by Niki Florica
A spasm wracked her body and she winced, clutching her arms.
Venom or not, Elillian had been rendered useless.
A blanketing weight rested suddenly upon her shoulders: his skycloak, warm with his wild, fiery heat. He gazed wide-eyed down upon her with mud clinging to his lashes, hands hovering over her ashen arm as if afraid to touch it while pure concern glowed in his streaked, exhausted face.
“What has it done to you?” he whispered. “Does it pain you?”
She shook her head, whispered, “No.” The lie fell flat as it left her.
He grasped her cold hand in his, flinching as their skin met, Elillian’s dead cold against his—feverishly warm. “Skies,” he murmured, warming her hand between his. “Skies, my lady, why did you not return to the river?”
Elillian was shuddering like a storm-tossed flame, but not so weak as to lose all pride. She frowned at him, indignant, humiliation burning in her cheeks as she struggled to rise and the trembling of her muscles forced her to the mud again. “I am not a coward, Skyad. I wished to help.”
He winced, his dark eyes darting away. “Kyrian,” he said.
“What?”
“My name. Kyrian of the Rain Realm. I thought you might prefer it to Skyad.”
Elillian’s lips pressed, the faintest twinge of shame pricking her heart as all defensiveness drained away in a breath. Her eyes drifted to his shoulder, and she flinched at the memory of his arms tight about her, his guttural scream in her ear as the shepaard’s claws had scored his back when all the Skies knew it was her flesh they had sought. His eyes found hers. One was fairer than the other, like a dark pool overlaid with a sheen of pale frost. The other was obsidian black, but a warm black, not like the vast and cold night sky but like a dormant coal. Flame lurked behind them, waiting to set them ablaze.
He offered his hand and, chagrined, she accepted it. “Elillian,” she answered. “Of Dunbrielle.”
The Skyad—no, Kyrian—offered an acknowledging smile. “I do not think you a coward,” he said softly, releasing her hand when the world ceased to tilt and Elillian’s gaze found focus upon him. “You proved yourself the opposite the moment you drove your blade into the creature’s ribs. Only a truly valiant heart would choose peril over escape in the heat of battle as you have.” Remarkably—and beautifully—his teeth flashed in a swift, bright smile that creased his eyes again. “You have the heart of a warrior,” he finished, placing Elillian’s black-hilted blade in her hand.
She pursed her lips wryly, veins humming with pleasure. “Impossible. I am a Naiad . . . a Peacemaker.”
Again he smiled, but it was weak, lacklustre. “Blood does not decide all things, my lady. I do not believe that.”
She regarded him in silence, slipping the knife into her sash without wiping it, watching the moonlight play in his eyes and cast shadows in the tangle of his dark hair. She had once believed all Skyads to be cold, remorseless, cruel—tyrants of wickedness who thrived upon spilled blood and battled perpetually for supremacy over the clouds. In Dunbrielle such tales were told to youths by moonlight, to satisfy their questions of the Usurper and his ruthless Silver kin. Her father had never approved, his memory bright with a time and age before the tyrant’s darkness, but Elillian, having no experience of her own, had accepted the tales as truth, and threads of them still gripped her now, staring at this stranger on her riverbank.
She remembered his eyes, flashing dark with battle, his jaw set in wild determination as he had slashed, scored, thrust for the shepaard’s heart. She imagined his hand severing a shepaard’s head from its neck and found that she could see every detail of it, from his roar of wrath to the flames in his coal-dark eyes.
Anxiety gripped her heart and she tore her eyes away.
Charming and surprising and kind though he was, this creature was still a Skyad.
She moved to stand and he rose to help her, brows knitting in confusion when she ignored his hand and scanned the bank, seeking the blade whose chill still pulsed in her hand. He frowned. “What is it?”
“Your sword.” Her gaze flitted over the bank, roving the pockmarked shore where lay the severed shepaard’s skull and its lifeless, draining corpse. “Your sword . . . where is it?”
She clutched her wrist to her chest as she spoke, avoiding his eyes until his silence grew uncomfortable. His presence had chilled beside her, hand withdrawing to hang lamely at his side, and when he spoke it was without meeting her eyes, his voice little more than a rasp. “What sword?”
Elillian’s eyes whipped so suddenly to him the world tilted, but she did not care, not while the echoes of his soft-spoken words were reverberating in her skull. “Are you mad?” she asked sharply, nails biting her flesh. “The sword you so desperately needed, the sword I retrieved for you. Surely you remember!”
His jaw flexed and one hand rose to worry his hair before he seemed to decide otherwise, and let it fall. “My sword was lost upon the riverbank before I attempted the Caralim crossing. I have not seen it since.”
Elillian’s lips parted for a disbelieving gasp. “Lies! I retrieved it from the Nelduith! I touched the hilt and it sapped the heat from my hand—you saw it! That blade did this to me. You must remember!”
“You are mistaken, my lady.”
“Elillian!”
“My lady—” his expression was unwavering, cold, his skin pulled taut over his cheekbones as he glared at the Skies, the ground, the trees, anywhere but at her—“you are mistaken. There was no sword, and it was no hilt that stole your consciousness. You were frightened, understandably, and you fainted.”
“Fainted?” She almost shrieked it, glowering at him from her frustratingly unintimidating height, wishing he would glance at her long enough to give worth to her fury, wishing her eyes stood but a little higher than his collarbone. “Skyad, if you think for one moment that a shepaard would be enough to—”
The sudden gasp of the Nelduith was a sound so ingrained into her consciousness that Elillian scarcely heard it, but he flinched, reaching instinctively for the knife in her hand when he found his sheath—again—to be empty. She pulled it away, scowling. “Skyad—”
The words died on her tongue when she saw them, the Naiads, crystallizing from river spray into a host of blue-robed nymphs, ghostly-pale in the moonlight as they appeared to surround them in a perfect ring.
Elillian froze.
The circle parted to allow one Naiad to step forward, a leering face wreathed in white-blond hair. Ranril’s thin lips were pursed in a sneer, hands clasped demurely within bell sleeves as he eyed Kyrian with an expression of perfect disgust and said in flawless Skyad, “You would be wise, Silver, to release the lady.”
She had forgotten that his hand was clenched over hers, gripping the hilt of the knife, and when his fingers slipped away she felt the absence of their heat like a wave of winter chill.
Ranril, third member of the Council of Peace, acclaimed judge of Dunbrielle, followed Kyrian’s compliance with cold, lightless eyes. “Good. You are wiser than most of your kind.”
Kyrian’s shoulders tightened.
Elillian stared at him, at all of them, struggling between the lingering anger in her cheeks and her confusion at Ranril’s arrival to piece together the scene before her eyes. “Ranril—”
“You need not fear, lady,” her father’s rival purred. “This creature shall harm you no longer. And, pray, allow me to express my delight in finding you alive beyond hope. Your father shall be much relieved.”
Elillian stepped from Kyrian’s shadow to frown at him. “Where is my father?”
“In Dunbrielle. The river brought word of an attack.” His eyes narrowed at Kyrian. “Let it be known that if this vile creature has defiled you in any manner—”
At Elillian’s side, Kyrian’s every muscle snapped taut as a bowstring. “Defiled her?”
Elillian reddened. “Ranril—”
“Come, my lady—” his small, cold eyes glinted—“your father awaits you in
Dunbrielle.”
“You cannot—”
“Elillian,” the river lord hissed, “step aside. This creature is now a prisoner of Dunbrielle.”
The Naiads swelled forward before she could draw a breath, before she could demand answers from the one nymph in Dunbrielle whose arrogance could set fire to her blood. One moment she stood in the Silver’s broad shadow, and the next she was being jostled, torn, tossed in a sea of blue eyes and pale hair as the ring of Peacemakers closed upon the Skyad and discharged her upon the open bank, alone. She shouted for Ranril, tore a fistful of hair from her face as she stood on her toes, sought his wretched, sneering face among the Naiads who looked for all the world like children playing a warrior’s game. Taller than Kyrian, they hid him from her sight, but she caught glances of him through the shoulders, the heads, glances of him in the midst of their tight ring as all of them hesitated, unwilling to touch him, like some contagious plague.
Their efforts were pathetic. She had seen him wrestle a shepaard’s fangs and bear a demon’s claws upon his back. He was a warrior, and undoubtedly had he wished it he could have escaped the pitiful cage of the Peacemakers in the blink of an eye. They were not warriors. They knew nothing of prisoners, of wounds, of war. Elillian was quite certain she was the first of her kind ever to wield a blade, let alone draw blood.
But Kyrian, though he shouted and glared, did not raise a hand against them.
She tore at the sea of arms and robes in an effort to penetrate the throng, screaming in rage when Ranril grasped his arms and wrenched them remorselessly behind his back. She did not hear his cry of pain but she saw it, written in his twisted, ghostly features, in the flashing of his teeth in a grimace.
“Ranril!” she screamed, tearing at the bodies, cursing his abominable cowardice.
The voices swelled to drown her own, and Elillian was ignored.
She shouted herself hoarse until the Naiad host had swept him northward, along the moonlit riverbank in the direction of the Naiad haven of Dunbrielle. Only Ranril dared walk within the imprisoning ring, as if his nearness to the bleeding, cord-bound prisoner were a testament to his warrior courage.
Elillian spat. Coward.
She stood upon the riverbank, alone, forgotten, watching the ethereal, rippling host drift northward along the Nelduith. The rushing murmur of their voices was constant, tumbling, but over it all she could hear the Silver’s indignant shouts: “I did not harm her! I swear to you upon all the Skies, I did not harm your lady!”
She shivered, clutching her bare arms in the darkness, unsure whether to scream or to weep.
The silver stars winked in mocking melody above, the Nelduith flowing on and onward.
The voice of Dunbrielle’s first prisoner died into the murmur of the river, and all was silent.
Gilvonel was waiting when she arrived in Dunbrielle.
He was not one to waste fear upon uncertainties, and for that many in Dunbrielle had titled him indifferent, though the wisest knew his calm reserve to be a sign of wisdom, not of folly. His blue eyes were pools of introspection, brighter than Ranril’s and twice as young. Were it not for his exceptional cunning, some said, he would have been deemed too inexperienced for his position on the Council of Peace. He reached no conclusion without reason, was never angered, and seldom anxious.
Except, of course, in matters that concerned his daughter.
When she emerged from the Nelduith he crossed the distance between them in two strides, his features slackening in tangible relief, hands reaching for her shoulders. “Elillian, where have you been? Ranril was sent to find you. The river brought word of the blood, the shepaard . . .”
“The Skyad,” Elillian finished for him.
Gilvonel frowned. “The Silver, yes.”
“You know of him, then?”
Her father raised his brows. “I have known of him since yester eve. When a Skyad of Rosghel drops his guard upon the bank of the Nelduith, my daughter, you may be certain that the Council is aware of it.”
Elillian’s brows twitched irately. “Why, then, was I not made aware of it?”
“Perhaps you were otherwise occupied. Do you think I have not noticed your midnight excursions, Elillian? I wish you would tell me before vanishing as you do.” His forehead creased with concern, with thought, and she saw in his blue eyes the rare kind of worry that only she could arouse in them. “The Nelduith’s tidings were dark, Elillian. I feared the worst.”
“Fallyl.” She halted him before his thought’s end, grasping his hand as her mind leaped to the single focus that had borne her there on the wings of the river, breathless and desperate. “You must listen to me. The Skyad . . . I have met him. He attempted the crossing at Caralim but the river was frenzied by blood and the Nelduith bore him north, to the shepaard’s shore. I—I could not watch him die at the demon’s mercy, Fallyl. I warned him. I needed to warn him. You would have done the same, I know you would have—”
His blue eyes sharpened as he chafed a thumb over her knuckles. “You are so cold, Elillian.”
“Father.” Skies, he needed to listen. Someone needed to listen. “He saved my life. He—he protected me at his own risk and now he is wounded. For me. I must heal him. Please, let me heal him.”
Blond hair drifted about his shoulders as he raised his eyes to hers and frowned thoughtfully. “Of course. His sacrifice must be honoured. This is the way of peace.” For the first time, his gaze hardened as it studied her face, her cold hand, her bare feet, the blood clinging to her gown and the mud encrusted to her skin. A crease appeared between his brows. “Elillian, you know that any victim in want of shelter or haven is welcome in Dunbrielle. If he is so wounded, where is this Silver now?”
Her response was killed by the sound of silver trumpets, announcing a host of blue-robed Naiads as they swept through Dunbrielle’s gates.
“Behold, Peacemakers of Ariad!” cried a triumphant Ranril, as Gilvonel’s blue eyes narrowed slightly and Elillian’s blood flowed hotter in her veins. “Behold, the Skyad traitor!”
Gilvonel muttered, “Ranril, what have you done?” But Elillian saw only the Skyad.
Against the pearl pavilions and the crystal spray of the Guilyra falls, he was an onyx stone in a bed of clear diamond. Like a trophy he stood in Ranril’s slender shadow, no longer protesting, shoulders slumped in submission, glaring at the ground while tatters hung from his black, shepaardskin tunic. She felt something hot and frantic spike her veins with a sudden, wild desire to run to him and rip the pretentious smirk from Ranril’s cowardly, contemptuous face. With her fingernails.
Her father’s hand tightened—all-knowing—over her own.
The Naiads emerged from their pavilions to watch him, wonder-eyed and fascinated by this strange, dark warrior whose nimbus of ferocity so starkly contrasted the peace that shrouded Dunbrielle. She could see the clenching of his jaw from the bank, and when he raised his glaring eyes she saw in them the same wild flame that had faced a shepaard by moonlight and blazed with his fight to save her life.
Once, this very night, she had thought those dark eyes terrifying.
Now, she would have touched a thousand frigid swords to be within reach of their flame.
Elillian watched Ranril’s host of followers herd their smouldering prisoner down the winding stone paths of Dunbrielle. “What can they do to him, Fallyl?”
Gilvonel’s cool gaze swirled thoughtfully, and Elillian’s chest flooded with euphoric relief at the sight of the familiar expression, the one that had earned him his place upon the Council and the respect of his people. “Do?” he echoed. “They may do nothing, not until he is tried. By the Ancient Law he must stand trial before the Peace Council for the crimes of which he is accused. Until then, I suspect Ranril shall have him guarded closely as a prisoner.” He spoke coolly, but Elillian saw the subtle flex of his knuckles testifying his distaste. “He will be tried, Elillian, and his hearing shall be just. I shall see to it.”
Elillian released a breath
. “That is all I ask.”
He studied her, through clear blue eyes. “You are wise, my daughter—wiser than most are willing to confess. If this creature has truly gained your trust, I am willing to extend him mine.”
She glanced at him, hearing the edge in his tone that always preceded a warning.
“All the same, if you wish to earn the trust of your people, you might refrain from more moonlight battles.” His eyes sparkled, but admonition lurked beneath them. “My daughter or not, you are still a Naiad, and Naiads do not carry bloody knives in their sashes.”
She hesitated, surprised, then breathed a laugh, one hand flying to the knife in her belt while Ranril led his throng and his trophy into the maze of pearl pavilions, planning already for the words she would use to reach him through the guards. The east pavilion. Of course. Of course they would take him there.
Gilvonel was awaiting an answer. She grasped the first words to surface in her mind.
“Blood does not decide all things, Fallyl. I do not believe that.”
Kyrian had battled the raiders of Arithcar with two dozen warriors against two hundred. He had led Melkian’s regiment to victory in the liberation of Vizryl, he had hunted the pirates of Sarantis and fought his way to the height of Rosghel’s Silver ranks one bloody victory at a time. He had fought and killed a shepaard with a knife from a Naiad’s belt.
And now he was the prisoner of a clan of Peacemakers too terrified to touch him.
He was halted before a small pavilion upon the outskirts of the haven. Halted, in the broadest sense of the word, only because the ring of Naiads that surrounded him ceased moving and he, feeling congenial, lacked the motivation to shove them aside. Where could he go even if he escaped them?