Sacrament of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 3)

by Kathrin Hutson

  The last thing Kherron wanted was to press her for that answer—perhaps in so doing even push her away—and he quickly turned around again. Now was not the time to hear her story, he knew, but he resolved to pull it from her in the end. He felt as though, once she told him, some larger part of himself might also be revealed.

  With a deep breath, he looked down into the pool and tried not to lose himself in the image he did not quite recognize reflected there. Instead, he focused on what lay beneath the water’s unnaturally still, clear surface, the falling sunlight illuminating every detail. A row of four stone steps descended from the moss-lined edge of the water into its depths, stopping at a flat ledge of rock just wide enough on which to stand. After that, the floor of the pool dropped away into nothingness so deep, the light could not penetrate all of it. Kherron placed one bare foot on the first step, surprised by the whirling eddies of both refreshingly cool and comfortably warm water moving interchangeably across his skin, though the pool’s surface barely stirred at his entrance. His other foot followed, and he descended farther, acutely aware of the water rising up his calves and thighs, his hips, belly, and chest.

  When he stood on the lowest ledge, the water rose just below the tops of his shoulders. He could not decide if the swiftly alternating temperatures embracing his body were pleasant or uncomfortably jarring; it made discerning any distinct sensation nearly impossible. Wondering what came next, he glanced back at Aelis to find her sitting now in the grass, her legs crossed, watching him. She raised her brows and lifted a hand level with her neck, pushing it slowly toward the ground to indicate the need for him to submerge completely. Kherron blinked and took a slow, deep breath. Then he bent his knees and lowered himself completely underwater until the surface rose some few inches above his head.

  If he had not already been holding his breath, it would have stopped anyways. The alternating churn of warm and cold now ceased entirely, and he no longer felt any temperature at all, as if the pool had become a womb of himself. The sun falling through the cavern’s ceiling and into the still waters flashed so brilliantly through his closed lids, it seemed he would see nothing but flaring golden light if he opened his eyes. While every burden had pummeled him beyond this place—physical toil, the shame of failure, the unceasing pull of his vow to Dehlyn, the weariness of travel, the fear of being hunted by unknown enemies, even the strain of the responsibilities he never wanted and the culmination of all these things bearing down on him in the violet realm—now, he felt none of it. He did not lack existence, awareness, or emotion as he had between each of his deaths and re-awakenings within the mists; he merely was. No thought, no sound, no unbearable expectation—time itself might have even withdrawn from these waters, though instead of leaving a void, it brought only peace, neither overwhelming nor extraordinary.

  He did not know how long he crouched under the pool’s surface, though he noted how little he felt the need to breathe. And he might not have even come up from this place of safety and being had he not felt his feet being lowered once more to anchor him to the smooth stone ledge. His body straightened and rose through the pool as if the water itself moved through him and not the other way around. His head breached the surface, wet rivulets streaming down his face, over his eyes and nose and mouth, without making a sound. Then he breathed slowly and without tension, as if it were merely the next breath and he had never held it at all.

  Immediately, he found Aelis again, the hint of a smile playing beneath the intensity of her gaze, giving reverence where reverence was due in this place. She nodded slowly, then she did smile, though it was brief and crooked. Taking a deep breath, Kherron rose from the pool and walked up the stone steps, feeling relaxed and aware and very much looking forward to donning his clothes once more. When he did, though, he found them heavy, scratchy, laced with the salt of dried sweat and the unavoidable grittiness of traveling in the same thing for days. He felt Aelis watching him as he dressed, and it amused him now more than it ever would have produced a self-conscious discomfort. He did, however, take pains not to glance at his own reflection again, wishing to remember the peace of the waters instead of the remaining surprise at what the new scars had made of his body.

  When he finished, he moved slowly across the grass again and felt the earth humming in pleasure beneath his feet. The red-haired woman nodded at the ground, and Kherron sat beside her, their backs to the great, gnarled oak tree underground. For a few moments, they gazed at the pool before them, which remained in its state of pristine stillness, undisturbed, as if Kherron had never submerged himself in the first place.

  Then he found himself curious, wanting to know, not because it pained him to remain ignorant but because this place—and his present company—felt so right. This felt like the time. “Why did you bring me here?” he asked.

  Aelis snorted. “That’s a question you did not need to ask.” She blinked and gazed up at the column of sunlight spilling through the cavern’s ceiling.

  “You know what I am.” He knew it as surely as he knew his own name. Finally, after everything, he’d found one person who both understood the full extent of his abilities—and what they made him—and had proven willing to share far more of what she knew than anyone else to date.

  Turning to look at him, Aelis nodded, then swept a hand out in a wide gesture to indicate the cavern around him. “This place was made for you,” she said. “Every pool, every sacred place. All for you and those like you.” When their eyes met again, Kherron didn’t have to voice aloud the final question burning within him. “You are Blood of the Veil.”

  Kherron did not experience the requisite surprise he imagined would have overwhelmed him when he finally received that answer. “I’ve heard that name before,” he said. The fae had used it, addressing him as such before the demonic behemoth came upon him in the grey and violet mists. Despite this memory, he found himself emitting a sardonic chuckle; it seemed his ignorance was never-ending. “But I don’t know what it means.”

  Aelis nodded, focused intently on the grass beneath them before she spoke. “I... knew someone, once. A long time ago. Geyr.” She swallowed heavily. “He liked to define things. Make them tangible. He called Blood of the Veil the bridge between what we felt in our hearts and what we could touch with our own hands. The Veil being the world beyond this world, the unseen. And Blood... well, little exists that’s more tangible than that.” She blinked rapidly, as if she tried to hold back an unexpected surge of tears.

  Kherron felt himself growing suddenly envious of this Geyr character, who seemed to elicit more emotion in the red-haired woman than even the threat of her own death. But when Aelis looked up at him again, her eyes were dry.

  “Knowing what I know now,” she continued, “and having met one of the Blood before you, I know what those like you were created to do in the beginning, when the world was not so... scarred.” She tried to smile, but it crossed her face as more of an apologetic wince, and Kherron knew her choice of words had made them both think of the new additions to the landscape of his flesh. But he said nothing of it. “Immortal knowledge had always been shared with the spirits of this world, those who appeared to man and made you what you are. Blood of the Veil were meant to be teachers, delivering the wisdom we could not have gained without that bridge of your ancestry. Only the Blood can commune with those spirits, the forces of life and being across these lands. They wield the same command over such things. Earth and water, time and breath. Yet they walk this world as mortals, flesh and blood, real and one of us and... something else entirely.” She paused with a small frown. “That was before the Unclaimed came to be.”

  That ancient name for Dehlyn hung in the air between them, though Kherron wasn’t sure what it meant to him anymore. “And now?” he asked gently.

  “And now, I don’t know how things managed to shift so off-course. So few Blood of the Veil still walk. A handful, at best.” Aelis raised her brows. “But it’s not impossible to think you may be the last. I haven’t seen
one in longer than I care to admit, and I...” She put a hand to the back of her head, as if she meant to scratch an itch beneath her fiery hair but didn’t. “I’ve been away for some time, beyond the whispers. I wouldn’t know as much as the others.” Then she gave him an apologetic smile and a one-sided shrug.

  “Your people,” Kherron prompted, remembering again what Siobhas had told him, seemingly so long ago, before Kherron had set out from Zerod’s home and Hephorai. The cat-man had said Kherron could find others like him everywhere, if he needed a guide, and it seemed Kherron had stumbled upon just that. Despite the circumstances of their first meeting, he still imagined he would have preferred the woman sitting beside him over anyone else he might have encountered. Aelis nodded. “I don’t suppose you call yourselves the animal people,” Kherron added, trying to bring some levity to the weight of this conversation.

  Aelis fixed him with a puzzled frown, then let out a loud, coarse bark of laughter that echoed only a little through the cavern, muted by the grass-covered ground. “We don’t call ourselves anything,” she replied and shook her head. “We just are. But I knew a people once who called us Nateru. The Wild.”

  Yes, Kherron thought, that was a fitting name for what he knew of Aelis, at least, and the bear form she took at will. Then he wondered if it applied as aptly to every one of her kind. “Do you know Siobhas?”

  With a snort, Aelis rolled her eyes. “I did.” When Kherron raised his brows at her to continue, she only briefly looked away from him, as if she’d revealed something of her herself she’d intended to keep hidden. “Like I said, I’ve been away a long time.”

  Kherron nodded, not feeling the need in that moment to press her further as to what she meant by “away”. Instead, he said, “Siobhas told me he used to be everything, once.”

  “What is he now?” Aelis asked; that glint of feral hunger and playful danger—as though she juggled knives instead of reminiscing—settled behind her gaze once more.

  “A man and a cat,” Kherron replied simply, emboldened by the smirk those words produced on Aelis’ lips. “He said his people were everywhere. I just assumed...” He shrugged and tried not to laugh at what he realized now had been such ignorant assumptions.

  Aelis grinned when what he’d implied dawned on her. “Fortunately for both of us, I think, we are not all reduced to man and cat.” Their shared glance reflected the humor of it, and Kherron rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s true, though,” she continued. “My people once wore the skins of this world like men wear clothes. We were every creature at once and still not entirely any of them. Whatever the Unclaimed has brought upon us... so many of us have been reduced to only a handful of skins. A fraction of our whole. I imagine many of them did not get to choose the form they’ve been condemned to endure.” She said all this lightly, as if she herself were not a part of the fate meted out to her people.

  “A bear seems a fairly strong choice,” Kherron added, smiling at the memory of both his muted fear and his indecision when he’d first seen her as such.

  Aelis’ gaze snapped up to meet his, and all the humor drained from her. “It should have been.”

  Surprised by the strikingly sudden shift in her demeanor, Kherron tried to correct whatever mistake he did not know he’d made. “Is that the only other form you have?”

  Her brown eyes bored into his for a long time, as if he’d just gravely insulted her and she now fought with herself not to physically attack him. He didn’t think she would say anything until she flatly replied, “I don’t know.” A flush of color rose high on her cheekbones, and blinking furiously, Aelis glanced about at everything around them but Kherron himself. Then she stood and nodded toward the tunnel which had led them here. “We’ve been here long enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kherron said quickly, standing himself and feeling as if he’d just entered an entirely different conversation.

  “Don’t be,” she said, then moved softly over the grass toward the tunnel.

  He followed her until she stopped beside the raised lip of the tunnel to don her boots again. Doing the same, Kherron bent down to lace his own and found himself distracted again by a glint of copper upon the cavern wall just outside the tunnel. Then he took a step back, grasping the full scope of such a puzzling feat; the same copper whorls and primitive figures spread across the stone walls of this expansive underground temple, rising to impossible heights until he couldn’t make out whether or not they stretched to cover the ceiling as well. Wondering how he could have missed such an impressive, seemingly impossible display, he asked, “What are these?”

  Aelis glanced up from her boots and followed his gaze. “A history,” she said. “Of us. Of the world. Excluding you, these are all that’s left of the Blood of the Veil. They designed all of it.”

  “With what?” Kherron asked, awed by the sight of it and feeling as if, were he to unravel that final mystery, the last connection between what he’d already known of himself and what it now meant to be a Blood of the Veil would be made.

  Aelis merely glanced at him, narrowed her eyes in that same ensnaring expression of secret amusement, and stepped up into the tunnel.

  Chapter 9

  Paden had fallen asleep during their absence. The healer lay curled up beside the fire, which had now nearly died again. He either stirred or shivered—Kherron noticed immediately how cold it had become in the hollow—but he did not wake upon their return.

  When they stepped out of the tunnel’s darkness, Kherron glanced at the fire’s partially charred wood, and the flames leapt back to life with a crackle of sudden heat. He tried not look at Aelis, to pretend he hadn’t, but he’d caught the small, acknowledging tilt of her head from the corner of his eye.

  They joined their even more unlikely companion beside the fire, sitting quietly and with seemingly little more to discuss. Kherron’s stomach growled, and the sensation surprised him; for a moment in the cavern below, he’d forgotten all about the baser needs of his body. “Hungry?” he asked Aelis, still wanting to talk to her and kicking himself for having run out of anything else to say.

  She raised an eyebrow. “I think I ate enough for the next week,” she said, and if the corners of her mouth hadn’t turned up, Kherron might have thought she’d grown annoyed.

  “Right,” he said and nodded. It seemed all the self-assuredness, all the confidence and peace he’d acquired in the cavern beside the sacred pool had left him completely, as if they belonged wholly to that place and were his to use only within those walls. “I’ll have to...” He’d planned to attempt some rendition of hunting for his own food; Aelis had completely devoured what remained in his pack, and he highly doubted they’d find a tavern or an inn anywhere within the next few days of travel. The prospect hadn’t seemed particularly inviting, with an incredibly low chance of success, but he would have attempted it, at least. But now, he realized he might not have to do anything of the sort.

  A large hare had appeared just outside the hollow’s entrance, ears standing nearly upright. It stared at him with one large brown eye, its nose twitching. The thing seemed completely unalarmed to have appeared in such company, and then a second, slightly smaller hare joined it. Kherron had the strongest hunch that they were waiting for him, and before he knew it, he was silently thanking them both for their sacrifice, assuring them it would only be to sustain his own life. Only then did the animals react in a way no animal would; together, they lowered themselves to the cold ground, rolled over on their sides, and lay completely still.

  “Well that was graciously done,” Aelis said, her words ripping him from such a strange sight at the mouth of the hollow.

  Kherron turned around to meet her gaze; she’d not spoken in jest, though the hint of a small smile played at one corner of her mouth. He shrugged in response, feeling no need to express to her that he’d had no idea the animals would respond the way they had. But he knew he had been the cause of their willing obedience; there was no denying he had done this and was quite capab
le of doing it again. The surprise remained in that he still did not know the extent of what he could do. He’d never imagined that would include entreating animals to their willing deaths.

  Before he could do anything else, Aelis rose from the floor of the hollow and stepped through the entrance. She stooped briefly to grasp each hare by the ears, then hoisted them together and raised them toward Kherron in acknowledgement. “Makes ‘em taste better than you can imagine.”

  Kherron recognized with distinct clarity, as the woman returned to her seat beside the fire, that not too long ago, he would have been overwhelmed by guilt for having asked it of two creatures to quite literally lay down their lives for him. The fact that he had not consciously known the consequences of his silent communion with the creatures would have, just a few days before, brought him unending doubt and concern for what havoc he might have wreaked on other beings. He felt none of that now—perhaps a little surprise, but more than enough acceptance, and far more willingness to embrace the things he could do than he’d ever harbored before. They were hares, he was hungry, he had asked, and they had responded. It was so simple.

  When Aelis flipped the larger hare onto its side in front of her and gripped the scruff of its neck, Kherron reached for his Sky Metal blade with the intention of offering it to her. He might have provided food in his own way, but he knew next to nothing about preparing a meal from what had once been a living thing. His hand had not reached his dagger’s pommel before the red-haired woman had sliced through the hare’s skin, working deftly with nothing but her bare hands. She seemed to notice him staring at her and raised a flippant hand, at the end of which extended at least an inch of curved claws better suited for a bear. “I assume you want to cook them,” she said, looking slightly embarrassed; it might have been in response to her having revealed an odd transformation, but Kherron rather thought her confidence had snagged on the fact that she did not normally eat this way.