Page 19 of Court of Treachery

Landry clenched a fist.I can neither deny nor accept him. After a pause, he swallowed. “I will consider consulting the guilds with your proposal.” He folded his arms. Unusually tall for a mortal, he was glad he stood in equal measure with the slim elf before him. He stood in silence, glaring, channelling his suspicion and fear into open distrust and dislike. The conversation was over.Leave, Landry growled in his head, wishing he could utter the command out loud.

The spymaster stirred, then nodded sharply. He glanced around the forge, his eyes lingering over the curiosities within. “I will bid thee goodnight then, Master Smith. I’ll return for youranswer soon. Extend mywarmestgreetings to your wife and children.” The spymaster’s words were genial, but his eyes were hard and cold.

Landry waited until Dimitrius turned away and strode from the forge before he blew out a shuddering exhale and sagged against the wall. He hurried upstairs to where those he loved and the warm hearth awaited. There, he could shut the door and bar it against the dark of night and the spymaster’s threats… and pretend they did not darken his threshold.

16

DIMITRI

Dimitri and his associates’ work had been a little too effective. Riots had erupted daily in the city of Tournai over the past week. The king’s curfew barely held, and it took the combined effort of the Kingsguard and Winged Kingsguard to keep a seething order—of sorts. The common folk protested the king’s rising tithes, as well as the class divides between more privileged elves and less privileged mortals. In turn, the court, struck down by the mystery affliction that tore through the city and spared few of magical blood, stirred up tensions yet more, with ruthless edicts and district-wide lockdowns.

The mortals of the city took advantage of their ruler’s infirmities. Shops were looted. Homes and buildings vandalised. Those of elven blood set upon and beaten—or worse. Hate toward the elves from the mortals, who had been little better than chattel to them over the centuries, ran deeper than Dimitri realised.

Rumours of instability in the king’s court only fuelled the divide and the fighting. Rumours of farther afield from traders arriving in the city, of the goblin uprising sowed fear amongst the populace, fear that had been contained to the guilds so far.It seemed the goblins had already taken the roads between the dwarven cities.

No one knew fact from fiction, but caravans had started going missing at an alarming rate on the now impassable trade routes and scouting patrols simply vanished, never to return. By all accounts, a dark, brooding stain upon the dwarven lands of Valtivar was spreading. Too close to Pelenor, all whispered. Too close for comfort.

Dimitri was thrilled in a way. Here was the sum of all his machinations now fruiting into open spoils. He had barely needed to try—they roused themselves to desperate action.It seemed that Toroth had indeed grown his own hostile army, one that would eventually cast him down. The spymaster enjoyed reassuring the king whilst sowing rumours throughout Pelenor of Saradon’s return in Valtivar. Before he knew it, trouble had spread through most of Pelenor, with looting and riots in all the cities, uprisings against the king, and fearful panic with the looming threat of the cursed one’s return. Meanwhile, he kept his own allies as close as he could, though many had fled to their own estates and lands in fear of the mystery sickness creeping through the court of Tournai.

Instinctively, whilst the country descended into chaos, Dimitri knew it was not yet time to act. To remove Toroth would only create a power void he could not fill. Yet. But it was time to finally hint at what was to come. The mystery illness was already being called, albeit in hushed whispers, Saradon’s Curse, thanks to insidious hints from Dimitri’s associates. His own father and brothers dithered, desperate to flee to their own lands, but Dimitri commanded them to remain. To their growing frustration, he would tell them nothing of his plans or what he knew, only ordering them to trust him to see them through the ruin that was to come. Damir, his cowardly father, did not like being blind to the threat. Dimitri could not have cared less.There was no love or loyalty toward them. They were another tool, nothing more. And he would use them all to the bitter end.

17

HARPER

When dawn broke, giant cliffs soared on both sides and a carpet of evergreens marched across the valley mouth, herding them into a narrowing valley. After the open plains, it felt oppressive and dark to fall under their shadow. Harper craned her neck up until it hurt, yet she could not see the sky, so tall and thick were the trees there as they entered.

Her faelight hung next to Aedon’s, bobbing beside them as they travelled. It was a pale imitation of his, but the first she had managed to conjure. She was proud of it, steadily fuelling it with a small trickle of magic, much like feeding a fire. Their horses plodded along, exhausted, and eventually, Aedon bade them to stop as they came upon a small stream crossing the trail.

“We’ll stop here. There’s water and plenty of shelter.” He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “We’d best not dally too long. We can’t afford to sleep all day.”

Fatigued, Harper sat against a tree, cradled in its roots, and was asleep almost immediately.

After a few hours, Brand chivvied them all to their feet. With barely a word, they mounted the horses and continued. Harper could have fallen asleep against Aedon’s warm back as she clung to him in the saddle, but after a while, the trees thinned, and a welcome breeze blew. Mountains passed on either side, soaring out of sight, and the ground slowly rose as they delved deeper into the mountains.

By the following week, they took winding tracks up through forested foothills, where breaks in the trees now showed the plains far below them, just visible through the foothills. Aedon told Harper that they were truly in dwarf country now, and Pelenor was far behind them. The countryside looked much the same to her.

That night, they stopped in a small clearing beneath a rocky overhang, surrounded by the dark trees. The valley was narrow, the trees unnervingly quiet. A small waterfall rushed nearby—the only sound—collecting in a small pool before it continued its journey down the mountains. Harper gratefully drank. It was the freshest water she had ever tasted; sweet and cold.

“That’s melt water from the glaciers far above us,” Ragnar said. “Soon, it will not flow, for all will freeze. We are lucky the first storms of winter run late this year; otherwise, some of the passes would already be closed to us.”

Harper nodded, regarding Ragnar curiously. The dwarf seemed nervous and tense to be in his homelands once more, not enthused as she might have expected, but she dared not pry as to why. He had already been uncharacteristically snappy with Erika that morning and disappeared to sleep as soon as theyhad eaten their evening meal, not even staying awake for his customary game ofchaturaor to carve his latest game piece.

Erika and Brand slunk off for their customary evening sparring session, leaving Aedon and Harper alone around the fire. Aedon grinned at her. She answered with a small smile of her own, one tighter and more guarded. He stood and stretched. “Come on. Time to practice.” Aedon had had her hone her magic skills daily in their travel, no matter how tired the pair of them were.

It seemed he too distanced himself from revisiting the intimacy Brand had disturbed all those days ago. A part of her wanted it—wanted the distraction of him, ofanythingto wipe thoughts of the spymaster she was supposed to hate from her mind. The handsome elven thief was an easier choice, after all—though perhaps no less foolish. A part of her was relieved not to have the choice before her at all.

Again, he laid out an array of rocks, twigs, and small objects of varying sizes before her, and as usual, she did her best to lift them. A few lifted easily, wobbling in the air a few feet above the ground. Others remained stubbornly frozen. Some flew through the air a few feet before they tumbled to the ground as they lost momentum.

She stopped when it felt as though all her energy and concentration had been leached from her. “Why does this make me so tired?” She groaned. Aedon seemed to not even break a sweat when he did significant magic. Aedon grinned as he sent leaves and pinecones tumbling around her. Scowling, Harper batted them from the air.

He laughed and released his hold on the objects, all of them tumbling to the ground. “I keep telling you. Magic is a muscle. Think how tired you are after walking or spending a day in the saddle. This is the same. It takes strength to perform magic. Whydo you think you cannot move mountains? If it were as easy as that, all mountains would be upon their heads!”

Harper snorted at the ridiculous thought. “How long does it take to be able to do, well,interestingthings with magic?”

“The more you train, the faster it will be,” replied Aedon, but he would not say any more than that. He suddenly stood. “Come. I’ll show you something else since we’re here.”

Curious, she followed him from the clearing along the cliff until they came upon the waterfall. Somewhere in the distance, the muffled sounds of weapons clanging filtered through the trees—Brand and Erika.

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