Ninthborn (The Ninthborn Chronicle Book 1)

by J. E. Holmes

  As Ediline approached, still fuming at how irritating Amnal had been, a Tithelken guard at the manor’s door saluted her, arms crossed over his chest. She waved at him politely, then realized as she drew closer that the guard was a woman. The guard may have saluted, but she still frowned at Ediline.

  “Hello, I’m here to see Javras,” Ediline said as cheerily as she could, which was considerably cheerily. Her Inherent Presence made it easy to conceal her feelings, including frustration, thank Lord Yainuo for that gift. She’d never have survived without it. “Is he in?”

  The guard nodded and used her head to gesture to the door. Such wonderful treatment at every turn—wasn’t anyone aware that they were supposed to treat her nicely? What if Javras had been watching through one of the windows?

  Ediline reached for the door, then stopped. She pulled back and turned to the guard. Possibly it was just her frustration at Amnal, but possibly it was her irritation at how even a guard assigned to stand outside a building all day treated Princess Ediline like a lesser being. Either way, she wanted to exercise some power and watch an irritating person be inconvenienced. “You know,” she said with the same stupid cheer, “I don’t feel like going inside. Could you please go inside for me and tell Javras that I’m waiting for him? I won’t move.”

  The guard frowned further. Ediline hadn’t thought it was possible. “I do not leave my post until I am relieved—”

  “I, Princess Ediline, eighth born to King Maxen of Sladt, of Korv, of the mighty nation of Tithelk, order you to go inside and tell Javras Teshtéshev that I am waiting to be delighted by his presence and treated to whatever type of night he sees fit.”

  The guard held her ground. Ediline didn’t have the patience for this. She stood straight and narrowed her eyes at the guard.

  “Now,” she commanded.

  Shifting slowly, like a stone finally pushed from its resting place by the flowing river, the guard left her post and entered the manor. Ediline grinned while she waited. It was immature and petty—but also wildly satisfying.

  Minutes later, the guard reappeared, returned to her position beside the door, and said nothing. Before the door closed, a hand caught it, and it opened fully. Javras, clean and bright, stepped out.

  “Princess,” he said, “you’ve come at the perfect time.”

  “Just before the ice-rain?”

  “Just as I was finishing my business. Would you like to come inside?” He looked stressed, worn out. She called up everything she had and gave him her most ingratiating smile, and she watched it break the wear on his face and bring relief.

  “I’d be happy to, thank you,” she said. She cast a pointed sidelong look to the guard. Then she entered, delighted.

  The inside of the manor was very Tithelken—sparse furnishing, simple and efficient. Yithin would have taken his personal belongings abroad with him. Therefore, the appearance of the manor now was even more incredibly stark.

  The eating table was bare, the side tables were bare, the kitchen was bare except for a small arrangement of dinnerware that Javras’s keepers must have brought with them. A short, round man with thinning white hair busied himself in the kitchen, preparing something that Ediline couldn’t see but smelled of salt and blood—meat, and a lot of it. She could also smell bread baking in the oven.

  Javras did not linger in the entryway rooms. Ediline followed him through, down a hall that connected the front of the main house to the back, where Javras opened a door and began to climb a ladder. She followed, not hesitating.

  “My rooms are in the upper house,” he said down to her, “but we won’t be going there. Not now. I just want to be away from that kitchen before I eat Jinnrey.”

  “It does smell amazing. Is Jinnrey your cook?”

  “He’s my father’s personal servant,” Javras said, “and yes, he’s the cook.”

  “Why isn’t he with the rest of your father’s company?”

  “No one is with my father.”

  Ediline’s foot missed the next rung of the ladder. “He’s traveling alone?”

  Javras made no further comment. Ediline held that bit of conversation in her closed hand. Ashwin came up rarely in their talks. She didn’t want to appear so curious and prying as to bring him up and pointedly ask questions. She had to exercise patience.

  At the top of the ladder, Javras opened another door, and he gestured for her to go inside first. The next room was a round place with enough seating for two dozen people. It was empty, but there were halls that led to other areas, and another ladder to her right, leading up. She heard loud and lively voices, but they weren’t speaking Tithelken. She was woefully untrained in Lanen’s languages. Hopefully that wouldn’t prove too much of a hindrance here.

  “If you do not object, I’d like to introduce you to my keepers,” Javras said. He gestured to one of the halls.

  Ediline smiled again and nodded. “I do not object.”

  He led the way down the hall. Before he entered the room, a booming voice erupted from him, and Ediline jumped and clutched her chest. He was speaking his native language. He spoke Tithelken—a language described by foreigners as harsh—softly and eloquently. His voice was a low rumble, a seduction of speech, nearly purring. But when he spoke this language, his voice projected, and the long words and rapid syllables were alluring in an entirely different way.

  The room at the end of the hall was not full of people, as Ediline had guessed by the noise. It was inhabited at the moment by only two, seated a table and playing some kind of game with small glass pieces of different colors on a board.

  One was a man, massive-armed and red-haired with an open-chested vest revealing a black tattoo on pale skin amongst fine red chest hair. The tattoo was the Attenian symbol for the Inherence of Might, Lord Cadex’s legacy.

  The other at the table was a woman, short and efficiently proportioned. She was not thin, nor thick, not obviously muscular but certainly fit and healthy. It was difficult for Ediline to decide on descriptors for the woman. She had straight black hair that half covered her face but didn’t reach her neck, and she wore a twisted vine band around her neck.

  Both rose to attention when Javras spoke. The man grinned and clapped his hands once loudly; the woman expressed very little. Javras then gestured to Ediline, and said in her language, “This is the Princess Ediline who has been—”

  “You have been showing young Javras how impressive a woman you are, yes?” the thick-armed man said.

  “I try not to show off,” Ediline said. She wasn’t sure if the man was asking if they were having sex, but he certainly could have been. She ignored that. “I’ve been doing my best to be a gracious host.” She looked to Javras.

  “These are Wulfgar and Wien,” he said. “They, and Jinnrey, my keepers.”

  “Young Javras loves us with whole heart,” Wulfgar boomed. “But what did you call us? Kipper. Caper? What this word does mean?”

  “Keeper,” Wien said. She spoke softly. Had it been just the one booming voice Ediline had heard? “It means we look after him. He is our responsibility.”

  Wulfgar laughed. “I look after young Javras only when I am winning his money. And my responsibility is to father Ashwin, to see that young Javras does not die.”

  “They’re your bodyguards?” Ediline said.

  “You could say that. I’m sure you have experience with that.”

  “I . . . .” I’m not liked enough to be guarded, she would have said if she were telling the truth. I need to be able to protect myself against people who hate me for no reason, she might have said. “I’m not allowed to socialize with them,” she chose instead. “For warriors in Tithelk, stealth is the primary skill. I don’t see my bodyguards, but I know they are there.”

  Wulfgar frowned. “Fighting in your jungles is like totoath lili tetenerefete . . . .” He made a sort of defeated grumbling sound. “Wien, how do you say this?”

  “It would be impolite to say it in front of a princess,” Wien said.

>   “Ah, you are wise.”

  “No, please,” Ediline said much too quickly to be considered proper. But to the desolation with being proper. “I love impolite expressions—please teach me one.”

  “Haha! I like her,” Wulfgar said.

  Wien sighed, but not in an impatient or put off way. Yet she didn’t smile, either. “Wulfgar’s vulgar expression means to defecate in a nest of spiders. It makes no sense.”

  “It is brilliance in words,” Wulfgar said while Ediline laughed. “What is defecate? Is to shit?”

  “Yes,” Wien said.

  “Yes,” Wulfgar said. He nodded approval. “To shit.”

  “He means to say that fighting in your jungles is messy and difficult to do without being bit,” Wien said. “Fighting in open plains, on even ground, is much easier.”

  “Does that not mean our warriors would be more skilled than those of Ronrónfa?” Ediline said. She cocked her hip, one hand on it, in full swagger.

  “Ediline, that might not be a good thing to say,” Javras said.

  “Oh ho ho, she challenges me?” Wulfgar said. “That sounds like challenge.”

  “I do not believe she was challenging you,” Wien said.

  “Maybe I was!”

  “Maybe another time,” Javras cut in. He looked like he was trying to separate two growling dogs without getting his hands bitten.

  Ediline wore her smirk like a pair of favorite boots, playful and taunting. Wulfgar looked strong enough to break her in half with his hands. He looked strong enough to pick up her broken halves and use them as weapons to fight off waves of soldiers. But Might was difficult to use effectively in the jungles. Straad managed it with decades of training. She liked her chances with her Grace.

  “Wulfgar, Wien, you may return to your game,” Javras continued.

  “But the princess is fun,” Wulfgar complained.

  “You are trying to retreat,” Wien said. She sat at the table and picked up the loose glass game pieces sitting at the side of the table. “I am about to win.”

  Wulfgar frowned and cracked his knuckles. “Wien is looking forward to crushing defeat. I must tend to this.”

  “I understand,” Ediline said. “Best of luck to both of you.”

  Javras led her back down the hall to the waiting room, then down another hall to an empty room. “I apologize for them.”

  “No need,” Ediline said. “I’m surprised, actually, and I would like an explanation.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You have Wulfgar around, protecting your life, and he says things like totoeth a . . . hmm. How did you say that again?”

  “I don’t need them to protect my life. That’s my father’s hand.”

  “How do you say the thing about shitting on spiders?”

  Javras sighed. “Totoath lili tetenerefete oekoekun bo tu is the full expression.” He said it slowly again, and Ediline managed to catch all the syllables. Then she repeated it to herself to commit to memory.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Anyway, I’m just surprised that you have him around saying things like that but you seemed incredibly put off when I said something offhand about my mother’s vagina.”

  He coughed. “Yes, well, it has to do with expecting such a thing.”

  “You expect it from Wulfgar.”

  “Just as I expect Wien to use a more appropriate word when translating it,” he said.

  “I think shit is the most appropriate word in the context of the expression.”

  “You know what I mean, Princess.” He led her through another room like the one in which Wulfgar and Wien had been playing their game, past several doors, and out onto a covered balcony. The clouds overhead gathered. They would be safe from the ice-rain, but it would be cold.

  “Is it because I’m a woman?” she said.

  “What?”

  “Wien is a woman, and you don’t expect her to say what Wulfgar said.”

  “She is reserved.”

  “And you expected me, also a woman, to be reserved?”

  “Princess, it isn’t because you are a woman. I had been speaking with your sister Betrys. Everyone in the manor had been very formal.”

  “You expected me to be like Betrys, then.”

  “It was the only thing from which I had to draw such an expectation.”

  “Well, then, I’m glad that I’ve defied your expectations.” She touched his arm, then leaned on the balcony and looked out over the jungle. Yithin’s manor was on the fringe, and this balcony faced away from the city. There were still some bridges and some houses, but much of what lay before her was the mangroves, the jungle, the wild land in which she lived. Some mist lingered.

  There was a lull in their conversation, a gap filled with potential. She could feel him there, feel him so close as if she could hear his heart beat. If the silence stretched on longer, she might be lulled into saying nothing ever again. Now was as good a time as any. “Your father really travels alone?” she said.

  “He insists on it,” he said. “And why wouldn’t he?”

  “I don’t know. It’s dangerous?”

  Javras laughed a cynical laugh. “My father, Ashwin Teshtéshev? Ashwin the Endbearer? To him, the world possesses no dangers but those that are dangers to itself. He is such a—” He stopped.

  Ashwin had never been discussed in such a context, not between them. Javras had talked about home life, about Ashwin in terms of his fatherhood, or his absence, but never as the warrior who stopped wars, the Endbearer. Javras was open to her, exposed, and warm. Ediline leaned closer.

  “Talk to me, Javras,” she said softly. She felt a stab of guilt. Was she manipulating him? Then again, was seduction anything but? Honestly, she didn’t know. Her instinct told her what to do, and she had to blindly trust it, trust her Presence to mold her into the shape that would get her what she needed. She wanted to know about Ashwin, to find out what was going on behind the curtain she couldn’t even approach. And she wanted to see the other side of Javras, the careful hidden side. She yearned to touch that part of him, an intimate caress, like when she held the sword.

  “It’s nothing,” he said.

  If he was beginning to trust her, if there were feelings brewing in him about her, she could get him to tell her with one word. If this was just politics, he would turn away and talk about something else. That one word would decide it. She touched his arm, and she said it: “Please.”

  He sighed. “You and I have different beliefs about things.”

  “There’s no need to talk about that right now,” she said. “What about your father?”

  “He acts so superior, making other peoples’s business his own,” Javras said. “He has always been like that, even before he found . . . that.” The Ender, the bloodsword. Discovered by accident in the Ruins of Attenia. “He sees people fighting, and he kills them. He behaves like a . . . Tyrant.”

  “You sound . . . I’m sorry, this may be forward of me, but you do not sound fond of him.”

  “I’m not,” Javras said.

  “You would rather allow people to war with one another?”

  “I don’t know what I would do if I had his power.”

  But someday he might. It dawned on Ediline, then, how much pressure Javras must have felt, why this son of an emissary might be such an important person to befriend politically. Ediline didn’t know the extent of the Ender’s power, but she assumed the bloodsword would not allow Ashwin to live forever. One day, he would die. If he did not give the sword to someone he trusted, millions would kill each other over it. He would have to choose carefully. One day, Javras might hold that power, that responsibility, and be forced to spend his entire life protecting it and everything else. Suddenly he felt so distant, so far away and alone, and she saw in that shadow a reflection of herself.

  “Javras,” Ediline said.

  “My grandmother developed a medicine used widely throughout Lanen. She was brilliant in a way I’ve never known anyone else to be.”


  “I didn’t know that.”

  “But the name Teshtéshev is going to be forever his.”

  “I . . . .”

  “My brother Amiral is a scholar of laws,” he said, his voice rising with passion. “He is in Nerebek, working in the great courthouses to defend the innocent and prosecute criminals. He is doing great work, and do you know what he has to do?”

  Edilline looked out over the jungle, the darkening skyline. The air had already begun to chill significantly, and she felt a distant shiver.

  “He uses a fake name,” Javras said. “Because he would not be treated equally or fairly, he has to use a fake name. I have Jinnrey send messages to him, to Amiral Netnétlen.” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I apologize, Princess, for venting about personal matters uninvited.”

  He looked so stricken. It was a glimpse of the real Javras, hidden deep within this beautiful man. It was the same when she caught those honest smiles, except fathoms more significant. She reached out to touch his shoulder. Her hand went beyond his shoulder and rested at the nape of his neck. She touched his short hair, soft, nervous jolts going up her arm through her fingertips. Her breathing was uneven and rapid.

  “No, don’t apologize,” she said. “In fact, I want to hear more, if you have more to say. Not for any particular reason, except that I care to listen.”

  “You are too kind to me,” he said, trying to turn away.

  “I’m just as kind as I want to be,” she said, trying to bring him back. Truths like that were sweet, when she could find the words to say them, when they could mean two or three things at once, and she felt like she was really reaching him, through her mask, through his.

  The sky had darkened, and it had grown cold. The roof hanging over their heads was struck with the beginning of the ice-rain, a firm and persistent tap tap tap. Ediline moved closer to Javras, her hand still on him. He looked outward over the jungle. They faced east. Somewhere out there, his father marched alone, untouched by fear. Ediline still didn’t know what the goals were of either side, why Ashwin was coming. Her involvement went only as far as Javras Teshtéshev, the man with dark blue eyes lost in the shadow of his father.