Chapter Thirty-Nine
Unraveling the Lie
A glimmer shone ahead of him. The Phoenix’s eyes opened on a black world. Rafen saw Him in the water above, His tail extravagantly long. Grasping it with frantic hands, Rafen clenched his teeth as the Phoenix shot upward, bubbles blistering the water around them.
His hands were out, his head was free, then he was gasping, sitting straight up in a bed in some royally furnished chambers. On a wooden, velvet-cushioned chair next to him, Etana was leaning forward, rasping and shaking from her efforts, her eyelashes trapped in teardrops. She snatched her hands back from the bedspread, staring at him disbelievingly.
“Oh Zion,” she whispered. “You are back. You came. We did it.”
His breathing was irregular and jerky, and he held himself tightly, as if every new moment might bring an attack. His body was slick with cold sweat.
The room was filled with a warm golden light. Near the bed was a circle of furniture: settees and one plush but dignified armchair. The wall opposite him had a number of arched windows whose casements were thrown open. Beneath them, short shelves and desks bore innumerable books and quills.
A wisp of white at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He glanced sideways and saw a misty figure with long white hair and a pinched, hungry face. Even as he watched, other elongated forms swirled into sight, peopling the air around him.
He recoiled as their whispers filled his mind.
Smack.
Rafen’s cheek stung where Etana had slapped it. He met her eyes, terrified that she had begun the punishment he undoubtedly deserved. She was staring at him with horror.
“You must not listen to them, Rafen,” she said.
He opened his mouth to reply, and it took several attempts to make his tongue and lips work. “Can you see them?” he asked hoarsely.
“No,” Etana said. “Nor can I hear them. You have gained Spirit Awareness. But I know what you are seeing; I knew you were fighting them the whole time. You must focus on the physical world. Listen to me, not them.”
She was grasping his hands now, her fingers quivering, and Rafen noticed how pale and drawn she looked, her eyes circled in black.
He stared back at her, his heart drumming. His stomach clenched as he struggled to find words. “I know what it means,” he said. “It was real – all of it.”
“Rafen, please don’t,” she sobbed. “You mustn’t. Please.”
He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “You don’t understand,” he hissed. “Francisco… I killed him.”
“It’s a lie.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s true, I know it—”
“IT IS NOT TRUE!” Etana shouted in his face. She gripped his shoulders and shook him. “Don’t you understand? That is what the Lashki would have you believe. He made you see things – terrible things – and you thought you were doing them. It’s all part of the curse, Rafen.”
Feeling like he was going to be sick, Rafen kept looking at his hands. And then, as if in answer to his thoughts, he knew irrevocably that Francisco wasn’t dead. Just as he had known his brother was in trouble when the changeling had caught him, so surely did he know Francisco was alive now. He glanced up in confusion.
“The Lashki put you through the Soul Breaker’s Curse,” Etana said, her weary face alive with compassion. “I researched it; I finally found out what it was. Every curse has a foundation instrument on which it is constructed and its existence is based. That instrument is always the last object the kesmal had contact with before it hit its victim. That was that horrible dagger I destroyed. The Lashki caused his kesmal to rebound off it, so that it would add the strength of the weapon to his own powers. The dagger held the sustaining force of the curse, and when I destroyed it, the curse lifted, but its effects remain.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “The Soul Breaker’s Curse can only be done by someone very powerful with kesmal, and they have to be of superior strength to the person they’re attacking. They construct the curse so that it rebounds off the instrument on which its life is based, and then once it has struck the victim, they enter as a spirit through his mouth. The Lashki is able to do it easier than most, because his body is unusual. Then,” she said, her forehead becoming creased with anguish, “the Curser creates some kind of world or illusion within the victim’s soul, and uses it to break the victim, normally by killing the things that are most important to them, tearing down everything that made sense or was right to him or her.”
It sounded horribly familiar. Rafen could feel the blood draining from his face as she spoke. But he still couldn’t forget his hands, his own hands. He stared at them, mesmerized by their solid reality, by the scarred fifth finger of his left hand, which was missing a part from the mid joint upward.
He held his face, his eyes perfectly dry. A strange, hollow deadness opened up in his chest. Now sitting on the bed, Etana wrapped her arms around him. Her hands were cool and comforting.
“I wasn’t strong enough,” Rafen choked, clutching her thin shoulders.
“I know,” Etana whispered. “Of course you weren’t. The Lashki made you think you were alone. And alone, we are never strong enough.”
As she spoke, he felt her warm necklace against his chest: warm as the Phoenix himself. Something in Rafen’s hem twitched in response to it. He started, pulling away from her.
“What is it?” he said, half to himself, half to her.
“My phoenix heartstring.” She placed a finger on it.
The glow of the single amethyst threaded through it was dull compared to the golden hue of the heartstring. Rafen put a finger to the hem of his clean shirt, above his heart. His phoenix feather was there.
He closed his eyes in silent gratitude. Then he opened them again.
“I thought Zion left me,” he said in a low voice. “But I… think now that I was wrong.”
“The Lashki wanted you to think you were alone,” Etana said.
“Why was it so hard to call on Zion?” Rafen said. “Half the time, I couldn’t even remember he existed.”
Etana looked at him with pleading eyes, and once again Rafen was aware of the barrage of spirits in his vision, their voices brushing his consciousness.
“It was never going to be easy,” she said. “I am sure you will get stronger, as time passes.”
“You mean I’ll get stronger as I keep facing this sort of thing,” Rafen said. “Etana, I’m not doing this again.”
He shook as he said it, still sweeping the room with nervous eyes.
“Of course you’re not,” Etana murmured.
Rafen met her gaze and remembered her diving into the swamp of his nightmare, a brilliant light in a terrible darkness. He was holding her hand gently, half terrified at their proximity.
Zion was in her eyes, he realized. And that was the proof Zion had never left him after all.
“The good news I spoke to you about,” Etana said quietly, staring down at his hand holding hers, “is we won the palace. In fact, we’ve as good as won Siana now that we’ve got the capital.”
*
He couldn’t believe how weak he was. His hands were permanently shaking, and most foods made him nauseous. His still had bruises on the back of his head from the Lashki’s attack, though they had mostly healed in the time he had been unconscious. Gradually, things were coming back to him. When Etana had told him her “good news”, he had found it impossible to understand. Siana? The capital? It all sounded surreal. What was Siana?
He was relearning the world. Etana showed him books, and the letters shifted senselessly before his eyes. The spirits around him were unbearably strong, and it took all his effort to fight them. He was terrified of sleeping, for fear he would descend again. His one comfort was that Etana had told him he had somehow wounded the Lashki during the struggle.
It had been a costly victory. He felt as if some inner wall, some barrier, some shield from around himself
had vanished forever. He was now open to the spirit world. The new vulnerability was both his terror and his obsession.
The first time Sherwin and Francisco visited him when he was awake, Rafen could barely keep from shrinking back in his bed.
“Raf, yeh’re conscious,” Sherwin breathed. His face was covered with scabbed cuts from glass, and his left shoulder was heavily bandaged. “Yer don’ know how worried we were. Etana said yer might never wake again.”
Francisco was staring at him with something between ecstasy and disbelief, his eyes blurred with tears. The bruises all over his face were fainter now.
“I feared you were with Mother,” he whispered.
Rafen couldn’t speak. He looked from one to the other of them, his heart pounding. Etana had told him it wasn’t real, that they weren’t dead, but he kept remembering his bloody hands, remembering the copper rod slicing Sherwin’s head open.
“Please say somethin’,” Sherwin said.
“Hello,” Rafen said, breathing shallowly.
When Francisco surged forward, his arms open, Rafen felt his own voice burst from his lips. “No.”
It was much louder than he had intended. Francisco froze, looking like a gigantic bird.
“Whatever do you mean?” he said in horror, lowering his hands.
“Rafen.” Etana had walked into view with a large volume she was poring over, and Rafen forced himself to focus on her, rather than the spirits that were floating around him, whispering in his head. “Don’t believe the Lashki’s lies,” she said.
Then she walked past Sherwin and gave Francisco a push toward the bed. Francisco looked over his shoulder nervously at Etana. Sherwin’s face had drained of color.
“Blimey,” he said, “’e’s not – yer know… is he?”
“Insane?” Etana said scathingly. “No, Sherwin. He has his wits back unharmed.”
Francisco hesitantly drew near the bed again, his arms open. This time, Rafen allowed the hug, and he found himself returning his brother’s embrace. Despite the fierce hissing of the spirits around him, Rafen focused on what he could feel of the back of his brother’s jacket. While Francisco sobbed on his shoulder, Rafen gritted his teeth to keep from crying. The feeling of having his brother back was like a tidal wave, something between extreme relief and fright overwhelming his senses. He didn’t want to let go.
After they broke apart, Francisco said amid tears, “It is all right, Rafen. Roger is safe too.”
“Roger?” Rafen said.
Etana nodded encouragingly at him, and Rafen searched his mind. His head hurt. Roger, Roger… a general of the Tarhian army. Rafen remembered hurtling toward the ground after being thrown out of a window. The story went further than that. Roger was his father, husband of Elizabeth. Mild revulsion on his tongue, Rafen said, “Where was he?”
Sherwin was still looking at him as if he were the inmate of an asylum.
“He fled from the Hideout when the Lashki attacked,” Francisco said. “He knew a path out somehow. He hid somewhere in the Woods until it was all over. He did not eat much either, because he was afraid to stir from the cave he was hiding in. So he is a little malnourished, but unhurt.”
Though Francisco seemed mildly pleased about this, Rafen found his face flushing as his brother spoke. It was so like Roger.
“He’s a coward,” Rafen said forcefully.
Francisco’s eyes grew wide. “Rafen, he is alive,” he said, as if expecting this to evoke gratitude.
“Whose side is he really on?” Rafen said. A spirit rushed across his vision as he spoke. Without thinking, he threw out an arm to brush it away, and Sherwin started. “When he could have helped – when his wife was dying – he hid in—”
“Rafen, not now,” Etana scolded, coming over to him and laying a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m fine,” he told her sharply.
“You can talk to him about it later,” she said. “Rest a little now, Rafen. The boys will tell you about the battle. Listen closely.”
“Actually,” Sherwin said, “I ’ad been hopin’ to hear about Sirius’ death.”
Rafen twitched. Sirius? He remembered a bald man’s face staring at him from the grass on which he lay, blood dribbling from his mouth. Vomit rose in Rafen’s throat, and he fought it back.
“No,” he said, leaning back hard against the pillows propped up behind him. “Tell me about the battle.”
“’ow come they all call yer the Pirate King now?” Sherwin asked.
“They?”
“The pirates.”
“Did they do it?” Rafen questioned fiercely. “Did they storm the palace? And are they gone now?”
“Yes, Rafen,” Francisco said. “They are gone. They left as soon as the palace was won.”
“We thought they were going to turn against us,” Etana said, her eyes fixed on him. “But they were too scared of the old curses they believe in, and it seems they were scared of you. They left two weeks back, all of them, in their own ships or in the merchants’ vessels.”
“Good,” Rafen said, leaning back. It was exactly what he had wanted.
“Yeah,” Sherwin said emphatically, “the pirates are pretty much the reason we won the palace. That and yer, of course. And then Etana’s grandmother Adelphia turned up and polished the whole thing off. But yer took out the Lashki, not sure if tha’ were intentional—”
“I wanted to hurt him,” Rafen said darkly.
“Well, yeah,” Sherwin said with nervousness. “And, er, the pirates pretty much took out the Tarhians. There were Sianians fighting too, Jacob’s men and Alexander’s, but we didn’t amount to ’alf as much as the pirates.”
Etana settled down on Rafen’s bed and passed him a glass of water from the small three-legged table near him.
“They are, really, the reason we have Siana back,” she said. “They had won Rusem and a number of other towns. Alexander hadn’t lost Parith, but he lost Quidon and a small settlement near it. Once the pirates evacuated those places, they were left entirely under our control. The Lashki did send his Naztwai after them, but he seems to control them by his own mental efforts, which were obviously interrupted when you somehow wounded him. Though the Naztwai did attack the pirates, halfway through the battle they stopped fighting and started jumping around and so on, and the pirates just killed them all. However, the towns and cities in the North are rather devastated. Some of them will have to be rebuilt entirely. Anyway, as for the rest of Siana, now that we have the capital and the lords, and Talmon and the Lashki have abdicated, and Frankston is dead, we—”
“Dead?” Rafen interrupted.
“He was killed in the battle,” Etana said. Some of the color had left her lips. “Anyway, now that all that’s happened, it will be merely a matter of finding the stray Tarhians in the South and rooting them out.”
Her hand found his and squeezed it. Watching the others numbly (and trying to forget the spirits swamping his vision), Rafen couldn’t believe it. Siana was saved. It had happened so suddenly, after over a year of hopelessness.
“I don’ know why yer went to find the Lashki, Raf,” Sherwin said more quietly, his forehead furrowed. “Fer Zion’s sake. Yer didn’t even wait for Alexander’s plannin’. Jacob brought some of the men through the passageway to the palace as a distraction anyway. But yer just left. Anyone would think yer wanted to die or—”
“Sherwin,” Etana said, seeing the look in Rafen’s eye. She met his gaze, holding his hand fearfully tightly. “You mustn’t think that what you did was for nothing,” she said, and gratitude rolled over him as she spoke. “Without you, the Lashki wouldn’t have left at all. Now is not the time to look back and say how we could have done things so much better. We must make the most of the life we have.”
“I’m sorry about the philosopher,” Francisco said, wringing his hands. “I tried so hard to find one, but I was led the wrong way.”
Rafen glanced at Etana, not understanding.
“I needed someone to he
lp me figure out what had happened to you,” Etana said. “Francisco never found anyone, but it was all right in the end. I am a Secra.”
As Secra, Etana was destined to become queen of Siana, aid the legendary leaders known as Runi, and help destroy Nazt someday. Rafen seldom thought of her in these terms, because she was so humble. She voiced exactly what he was thinking:
“I suppose I remember it now and then.”
“Yeh’re brilliant, Etana,” Sherwin said, with half a grin.
Then he looked at their joined hands knowingly, and the grin faded.
Chapter Forty
Siana
Lost Again
An entire month had passed since the Curse, and Rafen grew stronger. But he would never forget. He dreamed in a state of relative alertness, holding himself in a position of constant effort, constant pushing, constant flux, so that he could rise above the terrible suction powers of the spirit world the Lashki had opened him to.
As he grew used to Spirit Awareness, he could stop himself from brushing the images away, and he no longer stared at them until his eyes glazed over, no longer listened to them until the colors around him drained away like water and the world went black. He could tell the difference between them and reality.
Sherwin often still treated him as if he were brain damaged. He would talk extra loudly or wave a hand before Rafen’s eyes to make sure he was looking. Rafen gave him black looks in response.
They had moved him from Etana’s chambers into a set of three rooms the boys now shared. Rafen was becoming strong enough to walk, but he could only be out of bed for about half an hour before he was exhausted.
On his walks, he noticed the Tarhian wall decorations had been torn down in the hallways, though the Sianians had nothing to replace them with. Sianian guards were often posted at the doorways to royal chambers or other important halls. They had no livery, however, and Rafen once mistook one for a pirate. He hadn’t seen the royal family since the victory, but Etana promised him they would visit when he was strong enough. Alexander and Jacob had already visited his chamber. Jacob had been unnecessarily scolding, particularly about Rafen having been in the princess’ bedchambers for so long, and Rafen had almost burst a nerve before the end of their interview. He understood later that Jacob had at last heard properly who Rafen’s parents were. Full-blooded humans, especially children of cowardly traitors like Roger, were not highly regarded in Siana. Alexander had been kinder; blood seemed to matter little to him. He asked few questions, except about Sirius’ death, and kept Rafen thinking about other things.
Servant of the King (The Fledgling Account Book 3) Page 34