The Crimson League (The Herezoth Trilogy) (61 page)

Hayden held her hand tight. “Good luck to you,” he said. “Best of luck. And thank you, for looking out for me. Thanks for trying to talk me out of joining you. You were right, I had no idea…. but I’m proud,
proud,
to say I fought beside you. To call you a compatriot and a friend.”

“A brother,” Kora mouthed. They embraced again, and Hayden retraced his steps toward the Palace. He looked back to smile before he turned the corner. Though Kora could not quite imitate the gesture, she waved her farewell.

Bennie looked up at the sky, unsure what to do now she and Kora were alone. She stretched out a hand to touch the sorceress, but then pulled it back, clenching her fist. “I guess we should be going ourselves,” she hazarded. “I don’t think we have more than a couple hours before word really spreads. We should probably stop to pick up….”

Kora stared at her friend, confused. Nothing about Bennie bespoke confidence—not her voice, which was soft; not her posture, withdrawn, arms folded across her abdomen—but the girl asserted, “I’m going with you. I couldn’t let you sail off by yourself, it isn’t right. Besides, there’s nothing left for me in Herezoth. I have no one left to go back to. My Gran died just before I joined the League. We might as well stick together, don’t you think?”

Kora smiled, a genuine smile; her spirits lightened a bit to discover she still had that capacity. It came as a small shock, a sort of mini-miracle.

“We need to stop somewhere before we leave town. Just a street or two over.”

Kora sent her companion a quizzical glance, and Bennie admitted, “This might sound a bit strange. I’m not really sure how to explain it, especially to you, but a couple of days ago, Laskenay asked me to go to the well with her. Do you remember that?” Kora motioned for Bennie to continue, dreading what she might hear, sadder than ever to remember the woman who had taught her so much, to think of Laskenay’s son. She and Bennie started walking.

“She wanted to confide in me. I didn’t see why, but for weeks, she said, she’d been feeling that if any of us had a chance to survive today, it would be me. She sensed it, strongly. Stronger by the hour. I thought she was insane. Me? After what I wanted to do to myself? Laskenay didn’t know about that, she couldn’t have, but you saw it all. You know I never expected to make it through that battle. I was right, too, technically. I would have been a goner if Zalski didn’t have other plans.” The girl shook, but quickly gathered herself. “I guess my point is I decided to humor Laskenay. I figured it would calm her worries a bit, and what harm could it do? So she told me that no one but her knew where Zacry was, and that if something were to happen to her, I could find him here. In Podrar.” Bennie stopped before a cottage, unimpressive but well tended—or more so, if nothing else, than the others that surrounded it. “Right here, actually. We were closer than I thought.”

Kora threw her arms around Bendelof, swept away at the unexpected joy, the sheer comfort, of discovering that her brother was behind those shuttered windows.

Bennie rapped on the door. A man perhaps forty, with thick hair and a strong chin that Kora suspected she had seen somewhere, opened to them. When he set eyes on the red-haired youth, his face broke into a child-like grin that cut ten years from his visible age.

“That can’t be you. If you’re here that means….”

Bendelof spoke soberly, but her expression livened. “We did it, Drake. We have a king again, a true king.”

“Rexson?”

“He’s cementing his hold of the Palace right now. It was horrid, it really was, but we did it. We took Zalski down.”

“Thanks be to God! Thanks be to…. Listen to me, keeping you two outdoors. Come in, come in!”

The master of the house led the way to a dark kitchen, where the smell of roasted pork loin made Kora’s mouth water and Zacry was seated at the table, a slate and three books before him. He toppled his math book as he jumped up.

“Bennie?
KORA
!” The boy ran to hug his sister. The force with which he grabbed her took her breath away, but at the same time cleared her chest, removed the tightness that had plagued her so that respiration came easier. She tousled his hair. “Kora, what are you doing here?”

Bennie said, “We came to fetch you, unless you want to stay. You don’t have to hide here, not anymore. Zalski’s dead.”

Kora spun a chair around so that Zacry dropped onto it instead of to the floor. “He’s dead? And you two, you two aren’t? Is Lanokas gonna rule?”

Bendelof grabbed her chest. “How do you know he…?”

“Is he?” Zacry asked. She affirmed the boy’s intuition. “I don’t believe it,” he said. “I don’t believe it. Are you really who I think you are?” He rose to his feet again, his face hardening. “I mean that. You could be imposters. Zalski could have enchanted you.”

Bennie said, “You complained about Kora’s cabbage more than once back at Fontferry. Only the real me would know that.”

Kora sent her brother a look of mock insult. One side of his mouth twitched, threatening to turn up. “And you?” he said, half in jest. “What was the bedtime story you used to tell me? When I was little?”

The levity that had just arisen fell as rapidly as it had sprung into existence. Bennie pulled a second chair forward and sat facing Zacry, hands clasped on her legs. “Zalski took Kora’s voice,” she said.

“Zalski took her…? What do you mean?”

“Before he died. To stop her casting spells. She can’t talk.”

Zacry looked rather as though he and not his sister had crossed paths with Zalski that day. His alarm faded to relief when Kora held his slate out in front of her; she had written, “Orphan in the woods you twerp.”

“So I’m a twerp?”

Kora wiped the slate with her palm and scribbled, “You didn’t know me?”

“You’re the twerp, that’s what I know.” Kora punched him gently in the ribs. Zacry said, “No more jokes. Did he hurt you? Could you get better?”

Kora wiped the side of her hand across the slate, the chalk turning her skin white. “I got better when I got here,” she wrote.

“And you?” Zac asked Bennie. “What is that on your shirt, is that blood?”

Bennie told him, “I’ve never been better.”

“Someone stabbed you,” he insisted. “And you couldn’t have transported here if Kora’s mute. You were in the city already, you….” Zacry steadied himself with a hand on the table. “You didn’t attack the Palace?”

Kora wrote, “When you’re 15 I’ll tell you not before.”

“That’s not fair,” he protested. Kora underlined the last two words and jabbed a finger at them. Bennie rose to her defense.

“You don’t need to know these things. You’ve already found out too much. Zac, your sister’s right.”

Zacry huffed to himself and asked Kora, “So the day I turn fifteen, you’ll tell me everything? From the beginning, from when you took up with them?” Kora nodded. “You promise?” She crossed her heart. Her brother accepted the agreement. “So where are we going?” he asked.

Bennie answered, “To Traigland, I imagine. The ships from the nearest port usually head there.”

Zacry started. “What? Why are we leaving Herezoth? I thought you said Zalski’s dead. What about Mother?”

“There’s no time to explain,” said Bendelof. “There really isn’t. Go gather your things, quickly.”

Zacry groaned. “You two are lucky I like you so much. If anyone else tried to pull this….”

The man who owned the house spoke for the first time since his guests had entered the kitchen. “I’ll find your mother, Zacry. I have connections, you know all about them. I’ll tell her where you went. Now go pack up. If Bendelof says you three have to be rushing off, it’s for a reason.”

His foster son obeyed him. Kora erased the slate again and wrote, “What connections?”

“I distributed the
Letter
in these parts, so your mother and I have some mutual acquaintances. I heard she went eastward after the paper collapsed, toward the fishing towns nearest Yangerton. I should pick up her trail pretty easily, but if I can’t, the king will have the resources. You’re going to Traigland, you said? Stay near Triflag Bay, where you’ll make port. I hear it’s a livable town, and from there you can check each passenger boat for Ilana as it comes in.”

“That sounds like as good a plan as any,” said Bendelof.

“Are you hungry?” their host asked.

“I don’t feel hungry. I don’t want to think of food.”

“You should pick at something, both of you. Sit. At least while we wait for Zacry, you can eat.” He started slicing the pork loin. Kora, feeling more than ever that she should recognize her host from somewhere, wrote, “Have we met before?”

“I don’t think so,” said Drake, putting two plates before the women. “I’d remember that. I believe you know my sister, though. Nani Jute.”

Kora nodded. She had noticed his resemblance to Nani; they shared the same chin. Drake went to the other side of the room to grab a pitcher of water, and Bendelof asked after a couple of bites Drake prompted her to take, “How’s your sister?”

“She’s wonderful. And Ter and the baby. It’s a boy, I don’t know if you’d heard.”

“I hadn’t. It’s been ages since I saw her.”

“I’ll tell her you asked about her. You won’t see her yourself if you’re planning to go to Traigland. What’s taking you that way, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Bennie explained about the mob. By the time she finished, Drake was shaking with ire; he nearly slammed his fists on the table once, but thought better of it. “Those cowardly monsters,” he muttered. “Those mindless…. Where was Laskenay in all of this?”

Bendelof lowered her eyes. “Laskenay didn’t make it that far. I’m starting to think, though, maybe that was a blessing in its way. She took her brother’s evil to heart, more than she should have, and a part of me’s glad she didn’t hear the things those people shouted, because they would’ve said the same about her. Worse, if they realized they had Zalski’s sister at their mercy. They’d never have let her live. Even Lanokas would have been helpless to interfere. He’s just one person.”

Kora, who was cutting her meat, set down her utensils at Bendelof’s last words. She had not considered what those people would have done to Laskenay, but Bennie was right. They would not have left a piece of her to be found. A bitter taste filled Kora’s mouth, and she reached for her glass of water, unable to finish what remained of her meal. She had forced herself to swallow one or two pieces of pork, nothing more.

Even so, despite her grief and bruises, an unexpected strength—a will to live for nothing more than the sake of life itself—flowed through Kora’s blood, and she knew that her host’s anger, that this stranger’s fury on her behalf, as hard and scarlet-hued as the ruby on her forehead, would be no less significant in the course of her life than that hellish gem. Drake’s outrage had cauterized her emotional wounds. He reminded her that even in the capital, the seat of Zalski’s power and the center of his oppression, lived people who would distinguish between the sorcerer born into nobility and the girl who hailed from outside the smallest of the kingdom’s major towns. Some small number would recognize the truth about Kora. As for the distant future, who could say how her nation would remember her? Infamy could in no way be assured, though it had seemed that way in the heat of her shame, in the midst of the jeers and threats. The violence of her host’s reaction was of an entirely different type from that which had broken her, and Kora could not help but believe—she had to believe—that Drake’s sense and mercy represented more than just himself. He was nothing remarkable, neither rich nor especially educated. If he held the views he did, there was hope for Herezoth.

I can’t let exile change who I am. I won’t. I won’t be bitter, I….
Kora bit her finger.
I won’t be like Zalski. It’s a cycle of hate, that’s what we’re dealing with. They hate me because of Zalski, who hated them because of their, their loathing of the magicked. They turned him into what they dreaded, and then felt justified in what they’d been saying all along, because in their eyes, he proved them right. The same thing could have happened to me, if I’d known all my life what I was. It still could. My God, it still could. I’m not stronger by nature than he was. If I let myself feel victimized, I’ll only continue the cycle. It must be broken. It has to be broken.

“Kora,” said Bennie, “you need to eat. I know it’s hard, but it’s hard for me too. I feel sick. You need to eat.”

Kora managed a few more bites of the meat that sat before her. She sunk her teeth into some bread. Then Drake gave Bendelof a drawstring bag, a small one, but heavy enough to weigh her hand down. He said, “You three will need something to get you started.”

Kora shook her head, and Bennie protested, “I can’t. I can’t take this from you and your wife. It must be a year’s worth of savings.”

“Bendelof, it’s the least the king can do.”

“The king?”

“You think Lanokas won’t pay me back? He’d have given you triple if he didn’t have to send you immediately off. I wish I had more to give you on his behalf. Dresses,” he realized, “you can take some of Grailen’s dresses. I don’t know what she left here…. Damn those people!”

Bennie put a hand on his arm to quiet him. “This is more than enough, Drake. We probably should change clothes though, shouldn’t we? Bless you. And thank Lanokas for his generosity.”