Arbiter (The Arbiter Chronicles Book 1) (27 page)

“How did you even get up there?”

The wall in front of her suddenly shifted, the stone moving until it formed a defined set of handholds and footholds, almost like a ladder. When she looked up, Cathel was looking away from her, but she understood the silent invitation. Rae placed her hand on the handhold at eye level, pulling herself up. “If I fall off the building,” she muttered. “I’ll kill you.”

“You might just be talented enough to manage it,” commented Cathel, the corner of his lip twitching up in a smile. “Falling, I mean.”

“You’re an ass,” said Rae as she placed one hand on the roof beside him and pulled herself up.

Cathel gave her a faint smile in response. It didn’t reach his eyes. He reached out a hand, and she took it, letting him pull her onto the roof. Rae took a deep breath as she settled down beside him, sweeping her cloak underneath to give her some comfort against the rooftop’s hard tiles. She drew her knees up to her chest, looking down at the street below. A pair of ghostly gray lights bobbed through the main thoroughfare below them, and only upon closer inspection did she realize that they were Ivali, their small bodies wreathed in pale silver as they talked amongst themselves. After a moment, a man in a black and silver uniform passed them, offering them a polite salute. The Ivali’ laughter reached her even from the top of the building as the man walked on, a spear in one hand.

Rae slowly turned her eyes towards the mage beside her. Cathel was watching the scene in front of him, and there was an emptiness in his eyes that almost ached for her to look at. She didn’t need the sense she had acquired from Elrithea to know that he was withdrawing, and that knowledge hurt her heart in a way that terrified her.

“They’re guards,” said Cathel. He never turned towards her, but he spoke as if he noticed her looking. “…The patrols seem to come by this building every half hour or so. It’s fairly regular. I can’t quite work out whether those Ivali are working with them in some capacity, or just off on a midnight stroll.”

His voice sounded far away as well, as if he had closed himself off in another realm, one of his own making. Her hand splayed awkwardly on the roof between them, adopting the pretense of smoothing out her cloak. She wanted to move towards him, wanted to comfort, wanted to touch, to offer calming words and soothe his wounds, to heal. Her breath caught in her throat.

She wanted, but she didn’t know how.

So instead, she looked away, pretending to cough so that she could clear her throat, and wondered how long this mage had been sitting out here, to know that the patrols came every half hour.

“Had some trouble sleeping?” asked Cathel finally, glancing over at her.

“…Yeah,” she said, hating the way her voice trembled. She drew the fabric of her cloak between her thumb and forefinger, playing with it slightly as she glanced back at him. “…Elrithea warned me that I’d be uncomfortable in a crowd. There’s too many people thinking all at once. I haven’t figured out how to tune them out and sleep at the same time.”

“So, you decided to come out here to me?” asked Cathel with a teasing smirk.

“Well, you’re the only one out here with an empty enough head,” said Rae offhandedly.

Cathel blinked at her in surprise, and for a moment, she thought she saw a bit of the old Cathel flicker to the surface. “Oh, shut up,” he said. He frowned, as if a thought just occurred to him, and he looked back out at the streets again. “Are you doing it now?”

“Doing what?” asked Rae.

“Reading my Source.”

Rae stared at him, confused, before she realized he was talking about Elrithea's spell. She quickly shook her head. “No,” she said. “I can control it when I’m awake. Elrithea taught me how. But when I’m half-asleep…I let all my defenses down. It’s…overwhelming…”

“…Would you?” he asked.

“To know what you’re feeling?”

He nodded once.

“…Why?” asked Rae, turning away from him. She rested her arms on her knees, wrapping them loosely around herself. “You’ll tell me when you want to.”

It was an echo, from the first night they spent in Alcian’s glade. An echo of the time she first realized that Cathel understood her, the time she might have started to understand him. And he knew it too, because even through her barriers, she could feel his surprise, immediately tempered by his slight amusement as he turned towards her, the corner of his lip quirking up in a wry smile.

“That,” he said. “is not fair.”

“Do you want me to ask?” asked Rae, surprising even herself.

Cathel didn’t answer. He held her gaze for a long moment. She kept her eyes on his, even as his eyes eventually traveled, moving from her own eyes to her face to the hand that lay on the cloak between them. He sighed.

“…Can you see dreams?” he asked, turning away and changing the subject again. “When you use Elrithea’s Decadal Spell.”

“Selde has a thing for blondes,” she mentioned drily.

“What?” asked Cathel, his head snapping up as he turned towards her.

“Kidding,” she said. “No, I can’t sense dreams. Or at least, I don’t think I can. I can sense feelings, but I don’t get thoughts, or pictures from them. Or words, really.” She shrugged. “I’m used to looking at people. I think I’m mostly getting by by putting together what I observe with what I can sense.”

Cathel took a deep breath. “…You don’t really talk to people,” he said.

She snorted, tightening her hold around herself. “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

Cathel shook his head.“You know what I mean. How did you get so good at reading people if you don’t talk to them?”

Rae let out a sigh, her fingers digging into her arm. “I spend a lot of time on the outside looking in,” she said. “…I don’t have much better to do but watch, and read, and think. You get good at it, after a while. You realize what makes people tick, and how best to push them away…”

“…You never tried to push me away…” said Cathel.

“I did,” said Rae with a shrug. “I wanted to hate you. But you’re a jerk. You wouldn’t let me do even that.”

“Well…it’s nice to know that you find me so attractive,” teased Cathel.

Rae gave him a flat look. “…I will push you off this rooftop.”

“…And then I’ll be dead. And then you’ll be stuck up here until morning. Then you’ll have to explain why the Arbiter climbed the wall of the inn in her nightgown.”

Rae rolled her eyes, turning away. Her face flushed slightly, and she pulled her cloak tighter around herself. It didn’t bother her, because her nightgown was plenty decent enough for her own realm’s standards, but now that she thought about it, she wasn’t sure what Cathel would count as decent. “You’re insufferable,” she said.

“As you say, Arbiter.”

She really did have to resist the urge to hit him then. But she felt herself relax slightly, because this was the Cathel she knew. And this was the Cathel she thought she could deal with. The two of them settled into silence for a while, Cathel continuing to watch the road. After a while, Rae turned to watching the stars. There were many of them in the Twilight Realm, and it surprised her that even in a city like this, they were still visible.

They were beautiful.

She felt Cathel move and watched as he lowered his hand from his knee to the rooftop between them. for a moment, she thought it was going to cover hers and she tensed, unsure how to deal with that, but instead it settled a few inches away from hers, never even touching her cloak, just resting on the rooftop, inviting her to bridge the gap if she so chose.

If she chose.

How very appropriate.

She snorted at his odd behavior, hugging her knees close to her chest again and looking away from him. He leaned back, and if he was at all upset by her rejection, he didn’t show it. He watched her, before looking back at the city. The silence between them grew comfortable, and Rae realized in that instant that they had just had an entire conversation without either of them saying a word. She looked back up at the sky, and he followed her gaze, finally turning his away from the city as he lay back on the rooftop. She didn’t lie back—that would have been too familiar, but she shared her view of the sky with him, silently allowing him to join this world that had once been just hers.

“The stars are beautiful, aren’t they?” he commented, after a while.

“…Mm,” said Rae. “They are.”

“I would have loved to grow up here, in a place like this…”

“Yeah…” said Rae, nodding once. The corner of her lip quirked slightly, in what might have been a smile. “I figured.”

“What Selde said today…made me feel really betrayed. And it made me feel like a fool.”

She exhaled slowly, lowering her eyes to the city before her.

“…I know. I understand.”

She was surprised to find that she did.

And that was all that needed to be said.

They set out for Berais’s castle early the next day. Selde led the way. He rode a dark horse that he had apparently left at the stables in Velleter, guiding them through the winding path that led out of the grasslands and into the hills that cradled the city. The ground in the hills was rockier than in Alcian’s or Elrithea’s lands, and the forest that grew here was thinner—copses of trees around rivers or lakes and dotting the hilly landscape around them.

Cathel seemed in better humor than he had been the night before, but it was clear that the things Selde had told him were still affecting him. He seemed alright, at first glance, but once in a while, Rae caught him staring pointedly at the ground or at Rielis’s reins, anger smoldering in his eyes.

She could see his anger, but she couldn’t feel it. Even when they stopped for the night, even when she lowered her defenses in the moment before she fell asleep, she could feel no anger coming from Cathel.

No anger.

But a terrifying calm.

It worried her, making her wonder how Cathel would react if he ever saw his master again.

It wasn’t just Cathel that worried her, if she was being honest. Mika had acted odd after Selde first appeared to them, but the teenager seemed to have gotten over whatever it was that had bothered her in the first place. She laughed and made jokes with them as they rode along, even trying to get Cathel and Selde to join in with her. But like Cathel, all wasn’t as it seemed. Because at night, when Rae lowered her barriers to sleep, she felt it—a slowly churning insecurity radiating from their youngest traveling companion, like the emotional equivalent of a swamp.

The more she thought about it, the more she tried to convince herself it was nothing. So Mika was moody and insecure at times. She was a teenager. What teenager wasn’t
moody and insecure?

And it wasn’t as though Mika didn’t have reason to be, Rae remembered, watching the girl the next morning as she helped Selde break camp, asking her usual litany of questions. After all, she was far from home in a strange and dangerous land traveling with people at least four years older than herself and with her only sibling in a coma. That was enough to break weaker hearts.

She wasn’t sure it wouldn’t have broken her, or that it hadn’t already.

Still, she mentioned the thought to Cathel as the two of them went off in search of water when they stopped for lunch, walking along the edges of a shallow stream towards an area where Selde promised it would get deeper and clearer. In the end, talking about her worries for Mika were much easier than talking about how much she worried for him.

“She’s dealing with her own issues,” said Cathel, idly tossing a stone into the river beside them. It sank into the water with a plop. “As long as you don’t think it’s too serious, I say you leave her be. You know if you point it out to her, she’ll just think you’re patronizing her, or treating her like a kid.”

“I treat her like a kid because she is a kid,” said Rae, folding her arms.

Cathel shot her a pointed look. “She’s only five years younger than you.”

“I never said I was ancient, or even particularly mature,” said Rae, shrugging his comment off. “A thirteen-year-old’s only eight years younger than me, but you’re not going to tell me that that’s old enough to travel like this.”

“I was eleven when I traveled across the Safelands.”

“Oh yeah?” asked Rae, raising an eyebrow at him. “You meet many High Lords then?”

“No. But I did have a couple of adventures. We had an issue with bandits in the Southern Dells, and we got stranded for a few weeks in the Capital…” He shrugged. “Admittedly, I didn’t do much. I think I managed to burn one of the bandits when he tried to go for me, but that was more luck than anything else. Still, I was eleven, and I survived.”

Rae rolled her eyes. “The situation's different now, and you know it. The point still stands. She’s sixteen.”

“I was seventeen when I was getting ready to go for my mastership,” argued Cathel again. “And
I ventured into the Borderlands several times.”

Rae sighed, exasperated. “Yes, Cathel,” she said. “But you were a fully-trained—fine, almost
fully-trained mage, and a freaking genius. And you’d trained with the sword for years by that time. Mika’s a sixteen year old from my
world. She might be able to do a little magic now, but she's never had to worry about anything more serious than a sprain. She should be hanging out with friends and worrying about boys, not out here risking her life.”

“She wants to be here,” said Cathel. “And she’s working hard so that she doesn’t get in the way. Don’t underestimate her resolve.”

“She’s a kid—,” began Rae.

“And she’s not gonna get a chance to grow up if you keep treating her like one,” said Cathel, interrupting her. “She’s trying, Rae. The worst thing you can do for her right now is insist that she stop and try and send her home.”

Rae scowled. “I still think she should go home. And if I could trust Elrithea as far as I could throw her, I would have asked her
to do it.”

The sound of twigs snapping made Rae freeze, her eyes widening as they moved over to the forest beside them. Cathel stopped as well, placing a hand on her arm just as she surged towards it. He pulled her back, wordlessly stopping her from charging into the trees. He placed a hand on his sword and stepped in front of her, then let out the breath he was holding when a deer burst out of the bushes, its white tail visible through the trees as it galloped away from them. He slid his sword back the half-inch that it had been freed from its sheath, glancing back at Rae.

Her eyes were focused on the forest, one hand clasped around the fabric of her cloak. She opened her mind, sweeping the area surrounding them for presences. She couldn’t feel much. Just her, Cathel, and a handful of Ivali scattered amidst the trees.

“...Anything?” asked Cathel. 

She shook her head, pulling her power back into herself as if she were rolling up a net. She almost laughed at how paranoid they were. Rae would have said that their journey had made them that way, but she was fairly certain she had been as paranoid before coming here, although she couldn't speak for Cathel.

“Nothing,” she said. “Some Ivali here and there, nothing of any real power.”

Cathel continued to walk. “Anything with any real power would be able to hide from you,” he noted.

“The High Lord knows we’re here,” said Rae. “If he’s the type to sneak around his own forests and watch us from a distance, I’m not gonna call him on it. Selde’s with us, and he’s close to the High Lord, so none of his servants would attack us. And this close to the High Lord’s Castle? Any Ivali with real power would be ten kinds of stupid to attack the High Lord’s student out here.”

“You’ve thought this through,” remarked Cathel.

Rae shrugged in response. “I do a lot of it, you know,” she said. “Thinking, I mean. You don’t need to sound so surprised.” She glanced back at him, then turned her eyes back towards the woods. “Anyone who wants to kill me
wouldn't come this close to the High Lord’s Castle, and if they had to, they’d probably have the good sense to behave themselves. And the High Lord won’t kill me here.”

“You sound so convinced,” commented Cathel as Rae walked ahead of him slightly. “That the High Lord doesn’t want you dead.”

“Oh, I never said the High Lord didn’t want me dead.” Rae the empty bucket she was holding swing from her hand as she walked over to the pool, now visible ahead of them. “I said he wouldn’t kill me here. Why bother?” Gravel crunched underneath her boot, and she frowned, her brown eyes grim.“I’m giving him the perfect opportunity to kill me already. All he has to do is give me an impossible task.”

They were four days out of Velleter by the time they finally rode into Berais’s castle. Unlike Elrithea’s castle, which looked like something out a painting and was devoid of inhabitants other than the High Lord herself, Berais’s Castle looked more like a proper fortress. The Castle stood on top of a hill, and against a sheer cliff face. At the bottom of the cliff ran a great river, its waters currently calm. Selde had explained that the river was crossable upstream, where the ground was more level, but that the High Lord had chosen this area for his castle because it was the most defendable.

It said a lot about Berais’s nature, that he was prepared for a siege in his own lands.

Servants greeted them as soon as they stepped through the gates, most of them human. This surprised her, because Berais was the first High Lord she had seen with visible servants. Alcian had her wisps, of course, and Elrithea had…whatever she had—but she had never seen any of their servants actually do
anything before. And while Berais’s servants were mostly human, they weren’t completely so. She sensed several Ivali presences hovering around the courtyard, including coming from one of the girls that had taken their horses away.

“Why here?” she asked, turning towards Selde. “Why haven’t we seen any humans in the other lands we’ve been to?”

Selde turned towards her to respond.

“High Lord Elrithea and High Lord Alcian both have lands that border the Safelands,” said a voice coming from the palace entryway. The four of them looked up. The man that leaned casually against the courtyard wall couldn’t be anything else but Ivali, despite his relatively human shape. He was dressed in pale blue and black, his arms folded over his chest. The man’s eyes were a cool blue that Rae had never seen before. They reminded her of water, and the sea, and the sky. His hair at first seemed to be deep black, but as he moved, Rae could have sworn that the light reflected off of it somewhat, giving hints of deeper blues and greens. He was handsome, speaking purely objectively, but then again she was quickly learning that most of the Ivali were.

And she was learning that here in the Ivali realm, beauty and danger often went hand in hand. 

The man wore a sword at his waist. That didn’t go unmissed.

What also didn’t go unmissed was the fact that Rae could not sense him. He offered her a smile, revealing perfectly white teeth.

“My apologies, Arbiter,” he said. “I have learned to conceal myself from detection. Should I now reveal myself to you?”

A thought occurred to her, and her eyes narrowed. “Are you reading my mind?”

He shrugged in response, a single smooth motion. “…I don’t intend to. You simply think too loudly.”

Rae scowled, staring at him. She didn’t like this man. He reminded her too much of the Reaper. Selde stepped forward from behind her.

“Don’t tease her, Cienn,” he said.

The Ivali called Cienn shrugged. “I was just having a bit of fun.” He turned towards Rae, and the smile on his face disappeared, his expression growing momentarily serious. “My apologies, Arbiter. No, I cannot read minds. However, I am capable of sensing the flow of magic, and I do know when someone is trying to detect me. You can stop, by the way. I would rather not let you in.”

Rae relented, pulling her power back into herself again. Cienn nodded once, before turning towards Cathel. He held out his hand, the smile reappearing on his face.

“It would seem we are well met, brother.”

Cathel eyed Cienn. “…I’ve never met you before,” he said. “Why address me that way?”

“We are, both of us, of the
tarethain,
are we not?” asked Cienn, the corner of his mouth curling in a smirk that lit his eyes. Rae folded her arms, looking over at Mika. The girl was openly staring at him. She hadn’t said a word since he made his appearance.

Teenagers…
she thought, looking back at Cathel.

At Cienn’s declaration, he seemed to relax, nodding once as he clasped the Ivali’s hand. “Well met indeed,” he said, a faint smile appearing on his face.

The two of them released each other, and Cienn turned towards Rae again. 

“As I was saying,” he said. “Humans don’t generally live close to the border. And High Lord Elrithea isn’t the type who would take human servants in any case.” He smiled. “Although
there are some rumors of…exceptions.” The way he said it made it sound as if he were about to reveal some dark secret, and Rae was curious in spite of herself. She didn’t ask him, though. She had a feeling that that was exactly what he wanted her to do.

Cienn turned towards her, giving her a polite bow. “Well met, Arbiter,” he said. “I’m glad your journey has brought you here safely, and that you were not overly damaged by this blockhead of an apprentice.”

Selde scowled. “Cienn!” he said, an angry expression on his face. The icy look Cienn shot him stopped him cold, and Selde took a step back, letting out the breath he was holding as he nodded once. He lowered his eyes to the ground, and for just a moment, Rae sensed his sudden embarrassment. She glanced at him, but he avoided her eyes, shifting uncomfortably.

“…Well met, Cienn Tarethan,” she said, turning away from Selde. Cienn nodded. He looked around, his eyes landing on Mika, and he smiled again, his too-blue eyes glittering.

“So,” he said. “Selde I know, the Arbiter I know, and my brother, I know. But you I do not know. What is your name, human girl?”

Mika tensed, her face flushing as her eyes snapped up to meet Cienn’s. “It’s—uh—Mikaela James,” she said. “But my friends call me Mika.”