In the House of the Five Dragons
24. Whisper
“Is war our fate? It seems in our nature ever to reach for more than we have. More than we need, perhaps. Is humanity condemned never to find satisfaction, never to find a lasting peace?”
— From Our Red History, by Avilla Sallusi
The sky over Dormaen was full of stars, twinkling and flickering through the smoke of lamps and candles burning in the city below. Gaius followed his mother out across the grass, listening to her chatter with Saul and Althea. He held Sierra’s hand. It felt delicate and tiny in his grasp. Fragile.
Gaius hated it. He had absolutely no desire to marry this wilting little flower of a girl. Sierra Darius was a well-bred woman from a reputable family. A perfect political match, as his mother reminded him, but what did that matter? The Mazrem family rivaled even the Emperor Tychon in power. Gaius Mazrem was already heir apparent to the imperial throne. So what more could marriage to Sierra Darius possibly earn him? Respectability, Gaius supposed, and legitimate heirs.
But heirs mattered only when he died, and the inevitable end to his life wasn’t something that Gaius particularly liked to dwell on. Respectability and proper form were his mother’s concerns, not his. Besides, none of it mattered at all if Emperor Tychon passed the imperial crown on to Rikard. If Lady Mazrem kept the secret of her husband’s madness as well as she hoped to, then it seemed inevitable. If she didn’t, then the entire Mazrem family would be disgraced and the emperor would choose some other, more suitable heir than Gaius.
Either way, it was all falling down around Gaius’ ears and still he had to smile at Sierra, to pretend he actually cared for her. At the gates, she took his other hand and gazed lovingly into his eyes. Gaius fought down a grimace.
“I’m so pleased for you, my lord,” she said in a breathy, wispy voice.
“You are? Why?” Gaius asked. Things didn’t seem to be going well for him at all.
Sierra giggled as though he had made some wonderful joke. “Your father’s return!”
“Oh, hae. Sure.”
“Perhaps with Lord Mazrem taking control of VEIL, he’ll free some of your time. We can finally be married. I pray every day that I’ll be a good wife to you.”
Gaius grunted noncommittally. A dozen pretty maids waited for him at home and none of them expected anything more of Gaius than a show between the sheets. He acquiesced to a short kiss with Sienna as a few of the knights guarding the wall stepped forward to escort General Darius and his family away. When they were all out of sight, swallowed up by the night, Gaius turned to make his way home. His mother fell into step beside him.
“You seem particularly out of sorts tonight, Gaius,” she said.
“I’m surprised you even noticed, Mother,” he said. “You seemed quite busy pleasing everyone else.”
“Saul Darius is a very important man,” Laurael reminded him sharply. “We need his friendship and a union with his family.”
“What for? They’re far less powerful than we are. We don’t need Darius!”
“Don’t be naïve, Gaius,” his mother told him. “Even the emperor needs his generals. Men in power make enemies and no one can watch his own back.”
“Maybe,” Gaius said sullenly. “But if you’d let me take the promotion, I would be general of the Star Court! I wouldn’t have to sugar up Darius.”
“Did you hear nothing that I said? If you let yourself be promoted over Saul, you’d leave him with nothing. General Darius isn’t a wily man. He would not himself be a very dangerous enemy, but he’s also a likable man with many of his own allies. Better to have his friendship than enmity, Gaius.”
They passed beneath a pair of ivy-covered pillars, silvered in the moonlight and casting a deep violet shadow. The blue-lit shrine loomed just off the path, hunkered down in the night like a hunting cat, back arched and tensed to pounce. Gaius tapped his thumbnail against his bloodcap and scowled.
“Well, I didn’t take General Darius’ job,” he said. “Do I have to marry his girl, too?”
“Hae, you do. I don’t know why you object so strenuously, Gaius. Sierra’s a pretty girl. She’s docile and as easily pleased as her father. She’s healthy and young. Though she’s growing less so with every day you delay. Some proper sons would make you a better heir to the emperor.”
“Always in such a rush, Mother. If you really wanted grandchildren so badly, perhaps you should have given me a few brothers or sisters.”
“You’re a cruel boy,” Laurael said. “I was a young woman when your father left and you were an infant. I didn’t have the opportunity to bear you brothers.”
“How lucky for us, then, that General Darius whelped a little more successfully. Emperor Tychon never married, as you know perfectly well. I don’t particularly see why I should.”
“Castum Tychon has far too many exotic tastes,” Laurael said primly. She leveled an icy look at her son, all but daring him to remind her that thirty years ago, she had been one of those tastes. “He should have found himself a wife long ago and produced himself a true heir.”
Gaius laughed. “Not likely. You’d have killed the bitch and any of her pups to be sure of my claim to the throne. Bloody hell, you’ve probably been keeping yourself pretty just to make sure Tychon pines after you, instead of someone a little more marriageable.”
Laurael smiled mysteriously and Gaius belched in answer. The large dinner squeezed his stomach uncomfortably in the confines of his saela. He flicked open the buttons and sighed contently when he could breathe freely.
“It doesn’t really matter anymore. So far, you’ve said and done nothing to ensure that Father isn’t going to take everything.”
“I can control your father. You are my son, Gaius, born of my own flesh and blood.”
“And a little bit of Father’s.”
“Rikard is just a man. I could have been married to any man. But only you are my son. I’ve not worked so long and so hard to give up your throne to a man I haven’t seen in thirty years.”
“You’ve preached this all before, Mother. What are you actually going to do?” asked Gaius.
Lady Mazrem stopped at the door of his house and kissed her son’s cheeks, a touch of her cool, waxed lips against his sweaty skin. “Sleep well, my son, and have no worries.”
Gaius briefly returned his mother’s embrace. “Hae, Mother, as soon as I have nothing to worry about.”
The sky was full of racing clouds, hurricane and hubris in bright sunset orange. Razor winds cut at them, tearing out streaks of flat, slate gray like colorless wounds. Bright skyfire leaked away through the empty slashes.
Stumble flattened his cheese-shape into an eerie midnight mist and raced through the leaves until he felt Flickerdim nearby. The shadow-serpent coiled through the deep dreams lurking under the broad leaves of the tower. Flickerdim’s star-flecked scales took on a distinctly green hue. Stumble curled his tendrils around the older Alterran and clung close.
What’s happening? I saw a longing-flower and… and now it’s gone! It’s gone, Flicker. Why? Stumble panicked. How did the Shatter get so close?
Time grows short, Stumble. They have drained the Black Teeth and entered the Skeltersky Morose. The Shatter are closing in, infiltrating the tree-tower.
How long until they take the Uprising?
Flickerdim closed his inky black eyes and wove his head back and forth in a complex knot. His throat flared into feathery gills as he tasted the air for change. The nebulous fronds flickered through a dozen colors and numbers and then were gone. The old Alterran general slithered along the branch and the bark-stone beneath his midnight scales trembled like a plucked harp string.
How long? he asked again.
I don’t know. Flickerdim stared out between the branches. His eyes were turning a gray-ground pewter color.
Stumble had never known a wisdom — especially one as old as Flickerdim — not to have an answer. It was against their nature not to know. But if there ever was something that they did not know, Stumble supposed it would be wise to admit it.
High above, the Alterran sky was empty as a drained glass.
Laurael returned to her bedroom to find Rikard and the foster girl laughing at some joke. The joke, she suspected, had been Thainna’s. Even before his disappearance, Rikard was a serious man and his years in Alterra only made him more so.
Thainna went immediately quiet, made her report to Laurael and then politely left. As was proper. Rikard, however, continued giggling like a boy half his age. Less than that, she supposed. How could she ever hope to fathom a man who was somehow younger in body than the son he had sired? Laurael found herself annoyed at Rikard, and not for the first time that evening.
“It’s improper to be so familiar with a servant,” she snapped.
“Thainna isn’t a servant,” Rikard said. “She’s a foster of Surma. She doesn’t blind for us… work, I mean.”
“That girl is a servant, even if not one that we hired. More so, perhaps. Anyone here can leave when they like, but Thainna’s a foster. She’s sworn her entire life to Surma’s service.”
“It’s not so different than being a knight, then.”
Rikard sat back on their bed. Cleaned, shaved and beginning now to fill out his thinned frame, he was quite a handsome man. Another woman — one younger and less ambitious — might have been swayed by his looks.
Laurael sat on a stool and lifted a mirror in front of her face. Young or old, beauty was of much less importance for men. A man could raise himself up by wits, strength of arms or any one of a dozen different qualities. But a woman had fewer paths left to her. Laurael caught her reflection in the pale amber lamplight. Flawless, just as she had to be.
She felt something warm against the side of her neck. Rikard had crept up silently behind her and kissed her throat just below the ear.
“I remember some things that were lost to me,” he whispered.
“Take your time, my lord. I would not dream of rushing you.”
“Help me remember the rest.”
Rikard circled his arms around Laurael, fingers questing for the clasps of her extravagant tabba. She stood and pulled away. In thirty years of chastity, she had only occasionally regretted the loss of such intimate touch.
This wasn’t one of those times. Rikard’s skin was uncomfortably hot, damp with sweat and somehow clingy against hers. Her young husband watched Laurael reverently, still kneeling down on the rug-strewn floor.
“The day has been long, my lord. Surely you’re tired and would like to rest.”
“I’ve rested a lot lately. I’m not tired, Laura.”
He stood and hooked his arms around her again. He pulled her close. Laurael kissed him shortly, but nothing more. After a moment of stillness, Rikard released her with a frown.
“Laura, what is this? This… bleak? What’s wrong?”
“You’ve been through so very much, my lord. I wish only to care for you.”
“Then care for me,” Rikard said. He went to the bed and smiled shyly at her. “Laura, please be with me. Here.”
Laurael leaned on the corner post of the bed. She would have to lay with him sooner or later. Rikard noticed her hesitation and hugged his knees to his chest like an upset child. Before his disappearance, Laurael did not recall ever thinking him particularly boyish, but something in the last three decades had stripped away the usual mannerisms of adulthood.
“I took words from Thainna about it,” Rikard said. “About how you protect me. She said that you told her to make Saul and Marus and the others leave.”
“She told you that?” Laurael’s already faltering opinion of the skinny foster dropped another notch. “You’ve been so wounded, so changed by your time in Alterra, my husband.”
“I chose to serve VEIL and Carce, Laura. Please, don’t keep me from them.”
“The foster agreed with my choice. Do you doubt her wisdom?”
“I… don’t know.”
It wasn’t the answer that Laurael had hoped for. She pushed on.
“Be reasonable,” she said. “I know you’re eager to see more, but you are only newly returned! You have spent more time in Alterra than the world of your birth, my lord.”
Rikard’s brow creased, but he didn’t look entirely convinced. His unbound black hair fluttered in a warm breeze.
“But I want–”
He was going to argue all night. Laurael knew how stubborn her husband could be. She sat beside him on the bed and brushed her fingers through his hair, hooked them around the back of his neck and pulled Rikard into a long kiss. Any thought of argument was forgotten, drowned out in his tide of youthful passion.
“I know what you want,” Laurael said. “I can show you all that you’ve forgotten, my lord, and remind you that it is sweet.”
Even in his greatest hunger and weariness, Rikard was never so keenly aware of his own body. His wife’s kiss fanned the embers deep inside him into something livid, vital. He was awkward and guilty that he could not remember the details of joining, but the honeyed surge of fire inside him seared away all sense of shame. Laurael’s touch drew lines of light along his skin, tracing a fullness that seemed ever on the verge of bursting from his very core.
Laurael guided him with steady confidence, a skilled rider astride a wild and unbroken mount. Rikard fumbled like a youth, but Laurael calmly corrected his every faltering touch. She took him gently and smoothly into her soft, perfect body and his world exploded into velvet sensation.
Rikard searched with trembling hands and uncertain resolve to turn his pleasure back on the woman he loved, but Laurael took his wrists in slender fingers and whispered at him to be still, to let her love him. Care for him, just as he had asked. Rikard’s heart seemed at once too small to contain the things he felt and too large to fit in the too-constraining cage of his ribs.
Laura. My lady, my love! The worlds I would give and call and destroy to feel your love, to touch your heart, your body. You saved me a million times. Every memory of you was a spire of diamond rising above the howling storm. Feel me, Laura, feel my need for you, my love! Feel me, reach for me…!
Rikard reached for his wife, pouring such love into Laurael that the echoing surge from his body seemed small — though certainly pleasant — in comparison. But something was wrong. It was like pouring a cup of water down an empty well. His flood of need and feeling were received, but met with nothing in return.
Sweating and exhausted, Rikard collapsed back into the twisted sheets. What was wrong? Though he could remember little about their lovemaking before leaving for war, he was certain he could not forget something like this… this failure. What happened? What had he done wrong? Still holding Laurael in his arms, Rikard felt terribly alone.
“Laura, I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you, too, my lord,” she responded promptly.
But he felt nothing from her. His wife was cold and barren as stone. Was Thainna right? She said that he was… frightening. Had he hurt Laurael, scared her away with his strangeness? What if he wasn’t a man she could love anymore? Rikard kissed Laurael gently and stroked her cheek.
I will be better. Stronger. Good and proper. I will be the husband you loved thirty years ago, he swore silently, knowing his wife could not hear him.
Later, Laurael lay with her head pillowed in the hollow of Rikard’s shoulder, panting and trying to catch her breath. Loveplay was a sport for much younger women.
Rikard’s ragged breath evened and then fell into a deep, sleepy rhythm. Something behind Laurael’s eyes throbbed dully and made her ears ring as though she stood under a vast bell, recently struck. But the pain wasn’t quite enough to make it worth calling a servant to bring her willow tea.
Perhaps that meddling foster girl would have a better suggestion, anyway.
Thainna was proving to be a problem. What should have been simple support of Laurael’s decisions was becoming something else entirely. Thainna told Rikard things that were not her place to repeat. What did she want? Perhaps only to help a hero. Or perhaps more. Laurael would have preferred to dismiss Thainna, but she could not risk the insult to General Hern and to the priests of the Surmaen temple.
And the foster wasn’t the worst of Laurael’s problems. Gaius grew more resentful with each passing day, and with good reason. Rikard’s return threatened everything she had worked for. Disrespectful and sullen though he had been, Gaius was right to question his mother. How could she correct the disastrous path Rikard had unwittingly set his family upon?
Why did you have to return, Rikard? Why didn’t you die as you were supposed to?
The idea stuck. With Rikard dead to all of Carce, everything was perfect. If her husband returned to his grave, all would be as it had been.
If he were dead.
The details could wait. Pleased to finally have a plan, Laurael gently unwound Rikard’s arms, turned away and fell asleep.
“Remarkable. And she swears this is true?” asked the Crest. He sat forward on the looming Jade Throne. His eyes gleamed fever-bright with fascination.
“Not as such, but Arliss assures me those are Thainna’s exact words. Rikard Mazrem can hear thoughts.”
The Crest sat so still on his throne that Narissa wondered if he had fallen asleep. She jumped when he finally stirred. In the dim light of the single lamp, he looked like a statue, some relic of an era long past. Or yet to come… The Crest had been all but unknown before his sudden rise to power and his reign over the House of Five Dragons had been like no other.
“Can Captain Mazrem only hear thoughts formed into words? Or can he see things, imagined or remembered?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Arliss didn’t say and so I doubt that Thainna told her. She mentioned that the girl’s growing rather familiar with Captain Mazrem, as well.”
“I’m not surprised. She has a certain base charm. That was why I assigned her, after all.”
“I thought it was for her loyalty.”
The Crest laughed and nodded.
“That, too,” he said. “Tell Thainna that I want more details. And so speaking, how is the great hero? It’s been over a week since his return and he’s not made a single public appearance.”
“Arliss says that Captain Mazrem is quite mad, that his mind’s been scrambled.”
“I’ve heard that. What does Thainna think?”
“She believes that Captain Mazrem’s been deeply affected by thirty years of war in Alterra, but that he will recover.”
“Good. I have limited uses for a madman.” The Crest coughed. He touched his fingers to his chest and grimaced. “Has she been able to exert any control over Rikard Mazrem?”
“Not yet, but it’s a step forward,” Narissa said. The Eye wished she had better news, no matter how many steps removed from the original source. “Arliss reports that Thainna may be able to use Captain Mazrem’s abilities against him. She says that he’s injured or at least discomfited by fear.”
“Interesting. Has she tried the drams you sent her?”
“Not that I’m aware of, no.”
The Crest looked annoyed. “Anything else? Sex?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell Thainna to report directly to you. I want details and I want results. Now.”
“Hae,” Narissa said with a deep genuflection. “I’ll send for her and have more information within the week.”
“Do that.”
Narissa hesitated. “She’ll want to see her brother.”
“I care very little what Thainna wants,” the Crest snapped, then suddenly smiled. “No. Let her. Perhaps she needs a reminder of her priorities, lest she grow too fond of Captain Mazrem.”
