Sirens of Faldion: The Final Bond

by Anya Merchant

  Terrion was already stomping his way over. Kai looked up to see the man’s face, a twisted mask of fury, rage, and hot hatred. He was prepared for physical blows, his muscles already tensing up as Terrion came within range, but none came. Instead, the slavemaster raised his finger and pointed it at him, his finger shaking slightly from his anger.

  “Get down there and find the bodies,” he said. “Just you. Take the clothes and anything else they have on them and bring it all back up.”

  “Yes, master,” Kai managed.

  “You’ll receive your punishment once you see what actually happened to them,” said Terrion, his voice dripping with contempt. “And don’t even think about making a break for it. Some of my guards have bound birds circling overhead, watching for anyone stupid enough to try it.”

  Kai nodded, and Terrion walked away from him. He glanced at the other nearby slaves, but they wouldn’t meet his eye. A few of them seemed angry, not at Terrion, but at him. He could understand that. The three slaves had been coworkers and friends, and he’d failed at saving them in the end.

  He lingered for a moment, scanning the camp again for any sign of Selene and finding nothing. Kai knew that it meant that she was probably inside Terrion’s hut, suffering whatever he chose to inflict on her within. He felt his teeth grit together so tight that it was painful and started downriver, toward the waterfall, knowing that his own insubordination would do Selene no favors.

  The waterfall was massive, far larger than what it looked like from an overhead perspective. The grasslands were split by several high cliffs, each several dozen manspan high, jagged and rocky and sudden, as though the land had decided to break and slide out of alignment in a single moment. The cliffs went on in either direction for a couple of miles, dropping off in places, rising up in others.

  At the bottom of it, the waterfall fed into a medium sized lake about a mile or two across. It looked as though the river, along with several smaller streams and runoff water, fed into it. Kai couldn’t see any outlets on the other side, but that wasn’t unusual, and knew that it was very possible for it to be draining through underground routes.

  He spent a couple of minutes finding a path down on the riverbank, staying a few dozen feet clear of the tremendous force of the waterfall’s stream. A rainbow, probably a near permanent fixture of the landscape on sunny days, cut through the mist at the point where the bulk of the water met the lake.

  Kai climbed down another few sections of cliff, stepping from boulder to boulder where he could, allowing himself to dangle and fall to the next section when he couldn’t. He’d have to find another way up afterward, but that was a problem for later, not now.

  It took him a solid half hour to make it down to the bottom. The land surrounding the lake was fertile and primed for agriculture. Kai wondered why Terrion bothered trying to dam the river above, instead of just setting up operation near the lake. He figured it probably had something to do with the land Terrion already owned, or maybe his intrinsic cruelty made it impossible to resist torturing slaves with dangerous tasks.

  The only thing marring the beautiful scene were the three floating lumps scattered across the surface of the lake, each one surrounded by dark crimson clouds spreading outward underneath the water, each one mangled by the rocks to the point of being almost unidentifiable as human. Kai ran a hand through his curly hair and felt a painful lump of emotions form in his chest.

  He sat down on the grass and took several breaths intended to be calming, each one making his body ache over the reality of his new situation. He was no different from them. Someone would fail to save him one day, or he’d fail to save his master. Or worse, he’d fail to save Selene. And that would be the end.

  Something flashed overhead, drawing him out of his dark reverie. Kai turned his head up in time to see the flash come a second time, recognizing it as something he’d seen before. Bright white light, as though reflected by a mirror, sparkling to life for a fraction of a second and leaving a young girl in its place.

  She was in the air, two dozen or so feet above the lake, and immediately began to fall. Kai watched, sure that his eyes were playing tricks on him, or his imagination was running away with him, until the girl hit the water, sending droplets of it splashing out onto the shore and onto his face.

  “What in ripping hell?” muttered Kai. He stood up and took a single step closer to the lake. The girl didn’t come up for air after a moment, and rather than feeling relieved at finding evidence in favor of it being a delusion, Kai felt panicked and worried.

  He ran forward, high stepping through the mud and water of the lake’s shallows, and then tossed himself into a dive. Kai was a decent swimmer. He’d had lessons as a child back in Margellis, back before everything in his young life had fallen apart.

  He reached the approximate spot the girl had gone under after half a minute, an eternity when a person’s life is on the line. Then, Kai dove under the water, pushing thoughts about the blood from before out of his mind and keeping his eyes open to try to see her.

  She was only a few feet under the surface, and her body was still. Kai seized her by the shoulders and kicked his way back up to the surface. He held her tight against his chest and swam backward, trying to keep her face and mouth above the waterline. She didn’t seem to be breathing.

  “Hold on!” said Kai. “Just… hold on!”

  He pulled her onto the shore and laid her flat on her back. She wore a simple white dress that was tattered around the bottom hem. Her hair was blonde, medium length, tangled and wet across her shoulders. She looked to be about the same age as Kai, though it was hard to tell at a glance. And she was dying.

  “No…” muttered Kai. “No, no, no!”

  He couldn’t take another death, another failed opportunity to save a life. Not again, not happening right under his gaze, not when he could do something to stop it.

  Kai remembered seeing a healer back in Margellis save a drowning man once. He leaned forward and put his hands against the girl’s chest, ignoring his body’s own reaction to her nicely sized breasts, and began to push. A small dribble of water escaped the girl’s lips.

  “Please…” muttered Kai, as he continued to push in rhythm. “Don’t die.”

  He leaned forward, again drawing from what the healer had done, and pressed his lips against the girls, exhaling fresh air into her lungs in a desperate attempt to get her breathing again.

  The girl’s lips moved against his. Kai immediately flinched back, but her arms were around him in an instant, holding him to her tight. Bright white light flashed in her eyes, in the air, all around them. Kai felt an odd twisting sensation inside his body, spanning the distance between the ends of his toes and the tips of his ears.

  The moment went on for several seconds and then ended abruptly. Kai pulled back, staring at the girl in muted shock. She was moving now and slowly sat up to look at him.

  “You…” she whispered.

  The girl hurled herself forward and seized Kai by the neck with her hands, her strength far beyond what he would have expected. Her eyes were deep red, the color of thick blood against dark stone, and they locked onto his with an intense, ominous focus.

  CHAPTER 5

  Kai tried to say something, to do anything, in order to let the girl know that he wasn’t the threat that she seemed to think he was. He was just a slave doing a job, and he’d saved her life, as far as he could tell. He wasn’t anyone deserving of anything like death.

  The girl’s hands didn’t slip away, continuing to squeeze against the vulnerable flesh of his neck, pinching his wind pipe. Kai pleaded with his eyes, and he saw something that looked like confusion flash across her face. He made no move to attack her, though it was mostly out of how off guard she’d caught him, rather than any sage appraisal of what would happen between him and her in a fight.

  She let her hands drop from him and took a step back in the direction of the cliff, staggering slightly. Kai coughed and rubbed at the fresh bruises on
his neck, sliding himself back across the grass. His clothes were still soaked from the water, and small droplets fell down to the ground as the afternoon sun closed in on the horizon overhead.

  “Uh…” Kai frowned, unsure of what do or say. “Are you okay?”

  Logically, he knew that the best course of action would be to take off at a sprint. He might be able to make it far enough the cliff to call to the other slaves and Terrion for help. The slavemaster might even have an archer or two that could subdue the girl from a distance, and ensure that Kai lived to see another day of backbreaking work.

  His instincts, however, judged the girl as the farthest thing from a threat. There was something familiar about her, moreso than an old friend or lover, even. It was as though she was a member of his family that he’d come to know well enough to recognize in the dark on a moonless night, or across a crowd in a foreign city.

  He examined her features more closely, blinking in disbelief as his eyes met hers. They were cooling off, shifting in color from the red he’d seen before to pale purple, and then to a dull blue. Kai shook his head, sure that he must be imagining it.

  “Who are you?” asked the girl. “And why… were you doing that?”

  Kai raised an eyebrow, confused by her question. He thought about it for a moment and realized that she must have been referring to her rescue, and the kiss of life.

  “I was trying to help you,” said Kai. “You fell into the lake. It didn’t look like you were managing to swim on your own.”

  He paused, remembering what he’d seen, or at least what he’d thought he’d seen. She’d dropped out of the air itself in a flash of light. And he had seen her before, on the carriage ride in with Selene, he was sure of it.

  Kai saw something out of the corner of his gaze and looked up to see an eagle, one of the bound birds of the slavers back at the river camp, circling overhead. A worrying thought occurred to him, and he looked back down at the girl, and then to the cliffs behind them.

  “Come on,” he said. “We have to get you out of sight, right away.”

  There was a small cave in the wall of the cliff behind them, next to the waterfall and barely big enough to fit the both of them. Kai took the girl’s hand and led her over, somehow knowing that she’d follow him even after how close she’d come to killing him before.

  “I…” The girl spoke again, her voice irritated sounding and very confused. “Who am I?”

  “I have no idea,” said Kai.

  He ducked down to make it through the cave’s entrance and was pleasantly surprised to find that it opened up a bit after that, enough for him to stand and have a bit of space. There were no signs of any animal residents, and he let out a sigh of relief as he settled down to sit against the back wall and rest for a minute.

  “Look, it doesn’t matter,” said Kai. “You need to get out of here. Immediately.”

  The girl gave him an odd look and walked over to where he sat, taking a seat across from him. It looked as though she was about to say something for a moment, but instead, she brought both hands to her temples and let out a small noise of pain.

  “My head…” she muttered. “I… I can’t think.”

  “It’s probably just from the time you spent underwater,” said Kai. “You’ll be okay. But look, this isn’t a safe place for you. There are slavers on top of the cliff behind us, and they won’t hesitate to pick you up if they think they can get away with it.”

  The girl frowned at him.

  “You’re… a slaver?” she asked.

  “I’m a slave,” said Kai, the words coming out with a sharp, bitter edge that he hadn’t intended. “And you’ll be one, too, if you don’t…”

  He trailed off. The sun had dropped low enough for the light to make it into the far reaches of the western facing cave. The girl looked different, and not just in how her eyes had seemed before.

  Her ears were elongated, rising up and back on a diagonal longer than they should have. Kai had never seen a human with ears like that before and there was something else, too. Poking out from the back edge of the girl’s dress, which was still soaking wet and immodest in how it clung to her eye catching curves, was a long, tail like appendage.

  Kai gaped at it in disbelief, flinching slightly as it moved, sliding the girl’s dress further up and seemingly seeking the fresh air as though it had a mind of its own. It was covered in fine blonde hair, the same color as the wet clocks dangling across her shoulders, and extended most of the way down to the bottom of her legs.

  “You… you’re not human?” Kai meant it as a statement, but it came out as a question. The girl looked at him blankly, her eyes shifting into a contemplative silvery violet as she thought about what he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, finally. “I’m not sure, I mean.”

  She rubbed the sides of her head again and Kai felt a surge of empathy on her behalf. She was in a bad situation and didn’t even know it, and he could do little more for her than give her a warning and hope that she could pull herself together in time.

  “You’re… my master,” she said, after several more seconds of silence. “I am sworn to you.”

  Kai scratched at his ear and leaned in a little closer, unsure of whether he’d heard her correctly.

  “What?” he asked.

  The girl stood up. She didn’t smile at him, but there was something uplifted and determined in her expression, as though she’d derived a measure of confidence from her previous statement.

  “Who do you need me to kill first, master?” asked the girl.

  Kai went still. He’d heard her clearly this time, and the way she’d spoken left no room for any doubt in his mind. She would try to kill on his behalf, if he asked her to. All of the pieces fit.

  “You’re a spirit siren,” he said. “That would explain the ears and the tail. And probably the way you appeared out of thin air.”

  The girl shook her head slightly, more out of confusion than descent.

  “I… don’t know,” she whispered.

  “My name is Kai,” he said.

  “Kai…” the girl repeated. “I’ll serve you in any capacity you wish, master.”

  Kai had heard of the spirit sirens before, along with their masters, the Chosen. Ariexa, or the “Metal Queen” as she’d been often referred to in vogue, had been the spirit siren of metal magic and one of the players involved in the Meridian Enslavement that had destroyed Kai’s family and trapped him in his current life.

  “No,” he said, meeting the girl’s ever changing eyes. “I don’t want you to serve me.”

  The girl flinched back slightly. For a flash of a second, she looked righteously offended, like a little girl that had just been rebuked after offering to do extra chores. Her expression shifted to something harder to read almost immediately, however, and even though Kai knew she had no memory of who she was, he felt a bit wary of her intentions.

  “I… don’t think you have a choice in it,” said the girl. “It doesn’t really work like that.”

  “How would you know?” asked Kai. “You said before that you can’t remember anything.”

  The girl shook her head slowly. She looked as though she was thinking, searching for something in her mind to back up her argument.

  “I just do,” said the girl. “I can feel it. And so can you.”

  She smiled and licked her lips. A strange sensation spread through Kai’s chest and stomach. He could feel the connection between them, warm and reassuring, as though her body had been pressed against his. He felt her emotions, the subdued confusion along with inexplicable confidence, underlined by an edge of lust that made him suddenly aware of how exposed she was in the soaking wet, sheer white dress.

  “I’m not your master,” said Kai. “Only the Chosen have power over the spirit sirens. It’s heretical for anyone else to claim something like that.”

  He’d heard of people trying it before, mostly pacters that managed to make a blood bond with a powerful exotic creature, tho
ugh there was at least one myth about a necromancer who also made the attempt.

  The Chosen were handpicked by the One Master, given their spirit sirens as tools to use on his behalf. It was heretical for him to claim or even think that he could somehow be one of them, even by chance or coincidence. Kai wasn’t remotely religious and he still thought so, especially because the idea of it would get him executed if spoken aloud.

  “Kai,” said the girl. “You don’t have to be afraid anymore. But I’ll follow your lead, if you want to keep pretending.”

  From outside the cave, Kai heard the sound of footsteps against stone. He shot the girl a worried look and she met his gaze. Without anything being spoken between them, she blurred into a flash of blinding light and disappeared, sensing his intentions through their bond and acting on them in an instant.

  Kai took a few steps forward, dreading what awaited him outside the cave. Several slavers stood at the edge of the lake, and as soon as one of them saw him, all of them unsheathed their weapons.

  “You little bastard,” said the lead slaver. “Thinking you can just hang out all day and skip working, huh?”

  Kai didn’t say anything. He couldn’t see the girl anywhere nearby, but somehow, knew that she was safe. He bowed his head and let the men take hold of them, his mind racing.

  CHAPTER 6

  It was early evening when Kai and his escort returned to the river camp, with the stars emerging from the sky and Vana, the teal marble moon, half full on the horizon.

  The slavers, in the end, had removed the three bodies from the lake and carried them back up the cliffs. Kai knew this because he saw them, mangled and unrecognizable, laid out across the ground on the way back to the river camp. His stomach twisted as he passed by Yancy and remembered how desperately the man had attempted to cling to life.

  Kai knew that he’d be joining them soon enough. He could feel it in his bones. It wasn’t uncommon for a slave to fail to “take” to a new master, and the standard reaction was for a slavemaster to either trade them as soon as possible or work them to death immediately. Training a slave that had proved to be insubordinate was a waste of time and resources.