The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala

by Jeffe Kennedy

  All was still but for us, now riding at dangerous speed through harvested fields and fallow meadows, then creeping with quiet stealth past a sleeping house.

  He kept glancing back, over his shoulder to the east, where the approaching dawn hadn’t lightened the sky. It looked like full night to me, but he pushed us to go faster. Then a single bird sent out a quiet whistle, and, as if a minstrel had signaled for all to join in, a tree full of songbirds burst into a chorus. In the distance, a cock crowed, and Rayfe cursed, a harsh growl in comparison.

  We kicked into a flat-out run.

  Rayfe stretched over me and we leaned together over the horse’s neck, his mane lashing us.

  “It’s not even light yet!” I gritted out.

  “The birds know,” he shouted against the wind in my ear. “And even your people follow that.”

  Sure enough, lights began to flicker on in a few of the farmsteads. The far hills loomed near, but a disquieting amount of cultivated land still lay between us and them. Terin pulled beside us, pointing to the road. Rayfe shook his head and Terin made a complex gesture back. Rayfe cursed again, then nodded, and Terin galloped that way. We followed.

  I didn’t have to ask what it had been about. The road would be faster than taking the horses over the hummocks and pits of the fields. We would also be in the open. They were betting on speed now.

  The attack came as we rounded a bend. Hoarse shouts from Rayfe’s forward scouts warned us in time for him to wheel about and plunge us into a copse of trees. To my astonishment, the men around us suddenly melted away. No, that was a trick of the light. They disappeared and became something else.

  Here a hawk burst from the saddle. There three wolfhounds leapt from their mounts and charged down the road. The horses themselves became the ratlike beings I’d seen back at Ordnung, swarming after the larger beasts. Behind me a bear roared a challenge but stayed close on our heels. Watching them shift from one being to another gave me a spinning sense of falling, as if I’d lost contact with all reality. Though I saw it happen, I couldn’t quite make sense of it.

  “Moranu!” I gasped.

  “Surely this is not a surprise to you.” Rayfe’s voice was tight, nearly angry, as we plunged through the bracken. I clenched my knees tight to keep to the saddle.

  “It’s one thing”—I lost the words when the stallion leapt over a log—“to have an idea. Another to see it.”

  “Get used to it, my queen.” He punched the words at me and I didn’t reply. Even if I could have. His arm gripped my waist so tightly I could barely breathe, much less speak. I wondered if he thought I’d scream. Then I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to do so.

  The clash of swords, an angry howl, human shouts, echoed down from the road. Rayfe took us away in a direct perpendicular, but ahead the trees thinned again, opening into yet another field. He turned us, staying inside the wooded border, going too fast through narrow openings and deep bracken. Faster than I would have gone, but then, apparently the horse was smarter than I’d known.

  “Let me talk to them,” I told him when a tangle of fallen trees forced us to slow.

  He growled, like the wolf. If he hadn’t still felt like a man pressed against my back, I would have wondered what form he wore.

  “I mean it, Rayfe. I can tell them of the treaty. They must not know that we are in alliance now. If I tell them to desist, they will.”

  “You think to escape me.”

  I gasped at the injustice of his accusation. “I came to you willingly!”

  He snarled in my ear, plunging on now that we’d escaped the fallen trees. “You came to me to stop the bloodshed, as I knew you would. Don’t think to sway me with your sweet and reasoned words.”

  “Yes. I wanted to stop the bloodshed,” I gritted out, the saddle pounding at my tender inner tissues, which the man accusing me of wishing to betray him had so thoroughly pleasured and plundered. “I want to stop it now. Uorsin and Ursula simply have not yet received the news or—”

  “They know, all right.”

  “What?”

  He changed course again, back into the deeper shadows. A crow flew ahead of us, I now saw, flitting from tree to tree. Marking our path. The clatter of combat echoed behind and to the left. Soon we would reach the road again. I would lose my chance to explain.

  “What do you mean they know?”

  “Uorsin received our missive and denied your request for the release of the Tala prisoners. He declared his intent to burn one alive each day until you are returned to him. We are as at war as ever.”

  The news hit me like a cold fist in my throat. My father, my King, had made me foresworn. Oath breaker. And Fiona—she was likely already dead. Her beautiful alabaster coat turned to charcoal. Though I rarely prayed, I sent a fervent wish to Moranu to give a thought for the mare, perhaps take Fiona under her wing. Surely a goddess needed a good horse.

  I didn’t weep for her. Perhaps I’d run out of tears. Or the frozen tightness in my throat that wouldn’t let me breathe, wouldn’t let me think, stopped everything else. Numb, I simply clung to the saddle, baggage to be transported over the border. If it worked.

  . . . cannot afford to have our people pinned against the border if she fails . . .

  An overwhelming urge to break away from Rayfe seized me. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to run to my people—ones who didn’t nauseously become something else—and beg them to rescue me, to take me home. There, no one expected anything of me, except that I disappear. My many failures to distinguish myself mattered to none.

  Rayfe said nothing more, but his viselike hold on me suggested he knew the direction of my thoughts. The speed of our travel prohibited conversation, especially as we reached the road again.

  One by one, the men caught up with us, riding the horses that I knew now weren’t truly horses. A couple remained as wolfhounds, loping easily alongside. They must have lost their mounts. Terin arrived last, glancing at me with a hard stare, then holding up three fingers, then five, to Rayfe. Three men lost, I guessed, and five of the ratlike creatures.

  The rising sun glittered in the turning leaves now, rust and gold against a brightening blue sky. Our party blew past a farmer towing a cartload of vegetables to market, the only astonished witness to my passing out of Mohraya and into the land of nightmares.

  I think, when you’re a child and you see maps, you get this idea that there will be something to show the boundaries. Oh, you realize there won’t be a big black or red line on the ground, but you imagine things will look different, like passing from one room into the next. Here is the place of one kind of people. Here is the place of another. As you grow older, you know that going from one place to another doesn’t give you any particular feeling. There is no actual barrier.

  This is not true of Annfwn.

  We’d long since turned off the road again—not long after the farmer—and moved through denser forests and wilderness, deeply shadowed enough that the growing day did little to illuminate it. Eventually we came to a craggy path that wound up the mountain range Rayfe had pointed out to me half a day and ages ago. Had I felt like I understood him at that moment? I could hardly recall it now.

  This hardly seemed the way into another kingdom, but I knew Ursula would appreciate the strategic value. No one could bring armed forces in here very quickly. On either side of the path—hardly more than a goat trail in places, which forced us to go single file—the rocks rose steep and sharply tumbled. Snow pooled in deep fissures. With every hour that passed, the air grew thinner and colder.

  My eyes grew gritty from unshed tears and being awake too long. More, I dreaded the trial to come. I had no idea what I was doing. All I had were Rayfe’s vague guarantees that I possessed some sort of innate magic—which had never seen fit to present itself to me in all my life—and the unsettling changes in the way I felt. I seemed doomed to fail.

  What would become of me then?

  We came to a place where the path widened enough
for three to ride abreast, flanked by enormous boulders. An icy wind roared through the narrow opening.

  “Odfell’s Pass.” Rayfe broke our hours of silence. “We’re nearly there.”

  The path abruptly dropped after that, and we rounded a bend. I lost my breath at the sight.

  Waiting in the cold, wrapped in layers of furs, were thousands of Tala, all in human form. They stretched into the forest and down the ravines on either side. Countless sets of fierce blue eyes focused on me, their expectation strong in the air. They ranged along the border, which seemed to sparkle in the air.

  My blood sang with it, a low hum of recognition. Even if I didn’t have that, or the abrupt line where the crowded people ended and open land began, the other side made it clear. Where we stood in frozen, high-mountain early winter, the land beyond appeared to be in the bloom of late summer.

  Verdant trees spread enormous leaves to the setting sun. The forest floor, velvety moss studded with jewel-like blossoms, became a great meadow, waving with tall emerald grasses.

  “You can see it?” Rayfe asked in my ear, squeezing my waist when I nodded. “She can see!” he shouted, relief and triumph in his voice. The Tala cheered, a cautious rumble of approval.

  “Simply seeing isn’t enough.” Terin pulled up beside us, looking grim. “No more delay. We have to know if this reckless plan was worth it.”

  “We will, Terin,” Rayfe growled at him. “Give her a thrice-damned moment to adjust.”

  “We are out of moments,” Terin snapped. “Look, King! Your people are trapped outside their homeland. Fix what you’ve done.”

  Just then, a flock of black starling birds with blue eyes arrowed through the shimmering wall and passed through with no trouble. A few soldiers tried the wall, pressing their hands against it, to no avail.

  “It’s not working.” Terin sounded bleak now. “We are doomed.”

  “Just—” Rayfe ground his jaw, the sound cracking in my ear. “Back off, Terin. That’s an order.” Urging the stallion forward, he shot us up to where the trail ended at the wall, halted, and handed me down to the ground, then jumped down beside me. Absurdly, I clung to him for reassurance, though he had brought me to this moment.

  “Give us some room.” Rayfe’s tension carried and the pressing crowd backed off. He cupped my face in his gloved hands, dark-blue eyes intent. “This is in you, Andromeda. Just follow your instincts. Trust in that.”

  “I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do. Why is it important that I can see through the barrier?”

  “To people who can’t pass through, the wall reflects this side. It looks like more of the same to them.”

  “So seeing is important, but not necessarily enough.”

  “Yes. Some can see but not pass—it depends on their blood, their parentage.”

  “Why can the birds fly through, but the people are trapped outside?”

  “Animals can always pass. The people you see are Tala who cannot fully shape-shift, for whatever reason. They cannot cross without help. Your help.”

  “Have you ever shape-shifted, Princess?” Terin, calling out from a short distance away.

  “You know full well she hasn’t,” Rayfe answered for me, eyes not leaving my face. “Ignore him. You and I know you have the mark. We saw it together, remember? Trust in that.”

  “What do I do?” The birds in my blood came back full force, singing with the hum of the barrier, pricking me with their hopes and demands like the many desperate eyes focused on me.

  “First, just walk across.”

  “To make sure I can.”

  “To demonstrate that you can.” His thumbs caressed my cheekbones. “I believe in you.”

  It didn’t help to hear that. Of course he believed in me—he’d asked all these warriors to leave Annfwn, to fight the armies of the Twelve Kingdoms for me, with the guarantee that I’d bring them back in. What would they do if I failed?

  I’d never performed well under pressure, and this . . .

  I wished profoundly that I’d never gone to the meadow. That I’d stayed inside my circumscribed boundaries, stayed invisible Andi, the space between my sisters.

  I pulled on that old self, shrouding myself in that comforting sense of invisibility. Unseen, I walked up to the shimmering curtain, enticing summer just beyond. I’m not really here, I told it. Don’t mind me.

  And I stepped through.

  It was like passing through a curtain—one made of sparks that zinged invisibly along my skin. The wind stopped and I was in Annfwn.

  Every drop of my mother’s blood in me knew it.

  For maybe the first time in my entire life, I felt right in my flesh.

  I looked back to see all the people outside in the winter, like the starving pauper children that crowded around Ordnung’s walls until the guards drove them off again. Rayfe alone smiled at me, hope and belief shining from him.

  He stepped through, a bold stride, and signaled to the other Tala. Terin rode up to the barrier, a rime of fear under his anger. He must be one who couldn’t shift, I realized. With a grimace, he urged his horse through at a speed that would surely knock him from the saddle, should the barrier be solid to him. But he passed, with a hoarse shout of joy.

  After that, others followed.

  Rayfe stood by my side, watching his army reenter their homeland. He could have come through in his animal form at any time, but he’d waited, walking through in human form, as all these warriors must.

  They came through, all along the wall, like ghosts emerging from another world, shouting their excitement and saluting me with yells and fists pumping in the balmy air.

  But others did not.

  They remained outside, defeat and despair on their faces. Staring in, they silently implored me to help them. After a time, fully two-thirds of them lingered, still trapped outside.

  “What do I do now?” I asked aloud, not really expecting an answer.

  But Rayfe did answer. “Salena could . . . communicate with the barrier. I hoped it would be enough to have you inside—and look, it is for some. There must be something more. Can you ask it to let the others in somehow?”

  A derisive snort came from behind me. I didn’t have to look to know it was my faithful ex-uncle, anxiously awaiting my failure.

  And fail I did. Whatever in me allowed the people to pass through didn’t respond to all of my beseeching. While the sun slid lower in the sky, I did everything I could think of to “talk” to the barrier. Though my blood hummed to its presence, and even though I could move back and forth, from summer to winter and to summer again, nothing I tried let me bring the rest of the warriors through.

  Finally, Rayfe put a stop to it. I protested, but he pointed to the falling darkness, stepped through on his own, and sent them away.

  “Where will they go?” I asked him, rubbing my arms, though I’d long since doffed my furred cape and could hardly be cold.

  He slanted me an opaque look. “They’ll find places. The Tala are survivors. Many of the people you saw here have been outside Annfwn since Salena left. A few more days—or months or even years—won’t matter that much. They can wait for you to learn the way.”

  “But they came now because—”

  “There’s always hope. More so now than ever. But you’re tired. Let’s go to the campsite.”

  In truth, Rayfe seemed to be the weary one. Though he’d glossed it over for my sake, it showed in the lines of his face how much it bothered him to send those people away. They had been hoping, and though they still seemed strange and alien to me, their disappointment cut me.

  But maybe I could still help them.

  I walked with Rayfe down a forest path, the others having gone ahead while I worked at the barrier. We rounded a bend, and before us lay a crystal-blue lake, practically at our feet, almost entirely fenced by a wall of tall, dark trees, straight as spears.

  A shout from farther down the lake rang across the water. Rayfe squinted, then a look of profound relie
f and . . . joy? . . . crossed his face, like the sun breaking through clouds. He grasped my upper arms, squeezing them, and grinned at me.

  “Perfect timing. I have a surprise for you.”

  A group of Tala men picked their way along the shadowed shore, now screened by trees, now breaking out of the shadow. A flash of white in their midst threw me off. Then the breeze shifted, and she whinnied at my scent.

  If grief clamps down and stops breath, then joy is like the beast breaking free, shattering ribs and exploding the heart. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t gasp out Fiona’s name. All I seemed able to do was clutch my hands over my mouth, to hold what in I don’t know. But suddenly I was laughing and sobbing and Rayfe was leading my horse to me and watching me with such hopeful yearning, my already laboring heart nearly broke.

  With a glad cry, I wrapped my arms around Fiona’s neck, while she nuzzled at my hair. The silky white coat, her familiar scent, all of it centered me again, and I had something of who I’d always been.

  “She is a beautiful creature,” Rayfe observed. “It would have been beyond a shame for her to have been so carelessly destroyed.”

  I dashed my tears away—Moranu, Rayfe must think me a silly maid to weep so often—and tried to smile, but my wobbly lips wouldn’t hold the shape. “How . . . why? But how—?”

  “The night you told me about her. I sent some men for her. I couldn’t let you suffer such a loss when we’re asking so much of you.”

  The wary hope in his eyes moved me. He didn’t have to want me happy. We both knew this. I unwound my fingers from Fiona’s white mane and laid my hands on Rayfe’s chest.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, mindful of the men who ringed us. “This is the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.”

  I stood on tiptoe, slid a hand behind his neck, and kissed him with all the emotion that surged through me. I couldn’t separate all the joy, relief, and love swirling around in my blood from the desire that fired at his response, the way his big hands tightened on my waist, and how he deepened the kiss, urgent, fierce with unnamable longing.