by Lawrence, J.
INBORN
Written by
J.LAWRENCE
©
Copyright 2012
All rights reserved.
J. LAWRENCE
I hereby dedicate.
My first work of fiction to.
My life-long love.
Tracey.
Always Tracey.
Table of Contents
MAP of ARTH
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
MAP of ARTH
Chapter 1
The Salt Satchel
Keeping one eye on the girl, Keriim slowly took another step up the stairs. Under his armor plate, his heart raced as he caught sight of her running her fingers through her golden hair.
He licked his lips. It wasn’t the hair that did it for him. It was the hands.
Keriim always cut a finger tip off the girls he killed. He kept his little treasures in a leather satchel packed with curing salts. It never left his side. He wore it suspended by a leather cord under his crimson weave tunic. He grinned and patted his ribs, comforted by knowing the bumpy little satchel was nearby. There wasn’t anything he owned he loved more. Sometimes between his adventures, the mementos were the only things that kept him going. He knew every one of them by name.
The anxious little satchel lightly thumped his bare ribs as he ascended the stairs. He wondered if the others sensed a new girl coming soon.
He’d been watching her for weeks.
She giggled with her friends, all girls from the kitchen, as they excitedly pointed down into the crowd. No doubt one of them was eyeing up some boy for the festival.
The Festival of the Caller was the only time of the year the entire hold would be busy. Every dirty little villager was invited to dine in the great hall of Ontar Castle. It took two days to feed them all. There were games, contests, and plenty of drinking.
No one would miss one servant girl for a while. If he was lucky, maybe even the whole two days.
Keriim’s breath came in deep rhythmic pulls. Beneath his crimson weave and polished plate mail, his heart hammered in anticipation. He had to be careful now because this had to be done just right. Taking his time was crucial. How else was he supposed to remember everything just as it was?
The high main wall encircled the courtyard in a ring of great white stone. Long crimson banners hung down from it, undulating in the icy wind. Overhead, fluttering streamers of the same color swooped from bastion to bastion. Before long he was gawking at all the fancy decorations like a brainless villager, not really caring who saw his sincere delight.
The girl and a number of her friends were standing most of the way up one of the sets of stone stairs that ran from the courtyard floor to the top of the outer wall. They were in a perfect spot to hear Lisella Ontar’s speech.
Keriim ambled upward, one casual tread at a time.
Standing this close he had to force himself to be calm. She faced away from him. Keriim let his gaze linger on her lustrous blonde curls.
“Elycia, don’t let him catch you looking for him. You’ll spoil everything.” One of the girls, a pudgy little red headed busy body, grabbed her by the crook of her elbow and turned her away from the crowd. When she pivoted, face all flush, from the bitter cold, Keriim noticed his next girl had a bright red ice blossom fixed in her hair.
Keriim was a bit shocked that he hadn’t even noticed anyone courting her. He was reminding himself how important the little details would be to him later when he felt his face go hot with anger. Jealous rage boiled up from his groin. How dare she wear an ice blossom for someone else? On their special day. That little bitch!
As the girls pointed excitedly at the main gate, it occurred to him that they weren’t planted on the stairs in order to get a good view of the Ontar, but the entrance to the courtyard, so as to see her suitor the moment he walked in. Keriim let his gaze rake across the crowd as they milled in through the massive stone entrance.
“We’ll watch for you Elycia.” Another one of them tittered emphatically.
With his eyes locked on the bright red ice blossom, Keriim let his anger warm him, like a river of molten lava coursing through his belly. He felt his lips stretch in a smile, as an idea born of pure rage bubbled to the top. He would carve her name in her finger before he took it. He usually took the tip after they were dead but he would make an exception for her. It would have to be back to the second knuckle, at least. He had to think this through. He closed his eyes and tried to picture how the odd name, ELYCIA, would look after the finger cured in the salt satchel.
Chapter 2
Girlhead
Thaniel was thinking about one thing. Elycia.
He wasn’t really paying attention to the route he took to the castle. As a messenger for the hold, he knew both the town and Ontar Hold so well that navigating quickly through either was accomplished more by second nature than any conscious thought.
The ways were little more than plank covered spaces snaking behind the buildings that made up the marketplace section of the town. The larger older structures were mainly constructed of dark brownstone, while the mid-sized of square brick, and the newer smaller ones were sided in overlapping pine boards. On the front side the latter would be painted in every shade imaginable, but nobody actually traveled the ways, so the owners didn’t bother to coat the wood with much more than light pitch.
“Slow down loverboy!” Jorel teased from much further back than Thaniel recalled.
“Shut up.”
“You got it bad.” Jorel cackled as he caught up.
“You’re not helping.”
“I can’t.” He giggled. “There’s no cure for it.”
Jorel might be right. Maybe he did have girlhead.
What was he thinking running in the ways? People dumped all kinds of things back there. By the looks of it the muckers hadn’t been through in a month. If he slipped and fell in this… Thaniel cringed as he envisioned Elycia’s friends asking what the smell was when he walked up to her. No. He couldn’t have that. Not today. Today he would ask her to be his Festival Kiss. Just the thought of it made his tongue dry u
p like a week old biscuit.
He forced himself to focus on putting one careful foot in front of the other, keeping to the center of the narrow passageway the two of them strode down. Jorel sidled up to him, threatening to pass. Thaniel bumped him as he pushed forward a little faster, forcing Jorel to either fade back or walk in the half frozen muck that was piled up on either side.
“Nice.”
Thaniel shrugged the heavy warm collar of his messenger’s cloak back up to his chin and blew into cupped fingers before jamming them back into his armpits. At least the buildings towering on either side of them shielded them from the brunt of the Anwarian Range weather.
He couldn’t blame the cold alone for the pain in his hands. The truth was that he nearly rubbed his fingers raw trying to brush his heavy leather cloak back to its original deep brown. It took most of the morning. Thaniel smoothed the front of his shirt, checking himself over again as he kept moving. With the cloak smartly fastened over one shoulder by a red cord he braided himself, his hair finger combed back as well as he could get it, and his boots cleaned and oiled, he hoped he looked good enough.
His first attempt to give Elycia a flower had been an embarrassing disaster that he wanted to forget. And he would too. Yet before the shame of it had even cooled over he found himself climbing that tower and picking another ice blossom. He ran all the way to the kitchens where she worked with such abandon that he knocked over Sid, sending a crate of leather soles the cobbler was loaded down with flying. But when he saw her there, with her hands on her hips, her nosey friends all staring him down, all he could do was stand there looking stupid and ask for a piece of bread. So ended his second attempt. It still didn’t compete with the first… No. He was going to forget it.
So, last night, he did the next best thing. He stuck the little crimson blossom on her pillow where she was sure to find it.
“The kitchen girls were up all night baking redcake.” Jorel didn’t quit there. “She was probably too tired to notice the scraggly little thing.”
“What do you mean scraggly? It was the biggest one on the tower!”
Thaniel stumbled over a heaving plank he had stepped over a thousand times before. Frantically, he tried to get his feet back beneath him and would have landed face first in a frozen pile of what might have once been rotten turnips if Jorel, with the quickest hands of anyone he knew, hadn’t caught him up by the cloak at the last instant.
“You are hopeless.” Jorel laughed, enjoying his anguish a bit too much for Thaniel’s taste as his feet found purchase on the slippery muck.
“Just shut up.”
“Girlhead.” Jorel giggled infectiously.
Chapter 3
The Book
Lisella Ontar ran her fingers along the spine of the old book, feeling the raised letters of the title, Prophecies of the Code.
She stared at the design that was so long ago worked into the leather. The spiraling dra, with a body covered in symbols no one understood for millennia, sent a childish shiver sliding down her neck.
Every year, before the Festival of the Caller, she read the book again and couldn’t help but imagine the dra being real. She let out a nervous chuckle… as if the monsters from all the mountain folklore were real.
Lisella opened the cover and stared at a colorful drawing of an armored warrior with his hands on a carving of what was depicted on the cover. The next page depicted the stone dra coming to blazing life, naming the brave warrior as the Caller.
Something in her chambers moved. Lisella snapped the book shut as farina glided into her quarters. She garbed in her usual fashion. The crimson robe and yellow sash signified her as a personal servant of the Ontar.
“My Mistress, did I startle you?” Farina asked as she set down a blanket and a cup of hot spiced wine.
“This damned book.” Lisella endured Farina’s rolling eyes.
The book had her on edge in just two pages. Farina didn’t miss much. Although she hadn’t noticed her even glancing at the book, Lisella was sure that the woman had already read it.
“He will ask you if you read it.” Farina was talking about Irkhir. She was right, as usual. He would ask. The man stuck to tradition and custom as though it were law.
Irritated, Lisella scanned her chambers. The hearth was already lit with a warming fire that Farina would insist on her sitting in front of once she came in from the deathly cold balcony. Sometimes the woman was so efficient that Lisella wanted to slap her.
“So, I hear someone gave you a blossom.” Lisella asked and was rewarded with a crimson blush on Farina’s cheeks that was so dark that it complimented her robes.
“Is there anything else, My Mistress?” The woman had her eyes conspicuously glued to her slippers.
“Yes, see to it that I am not disturbed.” Lisella smiled as she added, “That will be all for today. Enjoy the festival.” She dismissed her with a wave, waiting for her to close the door to her chambers before she opened the book again.
She knew every picture. Every detail. She knew exactly what the book would say. Every Ontar had the damned thing drilled into their head from birth. Like bed time stories from the hells. She had always thought it to be just that, a story, no matter how her tutors had insisted that it would someday happen again. As a child she had nightmares of the dreaded book.
Her tutors had always insisted that every Ontar before her had hoped and prayed for untold centuries to be the one to serve the people when the Caller returned. They also said that the Prophecies of the Code was a manual that would instruct the next Ontar, the one for whom the code sang, in all the things necessary to usher glory back to their clan.
She glanced through the familiar pictures. It was bad enough that someone of her lineage dreamed this book up. That many of them actually believed it was laughable in a sick twisted sort of way.
She stared at the page that had given her nightmares as a child and doubted very seriously she could go through with half of it. With a resigned sigh of thankfulness that none of it was real, Lisella Ontar laid the book down on the reading table, drew herself up, chin high, eyes level, and prepared herself to address her people.
Chapter 4
Trouble
Jorel and Thaniel were still laughing when the ways spilled out into the street just outside of the Ontar gate.
Jorel waved a hello to Norrig, the leather merchant, a stick of a man with a sharp chin and an even pointier nose. His dog, Ghost, was a gray scraggly beast. He spotted them immediately and bounded in their direction, tail wagging furiously. Jorel pulled out a sliver of dried meat and held the treat up. Once the dog barked for it Jorel tossed it high in the air. Ghost glanced at Thaniel and seeing he wasn’t going for it, leaped straight up. Just before the dog could catch it Thaniel reach out and snagged it. The gray hound went nuts. Thaniel raised the treat as the dog spun in circles with anticipation. Then as Ghost watched, Thaniel made believe he ate it. The big gray hound raised its head and howled. It was a game they’d played a thousand times, and yet the four of them never tired of it. Thaniel reached down, patted the bellowing dog’s side, and slipped him the meat.
“Works every time!” Norrig shook his head at the ridiculously happy mutt. He watched as Ghost, content as always, padded back to his spot beside the wooden cart and started worrying away at the tough strip of meat. “Enjoy the festival boys.” He said as he turned to his next customer.
The hold had been buzzing about the festival for weeks. Now, most of the hold’s servants, mixed with a few of Ontar’s soldiers dressed in their traditional crimson garb, filled the streets and made their way through the heavy iron gate that separated the village from the Ontar castle.
“Same as every year… Listen to the Ontar prattle on about how glory awaits the clan.” Jorel raised his nose in the air and waved his hands around in imitation of haughty nobility.
“I’ll take her yapping over the line.” Thaniel interjected. The line was what everyone called a processional of children through the man
y halls of Ontar keep, culminating with every young person in the hold touching a carving of a spiraling dra. It wasn’t so much the waiting in the line that bothered Thaniel as it was the way his stomach fluttered at just the sight of that dra carving.
“I’d touch a thousand ugly statues for just one redcake.” Jorel licked his lips.
“Another stupid Ontar custom.” Thaniel said under his breath, trying not to think about the thing. The last thing he needed was something else to throw him off right now.
The entire village was giddy. Most people visited the Ontar Castle only once a year, during the Festival of the Caller, living out their lives in the walled mountain village that seemed to have been poured out of the high towers above it. Thaniel and Jorel were messengers and were called to the castle daily. Between the two of them they probably knew the hold better than the Ontars themselves. Thaniel had long ago memorized every shortcut that might get his messages delivered a bit faster. It was often enough that the structure ceased to impress like it once had.
Thaniel craned his neck, trying to see above the shoulders of the wide eyed village people around him. He didn’t see Elycia, or any of the kitchen girls for that matter. He kicked a pebble on ahead of him and sighed. Had she already found the ice blossom? He wondered if she would wear it, or if it was one of the few that always ended up ground into the cobblestone somewhere along the way to the castle. After all, not every girl that got a flower decided to wear it, no matter how much trouble they were to pick. He grimaced at the thought of his first two bumbled attempts to ask her. How could he blame her?
The street ahead bottlenecked into a stone path cut into the mountain’s flank. It was so narrow that only three people could walk abreast on it, or one horse. Above the procession of servants, slaves, and soldiers, long red banners rippled down the castle walls. From where he was standing, it almost made the castle look as if it was bleeding. Hard faced guards in shiny regalia stood on either side of the entrance, scrutinizing every one that entered as though they weren’t all forced to attend the annual festival. Behind them, the real gate sentries, two massive stone towers, rose into the sky.
