18. Elara
Chapter 18
Iwas mad. I was absolutely mad.
Why had I even agreed to this?
What in the world was I thinking?
I both ranted to myself, and to the nothing in my head as I paced back and forth in the sitting room, actually staying put for once as I waited for the Boy to get back. He was usually back by now, and after last night his tardiness was sending me into a tizzy. A tizzy that was getting worse with the fact of what I had agreed too.
“What is wrong with me?” I threw my hands in the air and continued pacing.
Aeinya had raced away after our walk in the gardens, vowing to get everything arranged for the Pankreatin in two days. Two days!
“What was I thinking? I’m going to die, that’s what I was thinking.” I mumbled and paced, that same tingly feeling from last night returning. I turned, throwing my hands out, half expecting that it would ignite whatever magic had been triggered last night.
Still nothing.
Maybe I had imagined it, and I had simply gone mad and burned and exploded my bureau on my own. Not that it would help me in what I had just agreed to. Real or not, I had a feeling that creating magic without a Catalyst would not end with the result Aeinya had in mind.
Magic or not, I was fighting, which meant I needed to train. Which meant I needed the Boy.
“Where are you?” I turned toward his space in the sitting room, everything blocked off by that ornate dressing wall.
I half expected him to pop out in his black shroud, as though he had been sitting there and listening to my incoherent rant for the last hour. Nothing. He had never been gone this long.
Unless he was there, and simply ignoring me.
Or dead.
Or sleeping.
I took a step, clenching my hands as I tried to shove the idea that had crossed my mind away. I shouldn’t go back there. It was his space and I had always respected that. I wanted to respect that, yet he had never been away this long, even for training.
I had seen his face, well part of his face, and then he had left. But what if he left, left?
What if he wasn’t dead.
What if he was gone.
Oh, by the Goddess. Something like a pit opened up in my chest, all the air sucking from the room as the thought had more than my fists clenching. My gut was a tight little ball as I took one step, then another toward the room divider.
“Boy?” I asked, knocking softly as I attempted to force that panic driven hole in my chest shut.
Except there was no answer, which of course made it worse.
“Boy?” I asked again, my voice more air than words as I pinched my eyes shut and made that last forbidden step to peer around the wooden panel that kept us divided.
He wasn’t there. But nothing much else was either.
A small cot was pushed into the corner, the linens and pillow perfectly made. A spare black uniform was on a hook next to a black sleeping gown, both looking like bits of broken soul as they hung lifelessly against the wall.
A small shelf had been tacked into place above the foot of the bed, a book, a cracked piece of glass, and a red stone set nicely in place. There was a small stretch of floor before the bed, the wood worn down from repeated steps.
But that was it.
No luxuries, no clues as to who he was, or what his name might be.
I turned toward the shelf, fingers fluttering over the glass, and then the red stone, something buzzing over my skin as I moved toward the book. It was well worn, the leather loose and supple, the strapped bindings that were common for the servants fraying in some places.
Fingers moving over the spine, I swallowed, wondering if a name had been written inside. Or what kind of book it might be. Did he like fantasy like I did, science, or Goddess save me: romance.
Attempting to swallow away the rock in my throat, I grabbed the book, the well-worn tome flopping open in my hand.
“Girl and her dog take a walk,” I read the words on the first page in a whisper, the picture of the girl and her dog above as some poorly formed letters mimicked the sentence below.
It was a primer, like the one my governess had used with me so many years ago. He had been assigned to me when I still had a governess, and he spent most of those hours in training while I sat reading and playing the harp, and drawing and all the nonsense things that princesses are supposed to know how to do.
While I learned, he fought. While I read, he trained. But there he was, teaching himself. There he was breaking one of the rules that Mother had set for him. He wasn’t supposed to know how to read and write, because he wasn’t allowed to have any way to communicate.
He was supposed to be as alone as I was.
That hole in my chest clenched as I flicked the pages forward.
“The girl is happy,” I flipped forward. “A professor is teaching arithmetic.” The sentences grew more and more complicated until I reached the end of the book where lines were set for writing instruction. The pages stopped flipping and I caught sight of my name, the crude writing slow and steady as he wrote.
‘Elara,
I am happy to be with you. You make me happy. You are funny. Love, Ar Boy’
I stared at the words, the writing making it look like they had been written by a child, who knows how long ago. But it wasn’t that that had my heart leaping into my throat. It was the tiny ‘Ar’ scrawled into the line before it was crossed out and replaced by ‘Boy.’
Ar.
His name started with ‘Ar’, or maybe it was a ‘N i’ I couldn’t be sure. My heart was leaping as I flipped forward a few more pages, looking for any other clue. There wasn’t much else, only carefully written words from the primer, ‘boy’, ‘cat’, ‘food’, ‘walk’, and then:
‘Momma, I am being a good boy. I am doing what she wants. I will help you, too. We will go home soon.’
“What she wants?” The page was dotted with what looked like tears, the ink from the pen having pooled around the word ‘she’ as if he had pressed too hard.
There was something about that phrasing that was off, something ominous, and yet I knew what exactly it was.
“She,” I whispered the word, visions of my mother flitting before my eyes as I ran my finger over the long since dried ink.
What had she done?
Oh Goddess, was she responsible for that scar?
The question froze through me as the sound of boots I knew all too well thundered down the hall toward my door.
“Holy Goddess!” I hissed, half forgetting my brain for a moment as I placed the book back on the shelf, hopefully just how I had found it and took off toward the chair on the other side of the room.
I should have never gone over there; I should have never grabbed the book. It was a mistake…
I threw myself into the chair as the door opened, the Boy emerging in his full black, not a bit of it out of place, the face covering was pulled taut and pinned down so tight there wasn’t a wrinkle in sight.
I, however, was half laying over the edge of the chaise, panting as though I had been wrestling with the thing. He froze at seeing me, his shoulders stiffening as he turned and he surveyed the space.
“Hello, I’m happy you are here.” I tried to sound normal, but my voice was too high, my breathing still too ragged. Besides, when did I ever talk that fast? I could practically feel his accusatory gaze burn through me.
He continued looking around before turning, hands gesturing with two notions I knew from him ‘what’ and ‘safe’.
What am I doing, and am I safe?
“I’m fine,” I said, still too high pitched and breathy. “I was waiting for you. You were gone all day.” He mimed a sword moving and went to his bunk. “I know, but you were gone all day.” Was I sounding whiny in an attempt to cover up my guilt? Yes, I totally was. I took a breath, trying to center myself. “I just… I missed you and I worried after… after last night.”
I wasn’t going to beat around the bush, especially when he was clearly ready to dart into his bunk and vanish for the night.However, he froze, his hands knotting at his side.
“I know it was an accident, and I know you don’t want me to see you,” I hesitated, standing from my chair to move behind him.
I froze a few steps away, his back tensing and moving with each of his breaths. My fingers tingled, practically begging me to reach up and touch him. To feel those muscles, same as I had his jaw. I exhaled, balling my fists in the fabric of my skirt if only to keep me from making that reach.
“I won’t tell anyone,” I continued, my voice thankfully returning to normal. “But you don’t have anything to hide. I promise.”
I whispered that last bit, still balling my hands in the cotton skirts as I thought of those scars on his ear and neck.
“You don’t have to hide from me.” The words barely escaped the knot that had formed in my throat, my hand slowly rising to touch him. He turned before I could make the move, his shrouded face peering toward me. I swore I could see the line of his jaw and his lip that time, but it was probably my imagination now that I knew what to look for.
He clicked twice ‘no’, and shook his head in a near frantic motion. The message was clear. He did have to hide from me.
He had to do what ‘she’ wanted, so that he and his ‘Momma’ would get to go home soon.
He was as trapped as I was.
The Boy made to turn, but I grabbed him, my hand gripping a taut shoulder. I tried to pull him back around, but I might as well have been trying to move the Runturin into a new position.
“I won’t–” I didn’t get to finish, he shrugged me off and stepped behind the partition, the place I wasn’t supposed to go.
“I won’t make you, and I won’t tell,” I finished after a minute, staring at the carving on the wood panel closest to me, two women on either side of a great tree, one with three babies at her feet, the other with a pail. All of the panels were weird, the distorted story of the Goddess all fantastical as it went from love to war to death. None of them were as weird as the center panel, though, where three people stood below three suns.
More knots wound themselves through my gut as I made my way back to the chair, flopping myself in it again.
“I am going to need your help, however,” I called after a few minutes, there wasn’t so much of a grunt in answer. I went on. I knew he could hear me, even if he was pretending not to be there. “Aeinya has a plan so I can prove that I’m not sickly, and I may have agreed to it.” Another pause and I waited; I couldn’t even hear him breathe. I would have been worried if I hadn’t seen him dart back there.
“I agreed to fight in the Pankreatin.” A foot hit the ground as though it had slipped off of something in shock. “Not officially, of course, but I would sneak in and show them all what I can do and then everyone would realize I wasn’t sickly and Mother wouldn’t have any excuse to keep me from the wedding.”
Two clicks sounded loudly from the other side of the partition before he emerged again, hands already moving in the clear sign of ‘no’ as he clicked again.
I pressed my lips together, “I know it’s maybe not the best idea, but Aeinya’s cousin will go easy on me. It won’t be a real fight, just enough of a fight that she will see I’m not useless. Everyone in Okivo will see.”
His hands dropped from their furious motion, moving instead to his hips and then ‘why’.
“Because I don’t want to let her control me anymore,” I paused, watching him as he stood there and thinking again to those words on the page. “Because I can’t be scared of her anymore. I need to do this. If it doesn’t work, I’ll sneak out while they are all at the wedding, we will sneak out, and then we can be free of this place. Of her.”
The wedding would be the perfect time for me to find a way out of this, after all. Everyone would be gone on the pilgrimage to the Temple of the Sister, where all unions were tied, blessed, and consummated on the altar before the Goddess. No one would know I had gone for almost a month before their return. The pilgrimage and the Walk of the Maiden was tradition, and I had waited for that ever since I first met Aeinya, before I actually knew what consummate meant. If none of this worked, I would miss it. I locked that pain inside. “I have to try.”
The Boy stared for a good long while, his breaths low and even. He didn’t move, didn’t gesture. After a minute he nodded once and for a second I thought he was agreeing, and then he moved back toward his corner.
“Wait!” I practically yelled, jumping up from the chair. “I need help to train.”
He didn’t stop, he only walked behind the partition again, leaving me staring.
I waited, counted to five, but still nothing.
Alright, so I guess that wasn’t an agreement.
Fine. I’ll do it myself. Who knew, maybe I would explode something again and figure that mystery out.
I straightened, flattening my skirts in preparation to fight the chair if it came down to it when he turned me back to him.
He stood there, still hooded, still shrouded, but holding my wooden sword out to me.
He didn’t click, didn’t nod, he just stood there with those swords held out, the silent promise enough.
“Thank you,” I whispered, looking toward what I hoped was his eyes as he nodded.
The two words were all he needed to hear before he swung his sword around to attack me.
I barely blocked it, the force of his swing against mine sending me back into the chaise.
He swung the sword, a dark chuckle issuing from behind the shroud. It had been years since I had missed a block from his attacks, years of training that had made my bones ache. Now, with one hit, they were doing more than aching, they were rattling inside of me.
Gritting my teeth, I jumped up, rushing and swinging him at the same time. He barely moved, only lifted his sword in what looked like a lazy parry and sent me away from him again. This time into the door.
What was happening? I hadn’t been this bad in years. But I could scarcely move quick enough to even get my sword close to his.
It only took three more swings of his wooden sword to realize why. He had been going easy on me before, but he wasn’t anymore.
Now, we were really training.