Iris was nine when she heard about the Legion of Death, as it had come to be called, for the first time. She and a group of others were clustered in the sun on the long, sloping lawn of their private school, listening while a boy named Dante Cypriss gave his rendition of the tale. He was ten, deadly serious, and his telling left something to be desired. He spoke like he was reciting a campfire ghost story—and in some sense, he was, his captive audience huddled close around him.
“They say only half of the soldiers are really alive, did you know that?” Solemnly, the members of the circle shook their heads. Dante Cypriss nodded gravely. “It’s because he collects the ones he kills, and the friendlies, too. Just picks ‘em right up off the ground.”
“But…how? I mean, they’re dead…right?” The question came from a girl in braided pigtails and thin, round glasses, a patch of freckles splashed across the bridge of her blunt nose. Her forehead was furrowed in anticipation of Dante’s answer. He hesitated.
“Well….they were. But then they aren’t anymore.” This explanation was just vague enough to be satisfactory, and they all fell into silent contemplation. Was it possible for corpses to get up and walk again? But at such a tender age, the dark implications of such a story remained mostly beyond their grasp, and so talk gradually shifted back toward the mundane: homework, or tests, or who liked who. For Iris, however, the story stuck in the back of her mind, putting down roots, like a tree.
Rai nodded, in a way that very much recalled the sober young face of Dante Cypriss. “So the Legion of Death,” Iris said. “It exists?” He smirked wryly.
“Is that what you call it?”
“When we were kids,” she said, a little defensively. He shrugged.
“He doesn’t call it anything. But, yes.” A protracted, heavy pause. “And yes, I made it.”
“Why?” She was watching him with the intent expression of a pupil, having all but forgotten about her original purpose.
“Why do you think?” he asked. For the first time, his voice was slightly sharp. She took her hand off his arm. When he continued, the edge had disappeared. “I had no choice.” Thoughtfully, he amended his statement. “I have no choice.”
“Are you indebted?” Rai looked at her carefully then, his azure eyes seeming to bore straight through her. She resisted the urge to step away.
“You’re interested?” he asked. “At the end of the story, you will walk out that door and we will never meet again. What’s the point?” The girl pursed her lips. The thought engendered earlier—that of his rescue—was drifting slowly to the forefront of her consciousness. He saw that she was thinking and said no more.
“How long have you been here?” she asked, without meeting his eyes.
“I don’t know.” Truthfully, it was getting very difficult to conjure up any image except that of the room in which they stood. He kept this to himself.
“Will you ever be free?” To this, he knew the answer.
“No.” Her green-grey gaze flicked to his face, alight with a bright, daring spark.
“Shall we change that?” As soon as he realized what she meant, a tight, unfamiliar emotion began to gather in his chest.
“It would be infinitely more dangerous for you to leave with me,” he told her. She shrugged. Again, he glanced toward the window, but he didn’t move, or make any indication that he was going to accept her offer. After a minute of nothing, Iris rolled her eyes.
“God, it’s like you want me to leave you in this shithole.” She turned away, toward the exit. “Come on. I decided for you. We’re out of here.” Halfway out into the narrow hall, she looked at him and said, “I assume you won’t repeal the magic around the treasury for me.”
“I can’t,” he said, with genuine apology. “The unbinding of the spell would attract too much attention.” She didn’t seem fazed.
“I figured it would be too easy, but that’s okay. You’re the most valuable thing he’s got here anyway.” Side by side, they scooted along the wall, toward the open chamber. As soon as they emerged, Iris took a quick look around. Like before, all was empty. “This is almost too simple,” she remarked lightly. “Is there a catch?” Although she was still careful as she retraced her steps down the winding path, she moved with much less trepidation than before.
“The only time anyone ever comes up here is when he checks on me in the morning and at night. At sunrise, he will discover my absence, and once he has…” He trailed off. An irrational fear had cropped up in his thoughts that if he told her the consequences of these rash actions, she might return him to his confinement.
“What?” Her voice broke through his apprehension.
“He will hunt us down.”
No more was said.
They could feel the drafty winter air coming around the final corner; Iris had left the door of the abandoned chamber open just a crack, but the wind had blown it ajar in her absence. Rai pulled it shut behind him, and for just a moment, a creeping uneasiness crawled across the girl’s skin. He was a master of the dead, and he had just locked the door. She crossed to the window, putting as much space between them as she could, and looked out onto the desolate landscape below. Even now, the prints she had left were gone, covered over by a new layer of snow. She looked over her shoulder.
Rai was observing her, his translucent skin glowing where the moonlight touched. He was like a living statue, those cold blue eyes the only hint of life. She was just now realizing that his presence posed a problem she hadn’t considered ahead of time. “How are we going to get you down?”
Smoothly, like a jungle cat, Rai strode over to the windowsill, his eye passing over the hole she’d hammered into the glass. He gauged the distance between the outside ledge and the drift on the ground. “I can jump,” he said mildly. As if forty-five feet were no big deal.
Iris had never heard anything so crazy in her life, and she told him so. “You will break your bones. I don’t care what kind of magic you know.” He glanced between her and the window, and then he shook his head.
“I’ll be fine. I can catch you.” The suggestion sounded even less appetizing once he made her part of it.
“Like I’m going to trust a man who wants to jump from a damn tower,” she replied acidly. His chiseled features remained impassive. “Am I missing something? Is there a reason you’re trying to kill us both? I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“You are. And if I catch you, I’m returning it.”
“Oh, so now it’s an ‘if?’ I don’t think so.” He was smiling just slightly as he turned away from her, pushing out one side of the two paned window. She watched him put his head and shoulders through. When he returned, his hair was dusted with snowflakes.
“If you want to waste time climbing down the wall, that’s fine with me. I already told you my plan.”
Then, swiftly, leaving her no time to answer, Rai jumped.
Iris had to stifle the urge to shout before any sound manifested in her throat. She wished it were similarly easy to resist the urge to stare downward along his trajectory, but she couldn’t help herself. Although the threadbare clothes he was wearing were dark with dirt and age, Rai was almost invisible through the driving snow. If she shielded her eyes, she could see a crater chunked into the drift where he had landed, and she could see him standing beside it, his face turned expectantly upward.
God damn it, she thought. How the hell did he do that? Though her vision was limited, he didn’t appear to have suffered the grievous injuries of which she had warned, and for some reason, this irritated her. Leaning into the frigid wind, she took a moment to inspect the weather conditions. In a word, they were horrible. The wintry gales hadn’t subsided even for a minute while she’d been busy with Rai, and they drove the thick snow sideways as it fell, destroying what little visibility there had been when she first arrived. She grimaced. It would take forever to get down through this, assuming she wasn’t lifted straight off the wall in the first place. Iris looked at the braces hanging from her b
elt. Then she turned her eyes back to the howling maelstrom outside. Somewhere in the whiteout below, Rai was waiting.
I can catch you, he had said.
She shook her head vehemently. She couldn’t even see him through the storm. There was no way he’d be able to break her fall. But then, the girl surprised herself by hesitating. Right? She chewed her lower lip in contemplation. It seemed completely implausible…until she took into account the fact that he had jumped himself, and he was as fine as he said he’d be. There was definitely some critical tidbit she hadn’t been told, and as soon as she had the chance, she was determined to find out what it was. But right now, she was stuck. Rai appeared to be her only way out.
I thought I was saving you, she thought wryly. With extreme reluctance, she pushed herself up diagonally through the open window frame, narrowing her eyes against the biting chill. Perched like a monkey, one foot still technically inside, she searched for him among the blots of ice and snow. A faint approximation of his voice reached her ears above the shrieking gusts.
“It’s okay.” At least, that’s what she thought he said. It was followed by a word she couldn’t quite make out. Crouching, poised on the edge of the stone, Iris pulled in a deep, razor-sharp breath, steeling her nerves. Her legs pushed off, and she was flying, the air stinging her cheeks as it rushed by.
She closed her eyes.
He tracked her dark form on its graceful descent, her arms spread like the wings of a bird. While he was waiting for her to make the decision, he had anticipated the place in which she would land, and that was where he stood as she fell, his eyes turned upward and impervious to the snowflakes that sought to blind them. Though fifty feet was high from the ground, and a long way for fragile bones to fall, he knew he had only a matter of seconds to position himself precisely. But he could see that he’d judged right, and an instant later, she dropped neatly into his arms. He stepped back to steady himself. She opened her eyes. Her cheeks were crimson with the cold.
“Shit,” she said. “That was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.” He set her down carefully.
“And now we’re even.” She took a couple of steps away from him, then turned back and locked eyes.
“Yes. Thank you for not dropping me.” He shrugged, as if it was the least he could do—which, really, it was. The hint of a smile caught her lip before she glanced toward the bleak horizon. Above the soft grey line of the snowfall, a strip of the velvet sky was beginning to lighten. Iris frowned. “We’d better get out of here.”
Like she had anticipated, their departure was much slower than her arrival had been. The snow was wet and heavy, clinging to their feet and legs like tailor-made weights. She tied her scarf tightly around her head, crossing her fingers that it would be enough to stave off frostbite. After a few minutes trudging through the frozen tundra, her joints felt stiff and dead. Perhaps this time, she’d bitten off slightly more than she could chew. She hoped she wouldn’t have to pay too dearly; after all, she was already leaving more or less empty handed. Behind her, Rai’s footsteps kept a comfortingly regular time.
The plains of Volikar were dotted here and there by copses of feeble trees, and giant boulders of mysterious origin. It was under an outcropping of one such rock that Iris had made her camp for the past eighteen days, and she had memorized its location so thoroughly that she could find it despite her mind being dulled by the elements. The thirty-minute walk felt like eternity; by the time she spotted the boulder’s face rising up out of the ice, she could no longer feel her extremities. Although she could see that the rock’s shelf had protected her tent from the worst of the blizzard, a chest-high berm had piled up in front of it, blocking their way. She paused. The process of thinking seemed painfully slow.
As he drew even with the girl, Rai put his hand gently on her shoulder. He could see from the way she was moving that she was exhausted, and possibly in danger of succumbing to the cold. Under the circumstances, he decided that it was best for him to take charge. He did not want to have to work his magic on her.
“It’s blocked,” she said, nodding slightly toward the drift in front of them. Her voice sounded thick through the filter of the scarf. “We need to get through there.” Rai took her by the arm.
“Come on,” he said, in the same way a farmer would speak to a reluctant horse. She followed docilely in his wake, stepping into the hollows left by his boots. When they reached the obstruction, Rai paused for a moment, thinking. Then he shrugged, pulled back his foot, and kicked at the base until a space had cleared in the middle. Iris didn’t even look at him. He could see red patches blooming where her skin was exposed, and he frowned, guiding her toward her tent with a firm, steady hand. Despite having spent most of it locked inside a primitive isolation chamber, he had spent enough time in Volikar to recognize the warning signs of frostbite.
Iris’ numb fingers were too clumsy to open the tent flap, so he reached around her to do it himself, nearly pushing her inside. As the entrance closed behind him, the wind’s howl died, and he turned around, surprised by the sudden silence. A look of mute disbelief crept into his eyes.
The cat thief’s tent was nothing like he had ever seen before. Though not grand in size, some sort of illusory magic had made the structure seem much smaller from the outside, certainly not large enough for the bookshelf he saw, or the simple stove in the far corner. The walls were dark and impressively sturdy—flame-resistant, he assumed. Such was the strength of his amazement that he all but forgot about the girl herself, roused only from his reverie by the sound of her voice.
“Can you go over and light the stove?” she asked. “There’s fuel right next to it.” She had pulled the scarf down from her mouth and was blowing into her cupped hands. The spots on her cheeks were already fading.
The furnace was a low-slung, potbellied affair, with a front loading door and a thin stack that threaded up through an outlet in the tent roof. The inside was remarkably free of ash, and when he looked for the fuel she mentioned, he found a neat stack of odd black cubes instead of wood. The handful he took weighed down his palm. “What are these?” he asked, half to himself.
“They’re an ultra-compressed form of energy that is manufactured en masse on the world I’m from.” She spoke by rote; it was clearly an explanation she’d given more than once. “They’re becoming quite popular elsewhere, but I’m not surprised you don’t know about them. Even if you hadn’t been sequestered in the castle, Volikar is still incredibly medieval, compared to the rest of the system.” She looked at him. “You only need two or three. They burn themselves down to nothing, and that takes a pretty long time.” Dropping the extras back into the pile, Rai tossed three cubes into the stove and lit them up with a lighter he found on the top. They smoldered for a second, and then a bluish flame appeared. He shook his head as he closed the door.
“I get the feeling I’ve missed a lot of things,” he muttered.
The oven’s warmth spread like a blanket; soon, Iris had almost pushed the harrowing subzero trek out of her memory. She sat on the large mattress in the center of the space, legs and lower arms tucked away under a comforter. “Are you cold?” she wanted to know. The young man definitely looked like he should be— in thin, roughly made clothing, he was hardly dressed for the sort of brutal weather they had just endured—but he seemed perfectly at ease. He shook his head.
“I’m fine.”
Iris furrowed her brow. “Okay,” she said, “we have got to talk about this. How could you possibly be fine? And how were you fine after you jumped from a goddamn five-story window? Like, really. Fill me in, here.”
Rai did not oblige her right away. He looked past her, at the painted scroll she’d tacked above the bed to make the surroundings a little homier. She sensed that it took a great amount of effort for him to drag whatever story he was going to serve her out of the depths of his memory, and she felt a pang of sympathy. But it was brief, overshadowed completely by her desire to know the truth about this half-stranger.
Iris tried not to look too interested, because she understood the story was painful for him to tell. She sat back against her pillow, listening.
“To tell you the truth, I can’t recall much of anything before a certain point. Maybe that means it’s been longer than I thought.” He rubbed his chin absently. “My parents’ faces, the places where I lived…those are all lost to me now.” He smiled grimly. “This isn’t going to be much of a memoir, I guess.”
She was feeling worse and worse about bringing the whole thing up, but Iris Deleone was nothing if not stubborn. He had started to talk, so she refused to be guilty about wanting to hear him out. “Where do your memories begin?” she asked. He mulled that over for a little while.
“I was thirteen, I think.” His voice was mild and low, and she found it curiously soothing. “King Serberos came to the town where we were living, and it was extremely important. There were a lot of preparations.” He paused. “I was standing in the square when his carriage showed up. I saw him get out. And as much as I’ve forgotten over the years, I’ll never lose the look he gave me.” Again, he fell silent before resuming his narrative. “It was the look of a man who knew something I did not. A lot of things, actually.”
“What happened?” Iris had to stifle the urge to lean forward.
The Man In The Wind Page 2
