Chapter Sixteen Lettle
Chapter Sixteen
Lettle
Lettle woke with a start. She hadn’t expected to sleep at all, but the quiet serenity of the sanctuary had lulled her into the depths of slumber. Afa slept next to her, surrounded by obeah. One was watching her with its unnerving placid gaze.
Perhaps Afa has put a spell on them? Lettle thought. She reached for Mortah’s walking stick and clutched it tight.
Afa murmured in his sleep and the sound was so like Alder, it frightened her. A sob began to claw its way up her throat and she left the moss field before she woke Afa.
She followed a trail of fireflies to a small pond, and only then did she let her tears fall.
Alder’s terrified face kept haunting her, his cheeks red from the waterfall, his eyes wide and pleading. ‘Help me,’ he’d cried.
‘I will, I promise,’ she vowed. The pond rippled with the reflection of something large. She tensed and turned round, not sure what she expected to find. After yesterday she knew anything could be possible.
‘Oh, Ajax.’ She let out a breath of relief. He saw her distress and pawed at her lap.
‘I’m all right.’ She squeezed her eyes shut, causing more tears to spill.
Ajax nudged her face, his cold nose startling her into looking at him. It elicited a small smile from her. ‘Thank you for being with me, Ajax.’ She tucked herself into his side, inhaling his familiar aroma.
I can’t believe Rayan was watching me this whole time. It should have made her angry but it didn’t; she liked that he had been with her in his own way. It proved that part of him still cared.
‘Is Rayan listening?’ she asked the obeah.
Ajax dipped his head in assent.
Though hundreds of leagues, thousands, separated them, she spoke the words she had been rehearsing in her mind since the day they had argued.
‘Rayan, I know that not being forthright about the extent of the prophecy was wrong. I didn’t think of it as a lie, but deception by omission is still deceit.
’ Afa had shown her that more clearly. ‘I was too caught up in the pain and fear of knowing I would one day be the death of you. The prophecy has haunted me from the moment I gave it breath.’
She wiped at the tears that fell down her cheeks. Ajax sat unmoving, his green eyes giving nothing away of the thoughts and feelings of Rayan within.
‘I hope you can forgive me. For this and also for what I will one day do. I don’t know when or how you’ll come to be my victim, but know that I will never do it purposefully. I am tired of being plagued by a future I can’t control. I love you, and want you, and need you.’
Ajax, of course, said nothing. Lettle’s tears turned once again into a heavy sob. She dropped her head in her hands and let the grief of missing Rayan wash over her.
Ajax whined softly. Lettle wrapped her hands around him until her tears abated.
‘I thought when I said this to you, Rayan, you’d have an opportunity to respond,’ she laughed a little and straightened her shoulders.
‘But perhaps it is best this way. I do not think I could continue on here knowing that you had rejected me–if that is still your wish. Instead, there is hope in this uncertainty. I can say I love you and imagine the response back. This fantasy will satisfy me for now.’
A frog sprang out of the pond and dashed across the rocks in front of them.
Ajax pranced after it, bouncing up and down like a kitten giving chase to a ball of string.
The fraedia was beginning to warm above them, setting the morning dew sparkling on the flowers and plants around her.
It would have been a beautiful sight if not for the situation.
She looked back to the field of moss behind her. Afa still lay asleep among the obeah.
He holds onto so many secrets, she thought.
Her hands went to her prophecy tokens in her pouch. If he wouldn’t tell her everything, then she would ask the gods themselves.
‘Hail, Bosome, grant me your knowledge this night: tell me of Afa, the last human.’ She cast the talismans onto the ground, Afa the single thought in her mind.
See without sight those that are missed. The obeah should never be again.
‘See without sight…’ Lettle whispered as she penned the prophecy into her journal.
The Fates were leading her to use magesight. Lettle stood and let her mind focus and relax at the same time. She always found it easy viewing the world in magesight since it was how she’d always read the Fates. But as she looked around nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Well, as ordinary as an underground meadow and a magical boundary can seem, she thought.
‘The obeah should never be again…’ she murmured.
She looked at Ajax, the spark that glowed in his chest bouncing up and down as he chased after the frog.
And just like the obeah, the frog was also lit with a small twinkle of life–like all living things.
After discovering in Mosima that obeah glimmered bronze, fae gold and elves silver, Lettle had begun to notice the variation in the hues of different animals.
The light emanated a faint green for reptiles and amphibians, whereas mammals were red and fish blue. Birds glowed a light purple.
The colours were so subtle, it took a lot of concentration to pick them out as she moved through the cavern. She passed a section of the sanctuary where there was no light at all and the shock of it drew her out of magesight.
Using her own eyes, she realised she was looking at the obeah that surrounded Afa. Once more she glanced at them, but not only was there no light within; the darkness was so complete it felt depthless.
There was no life within them at all.
But how? She had seen them breathing.
She began to walk towards them, her eyes squinting as she tried to pick out their movements. They couldn’t have all just died, could they?
They are soulless…
She was so preoccupied by her realisation that she didn’t look where she was going. Her toe stubbed against something hard, and she went sprawling. Ajax came running.
‘I really am done with falling over,’ she muttered as she looked at the fraedia glowing above. Ajax offered her his horn and she used it to pull herself up.
‘What did I even fall over?’
She looked around for the object of her ire and found a wooden post. It was placed too purposefully for it to be unintentional. She crouched down and ran her hands over the grain of the wood, noticing that there was a word engraved there.
‘Varnya,’ she read. Ajax huffed next to her, pointing out another wooden marker beside the first.
She noticed this was also labelled with a word. ‘Benan.’
Not a word…a name.
She looked around. There were ten, twenty, more…
‘A graveyard,’ she whispered as she began to back away slowly.
‘I didn’t kill all of them.’ The words and their meaning were enough to stop Lettle in her tracks.
She turned to face Afa. He met her judgement placidly. ‘You told me you were alone down here.’
‘I was, most of the time. But about a hundred years after Hady died, I heard voices in the cave above. So I sent stairs to greet them. And down they came.’ He moved his fingers to mimic walking down stairs.
He looked to one of the graves. ‘Davy was the first, he was a wonderful companion.’
‘Did you kill him?’ Lettle snarled.
Afa seemed taken aback by her anger, but she was done being gentle with him.
‘I did eventually. We had some happy years, but then he wanted to leave and tell the world about me. I had spent so long hiding the truth, I couldn’t let him change it all.’
‘What of the others?’
He cocked his head as if remembering. ‘There was a family, two daughters. They lived until they each died of old age. Then there was a soldier who kept trying to kill me, so of course I had to kill him back. Oh, about three hundred years ago, two friends arrived searching for my tomb—’
‘Did you ever let anyone leave?’
‘Once.’ His voice grew wistful. ‘Laral. In exchange for her freedom, she said she would write my story–well, the version of the story I wanted her to tell.’
‘The Wandering Human…’
He leaned forward in excitement. ‘Exactly! I was glad she managed to pen it ere malady claimed her.’
‘You only let her go because she was sick, didn’t you?’
The beat of silence was enough of an answer.
‘I cannot comprehend your disquiet. I am certain she was the cause of your war. Laral was the only person who knew of the fraedia crystal in the Fae Lands–the Bleeding Field as you call it.’
Lettle reeled. Everything pointed back to him. He was like a spider that had wound its web through time. Her hands found their way to the hinge on the walking stick and she withdrew the blade with a shaking hand.
The metal was rusted and slightly bent, but the point was still sharp enough to kill.
Ajax growled beside her as she levelled the knife at Afa’s heart.
‘I will not be buried here,’ she said.
Afa looked shocked, then betrayed. ‘You think I would hurt you?’ He sounded wounded before she had even broken his skin.
‘You have proved it is in your capabilities.’
He looked at the blade trembling by his heart. ‘And you think that would stay my hand?’
The ground rippled beneath Lettle and she watched in horror as water seeped through the soil. She began to sink, the mud holding her fast. The more she struggled, the faster she sank. The bog had pulled her down to her waist already. Afa stood above, his eyes a tempest of rage and fury.
‘You forget who I am. I am the earth, I am a child of Asase come alive. I defy death.’
The blade fell from Lettle’s hand as she struggled for purchase. Her hand brushed something solid–a branch, she thought–and she pulled. It came free in her hands.
A bone. She hardly had time to register her disgust before the ground moved again. This time she was pushed upwards through the soil, the water retreating, the dirt drying out. In seconds everything was as before.
Except for the bone in my hand. She threw it away with a scream.
Ajax came to her and pressed his body against her trembling legs. She was scared, yes, but that was not why she trembled. She turned her wrath on Afa.