Beyond Ragnarok

by Mickey Zucker Reichert

Tae did not address the comment. Instead, he gathered a deep breath. “I have something to say to you.” He took the book and figurine from Kevral’s hand, setting them on the ground beside her. “I know I don’t have any right to feel this, but . . .” The pattern of Tae’s speech quickened, and his eyes dodged hers. The nervousness caught her wholly by surprise. It was so uncharacteristic of the confident hoodlum she had grown to know that she scarcely recognized him. Yet, oddly, she found the vulnerability a spectacular change. “. . . I love you. There, I said it. I know you don’t love me back, but I have to say it anyway and now you know. . . .”

  “Whoa,” Kevral said. “Stop.”

  Tae looked at Kevral, finally. His eyes held a sparkle she could not describe and his features a fear that became them. It gave him the appearance of a wild animal cornered, moonlight sheening from hair so dark it was otherwise lost in the night.

  “I love you, too.” Kevral had to say it. It was true.

  Tae did not wait for more. He enfolded her in his arms, drawing her body tight against his. Desire throbbed through Kevral even before his lips touched hers, powerful enough that she knew it was no echo of what she had wanted and missed from Colbey. She relished the taste of his lips, the touch of his tongue, the caress of his fingers along her back and buttocks. For the moment, there was only Tae. He was the one.

  “Stop.” Kevral had to force the word, breathing it into Tae’s mouth.

  Though clearly as aroused as she, Tae did as Kevral bade, reluctantly releasing his hold and pulling away from the kiss she had returned as eagerly as he had given it. His hands slid down her arms, and he grasped her fingertips so that he did not have to fully let her go. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m not ready for this.” Kevral turned away, need still aching through her.

  “We were just kissing. Even if I didn’t respect you enough not to press you any further than you wanted to go, I could hardly force anything you didn’t want. And I know this isn’t the right time or place.” Tae scattered explanations the way a bowman with poor aim shot random flights in the hope of hitting the target.

  “You don’t understand.” Kevral’s eyes stung. For once, she did not fight the tears, taking a lesson from Colbey. “I really do love you. But I love Ra-khir, too.”

  “Oh.”

  Kevral braced herself for a clever, if nasty, slur against the knight-in-training.

  But Tae proved more sensitive than she ever expected. “Well.” He laughed self-deprecatingly. “What kind of silly, beautiful woman would choose a dashing Knight of Erythane over a punk? I’m sorry. I feel pretty stupid.” He tried to pull away, but Kevral closed her fingers tightly over his.

  “Stop that.”

  Tae looked at his feet.

  “First, thanks for calling me beautiful. A woman never tires of hearing that, even when it’s not true. And second, did I say I had chosen him over you?”

  “I don’t understand.” Tae sneaked a look, a tiny glimmer of hope lighting features more than attractive enough for Kevral’s standards.

  “I love you both. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen. I didn’t mean to fall in love with anyone. A month ago, I didn’t even believe it possible.” Kevral sighed to break the patter of her own speech, so like the apprehensive rambling Tae had displayed just a few moments earlier. “I know I have to choose, but this just doesn’t seem like the right time or place to do that.”

  “No,” Tae said. “By ‘I don’t understand’ I meant that I don’t understand what you mean when you say you’re not beautiful. You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “Gods,” Kevral closed her eyes, the tears now leaking from beneath her lids. “Don’t make this any harder.”

  “I have to,” Tae said. “Or I might lose you.”

  Kevral sobbed.

  Tae picked up Kevral’s presents and led her to a deadfall, resisting the natural urge to hold her in this susceptible moment. “Look. I don’t have much to offer, but you deserve to know the details.”

  Kevral sat and listened to the story of Tae’s childhood with sympathy and disbelief. The Eastern streets granted a lifestyle she would never have known existed; though Tae insisted Pudar’s did not differ significantly, she had missed it completely. The people of the night shifted silently through darkness and shadow, their survival from moment to moment a tenuous uncertainty. Kevral’s internal struggle seemed petty in comparison. While she worried over too much love, they fought for every scrap of sustenance. Yet, Tae assured her, he had not discovered this world until his early teens, after his mother’s death when his father had no time for a child.

  Kevral heard the tale of a loving mother and a father who had created a covert kingdom from the lawless. Bitterness warped the story. Kevral doubted the mother was quite as perfect as the son remembered or the father so cruel and wooden. Through Tae’s tone, and even his choice of words, Kevral found instances where the mother erred and the father demonstrated deep affection for mother and son alike. She cringed at the descriptions of ugliness that a child should never see, the deeds of the father’s followers and partners. She shuddered as he detailed the brutal assault in which he watched his mother slaughtered and was himself left for dead. And she listened raptly to the father’s final speech after which he sent his son, hunted, into the world to die or return to claim his inheritance.

  “So I didn’t really lie when I joined the group.” Tae made a circular motion to indicate all five of them. “I did want the camaraderie, but Ra-khir was also right about needing the protection. Until Pudar, I thought we’d killed all the enemies chasing me. At twenty, I can go home and claim a valuable business. So, I guess, if you married me, you’d marry the heir to a lot of money and power.”

  “Which you don’t intend to claim,” Kevral finished with the obvious.

  “All things considered, I’d rather be poor and hunted. I have no reason to go back there. Ever.”

  “Except to see your father.” Kevral latched onto the one positive.

  Tae’s expression hardened. “I have no reason to go back there,” he repeated. “My father can die the horrible death he arranged for himself.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  Tae shrugged, leaving Kevral to draw her own conclusions about the sincerity of a statement that certainly sounded emphatic. She did not usually press people to maintain links to family members they detested. Early in their journey, Ra-khir had described the situation with his parents, and she had condoned breaking ties with his mother as categorically as her companions. Even Matrinka, who found good in everyone, believed Ra-khir had made a proper decision.

  Yet Kevral had gathered clues throughout Tae’s story that proved his situation far different. Beneath the expressed hatred, Kevral thought she heard respect and affection. Although Tae claimed his father had dumped him into a street orphan’s life by ignoring him, the remainder of the story did not fit this picture. The father had spent too many quiet nights in the alley with his son, choosing family company over an enterprise that required his full attention. He had explained his purpose for pushing Tae into gangs rather than coddling him in plush, hidden cabins. Kevral did not condone the father’s actions, yet she saw a strange logic to them. The man believed he had taken the necessary steps to assure his son’s survival. A ruthless love, to be sure, but love nonetheless. Bad decisions well-motivated deserved attention but not necessarily disownment.

  However, Kevral refused to take on another problem now. Tae’s relationship, or lack of one, with his father could wait. Instead, she latched on to something else Tae had said. “Until Pudar, you thought we had killed the ones chasing you?”

  “Right. The prince-murdering incident.” Tae grinned wickedly. “You remember that.”

  “Vividly,” Kevral admitted, imprisonment and expectation of dismemberment would remain with her for eternity.

  “I didn’t kill the prince, you know.”

  “We all knew you hadn’t. Why do you think everyone
asked so little about it?”

  Tae snorted, staring at Kevral as if she had just appeared from another world. “Where have you been?”

  Blushing, Kevral looked away. “Mostly avoiding you and Ra-khir. And the decision.” She met his gaze again. “I already apologized for that.”

  “The Red Knight grilled me into the ground.” Tae slipped back into substituting descriptions for names. He had used one of his more complimentary terms for Ra-khir, wise enough to avoid condemning his competitor and subsequently alienating the object of his affection. “You know, it took me up until yesterday to feel sure I hadn’t done it.”

  The words made little sense to Kevral. “I remember you said if you did kill the prince, you didn’t mean to. But how could you not know if you’d killed someone?”

  “This may sound stupid,” Tae warned.

  Kevral dismissed his concern with a broad wave. They had shared too many intimate secrets to worry about how something sounded.

  “It was like this weird fog covered my memory. The whole thing was a blur anyway. People attacking me from all sides. The prince and his guards rushing in to help. And there were these little people, children I used to think, singing songs from the roofs of buildings.”

  “You’re right,” Kevral admitted. “It does sound stupid. But not until the children on the roofs.”

  “I kept leaving them out, too, thinking I imagined them. But they’re getting more definite in my memory, and they’re the key to making sense of this.” Tae sighed. “A type of sense anyway.”

  “Go on,” Kevral encouraged.

  “The prince got closer than he should have under the circumstances, and I was swinging pretty wildly.” Knowing Kevral well enough to realize she would hone right in on the battle technique, he defended his actions. “All right. Not the best strategy, but it was the only one I had with a dozen guys all jabbing at me at once.”

  Kevral listened without judging. Quick, chaotic defenses could buy time while sorting enemies.

  “I couldn’t concentrate at all. Usually, in a frenzied situation, my sight and thoughts become disturbingly sharp. This time, I couldn’t differentiate anything. All I could do was flail and hope. I knew my knife landed more than once. In all that confusion, who knew whether I hit the prince or not?”

  “But now you know for sure you didn’t do it?” Kevral could not fathom how he could sort out an event so muddily obscured at the time.

  “Strange, isn’t it? It’s like I said. This mist has been dissipating slowly, and the scene keeps getting clearer. I stabbed two of the men who attacked me, but not the prince. Someone pushed him toward me, and another killed him. Very deliberately.”

  “So what’s your idea about the children on the roofs?”

  Tae smiled. The expression wilted suddenly into a perplexed look, as if a new idea had just reached him even as he started to answer. He grinned again, this time in triumph. “Elfs,” he said.

  “What?” Kevral’s hand clutched the book.

  “Sure. Stay with me.” The speed of Tae’s speech increased as he worked the problem out for himself as well as her. “First Matrinka tells us about an attack by bears in the courtyard. ‘Magic,’ she says, but no one believes her. Not even us. But there’s no logical explanation found either. Then there’re the singing children that confuse an already confusing situation. But they weren’t children. They were small adults with animal faces and glazed eyes. Magic.”

  “Oh, please.” Kevral’s rational mind refused to accept a supernatural explanation so quickly, even in the wake of having just met a god.

  “You weren’t there,” Tae defended himself fiercely. “I’ve been in tight situations before, every bit as horrible as the one in Pudar’s alley. That lapse of memory doesn’t make sense with any other explanation, and its return feels eerie. It’s not natural. Add in the message from the dead Renshai. ‘Elfs,’ he wrote. Remember?”

  “I remember.” The instant Kevral allowed herself to believe, another answer snapped into her mind. “The gem you gave me. That’s the item Colbey was talking about.” She prepared to explain. “Last night, I met—”

  Tae interrupted. “Ra-khir told me over dinner.” He smiled impishly. “Wish I’d been there to see you knocked on your butt for a change.”

  Excited about her discovery, Kevral let the gibe pass. She rifled through her pockets, uncovering the odd green gem and drawing it from her pocket.

  Tae glanced at it for only an instant before loosing a thoughtful noise. “Here, let me see it.”

  Kevral handed over the gem, and Tae hurried over to the firelight to examine it.

  “Ra-khir said that Colbey said it belonged to its owner as surely as your limbs belong to you.”

  “Something like that.” Kevral recalled more eloquent wording, though the details escaped her at the moment. Colbey had said so many things that bore quoting, they had blurred together after a while.

  “I think he meant that literally. Kevral, I think it’s an eye.”

  “An eye?” Kevral dismissed the possibility. “I’ve seen severed eyes. There’re muscles and veins, all kinds of guts hanging off them.”

  “You didn’t see this before I licked it clean for you.”

  Kevral had witnessed enough gore not to let such a comment bother her, especially when she knew he was joking. “That notwithstanding, eyes are soft. And they’re white, except for the black part and the colored ring, of course.”

  “Human eyes are soft and the rest of that.” Tae tipped the gem up to the light. “See that.” His finger encompassed too large an area for Kevral to feel certain of the indicated spot. She studied it from different positions until a dark circle became visible in the center. “I think the Renshai was right. It belongs to an elf. Or a demon. Or whatever you want to call these things.”

  Uneasiness shivered through Kevral at the sight. Now that she believed it an eye, she could not shake the feeling that it studied her. “Put it away.”

  Tae went quiet, tightened his hand around it, and closed his eyes.

  “You know, if Randil knew the leader’s name, he probably had some reason for calling them elves, too.”

  Tae made no reply. Nor did he move.

  “Don’t you think?”

  More silence.

  Kevral seized Tae’s arm. “Stop that. You’re making me nervous.”

  Tae opened his eyes. “I’m just concentrating on this thing. If you block everything else out, there is a decided southern pull to it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Tae offered the gem back. “Here.”

  Kevral shook her head, making no attempt to take it. “You hold onto it. We’re not done fighting, and you’re far more likely to escape enemies than me. It’s safer with you.”

  Tae placed the elf-eye in his pocket without arguing the point. He looked at Kevral, lower lip clenched between his teeth and expression more somber than she had ever seen it. “We’ve got magical elves and enemies linked together. They’ve stirred unrest in Pudar, Béarn, and who knows where else. One or both groups has slaughtered at least one, probably at least two of Béarn’s envoy parties that included Renshai and Knights of Erythane.”

  Kevral nodded, the details falling together exactly as Tae described them, and a feeling of doom creeping over her as he verbalized the danger.

  “Far be it for a punk, or a Renshai, to call anything hopeless. But . . .” Tae let the topic trail. Nothing more needed saying.

  “We have to try.”

  “I know that,” Tae returned. “But Matrinka and Darris have this irritatingly happy view that love will bring them through anything. And Ra-khir . . .” He chose his words carefully, “. . . well, Ra-khir is Ra-khir. All that matters is doing the right thing. I’m not sure the concept of death will really reach them until the first of us actually dies.”

  Kevral did not bother to contradict him. As a Renshai, she embraced rather than feared death. She would joyfully give her life for the cause of Béarn’s
heir, though never in vain. If possible, she would see the entire mission through, but she never doubted for a moment that some, more likely all, of them would die. “They’ll handle it.”

  “They’ll have to,” Tae gave back. “But I hope one of us is there to assist. I need to confess another weakness.”

  “Proceed.” Kevral smiled. In the wake of so many, it would barely make an impact.

  “I never thought I could become so attached to people, but you five have become the most important in my life.”

  The math confused Kevral. “Five?”

  Tae raised and lowered his brows. “All right, I admit it. I’m including the damned cat. Without her, I’d never have gotten out of that prison, and she helped me through some rough times when I wondered if I wouldn’t rather kill all of you than try to win back your trust.”

  “That,” Kevral insisted, “I want to hear about in detail sometime.”

  “Of course. Anyway, I think Darris getting hurt gave them a good scare, but they’re not as ready as they think for the real thing.”

  Kevral shrugged. “What happens happens. I admit you’re right. We’re the only two with enough experience and a dark enough viewpoint to anticipate. But trusting in poetic justice has its positive side.”

  Tae refused the assessment. “There is no justice, poetic or otherwise.”

  “Perhaps not. But confidence in the triumph of good over evil is not without its rewards.” Although she could never become an optimist, Kevral enjoyed the company of too many to let Tae disparage them. “If faith works best for them, let them believe.”

  “Fine, I’ve got no problem with that. I just think that, when their world view shatters, we should both be prepared to pick up the pieces.”

  “Agreed.”

  “And, Kevral?” Tae took her hand again.

  “Yes.”

  “If we both survive this, promise me one thing.”

  At that moment, Kevral would have given him anything. “What?”

  “Before you run off to live happily with Ra-khir, you’ll act upon our love one time. Just once, and I’ll never bother you again.”

  “You mean sleep with you?”