There were plans to be made and his own trusted seconds to meet with, men who had held High Salure for him when he left to battle the galla and would do so again when he brought Megiddo’s body to the monastery where he once served as a heretic cenobite of Faltik the One.
His lightened mood, brought on by the anticipation of visiting friends at the new Kai capital, darkened once more. He blew out the candle, watching as black smoke from the extinguished wick rose in a serpentine spiral. Some of the galla moved like smoke, sinuous and choking. Others jittered and splayed like skeletal puppets pulled by a madman’s strings, their twisted limbs and black-fanged maws dancing to a discordant tune that made the ears of the living bleed.
He clapped a hand over his midriff a second time, remembering the feel of the galla swarming him and the spectral vuhana he rode. Even now, a crawling sensation purled along his skin and up his spine.
Galla had swarmed the lower chamber where the wound of the world pulsed and birthed the abominations as fast as he and his fellow Wraith kings butchered them.
Serovek’s heart tripped several beats at the memory of Andras’s desperation as he tried to claw the monk free of the hul-galla’s grip. The horde wrapped around Megiddo’s body like murderous lovers, a gleeful, writhing, gibbering mass. But it was Megiddo’s expression—that bleak acceptance of his horrific fate—that haunted Serovek most, his last word, a dirge that threaded his darkest dreams.
“Farewell.”
Chapter Two
You learn from your enemy; your enemy learns from you.
Anhuset
The sharp crack of a silabat stick against armor sounded loud in the room as did the curses that followed. Ildiko Khaskem careened into the wall before ricocheting back into the arms of her attacker.
Anhuset caught her neatly before pushing her back to the center of the imaginary circle in which they sparred. She spun the offending silabat in her hand with a casual flick of her wrist and offered the scowling hercegesé a faint smile. “You’re slow this evening, Highness. Maybe you should tell my cousin to leave you be for a day.”
Such familiar teasing didn’t go beyond the chamber’s closed door. Outside, Anhuset adhered strictly to the protocol of address and rank. Here though, with the human duchess as her student and she the teacher, Anhuset relaxed her rigid rules a little. And the hercegesé seemed to enjoy it.
At least most of the time. For now, Ildiko scowled at Anhuset and rolled the shoulder that had taken the brunt of Anhuset’s strike. She wiped away the perspiration beading on her forehead with the back of her hand before dropping into the familiar half crouch, her own silabat at the ready. “I only wish that had been the reason for my lack of vigor. The poor nursemaid and I were up all day with Tarawin and her sickly stomach.”
Ildiko did look particularly haggard this evening, and it wasn’t the weariness that came from spending hours indulging in pleasurable bedsport. Her heavy eyelids and the shadowy crescents under her eyes spoke of no sleep for an extended time. Anhuset recognized the signs. She’d pulled more than her fair share of long watches and guard duty. The boredom alone exhausted a person, though she suspected caring for a sick baby wasn’t so much tedious as it was challenging. She didn’t envy the hercegesé or Brishen the burden of parenthood.
The hercegesé dropped into the ready stance Anhuset had taught her: knees slightly bent, feet shoulder-width apart, body turned to the side to make herself less of a target. She gripped her pair of silabats in her slender hands, one raised perpendicular to her chest, the other elevated to her hip. The sticks acted as sword and shield. “Again,” she said.
Anhuset gave a nod of approval before mimicking her student’s stance. She lashed out, a calculated move that Ildiko parried with a quick block of one of her silabats. Anhuset didn’t give her time to counter-attack, going on the offensive with several more strikes that had Ildiko dancing across the room, grunting and cursing under her breath as she parried her teacher’s attacks.
“Better,” Anhuset said, landing a particularly hard strike against Ildiko’s crossed silabats that made the other woman stagger. “Hold with your forearms, not your wrists, unless you want them broken.”
They fought along the chamber’s perimeter, Anhuset continuously advancing, Ildiko retreating but successfully blocking each blow Anhuset attempted to land on her upper body.
Ildiko’s grim features lightened with a tiny smile, one that fled when Anhuset abruptly changed tactics, swung low, and struck Ildiko’s outer thigh with a silabat.
The hercegesé hopped to the side with a yelp and held up a hand to halt their bout. She rubbed her padded leg while glaring at Anhuset. “I thought you were just focusing on my torso.”
Anhuset arched an eyebrow. “Did I say that?”
Ildiko’s tone changed from indignant to wary. “No.”
“You assumed it, hercegesé. I repeated the same movement several times…”
“So I would assume wrongly.” This time Ildiko’s scowl was for herself. “You did say predictability was a blade with two edges.”
Anhuset nodded, pleased with her student’s echo of her words. As a novice at gatke, Ildiko made every mistake Anhuset expected her to make, but she listened closely to instruction and committed them to memory. The pain of that strike, and the bruise sure to follow, guaranteed Ildiko wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
“You learn from your enemy; your enemy learns from you. Surprise them with the unexpected by teaching them to expect the same thing.”
Ildiko wiped her brow with the back of one hand and blew a stray tendril of vibrant red hair out of her eyes. “I don’t think I’ll ever master this stick fighting of yours.”
“Every student says that until they do.”
“Even you?”
Anhuset answered Ildiko’s doubtful smile with a toothy one of her own. “Even me, and I had a lot more bruises to show for it than you ever will.” She pointed her silabat at Ildiko. “Enough chatting. Stance. Widen your feet a little more. Forearms instead of wrists.”
A brief tap at the door interrupted their next round. Ildiko gave Anhuset a questioning look, one returned with a shrug. The entire fortress knew not to disturb the hercegesé and her teacher during gatke lessons. To do so risked the formidable wrath of Anhuset. So far, no one had been that brave or that foolish except one man.
“Might as well open it,” Anhuset said, relaxing out of her stance. “He’ll just keep knocking until you do.”
Ildiko creaked the door open, a wide smile blooming across her mollusk-pink features at the sight of her husband standing on the other side. “Just in time, Brishen. You’ve saved Anhuset from yet another beating. I’ve trounced her at least a half dozen times this lesson,” she cheerfully lied.
Brishen smirked as he crossed the threshold into the chamber, but Anhuset didn’t miss the way his gaze swept his wife’s form, looking for wounds beneath the distortion of her padded armor. Confession time.
“She’ll wear a bruise on her left thigh for a week or so.” She flinched inwardly when his eyes narrowed. “She’s slower this evening than usual. I hear the queen kept her up all day.”
Anhuset silently congratulated herself on turning Brishen’s disapproval back toward his wife. His gaze settled on Ildiko’s face, noting, as Anhuset had, the dark circles under her eyes. “Where was her nurse?”
Ildiko stood on tiptoe to brush a conciliatory kiss across his frowning mouth. “Right beside me. We took turns coaxing Tarawin to settle down and finally go to sleep.”
“Bring in more nurses.”
She laughed. “How many people do you think we should cram into that nursery just to get Her Majesty to go to sleep?”
Brishen slid an arm around Ildiko’s narrow waist to draw her against him. “As many as it takes. I don’t like waking up and finding you gone from our bed, even if it’s in service to the little tyrant.”
“Who has you dancing on a string just like she does the rest of us.”
“I dispute that notion.”
Ildiko laughed. “Of course you do.”
Fascinated by the interplay between her cousin and his human wife, Anhuset idly wondered what it might be like to have such a connection with someone. She and Brishen trusted each other implicitly. She knew without a doubt her cousin would sacrifice himself for her, just as Anhuset would for him. They were cousins but closer than siblings, more accepting of each other than just friends, and her loyalty to him would remain steadfast until she died.
But it wasn’t the same type of devotion she witnessed now between the herceges and his hercegesé. This affection burned bright with passion, with desire. There existed between them an unspoken and private language only the two of them understood and shared with no one else.
A vague ache pulsed somewhere under Anhuset’s breastbone, and it took her a moment to realize the feeling was both wistfulness and no small amount of envy. What was it like to know someone so well that it seemed like they walked within your spirit and you within theirs?
She mentally shook off the emotions and the question they inspired. Such idle thoughts were a waste of time and not for her. She was pleased for her cousin. After all he’d suffered, he deserved this happiness. It didn’t mean she needed, or even wanted, the same thing.
“Was there something you needed, herceges?” The dry tone of her question drew his attention away from Ildiko and onto herself. A half smile, faintly annoyed, faintly apologetic played across his lips.
He bowed. “I can take a hint, cousin. Forgive me.” He reached inside the tunic he wore and fished out a letter, its parchment neatly creased and its seal broken. He fluttered it before both women. “Serovek will be here at the end of the week. To discuss something to do with Megiddo’s body.”
A pall settled over the chamber, and a pitying look chased away all humor from Ildiko’s features. “That’s all he said? No other detail?”