Page 21 of A King’s Trust (Heart-Mage Trilogy #1)

21

WE DO NOT KILL MESSENGERS

P enny and Lianna didn’t need him for the politics, so Beau buried himself in a frantic consumption of magical knowledge. In the back of his head, he could feel a constant tick like a clock counting down the seconds of Elias’s life.

He’s dead , the rational part of his mind insisted, but the rest of him didn’t believe that at all.

Deep in the most beautiful library Beau had ever seen, amongst the carved wood shelves and tiny art niches and cozy chairs piled with soft, tasseled pillows, the king sat surrounded by books and manuscripts and scrolls dealing with the Maurilel.

He’d begun, on Penny’s advice, in a thick book with a much-creased spine and dozens of pages marked with small scraps of paper, as if it had been referenced a thousand times, The Families of Maurilel Magic: A Definitive Guide.

He hadn’t even known there were different types of Maurilel magic, but each of the strangely named families seemed to have created their own kinds of objects. Spiriters, Fallacists, Smiths, Lifebinders, Carvers—each family had pages of illustrations and names of famous mages who’d made great discoveries or inventions for their branch of magic.

In the margins, Penny had made notations in neat, tiny script of dates, alternate names, and lists of things that must be artifacts attributed to each family.

It was the Tradelords who made Revenant Chains, and according to the book, they were unequivocally evil artifacts.

The Tradelords, sometimes called simply Traders—or Traitors, depending on who you asked—wielded the most controversial magics of the Maurilel age. Scholars who staunchly maintain that magic is inherently neither good nor evil, but dependent on the will of the mage, nonetheless agree that most artifacts created by the Tradelords can serve no purpose but a malevolent one.

While the other families of magic paid the cost for the creation of spells and objects in their own blood, the Tradelords paid in the blood of others—and in some cases, such as with their infamous Revenant Chains, their unholy bargains bartered prisoners’ souls.

An image of Elias, pulsing with dark magic and grinning like a stranger as something laughed with his vocal cords sent a shudder through Beau. He paged through more books until he found an illustration of a jade-green necklace around a man’s throat, not carved in the same shape as the one Elias had put on, but pulsing the same dark energy from slashes like wounds in the man’s flesh.

Beneath the image, in small text: Prisoners, once enslaved, remained animated long enough to complete their business in less than a quarter of instances.

“Enslaved?” he muttered. The pages that followed were one horror after another.

…preferable to select physically strong candidates, as the individual’s physical health equates to the durability of his revenant form. However, a strong will may substitute.

…consider carefully the complexity of business required of the revenant; higher intelligence candidates may be able to accom plish more challenging tasks, but will also be more capable of exploiting loopholes in the master’s commands.

…the difference between ‘alive’ and ‘animated’ is distinct. Candidates perish immediately upon donning the Chain, but may be animated for up to a month afterward. The bargain is complete when the revenant is no longer animated, which will occur a) at completion of business, b) when the revenant is too damaged to sustain form, or c) when the candidate’s will is expended.

Beau was running his finger over that one line— candidates perish immediately upon donning the Chain —and choking down the urge to cry when Penny found him.

“Oh, Beau,” she said, sinking down next to him. She had a riding dress on and gloves shoved in her waistband, ready to travel. “He knew what he was doing. He did it to protect you.”

Beau tipped his head up and took her hand. She was leaving to protect him, too, traveling into Chudeau to meet with families who could just as easily have her imprisoned or killed as help. He couldn’t lose any more people he loved. “I should go with you,” he said. “If they don’t side with me, you’ll be—it’s not safe. Don’t go alone.”

“They’ll try to kill you on sight. Your presence would be a needless complication,” Penny said with finality, kissing his nose. “I have to talk them around. I’ll return with an army, Beau.”

Beau captured one of her hands, cupped it in both of his, and pressed it to his lips, then his forehead. “Please be careful. Please . I need you more than I need an army.”

“I beg to differ,” she said with a laugh.

“I’m very serious.”

She sighed, fond exasperation spiking through the ring. Sitting on his lap, she leaned against him. “I can see that. I will come back, and with an army. Stop underestimating me. I’ve been playing politics with these people since I could speak full sentences.”

And Elias was the best fighter who ever lived, but look at him .

Still, he had to let her go. He didn’t watch her leave; he was afraid he’d be memorizing his last look at her.

Lianna came into the library an hour or two later and found him still touching the same line in the same book, staring off into space. She sat beside him. “So. Found a lot of good news, have you?” she asked lightly. She pulled a handkerchief out of a pocket and scrubbed it roughly over his face, which was how Beau found out he’d been crying.

“The Chain took his soul,” Beau said. “Enslaved it.”

“ Fucking Twelve . Can you reverse that? Cut him loose?”

Beau turned to stare at the shelves. “Maybe? If I could find another artifact that deals in souls. Tradelords, Spiriters, and Lifebinders all did things with—” He waved his hands nebulously in front of him. “—spirit sort of energy. Penny doesn’t have much on the Tradelords because their shit was fucking evil, but maybe…”

Despair overtook him. Even if he found a description of the perfect artifact, something specifically designed to reverse the process of making a revenant, what did it fucking matter? He didn’t have it. Every artifact he had was sitting in his room right now, useless in this endeavor.

“All right. You stick with the scary evil ones and I’ll start looking at Spiriters, hmm?” Lianna said, hopping up to run her fingers along the spines of the books as she perused titles.

“You’re going to help me? I thought you found the Maurilel unbearably boring?”

Lianna rolled her eyes and yanked out two books, stacking them on a table. “Ah, yes, good reminder. Being entertained for the evening is drastically more important than saving the soul of the man my new brother’s been in love with for most of a decade. Phew, close one. I was almost bored!”

Beau let her draw a chuckle out of him and began to read again in earnest.

They’d found descriptions of at least a half-dozen artifacts that would almost certainly help, and Beau was no closer to any solution he could bring to bear. Those that dealt in souls would do nothing for his wounded body, and those that healed the body didn’t touch the soul. And, of course, he’d never even heard of any of the artifacts mentioned.

Abruptly, he realized they were working backward. “I’m such an idiot,” he said aloud, standing and crossing for the library door.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Lianna teased, “but why?”

“Need to research what I have , not what I need.”

He darted down the hall to Penny’s room, shooed a servant out, and pulled the artifacts out of their drawer, laying them out on the bed. He turned the Perception Stone in his hand as he looked over the others, enjoying its strange tug of magic. The stone feather, just as sharp and finely crafted and utterly useless as it always had been. The butterfly pin—he didn’t need to change his appearance. And the Orb of Tethering.

Beau tossed down the stone and picked up the small glass ball, running his thumb over the gold wire. What had the vault card said—extends life? Penny had mentioned something about conditions when she’d pulled it out of Elias’s pocket in the forest. Extends life. Maybe…

He tapped it against his mouth and felt it buzz faintly on his lips. It smelled like magic. Not the awful kind of the Revenant Chain, but something like a rainstorm, like the ocean, like snow falling off a mountain in sheets—monumental and uncontrollable.

Leaving the rest of the artifacts, he marched back to the library. The Orb stayed cool in his hand however long he held it, absorbing no body heat. While he looked over the books, he found himself setting it against his lips or rolling it between his palms. Something about its magic was soothing.

Crouched or sprawled on the floor, he reviewed every book that seemed likely to hold information about the Orb of Tethering. He found dozens of different orbs described, and a handful of tethers. Every time he started to doze off, the glass in his hand sent a cool pulse through his fingers, like a nudge. Like it wanted him to understand.

“I’m trying,” he muttered to it, picking up another book.

He dug through everything from the spirit-magic families. He tossed book after book about war magic aside. He flicked impatiently through magic of illusions, of transportation, of domesticity. Finally, he trudged to the end of the shelves, to the section devoted to the Swains. The Swains were, in Beau’s opinion, useless. The ‘romance mages,’ Families of Maurilel Magic had called them—magic of beauty and love. Nice concepts, but not what he needed now.

He was so certain they’d be useless to him, he was utterly stunned to recognize some of their magic immediately. On the first page he opened in the first Swain book he tried was a drawing of two familiar rings, though the illustration was labeled Rings of the Shared Heart , not Rings of the Throne. The text described them exactly, down even to the different ways people experienced emotions, from physical sensations to visual color distortions to musical notes.

“Strong Swains were known to be able to manipulate emotions through the ring?” Beau read aloud. Baffling. He could do that, and he wasn’t a mage at all.

He took hold of the pages and flipped them with his thumb, letting his eyes unfocus as they rapidly thrummed by.

Wait —

He stopped, creasing a page as he slapped his palm down on the spread. Too far; he flipped back frantically.

There! There it was, the Orb of Tethering, illustrated in precise detail down to the gold leaf laid to make the dainty wires glimmer like the real thing. What was it doing in a book on the Swains ?

The Orb of Tethering is one of the most beautiful celebrations of commitment created by the Maurilel. Devilishly complicated to create, they’re even more challenging to use, as the magic demands perfect and complete dedication on the part of each end of the tether. History is littered with tragic tales like Arkan and Visolde, where orbs are shattered uselessly because one party is unwilling to meet the other’s sacrifice.

Honest communication is key to a successful tether. When each partner understands what the other offers, they can find shared ground and hold these e xpectations in mind while shattering the orb. Only equivalent offerings can form a successful tether.

Beau read on, blinking the blurriness of exhaustion out of his eyes and rereading as much as he needed.

As he understood it, the orb had no guaranteed effects at all. If—and it was a big if —the users were able to tether their souls, the effect depended on the tether’s strength. Some people reported small things, like feeling calmer, breathing more easily, sleeping better

Others found, once tethered, that they didn’t get sick, and injuries healed more quickly. A few legends spoke of people who lived two or three lifetimes with their loved one, health extended far past the norm by the tether.

No one spoke of bringing anyone back from the dead with it. And while it certainly dealt in souls, none of the books mentioned anything about stealing a soul back with it.

Beau went back for the Tradelord books and searched for information on where Elias’s soul would be. He felt—though he wasn’t sure why, as it wasn’t described quite that way—that the Revenant Chain must be another sort of tether, binding the soul of the one who wore it both to their failing body and to some other plane, where it would go when the bargain was complete.

If Beau’s tether were stronger…

A sudden sharp, sour-yogurt taste of shock resonated through his head. He froze as it began to grow more bitter, the acidic and herbal flavors of fear.

“No, no,” he muttered. Through the ring, he sent his concern, his worry for Penny. Two flavors assaulted him. The first seemed involuntary: a spikier, more astringent panic.

The second was an intentional push of honey and lemon, the taste of her calm.

“What’s wrong?” Lianna set her fingers on Beau’s arm.

Beau tried to sort through Penny’s pool without changing anything, wanting to understand the layers of her fear. With his focus so internal, it was hard to speak. His words came out halting and quiet. “Something is wrong. Penny was surprised, and not in a good way. She’s…she’s afraid. Or anxious. She’s not terrified. She’s not…I don’t think she’s in danger. She’s telling me to be calm.”

“You don’t think she’s in danger?” Lianna repeated. “I’m not crazy about that level of certainty.”

“Neither am I, I assure you.” His mind raced. Penny would be in the capital by now, and he’d barely slept since she left. If she was in danger, he’d arrive days late and too exhausted to stand. He could feel every healing wound pulse in time with his heartbeat.

“All right, what are we doing?” Lianna’s expression was fierce.

Beau pushed his questioning, his worry, harder through the ring. Penny’s response slammed into him: calm, determination, a flicker of anger, protectiveness, certainty. The latter was so strong, he coughed on the taste of stone dust.

He didn’t look at Lianna as he said, “She doesn’t want help. She’s certain she can handle whatever it is.”

He heard the snick of a fastener, the faint whisper of metal on leather; Lianna messed idly with the knives she kept on her forearms. The grim set of her mouth and the faraway look in her eyes suggested the same mental calculations he’d been running about the likelihood of being any help to Penny. “And yet…”

Beau nodded. “Yeah. We’re going to the capital.”

R iding at the head of an army did not make Beau feel as powerful as he’d thought it might. For one, it moved painfully slowly. And though it should’ve made him feel safer to be surrounded by swordsmen, he couldn’t stop thinking about how easy it would be for any one of them to be a Watcher, to slip into his tent at night and knife him in the neck.

They gathered gossip as they rolled out of Veritelutte and into Estforet: Lord Courdur, it seemed, had been reunited with the poor Lady Penamour, Duchess of Veritelutte, and she was now enjoying his protective hospitality.

Weeks ago, they heard, the late Prince Beauregard had kidnapped the duchess and tried to solidify his claim to the throne by faking a marriage to her. She’d foreseen this treachery and solicited Lord Courdur’s generous aid in ending a threat to her life and the security of the throne. Humbly and with great regret, Lord Courdur had accepted the burden of the throne in the prince’s stead.

More than once, Beau had to recite the mantra, We do not kill messengers , in his head to still his hands. Lianna was no help; her temper was worse than his, and she despised lies almost as much as he did. He kept her from violence, but she’d spat on a tavern keeper who said, “Shame King Alphonse is already married. Would’ve been better if he married Penamour and took Veritelutte under his wing. Ain’t right, a woman holding all that land.”

Long, empty hours gave Beau too much time to ruminate on Elias, on Penny, on the isle folk, on Courdur, on the lurking danger of an assassin’s knife and the looming war with Courdur.

“I don’t want war,” Beau admitted to Lianna as they rode. “The only reason I agreed to be my father’s heir originally was to prevent this, and here it is. I won’t give Courdur the throne to avoid a fight, but I hate that our people will die for a power struggle.”

“Thought you wanted retribution for the isles? Didn’t you tell them you were going to make ‘such an example no one would ever try to piss in your pot again’ or some such?”

Beau shot Lili a wry look. “I want to make an example of Courdur . Not hundreds or thousands of our people. We’ll need them when the Destiny Riders decide to cross our borders.”

“Uncle Alphonse won’t back down without a fight.” Lili popped a boiled peanut in her mouth from the small sack in her lap. “His move against you in the isles failed—now he’s not fighting for just the crown; he’s fighting for his life. He knows you’ll strike back. He’ll eliminate anyone and anything necessary to protect himself.”

Beau swallowed. “Penny?”

“Vic’s smart, and the people she was going to meet are friends. I don’t know if he’ll quite dare trying to kill her.” Lili grimaced. “Unless she’s pregnant. He’ll have to do something then. Can’t have your spawn running around.”

Beau hadn’t considered that. The blood drained from his face.

“Oof, he forgot how babies are made,” Lili muttered. “See, Beauregard, when a prince and a duchess love each other very much—”

“You are exhausting , Lili,” Beau said, rolling his eyes, but he was grateful anyway; her teasing managed to keep him from dropping into the deepest terror and despair. As he did every few minutes, Beau delved the pool of emotions and reassured himself that Penny was still connected to him, still calm, still resolute. And as she always did back, Penny sent him warmth and reassurance and love.

“Thank you,” Lili said, grinning brightly. “Now where is your guard? I haven’t flirted myself hoarse yet today.”

“Leave Aloise alone,” Beau warned. “She has a job to do.”

“Quit hiring such gorgeous guards and you’ll have to fight fewer nobles for them,” she teased, sticking out her tongue. When Beau’s face fell, her shoulders dropped. “Oh, fuck, I sent you down the Elias hole. I’m sorry ! Think about something else. Hey, what kind of tree is that? The acorns say oak, but I’ll be damned if those aren’t the maple-est leaves I’ve ever seen.”

His fingers trailed to his pocket, where the Orb of Tethering sat wrapped in a handkerchief. Though he’d spent every night of the ride contemplating how to use it for what he needed, he still had no real plan . And the little voice in his head that always doubted him loudly kept saying, Are you sure you even have magic? Fat lot of good it will do you to smash that thing and waste it without any way to make it do what you need.

“Would you help me with an experiment tonight when we make camp?” Beau asked abruptly, and Lili raised an eyebrow.

“Ew. Sorry, even if you weren’t my brother, I’ve tried men. Not for me,” she teased.

“ Ha ha,” Beau said. “I’m serious. I need to test magic, and I’m going to do something stupid. I’d like someone around who can at least call for help, if it goes wrong.”

“That sounds way less boring than reading about it. I’m in.”

Hours later, after camp setup and dinner and half a bottle of wine for courage, Beau stood in his tent with a knife in his hand, his left sleeve rolled up above his elbow, and his sister-in-law sitting on his cot, watching him doubtfully. “You’re going to…cut yourself?”

“Maurilel magic is in the blood,” Beau muttered, staring down at his arm. Before he could think too much about it, he swiped the knife along one of his old scars, reopening a thin red line. Beau made no sound; the pain was so familiar and so strange.

He tilted his arm so blood would run down into his palm and gathered it there messily. What would a mage do with this blood? Probably not hold it in their hand like a child with a skinned palm. Probably have some sort of dedicated ritual bowl with a matching jeweled dagger. He felt a giggle rise up in him and suppressed it.

“Should I be, uh, seeing anything?” Lili asked.

“Hold on.” When he felt there was enough blood in his palm, Beau lifted his hand out in front of him. Feeling silly, he closed his eyes. “Elias,” he whispered, but he willed the word out as hard as he ever had. “I need you. I need you to come to me.”

He squinted one eye open. Nothing had changed with his blood-streaked arm. How did the blood come into it? Did he need to do something with it? Was this all stupid because he actually didn’t have magic at all? Perhaps the Rings of the Throne were simply more attuned to him than most people because they’d been passed down in his family for so long. Perhaps the gold light they thought they saw in his eyes was just reflected light on hazel irises.

Elias? he thought harder. A drop of blood ran ticklishly down the side of his forearm toward his elbow. Fuck, he felt like a fool now. He wished he hadn’t done this in front of Lili. She’d roast him mercilessly for this.

“That wasn’t a command,” Lili said. “Just a statement of fact. Maybe you need to command him to come back.”

Worth a try. He didn’t close his eyes again. He couldn’t take another second feeling that silly.

As he spoke, he shouted in his mind, shoving the command out toward wherever he imagined Elias was just as he pushed his emotions through the ring. “Elias! Come to me.”

The blood in his hand boiled .

Beau yelped, trying to shake it out, but a cold, green flame ate through the pool of blood in his palm and started to climb the drip streaks up his forearm like a fuse. He grabbed at it with his other hand, but the flames freeze-burned through his fingers, climbing irrepressibly to the cut.

And then they burrowed into his arm.

“Fuck! Fuck !” Beau shouted, the ice-spike of green fire driving into his veins.

As quickly as it began, the flames extinguished, leaving Beau panting and grabbing at his arm. His skin was spotlessly clean of blood, and though he still bore a cut, it didn’t bleed. It faintly glowed green, as Elias’s wounds had.

The verdant energy crawled visibly but painlessly back down the inside of his arm toward his hand, tracing out his veins. “Oh no,” he breathed. “Oh fuck , what is it—?”

Lili appeared before him, reaching out to grab his arm. He jerked it away and stumbled back a step. “Don’t touch it,” he said urgently. “This isn’t my magic. This is…Tradelord magic, I guess? It feels bad, like the Chain did.”

“Is it hurting you? What’s it doing to you?”

He ignored the question, staring with horror at the corroded-copper color of every vein in his forearm and left hand. Just above the cut, where the green had tried to spread, his skin was hot , faintly glowing gold.

“Is that your magic?” Lili pointed to the aureate flare that cuffed his forearm, seemingly holding the green fire at bay.

“I don’t know,” Beau said. “I don’t know. I didn’t expect…I don’t know what the fuck is going on. I don’t know if this means I actually do have magic, or if it’s just the Chain responding to me trying to fuck with the commands I’ve given it, or…”

She brushed her fingers tentatively over the gold glow. “It’s burning hot. Does that hurt?”

“No.” He turned his arm to see every angle. “None of it hurts now. It’s just…unsettling.”

When it seemed his arm and whatever strange magic had infested it had reached equilibrium, Lili laughed. “ Gods , Beau, when you say you’re going to try something stupid, you really go for it, don’t you? Vic’d be slicing you to ribbons right now for trying that.”

“Yeah,” Beau said, chuckling slightly, but his chest was filling with a buoyant, giddy sort of hope. “But if I can make magic do whatever the hell it just did by instinct and happenstance, I can definitely make an artifact work a little harder than it’s expecting to. This proves I can do it. And as soon as Elias gets to me, I’m going to. He and I can get Penny and the throne back.”