Fire of the Forebears, page 17
Aethan held her gaze as though he wasn’t convinced. “Alright,” he said finally, and rose to his feet. “I’ve got the camp about packed up if you’re ready to go.”
Kura glanced around her. Both her charger and Aethan’s fuzzy brown mare were saddled, and the only evidence they’d camped there last night was the fact that she still sat on the ground, half-wrapped in her cloak. She clambered to her feet. “You should have woken me up sooner!”
Aethan grinned and hauled himself onto his horse. “It’ll be your turn tomorrow.”
Kura shook the grass and pebbles from her cloak before tossing it over her shoulders, then climbed back into the saddle. “I’m holding you to that.”
It’d taken most of the night, but Aethan had led her out of the hills and back onto the sprawling plains. They’d stumbled across this small grove of trees to sleep under, but gentle rolling hills—covered in swaying grass and bright white and purple wildflowers—stretched off toward the horizon in every direction.
“These are the Feldlands,” Aethan said casually, spurring his little horse to a smooth trot at Kura’s side. “If you traveled southeast,” he added, pointing to his right, “you’d reach the Au’dal Plains. The horse folk live there.”
“Horse folk? Like the centaurs?”
“No.” Aethan laughed, then squinted at her as though trying to figure out how seriously she meant that question. “They’re regular folk who raise horses—the best horses in Avaron. They probably bred that animal you’ve got there.”
Kura glanced down at her charger as she failed to keep her cheeks from flushing with heat. Of course that had been a stupid question. But after everything she’d seen since leaving the Wynshire…
“Back there,” Aethan pointed over his shoulder, “you can still see the Eigens. But that’s where you’re headed.” He nodded toward the tall, snowcapped peaks rising in the distance beyond them. “The Rohgen Mountains. Avtalyon is nestled in among them somewhere.”
Kura grinned. “‘Somewhere?’ You don’t sound like a very experienced guide.”
“Nope, you’d be my first client, actually. I’ve only seen the mountains from a distance. These plains raised me, and it’s about time I left them behind.”
His words sounded so familiar. A few days ago Kura would have said the same thing about the Wynshire. She’d still say the same thing about the Wynshire.
A herd of pronghorns frolicked across a nearby rise—prey animals, frolicking, without a predator in sight. What in this peaceful country would be enough to drive a man like Aethan away?
“You ever see a place full of tall stones, like a dead mountain or some sort of stone forest?”
Aethan nodded. “I’ve never seen it, but I’ve heard about it. Throgog, city of the stone trees. Legend says many saja lived there, with Vahleda, the Grey Lady.”
Kura swallowed. “Vahleda?”
“Sure. She’s one of our forebears who bound herself to the Crux, becoming one of the first vojaks. She was the first to die, too, in the war of the covenant. They say she killed herself, before Gallian and his forces reached Throgog and buried the place forever.”
Kura shuddered, clenching her white-knuckled fists around her reins as she fought to keep her expression calm. “Was she a rather short woman, with deathly pale skin, long, kind of messy, stringy hair—”
“I don’t know,” Aethan said with a laugh, catching her eye curiously. “I wasn’t around two hundred years ago. Though…” He shrugged. “I have had folks tell me they’ve seen her. A grey lady, like an apparition, wandering the plains on especially dark nights. Svaldans think she’s Yadgul, god of the mountains. In my opinion, they’ve just been drinking too much wine.”
Kura nodded thoughtfully, then forced a smile as she realized Aethan’s joke. Too much wine. So foolishly—and desperately—she had hoped he’d have some sort of explanation for what she’d seen.
She rubbed her dry eyes. Maybe she was going crazy. At this point that seemed entirely possible.
“Well, shit,” Aethan muttered. He stared down the road behind them in resignation. “We’re going to have company.”
Kura jumped and glanced back. “Soldiers?”
A thin cloud of red dust rose from the distant road, but it wasn’t enough to obscure the dark figures of the riders cantering toward them.
“Baza’s gang, I’d say.” Aethan flashed a grin. “Just stick to the road. It’s the first rule of the vagrant: strangers will assume you belong until you act like you don’t.”
“And if they aren’t strangers?”
Aethan shrugged, his smile fading. “Then don’t hold back from that man anything he thinks is worth fighting over.”
Kura mulled over Aethan’s words as they settled into an uncomfortable silence. He probably knew what he was talking about, but she still would’ve made a break for it if there’d been any decent hill or boulder to hide behind.
“Hallo!” The loud voice—Baza’s voice—carried over the plains.
Kura was tempted to be relieved, but then she turned back. The entire gang was there: Baza and eleven of his tall, broad-shouldered men and women, each armed with bows, swords, and clubs—which at least currently hung from their belts and saddles.
“Hello, Baza,” Aethan said with a surprisingly friendly grin. “What brings you out traveling this morning?”
Baza laughed, but true joviality was missing from his dark eye as he halted his horse a fair distance away. “I’ve lost something, and I’ve come back to find it.”
Aethan urged his horse forward a few steps, placing himself between Kura and the group. “Oh? And what is it you’ve lost? I’ve been out traveling this morning, too, and maybe I’ve seen it.”
“I’m sure you have.” Baza grimaced, then spat on the ground. “None of this had to involve you, boy, and it still don’t.”
“I told you I wouldn’t be a part of your harem-building, Baza.”
Baza laughed, this time in amusement. “Is that what I’m doing, eh?” He glanced at the followers around him, who began to chuckle as well. “I thought I was offering a refuge for homeless prairie rats like you. I thought you would be grateful!”
Kura nudged her horse forward to stand beside Aethan’s. “He’s free to come and go as he pleases, just as I am.”
Baza’s black eye fixed on her, and she held his gaze.
“There are rules on these plains, girl. When someone offers you hospitality, you don’t spurn it.” Baza’s eyes flicked toward Aethan. “But that ain’t what I’m here for. Not yet, anyway.” He gave a sharp whistle, and the group parted as the stocky, brown horse emerged from among the rest, her neck arched in pride.
Kura cringed. Serika sat in the saddle, hands bound and tied, and there was a fist-sized bruise on her cheek.
“Tell us what you heard, woman,” Baza commanded.
Serika hesitated, her hands shaking, and didn’t look up. “I…” She spoke quietly, too quietly for Kura to understand.
“Speak up!” Baza shouted.
“I heard them making plans to escape,” Serika blurted out, on the verge of tears. “To join the rebellion.”
Baza scowled. “Join the rebellion…” He stared at Aethan. “Sygus, what’s my one rule?”
The chubby-faced man beside Baza looked up. “Oh, uh, it’s don’t have nothin’ to do with the rebellion, sir.”
“Mm-hm. And why is that?”
“’Cause, um, it ends badly, sir. Brings in the king’s soldiers.”
Baza nodded. “I was young and foolish, once, like you. But I learned my lesson, as hard as it was.” He pinned his one eye on the faces around him. “We have our freedom here, don’t we? But one slip-up and we’ll lose it, huh? You remember what happened to the Blackembers, don’t you?”
Anger flashed across Aethan’s face, and he clenched his jaw.
“The rest here said I was a fool to bring you in. They said I ought to have killed you like they did the rest of them, but I didn’t listen. How did you repay me, boy?”
“Fuck you, Baza.”
“How did you repay me?”
“That’s enough!” Kura shouted. Every angry eye in the gang turned on her, but she pushed back against the pounding of her heart and kept her voice steady. “Is all this really what you want? To live in squalor, to fight and bleed for it, under Dradge’s thumb until the day you die? That isn’t freedom.”
Baza growled and reached for his sword. Kura pulled back on the reins, prepared to draw her own weapon, and with a whoop the group cheered them on.
“Stop!” Aethan spurred his horse forward between Baza and Kura. For a moment all attention was on him, and he unbuckled the sword at his hip and tossed it into Sygus’s open hands. “I renounce my kinship.”
Baza’s eyes widened. “Is that all this family is to you, boy? A trinket, tossed aside for what?” He motioned toward Kura, and laughed. “For her?”
“What does it matter?” Aethan said. “I’m no longer any kin of yours. There’s nothing left here to fight over.”
Baza watched Aethan for a long moment, then grinned. “This will be the end of you. Secession is permanent.”
“It better be.”
Baza looked over at Kura, his smile fading, and gathered up his reins. “I see either of you again, I’ll kill you.” He gave a shout then cantered away, the rest of his gang thundering along behind him.
Kura watched the riders fade into the distance, the rising cloud of red dust gradually enveloping their dark figures. “You just…”
“I know.” Aethan turned his horse back down the road. “I should have done it a long time ago.”
With a lingering quiet, the morning turned into afternoon, dragged along by the monotonous thud-thud of the horses’ hooves against the packed dirt road. Aethan said very little, and Kura could tell he was hurting—or was at least momentarily and bitterly contemplative—but she didn’t know him well enough to have a real idea what to say.
They passed only the occasional clump of scraggly trees, flock of songbirds, or distant herd of shaggy buffalo, but no matter how long they traveled, the mountain range in the distance came no closer. Finally, Kura could no longer stand the pressing silence, and she asked the question that sat foremost in her mind.
“Who are the Blackembers?”
She winced. That was the wrong question.
Aethan glanced across the short distance between their horses. “They were just another kin.” He let the silence linger, then sighed. “My true kin. Although not really by blood, either.”
“I’m sorry. You don’t have to tell me.”
He squinted at the sunlit horizon. “It’s no secret. Our commander believed in the revolution, and I suppose the rest of us did too. We started ambushing soldiers traveling through the plains, stealing shipments of food and weapons bound for the western border. Dradge did not take kindly to that, of course, and one visit from the royal army left all but me…”
“I’m sorry.”
Aethan shrugged. “What are you, then? Some sort of rebel scout?”
Kura hesitated.
“And hey,” Aethan said, a gleam of mischief in his green eyes, “I think I’ve earned myself a little bit of truth here.”
She held his gaze, a grin spreading across her face. Fair enough. And so she told him the truth. She wasn’t a rebel scout now, but she had been. No, she still wasn’t Fidelis.
“What about what I said yesterday, about taking the sword to Nansûr?”
Kura let out a deep sigh. For some reason, she saw Baza’s face—him and the rest of his gang viciously clinging to whatever little they thought they had—and it felt too familiar. “I suppose I ought to.”
Aethan perked up some at hearing that, but cocked his head at her all the same. “You know where it is?”
She tried not to grin as Skellor’s instructions echoed in her mind. If you’re meant to find it you will. “I’ll know it when I see it.”
“I see.” There was a knowing edge to Aethan’s smile. “Let me assure you I do in fact know how to get to the Beaduras.”
Chapter twenty-one
Half Truths
“A re we going to be moving on, sir?” Merric’s voice echoed in Triston’s ears.
Triston sighed, gritting his teeth as if that could drown the little man out, and continued to stare down the crossroads. There were no markings, no unique set of footprints to discern from the mass of cloven hoofprints—nothing to distinguish one path from the other beyond just the slightest bend in the right path and the slightest narrowing in the left. Their destinations made all the difference.
The left would take him into the mountains, while the right was the main road—the road he was supposed to follow, the road the girl had supposedly taken.
“Sir?”
Triston gathered up his loose reins, squeezing his horse between his knees, and then he and his small troop were simply trotting down the main road—the rightward path.
If he’d been able to bring just the boy, Darrow, with him as he’d wanted, the decision would not have been so difficult. He would have veered left, found a warm meal and soft bed by the end of the day at the outpost along the Amdais River, then procured a boat and arrived back in Edras in under two days. Then he could start searching for the answers to legitimate issues, instead of wasting resources hunting down one wayward rebel.
But Seren had insisted that two of his captains—Colmac and Merric—accompany him. As babysitters, likely as not, but they certainly jumped at his every command as though they intended to follow him alone.
Merric nudged his horse beside Triston’s. “It is an honor to finally have the chance to serve with you, sir,” he called out over the hoofbeats. “Everyone says it’s a chance to learn a thing or two.”
Triston nodded and struggled to give even a cordial smile. At least Colmac knew when to keep quiet. He didn’t trust either captain, and couldn’t figure out why Seren did. He’d always given the man the benefit of the doubt—Seren was an accomplished strategist, after all, advisor to the king, and he was good at what he did. One would be hard-pressed to find a project in Avaron that didn’t have the man’s knowledge or approval. And that had never bothered Triston before.
Maybe it was one thing to look at a tapestry, and another entirely to be a thread in it.
“They say that rebel’s following the main road, huh, sir?”
“Yup.” Triston didn’t bother meeting Merric’s gaze. “And the sooner we find her, the sooner we all get to go home.”
The evening sun burned bright behind the long, thin clouds that hung over the mountains, but a creeping chill settled over the plains. With a sigh of relief, Kura dropped from the saddle and let her charger run to the water source Aethan had been promising them for more than an hour. It was just a shallow creek a little ways off from the main road, but her horse slurped it greedily.
Rolling up her sleeves, Kura knelt on the bank beside her horse to take a drink herself.
“What happened to your arm?” Aethan asked, wiping the water from his chin.
Kura glanced down at the bloodstained bandage lashed around her forearm, which had been covered by her sleeve. “It was… a saja, I guess?” It felt uncomfortable saying that out loud. “It had these fangs, like a snake.”
Aethan frowned, dejected. “Kura, you really don’t have to lie to me.”
“I’m not lying to you. It’s what I thought I saw, anyway. It was dark. It’s dead now, though.”
Aethan rose to his feet, a seriousness about him that threatened to make her nervous, and motioned to her arm. “Let me see it.”
Reluctantly, she removed the bandages. The saja’s bite marks were deep, but they’d knitted over and no longer had such a disturbing purple hue. Gingerly, Aethan ran his rough fingers across the wound, shaking his head in amazement.
“You should be dead.” He grasped her wrist and turned her arm over, rubbing the smooth underside of her forearm. “And you said you’re not Fidelis?”
“Of course I’m not,” Kura said with a laugh as she pulled her hand out of his grasp. “What are you talking about?”
Aethan raked his hand through his hair. “Kura, that cat was a helry. Vahleda’s pet, if you’ll believe the legends. Most saja are nostkynna who have sold their soul for enhanced strength, that sort of thing. But helries are more than that.” He shook his head in disbelief. “They aren’t even supposed to exist anymore. Their bite is tainted, filled with a venom that plays on the mind to attack the will. You either die, or become a vassal of the Crux. A vojak.”
“Oh.” On some level she knew she should be terrified, but to hear that explanation—any explanation—was a comfort. It made sense, as much as it didn’t make sense at all.
“‘Oh’?” Aethan repeated with a laugh. “How did you do it? How’d you get out? A human can only become a vojak if they’re willing, but that poison is supposed to make you willing, or kill you if you aren’t.”
“I…” She fully intended to share the story, but she couldn’t speak. To put it into words would make it too real, would dredge up the questions she didn’t know how to ask.
“I’m so sorry,” Aethan said suddenly, and he placed his hand on her shoulder. “I can’t even imagine—I shouldn’t have asked. I’m sorry.” He turned back to his horse and pulled out half a loaf of bread. “Here.” He ripped the bread in two and shoved one piece into her open hand. “We can take a rest for a while.”
She chuckled to herself as she watched Aethan take a seat on the riverbank. It was as if she’d suddenly become a wounded little bird in his eyes—something delicate, something that needed tending to. But her legs were stiff from the saddle, and she wasn’t about to argue with him. “How do you know so much about these helry things?”
Aethan’s expression remained far more serious than her tone. “I knew a man who was bitten by one. He survived, and spent three weeks under the control of the Crux before he broke free.”
