The Adani Chronicles: Birthright

The decision to turn toward Thaliondris had been the right one, Evin knew. But knowing it didn’t quell the pit in his stomach with each step they took away from their quarry and their friend. A single word, the only descriptor he could think of, in spite of the logic behind their actions, rang in his head with every league toward the elven city.

Abandonment.

It was ridiculous; Ryn would’ve skinned him alive if they’d kept going when Kota’s injuries were so grim and their own chance of actually helping her kept diminishing by the second. Of their party, Evin himself was the only one left relatively unharmed, so long as you didn’t count the bruised ribs he was sporting and trying to hide from his brother. Brandt had problems of his own right now. Wyvern saliva may not be poisoned, but that didn’t mean it didn’t contain Aeos-only-knew-what filth, and despite Evin’s homemade herbal concoctions, Brandt’s fever persisted.

Before them, a clearing opened in the trees and they could see that the sun was just beginning to crest the ridged horizon. The pale sky was clear—it was to be a beautiful day—and the new sunlight shone in bands through the trees around them. The sound of hoof beats gave barely a second’s warning before a horse thundered into the clearing, whinnying at the sight of them. Brandt turned, snatching one of his axes from its sheath with his good arm, twirling it threateningly. Evin crouched to lay Kota gently between him and his brother, assuming a defensive stance over the lynx, who moaned but lay still.

More of the beasts rushed into the clearing; ten or so, though it was difficult to count them. The travelers found themselves surrounded, the horses snuffling and pawing as their riders brought them to a halt. The wood-elves were instantly recognizable; a smattering of richly-colored faces, for the Eloni were born with skin that suited best their particular strengths and probable place in the wood elves’ society. Healers tended to be shades of blue, Growers different hues of green, and Warriors like these, reds and browns. They wielded elegant bows, slung across their backs already strung, and long slender blades, which they had drawn immediately upon seeing Brandt and Evin. Clearly, they were expecting battle, the younger thought, dropping into a crouch and drawing his own sword. He had not realized they had drifted so far East while tracking the nagrat. The Eloni were allies to the Men of Laendor, but their land was sacred to them, and to trespass upon it beyond the road without express permission was death for anyone.

Brandt seemed uncertain whether to fight or talk, eyes moving rapidly as the elves surrounded them. His face was hard, but Evin saw the faint lines appear in his forehead that told him his brother was afraid; and well he should be. The fate of their kingdom and their quest—not to mention Kota’s and Ryn’s lives—depended heavily upon what would transpire in the next few moments. Brandt’s gaze settled on a burgundy hulk of an elf wearing a swirling circlet - the group’s obvious leader – but before he could utter a word, a slight she-elf lighted from her white mare and rushed to Kota’s side. Her skin was light enough to be pink, and she bore the intricate tattoos of a battle healer. She skidded to her knees in the grass, paying absolutely no mind to the two large warriors standing over the creature, shouldering Evin’s legs aside as she touched the lynx gently on the forehead.

Evin did not stumble, but he fell back a couple steps, aghast. “Hey!” he shouted, uncertain how to react.

Brandt got out half of a “what?“” before the leader spoke.

“Travelers,” the elf stated, his voice a booming rumble. “What is your business here?”

“We are making for your fair city,” Brandt answered, clearly calling on his statecraft training to make his words smooth, confident, nonthreatening. “Our guide was taken by the nagrat six days ago, and our lynx was ravaged by a wyvern night before last. I also was bitten by the same creature before we dispatched it. We were hoping you could render us some assistance, as well as allow us to rest and refit for the remainder of our journey east.”

“Commander, he is badly wounded,” the young woman spoke up from beside Kota, her roseate hands bright against his red-brown fur and the stained bandages. “He needs the Menders.”

The elf nodded from astride his massive destrier. “And the Menders he shall have, just as soon as it is possible.” He looked to Brandt and Evin. “I am Commander Jorlan Windspeaker, this—” he motioned to a lithe, burgundy-skinned warrioress on a bay mare, who nodded once, “—is my lieutenant, Nenna. We have received reports of a nagrat hunting party in the area, and ride to battle.” The look on his face was fierce. “They must needs be reminded why they so seldom trespass upon our lands.”

Brandt looked to his brother—a question—and Evin nodded, once. “We may be of assistance,” Brandt offered. “We are both trained fighters. If any of your mounts can bear us, we would be honored to ride with you. We wish to know the fate of our guide.”

“Any blow to those barbarians we can serve, we would gladly deliver,” Evin growled behind him.

Jorlan stared at them steadily, yellow eyes assessing as he considered. “You are wounded. You are not strong enough to be of use,” he said to Brandt. Evin saw the elder’s face pale slightly at the affront, and felt the heat in his own face.

“My brother is strong,” he protested, but Brandt held up a forestalling hand.

“The Commander is right,” he confessed softly, just to Evin. “And he certainly means no insult.” His brother turned back to the Eloni and lifted his chin. “I will take the lynx and make for Thaliondris on foot, with your permission, while my brother accompanies you to hunt down these nagrat brutes.”

Jorlan seemed to consider. Apparently he took too long for the lady healer, who spoke up. “I will take them on to the City,” she said. “My lord, the kit cannot wait.”

“Very well, Calle,” Jorlan agreed after a moment. “It shall be.”

It took a matter of minutes to ready for departure; Jorlan gave Brandt and the Healer two horses, requiring a few of the warriors to double up. It took a couple of the stronger elves to get Kota settled in such a way that the ride would not injure him further. Evin mounted up behind the fierce-looking lieutenant—Nenna, her name had been—and waved to his brother. Brandt looked stricken for half a moment, but then they were off, like sky-fire upon graceful steeds. Evin sent up a prayer of protection for Brandt as his brother faded into the distance behind them.

Jorlan thundered ahead of them, and Evin took a moment to observe his companion. The lass was an archer, her short bow held in one hand as she rode, a quiver slung at her side. She wore leather armor, light and easy to travel in, and her wine-colored skin was a stark contrast to the white bear’s paw that was tattooed over half of her face. Evin had to admit the effect was both striking and intimidating. Her white hair was straight and short, practical for a fighter, but unusual for a woman.

A human woman, he corrected himself. The Eloni were definitely not human.

Beneath their feet the ground flew by, and the wind tangled Evin’s hair despite the living shield behind whom he rode. He wondered vaguely if Eloni horses were faster than Laendorian ones, for he had never ridden at such a speed in his entire life.

“How far?” he shouted after a while.

“Less than a league now!” Nenna answered, and it was then that Jorlan placed a war horn to his lips and let loose a thunderous note that vibrated in the very atmosphere. It made the hair on Evin’s arms stand up, an undercurrent of powerful magic, the promise of death to those who served the Dark.

Not for nothing had the Eloni been considered allies of the staunchest sort through history. They seldom went to war or fought battles, but when they did? Legend said the earth itself would shake with the force of their magic, and all but the strongest foes would flee in terror.

Around him, warriors drew their swords, their bows, released their staves from back sheaths, readied for a fight. Evin stretched to peer over Nenna’s shoulder and caught a glimpse of the camp toward which they flew—smoke drifted lazily from several smoldering fires, lean-to’s and small shelters marred the field, tucked against the border of a small forest. A banner upon which was painted the elegant swirl of Skeðu drew his attention, blood-red against a black background mounted upon a war spike taller than he.

Evin drew his long sword and joined the others in a wild battle cry, the sound blasting through his veins and making him itch to fight something.

They thundered into the camp, blades held high, to be met with complete silence and not the slightest word of protest from their enemies. Slowly, they came to a canter, then a full stop. Something was wrong: they had just ridden straight into a nagrat hunting camp without being challenged once.

“Well. This is eerie,” he murmured to no one in particular, glancing about and trying to see. But Nenna shook her head and pointed her bow at the feet of her mare. Evin’s gaze followed.

“Oh.” He couldn’t help the murmur of shock that left his suddenly-numb lips. The party had gone completely silent in the wake of realization, and Evin shuddered. Around him, nagrat lay dead in every imaginable pose, as though they had just been stricken in the midst of everyday life. Pale and stiff, eyes wide and unseeing, they stared up into the morning sky.

With not a visible injury upon them.

It was honestly the most terrifying thing Evin had ever laid eyes on. Any mage—for it was clear their deaths were magically produced—powerful enough to do this to a hunting party of the massive, beastly dark creatures was something to be feared. Even the chimaera mounts were dead.

Evin felt cold despite the bright morning sun, and he looked around desperately for any sign of Ryn.

He could see none. He shivered.

“We should leave this place,” Nenna murmured, shifting uncomfortably. Evin silently disagreed with her, but Jorlan appeared to be considering something. The Commander sat perfectly still, eyes closed, face twitching as if he sensed...something.

“The magic here feels old, but not evil,” he finally spoke, in response to the questioning gazes upon him. “It is......unfamiliar to me.” He shook his head, black hair shining in the early morning sun. “Check for living. Do not touch the dead. I will return here with the Elders. They must see this place.” He turned to Nenna. “We will depart the moment we are certain none yet live.” The lass nodded and signaled to the others.

Evin dismounted and moved cautiously to the front of their mount, kneeling to examine the prints in the soft dirt; Nenna was speaking softly to Jorlan. “Bring Kenelm when you return, my lord. He will know of this.”

“The old one?” Jorlan questioned.

Nenna gave what was apparently an affirmative, then said, “He is eccentric, but wise in these matters.”

Evin saw no human footprints, so he stood, chucked their horse under her chin gently and moved toward the midst of the camp. He studied the ground, poked and prodded at several motionless nagrat with his sword, growing more uneasy with each lifeless body he saw. None of them bore any evidence of battle, or even sickness. They were ugly, in the way nagrat were, but they were not damaged. They were simply...dead.

Finally he caught sight of several prints that were neither animal nor nagrat. There were long scuffs in the dirt, just on the very top layer of soil, punctuated by close-set prints that looked distinctly human, distinctly distressed—Ryn had been dragged. One side seemed to strike deeper than the other, which implied she was either injured or off-balance. Ignoring the chill that crept down his spine, Evin followed the tracks to the very center of the carnage, leading straight into a small lean-to with a canvas flap over the open side. He crouched and looked inside, steeling himself for what he might see.

Evin’s heart jumped into his throat when he saw the blood covering the small wedge of green wood. It was very sharp on one end, but the entire thing was the ugly dark red of coagulated blood, and the grass in a good foot-diameter circle around it was stained the same color.

It was the first sign of injury he’d seen here yet. It didn’t make him feel any better.

“Ryn, no, come on…” he murmured shakily. Backing out of the rough shelter on his hands and knees, he noticed the ropes.

Blood-covered ropes, sliced cleanly in half. Then others, unstained, longer than the first but also clean-cut.

“Ryn?” he murmured, looking up as though she’d be standing right in front of him. He rose, ropes still in hand, and scanned the ground around the shelter. His heart thumped in his chest when he found them, uneven and stumbling, human footprints.

Ryn.

Evin rose and began to follow the halting tracks, completely unaware of the bustling Eloni around him now.

On the very edge of the camp, he found a nagrat that had evidently stepped away from the rest—a guard, perhaps, or a scout maybe. The tracks led straight to it. The creature’s eyes were closed, but when Evin nudged it with his sword, it flailed suddenly with a savage growl. He startled, jumped back even as muscle memory brought his sword down in a lethal blow. He stopped it just in time, his desperate need for information overcoming any sense of danger he felt—the nagrat was weak and struggling to breathe, clearly not in any condition to do him harm.

“What happened here?” he demanded, resting the point of his sword at the creature’s neck. Muddy yellow eyes squinted up at him as the nagrat fell back, its head hitting the ground with a low thunk. Evin waited for a moment, thinking it would answer once it caught its breath, but the nagrat stared fixedly at the sky. He could see it breathing, so he knew he was being ignored. Thinking of his friend, Evin growled his rage, pressing harder against the nagrat’s vulnerable neck. “Where is she?” he asked, his voice icy. “Your prisoner, what did you do with her?”

The brute looked at him then, met his eyes and gave him a weak grin. “So many questions,” it croaked, voice rough as filing stones. “Your little whore is dead.” Then it began to laugh, a pained, choked sound that evoked no pity in Evin.

No.

“If she is dead, then so are you.” Evin was looking the nagrat in the eyes when he thrust the tip of his sword deliberately into its chest. He kept its gaze during the few seconds it took for the thing to finish bleeding out, gasping and choking as black liquid pooled in the grass. Only when it stopped moving entirely, blank eyes fixed on the sunny sky, did Evin allow his expression to twist at the nagrat’s claim.

Dead? It cannot be. And yet...

The tracks ended here. There was no one left alive in the carnage of that camp. The only reason this one seemed to have survived was because it had been further away from its companions, outside the light of any campfires and well past the line of hastily-erected canvas shelters. If Ryn had been held inside the camp, in that rough, tiny lean-to, she would have been directly in the line of whatever had struck down the rest of them.

Also there was all the blood. The sliced ropes and staggering tracks leading away from the lean-to made it seem she had survived, at least temporarily; but there was a lot of blood. Evin’s heart clenched and his stomach twisted at the thought.

He liked Ryn. She was fierce, and smart, and refused to fit any mold she was shoved into. She’d taken what was obviously a painful childhood and turned it into a downright heroic adulthood, and Evin couldn’t have admired her more for it. He bowed his head, allowing the grief to wash over him slowly, knowing it would be all the worse when Kota eventually realized—

“What did you do?” Nenna growled angrily from his left. Evin looked up at her; she looked down at his sword impaled deep in the dead nagrat’s chest.

“It was dying,” he supplied, his voice sounding distracted even to his own ears.

Nenna studied him for a moment. “You should have called one of us over. It might have had information—“

Nenna petered off, staring past him, and Evin startled a little when he heard a gasp to his right. Whirling to meet whatever danger lay there, he nearly fell over entirely when his eyes registered what he was seeing.

Their guide was standing before him. She was bloody, dirty, pale, and her hair was a hopeless tattered mess, but it was definitely her.

“You,” he murmured.

“You,” Ryn breathed, and her knees shook. Had he been here the whole time? Had he been a prisoner too? She looked him up and down. He was filthy and gray, looked tired and his face was slightly pinched with some pain, but he didn’t seem to find it overwhelming. He looked far too well to have been a…guest of the nagrat. “What in the name of all that’s sacred are you doing here?” Her gaze skipped between Evin and the warlike party of wood elves at his back, trying to process the shock. Now that she was more certain she wasn’t in danger of dying in the next five minutes, her legs seemed to have decided they’d had just about enough supporting her. Her vision swam.

Oh I might need to sit down.

“He said you were dead,” Evin answered faintly, gesturing vaguely to the motionless nagrat at his feet. Ryn saw his long sword impaling the brute’s chest, and couldn’t muster even a little pity for it. Not after the last several days of captivity. She bit back a wild desire to laugh.

“He was obviously misinformed.”

Evin blinked, then barked a choked-off chuckle, but the sound was more stunned than amused.

Ryn tried to smile, but couldn’t quite manage it all of a sudden. Darkness encroached on the edges of her vision; she was not keen on the idea of fainting right here and now, and certainly not in front of everyone. Evin stepped closer to her, hands out in a conciliatory gesture, as if he was afraid she might bolt.

She almost laughed at the thought. Running was the furthest thing from her mind, even if the Eloni around her were quite alarming, all strange colors and unfamiliar armor and stern faces. They had a lot of weapons, but she had no strength to run. She was barely on her feet.

And then suddenly, somehow, she wasn’t. She was on her rump in the dewy grass, swaying dangerously close to being flat on her back; when she blinked again, Evin and a fierce-looking Elon were at her side trying to keep her upright. Ryn squirmed against the intrusion and struggled to sit up on her own.

“’M fine,” she whispered, stomach churning.

“Yes, we can see that,” Evin replied agreeably, getting an arm around her and pulling her gently but firmly to lean back against his solid bulk. That, more than anything, gave Ryn the strength to move, and she rolled to her hands and knees before struggling upright once again. Her body protested the treatment, exhausted and wanting nothing more than to accept her friend’s offer of comfort and strength, but she stood nonetheless.

She couldn’t need his help.

Evin blinked, confused, and moved once more to assist her. She flinched, and hated herself for it, but he got the picture and retreated. By now, they’d caught the attention of the leader of the Eloni, and Ryn looked up as he moved forward to meet her. He was terrifying, looming and large and well-armed, but his eyes were kind. He stood before her and opened his mouth.

“Don’t touch me,” she said, before she had a chance to think about it.

He tilted his head, nodded. “Very well. I am Jorlan. Who are you?” She shook her head, and the wood elf smiled wryly. “No? Then I shall call you Miriae, ‘nameless one’, in our tongue. Can you tell me what happened here?”

Ryn took a steadying breath, swallowing her first impression of terror—you have nothing to fear, here, they are allies—and answered. “I was their prisoner. When I woke this morning, they were all dead.”

Jorlan nodded, then looked her over and narrowed his eyes just slightly. “They did not harm you?”

“No, they did,” she answered, shuddering, struck again by the confusion of what happened. “All my wounds were…were healed. I don’t know how.” She paused a moment to gather her wits before looking around, then to Evin. “You are alone.” Her voice was small, disappointed and fearful even to her own ears.

His tired eyes held a strange look, but he smiled. “They are alive, fear not. They’ve been sent on to the city with all speed to have their wounds treated. We tracked you as long as we could.”

She shuddered at the confession—Kota had been hurt, and Brandt too!—before several realizations hit her at once. The first was an intense feeling of relief and joy, both at the news Kota was alive, and at seeing a familiar face. The second was the sudden remembrance at just how out of sorts she was at the moment, panicked and broken and dirty beyond belief. The third was a crushing physical exhaustion, brought on by six days of travel, torture, complete lack of sustenance, and now shock. Healed, her wounds may have been, but she still suffered physical ailments in response to the treatment of the past days. These conflicting feelings were all so powerful, and so intense, she didn’t have any clue how to respond to any of them; so for a long moment everyone just stared at each other.

Ryn sucked in a breath that was equal parts desperate and painful. Evin moved closer again—close enough to murmur, but not so close as to spook her. “What do you need, lass?”

Her hand going to her tattered hair instinctively, she barely registered the heartbroken look he gave her. “A cloak?” she croaked. “With a hood, please? And…food?”