Page 8 of Crown of the Dunes (The Ballan Desert #2)
Chapter three
Keera
T he handle of the cane bit heavily into my palm as I leaned my weight on it, forcing my weakened right leg to lever me up another stone step in the winding staircase. If Aderyn, who walked behind me, was impatient with my pace, she didn’t say so.
In fact, she had said very little since she came to fetch me, helping me dress gently but quickly. She had brought me loose pants and a belted vest. It was the most of my own body I had seen in weeks of being dressed in the shapeless, shift-like garments provided by the infirmary.
As Aderyn lifted the gown over my head, my gaze flickered down over my skin, and a lump rose in my throat.
The shadows of burns and blisters littered one side of my body, healed, and less severely scarred than they might have been, although they would never truly leave me.
With the amount of my body that they covered, it was clear that I would be dead if not for the efforts of Erix.
And the queen.
My hands shook as Aderyn held up a mirror and offered me a piece of string to tie my hair back with.
The right side of my scalp remained smooth where the lava wyrm’s flesh had burnt my hair away.
With a heavy sigh, I pushed the remainder of my hair to the left and braided it away from my face along the side of my head.
As I took the tie from Aderyn to hold the end in place, she did not smile, but she gave me an approving nod.
While fully shaven heads, like hers, were common among the clans—convenient for both combat and keeping cool—partially shaved heads were also a popular clan style, and I had braided my hair like many riders with such a style would.
I stared at my reflection and frowned at the warrior who stared back at me.
My deep-set eyes and upturned nose were accentuated by the hollowness of my cheeks and the harshness of my new hairstyle.
The mantle of the hero of Kelvadan, who had saved them from Lord Alasdar, sat heavier on me at the sight.
The remarkably scarless right side of my face—aside from the absence of hair—pressed the burden on me even more heavily.
Guilt made the weight of responsibility a burden to carry—guilt that I still craved the touch of one who would see Kelvadan fall and fear that I would fail them still.
Some of that weight abated in the face of curiosity at Aderyn’s reticence. While she was never one for unnecessary chatter—likely part of why I had grown comfortable in her home so quickly—we had never been prone to this thick of a silence.
As we climbed the stairs, I glanced back over my shoulder quickly, finding her gaze darting over the passages that lead off to our left and right, as if watching for a threat. I frowned and continued my climb.
Finally, to the relief of the quivering muscles in my thighs, we crested the last flight of stairs to the queen’s private terrace.
She sat at a small metal table, as she had when she waited for me to join her for lessons in controlling my magic.
The sight warmed my chest with comfortable familiarity.
As I hobbled closer though, that warmth was chased away by an icy horror that the rising heat of the morning sun did nothing to dispel.
The queen hunched in a wheeled chair, accentuating her slight frame.
While she had always appeared petite and never pretended to be in her youth, the strength and pride that normally kept her chin up and her eyes bright had fled.
Her head was bent over, and she stared at where her hands were folded in her lap.
More gray hairs than I remembered were woven into her twisted braid.
My cane rapped against the stone, and her gaze snapped up. Despite the depth of the lines around her eyes, they held a smile as she caught sight of me.
I braced myself for a wave of overwhelming magic and feeling at the sight of her—but it never came.
The night before, I had laid awake, trying to pick apart my feelings about my coming audience with the queen. They had remained as tightly woven and unable to be unraveled as Neven’s finest cloth.
In the desert with Erix, I had been overcome with anger at what she and Kaius had done to their son. Now, back within the walls of Kelvadan though, everything that had been so clear became murky, and the rage in my belly remained dormant.
Slowly, I crossed the courtyard and lowered myself into the chair across from her. I extended my right leg out in front of me as I did so, still stiff after so much immobilization.
I settled myself as comfortably as I could, and the queen smiled wryly, as if intimating “What a pair we make.”
We stared in silence for a moment before a throat clearing at the doorway caught our attention. I turned to where Aderyn hovered.
“I have some duties to attend to,” she said, her intention in giving us some privacy clear.
With that, she withdrew, and Queen Ginevra and I were alone on the terrace.
I looked back at her, but her gaze had drifted over the edge of the railing.
Instead of looking out over the horizon though, she looked down at the stacked tiers of the city below us, spreading out like the ripples in an oasis disturbed by a thrown pebble.
“It was the lyra leaf tea,” she started without preamble.
“…the tea?”
“I had become so reliant on it, that I didn’t even realize it was poisoning me slowly.
It was safe in small doses, but it turns out decades of constant use takes its toll.
” Her voice was even. Resigned. “It was only when I stopped and reached for the desert’s magic to heal you that it became clear what I had done. ”
My voice came out raspy and broken, just like it had when I first started speaking again after years in exile. “I’m sorry.”
She lifted her gaze from the city below me, examining my face.
“I’m just glad I still managed to save you some pain and scarring.” Her expression, which had been stoic, fell. “After all, I feel responsible for what happened.”
“Responsible?” Where words had come slowly before, now she shocked the question out of me.
“The Viper—Erix—my… my son. He was the one who lured you away after I wouldn’t send help to the clans. Then he led you to Lord Alasdar to torture you like this. If I hadn’t failed him, or if I had been able to send riders to help face the lava wyrm…”
I opened my mouth as she trailed off, but words wouldn’t come.
The anger I had expected to feel at Queen Ginevra now rose up to choke me.
It wanted to pour out of me in torrents—rage at the way a mother had feared her son so much that she drove him away, just like my parents had. It bubbled hot and potent in my belly.
But the look in the queen’s eyes gave me pause, putting a stopper on my anger, leaving me unfulfilled and frustrated. An emotion that had seemed raw and simple in the wilds became another thing complicated in this Great City.
“Erix isn’t responsible for what happened to me,” I finally bit out. “And you still have a chance to set all of this right.”
As I recounted the tale of our battle with the lava wyrm and what Erix had told me about the Heart of the Desert, the queen’s gaze hardened, calculations clearly taking place behind her eyes despite the exhaustion in every line of her face .
“If we can just get into Kelvar and Alyx’s rooms, we can restore the Heart and stop the destruction in the desert—prevent this war,” I explained emphatically.
The queen did not dismiss my claims, but neither did she jump at the information like I thought she would. “How do we know this wasn’t just another one of Lord Alasdar’s manipulations of Erix?”
I hesitated, grasping for the answer that seemed to evade words.
It was a question I had already asked myself several times.
“Don’t you feel it? The way the air is wilder than it used to be, as if lightning might strike at any moment?
Something has unbalanced the magic of the desert.
It would explain why the monsters rise again, like the lava wyrm that attacked Clan Otush. ”
The queen grimaced. “The crops in the irrigated lands around the city have been failing, and the herds grow thinner and more ragged by the day.”
“Surely you can’t dismiss the story out of hand,” I pressed. “We need to break into the tower and see if it’s true. It’s the only way to avoid a war.”
The queen sighed heavily. “Will it though? Does anybody besides you and Erix know about the Heart?”
I blinked and shook my head. “Lord Alasdar kept it a secret from the other Lords. He didn’t want anybody trying to steal the Heart for their own gain.”
The line of the queen’s mouth hardened. “I told you once that what people believe is often more important than what is actually true. If the riders of the clans truly think that destroying Kelvadan is the way to solve their plight, working to restore the Heart won’t stop their attack. Desperation blinds people to reason.”
The queen’s words swirled in my head, throwing stones into the clear flow of logic in my mind. As always, the realities of the situation were more nuanced than I had given them credit for, and Queen Ginevra picked up on the complications more easily than I.
“Aderyn told me Erix took charge of the combined clans after Lord Alasdar’s death,” I argued. “He will want to broker peace. He knows about the Heart.”
The queen sat up straighter, some of the regal elegance that had been absent in her posture returning at the mention of Erix .
“The spy that sent us that information has also sent word that the nine clans are preparing to mount a siege. Although we haven’t heard from him since right after our attack on the encampments, I believe The Viper has every intention of following through on Lord Alasdar’s plan.
Our failed attack has likely only added fuel to the clans’ ire. ”
Fire, dampened up until now by the queen’s guilt, now burst forth and flooded my veins at the use of Erix’s former title.