Sorshia lifted the isolation flap to go out. Before it fell he glimpsed the Shipwrights clustered beyond, awaiting events.
Then with a slap the canvas slid into place, leaving him alone with her.
She handed him a cup and, as he sipped cautiously, remarked, “Soras says he and your mother found you when you were only a little boy. You were standing on a battlefield beside a dead woman. And you didn’t speak for years, not until your mother managed to secure a position as Lord Eudes’s housekeeper. However did she manage that?”
He cleared his throat, wheezed, and finally marshaled enough breath to speak hoarsely. “We followed the armies. There are many folk who do that, living off what they can scavenge or sell. Lord Eudes was a general, as lords are.”
He paused to cough, and breathe, while she began to lightly dab a clear ointment onto his reddened arms. It didn’t hurt as much as he feared. He took another sip of the cooling juice and began again.
“I was too young to know why, but his personal household on campaign wasn’t well run. Our mother had the most necessary skill for survival: she could anticipate what people wanted, or needed, or if they were about to lash out so she could avoid getting hit. She made herself indispensable to Lord Eudes’s comfort. Thus when the campaign was over he took us back to Nerash.”
“And you were about the same age as Eudes’s son.”
“Yes. I was assigned to attend on Lord Agalar at all times, which meant I received the same tutoring and medical training. Only I was a far superior student.”
“Did Lord Agalar hate you for it?”
“Not as long as I flattered him. He believed my successes belonged to him. I wrote and answered all his correspondence under his name, and he would give demonstrations where he praised his own brilliance while I did all the surgical work.”
Her pained expression jolted him.
“Beauty, don’t be offended on my behalf—”
“Don’t call me that. You know what my name is. Which reminds me, that is Soras you were speaking to, not Sorshia. I didn’t want to say anything in front of him. But if his feelings and your relationship with him matter to you, you’ll remember.”
“That’s right. I’ll do better. I wonder what Mama will say.” He took another sip of juice to compose himself before adding, “I never meant offense by the nickname. I was impressed by how you kept your people together and safe. Intelligence is beauty.”
Her lips quirked up. She studied his face with such a look that he forgot about everything, even the stinging and itching. Hope was too precious to burn on the bonfire of longing but he cast it all onto the flames.
“Bettany, now that you know the truth of who I really am…”
A cough interrupted him. From outside Pearl said, in a stern tone, “We need to leave while we still can. I have no intention of my crew getting caught in a battle. Say your piece, Bett. Then we need to go, with him or without him.”
“Go where? What about my arrest warrant?”
She started in on his neck, each dab of ointment like a brief cooling kiss. Her face was so close to his that he scarcely dared breathe.
“The prisoner charged with impersonating Lord Agalar of Nerash will die of the fire curse. That’s the easy part. A name can easily be added to the manifest of the dead. No one will investigate during a war. The hard part would be risking a journey back into the desert, to the Akheres tombs.”
She didn’t explain because she expected him to figure it out. Instead she worked her way around his right ear. Here, where his hair had given him some protection, it hurt less, and each time her fingers brushed along his skin he found it hard to concentrate. But at length he managed to answer.
“The gold.”
She nodded without looking at him as she shifted her attention to the other side of his face, leaning over his body to reach it, so close that the temptation to embrace her would have overwhelmed him if he wasn’t stinging and burning.
“That a part of the gold has been hidden isn’t known except to a few, and those few must now be taken up with fighting this war. I have some ideas about where Lord Gargaron would hide it so no one but he and his most loyal servants would ever guess. I’m betting we can find it, take only what we can carry, which will be enough to make us rich, and leave again without anyone the wiser.”
“The priests and people like Lord Eorgas will have news of what happened at Crags Fort. They’ll recognize the Shipwrights.”
“People see what they expect to see. That’s how you got away with being Lord Agalar for so long, isn’t it? The Shipwrights will cut off their braids, which is what most people remember about them. We can disguise ourselves as a small merchant consortium, with me hired on as a local guide. We’ll say we were headed for Saryenia but had to turn aside because of the war. We’ll say that to salvage our investment we’ve headed for Akheres to purchase natron. No one will think that’s odd.”
“How will we finance this pretended expedition? We need supplies for the desert crossing, and money to buy natron.”
“The Shipwrights got paid, remember? They’ve voted. They’re willing to take the gamble because the reward will be so high if we succeed.”
“Even if the Shipwrights might be overlooked, people will definitely remember me.”
Sitting back, she laughed, and it was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard. “Do you say that everywhere you go?”
“People recall men like Lord Agalar.”
“Especially when they look like you.” She caught his hand, the linen cloth protecting her skin from the poison reddening his, but the pressure of her fingers made him wince so she let go at once. “We can dye your hair. Rash and sunburn will keep your face swollen for some weeks. You’re already blistering.”
He ventured a light touch to his chin, where stubble was already growing, and she snatched his hand back.
“Don’t touch anything.”
“Who will I be, then? For years I studied Lord Agalar to survive. I only know how to be him.”
“What about the boy you were before?” She frowned as she dabbed at his forehead. Her touch was not more painful than his memory. “The one who saw his mother murdered.”
His voice became tar in his swollen throat. He could not speak, or cry, or plead.
“Be him, and no one will recognize you. They won’t know how, especially if you never look directly at anyone so they don’t see those eyes.”
Her gaze met his, a lifeline with which to pull himself from the darkness. Lightly, he said, “Oh, are the eyes memorable?”
Her brows raised as if he had surprised her. “Maybe.”
“If I weren’t lying flat on my back, infested with the fire curse, I would give you a kiss.”
“Not a chance. I know firsthand how badly it stings and blisters. Your lips look terrible, and they must hurt.”
He smiled, and even though the gesture pulled painfully, he didn’t care.
The slight lift of her chin told him when she made the decision to push him into murkier territory. “What did happen? You don’t have to tell me.”
But he realized he wanted her to know the worst of him, so she’d have no illusions.
“He meant to cut open my brother to impress his friends but they didn’t have the nerve to see it done. However, word of his boast got around. A few months later he received a visit from a famous physician who challenged him to prove he could open and close a living man. The man’s arrival was so unexpected, everything happened so fast, and by this time Agalar was obsessed with somehow punishing my brother because he’d felt embarrassed in front of his friends. So I turned the tables. I pretended to be Lord Agalar the brilliant physician, and carried out the vivisection he had boasted of, using his body in place of my brother’s.”
He shut his eyes. The exact amount of pressure it takes to cut open a larynx with a scalpel so he could not scream out who he truly was.
“I’m a murderer,” he whispered as nausea swept him. “I did it knowingly, and
I killed him. I hated him.”
“You saved your brother’s life. The gods will judge you when you enter the hall of judgment after death. Can you live with that?”
He didn’t know what to answer. He was already living with it while Lord Agalar, although by no means an innocent man, was dead. “It isn’t that healing people makes me feel I’ve atoned. It’s just that it eases the pain in the world.”
“There is so much pain in the world,” she agreed softly.
“I can see another question in your eyes.”
She bit her lip in that way she had when she didn’t want to be caught smiling. “What is your name? What did your mother—the woman who raised you—call you?”
“She called me ‘mite.’”
“Mite? What kind of name is that for a child?”
“Poor little mite. I didn’t speak for two years after they found me. She didn’t know what else to call me, so the nickname stuck. Then Lord Eudes assigned me to Agalar, and called me Agalar too because it was easier for him to remember. So I took on Agalar’s voice and mannerisms.”
“You don’t remember the name your first mother gave you?”
“It was a long time ago,” he whispered.
The pain was so raw.
She kept dabbing, her touch soft and sure.
“I can’t,” he said, touching the ring that was all he had left of that vanished woman.
She draped a clean scrap of linen over his lips, leaned down, and with the cloth separating them skin from skin, lightly pressed her mouth to his. Her breath stirred the cloth as she whispered.
“You don’t have to. It only matters if it matters to you.”
The face was long lost, swallowed up by the bitter night of his grief, but he vividly remembered arms holding him amid that terrible chaos and a voice in whose timbre he heard love: Stay close, my precious boy. I won’t leave you. We’ll keep each other safe.
When he didn’t answer she went on.
“What about the gold? Will you come with us? Soras says he’ll abide by your decision.”
“You’re really going with them? With the Shipwrights?”
“Yes. I love my family… but I blame them too. Efea is their home but it isn’t mine, not anymore. Pearl wants to train me as her replacement, to become chief when I’m older and she needs to retire. I think there’s more we can do than just be thieves and mercenaries. Piece by piece we can use part of our take to set up hospitals, as Soras suggested. Or safe houses for escaped slaves. I don’t know, but there has to be more than this. If we can save my companions, if you can heal a person who everyone’s given up on, then we can save one more person, and one more after that.”
“One life at a time,” he whispered, thinking of the boy he had been.
She rubbed at her eyes with the back of a hand, and he realized she was crying because she didn’t want to leave him, but she would if she had to. “But you have to decide, because we’re leaving at nightfall.”
“I won’t leave you. We’ll keep each other safe.”
He said the words even though he knew by how fragile a thread such promises hung. Yet without such promises how was life endurable? The stars watch from their bright thrones and do nothing. But here on the mortal earth it is this fragile thread that stitches together the wounds of living.
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Keep reading for a sneak preview
of Buried Heart, the thrilling finale of the Court of Fives series
by World Fantasy Award finalist Kate Elliott!
1
I stand poised on the shore of Mist Lake like an adversary gathering focus before a Fives trial. South across the waters, too far away to see from here, lies the city of Saryenia, from which we just escaped. A rhythmic sound drifts out of the dawn haze that obscures the horizon: the drums of a fast-moving war galley.
“Do you hear that?” I say. “The new king is already hunting us.”
The boat I arrived in rocks wildly as its two occupants—Lord Kalliarkos and the poet Ro-emnu—jump out onto land and scramble up to either side of me. Kal takes my hand, the touch of his skin a promise against mine, and gives me a smile that makes my heart leap. Ro glances over, gaze flicking down to our entwined fingers, and looks away with a frown.
“We’ve got to get you out of sight,” I say to Kal, reluctantly shaking loose from his grip. “And get my mother to safety where your uncle can never find her.”
My mother has already disembarked. We are the last people out of the flotilla of now-empty rowboats in which our party fled the murderous new king. Surrounded by local Efean villagers, Mother is speaking to them with such an appearance of calm dignity that no one would ever guess how desperate our circumstances are. As the three of us run over, the villagers leave her and race past us to the shore, carrying baskets and fishing nets. They shove the boats back out onto the water.
“Are they abandoning us?” I ask as we rush up to Mother.
“Not at all, Jessamy. They are risking their lives to aid us.”
“By fishing?”
Ro breaks in with his usual needling. “The sight of Efeans hard at work to enrich Patron treasuries always lulls our Saroese masters.”
“By placing their own bodies between us and the soldiers,” Mother goes on. “It isn’t only military men wielding swords who defend the land and act with courage.”
I look back again, viewing the scene on the lake with new eyes. “That’s very brave, especially since they’re unarmed.”
“Doma Kiya, we need to get moving to the shelter of the trees,” says Kal to Mother, offering her a polite bow with hand pressed to heart.
Although his words and tone are courteous, Mother’s usually gentle expression stiffens into a stony-eyed mask. “I can see that for myself, my lord,” she snaps.
Kal is taken aback by her hostility, and so am I.
Irritation and impatience clip off my tongue. “He’s helping us!”
Kal looks from my mother to me and, still with his courteous voice, says, “I’ll scout ahead to make sure my uncle isn’t lying in wait in the trees to capture you.”
He races away while we follow at a brisk walk. Mother holds my infant brother, Wenru, while, beside her, my friend and former Fives stablemate Mis carries Wenru’s twin sister, Safarenwe. All the other Efeans have either gone out onto the lake or have left to escort the wagons conveying the fugitive Patrons of Garon Palace, who own this estate and its surrounding villages.
“Maybe the soldiers will pass by,” I say with another anxious look toward the lake. The shape of a mast coalesces in the mist. Oars beat the water in unison as the warship speeds toward us.
“Seeing only dull Commoner fishermen and farmer
s, not bold conspirators who just rescued the new king’s rivals from certain death,” murmurs Ro.
“Don’t speak of such matters in front of Lord Kalliarkos, Ro-emnu,” says Mother, with a warning glance at me.
“Kal won’t—”
“Enough, Jessamy. Keep moving.” Her tone scalds.
Kal waves an all clear from the edge of the orchard and ducks out of sight before the war galley can get close enough to spot his Saroese features and clothing. The fig and pomegranate trees aren’t particularly tall but they are bushy enough to conceal us. As the others push forward on a wagon track through the trees, I pause to look back one last time.
While most of the rowboats have dispersed out onto the water, six have made a rough circle with a large net between them, blocking the approach to the shoreline where we landed. But the galley cuts straight through the little flotilla. Two of the boats flip, and the others rock wildly as their occupants struggle to keep them from overturning. Oars slap the heads of people in the water to jeers from the oarsmen. Arrows streak out from the deck. Most splash harmlessly into the water but one strikes a hapless swimmer in the back. The armed men crowded on the deck shout excitedly and laugh as the victim’s head sinks beneath the surface. It’s a game to them.
The drumbeat ceases. The galley plows through a stand of reeds with a rattle of noise before dragging to a stop in the shallows exactly where we just disembarked.
A man steps up to the rail of the ship.
It is the new king himself, once Prince General Nikonos and now the man who murdered his older brother and innocent young nephew so he could seize the throne of Efea. From this distance I can’t fully distinguish his face although I know he resembles Kal in having regal features and a golden-brown complexion; they’re cousins, after all.
Nikonos calls out in the voice of a man used to shouting over the din of battle. “The Garon estate lies beyond the trees! The man who brings the corpse of Lord Kalliarkos or Lord Gargaron to me I will raise to become a lord! As for the rest of the Garon household and any who shelter them, show no mercy to traitors!”