The Twelve Kingdoms: The Mark of the Tala (20 page)

I ate quickly, certain they all waited outside for me, and left the dishes for whatever invisible denizens manned this house, pocketing an extra apple for the ride. Yesterday’s stops had been few and far between, with only a hard jerky to chew on. I walked out into the late-afternoon light, to find my sturdy little mare, saddled and ready, my stalwart guard nearly encircling her.

Biting back a sigh, I readied to mount her, dreading her brittle stride.

Rayfe’s hand appeared under my elbow, helping me up the half a length it took to be astride her.

“I understand you’re not fond of this mare.” He raised an eyebrow at me. His amused look. I searched out Terin, who grinned at me, a baring of the teeth more than anything.

“Rayfe—she’s all of, what, eight hands high? I’d put a ten-year-old on her. An inexperienced one.”

“So you feel insulted by this choice?”

I sighed. I’d asked him to explain, and I needed to try to do likewise. I put a gloved hand on his arm, and he started at my touch, as if he hadn’t expected it. “I know you don’t know me, but riding is something I love—something I’m good at. And here I’m riding through country I’ve never seen and it’s on a horse with a miserable stride and I’m surrounded by guards so that I cannot
see
anything at all, and—”
And I feel so very alone
. I stopped myself because the pitch of my voice had risen and I was suddenly perilously close to tears. I turned my face away, blinking furiously. Not what I’d wanted him to see at all.

“I understand now.” He took my gloved hand in his. “Come.”

I obeyed, if only so I wouldn’t cry. Rayfe led me to his big horse, bade me wait while he mounted, then held down a hand for me. “Can you reach?” he asked.

Now, this stirrup was much higher, but Moranu take me if I begged for help. I took his hand, put my booted foot atop his, and vaulted up. He caught me and laughed, a free and delighted sound that seemed most him. The men looked away while he kissed me, except for Terin, who watched with a dark and disapproving gaze.

“I should have known you’d need to see,” Rayfe told me, brushing a strand of hair out of my eyes. “Are you comfortable astride? Then let’s be off.”

He’d put it well. I did need to see. The restless tension of the day before bled away as we rode, harder and faster than before, without me burdening the short-legged mare. I was far too diplomatic to point this out, however. Though we rode through darkening forests, I thrilled to the changes in the trees, the road uncoiling before us.

At one point, perhaps near midnight, we topped a hill to find a valley spread before us. The moon had risen, waxing more than half-full. Silver light illuminated the valley, rolling in fertile meadows, green and untouched by the snow we’d left behind. Beyond, another ocean tossed at a distant shoreline. I caught my breath at the grandeur of it.

“You can see clearly?” Rayfe whispered in my ear.

I nodded, too awestruck to speak.

“Cat’s eyes.” He sounded approving. “See off there, where the craggy peaks go down to the ocean?”

“Yes,” I breathed.

“On the other side of those is Annfwn. Once there, we are safe. Or more safe. Things will be better.”

“What is this valley, then?”

“You don’t know?”

“How should I?”

“This is Mohraya. Behind those hills, just beyond, lies Ordnung.”

I stilled. I hadn’t known. Ursula would have, what with studying the maps. In all my journeys, I must have traveled a large circle, coming up, around, and behind the very piece of the country I’d always called home.

“You asked to know.” Rayfe sounded strained, and I twisted in the saddle to see his face, knocking my knee against the sword he’d strapped to the saddle. He looked wary, tense. I cupped his cheek with my gloved hand and urged him down to kiss me. He obliged, and I kissed him long and deep, the way he liked.

“Thank you,” I murmured against his lips. “It is good to know.” I turned again and studied the mountains, rearing against the silver sky. On the other side was an acid-green meadow I’d ridden into, not knowing how my life would change. “It looks so different from this side.”

“Everything always looks different from the other side,” he agreed, nudging the stallion so that the company moved on.

I looked to see his expression, his sword knocking my knee again.

“I’m sorry—I need to have it there, in case I must draw it.”

“I know,” I reassured him. How many times had Ursula told me to do the same? “Wait—why wasn’t it there when we rode to the cabin, that first night?”

“As you might recall”—Rayfe’s tone was dry—“there was a woman tied to my sword arm. The weapon would have availed me little.”

“Then you weren’t concerned about attack.”

“I posted guards, to hedge my bets. But that’s part of it, for the man.” He chose his words carefully. “To give up his defenses, his strength, to risk attack.”

“I see.” And I did—now. I hadn’t thought what it would be like for him to be bound to me. Hugh and his men could well have followed and slaughtered him while I was a dead weight on his arm. I wondered how close they’d been.

“Could you have . . . shifted, like that?”

“No. Not in such close contact with you.”

I hadn’t thought of Rayfe as saddled with me. With all his relentless pursuit, the triumph of his obtaining me as his prize, it hadn’t occurred to me that a foreign princess might not be his first choice in mates. Clearly some other reason drove him. The “Annfwn needs you” thing. He wasn’t Hugh, to have fallen in love at first sight. No, from what he’d said, he was relieved that we at least could bed each other in a satisfying way. In addition to his other agenda.

“Rayfe?” I asked him quietly.

“Yes, my Andromeda?” His voice was pitched low to match mine.

“Was there another for you? One you might have wished to wed, if not for . . . whatever this thing is that demands it be me?”

“No, my queen, it has always been you.”

“How could that be? How could you want a woman you’d never met?”

“None of us have met before we actually meet; isn’t that so?” He threaded his arm up under my cloak, to wrap around my waist and hold me close.

“Which doesn’t answer the question.”

I felt him shrug. “I saw you in the meadow and I knew.”

“You didn’t—you thought I was Amelia.”

He chuckled and pressed a kiss against my ear. “I didn’t know which daughter you were, but I knew
you
.”

“The animal in you recognized me. My blood.”

“Yes.”

“The wolf?”

His body tensed. “This is not the place to speak of such things.”

“I didn’t know you, in the meadow.”

He sighed and I realized I’d hurt him. “I know, Andromeda. I also know that you still don’t. I hope that will change.”

I had to ask. “And if it doesn’t? I have no wolf to know yours.”

“You have more than you know—you just fight it still. And we will speak of this later. Not inside Mohraya.”

I bit down on the rest of my questions, on the restless pacing in my heart that had started up again as we talked. Finally I had to say, “You’ve invested a great deal in something that may not be so.”

“You have no idea, my queen.” He barely spoke the words aloud. “You have no idea.”

W
e descended into the sleeping valley—warmer here—skirting the settlements whose names I likely should have known but did not. I could see why he’d timed it this way: everyone slept during these small, dark hours. Rayfe murmured these things to me, when I wondered that he didn’t worry about the farm animals sending up alarms. Very few animals are truly nocturnal, he said. Most are about in the crepuscular edges of night and day. Bats returned to their roosts. Even the cats had ceased chasing mice, resting for the dawn hours.

All was still but for us, now riding at dangerous speed through harvested fields and fallow meadows, then creeping with quiet stealth past a sleeping house.

He kept glancing back, over his shoulder to the east, where the approaching dawn hadn’t lightened the sky. It looked like full night to me, but he pushed us to go faster. Then a single bird sent out a quiet whistle, and, as if a minstrel had signaled for all to join in, a tree full of songbirds burst into a chorus. In the distance, a cock crowed, and Rayfe cursed, a harsh growl in comparison.

We kicked into a flat-out run.

Rayfe stretched over me and we leaned together over the horse’s neck, his mane lashing us.

“It’s not even light yet!” I gritted out.

“The birds know,” he shouted against the wind in my ear. “And even your people follow that.”

Sure enough, lights began to flicker on in a few of the farmsteads. The far hills loomed near, but a disquieting amount of cultivated land still lay between us and them. Terin pulled beside us, pointing to the road. Rayfe shook his head and Terin made a complex gesture back. Rayfe cursed again, then nodded, and Terin galloped that way. We followed.

I didn’t have to ask what it had been about. The road would be faster than taking the horses over the hummocks and pits of the fields. We would also be in the open. They were betting on speed now.

The attack came as we rounded a bend. Hoarse shouts from Rayfe’s forward scouts warned us in time for him to wheel about and plunge us into a copse of trees. To my astonishment, the men around us suddenly melted away. No, that was a trick of the light. They disappeared and became something else.

Here a hawk burst from the saddle. There three wolfhounds leapt from their mounts and charged down the road. The horses themselves became the ratlike beings I’d seen back at Ordnung, swarming after the larger beasts. Behind me a bear roared a challenge but stayed close on our heels. Watching them shift from one being to another gave me a spinning sense of falling, as if I’d lost contact with all reality. Though I saw it happen, I couldn’t quite make sense of it.

“Moranu!” I gasped.

“Surely this is not a surprise to you.” Rayfe’s voice was tight, nearly angry, as we plunged through the bracken. I clenched my knees tight to keep to the saddle.

“It’s one thing”—I lost the words when the stallion leapt over a log—“to have an idea. Another to see it.”

“Get used to it, my queen.” He punched the words at me and I didn’t reply. Even if I could have. His arm gripped my waist so tightly I could barely breathe, much less speak. I wondered if he thought I’d scream. Then I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me to do so.

The clash of swords, an angry howl, human shouts, echoed down from the road. Rayfe took us away in a direct perpendicular, but ahead the trees thinned again, opening into yet another field. He turned us, staying inside the wooded border, going too fast through narrow openings and deep bracken. Faster than I would have gone, but then, apparently the horse was smarter than I’d known.

“Let me talk to them,” I told him when a tangle of fallen trees forced us to slow.

He growled, like the wolf. If he hadn’t still felt like a man pressed against my back, I would have wondered what form he wore.

“I mean it, Rayfe. I can tell them of the treaty. They must not know that we are in alliance now. If I tell them to desist, they will.”

“You think to escape me.”

I gasped at the injustice of his accusation. “I came to you willingly!”

He snarled in my ear, plunging on now that we’d escaped the fallen trees. “You came to me to stop the bloodshed, as I knew you would. Don’t think to sway me with your sweet and reasoned words.”

“Yes. I wanted to stop the bloodshed,” I gritted out, the saddle pounding at my tender inner tissues, which the man accusing me of wishing to betray him had so thoroughly pleasured and plundered. “I want to stop it now. Uorsin and Ursula simply have not yet received the news or—”

“They know, all right.”

“What?”

He changed course again, back into the deeper shadows. A crow flew ahead of us, I now saw, flitting from tree to tree. Marking our path. The clatter of combat echoed behind and to the left. Soon we would reach the road again. I would lose my chance to explain.

“What do you mean they know?”

“Uorsin received our missive and denied your request for the release of the Tala prisoners. He declared his intent to burn one alive each day until you are returned to him. We are as at war as ever.”

The news hit me like a cold fist in my throat. My father, my King, had made me foresworn. Oath breaker. And Fiona—she was likely already dead. Her beautiful alabaster coat turned to charcoal. Though I rarely prayed, I sent a fervent wish to Moranu to give a thought for the mare, perhaps take Fiona under her wing. Surely a goddess needed a good horse.

I didn’t weep for her. Perhaps I’d run out of tears. Or the frozen tightness in my throat that wouldn’t let me breathe, wouldn’t let me think, stopped everything else. Numb, I simply clung to the saddle, baggage to be transported over the border. If it worked.

. . . cannot afford to have our people pinned against the border if she fails . . .

An overwhelming urge to break away from Rayfe seized me. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to run to my people—ones who didn’t nauseously become something
else
—and beg them to rescue me, to take me home. There, no one expected anything of me, except that I disappear. My many failures to distinguish myself mattered to none.

Rayfe said nothing more, but his viselike hold on me suggested he knew the direction of my thoughts. The speed of our travel prohibited conversation, especially as we reached the road again.

One by one, the men caught up with us, riding the horses that I knew now weren’t truly horses. A couple remained as wolfhounds, loping easily alongside. They must have lost their mounts. Terin arrived last, glancing at me with a hard stare, then holding up three fingers, then five, to Rayfe. Three men lost, I guessed, and five of the ratlike creatures.

The rising sun glittered in the turning leaves now, rust and gold against a brightening blue sky. Our party blew past a farmer towing a cartload of vegetables to market, the only astonished witness to my passing out of Mohraya and into the land of nightmares.

I think, when you’re a child and you see maps, you get this idea that there will be something to show the boundaries. Oh, you realize there won’t be a big black or red line on the ground, but you imagine things will look different, like passing from one room into the next. Here is the place of one kind of people. Here is the place of another. As you grow older, you know that going from one place to another doesn’t give you any particular feeling. There is no actual barrier.

This is not true of Annfwn.

We’d long since turned off the road again—not long after the farmer—and moved through denser forests and wilderness, deeply shadowed enough that the growing day did little to illuminate it. Eventually we came to a craggy path that wound up the mountain range Rayfe had pointed out to me half a day and ages ago. Had I felt like I understood him at that moment? I could hardly recall it now.

This hardly seemed the way into another kingdom, but I knew Ursula would appreciate the strategic value. No one could bring armed forces in here very quickly. On either side of the path—hardly more than a goat trail in places, which forced us to go single file—the rocks rose steep and sharply tumbled. Snow pooled in deep fissures. With every hour that passed, the air grew thinner and colder.

My eyes grew gritty from unshed tears and being awake too long. More, I dreaded the trial to come. I had no idea what I was doing. All I had were Rayfe’s vague guarantees that I possessed some sort of innate magic—which had never seen fit to present itself to me in all my life—and the unsettling changes in the way I felt. I seemed doomed to fail.

What would become of me then?

We came to a place where the path widened enough for three to ride abreast, flanked by enormous boulders. An icy wind roared through the narrow opening.

“Odfell’s Pass.” Rayfe broke our hours of silence. “We’re nearly there.”

The path abruptly dropped after that, and we rounded a bend. I lost my breath at the sight.

Waiting in the cold, wrapped in layers of furs, were thousands of Tala, all in human form. They stretched into the forest and down the ravines on either side. Countless sets of fierce blue eyes focused on me, their expectation strong in the air. They ranged along the border, which seemed to sparkle in the air.

My blood sang with it, a low hum of recognition. Even if I didn’t have that, or the abrupt line where the crowded people ended and open land began, the other side made it clear. Where we stood in frozen, high-mountain early winter, the land beyond appeared to be in the bloom of late summer.

Verdant trees spread enormous leaves to the setting sun. The forest floor, velvety moss studded with jewel-like blossoms, became a great meadow, waving with tall emerald grasses.

“You can see it?” Rayfe asked in my ear, squeezing my waist when I nodded. “She can see!” he shouted, relief and triumph in his voice. The Tala cheered, a cautious rumble of approval.

“Simply seeing isn’t enough.” Terin pulled up beside us, looking grim. “No more delay. We have to know if this reckless plan was worth it.”

“We will, Terin,” Rayfe growled at him. “Give her a thrice-damned moment to adjust.”

“We are out of moments,” Terin snapped. “Look, King! Your people are trapped outside their homeland. Fix what you’ve done.”

Just then, a flock of black starling birds with blue eyes arrowed through the shimmering wall and passed through with no trouble. A few soldiers tried the wall, pressing their hands against it, to no avail.

“It’s not working.” Terin sounded bleak now. “We are doomed.”

“Just—” Rayfe ground his jaw, the sound cracking in my ear. “Back off, Terin. That’s an order.” Urging the stallion forward, he shot us up to where the trail ended at the wall, halted, and handed me down to the ground, then jumped down beside me. Absurdly, I clung to him for reassurance, though he had brought me to this moment.

“Give us some room.” Rayfe’s tension carried and the pressing crowd backed off. He cupped my face in his gloved hands, dark-blue eyes intent. “This is in you, Andromeda. Just follow your instincts. Trust in that.”

“I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do. Why is it important that I can see through the barrier?”

“To people who can’t pass through, the wall reflects this side. It looks like more of the same to them.”

“So seeing is important, but not necessarily enough.”

“Yes. Some can see but not pass—it depends on their blood, their parentage.”

“Why can the birds fly through, but the people are trapped outside?”

“Animals can always pass. The people you see are Tala who cannot fully shape-shift, for whatever reason. They cannot cross without help. Your help.”

“Have you ever shape-shifted, Princess?” Terin, calling out from a short distance away.

“You know full well she hasn’t,” Rayfe answered for me, eyes not leaving my face. “Ignore him. You and I know you have the mark. We saw it together, remember? Trust in that.”

“What do I do?” The birds in my blood came back full force, singing with the hum of the barrier, pricking me with their hopes and demands like the many desperate eyes focused on me.

“First, just walk across.”

“To make sure I can.”

“To demonstrate that you can.” His thumbs caressed my cheekbones. “I believe in you.”

It didn’t help to hear that. Of course he believed in me—he’d asked all these warriors to leave Annfwn, to fight the armies of the Twelve Kingdoms for me, with the guarantee that I’d bring them back in. What would they do if I failed?

I’d never performed well under pressure, and this . . .

I wished profoundly that I’d never gone to the meadow. That I’d stayed inside my circumscribed boundaries, stayed invisible Andi, the space between my sisters.

I pulled on that old self, shrouding myself in that comforting sense of invisibility. Unseen, I walked up to the shimmering curtain, enticing summer just beyond.
I’m not really here
, I told it.
Don’t mind me
.

And I stepped through.

It was like passing through a curtain—one made of sparks that zinged invisibly along my skin. The wind stopped and I was in Annfwn.

Every drop of my mother’s blood in me knew it.

For maybe the first time in my entire life, I felt right in my flesh.