The first thing that annoyed Judge Kurellan on the morning of their departure was the size of Idris’s travel trunk.
“I assure you, it is all perfectly necessary,” Idris said, as Lila directed the trunk’s ascension to the top rack of the carriage. “Tools and texts I will need. My usual paraphernalia, too. And travelling clothes, and my own tent. Unless, of course, you want to share a tent.”
“No,” said Kurellan sharply, “I do not.” He nodded dismissively Lila’s way. “Her, too?”
“Lila goes where I go,” said Idris, with as benign a smile as he could muster. “All ready?” he asked her, and she nodded. “Then, you may find your steed.”
Lila was a capable rider; dressed in her travel attire, she looked indistinguishable from the squires that the soldiers brought for the journey, except smaller. Idris knew that Kurellan would not let her sit in the carriage, but she claimed she was grateful for the opportunity to ride alongside them. As Idris was appalling on a horse, they never got to go out together, and she missed the open road.
The yard was full of busy guards and stable hands, tacking horses and checking equipment. They had a retinue of five soldiers, five squires and the attendants that came with the carriage, but it looked like more, especially with the luggage. It was a solid ten days’ ride to the kingdom’s edge, but only if the weather stayed as bright and breezy as it was, and nobody wanted to have to stop for supplies. Idris did not travel light – his work did not allow it.
The other thing that annoyed Kurellan was Idris’s attire. He was in his comfortable peasant’s clothes, the kind his uncle brought with them when they first arrived, because he refused to sit in a carriage in his stuffy court robes. He had more appropriate clothing in the trunk, but that was reserved for their arrival. Besides, he did not want the general populace looking into the carriage and wondering what the Queen’s necromancer was doing, travelling out of town. Kurellan huffed about being seen with a scruffy urchin like Idris, and Idris smiled and leaned on his cane and waited for him to get it out of his system.
By the time Queen Cressida arrived to see them off, Kurellan had gotten over most of his gripes. She spoke kindly to the old man, thanked him for agreeing to help and for bringing the matter to her attention, and then she turned to Idris and touched his elbow fondly.
“Work hard, Sir Idris,” she said.
“Yes, Majesty,” he said, bowing.
“Send me a letter once you arrive. Keep me informed. And please do try to keep Judge Kurellan entertained,” she added, with a small smile to Kurellan. “He will be quite bored without your regular corpse interrogations.”
“I will find plenty of situations to amuse him with, Majesty,” said Idris, rising to kiss her ring. “Try not to miss me too much.”
“Oh, I am sure court will be positively dreary without you, Sir Idris.” Cressida suppressed a smile, and Idris did, too. “Do not let me keep you, gentlemen. When you’re ready.”
The soldiers stood to attention until she dismissed them, then mounted their horses; the carriage attendant helped Idris up into the box, then Kurellan. Idris parted the curtain so he could give Cressida one final wave, and she beamed, a vision in soft pink silk, and called, “Bring me back some flowers, won’t you?”
“What kind?” he shouted back as the carriage started to move.
“Blue ones!” she said, and they were out of the yard and trundling down the paved road towards the city proper.
“Blue flowers,” Idris said, more to himself than Kurellan. “Are there even such a thing as blue flowers?”
“You do know it is unbecoming of your position to court the Queen as you do?” said Kurellan gruffly, settling into his seat.
“If you had friends, Your Honour, you would see the matter differently,” said Idris, as politely as he could.
“She needs to be wed, and soon. You can’t stand at the door the way you do, barring all suitors who come to call.” The old judge tutted. “What’s worse is that you do not even know you are doing it.”
Sighing, Idris picked up one of the books he had packed for the journey, a hefty tome on aria bell resonance and how to effectively replicate the vibrations through voice. It was a topic he was particularly interested in since the war; he charred his throat with the aria on the battlefield and could not speak for two weeks after, hot sores on the inside of his lips from the command he gave.
“I had no idea you were so concerned about bed politics,” he said, opening the text.
“I am concerned about the future of the kingdom.”
“As am I.”
Kurellan eyed the pile of books, stacked by Idris’s feet. “Did you leave anything for the librarians to manage?”
Idris ignored him and focused on the diagrams.
The city passed in swathes of rose limestone and glittering riverways. Idris was distracted from his reading by the everyday comings and goings of Veridia, the sounds of the river birds and the cries of the market, the gentle cooing of the aria bells dotted here and there in strategic positions in the streets. He hardly ever left the palace – he had no need to wander the city – and he was aware that he romanticised the common folks’ lives. He had always been fortunate, or at least more fortunate than most, so he tried his level best to use the gift he had been given to help others. Thrall-raising was relatively simple to him, but it helped the general populace in ways he could not fathom, so he did not try.
As the carriage crossed the bridge into the lower city, Idris watched the boats carrying supplies dock in small commercial ports, heard them haggling for coin and goods; he stuck his head out to watch a flock of sheep cross before them in the market district, and smiled to the farmer’s girl when she begged their pardon; he threw a coin out to a pastry seller and received a hot, honeyed bun in return. Kurellan did nothing. He sat, arms folded, tapping his foot impatiently on the carriage floor.
“You don’t want a pastry?” Idris asked, licking his finger clean.
“I do not.”
“More fool you. It is delicious.”
“We are on royal business, boy,” said Kurellan. “Which is why I expected you to be in the appropriate state of dress.”
“To sit in a carriage for ten days?”
Kurellan was in his family colours, black-and-white, his shoulders stiff with armour plates and his hands gloved. Idris supposed if he was dressed so warmly, he would be irritable, too. He knew he should not bother Kurellan the way he did, but he found the old judge too easy to annoy. He suspected if he breathed too loud, Kurellan would have a problem with that, too.
Once outside of Veridia, Idris returned to his book. He whiled the morning away annotating and practising his hand movements, until the carriage rumbled to a halt for a comfort break. Lila opened the carriage door, her trouser-hems muddied, and bowed her head.
“Good sirs, a breath of air?” she said. Idris smiled.
“Certainly, Lila.”
“Your cane?”
“No need.” He got up, glanced at his companion. “You do not want to stretch your legs, Your Honour?” Kurellan said nothing. “Very well. I shan’t be long.”
They had paused on a grassy hill, filled with buttercups. The soldiers took their horses to briefly graze while the squires fetched provisions for their masters. Idris and Lila climbed the short incline until, from the top, they could see the vastness of the pink-and-white city sprawled in the valley below, glittering and glowing. The palace on the horizon shone in white-blue and draconis orange, and from this distance, Idris could hardly tell it from the cloud-scudded sky and the spring sunshine.
“She’s a real jewel, isn’t she, sir?” said Lila, taking off her cap to fan her face.
“That she is.”
“Lunch?”
“Please.”
They sat on the damp grass; Lila produced some simple meat and cheese sandwiches from a cheesecloth, and a small flask of spiced water.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“You lived outside the city once, didn’t you, sir?” she said.
“Ah, a long time ago.” Idris stretched his legs out in front of him, sighed wistfully. “When I was just shorter than you, I’d wager.”
She smirked, and he laughed slightly.
“Which way?” she said. He gestured east. “Out Marbury way?”
“That’s it. Follow that road. Do you see it?” Lila nodded, her eyes following Idris’s pointing finger. “Out into forest country, where the old temples are. Nothing but fields of herbs and pious healers out there, and still not enough of either of those to save my pitiful life, that’s for sure.”
Lila chewed thoughtfully. “I’d liked to have seen the temples, one day, sir.”
“Perhaps one day, I will take you. They are, after all, my ancestral home. None of my family is there anymore, of course, but still.” He sipped the water. “But they are fine buildings, Lila. Bright white monuments. Gardens even larger than the palace orchard. Oh, and the healer arias? Sublime. As if the very air could sing and rejoice. I should go and see what has become of the place, eventually.”
“If you hadn’t taken the position at court, sir, do you think you would have gone back?”
It was a fair question, one that Idris has not considered before. Back to Marbury? There was nothing there for him. If his uncle had lived, he assumed they would have returned and Haylan would have taken his position as head of the household in the grand estate at Temple Hill, and Idris would have skulked in the background, barred from any and all issues pertaining to his family name. Once they discovered his aptitude for necromancy, his claim to that was taken from him.
“No,” he said at last, quite quietly. “I do not think I would have.”
“If I were you,” said Lila mildly, “I don’t think I would have, either. Begging your pardon,” she added quickly, the tops of her ears turning red.
“No, no apology needed.” Idris dusted the crumbs off his hands. “Back to the carriage, then. You are well-rested?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The squires are treating you fairly?”
“I am sure they would have plenty to say, sir, if they could catch up with me,” she said, with another of her wicked little smiles.
“Excellent. As it should be.”
There were no incidents all through the afternoon. Idris studied and Kurellan tutted and shuffled and did not speak. When it came time to make camp, the call came from the front and travelled down past the carriage to reach the soldiers bringing up the rear. Not long after, the carriage attendants opened the door to let the noblemen out.
Lila was already pitching Idris’s tent, close to a well-sheltered tree stump just off the road. The captain of the soldiers organised tying up the horses and the creation of a fire to cook their dinner, and the carriage, minus Kurellan, was led into the trees, somewhere it would be safe from prying eyes.
There was a peculiar quiet out in the countryside, and for a moment Idris was not sure what was different. There were chirping bugs and rustling animals, and the breeze ran soft through the trees above. When he inquired of it, Lila smiled politely and said, “No aria bells out here, sir. Listen.”
She was right. Idris was so used to hearing the arias of all kinds of disciplines through the bells hung up in the palace – the courtyard arias and the water ones, and the fire songs from the kitchens – that without them, he felt rather empty.
“Can you still hear yours, though?” she said, laying out her bedroll outside of the tent.
“The death arias? If I listened hard enough, I am sure I could.”
“Must be bothersome, never being able to enjoy silence, sir.”
“I... well, I would not know,” he said, frowning. “You enjoy silence, then?”
“The sounds of the bells are pretty enough, for certain,” she said, sitting on the tree stump. “I do like the ones in the garden. But... out here, it is nice. Yes.”
“What about the arias in my bells, when I work? What do they sound like for you?”
She considered it. “Like... a deep hum, in my very bones, sir. Makes me sad and I couldn’t say why. But from your little bells, I hardly hear a thing. Only when you speak it. Or sing it. I can never tell the difference.”
Idris knew when he spoke through arias, nobody heard the words. They heard arias, in different tongues and tones, just like when he heard Cressida control water arias, or Magus Arundale conduct arias in earth magic.
“I would like to feel an aria, just once,” said Lila. “One of the garden ones. I wonder what it would be like. To... to shape it,” she said, lifting her hand like she had seen him do so many times, in the pentagon, “and... and breathe it.”
“It is hot,” said Idris, “and tiring.”
“It looks rather delicate.”
“It feels nothing of the sort. Like I have been hit by a carriage.”
Lila cooked their supper. Idris offered Kurellan some and was curtly turned down – the old man would not even open his tent flap for him – so he shared it with Lila and moved into his tent to prepare to sleep. For a short stop like this, it made little sense to unpack all of Idris’s belongings, so it was sparse and contained only his bed, a change of clothes and his travel magic pack.
He checked the pack before he called Lila in to remove his foot. It contained one, dainty set of aria bells, no larger than his hand, and two focusing crystals, a skin of wine and a vial of caustic salt, just in case. Idris checked the bells for cracks and chips, then wrapped them in their velvet sack. The whole pack was small enough for Idris to carry under his arm quite comfortably; he had done so when he was called to battle, not knowing what the conditions might be.
“One of the soldiers has set up bells on the carriage,” said Lila, after she had wrapped Idris’s stump in medicinal cloths. “What aria is that?”
Idris listened. “That is fae,” he said.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
The fae aria was twinkling, cold, like the shatter of icicles on a pavement. Idris used to hear it often out in Marbury.
“My mother used to say if you listened too hard to fae arias, they would bewitch you,” Lila said, cupping water to wash Idris’s skin.
“Superstition, I am afraid.” He tilted his head. “But there is a mixture of many in the bells, tonight. Earth arias, and moon arias. And, beneath it all, a little sad death aria for us. They do mix prettily.”
“How do you tell them apart?”
“Much study and practice.”
“Did I tie that too tight, sir?”
“No, Lila. Very comfortable, thank you.”
“My pleasure, sir.”
“You do not mind, sleeping outside?”
“Oh, no sir. I do like to look at the stars. The bells will sing me to sleep, don’t you fret.”
She packed Idris’s prosthetic in its travel box and promised to bring out a fresh one for the morning, and disappeared into the gathering dark outside.
Idris sighed, lay flat on his back and named all the sounds he heard that were new and different.
*
The countryside rushed past them, day by day. Idris’s hours were all the same. In the carriage, he read hefty texts on magic and anatomy, and outside of the carriage, he dined with Lila and listened to birds and streams, filling the absence of arias with other, pleasant music. Kurellan barely spoke to him; it was like travelling with a lifelike mannequin.
The kingdom’s landscapes changed subtly every time Idris climbed down to stretch his legs. Here, dense forest, there, marshland. Eventually, when he came out on the ninth day, he saw and heard the tell-tale sign of life that he was beginning to miss: a cluster of aria bells, hung on an inn signpost.
“We’re close?” he said to Lila as she helped him off the steps.
“I think so, sir.” To Idris’s amusement, the longer she had been outside, the more unrecognisable she became. Her skin was a tanned nut brown and her hair, usually mousey, had streaks of sun-kissed blonde, despite her tying it in a cap while she rode. If he did not know her better, he would have mistaken her for one of the squires in a heartbeat. “This is the last stop before the border, or so the drivers say.”
“I should change, then, lest I give Kurellan something else to complain about.”
“Your best boots, sir?” she said. Only Idris understood the double meaning.
“Please.”
It was refreshing, to rest in an inn. While Idris did not mind sleeping out, his back did ache from the carriage, and he was rather tired of road rations. The first thing he did when he entered the inn was order a flagon of ale and a hot meal, and only after that was delivered did he enquire about a washroom where he could clean up and dress. Lila, too, fetched her more formal clothing.
Idris’s ‘best boots’ were designed for mud, rather than the gentle walkways of court. One was an actual boot, with ridged grips on the soles; the other was full prosthetic, which was artfully disguised as a boot. It contained the same mechanisms which allowed him ankle-movement without the need for an ankle, but they were covered with thick leather and were undetectable to the untrained eye. The last time he had worn them, he was at war.
Lila had successfully scrubbed them clean, though, and not a trace of their last outing remained. She padded the socket that touched Idris’s stump with medicines and velvet, and hitched the whole thing to a special-built garter that went beneath his trousers. With the hems of the trousers tucked into his boots, nobody could tell the difference between his metal half-shin and his actual shin. It was heavy, though, and it took a few minutes for Idris to adjust.
“Is it biting?” Lila said, an anxious frown on her face as she watched him stride up and down the small washroom.
“No more than usual.” He shifted the garter, tried again. “I think that has corrected my gait, some.”
“I think you’re right, sir.”
“How do I look?”
She pulled his cuffs. “Intimidating, sir.”
“Please not ‘intimidating’, Lila.”
“Powerful?” she suggested, stepping back to admire her work.
“Like a necromancer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ugh.”
His travel robes were a charcoal grey, with blue beneath, embroidered with clematis on the cuffs and hem – dressy enough for visits, but light enough to work in, and he assumed he was going to work. All of his visiting robes were dark colours, as befitting of his position.
Lila handed him his cane, and he sighed heavily and put out his elbow for her to take.
“You should be proud, sir,” she said quietly as they exited the washroom.
“Should I?”
“Of course. Not many magicians get the privilege of being the Queen’s favourite, even if you are a necromancer.”
“You really do have a way with words, Lila. You put me quite at ease.”
“Teasing, sir?”
“Only mildly.”
Kurellan gave Idris a once-over when he returned to the carriage.
“Appropriately dressed, I see,” he said.
“Fresh and ready to work, Your Honour.”
Idris sat, lay his cane on the bench behind his back.
“Good. I was tired of looking at your sloppy shirt-sleeves.”
“If I read in my robes, I get ink on the hems, and that does so upset Lila. It is pure mischief, trying to get ink out of velvet.” He smoothed the creases out of his lap. “An hour to the border?”
“Roughly that.”
“What is the plan?”
“Captain Farley will meet us at the gate,” said Kurellan, sitting up. “We commandeer a couple of units for the Queen’s business, and you supply the border with replacements.”
“Will there be... material enough, for replacements?” said Idris, trying not to be crude about the necessities of his work.
“I imagine so.” The distaste wrinkling Kurellan’s nose told Idris that he was wise to avoid the word ‘corpses’. “If not, I am sure we will find some close by.”
“This is out near some of the battlefields, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Then I am sure I will have something to work with.” He paused. “Are we sending the scouts on patrol? Or taking them with us?”
“We can bring them with us. Drop them off at strategic locations.”
“And you are positive we will find some rebel cell of dissidents looting armouries for good steel?” said Idris. Kurellan narrowed his eyes, tutted as he looked out of the window. “That was an honest question, Your Honour.”
“And that was my honest answer, you prissy whelp.”
“Charming.”
They did not speak again until the cry of, “Open the gate!” came through the air, and the carriage came to a stop.