Rafen (The Fledgling Account Book 1)

by Y. K. Willemse

  “Feel it?” Etana said. She laughed a light, annoying laugh. “The only thing I feel is a slight breeze coming through the windows.”

  “Quite so,” Queen Arlene said, agreeing with Etana for once. “Rafen, if your kesmal is so unpredictable you cannot even summon it for our lessons, why would you expect us to believe you now?”

  King Robert leaned forward, his eyes filled with compassion. “Listen, Rafen – you will admit that you are naturally of a more, er, jumpy personality, after your years in Tarhia. Perhaps you’re merely worried after returning from the sabbatical. You must bear in mind that very few people have Sight – the ability to sense things before they happen. What you are feeling is, in all likelihood, nothing more than that: a feeling.”

  “I’m the Fledgling,” Rafen said, his face flushing. “And you think I’m bothering you about a feeling?”

  King Robert looked uncomfortable. “Rafen, you mustn’t be nervous. Zion is taking care of us.”

  “Zion wouldn’t want us to be foolish,” Rafen retorted.

  A painful silence fell.

  *

  Arriving at the palace, their carriages were escorted through the front entrance and the underground road leading beneath the outer wall. A large group of armed men in Sianian livery accompanied them through the inner wall’s maze of corridors winding to the throne room. They kept King Robert talking all the while, which wasn’t hard to accomplish. Rafen felt unusually hot. He kept seeing the customary red tapestries on the walls and thinking inexplicably of blood. The palace seemed subdued. Rafen was starting to remember Tarhia clearer than ever. This was how everyone had looked: the maid walking past him with a tea tray wore the look of a startled rodent. The men leading King Robert were obsequious.

  Bertilde had stopped crying, and was too carefree. Rafen’s phoenix feather was becoming uncomfortably warm against his chest.

  “Something’s not right,” he tried to tell Etana for the umpteenth time. If he was the Fledgling, why weren’t they listening to him?

  “For Zion’s sake,” Etana said so loudly that Rafen tried to hush her. “Rafen, that man you told us about in the carriage – Mainte, was that his name? – was probably a simple farmer who bore a stunning likeness to him. There are plenty of men with heads that big.”

  Rafen gave her a black look. He could feel the blood rushing in his ears.

  “Rafen, you mustn’t worry,” Bambi told him, seizing his hand in a bony little grip from behind. “It’s all right, remember?” She impulsively kissed his ear, her green eyes sparkling. “Be a good brother,” she said before releasing him and darting ahead.

  Rafen endeavored to swallow his frustration.

  At last, they arrived at the throne room, and their escort left them. The double doors were flung open for King Robert, and the family filed in behind him. Rafen loitered near the double doorframe with Etana. Bambi sprung forward, leaping with excitement at the sight of the old red and white checked floor, and the large wall with tall, skinny windows looking out onto the lush gardens.

  “And where is my brother?” King Robert exclaimed.

  A thin figure with a smooth, pebble-like head turned to face them from beside the large oak throne.

  Frankston’s face was pale white, with a prominent nose sprouting a few black hairs. Even though he was younger than King Robert, his balding head boasted a mere crown of grayish-brown hair. The exposed skin was shiny, as if it had been polished. Frankston’s large eyes were deep brown, like a dog’s. Wearing a horrible purple-colored tunic that reached his knees, he approached them on exaggeratedly long legs.

  “Ah, Robert,” he said in an oily voice. “How wonderful to see you. How I’ve missed you. Yes.”

  “Frankston!” King Robert said in delight. He hurried forward and threw his wide arms around his brother. Standing as straight as a poker, Frankston looked like he was enduring torture. King Robert released him and stepped back. Bambi was skipping around their ankles.

  “Uncle Frankston! Uncle Frankston! The greatest Uncle Frankston!” she cried, hugging his legs.

  Queen Arlene closed her eyes in horror at the scene. Rafen imagined she was wishing she were dead.

  The rest of the family had moved forward now to press around Frankston and ask him questions – Rafen followed them through the double doorway slowly, his heart still racing inexplicably. The two guards posted there trailed him, and Rafen kept glancing back at them. Frankston backed away toward the throne at the Selsons’ display of affection.

  “Yes, yes,” Frankston said. “The people behaved, Bambi. Yes. And your steward? An idiot, Robert. Yes. Etana is beautiful? Yes. Your sabbatical refreshed you? It did. Excellent. Excellent you have returned.”

  They were by the throne, and Rafen watched with dread when Frankston raised his head as if he had heard a call no one else had. The family paused, his manner arresting their attention.

  “I would like to introduce you to an important acquaintance I made in the last two years,” Frankston said. “The one who was really protecting the throne in your absence. Robert.”

  King Robert’s face folded into lines of confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s time you met the real king of Siana,” Frankston hissed, his eyes widening with anticipation.

  Rafen’s phoenix feather seared so violently that it burned his skin through the hem of his shirt. At the same moment, the guards seized him and tossed him toward the double doorframe.

  chapter two

  Wolves

  A cold wave rolled through the throne room, sweeping away the heavy summer warmth in an instant. Rafen landed on the floor with a thump, and he leapt up, shouting. Directly before him now, the guards shoved him fully out of the throne room, running out themselves. The doors slammed, and the lock within them clicked in a way Rafen instinctively associated with kesmal. He was trapped in the hall, weaponless. He vaguely remembered letting Bambi use his sword as a toy earlier in the morning, before they had disembarked from the ship. In horror, he heard someone shout exactly what he was thinking:

  “NO! BAMBI!”

  King Robert’s voice was almost unrecognizable.

  “Frankston, do something! Why are you just standing there?”

  Something crackling whipped through the air within. Rafen threw himself against the doors, rattling the curving handles that wouldn’t give, trying desperately to do kesmal with his cold arm.

  “LET ME IN! LET ME IN!” he screamed.

  The guards were muttering on either side of him. Rafen remembered there was a side door on the right wall of the throne room. He darted down the corridor, and an indignant shout from the guards pursued him around the corner. Then the Lashki’s throaty laugh rose above the din in the throne room, and there was a horrible, inhuman shriek. In another few moments, Rafen was at the side door. He kicked the guard there hard in the diaphragm, and the man tumbled to the floor, his head crashing against a wooden chest. Rafen seized the handle and rattled it.

  Locked too. Rafen tensed the muscles of his left arm, attempting to create a flame. His blood was icy. He ripped the concussed guard’s sword from his sheath and raised it above the keyhole, trying to unlock the doors in the same way he had unlocked his father’s bedchamber a year ago. Faced with the same result as before, he dashed the sword against the handles. They didn’t give. Through the keyhole, he glimpsed movement. He thrust his face against it, shaking the handles with his free hand.

  “ROBERT!” Queen Arlene shrieked.

  A blast of kesmal. With a heavy thud, King Robert fell face down from a height, a mess of flame-colored hair over his face. Then he was still.

  Making an inarticulate noise, Rafen flexed and flexed his arm.

  A dripping gray hand reached down and tore the thin gold circlet from King Robert’s head.

  “I am king!” the Lashki roared from within, placing it on top of his head and towering over the prone figure. His moth-eaten brown robe, rotting gray face, black eyes, and lank black dreadlocks were g
iven a strange glow in the blinding blue light emanating from the long copper rod.

  “NO!” Etana howled, and she rushed into Rafen’s limited field of vision. The Lashki swept down his rod. A snake of blue kesmal snapped through the air and tightened itself in a noose around her neck, choking her. A yell tearing his throat, Rafen banged his head against the door so hard that sparks danced around him.

  Hands closed on his shoulders. The two long-limbed guards from the first doorframe started dragging him away, and Rafen threw himself forward against their weight, writhing and lashing out with his sword. Another blade knocked it from his hand. Someone struck him across the face.

  “LET ME GO!” he bellowed.

  “—to His Grace!” one of them shouted in Tarhian over top of Rafen as they pulled him down the hall.

  “Stop,” someone said from behind.

  The guards whirled around, still clutching Rafen, who was fighting to pull away. Before him stood a tall figure with a stony, sculpted face framed by dusty brown hair. King Talmon of Tarhia stared at him with narrowed eyes.

  Rafen froze. The noise within the throne room was now a series of crashes, followed occasionally by a scream. His heart thundered; he tried to speak, but his voice was choked and unintelligible. Sweat poured down his face. Memories of Talmon’s pistol and the whip with the metal barb returned to Rafen, and the adrenaline rushed through his veins.

  Near the wooden chest, the guard behind Talmon had risen, looking confused.

  “Francisco, you should not be here,” Talmon said in Tarhian. “I told you Master was in this part of the palace. You didn’t believe me? Let go of him.”

  The guards released Rafen, who reeled, as if drawn by a powerful magnet, back to the closed door. Talmon grabbed his collar and shoved him to his right down the hall.

  “What do you think you are doing?” he hissed.

  Rafen stared at him. If Talmon was here, then the palace would be full of Tarhians. He needed help. He needed Alexander.

  Rafen seized his sword and bolted, vaguely aware of the king shouting, “Francisco! Come back this moment!”

  Everything was a blur. Nothing mattered except the pounding of his feet. Guards kept making way for him, addressing him as “Your Grace”. Rafen didn’t care. The next fifteen minutes passed unheeded as he flew through the inner wall and gained the courtyard he had passed through a year ago, the night he had received the phoenix feather. It was when he reached the door leading to the corridor that ran through the outer wall that the Tarhians tried stopping him. The first two only questioned him, and merely looked shocked when Rafen rushed through the door and left them behind. However, when he threw open the last door at the end of the corridor, a group of three seized him immediately.

  “Your Grace is not to—”

  Rafen kicked the first man between the legs. Amid the confusion, he seized a handful of dirt and threw it into the second guard’s eyes. None of them were drawing weapons. When the third made to restrain him, Rafen hit him in the diaphragm with the flat of his sword and threw himself down the slope next to the inclining path he was on. He rolled down the grasses and leapt up to hurtle into the trees.

  Accusing voices filled his head:

  You didn’t help. You didn’t do kesmal. You aren’t the Fledgling. You said to Alexander you’d give everything.

  He pounded through the greenery, the Tarhian guards’ footfalls diminishing behind. He was going to follow the belt of trees for a bit, and then break out and find the path to the Harbor, where he would search for Alexander –

  And then there was blue kesmal amid the trees, screening off gaps in the shrubbery and closing in around him. Rafen bit back a scream. He hadn’t even felt the air turn cold. Somehow the Lashki had come right after him.

  He stopped abruptly, trying to charge his sword with kesmal, even though hopelessness was swirling around within him. Perhaps if he attacked the Lashki now, this would all be over in a day. If only his flames would return to him! He banged the sword against the ground and tried again, focusing his energies on his left arm. Nothing.

  The rapid tattoo of the Lashki’s feet was gaining. Shouts rang out around, and more kesmal filled the Woods with garish colors.

  Rafen held his phoenix feather in its button hem with one hand and clenched the sword hilt with the other. Any moment now…

  Nothing was happening. He was going to get killed.

  He began to run, furious at himself. To the right of a basswood, a sliver of space in the ground forced itself into his bewildered vision. He flung himself toward it, crashed to hands and knees, and forced himself sideways into the tiny aperture amid the tree roots. Dim pictures of the Tarhian mines flickered in his mind: crawling through tight, narrow tunnels to find coal; Torius forcing him into a crack in the wall of a pitch black tunnel…

  He was lying in the low, flat opening, and the world abruptly looked distant as the darkness waited to consume him. Another wave of blue roared through the trees, and the ground shook. Rafen squirmed desperately to see if he could go in further – and then the earth lip beneath him vanished, and he was falling. His sword clattered from his hand.

  It felt like an hour, but it was really only seconds. His head hit something unrelenting, and then everything was gone.

  *

  He hadn’t lost them. Surely he hadn’t.

  And yet, the caressing breeze and the pale light filtering through the thickly-grown trees were all too calm for his liking. It said nothing of a flight for life. He couldn’t spy any footprints either.

  Though it was impossible, they had done it. The explosions and streamers and rings of kesmal had confused him, and he had followed the wrong group into the depths of the forest.

  Raising the copper rod and gripping it with both moist hands, Alakil thought that it was just like Alexander. Alexander was a fool, and less than a dog. Yet he had the sense that Robert Selson had never had. First he had commanded contingents of philosophers from Robert’s fleet to enter the palace one at a time, each five minutes apart, thus confusing the guards by creating a gradual threat. Then he had left a fourth group outside the castle. Once he had escaped the palace with significantly fewer men, he had split this group into five parties, each with ten philosophers from the Phoenix Wing among them. One of those parties had had his much-desired quarry. Alakil had followed the party with the most powerful kesmal, assuming that Alexander would have wanted it as safe as possible, as he always did. Eight of the philosophers now lay twisted and dead somewhere back in the Woods, and two had escaped. If Alakil found them, he would have their heads.

  He twisted the rod in his hand, his yellow teeth grinding.

  Breathe. Breathe. It had always been his philosophy: calm in the face of trial. The voices of Nazt were whispering to him, soothing him, and he would do whatever it took to succeed.

  He had waited twelve months for this moment, ever since Frankston had handed the throne to him. The first thing he had done after gaining the country was hunt down and destroy his mother. She had hidden from him when he had previously been in Siana, but now every hunting resource was granted to him, and he made use of them. He threw her off the same cliff she had intended to sacrifice him from, and then he had killed many of the elders of his previous Ashurite clans, aiming always to establish the young Ashurites in the place of the detested Sartians and Sianians in government. In his childhood, the Ashurites had thought the elders were of greater worth than the children. That was how Alakil had nearly lost his life. And that was why he put such a great emphasis on the promise of youth.

  However, some old blood was useful, as such people had expertise and understanding of Siana that he could not do without yet. He had made all the old Sianian nobles – any power-wielders – vow fealty to him. Those who didn’t perished in the most deserved way possible. In his spare time, of which he did not have much, he had been commanding a battle in southern Zal Ricio ’el Nria from a distance, hoping to perhaps kill the Selsons before they even returned. When t
he battle had gone hopelessly wrong, he had turned his attention to other things. In Sarient, he was trying to infiltrate the guard surrounding King Albert and Richard Patrick. He had not been able to get at them while they had been voyaging back to Sarient, and now he realized anew that it had been foolish to let the heir to the Sianian throne and the Fourth Runi (the only one who could theoretically stop him) get away. So far, he had made some headway with a man called Marcius.

  Yet all those little projects of his had entirely slipped his mind the moment he had heard the Selsons were almost ready to drop anchor. And now he had been thwarted once more.

  Still… the truly great persevered.

  Taking another slow breath, he allowed his mouth to hang slightly open as he tasted the air. He felt the body he had created for himself, after his first and only death, revive. The sinewy and dripping muscles relaxed and then poised, ready for what was to come.

  He was both Alakil and the Lashki Mirah: the keen, ambitious youth and the wiser, more powerful and ruthless elder. Together, they would win. He would not let this stop him from declaring himself king of Siana. Robert the coward (soon to be dead) did not deserve the title, and the Lashki did not want the people to believe there was hope.

  He narrowed his black eyes and moved swiftly into the trees, first sloping, then running at the unnaturally fast tattoo he had had since he was a child, the run that outstripped any creature in Siana. The slight corrections he made to his course were lightning. He zigzagged through the trees, leapt over logs, and shot through the leaves so fast that it was as if he merely materialized from one side of them to the other.

  Nazt was crescendoing in his skin, his heart, his mind; the exultation was dizzying.

  They could not have gone far.

  RAFEN! RAFEN!

  He froze, pulling into the eerie halt that came without any loss of balance or breath. The rod jumped in his grip, almost uncontrollable. He tightened his grasp, and it bucked harder. The chanting from within it – the chanting that was his life, that was louder than any birdsong of the woods, any blizzard of the mountains, any trumpet and clamor of the battlefield – was frenzied. His eyes dilated.