Blackmark (The Kingsmen Chronicles #1): An Epic Fantasy Adventure Sword and Highland Magic

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  “Kingsmount high.” Elohl den’Alrahel threw his hand of battered playing cards to the rough wooden table with satisfaction.

  The seven weatherworn men around the table groaned, tossing their hands facedown with little grace. Elohl’s trump of Kingsmount and Plinth over a straight flush of black stars earned him a few drunken curses, and a number of incredulous grins. Elohl rubbed his short dark beard out of habit, then curried a hand through his cropped black curls. He leaned back in his chair, giving his weather-hardened frame a good stretch. Climb-hammered hands laced behind his head, he rolled the game's tension from his shoulders.

  “Pay up, louts.” A vaguely pleased smile lifted one corner of his wind-chapped lips.

  His men chuckled with good humor as they swigged their ale. Cracking bitel nuts open now that the game was over, they flicked oblong shells to the straw-strewn floor of the alehouse, where they stuck in the tromped-in mud. A stray shell launched into the barmaid's cleavage and she growled at the roughshod Brigadiers, picking it out as she huffed passed with thick trenchers of stew. An itinerant in homespun tuned the strings of his gourd-shaped oube on a stool in the corner by the quarried stone fireplace. There would be music tonight, lifting to the blackened rafters of the alehouse's snow-shedding peak. Music was a rarity in the King's Army during time of war, even moreso at the remote High Brigade basecamp in the mountains near the Valenghian border, and Elohl was going to miss it.

  “Aeon's prick, Lead Hand!” Russet-haired Ihbram den’Sennia, Elohl’s Second Hand, threw down his cards with an affable smile. “Couldn’t you let us win just this once? You are leaving today. Could at least give us a chance to win back all the coin you’ve fleeced over the last ten years.”

  Elohl’s lips twitched up a bit more as he fastened the tarnished buckles of his worn dark brown military jerkin and adjusted his leather bracers. “You want your coin back? Play me again, Ihbram.”

  “And give you one final chance to cock my ass?” Ihbram’s lance-sharp green eyes glimmered with humor.

  “If you keep playing me, that might be your only chance to make some money.” Elohl actually smiled this time.

  Ihbram grinned back, showing impeccable white teeth in his deeply sunburned olive skin. “Take your coin and get the fuck out of here. Asshole.” He gave a lighthearted laugh as he slid his beaten leather purse across the bitterpine table. The rest of Elohl’s climbing team did the same. Most accepted the farewell whupping from their superior officer with grins, more curses, and swigs of their ale in the rough, mountain fashion.

  But there was one who was not pleased, and had never been pleased with his First-Lieutenant and Lead Hand. Wereth den’Bhariye, a wiry man with a face of steel surged to his feet unsteadily across from Elohl. A hateful scowl turned his graying mustachios down even more than usual.

  “Den’Alrahel!” He slurred. “You can’t just take our coin and sail! You owe us!”

  “Do I?” Elohl’s grey eyes were suddenly stone-hard as he raked his winnings into his leather belt purse. His gaze upon the man chilled the table to silence.

  “Yeah, you damn well do.” Wereth snarled, leaning in across the table, challenging. “Go drown yourself on the Elsee. But not with my coin in your purse. I'll have it back. Now.” Wereth’s wiry hand strayed to the hilt of the short rope-knife that rode his hip.

  “Whoa, now, Wereth...” Ihbram den'Sennia's clear voice was low and reasonable as he held out a hand, moving into a cautionary position between Wereth and Elohl. But Elohl moved around Ihbram, motioning his Second Hand out of the way with a subtle nod. Ihbram cocked an eyebrow, wary, but stepped back.

  “I’ve put up with you,” Elohl murmured, “for nearly two years, Wereth. Ever since you were ousted from den’Mhessua’s team for falling asleep drunk on watch. For not protecting your brothers.”

  “Fuck you.” Wereth sneered with disdain, fingers on the hilt of his knife. “You drink yourself into oblivion just like the rest of us, Lead Hand, you fucking suicidal cunt! You don't even try to hide those wrist scars!”

  “Whoa...!” Ihbram surged forward, but Elohl held his hand out over his broad Second Hand's chest.

  “You want a chance at me, Wereth?” Elohl dropped his voice, emptying his demeanor of care for the useless man in front of him. “Today’s your day.”

  “Fucking Blackmark!”

  The wiry man’s face was purple as he lunged, rope-knife in his hand fast as a keshar’s raking claw. But Elohl moved with the tingling speed of instinct, feeling the press of energy where the man would move. He whipped one longknife to den’Bhariye’s throat before the other could even come close, before the men of his team could so much as startle.

  Low whistles sounded around the table.

  Elohl’s team had seen how fast he could move, the precision his instinct lent him, the reason he climbed well and set true routes up the passes and kept men around him alive, both in battle and out of it. They had seen how Elohl earned his authority time and time again in blizzards, navigating around treacherous crevasses, saving a man from falling to his death by a fast anchor to the line. They had been saved by his longknives or his sword, thrust suddenly between them and an enemy when they were down and outnumbered.

  No matter what kind of scars he wore.

  But rarely did they see that fleet instinct used on a fellow Brigadier. His team had little understanding of what seethed in Elohl’s veins, beneath his careful crust of glacial calm. Elohl’s uncompromising gaze held den’Bhariye’s, daring him to even flinch. The moment stretched as Elohl’s authority bristled through the hushed tavern, his storm-grey gaze every bit his father’s now, but harder. Older.

  Ten years in the High Brigade did that to a man. Ten years in a bitter and unforgiving war that might have been stopped had the Kingsmen had any say in it.

  “Put it away, Elohl.” Ihbram den’Sennia muttered from his right. “He’s not worth a hanging. You’ve only two hours of service left.”

  Elohl took a deep breath, the single breath of his training. Glacial ice slipped into place once more, sluicing his rage. Elohl slid his knife back in its sheath, as Wereth simmered before him. Hateful. Hateful, like so many were now against a Kingsman. Hateful because of an accusation of treason none could conjure evidence for. Hateful simply because common men needed someone to hate when their families starved from rations shunted to fighting armies.

  Hateful to still be fighting in that endless war.

  “I’m no traitor to the Crown,” Elohl murmured, cold. “And killing a soldier of the Crown would be treason. Even a shit excuse for one such as you. Kingsmen do not commit treason.”

  Den’Bhariye snarled. His still-bared knife snaked up, fast.

  But Elohl was always faster. He surged, a heron-smooth strike. The heel of his open palm caught den’Bhariye square in the chest. It was a blow to shame, learned long ago at the capable hands of Elohl’s father. Wereth went toppling backwards over his chair and sprawled out over the sodden, straw-strewn floorboards.

  Elohl's team erupted into laughter.

  “Fucking cunt.” Den’Bhariye’s scowling mustachios scowled harder as he slunk away to the bar. And though he spit as he went, the man was broken. Satisfaction spread through Elohl as he turned to make his farewells, clasping hands with the veteran climbers of his team.

  “Lead Hand.” A grinning Jovial den’Fourth put away his short knife now that the fight was over, though he'd been ready to dive in to protect his commander. He proffered his arm, mouth quirked with humor in his aquiline face. Jovial was a good climber and a friend, eight years on Elohl's team, and as they clasped wrists Elohl felt a sudden pang, realizing he was leaving everything of his life behind, yet again.

  Just like ten years ago.

  “Jovial. Nice climbing with you.” Elohl murmured, masking any emotion.

  Jovial slapped him on the shoulder. “Don't be so sullen, Lieutenant! Maybe we'll see each other again someday. Who knows? Until then, watch your back on the roa
d. I can't be ready to knife everyone who insults you in a tavern.”

  “I'll keep that in mind.”

  A somber-eyed Harlis den’Sellen turned to him next, saying his goodbyes with respect for his First-Lieutenant, and the other six men on Elohl's primary team followed suit. In the lazy, frozen way of the High Brigade, each saluted with two fingers to the temple and a nod. Elohl clasped Ihbram’s climb-corded forearm last, as the other men moved off, giving their commander and his closest friend space to converse in the thin daylight near one grimy glass-paned window.

  “Travel safe, friend,” Ihbram muttered.

  “Same to you.”

  Elohl eyed his Second Hand a moment. He took in the older man’s weatherworn creases at eyes and mouth, the grey that streaked those roguish copper waves, braided back from either side of his face in the Highlands fashion. Ihbram had Elsthemi Highlands blood somewhere back down his mostly Cennetian family line, and remembered Highlands customs.

  “Ten years of war in the highpasses might be enough for a man.” Elohl murmured. “Your serve is up, same as mine. You don’t have to jump right back into the fray, Ihbram.”

  Ihbram den’Sennia shrugged, amused. He reached down for his pewter tankard, and swigged off the last of his ale. “Fifteen years of war for me, you forget.”

  “You sure you want to join the lowlands campaign in Valenghia?” Elohl asked.

  “Nah.” Ihbram chuckled. “But where is an old soldier like me supposed to go? Anyway, just 'cause I'm going back to the lowlands doesn't mean I'm joining the battle at the front. I might just use it as an excuse to sneak over... find a little silver-haired Valenghian gal someplace away from the fighting, with high bosoms and a good, roaring fire, know what I mean? Man can’t climb until his fingers bleed all the time.”

  Elohl snorted. “Deserter.”

  Ihbram grinned, baring very white teeth in the midst of his scruffy red beard. He’d always taken good care of his teeth. Highlanders did. “Go where the gold is, Elohl. Get a little of what I want for a change. Fuck these mountains.”

  “Fuck these mountains,” Elohl confirmed. “Walk me to the pier?”

  Ihbram nodded, and they fell into subtle military stride, at once possessing the clip of the soldier and the exhausted amble of a veteran Brigadier. The pair exited the alehouse, stepping off its creaking, waterlogged boards and into the three-inch mud that was ever-present in the heights of the Eleskis, except when it snowed and snowed and snowed. Now, it was raining, and when it rained in the heights of the Kingsmountains, it rained and rained, depressing.

  Thick mud squelched up around the stout leather of their knee-high Brigadier climbing boots. They slogged on in their oilcloaks, stopping by the log bunkhouse so Elohl could fetch his packed rucksack with his belongings, which weren’t much. It struck him suddenly that his life had come to so little. Only functionality. Survival. A single rucksack filled with rope, ice axes and claw-feet for climbing, longknives to engage Valenghia's Red Valor once the climb was over and the skirmish began. A military-issue longsword he now strapped to his back, heaving the rucksack over it but leaving the sword's handle free, just in case.

  And his Kingsmen greys, stuffed in the bottom of his pack, held on to all these years.

  He had learned practicality in the mountains, how to be emotionless in bad times, and Elohl pushed emotions away now. They were always bad times, more or less. Elohl had seen a man have to cut off his entire hand when he got it wedged in an ice-slicked crevasse once. He’d made it off the climb, but hadn’t lasted the night.

  And that had been a relatively good death, for a Brigadier.

  Elohl realized now, surveying his empty bunk, how far he’d strayed from his youth. Though a talented fighter, the lad he’d been when he first came here had been used to comfort and education, love and ease. But that lad had become numb to hardship, quickly, mired in the routines of war. And now there was nothing else. The High Brigade of Alrou-Mendera had suffered skirmishes every summer, as the Valenghian Red Valor tried to find a way through the passes to weaken the border. And they froze every winter, snows thirty feet deep even at basecamp, relentless.

  It was tiring, and Elohl was more tired than he had ever been. His tread was heavy in the mud as he stepped from the bunkhouse boards. Huddling in his worn oilcloak, he and Ihbram slogged through the sleeting spring rain to the lakeshore, Elohl trying to drown countless emotions beneath the empty glacial calm he'd perfected over the years. At the pier, the twin-masted sailing craft waited, to take him and the rest whose ten years were up over the Elsee, back the long, winding trek home.

  Home. A place Elohl no longer had. Everyone in Alrashesh was now gone. Faces surfaced in Elohl’s mind. The laughing, bright grey gaze of Olea. His father’s stern jaw but kind ease. His mother’s sweet smile and soothing fingers. The hot rage of Dherran. Suchinne’s perfect calm.

  Ghrenna. Twin lakes of cerulean mystery washed over his vision, the suddenness of it sweeping him away for a moment. Her eyes always came to him in times like these. Freezing on a ledge, half-buried, a vivid, dark blue would sweep his vision. As if Ghrenna were watching him from so very far. He could almost smell her pine-clean tundra fragrance, almost see her pale throat, the way tendrils of her white hair curled around her ears.

  Elohl set his jaw and drowned that thought, too, under frozen lakes, surveying the dock rather than indulging in lost memories. There weren’t many waiting for the boat from the High Brigade, he noticed. Just two men Elohl recognized by face but not by name, having never ascended with them. Most of the climbing team he commanded still had a few years of service left, and no one from his original team had made it ten years, except Ihbram.

  Not many made it home from the High Brigade.

  “Where will you go?” Ihbram muttered at Elohl’s side. It was a trick he had, picking up on Elohl’s thoughts. Elohl and others had accused the man of reading minds, but Ihbram always laughed it off with a flash of his impeccable white teeth.

  “Olea was in Lintesh, last I heard. So I go to Lintesh.”

  Ihbram eyed him warily. “That was eight years ago, Elohl. Your last letter from Olea. That’s a big risk, going right back into the keshar’s maw, right back to the capitol. After everything that happened.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Elohl murmured, submerging sensations of failure, of loss so acute still that his throat gripped, though it had all been ten years ago. “I’m going back to Lintesh. If Olea’s not there anymore, I’ll follow her trail until I find where she went.” Drops of rain pattered off Elohl’s nose, chill, like he tried to make his heart.

  “Your twin hasn’t written in all this time. You think…”

  Elohl shot his friend a hard look, anger breaking through. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. Olea’s alive. She has to be. Just like… all the rest.”

  Ihbram nodded, merely wrapping his oilcloak tighter as he watched the boatmen lashing down cargo, crates being loaded. After ten years climbing and fighting together in the High Brigade, living to keep each other alive, the two men knew each other better than Elohl knew his own twin at this point. And Ihbram knew when to let something go.

  “I got a cousin in Quelsis,” Ihbram murmured at last. “Friend of mine is a friend of his. Ihlen den’Almen. He’d get you on your feet. Get you hooked up with a trade.”

  “I have a trade.”

  Ihbram stopped Elohl with a hand to the arm, just to one side of the pier. His bright green gaze was deadly serious beneath the hood of his cloak. “Kingsman isn’t a trade, Elohl. Not anymore. Your people are gone, disappeared, probably dead. Nothing you can do will bring them back. Whomever penned that Summons captured you and sent you out here to this company to die, all to keep the worst secret our nation has ever known. If you go back to Lintesh, they’ll be that much closer to ending you.”

  Restlessness stirred in Elohl, of business unfinished. His heart clenched, trying to stir, trying to surface. “I have to go back, Ihbram. You don't know what
it's like, living with this. Knowing I failed them all.”

  “You did what you could.”

  “I didn't. I failed at Roushenn Palace and my kin disappeared and then I got caught. Olea got caught. Ghrenna. Dherran. Suchinne. All the Kingskinder. I failed them all.”

  “They didn't get caught because of you. Sheath those words. You’ve survived out here ten years. That’s an Aeon-fucked miracle, Elohl! Don’t be suicidal again, not like when you arrived here. Go get yourself a girl and a nice little farm and leave the whole damn Kingsmen thing be.”

  Elohl regarded Ihbram a moment, his brother-in-arms for ten years, knowing his friend's words for truth and yet unable to heed them. “I'll be in Lintesh looking for Olea. Looking for the others.”

  Ihbram narrowed his eyes. “You can't stay put near people for longer than a fortnight and we both know it. You're a ronin keshar if ever there was one. I give you two weeks before you leave the city and isolate yourself.”

  “I'm a man of solitude.”

  “You're a man punishing himself for the past, Elohl. There's a difference. Do you even know what you want? Out of life?”

  Elohl was silent a long moment, feeling emotions try to melt through like a volcanic vent beneath a snowfield. Guilt, fatigue, wretched rage, woe, loneliness, separation, responsibility. He could name them all, but he didn't allow himself to feel them. “I just want peace, Ihbram,” Elohl murmured at last. “Is that so much to ask? This turmoil I feel... I just need some peace.”

  Ihbram held his gaze with a concerned levelness. “Peace comes at a price, Elohl. All men pay that price in war. The only way to find true peace is to allow yourself to live again. To move on.”

  The bronze steerage-bell was rung from the ship. Elohl glanced over. Boatmen scurried up the masts, unfurling sails and loosing lines from the dock. He was going to miss his ship if he didn't move, and there wasn't another for two more months.

  Elohl proffered one climb-weathered hand. “Keep yourself well, Ihbram.”

  Ihbram den’Sennia grasped his arm solemnly. “Keep yourself alive, Elohl. I won’t be around to do it anymore.”

  Elohl choked at that, emotions almost loosed at that brutal truth. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  They shared a long moment of silent understanding, of climbs weathered, battles waged, nights huddling close for warmth, death always a thin breath away. But at last, it was time. Elohl turned, striding down the long, rain-slicked pier, leaving his truest friend behind in the mud.

  Mounting the chipped gangplank just before it was taken up, Elohl settled his pack at the railing for one last view of the storm-shrouded peaks of the Eleskis. There was no belowdecks for soldiers on the vessels that sailed the Elsee, but Elohl was used to weather in the Kingsmountains. The two coarse-bearded faces from the High Brigade saluted their First-Lieutenant as they settled their packs. Two veterans with scars as ancient as Elohl's and the same empty-hard visage. Nodding, Elohl turned his face away. He wasn't their First-Lieutenant anymore. He wasn't Brigadier-Captain Arlus den’Pell's steadiest ice-ax anymore.

  He wasn't anything anymore.

  Elohl wrapped his oilcloak tighter, snugged the hood and hunkered upon his pack, not letting himself think any further into the future than getting to Lintesh. It was death in the mountains to think too far ahead. Weather could change, allegiances could shift, glaciers could melt. Emotions could surface and get you killed. Draping his cloak around himself, he arranged it to keep everything dry. The rain deepened as the marine crew lofted the sails and swung them about, wind driving the wet against Elohl’s beard-roughened cheeks.

  If anyone had been looking, they might have thought some of those raindrops were tears. But no one was looking at a man with hard grey eyes who was no longer young, whose hands were roughened like the stone and ice they had climbed for ten years, whose weather-chiseled face could have been menacing, or placid, or sorrowful. No one was looking at a man who had drunk himself nearly to death time and time again, but whose hands were always steady when he climbed, or when he killed.

  No one was looking at a Kingsman who bore the star-and-mountain Inkings, but who had never really been one.

  No, Kingsman wasn’t a trade. Not anymore.

  CHAPTER 2 – OLEA