Knight Awoken

by Tammy Salyer

  To her father, her mother was saying, “It feels… wrong that Mylla was touched by Mithlí when none of the others in Arc Rheunos were. Greven, should we have told them that their creator healed her?”

  Though mild, Mylla knew her mother’s tone hid anxiety and uncertainty. She remembered them taking her to Mithlí the Everlight, creator of Arc Rheunos, her father begging the Verity to heal his daughter. He’d told the great winged man who served as Mithlí’s vessel that they were travelers from Ærd, and when he’d said that, the Verity had finally taken notice of the ailing Mylla. He had made her parents promise to bring her to Vinnr and have her stand before Vaka Aster and… the memory was hazy about what the “and” was. Could it have been something about a song?

  Not wanting the beauty and gaiety of the day to be spoiled, she tried in her childlike way to distract her mother. “Why did the winged Verity soothe my sickness, Mumma?” her young self asked. “Was it because he liked the way I sing?”

  Ayanna smiled at her, but it was not her old carefree smile. It was a weighted, harrowed, almost hunted smile that stole the joy Mylla was feeling. “Yes, my light, he did indeed. But who wouldn’t like such a cheeky and smart little one?”

  As a child does, she accepted that her mother may not have been feeling the gaiety she nevertheless forced into her voice, but Mylla’s mood lightened nonetheless. “When I grow up, I want wings like his. Do they have them in this realm, too?”

  “We’ll find out when we finally meet someone,” Ayanna said.

  Her father’s own worries made him immune to his family’s attempts to find cheer. In a flat tone, he said, “If we’d told them what Mithlí did, they would have resented us, and if we’d stayed, they would have wondered how Mylla could have survived their sickness, when no others can. We couldn’t leave her there.” He looked at his mate. “We’ve talked about this, Ayanna.”

  “And we’ve talked about this too, Greven,” Ayanna responded. “Once we’ve fulfilled the promise you made to Mithlí to take her to Vaka Aster—and Verities pray some greater cost is not exacted for the aid she was given—if we can’t find somewhere she’ll be safe in this realm, then we will take her home. You’ve run from your duty, but your duty won’t let us rest. If we needed proof, we found it in Arc Rheunos. All the realms have their dangers. We were foolish to believe we could avoid it.”

  “Fools,” her father mumbled, despair tinging his voice. Then more loudly: “I was a fool to ever become a Warden in the first place. And I’ve dragged you two into it with me.” He laughed darkly. “If we’d stayed, we could have died quickly in the war Balavad of Battgjald waged against us, like everyone else surely has by now. We—”

  Mylla’s mother suddenly stopped walking. Her hand dropped Mylla’s and grabbed her father’s wrist. “Quiet,” she demanded.

  Greven stopped as well, forcing Mylla to a standstill beside him. He looked stricken. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said—”

  “Quiet!” Ayanna repeated, more forcefully. She was looking into the thick woods that lined the north side of the roadway, her face a mask of focus and fear. “I heard…”

  Mylla heard it too. Branches rubbing, brush moving. Then—

  Several men emerged from the forest at the side of the road, pointing spears at her parents. She heard a strange thwick sound, then a thud, and her father was thrown backward. His hand still clutched Mylla’s, and she was pulled to the ground on her back, hard, knocking the breath from her. Another thwick and her mother fell beside them. Mylla watched through tear-filled eyes as Ayanna rose tried to rise to one elbow and looked at her chest. A long stick of wood protruded from her breast, near her heart.

  “Mumma!” Mylla cried.

  “Mylla,” Ayanna said, her eyes too filling with tears of both pain and fear.

  The men came at them then. Mylla’s father lunged to his feet, gripped her around the waist, yanked her into a side-arm carry, and sprinted away from the men, straight into the thick forest beside the road.

  She could hear them yelling for a moment, then all she could hear were her own screams. “Mumma! Mumma!!!”

  Her father clapped a hand over her mouth and carried on, running for all he was worth.

  Slowly, their attackers fell behind.

  When they could no longer be heard, her father let out a gasp of pain and stumbled to his knees, releasing Mylla. She jumped to her feet—and saw for the first time the shaft of an arrow through his shoulder. He remained on his knees, sucking in great panting breaths. With the hand he’d been carrying her with, he dug through a shoulder bag and pulled out a long metallic cylinder with a perfectly round crystalline orb in a setting at its crest.

  He looked to her and said, “Come here, Mylla. We have to go… get you out of here.”

  She could barely see through the tears cascading from her eyes. Without thinking of the trouble it would bring her, she yelled, “No, we have to go back for Mumma!”

  “Mylla, n—”

  But, heedless of danger, she was already running back the way they’d come.

  “Mylla!!!” she heard her father cry, then, as if the sun suddenly bloomed in the forest, a great scorching light exploded behind her. Her father didn’t cry again.

  She kept running, not thinking about the light or what it meant. She thought she was almost back to the road when she ran face-first into the wide, leather-clad chest of a man who stepped out from behind a tree.

  “Gotcha now, I do.” She hadn’t known the language then, but she understood him now. He’d spoken in Ivoryssian.

  The bandit had her around the throat and lifted her from her feet. She immediately began to choke, and kicked her legs, but as black dots erupted behind her eyes, her kicks became weaker.

  “Thass good. Don’t fight and I’ll let you breathe.”

  Of course, she hadn’t known what he’d said, but she’d stopped kicking anyway, the lack of air and her fear making her limp. He eased his grip but didn’t let her go, and soon the bandit had returned to the rest of the men, still standing by her mother’s body in the road.

  Ayanna was dead, her eyes already glazed and fixed on some distant point in the sky. And the bandits had already begun rifling through her mother’s garments and small bag of belongings.

  “Where’s the man?” another bandit asked her captor.

  “Busy dyin’. He won’t get much farther with that arrow in him. We’ll find him tomorrow, if we feel like lookin’. I expect he’ll be half-chewed by wolves by then.”

  “If the wolves get him, they might drag off anything worth a crimson.”

  “Look at them, idiot. Beggars, if that,” said her captor. “The only thing they had worth crimsons is hanging right here.” He shook Mylla a little, still holding her neck with one hand and the back of her shirt with the other.

  “Dyrraks, you think?” a pale-haired bandit said as he threw her mumma’s bag aside with a look of disgust.

  The giant man holding her stepped toward Ayanna and squatted down. Mylla bucked and flailed her arms to get away. To her surprise, he released her, and she flew to her mother’s side. Falling to the ground beside her, she took Ayanna’s lifeless hands in hers. She couldn’t sob, her lungs felt frozen. She just stared at her mother’s glazed, unseeing eyes.

  Her captor pointed at Ayanna’s head. “I’ve never met a Dyrrak with hair that red before,” he commented, then leaned forward and grabbed Mylla’s shirt again, and she was buffeted by his unwashed odor. She cried out and lost hold of her mother when he yanked her up. Holding her in front of his face like a rare item found at the mercantile, he said with a sneer, “What do you think we’ll get for you, little Dyrrak?”

  Then, without warning, Mylla grew angry. She didn’t know where it came from. Maybe it was because her father had abandoned her mother, and then her, taking a starpath well to escape instead of trying to save them—what else could the light have been? All of it was too much. It had used up all her fear and left her seven-turn-old body with nothing except a w
ild animal rage. She balled her fingers the way her older cousins in Kaldrwoot had taught her and threw her fist into the man’s throat with all her strength.

  He dropped her and grabbed his throat, gagging. She scrambled backward on her rear, knowing the fate that had just befallen her mother was coming for her too. She hoped her father would find out what had become of them, hoped he died from the shame. The other men around them began laughing and jeering at her captor, who quickly recovered.

  With his eyes on hers, he reached to his side and withdrew a thin, curved knife from a sheath. Light from the midday sun danced along the blade, taunting her with false cheer. “Won’t kill you, girl, and lose our payday.” His voice guttered like water in a drain from his injured throat. “But they won’t care if you’re cut up a little.”

  He bent toward her, holding the knife in preparation to slash. She rolled onto her side, trying to scramble to her feet to run, but was caught short by another man’s arm cuffing her hard across the cheek, sending stars shooting through her head. This time the stars were white instead of black. She collapsed against the cold flagstone of the road as heat from the slap roared across her cheek.

  “Make it quick, Jarrel,” the one who’d hit her said. “I’ve no taste for torturing children.”

  “Get kicked in the throat by one and your tastes will—”

  He was cut off by another of the bandits crying, “What in the Vigil Star’s eyes?!”

  Even in her memory, what came next happened soundlessly. One moment the bandit was holding up his hands as if to ward something off, the next his body was shrouded in a blaze of fire so hot that his clothes turned to ash and his skin melted before what was left burned. Mylla’s gaze froze on his face as it oozed from his bones, shrouded within a smokeless orange-red column of flame.

  Then sound returned, men screaming so piercingly that their voices sounded like hawks’ cries. “Dragør!” was the only intelligible word she heard, and within moments, she felt an inferno all around her, so hot her own skin felt as if it, too, burned. With one last look at her mother’s bloodied and lifeless face, Mylla decided it didn’t matter if she died as well. She closed her eyes and curled up on the ground by her mother, letting this terrifying world fall into blackness.

  Her eyes opened, somewhere else, sometime else. She felt herself again, Mylla the Knight Corporealis, servant of Vaka Aster, protector of the vessel of Vinnr’s creator, three hundred seventy turns old. Which meant her parents were long dead. Her father’s treachery no longer mattered. Her mother was at peace in the Great Cosmos, never gone, only diffused and scattered like dalla seed in the wind.

  The first thing she saw through her hazy vision was a broken stone roof, steepled and rising high overhead. Familiar—she knew this chamber, a room she’d been in recently…

  Mylla? Can you hear me?

  The voice’s owner came to her instantly. Safran, her sister Knight. As she began to piece what was happening together, heat flooded throughout Mylla’s body, but not dragørfire, the searing heat that she’d witnessed melt flesh from bones and burn bones to dust. Rather, it was the heat of being healed, of her resilient, long-living body recovering.

  Recovering…

  She gasped as all that had happened came back to her. The warship, Balavad’s malignant poison that had stabbed through her like a thousand venom-dipped blades.

  “Safran,” she tried to say, but her voice was broken. The last moments before she’d thought she was dead rushed through her mind. On the warship, she’d struck Ulfric with a Fenestros just before the monstrous Verity had wrapped her in the miasma that had crawled inside her, permeated her every fiber, seeped into her very heart. She had screamed her voice to splinters, blacked out, then awakened in time to warn the Glunt that Balavad’s Ravener had her sword and was heading toward Ulfric. But not Ulfric—Vaka Aster.

  You’ll be all right now, Mylla. You’re safe.

  Safran, she said again, now using her Mentalios link, and was relieved to find she could still communicate that way. What’s happened? She tried to sit up, got halfway, then felt strong arms stabilizing her from behind.

  “Got you, novice. No need to be working yourself into a bother now, there’s not.”

  Stave. His smoke-roughened voice was almost as much a balm as the Fenestros, still cradled in her hand, that Safran had used to rouse her. Mylla fleetingly wondered how many times the wysticism of the Verities would have to be used to turn her near-death back into life. And now, she knew, it had been at least once more, when the Everlight of Arc Rheunos had healed her as a child. Were all novice Knights as prone to so many near-death experiences?

  Did we stop Balavad? she asked.

  We will explain everything once you’ve had some time to recover. Mylla, the bigger question is, what happened to you?

  The question confused her. She cleared her throat, tried to speak again, and this time managed it. “Balavad’s poison—it almost killed me. But I’m fine now, since you’ve looked after me. How long was I out? Was Balavad defeated?” she repeated. “I saw Vaka Aster. She came, she was—or Ulfric was the vessel, like the Glunt said. But Ulfric… where is he?”

  Safran’s eyes darted from hers to Stave’s in an unreadable look, then she said, Mylla, you weren’t just out. You were gone.

  “What do you mean?”

  Roibeard came and knelt down beside her. “Lost in the Himmingazian Sea. We all believed you’d been killed.”

  She blinked at his words. Nonetheless, looking in their faces—Safran, Stave, Roi—she was reassured. That made three of the Knights. The only one missing was Ulfric. Eisa, she assumed, was lost to them completely. Her mind whirled with questions.

  She grasped Safran’s empty hand, cleared her throat once more, and said, “Tell me everything.”

  Chapter Three

  In two dozen Glister cycles, Jaemus Bardgrim had gone from being a brilliant engineer en route to finding the secrets to saving the people of Himmingaze, to a reluctant participant and eventual ender of a battle between the peoples of worlds far removed from his, to this new predicament—a Knight Corporealis of Vaka Aster, Verity, a thing that had only been a rumor before this all began, which boiled down to being a soldier of sorts in wars being waged, apparently, across the entire Great Cosmos. Now, back in Himmingaze, looking into the face of a slangarook, he supposed one tiny shred of his original goal remained. He had managed to save if not all Himmingazians, at least those he was closest to: the crew of the Bounding Skate. Despite that, the only part of it all that he felt was worth celebrating at this particular moment was the fact that he was only being stared down by the slangarook and not consumed by it.

  The moment the water dragør appeared in the doorway of the Creatress’s temple and Knight Dondrin began speaking to it as if it were an old friend, Jaemus had assumed one of two things was true: either he’d gone completely muddleminded and was hallucinating, or he was witnessing a phenomenon so profoundly ominous that it must mean the end of days had truly come for Himmingaze.

  Then the creature dropped the body of Knight Evernal from its jaws, and he decided there was a third option. Jaemus simply had to give up any and all of his expectations once and for all about the nature of reality and his assumptions about what constituted “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong.” The Great Cosmos simply didn’t abide by his narrow understanding of how things should be, and he, therefore, would have to quit pretending he did understand it. From this point on, he decided he would call these moments of unreality Things I Have To Accept Should Kill Me But Might Not, and carry on as if it were just a normal day. Now that he was a Knight, perhaps it was.

  Knight Glór was already sitting on her knees beside Evernal. She’s breathing! Knight Dondrin, quickly, give me the Fenestros.

  “Is she dead? Or maybe the question is: was she?” Jaemus asked Griggory. He’d never really be able to think of the old man as a Knight. He’d always been and would always be Griggory, the unusual vagabond his gramsirene
had befriended.

  “Is, was, could have been, likely will be again,” the old man answered in his not-unexpectedly-confusing patter as he handed Safran the Fenestros taken from the Vinnr Scrylle.

  Jaemus watched as Safran practiced the same action he’d seen Ulfric do over Evernal’s body not so long ago. He wondered how many lives a Knight could redeem before they simply ran out.

  Soon, in another example of the Cosmos being inside out, against every conceivable hope Evernal was once more alive, alert, and seemed no worse for wear than if she’d taken an overly long nap that left her in a bit of a fugue.

  When she sat up, her eyes filled with the questions she naturally had—and he supposed there were many. But there was more in her gaze, something haunted. Perhaps a side effect of being—by most normal measures—dead.

  As the three Knights were explaining all she’d missed over the last few cycles, or days in Vinnric terms, Jaemus listened with growing horror. Most of it was news to him as well, thanks to his having used the Scrylle to spirit the Himmingazian Glisternauts back to Isle Stonering before Dyrrakium was taken over. After Balavad had battled and beaten the Knights, he’d begun an all-out offensive against the people of the Dyrrakium Empire, and now he had Ulfric and Vaka Aster completely in his power. Jaemus wanted to kick himself for somehow leaving Ulfric behind. He’d thought he had a grip on the man…

  As their discussion progressed, the Knights could only surmise that Balavad planned a full takeover of Vinnr, if not something worse. With Vaka Aster powerless, Balavad could wipe out the realm in a single stroke and reap vengeance for what Vaka Aster had done to Battgjald. In Himmingaze, the only way they’d know if it happened was by looking inside Vaka Aster’s Scrylle. As long as it still maintained its archaneology, Vinnr still existed.