Chapter Fourteen #2
“Yes, you. You are a king, after all, even if you don’t act like one. Is it so shocking I would be curious about your long reign?”
“No, I suppose not. But I was not joking when I said you merely need to ask. I will happily answer anything you want to know about me.” Another short silence descends. “Almost anything.”
I shouldn’t pepper him with questions. It’s late, and he has better things to do with his time than indulge an inquisition…But before I can stop myself, I’ve blurted out, “How old were you when you took the throne?”
“Seventeen,” he answers immediately.
“So young.”
“At the time, I felt ancient, trust me.”
It is as difficult to imagine him as a teenager as it is to imagine him at six. Hell, it is difficult to envision him at any age remotely close to my own. There is a timeless air around him, a self-awareness accumulated by centuries on this earth.
My mind stalls on thoughts of a very different Soren. One less in control of himself, one more on par with my own floundering skills…
Incomprehensible.
My brows lift. “The crown passed to you when your father died?”
“When he was killed, yes.”
“Killed?”
His jaw flexes. “Poisoned. We never discovered by who, but I have long held my suspicions. His last wife, Duvessa—my stepmother, Efnysien’s mother—was fond of alchemy and fonder of the riches she drained so proficiently from the royal coffers.
I would stake my life that it was her hand that tipped the vial into his glass and stole him from us. ”
I swallow a gasp. “Skies, Soren. I’m sorry.”
“It happened nearly two centuries ago,” he says, shrugging.
Yet I can hear the grief buried not so deeply beneath his words and know he is still pained by the loss.
“My father was gifted the luxury of a long rule, and an even longer life. He died with a smile on his face, ready to meet the aether, even if he did not fall in the glory of battle, as he anticipated…or while bedding one of his many conquests, as the rest of us assumed he would.” He chuckles darkly.
“I like to think he had no regrets in either life or death. He certainly never acted like he did, given his wild enthusiasm for all of the world’s many pleasures. ”
“How long, exactly, was his reign?”
“Manawydan ruled Hylios for nearly four hundred years after Emperor Belenus elevated him to the throne. Before the Cull, the two men were evidently close personal friends. The emperor was gifted with two maegics—”
“Fire and air,” I interject, nodding. “Penn told me once.”
He stares at me. “What else did he tell you?”
“Not much.” I think back to the conversation.
It feels so very long ago. Another lifetime.
“He said the emperor was conceived from a union of two exceptionally powerful parents. Born the product of a soulmerge—and, thus, blessed with the ability to wield two distinct elements. A powerful combination that has not been seen in all the years since.”
His throat works on a swallow. “Yes. That’s true enough.”
Enough…but not everything. Not the full of it. I get the sense there is much more to this particular chapter of Anwyvnian history than I’ve been told.
Soren shifts the conversation forward before I can press. “Emperor Belenus valued my father highly for his formidable water powers. Manawydan could spin the seas with a twitch of his finger, could command the tides and influence the currents like none ever before. Or after.”
“Until you.”
He shakes his head. “Remnants possess but a vestige of the old maegics. We are an echo of what once was. Before the uprising, before the blight that followed on its heels, Anwyvn was a land of abundant elemental power. Each of the four courts brimmed with gifted sky sylphs, water nymphs…flame breakers, earth turners…” His eyes narrow a shade.
“It is difficult to imagine, even for me. By the time I was old enough to comprehend, things were already so irrevocably changed.”
Soren’s birth, I know, coincided with the Cull.
With the imperial execution itself. As the first Water Remnant—the only Water Remnant—his soul reputedly entered this world at the precise moment the emperor’s fled it.
His, along with King Vorath’s and those of two unknown others, scattered in distant spots across the realm.
The original four of the sacred tetrad, prophesized to someday restore the balance, should they ever find their way together.
So said the oracles, anyway.
I wonder, not for the first time, about the first wind weaver, birthed in the same breath as the man sitting before me. Who were they? Where did they live? When did they die? How many others existed in the time between their demise and Enid’s discovery, seventy years ago?
The one person in the realm who might know the answers is seated mere inches away.
“Were there others before Enid?” The question flies out. “Other wind weavers, I mean?”
“Two, to my knowledge.”
Two!
I lean toward him, interest piqued. “Did you meet them?”
“Not personally, no.” He frowns, thinking back. “About ninety years ago, one managed to send a raven north to Dyved—a desperate plea for extraction. She was dead by the time Pendefyre reached her in the Soot Flats of Nythia.”
I grimace, saddened but not surprised. Nythia is one of the worst stretches of the Midlands. The fighting there has raged continuously for two centuries.
“A few decades before that, around a century and a half ago, another made it nearly to the Avian Strait, where my armies were camped. At the time, we were embroiled in a decade-long conflict with a particularly persistent king from the plainlands.” A muscle ticks in his jaw, expression darkening.
“She got close. Achingly close…only to be struck down by a group of bloodthirsty culling priests and made into a depraved spectacle for the amusement of the Aranthonians.”
My whole body trembles at the thought of such an end.
Damned culling priests. Hypocritical monsters, the lot of them. They wrap their dark hedonism in false holiness, a shroud for acts of such evil only a blind man could mistake them for anything remotely divine.
“I pulled her down from the iron crucifix where they’d nailed her body,” Soren says, voice thrumming with untempered distaste. “Gave her a proper pyre. Then, I razed the priests’ temple to the ground—with them inside it.”
A fresh shiver moves through me at his admission. At the wrath in his voice, still fresh despite the lifetime that’s passed since the atrocity occurred. I feel no condemnation for his actions, only horror at the barbarity that necessitated them.
He forces a lighter tone. “It is good you were born where you were. Seahaven’s sheltered shores gave you a chance most others did not live long enough to take.”
I blink, concealing my surprise. I cannot recall ever telling him where I come from. Evidently, he was not exaggerating when he said he’d made it his business to learn about my life before I journeyed north.
“Any other questions?” he asks.
Only one I can think of.
“Did…” I pull in a breath. “Did they look like me? The others?”
His head tilts, examining me in the darkness. “Not really. Similar coloring, perhaps, but different builds, different features…The crucified one in Aranthon was far taller than you. And Enid was all curves whereas you are…” He trails off, then grins. “Not.”
I fight the urge to throw a pillow at him.
His grin widens, noticing my annoyed expression. “I’d say a passing resemblance, at best. Well. Except for…”
I wait, brows high on my head.
“Your eyes,” he finishes. “Every wind weaver has those stormy irises.” The grin fades into a new smile—less sardonic, more sentimental. One I’ve never seen on his face. “Even Enid, in all her softness, could unleash a tempest with her gaze alone.”
My stomach twists into a knot. “Penn said—” I start, then falter.
His expression clears. “Go on.”
I gather my courage. “He said she was beautiful, but…broken by all she had endured. The slaughter of her family. The loss of her home.”
“Beautifully broken. Mmm, that was Enid. Wildly intellectual, but exceptionally introverted. It was difficult to draw her out of her shell. Unless you wanted to discuss whatever book she had most recently devoured—in which case, it was impossible to stop her chattering. She spent hours and hours in my library when Penn brought her here to visit.”
The unguarded fondness in his voice makes the knot in my gut twist even tighter. Speaking of her feels intrusive, somehow. I begin to regret my own insufferable curiosity, and wish I’d never broached the topic of my venerated predecessor.
For who can ever live up to a ghost?
“What else did Pendefyre tell you about her?” Soren asks, gaze sharpening on me when he notices I’ve fallen silent.
Only that he believes himself responsible for her death.
And that you both thought yourselves in love with her.
I bury the words deep inside. “Not much of anything.”
He looks as though he does not quite believe me, but blessedly does not push.
“So…” I swallow hard. “Besides those two wind weavers who died in the Midlands, you have no record of any other Air Remnants?”
I do not ask about Earth. I know better. Whoever they are, wherever they are…they have never been located. Not once in two hundred years.
“No, unfortunately not,” Soren admits. “I did not begin to search in earnest for other Remnants for several decades after I became king. Frankly, whispered prophecies simply were not a priority at that time. Survival was our priority. War raged on a grand scale for a dozen years after the Cull, in every corner of the realm. It had died down slightly by the time I took the throne, though not by much. My formative memories are of bloodshed and death.”