Bloodfire Quest (31 page)

Voices.

“She cannot be more than a young girl.”

“She wears knives strapped to her waist; she’s no stranger to combat. Look, there is blood on her clothing.”

“But she only sleeps. She’s not dead, is she?”

Hands probe. Fingers explore.

“She is injured. Perhaps she dies.”

“We should help her, Sora.”

“We help ourselves, not strangers. You know that. You speak like a child. What have I told you?”

The voices faded. Arling waited, but weariness overcame her and she slept anew. This time there were no dreams. When she woke again, the darkness and the lethargy were still there.

And the voices were back.

“She should not be left alone.”

“Others have been here with her. Not that long ago. They will return for her soon enough. We should be gone when they do.”

“We cannot know if they will return or not, can we? Those who were with her may have abandoned her. They may think her dead. Or even wish her so.”

“There is nothing to suggest that any of that is true.”

“Why was she left alone, then? Why does she lie here untended? If they are family or friends, why would they go off and leave her even for a moment’s time?”

“This isn’t our business!”

“Helping others is everyone’s business. You sound so cruel when you say such things! Where is your compassion?”

“I have enough trouble looking after you and me! Stop arguing about this. You know we can’t become involved!”

A long silence. This time she did manage to open her eyes, if only a little, seeing loose pants tucked in work boots on one, ragged skirt hanging over worn, scuffed half boots on the other.

Her eyes closed again.

“Well, I won’t let you leave her like this. We found her, and now she is our responsibility. She should be taken to where she will be looked after. This crash was not her fault. Her injuries were not her doing.”

Arling tried to speak then, but the words would not come. Instead, she could only manage a low groan, one that sounded frightened and painful even to her.

“There, you see? She needs us! She is begging for our help!”

“She said nothing; she made a sound, and it could signify anything.”

Help me,
Arling thought, suddenly afraid that she would be left alone again—that even as her sister and her mother had left her, so, too, would these unknowns who hovered over her. She did not want that to happen. She did not think she could stand to be left alone again.

Hands touched her once more, this time resting gently across her forehead for long moments before moving away.

“She has a fever. She needs medicine and rest. Leave her here and you are killing her. Deliberately.”

“Her companions will look after her.”

“What companions? Do you see any? Besides, if they were any sort of companions at all, they would be looking after her now.”

“And if you are wrong about them, and if they come looking for her and find her missing? Then what? They will come looking for us! That might not be so welcome as you seem to think.”

“You always expect the worst. Try looking at it a different way. What if we save her life?”

“You ignore reality when you talk that way. You act as if you lack knowledge of the world.”

“I would rather it be my way than yours.”

A pause. “It doesn’t matter what you say. We should not involve ourselves. What would you have us do, anyway? I won’t stay here and risk being caught.”

“No, I don’t suppose so. Something else, then.”

“There is nothing else!”

“Don’t just dismiss me like that. Think of something!”

Arling drifted away again, riding the crest of her lethargy and weariness, returning to darkness and silence. Nothing disturbed her journey. She was buoyed by a deep sense of peacefulness, wrapped in a promise of safety and well-being. She could not determine its source, could not decide from whence it came. But it bore her on through time and held her with the firm gentleness of her mother’s arms and she gave herself over to it.

When Aphenglow Elessedil woke, not knowing how long she had slept, her first thought was of Arling. She had left her to come to Cymrian, but she had not intended to leave her sister this long. She had not intended to fall asleep. Anything could have happened to Arling in the interim, and it would all be her fault for abandoning her.

Cymrian was looking at her. “I think I might live,” he said, with a shaky grin.

She blinked and yawned. “I think you might. How badly do you hurt?”

“Hardly at all. Whatever you did, it took away the pain.” His quirky smile surfaced. “You saved me.”

She blushed in spite of herself, shaking her head. “Not yet, I haven’t. I can still do a little more. I can make you stronger so you can travel.” She sat up. “Here. Give me your hands.”

He did so, and, conjuring the magic that was needed, she sent an infusion of strength washing through his body, careful not to overdo it, to keep it moderate and controlled so that it would not disrupt the healing that was already under way. When she finished, she looked at him for approval, one eyebrow lifting quizzically.

“Better,” he agreed. “Much better. I can feel the difference. Amazing. I should be bedridden for weeks, but I think I can even walk.”

“You’ll have to. I can’t carry you.”

“No, I wouldn’t expect that.”

She stood up. “I’m sorry, but there’s no more time. We have to hurry.”

“Arling?”

“Sleeping when I came to find you. I found the problem and fixed it. But she’s very weak.”

He sat up gingerly and flexed his shoulders. “We’ll do whatever we have to for Arling. At least we won’t have to worry about being hunted. Not right away, anyhow.” He nodded toward the bodies surrounding them. “There’s one more farther back—another mutant. Ugly things. Men, once, but something much less now.”

“Who made these creatures?” she said. “That woman, Edinja Orle?”

“It’s possible.” He climbed to his feet, testing his weight, looking down at himself as if to make certain he was all in one piece. “I know her. A witch. A member of a powerful Federation family, most of them practitioners of magic. She was one of the candidates for the position of Prime Minister of the Federation Coalition Council when Drust Chazhul got selected as a compromise choice.”

She gave him a look. “How do you know this?”

“I keep up on what’s happening in the camps of our enemies. I’m surprised you don’t.”

She shook her head. “I’ve had no time for keeping up. I’ve spent almost a year shut away in a cellar looking at ancient documents. I’ve lost touch with a lot of things.” She paused. “Things I should have been paying better attention to.”

She placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him on the mouth. When she drew back, she kept her eyes fixed on his. “But I might want to think about changing all that.”

Without waiting for his reply, she started away. He fell into step beside her, his movements still tentative. “Let me know if I can do anything to help,” he said after a moment, and the smile was back once more.

They returned the way they had come, finding the path easily enough. Aphen was anxious to make certain Arling was all right. Her sister had been sleeping soundly enough when she left, and the danger from the shards that had penetrated her body seemed under control, but you could never be certain with wounds of that sort. In other circumstances, she would never have left her, but abandoning Cymrian to his fate when he was risking so much for them was unthinkable. Hard choices both, and she hoped she had made the right one.

The woods thickened, and the mist grew steadily heavier. Shadows floated all around them, cast by tree trunks, limbs and things unseen and unknown. The woods were still, and there was an odd sense of emptiness about them that was troubling. Aphen picked up the pace, suddenly worried.

She had reason to be. When they reached the clearing where she had left her sister, Arling was gone.

The pitted stone bulk of Kraal Reach rose against the gray smudge of the horizon, easily the most formidable keep that Oriantha had ever seen. Hidden in a thick cluster of boulders to the west, she studied the fortress in silence.

Next to her, Tesla Dart shifted restlessly. “We should not be here.”

Oriantha nodded. “But here we are, anyway. Is there a way in?”

The Ulk Bog stared at her in horror. “We do not go in there! You did not see what they do? Somehow you are made blind?”

Tesla was speaking of Khyber Elessedil’s head, spiked atop the east gates, ravaged by the elements and picked over by scavenger birds. Oriantha had crept close enough with dawn’s approach to make certain of what she was seeing. Such a terrible thing to witness, but it was not the first and would not be the last. Not while they remained inside the Forbidding.

The shape-shifter and the Ulk Bog had come looking for Khyber Elessedil and Redden Ohmsford almost a week ago—immediately after leaving Crace Coram to make his way back through the break in the Forbidding’s wall. If the boy and the Ard Rhys were still alive, Kraal Reach was where they would be found. Tesla Dart was certain of it. All of Tael Riverine’s prisoners were taken to his fortress as a matter of course, and that’s what would have been done with them.

Not that Tesla Dart believed for one minute that being here was a good idea. From the moment that Oriantha had told her what they were going to do, she had bemoaned their impending fate, railing against the foolishness of such a decision. But Oriantha was determined. She had made up her mind that even though her mother and most of those who had come with her were dead, she was at least going to bring back the two who remained alive. She was not going to leave them behind; she was not going to save herself without first doing what she could to try to save them.

And she had made it clear that the Ulk Bog would help her whether she wanted to or not.

Mostly, it was because of the boy, she thought. Redden Ohmsford. There was a quality about him that reminded her of herself. It spoke to her, intrigued her, drew her. Maybe it was the magic, a vast store of power and possibilities that were a birthright like her own—inherited, not learned, an inseparable part of who they both were and which defined them in ways that none of the others would ever entirely understand.

So after coming down out of the Dragon Line Mountains, they had journeyed on through the Pashanon, avoiding Furies and Harpies and several dozen other dangerous species, the Ulk Bog guiding them and Oriantha keeping a careful watch on her while she did. Pleysia’s shape-shifter daughter had learned the hard way to be cautious. She didn’t trust Tesla Dart. Her part in the demise of the Druid company was still suspect. Whatever had happened to Oriantha’s companions was not going to happen to her. Because of her shape-shifter heritage, she was much closer to being one of the things that were confined to the Forbidding than had been any of those who had come with her. If Tesla Dart did anything to arouse her suspicions, she would sense it and be able to act on it.

She had pointed this out to the Ulk Bog early on, warning that any suggestion of betrayal would result in swift retribution.

Tesla Dart, for her part, denied that she had played any role in bringing harm to Khyber and her followers. Quite the opposite. She had done everything she could to save them—everything they would let her do, at any rate. But in the end, they had brought about their own doom by ignoring her warnings and going off without her. It was because they hadn’t trusted her, she pointed out, and it would be tragic if Oriantha were to make the same mistake. She was not the shape-shifter’s enemy; she was her friend. Hadn’t she agreed to come on this impossible mission? Hadn’t she promised to show her the way and kept her safe? Wasn’t she risking her own life by placing herself in harm’s way, all for the sake of two people who were probably already dead?

Yet the shape-shifter remained unconvinced, and the tension between the two remained. To Oriantha, Tesla Dart’s motives were a mystery. The Ulk Bog talked of her uncle Weka and how much he had done to help the Straken Queen Grianne, and how this obligation had been passed down to her. She talked of obligation and loyalty and blood heritage. But none of it really explained what had brought her to them in the first place. She claimed she had been waiting for Grianne Ohmsford’s return, had been looking for this miracle as if she truly believed it was possible. But her intimate knowledge of Tael Riverine and his creatures—and of Kraal Reach and its secrets—was troubling. While she claimed she knew these things through her odd relationship with the Chzyks, Oriantha wasn’t convinced. Tesla was hiding something, and that made the shape-shifter nervous.

Their uneasy relationship did not prevent them from completing their trek to Kraal Reach, however—although they watched each other guardedly for the five days it took. They walked the entire way, traveling by day, hiding by night, kept safe from the ever-present dangers that threatened both of them by Tesla Dart’s knowledge and experience and by Oriantha’s instincts and caution.

When they arrived, almost the first thing they saw was what remained of the Ard Rhys’s head spiked atop the gates, and the shape-shifter’s first thought was that they were too late to save Redden, as well. Tesla Dart insisted this was so. If one prisoner was dead, so was the other. Especially if the one who was dead was Khyber Elessedil. Tael Riverine did not keep his enemies alive unnecessarily, and the Ard Rhys had been the one who mattered. The boy meant nothing to him.

Now, crouched close to the fortress walls, the argument resumed.

“I’m not asking you to go inside with me,” Oriantha pointed out. “I’m asking you how I can get in. Do you know a way?”

“You walk in, you will be carried out. In pieces!” The Ulk Bog was having none of it. “Forget this!”

“Do you know a way?” Oriantha repeated.

“Over the wall. Climb it, you get in!”

“No secret passageways, no hidden doors? Did Weka Dart teach you nothing?”

“Not talk that way of him!” The Ulk Bog was beside herself. “He dies for Straken Queen! Is that not enough? Doesn’t owe you, her or me!”

Oriantha looked away, studying the fortress some more. Apparently she was going to have to make it the rest of her way on her own.
Climbing might work,
she thought,
but how do I find my way once I am inside? How do I find Redden?

“Don’t do this,” Tesla Dart said suddenly, grasping her arm. Her voice had dropped to a whisper, as if in speaking louder she might be heard by others. “He is dead. Let him go.”

Inwardly, Oriantha was afraid this was so. But she was determined to make sure, nevertheless. She was resolved not to leave him if he was alive.

“We will wait here until it’s dark, and then I will scale the walls and search for him. In my shape-shifter form, I will not be so easy to spy or to catch. If I don’t find him by morning, I will come back out again and we will leave.”

Tesla Dart sagged back with a moan of despair, shaking her head so hard the clusters of hair sprouting from it quivered. “You will not come back,” she said. “You will not.”

High within the imprisoning towers of Kraal Reach, Redden Ohmsford sat alone in the cell to which he was confined, staring at the patterns of the stonework on the floor. The seams between the slabs ran this way and that, forming endless rivers of grout that crisscrossed and angled and curved from wall to wall. There were bits of dust and debris, the carcasses of dead bugs and stains that interrupted the otherwise intriguing flow, and he kept coming back to them as his eyes wandered listlessly through the maze. He should remove them. He should clear them out so that nothing blocked the way. He thought to do so over and over, but he couldn’t seem to muster the strength.

In point of fact, he couldn’t muster the strength to walk to the window and look out over the countryside. Bleak as it was, empty and pitiless, it nevertheless would have offered him a change of view. Wouldn’t that be better than just sitting where he was, studying the slabs and grout of the flooring? But if he did that, he would end up glancing down at the east gates—because curiosity would demand it of him—thinking that this time her head would be gone from where it had been fixed on the spike atop the ramparts. In the beginning, he was sure they would leave it in place only a few days, a reminder and warning. But days later, it was still there, the scavengers picking at it, reducing it to something unrecognizable—to a horrific caricature of what she had looked like in life. Finally, he had quit looking out the window at all, quit exposing himself to the feelings that tore at him, quit letting hope interfere with reality.

Let the dead rest in peace. Give the Ard Rhys that much. Or as much as could be expected, given the nature of her demise and her treatment subsequent thereto.

Khyber Elessedil.

Gone with the rest of them.

And now he was the last. The very last.

He couldn’t know this for sure. He had seen most of them die right in front of him, had seen the bodies or pieces of the bodies afterward, so of those he had no doubt. Oriantha and Crace Coram were unaccounted for, but he was certain they were dead, too. He could sense it in the same way he could sense what it would do to him to look out the window. They had been carried off by a dragon and had died in a faraway place, but they had died all the same. There was no point in pretending otherwise.

Just as there was no point in pretending any longer that he might find a way out of this nightmare.

He would have cried, thinking of it, but he was all cried out. He had shed all the tears he had left to shed. He was frightened and desperate and burdened with an unshakable sense of hopelessness. His chances of ever going home again, of ever returning to his old life, were gone. All prospects of such a miracle had dimmed to darkness. He was passing his time now awaiting the arrival of his own death. It was coming to claim him; he could feel it. It was just a question of when.

His days had grown endless. He had lost all track of time. When he had been brought back to the fortress following the battle between Khyber and Tael Riverine, he had been taken immediately to this cell and left there. No one had spoken to him during the return trip. The only words uttered were those of the rabble that tracked his cage as it rolled through the countryside, an indecipherable barrage of taunts and jeers. He could still recall the sound, a cacophony rising up from the mob’s dark mass. His champion had died defending herself, and his turn was coming. What weapons did he have to call upon? What magic did he have that could defeat the power of their Straken Lord?

None, he knew.

He had no weapons and no magic that would ever make a difference. Not while he wore the conjure collar.

He felt the weight of the collar around his neck, a constant reminder of his reduced state. Even thinking of it caused him to wince involuntarily. He had tried over and over again to remove it or at least loosen it to relieve its pressure. But each time the pain it had generated was so intense that it doubled him over and left him writhing on the stone floor. Each time the extent of his helplessness had been reinforced.

Until at last he had stopped trying.

Until finally he had accepted that it was never coming off.

There was nothing left for him after that. He sat in his cell, his prison, his jail, and waited for his inevitable execution. He had no meaningful expectations left. What expectations could there be? That a miracle would happen and someone would come for him? That he could still find a way out of this madness? Impossible! Who even knew where he was? Even those who had remained behind, stranded on that ledge with the Goblins coming at them from every direction, were probably dead by now.

Even Railing.

But he didn’t believe it. Oddly, it was the one hope he clung to. Railing was still alive, still out there somewhere searching. His brother would never give up. It might be hopeless for him, but it wouldn’t be for Railing. Not now, not ever. Railing was his twin, his other half, his shadow self, and he was alive and well and hunting for Redden. Railing would never be satisfied with leaving things as they were. Even if it killed him, he would find a way to reach his brother.

Of course, he was aware of the impossibility of this happening. And the thought of Railing dying, too, brought down by his efforts to reach him, was more than he could bear.

They brought him food and water, and sometimes he ate and drank. But mostly not. Sometimes they pulled back the metal plate set in the cell door that served as a peephole and looked in on him to see what he was doing. He never bothered to look up, never cared if they were looking at him or not. He ignored them. He tried to pretend they didn’t exist.