by J. J. Faulks
She snatched her hand away as if his fingers burnt hotter than flames. “You think I’m making it up?”
He shook his head, his hand retreating to hold the back of his neck, fingertips pressing into the knurls of his spine. “That’s not what I said—”
Her curls whipped round as she turned her back on him and stomped away, the roses bowing to the sides like water parting for a boat as she passed.
“Orleigh! Orleigh!” he called after her, but she ignored his cries.
He glared up at the house, his eyes narrowing on the window to the study. Whatever Teymos had told him, it hadn’t been the whole truth. What, exactly, was he helping Teymos to hide? A shudder rippled through his shoulders, goosebumps prickling over his skin. Behind the glass stood Teymos, looming over him, glowering down.
Lying was meant to keep Orleigh safe, but what if the people of her village weren’t the true danger?
His heart thudding harder than fists pounding the skin of a war drum, Beighlen fled to the Great Forest. Never before had he been in such a rush to return home.
The water in the rock pool reflected Beighlen’s image back at him. Out of the corner of his eye, his mother approached, taking long, careful strides to reach the shore. Still staring distantly at the water, he pulled his knees up to his chest, hugging them tight.
His mother sat beside him on the boulder. “You remind me of a crab hiding in its shell when you sit like that,” she said. There was a lightness in her voice that reminded him of birdsong.
He glanced at her, catching sight of her soft smile. He didn’t return the smile. Instead, looking back to the rock pool, he rested his chin on top of his knees.
“What’s bothering you, Beighlen?” she asked. Her fingers touched the hair at the nape of his neck, but only fleetingly before retreating. She used to play with his hair like that when he was a child. He wasn’t a child anymore.
“Nothing’s bothering me,” he said and he gave an exaggerated shrug, as if trying to free his shoulders from the weight of her concern.
“I know you, Beighlen,” she said. “I know when you’re not happy.”
Beighlen glanced at her again. Her smile was still there, but it seemed sadder somehow, and her brow was furrowed. She shouldn’t worry so much, she should just leave him alone.
“Tell me what’s wrong, Beighlen. I might be able to help.” She paused, her gaze skittered over the waves. “Or you could just sit out here on your own until the tide comes in?”
His grip on his knees relaxed a little. The creatures in the rock pool held his attention as he spoke. “There’s a girl living at Teymos’s estate—a mortal girl. Teymos said that her home was burnt down and that all her family and friends had died, but when I delivered that message for you I found out that he was lying. The village is still there and so are the people.”
“Could Teymos have been mistaken?” his mother asked.
He shook his head. “No. I spoke to Teymos and he admitted that he had lied, and he asked me to lie too in order to protect the girl. He said that she was in danger, that the villagers thought that she was cursed and that they were going to sacrifice her. So I lied too.”
“And that’s what’s bothering you? The fact that you lied?” She placed her hand on top of his, her touch light enough that he could have pulled his hand away if he wanted to. “Sometimes—”
“No,” Beighlen interrupted. “That’s not what’s bothering me. Not really. It’s just when I spoke to the girl she told me some other things.”
He hesitated. Was he right to confide in his mother? She didn’t care what the other gods thought of her; her value wasn’t dependent upon them. But he wasn’t like her: he was a demigod, only worth the alliances that he made. Teymos’s friendship, there wasn’t a more powerful alliance than that.
“What did she tell you?” his mother asked.
He tried to pull his hand free from beneath hers, but she tightened her grip.
“Beighlen, what did she tell you?” she repeated, a sharper note to her tone.
He shook his head. “I shouldn’t—”
“If you don’t tell me yourself, I’ll go straight to Teymos.”
His eyes darted to his mother’s stony face. She wouldn’t, would she?
She let go of him and gathered her shawl in one hand at the front of her chest, her other hand found the smooth surface of the boulder, ready to push herself up to standing. She arched one eyebrow at him: his last chance.
“Fine,” he sighed, his whole body slumping into the exhalation. “She said that she had found letters addressed to Teymos suggesting that he had been watching her since birth, and she found a room filled with a woman’s things. But Teymos didn’t say anything about that to me.”
The waves rolled in and broke against the craggy rocks that slumbered offshore. The water, so clear and focused one moment, crashed and spumed, sending foamy clouds flying into the air.
“If Teymos is lying to me too, how do I know that she’s safe there?”
“What’s the girl’s name?” his mother asked, her voice a wispy current beneath the roar of the sea, as if she hoped that if the question were quiet enough its answer would never come.
“Orleigh,” he said. “But does it matter?”
Her eyes slipped shut as she nodded. She took a deep breath and sighed, as if it was the precise name that she was anticipating, the precise name that she was dreading.
“It’s time that I told you the story of how we came to live in the Land of Gods,” she said. She braced her hands against her knees, her arms rigid. Deep furrows grooved the skin between her brows.
His heart fluttered, like fledgling wings ruffling for the first time. “But…you never talk about our past,” he said. “Why now?”
“Before you were born,” she began, “I was exiled from the Land of Gods for my failure to complete part of the Script. Your father and I lived together in the Land of Mortals and eventually I gave birth to you.”
She reached out and touched his hair with a smile.
“It wasn’t long before I recognised your talents and I realised that it wouldn’t be safe for me to raise you amongst mortals.”
As she withdrew her hand to her lap, her smile faded until the only trace that lingered was the slight tugging at the corners of her lips.
“At that time Teymos was in love with a mortal woman. She lived with him at his home until one day, without warning, she left. The next that Teymos heard of her she had returned to the village of her birth and had married her childhood sweetheart. When Teymos learnt from the Script that she was fated to die, he reached out to me, asking for my help. And so I attended the birth.”
His mother shook her head. She cleared her throat, but her voice still sounded strained.
“Of course I was unable to save the woman—I could only ease her passing—but I managed to save her daughter. In return for my help Teymos enabled us to move back to the Land of Gods, but your father could not come with us.”
Sweeping up his hands into her own, his mother clutched them tightly. Normally he avoided making eye contact with his mother, but now the ferocity of her emerald gaze confronted him like an armed Guardian defending the Sanctuary.
“Everything that I have done has been to protect you,” she said. Each word was spoken so slowly, so forcefully that he had no choice but to believe her.
Only when he nodded, a single nod to tell his mother that he understood, would she finally let go of his hands.
“The girl you saved was Orleigh?” he said. “And her mother…”
“Alea. Her mother’s name was Alea.” The name danced off her tongue, coaxing her mouth wide into a smile. “She was the woman that Teymos fell in love with.”
“Orleigh said that she found a brooch with the letter ‘A’. That must have been Alea’s.”
“It doesn’t surprise
me that Teymos kept her possessions,” she said. “And, of course, the letters Orleigh found were from me.”
“Teymos told me that he brought Orleigh to the Land of Gods in order to protect her,” he said, his eyes narrowing. “But do you think that really it has something to do with Alea?”
“I don’t know,” she said. Her eyes glassed over, her gaze as distant as her voice, as if she were watching the threads from the past world unravelling one at a time. “Teymos blamed Orleigh’s father for Alea’s death, perhaps this is some form of punishment.”
“But Teymos doesn’t seem vengeful,” he said.
“I’ve been friends with Teymos for a long time, Beighlen,” his mother said. She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders, as though touched by a sudden chill. “He is capable of far more than you could imagine.”
“Then what should I do about Orleigh?” he asked. Despite all of their talking, the problem still remained.
“You need to return her home to her father,” she said. “Alea made the choice to live in the Land of Mortals. It’s where she would have wanted Orleigh to be.”
“But what about the people in her village? Teymos said that Orleigh was in danger in the Land of Mortals because they thought that she was cursed,” he said.
“We all have ways of rationalising our actions, Beighlen,” his mother said. “Teymos can still protect her if she’s in the Land of Mortals. And I promise to protect her too, just as I did when she was born.”
His mother slipped down from the boulder and stood up, finding her balance on the loose shingle. She squeezed his shoulder and tilted her head towards the house. “Come with me.”
Beighlen followed his mother into their home. She took a needle and, holding her finger up to the light, she punctured the skin. She did not wince or flinch, just squeezed the pad until the blood blossomed. One drop at a time, she massaged her blood into a small glass vial, and when the vial was full and sealed, she laced a golden chain through the loop at the top and handed it to him.
“Take this with you,” she said. “It will keep Orleigh safe from the creatures of the Great Forest when you return to the Land of Mortals.”
The metal chain threaded through his fingers, as cold and as harsh as ice, but the teardrop of glass that rested in his palm exuded a lingering warmth.
Chapter Thirty
There was no great mystery. It was all in her mind. That’s what Beighlen had told her, but he was wrong! He had sided with Teymos, just as she thought he would. How foolish she had been ever to think that Beighlen was a real friend!
“Not hungry?” Teymos asked.
Orleigh blinked and the room hurled back into place around her. She was sitting in the dining room, across the table from Teymos, staring blankly at her food as she toyed with it.
“Hmmm? No, not really,” she said and pushed the plate away.
With Teymos’s eyes on her, she made a show of taking a bite of bread. Like a goat chewing the cud, she turned the morsel over and over, but it remained jaw-achingly dense in her mouth and it stuck in her throat as she swallowed.
“You’ve been quiet recently,” Teymos said. “Everything all right?”
She nodded through a sip of water. “Everything’s fine,” she said and she forced a smile, but it made her cheeks ache so she let it fade away again.
“Beighlen hasn’t visited recently,” he said.
A sharp pang hit her in the centre of her chest and spread outwards. “No,” she agreed, biting the inside of her cheek, “He hasn’t.”
Teymos watched her as he ate. The persistence of his stare prompted her to elaborate, but she had nothing to say. Beighlen hadn’t returned, and that was that.
“Will you be all right on your own for a while?” Teymos asked. “Nestra, Beighlen’s mother, has asked me to visit her.”
She nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
With Teymos gone, Orleigh scurried up the stairs, her hands leading the way. If Beighlen wasn’t going to help her, she would have to find answers for herself.
She had not returned to the secret room since she first discovered it, and at the time she had not looked through it thoroughly. Perhaps it held clues to the identity of the mystery woman, clues that she might find if only she searched a little deeper.
Teymos’s study remained unlocked. He could not know of her suspicions, or at least he could not know that she had already sifted through his private things. If someone had been through her possessions, she would make her room more impenetrable than the Sanctuary.
She strode across the room towards the vase that sat at the centre of the window ledge. Supporting the vase in the crook of her arm, she freed the key from the groove underneath. The key sprang out and dropped to the floor.
Orleigh crouched down to retrieve it, shaky fingers fumbling over the metal, but when she stood up she rose too fast, sending her head into a spiral of eye-prickling lights. She steadied herself against the window ledge and, as she did so, she spied someone approaching from the border with the Great Forest. It was Beighlen.
Abandoning the key, she bundled down the stairs and flung open the front door with a frown. The door slammed against the wall and rattled in its frame. She stepped into the doorway, her hands on her hips and elbows jutting wide, and blocked the entrance, glowering at Beighlen as he approached.
“Teymos isn’t here,” she shouted across the courtyard, but Beighlen didn’t stop. She met his eye for a flicker of a moment, just long enough to be sure that he had heard her, and then she turned her back to him and retreated into the house.
She hoped that Beighlen would go away, yet she left the door open.
“Orleigh, I want to talk to you,” Beighlen shouted back. “Orleigh!”
The crunch of footsteps on the gravel grew louder, letting her know that he was nearing the house.
“But maybe I don’t want to talk to you,” she said.
“Listen to me,” he said as he walked into the entrance hall. “There wasn’t a fire.”
One hand on the banister, Orleigh stopped. Her frown deepened and she looked over her shoulder to Beighlen. “What did you say?”
“There wasn’t a fire,” he repeated. “That was a lie. After you told me about the letters and the secret room I spoke to my mother. Then I visited your village. It’s still there and so are the people. It didn’t burn down.”
Her mouth was as parched as sun-scorched earth, her tongue a cracked mosaic of arid ground. “What do you mean?” she whispered.
“The people in your village thought that you were cursed, so they handed you over to Teymos. Teymos told you that there was a fire in order to stop you from running away.” Beighlen spoke quickly. He glanced around the entrance hall, his eyes darting down the corridors, as if afraid that they were being watched. “I’m going to take you home.”
“What about the letters? What about the room and the brooch?” she asked, a flurry of thoughts blurting out. Her hand clutched the banister, anchoring her to the bottom of the stairs. “I have memories of a fire.”
Beighlen shifted his weight from foot to foot, his gaze chasing after every creak of the house and every squawk from the grounds. “I’ll explain everything, I promise, but we need to leave—now!” He beckoned her with a flap of the hand. “Before Teymos returns. We can talk on the way.”
His hand dipped into his pocket and emerged with a necklace looped over his fingers. He turned his hand over, scooping the pendant into the cradle of his palm, the gold chain snaking across his skin. He offered it to her.
Letting go of the banister, she edged away from the stairs and took a tentative step towards him. She plucked the necklace from his palm, holding it by the chain. The glass vial swayed back and forth before her eyes. It was filled with a deep red liquid. Blood. She drew back, her nose wrinkling.
“You need to wear it,” he said. “It’s immortal
blood. It will protect you from the creatures in the Great Forest.”
“Whose is it?” she asked. She looped the chain around her neck, shuddering as the vial settled against her skin.
“My mother’s,” he replied and he nodded towards the door. “Come on. Let’s go.”
As Beighlen marched across the grass, Orleigh trailed a few steps behind. Her head was in a daze, as if she had just woken up from a dream and could not be sure if she was truly awake or still asleep. Her legs lumbered along, struggling to match his hurried pace.
“Beighlen,” she called after him. “What about the vines?”
Beighlen stormed ahead to the boundary with the Great Forest. He stepped over the line without hindrance and then waited for her to join him, but she came to a halt half a pace from where the vines would surface.
She raised her eyebrows at him. “How do I leave without the vines trapping me?”
He scratched at the nape of his neck as he stared at the grass, a puzzled expression spreading across his face.
“Please tell me that you have a plan,” she begged, “Any kind of plan.” Her heartbeat quickened. Could she trust Beighlen to see her through the Great Forest safely?
“Just come this way,” he said, and he motioned for her to step over the boundary. His eyes remained fixed on the ground as she took a step forward and the vines emerged from their nests between the blades of grass.
The vines wrapped themselves around her ankles and calves, twisting their way up to her knees. She tried to take another step towards the hedge, but they held tight and dragged her back.
Beighlen knelt down and, looping his fingers through the meshwork, he started tearing apart individual vines, but each tear that he made promptly healed.
