A Crown for Assassins

“You don’t need to worry,” Jan said. “The party is for everyone, you included. There are some things everyone should get to celebrate.”

“Yes, my lord,” the boy said. He held out a note. “This came for you.”

He held out a tightly rolled message for Jan to take. Jan lifted it, reading.

Jan, Endi has taken Ishjemme. He’s killing people. Rika is his prisoner. I have to do what he says. We need help. Oli.

The note made Jan freeze in place. He didn’t want to believe it. Endi would never do something like this. He would never betray Ishjemme like this. Oli wouldn’t lie, though, and Endi… well, he’d always liked sneaking about in the shadows, and it had been suspicious, the way so many of their ships had turned back midway through the battle for Ashton.

Even so, the idea that his brother had mounted some kind of coup was hard to comprehend. If anyone else had sent this message, Jan would have called them a liar. As it was… he didn’t know what to do.

“I can’t tell the others,” he said to himself. If he told his siblings, they would want to rush back to make sure that Ishjemme was safe, and that would deprive Sophia of support that she desperately needed. He couldn’t ignore a message like this though.

That meant that he had to go home.

Jan didn’t want to go home. He wanted to be here, as close to Sophia as possible. He wanted to be here in case there was more violence, in case she, or his siblings, needed him. Ashton was just recovering from the conflicts that had ruined it, and leaving it now felt like abandoning it. It felt like abandoning Sophia.

“Sophia doesn’t need me,” Jan said.

“What’s that, my lord?” the messenger asked.

“Nothing,” Jan said. “Can you take a message for me to… take it to Sophia when she’s able to hear it. Take her the message that you gave me, and tell her that I have gone to deal with things. Tell her that…” He couldn’t say any of the things he wanted to then. “Tell her that I will return soon.”

“Yes, my lord,” the messenger said.

Jan set off in the direction of the docks. The ships from the invasion were still there, and some of them would listen if he asked for their help. He wouldn’t take many of them, couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Sophia unprotected, but he would need some show of force if he was to convince his brother to back down.

Sophia didn’t need him right then, but it seemed that his younger brother and sister did. As much as Jan hated to leave Ashton, he couldn’t ignore that. He couldn’t stand by while Endi took Ishjemme by force. He would go there, find out what was truly happening, and deal with it. Maybe when he was done with it, he would have worked out what to do when it came to the woman he loved.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sophia lay upon the bed that the midwife had all but ordered her to, servants crowded around her, and a few nobles, and frankly enough people to make her wonder if a queen got any privacy. She would have ordered them out if she’d had the breath to do it. She couldn’t even ask Sebastian to do it, because the midwife had been quite clear that there would be no men in the room, not even kings.

“You’re doing well,” the midwife assured her, although Sophia could see the concerns in her mind; the preparations for a hundred different things that might go wrong. It was impossible to hold back her powers right then, thoughts washing over her in waves that seemed to match the pain of her contractions.

“I’m here,” Kate said, rushing into the room. She looked around the people there.

Who are all these people? she sent to Sophia.

I don’t want them here, Sophia managed through the pain. Please, Kate.

“Okay,” Kate shouted, in a voice that was probably better suited to her new role with the army. “Everyone who isn’t actively me or the midwife get out! No, no arguing. This is a birth, not a public performance. Out!”

The fact that her hand was on her sword hilt probably helped to get people moving, and in under a minute, the room was empty except for the three of them.

“Better?” Kate asked, taking her hand.

“Thank you,” Sophia said, then cried out as a fresh wave of pain hit her.

“There are some valerian leaves in a bowl there,” the midwife said. “They will help with the pain. Since you just got rid of all the servants, I think you just volunteered to help me, your highness.”

“Sophia won’t need them,” Kate said.

Sophia definitely felt as though she needed them, but then she understood what her sister meant. Kate touched her mind, and she felt Lucas too, the two of them working together to draw her mind away from the pain, out of the confines of her body.

We are here for you, Lucas sent, and so is your kingdom.

Sophia felt the kingdom around her, the way she had only a few times before. The connection was undeniable. She wasn’t just its queen, she was a part of it, in tune with the living power of everything that breathed within its borders, with the energy of the wind and the rivers, with the cool strength of the hills.

The midwife’s voice drifted in from a distance. “You need to push with the next contraction, your majesty. Be ready. Push.”

Push, Sophia, Kate sent.

Sophia felt her body respond, even though it seemed to be somewhere distant now, so far off that the pain that seemed to be waiting seemed like something that was happening to someone else.

You need to push harder, Kate sent.

Sophia did her best, and she could hear cries of pain that she guessed must be her own, even though it felt as though that didn’t touch her. It touched the kingdom, though. She saw storm clouds gathering above her, felt the earth rumble below. With as little control of that connection as she had, she couldn’t stop the roiling buildup.

The storm clouds burst into a torrent of rain that made rivers swell and drenched the people below. The storm was brief and powerful, the sun coming back into the sky so quickly it was as if it had never happened, a rainbow spreading in its wake.

You can come back to yourself now, Sophia, Lucas sent. See your daughter.

He and Kate drew Sophia back in, pulling her back to herself so that she was looking at the room again, breathing hard while the midwife stood a little way away, already wrapping a small form in swaddling. Lucas was there now, having obviously ignored the midwife’s injunction.

Sophia felt a wave of joy break over her as she heard her daughter cry out for her, gurgling in the way babies did when they wanted their mothers.

“She sounds strong,” Kate said, taking the baby with surprising gentleness and waiting for the midwife to leave before holding her out for Sophia to take. Sophia reached out for her daughter, looking down into eyes that seemed to take in the entire world. Right then, her daughter was the entire world.

The vision hit Sophia so quickly that she gasped with it.

A red-haired young woman stood in a throne room, representatives of a hundred lands kneeling before her. She strode out into the streets, distributing bread to the poor, picking up flowers strewn at her feet so that she could laughingly make a crown of them for a group of children. She reached out for a wilted flower and brought it back to health…

…She strode through the middle of a battlefield, a blade in her hand, thrusting down into the bodies of the dying, ending their attempts to cling to life. She reached down for a young man and drew the life out of him with a touch, feeding it into the great well of power that would let her heal her own troops…

…She danced in the middle of a ball, laughing as she spun, obviously loved by those around her. Artists worked at the side of the room with everything from paint to stone to magic, creating works so beautiful they almost hurt the eye to look at them. She welcomed the poor into the feast, not as charity, but because she didn’t see any difference between feeding her friends and feeding everyone who was hungry…

…She stood at the lip of a fighting pit, before a group of nobles who shook as they knelt, looking up at her with a mixture of fear and hatred that made Sophia wince to see it.

“You betrayed me,” she said, in a voice of almost perfect beauty. “You could have had everything, and all you had to do was follow my commands.”

“And be no better than slaves!” one of the men said.

She stepped toward them, a sword in her hand. “There must be a price for that.”

She moved close, and the killing began while around her the crowd chanted one word, a name, over and over “Christina, Christina…”

Sophia snapped back to herself, staring down at her daughter, not understanding what had just happened. Sophia understood the feel of a real vision by now, but she didn’t understand what all of this meant. It felt like two sets of visions at once, each contradicting the other. They couldn’t both be true, could they?