The Heir of Ariad

by Niki Florica

  The first drops were wasted, trickling down the sides of the Green’s face and mingling with sweat and tears. But Kyrian did not pull away until he saw the pale throat swallow, until Rydel of Robinsdwel’s lips shone golden and the flask was light in his hand. He left it open, resting against a root, allowing the golden light to shine from its mouth. The Robin’s breaths grew smoother, and slower. The sickly yellow dissolved, replaced by faint flush. Kyrian folded his arms over propped knees and rested his head on his elbows, numb and guilt-sick and too tired to think.

  The shadows lengthened beneath the trees, pierced only by the leaf’s soft golden light.

  And then, as the Heir prayed to his King, Angdeline’s last light flickered and died.

  Melkian’s every nerve was humming as he leaped the manor stair and shoved the door wide, the tidings from Rosghel swirling dizzily in his mind. The door slammed behind him, the latch falling into place. Without raising his eyes from the parchment in his hand he shouted for Salienne, Thunderfoot’s scrawling hand swimming in his vision, and when no response came he shouted it again. “Salienne!”

  He glanced up.

  She stood there, fully garbed in her warrior’s attire and armed as if for duty, a flask of melsith hanging from her belt alongside a parchment-wrapped parcel of rations. Her bow was slung over one shoulder, her hair tightly plaited; one hand was frozen amid clasping her sky-cloak over her collarbone, rigid, as if his eyes held her captive in time. He recognized her expression: the ferocity, the resolve, the slightest, softest guilt, like a child caught in conscious rebellion.

  The message lowered in his hand, forgotten. “You are assigned no guard tonight.”

  Salienne swallowed, pressed her lips. “I know.”

  The manor grew suddenly cold.

  Melkian watched her pull herself from the moment of entranced indecision, clasp her sky-cloak over her chest, and slip a knife into her boot to replace the one lost to her brother. She avoided his eyes, her movements forced, deliberate, as if she wished to persuade herself that he was not there, that he was not watching his greatest nightmare unfold before his eyes, and feeling her betrayal like a knife to his heart. “What are you doing, Salienne?” he rasped.

  She paused, fixing him with a glare. “I am leaving. Melkian, step aside.”

  He stood before the door, before her escape, and did not move. “You cannot do this.”

  “On the contrary, I most certainly can.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “To the Green Lands, naturally. I am going to find him. Kyrian. I cannot stay another day.”

  Melkian drew a breath and widened his stance on the threshold. “To depart from Rosghel is to desert your duties to your captain, your fellow warriors, and your allegiance. It is betrayal, Salienne.”

  “Ah.” Her lips quirked. “Fortunately, I have been told that treachery is in my blood.”

  “I have not taught you to believe such lies.”

  “Lies?” Salienne barked a harsh laugh. “You, Captain Melkian, are one to speak of lies. My blood, my very childhood, has been a lie, has it not? A Skyad for twenty-four years, and then I am suddenly to accept that I am not Skyad, that I have never been Skyad, that I am tainted with the peasant blood of my father?”

  “Enough, Salienne. I have explained my choice. You were not ready to know the truth.”

  The deep, dark eyes of Jasmiel’s daughter narrowed to dangerous slits. “I was not ready, Melkian?” she hissed, voice thick. “Or Kyrian?”

  His throat tightened.

  She read his silence, and anger burned in every taut muscle of her face. “He may have been a child, Melkian,” she said quietly, tightly, “but both you and I know that I was not. That I had not the luxury of being innocent, being reckless. That I was a warrior long before he was, and I deserved to know the truth.”

  His head ached. Melkian answered softly, “This is not about Kyrian.”

  “Please.” Her nostrils flared, lips tightening. “It is always about Kyrian.”

  Her words curdled between them, settling hard at the base of Melkian’s sternum, a thousand times more painful than the bite of any blade. Her expression was strained, her flesh stretched white over her cheekbones. Not with anger, but with hurt. Not resentment, but betrayal. Salienne did not weep, but Melkian found himself searching for tears in her dark eyes as his heart broke in his chest and guilt rose like bile in his throat. “Salienne . . .”

  She looked away swiftly, vulnerable only for a breath more before the pain was veiled beneath armour of anger and diamond and ice. “Step aside, Captain.” Each word was excruciatingly deliberate. “I shall not ask again.”

  He sought her eyes but she resisted, her shoulders pulled taut in decision, in defiance.

  Heart falling, falling into darkness, Melkian stepped aside.

  He was an empty husk as he watched Brondro’s daughter turn her back upon him, step into the night and allow the manor door to close in her wake. He listened to her footfalls on the terrace, listened as they fell into silence, slumped against the wall and sank to the floor while the hall closed in around him and blue torchlight vanished behind the black of his eyelids. She was gone. Salienne was gone. She had left him. They both had. They both had. Oh, Skies . . .

  Parchment crackled in his hand, and through unseeing eyes he gazed down upon the ink-scrawled words, penned in the Storm Lord’s script.

  . . . and thus the duty has fallen to me to inform you, at His Majesty King Tasnil’s request, that from this night forth the Skyad Alliance and the Green Lands are at war . . .

  Twenty-Two

  . . . and when [Aaron] seeth thee, he will be glad in his heart.

  -Exodus 4:14C

  The darkness was boiling hot and bitter cold and deafeningly, roaringly silent. Rydel lay still, knees drawn to his chest, when he awoke to find his gloomy world replaced by the darkness of his nightmares. But something was different this time. Starker, and colder than before.

  It was not a nightmare.

  The panic struck him hard and swiftly, fiercer than any fear of any nightmare past. One moment he was lying in the shadow, and the next he was wheezing for breath with darkness in his lungs and closing about his throat and pressing down upon him from all directions, seeking to smother him like a candle’s flame. He rose to his knees, gasped for breath, shouted his agony to the gloom as his heart pulsed slower and still slower with every excruciating, eternal instant.

  His eyes sealed; his lungs collapsed in his chest. Rydel crumbled to the ground.

  Suddenly the dark domain changed, and the hard, cold ground transformed into a sea of nothingness, drowning him beneath cold, gloomy waves. He struggled for the surface, heaved for air and found none, clawed at the shadow even as the moments between his deafening heartbeats stretched longer. A cold wave pushed him down and the dark deepened, and in that moment of panic and terror and breathless, hopeless despair, Rydel realized in his dying breath that Skies and moons he was not prepared to die.

  “My King!” he screamed, as his heart pulsed slower and the world grew darker and all hope of life slipped painfully through his clawing fingers. “My King, forgive me! Forgive me, forgive me, Aradin! Please, my King, please . . . I will begin again. Let me begin again, I beg of you, Aradin! Aradin!”

  His voice died echoless, swallowed by the darkness. Pain stabbed his lungs. The end that had chased him from Robinsdwel to Dunbrielle was overtaking him at last, in the forest of Jardenith, in a sea of darkness and fear and despair. Rydel ceased fighting, and with tears streaming from his aching eyes, surrendered himself to his fate. His judgment.

  But suddenly he was rising from the darkness, a beam of golden light piercing the shadow and a strong, mighty hand pulling him from the jaws of death. He broke the surface and heaved a great, clear breath, found his feet upon solid ground and the gloom dissipating beneath the brilliant beams shining from the presence of his saviour. He fell to his knees, tears dripping from his face as he bowed his head and gasped
desperate thanks to his King.

  He dared to glance upward, trembling and delirious with thanks.

  But it was no longer Aradin, King of Ariad, who stood before him, wreathed in golden light.

  It was Kyrian of the Rain Realm.

  At dawn Elillian emerged from the tunnels triumphant, a reckless plan in mind and an ancient, iron-hilted knife in her sash. She had wandered the tunnels for hours, searching every cavern, every cave, every crevice that any living creature—or warrior—could ever have occupied, and she had not been disappointed. The Naiads had, perhaps, claimed use of the Cavern of Peace, but they could not erase its makers from the ancient stone any more than the Azure Sea could return to the Pool of Glass. There were some legends that time itself could not touch. The knife, to her delight, had been one of them.

  The cavern remained exactly as she had left it. She walked over the dark stains of Kyrian’s blood, ascended the stone stair, and paused to reach her hands beneath the falls. It had been hours since she had last touched the waters and already she had begun to feel the exhaustion that was the nearest a Naiad could come to thirst. The falls cascading through her fingertips sent a shiver of rejuvenating energy into her limbs. She tossed a handful into her face and waited until the droplets had renewed her strength to step to the cavern wall and peer through the opening.

  Still dark, despite the dawn. And deathly quiet. The heavy clouds moored above Dunbrielle swallowed the rising sunlight to the east and held the haven in shadow. Dark fog billowed amongst the pavilions now, drifting and piling above Guilihryn, and some warning instinct in Elillian’s mind kept her from stepping out of the cavern’s shelter. The fog slithered nearer, thick, silent, and heavy over the haven. Elillian leaned forward to scan the gloom for enemies.

  The Grey appeared like a flicker of lightning, and Elillian had only a breath of a moment to flatten herself to the cavern wall and kill the shriek in her throat with a hand to her mouth. Her heart leaped to a blurry stutter in her chest—she felt it pounding against her ribs, seeking to escape them. She pressed her head to the cold stone and closed her eyes, hand still clamped over her mouth, fighting to remember how to think, how to move. For a long time she waited, motionless, but the Grey who had materialized in the fog did not reappear, and with a shaky breath, Elillian dared to peer out again.

  The fog was alive with Greys—hulking warriors cloaked in gloom, flickering between the pavilions of Dunbrielle. They must have descended at the break of dawn, as she had expected they would, but she had not expected such silence. Not, at least, from the brutes of the Storm Realm known first for cruelty, and then for recklessness. For the first time since nightfall, Elillian felt herself wavering, but she crushed the thought before its roots could burrow in her heart. She had remained out of principle, but she would act out of purpose. This much, at least, she could do for the Heir.

  Of course, she had hoped to arrive first.

  The Grey who had surprised her crossed the bank to salute a noticeably short, calm-faced warrior with an insignia that differed from the rest. Commander, Elillian presumed. Or captain.

  “There is no trace of Naiads, Commander,” the Grey reported. “The paths show no sign.”

  Elillian’s eyes rolled in her secret refuge. Of course the paths were clear. Naiads left no trail.

  The commander listed his head, a faint, thoughtful crease appearing between his brows. “The king would not have commenced the attack in Dunbrielle had he not been certain of finding them.”

  “Perhaps they were warned?”

  “Impossible. No Naiad can read the Skies, and assuredly not in the dark of midnight.”

  The first Grey straightened, his cold, thin lips curling in a faint smile. “Perhaps a Skyad was present to read the Skies for them.”

  Impassively, the commander ruminated, “A Skyad in Dunbrielle? Unlikely.”

  “Footprints were found upon this very bank, Commander. Skyad, assuredly, and embossed with the sign of Rosghel.”

  Elillian felt her heart thunder against her chest with renewed force. No, no, no, no . . .

  The commander’s eyes gleamed. They were bright, azure-blue. “Rosghel.” A nod. “Is this all, Dorius?”

  “No, Commander, it is not.”

  Elillian knew it. She knew before he pulled it from beneath his cloak and already her knuckles were clenched on the stone, rebuking her blindness, shaming her stupidity, scorning her as she watched him hold his prize to the light. The commander’s face shone in the brightening dawn. “Well done, Dorius. See that the haven is searched again. Do not leave the cliffs unexamined.” He ran a hand over the Rosghel emblem hanging in tatters from the trophy. “I believe we have found our fugitive.”

  The fog writhed with searching Greys, the messenger bowed low before his commander, and Elillian sank to the cavern floor, tempted to strike her empty, worthless skull against the stone.

  The commander turned away.

  Kyrian’s bloody Rosghel tunic flew freely into the rising wind.

  The wind had risen in the trees since the stark, east horizon had softened to grey. It came from the north, over the forest from Dunbrielle, where the dark clouds piled still darker over the Naiad haven. Kyrian had spent long hours that night staring at them, brooding over them, thinking of Elillian and hoping to all the Skies she would have the sense to hide until they passed. He should not have allowed her to stay. And he certainly should not have taken her knife.

  He sat with his back to a pine and his legs splayed, twirling the black-hilted dagger in his fingers, again and again and again. Too weary to pace and too exhausted to sleep he simply waited, in the accursed stillness, while the Robin drew breath after breath somewhere beneath the trees to his right. He may as well have been alone. His bracers mocked him from the dust to which he had discarded them, the embossed Rosghel insignia threatening to carry him backward into days, moons, and memories too painful to recall. Again he considered leaving them behind, and again he rejected the notion, knowing he would not, knowing they would follow him until the moment he ceased to be Skyad. They were too much a part of him. A part of his home. All that remained of his past.

  Irately he withered them with a glare, before propping a knee and leering skyward.

  They were only bracers, for all the Skies. Not relics, not memories. Armour.

  He thought of Salienne, alone with Melkian, and hoped for his sake that she would set aside her bitterness and stand at their guardian’s side, at least until Kyrian’s disgrace faded. He missed her then, with a dull, throbbing heartache, and swiftly dispelled the thought of her strength before it could rob him of all remaining sanity. He could imagine what was spoken of him in the watchtower at night, between the ranks, all of them claiming credit for their predictions from the time of his fiery childhood. Murder and flight and disgrace. Following in the footsteps of his traitorous father. The knife twirled faster in his hands.

  Some of them had said it then, behind his back, in disapproving whispers as they had watched him walk Rosghel’s pale streets alone. Melkian had always tried to protect him from the poisonous whispers, to smother them before they could reach Kyrian’s ears, but he had not been a fool. Not even then. He had heard them, all of them, and perhaps their dark predictions had always been somewhere in the deepest chasms of his heart, frightening him and daring him to see that they remained predictions and nothing more. Until they became more. Until they became true.

  Murder and flight and disgrace. But none of them had been so wise as to foresee the rest.

  His eyes were upon the knife in his hands, but Kyrian knew the exact moment in which he was no longer alone. He glanced up, fist clenching on the hilt, but when his gaze collided with clear, viperous eyes, and two worn moccasins stepped soundlessly into the clearing, he could do nothing, say nothing. Elillian’s gift slipped through his fingers to the forest floor.

  The Robin stood with one hand upon a pine bough, the other at his side. His stare was clear and green and wide, above sun-stained feat
ures that starkly contrasted his deathly pallor over the last days. Openly staring, Kyrian stood, returned the knife to his belt, and instantly regretted it.

  Rydel of Robinsdwel rasped, “It was you.” His eyes were starkly, clearly, almost unnaturally green. “He said that he had sent one to save me, but I did not realize . . . I never . . . Not you.”

  Kyrian released the breath he had been holding in his chest. “Who did you expect?”

  “No one,” came the flat reply. “I did not believe I could be saved . . . not even by Aradin.”

  Kyrian braced his arms over his chest, diverting his eyes from the fiery, earnest intensity of the Robin’s gaze, unable to discern whether it was madness or gratitude in this voice he did not know. The voice that was soft and heavy and grave, and surely did not belong to the Robin whose blade he had crossed beneath Robinsdwel.

  “Why?” his guide asked suddenly, burningly. “Why did you do it?”

  “Why must you know?” Kyrian demanded, feeling his thin-worn, fear-frayed temper flare.

  Confusion and a flicker of guilt crossed the fair features. “You misunderstand me, Kyrian of the Rain Realm. I am not accusing you. I am thanking you.” His brows furrowed. “But I must know why you have done this. Why you have wasted your gift upon me. It shall torture me to my death if I do not know the truth.”

  Kyrian was still hearing his name in the creature’s strange, soft voice, and it was a long moment before he could find the words to confess what he himself did not understand. Jaw clenched, he studied the clothbound arm, the bloodied shirt, anything to avoid the burning, soul-piercing eyes. “I could not watch you die,” he said at last, lamely. “I could not sit and watch you die, Robin. Not like that.”

  “Why not?”

  Kyrian pulled his shoulders back, vaguely defensive. “Why not? Because I was to blame for your suffering, because I held the means to save you, because Aradin had placed your life in my hands and I could not refuse him. I pitied you, Robin, and I wanted to help you, and—” he trailed away, sagging. “And perhaps that is why I could never be a Skyad. Because I pitied you when in every right I ought to have deserted you long ago.”