Blackmark (The Kingsmen Chronicles #1): An Epic Fantasy Adventure Sword and Highland Magic

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  Elohl had stayed for over a week at the inn. Eleshen, with her feisty ways and perpetual humor had charmed him, the first sweetness he had truly enjoyed for over ten years. She had put him to work in various tasks, letting him take comfort in the regular work of innship. Days had passed of a small, comfortable life. Scrubbing laundry, hanging it up to dry. Chopping firewood. Thatching the roof of the small barn out back. With the routine had come a kind of peacefulness for Elohl, his days mellow and mild for the first time in ten years.

  But restlessness had grown within him during his stay. A tingling sensation in his skin, an awareness of things left unfinished that made him lose all stillness, shifting with a subtle irritation in his tasks. Until finally, it was overwhelming. Elohl had blinked wide awake with the dawn this day, knowing his peace could not be found here, no matter how serene this placid life could be.

  “You can’t come with me,” Elohl growled for what felt like the hundredth time this morning.

  “Like Halsos I can’t,” Eleshen growled back, tossing her blonde braid defiantly, planted with legs apart right in the middle of the doorway. The frustrating little woman had packed some clothes and an overabundance of food the moment she saw Elohl making his own preparations to leave. And now she was standing in front of the door wearing men’s breeches and laced leather bodice, arms crossed and scowling, her petite, curvaceous form quite effectively barring his way to the road.

  “It’s dangerous in Lintesh.” Elohl tried again. “I’m a marked man. You can’t come.”

  Eleshen waved one hand dismissively. “It’s dangerous here. Your enemies, whoever they are, followed you. So like it or not, I’m already a target, Elohl. I’m safer with you.”

  Elohl couldn’t lift a hand to forcibly move her from the doorway, even though irritation had risen hot within him. With a low growl, he turned, marching for the door to the back porch instead. Like a barbed dart, Eleshen scurried around him, chucking her pack in his way and thrusting her arms out ahead of him, so that he nearly bowled her over. And clumsy as she was, managed to trip over her own boots and fall into his arms.

  Which he was starting to believe wasn’t entirely a lack of coordination.

  But once Eleshen was near, Elohl caught her scent, all spice and lavender, and his frustration made it even more alluring. He meant to push her away. He meant to tell her to move, but he found himself shucking his pack to the floor. He drew her close with a growl, and then she was on her tiptoes, kissing him hard. Elohl wrapped his arms about her little waist, crushing her close, one hand stealing up to hold her by the nape of the neck as his lips strayed beneath her ear. Eleshen moaned, then pulled back and slapped his face.

  “No!” She huffed, her cheeks hot and pale green eyes wrathful. “You don’t get to leave like that! Go now, or stay and make love to me. But you can’t have both.”

  Fire twisted Elohl’s gut, hot iron. He pulled away and glowered at her.

  “Go ahead,” Eleshen whispered fiercely, “Hit me. I’m a frustrating woman and I always have been and I know it. But you need a frustrating woman in your life, to keep you alive.”

  Elohl’s arms dropped from her like he’d been burned by firebrands. Her words had been meant to sting, and sting they did, far too much like Ihbram den’Sennia’s. Elohl had been living like a dead man for ten years, his glacial calm a replacement for true feeling. And now that he had finally begun to thaw, emotions roiled, unpredictable and wild. And Eleshen baited that raw part of him, that thawed part, sinking her spice and temper into his ice and cracking it wide.

  “You’re foolish,” Elohl growled. “You’ll be killed. Move aside and let me go alone.”

  Eleshen planted her fists on her hips. “Make me.”

  And then Elohl did something he hadn’t ever done before. Like a calloused cur, he put out one sinewed hand and seized her wrist, hauling her out of the way. He’d never handled a woman this way, but it was the only thing that would make sense to her stubborn temper. The only thing that could keep her safe, away from the plague of death that followed him.

  Eleshen sprawled with a squeak of astonishment, falling across a side-table as Elohl walked on, banging out the door and tromping down the back porch. Rounding the side of the inn from the backyard, he marched without looking back, his weatherworn boots sending up puffs of dust on the sun-dry road, though the thawing part of his heart clawed at him for doing so.

  But he’d not gone fifty paces before his expanded senses felt someone following. A scuff of dainty boots here, a sigh carried upon the breeze, the faint scent of spice. He walked on a few hundred paces without looking back, seeing if she would stop. It was a vain hope. She wouldn’t be deterred, whisking solidly on in his wake. At last, Elohl closed his eyes, taking the single long breath of his training and letting it out. He stopped and turned, eyeing Eleshen in his best forbidding manner.

  “What?” She quipped peevishly, pursing her lips.

  “You.” It was all Elohl could get out, and said everything he needed it to.

  “Me?” She argued back, feisty. “What about you? You’re the one going the wrong way.”

  He pointed down the road to the south. “I came that way ten years ago from Alrashesh, and I remember it like a nightmare. Go back to the inn, Eleshen.”

  She didn’t budge, smirking like she had all the apples in the world stuffed in her blouse. “That’s the way to Lintesh for any normal person. But the way to Lintesh for a Kingsman is that way.” She pointed, some distance up the mountain to his right.

  “No more games woman.” Elohl hefted his pack higher on his shoulders, turned, and marched on.

  “I’m not playing, you great idiot!” She shouted. Elohl heard her struggling to run beneath the weight of her pack, huffing to catch up with him. Slowing his walk, as if she pulled strings that went directly to his heart, he sighed and turned.

  “There’s no shortcut to Lintesh through the mountains.”

  “Not for regular people.” Her eyes glittered, almost merry. “Only for Kingsmen.”

  “An Alranstone?” He nodded up the mountainside, understanding filling him. “There’s one up there?”

  Her smirk grew wider. “Perhaps. But you’ll have to let me come with you. Traveling by byrunstone would save you the time you lost dallying with me.”

  Elohl stilled, remembering that last time he had journeyed in such a fashion. A wrenching sensation filled him, a twisting grip in his guts and limbs as if some great beast had seized him, trying to rip him apart. A grotesque rush and pressure like being drowned and threaded through a needle all at once. The thunderclap in his ears. All of it came rushing back, along with the searing heat in his throat, remembering his failure all those years ago. Of returning empty-handed, to an empty Alrashesh.

  “No.” Elohl murmured softly to the dust and breeze.

  “Why not?” Eleshen’s pretty heart-shaped face was surprised.

  “It won’t work for me.”

  “But you’re a Kingsman! Tales say that Kingsmen can travel by Alranstone any time they please!”

  “The old tales are misleading.”

  “Well,” Eleshen scuffed the heel of one boot through the dirt. “You could at least try it. It’s a half-day’s hike from here, up in a small valley just over that rise. There’s a bunch of tumbled ruins, a settlement. There’s a Stone in the middle of it all. We won’t be set back but a day if it doesn’t work.”

  “Unmarked can’t travel by Alranstone. It will leave you behind if I go that way.” Elohl gazed up the sharp ridge, searching for a spot level enough to indicate an old road.

  Eleshen pursed her lips. “That’s crap. I’ve heard they work for Kingskinder. They’re Unmarked.”

  Elohl fixed her with his best glower. Eleshen pursed her lips more, like she’d eaten a sour grape. He put his bristling commander’s demeanor behind his posture, staring her down. She fiddled with her braid but didn’t look away, chin elevating like a defiant horse.

  Elohl sighed, then
gestured towards the ridge. “Fine. But if you get left behind by the Stone, leave it be. Don’t come following me all the way to Lintesh. It wouldn’t be safe for you to travel alone.”

  “Any safer than it is for me to keep an inn alone?” Her eyebrows quirked. She smirked, then turned on her heel, marching down the road to the south.

  Elohl hitched his pack higher upon his shoulders with a torpid sigh, then picked up his feet, trailing in her dust. Not half an hour later of mutual stubborn silence, they spied an offshoot from the road, little more than a deer-track sprouting off to the west through the ditch. But the levelness of the ground where the track went suggested ancient stones beneath all the verge, and as Elohl stepped from the road to scuff his boot down through a hummock of moss, he found flat flagstone beneath, almost a handspan down beneath the tilth. Squatting, he brushed mud and moss from the stone’s surface, noting how flat and even it was.

  “This was a road, once. Well-traveled and fortified. Men don’t put this much effort into just any thoroughfare.”

  Eleshen squatted next to him. “My father and I used to take this track up to the ruins. We discovered the trail shortly after we arrived. A fisherman mentioned it when he was passing through. Most of the local hunters and trappers know it, though people don’t really come here.”

  Elohl gazed up the side of the ridge, the track winding upwards, switching back at long intervals just like a well-planned road would have. “But they do know about it?”

  She nodded. “Yes, local legend says it was a keep, a stronghold. When we get there, you’ll see, the stones in the main foundation are massive. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been a fortress. But it’s all fallen. It looks like it was badly sieged. Father and I found blocks of stone that we think came from the towers nearly a league down.”

  “Probably just ripped downstream by snowmelt,” Elohl commented. “I've seen massive boulders taken some distance in the mountains by spring floods.”

  Eleshen straightened, gazing back along the main road to the north. She shaded her eyes, squinting. Elohl rose from his crouch, glancing also. To see a lone man walking the road in the midday sunshine. His bearing was erect and his stature fit, and as Elohl squinted, he could make out the shape of a pack upon the man's shoulders, and the cut of his jerkin and trousers spoke of the military. High Brigade, in fact. And as the man drew nearer, Elohl could make out the lively features and shock of pale blonde hair that was Jovial den'Fourth, one of his own climbing team.

  “Trouble?” Eleshen whispered at his side.

  “No.” Elohl shook his head, puzzled and unsure what to make of it. “One of my former men. But what he's doing coming this way I can't rightly fathom. He's not due to be discharged for two more years yet.”

  “Maybe he's come to find you? Maybe the Brigade needs you back? Maybe there was a mistake with your discharge?”

  Elohl cocked his head, dark brows furrowing. All of those reasons seemed logical, and yet. Something restive within him stirred, like a mongrel dog prowling around an uncommon scent. “Arlus den'Pell gave me a formal dismissal himself. There was no mistake. Unless there's been a tremendous attack over the passes from Valenghia... but then they would have sent a rider after me. Stay behind me. I don't expect trouble from Jovial, but he’s… lecherous.”

  Eleshen blinked up at him. “What a gentleman. Or would you simply be jealous if he tries to kiss me?”

  “Just stay behind me.” Elohl growled. She did.

  Jovial was another minute approaching, hailing Elohl with a wave and a relieved smile upon his flawlessly-sculpted face, his blue eyes bright over his high cheekbones. “Lieutenant den'Alrahel!” He called. “Thanks be to Aeon! You've no idea how much of an ordeal it's been, getting even one man through to you!”

  “Jovial!” Elohl took a few steps forward, closing the gap as his man drew close. “What's the matter? I was discharged with everything in order. Is there trouble in the passes?”

  “Trouble for sure, that needs addressing, sir.” Jovial drew near, just a pace away now, slinging his pack to the dust of the road with a relieved groan, then moving forward with arm proffered in greeting. Elohl stepped forward, reaching out to clasp Jovial's arm.

  When suddenly, his entire right side tingled. The muscles twisted so badly that Elohl stumbled sideways, his hand spasming past his subordinate's grip. Shock flooded Jovial's face for a moment, at Elohl’s stumble. Elohl's own surprise at his body's reaction rushed through him.

  But then he saw the knife.

  Poised to take his kidneys, the short shank would have been thrust in from behind the moment they clasped arms in greeting. Eleshen's shriek confirmed what Elohl's body had already known. Jovial recovered, a snarl twisting his handsome features as he spun in, knife jabbing and swiping. A trained fighter, far better than any simple Brigadier, the man was a surge of mad intent. Shock flooding him, his senses on fire with tingling, Elohl recovered his equilibrium, blocking like wildfire. Slipping Jovial’s thrusts, he managed to get both hands to the longknives at his belt, protecting Eleshen with a growl upon his lips.

  “Assassin!” He snarled, ready with his own blades at last.

  “Don't you know me, Elohl?” Jovial's merry eyes were hard chips of blue as he threw down the short knife and pulled his own longknives. “Just one loyal Brigadier, come to collect his commander. Or rather, your body. There are some who would pay well to see evidence of your demise.”

  “Tell me who you are!” Elohl roared.

  “Why, I'm Jovial den'Fourth! And to you, that is all I will ever be.”

  Jovial lunged; they clashed. Muscles strained in a clinch for a moment. Their breath was hot face to face as they struggled. Suddenly, Jovial slipped out, taking a nasty cut on his shoulder to do it. They began to fight close, slipping and swiping. It was fast; deadly. Though Elohl’s senses spared him anything deep, he already had a number of slashes in the first moments of the fight, shallow cuts above his thick leather bracers, his shirtsleeves shredded and nicks on his neck. Jovial was the same, his knives flashing. Elohl went silent, entering a space of uncaring precision. A cut swiped at his windpipe. Elohl blocked with a forearm and it went shallow. Lancing in, his knife dove for Jovial’s jugular. The man slipped sideways but Elohl’s blade left a decent gash. Compacting, Jovial drove a set of fast swipes at Elohl’s groin. Twisting, the swipes hit Elohl’s outer hips, scoring his belt and leathers. Elohl lunged, upsetting the assassin’s balance, swiping to scissor-gut him. Pivoting, Jovial kept his belly whole as his blade dove at Elohl’s flank.

  Slippery with non-lethal cuts, both men’s white shirts seeped red in a number of places. Breathing hard, a musk-thick sweat rose from them, evaporating into the morning sunshine. The iron tang of blood flowing filled the air. But Jovial had been on Elohl’s team eight years. And there had been that time, high on a climb over Selten Pass, when an icicle had broken off and taken the man in the side of his left eye. Elohl took that advantage now with icy precision, slipping past, deep into Jovial's blind left side. The man was fast, but not fast enough. Elohl took a bad swipe across his upper chest to get in and slice Jovial’s forehead. Blood poured into Jovial’s eyes. He roared in fury. Blind, he blocked too low when Elohl dug the knife at his ribs, thinking Elohl meant to shiv his kidneys. Unseen, Elohl angled his longknife in and up, burying the slender weapon deep between the ribs and straight into Jovial’s heart.

  Accurate. Precise. And cold.

  The man gasped. His knees buckled, but the energy of the moment made him keep fighting past the killing blow. He swiped again and Elohl took it across his back, feeling it score deep through his leather jerkin, parting flesh and muscle. Elohl shoved his blade deeper, slashed with the other longknife across Jovial’s throat. Jovial crashed to the ground and Elohl let him fall with the first blade still buried in him to the hilt. Only one sentence escaped him as he fell.

  “Den’Sennia can’t save you now...”

  And then he was gone.

  Breathing
hard, Elohl stood over the dead body. Emptiness blew in his heart like a chill wind off glaciers. His body vibrated with energy from the fight, barely feeling his wounds. Jovial had asked for no mercy and Elohl had shown him none. And now, gazing down at a face he knew like a brother, Elohl felt his throat grip at last. A man he'd once called friend lay dead before him, bleeding out in the dusty road, his bright blue eyes glassy and dull. A man he'd once trusted. A man he'd commanded, trained, stood side-by-side with upon the battlefield with snow up to his knees and blood up to his elbows. He crouched, his gaze lingering upon Jovial's once-laughing face.

  “Just another assassin... Just like all the rest.” The pronouncement knifed Elohl to his core, skewering his gut. How many more were there, out there, men he had once called friend now tracking him? How many more knew he was traveling alone after his discharge?

  His gaze flicked to Eleshen. She was frightened, her breathing fast. But she'd stood her ground, her own boot-knife in her hand, ready just like the last time, her pack shucked to the dust.

  “You would have fought for me.” Elohl murmured, something about her defiant manner touching him.

  “Glad I didn't have to.” She breathed back.

  Elohl's gaze flicked back to the dead man. Emotions warred within him. Disgust, rage, sadness. With a sigh, Elohl retrieved his knife, wiped it on the body. He couldn’t bring himself to shuck Jovial’s sliced and bloody clothes to look for marks. It was indecent, somehow, even though the man had been an assassin. But Elohl had seen him naked at the bath-houses of High Camp enough times to know he bore nothing but the ordinary scars of battle.

  Elohl gazed at Jovial a moment more, then drew his glacial calm back into place. It was time to move on. He stood, wincing as he felt that nasty slash across his back at last, seeping with blood beneath his jerkin. The chest was bad too, runnels of blood making Elohl’s bracer slippery, coating his hand. But leaving the road was more important than his wounds. Elohl turned towards the trail by the roadside. “Up off the main road?”

  Eleshen nodded, wordless for once in all the time Elohl had known her. Elohl grasped the wrists of the dead man, hauling him off the road and under a spreading cendarie that would hide the body from any passersby. He came back, scuffing dirt with his boots, covering the blood that had soaked into the road until it looked like a pack of wolves had simply brought down a deer, then drug it off to the woods to feast. Jovial would be wolf-meat soon anyway.

  So much waste come from eight years of friendship.

  Silence persisted as Eleshen and Elohl took the mossy track beneath its tunnel of ancient cendarie and pine, boxwood and birch. But Elohl’s wounds called, pulling and agonizing. After a few hundred feet, he shucked his pack at a stream. Pulling off his sliced-up shirt and jerkin, he washed blood away in the stream. He let Eleshen tend the deepest wounds on his back and chest with a salve, stitches, and a dressing, then fished out his jerkin and shirt of his Kingsman greys and put them on. Then up they climbed again in silence, listening to the chirr of tit-widgets as they switched back again and again, the trail ascending thousands of feet up along the snake of the ridge. And though it was grueling, sweat soon pouring from them both, Eleshen said not a single word as she tromped determinedly on, buried in thoughts of her own.

  It was late afternoon by the time they gained the isolated valley beyond the top of the ridge. And now in the slanting rays, they found the secluded valley true to Eleshen’s word, a sprawling ruin nestled into the side of the mountains. The foundation-stones of a massive keep still lifted from the ground, though the forest had all but taken it back. A number of smaller foundations, houses and outbuildings, stood in precise semi-circles along more byrunstone roads out from the keep at the valley’s southern end. But enormous trees had worked their roots deep into the foundation-stones, some looking to be nearly three hundred years old, and all was quiet as specters beneath the spreading canopy.

  Eleshen led the way, and at last, they came to a wide area that was still mostly a clearing of low grasses and dirt over flagstones. Angling steeply up the mountainside, it arced upwards in a series of semicircular tiers. At the bottom was a massive Alranstone. Larger than any he had yet seen, this byrunstone towered four man-heights tall. It had not two or three eyes amidst the whorls and carven sigils, but seven, one above the next, climbing to its pinnacle. All of which were lichen-covered and closed, serene in their everlasting sleep.

  Elohl dropped his pack and approached, gazing up at the heights. He’d never felt drawn to a Stone before, had never really sensed them beyond the usual pressure he received in his sphere from normal stone. But this one felt different, compelling somehow. Elohl felt the rush of the Stone’s awareness as he approached within its boundary of Sight, his skin crawling and prickling his new wounds uncomfortably.

  But something about it pulled at him, as if he could feel it in his mind, a burgeoning pressure, an importance. Entranced, Elohl stepped up, extending one hand to touch the rough-chipped surface. A twinge crawled across his palm and wrist, the sensation like a wind blowing through his body from that contact, up into his mind. Elohl blinked, trying to dispel a sudden feeling of disorientation, as if he looked out over the entire amphitheater and the ruins from very high up. He had the sudden urge to climb the damn thing, a need to sit at the very top of the Stone and stare out over the valley far below and the high mountains beyond.

  Then, with a blowing whisper, the sensation was gone.

  “So what do we do?” Eleshen murmured at his side.

  Elohl blinked, pulled from his trance. He glanced over, to see her standing there with awe upon her face, gazing up at the Stone’s towering height. “Put your hand to the Stone with mine.” Elohl murmured. “I’ll say a few words, and then it should take us in. Don’t fight it. It will hurt, badly.”

  “Hurt?” Surprise flitted over her features.

  “Badly.” Elohl repeated, preparing himself with that word as much as her. Rolling out his shoulders, he readied himself for the pain. Memories rose of the last time he’d done this, gripping his throat. Elohl drowned them, deep underwater. It needed to work today, and the Stone had to feel him. Concentrating on the sensation of the rock beneath his palm, Elohl murmured, “Elohl den’Alrahel, den’Urloel, den’Alrashesh. Blessings to the Kingsmen. Blessings to the Alrashemni. Open, Stone of Alran, pass me free.”

  A shivering tingle lanced over his skin. A moment of recognition from the Stone, that words had been spoken, that someone stood penitent before it. But then it was gone. Elohl looked up. He wasn’t even certain the damn thing had judged him. All of the eyes upon the towering column were still closed. Disappointment clenched his gut, but relief eased his shoulders. Elohl sighed, then stepped away, walking back to his pack and rummaging through it for something to eat.

  But his fingers still tingled with an urge to climb.

  “That’s it?! What was that? Are you jesting with me?” Eleshen’s hasty feet strode up behind him. Wordlessly, Elohl found some mutton jerky in his pack and a roundel of cheese. He tugged them out and sat down upon his pack, chewing slowly to moisten the jerky. When one found oneself stymied upon a climb, it was best to take a rest and feed the belly, use the time to think. Eleshen dumped her own pack next to his, the both of them staring up at the towering, silent byrunstone.

  “I don’t get it,” she huffed at last. “You’re a Kingsman! Why didn’t it work for you?”

  “Alranstones are unpredictable, Eleshen.” Elohl bit off another piece of jerky, suddenly hungry as if he’d been ice-ascending all day. He could feel his wounds now, a throbbing, searing menagerie of pain. “They’re a cautionary tale among the Alrashemni. Three hundred years ago, there was a war in one of the Valenghian border passes. Rakhan Tourliat den’Tharn led a great host to one of the Stones rather than towards the battle, because he thought they could make better time. But it wouldn’t open for him. Every man and woman in his host tried their hand, and the Stone remained quiet. They lost two days trying to g
et the bastard to open, then had to turn around and trek into the mountains. The battle was over when they arrived. The pass was lost, and they had to fight in the Longvalley. It was a bloody skirmish, lasting a full summer, when it could have been solved in days. Rakhan Tourliat lost his life that summer, as did most of the five hundred he led to war. All because of the byrunstone.”

  “Aeon be merciful,” Eleshen murmured. “But you said you’ve traveled by one.”

  Elohl gazed up at the seven eyes, still serenely closed. Emotions roiled him, deep down. And he still had the itching urge to climb the damn column and put his face right up next to that topmost eye. “Our need was great. It is said that need allows them to see you. But not always. Sometimes they’re asleep, so the stories say, buried so deep in dreams that they don’t recognize you. Sometimes they’re awake, but they deem you unfit to travel. Tourliat needed to protect the border pass for his King, but even the need of five hundred Alrashemni was not enough. And my need now? To find a sister who might be dead? To look for a scattered remnant of a people ten years gone? To escape a veritable flood of assassins that are apparently after me now? My need isn’t enough. Apparently.”

  Eleshen’s hand settled upon his arm. “I’m sorry, Elohl. I didn’t know. Did you feel anything from the Stone? Anything at all?”

  “I felt its awareness. But… it passed on.” But even as he spoke, the tingling speared his hand and wrist again, and the fingers cramped as if they were already climbing.

  “Does this stone look like the one you used before?”

  Elohl shook his head. “No. All the stories I’ve heard, all the sketches I’ve seen, the most eyes any stone has ever had were three. One to direct the awareness of the Stone, and one to focus the energy in some way, so two minimum. And there is a third, sometimes, that provides visions to those with seeing abilities.”

  Ghrenna’s face surfaced in Elohl’s vision suddenly, her lake-hued eyes with their strangely long and curling eyelashes drowning him. Her white-blonde hair was back, gathered into a loose bun, a few wisps coming loose by her high cheekbones. Her head turned suddenly, as if she was listening, baring her slender white throat and fine jaw. The movement was at once elegant and alert, with the stillness of precision that had so drawn Elohl to her all those years ago. Her white-blonde hair was ornate, done in thick braids wound round and through each other like she belonged among the wild kings of the north.

  But Ghrenna had never worn her hair in braids, not like that. Elohl blinked, confused. A wind blew through him suddenly, like a northwesterly over icecaps, and the image of Ghrenna passed.

  “So what do the other four eyes do?”

  Elohl shivered, unnerved by the sensations he was having near this Stone. He glanced over, to see Eleshen staring up towards the top, shading her sight with one hand from the late-afternoon sun.

  “Truly?” Elohl gazed upwards also. “I have no clue.”

  CHAPTER 12 – THEROUN