The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala

by Jeffe Kennedy

  “I’m sorry,” I offered, unable to think of kind words and feeling like a lame horse. “I didn’t know.”

  “Damp is our eternal enemy. But it’s hard to keep something both dried out and secret with these accommodations.”

  “I meant about your family. I’ve lost only a mother—I can’t imagine what it would be like to lose everyone, along with your home.”

  Lady Mailloux lit the little fire already laid in the woodstove. “There’s not much good ventilation in here, so you’ll have to be careful. I miss them, but over time you forget the details, which is a mercy, and very little looks the same. I remember your mother, the Queen. She was kind to me. Her death grieved us all.”

  “Did you know she was . . .”

  “Tala?” Lady Mailloux squinted at the shelves as she drew on a pair of soft leather gloves. With nimble and unbearably gentle fingers, she pulled a scroll down and laid it on the table. She kept working, finding and laying out for me books and parchments organized according to some arcane system of her own. “Yes, I knew. Not everyone did, I don’t think. High King Uorsin, even during the Great War, didn’t like it to be discussed. But because I grew up here, bordering the Wild Lands before the war, I knew more than most. I remember my father saying that the Tala and Uorsin both had made a deal with the devil.”

  “You said you grew up here—at Ordnung?”

  She cocked that eyebrow at me. “At Castle Columba, on whose ruins Ordnung was built.” Her gaze wandered over the old walls. “In some ways, I never left home.”

  She drew down a large and dusty tome, reverently setting it on the table. “I built this collection from my family’s library. If you were one of the young scholars come in here, I’d threaten to break your fingers if you so much as smudged a page.” She studied me, chewing her lip.

  I held up my hands. “I value my fingers. May I borrow your gloves?”

  Lady Mailloux smiled, drew them off, and handed them to me. “I’d like to sit here with you and guide your research, but I’d best oversee my staff—and make sure your sentries don’t feel the need to check on you. This”—she pointed to the huge tome—“is an annotated history of the Tala. It’s quite dense and would take you weeks to get through. I suggest you use it as a reference. There’s an index in the back. For recent events, look through these scrolls. They’ll give you tales of Tala during the Great War.”

  “What about any . . . contracts or legal treaties that might have been . . . drafted, here and there?” I picked my way through the question, but she raised her brows with a look that told me she knew exactly what I asked after.

  “Derodotur keeps all treaty documents in the King’s study, Princess.” She had her formal demeanor back now. “You would have to apply to him or Lady Zevondeth for that information.”

  “Zevondeth? Why would she have the information?”

  “Why, Princess Andi”—Lady Mailloux widened her eyes, all innocence—“I thought you knew that Lady Zevondeth arrived here as your mother’s attendant. Indeed, she was your mother’s most devoted companion and was at her side even unto her death.”

  My world shifted again, realigned.

  “I’m indebted to you, Lady Mailloux.”

  “Dafne. Call me Dafne, Princess.”

  “Thank you. I’d tell you to call me Andi, but I imagine you won’t.”

  Dafne glanced around the confines of the little room. “In here I will, Andi.” She turned to go. “It means a great deal to me that someone will see these documents. I want you to know—” She hesitated, made a decision. “No matter what you may read or hear, your mother was not evil. Nor do I believe the Tala are demons. Salena was . . .” Dafne trailed off, considered me.

  “Sometime I’d like you to tell me more about her. I remember her as kind.”

  Dafne laughed a little. “Oh, she had a temper; don’t mistake that. But she loved life, in this brilliant, passionate way, before she declined. And she loved you. She would be proud of you.”

  That brought me up short. I’d thought before about making my father proud, and Ursula—though I had never really succeeded with either of them. But my mother?

  “Proud? I’ve done nothing with my life.”

  “Actions may speak who we are, but first we have to be that person. She would be proud of who you are. I suspect she would be proud of what you will do, too.”

  “Hide in the castle and let armies die for me while I read books?”

  She sobered. “Is that your plan?”

  “In point of fact, I have no plan. Nobody seems to feel that I, personally, need a plan here.” The bitterness edging my voice took me by surprise. Hadn’t I always gone along with what Uorsin and Ursula recommended? What Amelia coaxed?

  “It seems to me,” Lady Mailloux said thoughtfully, “that we drift along in life without particular plans until a point of crisis occurs. We find we want something we can’t have. Or someone wants from us something we don’t want to give. Only then do we have to really wake up and make decisions for ourselves.”

  “The voice of experience?”

  She nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. And if you want another bit of advice with that?”

  I did.

  “The people around you who are accustomed to you going with their plan won’t like it if you no longer are.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Good luck with those documents. I’ll come back to see how you’re doing.”

  I wanted to look for a name like the one Rayfe had said in my dream. It had sounded like “ohna-fn,” but I had no idea how it might be spelled, so I started with the longer ballads, thinking I might find the rhyme. These were the songs that had stuck in my head from childhood. The fierce battle tales set to music that left nightmare images in my head.

  One song told of wolves pouring like black ink over the hillsides, tearing apart friend and foe alike. Another spelled out in gruesome detail how giant ravens descended on besieged castles, plucking out the sentries’ eyes or sometimes ganging up to knock them from the parapets. Sometimes wilder beasts, like the tigers of the tropics, only black on black, with blazing blue eyes, or even dragons, snarled and laid waste through the stories. Though these beasts seemed to behave in ways that showed more than animal intelligence, none of the ballads mentioned shape-shifters or demons. Nor did the more staid descriptions of the Wild Lands and the Great War.

  Until I got to the history of Uorsin himself.

  It’s funny: though I knew my father existed as a man before he was King or my father, I’d never quite conceptualized it. That he wasn’t from Mohraya because Mohraya hadn’t existed before he created it. Instead his history began in the least likely of the Twelve Kingdoms, in peaceful and pretty Elcinea, with its sandy beaches and fertile waters.

  He’d been a sailor, which I hadn’t known—first for fish and then for treasure. When neighboring Duranor attacked Elcinea, he joined her defense. He sold his boat and all his equipment to buy himself a horse, armor, weapons, and a squire to feed. The history didn’t name Derodotur, but I knew that’s who it must have been, this “squire of uncertain lineage but excellent survival skills,” as my father had been quoted to say.

  Uorsin rose in the ranks, though Elcinea quickly folded to Duranor’s greater might and avid determination. Instead of going back to fish and hunt treasure to fill Duranor’s coffers, Uorsin stayed with the conscripted army. It was unclear how much of that decision was voluntary, however, as Duranor cheerfully took possession of all Elcinea’s bounty, including the dubious cream of its military.

  The soldier who’d found himself field promoted to lieutenant went on to captain the cavalry, and then served as general to defend Duranor when its vassal states rose in rebellion.

  Ursula would likely swat me on the head for not really learning this history, but names, dates, places, and battles? Not so interesting. But now I followed Uorsin’s rise in the Duranor military with intense personal interest.

  Especially when things changed.

&
nbsp; Duranor had overreached, the supply lines failing and battles waging on all sides. Even Elcinea, encouraged by the success of its neighbors, had managed to generate credible difficulties for her liege-country by bottlenecking the ports. Uorsin lost a crucial battle—right on these very grounds, where Castle Columba had stood. The siege of Columba took too long, and though General Uorsin overcame the Mailloux family in the end, he and his forces found themselves besieged in turn. Uorsin was wounded in the final battle that broke the original siege, then disappeared from view—presumed dead or captured.

  A seven-day later, he staggered out of the Wild Lands. With a bride.

  “How’s it going?”

  I nearly tore the scroll, Lady Mailloux’s voice startled me so.

  “Moranu!” I exclaimed. “Don’t sneak up like that.”

  “You were absorbed,” she said in a dry tone, “and your sentries wanted lunch, have been replaced, and now the new lot want to lay eyes on you, to ensure your safety and their duty.”

  “Are there descriptions of Salena?” I held up the scroll. “This one goes right from Uorsin returning with a ‘bride,’ description apparently unnecessary, to him suddenly becoming a god on the battlefield, winning the hearts of young and old alike, then finally transforming himself into the High King of eleven kingdoms that had hated one another, but suddenly and joyfully proclaimed peace and carved out a new spot just for him.”

  “With his Queen at his side, who gave him three daughters, each more beautiful than the last.”

  “Apparently you’ve read this one.”

  “I’ve read them all.” She held out her hand for the gloves and I stripped them off. “And no, there’s never anything more about Salena than that.”

  “What about the Wild Lands? Nobody describes them. It’s like no one has ever been there.”

  “I agree. And your men are waiting.”

  “Yes, but I—” I sighed. It would be worse than unfair to Dafne if they should come looking for me. “May I come back tomorrow?”

  “This is your library, Princess Andi. You don’t need my permission.”

  “In this I do. I don’t wish to jeopardize your hard work. What you’ve done here—I admire your tenacity.”

  She studied me. “You are very like her, you know. That same sense of being far away. Then suddenly your attention shifts and it’s as if a magnifying glass focuses.”

  “I was told I look like her.”

  “You do. More—you feel like her.”

  “How so?”

  “Can we walk and talk? I’m really worried that your men will—”

  “No. It can’t be that long of an answer and everyone is ducking it. Just tell me and we’ll go.”

  “It isn’t a short answer!” she flared. “There are no words for this. And it’s not . . . flattering, maybe.”

  “Tell me.”

  She pulled on the gloves and began efficiently returning the scrolls to their nooks. My fingers had grown chilled and numb, so I went to warm them by the stove.

  “When I was a little girl,” Dafne said to the shelves, “I saw a butterfly feeding on a flowering vine. So beautiful, with great orange and black wings. I tried coaxing it onto my finger, though I didn’t think I could. To my utter delight, it worked. I held it up close so I could see the gorgeous colors. And it clutched my finger, crawling up my hand with those pricking hairy legs, this enormous insect. Before I thought, I shook it away as I would a spider.”

  She shuddered in remembered horror. “It flew away and I was glad to see it go.”

  I didn’t know what to say. But it explained the looks, the uneasy sidling around me in the halls, as if I were some breed of insect. Perhaps I’d learned to be invisible because of that.

  “I’m sorry.” Dafne laid a hand on my now very dusty sleeve. “You look so sad—I should have found another way to describe it.”

  “No,” I breathed out, brushing off my dress and her hand with it. “That was a perfect way to tell me. Not quite human. It’s not like I haven’t seen how they look at me.”

  “People don’t think it.” Dafne caught my sleeve again, her cinnamon eyes earnest, serious. “It’s a feeling. A raising of the hairs on the back of the neck.”

  “Somehow that doesn’t sound any better.” She flinched and I sighed. “I asked you to tell me the truth and you did. I asked you to show me—at the risk of your life—interdicted materials I need and you did. I am indebted to you. But I have one more question.”

  She looked resigned, waited.

  “Have you heard of a person or place called Onnafen?”

  Her eyes opened wide. “How did you hear that word?”

  “Would you believe me if I said in a dream?” I answered weakly.

  But she nodded, solemn. “I would. Annfwn is beyond the Wild Lands. Ancient homeland of the Tala.”

  “I need to know more.”

  “There’s very little written about it.”

  “Can I see what there is? Please?”

  “Yes,” she decided. “You should know what you can. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

  “Thank you.”

  But I didn’t go back, because that was the night the Tala attacked Ordnung.

  5

  Despite the preparations, the increased guard, everyone seemed taken by surprise.

  After all, no one attacks Ordnung. No one with any sense.

  Ursula’s scouting expedition had found nothing. The meadow of the acid-green grasses apparently turned out to be only a meadow, which I could have told her. It wasn’t like Rayfe lived there. Or that Tala would have come swarming up out of the vegetation like flesh-eating insects.

  No, when they came, they came at night.

  I thought I wasn’t sleeping. I’d tossed and turned for a long while, afraid the nightmare would catch me up in its claws again. The stories at dinner hadn’t helped. Once again, Uorsin remained closeted with his advisers. Freed of his firm presence for a second night, the court fell into serious tale telling. The anticipation of the day, the thirst for excitement, and the building lust for battle got them dredging up stories from the wars. And before.

  One stern old soldier—the one who taught the younger kids basic defense skills because his missing legs were an excellent cautionary tale—told how he saw a pack of black wolves destroy a farming village. How they went for the bowels, tearing the guts from women and children alike while arrows bounced off them or went wildly astray. They’d knocked him down and chewed through his ankles, leaving him helpless to move while he watched them toss an infant around like a chew toy.

  “And then”—he took a deep drink of the soldier’s brew, a harsh liquid I could never abide—“they turned into men. I saw it with my own eyes,” he insisted to the scoffing murmurs. “The wolves were gone, and dark men with black hair stood in their places. They built a pyre and burned the bodies.”

  I wanted to ask how he’d survived, then—the blood loss first and the scouring of the village for bodies after, but someone had chimed in with tales of demons visiting the old kings in their beds and leaving them dead.

  “My gran told me this tale,” one of the younger ladies from Amelia’s retinue chimed in. “Old Erich’s father, who was king before him in Avonlidgh. He retired one night, hale and hearty. Some say his valet saw it. A black shadow crawled in the window—not an animal, nor a man. The valet was frozen to his chair, where he’d sat to keep vigil. The shadow had wings, like a great bat, and blue eyes that shone in the dark. It crawled over the king like a lover—and drank blood from his throat.”

  A few of the more timid ladies squealed and clutched the arms of their escorts. Amelia’s lovely eyes grew wider and glistened as she drank in the wild tales. Ursula raised her eyebrows at me in faint disgust. She wasn’t one to credit these stories much. Of course, no one mentioned our mother, not even glancingly. It didn’t do to imply the queen had been part demon, even now.

  Still, the lurid stories stuck with me, images of blood and wolves chasing on
e another through my mind, winding through the stories I’d read, some every bit as horrifying. Sleep would drift over me and start to take me under; then the covers would shift under my hands, sliding away like sand, and I’d jerk awake once more.

  But I must have slept, because Rayfe sat on the edge of my bed again. He stroked my cheek, calling my name in his husky voice. I opened my eyes, seeing him, black hair blending into the dark behind him, the stone walls of my chamber misting away into dream fog.

  “Andromeda—wake up, my bride.”

  “I am not your bride.”

  “You are. Always. Come to me.”

  “Leave me alone,” I whispered.

  “I can’t.” He shook his head, his long hair falling forward as he leaned over me. The scent of dark spices filled my head. He cupped my face in his long-fingered hands, midnight-blue eyes brilliant with intensity. “You’re the one. I don’t want to fight, but I will if I have to. The need is too great. You are the only one who can stop all this.”

  “I can’t stop it. You started it—you stop it.”

  “I promise I’ll treat you well, but you must come to me. Annfwn needs you.”

  “I’m afraid,” I pleaded with him. “I want to stay here.”

  “Why? There is nothing for you here.”

  “My sisters are here.” Well, at least Ursula was. Amelia would be gone again soon. “My horse. My home.”

  “They will still be your sisters. Bring your horse. Annfwn will be your home. Trust me—you’ll be happy there.”

  “Even if I believed you—and I don’t because I know you care nothing for my happiness—my father will never agree. You don’t know him.”

  Rayfe laughed at that, leaning back. He hissed in pain, and my heart lurched. The dagger protruded from the center of his chest now. Fresh blood radiated in a circle, like an archery target over his heart, bright crimson. He saw me staring at it and cocked his head.

  “Will you remove your dagger now?”