The snow and ice shot past in a haze of neutrality. I might almost have been running on the spot so little did the scenery change. All that marked my passing was the sputum topped waves and the occasional berg that drifted in some perpetual dream of finding warmer climes. I'd have enjoyed watching their journeying, but knew without feeling it, there were none. The world was cold like the hearts of those who dwelled in it. Soon, it would be just as dead.
I caught a glint, a flash of reflected ruby to my left, and saw that one twin, bedecked in owl-like goggles, already flanked me. I could not tell which and frankly did not care. The albino kept a respectable distance between us until his brother sped up alongside him then overtook at a velocity to marvel at. The two ran so light-footed, they barely left imprints in the snow, unlike my own furrowed passage. They endeavoured to outflank me and I dared say allow Ragnar time to sneak up and deliver the blow they thought would finish me. Determined and resolute, I would not allow it and fate came to my aid.
I watched as the twin who'd taken point caught his foot on something, whilst preoccupied with me. He tripped and crashed into the snow causing such a disturbance I had to leap over his sprawled form high into the air. The view from my greater height was an unpleasant one. I spied tinges of brown set against the snow, maybe limbs, but without investigating, I couldn't be sure. I was certainly not about to do so.
I hurtled on across the Arctic wastes, my black form mirrored by a single white blur. With only one brother flanking me, I felt confident I could not be brought down: I was wrong. But it was not Verstra, or Serstra, or even the mighty Ragnar that felled me, but an object of polished mahogany: a discard coffin. I skidded face first into a heap of what had once been Hispanics and their portable, wooden homes. By the looks of things, Chantelle had come this way, but her entourage had lessened somewhat. Whatever the Marquis had done to them, Raphael's kinsman had become less than impervious to the cold and had been dumped in unceremonious fashion in the snow, a lightening of the load, as had I. My face came to rest mere inches from the contorted features of a Hispanic female. She held such a look of terror, of absolute fear, that an Eternal should never have known; the look of someone who realised their own mortality.
I had no time to mourn, nor dwell on detail, as I felt myself pinioned to the ground by each arm. The twins had caught me. The gigantic shadow that was their brother engulfed my own, and I knew I was right out of luck.
“Friends of yours?” boomed Ragnar.
“No friends of mine, you oaf.”
The pain from his blow cracked my spine and almost rendered me unconscious, the anguish as the twins turned me to face their brother, even more so.
“I have decided you were right, Jean.”
Ragnar's words surprised me, but the blood swilling around my mouth prevented a response.
“Are we to kill him, brother?” the twins voiced together.
“Yes, boys. I have had my fill of the inkblot that is Jean.”
“Or soon will be,” one of the two returned.
I couldn't even turn my head, the pain of Ragnar's well-judged blow was too complete: I could not speak; I could not resist; I could only die. What was worse, I was going to die within reach of my dear, sweet Linka without gazing upon her beauty one last time. I would die in the weak rays of the sun and felt nothing but regret.
“I am not a man of many words and you seem all out of puns, my ravenesque descendent, so I will end this quick. In your own twisted way, you've earned that, Jean. We shall tell mother you fell and return your shattered body to her. What she does with it, I care not.” Ragnar spoke with the solemnity of someone conducting a eulogy, I just never envisioned it my own.
My head hung against my chest as I waited for that final blow. I watched as two feet planted before me, Ragnar poised. His shadow's arm lifted, his mighty body flexed, and I awaited death.
The crack almost split my head asunder, and I wondered if the ringing sensation in my ears was that of the afterlife, then realised an Eternal lived the afterlife, and presumed it something else. Perhaps it was finality that precursor to nothingness? I knew not, nor cared not, as I awaited obsidian night.
Another crack, and I suspected myself already dead. Surely I witnessed Ragnar beating me to a pulp from the beyond: I was wrong, yet again. The twins tensed, then released me. My short fall to the snow at Ragnar's feet caused unparalleled pain. My eyes rolled back as a fissure split the ice and the boots I thought to crush my skull were grasped by two slim, porcelain hands. They locked about his ankles with a power mightier than anything I'd ever witnessed. Ragnar's aghast look was one of sheer terror, as they dragged him through the fissure and into the cold oblivion of the ocean below.
* * *
That was the last thing I saw, felt, or wanted, as darkness took me into a realm beyond realms.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
-
Cinnamon
I stirred to the sound of a tinkling waterfall, its droplets pitter-pattered against my bare cheek to a magical rhythm. The thought I must have descended into an underworld of cascading water and permanent night was most prevalent in my mind. When all was said and done, there could have been fates far worse for a man with my history.
Something soft brushed against my brow, it tickled, and I twitched involuntarily. The shudder that shot through my body re-established the fact I was still alive; pain does that to a person. At least, I hoped so, for if it was Hell and an eternity of such agony my penance, then it was more hurt than I could endure.
I tried to open my eyes. They refused to respond allowing only the faintest chink of ruby light to filter into my retina. Redoubling my efforts, I tried again, and woke to the glistening purity of a snow-white angel: Aurora. My joy was short-lived as the fog in my mind cleared and the dear girl grew into focus. She wept as though the world had ended. For her, part of it had.
“Je…an,” she stammered. “Oh, Jean, what have I done?”
I endeavoured to lift my hand, to wipe away the tears that flowed from those beautiful sapphire eyes, to take hold of the hand that stroked my brow, but could not. “I do not know, dear girl, but I thank you for saving my life,” I said, instead.
“But at what cost?”
“I'm sorry, Aura, I know not of what you speak.”
Her answer was to remove her hand and hold it out to view. What should have been pale as new-fallen snow dripped in vivid crimson. The girl had killed.
“You see?” she beseeched. “You see what I've done?”
“Ragnar,” my one-word response. A nod of her handsome face confirmed it.
“I have murdered my step-brother. The worst shame is, if they had not fled, I should have murdered the twins, too. As it is…” she began, then trailed off.
I gasped in horror as the arm I was cradled in tilted me forward and I regarded the torn off limb of a Nordic prince settled in the snow. The thing twitched in crimson liquid like an eel in a hellish sea.
Aurora, as if sensing my pain, rested me back in the snow, stood and collected the torn off arm, and paced to the waterside. The fingers attached to it were still clenched shut, as though resistance had been desperate, but futile. The pale princess stroked her step-brothers torn off hand, then flung it limb and all into the waiting waters. I did not see it sink beneath the waves, but frankly, I was glad to see it go.
“Grella?” I called softly.
“Gone,” a bitter reply.
I felt as though the world had tilted out of orbit, everything sent askew. “He was a good man, Aura,” I offered as consolation.
“He was more than that, Jean, he was my brother.”
I was about to offer more, some crumb of comfort to her, but my body surged with such pain that I coughed into the half-light, my essence pooling as red spittle in the snow. Aurora saw it and hurried back to my side.
“You look worried,” I said in between grimaces.
“I am worried.”
“Please, don't be. I will heal, Aura. Being
an Eternal has some benefits.” I attempted a smile but coughed up so much blood as to spoil Aurora's porcelain robes. If the girl noticed, she did not show it, instead, just looked on more concerned than ever. “Do not fret, my dear, I just need to rest. I promise I shall heal.”
“You shall not,” a blunt response.
“Don't sugar-coat, will you.”
“How else does one state the truth? Ragnar is dead and Serstra soon will be. Grella is lost, and so am I. Soon, I will not only be lost, but I fear, alone.”
She cast me such a look of pity, I wished I were dead, so she would not have to do so again.
“What else is there to say?” she persisted. “Hvit will relocate and Mother shall live on. We shall not.”
“You can, Aura,” I encouraged. “Leave me, I care not, just promise to get Linka away from that accursed city of yours. I ask for nothing more.”
It was a good job too because I was seized by another fit of such excruciating coughing, I thought it should end me.
Aurora wiped her hands in the snow, then took some clean and mopped my face with it.
“I cannot leave you, and I cannot go home,” she said at length once I'd settled again.
“You must!” I implored.
“I cannot. I do not know how?”
“What!” A jar of protest rippled through my frame.
“What I told you before of never having left Hvit was the truth. I have never strayed more than yards from its door. Only when hunting orca and surrounded by others was I allowed my freedom and even then only in the water.”
I must have frowned for Aurora's eyes flickered with concern.
“I don't understand?” I wheezed.
“Only my elder kin were privy to Hvit's secret entrance. The city's citizens and I were not ever trusted with how to find it. That way they and I should never have dared leave. So, dear Jean, we are indeed stuck here in the middle of a barren wilderness with nothing to do but starve and die.”
The poor girl looked so resigned to her fate it almost tore what remained of me apart. She had always seemed so strong, so sure of herself despite her restrictions. It pained me to see her spirit broken, it was so very wrong.
“I can find it,” I stated, with as much confidence as a crippled man might.
“You what?”
“I said, I can find it. And I can, Aura, I know I can.”
“How?” She looked at me in disbelief, her jaw set, lips poised to argue.
“I can smell it.”
“Smell it?”
“Yes, the lavender. If we pass anywhere near the entrance to Hvit, I feel confident I will smell it.”
“Of course, how stupid of me. I have grown so used to it over the centuries. All this time, I have used my eyes when it was my nose I should've trusted. I could have strayed further in my cloak, run with Nordvind, lived. Escaped, too,” she said as an aside that ran right through my dead heart. “The lavender, the accursed lavender, if only I'd thought.”
“You are no more short-sighted than I, Aura. I have lived a lie. That is far worse than being unable to escape one.”
“Hm, perhaps, but to be caged by one's family's shame is beyond ridiculous.”
“What do you mean?” I tried to lift my head, then regretted it.
“The lavender. You are still unaware why they shower themselves in it?”
“I am,” I answered, the time for subtleties departed.
“They decay.”
“They what!”
“They are dead.”
“We all are.”
“No, Jean, we are not. Just because our hearts do not beat does not mean they cannot. Just because we have lived off blood for aeons does not mean it was always so. But for my family things are different. They are albino through inbreeding, not fluke, not Darwinism. If it not for the orca blood that surges through their frames reinvigorating long dead cells with false purpose, they would disseminate within days. Perhaps, sooner, I do not honestly know. But I know this, I am the only child of Hvit to be born to an outsider since records began. I am the only child of Hvit that is and has not been dead for centuries. That is why I am despised. That is why my mother hates me so. I have what she has lost.”
“And what is that, dear girl?” I asked, enthralled by her account.
“I have promise, Jean, the ability to reproduce, the thing she lost for good with my birth. I was a miracle, you see, as I suspect were you. That is the one thing I will both love and despise my father for. He has cursed me with a gift I will never live to use.”
“I'm sure it's overrated,” I said and instantly regretted it, as the tears flowed from her eyes. She put her head in her hands and wept as though she'd never cease.
“I'm so sorry, Aura, please forgive this petty, bitter man I've become.” She did not stir, so I tried again. “I see so much in you I am unable to verbalise. You are amazing. I wish you could see it, too. I don't know how else to put it. I wish my friend the old Sunyin was here, he'd know what to say.” But the thought of the old monk all confused and on the cusp of death brought great pain to me, far worse than that which wracked my body.
Aurora gave me a strange look then, lifting her water-filled eyes to my own, as though seeing me for the first time in an age. She took my hand in her own although I could barely feel it and spoke with conviction. “You shall see him again, Jean, I promise it. If you say you can find the doorway, I believe you.”
“It won't do you any good whilst I'm laid here,” I wheezed through the suffering.
“You will not be,” she replied. And, with the gentleness of a mother caring for a newborn child, the one thing my darling Alba had always wanted, she slid her arms beneath me and raised me from the snow. That was the last thing I remembered, as the pain hit like the bomb Vladivar had used on The Hierarchy but going off inside of me, instead. I whirled, grimaced, my mind blacking out and fell into the obsidian slumber of the dead.
* * *
“Ah, you are awake.” It was the voice of my guardian angel.
“Where am I?” I asked, then felt rather foolish.
“You and I are on our way home,” Aurora replied.
“But what if we've missed it whilst I've slept?”
“We have not.”
“That's very certain for someone who does not know the way.”
“I know the way just not where the door lies.”
“And we have not passed it?”
“We still have a long way to go, Jean. You must rest.”
But her words already faded away.
* * *
I cannot remember if I argued with her as I slipped in an out of uncomfortable darkness, but whenever my heavy eyelids opened, she was there. Aurora walked without complaint taking the greatest care not to jar my battered body. I might have lain on a bed of goose feathers, so soft was my passage through her lands. How long we travelled that way, I couldn't say, but I knew that every time I woke from my enforced rest her beautiful face appeared more and more concerned. I had an awful feeling that at some point, I would not wake at all. At least twice, I remembered with clarity, Aurora laying me in the snow and leaping into the sea's irritated waters. I presumed it was to hunt. She risked her own life for me as she had for Grella.
There was a time when I would've said she was far too good a sister for that man, but I'd judged him harshly. Grella had not deserved to die, especially not for me. I dwelt on that fact both in and out of consciousness and told myself it was all due to Serena's machinations, and through no fault of my own. However, my fault or not, there was now a princess without a brother and a future without a king.
The thoughts never lasted long, so erratic was my passing through that nightmare, yet like the sudden desisting of an Alpine storm, my torments ended.
* * *
“Drink.”
I heard Aurora's cool command as if from a great distance.
“Drink deeply, Jean, I can spare it now.”
I didn't need telling twice and suck
led at the free-flowing juices as though my life depended on it, which it surely did.
“Now, open your eyes.”
I tried, but failed.
“You can do it. Imagine Linka is here looking down on you.”
And just like that, I was awake. For a second, I thought Linka did look down on me, but as my eyes refocused to the ruby haze of perpetual twilight, I realised it Aurora.
“What's that godawful stench?” I bemoaned pulling my mouth from Aurora's proffered arm.
“That's not much of a greeting for someone who's just saved your life.”
“It was an honest one,” I said, laughed, and realised with some relief, I felt as good as new.
“Well, it isn't me,” she smirked, indicating I look left.
“Good grief! What on earth is that?” A mountainous cinnamon-coloured beast lay with its back to me. If it had been dressed in silken finery, I might have thought it the Marquis, so rotund was it.
“I believe they were once called walruses.”
“Then, I presume that is walrus blood?” I pointed to the stream of crimson which ran down her robes to collect as puddles on the ground.
“That would be correct. Not quite orca blood, but not bad, not bad at all.”
The beast lay sprawled on the ice like an overstuffed marshmallow. I marvelled at its obesity and wondered how the thing had survived the dying seas.
“Thank you,” I said, whilst Aurora splashed seawater all over herself at the edge of the ice.
“My pleasure,” she replied when finished. “I think you'll find my own blood better than that of the beast,” she grinned. “I only wish I'd dared gift you it earlier, but I thought myself too weak. This,” she gestured to the behemoth, “was an unexpected bonus.”
“I'll say. How did you capture it?”
“Stand, Jean,” her blunt response.
I was about to argue my wounds too severe when I realised to my joy, they were not, and I fairly leapt to my feet.
Hunter Hunted (The Eternals Book 2) Page 25