The Adani Chronicles: Birthright
Chapter 14

The sun beat hot upon Jorlan’s back as he stared hard at the thick thatch of trees before him. His elk leather vest soaked up the heat, trapping it against his skin despite the sweat dripping liberally down his spine.

It was a minor irritation, he allowed himself to admit. Jorlan sniffed the air.

There was so much heat; the bees and flies should have been out, buzzing lazily and pestering their mounts. There should have been birds and small creatures scurrying about. He should have been able to see more than only shadow inside that quiet forest just within Eloni borders.

But he could not. It was too dark, too quiet, and the air stank of decay.

They were near.

Jorlan allowed the rush of the hunt to bloom in his chest; his team had been tracking this group for two days, ever since they had attacked a young princess and her entourage arriving from Southdale for an official visit to Lord Áed’s court.

He turned to Nenna and motioned for his team to dismount. They would proceed on foot from here.

Pallyn Bowsinger was the youngest of their group. Barely an adult, the scarlet-skinned archer was Jorlan’s own nephew—though that had done him no favors earning a spot in the Commander’s Six. He was the most talented bowman Thaliondris had seen in an age, lethal with his arancia longbow and phoenix-fletched arrows. Twins Rowen and Jalen Brightblade were only slightly older than his nephew. Identical in both appearance and temperament, they could not have been more different in fighting style. Yet their respective strengths and weaknesses were a perfect match, transforming the two of them into an incredible fighting unit worthy of a place among the Eloni warrior elite. Other than Nenna, there was only one other female on his team; Shaia Cloudsong, of an age to him and yet so much wiser. Music was her weapon, her voice keener than any blade, able to call forth the magic of the very earth around them. Where Pallyn, Nenna, and the twins were quick to act and full of aggression, Jorlan depended heavily on Shaia for wisdom and caution. She was his dearest friend and most loyal confidante.

All together, they numbered Six.

Young Pallyn sent the horses to graze safely half a league away, and they were ready.

They moved silently toward the dark shadowed trees, weapons at the ready. Just at the tree line, the stench of death peaked, and Jorlan looked down to see a large family of rabbits, half-decomposed already but not stripped. Two adults and a litter of ten babies, simply dead. Left to rot.

Nenna saw them too. Anger twisted her face into an ugly grimace, and she spat upon the ground. “Barbarians.”

Jorlan nodded his agreement. It was a grievous crime to kill without purpose here.

He would see them answer for it. That, in addition to the quickly-growing docket of crimes Râza and his ilk were already amassing on Eloni lands.

His lip curled in disgust, he moved forward, into the forest.

They found the Val’gren party several hundred feet inside, awaiting them. Jorlan counted seven, and was pleased to see that four of them were already sporting Eloni arrows in varying parts of their anatomy. One lay quietly—dead, or very nearly—on the edge of the small clearing. The rest were clearly exhausted, worn down from two days of running from the Elven hunters.

He smiled.

The Val’gren closest to him, a youngster with no hair and eyes the color of burnt scarletweed, snarled a spell. A blast of livid green exploded from white fingertips toward his warriors, but Jorlan waved a hand and it dispersed before it even reached them.

“It is not my intent to kill you,” he said to the Val’gren. “Come with me peaceably and no harm will befall you or your brethren.”

Several of the Val’gren growled challenge in response, and more magic flew their way—purple lightning, black mist, green fire. Jorlan blocked them as well as he could, but some of the spells found their targets. He heard Nenna roar her rage behind him as Pallyn fell hard and did not rise. The Val’gren responsible for the lightning that had struck him laughed, and Jorlan felt his patience evaporate.

“Capture one,” he growled to his remaining four. “Kill the rest.”

Weakened and injured as they were, the Val’gren were still formidable foes, even for Jorlan’s hunters. Arrows and blades were treated with poison created from the darkest of magics, lethal to humans and severely damaging to the wood elves. Spells flashed across the clearing, flashing every hue of the spectrum. Secure behind Jorlan and Nenna, Shaia began singing quietly, summoning the nature magic that was her specialty. Her song took mere moments to begin working before one of the Val’gren was crushed, screaming, by the living roots of the trees around them. A swarm of crows pecked and scratched at another until he ran howling, only to fall several hundred feet away, pierced through the heart by Nenna’s white arrow. Two other Val’gren met the same fate, courtesy of his second-in-command, before they mounted a real counter attack.

Insidious brown mist formed around the Val’gren mage, the bald one with dark eyes who had attacked them at first, and a sweetly cloying scent filled the air. Jorlan felt his stomach clench; he knew this spell, had seen it work before.

“Nenna!” he cried.

“I smell it,” she answered tightly. She let fly three arrows in quick succession as Jorlan turned and threw Pallyn over his own broad shoulder, calling for his hunters to fall back. Nenna’s last arrow found its mark, right between the Val’gren’s red eyes, but the mist did not disperse.

“A death spell!” Nenna yelped, backing away quickly.

“Leave him!” Jorlan barked at Rowen and Jalen, who were dragging along a struggling and injured Val’gren. “He’ll slow us! Shaia, come on!”

“I can trap…it…” the songmage ground out, sweat beading her upper lip as she tried to compress the air around the mist into a hard globe that would keep it from reaching them. It was nearly working, but Jorlan knew it couldn’t last. Even if she could manage to cast a spell that strong, she could not hold it forever. There was little to be done with inkmist once it was created, little except get out of its way. The poisoned vapor would destroy all it touched—plant, animal, Val’gren, and Eloni alike—until it faded away.

They needed to run. Now.

“Come!” he dragged Shaia to her feet when the mist was mere inches from her face, and fled.

It was supposed to be healing magic she possessed, so it struck Ryn as odd that the moments when she managed to make it manifest, it did anything but.

She fought off a wave of irritation as she rubbed her stinging fingers on her pants. She, Kota, and Kenelm were holed up in a tiny garden near his home, and he’d had her working to access her magic since dawn. It was a new skill, and one she was not yet adept at executing on demand. She was sweating, her head was pounding, and just now when she’d managed to call the magic forth, it had burned her fingertips something fierce.

“It hurts,” she said through clenched teeth, her shieldenstone cutting into her palm.

“It is still new,” Kenelm responded serenely. “Try again.”

Ryn swiped at the sweat on her forehead and took two deep breaths to calm herself. Then she closed her eyes and reached for the magic again. The mental path to See her magic—the bright light that veined every living thing, so far as she could tell—had become more familiar, easier to duplicate each time she did it. From there, learning to replace her own nexus of magic and bring it into physical being was a bit harder.

Biting her lip, she concentrated. Scarlet currents interspersed with onyx sparks danced around her, teasing, playful. She reached for them, only to have them bounce away, almost mocking in their joyful dance. She growled, and the bright tendrils began to move faster, nearly vibrating with energy. Ryn swiped at them, reached for the core of her being, frustrated and skating the very edge of angry…

There!

She had it! It wasn’t a scarlet thread she held, but a blinding white rough sphere, from the very center of herself. It was hot, uncomfortably so, and heavy. She felt herself tiring quickly and bore down, refusing to give up when she had it now—

Without warning, she was thrown from her own head and jarred back into the physical by the sensation of her back hitting the dirt. There was a crash, and Ryn opened her eyes to replace herself staring at a blue, blue sky ringed by gently-waving leaves. She blinked, trying to clear the stars from her vision as she sat up with a groan.

Ow.

“Ryn!” Kenelm’s voice was laced with concern—the wild thought raced through her head that finally, something had cracked that irritating tranquility of his. “Ryn, are you well, young one?”

She grunted, a negative or an affirmative she wasn’t even sure, and pressed her forehead to her knees. “That did not feel very nice.”

Kenelm rubbed her back while Kota nosed her insistently until she raised her head and let him sniff her all over to ensure her well-being.

“Looks like it was a bit of a rough one,” Kenelm agreed.

Brow furrowed, Ryn looked at her teacher. “What do you mean?”

The old man gestured around him, and only then did Ryn notice that every plant within thirty feet of her was dry and brittle. Even the old oak was cracked and smoking gently. Ryn’s stomach dropped and her eyes widened.

“Did I do that?”

Kenelm nodded. “I am afraid so. This should be fun to explain to the groundskeeper.”

Ryn felt her face flame. “Oh gods, no. Can’t I fix it?”

“You can do a lot of things, Ryn-girl, but bring things back from the dead is not one of them.”

Ryn groaned and hid her head in her palms again. “He’s never going to forgive me.”

Kenelm laughed at that. “The Eloni have talents of their own, my dear. Just you wait, he’ll have this garden back and thriving in less than a season, don’t you worry.”

Still, apologizing to the gardener was no laughing matter. The old jade-skinned Eloni practically gaped at what she’d done, tutting mournfully at his plants—especially the oak.

“Fifty years old, that one,” he commiserated. Ryn wanted to disappear.

On the slow, aching walk back to Kenelm’s home, Ryn finally couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“Kenelm, I don’t get it,” she began, throwing her arms out to the side in exasperation. “I have healing magic, or so you’ve said. Healing magic. Why is it every time I call it up it destroys something?”

Kenelm stopped walking, studying her for a moment. His face became very serious, not at all the jovial expression she had grown accustomed to.

“No, child,” he explained, leaning on his walking stick. “You possess the ability to heal, and that is how the magic works best because that is what it was created to do. But the power itself is the power to infuse—and siphon—the very life essence of that which surrounds you.” At Ryn’s blank stare, he elaborated. “The power you see when you enter your mind? The lights?” She nodded, and he continued. “It’s not just metaphysical manifestations of something inside your head, Ryn. Those are real veins of real life force, and you can see and control those veins. This is your power, and how it functions. Will you use it to steal the life of surrounding plants in order to save a life? Or will you use it to sap the vitality from your enemy as they stand before you?” He thumped her in the chest with his stick, gently. “You can use it to heal, yes; but it can also kill, as it did in the nagrat camp.”

Ryn paused, then began walking again, silent as she tried to absorb this latest lesson. “I can kill with my magic deliberately.” The thought terrified her.

Kenelm nodded. “Some Y’rai did it on purpose; they were the warrior-clan of Lareth, and they were generally regarded as slightly more dangerous than anyone—even their own people—were comfortable with.”

Ryn gave her teacher a wan smile and buried suddenly-cold fingers in Kota’s thick fur. Her lynx growled low in his throat at her death grip on him, and she loosened her fingers with some effort.

“I don’t blame them.”

Brandt loved markets, he always had. As a child, Mother and Father had taken him often, believing it important that they—and he—interact with the people who supported the nation’s economy, who grew the food and forged the tools and weapons, who depended on the Royal Family for protection and safety. They seldom attended the market for necessities, but his parents always bought something, chatted with as many as there was time for, and usually Brandt ended up going home with a treat of some kind. While his parents talked, he’d been permitted to run amok with the other children, playing tag amongst the shops and trees.

Those trips, along with most others not directly related to training or schooling, had stopped abruptly after his mother’s kidnapping and his father’s disappearance, but his love for the atmosphere of a marketplace had never truly abated. There was something exciting about the air here, rich with scents familiar and exotic, echoing with shouts of laughter and murmurs of haggling and folks sharing the latest gossip. If he ever felt like a regular man living a regular life, it was when he visited a market.

And so, in disguise and with plenty of spare time over the past week, Brandt had staked out an unofficial spot for himself near the north end of Thaliondris’ trade district, under the shade of the magnificent Lelaenis tree, and had taken to simply enjoying the bustle as he did easy busy work—weapons cleaning or sharpening, sometimes recording their journey in his small travel journal or penning letters to his mother and uncle.

This particular day, he’d glanced up to notice a bedraggled-looking caravan limp to a fruit vendor nearby, the jolly tradesman calling out a cheerful greeting to the travelers. They had responded, tiredly, and the tradesman’s eyes had widened then narrowed at the sight of them. They were dirty, dirtier than they should have been from simply traveling a well-worn road, and their clothes were torn. The crates were battered, scuffed and splintered, some of them broken outright, their wares spilling out every which way as the travelers tried to move them from the mangled wagon to the vendor’s stall. Brandt stood and walked over quickly to help. The old woman who was bent over to pick up the errant red fist-sized fruits looked up at him, white hair falling in her face but doing nothing to conceal the livid black bruise blooming on her cheekbone. She straightened stiffly as he went to his knees and began gathering the fruits, a gnarled hand on her lower back, and gave him a wizened grin. Brandt marveled; he’d had a shiner like that before, he knew smiling hurt.

“Argh,” she croaked good-naturedly. “Gettin’ a bit ol’ fer all this, lad.” Brandt stayed kneeling, arms full of sweet-smelling pomes, staring up at her in something approaching awe. She noticed him gawking and winked, chuckling.

“Never seen an old hag before, boy?”

Brandt remembered his manners then, rising carefully and, unable to bow with his arms full, nodded once in respect. “My apologies, my lady, it is not your age that has bewildered me.” He let his expression show his concern. “Are you well? Was your caravan struck by bandits?”

To his surprise, the lady laughed at that—not a bitter laugh, as he would have expected, but a genuinely amused one that crinkled her eyes nearly shut. She looked at his expression and it made her laugh again. “This? Oh laddie, it takes more than a bruise or—” she shifted uncomfortably, “—seven to knock me down. A few days and I’ll be in perfect condition.”

“What happened?” he asked again. This time, the old woman was deadly serious when she answered.

“Val’gren,” she said, and he tried to ignore the way his skin crawled at the admission. “They attacked our caravan mere hours ago, two leagues outside of the city. Just a different sort of bandit, these days, it seems.” She nodded, shoved a crooked finger at him. “Back when I was your age, they were a real threat, not glorified criminals. Ha!”

So close to the city? Brandt clenched his jaw, a sick feeling settling in his gut. “But they let you go free?” That was unusual, for Val’gren. They were always on the lookout for sacrifices to their god Skeðu.

The woman nodded, her expression mirroring the direction of his thoughts. “I’m not complaining, mind you, but I’m as confused as anyone. I thought sure we were done for. As it is, they knocked us around a bit and sent us on our way thoroughly lashed.”

“With a message,” a new voice said. The man who spoke was clearly in charge, for he carried himself with the air of one used to being obeyed. He glanced down at the pomes Brandt still held, and his face softened minutely.

“Aye,” the old lady was saying. “But we’d be better served not passing such vile rubbish around. We may as well have given ourselves up as prisoners if we do exactly as they tell us!”

“The leadership of this city deserves to know—”

“Ach, laddie, they know already—”

“What message?” Brandt asked, a bit louder than was perhaps strictly necessary. Both the old lady and the stern man looked at him.

“It would seem the young Princes of Laendor are in residence in the city,” the man started. The lady glared and tried to interrupt, but he spoke over her protests. “Râza, the leader of the Val’gren, requests that they be handed over to him.”

Brandt’s chest tightened and he focused hard on schooling his features into something vaguely interested instead of blatantly horrified. “Aren’t the princes in Sannfold?”

“Aye, we all thought so, but evidently the Val’gren Hunt Chief has different information. And he won’t stop attacking folks until he gets what he came for.”

“Rubbish!” the old lady objected, rapping her knuckles hard against the man’s head. “Think, boy, with the brain Aeos gave ye! He says he wants the princes, and I don’ doubt it for a second, but if you think having ’em will stop him hurting everyone he can get his hands on, you’re out of yer head.” The man scowled at her, but said nothing, and it struck Brandt that perhaps she was his mother.

“Of course it won’t stop him,” the man agreed reluctantly. “But if he asked me to choose between me and mine and some bloody princes in some far off city, I know which hides I’d choose to save.”

Brandt’s blood ran cold at the confession, though he couldn’t see any way to blame the man—in his position, he’d likely feel the same way. But the oldster was tutting, shaking her head.

“Don’t know where I went wrong with you, boy, but I clearly fell short somewhere, if that’s how you’re thinkin’ of our King and his family.”

The man sighed. “Ma—”

“Don’t ‘ma’, me,” she snarled, motioning to the pile of red fruits on the display stand. “Git. I’ll set these up, savin’ your presence.”

Summarily dismissed, the man left; the woman set to work, organizing the pomes on the table, turning them over and inspecting them as she went, muttering all the while. Brandt waited a moment, then reached for one and looked it over, watching for bruises or broken skin, placing the fruit gently down when he found none. He repeated this, and they worked in silence for several minutes.

“You disagree with him?” Brandt asked, quietly. The woman placed a withered hand on his forearm, and he turned to look at her, watery blue eyes meeting dark brown.

“My great-great grandpapa fought next to Brandt, Son of Veris, two hundred years ago,” she said. “You know who he was, boy?”

Brandt nodded. “He was the first King of the Clan Vaeärne, Brandt the Compassionate, named for his generosity despite being a warrior all his days. I am named after him.”

The old lady nodded. “Good. Then you know who he overthrew.”

“Ferus Blackblade,” Brandt answered. “He was known amongst his subjects to have a heart as dark as his famed sword. They say he kidnapped and bedded younglings, among other crimes.”

“Exactly. The Clan Vaeärne lifted Laendor out of that era of horror and fear and brought us to one of prosperity and peace, even if it is tenuous at times.” She shook her head. “Too many forget that. Some folks’ loyalty is like the mist, visible when things are cool and peaceful, but dissipating under the heat of the day.” She stood a little straighter, lifting her chin. “Still, some of us stand true.”

The rush of gratitude Brandt felt set his knees weak, but he did his best not to show it. Instead, he nodded. “Aye, good lady. Some always stand true.”