The King's Blood (34 page)

Most said it must have been a strange case of one rare gecko that mutated and grew really big. Also refractions, light refracts a lot. Why can't it refract that as well?

"Myths are dangerous, they are a kernel of truth wrapped in enough lies that a new life is breathed into them," Medwin intoned, sounding like he'd been eating too many of those little oatmeal cookies the bakers hid inspirational messages in.

Ciara glanced at Aldrin who seemed to be taking the shattering of his beliefs rather well. She'd never subscribed to the old tales, the great battle between Scepticar and Argur over the shape of Arda, the way her father had. But she always really wanted to, to feel even a moment of the fervent belief that burned inside her Father.

To have Medwin tell her it was all lies, that a man as learned as him believed in magic, was the same face slap of someone declaring her father a liar. He'd given up everything he ever had to join Lord Albrant and serve in the name of Scepticar. He was there, every morning in the first row of the small chapel, quietly intoning the hymns as the other knights shuffled in trying to pretend they hadn't spent the entire night sinning. He'd rise every morning, give thanks to the bounty his new god laid upon his feet and go to sleep praising him for not taking it away. Asim never felt any hatred toward Argur either; Scepticar's sworn enemy who'd tried to sneak magic into the world by tricking a human into dipping into the pool. Instead, he praised his god for showing the foresight to strike that first and only mage down, ripping all magic from an apocalyptic world. Argur was to be pitied, not hated, and certainly not acknowledged for being right.

Ciara looked at Medwin, who stood tall in his knowledge of being right then towards Aldrin who shrugged. Tears she didn't know she could still shed rose behind her eyes and, without bothering to scoop up her coat, she burst through the door out into the frozen night.

Snow refused to give way to the stampede of bitterly angry teenage feet. Ciara dug through the forest, grabbing a hold of low hanging branches and pulling herself forward all while fighting against the winter with a burning sense of indignation at once again being the only one left out in the cold. Her skirts acted more like a poor shovel, scooping up the snow and leaving a wide berth behind her as she struggled deeper into the woods.

This mess kept going from bad to worse, and her father dumped her into it all sight unseen. If she felt like clearing her head she may have felt a sting of pride that he entrusted her to handle such a mission on her own, but even that was a bitter recompense in the face of the sheer cliff in front of her. On one side there were witches, emperors, generals and soldiers. And the other, a boy with a runny nose who kept sticking it into the most infuriating of places.

A branch snapped in the forest.

Ciara stopped, her breath the only taint to the dark forest air. She tried to turn in the black forest searching for the source of the sound, most of the stars curtained off by the naked treetops. There! Another broke, deeper in the forest, away from the ring of caravans, which still had an imminent pillar of smoke puffing away.

Fingers shifted through her pocket and found purchase on the dagger, deep in the folds. Instinctively her eyes closed as she tried to focus her sight into her ears.

She was seven years old again, an old pair of her father's muck boots riding up to her thighs as she stood impatiently in the middle of the marshy land near the river. Far in the background the sound of women slapping the rocks with sheets reverberated across the ever present arms of the mountain.

Her father dropped to his knees and looked her in the eye. He did that with every child he came across, lowering from his mighty peak to meet them as equals. Ciara had always taken it for granted and started to climb onto his thick shoulders. "No, No, Siyah kuï," he called to his daughter who dropped back down into the mud. A rare dip into the abandoned native tongue he reserved for Ciara.

"Hold out your hand," Asim instructed, and into her speckled palm he placed a pommel, wrapped in blackened leather with curiously gold accents flanking the cross guard.
 

Her fingers barely curled around it as she pulled the blade to her face. A curious symbol, a series of three concentric circles mimicking a target, etched into the pommel. She dragged her small finger around it, poking the bull's-eye with her nail.

"Like this," her father said, walking behind her and grabbing her arm. He carefully maneuvered the blade in her hand until the cross guard rested comfortably, then he bumped her elbow up.

"Am I doing it right?"

"Perfectly," her father said, smiling.
 

"Asim," her mother's voice called from the river's edge. She'd been overseeing the women and trying to keep her other child from breaking his neck on the rocks below the pool the children claimed for their own

"Yes, Cesaret," he responded to his wife, still shifting about Ciara's weight until she feared she was about to fall face first into the sucking mud.

"What are you doing?" Bralda asked. Ciara looked back at her mother, her hair firing in the warm spring light, the first they'd seen in weeks after the rains broke. She was dressed for castle work, her good hemlines dragging in the mud, but had slipped a pair of far too large boots onto her feet in a rush.

"Cia needs to learn, the land is dangerous," he said as he stepped away from his daughter who stood motionless with her right arm extended far from her body. Her right foot was sinking slowly into a makeshift bog throwing off her horizon, so that from her perspective the trees all seemed to be taking a bit of a slow nap.

"What she needs to learn is how to properly darn a sock," Bralda muttered, unhappy with the last sewing efforts her daughter made. Unable to get a proper stitch, Ciara began to pull apart the seams and then kept pulling until it was more a set of ankle warmers with long fringe than sock.

"Darn socks will help in the room. Sharp daggers will help outside," Asim said proudly. Then to his daughter, "Close your eyes."

Bralda crossed her arms, normally a sign the fight was over and she'd won, but this was one of those rare cases that her husband stood strong in his convictions, refusing to bow to the norms of the Albrants. Ciara was always sitting beside the fire, her hair soggy from her bath, while her mother took to their Lord's numerous tears and rips, when her brother would burst in all smiles upon her father's back chattering about all the mighty monsters he felled that day.

Asim never said a word or corrected the boy, as a true Scepticar should. It was Bralda left to scold the boy that monsters were not real and he shouldn't be putting such notions in his sister's head. But later, while their parents were asleep Corwin would sneak over to Ciara's bed and show her a tooth, as long as her finger and curved slightly inward. "The monster's were real, but they're not anymore," he confessed, dropping the tooth into his little sister's palm. But that was her son. Bralda had no brook with her daughter being drug out into the wilds and left to fend for herself. She would insert herself into all of Asim's talks of teaching Cia how to hunt, how to skin, even how to smith. Her daughter resented her mother for every bit of it.

Today was different though, even with her mother scowling on the sidelines, Ciara knew she was about to kill a monster of her own. Obliging, she closed her eyes and waited for her father to say something.

Suddenly her balance was thrown off as something fast bumped her left elbow. She shifted quickly to keep from face planting into the mud.
 

"Keep your eyes closed," Asim instructed, his voice oddly distant. Ciara cinched up her eyes so tight, the sides of her vision turned golden.

Another jab hit her in the back and she spun to meet it, the dagger hitting only air. She squelched up her boot, turning around to try to find what kept smacking into her. "Father..."

"Your senses, you cannot trust them at all times. Listen to your heart, Siyah kuî," his voice reverberated into her ears as if he were right behind her.

"All I hear is a thumping," Cia said dutifully.

Asim laughed heartily at that, the guffaw skipping around the clearing like a dragonfly on the river's edge. How could he possibly be moving that quickly?

"Then listen to your ears," he said, a bit less poetically.

She tried again; rolling her shoulders back and raising her arm as if she were about to swat a fly. The mud squelched under her shift in balance and at that moment the invisible monster attacked, knocking into her left shoulder.

Without moving her feet, Ciara swung her dagger arm towards her shoulder, but found only air. Her eyes cracked and she saw her mother, her arms still crossed as if she washed her hands of the whole thing but was ready to step in at a moments notice anyway.

"No," Asim said, and something sharp bit into the back of her knee, sending her arms pin wheeling to keep her balance.
 

Without falling to the mud, she caught a glimpse of her father, barefoot and carrying a flat stick not much longer than her arm. So that's what had been hitting her.
 

"Keep the eyes closed," Asim instructed again, his voice moving away.

She nodded her head and closed them, though not as tightly as before and took one deep breath. As she exhaled the world opened before her.

"Talk about learning to run before one can crawl," Bralda muttered under her breath. Asim seemed to not hear it as his feet paced about the edge of the mud pit, but Ciara could.
 

She stopped fighting with the darkness and used it. Her hand remained steady while her ears followed the soft squishing of something scampering across the mud. It reminded her of those silent nights on Soulday eve when everyone would gather in the snow and take the moment of silence for those who failed to return. And inevitably, in the edge would be a small rabbit scampering away from the crowd, shattering the quiet of the night.

Her head whipped to the left as a strange sound whizzed through the air but nothing hit her. She tried to reposition herself without making a sound, nearly impossible in the deep muck. But inside her father's oversized boots, she could easily shift her entire foot within them.

As she moved quietly, the stick tried to take its chance. But Ciara'd been counting on it. And giving it her all she spun her entire body, leading with her right arm until a pair of hands grabbed her wrist.

"Congratulations, you have slain the monster."

Ciara's dream shattered at the unexpected voice and her eyes flew open to the dark man still holding onto her wrist, her dagger inches from his chest.

He followed her eyes and let go of her wrist. She continued to hold the dagger near his heart, not flinching. "It's you."

Taban laughed, "Yes, it is me. Why is it no one is ever excited to see me?"

"Maybe they're not big fans of being assassinated," she said coolly, checking once more the man's hands were unarmed and held far from the sides.

"Killing is not all I do," Taban said

"No?" she slowly let her arm rest, but kept the dagger unsheathed.
 

"No, not at all. There is espionage, planting false evidence, altering the fates of those who come in contact with me," he counted off each crime on his fingers, "Oh and I make a magnificent ham and egg sandwich."

"Eating ham is sinful," Ciara said.

"Only if I do it right," Taban winked, sliding back into the snow. His footprints lined the clearing, as if he'd been pacing around the edge watching the girl with her eyes shut tight holding out a dagger in the middle of the forest.

Embarrassment burned hot in Ciara's stomach to help cover the fact she no longer had rage to keep her warm. "What are you doing out here?"

"I could ask the same of you. No coat, no heat, seems you wanted to be rescued," Taban said.

"I don't need any rescuing," she said tersely, trying to shake off that smile at her expense on his lips.
 

"Not this time, no. The little nightingale has a sharper beak than I expected." Even with the snow to provide contrast, it was still hard to spot Taban. He'd shrugged off the dark green leathers from their last meeting over two months ago for a light grey coat stuffed to bursting with down. He seemed to favor the cold about as well as Ciara.

"You're following me," Ciara said pointedly.

"Ah, technically no," he said.

"What? You just happen to be everywhere we are a few seconds later? It's all a coincidence? We'll laugh upon it when we're not freezing to death in the forest."

He laughed again at her outburst as she waved her dagger about to punctuate every word. But the assassin caught the hint and unbuckled his coat, displaying the familiar green leathers underneath. Taban held it out to her so she could slip an arm in, but Ciara glared.

"Freeze or do not, it is no tax off my pay." She continued to glare but snatched the coat up and slipped it over her arms. For the first time since the powder broke from the clouds, she actually felt warm. Ciara watched the assassin trying to manly shrug off the cold leaking into his veins. She didn't trust him. She didn't like him. But she felt beholden to him for saving her life. And she hated that.