Ninthborn (The Ninthborn Chronicle Book 1)

by J. E. Holmes

“And no one has asked why you were sick and muddy, alone in the jungle.”

  She stopped and stood from the stool. That was something she couldn’t talk about. Even if she wanted to, the memories of escaping Korv—of her father being slashed open, of Ashwin having a spike driven through his neck—were difficult to deal with. Her Presence helped her control the state of her mind, and she was able to banish them effectively most of the time. But to talk about them? Not only could it potentially endanger her and anyone she told, it would be painful. Sickening. She still didn’t want to think about being betrayed by Javras, being turned on by Ancil. Who had her side, except these nice people who didn’t know yet to hate her?

  “I appreciate that no one has asked,” she said.

  “Because you are not a spectacle, either.” He shifted to another stool and wrote on a piece of paper. “You are recovered from your infection. You may stay in the village or go.”

  That was as much a goodbye and you’re welcome as she expected to get from Kuo. So she just left the hospital, walked across the village, and sat by the river. For a few minutes, she watched the flow of the water, wondering where it came from, where it was going, how many other people were looking at the same river somewhere else, the same water.

  Her eyes darted to her small hut. Was the bloodsword still there?

  She squeezed them shut and listened to the river. Did it flow all the way from Korv, cutting and crisscrossing? Was this the same water that had once flowed under her house? It was possible, but she doubted it. There were just so many rivers, they couldn’t all be connected.

  Before she knew it she was on her feet, turned back toward her hut. She was walking, slipping inside, kneeling beside the bloodsword’s hiding place, and pulling it out. She didn’t unwrap it. If it had weighed more than the cloak it was wrapped in, she might have worried it had been switched for a different sword, and she might have unwrapped it just to check. Would she be like this until she died? That was the bond she’d made with the sword. Could she unmake it with another bond of blood? She didn’t want to risk it. Maybe two opposite bonds would just rip out her blood, or dry it all up.

  Relief flowed through her, holding onto it. Putting it down would strip that from her. Now, she needed to think about what she would do next, and she wanted as few distractions from that as possible. She slipped it over her shoulder, attached again to her satchel strap. She left the hut.

  At the edge of the village, Rei and Miu were seated on opposite tree stumps, volleying chatter back and forth and laughing. How lovely it would be, to have a partner like that. Someone to rely on, to joke with, to support and be with. It carried none of the pressures of a romantic relationship. At least, it didn’t carry the same pressures.

  Rei waved. “Hello, Ediline.”

  “Hunting?” Ediline said. The few words she knew of their language were already a little more than she knew of Saiyoen or Mor. She didn’t have a name for their language, but the village was called Tailiet, so she just thought of it as Tailieten.

  “Hunting maokaoroak,” Miu said with a grin. She turned over a hatchet in her hands.

  “No maokaoroak,” Rei admonished. She said something much longer that Ediline didn’t comprehend, but it wasn’t directed at her. Miu responded, and the two went back and forth several times.

  “What is maokaoroak?” Ediline said.

  Miu’s grin widened, and Rei sighed and rose from her stump. She drew a hatchet of her own and made practiced throwing motions, pretending to aim at a distant tree.

  “What?”

  “Maokaoroak hunting,” Miu said. “Come.”

  “What is it?” She was the disadvantaged one in these conversations. Even if they gave her an explanation, she wouldn’t be able to understand it without— “Wait,” she said. “Kuo.”

  Miu nodded. “Yes, Kuo.”

  Ediline raced back to the hospital and effectively dragged Kuo to the edge of the village. She placed him in front of Miu. “Translate please,” she said in Tithelken. “What’s maokaoroak?” she asked Miu in the other language.

  She spoke rapidly, Kuo nodding the whole time but gave Ediline sidelong, displeased glances. His discomfort made it all the more enjoyable. Sometimes surly people just needed to be prodded with a hot stick.

  “It’s a monster,” Kuo said.

  Ediline waited, but he was done. That was the whole translation. “She said more than that,” she said. “A lot more. Give me the full translation.”

  “Some words I do not know in your language.”

  “Describe them to me.”

  “Monster is all you need to know. It is not real.”

  She groaned. “But I want to know more.”

  “You are suddenly curious. When you aren’t ill, are you always curious?”

  She paused to think about it. “Most of the time?”

  “And you expect to get what you want,” he said. He peered at her at an angle. Rei and Miu watched their exchanges. Miu’s elation did not abate. “Why is that?”

  Ediline took a heavy breath. “When you aren’t tending to an ill person, are you always curious?”

  He frowned further and shook his head. “No. But I am about you.”

  “If you translate her description, I’ll tell you.”

  He sighed. “I already explained, I don’t know all the words.”

  “If you describe for me—no, if you come with us! If you come with us on the hunt, I’ll tell you.” She let out that heavy held breath. “I will tell you why I’m curious, why I was lost. What do you say?”

  He seemed repulsed by the idea of coming along a hunting trip, but she could tell he was weighing the offer. Despite how aloof he appeared to be, despite the distance he put between himself and everything else, he really was naturally curious. He had to be, to learn so many languages, to learn how to treat the sick. A doctor risked befriending people who might die. He could leave for a tiny village or for a large city and never see people again. It made sense to distance himself.

  “I will,” he said finally, “if you do not lie.”

  “I do not lie,” she said.

  “Hunting,” he said to Miu and Rei in Tailieten. “I am coming too.”

  Miu was excited, Rei was exasperated, and Ediline was wildly curious. They were hunting a monster? Surely it wasn’t like the shadow-creature from the dark-rain. This was probably some wild animal inflated by folklore, like the fire-bears from the Dripping Forests between Bannoch and Ronrónfa.

  Even thinking about Ronrónfa made her think of Javras. She saw his dark blue eyes in that tanned face, beneath his blonde hair. He could entrance her, turn her in his hand, place his lips to hers, and let her believe him the whole time. Yet he hadn’t lied when he’d told his father he was in love with her.

  She hated him. But she was almost certain she loved him, too.

  “Ediline?” Rei said. Miu and Kuo had walked off into the jungle. Rei carried a candletwig. “Are you okay?”

  The number of unknown words necessary to communicate how she felt was laughable. “Yes,” she said. Okay, sometimes she lied.

  The maokaoroak was a furry beast, sort of like a bear, but it walked upright all the time, and not on its fists like a gorilla. It had poisonous teeth, noxious breath, claws that would cause skin to rot; it could run like the fastest Ronrónfa horses, leap over trees, and climb straight cliffs. It was entirely mythological, but evidently Miu had dreamed of hunting it as a girl, of being the only person to kill it, and so she still joked about it. It sounded like the last creature Ediline wanted to encounter in the jungle, but at least she had the bloodsword, just in case.

  They hiked for a long time without coming across anything. It must have been an hour. Rei and Miu led the way, turning at landmarks they recognized that Ediline didn’t. Ediline and Kuo followed.

  “Okay, I am along,” Kuo said. “Are you going to tell me?”

  A root required careful stepping over, so she didn’t answer. She shifted the bloodsword, hooked onto her
satchel. It was so much more comfortable to have it on her, even though she didn’t dream of using it to hunt. She was repulsed by the idea of using it for anything. And so she thought, how much was she going to tell Kuo? She could tell him about herself, and her life, but not about this.

  “I’m just a spoiled brat who always gets her way,” she said.

  He turned his head sharply. “You said you would not lie.”

  “I’m joking, Kuo. Curiosity is just my nature, I guess. Or maybe, I wasn’t supposed to be curious, so I made sure that I was. The other thing, though . . . .”

  She took a breath and waited until Rei and Miu had moved on after pausing a moment.

  “I ran away from my home,” she said. “In Tithelk, I was a princess. Not an important one, just one of several.”

  Kuo didn’t even seem to react. “Why did you leave?”

  “I was hated.” Had lying like this really come to be so easy? She was telling the truth, but certainly not all of it. It was the same type of charade she’d had to play for Javras, and it seemed painfully comfortable now.

  “Are you happy you left?”

  That was a question that brought her to silence. Escaping with the bloodsword had at least prevented either Javras or Ancil from having it. That was one positive thing about what had happened. But she’d lost everything and everyone. Not just Javras and Ancil, but Geltir and Isbeil, too. Wulfgar and Wien had turned on her.

  In the end, she never answered, and he never pushed for an answer. They followed Rei and Miu as they stalked elusive prey, and the day wore on.

  — Chapter 18 —

  “There are those who are weak, and those who can spill blood.”

  —Lord Cadex

  It was past sunset. Rei and Miu had hunted a small boar, and Ediline had caught a sackful of crabs from the shallow waters that rose and fell through the adjacent swamp. Kuo had not participated.

  They were on their way back when Rei lifted her nose to the air, and her eyes shot wide open. She shrieked something in her language that sent a cold chill down Ediline’s neck, and she took off in a sprint, dropping her hoisted half of the boar.

  Miu dropped the other half and ran after her a moment later.

  Ediline grabbed Kuo. “What did she say?”

  “Blood.” He paled.

  Before she had a moment to think, Ediline took off after the two hunters with her hunting knife in hand. Her heart was tight in her throat. Her head was heavy but her body was light. Relying on her Grace, she picked her way between trees and shrubs, leapt over puddles and streams, evaded reaching roots and twisted branches curling low.

  The jungle was dim, silent. Ahead, the flicker of Rei’s candletwig. It bobbed with her movement, but then it stopped and shone on the same trees. Seconds later, Ediline came upon it. Rei had dropped it.

  An aching, terrible cry cut through the silence, echoing like thunder. Ediline stumbled and stopped, halted by the sound. It was followed by the clash of fighting, and more screams.

  She ran faster than she ever had in her life.

  When she broke through the edge of the jungle, her legs gave underneath her, and she collapsed to her knees. Outside the huts and houses, the hospital and every other building, were piles of fresh bodies. Blood soaked the ground, wet and reeking. Up through her body, from her knees touching the mud to her throat, rose a putrid disgust.

  This was incomprehensible. Animals could kill, yet animals, even a monster like the maokaoroak, would hunt for food, or challenge a rival for dominance. Not even a monster would kill for slaughter. Only a human would do that.

  As her senses came back to her, her vision returning to clarity, she saw Tithelken soldiers, armed with long, broad spears and wearing the deep green symbol of the King across the chest pieces of their lamellar armor. They did not notice her, because they were moving the bodies of Rei and Miu, who lay murdered in the center of the village at the feet of an aged soldier, a great axe in his hand.

  Straad.

  Instinct told her to run. She hadn’t been seen yet. Desire to survive told her to duck back into the jungle, to grab Kuo and to take him far away from these people he would have no power to heal.

  But instinct sat silent. There was only fury. Strength pulsed through her legs and pushed her to her feet. She stalked toward Straad, knuckles white around the hilt of her knife. She walked past slaughtered men, women, and children, the ground wet.

  “Straad!” she shrieked. She tried to control her voice, but couldn’t. Anger twitched through her.

  He looked up at her. Two soldiers pulled Rei and Miu away and tossed them among others. Would they wash downriver, or be burned or buried, or would Straad order them to simply be left behind, to decay and be eaten by maggots? The Lords could never have wanted this.

  “The traitor princess,” Straad said. His dark eyes flicked to her side, where her satchel rested against her hip. “Our search comes to an end.”

  All this to find her?

  “Lords deliver you straight to the desolation, Straad, and may they split your tongue and feed you your own heart.” She slammed a clenched fist into her leg. The pain blossoming from the impact tightened her focus. Straad didn’t move toward her, but she saw junglers closing in from the sides, spears at the ready.

  “Who are you to slaughter innocent people?” she shouted. She’d always thought highly of him—how could he do this? “What in the name of the Lords are you doing?”

  “Tithelk is mighty, Ediline, and once more all of Lanen shall know it!”

  “This is not might! This is cowardice,” she spat.

  She was about to demand who ordered this to be done, but they weren’t hiding it. Wearing the symbol of the King of Tithelk, they slaughtered. Right now, she couldn’t feel the sorrow within her, behind this rage.

  “Ashwin the Endbearer no longer stands in our way,” Straad said. He ran his hand down the shaft of his great axe. Its blade was wet red. “The Church of the Lords is weak. There is no empire in Morelek. The peace accord is a sign of weakness—the weakness of others. It was created out of fear.”

  “Then why did my father ever sign it?”

  Straad chuckled and shook his head.

  Oh, of course. To deceive everyone, so he could overrun them with their guards down. And he’d convinced his people—herself included, for a while—that it was the right thing to do, because he believed the other nations were just as selfish and greedy as he was. Now she was glad he was dead.

  “These people—”

  “These people refused to submit,” Straad bellowed. “This is what happens.”

  Her fists clenched. Her face was hot and her eyes stung. Anger coursed through her tense body pushing and burning for an avenue of escape. Fine. But the knife wouldn’t do.

  All at once she reached over her shoulder and hurled down her satchel. She pulled the wrapped thing off the strap, and she drew the bloodsword from her cloak. She let the black blade rest on the ground, where its tip sunk into the soft, damp dirt.

  “Ashwin may be dead,” she said, her voice steady, “but the Endbearer is not.”

  “Ediline, I had hoped not to kill you.” Despite the lament in his voice, he smiled grimly and readied his axe.

  “By the blood of the innocent,” she said, and she breathed in deeply the scent of blood and death, “I will end you.”

  She had never wielded a sword, not truly. Axe, spear, mace, staff—she knew those back and forth, but the sword was not a weapon of Tithelk. It was too elegant, not brutal enough. This was no simple sword. If the bloodsword had been designed by the Lords’ almighty foresight, it was without doubt a weapon of Tithelk. Ediline had never beheld something so brutal.

  A wave of Straad’s soldiers charged. She reacted. With one sweep of her sword, thin black wisps twisted through the air, grasping out toward the oncoming soldiers. Spears were sundered, and the shadows cut through the junglers like razors, ripping armor and rending bone and splitting them open. She didn’t let her eyes rest
on their bodies.

  They didn’t even have time to scream. The other soldiers halted, frozen.

  Lords. The power threatened to overwhelm her.

  Ediline snapped the sword straight out to her side. It was dry of blood, and so was the ground at her feet, from which she had drawn it. The adrenaline of the moment, the rage that demanded she kill Straad, kept the nausea away. She did not dwell on the fact that, in one moment, she had killed ten men and women, ten more men and women than she had ever killed before.

  Later, maybe. But not now.

  Straad approached, axe raised. She took a step toward the next source of blood. He moved his axe in warding sweeps, and she was forced back. No, she needed to press, to move forward. She attacked, lunging and striking. The black blade glanced off Straad’s axe. He was too solid to be pushed back. It was the same game Wien had played against Ashwin. Straad would not allow her to draw blood. He would find an opening, and he would kill her with one massive attack.

  She dove to one side, feinting, then moved around to Straad’s flank. He shifted back, just quickly enough to deflect her attack, but it had only been a test. He might be powerful enough to kill her in a single blow, but she was faster than the lumbering general.

  Some of the soldiers began to approach. Straad barked, “Stay back! If she draws blood, she will kill us all.”

  “I’m not like you,” she snapped.

  “Did you not just kill a dozen of my men?”

  “There were some women, too.” She felt ill at her quip and disguised it with another back-and-forth attack. He still didn’t let her near the blood.

  “A dozen, in one attack,” he said. Even in combat, his volume rose toward the end of each statement. “I would be impressed, if you were not a traitor.”

  “Traitor? I’m the traitor? Lords, Straad, would my father, for all his ruthlessness, have even wanted—?”

  He guffawed. It was only for show. The soldiers all around him looked on with cold stares. How could they live with themselves for that they’d done? She hoped it haunted them forever. If they survived her. She wanted them to live, just to suffer the nightmares born out of their senseless slaughter.