by A J Gala
Allanis’s eyes were wide as she exchanged looks with Athen and Lazarus. “Tye. Tye, that’s brilliant!”
“I need a boat,” he said. “A real one, not just a fishing one. Le’s my first mate. And, and that boy—Prince Ashbel, your Master Cobalt—tell him to find me a deputy for the docks.”
Lazarus grinned. “Alright, Alli. He’ll do.”
“Congratulations!” She threw her arms up. “Do you know how hard it is to get the seal of approval from him? Nearly impossible. Go home, pack up your things, and I’ll have Djara come find you when your villa is ready. I have many plans to discuss with both of you. That is all!”
Tye felt bolted to the floor. He was breathless as his mother grabbed his arm. She looked breathless too. He hadn’t seen the little wrinkles around her eyes when she smiled in so long. They started to laugh as they left the Council room.
Allanis stayed behind to watch everyone leave. Athen dashed out behind them to check on the status of the villa. Lazarus lingered momentarily before stalking away, Allanis’s eyes glued to him until he finally left her sight.
She’d have to confront him about Meeka before her new staff began work.
7
Lionsbane
Tizzy pried a dart from her hand and hissed in pain. The cold air outside stung the wound as warm blood dribbled down her arm. She glared at Kenway, and he shrugged.
“Next time, catch it the way I showed you.”
She grumbled, looking over three other cuts along her fingers from unsuccessful attempts to catch Kenway’s darts. One of them was lodged firmly in the tree behind her, so she knew she could at least dodge.
In another moment, the wound stopped bleeding. She stood straight again and loosened her posture.
Aleth stood behind Kenway, making no effort to hide his disapproval. “I don’t see how this is helping her.”
“Hey.” Kenway glared at him from over his shoulder. “Do you have a problem with my methods? This is good for her reflexes, and the darts aren’t sharp enough to kill her every time she misses.”
“Your methods are fine.” His shoulders shook with a little laugh. “I’m saying the problem is with the student, not the teacher.”
Tizzy scoffed at Aleth’s stupid grin. “Hey! I can’t be good at everything!”
“You could be good at something.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, you’ll say I’m good at something later toni—”
He coughed. “Alright, good luck with darts, Kenway. I’m going out with Doddie. She said she’s looking for a fern or something. I don’t know.”
“Is that why you’re all dressed up?” Kenway looked him up and down, noting his sword and cloak. “Just be careful and try to be back soon. The kitchen’s got some expensive requests, and Doddie’s the only one who knows how to make that stuff.”
“Sure.” He pointed at Tizzy. “You better be in one piece when I get back.”
“I’ll be a pincushion, but I’ll still be in one piece.”
He smiled and waved, then left down and around the ridge to meet Troll Daughter. The Bogwood was chilly, muddy, and red with sparse leaves still clinging stubbornly to the trees. He was happy to be outside, especially now that the big storm had passed. He didn’t mind the small ones that came through. Just ahead of him, he could hear Troll Daughter’s heavy footsteps crunching and sloshing around. He tacitly joined her and stared into the trees.
There was so much destruction and debris. Trunks were snapped in two, and sometimes the canopy was nowhere near its base. He knew when he took the same walk next year, the Bogwood would be full of new saplings.
Troll Daughter ducked under a branch and told him to watch out.
He did. Barely. “Damn, that would have smacked me right in the face.”
She said she knew. She could tell he wasn’t paying attention.
“I’m paying attention, just not to what’s in front of me.”
She laughed with her big, rumbling laugh and said he never was. After swatting a low-hanging vine out of their path, she asked him how he was.
“I’m fine,” he said. “In a weird place right now, but I’m fine. I’ll figure it out.”
He was always “in a weird place,” she noted, and she wanted to know why. Why did he say that? What did people mean when they said that? When he struggled to answer, she just sighed and nodded.
“What? What’s that for?”
She asked if he was thinking about humanity and benevolence again in a way that clearly suggested she knew what the answer was.
“Why do you have to say it like that?” he asked. “Are you making fun of me?”
She grunted. No one fussed over the subject of morality more than a human.
“It’s a good thing to fuss over! Doddie, the world runs on balance. On Order and Disorder. So why shouldn’t these things be considered? What’s the fault in trying to keep my humanity?”
She took a deep breath, turned to him, and spoke slowly, annunciating her words laboriously. “You—aren’t—human.”
The chill came for him. “But—”
“No!” She waved her finger and kept walking, bringing up the greenkind. Did the greenkind worry about humanity? Did they worry about checks and balances? No, of course not. They just survived the way they knew they should and didn’t bother with asking the universe questions. They’d find out what they should have done only after Death came for them.
“I’m not greenkind, either.”
“Live!” she yelled. He worried too much, about everything, and she told him exactly that. It was not his job to do the worrying for everyone else. In this life, he had been reborn with instincts, and it was time to live by them. “Not human!”
He knew it was true, but it still broke his heart. Everyone was telling him the same thing, now even his best friend.
She caught his abrupt silence and told him it didn’t mean he had to go back to the way he was before. He didn’t have to exist in an extreme. There was a comfortable place for him in the middle.
“Is it really fair that I get to live ‘comfortably in the middle’ after the things I’ve done? Doddie, think about it. You knew me back then; you know the blood that’s on my hands. And you know there was no point to it. To any of it!”
He was young, she said, and in different company.
“Don’t give me that excuse!”
“Shushup.” It mattered, she said. He had changed his ways, so he had every right to use it as an excuse.
“Yeah, and you want me to change them back!”
Not all the way back, she told him, exasperated. That would be ridiculous. But he was what he was, and he had done what he had done. It was time to move on.
He hated to admit that he was finding some solace in her words. It was a different argument than what had already been made to him. He still didn’t like it, but he was having a hard time dismissing what she’d said.
Then she asked the important question. Hadn’t he been beaten up enough already? Why did he have to continue doing it to himself?
“It’s all I know, Doddie. It’s literally all I know.”
Everyone kept telling him he had nothing to worry about. Maybe it was true. Maybe he could finally let himself believe it. He knew all Troll Daughter really wanted was for him to quit being a stick in the mud, and that’s exactly what he’d been. For a moment, he let himself imagine what it would be like to finally lean into what he was. To grow, to surpass those who would hold him down. He tried to think of what Louvita would say when she finally saw what he could be.
He snapped out of his reverie when Troll Daughter halted in her tracks.
“What is it?”
She sniffed the air and shuffled around, growing antsy, her head darting back and forth. She had to go, she said. She had to find out what this was and why she kept sensing it.
“Is it the Hunters again?”
It had been Hunters the first time when Aleth and Tizzy had found Troll Daughter in the woods and had to run fr
om the Malevolence. It had been Hunters the second time when Troll Daughter had left with Kenway in the middle of the storm and had saved Aleth from the Time Mages. Troll Daughter was sure that she would find Hunters on this third outing too. She looked at Aleth expectantly, and he grinned.
“What do you say we get into some trouble, Doddie?”
She clapped and led the way. It felt like old times. She didn’t tell him, but the outing had never really been about finding the fern. There was already a bundle of it tied up and drying at her workstation, but of course, no one took notice.
Troll Daughter stomped through the woods, and by the time Aleth could sense the others too, he felt uncomfortably close to the road. He could see it in the tracks, in the broken branches and dragged footprints and cloth fibers, that there had been conflict. Then, he heard someone. There still was conflict.
He looked up at her. “These the ones?”
She nodded and took a few steps closer before hiding herself behind a tree that was much too thin to conceal her bulky frame.
Aleth was uneasy that she was leaving him to tackle this alone. He had nearly been killed during his last run-in with Hunters. But Troll Daughter’s antics didn’t surprise him. In most cases, she was terrified of a fight and only wandered into them after following her incessant curiosity.
He perused the scene and determined that the conditions of the current fight—if he could call it that— were much better than his last. There was no foreboding tingle of Time Magic in the air. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything. He crept closer, silent as a wraith, and watched two men up ahead as they circled one another.
No weapons clanging together, no grunting in pain… just the faint shuffling of movement. The fight was either at a pause, or it was over. One of the men was unmistakably a Hunter. Aleth could tell by the man’s countenance alone, but the fine clothing and silver accents were also a dead ringer. Silver. Aleth remembered the casting tools that had been aimed at him only days ago and clenched his jaw.
The other man was shorter, younger, and on the losing end of the fight. He kept his distance, panting heavily, but otherwise uninjured. Aleth couldn’t tell if he was also a Hunter. Perhaps he was, and the two had just gotten into an ugly argument. At this point, Aleth wasn’t going to put it past anyone to be a Hunter.
The other man gritted his teeth and backed away as the Hunter rushed him with a wild swing of his sword. He narrowly avoided the attack and returned with one of his own, but the Hunter parried and pushed him back.
“Why do you keep doing this?” the Hunter asked. “I told you that you could go as soon as you told me what I wanted to know.”
“I don’t have the information you want!” the other man shouted. “I’m not who you think I am, and I don’t have the answers you’re looking for!” He swung again, but he was weary—there was more than enough room for the Hunter to move out of the sword’s way. “And of course I’m going to keep doing this. I don’t care who you are; I am never being taken captive again! Not by anyone!”
So it was just a single Hunter. The other man was unaffiliated. Hopefully. Aleth tried to remind himself that their conversation could still be about practically anything and that his assumption could be a mistake. But he’d spent enough time watching and speculating. It was time to find out what was going on. He took a steadying breath, calmed his nerves, and swept in behind the Hunter.
In seconds, Aleth had him in a tight grapple with the Hunter’s neck exposed. Both the Hunter and the other man shouted, prompting Troll Daughter to join the scene. Aleth glared at the other man, and he backed against a tree and stayed frozen in place.
“What do we have here?” Aleth mused. He could feel the body struggling in his grasp. It felt like almost nothing. Had he really become so strong? “A couple of Hunters?”
“No!” The man Troll Daughter guarded shouted it with desperation. “I’m not with him!”
“Then who are you with?”
“No one!”
“Unlikely. But we’ll get to you in a minute. I’m more interested in you.” He tightened his hold and twisted the Hunter’s shoulder in a way that made him cry out. “Pathetic. You’re nothing like the ones that were after me in the storm. You know, I’m making you a pretty good case if you want to play dumb and argue your way out of this.”
“You!” The Hunter’s eyes were wide with panic, dread, horror. “It’s you!”
“Sorry, I’m not your Protégé—”
“The Raven! It’s you!”
Suddenly, Aleth felt sick. Then cold. Then furious. “Why did you call me that?” He released his hold and spun him around, lifted him by his collar, and shoved him against a tree. “Who calls me that? Who knows?”
The Hunter coughed with the impact. “I don’t know, it’s just—it’s just a—”
Aleth slammed him against the tree again. “Why do you call me that? Answer me!”
The words spilled out of him almost too fast to understand. “Your cloak! Th-the Ravenshroud. W-we know you by the Ravenshroud!”
“Bullshit!” He let him down and grappled him from behind once again, staring down at the vein in the Hunter’s neck. “The Ravenshroud? You expect me to believe that? You guys are quick on the wit, I’ll give you that.”
“I don’t—why wouldn’t you—it’s the cloak—”
Aleth twisted his arm, and the Hunter cried out again. The other man winced at the sound.
“Gods, where’s Naia and her damn eye when you need her? Or Lilu! I’d even take Lilu at this point and her weird bloodborne empathy. Anything to sort through this shit.”
“I swear I don’t know what else to tell you! They only made me a Lion right before they sent me down here—”
Aleth bit into him, and he screamed. It wasn’t a clean bite by any means. Hot blood filled his mouth and ran down onto the Hunter’s torso and soaked his clothes. He tried to scream again. Aleth clamped his hand down over his mouth and let his claws come out, sinking them deep into the Hunter’s face.
After a moment, he pulled away. “That doesn’t taste right.”
The Hunter trembled in his hold. “Y-you don’t feel anything?”
Aleth narrowed his eyes. “No. Why?”
“They told me it would kill bloodkin. They told me I’d be safe!”
He laughed. “Did they? I think they lied to you. I think they wanted to test a theory, and you’re the bait.”
“B-but our alchemist! He’s dragonkind; he knows everything. He said the procedure was based on silver. I was the one who survived his silver potion. My blood is supposed to be deadly!”
“Sorry to tell you this,” Aleth whispered into his ear with a bit of wickedness, “but as far as bloodkin go, I’m just an infant. I haven’t quite developed my silver allergy yet.”
He bit down and drank, mangling the Hunter’s neck more, and could finally recognize what the man was talking about. It was not the same metallic taste he knew but something different—stronger—and it was spicy and sometimes felt like pin-pricks on his tongue. But he didn’t stop, not until he felt the man grow weak in his arms.
Then he looked at Troll Daughter. “You don’t need him alive, do you?”
“No.”
He resumed, drinking until he couldn’t anymore. He couldn’t remember the last time he had fed till he was full. It felt so good he shuddered. The Hunter in his arms was dead, and he let him drop to the ground, then wiped his mouth, unsheathed Mercy, and pointed it at the other man’s chest.
“Whoa! I’m not with him, I told you! I was trying to get away from him!”
He could feel that his eyes were red with bloodlust. He was too sated to drain the other man, but he still yearned to tear something apart and feel flesh between his claws.
“I heard.”
“Then what do you want me for? I’m not a Hunter!”
“You’re not a Hunter, but you’d still kill me, given the chance.”
The other man stared at him, locked onto his face like he
somehow knew it. “Why? Because you’re a—”
Aleth stared at him too. The bloodlust waned and became intrigue. He sheathed Mercy. “Yeah. Bloodkin. Come on, get up.”
The other man didn’t realize he’d fallen and took the hand Aleth offered, getting to his feet. Aleth couldn’t stop looking at him—pale skin, pale hair, pale eyes. The man was like a ghost.
“Do I know you?” he asked.
The man shook his head slowly and without conviction. “I don’t think so.”
An old memory finally dawned on Aleth. An unpleasant one. “That little encampment in the mountains… Burshen. I saw you at Burshen.”
“What do you know about Burshen?” The man’s pale blue eyes were wide.
Aleth’s grin was dark, and he let out a laugh. “You’re not a Hunter. You’re a raider. Let me guess, you’re on your way to Suradia?”
“How did you get out of Burshen? It’s, it’s—”
“Rubble? Same way I got out of Crana Camp, Greilia, Theis Bajan…”
“Were you following us?”
“No! I wondered if you were all following me! I thought for sure she was doing it on purpose. So, which one of them are you?”
The man swallowed hard. “Cato. My name is Cato.”
Aleth let out a sharp laugh through his nose. “Yeah, you’re definitely headed to Suradia. House Hallenar, right? To be honest with you, I’d be shocked if Adeska was still hanging around. I thought she would have skipped town after the party.”
“The party. H-how do you know—”
“I was invited. Like you, right? Hey, as long as you’re headed that way, can you give a message to my sister? The one who seems to give a shit, not the one you’re looking for. You got a scrap of paper on you?”
“Er, no—”
“What about you, Doddie? You’re always writing shit down. Paper? No? Really?” He sighed. “Oh well. Guess that means we’re going to have to get creative. Hold him still for me, Doddie.”
“Wait, what are you doing? Hold on! Couldn’t I just—couldn’t I just tell her?” Troll Daughter pushed him into a tree and held him down. “Let me go!”