Chapter 9
Elias fumed, sitting alone in his grandfather’s hill house two hundred miles away from Umbrveyl, closer to Lynsfeld, but still in the middle of nowhere, a sprawling old manor built atop the green Golgoran hills.
If Rubien was the crown of Aladria, and Umbrveyl its heart, then, anatomically speaking, the hill station of Golgora was the abdomen, which would make Lynsfeld the unseemly groin.
At least that’s how Elias thought of the entire country.
A dying body riddled with disease. The Deathless were a cancer, and their children were just a metastasis.
He felt justified in what he’d wanted to do.
He could have killed Miles Farrow and the others, and that would have meant less Deathless in the future.
If only that bitch Lesya hadn’t stepped in.
Now, here he sat in this grand house overlooking the hills and the sprawling countryside beyond them, all alone with his two other friends, who were also expelled for being accomplices.
Elias threw a book across the library and watched it crash against a shelf, toppling several volumes off. A maid emerged silently, bending to pick up the books.
The house was full of help—cooks in the kitchen, gardeners in the orchards, maids walking through the hallways, looking to clean surfaces or ask after the three unruly residents.
“Leave that!” Elias snapped at her. “I meant to do that!”
She left the books lying there, and took the empty tray from the desk. Elias had just had lunch, and he was missing the grand spread of Umbrveyl’s dining hall. He missed the company, the people of his house who looked up to him.
By comparison, this place was an abyss. A beautiful abyss with tall windows, airy hallways, and cool bedrooms from where you could see the lake in the valley below.
But an abyss nevertheless. He couldn’t care less for the aspens and alpines, the green hills.
That was all peacetime beauty. They were in a war.
Destroy all those trees to make forts or spears.
Burn the hills black. Prepare for the Grath Nomad by erecting fences and pikes.
This house could serve as a fort. It would stand a long siege. Its walls were tall and fortified with old stone.
Spellcasters on the parapets, battle-mages below.
Let the Grath Nomad come. Elias would himself lead the charge against him.
“El?” Theo popped his head through the library’s door. “We’ve been looking for you, brother.”
“Save it,” Elias said. He had been grim toward both of them ever since they had gotten expelled. They should have been more proactive in that room. Instead, they left it all to him.
“Freya worries,” Theo said. “You haven’t talked to anyone in three days.”
“I don’t want to. All I can think about is doing something.
Instead, I’m wasting away here in this fucking manor and the Solignis Covenant is sitting on its ass!
” Elias flung another book at the shelves.
This one hit paydirt, making an entire row fall off the shelf.
His grandfather’s collection. What a fucking joke.
It was arithmetically impossible for someone to have read so many books.
Even if his grandfather read a thousand books a year—which was impossible unless you could stop time itself—this library contained a hundred thousand books on every topic imaginable in the world.
Books of fiction, books of historical accounts, old religion, ancient magic.
It wouldn’t be unfair to say that his grandfather was hoarding a lot of these books, many of the copies being the only copies that existed.
He took another book from the pile—a volume titled Ars Aeterna—and threw it at the rest of the shelf.
He did it with such force that the entire rows of books fell over. Elias snorted. That was satisfying.
“I know what I want to do,” Elias said, looking at Theo. He beckoned Theo to come inside. Theo didn’t come alone; Freya followed him. Elias looked at her and chuckled.
“Hey, El,” Freya said, squeezing his shoulder as she stood behind him. “We’re worried about you. You haven’t eaten.”
“I’m having the maid bring my lunch to the library. It’s not like I’m starving,” Elias said. “Been catching up on my reading. I’m glad we left that damn place. One didn’t have any place to think there. Here, though, I’ve come up with a plan.”
The expulsion was not final. His grandfather had sat them all down in the same library and had told them that he needed them in the Solignis Covenant.
The expulsion could be the perfect excuse for it.
He had also promised that he’d ensure they’d graduate after this whole Grath Nomad thing blew over.
That was the only reason Freya had been fine with the decision.
Otherwise, a woman as studious as her with the best grades and a career trajectory pointed only upward, she was going to be livid.
Theo didn’t much care. He was going to join the Vanguard anyway. This seemed like a shortcut.
But it was the disgrace of it all that Elias could not swallow. Being expelled so publicly, and after failing to do what he’d set out to do.
“That motherfucker,” Elias said, thinking about Miles.
“I know where he lives. There’s a village on the northeastern edge of the country, Horrow’s Heap.
It was one of the places where Mortandagh rallied his power in the last century.
A lot of his followers still live there.
Miles Farrow hails from that village, along with that other guy, what’s his name?
Sid Vercliff. It’s a dogshit place, entirely in disrepair.
But like most of the country, they are celebrating the Harvest Festival.
I bet Miles Farrow is there, along with a bunch of other Balthazar motherfuckers. ”
Freya and Theo gave each other worried glances. They had been the ones who’d borne the brunt of the admonishments from the headmaster, admonishments along the lines of, “How the fuck could you let him charge into a detention room with the intent to kill?”
“But the Solignis Covenant…” Freya said.
“They’re not including us in their meetings just yet,” Elias said darkly.
“They convene at Umbrveyl, and guess where we’re not?
Umbrveyl. But if we go down to Horrow’s Heap, kill us a bunch of Deathless spawn, get our revenge on Miles for getting us fucking expelled, guess what the Solignis Covenant will do? ”
“They won’t be able to ignore us,” Freya muttered.
“Exactly. And you can say that a little more excitedly. We get our ranks by taking names. The Grath Nomad travels all over the country gathering supporters, signing them to his cause. When he learns that we’re killing his people, he’ll perhaps take a step back, realize what he’s up against.”
Theo Cohen shook his head at Freya, doing it in such a way that Elias didn’t notice.
“I know what both of you are thinking,” Elias said, not looking at either of them.
Instead, he walked up to the window, watching the clouds roll over the hills and the sky darken.
In another moment, the rain began, and the library was filled with the sound of raindrops falling on windowpanes.
“You think I’ve gone insane. You think I’m out for blood when there is no cause.
But I lost my parents. You did too, Theo.
It wasn’t Mortandagh who killed them. It was his followers, people that everyone had thought were all scattered and leaderless.
If only the Solignis Covenant could have been a little more proactive in those years instead of disbanding and calling it a day, my parents would have been alive. As would have yours, Theo.”
“I know,” Theo said, his fist tightening and quivering.
He hadn’t just lost his parents, he’d also lost five siblings, all of them older than him.
When the Deathless had attacked his house, Theo had been just a baby.
They had spared him on account of they weren’t able to find him.
Everyone else died. He grew up in the Desareth Orphan Home, where he had learned that violence was the answer to all questions, and that if you were not violent, then someone bigger and meaner was always around the corner hoping to beat you into submission and rob you of your belongings.
“What do you say? Instead of wasting days in this fucking place, we go and finish what we set out to do,” Elias asked. “I’d say it’d be revenge twenty years too late.”
* * *
The Grath Nomad had been benevolent, or so said the people of Horrow’s Heap.
He had come by a few days ago, all by himself as a humble traveler, and had declared himself at the ramshackle inn.
He had promised food and wealth for the people, and in that he had delivered almost instantaneously, donating a lot of gold to the village folk and filling their granaries and storehouses with grain and vegetables, and their barns with livestock.
Horrow’s Heap was cut off from the rest of the country because of its altitude. No railroad tracks, and the only road that led to the village was a very narrow dirt path. Aladria had forgotten about Horrow’s Heap. The Grath Nomad had not.
In exchange for his benevolence, he had made a humble request to the people, the young and the able, the men and the women. To join forces with him when the time would come. Not now. No. He was not coercive nor forceful. He just wanted their support.
He had made a rousing speech before his departure.
A speech that reminded the people of Horrow’s Heap of the good old days when the shrines of Aeterna still stood, when their old library had been a place for scholars to come from all over Aladria.
When the village was rich and bountiful, and everyone took care of each other.
He promised the people of Horrow’s Heap that such a day would come again, when religious persecution would end, when death would be conquered once more, and followers of Aeterna wouldn’t have to hide and pretend to be Solignites.