Chapter 13
Chapter
Ispent the next training sessions with Aidenar outdoors. He moved differently when the palace walls no longer penned him in. His power unfurled like a banner in the open wind.
I persuaded him to slip with me beyond the palace bounds.
In truth the Regent’s heir ought not to wander without guards.
Aidenar shook off his escort so none would ask where or why he went, and we made for the nearby meadows and the woods.
I wanted to show him what he could truly do with his element.
We halted by a stream whose crystal water caught the sun like shards of glass.
I fixed my will and reached into the current, stealing water from it.
At first I drew only a slender thread, then more, until I could fashion rings that circled us like quick, breathing bands.
They were kin to those that rose at our first meeting in the harbor, only now they were greater by far and steady as iron.
Aidenar strove to shape a spiral of air. He had power, yet his hand lacked measure. Each attempt sent the wind tearing from one side to the other, wild and scattered, instead of gathering into one coherent form.
“You lack the motivation again,” I said. “I must contrive something, else we will be stuck here till the world ends.”
“Would there be harm in that?” he murmured and sank upon the green grass beside me. He was weary, yet not angered as he often had been.
“You have duties,” I said, watching him from the corner of my eye.
“It is true,” he sighed. “Since my father fell into his slumber, my mother and I bear the burden of all things. And these lessons with you take no small portion of the day.”
His words pricked me, and he saw it.
“No. It’s not what I meant” he said quickly, pushing himself up on one elbow. “I do not resent a moment here. I only wish I could master this faster.”
“Believe me, you advance swiftly,” I said with a thin smile. “It took me years.”
“It is because of you. Alone I would still be rustling leaves.” He nodded toward the trees, and the branches stirred as if to make his point. “Even my mother goes easier on me. I think she begins to believe I can hold my gift.”
“Was she astonished when your power came upon you?” I asked softly.
“Not exactly,” he said with a shrug. “She treated it as inevitable. As though the blood of Cavareth could birth nothing less. I cannot say whether she trusts so wholly in our Family’s untouchable fortune, or whether nothing on earth can startle her now.”
We sat in silence, lulled by water and wind. The world felt gentle.
Then the forest cracked.
A harsh rustle sounded from the wood. Not wind in leaves, something heavier, as if a thing crept, step by step. We turned our heads as one.
A wolf slid out of the woods. At first glance it looked no different from any hunter of the wild. The illusion shattered. It came tottering, white foam upon its jaws. Its eyes burned red, not the eyes of any creature born clean, but fevered and foreign.
The Plague.
We rose together. Aidenar set himself before me and drew a dagger. Steel caught the last of the light.
Two more wolves followed from the forest. Each with froth and that same unnatural stare.
I reached for the water in their bodies and couldn’t. Nothing. Emptiness. As if the Plague had seared the life out of them and left only rage and death behind.
“If you want to bend your power to some worthy use, now is the time,” I said.
“I do not know if I can,” he answered and I saw uncertainty in his eyes.
The wolves began to circle. Step by step, with a soft, hateful growl. Praise the waters, we stood near the stream. It was my only advantage.
“Guard me,” I said. “I will cast down as many as I can.” I pulled hard at the stream and set a globe of water whirling.
A fourth wolf burst from the brush. It sprang for us, jaws gaping, spittle and foam scattering like sleet.
I drove the water-sphere as a ram, smashing the fourth aside and hurling it into one of the others. Squeals split the air, and I heard bones breaking.
The last two leaped together. I had no time left.
Aidenar moved at once. In a blink he was upon the nearer beast. With a speed I had never seen in him, he drove his blade upward into the skull. The wolf gave a long, riven howl, then sagged to earth.
The last one halted. It met my gaze. A chill ran down my spine. That look was not that of a beast. It was a man’s. And to my horror, it looked pleased.
Before I could take a step, it sprang for my throat. I lifted my knife, yet the brute’s weight would have crushed any defense of mine.
Aidenar crashed into its flank. His knife plunged into the side of its head, blood spurting across his arm.
The wolf roared and twisted, snapping for him.
He went down with it, rolled, then sprang away, leaving the creature writhing in its death-throe.
It dragged itself through the grass, teeth clacking, blood pouring from the torn maw.
Aidenar came back to me, took my knife from my hand, and, without the least falter, drove it straight into the wolf’s skull. One sure, heavy blow.
Silence fell.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, chests heaving, and watched the last tremor leave the carcass. Aidenar wiped the blades in the grass, then went to the other bodies and made certain none yet lived. I stood rooted, the memory of that sickened gaze boring through me.
“Are you hurt?” he asked when he returned, spattered with blood.
“No. And you?” I looked at his arms, where dark streaks ran downward. “That blood?”
“Wolves,” he said with a shrug. “Though I should wash it off at once. It stinks of rot.”
He did not tarry. He went to the stream, stripped his shirt, and waded in. He plunged beneath the water to get rid of the tainted gore quickly.
I could not help myself. I felt the water that slid over his body. It pulsed around him and gave me every detail, the rise of gooseflesh, the beat of his heart, the deep, rough draw of breath. My gift answered to him of its own will, as if it longed to touch him.
A breath of wind stirred across my skin. Delicate, scarcely felt, yet I knew it was him, perhaps unconsciously.
I was still in shock. The Plague was not just a tale from an old book.
It crept nearer with each day. Aidenar came back to me, wet but clean of blood.
He raked his hair back with his fingers, and his gaze was more grave than I had ever seen it.
The boyishness I had grown used to was slipping from him.
He set my knife in my palm. Only then did I note that my hands were still shaking. Before I pulled away, he closed both his hands over mine, firm and steady.
“Hey,” he said softly. “It’s done.”
We stood like that for a moment, in silence. The stream whispered beside us, and in the distance the birds returned to their branches, as if nothing had befallen this place.
“All my life I trained,” I said at last, voice rough. “But I had never faced a nightmare like that.”
“I know.” He looked aside, as if weighing matters. “Come. I will see you safely to the palace. Then I will summon the guards. The bodies must be burned, and the patrols in the city doubled”
I sheathed my knife. We took the road together toward the keep. Neither of us spoke, yet the silence bore a new weight, the thick knowledge that the world had shifted while we watched.
That night brought me no rest. The dream took me as soon as sleep touched my eyes.
I ran through the forest. Darkness lay thick as pitch.
All around I heard snapping boughs and the growl of throats.
Red eyes flamed in the black, dozens of pairs that marked every step I took.
They hunted me in packs, swifter, nearer, relentless.
I broke onto a glade. By night it seemed a foreign land, ringed by a wall of black trees. I stood there, gasping, and the eyes burned from every side, like coals in the deep.
Then he came.
A figure of a man stepped out of the dark. Tall, young and slender. His hair fell across his brow, black as obsidian. His skin was so pale it seemed to carry its own cold light. His face was boyish, almost innocent.
Clad all in black, he moved with an untroubled calm, and the hint of a smile touched his mouth as he began to circle me.
I wished to move, to flee, to do anything at all. I could not. It was as if roots from the trees had wound around my feet and held me fast.
He came closer. Our eyes met. His were near to black, bottomless, without end. However, I felt no fear. Not like I felt with the wolves. There was something different about him. Something that made me keep staring at him.
He smiled gently. He lifted a hand and set back a stray lock that had fallen across my cheek. The gesture was so intimate that I forgot to breathe.
“Powerful. Beautiful. Unconquered. Water itself,” he said, his voice rough, thick with desire. “I cannot wait until we meet.”
Then he was gone.
With him the dream was torn away, and I woke alone, heart pounding, chilled by the thought that this had been no common nightmare.
The next day the dream still haunted me. It had not been like an ordinary nightmare. I had felt it in my bones. Was I beginning to lose my senses like my mother?
The thoughts of plague and the man in black didn’t leave my mind. I decided to go to the palace’s library to see the ancient scrolls with my own eyes. The ones that bore images of gods and Plague.
In the Dominium, gods had never been worshiped with the fervor known in other lands. The temples I had seen stood silent and dust-laden, their stone altars veiled in moss, abandoned by the faithful. The gods had no names or faces here, they were the presence, the power.
The grand palace library astonished me. It was vast and, to my surprise, open to all. Cool air drifted through the aisles, heavy with the scent of parchment and age. A stooped librarian with sharp features studied me in silence before guiding me toward shelves he called the ancient volumes.