The Zi'veyn: The Devoted Trilogy, Book One

by Kim Wedlock

  Garon glowered briefly at Anthis. "They will be hunting us more aggressively now."

  Rathen snarled and turned away, looking back through the forest and intently searching the spaces between the trees. "They were hunting us anyway," he reminded them quietly, "and keeping away from settlements as we have been has probably only made it easier. They didn't only just catch up with us, their timing was too precise. They were taking advantage of the wind and Owan's absence, and they would have kept following us whether I'd done anything back there or not."

  "Then we could have found the opportunity to set them straight, tell them that we're not involved!"

  "When?! When they snatched us in their talons? Dragged us through the air? Tore us to shreds and fed us to their chicks?"

  Aria silently shrank back beneath the thought as she continued vigilantly surveying the dark forest.

  "They are the hunters, they're not going to show themselves unless they're ready to strike. If they wanted to talk to us, they would have."

  Garon opened his mouth to respond, but his voice halted behind his tongue as a tell-tale squawk echoed in the distance, stilling the calls of nearby birds and, for a moment, the movement of the now-natural breeze.

  Aria finally turned her big eyes away from the forest. "We shouldn't stay here."

  Rathen took her hand and pulled her to her feet before starting quickly along the shaded lakeside, and the others shortly followed suit. He growled in irritation, however, when Garon stepped past him to steal the lead without even a sidelong glance. But he didn't truly care. He was still shaken by what had almost befallen them, himself most of all. If the inquisitor truly had to be in charge all the time, then let him. Rathen had no desire at all to re-assume the mantle of leadership, especially if there was someone else more than eager to do it instead. Though whether he could do it well was becoming another matter...

  Chapter 18

  The air remained mercifully still for the rest of the afternoon, and when evening finally began creeping in, they felt just safe enough to stop for the night despite the harpy-haunted forest still looming over the lake. They'd followed the edge of the water into older woods on the far bank, hoping their assailants would assume them long gone by now, and pitched their camp a short distance from the treeline with a disappointingly modest fire. They ate immediately, a few small birds Rathen had gathered and concealed from Aria to avoid upsetting her, then began ignoring each other.

  Though they'd managed to lose the harpies, the atmosphere that followed the means had lingered by Garon's doing, and no one felt the desire to endure its weight. Even when he rose and stepped away from the camp without a word, the clouds seemed to remain.

  But despite Rathen's near equal fault, he stayed within earshot, his back turned against a tree, and shut the matter out. He allowed himself to get lost in his thoughts, absorbing himself in the day's unlikely events, but despite his findings, their peril and the unreasonably intense panic that he'd only just prevented from taking over his body, he was surprised to find himself dwelling above all else on the encounter that didn't happen.

  When he'd entered into the Order's military wing and Owan turned towards more academic pursuits, their friendship, as well as others, had dwindled under the strain of their diverging paths, and in time had devolved into an acquaintanceship. And yet, at the sight of him, Rathen had felt a ridiculous childish glee. He'd enjoyed it for a moment, until it mutated into a sickening reminder of how his life should have proceeded. He should still have been in the Order, leading his regiment against Skilan as the sahrot he was - if not promoted to sahrakh and issuing commands from a more strategic position. In the passage of eleven years, that could have happened.

  He should have been in Kulokhar with a true family of his own, and Elle would have been by his side, crying with their should-have-been children that he was leaving to go to war, while he assured them that a man as strong as he, with a family as loving and faithful as his, couldn't possibly fall to defeat, let alone against a force already so exhausted. But they would have cried anyway, and made him promise that he would come back...

  But that hadn't happened.

  He felt something light roll down his cheek, and grunted to himself as he wiped it away. He could not lose himself to those thoughts, especially not after what had almost happened that afternoon.

  With a rough breath, he took a hold of his himself and tightly locked his regret away.

  From what Owan had told him, the Order was as good as ignoring the matter after all. If they were moving so few in an attempt to remain undetected, they couldn't hope to solve the matter quickly even if they were utilising minds as intelligent as his. There were too many places affected, and it seemed that not all of them presented the same evidence nor the same strength - and those two factors didn't seem to line up, either. Had the war not been on their doorstep they might have been able to handle it, more effort could have been put into concealing their movements. But as it stood, the magic looked set to grow only worse before the Order could put a stop to it.

  Rathen's lips, already downturned, twisted only further. It seemed he'd been unfortunately correct in what he'd said: he really was the only mage with the time to see to this.

  The weight on his shoulders intensified as though another anvil had been strung to his burden. He found he'd been hoping all along that perhaps they were doing something about it, and that his involvement in this merry group of misfits would be both short-lived and pointless. But now he understood, and painfully, that the situation's outcome hung entirely upon his spell and Anthis's artefact.

  Still, as his body grew heavy with dread, he forced himself to realise the one thing of comfort that came of the non-encounter: Owan hadn't shrank back from him as he'd imagined his old friends would. While the Order had no answers for his personal predicament, if so light a term could be used, at least they didn't view him - or his memory, he reminded himself - as a monster.

  He sat a little taller against the tree, feeling an unusual sense of pride slip in, and allowed himself, for a moment, to indulge it. To feel like more than just a shadow of the man he used to be.

  But then he remembered that he was just a shadow, one with a terrible secret that had just tried to tear itself to the surface, and the feeling quickly escaped as if in fear of him.

  He sighed in defeat and slumped back down again, turning his mind onto the only thing that was presently expected of him. It may not have been as grand and noble as leading soldiers to the defence of Turunda, but he found himself now far more willing to accept the ill-suited task. At least it was better than shovelling Oat's damp straw.

  He focused his mind as best he could, blocking all else out. Elven magic, spell chain, interaction with the elements. Despite his wavering concentration, he compared these among other details with everything he could recall from Kienza, trying to line it all up, make some kind of sense of it - work out a solution as soon as possible. But no matter how he tried to rotate the details, it was like trying to press together two conflicting pieces of a jigsaw.

  There was still too much missing to make the connections, but just how much? One detail, or ten?

  Exasperation began to block his throat. Despite these new details - significant details - he was still no closer to working anything out. And they'd been out for so long already, moving from one futile location to another, getting themselves into dangerous situations along the way, and yet they had nothing at all to show for it. No information had been put to real use, neither his nor Anthis's research, and who was to say how long this would take? Or how long they had?

  Only one thing eased his mind, if fractionally, and that was that no mage could be responsible if the magic was elven. That meant that they weren't unwittingly going up against an organised and likely vengeful movement - but it also meant that there were no plans to discover and upset in order to delay whatever he or Garon had feared may have been happening. Instead, all they could do was continue chasing ideas. Because, in the
end, that was all they had been doing.

  A small voice cleared beside him, nudging him back to the forest. He looked up expecting to find Aria grinning broadly back down at him, her face lit by the weak fire, but he found her sitting quietly in the roots beside him instead, her head hung and a shadowed frown marring her brow. He hadn't noticed her join him.

  "Can I talk to you?" She asked softly while he frowned at her strange temperament, but as she turned her deeply conflicted eyes up at him, his heart dropped and expression softened. She'd probably been sat there trying to work up the courage to speak for a while.

  He gave her an encouraging nod.

  "I'm frightened." She shuffled closer as he sighed and looped his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close alongside him and kissing the top of her head. "It nearly happened again, didn't it?"

  His jaw tightened as he rested his cheek against her fair hair. "You noticed?"

  "It's hard to miss when you get that panicked. But that's not why I'm frightened."

  "So why are you frightened?"

  She only shrugged.

  "Do you want to go home?"

  Aria shook her head silently and pulled at the grass around her bare feet. As always, she'd discarded her shoes the moment they'd stopped.

  He raised his head and considered her carefully as she scrutinised the ground, and he knew in a moment that she was simply letting him know how she felt. After the events of the last few days alone, it came as no surprise, but she hadn't confessed it easily. He knew well that her trust in him was absolute - perhaps too much so - and admitting her fear must have felt to her like some kind of betrayal. He could see that in her eyes now, too. She was easy to read.

  He squeezed her, but didn't address the point, choosing to let her think such a conclusion would never even occur to him. "You have been quiet lately."

  "I just feel...useless."

  He frowned. "Why ever do you feel useless?"

  "Because I'm not doing anything to help."

  "But no one needs you to, little one." He watched her make a face and understanding snared him. He smiled softly and breathed a laugh, squeezing her once again. "That's the problem, isn't it?"

  "Anthis is reading things, Garon is guiding us, you're working on the spell," they both glanced down at the conjured notebook resting in his lap, its open page filled with crossed out words. "Even Petra is helping by protecting us."

  "Petra isn't really a part of this group, though," he reminded her. "She's leaving us at Bowden. And we have and will get by just fine without her. It's just for convenience's sake."

  "Well, either way, I'm not leaving at Bowden," she replied dismissively, and threw down the grass she'd pulled in the beginnings of a sulk. "I feel like a burden."

  Rathen turned and embraced her properly. "You," he said softly as he pulled her in, "will never be a burden. And have you forgotten about your help with the ditchlings?"

  "Arkhamas."

  "Arkhamas," he amended obligingly. "If not for you, we would have been in trouble."

  She sighed and let go of him. "They wouldn't have done anything to you."

  "Whether their abduction and changing of children is rumour or not, they are thieves and they are known for attacking people, especially in groups half that size. Don't underestimate what you did for us."

  "Yeah but either way, that was only one time."

  He didn't give in to his growing defeat. He considered her instead, his dark eyes masked in a practised way so that she couldn't possibly think he looked condescending, judgemental or dismissive.

  She was upset, that much was plain to anyone, but he knew that this was no childish turn. This was important to her - very important. Something had lodged itself in her head, perhaps because she was beginning to understand the importance of their activity, and she'd turned it over and over until it had become something negative, and the ideas it had given her - that she was useless, a burden - had become convincing. She wasn't looking for reassurance, and he knew that to try would only give her negative thoughts deeper root by appearing to brush it aside. She simply needed to be told that the voice in her head was wrong.

  A sudden idea hardened his eyes. "What do you want to do?"

  "I want to help!" She managed to stifle her desperation into a coarse and exasperated whisper.

  "I know. But in what capacity do you want to help?"

  Suspicion subdued her. She cast him a sidelong glance, narrowing at his curiously level tone, but though she certainly searched for the trick in his eyes, she found nothing but expectation. She frowned and replied carefully. "The same way as you and Anthis: something only I can do."

  He nodded slowly, folding his arms and looking up through the leaves to the stars above as his lips pursed in thought. "Well," he began tentatively, "things are likely to get difficult again. The harpies aren't going to leave us alone - but I don't know that songs about Oat will subdue them... And you didn't bring your rubber ball, so I don't know that you'll be able to provide many fresh stories to entertain us with..." he sighed and looked down, lifting the piece of half-whittled wood from the ground nearby and turning it over absently. "Your smile certainly brightens my day and, to be honest, can get you anything you want, but I don't think the artefact will appear at the sight of it..." He glanced towards her but suppressed his smile at the suddenly enthusiastic grin that now stretched across her face.

  "I know what I can do!"

  His brow cocked in doubt. "I don't know that pretending to be Anthis's shadow is going to be all that helpful..."

  Aria's cheeks flushed red. "No, that's not what I meant."

  "Well," he dropped the wood and thoughtlessly lifted the knife instead, "what then?"

  Secrecy fell over her impish face, squinting her eyes as she glanced surreptitiously towards Anthis who snoozed nearby against a tree. "We might not be able to find the arty-fact," she whispered, as though the thought hadn't occurred to anyone but the two of them. "Elf houses are either empty or a complete mess, and they're all broken. That's why you have to come up with a spell."

  "Yes..."

  "But you said the spell would be too big or something to be cast all in one go by yourself. So, what if I made something for you to cast it into, bit by bit, like the elves did?!"

  His jaw dropped, his brow rose, and he slapped himself in the forehead for good measure. "Why, Aria!" He beamed. "That is a genius idea! So very clever, I must say! Why ever didn't I think--wait," his black eyebrows bolted together. "Bit by bit?"

  Aria blinked. "Well if they couldn't cast it all in one go, perhaps they did it in pieces, or in chains like you and your friend were talking about."

  Rathen's eyes widened as his mind suddenly raced a thousand miles ahead of him. "Why ever didn't I think of that?" He repeated at a mumble. "Well because it's unorthodox...but the elves were better - much better - at using magic than us..." His gaze flicked down to Aria, who looked back with narrowed eyes. "You, my dear, are a genius."

  "I played along for a while, Daddy, but you're laying it on kind of thick now..."

  "No, truly," he beamed, this time whole-heartedly, kissing her firmly on the forehead, "truly you are a genius."

  She had seen what no one else had.

  Assuming, for a moment, that it was real, very little information seemed to have been recovered about this artefact and its spell. But, if it could have been used against other elves, its details would have been closely guarded even in its own time, and having few involved in its creation would certainly help in that regard. And as what had been recovered seemed to suggest that they'd never actually turned it against their kin, it was possible that there had been no great rush to create it, either.

  So perhaps, instead of starting and finishing the spell all at once with the hands of a number of casters, drawing attention to the active creation of a potential weapon, why not just one caster who built the spell up subtly over time? The container, if lined with suitable spells, should be able to prevent the destabilisation of t
he spell before it was completed as well as mark their progress, putting it in the reach of anyone's abilities, elf or human, as long as they had the patience for such precise and careful construction...

  Of course, if this was the case, it would mean fewer reliable sources of information, making their hunt for the artefact harder than they expected - but it also meant that, on balance, Rathen's own task was suddenly much more manageable.

  Ah, the simplicity of children and adults' ability to over-think.

  His eyes dragged back to Aria and found her grinning up at him. He realised he was smiling, too. "It looks like you have a job to do, little one."

  "I will make a vessel worthy of your magic, superior to anything the elves could ever have crafted." Her eyes burned even as she leapt eagerly to her feet.

  "Of that I have no doubt at all." He tore paper out of his notebook and conjured a stick of charcoal at her request, and she immediately sat down beside the fire to begin sketching. Usually she would have dived blade-first into a chunk of wood, but this, it seemed, she was taking quite seriously.

  Rathen, meanwhile, rose to his feet and approached Anthis.

  The historian woke with a start as he poked him in the shoulder, and recoiled additionally at the sight of him. Rathen's brow dropped, but he otherwise ignored it. "What do you know of the habits of elven casters?"

  Petra sat at the riverside, relishing a moment of peace with her feet in the cool water, running her toes over a small, smooth pebble beneath the surface.

  She breathed a sigh of contentment as the water lapped around her ankles. The past two days had been hectic, constantly on the move with barely a moment to rest. She was used to not staying in one place for too long - if anything, it was company she was unaccustomed to - but her travels were usually distinctly uneventful and not particularly hurried. Things didn't get interesting until she reached her destination, and even then it usually happened on her own terms. Lately, however, things had been more...exciting than she was used to.