Fractured (Lisen of Solsta Book 1)

by D. Hart St. Martin

  Korin shook his head in an effort to bring his world back into focus, but only succeeded at making himself dizzy and nauseated.

  “Come on,” Palla offered. “I’ll help you up.”

  He felt Palla’s arm slip under his right shoulder and pull him up into a sitting position. His head floated, seemed to drift disconnected from the rest of him, and for some reason, he couldn’t see anything on his left side. “What happened?”

  “You tell me. I just got here.”

  “I can’t see anything to my left. Why can’t I see?” He brought his left hand up to his face, but Palla grabbed it before he connected.

  “It needs cleaning and dressing,” Palla said.

  “What…?”

  Palla leaned in closer. “The eye’s gone, I’m afraid. Nothing left but a burned-out socket, old friend.”

  Korin nodded, tried not to vomit, and thanked whatever deity determined destiny that this had come when a friend was close at hand. Palla wouldn’t resort to emotional outbursts nor would he try to paint pretty pictures of ugly truths.

  “Is it clean?” Korin asked.

  “Aye, in its own way. Not attractive, but clean.”

  “I have to stand up.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have to get back to the inn,” Korin insisted.

  “You’re safe enough here for now.” Palla nodded towards the body behind him. “She won’t be troubling you.”

  Korin shook his head. It hurt like the Destroyer. “No. You don’t understand. I have to get back to the inn.” He rose to his knees, but dropped to all fours when the throbbing in his head grew unbearable. He was afraid he’d really be sick if he stood, but it was a price he’d pay if he must.

  “Here. If you insist, at least let me help your sorry body.”

  Korin raised his head and tried to smile. There was no time for more. The Heir was in imminent peril, and he had to get to his feet. Palla placed one strong arm under Korin’s chest and proceeded to pull him up, and all the while Korin spoke silently to his churning stomach. Be still. His head spun, his vision faltered in his remaining eye, but he kept the bile at bay. He put an arm over Palla’s firm, broad shoulders and allowed his friend to help him return from where he’d come.

  Palla would never ask; Korin knew that. He’d come to Halorin at Korin’s invitation and would wait to satisfy his curiosity until Korin chose to explain.

  “I’m sworn to secrecy,” Korin said, fighting past pain and unremitting vertigo.

  “Did I say anything?”

  “No,” Korin replied with a shrug.

  “You could at least tell me where you need to be,” Palla requested as they emerged from the alley.

  “The Riverside Inn. You know it?”

  “Aye.”

  They moved on in silence, Korin certain that something horrible awaited them, something from which there may be no return. Necessity pushed him forward—necessity and Palla’s strength. He’d originally intended to tell Palla some but not all and then send his friend back to Avaret to determine what sort of support the true Heir could expect from the Guard. Instead, he had deserted his charge at the exact moment she’d needed him most. He celebrated his pain and the partial loss of a sense upon which he relied heavily, for how else could he ever hope to atone for his failure?

  They reached the inn, and he and Palla were able to pass through the crowd in the main room unnoticed and up the stairs. His heartbeat pounded at his temples like the hooves of a galloping horse, and his breath came far too fast for comfort. What would they find?

  Despite having made excellent time, only two-and-a-half days from Avaret to Halorin, Nalin’s sense of urgency had not abated. Even as he navigated his horse through the dark, still-busy streets of the seaport, he couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that something wasn’t right. As soon as he joined Jozan, the captain and Ariannas, he would insist they discuss how best to proceed from here, and “from here” was exactly where he wanted to proceed. Away from this place that made his skin tingle. Nalin didn’t like how he felt here. He’d been in Halorin before, with Jo, but he’d never felt like this. He couldn’t define it, and he didn’t like things he could not define.

  He turned the corner and saw the inn Rosarel had described to him. Light poured from the place, piercing the darkness—light and noise and a great deal of commotion. Certainly not the appropriate atmosphere for the Heir of Garla and an unsuitable introduction to the world after her quiet life at Solsta. Nalin shivered as he reached the inn, then dismounted and tethered his horse to the post. He pulled his satchel from the back of the horse, and hefting it over his shoulder, he took the rotten wooden steps up to the inn’s open door and entered. He squinted against the light until he could pick out a person who appeared to be in charge, a woman behind the bar who was fully engulfed in the general mayhem. He headed directly to her and interrupted her as she spoke to one of the customers.

  “Pardon me, but could you direct me to Korin Rosarel’s room?”

  “You ain’t the first to ask tonight, but sure. It’s up the stairs and to your right.”

  Her comment about not being the first to ask stole the breath from his lungs, and with a sick sensation in his stomach, he left her without so much as a “thank you” and mounted the stairs one gut-wrenching step after another. At the top he stopped. The door to the right stood open, and he could see movement in the light and hear male voices speaking in rushed and muffled tones. He moved forward to the door, and despite all misgivings, he entered the room. Before him stood a man, his back to Nalin, speaking to someone beyond and below, probably on the floor.

  “What’s going on?” Nalin demanded as he realized that beyond this man, someone lay on the floor in a pool of blood. The stranger turned to face him.

  “My lord?” the man asked.

  “Captain Palla?” Nalin said, taken aback.

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “What’s happened here?” Nalin asked.

  The figure kneeling on the floor at the other end of the body rose and turned to face him, and Nalin gasped. It was Rosarel, disheveled and, worse, missing one eye, the left side of his face brutalized.

  “We just got here ourselves, my lord,” Rosarel replied.

  “Where’s the Heir?”

  “There,” Captain Palla said, pointing to beyond Rosarel where Nalin saw feet, the rest hidden by a cot. He dropped his satchel and pushed past the guard, past the first body and on to where Rosarel stood, then pulled up short. It wasn’t Ariannas as he’d expected, but Jozan, and if anything, more blood surrounded her than lay around the other body.

  “Where is she, Captain?” Nalin asked, but his eyes remained fixed on the pale face of his dearest friend.

  “I don’t know, my lord,” Rosarel answered. “She wasn’t here when we arrived. The window’s open. It’s likely she escaped that way.”

  Nalin dropped to his knees at Jozan’s feet. “She’s dead?” he asked, the quiver in his voice exposing his pain.

  “Aye, my lord,” Rosarel replied. “Before we got here.”

  “Damn.” He touched one of Jo’s bare feet. Still warm. “Damn!” He took a deep breath and forced himself to turn away from Jozan and look up at Rosarel instead. Another deep breath to steady himself and then he moved on. “Any idea what happened?”

  “Well, the scrollkeep is there on the floor,” Rosarel said, pointing towards the table by the door, “but the papers are gone. The most likely explanation is that that man there, a spy of Holder Zanlot’s named Stellet Arspas, if I recall, surprised them, kicking down the door. He killed Heir Tuane and then our little hermit offed him. The knife is there beside him. It’s Tuane’s knife, but I doubt she got a chance to use it. For some reason, after killing the spy, the hermit ran, taking the papers with her.”

  Nalin looked from the open scrollkeep on the floor, to the other body, to the broken latch and finally to the knife as Rosarel spoke.

  “And where were you?” Nalin demanded. “You were
supposed to be here, protecting them.”

  “I’d gone out. To meet Captain Palla here. I knew we were all in trouble when I realized I was being followed, probably by this one’s companion. She’s dead now, too.”

  “You left them to meet another guard?” Nalin said, making no effort to mask his anger. “You left them? I left you to take care of them. What kind of guard are you? How did you make it to captain, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  Rosarel rubbed his head. He was in pain, and that appeased Nalin, a little. “Yes, I failed,” the captain replied, exasperated, “and there’s the proof. The Heir of Minol is dead. And this is a lousy time to point this out, but I also succeeded. Do you see Lisen’s…I mean, the Heir of Garla’s body here anywhere?”

  “No,” Nalin barked. “She’s run off and we don’t know where she is.”

  “But she’s alive. Don’t you see? She’s alive. After defending herself from this predator.”

  “And she’s out there somewhere,” Nalin said, gesturing towards the window, “likely with documents that will get her killed if she’s found with them by the wrong person.” Nalin’s mind stumbled.

  “My lord?”

  Nalin looked up at Rosarel. The man’s face looked so blasted ravaged that Nalin could hardly bear it. “What?!”

  “Then we must find her first.”

  “And how do you propose we do that? There’s just the two of us, and you’re in no—”

  “Three, my lord,” Captain Palla corrected him.

  Nalin looked back over his shoulder. “You don’t know anything about this.”

  “Forgive me, my lord,” Palla continued, “but I know enough, and wouldn’t it be wiser to bring me all the way in than to leave me outside and out of your control?”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” Nalin snarled.

  “My lord,” Rosarel said, stepping between them. “He’s right. And, later, once we’ve found the Heir, he’ll be useful at the Keep. When the time comes.”

  “If the time comes,” Nalin corrected him.

  “That’s why we must find the Heir,” Rosarel said.

  “She could be anywhere,” Nalin noted.

  “I have a feeling, my lord,” Rosarel said slowly, apparently as reluctant as Nalin to indulge in feelings. “She ran out of fear even though she’d dealt with the immediate threat. If she killed this man—well, I just think that hard as that is for someone like myself, someone trained a lifetime to kill and move past the...emotional consequences, it must be impossible for a necropath.”

  “And your point?” Nalin asked.

  “My lord, I think she’ll run to a safe place, the closest safe place, and that’s Erinina Haven just up the river from here. We should start there.”

  “Well, I can’t go. I have to take this heir home to Seffa.” More death, more bad news to deliver. Had Elsba even left Avaret yet? He hated the thought of Bala having to handle this all alone.

  “Here’s our plan,” Rosarel announced, taking charge. Nalin let him; he’d lost all will to fight. “We leave Palla here, in case the Heir returns. You take Heir Tuane home, and I’ll head for Erinina.”

  “You’re in no condition,” Nalin said, weary, sad, overwhelmed and wondering how this injured man carried on.

  “A dressing and a night’s rest is all I need.”

  “Korin,” Captain Palla said.

  “It’ll give me a chance to fill you in on all of this.” Rosarel spoke directly to his comrade.

  “Yes.” Nalin rubbed his forehead and turned back to Jozan, wishing for some sign of life despite knowing better. “Yes. Now that he’s involved, he’ll need to know everything.” Nalin turned directly to Rosarel. “But no one else. No more ‘friends’ brought in without telling me first. Do you understand?”

  “Aye, my lord,” the one-eye-less captain replied.

  Nalin turned, stepped to a cot and sat down, dropping his head into his hands.

  Ruin. We’re ruined. Only two weeks ago, he’d left Avaret with Flandari, hopes high, anticipation filling him with a sense of purpose and the eventual fulfillment of a duty. He was about to meet the daughter Flandari was counting on to save Garla from Ariel. But then the assassin had struck, and the initial plan had disintegrated. Without Flandari, he’d been forced to recruit Jozan and Captain Rosarel, and they’d proceeded with a new plan.

  We moved too fast. We should have taken more time to consider all the options.

  Now he sat in this room in this Creator-forsaken inn, Jozan’s corpse on the floor, the Heir gone in the night, perhaps gone forever, never to be found. Why had he promised Flandari he’d see it through? He’d been a fool. He was a fool. Oh, he’d expected difficulties. But not catastrophe.

  He heard the rain begin to fall and knew they were undone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HOME

  Lisen could feel nothing save the painful demand for air and the slowly progressing cramping of her legs. She had run all night, and still she ran, following the river as the voice within kept urging her. Follow the river home. She was lost, knew the way to her home did not include the clear waters rushing past her in the opposite direction as she ran. Yet, the way home it was.

  No. This wasn’t real. None of it was real and hadn’t been since…since…she didn’t know when since. Had it stopped being real when she’d been “sent” away by Eloise when she was ten? Or was this the unreal, with Los Angeles and freeways, computers and e-mail being the real? She put her hands up to her head, aching with inconsistencies—clashing lives, conflicting bodies. There was no “real.” “Real” was a value judgment, and she lacked the wisdom to make such judgments.

  If only she’d wake up from this nightmare. An abandoned life, an assassinated Empir, a murdered friend. All dead, all gone, never to return. Someone had warned her about grief; she’d smashed head on into it now.

  And still, she ran. The voice wouldn’t let her stop running. The voice didn’t speak, not in words, but the longing to stop was consistently overwhelmed by the necessity to run. Where was Malibu? That night had begun so peacefully as she’d contemplated women and their place in America, the waves teasing the shore with their quick kiss and retreat, kiss and retreat. Then the horrible shifting of time and place, and her life had turned into this…dream. Of a mother she didn’t know. Of a destiny—God how she hated that word and its pretentions—dropped upon her with the same casual air Daisy Holt would have used to hand her a grocery list. Well, a grocery list was one thing; a freakin’ kingdom was another.

  Her head burned. Her brain felt hot and swollen, and she couldn’t think. Too many thoughts, too many…images firing off neurons and synapses. The burdens of the last couple of weeks tumbled onto her with the subtlety of a truck. She was still lost, still running through strange woods by an unknown river to a home she’d never seen.

  “I have.”

  “No!” she screamed up at the sky, finally halting, the crushing pain within her chest no longer allowing her to run. “No,” she whimpered to the voice in her head, the voice that was not hers. She leaned over, hands on her knees, her stomach threatening to launch its contents. She struggled for breath, but her lungs refused to cooperate.

  As she hovered between unreal universes, unable to catch her breath, barely keeping what little remained in her gut in her gut, her mind paused, no longer able to avoid seeing inward. Sobs wracked her lungs, and she didn’t know why. She dropped to her knees and then fell onto her side, weeping, keening, yet another act depriving her lungs of precious oxygen. Images penetrated her like spiky specters, stealing what little breath was left to her as they flew through her and forced her to see where she’d once been and where she was now, an unwelcome rerun of her life.

  She remembered agreeing, seven years ago now, to go to a strange place, agreeing not only to go but to have her memories of Garla erased—more accurately, left in the protection of Hermit Titus—so she would believe she belonged in the strange place. Eloise had insisted, and Titus had ag
reed. How could a ten-year-out girl question that? Thus, memories withdrawn, body shifted to conform, she had awakened in a bed in Woodland Hills, to parents grateful that she had finally returned to her senses after a bad blow to the head. Her memories of the life she believed to be her own had remained forever blurred, fuzzy, and Lisen Holt hadn’t questioned why her neurosurgeon mother had never insisted on a visit to a hospital or clinic. Now, Lisen of Solsta knew why.

  “Mommy! Daddy!” she cried out as she writhed upon the ground, her tears flowing like the river nearby. Gone. Gone forever. “It’s like a death,” Jozan had said not so long ago, urging Lisen to grieve. “They’re still there, but you’re here.” And never the twain shall meet.

  Abruptly, Lisen sat up, wiping her nose with her wet, dirty sleeve, using her hands to smear her tears into oblivion. It was over, no changing that. She was Lisen of Solsta now—or, rather, Heir-Empir Ariannas—and that life of movies, television and rock concerts no longer existed for her. She had better, more important, more heroic things to do.

  “Freakin’ fate,” she said, then spit on the ground. After two weeks of it, she’d had enough of fate. Fate was a fake, a fickle prick of a fake, and, no longer a child, no longer a naïve little girl, Lisen was done with her so-called fate.

  I’m no hero, she thought, disgusted with herself. I’m just a girl in a world of dead people and failed promises. And Jozan.

  “Get up. Keep going.”

  Yes, Jozan—her soul is a part of me now. Not sure how, but….

  She stood up, following directions like she had most of her life. Tell me what to do, and I’m there, she thought sarcastically. No thoughts of my own. No action of my own.

  She paused, standing very still, staring at the river swirling around outcropped rocks, heading toward the Milara Sea.

  No. She had taken action. She had taken an action so wrong, so horrible, she had allowed its memory to hide beneath everything else swirling through her mind. But now it had risen above memory’s flow, like the rocks in the river, forcing everything else to detour around it, the rapids it created defining it.