The Lyre Thief Read online

  Sophany smiled for the benefit of anyone watching. At close quarters, it wasn’t a happy smile. It was sad and filled with genuine remorse. “I have a plan for that, too.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask what your plan involves,” Rakaia said, still too bewildered by her sudden change from privileged princess to potential fugitive to really take all of this in.

  “You need to trust me, Rakaia,” her mother said.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “It will all work out for the best, Rakaia, I promise. All you need tell your base-born sister, my dear, is that she’s finally going to have a chance to be a real princess.”

  Chapter

  4

  CHARISEE WAS CERTAIN Princess Sophany didn’t give a rat’s behind about Rakaia’s gown. She’d wanted to get rid of her because something was going to happen to Rakaia and the princess wanted to break the news to her daughter in private. Whatever that news was, it undoubtedly impacted Charisee.

  Rakaia’s fate was her fate to a large degree. It was in her best interests to discover what that fate was.

  Finding out would not be easy. Unlike the king’s bastard sons, Charisee was a slave. Her mother had been a slave too, although the king acknowledged her paternity, and even let her call him “Papa.” But while her base-born brothers were free and honored with positions of trust, she was a servant and would remain so for life, because she was female. The king had far too many daughters to deal with and didn’t need his bastard daughters adding to his burden. What to do with her had been decided when she was six years old. Charisee was only a year younger than the legitimate Princess Rakaia. As a king’s bastard, she was considered a suitable companion. The two of them had been inseparable ever since.

  But there was something afoot, something that might change everything. Charisee was determined to find out what it was. The logical person to ask was the man who knew everything, Naveen Raveve.

  Doing anything of the kind, of course, was completely out of the question.

  Like everyone in the harem, Charisee made it a policy to stay out of Naveen’s way. The court’esa was a treacherous friend, an even more perilous enemy.

  Today, however, as Charisee hurried along the wide hall that led from her mistress’s apartments to the common areas of the harem, Naveen found her.

  “Charisee?”

  She froze at the sound of his voice behind her. Slowly, she turned to face the most powerful slave in all of Fardohnya, curtseying as respectfully as she knew how as he approached.

  “My lord.”

  He smiled down at her. “You’ve no need to address me so formally, Charisee. We are both slaves here.”

  And yet you love it when you’re addressed like that. “I’m sorry, sir, it’s just, well . . .”

  Naveen smiled. “I understand. Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

  “Princess Sophany wants me to check on Princess Rakaia’s dress for dinner tomorrow.” The truth was always the safest thing to tell Naveen Raveve.

  “How forward thinking of her,” Naveen said. “Is there a special occasion?”

  Charisee shrugged. There really was no answer to a question like that. If anyone knew of a special occasion, it would be the king’s closest aide, not a lowly slave like her. “She didn’t say, my . . . sir.”

  “Has your mistress spoken of her plans for the future?”

  “Nobody plans anything for the future in this place,” Charisee said before she could stop herself. When she realized how she must sound, she added apologetically, “I mean . . . we all . . . well, we serve at the king’s pleasure, of course. It’s not my mistress’s role to anticipate the king’s wishes by making her own plans.”

  Naveen seemed amused by her excuses. Or perhaps her discomfort. “You’re a sharp little thing, aren’t you?”

  “Sir?”

  “If you hear of anyone making plans that might interest the king, you would come to me about it, wouldn’t you, Charisee?”

  “Of course.”

  “And if you heard anything about your mistress, or her mother, that you feared might alarm her father, you would tell me also, so that we may stop her doing something foolish?”

  Charisee nodded. “I would not hesitate, sir.”

  Naveen smiled even wider, but it was a skeptical smile. He clearly didn’t believe a word she was saying. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said. “I’d like to think I can rely on you in the future for . . . help.”

  Charisee was too afraid to ask exactly what Naveen Raveve meant by help.

  And too afraid to deny him.

  “Of course.”

  He smiled at her indulgently. “Well, off you go, then, and see to your mistress’s wardrobe. It might pay you to start packing for her, too.”

  She doubted Naveen would let anything slip by accident. “Is she going somewhere, my lor—sir?”

  “Somewhere cold,” he told her, smiling at her barely concealed curiosity. “If you’re unlucky enough, she may wish to take you with her.”

  “I live to serve my lady,” Charisee said, lowering her eyes, not so much out of respect but so he wouldn’t read her expression.

  “I’ve no doubt you do,” he agreed. “Now run along. I have some princesses to disappoint.”

  Charisee curtsied—even though she didn’t need to—and scurried past Naveen, certain he had just confirmed what she had always feared.

  A chill gripped her as she hurried along the wide tiled hall. Rakaia had been chosen to marry the lord of Highcastle—and that meant her handmaiden was going to be made redundant. Nobody took their slaves with them to their husband’s house, particularly not slaves from Hablet’s harem, as everyone assumed that meant—not unjustly—they were Hablet’s spies.

  Charisee knew this day might come, but it seemed unfair it had come so soon. She had even begun to hope of late that Hablet would simply run out of suitable husbands for his daughters and Rakaia would remain in the harem, unwed. She was nearly twenty-one, after all, and almost too old for consideration by a man hoping for a litter of healthy sons.

  Charisee wiped away a tear and slowed her steps, afraid someone might realize how upset she was if her unseemly pace was noticed.

  She didn’t know what would happen to her once Rakaia left. There were no vacancies in the harem—all the princesses had their handmaidens assigned as small children. Hers had never been a position that offered any chance of promotion. The sad irony, of course, was that had her mother been a princess instead of a whore, she would have had her own handmaiden to torment and eventually abandon. She and Rakaia had the same father, after all . . .

  Charisee forced herself to push aside that dangerous line of thought. Dwelling on the unfairness of her lot in life just made her stomach burn and served no useful purpose.

  Her job was to prepare Rakaia for her wedding and if it happened to be to a scabby old Hythrun with syphilis . . . well, maybe there was some justice in this world after all.

  Chapter

  5

  CADEN FLETCHER WAS watching the Lord Defender of Medalon sign his death warrant at the moment the music was stolen.

  Of course, he didn’t know it was stolen at the time. Not then. And strictly speaking, the death warrant was his only insofar as it was his job to prepare it for the Lord Defender’s seal.

  But he remembered the moment the music changed from the sweet harmonies rising up from the traveling minstrel chorus in the Citadel’s distant amphitheater to a discordant, sour cacophony that stopped abruptly as every musician, every singer, every soul in the Citadel simply humming to himself as he went about his business momentarily lost the ability to make music.

  Any kind of music. Cade had tried it himself. Although the effect wore off within a few hours, at that moment, he couldn’t even whistle.

  But when the music stopped the Lord Defender was reading over the warrant before he signed it with a flourish and was pressing his seal into the wax.

  “That’s one miscreant the world will be
better off without,” Lord Tenragan was saying as he ordered the execution of a man who’d beaten his wife to death with the handle of an axe. “Sometimes I wonder what sort of man would . . .” He looked up. “Did you hear that?”

  Cade nodded and turned toward the window. It was a windy evening and suddenly silent. The Citadel was strangely hushed as the sun set over the huge white city, its luminescent walls fading with the sun into darkness. The encroaching Dimming seemed ominous tonight for some reason.

  “What happened to the music?”

  AN HOUR LATER they still didn’t have an answer.

  The Temple of the Gods was shrouded in shadows as the fading rays of light stole the color from the murals. The white luminescent walls were just beginning to fade for the night. Cade glanced up, wondering, as he did every time he entered this temple, how they’d managed to paint it so beautifully with such a detailed frieze depicting all the Primal Gods on a ceiling so perilously high. When he’d asked the Lord Defender once, he told him it had taken the Harshini nearly half a century to complete it.

  Cade suspected that if you stared at it for a lifetime you’d never find everything there was to see. Along the gallery above them was another mural dedicated to the Incidental Gods. Their followers came in every day to add to the mural as part of their acknowledgment of their gods’ existence. Parts of it were magnificent, particularly the panels devoted to the God of Artists. There were sonnets covering the section of the wall devoted to the God of Poets, too, although Cade had read a few and decided worshiping the God of Poets apparently required more enthusiasm for the art form than talent.

  The most worrying thing tonight, though, was the marble balustrade circling the upper gallery. If you looked closely, you could see each pillar was drilled with holes. With the windows open on either end of the temple, on a windy evening like this one, the whole hall should be singing in honor of the God of Music.

  But it was silent. There was no music. Just the haunting, ill-omened sighing of the wind.

  The sound was eerie and unsettling. Cade shivered inexplicably and wondered if it was more than the sudden and complete loss of music that made the world feel so poised on the brink of something unpleasant.

  Shananara, the queen of the Harshini, could feel it too. In fact, she was beside herself. The Harshini were incapable of experiencing extremes of emotion, but the queen was pacing the Temple of the Gods in front of the massive Seeing Stone like a caged leopard. The cupola above her was tiled in an intricate pattern, resting on a curved wall painted with a glorious fresco, although from where Cade was standing he could not make out the detail. The stone itself—which had been hidden behind a plaster wall when he was a child—was taller than a man and mounted on a block of polished black marble. But it was the queen and not the Seeing Stone he couldn’t take his eyes off. He’d never seen her like this before.

  Neither had the Lord Defender, if the frown on his face was anything to go by, and he’d known her much longer than Cade.

  “I don’t understand what you mean, your highness,” the Lord Defender was saying. “Are you suggesting the God of Music is dead?”

  “Of course not, Tarja,” she replied, turning to face them. Her black-on-black eyes made it almost impossible to guess what she was thinking. Harshini eyes didn’t offer a window into their souls. They were more like pools of darkness into which you had to stop yourself from falling. “Gimlorie is a Primal God. He’s not even immortal in the way you understand it. He can’t die. He just . . . is.”

  “Then what happened just now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it just the Citadel?” Cade asked, mostly to stop himself staring at Shananara.

  Tarja glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I’m no expert on the gods, sir . . . hell, I don’t even believe in them . . . but . . .”

  Shananara stopped her pacing long enough to look at him. “You don’t?”

  “I don’t worship them,” Cade corrected. It was hard to deny the existence of the gods or real magic now the Harshini were back in charge of Medalon, and you couldn’t walk down the street without someone wielding magic or a god appearing anytime Shananara chose to summon one of them. But a man didn’t have to worship them if he didn’t want to. The Sisters of the Blade may have been corrupt, and like most Medalonians, Cade welcomed the coup a decade ago led by Tarja Tenragan and his half-Harshini sister, R’shiel, which restored the Harshini to power, but two hundred years of the Sisterhood’s doctrine of atheism ran deep. So deep that Cade still thought of himself as an atheist, even though he’d met more than one god in person since being appointed the Lord Defender’s personal aide. “My point is, your majesty, if there is only one Gimlorie, and something has happened to him, then surely the music is gone everywhere, not just here in the Citadel.”

  Shananara nodded in agreement. “Of course. You’re absolutely right. I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me sooner. I’ll contact the Sorcerers’ Collectives in Yarnarrow, Talabar, and Greenharbour and maybe even Calavandra to see if they’re having the same problem.”

  “Surely if even one city other than ours has suffered the same fate, that would answer the question,” Tarja suggested.

  Shananara nodded distractedly. “I will call the High Arrion in Greenharbour first. She will know if Hythria suffers the same problem.”

  That was their cue to leave, Cade knew. Shananara rarely used the Seeing Stone when there were humans about. He and the Lord Defender turned to leave. As they did, Cade frowned, thinking something amiss. There were twenty pillars spaced evenly around the temple supporting the gallery. Each pillar was a shrine to one of the Primal Gods, and contained a small representation of the god it honored, although only a true believer understood the significance of the artifacts. Zegarnald, the God of War, was easy to spot. His shrine held a tiny golden sword. Kalianah’s shrine, on the other hand, made no sense at all to Cade. It held nothing but a small white feather. As he glanced around, he realized every shrine held its tiny representation of its god, except one. The shrine about halfway down the line of columns on the left was empty.

  “Is that supposed to be empty?” he asked, pointing to the alcove set about shoulder height into the pillar.

  Tarja and Shananara both turned in the direction he was pointing.

  “That is . . . was . . . the shrine to Gimlorie,” Shananara said, shaking her head with a slight quiver in her voice.

  “What was in it?”

  “A lyre,” the queen told him, unable to take her eyes off the empty shrine. “A tiny golden lyre.”

  “Is it just a coincidence that it’s missing or does it have something to do with the music?”

  “It has everything to do with it,” Shananara said softly. “Each representation of the gods is their Covenant seal.”

  “Their what?” Tarja asked, which surprised Cade because he thought the Lord Defender and the queen of the Harshini were fairly tight and there weren’t too many secrets between them.

  “The Covenant,” she repeated. “It is the Covenant which gives the gods the ability to walk among us. It is the Covenant that brought the Harshini into being.”

  “So it’s important then?”

  “More than you could possibly imagine.”

  “Then the God of Music isn’t dead,” the Lord Defender said. “Someone has stolen him.”

  Chapter

  6

  THERE WERE CERTAIN qualities one looked for when recruiting an assassin, but they were not immediately obvious in a child of twelve.

  Elin Bane cast his eye over the small group of hopefuls gathered in the tiled courtyard below and wondered if he would choose any new apprentices this year or turn the applicants away again, as he had the last three times the guild had conducted a recruiting drive.

  “A likely looking bunch this time?”

  Elin glanced over his shoulder and smiled at the woman who posed the question. The princess was sitting on a straight-backed chair in
his office, her hands balanced on the cane she required to help her get about these days. Although she wasn’t particularly old, a fall from a spirited sorcerer-bred stallion last spring was still healing. She could have sought a magical cure, but even after all this time, she was still distrustful of letting the Harshini inside her head. Given some of the things Marla Wolfblade must have done over the years, as she fought to keep Hythria safe from its enemies, both inside and outside the country, Elin was quite certain he knew why she was reluctant to submit herself to any kind of close scrutiny by the Harshini. Unfortunately, neither of the two sorcerers she did trust to heal her had been in Greenharbour when it happened and by the time they returned, the injury—so she claimed—was beyond an easy magical fix. So Marla suffered in silence and hobbled about on her cane, carrying it almost as a badge of honor.

  “I won’t know until we’ve properly tested them, your highness.”

  “And how do you test for cold-blooded killers?” Marla asked with a raised brow. “Galon would never tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” Elin told her, turning back to look down at the new batch of candidates. “We don’t accept cold-blooded killers.”

  “Really?”

  He didn’t need to turn around to imagine the skepticism on Princess Marla’s face. “The Assassins’ Guild takes on contract killings, your highness,” he reminded her. Not that she needed reminding. She’d hired his guild often enough to know exactly how it worked, and been married to his predecessor for a time. “Contract killing—as opposed to random thuggery—requires thoughtful judgment and a surprisingly strong sense of right and wrong. There’s a reason we guarantee no harm will come to innocent bystanders.”

  “It never ceases to amaze me that the two most principled men I know are the heads of the Assassins’ Guild and the Thieves’ Guild.”

  “That’s because you’re a princess, your highness. There are more scoundrels in politics than in all the Assassins’ and the Thieves’ guilds put together.”