Heirs of the Fallen: Book 02 - Crown of the Setting Sun Page 21

  Sooner than he wanted, Zera descended to a low dune of pure white sand, and gently set his feet back where they belonged. Once released, she flew a few paces and landed gracefully. As she turned, her misty shape, the embodiment of a shadowy dream, quickly shrank and solidified. He saw before him the face he knew well. Her eyes shone with the same green, bottomless radiance as ever. A shy smile quirked her lips, as if she had not just revealed a monstrous secret, but a wondrous gift. He stared open-mouthed, trying to understand.

  “I could not tell you before,” she said, sounding abashed.

  “Ba’Sel said you were like a daughter to him.” As he spoke, misery and rage filled him up. “Did you betray him as easily as you did me?”

  “Do you not see?” Zera countered, holding her hands out to him. “I did it for you … for us … for what we share. It pains me more than you can ever know to have deceived Ba’Sel. For you and your love, I not only turned against him, I turned on my own kind.”

  She drifted closer as she spoke, until stood before him. Leitos looked into her eyes, felt himself falling into them, into her. Madness, he thought, even as their lips met, tentatively at first, then with passion. In that moment, he nearly forgot all that had happened from the time he fled the mines to now … nearly.

  He broke away from her with a strangled cry. “Alon’mahk’lar, Mahk’lar, Na’mihn’teghul,” he said angrily. “Whatever you call yourself, you are demon-born—and demons love only the slaughter!”

  “Even I believed that … until I met you,” Zera said softly, trying to take him in her arms again.

  Leitos jerked away. The sorrow in her eyes fell on him like a hammer blow, but he refused to surrender to his remorse. He wrapped himself in disgust and outrage. She was the progeny of the Fallen, born of atrocities. Her demonic race, under the reign of the Faceless One, had subjugated him, his people, all humankind, reduced them to animals with only despair and death to wish upon.

  “I am sorry, Leitos,” she whispered, tears filling her eyes. “You must believe me.”

  He had never seen her weep. Though it pained him further, he felt sure it was a trick conjured in the blackest chambers of her mind. “As am I,” he answered heavily. The trusting part of him did not want to believe that the woman before him was the very face of evil. Unspeakable grief soured his tongue, filled his soul with emptiness. “How could you have possibly believed, knowing what you are and what I am, that we could ever be more than enemies?”

  “We do not have to be pitted against each other,” Zera said. “You and I, the love we share, the first of its kind, can bridge the gap between the children of the Fallen and humankind. Please, Leitos, I am willing to try, if you are….”

  Despite his anger and sadness, he wanted with all his heart to escape with her, to live out their lives away from the reach of the Faceless One, and even his own kind. But it would be easier for the air he breathed and the sand he trod underfoot to become one and the same, than for them to shape any kind of life together.

  “I can take us away,” Zera said in a desperate rush, as if she sensed the turning of his mind. “We can build a new creation … a blending of the best parts of each of our kind. One day our children can stand against those who oppose us now.”

  “Those who oppose us?” Leitos said, stunned by her willful blindness. “The Faceless One and his allies stand against humanity. They have hunted my kind until only a few remain, and those living few are chained, made into starving, hopeless beasts for no other reason than that we exist. The best of your kind have ground to dust the bones of a hundred different peoples. Other than our existence, Zera, what have men done to oppose your kind?”

  “Given the freedom to reap the slaughter, humankind would kill and destroy as eagerly as have the Alon’mahk’lar,” Zera protested.

  Leitos shook his head in dismay. “Even a rat will gnaw the stick jammed against its throat in the hope of holding to its life, but that does not mean it is at fault. No less can be expected from any living creature, including humans. After suffering for three lifetimes of men, can you expect anything other than a spirit of vengeance to have grown within the hearts of my people? We did not ask to be conquered, we did not grovel at the feet of the Faceless One for the chance to be bound in chains the whole of our lives.” When he continued, his words rolled into the night, propelled by the force of his shouts.

  “You speak as though it is wickedness if my kind were ever given the chance to seek justice against their torturers. Is that where you stand, Zera? With the demon-spawn who ravished our women in order to create abominations that would be used to further oppress men and women and children, whose only crime was trying to survive in a world laid to waste after the Upheaval?”

  Zera stared at him. “I do love you, if you would only see it. Please come away with me. I have no other purpose, Leitos,” Zera said, her chin trembling. “Not anymore.”

  Those words caught like a hook in his mind. “You used me to lead you back to the Brothers of the Crimson Shield, but in the Sanctuary, you said you wanted me. Why?”

  “Because I love—”

  “Stop saying that!” Leitos shouted. “It was not for love, could not have been! You wanted me because your master set you on this path, the same way he set you on the path to betray the Brothers of the Crimson Shield. Why me, Zera,” he said through gritted teeth, “why am I needed?”

  In the silence that held between them, Leitos thought he heard a sound just below the whispering wind, a rhythmic drumming.

  “You are the last direct descendant of the Valara line,” Zera whispered.

  “You said the same in the Sanctuary. That name means nothing to me.”

  Her puzzled expression faded as quickly as it appeared. “In order to protect you, for fear of the slavemasters learning your secret, of course your father would not have spoken of your shared heritage.”

  “I never knew my father,” Leitos said bitterly, “or my mother, or anyone from my family except my grandfather. Alon’mahk’lar took us when I was an infant. We were brought to Geldain to dig and scratch away our lives away as punishment for resisting the will of the Faceless One. That is who you serve … that is who you are.”

  “No, Leitos. No longer. Please, I beg you, believe me. Trust the quiet voice in your heart. Come away with me, and I will tell you all I know.”

  “Tell me now,” he demanded, but she held quiet.

  Leitos stood mere feet from her, but a chasm seemed to gape before them. From all directions, death stalked the desert, wearing the terrible faces of his lifelong oppressors, the slavemasters, the Sons of the Fallen. Facing that, the darkness grew wider. On the other side waited Zera, made all too human in her sorrow and professed love. Could such a creature know love, could she take it from him and return it in kind?

  “Why can you not tell me now?” he whispered, voice cracking.

  Zera spread empty hands and shook her head. The wind tugged her dark hair, and a few strands caught in the wetness on her cheeks.

  Frustration wracked him, broke something deep in his soul.

  The breeze shifted, bringing with it the drumming he had heard before. It thudded loudly now. He looked around, but saw only the face of the night. He turned back, thinking it his imagination, until he heard Ba’Sel shout a wild cry of warning.

  “No!” Zera said in an anguished voice.

  Leitos flinched when she rushed forward. Throat closing tight, he danced back, but not nearly fast enough. She slammed against him, her empty hands pressed to his shoulders, squeezing. Her gaze widened in dismay. A pained, breathless gasp drifted past her parted lips.

  “Zera?” he muttered. Then cried out, “Zera!”

  The scent of leather was strong on her, and that of faded flowers. Her green eyes flared inches from his own, brighter and more innocent than he had ever seen them. One of his hands rested against her hip, the other was lodged between them. He felt the suppleness of her flesh, the warmth of it against his own. He felt something e
lse, a sensation he did not immediately recognize in his distress.

  Zera fought for breath that would not come. A tremor rippled her flesh. “I … I … love you. Please … believe me. Tell me … Leitos….”

  With each breath, her heart fluttered against the edge of his fist. That once unrecognizable sensation, a terrible damp heat, washed over his hand.

  “Zera?” he murmured. He abandoned all his fear and loathing for what she was and, the dark chasm finally crossed, he saw only the woman in his arms.

  Her eyes dimmed, and another tremor convulsed her limbs. A slow line, black in the night, sketched its way from the corner of her mouth and over the delicate curve of her chin. It grew fat, heavy with a portent he refused to admit. He had envisioned that drop before, had feared it when dreaming in that forsaken city of the dead, even as he feared it now. The drop swelled, became a single tear that could not endure its impossible weight.

  “I do love you,” Leitos sobbed, willing her to hear.

  The bloody drop fell. Another drop formed, its course altered by Zera’s faint smile, but it fell unnoticed against the blood pouring from her pierced heart over his knuckled fist—the same fist that held the dagger given him by Adham, which he had tucked into his belt and forgotten.

  The shouts of the approaching warriors grew louder. It was a sound so far away, buried under a roaring inside his skull akin to the flooded river that had nearly drowned him. That raging tumult grew until there was no other sound in the world. It filled him, then flooded out in a single, tortured cry.

  His breath spent, Leitos dropped to his knees, cradling Zera to his chest. Her smile melted away and her eyes drifted shut, as if she were dropping off into a much needed slumber. Tears scorched his cheeks as he looked upon her. A memory that might have been someone else’s swam through his consciousness. He could not remember where they had been, or what they had been doing, only that Zera had smiled at him. He had feared then that smile would bring him to his death. And so it had.

  Chapter 31

  After the black of night, the rising sun set the sea afire. Turquoise waters lapped the sides of a handful of long, slender boats, each propelled by sweeping oars toward the hazy mass of the Singing Islands. Leitos huddled in the bow of one, alone with a shrouded Zera. Her face remained uncovered. Leitos traced her cool cheek with a finger still covered in her dried blood, a haunted light smoldering in his eyes.

  The others had wanted to leave her, but he refused. Had it not been for Ba’Sel and Adham, the remaining Brothers of the Crimson Shield, with Ulmek the most vocal among them, would have left him and her to the desert and the hunting Alon’mahk’lar. Had they abandoned him, he would have died or been taken captive. Either end would have suited him. Yet he lived, where she had died by his hand. A void had opened within his soul, a void now filling with unspeakable darkness. Instead of shying from that invasive blight, he immersed himself in it, used it as armor and shield against the remorse he could not fully face.

  “We must speak,” Adham said quietly, so that only Leitos heard. Swells rocking the small vessel had masked his grandfather’s movements to the bow. Holding to the side of the boat, Adham positioned himself between Leitos and the others, just at Zera’s feet.

  Leitos turned, his features blank. Right now he did not want to talk with anyone. What could there possibly be to say?

  He relented only because his grandfather looked worried. While an emptiness had taken hold of him, he wanted it to stay there, his secret from the world, even from Adham. “I suppose we must,” Leitos said, failing to hide the wooden quality of his voice.

  “It pains me to see you grieve, but.…” Adham trailed off with a probing look.

  “But she was a creature born of Alon’mahk’lar,” Leitos finished for him. “I know this, but all I see is her as she is now. I can still hear her laughter, see the light of her eyes. I smell the scent of flowers on her hair. That is how I will remember her,” he finished, knowing even then that he spoke a lie. He could no more separate Zera from what she was than he could wish a stone to become bread. And that was the crux of his dilemma: he had not fallen in love with a mere enemy, but a foe to all humankind, a murdering device in the employ of the Faceless One. Trying to reconcile those two sides of Zera, and his feelings for her, left him troubled, confused. Despite it all, he had loved her.

  “You loved her … the woman you thought she was,” Adham said, speaking aloud Leitos’s thoughts.

  Leitos nodded slowly. “She was human … some part of her, at least.”

  Even now, hours after she had died in his arms, grief struck him anew, as if for the first time. Her presence in the world, her companionship, had given him a sense of quiet joy and the strength to overcome the entrenched mindset of a born slave.

  “Any love is a blessing in a world filled with so much malice. I cannot, nor will I, condemn your love for the member of a race bent on our destruction,” Adham said. “But all love, no matter the face it wears, is bittersweet, as every present delight is tempered by the future agony of inescapable loss. Hold fast to your fond memory of her … it will keep the darkness at bay.”

  Leitos almost mentioned that it was too late to avoid the darkness with which he had already become fast friends, but instead he kept his secret.

  “Why does it matter if I am the last of the Valara line?” Leitos asked, wanting to turn the subject of their conversation.

  Adham cast his gaze upon the nearing islands, his face contemplative. He has changed so much. Impossible though it seemed, every hour spent free of the slavemasters and the mines gave Adham back more of his youthful vigor. The day he had risen up against the Alon’mahk’lar, Adham had looked ancient, weak, his body and flesh utterly spent. Now twenty years seemed to have fallen from him.

  In the continued silence, Leitos looked toward the islands and waited for his grandfather to speak. In the newborn sunlight, the islands’ naturally reddish hue was overstated, and the rocky protrusions jutted from the sea like skulls coated in blood. As the bobbing flotilla drew nearer, the islands’ namesake became obvious. Wind off the Sea of Sha’uul whipped through hollows and rocky outcrops to create a mournful wailing, a morose song to fit his mood. White birds wheeled over the scant greenery growing atop the islands’ rounded crowns. Gulls, Leitos thought. He supposed Adham must have told him of such birds.

  Under the steady creak and splash of pulling oars, the boats drew nearer to the main island. It proved larger than he had first suspected. Staggered cliffs and sharp outcrops dominated the side facing the sun, while the other side had collapsed into a jumble of boulders that eventually sank beneath the frothy blue-green waters. The gulls’ cries carried well over the crashing waves. Other birds plunged into the sea like spears. They surfaced moments later, flapped vigorously, and soared aloft with tiny silver fish dangling from their beaks. Leitos had nearly forgotten what he asked before Adham finally responded.

  “I can now reveal something I never told you, Leitos. I ask beforehand that you forgive me for the things I kept secret. That will be hard for you, perhaps, but understand that I did it to protect us from the eyes of the slavemasters.”

  “Zera said as much, before …” Leitos’s voice faltered, seeing again the stark vision of her death, feeling again the last fitful beats of her failing heart, the heat of her blood spilling over his skin. He pawed at his eyes, angry at the wetness that burned in them. “There is nothing to forgive between us.”

  Adham troubled over that awhile, then gave a brief nod. “Kian Valara, the King of the North, is my father, Leitos. In turn, I am your father. To hide that from the Faceless One, it was agreed that I leave my father’s side soon after you were born, and pose as your grandfather.”

  Leitos sat in awed silence. Adham’s eyes dimmed, as he spun a tale Leitos had never heard.

  “Your mother and I, with you swaddled in the back of an oxcart, departed my father’s mountain stronghold at Cordalia and made our way into Miz’Ratah, a land far north of Izutar
, beyond the Sildar Mountains. My father and I believed we would be safe there from any Alon’mahk’lar attack. We were wrong.

  “We had just arrived to E’ru, one of a score of secluded garrisons, when the Alon’mahk’lar raiders came out of the snowy forest. We held for near on a moon’s turn, but eventually our walls were breached. In the end, we who survived surrendered at the edge of the sword. In the dark watches of the night between then and now, I have often thought it would have been better to die with the rest … but I could not do that which would have kept you out of the hands of our enemies.”

  Leitos did not need clarification. Only his death would have kept him from being taken by the Alon’mahk’lar. He thought of Sandros then, who had claimed that Alon’mahk’lar did not aimlessly roam league after league in search for future slaves, but rather used human spies to find their prey. “All men are liars,” so he had said often. Maybe many are, Leitos thought, but in regard to Izutarians, Sandros had been wrong.

  Leitos’s mind turned. “Was my mother taken?”

  “Keri?” Adham rasped. He cast his eyes on Zera, his whiskered chin trembling. “No … no, my son, she was not. After the rise of the Faceless One, it is rare thing for an Izutarian woman to allow herself to be taken. Knowing what will come should that happen, they fight alongside our men. They are often the fiercer of the two, because where men have at least the choice of surrendering to chains in hopes of taking back their freedom later, our women have only death as a choice.”

  “Why is that their only choice?” Leitos asked, a sense of horror filling him.

  “Do not hate me,” Adham said softly, “but those like Zera are the reason that Izutarian women would rather die by their own hands, than fall into the grasp of our enemy. Alon’mahk’lar are created by the union of Mahk’lar and human women. Never have those abominations been able to hide among humankind. Some years before your birth, we had begun hearing unbelievable rumors that the Alon’mahk’lar had begun refining their race, breeding Alon’mahk’lar to human women. In doing so, they created creatures that looked entirely human.”