~7~
Cole Jin woke to the hard leather poke of a boot in his ribcage and pulled his blankets above his head. He could hear the hiss of rain outside, but it was warm under the blankets, soft and warm and nice and comfor—
“Up, Cole. Now. I’ll be needing your help with the levy again.”
The boot dug into his torso just below his bottom rib, where it hurt enough to make him lose his breath. He coughed, and it was removed.
Grumbling and rubbing his side, Cole rolled out of bed and found himself staring at the stubble-covered, unshaven face of his father. His nose throbbed dully.
One of these days, he thought. One of these days I’m going to leave for good, and you’ll miss me when I do. I swear it.
His father frowned and left the bedroom, and Cole laid back on his bed and let out a heavy sigh. The thatch above him was starting to break and hang down. It would need replacing soon, and the job would probably fall to him and his brother.
On his way out the room, he noticed that Litnig’s bed was empty.
Strange, he thought. It was Eld’s Day, and that was Litnig’s day off.
Cole stepped lightly down the creaking, wooden stairs to the kitchen, grabbed a crust of day-old bread from the table, and shucked into his heaviest wool cloak. When he opened the door, he discovered that it was not just raining but pouring outside. Deep puddles had formed in the muddy expanse of the yard. The world was wet, the sky was gray, and the city looked bloody miserable.
His father was standing under the eaves smoking a pipe, and Cole passed by the fat man and into the cold, muddy world beyond without a word or a glance. The wagon was already harnessed and loaded in the middle of the yard.
Cole rolled his eyes and scuttled under a blanket in the back of it. Every time his father lost his temper, he tried to make up for it by doing things like loading the wagon before waking Cole up the next day, or opening and closing the gate to the yard on his own. But he never apologized, and he never admitted he’d been wrong, and Cole never gave him the satisfaction of acknowledging the attempts to mollify him.
The driver’s seat creaked as his father climbed into it, and then the mule snicked and snorted and the cart lurched into motion.
The wagon creaked through a city muffled by more than just the weather. Usually, when it rained all talk was of the level of the Eldwater, of how bad flooding had gotten in the slums or how likely it was to spread. But the people Cole rolled past were speaking of other things. One man’s family had shared an unspeakable nightmare. Someone else’s dog had gone mad. A third man’s three-year-old son had been crying since the middle of the night.
Cole sunk deeper into the cart and tried to forget the eyes of a dragon and the shearing feeling he’d woken up with in his chest. Tried to forget his brother’s pale and shaken face and the slaughter at the Old Temple.
So many people dead, he thought, and they’re worried about nightmares. A box poked into his back, and he shoved it roughly aside. And where the hell is Litnig?
Cole’s brother usually slept in on his days off, and it worried Cole more than he wanted to admit that Litnig was out of the house so early. The city was on edge, and his brother wasn’t always quick to pick up on that.
Cole hoped he wasn’t getting into any trouble.
The wagon headed south along a roaring Eldwater that was already only a few feet below its embankments. The mule pulled. The wagon creaked. Two-story wooden houses and shops passed by, blurry shadows in the rain.
Up front, Cole’s father was a silent blob in the driver’s seat emitting occasional puffs of smoke into the rain. He clicked and whistled, and the wagon turned to face the Eldwater and joined a short line of others like it. Cole had a brief glimpse back onto the nearly empty streets of the Merchants’ Crescent out of the back of the cart before it clattered onto a wide, low barge. Men shouted and whistled. Winches turned, and the ferry began its journey across the Eldwater’s swollen currents toward a cleft in the dark bluffs on the other shore.
There were guards there, checking the wagons moving into Palace Hill, but Cole and his father were well known to them. Cole didn’t even have to get up, and they were waved onto a steep, switchbacked road up the bluffs.
A red-cloaked House guard squatting at the top of the bluffs scowled at them as they emerged onto the wide, white stones of Palace Way. Red was the color of House Elpion. Cole had seen none of the silver of House Eldani all morning. Odd, that, he thought. He would have expected the king’s men to be handling security.
Cole was familiar with the tall-walled complexes that lined Palace Way and the view of the square, onion-turreted Palace of Eldan at its end. His father held one of only a few greengrocer contracts with the palace, and Cole had been helping with the business since he was five. On his first day, his father had dressed him up nicely, dragged him into the palace yard for reasons that had only become clear long after the fact, and told him to get lost and look cute.
Getting lost had been easy. The palace’s maze of stone hallways and vaulted ceilings and plushly decorated rooms had dwarfed the small warren of streets in which Cole had spent the first few years of his life. Looking cute had been harder. He’d panicked at the unfamiliar, fancily dressed women and the tall men wearing swords and rich clothes, and he’d been on the verge of tears when a plump, kind-looking woman in white had swept him up and into a big, sunlit room full of other children. She had ooed and cooed and called him “Little Lord Graydawn,” and he had been much too petrified to correct her.
In that room of children and mothers, one tall, fair-haired boy had commanded all the attention. Unheeded in a corner had stood a dark-haired, small-framed child staring out the window. Cole had crept quietly over, and by the time the mistake had been sorted, he and Quay Eldani had been fast friends.
Water dripped on Cole’s nose, and he squirmed deeper into the spaces between the containers of vegetables in the back of the cart. The wool over him was thick, tight-woven Northplain stuff, and under two layers of it he was warm even in the rain. The complexes of nobles and rich men passed to the right and left of him as the wagon traveled the long, straight road to the palace. He swayed from side to side with its motion, listened to the rhythm of the horses’ hooves clacking along the flagstones, the hush of rain on buildings. And as he dozed, he thought of Quay’s mother—a tall, smiling, violet-eyed woman with strawberry hair who had let him into her son’s world, insisted upon grooming him for a life at Quay’s side, and then died before he’d had a chance to learn why.
And he wondered, again, where his brother was.
#
Some time later, Cole jerked awake to find his father’s fat face hissing at him. Torin had a massive barrel of pickled something between his burly arms, and his bald head was steaming in the rain. He did not look happy. Cole closed his eyes again and cursed a moment later as he was yanked forward by the collar and dropped on his feet at the wagon’s back.
“Watch your tongue, boy,” said his father. They were in the palace’s northeast courtyard, near the stables and the kitchens. The six-storied stone building itself yawned above them. Torin pointed toward the kitchen door. “They’ll be hiking the levy if the rumors of war are true. Go make sure that I don’t have to pay it.”
Torin shoved him forward, and Cole shot quickly through the rain and a warm, open door into the kitchens, glad to be out of the weather and away from his father. He dropped his hood, shook some of the water from his hair and helped himself to a roll dipped in honey before being shooed out. The palace servants knew him well, especially the ones who worked the kitchen. He licked the honey from his fingers as he passed into the corridors of the palace itself.
The big stoneheap was damp as a spring snowstorm, and Cole’s shoulders twinged as he walked. He rolled them back and forth, trying to work out some tightness just above his collarbone, and trailed his fingers along the cool, smooth stone of the walls. He loved the palace. It had always been a heaven away from his home, a place where the problems belonged to other people and all he had to do was make them laugh.
He wound up a few levels, heard angry murmurs coming from some rooms and quiet whispers from others, passed palace guards and House guards and Temple soulweavers and legions of servants and courtiers. He caught snippets of conversation about ships and spears and armor and supply trains, and he fought a growing sense of dread. War. With the Necromancers.
‘When the rich fight wars,’ he thought, ‘they pay the poor to bleed.’ It was something they said in Thieves’ Rise, well away from the ears of the rich they so loved to talk about, but that didn’t make it any less true.
There were no guards on Quay’s door. The only person Cole saw while approaching it was a wide-eyed, frightened-looking kid in the colors of House Galeni, who froze when he spotted Cole and then ran off in the other direction.
Odder and odder, Cole thought.
He knocked lightly and entered the prince’s suite.
Inside, all the doors were open. No fire had been laid, despite the rain. Quay himself was standing alone in the big stone archway that led to his private balcony. The prince was still as relatively small as he’d been in childhood, but he had grown into his body. He looked comfortable in his skin, confident, strong in a way that had nothing to do with muscles. A rich black doublet trimmed with silver rested over his shoulders and his thick gray trousers, and high boots and riding gloves covered his feet and hands. He faced the city with his hands gripped tightly behind his back, motionless.
Cole whistled—one low note, then a high one that slid back down. His friend didn’t move, so Cole took up position on the other side of the archway, staring out into the rain.
“In the slums,” Cole said, “they say that it rains this hard because Yenor loves pissing all over them.”
Quay didn’t laugh, but he did turn to look at him, and Cole’s heart fell into his stomach. Quay’s lips were pursed together. His cheeks were drawn in. There was a seriousness in his eyes that Cole had seen only a few times before: When his mother had died. When Cole’s father had nearly lost his palace contract. When drought had pushed the city close to riot.
“I’m glad you’re here,” Quay said.
The words me too died on Cole’s lips. He swallowed and could not find a joke.
“Last night the heart dragons in the Old Temple were broken,” Quay said. The prince’s eyes glittered, and Cole remembered the damaged statuette that the Twelfthman had dropped. “Do you remember the legend of Sherduan, Cole?”
The low rumble of thunder echoed over Sentinel Hill, and Cole nodded. In some parts of the slums, you couldn’t go twenty feet without some crazy person grabbing you and talking your ear off about the end of the world.
Three sets of golden heart dragons. One here, one in Aleana, and one in the White Forest. And if all of them are broken, a dragon comes from the depths of the void to burn the world. The histories said it had happened once before, when the old kingdom of Mennennar had sunk beneath the waves and the plains in the center of the continent had been burned to a blackened crisp from which they had never recovered. Cole had read part of one of the histories once, before his mother and the tutors she’d hired had given up on making a scholar out of him. He’d had nightmares for weeks.
‘It had a black-scaled face and fiery eyes, a mane of flames, claws the size of a man. As it tore my men to shreds, I could feel it laughing, and I knew for the first time the insignificance of my life, my wealth, my power, in the face of something much larger than humanity.’ Cole swallowed and adjusted his shoulders against the archway. His vision from the night before raced unwanted through his mind. Just another nightmare, he told himself, that’s all it was. A coincidence. A story remembered from childhood. It isn’t real. It never was.
The rain over the city grew stronger, and Quay continued speaking. “My father’s position amongst the Seven has become terribly weak, Cole. War is coming. House Eldani’s only choice is whether it comes against Menatar or between the Great Houses.”
A lump formed in Cole’s throat. There hadn’t been open civil war in Eldan since the Nutharians had rebelled 1,200 years in the past. “C’mon, he said. “It can’t—”
“My father has chosen Menatar.” Quay’s eyes narrowed. “Warships are being summoned to Densel. Troops are being pulled back from the Nutharian border and sent to the Black Gulf.” The prince’s shoulders were pulled taut in a way that made him look bigger and thicker than he was. His back was straight as a rod. He looked cold. Hard. Mean.
Like his father.
“But the necromancers are the lesser threat,” said Quay. “We need to warn the Aleani and the Sh’ma. They must protect the other heart dragons.”
Cole licked his lips. “We?”
“We.”
The prince brushed past him and into his solar, then strode toward a low stone table with two wire chairs on either side of it. He sat in one, motioned for Cole to take the other.
Cole did. The metal flexed beneath him surprisingly comfortably.
Quay leaned forward and lowered his voice. “My father cannot send anyone with me, and with things as they are amongst the Seven, I don’t want to ask for help from them either. As it is, the Houses might overlook my journey because it will make their play for power easier. To try to take a full bodyguard or other nobles with me might push Aegelden Elpioni and Aesith Lord Pendilon too far. They might send someone after us or turn on my father prematurely if they think we’re out looking for help.”
Cole leveled a hard stare at his friend. “And you think there’s something I can do to help you?”
The prince nodded. “You’re smart, Cole. You’re loyal. And you have knowledge of the world that I do not and friends who are not connected to the palace. I have seen your brother’s physique, and I respect his intelligence.”
Several jokes ran unsaid through Cole’s mind.
Quay’s eyes narrowed like he had heard them. “Aegelden Elpioni has eyes and ears everywhere in this city, but right now, for a little while, they are distracted while they try to cover up what happened last night. I need you to get me out of his sight before he realizes he should be keeping an eye on me. I need you to come with me to Aleana and the White Forest. I need you to help me protect the other heart dragons.”
Cole Jin took a deep breath. Outside, the rain poured down over the city of his birth. The chair beneath him bent and flexed as he moved. The lives of tens of thousands of people were about to change because of the decisions of the men and women in the building he sat in, and in front of him the Prince of Eldan stared down at him with all the weight of his office and ten years of friendship. Cole struggled to find the proper wording for no.
“What if they’re already destroyed?” he asked instead.
“Then at least we will know.”
Cole broke eye contact with his friend and studied a crack in the tiled floor. The road to Aleana ran through dangerous territory. The Sh’ma killed Eldanians on sight. “Until we’re dead,” he grumbled.
For a moment, he considered turning Quay down. It was possible. He had done it once or twice before.
But he had seen the hard-edged look on Quay’s face before as well, when someone dared to presume he was bluffing at King’s Conundrum. The prince would go alone, if Cole didn’t go with him. He would go, and with no one to help him he would fail, and Cole didn’t want to live with that. When he was sad, when he was angry, when he was hurt or he needed a place to run, Quay was always there for him.
So he ran a hand through his hair and sighed, “Okay.”
After all, he had always wanted to see West Eldan. And Nutharion, too. He’d heard the women there were beautiful, and the weather was so nice they wore nothing but colorful, see-through silks.
And the dragon is real, you thrice-damned idiot—you’ve seen it in your dreams.
The serious expression on Quay’s face faltered. His hands, folded on the table, relaxed. He looked briefly like the boy whom Cole had befriended, long ago.
“We’ll be fine, Cole,” he said. “I promise.”
Cole looked at the elaborately carved beams above his head, the paintings on the walls, the soft furniture and gilded mirrors, and then turned his eyes back to Quay.
“And if you’re wrong? If we never see this place again? What then?”
Quay leaned back, tented his hands under his chin, and with flint and steel in his eyes said simply, “I’m not.”
Cole stared at him. Quay stared back. And Cole, like always, cracked first.
“You have a cloak with a hood, right?” Cole asked, running his hands along the grooved wooden rim of the table. He didn’t need to see Quay nod. He already knew the answer.
“Get it,” he said. “And change out of that clown suit. It will stick out like a beggar’s palm where we’re going.”
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