The Heir of Ariad

by Niki Florica

  “He nearly killed you, Kyrian, nearly killed Elyis. I shall speak in your defence. Now, run!”

  Something shattered in his chest, in his skull, in the marrow of his bones.

  Blind with adrenaline, Kyrian ran.

  Through the dissipating crowds of Rosghel’s dusk, over the cloudy avenues and through the pale alleyways that only a child street-fighter could master he sprinted, elbowing his way through the throngs and ignoring the disapproving gazes that followed him. There were bruises on his throat and blood on his knuckles. They had seen it all before.

  He pounded over the streets, past the market square, the long-abandoned grain mill, and the old, nostalgic metal forge where his father had once built a soot-coated legacy, until the main thoroughfare of Rosghel was far behind him, replaced by the rolling cloudscape of the outer regions. Every step of this path was familiar as the beat of his own heart, and blindly he ran in the deepening dusk until Melkian’s manor came into view. Heart pumping wildly, his mind a racing blur, Kyrian leaped the front stair, blasted through the door, and bolted it behind him. The white corridor was lit by a lone blue flame, flickering on the ivory stair that rose in twin curves to the east and west wings.

  Breathing like a madman Kyrian collapsed to the ground, leaned his head against the door, and shouted hoarsely for his sister.

  Four

  Now when Pharaoh heard this thing, he sought to slay Moses.

  -Exodus 2:15A

  Word spread like wildfire. Mothers gathered their children into blue-lit homes, husbands hastened to join them, reckless youths darted to and from the alleyways, bringing news from the watchtower and the Silver Guard. Red flames blazed from the direction of the tower, along with voices—raucous, crude, and cursing as only the warriors of the Storm Realm could.

  Swine.

  Alya saw all from her post at the cookery window, and she was disgusted. She watched, scowling, as the red flames neared, listened to the thunder of footfalls until the procession came into view. Greys, holding torches high, marching behind the silhouette of their broad-shouldered leader, the tall, stone-cold warrior lord who had not walked Rosghel’s streets in decades.

  And at Thunderfoot’s side—the captain himself.

  She had always said it. Kyrian had been a menace from the beginning and she had chided that fool Melkian a thousand times upon his methods of upbringing. He was not a father, had never been a father, but had insisted upon clinging to those children and depriving them of proper discipline. Why? For Brondro Tarmilis, of all creatures. Fine. Captain Melkian had been the friend of a traitor, and now he was destined to be the father of one. He should have listened to her. Alya had known from the day of that wretched child’s first bloody victory that Kyrian son of Brondro was aimed for the gallows. A traitor’s son, destined for treachery. Nothing could rid that youth of Brondro Tarmilis’ blood in his veins, and it had simply been a matter of time.

  Melkian was white as death, jaw visibly taut through the filthy glass of the cookery window. Alya smiled in dark satisfaction. She did not savour executions, but this one was certain to be gratifying. She was, after all, a Skyad of sense, and every Skyad of sense had known the truth from the beginning. Melkian had been a fool to ignore it, and now, too late, he would see the light.

  A traitor’s blood was a traitor’s blood. It had always been simply a matter of time.

  Etta stood in her doorway on the main thoroughfare, one arm draped over her daughter’s shoulders as they watched the procession in silence. Her heart ached for Melkian, for the pain in his grey eyes as he marched, jaw taut, leading the search, as was the captain’s duty.

  She had never wished to believe her fellow Silvers as she had watched young Kyrian of the Rain Realm grow from youth to warrior. Excluding his childhood brawls, he had always seemed a good-hearted child, beneath the reckless fire that had earned him the title of a menace. It saddened her to think of the coming execution. Etta decided she would not attend.

  Her daughter was stiff beneath her arm, flushing fierce scarlet. Her infatuation with the bright-eyed son of Brondro was childishly passionate, and Etta knew she did not believe the claims being whispered of Kyrian in the blue-lit city streets. Oh, for the pure, simple faith of a child . . .

  The Storm regiment marched on, thirsty for blood and a murderer’s justice.

  Etta sighed, guided her daughter into the hall, and closed the door firmly behind them.

  Avel drained a second glass of prohibited ale and slipped the bottle beneath the ledge. The watchtower was abandoned and eerily silent after the departure of the Greys and the few remaining Silvers. He relished the stillness after the chaos, desperate for a moment to think.

  Melkian had sworn an oath to protect Rosghel as captain, and by the Skies he would surely honour it to the end. An unsympathetic Silver had reported that Kyrian had last been seen in a sprint toward the western edge, toward the manor. Melkian’s manor. Thunderfoot had gathered his Greys within heartbeats, and Melkian had been recruited to guide them. He had not refused. How could he refuse?

  Avel cringed and reached for the bottle, then decided against it.

  Melkian would perform his duty as captain, and it would tear his very soul to shreds, but Kyrian would understand. He understood already, or he would not have fled. Avel absently swept a dry cloth along the pockmarked surface of the ledge, then stiffened as his gaze snagged on Kyrian’s sword, still resting on the seat adjacent the one that had been his.

  He reached for the sword and hastily scanned the watchtower, assuring himself that he was truly alone before slipping it beneath the ledge and drawing a shuddering breath. Oh, Kyrian.

  His temples ached and his vision stung. He poured himself a third glass.

  Oh, Skies, Kyrian. Avel cursed to the silence. Skies, Kyrian, what have you done?

  Salienne tucked a half-braided bowstring into her belt as she walked, quickening when he shouted for her again. She could hear the panic in his voice, even from the western wing, and she knew her brother too well to brush it aside. Something had happened. What had he done?

  The moonfire sconces mounted on the corridor wall lit the shadows blue, dancing upon the dusty floor in erratic flickers. Salienne’s boots discarded shreds of cloud onto the tiles as she walked, lingering remnants of their journey from the northern edge. A mild irritation, but wildly satisfying. Melkian despised it when she did not remove her boots in the hall.

  At the western stair she turned and descended two steps to each stride, scanning its twin stairway across the front hall for Kyrian. Nothing. The two stairs joined in one. Salienne paused on the landing, directly parallel to the front door, looked down upon the entrance. And there he was.

  She needed only a fraction of an instant to compile every detail before her eyes. Her brother, sitting against the bolted door with his eyes closed and his elbows resting on propped knees, ten shades paler than he should have been and dripping sweat. When he heard her footfalls on the stair he opened his eyes, and they were wide and shining black and projecting tangible fear directly from his heart to hers. Salienne’s nails bit her palms and she willed herself to descend slowly, in control, for his sake more than her own. Something had happened. What had happened?

  When she asked his eyes closed again. He was shaking. “Kyrian.”

  “They will kill me, Salienne.”

  His voice was even and controlled, despite the ragged fear emanating from him in waves. “What do you mean?” Her tone chilled. “What have you done?”

  He tore a hand through his dark hair and winced. “What do you think I have done?”

  “You expect me to guess?”

  “Trust me,” he replied emptily, dragging white hands over his face, “it will not take long.”

  Salienne’s blood ran cold in her veins. “No.” Oh, Skies, no. “Kyrian, tell me you did not.”

  “I did.”

  “Who?” As if she did not know.

  “A Grey.”

  A Grey. The Grey. He sighe
d and cast her a plaintive glance. She glared skyward. “Why?”

  Kyrian rose, leaning for a moment against the door as if to remember how to stand, then pushed away and paced the length of the hall. “It was Elyis.”

  He explained as he paced, between the stair and the door, dark hair rising and falling with the jostle of his footfalls. Salienne listened in unbroken silence, arms crossed, ears tuned to the details he thought worthy of telling, mind filling the gaps he chose to leave behind. He could hide nothing from her and he knew it, but still, he tried. She could feel his fear, almost as starkly as she could see it. Both hands were in his hair now. He was pacing like a madman.

  Something shivered along her spine at the sight of him like this, broken and afraid and guilty. It was surreal, dreamlike, after so many sleepless nights and tense days of waiting—waiting—for him to return home this way, a fugitive guilty of a greater crime than another fiery street fight. Melkian used to wait with her in the evenings, by a roaring azure moonfire, until Kyrian returned home smiling and bright-eyed and wondering why his sister always seemed so solemn when the world was filled with so many victories to be won. He had always been that way. Reckless and impulsive and driven by emotion. The fire to her ice, Melkian always said. And neither could survive without the other.

  Kyrian cursed himself and kicked the stair. His fear was turning to anger now—a sign that it was real. But when the first red light flickered in the window, his curse of self-loathing died in his throat as panic stabbed at Salienne’s cool exterior, and she felt something fracture when his wild, dark eyes flew to hers. Their thoughts rang in unison. Thunderfoot.

  Images exploded in her mind, laced with something akin to panic, images of Kyrian and Thunderfoot and a host of Silver witnesses, of a rope and a noose and a poisoned arrow and a black, empty hole in Rosghel—in her soul—that her twin brother, her equal, her only friend had once filled. Salienne could not breathe.

  Rosghel would look to her, seeking her reaction, a test of her loyalty. If she wished to protect her place among her people she would lie, deceive them, deceive herself. Say she was ashamed to be kin to a cold-blooded murderer. Agree with all the others. Confess that she had predicted it from the first. Watch him hang. Watch him die. Watch the Storm Lord fire the venom-tipped arrow. Listen for the impact of the metal barb in his chest. See his blood, his mixed blood, stain the cloud scarlet. And lie. Lie, lie, lie. Until death claimed her as well.

  The fire flickered brighter in the window, red torchlight dancing over the cloudscape. Kyrian’s jaw clenched until divots appeared in the taut skin beneath his cheekbones. Salienne was numb.

  “I will forgive you,” he whispered suddenly, avoiding her eyes, “if you do not watch.”

  She gazed at him, bewildered. Until she understood.

  If she did not watch the trial. If she did not watch the execution. If she chose to stay away.

  Something snapped in her chest and she felt herself move, toward the door, toward the great glass window glowing red with distant torchlight. She grasped the shutters and slammed them closed so violently the walls trembled with the impact. Her hands were bloodless. “No,” she hissed, to herself, to him. “I will not watch, because you will not die. The torches are reflecting. They are yet far away. We have time.”

  He stared at her. “Time for what? It is over, Salienne.”

  “No.” She secured the shutters, tightened the bolt on the door. “When Thunderfoot arrives, you shall be far from here. You must run, Kyrian. You must be far from Rosghel come dawn.”

  He folded his arms over his chest, white and terrified but still defiant. Still Kyrian. “Where, Salienne? The outskirts? He will find me, if I do not first die of thirst.”

  “Not the outskirts.” She met his glare and sharpened her own. “The Green Lands.”

  His hands fell to his sides.

  “Thunderfoot will scour the Skies but he will not waste his forces upon an earthbound search. There are greater concerns upon his shoulders, Kyrian—the alliance, the Storm Realm, Tasnil . . . Only in the Lands may you escape him.”

  Kyrian hesitated, ebony eyes darting first to the shutters beyond which red torches glowed, then to the entrance beneath the main stair, used only by the servants Melkian did not have. She had used it as a child to escape her guardian in occasional bouts of rebellion, into the cloudy hills to fire arrows over the edge and watch the Green Lands swallow them below. It seemed foolish now. Melkian would not have cared. Had she told him, he would likely have sent her to the edge with a stocked quiver and his own distracted blessing, perhaps even one of his gilt arrows to fire into the Skies. His parenting had always been experimental at best.

  Kyrian reached for his belt, scowling when he realized that his sword no longer hung there, likely left beneath the ledge in the watchtower. Salienne crouched to pull the knife from her boot and withheld it to him, hilt first. He hesitated for a fraction of a heartbeat, then accepted it and slipped it, jaw clenched, into his belt. The distant thunder of footfalls ebbed on the edge of her consciousness but she chose to ignore it, watching as he unlatched the servant’s entrance upon the north wall and allowed it to swing wide, revealing a starlit twilight—pale, cold, and silent.

  There was no time for ceremony. There was a knife in his belt and a sky-cloak upon his shoulders, protection enough from the common Grey, if useless in defence against the Storm Lord. She decided it was enough. It needed to be enough. He hesitated on the threshold, a shadow of deep black against the dusky blue twilight. Salienne crossed her arms and exhaled, clinging to a warrior’s detachment, a warrior’s cunning.

  When he turned his eyes were bright again, and she could see in the light of the manor the dark, blossomed bruises upon his throat, the mark of the dead. The footfalls of a Grey regiment were growing steadily in the distance, and she resisted the urge to scold him onward. The warrior’s heart within her chest, the heart that despised weakness, killed sentiment and buried grief, commanded her to urge him away, close the door, and bolt it behind him.

  But he was her brother.

  His surprise washed over her in a wave but she ignored it as she crossed the hall, forced him to face her, and enveloped him in a last embrace, cold, hard, and defiant. A breath and his arms were tight around her—higher, for he had been the taller of them since their tenth winter. She despised her own weakness but still vowed to memorize him—from the strength in his embrace to the ardour in his voice as he whispered, “I am sorry, Salienne.”

  She offered no response, and knew he did not expect one. The thunder rumbled nearer. Clenching her jaw and burying her pain, she stepped away and shoved him over the threshold, one hand reaching for the door, the other clenching and unclenching in a tight, white fist. Kyrian’s eyes gleamed and he almost smiled as he stood upon the cloud in the starlight, dark hair whipping in the wind, Rosghel insignia glowing silver upon his chest. One ebony eye shone duller than the other, a single relic of his childhood battles, of the one fight that had almost killed him, the one fight Salienne could never allow herself to remember. Before he turned away he hesitated, sobering, and she saw the words in his eyes even before he whispered, “Tell him I am sorry.”

  She frowned.

  “Tell him I am thankful for all he has done, and . . .” He hesitated, sighed, ran a hand through his hair. The thunder rolled nearer. “And tell him that I love him. Please.”

  Salienne hesitated, then tersely nodded. For him.

  “Forgive him, Salienne.”

  She frowned and he sighed, conceding, before drawing his sky-cloak over his head and crouching to melt into the shadows of the cloud with a final, meaningful glance. He nodded, she nodded, and the door closed. She watched her fingers draw the latch. The thunder rolled nearer. Salienne stood with her forehead pressed to the door for many long moments, burying emotion deep, deep beneath the detachment, beneath the lie. She would never see her brother again. There was no sense in aching for him. He would be alive. Warriors knew greater loss. She would
not be weak.

  She was cold as ice and empty as a shell when she heard the Storm Lord’s voice rise above the rumble of the marching Greys. She felt nothing. She was a fortress of diamond and ice.

  Thunderfoot shouted a challenge from beyond the manor walls and Salienne wanly smiled.

  She was a fortress of diamond and ice.

  And she was a deadly liar.

  Had Rosghel thought to look westward it would have seen a starlit cloudscape, pale and blue in the light of the heavens. It would have heard the whisper of the cold night wind and the murmur of the drifting clouds, and perhaps, had it thought to listen, the footfalls of a shadow in the gloom.

  The shadow that Rosghel could not see ran low to the luminescent cloud, a borrowed knife in his belt and a sky-cloak heavy upon his shoulders. His destination was sure, his footfalls swift, and the eyes peering out from beneath his cloak were fixed upon a blue-lit tower upon Rosghel’s southernmost edge. The skyladder was guarded sparingly this night, the Silvers gathering elsewhere in anticipation of a coming execution.

  One with the cloud he halted upon the edge and gazed down the white stair, the bridge binding Skies to Lands, the moonlit steps that had once borne his father and the Sword of Kings into disappearance. He paused, hesitating, upon the very cloud where Jas of Rosghel had kissed her husband for the last time, and Tarmilis had become the name to accompany Brondro’s in legacy. Traitor.

  Somewhere behind his back, red torches flared, accompanied by the roar of a Storm Lord and his entourage of bloodthirsty followers, and somewhere behind his back, Salienne bore each attack like the icy, impenetrable fortress that she was. For the first time, he considered all that he had lost for his choice. All the invisible ways in which his deed had changed his fate.

  Torches blazed; the wind hissed. Somewhere in Rosghel, a grey noose swayed in expectation.

  Kyrian stepped from the Rosghel Cloud and shifted from murderer to fugitive.