Haven (War of the Princes)

by A. R. Ivanovich

  HAVEN

  WAR OF THE PRINCES: BOOK ONE

  A. R. Ivanovich

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  DRAGOON

  Copyright © 2011 by A. R. Ivanovich.

  Cover art by A. R. Ivanovich.

  Editing by Michelle Ivanovich.

  All rights reserved.

  Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher and author.

  To the inspiration of this book, Nani, who has always been more of a sister than a cousin.

  Chapter 1: A Crossroads

  I’m not exactly sure what makes people decide to follow through with the wildest, most unthinkably reckless thing they could possibly do. I am sure that at some point in everyone’s life, they reach a bridge. On one side lie safety, familiarity and comfort, and on the opposite, you find curiosity and excitement, served with ridiculously large portions of mortal danger. A sane person might look across that bridge, consider the other side and perhaps even be tempted by it, but walk away with the knowledge that keeping their skin was better than sating an irrational craving that led to no reward but survival itself.

  I wasn’t sane… I was seventeen.

  I suppose you don’t always need a reason to do something stupid. Living in a border town as simple and quiet as Rivermarch certainly didn’t help.

  I’d explored the entire village of stacked river-side houses by the age of six, built miniature fortresses in each of the outlying pine forests by age ten, pranked all of the five watermills with generous quantities of soaps and dyes by thirteen, and stole away to the quaint capital city of Pinebrook (which was impressive for two whole days) by fifteen. There were only so many lectures my forgiving parents were willing to dish out before they didn’t care about my recklessness anymore. That’s because, let’s face it, there was never anything to worry about in all of Haven Valley.

  Aside from the occasional wrestling match between boys and the belligerent outbursts of bawdy drunkards at the local bar, there was not so much as a whisper of crime. Weaponless peace officers sat at vine covered park benches and played cards. Judges paid personal visits to the tall duplex cottages to clear up marital squabbles and disagreements between neighbors. Stores were stocked, economies were balanced, taxes were fair, weather was good, doctoring was free, and nothing ever changed.

  Like any normal girl, I went to school, got good grades in the subjects I liked and trudged through the ones I didn’t.

  It was easy to become distracted at Rivermarch School. There were big, bright windows in every classroom. They brimmed with daylight, either facing the pine trees and lazy rivers, or Rivermarch Town. There was a soothing ambiance to the whisper of the trees, the murmur of the rivers, the clatter of hooves and carriage wheels on the cobble streets, and the tapping of sparrows on vine covered windowsills. It was enough to set anyone pining to escape the confines of class, or at least fall into a deep sleep.

  Of all my classes, Advanced Valley History was the last place I thought my attention would be piqued. At the time, I had no idea that my idle curiosity would set The Wheels of change turning swiftly toward a foolish choice that would change my life forever.

  Chapter 2: The Wheels Turning

  A Descriptive Perception of The Times

  By Katelyn Kestrel

  My world is pretty normal. Busy cities, rustic towns, steam trains; Haven Valley has it all. Technology is pretty standard... cameras, stereos and radio shows. We invented television two hundred years ago and did away with it... turned out all it had to offer was bad news and lame reality shows.

  “A person can only take so much,” my grandpa used to tell me.

  We hung on to the film theaters.

  Mechanical horse-drawn carriages are a big thing too. They've got easy-brakes, shock absorbers, and something else that helps propel The Wheels so that the horses don't have to do as much work... I forgot what it’s called. I fell asleep that day in Shop class.

  I've had a couple dreams that I lived in a place where the buildings were big, boring, reflective cubes, and people drove around in rounded carriage cars that didn't have any horses. We made horseless cars like that in Haven for a while too. It was right around the time we had televisions. We got rid of the cars, but we still have the monuments honoring all the people who were killed by them in accidents. Honestly, they kinda had it coming to them. Horseless cars. It's just plain unsafe.

  Flight technology and flight research is strictly forbidden in the nation of Haven. Officially, they say that the storms surrounding our enormous ring of mountains are too dangerous to trespass. I’m not sure if that’s the only reason. Despite all of our technology, intelligence and capability, no one leaves Haven Valley. Not ever. How boring.

  I frowned at yesterday’s assignment, the paper resting crisply in my hand. We’d only had twenty minutes to write “A Descriptive Perception of the Times” and it turned out that my assessment was “scattered and informal.” What did my teacher expect me to come up with in twenty minutes, a groundbreaking literary masterpiece that would make language professors cry and wet themselves in awe?

  Another note, below that of my mediocre grade, read, “Also, the only thing worse than writing that you’ve fallen asleep in class is having done it in the first place. Dim eyes make a dull mind!”

  I drew a sad face on my paper.

  There was no further discussion on yesterday’s assignment. Our material had leaped from modern time back to the beginning, before the nation of Haven was ever founded.

  My professor Barry Block, had a knack for enthusiasm that was usually wasted on the students. I think he knew he was fighting an against-all-odds battle to keep our attention.

  Pretending I hadn’t completely missed everything he’d said for the past ten minutes was a skill I’d honed over time.

  “Can you just imagine?” he exclaimed as if the thought had inspired him for the very first time. His hands were up in a flourish as he paced the width of the classroom. “There was a catastrophe of such a magnitude that it would force all of our people into the safety of Haven Valley. Something so big, so terrible, that seven hundred years ago, our best and brightest leaders brought us here and destroyed the way out of The Valley. It was a complete evacuation. Absolute separation from the outside world, forever.”

  Beside me, my friend, Ruby Rush stared dully out the window at the slow moving river beside the school. She was an inch or two taller than me, with glasses, and true to her name, her hair was a vibrant red.

  “It’s calling me,” Ruby whispered dreamily.

  “The preparations must have been immense and the causes great, for our forebears to first find this valley, uproot our entire civilization, bring it within the safety of these mountains and then destroy the only way in or out. Just let the implications soak in!” Professor Block said, leaning his thin frame against the chalkboard and scratching his salt-and-pepper goatee. It looked like he was letting “the implications soak in” more than the class was.

  Ruby didn’t bother to smother a yawn.

  I raised my hand.

  “Yes, Miss Kestrel?”

  “We know for sure that that’s how we came to Haven?” I asked with mild but growing interest.

  “Yes, thank you for asking. We have specially pre
served documentation in the capitol, under seal-and-guard. It is six hundred and seventy-five year old evidence of our origins outside Haven Valley, and while it doesn’t illustrate what the outer world was like, it does illustrate a very clear picture that we immigrated to this valley and then fortified it without any intention of returning to wherever we came from,” replied Block with another stroke of his short beard.

  A slight chill overtook me. I had never thought about a world outside Haven Valley. My world was a broad, green lowland surrounded by unfathomably tall, white capped mountains. Geography classes never extended past the foothills.

  When I raised my hand a second time, Professor Block jumped, obviously unaccustomed to the attention.

  He pointed at me and nodded, still looking bewildered.

  “So we don’t know anything about the outside lands?” I persisted.

  Ruby had dropped her head into her arms, staring sideways out the window, and Travis, a boy in front of me, turned sharply and whispered, “Don’t encourage him!”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, we know that there were different temperatures and ecosystems, probably different plant and animal life, depending on the region. That’s logical,” he said, pacing again. “There were large bodies of salty water called oceans. Many descriptions in these texts are aged beyond legibility. But beside that, no, we really don’t know much. Even if we did have better records, it has been seven hundred years. Many things may have changed since our people walked those lands.”

  My hand rose over me again and half of the classroom groaned.

  “Yes Katelyn,” the Professor said smiling patiently.

  “But what could have happened to frighten us away?” I asked knowing full well the beating I was going to get from my classmates as soon as the bell rang.

  “Again, we don’t know,” Professor Block said, sighing into the chair behind his desk. “It could have been a natural disaster, a storm, a flood, perhaps even a war.” Now there were murmurings in the class. They were finally listening. “I know that is an old word, but it’s as possible as any other theory.”

  “How can we not know? It seems like the most important part,” I demanded, wanting to know the end of the story… or the beginning. Whichever it was.

  Professor Block held up his hands to quiet me down, and chuckled dryly. “I’m happy to see that at least one of my students has a functioning pulse, but I’m afraid that’s all the information we have on the matter. It seems to me there might be a place for you as an Archives Apprentice at the University someday.”

  I groaned at the mere thought of such a boring job. “If we don’t know anything, why don’t we just go find out?”

  The Professor stopped smiling. “Out of the question. It has never been done. And even if it wasn’t absolutely impossible, which it is, every single bit of writing we have warns us of immense danger. No, there is no leaving Haven Valley. And what sane person would want to?”

  I crossed my arms, flustered. How annoying could his class be? Block had dangled the first bit of interesting history I had ever come across and then offered no real answers or conclusions. It was a complete waste of time. I may as well have been napping on my desk like Ruby.

  “Figures,” I huffed grumpily.

  “And now moving on to more important things,” Professor Block said with renewed vigor. “The first settling of Rivermarch! How lucky are we to live in one of the first villages constructed?”

  The classroom groaned together. We all knew the basic history of our hometown. I had a feeling Block’s rendition would take us to those agonizingly monotonous times.

  The bell rang before I could fall asleep. My frustration dissolved any real relaxation I could have achieved anyway.

  “Read up on ‘The Founding of Rivermarch and Squaretower Mill,’ I’ll be testing you on both before the week is over,” Professor Block called after us as we fled the classroom. I’m sure he thought he had bored me into disinterest. He was wrong.

  I wasn’t going to give up that easily.

  Chapter 3: Sunny, With A Chance Of Rain

  “Finally!” Ruby exhaled as we wended through the busy corridor, avoiding teachers and dodging tossed paper-cranes. “That was the longest day of my life!”

  “You say that every day,” I retorted, loosing my long braid to free my wavy black hair.

  “Well maybe it’s true every day,” she said with a smirk.

  “I can’t believe we don’t know what happened outside Haven,” I grumbled as we followed the other students out of the stone school building. “We have all this technology, but we don’t know what happened out there a few hundred years ago?”

  “Seven hundred. Kat, seriously, who cares?” Ruby said, pushing up her glasses. “Please come back to the here and now where the rest of us live.”

  The warmth of the three o’clock sunlight soaked us as we stepped out of the shade and under the clear blue sky. I sighed. The beauty of the day could always melt away my most frigid moods. The only thing that could have made me happier was rain.

  “Oh, oh no, uh, good-gravity,” Ruby stammered suddenly losing her breath. “Look, Kat, its Sterling. Hey! Stop! Don’t look, stand right there so I can look at him.”

  She pushed me into place, in line with Sterling, so she could ogle him over my shoulder. Ruby emitted a very girly, wistful sigh.

  “He’s sitting against the statue playing guitar. I love it when he plays guitar,” Ruby smiled, flushing.

  My lips pursed involuntarily. “Why don’t you take a picture?” I said in a gently sarcastic way.

  She didn’t get it. “I would but, don’t you think that’d be kind of creepy?” Ruby asked genuinely, never breaking the lock of her eyes on Sterling.

  “Yes, Ru, it would be very creepy,” I agreed and stepped out of the line of fire. She gasped at my leaving her exposed and huddled after me.

  “So why don’t you just tell him he’s hotter than the sun, make out, get married and have loads of babies all over the place?” I said, watching her face grow redder and redder as my rant went on. By the last part, I had reduced her to a wordless fluster and she smacked me with a textbook.

  “Look at him,” Ruby said, pushing her glasses higher on her nose again and sounding quite resigned. “He’s perfect. Everyone knows it. I’m sure he knows it too.”

  She was looking at him again, this time sadly.

  I glanced at him. She was right. He was undeniably gorgeous: tall, broad shouldered, well-muscled, with sandy blond hair. His build would have made him look like a handsome thug, but his quiet demeanor and kind eyes saved him. And then there was the guitar, the one he always played but never sang with. I wasn’t interested in the guy, but it was impossible not to take note of him.

  “Yeah,” I said finally, trying to make her feel better for being too shy to talk to him. “He’s probably a closet jerk. I’m betting he sits in his room and slaps kittens all day.”

  “Kat! Don’t say that!” she exclaimed, hitting me with the textbook again. She was trying to sound outraged but her unwilling laughter betrayed her.

  When we stopped giggling we just sort of stood there under a leafy green tree, looking in his direction and not saying anything. I could tell she really liked the guy. Hopefully, for her sake, something would work out.

  An upside down head with a mop of brown curls suddenly swung down from the tree above us with a garbled roar. Lightning-struck out of her reverie, Ruby screamed in complete terror and dropped all of her books and papers.

  I jumped and then laughed with the chuckling head.

  “Kyle!” Ruby yelled, infuriated. “I’m going to kill you!”

  It was an empty threat. No one killed anyone in Haven Valley. There was something endearing about seeing Ruby so mad though. I laughed harder, so did Kyle.

  He was hanging upside down from a branch in the tree and swung down to land easily on his feet. Kyle was shorter and skinnier than Sterling, with a ready sense of humor with a lopsided grin to ma
tch. The two of them were about as different as guys could get.

  “Hey ladies!” Kyle greeted us cheerfully.

  “Hey,” I grinned. “You got us. It was fair.”

  Ruby’s attention was gone again. Sterling had looked over when she screamed and now she was stuck, frozen like a frightened rabbit. She could have said something, waved, laughed at herself, anything- but she just stood there painfully still. It was awkward.

  Picking up her stuff, I set off, with Kyle helpfully following my lead. Looping one of my arms around hers, I pulled her into motion across the landscaped lawn.

  When we walked by Sterling, he was still looking at us with mild, passing curiosity.

  “Hi Sterling,” I said with a light smile, and waved at him with Ruby’s limp hand. When she realized what I’d done, she yanked her arm away and blushed furiously.

  Once we were out of earshot I chuckled again. “Jeez… Ru, it’s not like you haven’t had a boyfriend before.”

  “That was different. Travis was human… Sterling is ethereal,” she half whispered.

  Kyle was lolling his head backward making gagging sounds and rolling the whites of his eyes. Something had to be done or she’d scare him off. I liked Kyle, he was my friend too.

  “You’re right. Sterling wasn’t born, he was constructed… with silk, cotton-candy and the tears of baby angels,” I said, making Kyle chuckle and Ruby smile. Mission accomplished: Three cheers for Katelyn, the Destroyer-of-Awkward-Situations!

  “Speaking of… well never mind, this is a completely different subject,” Kyle said, looking more serious than I’d seen him in a while. “I was looking for you guys, because, oh man, you’re not going to like this.”

  “What is it?” Ruby and I echoed each other.

  “Calvin,” he said and trailed off.

  My heart thrummed to a stop. “What about Calvin?”