Good Blood

by Billy Ketch Allen

  The Descendant bounced around on the balls of his feet. His face had changed from hopeless to determined. He was ready for the bear. The enormous beast charged. The Descendant held his ground. As the bear drew close, the Descendant turned around and ran toward the wall. But there was no way he would outrun the bear or climb out of the pit. The bear reared up, almost upon him. The Descendant leaped up and kicked off the wall, flying back at the bear like an arrow, the broken sword its point. He struck the sword into the bear’s chest, and the beast fell upon him. The Descendant disappeared under the mound of brown fur.

  The crowd fell silent. Beside him, Cambria shut her eyes. The bear stopped moving; it lay in a brown heap.

  There was a shake as the bear stirred. Then the man’s arms appeared. He pulled himself out from under the bear. The Descendant’s torso was stained red, but he managed to stand. He looked defiantly to the crowd. The bear, dead at his feet.

  Gasps sounded from the crowd, but no one spoke. Not until Cambria tapped the speaker on the arm and handed back her paper receipt. “I believe that’s sixty shrines.”

  The man’s lip snarled under his mustache, but he counted out the coins and handed her enough to fill both hers and Ara’s pockets.

  “Stick around and we’ll see if your luck runs out,” the man snarled.

  People eyed Ara and Cambria as they tried to find enough places to stuff their small fortune. Ara’s clothes sagged under the weight of the coins. He lowered his head, nervous at the attention they were receiving.

  “Now can we go?” Cambria asked.

  “Yes,” Ara said.

  The speaker gave them one last grimace then turned to face the Descendant in the pit. The man stared directly at Ara; the look in his eyes was a mixture of gratitude and bewilderment.

  “As the generous Lord Severen has decreed, this man will not be executed,” the speaker said.

  The crowd groaned its displeasure.

  The speaker waved them to silence. “He shall live to fight tomorrow!”

  The crowd erupted in cheers and applause.

  “You can’t,” Ara said. “You promised his freedom if he survived.”

  “Where are you from, boy?” The speaker laughed. “He’s a Descendant. There is no freedom.”

  Cambria pulled at Ara’s arm, and this time she did not let go. Ara could feel the stares on them as they moved. A hooded figure pushed towards them through the crowd. Ara caught a glimpse of a scar on the man’s hidden face.

  “This way,” Ara said. He pulled Cambria away from the hooded figure’s path.

  They escaped the crowd at the pit and hurried down an alley, clinking with every step. They reached the street and headed towards the direction they had come. Ara turned several times to make sure they weren’t followed, but it was hard to tell with the crowded streets. As soon as they crossed the tree line, they broke into a run, moving as fast as they could under the weight of the shrines.

  I should be happy, Ara thought. He set out to get some coin for food and ended up with enough to feed them for months. But he couldn’t get over the horrors he had witnessed. Descendants beaten and killed for sport. He had seen the mistreatment of Descendants before, but this was something else completely. How could people live with such cruelty?

  Ara stopped and looked back. The forest behind him was empty though he could not shake the eerie feeling of being followed. Maybe he was still unnerved by what he had seen at the fighting pit. He ran and caught up to Cambria. Neither said a word until they were back at the camp.

  “Where have you been?” Hannah’s worried voice called as they crossed the grass towards their companions. “We’d thought you’d been abducted.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ara said. “We…went into the city.”

  “Ara!” Briton rebuked. “Farmount is a dangerous city. You could have been killed. Both of you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ara repeated. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. It was dangerous. He could have been caught and thrown to the bottom of the fighting pit—torn apart for people’s entertainment.

  “What were you thinking?”

  “I…we needed food. I wanted to help. I…”

  Cambria cut him off by opening her pockets. Shrines rained down onto the ground. Hannah and Briton looked on with open mouths. Ara reached into his own pockets and poured out an even larger share. Everyone gasped as the gold piled on the ground.

  “If it makes you feel any better,” Cambria said. “Dinner is on us.”

  Ara hadn’t felt this full since…well…as long as he could remember. Geyer had taken some of the shrines back to Farmount and returned with fresh meat and bread and potatoes and carrots and onions and, though it wasn’t on the list, a jug of ale. He even found a dish of sugar sweet bread, a special request by Cambria and Aaron. Hannah cooked up the food over a fire, and they ate for a group twice their size. Trepidation disappeared along with their hunger, and the mood lightened. It was one of the first pleasant evenings Ara could remember.

  After enough of the ale had disappeared, Geyer was even coaxed into telling the story of his first tournament.

  “Garmond the Gray,” Geyer said. “Big as an oak and with a personality to match. I was seventeen and entered the tournament as soon as I could afford my first sword. I had to duel in borrowed armor. Nervous as I was, I didn’t even try it on before my first bout.”

  Geyer took a long chug from his mug and wiped the ale from his chin with a satisfied gasp.

  “They kept calling my name, thinking I had lost my nerve. Ha! I was with the stablehand, fastening rope to keep the armor from slipping off. What a sight I must have been coming out in front of Lord Broming and most of the eastern realm, swimming in a bigger man’s armor.”

  Everyone laughed at the image. Except for Cambria. Sitting across the fire from Ara, she seemed agitated. Her eyes drifting off into the dark of the forest.

  Geyer drained the last of the mug.

  “Garmond refused to fight me. Said it would only blemish his reputation to sully himself with someone so far below his station. But tournament rules said nothing about the shape of a swordsman’s armor, and Lord Broming ordered him to get on with it. Ha! I think my clumsy attire distracted him because I bested him inside of three minutes. Half blind with my helmet sliding over my eyes with every parry. It took old Garmond years before he showed his face at another contest.”

  Cambria quietly rose and slinked off into the woods. Geyer finished his tale, and Briton began dissecting its historical inaccuracies. By then Ara couldn’t take it anymore; he stood up and followed after her.

  The moon was high and full making it easy to move through the trees. Hiding out in the forest these past months, Ara had rarely stopped to notice its beauty. The trees sparkled as if the light came from within their own leaves. The darkness was no longer the home of hidden danger but of mystery. Even the chirping of the insects sounded more welcoming this night.

  Ara found Cambria bathed in moonlight, staring off a cliff’s edge.

  “It’s your turn to sneak up on me now, I suppose,” she said without looking his way.

  “How did you do that?” Ara asked. He had kept his distance and stepped on the balls of his feet with practiced silence.

  “It was the silence that gave you away,” Cambria said, turning towards him. “The crickets stopped chirping near you.”

  “And how’d you know it was me?” He stepped closer. Into the moonlight.

  Cambria simply gazed back at him. Her hair was combed back, freckles scattered on her face like dark stars.

  “I saw that you left,” Ara said. “Is everything alright?”

  Cambria shook her head. “How can it be? After what we saw today. After what I’ve seen my whole life. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth doing what we do.”

  “Don’t say that. You and the other doctors help so many people.”

  “For what purpose? We stitch them up only to get cut again. Heal their sickness only to starve from a lack of fo
od. And that’s just normal people. What you Descendants go through…”

  “It’s horrible and it’s wrong,” Ara said with conviction. “I know that long ago, life under the Royals was cruel and unfair. But this cannot be any better. Why must one people always live atop another?”

  “Because they’re afraid of you. What you can do.”

  “They should be.” Ara shook his head, looking out into the night. All the pain he had suffered these past months…he now understood the Descendants’ hatred for dry bloods. He could even understand the rebellion’s attacks. “I’ve never felt like a Descendant, I didn’t even know what that word meant. But if that’s the side I’m on, then I will fight for it.”

  “No. That’s what people don’t understand. It’s not one side against the other. The world is comprised of individuals. Each one is capable of good or harm. It comes down to what we choose to do.” Cambria’s eyes sparkled in the moonlight. “You are not defined by your blood.”

  “That’s how the rest of the world sees me. And I don’t understand why. Are we really that different?”

  “No,” Cambria said. “We’re not.”

  Cambria sat on a large round rock near the cliff edge, and Ara joined her. Sounds of a river in the forest below reached up to them. Water that started in the mountains far away and passed them only this brief moment on its way to the other side of the world.

  “As a young girl, I thought my suffering was unique. But the more I traveled the more I saw I was just like everyone else.” Cambria stopped for a moment, listening to the rolling water below. “I was playing in a river when my parents were killed.”

  Cambria fixed her gaze on the forest below. A full minute passed before she spoke again. “We met some sick travelers on the road. My parents, of course, offered to help. My mother sent me to the woods to pick elderweed for lotions. I was searching in the forest, and when I heard the sound of a river, I dropped the elderweed and ran to the water. The day was hot, and I played by the water losing track of time, dipping my feet into the current. Splashing. Throwing rocks.”

  Cambria stopped for a moment as if weighed down by the memory.

  “When I returned my parents had already been infected.”

  “Infected?”

  “Gray Fever. They hadn’t taken the proper precautions when treating the travelers. They didn’t expect to encounter death.”

  Ara gasped.

  “It works fast. One of the travelers had already died, his chest caved in as my father was inspecting him. The others began panicking, trying to run. My father had to contain the disease. He couldn’t let it spread. In all that panic, he did what had to be done. He acted like a doctor should, clinical without emotion.” Cambria gulped down the lump in her throat. “I didn’t know he was capable of that. Or what came next.”

  She closed her eyes with a deep sigh. “My mother was sobbing when I got back. They were standing over the bodies. I had the elderweed in my hands, my hair was still wet from the river. I saw that something was wrong. At first, I thought they were just mad at me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing. They wouldn’t let me get close to them. I told them I could help; I begged them to let me try. But there’s no cure for Gray Fever.

  “We said goodbye. Then my father made me promise to burn the bodies. All of them.”

  They were silent for a long moment. There was nothing Ara could say. The crickets’ song grew louder in all directions. Though they were roughly the same age, Cambria had always seemed more mature. Always taking control. Now, alone, speaking in a soft, close voice, Ara realized how small she really was.

  “I was careful,” she said. “I took every precaution. If there was a chance they had touched something—supplies, the wagon—I burned it too. It took me all day, but I cleaned the site of any contamination. My father would have been proud.”

  Cambria wiped her face and looked up.

  “I survived on my own in the town of Caldesh for a month until I found Petar and Hannah. I’ve been with them ever since.”

  “I’m sorry, Cambria,” Ara said.

  She nodded. “I haven’t told anyone else that story aside from them. Not even Aaron, though he’s pieced much of it together.” Her eyes turned back to the forest below. “You don’t know how many times I’ve wished to go back. To that morning in the river. Just a little girl playing in the water, not knowing what awaited her. I think it was the last time I was truly happy.”

  Ara imagined Cambria as a young girl. Her somber face replaced with a carefree smile. “I don’t have any happy memories. Not one.”

  “You really did lose your memory?”

  Ara nodded. “It’s as if everything started over when I woke up in that hunter’s cart. Stuff must have come before because I know things. Only I don’t know how I know. I get pieces sometimes but they don’t mean anything.”

  “Like what?”

  Ara sat down on the rock beside her.

  “Like I’m in the sky, looking down.”

  “You fly in these memories?”

  “It’s more like I’m a cloud. I’m just there, above everything. Looking down on trees and mountains and…a river.” Ara’s voice trailed off as he pictured the scene from his visions.

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s the Arathan River. I’ve seen it before, in my visions. I’m sure of it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that I come from up north. That is where I will find the source. The source of the royal blood.”

  Ara stood up as he pictured the river on Briton’s map the day he chose a name. Something had been familiar then, and now he was sure the river had the same shape as the one in his visions.

  Ara was so excited by the hope of an answer that it took him a moment to hear it. The silence. All the crickets in the forest had stopped. Cambria leaped off the rock and spun around, blade already in hand.

  “Easy girl,” a voice said. A figure stepped from the darkness into the moonlight along with six others. They all had scars on the right side of their faces.

  “You’re not the one we want,” a man said. “We’re here for the boy.”

  25

  Briton held the lantern away from his face as he peered into the dark forest. He wasn’t worried at first when the two kids had snuck off. It was clear they’d grown closer over their time together, and Briton was happy Ara could find some connection in the midst of all this terror. But then they heard Cambria’s scream.

  “Cambria,” Petar called out somewhere to Briton’s right. “Ara.”

  The group had spread out into a search party, scouring the woods. It was unlikely they’d gotten lost; even without a lantern, there was enough light to see by. Briton moved through the brush, his stomach twisting in fear of what he’d find.

  A figure raced past him. Briton turned the lantern in that direction and followed, wondering if he should be carrying a weapon. Not that it’d be any use to him. All those years of study and he never once learned how to fend for himself.

  A soft moan cut through the silence.

  Briton stepped into a clearing by a cliff’s edge. Brim sat on the ground, cradling Cambria’s body. The girl moaned as the big man rocked her and stroked her hair. Briton held the lantern close; specks of dried blood dotted her hair and the side of her face. Someone had given the poor girl a good crack.

  Briton leaned down over the girl. “Cambria?”

  Cambria’s eyes opened and recoiled from the light. Briton pulled the lantern back. “Cambria, what happened?”

  “Ara,” Cambria said, trying to sit up and falling. Brim held her tight, stopping further movement.

  Briton’s heart raced in his chest as he glanced towards the cliff edge. It was a long drop. “Where’s Ara?”

  It was silly to fear for one who can heal from anything. Nearly anything, Briton reminded himself at the sound of water moving below them. Still, he worried. Despite all his power, despite how far he had com
e these past months—Ara was still just a boy.

  Briton asked again, “Cambria, what happened to Ara?”

  Cambria looked around, fear and panic taking hold. “They took him.”

  Ara woke in darkness. His hands were bound tight. His head was covered by a cloth that blocked his vision and trapped his hot breath against his face. He twisted in panic, but ropes scraped his back, holding him in place. The ground shifted beneath him in sync with the clopping sound.

  I’m tied to a horse.

  Ara focused on the clopping hooves around him but couldn’t get a count of how many there were. Five? Ten? He thought back to the attack. It had been hard to see in the darkness. He remembered being grabbed, he remembered…

  Cambria! Ara fought against the ropes. He remembered her knocked to the ground, unmoving.

  “Cambria!” Ara yelled into the hot cloth. The horse jumped into a gallop. Ara struggled against the rope, loosening it enough to slip part way off the horse. His feet dangled in the air.

  “Whoa,” a voice called, and the horse came to a stop. Hands grabbed Ara. The ropes loosened, and he was thrown down. His left side smacked against the hard ground spilling the air from his lungs.

  “That’s a good way to get trampled.”

  Ara climbed to his feet and spun around blindly. He shuffled a few feet left, a few feet right, a few feet left, waiting for the men to attack. But no one did.

  “Let’s see how far he gets before he cracks his head on a tree.”

  “Ha. Then we’ll see how good his blood really is.”

  Ara stopped, catching his breath. He reached up with his bound hands and pulled the hood off his head. He blinked away the sudden rush of morning light. There were seven figures before him, five men and two women. They wore dark clothes of brown and black. Scars marked the right side of each of their faces.

  Descendant rebels.

  “What do you want?” Ara asked.

  A tall man with black wavy hair and tanned skin stepped down from his horse and approached Ara. The man was handsome despite his scars, and there was a kindness in his sly smile. Two swords were strapped to his back, the handles crossing behind his head. He held his hands up as a sign of peace.