The Queen's Assassin (The Queen's Secret #1)(49)

So Alphonia, at just the right age and station to insist on having things exactly as she wanted them, and fortunate enough to possess the right temperament for the task, called for the smartest, wisest, strongest, and wittiest to join her at court.

They arrived in droves: aristocrats, beggars, traders, thieves, alchemists, farmers, lutists, bakers, mapmakers, and all others you can imagine. From these the girl queen chose the best of the best of each, then gathered them together at a feast. She told the chosen that they were the founding members of the new court of Avantine, and gave them rooms in the castle.

Quite pleased with herself, she then called for women from each clan, and gathered them together for a feast of their own. She told them about her sister, whom she missed very much, and her parents, whom she barely knew at all, and asked them about their loved ones. No one had ever asked them this before, so they didn’t know what to say, because killing and being killed was the way it was and always would be.

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” the girl queen said. “Instead of fighting one another and scrambling for the leftover odds and ends, we can band together and thrive.”

The clan mothers doubted the new queen, and went back to their lands, and back to the way things had always been.

Except one thing had changed. They couldn’t stop thinking about what the queen said. They had been introduced to the idea of something different, and there is no putting back an idea.

Meanwhile, Queen Alphonia had the best of the best at her disposal and not the faintest idea what to do with them after that.

“Our talents are wasted here,” they said. “If something doesn’t happen soon, we’re going home.”

The girl queen wasn’t sure what to do. It was her first official crisis as sovereign, and she had no one trustworthy to advise her.

She was ready to give up. But before Queen Alphonia could dismiss the best of the best from her palace, there was a booming knock on the castle door.

At the door stood the strangest, most beautiful being Alphonia had ever seen, a silver-haired mage with violet eyes, neither female nor male, but both, as all the most powerful mages are. They wore a long white tunic and an emerald gem around their neck.

“I am Omin of Oylahn,” the mage said. “I heard you called for the best.”

“I did,” said the queen. “But I’m afraid that time has passed.”

“No,” Omin said. “The time has not even begun, because the time was not right, and now that I am here, it is.”

And so it was that magic came to Avantine.

It is said that mages came from the Oylahn, a land beyond the Montrician Mountains, an impassable landscape no Avantinian had ever crossed; however, the girl queen never asked of Omin’s origins, or if she did, that knowledge was never recorded.

The women of the clans soon returned and agreed that they were tired of the way things were. Omin trained the group Alphonia had assembled and taught them the ways of Deia, which were already ancient even in the ancient time. As the years wore on, the Deian order served the kingdom well. The greatest scribes collected the wisdom of Omin and Alphonia and spent years handwriting the Sacred Texts of Deia, and the greatest artists illustrated them, and the greatest philosophers studied them, and the greatest teachers taught them, and the greatest students learned them.

In time the queen and Omin married, and had a daughter, and that daughter was named Dellafiore, and Dellafiore had a son, and that son took his mother’s name in her honor, as the first of their new house.

Thus began the story of the Dellafiore dynasty.





— II —





MONTRICE





CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Caledon

BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS, MONT, THE capital city of the Kingdom of Montrice, rises to greet them. In the sun’s glare the city’s harsh gray structures look like part of the natural landscape, jutting up aggressively behind an intimidating stone wall that stretches miles in each direction. But as they ride closer, they can see the carved-out details in the buildings, deep-set windows, arrow loops and battlements on every roof in case of attack.

“Not very welcoming, is it?” Shadow says.

Cal nods. “Mont is a city accustomed to war.” Most windows that he can see, especially near the edges of the city, are gated with iron bars—decorative, but also functional. Armed guards patrol the perimeter, on horseback and on foot. A wide gated entrance at the north side of the city, usually open, is shut tight. Cal frowns. They’re not going to be able to walk right in after all.

“What should we do? Find another way in?”

“No,” Cal says. “Stealth is too risky at the moment.”

Shadow looks down at her clothes and then at Cal. She’s still wearing her stable-hand uniform, except the shirt no longer has sleeves thanks to the incident with the Aphrasians, and Cal has been wearing the same clothes since he left to see the queen. They have been washed in the river, but are ragged and worn from their journey out of Deersia and into the black woods. “Except we don’t look like we belong here. We look like nothing but trouble.”

“We look as well as we are going to look,” says Cal.

“Do I still look like a boy?” she asks.

He shakes his head emphatically. “No one would mistake you as male. Your deception was successful at Deersia only because people see what they expect to see.”