Sunbolt (The Sunbolt Chronicles) (17 page)

“Let’s finish this,” Val says.

“Such a shame,” Kol says, drawing his sword. “I would have liked to keep you a little longer.”
 

Val doesn’t answer. Instead, he drops his gaze to Kol’s mount. The horse pauses and then—relaxes, its eyes dilating slightly, even its expression gentling. There is no indication that magic is at work, no prickling of my senses to alert me, but I have no doubt that Val is using his gaze.
 

When he looks back up, he smiles coldly. “Come then,” he says.

Kol’s horse won’t move, ignoring the tap of his heels. It gazes towards Val with equine adoration, and remains still as stone despite Kol’s kicks and the smack of his blade against her flanks.

“You have a choice,” Val says. “You can remain on your horse, who loves me better than you, or you can fight me on foot.”

“I don’t see you dismounting,” Kol snarls.
 

Val drops down to the ground without a word, relaxing into a fighter’s pose, weapons at the ready. Then he tilts his head, a challenge.

I watch him, unnerved. Isn’t a horse a warrior’s greatest weapon? So why would he abandon his own after beguiling Kol’s? Does he care that much for a fair fight? Or perhaps he isn’t as good a horseman as Kol is. Whatever his reason, I hope it’s a good one.

Kol dismounts, careful not to turn his back on his enemy, his face black with fury. “You’ll pay for that little trick, breather.”

“I said that I would kill you, fang. I intend to keep that promise. Come.”

They move towards each other casually, their swords ready but their motions easy, unhurried. And then they stop. They say nothing, make no move, and yet I cannot shake the sense that they are fighting, that something crucial is being decided in the very stillness of the air.
 

They meet so quickly that I can’t tell who moved first. Their swords clash almost faster than my eye can follow, the clang of steel ringing in my ears. Behind me I hear a curse that sounds more like wonder than anger, for both breathers and fangs move faster than any human. I’d heard of such things before, but seeing it in person raises the gooseflesh on my arms.
 

They fall away from each other, parting as if by unspoken agreement. They circle each other and then slide into stillness once more, their eyes meeting steadily. Kol, with his own hypnotic gaze, seems to have no trouble looking into Val’s eyes.
 

The fighters come together again in a fury of glittering silver. When they part, I see a line of blood across Val’s chest. It’s a shallow wound, hardly a scrape, but I hear the soft exhalation of the guards and know that it is a sure sign of victory to them.
 

Kol laughs. “Do you think you can beat me now? After losing to me a year ago and starving since then? While I’ve grown stronger?”

“Grown lazy,” Val says.
 

Kol lunges forward and again their blades flash, and I see the blur of their movements, the obscene quickness of their cuts and parries. When they part, Kol is breathing hard, but Val bleeds from a second cut, this one to the arm he holds his dagger with. Val should be faster than Kol—should be, because breathers are said to be faster than every other race in the Eleven Kingdoms—but he isn’t. Not after a year spent moldering in the tower. And Kol knows it.

I bite my lip. If Val dies, so will I. His fight, whatever its history, is mine as well. I have no distraction to offer Kol, nor any weapon to throw his way, but I have what my parents gave me in the hours that they spent with me and the blood that flows in my veins.
 

I scoop up a handful of leaves and dirt. It is all I have to work with. Whatever I do will have to be fast and simple: something that moves with the quicksilver speed of their blades, something that Kol will not see or expect. But what I hold are things of slow growth and gentle decay. I let them crumble through my fingers, trying to think of what else I might use.
 

Kol and Val stand stone still, the sunlight igniting the highest branches of the trees around us. The sunlight. While it is not lethal to fangs, it can be. All things burn at a certain point, and fangs burn a little faster than the rest of us.

I gaze up towards the rays of light, my mind racing. I can’t reach that high, but perhaps I don’t have to. Sunlight has touched everything around me, from the trees to the leaves and the earth below me. How many times have I tapped the essence of the things around me as I’ve worked my magic? I have only to draw it out.
 

I press my hands into the leaf-littered earth and draw on the sunlight stored there, pulling the last golden drops from the withered leaves, stealing the remains of its warmth from the air. I draw on the flicker and flash of the swords, the energy coursing through the living things around me—the horses, the guards—pulling from them the sunlight they have stored in their bodies, transformed and transformed again. I draw it all into myself, until my very core burns.
 

When I look up, Val and Kol stand apart, but Val has lost his dagger, and Kol has ripped his sleeve. I focus on Kol, fanning the white hot fury within me with my breath, with my outrage. I think of how Kol has treated his prisoners, and how Blackflame gave him Alia; I think of the deaths of Lord and Lady Degath, and the betrayal of my mother, and the creatures I have destroyed in my attempts to do good: the horse with its broken leg, the fang left behind to die in his cage. The blaze builds within me until it is a flaming inferno—and then I release it.
 

The fire roars out of me with the shriek of
lightning wrapped in thunder, searing my throat and eyes and nose, turning all I touch to ash. I do not see where it goes, for in its absence I have gone blind, and over its thunder I can hear no sound.
 

Through the earth pressed against my cheek, cool and soothing, I feel the thud of horses’ hooves, the fading reverberations of animals fleeing. And then only stillness.

In the darkness, someone holds a cup of water to my lips. I drink greedily, swallowing great gulps until it reaches my stomach, and then I am retching up coals and ash. What is left after a fire? The burnt out skeleton of what was, a few charred remains. Nothing that can hold water.

Later, there is water again. I open my mouth for it, but there are only small sips. They wash the soot down my throat, pool in the heat-born cracks within me. I learn after that to expect only a little at a time. Water, broth, whatever I am given is poured in tiny trickles between my parched lips.
 

I cannot say how much time passes, for what is time when there is only darkness? But eventually the darkness eases. I become aware of a faint brightness around me, a twilight I have made myself. I realize I need only open my eyes. Daylight pours in, harsh as the whitest lightning, and I moan with the pain of it.
 

“Hitomi?” a voice whispers from far away, or perhaps just beside me, but I am already reeling back into the night.
 

The next time, I only crack my eyes a little. I focus dimly on long brown objects that sway nearby. Trees? I take a breath, trying to slow their movement, and it rattles in my chest.

“Hitomi,” the voice murmurs above me. I find myself looking into a set of violet eyes. How strange that they should appear so serious.
 

I open my mouth to answer, not sure what will emerge as my voice. What comes is a cough so hard and hacking that I taste blood mixed with cinders. It is a good taste, though, for it means that not everything within me has burnt to ash.
 

After that, I spend more and more time with my eyes open. The violet eyes slowly gather more features, resolving into a face I think I know, and after a few days I find the name
Val
floating in my mind.
 

I discover that we travel through rugged foothills leading up to mountains. At first, Val holds me before him on his horse. As I grow stronger, he rearranges the packs strapped to his second horse, making a nest to hold me. He uses a rope to tie me to my seat that I should not fall, and he takes the lead, my horse’s reins looped through his saddle.

I notice that I wear layers of clothes that stink of sweat and dirt. I am wrapped in a mottled gray cloak to protect against the winter cold, the snow that settles on my shoulders, Val’s hair. I realize that I have no hair. It is a strange moment when I raise one arm awkwardly to touch my head and find only smooth skin beneath the cloak’s hood.

“It will grow back, I expect,” Val says when he sees me. I do not know how to answer him.
 

By the time we reach the mountain paths, I find my voice. It is a smoky, shadowy thing, but it carries meaning past my lips, for which I am grateful. “What happened?” I ask as we sit beside a small fire.

Val turns his violet gaze on me, silent. I think he will not answer, but then he moves to toss a twig on the fire and says, “Do you remember Kol?”

I only look at him.
 

He sighs. “He was the blue-eyed fang who held us captive.”

“The tower,” I say, the word black as soot.

“Yes. I was fighting him, and losing handily, when you killed him.” He purses his lips, watching me.

I look down, try to blink the blurriness from the edges of my vision. I cannot quite fathom this—that I have killed a man.

“You don’t remember.”

I try to focus on Val’s words. “I remember … fire.”

“And before that? Do you remember where you came from?” I listen to the sound of my breath, try to think past the flash of heat and light, a wall of flames beyond which lies only ash.
 

“Karolene,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You remember your father’s name?” When I do not answer, he continues, “Rasheed Coldeye.”

“Yes.”

“And your mother’s name.” I wait for him to tell me, but he does not. “Do you remember your mother’s name?”
 

“Yes.”

“What was it?”
 

We both wait then, I for the memory to crawl out of the flames, and he for my voice. Or perhaps he does not, for after a time he throws another log on the fire and rises and walks away, returning much later as I lie on my side watching the coals breathe white and red. He says nothing, and I have no words for him.

The snow begins to collect on the ground as we move higher into the mountains, little patches of white hiding in the shadows. I grow strong enough to keep my seat without help, though Val continues to lead my horse. We stop often for him to give me bread and cheese, or bits of dried meat to suck: provisions bought or stolen from a town I have not seen. Periodically, he leaves me at our camp and returns hours later with supplies. I notice that he does not eat, and it takes me some days to recall that this is because he is a breather. It seems strange, having remembered, that I could ever have forgotten.

“When do you eat?” I ask him.

“At night,” he tells me. “I hunt animals while you sleep.”

I nod and consider this carefully, adding it to the small store of things I now know: a breather might subsist on the life force of animals.
 

Every evening we sit before the fires that Val lights. He carves little pieces of wood with a knife, making foxes and owls and frogs that he tosses into the flames at the end of each night. I watch him throw them with sadness, wishing I could make something like them, or that he would not burn them all.
 

He will not tell me about himself, and I have nothing left that I remember. So, instead, he describes the places he has been. He has traveled to six of the eleven kingdoms. He has stayed with the desert tribes through the sun-bleached summer, and he has crossed the seas of ice with the northmen. He has even, he finally admits, visited Karolene, though he will not speak of it at all.
 

“I do not want to make your memories for you,” he says, and will not be persuaded.
 

After I lie down for the night, my back to the fire, I try to remember the things he has told me: a tower room, a fang lord, fighting. It is as if I sift through the ashes of old fires, my hands blackened with soot, and only sometimes do I find something: a bit of misshapen metal, a singed scrap of cloth. I remember a woman rising from a dark pool, a man with a wolf’s head, another woman dressed in silks. But I cannot piece these memories together, cannot be sure how one relates to the other, or how any of them relate to me. I remember reaching for sunlight so that I might kill. It is the only memory I wish I had lost.

We reach a high pass and see, stretching out before us, range upon range of mountains, indigo and amethyst in the fading evening light. We pause, Val allowing my horse to draw up beside his.
 

“Hotaru Brokensword,” I say, finding a name for the woman in silks. Val looks at me. I laugh, the sound breathy and wreathed in smoke. “My mother’s name.”

“You remembered,” he says, smiling. He seems very young to me. I cannot imagine why I ever believed him old.

The next morning, just as the sun climbs to its highest point, we reach our destination. I had not realized that we were going anywhere in particular. It seemed to me that we were only traveling, and that this was a thing that travelers do: move from place to place, never look back. But we take the little path curling down through woods into a valley, and come to a small stone cottage built on the edge of a lake. Together, they make a quaint picture: the single-story stone cottage with its wooden timbers, a small path leading to its front door, looking like a child’s toy set alongside the wide expanse of the azure lake.