Free The Rival by Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page A

clearly was.  Malnourished children with distended stomachs, young mothers with rotted teeth and boils on their necks, and men with legs bowed with rickets.  Poverty, starvation, and hopelessness, and all of it blamed on the government in Jahn.  Until two weeks before, most of these Islanders had never seen Fey.  They had thought the Fey a myth to justify the cut-off of trade to Galinas.  They had thought their government had arbitrarily ended the villagers livelihood to destroy life in the Snow Mountains.
    They had starved for two decades, held on by sheer determination, and hadn't even known why.
    By the time they saw the Fey invaders, they didn't care who ruled them.  All they wanted was food and shelter and a promise that the days of prosperity would begin again.
    He sat down on the cot inside his tent, and pulled off his boots, massaging his feet.  He had walked the length of this village and found it no different than all of the others. They had blurred so much that he couldn't even remember its name.  He had spent part of the last five years learning Islander so that he could be a politician as well as a conqueror.  But these apathetic creatures didn't care if he was either.
    This lack of resistance took some of the joy out of his effort.  He hoped, when he stopped at the garrisons his troops were establishing on the roads north, that he would be able to make use of his learning.  Blue Isle couldn't be a simple, pathetic place.  His estimate of his son, Rugar's, abilities was low, but not that low.
    Rugad leaned back and stared at the tent's brown ceiling.  He had learned long ago to make his quarters in Shadowlands as dull as possible because the Shadowlands leached the color out of everything.  He hated being inside, hated it almost as much as he hated dwelling in the same place too long.  Shadowlands, particularly the way he constructed them, were tight, narrow, economical boxes.  Some Fey couldn't even stand upright in them.  From the outside, they were invisible to the naked eye.  They were marked by a few blinking lights that looked, to the uninitiated, like fireflies winking in and out.
    The only time he felt his age was at rest.  He knew he still had years yet  —  he had at least fifty Visions unfulfilled, and in them all he looked older than he was  —  but sometimes he felt as if he were on the cusp of old age.  He was still vigorous, and could fight Fey one quarter his age, but his bones ached when he stopped moving, and when he got up in the morning he was stiff, even if he hadn't fought in battle.
    Old age was the curse of the warrior, and the blessing of a cunning man.
    He smiled.  He was cunning.  So far things had gone almost as well as he could hope.  His son, Rugar, was out of the way, and his granddaughter, Jewel, had lived long enough to mate with the wild magic in this place to produce a great-grandchild worthy of the Black Throne.
    Rugad had waited nearly two decades to invade Blue Isle.  He had several reasons.  He wanted the Islanders to become complacent.  He wanted them to forget how to fight.  And he wanted his great-grandson to become an adult, to come into his power.  
    Now that Gift was a man, it was time to bring him into the fold.  Rugad didn't want to rule forever, nor did he want his other grandchildren to take over.  Rugar's other children were as foolhardy, impulsive and reckless as he was.  None of them would take the Black Throne to Leut.  Only Gift would.
    Rugad had Seen it.
    The Circle door opened.  It whistled faintly, a warning only Rugad could hear, a safety feature he added into all his Shadowlands.  He sat up as Wisdom, one of his advisors, entered.
    Wisdom was so named not because of any added intelligence but because, as an infant, he had the look of an elderly Shaman.  He still did, even though he was Jewel's age, mid-thirties, still a child in Fey years.  He was slender and strong, his magick the subtle power of Charm, a power