“I know what you did,” Etana said, “and Father should be informed.”
“My father should be informed!” Richard screamed. “You’ve nearly killed me, you—you Tarhian!”
Sweeping his sword up, Rafen surged forward. Etana grabbed his left arm. “Please,” she said.
“I AM NOT A TARHIAN!” Rafen roared, throwing Etana off and preparing to bring his sword down. Richard screamed again.
Someone seized Rafen’s arm in midair with a grip so hard it was painful.
“ENOUGH!” Jacob bellowed, eyes flashing. He wrenched Rafen’s sword from his hand. Rafen’s arm dropped to his side.
Etana hovered nearby nervously.
“I do not know what this is about,” Jacob said, breathing quickly, “but you have well and truly overstepped your bounds. It is a great evil to attack a Runi and is comparable to Talmon abducting the Secra.”
Rafen trembled. With the sound of an earthquake, Richard unearthed himself, still whimpering, his nose dripping blood onto the floor. He shot a nasty look at Rafen.
“Please, General Aneurin,” Etana said. “His Runiship said it was all right to duel.”
“I beg your pardon, Highness.” Jacob sternly turned to her.
“They were having a practice duel, you see,” Etana said, gently taking the sword from Jacob’s unresisting fingers. “Unfortunately, there was an accident because Rafen slipped on a polishing cloth, and My Liege stepped back one too many times.”
She gestured to the shelf with Rafen’s sword. Richard abruptly leapt out of the way, tripped, and reburied himself. He began to howl. Etana continued as if nothing had happened.
“When My Liege fell against the shelf, he was enraged because he was in so much pain, therefore he accused Rafen of fighting like a Tarhian.”
“What did I see when I came in?” Jacob asked, eyeing Etana.
“You saw…” Etana began uncertainly. Jacob finished for her.
“Something I trust I will not see again,” he stated firmly, his hand moving to Rafen’s shoulder to restrain him.
Having crawled out of the mess of scabbards and cloths again, Richard paused his howling, because no one was paying attention to him. Rafen desperately hoped Jacob wouldn’t notice Richard’s smoking sleeve. That, surely, could not be put down to a ‘practice duel’.
“I trust your swords were blunt,” Jacob said suspiciously.
“They were indeed,” Etana said as if she were commenting on the weather.
Jacob stared at Rafen. “Then I will not hear such a scandalous outburst again?”
“It won’t happen again, sir,” Rafen said.
Narrowing his eyes, Jacob turned smartly on his heel and strode out the far end of the armory. Richard leaned against the wall, wiping his bleeding nose with his sleeve.
“I’ll kill you,” he said darkly to Rafen.
Rafen remembered King Albert mentioning the possibility of his execution. This matter simply could not reach the Sartian king’s ears. He backed away, sweating.
“You have forgotten something.” Etana offered him his sword.
Rafen snatched it from her, sheathed it, and made to exit the same way Jacob had, his back still burning from hitting the floor.
“My Liege,” Etana said in her prettiest tone as he left, “I shall bathe your bleeding nose. You are the bravest of men.”
*
Later that day, Etana found Rafen in his bedchamber, reading. At her light footsteps, he sat up on his canopy bed, tossed aside the book, and pulled back the curtain, already guessing who it was.
“Etana, has Richard told anyone?” he asked.
Etana raised an eyebrow, and Rafen was strongly reminded of her mother. She shut the door, pulled a cushioned chair out of the corner of his room, and sat directly before him. Despite his worries, Rafen found himself soaking in all her perfections. It had been so long since they had been together like this.
“You look very nice,” he told her.
“You are going to be in huge trouble if Richard says anything,” she said.
The blood throbbed in Rafen’s ears. “Then he has?”
“No. And I will do my best to stop him, Rafen. I’ve told him he’s braver if he doesn’t say anything. I told him you were only looking for attention. I’ll tell him anything,” she said, even though Rafen was looking mildly indignant, “because I couldn’t stand it if you got killed. I couldn’t stand thinking… that I’d never see you again.”
Rafen liked the sound of her voice. There was something so comforting and familiar about it.
“I want to be with you too,” he had said before he realized it.
Etana’s eyes widened briefly. “Hmm, well. I’m going to tell Father about the duel.”
“What? No, Etana, you can’t,” Rafen said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean to get that angry and—”
“Rafen, I must. You do realize you did kesmal, don’t you? Mother told you, didn’t she, that only Runi, Secrai, and philosophers can do kesmal? Which means you must be some sort of philosopher in the making and that you probably are the Fledgling of the Phoenix.”
Rafen shook his head. “It was an accident. It was—”
“Real kesmal.” Etana reached over and snatched his hand. “Isn’t it exciting?”
“I don’t like excitement,” Rafen said, and this would have been true of all the kinds of excitement he had experienced in Tarhia. At this moment, however, it wasn’t true of the excitement he had when grasping her hand. “What does the Fledgling do?”
“Oh, he fights. He was prophesied to be a leader of the Sianian people, when enemies invade the land and when the royal family is in danger. He’s a kind of guardian, you might say, the servant of the Phoenix. When I tell Father what you did, he will have you trained in kesmal and many other things, like I am, and you’ll be all ready to help us when disaster appears. Doesn’t that sound wonderful?” she finished breathlessly.
Rafen withdrew his hand. His insides had grown cold at the word ‘servant’. Slaves had masters. Talmon had a Master. Rafen would never have another one. And training as mercilessly as Etana did sounded agonizing besides.
“Please don’t tell your father. I’ll get punished. Didn’t you hear what Jacob said?”
“Rafen, I must.”
“Etana,” he said in exasperation. Then he had an idea. “I’ll tell him myself. I’ll tell him everything.”
He had no intention of doing so. She squeezed his hand and murmured, “Oh, Rafen; you are good. I do prefer you to Richard, you know.”
Rafen couldn’t help smiling.
*
Meals at the banquet hall were now even tenser than before. With their noses in the air, King Albert and Richard sat at opposite ends of their accustomed table, so far from each other that they had to shout to converse together. Richard threw deadly glances Rafen’s way and complained loudly about how offensive he was to look at. He also spoke to everyone in general about fencing, dropping nasty hints. Rafen went through each meal in fear of being told on. To make it worse, Annette started attending meals again. She took the opportunity to make Rafen uncomfortable by giving him sideways looks and sitting directly beside him.
Apart from evening meals, Rafen never saw Richard, and he had the feeling Bertilde and Etana had an agreement to keep them away from each other. Though Rafen found it hard to imagine Bertilde in a conspiracy, he couldn’t help suspecting her when she said things like: “I would simply love to go to the gardens today, Rafen, but cousin Richard – I mean, his Runiship – is there, and it’s so much nicer inside, don’t you think?”
Two and a half months crawled by like this. Apparently Richard hadn’t said anything to his father. Rafen supposed he was merely looking for an opportunity to hold the incident over his head. Rafen had not spoken to King Robert about it at all, and Etana had not questioned him because they did not have much opportunity to be together. Richard stole all her leisure time. Rafen had the feeling that Queen Arlene knew, because she was more re
proving than usual. Jacob was absolutely frigid, and spent a month of lessons on ‘the art of self-control’.
Richard and his father were planning to leave after the Festival of Zion, a four-week celebration in the second month of the year. So far, two weeks of this celebration had taken place. The constant incense burning and praying was wearying, and while the processions and speeches were more interesting, Richard dominated many of them. Gazing at the tops of the trees that were visible from where he would stand in the city, Rafen had endured these two weeks through the knowledge that Richard would soon be gone.
Turning the wooden door handle and trudging into his room at nine o’clock one night, Rafen thought with satisfaction that at least he and Bertilde had been able to lose his mysterious spy tonight. They had run through a labyrinth of corridors, retracing their steps, and going in circles. After that, they had headed for his room. Bertilde had bid him goodbye affectionately and made for her own chambers.
His room was cold. On the shelf against the left wall, his book Perils of the Mortal lay open with its pages flapping. The gaping walk-in wardrobe beyond the shelf looked like a dark hole.
A frosty wind swept through the open window at the far end of the room, and the spitting candle left for Rafen on the chest of drawers went out. The maid was supposed to close that window before night. Rafen felt his way past the chest of drawers. To his left, the shape of his huge canopy bed loomed over him. As Rafen groped for the window sill, the door blew shut with a bang.
Leaning out the arched window, Rafen reached for one of the casements swaying in the wind. What he could see of the woods looked so ghostly tonight, and yet Rafen felt once more that magnetic attraction to them.
He couldn’t quite grab the casement. Standing on his right leg, he rested his left knee on the window sill and leaned out farther still.
A cold hand grabbed his right ankle, and another hand shoved him. The shadowed trees in the palace gardens six stories below lurched toward him, spinning crazily. Rafen yelled, retching at the same time as he swung upside down. The hand clasped around his ankle, exactly where his slave number was branded, was the only thing preventing him from splitting his head open on the ground below.
Rafen twisted to look up, gasping while the blood rushed to his head. Roger sneered at him from the window frame. He allowed his fingers to slip a little and Rafen choked, jolting closer to destruction.
“Hello, Rafen,” Roger said in accented Tarhian. “I have a message for you from King Talmon.”
Rafen desperately reached out for the stone wall of the palace. Dizziness and gravity forced his fingers to drop.
“His Grace says you can never be free.”
Bang. Rafen’s door had been flung open.
“Rafen!” Jacob called.
Glancing behind him, Roger let go.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Phoenix
Rafen screamed as he plummeted, the stone walls racing past him. The ground leapt up, and he couldn’t breathe. It was all over, everything, but he didn’t want to die yet. He was turning over in the air – the ground was close now – and suddenly, his hand slammed onto a stone window ledge.
Rafen’s arm jerked in its socket, and he howled with the pain, gripping the ledge. His knees crunched against the stone wall beneath. He could barely see because of his dizziness after hanging upside down. His fingers were slipping. Panting, Rafen slapped his other hand onto the ledge and braced his feet against the stone wall. He tried desperately to pull himself up, but his arms were too weak.
Someone was watching him, maybe even mocking him like the guards in Tarhia had.
Rafen, something whispered in his head. His name had never felt so full of meaning.
Rafen gritted his teeth. The Phoenix Zion hated him. Rafen’s name – his only connection to Zion – was a curse that attracted all kinds of trouble. Still, as his fingers slid even more, he gasped out, “Please! Help me!”
Gold flashed across his vision. In the seconds following the image, Rafen realized he’d seen the shape of a bird. He felt the rush of heat up his arms that accompanied his rare bursts of kesmal. Heaving first one arm, then the other onto the ledge, he flung one leg to safety. He rolled sideways toward the wall, bringing his other leg up.
The ledge was narrow, and he was up against a tall arched window. He sat, swaying unsteadily while he waited for the blood to drain from his head. Bubbles popped before his eyes. He glanced down. He was two stories above the ground. With one hand, Rafen shook the window, trying to pull it open, and found it locked. There wasn’t space to maneuver himself through it anyway.
Rafen held his head in his hands. Why wasn’t this over? He’d thought he was safe… free. His hand shifted to his right ankle, where 237 was branded into the flesh beneath his boot.
How had Roger gotten into the palace? Bertilde had told Rafen that King Robert had protected it better than ever. Unless there was someone within the palace who had betrayed him.
You can never be free.
After all, the great cell was wider than four walls. It was seen in the ghostly spies lingering in the places of freedom, in the sidelong looks strangers gave him; its ceiling was the suspicion in his mind, the memories that wouldn’t die, the smiles that never quite reached his eyes and failed to warm his heart.
Tarhia would always win in the end.
Rafen faced another ledge further along the wall. The large window behind it was thrown open. His palms flat against the casements beside him, Rafen slowly rose and moved to the end of the narrow ledge.
He was going to kill himself trying this, and that would make Talmon very happy. He thought back to the Phoenix he had seen. The blood pounding in his ears, he threw his head back, staring at the star speckled sky.
He was going to die sometime. If Talmon didn’t kill him, the Lashki Mirah would. Or King Albert would. Richard might even do it one day. If his name was going to get him into so much trouble, it was probably better to know the Phoenix it referenced. He was shaking by now. He didn’t want to surrender. He didn’t want to give himself up to another Master.
He clenched his jaw.
“Zion,” he muttered, “if I’m your Fledgling, please protect me. And I…” The darkness was listening intently. He didn’t want to say it. He was crying. “I will be what my name says I am. I will be yours…”
Rafen found he was no longer shaking. The struggle was over. It was like he had died and been reincarnated. The Presence that had been nagging at the edge of his mind had entered and sent up a flare of light.
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Rafen stepped backwards so he would be able to run at least two steps before he jumped. He lunged across the ledge and leapt…
The wind whistled past him. Rafen’s right hand closed on the edge of one of the casements of the open window he’d been aiming for. When it swung to, he flew through the window frame. Releasing the casement, he fell onto carpeted floor, panting.
The indistinct shapes of strange instruments surrounded him. The room, perhaps an orchestral chamber, was deathly quiet.
He moved away from the window, heart pounding.
“Rafen. Rafen, lur uki lii.”
The voice was around and within him. Again, Rafen saw the wall of rock hidden deep within the woods near New Isles.
Rising, he walked toward the door leading from the room. The collection of dreams he’d tried to convince himself he’d never had returned to him in a flash. How often he’d dreamed of the woods since coming to Siana! Yet he hadn’t gone to look for his phoenix feather because he was afraid of the Phoenix.
“Now I will go,” Rafen whispered to Zion.
He moved from the room into a hallway leading to a staircase. Rushing down the steps in breathless excitement, he made it to the landing and swerved into another corridor. The torches on the walls flashed past him, and the red carpet snaked behind. Roger no longer existed.
He sped down another two flights of stairs and fumbled with the bolt of the door
leading to the gardens. Unusually, no guards stood sentry at this spot. The cold air bit into Rafen when he flung open the door and sprinted into the gardens, racing beneath the flat-crowned, spreading trees and over the stone bridge that spanned the small pond.
The castle’s six-story inner wall encircled the gardens. Banquet halls, guest rooms, lounges, kitchens, the throne room, and the courtroom were either within or adjoined to this wall. The outer defense wall surrounded it.
Rafen knew his way. He slipped through an adjacent building with a thatched roof and into the inner wall itself. Stealing through corridor after corridor, hall after hall, he reached a lone door leading into a long courtyard between the inner and outer wall.
Another door was strangely unguarded at the opposite end. It led into a torch lit, tunnel like corridor. Rafen dashed down it, at last reaching another door. He turned the cold metal handle, and it opened.
Darting through, he ran into the open and down a narrow sloping path.
Clouds obscured the three moons, and black swallowed the trees below the path. Rafen’s foot struck a stone. With a cry, he hit the ground and rolled sideways down the pine choked slope, shrubs bristling against his body.
He leapt up, his sense of direction gone.
The wind stirred, and a flurry of gold shot through the sea of leaves around him, weaving in and out of branches and diminishing to a pinprick of light ahead.
Rafen lunged through the foliage after it, the picture of the wall within the woods enticing him. And then he was running furiously through the secret paths of the forest, the flame of feathers whistling through the trees ahead at a tremendous speed. It was timeless. He felt no weariness.
The blur of gold vanished in a thick mesh of branches ahead. Rafen raced through them into a large, smoky clearing surrounded by wispy trees. To the left, a crude stone wall stood behind a few shrubs. One of the three moons had crept out from behind the clouds and threw undulating light on it. Rafen was alone.
Here. He belonged here. The nervous pulses in his body slowed as he breathed deeply. He liked this place.
He walked forward, glimpsing a transparency in the stone wall. A moonbeam sliced through into the cavern beyond. The cave entrance disappeared when he drew closer. Rafen ran his fingers along the wall. His hand slipped through, and he stumbled. Falling into the cave, he was enveloped by deeper darkness than the midnight gloom outside.
Rafen (The Fledgling Account Book 1) Page 19