Elk riders omnibus, p.98
Elk Riders--Omnibus, page 98
He tried to remember the other details: the loaf-shaped stones of the hut, the thatch roof, the pen for animals, the racks of drying fish, the bright green grass growing at the edge of the path. Gulls wheeled in the breeze and terns nestled in the eaves of the huts they passed. A woman’s hand closed the shutter in a window.
The ship was larger than any fishing skiff Nathan had ever seen before. Previously he had not been allowed on boats, even though he watched his father and other men of the village sail out each morning for the early catch, too many times to count. This boat had high sides and a wide, flat floor like a house, uninterrupted by thwarts. Fierce-looking men stood by awaiting orders that came from the visitor himself, who barked them out over his shoulder as he walked back to his cabin. The chief put Nathan down on the deck, said a blessing over him, then scrambled for the gangway, his head held low.
Nathan did not like to remember what followed. Days of crying, weeping, calling out for his parents, asking when he would return home. This sadness accompanied by a seasickness that reduced him to a soiled mess on the boards of the deck. The sailors mostly ignored him. He was only quiet when he was too weak from hunger and thirst to continue. It was then that the visitor reemerged from his cabin, knelt down beside him, and offered him a cup of water and biscuits. Nathan took them without thanks and while he ate, the man, his face visible for the first time, stared at him with deep-set, pale eyes and said in a firm voice, “From now on, your name is Gregor.”
This man had given him food and water. This man was the only person he knew on the boat. He—Gregor, not Nathan—decided not to argue. But he did muster the temerity to ask, “What do I call you?”
“You, Gregor, will call me, ‘Master’.”
Chapter 2
Karrith
Haille thought he had left the demons behind in Sidon, where the bodiless shadows had tormented him and his friends. But now he knew better. Now he knew his inner turmoil could be as much a beast as a wolf in a cage or an undead shadow in a haunted forest.
So he ran. Otherwise he would sit in darkness, his own thoughts torture to him. He yearned for oblivion and only in the exhaustion of running through streets in the small hours of the night could he find it. In daylight he shut himself away behind locked doors, drawn curtains, and clenched eyelids. Even in that darkness there was no comfort from the endless images replaying themselves in his dreams.
His father wounded, coughing up blood so that drops caught on his lips and chin, like an old man dribbling some heinous meal down his face.
But his father was not yet old and what a catastrophe to die before then, to die at all. King Talamar’s once bright eyes mere shadows, the color draining from his face, and his breath smelling of copper, a smell Haille could only associate with a butchery. And then his father’s last words:
“Airre’soleigh.”
King Talamar’s wife. Antas’ queen. Karrith’s own daughter.
Haille’s own mother, whom he took after so much in appearance that strangers who had never met him knew him to be the prince. After so many leagues, fields, forests, and seas, his father never saw him. Instead Talamar spoke to a phantom of his own sorrow.
In the end Haille had failed. The prophecy from the old woman, Lorna—that his father was in mortal danger—was no prophecy but rather fate. There was no changing it.
Haille had been doomed to fail.
And so he ran. He ran so that his muscles burned like acid in a chemist’s crucible, his lungs drank fire, and his skin wept salted rivers. The Karrithians left him alone in those first long winter nights after the battle for their city was over. There were so many madmen and madwomen who wandered the streets at odd hours alongside orphaned children, all of them too traumatized by nightmares to sleep.
The smell of funeral pyres still hung in their air, an acrid replacement for the foul odor of the bodies that rotted, Anthorian, Karrithian, Maurvant, not to mention the horses that had borne men of both sides into battle.
Haille ran. He pictured the bones of his frame coming loose from his body, continuing ahead of him: a fleeting figure of death. Could he outrun his own life, his own identity? His feet pounded out a dirge, at a furious pace but a dirge nonetheless, one that all the other lonely souls of the night understood. Could he outrun his grief, his loss, his failure? On two occasions the exertions caused him to seize and, for once, he welcomed the unconsciousness, the relief from his own thoughts, and the dreamless sleep that followed as he lay undisturbed in the street, taken for just another drunk.
Nights passed. Haille ran. One evening a cat pranced out of his way, startled by his oncoming footfalls. The cat stuck out in his mind because he had seen so few cats in the days before, so many had been killed and eaten in the city which had been bursting at the seams with refugees. Gutters overflowed with filth and excrement. On the first few nights Haille had not known the streets and had fallen into those same gutters and returned to his bed chambers smelling of filth.
He had not bothered to wash since, the stench still clinging to him, but cleanliness was for day dwellers . . . those people who still celebrated the victory, those people within whom hope had rekindled, those people who had set about rebuilding, rehabilitating, refurbishing. Those people included his friends. How could he explain to them that he felt as if he stared at them from across a river, some tributary demarking the living and the dead, and he was a mistake—in the land of the living but no longer willing or able to endure.
Sadness. Failure. Loss.
His eyes blurred with tears, the torchlights on the walls of the city turned into halos of orange. Fire had saved the castle, or so they said, the Karrithians turning the flaming rampart against the invaders, an avalanche of heat and smoking debris that had turned the tide of battle.
His father had done the same at the city gates, serving as the decisive force, the inspiring leader at the time when he was needed most. Haille ran past the portcullis now and heard the voices of soldiers. He could smell the scent of their pipe weed as they smoked to pass the time. He turned up the wide boulevard, the sky behind him lightening. Haille hated these open spaces. He wished to disappear in the maze of side streets where he could slip behind corners, avoiding the gaze of onlookers. His strength was failing, his throat raw as he turned into a narrow alleyway and splashed through muck. A cock crowed. Morning was not far and neither was exhaustion and the relief of sleep.
Haille came to the manor house that had been granted to him and his friends to stay in after the battle. The sentries knew his habits by now and offered no salutation as he passed through the front gate into the courtyard. He heard the horses stirring in the stables, huffing and stamping in the cold. He imagined wings of breath spreading from their nostrils.
He had to hurry to avoid seeing his friends awake. He slipped off his shoes, his pulse still pounding in his head, stole up the stairs, passing closed doors before coming to his own, opened it quickly and collapsed on the other side, the curtains already drawn, a chest of drawers standing by, ready to be pulled across the doorway.
The first few days they had knocked and called to him, Val, Katlyn, Chloe, Cody, Gunther. But nothing and no one would draw him out. He had let the voices merge with the visions of the battlefield he still saw in his nightmares, where he experienced his father’s death over again, the blood on his hands reminiscent of the blood already there from the death of his mother. He was complicit in that death as well, his own birth, his own life, the cause of her demise. So it was with his father, too. Had he not ridden a beast of the same breed that had killed the king, an elk of unknown origin? Together, he and Adamantus had been a force, a thunderbolt renting the Maurvant lines apart. Haille and the elk had beaten a course straight for his father’s banners. But, lo, what waited there but three more beasts, these dark and twisted cousins of Adamantus, but elk nonetheless, who had rammed the points of their antlers into his father’s broken body.
He had failed. Not only that, Haille was guilty. To what extent he was not sure, but perhaps it did not matter. Adamantus had fled with the Maurvant, what more obvious sign was there of the elk’s own guilt? Now Haille felt his own life was forfeit. What would the world care if he died at sixteen or eighty-six? Perhaps justice would call for his death sooner rather than later. Perhaps then all would be righted with the world.
So when the banging grew so loud that it woke him, and the Karrithian soldiers stormed in and opened the curtains, the unwelcome light burning his eyes and reflecting off their drawn blades and polished armor, he did not resist.
“In the name of King Oean of Karrith, we place you under arrest,” their captain said.
Val, Chloe, Cody, and even Katlyn had followed them in, the concern on their faces obvious, Katlyn’s eye gleaming with tears to see how thin Haille had become over these days of self-imposed isolation.
“On what charges,” Val said, moving between Haille and the captain.
“Regicide,” the captain answered.
Haille, surprisingly, felt no reaction whatsoever, even if his friends appeared confounded. Chloe and Cody’s hands moved towards their swords. He had learned to read them well over the past weeks and knew they were ready for a fight. But he wanted no more bloodshed. He got up from his bed, slipped on the trousers that were sizes too big for him, and offered his wrists to the nearest solider who clamped shackles around them.
At least the dungeon would offer some darkness.
Chapter 3
Trial
The court chamber was a pit: a circular amphitheater in the bowels of the castle, it was deeper than it was wide, with rows of seating, one row teetering just above the next. This carried the sound of the proceedings, but more strikingly resulted in the accused appearing to sink into a hole while rows of eyes looked down in judgment.
The judge, waiting on a dais, was none other than King Oean himself. He was hoary with age, his long hair and beard gone white and clasped in tarnished brass bands. His skin was red, his eyes rheumy and opaque. The years had bent his spine so that he sat hunched, glowering out under bushy eyebrows. He wore no crown except for a silver circlet. A blue stone set in a necklace rested against his chest, its brightness was a contrast to his snowy beard, and it peered out like an unblinking, watchful eye.
No wonder he had called upon Talamar for help repelling the hordes of Maurvant, Katlyn thought to herself. Old as he was, Oean could have never led a charge against the sieging forces. Otherwise, she had only heard praise for the king of Karrith. He was called wise and beneficent by his people. Talamar had looked to him like a father, so it was said, and the bond between the two men had been strong.
But for all his wisdom and alleged joy at the triumph of their forces, Oean struck Katlyn, from where she was sitting in the front row, as nervous. The muscles of his jaw flexed unceasingly, his mouth frowning as if he chewed something disagreeable to him. His fingers curled tightly around the stone hanging from his neck and his eyes darted around as if he spied thieves in the crowd.
Katlyn sat alongside Val, Chloe, Cody, Gunther, even Twenge completing the row of Haille’s comrades, all ready and willing to be called to defend him. Her eyes burned and her head hurt, for she had slept little the night before. Instead she had stayed up reading Karrithian law texts which Cody had “borrowed” from the castle library for her. Now her curiosity centered not on statutes, procedures, or addendums to laws, but rather the stone that so preoccupied the king.
“Val, where did King Oean get that stone?” Katlyn asked.
“A trophy, I heard. It was taken from one of the slain Maurvant captains. His men presented it to him after the battle.”
“He prizes it, that is for certain,” Chloe said from Val’s far side. “Look how he touches it.”
“I noticed the same,” Katlyn said. “Strange isn’t it? By all appearances he seems to be a man who does not relish adornment. He wears no rings and a simple crown, yet that stone, and its necklace are . . . opulent.”
“Ostentatious.” Chloe snorted
“As trophies of war often are,” Val said with a shrug, his voice dismissive, as if he understood the ways of kings and warriors well. Chloe opened her mouth to offer a reply, but it never came. A guard hammered the floor with the end of his poleax, calling the room to attention. In the silence that followed, Katlyn could hear the chamber doors opening. Haille’s appearance in the center of the room was preceded by his shuffling footsteps and the jangles of his chains which ran from the shackles on his feet to the irons on his wrists. Val cursed under his breath when the prince walked into view. Chloe could not help covering her mouth with her hand; with her other she took Katlyn’s hand in a firm grip and did not let go.
Haille was nearly unrecognizable. In the weeks since the battle for Karrith, since his father had died, Haille had shunned the world, including his friends and most meals. The time in the dungeon had only worsened things. His skin seemed to hang on his frame, his face was pinched, his eye sockets deep and the cheeks beneath them hollow. His hair had grown long, his complexion pale, and his shoulders hunched. He did not look up to meet their eyes. Instead his face was vacant, his gaze focused on some invisible point in the middle space between him and the dais that held Oean.
“Do you understand the charges against you: that you conspired with the enemy in the betrayal and the murder of your own father, the King?” Oean asked, his voice reedy and thin.
Haille mumbled something, his chains tinkling with his slight movement. Oean asked him to repeat himself.
“I understand,” Haille said.
Oean continued, “As witnesses have reported, you rode into battle a creature, an elk, and it was these same creatures that broke through the lines of defense around King Talamar and slew him. Is there any part of this account that you dispute?”
“No, my liege,” Haille said.
“Can you explain your association with these . . . beasts?”
Here was Haille’s moment to defend himself, to proclaim his innocence, and to dispute the interpretation of the facts against him. Katlyn rose to the edge of her seat and felt a tremor in Chloe’s hand. But Haille did not stand erect, he did not raise his voice so that it could echo through the chambers. Instead his voice was but a murmur. He shook his head, as if confused, and attempted to wipe a bead of sweat from his temple, but his chains caught and his hand stopped short. “I can only offer that the beast I knew was of a different nature . . . a different disposition from the others I saw on the field that day.”
“Yet this one you rode has gone missing, like the other three. Do you feel that this implied collusion among their masters?” Oean rubbed the stone at his neck with his thumb.
Katlyn could see Haille’s throat flutter. “I do not know if these beasts have masters,” was all he offered.
“Do you claim that your own was tame?”
Now it was Katlyn who swallowed a lump in her throat. How did one explain all that they had learned of Adamantus, the elves, the vaurgs, all the many fantastical things they had witnessed on their journey in the past months? Even in Karrith, where myths were told around campfires and with more fervor than in Antas, all Katlyn and her friends had seen would strain credulity.
Haille was at a loss. Oean leaned forward. “Are you conspiring with the Maurvant?”
The room erupted in murmurs. Val’s hand balled into a fist and Chloe drew her own arm across him to keep him from rising up from his seat. Haille lifted his head for the first time, his eyes incredulous. “No, I came to aid my father.”
“Our messengers from Antas report that in previous weeks you had disappeared. Was this in order to liaise with Maurvant spies?”
Even the Karrithian nobles and army officers gasped with surprise at this accusation. Haille looked into the stands as if to beseech the crowd for help. Val shifted in his seat again.
“Only Karrithians are allowed to testify,” Chloe reminded him. “You will not help his case and only draw suspicion to us.”
“Suspicion be damned. Someone has to say something,” Val said.
“Someone is,” Chloe said, pointing to a figure that had risen from the rows of stands across the chamber. She was a petite woman but her posture was regal, her shoulders thrown back, and her chin tilted upwards with grace befitting her station. Queen Amberlyn’s hair was silver, her face lined with age, but her eyes were bright and her footsteps swift as she came alongside Haille. Even Oean could not hide his surprise, his head tilting to the side, and his fingers falling away from the stone that hung around his neck.
“My lord, my king, and my beloved husband, I beg leniency for the Prince. By what do we judge him, much less convict him? That he brought a contingent of reinforcements to help turn the tide of battle? The enemy rode horses. Our men rode horses. Does that place them on the same side or call their loyalty into question? I think not.”
“Here, here!” Val stomped his foot. “This city would be a burning ruin without the intercession of Prince Haille!”
“Silence,” Oean barked. “I will not have foreigners speaking in my court.”
Soldiers moved from the periphery towards Val, but he showed little sign of intimidation as he took his time to return to his seat, throwing challenging glares to his left and right. Katlyn’s palm, where it rested in Chloe’s, was slick with sweat.
“This is highly unusual,” Chloe whispered.
“Oean, my lord, husband, my friend,” Amberlyn implored, stepping towards the dais, one hand to her breast, the other outstretched towards Haille. “Is this the countenance of one who would commit regicide—patricide? We do not know what these creatures, these elk, are. But could it be allowed that they possess two natures? Much as men can be good or bad, so can animals?”
Oean’s features softened as he looked upon his wife, even the beginnings of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth, his eyes brightening, as if the sight of his love cleared some of the rheumy haze that clouded them. But the reprieve was short-lived for as he leaned forward the blue stone shifted on his chest. His hand moved to settle it and as he did so, his expression turned severe once more.
