Douglas Niles - The Kinslayer Wars

The dinner arrived, as Nirakina had promised. Kith-Kanan guessed that his mother had sent orders to the kitchen, and someone in the kitchen had communicated the situation to another interested party. For it was Hermathya who knocked on his door and entered.

“Hello, Hermathya,” he said, sitting up in the bed. He wasn’t particularly surprised to see her, and if he was honest with himself, neither was he very much dismayed.

“I took this from the serving girl,” she said, bringing forward a large silver tray with domed, steaming dishes and crystal platters. Once again he was struck by her air of youth and innocence.

Memories of the two of them together.... Kith-Kanan felt a sudden resurgence of desire, a feeling that he thought had been gone for years. He wanted to take her in his arms. Looking into her eyes, he knew that she desired the same thing.

“I’ll get up. We can dine near the windows.” He didn’t want to suggest they go to the balcony. He felt there was something furtive and private about her visit.

“Just stay there,” she said softly. “I’ll serve you in bed.” He wondered what she meant, at first. Soon he learned, as the dinner grew cold upon a nearby table.

Hermathya slipped away sometime during the middle of the night, and Kith-Kanan felt profoundly grateful in the morning that she was gone. Now, in the cold light of day, the passion that had seized them seemed like nothing so much as a malicious and hurtful interlude. The flame that had once drawn them together ought not to be rekindled.

Kith-Kanan spent most of the day with his brother, touring the stables and farriers of the city. He forced himself to maintain focus on the task at hand: gathering additional horses to mount his cavalry forces for the time when the Wildrunners took to the offensive. They both knew that they would, they must, eventually attack the human army. They couldn’t simply wait out the siege.

During these hours together, Kith found that he couldn’t meet his brother’s eyes. Sithas remained cheerful and enthusiastic, friendly in a way that twisted Kith-Kanan’s gut. By midafternoon, he made an excuse to leave his twin’s company, pleading the need to give Arcuballis some exercise. In reality, he needed an escape, a chance to suffer his guilt in solitude. The following days in Silvanost passed slowly, making even the bleak confinement in besieged Sithelbec seem eventful by comparison. He avoided Hermathya, and he found to his relief that she seemed to be avoiding him as well. The few times he saw her she was with Sithas, playing the doting wife holding tightly to her husband’s arm and hanging upon his every word. In truth, the time dragged for Sithas as well. He knew that Vedvedsica was laboring to create a spell that might allow them to magically ensnare the griffons, but he was impatient to begin the quest. He ascribed Kith-Kanan’s unease to similar impatience. When they were together, they spoke only of the war and waited for a message from the mysterious cleric.

That word did not come for eight days, and then, oddly, it arrived in the middle of the night. The twins were wide awake, engaged in deep discussion in Sithas’s chambers, when they heard a rustling on the balcony beyond the open window. Sithas drew the draperies aside, and the sorcerous cleric stepped into the room.

Kith-Kanan’s eyes immediately fell upon Vedvedsica’s hand, for he carried a long ivory tube, the ends capped by cork. Several arcane sigils, in black, marked its alabaster surface.

The cleric raised the object, and the twins instinctively understood, even before Vedvedsica uncorked the end and withdrew a rolled sheet of oiled vellum. Unrolling the scroll, he showed them a series of symbols scribed in the Old Script.

“The spell of command,” the priest explained softly. “With this magic, I believe the griffons can be tamed.”

The twins planned to depart after one more day of final preparations. With the scroll at last a reality, a new urgency marked their activity. They met with Nirakina and Lord Quimant shortly after breakfast, a few hours after Vedvedsica had departed.

The four of them gathered in the royal library, where a fire crackled in the hearth to disperse the autumnal chill. Sithas brought the scroll, though he placed his cloak over it as he set it on the floor. They all sat in the great leatherbacked chairs that faced the fire.

“We have word of a discovery that may change the course of the war—for the better,” announced Kith.

“Splendid!” Quimant was enthusiastic. Nirakina merely looked at her sons, her concern showing in the furrowing of her brow.

“You know of Arcuballis, of course,” continued the warrior. “He was given to Sithel—to father—by a ‘merchant’ from the north.” According to the strategy he and Sithas had developed, they would say nothing about the involvement of the gray cleric. “We have since learned that the Khalkist Mountains are home to a great herd of the creatures—hundreds of them, at least.”

“Do you have proof of this, or is it merely rumor?” asked Nirakina. Her face had grown pale.

“They have been seen,” explained Kith-Kanan, glossing over the question. He told Quimant and Nirakina of his dream on the night before he departed Sithelbec. “Right down to the three volcanoes, it bears out everything we’ve been able to learn.”

“Think of the potential!” Sithas added. “A whole wing of flying cavalry! Why, the passage of Arcuballis alone sent hundreds of horses into a stampede. A sky full of griffons could very well rout the whole Army of Ergoth!”

“It seems a great leap,” Nirakina said slowly and quietly, “from the knowledge of griffons in a remote mountain range to a trained legion of flyers, obeying the commands of their riders.” She was still pale, but her voice was strong and steady.

“We believe we can find them,” Sithas replied levelly. “We leave at tomorrow’s sunrise to embark upon this quest.”

“How many warriors will you take?” asked Nirakina, knowing as they all did the legends of the distant Khalkists. Tales of ogres, dark and evil dwarves, even tribes of brutish hill giants—these comprised the folklore whispered by the average elf regarding the mountain range that was the central feature of the continent of Ansalon.

“Only the two of us will go.” Sithas faced his mother, who appeared terribly frail in her overly-large chair.

“We’ll ride Arcuballis,” Kith-Kanan explained quickly. “And he’ll cover the distance in a fraction of the time it would take an army—even if we had one to send.”

Nirakina looked at Kith-Kanan, her eyes pleading. Her warrior son understood the appeal. She wanted him to volunteer to go alone, leaving the Speaker of the Stars behind. Yet even as this thought flashed in her eyes, she lowered her head.

When she looked up, her voice was firm again. “How will you capture these creatures, assuming that you find them?”

Sithas removed his cloak and picked up the tube from the floor beside his chair. “We have acquired a spell of command from a friend of the House of Silvanos. If we can find the griffons, the spell will bind them to our will.”

“It is a more powerful version of the same enchantment that was used to domesticate Arcuballis,” added Kith. “It is written in the Old Script. That is one reason why Sithas must go with me—to help me cast the spell by reading the Old Script.”

His mother looked at him, nodding calmly, more out of shock than from any true sense of understanding.

Nirakina had stood beside her husband through three centuries of rule. She had borne these two proud sons. She had suffered the news of her husband’s murder at the hands of a human and lived through the resulting war that now engulfed her nation, her family, and her people. Now she faced the prospect of her two sons embarking on what seemed to her a mad quest, in search of a miracle, with little more than a prayer of success.