by Shelley Cass
It was the girl we had met when we had first arrived.
Isadora.
And she was kissing Dalin.
When their lips parted she giggled again, batting those weapon-like eyelashes at him like before, and he smiled impishly back. His tunic had been pulled off. It was crumpled at their feet on the grass. She was holding his hands to her waist as she smiled, and I found that my teeth were clenching.
She took her hands from his, and her fingers started untying the cord lacing the front of his shirt. She stopped when his shirt was open to the navel, and started circling her fingers across his chest, tickling his skin lightly. Tracing the muscles there.
There was obviously no care for honour from either of them and I felt judgment cloud my face, for the noble gentleman in particular, and was just about to turn to leave when the dim witted, selfish sot of a boy spoke, looking down into Isadora’s adoring eyes.
“This is nice,” he smiled.
I nearly felt my eyes roll out of my head.
“But I really only wanted your help,” he finished.
I paused. How could Isadora help Dalin in a way that Noal or I couldn’t?
“Isn’t this helping?” she asked playfully, and she started to caress his bare chest with her lips.
“Mmmmmm,” he agreed slowly, as she kissed his skin. “But honestly, if you were angry with me, what could I do to apologise? I don’t have access to the nice gifts I could give to someone from my home, and I doubt that buying gifts would help in this instance.”
She tore herself away from kissing his chest to stroke his cheek. “But I’m not angry with you. In fact, I’m very, very happy.” She kissed him again.
He pulled away after a few moments, thinking. “But what could I do?”
She sighed, considering. “I would love the bought gifts you mentioned. But if you had to, you could give me a flower.”
“I’m not sure cliché tricks will work in this instance either,” Dalin replied doubtfully.
“Find a special flower,” Isadora shrugged. “Doesn’t matter, the effort will say everything.”
He nuzzled at her cheek, kissing her softly all the way down to her collarbone. “You’re an angel!” he said at last, grinning down at her.
“Is this for that girl you came with?” she asked without any hint of concern as she went back to tracing her dainty fingers along his chest.
“Yes,” he nodded. “Thank you for your help.”
My jaw dropped in surprise.
“You shouldn’t worry about her. I’ll make you forget your troubles.” She said it slyly, and her fingers started to move south, travelling down his chest and past his navel.
My mouth dropped open a little further in amazement.
But Dalin gently clasped her fingers, stopping them as they roamed and stroked their way down to his trousers and began fiddling with his belt. He kissed her hand, holding it, then kissed her lips and pulled away, beaming.
“You taste nice,” he smiled. “But, now I have an important errand. I’ll have to find the perfect flower, in the dark.” He kissed her again, a long slow kiss, then a quick one, and then stooped to pick up his tunic.
“Well, come to say goodbye before you leave on the morrow,” she looked at him suggestively.
“I am indebted to you for your help, fair maiden!” He bowed comically so that she laughed, before he turned and set off on his hunt in the trees opposite the stream.
She looked after him for a moment, then left too, walking past the other side of the bushes I sheltered behind, back toward the village.
“What happened Isadora?” I heard excited whispers from further back as she withdrew.
“We have a true connection,” she gushed. “He said he loves me.”
I nearly snorted as I heard them squeal as they departed.
Not long after, I filled my pail and headed back too.
But, for some reason, I wasn’t angry anymore.
The girls who had visited me had been right – spying could be beneficial.
Chapter Thirty Four
Dalin
It was already late when I found the best flower in the hilly tree lands around Wanru.
I’d been traipsing all around the area, thanking the Gods for the moon’s light, when I’d almost tramped on it.
A wild gardenia.
To be more exact, it was a fragrant patch of wild gardenias, but just one, raised above and more delicate than the others, caught my eye. It was beautiful, looking silvery white in the moonlight, with petals opening to become a star shape.
I gently stroked the soft, velvety petals with a fingertip before carefully picking it, and cradled it like a baby on the way back to the village while rehearsing what I would say as I walked up to the room Kiana was staying in.
It was very late, but the light of a candle could be seen behind the curtains of the window, and for some reason drunken butterflies began crashing around in my stomach.
I stood on the doorstep for a moment, breathing deeply, then knocked lightly on the door. When it opened, Kiana stood in the doorway as if she were a framed and mesmerising portrait.
She gave me an appraising look as I stood speechlessly on her doorstep with a flower and a bashful expression.
“You’re out late,” she commented. “Did one of those girls try to kidnap you?”
“Yes,” I said seriously. “It was awful. But, with the bravery and strength of a lion, I courageously fought my way to freedom.”
She gave one of her half smiles. That was a good sign, when she normally didn’t smile at anything I said.
“Kiana …” I cleared my throat nervously. “I braved my way through all of those nasty girls because I had something to say to you.”
“Yes?” she encouraged. My face was colouring and I was sure I looked like an absolute fool.
“I think …” I cleared my throat again. “I think we’ve got off to a bad start.”
Kiana raised an eyebrow.
“I know how much you’ve helped us, and I’ve not shown you as much respect as you deserve. I do truly think that we need you to get safely to Jenra, and I’m sure we can work together and cooperate. But even more so, I hope that we can also be friends. I really want you to know that I can do better.”
I stopped there, smiling at her hopefully, and held my perfect gardenia out to her.
She regarded the flower, and me, carefully. Then slowly she held out her hand and took the flower gently from my fingers. She inclined her head.
“Thank you.” Her eyes were soft instead of impartial as they looked at me. “We must try to get along, my friend. I am also sorry for treating you harshly.”
I was more elated and relieved than I’d guessed I could be as she stood twirling the flower in her fingertips.
“Thank you Dalin,” she said again with her smile, and then quietly closed the door.
As I hopped down from the step and made my way to the small apartment that Noal and I shared, my heart sang with a happier beat than it had since before Noal and I had planned our Quest. And the next morning as Noal and I made our way over to Kiana’s room, I still felt buoyed with optimism with the thought that there was no longer any frostiness between Kiana and I.
Her door was open when we got there and we found her leaning a wooden chair back lazily from the rickety dinner table, flipping her knife up and catching it playfully as she waited. A map was laid out on the table.
“Please stop that, it makes me nervous,” Noal pleaded, watching the blade spin in the air as he sat by me on the edge of the bed.
She let all four of the chair’s legs fall forward to the floor and slipped the dagger back into her boot. “Right,” she swivelled to look at us. “Here’s the plan.”
Kiana proceeded to inform us that the horse breeding village of Wrilapek was our next and likely our last populated place to visit and try our fortune at buying another mare. She also explained that we needed to move much faster to cross Awyalkna, Sylthanryn and the
Jenran mountains within a limited number of months.
But I was looking at her contentedly as she talked. Because, sitting at her ear, soft and white against the coal black of her hair, nestled the flower I had picked for her the night before.
Chapter Thirty Five
Noal
Kiana and I had been farewelled from Wanru by our baleful runes opponents, who had eyed Kiana’s bulging coin purse regretfully as we rode out. In contrast Dalin’s farewell party had been much larger, more feminine and more tearful as they’d watched us riding out of the hilly basin.
But as we rode from then on, there was no longer any tension between Dalin and Kiana, and Kiana even spoke to us as a friend rather than distant guide.
Her light heartedness lasted for a few days, though I noticed something change about her as we roamed into more isolated lands. She became quiet, and I could see that her eyes regularly scanned the land, and even the sky. Her face became increasingly worried the further we journeyed, but more disturbingly, as she became withdrawn, the horses also became increasingly skittish as we travelled too.
Dalin finally asked: “What is it, Kiana? You’re watching ahead as if for danger and behind as though you believe we’re being followed. Are you worried we’ve been found?”
She waited for a moment, as if deciding what to admit. “Can you feel anything out of the ordinary?” she replied with her own question.
“Feel what?” I asked with deepening apprehension.
She hesitated.
“Be honest,” Dalin encouraged her. “We know your hunter’s instincts must be keener than ours.”
She straightened her shoulders resolutely and peered around the open lands once more. “I have a … sense of foreboding. Something feels wrong to me, as though someone vile was thinking of me or looking for me, lurking close.”
Her solemn face was pale, though I knew there were few things that could shake her.
Dalin leant around her back to look at her. “Perhaps you’re catching cold, or perhaps you’re tired.”
“No. I am aware of some wrongness that’s not part of me, but is around me. I am dreading something, I can feel something rotten.”
“We should definitely be careful then,” Dalin answered, sounding concerned. “But perhaps we should stop for you to rest.”
I saw Kiana assemble a reassuring smile across her features and consciously relax the tension in her posture, which only added to my own growing anxiety.
“I’m sure all is well,” she replied. “In fact, I’m probably just restless, and in need of exertion.”
At that, she slipped herself out of the saddle, even as Amala was moving, and tossed Dalin the reins as she took up the pace to run easily beside us.
Dalin and I swapped expressions of unease, and I noticed that we both started furtively glancing over our shoulders and scanning our surrounds.
By the end of the week I felt a strange disquieting feeling gnawing at me too. Similarly, Dalin seemed pensive and we all sat quietly and agitatedly close to the light of the fire, huddling away from the darkness each night.
Chapter Thirty Six
Kiana
A white hand, so skinny as to show the bones of the fingers like claws, slapped my face.
A woman, tall and pale as a ghost, more beautiful and terrible than any mortal, had stopped Angra Mainyu’s sabre from its path to my body. But it was no relief.
I quailed as she smiled at me, and I prayed for death.
I could feel her evil in the air, churning through the atmosphere. I was choking on it as it spread from her like poisonous vapour that stung my throat and scorched my lungs as I was forced to breathe it.
I wished for the sabre’s cool touch. A quick rip.
Or for the burning. For the fire that had raged before to have taken me, biting up my fingers and hair so that I crumbled and blew away like everyone else had in Bwintam.
The Witch smiled as if she had seen my thoughts.
She told me I would go on alone. Lost.
I would weep, she told me. I would grieve, forever, in the darkness, alone.
Then her claw-like hand gripped my shoulder so that she could leave a branding as a reminder upon my skin to carry always.
There was blinding pain as her evil seared my flesh. The skin she touched smoked and hissed and steamed so that I screamed.
When she was done there was a tear drop shaped burn on my shoulder, and her form twisted and Agrona suddenly melted before me, oozing into the form of a raven.
She, the raven, screeched at me. And I knew, as she screeched and flew away to leave me with the torture of life, that I would weep and face the darkness of life alone.
I sat up, sweating, panting and weeping quietly in the darkness.
Alone?
Alone and a coward, weeping into the darkness?
No. Not alone. I could see the sleeping forms of Dalin and Noal next to me.
The nightmare was gone, but the feeling of wrongness remained. It had been growing steadily with each day, with each hour, with each moment as we drew closer to Wrilapek.
It was close. It was real. It was something I’d felt before, and that inspired nightmares from the past like the one I’d just had.
I had felt the wrongness in the beasts I always hunted.
And I had felt it in her. In the nails she had dug into my skin when she’d left her mark on my shoulder, the day the Witch and Warlord of Krall had come to Bwintam to destroy it all.
As if the dream had been forewarning, a small ache was growing again now in my shoulder where her hand had burned me two years before.
And I was afraid.
But if the wrong I felt, the wrong even the boys now felt, was what I dreaded it to be, then our Quest was more important than ever.
Chapter Thirty Seven
Darziates would love her for this, Agrona had thought as she’d drifted lazily over her marching soldier pawns.
She would burn Wrilapek and steal its crucial stores of horses for Krall. And she would find for her Sorcerer the elusive Awyalknian boys and their helper.
Though she couldn’t manipulate time through the Other Realm as Darziates could, she had moved Angra and his army across Krall’s wastelands and into Awyalkna within days instead of months. She had flattened their dust, stifled the sound they made, hidden them from sight and bolstered their energy.
The Witch had even been getting ahead on her next task, bending her will during the entire journey towards the Awyalknian boys and their guide, sending her malice towards the blurred snatches of images she could catch of them when she tried – to hinder and worry them wherever they were.
Now as her soldiers closed in on Wrilapek she sent out one last spiteful thought, not caring at the pain it caused her, to hurt the three figures across the distance again. She was happy to dimly see one of the blurred forms even fall from their horse this time. Agrona hadn’t realised she had sent such a potent spell.
But then the sound of Angra breathing heavily brought her back to her current task.
Night had begun to creep over them and her pawns were all in place, spread amongst the thick growth of bordering trees around oblivious Wrilapek so that none of the villagers could escape.
The men were in an intoxicated state, euphoric with anticipation, and she enhanced this with a gesture until they were almost howling with a want to kill. Angra Mainyu was frothing at the mouth and the red glow of insanity was again showing through his bulging eyes.
“Darziates will love me for this,” Angra rumbled so hungrily that his words sounded slurred.
Agrona scowled at how he echoed her thoughts.
“He will love me for this,” she glowered.
“You only offer to kill his enemies and to share his throne,” Angra chortled. “You’re just a body to him. Something he can use to make an heir.”
“What could possibly be more valuable than all of that?” Agrona hissed.
Angra fixed his glowing gaze on her. “He wants my so
ul. He said I can give him pieces of it, and help him create his new army.”
Agrona fixed him with a withering stare in return. “You’re basically an animal already. What will you be like with less of your humanity?”
“Invaluable,” he husked darkly.
She rolled her eyes. He would be the only mortal in the whole world who was already so corrupted, that Darziates could dissect him. She refused to be jealous.
“Just focus on the treat ahead,” she scowled, turning her gaze back to Wrilapek.
Angra stared fixedly between the trees. “Yessssss …”
Beyond the trees, deaf to the army amassed and watching, people chattered in the streets or settled in at home with soft candle light showing through their windows.
As she listened, laughter rang from the tavern. A horse whinnied from the stables in the distance.
All was perfect.
“Pleeease,” Angra begged. “Lift the spell.”
She waited just one more moment to spite him.
Then she released her men, removing their invisibility and unleashing their sound to let them sweep away the peacefulness.
Chapter Thirty Eight
Dalin
We were crossing bleak, rocky planes. Noal and I led Ila while Kiana roamed ahead on Amala.
My focus had been on guiding Ila between rocks that could make her stumble, until suddenly I heard Amala whinny ahead of us, and my head jerked up.
Kiana unexpectedly cried out too, and stooped forward in the saddle. Her cry was one of instant and terrible pain, and as she slumped, she clutched her shoulder.
Before I’d processed what was happening, she was sliding sideways out of the saddle towards the ground in front of the panicked Amala, who backed up anxiously.
I sprinted toward Kiana as her body collided with the rocky ground, and Noal rushed after me, still pulling Ila along.
I skidded to a halt and knelt at her side hurriedly, lifting her to lie in my arms.
“Is she awake?” Noal asked with the sound of rising panic in his voice.
“Take Amala’s reins before she bolts,” I told him, and he was distracted by the task. The mare had reacted to whatever had hurt Kiana before even she had. I didn’t understand what that could mean, but I didn’t have the time then to contemplate it.