The Other Lands (55 page)

Motion on the stairs caught her eye. Two more Numrek had arrived. They emerged from one of the tunnel mouths at a brisk pace, stopped, and scanned the field and then the bleachers. Seeing the other guards, one headed toward the chief of the guard detail, and the other walked to the other nearest Numrek. Mena watched them speak for a moment, and then she looked at Aaden and Elya, who were at the far edge of the stadium now.

There was another reason for her good mood, a secret she and Elya shared. Three days earlier, in the private courtyard that had become Elya’s domain, the creature had shown Mena a clutch of four eggs. They nestled within a blanket, tucked in a basin that caught the rays of the afternoon sun and preserved the warmth in the stone. They were like no eggs Mena had ever seen before—as large as dinner plates, tapered from one thicker side down to the other, only faintly oblong, and colored by pale orange swirls against a creamy background—but there was no mistaking them.

Nor could she doubt the nervous, hovering concern in Elya’s demeanor. Mena looked up from the eggs, with moisture gathering on the rims of her eyelids, to find the creature standing behind her, waiting. In the look was a mixture of so many questions. It was hopeful, proud, frightened, seeking approval, but also defiant, ready to react should anger need to be a part of her response. In her eyes were the hopes of a mother faced with the enormity of what it meant to create life. How Elya could have been pregnant or how the eggs could be fertile Mena could not explain, but she did not want to. She just welcomed it.

Or perhaps Mena saw the things she imagined she would have felt faced with evidence of her own unborn children. Either way, she formed thoughts of warmth and pride and comfort and joy in her mind and floated them toward Elya. Even now, she still felt the pulsing intimacy of the moment. She knew that the first thing she would do back in her quarters would be to return to the eggs and whisper kind things to them.

She had said nothing about it to Corinn or Aaden or anybody else except the four maids who lived and worked in her private quarters. Them she could keep nothing from, but they were loyal to her and just as smitten with Elya. They would do nothing to endanger her, which is how Mena had explained the need for secrecy. “People are quick to fear,” she had said, speaking to the four young women as they huddled around the nest the evening she learned of the eggs. “Even my sister might think nightmares will be born of these eggs. Foulthings. But we who know Elya best know that there is nothing but goodness in her.” She had waited for eye contact with each of the women before continuing. “These babies will be beauties. They will be blessings on the empire, if only we are brave enough to see them born into safety.” They had agreed, as she knew they would.

Even so, the eggs made her think even more about journeying to Vumu. Perhaps she should take the eggs, Elya, and Melio to the archipelago. She could raise Elya’s offspring there in greater seclusion. Melio would go with her. Of course he would, especially when she told him she was ready and willing to grow his child within her. She and Elya would be mothers together. And then what? Perhaps she could start the other project she had been thinking of recently: an academy of the martial arts. It would not be the same as the Marah training. She would make it something else, less about killing and more about honing the body and the mind and finding peace through mastery of skills. She would have to achieve this herself first, but she increasingly felt she might be able to, now that the wars were over and the foulthings no more.

“Princess,” one of the servants asked, “will Prince Aaden be eating anything else? Or needing anything more from us?”

Mena said, “No, I don’t think so. You may go back to the palace. We’ll be along soon as well.”

She used the impetus of the exchange to rise and stretch her legs. The newly arrived Numrek and the chief guard left their post and proceeded toward the other group of two with their long strides. Likely, Corinn was checking up on them, Mena thought. She did that often, even within the royal confines and other protected areas. Mena began to walk toward her nephew and Elya.

I’m sorry to keep secrets from you, Mena thought, but you’ll see. You’ll thank me later, and we really will find ways to be better, to do something with this rule of ours. Not that she thought it all through in reasoned terms, but Mena half believed that Elya could warm Corinn’s heart. By the Giver, she needed that! Something had to melt that icy barrier she maintained between herself and the world. Mena had thought Grae could do it, but Corinn had rebuffed him and sent him away without explanation. Afraid, Mena thought. She’s still afraid to love. It did not make much sense, but she could not help feeling that Elya, with time, would change that.

Aaden had dismounted, his stalking game seemingly forgotten. It looked, from a distance, that the two boys were performing an arm-waving drama, with an audience of one rapt creature. Without deciding to, Mena knew that sooner or later she would mention the eggs to Aaden—a slip of the tongue, perhaps, an inadvertent hint dropped in such a way that he, inquisitive as he was, would not let it go unchallenged. It would happen, and she would shrug and they would keep the secret for a time. Eventually Corinn would find out as well. She would purse her lips and ask sharp questions and fume about the dangers and then … well, then it would be fine. How wonderful it would be to have smaller versions of her flying above the island! What tales the people would tell then. A new age dawning, new creatures to announce it.

Mena was still some distance away from the trio. Glancing back, she saw that two of the Numrek had climbed onto the field and were following her. A tingling of unease climbed up her spine. She never liked having people at her back, especially not armed ones. That was nothing unusual. She brushed her fingers along the belt that snugged her tunic at the waist. Just a strip of leather. No weapon on it. That realization was another unnerving jolt, but just as quickly she brushed it away. Of course she was unarmed. She had made a point of putting down her sword when she returned to Acacia. It had been hard to do, but important because of that. Who wanted to live with a sword always in hand like another limb? Not she. She quickened her pace briefly, skipping ahead in a manner meant to keep her mirthful mood physically alive.

Elya—apparently at a signal from the prince—leaped into the air. Her wings rolled out and beat hard enough to keep her aloft a moment. Aaden lifted his bow, nocked an arrow, and drew. For a moment, it looked as if he planned to shoot her. But then he snapped around and loosed the arrow toward the sea. Elya snapped her wings down hard and bolted after it. A game of fetch, then. Watching them, Mena dropped back into a walk again.

She approached the boys from one side as four Numrek came down the stairs and approached them from the other side, and as two others closed the gap behind her. The guard in the front beckoned Aaden toward him with a hand. “Prince,” he said, his Acacian thickly accented, “your mother wishes for you to come to her. Please come. I will escort you.” He kept moving forward as he spoke, the others close behind him.

“Wait!” Mena called, but she was not sure why the word shot from her mouth. She was only twenty or so strides away. She had only to hurry forward and she could leave with them. Something was wrong. The guard had just done something Numrek never did. Her hand automatically went to where her sword hilt would have been. There was still no real reason to feel threatened by the prince’s guards. And yet threatened was exactly what she did feel. She asked, “What are you doing? I will take them. Draw back and—”

“Please, Princess, the queen wants me to—”

That was as much as she heard. Two things happened at the same time. She realized it was that “please” that had sent her pulse racing. Numrek never were polite like that, even when serving the queen. Then a shout turned all their heads. Looking up into the heights of the stadium, a figure she recognized as Melio dashed up from one of the tunnels, armed and followed by a river of Marah, their swords unsheathed. They ran along the landing and hit the stairs at a tumbling run, leaping four and five at a time.

Mena grabbed for her sword again, and again clutched only the air. She looked back at her nephew, who was standing beside Devlyn, perplexed, his hands on his hips as if in grown-up disapproval of the Marah’s strange urgency. Mena cried, “Aaden!”

He turned his head.

The chief Numrek turned back to the prince. He stepped toward him, grim faced but unhurried, a dagger slithering from his sleeve and into his hand. The motion was so muted, so in line with the matter-of-fact manner that the Numrek usually kept up around the prince, that Mena did not believe what her eyes told her. Casually, the Numrek reached down and drove the blade into Aaden’s belly. He twisted it, studying the boy’s face as he did, and then yanked the blade out and jabbed it into Devlyn’s abdomen. The Numrek twisted the blade, then ripped it down. Devlyn’s intestines tumbled onto the grass, the boy collapsing at almost the same instant.

Mena had started to run forward the moment she saw Aaden stabbed. Her strides ate up the remaining distance so that when she vaulted over Aaden and toward the Numrek she was in full sprint. The Numrek, surprised and still stooped forward with his dagger blade spilling Devlyn’s insides, snapped his eyes up. The muscles in his back and shoulders and arms tensed, and had Mena been any slower, he would have caught her with an upswing of the dagger.

But such abrupt, complete Maeben fury drove her actions that she was a blur of deliberate motion. As she flew forward, she kicked her legs out to one side. She caught the Numrek’s head to her chest, clamped her talons around it, and held tight as the momentum in her legs swung her around, horizontal to the ground. She felt two moments of resistance. First, the muscle of the Numrek’s late reaction, and then the catch as the vertebrae in his neck reached the limit to which they could turn. They snapped.

His body was so heavy, legs planted so firmly, that Mena swung all the way around with the now dead head clutched to her chest. She let go and landed on her feet. She caught the dagger that was just then falling from the Numrek’s suddenly limp grip. With her left arm she shoved him in the chest, needing to use all her force to make sure his body, with the wobbling head still attached, fell backward away from Aaden, who was now a knot on the ground, unconscious.

The others were upon her now, two with swords drawn, another swinging an ax before him, intent on killing her quickly. Mena moved faster than thought. She ducked beneath the hissing arc of the ax that was swept around by the first of them to reach her. She stooped under him and sliced the tendons at the back of his knee. The man fell roaring to one side, knocking one of his companions down and entangling another in his writhing agony. The few seconds this allowed was enough for her to scoop Aaden up with one arm, half dragging, half carrying him as she scrambled backward. He was warm and slick with blood, heavy and so very fragile at the same time. He said something, a moan or single word or a hope that Mena could not make out, but that was all.

The two Numrek shoved the wounded man away and came at her, their massive strides eating up the distance quicker than she fed it out. The one approaching from nearest the oncoming Marah said something to the others, but they stayed fixed on her. Mena changed the direction of her retreat to keep him in view as well. She did not look, but in the periphery of her vision she registered that Melio and the others were about to reach the field level. Near, but not near enough.

She feared she would have to put the boy down again to fight, but then something behind her caused the Numrek to slow. They hesitated, weapons raised defensively. Their eyes widened. One of them pointed, as if the others might not be seeing what he saw.

Then Mena understood. And she knew what to do. She dropped one shoulder and twisted her body around, throwing all her weight behind the other shoulder, which came up and around, lifting Aaden off the ground. She swung him in the crook of her arm, which she snapped taut at the exact moment to hurl him into the air. It was an awkward move, her force not entirely controlled. The boy somersaulted in the air. Only then did Mena see Elya.

She had landed at a run and was closing the last few strides with her head low to the ground. She moved with a frightening, reptilian rapidity, all sinewy snapping and writhing, her feather plumes erect and trembling, her mouth open in a rasping hiss. Her head stretched out, neck reached to receive the tumbling boy. He slid down her length and his torso smacked against her back, cradled between the nubs Mena used as a saddle. And then Elya leaped over Mena, wings snapping out and smashing down, shooting her and the prince up into the waiting sky.

T
his place is eating itself,” Skylene said. “That’s what’s wrong with the Auldek. They thought they had bargained for a blessing; instead they got an everlasting curse. They live on, bodies the same, souls more and more twisted. That’s the curse of the soul catcher.”

She poured water from a small stone pitcher into two beakers of the same marbled material. One she pushed across the table to Dariel, the other she held up for Tunnel, who shook his head. She sipped from it herself. “Think of it. On one hand you live on year after year. You die every now and then, only to rise again. Wonderful, yes?”

Dariel rolled the stone beaker between his palms, enjoying the smooth texture of it, the coolness against his skin. His wrists had been unbound only a few days before. He was still relearning mobility. A short length of chain still hobbled his legs and chafed his ankles, but he was making progress, earning their trust. That was what this sudden discourse was about, wasn’t it? Something had changed. He could hear it in Skylene’s voice and see a hint of something tickling the edges of Tunnel’s bizarre features. He said, “I don’t think that immortality is so great a gift, not if it keeps you forever separated from loved ones who have died before you.”

“True. And what if you can never have children? You cannot see yourself in generations that will continue after you. For some, this doesn’t matter; for others, it drives them crazy.”