Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  So there it is. I am who I am because of my father. I am thankful for knowing him. Is that so strange? Does that make me weak? A collaborator? I like to think not. I hate myself less when I think of my father as human, however flawed. I suppose it is pointless to dwell on him much more. He is gone. They say the Cornerstone, place of his exile, is bitterly, brutally inhospitable to life. Even though he promised me otherwise, I have to assume he is dead.

  Enough of Father. Enough of pining and pitying and wishing all were different. I try to write of happier things, but there are too few. I am alone in this. I must steel myself for the future. This rocky, treeless vale is mine to guard. If more men should come to capture or remove me, I will drive them away or slay them. Should Grim think to swoop down upon me, I will be ready to destroy him. I have my methods. I do not like them, but they are mine. Perhaps he remembers me as the doe-eyed fledgling I was, not as the sorceress I have become. How wrong he would be. So now I challenge you, Grimwain. Do it. Bring your finest. Bring your army to dig out the Undergrave and unbury the Ur. I will become all that I hate just to see you fail. I will melt your swords, nettle you with fever, and roast you out of your skin. I have these damnable powers. Do you think I am afraid to use them? I will sacrifice everything I am to destroy you. I will use the Nightness in ways the Ur never intended. I will slay a thousand of yours to save the world.

  Listen to me prattle. I write like an adolescent, brash and quick and bold. It is the Nightness. It quickens my thoughts and evokes my passions. I feel it throbbing inside me, even now wanting me to use it. If it had its way, I would have chased last night’s villains and burned every one of them to ash. I could have done it. I could have stretched out my fingers and set the entire valley ablaze. Maybe I should have.

  Resisting these powers takes a toll upon me, body and mind. I am so very tired. It hurts to do the right thing. It was ecstasy to do what was wrong. How long can I hold out? Where are you, Grimwain? I am waiting.

  Nephenia

  At dusk, the Hunter crouched amid the trees in the scarlet light.

  It was two evenings removed from the slaughter in the south, and it was all he could do to shut his eyes and try to forget what he had done.

  Fire. Death. The Wolfwolde. Nephenia.

  Atop his hill, currents of evening air washed through his tangled mane, soothing his soreness and wicking away his sweat. Beneath him, fog filled the valley to its brim with grey, steamy broth. His hill became an island in the mist, utterly alone above the world, a haven none but he and the stars could see.

  Me, the stars, and the Princess of Yrul.

  With his fire crackling before him, he leaned against his favorite tree, a stone-hued ash whose trunk cradled him and whose roots were warm and dewy. After a time, he opened his eyes to see the source of his newest, unlikeliest trouble.

  I should not have brought her here.

  Nephenia sat across the fire from him. Her lavender dress pooled about her like liquid silk. Her hair danced in the breeze, shining in the firelight the same as sun-braised copper. Her amber gaze, warm as summer, wandered from star to star. Of all the creatures to have befriended, he wondered why she should be the one.

  The night grew ever darker. Shadows fell across his eyes. At length he found himself lingering much too long upon her.

  “Something the matter?” she murmured.

  Had his beard been less wild or the moon a bit higher in the sky, she might have seen the flush in his cheeks. Glad to be hidden, he stretched his arms and stared into the fire.

  “Nothing the matter. Only tired and hurt. My body feels older than it is.”

  Nephenia plucked a strand of grapes from her lap and popped several into her mouth. She looked only slightly sleepy despite two days of tramping through the Romaldarian wilderness. “You’re a mess, Ser Hunter,” she said with a mild grin. “You need a bath and a dozen more stitches. But most of all, you need a shave.”

  He reached to his chin, where bristling strands of year-old beard greeted his calloused fingers. “I have not lived anywhere but the forest for a very long time.”

  “This I see,” she quipped. “What I mean is; there’s water down in the valley. One of your blades would do rightly to get rid of that scraggly mess. Does being the Hunter mean you have to look like a mountain goat? Or have you been doing this so long you’ve forgotten what you looked like?”

  She is trying to amiable, he knew. Her betrothed is dead, her family likely the same. She laughs to hide her pain.

  Roughing his beard between his fingers, he managed a half-smile for her. “Princess…”

  “Nephenia,” she interrupted. “Call me Nephenia. Anything but Princess.”

  “Nephenia,” he corrected himself, “you are right on all counts. I am scraggly. I need a weeklong bath. But these things matter none. Once a few nights pass and my wounds heal, I will return to the hunt. There is little point in being presentable when one’s work is death.”

  She shook her head, ambled to his tree, and with a sigh lowered herself to the ground beside him. “Ser Hunter,” she said while raising her brow, “what manner of madman are you? Your enemy has thousands of soldiers on his side. He has castles, horses, spies, and if I saw rightly, the services of dead men. What’s your grievance? Do you value his destruction more than your own life?”

  “I do,” he answered. I would die a thousand times to see him once in the grave.

  “I know why I should hate him,” she said, “but why should you?”

  “It is not for strangers to know.”

  She allowed a moment of silence to drift like a curtain of clouds between them. She spoke again only after his gaze wandered to the stars.

  “What is your name?” she asked in a softer tone. “Your real name, not the other.”

  “I have no other name. I am the Hunter.”

  “Fine. Keep your name if you like.” she pressed. “But tell me something else. Since you’re my protector, I insist. I want to know why you’re really in Romaldar. Do yourself the favor of unburdening your mind, and me the favor of knowing why you came to my city.”

  “Tomorrow. Not tonight.”

  “Nothing? Not even a morsel?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Fine.” She clucked her tongue. “I’ll talk instead.”

  He assumed her interest would wane. He knew in the next breath he was mistaken. Gazing reverently at the stars, Nephenia became uncommonly still, seeming to lose herself in thought for the hundredth time tonight.

  “Maybe there’s not so much to tell,” she sighed. “I never wanted to come to Romaldar. Roma is the home of our ancestral enemies, and I did only as Father and Mother bade me, as my duty commands. Mother, Father…I’m lost without them. I can’t imagine they’re still alive. For Lykaios to attack my husband’s village so openly, it means he’s in league with our king. It means…my brothers and sisters…all murdered. It means I’m alone.”

  “I apologize.” He touched her hand.

  Too proud to let him see her weep, she sniffled and looked away.

  “Were there something I could do,” he felt clumsy to offer, “I would do it. Trust in that much.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I will see you to safety if I can,” he said. “And if vengeance is any consolation, I will find the men who did this and string them up for the crows.”

  She faced him again. Her eyes were rimmed with tears, glistening like rain-wetted jewels, and her cheeks were glazed with starlight. She said nothing, but her unblinking gaze told oceans of her mind.

  She would hunt with me if she could.

  He laid down, resting on the dewy grass beside her. He was near enough to share his only blanket with her, but distant in all other ways. She was soon asleep and snoring, but he lay awake for long while afterward, scanning the stars as if hoping to find some meaning between them.

  As the night deepened, his thoughts blackened.

  He counted the stars, each one like an escaping soul, and his ins
ides roiled with vengeance unfulfilled. The Wolfwolde. His anger swelled inside him. No matter how many I kill, they grow. And now…this poor girl. Dead without me. Doomed to know me.

  I should help her.

  The next morning arrived after what felt like an eternity. Dawn’s early light washed over the hilltop, cutting the night’s coolness and driving back the fog. Sleep, ever a welcome medicine, had dulled the sharpness of his fury such that his first thought upon waking was of food rather than violence. His memory of the smoldering, corpse-riddled village feels mercifully dim.

  Somewhere amid the trees, he heard Nephenia singing in the Yrul tongue. Her song sounded mournful, yet somehow hopeful. He peeled himself from the earth and trudged to the hilltop’s edge. Where the grass ended and the trees began, he saw her marching back up the hill.

  “Good morning,” she sang to him.

  “So it is,” he replied.

  With his satchel slung over her shoulder, she returned an impossibly sunny smile before striding straight past him. The moment she reached the hilltop’s center, she plopped down onto the grass and poured a pile of figs from the bag.

  “Delicious.” She stuffed her cheeks. “Figs, plums, and berries. This valley of yours...a good place to hide.”

  “You are in a good mood,” he observed.

  “Am I?” She chomped. “Well, I’ve been thinking. If this is my new life, I’d best get used to it. No sense in pitying myself.”

  “I thought to wake and find you starving.” He gestured to her pile of food.

  “Oh?” She dropped three more berries into her gullet. “We Yrul are not like Romaldar girls. I was shearing sheep by the time I was five and splitting logs at ten. Yrul winters are hard, bitterer than anything you’ve known. There’re no idle hands in the mountains, and no such thing as daintiness.”

  Kneeling beside her, he reached into the bag and helped himself to a fig. The wound in his ribs ached, but he showed no sign. “Yrul winters, you say.”

  “You could have quite a life here, you know,” she said as she chewed. “Plenty of food, plenty of quiet to brood by. If you weren’t the big, scary Hunter, you could stay here forever. No more Wolde, no more Lykaios. With such a life, why do anything else?”

  “Show me where you found the fruit.” He changed the subject. “I will need plenty on my way to Archaeus.”

  “Fine.” She bounded to her feet. “Follow me. I found a grove in the valley.”

  In silence, he fell in behind her. Down the hillside she led him, skirting scores of barrel-bellied trees and pushing her way through curtains of hanging creepers. He admired her grace in the wilderness. Deep down in the valley, splashes of autumn sunshine made pools of light through which she walked comfortably, as if she had been here a thousand times before.

  She pushed her way through a last veil of vines and vanished beyond a wall of sun-touched leaves. He followed, and on the far side of the vine wall he halted before a stream. The water was shadowed by some dozen fruit-bearing trees, their branches green and heavy with ripe plums and figs.

  “Here it is.” She opened her arms.

  “Yours is a keener eye than mine.” He nodded his approval. “I have lived here many years and never once found this place.”

  “A little luck. A little snooping.” She shrugged.

  He walked the tiny grove from end to end. From the lowest branches of a dozen trees, he plucked two handfuls of fruit. “Perfect.” He held a plum up in the light. “This will serve me well on the hunt.”

  “So determined.” Her smile dimmed.

  “As I must be.”

  “Fine.” She stood tall beside the water. “About last night…about your beard and hair…I should very much like to clean you up. If you won’t tell me your name, I want to see your face.”

  “No reason for it.”

  “I won’t take no for an answer,” she explained. “You can sit while I do it, quiet as snow in the dead of winter, but you will be clean. Consider it my gift to you for saving me. You must accept. It is the Yrul way for a woman to cleanse a man after battle. I’m not your wife, but I’m all you have.”

  He considered arguing. But then, he thought, suppose a clean Hunter blends in better with the Wolde. Suppose it helps me reach Lykaios.

  “I accept.” He gave a modest bow. “It will be nice not to look like a monster, even if I remain one.”

  “Good.” She nodded. “Wait there. I’ll fetch your knife.”

  Before he could open his mouth, she was off, gliding like silver through the vine curtain. Grateful to be alone, he kicked his boots aside and dropped down on the bank of the pebble-bottomed brook. Five years, and I never came here. One night, and she finds it.

  She has to get away from here.

  His brooding lasted a while, and then Nephenia returned. She slipped through the vines like an invading glimmer of sunshine. With a shiver, he realized she was the first woman he had seen in months, and that she is utterly beautiful.

  “Dreaming dreary thoughts again?” She flipped her skirts and took a seat beside him.

  “A thousand thoughts are in my head, but none so clear as to make any sense of.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  She dabbled her feet in the water beside him. Ever playful, she bumped him with her shoulder. He felt ill at ease, a rabbit eating supper beside a wolf, though he could not dream of why.

  “Are you well?” She noticed his discomfort.

  “I am. You have the knife. Get on with it.”

  As though she had performed the deed a hundred times before, Nephenia took reverential hold of the moment. She hummed a soothing song, a Yrul melody, which calmed his restless nerves. She cupped her hands and cleansed his face with water from the stream, and afterward she used his knife to cut every trace of beard from his face and neck. Afterward, he sat still as she cropped his hair. She treated him as though he were a statue and she his sculptor, never once so much as nicking him.

  It was a sublime feeling to relax in her capable hands. Her touch felt like sunshine against his skin, carving away the shadows. She performed her work without a word of conversation, finishing just as the sun climbed directly overhead.

  Her ritual complete, she stood and regarded him. “And there you are.” She dusted the last of his hair from her hands. “The Hunter reborn.”

  He put two fingers to his cheek, now bare and clean. He ran a palm across his scalp, enjoying the bristle of cropped hair upon his hand.

  “I like it,” he told her.

  “And you should.” She nodded. “Had you a clean set of clothes, I’d stake your handsomeness against any man of Romaldar, maybe even of Yrul. Not bad for a morning’s work.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you coming then?” She parted the vine veil and glanced over her shoulder. “Or should I leave you be?”

  “Coming.”

  Thus began his time with Nephenia, princess of Yrul.

  For that day and three more, he spent his every hour in her company. He expected her to demand a quick return to civilization, but she never did. The least demanding woman in the world, he came to understand. A princess no more spoiled than any common girl of Romaldar.

  Without once mentioning that she was royalty and he the farthest thing from it, she toiled beside him. When his injured calf throbbed and the wound on his ribs leaked streamlets of blood, it was she who redressed his wounds, she who prepared his dinner, and she who lugged fresh water to the top of the hill. She was adaptable, agreeable, as hard-working as anyone he had known. And as proud and self-possessed as the mountains of Yrul.

  But then of course she had questions. Come each evening, when summer’s heat lessened and starlight pierced the cloudless sky, she sat beside him at the fire and pleaded with him to reveal his name, his history, and the reasons why he chose to hunt the Master of the Wolde.

  “You’ll tell me your secrets someday,” she claimed on their fifth evening atop the hill. “You know that, right?”

&nbs
p; He shook his head. “You remind me of someone. Someone just as persistent.”

  “Who?” She perked up.

  “I was not always the Hunter. I used to be freer and wiser. I knew a lady not so different from you.”

  “Tell me more.”

  He strained, stretching his mind to its limits. The memory dwelled at the edge of thought, the shores of a far-off realm. The man he once had been was almost entirely gone, consumed by the Hunter. “I cannot say much about her,” he faltered. “A woman, young and full of fire. You brought her to life in my mind, but now she is lost again.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I cannot recall.”

  “Was she beautiful?”

  “Yes. As are you. Somehow so alike. And yet completely different.”

  “Oh.”

  The night deepened. He and she sat companionably together, her countenance stroked by the moonlight, his eyes hidden in shadow. Not yet ready for sleep, he took the Greyblade across his lap and burnished it from pommel to tip. Nephenia lay with her head in the grass and her gaze angled to the stars, searching for meteors streaking through the night.

  This is be our last night here, he decided without saying. My wounds have healed faster than I hoped. Tomorrow we will wake and march northward. The Grae border is two days away. She will go to Gardenn. I will go to Archaeus.

  To Lykaios.

  He sat in the darkness and fell deeper into thought than any starlight could hope to breach. His heart seemed a haunted prison, for no matter which direction his thoughts wound through his mind, it all ended the same.

  “I had my chances,” he murmured, oblivious that he was awake and speaking.

  “What do you mean?” Nephenia yawned.

  “To kill him.” He gazed into the night. “The Master of Archaeus.”