Stifling a moan of pain, she bent closer to the water and sniffed it cautiously. It didn’t smell like anything, but she’d heard plenty of stories about people getting lost in the wilderness who died from drinking stagnant water. With a helpless shrug, she unscrewed the lid of her canteen and pushed it into the puddle, letting the water bubble in. She was damned if she did, damned if she didn’t, she decided. She’d have to boil the water later. At least that way most of the toxins would be killed.
Red-faced and body drenched with sweat, Bleak eventually found her way back to Rion and the camp. He snarled in greeting, but Bleak was convinced that his heart wasn’t really in it this time.
‘A little gratitude wouldn’t hurt,’ she muttered to him as she struck a piece of flint and lit the tinder for the fire. While she stoked the flames, the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.
This time, she knew someone was watching her – she could feel it. Carefully, she propped herself up with her staff, and unsheathed her dagger.
‘Show yourself,’ she said, her voice sounding stronger than she felt. ‘Who are you?’
Her words echoed amidst the ruins, and once again, she felt stupid. Perhaps she was becoming delirious. She’s struck her head one too many times and eaten one too many seed bars. Perhaps Rion was a hallucination as well …
Just as she was about to lower herself back down to the ground, rock crumbled nearby. Bleak gasped and backed up, knocking over her canteen.
A cloaked figure emerged from atop one of the walls. Laced black boots landed deftly as the stranger jumped down to where Bleak stood. Rion snarled in earnest this time, even getting up on his haunches to bare his teeth.
‘Easy there,’ said a familiar voice.
Thin, feminine hands lifted to pull down a crimson hood.
Bleak gaped. ‘You!’
The woman took a step forward. Bleak would know those graphite-grey eyes flecked with green anywhere.
‘Henri,’ Bleak breathed, staring at the reigning warrior Queen of Valia.
Henri’s long hair, usually pulled tightly into the traditional side braid of the kindred, now hung loose around her face, cropped just below her jaw.
‘Close,’ said the woman, ‘but not quite.’
Chapter 2
Bleak stared open-mouthed at the woman before her. She was Henri’s likeness in every respect, bar her short hair and lack of Valian leathers. Everything else was the same: the sharp features, the eyes, the build – they even moved like one another, with the same silent, predatory grace.
‘What?’ Bleak spluttered.
‘My name is Sahara,’ the stranger said, tucking that midnight-black hair behind her ear. She watched Bleak’s eyes widen. ‘Henri is my sister.’
Sahara … The name sounded familiar to Bleak. A distant memory tugged at her.
Sahara is dead, Henri had yelled at Allehra after Bleak had trained with the Mother Matriarch. The raw emotion in those three words had stoked Bleak’s curiosity, but she hadn’t had the nerve to question the warrior. It had been only in the days leading up to her imprisonment that Henrietta of Valia had spoken of her twin disappearing into the mist.
‘I swear I felt the moment her heart stopped in there …’
Bleak swallowed the lump in her throat. ‘They … They think you’re dead,’ she said. ‘Is that what you wanted them to think?’ Her voice quavered.
Sahara shook her head. ‘That’s what I wanted to be true. The mist … It had been deadly for centuries. So when I walked in, it was to end my life.’
Bleak stared at the ground, shifting from foot to foot. Finally, she glanced up. ‘You’re truly Henri’s sister?’
Sahara’s eyebrows rose and she gestured to her face with a sardonic smile. ‘Is this really not proof enough?’
She tried to focus on Sahara’s thoughts, which clouded with emotion as her gaze swept over the markings on Bleak’s wrist. There was no single truth to latch onto. ‘You could be bewitching me somehow.’
‘I could,’ Sahara allowed. ‘But I’m not.’
‘How do I know for sure?’
Sahara pointed to the dark markings she’d been studying. ‘My mother gave you that.’
Bleak said nothing. Is this a trick?
Sahara crouched down and rolled up the leg of her trousers. Wrapped around her ankle was a similar pattern of dark-blue swirls.
‘She created this for me when I was nine,’ Sahara explained. ‘She was certain it would draw out some sort of hidden Ashai power. Alas, I remained a perfectly average Valian.’
‘There’s no such thing as an average Valian,’ Bleak heard herself say.
‘So you have spent some time in the forest, then. That’s the sort of thing a Valian would say,’ Sahara said, momentary fondness flickering across her face.
‘Is that what it does?’ Bleak asked, touching the marked skin on her wrist. ‘Draws out power?’
‘You tell me. I imagine you’ve had your own experiences with it?’
Death flashed before Bleak. Once leering faces, blood leaking from glassy eyes. Piercing screams she’d heard beneath the waves. She’d had her own experiences alright.
‘We need to get out of the open,’ Sahara said, no doubt noting Bleak’s paling face. ‘And just as well you didn’t drink that,’ she added, nodding to the spilt water. ‘Tell me, what’s your name?’
‘Bleak.’
Sahara raised a brow. All at once, the Valian’s thoughts came crashing into Bleak’s mind: her observations, the gleaming surface-level memories of the past few days. An argument with a scruffy, bearded man. Scavenging for weapons amidst the ruins, and then – Sahara’s first sighting of Bleak, washed up on the shore. The Valian had watched Bleak journey from the beach and find shelter in the rubble. At first, she hadn’t known if she could trust the newcomer, until her eyes had fallen on the markings around Bleak’s wrist – she’d recognised her mother’s work.
Sahara made to start walking. Rion snarled, saliva foaming around his mouth.
‘Interesting choice,’ she said. ‘To water and feed the lethal beast.’
‘Did you do that to him?’ Bleak threw at her, gesturing towards the teerah’s wounds.
‘Gods, no,’ Sahara said. ‘I wouldn’t go near one of those things with a ten-foot stick.’
‘What happened to him, then?’
‘There’ll be time for that later. We need to move somewhere more secure. Ines has eyes everywhere.’
‘Ines?’
‘The bitch who calls herself Queen of Oremere. Queen of the Upper Realm. We’ll speak of it later,’ Sahara said, hoisting Bleak’s pack on her shoulders.
Queen of Oremere. The phrase snagged on something deep within Bleak’s memories. It didn’t sound right. But whatever memory had stirred settled back into the dust, lying dormant.
She pushed the uneasy feeling aside. ‘Where are we going?’
‘My camp.’
‘Your camp? Is it far?’ she asked, glancing at Rion.
Sahara shrugged. ‘Depends what you think far is.’
Frowning, Bleak approached Rion and crouched down beside him. He glared warily at the two women.
‘Rion,’ Bleak whispered. ‘You gotta get up.’
Sahara’s eyes bulged. ‘You can’t be serious?’
In that moment, Bleak knew she was Henri’s sister without a shadow of a doubt. Their tone of incredulity had the same inflections, the same matching facial expressions.
‘I don’t want to leave him here to starve.’
‘Then put him out of his misery. We can’t take him.’
‘I won’t leave him,’ said Bleak, plonking herself down next to the beast.
Sahara studied Bleak, eyebrows raised. And then did something that Henri never would have done. She threw her head back and laughed. It came from deep within her belly, and her eyes lit up with amusement. ‘Whatever did my sister do with you?’
‘Yelled at me, mostly.’
More laughter. ‘I can imagine. Y
ou’re clearly no Valian. And I don’t mean that as an insult.’
Bleak found herself grinning.
‘Well,’ said Sahara, ‘if you can get him to move, by all means bring him along. No doubt he’ll try to slaughter us in our sleep, but we’ll figure that out when it comes to it.’
Bleak nudged the teerah panther. ‘Rion,’ she coaxed. ‘Get up, come on …’
He growled.
Bleak shoved him a little harder. ‘You have to come with us, or you’ll die.’
Another growl.
‘Perhaps he wants to die?’ Sahara said. ‘It looks like he’s been through a lot.’
‘If he wanted to die, he wouldn’t have drunk the water or eaten the food.’
Sahara shrugged. ‘Why the attachment?’
‘What?’
‘Why do you care?’
Another very un-Henri-like question. Henri never involved herself in others’ emotions or motives, and here was her twin sister, openly asking questions so that she might understand Bleak better.
Bleak considered it. She cared because she and the beast had been through something together. Feeling the whisper of death alongside the beating heart of another creates a thread, a connection. But it was more than that with Rion, Bleak realised. Deep in her bones, she had started to feel a bond awakening, a buried instinct that told her the teerah panther was friend, not foe. How could she explain that, though?
Eventually, she sighed. ‘I don’t know …’
Upon her words, a fierce, distant roar filled the air. It wasn’t Rion. Another sounded. The earth-rumbling noise sent a cold shiver down Bleak’s spine, and Rion’s hackles rose.
‘What’s that?’ she asked.
Sahara’s mouth set in a grim line. She nodded to Rion. ‘That’ll be his pride – his pack.’
‘Are they looking for him?’
‘No,’ Sahara said. ‘They’re contained in a pit beyond the walls of Freyhill, receiving the same treatment as he did.’
Bleak’s stomach churned as she looked to where Sahara pointed in the distance. ‘Why?’
‘Ines keeps them confined and tortures them, then sets them upon her enemies as she needs. The torture makes them as brutal as their captors.’
Bleak looked down at Rion, pity for him hitting her in waves. ‘That’s …’
‘Horrible, I know.’ Then, on a sigh, Sahara said, ‘Wait here.’
Before Bleak could respond, the woman was off, her crimson cape billowing out behind her as she moved like liquid through the ruins.
Bleak tried not to look at Rion’s wounds. The thought of someone hurting him like that set her teeth on edge. She absent-mindedly stroked the big cat’s head and he didn’t object. Maybe he would kill her when he recovered. And if he did, she wouldn’t blame him, not after what he’d endured at the hands of one of her kind.
Sahara emerged, pulling a wooden cart after her, one of the wheels waving uselessly above the ground.
‘Get him in here,’ she said. ‘You take his front – I’m not dealing with those teeth.’
Despite the snarling and weak swiping of claws from Rion, the two women managed, with much effort, to get the beast into the cart.
‘If Henri could see me now …’ Sahara muttered.
Together, they hauled the cart through the ruins, with Rion hissing every time they struggled over a particularly bad patch of rubble. When Sahara caught Bleak clutching her ribs and wincing through the pain, she insisted on taking the whole load.
‘No point in making yourself worse,’ she said. ‘Not far to go now anyway.’
Sahara led them deep into the fortress, where the red blooms became more and more prominent and the stone became sturdier. Bleak grimaced as the Valian’s thoughts got louder, and her temples began to ache.
What will Geraad make of her? After all this planning …? And the beast … Will he see the connection? What this could mean for us, for Oremere?
‘What … What do you know of this place?’ Bleak asked, trying to focus on the task at hand. Hearing more of Sahara’s thoughts right now would only feed the ember of panic that had begun to flare to life.
‘Enough,’ Sahara said. ‘This is Westerfort, or was. It’s the biggest fortress in the realm, not that anyone knows about it, of course.’
‘So it really was wiped? From history, I mean. No one knows about Oremere?’
‘Hmmm, it’s hard to say. It was struck from written history. Books were burned. Hundreds, thousands of documents were destroyed and rewritten. But the people of Oremere were not exterminated, despite the attempts. People escaped. Underground, and to other continents. There are Oremians scattered across the realm, in hiding.’
Bleak marvelled at the scope of the deception. To conceal an entire continent, an entire race of people … She took in the grey surroundings, the red flowers that seemed to feed off the eerie nature of the place, and the thin mist, still coiling around her ankles.
‘I can’t believe I’m here,’ she said.
‘Well, you are. It’s all true. Consider me your official welcome party.’ Sahara grinned. ‘Welcome to Oremere.’
They stopped in front of a massive pile of wreckage. Sahara put her body weight behind a large boulder and pushed with her shoulder. To Bleak’s surprise, the boulder rolled with ease, revealing a dark passageway.
‘My humble abode,’ Sahara said dryly. ‘Come on. Leave the cat for now, would you? I’d rather not be in a confined space with him just yet. You can bring him up some fresh water and food in a moment.’
Tearing her eyes away from Rion, Bleak obliged, following Sahara down into what could only have been a cellar in a past life. While Sahara lit the torches, Bleak realised this was more than just a camp; this was a home. A bed of dried grass was set in one corner, with a pile of grey blankets stacked neatly on the end. There was a bench pushed up against one wall, with a stove sitting on top. It wasn’t conventional, that was for sure, but little things, like the tattered books, two chipped mugs, a plate and a wash basin, made it homelier than any camp Bleak had seen in a long while.
‘Bits and bobs I’ve collected from around the fortress.’ Sahara waved her hand in their direction, setting a pot atop the stove and lighting a small fire beneath it. ‘If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say this place used to be where they stored wine and mead brought in from the port. Likely, it was just a holding place before they carted it off to the capital.’
Bleak’s attention snagged on the farthest wall, or rather, what was nailed to it: a massive hand-drawn map. It detailed the fortress in which they now stood, and the surrounding lands. Distances were scribbled across certain sections, pins were stuck at various points all over, and further north lay a giant city. Two separate pieces of parchment had been stuck next to this, both drawings as well. The first outlined the levels within the castle: three floors of dungeons were set below the surface, four floors above. The second piece of parchment showed a rough sketch of the layout of the ground floor, depicting passages between the walls and markers for what Bleak imagined to be guards. In addition to the maps and floorplans were pages of logs showing initials and times, and barely legible notes.
Bleak glanced at Sahara. The Valian was scrutinising the papers herself, arms folded over her chest.
‘What is all this?’ Bleak asked finally.
‘This,’ Sahara said, turning to her, ‘is our salvation.’
Chapter 3
The warrior matriarch, Henrietta of Valia, had long since ditched her disguise as a noblewoman, having escaped the clutches of King Arden. Now, as she climbed down from Nadia’s Voyager into a small boat sitting atop broken shards of ice, she looked very much herself. Her face was free of the oily cosmetics, save for her eyes, which were lined with traditional Valian black kohl.
The bitter cold of Havennesse’s Port Avesta bit into Henri’s bones. The north-eastern continent’s infamous winter season was in full swing, and the Battalonian ship could only stay an hour while its passengers disembarked ont
o rowing boats, lest the ship freeze in place. As she guided herself down the ladder and into the boat below, her thickly gloved hands already aching from the chill, Henri looked to shore. Beyond the ice of Hamasaand Bay stretched miles and miles of snow-capped pines and jagged mountain peaks. She loosed a clouded breath. It had been years since Henri had ventured this far from her home.
The boat rocked as a pudgy, middle-aged man clambered down beside her with none of her grace. ‘Gods, I’ve never been so cold in me life,’ he blustered, before glancing at her face. He looked again.
‘Geez, long trip for you,’ he said. ‘You’ll miss the summer winds soon enough, Valian.’
Henri didn’t bother with a reply. Even with the additional furs, she looked like one of her kind. She had donned her usual forest-green leathers that clung to her like a second skin, and covered her from her ankles to the base of her throat. She wore heavy black boots that hugged her calves, and draped over her shoulders was a grey hooded palma fur that did wonders for her chattering teeth. The tail of her midnight-blue braid had escaped from her hood and rested like a snake down her chest.
‘I’d heard you lot weren’t much for talking,’ the man said.
This time, Henri turned. She locked eyes with him, flashing a silent warning with her green-flecked graphite eyes.
The man raised his hands in surrender, and said no more.
Despite her cosy hood, Henri could feel the icy wind stinging the exposed skin of her nose and cheeks. She would have to wrap a scarf around the lower half of her face once they were ashore.
As a crew member took up the oars, Henri allowed herself to sink into the rhythm of the boat pushing through the chunks of ice. Although her journey had been long and tiresome, it now felt over too soon. Her people were in danger, as was the entire realm. She suppressed a shudder at the memory of King Arden’s madness, and the strange, magical taint that had filled her with fear.
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