Page 23 of A King’s Trust (Heart-Mage Trilogy #1)

23

HELL

H e stood in a room chiseled entirely out of the green stone from which the Revenant Chain had been carved, air so cold it ached to breathe. From his chest, a thin, gold line trailed off toward a floating form Beau didn’t have time to identify.

Another figure, half-again as tall as Beau and dripping unholy magic, stepped in the way.

“You are very far out of your depth, little heart-mage,” it said.

Beau took a step back, fighting to get his bearings. This…creature…was humanoid, but its strange, otherworldly form defied any categorization his mind tried to fit it with. Terrible, dangerous, fiendish, and beautiful in an awful, unbearable way. The voice was the same, flaying and chilling him as its magic did, but simultaneously drawing him in.

He had no idea how long he had stared, silent. The creature gave no sign of impatience. “I’m—” His voice broke, and he swallowed hard. “I’m not a mage.”

Its smile made him ache. “Oh,” it breathed, “I do love a liar, and they are so rare among your kind. But you need work no harder to intrigue me, heart-mage. Such sweet, sweet offerings. Put the taste of you in my mouth, and then follow an offering straight into my home? You have my fullest attention.” It advanced on him as it spoke, delivering the last few words as a whisper that curled along his neck. Beau shuddered, frozen to the spot, afraid to breathe.

Though he had no idea what this entity was, he knew in his bones that he did not want its fullest attention.

“I didn’t come here for you. I came for Elias.”

Its eyes flared, and it turned slightly so it and Beau both could look at Elias’s form, floating slumped in the air behind it. Every wound Beau had seen on the revenant was present on him; his body had been cut and pierced so many times he was simply a mess of red in places. A pool of blood and entrails filled the floor beneath him. Aside from Courdur, Beau had never seen a more viscerally destroyed corpse.

“The offering?” The creature chuckled, a dark sound that vibrated through Beau’s chest. “You would attempt to retrieve him? Do you mean to tell me he spoke truth when he said he put the Chain on himself? He tried to tell me, but he is such a beautiful liar, I could not give it credence. I was too cruel in my disbelief.”

It stroked its hand tenderly across one of Elias’s cheeks as if in apology. Elias twitched and groaned. His eyes moved beneath the lids fitfully.

Beau staggered toward him. “You did this to him?” A sob caught in his throat: relief that Elias was alive and horror that he’d been mutilated so completely and was still alive .

The creature cast a sharp, sidelong glance at Beau. Its clawed hands moved continually over Elias, and where it touched, flesh stitched itself together, reassembling into slopes of muscle and skin Beau remembered. “ You did this to him, heart-mage. Some of the heaviest business I have seen a revenant bear.”

It studied Beau for a moment, then narrowed its eyes. “The necromage slavers built the deal to ensure their prisoners would feel in their soul whatever torment their bodies endured. Once the deal is complete, I prefer to give them their relief.”

It ran the tip of a claw lightly along the gold thread between Beau and Elias, and Beau shivered as he felt it distorting the tether’s magic. “I do not expect a heart-mage to understand necromage bargains,” it said, “but I must wonder what has happened on your plane to produce a heart-mage who does not know well enough to leave slavers’ magic alone. You offered your own blood in a necromage’s trade. How is it you do not know better?”

Everything in Beau’s mind was telling him not to trust this creature, even after the mercy it had shown Elias’s broken soul. But he found his mouth opening regardless. “There are no mages anymore. Only the objects they left behind. We study them to try to understand how to use them, but books can only tell us so much.”

The creature bent toward him, bringing its face close to his and sucking air in as if inhaling his words. It closed its eyes, mouth working like it was tasting, savoring. “So honest. So earnest. Like your magic.” It leaned close and whispered, “May I have your soul? I have never consumed a heart-mage soul. It smells delicious .”

“No,” Beau said, stepping back. “I’m going back to my plane, to my body, and I’m taking Elias’s soul with me.”

“It need not be now. I am happy to pluck your soul at the end of your mortal life. His as well. You could spend eternity together, in a way. Poetic.”

When Beau only shook his head in fervent denial, it smiled again, and its unholy allure drew a gasp out of him. Its fingers found the faint gold thread again. “I could tear this so easily,” it breathed, “and the one that ties you to your plane as well. Keep you here just as you are. You are so, so far out of your depth. Do you know what is required to make fast a soul tether?”

Beau nodded, trying to look more certain than he felt. His knees shook. “He has to agree to my terms. And it has to be strong enough to repair his body as well.”

“Indeed,” it said. It studied him, eyes cycling through colors he’d never seen, colors he hadn’t known existed. There was so much he’d never known existed.

He stared helplessly back at the entity, trapped in numb awe. “I have made a decision, heart-mage.”

It tugged on the gold line, pulling Beau closer hand over hand with no visible effort. When he stood less than a foot from it, it bent to put its eyes level with his. He could feel its breath, cold and searingly painful against his face. “I will not tear your tethers and imprison you here. I will allow you to touch him and attempt to complete it—on two conditions.”

Beau couldn’t move. The constant, inexorable pressure on the gold line where it was rooted in his chest was on the edge of tearing it, an awful, sickening almost-pain. “What conditions?”

“First: if the tether fails either in binding your souls or in repairing his body, you will both stay with me. You will give me freely whatever I desire, heart-mage, for as long as your soul dwells in my home, and then I will consume you and let you rest.”

Its voice promised pain and pleasure and torments he couldn’t begin to imagine. He wondered fleetingly what the alternative was; where was his soul supposed to go? Beau couldn’t bear to look at it anymore. He shut his eyes and said, “And the second condition?”

“You will permit me to visit you.”

Beau blinked his eyes open again, frowning. “Visit me? On my plane? In the flesh?”

It smiled again. This close, he could see each long, glistening tooth was etched with runes. “Yes. A single visit is all I ask.”

What choice did he have? He had nothing at all to bargain with. “I would choose the time. You’d have to be invited—called. And you couldn’t hurt anyone.”

“Oh, do not limit yourself, heart-mage. If you call me, you may want to take advantage of the damage I can do,” it said, chuckling with deep, devilish mirth. “I will submit to being called. I will not cause harm to you or to Elias.”

“You will not cause harm to anyone I care about.”

“Care is too broad. A heart-mage can trouble himself over half the world,” the creature snapped, and for the first time, Beau felt the devastating hint of how powerful the thing truly was, how much it had softened and gentled to speak to him. “I grow impatient.”

Its claws pressed into the tether until he felt the magic wither and peel. “I will not harm the ones you love personally. You will place no more restrictions on me,” it hissed.

Something much more vital than magic from a glass orb was starting to shred under this creature’s claws. Beau fought down a whimper, every corner of his being vibrating like glass about to shatter. “I agree,” he gasped out. “With those conditions, it’s a deal.”

When it released him, relief drove him to his knees. It had already turned away from him, reaching out to run the backs of its fingers along Elias’s jaw. “Wake, morsel. Wake deaf and dumb, and despair to see your heart-mage risked himself for you.”

Elias’s eyes slitted open. When they met Beau’s, they went wide with horror. He thrashed in the air, and though he wasn’t bound in any way Beau could see, he hung as if tied in place with rope. He tried to shout, but no sound came out.

Beau didn’t know if any of the gods could hear him here, but he prayed with the entirety of his soul for this to work. He didn’t try to speak; the creature had said Elias would be deaf. He reached up toward Elias so the gold line of the almost-tether lay along his palm.

The books had spoken about all the necessary terms, the things that needed to be held back and the things that must be offered. They’d recommended couples lay out detailed documents, memorizing them so they could feel them when the orb was broken.

Beau didn’t know what was required to make a tether strong enough to bring a body back from the dead. He didn’t know how to communicate carefully delineated terms to someone who couldn’t hear or speak to him. And, truth be told, he didn’t know how to hold anything back from someone he loved.

So he didn’t.

Everything , he willed into the tether. Everything is yours. All of me. It’s yours. I’m yours.

Elias looked at his offered hand, the gold line that lay on it, and Beau’s face. He shook his head; he didn’t understand. His mouth formed questions he couldn’t ask. His eyes flicked to the creature standing over Beau’s right shoulder, and raw horror played over his face. He turned back to Beau’s hand.

I’m giving you everything. Beau willed the thought toward Elias harder than he’d ever tried to send any magic command. Give me all of you in return.

Elias nodded. He licked his lips. He swallowed hard. He grabbed Beau’s hand, gold line lighting up hot between their palms.

The tether pulled tight, jerking Elias down out of his floating imprisonment, and then Beau and Elias both started to slide away, the room blurring around them. Did it work? Beau’s mind fired frantically. He held his breath.

The creature’s hand closed around Beau’s arm, and he felt the tether tighten painfully. “My name is Vensharice, heart-mage. When you speak it, I will come.” Its fingers uncurled, and Beau let Elias’s unyielding grip pull him back toward reality.

B eau was too big to fit back into his body. Folding, crushing, sliding himself into the ends of his fingers, the cavity of his chest, the length of his legs was the painstaking work of an eternity. When he had enough control to take a breath, the gasp shuddered and stuck like his lungs had forgotten their function. Puppeting limbs was too much, but he could manage eyes.

He peeled one open, then the other. A face swam into focus.

“Pen,” he croaked. He tugged at the muscles at each corner of his mouth until they raised into a smile. “Did it work? Is he alive?”

Penny leaned forward, the brown of her eyes splintering and glittering with tears. “Beau!” She turned away and said, “He’s—” Then her eyes refocused on his, wide and hungry, eating him up. “You’re alive. Gods , you’re alive!” He became aware of pressure on his chest and realized she had his shirt clenched in both hands.

With immense effort, remembering how tendon and ligament bound bone and muscle, he lifted one arm, resting his palm atop her hands. “’Course I’m alive. Just had to get this soul back in. Elias—”

“El is alive,” she said, nodding. “You did it.” Her voice broke and she bent, pressing her forehead against their stacked hands on his chest. She was shaking.

The other arm was harder to puppet. He lifted it eventually, running fingers over her soft, soft hair. “I’m all right. Everything is all right. I didn’t have a chance to say it before I…went away, but you were incredible. Thank you. Thank you. You gave me the crown.”

He closed his eyes, opened them again. A blink, he supposed, but a slow one. He was so tired. “I was afraid I wouldn’t get back to tell you I love you. I love you, Pen.”

Penny pressed herself to him so hard it hurt, sobs wracking her. Beau focused, leaking back into his own brain. He found the pool of emotions there and peered down into it.

Relief. It was relief shaking her like a rabbit in a dog’s mouth.

He examined the edges of the pool, saw how they stretched away from him, gold and shimmering. Ah . The entity’s words— I could tear this tether so easily, and the one that ties you to your plane as well —slid into clarity. “You were the other tether, the one that let us come back,” he said aloud. Something like a laugh coughed out of him. “Holy shit, if I didn’t love you, if we didn’t have the rings—”

“Beau?” Elias’s face appeared above him, whole and hale and creased with worry, and an echo of Penny’s relief rocked through the king. “Does it hurt?”

With one hand under Penny’s head and the other tangled in her hair, Beau had no way to reach out for Elias, so he just let his eyes drink him in. His clothing was a shredded mess, but the skin visible beneath was almost entirely flawless. Beau could see glimpses of something on his chest, but it didn’t look like a wound. “Hurt? No, nothing hurts. I’m just so tired. It was hard to fit my soul back in. Are you all right? You look perfect.”

For some reason, that made El’s face crumple. “Perfect,” he said, nodding. He lifted his hand toward Beau, tracing a beautiful, opalescent line across the back of the hand. It caught the light, fragmenting into alternating pale and fiery colors as he pulled his scraps of sleeve back. The line ran up his forearm, along the back of his arm, up his shoulder and to the back of his neck. It was strangely familiar. He held his arm out closer to Beau’s eyes; more glimmering lines hatched his forearm, straight and thin. Then he pulled his shirt aside to show his chest.

Beau jerked, sitting half up. Those were his tattoos on Elias’s torso, though they were painted in milky, prismatic swirls instead of black ink. His scars decorating El’s body in milk-and-fire lines. “What—?”

“We made a trade,” Elias said, face grim.

Hefting himself up until he was sitting, one arm around Penny, Beau finally looked at himself.

Those opalescent scars were everywhere on his body, thick and ropy in places, thin and spiderwebbed in others, cratered like ragged holes in still others. He couldn’t find a single square inch of himself clear of them. In most of his torso, he was more scar than flesh. Their pale kaleidoscopic light was hypnotic; he couldn’t stop staring.

At length he muttered, “Even your scars are pretty, El. You should be studied.”

A strange choking sound from Elias and Penny drew his attention away from his body. They were laughing, though their grim, tearful eyes made it seem a joke told from the gallows.

The throne room doors slammed open, and Lianna strode through, a lurid spray of blood across her breastplate. Behind her, Aloise entered more slowly, shutting the doors carefully behind her. When she caught Beau’s eyes, her entire body sagged with relief.

“Everything properly went to shit out there for a while, but we’ve mostly got it sorted,” Lili said. “What the hell happened in here? Why do you look like somebody carved you up and glued you back together with magic?”

“I believe I was, um, dead.” Beau laughed. “A temporary condition. I’ve reconstituted.”

“What a stunningly unsettling way to say you’re alive,” Lianna said. She gripped his arm and shook him slightly as if testing how solid he was. Then her eyes went past him to Elias. “And I see you’ve sucessfully un-revenanted the revenant. Hello, prince-killer. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Duchess’s sister, I presume,” Elias said in his deep-gravel voice, bowing his head to her.

She grinned. “The very same.” She winked at Beau and said, “I fully understand what all the fuss was about now. I mean, he’s not for me, alas , but I get it.”

“Lili, everything went as planned?” Penny asked.

Lianna shrugged. “Better, in fact. Uncle Alphonse was, shall we say, not much of a military strategist, and it seems the people advising him turned up dead a couple of weeks ago.”

Elias’s lips lifted in the faintest possible smirk.

“Most of his fighters surrendered as soon as the nobles rode out, shouting that Courdur was dead. Lord Tivelyn and I were just discussing what to do with them.”

Beau swayed on his feet as they discussed the logistics. Penny was in her element, command pouring off her as she counted directives off on her fingers. Lianna, too, was entirely comfortable, armed and armored, relaying concerns and countering ideas. Granvallée’s most formidable nobles, and they were on his side.

An arm circled his waist, holding him steady. “Sit down, Highness.” Elias’s voice: he’d tried not to think about it for the weeks of travel, but having it back was the first cool drink of water after a long stumble through the desert.

Beau let El walk him to the throne and ease him down onto the seat. It was just as uncomfortable as he’d always imagined it would be. “When you came back,” the king said, watching the others talking, “was my body all in one piece?”

Elias hesitated. “No.”

“Ah.” Penny’s visible grief and palpable relief made more sense. “Was yours?” Elias nodded. “Good.”

Lianna and Aloise left again, talking quietly, and Penny turned her face toward Beau and Elias. There was something in her eyes, a sort of shadow when she looked at him, like she was still picturing him dead on the floor.

“Beau…” Elias knelt down next to the throne, resting his elbows on the carved wooden arm of the massive chair. “How do I thank you for what you did? How do I earn your forgiveness? How do I begin to repay you?”

“Repay?” Beau considered that. “You’re mine to forgive as I please. And I do forgive you. I don’t know that you owe me a debt.”

Elias frowned incredulously.

“All right,” Beau said with a shrug. “If you feel you do, you do. Here’s my proposal: pay me in honesty. Never lie to me again for as long as we live. No white lies. No lies of omission. No oblique answers to ‘protect’ me. I gave you everything, which means somewhere in there, you have my honesty. Use it.”

There was no trace of teasing or sarcasm in Elias’s response of, “Yes, Your Majesty.”

Penny crossed the room to them, setting a hand against each of their cheeks. “I cannot believe you’re both alive,” she whispered. “Lianna will work with the others to take care of things here in the capital if you need to rest. In a few days, we can announce—”

Beau grabbed her hand, kissed it. “No. There’s too much work to do. A celebration feast, a coronation—then we should make our move on the Destiny Riders while our forces are gathered. Which means you and I need to visit Almeida, the sooner the better.”

She blinked, and Beau felt her surprise and pleasure; it was exactly what she would’ve said, had she not been so worried about his wellbeing. “If you’re able, but it can wait a few days, Beau. You came back from—”

“The dead, yes,” Beau said, shrugging. “I feel fine. Come on. Let’s get some servants started cleaning up in here.”

For the next several hours, Beau was the perfect king. He cleaned up and redressed quickly, walked the fields to congratulate the fighters, assembled a hasty but sufficient victory dinner for the leaders, and sent wine and beer out for the soldiers to celebrate around their fires.

It was not as hard as it had been in the past to say the right thing, to smile the right smile, to offer a clap on the back or a shake of the hand or a regal nod. Whatever he’d given to Elias, he thought he might have taken some of the man’s ability to play a part. Though his appearance gave everyone pause, it also called up some of the awe and fear Beau had always seen these people give his father.

When his strength finally gave out, he was already walking through the door of his bedroom and could collapse into bed with impunity. Elias sagged down on the end of the bed next to him, and Penny leaned against the bedside table to remove her boots.

“What a fucking day,” Beau said into the mattress.

Elias lay back, arm warm against Beau’s side. “Yes. Fucking day. Fucking month. Fucking eternity.” Hoarse and humorless.

When Penny climbed onto the bed, the too-soft mattress sank in the middle, tumbling them together. Beau could feel all of their heartbeats; he couldn’t pick his apart from the others. The pure, simple pleasure of warm bodies against him and lungs moving in rhythm with his lulled him into a syrupy, drunken sort of joy.

There were many, many questions to answer. Many problems to solve. Many threats at the door. But tonight , he had Elias and he had Penny and he had a crown. The world was right.