The Passage of Kings

by Anant V Goswami

  “This is a well not twenty feet deep,” Elsa argued.

  “It’s not the drop that I fear, but what we may find waiting for us at the bottom.”

  Elsa looked undecided for a moment, but then she nodded her head and said, “Very well, I will wait for you here. Scream if you need my help.”

  “That is the only thing I would be able to do,” said Diyana as she climbed on top the wall of the well, and then lowered herself on the first step. Her foot landed on a slippery stone which was just broad enough for one of her feet at a time. Diyana looked up and saw Elsa’s face peering down at her, displaying a sense of calm and composure that had become so distinguishing of the Harduinian princess.

  “I will need light.” Diyana heard her own voice echo all around her.

  “Wait for me. I will be back,” Elsa’s golden hair whirled behind her as she spun around and vanished. Diyana looked down and thought she saw the sparkle of the water below, or perhaps a creature that had just burst through the surface and was slowly crawling up the walls, aiming for her legs. The air around her felt damp and stuffy, and a foul smell wafted from the bottom and made her think of dead animals and rotting corpses.

  I did not escape the bats to die at the bottom of an old well. I wonder if they would write a song about that, and how it would sound?

  ‘A warrior she was, brave and strong,

  Her sword was sharp, her arrows were long.

  But she ran when the bats approached,

  while the king fought along with his Aerdonian host.

  She ran till she found a well,

  She found the steps, and then she fell.

  She ran when the bats approached,

  Only to die inside a hole.

  Diyana chuckled at the thought of the song being played in taverns and brothels across the realm, and common folk laughing their hearts out at the manner of her death. And then she thought of her mother, and suddenly, she wanted to survive and live a little bit longer.

  “Here, catch this,” Elsa’s head appeared over the ledge, and her face glowed from the light of the flaming branch that she held in her hand. She dropped the crackling piece of wood, and Diyana caught it from the end where it burned. A stab of pain shot through her palm as she quickly switched ends.

  The well suddenly came to life as the light of the branch illuminated Diyana’s surroundings, and revealed moss and algae covered walls that appeared to have once been under water. Diyana lowered the branch to have a better look at the bottom, and that is when she saw it. A shallow pool of murky water that had a greenish tint to it because of the algae that floated on the surface like small heavily wooded islands on a green ocean. Diyana did not know how drinking this water would be any better than dying of thirst, but she decided to continue climbing down.

  Finally, she reached the bottom of the well and found herself standing on a stone platform that jutted out from the side, hovering over the still water that Diyana discovered was the cause of the revolting smell that floated around her. Diyana bent down to examine the surface of the water in the light of the fire. The water could not have been more than two feet deep, and definitely not fit for human consumption. As Diyana got up and turned around, the light from her torch fell on the glistening surface of the wall behind her and revealed words that had been scribbled onto the stone surface by swords, daggers, arrowheads, and other pointy devices. Diyana brought the flaming branch closer to the wall and what she saw left her stunned.

  The words were names.

  “Dan Wildernick,” Diyana muttered under her breath, “Martijn Becud, Jurian Foer, Harold Frostman, Gilbert Dowse, Annalies Kort.” Diyana’s eyes swept over a few more names before they lingered over two names which looked to have been recently carved into the stone. Diyana’s heart pounded in her chest like war drums. She could not believe what she was seeing. Her fingers trailed over the two names, as she felt the wetness of the wall and the scratches of the swords on her fingertips. The first name was written in beautiful handwriting, as if the person had taken their time with the work. The other was scribbled in a hurry and appeared to have been written by a child.

  “But this is not possible.” Diyana’s whispered in a shaky voice. She did not waste time in beginning the ascent back to the top. She needed to find Elsa.

  Elsa Faerson was already waiting for her, as she had promised. She was leaning over the edge, her hair covering her face in a veil of golden excellence, her face and its bony structure, caused by days of hunger and starvation, highlighted and accentuated by the light of the flaming branch, as Diyana handed her the torch and climbed out of the well and collapsed on the ground. The strain of climbing the well had taken its toll on the famished frail body of Diyana, and the strong stench of the water had left her nauseated.

  “Did you find the water?” Elsa said as she helped Diyana back to her feet.

  Diyana took the support of the well as she swept her hair from her face, and stripped the breastplate from her body, “a lot more than just water,” she said when she was just in her tunic and trousers.

  Elsa looked at her with curiosity, “What?”

  “The names of men and women who made it this far, scribbled on a wall beside the water.”

  “How many were there?” Elsa asked, straight-faced.

  “Ten, perhaps twenty. But two of them had been scribbled recently.”

  “And?” Elsa’s calmness was slowly turning into a rare display of excitement.

  “And they belonged to Olver Liongloom and Garen Swolderhornn ”

  ∞∞∞

  Diyana did not sleep that night. Hope had been kindled in her heart. Hope that Olver Liongloom survived. Hope that Garen Swolderhornn was not the coward that she thought him to be. Hope that their fellowship was still intact. However, Elsa Faerson had slept early. Something Diyana had never seen her do, while Sanrick Faerson sat beside her, giving her company in the dark of the night, enthralling her with tales he had read in the various books that lined the shelves of Timehall. The boy had been feeling better ever since he began eating the worms; however, his skin still had a bluish hue to it which signified that the infection still lurked somewhere in his body.

  “Do you know the tale of Rihaan, the unifier?” Sanrick asked Diyana.

  “Yes, every child hears the story at some point in his childhood. The story of how Rihaan, the king of Indius, was the first and the last king to try and unify the five kingdoms into one, and how he was butchered by the king of Azgun, Jornag, at the council where the kings of the five kingdoms were about to give their consent for one unified kingdom.” Diyana had herself heard the story from her mother, back when she was a child. She still remembered not liking the story, for it did not comprise a bloody battle, neither did it contain heroic deeds from a knight on a warhorse who overwhelmed hundreds of men, nor an account of bravery and sacrifice where a single warrior died trying to keep the enemy from breaking down the portcullis, as he stood alone on a drawbridge, his hammer slashing and cutting and hurling enemies in the moat around him. The story only contained an act of cowardice, treachery and cunning, and Diyana was not fond of any of those.

  “Do you know why Jornag slew every king and queen that attended the council that day?” Sanrick asked in a strained, weak voice, his eyes fixed on the well which was hardly visible in the pale moonlight filtering through the canopy of leaves overhead.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Diyana shuffled closer to Sanrick so she could understand Sanrick’s whispering, “he wanted to rid all of the kingdoms of their kings, so he could leave them vulnerable, and ripe for an attack. And that is what he did and became the only king ever to hold the five kingdoms at the same time, if only for a week.”

  “Isn’t it funny how perception forces people to assume the worst of people. And how those assumptions shape our understanding of the past and paint a picture that is far different from what actually was,” Diyana saw Sanrick smile in a very long time, “People thought because Jornag was an Azgunian king, so he must
have killed everyone to rule their kingdoms. Because that is what Azgun came to be known as, an evil kingdom whose ambitions led to the Great War and the eradication of half the population of Aerdon. Whereas the real reason was something entirely different.” A gust of wind roared at that moment, charging at them like war horses on a rank of soldiers, blowing away Sanrick’s cloak from his body and revealing his disfigured body.

  “What was the real reason?” Diyana was finally intrigued. In the beginning, Sanrick’s mumblings had seemed nothing but a sick boy’s mind trying to distract himself, but as she paid heed to what he was saying, the boy’s knowledge took her by surprise, and she found herself listening attentively.

  “Love. He killed every one of those kings, their wives, their children, some so young that they had not even learned to walk, all for the love of a Harduinian girl,” said Sanrick.

  “A princess?”

  “Far from it,” Sanrick’s mouth twisted into a nervous smile, “A whore he had the chance of…pleasuring. She wanted to rise above the work she had been doing since she was a girl of ten. She wanted glory and fame, but most importantly, she wanted respect. Jornag asked her to marry him, but she said ‘only if you prove to me that I am more to you than just a whore, that I hold the same place in your heart that a girl of a higher birth would. And so, she asked him to kill everyone that attended the council.”

  “But wouldn’t she have become the queen of the realm if the council had succeeded in unifying the realm?” Diyana asked.

  Sanrick leaned forward, and Diyana saw a twinkle in his eye, “No, for the king of the unified realm would have been Gyen of the Liongloom dynasty. Indius was the most powerful kingdom then, even more powerful than, perhaps, Calypsos of today. And the girl did not like that. She was a Harduinian, and later, found to be the bastard daughter of King Dwen of the Faerson dynasty, the tyrant king who nailed the cock of her wife’s lover to her wife’s…um…thing. I wonder how the same blood runs through me.” Sanrick lowered his eyes as they lost their twinkle.

  “You seem upset about that? Isn’t it better than you are not like him?”

  “At least people remember him. No one will remember me when I die. I will be known as ‘Sanrick, the pig king’. That is what the common folk in East Shade already call me,” Sanrick said as he swathed the cloak around him once again.

  “It’s better than being called a tyrant.” Diyana kept her hand on Sanrick’s shoulder, and the boy’s eyes lit up once again as he smiled timidly.

  Your sister has the Faerson blood, the Faerson fierceness, but you have the Maeryn wisdom. It is sad that you were born in a kingdom that values a man’s skill with a weapon over his skills as a strategist. And more wars have been won through strategy than bravery.

  “After all of this is done, I invite you to visit me at Silentgarde. The great library of Timehall may possess the largest collection of books in the realm, stacked in shelves as tall as watchtowers, but we have books that no man ever knew existed, hidden in chests locked away in the deepest caves and tunnels of Zaeyos. Although we do not let anyone have a look at them if they are not a Maeryn warrior or scholar,” Diyana said in mock condescension, “however, I believe we can make an exception for ‘The Scholar King’, Sanrick Faerson.”

  “I will come…cough…gladly…cough…” Sanrick said in a throaty voice and coughed again.

  There is something wrong with his eyes.

  Sanrick’s eyes had turned bloodshot. A web of thin red lines began to cover the white of his eye as he coughed a couple more times. For a moment, Diyana thought it was the White Curse, but then she thought it impossible as Sanrick had not shown any indication that would suggest he was infected.

  It was when Sanrick coughed blood that Diyana knew this was something else.

  “Sanrick! What is it?”

  How would the boy know, you dim-witted cow?

  Sanrick did not respond as a fit of cough took him once again, and he sprayed blood all over Diyana’s face.

  He is dying. I must do something. But what?

  Thick red blood now started to ooze from Sanrick’s nose, and he began to claw at his neck as if a noose was slowly tightening around him and he wanted to rip it away.

  “Sanrick? SANRICK?” Elsa woke up, and her voice was laced with fear, “Don’t be afraid, brother, I am here, lie down, shh… don’t cry Sanrick.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Sanrick howled, “please Elsa, save me. It hurts…my throat…please…fire inside…cough…my…throat…it…cough... hurts.”

  “Give him water!” Diyana’s senses rushed back to her as she snapped out of the horror that unfolded before her. Elsa rushed towards the horse and came back with the flagon of water that Diyana had fetched from the well earlier in the day.

  “It’s the worms…they are…alive…inside…eating...cough…throat.”

  Sanrick could hardly open his mouth as Elsa poured the murky green water into his mouth. The boy lapped at it like a hound in a desert.

  I hope this quenches the fire in his throat.

  Sanrick drained the flagon swiftly, and then he just lay panting on the ground, as a wide-eyed Elsa stared at him with a face devoid of color. The wind had ceased its howling, and the silence around Diyana was a stark contrast to the sound of her beating heart and the voices that were screaming in her head.

  Finally, the coughing stopped, and the blood stopped flowing from Sanrick’s nose. Diyana managed a smile as she met Sanrick’s eyes. Tears glistened in the corner of his eyes, and his throat was covered in scratch marks from his own nails which had become jagged and long during the passage of the journey.

  “It was the water that saved him,” Elsa said, dabbing at the blood smeared on Sanrick’s face and hands. Diyana also realized that her face was covered in blood, as she wiped it away with her hand, like a warrior in a battlefield.

  “But what caused it?” Diyana questioned.

  “The worms. What else? Nothing in this forest happens naturally. The bats, the worms, thousands of acres of land meant to starve you to death, all of them are deliberate impediments created to prevent the crossing of the Endless Forest,” Elsa said as she slumped beside Sanrick, “I hope his coughing drew Olver’s attention if he is close. My heart grows frightful every day, and I know that whatever comes next will be the final blow of the horn, before we either come to the end of this forsaken place, or we die, and I would like as many people around me as possible when that happens.”

  I hope it did not draw the attention of something sinister.

  Diyana’s stomach growled, and the realization of intense hunger struck her as she realized she hadn’t eaten in two days. Her eyes traveled from Sanrick, sprawled on the forest floor, drenched in sweat and blood, to his sister who lay beside him, her eyes closed from exhaustion and trauma. Then, her eyes fell on the well nearby, a grey shape in blackness.

  Did the water from the well save him? Did it also save the others whose names are scratched on the wall at the bottom?

  The hunger pangs started to become unbearable. Like small jabs to her stomach from a dagger, they began inflicting pain and misery in a way she had never experienced before. But that was before she felt the pain in her throat. It began with a slight tickle whenever she swallowed saliva, but quickly, it turned into hot flames of fire that were licking their way up inside the walls of her throat.

  Diyana tried to scream, but only coughed. She tried to move, but the worms that were crawling up her body left her paralyzed. All she could do was squirm and throw her legs in pain, hoping the movements would draw Elsa’s attention. And they did.

  Elsa opened her eyes and looked at Diyana with an expression of…Diyana could not figure out whether it was surprise or amazement. Elsa did not spring into action, as Diyana hoped she would, neither did she reach for the flagon that lay beside her, still filled half with the green water from the well. All she did was stare back into Diyana’s wide, horrified eyes as she attempted to brush away the imaginary worms that were cr
awling up her arms, biting their way red from her forehead and into her mouth, and then down her throat.

  Sanrick stirred awake, and Diyana saw his mouth open to let out a scream, but she could not hear it. Her head was filled with crunching noises of worms eating through her skin and burrowing inside her bones, as if they were finding their way back to their homes, inside the mud and the earth. She saw Sanrick reach for the flagon, as Elsa got to it before him and snatched it away, while the weak and bloodied body of Sanrick could do nothing but plead to his sister. She saw tears roll down Sanrick’s cheeks, and then realized she was crying as well. Had she ever cried before? She could not say. Was it because of the pain that she cried? It could not be, as she remembered suffering through gruesome wounds in her childhood, only to smile through the surgeries after. Then she realized she cried for her mother. And for her sister. And the realization that she was forever leaving one to join the other, wherever she was. And finally, she realized she was crying for Jaeriz, the tall bearded archer from Silentgarde, her beautiful secret, the love of her life.

  Elsa crawled towards her, with the flagon in her hand, and a face as blank as an unused parchment. Sanrick still wept behind her, but it seemed he had surrendered and ceased his pleading. ‘Your sister has the Faerson blood, the Faerson fierceness’, the words echoed in her head as Elsa tilted the flagon, and the murky green water rushed out of the mud-covered opening and began to fall with a steady stream on the forest floor. Along with the water, Diyana saw her life being wasted away, falling and mixing with the mud, just how her corpse would in a few months. But then, the worms chewing through her would be real; however, she would not feel the pain, and the thought gave her relief.

  Let it all be over.

  Diyana closed her eyes, and just listened to the water falling on the ground. Just before she surrendered her life to the Endless Forest, and the deceit of Elsa Faerson, she mustered all her strength and whispered, “Why?”

  Elsa brought her lips closer to Diyana’s ear, and murmured in a sweet voice, “Because you had what I needed,” Elsa’s hand wandered from her neck to her cleavage, and then slipped inside her gown, and found the stone, nestled in Diyana’s bosom, “and now I have no need of you,… and also, you lied,” said Elsa as she unsheathed her dagger and Diyana felt the tip press into her stomach, “This is to end your misery.”