8. Rorax
Rorax could vaguely hear Jia screaming, the sound pulling at her consciousness.
She slowly blinked her eyes and found herself looking down into coarse, black hair.
Jia screamed again, and Rorax rolled her eyes to the side to see Jia off their horse, falling to her knees and clawing at her chest, her fingernails scraping uselessly against the Heilstrom’s black scaled armor.
“Jia?” The ground— no, not the ground, a horse— shifted nervously under Rorax as Jia’s screams cut off into sounds of distress, her fingertips splitting open on her armor, spreading fresh blood over the sharp black scales she clawed at.
“No. No, no, no nonono,” Jia sobbed, rocking back and forth on her knees, tears running freely down her cheeks. She stopped digging at her chest only long enough to lean forward and vomit.
Jia had been clawing at her chest like an animal, at a wound that was not there. A phantom wound, a wound she might be feeling through her mating bond.
Volla.
The thought rang through her bones with such clarity, with such finality, it rocked Rorax to her core.
Volla was dead.
Jia’s mating bond with Volla had been severed, and Jia felt Volla’s last feelings . . . an injury, a sword, an arrow, or a knife through her heart.
Rorax turned away from Jia, who sobbed, her bloody hands cradled into her chest as she curled up in a ball like a fetus in the dirt.
Rorax shoved her way off the horse, falling to the ground, the sounds of Jia’s sobs forcing her body to move. She needed to get away, right now. Rorax half walked, half stumbled through the nearly pitch black Lyondrean forest until she couldn’t hear Jia’s cries anymore and collapsed to her knees.
Volla was dead. Volla was dead. Rorax and Jia had left her to die alone.
Sahana’s words echoed through Rorax’s head, making her want to scream. We’re a family. This unit is a family. That’s what makes us so good.
Sahana was dead too.
Rorax’s heart cleaved in half as she gripped the soil into her fists. She didn’t know how she would ever be able to move again.
“We are stopping.”
“No.”
“We have to, Jia. We need to recoup.”
“I want to keep going. The Realms are only a day’s ride away.”
“We haven’t had any food for over a day. We need to eat.”
Jia, who was pressed against her back in the saddle, kept quiet but didn’t protest further when Rorax turned the horse towards the dilapidated building. The sign on it read “Dowager’s Bed and Breakfast.”
Rorax pushed their horse into a trot. A woman was in the yard, already tending to a pair of chestnut horses, so Rorax pulled their stolen stallion next to her and slid off the horse. Rorax turned and faced the woman, her body stiffening as the woman’s pair of big, blue eyes looked up at her. Something about the woman’s gaze was unsettling, it was missing something . . . She stared at the woman and found something unfamiliar staring back.
Mortality.
The woman was Ungifted.
The people of Illus were split into three possible lifespans. The Gifted had immortal lifespans and they could hold magick, even if it was so faint that they could not manifest it outside their body. Those that could not manifest magick were called Lowborns, and those that held enough magick to manifest outside of their bodies were called Highborns.
The Blessed lived lifespans of up to three hundred years before they passed into the afterlife, and the Ungifted aged until they were eighty to one hundred years old before they died.
In the Realms, the center of all magick in Illus, there were rarely ever Ungifted that lived there. She only knew of a small colony of them who lived in Valitlinn under the Guardian’s protection. The Blessed usually took residence in Ostr and the Principality of Pazula. To see an Ungifted here, so close to the Realm’s border was surprising. Jarring even.
Rorax was Gifted, but usually didn’t have enough elemental power to be able to pick out specific magick types a person held, like Sahana could . . . like Sahana used to be able to. She had just enough to be able to sense the lack of threat, the silence, and the complete lack of a magickal wave, from this woman however. Her big eyes were almost completely void of any kind of life, let alone a gift.
Their continent was historically unkind to the Ungifted. When magick was left stagnant in the earth for too long, unused by the Gifted, monsters and creatures were known to spawn. It was dangerous to live on the border of the Realms without some kind of gift to protect you. Not only that but there was a stigma that the Ungifted couldn’t be trusted since Blood Oaths needed magick and didn’t work on them to force them to be accountable.
Based on the faint lines on the woman’s face she must have been alive for thirty of the Ungifted Years.
“What is your business in Lyondrea?” The woman grabbed the reins of the dark stallion.
Rorax’s eyes flicked to the wooden inn behind the woman. Except for deep gashes that looked an awful lot like claws had cut deep into the wood of the front door of the inn, it looked safe enough.
Rorax studied the marks as she spoke to the woman. “We are looking for a place to stay the night.”
The stallion shifted his weight nervously as Jia slid off his back behind Rorax, but the woman kept his head still, gripping the reins tighter. “We have two rooms available, above the kitchen. Two coppers per night, but there’s an extra coin due if we’ll need to stable your horse.”
Rorax looked back into the woman’s big blue eyes. She fished three copper marks and a golden coin out of her back pocket and dropped it in the woman’s dirty palm. “That’s for your silence.”
The woman looked at the golden coin in her palm then glanced up to Rorax with slightly narrowed eyes. Her teeth bit into the dark skin of her lip as her eyes traced over the handle of Rorax’s sword peeking over her shoulder.
“We don’t want any trouble here. Can’t have any trouble here.”
Rorax tried to keep from curling her lip over her teeth at the woman’s inspection. “If anything, maybe you’ll sleep easier knowing you have us around for the night in case whatever made those marks comes back for more.”
“Right.” The woman seemed to sag a bit at the reminder. “Follow me.”
The woman showed them to their room, which was cozy and clean with two small beds.
Rorax nodded to the woman as she left Jia and her alone. Jia immediately curled into one of the beds, her face to the wall, and didn’t say a word.
Jia was crying in the bathroom.
She had been locked in there for almost an hour now.
Rorax looked forlornly over at the dinner she had brought up from the kitchen below; it lay completely untouched. She rubbed the back of her neck with her palm, trying to push down the feelings of helplessness and grief rising in her chest, making it hard to breathe.
Jia had slept for a while before taking a bath. And she was still in there, crying. Rorax hadn’t let herself cry. She didn’t have the time to mourn yet. Just a few more days. She needed to get them on a boat to Koppar first.
Assuming she could peel Jia away from the bathroom tomorrow morning, they would be across the border and back into the Realms in only a day or two. Then they’d be back to Valitlinn in a week if they caught a boat, and back to Koppar in two if that boat would carry them all the way home. Once she was back in her own rooms and she’d reported to the king and told Karan what had happened to his mate . . . then Rorax could fall apart.
Karan could probably feel what had happened, just like Jia had. He was probably on his way to Lyondrea right now in a storm of grief and anger.
As she sat on the edge of the bed, her forearms on her knees, images of that night started rolling through her mind. The same images, over and over.
The knife in Sahana’s chest; Crax’s blood speckled across Jia’s face; Sahana curled up on the ground in a puddle of her own blood; Volla’s golden hair as she stood in between her and Crax’s men . . .
Rorax’s stomach roiled, and she absentmindedly rubbed her palm across her chest.
Had Volla died of her wounds? Had she been captured and tortured while they had fled and left her there to fight on her own? The questions whirled violently in Rorax’s head until her chest and throat grew tight.
She jerked herself off the side of the bed, knocked on the wooden bathroom door once, and pushed her way inside when she didn’t hear a response.
Jia was in her bath, curled up in a ball, her knees pressed into her collarbones protectively.
Rorax squatted down next to the tub. “Jia. Look at me.”
Jia’s head lolled to the side, and her lifeless eyes slid to Rorax.
Rorax bit her lip to keep from flinching.
No joy. No spark. Nothing but raw agony reflected in her eyes, and it made something ugly and unfamiliar crack open inside of Rorax. Shame. Disgust. Regret. Guilt. Something she had not felt so keenly towards herself in nearly fifty years.
Rorax ignored it, pushing it down. “Can you feel your magick yet?”
“Not really,” she rasped.
“I can’t either. Which means the blocker is still in our blood. We have to take samples to get them back to Kiniera.”
Jia nodded, her eyes slowly sliding to her backpack on the floor. “The vials. They’re in my backpack.”
Rorax grabbed a rag from the bathroom before she manually reached around and unsheathed Glimr from her back. She used her knife to cut a strip of fabric from the bottom of the rag before she sliced it across her palm. She directed the slow stream of blood to fill one of the vials before she turned to Jia, holding out her knife.
She used the strip of cloth to soak up the excess blood as Jia filled her own vial. When both vials were filled and capped again, Rorax rubbed her blood over the tops, where a witch-rune was etched into the corks. The blood activated the runes and Rorax watched as the glasses frosted over. The blood would be preserved there, frozen, for weeks.
Rorax stood, tucking the vials back into Jia’s backpack. “You need to eat something.”
Jia’s purple eyes glazed over, but she nodded, the movement small and pitiful.
“I’m serious Jia. You need to eat. Promise me you’ll try to get something down.”
Jia nodded slowly, woodenly like a broken doll.
Then, like a coward, Rorax turned and left the room.
Rorax found herself downstairs, in the small tavern below their room.
The woman from last night and a tall man who was drying a mug stood behind the bar.
Four tables in the hall were full of rowdy customers, but the majority sat empty.
Rorax ignored the boisterous customers and made her way to the bar. The girl offered her a tight-lipped smile, but the man put down the mug he was drying and scowled. “We don’t want any trouble here, ya hear? No amount of—” his eyes flicked to the tables of customers behind Rorax’s shoulder who was now bellowing Lyondrea’s national anthem, “—compensation . . . would be worth it.”
Rorax ignored him but slid a few more copper coins to him over the counter. “Do you have any wine here?”
The man looked Rorax over once more. His lips pressed together in a tight frown, but he used the mug he’d just cleaned and filled it.
“What happened to your friend?” the woman asked as she took the mug from the man and slid it across the bar to Rorax.
Rorax shrugged at the woman, tipped the mug back, and drained the contents in a few gulps. She smacked the mug back on the countertop and wiped her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She couldn”t get as drunk as she wanted to, in case she needed to haul Jia and her out of there but . . . “One more.”
The man looked at the woman, who just shrugged, before filling it again.
Rorax took the mug and sat at the closest table, her back to the table full of idiots who were now arm-wrestling each other.
She nursed her mug of wine, brooding when the Ungifted woman slid into the chair across from her.
“Where did ya get that ring?” She looked down at Rorax’s pointer finger wrapped around the mug.
The ring had been cast to resemble the top of a raven’s skull.
Two empty eye sockets sat close to her first knuckle; the bird”s long, sharp beak ran all the way to her second knuckle towards her fingertip. Rorax had used the long sharp beak as a weapon many times in battle.
It was made of silversteel. House of Alloy could move and manipulate all metal at will, so the gods had given the Gifted deposits of goldsteel, silversteel, and starsteel (the rarest of them all) into the earth. The different metals that the Gifted from House of Alloy couldn’t manipulate with their magick. The metals were expensive, rare, and dangerous to mine but necessary when anything made of iron, bronze, or steel could be used against you.
“It was a gift.” Her heart gave a little lifeless squeeze; it had been a gift from her brother, whom she’d abandoned in exchange for Volla and Jia. Gods, she was worthless.
“What does the symbol mean?” the woman asked, her eyes narrowing on the skull.
There was a symbol stamped onto the top of the skull. Three circles stacked up, the largest on the bottom and the smallest closer to the beak with a straight line running through the center of all three.
Rorax shrugged, she didn’t know what it meant.
The woman’s eyes finally snapped back up to Rorax’s face. “What happened to the girl you’re with? She looked like she’d been terrorized.”
Rorax saw the man out of the corner of her eye. He was staring at the two of them with an unhappy frown. “She has been terrorized. In a certain way.”
The woman’s eyes narrowed even further. “What does that mean?”
“You’re prying now.” Rorax took another big swallow of wine as pink blossomed on the woman’s cheeks.
“I . . . I guess I am.” The woman bristled, crossing her arms over her chest. “But I’ve only seen that . . . look, that pale, scared, dead look on two other people before, once when the creature came who made those marks on my front door, and the other when someone I know lost their mate, and I deserve to know if a monster is on its way to my inn.”
The reminder of Volla had Rorax finishing her mug of wine. The woman still looked at her suspiciously, so Rorax curled her lip over her teeth. “It wasn’t a monster.”
“Oh!” The woman’s eyes went wide before going soft. “Oh.”
The pity and sadness lying in her eyes made Rorax ache, so she changed the subject. “No one should come looking for us. If anyone does, just tell them the truth.”
“And what is the truth?”
Rorax pushed herself up, looking the woman dead in the eyes as she stood over her and told her the eventual truth. “We’re heading east.”
She turned from the woman, not bothering to look at the man who was staring holes in her back and pushed outside.
Rorax needn’t have bothered misdirecting the innkeeper.
At least thirty armed soldiers stood between her and the stable, all on tall Realm bred horses; they were all wearing dark brown leather armor with a silver wolf in a black triangle painted on their chests. The silver wolf was the sigil of the House of Dark.
They all had that sigil. All except for one.
A man in front of the pack pushed a raggedy hood away from his face and sniffed the air. He was so pale his skin appeared almost gray, so translucent you could see the veins under his skin. His hair was long, stick-straight, and white, falling out of his hood in waves to his lap.
He dismounted his horse, sniffed again, and two sightless eyes fell to where Rorax stood, frozen to the spot.
His eyes were cloudy, but even without any pupils the man managed to stare right at her, causing a shiver to wrack through her shoulders. “The Guardian has summoned yeh teh the Northern Castle, girl.”
Something was wrong with this man, something different. Rorax slid to the side, and his sightless eyes moved with her, like he could see her.
He was tracking her with some kind of magic. He was an Elite. And from the looks of his long, white hair he was an Elder Elite.
There were twelve main forms of magick in the world, and Fire, Ice, Weather, Alloy, Air, Dark, Light, Foliage, Fauna, Water, Life, and Death were the Realms that housed them. Anyone that held outside of those twelve main types were called Elites. Elites that had been alive since the Rip, since the beginning of time, were called Elder Elites. There were less than ten of them still alive in all of Illus, and Rorax was staring at one. She knew it.
“The Guardian can go to Hell,” Rorax hissed, reaching back and unsheathing Glimr. “Who are you?”
The Elder Elite didn’t even bother answering her. Fast as a whip, he charged her. Rorax barely had time to dodge under the sword that arched towards her torso. She twirled, pulling her sword out and clashing against the man’s steel. He pushed her back, making her stumble. She threw her knife at the man as hard as she could.
He knocked Glimr to the side in a shower of sparks, and Rorax was so shocked she didn’t have time to do anything as the hilt of the man’s blade redirected downward and hit her across the temple.
Rorax blacked out for half a second but came to just in time to feel her face hit the ground, her nose spurting blood. One soldier kicked her in the ribs, then another, and Rorax scrambled and fought, earning herself an elbow or a fist to the face, and more blows to her ribs before there was a pressing against her skull of dark magick so tight she couldn’t see or hear. Everything went black.