Chapter 26 Valenna
Chapter twenty-six
Valenna
How does one attempt to kill a man and then, four years later, kiss the same man and not recognize him?
Valenna sat by the creek and watched a frog on the bank, its throat bobbing and its poison green eyes fixed on a damselfly.
Deep down, she had known. She must have.
She was just too much of a coward to look the truth in the face.
Valenna wanted to scream; she wanted to weep. A part of her even wanted to run through the trees, back to her life in Largotia where anger was lighter than regret.
A commotion caught her attention. Torsten was in the garden, trying to tug Hera out of his turnip patch. Dusty red turnips hanging from all three mouths, the huge creature paid him as much attention as she might pay a bumblebee.
Valenna wanted a distraction—from her past, from Evander’s gathering doom, from the possibility of wyvern bone powder and the fragile hope it held out like a carrot on a stick. So she got up and walked to the garden.
“Let me help you,” she said. Approaching Hera from the side, Valenna placed her hand behind the hydra’s front right knee.
Hera buckled it immediately, lowering to the ground, but when Valenna attempted to mount her so she could guide her from the garden, Hera curled one of her necks back, bit the back of Valenna’s shirt, lifted her gently, and deposited her on the ground.
“Hera!” Valenna cried, indignant. She stood, brushed off her trousers, and reached for Hera’s neck, but the hydra shied away.
“Of course, your master has spoiled you and not trained you properly,” Valenna fumed. “You unmannerly beast.”
Hera tore a mouthful of radishes from the soil and turned her rear to Valenna.
“We’ll need to lure her out with something she wants more than your garden,” Valenna said. “Have you got any meat?”
Torsten looked forlorn. “I have a brace of rabbits in the shed."
“Let’s try that.”
Leaving Hera to desecrate the radishes, Valenna followed Torsten across the creek to a potting shed.
He stepped inside and cut some rabbits from the low rafters.
“And how do you know Evande … Evandaine?” Valenna asked.
“I was his father’s physician before the king’s death.”
“And why are you here, in the forest?”
“After the prince was injured at Scathmore Barrens, I helped him escape Ashkendor and left him in Cobblepine. I’ve no skills with dragons, so I came here, where I’ve been quite happy.”
“And Bernice won’t hurt you?”
“My magic is rather too strong even for her.” He glanced out the door, making sure they were alone, then continued in a low voice, “My dear, if Daine’s broken his oath, Cobblepine won’t be friendly.
I fear if you can’t come up with another way to save him, the end is inevitable.
Watch for bleeding, especially from his nose and ears.
If you see it, then you’ve got hours left before it’s too late.
In the meantime, make sure he doesn’t overexert himself. ”
“You’re a physician. Can’t you help him?”
Torsten bent a sorrowful look on Valenna. “If it were a broken bone, I could perhaps. I have a friend who is working on a fascinating solution to broken bones. But this dark magic? I cannot fix this.”
“Since the condition comes from magic,” she said, taking the rabbits from Torsten, “I think I may know a way to draw the corrupted magic out of him.”
“Yes, but you know it comes at a cost. And the cost will be too high.”
She knitted her brow. “How could any cost be too high? I would give my life …”
“Ah, but it is never your life that is required, is it? That would be too easy. Believe me, child, if it is written in the tomes that Evandaine dies, then he will die, one way or another.”
He stepped out of the shed and she followed him, her heart lead-heavy.
Hera was sitting demurely beside the hut, with Evander lying across her back, his sleeves rolled to his elbows as he stitched a long gash in the hydra’s shoulder.
Valenna started when she saw him. It had been less than five minutes since she left the hut.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
“Baking muffins,” was the dry reply.
“And you think hanging upside down is a good idea right now?”
“Do you think letting Hera go gangrenous is better?”
His needle punctured Hera’s skin, and she nipped at him with her left head. He batted her away, nearly falling, but he caught himself and continued.
“Get down!” Valenna ordered. “I’ll do it.”
“It’s alright; I’m almost finished.”
Hera grunted, snapping at his shoulder irritably as he stitched.
“No more of that,” he scolded, squinting at the needle. “Or you won’t get another cabbage.”
Hera bent her right head around and nudged his ear.
“I mean it,” he said. “Bad hydra don’t get cabbages.”
Torsten shook his head and took the brace of rabbits from Valenna, then strolled inside to prepare for supper.
Tying off the stitches, Evander slid to the ground and kicked a cabbage up on his toe, then into his hands, like a ball. He ran his hand down Hera’s neck. “I used to be the most powerful dracomage in Ashkendor. I was more powerful than my father, even, but since Scathmore, my magic is so weak.”
Guilt and self-loathing rose in Valenna’s throat like bile. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I always wondered how it worked. Can you control any dragon, or only one you’re touching?”
“Before, I could calm and command dragons I had a connection with—ones I’d raised and or ridden or petted. I could command them from a distance. Now, I must be very close. Even Hera, I have to be within a few yards.”
The sun was setting, and the trees pulsed with blue, green, and purple bioluminescence, the poison in their sap lighting them up from the inside. Evander sat on a broad stump in the wild garden and rested his elbows on his knees, rubbing his hands together.
“How did you escape Ashkendor?” Valenna asked.
“After Scathmore, I wasn’t ...” He glanced at her, picking his words with care. “I wasn’t in the best of health, and my father, who was also not in the best of health …”
“Wait, did he survive Scathmore?”
“Um, well, no.”
Valenna pinched the bridge of her nose. “Vander, stop trying to save my feelings and give me the bloody details.”
He shrugged and flicked a hissing caterpillar off his shoulder. “Alright, fine, but don’t go acting guilty and growing bleeding thorns around my feet.”
His accent grew thicker with each sentence, and Valenna was only partially curious about his story; mostly, she wanted to hear him talk. The accent was lovely, and if he was attractive before, he was magnetic now.
“My father was dead, and I was very near it. My mother wanted my father’s crown, so she was going to kill me, except Torsten convinced her to wait, saying if I died from the magic, then she wouldn’t have my blood on her hands. If not, she could do what she liked.”
Even Valenna, raised in her own hell, was shocked by this. “Your own mother tried to kill you while you were already dying?”
“Ashkendor is like that. Power and dominance are everything. And I have a strong suspicion Marwenna isn’t my birth mother, but that’s a tale for another day. Torsten snuck me out in the night, and we took Hera because her magic wards off Raska.”
“Oh, that’s why you need Hera.”
Valenna sat beside him on the stump and twined her fingers in his. “How long were you in Cobblepine?”
“Only a few weeks, and then I stayed with a friend from school until I was able to think straight again …”
“How long was that?”
With a short, irritated laugh, he said, “You do love to torture yourself, don’t you?”
“How long?” she demanded.
He rolled his shoulder and sniffed. “A few more weeks.”
“It was a year, wasn’t it?”
“Nine months.”
Valenna grimaced.
“You asked.”
“Why Allagesh? Why not stay in Cobblepine?”
“Ach …”
Valenna had heard him make this sound before, a guttural noise in the back of his throat, distinct to Ashkendor. She’d always assumed he had a cold.
“… they kicked me out of Cobblepine.”
Valenna furrowed her brow. “Why?”
Evander’s face softened. “You’re so darling when you’re puzzled.”
“Stop that.”
“What?”
“Distracting me. Why did they kick you out of Cobblepine?”
“Because I had a hydra eating them out of bushel and larder, and my magic confused their dragons.”
She looked dubious. “And it had nothing to do with the fact that you can be aloof and unsociable?”
“I’m not unsociable. I love spending time”—he tapped her nose with his finger—“with you.”
“That doesn’t count.”
“I don’t see why not.”
Valenna cast him a look of fond exasperation. “So, when are you going to claim your rightful throne?”
“Oh, never. I refused to take a vow promising I would rape and murder my enemies, and so I abdicated by proxy. Also, my religious beliefs made me very unpopular.”
Valenna knew of Evander’s unusual religious beliefs because she shared them.
Monotheism was rare—Ashkendor preferred the hedonism and brutality of their blood-soaked pantheon; Sennalaith preferred their aloof goddesses of honor, wisdom, and war, who exacted a thin self-righteousness and conditional morality from their subjects.
A society can never rise above its gods, and neither can a person.
Valenna and Evander wanted a deity better than themselves to worship, instead of some sadistic demigod laughing as his subjects lopped off one another’s heads for his amusement or a goddess sending men into battle in the name of some abstract concept.
“So there it is,” Evander said, standing and moving across the garden in the warping light of the trees. “And all this means that your father killed my father …”
“And your mother killed mine,” she added. “A legacy of blood.”