Two Worlds of Provenance

by Angelina J. Steffort

  “How do you know about him?” Gerwin asked with curious eyes.

  “He was the one who brought me to Allinan in the first place… I thought you knew…”

  “I didn’t know how you’d gotten there, just that you had,” said Gerwin with a tired voice. The day was already getting long, even though it was only early afternoon. “But, I’m grateful it was one of the guards of dimensions. It could have been way worse.”

  “Worse how?”

  Gerwin didn’t answer but pointed at the dining table. “We should finish our meal before we continue your training.” He got to his feet and held out a hand to help her up, but Maray pushed herself to her feet and trotted to finish her curry, going back to Jemin in her mind.

  A part of her wanted to return to Allinan immediately and let him know that she knew, that he didn’t need to hide his sorrow. But then, her father’s story had more meaning than just to finally know why Jemin couldn’t look at her without conflict. If Rhia had threatened her father as if she was willing to go to the lengths of killing her son-in-law, what might she do to someone who simply got in her way by chance?

  Jemin

  A pair of furious eyes stared at him, sitting close enough to make out the layers of blue and gold that were dangerously sparkling in front of him.

  There was no time to worry about what had happened to Heck. Jemin was sure the furry beast in front of him wouldn’t tell him the answer—and he didn’t need one. The Yutu had gotten him. There were strips of woven Thaotine hanging loosely from the beast’s muzzle.

  That was the thing with Yutu: they were soundless if they wanted to be, deadly hunters. Even the best trained soldier couldn’t hear them if they wanted to remain unheard.

  Jemin’s fingers grasped the sword more tightly. Not today, he thought, and raised the blade above his head, ready to strike. The Yutu, its full dimensions hard to make out in the dark space, growled again; a low sound, rolling through the tunnel like the echo of a death threat. But, it didn’t attack. Instead, it stood motionless, eying him with fierce eyes; yes, full of intelligence.

  Jemin hesitated for a moment, and that was enough for the Yutu to whirl around and blur into darkness before his eyes. Jemin blinked, trying to clear his vision, and when he thought the beast was gone, a human shape stepped into its place.

  “Jemin Boyd,” the man said.

  He looked familiar, hair long and tangled, shining silvery in the low light of the tunnel, a fleecy beard covering most of his face.

  Jemin didn’t lower his sword. He knew better than to be surprised by illusions. After all, one of his closes friends was a warlock.

  “Identify yourself,” he demanded in his soldier-voice. It was the sound of someone who would mercilessly kill whatever threatened the crown. A small part of himself cringed away from the voice. It had seemed the right tone a couple of months ago, but then, after the incident with the queen—

  “Please, don’t hurt me.” The man said in a tone that was the exact opposite of Jemin’s. “I mean no harm.”

  For some reason, Jemin had a hard time believing that.

  “You just turned from a Yutu into a human,” he noted. “You are a warlock.” He brought his sword between him and the man and poked it to his chest. “Is this even your true appearance? Or are you just trying to hide in the shell of an old man so I take pity and let you live?”

  The man stared and snapped his fingers.

  Light flared along the sides of the tunnel, blinding Jemin for a second. He drew his sword closer to have better control over it, shielding his eyes with his free hand.

  “Lower your weapon, boy,” the man growled, not aggressively but more annoyed at Jemin’s reaction. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  With a swift motion—too swift for a man of his age—he pulled the sword from Jemin’s grip and let it drop onto the floor between them. There was humor in the man’s wrinkled face as Jemin’s eyes finally adjusted to the light.

  The man wasn’t just familiar. Under the layers of dirt and long hair he recognized— “Ambassador Langley?” Jemin lowered the arm which was still protectively shielding his chest and relaxed his posture. He hadn’t seen the ambassador in years. “What are you doing here?”

  Langley stared back at him with an expression Jemin had seen all his life. How many times had his father sent him to play in the palace when he was a child and ‘accidentally’ overheard the ambassador’s conversations with Feris or Scott? The only difference between him and the other two was that Langley had never given him a bad word for running his father’s errands.

  “An unlikely place to meet again, I am aware.” Langley ran his fingers over his beard the way he had always done since Jemin could remember. But where the ambassador’s whiskers formerly had been trimmed into a long sharp spike, waxed to stay in shape, now it was bushy and didn’t resemble the elaborate look of an Allinan noble.

  “It really is you,” Jemin concluded and could hardly believe it. “How did you—”

  His question got stuck in his throat as Langley’s eyes reflected in the same blue and gold manner the Yutu’s had. He glanced to the ground to locate his sword. It would take him a second to get it if he needed to.

  “I thought you were—”

  “Dead,” Langley finished for him.

  Jemin nodded. The last time he had seen the ambassador was when he had taken off on a mission to bring back Queen Rhia’s daughter. No one had seen her either in years before that—like a family of monarch ghosts. No wonder their opponents had used Queen Rhia’s illness to infiltrate the castle and try to bring her down.

  “It might have been the easier option,” Langley interrupted his thoughts, his eyes irritatingly reflected in those colors of the Yutu’s eyes, and Jemin dove for the sword.

  “Where is Heck?” Jemin held the sword to Langley’s throat, and this time, the ambassador—former ambassador—didn’t attempt to get the blade away from him. And as the man didn’t respond, Jemin yelled, “What did you do to him?” He remembered the Thaotine fabric in the Yutu’s mouth and had trouble controlling his shaky hand.

  Langley shrugged, and before Jemin’s eyes, the same blur occurred, dizzying him as he watched, until Langley had turned into the same blue-golden eyed beast that had snuck up on him.

  In a reaction of shock, Jemin stumbled back, away from the animal. “This is impossible.” He saw it with his own eyes, and yet he didn’t want to believe it. “Tell me this is an illusion.”

  The beast shook its head, mouth open, sharp teeth gleaming in the bright light.

  “You just turned into a Yutu.” Jemin couldn’t believe he was saying this and actually meant it. Before, he had believed it was a warlock’s illusion that he had seen the Yutu turn into Langley. Now, he was clinging onto the last shred of sanity as he felt that even the basics of what he knew was possible were challenged by what his eyes saw.

  The giant animal nodded, muzzle lifting at the sides as if it was laughing at him.

  “But how—”

  The blur happened again, making Jemin wish he’d eaten lunch. He was a trained soldier. Why did the Yutu’s transformation affect him that much?

  “I told you,” said Langley, back in his human shape, “it would have been the better option to be dead.” He grinned darkly. “To stay dead,” he corrected.

  Jemin shook his head again. All those years of scouting for his father, and he thought nothing could surprise him, but Maray the day before, and now this—

  “Don’t worry about Hendrick Brendal,” Langley reassured, reaching back up to his beard. “He will be out for a bit, but there won’t be any lasting effects.”

  Jemin was still searching for the right words to say. Only now, he noticed that Langley was wearing rags instead of the gold-embroiled armor-shirt of the ambassadors.

  “I killed three Yutu this month,” was the first thing that came from Jemin’s mouth as he was still sorting which question to ask first. “Please don’t tell me they were shifters like you. I re
ally can’t afford to have killed someone important.”

  “Oh, don’t worry, boy.” Langley patted his shoulder. “I am the only one like this. There weren’t enough resources to create another one—”

  “Create another one?”

  Langley flexed his arms as if he had just gotten out of bed.

  “I am not sure I should even be telling you this, but you might be the one person who understands.”

  Sentences like that rang an alarm bell in Jemin’s mind. How many conversations had he overheard as a child where one person had planted a lie by making the other feel as if they were being let in on a secret? But Langley looked him in the eye with a blunt honesty he had rarely seen in diplomats, not even in his own family. “I know you saw her.”

  “Saw who?” Jemin felt cornered. He knew that feeling too well. Every time he stepped in front of court officials, he was reminded that he was there only at their mercy. And after the encounter with the queen…

  Langley raised his bushy eyebrows so high they threatened to become one with his hair. “Her. The queen. You know what she’s capable of.” He didn’t give Jemin time to ask how he knew. “I saw you as you interrupted them—Rhia and her son-in-law.”

  Jemin had seen it all—he had thought a minute ago—and now again, he was surprised. “Laura Cornay is married?” He remembered Laura Cornay, the princess of Allinan—and some said the one who should be ruling in Rhia’s stead—from the incident five years ago, when all of the bells in the palace had been rung to announce the return of the heir of the throne. There had been some quarrel between her and the queen a long time ago before he had been born. Some said there was a direct connection between Laura Cornay’s disappearance and the queen’s disappearance.

  “Married and has a daughter.” Langley gave him a look that told him that there was more. There always was more.

  “Maray.” It fell into place as if it had all been there right before his eyes.

  “You know about her?”

  To Jemin’s satisfaction, this time it was Langley who was surprised.

  “I don’t only know about her.”

  Langley stared as if he’d seen a ghost. “How do you know her?”

  A sigh wanted to escape his lips as he thought back to the moment he had laid eyes on Maray in the park in the other dimension. How she had tried to help him, thinking he was deadly injured. She was the epitome of pure heartedness and beauty—something he had thought about the queen until recently. “Long story.”

  “I am a mutant,” Langley said with a bitter tone he didn’t know from the former ambassador. “There is nothing for me but hiding. Any story will help.”

  “First you tell me where Heck is,” Jemin fiercely demanded.

  Langley nodded and turned, gesturing for him to follow. “He’s in my new home.”

  He led them back through the tunnel in the direction they’d come from. Now that everything was lit by magically enhanced torches, the light was almost as good as the one in his bedroom. The earthy corridor was cut out of the soil like it had been done with a knife, and it held a small room with two doors at the end. One of them he had seen earlier when he had followed the footsteps.

  “What is this?” He looked around, beckoning at nothing in particular.

  “This,” Langley said, following his gaze, “is the resort of the revolution.”

  “Revolution?” Jemin stopped as Langley opened the second door. “You mean the uprising from five years ago?”

  He remembered voices behind closed palace-doors, whispering about the peace being an illusion.

  “I mean the revolution.” Langley gave him a serious glance over his shoulder before he stepped through the ragged wooden frame that was set into the earth.

  Jemin followed. There was more reason to trust Langley than not to. And if Heck was in Langley’s chambers, then trust wasn’t even something to consider. Even if walking in there meant he had to lay down his own life so Heck could come out, he would still do it. Luckily, today was not the day. Langley, despite his scary Yutu shifter feature, wasn’t quite the type to slaughter people for no reason. He took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold.

  “The revolution was exactly that—a revolution.” His voice echoed off the brick walls which stretched along the narrow, torch-framed corridor. “The only reason no one calls it by its true name is because the queen managed to smother it before it even started.”

  Jemin listened, remembering his father’s words. ‘It doesn’t matter how nicely someone phrases it; it remains what it is. Love is love, and treason is treason.’ He swallowed. Those had been the last words his father had spoken to him before he had died—of an illness, or so Jemin had thought back then. Today, he knew better. Since the incident with Queen Rhia.

  “The Allinan nobles like their monarchy the way it is.” Jemin commented, “It guarantees their position.”

  He had seen enough of it to know what he was talking about.

  “You are absolutely right,” Langley agreed and led him around a corner. The humidity decreased as they were walking, and the wooden planked ceiling became a little higher. “Some of them would do anything to keep things the way they are while others—”

  “Others will do anything to break the system.” Jemin had heard those words from his father almost as often as his favorite bedtime story from his mother.

  “You are your father’s son, aren’t you?” Langley grinned, but there was a hint of concern in his eyes as he stopped and measured Jemin’s face.

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Jemin did know. He had been asked if he was like his father again and again when they had decided his fate at court, and his answer had been the same each time. “I am loyal to the crown.”

  “See, and that’s exactly what makes you your father’s son.” Langley studied his face, reading the youthful features and making Jemin feel self-conscious. “He used to say the exact same thing. The only difference is; you say it because you believe it while he used those exact words deliberately.”

  Jemin thought of the look on his father’s face when he had spat blood and coughed on his deathbed; full of pride and honor despite the pain of what Jemin had figured must have been the effect of poison.

  “He always was loyal to the crown.” Jemin gave Langley a look that was supposed to make him feel guilty about bringing up his father in that context. But, Langley was a trained and seasoned diplomat. No look, no matter how dangerous it was, could push him off the rails. Jemin had observed that in countless missions to gather intelligence on what was going on inside the palace walls. Many men and women had failed to start a fight with Ambassador Langley. And many had failed to appeal to his compassion in order to gain an advantage in negotiations. Even at the age of ten, he had recognized that.

  “The crown—” Langley’s grin widened, and he set in motion again, “—not the queen.” Jemin hurried after him along the corridor until they stopped at a dark-painted door. “That’s what makes the whole difference.”

  “Is he all right?”

  Heck’s olive skin was ashen. He was sprawled out on the one bed in a small wooden-walled room, eyes closed, mouth hanging open.

  Langley nodded and closed the door.

  “He doesn’t look okay.”

  “He will be.”

  Jemin stepped over to the bed and bent over Heck’s chest to check for his heartbeat and breathing, one ear following the noise behind him. It sounded like ceramic pots and dishes.

  “You must be hungry,” Langley noted, and when Jemin turned around, he found the man pulling a small wooden table from the corner and placing two chairs. “Please, sit.”

  Jemin hesitated. His stomach was ready for a refill, and Heck was deep asleep. “While we are waiting—” He took the invitation and sat down on the chair closer to the wall.

  Langley smiled and placed a plain brown bowl in front of him. “It’s not much, but it will keep you satisfied for a while.” He gestured at the greyish-brown stew-like dish.<
br />
  “Thank you,” Jemin pulled the spoon from the bowl and let the contents drip back into it, examining its consistency.

  “Tastes better than it looks.” Langley sat down at the other side of the table, another bowl in his hands, and started eating. “Shifting makes me hungry,” he explained with a wink.

  Jemin nodded and looked around, trying to learn more about where they were. There were no windows, so they had to still be underground. The air was dry and smelled of straw and bread, the stench of where he had entered the tunnel with Heck entirely gone.

  “Ambassador Langley?” He looked back at the modest bed and the ragged blanket on which Heck was resting.

  “I think it is time you call me by my first name.” He gave Jemin a smile that was almost fatherly. “Cardrick.”

  “Cardrick,” Jemin corrected, “may I ask where we are?”

  “Welcome to the secret quarters of the castle.” Cardrick gestured at the room. “Need a place to hide? Here is where you go.”

  Jemin had never heard about anything like that. He dug the spoon into the stew and lifted it to his mouth.

  “Your father and I spent many nights here, plotting Rhia’s downfall.”

  “You were part of the revolution?”

  “I still am.”

  Jemin’s eyebrows rose as he lowered the spoon again without tasting the contents.

  “Though your father died before the first attempt, that doesn’t mean we gave up. Your father was the one who started all of it.”

  He had known his father had been considered a traitor, but he had thought it had been for spying on the palace, for assisting the factions against the queen. Never in his wildest dreams had he thought his father had been the one to start a revolution.

  “He was the best of us. And anyone of us would have given their lives in his place.”

  The tone Cardrick used as he spoke about his father, almost the way he had heard others speak about the queen—the way he himself had used to speak about her before she had informed him that she had been the one to erase him…