Her Reputation (The Empire: Book 1)

by Laura R Cole

  *

  Wren threw another rock into the pool of water. He succeeded in making it skip three times. A bird chirped overhead.

  “Why do you sit here everyday?” Lise’s voice suddenly sounded behind him. He’d imagined it happening so many times, but now that she was here, he wasn’t sure how to handle it. He turned to her slowly.

  “To see you,” he finally answered. He paused a moment, gazing into her eyes. “You don’t seem very happy about it.” As though you have been using me for information about Phoenix and now feel badly about it, he thought.

  She dropped her eyes. “As I told you, it’s pointless. I told myself that I should just move on.”

  Wren clamped his jaw shut. After a moment, he pried it apart. “What changed your mind?”

  “I couldn’t stay away,” she answered, almost sadly, tearing at his heart. He hadn’t realized just how strong a hold this woman had on him until he thought she might not return those feelings. “It must be fate.” She smiled, most definitely sadly this time.

  “You sound disappointed,” he commented, trying to keep his own disappointment from showing in his voice. Perhaps it had started out as a ruse to get information and had turned into more.

  “Only at the futility of it,” she answered. “I find I enjoy your company more than I should.”

  Wren’s heart skipped a beat. “I enjoy your company as well. I don’t understand why it is futile for two people to bring happiness to one another.”

  The woman pondered this a moment. “Because it’s not real. And it can never be so for me. You deserve more than what I can give you.”

  She didn’t speak for a long moment, but Wren, sensing she was formulating her words, stayed silent. His heart dropped and his mind whirled with possibilities. Could she really have been the one to have leaked information he had given her about Phoenix to the people spreading rumors? Could he forgive her for doing so?

  Eventually, she spoke again. “Lise is not my real name.”

  Wren was taken-aback. She had been lying to him! Maybe she was the traitor after all. “What is your name?” he asked warily.

  “Those who know me now call me Echo, because that’s what I am. I’m an echo of the person I once was. But you,” she stroked his face softly, looking up into his eyes, a shiny tear threatening to fall from her own, “you should call me by my given name, Ketharly.”

  She looked into his eyes searchingly, as though waiting for him to have some reaction to the name, but it meant nothing to him. A tiny thought in the back of his head remembered something, but the thought flitted away before it could take form.

  “Why lie about your name?”

  “For no malicious intent, I assure you. I have only been on my own for so long that when I first met you, I felt the need to preserve my anonymousness. But now, you deserve to know the truth.”

  “Why are you an echo?” Wren asked, bewildered, and distracted from his dark thoughts by her warm touch.

  “My life happened long ago. I am just a shell of what I once was. Though I have healed well the past years, I will never be the same.” She sighed. “And if you knew more about me, you would never seek out my company.”

  “I doubt that,” Wren disagreed.

  “There’s more I haven’t told you,” Ketharly said, ashamed. She hung her head. Wren hooked a finger under her chin and gently lifted her head so that her eyes met his once more.

  “Tell me.”

  “This isn’t my true form.”

  Wren had nothing to say for a moment. Finally he asked slowly, “What is your true form?”

  In response, Ketharly’s form shimmered and sparkled, growing larger and more equine. Her arms lengthened and her fingers melded together to become hooves. Her face elongated, her eyes spreading to either side of her now horse-like head. Her skin darkened and drew fine black hair. A long silver horn sprouted from her forehead.

  Wren involuntarily jumped, his jaw dropping, and he tumbled backwards off the log. He scrambled away, intent on putting space between himself and the huge animal that had just appeared before him. The silver horn glistened menacingly, but the creature remained still. Wren finally stopped and collapsed on the cold, wet ground, moisture seeping through his pants. He hardly even noticed the wetness as he stared hard at the unicorn.

  Wren’s eyebrows rose high. “You’re the unicorn?” he squeaked out, so surprised that he didn’t even bother to be embarrassed by his cracking tone.

  The unicorn – Ketharly – nodded her head regally. He heard her musical voice in his head.

  - This is my true form. The woman you saw, while truly my appearance when I was still human, is now only an illusion. When you burst out on me while I was in the stream I had no time to run. Instead, I made you think that it was a naked maiden you saw and not an animal. So you see, enjoying one another’s company is futile. –

  Wren was in a state of shock. There were theories that the unicorn was a mage who had turned herself into the magnificent creature, but he had never really put much stock in them. He thought that magic like that was lost back in the Dark King’s era. But it did make a certain sense, especially given the more recent encounters.

  Wren had surge of emotions. He had found the unicorn! And even better, Lise – or rather Ketharly’s – reason for being so secretive was because she was the unicorn. Wren was so relieved that this was her terrible secret and not that she had betrayed the Princess to the traitors that he laughed out loud.

  Ketharly tilted her equine head at him.

  “Are you also the nightmare that took Endlyfta by storm eighteen years ago?”

  - You’re taking this well. - The voice in his head sighed. – I hoped that most of those who knew about me simply forgot my existence. Others I helped to forget. I find it difficult to be around people anymore. –

  “Why don’t you just change back?”

  - I don’t know how. It took many mages to make me this way, and my memory is not what it once was. -

  “What do you mean? How old could you be?” Wren mentally tallied up the years in his head. If she was around and already adult enough for the Treymayne council to have listened to her, it was likely she was at least eighteen years older…

  - Hundreds of years. - she told him. - The spell also slowed my aging. I hoped to spend the years in quiet peace, but I find myself agonized by that which I cannot have. Even the brief time I spent among people made me realize just how much I miss being with others.-

  “Can’t Queen Layna and King Gryffon turn you back?”

  Wren knew that they were the most powerful magical forces since before the Dark King’s era and found it hard to believe that there would be a spell that they couldn’t undo. Ketharly shook her head, making her silver mane shine as it flipped back and forth across her muscular neck. - They tried. It was no use. Without knowing what the original spell was, they couldn’t do anything without endangering my life. -

  “So you know Queen Layna and King Gryffon,” Wren stated.

  Ketharly nodded.

  “And you aren’t selling information about Phoenix to spies?”

  Ketharly shimmered and turned back into her woman form to slap him loudly across the face, her own turning red in outrage. It was a rather real-feeling illusion.

  “How could you even think such a thing about me?”

  He raised a hand to the spot on his cheek where it was still stinging from her hand. He gave her an incredulous look. “After you just told me how dishonest you’ve been with me you really wonder why I might be suspicious of your secrecy? The timing of things I told you suddenly turning up in the rumors was uncannily coincidental.”

  Her face went from red to white in an instant. “I’m so sorry,” she said, raising her hand again to his face, this time gently to examine what she’d done. “I shouldn’t have done that. I just –” she looked away, “you just took me by surprise. Will you forg
ive me?”

  “Perhaps we should kiss and make up.”

  Ketharly looked up shyly through her eyelashes at him, then quickly leaned in and brushed her lips briefly against his. Wren closed his eyes, relishing the sweet taste. When he opened them again, she was staring down at her hands. She raised her eyes to his face once more.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was unfair of me.”

  Wren rubbed his jaw where the heat from her slap was still burning. “I’ve had worse,” he shrugged.

  She was silent.

  They simply sat together for a few very long minutes while Wren thought about all she had told him. He stole a glance at her and saw that she was staring off into the woods with a faraway look in her eyes. The forlorn expression she wore was so heart-breaking that Wren knew he had to do something.

  “I’m going to find a way to turn you back,” Wren stated firmly.

  She looked at him, her eyes blazing with new life. “It’s not that simple –” she began, but he cut her off.

  “No,” he said, holding up a hand to stave off her objections. “I will. I will not rest until we find a way to turn you back. It was done, so somewhere there must be a record of it, or a mention of it, or something that will give us a clue. All it will take is a scholar to pore over the records and find it. And it just so happens that I am a scholar.”

  Ketharly narrowed her eyes at him appraisingly. A small smile spread across her lips, growing wider the longer she stared. He refused to look away from the intense look.

  “Well, then, Master Wren,” she said slowly, offering him her hand, “I give you my most sincere thanks.”