by Jeff Wilson
In the morning, as he sat finishing his breakfast, and while Irial was still in her room getting ready to leave, Eithne finally deigned to let him know what it was that he had done.
“You didn’t tell me you were the Blood Prince,” she said. There was an angry blue fire behind her eyes, and Eithne was filled with a little awe, a measure of disbelief, and a great deal of hurt and betrayal, as she made this accusatory declaration.
“You heard us talking,” Edryd guessed.
“No, I heard him before you came back. He said that he was looking for Captain Aisen. When I didn’t let him in, he kept pounding on the door, asking for Lord Aisen of House Edorin.” The last part she accented to show what she thought of ‘Lord Aisen of House Edorin’ and of the man who had come looking for him.
“That doesn’t mean…”
“Yes it does. He was looking for the Blood Prince. He was looking for you.” There was fresh hurt in her eyes and she began to cry. He was still, even now, trying to continue to conceal who he was from her.
“I didn’t want you to know,” Edryd said. He wanted make this better for Eithne, but he did not know how to help her understand.
“Why?” she pled.
“Irial once told you that I was dangerous,” Edryd explained. “She was right.”
“You’ve killed people,” Eithne said, starting to understand.
“And hurt many others,” he agreed. “I didn’t want you to know that.”
Despite the serious nature of the discussion, the conversation was making Eithne feel better.
“The people you hurt were trying to hurt you,” Eithne said, trying to reassure him.
“One of the people I hurt and killed was my younger brother,” Edryd said, trying hard to keep his emotions in check, and immediately regretting what he had just revealed. Painful memories were surfacing, and thinking that it wouldn’t help if he began crying too, he said no more for a while. In the quiet that followed, Edryd recognized how misguided it had been to share the grief and the guilt that he felt over his brother’s death, with such a young child. Berating himself, he changed the subject.
“I promise I won’t ever lie to you again,” he said.
“You are not a bad person,” Eithne insisted. Her tears were now dry, but she looked worried about Edryd. “I know you didn’t do it on purpose.” She could not have known whether her profession of faith in his good nature was true, but Edryd was comforted in the depths of his heart to hear her express it. The sentiment would have sounded so self-serving and feeble had he made the same protest on his own behalf.
As Edryd walked beside Irial on the road that morning, the memory of Eithne’s confident assurances regarding her unshaken belief in him softened his suffering, but it had still been a poor start to the day. He could have used time to himself and was in no mood to talk. Irial seemed equally content to walk in silence, fearful that he would be demanding answers to the questions that she knew he must have. As they continued, Irial became increasingly tense, feeling pressure from anticipating the questions that never came, and attributing Edryd’s dark mood to frustration borne over her failure to be open with him.
“I will tell you what I can,” she suddenly blurted out.
Edryd looked up in surprise and met her serious and worried gaze.
“I need help from both you and Aelsian,” she said. She seemed frustrated, realizing how little she was prepared to reveal. “I need you to accompany Eithne, and get her away from An Innis,” Irial continued. She had no choice but to take into her confidence, the man in whom she had decided to entrust her sister’s safety. The disclosure was met with silence.
“I think you will agree that An Innis is no place for her,” Irial pointed out. Edryd did agree. He couldn’t agree more. He just didn’t see how this connected to him.
“Why didn’t you have Logaeir get her out a long time ago?” Edryd asked.
“I don’t trust Logaeir,” she said, “and neither should you.” She didn’t have to tell Edryd why he shouldn’t trust Logaeir. It was also unnecessary to include in that statement that she didn’t trust Seoras, Esivh Rhol, the harbormasters, or anyone else in An Innis who could possibly arrange a means for Eithne to leave. Also implicit was the fact that she did trust Edryd.
Edryd was confronted by a set of opposing emotions. He would do it. Of course he would. But it had at first been lost on him, that her proposal also included his escape from An Innis as well. Perhaps it had not occurred to him because at some point, he couldn’t say with precision when, he had stopped wanting to leave the island. As Edryd thought about this, he desperately wanted Irial to modify her plans.
“You have to leave with us,” he insisted.
“I can’t,” was all she said.
Infuriatingly, now that he had agreed to her request, she was no longer willing to bargain away anything else, and she gave no explanation for why she would have to remain behind. Gentle but earnest efforts to question Irial further led nowhere, and Edryd could not get her to say much more. Irial had given him answers, not to all his questions but to most of them, and he was made miserable by what he had learned.
There was time yet. It would take weeks for a message to reach Aelsian once it was sent, and weeks more for the navarch to travel to An Innis. He would have to persuade Irial before then that there was no need for her to stay behind, and argue that Eithne would never leave without her.
Edryd was looking down, distracted by his troubles as he walked beyond the gates of the estate after passing through them. Irial was no longer beside him, having taken a path behind the stables that led up to a side entrance of the manor as Edryd had continued towards the practice yard. He would have been caught unaware had he not felt the shifting flows of the displacement when it formed.
He recoiled from the boundaries of the distortion as they passed over his body. It felt to Edryd like a sudden change of pressure in the air, preceded by a sense of the ground falling away from underneath his feet. The odd but familiar experience was accompanied by waves of anger emanating from the man who stood in front of him, effortlessly shaping the dark to his will.
Jumping back, as if he had stumbled into the menacing path of a rabid animal, Edryd drew his sword on instinct. He kept moving back until he was out of the range of the displacement that surrounded Seoras. His teacher’s sword was drawn as well, held low, and ready to strike at any moment.
“I warned you,” Seoras said. “I told you what would happen if you held anything back from me.”
Edryd was confused. He couldn’t think what had triggered Seoras like this.
“You did not break any of the glass,” Seoras continued. “I am left to suppose then, that you are already a master of the technique. If not, then this will be a short and painful lesson.”
Edryd could not comprehend the motivations that were driving this dark and unbalanced behavior, but he did have insights gained from a month of peering in through an unnatural window into the man’s emotional state. There was more behind this than just unbroken glass.
The displacement in the dark around Seoras shrank as it intensified, and then momentarily wavered as he exploded forward, attempting to close the distance between them in an instant. Edryd anticipated, reading his attacker’s intent, and reacting to the charge before it was ever executed. He was safely away and beyond the boundaries of the distortion that was now reforming around his attacker. Edryd could not allow the gap to be closed or he would be out of options.
The anger in Seoras rose even further, coupled with frustration, but he did not charge again. He settled into place and began to concentrate. An area of distortion began forming at Edryd’s feet. His first impulse was to push the displacement away, to shred it into oblivion, but like always, he had no purchase on it. Edryd understood what was happening though. Seoras was binding him to the ground, keeping him in one place so that he would be unable to escape.
The task of shaping became increasingly difficult with greater distances, or so Seor
as had said on more than one occasion. Moving something large in near proximity might be done with little effort, but when extending the range of the object you intended to affect by even a modest increment, a small stone could begin to feel to the shaper as though it had the weight of an enormous boulder. Seoras was trying to disguise what he was doing, but at this range it had been overly ambitious, and Edryd could sense the strain behind the effort. Edryd calmly stepped away before the patterns could be properly formed, and the displacement collapsed. As powerful as Seoras was, his capabilities had limits.
Seoras appeared to have become fatigued from the exertion, and he was clearly surprised that Edryd had evaded his trap, but he seemed to almost calm down as he took a moment to recover. Seoras was no less angry, but the frustration he had been feeling was gone. In its place there was deep satisfaction, a definite sense of having accomplished something.
“Your senses would not be this sharp were you not deeply and intimately attuned to the dark,” Seoras declared. “You can no longer deceive me. I have measured your strength, and now I am going to make you show it to me.”
Seoras didn’t give Edryd a chance to try and comprehend anything. He exploded forward again. Edryd could not concentrate on anything but evading the charge. He had to think ahead, and choose efficient movements in order to keep the distance from closing. Illness had robbed him of strength, but his recovered body was lighter, quicker, and had increased stamina. These latter qualities were better tools in this exchange.
The anger from his opponent continued undiminished as Seoras charged relentlessly, surging forward over and over again. More than once Edryd barely slipped beneath the lightning quick arc of his opponent’s weapon, avoiding fatal injury in the process. Following each momentum-aided rush, it took Seoras a fraction of a second to restore the gathered tension. This delay was enough to make it possible to continue to dodge the attacks, but it left no margin.
Were they not in an open and unconfined space, or had his opponent been calm enough to better calculate and manipulate his movements, Edryd would have been quickly trapped in a corner. As it was, Edryd could not survive this much longer. He had to hope that it would be over soon. Such hopes were not entirely unfounded. Seoras was rapidly growing tired, recklessly giving no moment for either one of them to rest.
As the tactical exchange played out, Edryd felt something entirely unexpected in Seoras. It was deep pain born out of humiliation. His teacher had declared that he would force his student to use his abilities, and the student was making a joke of it, evading the attacks without resorting to anything other than skillful timing and fluid movements. It was an unforgivable slight—a dismissive insult that had to be answered. Frustration once again dominated the shaper’s emotions, and with it had come an unmistakable desire to kill. It frightened Edryd to realize that up until this point, Seoras had not been trying to kill him.
After a single misstep by Edryd, a miscalculation in the placement of his feet, Seoras was able to reduce the separation between them, and a sharp line of pain flared in Edryd’s right leg as Seoras scored a shallow cut across his thigh. It wasn’t serious but it made Edryd freeze for just a moment. It was more than Seoras needed. The shaper closed the remaining distance and a decapitating blow came slicing through the air.
Edryd felt the sharp steel of the blade penetrate his neck. It took him a long surreal moment to realize that he wasn’t dead. Edryd reached up with his hand and pulled the sword away without stopping to wonder why he was able to do so without encountering any resistance. He felt heat as he traced the wound on his neck. When he pulled his hand away, it was covered with warm blood.
The sword had stopped at the exact moment it had come into contact with his skin. It didn’t seem possible, but he had to accept that Seoras was capable of a good many things that no one should be able to do. Edryd looked toward Seoras for the first time. The man’s dark blue eyes were dim and devoid of awareness, appearing as fixed empty points in a hollow tormented expression. Seoras’s mind was a blank.
It seemed to Edryd, quite convincingly, as if time had stopped. But it hadn’t. It was only Seoras that seemed to be frozen. That illusion fell away too as the tall man’s legs collapsed and he crumpled to the ground. Edryd couldn’t see whether Seoras was breathing, but he felt certain that the shaper wasn’t dead, at least not yet. There was an emotionless and incoherent chaos stirring within the man’s unconscious mind. It was an opportunity, one that would not come again, to kill Seoras. Edryd would have had a host of points of solid justification for doing so if he chose to act. Self-preservation was high on that list.
Edryd rushed off yelling for Irial, and was still running up to the manor when he saw her running towards him in the opposite direction.
“What did you do?” she asked.
“I didn’t do anything…” Edryd began defensively, failing to realize that her question wasn’t meant as an accusation. She just needed to know what had happened. Irial didn’t wait for him to figure it out; she started hurrying down the path again.
“He attacked me,” Edryd explained as he ran along behind her, trying again to make it clear that he deserved no blame for what had happened. “He tried to kill me, and then he stopped.”
Irial glanced back at Edryd, thinking that he wasn’t making much sense, and doubting that he had given an accurate description of events.
Edryd could see the suspicion on her face, but he couldn’t blame her, not when he didn’t understand what had happened himself. It only stood to reason, that once she saw Seoras lying on the ground, she would have to then think him guilty of having struck Seoras hard enough to knock him out.
Had he done something though? His memory of that moment felt indefinite and unreal. He had believed that he was going to die. Might that have broken something loose? It wasn’t without precedent. Something not altogether dissimilar had happened when he had fought and killed his brother Beonen. No, this time had been different; he no longer even had the sigil blade. Whatever had happened in that moment when Seoras’s sword had begun slicing into his neck, Edryd was certain that he had played no part in it other than the innocent object of the unprovoked attack.
Edryd began to consider whether Seoras had done something to himself, waiting too late to stop the momentum from a shaped swing. Seoras could have created a force in opposition to the one imparted into the original attack. Nothing else could have stopped the strike so suddenly. Edryd thought of the stone Seoras had been holding in the air, pushed at by opposing forces, before it exploded inside of the outbuilding behind the stables. Seoras had grasped it so tightly that it had been crushed. Had the mental equivalent happened within Seoras? It was a horrible and unpleasant thought.
Arriving in the practice yard, Edryd stood beside Irial as she knelt over Seoras. He braced for the accusations that were sure to come, but Irial was too focused on Seoras to notice him. She loosened the injured man’s shirt and listened for his breathing. Putting the side of her head to his heart, she listened intently for a short while before pulling away.
“Apart from being entirely insensible, he is perfectly fine,” she said. “He is worn out, but not injured.”
Irial began to check for signs of any bruising on his head.
“I didn’t hit him,” Edryd insisted. “He fell, but he was already unconscious before that.”
Irial turned to Edryd and noticed the long cut across the side of his neck as well as the gash in his leg. The bleeding had stopped on Edryd’s neck, but blood was still soaking into the cloth on his leg, drawn from the wound on his thigh. Forgetting about Seoras for the moment, Irial focused on attending to Edryd’s injuries.
Tolvanes came into the square holding strips of cloth and a bucket of water, which Irial used to carefully clean and then bandage Edryd’s injuries. When she was done she asked Edryd again what had happened.
“I didn’t kill him,” Edryd said.
“No, but you would have been within your rights if you had,” she said, l
ooking at his injuries.
Irial turned her attention back to Seoras. She seemed to be going through the same debate he had only moments before. It was an opportunity to end the man. An unnecessary one, Edryd thought, remembering again the stone he had seen shattered into thousands of pieces.
Tolvanes, who had quietly moved closer to Edryd, leaned in close. “Why didn’t you kill him,” he hissed.
Edryd was a little taken aback, until he remembered what Tolvanes had once asked of him.
“If you want him dead,” Edryd said, “do it yourself.”
Tolvanes regarded Edryd warily, his gaze travelling to the short sword resting in its sheath at Edryd’s side. Edryd could not tell whether Tolvanes was eyeing it as an implement with which to carry out his ambition to kill Seoras, or whether he was just worried about what Edryd might do to intervene.
“We need to carry him to a bed,” Irial said. Whatever Tolvanes had been contemplating, this pulled him out of it.
“Of course Mistress Rohvarin,” Tolvanes obliged, positioning himself near the feet of the still unconscious Aed Seoras.
Edryd moved into place opposite Giric Tolvanes and together they prepared to lift Aed Seoras from the ground. As he knelt and took hold of Seoras, placing his arms under the injured man’s shoulders, Edryd felt Seoras begin to stir.
“Get back!” Edryd ordered, jumping to his feet and shielding Irial.
The displacement emanating from Seoras was unfocused and without form, but it was powerful, encircling all of them and extending past the edges of the courtyard. Irial and Tolvanes had not noticed anything, apart from Edryd’s strange behavior, but Edryd felt successive waves of pulsing distortions that left him feeling disoriented and unsteady. Loose gravel began to vibrate around the still prone figure of Aed Seoras, and seeing this, Irial and Tolvanes backed away cautiously. Edryd couldn’t move. He was fixed in place within a smaller circle of gravel that was resonating around his own feet. Some of the small stones began to rise in the air, and then they fell abruptly to the ground as Seoras woke and stabilized the distortion.