like that all day, Private Zennar? Or are you going to stand and claim victory?”
Right. Of course, his choice to wait was clearly the wrong one. He released her, and his skin became cold again.
She examined him, a faint smile drawn upon her full lips. “When the others get back, you ought to face Ko-”
A soft crackling of dead leaves and low thud of horse hooves touched their ears.
“I spoke too soon.” Her smile grew to a broad grin. “Koviere! How are you feeling? Were the children returned successfully?”
The giant lumbered into the clearing atop his equally oversized mount. Together they made the rest of the soldiers look like will-die pieces, or possibly sworded dolls. His square face grinned broadly as he slid from the top of his vast horse. “Aye. All accounted for and now suitably parented. You know, iron prices are going to go up because of this kind of heroism.”
“Shut up, Kove.” The queen placed her hands on hips. “You love it, really.”
He shrugged. “What’ve you done to everyone here? They look worn-out, tired and...” his ancient eyes snapped onto Morghiad, “... and grumpy.”
“Yes, yes. I’m doing what I can with this one.” She threw a sideways glance to her bodyguard. “But he just bested me in a wrestling match, and given your obvious advantage, I thought you would be an excellent contender for our victor.” She placed a hand on Morghiad’s sweat-soaked arm, producing a peculiar sensation of damp fire.
Koviere rubbed at the stubble on his massive jaw, and Morghiad felt a slight sense of foreboding dig into the soles of his feet. “Alright. Give me a
moment to get ready, then I’ll show this boy what swordless fighting is all about.” The giant went off to drop his blades and put away his horse, before stamping back into the central arena. He was very, very tall indeed. And how old were his eyes? Older even than their leader’s, surely? Morghiad had the distinct feeling that this was not going to end well for him. Blazes, why hadn’t he just let the woman win? No one would have been surprised at that, and she would only have tried to do something improper as her reward.
He sighed quietly and rolled his shirt sleeves up; this was probably
going to hurt. The air around him had grown unusually still, and the rest of the squad seemed to have ceased drawing breath. He could not tell where the queen had settled herself, as all of his focus was on the large, lumbering opponent looming over him. A hand came shooting out from the body of the giant, and grasped the circumference of Morghiad’s arm as if it were nothing but a tree twig. Neither earthquakes nor teams of horses could have relaxed its grip. He did the only thing he could, and twisted his body to dislodge one of the giant’s tree trunk legs from its footing on the ground.
Koviere was felled, but his reaction was implausibly rapid and precise. The floor greeted Morghiad with a flump of dead leaves and soft earth. There was no time to recover, and he found himself defending against a flurry of body throws and lifts. Another face-full of dirt followed. This was not going well. He managed to achieve a brief hold before his third crush into the ground, which snapped something in his ribcage. Blazes! There was nothing for it. Morghiad was going to have to change his tactics.
He did not resort to hair pulling this time, attractive a lure as Koviere’s
bound ponytail was. Instead he launched himself from the ground, kept his chin low and presented the giant with a boxing guard.
“Like that, is it?” Koviere grinned with his vast, square face. He folded his giant’s hands into large blocks of stone and stood ready.
Morghiad made the first strike, landing his blow under his opponent’s ribs, and it served well to knock the larger man back. But Koviere landed several of his own powerful blows subsequently, which led to Morghiad’s final meeting with the ground. He could no longer see, barely feel and scarcely
hear the sounds of laughter around him. How humiliating.
“Ah, you’re not bad, Zennar. And those bruises will heal before I’ve finished this sent- There we go.”
He sat up and attempted to open his swollen eyelids. Eventually the woodland light filtered in, and he was unfortunately able to make out the features of his audience. Blazes, but he felt dizzy!
“I’ll see to his hurts,” a moving shadow said - presumably the queen.
A few whistles and titters were emitted by the squad; the loudest among them was Beetan.
“Alright, stop it,” she instructed, and he felt her fiery hand touch the back of his own. “Come with me.”
He followed obediently, if a little clumsily, as she led him into the thick brush of leafless trees and knotted bindweed. After he had tripped over a hundred exposed roots, she sat him on a pile of dead foliage.
“You’re lucky these are the only injuries he gave you. Koviere does tend to get very competitive with his barefist fighting.”
Morghiad remained silent as she worked to remove his shirt.
“Zennar, forgive me if I have
misunderstood, but it seems that you do not like me very much. Would you care to tell me why?”
“You have an entire country to love you. Another man’s appreciation hardly matters.”
She frowned briefly as she ran a soft Blaze form over his misaligned ribs. “Yours does matter to me, and I will do what I can to earn it. Will you tell me what I need to do?”
How about change her entire attitude and actions of the last twenty years?! She was nothing but a cliché; a woman with hair of fire and a temper to match it! He grunted as she teased
his fractured bones back into place.
“I am not a cliché!” she hissed.
Had he said that aloud? He must have.
“If anyone cannot control their temper, it is you. I do not expect everyone to like me, Morghiad, far from it, but you cannot have missed the fact that you are treated differently from others – both by myself, my friends and my family. Perhaps it stems only from your looks, but you could have a home with us if you wanted to. You would be far more than a soldier of Calidell.”
Oh, it would have been so much
simpler if he had been able to ingratiate himself with them as if he were a longlost friend, if he had been able to love them. But, try as he might, he had not had the strength to play to that particular lie. He knew that he had sulked around them like a spoiled child, but it had been the best he could manage without exploding into a rage. He was no actor; he had been trained to fight for good.
The former queen continued, “With an improvement in your attitude, we would like you to become a part of the family. And you would always have our friendship and support. How does
that sound to you?”
“I already have a family.”
Her lips thinned as she frowned. “And you would not lose that through any association with me, I hope? Tell me about your father.”
Morghiad pulled his shirt back over his newly fixed upper half and took a breath. “He taught me everything. He is a very unique man.”
“But presumably he does not like me?”
“It is not that. He thinks you are misguided, that is all.” That much was true. Morghiad’s own feelings were quite different, of course.
The lady rocked back and seated herself with elbows upon knees. “Misguided in what way?”
“He feels that you have valued your own desires above the needs of the people.”
“That is still too vague, Master Zennar.”
This was becoming a difficult subject to discuss without revealing what ought not to be revealed. “You are a better fighter than you are a politician or a mother. Perhaps you ought to have employed someone else to do those roles.”
She blinked at him, and then her
eyes dropped to the ground. “I did the best that I could.” With that she rose and swept off into the woodlands. He knew he would not see her again for the rest of the day, and was glad for it. Morghiad rubbed his foot through the rough dirt. He had been correct about what he had said. She should never h
ave had children. Never. Artemi lay amid the crowd of branches and crush of leaves. Her eyes burned with heat and stung with salt; her head hammered with the hefty pump of blood that fed her reddened features. Crying was an exhausting business, and it did not seem to make her feel the slightest bit better about her former husband’s comment. How could he think her such a failure? And what did he know of the trials of being a mother when he was just a child himself? Had she really failed at ruling her offspring and her country? As hard as she thought about each of them, she
could not find any true faults in either.
She roused herself from the ground and looked to the orange glow of the rising sun. If she had been a paranoid woman, she would have thought the Law-keepers had put Morghiad up to this as some form of punishment. But even they were not that petty, and Mirel had gifted them with what they wanted. No. This was just bad luck.
In the depths of her mind, the creature stirred again and made a rapid leap towards her power. Artemi was only able to stop the thing through sheer reflex of thought. It would not
have her fires! She thumped the dirt to punctuate her defiance, and found herself considering the other mutterings that Morghiad had emitted on the previous evening. A cliché, he had said. Everyone had the right to be angry at some stage in their lives, and she had more excuses than most. “I am not a blazed cliché!” For years she had lived with the expectations of others that were assigned to her because of her hair. Not that those expectations were always the same. She had discovered that one person’s truism was usually another’s oddity.
And how was she to help it if a
thousand books were written about her, thus making the inevitable formula? Those authors had been the ones to pick out her hair and her fires as aspects to drone on about. They could just as well have chosen her stupid, long nose or silly jaw as conversation points, but had not. It was an impossible situation to win.
She stood upon aching feet and stumbled downhill through the bare brush. The branches tugged at her sleek clothing and snagged upon her dagger straps, but she hardly noticed it. A torrent of dismay was welling up in the nadir of her mind, and she had to
find a way to quell it. Her skin felt hot, and her face was still full of the tears of her upset. She began to undo her sword belts as she trotted down the slope.
The leaves that sprang up from her footfalls faded from beige to a deep, blood red, and the sky turned from shades of fire to pale hues of azure. She tore off her coat, and flung her boots into the brush. The sound of rushing water touched her ears, and she knew it would be the saviour of her mood. The slope of the ground became more acute, and her bare feet began to slide down its surface. Artemi pulled
off her shirt, then removed her breeches. The air was chill and bitter against her skin. As she trotted the last few steps down the bank, the sound of rushing water turned to a roar. It was the summit of The Southern Falls, the principal plunge of the cascade.
A broad grin unfolded upon her lips. She had jumped them once before, but that had been many centuries ago. Would it be just as she remembered? Her trot turned to a sprint, and the flames of her mind leapt to the limits of her skin. They wanted to escape as she did, to burn through the air and the ether and the earth and
to sear the dead branches with their heat. Artemi ran to the roar of the water, her breathing synchronising with the undulating rumble of white noise. And the edge was there. It curved around in a vast arc of black stone, white froth and moss. Beyond was nothing but the rising steam of the falls, and before her were the level, plateaued rocks worn smooth by millennia of water flow. Her feet crashed onto those rocks in broad, thumping strides, sending up high sprays of glass that fanned about her knees. The only smell was of damp rock and caves; its odour was exactly
that of the fallen city of Cadra. One, two... three. Artemi leapt from the rim and extended her arms as if she were a bird swooping for its prey.
She thrust into the heady cloud of steam, her skin rapidly becoming wet from the droplets that clung to her. Faster and faster the beads met with her face, and the air began to thunder past her ears as loudly as the water pounded its pool below. Her stomach had ventured to somewhere else, entirely removed from her body; she scarcely dared to breathe. And the fires.... Great, white sheets of Blaze fizzled before her eyes as their heat
filled her veins. Her heart beat once – thud – and she folded her arms around her head to make the final plunge.
The water hit her harder than she remembered it had the first time, and it was fiercely cold. But she allowed herself to plummet deeper into the pool beneath the tumbling froth, and deeper into the icy clinch of its lower reaches. When she finally slowed her descent, she discovered that she would continue to sink for her lack of buoyancy. Artemi opened her eyes. It was deathly dark down there, and the only sound was the now-distant rumble of thunder above and the sprinkle of
tiny bubbles escaping from the trappings of her hair. She could stay here for hours if she wished, and could do so by slowing her heart rate just as she had learned during her years of training with the Kusurus. But she did not wish to meditate in this cold pit for any longer than she already had, and it reminded her too much of the Era of Floods. She had learned to love breathlessness far more than she should have in those years.
Artemi made the first strike out with her arms and her legs. Her movements were long, forceful and yet slow. She could see the paler waters
above her, and the faintest hint of daylight. Her rhythm remained the same, with steady, purposeful strokes. Slowly, the depths grew brighter until she could see the floating weeds and the tiny fish wiggling past. She pushed harder and upward into the light, and then her own buoyancy carried her higher still. The rumble of the falling cascades had resumed their roar now that she was closer, and she could feel the push of the river’s current against her.
One final stroke was all that was needed to bring her face to the surface, where she waited for the water to drain from her features, and then she took as deep a breath as she could inhale. Waves of calm and relaxation washed over her as she breathed. The jump had been as good as she remembered; better, even.
She spent some moments allowing herself to float through the steam of the whirlpool, and stared at the clear skies above through the rainbow-ed haze. No part of The Crux had ever displayed as much life or vibrancy or variation. This Darkworld of hers had a great deal more to offer the senses. Even Mirel would have agreed with her on that.
Artemi swam lazily to the side of the plunge pool, and clambered out of it somewhat unwillingly. The return of gravity was not altogether desired. She gazed up at the distant heights of the falls, their peaks utterly obscured by the airborne water and bright sunlight. It was going to be a long climb back to her clothes, but at least she would be dry by the time she completed it. Of course, she could have simply wielded her way there, but where would the fun have been in that?
She hopped lightly between the worn rocks, leapt onto the first of the stones that met with the cliff face and
took an extended inhalation of the humid air, but a movement to her right caught her feet. She turned to face it. Morghiad was there. His black hair ruffled in the light breeze, his boots were muddied and his chest moved with the breathlessness of recent exertion. His leaf-green eyes were steady upon her.
Artemi was frozen to the spot. As he approached her, she found herself fearing his next action or his words, and that she would not be able to defend herself against any of them. She swallowed. But Morghiad’s advance did not slow or stumble, and
soon he was looming over her with his dark looks and shadow-luring shoulders. Had he always been so tall? Before him, she felt like a small, shivering and naked shrew.
Without urgency, his hand lifted and he moved it to her mouth. The touch of his fingers against her lips was unexpectedly soft, but it caused them to burn with the thousand flames of their power. Artemi’s hunger was roused; the creature in her mind was becoming wild with deprivation an
d need. She had to release it, to release everything!
His eyes narrowed momentarily. “This is wrong,” he muttered, “Very wrong.” He withdrew his hand from her, leaving her lips cold and bare once more, and swiftly turned to march away.
Artemi found her limbs weak and her lungs feeble as she watched him vanish into the woodland beyond. What? A scream of fury and frustration was building up inside her. How could he... She clenched her fists as tightly as she was able and ground her teeth together. Young he may be, but blind he was not. He would know perfectly well that such actions would upset any woman who had made her intentions as clear as she had. A part of her wished to jump from the top of the waterfall again out of despair, while another desired only to bring Morghiad into line. She chose to follow the latter part. The former Queen of Calidell strode forth in all her naked glory, and then broke into a run along the path her bodyguard had taken. When she caught up with him, she found that he was striking the various bushed and shrubs with his sword as he walked. All around, the forest was alive with the sounds of squirrels and pigeons and a thousand other creatures that went busily about their foraging. But his
bearing was a stark contrast to his environment: stiff shoulders told her that he was not in a mood for conversation, and Artemi was not in a mood for deference.
The Fireblade Array: 4-Book Bundle Page 138