Page 27

I t’s another two hours before we break up, and it takes Tennet nearly toppling over with fatigue before Fortiss is willing to let everyone go.

He orders Nazar and Caleb to get as much sleep as possible before noon when the councilors will be returning in force with all of the information they’ve been able to scrape together on the Western Realms after Rihad’s purge of the library.

But I can tell from how keyed up Fortiss is that he won’t be sleeping any time soon.

“Walk with me?” he murmurs, and we fall into step together, threading our way back through the First House and to the great banquet chamber.

I smile wearily to see it. While he entertained Tennet and his men in one of the smaller, more intimate dining halls, this great space was filled to bursting just a short while ago during the Tournament of Gold.

Men and women—mostly men—chanting and cheering with genuine camaraderie and excitement for the battles to come.

My smile fades. How many of those men were now dead? Husbands, fathers, sons…brothers.

Fortiss is clearly thinking the same thing as he stalks through the shadowed room, past the empty tables and tidily tucked benches, heading for the far wall and its door into the caverns of the keep.

Up until a short while ago, a dragon had been trapped in the bowels of this great fortress.

Now, that dragon has been freed and the current prisoner residing beneath the First House is arguably far more dangerous.

“Should you be coming down here?” I ask Fortiss. “Can he sense your energy, even if he doesn’t wake?”

“I don’t care if he does. At every turn—especially after I think we can sink no further into the abyss of his betrayal—he surprises me still.

Destroying the history of the Western Realms, the history of the Protectorate?

Dropping homing beacons at the houses so that our enemies can find the location of our strongholds without even having to look?

Lying to us about the dictates of the Imperium when year after year, he sent envoys that he never intended to breach our own borders, let alone journey all the way to the capital city?

Is there no end to it? Are there yet more lies we have yet to uncover?

Is he even near death like he appears, or is this shell, this husk of a man just an illusion meant to deceive us while he is off plotting our destruction? ”

I shake my head. “I don’t think he’s off doing anything in a manner that he wants. Lord Rihad was nothing if not a proud man. Now he’s a prisoner completely at our mercy. He wouldn’t want that; I don’t care how much he’s plotting.”

Fortiss grunts, then moves ahead of me in the narrow corridor, bypassing the stairs that lead down to where I’d first met his beautiful Divh. These stairs go to the holding cells, and barely a quarter of an hour later, we step out into the final passageway.

This corridor is lit up like full day. Two guards stand at the top of the corridor and two at the base next to Rihad’s open door.

“Any movement?” Fortiss asks, and the guard shakes his head.

“He’s resting comfortably, and he doesn’t wake or speak in his sleep.

The guards at the door continue to wear their ear protectors, but we’ve heard nothing this far up.

The councilors who have come down to sit with him appear unaffected by him as well; their questions go unanswered, and he doesn’t volunteer any direction or orders.

They don’t touch him, though.” The guard gives a little smile.

“That at least was an order that they had no problem following.”

“Keep the watch,” Fortiss says, lifting his fist to his heart, then extending his hand to clap the other man on his shoulder.

“Always,” the guard agrees.

He repeats a similar greeting and brief touch with the guards at Rihad’s door, and with this second display, I watch the connection more closely.

The guard isn’t surprised or awkward—he’s used to the move, expects it.

Welcomes it, even. In all the times I saw Rihad interact with his guards, had he ever so much as looked at them, let alone touched them?

We move into Rihad’s room.

As prisons go, this one is more comfortable than most—certainly more comfortable than the cell where they had held me overnight, with my father seething in outrage and Rihad calculating how he could turn the situation of a woman combatant in the Tournament of Gold to his advantage.

That night, Fortiss had realized who I truly was, and how I’d been deceiving him for weeks.

I push those thoughts away as I focus on the man stretched out before us on a pallet heaped with blankets.

For a man who should be dead, Rihad doesn’t stink. He doesn’t even appear to be sleeping. Just…shrunken. Which is somehow worse.

The former lord protector is a tall man, lean and hard, his face dominated by harsh cheekbones and a knife blade of a nose.

His eyes, sunken on the best of days, now are closed beneath their hooded lids, his mouth drawn into an expression of peace that I never saw on his face while he was among the living.

There’s no sound at all in the room save the rhythmic rise and fall of his chest, our only indication that he’s still alive.

“He doesn’t dream, I don’t think,” Fortiss says quietly. “I’ve never seen his eyes move or his lids flicker as if struggling to open. We’ve changed these bedclothes every other day, looking for any hint of blood or even sweat to indicate a fever, and there’s nothing.”

“And you found nothing in his books of magic to indicate how he might have done this? Because it’s certainly not of the Light.”

He snorts. “It’s definitely not of the Light.

Very little that Rihad did was. And yes, there are incantations to preserve life, to thrust a body into a sleep so deep that none may wake them so that they may heal.

But nothing lasting this long. And nothing to indicate that the body would be so perfectly preserved the way it is here.

For our purposes it serves, though. When the agents of the Imperium come, they can take him away as they see fit, order his execution, or demand that he remain our prisoner until his eventual death, natural or otherwise.

It’s a waste of time to guess what they may choose.

So, until they arrive, we wait. But we don’t wait idly. ”

“Mm.” I don’t sense that these words are for me alone, and who’s to say if Rihad can actually hear us in his self-imposed stupor?

But I blinked with surprise as Fortiss takes another step closer, then reaches into one of the pouches hanging at his belt.

He extracts a slender set of shears and a square of white cloth.

Quick as a handmaiden, he snips off a lock of Rihad’s hair, and folds it into the cloth, then tucks it back into the pouch, dropping in the scissors.

While he does this, I stare hard at Rihad.

I don’t understand what Fortiss is doing, but the dark wizard should.

Rihad makes no move, his breathing remaining steady and unconcerned.

Fortiss however isn’t done. He leans forward, his face only a hand’s breadth from Rihad’s, and his expression changes. His jaw locks, his eyes flash, and a cold certainty seems to turn his skin to stone. “ Sahktar ,” he murmurs?—

Rihad’s breath stills in his throat.

I stare from him to Fortiss, but after another breath, a third, a fourth, Fortiss speaks again, only this word I cannot even attempt to make out.

It serves what I suspect to be its intended purpose, however, as Rihad’s body arches, his mouth falling open to draw in a harsh, full breath of air.

After a shuddering exhale, the man returns to the steady rhythm of airflow once again.

Fortiss straightens, and when he turns to me, I’m struck by the difference in his expression. He grins at me, his eyes alight with purpose and intensity. “Got him.”

He gestures me out the door, and we don’t speak, not to each other anyway.

He shares a few murmured words of thanks with the first set of guards, then the second, then we’re out and on to the stairs again climbing swiftly.

Within a few moments we’ve cleared the caverns and are back in the empty banquet hall, but when I expect him to lead us on, he stops and gestures me to a table.

“It’s been a long day and when we finally rest, tomorrow will come too quickly. Have a drink with me?”

He moves off before I can respond to this, striding towards the kitchen where the great feasts were prepared for the warriors of the Tournament of Gold.

I hear the scrape of stone, the rattling of dishes, and I smile to think of my own time in those kitchens, grabbing flagons of wine and ale while I was dressed as a servant girl, desperate to find the truth behind my brother’s murder.

As I always do, I imagine the joy he would have had in seeing all the warriors gathered together, cheering and laughing and eating Rihad out of house and home.

Merritt should have competed in the tournament, the feted son of the Tenth House.

Instead, he died in a lonely vale outside the Shattered City, pierced through by an arrow shot from the bow of Rihad’s assassin.

Why? What power could the creatures of the Western Realms have promised the lord protector such that he was willing to betray his house, his land, the Imperium itself? What promises had been made? What covenants?

“You’re thinking about your brother.”

I look up with a jolt, then blink as Fortiss lays down his impromptu meal. A flagon of wine, a loaf of crusty bread, a part of stewed fruit so aromatic it sets my stomach growling. I reached for the wine to cover the sound as Fortiss drops down next to me on the bench.