Oathbreaker Read online

  “Kenton . . .” Perchaya warned, tugging nervously at the fingers of her gloves. Kenton may not be able to recognize—or care—when he was beginning to seriously irk the very people he needed for his big quest, but she sure did.

  “No,” Jaeme said. “She can’t. These stones may be gods, but they’re not what you might call helpful.”

  “What about you?” Kenton asked him. “Feeling a call you want to answer?”

  Jaeme took a deep breath and thought about it. Despite all that had happened, he still didn’t like the idea of being the bearer of Kotali. He’d felt the pull drawing him to Saara and Sayvil and Nikaenor, but even though he couldn’t deny it, he didn’t want it to be real.

  But assuming it was, where did he feel pulled to?

  Back to Saara, clearly. But also east, toward the mainland.

  He missed his uncle. He missed Grisham. Though he had every reason not to want to be there, he missed his home.

  “Grisham,” Jaeme said. “Home to the castle.”

  “Home,” Kenton shook his head. “I can think of a few others besides the gods that I wouldn’t call helpful.” He turned to Nikaenor. “And you?”

  Nikaenor looked miserable. “I want to go home, too. I miss my mum.” Perchaya placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  Kenton, on the other hand, was turning red in the face, though he was managing to contain it better than usual. “All right,” Kenton said. “We can stay on the boat until we get to Ithale. It’s the last port in Foroclae, so hopefully you’ll get an inkling telling you where to go before we arrive there. If you don’t, we’ll get off the boat in your hometown and work from there.” He turned his glare on Jaeme. “After that, you’re up.”

  “Be still my heart,” Jaeme said. He shouldn’t have taken pleasure in taunting Kenton, but somehow he always did.

  Plus, there were some perks to returning to Mortiche, even if it might complicate things with Daniella. “If we find Mirilina quickly in Foroclae,” Jaeme said, “then we might make it to Grisham in time for the tournament. We’re hosting the big one this year. There’ll be lots to see.”

  “Yes,” Kenton said. “Please let’s plan saving the world from Maldorath around sightseeing.”

  Daniella, however, looked eagerly at Jaeme, those forest-green eyes of hers bright. “I’ve always wanted to attend one of those. Would you compete?”

  “He’d be looking for his god,” Kenton said. “Not ninnying about with a bunch of teenage knights.”

  The tournaments were mostly for the younger knights. At the age of eighteen they all took an errant year to travel to tournaments all over Mortiche—though that pursuit left plenty of time for drinking and whoring . . . and worse, depending on the honor of the knight in question.

  But knights Jaeme’s own age still did occasionally enter. You didn’t even have to be a knight to compete—if you didn’t expect to win. “I don’t know, Kenton,” Jaeme said. “Wouldn’t you want to try your steel against a bunch of teen-aged ninnies? Seems like money for the taking, if that’s your assessment.”

  Kenton glared. “I have more important things in mind than money. And so should you.”

  Jaeme did. Tradition was that the winner of the tournament took a cash prize . . . or could forgo the prize and instead ask a noble lady—even one high above the winner’s station—for her hand in marriage. It was generally considered a very romantic, if showy, means of proposal. He looked at Daniella, his heart beating faster. She knew so much about Mortichean history. Was she aware of that? Was she making a suggestion?

  “Regardless,” Kenton said. “It would be nice if we were in and out of Foroclae quickly, because we’ll be safer once we get to Mortiche.” He cocked his head at Jaeme. “Unless your country has fallen to Diamis since we’ve been overseas, of course.”

  Jaeme shook his head. “My country might be full of assholes, but they’re stubborn assholes. Mortiche will still be standing against Diamis. When we get to Foroclae, I’ll write a letter and tell my uncle to expect us.”

  “No,” Kenton said. “I don’t want anyone writing letters. Too much chance of information falling into the wrong hands. We still don’t know how Diamis found you all in Bothran, and once we get back to the mainland, we’ll no longer be out of reach.”

  Daniella gave Jaeme a look, and he shook his head slightly, wishing she wouldn’t. She knew he’d already written to his uncle when they first arrived in Tirostaar. By the time they reached the mainland, his uncle would long since have received it.

  No matter what Kenton thought, it was better that he write than have his uncle send a search party after him, especially when the last his uncle heard, Jaeme had been working on his mission to seduce Daniella.

  Jaeme had to tell her; he knew that he did. But he also had enough sense to know that timing was everything. Kenton looked from Daniella to Jaeme and opened his mouth, no doubt to ask what the look was about, when Sayvil saved them.

  “I’ve been writing my husband for months.” She narrowed her eyes at Kenton. “Are you going to accuse him of selling us out to Diamis?”

  Kenton’s jaw set. Sayvil’s husband was part of the resistance group in Drepaine, but there seemed to be no limit to who Kenton would accuse of being dangerous.

  “We can’t be certain our letters won’t be intercepted,” Kenton said carefully, glancing at Perchaya. “I know you all have family members you want to write to, but it’s too dangerous, so please. Don’t.”

  Daniella looked down at the deck, and Jaeme wanted to shake Kenton. They all had people to write to.

  Except her.

  “Well,” Jaeme said. “I suppose we’ll have to surprise my uncle, then.”

  And what a surprise it would be.

  “So,” Kenton said. “We’ll land in Foroclae, find Nikaenor’s godstone—possibly in Ithale—and then head through the swamp over to Grisham.”

  “No!” Nikaenor said.

  Kenton looked at him sharply. “Why not? We’ve waded through the swampland before.”

  Nikaenor shook his head. “Not that swamp. Not the one that borders Mortiche. It’s full of”—he shuddered—”Nichtees.”

  Kenton rolled his eyes. “Those are a myth.”

  “No!” Nikaenor said. “No, they’re not. They’re real.”

  Daniella leaned toward him with an expression almost as eager as it had been for the Mortichean tournaments. So perhaps Jaeme shouldn’t get his hopes up there. “Have you seen one?” she asked.

  Nikaenor looked horrified and shook his head.

  Sayvil raised an eyebrow. “What, for the love of the gods, is a Nichtee?”

  “Swamp creatures,” Daniella said. “Sub-human, bloodthirsty monsters, if the tales are to be believed. The legend is that they were Foroclaeans, once, before the Banishment. They joined Maldorath and because of that, Mirilina cursed them to rot in the swamp.”

  Jaeme had heard stories of these creatures when he’d been in the Mortichean border town of Haidshir, though he’d never met anyone who’d actually seen one there, either. He wasn’t inclined to believe in them any more than Kenton did.

  “They’re not tales,” Nikaenor insisted. “They’re evil, treacherous creatures that will rip apart any who go in that swamp. They blend in with the mud and they have claws and teeth like knives. They hunger constantly for human flesh and no one has ever survived an encounter with them.” Nikaenor turned to Kenton. “And I know what you’re thinking—how do we know about them then, if no one survives? Well, we do. Ithale is right up against those swamplands. I’ve lived my whole life in their shadow. Everyone in the town has. We never, never go into the swamp, not to the north. We hear them; we feel their presence. They exist, and they are there.”

  A stunned silence followed Nikaenor’s rant—the normally easy-going boy rarely stood up to Kenton and never with that intensity. Kenton looked from Nik
aenor to Perchaya, as if to measure her reaction. He had been doing that more and more of late.

  Perchaya finally broke the increasingly uncomfortable silence. “Kenton thought the creatures didn’t exist, but that doesn’t mean they don’t.”

  Kenton sighed. “I suppose they could,” he conceded. Which was a rarity for him, as well. “Gods know I’ve seen enough in my travels to keep me from being entirely skeptical. We could take a boat over to Haidshir instead and then travel north to Grisham from there.” He raised an eyebrow at Nikaenor. “Any Nichtees in our path if we do that?”

  “No,” Nikaenor said. “That would work.”

  Kenton looked from Daniella to Jaeme to Nikaenor, as if the three of them were jointly responsible for the pressing return of Maldorath himself. “Great,” Kenton said, though his tone made it clear he thought it was anything but. “We’ll go visit your homes. And I suppose we’ll pray to your individual gods that they chose people who were as physically close to them as Saara.”

  Kenton stood and walked to the stairs that led below deck. Perchaya followed after him, no doubt to congratulate him on barely keeping his temper in check. Sayvil and Nikaenor wandered off as well, leaving Jaeme and Daniella seated in front of what remained of lunch.

  Alone, which was how Jaeme liked it. He scooted his wooden crate closer to hers, though she stiffened slightly at his approach.

  No, now was certainly not the time to tell her they’d only met because he’d been commanded to seduce her.

  And done a piss-poor job of it, at that.

  “Do you really want to go home?” Daniella asked. “Or did you just want to spite Kenton?”

  Jaeme shrugged. “I told him the truth. But if Kotali does exist, I’m pretty sure he’s not calling to me.”

  “If he does?” Daniella looked incredulous. “You mean you’re risking your life to find the godstones on the assumption that he doesn’t?”

  Jaeme smiled. He was risking his life to be with her, instructions from the Dukes Council be damned. But she’d been so tentative lately, he didn’t want to scare her with proclamations of his feelings. He’d only kissed her once, after all. And, at the time, they’d both been drenched in blood. “I’m risking my life on the assumption that I don’t have anything better to do. This way I get to spend time on ships talking to beautiful red-haired princesses. If Kotali does exist, I hope he does the job of finding himself, because I’m distracted.”

  Daniella shook her head, smiling to herself.

  “What?” Jaeme asked.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Just . . . you remind me of someone.”

  “Really? And who would that be?”

  Daniella’s smile turned wicked. “Ebrina the Maiden.”

  That was not the response Jaeme had been expecting. “I think that might be the most unusual thing a woman has ever said to me. Possibly the most insulting, too, but I’ll wait to see where you go with it.”

  “It’s not a comment on your manhood,” she said. “It’s a myth from before the Banishment, long before. Back before the gods banished the Elder Races, when the forests were filled with river spirits. There was a girl named Ebrina who lived in what’s now northern Sevairn. She was unnaturally good-looking, like all women apparently were in myths, and the river king fell in love with her.”

  That didn’t do much to clear things up. “Other than the unnaturally good-looking part, which I certainly appreciate, I don’t see . . .”

  Daniella gave him a harsh look for interrupting, but a smile played across her lips. Jaeme struggled to focus on the story and not on the memory of what those lips had felt like against his. “But Ebrina didn’t believe in the river king or his domain. Even when she was dragged deep down to live in his water palace, she told herself that she was dreaming or that she had gone mad. Even when she saw him, even when he took her hand and pressed it to the scales of his face, she couldn’t believe, because after all her life of not wanting to believe, she wasn’t sure how.”

  Oh. Jaeme supposed she understood him better than made him comfortable. He loved her, but that didn’t mean that he wanted her getting a look at all the workings inside his head.

  At least, not yet.

  “So, the moral of the story,” he said, “is that you think I need to be open to believing now, or I might never?”

  She bit her lip. “Maybe, maybe not. I just think you’re going to slow us down if you claim Kotali and then need to engage him in a debate about his existence.”

  She had a point. “What happened to Ebrina in the end?”

  Daniella’s smile turned wicked again. “Well, the river king didn’t want a wife who didn’t believe he was real—I imagine that would make the wedding night a bit uncomfortable—so he sent her back. Eventually she ended up being eaten by a group of tree trolls. But don’t worry, I’m sure that won’t happen to you.” She fought to keep her expression serious.

  “Comforting.”

  “Definitely,” Daniella said. “What would you do without me?”

  Jaeme laughed it off like the joke it was intended to be, but he wasn’t at all sure he knew.

  Three

  Daniella lay in bed, feeling the motion of the ship as it rose and fell. The waves were high this morning, but that wasn’t what turned her stomach. She squeezed her eyes shut but didn’t dare fall back asleep. She tried not to think; she tried not to feel. Most of all, she tried not to return to her dreams.

  The images were always the same. The sword whistling through the air toward her neck, flashing with sparkles of light from the throne room ceiling. Then the thrum of a force that burst from within her.

  The screams. The blood. More death she’d caused. More murders she’d committed without even knowing why.

  Sure, these might have in some sense been justified. The queen’s guards would have killed her—and Kenton, Perchaya, and probably Jaeme, as well. She remembered the look of hate in the guards’ eyes as Daniella had taken their weapons. The fury as they retrieved them and came after her.

  Still, they had been people. People who had died such grisly deaths that they must have been burned in private instead of at a ceremony.

  She wondered if any of them had children.

  And how many others had there been? She remembered Erich’s voice in her bedroom, almost a taunt, as he told her she’d killed before, that she’d gone mad and people had died who weren’t even in the same room as her. At the time, he’d seemed the mad one, talking about powers she didn’t know and memories of an illness that wasn’t real.

  But now, after what she’d done in Tir Neren, it seemed all too possible.

  The boat plummeted over an exceptionally tall wave, and Daniella sat up in bed. The question beat like a drum in her mind, even while she was asleep.

  What was she?

  She dressed quickly, needing to get up on deck and breathe in the fresh sea air, even if the water was choppy and dangerous. She shivered, rubbing her arms briskly, though it wasn’t particularly cold. Then she left the small cabin and made her way up to the deck. The sunlight shone bright and warm, and the air was filled with the sounds of sailors chatting amiably and scurrying about as they did their work.

  She shaded her eyes with her hand until the brightness wasn’t as blinding. Jaeme was nowhere to be seen, which filled her at once with disappointment and an odd relief.

  The memory of his lips on hers was at once dim and entirely clear.

  He’d kissed her, even after watching her kill. Even after hearing the screams. He said that she wasn’t a monster, that she was brilliant and beautiful and kind and Daniella, and it didn’t matter what else she was.

  But as much as those words warmed her soul, as much as they made her want to stay in his arms and never leave, he was wrong. It did matter what else she was. She could still hear Erich, who had once been so sweet and tender . . . until he fell in l
ove with her.

  Was she somehow to blame for the change? If her father had manipulated her with blood magic, turned her into something marred by it, might she have the same corrupting force, the same pull toward darkness as blood magic itself?

  If so, perhaps it was impossible for anyone to love her. Perhaps they could only love the idea of her, the image of the girl they thought they saw. But once they got close, once they knew what she was underneath—

  It was the reason her father had never seemed to love her. Perhaps the reason her governess hadn’t, either, or Adiante. She’d thought Erich had, but that had turned out to be a sham.

  Daniella wondered if she was capable of being loved—really loved—or if she was, as Kenton claimed, merely a thing, a weapon, and not a person at all.

  And if that was so, whatever she’d begun with Jaeme—this beautiful, fragile thing she longed to hold onto, to grow into—might end up exactly the same.

  She needed to talk to someone about it, but she feared that her friends would only try to console her, when what she wanted instead was the truth. Still, if there was one person Daniella could trust to tell her things she didn’t want to hear, it was Kenton. He’d known what she was even before she did.

  She found him at the stern of the ship, holding a dagger to Nikaenor’s throat.

  Daniella’s breath caught, thinking of mere days ago when Kenton had held the queen like that, in a throne room that became a living nightmare. Nikaenor, for his part, looked more frustrated than nervous, his brow furrowed as he strained against Kenton’s hold.

  “Again,” Kenton said. “You can actually use some strength this time. Trust me. I’ll be fine.”

  Nikaenor struggled ineffectually, his arms locked behind his back. “The waves are too high today. It’s throwing off my balance.”

  “Good point. Make sure you tell any future attackers to wait until you have proper footing. I’m sure they’ll understand.”

  Nikaenor groaned. Then he saw Daniella approach and his face lit up. “Daniella! I think it’s time for Daniella to take a turn. And for me to have some breakfast.”