The King's Blood (13 page)

Despite his years fighting through battlefields whose horrors the underworld could never top, the old General still shuddered at the unhinged voice of his Lord as he took his leave to return to the barbarian's lands.

CHAPTER NINE

A
ldrin woke slowly, his feet slipping to frigid floors as the tattered blanket tumbled off him, revealing the bandages -- much less gangrene now -- below. He wrapped the blanket around his freezing shoulders and wandered out of the tiny back room he spent almost a week feverishly recovering in.

A shadow sat hunched over the waning fire, the dawn light alighting her frizzing hair. The quickly marching snow never played nicely with her.

"Still alive, I see," Ciara said without turning to face him. She poked at the embers clinging to life in the pit. It was how she greeted him each morning, or what felt like morning to the boy, curtly and with as little fanfare as possible.
 

The first day he'd looked up into the amber eyes carelessly hovering above him, mumbled something incoherent about a wooden duck, and passed back out. A day and a half later his body forced him to try again. Eventually, he had to face the new world thrust before him trapped inside of a witch's cottage, somewhere in the midst of the woods, with a wrenching pain in his side that only hurt when he lived. His consciousness seemed to be about as welcome to Aldrin as it was to Ciara.

She kept him fed, kept him warm and kept cleaning his wound; a fact that would have burned his cheeks if he had the blood to spare. The witch, who he could only picture as a vague presence heavy on the incense and jangling of hands flitting through his mind, was nowhere to be seen.

After about three days, as faculties began to creep back into Aldrin's toolbox, he finally tried to stand on his feet. The cottage looked even more disappointing in the waning afternoon light. Someone tidied the place up, stacking the un-used jars in boxes, scrubbed off the blackened cauldron until it almost shone, and mopped up what had been his blood. Something told him it wasn't the witch either. She didn't strike him as the sponging and mopping type.

He collapsed in front of the fire, still roaring strong despite only a few logs fueling the flame.
Magic
, Aldrin thought at first, then caught himself.
Of course it wasn't true magic, just a trick
. As any true Scepticar would mumble to himself while backing away quickly from previously noted not-magic.
 

Ah!
The dull ache in his side drilled into his nerves, up through his clenching teeth. His hand clutched upon it, trying to shelter off whatever invisible menace plucked upon his sinew like a harp. It came away covered in red discharge.

The door flew open, cracking into a rock painted like a sleeping cat and Ciara entered with an armful of colorful jars. She paused, watching Aldrin slowly sinking to the floor in pain. After carefully placing the jars on the table, she scooped him up under his arms and leaned him into the chair beside the not-magic fireplace.

"Still alive, I see," her eyes wandered to the bandage, half coated in discharge, "but not for long at this rate." She unwound them carefully, and reached behind her to a bucket of water sitting on the hearth. Dabbing a sponge into it, she wiped away at Aldrin's innards still trying to find a life on the lam outside his body.
 

He expected the water to be cold as ice, but it was body warm to the skin. Unfortunately this enflamed the wound more, sending another wave of pain through his aching muscles. Aldrin gritted his teeth and mumbled, "Thank you."

Ciara didn't pause, as if she didn't hear him, still dribbling more warm water into the surprisingly healing wound. It had only been a few days but it already looked less like a death sentence than she'd feared. As she slapped on some of the root mixture the witch left behind and wrapped on fresh bandages, she said, "You should be resting. The sooner you heal, the sooner we can get to Tumbler's End, the sooner I can get rid of you."

The barb stung, but no worse than the ointment crawling its way into his skin. Nodding, Aldrin stood on his own and limped back to his makeshift room wondering for the first time where the girl slept as his failing body claimed the lone bed. It was a few days more before he worked up the courage to ask her what happened. Ciara spoke of the shadow man in the woods, finding the cabin, the witch who ministered to him, then drugged her. How she woke to find the woman pinning the hat out of Ciara's pack to her head and gesturing to a long list of instructions on how to keep Aldrin alive. Then the woman vanished, leaving the two of them free run of her cottage. She hadn't been seen since.

Ciara grew quiet again and stared into the fire. Aldrin slipped down in the worn chair, his fingers still sticky from the last meal of apricot jam. He feared if they didn't get out of here soon he'd die from hyperfruiting.
 

"Was there something you wanted to tell me?" The voice was low and soft, like a tiger's growl from the camouflaged grass.
 

But Aldrin had no idea what she was talking about. "Um, thank you?" he offered up, realizing by the head snap he just thrust his foot into his gaping wound.

"The witch didn't just save your life and then bugger off. She demanded payment."

Aldrin gulped, vaguely aware that whatever coin they had couldn't afford a witch's cure, and he still had his pants. "What kind of..."

But Ciara cut him off, her eyes boring into his now, "She said we must stop, in three months time, at another witch's cottage off the Snaldir road near Caddersten. That was it."

Aldrin, who only had a vague idea of where they were in relation to his kingdom, settled down. Caddersten had to be, what, spitting distance to that End of Tumblers place. That seemed a very minor request for her gifting them her cabin and his life.

"And why would a witch ask two seemingly unimportant children to stop by another cottage? What could she stand to gain from that?"

Something approaching an understanding rose in Aldrin's gullet, but it had a hard time getting past all the apricots. He tried to rise, but the pain pushed him even lower into his chair.

"Something you refused to tell me. Something my father knew, something that assassin after you knew, something even this old crone in the middle of nowhere knew!" Her fist balled up tight, nails digging into her palm. "You're the fucking prince of Ostero?" there was a small question mark at the end as if she hoped it was all a big misunderstanding, that he hadn't been lying to her this entire time and he was really some lost Earl's fifth son who kind of looked like the old King if you squinted.

But Aldrin knew when he was licked; about the only thing he excelled at was accepting defeat graciously. He bowed his head and mumbled, "I'm sorry."

Ciara rose as the prince shirked back, expecting either a blow or a verbal barrage. Instead, she picked up her coat hanging by the door and opened the door into the silent night. The girl spent most of the days exploring the terrain around the cottage; she knew it even in darkness about as well as the passages in Castle Albrant.
 

"I agreed to take you to your army. I never agreed to like you," and she slammed the door hard, the reverberations shaking his chair's arms sending the glass jam jar shattering to the floor.
 

That was nearly a week ago. While Aldrin's flesh healed, the sundered rift between them did not. She'd still gather food from wherever the witch kept a winter's supply a squirrel would be envious of, kept as much of the fire going as she could, and only asked if he was still alive.

Today was different.

As Aldrin settled into the chair, always unoccupied whenever he rose in the morning, Ciara stirred the few charred logs, kicking more ash into the air. "We can't stay much longer. The logs are long gone, it's mostly scraps of paper scattered about the cottage."

He nodded, picking up the mug that sat upon the edge of the hearth each morning, downing the bitter draught as quickly as possible. Ciara stirred the pit once more before dropping the poker to the side and rising, her dress coated in spellbook ash. For a brief moment, Aldrin wondered what she wore while she washed it, but the ice pouring from her glare reeled back in that caravan of thought before it crashed over a cliff.

"Are you well enough to walk?"

Aldrin placed his mug down on the floor and lifted the oversized bed shirt he'd been wearing ever since he woke up that first day. He never thought to ask where it came from, being given things was second nature to royalty. The bandages looked as clean and crisp as when they were last cleaned. He slowly put his palm upon them and shuddered a bit at the dull ache, but there was no bone-shattering bolt of pain to accompany it. That was a major step up.

The prince grinned grimly and nodded. Yes, he could probably make a journey on foot, provided there was little running away from assassins this time. Ciara stepped back and walked over to her pack, long since ransacked then re-packed with anything she thought might have been useful for their trip.

"Good. I've been studying this map and we should make Dawning in two days time if we set out soon," she picked up a long sheet of vellum and held it in front of Aldrin's nose as if he had a clue what any of those markings meant.

"You can read?" he asked incredulously.
 

Reading wasn't considered a scholarly pursuit in most of Arda anymore, not since the Old Empire Fall. Those who lifted meaning out of ink scratches were declared practitioners of dangerous magic and were forced to eat all their books. The fact that it was mostly witches and clerics who maintained anything approaching literacy made it that much certain to be a dark art in the minds of Argur's.

Those who praised Scepticar, who believed magic to be nothing more than tales to frighten scared priests with waning congregation numbers, strangely also looked down upon reading. But not because of any magical reasons, oh no, it was just not worth one's time when there was so much damn snow to move from one place to another and cows to restrain from orbiting planetary satellites. If it also kept young girls from learning about equal power or young boys from trying to start democracies or talk about legal representation in a fair court, well then, all the better.
 

Ciara cast her eyes down, her father had been very careful in teaching her what few letters she knew. Dunlaw was the rare land in Arda where many of the nobility and even some commoners were taught more than just which part of the sword goes into someone. The fact they tightly closed their Northern boarders after the Elven Wars made whatever secrets locked within their large tomes in the Library of Asha that much more terrifying.

"Only enough to follow maps. Albrant didn't have a lot of clerics he could call upon in the middle of his campaigns so my father would fill in at times," she admitted, trying to shrink into the floor.

But Aldrin had no intentions of burning her at the stake. For starters, the best he could do is ash the hems of her dress a bit with what fuel remained. And the world of books held an allure for the quiet boy who never found his place in the world of swords and bigger swords. He wondered what was tucked inside those pages rotting away in cobwebbed rooms or between the covers nailed to walls as a strange decorating style swept the nation. In his silence, Ciara regained her hatred of him and rolled up the map, sliding it into her pack.

At this, Aldrin started, "Should we be stealing from a witch?"

"If'n she wants us to meet her at this Caddersten, then she should have anticipated we'd be stealing her map."

Ciara wasn't as staunch a Scepticar as her converted at adulthood father, but the powers of premonition the witch seemed to yield unnerved her. She left just enough jars for both of them to survive for two weeks, canned right before their arrival. She seemed to demand both very little and much, as if she knew they were going to somehow wind up on the other side of the mountains, far from the northern pass. The fact Ciara still intended to aim for it before the first snow didn't ease her trepidation.

And, of course, she knew that Aldrin's father was the King. As did seemingly everyone else but her.
 

"Come on, eat your breakfast. We should set out before the sun crests."