A Chill in the Flame (Villains #1)

Thirty-seven

Thirty-seven

Harland’s fingers flexed against the war-room table. It was too hot, then too cold. Job and title be damned, he was a shit royal guard. He hadn’t just failed at his mission. He’d burned it to the ground.

“This doesn’t make any sense.” King Eero bumped against his crown as he stuck his fingers in his hair, holding his head against what may have been the early signs of a headache. He wasn’t sure how the news could get worse, but then again, he’d never met a scryer before.

Harland’s brows knit in reluctant agreement. He shot a desperate look at the scryer. “Can you try again? They can’t be at the same place.”

The fae who looked back at him was a void of disapproval. There was a general agelessness to those kissed with immortality, but every once in a while, a fae entered the room with an aura that felt thousands of years old. The scryer had been escorted from Raascot to aid Farehold’s monarchs at the behest of her king. If Ceneth hadn’t offered generations of her family sanctuary from the southern kingdom after they’d been forced to uproot from their ancestral lands, she would have denied the request altogether. Though her face had no lines, and her hair no grays, she was very, very old. The air around her was heavy, as though time itself dragged behind her like a cape around her shoulders, filling the room with her presence.

Perhaps the exodus of fae was not Eero’s fault, but he hadn’t stopped it, either. Harland kept his eyes on the fae woman, battling the unwise urge to drag a gaze of treasonous disapproval over his king.

The scryer looked as though she couldn’t be bothered to fully arch a brow. Her dark eyes were nearly bored as her head lolled from the guard to the king. Everything about her was terribly, if not laughably, informal. She wore a loose, black dress that may as well have been stitched from shadows and cobwebs. The gossamer gown was a product of comfort rather than fashion, and not a fit, shape, or fabric he’d seen in any kingdom. Perhaps she’d been on the earth long enough to value the gentle brush of whisper-thin material on the skin far more than the opinions of peers. Her dark hair was entirely unbound, which was also out of fashion. Most of the women wore braids, even if they only adorned half of their hair. Perhaps the rubbing or twisting of braids and ties was just as unimaginable as the discomfort of fashionable clothes. The woman looked tired, not in a way that denoted sleeplessness or stress, but with an overall fatigue at the world and her role in it.

“If you know better than the spirits, then you know better, Your Majesty,” she said, a lip pulling back ever so slightly, showing the barest hint of her pointed teeth.

Harland fidgeted, looking to Eero.

The king’s grip on his temple tightened. “First, we ask you where Berinth is, and you send us to the desert. The man is clearly of Farehold blood. He’s not a Tarkhany man. Then we ask you where Ophir is—the daughter of Farehold—and you point us to the same desert! Are we to believe they’re together?”

She inclined her chin. “That is an entirely separate question. Shall I?”

His crown tilted over the press of his fingers as he nodded. He pushed back from the table and moved from one side of the room to the other as he waited for the woman to act.

“Stillness would be preferable.”

Eero stopped his pacing. Speechlessness seized his tongue. The man was a king all right, Harland thought. Perhaps the occasional serving of indifference was good for his humility.

The scryer closed her eyes and rested her hands on the map that covered the war room table, palms facing toward the ceiling. The fae inhaled through her nose slowly, breathing the dense quality of eternity into her body, letting it fill her lungs. Her hands slowly began to turn over as the spirits guided them once more to Tarkhany, fingertips landing near one another, but not touching. Her fingertips dragged left to right and right to left, one scratching from The Shining Wilds, written in both the Farehold tongue and in the two unpronounceable languages of the southern kingdom, and the other from The Dying Sunset, which shared the same three-name process so common to the regions of the desert kingdom. One finger landed on the border town of Amurah, while the other stopped just shy of the capital city of Midnah.

“It would seem,” she said, slowly opening her eyes, “that though they’re separated by stretches of sand at present, the two will end in the same destination, though they do not share the same journey.”

“And what are they doing there?” Eero asked.

She slowly allowed a single brow to rise. “It would seem ,” she drawled, “that you’re mistaking me for one with omniscience, Your Majesty .”

Another man would have snapped. Anger would have been an understandable response. Instead, King Eero grew still as he soaked in the information. This was a quality Harland had both loved and hated. Eero was a fair, level-headed monarch, but it would have been easier to understand his emotions if he would yell. His benevolence made his disappointment so much more poignant.

“We knew she’d pursue those responsible.” Harland lost himself in the map. “She must have learned of his whereabouts before we did.”

“I understand,” Eero said slowly. He turned to Harland. “But how did she cross the desert? And more importantly: why? We barely trade with Tarkhany. We’ve only received them on one ambassador mission in the last hundred years. Aubade and Midnah do not speak.”

Harland frowned. “By design?”

“By geography!” He gestured to the map, making a broad gesture toward where the fae woman’s hands still rested. “There’s no known water between Farehold’s border and Tarkhany’s capital. There’s rumored to be an oasis near Zatra, but those who’ve made it back alive swear it’s seasonable and cannot be depended upon. Besides, I don’t believe my father left things on particularly good terms with their ruler.”

“Your father was on the throne four hundred years ago,” Harland offered. “The desert king at the time was human, was he not? Those in power might not even know the tales. Things went smoothly on the ambassador visit, or am I mistaken?”

Eero resumed his pacing. “I have no way of knowing if those in power are human or fae right now. We hear nothing from Tarkhany, nor do we send word. But the appropriate time to offer my condolences has long since come and gone. After my father…”

“What happened, Your Highness? The books don’t—”

“I was a child.” He shook his head, halting his stride to grip the back of the chair with both hands. He looked down at the map, eyes flitting between the words that may have shared Farehold’s letters, though their vowels had new, strange marks and dashes, and the artistic, unreadable dots and lines of a slithering language that twisted and turned over the dunes. “It was a different time. My parents and their parents before them ruled with iron fists. Our lineage has not been known for fostering peace relations.”

Harland pursed his lips, eyes grazing the fae woman who continued to sit at the war room table. The bright, circular room in the tower always allowed for natural light, which somehow felt improper given the solemnity of scrying. He studied her features—she was not quite the rich bronze of Raascot, but also not the pale pink of Farehold. She was probably from the borderlands between kingdoms. Perhaps Farehold had been her home once, long before the division of the world. His mother and brother had been forced north due to the hostility toward certain magics in Farehold, just as hers undoubtedly had. Farehold hadn’t been known as a kingdom of tolerance. While Eero was good, he was also benign in the face of generations of injustice. Caris had been the continent’s first hope in shifting the tide.

The woman looked up at the man from where she remained at the table, growing more disinterested with every second that passed. “Will there be anything else?” She didn’t bother using his honorific this time.

Eero frowned at her. “Midnah? You’re sure of it?”

She looked at him in a way that conveyed deep disapproval over his question. Of course, she was sure of it. This was her power. She’d been doing this for millennia. This ancient fae had been scrying since before the king of Farehold had been in his mother’s belly.

Her look was answer enough.

“Okay. Thank you. That will be all.”

She stood from the table and reached into a bag, extending an object to the king.

He frowned. Pinched between her fingers was the plume of a long, blue-green peacock quill. “What’s this?”

“Convenience,” she said. “Don’t make me travel across the continent to answer simple inquiries. Write your questions to Ceneth, and I will have them answered from the comfort of my kingdom.”

Eero turned the feathered quill over in his hand. “What do I do with it?”

Once again, the deadened, bone-tired look of a headmistress frowning at a misbehaving student overcame her emotions. “You write with it, Your Majesty. It’s a quill.”

Harland sucked in a breath of air at her disrespect. He knew enough of his king to know that he was relatively toothless, and he expected there’d be no recourse for her back talk. Still, it was incredibly bold to speak to a monarch as though he were an uneducated child. Perhaps she’d lived long enough and was simply poking bears, hoping one would bring her days to an end.

“My sister is a manufacturer,” she said with infinite boredom. “Her quills are particularly popular among young lovers, as they never seem to run out of things to say when separated. This one, however, will be for you and King Ceneth exclusively, as he owns its twin. Anything you write with this quill will appear in his castle. If you have a question for me, he can fetch me in Gwydir. And if that’s all”—she stood eyeing them for a long, judgmental moment—“I will begin the three-week trek back to Gwydir.”

The king looked surprised at this. “They’re not flying you back?”

She’d reached the end of patience that had never existed in the first place as she said, “I was brought under the urgency of a king summoning me. No one cares how long it will take me to return. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

The scryer didn’t wait to be dismissed. Her loose, black dress floated out of the room—the material existing as the only buoyant thing about her. The room seemed smaller with her gone, as if her presence had been holding the cream-colored stones at bay. They pressed in on the men as they stood around the map.

“She lacked decorum,” Harland said politely as the tower door closed.

Eero laughed, though the sound was not happy. “I admired her apathy. I can’t tell you how comforting it would be to feel indifferent when facing such things.”

“Your Highness?”

Eero closed his eyes, perhaps shutting out the too-small room like Harland wished he could. It wasn’t just his missing daughter, nor was it the one who’d been taken from him. It wasn’t just his people, or the kingdom, or the direction of the continent. It was his crippling inability to do anything about it. It was supposed to be Caris. She had been meant to succeed where he’d failed.

Instead, that’s all he’d leave.

A legacy of failure.

“Shall I leave today?” Harland asked.

Eero looked at him with eyes as bright and golden as Ophir’s. “You’re a good man, Harland. You’ve done a good job taking care of Ophir. If anyone has a hope of getting her back, it’s you. I know you’ll do right by this kingdom. Have you spent much time with our spymaster? He’s rather young—still in his first century of life, but he’s a discreet and powerful asset with an impressive skillset. I’m confident he’s picked up more than a few languages as a hobby.”

Harland made a face. “You trust him?”

“As surely as I believe in the heavens, yes. I put my faith in him as I trust you with Ophir’s. You shouldn’t go on this mission alone. It’s important that we keep our efforts contained. Relations with Tarkhany are strained, and sending an army to retrieve her and slay Berinth might start a war, for which Aubade is not prepared. This kingdom will not survive more loss.”

“I’ll leave tomorrow,” Harland promised.

“Make it tonight,” Eero said. “I’ll send word for Samael to meet you by the stables.”