The Shattering of the Spirit-Sword Brackish 1

by Sam Farren

  “No,” Eos said. “Most of that is correct. The civil wars were the only understated part. King Mykos spent much of his reign trying to put an end to the growing resistance. Much of this came to bloodshed.

  “When the Greyser Monarchy fell, something stirred within the people of Nor. Those who sat by, believing it hopeless, began to raise their voices. The Yricians who had been moved from their land and forced to fight banded together, turning against the King. Two years after the King’s defeat, the monarchy was abolished. Since then, the people have ruled themselves, as they rule Fenroe.”

  A dynasty destroyed in a matter of minutes.

  Eos’ story was lost to the wind, and she continued as though reciting facts of her own. She had compiled the bones of it from some book she’d pulled from a shelf by chance, and now it was Castelle’s tale to pass on.

  “Eos. Wait,” Castelle said, catching up with her. “Is that it? Is that all you have to say?”

  “It does not matter if you don’t believe me,” Eos said. “It is the truth.”

  “That isn’t what I mean,” Castelle said, grabbing Eos’ wrist to stop her. It worked too well. Eos froze until Castelle’s grasp loosened. “You said you came from Nor, eight years ago. You spoke of war, of the Yrician’s place in it, but not of your role. You were involved, weren’t you? You were part of it. You must be, otherwise…”

  She trailed off, hand falling to her side.

  Eos waited for a conclusion, head tilting to the side when she reached it through the shadows that fell upon Castelle’s face.

  “Otherwise I would not look like this,” Eos said. Her mouth pressed into a thin, tight line. “Torture was often employed by the Dracmas. They were your cousins, Princess. You should know this.”

  “That isn’t fair,” Castelle snapped. “My family has never engaged in such barbaric practices. To claim otherwise is—”

  “The Greysers were tyrants. Your mother wore the crown with pride, with glee. Torture is but the lowest of her crimes.”

  “Silence,” Castelle demanded, stepping closer. Eos didn’t flinch. “I will not have my family defamed by you. By a Yrician. You do not know anything about them. You have been fed lies, like the rest of this sick land.”

  Eos lifted her chin and said, “You have been gone from the world for more than a decade. You know only what Lords Damir and Ira have told you.”

  “You were not there. My entire family was murdered six years before you arrived on our land! How could you know, Eos? How could you know?”

  The wind fell silent, letting her howl the words. Eos didn’t bow her head in shame, didn’t mumble an apology.

  Castelle’s mind was finally clear. Exhaustion peeled away, and she stared down at Eos, knowing there was nothing she could say in return. Knowing there was no response that did not disrespect the dead and wound the ever-grieving.

  Eos was bloated with lies, scorn carved into her. The truth was lost in translation, and she had only clung to the parts of the tale that served her. Castelle was right. She was right! Her mother, her family, had served Fenroe down to their last breaths, had given everything to the people of their land.

  Everything.

  Castelle’s jaw trembled. She tried to look away, but it was too late.

  Hot tears ran down her cheeks. Eos’ eyes widened and Castelle brought her hands to her face before she could see anything else shift in her expression.

  “Stop this,” was all she could murmur, shoulders heaving.

  “Princess. I warned you it would be too much.”

  “Stop it. Stop it,” Castelle said, words muffled by her palms, slick with tears. “I am not my mother. I am not my mother. I was never supposed to rule. Marigold, she was to be Queen, but the rebels, they—I am not my mother. I was not made for this.”

  Eos’ fingers brushed her shoulder, but no comfort followed. Eos lifted the bag from Castelle and took the weight upon her own back.

  “No, Princess. You are not your mother,” Eos said. “I would do well to remember that.”

  Chapter Nine

  The monotony of walking left no room in her head for thoughts. The beat of Eos’ boots in the grass and her own scraping across rocks droned on and on, and Castelle didn’t notice the sun setting until it was pitch-black around her.

  It was another cloudless night. There was only a month or two left of them, until the far-off spring. They had walked for hours on a path Eos had devised, meeting no one but sheep along the way. No words passed between them. Eos didn’t look back.

  Her guards would catch up to them, soon. The Captain would challenge Eos and take Castelle to Laister Forest, where her fathers would tell her how the world was shaped, and what she ought to think about it.

  When they finally stopped, close to a stream Castelle ached to sink her feet into, Eos made a fire and laid food out on the ground. She boiled rice and beans, and silently served it with thick slices of bread and handfuls of nuts. Everything they needed for another day of walking, walking, walking.

  Castelle’s body was fraught with tension. Now that she’d sat down, she’d never rise. The last time she’d walked so far, she’d been fleeing the castle. She’d buried that memory for a reason. Her legs and back ached, her skin was covered in sweat and dirt, but she didn’t care. Her stomach was as empty as the rest of her, and asking her to sleep was asking too much of her.

  She would’ve stared into the fire forever, had Eos’ eyes not been fixed on her.

  “What?” Castelle croaked.

  “Eat, Princess,” Eos said. “We will cover more land, tomorrow.”

  Castelle lifted the bowl. The dull smell rose up, stirring something within her. She wrapped her fingers around the spoon, supposing she wanted her hands to stop shaking at some point.

  Castelle took a mouthful. Her eyes stung as something so plain rushed through her, reminding her who she was. She tore off chunks of bread, eating so fast her chest ached, and still, Eos watched her.

  “What is it really?” she muttered.

  “You were right, Princess. I was there. The Yricians I spoke of, we…” Eos said, picking up her own bowl. “You mentioned Marigold. Your sister?”

  “Yes,” Castelle said cautiously. “My oldest sister. Marigold, Marcella, Tobias, and Edward. That was all of us.”

  Eos broke her bread in half and said, “Would you tell me about her?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know nothing of her. Because there is no wrong or right in this. There is only the sister you knew.”

  Gods.

  Castelle’s hands were shaking again.

  Useless, useless. How could her sister have left the throne behind, have left her behind? She had always been so bright and brilliant, had known how to speak with the nobility and commoners alike, yet Castelle couldn’t find words good enough for a Yrician.

  A Yrician who had been so scathing about her family.

  A Yrician she wanted to talk to, regardless of that.

  No one had asked her about Marigold since Layla had disappeared. No one had spoken of her as anything but the former heir to the throne in years.

  “She was five years older than me. Everyone said we looked so much alike—just like Ava Greyser herself. We both have her nose. Well, I have, she had,” Castelle said, tugging at the tips of her tangled hair. “She was always so focused. She was ready to be Queen from the day she could pick up a book and push herself on tiptoes to stare out of the castle windows. My father said the throne had been carved purely for her to sit upon it.

  “Do you know what I used to think? I used to think thank the gods for Marigold. She took every burden upon her shoulders so that her siblings would never have to. Not in the same way. She did so much for Fenroe in her short life, and… Her children would’ve been teenagers, by now. They were twins, they…”

  “She had children?” Eos asked.

  Castelle’s eyes shot up.

  Eos hadn’t been told everything. She didn’t know every fact about Caste
lle’s life, every branch of the Greyser tree, no matter how burnt they were.

  There was relief in that. Some things were still her family’s. Some things belonged to them alone.

  “She did. She married a Count, Lord Thomas. He was like a brother to me.”

  “She was so young,” was all Eos said.

  “Yes,” Castelle agreed. “She was so young. She was nineteen when the rebels cut her throat.”

  Eos put her bread in the grass and busied herself dusting crumbs from her lap.

  “Do you miss her, Princess?”

  It was the hardest question Eos had asked her. It was impossible to answer, because it was all right there, in everything Castelle had said, in everything she’d shared.

  “… Do you have siblings, Eos?”

  Wood cracked as it twisted with heat in the fire, golden light thrown across Eos’ face.

  “No, Princess,” she said. “I am alone.”

  Castelle wrapped her arms around her knees, rested her chin atop them. Eos’ words were lost to the rising wind, but the spaces between them, the pauses where Eos wanted to speak, hung heavy in the air.

  Out there, under the bright, distant stars, Castelle lost herself to an isolation she hadn’t been allowed to feel, within the temple walls. Eos sat there, eyes on the fire, and her scars said as much as Castelle’s silence.

  The fire dipped low. A chill settled in and Castelle pulled her cloak tighter around herself. Eos, having sacrificed her own for the fox kit, threw more wood on the fire.

  “Sleep. We have four hours,” Eos said. “We were not followed, Princess. Do not worry.”

  Eos laid on her back, fingers knitted together, hands on her ribs.

  Castelle didn’t ask Eos if she was worried she’d flee into the night, if she wasn’t going to keep watch over her.

  All that was left within her was exhaustion. Escape was as futile as following Eos, but she wouldn’t have to do the latter for hours. Sleep called to her.

  Despite all the past days had held, Castelle drifted off the moment she laid on her side and closed her eyes. A lifetime sleeping in the Kingdom’s finest beds, on mattresses as thick as tree trunks, and the ground was the only true respite she’d ever known.

  When she awoke, it was for good. Dawn had not yet broken, yet rain blanketed the land. Grey filled the sky and masked the sun, and it would be days before the showers passed. Eos had already cleared their camp, bags on her back, ashes thrown into a grove.

  Breakfast was eaten on the go. Castelle’s body ached from a lifetime confined to the temple grounds, and she protested with every heavy step, every puff of breath as they climbed the hillside.

  After an hour, Eos started looking back. Castelle grabbed handfuls of grass and pulled herself up whatever slope had caused her to stumble.

  “There are paths, you know. I can see them from here,” Castelle said, uselessly dusting her knees. “There’s nothing to trip over on them. They’re designed to be used. Look! I can see a dozen travellers from here.”

  “This is the fastest route,” Eos said.

  “Then why isn’t there a road cutting through the hillside?” Castelle asked, hands on her hips as she caught her breath.

  Eos raised her brow and continued walking twice as fast.

  “Wait!” Castelle called, hurrying after Eos.

  Any one of those travellers could’ve been sent by her father. It wouldn’t do to stand idle, surveying the land, the fishing villages dotted along the coast, the hamlets and villages built into the hills with their turf-topped roofs.

  Half a dozen miles and almost as many stops in, signs began to sprout from the ground. They had been there for a decade or longer, weather-worn and wrapped in ivy, but there was only one word for travellers to take in.

  SPIRITS !

  Eos stepped around the sign.

  Castelle debated between stopping dead and hurrying to her side.

  “You saw that, didn’t you?” Castelle called. “That is, you can read Fenronian, can’t you?”

  “They are only spirits. They will not harm us.”

  “Yes, absolutely. That’s why there are a dozen warning signs littered across the hillside, no other travellers for miles around, and a thousand terrifying bedtime stories about spirits.”

  Nothing appeared out of place. The hill was vast and not as steep as some she’d scaled that day, and fragile flowers fought for their place amongst the long grass. Rocks jutted from the ground, and Castelle’s surroundings grew eerie for their normalcy.

  “They will not harm us,” Eos repeated. “I have never had trouble with spirits.”

  “Is that a Yrician thing?” Castelle asked, not daring to fall a step behind her.

  “A Yrician thing?”

  “Because you are so—connected to the world. Nature. Whatever it is. Is that why the spirits supposedly do not trouble you. Some part of your religion, or…?”

  The corner of Eos’ mouth twitched.

  Not a smile. It was too sour for that.

  “I am glad you know so much of the Yricians,” Eos said, bowing. “My people are connected to the land as all things are, living and not-so. The only difference is that we respect that fact. But it is not a Yrician thing, Princess. I can only speak for myself, and the spirits have never troubled me.”

  In the north of Caelfal, dozens of miles from the capital, a bay had been infested with spirits. Queen Marcella had devoted years of her life to clearing it. Scholars had been paid to study the most obscure religious texts and records for a solution, soldiers had been sent in, but the bright blue light continued to ripple across the shore, tearing through any who intruded.

  Part of Torshval itself, the bones of the old city, were plagued by spirits, too. There were reports of the same all over Fenroe. All over the world. From the dawn of time, humans had railed against death, and plenty had been so stubborn that their spirits entwined with the earth, unable or unwilling to return to The Embracer.

  “I’m glad they don’t care for… don’t care for… for…”

  The bright blue of the sky, lost to the clouds, had fallen to the ground. It wasn’t light in any form that felt familiar: it glowed, but was not fluid like fire. It did not burn to stare at, did not incinerate that which fell into its path. It was mismatched shapes bound together by itself, rising and falling in jagged motions.

  Castelle’s head ached to look at it, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away.

  The spirits looked so different, in Laister Forest, bundled between the dark of the trees.

  Eos held out a hand, guiding Castelle around the spirit’s – spirits’? – path, slow and silent. Castelle’s feet followed, but she lost all sense of time and movement.

  The spirit was gigantic, the size of the blue whales Castelle’s parents had taken her to see, so long ago. It fell to the ground, moving through the grass and dirt as it had the air, surfacing in places, arching up towards the sky.

  How had it taken her so long to notice them? They were everywhere, great and small, twisting in the long grass, following a path they may have been on for a hundred years or more. Her breathing grew shallow, and as she followed Eos past the bulk of the spirits, she understood that they were bound there, trapped in temples of their own; they were stuck in this world by their own doing, or something worse.

  “Eos,” Castelle asked, thinking it right to whisper. “Were there really spirits in the forest?”

  The blue lights she’d seen between the trees could’ve been made by distant lanterns, there to trick her.

  “There were,” Eos said, and Castelle’s heart leapt. It wasn’t all lies. Of course it wasn’t. “They did not like to be seen. They hid in the trees, whispering to the dogs through their leaves. Perhaps that is how they died.”

  A spirit swam through the grass like a gigantic snake, coming within feet of them. Castelle lifted a hand, but overcame the urge to grab the back of Eos’ shirt.

  “Pardon?”

  “Hiding. I believe they died h
iding, Princess,” Eos said, clambering over rocks, when spirits blocked the way. “There is no record of it, but Laister Temple was home to hundreds, and suddenly it was not. Something terrible happened a long, long time ago, and the spirits are still cowering.”

  Spirits didn’t cower. Spirits sealed themselves in swords and blades, whispered to the living, and possessed those foolish enough to make contact with them. Spirits were not afraid. Spirits had outwitted the gods, had overcome death, and this was their reward: a hillside they could not escape, a forest that ensnared them.

  “Then—then my fathers were right. The spirits protect me. That’s how we were safe, all those years.”

  “That is half-true, Princess,” Eos said. “Your fathers used villagers to discern which paths were safe to walk, and which weren’t. The spirits did not spread through the entirety of the forest. Those attempting to breach the forest didn’t employ such methods, and along with the dogs and guards, mistook the spirits’ territory for traps of your father’s making.”

  “Put it how you please. The spirits protected me for twelve years,” Castelle muttered.

  “Why would they do that, Princess? Why protect a human?”

  “Because they believe in me. Because they sensed what happened to me, to my family, and knew it was wrong. Knew it was vile,” Castelle said. “Our family has always been tied to the spirits. Without Brackish, we are nothing. Brackish is wielded by us, and so becomes something incredible, proof of our divine right to—”

  Eos paused, holding out a hand. Her eyes darted left and right, and her brow furrowed as if straining to hear something. She swung one of the bags from her back and placed a hand upon it, breathing deeply.

  “What is it?” Castelle asked.

  Her gaze shot straight through the spirits, in search of assassins and those who’d drag her back to Laister.

  “Nothing, Princess,” Eos said, shaking her head. “We have been walking for a long time. Look. The spirits’ land ends soon.”

  There were signs ahead, facing the opposite way. Castelle hurried up the hillside, glanced back to read the warning, and fell onto the grass. Her hands weren’t shaking, and it wasn’t right.