The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala

by Jeffe Kennedy

  I drew back and held his face in my hands, the way he touched me.

  “Thank you,” I said again, firmly, like an oath.

  He wrapped long fingers around my wrists, holding me there, then turning his face to press a kiss into each of my palms. “I wish you happy, Andromeda. Remember it. Despite all the rest, I want that for you.”

  I would remember that.

  Reading my father’s letter only drove the point home. I bathed in the cold lake and took the time to run my hands over every inch of Fiona’s crystal-clear hide, to reassure myself that she was unharmed. Then I sat a private distance away while Fiona searched out the tender water plants at the lake’s edge.

  He demanded my return, accused me of treachery, yet again. More, he named Annfwn as his by right and threatened to take it by force. His hatred of Rayfe and the Tala oozed from every line. The man who wrote this wasn’t the wise king he pretended to be. But then, nothing seemed to be what I had always believed. I wondered if Derodotur had watched him write this missive, his serene face impassive, if he’d seen the cracks running beneath the surface.

  No wonder Rayfe hadn’t wanted to show it to me until he knew Fiona’s fate. I wondered how he would have broken the news to me if they’d been unable to retrieve her.

  Not one word after my well-being.

  “He’s insane,” I remarked, hearing the footstep behind me.

  “Like father, like daughter?” Terin quipped.

  He stood just inside the tree line, head cocked saucily, eyes glittering.

  “Has everyone read my personal business?”

  “You have no personal business, Princess.” Terin circled around behind me. I refused to crane my neck to watch him, so I gazed at Fiona instead and twisted the silver ring on my finger, with the bloodred stone. “Everything that involves you is a matter of national security, which means it concerns me.”

  “I didn’t ask for any of this. You can hardly consider me a spy.”

  “I didn’t ask for it either,” he snapped back, “and yet here you are. Everything you touch becomes distorted beyond recognition.”

  He finally stalked around into my peripheral vision.

  “You mean Rayfe.”

  “He wants what cannot be had. He gives you what he should not. All to chase after a pipe dream.”

  “What is the dream?”

  Terin grinned, foxy and canny. “Oh, no, it’s his to tell you.”

  “Is that why you hate me so?”

  “Do I hate you? Hmm.” He pretended to ponder the question, squinting at the sun and tapping his chin with dirt-stained fingers. I wondered what he’d been digging at. “How would you feel about the child of the woman who drove your brother to suicide?”

  I stiffened. “I’ve never heard such a story.”

  “Ah, so sweet Salena dishonored his memory as well. Alas for that. History is written by the victors, by the callous survivors and the murderers. And by their vicious progeny.”

  “I was a child when she died. She could hardly have told such a horrible tale to someone so young.”

  “She wouldn’t have cared about that. You were a means to an end for her. If she’d truly seen you as her daughter, she would have taught you something.”

  “My mother loved me.” I remembered the sound of her voice, singing to me. The way she let me brush her hair. Her face when she gave me the doll.

  “Salena loved no one.”

  “Why would you say such a thing?”

  “You didn’t know her,” Terin snarled. “You were a sniveling brat when she died, and she was nothing more than a weeping teat to you. She was incapable of love or she never would have—”

  “Terin.” Rayfe, voice pitched low, even, and with unmistakable command, cut through the man’s rant. “Enough. Begone.”

  Terin snapped his mouth shut with an audible click. Then he clicked his heels and saluted me in a mockery of some of the Avonlidgh customs. The man disappeared and a large red fox blinked cinnamon eyes at me, then dashed into the forest.

  Rayfe sighed and lowered himself to sit next to me.

  “If Terin can shape-shift, why did he wait for me to open the barrier and cross as a man?” I asked.

  “Shifting outside of Annfwn is tenfold more difficult. Not all Tala can manage it.”

  “Do you all become one particular animal?”

  Rayfe chuckled, shaking his head and drawing up his knees to dangle his hands between them, casual and relaxed.

  “I heard pretty much everything Terin said to you. You hold the letter from your father filled with poison—and you want to ask about the shape-shifting?”

  “Well, I have ten thousand questions, but that seems like a fair place to start. And I don’t care to talk about my father or my mother just now.”

  He studied the glimmering lake. “Are you not tired?”

  “I think I’m so exhausted I’ve passed into this state where I can’t even feel the need for sleep.”

  “And your mind is busy.” He reached over and took my hand, holding it between his to study the ring he’d given me. “Supposedly, our ability to shift is limited only by our imaginations, or so I was taught. Unfortunately, some of our imaginations seem to be quite limited. Most of us have a favored form—an instinctive one, if you will. The more time we spend as that animal, the more it . . . leaks over into our human forms, the more it becomes instinctive to become that one thing and the more difficult to become something else. Most Tala have one form only. A few can do more. The magic lives within all of us to greater or lesser degrees.”

  “So you become animals other than a wolf?”

  He glanced sideways at me, with that half smile, and rubbed my fingers. “A rather large black falcon.”

  “Not fond of stained glass, are you?”

  “Not when you are on the other side, no.”

  “I never saw my mother shape-shift.”

  “No. You wouldn’t have. Uorsin would have insisted upon that, I’m sure.”

  “Why would she agree to such rules?”

  He sighed, turning my hand over and lacing his fingers with mine. “I don’t know all of it. I never met Salena. She was born to another family—one of our oldest, the purest blood. Really, her family—your family—is the stuff of legends among our people.”

  “But you said I look like her.”

  “I saw her once,” he admitted, voice soft. “When she was queen of the Tala and I was but a boy. Her hair dragged on the ground, it was so long then, like a cape. She radiated Tala magic like a lily redolent with sweet perfume.”

  “Why did she do it?”

  “Abandon Annfwn and wed Uorsin? Some say ambition. Some say the simple powers of Annfwn were not enough for her and she longed for more. Others say she did it for love.”

  I studied his profile, in bright relief in the glittering light from the lake. “That’s not what you think.”

  He looked at me, raised an eyebrow. “I have reason to believe otherwise.”

  “The reasons you’ve engaged in this entire enterprise. Bringing me here.”

  Rayfe held my gaze, solemn. “You do have the look of her.”

  “But I am not her.”

  “No—you’re more. I think you are what Salena left Annfwn to get.”

  “A child who benefited her not at all? Who she didn’t live to see more than a few scant years?”

  “Salena didn’t want you for herself. Make no mistake—Terin is a bitter fool. I’m sure she loved you all, the daughters of her heart that she sacrificed so much to have.”

  “To gain what?”

  “Everything. Not for herself, but for her people, for all the people of Annfwn. To carry on her family’s legacy.”

  My heart quaked. I could barely voice the words. “Rayfe—I’m not that.”

  His eyes blazed, fiercely dark blue.

  “Oh, Andromeda. You will be.”

  Mute, I shook my head.

  “You want proof?” He tapped the scroll in my other h
and. “Uorsin knows it, too.”

  “Your men who brought Fiona—they’re the prisoners you asked to have released from Ordnung.”

  “It’s difficult to keep shape-shifters imprisoned. There’s always a friend who’s mastered the knack of changing into a smaller shape, even outside the borders.”

  “Then why go through the motions of having me ask for their release?” I found I dreaded his answer. Feared that I already knew what it would be.

  He nodded, confirming my thought. “You believed Uorsin would honor the treaty you made. I needed to find out if that was the case.”

  “No, you wanted me to find out for myself that he wouldn’t.”

  He stared out over the water again, as if he saw something beyond it. Opened his mouth to say something, stopped. Sighed. “Yes.”

  I turned that over in my mind. Rayfe didn’t wish to cause me pain—I believed that. He’d gone to great efforts to prove it. My mother’s great plan that she hadn’t bothered to clue us in on. Perhaps she’d died too soon, before we were old enough to understand. The empty place she’d left behind pained me even more now. Amplified by the loss of my father in almost as profound a way.

  Though it was clear he’d never really seen me as a daughter, only as a tool. Or Salena’s triumph over him.

  Which was what Rayfe had surely wanted me to see. The lines had already been drawn in the sand, before I was even born. All of this had forced me to choose between conflicting loyalties. Was I a traitor to one just because I chose another?

  No.

  I was still both.

  Then it occurred to me that perhaps my mother had tried to tell me. The doll she’d given me waited for me in Annfwn. Perhaps it contained answers. Maybe it would show me how to open the barrier for the other Tala.

  “My mother chose him for a reason.”

  Rayfe glanced at me, perhaps surprised at the direction of my thoughts. I liked catching him off guard, when he wasn’t quite so . . . flinty. I wound my fingers in a lock of his hair and tugged him to me for a kiss. He hummed in pleasure. Definitely not what he’d expected from me.

  “He wasn’t High King when she met him. I think she put him on the throne as part of whatever deal they made. She picked him for some other reason.”

  “Which was?”

  “I think I need to find out. Where to next?”

  He smiled, warm and full of anticipation. “Tomorrow you get to see the heart of Annfwn.”

  18

  We camped by the lake that night, the Tala men celebrating their reunion and mourning those lost in battle. They broke out a dark-red wine I’d never tasted before and shared it around.

  It didn’t take much of that before all the missed sleep caught up to me and swept me under. Rayfe tucked me into a roll of fur blankets and curled up at my back. For the first time in my life, I slept under the stars instead of a roof. The animal in my heart uncurled and relaxed at the freedom of it. I fell asleep wondering what kind of animal she was, what I could become.

  In the morning, Rayfe asked me to leave my hair loose and I saw no reason not to indulge him. When I brushed it out, it shone from being washed in the cold lake water. The long swing of it felt right somehow as I mounted Fiona. They hadn’t brought her saddle or bridle, so I rode her bareback, as I’d often done in my more carefree youth. That felt right, too.

  Thus I rode into the heart of Annfwn, on my own horse, at Rayfe’s right hand, followed by a triumphant troop of long-haired shape-shifting barbarians.

  It was so much better than riding into Windroven.

  How a place can feel familiar without being so, I don’t know. Perhaps I felt my mother’s memories drifting through my mind, but Annfwn unfolded before me like a cherished childhood fantasy.

  From the lake, we’d ridden up another ridge, then wound our way down. Huge trees, gnarled with age and fat from the moist, gentle air, towered around us. There seemed to be no roads, only trails, winding around wind-carved rounded boulders tumbled like a giant cat had knocked them about and trotted off, soon to return. I became aware that the regular birdcalls and rustlings in the canopy represented a complicated line of defense. If I tipped my head back and observed the dense canopy above, small animal shadows flitted about.

  Rayfe caught me looking and grinned, wicked and wolfish. Delight spread through me, though I couldn’t say why.

  Then we broke out of the dense woods and I saw the city.

  This was not Ordnung or Windroven. This was something altogether other.

  Altogether beautiful.

  A white cliff rose, startlingly high, riddled with caves and various openings. Here and there, larger arches were filled with fanciful structures carved from the same stone, with balconies and towers, some swooping out at seemingly impossible angles. Window openings were lined with jewel tones of lapis, ruby, and emerald that glittered in the sun. Stone pathways wound up and around, bordered by low walls draped with vines and flowers. Giant trees rose from the valley floor, multilevel dwellings built in and around the massive limbs. Bridges of rope and wood connected them to the cliff homes. At the base of the cliff, paths dived under and into shadowed recesses.

  The air swirled around me fragrant and warm, filled with salt moisture from a turquoise sea in the distance.

  “Welcome home, Andromeda,” Rayfe murmured.

  “How is it all so warm?” I marveled. “How is it even here?”

  “Haven’t you heard?” He grinned at me, black hair shining in the sun. “Magic.”

  I had seen too much to disbelieve him. We rode through a meadow of lush grass—acid green, I noticed, and tall with it—past orchards of trees laden with fruit. The path beneath our horses’ hooves gradually changed from dirt to pink to white, lined with crushed seashells. The cliff city towered above us, level upon unimaginable level, stretching off into the distance, shimmering against the blue sky. Farther down, a white-sand beach brought the gentle sea nearly to the base of the dwellings, and I imagined what it might be like to change into a fish.

  “How many Tala are there?”

  Rayfe shrugged. “Difficult to say. Annfwn is quite large and they come and go. Some prefer to live above, where it’s cooler, others down below. Some as far as the northern ice. There are groups who dwell in the deep forests, keeping to the canopies.”

  “Depending on their primary animal.”

  “Indeed.”

  “So how does a wolf come to prefer a cliff dwelling?”

  “Ah, but the wolf is only one part of me. I’m also the falcon—that form came first to me, though the wolf can be more useful. And one makes sacrifices.”

  “To be king.”

  “To protect my people.”

  “I can see why now.” I surveyed the incredible beauty and bounty of the place. No one starved here—I felt sure of it. “This is a rare jewel. I confess I can understand why Uorsin wants to lay claim to it.”

  “He never saw it.” Rayfe caught my gaze with his intense blue eyes. “Salena led him away before he could. All he knows are stories he was told.”

  “No wonder she missed it so,” I commented softly.

  “Did she?”

  “Yes. She used to sit in her window and look westward. She lived here, didn’t she—in this cliffside city?”

  “I’ve asked that her rooms be prepared for you, unless that would be too painful.”

  “I would like that. It’s thoughtful of you. But I—”

  I stopped myself, unsure of what I’d been about to say. I wanted to be in her rooms, yes, maybe to find something of her.

  But I did not want rooms that Rayfe did not also sleep in.

  Last night had not been the time or place for lovemaking. I knew that. Still, it made me uneasy, thinking of taking Salena’s place here and reenacting a mirror of her marriage with a foreign man. Had she felt this passion for Uorsin at first? Only to have it crushed under the pressure of becoming someone else, forever helpmeet to fulfill some fate? It mattered not whether Rayfe and I took s
eparate chambers. Ours would never be a marriage based on love. It would always be political first. There was nothing wrong with that. I followed in noble footsteps that way. I’d be lucky if a silly fantasy of love was all I had to sacrifice.

  In ten years’ time, I might be the one gazing out my window, looking to the east and the people I’d turned my back on.

  “What?” Rayfe raised dark, winged eyebrows at me.

  I shook my head and looked away so he wouldn’t see the damp emotion in my eyes.

  “You asked me to be honest with you, Andromeda,” Rayfe reminded me in a soft voice that nevertheless held the hint of a growl.

  “I fear I’ll be uncomfortable living on a cliff face—don’t people fall off?”

  He eyed me, and I knew I hadn’t fooled him for a moment, but, thankfully, he let it go.

  “It goes deeper than it looks,” he explained as we rode closer, a polite tour guide, “so the young children can be kept away from the edges. And there is rarely a drop-off without some sort of barrier, if only as a reminder.”

  The Tala, it seemed, were not given to overt demonstrations. No fervent or cheering crowds lined the polished stone paths. People acknowledged Rayfe in various ways, with no standard bow or salute. They glanced at me with curiosity. Some gave me more penetrating looks than others, and I wondered if they remembered Salena.

  Most of the folk went about their business, airing out bedding or hanging laundry. A woman worked a pottery wheel in a small courtyard, surrounded by pale pink urns. Down one lane, a marketplace bustled under a curving cave wall, bright silks draping stalls filled with glittering items and wafting the scents of cooking food, making my stomach growl. A trio of little girls with raven-black hair dashed by, giggling and trailing ribbons. I realized these were the first female Tala I’d yet seen.

  “Do your women not go to war?” I asked.

  Rayfe glanced at me and raised a brow. “Tala women don’t leave Annfwn, as a rule.”

  “Too busy cooking and making pots?”

  He frowned and tipped his head at a group of women coming down the road carrying stacks of scrolls and arguing with enthusiastic animation. “That is one of our legal teams, so no.”