The Onyx Vial (Shadows of The Nine Book 1) (14 page)

Tehya pulled a book out. “Tierendem.”

Dilyn dropped to his knees, crawling on the floor as he scanned the bottom shelf. “That means…” He reached for a book. “Gorse. Tierenvem.”

Finn stooped, pulling a book from the shelf above Dilyn’s. He opened it. “One shelf off,” he said, handing the open book to Hunter.

He took it. At the top of the page was the word he wanted. “Tierendar,” he read aloud, scanning the pages. Each page had just three entries; names, places, more names, dates. Confusion trickled in. “The, uh… the date says four hundred sixty.” He racked his brain for the calendar his grandpa had written out. But the only thing he remembered was that the seasons were off
—
that spring in Kansas was fall in Ladria. “What year is it
now
?”

“Eight eighty-nine,” Perry said, taking the binder from Hunter’s hands. “It shouldn’t go that far back…” He flipped to the end, frowned. “Hm.”

“What?” Dilyn asked, standing.

Hunter leaned in to see the page. “It’s blank.”

Perry flipped to the middle, then quickly through until he reached blank pages again. “Finn. You picked out
the
only binder that holds Tierendar births.”

Finn shrugged. "I'm
that
good."

Bardoc was right. Tierendar was very rare indeed.

“The last recorded birth was…” Perry leafed through the pages.

Dilyn peered over the book. “Looks like year eight hundred seventeen."

Perry examined it, then turned his eyes to Hunter. “I’m impressed. You look…
fourteen
for a fifty-eight year old.”

Dilyn snickered. “What’s your secret, Master…” he checked the page, “Lan Philpps?”

Hunter deflated. He’d been so close. Now they’d have to search through hundreds more books to find his name.

“Wait a minute,” Finn said. “Look at that.” He put his hands on the pages and spread the book until its spine creaked.

“What?” Tehya poked her head over Dilyn’s shoulder.

Hunter saw it now, too. “A page was torn out.”

The rough edges of the missing page poked up like freshly mown lawn, but it was clear that someone had taken great care to leave as little evidence of the page as possible.

“Do you think it had your name on it?” Dilyn asked.

Hunter considered for a moment. “My luck? Yeah.” But what purpose this served, erasing him from the records, he had no idea.

“Why would anyone do that?” Dilyn wondered.

Hunter shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Maybe to make it harder for Falken Fyrenn to find me.

“We should check the Eerden records,” Tehya said. “Just to be sure.”

“Good idea.” Perry snapped the book shut and handed it to Hunter. “Let’s all grab a few of the Eerden catalogs and search. One year can span a couple of those things, easily.”

They followed Perry, started dragging books off the shelves, then brought them over to the table and set to work.

Half an hour later, Perry grumbled and stood. “Seriously. Why do people do this?”

Everyone looked up from their books.

“Do what?” Dilyn asked.

Perry lifted a loose page and waved it at them. “Tear these out.”

Finn shrugged. “Who cares?”

“
I
do,” Perry said. “It’s annoying.”

“
You
think something's annoying?” Tehya snickered.

Perry ignored the jest and turned to Hunter. “Here I was, thinking I’d found your torn out entry—it’s stuffed in the right set of dates for it. I mean, the
exact
spot it should be. But it’s an article about something that happened a whole
season
later.”

“Am I in those records?”

“No.”

So his name
had
been torn out. On purpose. “What’s the article?” Maybe it would be something useful. A clue?

Perry flicked the sheet at him.

There was a grainy photo of a house aflame. For a moment, Hunter thought the coloring was skewed, but the black of the night and the green of the lawn insisted that it wasn’t. The flames eating away at the house were as blue as a summer sky.

The outer walls were frosted glass, turning ashy grey with smoke. Below the photo was a caption that read:

Rockwood Clearing, Eastridge Township: The home of Aeolus and Loreina Rueklin, outspoken members of the Ionian Rights Rebellion, burned to the ground while the Fyrennian Elite Guard looked on. The Rueklins were convicted of treason and sealed in the house moments before the fire began. There were no survivors. The Rueklins’ remains were collected for proof of death, then destroyed.

“Rockwood Clearing?” Tehya said. “That’s out by Ariana's—” the words died in her mouth, her lips crinkled into a pout.

Hunter warred with frustration and a curious hope. The article was pointless. And yet, he’d only recently discovered he was Tieren, meaning that he would have checked this very spot for his birth record. Was it coincidence that the article was there? Maybe. But his real birth record had been removed. So maybe it
was
a clue. Or maybe he just wanted it to be.

Perry left the table and disappeared into the shelves without a word.

“What's he up to?” Dilyn wondered.

“He didn’t take anything with him,” Tehya said. “But while he's up, we ought to put all these back.” She nodded at the table.

“Probably,” Finn said, scooping up a couple books and hauling them off.

“Guess so,” Hunter grumbled. What else was there to do? Until he figured out what, if anything, this article was telling him, he was at a dead end. He folded the article and stuffed it in his pocket, then closed the book and headed to the shelves. 

He returned to find Perry at the table with a stack of black, hardboard binders that were double the thickness of any of the regular ones they’d been looking through.

“What’s all this?” Tehya asked.

Perry doled out a binder to each of them. “Just want to see something,” he said. “Start searching for the days around the Autumn Solstice. I’ve got the right year.”

Hunter frowned, pulled the article from his pocket and checked the date. The torn edge of the page was jagged and only part of the date was visible:
rty-third of Autumn, Eight-hundred-fifty-seven
. “You’re looking for where this goes?” he asked, holding up the page.

Perry glanced up. “Mhm.”

Hunter sat quickly and flipped open his binder. It was filled with articles from several different newspapers:
Heromalii Informer, Cerulean Sun, Ladria Viewpoint
... but the dates were early Autumn. None of them matched. Hunter set his binder down and looked around.

Tehya relaxed back in her chair as she read. She blew at a loose strand of hair that hung across her face, but didn’t bother brushing it away.

Perry and Dilyn both hunched over their binders. Perry shook his head, mumbled, turned the page. Dilyn tucked his chin in his hands, his nose buried in the pages. Had he fallen asleep?

Finn studied his binder as though perusing a menu, one leg propped on another table’s chair. He seemed to actually be reading the articles.

For a moment, Hunter felt frustration building. Finn was supposed to be searching, not reading leisurely.

Then Finn straightened. “That’s interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“This page is… well, it’s torn, but it’s been pieced back together.”

Hunter’s heart leapt and fluttered like a trapped bird. “What do you mean?”

Finn set the binder down, the open pages facing Hunter. On the right hand side, with a headline that read:
King Fyrenn Reveals Heir to the Throne
, the page had clearly been torn and pieced back together. But the dates didn’t match.

“The tear looks just like the other one,” Tehya said, fingering the jagged line where the two pages hooked together.

She was right. Hunter flattened out the article about the fire and laid it over the impostor page. The torn edges were another perfect match. And now the date read:
Forty-third of Autumn, Eight-hundred-fifty-seven

“A record keeper wouldn’t have done this,” Perry said.

Then who did?

“What’s it say?” Dilyn asked.

They leaned in, their heads crowded around his own.

Below the title was a massive photograph of a much younger Falken Fyrenn, standing proudly at a pulpit, surrounded by guards in immaculate red and black uniforms. His dark hair was woven through with a kingly band of jewels. A crown. His fiery, golden-brown eyes glowed from the depths of darkened sockets.

Flanking the King were three women. On his left, a lean, dark-umber skinned beauty with black hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She wore nothing more than a few strategically placed leather straps that crisscrossed over her neck, chest, and stomach. The straps attached to the leather waistband of a floor-length skirt made of what he could only guess to be tissue paper, based on its transparency. For an instant, he pictured Tehya in something like that, but he forgot how to breathe and choked on the air.

“You alright, Hunter?” Tehya asked.

He blinked and nodded, his cheeks burning, and forced his thoughts back to the photo.

Beside the dark woman was a petite blonde with a round face and wide, haunted eyes. She hardly looked older than Tehya, though she must've been, as she had an ample, womanly chest strapped down by a single band of bright red fabric. She was tan, like the schoolgirls back home after a summer at Flatrock River. Her skirt was probably just a bandana, repurposed. Her legs were lean and strong.

The third woman, standing on Falken’s right, was as pale as moonlight. Her dark hair hung in perfect waves to the middle of her back. She wore a tight, complicated weave of red and black ribbon that covered her from her neck to her hips—where the ribbons were knotted. The spare ends hung loose and uneven to her knees. Held tightly in her small arms was a stoic, resigned-looking baby boy.

“I didn’t know he kept the prince’s birth a secret for two seasons,” Tehya mused. “How odd.”

“It’s really not,” Finn said. “Falken was squashing the last stand of the Heledian rebellion at the time. He wouldn’t have called attention to anything that might’ve been perceived as a weakness. The heir’s one serious weakness.”

“Thank you, Instructor Donovan,” Perry jeered.

Finn ignored him. “Either way, the spade didn’t do too bad for himself with the wives, did he?”

Hunter snickered along with Perry and Dilyn. Tehya just huffed. “Boys,” she muttered. “You don’t see anything above their breasts.”

“Not true,” Perry said, proudly tapping the woman with the baby. “This one’s wearing a necklace.”

Hunter peered closer. Perry was right. On a thin silver chain, a pendant nestled between her collarbones. It had three metallic stars encircling a blood red stone. The exact same pendant, without the blood, that he’d held in his dreams.

Hunter slipped off his chair. He caught himself and stood. But his legs were suddenly weak.

“Hunter?” Dilyn and Tehya’s voices sounded far away.

He needed air.

“Hunter? What’s the matter?” Just a buzz of words.

He grabbed the page, jerked it out of the binder.

“Hey, come on. That’s not—”

Hunter folded both articles, stuffed them in his pocket, and left the record room, his mind reeling.

Chapter 11

Despite the aches of thirst, the heat radiating from her fatigued body, the chill air clawing at her tender skin, and the hammering pulse in her head, Ariana had soldiered through the night, following the horses' trail. And j
ust as morning arrived, she came upon the crumbling stone streets of a quiet town where the tracks faded and disappeared. She listened. But she heard no hoof beats or voices. Without hesitation, she popped in and out of the empty houses, hoping to find something to drink or someone to help her. But the town was abandoned and had been for some time.

Warmth was returning with the sun. For the moment, it was welcome. She stared down the wide street, gauging the height of the buildings. She wasn’t so far behind that she could’ve missed the horses leaving. If she could get up high enough, she’d find them.

Around the back of the nearest building, she found a heavy wooden ladder leaning against the wall. She climbed carefully toward the flat roof, her arms and legs shaking slightly as she reached each new rung.

The town was no more than a thousand strides in any direction. Few buildings were more than double her height. Most were packed tight enough to hop from one to another.

She tread lightly across the unstable rooftops, occasionally slipping on loose bits of shale-shingle, cringing at the noise as those bits hit the ground. The buildings were old. There was a chance one might cave in. But she needed to conserve energy—the precious little she had left—so canvassing the roads would be even more foolish than this.

She blinked away the blurriness that pervaded her vision and tried forcing out the constant, distant, hallucinatory sound of rain. She focused on finding the horses, searching the streets as she hopped between rooftops, her weak legs giving way beneath her each time.

Finally, she spotted the cart.

It was parked between two buildings to her left. Both had sloping, triangular rooftops. Difficult to climb. But she was less likely to be spotted on the roof than in the alley. Until she knew who she was dealing with, she couldn’t risk being seen.

Slowly, she made her way over and climbed onto the roof least likely to break away beneath her.

She crawled to its peak. Peering over the side, she zeroed in on a jug of golden liquid. Her mouth would have watered if it wasn't so dry. The cart was unguarded. The two massive horses—attached to the cart by a system of poles and ropes—were riderless.

She crawled over the peak and inched down, intending to hang off the ledge and drop to the ground beside the cart, when she heard voices.

She froze, clinging to the roof. Her fingers dug into the crumbling gaps between the shingles as she listened.

“How do you know that name?” A man snarled, with the grizzled bass of someone who, she imagined, had seen his share of hard times over many years.

There was a muffled reply. A younger male voice.

“Which is exactly why you
shouldn’t
know it.” The older man again? His voice was smoother than before. Was this a third man?

“Well, I
do
.” The younger voice was somehow familiar. “So show me how to find it.” The accent was different, but there was a quality to his voice that tugged at her memory. She knew this person.

“You’ll not be getting directions from
us
.” The gruff voice again.

She scanned the ground for shadows as the younger one responded. Where were they? They sounded too close to the cart for her to try anything. But she was so thirsty she could barely swallow. The golden liquid winked at her with a spot of sunlight, teasing her, tempting her to jump down.

“You expect us to believe that?” The gruff man snapped. “Go back to your father’s castle, boy. Stop playing games.”

“You don’t get it,” the boy's voice lowered. She missed what he said next, catching only the end. “What other reason would I have to be talking to you?”

A growl. “I can think of at least one.”

“What
is
the reason?” The smoother voice spoke over the rough one.

Now she understood. This was, indeed, a different man. Her odds were getting worse.

The roof was warming. She carefully shifted her slick hands, then resumed her eavesdropping.

“...that I murdered my mother." She'd caught the end of the boy's sentence.

Her heart leapt.
Murdered
?

She strained her ears on their voices but they diminished to murmurs. Their words flowed too quickly for her to follow.

Where were they?

She was so thirsty. She couldn’t stand it anymore.

She scanned the remainder of the roof below her. There wasn’t much. She eased her leg over to the next foothold. It was a decent stretch, but she was limber enough to pull it off. The toe of her boot found its place. She tested the shingle’s strength with bated breath. When it held, she risked moving her hand.

As she stretched flat across the roof, the shingles dug into her stomach and clawed at the exposed skin on her legs. She suppressed a whimper. Once she had a firm grip, she risked sliding over. But the strap of her satchel snagged on the edge of a shingle and held her in place.

Her leg dangled uselessly. She couldn’t risk fumbling for a foothold and kicking off bits of shingle. The muscles in her right arm and leg lost strength. As she maneuvered to get at the strap, the smooth-voiced man spoke.

“Excuse us for a moment. My brother and I need to discuss this.”

Someone appeared in the shadow of the building—near the cart—clearly in her view. She held her breath.

The boy—tall, with disheveled, unwashed black-brown hair—had his back to her. What she could see of his black and silver uniform was covered in reddish-brown dirt and grit.

He turned slightly, his gaze on the cart, staring at it as though expecting someone to ambush him. His skin was tan. He looked weary but capable. He ran a finger over some kind of burn on his left forearm. It stretched from the middle of his forearm to the base of his thumb.

She squinted, feeling a sick twinge in her stomach. She wasn’t sure she could trust her eyes, but the burn appeared to be the Fyrennian family symbol. She blinked.

Her arm shook, reminding her that a toe and four sunburned fingers were all that supported her. As carefully as possible, she worked the strap free and slid toward the edge, gaining her other hand and footholds, the burden of her weight redistributing evenly.

The boy moved toward the horses. The men whispered not-so-quietly in the shadows.

Ariana pried a hand free of the shingle and flexed her fingers. She rolled her wrist, easing the ache that had built in the joint. It popped.

The boy straightened, cocked his head. Ariana froze.

How had he heard that?

He turned, scanning the other side of the street.

Please don’t look up
.

He looked up. Directly at her. His swirling brown-grey eyes were clear, alert, and deadly.

Ariana sucked in her breath. “Hunter?”

In her surprise, she forgot—for an instant—where she was, and tried to move away with both feet at once. She slipped. Gravity yanked on her, peeling her fingers from the shingles, sucking her downward, heedless of her attempts to stop. Her hands grasped for something, anything. But there was only air.

An electric rod of pain drove into her heels and up her legs, branching out through her spine and—as her head whipped back, slamming into the ground—exploding into fiery blackness inside her skull.

“She with
you
?” was all she heard. Then silence.