The Assassin’s Bride: A Fantasy Romance Tale (Artisan Magic Book 1)

The sounds of construction rang against the mountains, faint from distance, but present. The echoes of hammers and pickaxes made Thea’s eye twitch.

“How in the name of the One did they get all these people here?” Rilion asked in a murmur.

“What name is that?” Gaius crouched and inched as far forward as he dared, studying the lay of the buildings. Thea did, too, though she didn’t know what she was looking at. The fortress looked strange compared to the surrounding mountains. Flat, square. Shapes common in Kentoria’s architecture. Ranor’s buildings had been taller and more angular. She didn’t know what to expect from Angroth.

“I’m not saying it,” Rilion replied, irritated. “You know it’s forbidden to speak it.”

“But writing it doesn’t count, somehow?”

“His word can be written because it’s knowledge the One has given to us. If the name is part of that, then—why are we discussing this now?” The prince made a sour face and returned his attention to the scene below.

Thea was already counting. “I don’t know how to categorize the people down there. There are so many people working construction, but there are soldiers, too. Hundreds.” It was hard to make out more than the minuscule shapes of people, but many carried large poleaxes or halberds that made them easy to spot. “Where did they all come from?”

From the way Gaius scanned the fortress from end to end, he was counting, too. “Settlements like the one we passed.”

There were children, too. Thea didn’t see them often, but now and then, a tiny person ran from one side of an open space to another. She shifted her attention outward, to the slopes. If there were fences, she couldn’t see, and the pale bodies of livestock would have blended into the snow-dusted mountainside if not for their shadows. “What could convince people to come so far? Is there a shortage of work in Ranor?”

“No,” Rilion said, “but if you offer enough money, just about anyone will move. Why here, though?”

“The southwestern region of Angroth is the best place someone who wants to go unnoticed could choose to settle. It’s not as if there’s anything down here. Not here, and not in Lyrangroth on the other side of the range.” Gaius glanced west, toward the higher peaks. Looking for trails through the mountains? Thea saw none, but she’d already learned he was better at finding anything out of the ordinary.

“They aren’t all Ranorsh people, though. We would have noticed this sort of exodus.” Rilion studied the mountains, too, then turned to make sure the horses hadn’t left.

Thea worried her lower lip between her teeth. “I can’t be sure, but I think at least half of them are Kentorian.”

Both men looked at her in surprise.

“Their clothing,” she explained before they could ask. “It’s too far for me to see clearly, but the shapes—the outline of their silhouettes is consistent with Kentorian fashion.”

Gaius squinted at the workers near the top of the fortress. They were working on some sort of wall, transporting stones and mortaring them in place. “How would so many Kentorians get this far into Angroth’s mountains without being noticed?” That was a question for Rilion; as a prince, even a Third Prince, he should know.

All Rilion offered was a shrug. “I certainly haven’t seen that many migrants.”

For a time, they were all quiet.

Thea stifled a sigh. “So what does all this tell us?”

Again, Rilion looked sour. “My information may have been somewhat incorrect. This is how the outpost was described to me, but they definitely indicated it was north of Passgate.”

“Maybe it was,” Gaius said. “Maybe they moved.”

The prince waved a hand at the construction. “Considering how many people have moved without notice, I’m willing to consider the possibility.”

“So this is it?” Thea asked. “This is where we’re supposed to be?”

“Maybe.” Gaius didn’t sound convinced.

“You know there’s only one way to find out.” Again, Rilion looked toward the horses. He made a small sound of exasperation and hurried that way. The gray dapple, Nib, was headed down the slope.

Thea thought he might return to finish that conversation, but instead, he climbed onto his wandering horse. She glanced to Gaius. His eyes were intense, focused. Did he envision his target there, hiding in that fortress? Leading it? Her nerves prickled with anxiety. “How do we find out? Sneak in?” she whispered.

“No,” he said, a wry twist to his mouth. “We walk in the front door.”

The descent back the way they’d come ate up the rest of the day.

“They’ll close the gates at nightfall, I’m sure,” Rilion said as the sun dipped below the ridge of mountains to the west. “Do we make camp again, or press on?”

“We’ll venture as far as we can. Even with the fastest horses the world has to offer, we wouldn’t make it to their settlement tonight.” Gaius sounded frustrated.

Thea sympathized. It was hard to be sure what they were doing was even the correct choice. They’d turned to follow that trail on a whim. The fortress being there was promising for their cause, but if they reached its walls and discovered it wasn’t the destination they were after, they’d be several days behind. Would that much time affect the likelihood of finding whoever pulled the strings of power in Kentoria? She hoped not, but Gaius had already spent years searching without finding what he sought. Delays now were not promising.

The sky remained bright for some time after the sun dipped out of sight. When the first hint of gold appeared, they halted for the night and set up their meager camp.

Rilion scrounged enough sticks from the nearby hills for a fire. Gaius did not object when he cleared a patch of dirt and piled them to light. Instead, he paced restless circles around the campsite.

After his third lap, Thea left her things behind and touched a hand to the dagger on her thigh. “We should practice.”

He slowed, then shook his head and continued his circuit. “If you are not ready by now, nothing I do tonight will change that.”

It was fair, and probably true. She knew she’d gained skill, though that hadn’t been hard, since she’d known nothing when they began. Now she could hold her own in one-on-one combat, though the few times Rilion and Gaius had teamed up against her, she’d struggled. She thought that reasonable. Gaius could track and manage a seemingly endless number of opponents at once, but not everyone was him. No matter how much training she’d had, she was still a seamstress, a Threadmancer, a noblewoman whose hands had scarcely touched a weapon before this ordeal.

When he did not stop pacing, she finished spreading her bedroll. “Come sit with me?”

Gaius slowed again. This time, he considered the request. No objections came to mind, Thea supposed, for he strode over to sit at her side.

Satisfied, she leaned her head against his shoulder.

Rilion watched as he worked to start the fire. He’d witnessed affection between them enough since they’d left Danesse; nothing improper, only kisses and embraces that rarely lingered. There was speculation in the way he studied them, though, and Thea didn’t think she’d seen that before.

She shut her eyes so she wouldn’t have to ponder it. “You’re worried. About tomorrow? That we won’t find what you’re looking for?”

“That we won’t find him,” Gaius said, “Or perhaps that we will.”

He sat stiff, his shoulder still as stone beneath her head. She inched closer. “After all this time, you’ve still never told me who exactly it is we’re looking for.”

“I don’t know, and therein lies part of the problem.”

“Oh.” That would be a problem.

“I’ve always told myself I would know when I see him, but perhaps that isn’t true. I may know him. Or it may take time for me to be sure.” Gaius rubbed the back of his neck. “If I am to be truthful, I never saw him. But I have seen what he has done to my family, and he will answer for it.”

Thea rubbed his arm. “I’m sorry.”

“After all these years, we still don’t even know why.” Rilion held out his hands before the tiny fire as the flames took hold.

“Rilion has been aiding me since my father’s death,” Gaius said. “For a long time, he has been the only one to help. Calem cared, as did Aleron. Lucan…”

“Lucan cared,” Rilion said. “In his own way.”

Gaius stared at the ground and Thea rubbed his arm again. She didn’t know how to comfort him; not in this. She’d known people who suffered loss, had suffered loss of her own, but this was different. His whole family. The stability of the kingdom he was supposed to rule. All gone.

Eventually, he drew a breath to speak again. “Calem could have been a threat to many countries in this part of the world. He was well-liked. It made sense for an assassin to target him, but I never found any trace, no signs anyone had breached our defenses. It was worse than chasing a ghost. At least ghosts have sightings.”

Thea nodded. That was, she assumed, part of why everyone believed it was the plague. The king had died so swiftly during the plague, an illness that took its toll within a matter of days. The palace had been closed against disease, and only a madman would have passed through the city at that time. The revelation it had been poison still shook her.

“For all that I mourned Calem as a friend, as well as a brother, Aleron was harder. You know what they said. An accident. Ill luck on the hunt.” He snorted softly. “It was in the shelter of his own quarters. I was the one who found him. I’d just come back from searching. I was to offer a report. Had I arrived only a few hours earlier, I could have been there. I could have stopped the assassin. I know I could.”

“You don’t,” Rilion put in. “You have no way to know that. You could have been asleep in your chambers and it would have happened, all the same.”

Gaius frowned so deep, Thea thought the furrows in his brow might never smooth out. “Or I could have been there. I was Aleron’s blade. As I was Calem’s, as I was my father’s. I failed them all.”

“You’ve done all you could.” Thea hugged his arm. It would have been too difficult to get her arms around him from the side. “But what about Lucan? All these deaths are so different, I don’t know if…” If she had the right story? By now, she expected not, and she shouldn’t have asked.

But he didn’t seem to mind, and he laid a hand atop one of hers. “Lucan was… difficult. He was already paranoid after Calem’s death. After Aleron, it became unbearable. He began sequestering himself in his quarters, refusing to see anyone, even… no, especially me. He feared me. He accused me of having killed Aleron, at one point. I swore my loyalty to him a thousand times. I swore it on the Light, I swore it on our blood, I swore it on anything he asked. But it was never enough, and in the end, he…”

Her hands tightened on his arm.

He swallowed and closed his eyes. “He could bear his fear no longer. In the end, that was what killed him. And to an extent, it was my fault.”

“You’ve been saying that for months,” Rilion said. “It’s still not true.”

Thea cast him a frown, then looked to Gaius. The lines of the face she’d given her didn’t match the shadows cast by the fire, not quite. It gave him an unsettling look. “Why do you think that? Just because he was afraid of you?”

“Because I gave him reason to be afraid. He gave me orders I didn’t agree with. My role was to be the king’s blade, a weapon with which he could strike. I wasn’t supposed to refuse. But his paranoia went too far. I tried to reason with him, to convince him the people he wanted me to kill had done no wrong. That harming people who were supposed to be on our side would destabilize Kentoria and its alliances. But he insisted, and I felt I had no choice. I was sworn to him a thousand times over.”

Her heart twisted. She knew the cost of Lucan’s paranoia all too well. “You can’t blame yourself for his actions. We all know he was…” Mad? She couldn’t bring herself to say it, even if she was sure the word fit. Even if it was a milder word by far than the curses that first sprang to mind. By the Light, would it ever get easier to think of her brother? She cleared her throat lightly and continued without fitting any word to the former king at all. “He arrested many innocent people throughout Samara. Executed people who didn’t deserve it. No one was safe, but that wasn’t your fault.”

For a time, Gaius said nothing. When his eyes reopened, they bore a deep sorrow, darker and heavier than the illusion she’d spun over their color. “I tried to make my peace with what he wanted me to do. Tell myself it was for the best. That I’d sworn to serve him and I would do so until the end. I couldn’t. By the time I refused to lift a blade in his name again, I’d already shed far too much innocent blood.”

Thea ran her hand up and down his bicep. She didn’t know what to say. What would comfort him? She had nothing to offer but the story of her own loss to the same king’s illness, and that was hardly a story that would make anyone feel better. Yet there was little else to say, except the simple words that left her mouth. “I understand.”

And she did, at least on the surface. It made perfect sense that Lucan would fear him. That a man with the power to strike a king dead would refuse to obey was terrifying. She saw how it could drive him to the brink. And she understood the quandary Gaius had been left with, though she lacked the fortitude to think of the things he must have done. He’d been forged into a weapon; all he knew was how to cut.

To rise and refuse to cut anymore must have been far harder than anything else he’d done.

Rilion scratched the back of his head and sighed, long and deep. “To an extent, Lucan probably had reason to fear. I had hoped Aleron’s death was the end of it, that Gaius wouldn’t be a target. We can all see that wasn’t the case. I don’t mean to excuse Lucan’s paranoia, but an assassin came for Gaius, too. We still don’t even know why.”

Thea’s eyes snapped to his face. “You don’t?”

Gaius nodded, resigned. “We’ve never turned up even so much as a clue. For all that I’ve searched since Calem’s death, I’ve found nothing. No motives. No demands. Only more uncertainty. My father was old when he passed. He settled late in life. We all expected it, and Calem was ready to take the throne. For a long time, I believed his death was by natural causes. Now, I am no longer sure. It’s only an assumption, but I have reason to suspect he was poisoned as well. All with no traces left behind, just as it was with Calem.”

“But we’re close,” Rilion said. “I have a good feeling about this lead. We’re going to find answers soon.”

“Perhaps.” Gaius took Thea’s hand in his and pulled it to his mouth so he could kiss her knuckles. “But I have been sullen long enough. A king should not be given to sulking or self-pity, and I have indulged in both enough tonight. We should rest while we are able. Tomorrow, we’ll find answers.”

Answers, or yet another mystery.