The Master Read online

  Wren felt herself smile again and tilted her face up to the sun. The lutins might hate her and she was far from her family, but she could be out in the morning air, walking in daylight for short periods without fear of burning. It was a legacy from her human mother. Her child would have this gift, too, and it was a good thing.

  A part of her wanted to tell the world of this miracle inside her. It was widely believed that hobgoblins could not breed. There were physical bars, and also it was forbidden by law. But in spite of the risk of the king’s potential displeasure, breeding had been attempted many times with lutin women and never succeeded. Qasim himself had been with lutin women before. Only a few had conceived, and those malformed infants had always aborted early in the pregnancy. That wouldn’t happen with Wren; Qasim was certain she could have a healthy child because she was herself a half-breed. It was her human blood that would allow them to procreate and produce healthy offspring.

  She had wanted to ask him why he thought this— if he had ever had a child with a human woman— but she did not. Some things were not to be spoken of. Hobgoblins and pureblood humans were a forbidden union. Even to speak of such was forbidden. And it would bring certain death upon both parties if they so much as attempted it.

  It was rumored that the king feared a half-human, half-hobgoblin child because it would have all the powers of the hobgoblins and many more besides. There were wild stories about how such a child would be able to see into the past as well as the future, that it could call ghosts and even raise the dead.

  That was nonsense, of course. No one really believed those stories any more than they believed that hobgoblins had been made by stolen Seelie magic.

  Still, Wren had read in the human Bible about a king called Herod who seemed to her a bit like Gofimbel. She read the Bible sometimes because a few of the stories comforted her. Her favorites were the ones about the virgin, Mary. She thought she knew how the Virgin had felt, her terror and responsibility at carrying a piece of the human Heaven inside her womb. She had been forced to leave her family, too, just when she was ready to give birth. Wren had empathy for her. Probably she and Mary would have been friends.

  But as much as she liked the stories of Mary, parts of the Bible disturbed Wren. The worst were the passages in a book called Matthew. She had only read them once but they stuck in her mind:

  Behold! Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem saying, “Where is he who was born King of the Jews? For we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him.”. . . Then Herod was exceedingly angry; and he sent forth and put to death all male children who were in Bethlehem.

  Wren shivered again. Not that King Gofimbel would do anything like that—he was a stern king, but surely he wouldn’t kill innocent children. Still, she and Qasim were certainly fortunate that her father was lutin and therefore Wren was lutin, too.

  Feeling suddenly tired, Wren seated herself on the rock wall and opened her journal. She had found herself feeling more emotional of late— more lonely, more frightened, more passionate— and her mood changed erratically. Since she could not share the truth of her situation even with her friends, she had taken to keeping a journal. Her writing was still imperfect, as was her French. But she was careful to follow Qasim’s instructions and never use Lutin.

  May 12:

  I am a little sad today, even though the sun is shining and I have a new frock. Why am I this way? It is as if I am sometimes a stranger to myself, someone who is waiting for her true life to begin. I wait for my lover and I wait for my baby. . . . I am always waiting. Sometimes I hate it.

  A soft rumble interrupted her, and Wren felt Bastet curl about her ankles. She never let the cat out of the house for fear of a carriage hurting her, but somehow the beast always managed to turn up when Wren wanted her.

  “Hello, beautiful puss,” Wren said softly. “Are you tired of waiting, too?”

  Bastet gave a soft chuff and allowed Wren to caress her ears. The cat didn’t relax, though; her vigilant eyes never stopped searching the shadows where someone might lurk. The beast always seemed expectant. Maybe she was waiting for Qasim, too.

  “Soon, puss. He’ll come soon.”

  Chapter Two

  Wren came awake, nerves screaming that she wasn’t alone. Even before her eyes opened, she felt the others in her room: lutins, three of them. She opened her mouth to call for help, but a cold hand slapped over it and she was dragged from her bed. The grip on her wrists was just short of bone crushing.

  “Bring her to the window,” said the largest goblin, who turned toward the casement, pulled back the heavy drapes and then freed the shutter. At the sound of his voice, Wren stopped struggling. It was King Gofimbel. She had never seen him, never heard him, but still she knew his voice; every lutin in the empire had it whispering in their head.

  The king turned back to her. In the moonlight, his eyes were black. A tongue that looked much like a yellow serpent flicked out quickly and dipped into a small pouch he had about his neck. It came out coated in a phosphorescent green powder that was rubbed quickly on Gofimbel’s gums before the tongue snaked back inside the goblin’s cavernous mouth. Cold, serpentine eyes watched Wren all the while.

  She thought the king repellant and was ashamed.

  “So, you are Qasim’s little secret.” The voice reverberated in her brain just as Qasim’s would. But this voice hurt and pried cruelly.

  Her captor’s hand dropped from her mouth so that Wren could answer. She resisted the voice in her mind, but the struggle was unequal. Unable to help herself, Wren finally nodded assent. The tendons in her neck popped as she fought the acknowledgment, and pain raced down her back and shoulders as the muscles tore, but she could not refuse to answer.

  Gofimbel reached out one of his left hands, and Wren noticed that the rumors were true. The king had six fingers. It was said that several goblins in his family had grown extra limbs and digits. He laid his large palm against her belly and cocked his head, as though listening. Wren urged the baby to stillness, but like her, it felt compelled to answer the king’s call. And like her, it felt pain.

  “So it’s true.” Gofimbel sounded almost baffled. “Mabigon was right. Qasim has disobeyed me and conceived a child with a human. How unacceptably bold of him.”

  “I am lutin,” Wren answered, desperation forcing the words from her frozen throat. The sound was barely a whisper; terror had a stranglehold on her vocal chords. “My father is lutin, so I am, too.”

  “Not lutin enough—not nearly enough. After all, your bastard child lives. That should not be.” The king nodded once to the goblin on Wren’s left. “Finish it. I want to be gone before full light. I’ll deal with Qasim later.”

  Wren was spun about roughly. One lutin guard held her while another cut off a hank of her hair. She watched in horror as he began braiding it into a garrote.

  So that is the sentence. It is to be strangulation, she thought, numb with horror. How could this happen? It couldn’t be real—she was asleep. In a moment she would awaken and go to the window and smell the orange blossoms and mimosa on the morning air. Those were her favorite scents.

  “You can smell the mimosa,” King Gofimbel said. “I hate mimosa. It’s such a human odor.”

  There was a slight movement from under the bed and two golden eyes stared out at Wren. They were angry.

  No! Don’t! Wren thought. They’ll kill you, too. You know they hate cats. Please . . . one of us must live so Qasim will know what happened. He must be warned to stay away or the king may kill him too.

  Gofimbel shrugged off his cape of goblin hides and turned around. He opened a long ivory box sitting on Wren writing table and removed an obsidian blade. He held it close to his nose and then flicked it with his tongue. His voice was almost gentle when next he spoke, using human French. It was as though he didn’t believe she was at all lutin, and that he wanted to be sure she understood what was going to happen.

  “I truly am sorry about this, but I can’t let that chi
ld—or you—live. It’s a matter of discipline. It’s taken me three hundred years to unite the hives. I can’t have anyone disrupting the union with a challenge for power, and I am very afraid that this is what Qasim means to do.”

  Wren began to cry silently. She didn’t beg for mercy, though, because she knew that none would be forthcoming. Nothing had ever looked more pitiless than her king.

  “Get on with it,” Gofimbel ordered.

  The goblin with the garrote quickly closed the shutters, closing out the moonlight and closing in the noise. Wren closed her eyes and tried to think about the mimosa.

  Maybe, she thought, if I think about that, it won’t be so bad.

  Chapter Three

  Qasim knelt at the side of the bed, uncaring that he squatted in shards of glass from a broken vase that had held a small bouquet of mimosa and orange blossoms. Bastet, more fastidious, sat beside him on a clean patch of rug, head bowed in a show of formal mourning. Neither of them looked at Wren’s stiffening body: Qasim because he couldn’t bear to see her glorious locks tied tight around her neck, Bastet because she had already seen it.

  The emotional desolation Qasim felt was strange. He understood his anger, his impotent rage that Gofimbel should have discovered Wren and their child, whom he had killed in retaliation. But there was another sensation: a wretchedness of spirit that suggested he was feeling something more, some other loss unrelated to the frustration of his ambition.

  Qasim comprehended it in part. His affection for Wren had been foolish and unintended, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been real. Nor had it been a simple, frivolous physical desire that would eventually be forgotten when she was replaced by someone else. None of his desires were ever simple or frivolous. In that respect, he was more like a human than a goblin.

  So, Qasim thought, he was suffering the death of his ambitions, but also something more. Maybe several somethings.

  To begin with, though he had done his best to protect her and the baby from Gofimbel, it hadn’t been enough. Wren and the child had died because of him—casualties of war, but unwitting ones who should not have come under fire. So he felt guilt; unwanted, but not undeserved. This, too, was a more human reaction than a goblin one.

  But, unlike a human, Qasim could not cry. Hobgoblins had not been created with the capacity to weep, and he had never anticipated the need. After all, weeping changed nothing. It didn’t alter fate, or soften evil hearts. It couldn’t raise the dead or cure the sick, so why should hobgoblins have been given such a visible weakness? What cared the goblin king that by not weeping Qasim was kept from something inside of himself—something that lived in desperate isolation? Better that the king’s soldiers never feel anything at all than feel weakness.

  But Gofimbel had somehow miscalculated, and inside Qasim did cry out. In his heart—if heart he had—he wailed and asked for Wren’s forgiveness.

  Of course, there was no answer. She was gone beyond where he could reach her, or make amends. And reparation meant nothing to the dead. He had learned this at Gofimbel’s hands. Comprehension of his loss was suddenly absolute:

  There would be no future with Wren. They would have no children.

  Gofimbel would remain king.

  Hobgoblins would remain slaves.

  “I failed, Wren.” The words were a wound in his throat.

  The realization was terrible. It filled him with . . . grief. That was the word. He felt grief.

  Absently, Qasim reached out for Bastet. The cat permitted the touch. She hated goblins; they were anathema to her race. But Qasim was different. Part animal himself, he understood her. The cat hadn’t understood Wren as well, but the half-lutin female had belonged to Qasim, so Bastet had stayed with her in her exile. She had stayed even for her death.

  “I smell mimosa and orange blossoms,” Qasim said suddenly. “Wren loved mimosa and orange blossoms. They were her favorite flowers.”

  The cat looked toward the shuttered window.

  Qasim followed her gaze and then got to his feet. He went to the window, where a small current of air eddied at the shutters’ imprecise joining. He pulled the boards wide. Leaning out into the cool morning air, he grabbed limbs from the trees, ripping them free. Not sure what to do with the blossomed branches once he had them in hand, he took them to the bed. Bastet rose onto her hind legs and pawed the coverlet. Understanding, Qasim gently laid the bruised twigs on Wren’s small body, softening the grim view and making it look as though she was just sleeping in a bower. The gesture made him feel a little better.

  Below them, a door slammed. Bastet hissed a sharp warning and then leapt for the open window. There were two things the cat loathed: one was goblins, the other Queen Mabigon. Qasim had never been certain whether it was the queen herself who bothered the cat, or her constant companion, the ravenous gargoyle.

  Not knowing whom to expect—and, at the moment, not really caring—Qasim turned toward the door and waited.

  A moment later, the Dark Queen appeared. She came veiled in black and bearing an armload of deep, red roses. Qasim noted that they still had their thorns, and their stems were as ragged as the branches of orange blossoms and mimosa he had torn from the trees. She had probably ripped them off the bushes in the garden.

  “You,” he said. He added ironically, “I’m honored.”

  Mabigon tactfully left her pet gargoyle outside the door.

  “I came as soon as I heard,” the queen said in her dark, smoky voice. She pulled back her long black veil and then scattered her flowers carelessly over Wren’s body and face, demonstrating her true indifference to Wren’s death. The room filled with the familiar scent of dragon’s blood, thickened with myrrh and tickles of clove; it was the queen’s favorite perfume, and Qasim realized that he hated it even as it attracted him. “How upset you must be. This does rather end your little plan for freedom, doesn’t it, my foolish one?”

  Qasim looked at her, wondering how—and why and when—she had heard about Wren. Mabigon was a jealous queen and also a jealous lover. This made her vindictive, a trait that did not endear her to her people. Or to Qasim.

  But there was also no denying that she had a terrible, enthralling sort of beauty. It had fascinated him from the first. He wondered why he wasn’t moved by it anymore.

  “It certainly ended Wren,” he said, surprised at how cold he sounded. Apparently his vocal chords were not connected to his heart, which still wailed.

  “What will you do now?” the Dark Queen asked her sometimes lover.

  “That rather depends on King Gofimbel. He’s bound to be somewhat . . . upset.” Qasim wondered now if Mabigon had been the one to betray him to the king. It would be like her to get someone else to do her killing for her—and she would enjoy having the goblin lord in her debt.

  “I’ve spoken with Gofimbel already,” Mabigon answered quickly. “And he is prepared to let the matter pass without further punishment. Assuming that you are also going to be reasonable.”

  So, she had been the one to betray him. Was he going to be reasonable about this? Qasim wasn’t sure. Wren was dead and he had just decided that no reparation could be made to her. And there was no denying that the queen could still be useful. Nevertheless, a part of him wanted to break the Dark Queen’s lovely neck. Gofimbel’s might have been the hands that wreaked the murder, but she had certainly guided them. And Qasim could kill her. The creation magic forbade him turning on Gofimbel, but his lover was another matter—and she had foolishly come with just her gargoyle, the arrogant bitch.

  “You will do the wise thing, won’t you?” she asked.

  He ignored her question. “And you?” he asked, distantly curious. “What is to be your pound of flesh for this indiscretion?”

  “For this little half-goblin?” The queen’s nostrils flared. “She is nothing. A means to an end—a foolish end, which I hope you now realize is impossible. . . . You didn’t love her after all, did you?” The queen’s voice was a sudden whiplash.

  “Love her?”
Qasim repeated. He tilted his head as he considered this. He said slowly and truthfully, “I don’t think that I can love anyone. I wasn’t made that way.”

  “Well, then,” Mabigon said with a cold smile, “I have nothing to be jealous of, do I? For I am far more beautiful than she.”

  “Far more,” Qasim agreed.

  “She is nothing—especially now. Shall we let Prax eat her?” Mabigon asked, indicating her gargoyle, who had crept a few steps into the room, drawn by the smell of death. The creature’s gaze was avid as it stared at the corpse.

  Unable to explain his reaction even to himself, Qasim was nonetheless offended and even enraged at the idea. “No,” he said, managing to keep his voice calm, in spite of the heat that rolled through him. “I’m going to burn the building. The humans will find her body in bed and think it was an accident.”

  The Dark Queen nodded reluctantly. Qasim knew she wanted to watch Prax eat Wren—and make him watch, too—but she was also practical. Anything that looked like a gargoyle attack would arouse the humans and bring on a hunt for the beast.

  “Then let’s do it and be away. This place stinks of flowers—and you know how I hate being out in the sun.”

  And death. It smells of death, Qasim thought. But that didn’t bother the queen. And had it been anyone other than Wren, it wouldn’t have bothered him either. It was what they traded in, after all.

  The hobgoblin reached for the candle at the side of the bed. He lit it carefully and then lifted the flame to the bed curtains. The velvet shied away, but in the end it caught fire, began blazing grandly.