by Sam Farren
“Something like that,” I said, letting one corner of my mouth tug into a frown. “Listen—I know you can't tell me what's happening, and I know that's supposed to be for my own good, but do you think I should be here?”
“That's a funny question, yrval,” Rán said, “You're worried about what's going on, about any danger, when usually, any person on this backwards continent would be running from what you are. Makes me think you don't know the half of what your sort get up to.”
“What—” I started, but Rán tapped a claw against my nose as she rose to her feet. She promptly bowed, curved horns grazing the ceiling even with her back arched.
“The dragon-slayer told me a little about you. Nothing too personal, mind,” Rán went on to say as she reached for the orange sash bundled on the bed. “Just about you being cooped up in that village, pretending to be a healer. Reckon you're gonna figure out a few things along the way.”
I folded my arms across my chest, not caring that Rán was avoiding giving me a real answer. My initial reaction was to say Sir Ightham speaks about me—? but I stood my ground and said, “What do you know about people like me?”
“Not much,” Rán admitted with a shrug. She held her sash out in her arms, shaking it flat. “Not met many. Well—not met many and been aware of it. But down in Canth, people aren't so pointlessly aggressive.”
Rán paused, furrowing her brow as she wrapped the sash around the leathers she'd slept in.
“Scrap that. They're pointlessly aggressive alright – you ever tried living in a pirate town? – but not about these things. If anything, necromancers are revered down there.”
I couldn't swallow the idea that not everyone hated and feared necromancers. Canth was still a myth to me, something from my brother's stories; it had no bearing on my life, and Rán was only trying to cheer me up. I said nothing in reply, despite the questions that were clawing at me, and tugged on Rán's arm, leading her out of the room.
We took our bags with us. A guest paused in the lobby, confused when the staircase groaned in protest of Rán's feet, and made himself scarce when he spotted a pane. The woman working behind the counter kept her eyes on us, ensuring that Rán didn't reshape the doorway on the way out, and didn't say that she hoped we'd stay again.
“Everything okay down there?” Rán asked, dropping a hand atop my head.
I'd fallen into a well of thoughts and was having troubling clawing my way out, but Rán's hand did something to help. I looked up at her, nodding, deciding there'd be plenty of time for plenty of questions later. What had transpired between Sirs Ightham and Luxon seemed to be far more pressing than necromancy.
“Sir Ightham said to meet her at noon,” I told her as we set off through the parting crowd. “She said you know where to go.”
“That I do,” Rán agreed, fingers lingering on my shoulder as she pushed herself up to her full height, humming thoughtfully when she spotted a clock on the side of a tower. “Gives us a little time. Treated yourself to breakfast yet, yrval?”
“Something came up,” I said with a wince of a smile, and Rán declared that she knew the best place to go. Not that she'd been to Benkor in a number of years, mind, but she was sure it must still be in business.
I was certain the place we eventually found ourselves at wasn't the establishment Rán had spoken of, if it existed at all, but the food there smelled better than any imaginary café could hope to. The owners were a cheerful pair of twins, selling fresh bread and roasted meat, and when they spotted Rán, one of them said, “Good timing—just pulled this out.”
They held out a raw leg of meat as they spoke, and I began to see that Rán was constantly stepping between two worlds. The one where she was a monster, carving her way through crowds and being turned away from shops and inns and taverns, and another where people greeted her warmly and she responded in kind.
If it was like that for the pane, perhaps there really was a similar duality for necromancers, even if it was across the Uncharted Sea and buried beneath a story.
We wandered through the city with our breakfast in hand. I kept an eye out, hoping to see Sir Ightham, but quickly concluded that Rán wasn't heading anywhere in particular. I stuck close to her side, walking along the sunny side of the street that she favoured, and through the crowd, spotted a second pair of horns drifting towards us.
“Oh!” I grabbed Rán's arm. Her pace slowed for all of a step, and she returned to wrapping her tongue around the near-clean bone as though I'd pointed out nothing more than another human.
The second pane moved through the shadows, leaving as much of the street between himself and Rán as he could.
He was taller than she was, something I hadn't believed to be possible, but his horns weren't as long. They'd yet to start curving back, and his skin was black, making the two pane look as different as Sir Ightham and I did.
I craned my neck trying to fix my eyes on him as Rán hurried me along. Neither of them looked at each other, despite the way the street buzzed with talk of two pane, and once he was out of sight, I said, “Why didn't you say hello?”
“Are you always saying hello to every human you pass?” Rán asked, not annoyed, but not looking down at me, either.
“No, but—it's not as if I'm in a world of pane, and I've only run into one human in days!”
Rán shrugged.
“Those are the laws,” she said, but she said it in a way that made me think twice about asking any more questions.
I stood straight, wrapped an arm around Rán's, and leant against it as we carried on through the city.
They were making preparations for the Phoenix Festival in a square we came across. There weren't any decorations out, nor was there any of the entertainment I was used to on display, but people sat behind tables covered in scrolls. Queues formed in front of them as people scribbled something down and then left. I only realised it was for the Phoenix Festival because of the golden bird embroidered onto one of the cloths draped across a table.
If my village needed months to prepare for the fifteen hundredth celebration, then Benkor had likely been making arrangements for twice as long. I thought back to the festival, to how cheerful everyone was to recall that the Necromancy War was over. Our ancestors had fled the Bloodless Lands and we'd shaken off the shackles of our old gods. The necromancers were dead and gone, and Kondo-Kana had met her end at the bottom of the ocean.
I'd always smiled and laughed and sung along, because I was a healer and nobody ever questioned that.
“Do the pane celebrate this too?” I asked as we drifted close enough to one of the tables to learn that they were taking on volunteers to hang the lights around the city.
“It's a ridiculous human tradition,” Rán huffed, rolling her shoulders back, “The same as most things: remember what you want, omit what you'd rather forget, change whatever makes you look bad. The pane aren't about to be wasting their time on something of the sort.”
“Right,” I agreed with an unsteady laugh. It hadn't seemed ridiculous to me at the time. Michael had never questioned the truth of it, and so I hadn't, either.
“Come on,” Rán said, nudging me away from the festival preparations. “Let's go track down that dragon-slayer before she gets herself into any more trouble.”
It wasn't quite noon, and we took the long way around to wherever we were going. Rán talked all the while, telling me that Benkor was the same as ever, once you looked past all that had changed, and pointed to this store and that, reading all the signs and plaques aloud to me.
I didn't forget anything she'd said about Canth or necromancers, nor did I managed to put thoughts of Sir Luxon or the Phoenix Festival out of mind, but it was easy to focus on other things in Rán's company.
We looped around to the entrance of Benkor, and I was in the middle of telling Rán a story she was enjoying far too much, considering that it was about little more than wandering sheep, when she nudged my shoulder and nodded towards Sir Ightham, over by the stables.
<
br /> I broke away from Rán, relieved that nothing had happened in my absence – as though my presence would've stopped it in the first place – hurrying to rejoin her, when I saw who she was with.
There, in the shade of the stable, stood my brother.
CHAPTER VII
My first thought was betrayal. Sir Ightham had only let me tag along because waiting for my brother to collect me was easier than prying me off herself. I marched over, meaning to declare that I wasn't going back with Michael, but faltered when he caught sight of me.
He started so much he almost tripped over backwards. If nothing else, he hadn't expected to run into me. Hurrying over, he hit me around the side of the head with an open hand. There was nearly enough force behind it to make me blink.
“Rowan!” he exclaimed. “What the hell do you think you're doing out here? Do you have any idea how worried we've been? What are you playing at?”
Michael gripped my shoulders and shook me in the middle of the street. I decided it was a good idea to kick him in the shin, and he hopped back, hissing.
“What am I doing here? What are you doing here?” I asked, throwing my hands out to the side as he made a fuss of his leg.
“I have a reason to be here, unlike some people,” he said proudly, forgetting his pain and straightening. “I wanted to send Sir Ightham's things by raven, you know, but it seems that I was right in not trusting the mail. And a good thing, too! If I hadn't come here directly, who's to say what would've happened! Beyond me and dad assuming you met your end at the bottom of a ditch, a-any...”
Michael trailing off in the middle of a lecture was an event in and of itself. I followed his gaze to find Rán wandering up to us. Michael stepped back, and so did I; only I backed into Rán, who put a hand on my shoulder and bowed down.
“Collected another one, have we?” she asked, nodding towards Michael. From the way his hands were shaking, I didn't think he was capable of absorbing anything we were saying. “Now, if you don't mind me saying, this one looks an awful lot like you, yrval.”
“My brother,” I explained, grounding myself with a sigh. I didn't understand what Michael was doing there, but I could relish in the fact that he was scared and I wasn't; that I knew something and he didn't. “Although what he's doing here, I can't say. When Sir Ightham said we were meeting a contact, I thought it'd be someone... important.”
His face remained pale, but Michael came back to enough of his senses to snap out, “Hey—!” before boldly stepping closer and tugging me towards him. “That's a pane,” he hissed in my ear.
“Her name is Rán,” I said clearly, and saw Sir Ightham bring a hand to her forehead.
“Alright,” she said firmly, tempering the situation. “Let us keep this brief: I asked Michael to come here as a necessity. I did not inform him of your presence, for it is none of my business, and he is merely here to deliver me the documents necessary to cross into Kastelir.”
“—we're going to Kastelir?”
Michael's sudden appearance was no longer worth worrying over.
“You didn't know?” Michael asked cheerfully.
Sir Ightham remained stony-faced and Rán shrugged.
“Wait. We're going to Kastelir,” I repeated, desperate to make sense of it. I'd known Michael to be a skilled forger, that much was clear, but the fact that Kastelir was looming beyond the walls of Benkor became startlingly obvious. “We're going to Kastelir and you didn't tell me.”
“It didn't seem pertinent,” Sir Ightham explained. “You hadn't left your village, so I doubt you'll measure much of a difference between Eaglestone and any city Kastelir has to offer.”
“It didn't seem... you didn't think it was important? We're going to Kastelir and, and...”
I was battling against panic and outrage while the others watched on, perfectly calm. Rán knew the plan and Michael had been aware that Sir Ightham was crossing into Kastelir for longer than I'd known her, by all accounts. The tips of my ears burnt red.
Sir Ightham hadn't told me that we were heading into a country in a perpetual state of discord, even throughout peacetime, hadn't told me that she was in contact with my brother; it hadn't occurred to her that it might matter.
“Calm down,” Michael said, throwing an arm around my shoulder and dragging me further and further from Rán, where Sir Ightham was close enough for him to pretend to be brave. “You're getting yourself worked up over nothing. Sir Ightham didn't mention Kastelir because it's of no concern to you! We'll head back home before there's too much of a fuss about your absence and let Sir Ightham return to her work without distraction.”
I threw Michael's arm off, certain the buildings of Benkor must be drawing closer for the way my vision dimmed.
“What? I'm not going back. Do you have any idea what will happen if I do? Do you have any idea of how they'll—”
“Yes, yes,” Michael interjected, waving a hand. He frowned at the thought of me continuing, not the reality of what awaited me in the village. “It's terribly hard to be a necromancer, I've heard it a thousand times, but there's work to be done and if only you'd make an effort to get on with things, you'd see that—”
I didn't have the chance to protest. Sir Ightham cut Michael off.
“Rowan is coming with me,” she said firmly, garnering our attention. “If she still wishes to. It would seem that I was mistaken in not divulging our destination sooner.”
I didn't know what to say. Happily, neither did Michael.
There was no arguing to be done with Sir Ightham, and we stood there awkwardly, not looking at one another. We'd acted like children in front of her. Michael presumed to tell me what to do, to act as though dragging me back to the village was an inevitability, and I let myself get flustered and frustrated in the middle of the street.
“... I want to come with you,” I mumbled, still staring at the floor.
Sir Ightham placed a hand on the back of my shoulder, and I thought that if I'd been wrong about the pane, perhaps I was wrong about Kastelir, too.
“Clearly, there's a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding going on here,” Rán said, stepping closer and making Michael flinch. “Let's be taking a moment to sit down and explain as best we can.”
We didn't sit down. Sir Ightham claimed there was no time for that, but we spoke as we collected our horses and headed for the other side of Benkor.
“Sir Ightham is obviously doing important work, so I've done what I could to help,” Michael told me, but it was a blind sort of faith that made his words light. He had no idea what she was really doing, either. “Let the surrounding villages and towns believe that she was on her way to Canth and rushed to the elders to let them know that I'd seen her off when she disappeared. That sort of thing. Kastelir was her real destination, of course, which is where I come in—again. While Sir Ightham is no doubt skilled in a great number of things beyond dragon-slaying, I must admit that I have far more practice when it comes to forging certain documents.”
He turned to her, smiling and bowing his head as he spoke. Sir Ightham didn't take her eyes off the road ahead.
“But sensitive documents are rarely safe with ravens. Inn owners probably make half their yearly income on blackmail alone; I thought it better to deliver the items in question, and it would've taken too long to reach Praxis. Thus, here we are, meeting halfway.”
Michael was positively beaming, which only made me more frustrated with him. He reached out, feeling the fabric of my clothes between a thumb and two fingers and took the time to frown.
“What about you, though,” he said, tutting. “Running away in the night. I actually hiked up to the fields, thinking you'd fallen asleep with the sheep again—and all for nothing! Never thought you'd get up the nerve to actually do it.”
He was irritated that I'd done something he hadn't, devoid of a reason as he was.
“We ran into bandits,” I told him, elbowing him in the ribs. “Five of them against Sir Ightham. Oh, and I have my own sword now. An
d what about Rán? You've been ignoring her all this time. Don't be rude, Michael.”
Michael opened his mouth, not sure where to start – bandits or blades – eyes betraying him and fixing on Rán.
“Good day,” he managed to squeak, and she grinned, letting him see all of her fangs.
“You have my thanks,” Sir Ightham said as we neared the gate to Kastelir. Her fingers hovered over her pouch as Michael, who'd grinned ear to ear at a hint of gratitude, waved a hand in front of him.
“Wait! You can't expect me to leave my little sister behind!” Michael said, clinging to me like an anchor. “It'd be a tad suspicious, don't you think, for a woman of your supposed standing to only take one servant on such a trip. Even if a pane could bow to a human, they would never serve one, which takes this, ah... which takes Rán out of the equation.”
I was fuming, but did all I could to keep my calm. The guards at the gate were idly watching us from a distance and I didn't want to jeopardise Sir Ightham's plans. I breathed deeply, thought of a way to phrase myself, to explain that I didn't think it was the best idea, because... because what?
Because Michael had more experience out in the world than I did and had proven himself useful already?
Sir Ightham turned to Rán and shared a few words with her in a language I didn't understand, and they both came to the mutual agreement of a shrug.
“Hurry up,” Sir Ightham said.
“Excellent!”
Michael clapped his hands together. With the way he was grinning, anyone would've been forgiven for thinking that Sir Ightham had begged him to come along.
The documents he'd brought were proof of identity. I only had a vague notion of such a thing existing in the first place, but as I learnt at the gate, my Kingdom was eager to keep the Kastelirians out and curious when it came to those who willingly chose to leave. The documents Sir Ightham presented at the gate were squinted over, while Rán's horns negated any need to fuss with paper.
I didn't need to be told to keep quiet. I made myself as inconspicuous as I could, piecing together Sir Ightham's story as the guards questioned her: she was a wealthy trader from Thule – the papers were stamped to say as much – by the name of Eden Westerdale, headed towards Riverhurst and the cities along the border to help redirect some of the trade from Praxis, through Benkor.