The Guardian Prince Chapter Two
“Over there,” Koen pointed to their left as they rode through the interior of the Dryht encampment, his arm bobbing slightly with the rhythm of his horse’s steps, “is the Grand Clearing. It’s the main gathering spot for the camp.”
“You keep calling this place a camp,” Sabine mused as she studied a huge clearing visible through a break in the trees. A massive slab of rock dominated a quarter of the space, absorbing the crisp, mid-morning sunlight. Sabine wondered what it would be like to sit on it, enjoying the warmth that must be radiating from it despite the chill in the air. Beyond, in the far distance, she spotted the glint and shimmer of a stream. A moment later the forward motion of her horse carried her beyond the opening, and the view snapped shut. “It looks more permanent than that.”
Koen quirked his lips into a wry smile. “What makes you think so?”
Sabine drew her eyebrows together, trying to find the words to express her thoughts. “Camps move. You can take them down, travel, then put them back up wherever you are at the end of the day. Your people have grown the trees into houses. Not just a couple but enough for an entire community.”
Sabine gestured to her right where some youngish Dryht were using their camouflaged-style clothing to play a hiding game in the branches of nearby trees. A short distance away an elderly Dryht woman stood near a copse of saplings, talking to the air as she waved her hands over them. The young trees appeared to be moving in response to the woman; not swaying as if in a breeze, but shifting, flowing ever-so-slowly to where the elder Dryht’s motions indicated. “What is she doing?”
“Hmm?” Koen glanced to where Sabine had gestured. “Oh. She’s directing them. Telling them where she wants them to grow. Although, why she’s growing her home right there is beyond me.”
“Growing her home.” Sabine gaped at Koen as they rode past the tableaux being discussed. “How is that even possible?”
Behind her, Tayte chuckled. “The Dryht have a way with nature. Some say they are able to commune with the trees, the plants… all of the living things around them.”
“It’s a bit more complicated than that,” Koen retorted dryly, “but your Aethel friend is right. My people do, indeed, have a way with the living aspects of nature. It is part of our gifting from Torian.”
“How long does that take?” Sabine asked, then frowned. That question had made more sense in her head. Searching for a better way to ask what she meant, she noticed a thin sliver of pain tracing its way through the right side of her brain. “The houses, I mean. How long does it take to grow the houses?”
Koen shrugged. “A few years. Five, maybe. Depends on what type of trees you use.”
“See? That is exactly my point.” Sabine rubbed her right temple, trying to ease the pressure building behind it. “This whole place is much more permanent than a camp.”
Koen regarded her with a wry smile. “Even so, it is still only temporary. Once the Rüddan are overthrown and the balance among races is restored, we will return to our former homes, rebuilding with living stone. Then you will understand permanence.”
Recalling the Dryht ruins she had frequented in the woods outside Khapor, Sabine nodded. She tried to imagine what they would look like when they were rebuilt, but the pressure mounting in her head was making it hard to think. It seemed to grow incrementally stronger with every step her horse took.
“Sabine?” Tayte’s voice sounded as if it came from a great distance away. “Are you well?”
“What?” Sabine started. She realized she was rubbing her temple again, so she dropped her hand to her lap and flashed Tayte a small smile. “I’m fine, thanks. Just a bit of a headache.”
Tayte nodded but eyed her warily. Did he look worried?
Sabine glanced ahead to where Aodhan rode with his sister, Diera, and her lady-in-waiting, Amala. She still had no inkling what the Aethel prince wanted with her, but she was not about to give him or anyone else in this group a chance to accuse her of being a burden.
“I’m fine,” she promised Tayte, shifting her attention back to him. Then, in an effort to change the subject, she turned back to Koen. “You were right, by the way.”
“Oh? About what?”
“About the people,” Sabine stopped, assailed by an airy, breathless feeling in her chest. Why did she suddenly feel so winded? Inhaling deeply, she tried again. “Before we left, you said there would be more of them,” she paused for an instant, trying to fill her lungs with air, then covered the action by changing the pitch of her voice to sound as if she were imitating Koen’s, “in the camp.”
She gasped again, as discreetly as she could. Was this what a fish felt like out of the water?
Koen said something in reply, but Sabine could not make out what since she was busy cataloging her symptoms. A sharp headache on one side of her head, trouble taking a deep breath… the sensations were similar to the effects of the litri, the anti-escape charm Dargan had used to bind her on the first day of her enslavement, only they were not so strong.
The urge to panic swelled within her, but she quickly shoved it down. Now was not the time to lose control. Besides, Gaelan had deactivated the Rüddan’s charm last night. If he had not, then she would never have escaped Dargan’s home.
Unless the Rüddan had wanted her to.
Panic surged in again, and this time Sabine had to fight harder to get it under control. The throbbing in her head was solidifying into a silver spike of pain, still building with each step her horse took even as her breath became more and more shallow. The paralysis was occurring slower than it had at Dargan’s house, but the symptoms were the same. Could it be?
She needed to stop moving before she lost consciousness. She tried to tug on the reins, but her arms felt so heavy. Although she managed to twitch her fingers, she could do nothing more.
“Tayte,” Sabine gasped. She waited for the Aethel shape-shifter to respond, but he appeared not to have heard her. Gasping for air, she tried again. “Tayte!”
This effort left her so winded that the edges of her vision turned black. This time the panic swamped her, overwhelming her as each gasping breath brought the blackness closer in. She struggled against the urge to cry, knowing that would only make things worse. At last, Tayte turned to her.
“Sabine?” he said, his voice distant and hollow.
She tried to respond, but the blackness was closing in too quickly, bringing a deep sense of nausea with it. She watched, helpless, as her vision tunneled to a pinpoint, the darkness growing with each step the horse took until everything finally turned black.
The voices were the first things to register. Three of them murmured somewhere nearby, gently and wavering, as if Sabine’s head were under water.
“… until we know what happened,” the first voice said, his words snapping into clarity as smoothly as if Sabine had surfaced into the air. The speaker sounded familiar, and Sabine knew she should recognize him, but she could not quite place the voice’s identity.
The next things she registered were the sensations of wet coolness on her forehead and nausea in her gut. She wanted, no needed, to get up, to run somewhere and vomit, but she could not seem to move.
“We can’t know that until she wakes up,” a second voice, also familiar but unidentifiable, countered.
I’m here, she wanted to say, I’m awake, but even the desire to speak took so much effort. All she could manage was a faint groan.
“It appears she is coming out of it now,” the third voice said.
Sabine tried to speak once more, but still all she could manage was a moan.
“Come, Human,” said the third voice. “Enough of that. Open your eyes now.”
If only I could. She tried, she really did, but her eyes would not obey. It would be so much easier to just stay asleep…
“Sabine,” the second voice snapped as if issuing a command. The cold wetness on her forehead disappeared, only to return a moment later, colder and wetter than before, reminding her of how desperately she wanted to wake up.
“Trying,” she croaked at last. “Sick.”
Someone lifted her legs, bending them at the knee to elevate them on something soft. The cold wetness dabbed across her forehead and down her cheeks over and over again while a small, chilly breeze fanned over her face. The coolness made her nausea fade until, at last, she was able to force her eyes open.
“She wakes,” the third voice commented dryly, now directly over her.
Sabine opened her eyes to find Kyar, the healer Aethel, dabbing her face with a cold cloth he held in one hand and fanning her with his other hand.
“There’s my girl!” Tayte, the owner of the second voice, said. “Can you sit up?”
Nodding, Sabine tried to push herself into a sitting position. The nausea rose within her, but she swallowed it down. Kyar helped her, supporting her shoulders with his arm.
Aodhan sat across from her, staring at her as if in contemplation. He did not speak, but he did not need to. Sabine knew his was the first voice she had heard, and he had held the conversation in her language in case she was listening. Shame and anger scalded her cheeks, provoked by the thought of him judging her weakness. So much for not being a burden.
“Where are we?” she asked, glancing around. She noticed she was inside one of the Dryht copse-houses. It looked very much like the one she had slept in last night. “Where’s Bree?”
“Safe,” Tayte said, proffering a wooden cup to her. Kyar moved aside, leaning against the wall beside the washstand to give Tayte enough room. “Can you drink this?”
Sabine nodded and turned sideways, slipping her legs off of the pillows that had elevated them, then sat cross-legged on the bed. Accepting the cup, she took an experimental sip. The cold water felt good on her stomach, curbing the nausea, so she took another sip and examined the room. The more she saw, the more she became convinced that this was the same room in which she had started her day. The narrow bed was draped in a downy-soft, silvery-green blanket, and the washstand sat in the same position along a wall of trees the same color. The only difference was that Aodhan now occupied the chair that had been empty when she woke this morning. Once again, she asked, “Where are we?”
“Back where we started,” Tayte said. “We had to return because you fainted at the edge of the camp. Can you tell us what happened?”
Sabine frowned, took another sip of the cold water, and nodded. She told Tayte every detail, including her theory that she might have experienced some altered version of the litri Dargan had used when she served as a slave in his home.
Gaelan entered the room as she spoke and positioned himself next to Aodhan. Sabine paused in case he wanted to speak with the Aethel prince. He made no attempt to do so, however, so she finished her story.
“I thought you nullified that enchantment,” Tayte said, shooting Gaelan a look full of some meaning that Sabine could not discern.
Gaelan shrugged, a mystified expression on his face. “We got away, did we not? How else would she have escaped? If the charm was still active, it would have stopped us.”
“Unless they deliberately let me go,” Sabine suggested, recalling last night’s flight through the woods. She looked at Tayte, catching his stare with hers as she remembered the exact moment when Dargan had stumbled upon the two of them.
“Why do you think that?” Aodhan asked quietly, speaking for the first time since Sabine had woken up. His tone was so neutral that she could not identify any emotion in it. It made her think of how different he had been at her house when she had nursed him back to health. There, she had been able to discern his expressions, to guess what he was thinking. Here, he was completely unreadable.
“We ran into her Rüddan master in the woods as we were leaving,” Tayte explained. “Since Sabine had saved the lives of his wife and son, he owed her two death debts. He was not about to help us escape, but to repay the debts, he said he would not keep us from going.”
“He granted permission,” Sabine affirmed. “When he first took me from the Tower of Khapor, he said that only his will could circumvent the charm.”
“Which means,” Kyar mused, his arms crossed over his chest, “that he wanted you to leave the Human village but wants to keep you here. Why?”
Suddenly, they were all looking at her. Their expressions each suggested varying degrees of curiosity, puzzlement, and—for everyone except Tayte—a hint of suspicion. They seemed to be waiting for an answer, so Sabine searched for one, casting through her memories of the past few sennights until she found it. “I’m the bait.”
Before they could ask what she meant, she described everything. She began with her capture and imprisonment within the Tower of Khapor, then detailed her interview with Naois, the Rüddan Emissary and the highest-ranking official of the Empress’s Council. She told them how Naois had invaded her memories, scouring them for information about the Aethel and their use of the portal built into her garden wall.
“Why have you not mentioned any of this before?” Aodhan asked as she paused to drink a final sip of water.
“When?” she snapped, irked by his imperious tone. “You’ve avoided me all morning. It’s not as if I had a chance.”
She hesitated for a moment because she felt she was losing her temper and because she expected the Aethel to reply. When he did not, she inhaled a calming breath and continued with her story. She told the four Aethel about her release from the Tower to serve as a slave in the home of Dargan and his wife, Gaielle. She emphasized the point of her release, stressing that no Human imprisoned in the Khapor Tower had ever been set free. Then she described the conditions of her enslavement, including her daily trips into the village to apprentice her sister, Elise, as a healer.
“Elise often asked me strange questions,” Sabine told her audience, “about the house and the portal. She even asked me about you, the Aethel. I told no one about you, ever, so she can only have learned that I knew of you from the Rüddan. That made me think I had something they still needed, maybe some piece of information they still did not know. But now I wonder if they were just holding on to me so they could get to you.”
“Perhaps the litri was not the Rüddan commander’s to release.” Tayte glanced to Aodhan, raising his eyebrows. “It is possible the Emissary set it, only granting him limited control.”
Aodhan nodded in return.
“If the human is the bait,” Gaelan said, “and we are, apparently, the target, then what is the trap?”
“I don’t intend to find out,” Aodhan studied Sabine with hard eyes and a face blank of expression, then glanced at Kyar. “The connection must be severed.”
Kyar nodded, uncrossed his arms, and pushed himself off the wall. As he did, Koen entered the already-crowded room. His quick glance seemed to assess his surroundings and everyone in them instantly before settling on Aodhan.
“Your majesty,” he said, his voice low and urgent. “May I speak with you?”
Aodhan scowled, apparently ready to dismiss Koen. This intention seemed to disappear, however, when his glance connected with that of the Dryht. A moment later, Aodhan nodded brusquely and rose from his chair.
“Kyar,” he said, looking from the Aethel healer to Sabine. Kyar nodded.
Aodhan turned to the door, his gaze crossing over Sabine once more. For a moment she thought she saw a hint of an expression on his face, something unguarded that reminded her of the patient she had healed, but it was gone so quickly that she could not be sure. An instant later, he was following Koen outside, trailed by Gaelan.
Sabine watched them go, then looked up at Kyar, who now towered in front of her. She swallowed, apprehension building as she recalled the pain she had endured when Gaelen had set the bond that the Aethel in front of her would now attempt to break. She dreaded the idea of enduring that kind of examination again, but reasoned that it probably could not be avoided, so steadied herself with another breath. “Should I lie down?”
“It makes no difference,” Kyar stated tersely.
Oh, but it does, Sabine thought. If she lay down, she would be totally at the Aethel’s mercy. If she remained sitting, however, she could maintain some control of the situation, separating herself from him if his presence became too much to bear.
Behind Kyar, Tayte nodded to Sabine, as if to assure her.
Before Sabine could decide what to do, Kyar placed one hand on her forehead, his palm pressing into her while his fingers rested on her scalp.
Sabine inhaled deeply. Fixing her attention on Tayte’s smile of reassurance, she tried to relax and brace herself at the same time. If she could remain calm, then perhaps Kyar’s invasion would not be so painful. No matter how much she breathed, though, she could not keep her stomach from knotting. Willing herself not to panic, she closed her eyes and focused on not falling over.
She sensed Kyar’s presence the moment it arrived, slipping into her memories and thoughts with ease. Exhaling deeply, she dropped her shoulders, willing the tension away as his awareness moved through hers. He paused a moment later, his consciousness still and focused among Sabine’s swirling thoughts. Presuming that he had found whatever it was he sought, Sabine braced to receive the pain that would overwhelm her at any moment.
She waited a long time, wondering why he paused and wishing he would just get it over with. The pain, however, never came. As quickly as Kyar’s consciousness had invaded her own, it was gone.
The Aethel stepped away from her, rubbing his hands together as if to rid them of some unclean taint.
“What is it?” A sense of misgiving stirred within Sabine. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” the Aethel snapped. But the glance he flashed at Tayte suggested otherwise. “I am finished.”
Sabine wondered how that could be since she had felt no pain but decided to ask Tayte later. She sat silently, awkward and uncomfortable, until Gaelan returned a few moments later.
Glancing from Sabine to Kyar, then back again, Gaelan simply arched his eyebrows.
Kyar nodded.
“Good.” Turning, Gaelan headed back to the door. “The portal gate has almost fallen, and our enemy will soon be through. Get to your horses.”
Sabine stared after Gaelan, surprised and confused. Koen had said portal gates had never been breached! How could it be that she and her companions suddenly needed to flee? She looked to Tayte for explanation, but he was already on his way through the door.
Once outdoors, Sabine called to Bree and followed the Aethel back to the horses. She mounted as quickly and silently as the rest, but her mind would not be quiet. She still did not know where she was going or why. And what about her connection to Naois? Had it truly been severed this time, or would Sabine black out again? If she did, would her companions stop for her? Or would they consider her too much of a risk?
What did they want from her, anyway?
Continue to Chapter Three