The Chosen of Anthros Read online

  Fortarian also didn’t look as well put together as he did the last time she saw him. His long white hair was in tangles around his head. His lithe form looked more skeletal than elegant. The shadow plague that consumed the entire right half of his body was graying, almost like ashes. Where the plague had once been deep and shimmering, like fresh ink, his skin now seemed to flake away. Clothes that were once so clean and immaculate were now torn and hung off his frail figure like rags. His left eye was blackened and nearly swollen shut.

  “What’s happening to your darkling wyrd?” Leona wondered.

  “It’s flaking away,” he told her. A tear rolled out of his eye, over the angry bruise to moisten his split lip. His mouth quivered, and his hands shook when he pointed to the collar around his neck.

  It was the same collar they’d placed on Abagail. Was this going to happen to her sister too?

  “What will happen when it’s all gone?” Leona wondered.

  “Who knows?” Fortarian asked. “Maybe my right half will be as withered and rotten as Hilda.”

  Leona shivered when he mentioned the dark goddess’ name.

  She stared at him for some time. The man who had wounded her, used her to activate the hammer. But that wasn’t him, she thought. That was Gorjugan, the serpent god.

  A darkling had once controlled Fortarian, using him as its vessel in Agaranth.

  “Why are you here, Leona?” Fortarian wondered. “Is my sister going to let me loose? Have they realized that I’m no harm to them?”

  Leona shook her head. “I don’t know,” she told him truthfully. “You were home to Gorjugan and you were a darkling long before that. That’s how he got in, isn’t it? You welcomed him.”

  “I’m aware of what I was,” he said. It wasn’t aggressive. “And it’s adorable that you think a darkling god needs an invitation to take control of us. But that’s neither here nor there since there’s nothing I can do with this collar locked around my neck.”

  “There’s plenty you can do without the use of darkling wyrd,” she told him, squaring her shoulders.

  He shook his head and sighed. He flopped back against the brick wall. Several moments passed when she just stared at him.

  “So why are you here? Did you come to mock me?” he looked up at her. “Did you come to see for yourself that I was locked safely away and couldn’t cut you up again?”

  “I came to see what happens to darklings who finally meet the fate they deserve,” Leona said. “You’re pathetic.”

  And he was. Fortarian didn’t even wince at her. He nodded as if he agreed. Whatever it was that she’d come to feel, come to see if he was the darkness plaguing Haven, she’d found out. He was nothing and would likely never be anything again.

  “You let the darklings into Agaranth. You cursed your world to this wintery hell,” she accused.

  “You’re sure of that?” he asked her. “You think I alone had the power to bring the darklings here dear niece?”

  “I’m not your niece.” She slammed her scarred palm against the bars to his cell.

  Fortarian didn’t flinch. He stood and neared the bars. Leona backed away, sure that he might be able to still infect her with his shadow plague, even if he wore a collar hindering its power.

  “So certain,” he whispered. “Darklings aren’t the only ones able to lie and hide the truth.”

  Leona shook her head, but she couldn’t find any words to argue. Truth, she thought. Wasn’t that what she was trying to figure out?

  She fled back down the hallway and James let her out the moment she knocked on the door. She had to talk to Abagail. Leona burst out of the stockades, the sudden light of the sun blinding her from the darkness of the prison.

  Abagail will know what to do, Leona thought. How was she ever going to explain all of this to her sister? How was she going to tell her about the hammer and the vision she had? She was in a world of trouble. So isn’t Abagail.

  Was it selfish of Leona to be thinking of herself and laying all of this on Abagail?

  I’m in no shape to spar today, she thought. But she had to. She didn’t want anyone to know there was something wrong with her. She had to talk to Abagail, but her sister was likely still doing her own thing.

  She cast her gaze up to the sky. It was time for lunch, but she just wasn’t hungry. There was no way she could even force herself to eat after the upset that morning had been. She found her way around the second level and to the yurt the ravens used. If they were inside there was no indication from the outside. She tried the door, but it was locked. Leona knocked and listened for a time, but there was no movement inside.

  With a sigh she slumped down onto the stairs and watched the students in the center of the courtyard spar.

  “Again!” Ephram said.

  Rorick’s hand still screamed from the shock of Ephram’s disarming blow. He didn’t think it was possible for someone so slight, so short, to pack such a punch. But the dark haired, bearded quartermaster was a force to reckon with. I suppose you don’t become quartermaster by being weak.

  Rorick grabbed his practice blade and stood. He shifted his grip on the hilt and went after Ephram again. The man was like water, flowing through the air, evading every one of Rorick’s blows. But Rorick had him. Ephram was against the wall and the burly man lunged at his teacher. This time he was Rorick’s.

  Except he wasn’t. Ephram dodged out of the way, rolled under the blow, and came up, kicking Rorick in the side, knocking the wind out of him.

  Rorick gasped, and limped to the side of the practice field. He grabbed his rib. Figures, right where the elle folk got me. Why does everyone keep smacking the same spot?

  “Come on now!” The quartermaster jeered. “I thought you traveled with those girls to protect them. I’m surprised they made it here alive.”

  “Actually I think the youngest did more protecting than I did,” Rorick said, rubbing his side.

  “You don’t say?” Ephram said. He motioned that they were taking a break and leaned against the wall of the yurt beside Rorick.

  “She is something else,” Rorick told him. “Made decisions that I’m not sure I could have made, and carried them through like a trained warrior.”

  “Then I delight in meeting her this afternoon.” Ephram took a deep pull from his canteen and then handed it to Rorick.

  “Go easy on her,” Rorick cautioned. He accepted the canteen and guzzled down enough water to make his stomach sloshy.

  “If she’s as tough as you say, I should hope she goes easy on me.” Ephram smiled, showing a straight row of white teeth. “Camilla will help you learn the basics of fencing. She tells me you don’t have much experience with a blade?”

  “No, I never used a sword. Blunt objects here,” Rorick said.

  Ephram nodded. “Discuss that with her, see what she wants to do. We prefer our guards know their way around swords.” He pushed away from the wall. “Speaking of, you’re on guard duty tonight with her. You will meet her back up here after dinner and she will show you where you’re going to be stationed.”

  “How long before I’m on my own?” Rorick wondered.

  Ephram laughed at that. “Not so fast. Part of your training is in weapons, part of your training is us evaluating if you’re trustworthy or not. You will stick with her for now.”

  Rorick nodded. The rest of their training session passed with a little less abuse and a little more teaching. By the time they were done, Rorick knew the basics of the sword and had even disarmed Ephram once, though he suspected the quartermaster let him disarm him.

  Dinner came with no sign of either of the girls. Gil joined him, but the harbinger was an odd sort. Half the time he couldn’t tell if Gil was talking to him or to the book that sat open before him.

  “Guard duty tonight?” Gil asked, fingering a page of the book. He didn’t bother looking up.

  Rorick grunted around a mouthful of roasted chicken. He poked at a rogue potato that slipped across his plate through the gravy.<
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  “Who’s teaching you now?” Gil asked. This time he did peak up at Rorick, almost like he was checking to see if the other man was still there with him.

  “Camilla,” Rorick told him, stabbing into the potato.

  “Hmmm,” Gil said, going back to his book. “That should be…interesting.”

  “What’s wrong with Camilla?” Rorick asked, not bothering to eat the potato.

  “Nothing’s wrong with her, exactly, but she’s a very tough woman. She’s been through a lot. She doesn’t normally take students.” Gil sat back in his chair, crossing his arms over frail chest. “I wonder why Ephram put you with her.”

  “Who is she anyway?” Rorick wondered.

  “Ephram’s second in command. She’s captain of the guard.” Gil went back to his book as if it didn’t matter.

  It mattered to Rorick. Here it was, almost time to meet Camilla, and his nerves were so on edge he thought he might jitter out of his chair. Why would Ephram put him with the captain of the guard? Why would he have Rorick studying with his second in command?

  “Well,” Gil said, pushing to his feet and closing his tome. “You better not keep her waiting.” The thin man strode away from the table.

  Rorick barely registered making his way back up to the second level and to the courtyard where they sparred. Ephram was there with another person who was, impossibly, half his height and half his weight. The person seemed nearly elven, if it wasn’t for her height. Elves seemed tall. This person would barely come up to Rorick’s chest.

  She was short enough to make Leona seem tall.

  As he neared he could see the way the person was poised on their feet as if at any moment they might attack. Like a coiled spring, he thought.

  He wasn’t surprised when Ephram introduced her as Camilla. She had an angular face and black hair that was longer in the front than it was in the back. She had twin blades strapped to her back, and the leather armor she wore was soft and black. She was almost like a shadow.

  Camilla’s green eyes took in every inch of Rorick.

  “How do you expect me to train an ox?” she asked Ephram. She didn’t bother looking at Rorick again. “He’s better suited for blunt objects.”

  “That’s what I told him,” Rorick said.

  She ignored him. “At least then his brutish size would work in his favor. No one will believe he is stealthy enough for a blade.”

  “Then teach him power instead of stealth,” Ephram said. “He’s to be a guard, not a warrior.”

  “He would make a good warrior,” Camilla commented, turning her eyes back to Rorick as if he was a specimen rather than a person. “Train him with an axe or a cudgel and put him on guard near the Fey Forest.” Camilla waved her hand as if dismissing Rorick from guard duty that night.

  “I will not,” Ephram said. There was a note of authority in his voice.

  Camilla sighed and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Fine.”

  She left and Rorick had to scurry behind her to keep up. “I don’t have a sword,” he told her.

  “Better grab one,” she motioned dismissively behind her toward the weapon’s wrack.

  He jogged back to where the weapons were kept in a lean-to beside one of the training yurts. He selected one he thought was a good heft, and had to run to catch up to Camilla. In the darkness he could barely make her out until he saw the rigid movements of her slight frame.

  “I won’t have time to train you tonight,” she told him. “When we are on guard duty we guard, we don’t mess around. Tomorrow before your duty we will train, and we will train hard.”

  “Ephram showed me the basics today,” Rorick told her.

  “You will learn as we go,” she told him. “Basics and advanced, it all comes down to experience. You won’t practice with me all the time, you will start out battling some of the other students and learn from there.”

  Rorick didn’t say anything.

  “We don’t use practice blades when I teach,” she said.

  “What? How am I supposed to not lose a limb or something?” Rorick asked.

  “You better be good,” she said. She smiled over at him, but there was no humor in the gesture. “If we used practice blades, then it would allow you to be sloppy. Real weapons and you’re more on edge.”

  They were silent the rest of the trip down the switchback hills of the different levels of Haven. Finally they were below the last level of houses and entering the more overgrown portion of the mountain Haven perched on.

  Camilla took up a position near a large bush that she nearly disappeared within and Rorick stood beside her.

  “Well, find a spot,” she told him.

  “And do what?” he asked.

  “Guard?” she said to him sarcastically. “We watch the hill, make sure no one is coming or going. Try to hide.”

  Rorick shrugged and found a spot close to Camilla and tried to fade into his surroundings like she did.

  “So what brings you here?” Camilla asked in a whisper some time later. It felt like hours to Rorick, but he knew that guard shifts happened in six hour increments.

  “A friend of mine caught the shadow plague, her father sent us to Agaranth to her aunt.” Rorick recounted the story of how Mattelyn hadn’t been at the house they arrived at, and they had to travel through many hardships to find her. When they did, the harbingers rescued them and brought them to Haven.

  A silence hung in the air between them. Rorick thought for a moment that Camilla wasn’t going to speak again when finally she did.

  “Harbingers destroyed my home,” Camilla said as if it didn’t matter. Her tone was more like she was commenting on the weather rather than talking about the destruction of her family.

  “You mean harbingers of darkness?” Rorick asked.

  “What does that matter? All harbingers have darkling wyrd running through their veins, whether they act upon it or not.”

  Rorick couldn’t really argue with her. As far as he knew once they were trained, the harbingers didn’t have darkling wyrd any longer, just wyrd. But he could be wrong. He had heard many times traveling with Abagail that the emotion behind the wyrding was what mattered. Maybe the darkling wyrd never left a person once they were infected. Maybe it was always a balancing act. Would he always have his promise to kill Abagail if she turned into a darkling hanging over his head? Was she always going to be at risk of becoming like what destroyed his home?

  “So why are you here?” he asked. “Why did you come to Haven to protect harbingers if you think they’re all evil?”

  “Hope,” she said. “I hoped they weren’t evil.”

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “There’s war coming, Rorick,” she said. “Good and evil kind of war. You can see it already. Agaranth wasn’t always like this. The shadow plague comes, and the shadow plague perverts and it’s already killing all of what’s good in Agaranth. The harbingers aren’t only to blame, but they are a big part of it.”

  “The harbingers of darkness,” he asserted again.

  “What does it matter? The harbingers are on both sides of it. They are the reason for this war. It’s better to watch an enemy close up than it is far away.”

  “But you guard them!” Rorick said incredulously. “How can you hate them?”

  “I never said I hate them,” Camilla barked. “I just don’t trust them.”

  “And what, you’re planning on killing them?” Rorick asked.

  “If I were planning such a thing, would I be talking to you about it right now?” There was a smirk in her voice. “I plan no such thing. My cousin, Gil, is a harbinger. I’m merely here to watch and guard and make sure they remain harbingers of light. That’s the true reason we guard.”

  Rorick’s stomach was in knots. He didn’t know exactly what Camilla had been getting at. Was she trying to recruit him for something? Was this something he was supposed to tell Ephram about?

  She hadn’t said she was going to go on a killing spree, he told himself. Hones
tly you should be watching for the same thing. If she’s right, and what you’ve heard is right, then maybe a harbinger of light could go dark at any time. Maybe Abagail is right to be afraid. Catching a harbinger of darkness at the quick does make sense.

  He let his eyes roam the side of the hill and was just about to say something to Camilla when he saw a shadow move toward the base of the hill. Another joined it.

  “Camilla,” Rorick whispered.

  His teacher eased closer. He pointed off into the darkness where he’d seen the shadows.

  She watched with him for a time and nodded. “We see those shadows every night,” she told him. “They never come any closer, and we can’t tell where they come from. But we watch, and we guard.”

  “Are they darklings?” he asked, casting his glance in her direction.

  “If they were, you’d think they would attack,” she said. She sounded as though she wasn’t completely sure herself. “But it’s almost every night at this time. Which means that noise you hear coming down the hill is our replacement.”

  Rorick nodded but waited for Camilla to move before he did.

  “They’re back,” she said to the burly man that came to take their place. “About five of them tonight.”

  “I thought maybe they had moved on,” he said. His voice was surprisingly high for all his baulk. “I haven’t seen them for about a week.”

  “What do you think they are?” Rorick asked the man.

  “No one knows,” Camilla said in a way that shut him up. “Besides, it’s time to turn in. Take your sword with you and head home. You have an early start tomorrow. Meet me at the sparring ring at first light.”

  Rorick nodded and headed up the hill. Camilla didn’t follow him though, she stayed behind with the other guard, their heads together and whispering.

  “You’re breath smells like meat.” Skye scrunched up his nose and looked sidelong at Abagail.

  “I just got done eating, what do you expect?” She asked, raising an eyebrow at him. “We can’t all live on twigs and berries you know.”