“What is it that you want?”
“A stone,” the woman informed her. “It will be in a most sacred place, heavily guarded. Made from moonstone, it shines a different color from every angle. This is how you will know when you have found it. Retrieve it, and bring it back to us, and we’ll let you go.” She waved a hand nonchalantly as though it didn’t really matter to her what happened to them after that. In reality, Katya was sure she’d order them killed anyway just because they knew too much.
“Very well,” she nodded. She caught Hunter staring at her. His eyes were blazing with frustration at not being able to speak. She ignored his look. “When shall I go?”
“Immediately.”
The woman waved the healer forward and Katya eyed him warily as he held out his hand to her. He held something small in his palm and as he pressed it against her arm, she felt a sudden burst of pain.
“Ow!” she exclaimed, more out of annoyance than actual pain. She was well-accustomed to discomfort, thanks to her time as an assassin with Karl, and the tiny prick was hardly anything. But what had he done? She stared down at the flesh of her forearm and was alarmed to see a miniscule bump where he had pressed the contraption.
“It is a tracking stone,” the woman informed her smugly. “If you try to remove it, the experience will not be pleasant.” She smiled evilly. “If you try and enchant it to make it seem like you are somewhere you are not, it will not be pleasant.” Another obnoxious pause. “And if you betray us in any manner-”
Katya cut her off. “I know, I know. It won’t be pleasant.” She scowled down at the unwanted accessory.
“We will check in with you periodically through the stone – it will become warm when we wish to speak with you at which time you must find a reflective surface through which to communicate with us. If we find that you are not making progress, your friend here will be killed.” She glanced back at Hunter, who simply glared back at her defiantly. “And if you take more than one month to complete this task, he will be killed.”
“I haven’t been back to the Dena’ina in some time,” Katya lied, “I’m not sure I’d be able to find it easily from here.”
“It is to the north, through the Barren Lands. This map will lead you to the territories.” She stepped forward and handed her the map.
Katya took it and pocketed it without opening it. “Let’s get to it then,” she stated.
Another man stepped forward and took Katya roughly by the arm. Hunter moved towards them to interfere, but the two burly men standing on either side of him still held him tightly. She gave him a wry smile. It appeared fate was determined to thwart her efforts to live in simple happiness. She had finally found her past, only to have the only person from it be torn from her, and the lives around her endangered yet again.
She glared at Slade as she passed him on the way out. All that worrying about him for nothing. She should have known. Poor Gareth. She tried to ask about his fate as she was led down the long winding stairs to the lower levels, but her guard remained stoically silent.
At the bottom, she was shoved violently out, and the door was slammed behind her. She supposed there was only one thing to do: She set out towards the Barren Lands. A few steps into the forest, however, and she had a thought. She smiled to herself.
Steeling quietly back towards the village, she focused her magesight on the buildings above. Searching through them, she found what she was looking for. Her unique bond with the Bloodstone allowed her to recognize it easily, and she zoned in on it. While the tribe’s attention was still focused in the Chamber at her exit, she sent a transport spell into the building which held it. Her spell snuck past the wards around it and moments later, she felt a weight in her hand. For good measure, she did the same for her knives and the few other possessions they had confiscated from her and tucked these away.
Laughing to herself, she hefted the Bloodstone into the air and caught it again neatly. So there, she thought smugly.
*
Lorcan watched the proceedings through a tiny crack in the Chamber wall. He had shimmied his way up the steep slope to the spot he had discovered some time ago while hiding from Slade’s wrath. Ever since their parents had died, his older brother had acted as though he was the boss of him.
The girl, Katya, he had found out on the Plains and brought to the tribe was currently on trial - if that was what you could call the quick punishment that the Elders had just inflicted upon her - and was being sent out on a mission to gather some artifact. Lorcan scrunched up his face as his brother Slade made a comment. Lorcan had lost track of how many times Slade had pointed out to him that it was his fault that Katya had been brought up to the city, ‘and without going through the Chamber first!’ As if he hadn’t fallen for her himself. Lorcan knew they had been spending time together and had even kissed before he found out that she had the Bloodstone. Lorcan wasn’t supposed to know about that, but when Gareth had approached him about helping get Katya out of the prison cell, he’d been filled in on quite a bit he hadn’t realized had been going on.
He didn’t understand what the Elders were up to, and he didn’t believe that Katya deserved to die. He couldn’t even begin to guess what sort of ‘crimes’ the Elders had determined she’d committed to justify such a fate. The Elders had only told the tribe that she had been caught betraying them, not the specific deed, which had supposedly warranted her being thrown into the cell. She definitely was a loner and did not share much information about herself, but she hadn’t come here for malicious reasons, he was sure of it.
When she was led down below, he tried to intercept their path seemingly by accident so that he could speak with her, but the guard’s bee-line towards the stairs made it impossible. He watched her from above as she hesitated only a second, staring towards the door that had just been slammed in her face, before moving into the forest.
When he could no longer see her retreating form, he climbed back up to his perch atop the Chamber and pressed his ear against the hole.
“They were able to break free,” Maliki was saying, “if they can do that, they can undo our enchantment.”
“They haven’t even detected it yet,” another voice chimed in; one of the Elders Lorcan didn’t know. “We have time.”
“But how much time is the question,” Kali, the leader of the Elders, said. Lorcan could picture her pressing her lips together tightly, an expression she wore often, while twirling her braid. Her eyes seemed to narrow every time she looked at him, though he couldn’t remember ever doing anything to her. “And the answer could make all the difference. We will have to hope that her feelings for the man are strong enough that it will cause her to make haste.”
“The bond between them is strong,” the healer informed her and Lorcan felt a strange twinge. He had been spending time with Raina which had helped to dull the pain of Katya’s flirtation with his brother. Her newfound hatred of Slade had given him something in common with her, however, and he felt the familiar attraction. She was a mysterious woman.
He found his interest in the meeting suddenly diminished and Lorcan shimmied down to the landing below. Seconds after his feet found the ground, he heard a voice.
“Lorcan,” Slade admonished, “What are you doing here?”
Lorcan turned around slowly, pasting on an innocent expression. “Nothing,” he lied, “just taking a walk.”
“You’re not sneaking out to see that Raina girl again are you?” his brother questioned sternly. Lorcan hated it when he used his fatherly tone.
“I wasn’t-” he started, but then realized that this would be the perfect excuse. He tried to look contrite. “Well…maybe I was hoping I would run into her,” he seemingly reluctantly agreed. He sold the lie by quickly adding, “but I wasn’t doing anything bad!”
Slade gave him his ‘I’m disappointed in you’ look; an expression that Lorcan was sure his brother stood in front of a mirror and practiced. Lorcan looked at his feet and bit his lip, though seething inside.
“I’ll just head home now,” he said in a downtrodden voice.
“That’s a good idea.”
Once out of sight, Lorcan made a rude gesture at his brother. He couldn’t believe that Slade blindly lapped up everything that the Elders said. Or actually, he could believe it since his brother was a meat-headed idiot. He cared more about perfecting his Forest Guard and being Mr. Perfect than he did about Lorcan.
As he passed through the section where the prisoners were housed, he heard the man with whom Katya had been captured being led back into the cellblock. He backtracked and hid behind a corner of the building.
Instead of being led back to the same cell that he had been taken from when they had the two of them drugged, however, he was led into one of the infirmary cells. How odd. Lorcan knew that Gareth was also being kept there. He had seen them drag his bleeding body up the night he had helped Katya escape. He had tried to get in to talk to the man, but he had not yet regained consciousness, so there was little he could do. He was also a little worried that they might figure out his own involvement. Gareth had been shot because of it…
He wondered why they would be putting this stranger in with one of the tribesmen. Surely they weren’t so angry with Gareth that they had cast him out? Exile was the tribe’s worst form of punishment, and even if they were spending the time to heal him out of respect for what he used to be, if he had been exiled when he woke he would be told to leave.
Lorcan hadn’t witnessed any exiling, but he had heard the tales of the evil ones being thrown out so they couldn’t pass on their traits in order to cleanse the world of them. The Dark King of the Lost Lands had marked those of his blood and the tribes used this mark to eradicate his presence from the world. It was said that once his evil taint was gone from the world and the tribes reunited, the blessed one would unveil their eyes. The child of the Arrival was believed to possibly be the blessed one who would do this. That was why the Elders had taken her to ensure that she was healthy and could fulfill this if it was indeed her destiny.
Or so they said. Lorcan was beginning to doubt the wisdom of trusting their words. If the enchantment was a good thing, why were they worried about the Lost Ones detecting it?
He pondered this a moment, chewing his fingernail, while he waited for the guards escorting the stranger to leave. He supposed they could just be worried that if they detected it, they might also guess its source. One of the tribe’s most important rules was that they never made any contact with the Lost Ones which could reveal that the tribes existed.
The tribes had been driven out of the Lost Lands by the Dark King’s evil, many of them dying before they made their escape. The Dark King was frightened of their power and he had tried to send them all to their deaths at his experiment camps. He had done atrocious things to them, testing the effectiveness of blood-magic with torture and pain. He experimented changing their appearances, twisting their looks to mimic those of animals and hideous beasts. Though most of these changes had been reversed and over time any that they had been unable to change had slowly faded. There were a few people whose eyes were still slit like cats, or whose teeth were more pointed than any humans should be. Lorcan had noticed that the envoys from the Kanza tribe seemed less human than the rest, and had heard stories that the worst cases had followed their founder to the Plains beyond. To the best of Lorcan’s knowledge, all the tribes had succeeded in erasing most traces of the Dark King, but the hatred for him was still prevalent all these years later.
Stories of his horrors were the high point of festivities, with the young ones clapping and enjoying the wild tales with exuberance while the elders tsked them for their lack of respect for the seriousness of the history. Lorcan and most of the children his age were becoming bored with the Elders single-minded obsession with everything that had to do with the Dark King and plans to finally getting rid of the last of his influence. In Lorcan’s opinion, the only influence that the Dark King still had was what the Elders were keeping alive by holding on to his memory.
He peeked around the corner and saw that the guards were leaving the man’s cell. Unfortunately, two more had just arrived and had positioned themselves outside the door.
Lorcan snuck around the side of the building and scampered off towards home. There was no point in making Slade more suspicious.
CHAPTER 3
Layna hugged Phoenix to her and walked through the gardens contentedly. She had needed the relief that being with her little girl gave her. No matter how much stress being the Queen she had, as Phoenix’s mother she could be nothing but proud and happy.
Unfortunately, duty was calling her, and the longer she stayed in the gardens, the louder it got. It was hard to ignore that pesky voice in the back of her head telling her she was just procrastinating. With a sigh, she meandered back towards the palace and made her way to the suites that Lord Telvani had, until recently, occupied. The guards at the door nodded to her and she searched their faces for that of Philip, with whom Phoenix always got along with well. He had the patience of a saint and didn’t seem to mind doubling as guard and baby-sitter while she looked through the books they had gotten from Telvani.
“Where is Philip today?” she asked the other guards.
“Out with a cold, Your Majesty,” said the one nearest her, saluting her smartly. He was a bit rigid for her tastes. With regret, she doubled back to the nursery to leave Phoenix with Amelia. She hated to bother any of the other guards with the task of watching her, as they always looked put out at this request, though she would have preferred having Phoenix close. She entertained the idea of asking Amelia to come back with her, but she felt too guilty asking her to leave the comfortable nursery in favor of the stuffy office. The woman might still be as feisty as she was in her youth, but her body was starting to show its age.
Once she was back at Telvani’s suites, the guards nodded to her once more, looking relieved that she no longer had the child. She opened the vault they had discovered there, and murmured the key to get past the magic that they had put on it to keep it from prying eyes.
Tomes of blood-magic did not need to be seen by just anyone. Layna had wanted to destroy them when they’d first been confiscated, but Gryffon had pointed out that the knowledge within them might actually be useful. They hoped that something in the troves of information might contain some clue as to what Telvani had been up to.
Layna sat down in the chair she had occupied too much of late and started reading. Hours passed with no luck, and Layna rubbed her temples. She glanced out the window and forced her tired eyes to focus on the trees in the distance. They wavered slightly, but eventually cleared and focused.
Most of what she read simply sickened her. A large number of the spells focused on the application of pain in order to release the most power from a creature rather than on the intricacies of the spell itself. Many of them were tasks that could be completed without the use of blood-magic, but the authors seemed disinclined to mention this fact.
Blood-magic was an easy way for a less capable mage to wield the power, by using the sacrifice’s body to buffer the blow of drawing out more magic than they would otherwise have been able to manage, so the mage could become much stronger than they once were. These spells also tended to gravitate more towards destruction, the tomes including long winded explanations of all the nasty creatures you could come up with and horrendous traps and killing spells that could be implemented with it.
The blood-magic itself, while still horrible enough as it required causing pain or death in another being, did not necessarily mean that the magic it provided would be used for an evil purpose, though anything tainted by it was prone to be.
The need to look at the horrendous tomes made her feel ill and she stood to take a break. Moving to the desk that Telvani had once used, she searched it once again for signs of his activities. She opened the drawer and shuffled through the papers listlessly. They had been looked through so many times before she had little hope of finding anything
new now. Even Gryffon, with his experience in espionage and codes, could find nothing suspicious about the documents.
As she slid her hand along the edge to grasp the sides to take them out, her finger caught on something, and a sharp pain shot up her arm.
“Ouch!” she exclaimed, pulling her hand out of the drawer and scattering the papers all over. She examined the cut dispassionately, and sighed as she looked down at the mess. She gathered all the documents back together, and tapped them on the desk to get them in order.
Something caught her eye in the drawer, and she peered closer. The area where she had cut her hand looked slightly different from the rest of the wood. She carefully ran her finger against it, mindful of the possibility of injuring herself further, until she came across the section which had cause the wound.
She hooked her fingernail underneath the tiny lever and clicked it outwards. A long sliver of wood swung out, and as it did so, the bottom of the drawer popped up slightly.
“Well, I’ll be…” Layna murmured and reached in to remove the panel. Underneath were piles of more papers, all with a particular symbol etched into the top right corner, the symbol of the Order, but slightly modified. It must be Telvani’s correspondences to his new faction of the Order, the Faithful!
Layna picked these up with glee and read through them quickly. The first few gave no more information than they had already gathered themselves, though they were an unwelcome reminder of the humiliation of what was going on behind their backs.
One near the bottom, however, spoke of a project on a much greater scale. One that would make certain that Lord Telvani would have the support he needed to gain control of the country. Layna gathered up all of the hidden papers and rushed from the room, sweeping past the throng of aides to find Gryffon.
He was talking with the royal mages, and by the expression on his face, they had come no closer to figuring out what was wrong with the Council members. They had several of them transported to the palace to keep an eye on them and hopefully quell any rumors of what was going on. Layna hated the need to not be forthcoming with the people, but the last thing they needed was to hear about yet another misfortune in the government. It was supposed to be a time of healing.
Bricrui (The Forgotten: Book 2) Page 4
