Chapter Eighty-Six. Hide.
Eighty-Six
Hide.
Just as the sun peeks over the eastern horizon, Merc and I are checking the tack on the horses.
We’re outside the royal stables, attended to by a couple of guards and some uniformed footmen.
In spite of the hour, Merc and I are ready to go, and so are our horses.
The others are a different story. Given their half-mast eyes and the wafts of mead that emanate from their very pores, the celebrations continued well into the evening.
Putting my hand on Lavante’s silken flank, I walk around to his butt and sweep down to check his back shoes, remembering what Emma warned me. Both seem fine. Then again, if he only throws one when he’s bored? This stallion hasn’t had a moment’s peace unless he was sleeping.
“Oh, I forgot,” Merc says as he swings his pack off the back of his saddle. “I have something for you—”
One of the guards weaves on his feet, goes elbow over teakettle, and lands in a planter. His comrades, and the stable hands, immediately attend to him, and Merc shakes his head as he pulls something out.
“This is yours, isn’t it?”
In his callused palm … is a red velvet bag I never expected to see again.
My breath catches and all I can do is stare. Mare’s coins. “Where … did you find it?”
“I saw it on the ground back at the ruins, just as I was bolting out of there. It was so out of place, and right where you and the stallion were.” He jogs the satchel, the muffled chiming that rises up sweet to my ears. “Heavy. Sounds of only one thing.”
“Thank you.” I take the weight and hold it close, closing my eyes. “Thank you so much.”
He settles his pack back on Snooze. “I don’t know what kind of coins are in there, but going by the weight? I’d say that’s a fortune.”
Glancing up at him, I wonder if he’s thinking of payments and that I hid wealth from him at the start of all this. There’s no bitterness on his face, no tension in his body, though.
“This was … a gift from a very dear friend. Upon her death.”
“Then she must have loved you very truly.” As a second guard faints, Merc steps around his horse—who is, actually, snoozing even with all the activity around him—and goes over to help with a curse. “Oh, for fate’s sake, man. You’re in uniform. Pull it together.”
Turning in to Lavante’s flank, I open the neck of the satchel and pour a couple of the coins into my palm. They gleam in the dawn light, as if bits of the sun have fallen from the sky. I remember Mare, and wonder what she would think of me now.
Only parts of my evolution would she approve of.
I’m putting the coins back when I stop and frown. Picking one up, I angle it this way and that, an eerie feeling coming over me.
“Julion…” I breathe with shock.
I’m staring at his face on the coin. It’s the strike marking that’s different from all the others, the one that features the unbearded young man …
He was no mere knight of the court. He is heir to the throne.
Yes, I think to myself. We go to Prosperitus.
I couldn’t coerce the warrior queen with the crown, but maybe I can leverage a different throne if I do what its prince requested of me.
“So are we ready, then?” Merc asks.
I glance up, and have to shake myself back into focus. “Ah … yes, yes, we are.”
Closing the tie, I put the velvet bag back in the pocket of Julion’s jodhpurs—which have been laundered and pressed by the royal attendants and are just like new. They even cleaned the turban, although I left it behind.
Merc and I both saddle up, and then the guards—minus the two who are sitting on the ground with their heads cradled in their hands—walk us over to an exit in the back of the royal castle’s protective wall.
On the approach, as our horse’s hooves clip-clop over the stone aisle, I think of the great gate, the one that opened up to mist and the ruins.
This one up ahead would be considered towering, if I didn’t have the former for comparison.
As the oak panels open, a dew-laden meadow is revealed on the far side, the dawn’s delicate, golden light drenching flowers and fruit trees alike.
All around, birds chatter sweetly on branches and flit from post to post in flashes of blue and red and yellow, blooms in the air itself.
Taking a deep breath, I’m reminded that the scent of nature feeds the soul, and I miss my herbs and potions.
Can I call myself a healer anymore? Or did my actions in the torture dungeon taint what I always thought was my calling to the point where I am like the Fulcrum, contaminated and no longer serving a higher purpose?
“You’ll be wanting to just follow the road—” The guard’s instructions are cut off by a burp that is obviously sour in nature given his grimace. “That would be, go north and north anew. Few travel this way, so you should be fine, but keep sharp.”
Merc inclines his head. “I will.”
“Thank you,” I say to the man. “And thank you for caring for our—”
All at once, the guards remove their hats, place them over their hearts, and bow low to me.
As they speak in a quiet rush of words I don’t understand, I think they’re praying for our safe travels.
Certainly as they straighten, I can feel their warm regard, even though I don’t risk meeting any of the eyes that rise up to me with open reverence.
As soon as we are outside the wall, the gate is closed and I can hear the echoing of a sturdy bolt as it’s thrown. I glance over my shoulder. Though this is the rear entry to the Kingdom, it is still grander than any I have seen, but the luxury falls away quickly as we start forward.
So many abandoned homes.
Beyond the lee of the great court and all of its acres of protected, tended, marbled finery, out here to the north and the west, there’s nothing but vacant property and overgrown fields.
It may be because everyone is crammed into safety inside the palace walls, but you couldn’t fit this populace into that space.
No, this is a decline in citizenry.
And the guard who spoke was right. The carriage lane we’re on is not well tended at all, a reminder that the Kingdom isn’t looking or caring for visitors in any fashion: Weeds grow up on the shoulders, choking out a series of marble plaques that bear the profile of the Queen, and the median in the center has a cultivation of curly green grass and tiny blue flowers.
The tree line that stands in sentry on both sides is sloppy with suckers invading what was certainly once a maintained allée, and there are rusted-out pieces of farming machinery decaying here and there.
And then we’re reminded of just how bad things are.
As we round a broad turn, Lavante’s leisurely trot gets choppy, and he tosses his head, his nostrils flaring and then releasing on a worried whinny. Snooze likewise shies away—
The dead cow is lying on its back in the center of the lane, its hooves lax, its belly exposed. Between one blink and the next, I see the officer I killed in a slump against the corner of the cell, his abdomen as open as a window in the summer.
As I cover a choking sound with my hand, Merc curses. “We deviate.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about, but then he directs his horse into the ground cover along the road’s shoulder. Lavante is more than happy to avoid the carcass, and he bounces through the undergrowth as I try not to dwell on the desecration.
And then there’s another one seven lengths farther up. This time, without a head as well with that stomach.
“We must hurry,” I hear myself say.
And hurry we do.
The route we take is over flat land, with plenty of fresh streams to keep the horses and us properly watered.
Though the sky overhead is blue and dotted with fair-weather clouds, the wind only the kind that keeps a rider in the sunshine comfortable and cool, I can feel a storm coming, every instinct in my body calling for me to take shelter and hunker down.
As noontime arrives, we are no longer in the Kingdom of the South, but I have no idea what territory we’ve entered.
Merc checks his useless map and I confirm our trajectory with the compass, and that’s all we know because the former offers no name and the latter doesn’t speak.
Whoever took care of the horses also packed us some food, so we stop briefly to eat and relieve ourselves.
Then we take another pause at a river to water everybody, and we continue going.
The road takes us over bridges that are ancient, and we pass by settlements that haven’t been lived in for eons.
There are also so many fields that used to be tended, but have since reverted back to forestland, only the low stone walls indicating property lines left.
And still we press on, neither of us saying much. Merc, because he is hyperaware, his broadsword in his hand, his black and white gaze scanning everything we go by in search of threats. Me, because the sense that I’m heading into something on the horizon consumes my every heartbeat.
Going by the angle of the sun, I’m guessing it’s around three in the afternoon when I first hear the roar off in the distance. I’ve noticed that any mountains are strictly to our east and mind what Merc said about where this route takes us.
Some twenty lengths later, the forest to our left thins out, and not because some other kind of topography takes the place of the trees.
Everything is dying. The leaves on the branches have shriveled up and dropped off—and not on account of any change in season.
Though fall is certainly coming as we continue north, and temperatures are dropping, it’s not enough to kill what grows.
No, these leaves haven’t gone through their normal cycle.
They’re blackened and deformed as they lay fallen on the ground, their crumpled twists mixing with strips of bark that have peeled off due to blight as well.
Even the root systems are affected, the arboreal legs mangled and protruding from the dirt.
Which is riddled with black contamination.
That’s when I see it, off in the distance … the Fulcrum.
All of us stop, Merc, myself, and both of the horses.
The containment is nearly all black now, and the strange flakes that float off from its churning circumference swirl around as evil snow.
Beneath my saddle, Lavante churns at the ground with his hooves as if he’s looking for permission to bolt.
“We must keep going,” Merc says grimly.
And I agree, but I find myself hypnotized by the slowly turning mystery—
“Sorrel? What ails you?”
“Nothing. I just—” A tickle in my throat prevents me from going any further.
Putting my hand to my mouth, I taste grit and spit out black grains of sand—and that’s when it happens. The nightmare that’s been haunting me finally reveals itself.
Just as before, a face comes forward, pushing out of the Fulcrum’s swirling sand, the features at once completely foreign—and terrifyingly familiar: They’re not only what I know I have seen in my tortured sleep … they’re something I have stood in front of.
It’s the statue.
From outside the ruins. The man whose face was turned to the beautiful woman. The man who looked at her with possession.
“What is it, Sorrel?”
“Do you see that,” I moan helplessly.
“See what?”
And that’s when my inner village wall, the one that’s protected me all these years, the one that’s been crumbling and disintegrating with increasing decay, falls to the ground. Except instead of keeping things from getting at my mind and my marrow, it releases everything it’s been holding in.
I know this man. In my soul, I recognize who he is, and who he is to me. Though my conscious thoughts reject the shattering conclusion, my soul cannot deny it—
Hide.
The step-by-step journey from who I thought I was to who I have always truly been is suddenly completed.
It started with the story of my birth, the one that I repeated as if it was programmed into me, the lie that I told others and believed myself …
and continued with my ability to know and dance with death …
and kept going with Mr. Lewis’s revelation …
and then kindled further and further with the compass, the crown, my first sexual experience with Merc, and finally with the fire and the trees parting …
As well as the way I wanted the cook dead and how I killed that officer.
With my vengeance.
It was in the visions that I saw with such clarity as I looked down the lane of the ruins.
It was especially in the nightmares that have stalked my sleep.
It has been with me all along, driving my urgent need to keep my face covered …
so that those around me, who were born and matured and died in the normal course, wouldn’t notice that there was an immortal in their midst, stashed in the pub of their little village, overseen by generations of the same family until the night came when fate was a tide that could be dammed up no longer.
And here and now, the beast of truth within me is released, no more mental wall to hold it in. With horror, I realize that I’ve had it wrong all along.
Hide.
That voice, which I have always minded, to the point where for years and years I have covered my face and kept to myself in spite of my loneliness, wasn’t warning me about other people.
It was keeping me away from him, from this face that emerges out of the black sand, the contamination.
That voice is not mine. It is my mother, the Savior, who has spoken to me.
And she’s commanding me to stay away from he who she imprisoned within the Fulcrum she created … from the other half of me, the half that has always simmered below my surface, powerful, vengeful, and angry.
The Dark King.
The source of all evil, the commander of demons, the scourge who seeks to be free, once again.
Who we must battle to survive.
My … father.