Prince and the Throne (Fedosian Wars #2)

14. Sunshine

fourteen

Sunshine

The hangover banged in his skull, the earth swayed under him, and the smoke of burning fat from the kitchen nauseated him. Taking his time, Lev walked through the courtyard and labored the length of the fortress ground to arrive at the gate.

“Lower the bridge.” He squinted at the sunlight. Why was the day so bright when his hangover was the worst? He meant to brew himself a cure once he returned to his chamber. For now, he shivered in a thin cloak as the many pullies and chains clanked, the long drawbridge slowly bowing till the tip touched the narrow strip of raised earth.

The Apraksin were on the other side, and as they crossed the bridge Lev went out to meet them halfway. They’d brought bodies wrapped in cloaks draped over saddles, and Vasily looked as though someone had sapped the life out of him.

The morning was calm but the chill from the frozen lake seeped under Lev’s cloak and penetrated his bone marrow. Yet people lived out here, little children too. He was just a whiny bitch, he supposed, but couldn’t help wrinkling his nose at the Apraksin men, who’d apparently rolled around in manure since they left. Lev was tempted to plunge the men into the frozen water to wash them before they entered what was essentially his home. Had it been warm, he’d think the stench was from the dead, but it was freezing.

“For the saints, Vasily, even your horse smells,” Lev hissed under his breath, frowning at the ooze running down the mount’s side. “Please keep that horse out of the stables until the veterinarian looks at it. I don’t want the other horses catching whatever that one has caught,” he said, then realized he didn’t have a veterinarian at Usolya, just the stable hands. “Never mind, I’ll look at it.” Later, later, he’d do everything else but needed to fix the wretched headache first.

“So what happened?” Lev grimaced at Vasily, but the Apraksin only blinked. Sometimes, he acted as though not all right in the head. “Your men, Vasily, what happened to your men?”

“Wolves.” Vasily shrugged.

“Wolves?”

“Wolves.”

Lev sighed and dragged his heels to a horse with a body draped over the saddle and pried open the cloak. The retainer’s throat was ripped out by a wild creature. Bear or wolf, who knew, but it certainly wasn’t a blade.

Heading back to the gate, Lev passed by Vasily. “Burn the pyre for them before it gets dark, and please keep that fucken horse away from the stables till I can look at it, yeah?”

Lev made it all the way to the gatehouse, realized the Apraksin were still on the bridge, sighed, and went back. He’d ask them about their troubles, of course, but he’d hoped to do it inside, after he cured his hangover and put on a fur cloak. But it was what it was.

“I’m sorry for your loss, Vasily.” Lev searched deep into his patience to produce a spoonful of empathy. “Do you want to tell me what happened? Is there anything I can do for them? I’d say send them home, but they need to be burned before dark, yeah?” said Lev. Vasily didn’t answer. He sat like a doll on his pus oozing horse. “I’ll make sure their families are compensated,” Lev managed though he’d clearly told them not to go. And how Vasily managed to lose half his men to wolves was beyond him.

“What is that?” Vasily whispered, only audible because the morning was still and no one else was speaking.

Lev looked over the shoulder at what Vasily was asking about. It was the Guard crest. The Apraksin were so odd. When they were children, Vasily’s twin sister had passed and the prick frightened Lev by telling him how he’d killed her and had her stuffed like a hunting trophy. It wasn’t true. His sister was thrown from a horse and broke her back, but at the time Lev hadn’t known that and was scared of Vasily.

Then there was the time he lied about how Apraksin forges were for incinerating bodies and how Apraksin steel was forged with the ashes of the dead. Not only it wasn’t true, but his father beat him for the lie. Vasily liked grotesque things, assumed others would enjoy them as well, and when he joked, it was just weird.

Lev had fallen down the rabbit hole of his childhood memories and frowned at how Vasily once chased him around with a ladle of shit. It was exactly as it sounded. He put human feces on a wooden ladle and chased Lev threatening to fling it at him. He couldn’t recall how old he’d been, only that he was small enough Sofia could pick him up.

They were at the White Palace, and she came out and yelled at Vasily because Lev had been screaming and crying.

‘That’s disgusting. Stop it!’ she scolded Vasily. ‘Where did you get it anyway?’

It turned out Vasily had climbed down the outhouse in the servants’ quarters. Why!? No one knew, and Soful had washed him out in the yard like a dog and burned his clothes in a pit.

“Why is it so bright?”

“What?” Lev realized he was still out on the bridge, his balls frozen solid. He flicked a look at the Guard crest Vasily was squinting at, and said, “Because it’s a sun made of gold. What the fuck is your problem?”

“It hurts,” he whispered. “It’s hurting me.”

“Then stop looking at it.” There was a marble ball in a tin cup rattling inside Lev’s head. It did hurt. “For the saint’s sake, go in!”

“You haven’t said we could come in,” Vasily murmured.

Lev wanted to punch him but restrained himself because he’d lost many men. Perhaps stupid humor was how Vasily dealt with distress.

“Come on in,” Lev said and turned, this time the Apraksin following him. They’d been out in the cold for two days. He’d go make sure they had warm food, but hangover cure first. That was killing him.

They used to have a proper veterinary surgeon at the White Palace who took care of Rhytsar, and the other expensive racehorses Lev had. But he was dead now. Usolya only had a few villagers pretending to be stable hands. They didn’t have a physician, only an old woman who knew the names of some common herbs and could bandage wounds. Anything a bit more sophisticated had to be Lev and it said more about the shambled state of the fortress than him. He was terrible. He knew was. Even then, he’d gathered his shit including a set of surgical knives, a veterinary book of common communicable diseases, bandages, some ointments he had, and had troubled himself with dragging them to the courtyard only to find someone, probably Vasily, had struck the horse in the head with an axe and left the creature on the snow—a while ago from how the blood had coagulated already.

He found Vasily by the well and punched him in the face.

“It’s a living thing, no?” Lev stood over him and hissed, “Why did you kill your horse?”

“You said it was diseased.” He got up, wiping his mouth, then flinched as if Lev beat him all the time.

“I said I’d look at it! I hope you treat your men better than your mount. It doesn’t seem like being loyal to you pays off very well.” Lev was furious about the horse, and the men Vasily brought back dead, and the Apraksin’s nonchalant attitude wasn’t helping.

He’d been so upset when he lost Rhytsar and seeing the dead horse had reminded him of that, somehow, and he’d been sitting in the stables and crying like a boy at everything that just had to go to shit, when Semyon found him.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Lev got up. “I just need more wine. Sobriety sucks.”

“Do you know what will make you feel better?” Semyon asked.

“Dying?” That would solve all his problems.

“Draw your sword, Guard.” Semyon smiled. “Your form has fallen to shit because you’re drunk all the time.”

“Says a fat boy to the fencing champ—” Lev twisted to evade Semyon’s thrust, the steel hissing by his face. “That better be a training sword!”

“Nope. It’s got two sharp edges.”

“I’m not in the mood.” Lev took his empty wine cup and strolled past Semyon, and the bastard struck him in the ass with the flat of his sword. It stung.

“Point,” said Semyon.

The House of Iron bred large men who carried heavy armor and thick steel. Lev finished his wine and drew his saber. Unlike Skuratov’s two-handed longsword, Lev’s curved saber was single-edged and single-handed. He used his free hand to hold onto his favorite wine cup while they fenced as though they were children and chased each other around the courtyard.

Lev kicked snow into Semyon’s face and slapped him with the flat of his blade. Semyon narrowed his eyes at him, and Lev pitched his cup and ran. Blond bear had been right. He wasn’t only his lover but his childhood friend, and sparring like stupid boys running around the fortress did brighten his soul like sunshine… till Lev had to pray for the fallen before they burned the pyre.

“How did you lose your men?” Lev tried being respectful and not judgmental because the Apraksin were here for him when they had a home they could go to, but he’d cleaned the bodies to prepare them for the ritual and couldn’t help but notice the oddity. A man had his armor on, Lev cut the leather laces, removed the cuirass, and found the side of his ribs missing, eaten by scavengers.

“Wolves,” said Vasily, somber faced. But that wasn’t an answer.

“How?” Lev frowned.

From the wounds, it appeared as though the men had died, were left in the elements without their armor, got scavenged on, then were dressed again. Were they sleeping when they were attacked? But then, why not have their gear on?

Vasily grumbled and stared at the dead. It’d been a hard day, Lev supposed, said a word of prayer in Fedosian rather than in spells, and lit the pyres with a Dragon’s Breath. It was an expensive spell costing three ounces of gold.

Before the conflict began, he used to wear a five-ounce gold bracelet, but since then, he’d been wearing fifteen-ounce cuffs, just in case. Any heavier than that and it became clunky, got in his way, and bothered his wrists to always have them on.

“Why don’t you have a shadow?” Vasily whispered, or at least Lev thought that was what he said.

“What?”

“You don’t cast a shadow.” Vasily was staring at the ground where earlier snow had melted from the pyre and turned to slush.

It made Lev look at his own shadow, dark in the bright of the fire. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You have no shadow.” Vasily looked up at him and stared.

“You’re so odd.” Lev grimaced. Then it occurred to him Vasily was making a light alchemy joke. It was clever, perhaps something a mage would have said, and the answer would be, “Because we’re godlier than thou.”

Guards being considered the source of light shouldn’t cast a shadow, except they did, and Lev’s shadow was long and behind him because the pyres were in front of him. He placed his hand on Vasily’s shoulder, trying to comfort him, and tipped his head at the darkening sky. They went from night to night, it felt like, the daylight shortening till it was just one long night over the frozen wasteland they called the Bone Country.

“Dinner, Lev.” Semyon stepped into the lanternlight.

“Not hungry.” Lev was on a ladder in the library. It was an entire wing in the fortress, and the rooms didn’t have candelabras or any such fixture where you could leave an open flame unwatched. From childhood, he’d been taught to bring a single lantern and leave with it. Anyone who left a candle burning at the library would be whipped to the bone.

His lantern was on the table where he’d been reading, and he was using a bit of alchemy, a little ball of light on his palm, no fire, to look through centuries of Guard writing. The good thing about the mages was they presumed every single thought they had, each little thing they did, even the number of times they farted in a day, were important enough to memorialize, because ego, but that was also the bad thing about mages. There were shelves, and shelves, and shelves, and shelves of useless shit, making it harder for anyone to find anything.

Instead of having a section for unusual spells, for instance, it was sorted by the mages’ names, so Lev had been reading everything every mage wrote around the time frame he was looking for—five centuries ago, the one and only occurrence of the darkling before the archmage’s death. Since then, the incident had only been referenced, and the recounting was conflicting, to say the least. So, he was looking for records contemporary to the incident. So far, nothing.

“It’s as if they destroyed the records,” Lev muttered.

“What are you mumbling about?” Semyon came and groped him.

“Nothing, don’t worry about it. I’m not hungry.” Lev frowned at the illegible scrap of parchment. ‘Hire a fucken scribe!’ he wanted to yell at these people beyond the dver.

“Did you hear they didn’t even find Grigori?” Semyon asked. “They got lost, camped in the wood for the night, and got attacked by a pack of wolves.”

“Is this your attempt at washing the fact you got lost?”

“Well, the Apraksin got lost and this is their terrain. At least I didn’t lose men.”

“Is this because Konstantin found you?” Lev sneezed from the dust. He thought to organize and clean the library wing while he waited for his knights. There wasn’t much to do, anyway.

“Maybe.” Though Semyon was behind Lev and he didn’t see his face, he imagined the blond bear smiling and scratching his head.

“I think the Apraksin were doing each other,” Lev remarked. “Why else would they have their armor off in the middle of the night in the woods?”

“Unless their cocks are on the chest, there’s no need to be stripping the gambeson. That was weird,” said Semyon. “What do you think they were really doing?”

“Dancing nude and sacrificing virgins,” Lev said. “Fuck if I know. They’re an odd bunch.”

“What are you looking for? Can I help you?”

“Can you bring the lantern and hold it here for me? I don’t want to keep wasting alchemy.” Lev flicked off his light.

“Sure.” Semyon stood behind Lev, holding the light while Lev shook an imaginary fist at the dead mages. “You’re so smart,” Semyon said.

“Oh, shut up. Can you move the ladder that way?”

“Sure. Tell me when. Here?”

“When.”

“So, what are you looking for?” Semyon asked after a long silence where Lev just flipped through pages. “Am I distracting you?”

“Ah, no, sorry.” Lev slid a scroll back into the narrow columns of wood holding them. “It’s the darkling thing. It’s bothering me. It was first cast by an acolyte, which means she was a Guard…”

“All right,” Semyon said after waiting for a while.

“Sorry.” Lev flipped through a nonsensical codex someone had written as a joke. The Apraksin weren’t the only ones guilty of a shit sense of humor. “Vasily mentioned something and made me think of another thing… Anyway, the darkling, I realize, sounds more like shadow alchemy than dark alchemy. If that’s the case, it’s not something Uncle could cast, so I was…” He found an interesting looking scroll, but it was blank. Not that the letters were faded, just blank.

“What’s the difference?” Semyon asked.

“What?”

“What’s the difference between shadow and dark alchemy?”

“One is not dark, and the other is not alchemy.” Lev turned and smiled at Semyon. “Don’t worry about it.”

“No, tell me. I want to learn. Maybe I can’t be as smart as you, but I can’t always not have a clue what you’re talking about. Eventually, I want to be able to hold a conversation with you.”

“All right,” Lev said. He didn’t want to be like his uncle who always sneered when he asked him a question. ‘Don’t worry about it, boy. It’s beyond you.’

“The term ‘dark alchemy’ comes from the symbol ‘dark’, which in the language of spells also means ‘forbidden’. So, it really means forbidden alchemy, which is necromancy. Not only it’s wrong and horrible, fusing creatures together, it’s also profane because the ultimate goal of necromancy is to create life without conception. You put some ingredients together, like clay and earth, and voila, a man. Do you see how that’s blasphemous?”

“You’re trying to be God,” said Semyon.

“Yes, necromancers are trying to be God. But most of the time, it ends up being hideous cruelty because they fail and make things like a butterfly with one wing and a two-headed sheep that lives for three days and dies. That’s three days of suffering and fear that didn’t need to be. It’s cruelty to God’s creatures. Necromancy can’t create life, period. Not human, not donkey, not even a seed that sprouts into a plant.

“But what they can do, is take the body of the deceased, and animate it with alchemy. It’s like Durnov machines, but instead of darksteel, they are using flesh. The dead do not come back because their essence, light, soul, whatever you want to call it, passes through the dver and becomes a star in the sky, yeah?

“So, these ‘dolls’ let’s call them, have varying degrees of sentience depending on how much magic was used, but they do not have light. That’s where the term soulless comes from, because the symbol for a man is light inside life, and the symbol for a soulless is just life, without the light.

“Because all alchemy even the so called ‘dark’ alchemy uses light, a soulless cannot perform any alchemy. However, it has been recorded they can… Manipulate shadows, is the best way to explain it, I suppose. It goes into dark alchemy lore and what a shadow is. Basically, a shadow is your reflection onto the world beyond this one, and a soulless has, let’s call it ‘art’ because alchemy is the wrong term, art which can affect you in a different dimension.

“It kills your shadow, and you die is what it is,” Lev said, realizing he was rambling. “So, dark alchemy is necromancy. Shadow alchemy is a creepy thing that exists in scripts but I’ve never seen. Anyway, I thought the darkling thing might be a part of shadow art, but if so, there isn’t a way for Uncle to cast it because he wasn’t a soulless. Am I making sense?”

Frowning, Semyon thought for a while, then said, “You’re looking to see if that acolyte was a soulless. Then it would confirm it was shadow art, and if that’s the case, we still don’t know who killed the archmage.”

“Yes!” Lev was so proud of Semyon.

“But why would there be a soulless acolyte?”

“She was an acolyte first, then died, and was brought back,” said Lev.

“Then that story also has a necromancer,” said Semyon.

“This is true.” Lev chewed his lip.

“Quit doing that.”

“What, this?” Lev bit his lower lip.

“Do you want to be fucked?” Semyon mouthed, a crooked smirk on his face.

“Why so crude? I was going to say you’re my sun—”

Lev felt a breath on his neck, turned around, and threw a punch. “You gutter crawling whore!” he yelled.

He’d struck Vasily in the face because the freak had come out of nowhere in the dark, making him nearly wet his trousers. Semyon hadn’t heard Vasily either and lunged with his sword drawn before he laughed his ass off.

Lev had to take a moment, a panting and heaving moment, to calm down, and once he did, he said, “All right, let’s get out of here before we slice each other’s bits off swinging sharp objects in the dark. I’ll try tomorrow when there’s light.”

“You didn’t eat,” said Vasily, walking behind Lev and Semyon as they headed out of the library.

“Wasn’t hungry,” said Lev. “Have you eaten, Syoma?” He didn’t like Vasily behind him because he felt his presence but couldn’t hear him at all and it was making his skin tingle and the hair at the back of his neck stand on end. “Vasily, walk ahead of Semyon, please.”

When Vasily didn’t reply, Lev stopped and let him pass. “Are you all right?” Lev asked because Vasily was grimacing and rubbing his temples.

“It’s just so bright,” he whispered.

“Sure is.” Lev bumped into a fucken statue. The moving light stretched their shadows, and their stone faces flickered.

“What’s with the knife, Apraksin?” Semyon asked.

They were walking ahead, and Lev flicked at look at Vasily and saw a plain cleaver tucked into his belt. Then he noticed the Apraksin didn’t have any of his gear.

“What’s bright, Vasily?” Lev asked, slowing his pace and falling back. It crossed his mind that Apraksin blades had gold on the pommel. They’d been acting strange since they returned—the retainers not saying a single word, and Vasily sulking all day. They were grieving, Lev had thought, but there was a stench in the air, like invisible soot that he could no longer ignore. “What’s bright, Vasily?”

“It’s his attempt at a joke, Lev,” Semyon said. He stopped and turned, and now Vasily was in front of him.

“Didn’t ask you, Syoma.” Lev looked from Semyon to Vasily. “What’s bright, Vasily? Maybe it’s making your head hurt. I’ll turn it down if I can.”

Semyon made a face because he thought Lev was ridiculing Vasily. “Drop it, Lev.”

“Asked you a question, Vasily.” Lev’s hand glided down to his hilt. He was standing in the dark, they had the lantern, Semyon didn’t see Lev reach, but Vasily’s dark eyes followed Lev’s hand.

Lev couldn’t toss Dragan’s Breath down the corridor because Semyon was in the way, and he gauged the distance between himself and Vasily. “Don’t lose the light, Syoma. He can see in the dark.”

“Lev?” Semyon frowned.

“But it’s not dark,” Vasily muttered. “That thing above the gate is so bright.”

“You mean the crest of my house?” Lev pursed his lips. “It’s cast with Saint Aleksandar’s gold. It’s a sacred relic. We like doing that, blessing our own shit.”

“Oh.” Vasily looked down. “It hurts to be here. I want to leave.”

Vasily reached for the cleaver, Semyon slammed him into the wall, stepped back, and grabbed the hilt of his sword, but it looked as though his blade stuck, because he froze that way, took a beat too long, and Vasily’s cleaver bit into his side.

A shadow of a man grabbed the shadow Semyon cast, and it fucked with Lev’s mind making him think there was another person in the corridor though there wasn’t. He’d never seen shadow alchemy, and though he deduced this was probably that, he’d reacted by leaping back and drawing his saber when the shadow on the wall turned and ran toward him.

The mind kept searching for the thing casting the shadow rather than… Lev didn’t know what to do. Was he supposed to make his shadow stab the thing? He tried when it pounced on him, hacking and hacking at his shadow, but nothing happened to Lev, which was more confusing.

“Why won’t you die?” Vasily whined.

It made Lev look that way. He had to stop freaking out about the shadow because it didn’t do anything. But Vasily’s real cleaver had struck real Semyon who was still frozen as though he’d turned into a statue. Lev threw a dagger and it hit Vasily’s shoulder. Vasily twisted and fell, and the lantern rolled on the floor, making the corridor strobe. Lev got to Semyon, but Vasily was nowhere to be found.

“Are you all right?” Lev inspected Semyon’s wound. Though the red gash was nasty, and the iron might have fractured a rib, the blade hadn’t gotten any further than that. “It’s not too bad.”

“What the hell was that?” Semyon was bewildered. He wasn’t too worried about the cut but was startled by the shadow.

“I think the Apraksin may have died.” The ‘may’ was unnecessary. Lev knew they had died and returned soulless. It was a hard thing to believe, though, because it turned from a thing that happened to the Menshikov, to a thing that was happening to them.