The Orchid Throne Read online

  Accustomed to such bumbling, one of my ladies snagged her by the elbow, preventing her from careening headlong into me. A fortunate catch, as I would have had to be severe with her over the lapse. I’d already begun the day with bad luck—I didn’t need to add ruining the best day of this young girl’s life. Never mind that attending me shouldn’t be anyone’s best anything.

  “If I may, Your Highness?” Recovered from her near disaster, though blushing prettily—and as only those who’ve never suffered severe consequences for their errors can—Glory offered a gloved hand to me. I took it with my left, letting her see the famed orchid ring, a treat possibly greater than any other. It hadn’t left my hand since the day my father took it from his and threaded it onto my finger with his dying breath. What would happen to it—and Calanthe—upon my own dying breath didn’t bear considering.

  I simply had to survive until I found an heir. Promised to Anure, I couldn’t conceive a child without bringing his fury upon me and Calanthe. And I’d die before I’d have a child of his abominable blood mixed with Calanthe’s. A pretty prison I found myself in.

  I gave Glory a moment while she bent her head over the ring in stunned admiration—who could blame her?—breathing in the fragrance of the living orchid. True Calantheans sense the magic in the gorgeous bloom, even if they don’t know what it is they feel, and the encounter is nearly a religious experience. Perhaps Calanthe Herself whispers to them. No one has ever said, and I won’t ask. I try not to rush the moment.

  But finally I set my feet on the stone floor and used the leverage of the Glory’s grip to rise. More to snap her out of it than because I needed to. I wasn’t that old. Court rituals, however, have taken the place of the magic spells we practiced before Anure killed all the wizards. Though empty rituals like welcoming the Morning Glories arguably do little to protect us, we nevertheless cling to their assiduous practice to fend off disaster.

  I suppose it makes us feel better, though disaster seems to find us regardless. Magic had deserted us, leaving us only with science to fight the monsters. I sometimes entertained the notion of skipping some rituals—or even controverting them—as a test. But the risk of finding my way into even worse trouble always seemed too great, especially just to satisfy my curiosity.

  So I followed the dance steps, allowing the Morning Glory to take my head scarf, which she would keep as a memento. In my rare whimsical moments I imagined thousands of my scarves, stained from the oily sweat of sleep, enshrined in towns, cities, and villages across the realm. I really didn’t want to know what they did with them.

  I only wished the nebulous comfort of the orchid ring had enough magic to silence the rest of the world, to banish the nightmare images that clung to my thoughts in sharp-edged fragments, refusing to disperse.

  As my ladies and Glory helped me into my bath, I used the quiet to clear my mind. They washed, dried, then oiled me from toe to scalp. A practical aspect to the custom—the Glory could attest to my continued good health, my nakedness hiding nothing, dispelling the rumors that I was anything but a human woman for those spies of Anure’s in my court. Not that any Glory would say so if she detected otherwise, which was why every one was carefully chosen for her connection to true Calanthe. A discretion and loyalty that cannot be shaken.

  The daily sameness of the bathing ritual usually allowed me to order my thoughts—and my plan of attack—for the day. But missing the dreamthink left me in the grip of the nightmare images. If only I could wash them away, too, along with the sticky dregs of the night.

  These dreams had been more specific than usual. A wolf fighting heavy chains, howling in hoarse rage, shedding fire and ash as the sea churned beyond, bloodred and crimson dark, bones tossed in the waves, white as foam. Then the tower that fell into a pile of golden rubble, then to fine sand, the grains sliding against one another with soul-grinding whispered screams.

  I often got fragments like that—memories of the forgotten empires and abandoned kingdoms, mourning their lost kings and queens, forever replaying their deaths and destruction.

  But in these dreams, I’d been present. I’d stepped close to the wolf, ignoring the falling tower, the distant cries of the flowers as they burned, shedding crimson petals into the sea to stain the waves, and put my hands on the wolf’s chains. He savaged my bare hands with his fangs, my blood running into the sea also, staining it. Screaming with the pain, Calanthe fell in fire and ash while I ignored Her cries and persisted in my foolish task. Breaking my fingers on the wolf’s manacles, I tried to free it, knowing it would be the death of me, the ruin of all I loved and had vowed to protect. Then, in place of the wolf, a voiceless man stood, holding out an empty hand. A demand. A question.

  None of it made any sense. There was nothing I could do to help the world.

  I’d considered asking my diviners for their interpretation, but some quality of the dreams made me afraid to describe them aloud. If I knew any wizards, I’d ask them. Calanthe spoke to me in Her own ways that even my brightest philosophers could never understand—especially those not born on the island. No matter how many invitations I sent to bring the best, brightest, and most creative to Calanthe, no one had ever answered the call who could answer my questions.

  The land communicates in images and symbols, in the blooming of the flowers and the fall of the rain, the songs of the birds and the swish of fish through the waters, whispering into my dreamthink self, sometimes in the florid movements of the orchid ring. My father only hinted at how I’d have to learn to interpret what Calanthe tells me before he died so precipitously. In this, as with so many things, I was on my own.

  I had to consider that the change in the dreams meant something dire.

  An omen. A warning.

  But of what?

  2

  The imperial soldier screamed as I swung my hammer in a remorseless arc. The sound stopped, silenced by the satisfying crunch of his skull collapsing. Mad joy filled me, along with the taste of blood and grit—and the sweetness of vengeance.

  But only until I sighted the next target. Leaping, I used the momentum to swing my bagiroca and punch it into the soldier’s kidneys. The thick leather bag filled with heavy stones dropped him to his knees. I brought round the rock hammer in my other hand in a counterswing to the head that crumpled the man. With him down, I took out another soldier trying to sneak up on Sondra’s back, cleanly crushing him with the same one, two strike. Freed to focus on her opponent, she launched into a sequence of furious slices, her sword flashing in the sun, reducing the soldier to a bleeding pile to join his fellows.

  “Thanks, Conrí!” she called, flashing a satisfied smile. A feral, lethally sharp smile, and one that mirrored my own, no doubt. After all the years of chains, labor, and lashings, none of us tired of this—the freedom to strike back. The clean rush of retribution and victory. If only for that moment.

  I roared, pointing the army behind me to surge forward, and we both wheeled to find the next volunteer to die. A phalanx of soldiers approached from the off side and I launched myself at the nearest of them, muscles singing with power. Here was the strength they nurtured by forcing me to labor for them in the mines. Here was the hammer they handed me to crush the rocks they coveted. They created me, all that I am, and I relished using it to beat their evil brains from their useless bodies.

  Sweat ran in hot cracks through the dust coating me, hair whipping into my face driven by the coastal wind. Ignoring all of it, I chewed through their ranks, mentally howling the mantra of my revenge. Rocks. Hammer. Rocks. Hammer. Like a hero of the old tales, except there was nothing good or noble left in me. The child prince called Conrí had died when he’d been imprisoned and then escaped from the mines as the King of Slaves. They meant to mock me with it, but I owned the title. Rocks. Hammer. Rocks. Hammer.

  The imperial soldiers fell before my might like wheat before a farmer’s scythe. The Slave King’s gruesome harvest, making the worthless into fertilizer.

  One sweet day it would
be Anure returning to the shit he sprang from.

  A boom crashed over the landscape. False thunder shook the already faltering ranks of the enemy. Weak as well as worthless. Only the spineless and morally corrupt could stomach working for the false emperor, especially since we’d offered them the honorable alternative of joining the rebellion. The defense broke, imperial soldiers scattering. Some ran for the forest bordering the Keiost plain. Others for the city that would no longer be their haven.

  To my right, Sondra streaked after one group, golden hair streaming, looking like a lioness running down her hapless prey. Her warriors followed, ululating their terrible glee. If the soldiers surrendered in time, they might be given a chance. A single opportunity to convert.

  I took a moment to assess the positions of my people and theirs. Calling out the orders, the shout grating painfully in my throat, I sent units to run down the soldiers fleeing for the woods. The ones hoping for protection of the city walls would be taken care of soon enough. They’d neatly trapped themselves for us.

  The wind shifted, bringing the tang of vurgsten in billows of sulfurous yellow, thick with the grit of exploded rock. My scarred lungs spasmed at the searing contact. I hated the accursed stuff. And not only for the way it made my chest tighten and my lungs labor to draw air. Even after all these months out of the mines, the smell reminded me of slow suffocation in the close tunnels, body aching in every joint from the hard labor. Still, I made myself inhale it, sucking in its foulness as if breathing the sweetest of perfumes, letting it fuel my rage and resolve.

  After all, how delicious that we used the emperor’s vurgsten—his own secret weapon that he’d nearly killed us to mine for him—to fight the war to destroy him forever. He who controls vurgsten controls the empire. Not one of the wizard’s mystical bits of obscure advice, but my own hard-won insight.

  Anure had controlled us with his vile rock. Now we’d destroy him with it. Nothing like taking the arrow meant for you and sending it back on your assassin. Anure had orchestrated his own demise. The false emperor made me into his slave and his enemy when I was only a child. He bestowed on me the brutal training that forged my body into the weapon that would bring down the empire. He’d forced us all to mine the toxic rocks, thinking to use and discard the children of the nobles he’d crushed. But we were a tool that turned in Anure’s hand. We became his doom.

  Another boom, rolling out and thundering back. Right on schedule. The walls should be down now. I climbed a small hill, legs pumping with strain after battling since before dawn, and squinted into the lowering sun that glanced off the sea beyond Keiost. The walled city stood in silhouette, dark and stolid amid the green coastal marshes. Its famed golden tower gleamed against the sky. As poetic in reality as in the songs and paintings, the Tower of Simitthu speared like a ray of sunlight beaming out of the squat stone castle beneath it.

  Most of the city hid behind its high walls, once a nearly perfect circle. But there, on one side, the line broke, the neat architecture crumbling as if impacted by a giant rock hammer swung by Sawehl Himself. Not at the well-defended, grand entrance, but on the poor side. The Slave Gate.

  One more way to use imperial blindness against them.

  A third boom, and the rest of the wall fell. Where the gate had been, a hole gaped as wide as a toothless mouth. Led by General Kara, our reserve army rose from the mudflats, lethal weeds sprouting from the tall grasses, and poured through the opening to take the city. Below me, the soldiers our battalions had drawn away from the city’s defense—the ones who hadn’t already fled to the woods in terror—turned in response to the shouted commands of their leaders. They broke into a run, hurrying to defend walls that were no longer theirs.

  Yes, the vurgsten fumes smelled sweet, indeed. I inhaled, savoring the burn.

  Then I raised my hammer for all to see, calling the charge to chase the hapless troops. With a roar, my army surged past, racing for the final kill. The imperial forces in front of the main gates moved, but sluggishly. Too late. They tried to cross the bridge over the brackish moat, to escape the lethal pincer we brought down on them. Loosing the last chains on my restraint, I charged downhill, leading all those we’d recruited to share in vengeance to smash the city’s defenders. We became the hammer that crushed the soldiers, pinning them between their erstwhile servants and the no-longer-friendly walls.

  I spotted my own people on the parapets, dropping vurgsten charges on the soldiers below. Those too close to the explosions died outright, while those who tried to flee found themselves mired in the moat embedded with more vurgsten planted with subtlety in the quiet of the nights before.

  Our curse and cure in one, the vurgsten rocks enabled us to destroy the imperial forces wherever they posed any challenge. We’d started small, as we’d been few—but far from weak. Toughened by years of hard labor and emptied of compassion, we conquered and took over first one deteriorating estate. Then another. After that we conquered poor villages, then barely more prosperous towns, one by one. Guile in one hand, might in the other, we created our own empire of revenge.

  In truth, it had been easier than I’d ever expected. Far more than the initial rebellion and escape. Doing that had been ascending the mountain, and we’d fully expected to die in the effort. After that, each new target had been a risk, and we’d been just as glad to perish. Better to die free than live in prison. No one had been more surprised than I that we kept winning.

  Now we hurtled downhill, an avalanche of rage and revenge that none could slow, much less halt. Not that we met many obstacles worth the name anymore.

  In his confidence—his megalomaniacal complaisance—Anure had let his forces in the outlying countryside thin to the point of fragility amid the broken scattering of the kingdoms he’d consumed and virtually discarded once he bled them dry. In his paranoia, he refused to stock them with vurgsten, hoarding it all for himself at his citadel in Yekpehr. Complacent and greedy, he cared only for the goods his vassals tithed. In that forgetting, he’d made yet another mistake.

  A man who took loyalty, who manipulated, tricked, and forced it from people, had acquired a worthless commodity indeed. People’s memories were short for being intimidated, and long on the bitterness from the horrors of conquest. Even the imperial soldiers had little to motivate them. Most of those soldiers—often conscripts to begin with—had been exiled for poor attitudes or worse performance, then also forgotten. Corrupt, incompetent, or disloyal, they either threw in with the rebels or died at the hands of those they’d brutalized.

  Before I could count them, my group grew from less than a dozen desperate escaped fugitives to a small, committed army. Even the greater defenses at the minor seaports of Esaq, Irst, and Hertaq fell quickly to our determination and the judicious use of vurgsten. Once I possessed a navy of fishing vessels and sailors more than willing to try for bigger fish, I figured it was time to do something truly ambitious.

  And lo! There fell the walls of Keiost, the golden city by the sea, struck down by our hands. The imperial governor for this entire region would be squatting somewhere inside, a tender morsel to be plucked from the bones. He who controls vurgsten controls the empire. I sent a prayer to my father’s spirit, the victory missing only his presence. Vurgsten killed him and now became my own weapon.

  How he’d laugh at that. All I could do, however, was send his restless spirit more blood. More men to die for all those of lost and forgotten Oriel who’d followed their king to their doom.

  I swung the rock hammer, mining more of Anure’s men to pay for all the horrors they’d wrought. The wolf prince had grown up and broken his chains, thirsty for vengeance. One day it would be Anure himself, and then it would be enough.

  As much as anything ever could be.

  3

  “If Your Highness will look to the sky,” Tertulyn coaxed, breaking into my dark thoughts and affixing the crystal-tipped black silk lashes to my lower lids. The glue itched already. Small pains. Requiring nothing more of me than this simp
le compliance, Tertulyn returned to her muted conversation with the other ladies and the Glory. I let their soft words tinkle in the background, relaxing as the fall of water—a peace I was unlikely to have again until the end of the day.

  For the moment I wore a simple silk shift, to protect me from the bite of the corset I’d soon be encased in from hip to collarbone. A queen mustn’t slouch or sag, no matter how long the day, and this one promised to be endless. Until then, for a short time longer, I could enjoy the freedom of movement and cooling breezes before the sweltering commenced in earnest.

  Ibolya, one of my junior ladies, filed my toenails, hiding their true nature with glued-on bits of abalone shell, while Nahua did the same to my fingers, though those would be covered with fitted, jeweled tips with long, wicked points. I’d had to give up the simple expedience of gloves when I took the orchid ring. I liked the curved metallic thorns, however. They suited me and gave a message: I guard my blossoms of all kinds with wicked barbs.

  Tertulyn painted on my makeup personally, covering my skin to smooth perfection. She’s done it since we were girls together and is an artist beyond compare in creating the mask I wear for the world. Once she finished, my ladies would dress me in the costume I’d chosen the night before. The day called for virginal white, if one ever did, with Syr Leuthar returned from his extended consultation with the emperor.

  His absence had been like a holiday and I now faced a return to the onus of dealing with him. His ship’s sails had been spotted out beyond the barrier reef at sunset—though the seas around Calanthe had murmured to me of the foreign ships’ arrival for some time before that—along with several more. If I could sink those ships and guarantee the emperor’s men never again set their foul feet on Calanthe’s soil, I would.

  As it was, all I could do was continue my father’s desperate game. When I’d been only twelve years old, King Gul had betrothed me to Emperor Anure—a clever plan, if one of last resort. He’d made Calanthe and myself into the emperor’s concubines—but at a protected and cherished remove. Coy and virginal, allowing ourselves to be viewed from a distance. As princess of Calanthe and sole heir, I’d known from childhood that I’d have to marry for duty.