Fury Lingers: Book One of The Foreseen Trilogy

by Ethan Spears

  Of course, that wasn’t what the others involved had to say. Jonny claimed that Aoden had threatened him with his sword and had struck him with his shield. The men who brought him in said he had been resistant and violent. Random townspeople claimed to have seen him struggling with the guards as he was led through town. He remembered the trials he had heard about during his time at Handock and wondered how many of them had been as terribly skewed as this one was turning out to be.

  It had been two weeks since Maddy’s last visit and he was thinking she had no intention of returning. Of course, the very night he began thinking that, she showed up out of the blue. Or rather, the white, as the snows outside had become outrageous, leaving five-hand-high drifts that climbed higher each day.

  She came in trailing snow. Aoden was perpetually wrapped in blankets these days which, to his credit, the jailor made sure he had in ample supply. He stood thus bound and waddled over to the bars.

  “I need to know about my mother,” she said without preamble.

  “Oh, no,” said Aoden. “Fool me twice, little lady. You’re not a trustworthy person. Look, this saliel thing is driving me out of my mind. Just tell me how you know that word and I’ll tell you anything you want.”

  She shook her head. “I will tell you next time I visit, no sooner. Until then, tell me what I want, or you’ll never learn.”

  “You’re the worst person I’ve ever met, you know that?” Aoden said.

  She ignored the comment. “I’ve been told my mother isn’t a proper Triarch. Why is that?”

  Aoden raised a brow. “By someone in the village? I mean, it’s true, but it isn’t well known, nor does it seem like something they would say openly where that hammer-happy dictator might hear them.”

  “Forget where I’ve heard it from,” she snapped. “You said it’s true? How is it true?”

  “Look, if you never come back to tell me about how you know—”

  “Just answer the question!”

  “Fine!” Aoden ran his hands through his hair. “You’d better tell me next time.”

  She waited. Aoden was frustrated that his own fascination and obsession allowed her to get an advantage over him.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m sure you’ve heard how Triarchs were raised. Every year, they’d find three orphans: one male, one female, and the third can be either. These three were raised together as a ‘triplet’ in any of the royal nurseries in Rosemont, Azurcourt, or Whiteplains. At all times, there was a triplet of potential Triarchs ranging from ages one to twenty-five, one new triplet each year. Until they turned eighteen, they were educated like most noble children were in the sciences, mathematics, history, and other things here and there. From nineteen to twenty-five, they were taught how to be leaders, tacticians, diplomats, all the things a good ruler needs. When a Triarch dies, the other two Triarchs retire and go into solitude, at which time the twenty-five-year-old triplets became the new Triarchs. Any triplets who did not become Triarchs by the age of twenty-six joined the Triarch Council which, among other things, worked at the nurseries to raise a new batch of triplets.”

  Maddy nodded. “I’ve heard nothing new so far.”

  “Did you know your mother was eighteen when she became a Triarch?”

  She frowned. “Mother is forty-three.”

  “No, she isn’t. She’s thirty-seven. Subtract nineteen years and you have eighteen.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Why would she lie about that? How could no one know her true age?”

  “The Triarch Council, made up of all the triplets that never ascended to the thrones, had to make a decision. The woman of the twenty-five-year-old batch, Daisy, was struck in the head by a shying horse and died. It was pretty big news, especially when Tatalon, one of the then-current Triarchs, passed away a few months later. It was only the second time in history that this had happened: with clear succession broken, most people just assume they take the twenty-fours, but that’s not how it works. Instead, the Council gets to choose any group that was still intact. Some wanted the recently-retired twenty-sixes to take over, but the Council would never allow such a drastic divergence from tradition. From there, it was all politics and haggling, trying to determine whose triplets the Council found most likely to rule well without being overly influenced by their tutors. In the end, they chose Mira, Hemel, and Eckel not because they were the most intelligent or most capable, but because one of their tutors had already died and the other two, overwhelmed by the responsibility, were more than willing to disappear from politics in exchange for having their triplets ascend. It’s all the usual political sliminess, but because of that, Mira and her fellow Triarchs lacked any of the advanced teachings that are arguably the most important for a Triarch to be effective.

  “The Council recognized that if people knew about this, they’d have no confidence in their new Triarchs, so they lied about their ages. The identities of triplets are kept well-hidden until they either ascended or joined the Council, so no one was the wiser. The only reason I know is due to a friend of mine, Reggy, which, since I’ve learned a few things about him, I only now realize how he knew.” Aoden had to laugh at that.

  “So my mother wasn’t properly trained to lead the kingdom?”

  “Not by a long shot. They wouldn’t have been ready for the challenges of leadership. Even without the Fury, their reign would likely have gone down as one of the worst in history.”

  Her face darkened. The news hit her hard, though she didn’t seem offended. She stood from the bench and left the building without a word. Aoden wrapped himself in another blanket, lay in his bed, and tried to get some sleep.

  ***

  “I am so, so sorry,” Gale was saying, her eyes watery and her face distraught.

  “No, no,” said Aoden, still reeling from the news. “There was nothing you could do,” he added mechanically.

  “I was sure that Lady Mira would listen to reason, but she’s just so angry. It must be because you’re an elf. It’s so unfair! I’m so very, very sorry. We’re still trying to get a stay of punishment, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up. It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be able to get anything done before the dawn execution.”

  Aoden nodded dumbly. He would never have expected to be executed for simple trespassing. Had he known it would come to this, he would’ve just hit that damn girl with his shield and been done with it.

  ***

  Maddy returned that night, as he knew she would. He didn’t rise to greet her, didn’t even look at her. He just lay on his bed, his face smothered in his thin, uncomfortable pillow.

  “Sorry,” she said. He didn’t respond to her, instead pulling one of his blankets over his head and disappearing under it. “That’s not going to help either of us.”

  “I don’t care,” he said. “One wayward walk and I’m set to die. Hardly seems a fitting end. And I don’t want to spend the last moments before that end talking to the one who put me here, so if you don’t mind.”

  There was no response, but he didn’t hear her walk away.

  “Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” he said, presumably to her. “I once wrote a eulogy for an elf who died. I wanted to write a poem but couldn’t for the life of me get it to sound right. I sat there day in and day out writing, rewriting, editing, and just trying my damnedest not to ruin the most important thing I would write in my career. Now that I’m sitting here, I have a thousand lines in my head, each more beautiful than the last, and nothing to write them down with and no one to sing them to.” He bounced his head on the bed in futility, letting loose a mad laugh and close to tears. “I kid, of course. No poem I’ve ever written has been worthy of sharing. At least I’ll never have to suffer them again.”

  The girl was silent. Aoden continued bouncing his head off his pillow. It wasn’t like he could sleep now, anyway.

  “What does saliel mean?” she asked at last.

  “What does it matter?!” Aoden shouted, popping his head out from his blankets. “In a few h
ours, whether you know the answer to that or not isn’t going to matter to me.”

  “It will matter to me,” she said evenly, “and it might just change things.” She was standing with her body and face pressed against the bars, trying to get as close as possible without actually entering his cell. Her face was as serious as it ever was, but there was a look of worry in her eyes that was alien. It didn’t belong on the face of someone who had stared down an armed elven warrior.

  Aoden sat up. He wanted to be alone, and if she got what she wanted, perhaps she would go away. “If you really want to know…” He paused. Maybe he didn’t want to tell her after all. The elves knew what it meant, of course, but he had never told anyone else. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Sa,” he said slowly, testing to see how he felt about it. There was a tinge of anger in his gut and a burning shame, but it was dim, simmering low under the great fear that was his impending death.

  He decided he would tell her after all. He looked up and met her eyes. “You were right. I lied. It’s the one lie I tell everyone, even myself. Sometimes I even believe it.” He took a deep breath. “Sa doesn’t mean ‘half.’ It means ‘not,’ ‘no,’ ‘none.’ I was given the nickname Saliel by elves not because it means half-elf, but because it means not-elf. Meaning I’m not just an outsider: I’m not even an elf.”

  He laid his head weakly back on his pillow. “All I wanted when I arrived in elven lands was to be accepted, and the first thing, the first thing that I have said to me, is saliel. It’s nothing but a slur, a dismissive nothing they can call half-elves to let them know how little they think of them. Forty miserable years of my life I gave to them and they couldn’t even see me as one of their own. That’s why I lied to you. That’s why I lie to myself. Who wants to be constantly reminded that their own people hate them?” His eyes rolled towards the door. “And now the other people I’d have called my own are going to hang me. I’d call that poetic, but even I find it trite.”

  He lay in his bed, staring at the curtain, watching the occasional snowflake drift in. He only looked up again when Maddy pulled a wad of papers from an inner pocket and cleared her throat.

  “Since you told me the truth,” she said, “I guess it’s my turn.” She put the papers on her stomach and flattened them out. She leafed through them, searching for something at a leisurely pace. She laid the papers in a neat row on the bench one by one until her hands were empty. She then picked up the first paper and read aloud. “‘I am a friend. The things I have to say you may not wish to hear. You’ve been fed lies and half-truths. You’ve always felt this to be true, and I confirm it. The one you respect most is not what they seem and deserves not their charge. One who knows comes. He will tell you the secrets that are kept from you. You can mark my words by the following events as they occur tomorrow.’” Maddy listed a dozen seemingly arbitrary happenings.

  Aoden looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “We had fortune tellers in Handock as well. Never could make sense of a damn thing they said, and they never came true.”

  She put down the first letter and lifted the second. She scanned the contents until she found what she wanted. “‘A half-elf, tall and blond, will appear. He will be armed, but he will offer no violence. Do not let him run. Hold him there until the men of the village come. Once he is a guest, he will give you the answers that you seek.’”

  Aoden gave her a strange look, lifting his head from the bed, but she simply picked up the next paper in line and read from it as well. “‘He will know the word saliel. Ask him its meaning. If he tells you it means “half-elf,” he lies. Do not loiter if he tells you this lie. Go, and return another night.’”

  Aoden pushed himself up from his bed, his blankets left behind. “What the hell is going on? Who are those letters from?”

  She pulled up the fourth letter. “‘He will not only know that which you don’t, he will hold truths unknown even to others of your kind. He will offer them at a price. Do not worry what that price is: he will make it clear to you, and you will be able to pay, though you must hold payment until the last possible moment.’”

  He was at the bars, trying to snatch a letter from her hands, but she was too far away for him to reach. “Why are you taunting me like this?”

  She read from the fifth. “‘He will reveal himself to you. You will know him to be nothing to fear. You will show no fear to him, nor will you show him friendship. He will come, then he will be gone. That is how things must be.’”

  Aoden clutched the bars and rattled them. “Ezma! It’s Ezma, isn’t it?! Just tell me it’s her so I might know which name to curse when they hang me!”

  She grabbed the sixth and final letter, reaching into her shirt as she did so. “‘He will know my name. He will curse it. When he says my name, give him the key and the message, then go. Stay in your home until morning, and regret nothing that you’ve done, for it was all my doing.’” She looked up at him and held out her hand. “‘You’ve done well. Ezma.’”

  A key and a folded slip of paper fell into his hand. She turned and scooped up her letters and dashed for the door. She stopped briefly, turned, gave him a nod of farewell, then vanished into the night.

  Aoden blinked at the items in his hand. His fingers, already cold and stiff from the short time he had been out of the warm embrace of his bed, unfolded the slip of paper. On it were six simple words:

  Take the hammer and run. –Ezma

  The key fit the door to the cell, because of course it did.

  ***

  Aoden pushed through the thick snow drifts. It wasn’t snowing, the sky was clear, and the snow was shining white from the moonlight. There he was, blatantly obvious to anyone who looked out their windows and doors, running through the snow bundled in a ball of blankets, wildly searching for that huge building he had been taken to be judged by Mira. His new lease on life filled him with tremendous energy, making him bound through the snow like an animal, urging him onwards even as his body tired and the frigid winds buffeted him.

  The building appeared over the others like a great lumbering hulk and he raced towards it, sending clouds of snow flying. He didn’t know what he and Mergau were going to do with the ‘steel of a god,’ but his month in that frigid prison won’t have been for nothing. Ezma’s life-ending/life-saving flip-flopping would not go to waste. He was astounded that so much love and so much hate could be directed towards one person at the same time, but his excitement and intense fear made him put more thought to his running than to that damned schemer.

  He rounded a building, bringing the court into sight, barely two fields away. A guard in fur-lined armor stood by the door holding a spear, an oil lantern hanging on the wall lighting the area around him, but he was more intent on holding his furs closed than watching to see if anyone was coming. Aoden sprung on him without giving him a chance to react, the knowledge that Ezma expected him to succeed making him enthusiastically reckless. His knee met the man’s face and his hand wrenched the spear from his grip. The man tumbled to the ground, stunned. Aoden gave a sharp thrust to the man’s diaphragm with the butt of the spear, keeping him from crying out. The man rolled in the snow gasping for air as Aoden snatched his key ring, took the lantern, strode over him, and went inside.

  He didn’t waste any time. He knew where the hammer was. He dashed down the hall on his right, took a left, and saw a guard halfway down the hall walking towards him. He sped up, jumping wildly and meeting the surprised man with both knees to the chest. The human hurtled backward, his broken ribs enough to keep him down while Aoden continued on.

  Aoden skid to a halt outside the room where they had stored his sword. It was locked, naturally, but the key ring fixed that problem after seven tries. He grabbed his ralat, its bright white sheath immediately obvious when he opened the door, and Magragda’s golden idol. He also claimed a longbow for himself, then sped away.

  There were three more men standing guard in front of the double
door to the courtroom, chatting in a circle. That there were so many guarding this empty place showed how much concern Mira had for the hammer.

  Aoden didn’t care for her concern. He kicked one man in the crotch from behind, then kicked him over as he writhed. The other got a spear butt to the bridge of the nose, a jet of blood informing Aoden that he broke it before he pummeled the man in the gut with three deft spear strokes. The third was slow to react and bring his spear to the ready, but Aoden was already swinging the oil lamp around, catching him in the side of the head, shattering the glass of the lamp and spewing oil and fire everywhere. Half of the man’s face and clothing set on fire, as did a sizeable section of the hallway, but Aoden was already barreling through the door.

  There was the dais, her hideous throne, and the door in the back. He already had a key ready to go: the large, obvious ornate key. He jammed it in, the door clicked, and he threw it aside. The hammer was inside, sitting on a fuchsia pillow on a pedestal. He grabbed the hammer and, in a fit of adrenaline and rage, kicked the pedestal over and stomped on the pillow.

  As he turned back out into the courtroom, he could see the flames from the smashed lantern rapidly spreading. The hallway was almost completely engulfed in fire as he forced his way through the three recovering guards. Back to the hallway, to the entrance, and outside. By the time he was in the fresh air, most of the building was aflame. People, having spotted the fire, were running towards the building, but he pulled his ralat and charged at them, scattering them as he made his escape.