Blood's Pride (Shattered Kingdoms) (16 page)

The jolt of landing flung him up against the straps of the harness and he tugged blindly at the buckles until he found himself on his hands and knees in the sand, retching violently. A few moments later he rolled on to his side, breathless and trembling, wiping at his watering eyes. The elixir had left his skin crawling and his white hair and the back of his linen shirt were damp with cold sweat. Slowly, he sat up.

He looked back up to the temple to orient himself. He was still in the Shadar, not the desert, but a dune was there, rising to about twice his height and measuring about thirty paces to either end. In the sandy dirt all around him were footprints: smaller footprints than his own, and made by sandals, not boots. The first led south, towards the mines, while the deeper
set wound around the dune and turned towards the mountains. Eofar lurched to his feet with his heart pounding in his chest. He followed the deeper set around the dune, and then swerved with them around the piles of fallen rocks, zigzagging as if he were running by the side of an invisible companion.

He cut around the jagged sides of a boulder, and there she was.

She had climbed a treacherous pile of rocks all the way up to the doorway and was leaning with her face close to the wall, tracing the line of the carving. Strands of her dark hair waved in the breeze. The moonlight was bright enough for his Norlander eyes to make out every change in her: her full lips were fuller than before; her round cheeks were a little rounder; her rich brown eyes were the same, but underneath were pink swells that told of fatigue and worry. But it was the baby, the baby that was enormous within her, that made Eofar feel the stirrings of an impossible joy.

He was trying to find a way of calling out to her without startling her when she suddenly turned to him. The expression on her face changed, her eyes opened wide and her lips parted. One hand fluttered to her mouth as she reached back with the other to brace herself against the rocks.

‘Eofar!’ she gasped. ‘I don’t believe—’ She began to stand, and grit and pebbles skittered down around his feet.

‘Careful!’ he cautioned her, his flat voice reflecting none of the agony of his concern as he watched her climb down to him, but he was there the moment her foot touched the ground, and he swept her into his arms. She shuddered, either from emotion or the chill from his skin, he didn’t know and he
didn’t care. For him, her heat was like a brushfire, burning away the misery and doubt that had infested him while they’d been apart. He was renewed, reborn. ‘You’re all right – you’re all right,’ he repeated, releasing her by necessity but kissing her searing lips, weak with relief. He couldn’t stop staring at her firm, round belly.

‘We can go, right now – tonight,’ he said finally, leaning back to look into her face and carefully tucking a strand of hair back under her scarf.

One of Harotha’s fingers strayed up to stroke her bottom lip, a familiar gesture that enflamed his desire to kiss her again. ‘But how did you find me? And here, of all places?’

He reached into his shirt pocket and brought out the little bottle. ‘You told me about it,’ he reminded her as he held it up for her to see. He had not taken it all; the bottle was still almost a quarter-full. ‘We can sell the rest. The Nomas—’

‘Elixir!’ she cried, taking the little bottle from between his fingers and holding it up to the predawn sky. She tilted it and watched the dark liquid slide slowly down to the lower end. ‘And you took it?’

‘Yes.’

Her shoulders twitched excitedly. ‘So? What happened?’

‘I saw you, here. Then I had to find you, and I did.’ He leaned in to kiss her again, but she evaded him.

‘Is that all?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Eofar, I need to know: is that
all
you saw?’

‘That’s all that matters.’ He watched her tuck the little bottle into the pocket she wore at her side. ‘The sun will be up soon. We must find some place to spend the day. Then we’ll leave
when the sun goes down. This cave, maybe? With Aeda’s help I could move the rocks.’

She didn’t need to say anything; he had only been pretending not to know. He stared at her bowed head, a few locks of lustrous hair falling over her face, as their future together, his one and only dream, broke into bits.

‘We’re not leaving,’ he finally forced himself to say. He felt sick to his stomach again, but this time the elixir was not to blame. ‘You never sent the signal – I thought something had happened to you, but you just didn’t want to go.’

She winced as if in pain and clasped his arm for a moment, but still she didn’t look at him. ‘Eofar, I’m so sorry.’

‘Is it your family? Is that why?’

‘Not exactly. It’s— Eofar, kiss me,’ she sobbed suddenly, but this time, he was the one to avoid the embrace.

‘Tell me,’ he insisted.

She fell back from him, her eyes clouded over with the worry he’d already sensed. ‘People are scared and angry. Three years ago, when word got out that your father was ill, everyone assumed that you would take over the colony – but then, when the White Wolf—’ Harotha wet her lips. ‘Eofar, they brought the
Mongrel
here. She’s here in the Shadar, right now.’

‘The Mongrel?’ he echoed, taken aback, suddenly remembering the girl in the desert, the girl who was not Nomas, nor Shadari.
The Mongrel?
That would certainly explain why Jachad had not wanted him to meet her, but it did nothing to explain Eofar’s unsettling sense of recognition.

‘You understand, then,’ she said, mistaking his reaction. ‘You
see how serious it is. I’m afraid they’re going to do something really reckless.’

Eofar looked down at her belly. He reached out slowly and held his palm up close enough to feel the warmth. ‘Even more reason to leave,’ he said quietly.

‘Eofar—’

‘You said that being together was all that mattered, remember?’ His throat burned. ‘You said that we can never change anything here.’

‘That was
then
– in the temple. Things are different now,’ Harotha told him. Her eyes flashed strangely. ‘I discovered something – something about the past. If I have the chance to tell people, I could save them from—’

‘I don’t care about
them
,’ he interrupted, ‘I care about you, and our baby. What will happen if he’s born here? Do you think we’ll be able to protect him?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. She walked away from him, back towards the rocks, but her shawl slipped from her shoulders and fell to the ground. She bent down awkwardly to pick it up. ‘Running away, just to suit ourselves?’ she said, twisting the dark fabric in her hands, still with her back to him. ‘How can that be right? Abandoning our families? Our friends?’

‘Harotha.’ Every muscle in his body clenched. ‘Do you still love me?’

She stopped pulling at the shawl. ‘You know I do,’ she answered, but she did not turn around.

‘Harotha?’ he called faintly, walking towards her. ‘Harotha: look at me.’

Now she did turn around, with her lips parted as if she was
about to speak. But before she could, the expression on her face suddenly collapsed into shock. Her eyes fixed on a point over Eofar’s shoulder. So softly that even his finely tuned Norlander hearing could barely make out the word, she murmured, ‘Faroth!’

He whirled. A group of Shadari men, roughly a dozen of them, had stopped on the near side of the dune about thirty yards away, as if they had just run around from behind it and drawn up short. Their leader took a couple of steps forward, dragging his left leg lamely behind him. Eofar knew him at once from Harotha’s description.

‘I recommend that everyone stay calm,’ a voice called out from the opposite direction, near the cliffs.

Eofar called out in confusion, and he turned back towards the mountains in time to see Jachad emerge from behind one of the larger boulders.

‘Sorry, we haven’t been introduced,’ Jachad said to Harotha, smiling and holding up his palms pacifically as he walked towards them. ‘I’m only here to—’

She lunged towards Jachad so unexpectedly that neither the Nomas king nor Eofar had time to react. She grabbed the thin, sharp knife from the scabbard at Jachad’s waist and paced back, brandishing the knife at both of them until she bumped up against the rocks.

The world tilted for a moment. The elixir’s vision hung before Eofar’s eyes as if it had been etched on a piece of glass. This was the moment he had seen: it was the same, in every detail.

‘Harotha!’ he cried, lunging towards her.

‘Stop! Stay away! Don’t touch me!’ she shouted, and he drew
back, cringing. They were the very words he had dreaded hearing from the first moment he’d realised, with despair, that he’d fallen in love with her. Then she cried out to the Shadari, ‘Wait there!’

‘Harotha,’ he groaned.

‘I used you.’ Her voice sounded flat and hard, and totally unfamiliar: the voice of a stranger. ‘I want you to know that. Everything I told you was a lie. I needed to escape with my baby, and you were my way out.’

She stepped forward, away from the rocks, and waved the knife to move them aside. Eofar and Jachad both backed up out of her way, clearing a path between her and the other Shadari. She walked past them, revolving as she went to keep them in sight, until she was backing across the sand towards the dune. The band of Shadari waited behind her, jostling restlessly around their leader.

‘Harotha, please,’ he begged, his throat so raw that each word was little more than a cough.

‘Did you really think I would carry your baby?’ she spat at him, one arm crossed over her belly as if to shield the child even from his sight. ‘I would have thrown myself from the temple before I did that.’ In a voice less loud, but filled with more venom than he could possibly have imagined, Harotha delivered her final, crushing blow. ‘Daryan is my
real
husband.
Daryan
is the father of my baby.’

She took another backwards step, leaning awkwardly to balance the weight of the baby. He wanted to reach out to her, but his arms hung at his sides like leaden weights. She kept her head tilted so he could not see her eyes.

‘Don’t follow me,’ she commanded.

She turned and ran into her brother’s arms.

he heard Jachad calling to him from somewhere behind him. He had lost all ability to move.

He could feel the elixir’s poison twisting through his veins still as he gazed across the sand at the Shadari. Despair slid in front of his eyes like an oily film. me
.>

But he was thinking of the long, hot days that he had slept away, alone in his bed, and of Daryan and Harotha quietly talking, laughing, casually touching one another on the arm or the shoulder. The pair of them fluttered through his mind, eating away at his happy memories like moths.

someone asked from behind him – not Jachad. This was a different voice: an ageless, sexless, expressionless voice. He turned and looked into a single silver-green eye, and now he was sure of one thing: the Mongrel was his sister.

Harotha clung to her brother’s shoulder and rubbed her face against the coarse fabric of his robe. She wasn’t weeping; she was trying to gouge from her memory the stricken look in Eofar’s eyes. Faroth circled his left arm stiffly around her back and she could see his right arm stuck out awkwardly beside her, keeping the blade of his curved sword at a safe distance. ‘All right, it’s over now. Get a hold of yourself,’ he whispered gruffly into her ear.

‘Faroth!’ Elthion cried out.

She lifted her head away from her brother’s shoulder and saw the young Shadari dancing at his elbow. She recognised most of the same faces she’d seen at Faroth’s house, plus a few others. Most of them were armed, of a sort, and many were bloodied. Their ragged clothes reeked with an unwashed funk that turned her stomach, but it was the hard expression on their faces that made the muscles in her throat constrict.

‘Come on,’ Elthion shouted, ‘what are we waiting for? He’s just standing there by himself – let’s get him!’

‘He’s got an imperial sword,’ said Binit, sounding worried. ‘That Nomas is there, too. He’s got that fire trick.’

‘Jachad works for the Mongrel, and she’s working for us,’ Elthion reminded him impatiently. ‘He won’t stop us.’

‘The Mongrel didn’t say anything about killing Lord Eofar,’ Sami pointed out.

‘But she did tell us to come here!’ Elthion insisted.

‘To get Harotha,’ Sami argued.

‘The
Mongrel
? That’s how you knew I’d be here?’ she asked, shocked. But then she bit her lip. Best to keep her other questions to herself for the moment.

‘Come on, Faroth, Elthion’s right. Let’s kill him.’ Alkar flexed the only remaining digit on his maimed hand. ‘We can take him. This is a lucky chance for us: one less Dead One to worry about later on.’

‘We should take him hostage,’ she interjected, gripping Faroth’s forearm. She filled her voice with loathing and gestured towards Eofar with Jachad’s knife. ‘He’s the governor’s son – and he’s weak. We can use him.’

‘Use him for what? Practise? We already know how to kill Dead Ones,’ snarled Alkar.

‘Shut up, all of you,’ commanded Faroth, pulling his arm away. ‘Look! What’s
she
doing there?’

She turned towards the mountain and saw a bare-armed woman standing next to Eofar and Jachad in front of the cave. The stranger looked remarkably similar to Eofar – his build, his height, even his stance – but her skin had a much darker cast, and her tangled hair was as black as Harotha’s own.

A shrill whistle cut through the chilly dawn air: Eofar, calling to his dereshadi. He was going back to the temple, she realised, simultaneously relieved and panicked. In a few moments he
would be gone, perhaps for ever, carrying her ruinous lies along with him.