Blackmark (The Kingsmen Chronicles #1): An Epic Fantasy Adventure

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  “If you are withholding information that is vital to my realm, Captain-General, I will have your head for it!” Elyasin raged, not to be undone by Olea's plea. “My father kept secrets from me, and now I find Alden did, too. And you! You, whom I've always trusted, have kept secrets from me for years. Now I see the truth. Roushenn holds secrets deeper than the mountain, and from its liege! Secrets as elusive as the Ghost of Roushenn! I could have you thrown in the cells for hiding important information from me. The Kingsmen Summons is an issue of security. And finding out these secrets my father kept is vital to me holding my throne. You've raised my ire, Captain. Whatever secrets you and Alden found out, you will tell me. Now.”

  It was a scathing tirade. But Elyasin had no idea the danger she would be in, should such information come out within the walls of Roushenn.

  Olea growled, her temper flaring to match her liege as she rose. “Alden was sent to Ghrec with the merchant fleet to keep him safe! Far away from Roushenn! I was thrown in the cells because someone found out about us! And when Castellan Lhaurent revealed our affair before the Chancellate, Uhlas’ hand was forced. Whether it was Lhaurent who exposed us, or someone else who was spying, I don't know. But either way, it forced your father to part Alden from his protection! And in that gap, both son and father were killed, one undone by treachery and the other by what I believe was a slow poison! So I withhold information from you now because I deem it unsafe, Dhenra. Please. You have to trust me. And we have to get you back to your rooms before anyone knows you've been here!”

  Olea seized her Guardsman's shirt from a nearby chair, yanking it on. Then her breeches, kneeboots, and jerkin. Her fingers raced up her shirt, lacing it nearly to her collarbones, covering her Inkings as she buckled her cobalt leather, then slinging on her baldric. Olea tousled her blue-black curls viciously, then turned, regarding her almost-Queen. To see a thoughtful woman now before her, Elyasin’s hot temper simmering, but less.

  Elyasin’s gaze flicked to the window. It was going to be a hot summer day. Olea could smell it in the air, could hear it in the way a chorus of wrens and ululi had begun their tirade now in force. “Take me back to my rooms,” Elyasin murmured. “We will continue our conversation later.”

  “As my Queen commands.”

  But those green eyes flicked back, razor-keen. “I’m not your Queen yet. But when I am, we will have some frank discussions, you and I. And you will tell me everything I ask. And you will tell me everything that I don't even know to ask. Are we quite clear, Captain?”

  “Yes my liege.” Olea nodded, letting out a single breath to bleed off the last of her own temper. She had come close, tonight, to being thrown in the cells. She could see it in the vibrating tension that rippled through the Dhenra, that set Elyasin's fine jaw, that made her temper flare.

  Olea pushed it aside. Elyasin could be pissed that vital information was being withheld from her tonight, but she would be alive. Olea strode to the door, hauling it open, glancing both ways. She heard no boots to either length of the soldier’s hall, and Elyasin whisked out quickly when she nodded. Closing her door, Olea offered her arm, but Elyasin raised her chin and strode forward, denying Olea the honor of acting as escort. Suppressing a growl, Olea fell into step behind her liege. She had never been allowed to walk next to Alden, either, despite everything. Olea was just a soldier.

  But once, monarchs and Kingsmen had walked side by side. And once, the kings of Alrou-Mendera had known they held Alrashemni blood. A secret that had pushed Uhlas into the shadows, that had made him paranoid after his Kingsmen had been tricked, fallen to treachery in his very own palace. A secret that Uhlas had trusted her with, and her alone, knowing that of them all, perhaps she was the only one who could do something about it. Who could protect what was left of the Alrashemni royal line. Elyasin. Herself. Elohl. Olea strode down the hall of low-burning torchlight behind her Dhenra. One hand touched her sword, scanning the niches and shadows for threats just as a true Kingsman should for her blood-kin liege.

  CHAPTER 18 – ELOHL

  Elohl’s eyes snapped open, awake to a yell from down below. His first thought was that he felt amazing, every sinew at ease despite having apparently slept all night atop the high bluestone column, out in the elements. And feeling the sunshine blessing his skin now with warmth, a sweet breeze full of spring foxglove and linden wafting around the column, his mind strayed to a place of deep ease. He felt good, such as he’d not felt in a long time. But his mind sharpened suddenly, alarmed as another yell came from down below.

  “Hey! Are you asleep up there?!”

  Elohl’s tension eased. If Eleshen had been under attack, she’d not waste breath chastising him. And as he listened, he heard a muffled, “Dammit, Elohl, how do you climb so well…” waft up on the warming air.

  A scuffling came from the base of the plinth. Elohl peered over the side. He watched Eleshen’s fruitless attempts at climbing for a few moments, finally unable to stop himself from chuckling. Like a thick canvas had fallen away from his mind, he found himself enjoying the brightness of the new day, and similarly enjoying Eleshen’s antics. She placed a bad foothold, and went sprawling on her pretty ass again, having ascended not even a foot above the ground. A natural, amused laugh rolled out from Elohl’s throat.

  She gazed upwards, shading her eyes with one hand. “Very funny! Just sit up there all day and laugh at me bruising my ass! Ha, ha! What are you doing up there? And how the hell did you get up this thing?” Testy now, she slapped the stone with one hand.

  Elohl chuckled again, loving how fierce she was, how unabashed. “Hang on, I’m coming down…” He stood and stretched languidly, breathing deep of the morning breeze. It was warm already, even up on the ridge as they were. Elohl blinked, trying to remember his dreams. Perplexed, he found them fleeting, just out of mind. All he recalled was a feeling of expansiveness so blissful that it lingered today, as if his heart was as wide as the sky, as light as the dawn. He thought back to waking in the night, remembered the pulsing of the column and feeling called to climb. But that was where the memory stopped, and Elohl supposed he had simply fallen asleep once he’d reached the lookout.

  Rolling his shoulders, he shook out his legs and stretched his arms and hands, pushing worry away. It was too beautiful a day. He backed down over the side of the column. With graceful ease, he made it to the ground in moments, not a single hold out of place. Eleshen’s eyes were wide as he dusted his hands off at the bottom.

  “Aeon’s brows, Elohl, where did you learn to do that?”

  “You learn to climb trees fast when your twin is always hunting you down.” He grinned rakishly. He felt rakish this morning, and gazing at Eleshen now, he suddenly wanted to take her in his arms and kiss the Halsos out of her until she squeaked and hit him for mercy. He reached out, netting her at the waist, pulling her close, wanting her.

  “Practice my ass.” Eleshen grumped good-naturedly, grinning at his attention, their argument of the previous day all but forgotten. Elohl knew that she was coming with him now, and that was that. And strangely, he felt fine about it this morning. Pulling her in for a kiss, their lips were just about to meet when Eleshen’s fingers suddenly flew to the neck of his shirt, pulling the laces open. “What the…? Elohl!”

  Elohl chuckled, a very masculine heat in his body. “I know you’re coming with me, even if it means following ten paces behind the whole way to Lintesh. And I’m alright with it now, honestly—”

  “No, Elohl! What happened to you?!” Her face was shocked, her fussy fingers all over his shirt, tugging it out of his breeches. “Take this off…!” Laughing, he moved his fingers to her bodice-laces, but she slapped them away. “No! Elohl, your skin! And your wounds are gone!”

  “What?” Confused, Elohl glanced down at his chest where his shirt now bared a goodly patch of chest. There, where it should have just been his black Inkings and white blade-scars and the new red gash, whorls and scripts in gold flowed out from the black, up below his collarbones,
disappearing beneath the fabric. Elohl shucked his shirt quickly. With the wind licking at his skin, he saw his body made anew. Like a spider’s filaments, his body was limned with tenuous filigree, sweeping arcs of gold as fine as Eleshen’s hair, radiating out from the Kingsmount and Stars, cascading across his chest, curling up below his collarbones, cresting up over his shoulders. Lines of gold dove down from his Inking, too, marking the centerline of his abdomen like the blade of a longsword, diving in thin lines below his belt and lower. And where the lines went, they formed patterns, arcane sigils surrounded by a flowing script in a hand so minute it was barely recognizable as language.

  And all of his slashes from yesterday were utterly gone, as if they had never been.

  “By Aeon’s hands…” Eleshen traced the markings of gold with light fingers. She wound behind him, tracing unseen markings from his shoulders all the way down his spine and up his nape into his hairline at the base of his skull. Her fingers lingered in the center of his back, tracing a pattern with a vaguely circular shape up over his shoulder blades and around his spine.

  “Elohl!” She whispered at last. “It’s beautiful… the front is uncanny, but you should see the back!”

  “What is it?” He murmured, too stunned, gazing at the lines of script upon his front.

  “A dragon! And a wolf… fighting…” she murmured to the breeze.

  Something in Elohl went cold, and the bliss of the sunny day dimmed. “Describe it for me.”

  “They’re… well, they’re trying to kill one another! The wolf has the dragon’s neck in its jaws, and the dragon is disemboweling the wolf with talons, but it seems perfectly balanced…”

  “As if neither is actually winning.” Elohl breathed. He could see it all, every nuance of it. Every part of it just the same as it had been upon the Deephouse doors of Roushenn so long ago.

  “Precisely! But there’s more… they fight inside a ring of flame, but it’s more than fire, it’s the blaze of the sun! With thirteen flaming spokes, lighting their battle. Aeon, Elohl…! What do they mean? What happened to you up there last night?”

  Elohl turned back towards the monolith, regarding the towering Alranstone. Standing behind it as they were, he could see nothing of the carven eyes upon the other side. Moving like a sleepwalker, he circled around, gazing upwards, already knowing what he would see. Already feeling it vibrating in his body, just there, like the hum of bees in a field so distant you have to listen to the wind to hear it.

  And there it was, the corner of an eye open near the ground. He circled further, his breath catching. The lowest eye was fully open. All the eyes upon the massive plinth were wide in the morning sunlight. One had an iris of malachite, one an iris of flat jet. One was white moonstone, one a sunlight-flooded citrine. One was the red fire-opal that had gazed upon him before at the top of the column, one was blue lapis. And the center eye upon the column carried every color within its veins, reflecting a radiance so bright that it outshone diamonds.

  Eleshen gaped next to him. “Well, they weren’t like that yesterday.”

  “Were they like this when you woke?” Elohl breathed.

  “Honestly, I didn’t look. I was too worried about where you had gone.”

  Thrumming filled him, building in his sinews. Certainty. That somehow, this was his path, right here, right now, through this Stone. It was aware of him now. Aware, and docile. Elohl reached out a hand, placing it on the massive plinth. And when his fingers contacted the Stone, all seven eyes upon the column blinked.

  Eleshen whistled. “Do that again.”

  Elohl put his other hand to the stone. The column blinked again.

  “Do you think we can travel by it now?” Eleshen whispered.

  “Get your things,” Elohl murmured, “and get ready to travel.”

  Eleshen nodded, one quick dip of her chin. Hastily, she moved off. Elohl heard sounds of her whisking through the grass, jangling her pack, stuffing away pots and bedrolls. And though he wanted to help her, something held him. He stood there, transfixed, eyes closed now, feeling the Stone, leaning into his palms. Almost, something came to him. A flash of a stern countenance, maybe. A feeling of purpose, like someone goaded him, challenged him.

  And suddenly, Eleshen was back, one pack upon her, the other dragged across the overgrown flagstones. “Elohl? Are you all right?”

  He blinked, realizing he’d been deep in trance. “Fine. Are you ready? Prepare for pain, Eleshen. This won’t be pleasant. And shuck your pack. Just hold it between your knees.”

  She waved a hand dismissively, handing his pack over and then dumping hers, doing as he suggested. “Women know all about pain. Don’t worry about me. Let’s do this.”

  He set his hands to the Stone again and she did the same. Elohl closed his eyes, digging into that trance, feeling the Stone’s sight crawling all over him, pulsing now, demanding. Demanding so many things, but first of all, that Elohl travel.

  “All right, I’ll do it, you bastard…” Elohl breathed out at no one. “I’ll take it.”

  He’d not known why he’d spoken those words, rather than the ones he’d been trained to since childhood, the words Alranstones supposedly responded to. But he needed say no more. In a clap of thunder that split Elohl’s ears, he was sucked in. Twisted through, folding and writhing, on the edge of screaming madness, pain ripped and gutted him. And just when he thought death had come, just as he was succumbing to it, it spat them out unceremoniously upon the other side, in a sprawling heap in the wooded grotto near Lintesh that Elohl remembered all too well. They sprawled into the tall grass. Gasping, Elohl could do nothing for a few moments, his body stunned. Feather-blume was in season, his mind noted from faraway, the tall wispy fronds obscuring the rest of the forest. Little keens of pain came from Eleshen at his side. But at last, his faculties returned, though everything still ached like it had been burned. He rose to his feet, offering Eleshen a hand. With a grimace of pain, she took it and rose.

  “Let’s never do that again…!” She growled through gritted teeth, picking up her pack and slinging it on.

  “What if we have to?”

  Eleshen blinked, stopped, stared at him. “Do you have some plan you’ve not told me about since you dream-climbed that damn plinth? And got all those by some fucking magic no one will ever understand?” Her fussy fingers poked at his new markings, where they could still be seen above his jerkin’s high collar, a few tendrils creeping up the sides of his neck, though his jerkin’s cross-over flap was now buckled high and tight. “Yesterday, you were a gruff, troublesome man, Elohl. But today, you’re changed. Don’t tell me you can’t feel it. That Stone did something to you.”

  He gazed at her, comprehending and yet not. A flicker of dream pushed through, suddenly. A man standing tall before him, decorated by sigils in red and white. But just as Elohl focused upon it, it slipped away. “Am I changed?” He murmured.

  He hadn’t exactly been addressing Eleshen, but she nodded decisively. “I can’t put my finger on it yet, but you seem… lighter. More purposeful. Whatever that thing did to you, you’re less lost now, I’d wager my boots on it. Well? What now? What plan did that damn Stone dump into your brain? It better be a good one for all that misery we just endured!”

  Elohl hefted his pack from where it had fallen on the ground when he sprawled through the stone. “I don’t have a plan, Eleshen. Other than collecting my pension and finding some Guardsmen to speak to, someone who might have known Olea. I’m a loyal Brigadier, honorably discharged. My name will be in the lists. I am instructed to pick up my papers of discharge at the West Guardhouse, and my discharge pay. So we’ll start there.”

  Elohl started off through the copse of woods, angling left to follow the stream as it coursed out of the grotto away from the Alranstone, down the forest’s slope towards the city. He knew the way by heart, etched within him all those years ago, though his pain of those memories seemed distant today. As if the ice that lived within him had been sloughed, worn away,
warmed. His long strides were easily matched by Eleshen’s short, quick ones. Soon, they were through the Kingswood, the sloped margins of the forest breaking to level fields as they approached the Watercourse Gate of Lintesh.

  The gate was bustling with activity, people passing with carts and oxen, some higher lords moving through upon horseback. The land was dry this far down from the mountains, and on the edge of the Elhambrian Valley, it was hot with the sweeping fugue of summertime. Crickets chirruped to their passing. Cicadas whirred in the oaks that dappled the way at the edge of the forest. Elohl and Eleshen strode from the fields and onto the bluegrey grit of the thoroughfare, joining the activity that kicked up dust beyond the massive gates with their fanged portcullis high above, embedded into the towering guardwall of the First Tier.

  The whole thing looked like a wolf’s maw to Elohl suddenly. He halted, staring at it, watching people moving in and out beneath those cruel iron fangs, engulfed and regorged by the beast, its jowls of stone wide. Eleshen paused at his side with a quizzical look. Elohl’s attention drew into his shoulder blades, the spot behind his heart humming, prickling. But it was only a vague discomfort, nothing that signified immediate danger.

  Elohl squared his shoulders, adopting the pose of command he used with his climbing team. Glancing down, he made sure the crossover flap of his military jerkin was properly buckled. The thin lines of gold upon the sides of his neck would raise eyebrows, but only because it was unusual. Inking was not common in Alrou-Mendera, but there were places on the borders where customs had come from other lands. Soldiers were often Inked in various ways, especially if they had traveled.

  He strode forwards, towards a knot of guards that stood by idly to keep the foot traffic and carts flowing. Fishing out his discharge notice from his leather belt-purse, he walked up to a likely guard with blonde hair and a stern, no-nonsense face, and a posture of strength that spoke of rank. The man noted his approach with cool interest, his eyes flicking over the small amount of gold that could be seen upon Elohl’s neck, before noting Eleshen with obvious pleasure.