by Victor Poole
Delmar did glance at her now; he had a spark of understanding in his eyes.
"And he's watching you?" Delmar asked. Ajalia nodded.
"I have power," she told him. "Your father can see it. He is cautious because he doesn't know how much I have. He doesn't understand the East."
"So he's trying to learn," Delmar guessed.
"No," Ajalia said. "It's more likely that he wants to kill me."
Delmar stopped walking. He threw his arms into the air. His face was contorted with emotion.
"Why," he demanded ferociously, "do you always talk about killing?" He peered at her as though he was diagnosing an illness. "Is that another thing about you?" he asked. "You fall down a lot, and you can't stop thinking about death?"
Ajalia laughed. She continued to pick her way through the thick grass. Delmar followed her, his eyes glaring at her back.
"Stop sounding so carefree!" Delmar snapped. "I'm serious. This isn't normal. People don't kill each other here. My father doesn't," he said, hesitating a little, "kill people." A puzzled expression clouded his eyes.
"Except for witches?" Ajalia asked. Delmar shifted, disturbed in his motion, like a tree blown in the wind.
"Well," Delmar said. He said no more.
"If he perceives a threat to his position," Ajalia said calmly, "he will act."
"I'll tell him not to kill you," Delmar said.
Ajalia started to giggle. She felt roiling pieces of dark laughter loosening all along her back; she could not help herself. She leaned against a narrow tree. A sharp ache came through the wrist she leaned on, and she removed it gingerly.
"I don't know what you find funny about me protecting you," Delmar said. His voice was stiff.
"Sweet heart," Ajalia said soberly, turning towards him. She saw that her knife was tucked just beneath his shirt. He had taken the sheath out of her leather harness, and there was a peculiar ridge beneath the fabric of his waist. She let her eyes slide neatly away from the lump, but her palms tickled.
"What?" Delmar said suspiciously. Ajalia looked into Delmar's face; she found that she had not the heart to crush his ideas of shielding her from harm.
"Nothing," she said gently, and moved on. Delmar followed her. When they came to the low branching tree that split at the bottom into two trunks, he put a hand on her elbow.
"That way," he told her, pointing to the left.
Ajalia's body was beginning to empty of the energy that had built up as she rested in the warm hollow. She felt strangely spent.
"If I can't go on," Ajalia told Delmar, "you can leave me here. All right?" she asked.
Delmar looked at her.
"What?" he asked.
Ajalia watched the light in the trees; a tickle of warning was bouncing at the base of her skull.
"Lim," she murmured. "How far do the screeching metheros live?" she asked Delmar. As Delmar opened his mouth to answer, a shrieking cacophony rent the forest almost in two. Without thinking, Ajalia reached for the lump of her knife that she had glimpsed beneath Delmar's clothes.
Her fingers closed over the hilt, as a slim dart of wood whistled out of the trees, and impacted into her side. Ajalia cursed, and ripped the projectile out of her skin. She hoped it wasn't poisoned.
"Get down," she told Delmar. Delmar was standing still, his eyes wide. He had reached for her when her hands had flashed to his waist, but Ajalia slipped away from him to the side. She darted into the forest. As though from far away, she heard the crunch of leaves; she hoped Delmar was getting himself out of the way.
She searched the trees with her eyes, her hearing attuned for the particular sound of Lim's breath. She moved stealthily, with the tread of a great cat. In a moment she found the Thief Lord's slave.
Lim was crouched in the center of a bush. He was dressed in the plain brown of the Slavithe people, but Ajalia recognized the particular slump of his neck, and the color of his shorn hair.
Lim was half-standing in the bush, looking forward, his eyes darting from side to side, trying to see where she had gone. Ajalia wished she had not been so weak, but, she reflected, nothing was perfect.
"Hello, Lim," she said in the Eastern tongue. The unearthly shrieking was still echoing through the trees; Ajalia had muted the sound out from what she heard. Her voice reached Lim, as she was just behind and to the side of him. The former lead slave spun wildly. He had a wicked knife clasped in his hand, and a blow pipe hung around his neck.
Lim's body crouched a little; Ajalia watched his eyes take in the bandages on her arms, and the trembling that was spreading through her limbs. Lim smiled.
Ajalia snarled, and killed him.
A long crashing came through the trees. Delmar half-fell from a tree nearby.
"What did you do?" Delmar demanded. Ajalia pulled her knife out of Lim's throat with a terrible wrench; the blade had notched into cartilage. The hole left behind by her blade made a gurgling noise. "I was going to fall on him," Delmar said, his voice strained and high. The screeches of the metheros were beginning to die away. "You didn't have to kill him," he added, staring at the thing that had been Lim.
"He would have killed you as well," Ajalia told Delmar. She stumbled away from Lim's limp body, and sat down with a motion like falling gravel. The air was knocked out of her when she sat. Ajalia put her head between her knees, and attempted to drive the shattering white shards of light away from her eyes. The excitement of Lim's attack had changed the interior of her body; she was fraught with a sudden motion within, and seasickness washed at the inside of her jaw. She could not hear Delmar anymore, but she could see him, gesticulating and stomping up and down between the long grasses and the trees. Through the long shadows of refracted light that danced in her mind's eye, she could see Delmar's face, which was livid.
Ajalia stood, swaying a little in her knees, and walked through the way she had come towards Lim. She found the sheath of her knife, and picked it up. Ajalia raised the blade to put it into the sheath, but the long thick ribbons of glistening blood caught her eye.
"Oh," she said. She sat down again, like a child, and wiped the blade against the grass.
"That isn't going to work," Delmar snapped furiously. Ajalia looked up at him and blinked hazily.
"What isn't?" she asked. She couldn't remember where she was.
"Give me that," Delmar said. He wrapped his fingers around Ajalia's wrist, and worked her hand away from the hilt with his other hand. "You shouldn't have a knife," he told her, but his voice no longer sounded sure.
"Saved your life," Ajalia said, a vague smile drifting over her face. "He would have killed you," she added. She could feel herself going to sleep. A drenching fear was trammeling down her back, and putting pins of ice into her thighs. She tried to stand up, and fell down. Delmar dropped the knife and caught at her clothes.
"What do you think you're doing?" he shouted. "Sit down!" Ajalia blinked. She shook her head.
"Sorry," she said. Delmar retrieved the knife, still wet with blood, and scrubbed it against his tunic.
"Disgusting," Delmar said. He twisted the brown cloth around the hilt, and jammed the knife back into the leather sheath. "Here," he snapped, thrusting the sheathed knife back at Ajalia. She stared at him for a moment before taking it.
"I'm sorry I took your knife away," Delmar said, after a long pause.
Ajalia shrugged. They sat in silence for a little while. The split tree thrust out of the ground like reaching fingers; Ajalia looked at the upper limbs of the tree.
"Do you want anything from the body?" Ajalia asked finally. Delmar's head snapped towards her. He looked revolted. "Lim will have money," she told him, "and gems." She did not add that Lim would probably have a lot of little things from Delmar's mother's house concealed on his person. Ajalia did not quite want to disabuse Delmar of all his innocence at once. Delmar looked through the trees at the place where Lim's body lay concealed in the high undergrowth.
"What are we going to do with him?" Delmar asked. Ajalia coul
d see a veil of disbelief, a sense of unreality, descending all around Delmar like a cloak. She smiled at him. He grimaced at her smile. She sighed.
"Take me to the poison tree," she said. She stood up very carefully and went to Lim's body.
"What are you going to do?" Delmar asked nervously.
"Do you want this?" Ajalia asked. She lifted up the long wicked knife that Lim had held. Delmar cringed a little.
"No," he said.
"All right," she said, and tucked the knife into her waist. It was longer than her own knife, and ugly. Her skin shivered a little against it.
"You can't keep that," Delmar said. "And the poison tree is too far."
"How far is it?" Ajalia asked. Delmar looked down.
"Not far," he admitted.
"Good," Ajalia said. "Do you want to help me?" She watched his face. Delmar had jagged stripes of blood all down his front from wiping the knife. A tide of sharp nausea lifted through her ribs; she stuffed it away. The terrible dark fear was creeping out of a hole behind her. Ajalia saw it, sensed it, and forced it down. Delmar was beginning to swim before her eyes.
"Are you going to help me?" she asked again, her voice harsh. Delmar's eyes flicked to the body at Ajalia's feet, and then to her hands, which were stained red with Lim's blood. The bandages on her arms had new marks on them. Delmar came close to her, and lifted up her left wrist.
"You're bleeding," he said. Ajalia's breath caught in her throat; Delmar's closeness made the muscles down her legs relax. She had to concentrate to keep from stumbling to the side. "What are you going to do at the poison tree?" Delmar asked.
"I'm going to put the body in," Ajalia said. "There's a pool, isn't there? Like in the backs of the houses?"
"Yes," Delmar said. He was watching her closely.
Ajalia felt a curious wet warmth against her skin. She looked down. Blood was seeping out over her clothes from the puncture wound in her side. She fumbled at her too-large shirt with clumsy fingers, and pulled the fabric up and away from her skin. An evil-looking black hole was in her side, pulsing with blood and a tiny stream of green goo. Ajalia swore under her breath.
Delmar hissed violently. He knelt down before her and examined the wound.
"Well," she said. "Now I will probably die." Ajalia put her hands into Delmar's hair.
"You aren't going to die," Delmar told her. A flavor of dangerous anger had come into his voice. He stood up, and put his arms around her.
"What are you doing?" Ajalia asked. She wanted to laugh. She had forgotten the time that Lim had boasted to another slave in the East that his father had been an assassin in the court of the king of the west. The other slave had mocked Lim, and had become violently ill a few hours later. Ajalia had no doubt that she would become more than violently ill.
Delmar scooped Ajalia up, and carried her some distance from the crumpled form of Lim. He laid her down on the earth, and stripped the shirt away from Ajalia's skin, tossing it to the side. Ajalia struggled to bite back a giggle.
"I'm naked again," she gasped.
"Hush," Delmar snapped. He had put his hands into the forest floor, and was scooping up mounds of black earth from beneath the roots of grass and rotting leaves. A smell of rich, moist growth made a cloud in the air around the two of them. When Delmar had dug past the roots and leaves, and was lifting bare dirt, he patted a handful of black earth into a hard pellet, and jammed it into the puncture wound.
"Oh, stop," Ajalia complained. The wet earth stung and crumbled against her blood and skin. "Also," she gasped, "that hurts."
Delmar pushed his mouth against her in a kiss. Ajalia made a noise against his lips; he clasped her cheek with one hand.
"Now be quiet and hold still," he told her, drawing away. His fingers left dirt on her face.
"No," Ajalia said weakly. She could feel a tingle of itching sensations trickling out from the bloody hole that was covered with thick black earth. The earth was mingling with the blood, and turning to a wet dark mud. "I will talk the whole time," she said, "and then I will die, and you will be alone."
Delmar had thrust his fingers into the hole he had made in the ground; Ajalia could see a glowing shimmer from the corner of her eye.
"No magic," she breathed, but it was too late. Delmar raised a shining white fist from the earth, and pressed the brilliant light into Ajalia's bloody wound.
THE END
of
The White Brand
BONUS:
Chapter One of book 3: The Thief Lord's Son,
available now on amazon.com.
THE AFTERMATH
Ajalia screamed like a dying animal; the light from Delmar's fist sank into her side, and she felt as though a great mountain was resting on top of her, crushing the air out of her body, and squishing away the juices in her organs. She was beyond the pain of death; she wished that she had never existed at all.
Delmar withdrew his hand. He jammed his fingers into the earth again, deeper this time. Ajalia could see a radiance, like the shining of a sun, crackling from inside the hole Delmar had dug.
"Don't," she gasped. "Delmar, don't, I—"
Delmar had a look in his eyes like a bear hunting fish. He did not look at Ajalia, or seem to see her desperate and flushing face. Before Ajalia could finish her sentence, he withdrew another ball of shining white from the dirt and put it straight against the hole in her side. The mud he had packed there exploded outward, carrying flecks of blood and slimy green goo. Ajalia fainted, but before her consciousness wiped away, she saw Delmar's face, anxious and intense, hovering over the pulsing pain in her side.
Ajalia did not wake up for a long time. After a while, she came to herself, enough to recognize that she was herself, but she could not open her eyes. She was trapped in a kind of endless black prison; faintly, as from a distance, she could feel the tremors and quakes in her body. Her arms she saw as pulsing orange sticks of angry fire; her side was a purple whirling hole of painted water. She had forgotten about Delmar.
All the past, all her pain and her memories, were swirling inside of her like a kind of panorama of terror. She saw her father's face, and heard her mother's shrill screaming voice. Her bother was there, a thing in the background, present and unforgettable, like gnats in her eyes. Her brother's face was turned up to her, and his mouth was half-open. She thought that he, her brother, looked like a wolf puppy who was staring up at her, and waiting for her blood to drop down into his mouth.
Ajalia heard again the chants from the priesthood, and the high, quavering voices of the children her father had taught there. Her father was at the head of a class of boys; they were seated on long benches made of gray wood, like shaped ash. Ajalia saw herself standing at the back of the room, watching the image of her father's body shake in the air like a flame. Her father was like a reflection of herself; she saw herself in his eyes, and in his cheeks. A quiver of revulsion shuddered in her ribs; she told herself that what she saw was not real, but she did not believe what she told herself.
Her father was facing the class, his arms stretched out to each side, his eyes calm and serene in the afternoon sunlight that streamed into the room. Her father was speaking in the old tongue of the priests; Ajalia could hear the scratch of pencils against the wooden benches the boys used as desks.
She wanted to run away, but her legs would not move.
"Delmar," Ajalia said. "Delmar, where are you?" She could not remember who Delmar was, or why she wanted him.
"Delmar," she said, and the pictures around her faded away. Philas was sitting against the narrow hollow, the special hollow that Delmar had found as a child, when he had run away from home. He had told her that, she remembered.
I ran away from home, Ajalia told herself. Her mouth smiled without her permission. Philas was watching her.
"We haven't sold the yurl," Ajalia told Philas. "Raephos wants to buy him. You haven't met Raephos," she added. "His real name is Rosk. You'll like him, though. If we could steal his way of making armor, we
could set up business for ourselves here in Talbos."
Ajalia remembered then that she was not in Talbos, or in Slavithe, either. She was in the woods, in the hollow formed of tree roots.
"Where is he?" she asked Philas, meaning where is Delmar. Philas was looking at her. Ajalia realized too late that her lips had not moved; she had imagined saying all those things. She tried to speak again.
"Is Delmar around?" she asked. A graveled whisper of sound came out from between her lips.
"Jay's waking up," Philas called, standing up and leaping over the edge of the hollow. The twisting tree roots lay over the rise in the forest like a folded cloth; the boughs of the two trees that formed the hollow spread wide and green over Ajalia's head. She opened her eyes, and the light blinded her. She blinked, and turned her face into the darkness of the rough bark. She realized that she had been looking out at Philas, and at the trees, between barely-open eyelids.
"I don't want to be here," she whispered into the bark. Her nose was pushed into a harsh fold of tree. She tried to look down at herself, but her neck was stiff. Ajalia sighed. She was tired of being blind; she was tired of holding still. She wanted to stand up and run away.
Ajalia, emitting a groan, rolled onto her side. She moved her wrists. Gasping tremors of pain and throbbing fire came sprinting up her elbows to her spine. She began to cry.
Delmar appeared over her.
"You're not dead," he observed. Ajalia laughed. Delmar made her feel somehow better; his face was shining like a dying star; he had black bruises under his eyes, and his cheeks looked harsh and hollow. He looked as though he had been kissing his life away in death's embrace.
"Where is Lim's body?" Ajalia asked. A squeak came out instead of words. She moved her fingers, laboriously, to her waist. Her knife was still in the waist of her pants, but Lim's wickedly long blade was gone. She forced her eyes open another crack, and examined Delmar's side. She could not see beneath his bloodied shirt, but a long lump was pressing against his hip. She knew he had the knife, and she smiled. Delmar, she told herself, was coming to terms with reality.