Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  “What now?” She managed a smile between shivers.

  For once in his life, he had no answer. His cloak dripped, water pooling in a pond around his boots. She saw his thoughts, light and dark, flicker through the blacks of his eyes. She feared the silence might last forever.

  “What if you took me to your house?” She broke the silence. “If the rain keeps away, the streets will overflow with people. I would rather it be just you and me. You can lend me a shirt and a sitting place before your fire. We can talk and tell everything.”

  Another thousand thoughts flashed through the darkness of his gaze. She worried he might never speak again, that in her next breath the skies would open and a black rain sweep all of Thillria from the earth.

  Just as the cold began to course through her again, Garrett stirred to life. “Come with me,” he said. “Take my hand.”

  She raised her hand. He took it into his. His touch, warm as a hearth, melted the numbness from her fingers and arm.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “You will see.”

  He led her down the street and through the archway. She was helpless but to follow. Walking beside him, gaze glued to his face, she did not care whether he meant to take her to his home or lead her straight into the sea. Her heart drummed, her blood pounding like lava in her veins, and with each step she took it was all she could do not to slip inside his cloak and entwine her limbs around him. She missed him. She ached for him. My final anchor to the world. If ever he leaves again, I will die on the spot.

  Steady and silent, he guided her across Lyrlech’s cool, rain-splashed stones. The Selhaunt’s mist sprinkled her with every step. She followed him the same as a lost child, the same as a puppy, and when next she lifted her gaze, she found herself standing before a small dwelling of stone, a lonely hut at Lyrlech’s outskirts.

  “Home.” He rapped his knuckles against the hut’s heavy wooden door.

  “Home…” she murmured. “How long have you been back?”

  “Twelve days. Maybe longer. I do not count anymore.”

  He opened the door. As if entering an otherworldly dream, she wandered after him, though only for a few steps. He went ahead, and she remained in the doorway. His dwelling was small. Barely big enough for a hermit. But perfect for him. The round stone room beyond the entryway was furnished with a fur-buried bed, a sailor’s chest, and a lonely, dusty chair. Grey light peeked into two shuttered windows, glimmering like stray moonbeams across the floor. Most noticeable of all were the sounds of the sea, which permeated the dwelling’s stones and drowned out all the noise of Lyrlech.

  Unaware of her thousand streaming thoughts, he knelt to strike a fire to life in the hut’s tiny hearth. The first flames licked the kindling and scattered scarlet light throughout the room, and he shrugged off his cloak, kicking his soaking boots to the corner.

  “What is this place?” She stood on the threshold.

  He moved to one of the windows. He tugged the shutters open, allowing the grey light to enter.

  “A fisherman lived here,” he said. “I traded my sword to him. He went to battle the Wolde. In his place, I live out the end in peace.”

  His tone struck a cold chord within her. That he no longer desired to make war against the Wolde surprised her. Grimwain’s victory felt all the more complete.

  “Then you know?” She closed the door and dared two steps across the threshold. “The Ur are almost here.”

  “I have known since my time in Archaeus.”

  “You have?”

  “In the dungeons of Archaeus, I felt a presence I knew could not be human. I sensed everything you told us was true. And then, there is this…”

  He reached down to his bed and plucked up a wet leaflet of paper. She recognized it immediately. A Lyrlech pamphlet. The roughly-printed rag looked just like the one Daedelar had brought to her, only newer.

  “I found it on the street last night.” He regarded it. “I do not know why I read it, but I did.”

  He placed the leaflet in her hand. Different than the one I read, she knew. The thing dripped between her fingers, its ink running, but the header was legible:

  Old Legends Prove True. Black Moon Falls North of Shivershore.

  Her heart jumped. A shiver rattled her bones. Not trusting her eyes, she read the headline thrice before peering up at him.

  “They know?” she stammered. “How could they?”

  He looked to the window. “Because it is real. The moon, Grimwain, your father. All real. All true. For everyone. Not just us.”

  “What do they mean by fall?”

  “I do not know. I have not looked.”

  “But the Thillrians do not understand,” she said. “Else they would try to stop it.”

  “And they would fail,” he said. “Just as we did.”

  With that, she had no argument. She opened her mouth to rail against it, to rage against Grimwain and Lyrlech and all those who knew about the second moon and raised no war against it, but nothing spilled from her lips.

  To be angry now…meaningless.

  She sank onto the edge of Garrett’s bed. He came to her, folding a dry blanket around her shoulders. He pushed an errant lock of wet hair from her cheek. His shoulder bumped hers and his hand came to a rest upon her leg. She nearly jumped at his touch, so warm compared to her own.

  “How are you alive?” She entwined her fingers into his.

  “I will tell you everything, but not now,” he said. “First we need to make you well. You are cold and hungry. You need new clothes and a bowl of broth.”

  “None of that matters to me.”

  “I know. But it matters to me.”

  A brief, comfortable silence took hold of the world. She leaned into his arm, telling without saying that she wanted him to stay, knowing he would not linger longer than a few heartbeats.

  “I will not ask,” he said to her, his stoicism softening.

  “Ask what?”

  “What they did to you. How you escaped. How you came to be back in Lyrlech.”

  “I would tell you if you wanted.”

  “I know you would.”

  She blinked at him. Her body trembled like an icicle about to break. He was supposed to be dead, and her heart cold and mournful.

  “Can I stay with you?” she asked, almost a whisper.

  “Yes.” He squeezed her hand. “My home is yours.”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  She smiled, but it soon faded. “I have so many things to tell you. I wish I knew where to begin. I tried to survive. I wanted to be strong, but when I learned you and Saul were dead, I gave up. I am sorry. I lived, but I am weak.”

  “No,” he said. “None of us are weak. We are where we are not for lack of trying, but because Grim is too powerful. That is the way of things. The strongest prevail.”

  Tears quivered in the corners of her eyes. “Did Saul make it?”

  “Yes.”

  “He did?” The darkness in her eyes fled. “Where is he?”

  “We parted a week ago. He is well, but no longer in Lyrlech.”

  The memory of Saul made her eyes flicker with fresh happiness. She thought of his billowing beard, his sternness, and the smell of oak always on his hands. “That is good,” she said.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “It is something.”

  The longer she lingered beside him, the warmer she felt. Her body, cold as ice an hour ago, tingled as though her heart were pumping fire. Her natural senses thawed and the Nightness retreated to the abyss at the back of her mind. No other had this effect upon her, only him.

  “Garrett,” she said, “what we will do here? How will we spend our days?”

  Squeezing her hand, he looked upon her as though she were no longer a ghost, but a sight for the sorest eyes. She might have kissed him then, had not her courage faltered.

  “We have one month.” He cast a cold glance at the window. “We have no gods to answer to. We h
ave no fears remaining. We can live however we want, for whatever one month is worth.”

  “One month.” She remembered the summer solstice. “You know?”

  He squeezed her hand again, then released. “It will go quickly.”

  Storm before the Calm

  Ten days and ten nights after Andelusia’s arrival at Garrett’s hut, and the heavens over Shivershore knew only anarchy.

  My restlessness is to blame.

  During each of ten waking dawns, Father Sun snapped over the horizon with a vengeance, laying waste to Shivershore’s gloom. Colonnades of sunlight cut the night’s clouds like silver swords, and great swaths of earth and sea lit up like never before. Lyrlech was rapt. Father Sun’s light, so bright and unremembered, struck the people to profound stillness. They stood like statues in the streets, mouths agape, until their eyes grew bleary and disbelief ascended to acceptance.

  So did each day begin, sunnier than any in Lyrlech’s living memory.

  But then, as each day lingered, Father Sun inevitably failed. Ten dusks curtained the world, and each night all traces of sunlight were masked by the clouds. Like revenants the clouds became, the tattered remnants of an entire planet’s dead. Scudding, nightmarish nimbi screamed through the sky, and all who saw it fled fearfully indoors.

  This was Shivershore’s torment, caused unwillingly by Andelusia. If she could have looked beyond Thillria’s borders, she would have known that all lands suffered likewise. During the day, Father Sun shined majestically, but at dusk and beyond, black clouds haunted every sky, shadowing every heart in darkness.

  If her restlessness was at fault, she did little to quell it. During her first ten days with Garrett, she floated between contentment and despondency, between mild happiness and unquenchable loneliness. Garrett’s house was hers to share, but his heart seemed not so. At night she slept in his bed while he took to the floor, and though she ached to slide from beneath the sheets and nestle beside him, she never once dared. Her guilt for failing to stop Grimwain prevailed upon her the belief that she lived dishonorably, that I should enjoy no comfort or love.

  So it was that after each day, no matter how pleasant and serene, she crawled into bed with fear and anxiety in her heart, and the skies above Thillria answered in kind. She was only human, after all. The terror of death affected her the same as it would any other.

  And then the eleventh dawn arrived.

  Father Sun speared his early light into the little house like a trumpet’s triumphant blast. When she awoke, she stumbled to the window, scanned the sun-torn skies for any sign of the Ur, and sighed with relief when the darkest things she saw were the Selhaunt’s waves lapping against the rocks. The clouds cleared off and silver flashes of light danced on the tips of every wave. She shielded her eyes, and she saw Garrett.

  Like most mornings, he stood atop a boulder at the shore’s edge. Eager to be closer to him, she slipped out the door, clambered across the stony beach behind his house, and leapt atop the boulder beside his. She felt like a far different creature than only a few weeks ago. Her ebon locks, dry and dangling to the small of her back, whipped merrily in the Selhaunt breeze. She was clad in the folds the clean white dress Garrett had bought her. Though it was only peasant’s garb, she lent it the appearance of something far lovelier.

  I feel better than I should.

  I should be miserable. But no.

  Garrett looked at her as she climbed the rocks beside him. His acknowledgement drove back the night’s gloom, and she knew she would live another day.

  “Quite a sky you stirred up,” he said.

  “It might not be mine, you know.” She teetered atop her rock.

  “It is,” he said. “You told me you were miserable in Daed’s tower, and lo, the rain drowned us. Now you are here, and each time I see you smile, the sun cracks through. It was your work in Sallow, and yours here.”

  “What if it were the other way around?” she mused. “What if the sun makes me happy and the clouds at twilight terrify me? What if I am a slave to them.”

  He looked to the sea. “Possible. But you know better.”

  She did indeed. The ebb and flow of Shivershore’s climate was her doing, and no other. If her passions and miseries had a greater effect than ever before, she assumed it was because the end was so near, and I am so aware of it.

  Wanting to forget her fears for a while, she hopped from her boulder to Garrett’s. So near to him, her body felt hot with tension yet to be plucked. Her tongue tingled with words she wanted to say, though when she cracked her lips, no sound came out.

  Just ask him, she thought. Just say it.

  The clouds over Lyrlech were well aware of her angst. In the moments after she landed on Garrett’s rock, they crowded overheard, churning like black broth inside a cauldron. Yet when Garrett took her hand, dazzling shafts of sunlight cut through in a hundred places, spraying silver across more surfaces than not.

  “Garrett?” She fixated upon him.

  “Ande.”

  “Are we cowards?”

  He scanned the open sea as though it might offer an answer. “No, not cowards,” he said.

  “What then? Here we stay, doing nothing.”

  “Saul used to say all evils could be overcome,” he said in his most distant tone. “With reason and cunning and force of arms, he believed the righteous would always prevail over the wicked. I admit; I thought for many years he was right. But no longer. The powerful claim victory, no matter their morals.”

  “So you trust in our decision?” she pressed. “We did our part? We can do nothing more?”

  He peered skyward. “If there were a way, I would choose it. But I cannot see it. The Wolde are too many, and Grimwain is immortal.”

  “What if we tried anyway?” she blurted. “If we are to die in fewer than twenty days, what if we did something reckless in the meantime?”

  “I can almost see it,” he quipped. “You and I charge into Sallow, swords swinging. We slay a few hundred Wolde and raise a fire to singe the Black Moon’s bottom. We die entertaining deaths. And yet the ending is the same. No one will be left to remember us.”

  “Because in the end it will not matter,” she sighed.

  “No.” He shook his head. “It will not.”

  Her musings made for morbid conversation. Feeling ill with fear and doubt, she swallowed a hard knot in her throat. The sunlight dimmed, and the Selhaunt’s surface went dark.

  “We should talk about something else,” she said.

  “Everything else has been said.” He shrugged.

  It felt true. There was little left for him and her to share. After ten days alone with him, she knew all his stories: how he and Saul had built a skeletal galley on the Cornerstone shores, how they had rowed the Selhaunt with a Wolde soldier named Garkhan, and how, near starvation and death, they had crashed against a beach in the middle of the night and staggered ten thousands steps to Lyrlech.

  He had told her other stories as well. There were some she did not relish knowing, such as his imprisonment in Archaeus and his encounter with the Yrul princess Nephenia. She feared sometimes his spirit had been lost in Romaldar, or worse yet, that the reason he had not opened his heart to her was that his love belonged to another.

  After a moment of melancholic daydreaming, she snapped back to the present. “We have said much.” She tried to shape a smile. “But not everything. Not quite.”

  He looked at her, but then lost himself in the Selhaunt again. “No, not quite.”

  “Why do you look away?” she pressed.

  “Because I remember what we said.” His hand pulsed open and shut. “That eve in Sallow, when we agreed nothing could last between us until the war with Grimwain was finished. Here we are, alone as we ever will be, but still he lives.”

  She remembered the moment at Sallow’s edge in a far different light. She shut her eyes, and she could almost feel the kiss he and she had shared, the night that might have been had she been braver. “Reality conquers
all,” she remembered. “I know what we said. But our part in the war is over. You are all I have left.”

  “Perhaps.” He tore his gaze from the sea and brought it back to her.

  “I do not care if you have loved others,” she told him. “I do not care if we are doomed, if we are ghosts waiting to depart. All that matters is you and me.”

  He said nothing. For once, I am the steadier one, she thought. Her hair danced around her neck and her dress caught in the wind, but she held fast.

  “Do you love me?” she dared.

  For a half-breath, she thought he might leap from the boulder and march away without a word. But then, at long last, he looked at her.

  “I do.”

  A surge of warmth sang inside her. “You mean it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why…why not say it sooner?”

  “Ande…” He faced her. His hands fell to her waist, his fingertips electrifying her. “I have traveled the world. I have walked places nameless and dark, and I have lived when I should have died. In all these things, it was you I remembered. I searched for you in the face of every woman, and I thought of you when death was at my throat. If I said nothing, I beg you to forgive me. You were Rellen’s, even after he died. He was a brother to me. You were never mine to love.”

  She teetered atop the boulder, her heart banging so hard she thought she might die. “And now?”

  “Now I swim in unfamiliar waters. I never expected to see you again. That you are here seems unreal.”

  The shadows in her eyes broke. She wanted him to kiss her, to tear her down from the rock and carry her inside.

  “But I am alive.” She trembled. “Right here. Rellen’s gone. I have nothing else. Nothing besides you.”

  “I know,” he answered. “I feel the same.”

  Her lips parted. Her eyes fluttered open and shut. She leaned closer to him, wanting him to give in.

  But no.

  His fingers slipped off her waist like sand torn from the Selhaunt shore. Rather than pull her close, he stepped off the boulder and dropped down to the beach. She shivered in his sudden absence. The darkness gathered gleefully in her eyes.