The Chosen of Anthros (9 page)

“Lucky for you I saw you coming and figured you’d want tea.”

“What do you normally drink?” Abagail wondered, ignoring her sister.

“Normally wine.”

“That’s all?” Abagail wondered.

“Here you go,” Leona said, setting the hot cocoa before Abagail and a cup of hot water before the elf. She placed a tin of loose tea leaves beside it.

Abagail inhaled the cocoa deeply. It reminded her of home when her father would make cocoa for them on snowy afternoons and they would read by the fire.

Leona took that moment to disappear up the stairs with her cocoa, but not before she shot her sister a wink.

Abagail blushed. Was she really that obvious?

“Elves don’t tend to get drunk like humans think of it.”

“So how do elves get drunk?” she asked, setting the mug before him and taking a seat beside him. Even from that distance she could feel the energy radiating from him, playing across her skin like heat.

“Is this an opening line of a joke?” Skye asked.

Abagail smiled at him and looked to her hands. “No!” she laughed. “It’s a real question.”

“Not something stupid like, ‘how do elves get drunk? By sipping sap from the five fingered grass.’”

“Do you guys smoke that?” Abagail wondered. “I’d heard rumors.”

Skye started laughing. “Our ancestors did. Some of our shamans still do, but not generally, no.”

“So how
do
elves get drunk?” Abagail insisted. She took a sip of her cocoa. The heat and the sweetness were perfect and seemed to infuse every muscle, relaxing her from head to toe.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Probably poor choice of words. We don’t get drunk. Wine is to elves like juice would be to you.”

“Oh,” Abagail said. “I like the taste of wine. I wish it had little effect on me.”

“If you like wine, then you have to try elvish wine,” Skye told her.

“Yea? I’m assuming it’s not like juice?” Abagail asked.

“Well, it
is
pretty sweet, but you probably wouldn’t make it through one glass.”

“Is that a dare?” Abagail wondered.

“Would that make it more inviting if it were?”

“Maybe…”

“Well, come hang out in New Landanten some night,” he told her. Skye smiled slyly at her.

“I might have to do that,” she told him. Having him invite her to New Landanten reminded her of the meeting with Fen earlier in the day. It was a sobering thought.

“You should. The sooner the better.”

“So where is Celeste?” Abagail asked.

“What, I can’t stop by to see how you’re settling in?” Skye asked. He winked at her. Abagail felt her face flush and she looked down at her hands on the table. She couldn’t help but stare at her right hand, covered in a glove, proclaiming to all that she was marred; imperfect. Skye laughed. “She’s on assignment.”

“Another harbinger?” Abagail asked, trying to calm the emotions running through her body.

He shrugged and took a sip of the tea. “Might be that, or we might have found where more harbingers of darkness are holed up.”

“They have little establishments?” she wondered.

“Not really,” he shrugged. “It’s not that common to see them working together. Can you imagine if they were? Wow.”

“Why, what would that mean?” Abagail asked, sitting up straighter.

“Well typically they are the hiding kind. They live alone, terrifying the locals and feeding on children.”

“What?”

“That’s kind of a joke. I don’t know if any of them actually feed on children, but there is an air of misfortune that follows them. Some of them become like Fortarian and decide to rule over wherever they live.”

“Okay, so they don’t get along?”

He shrugged. “That’s part of what we are trying to figure out. Why aren’t they living more clustered together? At this point we think it’s good they are living separate. If they lived closer together then that might mean something big is about to happen.”

“Like what?” Abagail asked.

“How am I to know?” He laughed.

Abagail smiled.

“So how are things going here?” he asked. “Rorick acting better?”

“Yea, he seems to be less tense now that we are in Haven,” Abagail told him.

“Leona settling in okay? She vanished rather quickly.”

“Better than I expected,” Abagail said, casting a glance at the stairs. “What about you?” She asked, looking at Skye.

He fingered the rim of his mug and wouldn’t meet her eyes. But his smiling face was gone, and she could see there, traced in the subtle lines of his pale face that he wasn’t as good as he put on.

“You miss Mari, don’t you?” Abagail asked Skye.

He nodded and tried to smile, but it came out more like a smirk.

“Were you a couple?” Abagail didn’t want him to see how eager she was to know the answer to that. She tried acting subtle, toying with a scar in the surface of the table like his response didn’t matter. She hoped she succeeded.

“No,” he said, and then chuckled. “Mari and I were certainly not a couple. When we first met I thought we could have been, but as we grew closer, I realized that we were only going to be friends.”

“But you loved her?” Abagail pushed the words out around the lump in her throat. Her stomach sunk so fast she thought she was falling.

“Not like that,” Skye said. “As a sister, yes, but not as a lover.”

Abagail nodded. “But that’s just as hard.”

“Harder maybe,” Skye said. “I really wouldn’t know, she was the first person I’ve lost that I was close to. I’ve never had a lover to lose, so…”

“Oh…”

“Anyway, I have to go check on the fey tomorrow, would you like to come along?” he asked.

“I have training all day,” Abagail told him.

“Well that’s fine, they don’t really start coming alive until twilight anyway,” he said. “So your excuse is irrelevant.”

“It wasn’t an excuse.” Her eyebrows furrowed together and her back straightened.

Skye laughed at her, and clasped her gloved hand. Even though there was fabric separating their skin, she could still feel the tingle of his flesh on hers. She stared down at where their hands were connected.

“You’re easy to get going,” he said. He followed her eyes down to the glove. He slipped his hand away. “Does that bother you?”

She shook her head. “It’s just that no one is really willing to touch my hand now.”

“Well, some people are afraid of it. Some aren’t willing to accept it.”

“And you?” she asked, looking into his violet eyes, without caring if she got lost in their depths or not.

“I accept people the way they are,” he said. “And I’m not afraid.”

Abagail saw the truth of his words in his eyes. It didn’t matter to him if Abagail had the plague or not, that wouldn’t stop him. She had to look away from his blind acceptance. It seemed he accepted her more than she accepted herself.

“Should I ask Leona if she wants to come?” Skye asked. “It’s up to you.”

There was something in his voice though, something that said he didn’t really want Leona to go, that he’d rather have the time to spend alone with Abagail. She didn’t know what to say. She didn’t want Leona to feel left out, but she also really wanted time alone with the elf.

“I’ve got plans tomorrow night,” Leona called from the top of the stairs.

Skye laughed. “Seems like we’ve had an uninvited third guest this entire time.”

“Very funny,” she said, coming down the stairs, acting as if nothing was wrong. “I was on my way down anyway.” She showed him the empty mug as if that was the only reason she had come back down.

“Yea, sure,” Skye said. He slid his hand further from Abagail’s and stood up. “Well, thank you for the tea. I will meet you here tomorrow night.” He gave Abagail a wink and ruffled Leona’s short hair. Leona swatted at him, but smiled.

“What do you have going on tomorrow night?” Abagail asked Leona once Skye had shut the door behind himself.

“My plans for tomorrow night are to not come between Abagail and the guy she lusts after.”

“I don’t—”

“Don’t lie. I’m a seer, remember?” Leona said. She waved at her sister behind her back. “Early day tomorrow. G’night.”

Abagail closed the door to the classroom behind her. The darkness inside was nearly all consuming compared to outside and it took several moments for her eyes to adjust to the candlelight inside the yurt. Her stomach growled because she’d gotten up late and hadn’t had time to grab anything to eat before her training. She’d made a mad dash up to the second level just so she’d be on time. Rowan seemed like she was warming up to Abagail, but she still didn’t think that the harbinger would be happy if she was late to her first class.

When her eyesight adjusted to the darker room, she noticed Gil standing in the back of the room, dressed in a nondescript brown tunic and trousers. If at all possible, it made him seem plainer than he had before.

Abagail hadn’t really had time to plan what she was going to wear, but her lavender tunic and black trousers looked almost festive compared to his outfit.

“Where’s Rowan?” Abagail asked, stepping further into the room. Her shoulders eased their tension knowing that the harbinger couldn’t see that Abagail was nearly late to her first lesson.

“She will be a little late,” Gil said.

Great, here I was worried about being late, and she isn’t even here.
But it would have been her luck to show up late and have Rowan here at the exact time she was supposed to be.

Gil gathered something from a table beside him and came closer to Abagail. When he was close enough that the meager light illuminated him, she could see he carried a strange bracelet of sorts. “You can take off your glove,” he told her. “This is a sparring glove. This ring attaches to your middle finger, and the bracelet clamps over your wrist. Make sure that this flat disk is against your palm.”

He handed the bracelet to Abagail and when he did she noticed a similar one on his left hand. She didn’t see any evidence of the shadow plague.

“Where is your plague?” Abagail asked, slipping the silver ring over her finger. She pressed the bronze disk to her palm and fastened the bracelet to her wrist. Somehow the contraption seemed the perfect size for her.

“Rowan told you that not all harbingers have been infected with the plague. I’m one of the lucky few.” He smiled at her.

“Not to be rude, but how are you going to be able to teach me to combat my emotions well enough to learn to work my wyrd if you’ve never been tempted by the plague?”

Gil walked behind her and ran his hand over the collar around her neck. It clicked open and fell to the floor with a heavy clang. “Just because I don’t have the plague doesn’t mean I haven’t had to learn to control my emotions when it comes to wyrdings.”

“Right, but the plague makes those emotions worse,” Abagail told him. “I don’t know how to really explain it, but the plague is almost like another entity in your mind, fueling your fears and your anger until the darkling wyrd is taking over.”

“I’ve heard that. It doesn’t mean that my hardship is just like yours, but it’s similar. There’s good and bad in every wyrd. Darkling wyrd is one half of all wyrd. While it’s not as strong in some as it is in those with the plague, the darkling wyrd is always trying to come out.”

“So there are harbingers of darkness who haven’t been tempted by the plague?” Abagail asked, turning her head to look over her shoulder at Gil.

“Yep, they’ve chosen of their own free will to be harbingers of darkness.”

“So you’ve had to learn to control it too?” Abagail asked, her head following his movement until he was right in front of her again.

Gil nodded and then gathered the collar from the floor and tossed it to the side of the yurt.

“How did you do it?” Abagail asked him. “Are you going to be teaching me to do that here?”

“In part,” Gil asked. “Later when you start learning to ignore the darkling wyrd more, we will up the stakes, maybe start giving you prompts that we know would upset you, and see how well you keep your emotions out of it.”

Abagail shifted uncomfortably remembering the verbal attack she had to endure from Rowan on their way to Haven.

“No need to worry,” Gil told her. “That isn’t for some time yet.”