Children of the Blood by Michelle Sagara
At last they rode out of the forested trail and into a small clearing. It was bisected by a clear, small stream with a visible rocky bottom; on either side of it were large, moss-covered rocks and a few fallen tree trunks.
Stefanos dismounted at the edge of the trees and quickly secured his horse. Sara mimed his actions slowly; it had been long since she’d ridden, and the trail had been difficult.
But he had chosen it because the blood-wall would not be visible. She steadied her horse as he brushed by, and he caught the meaningless murmur of comfort that she provided.
It was a comfort that could not touch him.
Angry, he nimbly made his way past, over the large rocks that the water swirled around.
She watched him go, the tension growing as the silence did. It seemed to her that he only touched the rocks with his shadow; his step was that quick and that sure. He crossed the stream without pausing to look at it, and after a few concise half steps and jumps he stopped, his back toward her. She moved forward more slowly, aware of the size of the rocks, and the large gaps between them. A fall here would certainly not be fatal, but it would be painful and hard to land on the rocks. She chose her steps with care and caution, planting one foot firmly against the moss before venturing another step forward.
She stopped for a minute when she reached the stream, her gaze caught by a continual distortion of rock as water rushed glibly over it. She could see the bobbing green of leaves and branches that had been trapped by the narrow current and imagined, briefly, that they pursued some futile struggle against its pull. On impulse, she bent down and, leaning precariously forward, swept one bedraggled leaf up into a cupped palm. It lay, wet and glistening, against the droplets of water on her skin, its veins branching delicately outward within the green of its flesh. With careful, slow movements, she set it down on the rock beside her.
“Be careful of the metaphors you force out of nature, Sara.”
She looked up quickly at the sound of his voice. His back was still turned toward her, his shadow a cloak on the rock. He was dark.
“Very well, you have saved a single leaf from the ravages of the stream it has fallen into; but does it have a better fate now? We will stop here awhile, we will speak or not as our whim dictates, and we will leave it behind for the sun to scorch or a random breeze to begin again the journey you have interrupted.”
There was pain in the words, distant and undefined, but there was anger as well. She picked up the leaf defiantly and slipped it into her pocket. He laughed.
The laughter was dark, wild.
“Do I make you nervous, Sara?”
“No.” It was a lie; she had never been good at lying. But she didn’t understand the way the tension honed itself into a fine, sharp blade that pressed, invisible, against her throat.
He turned then, his eyes flashing brilliantly in the shadowed glade.
Instinctively, Sara took a step backward, lifting and dragging her arms across her face. The motion was over before it had begun, but he recognized it easily. The Greater Ward. Smiling, he stepped forward, but she stood her ground, just as she had always done.
“Little Sara”—his voice was a whisper—“do you remember the first time we met? Do you remember what you offered me, and what I accepted?” He held out a hand; it was shaking.
“Come.”
She moved then, as if in a trance. Her feet touched the flat surfaces of rocks jutting above the water that rushed past. He caught her arm as she came the last few steps and pulled her up. His fingers caught her chin.
Very slowly he raised her head until he met her eyes. There was shock, pain.
“You don’t remember.”
“And you do.”
He nodded. “Clearly. I forget little.” He wanted to tell her then, tell her all of his grand plans for the life that he wished to lead—the life that he wished to share with her alone. Words whirled past him like ash in the breeze. He could not speak.
“Have you finished playing with me? Is the game over? You know. I don’t. You’ve proved some point that I can’t understand.” She pulled her chin away from his hand and took a step back.
“The game is over, Sara. If you feel that you have lost it, you are not alone. This was new for both of us, but I am not accustomed to dealing with new things.” He gestured, the movement brief and final. For a moment a spasm crossed and caught his face, and then his features began to alter subtly, his form becoming gaunter, nearly insubstantial in the daylight, his face sharpening and hardening into gray angles. His eyes grew wider, rounded, the white of them engulfed by a spread of black and red that swallowed Sara’s reflection.
He watched as her face mirrored his transformation; as realization took in what memory would not yet supply. One word broke through the trembling of her lips.
“Nightwalker.”
And with one word, spoken in a dead language, he replied. “Sarillorn.”
His eyes flashed again, gleaming briefly like light on a blade raised to strike. Sara cried out and, taking a step backward, huddled down, her hands gently stroking the cold rock beneath her fingertips.
“Anders, Anders, can you hear me?”
Stefanos watched impassively as tears began to roll freely down her cheeks. He gestured; she stiffened. A step, and his arms were there to catch her and lay her gently against the moss. He unraveled the binding of memory with delicate care. The power flowing out of him was a peculiar pain, an echo of loss.
He watched, again, the fall of her little outpost; watched her fight and her flight; carried her back in the darkness of his arms, in the blanket of his power.
He stiffened as she made her offer, shivered as he received it, and flinched as the sunlight touched his back. And he watched as she struggled to ease the pain of the Kamar—watched as she succeeded, fully and finally.
And it was then, lady, that I wondered. His hands touched the paleness of her skin as she lay insensate against the rock. She didn’t respond, but he didn’t expect it; she had been forced to relive the memories he had returned to her—as had he. She would sleep a few hours, and he would watch over her, as he had watched through the passing of that earlier day.
I wondered what you were—how your strength could support your weakness, how the light could be so strange and so haunting. Yes, the desire to understand the oddity that was the Lernari had taken root that night, and that morning.
Stefanos laughed, silently and bitterly.
And I still do not understand it, lady.
Rest awhile; there is more to come.
He stood, eyeing the baleful sun. It never ceases to amaze me. He tilted his head upward defiantly. The memory of physical pain passes so quickly. It has been long since your touch has had any power over me.
Physical pain could break a man; it was short and sweet in its immediate reward. Yet he had seen men come through the fire of intense agony whole. Their skin might be scarred, perhaps a limb lost or crippled, but what had been shattered so easily could yet be reclaimed.
He thought of physical pain as black and red, explosive, immediate, and powerful. Powerful?
Bending down, he touched her forehead. It was warm; he could feel the intricate network of veins beneath the paleness of her exposed skin.
Powerful.
And yet ...
Why was intangible suffering so impossible to elude? A mother could lose her child, and the memory would never cease to shadow her existence; a husband might lose a wife, and although he could carry on as before, an emptiness remained that caused echoes throughout a lifetime.
And Stefanos knew, as he stroked her brow, that he would lose her. The spells woven in the dark of his study had at last borne fruit, had showed him what he least wanted to know in a way that made it impossible to refute. She would be lost. The mark of her passing would define loss for him; already he could feel the scar of it, indelible, upon his mind. Yet he was no victim of ceremony, no fodder for the contemptible priests. No pain would rack his body, no torture b
Physical pain is powerful.
But he caused her no pain as his fingers continued to touch the contours of her face; the sun caused him no pain as it touched him—he knew a strange numbness before the two of them, the chosen banes of an earlier life.
He felt the gray of the day close round him like a web.
Sara stirred, and he was thankful for it, for although it meant the exacerbation of memory, it was still something he could share with her.
His eyes flashed silver anew, the gray of the day above and the shadow within. He spiraled down through the chaos of memory, catching strands of it that were mutual between them.
He walked with her again on the long road away from the Lernari border; walked the path to the heart of his Empire under the chill of her mistrust; walked in strength while she followed in weakness. But she walked free.
He rose again, walking in a tight circle around her body.
Memory. Although he knew all that had passed before, something existed in it that burned anew each time he stirred its embers. Sara was still unaware of the forest, the glade, the touch of his hand on her brow; her eyelids flickered every so often, her mouth creased in smile or frown, but she was not with him.
She was in Rennath, dying the slow death that mortals called age. He felt his fear of it still, felt it strongly. And accepted it; time at least had done this.
But he remembered much beyond that. And these memories, these were beautiful. They lived still in the way his hands now caressed her face, pressed gently against her closed, still lips.
When did you first talk of love, Sara? When did you ask it of me?
Why did I grant to you what no Servant in all of time has ever felt?
He relived, alone, his own doubts, his own anger, his own resentment—and his own desire. He faced again the oddest truth that he had had to come to terms with: That the happiness of the Sarillorn was something he valued, something he wished to increase where he could.
And thus had it started. He had given her one life, and the one life became many. Where she walked, mercy walked.
He had done all that he could for her sake, but the one thing he would not give up was his power, his Empire. Her inability to accept it troubled him greatly, but never so much that he would—could—stop. No. He would build his Empire across the whole of the Twin Hearts’ body—and everything in it would be at his disposal. Let her then change what she liked; let her ask for what mercy she wished—he would grant it. But it would be his to give or to deny her. His. As she was his.
For four years.
She had become Lady Sara. Her birth-name and her line name were cast aside with a regret he could only now feel.
His fingers curled into fists. They shook.
Time.
Sara, Sarillorn. I pulled you from Lernari gardens, from the sway of the Lady herself. I killed my descendants for your sake; I left my heritage behind to enable you to forget yours a little. I was building an Empire I intended to let you live in, in peace. I loved you, Sarillorn. You were mine.
The sun was almost beneath the horizon.
Did you not understand that? Could you not see what you had become to me? You were mine. Not some subject of time or mortality. Did I not say that I would never release you?
Something welled up in him as he held her, as the last of her bound memories began to return. It was strong, stronger even than his desire to keep her at his side had been; stronger than his great and ancient hatred.
With a low, vicious snarl his eyes flashed red. He pulled his hands away from her face, whirling in a low crouch to face—pain.
Not physical pain; that would have been welcome.
He remembered; and although he had decided that she should know all, he could not bring himself to share this last thing with her. Could not pay again the price of her anger, her hatred, her loss. He cursed his weakness, cursed his fear, cursed his desire. All of these, these were the flowers of seeds that the Sarillorn had planted; these were the harvest of four years that he might have easily missed in the blink of an eye.
The emotion in him would not subside. This was the Sarillorn’s last teaching to him. He faced it, wary, but at last aware of the truth: Physical pain was nothing to this. Nothing.
And because he had not been willing to accept her loss through time, he had deprived himself of even the span of her short life.
Twilight would come soon; twilight, half-dark, a time of safety for him and for her. She slept under the bands of his enchantment, her back warming rock grown cool at the passage of several hours.
But he had those hours. Very gently, he lowered himself down to the rock. He pulled her limp form into his arms, and she responded by snuggling into his chest, a faint hint of a smile around her lips. She did not wake; he would not allow that. This time was his; it might be the last that he could hold her so.
He had learned to love her, learned to see her moods and emotions clearly enough to be able to please her.
He pulled her closer, breathing in her scent. It seemed bitter indeed that the last lesson of the Sarillorn, his Sara, should be this one.
She had taught him the meaning of sorrow.
chapter sixteen
But in the morning, she woke alone.
As she had always done in Rennath.
She jumped up, her head spinning from side to side, and then relaxed. They day stretched out before her, but she had much work to do. She leaned back for a moment, her hair spilling in a dark splash over the pillows.
She could not remember all of the previous day; it was hazy and somehow shadowed. But she knew that she remembered nearly everything. She balled her hands into fists.
There’s so much to do. And I’ve been lying here, doing none of it.
Well, that would stop here. She slid her legs over the side of the bed, thinking about the castle. Creases etched themselves into her forehead as she realized that she knew very little of its geography.
But there was no infirmary here. That much she knew. Frustrated, she rose and began to hunt about for clothing.
Gervin rose as the door to his chambers creaked open. Only one person in the castle ever entered without knocking, and even he only in times of urgency.
“Lord,” he said, bowing.
Lord Darclan cast a long shadow that no light could explain as the door moved toward the wall. But he stayed a moment in the door frame, his dark gaze sweeping the sparse room.
“You have been here many years,” he said, almost to himself.
“Yes, lord.”
“Gervin.” The lord stepped into the room and let the door swing shut behind him. “I must speak with you.”
Gervin did not rise from his bow until the door had clicked, trapping him with the lord he had vowed to serve.
He looked up then, weary.
What new task? he thought, although he let none of it show.
But perhaps had he, this one day, his lord would not have noticed.
“Gervin, the lady will come to you, if I am not mistaken, and she will request any variety of changes. I believe she may also call upon Darin; I do not know. It is not important.” He stepped forward. Gervin did not move.
“Grant her what she desire.”
“Pardon, lord?”
“Do what you can to give her the things she will ask for. An infirmary, I believe. Perhaps some type of religious service. Again, I do not know. You came from the lines, and if it is not too long past, you will remember.”
He looked at Gervin keenly and then bowed his head.
“Have you ever wished vengeance, my faithful slave?” He put his hands behind his back; even now he did not wish one beneath him to see the way they were shaking.
“Yes, lord.”
It was Gervin’s way to speak only the truth. It had been Lord Darclan’s command, and Gervin had followed it to the letter. As he had done all else.
“You have it, then.”
Gervin raised an eyebrow.
“L-lord.’ He could hear the rustle of cloth that was Gervin’s formal bow.
He opened the door, and then stopped again; he could not have said why. But there was one more thing that he wished Gervin to know.
“She is the last,” he whispered, “Of the Line Elliath.”
He did not wait to hear Gervin’s response. Now that the words were spoken, he was suddenly free to leave. And he did, to seek the silence and the comfort of the study that he had governed the Empire from for so many human years.
‘But I don’t understand what you’re doing.”
“The last two beds at right angles to the east wall,” Sara said, pointing. She had one arm full of what looked like bandages. “Where is the table beneath all this mess?”
“Sara?”
She nodded as she found the table, and then frowned. “Help me move this.”
Darin sighed and grabbed an end of it. Sara plunked the bandages down and grabbed the other end.
It was very heavy. “What is this made of?” Sara muttered. But it didn’t matter; before she or Darin could try to lift it again, two of the slaves appeared on either side. Their larger hands gripped the table, and they lifted it with an ease that made Sara sigh.
“Lady?” one asked. Darin had not seen him often, and thought perhaps he was one of the house guards. While he puzzled over this, Sara pointed at the wall.
“There. ”
The door swung open and a man entered, followed in procession by three men who carried a set of drawers between them. Given their expressions, neither Darin nor Sara felt obliged to offer their help.
“Other side of the door,” Sara called quickly. She looked around the room as it began to take shape, counted the beds, and frowned slightly.