Chapter Fifteen Aftermath
The Prince woke to sunshine, warm and buttery like freshly churned cream, playing across his face.
His body was swaying slightly, which seemed strange.
He was relatively certain that one did not naturally sway when one was lying down, but then again he supposed one could never be entirely certain.
He chuckled to himself. He sounded like Geofred.
Who was that again? Who was… oh, well, there it was, of course: Geofred was his pet eagle.
Pet eagle?
He twitched slightly as he heard a voice talking to him in the back of his head. He told it to leave him alone; he could have a pet eagle if he wanted to. But the voice just laughed.
Wake up, princeling.
He opened his eyes and reality resolved into being. A face was peering down at him, black hair with green eyes. A few freckles across the nose. A strong mouth, curved in a grin.
“Leah!” he exclaimed. He sat up and realized that he was in a litter slung between two horses he hadn’t seen before, and Leah was walking behind him and watching him over the edge of the wooden frame.
Tomaz was leading the horses down a narrow but surprisingly well-laid woodland trail.
A third horse was tied behind the litter and was loaded down with most of the packs and supplies.
“Thanks for joining us,” Leah said.
“And I sincerely hope you don’t think your brother Geofred is an actual eagle,” rumbled Tomaz from up ahead.
The Prince rubbed his head, which felt fuzzy.
“I said that out loud?” he asked.
“You’re a pretty big sleep-talker, princeling,” Leah said, ruffling his hair and giving his head a playful push.
“We certainly learned a bit more about your feelings for a young lady by the name of… Monsunne, was it, eshendai?”
Leah let out a laugh like the peal of a bell, as bright and golden as the day. The Prince felt his cheeks burn, and he lay back down on the litter.
“I’m going back to bed,” he said, mortified.
“I think not!” roared Tomaz. “I want to know more about this Lady’s magnificent bosom!”
“I did not say that!” the Prince protested, sitting bolt upright and pointing at Tomaz severely with an outstretched finger. The big man just smiled and shrugged. The Prince caught Leah stifling a laugh out of the corner of his eye.
“Don’t encourage him,” the Prince said. He looked around and realized he had no idea where they were and said as much.
“A few days past Lake Chartain,” responded Tomaz.
“Past Lake Chartain?”
“Indeed,” Tomaz rumbled. “We’ve hauled your skinny butt nearly a hundred miles. But it’s fine, we know Princes need their beauty sleep.”
“And what,” the Prince paused and cleared his throat before continuing. “Happened after… after…”
He broke off and left the sentence unfinished.
“You mean after you saved this girl’s worthless hide?” Tomaz asked. Leah stooped, picked up a pebble, and threw it at him. It glanced harmlessly off his massive shoulder.
“Just say that again, ashandel,” she taunted. “I can take you.”
Tomaz pretended to cower in fear. Leah laughed.
“Why are you in such a good mood?” the Prince asked, bewildered.
“What do you mean why are we in a good mood?” Leah asked. “You might defy death and certain torture everyday back in the great big capital city of Lucien, but out here, being spared all that is cause for celebration!”
“But aren’t we still being followed?” he asked.
“Not so far as we know,” Tomaz said. “We did some serious scouting and found that those Defenders were the only ones who knew where we were, and you,” the big man looked back over his shoulder at the Prince, “you certainly dealt with them.”
“Yes,” the Prince said, his mood darkening as vague shapes and images came back to him, his own memories of the memories that he had absorbed from the men he had killed.
Suddenly he felt immensely tired and ravenously hungry.
Leah seemed to have anticipated this—she passed him a small hunk of bread and cheese and a waterskin.
Without even thanking her, he tore into the food, and drank heavily from the skin.
He wondered how long it had been since he had eaten, and how many days he had lain unconscious after… after he had killed the Defenders.
The food turned to ash in his mouth, and his appetite left him. He saw Tomaz and Leah exchange a significant glance.
“You never told us the exact details of what you could do,” Tomaz said. “Would have been nice to know. Come in handy in a fight.”
“Yes… well, that’s why I don’t kill unless I have to,” the Prince said quietly. Both of the Exiles were looking at him intently now, and, reluctantly, feeling every word pulled from him like a splinter from under his fingernails, he attempted to explain.
“The Raven Talisman connects me to the life of everything around me. But human life—human life is somehow more than everything else. Brighter, more intense. When a person dies, well, when I kill someone, their life… I absorb their life. Geofred always said he was more inclined to think it was their soul, since I don’t just absorb their physical qualities, but also what makes them them.
Memories, fears, anger, happiness. One time I even absorbed a rash. Damned inconvenient.”
He was studying the grassy ground of the forest to his right, not wanting to look at the two Exiles.
For some reason he couldn’t put his finger on, he felt ashamed talking about this with them.
As if he were talking about something dark and unclean, something that would never enter polite conversation.
“And after a certain time,” Leah said gently, “the memories fade?”
“Yes,” the Prince said slowly, not knowing why he continued to speak, but feeling compelled to do so. “Impressions of them remain, though. Memories of those memories. The first time, it was bad. The first state execution I took part in. The man had… taken a woman by force.”
The Prince felt more than saw the girl tense, and he couldn’t bring himself to look up at Tomaz, to see how the big man was reacting.
“I relived every action for an hour. I lived in his skin. I was too young to know anything about right or wrong, really, but I knew that something about it was monstrous, and still I couldn’t let it go, couldn’t push it away. The experience was… unpleasant.”
He almost said more, but then closed his mouth.
He couldn’t continue. They had stopped moving, sometime along the way, and for a long moment the three of them just sat and stood in the silence, the Prince looking intently at the hunting trail beneath his litter, and the two Exiles looking intently at him.
Tomaz was the first to move. He crossed the distance to the Prince and placed two enormous hands on his shoulders, nearly engulfing his head.
“I had no idea,” he said simply. “For what it counts, to survive that as the man you are, you’re stronger than I will ever be.”
The Prince felt the corners of his eyes prickle, and a lump formed in his throat.
He sat there for a moment, holding himself in check.
And then he looked up, cleared his throat gruffly and nodded to Tomaz.
The big man, his stony black eyes watching him closely, nodded as well, and dropped his hands.
“There’s a stream not too far from here—I’ll go fill up the waterskins. I know it’s a bit early, but I say we camp here for the night unless anyone has any objections?”
“None from me,” Leah said softly.
“All right,” the Prince said quickly, anxious to change the subject.
Tomaz nodded, grabbed the waterskins, and headed off into the trees. The Prince pulled himself to the edge of the litter and slowly slid himself to the ground. He let out a small groan as a hundred aches and pains suddenly came crashing down on him.
“Oh shadows and light, that hurts.”
“Are you all right?” Leah asked, looking concerned.
The Prince slowly straightened up, his back letting out several loud cracks, and stretched. He took a deep breath, and in spite of all that had happened in the last few weeks, he realized he actually did feel rather good.
“Yes,” he said, surprise coloring his voice. “Yes, I think I do feel all right.”
“In that case, help with the food,” she said, motioning to the packs on the horse. She was untying the strings holding the litter.
“How did we get back to Tomaz?” he asked, opening a pack at random and looking into it.
“Other pack,” Leah said. “And you and I got back to Tomaz on these horses. Both Trudger and Malial were put down by the Defenders. Tomaz was pretty torn up about losing Malial, they’ve been together for years now.
But, in the end there was plenty of good Tibour stock running around after you fainted, so I picked three, tied you to one of them, and rode them back. ”
“Fainted?” the Prince asked, pulling open the other pack.
“Yes. Fainted.”
“I didn’t faint.”
Leah looked at him with an amused expression over the backs of the horses.
“Oh, you didn’t?”
“No,” the Prince said. “I fell unconscious due to the strain of saving you. See, it sounds better that way. Much more like something a Prince would do.”
Leah rolled her eyes, and he smiled.
“You fainted, princeling.”
“Fine. But while rescuing you. So, still princely.”
She laughed and shook her head. She undid the final strap holding the litter in place and it fell to the ground in a clatter of wood.
“Whatever you say. You’ve been riding in this for almost a week now, sleeping like a little baby. Aside from the occasional muttering about Lady Monsunne, of course.”
She smirked at him and bent to pull the wood they had used for the litter frame out from the tangle of blankets they’d stretched across it.
“You know what’s funny?” the Prince asked.
“I never should have said that to you, you use that expression too much now.”
“Yes, but, you know what’s funny?”
The girl sighed. The Prince managed to locate the last of the dried venison and three large rolls of bread and a wheel of cheese that must have been scavenged off the Defenders.
“All right,” she said, “what’s funny?”