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Daindreth
Daindreth rubbed down his chestnut late that night by the light of the campfire. The horses chomped at the ferns around the bases of the trees, tails swishing contentedly. Thadred’s dapple had more trouble navigating between the trunks of the pines, but Amira’s small mare had already made short work of the greenery at her hooves.
At least the horses seemed to be eating well. Their riders had nothing except a few tubers Amira had dug up along the riverbank that evening. Daindreth’s stomach growled, and he glanced over at the campfire where Amira was crouched beside the flames, turning the tubers on a makeshift spit.
She brushed a stray strand of hair back from her face, leaving a streak of dirt across her cheek. He studied that single strand of hair as it tickled the side of her neck. He imagined winding it around his finger as the firelight brought out the copper and red in her hair, making it spark like embers. Several other strands had worked free of her braid and caught the fire’s glow, giving her a halo in the light of the flames.
His chestnut snorted, reminding him of his task. Daindreth finished cleaning the mud from her hooves as best he could before joining Amira.
She prodded at the flames with a stick, not looking at him for several long heartbeats. “I am a murderer, you know,” she said softly, still not looking up. “I’ve killed men over far less than that. Women, too.”
“I know,” Daindreth replied. How could he not know? She’d been her father’s assassin for years.
“Do you?” Her eyes met his, the reflected firelight making them glow like burning coals.
“You were under compulsion,” Daindreth said. “Your curse would have allowed nothing less.”
“I’m not so sure.” Amira shifted. “There were some I could have spared. A few witnesses I could have outrun or slipped past. But I didn’t, for one reason or another. I know I’ve maimed a few. Left men crippled for life.” Amira let those words hang in the air.
Daindreth didn’t know what to say to that. People from the lower classes who were maimed or crippled were often reduced to begging unless they had family willing to take them in. It would be a short and hard life.
“It’s not as if I could find them and find ways to make amends,” Amira said. “I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I didn’t know their names and sometimes I didn’t even know the names of whoever I was sent to kill.”
Daindreth had lived his whole life with the awareness that everything he said and did had implications for the empire. When he’d been eight, his tutors had dressed him in a cravat to hide a bee sting. The next day, all the boys in court had worn cravats.
Not long after Caa Iss had first begun to torment him, before he had reached his teens, he’d yelled at some seamstress’s apprentice. He didn’t even remember the reason now. The next day, he learned that the apprentice had been sacked and turned out into the streets for angering the archduke. Worse, the girl was an orphan and had nowhere else to go.
Daindreth had been wracked with guilt until Taylan was able to find the girl and secure her a job with another seamstress in the city. That had been a minor incident in the grand scheme of things, but every so often, Daindreth wondered how many lives he had accidentally ruined.
How many incidents like that had occurred without his knowledge? How many of his careless words and thoughtless gestures had been taken as commands?
Daindreth realized Amira was watching him, waiting for an answer. “None of us are without sin, my love,” he said. “And if you’ve forgotten, I’ve given you a full pardon.”
“Is there no justice in the world?” Amira whispered. “Will I be absolved just because the future emperor loves me?”
“Yes,” Daindreth said. “You’re absolved because the future emperor loves you.” He’d had this argument over Amira with Taylan and Thadred months ago. In his mind, it was already settled.
He’d tried to justify it many times over—that Amira had been under her curse, that she had to be as much a victim as her victims. But Taylan and Thadred had been able to poke holes in every argument he could think of. In the end, he’d decided that it was indeed unfair, and he didn’t care.
“Mercy by its nature is unjust.” Daindreth exhaled a long breath. “None of us is blameless. We’re all accomplices to some atrocity or another. It’s the way of the world.” He shook his head. “If justice, true justice, were to be given free rein in the world, we would all be doomed.”
“That sounds a bit nihilistic for you.” Amira’s nose crinkled.
“No,” Daindreth chuckled. “We do the best we can do, Amira. And hope that our actions will help more than they hurt.”
“So, hope for the best even as you do your worst?” Amira rolled her eyes, pulling her cloak tighter around her shoulders.
A cold wind whipped up from the north and Daindreth restrained a shiver. It seemed a bit cold for a summer night, but he hadn’t spent much time in these northern lands.
“Not quite,” Daindreth answered. “We try to help those we can, knowing all the while that we might have to hurt others to do it.”
Daindreth thought back to a dispute last summer from the eastern plains, a case that had made it all the way to Mynadra for an imperial ruling. A coalition of seventy or so farming families wanted to redirect a river to irrigate their crops as they claimed was their right under the imperial charter given to their town more than eighty years ago.
Unfortunately, a logging community downstream relied on the river to move their product—something they were also allowed to do by an imperial edict, though theirs was newer—and redirecting the river would make it too shallow for their uses.
In the end, Daindreth had allowed the river to be redirected. That had meant a thousand new acres of arable farmland, but it had also meant he destroyed the livelihoods of the estimated three thousand people along the river who relied on the logging trade.
Was that justice? No doubt the loggers felt that they had been wronged and perhaps they were right.
But the farmers had the right to that water and the empire needed grain more than it needed lumber.
The archduke could think of a dozen cases like that off the top of his head. Cases where there had been no clear definition of right or wrong. Cases where it had always felt that someone would go away cheated or at least believing that they had been.
Since his mother had begun having him sit in judgment at court, he had come to believe that the rulers who were universally loved, if any actually had been, must have done very little in their lifetimes. In his experience, everything he did made someone somewhere hate him.
Or perhaps rulers were only loved after they were dead and people no longer had to contend with their less popular decisions. Either way, if the measure of a ruler was what the people thought of them, that was truly frightening.
Amira hugged her legs to her chest, resting her chin atop her knees. She watched the tubers roast over the fire, those sparking eyes absent as she gazed into the flames.
Daindreth wrapped an arm around her and tugged her against his side. She remained stiff at first, seeming surprised.
He kissed the top of her head and she relaxed, her body melding closer alongside him. She smelled of the road and a bit of sea salt, but he could still catch some of the Mynadran perfume in her hair. He might have imagined it, but whatever it was, he breathed it in, savoring her closeness. He rubbed her back, tugging her nearer.
Amira touched his chest, and he folded a hand over hers, pressing her fingers against his heart. She straightened then, moving so that she could look him in the eye. For a long moment, they stayed like that.
Amira’s eyes darkened and wandered down his face. Her breath quickened and Daindreth felt his own heart patter just a little faster under her palm.
Daindreth broke first. He closed the distance and brushed his lips over hers.
Amira returned his kiss eagerly, her free hand cradling the side of his face. Her fingers played lightly along his chest, tugging at the ties of his linen shirt, but not quite untying them. There was something both sweetly innocent and devilishly wicked in her touch and it made Daindreth’s heart pound.
Daindreth kissed her deeper as she pressed against him. She was soft and yielding in his arms, and it would have been easy, so easy, to roll her under him and start freeing them both from these clothes, but he couldn’t.
Couldn’t.
“Amira.” His voice came out hoarse, cracking with the effort. Daindreth put his hands on her shoulders, pushing a breath of space between them. “Not yet,” he panted. “Not yet.”
Hurt flashed across her face for just a moment before she pulled away from him. She drew her cloak around her like a shell, cutting herself off from him.
The absence of her left him with a sense of loss, an ache that made him regret pushing her away. Daindreth was playing with fire every time he kissed her, he knew that.
It was dangerous how much he wanted her. He wanted her warmth and touch. Her passion and pleasure. Her moans and sighs. He wanted it all with her—but only for himself.
Caa Iss still haunted the back corners of his mind. It was easy to forget, with the demon bottled away for so many days, but the cythraul was still there—and he saw everything, felt everything.
Daindreth wasn’t about to share Amira with anyone, least of all that creature. But that wasn’t his only worry.
What if he couldn’t contain the demon? What if, in a moment of ecstasy, he lost control? Amira suppressed Caa Iss, but Daindreth had no way of knowing what would happen. All Daindreth knew was that when Caa Iss inhabited his father, the emperor had lost control while with his wife. Though Daindreth had never been told for sure, he was fairly certain his parents had been making love at the time. Caa Iss had nearly killed Daindreth’s mother when it happened.
Daindreth raked a hand through his hair. He couldn’t risk it. Wouldn’t. So long as Caa Iss crouched in the corners of Daindreth’s skull, he couldn’t bed Amira.
“I swear this whole forest is soaked,” Thadred grumbled, shoving his way out of the trees. “Only good kindling is wet and what isn’t wet is too small to be of any real use.” The knight dropped a pile of sticks and logs by the fire.
“I told you, you didn’t have to do that,” Amira clipped, her voice a little sharper than usual.
Thadred waved her off. “I might not be a skilled woodsman or criminal mastermind like you, but I can gather sticks for a damned fire,” he muttered.
Amira kicked at the edges of the flames, hunched low with her cloak tight around her shoulders.
Thadred eased down across from them, cursing his bad leg.
“You really didn’t have to do that,” Daindreth said. “You could have cared for the horses.”
“On that ground?” Thadred pointed to where the horses were tied. It had plenty of ferns and other forage, but the roots of an oak tree had created grooves and notches like a toad’s skin. “Horse makes one quick move, I trip and get slammed to the ground, and then we’ll have bigger problems.”
Amira prodded at the tubers over the fire, not responding.
“How far from here to Lashera?” Thadred asked.
“Not far,” Amira answered. “Three days. Two if we don’t have to hide from any patrols along the way.”
“Do you think magistrates are looking for us?”
“Definitely.” Amira pulled her legs against her chest again. “We most likely killed a soldier back there.” She studied the flames, not looking at Thadred or Daindreth.
“You mean you killed a soldier.”
Daindreth winced at his cousin’s words, but they were true enough.
“Yes,” Amira said, her voice flat as a frozen lake.
“Is there a plan for once we get to Hylendale?”
“We’re in Hylendale.” Amira began stripping the fronds from the stem of a fern. “All the land from here to the mountains belongs to my father.”
“We can’t use this to our advantage somehow?” Thadred asked.
“We are,” Amira said. “In case you didn’t understand what happened back there. I used my father’s gold to buy our horses.”
“You can’t get any more help from his vassals or the local baronies?”
Daindreth looked to Amira at his cousin’s question. “Well. Can we?”
Amira let a breath out her nose. “My father tried to have you killed.” She cast Daindreth a sardonic look. She was upset about him pushing her away just now, he was sure of it.
Guilt pulled at his chest. He was rejecting her because he didn’t want to hurt her, but rejecting her was hurting her anyway. It felt like another no-win situation, just like the loggers and the farmers.
Gods, he needed to be free of this demon. He’d never been anything less than desperate to be rid of it, but now with it getting between him and this woman—
“He’ll turn on us?” Thadred asked, toying with the head of his cane sword, then drawing it to examine the blade. Daindreth wasn’t sure what he planned to do with it, but Thadred had a habit of inventorying his possessions when he was anxious.
Amira let a breath out her nose. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Daindreth thought back on what little he knew of King Hyle—his future father-in-law. Hyle had been one of the few kings to bow to Erymaya without a fight, surrendering to Daindreth’s father, Drystan, not long after he learned of the emperor’s designs on the north.
It had been riskier than many gave Hyle credit for—he’d pledged his allegiance at a time when Hylendale was still surrounded by free countries in open war with the empire. They had all counted him as a traitor and a coward. That included the independent clan of sorceresses within the borders of the country—the Istovari.
Emperor Drystan had required all sorcerers to take a Kadra’han’s vows to him, be banished, or slain. The Istovari, like many other sorcerer clans, had not approved. Like the many other clans, they had paid in blood.
But King Hyle was a pragmatic man. He chose his enemies wisely.
He might have tried to stop the marriage of his youngest daughter to a demon-infested prince, but not without risking his eldest, Amira. When that had failed, Hyle had also been willing to give first Fonra and then Amira over to a cursed man for the sake of his kingdom.
Hyle would go with whoever he thought the most powerful and the most likely to win. Daindreth thought of his mother and the undisputed power she had wielded as his regent since the death of his father.
No one doubted her hold on the empire. No one doubted her power.
“He’ll turn us over to the empire if he gets the chance, won’t he?” Daindreth asked quietly.
Amira nodded, tossing the fern stem into the fire.
“Bastard,” Thadred muttered. It was an ironic curse for Thadred to use, but neither of the other two said anything.
Amira didn’t respond to the insult to her father. Daindreth had a feeling she’d called the man worse and probably to his face. “My father will know where we can find the sorceresses,” she said. “We need information from him regardless.”
Daindreth glanced to Thadred. “You have a plan for that?”
She paused, watching the popping flames. “I’m working on one.”
Daindreth scratched at the stubble on his cheek. He hadn’t shaved since Mynadra. It made him feel scruffy and unkempt, but perhaps he should grow a beard to blend in. Most of the northern men grew beards.
“Can’t ask more than that,” Thadred said. “But I don’t suppose we could find them ourselves? They’re in a forest, right? The Cursewood?”
Amira shook her head with a tired, longsuffering look. “It’s not that simple.”
“What do you mean?” Thadred pressed.
Daindreth had a feeling they’d been over this before. The three of them had talked for hours onboard the ship with little else to do.
“It changes,” Amira answered. “The forest moves. Maps are no good there. Hopefully my father’s agents will know the secrets of how to find the Istovari inside.”
Thadred was quiet for a moment. “You’re still sure your mothers won’t try blasting us on sight?” he asked. “What with you being engaged to their sworn enemy and all?”
Amira shrugged. “I can be persuasive.”
Daindreth didn’t like that answer. Amira was powerful, true. But her clan had been one of the larger ones, rumored to have two hundred sorceresses or more even after the battle that had decimated their numbers and forced them to flee into the wilderness.
Daindreth looked up to the sky. Outside the halo of the fire’s light, the darkness sparked with a sea of diamonds. It looked like a poem, he thought, or the beginning of one.
For years, Daindreth had scribbled words on parchment, trying to untangle his own thoughts from the demon’s. Sometimes what he spilled onto paper horrified him and he had burned the papers before anyone could see.
Ever since Amira had come into his life, the words had changed. When he had sat down to write after those first few weeks with the alien sound of silence in his head, he’d found himself writing about her.
Amira shifted, leaning closer to the fire, and her hair fell around her face like threads of flame.
She’d been his muse for months and never known it. Back in Mynadra, he had written stacks of poems about her, sometimes without even knowing it until after he went back and read what he wrote.
Even dirty from the road in the breeches and leather coat of a rover, she was lovely. So lovely.
He thought of lying down with Amira on a bed of grass under a blanket of stars, of holding her somewhere so silent it felt they were alone in the world. That seemed like poetry to him. Living poetry.
Amira let off a huff that interrupted his train of thought. “Well,” she said, prodding at the tubers over the fire with a stick, “I hope you’re hungry. Because this is going to taste like dirt.” She speared one of the smaller tubers and handed the stick to Daindreth. “Let it cool a bit before you bite into it.”
She passed another to Thadred before taking one for herself.
“The smaller ones should be done.”
Thadred shrugged, studying the roasted root in front of him. “I would like to be manly and say I’ve eaten worse, but I honestly don’t think I have.”
Amira laughed at that, a gold, chiming sound like brass bells. “So coddled, both of you.”
Thadred pointed at her with his cane sword. “I’ll have you know I am no stranger to hardship after sharing a ship’s cabin with the likes of you for three nights.”
Amira snorted, unimpressed.
“And living with that one my whole life,” Thadred added, pointing to Daindreth.
“He is a harsh master, isn’t he?” Amira said with a shake of her head. “So demanding.”
“And cruel,” Thadred added. For all his complaining, he took a bite of the tuber and choked it down. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Thadred said, gesturing to Amira. “You didn’t know him when we were children.”
At Daindreth’s side, Amira picked gingerly at her roasted root, breaking off pieces and nibbling at them. “Was he quite a prat then?”
“You have no idea. Has he ever mentioned the polecat story?”
“Thadred,” Daindreth groaned.
“No,” Amira replied, perking with interest. “Do tell.”
Daindreth cast Thadred a tired look. “Please, I beg you,” he said in a flat tone.
“If she’s marrying you, she should know what she’s in for.” Thadred cleared his throat. “We were about eight and nine at the time.”
Daindreth took a bite of his own tuber. It was piping hot and grainy, reminding him of a potato. There was a vague aftertaste he didn’t quite recognize, but he gulped it down all the same. He’d often heard that hunger was the best seasoning, and he was finding that true.
Thadred went on. “We were visiting the imperial estate in the country for the summer. One of the nurses mentioned that they’d had problems with cats disappearing on the estate thanks to hawks.”
Amira raised one brow. “Oh?”
“Yes. Well, a few days later, we were exploring the grounds as boys will do, when we found an ugly cat trapped in one of the henhouses.”
“Oh no,” Amira said, a smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth.
“Sure, it was a bit long and short legged, but what did we know?” Thadred shrugged. “Dain decides we need to try and catch it to get it back in the manor house.”
Daindreth’s cousin went on, telling the story of how they had caught the weasel with a bucket after chasing it around the coop for an hour and terrifying the chickens.
“Our governess found us covered head to foot in chicken shit and blood from the scratches on our arms.”
“But we caught the weasel,” Daindreth interrupted.
“That we did.” Thadred laughed. “We had to convince the groundskeeper to let it go into the woods instead of killing it. First time I ever heard Dain give an imperial order.”
Amira grinned at him. “You ordered them to release the weasel in the name of the empire?”
Daindreth nodded. “And the gods that granted me the crown.”
Amira laughed again and Thadred joined in. They were joking together—the two people he cared for most in the world appeared to finally be done tearing at each other’s throats. He hadn’t realized how much their animosity troubled him until now. To see them getting along meant far more than he had thought it would.
Amira touched Daindreth’s arm. She did it stiffly, awkwardly, but he hoped that meant she forgave him. That she understood why he was pushing her away.
Thadred began recounting how their governess made them strip naked and bathe in a water trough before going back indoors and Amira laughed again.
Daindreth laughed with them and realized he was happy.
For the first time in a long time, he was happy.
♦♦♦
Daindreth knew it was a dream right away.
He stood in the middle of a burning field, if it could be called that. Black basalt stretched as far as his eyes could see and red veins cracked up between the stones.
He glanced down to himself, dressed in a black brocade coat and the high black boots of court. It was as fine as anything he had ever worn to a state dinner—the clothing of an emperor.
There had been times when he had been a child, in the early days of his possession, when the demon had chased him around these burning plains. It had swooped and dived and clawed and called out promises of tortures Daindreth had been too young to understand.
As he’d reached his teens, he would sometimes go looking for the cythraul to get their conversation over with. Caa Iss had evaded him for days once—time moved differently in dreams.
Now, Daindreth stood and waited. If Caa Iss had pulled him into a dream, Caa Iss wanted to talk. If Caa Iss wanted to talk, he could come to Daindreth.
Sure enough, he didn’t have to wait long.
“Hello, archduke.”
Daindreth turned to face a bulky shape of flame and shadow—a towering figure with wings and curling horns bending back close to its head. Veins of crimson glinted beneath his ashen skin.
For a few moments, Caa Iss’s shape flickered between two forms—one the fine boned features of a young man, the other a cythraul’s toothy, knobby mask. Then he settled into the form of the demon.
“You think to cast me out?” the demon demanded.
Daindreth had not spoken to Caa Iss since the night of the ritual, when the cythraul had possessed him fully and Amira had beaten the creature back. A part of him had hoped Amira’s bond was strong enough even to protect him in his dreams, but it seemed that even her power was limited.
“I’d thought you would still be licking your wounds,” Daindreth said, examining the buttons on one of his cuffs. “Amira gave you quite a beating.”
Caa Iss snarled. “I am not your enemy. Nor hers.”
“You are,” Daindreth answered calmly. “And you will never be anything else.”
“You need me as much as I need you.”
“I need you as much as a stag needs a tick.”
Caa Iss let off a great belch of smoke from his nostrils, wings shuffling behind him. “You have no idea the consequences of your actions.”
Daindreth folded his arms across his chest. “Are you going to punish me?”
Caa Iss couldn’t touch him in these dreams. At least, he had never been able to before. But he could send fire. He could send stones and rocks and the sensation of drowning. He could send torment.
“Your empire is held together by my mother!” Caa Iss snarled. “By my brothers and sisters and their aid. If you refuse to keep your end—”
“I made no deals with that bitch!” Daindreth shouted back.
“Your mother did,” Caa Iss reminded him, burning spittle hissing from between fangs. “Your bride’s mothers did.”
Daindreth watched the demon, chin up.
“I could make you great, Daindreth. As my mother has made yours great.”
Daindreth folded his arms across his chest. “Are we done here?”
Caa Iss snarled. “You don’t know what you’re doing, boy.” He shifted, wings shuffling.
The archduke surveyed him, eyes narrowing. He hadn’t seen Caa Iss quite this agitated before. Something troubled the demon.
“You know your time is up, don’t you?” Daindreth asked. “You know you’re going home soon.”
Caa Iss gnashed his teeth. “I will be free of the Dread Marches with or without your pathetic meat clothes.”
“Then it makes no difference for you, does it?” Daindreth clipped back, not believing a word. “Your time with me is up and you know it.”
Caa Iss roared at the sky. He strung together sounds that rumbled and skipped and might have been words, but they held no meaning for Daindreth.
“I’m sending you back to where you came from,” Daindreth spat back. “All of you. I’d rather see my empire in pieces than ruled by cythraul.”
Caa Iss bit at the air, like a dog snapping at invisible flies. “You have no idea what you’re saying.”
“I mean it,” Daindreth said.
“You have no idea the price you are about to pay,” Caa Iss snarled.
Daindreth’s chest tightened at that and instantly his mind went to Amira. But no, the demon couldn’t hurt her in this state. If he could, he would have done it already.
“No.” Caa Iss’s voice changed timbre, dropping to almost a purr. “No, it won’t be you that pays the price at all.”
“You don’t get them,” Daindreth growled, facing down the cythraul. “Whoever they are, I won’t let you near them.”
“Stupid boy! You were ready to surrender a few days ago. Has that woman of yours made you so much of a man?”
“You don’t get her, either,” Daindreth shot back. “Not her, not Thadred, not my people, not me.”
“You damn them all!”
“Damn you!” Daindreth yelled back. “Damn you back to the hellscape you came from!”
Caa Iss charged him, swiping with black talons.
Daindreth didn’t move. He stayed planted to the spot and glared straight into the demon’s eyes as the cythraul’s talons tore through his chest—but he felt nothing.
Then he was breathing in the cold mountain air. The burning plains of basalt were gone and so was the demon.
Overhead, the pine trees reached for the sky and the stars glittered like crystal. The air was crisp and cold as a woodland bird chirped from somewhere in the distance.
Daindreth lay still for a moment, breathing deeply to slow his racing heart.
Every time the cythraul tried to touch him in his dreams, Daindreth woke up. He still checked his chest, assuring himself that there were no scars or claw marks.
Settling back down, Daindreth listening to the even breathing of Thadred and Amira.
His cousin laid across the smoldering fire, flat on his back. Thadred had always slept straight and rigid, like he was sleeping in a barracks.
Amira laid a few steps away from Daindreth, curled on her side with her messy braid draped over her shoulder.
Daindreth listened to them both breathing for a long time after that. This was his reality—the silence in his mind and the peace of the forest around them.
These two people were more precious to him that anything in the world and they were safe, unhurt, and with him. If he wanted to keep them that way, Caa Iss had to go.
The demon might threaten retaliation, but Daindreth would rather fight a war with the Dread Marches than try to make them his allies.
He stared up at the night sky for a long time after that, unable to fall back to sleep. He thought for just a moment that he saw a winged shape blot out the stars, but then it was gone.
