Crown of One Hundred Kings (Nine Kingdoms Trilogy Book 1) Page 2

  Laughter danced in his brown eyes. “At least he blames you for my failing.”

  My eyes widened at his nerve. “He blames me because you blamed me! In front of the entire assembly!”

  “They wanted to know why I had no discipline! And it truly is your fault! You do not have to live here for the rest of your life, Princess. I do. Of course I blamed you. I still blame you.”

  “Oh, you!” I lunged forward, balancing on the tip of a pointed rock and ignored the sharp dig into the ball of my foot. Oliver hadn’t grown into his gangly body yet. Despite his towering height, I had something solid to my body, unlike his scrawny arms that could barely carry a bucket of water from the well to the kitchen. I tried to push him into the river, but he skipped out of reach, laughing.

  I hopped to the next rock. We tried to stay near the edge of the riverbank, but somewhere in my pursuit I forgot to be careful. Before I knew it, the current licked my ankles and soaked the hem of my dress. The rocks were covered in slick moss and I could no longer move quickly between them. I needed time to settle on each and catch my balance.

  Oliver, realizing how far out we’d accidentally wandered, started jumping back toward the bank, his laughter floating on the wind. I could not wait to dunk him into the mighty river. He could swim, but not well.

  I grinned at the thought of him flopping about on the muddy bank.

  A caw pierced our moment and I looked up to see a large raven settle on a drooping branch overhead. It tilted its head toward the sky and shrieked once more.

  A memory flickered through me. Elegant, feathered wings, blood dripping from their tips. Blackened feet with the claws of a predator. Equally darkened eyes that shimmered with hatred and fury. I shut my eyes, anxious to be rid of the images I couldn’t exactly recall. They floated through my mind dreamlike and fleeting. And yet, somewhere in the recesses of my memories, I felt as though this had happened once before.

  My blood turned to ice.

  Perched on a stone with water rushing over my naked feet I heard the creature scream once more, a sound so loud that I paused to stare at it. My arms flailed in my attempt to stay upright.

  I had a moment of prickling dread when the raven snapped its head down to meet my gaze. My breath whooshed from my tightened lungs and I thought for a moment that the bird recognized me.

  Or maybe I recognized the bird.

  I shook my head. Then the bird spread its long, onyx wings and swooped down toward my face.

  I screamed and ducked out of the way, but I lost my footing. I was submerged before I could close my mouth again.

  I sucked in a lungful of cold water as I struggled desperately to break through the surface. My heavy dress only became heavier in the water. My feet brushed the sandy bottom, but the water moved too rapidly for me to find purchase so I could launch my body upwards.

  I fought frantically against the rush of water and my tangling clothes, but I was no match for the fierce current.

  Everything grew dark.

  The raven flitted from my mind as the need to survive took precedence. There was nothing left to think except, drat.

  Pure, raw frustration pulsed through me. This was the stupidest possible way for my life to end.

  I should have died with my family eight years ago.

  2

  I pushed upward in one last great effort and managed to suck in a final breath. A wave smashed into me in the next second and dragged me under the surface once more.

  As though its claws could reach down and grasp my attention, I heard the distant call of a raven as the current continued to push me along. The malicious bird bellowed a song of victory.

  It must be a dream, I reasoned. Images of my family smiling and laughing and living danced through my mind and I had the odd sensation that I was dreaming while awake. Their deaths haunted me even while I succumbed to my own.

  I imagined my family waiting for me on the other side of death. Their familiar arms opened wide in welcome, their smiling faces promising peace and safety, love and warmth. “Tessana,” my father called through the murky haze. “Come home.”

  He is calling me to them, I realized.

  I didn’t particularly want to die, but it didn’t seem so bad, now. It would be better to be with them. Better to leave this world behind and find them in the great afterlife.

  I opened my mouth to tell him I was on my way, only to suck in a great, gasping lungful of water. Fear fought with acceptance. And I decided I wouldn’t be a coward about this. I would face death with courage.

  Just as water filled my mouth something wrapped around my arms with biting force. My breath turned into a scream and I clenched my eyes shut in agony. Then I was flying… soaring out of the water in a great upheaval of river and foam.

  I choked and vomited and shivered along the bank. I couldn’t control the violent shaking of my limbs.

  When I finally stopped heaving, I rolled to my side and collapsed. I blinked up at the sky, surprised to see the bright light of day. It seemed out of place after the darkness of my near death.

  My teeth chattered so violently I worried I might crack a tooth.

  A figure appeared over me, grim and serious. Father Garius.

  “My…” I couldn’t speak through the shivers. I tried again. “My… Father...” He swooped down to hear me better. “Home.”

  As darkness wrapped around my mind once more and I succumbed to sudden, overwhelming exhaustion, images of my family waiting with outstretched arms became something grimmer. I stopped longing to reach them. I stopped wishing to see those beautiful faces and wrap my arms around my mother and father. Instead the instinct to flee surged through my racing blood while silent terror squeezed my lungs.

  A raven, the same one that always appeared in my dreams, sat upon the windowsill watching. Waiting and watching and listening. It always watched. It always stood by while my family drowned in their own blood. While their lungs shook with wet, stuttering breaths. While their limbs twitched helplessly.

  This time, I watched it back.

  I watched it watch me. Its black beady eyes focused with calculating interest. I felt its disappointment. Its silent rage.

  I felt the sinister spirit inside of it bristle and balk because I wasn’t also dying.

  It wanted me bloody.

  It wanted me broken.

  In my dream, I lifted my chin and dared the bird to do something about its discontent. After the river, I had no patience for games. I stared the raven down and dared it to finish me.

  “If you want me dead, come for me yourself,” I whispered. My heart fluttered wildly in my chest. I had never spoken to the bird before. I’d always ignored it. I’d never been able to tear my attention from the lifeless bodies at my feet, from the pool of blood saturating the hem of my sleeping gown. Usually I stared at my father’s blank gaze or my brothers’ limp, useless bodies with a helplessness that clawed at my soul.

  Then, for the first time, I noticed a presence looming in the background.

  The raven lifted its beak toward the gray sky on the other side of the window and flapped its mammoth wings in a ripple of fury. It opened its dark mouth and screamed at the thing I knew hovered just beyond my consciousness.

  The bird’s call shredded the air. I tucked my chin to my chest and pressed my palms over my ears. And still I could hear it. As if it came from my own mind. As if the screaming poured from my mouth and not the bird’s.

  As if I were the one to call upon that great evil.

  And while I fought against the terrible pain in my head, my father’s voice spoke above the screeching. He had never spoken to me before today. He had never done anything but die.

  “It’s time,” he declared. His low, rumbling voice boomed through the room, drowning out the sound of the bird. “Tessana,” he demanded, “Come home.”

  The screams from the raven grew louder and louder until even my father’s voice couldn’t be heard. I bent in half, pressing my hands against my ears as tightly
as I could, but still the raven screeched and bellowed. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth through the pain, confident the horrific sound would make my head burst before I ever woke.

  Just when the pressure behind my eyes became excruciating, the screeching stopped. The raven vanished. The images of my family’s bodies disappeared.

  The darkness didn’t relent and I didn’t see my family again. I was finally left alone in the deep abyss of my subconscious. I saw nothing. I heard nothing. I simply slept.

  When I woke, I had a niggling feeling that I should be doing something.

  My eyelids fluttered open and my burning lungs pulled in a breath. I blinked up at Father Garius who hovered over me with the root of a telly weed sticking out of the corner of his mouth. He chewed viciously, a nervous tick that signaled his anxiety.

  It was in that moment I remembered. I felt the seedling grow stronger, louder, more purposeful… invincible.

  “Home,” I croaked in a voice scraped raw.

  Father Garius nodded once. He agreed.

  An hour later, I’d bathed and changed into the warmest clothes I had. My fingers shook around the warm cup in my hand. The tea did nothing to banish the chill that had seeped into my bones and forced my toes to curl inside my wool slippers.

  Father Garius perched upon the edge of his desk, watching me with gray eyes that saw more than they should.

  I watched him back. Father Garius had seen me at my worst. He had dragged me to the Temple of Eternal Light against my will and forced me to stay all these years. He was as stubborn as I was and as determined to keep me alive.

  I wasn’t a prisoner. He had saved my life, after all. But I wasn’t exactly free, either. His reasoning made sense and as I watched the political climate of the realm shift and change over my lifetime, I understood.

  However, I grew tired of watching from my quaint prison. My bones were restless. My mind eager for responsibilities other than feeding chickens.

  And my mouth desperate for conversation.

  Besides Oliver.

  Something else waited for me, beyond these walls. I felt it now more than ever.

  “I need to go home.” I held my mentor’s gray gaze and spoke slowly so that my voice would not waver. The Brotherhood of Silence had done their best to raise me to be the woman they believed I should be. But they were not women. Nor did they possess the manners a noble of my standing should. So when I resolved to make my case today, I did so with the poise of someone I had nearly forgotten. I called upon the earliest memories of my schooling and the image of the woman my mother would have wanted me to be. “I have tarried long enough, Father Garius. And while I am thankful for your shelter, I am needed at home.”

  He blinked at me. What is home to you, orphan? When I held my chin steady, one of his bushy eyebrows quirked with another silent question. How do you know?

  My breath shook as it left my lungs in one long exhale. Wetting dry lips with the tip of my tongue, I told him the truth. “I’ve had dreams. Of my father.” Father Garius’s placid gray gaze turned as sharp as silver.

  The Brotherhood of Silence did not believe in dreams from the dead. The idea was heresy to a man who believed his soul would leave his body and be absorbed into the Great Light in the sky. Most of the realm also believed this. It was my pagan mother who had taught me to whisper prayers to those that had died before me. To look for them in my dreams.

  “He tells me to come home,” I finished. “He says that it is time.”

  Father Garius glared at me. Was he angry that I had ignored eight years of his teaching? Or was it that I had kept my dreams from him for this long?

  He would never explain, so I picked the third option. He was heartbroken that I could leave him after all this time.

  It wasn’t my fault I’d left such a strong impression.

  I took a sip of scalding hot tea to hide my smile.

  Father Garius waved his hand in a circle, indicating that I should tell him more. I continued. “I dream about them nearly every night. But this afternoon was the first time my father spoke to me. And when he spoke, he told me to come home.”

  Father Garius stood up and walked the length of his office. When he reached his bookshelf, he trailed his finger over the spines of leather-bound books along the bottom shelves.

  When he found what he was looking for, he extracted it with an accompanying click of his tongue. He turned around, his robe billowing out. I felt the press of fear on my chest and an ominous prickling at the back of my neck.

  When he set the book on the table in front of me, I recognized the text. An identical book had been hidden away in my mother’s chambers when I was a child. The pagan holy text, now outlawed in the realm and declared heretical by the nine kingdoms in unison.

  I followed Father Garius’s finger, all gnarled knuckles and leathered skin. His blunt nail pointed at carefully scrawled black ink on ancient vellum.

  A raven spread its wings to two corners. The wings had been scrawled with a heavy hand that dripped ink as if each feather were bleeding. The artist had pressed substantial pressure into each detail, bloating its features, blurring its finer details.

  Its dark beak hung open, its head tilted to the side, watching, waiting… seeing. Its sharp feet curled razor sharp talons into the page until the page itself bled. The artist’s wrinkled lines pulled, stretched, and squeezed until there was no doubt that this animal was dangerous.

  This animal meant death.

  Father Garius tapped the picture impatiently. I glanced around at the words scrawled on the borders and the paragraphs on the adjacent pages. But everything was written in a different language. One I couldn’t understand.

  Father Garius tapped again and I lifted my eyes to meet his. He grabbed his throat with his other hand and pretended to choke himself.

  “Yes,” I whispered, finally understanding. “Yes, I’ve seen this before. In my dreams.” I swallowed and breathed through my suddenly fluttering heart. “And at the river.”

  The old monk’s eyes drooped with defeat. His hands slammed the book shut as if he could trap the raven inside those ancient pages. Alarm crept over my skin.

  “What should I do?” I asked a man that couldn’t tell me.

  Father Garius looked at me for a long moment. Finally, he moved to the bookshelf again, climbing a sliding ladder that allowed access to the upper rows of texts.

  At last, he found the place on the shelf he needed. He moved books out of the way, piling them in a precarious heap on the lip of the shelf. He took two strong fingers and knocked at the back wall. Something gave way and his hand disappeared into a gaping black hole.

  It reappeared gripping a leather satchel. He tucked it beneath his arm and reset the wall, the books and scrolls, and carefully made his way down from the ladder. He sat down and stared at me for another long minute.

  He nodded, finally conceding to whatever idea had set him into motion. He untied the flap and removed the contents from within.

  I sucked in a breath, the sheer force of it slicing through me with a knife’s edge.

  The gold caught the late afternoon light sifting into the room like long fingers from the low sun. The ruby in the center of the diadem winked at me, whispering memories and meaning and a kingdom full of dreams and fuller of regret.

  I reached for the crown before I’d put two coherent thoughts together. I closed numb fingers around the thin edges and let the gold cut into my palms, let it show me how real it was, let it prove that it was what I thought it was.

  “How?” I choked on the word, stuttered on the weight of it. “How do you have this?”

  He stared at me with those wise gray eyes and my mind drifted back to a day I dreamt about, but never thought about willingly.

  A boy. A girl. A lost monk.

  “They’re dead,” the little boy whispered earnestly. “All of them. The entire royal family.” The monk stared at the boy. “Take her. You have to. They’ll kill her if they find her.” The monk shook
his head, denying the truth of the young boy’s words. “Take her now,” he pleaded. “Take her and take this.” He shoved the bloodied crown into the monk’s hands. His fingers left sticky fingerprints in the filthy gold. The monk gazed down at the crown, at the headpiece of an ancient kingdom and then at the frightened little girl. The monk finally nodded. Once.

  I cried. I couldn’t stop crying. “I can’t leave you,” I told the boy.

  His bright blue eyes stared at me with unshed tears of his own. “This is the only way to keep you safe.” He took a step closer, grasping my hands, red with blood not my own. “You have to go, Tessa. You have to go, or they’ll kill you too.”

  “What about you?” I sniffled, trying to hold back the tears, trying to be strong and brave, just like him. “They’ll kill you too.”

  He shook his head hard, jostling his dark curls, tossing them over his forehead. “They’re not after my kingdom. They don’t want anything to do with me.”

  “I can’t leave you,” I insisted.

  His blue eyes pleaded with me even as he pushed me toward the monk. “This is the only way I can protect you. Please, Tessana, let me protect you.”

  I blinked, surprised by that memory. I’d forgotten about the prince. I’d forgotten about the crown.

  “I’m to marry you one day,” that same little boy declared just weeks before. “I’m to marry you and that means you have to let me protect you.”

  I’d tilted my defiant chin and argued, “I don’t need you to protect me.”

  His smile had warmed my insides. It was as brilliant as the sun. “I know that, Tessa. That’s why you must allow me to.”

  “Fine,” I’d sighed. “You may protect me. When we’re married. But not a single day before.”

  Father Garius cleared his throat and my mind snapped back to the present. The crown pressed against my rapidly beating heart and I had to swipe away a tear I hadn’t realized had escaped.

  “This is my father’s.” I spoke words trapped in the prison of my past. I moved my thumb over the diamonds and engraved vines. I closed my eyes and saw him seated at the edge of his throne, the crown on his head, a smile tilting his lips. I could see my eldest brother trying it on when my father wasn’t in the room. I could see my sister staring at it with open-mouthed awe.