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

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  “Ghren? Ghrenna? Can you hear me?”

  Ghrenna tried to open her eyes, tried to form words to respond to Luc’s question, but all movement failed her. The iron tang of blood filled her mouth from the chewed insides of her cheeks, but she couldn’t swallow it away. She tried her eyelids, but they stuck as if sealed shut with horse glue. Her hearing pulsed in and out like a slow tide. Memory was coming back now, through her fog. Crouching upon the estate wall, her jaw locking tight with a spasm, not even able to shriek. Her limbs suddenly turning to water, splaying out from beneath her. Falling. She had a vague impression of being caught in strong arms, a curse and a grunt. A flurry of motion and sound that her seizing mind couldn’t comprehend, but which must have been her guildmates rushing her away from the manor they had been about to rob. Moving through trees, watching silveroaks sway and dance in the crescent-moon dark. Her eyes coming unrolled as her body finally gave up in utter exhaustion, everything lax. Her head lolling over someone's strong arm.

  “What the fuck was that back there!?” Gherris’ voice was a raw snarl, sandblasting her ears.

  “Shut up Gherris!” Luc’s voice rose with a fierce bite. “She’s had a Thren-Maule seizure. We need to get her to a physician.”

  “At this time of night? Dressed like we are?” Gherris growled.

  Ghrenna struggled to open her eyes, but only managed to flutter them. Their voices were too loud, too harsh for her still-pounding head. Someone had unbound her hair from its bun, and it fell over her ears, curtaining her somewhat. It had probably been Shara. Shara knew that when the headaches hit hard, every sensation was misery.

  “Shut up, both of you,” Shara interjected. “She’s coming around. Ghrenna? Can you hear me?”

  “I told you all that shit she smokes will be the death of her.” Gherris sounded sullen.

  “It’s the only thing that keeps her headaches at bay!” Shara snapped back, hennish.

  “A little threllis never hurt anyone,” Luc’s warm hand traced Ghrenna's brow. “I’ve never seen it do anything like that. I don’t think it’s the smoke.”

  “You’ve never seen anyone smoke as much as she does.”

  “True,” Luc’s voice was considering. “But I’ve spoken at length with an apothecary who smoked nearly as much. They use it for chronic fugue-headaches and to forestall seizures. She vomits in the morning, doesn’t she? And her appetite is weak until midday? If she's seizure-afflicted, I bet she's never even without her pipe when it's just the two of you girls around the cavern, is she?”

  “How did you know all that?” Shara murmured.

  Luc chuckled, wry. “I know a lot more that you give me credit for, woman. Come on, Ghren, here, whiff this.”

  Something between the Sewage Canal and a dead porcuphensis wafted past her nose, its reek the stuff of a whore’s after-bath. But Ghrenna found her body suddenly gagging, and her eyelids finally popped open, to see Luc above her.

  “There you are,” he breathed, fingertips stroking her face. Luc's smile was grim, a fearful tightness to the corners of his green eyes. “You gave us a turn, woman. Don’t you ever fall off an estate wall like that again!”

  Ghrenna struggled to sit up. Luc and Shara each took an arm, propping her up on pillows. She was back in the underground grotto, in her very own ruined canopy bed. Relief filled her, a deep feeling of safety, knowing that no enemy could accost her while she was weak. While she had been unconscious. Her vision rippled through her, flashing and receding, boiling up and fading. Hundreds of men in dark grey, standing defiant in a blue-cobbled plaza. Pennants fluttering in the breeze, from five different nations. So many colors of skin, from the pale redheads of the north to the bronze Cennetians of the south. And beyond that, massing at the city’s walls, an army the likes of which she had never seen. A vast host, filling the plain, ready to do battle.

  Ghrenna took a deep breath, trying to stabilize her mind in the present, focus on returning to her pain-riven body, even though a part of her wanted to stay away in this astonishing and strange future she had seen.

  “How did you get me home?” Ghrenna grated at last, her voice raw, throat still mercilessly tight.

  “Luc carried you,” Shara murmured, stroking Ghrenna’s unbound hair, “all the way. He caught you, too.”

  “Fifteen-foot fall, little Byrune.” Luc grumped, his demeanor consumed by worry. “Nearly wrenched my shoulder off keeping you from splatting like a ripe fig-melon.”

  But Gherris was pacing, back and forth near the armoire and the black abyss that ran the length of the cavern. He rounded on them all, furious. “You’re a liability, Ghrenna! Always smoking! These headaches… and now this!”

  Luc rounded on the younger man. “Like you should speak! You just can’t wait to slit a throat for your sick pleasure. Every damn night! You want to go be bloodthirsty, you sick fuck? It’s called the King’s army. Go sign the fuck up! I’m so tired of your bullshit—”

  “Everybody calm down,” Ghrenna struggled up from the pillows to show she was hale. But sitting up made her head a cascade of misery, lancing so deep she keened out, “Can someone find my pipe?”

  “Here, sweetie.” Shara had her glass-blown pipe already packed and lit from the copper threllis canister by the bed. She held it out. Ghrenna took it carefully, brushing her white-blonde waves out of the way, then had a long pull. The thunderous roil dulled some.

  Gherris gestured at her angrily. “You can barely even move! And right to the smoke! Like an invalid. What the fuck is this?”

  Ghrenna pinned him with her eyes. She put everything into that stare, letting him feel how little she cared about him, letting him feel that just because he was Kingskinder, she owed him nothing. Ghrenna had always made alliances of necessity, and Gherris was more liability than she was. It was time to tell him, to tell them all, and see what her guild would do.

  To see if they, like everyone else, would call her a witch.

  “Alrashemnesh aere phelo Areseitya rhavesin.” Ghrenna murmured, empty, filling herself with stillness.

  Gherris blanched. He trembled. “Areseitya?” He breathed. “Are you fucking with me?” Ghrenna did not comment, still pinning him to the wall with her gaze. “Fuck.” But shame was in his visage now, the rage in him retreated. He stared at her for a very long moment.

  Luc cleared his throat, glancing from one to the other. “Um… what did I miss?”

  Gherris spared him a cursory glance, then stared at Ghrenna again, peering at her as if she was a very dangerous species. “She’s says she's a seer. The word Areseitya means True Seer, in Alrashemni. It's used for people who have visions.”

  Luc was staring at her now, his lips fallen open in astonishment. “Um…like… the Three Seers of Wyr? Like that old fae-yarn?”

  But Gherris shook his head. “No. Fucking childish drivel. True Seers don’t have visions about lost chickens, Luc. True Seers have visions like, when the fuck we are going to die. Visions like, who killed the little girl found strangled in the street. Visions like, if there are any other Alrashemni left… right, Ghren?” His last words were a whisper, a flicker of hope in his young, cruel face.

  “I don’t know that for certain, Gherris.” Ghrenna murmured. But she knew the color of that grey from her vision. And she had seen hundreds of them, massed for battle. Massed for war.

  “Then what good are you?!” Gherris snarled.

  “Good for a lot, I’d say.” Luc was appraising her now, thoughtful. “Did you see something, Ghrenna? Is that why you seized and passed out?”

  “What was it, Ghren?” Shara was calm, taking it in stride, the only one of Ghrenna’s guild that knew Ghrenna was finally admitting the truth of who she was, and what.

  “I saw Kingsmen.” Ghrenna’s gaze was still on Gherris. “Hundreds of Kingsmen. Alive. In the courtyard of Roushenn Palace and arrayed for battle.”

  “What?” Gherris startled. “But I thought all the true Kingsmen were dead! Are you saying there are hundreds alive out th
ere somewhere?” Gherris was attentive at last, his manner sharp as he came over to lean upon the post of her bed.

  Ghrenna took a long pull, eyeing him. “My vision could be wrong.”

  Gherris’ eyes narrowed. “True Seers don’t have false visions.”

  “And mine generally aren’t. Save for one, once. But it was something so important…”

  “That now you don’t trust them.” Luc’s voice was somber beside her.

  She glanced over. “Some I trust. They feel true. But there are others I can’t prove true or false right now.”

  “About Alrashemni?” Gherris watched her carefully.

  Ghrenna nodded. “Yes. About Seventh Seals, like me, friends I once knew. There were five of us. Four now, if my visions are correct.”

  “Where are they?”

  “One is in Lintesh. She’s Captain-General for the Palace Guard. One is a traveling prizefighter. One died in battle. The last I think was High Brigade, I always see him in the mountains, but he may have been discharged.” Ghrenna’s mind strayed as the threllis kicked in. She saw Elohl’s sinuous limbs again, saw him fucking that other woman with the honey-blonde braid. It sparked a bitter possessiveness. Ghrenna pushed it away, making herself still, empty. Getting angry would only heighten her current pain.

  “Lintesh. That’s only a week’s ride,” Gherris mused, and Ghrenna could see the calculating wheels in his mind turning.

  “We find my friend in Lintesh, and what? Your parents are suddenly alive again?” It was mean, and Ghrenna took a long pull from her pipe, angry, afraid. Gherris’ words had voiced a thought she had often had. But like every other time, she pushed it away. It was safer to stay here, in this beautiful tomb of whorls and silver sigils, slowly dying, than to go back there and face what she had done. How she had sent them off on a fool’s quest from a false vision. How she had spilled the whereabouts of the Kingskinder to the brute in herringbone leathers, who had broken her mind. It was safer to stay here, thieving, living like a rat, then to face what she feared. The truth and the judgment in Olea’s eyes, of how she had betrayed and ruined them all.

  Or Elohl’s.

  Luc was strangely sad at her unkind outburst, gazing at Ghrenna with a mixture of pity and concern that she found she couldn’t stand. A shocked silence filled the room, her guildmates all staring, Shara with her mouth open, Gherris flushed red as if holding back tears.

  “They called me a witch,” Ghrenna murmured at last around the stem of her pipe, seeking to explain. “Age three. A witch. Be lucky that you had love for your parents, Gherris, because mine called me a witch and then gave me up. The only ones who would take me were the Alrashemni. But this possible future…” Ghrenna sighed around the pipe in her teeth, then had a long pull, settling back into the pillows and staring at the rotted lace of the canopy. “It was just a flash, Gherris. A future I have no idea how or when it will come, or what to do about it. We could go to Lintesh, find my friend Olea, and never have it come to pass. Futures are tricky. Most of the things I see are common-thread events, which means they happen right as I see them, or immediately afterward. I’ve only seen a few true futures, and one was wrong. Deadly, horribly wrong.” Her gaze flicked to her laudable collection of clockworks, feeling all her shame again, just as fresh as the day she’d been carted to the Fleetrunners.

  Gherris’ eyes traced her attention. “Why all the clockworks Ghrenna?”

  “Because I was wrong. And everything collapsed because of it.”