The Element of Fire by Martha Wells (top novels TXT) 📕

I can’t confuse the issue any further by pursuing Falaise.” The young Queen was beautiful, but so were most of the other women at court. She was also the kind of woman for whom men would continually ruin themselves, and he was past that stage. Did Denzil want Falaise, or was that the only way he knew to approach her? Falaise had evidently not wanted him. Thomas doubted she wanted anybody. Her offer to him had held no warmth. She offered her body because she thought it was part of the process of sealing an agreement.

Was I like that? Thomas wondered. Was that what I thought when Ravenna first approached me, all those years ago?

Kade interrupted his thoughts. “Why not?”

He had time to notice that he had spoken to her in the offhand way he might speak to a friend, without any regard for propriety or anything else. He also suspected he had just opened the way for her to ruthlessly question him about whatever subject occurred to her, but it was too late to stop at this point. “If I were going to raise a child, I’d have started before now.”

Kade greeted this with another long moment of enigmatic silence, then she said, “Oh.” She looked into the fire for a little while, then chuckled to herself.

He glanced at her suspiciously. “What?”

“Nothing.” Another pause, then she asked, “How did Denzil get such a hold on Roland? That he can threaten the Queen, of all people, with her too afraid to ask for help?”

Thomas watched the fire for a moment, remembering. “Right before your father died, Roland tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists, but he bungled it. Denzil found him, bandaged him up, concocted a story to explain it. He also kept him from attempting it again.”

Kade bit her lip, thinking, then shook her head. “But that almost seems like Denzil must care for him, and I may be odd, but I can’t imagine that.”

“You can care for someone and hate them at the same time. And Denzil was nothing without Roland’s support then. He needed a live prince to attach himself to.” He glanced over at her. “Don’t look like that. Roland didn’t have to fall into Denzil’s clutches. Look at you. You haven’t got a Denzil hanging about somewhere in Fayre, have you?”

“Of course not.” She shuddered theatrically. “And I was not looking guilty, I was looking thoughtful.”

Thomas hadn’t said the word “guilty,” but he didn’t intend to point that out. If she could fall into such an obvious trap then she must be considerably distracted.

A log rolled to the edge of the hearth, and he stood, somewhat awkwardly, supporting himself on the arm of the chair, to push it back in with the poker.

Kade winced. “I’m sorry about that.”

He dropped back into the chair. “About saving my life? There’s a cheery sentiment.”

She refused to be diverted. “What if it never heals?”

She was just as well aware as he was about what it would do to his speed in a fight. “Well, I’m getting old for a duelist. It probably won’t make any difference in the long run.”

“Don’t say that; I have enough to worry about.” Kade slumped further down in her chair. “How are we going to get rid of Denzil?”

Thomas wondered how she could sit like that without breaking her back. He answered, “I’m going to kill him, if I ever get the chance. But I’d like to do it without dooming Falaise, myself, or anyone else.”

“I could do it. Roland hates me anyway, and he can’t come after me where I live.”

He snorted. “I’m hardly likely to ask you to do a thing like that.”

“It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”

The somewhat airy way she said this caused him to doubt that she was as indifferent as she pretended, but he answered, “I don’t care if you go about murdering people every afternoon. You’d make me look a fool or a worse scoundrel than Denzil, and I’d think of some horrific way to retaliate.”

She shrugged and rubbed the arm of the chair distractedly. “It shouldn’t matter, even if I am related to him. I wished my father dead.”

Thomas frowned. “What makes you say that?”

Her eyes on the fire, Kade said slowly, “I wished it, very hard, with everything I had, which I was beginning to realize might be quite a bit. And he died.”

“He didn’t just fall over dead.”

“Yes, he did.” She looked stubborn.

“No, he did not. Were you there?”

“No, of course not, but I know what happened because I caused it.”

“I don’t know why I bother to listen to you argue in circles.”

Kade made an exasperated gesture. “Because you can’t come up with anything better than ‘No, he did not.’ How do you know? My magic was wild then, I didn’t know what I was doing, I could have caused any amount of harm.”

He was silent for a long moment. He said finally, “Does it matter, as long as he’s dead?”

“No, I suppose not.” She sank further in her chair and stared at the fire.

Thomas glanced back at the two servants. Berham was deep into a story of one of the last battles of the Bisran War, and Phaistus was so engrossed in it he was getting hot lead all over the table. He turned back to the fire. “Fulstan was poisoned.”

Her expression went blank. It was hard to tell if she was astonished or not. He said, “Ravenna did it. I got the poison for her. It was foxglove, as I recall.”

Kade stood up and walked around the room in a circle. After a few moments she wandered back to the fire and sat down again as if she had just arrived.

Thomas added, “Believe it or not, Ravenna never quite realized what Fulstan was doing to you or to Roland. She’s very single-minded. He knew he should be wary of her, but she couldn’t touch him under court-or landlaw, and I suppose he thought his position was safe. After your little outburst in the cathedral, she began to wonder why you’d become such a terror. I discovered some of the details for her so she sent you out of the city to the convent. You’d been gone a week when Roland botched his attempt to bleed to death, and when she heard about that she made the decision.” He shrugged. It all seemed a very long time ago. “There wasn’t any dancing in the streets, but most of the mourning was insincere.”

She was silent for a long time, and Thomas listened to the fire crackle and Bertram’s voice in the background. Finally Kade said quietly, “I never thought anybody wanted to kill him but me. Even Roland thought it was something he did, like not riding well enough or playing games badly.”

Thomas leaned forward and added another log to the fire. “Well, it was time you knew.”

*

It was much later and most of the house was asleep when Kade made her way up to the highest attic and eased up the sash of a window there, mindful of the nails in it. It was cold, bitterly cold, with a patina of frost glittering over every surface and clouds hiding the stars. It was very dark and the moon was in its waning; in the Old Faith, it was the dark time, the death of white magic. The reigning time of the Host. The gray-black rooftops spread around her like an angular un-moving sea. She could just see the palace from here as an odd collection of shapes, some recognizable as towers, another as the dome of the Summer Residence. The faint glow of witch-light flickered over the walls.

She climbed out onto the slate-shingled roof of the gable just below and sat in front of the window, to keep anything from trying to enter the house behind her back. She shivered and hugged her knees, though she had augmented her clothing with a man’s shirt Berham had found for her and Thomas’s battered buff coat.

I did not kill my father. Her emotions were as tangled as a jumbled collection of beaded necklaces. She wished she could untangle the strands and run them through her fingers one by one. Disappointment, that she could understand. It was not an odd emotion for someone who had believed a lie was the truth, particularly as it was a lie she had told herself. Confusion, anger, remembered fear, all these were explicable, if hopelessly intertwined. It was the strange sensation of release, the sense of freedom that she couldn’t understand, that made her face hot and her hands numb with the strength of it. As if something tightly coiled inside her chest had relaxed a trifle. It seemed to make other things possible as well. It seemed to imply that it might be possible to forget, eventually. Time to stop dreaming like a child, she told herself with an irritated toss of her head. Time to think and plan.

She closed her eyes and whispered, “Boliver, come here now; I need to talk to you.” A gust of wind carried the words away.

Nothing happened. I hate it when he makes me do this. “As Queen of Air and Darkness, and on my sovereignty of Knockma, I call Boliver Fay.”

For a long breathless moment there was no answer, then out of the cloud-covered sky a star fell. It plunged toward her and landed lightly at her feet, then resolved with a flash of light into Boliver, who said, “It’s not bloody easy getting here, you know.” He was about Kade’s height, wizened and red bearded, and his vivid blue eyes were worried. He wore a high peaked hat and a somewhat tattered velvet doublet.

“No, I don’t know. That’s why I called you. How is Knockma?”

“Not so good. There are members of the Host drawn up on the border to Fayre, though not a sign of them on the mortal side, so far. They didn’t like you much to begin with, and now with you taking the human part in this war—”

“Is everyone all right?” Kade had worried about her household. Some of them were human, and none terribly good at defending themselves.

Boliver was offended. “You know I wouldn’t let anything happen to them. But why are you doin’ this? Have you gone witless? You didn’t make up with your brother by chance?”

“No, of course not.” Kade doubted she ever would. Roland wouldn’t welcome such an overture, and she wasn’t certain she wanted to make it anymore. There was too much history between them, and they might only remind one another of things better forgotten. The news that he had tried to take his own life had been an unpleasant surprise, and her thoughts shied away from it. She looked out over the dark dead city again. “I’ve got a reason for it.”

“‘A reason,’ she says. Oh, joy.” Boliver rolled his eyes.

She rubbed her forehead. “I’ll hold Knockma for us, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.” He let his knees knock and his teeth chatter convincingly. “I’m petrified. I’ve no wish to vanish down Evadne’s gullet. Or watch me bosom companions do likewise.”

“Neither do I.” She shifted impatiently. “I need your help.”

He snorted. “As if I had a choice.”

“Well you don’t, so be quiet and listen. I need you to fly over the palace and tell me what you can see.”

“Fly over the palace? What have I done to deserve it? With all those boglie-woglies everywhere?”

“Yes. I’d do it if I could, but I can’t, and that’s all there is to it!” Boliver was her oldest friend in Fayre, and she didn’t want to risk him, but