Take the Tower of the Sun,
Claim the hand that wears the Abiding Ring,
And the empire falls.
Claiming the hand that wears the Abiding Ring? I only wish it had been as simple as conquering an impregnable ancient city. Instead I’d had to find a way to convince Queen Euthalia of Calanthe to marry me. Against all probability, I’d succeeded. We were duly wed, though saying I’d claimed anything about Lia would be a stretch, and I sure didn’t see the empire falling anytime soon. The reverse seemed far more likely.
Doing nothing while my enemy mustered a crushing attack was driving me out of my mind.
“Lia’s spies can maybe tell her how much vurgsten Anure has, yes,” I finally replied to the wizard’s expectant silence. “She might find out exactly how many ships and troops he can send against us, how well fortified his citadel is, and we’ll know nothing more than we do now. We’ll be no closer to defeating Anure. I thought claiming the hand with the Abiding Ring would lead to the empire’s fall.” I leveled an accusing glare on him.
“You claimed Her Highness’s hand in marriage all right, but the wooing doesn’t stop there,” Ambrose replied with mild reproof. “You can’t order about a queen like you can your soldiers.”
“Don’t I know it,” I muttered. Since Ambrose had destroyed what little peace I’d found, I turned and strode down the long gallery. The wizard glided alongside me, making no sound though my bootsteps echoed on the polished marble of Lia’s pretty palace. Ambrose could move silently as a cat when he wished, which was how he’d managed to sneak up on me. No one else could. I’d learned early on in the mines of Vurgmun to duck the ready lash of the guards, a habit that had stuck—and served me well in the years of battle since.
I’d have liked to say I’d gotten used to Ambrose’s strange skills, but even I didn’t delude myself that much.
We emerged from the shadowed portrait gallery, a place thick with ghosts and the stale smells of hundreds of destroyed kingdoms, and into the bright, flower-scented sunlight of the main hall. Lia’s palace didn’t have much in the way of walls. With the eternal summer of Calanthe’s tropical weather, they didn’t need them. Open arcades of carved pillars framed the lush gardens, pools, and lawns surrounding the palace, with the gleaming turquoise sea beyond. Flowers bloomed constantly from lawns, flower beds, shrubs, and towering trees, with vines coiling over all of it. Butterflies of hues I hadn’t known existed lifted in clouds, then drifted on the breeze, and everywhere birds sang, all sweetly, of course. I hadn’t figured out yet if Lia had an army of gardeners to tend it all or if it just … did that on its own.
I’d made a deal with myself that I wouldn’t ask. Not that Lia would laugh at my question—not out loud, anyway—but I didn’t like to remind Her Highness of what an ignorant lout she’d married.
A stream burbled its way through the palace from a lagoon on one side to a pond on the other, meandering through in a trough cut into the marble floors and inlaid with little tiles in all shades of blue and green. Arching bridges crossed it in places, more for show than anything, because all but the most mincing courtier could easily leap across the narrow channel. I might not have much in the way of fine manners, but even I knew it would be rude to actually jump over the thing, however, and I didn’t much feel like changing my path to cross over the nearest dainty bridge. So I turned and followed the stream outside.
Ambrose, of course, tagged along as if we were out for a companionable stroll.
“What do you want, Ambrose?” I finally asked, capitulating to the inevitable.
“Me? Oh, what a question.” He let his staff thunk on the path of crushed stone, leaning on it as we walked, Merle rising and falling with the movement, like the carved masthead of a ship on stormy seas. “I want different things now than when I was an apprentice wizard,” he continued conversationally. “Those ideas change over time, have you noticed? The expectations of youthful idealism give way to more mature dreams and goals. Not in a bad way. It’s just that what we thought we wanted comes from not really knowing what we could have. Once I learned more about what the world offered me, I discovered I wanted entirely different things. And you?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Or how I’d gone from leading armies, with every conquest increasing the momentum of my vengeance, to strolling through a garden, having a conversation like the pretty lads and ladies we passed. Most of the courtiers were in court, naturally, kissing Lia’s gorgeously garbed ass and passing their fancily folded notes, but the other denizens of the palace seemed to spend most of their time looking decorative in the gardens. In my black garb—granted, finer than what I’d arrived on Calanthe wearing—and carrying my weapons, I felt like a scarred monster by comparison. Given the askance looks the courtiers gave me before they deflected into other directions, they thought so, too.
“I’m talking about changing expectations,” Ambrose replied, lifting his face to the sun and smiling like that one painting of a saint back in the gallery. “You, for example, can expect very different things from your life now that you’re king of Calanthe and no longer the Slave King.”
“The consort of the queen of Calanthe,” I corrected, hating the testy edge to my voice, already so rough compared with the wizard’s fluid tones. “Not the same thing. I’m not king of anything, never have been.”
Ambrose waved that off as irrelevant. “My point is, it’s time for you to stop moping about in the shadows. You can’t afford to do nothing. Time to take action, my boy!”
I stopped next to a tiered fountain of roses, glaring at it while I mastered the urge to throttle the wizard. The roses at the top were bright white, then they got pinker lower down. The blooms progressed through all shades of pink and red, until the bottom ones that were as dark as the blood that pours out when you strike a man in the liver.
Tiny purple bees buzzed around them, making a hypnotic sound that somehow seemed part of the heavily sweet scent of the blossoms. I kept an eye on the bees to make sure they planned to stay occupied with the flowers rather than attacking us. “What action do you want me to take?” I asked, sounding more or less calm. “Lia refuses to convene her Defense Council and you agreed with her, saying we should wait to see how Anure responded when he received news of the wedding.”
Ambrose sighed heavily, then settled himself on a stone bench that circled the flower fountain, heedless of the bees that investigated the garland in his hair, though Merle snapped at one curiously. “That’s what I’m telling you, Conrí,” the wizard said with exaggerated patience. “We did have to wait. Now we don’t. Must I forever explain these things?”
I wrapped my fingers into my palms, making them into fists so I’d be less likely to forget that I needed Ambrose and accidentally strangle him. Also, he was Lia’s court wizard now, and she’d be put out with me if I killed him.
Ours wasn’t a marriage of affection. Exactly the opposite, in fact, as we’d started out trying to kill each other before we ever met face-to-face. But the ritual had been done properly, tying us together for the rest of our lives, like it or not. Aside from the sexual consummation, where we seemed to get along just fine, we mostly seemed to piss each other off. Like two bulls in a small pen, one of Lia’s pet scholars, Brenda, had called us. Not a bad comparison, if unflattering. I wouldn’t mind having horns to wave at Ambrose in menace.