Seablood

by Cameron Bolling

  The eclipser swung. Oleja dodged the strike. Before she could raise her bow, however, the eclipser kicked her hard in the stomach. A roaring pain filled her gut as she staggered back, doubled over from the blow.

  A hand grabbed her ankle and pulled. All at once, her body entered a freefall. When she hit the ground, the pain swarming in her gut erupted through the rest of her body. All of the air in her lungs left in one gust, and for a moment she lay there in the dirt, gasping for breath. One eclipser loomed tall above her, perched on the boulder in the position she had occupied before. The other dropped back to the ground and raised his sword, a cruel grin splitting his face.

  Oleja rolled out from beneath his strike. The sword cleaved into the damp earth. She sprang back up to stand, still sucking in deep, shaky breaths, and drew back her bow.

  Thud. An arrow pierced his armor, finding a home just below his collarbone. He fell to one knee.

  For a moment, he crouched there, breaths coming ragged and quick, fury spreading across his face. For that same moment, Oleja thought for sure he would stand again and keep fighting. His companion, clearly, did not have such a mighty opinion of him. Leaping from the boulder, she landed on his body, crushing it beneath her weight as she used him to cushion her fall. A horrible crunch filled the air, and then his broken body lay still. The other eclipser kept advancing.

  Oleja dodged two strikes as she backpedaled. She hastened away, trying to put enough distance between herself and her opponent to load an arrow. But the eclipser moved too quickly.

  And then Tor came sprinting around the boulder and leapt at her. She turned a split second too late as his body collided with the back of her legs, knocking her forwards one step. His teeth pierced the back of her thigh and she shouted in anger and pain.

  Seizing the opportunity at once, Oleja jumped back a few more paces and nocked an arrow. A moment later it tore through her neck, piercing one side and ripping straight through the flesh before coming to rest on the ground nearby, slick and bloodstained. The eclipser clutched at her wound, gurgling sounds bubbling up from her throat. And then she, too, was still.

  Back down at the river, the captain still stood in the current. Oleja nocked an arrow but did not draw. She walked to the riverbank and looked out at him.

  “So far I’ve proven I can take out four. Give it another minute and I’ll best your challenge of five.”

  The captain laughed. “Five is not the challenge. You have an entire army to cut your way through before you’re finished. You’ll run out of arrows long before then.”

  “Then it’s good I can take up a sword and end as many lives with it as I please.”

  The eclipser shook his head. “Do you hear yourself? You will take so many lives—and you humans think we are beastly? What does killing get for you?”

  “Why haven’t you attacked me?” asked Oleja, ignoring his words.

  The eclipser shrugged. “I have a message I want to share with you. And I knew that if I stood here and waited, you would come to hear it, whether you knew I carried it or not. You are boastful—too much for your own good, I’d say.”

  Oleja drew back her bow and aimed it at the captain’s head. She said nothing. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t you want to know what fate your people think you met? Don’t you want to know what we have done to them in your absence?”

  “No.” She loosed the arrow. The captain fell limp into the current. “And killing gets me my freedom.”

  Her thoughts snapped back to the night before. Six eclipsers—there were six eclipsers in the envoy. She looked around.

  Nothing stirred in the woods, and beyond the babble of the river she heard nothing. Her eyes swept the hills and cliff faces.

  Atop the peak rising above the south bank of the river, a flash of movement caught her eye. There, high above her, two flags waved in the breeze. A figure sat atop something, which after a moment of studying she realized was an enormous beast—larger than a horse and far more muscled, with brown fur covering its hide. Then, mere seconds after she spotted it, the animal and its rider turned and took off out of sight at impressive speed.

  She couldn’t catch the rider, that she knew. They rode back for Itsoh, no doubt, to inform the eclipsers there of her whereabouts just as Honn had done many times as he pursued her. They would continue tracking her until they all lay dead and their corpses burned, filling the dawn sky with thick smoke. Only then would she be free of them for good.

  And the survivor rode to tell Itsoh of Ahwan’s killing of their envoy, no doubt. But what choice had she had? Would it matter that they swung first? They sought to claim her life, and when it came down to their lives or hers, the choice was not a difficult one. Ahwan would just have to handle to conflict.

  They’d be at war with Itsoh soon enough anyway, once she bested all five trials and took her place as hero—and the king would never kill the hero, whether she killed an envoy or not. When she took up her new role, the people would follow her to war without question—the king included. The war loomed near; the envoy’s deaths meant nothing, ultimately. Might as well get a few more eclipsers out of the way while she had the chance.

  But another party of eclipsers coming to hunt her down? That would be an ill favor. They’d send more next time, surely—Honn alone hadn’t been enough, nor this group of six. What could she expect next, twenty?

  She shook her head. She could pierce their armor now. Any fight that came her way, she would win it—death was not an option.

  Moving from body to body, she reclaimed her arrows and her knife. The eclipsers carried nothing else of use to her besides their swords, and though she considered taking one, she refrained; she already carried a good deal of supplies, and as her leg continued to heal, she expected the journey ahead to be a trying one. Any weight she didn’t need to carry had to be left behind. Besides, the swords were just a bit too big for her, being optimized to eclipser proportions and all, and though with her strength she could lift and wield them without issue, they still felt clunky in her hands.

  With her things gathered, she set off again. She walked straight through the remainder of the day until after nightfall, when at last she descended from the mountains. Only rolling hills stretched ahead to the west, and she turned her course south, plotting a route southeast along the edge of the mountain range to stick to easier terrain as she made for the mountain detailed in the trial instructions, the one where she sought “snow.”

  After building herself a small fire for warmth and eating a quick meal from her rations, she curled up and pulled her cloak around her. Tor fit himself in beside her chest.

  Though a watch shift might have been wise—especially while the last member of the envoy still rode about somewhere in the wild—she knew she could not create such a schedule, being only one person and doubting Tor could understand the concept even if she attempted to explain it to him. But the rider headed east to Itsoh, surely, and her eyelids hung heavy, so she let them close. If danger approached, Tor would wake—or she would—and she’d take care of it.

  After all, her record so far proved that she was the fiercest thing out there. Anything that dared approach her in the night was in for a fight, and not one that would fall in its favor.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The way stretched long ahead of her, and for several days Oleja walked along the edge of the mountain range. Over hills and through river gullies she went, the ground underfoot loose and dry with patches of scraggly green shrubs and trees that dotted the rolling landscapes like tufts of hair on a balding scalp. The mountains loomed as an ever-present wall on her left, tall and sharp, their great grey slopes scratching the sky. Some of the taller peaks glittered with patches of white in the same way she remembered seeing before, when first she laid her eyes on them while approaching from the east. At the time, she carried no knowledge of what made them look such a way, but now she knew it was due to the snow—white water, so cold it froze into a form like rock, supposedly. And that
snow was exactly her aim.

  How the king would know that she brought snow from the designated peak rather than any old mountain, she didn’t know, but she wasn’t willing to take the risk and come all this way to cheat and bring back the wrong thing. Her honor barred her from it besides. She would complete the trials honestly, because she could—she was meant to, so she knew she’d encounter no obstacle she couldn’t overcome.

  She studied the map several times each day. Symbols marked the paper, the same as those displayed on each of the jars and box. A drawing of the king’s palace marked Ahwan as well, and sprawling lines made up the rest: mountains, large rivers and lakes, and on the left side of the page, some enormous division that cut the entire length of the side from the rest of the image, as if some kind of barrier between two great lands. She didn’t know what to expect there, but she would find out in time—the symbol for the seablood rested just on the junction of the two.

  Days passed, and then she reached a river that ran out from a gully between the mountain peaks. She turned her course east there and followed the river upstream into the mountains.

  The shape of the gully reminded her of the one she followed out of Ahwan. Equally deep, it cut between fertile green slopes and steep grey cliffs. The ground underfoot was rockier, however—more heavily layered in gravel—and few trees grew along the landscape, with most of the vegetation taking the form of low shrubs, grass, and moss. The river ran faster as well, cascading over rocks as it rushed with impressive force for the lowlands beyond the mountain peaks.

  Several more days she followed the river deep into the heart of the mountain range, then took a sharp turn south where the valley did the same. The turn led her up into the mountains for a time, but then she descended into another valley on the other side that continued her path south. But as the mountain she sought came into view just to the east, she turned away from that southwards path. The peak rose up amidst the others, taller than all those around it.

  Oleja awoke one morning at her campsite on the mountain’s slopes. Shivers wracked her body, and she pulled her cloak and blanket tighter around herself. Her fire burned only as embers now. Red and orange flecks glowed amidst the charred remains of branches, but they offered little heat. Tor huddled close, burrowing under her blanket with her.

  The camp lay at the base of a low cliff that pitched inwards just before reaching the ground, creating an alcove where she could sleep away from the wind, which grew fiercer the higher she climbed.

  She pushed herself up to sit beside the fire and placed the remainder of the wood she gathered atop it one piece at a time, letting the last sputtering embers take hold of each before piling more on top. Soon, a fire blazed before her, thawing her bones. Tor stirred and awoke. He crawled closer to the fire and lay on his stomach beside her.

  She fashioned a quick breakfast for herself and for Tor from her rations. Typically, Tor hunted for his own meals, but up so high in the mountains they encountered few other living creatures. Hunting had served her well, however, and she had food to spare, so giving some of it to him created no issues in her own supply. When they finished eating, she gathered her things and readied to leave, though drawing herself away from the fire took more of her strength than all of the rest of her walk so far. She kept her blanket wrapped around herself beneath her cloak as an added layer of defense against the cold.

  With every exhale, her breath gathered in the air like a cloud, as if she breathed out steam. The mountain wind quickly whisked it away and carried it off to join with the clouds above, which wove together to create a thick blanket of grey in all directions. Without even the sun’s light to warm her, she relied entirely on her cloak, blanket, and the blood that pumped through her veins to keep her from freezing. Fortunately, she had quite the strenuous day ahead of her if the steep cliffs and rocky slopes rising above her meant anything.

  From the harness beneath her quiver, she took her crutches. The walk so far had been harder on her leg with every passing day, the aches growing into stabbing pain with every step. She used the crutches when she could to take some of the load off.

  “You ready for this?” she asked aloud, turning her head to look at Tor beside her. He met her gaze and she nodded. “Trial two, here we come.”

  Not long after Oleja took to the slopes, the clouds made their intentions known and a drizzle began to fall. Light at first, Oleja did her best to ignore it, but soon the rain fell more forcefully, driven by the wind which did an impressive job of managing to fling raindrops up beneath her hood despite her efforts to keep her head low. She wiped the water from her face and tried to dispel the chill that bit at her nose; she had a trial to beat.

  The cold commanded her to move faster in order to heat her body. Her leg demanded the opposite. With every hastening of her steps, her leg roared in protest, but each time she complied with its groans, the cold leeched in and threatened to freeze the blood within her veins. Unable to tend to both issues, yet alternating rapidly between which she favored, she continued on at that pulsing pace.

  Higher she went. The air grew even colder around her, somehow, and she shivered as she walked. The rain turned hard, and when Oleja caught a few drops in her hand she saw that they fell as tiny solid spheres. Prioritizing her warmth now, she hastened her pace, pushing back against the pain in her leg.

  Rocks shifted underfoot—gravel and larger slabs that sat unsteadily atop one another, ready to shift one way or the other with the slightest push. The loose ground made her stumble several times. Tor took the obstacles much more easily, jumping from one to the next with footfalls so light they hardly disturbed the stones at all. He turned his eyes back to her often, checking to be sure she still followed. Ice clung to his rain-dampened fur.

  For a short while, she followed a stream across a stretch of more gently sloping rock. As she crested that section of the hill, she came upon either a large pool or small lake. Solid white patches floated across its surface; more ice, she guessed.

  Past the lake, only the last stretch of the climb remained: a tall ridge of rock steeper than any she had yet encountered. Streaks of loose gravel and stone crumbled away down the sides, interspaced with patches and drifts of perfect, pristine white.

  A few of the same patches lay around her by the lake, tucked up against boulders or within crevices in the rock. Oleja looked to them for a moment. Neither the king nor Helis said she had to take snow from the very top, only that it needed to come from the mountain. Well, she had reached a height where snow lay about, and could take it from any one of them by the definitions laid out in the trial instructions. She could scoop up a jar full and then be off, out of the wind and the cold as quickly as possible—trial two completed.

  Her eyes went to the peak once more—the highest point for hundreds of miles around, according to those in Ahwan. Quite likely the closest to the sky she could ever be.

  She wanted to stand atop it, there at the very peak. For that moment, she herself would be the highest point—Oleja Raseari, skyborn, the junction between the land and the sky.

  She had to get there.

  On the other side of the lake, she reached the base of the final slope and began to climb. Rocks shifted underfoot and gravel slid about. Water and ice dampened the footholds and made the ground too cold to touch with her hands, but still she returned her crutches to their harness to free her hands should she need them to catch her balance. She was so close now.

  Tor scampered up ahead of her. His body shook in the cold, and for a moment she considered turning back; it was her choice to press on to the peak, though she didn’t need to, and he would not part from her side, so he suffered the cold just as much as she did. She dragged him into his own danger alongside her.

  But then she cast the thought aside. He was strong and could bear the cold as she could. They’d summit the mountain together and then be off.

  Higher she climbed, her pace slowing as she reached new obstacles. In some places the terrain grew too steep for her to
climb and she had to descend back down a short stretch and take a new path up. In others, the ground underfoot became so unsteady that she sent boulders crashing down the sides of the mountain, barely avoiding getting caught in the collapse herself. But as the wind whipped around her, she kept on with her slow, steady progress.

  Again the weather changed as she rose higher still, no longer rain nor the tiny balls of ice she had assumed were snow. Now it came down as a cold powder matching the description of snow she received from Cyrah. Though these new flakes were not as hard and no longer pelted her with the same force, they clung to her cloak and her hair where it stuck out from beneath the hood, as well as her eyelashes and cheeks. The chill worsened, and in the cold air she lost the feeling in her hands and foot as if all were gone or imprisoned in solid stone.

  As she reached the final leg of the slope, she found herself at the base of a sheer vertical cliff that rose above her head at twice her height. Her first thought called for her to turn and find another route, but when she looked up and down the slope nearby, it became clear that going around made for a lengthy detour. The cliff continued all the way to the bend before disappearing out of sight on her right, and stretched at least forty feet long on her left, gaining height as it went before giving way to another slope of gravel. The fastest way up was the one right in front of her. Tor would have to wait there for her return.

  Wasting no time—knowing she had little—she took the rock face in both hands and began to climb. Her fingers shook, more so than the rest of her, and beneath their grip she felt only the chill from the stone and nothing more of its features. In fact, she could barely tell that she held anything in her hands at all.

  Hand over hand she climbed, finding footholds blindly. The motions brought back memories of hauling herself out of the crevice where she killed Honn; the crevice where she lost her leg; the crevice where Pahlo fell. Except back then she had been in the blistering heat. What she wouldn’t give for just a fraction of that heat now.