Lightfall, p.26
LightFall, page 26
Bolting down one rough passage, part of me thinking it looked like the place a dark and brooding prince would brood darkly, I stumbled into deeper shadows. I hadn’t appreciated all the discrete lamps lighting my way until they were gone. Obstinately, I continued on, fingers trailing along the wall to guide me—until a razor’s edge of obsidian made me cry out.
Halting, I cradled my wounded hand against my chest, peering ahead then glancing back. Maybe I should just go back.
Wounded himself, Aric would bite deeper than the glassy rock, crueler than a wordless beast. If I couldn’t stand that risk, I should indeed go back.
Uncertainly, I peered ahead. Was that a faint glow? So far into the mountain? What could be hidden here?
No surprise then, I went deeper.
The cave where I emerged was the largest, most untouched I’d seen—what I could see of it. Small braziers were low burning and far apart, just shallow bowls of simmering embers that emitted barely enough light to see and not enough heat to counter the mountain chill. The arching walls disappeared upward, then seemed to cascade down in haphazard flows of undulating stone, creating partitions that made it impossible to see all the chamber at once. So I crept forward.
A faint susurration reached me, a whisper of sound so low I wondered if it was just the echo of my footsteps shuffling forward, coming back to me in reverse—a warning to flee. But a glimpse of a familiar form drew me forward: a figure reclined on a low pallet, draped in silkha.
The woman lying there unmoving, eyes closed, had dark hair and one white braid. Her dusky skin had an odd, translucent sheen, and for a moment, I just blinked.
“Lady?” I whispered.
But it wasn’t Dyania. This woman was older, more statuesque despite her vulnerability.
Ah, blight and spite. This had to be Lady Morowyn of Sevaare, Dyania’s older sister.
Who’d come to the High Keep as Chosen One nine years ago.
I reeled back with a choked gasp. I’d forgotten—worse, I’d deliberately disregarded—what I knew he was: worse than a killer, an aura thief.
And here were the remains, like the base metal findings cut away from precious jewels, removing what made them unique and let them shine while the stolen treasure filled other greedy maws.
With a quick pass through the cavern, I found seven sleepers. I didn’t know what else to call them. They weren’t conscious and couldn’t be awakened even with a sharp whisper and light shake. But they weren’t dead either. The soft sigh I’d heard was an echo of their low, slow breaths that barely raised their chests. All of them had that translucence to their skin, maybe from lying here in the dark so long. Two of them lay as if carved from finest quartz, unmoving except for the nearly imperceptible pulse of blood through the blue-gray map of veins under their skin.
I didn’t know all the Chosen Ones by name or face, but I knew this uncanny half-living graveyard didn’t account for all those sacrificed to the dragon. Somehow these few had survived.
If this existence even counted as surviving.
While I stood there, almost as frozen as the sleepers, dozens of cave-pallid arachnids crept around them. The size of my thumb, the scorpiders scuttled over and under the silkha pennants, picking at the bodies. Stomach heaving, I lurched forward to brush the scorpiders away, but they fled at my sudden movement.
A rattle of beads warned me of Nenzo’s approach, but I didn’t try to hide. “What is this? Why are they here—?” Words failed me, and I gestured the Rokynd word for ‘broken’.
“Their auras held the dragon to me,” the prince answered, “and me to the Living Lands.” When I startled and turned defensively, he did not move, though he kept his face averted. “I knew the haloria kept the demon-touched in the cloister, and I thought if they had a way to heal the afflicted with prayers or sunlaris or something else, then maybe…” His broad shoulders sagged. “Once I discovered that they sanctioned murder to cleanse the ‘taint’, I couldn’t tell them about these Chosen Ones.”
Wrapping my arms around myself, I stared at the prince and Nenzo. “What did you do to them?”
‘Kept alive,’ Nenzo signaled even as the prince said, “Nothing. Not after…” He glanced at Nenzo’s furious gesturing but only shook his head. “In the end, it didn’t matter.”
Biting my lip until I tasted blood, I glanced between them. “What did he say? What didn’t matter?”
When the prince stayed silent, Nenzo signaled again, slower, but I didn’t have the words. The prince signed back at him, almost as fast as Nenzo. I knew Nenzo could hear, even if many Rokynd lost that acuity due to the volume of their stone and metal workings, so the prince was just cutting me out of the conversation.
“Tell me,” I demanded. “Or I will go to Ani right now and say her sister lies undead in your lair, what’s left of her eaten by bugs.”
“Not eaten,” the prince muttered. “Scorpiders only forage decaying matter, not quickened flesh. Their scavenging keeps the Chosen Ones clean, and the Rokynd make a tincture from their venom that—”
“You let the bugs bite the Chosen?” My yelp echoed off the stone.
The prince sighed. “Tincture, I said. Scorpider fangs aren’t strong enough to penetrate skin, and the venom, even when extracted and concentrated, isn’t deadly. Unless you are another bug.”
I glowered at him. “What does the tincture do? Is that what’s keeping them asleep?”
He shook his head. “The venom slows the body so they can continue in this suspended state—at least for a while.” He glanced at Nenzo. “They can be roused enough to swallow, sometimes, though that reflex fades in time. Eventually, so does the impulse to breathe. And then they die.”
Squeezing myself until my own lungs seemed unable to fully expand, I whispered, “They can’t ever live without their auras.”
When the prince bowed his head, my heart constricted as if I were crushing that too. But I hardened myself against the urge to console him. He had stolen their auras.
For the good of the Living Lands.
That was a truth too. How was I supposed to balance that, weave such incongruous threads into harmony?
“Why didn’t you just let them die?” My question sliced like the obsidian, and Nenzo waggled his beard beads in objection.
“Have you ever killed, Feinan no’Sevaare?”
The prince’s question slashed back at me, like we both had swords. But I’d only ever had my knives, one stolen, one that wouldn’t hold an edge. “I’ve never killed with my own hands.” I lifted my chin. “But I once followed a friend to the steps of the gallows and didn’t find a way to change fate.”
“And that is what I’m doing.” He spread his empty hands, with none of Nenzo’s graceful gesturing. “Except I am the gallows, watching the dead walk toward me.”
Was Kalima’s way kinder? Or this dwindling? Did I expect him to slit their throats now or drown them in the pool of silver bubbles?
My tight grip on myself weakened, and my hands slid down to hang at my sides. “I shouldn’t have come.” My own fingers twitched without words.
Though he should have, he didn’t strike back at my unvoiced wish, selfish as it was, that I not have seen this. To never have seen the silverleaf carriage door opening in front of me. To not know that all my friends, starting with Lady Dyania but all the Living Lands eventually, were stumbling toward the gallows.
Instead, he bowed his head. “When I leave the tower lashed to the dragon, our path takes us always over the pass where Ormonde made his stand against the horde that overran Velderrey.” His words took on a droning cadence, like one of the lady’s prayers. “As stories tell it, during the Great Gorging, verges unfurled throughout the Livings Lands, spewing earthbone, and demons raged across the Widening Leas. But Ormonde never lost faith. He fought the dragon on the threshold of the Lost Lands and took her captive. In the end, he won us almost three hundred years of something close to peace, though it left the earthbone scars and the middle of the kingdom in desolation.”
His tempo quickened. “And for a while, when I’d fly past that barricade, I’d look down and see signs of promising life. Towns beyond the lightkeeps, dotting up on the plains, and more travelers on the roads. I wanted to believe I’d helped in fighting back the horde, closing the verges, fulfilling Ormonde’s legacy, so we could restore what was lost. And I thought, if life could come back to the Widening Leas, maybe there was still a chance for these Chosen who’d sacrificed so much. Maybe…”
For a long moment, I swayed with the fierce longing in his voice. And I wanted to believe him but…
“An aura isn’t like a garden plot where you can scatter some seeds with a few scratching chooks and wait for spring rain,” I said, my own voice wavering. “It’s not yaxen fur or a hart’s horns that after a hard winter or long rut grow back thicker than ever. And if there was to be a Devouring—”
“I didn’t know,” he snapped. “Kalima didn’t ask me before they claimed we must hold a Devouring. But I can’t fight the horde and the haloria.” He looked away. “Anyway, I was wrong. All our fighting wasn’t enough. The Chosen can’t be saved. And neither can I.”
He lifted one hand to gesture a Rokynd saying that the thieves in Sevaare used too: ‘Let the mountain crack where it may and the molten ore flow to the shape of its fortune.’
The saying was shorter in Rokynd.
But when he spun on his heel to stalk out, I jolted forward and caught his wrist. “No. No running away again.”
Freezing in place, he stared down at my hand. Since my fingers weren’t long enough to encircle his swordsman’s wrist, he could’ve broken free in less than a heartbeat. But he just stood there, every muscle quivering with tension. Slowly, he lifted his icy gaze to mine, as if his glower should be strong enough to force me away.
It nearly was.
But finding these ghosts of the Chosen was too much. “You brought me here. Why?”
“Because with the relic gone, your life and mine might be forfeit.” The cruel twist to his lips wasn’t a smile. “And maybe I thought at least neither of us will be alone at the end.”
Not alone? That did make my fingers slip away, tingling with an uncomfortable awareness. “If we…stand together, do you think the king or the haloria will be more likely to believe us?” While I hadn’t much book learning, even I could do such simple math, and two against so many seemed still not enough.
“No. But while the dragon remains under our command, I think they can’t do anything about it.”
“Our?” The word was a squeak from my lips.
“The relic held the last of Ormonde’s power. It’s yours now.”
I scowled. “That’s not possible. I’ve stolen bread and jewels but not power. I’m not like…”
“Not like me,” he finished. “Maybe not, but you speak with kings and lors—”
“One king,” I muttered.
“—And now with a dragon. If your voice called her once, you can do so again.”
I couldn’t. I’d coughed out that bone dust, and it was over.
But if I said that, what happened next? Would the dragon hear and rampage? Would the king find out and kill me?
Leaving Nenzo to tend to the sleepers—apparently he had arrived with that intent only to find me prying and had gone in search of the prince to confront me—Aric guided me out of the cave. Following his blacker-than-the-shadows figure meant I didn’t have to guide myself out by touching the glassy walls, but my fingers curled into protective fists anyway.
Like the rest of me should tighten away from the memory of his touch on me.
He took me not to my room—where I half wondered if he’d lock me in, drilling in gates like on his own cell—but to the smaller cavern I’d noted in my explorations set up as a little kitchen.
I gazed at the seven cups of gruel cooling on a platter. “Should we take these to Nenzo and help him?”
But Aric shook his head. “If I stay too long, sometimes the Chosen start to cry, even in their oblivion.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, trying to shut out that image. “Maybe I should go then, to help him.”
“With your connection to the dragon, you might eventually cause the same reaction. Leave Nenzo to his task in peace.” When I subsided, slumping on a crate, he just shook his head. “Throw me an onion.”
At least we’d have an excuse to cry.
Doing as he ordered, I watched morosely as he chopped. Not surprisingly, he was skilled with a knife. In a few flashes, the onion was diced, along with a few other vegetal orbs of various sizes and earthy smells. He tossed all that into a heavy iron pan along with a generous pat of yaxen butter, which he swung over the brazier in the hearth. When it was all sizzling, he added thin slices of some smoked meat and a splash of wine before covering the pot. “It needs time to simmer. Peel that speridia while we wait.”
I would’ve sworn there was no way I’d be hungry. But maybe it was the generous slathering of butter he spread on the crusty bread that he stacked neatly on the pot top to toast against the hot metal. Or maybe it was just the spike to my appetite when he sprinkled some red spice over the speridia segments and I sneaked a piece of the tangy sweetness.
Snagging the crystal container that held the spice, I added more to my speridia. “Why does a prince know how to cook?” When he only grunted, I licked my fingers and mused, “I suppose you said you weren’t always a prince. What were you?”
He kept his clouded gaze on the hunk of cheese he was grating—the stuff was harder than Ormonde’s stupid old bone. “Does it matter?”
I popped another slice of speridia in my mouth and chewed. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m very nosy.” Also, I wanted to not think about the last few days, just for a little while.
He let out a sound that might’ve been an amused snort or perhaps was just from the cloud of spice I’d sent up. “And how has that impulse served you so far?”
Considering for a moment, I said, “After being abandoned as a mere child in the rougher part of Sevaare, I kept myself alive long enough to survive a couple demon attacks and the interrogations of the haloria, the king, the king’s advisors… And you.” I lifted my gaze to him.
This time he was watching me. “Am I as bad as all that?”
I wasn’t sure if he was joking or serious, but I tilted my head. “Perhaps you could change my judgement if you answered my question.”
He went back to his knife work then turned to check the stew. As steam rose from the pot, he sighed. “The rulers of the Living Lands have never been particularly fertile. While that has certainly cut down on the number of battles over inheritance, it left them with a dearth of offspring of suitable auric purity to sacrifice to the dragon.” His knife work slowed. “Over the centuries, they’ve quietly fostered likely children into the royal household and adopted those few they believed could bond with the dragon.”
“Bond?” I whispered. “How much closer can you be than chained?”
The quirk of his lips was both mocking and sad. “When Ormonde captured her from the Lost Lands, she was the essence of a fiendish emptiness spun into flesh and bone and endless hunger. Now she suffers her imprisonment with more or less carnage depending on the affinity of her sacrifices.” The twisted smile faded. “But she drinks first and always from the one closest to her.”
I held back a shudder. Bad enough to have imagined the Chosen Ones being savaged. To experience that repeatedly and ongoing as both prey and perpetrator…
Could I blame him for brooding?
“When it seemed inevitable that Mikhalthe would be an only child, I was found. Since we were of an age, we were brought up together. Until we were eleven, we had the same tutors and the same fightmasters. We slept in the same quarters, ate at the same table, and heard the same droning stories of honor, bravery, purity, and sacrifice.”
“It sounds princely.”
“And then one morning, our dancing instructor came for Mikhalthe and the haloric guard came for me. They took me to my new chambers—in the dungeon.”
I stiffened. “The dungeon? But…why?”
“Because the one-day king of the Living Lands must learn to rule. The dragon’s ransom must learn pain and fear—and how to fight it. And so they taught me that.” He set the point of the knife on the stone board, the last of the cheese under its blade though he did not cut. “All day in the dungeon, they beat me. And at night they dragged me up the tower rise, hauled me down these black hallways, and threw me, bleeding, into her lair.”
I flinched. “You were only a child!”
“How old were you when you found yourself on the streets of Sevaare? And how old is the little Osri boy, sent away from his home, who now lurks in your shadow? What age would’ve made it right? Did you not know fear and pain—and yet survive?”
He wasn’t wrong, but suddenly being abandoned seemed so much less worse than I’d ever thought it. “They couldn’t have waited until…I don’t know, until you were old enough to truly choose.” The way Dyania had. Although that had not been a fair choice either.
But he shook his head. “The dragon’s last bondsman, a scion of Xabhad, had died unexpectedly—not by demons but by his own hand—and they couldn’t lose command of the monster.” The knife blade descended slowly. “So I took her. Or more like, she took me. Every night, she’d curl around me and lick away the blood and my tears of panic. Every morning, my cage door would open and I would flee from her back down to the palace, hoping they’d let me into my old rooms, hoping they would save me. And they would beat me raw and throw me back with her. Eventually, I stopped trying to leave her, and now we fly out together to burn our fury on the horde.”
Silent and shivering in my horror, I only watched him as he turned back to the fire again. The red glow surrounded him, but maybe it was the kingdom itself that deserved to burn.
