The Queen Underneath Read online

  Devery reached out, cupping her chin in his palm. “It’s your call, Gem. If you’re done with them, then prick the Above. Tollan Daghan’s a half-wit not to listen to you, but I’m fine. We’re fine.” He ran his thumb along her jaw, sending little bolts of lightning through her skin.

  She was struck, looking into his eyes, by the overwhelming urge to take him by the hand and run as far from Yigris and the shambles of the Guild as they could get. She knew the secret bank codes in Ladia and Balkland. They could live extravagantly for the rest of their lives, without a care in the world. They could take a ship to Far Coast and beyond and never look back. Everything she loved, except Devery and the secret she carried, was already gone.

  He must have seen it in her face. He snapped his fingers three times. Their old code from when they were little more than children. One snap meant “run,” two meant “I’ve got your backside” and three meant “have patience.”

  Tied up in that memory was Elam—the third in their triad. She couldn’t leave Elam any more than she could leave Devery. “Prick me,” she growled.

  He caressed her cheek as he swooped in for a quick kiss. “I tried, darling. But you were too busy. And now, in the middle of a goddess-damned revolution, it doesn’t quite seem the time.”

  She kissed him again. “I should have listened to you, then,” she said, languidly pressing herself against him. “You couldn’t have warned me that the Void was about to break loose?”

  Tears wet his eyes as he leaned in, this time kissing her deeply. “I love you, Gemma, and we’ve got all the time in the world,” he whispered. Then he added, “Lead the way, my queen. I always did enjoy watching you run away from me.” He patted her ass gently and that was all the prodding she needed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE STREETS

  Gemma and Devery threaded their way through vacant streets. They almost always traveled through the city via the now compromised tunnels and walking beneath the stars with him made her smile. In the emptiness, Devery reached out and took her hand.

  Gemma was queen now. If she wished to take an assassin as her lover, there was no one to forbid it. The very thought sent a thrill through her.

  She had never planned on disobeying Melnora. It should have been simple for them to follow this one rule. And it had been simple for a long time.

  Once, Gemma had even understood Melnora’s reasons. The ruler of Under must be accessible to all, and if Gemma was romantically involved with a trained murderer, she would not be approached by those who feared her displeasure. In fact, any who approached her might come to fear for their lives. There had been plenty of logical reasons against it, but logic had nothing to do with love.

  And for all of Melnora’s protestations, the very bylaws that addressed the training of the future Queen of Under had complicated the situation. The bylaws made it clear that no team was to stay together for more than a period of one year, except in the case of the heir apparent—who was to be placed with a team that would serve as conscience and backbone to the future ruler of Under. In their world built on lies, Melnora had handed Gemma two people she could trust no matter what. If she hadn’t known her better, Gemma would’ve almost thought that Melnora had forbidden the relationship just to make them want it more.

  She squeezed Devery’s hand, feeling the pulse in her thumb throb against his own. She was distracted in the very best way. She wanted to put her hands in his hair, to scream out to the world that she loved him. She wanted to forget all the other shit she was going to have to remember soon enough.

  Desire swelled within her and Gemma stopped walking.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She released his grasp on her hand and began to unbutton her shirt.

  They had been lovers long enough that Gemma no longer experienced the flutter of wings in her belly at every brush of his hand. But this new public touching set her skin aflame. Despite her exhaustion, despite her grief, she felt the stirrings of heat.

  They were half a mile from the edge of Yigris—in the heart of Brighthold Above—surrounded by the stately manors and lush keeps of the wealthy. From here they could barely see the fires that were decimating all the prominent offices of the Guild, though the palace lit the night with eerie shadows in the distance. There was not a soul to be seen.

  She slipped out of her oversize bloodstained shirt and started to unlace her breeches. Then she crooked her finger, beckoning him closer.

  “Gem, I …” he began, but she pounced on him, ravaging his lips with her own as her fingers began to work on his shirt buttons.

  “Is this all right with you?” she asked. She leaned away and offered him the chance to stop her. She would have expected nothing less from him.

  He smiled shyly. “You just surprised me, is all. Of course it’s all right. Goddess, you are beautiful.” He admired her as she basked in the lantern light. “What if someone sees?”

  She looked around at the silent sleeping city. Here, she could almost believe they were the only two people in the world. She imagined a life where she and Devery could be together, could talk or touch or kiss whenever they wanted to. Just the two of them, disentangled from all the concerns of Yigris and the Shadow Guild. And then a thought tickled at the back of her mind, and she grinned. It wouldn’t be just the two of them for much longer.

  “There’s no one to see. Maybe the mages have killed everyone. Maybe they’ve put them all to sleep for a hundred years. Maybe you and I’ve been swept away to the land of the dead and we await judgment from the goddess. I don’t care anymore. I want to lie down on this grass,” she pointed at the manicured garden in front of the adjacent manor. “I want to make love until the sun comes up. I don’t want to think about my duty or what is happening over there.” She waved toward Shadowtown. “I just want you.”

  She slipped out of her boots and stepped the rest of the way out of her breeches, then unbuckled her knife belt and pouch. She ran a hand through her hair. Then she walked to the grass, and lay down on her side, propping her head on her hand.

  “I love you, Gemma,” Devery whispered as he moved toward her. His shirt blew open in the breeze, exposing the line of soft, dark hairs that ran down his belly.

  She patted the ground in front of her, biting her lip. “I love you,” she whispered, as he sank onto the grass, flat on his back, his hands behind his head and his legs spread out.

  She laughed at his pose. “Too many clothes,” she murmured.

  Together they unburdened him of his wardrobe. His pale skin glowed in the lantern light. Each time his fingers brushed against her, she squirmed at the overwhelming sensuality of unrestricted caresses. Despite her grief and the losses she felt so keenly, she felt vividly alive.

  They explored one another as if they’d never touched before. She pulled at his hair, dug fingertips into his back. The gardenia blooms nearby scented the air. Their laughter and groans of pleasure sounded like murmured prayers.

  His mouth pressed against hers then suckled at her breasts and later, between her legs. She bucked against him, her thighs wrapped tightly around his shoulders as he lapped at her. Her fingers tore at the pristine grass as moans of ecstasy escaped her mouth until a sun exploded deep within her. She shuddered beneath him, and when he looked up at her, his eyes were hungry and dark.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SHADOWTOWN

  Tollan and Wince were lost.

  One would think that a king would know his own city—but there were sections of Yigris that a king wouldn’t be caught dead in. Or rather, if he were to be caught there, he’d probably end up dead.

  “Any idea which way?” Wince asked as he stopped the cart at a narrow intersection. The street lanterns here were more widely spaced than any area that Tollan was familiar with—and there were empty, forbidding zones between the puddles of dull light that they provided. The streets remained deserted—even the public houses and inns were locked up tight.

  Tollan shook his head, then realized the stre
et was too dark for Wince to see him. “None whatsoever,” he groaned, listening to the silence.

  They passed slowly through a pool of light, and Tollan saw a glint of gold running across Wince’s knuckles. Wince only ever played with the ancient Vagan coin when he was truly nervous. He called it Uri’s Blessing, and he believed that the gold piece she’d given him as a girl still held some of the luck that she had wished on him.

  “I think we’re going to have to retrace our steps,” Wince said. “I don’t see any other way to get back to some semblance of civilization.” The heavy, uneven clopping of the horse’s hooves on the cobblestone street was the only sound they heard until the sudden crystalline ping of a coin hitting the street.

  “Oh, balls!” Wince stammered. He pulled the horse to a stop. “Prickling Void!”

  Tollan heard Wince fumble in his pouch for a long moment, then he lit the nub of candle they’d salvaged from their race through the tunnels with Gemma.

  “I have to find it,” he said. “It’s the only part of her I’m ever going to get to keep.” The panic and pain in Wince’s voice shook something loose within Tollan, something that he should have seen long ago. The coin, which Wince had always associated with Uri, had become his only connection to her, and the grief in his words wasn’t a friend’s grief. It was so much more.

  “Of course,” Tollan replied. And it was suddenly as if he’d never really looked at Wince before. There was a distant wound there that would not heal—an injury he didn’t want to examine too closely. How could I have been so blind?

  They scoured the street in search of the lucky coin to no avail. Wince had gone stonily silent, and Tollan tried desperately to ignore the tracks of wetness he saw running down Wince’s face. This wasn’t about a coin. This was about a girl who would never be coming back.

  Goddess, what a mess I make of everything.

  When they’d exhausted their search of the street, they started to look through the scrubby grass that surrounded the homes that lined it. Tollan continued to run his hand along the ground. More than once he encountered a thorny weed that left his hand stinging and itching, but the hunch of Wince’s shoulders and the trembling of his chin kept Tollan searching.

  There was an alley between two buildings that was mostly bare of vegetation. As they moved into the narrow passage, Tollan prayed silently to Aegos for a small miracle. The path was full of refuse and the overwhelming smell of human waste.

  Tollan was nearly overcome by the odor, but Wince seized a long piece of wood and began sweeping aside garbage in search of his talisman with a seemingly single-minded focus. Sighing, Tollan bent to look along the edge of the bedraggled wooden house, brushing aside the sparse foliage in search of the glitter of gold.

  If he had not been bent over, nearly crawling on his hands and knees, he never would have found the coin. And if he hadn’t been on his knees in the alley looking for the coin, he’d never have seen the mage mark, burned into the rough shingle of the house. His breath was a trembling thing as he pointed it out to Wince.

  “Thank Aegos,” Wince said, knees in the muck as he snatched up the coin. His damp eyes clung to it for a moment, and a small sound escaped his throat before he remembered himself. He shoved the coin into his pocket. “And thank you, Toll.”

  Tollan nodded, afraid his voice might betray his guilt over Uri and his sudden realization that Wince could have been the true father of her child. If that were the case, he had failed both of his best friends. Desperate to change his train of thought, he gestured to the mage mark. “What the prick do you make of that?”

  Wince’s fingers traced the charred edges of the symbol.

  Tollan had also touched it and could feel the mage work tingling. The mark was working, though what it was made to do he couldn’t imagine. In all of his life in the palace, Tollan could almost count the number of marks he’d ever seen. To find one on a random dilapidated home in the middle of Shadowtown made no sense to him.

  Wince stood. “Toll, I don’t think you should go home.”

  Tollan watched as Wince shoved all of his emotions into his pocket along with the coin. His expression went blank, his voice no longer trembled. It was as if he had put on a mask to cover over his pain. “All of this feels …”—he ran his filthy hand over his face—“wrong isn’t a strong enough word. Maybe we should find a place to stay close to the ground for a few days, see how things play out? Maybe find a ship to take you to Far Coast? If something happened to you I’d probably hate myself for a month or two.” He winked.

  What Wince said made logical sense, but his brother was at the palace in the clutches of a Vagan princess and four mage women. “I can’t abandon Iven,” he replied and sighed. Even as he said the words, he pictured his mother. She’d had no problem abandoning any of them. “But I think you’re right. Even if I could somehow make it into the palace without being killed by mage women, the guards won’t follow my commands. They think I killed my father. They’d probably just hang me.” Tollan had grown up a prince in a place ruled by men. Acknowledging that he’d lost access to that privilege was more difficult than he would have thought.

  He sat still, thinking, whispering a quiet prayer to Aegos. When they had fled the Canticle Center, a priest had stood atop the base of a large stone statue preaching about Aegos’s loving, protective arms and the safety she provided for all who were faithful, but Tollan had his doubts. He didn’t believe that this night was being watched by Aegos the Merciful. This night reeked of blood and violence—the realm of Aegos the Victorious. The goddess, like most women, wore many faces, and tonight she prepared Yigris for war.

  The Ain had been there, assembled in ranks, their red-and-gold armor glittering in the light of the flames. Tollan could picture the steel glinting in the hands of each of the two hundred men and women who made up the exclusive fighting force. It had been so long before Tollan was born that the Ain had last been sent out to defend Yigris that the soldiers had fallen into legend, but Tollan had seen them with his own eyes, just before he’d gone chasing after Gemma. Perhaps they were the answer to his problem. Perhaps they could get him into the palace and closer to his brother.

  Just as quickly as the idea came to him, he remembered that the Ain’s loyalty lay with Gemma Antos and the Under. He would need her, if he were to gain access to the Ain, and getting her to listen to him might take a kind of diplomacy that he’d never been taught.

  It had been a long time since he’d wished for his mother’s return from the sea, but now he fervently longed to see the mast of the Heart’s Desire rising above Dockside. If there was anyone who would know how to deal with this situation, it would be Queen Isbit.

  As Tollan was dreaming of the miraculous return of his swashbuckling mother, Wince approached the building to the west, which nearly butted up against the marked one. Tollan heard him hiss, “Prick’s sake.”

  Tollan approached. There, not three paces farther, was another mage mark. The same mark.

  “Come on,” Wince growled.

  It didn’t take them long to conclude that every building in the area bore the same mark. “Goddess!” Tollan hated the self-pity he heard in his own voice. “Are we looking at a whole army of mages?”

  Wince took his elbow and guided him back toward the cart. “I won’t be party to you going back to the palace. Whatever we’d be walking into, it’s more than we’re prepared for. If you won’t leave Yigris, then we need to find a place to hide.”

  Tollan yanked his arm away from Wince. “Like the Void I’ll leave Yigris.” He couldn’t believe that Wince had suggested it. “But I see your point. We need to find Gemma. We’re going to go find her, and we’re going to get on our knees and beg because she’s the only one who can help us now.”

  The horse went down onto the cracked and broken cobblestone street with a throaty scream an instant after Tollan heard the snap of its leg. Wince leaped from the seat of the cart as the animal writhed in agony. Tollan climbed down from the cart and drew his
sword, heart pounding in his chest.

  “Aw, prick,” Wince groaned. “He stepped in a hole.” He glanced up at Tollan, then drew his own sword and swung at the horse’s thick neck. A geyser of blood blew back in his face, and he wiped it off on his sleeve. The horse twitched and kicked, then went still.

  Tollan scanned the street. How could the people inside have slept through that clamor?

  Wince put his back to Tollan’s, both of them circling, eyes alert for danger that did not come. “It’s prickling eerie,” Wince whispered after a moment, then sheathed his sword. “It’s got to be the marks, but I …”

  “Shhh …” Tollan warned, his ears picking up the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Wince dragged his bloody cutlass back out of its sheath. A hundred yards ahead, a figure turned in their direction. He could make out a frown on the man’s face in the lamplight.

  “Odd night for a walk, Your Grace,” the man said, bowing formally.

  Tollan felt his breath rush out of him in relief as he saw the familiar spectacles and close-cropped hair of Brother Elam.

  “Where’s Gemma?” the prayer keeper asked.

  “Run off with her lover,” Wince replied, taking a step toward the priest. “We didn’t much feel like accompanying her as she went about murdering folks.” Elam gave Wince a sideways glance and Wince continued, “She wouldn’t wait to find Devery and we thought that the fate of the city and Prince Iven were more important.”

  “Though, in the long run, that may have been our mistake,” Tollan said.

  Brother Elam chuckled, “With Gemma, you can never be sure, but getting between her and Devery is never a good idea. You’re going the wrong way if you’re heading home, though. If you want, I can lead you as far as Brighthold.”

  Tollan and Wince shared a glance. At this point, they were going to stumble into a sewer pit and drown in Shadowtown’s shit if they weren’t careful. They might as well take what assistance they could get.