Amber Queen Read online

  “Basha?” Iellieth knocked against the wooden archway that opened onto the king’s guest hall in Nocturne.

  It had taken longer than she had hoped to find the dwarf pacing before the double doors bedecked with iron. But eventually, after they settled Scad in their room, found a place to lay the bodies of the young man and the child, and asked half a dozen soldiers for their aid, they found the stormguard.

  The dwarf looked paler than she’d ever seen him. When he didn’t respond, she called to him a second time.

  Basha whirled around, spinning his battle-axe free from his shoulders, and hunched in a ready stance.

  Iellieth stumbled back toward Marcon and Quindythias. “Basha, no, it’s me.”

  He shook his head and blinked his eyes clear. “Ellie, what are you doing up at this hour?” Basha waved them closer, his voice a low, deep whisper.

  She met him halfway down the hall. Deep lines of worry crossed Basha’s face. “We . . . we have to tell you something. It’s about Lord Nassarq.”

  Basha glanced over his shoulder at the reinforced doorway. “What about him?”

  Iellieth recoiled at the dwarf’s tone. He had never snapped at her before, and she could only imagine him doing so if— She gasped. “Has something happened to King Arontis?”

  He nodded gravely.

  “Has he been bitten by a vampire?”

  “A vamp—how did you know?” Basha scowled at her, disbelief and concern swirling behind his eyes.

  Iellieth wrapped her arms around herself and spoke slowly so as not to distress the stormguard further. “Lord Nassarq is a vampire. He’s the one who’s been taking the children.” Her lip quivered as she thought of the prison cell Marcon had shielded her from. They had skirted around it as best they could as they left, but still the soft scraping and crying from inside reached her ears.

  Basha stared back at her. If the king had been bitten, why did Basha still doubt her?

  The door creaked open at the end of the hall, and her stepfather emerged, his head hung low.

  “Wait here,” Basha said under his breath. He pulled his shoulders back and strode down the hall to meet the duke. “Well?”

  Duke Amastacia sighed, his lips pulled tight together. As he raised his head to address the stormguard, he spotted her, Marcon, and Quindythias. Immediately, his gaze narrowed. Her stepfather drew himself up, acting as though nothing was amiss. “The healers believe the king will make a full recovery, but he’s weak.”

  Basha waved them forward once more.

  The duke widened his stance and crossed his arms. “I don’t believe now is the time to allow those who are simply curious about the king’s state into his chambers.”

  The dwarf stamped a foot and lifted his head toward the duke’s. “I have dedicated my life to guarding that man.” He poked his forefinger into her stepfather’s chest, and the duke stumbled back against the door. “And I won’t have a sniveling adviser interested only in his own gain stand in the way of me bringing important news to the ears of the king.”

  Duke Amastacia’s mouth hung open as he stared down at Stormguard Basha.

  “Now move,” Basha growled.

  Preserving as much of his dignity as he could, her stepfather slid away from Basha’s squat, imposing frame and stepped away from the door. The duke’s lips returned to their thin, disapproving line, and his haughty eyes flicked over to meet her gaze. A glare she knew well.

  He lifted his head high and strode down the hall away from the four of them, not giving her a second glance. Marcon’s hand rested on her shoulder, its glowing warmth subsiding the farther the duke went down the hall.

  Quindythias shrugged and pranced forward. “Well, that was dramatic. Should we introduce ourselves to the king now so he can honor us for saving the kingdom?” The elf stepped back at Basha’s glower. “I speak only in jest, Master Stormguard.” He gave a half-bow at the waist and gestured toward the door. “After you, of course.”

  Chapter 2

  Dry leaves whispered overhead as the zombie corpses floated downstream. The current pulled them across rapids and slammed them into dark, wet rocks.

  Briseras rolled her shoulders back. It wasn’t worth the effort to retrieve her arrows.

  Vera, her wolf companion, stood close beside her, her mouth open to better smell the woods on the other side of the river.

  Sleep tugged at Briseras’s eyes. She squinted them shut and open again. Where had the blood portal taken them?

  “Tut, tut.” She clicked her tongue after Vera and called Otto, her raven, down from the treetops and onto her arm. “See if you can spot a settlement nearby.”

  Otto croaked in reply. Briseras held her arm stiff, raising it with the raven’s feet to aid his flight.

  “We’ll keep moving, Vera.”

  The wolf plodded after her.

  Crisp pine needles crunched beneath her feet. Several hours had already passed in the thick woods of this unknown land, with still no sign of Lavinia, the witch who’d led her and Everett to Nassarq. Her jaw tightened at the memory of the vampire ripping through the flesh of Everett’s neck, tearing asunder his veins and spewing the folklorist’s blood across the opulent chamber beneath the castle.

  Everett had been certain that Lavinia hadn’t betrayed them the night she disappeared. Her fierce determination to destroy the vampire in the bowels of the castle certainly pointed toward his instincts being true.

  But now, Briseras had nothing more of his than the journal he’d kept of their travels together.

  She ran her fingers through the thick, warm fur on the top of Vera’s head. Everyone else, she had lost, either through death or abandonment. But not her wolf.

  Full dark fell around them. She whistled for Otto. They would need to make camp and try again with daylight. The raven carved a blue-black silhouette against the cloudy stars and returned to her.

  Otto tilted his head and gurgled low, puffing his throat feathers. He shifted back and forth between his feet for good measure. He hadn’t spotted any settlements in his search.

  “Better luck tomorrow,” she said as she squatted down. Otto hopped off her arm, and Briseras placed a strip of dried pork on the ground for him and offered a second piece to Vera.

  In the darkness, Briseras found a few large rocks piled together. They settled at the stones’ base, and Vera curled up against her legs. It had been a day and a half or more since any of them had found a chance to rest. At least this way, whatever dangers lurked in the autumnal forest would have to find them instead of the three stumbling upon a foul creature prowling about on a task of its own.

  But as Briseras closed her eyes, the sharp edge of her intuition slipped its blade into the base of her ribs. Something stalked ever closer to her, attuned to her scent.

  The vast reaches of the forest continued through the next two days of travel by foot along a winding woodland road. She and Vera each found a rabbit, and Otto, a few scrawny nestlings among the trees.

  Briseras’s silver eyes glowed as she reached out for the spirits that made their home in the forest, an ability she’d acquired after Ophelia had returned her to life. Misty shapes fluttered beneath the boughs, the residue of souls who had dwelt among the trees. But around each shape, shadows clung, the distant remains of an ancient, dark magic. She extended her sight farther. The earth itself, the trees—this corrupted past tainted all her spirit touched.

  In her extensive travels across the Azurian wildlands, she had never encountered such an environment, stained into the very fabric of its rocks and roots. Briseras rubbed at the bruises still throbbing along her neck from Nassarq’s strangling hold. The sun had not once broken through the clouds in her three days here. It was the perfect landscape for a vampire’s sanctuary.

  But what better place than a sanctuary to catch a creature unawares?

  A low fog draped across the splayed roots and undergrowth at all times of the day or night. Briseras made the fog her own, cloaking herself in its shifting embrace. Every hour or so, she sent Otto to look out over the expanse of the forest. He croaked excitedly as he returned from his second mission of the morning. They must be getting close to the edge of the road.

  Briseras clicked her tongue for Vera to follow after her. They slipped off the dirt path and into the swirl of mist beside it, lest anyone spot them as the road opened up. The black, twisted shapes of the trees grew thinner, and the fog loosened its grip.

  Choking brambles replaced the black, spindly branches overhead as they approached the borders of the wood. Beyond the tree line, rolling fields, dry and brown, spread over the earth, and the road, a depleted riverbed, wound between the hills. Far in the distance, mountains curled their backs and shoulders against the horizon. They resembled the sloped hills of the Andel Mountains of Tor’stre Vahn more so than the sharp peaks of the Frostmaws of Caldara. Everett and Lavinia, mountain people in their own right, would have treasured the highlands where she lived after Rajas took her from Haven. It was in those hills that she had learned to track monsters, and here were mountains again, always calling for her return.

  The road turned north. Several hours later, near dusk, the top of a large hill revealed plowed fields leading to a settlement of sorts, what she had taken to be a craggy hillside before. A walled town squatted at the base of a small mountain. Between it and the road, lean-tos and shanties covered the sloped hillside, many propped against the stone walls of the town. Giant mounds of hay circled the base of the hill. Briseras squinted. A thin line of smoke curled up from one of the mounds into the sky above the town.

  Curiously, none of the homes rested outside the dense hilltop collection despite the fields stretching for miles past the outskirts of the settlement. An odd white tower poked out from among the lean-tos. It tilted to the side, a taper that had bent in the burning.

  The fields she passed had been harvested recently, and no one toiled among the scant leavings of corn and hay. Briseras found a few discarded ears of corn, protected by their shucks, and filled her belly with the farmers’ leave-behinds.

  White-clad figures milled about the town. She tossed her final ear of corn back into the fields for rodent foragers or the strangely silent birds of this desiccated realm.

  One of the bales had been placed near the road. As she approached, it became clear that the piles were not mounds of hay at all but stacks of brush and branches from the forest. Briseras frowned. Why prepare a pyre of such size, so far from the town? And so many?

  “Stay close to me, Vera.” She sensed the flitting spirits from the woods here as well, hidden among the living.

  At the base of the hill, where the road split in twain, was a second, extinguished pyre. A twisted skeleton, either human or elf, lay atop the pile of ash. The figure’s howling scream contorted its charred remains, its skull splayed wide along the tortured jaw.

  So this was why the spirits clung so close to the earth.

  Briseras’s hand darted to her hip as two children appeared from behind the next pyre she passed. She dropped her hand free of her sword’s hilt and waved them out.

  Gripping one another’s hands, they approached. “I-is your wolf good?” the little girl asked. She stared wide-eyed at Vera.

  “She is.”

  “Can we . . .” The children held their hands outstretched.

  Briseras grinned. She’d first seen a wolf at the side of a hunter visiting Haven when she was about their age, seven or eight, perhaps younger. The way the creature had met her eyes, had looked at her—she’d felt seen for the first time in memory, by anyone save her mother. She’d reached out a trembling hand, as they were doing now, and rubbed her palm from the base of the wolf’s nose to the top of its head. The wolf didn’t blink or flinch when she touched it. Something deep inside her had shifted, mended, and she knew she’d discovered an ancient part of herself, of who she and those like her were meant to be.

  Vera sat tall and still on the road beside her. She knelt down next to the wolf and nodded to the two children. “One at a time.”

  The little girl came first, running her fingers through the thick fur at Vera’s neck. She gestured for the boy to approach now as well. He rubbed the top of Vera’s head as she had the first wolf she met more than two decades ago. Slowly, twinned smiles spread across their faces.

  “What are your names?” Briseras asked.

  “Vasile,” the boy whispered.

  “Romina.”

  Briseras met the boy’s eyes while the girl continued to stare at her wolf. “Vasile, Romina, this is Vera. And I’m Briseras. Is this the town where you live?” They both nodded. “What’s it called?”

  “Inside the wall it’s called St. Sebastian,” Romina began.

  “And outside, where we live, is the Ring of Light.”

  Strange to have two separate names for the same settlement. “I see. And what is your town like?”

  Vasile frowned. “The Brotherhood can be mean. Our pa didn’t like them. B-but Missus Higgins, she says that they keep us safe and protected.”

  “Mmhmm.” A familiar refrain. “And Mrs. Higgins, she takes care of you?” The children were thin but not starving, though they didn’t seem appropriately clothed against the chill in the air. Romina’s shoes, most likely passed down from her brother, were nearly worn through.

  Shouts echoed from the top of the hill, the screeching voice of a single man and the jeering roar of a crowd. Romina’s eyes widened and she scooted closer to Vera. A wise instinct.

  “Can the two of you show me to the Ring of Light? Is there a place for travelers to stay?”

  Vasile took her hand, and Romina walked between her and Vera as they climbed the hill.

  The road cut switchbacks up the side of the knoll, and they reached the top at dusk. Torches glowed in a ring around the hill’s edge—was it these lights or the circle of pyres for which the town was named? More torches wound between the shelters, marking their way toward the center of town where the shouts continued to echo.

  Vera’s ears pricked up and turned from side to side, searching their environment for the source of the threats she sensed. Briseras and the wolf both felt it deep in their bones—the dangers closed in with each step.

  Romina blenched and grabbed Briseras’s free hand as a new round of shouting began. The children guided her through the narrow streets of the Ring of Light, winding nearer to the source of the screams. Their grips tightened as they approached the center of town.

  Two rows of houses separated them from a mob of villagers with torches. Briseras shuddered, bombarded by memories of the priests’ midnight raids through Haven’s brothels, echoes of the attacks they’d mounted in the wilds of Tor’stre Vahn, assaults that brought witches like her mother within their walls in the first place.

  In the center of the mob, a man stood with knees bent, hands tied behind his back atop a small wooden platform that held two sets of stocks. A villager approached, teeth bared. The bound man send him reeling with a kick to his chest.

  “Briseras.” Vasile pulled on her hand. “We shouldn’t stay here.”

  She cast a final look over her shoulder and followed the children.

  The bound man wore dark, forest greens as opposed to the white worn by the rest of the village. Townsfolk on the edge of the mob carried long sticks and kindling.

  They were building a new pyre.

  Chapter 3

  King Arontis leaned back against his wooden headboard as Iellieth, Marcon, and Quindythias recounted what they had witnessed in the Nocturne dungeon. Anxious healers fluttered about on either side of the bed, watched closely by Stormguard Basha. Guards lined the edges of the bedchamber, poised by the draperies like helmet-less suits of armor.

  “That is quite enough,” the king snapped. “I’m not dead. Fetch me a tonic, and let’s be done with the matter.” Arontis waved one of his personal guards to his bedside and ordered that he and the others rouse the nobles from their beds. “Tell the steward to oversee preparations in the great hall. We’ll gather there.”

  Arontis pressed the linen bindings to his neck as he returned his attention to the trio. “Now, you three.” The king grimaced as he rose from his bed and donned a burgundy robe. “Heh. We’ll certainly give them all a fright if I look anything like you.”

  Iellieth’s hand drifted to her side, where Lorieannan’s claws had gouged through her armor. Dirt and dried blood clung to the few visible patches of Marcon’s and Quindythias’s skin, smudging the lines of their tattooed runes. She curled her fingers into a fist to stop their shaking. She had never interacted with the king outside a formal gathering, and she wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “None of you look as fetching as me,” Quindythias said with a shrug.

  The sovereign chuckled. “We’ll don our frippery later and see.” He nodded to Basha, who came to stand at his side. The king’s smile faded, and he turned to Iellieth. “You are full of surprises this evening, Lady Amastacia. Now, your king must ask of you another great service. You’ve dispatched a vampire—will you face the vipers next? I’ll need you to repeat what you saw in the dungeons for the court so that we may proceed.”

  Arontis walked slowly, Basha beside him, as they returned to the dining hall where Nassarq had sat at the king’s hand and slipped away to threaten her only a few hours prior. Marcon glanced down at her as they walked, and Iellieth took his offered hand. Entering the hall full of nobles had been frightening enough the evening before. But now, on the other side of their battle with a vampire and a revenant, all of their eyes would be fixed on her. She squeezed Marcon’s hand, and he returned the pressure of her grasp. Unlike the countless times she had walked into a ballroom or other courtly assembly, the weight of onlookers’ judgments a velvet cape pressed over her mouth, dragging at her shoulders, this time, she wouldn’t have to stand alone.