Read The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala Online
Authors: Jeffe Kennedy
U
rsula and I fell off our horses and onto our knees into the deep snow. Between us, we bracketed Hugh. She plunged her bare hands into his rent throat, as if to hold his lifeblood in by sheer force of will. Tears ran down her face, unheeded.
I held his hand as the last bit of brilliance left his face.
Dimly I became aware that fighting had begun and abruptly ended. I couldn’t think about that. It seemed all I could do to track the slowing thud of my heart, to gaze on Hugh’s lifeless face and grasp that he was dead.
Hugh was dead and Rayfe lived.
And I was frozen inside.
Ursula finally pulled her hands from Hugh’s cooling flesh and wrung them together, the blood sticky and covering her to the wrists, like dull red gloves. Her gray eyes lacked all steel; instead they were haunted, ghostlike, the shadows of her skull ringing them in a wide circle of dread.
“What do I do?” she whispered. “Andi—I don’t know what to do.”
Rayfe dropped down beside me on one knee, his arm around my shoulders. “He was a good man. This is a dark day for us all.”
“Not the least of which is that it means all-out war.” I kept my voice as low as hers. Images of the days ahead flicked through my mind. Battles and the ravages of internal strife. Avonlidgh turning on Mohraya. Erich gutted at Uorsin’s feet and Windroven dismantled. Amelia, weeping over a stillborn child.
No. This could not come to pass.
“You’ll tell her I did it,” I told Ursula. Yes. That felt right.
She gaped at me, her lips moving without sound. Rayfe squeezed my shoulder, one fierce spasm, but said nothing.
“I can’t tell her that. This is my fault.”
“You did it to protect me, Ursula.” I took her hands in mine, Hugh’s blood sticky and cold, as cold as the despair in her eyes. “This was my fault, too. We need you. The Twelve Kingdoms need you. We cannot afford civil war.”
“Erich—he will want revenge.”
“A revenge he cannot seek. He won’t be able to reach me in Annfwn.”
“And Amelia. She will believe you killed her one true love.”
The thought stabbed through me, the twin arrows of my sisters shredding my heart. “She already believes I betrayed her.”
In truth, this seemed fair punishment to me, that Amelia would know I’d deliberately hurt her, even though she’d blame me for the wrong thing. The penance fit my crime.
“How can you be sure it will work?” Ursula turned the thought over. “Passes can be taken. You are not safe just because you’re over a meaningless border.”
“Not meaningless, Ursula. Come see.” I glanced back at her over my shoulder. “Bring a witness or two.”
Rayfe raised a black, winged eyebrow at me but followed my wishes. My heart warmed at that, more than if he’d offered me a bouquet of hothouse flowers.
Ursula followed me with the same perfect trust, three of her key troop leaders following. I stepped past the veil, hoping I could, speaking to the crabs.
Pray Moranu this worked.
“Cross this meaningless border, Ursula.”
With a wry twist of her lips, clearly humoring me, she stepped forward. And was stopped.
Wonder and shock twisted the faces of Ursula and her Hawks. Rayfe’s hand landed on my shoulder in a fierce grip that shouted of his feelings more than any words could.
“You cannot, unless I allow it,” I told my older sister. Hopefully I’d get that much control over it, to let in who we wanted to.
She looked at me then, as if seeing me for the first time.
I pushed my advantage. “Ursula—to protect me, you cannot let Uorsin pursue his plans. You must say that you were defeated. You could not take the pass. No one can.”
She studied me, the lost look transforming slowly back into her usual keen stare.
“Without magic involved, I could have taken the pass. And held it.” Her pride stiffened her slumped shoulders.
“No, you couldn’t,” Rayfe and I said on the same breath. A little laugh escaped me, and I looked up at him, at the half smile lifting his lips for me.
Ursula looked back and forth between us. “Perhaps you two are suited.”
She stood, scrubbing the blood off on her thighs, looking back down the trail at Hugh’s corpse, regret and grief lining her face.
“I suppose my penance shall be taking him back to her. Giving her the news myself.”
“Help her, Ursula. Don’t let her lose the baby.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That was a lie, Andi. Hugh thought it might persuade you if you were too deeply”—she glanced at Rayfe—“enthralled.”
I thought of the vision. There were two now. Amelia holding a golden-haired child, overlaying the shadowed bed where she wept for Hugh as the child died. And another, over a dead child. I swayed on my feet and Rayfe steadied me.
“No. There’s a child. And she’ll carry our mother’s blood—the mark of the Tala—as I do. Make sure Amelia and her daughter survive this, Ursula. I’m trusting you to do that.”
She tipped her head a bit, as if seeing me from a different angle would help her understand who I’d become. “Why do I think there’s something more?”
“There is. The child should be with me, so I can teach her as we should have been taught. Send her to me.”
Ursula barked out a laugh, and she shook her head. “I can’t see that ever happening, Andi.”
“I can.”
Something in my certainty stopped her.
“And me?” Her face turned as grave as stone. “Do you still see me as a wise monarch, the murderer of my sister’s husband?”
I stepped out from Rayfe’s sheltering arm and took her hands again. I looked deep into her haunted gaze, past that.
“Yes.”
Maybe
. “Find the doll our mother gave you. Help Amelia. And don’t trust Uorsin.”
She started to sneer. Stopped. Searched my face.
“What do you know, Andi?”
I opened my mouth to tell her and realized she would never believe me. Not until she learned for herself.
“Take Hugh to Amelia and remember what I’ve told you.”
I squeezed her hands and started to let go. She grabbed me, embracing me in a fierce hug.
“Find the doll. Tell Amelia to find her doll.”
“Dolls, Andi—really?”
“Yes. It’s important.”
“I wondered why you wanted to take that thing with you,” she mused, a vertical line between her brows as she thought. “There won’t be one for Amelia. Salena never had time to make one, the way she died in childbirth.”
I shook my head, slow and measured, so the truth would sink in. “She didn’t. Ask Zevondeth.”
She nodded, slowly, not understanding. Not yet. She would, eventually, and a little piece of my shredded heart broke off for her, knowing that I’d consigned her to sorrowful discoveries.
“Done, then.” Ursula gave it the force of a vow. Hesitated.
“I’ll miss you,” she whispered. “I won’t be able to bear it if we never see each other again.”
“Come back. I’ll let you in. Only you. Annfwn could be yours, too. It’s your birthright also.”
She shook her head, duty replacing all else. “If you are our mother’s daughter, I am our father’s. My place is at his side.”
“If you ever change your mind, Ursula, you know where to find me.”
And with that, the Hawks shouldered Hugh’s corpse, carrying him shoulder high in a mark of honor. Hawks were loyal only to Ursula and so would serve as witnesses to carry her version of this day into the greater world.
They escorted Ursula down the pass and away from me. Until, between the falling snow and deepening shadows, I could no longer see her.
“Shall we go home?” Rayfe finally asked.
I turned to find them all ringing me, watching with solemn concern.
As one, the men, led by Terin, sank to their knees in the snow and saluted me.
“My queen.” Terin lifted his bowed head. “I know you loved him. Your sacrifice for us is great.”
“Loved him? Hugh?”
I looked up at Rayfe, searching his gaze. He nodded at me. “It’s all right. I understand. I never minded that you wished to be with him. It’s my bed you slept in.”
“No. You don’t understand.” I looked from Rayfe to Terin. “I never loved Hugh.”
“I saw you kiss him, my queen”—Terin spoke the words without accusation, only grief—“at Windroven.”
“Ah.” I remembered the moment now. How I’d kissed Hugh’s cheek for all I’d put him through, even as anticipation for Rayfe warmed my blood. “No. That wasn’t love. That was good-bye, to everything I thought I was. That I thought I wanted.”
I took Rayfe’s hand. “I’m where I belong. There’s nothing I wish for more.”
I smiled at him, feeling my lips crack with the movement. The grief would never leave me, but perhaps I could yet find joy in Annfwn. I could enjoy my life. And find ways to make reparations to my sisters.
I stood on my tiptoes and kissed him. “Yes. Please. Take me home.”
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The Tears of the Rose
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W
hen they brought Hugh’s empty body home to me, I didn’t weep.
A princess never lets her people see her cry.
Father expected that much, of even me.
It wasn’t even that difficult. My grief, my rage, they bloomed large in my heart, too huge to escape through such a small channel as a tear duct. All that he had been, so glorious, so handsome, full of life and love . . . gone.
The procession climbed the winding road to Windroven, lined by Hugh’s people, all dressed in the ashy gray of mourning. The folk of Avonlidgh don’t call out with their mourning. No, they observe it with silence, stolid as their remote and rocky coastline. Fittingly, however, the wind wailed instead. It tore at my griseous cloak with pinching fingers and snapped my hair painfully against my skin.
When we first received the news, I’d tried to cut it off, the long tresses Hugh had loved so much. But my ladies stopped me, saying I’d regret it later.
They didn’t understand that I had room for only one regret. It edged out everything else. I couldn’t understand how anyone could imagine that any other thing mattered or would ever matter again.
Hugh was gone.
Even though the words circled my mind in an endless cruel march, I couldn’t quite believe it.
The members of the procession struggled against the ferocious wind, full of bits of biting ice off the churning ocean, my sister and her elite squad, Ursula’s Hawks. They carried the pallet at shoulder height, despite the added effort, a gesture of highest regard. Not enough regard to have prevented his death, however. As they passed, the people and soldiers of Avonlidgh fell in behind, a drab parade in their wake.
Not so long ago, before winter set in, Hugh and I had ridden up that hill, bringing my other sister, Andi, with us. We’d given her protection, the shelter of our home. Sacrificed the armies of Avonlidgh to save her—and failed.
Hugh had gone to rescue her and died for it.
I loved Andi with all my heart—and I worried for her, married to that demon Tala king and exiled to his backwater country beyond the Wild Lands. Hugh’s death was all their fault. And mine, for being so stupidly captured by the Tala. A sour ball of frozen guilt and hate choked me, the gorge rising every morning.
That channel wasn’t big enough, either, so it just grew inside me, monstrous and vile.
They reached the top and Ursula’s steely gaze found mine. The eldest and heir to the High Throne of the Twelve Kingdoms, she looked more gaunt than ever. In the past, some might have called her passably attractive, in her hard-edged way, but not at this moment. Her normally clear gray eyes clouded dark with defeat and her thin lips pursed tight with exhaustion.
She dismounted, saying nothing, gesturing for her Hawks to lay Hugh’s shrouded body at my feet. They hadn’t had the appropriate cloth to work with—we’d fix that—so they’d wrapped him in his cloak. I’d thought my heart had already died, but it clenched at the sight of the sigil I’d embroidered for him. Still, it could all be a lie.
Couldn’t it?
“Show me.” My voice croaked out, and Ursula, the brave one, she who never flinches, blanched ever so slightly. The she dropped to one knee and did the honors herself, touching the fabric tenderly with bare fingers the color of ice. The frozen wool resisted, then tore with a sigh that could have been a man’s dying breath. One of my ladies broke into hysterical sobs that quickly faded as someone led her away.
I wanted to say it wasn’t him. Surely this lifeless
thing
couldn’t be my golden prince. When he first strode into the audience chamber at Castle Ordnung, he’d won everyone’s hearts in an instant. We all fell in love with him, with the way the sun walked with him, radiant and perfect.
The light had abandoned him now.
There was nothing left to say good-bye to. Just a frozen husk.
Ursula stared at him, too, hands folded over her armored knee. The sour taste of guilt and metallic shame filled the air. Of course she felt it, too. Ursula never failed. Especially not in such a spectacular way. I saved out some of my hate for her. If she’d arrived in time to stop the siege, if she’d taken Odfell’s Pass as was meant, Hugh would still be alive.
“Tell me what happened.” I spoke to her only, where she still knelt by Hugh’s pallid corpse, even his sunny blond locks sapped of color.
King Erich, who’d stood in silence behind me this whole time, stirred. A gnarled oak tree coming to life and moving its creaking limbs. “Perhaps we should go inside and—”
“No,” I interrupted him. Someone gasped in shock, but I was beyond caring. “I want her to say it out loud, now. So everyone can hear. And bear witness.”
Ursula measured me with her eyes. Maybe seeing someone besides her flirty, flighty baby sister for the first time.
“We attempted to take Odfell’s Pass. King Rayfe and his Tala armies stopped us. Hugh fell in the battle.” Her voice choked on the words, the burnt smell of lies floating up from them.
“Was Andi there?” I demanded to know.
Ursula hesitated—so, so unlike her—and inclined her head.
“Why didn’t you bring her back with you, then?”
“We could not,” Ursula answered, in a voice devoid of emotion.
“So the mission failed?” Old Erich sounded weary. He’d traveled to Windroven in the dead of winter to keep vigil for his fallen heir. Now all Avonlidgh had was me. Having the most beautiful woman in the Twelve Kingdoms for your son’s wife sounds just great, until you realize she’s the one who will be making the decisions when you’re dead. Who wanted a girl who cared only about pretty dresses and picnics running a kingdom, after all?
Yes, I knew what they were thinking. The stink of their doubt filled the castle.
And soon I wouldn’t even be beautiful, my one claim to importance. With every day, that famed beauty flaked away, dying on the surface of my skin and sloughing off like moss deprived of water. I felt it and didn’t care.
Let it wither and die with everything else.
“Princess Andromeda elected to honor her marriage to Rayfe and her commitment to the Tala,” Ursula was telling Erich. “The pass cannot be taken by force. There is a magical barrier that cannot be breached. We tried and failed. It’s over.”
“I’ve heard such ridiculous rumors for decades.” Erich’s exhausted tone held a world of regret, possibly larger than mine. “You should not believe everything you’re told, Princess. Especially by such tricksters as the Tala.”
“I witnessed it myself,” she replied.
“I highly doubt High King Uorsin will be so convinced.”
“I will convince him,” Ursula answered. “I shall go to Ordnung next and confess—”
“How did he die?” My voice cut through their conversation like a rusty knife.
Ursula rose. Met my eyes. So stoic. So steady.
“He fell in the battle at Odfell’s Pass.”
Her words smoldered, stinking of a lie. How I was so certain, I didn’t know, but I was.
“Whose hand wielded the blade?”
Erich laid a hand on my shoulder. “Princess Amelia, in the heat of battle it is rarely easy to know—”
“
She
knows.” I hissed it at her. “Don’t you? Tell me what you’re not saying.”
Ursula’s shoulders dropped, her hand finding the hilt of her sword, fingers wrapping around it for comfort.
“Hugh went for Rayfe and Andi stepped between them. She asked me to give you her confession: that he died at her hands.”
A murmur ran through the erstwhile silent crowd, growing larger the farther it rippled away. I closed my eyes, listening to it spread. This. This was what I’d known. The burning ball in my gut turned, wanting to rise again. Andi. How could she?
“She offers you her grief and great sorrow. One day, when you’re ready to hear it, she will offer you her apology. She knows well that it is nothing you will accept now.”
“This is true then?” Erich’s voice was ashen, weakened by the shock.
“It was never intended,” came Ursula’s reply, “but yes. In his zeal, Hugh thought to slay the King of the Tala. He died a brave and noble death.”
I felt the sneer twisting my lips and opened my eyes to gaze down at the rotting shell of my true love. “There is no such thing as a brave and noble death.”
“No.” Ursula spoke the quiet agreement. “I erred in saying so.”
“Yes.” I swallowed, my mouth filling with the saliva that presaged vomit. I couldn’t be ill in front of my people.
“She asked me to give you three other messages—in private.”
“I don’t want to hear them!” The world darkened at the edges.
Ursula frowned at me. “Ami—are you all right?”
The childhood endearment nearly broke me open. I couldn’t do this.
“I have to lie down.” I fumbled to stay on my feet, and my hand found Dafne, solid and steady by my side. I leaned on her before I remembered that she had been Andi’s friend first. Before Andi had betrayed me so foully.
“Shh,” she soothed me, though I hadn’t said anything to her. She wound an arm around my waist. “Let’s get you inside. I’m sure it’s not as bad as it sounds. Your sister loves you. They both do. Princess Ursula—would you care to accompany us?”
“I don’t want her to—”
“Now, now. Save your energy, Princess.” Dafne sounded all concerned, but I knew they were worried about offending Ursula. As if anything touched her hardened heart.
But I was beyond protesting, and my ladies swept me along, a sea of soft hands and gray silk skirts. As if my stomach knew we’d entered my chambers, it heaved in earnest just as I reached for the washbowl. Lady Dulcinor held my hair away from my face and I emptied myself into the basin. My eyes watered from the vicious spasms, but still I did not weep.
“How long has she been ill like this?” Ursula was talking to Dafne in lowered tones, and I couldn’t make out the librarian’s reply.
I lost the rest of their conversation in the rustle of silk and comforting murmurs of the other ladies as they swept me away from my sick and eased me onto the glorious bed I’d shared with Hugh for such a brief marriage. As I stared up at the fanciful draperies of lace and ribbon, his teasing words came back to me.
A beautiful princess bed for the most beautiful princess of all.
Our story was not supposed to end this way.
Ursula sat on the bed beside me and I let her sinking weight draw my eyelids closed. I didn’t resist when she took my hand, though hers was still cold as melting ice. I felt nothing.
“Ami—”
“Don’t call me that.” My voice was dull, but she heard me.
“Let me help you, Amelia. I want to be here for you.”
“I don’t need anyone killed today, thank you. I’ve had enough of that.”
Her fingers tightened on mine. A low blow, but a direct hit. Funny that she was trying to mother me now. She’d never wanted to before. Always our father’s daughter, obsessed with sword fighting, strategy, and law, she’d never even seemed to miss our mother. Ursula had always been studying or practicing in the yard, telling me to stay out of her way when I toddled after her. Andi had been the one to care for me, my substitute mother. Andi had always been the moderator between me and Ursula, too.
Andi, who had betrayed me and now was just as gone from the world as Hugh.
“I can’t imagine the kind of grief you’re feeling, Amelia, but you must think of the babe. Take care of yourself for your child’s sake.”
What in Glorianna’s name was she talking about? I squinched my eyes open to glare at the lacy canopy and pulled my hand out of hers.
“I’m sick over Andi’s betrayal and Hugh’s murder, Ursula. I’m not pregnant. I realize it’s not in your realm of expertise, but a woman needs a living man’s member inside her to make a baby. It might have escaped your notice, but
my
husband is dead.”
“I’m going to ignore that and write it off to you being out of your head. But you need to get a grip.”
There was Ursula’s usual impatience—and a shadow of hurt in those steel-gray eyes. I was on a roll today. Normally nothing pierced her heart.
“Hugh left only a month ago. You could easily be two or three months along. I realize it’s not
your
realm, but I think you can do the math.”
My ladies had discreetly retreated into the antechamber, giving us privacy to squabble, so I scooted my own self up to sit against the pink-satin-padded headboard. Ursula made no move to help me.
“You think I’m with child?”
She nodded. She’d cut her hair short for the campaign—all the better to fit under her helm. The ragged cut set off her sharp cheekbones. “More, Andi said you were. No, don’t shake your head. This is one of the things Andi asked me to tell you.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I hate her. I’ll hate her forever!”
“I don’t care. Enough with the drama. Be your father’s daughter and pull yourself together.”
“I am, Ursula! I’ve held up for days and days and
days
. You have no idea what it’s like! But I stood there and let you lay my husband’s body at my feet and I didn’t break. Now you want me to listen to the words of the woman who killed him in cold blood?” The poison wanted to rise again, but I choked it down. I didn’t want Ursula to see me sick again.
“It wasn’t cold blood.” Ursula’s voice was the flat of a blade. “It was chaotic and frenzied and horrible. Impossibly fast and excruciatingly slow. If I could take back that moment, if any sacrifice I could make would change that dreadful sequence, I would in a heartbeat. We could have hidden the truth from you, but Andi wanted you to know she takes responsibility for it. Even if it means you hate her forever.”
She let the silence hang between us, full of the weight of expectation. She’d learned the trick from our father and wielded the weapon with the same mastery. I’d never been able to bear it. I plucked at my gray skirts.
“Fine. Then tell me and have done.”
Ursula held up her blue-veined hand and showed me three points, as if I were still the five-year-old to her fifteen and she was explaining the three goddesses. “First, she said that you were with child and that she will bear the mark of the Tala also.”
“How could she possibly know that?” The question ripped out of me. “I’m still not sure it’s true! Besides—why in Glorianna’s name would she wish such an evil thing upon her niece? That thrice-cursed mark brought her only misery and destroyed her life.”