Elegy in Red

Eight

Chapter 8

 If reptiles had a human form, Ari imagined Jin would be the perfect embodiment of one such species: self-sufficient in many ways, but spoiled and careless in others, he seemed to feed on human emotions like a carnivore would lunge at a freshly killed carcass. It was interesting to try to figure out how his mind worked. He shed his skin upon convenience but never quite bothered to hide the venom stored in his teeth, evidently enjoying the debilitating, clammy terror his presence alone ignited in people’s hearts. And he was very much not afraid – of anything, as far as Ari was able to tell. Where Ari’s own bravery came stoic and fortified by the gravestones of everything he’d been through, with Jin any attempt to find even the most remote semblance of such emotion rang hollow. The nobleman just didn’t seem capable of the most basic feelings, though whether that was a gift or a curse, it was ultimately impossible to say. So far Ari had only spent a few night playing chess with his master, had talked and occasionally even argued with him; but Jin was a wall. He was an unpredictable, isolated entity, and the things he said could just as well be lies, evasive fairytales that bred no conclusion.

So Ari let things be for now. He explored the areas around the palace to fill up his free time, deriving crumbs and bits of joy from this fruitless scavenging where nothing else seemed to bring him any. Jin’s home had been erected virtually on the borderline between Myth and the place where forests, hills and wilderness began. It felt like the end of the world, just step off the edge where everything would be tumbling down into an abyss, and yet there was something oddly peaceful about this isolation.

It only took a week of wandering about before Ari had a radius of a few acres mapped inside his head, terrain, soil, growth and all, the unwanted knowledge perpetually amassing among the debris of other memories. A few minutes’ walk separated the palace from an old wooden bridge than hung over a powerful mountain river. The water cascaded into an enormous waterfall just a little down from the section where the bridge hung, but if one crossed over to the other side and followed up against the direction of the current, some half an hour later they emerged on the bank of a lake (Balfour had called it The Eye), the waters from which were partially responsible for the wild river flow. It wasn’t long before Ari was off climbing up the hills to swim in the lake every other day or so – the experience was especially pleasant in the hotter afternoons, when the summer heat became too unbearable and the need to clear his head and vanish for a little while drove him out of the clutches of his new home and his new master.

Swimming didn’t always help.

Lumbering and tedious, the days went by. Ari’s searches were starting to feel more and more futile with every hour spent in vain and every defeat that shooed him out of yet another dusty room, flustered, incredulous and enraged. His world had been reduced to a flat standstill, and in that standstill, he understood perfectly that he was being observed like a flawed and surrealistic painting. It took him a while to decide that he needed to watch back – and that, if he didn’t make the effort, the slippery plane on which he was already tiptoeing, would crack beneath his feet like thin ice.

This wasn’t a game he could win by not participating at all.

Jin didn’t have any strict habits or an established routine; one day he would spend locked up in his room, unable to deal with anyone, and other times he would be under everybody’s feet, lurking like a bored child that craved attention but didn’t know how to ask. With time some oddities began to become more pronounced, emerging with incredible difficulty and only when Ari knowing them would do the boy little to no good. Hunting was one of the few regular things that happened to stand out. For someone who made a grand show of being in control of himself, there were times when Jin came across as almost wild. He seemed to like chasing game, but where most people of his status would make some spectacular event of an outing, accompanied with hounds, and noise and other people like himself, Jin slinked into the woods alone and without a horse, carrying his bow and arrows on his back, only to come back late in the afternoon covered in dirt, blood and branches, towing along a string of birds or some other animal that he’d ended up killing.