Daindreth's Assassin #1 Read online

  Daindreth’s Assassin

  by

  Elisabeth Wheatley

  Copyright 2021 by Elisabeth Wheatley

  All Rights Reserved

  Published by Avowed Publishing and Media, LLC

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One: The Assassin

  Chapter Two: Kingdom’s Sacrifice

  Chapter Three: The Archduke

  Chapter Four: Smitten

  Chapter Five: Bargain

  Chapter Six: City of Emperors

  Chapter Seven: The Empress

  Chapter Eight: Darrigan

  Chapter Nine: Caa Iss

  Chapter Ten: Pageantry and Prizes

  Chapter Eleven: The Witch

  Chapter Twelve: Secrets and Schemes

  Chapter Thirteen: Palace Intrigue

  Chapter Fourteen: The Second Kadra’han

  Chapter Fifteen: Warding

  Chapter Sixteen: Dancing with Vipers

  Chapter Seventeen: Cast Out

  Chapter Eighteen: Killing the Curse

  Chapter Nineteen: Power-Drunk

  Chapter Twenty: Battle of Wills

  Chapter Twenty-One: Flee

  Epilogue

  Daindreth’s Outlaw

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  The Assassin

  Amira couldn’t disobey her father even if she tried—and every god in the lower heavens knew she had tried.

  Fonra kneaded the hem of her nightgown in her hands. “Do you have to go?” she fretted, though she knew the answer. “Maybe I could speak to Papa in the morning. I need you to help me with the arrangements for the betrothal celebrations. And then there’s the wedding—”

  “No use,” Amira said, her words flat and unsympathetic. Their father had ordered her out tonight. She couldn’t refuse.

  No one was supposed to know what Amira did on their father’s “errands,” but Fonra knew. They never discussed it, never spoke of Amira’s midnight escapades, but something passed between them unspoken, unknown, and at the same time undeniable.

  Amira finished lacing her boot beside the single glazed window.

  The two sisters were in Amira’s room—the bedchamber meant for a lady’s maid that adjoined Fonra’s suite. It was far better than some of the hovels where Amira had spent her nights during her occasional travels. Yet it was nothing compared to the gilt accents and lacquer motifs Fonra had on her side of the door.

  In her grey dressing gown with the candle casting shadows on her face, Fonra seemed more ghost than girl. “Please, Amira,” Fonra whispered, voice shaking for the first time. “I can’t do this without you. I can’t—”

  “Hush,” Amira snapped, pulling the cowl of her cloak to cover her head. “You’ll be fine.”

  “But I—”

  “Do you expect me to hold your hand through every moment?” Amira’s words turned sharp, toxic. She had nothing but poison and daggers in her tongue tonight. “Follow you down the aisle? To your bridal suite?”

  Fonra flushed. “If I tell Papa I need you, he’ll—”

  Amira cut her off. “He’ll ignore you and tell you to focus on your wedding.” Even if the wedding wouldn’t happen. Not if Amira succeeded in killing the bridegroom tonight. “Now go back to bed, Fonra. Before your maids notice you’re gone.”

  Fonra was quiet for a moment. “When will you be back?”

  Amira replied with a string of words she’d learned from a mule driver in Kelethian.

  Fonra spun around so fast the candle’s glass case wobbled and she had to steady it with her hand. In a flurry of silk, Fonra disappeared back through the door and to her side of the apartment.

  When she was sure her sister was gone, Amira checked her bandolier and the blades strapped across her chest and over one hip. Too many weapons would slow her down and there was rarely time or need to draw more than one, but their weight was comforting against her chest.

  Amira opened her window, and hesitated as she placed one boot on the sill. “You are to protect your sister with your life,” was one of the earlier commands her father had given her all those years ago.

  She couldn’t protect Fonra from where she was going, could she? No, she needed to stay here and—

  A subtle tightness in her throat warned her that the curse was having none of it. Amira gritted her jaw and stepped up to the edge of sill with both feet.

  She gripped the trellis to the left side of her window and swung to the outside of the wall. Almost immediately, the tightness vanished. So long as she obeyed her father, the curse was her friend. It made her stronger, faster, and more powerful, but only if she served well. Unfortunately, Amira’s tendency to hunt for loopholes and gaps in her father’s commands meant that the curse had done little for her in the decade and a half that she’d been subject to it.

  Amira checked the surroundings below before dropping into the grass beneath her window.

  The private garden of their family’s city estate was nothing compared to the herb gardens of Count Falen in the south or the fabled game park of the Erymayan palace, but it still took Amira several minutes to make her way out.

  Most of the servants had been dismissed for the night and those who were out at this hour usually didn’t want to be seen any more than she did.

  In the stables, she found Penrad, her father’s steward. He waited atop his dappled grey gelding. His dark green riding habit reminded Amira of pond scum by the light of the lone lantern. “There you are,” he snapped the moment Amira came into view. Here in the palace, he liked to pretend she was a page or squire.

  She kept her head down, avoiding the gaze of a yawning groomsman. She took the reins of a second horse beside Penrad’s and swung aboard the mare without a word.

  Penrad tilted his head to one side. “What? No apology for being late? Lazy, worthless, good-for-nothing, sack of—”

  The dark and her hood shadowed her face, but her voice would give her away to the servants. And her father had commanded her not to tell anyone who she was—what she was. She wouldn’t—couldn’t—make so much as a squeak in her own defense. That didn’t stop her leveling a glare at the steward. If she ever got free of this curse...

  “His lordship should have you whipped for your insolence,” Penrad added.

  Amira jabbed her heels into her horse’s sides. The animal bolted for the gate toward the city. Steering the animal around a tight corner, she rode out under the low arch that separated the Hyle palace from the rest of Lashera, their capital.

  Penrad stopped cursing once they made it to the main roads. Amira slowed her horse to a trot to avoid attention and Penrad slowed his animal to a trot beside her.

  The city was drowsy, but a place like this was rarely ever fully asleep. Even in the dead of winter when snowstorms blanketed every eave and cobble in ice, a few intrepid Lasherans could still be seen scuttling through the streets.

  Penrad let her lead the way to the side gate of the city—the one reserved for messengers and those on official business from the Hyle family. Four guards outside, another ten inside the guardhouse. Without looking up, Amira could see the ka wafting from them with every exhale. There was something small and alive in there with them, perhaps a cat or a rodent, but it was too small to be a dog.

  Some scholars believed that ka was magic. Others claimed it was raw life force that bound magic. Whatever it was, it came from living things and only those who could channel it could detect it. Amira could sense ka on a spectrum somewhere between sight and touch. It had always been warm and golden to her—ribbons of aurelian energy.

  Penrad flashed the bracelet around his wrist and the guards let them pass. In a fiefdom as large as Hylendale, there was always some urgent errand or message that needed to be couriered from the capital.

  Amira let the steward lead the way out the gates, down the narrow courier’s road toward the pine forests that cloaked the hills. Forests were always heavy with ka, just thick enough to be distracting, but rarely strong enough to be useful.

  They rode on in silence for a good ten miles. The horses’ hooves squelched in a thick layer of mud, mingling with the hundreds of tracks already on the road.

  They left the main road and ventured another six miles into the dark before they stopped. Amira dismounted, pulling a single satchel from her horse before passing the reins to the steward.

  “You know what to do,” Penrad said. In the dark, Amira couldn’t quite read his face, but his voice trembled slightly. Gone was the bravado and derision from the stables.

  They were out here to commit high treason.

  Amira gulped, forcing herself to breathe evenly. “I’m not powerful enough,” she said. “The king overestimates me.”

  Penrad jerked his chin toward the woods. “Get on with it.”

  It was no use. Even if she could convince Penrad of the truth, only her liege lord could rescind his own order—and that was her father.

  As a child, swearing to obey and serve her father had seemed such an innocent thing, a right thing. If she’d only known the truth then.

  Marching alone into the woods, Amira slung her satchel over her shoulders. There was food and water for one day along with the strings, hooks, and nails needed to make snares.

  Her father wasn’t intentionally trying to get her killed—that much she believed. He’d invested and profited too much from her to throw her away needlessly.

  So, he was either arrogant or desperate. It was always hard to tell with him.

  I
f he was ordering her to strike against the empire’s heir, it must be desperation.

  Amira had been young, but she remembered enough of the Conquest to remember the smell of the empire’s wrath—burning flesh and smoking pitch. What she was about to do would be enough to bring all of that and more crashing down on all of Hylendale.

  She stopped to rest a few times before continuing her trek. Her father’s scouts had confirmed the caravan was only a day or so away. On foot, she could cut through the forests and catch them well before they reached Lashera.

  These imperial soldiers rarely moved with haste in peace time. Nor did they move with stealth. It wasn’t hard to find them and she did it in a matter of hours.

  Amira prowled the edge of the camp, hidden in the shadow of trees. They’d stopped in a clearing off the main road, pitching their tents in a neat grid. No one else had been spotted traveling into the fief and this many people together wouldn’t have been able to hide from King Hyle’s scouts. It could only be the archduke’s personal convoy.

  Some two hundred guards, if she had to guess. Not to mention the cooks, pot boys, porters, footmen, laundresses, hawk keepers, dog boys, scribes, and everything else that traveled with an imperial caravan. She guessed there must be some five hundred people all told.

  Five hundred people and she was supposed to find one?

  Amira pushed aside the impossibility of her task. Yesterday, she had burned candles to Eponine, the goddess of sorceresses. Seeking the goddess’s favor produced mixed results in her experience, but Amira had been desperate enough to give it another try.

  Kneeling a few hundred paces off, Amira chewed her lip, studying the camp. She needed to get to the center of the circle of tents. That was where her mark would most likely be.

  She climbed a tree and hung her satchel among the topmost branches. It was unlikely she would be able to retrieve it, even if she survived, but she liked to hope for the best.

  Slinking down to the ground, Amira took her time, lingering until the tightness in her throat returned and her curse threatened to strangle her if she didn’t stop stalling.

  The curse had endless patience for planning. Once, she had spent three weeks stalking a mark and it had never prodded her. Yet it always seemed to know when she was stalling for time and punished her accordingly.

  Once she was on the ground, Amira picked up the pace in the direction of the imperial camp. She inhaled the crisp night air, steadying herself before she moved on.

  Tonight, she would kill an archduke and end a dynasty.

  Reaching the outskirts of the camp, she found guards stationed about one hundred paces from where the tents began. Circling carefully, she hesitated, studying the camp. There was nothing unusual about it as far as a nobleman’s caravan. Fairly straightforward.

  Amira would have expected more guards on duty for an archduke, but she supposed His Imperial Highness didn’t expect much resistance in Hylendale.

  Her father’s kingdom had never been one for resistance.

  Amira walked back into the trees. She cocked her head to the side, half listening and half searching for the faint wisps of ka that flowed from all living things. The pines around her created a soft haze that made it like wading through fog, but she still only had to search a few hundred paces before a soft pulse of ka caught her attention.

  Sliding one of her knives from her bandolier, she squinted, measuring the distance to be sure she had a straight shot. With one flick of her wrist, there was a squeak and a faint shuffling.

  The rabbit kicked and thrashed with her knife pinning it to the tree at its back.

  Amira swept in and yanked the knife free, slitting its throat while its claws scratched at her armored forearms. She grimaced, holding the animal away from her as it kept kicking. Blood thick with ka flowed over her hands. Gripping the dying rabbit by the scruff of its neck, she poured the blood over the runes etched in her bracers, her breastplate. Lastly, she painted two stripes down her cheeks and smeared three vertical lines across her forehead.

  She focused, turning her mind inward. Amira pulled her own ka from within her chest, where her life force pooled around her heart. Ka accumulated in the skull as well, but the heart was easier to channel out the hands.

  Amira waited until the blood stopped dripping, tracing over her runes again and again even after she could feel them burning with ka. Amira laid the rabbit’s limp body on the ground. She was glad for the dark so she couldn’t see it.

  She took a moment to steady herself, pushing away fear, anxiety, dread, and all her other useless emotions. She couldn’t turn back. Her curse wouldn’t allow it.

  Returning to the edge of the clearing, Amira crouched low and made her way toward the camp. The nearest guards stirred as she came closer. The grass rippled around her, but to them it would appear as just a disturbance from the wind. Two of them at stations fifty paces apart glanced in her direction.

  Amira froze. This spell didn’t make her invisible, only unnoticeable. It was a simple bit of magic, one of the few pieces she’d managed to teach herself. When she used this spell, most people blinked and looked away. These men were no different. The guards’ eyes passed over and around her, but never landed.

  Amira stayed low to the ground, waiting until they went back to watching the woods. Guard duty was the dullest task imaginable, especially when one was in a vassal fiefdom in peace time.

  Hylendale had its brigands and robbers like anywhere else, but few were brazen enough to attack an armed caravan. Even fewer were brazen enough to come this close to Lashera.

  Amira had been sent to practice on outlaws as a child. She’d brought back at least a dozen heads to her father to be staked on the city gates. Rumors had spread that King Hyle’s sheriff must be dabbling in sorcery. Criminals had begun fleeing the fief, yet their heads had still found their way to the city gates just the same. Amira had moved on to bigger tasks now, but the rumors remained strong. No one meddled with the lawmen of Hylendale.

  A mastiff tethered outside one of the tents let off a chuffing growl. The big dog stood, tail erect and ears perked. It half-whined, half barked in her direction, blinking in confusion.

  Amira slunk away from the dog. Animals were often more resistant to dreadsight spells. Perhaps the dog could scent the rabbit’s blood.

  Slipping deeper into the camp, Amira walked quietly, not drawing attention to herself. To those who saw her, she would be a nondescript shadow, a faceless figure moving past in the firelight.

  Four soldiers gathered around a dice table stopped laughing, hunkering a little closer to the swords that lay at their sides. She slipped past them and they never even looked up.

  Amira crossed paths with a middle-aged woman in a linen dress, fur cloak about her shoulders—probably an officer’s wife. The woman frowned and glanced in Amira’s direction, but her eyes never quite landed on the assassin, sliding over and around just like the guards’ had.

  The woman pulled her cloak tighter about her and retreated in the opposite direction. Amira continued on.

  The archduke’s tent wasn’t difficult to find. It was predictably at the center with the full banner of the imperial stag, a white raven perched in its antlers.

  She angled toward the tent, then stopped a few paces off. The tent had no guards, but that wasn’t surprising. Outside the entrance slumped a page and what she guessed was a footman in their respective sleeping rolls beside a dying cooking fire.

  Squinting, she noted the light of a lamp from inside. Was the archduke still awake? She grimaced. If he was awake, would he be alone? If he was drinking with a companion or attended by a courtesan, that would make her task much more difficult. He might be betrothed to her sister, but fidelity was not a prized virtue among men of the nobility. Either way, the tent was secured to the ground with massive iron stakes and cutting her way through the canvas would draw too much attention.

  Amira checked to make sure there were no dogs nearby and edged toward the tent. So long as she was quiet and didn’t do anything to draw attention to herself, the dreadsight spell allowed her to do as she pleased.

  She slipped inside and paused beside the tent entrance, surveying the lone figure crouched over a folding desk. The single lamp silhouetted a man with a slim fencer’s build, his sandy blond head bowed over parchment.

  The cot in the corner was unmade and empty.