Risen (15 page)

“Please,” Risen begged after he was
gone, and fairly out of character. “It’s been so long. I’ll bet the
battle is already won.”

Moira seemed unconvinced.

“Just something. Pleeeze…I’m
starved.” He appealed to Moira with his most sincere smile. “Just
some bread, maybe some cheese. At least for Niveus.”

Niveus, meanwhile, appeared scarcely
concerned whether breakfast arrived or not.

“Very well,” Moira conceded. “But
stay with her. I’ll run to the kitchens, be back before you even
know I was gone.”

After she left, Risen knelt in front
of Niveus. She ignored him, only continued to press her finger at
intervals along the rough mortar between the massive stones.
“Niveus,” he said calmly and tried to catch her gaze.

Truthfully, Risen was the person she
most attended to at times, and she ceased her task, focusing on her
brother’s face.

“Niveus, I must go, but I’ll be
back soon.”

“You should stay.”

Her response surprised him. “I have
to go. But it will be all right, I promise. I’ll be back before
lunch and we’ll have that cheese together.”

“You should stay,” she
repeated.

He leaned into her, kissed her on
the forehead. “Don’t worry, and don’t say anything. Just pretend
you didn’t know.”

“But I do.”

He sighed. “Stay here, Niveus. Moira
will be right back.”

There were two torches lit in the
library, staked on either side of the room. Risen considered taking
one of them, but then decided not to. If the last torch, for
whatever reason, went out, he worried Niveus would be alone in the
dark.

He approached the library door,
looked back over his shoulder, and saw Niveus staring right at him,
focused clear as could be on her brother. She said nothing, only
stared.

“I love you too,” he
said.

“There is only so much you can
do.”

He held here gaze, said nothing in
return. Then Niveus was left alone.

Easing from the library, Risen
snaked his way back down the catacombs, feeling his way along the
black tunnels as he went. He knew them, knew them perfectly, for he
and Tobias has spent many hours playing in them. What was more
exquisitely perfect for boys to play in than a blackened maze of
tunnels?

Today, however, there was no stolen
torchlight to show the way, and he could see absolutely nothing.
Once, when their torch had gone out before they meant it to, Tobias
had described it as “black as Lucifer’s ass.”

Risen could feel his heartbeat
quicken as he inched his way along, could feel cold on the back of
his neck. Was Lucifer with him now, he wondered, then shook the
notion from his head. “God is with me,” he murmured and counted,
one, two, three aisles, turn right, one, two more. It went on like
this for a bit. However, instead of making his way up to the ground
floor of the castle, Risen changed his course, sidetracking to
another room some distance from the library.

Inside the room was nearly nothing.
It was bare except for one enormous large tapestry on the opposite
wall. He knew the tapestry was there, even in the pitch blackness.
As he felt his way around the margin of the room, drew his hands
over the icy cold of the stones, he was relieved to feel the edge
of the tapestry in his hands. Slipping behind it, he heaved the
massive timber aside with a grunt and opened the hidden
door.

* * *

He was no longer in a catacomb. No,
this was narrow tunnel of a different sort, trussed with massive
timbers, but earthen besides. It was much more narrow, and at
intervals, he came to a door. Each time, he heaved the heavy wooden
bar aside and let it fall where it would. Each time, he closed the
door behind himself and continued on, feeling of the tunnel wall as
he went.

Not expecting his nerves to trick
him so, he was surprised how quickly anxiety crept up on him,
perching between his shoulder blades, tapping him on the back of
his head. Listen to me, pay attention, be afraid, it tried to say
to him, but he silenced it.

“You don’t scare me! I might be
alone, but…” he began to say then stopped himself. He wasn’t alone!
No, he had his first in command with him, just as Father said he
always should! As he inched his way along, it was only natural that
his memory returned to the time when he and his father built the
knife together. That had been a wondrous couple of days.

* * *

There was no man alive whom Risen
idolized more than his father. He observed Ravan help Nicolette
maintain security in their realm and had watched in naive awe as he
trained his warriors himself, instilling not just strong battle
skills but keen devotion to their leader. When his father said they
should build the knife together, Risen was only eight years
old.

It fascinated the boy, the
meticulous process as they heated, hammered, and seated the steel.
The fire burned fierce for a long time in the oven, and Ravan
taught his son how to bellow the coals to a brilliant golden white,
coaxing the temperature even higher.

The steel glowed like a brilliant
bolt of lightning when they pulled it from the flames. Risen had
never seen anything so raw, so fundamentally perfect as the white
steel drawn from the fire. Then, it took hours longer to bring from
the rough metal the fearlessness of the double edged weapon. Back
into the flames it went, then to the forge. When Risen’s arm
weakened, tired with the hammering, they heated the steel again,
and Ravan simply waited until the boy could again pick up the steel
mallet, not invading upon the process anything more than
guidance.

Several times the boy wanted to
cease, fatigued of the process, satisfied that the blade was
hammered “well enough,” but Ravan gently insisted that it could be
better. It taught Risen something more than the art of it all; it
taught him a respect of the weapon, of the potential of
it.

They lastly seated the steel in an
antler tine, something that struck the boy as odd, for he’d never
seen such a thing before. His father spoke of another blade he once
made, when he was a boy not much older than him.

“Pig-Killer,” he called
it.

“Did you kill a wild pig with it?”
Risen asked in wondrous sincerity.

Ravan paused, as the boy noticed he
sometimes did when his memories took him far away. His son knew the
look, knew that for his father some things were beyond speaking of.
The boy lifted a small hand, passed his fingers over the scar—the
one that marked the wound that should’ve taken his father’s left
eye but somehow didn’t. The scar extended from Ravan’s forehead,
across his brow and deep onto his left cheek. His father had told
him he was fourteen years old when this one had claimed his face
for its own.

There were many scars on Ravan’s
body. Risen had seen most of them and wondered how his father had
survived the wounds and remained as strong as he was.

“Did it do this to you—the wild
pig?” the child asked, his voice soft with compassion as he touched
the scar again. “Such a wicked pig it must’ve been to smite you in
such a way. I’m glad that it is dead.”

Ravan took his son’s hand into his
own and smiled at the innocence he enjoyed. “Risen, evil can befall
good men. You must always be ready for this. A friend is always
good to have if such a thing happens, and this,” he motioned to the
blade in progress, “will be your friend when you feel you have no
other.”

He then gently guided the boy’s
attentions back to their task, and together they fashioned the
weapon over the span of three days.

“I made this?” Risen was
incredulous when they were done. “What shall I call it?” He held
the finished weapon up, marveled at the glint of light on the
perfect edge as he tested the balance of it in his hand. “It seems
so big,” he admitted as he awkwardly flipped the blade over,
promptly dropped it, and scurried in his embarrassment to pick it
up, gently brushing the dirt from it with his finger.

Indicating he should try again,
Ravan watched with some amusement as the boy attempted to flip the
blade again, failing just as before. “It will earn a name. Until
then, it is simply your first in command. And as your first in
command, you should have it with you always. You must know this
friend, know it as well as you would a brother.” Ravan paused,
collected himself and added, “Your hand will grow into it with
time.”

His father snatched the blade up
from the dirt after Risen’s third attempt, held it flat in his
palm, then with a series of moves, flipped the blade magically back
and forth over the front and back of his hand. It seemed to come
alive with an animation all of its own until he grasped it from
mid-air and lunged, plunging it into an imaginary foe with an
impressive yell that Risen believed was not quite human. The boy
startled, stepped backwards, wide-eyed with awe. Truthfully, most
men would’ve done the same.

“I want to be able to do that
someday,” the boy whispered in reverence.

“You will,” his father chuckled.
“Until that time, a lesson.” Then Ravan spent patient hours
schooling the boy in the proper art of wielding a small hand
weapon. “A blade is a beautiful thing,” Ravan coached him. “It is
small enough, light enough, that it is much more personal than a
sword. It is the tool of your art—becomes part of your arm.
See…”

He swept the blade with deadly
precision. It almost disappeared and just as magically reappeared
as though enchanted. All at once, he stopped, the blade tip so near
his son’s face he could have touched his nose with it.

Ravan eyed his son closely as though
to see if he comprehended what he was trying to impart. “Your knife
becomes an intrinsic part of your intent, an extension of your
heart, your soul. What you do with it is infinitely more intimate
than what you accomplish with any other weapon.”

As an eight year old boy might do,
Risen focused on the display. “Father, show me how to do what you
did with it, just a moment ago!” He stabbed at the air, poorly
mimicking his father’s demonstration.

“Risen,” Ravan gently stopped his
son’s efforts and made him face him, kneeling so they were nearly
eye to eye with each other. “If you kill something with this
blade…” he slipped the blade into his son’s hand, “…if you kill
another living thing with this—it will be one of the most personal
deeds you will ever do. You must know this, for the good or the bad
of it. It can lay to rest a lifetime of persecution or…torment you
for an eternity.”

These were compelling words for one
so young. The boy held the blade across both open palms. He gazed
at it, studied it, saw his own reflection in it, wondered if it saw
into him as well.

* * *

As he made his way slowly through
the tunnel, the weapon lay hidden in the boy’s right boot where
Ravan had insisted he keep it always. His calf holster was just
below the knee, and the blade rode comfortably there. It likely
would remain undiscovered by an enemy should he eventually need
it.

“With the blade in your boot, at
your age, you will reach it easily in a fight, more easily than if
your arms are locked in battle and the blade is at your side. You
can lift your boot to your hand at any time.” Ravan grabbed his
son, pinned his arms to his sides, and wrestled him to the ground.
“Get it!” his father laughed, “get it and exact your
retaliation!”

The boy struggled, finally bending
his knee so that the blade met his hand. Sweeping it from the
holster, he yelled, “Hyah! You are undone, Father!”

Ravan released his son, laughing.
“Good. You see?”

This made perfect sense to Risen,
and he’d practiced just what his father taught him, rolling on the
ground in mock battle and bringing his foot up to his pinned right
hand. Risen believed his father was right on nearly all things, and
the young warrior flourished under his tutelage.

Encouraged by the steadfast presence
of his first in command, Risen opened the final door and stepped
from the hidden mouth of what appeared to be a small cave tucked
into a secluded hillside some ways from the castle. Pulling his way
through the dense bank of fir shrubs, he cursed them as their
needles tormented and scratched at him, hindering his
advance.

“Why were these here?” He was
frustrated at the delay. Then he answered his own question. Not
only did the miserable shrubs obscure the mouth of the tunnel, no
one would be inclined to see what lay behind them. His next thought
was something to the effect of just how brilliant he believed his
father was.

CHAPTER TWELVE

†

Sylvie’s Home: The Night
Before

Sylvie sat next to her father,
curled up by the hearth and enjoying the last of the dying fire. It
was late, and Tobias—worn out as the scrappy, twelve year old boy
could be—had already gone to bed. Her mother was mending Tobias’
trousers. It seemed like his were eternally torn, and she was
humming softly to herself as she did, a habit of hers that her
daughter particularly loved.