Final Fieretsi: Part I of the Fabula Fereganae Cycle by Will Davidson
Chapter V: Ariga's Hope
A year had come and gone since Pheia last stood atop the outer walls surrounding Ariga’s acropolis, along with her brethren, and defended what little remained of their land. Although the fires that had ravaged the plains had long since died, the smell of stale smoke still seemed to hang in the air. Somehow the Furosans of Ariga had survived the war and managed to rebuild their home from the ashes of a Pyrrhic victory. But in a land still recovering from the wounds of war, the healing process was slow and pained.
As Pheia once more stood atop the walls high above the plains, she turned over the sad prospect of the future in her heart: Ariga’s lands had been razed; Minhera had long ago slipped beneath the waves; Alzandia was nothing more than a memory lost to the fog; and the Mafourans hadn’t been heard from in a decade as if they had suddenly forgotten their eastern allies. And as for the Acharnians, it was their blatant refusal to stop playing and growing vegetables that had consigned them to whatever history books still acknowledged them.
To make things worse, her father, King Atticus, had never fully recovered from the injuries of war. She had climbed the many stairs to reach this place to get away from the reminders of the war, but they lay across the land, permeated the very air. And it was the furthest she could get away from her father and brother, Richo. She was seeking solitude. She found only isolation.
As she stood contemplating the dire state of everything, of the burned and dying land she and her brother might one day–maybe any day now–inherit, she heard the padding of bare feet on the stone behind her.
“Miss Pheia?” a soft voice said.
Without looking she knew who it was. “Yes, Nrika?” Though the woman behind her had been her maid for many years, she was more sister than servant. “Is it about father?”
“I am afraid so,” Nrika said in a hushed voice. “It would be best if you see him now.” She turned and left as quietly as she had arrived.
With her stomach suddenly growing heavier, Pheia made her way back down the many flights of stairs from the walls, past many doors that led to rooms even she had never entered. To her brother Richo they represented adventurousness. To Pheia with her fear of the unknown they were gateways to innermost fears.
She crossed the township, the only truly safe place to live in Ariga sheltered within the massive walls. The towering acropolis stood in its center, an island amidst a sea of smaller buildings. And atop it was the stone palace of the Arigan royal family.
Pheia climbed the winding road and hurried past the temples of the elemental guardian Shizai and the lesser Uiverrae to the palace itself. It was a squat building, built more for protection than decoration.
As she entered her father’s dim, curtained room, several attendants hastened past her and out the door. She knew then it was serious.
“It’s time, isn’t it?” she asked. She knelt by her father’s bed and clasped his hands in hers.
Atticus stared into her brown, almond-shaped eyes with an unfocused gaze. He said nothing. Instead he nodded deliberately, his pale and gaunt face strained with the effort.
“And our land… to whom is it entrusted?” she asked. She didn’t ask it thinking only of the gain, but rather out of concern and even a hope that its responsibility wouldn’t fall on her.
For the first time in days her father spoke to her. “As you may have already guessed, I find it most fitting for your brother to rule,” he said. Pheia almost sighed with relief. “After his arranged marriage to Ifaut Mafouras, perhaps a stronger alliance may arise, one that might help unite our divided world, one stronger than if you alone were to take my place.
“I have a more important task for you,” he added. “We are only just recovering from war, and you know as well as I that we could never truly survive another attack, even if we were to somehow emerge victorious again. Even now I fear the humans are readying for further war, and rumor speaks of a concerted effort to quell pockets of the Acharnian resistance. Our people are spent. There is no fight left. And with my imminent death…” Before he could finish he was interrupted by a bout of coughing. When it finally subsided he continued.
“Minhera is lost beneath the ocean to the wrath of Shizai. The Alzandians, bar the White Demon Cédes and a few remnants, are all but lost to the fog that has enveloped their land. And we have not heard from the Mafouras kingdom in several years. I fear a similar bad fate may have befallen them, just as we are now upon the wane. That would prove disastrous for any hope of a strengthened alliance.”
“Don’t say that!” Pheia said. “But what can I possibly do?”
“You must seek out the Fieretka and the one who can talk to ferrets, the Fieretsi. They may be our last hope.”
Since childhood Pheia had been told about the legend of the Fieretka, a group of Feregana’s divided races, and the one among them who could talk to ferrets and manipulate Furosa: the Fieretsi. Until this moment they had been nothing more than a story to her ears. Now maybe her path was going to entwine itself with theirs. Perhaps she would even become a legend herself.
“Then the stories are true! Where might I find them?” she asked.
“You ought to know from the stories I told you to help you sleep. Somewhere in the west, but I do not know where, exactly. And the inexorable pull of Atora’s pendulum may be yet to bring them together.”
“Then how do I know who they are? Must I ask everyone I meet?”
“Trust in me. You will know when you find them.”
He broke into another coughing fit and his breathing became labored gasps. Without saying anything more he reached into his pocket, removed a blue stone about the size of a fist, and handed it to Pheia. She pocketed it without a second glance.
“This… this will help you,” he said, forcing out the reluctant words with difficulty. “Now please leave. I need my rest.”
Her eyes misting over with tears, Pheia felt a depth to his words that said more than he spoke aloud. She knew right then he was about to die.
Without knowing why, she said, “See you soon. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.” She spun on the balls of her feet and ran from the room, her waist-length auburn hair streaming behind her. She coldly brushed off the concerned inquiries of Nrika as she went. In truth she didn’t want anyone to see her tears.
Pheia pounded up the steps to her own bedroom. Even though she was a member of royalty, her room was simple and practical without needless adornments or many possessions. A wooden cupboard holding everything she owned stood against one wall and a bed lay opposite it against the other. Resting on a rack attached to the stone wall was the large composite bow, nearly her own height, with which she had accompanied the archers defending Ariga’s outer walls in the war. She shuddered just thinking about the number of lives she had taken with it and its deadly arrows. Carved on the side were Arigan letters spelling Reda Dei-Latannga, the rough Common Language equivalent of “Deathbringer”. A fitting name, she thought, for something that had brought death to so many, although not just at her hands.
She lifted her bow from the wall, strung it, and gave the string a few experimental tugs so that it sang in a high, angelic voice belying its true nature. Satisfied with the tension, she reached under her bed and retrieved an old leather quiver filled with a dozen hunting arrows. Their heads were capped with golden cephei hunting tips, their ends balanced in flight with the shimmering feathers of some long-extinct breed of dirriwan. The bow had been passed through the Arigan line for generations, yet bore no signs of its true age. What it did bear was whispered tales of its origin, supposedly carved from a tree at the Rainbow Bridge.
She placed her equipment on the floor near the door, ready for her departure the next morning, and sat down on her bed. She sighed and unwrapped her faded blue bandanna from around her head, tossed it to the floor, and stretched on top of the soft blankets. From where she lay she could see straight out the window across the bare plains, and, balanced barely discernible on the fringe of the horizon, the thi
The sun rolled lazily towards the distant sea, towards her future and Western Feregana. The sadness of her father’s looming death and the excitement of a new adventure mixed oddly inside her, provoking thoughts about the road and sea that lay before her. She’d crossed it once before on a diplomatic visit to Mafouras, but that was long ago aboard the Arigan fleet. Now the remaining ships were moored far to the south, barely maintained in these times. That meant she’d have to make her way to the humans’ port town of Leibos and stow away on a ship bound for the west. Before that she would have to cross much open land and hill country, greatly risk being spotted, and, to take a direct route, pass through the human town of Chalja. There was little cover between here and her destination, and she had little choice of where to go.
‘Besides,’ she thought, ‘it’s up to fate. Destiny. Perhaps the Uiverra Atora and his accursed pendulum are due to swing back in our favor. Maybe I’ll die, maybe I’ll succeed.’
Her eyes finally fluttered shut as the sun’s last flames extinguished themselves in the watery depths of the sea.
A warm breeze from across the plains wafted through the half-open window. It ruffled Pheia’s hair and sent her bandanna fluttering across the floor like a skittish ferret. She yawned and sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and blinking rapidly in the harsh light of the new morning. The sweet sound of birdsong floated on the breeze and danced about her ears as she snatched up the bandana and tied it around her head to tame her errant hair.
She hoped to leave as soon as possible to avoid any second thoughts about going, but most of all to avoid the temptation to see her father again. It would only add more weight to the burden that was the future of her people, and perhaps her world.
She fixed the quiver to her belt and picked up her bow. As she did she felt the familiar chill course through her body as if the souls taken by it still haunted its otherworldly wood, trickling ice-water through her being.
As she walked towards the door she calmly smoothed out the creases in her skirt with her free hand. “Huh?” Her hand hit a lump in her pocket. She reached in and pulled out the turquoise, watery stone her father had given her the night before.
“I forgot all about this thing,” she said to herself and turned it over in her hand. Her eyes were drawn as if hypnotized towards the depths of the stone and its viscous, angrily swirling center; aquas and greens in a constant, whirling spiral.
“It’s trying to get out!” she gasped and quickly pocketed the thing. As frightened as she was, she wouldn’t return the last gift from her father. And contained within it was perhaps the only thing that could keep her people alive.
Even as she walked down the hall with only her echoing footsteps for company, her thoughts kept returning to the mysterious stone and the animal-like substance encapsulated within. Her father as a ruler had many valuable items, but why give her something as precious, as dangerous, as this? She shook her head to clear her thoughts and walked briskly towards a small door in the outer walls where no one else could see her slipping away.
‘Time to go,’ she thought. It was a beautiful day, if one ignored the fact that the bare plains had once been teeming with people and life.
From high up and out of sight on one of Ariga’s walls the melodious voice of a young woman reached her ears. Never before had she felt so utterly alone around her own home. That beautiful, haunting voice only deepened the isolation. But it filled her with courage and hope.
“Ma dahnie las dahkensen mai. Ah noh ji mahdo shigat roh.”
We have fought this far and lost too much. We will never give up.
The voices she’d always taken for granted were soon to become but distance memories in her mind. She only wished her and her people’s hopes would make it to the west alive.