Authors: Kristen Britain

Tags: #General, #Fiction, #fantasy, #Epic

Blackveil (90 page)

BOOK: Blackveil

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A gap opened on the bridge. A Sleeper hesitated on the arch, his posture different, less erect. Had he awakened while crossing? If so, he was probably startled to find himself on a translucent bridge spanning a strange chasm in the white world. Shocked was more like it. She decided she’d better help him.

She started back across the bridge. When the Sleepers started to follow her, she raised her hand and said, “No, stay.” For some reason, they obeyed and remained on the island.

Her relief was short-lived, for as she approached the arch, she realized it wasn’t one of
her
Sleepers standing there, but one of the tainted ones from Blackveil.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

A second appeared through the haze behind him.

She started to back away, her staff held before her. How was she going to get her Sleepers across the second bridge to Eletia with these tainted ones behind them? It would be a massacre.

The first tainted one snarled and lunged.

MOONFIRE

K
arigan did not hesitate. Her training had prepared her to act first and think later until it was instinctual. Before the tainted one reached her, she cracked him in the head with the staff’s steel handle. It slowed him down, but did not stop him, and she followed up with a low sweep to his knees. He fought for balance, his arms wheeling in the air. A third blow knocked him off the bridge.

Karigan clenched her jaw at his scream as it trailed behind him. Through the bridge she saw him plummet, become smaller and smaller and smaller until he wasn’t even a speck.

The second one did not charge her, perhaps learning from the other’s mistake. Karigan adjusted her grip on her staff. Licked her lips. Waited. The tainted one stared at her with a malicious half-smile, his eyes like pitch.

Karigan felt time rushing away as she faced the dark Eletian. Laurelyn told her she could hold the bridge for only so long.

In a blink, the dark Eletian dove for her legs. Karigan got in only a glancing blow to his hip before he knocked her off her feet. The staff flew from her grasp and rolled down the bridge, teetering on the edge. She hit the bridge so hard that air rushed out of her lungs. The dark Eletian grabbed her legs; she thrashed and kicked, but his grip was like steel, his claws digging into her wounded leg, ripping open the old injuries and creating new ones.

She desperately glanced toward her staff, but it was out of reach. The Sleepers stood on the island as a mute audience to her struggle. She tugged on the hilt of her long knife, drew it, and gashed the creature’s face. He grabbed her wrist and squeezed. Before she felt it, she heard bones snap. She screamed. Her knife clattered to the bridge and over the edge, twirling tip over hilt into the chasm.

Karigan had been trained to handle blades with either hand, but the scabbard of her saber was entangled in her legs and her position made it impossible to draw. She’d only one other weapon left to her. It was awkward getting to it. Even as the tainted one wrestled with her, she flipped her hips, thrust her good hand into her trouser pocket, and drew out her mother’s moonstone. Brilliant light flared out and she blinked. The dark Eletian averted his gaze and loosened his grip. She kicked. as hard as she could.

The dark one fell back, and the moonstone’s light grew in intensity and ferocity, driving him still farther back. Karigan kept kicking, landing one booted foot squarely on his jaw. This time it was not
her
bones she heard breaking. Blood rushed from his mouth. Another blow sent him flailing on the edge. He did not regain his balance and he fell.

She’d barely begun to register what happened when the dark Eletian grabbed her bad leg as he fell. She slid half off the bridge, grasping the opposite edge with her good hand. The dark Eletian dangled from her leg, his weight dragging her down. Her fingers faltered, started to slide. She kicked at the Eletian and he slipped down her leg, claws scrabbling for a hold in her flesh, but failing. And suddenly, his weight was gone.

With a grunt Karigan swung her legs back onto the deck of the bridge, breathing hard, all her hurts colliding at once. Tears pooled on the translucent bridge beneath her.

A thread of Laurelyn’s voice came to her.
Karigan, you must get off the bridge now!

Karigan looked up and understood Laurelyn’s urgency. Three more dark Eletians emerged onto the arch.

Karigan crawled, taking up the moonstone that had miraculously not rolled off into the depths. She crawled, leaving smears of blood on moonbeams. The moonstone bought her time—its fierce glow flashed into the faces of the dark ones, making them hesitate. The bridge flared and seemed to be ablaze with moonfire.

She scrabbled along the bridge as fast as her battered body allowed, grabbing her staff as she went. She rolled the rest of the way, with the dark Eletians sprinting after her. When she reached the island, the bridge vanished. The three dark Eletians hung in the air for a moment before plunging into the chasm.

There are no others,
came Laurelyn’s distant voice, and the bridge flickered back into existence.

Karigan rolled onto her back panting, gazing into the milky sky. She wondered if she had anything left in her to get to the next bridge, much less cross it and return. She
could
stay in Eletia, perhaps get her wounds tended. Would it be so great a betrayal if she did not return to her companions in Blackveil? Surely they could find their way back to the wall as easily without her, if any of them survived ...

No, she couldn’t abandon them, especially Yates. Yates, her friend who had gotten into more than he reckoned for when he had volunteered to join the company. Thinking of him made her climb up onto her feet. No matter how her leg hurt, wrenched and torn, she knew she had to return to Blackveil to ensure Yates made it home.

She slipped the moonstone into her pocket and leaned heavily on her staff, blessing the Weapons for the foresight of their gift. With her broken wrist held close to her, she hobbled across the island, a shepherd to the Sleepers who followed her like silent specters.

The second bridge was, to Karigan’s relief, shorter, spanning a narrower section of the chasm. The stones were cut in a rustic style, their earthy feel was a source of comfort to her. At the arch she stepped through a golden haze and into the sunshine of a forest glade that immediately warmed and soothed her after all the time she’d spent in the dark and wet of Blackveil. She sighed, closed her eyes, and let the sunshine wash over her. Laurelyn said her piece of time might not correspond to Eletia’s. She had left Argenthyne at night, and here it appeared to be full afternoon. Karigan was glad.

When she opened her eyes again, she took in the burbling stream, the towering grove of trees that surrounded the glade, star flowers and pink lady slippers wavering against a backdrop of emerald, the warbling of songbirds. She felt alive again.

A man knelt by the stream trailing his hand in the water. Flaxen hair hung around his face. He turned to gaze at her. He reminded her, with a start, of Graelalea.

“Hui a ven?”
he asked.

“I’m a Green Rider,” Karigan replied, hoping that’s what he wanted to know.

“Are you an apparition then?” he asked in strongly accented common tongue, his voice rich and resonant.

Karigan glanced down at herself. Because she was using her ability to cross thresholds, she was also faded out, but the sunshine of the glade prevented her from completely disappearing, leaving her appearance ghostlike. The fading usually dulled her vision, but everything here was vibrant.

“No,” she told him. “I am not an apparition.”

The Eletian stood, his hand dripping. He did not shake the water off, perhaps because it would have been painful to do so. His hand was blackened with the fingertips desiccated to the bone so that they resembled claws. She had never seen such a disfigurement on any Eletian—not that she’d met that many. The man himself was tall and radiated brightness.

“Did your captain send you? Speak quickly. There are arrows trained on you, apparition or no.”

Karigan glanced around the grove, but saw no one else. That did not mean the Eletian archers were not there.

“Laurelyn sent me,” Karigan replied.

“Laurelyn! But she was overcome. I do not believe you.”

The Sleepers were jammed behind her and obscured by the mist of the arch, so she walked off the bridge, the Sleepers materializing into the sunshine and following her into the glade.

“She wishes a safe haven for these people,” Karigan said. “If they stay in Blackveil—Argenthyne—they will be changed, and not for the better. Laurelyn protected them for as long as she could. Until I came to bring them to Eletia.”

As the man took them in, his expression transformed from distrust to joy. “For how long did she protect them?”

“About a thousand years, I’d guess.” His question made Karigan wonder
when
she was herself.

“It sounds a strange story,” he replied. He took a few steps closer to Karigan, glancing at the Sleepers. They began to disperse on their own, instinctively seeking out the grand trees of the grove. “You’ve the fading of Lil Ambriodhe.”

“I wear her brooch,” Karigan replied. Had this Eletian once known the First Rider?

He glanced at the Sleepers vanishing into grove trees to resume their rest. Karigan felt her own strong impulse drawing her back to the bridge. If she released her ability, it would not pull on her. She could stay.

“I am grateful you have brought these Sleepers to us through unknown dangers,” the Eletian said. “Will you not sit with me and tell me your story? About Argenthyne and Laurelyn? We’ve been so grieved.”

“I—” The brooch pulled harder on her. She stumbled backward.

“We could tend your wounds.”

Karigan thought of Yates and the others back in Blackveil and she was overcome with a sense of foreboding. “N-no, I can’t stay.”

He drew nearer still. There was great age and great weariness in his eyes. They were the blue of snow shadows and reflected ages past. Karigan almost lost herself in them.

His gaze grew unfocussed, far away. “Before you depart, I must warn you to be cautious of the mirror man.” His voice carried the weight of prophecy. “He is a trickster who will try to ensnare you for his own amusement. Beware the choices that lie ahead, and choose wisely. You have traveled great distances for one so young. Your wits and skills have served you well so far. They will aid you in the trials ahead.”

Karigan backed toward the bridge, stepped on it, and immediately the glade in Eletia began to grow more distant. The pull to return to Blackveil increased, and even the immense attraction of staying in the sunshine of Eletia and the presence of the remarkable man could not anchor her.

The man, she realized, who could only be Graelalea’s father, King Santanara, the one who had defeated Mornhavon the Black at the very end of the Long War. He’d become a Sleeper himself sometime after the war, leaving his son, Prince Jametari, to lead Eletia.

The heady sensation of meeting King Santanara made her shiver even as she hastened across the bridge back into the white world.

CHOOSING
MASKS