Kalyna the Soothsayer by Elijah Kinch Spector

Author:Elijah Kinch Spector
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Fantasy / FIC009020 - Epic, FICTION / Fantasy / FIC009030 - Historical, FICTION / FIC002000 - Action & Adventure
Publisher: Erewhon

Part Four

Lock It Away

The Reds spent the next few days rifling through the kitchens, and scaring the poor workers, and the Yellows spent them sniffing around Vorosknecht’s and Queen Biruté’s apartments, but nothing useful was found either way. I do not know how much influence the Prince and Lenz had over even the King’s Reds, through Olaf, at this point, but those soldiers certainly didn’t seem to be doing anything particularly useful.

But then, neither was I, at least not insofar as it would help find or stop whoever had tried to poison Olaf. My focus was still entirely upon escape. With every new wrinkle in the catastrophes unspooling around me, I imagined only the ever-growing probability of what my father had foreseen. If Martin-Frederick could be believed, the Bandit States were not, in fact, invading, and that was all well and good. But something must have been going on there, for High General Dreher to be keeping such a close eye on Andelka and “you-know-who.” Vorosknecht was, it seemed, attempting to kill our false King, while the real King was hidden from us, and I had implicated the Queen in a (justified) fit of pique.

I did my best to ignore the continuing feeling that I was causing the Tetrarchia’s impending collapse. After all, these powerful idiots had been undermining each other for years, so how was one imprisoned faker supposed to waltz in and ruin the whole place? (Dare I admit, even now, that a part of me felt satisfaction at the thought? That the narrative of me being plucked against my will, dragged into their court intrigues, and tearing everything down had a thrill to it? If only I could have destroyed only the monarchy, the nobility, and the armies, leaving everyone else alive and well. That, I think I would have been happy to do.)

Whatever the case, I tried to focus on my escape. I wanted to see if my father had picked through his visions to see anything useful about Lenz, but avoided visiting for the next two days. I told myself this was because it would strain him to have me asking, every day, whether he’d found something helpful, which may have been partly true. But I was also getting comfortable, and Papa and Grandmother were reminders that we were not meant to be comfortable. Besides, for once in my life, I did not have to take care of him myself. He was in good hands.

I had somewhat free rein over the palace grounds now (in two-hour increments) because Lenz guessed, correctly, that I would not leave without Papa, whose building was guarded. In the absence of useful information on my captor, or any word from Martin-Frederick Reinhold-Bosch, I devised schemes.

I was set on the Bandit States as our destination, as it was the closest way out of the Tetrarchia and had not, I hoped, been raiding Rotfelsen anymore than before. What’s more, I knew which obscure villages and tunnels in lower Rotfelsen to take there,

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