Then no one would be able to stop him from doing whatever it was he wanted to do. Stuff I couldn’t fathom and didn’t even want to try to imagine.
The worst part was knowing that eventually it was going to happen. Somehow, someway, I was going to mess up. I always did. That’s me—Reigh—Luntharda’s number one screw up. It was just a matter of time before I lost it and Noh did something … unforgiveable.
***
My body was heavy. I couldn’t move. I was delirious, feeling nothing but a cold like pinpricks on my skin. I could hear the deep, constant sound of my heartbeat. So maybe that meant I wasn’t dead.
Then there was a voice—someone shouting right over me. “Reigh? Reigh!”
A strong hand smacked my face.
My eyes popped open. I bolted upright and choked, sucking in a deep breath.
“It’s all right. Breathe. You’ll be fine.” I recognized the voice. It was Kiran. He was sitting right next to me, studying me with a concerned furrow in his brow.
“E-Enyo …” I tried to speak, but I was barely able to catch my breath. I felt weak and dizzy, as though I’d nearly drowned.
“She’s fine.” Kiran put a hand on the back of my head and leaned in close, poking experimentally at the open wound on my face. It hurt so bad my eyes watered.
“You’ll need stitches,” he decided aloud. “One of the stag’s horns had blood on it. I feared the worst.”
That’s right. The stag had nicked me. In my daze, I’d almost forgotten.
I looked past Kiran to the place where the doe should have been lying. But she was gone. There was no trace of her or the stag anywhere. Across the clearing, a few other gray elf scouts were checking Enyo. She was unconscious, but her cheeks were still flushed with color. She was alive.
My body sagged with relief. I met Kiran’s knowing gaze. The hard lines in the corners of his mouth grew deeper when he frowned.
“Is he still here?” he asked quietly so that no one else would hear.
I glanced around, checking for shadows. Noh was gone, for now. I shook my head slightly and winced. My arm—my whole shoulder—felt like it was on fire whenever I tried to move it.
“Good. Now get up.” He patted the top of my head; a gesture that passed as his gruff, awkward effort at parental affection.
I struggled to stand. My arm was killing me. I couldn’t bear to move it, and Kiran had to help me get up. He dusted the leaves, moss, and twigs off my clothes and picked up my bow. Across the clearing, one of the other scouts had picked up Enyo and was carrying her back with the others toward the nearest tree-path.
I followed with Kiran walking right behind me. I could feel his gaze burning at my back. Anyone else would have thought he was just back there making sure I didn’t stumble and fall to my death because of my injured arm. I guess that could have been part of the reason, but that wasn’t all of it. He was probably worried about Noh showing up again. I was worried about that, too. Worried—and confused about what had happened to the doe and the stag.
Kiran managed to keep his temper in check until we got back into the city, behind the private walls of the home we shared. He walked me through the front door of the clinic we ran together, a Healing House for the sick or wounded. Like an angry specter, he haunted my steps as I walked up the stairs to the fourth floor where we lived.
Then he let me have it.
***
“Have I taught you nothing? Did you ever hear a single word I said?” Kiran stared straight at me, expecting an answer.
I couldn’t decide what was more terrifying, that he was about to pop my dislocated arm back into socket or that he was using the human language to scold me this time. He only did that when he didn’t want anyone else to overhear what we were saying.
Kiran hadn’t said much of anything while he cleaned the wound on my nose. The gash was deep, and it had taken fifteen stitches to close it. Now I was going to have a brutal looking scar from one cheek to the other, right across the bridge of my nose. Painful? You bet. And I had a feeling Kiran had intentionally taken longer than usual to close it. Part one of my punishment.
Now it was time for part two.
I swallowed, tensed and ready as his fingers probed around on my shoulder. Whenever he poked too hard, it hurt so badly I thought I was going to die.
“And this time you took Enyo with you,” he went on. “You risked her life, as well. She is a child, Reigh. A child!”
I looked away. “I told her to go back.”
He gave my shoulder a sudden, violent jerk. It snapped, and I screamed. But the tingling numbness in my joints was gone. I could move my arm again. It actually felt … better.
“You are a reckless, thoughtless boy.” He growled as he began to rotate my arm, testing to see if it really was set properly. Then he sternly wrapped my whole shoulder in a bandage. “Everything you do, every decision you make, has consequences. Why don’t you understand this? You only think of yourself. And that is exactly why I do not let you take your place as a warrior.”
I glared at the woven grass mats on the floor. “Is that why you’re ashamed of me? Or is it because I’m human?”
Kiran stopped. “I am not ashamed of you.”
“Then it’s because I’m a monster?”
“You aren’t a monster, Reigh.”
I raised my burning gaze up to him. “Then what am I? Who else do you know who can feel if someone is dying? Who else has a bad spirit living in their head? Noh killed the elk didn’t he?”
When I started to shout, Kiran raised a hand. I closed my mouth and glowered back down at the floor. Right. I wasn’t supposed to get angry. We wouldn’t want my dark friend showing up again.
“Is that why you won’t let me call you father?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He never did. We’d had this argument before—lots of times, actually. And that was where it always stopped.
Kiran wasn’t my father. He was a gray elf who had taken me in when I was a baby, although I didn’t understand why. Clearly parenting wasn’t his thing. He avoided people like others avoided the plague. And while he did try to be warm to me, it was like he didn’t know what to say. So instead he just didn’t say much at all.
According to him, I’d been abandoned as an infant. Someone had left me lying on a rock just inside the boundary of the jungle, alone and vulnerable. Luckily, he had heard me crying before a hungry tigrex or snagwolf could make an easy meal of me. Kiran had taken me in, raised me like a son, but never once allowed me to call him my father.
I still didn’t understand why.
He was plenty old enough to be my father. He’d earned his scars almost forty years ago, fighting in the Gray War. Of course, he never talked about any of it. But sometimes I overheard others telling the stories during the great feast. They talked about how he’d ridden on the back of a dragon, fought to end the war, and stood alongside the princess. Some said he’d even called the lapiloque by name.
I didn’t know if any of that was true, although sometimes Kiran would sit for hours in front of the fire pit, completely silent, just watching the flames slowly die. Those were the nights when I saw the darkness in his eyes I didn’t understand.
And sometimes, when he didn’t think I was paying attention, I would catch him staring at me that way, too.
What I did know about him was that he was strange, even by gray elf standards. He’d never married, never had any children of his own, and he didn’t have all that many friends. Not that he wasn’t well-thought-of in our community—his reputation from the war basically made him a local legend. He was regarded as a hero. But that didn’t seem to matter much to him. He never smiled, he never danced, and he never talked about his past.
“Drink this,” he said and pushed a cup of strong smelling tea into my hands. It was an herbal remedy to treat swelling and pain, and it tasted so bitter I could barely swallow it. But every awful sip made the soreness in my shoulder subside
.
“She’s okay, isn’t she?” I dared to ask only once his back was turned. “I didn’t hurt her, too, did I?”
Kiran paused. He let his hands rest on the top of the chest where he stored all of our medicines. When he turned around, his expression was wrinkled with a sour frown. “She was unharmed,” he replied. “But her mother will break her bow for this. She will have to start her training over to earn another one.”
I looked down again. Great. So basically, she was alive, but she was still going to hate my guts from now on.
“Did she see what I did?” I couldn’t make my chin stop trembling so I bowed my head, hoping Kiran wouldn’t see. “It’s just, you know, I don’t have a lot of friends and Enyo is the only one who …”
I couldn’t finish.
“No. I don’t think she knows what happened.”
A sniffle escaped before I could choke it back in. With a sigh, Kiran sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulders, pulling me over to lean against him. “I found you before the others did. You were right. Noh did kill them. But I disposed of the carcasses. No one will find them. No one will know what happened. You’ll be fine, but this cannot happen again. We were very fortunate.”
I nodded shakily. Yeah, we we’d been insanely lucky. Noh had never killed anyone or anything before. I’d always been able to stop him. “I just couldn’t control it. I just—I didn’t know what else to do. I had to save her.”
He patted my head. “I understand.”
“It’s getting stronger. I see him almost every day. He won’t leave me alone.”
Kiran didn’t answer.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked quietly. “What am I?”
His answer was barely a whisper, “I don’t know.”
***
It was close to midnight when I gave up trying to sleep. My mind was restless, and the moonlight pouring through my open window was too bright. I couldn’t stop thinking about the elk, the feeling of letting Noh go, and how the wound on my face was absolutely killing me. I got up and took the bandage off my shoulder to stretch and flex my arm. It hurt, too, but the herbal remedy me helped a lot. By tomorrow it would be as good as new.
Pulling on a long, silk tunic with baggy sleeves, I buckled my belt and dagger around my waist. I carried my sandals downstairs, careful to hold my breath when I crept past Kiran’s room. He had ears like a fox and slept on the first floor in case we got any late night emergency calls.
I grabbed my bow and quiver off the hook and slipped out the door of the clinic. Above me, a wooden sign hung with the words “HEALING HOUSE” painted in green elven letters. Our clinic was right smack in the middle of the market district. All around me the lights of the city twinkled in the night. Oil lamps flickered against colored glass windows and towering buildings made of cool alabaster stone.
Mau Kakuri was the largest gray elf city that had been rebuilt after the war. Some called it the “city of mist” because it stood against a steep mountainside where a curtain of waterfalls poured down into a shallow river that ran through the middle of the garden district. The falls provided a constant haze of cool, crisp mist that hung in the air, trapped beneath the dense jungle canopy. Sometimes, if the sunlight broke through the trees just right, it made dozens of shimmering rainbows.
The streets, arched bridges, tall stone buildings, and elegantly spiraling palace towers were all built atop the mossy rocks and around the plummeting water. This was where the royal family had chosen to live, where the ancient archives were kept in the caverns behind the falls, and where I had lived my entire life. I was one of only two humans in Mau Kakuri, and we were so far from the boundary of Luntharda and Maldobar, so deep within the dense jungle, that odds were I’d never seen another one … ever.
I took the quiet back road to the edge of the city. I wasn’t sure she’d be there. After all, Enyo was probably furious with me. She might never want to speak to me again. But I was willing to take that chance.
At the end of a long, narrow path that zigzagged treacherously up the side of the cliff face behind a few of the falls, I found her. She was sitting in our usual spot, her bare feet dangling over the edge of the mossy rocks. The water poured over the edge before her, a constant veil from the city below.
It was tricky to get to her. The boulders were slick and the edge was steep. But I’d come this way so many times that I could have done it with my eyes closed.
“Did you come here to apologize?” Enyo wouldn’t look at me as I sat down beside her.
“Would it help?” I hesitated and studied her profile.
She didn’t look thrilled to see me. “No. And I’m not sure I would believe it, anyway.”
I chewed on my lip.
“Your nose looks awful,” she said.
I poked at the fresh stitches gingerly. “Hurts, too.”
“Good.”
We sat in uncomfortable silence for what seemed like a long time. Then, I took my bow off my back and placed it gently on her lap.
She stared at it, ran her fingers over it, and then slowly raised her eyes to meet my gaze. “You’re giving it to me?”
I nodded once.
“But you’ll lose your place to become a warrior. You’ll have to start all your training over.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll probably have to do that anyway.” I shrugged. “Kiran doesn’t think I’m ready. He thinks I’m selfish and probably stupid, too.”
Enyo smirked and nudged me playfully with her elbow. “I kind of agree.”
“As long as you don’t hate me, that’s all I care about.” I sighed and sat back, resting my weight on my hands. “But I am sorry, you know. I shouldn’t have brought you along.”
I heard her snort sarcastically. “I saved your life! You’d be dead without me.”
“As if.”
“You’re such an idiot, Reigh.” She socked me in my sore shoulder.
I whimpered and rubbed my arm.
After a few seconds of sitting there, watching the falls and listening to the constant rumbling of the water, I saw her look my way again. She was still rubbing her hand along the bow I’d given her as though she were anxious about something.
“Do you remember what happened? After the stag charged for me?” she asked at last.
I tried to avoid her probing stare. “Do you?”
“No,” she said quietly. “Everything got hazy. I was so afraid I must have fainted. I just remember … feeling so cold. When I woke up, I was at home. No one would tell me where you were. I thought you were dead, Reigh.”
I swallowed hard.
“Was Kiran angry with you?”
“No more than usual.”
She nibbled on her bottom lip. “My mother was furious. She said that we both should have died. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? Why would the stag just decide to let us go? And what happened to the doe?”
I didn’t want to answer any of her questions. Lying had never been one of my finer skills.
“My mother said it was a miracle,” she said softly, like it was some kind of secret. “The spirit of the lapiloque saved us.”
I stared at her. Then I couldn’t help it. I laughed out loud. “Seriously? You think the ghost of some dead god saved us?”
Enyo made a sulking face. “Don’t say it like that, it’s blasphemous.”
“Right.” I rolled my eyes.
“He’s not dead, Reigh. I know it.”
“How? How can you possibly know that?”
I watched her expression become dreamy, almost like she was lost in her own private fantasy. “I can’t explain it. I just do.”
“That’s ridiculous, even by your standards.”
She glared at me. “Haven’t you ever just believed in something, Reigh? Even though you couldn’t see it or touch it?”
I thought about Noh and my body instantly got chilled.
“He’s not just a myth. He’s real.” She spoke w
ith such conviction; I almost wanted to believe her. “And I believe he’s coming back.”
THREE
Things were quiet for a while. I kept a low profile, following Kiran’s orders to stay in the city and out of trouble. He didn’t want me out of his sight. This was part three of my punishment, I guess. Part four was when he took the stitches out of my nose.
Meanwhile, rumors swirled through the crowded markets and bustling public baths about how Enyo and I had miraculously escaped being mauled to death by a faundra stag. Some of our local friends even came by the clinic to ask me about it and check out my battle scar, although Kiran forbade me to tell them any details. Most people agreed with Enyo’s theory that the spirit of the lapiloque had somehow intervened and protected us.
Only Kiran and I knew differently.
In fact, Kiran didn’t act like anything had happened at all. He went on running the clinic, treating patients for snake bites, broken bones, cuts, and all the usual daily ailments like usual. He doubled my load of chores probably to make sure I didn’t have any spare time to do anything stupid, but I didn’t mind it. Staying busy helped pass the time … and kept me from wondering what Noh was doing. He’d been unusually quiet since the incident.
I ran errands on foot through the city squares, buying ingredients so I could spend the evenings grinding herbs and making medicines. During the day, I changed bed sheets, washed bandages, scrubbed Kiran’s surgical tools, and helped him make the delivery kits for the midwives. He was the best healer in the city, so his schedule was always packed and there was rarely a day when we didn’t have a line of patients going out the door.
But on some mornings, before the sun rose, Kiran left me in charge while he went out with the other warriors to lead scouting parties that kept a close watch on the city’s outer perimeter. Every able-bodied warrior had to take a turn doing that. Well, every one except for me.
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