Where Serpents Strike (Children of the Falls Vol. 1)

by CW Thomas

  But she shushed him. “It wasn’t your fault, brother. You don’t need to be sorry for what was beyond your control. It’s over now. And we’re together again.”

  Merek realized that perhaps Awlin didn’t know why she had been kidnapped. Perhaps her captors never explained to her that she was taken because of him. For years he had longed to have many conversations with his sister, but revealing the truth about his crimes, his selfishness, and how they had led to her imprisonment, wasn’t one of them.

  She beamed at him, her eyes crinkling. “We will go home now?”

  He took Awlin by the hand and said, “Right now I need to get you somewhere safe.”

  Merek felt relieved when, at last, they exited the bleak enclosure of The Pit. Awlin was a pleasure to look at in the midday sun, the play of light and shadow across her features, the shine and spring of her hair, the gleam of her bright green eyes.

  He led her to the grumpy old mare, thankful that Patryk had at least left the horse. He mounted and pulled Awlin up behind him and then set off toward the white tower that Patryk had pointed out earlier.

  A tremendous rush of urgency surged through his chest. He hoped he could stop Patryk before his friend did anything too stupid.

  On the corner of the next intersection, Merek saw a large wooden board building with a sign that read Wanderer’s Rest, an inn that sat diagonally to the crossing streets. Slowing his horse he approached the building’s front and handed Awlin a purse of coins. He helped her down off the horse and started to give her instructions to rent a room and wait for him, but she shook her head.

  “No. I don’t want to leave you.”

  “I’ll be back soon. You’ll be safe here. Just stay inside the room.”

  “Merek!”

  “I’m sorry, Awlin, but I have to do this.”

  In his head, Merek cursed Patryk for putting him in this position. Leaving Awlin alone was the last thing he wanted to do, but he couldn’t take her back to the estate of the very same man who had just sold her. She would have to wait while he attempted to talk his friend out of doing something incredibly stupid—if it wasn’t already too late.

  He swung his horse around and galloped north. It took less time to reach the estate than Merek expected.

  Like all other structures in Slavigo, the buildings of Adairous Dolar’s extravagant and portentous villa stood only two stories high, with the exception of the tower, which appeared to be little more than a decorative lookout.

  Large and luxurious, the property consisted of a main mansion built of white brick capped with shallow pitched roofs, a barn, servants’ lodgings, and a few other outbuildings all centered around a well-groomed courtyard of palm trees and lush vegetation. Merek left his horse under the shade of a cluster of trees, then made his way down the street toward the villa.

  With expert eyes he took it all in, noting with ease the location of several guards. He was pleasantly surprised to find that there weren’t more. The front gate was closed and guarded, but the walls were low enough that with a few quick steps up the rough surface he managed to hoist himself over.

  In Merek’s years of experience he had come to find that the well-lit palaces and mansions of Efferous, with their bright stonewalls and open roofs, were much more difficult to hide in than the cramped, shadowy corridors of Edhen’s castles. Still, no Efferousian mansion was impossible to sneak into.

  Merek stole past a gardener watering flowers in their tubs. He hopped over a stone barricade and into the main house.

  In the right wing of the mansion, from a room toward the back, he heard raised voices. He made his way through a shaded corridor that took him to a second floor balcony overlooking a white cobbled courtyard. In the center of the massive, open-roofed room was a deep blue pool surrounded by native stone and green vegetation. The smell of salt water hung in the air.

  There were four men below, including Adairous Dolar, a trim man with a square jaw and hair as dark as night. He wore a long white tunic fringed with gold that dusted the floor at his feet. In front of him were two armored bodyguards, their beefy fists clasped onto a bloodied Patryk Brennan.

  Merek’s head sagged. He grit his teeth in frustration and whispered, “Why couldn’t you just wait? Damn you!”

  The sound of a body falling lured Merek’s gaze back to the scene. Patryk had just slumped to his knees.

  “Say another word and I shall have him strike you again,” Adairous said coolly.

  “My lord,” Patryk blubbered, “I have your money, I just need to—”

  Adarious gestured with a nod of his head, which prompted one of the bodyguards to deliver another punishing blow to Patryk’s ribs.

  “Maybe we should invite a doctor to examine his hearing?” Adairous asked, looking from one bodyguard to another. The two men only half smiled as though they had heard the sarcastic remark before.

  Adairous clasped his hands behind his back and paced over to the pool of saltwater. “I want to introduce you to a fish,” he said.

  “What?” Patryk moaned.

  “It is a very small salt water creature native to Efferous’ shores. I had never heard of it until one afternoon I was swimming in a bay not far from here when something bit my ankle. The natives call it pienne, which means ‘little teeth.’”

  A feeling of dread began to creep over Merek as he watched from the balcony, hidden from view by a dark wooden railing and a large indoor fern.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Patryk said. His voice sounded distant and weak.

  “Hold him!” Adairous shouted.

  The bodyguards clamped onto Patryk as Adairous sailed across the floor and kneed him in the chin. A spray of blood and teeth arched through the air. While Patryk coughed and cursed, Adairous dragged out a pair of large gold leg irons that he clamped onto Patryk’s ankles.

  “What are you doing?” Patryk croaked as he attempted to get off his knees.

  Adairous grabbed him by the hair and snarled into his face, “Taking what you owe me.”

  He pulled out a knife and made an incision all around Patryk’s neck, starting on the right side and carving down around his throat, up the left side, and around his spine. The cut wasn’t deep enough to kill him, but it did draw from Patryk a fair amount of blood and a slew of pained screams.

  Merek looked around for some way to distract Adairous or call him and his bodyguards out of the room. He wagered he could best one of them in a fight, maybe two, but certainly not all three.

  And then there was Awlin. He pictured her waiting for him back at the inn. She needed him now more than ever. He couldn’t risk getting hurt and never seeing her again.

  “Damn you, Patryk,” Merek muttered. “Damn you. Damn you!”

  The bodyguards dragged Patryk forward and tossed him into the saltwater pool. His shackled feet plunged to the bottom like stones and for a moment he vanished beneath a blue and white spray of water. His face remerged, punching through the surface by only a couple of inches. The saltwater slopped back and fourth over his eyes and nose, making him cough and spit as he struggled to stay up for air.

  “Adairous, please!” he begged. “Wait!”

  “The pienne is attracted to blood,” Adairous continued in a bored voice. “By itself, it will nip at you, taking a piece of skin perhaps.” He knelt by the edge of the pool, watching Patryk flail to keep his nose above the water. “But if you get ten of them together, or fifty, or, say, in the case of this place, a hundred, they will tear through a man like butter.”

  Patryk flinched as something swam up close to his neck.

  “Bloody hells, what is that?” he yelled.

  After it bit him, he screamed and began to thrash, but that only seemed to further provoke the feeding frenzy that ensued.

  Merek watched, horrified, as the water around Patryk’s head came alive with the wild flapping tails of a hundred tiny hungry fish. The water turned a disgusting shade of red and Patryk’s screams filled the mansion. After several horrific moments, hi
s head popped free of his body and bobbed in the water before it was pulled under and eviscerated.

  Merek’s blood had turned to ice. He left his hiding spot and fled the mansion in a hurry. He managed to weave back through the mansion’s right wing, narrowly avoiding a guard passing through the garden. After a few moments he was back at the wall where he climbed up, over, and out onto the street.

  Shivering with shame and regret, Merek tried to convince himself that he didn’t just let his friend die. He had tried to help him, tried to convince him not to go through with his plan, but Patryk had insisted. Surely, then, it was his fault he was captured and murdered. Merek had done all he could.

  Besides, he had Awlin to care for now.

  Though he tried to shun it, Merek’s shame lingered. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Patryk’s death was on him.

  Before he reached Wanderer’s Rest his regret had become so heavy in his gut that he ducked down a narrow alleyway and spewed the contents of his stomach.

  LIA

  Thunder cracked through the darkness outside, jolting Lia awake. Her head bobbed and her forehead smacked against the glazed window where the rain tapped its own rhythm on the other side of the glass. For a moment, disorientation seized her as the memories of her nightmare dissolved—barking dogs, screaming children, violent waves and death and choking for air. She’d dreamed it a dozen times before.

  From her seat in front of the cottage window, Lia looked over her shoulder to the candlelit room at her back. Warm colors of brown and orange reflected back at her. The accommodations were humble, all that simple farming peasants could afford, but there was a bed, a chair, and a chest of drawers, which gave a homey feel. A wooden tray on the bureau held a bowl of soup that had once been hot. Lia remembered the old woman bringing it into the room, but she had been too lost in her own depressing thoughts to bother eating any of it.

  She picked up her silver dagger from the windowsill. She inspected the blade in the candlelight, huffed on an oily finger smear, and wiped it clean with the sleeve of her tunic. Not a day went by that she didn’t spend some time polishing the blade or running her fingernail through the etched pattern on the hilt. The cold steel was a comfort to hold.

  On the bed, a man groaned in pain.

  Lia Falls wiped the sleepiness from her tired eyes and went to the side of Khile Alexander. He had been lying unconscious for almost two weeks. His fever had broke earlier in the morning, but he had yet to regain consciousness.

  Lia had a question to ask him, and her patience was running thin.

  He opened his eyes, big and blue even in the candlelight. He looked up at her as she brushed the hair from his brow. “Where am I?” he asked.

  “Some cottage,” she said. “The people won’t give me their names, but the old man says he’s from Edhen. The old woman doesn’t speak our language.”

  Khile put his hands at his sides and pressed down as if to sit up.

  “No, be careful!” The moment the words left her mouth Khile’s face contorted into a frightening display of agony. “Your leg,” she said, after he had calmed a bit, “it broke in the storm, remember? The old man put a new splint on it, but he said it will be a while before you can walk again.”

  Khile sighed in obvious disappointment and relaxed. “Lovely.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Very.”

  She helped prop him up with some pillows before retrieving the bowl of soup. Khile didn’t care that it was cold. She fed him a couple spoonfuls, which he seemed all too eager to swallow. He wiped the back of his hand across his thin lips, which were now lined by a light brown beard.

  “I think I can manage,” he said.

  He took the bowl and spoon into his own hands.

  Lia opened her mouth to ask a question, one of the many that had been sitting on her tongue for the last week, but she changed her mind. She figured it was best to let Khile get some of his strength back before she inundated him with all that was on her mind.

  He slurped another mouthful. “So what happened?”

  “What happened to what?”

  “How did we get here?”

  Lia cocked an amused eyebrow. “Shipwreck, remember?”

  “Vaguely.”

  As they spoke a bit more, Lia was surprised to learn that Khile’s memory stopped before they had washed ashore. Even though he had awoken many times over the last two weeks, always appearing cognizant of what was going on, it seemed as though his fever had ultimately plundered his memory.

  She recounted for him their journey to Efferous, how rocks had sunk their ship. She had used those rocks to orient herself in between the flashes of lightning. She had kicked and kicked for so long that her legs felt like worn leather by the time they finally reached land. She told him of her journey through the hills of Advala to the farmhouse where she met the elderly couple. They had been leery of her at first, unwilling to trust anyone from Edhen. If not for the old man softening to Lia’s plight it’s likely Khile would never have survived.

  “Why don’t they like people from Edhen?” he asked.

  “The old man says it’s because there’s too much evil there.”

  Khile’s brows drew down. “‘Too much evil?’”

  Lia shrugged.

  “Have you seen any black vipers?”

  “No, but a farmer came by and delivered a pig yesterday, and I overheard him telling the old man that black vipers were in West Galori.”

  Khile took another sip of his soup.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Mm–hmm,” he said, in between slurps.

  “Could you, I mean, would you, if you don’t mind, um, where did you, you know, um…”

  “Spit it out, kid.”

  She sighed, irritated by her own hesitation. “Who trained you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where did you learn to fight?”

  He thought for a moment as he scraped the sides of his bowl. “Lots of places, I suppose. Why?”

  “Because I want to learn to fight, and I was wondering—”

  The door to the bedroom thumped open, startling Khile and Lia. In the doorway stood an imposing elderly fellow with short white hair that stood straight up on his head. His face, haggard and stern, bore many lines of age, but his eyes were alert and sharp. He regarded Khile with a scrutinizing gaze for several long moments.

  “Sorry if we woke you,” Lia said.

  The man stepped into the room, a beeswax candle in a clay holder out in front of him. He walked toward the window in patched leggings and a tunic of faded gray. He yanked the drapes across the panes.

  “I told you, you are to not leave this open,” he grumbled, his voice heavy with accent.

  Lia winced. She hated being confined to such a small room. She liked to look out the window because it soothed her adventuresome spirit. Seeing the closed curtains gave her a sense of claustrophobia.

  “Black vipers find you here and we all in trouble,” the old man said. “Understand?”

  “I understand,” Lia said, though she didn’t like it.

  The old man walked to the foot of the bed and eyed Khile once again. “You fever break, yes? This is good.”

  “Thank you for all that you’ve done,” Khile said. “If not for you, we’d be—”

  The old man waved his hand, his ratty sleeve trailing threads through the air. “Yes, yes. You stay here until you can walk, but you not go outside. No one must know you are here. And you,” he said, pointing at Lia, “keep away from window.”

  Reluctant, she promised to obey, though she knew full well that she couldn’t stay cooped up in this room for months waiting for Khile to heal. She just couldn’t. She would have to go outside at some point. Maybe at night when no one was looking.

  The old man stomped out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  Through the door came the muffled voice of a woman who sounded irritated. The old man responded to her in a soothing way and after
a short while their voices faded.

  “His wife?” Khile asked.

  “And she’s a crotchety old gal.”

  When Khile finished his soup Lia took the bowl and spoon and returned it to the dresser.

  Khile gingerly removed the pillows he’d been reclining against and let his body lay prone once again.

  “Where do you sleep?” he asked.

  Lia motioned to a spot on the floor at the foot of the bed. “Down here.”

  Khile looked mortified. “My lady, I will not have you sleeping at my feet.”

  Lia snickered. His comment struck her as odd because there were times when he spoke to her like a typical commoner, with plain words and an almost cold disregard for her former position as a princess. Then there were other times, such as now, where he pretended to revere her.

  “Did I say something funny?” he asked.

  “Yes, actually you did.”

  “What did I say?”

  She thought for a moment before replying, and then remembered some words that she had overheard Khile say to Khalous as they were boarding the ships in Aberdour. It was a phrase familiar to anyone who opposed the Black King, but one Lia wasn’t convinced Khile clung to with any conviction.

  “What does ‘For the west’ mean to you?” she asked.

  After a moment of thought, he said, “It’s the rallying cry of all those who oppose the Black King.”

  “So, were my father alive today, you would stand with him? You would oppose the high king?”

  Again, Khile hesitated, but she couldn’t tell if it was because he was lying or just confused about her odd line of questioning. “Yes, I would.”

  “So you have much respect for the old kings,” she said. “Then why do you talk to me like I’m a common citizen one moment and a princess the next?”

  “Ah. So that’s what this is about.” He crossed his arms. “Because I disapprove of spoiled children who don’t know their place in life.”

  His words knocked Lia hard. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s clear you’ve been raised by nursemaids and servants and others waiting on you hand and foot,” he said. “You’re smart, don’t get me wrong. I respect your wits, but you’ve been sheltered emotionally and that makes you a danger to yourself when you get all riled up.”