by B J Hanlon
He said nothing, Edin just leapt into the bath. He felt warmth… then heat. Too much heat.
It was hot… too hot. He yelped and jumped back out of the tub. His feet slipped on the slick stone and he slammed into the floor, his naked body slapping the tile like a towel whipping. Pain flared in his hip bone…
“Oh my god, Edin,” Arianne said suddenly moving toward him.
He covered… himself with his hand. “I’m fine,” he said quickly. He knew his face was turning as red burnt as the rest of his body felt.
She stopped halfway between him and the door and put her hands over her eyes as he reached for a white towel. It held the king’s sigil. Edin threw it around his was and he could feel the crown against his manhood. It felt wrong.
“Um… sorry.” She stood in the middle of the wash room in a comfortable looking robe and fur slippers. “I forgot to tell you, it comes out very hot. The knob next to that is the cold.” Despite the look of pampered royalty, standing in the middle of the wash room, Arianne was clearly uncomfortable.
He stood and wrapped the towel around his waist. “You can open your eyes.”
When she did, he saw her look toward his groin and back to his face. This was too much like the dreams he had of running naked through the village green.
“Haven’t you heard of knocking?”
She glared at him. “I was trying to be nice and bring you some cold white wine. It’s on the bureau,” she said before turning around and nearly running from the room.
After fiddling with the knobs, he was able to settle into the bath with the wine. He relaxed and felt comfortable for the first time in months.
Edin laid there until his skin was completely wrinkled and only at the very end did he scrub himself clean with a lamb’s wool brush and liquid soap, something he’d never seen before.
Edin scrubbed his undertrousers in the bath to try and get them at least a little clean. There was no way he was wearing another man’s despite the regal selection.
With a full glass of the chilled wine, Edin left the wash room and knocked softly on her closed door. “Arianne?” There wasn’t an answer and he wasn’t about to walk in. He sighed and stared down the hall.
Inside the small antechamber before his room, Edin decided to look around. He reached for a drawer and tried to open it. He tugged the handle, a metal half-oval, but it didn’t move. He tried again, tugging harder, his muscles straining but it wouldn’t budge. There was no keyhole in that one or in any of them.
All the drawers were the same. It must’ve been some sort of spell or magical lock. After searching through the book shelves, he grabbed a few books that seemed interesting and he could actually read. Others were written in a language he couldn’t understand. Ulstapish, or highborn he assumed.
The day was beautiful, if he was at home there’d be no way to keep him inside. Despite Master Horston’s protests, they’d take their studies to the outside near the small garden his mother kept or by the river beneath the large willow whose leaves drooped nearly to the ground.
He took a large tome and moved to the courtyard and perched on a stone bench. The title was The Art of Magi – A History of the Rise of the Gift.
Gift, that was a much nicer word than what the current populous called it, a disease, taint, sickness, or any number of other painful words he’d used in the past.
The gift seemed to appear first in the west, before Porinstol became a desert. A single man was born first. Then others until there was a small cabal of people were able to seemingly control the elements. It was a time of terror before a real civilization. Monstrous beasts reigned during that time. Dragons and wyverns brought terror from the skies, while giants as well as giant serpents and spiders, and the demonic dematians controlled the earth. ‘The crillio beast is the only terror to still live.’
But he knew that wasn’t true. He’d heard of dematians but the drawings on the thick pages were black. Pure black and their jagged needle-like teeth protruded terrifyingly. Their clawed hands and feet, almost human, but closer to elves.
The cousins were dematians… and they lived.
They were not destroyed as this history stated and they hadn’t abandoned the land as the she-elf had said. Where had they gone then?
The sun was warm on his neck, and he felt sweat dripping to the page, though he made no effort to stop it.
Arianne appeared next to him. He hadn’t noticed her approach.
Unconsciously, Edin crossed his legs and heard a soft snort. He glanced up and saw she wore a sky-blue sleeveless dress that covered her from her shoulders to knee-high boots. Her long golden hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She had holes in her earlobes but wore no earrings.
“You really want to read that? It’s boring and tedious,” Arianne said, an eyebrow raised.
“We don’t have anything like this… maybe anywhere in the world.”
“How’s that possible? It’s in every library on the continent. My ancestors saw to that.”
Edin closed the book and looked at her sparkling eyes. “The purges took care of not just magi, but anything with a reference to them, statues, art, books… even songs weren’t spared. Any bard singing of the old world was said to have their tongue torn from their mouth.”
“The purges?”
Edin swallowed a drink of the wine. “People like us… we were targeted by the mage hunters… the Por Fen monks.”
“God sent?” she queried.
Edin raised an eyebrow.
“That’s what Por Fen means in highborn.”
Edin raised an eyebrow. “Oh… after the fall of the kingdom,” some said empire but he wouldn’t use that… it sounded too evil. “The Por Fen rounded up the magi and their creations and slaughtered or destroyed them. Hence The Purges.”
She was quiet for a moment, her gaze looking somewhere beyond him. “That’s so horrible… evil to murder humans because of their gift. And what of the books and art… it’s so short sighted. Who’d be so foolish to destroy history. Tear down statues… its destroying truth. Every book I read growing up had some knowledge or reference to the gift. To lose everything…”
“The destruction of history is a way to be sure you’ll repeat it,” Edin stated. “Something my old tutor used to say.” Edin ran his finger over the embossed yellow lettering of the title. He wondered… could the talent rise again? The stories he’d grown up with told of horrific atrocities committed by the ancient magi… by Arianne’s father.
“The artistry of the great sculptors… wisdom of the great thinkers like Solic or Heilis.”
Edin didn’t know the names and it must’ve shown on his face.
“They were philosophers approximately two… three-thousand years ago. Solic believed in a connection between man and nature, while Heilis studied human interaction. They had some great debates that were recorded before kings and commoners. Witty too, especially Heilis. I can get you a couple of books if you’d like to read them.”
He glanced at the large tome, then back to her. “I don’t think I’ll have time... I have to leave.”
The corners of her lips dropped and she stared into the distance. “I understand. You have a life outside these walls.”
He didn’t answer, he couldn’t. There was no life outside here waiting for him. Only persecution.
Was this place safer than the Isle? It had been for a millennium. He wasn’t sure how long the food would last, and the ale...
If there was a spell that preserved it, maybe there’d be one to have it replenish itself. A life in this mountain palace would be peaceful, maybe even pleasant.
With a woman like Arianne, it was possible, though he wasn’t sure how he felt about the thousand-year old princess yet. Rude, powerful and angry yet… scared and vulnerable. A few clouds were beginning to move in from the east and Arianne stood.
“It’ll storm soon, and I don’t wish to be out here when it does.”
Edin stood with her, he had to say something. There was a s
adness lurking behind her eyes as he basically told her he’d abandon her. Seeing that sorrow made his stomach twist.
“In my house, when a guest visits, my mother would give them a tour,” Edin said. “Would you be willing…”
“It shall be done.” She smiled slightly and held out her arm. Edin looped his around hers as he’d seen men do with their ladies in the town square.
“You’ve seen the upper level. The lower is the kitchen, storage, and servants’ quarters,” she said when they came in from the courtyard. “It isn’t a large palace. Guests are very rare, only top advisors, palace guards, and personal servants ever stay here. My ancestors loved their privacy.” They were at the stairs, the ones going up and down and she was staring into the darkness below. He could feel the hesitation in her movements as she stepped toward it.
“Can you do that ball light thing?” Arianne said.
Edin barely had to think about it. He held out a hand and the ball of white light appeared just in front of them.
“There are gas lights, down below.” The freshness of the mountain air began to slowly disappear as they began their decent into the bowels of the building.
“It seems… different down here,” Edin commented.
Arianne nodded. The staircase stopped at another landing with an open passage and more stairs delving deeper into the mountain.
“This is part of the far peak, not the stairwell that you entered from.” Her words were rapid and trembled slightly.
“Are you alright?”
“I do not like coming down here alone.” She pulled him over to a metal bar sticking out of the wall. She pressed it down and Edin heard a whoosh of air. A moment later a flicker of blue light erupted followed by a flame as sconces lit up on the wall. The long hallway turned golden in the flame. On either side there were doors that led into dark rooms. It was musty but through it, he caught a whiff of something else. A lavender flowery perfume coming from Arianne.
“This stone is older than the ones up top. I don’t know what this place was before my ancestors claimed it… but it is old, maybe even from before the beginning. Some say it holds an energy and that is what gives the lower levels this… feeling. Some say that memories of past events, past occupants, live in the stone.”
Edin felt the hair on his neck stand. It reminded him of the ruins where he killed the crillio. Arianne’s steps were slow, almost hesitant. She moved slightly closer to him, her bare shoulder brushing his.
“Down here is a library,” she motioned to a door to one side, “that is the war room… we have a dining hall here as well, though few meals are ever taken in there.”
She opened the library’s door. Somehow, it seemed that the flames knew where they were going as sconces began to light up one by one around a huge circular room. Soon it was aglow with flames and on the floor before him were five long bookcases.
The lights then went up wide staircases that abutted the walls to a balcony surrounding them; more books lined the shelves up there. Small alcoves sat around the walls with desks or reading chairs. On one of them, only a few feet off to the right, he saw parchment, a pen, and a stack of books.
“Almost fifty thousand books in all,” Arianne said drawing his attention back to her. “My ancestors made attempts to collect every book ever written, we had about half here and the other half in the palace.”
Suddenly, two large golden chandeliers about ten yards above them lit up with hundreds of small flames in glass balls. The room became much brighter but the flames weren’t normal, they had blues, yellows, and whites. The ceiling transformed into what looked like the sky. Off to the side, he could see a patch of clouds that looked familiar.
“It changes to reflect the sky. At night, you can see the stars and constellations.” She nudged him out of the tiny trance he was in. A grin was on her face.
“I’ve never seen anything like it… I was always told magi were destructive, not that they could make something so…”
“Beautiful,” Arianne said finishing his sentence.
Edin nodded and felt her squeeze his arm against her body.
“Come on,” she said after a few moments and they turned around to leave and he saw the lights already beginning to fade. “This is the war room, though my father rarely used it. He and my mother didn’t join me in the end.”
Edin glanced at her as she wiped her eye. He reached out and tried to squeeze her hand.
She pulled it away as if she just touched a mouse.
Inside, the room had a large table with a map of the entire continent. On the walls were others, one of the southern islands and one of a different land altogether called Seoreh.
“What’s Seoreh?”
“It’s mythical… not real.”
“Then why is there a map of it?”
Arianne shrugged.
They left and went to the dining hall. It was long but narrow. “Enough seats for thirty people, though I doubt there’s ever been more than ten at the table.”
A banner with the king’s coat-of-arms hung against the far wall, more chandeliers projected the overhead sky on the ceiling. “And we have the best wines in the world through that door.”
She took him into a large room at the back. It held racks of black and green bottles that rose from the floor to the ceiling. A couple of casks reached his chin and had spigots twice the size of his hand. There was more than enough wine for hundreds, if not thousands of people.
“How do you expect to drink all of this?”
“We do not… we did not,” Arianne said correcting herself. The smile on her face faltered. She looked away as her empty hand rushed toward her face.
He had to change the subject, do something to get her mind off the world that disappeared as she slept. He peered at the bottles. Words were written but again he couldn’t understand.
“What do the bottles say?”
“The vintage and type of wine, written in Ulstapish not Borsi… which is what we are speaking. The commoner’s tongue. Borsi isn’t my first language but I am proficient.”
“You sound better than proficient,” Edin said with a smile. “I know native speakers back home who seem to speak a whole different language.”
On a large shelf to his left was a huge selection of glasses, carafes, decanters, and jugs. Edin picked up a pair of long-stem glasses and glanced at her. “Which would you prefer?”
“The Yaultan port,” she tapped a black bottle slightly above his head.
“Yaultan?” Edin said tilting his head as he grabbed it, “I don’t know of any vineyards there.”
“Well there used to be.”
Edin took a few moments to open the bottle. It popped and he began to pour the red wine into his glass.
“You should let it breath a bit,” she sighed. “Commoners.”
Edin flushed.
“This is a red, one of my favorites, though my father doesn’t… didn’t let me drink much because of my age.”
He handed her a glass and wondered if one of his ancestors was around when this was made. He was unsure how far back his mother’s family had lived in Yaultan. How many generations would it be? There were so many forests and farmer’s fields. And the people, few seemed smart enough to make wine… He stared into the red liquid as if it were a window back to his village.
“Is the aroma not to your liking?” Arianne asked. “I like the more fruit smelling wines.
“Yaultan is…” he paused, “was my home. Let’s keep going.”
“As long as you grab that,” she said nodding to the bottle.
They walked back down the corridor toward the stairwell. “Stairs to the armory, barracks for the king’s guard, and the dungeon. I’d rather not go down there.”
“You have a dungeon and left me in a storage room?”
“You are too heavy to carry.”
“You’re a wind mage. Couldn’t you have just used your talent?”
“I don’t have the stamina I used to. It takes training a
nd I’m out of it… Besides, until you woke up, you weren’t a threat. Though I should’ve tied you tighter.” She took a drink of her wine. “I still don’t know how you got out of your bindings.”
“Magic,” Edin said flatly.
She laughed misting wine on him.
Edin smiled, wiped his eyes and looked at her. She was covering her mouth with her hand but he could see the grin beyond her attempt at hiding it.
“Apologies.” She said and burst into another laugh and Edin followed.
Her smile, her laugh was contagious. He remembered the stories said she was cruel and mean and her beauty was a weapon her father used to destroy men. He didn’t see that at all.
Edin lifted the front of his tunic and wiped his face. He saw her glance at his torso and quickly avert her eyes.
“Okay, so is that the end of the tour?”
“There are the towers… the relay I haven’t been able to get it to work.”
“Relay?”
“Mage relay, it is to send messages between locations. I’ve tried to reach anyone… but either they’re destroyed or no one is listening.”
“You said a hawk carried a message, why use the animal if you can just talk?”
“It’s complicated…” Edin didn’t reply. “Well, it takes a lot of power to construct a relay and you don’t talk, you jump in. Or your consciousness jumps in. It is very complicated and sometimes dangerous.”
“Tell me,” Edin said. He was quite curious. If they had communications that could be sent over vast distances instantly… that would be amazing.
“Well, I’ve never actually used one but supposedly you and the person you are talking with can be projected anywhere, on a mountain, under the sea or in the clouds. You are there, but you are not. You understand?”
He didn’t really, but he nodded anyways. They went up the stairs to the residences. “There’s a relay above the east tower.”
Edin glanced out of the window. The storm was much closer and it looked like it’d swallow the mountain in a matter of hours.
“I believe that’s enough for the day,” Arianne said. “I’m tired and you need a new shirt.” Her eyes once again reached his torso. He knew his muscles had grown and women liked that sort of thing… But he didn’t know they could make a princess blush.