5000
They crested a hill, and the city was laid wide and bright before them, like the Glorious world’s first sunrise. Like an open, unread tome.
“So,” Brontus uttered, edging his way past Eldor, who had somehow ended up at the forefront of the company, “this is Daerion.”
He still had his arm about Lincia’s shoulder, as he had throughout much of the journey, if not all the while. His forearm to her felt like deadweight. It had been a long journey. Having left just past daybreak, they now arrived well after noon.
The hour of day was perfect to illuminate the vista spread before them. The sun smiled down on the city’s high spires and smooth marble surfaces as if on its own children. Even the shadows that it cast seemed somehow full of light. The city was sumptuous, regal, its every building borderline palatial—and yet it was modest. As if by some impossible magic, it was modest, no less so than the small neighboring village from which this company had just come.
This company comprised Eldor and Garendor, Lincia and Brontus, and a fraction of the army of Zoll Zorans. The bulk of the army remained at the Dorothan shore.
Those soldiers who had come were now faced with a sight much unlike anything they’d ever dreamt. The jet, onyx, and iron of Zoll Zora were here recast all in lustrous white, silver, and gold. Eldor alone felt that he mayhap had dreamt this vision once before. But that dream was a far distant one, suppressed by years of darkness in the shadow of the king. He smiled deeply now to see that vision, that dream, reawakened, and this time rendered a reality.
Daerion was of no interest to Lincia. It was not any different from her village after all, not in any meaningful way. She rather fixed her eyes on Eldor—looking slightly behind her and over her shoulder, over the knuckles of Brontus’s hand, which there lay—and saw his ebon eyes afire with new light. The same firelight that she could feel kindling in hers whenever she gazed upon him.
Close near Eldor’s side, Claron stood breathless and wordless, his own walnut eyes alight with a similar fire. The walnuts roasted in the fire and cracked beneath the beautiful, blinding sight.
A pool of unshed tears welled in the eyes of pale, beautiful Osus.
None of them dared breathe a word, not just yet. But their eyes were silently eloquent, and just as legible as open tomes. The unread story illustrated in the city sprawled before them was now mirrored in a multitude of wide, Zoll Zoran eyes.
Not all of their eyes, though, were affected in this way.
Garendor for one looked on with eyes unfazed. A quick crack may have formed in the sheet of blue ice, but if ever there, it quickly froze over.
He drew up abreast of Lincia—obstructing her view of Eldor—and scanned the land with his refrozen glare. He smirked, almost scowled. “I suppose everyone is in charge here as well?”
“I am sure,” she affirmed, the sardonic punch sailing straight over her head.
“I will take you to my uncle’s house,” Brontus announced to the immobile crowd behind him, beginning promptly down the hillside.
The others followed as he led them away from the direction of the shimmering city center, his path hugging the Glorian shoreline. The men descended the shallow grassy hill and soon found themselves walking along a long beach. It was difficult, for them, to tell just where the hill had ended and the beach begun—everything here melted into itself, the Glorious sun overhead suffusing everything with otherworldly mystery and light.
The sands of the Daerian coast were much softer and finer than those upon the pebbled beach of Doroth. Beneath the foreigners’ shod feet, these sands swelled and sank, sifting endlessly into each other, undulating as if to the rhythm of the waves.
Just past a set of towering palms, they could soon see walls and terraces of gleaming white. In the shifting, dappled shade of the high swaying palm fronds, the pale gleam was like that of a great secret pearl sparkling in and then out of existence. It may as well have just been a mirage.
But those marble walls were solid. Real and solid, Eldor discerned as they drew ever nearer.
They soon were nearly at its doorstep. Close enough that those at the front of the company stood now in the shade of the great marble villa. Its shadow, too, was real and solid. But nonetheless a shadow full of light, like everything in Daerion.
Eldor found his eyes pulled heavenward. They lifted unbidden, alighting on hers.
Even from this distance, he could see that they were blue; theirs was a blue as deep, nearly as dark, as the black of his own. There was an ocean there. On that ocean’s horizon, an infinite world. Even from this distance, there was no distance. From where he stood upon the sands, to where she stood at her terrace two stories above, in that distance so small and so great, there lay two stories begging to be written into one.
He felt more things in that one moment than he’d felt in all his life.
Lincia turned, sensing straightaway that Eldor had fallen a few steps behind. She saw his upturned face, the direction and depth of his gaze—and that was enough. She already knew that that was a gaze she would not want to follow. She instead turned her face forward again and just followed Brontus, whose arm upon her shoulder would not have it any other way besides.
Leara’s head, crowned by the high sun as though by a halo, presently vanished. Eldor blinked twice at the sunspot she’d left in her wake.
Leara had meanwhile rushed inside and was now sailing down the stairs. The magnet of that ebon gaze had threatened to pull her tumbling from the terrace to the sands. It had taken every ounce of her to tear herself away from it. Surely he would have caught her if she had so fallen, or leapt, Leara mused. Those arms seemed strong enough to uphold entire worlds! But that would have been most ungraceful, she reminded herself as she careened down the marble stair toward the ground floor. And much too poetic. Too much out of a storybook. This, whatever this was, was too real to be out of a storybook.
Brontus and Lincia, by this point several paces ahead, approached the great ground level entranceway.
Gorovan soon emerged, glad to greet this familiar face he’d not seen in a while. No ties of true kinship bound him to this boy, but he loved him like a blood-related nephew nonetheless.
Crusea had come from a humble lettuce farm in Doroth. She and her family had moved to Daerion years ago, all save her eldest sister, who’d remained behind in Doroth with her husband to keep to the family farm. Brontus had been born on that farm soon afterward, shortly before Crusea’s death in Daerion. He had never known his aunt. But he had her gentle cheekbones, and the same pattern of faint freckles was scattered across the low bridge of his nose.
Gorovan saw in Brontus relics of the wife he’d lost—the wife he always felt he’d loved too weakly. Those relics were a painful reminder, but each freckle also offered a twisted promise of vicarious redemption. What love he’d failed to give Crusea in her lifetime, he hoped to give now through the freckles on her nephew’s nose.
“Uncle,” Brontus greeted him as Gorovan clapped him into a warm and welcoming embrace. “I’ve brought guests.”
Gorovan smiled at Lincia, but the smile sank to stone when he saw past her shoulder.
The glint of sable armor. Unmistakable, unforgiving. It was a darkness on which he’d hoped to never lay his eyes again.
“So you have,” he dismally concurred.
Gorovan looked out upon the dark-clad soldiers massed behind his nephew. From the front of his house, a trail of them littered the pale beach like bright black beetles. Gorovan counted out threescore, at least, though less than a hundred.
“Is this all of them?” he wondered aloud through the stone in his throat.
“There are a fair many more harbored by Doroth,” Brontus replied.
Gorovan wanted to speak; he wanted to utter a word that would send the beetles zipping across the sea, back whence they’d come. But there was no such word, and so he could not speak.
“Father, we’ve—” Caliphria began as she came now to join her father, Kevriel in tow.
Her thought was cut short and fell from her mind. The smile upon her face, already bright and breathless, livened into a beam at the sight of the great throng of visitors.
“…We’ve guests!” she exclaimed, grinning exuberantly as she threw her arms around Brontus, all the while looking over his shoulder at the mass of men who stood behind him. “Dear cousin! It’s been too long—how goes it in Doroth? These must be… friends of yours…”
Brontus faintly grimaced. He detested that label. “Fast friends, then,” he returned wryly. “They only just arrived yesterday, from the city across the sea.”
Caliphria’s eyes, at these words, were as wide as the sky. She’d so long longed to see the world beyond those shores, and a contingent of that world had now been brought straight to her doorstep. “Across the sea! Father, we must have them to dinner.”
Gorovan smiled in mute assent. He tried and failed to mirror his daughter’s excitement, if only to hide the fear that racked his fast-hammering heart. “And where is your mother?” he asked, turning to Kevriel.
“Still at market,” Kevriel replied.
“In best hopes buying heaps of food, for we’ve many extra mouths to feed tonight!” Caliphria trilled. She exchanged courteous, quick introductions with Lincia, then eagerly hurried past her to greet the horde of foreigners lined up along the beach.
A series of blurred introductions ensued. Brontus meanwhile introduced Lincia to his uncle, and Lincia took Eldor proudly by the elbow to introduce him to Gorovan in turn. Gorovan shuddered beneath those deep, dark eyes. He recognized those eyes too well. They were set in quite a different face this time, but that foreign and fathomless gaze was the same.
Then again, it was completely different. This man was so like Xor, and yet so different.
But Gorovan dismissed that difference as illusion. This prince could not be any different, truly, from the first Zoll Zoran royal he had met those years ago. If Gorovan found himself seduced, again, by the spark of promised virtue in a stranger’s eyes—if he let himself believe that this breed of men could ever earn his trust again—then he would once again fall victim to the doom of that seduced and stupid trust.
He would never again let that happen. Never again would he allow such dark doom to befall those he loved. His own auburn eyes he turned into walls of impervious brick, and around his hot heart he erected a cold, solid stronghold of stone.
Garendor, in the meantime, was focused elsewhere. There was only one Daerian whose acquaintance he had any interest in making.
“My lady,” he broke in as he stole up to her.
Leara turned, slightly startled, her trance interrupted. From in the shadow of this column, she had thought to go unseen awhile as she looked upon the deep-eyed stranger. This shallow-eyed man, stepping in, had obstructed her view.
“My lady,” he repeated. “Forgive our… unexpected intrusion.”
She looked at him a moment. His eyes were shallow, yes, but troubled depths lurked somewhere underneath that coat of ice. Her lips upturned into a subtle smile. “Nothing to forgive.”
His own lips straightened into an ungainly grin.
He then lowered his head in obeisance as he introduced himself. “Garendor, prince of Zoll Zora, high general of the imperial army.”
When he lifted up his head again, he found that she looked not at all impressed.
“Then you are the leader of these men?” Leara asked, nodding past him toward the great crowd of soldiers, with whom Caliphria and Kevriel were busy becoming acquainted.
Garendor blinked clumsily, then cleared his throat. This woman was clearly unimpressed by high Zoll Zoran rank—perhaps, he thought, she would prefer to hear of Glorian equality. “Well, we…” he stammered, “…we are all as brothers, so… so among us… everyone is in charge.”
She arched her pretty brows in disbelief.
Garendor cursed at himself, not as inaudibly as intended. Everyone in charge! It had been a stupid thing, when that Dorothan girl had said it; surely it had sounded even stupider from him, and much more obviously spurious. “Apologies, my lady,” he uttered, redirecting the subject and bowing his head once again. “I have not greeted you properly, nor asked your name.”
He presently and thoughtlessly took up her small right hand in his, and bent to kiss it.
“You would kiss my hand?” she responded, her blue eyes amused.
Garendor paused, her rounded foreknuckle mere inches from his pursed and parted lips. He raised his face reluctantly away. “Is that not… customary here?”
Her lips upturned into another of her subtle, winsome smiles.
“Ah, Leara,” Gorovan interjected as he approached. “I see you’ve met the leader.”
Leara cast a quizzical glance at Garendor, who promptly lowered his eyes and let go of her hand, his own hand returning limply to his side like a defeated trout. “Not quite the leader, sir.”
“But are you not the high commander of these warriors?” Gorovan queried, having been informed as much.
“I am,” Garendor attested, “but my brother…”
“Well, and here he is,” Gorovan declared as Eldor strode silently toward them. “I had hoped to speak with both of you. Leara, would you go join your mother at market, and let her know that we’ve some visitors?”
Leara and Eldor both were elsewhere at the moment, caught up in a spell of mutual magnetic pull. She once again was forced to tear herself away from it. “Happily,” she agreed, her heartstrings tense as strained elastic as she slipped away.
Three pairs of eyes momentarily trailed after her.
“She is your daughter?” Garendor asked.
“No,” Gorovan denied, “though I cherish her, closely, as if she were my own.”
“Then her father…” Garendor began to venture.
“Is away,” Gorovan rejoined. “But let us speak, my dear guests, of your father. The king of Zoll Zora. You are his only two sons?”
Eldor affirmed.
“One of you, then, must be first in line to the throne,” Gorovan gathered.
Garendor indicated his brother with a grimacing nod, begrudging the answer.
Gorovan easily gauged the tension between these two brothers. He considered them for a moment. They were each, in their own way, so like and yet so unlike their father. “I understand that Zoll Zora is a great empire. The king must be a great and powerful man,” he surmised.
“He is very powerful,” Eldor answered.
Gorovan paused briefly with an indrawn gulp of air. “Why has he sent you here?” he asked. A sudden urgency had sprung into his voice, and Eldor saw a pang of terror lurking behind those ostensibly calm brick-brown eyes.
“He believed that there was land beyond the sea,” Eldor replied.
“And what does he mean to do? With this land?”
“I assure you, my good man,” Garendor put in, laying a heavy hand on Gorovan’s sturdy but tremulous shoulder, “you’ve nothing to fear. We come in peace and friendship. We are good men, just like you.”
Gorovan smiled. But it was the weakest, meekest, and most terrified smile that either prince had ever seen. Caliphria was currently calling her father over, and so he excused himself.
For him, that promise of peace and friendship—that claim to goodness, and humanity—that was what sealed his family and his country’s doom more surely and more hopelessly than anything.
Eldor took his younger brother by the scruff of his hauberk and pushed him up against the column at hand, the same column behind which he had earlier seen Leara watching him. The shade of the column was adequate, this time, to keep the two brothers out of sight from everyone else.
“I wonder if she is a virgin,” Garendor mused below his breath.
Eldor ignored this wanton comment on the beauteous Daerian to whom he and his brother both were drawn. “Nothing to fear?” he echoed indignantly, the abyss in his ebon eyes roiling with outrage, his fury well contained but nonetheless irate. “Have you not sworn to raze this continent to the ground?”
“I have so sworn. As have you.”
“I made no such promise.”
“Your very birthright, Eldor, is a promise,” Garendor spat. “A promise to your empire and your king. A king whose throne will soon be yours.”
“My birthright is not a promise. It is a curse.”
“Perhaps, then, I ought to take it from you.”
“I would give it to you, brother, were it mine to give,” Eldor vowed, his dark eyes wishfully earnest. Even if the throne would soon be his, he knew that his birthright was not his to place on another man’s shoulders. Even if he were to renounce his future kingship, it would be up to the present king to decide who would inherit it instead. And Eldor was sure that Xor would sooner bequeath the crown to very many other lords than to his own second-born son, the low prince.
And yet, Eldor thought, as much as he spurned and detested this birthright of his, as much as he wished he could pass it instead to his brother, he also realized that that birthright promised power. He did not want this power—and yet, to have that worldly power in his hands would be the best and only way that he might save this Glorious, otherworldly place. Perhaps this birthright was a burden that he would do well to shoulder after all. His mother had reminded him as much, before he had set sail; the power that he spurned would be better placed in his hands than anywhere else.
He lowered his hand from Garendor’s collar, but his gaze he did not lower, instead keeping it fixed on those pale ice-cast pools.
Garendor stared down his brother in turn, unwilling to be the first to break this contest of mutual glares. Always, his brother won. At every contest, no matter how small. Or how great. “Don’t claim brotherhood with me,” he growled.
“Then you, brother,” Eldor spat the word as if it, too, were a curse—but this accursed brotherhood was a burden that he would not shirk, another burden that he knew he ought to shoulder, “don’t claim peace and friendship toward a man whose home you have come to destroy.”
Garendor smoldered as he heaved a few deep, snarling breaths.
The buried flames beneath those ice-cast pools then began suddenly to flicker more hotly and more violently as he leered at his brother, a roguish smile spreading across his face. “I would destroy that man’s home in more ways than one,” he avowed, eyes ablaze, the sheets of ice threatening nearly to crack, or to melt, from the fire. “The only thing sweeter than victim blood upon my sword is virgin blood upon my sheets.”
Those were words that Eldor refused to acknowledge. With one last seething glower at his brother, he turned upon his heel to leave.
He began away, about to turn the corner of the villa, heading inland.
“Eldor!”
He came to a slow halt and turned his head.
Lincia could not so much as breathe his name without a ravished smile encompassing her face, a lambent glow illumining her wide green eyes. “Where are you going?” she inquired as she hastened up to him.
“I want to see the city,” he proclaimed.
She was near his side now, near enough to see that beautifully rendered reflection of her own face in his eyes. She started her tongue, about to ask whether she might accompany him—but that tongue shortly held itself back. The glow in her eye flickered visibly, a candle shivering in the sharp intake of breath just before it blows out.
Lincia remembered what she’d seen just moments ago, those ebon eyes raised heavenward, far away from her, illumined like sunlit new moons. She reminded herself that love, like vended lettuce, was not always a welcome thing. She could not let herself forget that, not now, now that she knew her love was doomed to be more unwelcome and more unreturned than ever.
Eldor drew up to her carefully, and swept a stray russet tress from her cheek as he smiled. “I won’t be gone long,” he assured her.
He turned quietly and continued on his way, inland from the beachside villa and towards the heart of Daerion.
He moved throughout the city as if through a waking dream. The sight that had looked wondrous from the vantage point atop the hill struck even deeper wonder in him as he wended through its streets. The very sun seemed to inhabit this place, emanating from the city center rather than simply glinting off of its bright surfaces.
As had been the case in Doroth, what struck him most profoundly was the radiance of the gladsome, smiling passersby. Even those with seemingly straight faces were really just smiling invisibly. In all his many days spent in Zoll Zora, he had never seen so many smiles as he now saw in this single hour walking the Daerian streets.
The air here tasted sweeter, the clouds soared higher, and the thrum of life resounded like a ubiquitous drum in every footfall, in each peal of laughter, in the cadence of the city’s collective heart. Not even the alien sight of Eldor’s dark, daunting armor disturbed the peace of that collective heart, the radiance of that one collective smile. No one so much as cast him a curious glance.
Eldor was overwhelmed, but he felt more at home than ever in this foreign place.
He then felt a small forefinger prodding his leg, and turned to see a young girl at his side and gazing up at him. Her cheeks were like apricots, and the chestnut curls framing her beaming face danced as she spoke. “You look different.”
He beamed right back at her. “Ah, this thing? You are right,” he agreed, gesturing toward his armor and beginning to remove it. “I look ridiculous in these clothes.”
Her bright gaze did not move from his face, did not blink as he took off his breastplate and hauberk and cast them to the ground. Her smile widened a little. “You still look different. I wasn’t talking about your clothes.”
“Well, they were very ugly clothes. I’m glad to be rid of them.”
The young girl took up the sable breastplate from where it lay beside her feet. “May I try it on? Your shirt.”
“It is a bit big for you,” Eldor answered, laughing lightly through his smile. “But I’m sure you would look very pretty in it, like a warrior princess.” He helped her don the dark, unwieldy armor.
“What is a warrior princess?” she asked, her head poking out like a budding spring flower from black metal topsoil.
“A princess who is also a warrior.”
“But there’s no such thing as warriors and princesses, silly,” she giggled, her rounded nose wrinkling into a lighthearted simper. “Wars and royal families and terrible things like that are only in the storybooks. And I don’t like those kinds of stories, anyhow. Everyone else finds them exciting in some horrifying way, but they just make me sad.”
Eldor smoothed her bright brown ringlets, which were rumpled from the armor into which she had just slipped. “Well,” he spoke. “If you don’t like the world of warriors and princesses, then you are a very lucky girl.”
“Lucky?”
“Lucky to live in a place without wars and royal families and terrible things.”
“But of course I live in a place without those things! Because they don’t exist anywhere, silly,” she asserted. She regarded him with fond amusement for a moment. “Do you have a name?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Friends must know each other’s names. Mine is Noria,” she announced.
“Eldor,” he replied, extending his hand to shake hers in greeting.
She looked bemusedly at his hand and did not take it. “Eldor,” she echoed, instead raising up her forefinger to playfully poke his nose. “You are a funny man, Eldor. I like you.”
He was taken aback for one brief moment, but realized quickly that as a ceremony of greeting, a nose-poke was no less absurd than a handshake.
“Do you want your shirt back?” Noria asked him.
“I don’t like that shirt very much, but I may need it later.”
“Well, I want to keep it,” she declared. Her eyes flashed with impish, sweet humor as she started to scamper away.
“You can keep it if you like!” he called laughingly after her.
“Chase me!” she called back to him.
He mirthfully obliged, trotting after her at a small fraction of his fastest pace. She scurried ahead of him, darting in and out among the legs of passing Daerians, who smiled to witness this frolicsome game of chase. Not a one of them doubted for a moment that the chase was all in good humor; not a single one frowned at the unfamiliar stranger, or at the young girl’s strange and sinister costume.
“How fast you run!” Eldor remarked. He kept a steady eye on the bouncing chestnut mop ahead of him, while also keeping enough distance between them so as to make his claim believable.
The mop of curls vanished as the girl slipped stealthily onto a side street. Eldor was held up for a moment at an intersection of two wide avenues, caught between a knot of passing children and a barrow of apples being leisurely wheeled by. Once past this gridlock, he hurried ahead and turned onto the street down which he had seen Noria disappear.
He stopped short as he rounded the corner—though he found his heart tugged to continue lurching headlong forward.
“This is my dear friend Leara,” Noria declared, from where she sat scooped up in her friend’s slender arms. “Leara, this is Eldor. He’s my friend, too, and I’m wearing his shirt. Do I look pretty in it?”
Leara’s wide blue gaze was locked on Eldor as she smilingly replied. “Beautiful.”
“It’s very hard, and very heavy,” Noria complained of her new outfit. “But I like it. And he said that I could keep it.”
“I did,” Eldor affirmed as he took two slow steps toward them, not yet daring to venture any closer, lest those dark blues draw him into their bright depths and drown him.
Noria bit her rosy lower lip, her vibrant gaze flashing from Eldor’s face to Leara’s, then back again. “Well, then, I’m going home to show Mama. And you—” she pressed her parted lips to Leara’s ear and murmured a hushed whisper.
She then promptly descended from Leara’s arms, suppressing her laughter behind a wide grin. “Thank you, Eldor, for your funny shirt. I’m very glad I met you.”
He sat on his heels, lowering his face to her eye level, returning her smile and gently poking her nose. “As am I. I hope I will see you again?”
“Hopefully. And you know…” she paused and peered at him through playfully squinted eyes, biting her lip again in rumination, “…you don’t look so different anymore.”
She beamed at him, bidding both her friends farewell as she bounded away.
Eldor stood as he turned to watch Noria go, then faced forward again to drown in that gravid blue sea.
A soft smile tugged at the corner of Leara’s upper lip. “I think you still look very different.”
He dared now to take another two steps forward, edging closer, his own smile just as soft, just as magnetic. “Different from what?”
Her smile softened further, and deepened, along with her eyes, in answer to his. “From anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Then show me everything you’ve seen,” he breathed, drawing yet closer, then catching himself with a lowered eye, a slight bow of the head. “If you would please, my lady. I would like to see the city.”
She wished he’d raise those eyes again!
At the behest of that unspoken wish, he raised them.
Her hand moved from her side and grasped his. Firmly, gently; slowly, suddenly. Calmly, yet at the command of a fast-pounding heart.
She showed him the city. She kept his hand in hers to lead him, guide him as they ambled all throughout the city streets, though all the while she felt that he was pulling, leading, guiding her.
They spoke, as they wandered, about many things. About a great many more things, they were silent.
“Noria likes you very much,” Leara told him as they toured through the market. “She is rarely so quick to call someone a friend.”
“In a city like this, filled with people so constantly smiling and warm, it seems hard to be anything other than friends. Especially with a girl as sweet as Noria. I do think,” he uttered, “that she captured my heart the moment I laid eyes on her.”
His eyes, at this moment, were of course laid on Leara.
She felt that gaze, and met it for the first, the tenth, the thousandth time. “Has not all of Daerion captured your heart?”
He smiled in confirmation. From behind the fruit stall by which they were presently passing, an eager vendor proffered a ripe roseate peach, pushing it gladly and gratuitously into Eldor’s palm. He welcomed and accepted it with grateful, silent laughter, a laugh of wondering alarm and admiration for this place that was so much unlike his home across the sea. “The more I see of this city, the more I grow to love it. To wish it were my home.”
He held the fruit up to Leara’s lips—close enough to evince the fast-formed, familiar intimacy between them, but far enough to respect whatever boundaries remained.
She did not want any boundaries. She did not even want respect. Not now, at least. For now, she wanted something more, and something else entirely.
She arched her neck slightly forward to press her parted lips against the peach, the downy pink brushing her tongue as she bit into it, gingerly but boldly, softly but swiftly, tamely despite adeep, torrid thirst. “Well,” she uttered, smiling, once she’d swallowed down the sweet and tender flesh, watching him as he took his own bite of the ripe fruit in turn. “They say that home is where the heart is.”
“Do they, truly? I wish I could believe it. The only home that I have known is a heartless place,” he claimed as he chewed down his first bite, offering Leara a second.
She wagged her head, politely declining, much preferring to watch him work his mouth upon that fruit than to take it in her own. He was all too conscious of her ardent gaze upon him as he did so, and that thrilled him more hotly than he’d have imagined.
He would have liked to watch her eat the fruit, of course. But if she’d rather have it this way, he was happy to oblige. Whatever she wanted, howsoever she would have it. As she willed it.
“Zoll Zora?” Leara asked.
He looked curiously at her, his tongue stopped for the moment with a mouthful of peach.
“Your brother mentioned it to me. He claimed to be its prince,” she explained.
Eldor smiled humorlessly. “That he is. A prince of Zoll Zora, through and through.”
“And yourself?”
The peach, perfectly ripe as it was, was positively dripping down his palm. He caught up a particularly low-fallen drop of its nectar with the tip of his tongue. “The title is mine. The throne will soon be mine as well. But truth be told, I spurn these things.”
“Your brother spoke in earnest, then? You truly come from a place of kings and princes?”
He nodded gravely. The peach was so sweet, and she so much sweeter—he wished that, in the midst of these things, he did not have to speak of something so unsavory as Zoll Zora. “An accursed place. A place where blood is spilt and war is waged every second of every sad, dark day.”
Eldor saw, then, that the color had drained somewhat from the sweet face beside him. Those soft lips were flat and unsmiling, the eyes rather dimmed. It was a dark and heavy truth, for her, that he had just attested. Surely much harder to process than those things that had heretofore occupied her in this past hour—a heart full of passion, a handful of held hand, a mouthful of fruit.
The peach was at its end; the core, with clinging scraps of flesh, was wet and naked in his palm. They had by this point made their way past the market, a ways away from the city center. The land here was unpaved and largely untrodden. The passersby were here replaced with silent trees. He tossed the bare pit to the soft unmown grass, returning the seed to its womb in the earth.
“Across the sea, my lady,” he continued, turning to face her squarely and solemnly, gently tightening his grip around the soft hand that lay still in his grasp, “lies a city straight out of your saddest and most horrifying storybooks.”
He wanted her to know. She needed to know what dark truths this world harbored; she needed to know the dark place whence he’d come.
She’d grown pale, but the roseate flush swiftly returned to her cheeks as she felt his strong fingers more tightly enlacing her own. What small horror there was in her eyes receded readily beneath his earnest gaze. Those eyes of his were impossibly dark, but that darkness was not frightening at all—it was rapturous and beautiful and bright.
He spoke of dark things. But surely, and clearly, not all that was dark bespoke doom.
She dismissed all thought of doom and darkness, allowing another of her smiles to illumine and recolor her face.
“Pray tell, Eldor,” she uttered, the timbre of her voice as bright and mirthful as her smile, “in what way am I your lady?”
Eldor, for his part, had not yet returned from that dark place of serious concern. He could not understand how she’d so quickly and so easily averted the subject. His was not quite a Glorian heart; it was not so quick to buoy up and brighten, so quick to discount the prospect of doom.
“I suppose it must be customary in your country, to address women so,” Leara proceeded in response to his grim, furrowed brow, which was slowly but surely slackening. “Your brother did the same. And, abiding by these customs… I don’t think you’ve greeted me properly yet.”
His brow may have slackened as he let the pall of solemnity slip away from his heart, but he now furrowed it once again, this time in confusion. His lips, though, were lifted into a faint smile.
Leara’s own smile was much wider. She remembered the custom that Garendor had hoped to honor in properly greeting her. “So, Eldor—a kiss?” she requested, gracefully disengaging her hand from his grasp, and raising it, palm downward, toward his face. “Would you kiss my hand?”
Her hand, extended at the end of an exquisite arm, lay in the space between them as an unfinished bridge between two worlds that had yet to meet.
Eldor felt its presence there, and saw the pale, smooth surface of that hand, upraised just below the level of his collarbone—positioned just close enough for intimacy, just far enough for respect. This was a respect, this time, that Leara actually wanted, in fact craved.
But he saw the hand only from the nether periphery of his gaze, the center of which he kept focused on Leara’s. He did not lower his eyes to look upon the hand; he made no gesture to take that hand up in his own. He instead kept his eyes locked steadfastly on hers, watching the seas therein roil with undeclared yearning, a yearning that he knew was mirrored in his own.
He wanted nothing more than to press his lips upon that hand, a hand so much softer and sweeter than the fruit to which he’d laid his lips moments ago. He wanted nothing more than to pay homage to her ladyship in the most deliciously customary way.
But what was homage in his world meant nothing in hers. To become a part of that world, to ever so much as hope to become a part of that world, he knew that he must first abandon all the hollow customs of his own. A customary kiss upon the hand—that was just as absurd as a handshake. And just as empty.
Drawing nearer to her, ever so slightly nearer, he clasped her one hand in the both of his, keeping his eyes fastened on hers, completing the bridge as he began to slowly close the space between them. Some space remained yet as he gazed evenly into her sapphire eyes. He wished that space would disappear, but he did not yet dare to traverse that sweet distance himself.
“No,” he denied. “You are not my lady. You are Leara. And I would not kiss you…”
His very eyes were kissing hers as he spoke.
“…not out of mere custom. That is no reason for a kiss.”
Leara clung to his every word, tenaciously and breathlessly, like the innermost flesh of the peach to its core. “There are a million other reasons,” she whispered. “Better reasons.”
“Yes. And if I were to kiss you, Leara,” he murmured, “it would not be in the customary way.”
A smile teased the corner of his upper lip, with a tenderness that trembled, but it was a fervidly serious smile. He meant what he’d said, and that thrilled her, more hotly than she’d have imagined. What he’d said had meant so many things.
Paralyzed with something that she could not name and could not understand, she willingly melted as she froze beneath his gaze, drowning deeply therein as he drowned in hers. Blood coursed through veins like unwatered wine, throbbing hearts echoed each other in tandem, and unspoken promises pulsated with the fierceness and finesse of a series of thunderbolts released in rhythmic sequence from a tensile sky.
All in a moment. A moment that seemed, somehow, to be gravid with eternity.
“Leara?”
They both turned, abruptly lifted from the depths in which they were mutually drowning.
“Mother!” Leara exclaimed, unashamed but evidently startled.
As Anorrah looked in mild alarm upon the scene, her wide eyes glimmered with what almost looked like wistful recognition. She might have dropped the basket in her hand, but she instead found that her grip on its handle was tightening. Every fiber in her seemed in fact to tighten—though truly, these were just her heartstrings tightening on what wistful glimmer the scene before her now had sparked in her nostalgic mind. This scene was one from Anorrah’s own far distant past, a past she wished she could forget, even as she clung every day to its memory.
Somehow, she knew; this man was not wearing, at the moment, the telltale sable armor of Zoll Zora. But there was a telltale foreign beauty in the blackness of his eyes, in the visible strength of his grip around Leara’s hands, in his impossibly manly frame and face—a manliness that should have bordered on the monstrous, but was instead more heartbreakingly human than anything.
And that humanity, Anorrah knew, had worked its breaking magic over Leara’s heart.
Never before, in all her days, had she seen a sharper mirror image of herself in her daughter.
“I had thought you would be home by now,” Anorrah reflected, offsetting her onrush of smothered emotion with a shallow, simple smile.
“I was… diverted,” Leara answered. “This—this is Eldor. Eldor, this is my mother Anorrah.”
He bowed his head in greeting, but remembered not to try to shake her hand.
Anorrah returned the greeting with a slight dip of her own head, a civil widening of her smile. “Is he one of the visitors you told me about?” she asked her daughter.
Leara affirmed.
“Thank you, Anorrah, for welcoming us to your beautiful home,” Eldor expressed.
“He means the city,” Leara clarified. “He is very much in love with it.”
“Oh?” Anorrah responded with a raised brow, knowing full well the answer to the question she next asked. “Is it terribly different from where you have come?”
His eyes deepened, as if he could read the foreknowledge in hers. “Yes. Very terribly.”
Leara did not want them to dwell upon this subject. “I had hoped to show him more of the city. He hasn’t seen the half of it yet,” she claimed. “Would that be all right, Mother? We’ll be home in an hour or two. Mayhap three if we get… carried away.”
Anorrah blinked blankly at the portrait of love before her. A deep part of her wanted to blink it away, blink it out of existence. It was a self-portrait, really, and that portrait of her own love had died, years ago, in the deepest tragedy of her tragic life. That tragedy was the last thing that she would ever wish upon her daughter.
And yet—and yet there, too, had been so much beauty, such deep joy. For every fissure scored across her broken heart, there was a fathomless depth of fullness and fulfillment, a moment or a memory that, long ago, had once been the very thing, the only thing, to ever render her heart whole. She did not know if it was whole or broken, now, these many years afterward—mayhap a bit of both. But never would she regret the wholeness that she’d once found in the world across the sea. Not ever. It was well worth worlds of tragedy.
She would rather have a whole heart, though since broken, than a heart that had never been whole or open to break.
She laid a hand upon Leara’s cheek and smiled warmly at this mirror of a daughter. It was a mother’s smile, filled with knowledge and with love. “Of course, love,” she wholeheartedly assented. “Get carried away as far as you’d like.”
Leara leant in happily to kiss her mother’s cheek, then whisked her lover wordlessly away.
Anorrah continued on her way home, her whole, broken heart heavier than ever.
Gorovan was standing at the forefront of the atrium when she arrived, looking out the wide glass window at the beach, where Kevriel and Caliphria were entertaining the guests as they helped them make camp.
He felt her presence, noiseless though she was, and did not have to turn to see her come.
“Leara told you?” he asked her flatly.
“Yes,” Anorrah confirmed, gaze downcast as she set her basket softly on the polished marble counter and began to empty out its many contents. “I’d best begin preparing dinner.”
“She told you? Where they’re from?”
Anorrah raised her face up toward him now, where he stood at the opposite end of the atrium. He riveted her in place with his foreboding auburn stare. Her hands paused, her jaw froze as her gaze ventured past him and out the window. She saw there, scattered all across the shore, the dark glint of obsidian armor.
It had been one thing, to see the stranger with her daughter and intuitively recognize him as from beyond the sea. It was quite another thing to see a squadron of an army from that city on the beachfront out her window. Eldor’s ebon eyes had reminded her of all the love and light that she had found in that far distant world, but these soldiers’ ebon armor now reminded her just how dark and damned, and full of doom, that distant world had been.
“They’ve come for us,” she breathed.
Gorovan gritted his teeth as he cast one last glance out the window, then tore his gaze away from it and crossed the room toward Anorrah, standing at the opposite side of the counter. “Xor sent his sons,” he informed her, bracing his clenched fists solemnly against the solid marble. “He sits across the sea, and he has sent them here to conquer us.”
Anorrah had meanwhile set about arranging all the items from her basket, assuming a guise of calm, a mix of true numbness and feigned nonchalance.“Did they tell you as much?”
“They claimed to come in peace. But I am not the bright-eyed fool I was those years ago. I know better than to trust this breed of beasts.”
“Yet you welcome them, into our home—”
“Have I any choice, Anorrah?” Gorovan broke in, his voice both raised and lowered in fear. “Their presence seals our doom. Every hour that we please them, placate them, and welcome them as guests is one more hour that I may see my daughter smile before her blood is spilt.”
Anorrah hefted a peach in her hand, wondering whether this fruit that she had bought was not as ripe as she’d first deemed it. “Perhaps it is not bloodshed that they seek.”
Gorovan took this with a faint, laughing snort by the nose, a slight roll of the eye. “What is it that they seek, then? Brotherhood? Love?”
Anorrah met his gaze for a brief instant, her hands empty, her face full, fraught with more emotions than either of them could name. She swallowed audibly ere venturing to murmur what she did, with lowered eyes. “He loved her, Gorovan.”
“Anorrah!” he instantly protested, his anxious face incredulous with horror at the thought.
She looked at the white knuckles of his fists upon the counter.
“Do you remember nothing?” Gorovan pressed her.
“I remember everything,” she levelly maintained. “I know that they can love. I need to believe that they are human.”
“Anorrah,” he repeated, reaching one of his white-knuckled hands toward hers, stopping her as she reached into her basket to take up another fruit. “It was all a lie. A deathly, deathly lie. There is nothing human across the sea.”
She blinked at him. “Mayhap humanity is darker than we think.”
Gorovan stared at her a moment, absorbing her words, imbibing them like indigestible pills. He relinquished her hand, deeply and visibly vexed. “I fear for you, Anorrah. Truly I do.”
“Shouldn’t you fear for all of us? If we are now doomed?”
“Father!” Caliphria effused as she burst in. “These men are absolutely fascinating! And Kevriel fits right in among them, like a brother. Can I help you with dinner, Anorrah?”
She rushed up towards them, absently smoothing back a stray lock of her loose-bound flaxen hair. Anorrah and Gorovan both looked at her in solemn silence for a moment, all too conscious of her frailty, her fragility, the vulnerable vibrancy of her wide, sky-hued eyes.
Anorrah cleared her throat softly, reaching across the counter to reposition the stray golden lock on her adoptive daughter’s head—Caliphria’s hasty hand had not done well enough to keep it from falling out of place again. “I can manage, dear. Just go on entertaining our guests.”
She beamed, at the answer that she’d hoped to hear. “They are the ones entertaining me! Oh, they’ve so many stories to tell—some of them sound horrifying, but I can’t believe they’re true. Most of these men seem so kind, they cannot have actually done all these horrible things they describe,” she averred with stammering enthusiasm. “And the stories are too fantastical besides. This concept of, of an empire ruled by a fearsome and almighty king, it… it cannot be real.”
Anorrah smiled at her warmly. “Caliphria, love, you are breathless with excitement.”
“This is the most exciting day of all my life! Except, of course,” she caught herself with a luminous grin, “the turn of the millennium. The day your son came home.”
Anorrah laughed lightly and lovingly.
Gorovan did not so much as break a smile. “Do these men really seem so kind?” he asked his daughter, resting a hand on her shoulder, out of an instinct to protect her from her own naiveté.
“Well, there is Garendor, the ‘general.’ He’s not so friendly, and he’s always off to the side, there, speaking with some of his soldiers,” she stated, turning back to look out the window, gesturing with her gaze toward a small group of warriors seated a ways away from the larger group that Kevriel was hosting. “I’ve asked them to join us—”
“I think it’s best, love,” Gorovan demurred, “that you leave those men alone.”
Caliphria met his grim bricked eyes and saw therein a graveness that she’d never once witnessed in her father, not once in all her days. She dismissed the glimpse of terror that that look of his inspired in her, resuming her lighthearted wont. “I don’t know where his brother’s gone. The high prince, Eldor.”
Anorrah iced over in recognition at the utterance of that name. “Eldor?” she echoed through a choked throat. “The son of the king?”
“Yes,” Caliphria affirmed, again ignoring the air of somber gravity in the atrium. “I only met him very briefly, before he apparently disappeared. He seemed much kinder than his brother, though, and the friendly soldiers all speak very well of him. I think he is a good man.”
Anorrah had taken up the dubitably ripe peach in her palm once again, and she found that she was clutching it too tightly. “Let us hope so.”
The somber pall that had fallen over this pair was now quite too much for Caliphria to withstand. “Well,” she chirped, “let me know if you need help.”
“Help?” Anorrah parroted, still frozen.
Caliphria regarded her with a bemused, raised brow. “With dinner.”
“Oh. Of course. I’ll let you know, love.”
Caliphria hastened back to the shores, where her lover and her horde of guests awaited.
Gorovan turned to watch her go, leaning the small of his spine against the cold ledge of the counter. “They could strike at any moment,” he told Anorrah, keeping his back to her as his nervous eyes scanned the swarm of human beetles along the beach.
“There is that danger, yes,” Anorrah concurred, reluctantly willing herself to loosen the grip on the peach. She had, after all, told her daughter that she could get carried away as far as she’d like. That was a license that she could not rescind. And, Anorrah reminded herself to the rhythm of her own heavily pounding heart, one that she should not and would not rescind. Not ever. “But we must… we must pray that they will conquer Glorion without doing us any harm.”
“Conquest, Anorrah, is harm.”
“If we let them take us, Gorovan, as willing subjects of the empire, I would trust that they’ve mercy enough—”
“Trust!” Gorovan rasped, pivoting to face her. “This trust of yours, Anorrah—it is blindness.”
“I’d rather be blind than watch my family and my country torn to pieces.”
Gorovan leant in intently over the counter, his urgent gaze demanding her acknowledgment. “Then close your eyes,” he exhorted her darkly. “It’s happening.”
Eldor and Leara returned to the beach as sundown’s first emergent stars rose to silver the blue-violet dusk. They headed toward the shoreline; he hoped to introduce her to Claron, Osus, Mohrdon, and all of his other best soldiers and closest friends.
First to notice their return was a pair of ill-humored ice-blues.
“You’ve lost your armor,” Garendor arraigned his brother as the couple passed him by.
“I have,” Eldor upheld as they continued past him.
Dinner that evening was a peaceful, friendly, and altogether wonderful affair. There was plenty of wine and warm nectar; no shortage of loaves, cakes, and cheeses; a bounty of fruit, damsons, apples, and peaches both ripe and unripe; and a fair amount of lush greens, mostly lettuces. The soldiers might have missed their fill of heavy ale and hearty meat. But the crude fare of Zoll Zora, meaty and filling as it was, was so much less ambrosial than the Glorious bounty before them that none of them felt even the slightest pang of carnivorous hunger.
Seduced, for the night, by the lavish, luscious spread, they all slept well on the silver-gold beach that first night. They slept in their makeshift camp deeply and peacefully, bellies full and spirits lifted, all thought of battle and bloodshed effaced from their slumberous minds.
Even Garendor slept soundly. He did not so much as dream of war and conquest.
From what he could remember the following morning, as he rose just before sunup and sat himself at the edge of the surf, he had dreamt of spilling blood in quite a different way.
“Garendor.”
He swiveled his head, somewhat startled, by the very same voice that had been playing in his head all night and even now.
“My lady,” he addressed her, motioning to stand and greet her.
Before he could rise to his feet, Leara had already knelt beside him. She fixed her dark eyes on his face, and he trembled a little. He hoped that it hadn’t been visible.
“Your brother tells me that you are bent on destroying this city and conquering Glorion.”
“He ought not speak on my behalf,” Garendor complained.
“Would you deny it?”
Garendor scowled at the sea. He heaved a deep, loud sigh, his mighty shoulders rising and falling with the tide. “I would imagine you’ve run off and told your family,” he surmised, with a failed attempt at wryness. “Why are they not all in a panic, groveling at my feet and begging mercy?”
Leara’s brows drew down in gravity. “I’ve not said anything, to anyone. I would hear it from you. I would have you look me in the eye and tell me that that is what you’ve come to do.”
“That is what I’ve come to do,” he verified promptly, fixing his pale gaze on hers, his nostrils flaring and his own brows hard and stern. “Are you now satisfied?”
He could not keep his gaze fixed on her in that way for very long.
“What stays your hand, then, Garendor?” she asked him, her own gaze on him unchanging and unwavering. “Why do you wait?”
He shrugged his lower lip. “The moment is not right.”
“The moment will never be right. There is no right time for war and bloodshed.”
“Oh, and I suppose those horrible things are only in the storybooks? Tales spun to terrify children? Let me tell you, my lady,” he spoke, locking his eyes on hers again, “across the sea those horror stories come to life every day.”
She nodded faintly, not allowing his eyes to leave hers this time. “Eldor told me as much. I believe it. I believe that you bring them to life, Garendor.”
“As if I were the only one,” he scoffed.
“Are you not a leader among these men?”
“My brother,” Garendor spat, unable to maintain her gaze at this point, “my damned brother is the leader.”
Leara now turned to look out on the sea. “No, Garendor. Your brother spurns the world across the sea, and everything it stands for. He would never lead your soldiers into battle. He would command against it. But I fear that you would not obey his command.”
“You are right to fear me,” he claimed.
She smiled in silent laughter. “I do not fear you. I fear the sword you wield, the havoc it would wreak, but I do not fear you. You, Garendor, are only a man.”
“Mayhap I am a man you should fear.”
“You cannot make me fear you,” she challenged, her tone half playful, but her import entirely serious.
In an instant, he had a dagger pressed against her soft, smooth throat. With his other hand, he supported the back of her skull, keeping it firmly in place, positioning her pretty head at the mercy of his weapon and his wounded pride.
“Watch me,” he muttered.
Leara did not so much as bat an eye. The cold blade of the knife remained poised at her neck, but she knew well that this man would not leave a mark, let alone cause her harm. He could have done it, so swiftly and so easily, with no waking person near enough to witness it, no threat of retribution, no ounce of remorse. He could have done it, but she knew that he would not.
“I’m watching,” she stated.
The pressure of the dagger on her delicate skin intensified, if only by a hairsbreadth, as his eyes grew hotter, colder, blazing into hers like icy flaming arrows—but as soon as those arrows darted into and drowned in her dark, sea-blue depths, the flames were put out.
He lowered his dagger at length, defeated as always, returning the weapon to its place at his side, settling his elbows on his bent knees and watching the sunrise-limned waves.
“You said you at least fear my sword,” he grumbled.
Leara grinned. “That was only a dagger.”
He turned to look at her again, upon her smile so soft, and yet so much sharper, so much stronger than any sword that he could ever wield.
“Come,” she invited him as she rose gracefully to her feet. “I am taking you to see the city.”
“I do not want to see the city.”
Her open hand was extended down towards him. He looked at it, and wanted to kiss it.
“Yes. You do,” she insisted. “I would have you know what you are going to destroy.”
He paused and stared awhile at her proffered hand. He then placed his in hers, slowly and silently, and let her fragile strength help lift him to his feet.
Truth be told, he told himself, he wanted to see the city more than anything. More than almost anything, at least.
She showed him the city, much as she had just yesterday shown his brother. They walked the same streets, their hands similarly clasped all the while—though this handhold, Leara sensed, was deeply different. In this instance, she was the draw, the guide, the leader; there was no mutual pull at work. If she had wanted at any moment to let go, she easily could have. There was no center of gravity there in his palm, not for her.
There was perhaps a modest magnet. There was something in this man that bound her to him. And yet this was a bond that she could break at will. This bond was a choice. Or at the very least, the illusion of a choice.
As they passed through the marketplace, a vendor offered Garendor a plump and pretty peach. This he took and offered Leara. She shook her head, refusing civilly. He pondered the fruit a moment, hefting it like a precious treasure in his hand. He then tossed it to the ground.
She spoke to him of Daerion as they walked. He did not speak much of anything. Nor did he visibly smile. But there were moments, Leara saw, at which the pale frost in his eyes would seem to thaw, if only one degree, if only for a second. The sight of gamboling children smiling wider than the sky; the sight of early sunlight sparkling in the city’s central fountain; the sight of redder apples, rosier peaches than he’d ever seen across the sea, which resided not only in fruit stalls and passing barrows, but also in the cheeks of all the gamboling children frisking by; the sight of the navy-eyed maiden beside him, who did not once let go of his hand. Such were the sights that warmed the hoarfrost of his heart.
He did not feel it, did not know it—but she saw it in him, as bright and evident as day.
Leara brought him at length to a glade set far apart from the center of Daerion, in the heart of the woodland surrounding the city. This had been Eldor’s favorite place of those she’d shown him. And it had always been her favorite place in Daerion, long before he came.
The very heart of nature seemed to draw its lifeblood from this place. The stream that trickled through the center of the clearing ran with all the pure, silent vigor of blood through their veins. Leara knelt beside the stream as they approached it, dipping one hand in the crystalline rill, her other hand still clasped in Garendor’s.
He remained standing, thrilling in the vision of this Glorian angel kneeling near his feet, her head just at the level of—but that was a thought that he quickly dismissed. Somehow, in her presence, those hungers that were so natural to him, so basic for him, in his home across the sea now felt horribly unnatural and misguided. Even wrong.
He sank to his knees alongside her.
“Is it not beautiful?” she asked him, faintly smiling.
“If I cannot take it to bed with me, it is not beautiful.”
She smiled, taking his comment in better humor than he’d have expected. And yet the smile was brief, for there were heavy and unhappy matters at hand. “These waters will run red with blood when you are finished,” she told him.
He looked hard at the stream. Clear as it was, he could see straight from its surface to its floor, the bed of wholesome earth that underlay it. The shallow transparence of this stream was so unlike the endless depths in Leara’s eyes. “I will never be finished.”
Leara paused. It was at this juncture that she finally disengaged her hand from his.
It had been for a purpose: she dipped both her hands into the water, the flowing rills lapping up at her delicate wrists. “You thirst for blood,” she uttered as she then raised her cupped palms up toward Garendor’s face. “Here. Imagine it runs red with blood already. Does that not slake your thirst?”
He blinked at her, while his lips of their own accord magnetically pressed up against the soft tips of her thumbs, allowing her to spill the freshwater into his open, thirsting mouth. This was not quite the kiss of the hand that he would have imagined.
Garendor swallowed, his lips parting right afterward, his mouth empty again and thirstier than ever. “No,” he answered plainly, “it excites it.”
“Everything I have shown you today,” Leara spoke, “all the beauty and brightness of Daerion; it has awakened no compassion in your heart?”
“No compassion. Only passion.”
“Eldor found the city beautiful, and fell in love with it—”
“The only beautiful thing that I have seen today,” Garendor cut in hotly, “is you. Are you sure it was the city that captured his heart, my lady? Are you sure that you did not win his compassion by slaking his thirst?”
“Of course I slaked his thirst,” she stated simply. “We drank together from this very stream.”
“My lady, you know full well what I mean—”
“Oh, yes,” she readily affirmed. “I do. We Glorians may be pure of heart, but we are not that innocent. Blood runs through our veins. And sometimes it runs hotly.”
“Sometimes?” Garendor echoed, suddenly and starkly conscious of just how close his face was to hers, just how warmly and sweetly their breath intermingled, just how clearly and beautifully he could see his own face bluely mirrored in her eyes. “And in this moment?”
Leara looked at this man, this brother of Eldor before her. His eyes, to her, were no beautiful mirrors—they were cold, hard glaciers, unreflective and impervious. She looked evenly into them, and that was all that she could see. “In this moment, Garendor,” she murmured, unwilling and unable to be anything but honest, “my blood runs cold as ice.”
He rose irately and abruptly to his feet. “You play me!” he snarled.
“You think this is a game?” she questioned urgently. “The fate of my family, my country, now lies in the balance, and you think that I would play you?”
“To incite my passion, then to offend me with your ice cold blood—”
“How, Garendor, have I offended you?” she asked sincerely. “I have been honest. Every word. I am inciting your passion because there is such a fine line between passion and compassion, and that is what I want you to feel.”
“You have failed,” he snapped.
“Your blood runs hotly, Garendor,” Leara countered. “Soon it will warm your heart. If it hasn’t already.”
“You are wrong!” he barked indignantly, sinking again to his knees, this time to clutch her chin in his strong hand. “Do you know what they do in my country, to women like you?”
“Show me,” she invited him through gritted teeth. “I dare you to show me.”
He did not, could not, show her anything. His hand fell away as he stood again to his feet.
“See,” she noted, lifting her own hand to her jaw where he had held her. He’d left no mark on her face, but her skin was faintly hotter where his hand had been. “Something stays your hand.”
He sniggered, grimacing deeply. “What are you trying to do to me? You want me to become like you? Become like all the sinless, starry-eyed pansies on this pathetic continent?”
“No,” Leara denied. “I want you to become yourself.”
He did not even know what this meant.
“And if our continent is so pathetic, Garendor,” she continued, “does it not then deserve your sympathy?”
“Mayhap so,” Garendor granted grimly. “But I have none to give.”
Leara sighed, lowering her gaze from his face to the clear, unfazed stream. “How wrong you are. About yourself. It is a sorry thing to see.”
“Well, I am sorry,” he hissed, “that I am not more like my brother.”
Leara uplifted her gaze to him once more. His face had never looked more human than it did now, in this tense and tragic moment. “Envy,” she reflected. “We feel it here as well, you know. Even in Glorion, there is such a thing as envy. And in itself it is no sin. But here, we would not let our jealousy drive us to murder and war.”
Garendor laughed humorlessly, absently fingering the hilt of the sword at his side. “What is there to be jealous of, in a land where everyone and everything is perfect?”
Leara smiled unexpectedly. Garendor saw her smile, and his hand fell away from the sword.
“I have succeeded, then,” she asserted.
He furrowed his brow.
“I have shown you my city, and after what you’ve seen,” Leara explained, “you’ve come to believe that this place is perfect.”
“That will not stop me from destroying it,” Garendor scoffed.
“Mayhap not,” Leara acknowledged, rising to her feet to look him squarely in the eye. Those eyes were still glacial, but the more closely she looked, the more uncharted depths she began to discern. “But you have a conscience, Garendor, and you have a heart. And they will bleed. For every drop of blood you spill upon this perfect continent, your heart will bleed. And there is something to be said for that.”
She wanted him to meet her gaze; she wanted to explore the depths beneath those sheets of ice. There was fire there, lurking behind them. But, too, there was more. It was not only ice and fire. She knew that there was more, but she could not tell what, for to those smothered depths, he would not let her in. He would not even let himself in.
“And I promise you,” she pressed on, though he would not meet her warm gaze as she made him this promise, “that when all is said and done, that is what will save you.”
He continued to stare at the bed of the stream. “It will not save Glorion.”
Leara looked up at him in profile—the line of his nose, not as proud or as perfect as Eldor’s; the tense set of his jaw, not as solid and square. Even his profile bespoke a world of pain and wounded pride. Those were the things that bred the rage and bloodlust in his soul. She knew it well, and she pitied him for it. But this was not a time for pity. If he would spare no pity for her people, then perhaps, she mused unhappily, she’d best not waste her sympathy on him.
“No,” she acquiesced. “I leave that to your brother.”
And with that, she was gone.
Garendor descended again to his knees once she’d left. This time, when he stared at the floor of the rill, he was conscious for the first time of his own upset reflection. His face, there, challenging him with knit brows from the bed of the stream. It looked to him as cold and shallow as the rivulet of water that played host to it.
There came faint footfalls in the underbrush. He did not hear them, not till those tiny feet had padded right up to his side.
“You’re wearing a shirt just like Eldor’s!” Noria pronounced.
Garendor saw the girl reflected in the rill before he turned to see her coming. Her beaming face there seemed to change the very surface of the water, rendering it a brighter mirror than it’d been when his face had appeared there alone. “This is not a shirt. This is called armor.”
“I don’t care much what it’s called; I like it anyhow. Eldor gave his to me, you know.”
“Of course he did.”
Noria squatted down on her haunches beside him. “You’re not like Eldor, are you?”
His pale gaze darkened as he turned his head to face her. “And what makes you say that?”
The little girl considered him, narrowing her bright eyes and pensively chewing her lip, a fast opinion forming in her fertile mind. “You look very different,” she observed. “Your eyes don’t smile and shine like his do. And you seem…”
He downturned his face once again to look into the stream.
“…you seem to wish that I weren’t here,” she concluded, her voice mirthless and hushed.
Garendor sniggered at that, watching his own upper lip curl into a bitter smirk on the surface of the stream. “Maybe,” he sneered, “maybe that is what I wish.”
Noria paused. “But I mean to say,” she kept on, “that there is a look in your eyes. You seem to wish that I really weren’t here, that I… that I were really… gone…”
His smirk hardened; he silently laughed. Her bright-eyed innocence bemused him and disgusted him. “So there is murder in my eyes, then?”
She nodded, visibly swallowing a heavy gulp of air. “It is horrifying,” she expressed. “But I think that you just need a friend.”
Garendor’s laughter now emitted through his nose. “I need nothing,” he professed.
“You do, though,” Noria objected. “You do need a friend! And I could be your friend.”
She grinned and inched closer to him, such that her feathery ringlets brushed his upper arm. He shuddered, at that. That was much too close. No one—no one that he could not kill, or take to bed with him—should ever come that close.
He shifted a bit, freeing his bicep from the brush of her innocent hair. “And why, now, would you want to be my friend?”
“I want to make it go away,” she stated simply. “The murder in your eyes; I want to make it go away. I want to make your eyes smile. Like Eldor’s.”
“You listen,” he rasped, his hard fingers suddenly encircling her throat. He had heard his brother’s name today now once too many times. “I am nothing like that man. My eyes will never smile and shine like Eldor’s, do you hear?”
She heard; and she saw; she did not, could not, speak.
He, too, heard and saw himself. There in the mirrors of those over-bright eyes. He saw his own face twice therein, but hardly recognized it—in those mirrors so bright and so pure, his reflection looked more darkly damned and dirty to him than ever.
Garendor slackened his grip on her throat, then let his hand fall away. These hands of his, he grimly mused, he raised so often in his fiery fits of rage. And yet today, he reflected, every time that he’d raised these volatile hands of his in violence, he had let them fall. There was something in him, on this day, that stayed his hand. Something that felled his hand.
He did not know, yet, whether that was something he was proud of, or something that he censured with the deepest sense of shame and self-disgust.
“I am sorry,” he wholeheartedly apologized, in a hushed and mirthless voice.
Noria was kneading the vulnerable, violated skin of her tender young throat. “That’s all right,” she readily forgave. “It only hurts a little.”
They both were silent for a short and solemn while.
“Where did Leara go?” she inquired at length. “I heard you here speaking together, just before I came. It sounded like her voice; it was Leara, wasn’t it?”
Garendor nodded without moving his head.
“Where did she go?” Noria asked.
He still would not move, would not blink an eye. “She is gone.”
Noria stopped kneading at her throat. The pain and shock of the chokehold had by now mostly worn away. “Did she go back to Eldor?” she chirped, oblivious to the effect that that brotherly, ebon name bore on the low prince before her. “I know she likes him very much.”
The sheet of ice—the ice in his eyes and, too, that in his soul—promptly cracked.
It was not the kind of crack for which Leara had hoped all throughout this morning. Not the kind of fissure that would happily usher in new bursts of warmth and light. It was instead a fissure from which spewed forth all the violent heat and fire of his wounded heart. This passion of his did not come anywhere close to compassion—it rather bordered on the opposite, the absence.
This little girl, this guileless child, had wanted only to make the murder in his fierce eyes go away. She had instead brought all the murder to a boil, and brought it forth into his hands.
Up till now, today, those hands had fallen every time he tried to raise them.
But each of those surrenders had been a sin against his nature. Against the fiery beast caged in the iceberg of his human heart; the beast that Garendor now knew would always be the master of that heart, and of his hands, and of his soul.
Even nature herself had enabled his crime! He convinced himself that nature, earth and cosmos, were accomplices. Nature had placed that sad, cold rock, that heartless boulder, at the side of this stream. Surely that rock did not belong here. With its rough surface, each jagged edge like a freshly honed sword. It had no place beside a stream so clear and soft and pure; a girl even clearer and softer and purer.
There was blood on the stone, where her skull had collided against it.
He had not known that she would be so light, so feather-light and feather-fragile. Nor had he known that his hand would be so metal-heavy and metal-strong. He should have known, he thought now to his cold, lonesome self.
But then again, the beast in him knew nothing. Nothing but pain and rage and hateful brotherhood. And blood.
He did not know what to think, or to feel. Perhaps that was best. A beast ought not to think or feel a thing. The beast was thirsty. He bent down to drink from the stream. Raised the bloodless water to his lips and swallowed slowly. Paused and spat before he left—the water tasted red.