he said.
“Wolf,” she teased. “You look good enough to eat.”
One of his eyebrows rose. “Why is it when I tell you that, you look ready to bolt for the door?”
She braced her hands on her hips. “I do not,” she said, indignant. “At least not anymore.”
He surveyed the room, noting the empty baby bed. When the Elsod left, they had turned Ildiko’s former bedroom into a nursery and occasional changing room. Brishen hadn’t protested the proximity, especially after Anhuset recounted the assassination attempt and her continued search to find who put him to the task. Guards still lined the corridors outside the royal bedchambers, and the door between the chambers stayed open when he wasn’t making love to Ildiko in their bed. They had both quickly learned the absolute and indisputable importance of not waking the baby.
“Where’s my niece?” he asked.
“I’ll fetch the nurse,” Sinhue volunteered and left the room after receiving assurances from Ildiko she was no longer needed.
Ildiko sashayed to her husband and raised her face for his kiss. Brishen tried to pull her close, but she danced out his reach. “You’ll muss my hair, and Sinhue will string you up by your guts if you ruin all her hard work. I’m terrified of even sneezing in case I do something to it and suffer the same death.”
Brishen scowled, his expression both exasperated and puzzled. “Just wear a hat.”
She refused to dignify the ridiculous suggestion with a reply. Men. Instead, she asked him the same one she’d been asking for the past week. “Have you decided on your niece’s name yet? Her coronation is less than an hour away, Brishen. You can’t just call her ‘Queen Little Girl.’”
“Why not? I rather like it.”
Again, she graced him with the same expression she’d worn when he suggested she wear a hat. The Kai tradition of not formally naming a child until they had reached the end of their first year was all well and good unless that child happened to be the Queen Regnant. “Tell me you’ve thought of something.” He had waved off her numerous suggestions, all good Kai names taken from the family trees recorded in the scrolls stored in Saggara’s library. Brishen would have none of it, nor did he reveal what he might have in mind. Until now.
“Tarawin,” he said, and his features sobered. “Her name will be Tarawin.”
Ildiko blinked hard, forcing back the tears that filled her lower lids and threatened to spill over. She didn’t need to look any more like a shellfish than she already did. Crying only made it worse.
He’d chosen a commoner’s name, specifically the name
of a common woman with more nobility in a drop of her blood than entire royal dynasties. She’d lost her son during his service to Brishen and sacrificed herself to the galla on the banks of the Absu, along with other brave Kai men and women, so that many more Kai might survive.
Her eldest daughter Kirgipa had braved a hard journey and left behind a beloved sister to make certain she delivered the only surviving child of Harkuf Khaskem to his brother. Today, before Brishen formally abdicated the throne to his niece, he planned to ennoble the faithful nursemaid and her sister, bequeathing both land and title to them and their descendents.
“A small thing,” he’d told Ildiko earlier, “of far less value than the life she saved and the one she gave back to you and me. I’d give her a country, if I had an extra to spare.”
He hadn’t forgotten the palace guards either. Both had looked horrified at his suggestion of ennoblement, though equally happy when he offered the alternative of generous coffers and a place among the highest echelons of court guardianship, second only to Anhuset and Mertok.
“What do you think?” Brishen said when Ildiko continued to stare at him without replying.
She gave him a watery smile. “It’s a good name. A name more than suitable for a Kai queen. Kirgipa and Atalan will be overjoyed.” She toyed idly with a lock of his hair. “You’re a fine man, Brishen Khaskem.”
“It’s hard work remaining worthy of you, Ildiko Khaskem.”
“You’ve a velvet tongue.”
“That’s what you said yesterday when I had my head between your—”
She shushed him with a shocked laugh. “Stop that.” She turned for a final check in her mirror.
Brishen came to stand behind her. He stroked her shoulder with a clawed hand and met her gaze in their reflections. “I’ll do this poor child no favors by turning the throne over to her. We celebrate today with heavy hearts. The Kai rejoice at the galla’s banishment and grieve for the loss of their magic because of the demons.”