Ash Rising

by Katya Lebeque

It went straight for the silver flicker of the duke’s bridle, swooping down so fast Rize could barely keep track of it. As it extended out its scaly massive legs the duke pulled his horse back, doing a sharp circle, missing the cruel talons by less than an inch. Mouse neighed again loudly.

  They never left the palace walls, even for the shortest time, without donning peasant garb and blackening any shiny bits and bridles with mud. But today they had hurried. And today, Rize noticed too late, the duke was sporting a fine silken white shirt beneath his cloak. Even to Rize, his cousin looked a bright and shiny thing ripe for the taking as he circled now nervously on his horse.

  The bird waited until the duke’s back was to it as he led his horse around. Then it hopped forward and pulled at the horse by its tail, the sheer size of the bird almost managing to drag the terrified creature. The duke turned in his saddle and drew his sword, stabling at the crow that hopped smartly out of his reach. He waved his sword again. One raspy cry and it was upon him again in less than a second, giving a short, sharp tap with its formidable beak on the back of his head before flapping up into its tree again.

  The duke fell.

  “Lorin!” Rize forgot all notions of staring the crow down and raced for his cousin, before that beast could come again.

  He seemed dazed but unhurt, but Rize wanted to make sure. As he neared the fallen duke, some instinct made him look up.

  A black shape against the sky, coming closer. Another crow.

  “Duke, you have to get up. Come on. Here, I’ll hold her steady for you just, please, hurry!”

  He leaned down. “Listen, I say we go back for those caves, that one with the gate alongside it could help, the horses will both fit in. We’ll just make for there and –”

  Suddenly a sensation like being hit by a charging bull ploughed into Rize. He gasped winded, shocked to find himself on the floor. That first crow must have attacked again. Now it was the duke shouting. Rize was gratified to see that he was back on his horse now. He looked around for Mouse, wondering where she had got to.

  Then he saw her. The other crow was watching her, landed now and standing a head taller than his horse, eyeing her beadily. His dappled grey stood still, tense.

  With sinking dread, Rize knew what she was going to do.

  Mouse tossed her head. And the crow lunged.

  As it pecked at her head, the crow in front of Rize did an ugly jump, swooping into a dive that ended with it landing full force on Mouse’s back. A terrible scream and Rize saw a splash of red on his horse’s neck.

  “Leave her alone!” He was screaming, crying both, with his sword out and charging at them. But carriors would not be stopped. They ripped and cawed and pierced and even as his cousin threw his arms around him and roared at Rize to stop, he still kept going at them.

  When the metal of his blade finally connected with some part of one of the crows, they both launched off the ground for the nearby tree. And the Mouse Rize knew was gone.

  A sound escaped as he finally reached her and fell on his knees next to the ragged scraps of flesh. He couldn’t look at her face – no, not that, not at that head she was tossing just a few minutes ago – but there was a piece of unruined flank that still had her dappled grey and he stroked it. He looked down at the shin with its white socks. He could not believe. Mouse, his Mouse, gone.

  Hands on his shoulders, not comforting but pulling him up. “Rize, not now. We have to go.” When Rize refused to hear him, the duke hauled him away from the carcass by force. Rize didn’t exactly resist him or leave willingly. He just stared and stared at that one white sock-like leg until he thought his chest would explode.

  “You can mourn later” the duke said gruffly as he propelled Rize towards the surviving horse. As they retreated, the crows hopped towards the remains again, to eat.

  “The cave was a good idea. Thank you for saving me cousin.”

  Rize looked at what was left of his Mouse and didn’t say anything.

  The hoarse, raucous cawing of the crows broke the silence and the duke hurried them both onto the horse. The sound of the horse starting off at a swift canter seemed to be more interesting than their meal, for the carriors both looked up and the one launched into flight to follow them.

  The duke kicked his heels in, shouting at his horse to go faster. He was so panicked that he almost rode past the cave entrance when they saw it, yawning wide in its dismal surrounds. As the crow landed the duke led the horse inside and Rize got an idea.

  “Here. Hold that gate against the cave entrance. Crows are the smartest of carriors. I’m going to use that.” Deafening his ears to his cousin’s protests, Rize jumped off the horse and crouched down at the side of the rocky hillside near the cave entrance and lay in wait.

  The carrior hopped over, cocking its murderous head. It glanced briefly at Rize, but its curiosity was captured by the puzzle of fresh meat behind a cage-like door. The crow tried to poke its beak through the gate’s openings, but the horse had been walked out of reach and the duke held firm. It seemed to consider this for a second, then abruptly pushed itself off of the ground and flew off.

  “What now? It’s gone?”

  “Keep holding on, cousin. I saw a crow do this once. Watch.”

  A sharp cracking sound some way away and the bird was back, with a torn-off branch from the tree it had perched on. Beady eyes gleaming, it tried jabbing the added length of the branch through the gate, the duke yelping at the force of it.

  “Cousin, when it does it again, grab that branch and don’t let go.”

  “But I won’t be able to hold –”

  “Just for one second… Now!”

  The duke lunged for the branch, clumsily grabbing it in both arms and holding it in a desperate embrace. As the duke held the struggling carrior steady, Rize swung his sword. Hatred erupted in his chest as he looked at the ungainly back of the creature that had killed his friend. It had jumped on her back, so he struck it in between the shoulder blades with his blade and all of his strength.

  “How does that feel?” he screamed, and the crow screamed also. A couple more hacking motions and the crow still had not stopped cawing in pain. He didn’t care. He kept swinging.

  It was a hand on his arm that stopped him. The duke had somehow come out of the cave to stand next to him without his noticing and Rize felt a sudden wave of exhaustion as the crow stopped moving. Saying nothing, the duke took his sword from him and, with a clean and practised movement, cut off the crow’s head.

  “There. Now, let’s go bury Mouse.”

  “Plenty of space to run around here, my girl,” Rize whispered to the freshly turned earth an hour later. The sun was starting to sink towards the horizon, casting a slightly less harsh light on the barren stretch of rocky land. He knew that had to get moving, to make it to Rhodopalais and shelter before dark, but he didn’t want to leave her all alone. Part of him felt sure that if they just headed back to the palace and stopped in at the stables, he would see her there, running circles around her stall and neighing and tossing her head. Rize sighed.

  “You be good, Mouse. Goodbye.”

  There was nothing more to say. They rode on.

  The bird eats fiercely, though it was not that hungry, as it stands over the pulpy remains of the dead crow.

  One of the bird’s offspring had been killed by a crow just like this one. It had been flying, when the crow had come out of nowhere. She had rolled onto her back mid-air, clawing at the crow from underneath, but the crow had known that trick too. It was over before it even begun. The bird had watched from a distance as its spawn fell to the ground.

  The bird dips its beak again into the black feathered mass again and tears hard as though the crow can feel it.

  There is nothing more to do. The bird eats on.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Under Attack

  Hours later, Vanita lay staring up at the ceiling, listening to her mother in the next room.

  Her mind was a curiously quiet place, thinkin
g in simple sentences. The sun is out. That noise is from my mother. I am in pain. To keep her mind off of the latter two, she looked around at the room. How funny that now, with one side of her head bandaged, she saw it with new eyes.

  It was atrocious. She could only see out of one eye now, so why was it so much worse today? She had no idea how she had lived like this for so long. The fussily embossed powder blue drapes that had made up her canopy bed were knotted in places on all four sides, to cover the bad rips and thinning of the aged material. Some of the mouldings on the walls and ceilings had given way to disrepair and flaked off, rotted wood from the ceiling beams exposed. And the dust! It was everywhere, clouding the whole wooden floor with a patina of neglect. Vanita shuddered, remembering for the first time in a long time the former splendour of this room. She had been a spoilt child then, thought nothing extraordinary about it. And now, look at her complaining, when Ash was sleeping on the kitchen floor.

  Ash. She remembered some of their conversation that morning vaguely, but not enough to know how long it would take for her to be alright again. Not that this was bad, lying in this bed felt safe. But still… After some thought, Vanita decided that for the sake of variety, she would test out her legs and see if she was on the mend. It took five tries to get up – for some reason the left side of her face exploded with pain every time she leaned forward – but she eventually rocked herself up enough to sit, then stand, shaking, beside her dusty bed.

  The wooden floorboards in their star-shaped pattern flickered in and out of focus as she wobbled, but one step at a time, Vanita made it to the bathing chamber she and Ash had once shared, a million years ago. There was an uncracked mirror there.

  If Vanita could have whistled she would have, looking at the various red scars and bandages all over her body. She knew she shouldn’t be undoing Ash’s hard work with the bandages but, well, how bad could it be? She sensed that she couldn’t remember things from last night and she wanted to see if not understand what had happened with that owl. One bandaged gash just below the left shoulder hugging her armpit told her one part, an ugly red vertical gash from her jawline to her breast told her another. She looked, with these marks and this face bandage like a pirate, a warrior. She felt a curious sense of vertigo for a split second, as though she were crossing a threshold, but Vanita shrugged it off. She retied the shoulder bandage as best she could and reached up and undid the one around the top left side of her face.

  And screamed.

  Ash was suddenly there, holding her, saying soothing things in her soothing voice. Vanita wasn’t sure how she had ended up on the floor, but she was there, crying choking sobs that sent searing salt water down what remained of her face.

  “M-my my eye...”

  “I didn’t realise you didn’t know.”

  “My eye!”

  “The owl carrior… one of its talons pierced through and it, it was just gone when we got you back home and I could attend to you.”

  “My eye.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  In that clever, coaxing way she had, Ash had managed to get Vanita standing and was shuffling her across the dirty floor. “Why not lie down, Vee. Get some more rest.”

  She said some other things, but Vanita wasn’t listening. Then she was gone and Vanita was staring up at the ceiling again. Now, though, she couldn’t stand this inactivity, couldn’t stand the dirt in this room, couldn’t stand herself and how she now looked. She had to get away.

  Perhaps it was mostly in the mind, for she found it was far more difficult to get out of bed now. More difficult still to walk in the other direction towards the landing and slowly, slowly, down the stairs. But it was easier than thinking.

  “- that’s not an answer” Derrick was saying as she hobbled the last few steps.

  “No,” Ash’s voice sounded quiet, subdued, sad, worlds away from what it had been an hour go, or however long it had taken to get down the bloody stairs. “No, but I don’t have an answer for you yet. It’s not a ‘no’ it’s just a…” Silence.

  “Just a what?” croaked Vanita as she came into the room.

  “Vanita! You’re not supposed to be up and walking around! You need rest, good lord!”

  “I am tired of listening to my mother who, for some reason, seems to have been rearranging furniture for hours now.”

  Ash and Derrick looked at each other.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, just… Stepmother had a shock last night.”

  Vanita nodded grimly. That made sense. She had all her hopes pinned on her daughter marrying the prince and now she had come home a mutilated near-corpse. It seemed a good thing after all that she couldn’t remember some of last night.

  “Wh-what have I missed?”

  Derrick whistled but said nothing. Vanita was beginning to get irritated and her head’s continuing pain was beginning to make her lightheaded. She made her way to the one kitchen chair, dimly wondering where Old Merta had got to. As she sat, the pristine white of the missive on the table caught her gaze.

  “What’s this?”

  “It came from the palace. It says that the prince is coming here for his bride. Here, to Rhodopalais.”

  Vanita shivered. “The prince is coming here?” she repeated unnecessarily. Her head hurt, she knew some of what this would mean, but Ash’s white face was making her feel weak.

  “If that prince thinks he can just swan in here and ‘claim his bride’ and ride off into the sunset…” Derrick began menacingly, but Ash put a hand on his arm.

  “What’s going on here?”

  ***

  Stepmother sounded strange, stepping out from the shadows of the kitchen doorway like an apparition. Her hair was a mess, a long bedtime plait that had been pulled wildly to resemble a bird’s nest more than anything. She was still in her old nightgown and had not washed her face, her eyes ablaze. In all these years, Ash had never seen her like this. It frightened her more than she could say.

  “Are you alright Stepmother?”

  She looked at Ash and nodded slightly, but when Ash brought her water to drink she just stood, glassily, with the cup in her hand and did not drink. Her eyes passed right over Derrick and Vanita.

  In spite of herself, Ash shivered. To see the wife of her father reduced to this… But no. They had other problems right now. And she couldn’t quite forget what had happened last night, what this woman had done to Old Merta. “How could you have done what you did last night?” she asked.

  The woman shook her head as if baffled and said only: “I… I wasn’t thinking I… could not. I just could not.”

  “Convenient!” barked Derrick, his voice raised. The change was instantaneous. At the sound of a man’s voice, the old woman fell to the ground. Then, before anyone could so much as move, she was on her feet again, swinging her cup and water both at Derrick as though it were a sword.

  “What the hell?”

  But she was already gone, running as though her life depended upon it up the stairs.

  Ash and Derrick turned to look at each other, but a strange noise was coming from Vanita.

  “Vee, it’s alright, your mother will be alright…”

  “No… N-not it…”

  “Well, that was interesting,” Derrick put in. Having got over his shock, he was wrestling with his face and trying to keep from laughing. “Where has she gone?”

  “The same place she always goes. Somewhere she won’t have to face what she’s done.”

  In the middle of all the chaos, Vanita’s hand on Ash’s made her jump.

  “Ash, pl-please check the drawing room,” she said in an eerily quiet voice.

  “Your mother’s not in the drawing room, but don’t worry.”

  “No Ash, I… I saw something… it’s difficult to explain. Men, blood…” she paused, gasping, then used the last of her strength to finish in a whisper. “In the downstairs reception room, the one where Mother used to host her salon? Please.”

  “What?”

/>   “Please just go and check. I’m afraid.”

  The salon room was high-ceilinged and cold and not how Ash remembered it. Rhodopalais was a grand home and life was no longer grand. And so without meaning to the Cerentola family had shrunk its existence to certain key rooms – the sleeping apartments, the servants’ quarters, the informal solar, the halls. Ash had not seen the downstairs formal drawing room for some time, since survival had replaced cleaning in the Rhodopalais servants’ list of duties.

  The salon was unique in that it was filled largely with Stepmother’s furniture from before her second marriage and as such she was much more reluctant to sell or burn these. The result was a strange setting – a chandelier adorning a patterned pastel ceiling with ornate mouldings, which looked down upon a sole threadbare rug peppered with a few isolated lounges and chairs showing slight signs of age beneath their gilded craftmanship. The prized family artworks had been taken down and stowed in the attic for safekeeping and now empty gilded frames hung on the walls. Still, Ash had forgotten how grand it was, how fine. Where before she had seen the stuffiness only, she now saw the beauty and the sheer good fortune in its dusty floors and wide glass French doors looking out upon the gardens. What a strange place to starve in thought Ash, feeling like a little girl again in such a room.

  Still, it was undoubtedly empty of marauders. She wondered what had got into Vanita. Ash turned on her heel in the dust and walked back to the kitchens.

  When she got back, Vanita was on her way to becoming hysterical, shouting even though bent over from pain at the kitchen table. Derrick was looking slightly annoyed, but he spoke patiently enough:

  “Tansy has gone to shut all the doors. The pumpkin is in the vegetable patch, which is walled off. And we can easily see all the way down to the gate from the second storey.”

  Vanita just carried on shrilly. “You and Ash need to get your crossbows, or knives, anything!”

  “What’s going on? Vee, what is it?”

  “The salon and balcony, they’re under attack!”