The Wildest Woods

by S. K Munt

  I also liked the fact that a lot of what I’d learned had stuck with me too, because it meant that my entire existence up to that point hadn’t been a complete and utter waste of time. Sometimes certain smells or scenes would trigger a sense-memory of sorts, but they were never related to people or places, just feelings- but my physical memory was more precise and a lot stronger. I’d read a book, and would know how it ended by the first chapter, or I’d see a house, and then know where the street led. I’d hear a song and chime in with the lyrics halfway through, or I’d pick up a bow and arrow, feel its weight in my hand, and then instinctually just know how to get the arrow into the bull’s-eye even though I could not recall ever seeing a target before. It was like my brain had been divided into two parts- one half that started a sentence and another that finished it, and I just knew that if I could get the first half to recognise the second instead of the other way around, everything that was missing- everything that I’d been doing or thinking when I’d acquired the knowledge- would come rushing back to me.

  Just like I knew that every missing thought I had must have been connected to Larkin Whittaker in some way. I’d picked favourite foods with her, I’d studied with her and I’d learned song lyrics at her side. Everything that I needed to know about myself was tethered to her, and when she’d broken my heart- and I hers- my sub-conscience must have gone into panic mode, and had scooped her right out of the centre of my head- taking the roots of my personality and therefore, my entire history, with it. And if she ever returned… God, what would that do to me? Surely I’d recognise her on sight, yes? Would I still crumple into a heap as I’d always feared I would, or had God given me two year’s worth of clean slate so I’d have the chance to forgive myself and become someone that could face her again?

  That was another thing- I didn’t know how to feel about Larkin Whittaker at all! I’d learned so much about us, but so much of it was still a mystery, so all that I did know for sure was that I wouldn’t know a moment’s peace until I’d looked into her eyes and had had the chance to decide: Was she public enemy number one… or just the product of my family’s corruption? I didn’t know but it drove me to distraction, just like the whole chicken and the egg thing did. I was fairly certain that it was the chicken, but I couldn’t remember why...

  Oh well. It would come to me soon enough.

  *

  We took the route out or Arcadia that I’d charted, and although people didn’t line up to scream ugly things at me like they had the first time I’d gone off with the Corps, they still made a point to keep their heads down, making me wonder if it was me they were hiding their faces from, or the line of reformed convicts that I was stringing along behind me. Theodore made a huge point of walking with a stupid smile on his face and a loopy gate, to keep up the pretence that he was a big, blonde, idle-minded ogre, and Jent shaved his beard as he walked with his hand knife, making him look positively lethal. The opposite was true because Jent was an aspiring poet and had been branded for having extra-marital sex- with a duchess’s male spouse whom he was now in a long-distance relationship with- but he had a flare for the dramatics and had learned early in that gay men fared a lot better in the Corps if they pretended to be straight ones. No one had ever given him a hard time about the fact that he was attracted to men because that wasn’t rare or a big deal in any way, but homosexuals were still renowned for being soft and feminine and that was what would get your ass kicked amongst the wrong crowd.

  Saul-Yin didn’t mind being seen as soft and feminine though, because they were traits that she exploited ruthlessly. One of our best party tricks was to dress her up in a gown and hurl her directly into the epicentre of any pirate brawl. The biggest, meanest, horniest guys would grab her so she wouldn’t have to give herself away by grabbing them, and she’d have them good and stabbed through the throat by the time they’d managed to get their hand on her arse or into her purse. And as far as life in the Barracks went, no one messed with Saul-Yin or our only other female guard, Paisley. Paisley was absolutely defenceless, but she had Nephilim blood in her veins and like my brother, possessed the ability to heal. Her power was nowhere near as strong as his was, but she was handy to have around when it came to things like headaches and infections, so even the most brutish guys, like Monty, Macklin and Templar, went out of their way to be nice to her- and to keep her gifts secret. She didn’t have enough Nephilim in her for it to have shown up in her blood tests, but it was definitely there, so keeping her at our side meant keeping our mouths shut.

  We were all very different from one another in the third division, but because we had a lot to prove to outsiders, we worked hard together and well. No, not all of them had volunteered to come along but as far as I was concerned, the ‘right’ ones had and so I felt fairly confident that we’d be able to keep one another safe in The Wildwoods, even if we didn’t get very far into them.

  The original plan had been to ride our horses to Rachiel, then leave them there in the stables and then go on by foot over the border, but we were still in Arcadia’s suburbs when my well thought out itinerary took an unexpected twist. I’d been trotting along, counting the rings and rings of neighbourhoods that circled out from the town square and wondering if the fact that all of the houses were absolutely identical was beautiful or creepy, when we crossed the final street, and saw something that was shocking to me- evidence of evil, right there in our Utopia.

  The houses in the city centre were taller and grander than the ones on the outskirts were, because Blue Collars were housed on the outer rim and the nobility got the more central neighbourhoods, but I’d been admiring the tidy little cottages anyway and thinking that I’d prefer them because they had larger, less shadowy yards- when I saw one that was in such a state of disrepair that it actually startled me a little. All of the houses in Arcadia had been re-painted at the start of the spring, so they had bright white walls and slate-blue-tiled roofs now, but one had been not so much overlooked as it had been overrun, because the roof was sagging, the grass in the yard was higher than my knees, and despite the fact that a massive official sign had been nailed to the front fence that read: ‘Condemned, No Trespassers By Order Of The King!’ people had obviously ignored that warning because graffiti was scrawled over every inch of it.

  Oh shit… I thought, wiping sweat off my brow that had nought to do with the heat. What’s this now?

  Some of the graffiti was downright ugly: words like Whore, Slut and Demon had been painted in bold colours on the exterior walls and even the stucco fence, but some of it simply read: ‘Liberty for all!’ or ‘Power to The Oppressed!’ or ‘The Godless are already HERE!’ and those slogans made me feel as ill as the nastier ones had, because those were some of the things that people had used to shout after me when I’d been shuffling by- those were signs that the propaganda that The Banished and The Sequestered had been circulating was still being echoed by my own people.

  Feeling my charge begin to hum inside me, I pulled up my horse near the garden gate and stared at the mournful old place before asking quietly of no one: ‘Does anyone know who lived here before it was condemned?’

  Templar was the one to come forward, and even though he was the most aggressive of us all, he clearly sensed that now was not the time to rub anything in because he said: ‘I’ve never called this city home, Guardian Barachiel, but I’ve heard it said that this was her house, once.’ He nodded towards it. ‘Her family lived in it for a while after she came to live with you, but the whole lot of them left town after the mother died. It’s been empty since because no one wanted it- they all said it was bad luck.’

  I looked at him, confused. ‘How could a house be bad luck?’

  Templar shrugged, lighting a cigarette. ‘Like I said, I don’t knows anything for sure… but people reckon the girl’s family had a rough trot, of sorts. Not only were they cursed with a third-born that turned out to be a demon, but the father was hurt bad right before she was born while working on the palace’s bridge, t
he mother was killed at the palace’s fence, and the son was escorted out of the fence once- kicked out of a ball for behaving poorly- and there were whispers that not one of ‘em liked the other anyway. Only one that did all right for herself was the eldest sister, but I heard that she’s miscarried three times since she got wed, and that she and her husband are very unhappy. On top of that, the dad died not long ago from a stroke and because the siblings were getting so much grief over their sister’s antics, the boy packed up his family and moved to Tariel, claiming refugee status that the other kingdom accepted- after he’d taken a blood test, that is.’

  I looked at him. ‘For someone who never lived here, you know an awful lot about this saga.’

  ‘He spends a lot of time with companions, and those girls love to talk,’ Saul-Yin said, sauntering up to me and leading her horse behind her. I followed her lead and dismounted, while she shielded her eyes from the sun, took a drink from her bottle of water and then said: ‘I don’t care who lived here- the fact that people that claimed to be holy would use language like that is beyond appalling.’ She glanced back at me. ‘How long do we have to stand here for? I’m getting sun-stung, dry mouth and goosebumps.’

  ‘It’s not just the house they shy away from, it’s the location.’ Templar pointed to the backyard, which was unfenced and shared a clearing behind the street with every other house. There was a fence at the very back of the clearing, but it was the electric one that encircled the entire city, and served as a barricade between Arcadia and The Wildwoods. A small child’s playground had obviously sat there once between the house to my right and the old Whittaker place, but it’s amusements had been taken out of the ground leaving an unfriendly-looking sandpit behind and one park bench- which was also covered in graffiti despite the fact that the lawn around it had been neatly manicured, as every other lawn on the street had been. ‘That part of the fence backs right onto the river, and it’s constantly damaged from Banished folks trying to get in. It’s patrolled now to be safe-’ he gestured to a small guard tower closer to town, where I could see a man watching us from a distance, ‘but this whole section of the road is considered undesirable and dangerous. The other places look as fine and dandy as the ones one block back do, but I’ll betcha good money that they’re empty too.’

  ‘You’re telling me that Arcadia has an actual slum?’ Saul-Yin asked, feigning shock as Theodore came up beside me and started crossing the park in step with me. ‘That’s preposterous!’

  I agreed, and I was sort of shocked that Karol had allowed The Whittaker place to deteriorate so, poisoning the neighbourhood around it. I didn’t think that it ought to have been bulldozed or anything, but if the Banished were on the other side of the fence and screaming to get in, then didn’t it make sense to at least try to give a few of them a roof over their heads seeing as we had empty ones that our own people turned their noses up at? I’d been out and about amongst the Banished, and I knew for a fact that some of them were decent human beings that only wanted a second chance.

  Feeling a bit sun-stung and shivery myself, I began to approach the most north-east corner of the fence where it was clearly sagging despite the obvious fact that it had been repaired numerous times, and noted that Theodore was moving just as slowly and carefully as I was, adhering himself to my side. He was so tall that he actually cast a shadow over me, and I was both grateful and nervous regarding his proximity. Theodore usually only shadowed me like that when we were in a dangerous predicament because he was always ready to serve as a human shield for the prince of Arcadia, but where was the danger here? I could see through the chain link fence and clear into The Wildwoods, so what was he sensing that I was not?

  ‘That’s odd…’ I said, pointing to the damaged part of the fence, and Theodore nodded, lifting the scarf that was attached to the side of his combat collar and draping it over his head like a hood. People made a habit of climbing over it there, no doubt, but how did they manage to do it without dying? The voltage in the fence was so intense that my own body began to hum and generate a pale blue light by the time I was within metres of it, and I noticed that Theodore’s thick mop of straggly blonde hair was begin to lift and fizz from static energy too, so how had people managed to scale it?

  But there was more to the energy there than a sense of foreboding. More to the charge in the air, than electricity. I knelt by the base of the fence and peered around as Theodore did, looking for signs that anything was amiss or that someone was watching us, but I saw nothing- just a dense thicket of Devil’s Claw straining towards us from the other side of the river. The river was little more than a stream that could probably be leapt across by long-legged and courageous types, but the current was still raging beneath between the banks so fiercely that a massive tree stump whipped past while we were standing there watching, and vanished from sight as it continued east on its way to the Tidal fall in a matter of seconds. I looked up at Theodore, who nodded to indicate that he was also impressed, and then looked back at the clearing that ran behind the houses, frowning as I tried to imagine a little Larkin Whittaker growing up there- and then when I saw Saul-Yin sidle up to Ambrose and rub his arm, whispering something that looked less than soothing, and more branding-worthy. It was almost impossible to imagine Larkin Whittaker at all because I’d heard her described in so many different ways that I couldn’t tell if she’d had golden or grey hair, or had been six feet tall or petite, or muscular or curvy… but I did get a sense of something significant in the air: of a whisper like a breathy giggle on the wind that wasn’t coming from Saul-Tin for once- just as I looked across the river and saw where it sort of broke off and trailed away through a denser thicket of trees: not just something, but a voice.

  ‘I heard that stream starts tiny and gets bigger and bigger, so those who can stand the cold long enough to follow it get to a real paradise…’

  I was so shocked by the memory of that voice- that tiny, delicate, voice, that I almost fell forward and touched the fence by accident. Theodore stood to attention, whipping out his gun and Macklin called out to see if anything was wrong while he began to jog over, but I held my hand out and shook my head, holding a finger to my lips as I tried to collect myself. I didn’t know where that voice had come from- whether it had been a memory resurfacing from my amnesia, or if it had just been something that had been said around me before I’d turned five… but it had been a real recollection, and it had electrified me.

  Someone’s found a way north before… I thought, squinting through the trees and over at that tiny little stream that had broken away from the river while Miguel, Templar and Paisley began to gravitate my way, drawing their own weapons. And someone told me about it once! We thought it was a story, but it could have been true! Karol’s sent me on this mission to keep me out of his hair and in danger, but what if I return from it not only alive, but as a conqueror? My guards and me would go from being the black sheep of the village, to its heroes! They say there’s oil up here, yes? If we could find it first… if I could stake a claim… we’d make enough money to make up for what I lost with that necklace, right? Twice that, even!

  I’d heard Amelia-Rose speak of callings, and I’d always rolled my eyes because the notion had always struck me as being self-indulgent, but dear God, I felt a calling now, and just like that, all of my plans dissolved and were replaced by a new, crazy one. I stood up, not taking my eyes off that tiny stream across from me, already feeling the muscles in my thighs coiling tightly in anticipation of taking a leap- of faith.

  ‘We’re going this way,’ I said hoarsely, and though Theodore had every reason to knock me out for suggesting that we follow a trail that had been forged by The Banished, he merely nodded, patted my shoulder and began to beckon over the others, following me blindly. Not because I was a Barachiel, but because I was Kohén, and I was incredibly grateful for that.

  I only hoped that neither of us would come to regret it.

  PART FOUR

  32.

  Libertie Ci
ty, Raphael

  Larkin Aztaroth

  May 11th, AA647

  The next week passed in a radiant blur of stolen moments, willingly given kisses and a whirl of frantic party planning and before I knew it, it was the day of Cairo’s twenty-second birthday party, and I was getting dressed in the dress of my dreams for the man of everybody’s dreams. We loved celebrating special occasions in Raphael and there was no end to the amount of parties and festivals we had a year, but I’d never anticipated one the way I’d anticipated the fairytale ball, and as a result I felt like I was shimmering from the inside out- every cell in my body alight with nervous energy.

  We had at least eight hours to go until the ball started because it was still only noon, but we only had a handful of stylists in Libertie to help everyone, so everybody was taking their time and making a day of it while helping one another. I’d already had a sleep-in and a long brunch with Cairo, Bastien, Sam and Martya, and now Cairo was having a few beers out on The Iana with his male friends and had promised to stay away from the chateau until it was time for the ball, and Martya had joked that the entire day so far had reminded her of the pre-wedding celebrations in Calliel, only with less praying and more drinking.

  ‘Sam says that everyone’s so excited that they’re all thinking extra loud and with exclamations points!’ I babbled as I held out my arms, giving my dressmaker Riesling the chance to make the final alterations on my ‘dragon’ dress, which had taken her three solid days of hard work to craft. To match me and the fairytale theme of the ball, Cairo was going as a knight. ‘I hope I don’t disappoint them! I hate the fact that it’s all been so rushed! I thought I’d have weeks to prepare, you know? But with Cairo heading off to get more of his people next week…’ my excitement dipped at the reminder that Cairo would be leaving me soon, but I took another tentative sip of my champagne, being careful not to spill it on Riesling, who was crouched by my legs and pinning the hem which was still too long for me.