The Dread: The Fallen Kings Cycle: Book Two (70 page)
“Did Beyral have anything to add?”
Tris smiled and sat down next to her. He swept the runes into his palm and placed them carefully into the velvet bag, which he returned to Kiara. “Only that we shouldn’t read too much into the runes or expect them to chart a course. Cwynn will have to do that for himself.”
Kiara twined her fingers through his. “How about your magic? Does it tell you anything?”
Tris took a deep breath and sent a tendril of magic along the paths of spirit. But for the first time in many months, nothing stirred in response. “Nothing,” he reported. “No strange hum of power, no looming dark presence, no message from the spirits, no rift in the Flow. I suspect this means we’ll have to figure this out ourselves, one day at a time.” He squeezed her hand. “That’s good enough for me.”
Writing is a lot of time spent stuck in your own head, so it’s a wonderful thing to pop up for air and rediscover wonderful people around me. Thanks certainly to my agent, Ethan Ellenberg, and to Evan Thomas at the agency, for all their hard work. Thanks also to my editor, DongWon Song, and all the wonderful people at Orbit who help my books go from manuscript to finished product and do such a great job of it. Thanks to all my con and bookstore and Renaissance festival friends, both writers and readers, who show up for panels and readings and make the crazy travel stuff much more fun. Most of all, thanks to my family, who helped with the creation of this book in a million little ways and a lot of big ways. I couldn’t do it without you.
Gail Z. Martin
discovered her passion for science fiction, fantasy, and ghost stories in elementary school. The first story she wrote—at age five—was about a vampire. Her favorite TV show as a preschooler was
Dark Shadows
. At age fourteen she decided to become a writer. She enjoys attending science fiction/fantasy conventions, Renaissance fairs, and living history sites. She is married and has three children, a Himalayan cat, and a golden retriever.
www.ChroniclesOfTheNecromancer.com
On Twitter: @GailZMartin
On Facebook: TheWinterKingdoms
www.GhostInTheMachinePodcast.com
If you enjoyed
THE DREAD,
look out for
The first book in the all new
Ascendent Kingdoms Saga
“
T
his has to end.” Blaine McFadden looked at the young girl huddled in the bed, covers drawn up to her chin. She was sobbing hard enough that it nearly robbed her of breath, leaning against Judith, who was murmuring consolations. Mari, his fourteen-year-old sister, looked small and lost. A vivid bruise marked one cheek. She struggled to hold her nightgown together where it had been ripped down the front. Blaine’s right hand opened and closed, itching for the pommel of his sword.
“You’re upsetting her more.” Judith cast a reproving glance his way.
“I’m upsetting her? Father’s the one to blame for this. That drunken son of a bitch—”
“Blaine—” Judith’s voice warned him off, but Blaine would have none of it this night.
“After what he did to our mother—your sister by marriage—you stand up for him?”
Judith McFadden raised her head to meet his gaze. She was a thin, handsome woman in her middle years, and when she dressed for court, it was still possible to see a glimpse of the beauty she had been in her youth. Tonight, she looked worn. “Of course not.”
“I’m sick of his rages. Sick of being beaten when he’s on one of his binges—”
Judith’s lips quirked. “You’ve been too tall for him to beat for years now.”
At twenty-six and a few inches over six feet tall, Blaine stood a hand’s breadth taller than Lord McFadden. The work he did around the manor and its lands had filled out his chest and arms. He was no longer the small, thin boy his father caned for the slightest imagined infraction. Now, Blaine thought, his heart thudding with rage, his father found other, weaker targets.
“He killed our mother when she got between him and me. He took his temper out on my hide until I was tall enough to fight back. He started beating Carr when I got too big to thrash. I had to put his horse down after he’d beaten it and broken its legs. Now this… it has to stop.”
“Blaine, please.” Judith turned, and Blaine could see tears in her eyes. “Anything you do will only make it
worse. I know my brother’s tempers better than anyone.” Absently, she stroked Mari’s hair.
“By the gods… did he…” But the shamed look on Judith’s face as she turned away answered Blaine’s question.
“I’ll kill that son of a bitch,” Blaine muttered, turning away and sprinting down the hall.
“Blaine, don’t. Blaine—”
He took the stairs at a run. Above the fireplace in the parlor hung two broadswords, weapons that had once belonged to his grandfather. Blaine snatched down the lowest broadsword. Its grip felt heavy and familiar in his hand.
“Master Blaine—” Edward followed him into the room. The elderly man was visibly alarmed as his gaze fell from Blaine’s face to the weapon in his hand. Edward had been Glenreith’s seneschal for longer than Blaine had been alive. Edward, the expert manager, the budget master, the secret keeper.
“Where is he?”
“Who, m’lord?”
Blaine caught Edward by the arm and Edward shrank back from his gaze. “My whore-spawned father, that’s who. Where is he?”
“Master Blaine, I beg you—”
“Where is he?”
“He headed for the gardens. He had his pipe with him—”
Blaine headed for the manor’s front entrance at a dead run. Judith was halfway down the stairs. “Blaine, think about this. Blaine—”
He flung open the door so hard that it crashed against
the wall and ran down the manor’s sweeping stone steps. There was a full moon, and it lit the sloping lawn well enough for Blaine to make out the figure of a man in the distance strolling down the carriage lane. The smell of his father’s pipe smoke wafted back to him, as hated as the odor of camphor that always clung to Lord McFadden’s clothing.
The older man turned at the sound of Blaine’s running footsteps. “You bastard! You bloody bastard!”
Lord Ian McFadden’s eyes narrowed as he saw the sword in Blaine’s hand. Dropping his pipe, the man grabbed a rake that leaned against the stone fence edging the carriageway. He held its thick oak handle across his body like a staff. Lord McFadden might be well into his fifth decade, but in his youth he had been an officer in the king’s army, where he had earned King Merrill’s notice and his gratitude. “Go back inside, boy. Don’t make me hurt you.”
Blaine did not slow down or lower his sword. “Why? Why Mari? There’s no shortage of court whores. Why Mari?”
Lord McFadden’s face began to redden and his lips drew into a sneer. “Because I can. Now drop that sword if you know what’s good for you.”
Blaine could feel his blood thundering in his ears as his heart pounded. In the distance, he could hear Judith screaming his name. Blaine’s only focus was the man in front of him and his father’s smug, leering grin.
“I guess this cur needs to be taught a lesson.” Lord McFadden swung at Blaine with enough force to have shattered his skull if Blaine had not ducked the heavy rake. McFadden gave a roar and swung again, but Blaine
lurched forward, taking the blow on his shoulder to get inside McFadden’s guard. The broadsword sank hilt deep into the man’s chest, slicing through his fine satin waistcoat.
Lord McFadden’s body shuddered, and he dropped the rake. His eyes, wide with surprise, met Blaine’s gaze. “Didn’t think you had it in you,” he gasped.
Behind him, Blaine could hear footsteps pounding on the cobblestones, heard panicked shouts and Judith’s scream. Nothing mattered to him, nothing at all except for the ashen face of his father. Blood soaked Lord McFadden’s clothing, and gobbets of it splashed Blaine’s hand and shirt. Lord McFadden gasped for breath, his mouth working like a hooked fish out of water. Blaine let him slide from the sword, watched numbly as his father fell backward onto the carriageway in a spreading pool of blood.
“Master Blaine, what have you done?” Selden, the groundskeeper, was the first to reach the scene. He gazed in horror at Lord McFadden, who lay twitching on the ground, breathing in labored, slow gasps.
Blaine’s grip tightened on the sword in his hand. “Something someone should have done years ago.”
A crowd of servants was gathering; Blaine could hear their whispers and the sound of their steps on the cobblestones. “Blaine! Blaine!” He barely recognized Judith’s voice. Raw from screaming, choked with tears, his aunt must have gathered her skirts like a milkmaid to run from the house this quickly. “Let me through!”
Heaving for breath, Judith pushed past Selden and grabbed Blaine’s left arm to steady herself. “Oh, by the gods, Blaine, what will become of us now?”
Lord McFadden wheezed painfully and went still.
Shock replaced numbness as the rage drained from Blaine’s body.
It’s actually over. He’s finally dead
.
“Blaine, can you hear me?” Judith was shaking his left arm. Her tone had regained control, alarmed but no longer panicked.
“He swung first,” Blaine replied distantly. “I don’t think he realized, until the end, that I actually meant to do it.”
“When the king hears—”
Blaine snapped back to himself and turned toward Judith. “Say nothing about Mari to anyone,” he growled in a voice low enough that only she could hear. “I’ll pay the consequences. But it’s for naught if she’s shamed. I’ve thrown my life away for nothing if she’s dishonored.” He dropped the bloody sword, gripping Judith by the forearm. “Swear to it.”
Judith’s eyes were wide but Blaine could see she was calm. “I swear.”
Selden and several of the other servants moved around them, giving Blaine a wary glance as they bent to carry Lord McFadden’s body back to the manor.
“The king will find out. He’ll take your title… Oh, Blaine, you’ll hang for this.”
Blaine swallowed hard. A knot of fear tightened in his stomach as he stared at the blood on his hand and the darkening stain on the cobblestones.
Better to die avenged than crouch like a beaten dog
. He met Judith’s eyes and a wave of cold resignation washed over him.
“He won’t hurt Mari or Carr again. Ever. Carr will inherit when he’s old enough. Odds are the king will name you guardian until then. Nothing will change—”
“Except that you’ll hang for murder,” Judith said miserably.
“Yes,” Blaine replied, folding his aunt against his chest as she sobbed. “Except for that.”
“You have been charged with murder. Murder of a lord, and murder of your own father.” King Merrill’s voice thundered through the judgment hall. “How do you plead?” A muted buzz of whispered conversation hummed from the packed audience in the galleries. Blaine McFadden knelt where the guards had forced him down, shackled at the wrists and ankles. Unshaven and filthy from more than a week in the king’s dungeon, Blaine’s long brown hair hung loose around his face. He lifted his head to look at the king defiantly.
“Guilty as charged, Your Majesty. He was a murdering son of a bitch—”
“Silence!”
The guard at Blaine’s right shoulder cuffed him hard. Blaine straightened and lifted his head once more.
I’m not sorry and I’ll be damned if I’ll apologize, even to the king. Let’s get this over with
. He avoided the curious stares of the courtiers and nobles in the gallery, those for whom death and punishment were nothing more than gossip and entertainment.
Only two faces caught his eye. Judith, dressed in the somber tones of a funeral, gowned for high court, sat stiffly, her face unreadable although her eyes glinted angrily. Beside her sat Carensa, daughter of the Earl of Rhystorp. He and Carensa had been betrothed to wed later that spring. Carensa was dressed in mourning clothes, and her face was ashen, her eyes red-rimmed. Blaine could
not meet her gaze. Of all that his actions cost him—title, lands, fortune, and life—losing Carensa was the only loss that mattered.