Companion of Darkness_An Epic Fantasy Series

by CJ Rutherford

  Lyssa came over and took my hand, still grinning widely. “Yes, Father. We shall be as inseparable as sisters. Now come along, Jes.” She dragged me to a circular pattern on the ground I hadn’t noticed until now. She mumbled something under her breath and suddenly the evening sky was gone, replaced by a large room.

  I gasped. “What just happened? How?” My head reeled, and the same strange scent filled the air.

  Lyssa laughed. “I used the transportation circle.” She gestured to the deep-red crystal floor, and sure enough, a similar rounded pattern was embedded in the surface. She walked off, and I followed her through a large doorway that led to a wide spiral staircase. Everything was constructed of the same crystal, and, like the walls, it all seemed to flow together, only the differing colors giving an indication of changes.

  Up, up, and up we climbed, and by the time we reached our destination I was out of breath.

  “You know,” I gasped, “if you’d told me where we were going I could have flown us both here a lot faster.”

  Lyssa’s smile faltered, and a strange gleam flashed in her eyes before she beamed at me again. “Oh yes. Please, come inside and let me show you your rooms, then I would simply adore it if you’d show me your wings.”

  I returned her smile hesitantly, wondering briefly about the strangeness I’d glimpsed in her eyes, before dismissing it. As I entered the rooms—my rooms—I blinked, twice. I don’t know what I’d expected. A simple but comfortable room, perhaps? My mouth dropped open. This was a cell.

  Gone was the crystal, replaced with hard black stone. A narrow cot with a thin mattress lay below an open window, through which a bitterly cold draft blew in. To one side was a simple bathing room, but aside from a small table and wardrobe, the room was bare.

  “What is this?” I asked, turning to face the princess, the cold ball back in my stomach. She still smiled, but now the wicked gleam in her eyes was undisguised, and her lips twisted in a sneer. “I thought…I thought we were going to be friends?” Even to my own ears, I sounded pitiful.

  Lyssa laughed, the sound completely different from the earlier happiness. “Oh dear, Jesaela. Whatever gave you that idea? How could I, an eldar princess, be friends with a lowly faer like you?” She walked around me again. I tried to take a step toward the open door, but I couldn’t move, and the smell of magic again filled my nostrils. My heart hammered in my chest and my breath became ragged, frosting in the frigid air. Dimly I wondered at that. It was a balmy summer evening outside, so why was it so cold in here?

  “Now, about those wings of yours. I would so love to see them.”

  I shuddered as my wings flew outward. The princess had complete control of me. I was totally helpless. “I’m supposed to be your companion, Lyssa. Your parents even said so. Please, let me go. I’ll do whatever you want, I promise.” I sobbed, but Lyssa just laughed, and I realized I could feel her emotions. She’d hidden them up until now, choosing to unmask them at just the right moment to get maximum effect. The feelings of hatred and revulsion roiled over me, causing bile to rise in my stomach. She was utterly horrid.

  “I do love the wings.” She reached a hand out to caress the silken surface of them, and a shiver ran through me as she came close enough to whisper in my ear. “I suppose you could fly away at any time.” She skipped over to the open window. “Once I free you, what’s to stop you flying out this open window? No, we can’t have that, can we?”

  I didn’t know what she meant. “I won’t. I promise to stay. I promise to do anything you want.” I meant it. I’d heard the words of my family. I couldn’t go back, for if I did the eldar would send the dragons to turn my people to ash.

  Lyssa chuckled, but there was only cruelty in the sound. “Why should I take the word of a worthless forest dweller? No, I’m afraid I need to take action.”

  The air filled with the scent of magic, thick and cloying as it snaked around me. What is she going to do? Then a tingling sensation settled over my wings and intensified to border on pain.

  “What are you do—NOOO!!” My back spasmed and arched as a wave of pain unlike anything I’d ever felt ripped through me. It felt like every cell in my body was burning. I collapsed onto the cold hard floor as Lyssa released the spell that had been holding me. She laughed as she watched me writhe, screaming my lungs raw as I futilely tried to reach over my shoulders to put out the flames engulfing my wings. It was useless, and even as the flames died and the searing torment slowly subsided into mere agony, I screamed myself hoarse. The torment stretched time and all I knew was pain. It might have been hours. I had no reckoning.

  All the time, Lyssa giggled and clapped her hands, even when I threw up. She skipped around the room as I retched, my stomach muscles adding their own agony as I heaved and heaved. When there was nothing left, I collapsed, face down and unmoving on the black stone, letting the icy surface leech the heat from my body. I twitched, barely aware of the princess as she walked toward the door.

  Her final words chilled me more than the floor. “There,” she said, and I heard the wicked glee in her voice. “Now neither of us has wings, just like it should have been from the beginning.” Beginning? What beginning? She came back and knelt down so her lips almost grazed my ear and whispered, “You have a lot of suffering ahead to make up for what they did.”

  Pain. That was all I was, all my existence. I tried to close my eyes and drift off into blissful unconsciousness again, but even the effort of keeping my eyes clenched shut caused explosions of agony to wrack my body. To add to my misery, I shivered uncontrollably, the thin sheet giving little comfort against the freezing draft tugging at its corners.

  Wait. Sheet? The last thing I remembered was passing out on the stone floor, but as I managed to open an eye, the light causing another spear of pain to shoot through my head, I realized I lay on the mattress.

  How did I get here? I couldn’t remember crawling over to the cot, and Lyssa surely wouldn’t have cared enough to try and comfort me. No, I must have a benefactor, of sorts…or another torturer. Perhaps they just didn’t want me to freeze to death. Didn’t want me to escape the suffering in store.

  I forced both eyes open, clenching my teeth. When I tried to rise, a wave of nausea forced me down again. If the princess came in now, I’d be helpless. Despair washed over me. Even if I were perfectly healthy, her magic was too strong for me to resist.

  How could anyone be so cruel? Monsters, that’s what my brother had called them, and he was right. How was I going to survive, if Lyssa’s first betrayal had been so vicious? I remembered the frigidity of her mother’s eyes. The apple had clearly not fallen far from the tree, and at that thought, I sobbed. The Tree. My home, the one I’d never see again. Then, with a horrible sinking shock, I remembered my greatest loss.

  The pain blossomed across my back when I rolled onto my side. I winced and cried out as I reached back with my shaking right hand to run my fingers over the ruined ridges that marked where my wings hid when not in use. I wailed. I’d never fly again. Never race my tiny avian friends, even if there were any in this Maker-forsaken place.

  Then the last moments with my family came to mind and I sobbed with renewed grief as I tried—and failed—to feel them through the magical tether that bound us. It was gone…blocked, or snapped irrevocably, I didn’t know. I was truly alone, for the first time ever, trapped in a castle of monsters and doomed to live a life of torture and misery.

  I might have lain there and cried for an age, but something on the table sitting against the black stone wall caught my eyes. Something that hadn’t been there the night before. I struggled upright to put one foot after the other on the floor. The vomit from last night was gone. My mystery ‘friend’ who put me to bed was nothing if not thorough.

  I staggered to the table and collapsed onto the chair. My back burned so painfully my vision swam with stars. The object was a small glass container, square with rounded edges. I ran my fingers over the top of it and jerked them back as the lid dissolved to rev
eal a thick lotion within that shone with a silver sparkle.

  It felt silken and cool, and as I rubbed a tiny amount of it between my fingers, a tingle spread out, flowing across my hand and up my arm. It felt wonderful, and I instinctively reached back to rub some of it over the raw scars. Instantly the magical salve took effect, cooling the fire of the wounds, but more than that, healing them.

  I sighed with relief as the pain decreased then vanished completely. Thank you. Thank you, I thought, to whoever had given me the precious gift, but I still cried bitterly for my lost wings.

  ‘Stop this, now!’ The tiny voice sounded in my head, in the voice of my brother, Browaen. I looked out the window, the morning sky red as the sun crested the horizon, toward the forest. It was still a dark smudge in the distance, but a glimmer right at the edge of sight caused my heart to skip a beat. I didn’t know if the voice was real or some trick of my mind, but I sat up, wiping the tears off my face and standing up to walk to the window.

  ‘What can I do? I’m nobody, nothing in this place.’

  ‘You are hope!’ My heart swelled as I heard my queen’s voice. I felt the emotion, but under the love for me lay an undercurrent of something that tasted like desperation. ‘You can break the curse, Jesaela.’

  No! ‘I’m not worthy. I can’t do this. I’m only a child!’

  A roar shook the room, and I looked wildly around for the source until fire exploded in my head. Pressing my hands against my temples, I expected another demand for action, another false hope.

  Instead, Glyran’s voice was soft and compassionate. ‘We are both children, trapped by the curse.’

  I couldn’t cope. There were too many demands. I didn’t know anything about a curse. I just wanted to go home. How would I, a single forest-dwelling faerie child, withstand whatever the princess and her family planned for me, much less while unraveling whatever mysteries were hidden within the Citadel?

  The glass container caught my eye again. Maybe I wasn’t entirely alone. Maybe I had at least one ally in this nest of snakes. I took the container and hid it in the wardrobe, which was full of plain homespun dresses. Another of Lyssa’s barbs twisted my gut. My own beautiful dress was ruined, hanging ragged and scorched from my shoulders and barely covering me, so I took one of the robes and went to the bathing area, running the taps to fill the bath. Of course the water was cold. Why would Lyssa allow any warmth in the room she’d bewitched to be freezing even in midsummer? It didn’t matter. How could she know that I loved to bathe in the flowing springs that ran down from the mountains?

  No, there was a lot she didn’t know about me. A weight settled on my shoulders, palpable and heavy. The words I’d just heard were another burden for me to bear. I sat in the frigid water, pondering.

  I had barely toweled my hair dry when the door to my rooms burst open and Lyssa strode in. I had just enough time to stoop and feign a wince. An innocent smile graced her beautiful features at the sight of my pain, innocent except for the wicked gleam in her hazel eyes.

  “I’m surprised you managed to get out of bed, Jesaela.” She spat my name like an insult. “Next time I’ll have to do a more thorough job.”

  I flinched visibly. She couldn’t take my wings again, so while I watched her smile in satisfaction at the mask of terror on my face, inside me a spark ignited. It was tiny, this ember of defiance, but it was something I hadn’t possessed before. I grabbed it, determined not to let it go.

  My grip almost slipped when the scent of magic filled the air as my rooms transformed. The stone walls turned to a deep, emerald-green crystal, the ceiling sky blue and the floor the color of spring grass, to tempt and torment me with memories of home. It wasn’t perfect. It was like a transparent overlay covered the room, but I could still see the black stone, still feel the cold breeze blow through the room.

  Lyssa smirked at me as footsteps approached up the staircase.

  So…this was the way it would be. To all but her, I was to be a cherished friend, trapped in a gilded cage. I looked around at the huge luxurious divan flanked with bedside tables, the double wardrobe with gleaming silver mirrors reflecting the sunlight streaming in; the room would feel warm to anyone but me.

  A door that hadn’t been there before lay ajar and I glimpsed a piano and a gaming table within. All designed to add to my misery. The worst thing was Lyssa’s unuttered laughter.

  I was little more than a child, small even before I bowed in fake pain, but the being entering the room was tiny. More than that, her shuffling feet, if they could be called that – they looked like gnarled roots – were chained together. So I wasn’t the only prisoner here. However, as the brownie entered alone, I knew the illusion was for her benefit. Lyssa wanted her other captives to think I was special, getting better treatment.

  Why?

  “Brecca here will be your maid, Jes.” The princess’s voice was warm and friendly, her face the picture of happiness. I clenched my jaw at her use of my name in this way. “I thought you’d appreciate a fellow forest dweller instead of one of us.” By now, I knew enough about her to finish her unspoken words: that she wouldn’t demean any of the eldar or even the lower elves by forcing them to serve me.

  I bowed, stiffly, faking a wince. “Thank you, Highness. That was very thoughtful of you.”

  Lyssa looked down at the small being, her nose wrinkling. “Well, I’ll leave you to get acquainted. I shall meet you in the hall below in, oh, an hour?” She didn’t wait for an answer as the door slammed shut, leaving me with Brecca.

  I’d recognized her as a brownie as soon as she’d walked in the door, her bush-like appearance marking her. Her people lived in the deep forest, preferring to live in seclusion. Her skin was mottled green and brown, and her eyes were the color of chestnuts. Her hair was a collection of twigs and moss, which allowed her and the others to blend seamlessly with the undergrowth.

  What was she doing here? “How were you caught, Brecca?” Her gaze dropped to my feet, looking for manacles like hers. She remained silent, so I knelt in front of her. “I’m just over a century old, did you know that?” Silence. “And in all that time do you know how many brownies I’ve seen, outside of the ones that came to the queen’s court?” I paused and smiled as Brecca’s eyes revealed a spark of interest.

  “None. Not a one, Brecca. Your people are invisible unless they want to be seen, so I’ll ask my question again. How were you caught?”

  The deep eyes shone with tears, bitterness etched on the small face. “I wasn’t caught…but my brother. He…” Brecca turned away, the memory clearly painful.

  I took her hands in mine, gently squeezing them. “Your brother?”

  “He’s dead!” Brecca snatched her hands away and turned her back to me. “You killed him. And now I have to serve you, and if I don’t my family will suffer his fate.”

  What?! My head reeled. What was she talking about? I’d spoken truly. There had been infrequent visits by brownies to the court over the years, but outside of that I’d never clapped eyes on one.

  “Five years ago, my brother and I were playing on the edge of your clearing.” The brownie’s voice trembled. “We often did that. We loved to venture far enough to see your tree. It was a wonderful sight.”

  My breath caught in my throat. One day. It had only been one day since I’d left, but I already missed it, so much my heart squeezed.

  “Bronta, my brother, heard singing, beautiful melodies, and ran after them. I tried to keep up, but…our power to hide is part of us. We cannot turn it off, and I lost him in a heartbeat. So I followed the music and found you.”

  My brows furrowed. “Wait…what do you mean? I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

  Brecca shook her bushy head. “No, you did not see me, but as you sang in the mountain stream I remember smiling. You do sing wonderfully, you know.”

  I smiled at the compliment, before her eyes bore into mine. The fury within her gaze was raw and terrible and I reared back. “That was the last time I smile
d. You couldn’t have heard the scream – faerie ears can’t hear so high – but as I raced through the undergrowth I heard the final moment of my brother’s life. The clearing he’d run through on the way to get to you was small, but the grass was short. There was no cover at all, not even for us.”

  My heart almost stopped. No, no, no!

  “I ran to him, cradling his head. He looked up at me, and do you know what he said?” Brecca’s eyes burned with accusation.

  I didn’t want to ask, but she told me anyway. “He said, ‘sorry.’ Sorry he’d run off, but the music was so beautiful he had to see its source. Only he didn’t get that far.”

  I knew. I was certain what was coming.

  “Your princess stood, her parents behind her. The knife in her hand was covered in Bronta’s blood. I lunged for her, but I didn’t get two steps before these appeared.” She indicated the chains at her feet. “They brought me back here. They threw me in a dark room.” She bared her pointed teeth. “Do you know what it’s like not to see the sun for a year?”

  I didn’t…couldn’t imagine that. I didn’t want to even think about it. For a forest-dweller, a year of darkness would be the worst form of torture. I reached out, but Brecca recoiled.

  “Every day, the princess visited me. At the beginning, I thought she was being kind. She brought me food, secreted inside her gown so the guards wouldn’t see. We’d sit talking for hours, with her saying how sorry she was, that Bronta had been running so fast toward you – toward your song – that he’d impaled himself on her knife.”

  “I didn’t know,” I whispered, horrified.

  Brecca’s head snapped round. “Ignorance is no excuse,” she spat. “Bronta ran toward your voice. You killed him.” She stood and looked around, her eyes taking in the room. I knew she saw what Lyssa wanted her to: the luxury of the room and the lack of any visible signs of bondage. I clenched my fists. I had another enemy, one personalized to hate everything about me.