I felt his eyes on me, almost as if he knew I was present and listening to his words, needed to hear his words as much as Tashka did. That I needed to understand their power not just for myself, but with hope for Terraleise.
A flash of a memory shot through my battered mind, causing a pang of pain to course behind my eyes.
Your time is running out.
Dreamlike, almost as if the words were draped in fog, they rose into clarity.
Though no one dare disobey the command of a king, to rest was what I wanted least. I wished to have my strength to respond. I feared I would forget his words, those spoken to me by King Eaton. I needed to share with everyone his words, so dipped in riddles as they were.
My eyes became too heavy to even be guided behind my eyelids. It was mere moments until I was falling back into my peaceful darkness. I welcomed it, having so easily forgotten the justification I had clung to that caused me to rise from my earth scented embrace to begin with.
Like gazing through a muddied puddle my mind was weighted as I lifted from my sleep.
Voices.
They were unfamiliar, like I was in search of something, someone, and couldn’t find them. So, my will dissipated and I let sleep drag me once again into the stillness that was becoming so fond of me, and I of it.
Whipping.
Screeching.
Haunting echoes that beckoned me, nurtured my fear to rise from my dreamless rest.
Amongst the chaos there she stood, a lighthouse in uncharted waters. Terraleise.
Amongst the chaos of my bruised mind, the lashes on my memory, I could not forget her.
“Come back now, Silas.”
Like she was before me with hands outstretched. In her tunic and pants, bow slung across her body and hair unbound.
So, the fog began to clear, and the pain, the aching and itching of my healing body settled in once more, its presence only an annoying flicker in the darkness that I paid no heed to. As it became more real, as I filled my body with consciousness once more, I took a breath and opened my eyes.
Nine
I had not expected to sleep easily. I fought the heaviness in my eyes until they were so weighted that not even the promise of turning back time would persuade them to remain open. The fear of reliving the darkness was a hand around my throat, squeezing tighter with every blink that had my eyelids remaining slightly less open than they had before.
I was seeing through eyes that were not my own. Tanned hands sat atop the railing of a ship as we sailed past a coastline that looked all too familiar yet unexplored by my own eyes. Its colours dulled and muted in comparison to what I had remembered. Cliffs I had only ever known to glitter in the sunlight, to mirror with such clarity the ocean before it were somehow off. Almost as if they were unclean. A mirror sat to rust, scratched with dust and untended to. The flowers above the cliff face seemed dreary – sad. Even the sand of the coves that dotted the base of the cliffs seemed to have lost its appeal. I looked down. I knew those hands. These were the rough hands that had caressed me softly, their touch strong but gentle.
Silas.
His name jumped from my mind like a breath being held, a relief to lungs burning with the strain of holding one breath – one thought – for too long.
Stirring within my chest like a whirlwind come to life the magic in his body leaped out, called by the ancient song of the wind that blazed across the coastline, that moulded the stark white cliff faces into the cascading glass walls they now were, or rather should be. These cliffs did not shine as they used to – plunging deep into the turquoise blue. There was a moment before the pain, where it was as if I – Silas – had been kicked in the chest. All the air vanishing from my lungs as invisible tethers I had not known existed were tied to every organ in my body and simultaneously pulled outward, and then there was nothing but the pain.
Like none he had ever known but that I only knew too well. I screamed but it was his voice that came out, not mine. Whips of wind and talons of solid air ravaged his body, clawing at the unwanted intruder that he so openly invited, and wished for its company. I wanted to be free of his body, free of the confines of his mind to help him.
I couldn’t help him.
Bile rose in my throat until it propelled me from the
entanglement of sheets wrapped
around my legs, only just making it to the chamber pot at the end of my bed. I had turned my nose up at the dated representative of a toilet but I couldn’t have been more grateful for it now. One hand pressed against the wall to support myself as I spat the last of the acidic taste from my mouth.
The heaviness from my eyes had vanished and I spent the rest of the night praying to the Gods that had never crossed my mind so much as they had this past year, that what I saw was not real.
Rising from my bed that morning I was pleasantly surprised to feel like my body had done a tremendous amount of healing since the day before. Where I had barely been able to walk or speak, this morning I felt like it had been days between then and now. The simple action of moving my fingers without feeling like my bones were made of glass and had shattered.
I laced my boots, undid them, and began again for the third time. Not only because my fingers could move as they once had and I was savouring the ease of their actions, but because it settled me.
There was nothing wrong with the bows that I made, but there was something comforting in the methodical action of tying my shoes.
When did it become so second nature? To slip on or lace my boots. How many times did I take for granted the knots I made before entering the woods that surrounded our small home in Lex before being welcomed by the embrace of pine and dirt. I had so often groaned inwardly – and outwardly – at the task I faced at the start of most days. To head into the forest and hunt.
How was it just shy of a year that I had been only a girl, too innocent for any of what lay beyond the first eighteen years of my life. Now, well I suppose my displeasure with life would be that it had made me hate things. Parts of myself and all the parts of others. It made me look for things, for people, to blame because there had to be someone responsible for all the filth and hate. Oh yes, there certainly was and he was at the very top of my list. That is another thing, I never imagined I’d have a list of people whom I wanted to kill, but there you have it.
Now, just weeks shy of my nineteenth birthday I could scarcely recognise the girl in my own memories. I thought sometimes it was easier to feel the way I did than it was to feel all that was beneath the surface. I knew it was.
If I had known then where I would be now I would have never dared wash the dirt from under my nails but instead savoured its scent and what it meant.
I had been drawn back into the dark embrace of a dreamless sleep in the early hours of the morning, only stirred by the first rays of light that crept into my small room at sunrise. It had brought with it a forgotten comfort, just as the laces on my boots. I had not thought of when I would see such things again, I didn’t dare wish for it. Just moments after having the thought, my head rolled to the right, taking in the Vyterran military attire. With a jolt I remembered the nightmare that had etched the sound of Silas’s hoarse screams, his brutal roar, into my eardrums. As if I could have avoided my situation for longer than the mere second between my first and second breaths. As if I could forget what it was to witness him being torn apart. To feel it.
My uniform lay scattered on the worn chair in my room, it looked as though it belonged to someone else and I suppose in many ways that was true. I felt like taking it off had released me from the mask I had adorned.
To be without that mask meant to think of everything that had happened, to come to terms with the realisation that it had been my screams echoing back to the dripping in the darkness. My haggard breathing to interrupt the silence. My body that had been broken, and then left carelessly in the hands of people who did not know me, who did not care for me, it was to them my broken body had been left to be patched back together. If
anything, I was glad to be chased from sleep, but I would have begged to hear the sounds of my own bones breaking than to witness Silas’s soul shattering pleas. Begged.
No, it was simply much easier to be a soldier in the Vyterran Army. To be a silent bystander in an ill-fitting uniform who stole weapons from the other soldiers in her unit.
I tore my gaze from the discarded uniform, rolling my head to the left. It was a little bit foreign, to be overcome with the urge to gaze out the window and view the forest that surrounded us in this paint-chipped, creaking Inn.
It was strange to feel any sort of pull from the earth. I had just assumed that the longer I was away from Altrey Palace and the clutches of Cander, my pull to the earth would come back, but it felt like the forest was pulling away from me, like there was something wrong.
Like there was fear and the very soul of the earth was running, trying to hide. Not the magic within me. Had I wanted to summon my vines I knew I could’ve. I could feel the magic stirring. I had felt this the moment I had left the palace in Altrey. The hum in my blood reverberated through my entire body. No, this was my bond to the earth. The magic that rested naturally beneath the surface and in the trees. The magic that danced with my own, sisters in their affinity; this was the magic that hid from me now. At first I had thought I was so broken that my own power had abandoned me, not that I knew if it were possible for a thing like that to happen. I was mistaken, I knew that now and I could feel a frown of confusion on my brow at the mess of it all.
A knock sounded sharp and quick at my door, pulling me from my thoughts of the early hours of the morning. I stood from the chair, being forced into contentment with the knots on my boots. Yanking the door open from a frame that no longer suited its shape showed Dee beyond the threshold, greeting me as soldiers do; a stiff stance snapping her elbow sharply to rest the back of her hand near her temple. It was quick and followed by a short bow. Her eyes darted to the chamber pot at the end of my bed, at the sunken nature of my eyes, but mercifully she said nothing.
After our introduction last night, she had stayed with me for some time. At first it felt wrong to talk so much, using words I hadn’t strung together in a long time, not to mention the strain on my voice. The idea of having a conversation felt so foreign, so safe. It took some time, but eventually my words began to flow freely and she didn’t mind so much when I whispered to her my questions and responses. She was patient with her answers and I knew she didn’t mean to, but it was obvious to me that she was sweeping her gaze continuously across my features. I wonder what she saw of my mother and father. I wonder if she had ever thought she would see them again, not truly but in the way she could see them in my own appearance. A part of them.
Dee continued to talk to me about my parents. For a moment there was a spark of something in my chest. Something that cracked but a fragment of the hard exterior that had formed around my heart. It made me want to yell from the top of the ranges that skirted this forest village what had been done to me and how I had suffered. More so, I wanted, for a moment, to curl in her arms and cry about how it wasn’t fair. But if not me, then who would it have been? It was those questions I asked myself that blew the self-pity from my mind, because if not me, then it would have been Silas, and I would have never allowed it to have been him. Ever.
I allowed myself to let go for a moment. To leave who I was and what had been done – where I was and why I was here – I let it go and fell into the stories that danced off Dee’s tongue.
My parents had grown up together in the Vyterran Court. My father was the eldest of two sons and one daughter of a noble Vyterran family. They had an estate fit for a family of their title just a short journey south of Venta. Eaton Frost was his name from birth. Hearing his full name for the first time softened something in my features, I felt it. For all the times I had been told I looked like my mother, my father had been mentioned but a handful of times. It felt good to hear his name spoken out loud by someone other than myself. He and my mother were only married for a short while, so there was only one portrait done of him as a royal, and it had not mentioned his birth name, only the royal name.
I had only seen his name printed as Eaton Aslow. Because he married into the royal bloodline he had to adopt my mother’s maiden name. At the age of eighteen he had made a permanent move to the Royal Palace in Altrey where his parents, my grandparents, Lord and Lady Frost were hopeful that he would catch the eye of the king’s only daughter.
Dee had gone on to mention that she was older than both my parents by only a couple of years and knew my mother from adventure filled visits into the city of Altrey that she so often undertook as a young girl. It was then that they had formed a bond that would become a friendship that neither could part from. My mother had become a second daughter to Dee’s own parents and at the age of sixteen my mother had asked Dee to come to the Palace, true as it was that there were no skills she held that would deem her useful having come from a family of labourers. Dee’s father was a blacksmith in Altrey and even though she had learned from her father and helped him in his trade – mastered it even – there were no women blacksmiths. It became her mission to ensure there was not a single skill from combat to culinary that she could be bested at, and from time to time she was requested by the royal blacksmith for her expertise. At this she smiled, and so it made me smile. I had a feeling that anything you told Dee she wasn’t able to do, she would learn it twice as fast and do it three times better than anyone else. I liked that.
The smile that cracked at my lips felt foreign but unstoppable. Her ambition, her confidence and drive, it reminded me of myself. Of who I truly was. My smile faded quickly.
It was only at eighteen that my father made the Royal Palace his permanent residence, his consistent and frequent visits since he was a boy had resulted in him making the acquaintance of my mother, one filled with garden walks and stolen kisses as well as the many lessons she gave him on the proper way to hold a sword.
A smile appeared at this as well. I could feel the sadness in it, just as Dee could see it for she reached out for my hand and held it tightly. We sat like that for a while, it was nice to be held, however loosely. It was nice to be touched by hands for comfort, to share strength instead of having it be taken from me.
We did not talk about my birth, or the moments – the years – that followed it, but rather focused on the many happy moments before it that offered me the opportunity to piece together all things I had imagined since picking the rose from my snow-covered garden. All the memories that I conjured up myself, of my father – hair greying at his temples – and my mother, a plait of chestnut waves that cascaded down her back, my own hair the mirror of hers. Linked arm in arm, lazily walking through the very same gardens they had walked together years before my birth when they were mere children themselves. How I would pick a rose bud and see it bloom before me. My head on my father’s shoulder and my other hand gripped tightly by my mother.
They were not real, those memories. They would never be so. Yet somehow they had quickly become some of my fondest memories, a light that ever so slightly pierced through the stone around my soul.
“We are to patrol the thinner parts of the forest before we continue up to Move. There have been reports of soldiers hiding in the woods, but none of the town folk can identify who they belong to. General Simeera has agreed to do a sweep before we move onward.” My answering nod was short and stiff. Grabbing the overcoat of my uniform and buttoning it up, I patted the spots on my body that held my weapons – a few more additions since the night before, courtesy of Dee – and followed her out of the room to join the others.
Being immersed in the forest I could feel the wrongness that had settled over it like a heavy blanket. We began our sweep just up from the Inn, still on the western edge of the forest but slightly farther north, closer to the sightings of the soldiers from the night before. Perhaps it was the closeness I felt to my parents, or maybe it was the knowledge that I was no longer so alone, bu
t a surge of courage had me calming my racing heart long enough to reach out – tentatively – with tendrils of my magic. I remained gentle and cautious so as to not overwhelm the forest with my presence.
At first it felt frantic, like it wanted to take my energy, like it was searching for a way to separate my magic from me. The pain was blinding but only lasted a moment. Gulping down air I steadied myself against a tree, glad to be at the back of the group. With each exhale I willed myself to calm, my stomach turning instantly at the pain. The pain that I knew too well, from my own mind, from being held at Altrey Palace and also my dream of Silas. But then it stopped. It happened so quickly I thought I may have imagined it. An illusion; brought on by my own apprehensions that were playing on my fears. The lingering terror of what had happened in the weeks that had passed. I wasn’t sure if I would be greeted back as openly as I had been welcomed when I first grew into my gifts.
Heir of Vaashaa: The Lost Child of the Crown (The Lost Child of the Crown Series Book 2) Page 6
