Realm of Ruins

by Hannah West

  I looked down at the blood caked in the basins of the knuckles on my marred hand.

  “He’s not the man you knew him to be, Mercer,” I said, finding it beyond difficult to look back up at him.

  Mercer slid Glisette’s hand away and turned his ire on me. “I know he’s not the same. But all I’ve wanted is a chance to break through the Moth King’s manipulation, to remind him of who he once was, or at least try—”

  “He didn’t even flinch at the sound of your name.”

  The moment the words escaped, I wished I hadn’t said them. Pain worked its way across his pleasing features. But something about my ruthless tone made the truth sink in. His shoulders sagged. “So, what happened?” he asked. “How did Tilmorn know you were there?”

  “Ambrosine,” I breathed, relieved that Mercer wasn’t about to charge back to meet almost certain death.

  “She didn’t think she was betraying us,” Glisette rushed to say. “She thinks Valmarys is a doting suitor, that his men were willing to escort me safely back to Pontaval. She didn’t share my location initially because she was hoping to lure his envoys to her with more gifts. It worked. And now she and Perennia are in danger.”

  “Tilmorn could have killed your entire family already if he wanted,” I reassured her. “He hasn’t.”

  “Valory’s right,” Mercer said. “If that’s what the Moth King desired, it would be done. He finds his pleasure in other ways.”

  “Torture?” Glisette asked feebly.

  “Sometimes,” Mercer said. “But other times, it’s corruption. Subversion. Making the mighty fall on their own swords.”

  Glisette nodded, staring at her worn boots. “We should keep moving.”

  Kadri groaned, and the horror of our situation came bearing down. We were stranded without food. Calanthe had been stolen, fate willing by someone who would care for her. Rayed had betrayed me. Kadri was dying.

  “If Rayed…Do you think Kadri…?” Glisette whispered, losing her nerve before voicing the suspicion.

  “I’ll assume not, for now,” Mercer said. “She couldn’t hurt us if she wanted to, and I don’t think she would want to.”

  He worked off one of his boots and tore at a hole in his threadbare stocking until the fabric ripped. He limped toward me, barefoot on his wounded leg, and folded my tunic sleeve beneath the makeshift bandage for extra padding. I stifled a whimper as he knotted the stocking.

  “What do we do?” I asked.

  “We get as far from here as we can,” he said. “We go to another town for supplies and hope to find an elicrin Healer. We press on to Darmeska.” He looked from me to Glisette. “And we don’t trust anyone.”

  * * *

  The color of Kadri’s skin began to improve hours after we administered the astrikane. By the second application the next morning, the hard lines of suffering around her mouth had softened, which offered a bit of encouragement amid the harsh landscape of despair. Like Mercer, I found it hard to believe she had plotted our demise.

  Glisette and Mercer took turns levitating Kadri, but it wearied them. I could tell it required concentration, almost more than they could spare on another day of journeying on nearly empty stomachs. I blazed the trail, trying to stop my magic from leaving a path of wilted, faded foliage.

  I missed Calanthe loping on ahead, hunting for prey. Why would Rayed’s master have taken her? She didn’t offer protection, except maybe from wolves, and wolves were the least of our worries. She wasn’t much of a hunter either. Had he done it to save her, knowing her mistress was about to be murdered?

  Rayed must not have known that Kadri accompanied us. No matter what he had done to me, he would die a thousand deaths to save his sister.

  My hunger soon surpassed my desire to divine his motives. The few berries we’d found weren’t enough to stop me from fantasizing about the stocks of food sitting in the kitchens at the summer cottage. Glisette had made a rock look and taste like a hunk of bread, but nibbling on it helped nothing. The spell only made it seem like sustenance.

  “How far are we from the nearest town?” Mercer asked.

  I glanced down at the map, which thankfully had been tucked in a pocket of my tunic when the supplies were stolen. “We won’t make it before nightfall. We’ll reach the road, though.”

  “And ask for a ride?” Mercer asked.

  “No one’s going to take Kadri,” Glisette said. “Word of the plague has gotten around.”

  “For a leaf of white astrikane they might,” Mercer said.

  “Even the saddest folk won’t chance their life on a happy vision,” I said, glancing back at Kadri. I wondered what she was dreaming about, what joyous truths might be revealed to her under the influence of the astrikane. Blue astrikane from Galgeth was pungent and gave frightening visions, while its rare Nisseran counterpart was said to offer glimpses of hopeful truths or possibilities. “Besides, it appears to be helping her. I don’t want to give a single leaf away, not until we can find a Healer.”

  “We have these elicrin stones.” Mercer dug in his pocket and extracted two silver medallions, one holding a ruby and the other an orange sunstone. Now that their possessors had died, they were probably no better than trinkets—to anyone but Tilmorn, at least. Callista’s amethyst diadem had remained powerful even after her death, but many elicrin stones dimmed out, magical no longer.

  Under ordinary circumstances, we could probably find a mortal who would pay a high price for their beauty. But no coachman or mortal healer would risk death by plague for a bauble.

  “I’m hungry,” Glisette whined. “How come we saw mushrooms left and right back when we had plenty of food in our packs?”

  Kadri muttered something unintelligible. I looked back at her ghostly figure floating above the sprawling growth of the forest floor. Mercer stopped to lower her to the mossy ground while I trudged over the crushed weeds, keeping my distance.

  “Don’t get close to me,” she mumbled.

  “We can’t catch it,” Glisette reminded her. “Well, we don’t know about Valory. That’s why she’s over there.”

  “And…” Kadri blinked again, staring at the beams of evening sunlight wedging through the dense branches. “Where are our things? Calanthe?”

  “Stolen,” I muttered, exchanging a glance with Mercer. “During an attack.”

  Mercer helped her sit up. “We’ll find supplies. We’re not far from a village.”

  She dabbed at the sore along her neck, peeling off the white astrikane leaf before Mercer could stop her. “I had wonderful dreams,” she said. “Not to offend, but I would rather have stayed in them. Is it bad?” she asked, tilting her chin so he could look at her neck.

  “It looks a little better,” Mercer said, evading the actual question. “We couldn’t find a Healer at the summer cottage, but white astrikane seems to be helping for now.”

  “I want to stand up,” she said.

  Mercer supported her shoulders. “I don’t think—”

  Kadri waved off his naysaying and planted her hands on the ground, lifting herself to a crouch. She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, and, with Mercer’s help, found the strength to stand.

  “We’re set to reach the village after nightfall as it is,” he said. “We should carry you.”

  “I’d rather walk than float.”

  Her deep brown eyes rose to meet mine, golden in the dusky light. “I thought you were gone,” I managed to say through the pressure in my throat. I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she’d taken part in her brother’s plot. If she hadn’t, news of his betrayal might weaken her again.

  “I couldn’t let myself be a mortal liability, could I?” she asked, giving Mercer a sideways look. He grinned in response. A thrill fluttered through me.

  “Let’s keep moving,” I said, remembering my hunger. If Kadri was recovering, that meant she would need food soon, and more than a few blackberries.

  As we walked on, Glisette tiptoed along sprawling roots and caught up to me. “It adds
up, doesn’t it?” she whispered. “Ambassador Lillis betraying us. But I was thinking…he would only have done so for good reason. I know that much about him. Perhaps he was threatened.”

  “Perhaps,” I responded. “It doesn’t excuse what he’s done.”

  Her eyes skimmed across the darkening horizon. “Even his outright treachery doesn’t vex me as much as Ambrosine’s infatuation with the Moth King’s trinkets. Not because I’m surprised, but because of how easily that could have been me. If I had stayed in Pontaval, I would have been dazzled by those trunks of gems and silk. And I wouldn’t think twice about raising the tolls. I didn’t even know that, about…about the famine.” Absentmindedly, she patted the scab over her eye. “But walking in on that spectacle when I did…Ambrosine looked vulgar and vain.” She expelled a long breath. “Only an elicromancer with a very special gift could produce that many precious gems. And I hope I never meet that elicromancer, or I might end up like Ambrosine. She almost pulled me in….”

  I was thankful for the shadows of dusk that concealed my expression. “What you did matters more than what you might have done.”

  E found the road just before dark. It wrapped like a brown ribbon around a tree-covered hill that otherwise looked identical to all the other tree-covered hills.

  Kadri’s bout of strength didn’t last long. Mercer had to give her more white astrikane as we edged west along the road toward the village of Greenglen.

  The village square was dim and lifeless, aside from the lanterns burning around the statue in the square. But dozens of campfires winked among circles of peddlers’ wagons tucked between the village and the border of the forest.

  “Do you smell that smoking meat?” Glisette asked as we looked on the glen from the shadows of the woods. “I’m going to steal us some.”

  “There are so many people,” Mercer said. “It will be hard to get away with stealing food and sneaking around.”

  “What are you saying?” Glisette asked.

  Mercer sighed. “I’m exhausted and hungry and the night’s getting cold. Kadri will need warmth, and if we’re going to have a fire it might as well be one of thirty fires rather than a lonely little one in the woods. We’ll cause less of a stir if we keep our heads down and camp on the fringes than if we go traipsing around taking enough food and bedrolls for four people.”

  “But it could—” I started.

  “I know, whoever’s following us could be dangerous to them,” he admitted wearily. “But they’re travelers. They’ll be gone soon. And look: some beggars have joined the camp. They’ll think we’re nothing but vagabonds.”

  “We certainly smell like vagabonds,” Glisette snorted.

  “I agree with him. No stealing,” Kadri said. “The belly of one who asks for bread is fuller than the belly of one who steals it.”

  “That astrikane is making you sound quite transcendent, Kadri,” Glisette teased.

  “It’s an Erdemese proverb,” Kadri said, her shadow swaying. “But it did come to me in a vision a few moments ago. My mother said it. She smelled like jasmine.”

  “I’m not going to defy the wisdom of a white astrikane apparition that smells like jasmine,” Mercer said. “We’d be asking for trouble.”

  “We can’t just—” I started again, but a recurring pang of hunger squelched my argument, so we seamlessly joined the sparse outer circle of the sprawling camp. No one paid us much mind, not with elicrin stones tucked out of sight and lovely locks tied in filthy braids.

  An old woman offered us a bit of bread while a little girl served soup to all the beggars. We sat far enough away from the flames of our modest fire to obscure our features.

  While Glisette helped Kadri eat for the first time in days, I bought supplies from a drunken peddler, trading one of the elicrin stones for packs, bedrolls, and food. As he opened the panels of his wagon, I saw uncanny likenesses of the three Lorenthi princesses and a slightly outdated likeness of Devorian painted on miniature wood panels. When the peddler asked if I was traveling with anyone, I pointed indiscriminately and wandered around in the shadows flanking the camp before rejoining my companions.

  Mercer was speaking with an elderly man when I returned. I watched Mercer comb a hand through his dark blond hair, the movement accentuating the lean length of his body. They laughed as they talked, which brought a pinch of worry to my chest.

  “You two seemed friendly,” I said when he returned.

  “He wanted to know how I got so lucky as to travel alongside three beauties with golden, red, and raven hair. I told him one of you was my wife and the other two my mistresses, but I wouldn’t let on who’s who.”

  “My hair’s not red,” I said, because it was the only response I could think of that wasn’t a chastisement.

  “It’s red when the light hits it.”

  When Mercer found the three of us watching him, he averted his attentions to my purchases. “He said there’s a well in the square. Did you buy skins?”

  I delved into the packs and handed him the empty water pouches.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “None of us should go off alone,” Glisette said.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “There were miniature portraits of you and your siblings in that wagon.”

  “You should have bought them all so no one would see,” she said. “They can’t be more than an aurion apiece.”

  Mercer and I couldn’t help laughing, and even Kadri let out a halfhearted giggle. “More like a copper thesar,” I said. “And that would have drawn even more attention.”

  Glisette rolled her eyes. “Just go get some water, will you? I’m parched.”

  While Mercer and I wandered toward the village, I suddenly wanted words to fill the silence, but didn’t have any to offer. I felt his glance skim over me and saw his lips part, but he closed them and rubbed the back of his neck.

  He soon cleared his throat. “Tomorrow we’ll arrange a coach for Kadri, whatever it takes. She’ll arrive in Beyrian in time to be treated by the palace Healer.”

  I stopped in my tracks. “You want to send Kadri back?”

  “We don’t have a choice. So far, her illness has forced us to take a dangerous detour and slowed our pace by half.”

  “Our injuries haven’t exactly doubled our speed either.”

  “It’s not just that. The astrikane is keeping her alive, but can it cure the disease? We’ll run out soon, and we can’t just pick it like a wildflower. Even if she recovers, we may encounter more blights. What then?”

  “But the guards may not let her back into the city.”

  “Her status in Yorth will all but guarantee her entry and healing. If she were to keep pressing north with us…at the border of Volarre and Calgoran, that much is not guaranteed, if she even survives to reach it.”

  I rubbed my eyes, exhausted, feeling I could curl up in a hole and die. “I see your point.”

  “Will you talk to her?”

  “I’ll try. In the morning.”

  As we skirted the edge of the camp, a soft melody sung by a feminine voice glided toward us. The words were in another language, but each one moved me more than the last.

  Mercer recognized it and softly sang along, his voice tired but still tuneful:

  “Kor iknor il efrindaren

  Kor elenis il efrindaren

  Pren olisthar var lenis den

  Eft magar int glinnis var hessen

  Kor shinavar ah sera norn

  Ef glithila tis var eshal fiorn”

  “Old Nisseran?” I asked, glancing around to place the origin of the heartrending song.

  “Yes,” Mercer answered.

  I scanned the thinning crowd and found a young beggar woman by a lonesome fire, watching us from underneath her hood. I bit the inside of my cheek and walked faster to escape her gaze.

  “What does it mean?” I asked Mercer, catching up to him.

  He stopped and turned to me, his barley-brown eyes softer than I’d seen them. “‘Through the
night I search for you. By the dawn I search for you. Under summer fire and winter snow, my footsteps mark the meadows and the hills. Through forests deep in lands unknown, I call your name and hear the wind.’”

  “That’s what you were singing when I was helping you?” I asked, my voice feeble. I realized I had stepped closer to him, and instead of moving away, he had answered my boldness by spanning the same distance. He stood so close that I could see the fine lines etched into his lips.

  “We enjoyed each other’s company more in those harrowing moments than we have in the many harrowing moments since,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because you were vulnerable and grateful instead of argumentative.”

  “Or maybe it’s because you were helpful and obliging instead of stubborn.” He smiled, reaching out to rub dirt from my cheekbone. Surely I was imagining the lingering caress.

  “The song is, um, sad,” I muttered, walking on to escape him.

  He paused in the dark before following. The grass of the glen turned to cobblestones beneath our feet. The village square was silent and dark, but not in the threatening way I was accustomed to in the recesses of the mighty forest.

  “There’s the well,” I said, striding past the statue at the center of the square. Leaning on the stone ledge, I lowered the bucket into the depths. When I brought it back up and it overflowed with fresh, cold water, I couldn’t resist splashing it into my mouth with abandon. I took another deep gulp and slid the bucket toward Mercer.

  “Il samenef Nisserali?”

  The voice behind me startled me so much that I choked on the water and fell into a coughing fit while I furnished my dagger. I twisted around to find the beggar woman who had been singing and watching us. I’d seen no one behind us, nor had I heard any footsteps.

  “What do you want?” I demanded when I could speak again.

  The woman slipped off her hood, revealing nutty-brown hair and a face pale for a wanderer. She gave me a steady, fearless look, not even acknowledging the dagger before she turned back to Mercer and repeated her question.