The Savage War

by Esther Wallace

  Some hours later, he looked up, hearing the door open. Valoretta rushed in at that moment, slamming the door behind her, and briefly rested her back against it. Before Arnacin could ask anything about her behavior, she dashed over and dropped down on the floor beside him, hiding against his chair.

  “Sara wants to know where I’ve been,” the princess panted, looking up at him. “If someone comes in, hopefully I’m well hidden here.”

  “Why not wait until a couple of days later, if you can’t stay?” Arnacin wondered, trying to discreetly brush her auburn waves off his leg.

  “Keep reading,” Valoretta ordered. “I’ll tell you why. I found a book that will probably help, as it documents the first attempts at leaving Carta. There is no translation, so if you are serious about leaving within a reasonable amount of time, you’ll have to learn our older language quickly.”

  Taking his gaze off the pages to give her a sideways look, Arnacin teased, “How are you going to help from down there?”

  In answer, she smacked the back of her head into his arm. “I’m only staying here long enough to translate important nouns for you to study. After that, Sara will probably be in here to look for me, and I want to be gone before she gets here.”

  Smirking at the back of her head, the islander returned to his book without comment. Within a few minutes, the only sound was the scratching of Valoretta’s pen on the piece of parchment she held pressed against her knees.

  Two hours later, a soft gasp of pain emitted from the princess as she shifted against Arnacin’s leg. “Finished?” the islander inquired.

  “For now,” Valoretta nodded, wincing as she slowly pushed herself up. “If I don’t leave now, Sara is bound to discover I’m gone. Until tomorrow, you can study those.”

  Arnacin shrugged, “If you wish.”

  “I wish.” The princess’ words were a groan as she took one hobbling step and had to catch herself on the chair.

  Watching her, Arnacin inquired, “Would you like some help?”

  “No.” So saying, Valoretta regally pushed herself away from him, straightened, and promptly landed on the floor.

  Stifling his amusement, the islander turned back to his book, stating unconcernedly, “If you’re sure.”

  “I changed my mind,” the princess laughed hopelessly, holding out her arm. “I would appreciate your help, son of Bozzic, if you will give it.”

  “Oh, no,” Arnacin teased wickedly. “I agree with your first statement. You don’t need my help.”

  “Arnacin,” Valoretta moaned through her teeth half in exasperation and half in amusement. Putting his book down, the islander arose and helped the girl to her feet. As she slipped her arm over his shoulder, she admitted, “I could likely crawl to the hall myself, but if I want to save any dignity…” She left the rest hanging.

  Taking up the slack, Arnacin joked as they began stumbling toward the doors, “If that’s what your dignity’s based on, I should just leave you to lose it.”

  “You really don’t believe in thinking normally, do you?”

  “Why should I? If everyone thinks it, nothing’s unique.”

  Missing his teasing tone, the princess exclaimed, “Oh, so you worry about being unique?”

  Laughing outright now, the islander shook his head. “I just don’t worry about my dignity.”

  Her laugher joined his as they pushed open one door and hobbled through, right into a smallish woman quickly approaching. They froze in surprise and the woman shrieked. Arnacin instantly dropped his arm from around the princess’ waist, feeling her stiffen beside him.

  The woman was the first to break the silence with a reproachful gasp, “My Lady!”

  “Sara,” Valoretta inclined. “Arnacin has been nice enough to offer his assistance.”

  “You… you’ve been reading in front of a stranger.”

  “She actually wasn’t reading,” Arnacin muttered, feeling his cheeks warm.

  “That is not the point. My Lady, do you know nothing of proper conduct?”

  “Do you, Sara?” Valoretta intoned. “Do not forget, you stand before a foreigner, chastising royalty.”

  It was the nurse’s turn to redden. Curtsying, she turned away—but not without a last, lethal glance toward the islander. Only as Sara’s back vanished around the corner did Arnacin inquire, “Why is it such a problem that you read?”

  Looking at him, Valoretta turned along the corridor. “I’m not just a princess, Arnacin. I’m the heir and future queen of Mira. It makes the crime even greater, from Sara’s viewpoint.”

  “Should that not make it detrimental for you to be unlearned?” the islander asked in quiet astonishment.

  “In Mira, Arnacin,” the princess recited, “traditionally queens are important, and not just for the children they bear.” She exhaled. “Apart from that simple fact, we are no different from any other kingdom. A fair-complexioned, idle queen means that Mira is strong and powerful, that its nobles can simply take life at ease. A queen that toils in any form or publicly works her own mind is the sign of a crumbling kingdom, one where anyone can swoop in and take over. Therefore, queens have long done little to nothing, not even raise their own children. Hence, Sara.”

  A brief pause followed before her voice rose in pride. Throwing back her head, she scoffed, “But I will not be a puppet queen. I will accept the authority granted me and lead my people to their best advantage. So let the wars rage when I become queen. Let the world throw itself on spears if it’s stupid enough to defy my authority and scoff at my intelligence. I shall end that vision of queens. That, I vow.”

  Turning aside with a distant smile, Arnacin’s thoughts fled the castle.

  Apparently noticing, Valoretta snapped, “I’m deadly serious, Arnacin. Mira is mine and it needs my intelligence. Even if it didn’t, I could not live without more meaning than I ever saw in Mother’s life. I want to know—I must know—that the world needs me.”

  The islander turned back to her. “I wasn’t laughing at you.” As they continued walking aimlessly, he told her of his sister, of whom the princess’ last words had reminded him. He told her of his brother and mother, and of how his father’s death had devastated him.

  And he didn’t stop there. Strangely, he even found himself sharing how he had searched for hope and a light that had not appeared in his home until the thought of high seas adventures had returned some life to him.

  Valoretta’s understanding lay in the hand she had slipped inside his as they strolled the corridor.

  Chapter 3

  The King of Mira

  DAYS PASSED WHILE THE OUTSIDE world almost disappeared. Arnacin spent all his time in the library, searching, studying and sometimes even sleeping there, for he intended to be on his way home by spring at the latest. Only Valoretta kept him in touch with reality while she continued to help him read through informational tomes written in Mira’s ancient language. Even when he did not need her, she would sit beside or across from him reading her own interests, which, to Arnacin’s amusement, grew increasingly to be the same things he would read.

  “Arnacin?” Valoretta wondered, looking up from the book she was reading when she wasn’t helping the islander decipher the book of Mira’s beginnings. “You said your sister is the best tracker on the island. Didn’t the villagers have a problem with a girl being a tracker? Was your family considered odd or even crazed?”

  “I expect the villagers did,” Arnacin admitted with a shrug as his mind drifted back home. “I remember…”

  He paused, but the princess leaned closer in a silent request for him to continue. Grinning, he obliged. “When I was eight, there was this red spruce tree, two trees grown together actually. At their base, before they connected, they formed a little tunnel of sorts, an archway into the ground and, when the sun set, its light would strike one side of that arch, casting part in shadow and making the rest glow, dark brown on one side and lit red on the other.

  “I liked to stare at it sometimes and to imagin
e how a tiny dragon slept beneath that arch, waking at sunset. And as it rose from beneath the leaves, its fire would waken with it, burning the underside of the tree with its colors, red-hot yellow and dancing russet. That was my wild imagination, anyhow… but we, boys around my age or so, were playing in the spruces at sunset, and one of them asked me what I was looking at as I watched that little archway begin to glow and thought about my dragon.

  “So I told them, and one thing led to another in this… tale. Our legends of dragons as beings of evil merged with my little dragon and I found in this story that the dragon grew out of the village’s greed and concealed itself as the small thing it started from during the day. When nothing changed in the village after many years, it reached the size of its forefathers. By night, as the sky darkened around us in reality, it woke with that light beneath the tree arch. Crawling out, it spread its black wings, creeping and crawling up the tree. As it did, however, it kept growing as if a snake was stretching. Once it reached its full size, it attacked and burned down the village, slaughtering and devouring everyone—all due to their greed.”

  Arnacin paused in his tale, remembering those days, but then, apologetically, he shrugged. “The next thing I knew, women kept pounding on our door, telling Mother that I had given their sons nightmares, and that they couldn’t sleep and were too afraid to enter the woods. Some of them said I possessed a sick mind and that they wouldn’t allow their children to associate with me anymore. For a week, it continued to worsen. Parents whispered about how Mother and Father didn’t raise us right, about how Charlotte was sure to grow up even more demented than I since she helped Father with bow-making among other things.

  “Finally, it died off and I continued to play with those boys, but I’m not sure the gossip ever completely ended. I sometimes overheard whispers about how we had to be part enchanter ourselves, owning bad blood, as they liked to say—”

  “Wait,” the princess interrupted. “Are enchanters bad and only enchantresses good? After all, your island is named after an enchantress.”

  Laughing slightly, Arnacin shook his head. Remembering Carpason’s warning, however, he said as truthfully as possible, “My home’s named after our legends, which are as old as the island itself, particularly the one about the enchantress who survived when evil was destroyed. In all our legends, though, enchanters, dragons and the like are evil. The enchantress was just of a different make.”

  Nodding, Valoretta asked, “So, despite the villagers’ whispers, you were accepted?”

  “I suppose it didn’t matter too much as I grew. I had friends, like Raymond and Tevin—I wasn’t too odd. Little by little, I was looked at as more common, and just another boy with my own set of flaws and strengths. Charlotte was never accepted, though. She never became their expectation of a young lady, and so was often ousted from the rest of the village. I only hope it didn’t destroy her as it sometimes appeared it might, but I don’t know.”

  As he trailed off in thought, Valoretta asked, “Did she not love her family, at least?”

  “She loved us,” Arnacin stated, “but it seemed at times that was all she loved. She could say the darkest things when certain subjects rose. Not that any of us could really blame her, but… well, she didn’t even enjoy the things common girls did—at least not most of the time. She liked to sew with us when it was a family thing, but otherwise thought it a bore, and the rest of many girls’ interests were simply scorned by her.” The islander shrugged, “I don’t do her any justice…”

  “I think you do, though you might not know it,” the princess whispered. “It’s both tiring and hate-spawning to have people trying to force you into an ideal of what they think you should be like, what you should do, how you should dress, what you should enjoy… The list can just go on, but we don’t fit it. Sometimes, we don’t fit any of it and, when that is the case, they try to kill our spirit.” Looking back down at her book, the princess whispered, “I know. I think I could easily like your sister if we ever met.”

  Smiling bittersweetly as he thought of his sister’s reclusiveness, Arnacin knew friendship with Valoretta would unhappily be harder than it appeared. The laughter he had heard emit from his sister last they spoke seemed to ring in the corners of the room and, sadly, he returned to his own book.

  Valoretta was not done probing however. After a moment of silence, she asked, “What is your extended family like?”

  “Extended family?” Arnacin distantly repeated, slowly pulling his focus away from Mira’s records of the first flat-bottomed ships.

  “I was asking about your extended family. Do you have any cousins?”

  Marking his place, he closed his book to give her his full attention. “Well, not any that I’m extremely close to. On my mother’s side, there were no other siblings, and…” He shrugged, turning back to his book.

  “No, tell me, please,” Valoretta begged. Meeting those blue eyes, Arnacin recognized the hope for freedom in them—the freedom brought by tales of worlds nothing like one’s own.

  Conceding, he started, “My grandfather—when he still lived—was a carpenter. I never met him, but Father’s favorite story about him was how he waited until his son was married to reveal that he possessed plans to a ship.”

  As the princess laughed appreciatively, Arnacin continued, “Anyway, Father had one brother, who, despite being the younger, inherited the carpentry work because of Mother’s sheep. I heard that he raised a very successful family while he lived, with four children, only one of which was a boy.”

  “You say that like you don’t know. But wouldn’t those be your cousins?”

  “Technically, yes, but I’m fifteen years younger than my first cousin once removed. That gives you an idea of how close we are, not to mention how my remaining cousins all moved after they married. They left their father’s work to their brother, naturally, and found husbands in other villages.”

  “What happened to his family then, unless you’re saying he didn’t marry?”

  “Oh, no, he married and had a son as well, but when their son was only two…”

  He once again stopped, but Valoretta finished for him. “They died?”

  “Falling logs killed both parents in a timber accident, but that was the last of the carpenters in our family. One of the boy’s aunts took him to live with her in another village, since she was closer of kin. He didn’t come back either. Last I knew, he aspired to be a potter, of all the boring tasks—” Valoretta’s laugher cut him off and he grinned back at her, knowing what she must be thinking.

  “Yes, the shepherd says it’s boring,” he conceded. “Sheep have personality. There’s none in whirring a wheel around until it makes you sick.”

  Returning to the point, the princess pressed, “And did he not marry? What about your remaining cousins, who you said married, and illegitimate relatives?”

  “What type of relatives?” Arnacin wondered.

  “You never have those?” Valoretta’s tone was both curious and bashful. “My only extended relative that I can honestly say I know about is illegitimate, which means his parents weren’t married when he was born. For that matter, they never were.” She turned bright red as Arnacin simply continued staring at her. “Well,” she shrugged, “my great aunt was banished for… being found pregnant when she was not wed. When it was discovered that her companion was a foreign squire, his master had him beheaded.”

  Arnacin stared at the princess in speechlessness. Then, deciding not to comment at all, he threw his book back open and attempted to resume reading, yet his concentration had been ruined and after three seconds he looked back up at the princess in annoyance.

  “They banished her and executed him?” he finally repeated. “One crime wasn’t worse than the other.”

  Sighing, Valoretta dropped her gaze to her fingers, entwined in her skirt. She shrugged. “The same people didn’t invent the penalty. The squire’s master alone was responsible for his servant’s punishment.”

  “Is that a
ll he was to whatever type of brute the master was—a servant?”

  “I don’t know, Arnacin, but I do know politics dictated some sort of like response.” At his incredulous gaze, Valoretta patiently explained, “He was a foreign lord with a servant who had just dared to tarnish nobility. War could ensue instantly over such an occurrence unless he made the squire pay the price and, even then, everyone would be pacing for months afterward, waiting to see if Mira’s wrath had been aptly appeased. Moreover, he was responsible for his servant’s actions, so…”

  “If so, he should have taken responsibility,” Arnacin snapped, causing Valoretta to regard him strangely.

  “He did. That’s why he had the squire beheaded.”

  “No, that’s shifting responsibility, and it’s cowardice—pure cowardice. If someone under your charge does something wrong, you must pay the penalty, and you alone.”

  “In other words, you think he, a noble himself, should have been beheaded? That could start a larger war and certainly would never solve anything, since he wasn’t the one to commit the crime in the first place.”

  So the argument went until Arnacin said, “Then you should have made it abundantly clear that you had no intention of going to war over the crime from the start. Otherwise, their fear of your attack aided their murder.”

  Opening her mouth, Valoretta just as quickly shut it. Coolly, Arnacin retrieved his book, burying himself behind it. He could feel her watching him, but he did not look up to read her expression.

  “Sire.” Carpason bowed upon entering the great hall, which was adorned in gold, blue lapis and opal.

  The king stood beside the windows. Miro would stand out in any crowd of Mirans. Both wisdom and age shone in his pale blue eyes, his bearded jawline spoke of his determination, and his powerful shoulders revealed his past on the field, still maintained after all the years on the throne. He was no spoiled, flabby, bejeweled monarch. The only ring he even wore was the signet, the crane with its piercing ruby eye. Miro was a king who could still defend his people.