The King's Might

By Emily Russell

In the dark heart of the earth a magician sleeps, dreaming of a deadly frozen peace.

A young orphan, northern in a southern country, must take on the burden of Kingship, and accept his fate as an unwelcome heir to the southern throne.

What secrets might bind an ages-old magician and an unpopular prince? More, perhaps, than either has thought--for, as the orphan Jalith roams the southern countryside taking the yearly Census, he cannot escape dreams of the North, and the icy call of his northern blood.

Can Jalith prevent the oncoming war between North and South? More importantly--does he want to? For, as Jalith soon discovers, nothing in the world of Averdan is quite what it seems--and more than mere strength of arms makes up The King's Might.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily Russell
• Release date: Jul 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311058607

Emily Russell

Hello there. I'm a writer. I enjoy Thai food, dry humor, and long walks off short piers. I don't enjoy short walks off long piers, because these leave one feeling unsatisfied and the scenery never changes. My book, the epic fantasy legend The King's Might, is available here for FREE. Because I'm nice, and I want you to have things. I have a second series, much more lighthearted and fun, available on Amazon for Purdy Cheap. Visit the website link below for Aurian and Jin.

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Copyright © 2015 by Emily Russell

Design copyright © Cissy Russell

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed,

or transmitted in any form or by any means without

written permission from the author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental

and not intended by the author.

The foremost art of kings is the ability to endure hatred.

SENECA

PROLOGUE

The girl had been down in the earth for a long, long time.

She had once—weeks ago, months ago, maybe even years ago—been a bright and chubby little thing, full of laughter and smiles. But they had been traveling through the Mountains of Vigilance—her parents had turned away, for just a moment, to consider the crossing—and she had fallen, playing on an outcropping of stone.

She had fallen into a ravine. She had fallen farther, deeper. She had fallen into this place, this sunken city, cold and dark and lonely. There had been dead brush, to save her from the worst injuries, but there had also been silence, and limitless dark.

She didn’t know if they had tried to find her. They probably had—she had been well loved.

There were mushrooms and lichens to eat, glowing faintly in the dead libraries and bedchambers of the swallowed city. There were pools of water, dripping from cracks in the wall and forming in buckets and plates from long ago. There was a constant filth, a mixture of soot and new soil that wouldn’t scrub off. There was the sound of her own voice, echoing down the endless stone halls.

There was nobody else.

She was sure of it. Looking and calling had been the first things she had done. Her mother had taught her this, to look and call if she got lost. No one will hurt you, her mother had said. You’re only a child. They will help you find the way back to us.

The little girl remembered her mama, and her papa, and in this dark place, lit only by phosphorescent fungus and the eyes of sightless creatures, she wept.

There was nobody else, and no way out. All the paths curved downward. All the doors led downward.

She didn’t know how many tons of rock were over her head. She had walked down many hallways here in the dark, gone down many flights of stairs. She could feel the weight of it all above her—crushing weight, impossible to lift or navigate.

All paths led down.

Even when she tried to turn around, go back the way she had come, all paths led down.

Which is why, when she woke in this dark place at some unspecific time—it could have been midday, for all she knew, and she could have slept a hundred years—she was surprised to hear voices.

They were indistinct, these voices. Gauzy shreds of whispers. Barely real. She had to strain her ears to catch them, and her hearing had become very keen indeed.

But they were voices. Up ahead.

She ran. She left her tattered cloak and the handful of mushrooms she had planned for breakfast behind her.

Down, down, down. All the paths went down, but the rock overhead didn’t seem quite so crushing, the place quite so airless.

Voices!

And, like her mama had taught her, she called. Her own voice seemed deafening in the darkness, a thing meant for the world of light and movement.

I’m here! she screamed. I’m here! Here!

The echo came back to her: here, here, here.

The voices—were they louder now? Sibilant whispers. They might have scared her, if she hadn’t been scared for so long already.

I’m here!

Here, here.

Her little boots were loud against the paving stones, flap flap flap. She ran through what must have once been a great hall, its ceiling extending neverendingly up into the darkness, ornate columns receding with each footstep to her right and left. She passed through a meaner hall, its columns plain, its ceiling low.

The voices were almost deafening now, hissing, whining, cajoling.

There was a door in the hall. There was frieze on the door, a hunting scene, figures so worn they were barely visible. The voices came from behind the door.

I’M HERE, the girl shouted, with all her might.

From below—though how there could be more below, with all she had traveled, she was not sure—there were cracks and scrapings, as though something vast had stirred from its sleep.

The door creaked open.

Inside, in a room that was dark but not quite as dark as it should have been, it was very cold. The girl wished instantly for her forgotten cloak, for the stout fur vest that existed somewhere above with her parents. Frost coated the walls and the flooring, turned the few furnishings remaining into half-visible lumps.

There was a man in the room, lying on one of the tables. She thought he was asleep, until she crept closer—though he lay very still, his eyes were open. They were the color of old blood. His breath—so shallow it might have almost been her imagination he breathed at all—let wisps of white frost into the air.

She might have been afraid of him, in the world up above. He lay so very still, and the face underneath his long pale hair was as cold as the room around him. Here, he was the only other person she had seen.

She jumped into his arms, buried herself in the ancient blanket someone had wrapped around him. He blinked, once, twice. He raised himself a little off the table. His movements were slow, careful, and filled with terrible certainty.

Hello, child, he whispered. Are you, then, the one the earth powers have chosen to wake me?

Help me, she said. You’ve got to help me. We were going through the pass—through the mountains. I fell. I can’t find mama. You’ve got to help me find my mama.

Shh, the man said. Shhh.

There was calm to him. Terrible calm. Though she should have felt comforted, should have been overjoyed, she felt only lightness, only unending cold. His hand twisted through her hair—a hand nearly skeletal, white as frost, thin and long-fingered. She didn’t want him to touch her, but it had been so long since anyone had held her, had comforted her.

I’m looking for someone, too, he said. A boy. He’d be—about your age, perhaps a little younger. A golden-haired boy.

I want my mama, said the girl.

The man smiled. It was not a comforting smile, and there was little pity in it.

Your mama is long gone, he said. There is no time, in these deep places. There is only the earth.

She began to cry. She had forgotten why, precisely—she had forgotten why she was unhappy. The tears froze to her cheeks. The pale man picked them off, his spiderlike hands gentle.

Your home is here now, he said. You are the Waker, and for you to be the Waker there must be something of the old powers in you. Did you hear the voices, little one? Did the earth speak to you, as it speaks to me?

She nodded. She remembered, vaguely, thinking the voices were something else—human voices. The memory was tinged with white, as though seen through a thin sheet of ice. It was silly, to have thought they were human voices.

They were the voices of the earth—of the hefenta, of the deep powers of earth. And this man—this man was their creature. She knew it, somehow, though she did not know why or what precisely it was she now knew: the earth was a part of her people, the Norchladil people. The cold was in the bones and the blood.

She shuddered.

The man wrapped the blanket around her. She noticed, distantly, how very old it was—the threads breaking with the gentlest touch, something staining it that may, long ago, have been blood. The man’s robes were stained as well, their style ancient. Even as she watched he drew the robes closer to him, and they brightened and whitened, as though touched by frost.

Who are you? she asked. Though she knew the answer—though her bones, and the ancestral memories inside them, knew the answer.

I’m a magician, the man said. His mouth twitched. A Northmage. A relic of a time long before. A ghost. The worst sort of ghost—a ghost that knows your name.

And, bending to adjust the blanket—bending so his cold breath blew right in her ear—he whispered it to her, in the old language of blood and death and the angry earth.

And she was no longer what she had once been.

Some things are that simple.

Come, the man said, standing and stretching his ancient bones. "If we’re to find the boy, we’ve much work to do—and you’ve much to learn. Macher tanith ii, they will call you—she who is servant of the dark world."

Twisted up in his hair, a white comb winkled—the warrior’s comb, malat ma’a. The man withdrew it, held it out to her—its teeth were sharp and long, and its weight was cold and deadly in her hand.

You shall hold this, for a time, he said. You shall learn of its power. But don’t grow used to it, for it must go to the boy. We shall pass it along, when the time comes for me to deploy you.

He was almost handsome, creature of ice and frost that he was. His hair like white silk, his eyes the same blood burgundy as the eyes of the carving on the comb.

She could almost love him, almost. After all, who else did she have to love?

Papa, she whispered. The word died unheard in the airless dark. The man had turned, begun to walk. He didn’t turn around or even pause to witness its death.

Her last thought, as the final pieces of her mind that belonged to her dissolved, came to her in a strange woman’s voice, a voice she no longer recognized or cared for.

No one will hurt you. You’re only a child.

Fifteen Years Later, In A Warmer Part of the World...

PART ONE

HAMRAT

ONE

In Which The First Prince Makes A Well-Meaning But Ill-Considered Decision

 In the beginning of the rainy season, as was his annual habit, Jalith Silverhand left the palace of his adopted father to do a bit of holiday shopping.

It was a good time to do it. The weather was, for a few days only, humid and foggy and wet (as opposed to dry and clear and dry, which was usually more the case). He could bind his hair back in a scarf, use a wide-brimmed sun hat to hide his pale face and prominent nose. A plain oilskin rain wrap hid the richness of his clothing. Frayed gloves, bought off one of the men in the scullery for a bottle of cactus beer, hid both his Appointed Scars and his signet ring.

He appraised himself momentarily in a horse trough beside a public stable, smiling at the dirty and thoroughly ragamuffinly countenance that smiled back. A hunk of someone’s barely masticated market day sausage bobbed in the trough right beside his reflection. He smiled at it too—a wan, half-wistful smile that might have drawn some attention from passers-by, had there been any to wonder.

He looked nothing like himself today. He was the happier for it. For two weeks, the bright Hamrat desert would be steamy and muddy, and he would not look so out of place in the layers of gear it took to disguise his true nature. He could go out. He could, albeit briefly, be a person and not just a Prince.

He wrapped his scarf a little more tightly around his head and turned down a shortcut alley, past scrubwomen and orphans and a two-bit magician with a cart draped in multicolored and boldly lettered silks (‘Fortunes Two For One on Market Day, No Refunds For Tempting Fate’). He smiled at all of them—perhaps, on reflection, an overly optimistic thing to do.

The scrubwomen grunted, the orphans told him to get stuffed, and the magician, with a tip of his threadbare green turban, recommended he seek accommodations with his own kind.

My own kind, Jalith said, frowning. Do I look...wealthy, to you?

No. Just pale. Like one of the Northmen—like the First Prince almost. You best be losin’ some of that white skin in the summer months or you’ll be out on a pike in front of the gates like the rest of ‘em.

The First Prince isn’t such a bad sort, Jalith said, trying not to sound too indignant. He wasn’t certain whether he succeeded or not—the magician eyed him a little too shrewdly from under his turban.

That may be, he said, almost gently. "But he’s Norchladil. Hefenta. The badness runs in the blood there. Would to the Allking lord our Lanon hadn’t chosen him as his heir. It’s fine while Lanon lives, but when he dies— the magician shook his head. This ain’t no country to be ruled by a Northerner, laddie, even one as clean-seeming as the First Prince. Never in the six thousand years this city has stood. Never—an’ for good reason."

The two men stood, silent for a moment, in the warm drizzling shelter of the alley. Something old and dangerous twinkled, momentarily, in the magician’s eyes. From inside the covered cart, something growled: a sound like rocks grinding, gravel sifting.

Scuse me, he said gruffly. I’ve got to feed the herpsicore.

Herpsicore, Jalith said numbly. Right.

The magician disappeared into his cart. Jalith took a moment to collect himself, willing his face into an expression of placid indifference. He knew he was an unpopular choice as First Prince. Out of King Lanon’s hundred candidates (some of them noble—some of them wealthy—all of them Southern and many born right here in the great desert city of Hamrat) he had been an unexpected and unwelcome front runner. He had, honestly, not even expected it himself. Orphans and charity cases such as himself were occasionally accepted into the House of Heirs as wards of the state—raised and fed with the Princes for a few years before being gently employed elsewhere in the palace. No one had been more surprised than Jalith when, upon his tenth birthday, he was given a Prince’s knife, and not a boot brush and can of polish.

So why did the little magician’s words hurt him?

No matter, he murmured to himself. There was shopping to do, there were sights to see. He was no less unpopular today than he had been three years ago, when King Lanon had burned the Appointed Scars into his hands and sealed his choice as final. Hearing all this talk firsthand made it no more real.

Why, then, this stomach-dropping sense of disappointment?

No matter, he said again, more firmly this time.

When no one was looking, he scraped a bit more mud off the cobblestones and rubbed it into his cheeks. The better to hide his pale face.

• • •

The Great Hamrat Market was teeming with life, overflowing with bedraggled and damp shoppers dressed much like he was. Steam rose from everything, rain evaporating as it hit hot cobblestones and sun-drenched tent silks and hasty Southern backs alike. Salesmen barked their wares, musicians honked and rattled and tinkled. Food vendors offered hot curries and cactus beer and candied dates for prices even Jalith, bred into luxury like a promising dog, hesitated to pay. Children, shrieking the market-day songs at the top of their lungs, jounced and fidgeted and generally got underfoot.

Some of the souvenir stalls, the pricier ones, carried miniatures of the realm’s one hundred princes—Jalith was surprised and pleased to see a young boy buying his own image, inexpertly sketched in the Appointed Armor of the First Prince. He wanted to draw closer and have a look at the pictures himself, but he was worried even the badly drawn image was close enough to his own face to draw comparison. He watched the booth from a distance: Second Prince Lukere, he noticed, was selling like hotcakes, and no wonder. It was his image, and not Jalith’s own, that was crowned in cactus flowers on the front of the stall.

Suddenly less interested, Jalith began to amble again, letting the sounds of the stall-hawkers fill his ears.

Cactus beer, cold cactus beer! Relatively cold, anyway.

Salt-cured olives, come and get your salt-cured olives! Free turkey leg with a pouch of salt-cured olives!

Silks, ladies, silks! All the way from southmost Oot, nurtured by the Five Ghosts of Baroness Machertani herself. Softer than a whisper, ladies. Softer than a whisper...

Love spells, hate spells, spells to make your garden grow. Spells for taming canaries and oxen, spells for a brighter tomorrow!

Swords an’ knives, swords an’ knives! Careful, now. Some of ‘em are sharp.

In spite of himself, Jalith stopped for the sword tent. Every year he told himself he wouldn’t—he had yet to see anything worth buying there—but every year he came back.

There they were, same as always—a jumble of weapons, some rusty and some not, some golden, some silvered, some hilted with glass stones Jalith was somehow sure were meant to look precious. In a glass case sat a three-bladed dagger Jalith had seen for at least four years running. A sword, heavily encrusted with tarnished silver, lay to the dagger’s right on a motheaten velvet cloth. Next to the sword was an assortment of pocket knives and eating dirks, gathered haphazardly together