Bright Thrones
A Court of Fives Novella
by Kate Elliott
Little, Brown and Company
New York Boston
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Katrina Elliott
Excerpt from Buried Heart copyright © 2017 by Katrina Elliott
Cover art copyright © Diana Hlevnjak/Shutterstock.com; © Brem Stocker/Shutterstock.com; © Amstockphoto/Shutterstock.com; and © Ali Mazraie Shadi/Shutterstock.com. Cover design by Nicole Brown. Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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First Edition: June 2017
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ISBN: 978-0-316-34446-3 (ebook)
E3-20170607-JV-PC
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
A Sneak Peek of Buried Heart
1
“Murderer.”
He woke in a sweat, sat bolt upright in the darkness, and reached for his sister’s hand.
She wasn’t there.
He felt around; her cot was gone. She was gone. This place smelled wrong; it stank of heat and stone and sand, not the fresh sea breeze and herb-soaked scents of the comfortable kitchen where his mother cooked and younger brother meticulously prepared plants for medicinal use.
The voice continued, someone speaking not in a dream but nearby. “No need for Lord Agalar to examine this one. Send the prisoner directly to shaft five with the other murderers.”
The mention of Lord Agalar jolted him into action. He swung his legs over the edge of the cot on which he’d been sleeping. He expected to touch worn floorboards or dusty stone but instead his feet sank into a soft carpet. The touch of luxury cleared his muzzy thoughts. He remembered in vivid, taste-soaked detail: a slice of lemon stings on his tongue to distract himself as he applies the exact amount of pressure it takes to cut open a larynx with a scalpel.
His limbs went clammy, his chest constricted, and a wave of dizziness caught him by surprise because he was sitting still, not cutting a man open, not fleeing with his sister on that blood-drenched day over a year ago. For several breaths he sat with face cradled in his hands as he had trained himself: slow inhalation, hold, slow exhalation.
When his pounding heart calmed and his hands were no longer shaking, he groped along the table placed beside the cot and found a basin, his shaving kit, and finally the oil lamp he was searching for. After lighting the lamp and getting dressed, he ventured past the folding screen that concealed the cot.
The large chamber beyond the screen was also hot and dark. It stank of blood, although the floor had been mopped last night and all the basins scrubbed with sand before being replaced beside the surgery table. A mirror caught the lamp flame and showed him a ghost of himself, like a reminder of who he once had been, years ago, his earliest memory: a young child standing terrified in the dark.
“Lord Agalar?” A man spoke from the other side of an outer wall concealed by floor-to-ceiling curtains.
The face that looked at him from the mirror had no voice, so he set down the lamp and thus banished the ghost. To save his sister and mother and younger brother, he had to shed the murky past. In diction, tone, mannerism, and conceit he had to become Lord Agalar of Nerash, a man utterly sure of his exalted place in the world, of his expertise, of how cumbersome it was to be surrounded by people less important than himself.
“Who has interrupted my morning routine? Where is my tea? Why are the curtains not open?”
The curtains were drawn aside by an armed guard. The space opened directly onto a covered porch supported by stone pillars. Agalar shaded his face as sunlight assaulted his night-adapted eyes.
Beyond the porch lay the mining settlement, a village nestled beneath the rocky slopes where the mining shafts cut into the ground. The mudbrick houses for the supervisor and visiting notables clustered off to the right. There was also a stable, a barracks for guards and free laborers, and a cookhouse built of quarried stone. Judging by the angle and length of shadows, he had slept to midmorning. Usually he rose at dawn, the only time of day to enjoy this blighted landscape. By now it was already uncomfortable.
Pearl entered bearing a tray with a pot of tea and a platter of freshly baked bread, peeled figs, and slices of melon. She examined him with a frown that reminded him of his mother.
“I can see you didn’t sleep well.” She set down the tray and without asking, straightened his clothes so he would look less like he’d tossed them on the carpet before going to sleep, which he had in fact done. Only after she tidied him up to her satisfaction did she gesture to the armed men who waited on the porch outside. He called the two guards Sunny and Flint because it irritated them, and they had to put up with it to keep up the pretense that he was really the esteemed Lord Agalar of Nerash, a rich and highborn physician traveling the world in pursuit of medical knowledge.
“Lord Eorgas requests an audience, my lord.” Sunny had the most cheerful of voices but in fact was a nasty man with not the tiniest gleam of light in his foul spirit. “A new lot of prisoners needs inspection for the mines because they may be ill.”
Lord Eorgas peered nervously into the chamber from the edge of the porch. The mine supervisor was a man whose skin was baked brown and leathery by a lifetime living under the unforgiving sun of the desert. Like most of the other upper-class Saroese men in the land called Efea, Eorgas kept his black hair shaved close against his head to keep it lice-free and his scalp clean.
Agalar stiffened his back and gave that confident twist to his voice that so impressed people who bent over backward to please any man titled “Lord.”
“Ah! Eorgas. Do join me. Pearl, do hurry up Ash with my wash water. I can’t eat before I’ve washed.”
She went out as Eorgas ventured in. Dust darkened the mining supervisor’s clothing but at least his face was clean.
“Blessings of the morning to you, Lord Agalar. I’m sorry to wake you so soon after all the work you did last night, and for nothing.”
“It’s never for nothing to make the attempt to save a life. I regret that my efforts were not enough to save the man. But perhaps the next patient will benefit from his death because your shift supervisors have learned how to properly tie off an injured limb with a tourniquet. Ah, Ash.”
Unlike Sunny and Flint, who had been hired separately to keep Agalar under observation, Ash and the rest of Pearl’s crew of thieves were the sort of p
eople you could trust as long as they weren’t trying to steal from you. So Agalar felt safe enough to sit down and close his eyes without fearing he’d get spit on or hit. He wasn’t sure he would ever get used to the opulence of sitting passively as another person soothed the dry skin of his face with a hot, moist towel scented with rose water, then thoroughly washed his hands for him in lemon-scented coconut oil.
“This astounding heat sucks vitality as well as water from the body,” remarked Agalar to Eorgas. “And the ever-present film of dust is quite astonishing. I fear my surgery tools will never be properly clean while I am in residence here.”
“You waste a great deal of water. Your demands are taxing our well.”
“Clean wounds and clean surroundings lead to much improved chances for healing. Now, Eorgas, what brings you so urgently to my office this early in the morning?”
As the man began to ponderously explain about a newly arrived group of prisoners needing examination, Agalar’s attention drifted to two ragged figures standing in the full glare of the morning sun. One was a boy of perhaps twelve; he had the brown-black complexion common among the Efeans whose people had always lived in this region. Men like Eorgas called themselves Efean too, but their black hair was straight instead of tightly curled, and their skin was lighter, marking them as descendants of the Saroese who had sailed to Efea five generations ago.
The exhausted slump of the boy’s thin shoulders triggered a twinge of clotted memory.
A young child standing terrified in the dark in a field overrun with fighting.
He forcibly suppressed the memory by shifting his gaze to the creature standing beside the boy. It was a frightful thing draped in a baggy shift that had been enthusiastically smeared with a dried substance he hoped was not feces, but considering its matted hair and dust-blotched skin, he wouldn’t have been surprised. Still, a kind of feral intelligence shone in its dark eyes. It noticed him looking and, after a glare as staggering as a knife stabbed into his face, looked angrily at the ground.
“Bring those two in under the shade,” he said, interrupting Eorgas without compunction. “I wouldn’t leave a rabid dog out in this sun.”
“They might be carrying the fire curse. It will infest the whole mine if we’re not careful.”
“The fire curse! I don’t know this disease.”
“It’s a burning rash that eats into your skin until it weeps blood. Men in particular dread it because it often infests their tender areas in a most unpleasant way. They call it a curse because it’s said only magic can heal it.”
“Magic! We shall see about that.” Agalar walked out to the porch only to be stopped dead by the astounding stink. “Whew! I would recommend a bath for this beauty, Eorgas, but dare not risk your complaining about the waste of water. So which will it be? Endure the stench when I bring them into my surgery to examine the rash, or wash them first?”
“We do not need a wash. We are fine as we are.” The voice was low, scarcely more than a whisper. It startled him in its intensity and in the precise, educated diction of its Saroese, since he’d discovered most of the native Efeans either did not speak Saroese at all or spoke it badly.
At first he thought it must be the boy speaking but it was the other one whose chin was raised defiantly. That’s when he realized what was staring him in the face. The creature was young and, by the suggestion of shape beneath the loose garment, female.
He sat on the edge of the porch. “Boy, come here. Show me your arm.”
People betray a great deal if you watch carefully, as he had been obliged to do his entire life. The boy looked at the older girl for permission. She gave Agalar a threatening look, brows lowering like a storm.
“I am a physician,” he said. “No one is going to touch any of you while you are under my care.”
She nudged the boy with a foot and he took a shuffling step forward, arm held out.
It was a rash, all right, red, swollen, bumpy, and blistering.
“Does it itch?” he asked.
Again the boy looked at the girl.
“Yes, it itches.” She indicated a group of undernourished and dehydrated women and children huddled together a stone’s throw away. “Our whole group has the fire curse.”
He couldn’t help himself. He smiled. “I see.”
“There is nothing funny about the fire curse.” Her anger blazed as if the sun had shot a tendril of its fury into her eyes.
He was surprised to feel a rush of elation at her audacity in scolding him, not that he could show it. She was disgusting and she stank and she was utterly vulnerable but yet too stubborn and proud to submit. She finally dropped her chin grudgingly as if she had just remembered that men like him held the power of life and death over people like her.
He knew exactly what happened to vulnerable prisoners.
Just as he knew what the rash was, and how this group of women and children had contracted it.
2
If only her anger could cause people to burst into flame, Bettany thought. Her imaginings were the last pleasure left to her. What if the foreign physician and his fastidiously clean hands literally ignited? That straw-colored hair would burn as easily as dry wheat stubble. He could flame away, spewing his lemon balm scent as he burned, until he was nothing but a charred lump twisted in agony, like her heart.
But he was incidental, merely the latest shackle in a long chain. What galled was the way he sat as if he was remembering an amusing joke that no one but him could possibly be intelligent enough to comprehend. The fresh whip marks on her back had taught her where defiance led. His smile goaded her into intemperate words regardless.
“When you are done laughing at us, my lord, I beg you, at least allow my innocent companions to sit in the shade and have a drink of water and perhaps a mouthful of millet porridge before we are all sent into the mines to die.”
His eyes opened wide, as if her capacity for speech astonished him. “What makes you think I am laughing at you?”
“My mention of the fire curse brought a smile to your lips. As if suffering is a jest.”
“Suffering is never to be taken in jest.” A wind spiked up, blowing into his face, and he pressed a hand over his nose and mouth. “I am going to have to insist you all be thoroughly washed before I examine you. I’ll send Pearl to escort you to the stables. You can trust her.”
“Trust her with what?”
“Trust that she obeys my directives and not those of the mine supervisor.”
Leaving this mysterious promise like a sack of ill omen festering on the dirt, he went back into the building. He and the mine supervisor returned to their morning meal, eating from a tray of delicious-looking foods that she and her companions would never enjoy.
Maybe death would come quickly. A rockfall inside the mines crushing their chests with a ghastly pressure; a sandstorm swallowing them up in clouds of choking dust that clogged their lungs; throats cut and blood soaking the dead desert soil. But she doubted the gods would be so merciful.
“What’s going to happen to us now?” whispered poor frightened Montu-en.
The boy leaned against her as if she could protect him when she was as helpless as he was. Yet she put a hand on his shoulder for the false comfort her touch would provide. Once a stout, healthy lad, he was nothing but skin and bone now. He wouldn’t last a month in the mines. Their ten companions watched her with the same wary hope that had kept their group together and alive on the cruel journey. They had trudged halfway across Efea, ripped from the welcoming streets of their home in the city of Saryenia and banished to this blasted stone desert. Now all would suffer a painful, humiliating death through overwork and worse abuses. The guards on the journey had taunted them with all the things their group would be subjected to once they reached the pitiless shafts of the mines, even as they never touched them for all those weeks because they feared the rash.
She wanted to force her captors to kill her outright. It would be simple enough to do. Grab a knife and l
unge at the immaculate doctor, or at the foul-faced mine supervisor, or even at the ugliest and most belligerent of the guards. They would cut her down, a blade stabbing into her entrails for a messy, stinking, and relatively quick death rather than the months of slow misery and torment that awaited her.
But she couldn’t kill herself. Her mother had made her promise to take care of the others, a responsibility she could not shirk even if a part of her resented its burden.
A stocky, middle-aged woman strode up. She had the callused hands of a laborer and a blunt face: flat nose and broad cheeks. She offered Bettany the courtesy of looking her in the eye. “I am Pearl. You come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“You stink worse than a stable. I suppose you dirtied yourself to keep the guards away. For your sake, I hope it worked.” Her Saroese was sufficient, if simple, and spoken with an accent that differed from the doctor’s way of speaking.
Pearl lined them up single file and walked toward the stables at a pace even the most exhausted could manage without stumbling.
Beyond the stable yard’s fence the land sloped down into a ravine. All along the rocky slope stood a patchwork of huts and hovels made of slabs of stone, shelters for slaves that were not much more than windbreaks. Sounds floated like dreams: the incessant pounding of sledgehammers, the creak of rope pulleys, and the grinding of stone against stone. In this toil people’s souls were wrung until they were empty, and all their sweat and blood went to enrich the highborn Saroese rulers of Efea who presided as far above it all as the stars above the cruel earth.
“This way, Beauty.” Pearl tapped Bettany’s back with the tip of her driver’s whip.
“My name isn’t Beauty.”
“You are no beauty, for sure. But Lord Agalar told me to bring Beauty and her pack. Unless you want to tell me your real name?”
Refusing to share her name was the only revolt she had. “Call me what you want.”
Inside the stable yard the oxen that had pulled their supply wagons on the journey from Saryenia were being fed and watered under the shade of a canvas awning, a greater courtesy than would have been shown their group if the doctor had not intervened. Pearl led them into a chamber with a trough, a slab floor, hooks for hanging meat, and basins smeared with dried blood.