At Water's Edge: An Epic Fantasy (The Last Elentrice Book 1)

by S McPherson

  ‘Don’t fight me girl,’ it crows, ‘stay and together we can live a long life. An eternity I believe.’ It tugs me, trying to bring me into the water but I wedge my feet in the snow until they are nestled beneath gravel.

  ‘I’ll drown,’ I splutter. I don’t want to hurt this creature, the dormant rage and power simmering in my gut reserved for those who took my sister. I don’t even know if I can hurt it.

  Another bare grin from the thing. ‘Not in the box I have for you.’ Swirling black seems to leap from the Syphogy’s eyes and I gasp. Box? It wants to keep me in some horrible enchanted box?

  ‘Please,’ I beg, feeling my energy tremble inside me.

  The Syphogy cackles at my plea, a horrible screeching sound that feels like spiders scuttling across my skin. And then it yanks as hard as it can. I’m falling. Before the slap of the water comes, it wails, releasing me. I tumble backwards instead, hitting the ground, next to its twitching hand no longer attached to its body.

  I gape at the figure beside me: Rawn. Sweating, panting Rawn with his sword dripping blood and slime from where he hacked off the creature’s hand. The Syphogy howls, this cry worse than its cackle or the cries of my people. Rawn grabs my hand and drags me half-stumbling, half-running behind him.

  Exhaustion and spasms of hunger leave me clutching my stomach, hunched over my knees. My head swims and vision blurs. The sun has come and gone and come again and Rawn’s meagre supply of nuts and berries ran out at last sunset. My toes peep through the holes worn in my wolf-skin boots, blistered and raw. And my bones creak with every step.

  Rawn stays beside me, stroking my back when I fall. My eyes meet his. They’re puffy from lack of sleep and perhaps tears, but I tell by the way he holds himself that he can last a while longer. Trained for this, a warrior through and through.

  ‘You need to rest,’ he soothes. I shake my head. No time. Those monsters have taken Ava. ‘Yes,’ he insists.

  I barely register as Rawn scoops me up in his arms as if I were no more than a fallen hawk. Lazily, I sling my arms around his shoulders, resting my head on the icy metal of his armour.

  ‘You sleep,’ he murmurs into my hair, ‘I will be your legs.’

  I mumble some response and before I know it, I am asleep.

  When I wake, uncomfortable but rested, Rawn sets me down, pulls out his hunting knife and hacks away at a tree nearby.

  ‘Eat this,’ he orders, handing me the bark and returning to the tree to break off pine needles, ‘and this.’

  I don’t argue, shovelling the tree bits in my mouth as Rawn consumes the same. Food or at least an imitation of it. We meander on and he continues to chop us nutrition from nature. With every mouthful, I am revived.

  ‘What will you do when we get there?’ Rawn asks, his deep voice the only sound in this deathly quiet.

  My power squirms as if given permission to ignite the embers inside me. I clench my fists. Not yet.

  ‘I’ll get her out.’

  ‘How?’ he asks, trying to keep the scepticism out of his tone.

  I turn to him, my gaze stern. ‘By any means necessary.’

  He stares ahead and doesn’t ask any more questions that night.

  Like a beacon in the dark, the kings castle rises up in the distance. A fortress of black rock and twisted spires that claw at the sky, warning us to stay away.

  When at last, we stop at the edge of the forest – a few paces from the castle – I turn to Rawn and say, ‘Wait here.’

  His eyes widen and I sense an argument on his tongue which I silence with a glare.

  ‘You haven’t slept in days. Rest,’ I say.

  He grabs my arm. ‘No.’

  ‘I won’t go in,’ I lie, ‘but I’m moving faster than you are. Rest whilst I look around.’

  His grip loosens but doesn’t yield.

  ‘Rest.’ I urge and unknown to him, send a ray of my power to lull him. There’s a good chance I won’t make it out of the castle tonight and too many people have died for me already. I won’t take Rawn with me. Finally, he lets me go, slouching heavily against the tree behind him.

  ‘If you need me,’ he grumbles, sliding to the ground, ‘scream.’

  I dart from the cover of the trees and sprint across the expanse of snow leading to that monstrous structure. Sentries patrol the keep and flanking towers, torch flames dancing across their silhouettes. The moon bounces off the spears they carry and the canons resting on the wall, pulsing with an urge to fire.

  I crouch low at the base of the castle, panting, listening to hear if any of them noticed me. All seems well; just the rhythmic thud of their marching feet and the occasional murmur of arrogant voices. Inhaling, I embrace the storm raging inside me: hot bolts of lightning and the bitter fury of a blizzard vying for my attention. I yield to both. The king tore the world apart for The Emerald Eye. Well, here I am.

  The brick is cold as I press my palm against it, and twisting that gift that allows me to heal and mend, I instead destroy. The wall explodes, showering down like hail around me. The sentries holler unleashing a rain of arrows but I am already inside, bursting through the hole I forged, not minding the sting of the scrapes from the jagged rock or the way it snatches strands of my hair.

  Winding through the passages of beige stone and suits of armour; I follow the shattered light offered from torches burning in brass brackets on the wall. I feel my sister, her energy matching mine and in my mind’s eye I see her, huddled against a stone wall in a dungeon. At last, a staircase. I barely notice the steps as I barrel down, deeper and deeper into darkness, the air turning wet, singed with the stench of rot.

  I can’t be far now. I leap off the last step and a blinding pain collides with my skull before everything goes black.

  The sound of gentle sobs stirs me to consciousness, my stomach roiling as my vision sways then settles. I am in a cell, caged like some beast, lying on damp concrete. A meagre pile of hay rests in the corner beside a tin pan reeking of urine and a lantern swings overhead. Slowly, I turn my head the other way: bars. Thick steel bars.

  ‘Irina?’ a voice gasps, the sobbing stops.

  I jolt up, wincing at the shooting pain at the back of my head.

  ‘Ava?’ Turning, I see more bars and on the other side of them is my sister, wide-eyed and crawling closer. Her face is battered and swollen, one eye barely able to open. The scraps of fabric she managed to tie around her are barely hanging on and her ankle seems twisted at a wrong angle, her foot dragging. ‘Ava!’ I gasp, racing to the bars.

  She starts to cry again and anger like I’ve never known pulses through my gut.

  ‘Isn’t that sweet?’

  Snarling, I turn to the buttery voice that dared speak: King Nicolai.

  I’m at the bars, hissing and banging against them. He doesn’t even flinch. ‘Let her go!’ I roar.

  ‘My device tells me that the source of the Emerald is in you.’ The king cocks his head in question, ‘Did you swallow it?’

  Fool. He has no idea what he’s dealing with.

  ‘No,’ I growl. The king merely chuckles as I stand here, seething. ‘Let her go!’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ the king purrs. ‘Now, everyone will believe you both dead. If I let her return, she’ll be blabbing to all the lands about how I’m keeping you prisoner, torturing you until you hand over the Emerald.’ He sneers. ‘Which I will do and enjoy doing.’

  His face is so close to the bars, I could reach out and snap his neck, but I don’t miss the wall of sentries behind him, some with arrows notched and aimed at my sister through the bars of her cell.

  ‘So you intend to keep us here like animals?’ I spit, searching my mind for a plan, an escape.

  He shakes his head and a chill trills through me as I guess what he is about to say. ‘You, I will keep. Your sister, on the other hand, will serve as food for the hounds.’

  My hands slacken and a deafening silence rumbles over me as his words sink in like rusted blades. A few sentr
ies step forward, unlocking my sister’s cell and she screams.

  ‘It’s feeding time.’ The king smirks, watching the terror rise in the room with bloodlust. No! The guards crush into Ava’s cell as she wails and pushes herself against the wall like she hopes to claw through it. No! I bang my hand against the cell, willing it to rupture like the wall before, but it doesn’t budge.

  ‘These bars have been built to withstand the greatest of power. A little girl is no match,’ King Nicolai explains, reading the confusion on my face. The sentries reach for Ava but she kicks, screaming as pain blazes through her mangled foot and falls. They haul her from the ground. She cries, snot and tears mingling on her face, grime and matted strands of hair clinging to it. No!

  ‘Irina!’ she screams and my heart breaks, ‘Irina!’

  They drag her as she clutches the bars and I do the same, desperately trying to pry them apart though I know they won’t budge.

  ‘Ava!’ I scream, everything inside me shatters as they yank my sister through the door whilst outside, dogs bark, the sound like canon fire and here the king laughs. Laughs!

  ‘NO!’ I roar, falling to the ground and pounding my fists against it. That swirling rage to destroy bursts through my flesh and drills into the earth. I see nothing but green, feel nothing but power and then the ground shakes. The king stops laughing, the guards stop yanking and my sister stops screaming. The ground caves in. I grip the bars as the earth falls from under me, the sentries going with it, sinking beneath the ground, their cries smothered by the dirt. The king lunges, using their falling bodies as stepping stones as he swipes my sister from their clutch.

  ‘This isn’t over Irina Drakarkus.’ And then he leaps, my sister wedged beneath his arm, over the tumbling ground and up the stairs.

  I growl, feeling now like a beast that should be caged; heaven help those who get in my way. I pull myself across the enchanted rods of the cell, ignoring the abyss below me. I swing under the bars and haul myself along the other side until I am close enough to leap for the stairs. There is a second my heart halts as I’m suspended in mid-air and then my feet smack solid ground and I’m charging upstairs, flashes showing me exactly where my sister has been taken.

  I find them in the open stretch of snow outside the castle, the bodies of the king and Ava bobbing on the back of his creature. I swipe my hand through the wintry air, snatching wind and frost until it is almost tangible, then hurtle it towards them. It collides with the creature’s head and it tumbles to the ground. My sister rolls from the king’s grip and before he can grab her, I am there.

  ‘Go to Rawn,’ I tell her, my eyes never leaving the king’s as he struggles to free his foot from under the beast. ‘He’s at the edge of the trees.’

  ‘You—’ she starts.

  ‘Go!’ I order and watch with a pang of love and admiration as she scrambles away, hobbling at an impressive speed.

  When I turn back, King Nicolai is free, pulling himself up. He snatches his blade from its sheath and lunges at me; not to kill, but to detain. I swivel out of the way as if dancing, curling my hands once more and propelling him back with a gust of wind. He flips, quick to his feet and dives again, snarling like a rabid beast. This time I call on the skies. Thunder roars like a lion caged and lightning zags at us: an electric blade. We both leap away as it cuts between us, singeing the ground. Snow turns to slush.

  King Nicolai chuckles without amusement.

  ‘Let me go and I’ll let you live.’

  He barks at this, wiping blood from his bleeding lip.

  ‘I am the king, girl. You do not let me do anything.’ He tackles me so suddenly, I lose my footing, smacking my head on the ground, snow puffing like clouds around me. He grips my throat, squeezing with the force of an ox. I gag. ‘Where is the Eye?’ he howls in my face, speckling me with spit spraying from his mouth. ‘Did you swallow it?’ He rams his fingers down my throat. My eyes water. I can’t breathe. A sinister smile stretches his face as he watches me convulse beneath him, choking, gagging.

  He yanks his fingers from my mouth and I suck in air that burns like fire. He puts his face so close to mine, I can smell old meat on his breath and blood on his skin. ‘If you ate it, girl, I will carve it out of you,’ he growls.

  He covers my face with his rough palm, squeezing until I bite through his flesh causing him to whip his hand away, striking me across the face. Then he fumbles through his robe and draws out a dagger, watching as I clench my teeth against the agonising throb in my cheek. He raises his weapon above his head and brings it down. On instinct, I grasp his hands in mine, stopping the blade just above my heart. The king howls as I crush his hand in my bear-like grip, twisting his wrist, snapping his bones, and with his own hand still pressed around the hilt, I drive the blade through his chest. He gapes at me, blood spluttering from his lips as he crumples and slithers to the ground.

  ‘Your eyes,’ he chokes, blinking at me as I crouch over him, watching breath leave his body. And realisation widens his own eyes, slackens his mouth and then he is gone.

  I collapse to the ground, breathless, the king’s body lifeless beside me, staining the snow a dark red. I don’t fight as his guards surround me or when they haul me to my feet and take me away.

  I am in chains, strapped to a pipe on the outside of the castle when I hear a commotion and spy a sea of people; the Nivarum, charging through the trees with weapons raised, flooding into the fortress. The right-hand of the King, has sentenced me to be flogged and hung in the streets: a traitor. I flinch when his body sails over the edge of the tower and splatters at my feet. I look up, squinting in the sun to see Rawn grinning down at me.

  ‘By law of the land, he who slaughters the king becomes the king.’

  My knees buckle as I turn and see Ava limping towards me, leaning against a wooden staff for support.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He who slaughters the king becomes the king,’ she repeats. ‘We are descendants of wolves, my sister. You are now queen.’ She strokes a hand through my hair. ‘It is the law.’

  Days later, when the lands have begun to heal and its people have started to rejoice, I sit atop my throne in fine robes, a crown, dusted in emeralds, on my head. I stare down at the line of snarling men and beasts below me, hissing, spitting and refusing to swear allegiance. Rawn stands over them, Captain of the Royal Guard and a smile creeps across my lips.

  The hall is full of Nivarum people, waiting anxiously for my decree. How are we to deal with these offenders? How are we to send a message to lands near and far to never come for me or my people again?

  I look back at the ill-fated faces, remembering how they brutalised town after town. How they ripped babes from mother’s arms just to crush the skulls with their bare hands. I imagine how they tortured my sister and remember how they tore her from me, kicking and screaming to be food for the hounds.

  ‘What’s it to be?’ Rawn asks, pressing the blade of his sword in the back of one of the men before him, not enough to pierce the skin but enough to remind him who’s in charge.

  I rise from my throne, staring each of the prisoners in the eye. I push back my shoulders, hold my head high and I don’t know whether to be proud or not when for my first order as queen, I turn and say, ‘Kill them all.’