The disturbed execution was on everyone's lips along with the story of his disappearance. Theories and thoughts bandied about wherever he drew close enough to listen. His favorite was that the Immortal assisted him in his escape even though she wasn't there. As if everything had something to do with her.
Her.
Every time he thought of her, he couldn't be sure which her it was. Jalcina had been quieter, but still certain. Leviana, brash and sometimes thoughtless, but sincere. In honesty, he had learned to like her some. Of course, that didn't keep him from wondering if the woman was madder than a starving wild cat faced with an out of reach carcass. She chose to come back to Arathum despite a price on her head, marched in the front door, and demanded to be allowed her place. Warden lived his life avoiding such situations. What he could not get through subterfuge, he stole.
Upstanding and honorable had never been hallmarks of his age.
"You survive."
Warden knew that voice and even without a weapon considered how he could kill her.
Red Falcon wore the mask of the final humiliation, a familiar face to those who thought Curcula, the Betrayer Wife, had been wronged. He let her circle him, into and then out of reach of the light, aware of her every motion. This was a different woman than the one he met it seemed like forever ago at a terrible seedy inn. She moved with a creature confidence he expected of someone greater. So was she acting then or acting now?
"Always the survivor, dear one?"
Dear one…
The words rang hollow in his ears. Ages since anyone had called him that, ages before the blood and the pain. His hands clenched. The voice in his memory using those words cared about him. This woman did not.
He tried to slink away but she blocked his passage with her body raising a hand to stay him.
"If you are going to try and kill me, you might want to start trying," Warden said as he moved to brush past her. He was nearly past her when she said,
"They froze. You survived. Did you wait for them to be dead before you left them alone, dear one?"
Lashing out, he caught air as she stepped aside.
"Her tears broke cold on her face. You huddled close to her for nothing. Did you hate him for that?"
Warden hadn't thought of his father in years, but the last vision of him lying dead in the street came like a flash. The splash of blood on stone hard ground pooling and melting the ice creating a garish display. His mother holding him and his siblings back.
Hatred was not what was in his heart.
"You have the wrong man," he said. The young man who might have been born from that day, from that ten year old had gone on to become something else and he regretted it not at all. With no one so close, he had no one left to lose. "Good night."
"You have a soul of revenge," she said. "That is why it chose you. And soon you will find yourself unable to do all else but pay."
He expected the knife in the back, expected it so completely he turned before she unsheathed it and grabbed her as she thrust it forward.
"I am not your fool." With a twist, he disarmed her, but she didn't struggle to escape. Instead she pressed closer and he read the lines of her age in her face. This was certainly not the same woman. She bore history in her eyes he hadn't seen there before.
"You are Fate's fool and you will carry out your part."
Red Falcon thrust her free hand into his chest and warmth invaded him. Warden took a step back and rubbed the offended spot as she turned to walk away. Vividly he saw the shape of the blade lying forgotten on the street in her back. It would protrude just enough to give away how she died. His movement toward it came unbidden and then it was in his hand. With a quick throw, he launched it. This time, she turned and held up a hand against it as if she would ward it off.
The blade stuck in mid-air before dropping again with a clatter.
Warden didn't try to make sense of it. Everything about this encounter was wrong. She did not pursue him as he disappeared into the night.
The stars offered him no solace as he roved. The guard shifts would not change until the high moon which would give away his position without a doubt. Yet he had no choice. He needed to escape the prison of the city.
Memories dogged his steps like the small shaggy dogs Uticans kept as pets.
The one his father gave him had been called Opera at the request of his younger sister. Warden hadn't minded. He doted on her with her pretty eyes and constant pink bow of a mouth. A mouth he wondered if it would become like their mother's when they grew up.
Before that winter came…
He tried to close off those thoughts. The sight of his father lying in the street, body bloody and broken before all who dared to watch. The horror of his mother trying to shield them all from the sight and Warden being unable to do anything but get closer. He had lain down in the street before the guardsmen came and sent them away, before they banished them to the forest to starve.
He spent a year in the woods, first in the company of his mother and siblings, watching as each grew weaker and weaker until death was the only thing they longed for. His mother lasted the longest, but he wasn't sure if it was strength or pain keeping her from her rest. When she finally did not open her eyes one frozen morning, he counted it as a blessing.
There would be more for him.
When he returned, no one knew him. No one cared. He was a forgotten boy on the streets.
Dear one…
His mother's appellation for her children and even her husband. How she had cried in response to her husband's death. He had forgotten the names of his mother and father. They flitted like ghosts with shrouded faces through his thoughts.
The streets moved under his feet as he circled his way closer to the walled edge. Going over the wall was out of the question. Even if he did, he would still have to cross the unforgiving land around the city itself offering him no shelter or hiding place. Better if he had something, anything at all, but blessings were few in his life.
Aliata.
His little sister, the namer of Opera.
He had never truly forgotten her, only buried her with his cramping frozen hands in a wash out of a small stream where she had once thought only of skipping rocks and one day meeting her love.
In Utica, beggars did not survive the winter. Charity was hard to come by for those who had nothing and depended on others. Fate changed him when he was caught stealing and the shopkeeper sold him for the price of the food he wanted to a stranger headed south. Why the man bought him Warden didn't ask. He only knew the man gave him his name, the old one went away with his family, and gave him food in return for him being a pawn in the man's schemes.
His mentor taught him poison. Offered him lessons in knives. Gave him a future and made sure he understood the only matters in life were those of gold. A heart was a fine thing to have, but when it came time to make decisions, the heart would only complicate things.
The wall and those buildings closest to it offered him no sympathy, only shadows into which he could insert himself in hopes of taking a momentary respite from his wandering thoughts.
If his father had not died, would he have grown old in Utica, a pampered noble's son? Maybe. Fate would know. It didn't matter. His father had died. His mother had died. His siblings had died. He survived. He buried each of them with hands burnt by cold and leathery from hard use.
Bringing his scarred hands to his face, he saw how they had cramped in the cold and became almost useless for what seemed like ages. Remembered running in shoes too small for his feet hoping against hope he would move fast enough to evade the frost in his bones and catch something worthwhile for dinner. He never wanted to know hunger like that again.
He would never allow it.
He didn't hate them. He couldn't hate them. They no longer had the strength in his memory for that.
Ghosts did nothing the haunted did not allow.
The guard shift would happen soon. He heard them coming up the street wearing the me
tal of their station. He shifted further back into the shadows and waited. He couldn't hope to take them all on, but he hoped the change would offer him an opportunity. If Fate offered him some luck, he would take it.
Closing his eyes, he visualized his next move. Once the guard changed, there would be six men. Those six men would be spread across two levels. Closest to the gate would be four. Above them, where scaling might be a possibility would be two more armed with bows. He could only hope none of them had long cannons. Though he wasn't sure what they could do, he didn't want to figure it out on the run either. He bent around the corner and then shied back as men came toward him. Being found loitering in the area of the gatehouse would get him killed.
The guards walked away from him down the main street taking with them their wariness. He should have tried his way through sooner. Too late to worry about it now. The high moon bathed the street in light denying him the shadows he needed to move.
There had to be another way.
He looked up at the sky and sought the thin lines of clouds which might bring some darkness. Just a few minutes was all he would need. Once he was outside of the wall, he could figure out what to do from there. Heading across the land on foot was not the choice he hoped to make, but if he had to travel to the nearest village in nothing but his sandals, Warden would do so.
As if in response to his wish, the clouds gathered and the moon disappeared behind them. Warden moved as the last of the light left, gathering his will around him as he did. The men at the gate did not see him as he slipped close enough to grapple his way up the wall itself thankfully it was not smooth on either side. On the second level where the windows were only barely large enough for a man's shoulders, he saw the other two. They chatted back and forth with the boredom he expected of those on guard duty. Their boredom would be his luck.
Having nothing to throw to garner their attention, Warden clung and waited as his shoulders bunched and nearly let him down. Still he hung on. The moon returned and if someone dared to look up, they might have seen him clinging to the side of the wall like a spider. No one looked up. Fate must have spared him a smile. The two guards moved away from their posts, perhaps discussing rotating with the others on the lower level. Hours spent watching the empty landscape for an army which would never come, attempting to invade the seat of the Empire had not been tried in the Immortal's lifetime or even in that of reign of the Black King, brought nothing. In their absence, Warden took his leave shimmying through the window, a tight squeeze, and then down the front of the wall to the ground before he tried to jog away. It took a few missteps before he hit his strides, running with the wall at his shoulder. He needed to stay as much in the shadow as he could.
Once he thought his time of running away with his tail between his legs were over. Once, he thought that. Now he knew he was wrong.
Hours would find him still on his feet pushing to where he wasn't even sure. One foot in front of the other until he collapsed was his only plan. If he found some solace between those hours of night and the morning, he would take it, but until then he had only to keep going forward. Ghosts of a long forgotten past or not.
The Kemalan
Arathum, the seat of the empire, held its place clinging to the side of a mountain said to be dangerous. In its earlier years, the mountain hid fire. There were some who said it still did. Few reached the summit and they did not speak of what they found there. Cross, the seat of Xernia had little in common with the capital, being made of many islands separated by canals full of colorful boats. Had she been less worried about what was to come, Jalcina might have felt some fascination for the place. As it stood, being hustled off the boat with Mekan at her elbow, she could only think of how much it smelled of a world she didn't care for. Everything was rot and fish guts. After days at sea with nothing but the company of those who spoke little of her language, she did feel some gratefulness to be granted the reprieve from having to take what ease she could above deck to avoid being trapped in a corner by Mekan. His intensity refused to abate, but it came and went like a capricious tide. He would find her and sit with her for hours without a word, eyes full of her as if she were a mystery he had been sent to unlock.
She snapped at him once or twice for staring, but it did nothing to stop him and there was nowhere to go to escape him regardless.
The people of Cross surveyed them as they walked past with Mekan leading. They crossed three arched bridges over canals full of what might have been fish. Jalcina wanted to touch them. They seemed more like flowers than fish with their myriad bright colors. Mekan gave her no time.
While there were a few buildings in Cross made completely of stone, most of them were of wood that smelled of the sealant used to keep out the rampant water. Different from home, but at least it wasn't the rot smell. They entered a house which jigged gently as they stepped onto the step telling her it was not built on land at all.
With a bow, Mekan thrust her at their new host.
Age wore this woman like a cloak and for a moment, Jalcina tumbled backward in time to her first meeting with the enigmatic Queen of Backaran. The consort of the Mad City had a similar countenance, but this woman was flesh. It showed in the pulse of the veins of her face. Jalcina settled on her heels before her, careful of the skirt she had been given to wear.
The woman looked from her to Mekan and shooed him away. To Jalcina's surprise, he went without protest.
"You have come back," the woman said. At her right hand sat a shallow cup full of an oily smell. "You have changed."
Jalcina wanted to protest she had never been there before. Except she knew, somehow, that wasn't true. If anything had been true of late, it was that her life had been walked before by someone else and now she retraced their footsteps hoping for a glimpse into who she might have been. The weight of it sought to crush her, yet she wouldn't let it. She came too far to let it destroy her.
"Show me your hands."
It came out as a command, just as it was meant. Jalcina obediently rested on her knees and turned up her hands to the woman who took them in her own brown ones.
"This life," she began. "Ease has been with you, but not always."
Jalcina did not remember the last three hundred years. How could she? Her life had not been her own. When she last laid down her head, her father had been alive and Sartol was still free. From what she learned on her journey, Sartol had fallen a mere two years after the death of Vad'Alvarn at the hands of his betrayer wife and it only took that long because the campaign could not be pressed during the winter months with the passes blocked by the snow.
"Who are you?" Jalcina's question interrupted the woman's musing which earned her a sharp glance. Her host dropped her hands and picked up the cup beside her. The liquid foamed as she swirled it before Jalcina's nose.
"Will you drink this?"
"What is it?"
"Unimportant. Drink it."
Jalcina shook her head no. A strange drink from a strange woman did not make her feel any trust. The woman did not press her.
"You will stay here overnight. Tomorrow, you will go on the next leg of your journey to her."
"To who?"
"Wrepta."
Jalcina's brow furrowed. Mekan mentioned that name once, but only once and then he clamped his mouth shut tighter than a cave in. Whomever that was held great weight with him, but to Jalcina it was simply a name and a strange one at that. The woman dismissed her with a wave just as she had Mekan and Jalcina rose to her feet in her borrowed sandals. She knew nothing of her way around and Mekan had absented himself, at least for now. Perhaps for the best. She needed to think.
Without direction, Jalcina returned to the door she came in to find it barred with a lacquered red bar painted with black symbols she recognized.
Realization dawned bright in her vision. They were the same symbols attached to the rope wards of Sartol, the wards meant to keep the darkness within the realm of the trees and away from men. This woman used them to bar her door;
what did she wish to keep in? She ran her fingers across the slick bright wood. It felt like beauty. Jalcina turned away from the doorway and moved through the small house in another direction. A new doorway, covered only by a curtain of reeds, allowed her access to a garden. Here the smell was fresh, strong, and inviting, an oasis against the constant nasal press of the city. Stepping off the house, which again let her down with a soft dancer's sway, she put her feet on the ground. It did rock, but not as hard, perhaps it was anchored better. The strange grass touched the edges of her sandaled feet and offered comfort. A few feet away, a small tree shaded a spot where things had been matted down from constant sitting. Jalcina took the offered place and folded her legs under her skirt.
Mekan, her mind turned to the question of him. He had intentions for her and they involved this Wrepta who held some power over him. The branches overhead sighed as if in agreement with her wandering thoughts. Fear and despair offered their greetings, but Jalcina refused them. She had come far too far and survived too much to allow someone to destroy her from without.
Rubbing her fingers together, she sought the strength she had in the fight with Versa, the certainty of her own ability even if it felt foreign to her. If it came when she was threatened, she could only hope it would come when she needed it most against this new threat.
There had been a moment when she did not consider Mekan a threat, but since he had abandoned those she thought of as his friends and left them to face death alone, she had to wonder how right she was about him. It did not endear him to her.
Of course, his choice to help her did give him some rope, not much though. Everyone seemed interested in helping her for their own ends.
She sat alone in the garden for over an hour before a man in a white robe appeared. The belt he wore was the same color as the door bar and he wore much the same symbols. Did they truly mean warning here as they had back home? He approached with a tray which she assumed meant food.
He set it down on the grass beside her with an inclination of his head and no words before making his easy steps back into the house. Jalcina looked at the bowl set before her. The cup of foaming oil sat beside it as if in offering to get her to try it.
Ruins of Fate Page 10
