by Niki Florica
The rapping of his boots were far, far away. They were filled with sand and shuffled uncomfortably with each stride, but he lacked the motivation to correct it. He was grateful now for the weight of his sky-cloak; despite the day’s intolerable heat, the dark channel of the Oenghon Road bore a chill that seemed determined to infuse his very bones. He raised a hand to the cloak’s clasp, where the Robin’s knives had sliced the cloth in two during his trial in Dunbrielle. The Naiad embroidery that had repaired it was scarcely distinguishable beneath his fingertips from Melkian’s masterful work.
Were Salienne beside him, he knew she would have rebuked his recklessness, his exhaustion. She would have chided him against pressing forward, always forward, when every muscle screamed against it and every sense was dull as an Oenghi stone. She would have told him that a lost night of travel was a worthy price for sharp senses and a wary eye. She would have told him he could never hope to sense a coming threat when he could scarcely keep his mind tethered to his body.
Skies ablaze, he would have given his right hand for his sister’s reprimand in that moment.
Kyrian stumbled, catching himself upon the wall, blinking hard and realizing for the first time that the Robin’s laboured inhalation was no longer at his side. Salienne’s voice said, You see?
“Robin!”
“Here.”
The voice was small and far away, several paces behind him. He halted, turned, drew a weary breath. Retraced his footfalls along the tunnel incline until some instinct informed him of a living presence slumped against the tunnel wall. “Robin?”
“I am here.” So faint was the Green’s voice that Kyrian almost believed it an illusion of the stillness. “Forgive me. I did not mean to alarm you. I need only a moment.”
Kyrian released a heavy breath and squinted into the ink-darkness. “What is it?”
A hesitation. Then, shakily. “It is nothing. I am all right. We must go on.”
Kyrian reached forward, his hand snagging upon coarse curls that betrayed the Robin’s seat upon the tunnel floor. He drew back and reached again, this time to grip a gaunt shoulder. “On, then.”
A breath of silence passed before a firm hand clasped his forearm, allowing Kyrian to pull the nearly weightless creature to his feet with no more effort than he would a fragile child. He expected the Robin to release him upon standing, but the long, nimble fingers remained locked upon his forearm, gripping him with a fierce, unyielding strength that betrayed a troubled mind.
“Forgive me, Skyad,” he said from the shadows. “I have drawn you from your path. Had we not turned to pursue the cloud, there may yet have been hope of reaching the skyladder. Forgive me. I have led you astray. It was not my intent to chance the fate of Ariad upon the darkness of this road.”
Kyrian shook his head, if only to himself, wishing for a sight of green eyes or russet curls. “It was my choice, Robin. In truth, I feared already that I had missed the skyladder . . . I lingered too long in Dunbrielle. If the ladder is lost to us, nothing can be done for it. We can only go on, and hope that at the end of this road we will find the Silvercloud and regain lost time.”
“And if we do not?” The voice was faithless.
Kyrian pulled his arm away and straightened his spine. “We will.”
Silence fell again, but it felt to Kyrian as if the door of their conversation were not yet closed, the unspoken words of Rydel of Robinsdwel keeping it ajar. Pulses passed without remark, bleeding into breaths, then moments. Down into the earth they strode abreast, darkness heavy in Kyrian’s lungs and pressing upon his shoulders with each stride.
“Dunbrielle,” whispered the Robin suddenly, causing Kyrian to glance at him despite the shadows that hid him from view. “You say you lingered too long in Dunbrielle. It is dark in my memory, a faded recollection. There was a trial, was there not? You were wounded.”
“Yes.”
“I remember. A pavilion. You lay senseless for days, and she feared you would not wake.” A pause. “She. She . . . the—the Naiad maiden. The healer.”
Kyrian’s face attempted a smile. “Elillian.”
The Robin tested the name for familiarity. “Elillian,” he murmured. “I never spoke her name.” There was another hesitation, then, “I do not remember our reason for entering Dunbrielle. It is far north of the Caralim crossing . . . I cannot understand how you came to be in—”
“Robin.” He killed the question before its asking.
Rydel of Robinsdwel halted mid-phrase. His voice died in a tremulous, “Oh.”
Kyrian thought the exchange had reached its end. Though thrilled by their first true conversation, he knew the Green to be a creature of few words and, like Salienne, expected him to fall silent, having exhausted his careful reserve.
The grandson of Camuel seemed determined to surprise him.
“I was nine winters when my grandfather returned to Robinsdwel with a stranger,” he said softly, with the voice of a phantom in the dark. “I was accustomed to him appearing without warning. His duties for King Aradin kept him in the Skies often, and I seldom knew for certain when he would return. He was early this time. Near a fortnight earlier than he had promised. He was never earlier than promised.”
Kyrian glanced toward the voice. Rapt, despite exhaustion.
“There was a stranger with him,” the Robin went on. “I thought at first that he was Skyad. He was pale enough, and clothed in Rosghelli garb, but I recall thinking that otherwise he did not look one.”
Kyrian breathed a laugh. “That sounds familiar.”
“As it should,” came the response. “He was your father.”
Kyrian stumbled. The Robin plowed on. “He was quiet, I remember. Brondro of the Adamun, or Brondro of the Skies as he was then. I realized later that when he fled Rosghel, Robinsdwel was the first refuge he sought. He arrived with my grandfather, and he remained with us for little more than a moon. He was nervous and uneasy, and he never strayed far for fear of being seen. I did not know why. I was wiser than to ask. He had with him the Sword of Kings. I never saw it, for he kept it hidden, and if I had I would surely have recognized it upon you. But he never unveiled it, never spoke of it. I did not understand until rumours reached Robinsdwel of the accusations made in Rosghel against him.”
The words began to spill from him in rapid succession now, tumbling over one another in their haste to escape the body that had caged them for uncounted years. His voice assumed new life, rising and falling with a sudden vitality, never allowing silence to fill the time between words or the darkness to swallow his tale before its end. “He gave me my knives the day he arrived. A gift, made at my grandfather’s request. He told me of how he had made them, showed me his work, told me of Rosghel and the battles he had fought, of his forge and his wife and . . . and his children.”
Kyrian halted, staring into the gloom from which the words had come. “What?”
“You have a sister. Born in the same hour, the elder of you by moments. Yes?”
Astonishment seeped from his thoughts to lace Kyrian’s voice. “Yes!”
“I remember it now. All of it. He spoke of you often. Until now the memory was lost to me.”
Kyrian shook his head, lost in disbelief.
“You must think often of her.”
Kyrian willed his strides to commence again, listening to the rapping of his footfalls as he chose his words in the dark. “I do,” he replied, toying with his cloak’s clasp. “We have never been apart. As the children of Brondro Tarmilis we have relied upon one another from the beginning, to stand against the lies, to prove our worth. Until a moon ago we were united in everything, always stronger together than apart. Always.”
The Robin drew a breath, and Kyrian heard it rattle. “Until a moon ago?” he asked.
Kyrian snapped the clasp open, then closed it again. “The day we were told of our Green blood, we lost something. Our unity, or a thread of our bond. She was angry, and bitter . . . and betrayed, I think. Our guardian had been se
eking to protect us from the truth, but my sister sees only treachery.”
A thoughtful, indecipherable pause. “And you?”
He had anticipated the question, but still it unbalanced him. “Me?” he echoed, hesitant. “I . . . I do not know. I was unprepared for the truth, but I think I almost welcomed it. I was strange among my people, had always been strange. It was . . . a comfort, I suppose, to know that the fault did not lie with me. Not all of it, at least. But Salienne—” he sighed—“Salienne is different. She is Skyad through and through. That is why she resented the truth.”
“Is she a warrior as well?” the Robin asked, after a moment. Kyrian strained for a whisper of worn moccasins upon stone, but the creature, as ever, remained a phantom.
“Yes,” he answered, “and a fiercer one than most. She is strong, and cold, and fearless, and the wisdom to my recklessness. The ice to my fire, Melkian says.”
He did not know why he continued, why he spoke the words perched on his tongue which he knew would do nothing to earn the Robin’s respect. They simply spilled from him, much as the Robin’s had moments before, burdened with honesty, and weighed with self-doubt.
“Had I the power, Robin, to choose Ariad’s fate, I would far sooner place this Sword in my sister’s hands than mine.”
He was speaking too much. He knew it. Hour upon hour had passed in darkness, surely dawn was approaching beyond the road, the Skyad was near to stumbling with exhaustion, and Rydel had scarcely ceased speaking long enough to draw a breath.
What in Nirtuikka was wrong with him?
He spoke of his grandfather, of his childhood, of Robinsdwel. Of the games the other children would play while he looked on, disinterested and unwanted for his gravity. Of the merry Robin family with which he had lived while waiting for Camuel to return from the Skies, Piri and Alma and their bustling, clamorous children who always said he was one of them while never truly wanting him. Of the city square and the nightly dances, the wooden pipes his grandfather had once taught him to play. Of the tales and the relics that Camuel would bring him, trinkets and baubles from his travels for the King.
These tales, these memories—he had never spoken them aloud. He knew he was rambling and could scarcely recognize his own voice but still the words came, still he heard them, and still he knew they were his. Every time he attempted to still them the silence drummed down upon him like a suffocating fog. The darkness and the stillness would press in his lungs and lodge in his throat, and he would draw ragged breaths and squint desperately into the tunnel ahead but there was only black, only utter dark and by Caralim why was it so dark?
So the words spilled from him in an endless stream, tales and memories all unspoken, holding the darkness at bay. The Skyad said nothing. Merely listened and laughed. For hours.
An eternity had passed in the shadow when Rydel came to a halt, the tunnel floor levelling suddenly beneath his feet and the right wall curving away from his hand into the gloom. The Skyad muttered, “What is this?” and the voice echoed eerily, as if through a vast space.
Further investigation revealed that the narrow tunnel had opened into a funnel-like chamber, wide enough for twenty warriors to walk abreast at its broadest point. From the north was the passage from which they had come, but in the southern wall their simple path divided into three tunnels, discovered only by trailing a hand along the wall and completing several rounds of the space. The Skyad stood in the antechamber centre, revealed to Rydel by the telltale rasp of a hand pulling through thick hair.
“Three paths, Robin,” the Heir declared with a sigh. “Bouldegar said nothing of this.”
“One delves deeper,” Rydel supplied, standing in the mouth of the middle passage. “The scent of rot and death is upon it . . . air trapped too long without escape.”
“We shall avoid it, then,” said the Heir, lightly, though exhaustion still leached through his optimism. “What of the others?”
Rydel cocked his head, an inevitable tic of the birdfolk. “Of the others I am not certain.”
A darker tone. “Excellent.”
Ah—there was Kyrian of the Rain Realm.
They agonized for a time over the wisest of the three paths, trailed their hands along the smooth-hewn walls and wondered at the mysterious stworf craft that had delved them, until the Heir declared himself too worn to go on. They were the very words Rydel had been dreading, but he swallowed his apprehension if for no reason save the fact that the Silver had not slept the previous night. For him.
He offered, against every screaming nerve, to keep the night watch, to which Kyrian of the Rain Realm offered feeble protest before relenting. In the obsidian dark, crouched against the Oenghon wall, the Skyad handed him a piece of tasteless Naiad bread and apologized again for their lack of water, the last words he spoke before falling into silence. His breaths grew even and heavy, though not half so deafeningly ragged as Rydel’s own. He caught himself focusing upon them, counting them, fighting not to think of the shadow that surrounded him after a single, blissful day of believing he was free of it.
He was beginning to believe he would never be free of it.
Hours upon hours of breathing, listening, twirling his Adamun-made knife between his hands. It occurred to him that he had lost the Naiad maiden’s scarlet feather in the Jardenith Forest; he scarcely felt a Robin without one. Between occasional tastes of the Dunbrielle bread he listened to the stillness, daring himself to glare into the dark. After one lifetime, and still another, he succeeded in convincing himself that he no longer heard the voices from the shadows, voices and faces and haunts from his nightmares.
One lifetime, and still another.
Then he heard the chant.
The Silvercloud could not have travelled more lethargically with an anchor tied to its prow. Between its time-worn sails, pockmarked hull, and the gross disadvantage of an oncoming wind, the small scout vessel traversed a hundred leagues in the span of time a superior vessel could have sailed a thousand. The Seiri Wilds had hovered in the distance for what seemed an eternity, and it was not until pale blue began to streak the sky that the vessel dipped downward, for the Lands.
Its pilot was losing patience. Beneath the light of a moonfire lantern the Silver fugitive studied a time-creased chart pinned to the mast by the head of an arrow. The blue flame cast dancing shadows over the faintly scrawled shapes and corresponding titles, most of which were blurred by an unsteady hand or telltale, ale-coloured stains. The reader’s lips curled in disgust at the thought of the cirras that had paid for this sketch, wasted on some destitute assassin’s daily draught at the Calryss tavern. Long, slender fingers plucked churlishly at a bowstring. What use had they for cirras? None. There was no going back.
The vessel shuddered violently, and tight-pressed lips only barely restrained a choice execration. Abandoning the chart the Silver grasped the spar in one hand and heaved upon the pale sail with another, folding it tightly against the fierce wind that threatened to bear it backward, to the west. Rabidly the pilot darted from port to starboard, tying down the sails, heaving upon the rudder, pulling the lantern from its hook to lean over the gunwale and peer down upon the shadowy land beneath.
The chart’s route was memorized, and soon the way became clear. Landmarks presented themselves in succession: a scattered moor of stones where desert became forest, a dark blur of thick, tangled wood, a weaving brown serpent that must once have been a stream and ended in a rocky plateau that must once have been a waterfall. The destination was approaching, at long last. The pilot returned the lantern to its place, folded the chart, and slung a bow and quiver over one shoulder. As if sharing the anticipation, the stolen ship settled into quiet, focused flight, slicing purposefully through the oncoming wind for the first time since leaving Rosghel.
Dawn was tracing the sky over the Seiri Wilds when a silver anchor tumbled over the gunwale, threaded upon a slender rope, to snag in the treetops below.
The pilot slid over the bowsprit, gripped the pale cord
, and began the descent to the Lands.
Kyrian startled upright to a cold hand on his shoulder, squinting into the dark while simultaneously fighting to dispel the tangled haze from his mind, a hand already upon the Sword. “What is it?”
A rumbling chant pulsed through the ebony air, resonating in his bones.
He scrambled to his feet as another dark note stirred the passage, shivering through the air, colliding with the silence. He felt it, in the walls, in the earth, in his core, the heart of the Oenghon beating in the dark beneath the sands. His thoughts flared with a sudden vision of the great, stone-capped hilltop, the head of a buried king whose brow was crowned with ancient stones and whose heart lay far beneath, drumming for eternity while strangers flowed with shadow through his veins.
Light bloomed in the dark. Faint and distant, it was more a pool of paler darkness than a splash of light, sprung to life in the left tunnel, the widest of the three. The chant rolled again, the paleness brightening as terse moments passed and the ominous whispers grew to a hum, then a rumble, then a roar. Then footfalls in the tunnel, heavy steps that echoed ominously upon stone, swelling to a marching chorus, an invisible foe closing in from ahead. The Robin’s knives rang in their sheaths. A red light sprang to life ahead, stabbing through the darkness to burn Kyrian’s eyes. It was the angry fire of upheld torches, flaming rabidly upon the tunnel walls to the rolling of the footfalls and the thunderous cacophony of too many savage voices. Their dark invocation vibrated in his lungs. The Sword of Kings was glowing like hot-molten gold. He wrenched the blade from its sheath, its light casting flames upon the Robin’s taut face and pooling with the red of the torches.
