Reign of Darkness

by Michaela Riley Karr

  “Cornie,” he breathed as his blue gaze met hers.

  She was the picture of their mother, Gloria, as she sat on a mediocre, cushioned seat in the corner of the cottage, her golden curls spread behind her. Frederick watched as the darkness dawned on her senses as well, hers being slightly less trained at her age, and she mirrored his movement of looking for the shining, amethyst feather around her neck. Dominick was curled up on her lap underneath her tapestry, and Frederick could see the orange feather hanging from him.

  How could he be sensing Rhydin’s cruel, dark magic? There should have been no possible way for them to be found.

  The prince jumped from his seat, accidentally knocking his stool over backwards. He drew upon his magic, summoning every air molecule in the general vicinity toward the cottage to make a defensive barrier of wind. Cornflower tossed her tapestry to the side and rapidly gathered Dominick into her arms. Then, she reached out with one hand and tried to aid her brother with what little magic she possessed.

  They weren’t quick enough.

  Frederick was attempting to close the gaps in their barrier when somewhere out in the rain, a sharp slice of dark magic pierced their wind. He felt as if a dagger had truly nicked his heart. He grunted, his sister gasping in pain. Clutching his chest, Frederick pushed Cornflower away from the door toward the one, tiny window in the back and thrust a blast of wind at it. The window shattered into a million pieces, and the damp smell of the rain seeped into the cottage. Cornflower was hoisted halfway through the window, her blond hair darkening and plastering to her head in the wet, when the door to the cottage was blasted off its hinges.

  Framed within the smoldering threshold was none other than Rhydin himself, and Frederick’s heart nearly stopped beating. He dropped his sister and immediately fired two gusts of hurricane-force winds at the man who had tricked the rest of the world into calling him Emperor.

  To Frederick’s surprise, Rhydin didn’t simply hold a hand up and catch his spells as he had in the past. Instead, the black-haired man threw his body sideways between the two charges, one of which happened to rip one of his regal sashes off, and then fired a blast of purple energy at Frederick’s legs. The prince found this odd as well, but he was too busy dodging the surge to really think about it at the moment.

  Rhydin’s eyes narrowed. He was still unnervingly silent.

  Frederick shouted, “How did you find us? What do you want?”

  The hint of a smirk played at one of the edges of Rhydin’s mouth. All of a sudden, he crossed his arms like a frustrated parent, and figures in black armor filtered through the hole in the wall. Frederick’s heart sank lower than ever before when he realized that these people weren’t Einanhis but actual, human soldiers of Nerahdis. His people.

  Rhydin tried to keep his face slack for the sake of the soldiers around him, but for Frederick, there was no mistaking the dark joy in his violet eyes. “Prince Frederick and Princess Cornflower Tané of Lunaka, you are both under arrest for attacking your emperor with witchcraft.”

  Close to a week after we met Anne and added her and her two boys to our strange little caravan, Stellan appeared on the horizon. It started as nothing more than a tiny, black smudge, being the smallest town in Lunaka by far and one of the few that was built above ground. As we grew closer and the smudge grew larger, my eyes were arrested by the sight of the landscape around us.

  For miles in each direction, all the farmland lay in ruin. Some fields were completely empty, as if seed had never been sown like those travelers had told us on our way to Canis. Others contained short, crispy corn stalks that fell over each other long ago as they baked in the summer sun, drying away into dust. The wheat and the barley too stretched across the cracked, parched earth as if it had been flattened. During a short break, I went on a small walk toward the nearest field, stretching my healing ribs. There, I took the liberty of plucking one of the dried wheat heads to roll it around in my hand like I’d done a million times, but it completely dissolved into ash to be carried away on the wind as soon as I touched it.

  Not every crop year could be good. Every farmer had experienced their fair share. After all any little thing could go wrong when your livelihood sat under open sky with no protection. But my old theory was right. This wasn’t a natural blight by any means. Only dark magic could have caused this. The only question was why.

  My eyes met Sam’s for the briefest of moments, and I could see recognition in his eyes as well. He knew just as I did that something wasn’t quite right here. Then, he turned his head toward Stellan on the horizon, and anxiety seemed to age him ten years before my eyes. I tried to ask him what was wrong, but he kicked his horse into motion before I could.

  We galloped along faster than before, and as we approached Stellan, my heart began to sink. Evan, who rode next to me, noticed my expression and asked, “What is it?”

  I swallowed carefully before responding, “The last time I was in Stellan was when I picked up our cousin, Keera, four years ago.”

  Evan remained mute, a sadness masking his round face. Her death was still a fresh wound for him. Still a little for me, but far more for him, who actually raised her.

  “I saw you for the first time then, too. Though I didn’t know it. You were the person with the violin dropping her off,” I kept rambling. “Life was so different…before. Sometimes I wonder if I would still be living with Rosetta and Keera on the farm if I’d never become the Allyen.”

  “Maybe if Rhydin never existed,” Evan commented. “But if he hadn’t existed, we would have never been separated. Our father would have never joined Rhydin. Rosetta probably never would have been born because our mother never would have remarried.”

  “You have a point,” I mused, then turned to him more fully. “I hope you can meet her someday. My sis-…our sister. Rosetta.”

  “Me too,” Evan said as he turned back to his horse. “I hope she finds her way away from Rhydin and can join our rebellion.”

  I chewed on my cheek. It still made me sick that she was stuck with Rhydin’s people, all because of that Mikael. Sometimes I had nightmares about it. About him stealing her away and leaving the Einanhi of her body to trick me into thinking she was dead. About one of Rhydin’s people killing her before she could get away. She had been so determined the last time I saw her that she could bring Mikael back to the light and leave together with him. I could only continue to hope that she was right.

  My heart sank further when our entourage reached Stellan. Gone was the quaint little town that bubbled with country life. In its place was a ghost of its past, and the heavy cloud cover above certainly didn’t help the grayish cast to everything. Houses and shops stood haphazardly, windows and doors hanging open like empty eyes. It was so quiet that the wind whistled, dragging dust from the main, dirt road along with it.

  As we rode further into town, I started noticing something black smeared across doorways, sometimes in the shape of an “x” and others sloppily dripping down the walls to the threshold.

  I’d seen this before. Memories came flooding back. Sam’s eyes widened, and I knew he recognized it too, even though the two human-looking Ranguvariians, Evan, and Anne looked on in confusion. After all, the Epidemic had only ravaged Lunaka, well before the Owenses came to town.

  Sam suddenly pulled tight on his horse’s reins, which caused it to rear and scream in fright, before bolting down the main road to the east. James took off after him faster than my mind could compute. I would have followed if Evan and Anne hadn’t looked to me with alarm.

  Anne’s grip on her two boys stiffened as she asked, “What’s going on? What do the black marks mean?”

  “I-It’s the Epidemic,” I answered, struggling not to stutter. “A nasty disease Rhydin told me once that he created in order to kill me a couple years before I found out I was an Allyen. He set it off in Lunaka since he didn’t know where Evan was. It killed my parents and got my sister instead of me, even though she got better. The black is ink. People would s
mear it on the doorways of people who were infected.”

  What I didn’t add was the reason the ink was chosen. The ink eerily resembled the disease. Infected people’s veins would turn black like ink as the disease spread through their bodies. Once the blackness reached their heart, it was all over.

  “But all these houses look empty,” Evan replied as he lifted the collar of his tunic over his nose. As he did so, I began to smell it too. The smell of death.

  “When it got bad in Soläna, they started moving sick people to a central location to try to care for them better and keep them away from others,” I said as I covered my own nose.

  Sure enough, as I looked around again, only the houses with the black marks stood empty like sad faces. Those without the marks were boarded up tightly, their inhabitants likely hunkered down until it passed. I wondered how long this had been going on.

  “Shouldn’t we get out of here then? You’re not gonna gain any supporters from their death beds, and we sure can’t make others come out to be exposed. Much less expose ourselves if we haven’t already,” Anne muttered, looking like she was ready to skedaddle at any second. Her orange turban was strangely bright compared to the gray town.

  “But Rhydin is the one who did this! This illness isn’t natural! I nursed my sister back to health. We could do the same for these people and save them!” I argued. “If we can save any of them, they’re sure to join our cause once they know Rhydin is the one who did this to them!”

  “Er, that’s a lot of ifs, Lina,” Evan groaned. “Especially when the biggest if is whether we’ll contract the disease too!”

  “Yeah, I think that might just be a disaster waiting to happen,” Luke pitched in. “Sorry, Lina, but it’s not worth the risk. Even if you won over a whole army from this town, it wouldn’t be worth it if both adult Allyens died of the Epidemic a week later.”

  Abruptly, I heard the thunder of hooves racing back towards us, and I turned just in time to see Sam and James barreling back into town. Sam never stopped, his horse sprinting on by, but James skidded to a halt at the sight of a demanding, questioning look from his brother.

  James gasped for breath as he said, “Sam’s sister…She lives in a Rounan settlement just east of Stellan… Epidemic started there… He won’t stop ‘til he finds her!”

  Realization slapped me in the face. I’d totally forgotten Kelsi, the pompous woman who served as Kidek in my place during the war, lived in Stellan. No wonder Sam had been so anxious and torn off so suddenly!

  I gathered my reins again, steering my horse in the direction Sam had gone. “I have to help him!”

  “Lina, the disease…!” Luke cried.

  “Doesn’t matter. Family comes first,” I announced as Anne looked at me with new eyes. “Everyone else go make camp. The rest of you have never been in contact with this before. Sam and I have been exposed to it before without catching it, hopefully there’s some power in that! We’ll meet up with you later.”

  Evan looked at me gravely, but he nodded. Anne moved her horse to follow his, but Luke ushered his closer to mine as he said, “I’m coming with you. I can’t let you go alone. James and B-… James will stay with the others.”

  With that, our group split apart. Evan, Anne, and James rode away from town to set up camp, and Luke and I took off after Sam. Stellan was a very small town compared to the capital of Soläna and the towering city of Lun. It didn’t take long before we reached the center of town, and from there it was easy.

  Even though the rest of the buildings in the central square were marked with ink or tightly locked up with only a glimpse of firelight to be seen through the cracks, one building stood out from the others. Every window of the schoolhouse was thrown open, flickering light visible from each one, and Sam’s horse stamped the dry ground by the hitching post.

  Luke and I joined our horses with Sam’s and strode up the three steps to the schoolhouse door. Luke was having trouble keeping his eyes their normal color of blue. Recently, he had resorted back to his old, sullen behavior around Anne to keep his eyes from shifting color with his emotions, his one inherited Ranguvariian trait, just as he used to do around me before I knew he and his siblings weren’t human. Now, however, as I placed my hand on the doorknob, his eyes flickered back and forth from the blue his siblings possessed to the daffodil color that took the phrase “yellow with fear” to a whole new level.

  Compared to the firelight outside, the inside of the schoolhouse appeared dim. Oil lamps sputtered in sconces every few feet along the wall, but they weren’t nearly enough to illuminate the crowd of people we found within. School benches had been pushed aside and cots set up in rows barely a foot apart, and the people still on their feet were vastly outnumbered. People of all ages, genders, and skin tones lay side by side, and even though all of the windows were open, the air tasted stale.

  I untied my sash and retied it over my nose and mouth before moving through the sea of illness. Luke remained by the door like the faithful bodyguard he was. The only real sound in the room was that of whistling windpipes as these poor people tried to keep breathing. I found myself searching each of them for how far the disease had progressed.

  On some of them, the blackness in their veins was still confined to their hands, and presumably their feet although those were bundled up under blankets. On others, I could see ink peeking out from the collars, and I knew that these wouldn’t be alive in another twenty-four hours. Still others were completely covered up in their blankets, yet to be removed from the room. All of it jogged dark memories of my parents’ final days that I tried my hardest to shove down.

  I pushed my way toward the back of the schoolhouse where I thought I could see Sam’s bandana hidden down between a couple cots. As I got closer, I realized he had crouched down between two cots at the end of a row, and sure enough, I recognized Kelsi in one of them. Her face was pale and clammy, and her hair had lost its shine. I couldn’t hardly look at her with the same disdain as I once did, she looked so pitiful.

  “How is she?” I said in a voice barely above a whisper. There wasn’t enough room for me to huddle down with Sam.

  My husband took a deep breath and swallowed before responding, his voice a little raspy, “Her marks are about at her elbows. Nikolas is a lot worse.”

  I stared confused for a moment until Sam nodded at the man in the cot next to Kelsi. He had a baby face and freckles, like he was Kelsi’s much younger brother rather than whom I could only assume was her husband. I thought I remembered her mentioning a husband when she came to our compound during the war, but I wasn’t sure. It only reminded me of how Sam hadn’t told her about me, or really me about her, and I didn’t want to dwell on that.

  Nikolas was almost entirely covered in blankets to keep him from shivering, but his plague marks were nearly to his jaw, which could only mean that the ones on his arms had reached his collarbones. It wouldn’t be long before they choked his heart.

  I rolled up my sleeves and set off to find some materials from any of the other overwhelmed caregivers. Rags, poultices, herbs, any of the things I could remember helping ease my parents or my sister of their fevers or pain. Of course, there was no cure. Nobody knew why most people died, a few recovered, and some never contracted it in the first place. We could only try everything we knew to do and hope for the best.

  Thus, we began a new routine that I wasn’t sure how long would last. Sam and I spent long days in the Stellan schoolhouse caring for Kelsi and Nikolas, as well as any others that seemed to have a fighting chance. Luke would escort us to town every morning and out to Evan, Anne, and James’s camp every evening. Those three made use of the extra time by traveling a few hours in different directions to look for possible places to hide a large rebellion or to speak to uncharted Gornish and Rounan settlements.

  As the days stretched on, Sam became engrossed in his sister’s health. It wasn’t that I entirely blamed him, but it began to feel like he was in a different kingdom even though we were at least alw
ays in the same place if not side by side. Kelsi was the only thing he saw through his tunnel vision. My thoughts became my constant companion instead, and as the days stretched on, I kept coming back to one.

  What did Rhydin think he was accomplishing by destroying crops and resurrecting the Epidemic? He’d won the people of Nerahdis. Why jeopardize that?

  There was a new citadel among the mountains of Nerahdis, located a few miles north of Caden’s Peak where it straddled the border between Lunaka and Mineraltir. While the other castles boasted nothing more than large footprints, this palace stretched high in the sky, likely the tallest fortress that Nerahdis had ever seen. Its thin spires were midnight black and delicately constructed unlike the crude, thick formations of the castles of the Three Kingdoms. Rhydin had ensured that his imperial residence would in no way resemble anything the people of Nerahdis had seen before, just as he was a leader unlike any other.

  Rhydin paced the empty halls, his footsteps echoing along the white marble pillars that contained veins of black so dark they appeared to be bleeding. Very few of his Followers were permitted the right to live with him in the palace portion of the citadel, but even then, not a single one of them was allowed in certain areas. The punishment was death if they were even caught outside the door.

  What was taking them so long? He pondered.

  Rhydin tossed his thick, fur cape behind his shoulders as he reached a balcony facing east. The sun was setting to the opposite direction, and its light was fading from Lunaka. He could see Spenser’s Lake from here, its waters growing dark. His mind turned numb at the thought that Diagalo, a town wiped from the face of Nerahdis, used to lay on its shores. His memories of that place were…blurry, to say the least.