by Niki Florica
“I believe I have introduced myself.”
“I do not believe you.” His right eye blurred faithfully. Scowling, he blinked to clear it. He did not have time for this. He did not have patience for this. “You cannot be Rydel of Robinsdwel.”
Another slow blink. The Robin’s sinewy forearms flexed against his chest. “I assure you, there is no other in Robinsdwel by the name.”
Lying. Of course he was lying. He needed to be lying, or this entire night—this weary, aching, sleepless night would be for naught. Kyrian did not need this. He had not sacrificed a night of journeying to engage the guidance of a wraith, and certainly not one whose unmitigated hatred of Skyads was almost as blatant as the unnatural green of his eyes. Skies and moons, where was the one Aradin had promised? Where was the one meant to share the weight of his burden—the burden of Ariad itself?
Surely—surely—this could not be the grandson of Camuel. Not the one he sought.
But it was.
Somehow, he knew. It was.
He sighed, exhaustion churning like nausea in his stomach, and raked a hand through his hair, no longer caring that the Robin’s eyes followed the gesture above a glinting silver blade, no longer caring that he was alone and vulnerable before a creature perfectly willing to kill him. For the first time in three days he gave thought to the fact that he could not remember the last time he had slept. Truly slept. Without fear or guilt or a vain road to travel. For the first time in three days he realized his strength was almost spent, and the true journey, the quest, had not even begun.
“I have not come to challenge you, Robin,” he said at last, one hand buried still in his hair. Even his voice was weary, thin. His right eye blurred again and this time he made no effort to clear it.
The Robin’s head cocked slightly. “Oh? And why, then, have you have come, Skyad, if not to execute the wishes of your precious, tyrant king?”
Kyrian’s hand lowered and he drew a steadying breath, pressing his palm to the rejuvenating warmth of the Sword’s hilt and willing himself to cling to patience, if only for a time. Aradin had brought him here, to this creature, to this moment, to this stunted, moonlit bank. Aradin did not err. Aradin knew all hearts.
And, more relevantly, Kyrian’s present choices were very, very few.
He straightened his spine, met the Robin’s eyes. Willed himself to speak the words.
“Rydel of Robinsdwel,” he said through a scowl, “it seems I am in need of your assistance.”
Eleven
“A guide,” the Robin echoed, after Kyrian had finished, his expression dark with thought. “You are aware, Skyad, that you are travelling in the wrong direction? Rosghel lies to the west.”
“I know,” Kyrian flatly replied, “but I do not know these Lands. Rosghel drifts farther with each passing day, and I was under the impression that your skill and guidance, Robin, would be worth the night lost.”
“Another chink in your tale.” Rydel of Robinsdwel’s hood had shifted, and a few short curls drifted loosely against his forehead, russet brown, like his brows. “You know my name. You seem to know something of a reputation that I was unaware I possessed. You claim you do not serve Tasnil the Usurper, and yet you refuse to reveal your master, the same master who has, by your account, brought you to me.” His green gaze narrowed. “I am sure you understand my suspicion.”
Kyrian faced the glare and sharpened his own. “I have told you all you must know.” All but Aradin, his father, the quest, the Sword, and—naturally—the rise of the Heir of Ariad.
“I would disagree.” One green-beaded moccasin scuffed. “Do you take me for a fool, Skyad? Do you truly believe I shall abandon my people to the devices of the Usurper, simply to guide you across the Green Lands on your king’s errand? I have seen enough Skyad treachery to know the deception of your kind.”
“I am not deceiving you.”
“Are these your words, or those of the Usurper?”
“I do not serve the Usurper!”
“Liar.” A pulse and the creature stood before him, eyes level with Kyrian’s chin but made fiercer by the glint of the silver blade reflecting in their green depths. Like day and night his unruffled exterior had disintegrated, melted into a fierce, scowling, fire-eyed warrior whose hatred of Tasnil and all Skyadkind burned like shimmers of heat from his skin. “Do you think I have not heard Silver treacheries before? Does your master wish to know what became of those he sent before you? The worms who came with their orders and thirst for Tarmilis’ blood and never returned?” He snarled. “They are dead, Silver filth! Every last one who dared step within the bounds of my wood, my city, within even the sight of my people. Dead, Skyad, because I killed them, and I swear to you I shall kill again to protect what remains of those beneath my charge.”
A cold, sharp point was pressed to his chest, digging through black leather and Rosghel silk. He felt the blade’s edge, the slightest resistance to the heartbeat beneath his skin, but refused to look down, refused to break the creature’s stare. “I believe you,” he rasped evenly, jaw tightly clenched.
A tattered breath blew Rydel of Robinsdwel’s nostrils wide. There was a madness in his face, a wild, hate-filled malice almost deadlier than the knife in his white-knuckled hand. “Tell me the truth, Skyad, or die. Why would I abandon this wood and my people to guide you into the den of the Usurper himself? Why would I aid you in your Silver treacheries? Why would I swear my service to you, son of the filthy race that has brought the suffering of ages down upon us?” His green eyes flamed in the darkness, narrow and half-glowing with wrath. “Tell me, Skyad, before I end your life. Why in Skies’ name would I ever trust you?”
Kyrian’s answer hung upon a silver chain about his neck, a cold pendant pressed to his bare chest beneath a uniform of ebony silk and shepaardskin leather. “You will,” he replied slowly, watching liquid hate churn in the creature’s eyes, “because I know what became of your grandfather.”
The last word hovered in the air between them, crystallizing, like a spire of ice, sharper and colder than any Robin knife. The eyes widened, the features slackened, the knife itself sagged from its place against his heart. Moments of painful, breathless silence stretched in agony over the listening rasp of the Nelduith, and Kyrian waited, motionless. Waited to know how cruel he was.
“What do you know of him?” the Robin rasped, his voice so low it was almost lost in the river’s roar. “Have you seen him? Is he . . .” A quick, shallow breath. “Is he alive? Tell me, Skyad, where is he?”
Hope and longing, hanging from each soft, taut word. Palpable, like the hot hatred that had chilled to a nimbus of desperation around the green-cloaked Robin. Kyrian felt the heat of temper in his blood ebb away, forgotten beneath the weight of his guilt, beneath the shine of eyes wide with childish hope. A moment stretched between them, and then another. Kyrian wondered when he had become death’s messenger, wondered when his calloused anger had been stolen from him and replaced by perfect pity.
The Robin’s lips pressed white in the deafening dark. Waiting, waiting. How long had he waited?
“No,” Kyrian said at last, looking away. “No, he is dead.”
The knife trembled against his chest, breaths away from the pendant beneath his tunic. Kyrian found himself watching it, the silver blade, watching the long, slender fingers curled about the hilt, bloodless and shaking. As uncertain now as they had been immovable a breath before. There were scars along the creature’s forearms, battle wounds inflicted by Skyad blades, running white trails across tanned flesh until they disappeared beneath the sleeve cuffed at his elbow. He had killed before, he had said. Often. But how often had the warriors of Tasnil’s madness come near to staunching him instead?
“Dead,” the Robin repeated, as if to himself, tongue running idly over colourless lips. He looked paler now, smaller, the knife’s point scarcely piercing the leather over Kyrian’s chest. “H-how? How can you know?”
A twitch was developing in Kyrian’s brow. He wish
ed he could answer.
Rydel of Robinsdwel read his silence. The knife lowered to hang lamely at his side, in the shadow of his forest-green cloak and a shroud of Nelduith mist. “How then,” he rasped, “may I know you speak the truth?” It was a challenge, like the rest had been, but it fell flat as it left him, as if he were too weary to lace it with a threat.
Kyrian reached for his collar, felt his fingers close about the chain, the only answer he possessed. The Robin’s eyes followed it as he snapped it from his neck and held it high, allowing the pendant to sway from his fingers, catching and scattering the light of the moons, stirring silver sparks in the creature’s eyes. They stretched wider, pale fingertips reaching to brush the leaf pendant with reverent awe. With hunger.
“It was given to me by a friend of your grandfather. He . . .” Kyrian stumbled. “He sends his sympathy.”
A frown, but whether by Kyrian’s adamant refusal to speak or the Robin’s sudden weariness, the answer was sufficient for the moment. The leaf charm swayed, glittering at the end of the chain pooled like a cord of diamonds in his palm. There were etchings in the pendant, runes carved into the metal that Kyrian had never studied and could not understand. He strongly suspected, however, that Rydel of Robinsdwel could.
“You realize, of course,” the Robin said suddenly, the words grating in his throat, “that this chain is the heirloom of my house, of my grandfather’s line and lineage. Rightfully, it belongs to me.”
His lithe, nimble fingers closed around the charm.
Kyrian wrenched it away.
“You seem to have forgotten, Robin, that I am still in need of a guide.”
The little flecks of black buried in the Robin’s irises burned like green-lit coals. The white hand still hung midair, but as Kyrian looked on, the fingers flexed into a pale fist and fell once more into shadow.
He refused to be unnerved. “Consider it a bargain. Your service, in exchange for my payment.”
White teeth flashed in the dark. “You would withhold from me my own inheritance?”
“It shall be yours in return for guidance to the skyladder.”
“Upon what vow?”
“Upon my word.”
The Robin barked a laugh. “Your word? If that is meant to assure me, you are more ignorant than even I had thought, Skyad. I suppose you will swear upon your king, yes?”
Kyrian peeled his shoulders back, revelling in his advantage of height and praying that for once in his life he could rely upon stature to serve him. “No. You have my word upon my life—your service for my payment at journey’s end. Should you decline, the necklace remains mine and we forever part ways. What say you?”
There was a handful of slow heartbeats in which nothing was said, Kyrian waiting with the chain in his Sword hand and the Robin standing rigid with one knife in his palm and the other in his belt. The moonlit face was taut, chiselled from hatred and etched in wrath, twin green orbs the sole indication that life burned beyond the stone features. The Robin’s eyes narrowed, then slackened again, blazing in the shadow of his hood. One russet brow twitched. His shoulders stretched back.
“Very well,” he replied at last, voice thin and cold as spring ice. “I give my word to guide you to the skyladder, in exchange for my inheritance.”
He turned away so violently the hood flew from his head, dishevelled, rusty curls drifting about his ears as he stalked toward the shadow of the forest.
Kyrian glared after him. “Where are you going?”
The young warrior of Robinsdwel halted at the treeline, a rigid green silhouette against the dark swath of the wood. Pulses bled into heartbeats, then into moments. Kyrian waited.
Without turning, the Robin growled, “We depart at dawn.”
And then, like a vapour, he was gone.
Kyrian waited long for the Robin’s return, sitting alone in the dark with his back to a stone, deaf with the roar of the Nelduith and numb with the exhaustion of too many surreal days and sleepless nights. He waited, one arm draped over propped knees, the other hand clenched about the green leaf chain, as if Rydel of Robinsdwel would materialize to pilfer it from his neck if ever he allowed his guard to fall. The chain was cold in his hand. Camuel’s chain. The Robin’s inheritance. He felt like a thief. Perhaps he was one.
In the morning, he knew, the guilt would be fiercer. He was the cruel Skyad, the messenger of death, the one who had broken a warrior’s heart and used his only consolation as a weapon against him. It was there already—the guilt—simmering somewhere deep in his heart but overshadowed by exhaustion, at least for a time. Until dawn returned and with it, the Robin himself.
“I have already failed you,” he whispered to the night, to his father and the King he could not see. Camuel’s chain hung like a millstone about his neck, a weight and a burden that should not have been his. “I do not understand, my King. Where is the brother you promised? Where is the one to share in my burden?” He leaned his head against the stone and stared into the sky, fatigue pulling at his limbs, dragging him downward into despair, into numbness. “Did you not say that I would not be alone?”
The question hung in the air and blurred with the mist, lingering unanswered in the darkness.
One hand slipping from his knees to lie half-submerged in the river, Kyrian of the Rain Realm slept.
The river Nelduith had flowed through the heart of Ariad since the very dawn of time. It had seen the rise and fall of empires, revelled in the dances of the Dryads, and cowered in fear of the Skyads as it had watched the unfolding of the Adamun Massacre. Many tidings, good and ill, had it borne between the Naiads, but the world had lain silent these last years, and the Nelduith had long awaited word from the Skies.
When the Skyad’s hand touched its waters, it knew. Something had changed. A new force had entered the war of the Usurper, young and most certainly Skyad while distinctly something else as well. The Nelduith could not tell for certain. The river was not wise, not profound as the trees and the stones. Such intricacies were beyond its understanding, and yet it knew that those truths which bewildered it would most certainly be clear to the Naiads. Yes, the Naiads would know. The Naiads would understand the significance of the new someone, the new Skyad who was not a Skyad and whose hand held a strength far beyond his years.
The Nelduith sputtered, frenzied with excitement, and sent a flurry of spray northward, toward Dunbrielle, toward the haven of Ariad’s noble judges, the wise keepers of the peace.
Something had changed, the river knew. This Skyad, this lone traveller, held significance, though whether for good or ill the Nelduith could not tell.
The Naiads of Dunbrielle would surely know.
The world was grey, the first fingers of dawn clawing at the Skies from beneath the tree-lined horizon. The wood stood in silence, watchful and vigilant, indifferent to the warrior striding alone beneath the canopy, a phantom of the pale daybreak.
He had not slept. He never slept. The raging, churning turmoil of his mind did not allow it, holding him in its talons, trapping him in the storm, driving all hope of rest as far from Rydel as the border of the world itself. Weariness was beyond him; he was numb to its weight. He simply walked, rigid, unfeeling, ever drifting, never resting. He could not rest, lest the beast destroy him. He could only walk. Onward, forward, marching, stalking, drifting like a wraith through the withered, ebbing trees.
His jaw ached from clenching. His nails had chewed scarlet crescents in his palms. The sight of the chain, of his grandfather’s chain, still lingered like a phantom before his eyes, haunting him, taunting him, frenzying the scarcely restrained beast of hatred that raged within his chest. It was his. It belonged to him. What right had the Skyad to bear it about his neck? What right had the Skyad to withhold from him his own property, his own inheritance?
What right had the Skyad to survive the night?
Rydel of Robinsdwel stumbled, choking on the ferocity of the beast in his chest, the beast that thirsted for blood, for vengeance, for deat
h. Always death. He staggered against a silver oak, dug his fingernails into its bark to hold himself upright. The beast clawed at his ribs, hungry, raging, insatiable. It screamed for death to the Skyad, to the filthy Silver thief whose throat bore the treasure reserved for him, the treasure that belonged to him.
Death to the Skyad.
Death to the thief.
Death to the Silver slave of the Usurper.
One hand sought a knife and already he could see it. The Skyad, skewered upon the edge of his blade, blood draining from his pale, sunless features, lips parted in a half-formed curse that would trail into silence with the last of his breath. Rydel would pluck his inheritance from the throat of his treacherous opponent, cleanse his dagger in the waters of the Nelduith, and return to Robinsdwel adorned with his prize to starve alongside his people. None save the river would stand witness to the murder. None would challenge his justice. There was no law in a world ravaged by suffering and want, withering beneath the shadow of a tyrant. He alone stood guard against the vermin of the Skies. He was the last guardian, the last defence of his people.
This wood belonged to him.
That chain belonged to him.
Rydel’s knees buckled beneath him and he crumpled to the forest floor, gasping as the hate and the darkness receded, as suddenly and blindingly as they had arisen to consume him. He could scarcely breathe, scarcely think. His veins still hummed with the heat of wrath, gripping him with horror, terrifying him with every morbid image still clinging to his consciousness. Every morbid image of death and destruction that was the same each night, in his nightmares, if accompanied by a different victim’s face. His throat constricted and he fought for breath, fingers flexing white against the dry forest floor.
He was not a wraith of darkness and hate. He was not an assassin, livid with bloodlust.
He was not a monster. He was not. He was not.