Ninthborn (The Ninthborn Chronicle Book 1)

by J. E. Holmes

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I was too late, too, and I couldn’t bring myself to use it.”

  Javras nodded at that. She’d expected a barbed retort, a comment of some kind. Wulfgar too seemed pleased with the answer. “If you aren’t willing to kill with it,” Javras said, “even in revenge, then you’re the right person to have it.”

  “What? No. I did kill out of revenge. I cut down a dozen Tithelken junglers; I stabbed Straad right through his chest.” She fought down the sick as she remembered the blood on her neck, on her face, running down her arms.

  Javras spoke to Wulfgar in Fa. Ediline hadn’t heard the language in a while, so she only caught a few words, mostly useless ones. Wulfgar made a few comments back, and then slipped away. Javras turned his shoulder away from Ediline. They were alone now. The air hummed with potential. The space between them was aching, but for what she couldn’t tell.

  “Why did you come after me, if not to get the sword?” she said.

  “Are you returning to Tithelk, Princess?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “Yes you have.”

  “Fine, I have. Yes, I’m returning. Ancil is waging my father’s war, and I know he doesn’t want to. I know he doesn’t want this legacy. I’m going to stop him.”

  “Good,” Javras said. “We’re coming with you.”

  She jerked back, and her face felt warm. “No,” she said. “No, I refuse.”

  “I’m sorry, Princess, but you are not in command here. I did not request.”

  He walked away and left her alone in the small clearing. Her hands twitched, knowing that others—potentially hostile people—were moving toward the bloodsword. But she ignored the twitch, fought down the urge to follow him, and forced herself to consider what had just happened.

  Javras was here. He had followed her, and he intended to join her in retuning to put an end to her brother’s war. She didn’t know what Javras was planning, but she knew that right now, she didn’t trust him. Lords, did she want to, but she couldn’t. She wanted to touch him, to look into the deep blue of his eyes, to feel the cool softness of his hair, to know that he was real, that what she’d had with him had been real. She wanted that viciously. Instead, she waited an appropriate amount of time and then stomped after him. The pain in her back was brutal.

  Wien stood beside Kuo, who remained on his knees, with her taibuo held loosely in one hand. Kuo straightened at the sight of Ediline. The bloodsword remained where she had left it. Javras and Wulfgar finished their approach as Wien came into view.

  “Did any of your stitches tear?” Kuo said.

  “I don’t know,” Ediline said. Walking back to him, subdued and defeated, felt shameful. She felt embarrassed, like she didn’t want to be seen. They could both be dead, but they weren’t, because someone had decided not to kill them.

  “Wien, give it to her,” Javras said.

  Wien nodded and pulled something wrapped in cloth from her back. It was long, thin, flat. Ediline knew what it was before Wien finished unwrapping it, exposing its smooth black finish, the gold trim and etched runes. The Ender’s sheath. Ediline took it, picked up the bloodsword, and returned it soundlessly to its sheath. Having it back in its sheath, away from her constant eyes, and now out of her hand, was a relief.

  “Ediline, wound,” Kuo said. “Sit, lift up your shirt.”

  “I’ll give you privacy,” Javras said. Too much edge to his voice. He was jealous, and terrible at hiding it. He motioned for Wulfgar and Wien to follow him away. Ediline watched him go, watched him not looking back. She didn’t say anything to stop him. Once he was out of sight, she knelt in front of Kuo, turned her back to him, and lifted the back of her shirt. Maybe Wien had circled back and was watching. She didn’t care.

  “It’s bleeding,” Kuo hissed. “Damn. They injured you.”

  “I’ve got plenty to damn them about already,” she said.

  “Who are they?”

  “The one in charge is Javras, Ashwin’s son. The others are his bodyguards. Also, I’m thinking, assassins. The woman who surprised you killed Ashwin.”

  “You took the sword from him, you said. But he doesn’t want it back.” Kuo dug around in his bag for his supplies. Just things he had gathered during their trek, but it would do. She felt the touch on her back, not gentle but not harsh, the sting of something touching her wound, the smear of her blood.

  “They want me,” she said. “They want me to use it.”

  “Good.”

  “No, there’s something hidden here,” she said. She bit down on the bunched up collar of her shirt at the pain. When it subsided, and Kuo said she could lower it again, she continued. “I don’t know what it is, but I can’t trust them right now.”

  “They chose not to kill you.”

  “That wins no one awards in my history. That just means it was an option they might have considered, and that’s plenty to get me angry.”

  Wien stepped out from among the trees. Yes, she had been watching. “We go now.”

  Ediline fitted the sheathed bloodsword to her belt, and shuddered at how right it felt to sit there. The weight of the scabbard on her hip seemed to balance her, like she’d been tilted, off-kilter all her life until the moment this desolation-damned weapon rested against her hip. How good it felt made her want to smash it against a tree until it broke. It wouldn’t. She’d tried it already.

  Wien raised a hand to stop Ediline. “Princess,” she said, and she seemed pained. Wien had never expressed much emotion, like an anti-Wulfgar. She was a terrible liar, a reason Wulfgar claimed to so easily defeat her at penpén, because she failed at bluffing. She made up for it in cunning. “Javras is—”

  “I don’t want to hear about him right now.”

  Wien nodded. She mouthed words, her face tight in thought, and then she paused. “The night is deep,” she said. “We are in the deep of it now, but dawn is coming.”

  “What does that mean?” She looked from Kuo to Wien and back.

  Kuo spoke in Saiyoen, and Wien nodded. “She means,” he said, “that things are bad now, but she is glad that they are this way, because she can see them becoming better. It is a Saiyoen expression of hope, of determination.”

  Ediline couldn’t look at either of them. Yes, she had determination, too, but it shook now that she’d encountered Javras. He was a distraction, something separate from her focus. And Wien just seemed so earnest; she was certain she knew what Wien had been about to say about Javras.

  — Chapter 22 —

  “On the first darkened day, blood ran hot. A man in Kelvren murdered innocents with his reaping scythe. A woman, a devotee of Tathia, set fire to her neighbor’s field, and then to herself. Eighty soldiers abandoned their duties, left the streets of their city empty. While this happened, the Masters of Attenia bickered.”

  —The Chronicle of Tyrants, ed. x

  Something strange happened to the buildings. They began to sit closer together, and the ground was made of stones fitted together. Grass grew between the cracks. After a day of travel through the mountainous jungle following Javras’s appearance, where the buildings had been scattered and simpler, Ediline had come to an actual city of Attenia. What had it been called? What had life been like for the people who had lived here?

  Massive roads of stones, different colors to make the ground seem speckled, shot between rising structures, with pillars and balconies and open spaces where the glass of windows had long ago been broken. Some arches remained standing. It was still a ruin, but it was far more impressive than anything else she’d seen so far, more impressive even than the first tower. Stones and dust were scattered everywhere, but it was just so grand. It was magnificent. The buildings were different shades, too, different hues and tones that gave the entire scene the effect of a painting.

  She marched down a wide avenue. Kuo was by her side, Javras a distance back, his bodyguards between him and Ediline. He hadn’t spoken much to her. Mostly he conversed in Fa with Wulfgar a
nd Wien. Her anger with him smoldered and burned in her stomach.

  She stole a glance back. He turned away, his hair tossed. There was that flutter again in her chest—how could she still feel that way about him, knowing what he’d done? How could she still want to grab him if he made her so angry? That was the most infuriating thing.

  “What is your plan?” Kuo said.

  “I have to do whatever I can to get to Korv, the capital, and into Sladt, my father’s manor. The King’s manor.” She paused and let out a breath. This was so much bigger than anything she’d ever done before. How could she do it? For now, until she figured that out for herself, all she could do was convince Kuo that she wasn’t as lost and hopeless as she felt. “We have time,” she said. “I’ll figure it out.”

  He just looked ahead, down the cobbled road littered with debris and overgrown with vines.

  That night, a slicing-rain blew sideways in a heavy wind. They took refuge behind a corner of wall with a fraction of a ceiling still attached. The rain had come on so quickly, Ediline had torn clothes and bloody cuts after running through it toward cover.

  Wulfgar nursed a fire in the middle of their clearing, and Wien sat beside him, sharpening her taibuo with a small round stone. Javras tossed river crabs into the fire and fished them out with a stick when they were finished. He shared equally with Ediline and Kuo.

  Kuo fidgeted. No one allowed him to check their cuts from the slicing-rain. He checked his own, two or three times, to keep his fingers occupied.

  And no one spoke. It itched at Ediline, crawled up her legs like spiders. She couldn’t get up and run or even walk; the constant pounding of the sharp raindrops was all one sound, and it was all the reminder she needed that she was stuck here.

  After eating the sparse innards of one crab, she couldn’t take the silence anymore. “When did you catch up with me?” she said.

  “Just before the village,” Wulfgar said. “But you went in, and we did not follow.”

  “So you were nowhere near me in the dark-rain?”

  “No,” Javras said.

  “Did you . . . encounter anything strange that night?”

  “It was a dark-rain.”

  She let it drop. She wouldn’t bring up the creature, not now. Not to them. If she did return to Korv, she would tell Isbeil, she would seek out Remer and get to her answers—all of this assuming, of course, she wasn’t killed in the process and was still allowed to be in Korv after what she’d done.

  “This is not good.”

  Ediline looked up. Wien had spoken, but she continued to run the smooth stone across the point of her taibuo. The very same weapon. How much blood had it touched, in its time?

  “What we hope to accomplish is not only difficult, it is deadly,” she said. “It cannot be accomplished with silence, with distrust, with resentment and with hurt feelings. Ediline, I am sorry that I attacked you.” She still did not look up. How old was Wien? Ediline had no guess. Thirty? Twenty-five? Forty? “I am sorry I injured you, and I am sorry we chased you. It was foolish.”

  “Do not speak for all of us,” Javras said, and Wien went silent, her head bowed.

  Wulfgar cracked open a crab, slurped up its meat, and tossed the shell to pop and crunch on the embers. When he went to reach for another, there were no more, and he sighed. With a hand on his stomach, he put his back to the wall, and he closed his eyes.

  Ediline didn’t want to be silent. “I forgive you, Wien,” she said. “You weren’t the only one acting rashly. You could have killed me, but you didn’t. And I agree—I can’t expect myself to travel, to survive, to infiltrate my home and to confront my brother while all this is still looming. I don’t even understand everything that happened.”

  Javras looked down at his hands. Wien sharpened. Wulfgar kept his eyes closed. Kuo fidgeted.

  “And Kuo,” she said, “he doesn’t know any of it. He hasn’t asked. I won’t allow him to be put into danger for something he doesn’t even know.”

  “We won’t take him,” Javras said.

  “He is not warrior,” Wulfgar said.

  “You’ve never found use of a doctor in a battle?” Ediline snapped. “Lords, it’s amazing you all escaped my brothers. How did you manage?”

  Dark silence. Each of them seemed to retreat further. Kuo lifted his head, and he looked at Ediline a moment. The fire flickered through darkness, casting shadows on his face. He didn’t know what to do. None of them did.

  Ediline stood. Wien looked up momentarily, then cast her eyes back down.

  “You had to know this was going to be the outcome,” Ediline said. “Your actions were going to have incredible ramifications—what did you think was going to happen? Lords, am I your accountability for all this? You’re just going to rely on me and this damned sword to fix all your problems? You are no better than your—”

  Javras was up in a flash, and he had her by the shirt. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence.”

  Wulfgar opened his eyes and stretched. Wien slowly rose.

  Ediline almost snarled in Javras’s face. “What was your plan? Tell me your grand scheme, you tyrannical, egotistical, manipulative opportunistic pompous entitled jackass!” There was going to be more, but she ran out of breath, fuming, her face so close to his their noses almost touched. His eyes were so deep and dark.

  He showed remarkable poise and didn’t blink. “That’s quite a lot of insults.”

  “I feel like insulting you.”

  “Ediline—”

  “You killed your father, Javras!” she shouted. “Wien may have been wielding the weapon but she was a force released by your command.”

  “And you think he didn’t deserve it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “He was a monster who needed to be killed. You think otherwise?”

  “I think I can’t look at you the same way again.”

  “I don’t need you to look at me.”

  It hurt so much she felt tears well, but she kept her composure. “What was your way out? What did you plan to do, after your father was dead?”

  Javras swallowed, and he finally released her. He took a step away, then rounded the fire. The slicing-rain clattered overhead, and it scratched at the trees and vines and leaves all around their enclosure. The air was thick with the smell of cut plants.

  “It was the same as my father’s way out,” he said. His voice was soft, low, like a growl. It almost disappeared behind the crackle of the fire and the clash of the rain. “I have no idea what he hoped to happen. He announced he was going to Tithelk to keep the peace, and he just left. He ordered me to stay.”

  “What do you think he planned to do?” Ediline managed to ask it without screaming. Her anger was just barely in check. She’d never felt this much anger pulse through her, even growing up as she had, tormented as she had been. Probably because she’d never felt she had the power to do anything about any of it. Or maybe because she’d never cared for someone the way she had come to care for Javras.

  “You heard him in that hall,” Javras said. “He was going to kill your father if he didn’t submit. He would have used your father’s blood to bring down the whole manor. He would have used that blood to level your father’s army. He would have used that—”

  Ediline felt herself pale. “Lords, is that all possible?” She looked down at her hip, at the sword, and felt every surface of her skin crawl away from it. So brutal, so deadly. But it was under her control. It wouldn’t kill unless she bid it, unless she directed it to do so. If only it could remain sheathed forever.

  “My father perfected his understanding of the bloodsword,” Javras said low. He let out a breath. “You know his actions would have led to chaos. In keeping the peace, as he thought it, he would have shattered the accord. The Era of Peace was going to be cut down at its knees, no matter what he did.”

  “He did what he felt he needed to do,” she said. Her mouth was dry. Could she possibly defend him? She’d seen him. He’d been bare
ly human. Yet his morality was somehow . . . no, she couldn’t bring herself that far. She felt the sword at her side, and suddenly it felt incredibly heavy.

  “How could you say that?”

  “If he hadn’t killed my father, this war would have been delayed, yes, but it would have been far worse. It’s being carried out now because my brother still has the element of surprise. If word carried that Ashwin was dead, they would have lost that.”

  “How does that make it better?”

  “Because if he began this in ten years, he would still have the element of surprise. But he would have an army that much bigger. He would overrun Saiyoe twice as quickly, set up new barracks and fortresses eight times as quickly. If he’d waited twenty years, he could have crushed the whole continent under his might.”

  Javras kicked at the dirt.

  “She is right, young Javras,” Wulfgar said.

  “You’re going to defend his actions, too?”

  “Father was fufúnicket,” Wulfgar spat. “I defend your actions, Sesér.”

  Javras nodded. She’d never heard Wulfgar refer to him by any title.

  “How did it happen?” Ediline said. “How long were you looking for an opportunity to kill your own father?”

  He whirled. She did not shrink away. The fire danced across his furious features. She was sure hers looked the same. “You grew up under a terrible father,” he said. “Did you never think to kill him?"

  “No,” she said.

  “Not ever?”

  “Not ever.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because I’m not a terrible person!”

  He smirked, and she wanted to beat it off his face. “Give me the real reason, Princess.”

  She bit down and swore eight times. “Because I never could. Because I am too weak.”

  The smirk was gone, and he paced around the fire. The rain was beginning to let up past their enclosure. She wanted to run. She wanted to climb and hide somewhere, alone, away from these people, even from Kuo. He looked at her, like he only wanted to help, but he was lost.