Chapter One Lettle
Chapter One
Lettle
Lettle couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t tired. The soles of her feet were cracked and bleeding. Her boots were packed with tarrow root to help ease the pain, but the herb’s lingering smell–a bit like decomposing fish–made her feel nauseated.
Four months the three of them had been walking. Farhan’s faeguard uniform bore signs of every step they had taken, the seams coming apart, the gold thread splattered with mud. Even Alder’s frequent smile had tarnished, growing duller each day.
Though I think it is less the trek and more his distance from Golan.
Jealousy blossomed behind her eyes in the form of a headache, adding to her list of ailments. But she would rather feel the pain of it than linger in her thoughts. In one thought in particular: Rayan.
‘We might love each other, Lettle, but without trust we cannot live for each other.’
His words had grown blackened roots in her heart, poisoning her soul, so that day by day she felt a little less like living. She looked sidelong at Alder beside her. It was only her curiosity that kept her going now.
‘Will we make it to Caperly tonight?’ she asked him.
He hesitated before replying. ‘…No.’
It was her, she was holding them up. But she couldn’t go faster, no matter how much she willed her body to move.
The quicker we get to Caperly, the sooner we can uncover the truth.
She stumbled, her attempt at speed failing, and fell heavily on her left elbow. She cried out in pain, the shortened muscles in her atrophied arm straining from the fall. The wasting pox had stolen all the strength in that limb and she struggled for a moment to sit back up.
Alder grabbed her by the shoulder, easing her into a sitting position. In his other hand he held out the jar of owen tree sap. Lettle swallowed a mouthful of the sticky liquid and sighed when it took effect, easing the pain.
She looked over the cliff edge. They were far from sea level now.
The foliage had long become unfamiliar to her.
The conifers, which Alder fondly called ‘Asase’s children’, lined the trail.
When she’d asked him why, he shrugged and said that was just what the Nomads called them.
Their pine cones scented the air with a fresh, citrussy smell that would have been pleasant if Lettle wasn’t thoroughly sick of it.
She plucked the fruit from a nearby juniper bush, the berry bursting on her tongue with a bitterness she’d come to appreciate. She offered one to Alder, who shook his head.
‘Are you all right now?’ Alder asked.
‘No,’ she answered honestly.
He nodded and looked to the horizon. Neither was he. That was the thing about travelling together for so long; she now knew his moods as intimately as her own.
‘It will be sunset soon,’ he said. ‘Let’s stop here for the night.’
Lettle should have felt relief, but the nights were harder than the day. The further they trekked up the mountain, the colder it had become.
She looked to the sky and her dread deepened.
‘Snow clouds,’ she said.
Alder’s smile was proud, despite what she’d surmised. He’d spent many days teaching her to differentiate between the blurred edges of a snow cloud and the sharp outline of a rain cloud.
‘It will snow more frequently now,’ he said. ‘Soon the village pass will be blocked by ice and snow.’
‘What if it’s already blocked?’
‘It isn’t,’ he said with certainty. Lettle had come to trust Alder’s word on everything relating to the environment. He simply knew things. Neither of them understood how he did, but they had begun to understand why.
He was human. Or partly human at least. A race not seen or heard of for a millennium.
And the only tool that she had to understand how he came into existence was another reason why she hated the nightfall–his sleepwalking.
It was then that Alder was able to access the memories seemingly lost to him and he would talk in the human language.
It didn’t happen every night, but she had to keep watch for when it did.
Not that she could speak the human language.
That’s what Farhan was for.
‘Do you think he’s noticed we’ve stopped?’ She jutted her chin in the fae’s direction.
Alder grimaced as Farhan continued walking up the trail, his slender frame an echo of the conifers that surrounded them. ‘No, definitely not.’
‘Farhan!’ Lettle called.
The fae’s obeah turned before he did. No matter how many times Lettle caught sight of an obeah, her heart would always stutter. Her father had been a hunter, so she was raised to regard them solely for the potency of magic in their skin.
Now she saw them for what they were, and that unsettled her more.
With the body of a black leopard and the antlers of a stag, they had the agility to both climb the tallest trees and navigate between the roots of the forest ground.
Those bound to a fae had fur as black as a midnight sky.
Their tails were adorned with a longer pelt, more akin to a fox’s.
But it didn’t matter what they looked like on the outside–their souls were the colour of bronze. Like Alder, they were human.
‘Shera,’ Lettle said, a little more quietly. The obeah’s ears could hear much more than Farhan’s. ‘Tell Farhan to turn around, we’re going to camp here for the night.’
Shera’s horns were wider than any other obeah’s Lettle had ever seen, so when she dipped her head in acknowledgement, Lettle wondered at the weight of them.
Finally Farhan stopped and turned. His wide face was a mask of surprise as he saw both Lettle and Alder sitting on the ground some twenty paces behind him.
Lettle had never met a person with fewer thoughts in their head.
Or perhaps he has too many thoughts and thus cannot follow the trail of one without getting distracted by another.
They had lost him countless times. No matter how much Alder stressed the dangers of the terrain, somehow Farhan would go astray. Once, when bathing in a stream, he had decided to ‘watch the sky for a few moments’ and found that the currents had floated him half a league downriver.
‘He is solely responsible for at least two extra weeks of delays,’ Lettle muttered to Alder.
‘At least,’ Alder replied. ‘But we need him.’
‘We need Shera, you mean.’
‘And Farhan–he’s the one who tells her what I say in my sleep. Without him we would never know.’
Lettle ground her teeth. It frustrated her that she hadn’t been able to figure out the human language Alder spoke during the night. She’d learned fae in less time, and that was renowned to be difficult–so difficult that they didn’t even teach it in schools.
‘I know, I’m just irritable and tired.’
‘When are you not?’ Alder said with a wry smile, but she didn’t have it in her to return it.
‘Do you ever regret leaving Mosima?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said quickly. ‘I can’t think like that. We’ve come too far. If we don’t find out anything then that’s fine, but to leave that question mark there? Never knowing if we could have helped end the curse?’ He shook his head firmly. ‘No, I would not change it.’
Lettle nodded. There is no point looking back. I am here now, and there is no other way but forward.
But even though she told herself that, she felt her mind blurring like the edges of the snow clouds, until her thoughts turned to memories and she was back in the room where her quest was born.
—
Lettle threw open the doors to the royal chambers. Yeeran stood on the other side, her hand held aloft as though she were about to open the door herself.
‘Alder spoke to—’
‘The obeah were—’
Words burst out of both of them, drowning the other out as they each sought to share what they’d learned. Their earlier quarrel was now an inconsequential thing of the past.
Yeeran’s eyes were wide, her grin toothy as she crackled with excitement. But Lettle couldn’t fathom any news could be as important as hers, so she kept talking, saying over and over again, ‘Obeah were once humans. Obeah were once humans.’
Eventually Yeeran’s excited chatter faded into shocked silence.
‘Did you say obeah were once humans?’ Golan said beside Yeeran.
For the first time Lettle looked around the room. Alder was staring bleary-eyed into the distance, as though he had just woken. Pila sat watching him, her paws resting on his feet–which would have struck her as odd if she wasn’t wholly invested in sharing her news.
‘Yes,’ Lettle said triumphantly. ‘Obeah were once humans.’
‘How?’ The voice behind her turned her nerves to ice. There was no warmth in Rayan’s voice and the single word was spoken like a command and not a question.
I am just a subject to him now. Not a consort. Not a lover.
Lettle swallowed the sob that lurched up her throat and turned to face him.
‘The Fates told me.’
There was a snort and Furi walked past Rayan’s shadow into the room.
Yeeran took a step back, as though Furi’s presence had pushed her to the periphery.
Lettle knew what that felt like. The king and queen were a presence to behold.
Both astoundingly beautiful, both tall. And each dangerous in their own way.
Furi held the tension of someone poised to strike at any moment.
Rayan held himself like a soldier…but he was most dangerous beneath the sheets.
Lettle tugged at her braids until her scalp grew painfully taut. The pain distracted her from her breaking heart.
‘Well? Tell us everything,’ Furi prompted.
And so Lettle did. She explained how Sahar had swapped her talismans to prevent her from speaking to the Fates. Then she told them of the prophecy.
‘Don’t you see? Humans made low no longer. Cursebound to centuries on four fleet feet. ‘She pointed to Pila. ‘Four feet!’
‘Many things have four feet, Lettle,’ Furi said dryly. Lettle felt the mood in the room shift to disbelief.
‘Look at them in magesight, then look at Alder: they have the same bronze hue.’ Lettle was getting exasperated. Rayan refused to meet her eyes, so she looked to Yeeran.
Her sister was mumbling the prophecy to herself. ‘Soon their freedom beckons…’
‘Yeeran?’