“Yeah,” Kaleo said with great uncertainty. “Senor Reven. Uhm, look, I’d like to send this letter to Damaskha.”
Kaleo produced a folded piece of parchment from his pocket. The courier looked at it and then at Kaleo expectantly.
“Damaskha? Uhm… send… send to Damaskha. To Grolly,” Kaleo continued, complete with hand gestures of walking fingers. It did not help.
“He can’t understand you.”
Kaleo turned toward the new voice. A girl in a loosely knit cap stood beside him, her hair tucked up into the cap itself. Other women wore a silk head scarf loosely draped over their heads and some of the young boys wore caps like the girl wore. Even Serai had adopted the head scarf trend. The girl’s words had a gentle accent that was not entirely Mahalan. Something else, perhaps. He arched a brow at her. “The errand boy needs to learn. Where are your wings, errand boy?”
“Errand boy?” he repeated, briefly glancing at his back. The wings remained absent.
“You work for the bard,” she said. “Everyone knows. You are with him for Senor Luca’s performances with wings. They talk about you.”
Kaleo gave her a slightly stunned expression but smirked, folding his arms. “Care to help then?”
She scoffed. “Sure, for a sixer.”
It was his turn to scoff. The money in Mahala was strangely shaped, not round like in Esbeth or paper like in the Empire. Each piece had increasing edges depending on its worth. The one she wanted, had six edges and was known as a sixer to the locals. The one he’d given to the boy that helped him find the courier had one edge, making it the only round coin in the set. She was asking a lot for a simple favor.
“Fine,” Kaleo finally relented, pulling the coin from a pouch tucked in the band of his trousers.
She grinned, acting as translator for the courier. The letter was for Mama Zuri with another tucked into the folded parchment to be sent to Navid. He wanted them to know he was safe, wanted Navid and the girls to know about Aeron.
“Sending a letter to your old master?” the girl said, looking at the parchment. “Or mistress?”
“What? No!” Kaleo said, frowning. The girl giggled, shaking her head. “Why… why would you think that anyway?”
She shrugged again. “You are sending it to Grolly. You are good with music, but not good enough to be part of the guild. But… you are pretty so…”
She left it at that, Kaleo gaping at her assumption of him. Pretty? Really? He very nearly shifted on the spot to be less pretty and vowed to use his ability more often when going out. Pretty…
It took several minutes of translation and another sixer for the girl with amber eyes for the letter to be sent. That alone cost him more than he cared to admit. The deed was done, however, some of his guilt assuaged in that simple act.
“Thank you,” he said when the transaction was complete.
“Sure,” she shrugged, pocketing her coins. He smirked. The girl was lovely beneath the dirt on her face. She had an ethereal appearance that was intoxicating, making him look away with a rush of heat rising into his face.
“You know, I’ll give you another sixer tomorrow if you show me around the city,” he said while looking at his toes. He needed to learn, to adapt. He was not a prince anymore. Reven had neither the time nor inclination to show him around because the bard had other needs to attend to. That’s what he had an urchin for, or so he’d said that morning.
“Two more,” the girl countered.
“One and I’ll buy lunch,” Kaleo retorted in rapid fire. She twisted her lips in thought but agreed. Food, he knew, was a very powerful motivator to a young thief with a dirty face.
“Tomorrow then, errand boy. Bring your wings,” she said snatching the second coin with a wink. She tucked it into the front of her tight pants, and turned to leave.
“Kaleo,” he said. She turned and gave him a questioning look. “My name. It’s Kaleo.”
She smiled. “Lara! See you tomorrow, Kaleo!”
***
Fire consumed every hall, every room, every body that he passed. Reven choked on the acrid smoke, blinded by it as he stumbled toward safety. Except, there was no safety. He’d run from the forest; from the monsters that hunted him. Pain radiated up from his leg, but he could not focus long enough to see why. He pushed forward, he had to, because the monsters were still chasing him. They growled and snarled, hissed and barked at him to remind him of the horrors that awaited him. So, he ran until colliding with a door, slamming it shut behind him.
His chest heaved, back leaning hard against the wooden door. It would not hold back the beasts for long. The room he was in was dark but oddly crowded. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light. There were tall tables and stools, a window that let in too much moonlight and still forms all over the floor. He focused on the forms rather than surrounding furnishings. When he did, he gagged.
Bodies littered the floor, twisted and mangled. Their faces stared at him, an accusation held in their lifeless eyes. He did not know them, despite feeling an affinity for them. A centaur and three tirsai children - a boy and two girls - a man with lavender eyes, and…
“No… Azrus, please, no,” he breathed out, crawling over to the other form on the floor. He lifted the boy carefully, his body broken, wings torn to shreds. His heart pounded, knowing that the boy shouldn’t have been there. He shook the boy, feeling the lifeless limbs move and the head rise with hateful accusation.
“This is your fault,” the boy croaked, neck twisted at an unnatural angle...
“No!”
Reven caught movement to his left as he sat up screaming. Sweat covered him from top to bottom, chest rising and falling so fast that he barely drew breath. He shook violently and felt the need to wretch but swallowed it down. Kaleo and Serai watched him from the small table inside the inn’s apartment. It was a small, terribly intimate space with a single room, iron stove, table, and a hammock strung across the common area for Kaleo to sleep on. Reven stared at his small little world and the people he held so dear then focused hard on Kaleo. How had the child come to worm his way into the bard’s heart so quickly? Why?
You know why, Beloved.
“Shut up,” Reven growled, shoving himself off the tiny sofa upon which he slept. It was more like a set of broken wicker chairs lashed together with pillows atop it to hide the ugliness of its construction, but it served its purpose well. Kaleo and Serai watched him with wide, concerned eyes. They sat across from one another with a deck of cards between them and a pile of… grapes. Odd betting tools but, Reven was not in a mood to question. Both were in various states of dress, but he chose not to focus on that either, walking to where he had a large decanter of amber liquid.
“Urchin,” he barked, walking toward the door to their shared living space. “Walk. Now.”
“Walking,” Kaleo stammered, catching his knees on the underside of the table and his wings on the back of the chair. Serai rose to her feet as well but Reven shot a glare at her that made her sink back down slowly. He did not want her company, her infuriating patience and tolerance. He felt out of sorts and struggled with his thoughts and emotions. Serai did not need to be caught in the backlash of his own personal demons.
“Uhm… we’ll finish the game later,” Kaleo said as he followed the bard out of the apartment.
Reven did not wait, walking out of the inn into the streets of the city. A summer rain fell from the sky, soaking the unpaved streets with water, churning the red clay into a thick paste that sucked at his bare feet; he’d not bothered with shoes. Citizens danced in the rain, celebrating the rare event. Kaleo caught up quickly, walking silently beside him with his large wings tented above his head for protection. After a few minutes, he extended one of those wings to cover Reven’s head as well.
“Don’t bother,” the bard said. He felt … confused; angry; hurt; uncertain. He walked until he was calm enough to think clearly, taking swigs of the decanter from time to time until they’d walked clear acr
oss the whole of Azucena to the foothills of the Sierra Alto mountains. Reven slowed his steps then, winding through a small path until reaching a large manse devoid of light and life.
“What’s this place?” Kaleo asked. There were new clay shingles on the roof that gleamed in the rain and patches along the outer walls that suggested repairs were nearly complete. The manse was now part of Reven’s new relationship with the Azucena cartel lord.
“Home,” Reven answered before walking in to get out of the rain. There were no doors yet, no shutters, and old crates that once belonged to the previous
owner rotting in a corner. According to Luca, a man named Manuel Escado once ruled over Azucena as a duke or viscount or something of the sort. The man died of disease more than two hundred years gone and left the city to the cartel lords to fight over, but none had claimed the old manse out of some strange Mahalan superstition about the dead. Reven had no such quandaries and was tired of living out of an inn. He happily claimed the manse, loitering spirits and all.
“Whose?” Kaleo continued, following the bard inside. Reven rounded on him so fast the poor avian nearly fell back on his rear, hazel green eyes wide with surprise and mouth open to apologize. Reven was going to demand answers, to finally be done with the nonsense in his head when the fight suddenly drained right out of him.
“Ours,” Reven breathed out through a heavy sigh. He dropped heavily to the dirty floor, mud and leaves blowing in from the summer storm. Kaleo looked at him with clear uncertainty as if contemplating a run out the open doorway. There was a small puddle on the tiles beneath their feet and a few vines creeping in through the unshuttered windows. “Sit down, Kaleo. We need to talk.”
The boy’s reaction was priceless. He blinked, mouth dropping with uncertainty as he slid carefully to the floor across from the bard.
“Alright, what’s wrong? If this is about the courier, I swear I didn’t say anyth-”
“Stop,” Reven said. Kaleo shut his mouth with an audible click. Reven listened to the rain for a few moments, drawing enough Power to bring some light into the grand foyer where they sat. He set the decanter down, looking around briefly before settling on Kaleo again with a smirk on his face. “Courier?”
The boy looked as if he wanted to crawl under a rock so Reven pressed on, shaking his head. “It doesn’t matter. That’s not what this is about. I thought I could ignore the past; that it didn’t matter - wouldn’t matter. But it does. I keep… I keep seeing things in my dreams, when I’m awake. I don’t want Serai to know but I need to know.”
“Know what?” Kaleo asked. He flinched as a large moth flew at his head, batting the creature away. Most things in Mahala were larger than what one might consider normal. Kaleo had only been with him a couple weeks at best, he had not had time to adapt like Reven had; had not learned to adapt as quickly as Reven had because he had no reason to. The boy was not actually an urchin. He was the exact opposite, in fact, which only made Reven’s confusion that much greater. The boy came to Mahala in search of his father. Reven was no fool. Despite never saying it, he knew that Kaleo stuck around because his search was successful. Accepting that, however, meant also accepting that Reven was also not just a bard. He needed the missing part of his life. It was cruel to the boy to ask so much of him, Reven knew. But something had changed.
“The nightmares I have... There is one in particular: I’m trapped, in a room, and… and there are bodies on the floor. They’re looking at me. There’s no life in them. Four usually, sometimes five and now… Who are they?”
“I… don’t know,” Kaleo offered, wings spread wide enough to catch the wind so the feathers would dry. He had no shirt, Reven noticed and only wore one sock with a hole at the toe. Reven frowned at it, at Kaleo, easily distracted.
“What were you doing anyway?” the bard inquired, drinking from the decanter again before passing it over to Kaleo. The boy took it, hesitating briefly before taking a good long drink and handing it back. He made a face, unaccustomed to the taste of liquor, but took it well.
“Just playing a game,” the boy shrugged. “The point is to remove clothing but Serai already hates them so we changed the rules and put clothing on instead. She was losing. Describe them to me, the people you see. I don’t think you really want me digging through your head for dream remnants.”
Reven arched a questioning brow at his apprentice.
“I can walk dreams,” Kaleo dismissed. “Describe them.”
Reven did so, down to the horrid details of their pale faces and the bloodied wounds that took their lives. He left out the part about seeing Kaleo. The boy sighed and began explaining as best he could, answering all the interruptions Reven threw back. Some things the boy did not know by age alone. Other things he was unclear of. The tirsai children in the dream were the children of the Phoenix Empress - Gannon Oenel’s nieces and nephew; Reven's nieces and nephew. The centaur was the missing prince’s guardian though all the boy knew about that arrangement was that it had to do with centaur honor and a life debt owed to the fallen prince. Reven, he gleaned while listening to Kaleo, was older than Liam’s original estimation at one-hundred-twenty-one summers rather than the paltry seventy the thief-taker claimed. Liam, Reven was learning, knew too much.
“…suppose you’re seeing what happened after he - - you left us. You promised to come back but, well, we know what happened after,” Kaleo shrugged. “They’re safe though, as far as I know. The girls and Navid are with my Aunt Maeve in Tierra Vida and Aeron is somewhere in Kormaine. I… I wrote to Navid. I told him that I found you. I sent it a few days ago when you sent me to find all those stupid fruits. I didn’t want him to worry and, honestly, he deserves to know. Losing you was devastating to him. He felt like he failed you.”
“Who else did you tell?” Reven dared after a long silence. Kaleo’s face sank.
“No one,” he answered softly. Reven arched a brow. “No one, I swear. No one would believe me anyway. Everyone thinks you’re… well, they think Gannon’s dead. They’re not wrong. Not really.”
That hurt to hear though Reven understood it. He was not the man Kaleo described, the prince of a fallen nation, husband, father, skilled diplomat - he was none of those things. He was a bard barely worth his salt. He watched Kaleo retreat in on himself some and sighed.
“Gannon,” Reven said gruffly, clearing his throat. “Was … was he a good father?”
The question surprised Kaleo. Reven saw it on his face, saw it in the sheen on the boy’s large eyes. He snorted, ducking his head almost shyly and nodded. “Still is…”
Silence fell between them again before Kaleo sniffled and cleared his own throat. “Whose house is this?”
Reven chortled. “Mine. Luca’s people are fixing it for me.”
“Yours? You bought this old thing? Lara would probably say its cursed,” Kaleo snorted. Reven shut his eyes and shook his head. Lara, he knew, was an urchin girl Kaleo had been loitering bout the city with. Many people had told him in case the boy took it into his head to run off with a pretty face. Reven smiled finally, feeling an odd weight lifted.
“Tell me more about Aeron,” the bard said, now eager to learn of his family and past. Kaleo smirked.
“He’s a lot like you, actually…” the boy began.
Chapter Sixteen
No one spoke, exhaustion and defeat bearing down on the small band of Kormandi survivors. They could not stay in one spot for long, constantly moving lest they be found again. They left the catacombs licking their wounds with no direction and no real leadership. Demyan was a king in title only. The Baron had been the one calling the shots, but he did not make it. Aeron glanced around the tiny room they hid in, focusing on the would-be king. Demyan rested with his back against a cracked wall, his head wrapped in thin bandages that were created out of torn sheets given to them by the home’s owners. His arm was in a makeshift sling, the bones broken and his breathing a little ragged from cracked ribs. Aeron winced on his friend’s behalf, feeling the acute
pain of his own injuries. They dared not use any magic for fear of being tracked.
The few citizens that remained, remained in boarded up farm houses or wooden homes in small villages that were found between cities. Anything from Tatengel to Sapphire City was barely more than the size of a hamlet in Aeron’s view. The cities of the Phoenix Empire - of the tirsai peoples in general - were much larger, more elaborate spreads than anything he had seen in Kormaine thus far. The only truly impressive thing about Kormaine was the Sapphire Tower.
“We will need to move soon,” Nadya said, breaking his thought process. She sat beside him, her wrist wrapped in bandages. It was swollen and bruised, most likely broken from what Aeron could tell. “We are putting these people at risk.”
“We need to rest too,” Aeron said. “If we get caught again like we are now, we don’t stand a chance.”
Nadya sighed but could not argue with Aeron’s logic. The fallen prince struggled to keep his head, to focus on the moment and stay strong. Of their small group, he was the only one with experience dealing with the demons. It was experience he never wanted to relive. He remembered running through the halls of the palace with his sisters, trying desperately to keep them safe while searching for his parents or his uncle - anyone. He remembered listening to soldiers scream in agony as they were torn apart or women of the palace holler and plea for their torment to end. Watching the same happen to the Kormandi made him sick.
And then, of course, there were the things he saw in the Catacombs. That creature called Roth, for example. He knew he was not imagining things when the beast turned to look at him. It was Danyel Illurian, his mother’s cousin, the Speaker of the Phoenix Empire and Nadya’s betrothed. The man went missing a full turning of Krishin’s short cycle, one full turning before Illurian City fell and the demon hordes took hold of the Phoenix Empire. He looked at Nadya, unable to speak of what he saw, not to her; not yet. The boy at the far end of the catacombs bothered him too. He’d seen them, yet had not. It was a puzzle that the tirsai prince tried to work out to no affect. He did not even want to think about the green thing that attacked Aisling. The gryphon hunkered down beside her audaen, making the tiny room seem smaller still with her size but no one complained. They didn’t have the energy for it.
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