Authors: S. E. Zbasnik,Sabrina Zbasnik
Ciara glanced over at "her prince" stirring the logs with an expert precision, his eyes focused as he dropped various bits of forest droppings in, trying to calculate what would give off the best heat. She sighed and dropped onto the cleared ground beside Taban. He'd been the only one wise enough to carry a rug. A smart investment to keep ones backside out of the snow.
Still rubbing his nose like a witch apprentice, Kynton said, "If she does kill me, it would be quite a way to go."
Ciara's eyes briefly met Taban's, and he rolled them back. Bravado was the vice of a man who wouldn't see his thirtieth year. This strange desire of his to poke the pale bear was new to the assassin who'd seen much of the world but little of the people in it.
For Ciara; however, it was almost old hat. One of the Knights of Albrant, a small man with eyebrows like caterpillars would always run up behind the maids working the fires and pinch them. A woman holding a flaming poker was certain to do one thing to a man that just invaded her personal space. It was hopeful he'd learn his lesson after the first or second burn near his vitals, but after the sixth Ciara's mother began to catch on and had the stable boys working the fires from then on out.
She tried to ask her mother why he kept it up, but Bralda would only tell her to "mind her peas and cues" from the nobles. But behind a poorly soundproof screen her mother giggled with her husband about the knight who enjoyed pain, as did the more elder of the serving staff for months after. Perhaps it was best to leave Aldrin in charge of the fires as long as Kynton was around. Even if he was dangling a scrap of his own shirt over it at the moment, watching the flames rise.
Ciara shook her head to clear her thoughts, and Taban looked over at the priest picking through his pack. "Why not go see if she'll finish you off now, so we can save on supplies?"
Kynton rose slowly, a small nibble of bread still clinging to his hand. The man had the appetite of the teenager and the stomach capacity of a bull elephant. His eyes trailed over the assassin who carefully laid every single one of his elements of destruction in front and within quick reach. The priest swallowed down his bread and any hint of anger that bubbled beneath him. A half a lifetime of repressing all emotion lest a superior go ape and actually show how to properly use a scalpel on your own leg trained him well when danger was evident. Kynton shrugged under the lion's gaze and said nonchalantly, "Why not?"
Spinning upon his freshly traded leather shoes, he marched after Isa, following her measured and tiny snow prints. For a moment, he wondered if it was wise to leave the dark girl in the company of the killer, but they seemed to get on best. Birds of a feather and all that.
As Kynton disappeared into the distance, his voice calling a "Coo-eee!" across the hills, Taban's blade cut through his excess bowstring. "The snow men are crazier than I feared, and twice as touched."
Ciara knew commiserating with a like when she saw it, she just never had the luxury of joining in. "My mother is one of those 'snow men,'" she said dangerously.
"And a brilliant and rare jewel of one she must be to choose an Adherent," Taban recovered effortlessly.
"You make them sound so noble," she muttered back, not wanting to think about her father.
"Noble..." Taban looked over at the princeling he'd been tasked with keeping in enough pieces he'd still be considered alive, "No. I have seen what passes for noble in this land, we approach nothing close to that."
"I can hear you, you know," Aldrin called back, even with his backed turned to them.
"And we know the decency of when to over power a conversation and when to hold our tongue," Taban volleyed. He preferred to think of the baby Ostero King as weak. It was what the child was supposed to be, and any evidence to the contrary displeased him.
Aldrin mumbled something inaudible and returned to his fire, but Taban still lowered his voice as he spoke to Ciara, "Adherents stand for the will of the Triad."
"And beating helpless prisoners within an inch of their life is part of the 'will of the Triad?'"
Taban's honeyed voice grew cold, which caused a stiffening of Aldrin's back as he continued to drop eaves, "You saw the man yourself. Pain was the only source that could break the religious fog he swaddled himself in."
Ciara rolled her fingers and jumped into the question that'd been eating her up, "So you waste your time beating mad prisoners instead of rescuing good men burning to death?"
"I am not paid to risk my life for landless clerics."
This was the wrong flippant response to a girl whose still raw nerves plucked every time her mind drifted back. Anger that festered like an old wound finally burst.
"You cower like a child while a better man goes to his death trying," tears stung her eyes but she didn't notice.
"If he were a better man he wouldn't have died."
Ciara's hand flew across the assassin's hard jaw, crooked inward from an old mistake, before she realized it. Her shoulders shook as she raised her hand, stinging from the slap, and looked at the red welt matched by another rising upon the dark flesh.
Taban for his part, made no movement towards any of his weapons, his hands laying across his knees. He looked into the hot glare of the girl, and felt the cold one of the boy king upon his neck. Picking words as if he were dressing for battle, he said, "Contrary to the rabble of fishwives, my skin is no more fireproof than the snow men. As you well know. I'd have died as surely as your 'Historian.'"
"But you didn't even try," the cry was strangled and helpless, as if she were asking it of a neglectful god and not the mortal man before her.
"No," his eyes broke from hers, unable to watch her cry, "I did not. The mission must take precedence always, often before many lives. We are gifted only one chance at this world. To toss it away on frivolity and emotion is an affront to the breath of God."
Slowly, the assassin's hand rose from his knee and he held it out towards her still smarting one. She let him turn her palm up so he could look at the throbbing skin. "Tsk," Taban said, lightly scooping a bit of snow up and placing it in the open palm, "that was quite the slap. I must say you have the spirits within."
"Call me sassy and I'll slap you again," Ciara warned, but almost on reflex, as if it were a response she issued often.
Taban laughed at that as he closed her fist around the snow before scooping up some to hold to his own face, "The spirits are our...there is no proper term. Ancestors, our first ones, the beginning of us? They embody the forces of humanity. It is...an acolyte would explain better."
She looked at her closed fist, beginning to freeze around the snow and asked in her still broken voice, "Is there nothing you'd gamble your life for?" Ciara, after losing so many father figures to war, tactics, and fire, needed to find a sliver of hope in perhaps the most despicable man she'd ever trusted her life with.
The assassin smiled sadly, his entire face softening as if the hard years melted away, "There is. Three in fact."
"Your precious Triad," she mumbled.
"No," Taban shook his head at misty memories that drove him on. A pair of small faces clinging to a beautiful woman in lands he wished he were in every moment of his days. His brown eyes rolled up to the girl as she dropped the melting snow, "You are correct. Some things are worth dying for."
A flock of birds burst forth from the trees, screeching for freedom away from whatever monsters invaded their home. Ciara stared at the ruckus as the priest burst from the treeline followed quickly by a very angry witch, a thick branch in her hands. Taban snorted at the scene but lapsed back into his traditional silence, his words already scraping at the edges from such unexpected overuse.
Ciara watched as Kynton failed to take into account his much more ragged robes, as the dangling edges caught under his boots and rolled him ass over end through the slowly melting snow. Isa paused, her branch poking into the priest's backside. A small gurgle answered back.
"He's still alive," she shouted to the others as if it were a warning.
Turning from the scene, Ciara walked over towards the slowly rising fire and the boy king hunched over it. The Historians had offered him a fresh change of clothes for his lone ride but Aldrin waved it off, favoring that itchy formless brown tunic they'd traded for a lifetime ago. He rose and wiped his hands across his far too thin breeches, leaving black hand prints behind.
"The warmth will be nice," Ciara said softly.
Aldrin looked over at her, then quickly to the fire. No words had been exchanged beyond small instructions of when to leave, what to take while leaving, and why they were about to leave Kynton if he didn't stop braiding daisy chains. Aldrin was afraid any of his words would draw her back to the night.
"It'll give away our position," the prince mumbled to himself.
"Oh, I am certain our witch and priest have done a spectacular job of that already," she responded, gesturing to the pair having a gallant row about Grace, of the gods. Kynton insisted that any soul could be saved if a person only put his faith in Grace. Isa called her the concubine of the fat men sitting on a cloud in the sky.
"We'll know we're in actual trouble when someone brings up noodles," Aldrin said, trying to hide his shudder.
For the first time since the fires Ciara smiled, a tiny one, and a ping shot through Aldrin's heart. He'd been uncertain what to say to her, if there was anything he could say, to cut through the cloud of grief hanging over her silent head as they trudged deeper into the Ostero lands. So he favored the least form of possible action and said nothing, only making the occasional note of how someone needed to really repair the roads, and in a few cases actually finish one after Kynton, in his own mental fog, followed a forgotten path straight into a tree.
"I...how are you, um, holding up?" he asked, finally dipping a toe into the mass of swirling emotions between the two.
"Why?" Ciara asked, afraid to let anyone through her shield.
But Aldrin had no use for bravado, he barely had any idea what it meant (it was a kind of pungent cheese, right?), and rubbed his still smoky eyes, saying, "Because I'm a fornicating mess."
The boy sagged to the empty ground, his gaunt hindquarters landing in a patch of mud. Ciara's armor wavered dangerously as she watched the young man pull his knees up to his chest and hug them tight. His suddenly over extended and lean legs. When did he get almost as tall as her?
She lowered beside him, sitting on her hip, with one hand on the cold ground. Her finger picked at the snow still hiding amongst the dead weeds and said, "Spent too much time with Ch...with the brothers?"
Aldrin's watery eyes broke free of his kneecaps as he traced back over what he said and grinned, "They're...they were an unforgettable influence."
"Yeah," Ciara looked deep into the fire, "they were."
A silence fell, one of many, as they both mourned the man who took a chance on both of them. Only their actions here on out would determine if it paid off. Aldrin dropped his knees and extended them out, his eyes watching his feet as they knocked into each other.
"And I'm...I'm sorry if I, if I pressed my advantage that night." He'd tried to forget many things from the night of flames; the smoky visage of Pajamas watching his home burn to cinders, the charred face of a man who'd been the warmest guiding hand he'd ever known, the sight of Ciara sobbing as if the entire word turned its back on her when she thought she was alone. But their one foolish moment of hormones...well maybe some pleasure could be found in pain.
Her eyes didn't break from her fingers as they still picked around the grass, but a very small flush broke her cheeks that Aldrin tried to ignore. "A great many things happened that night. Things I would give years of my life to take back," she said to the grass, "but that wasn't one of them."
A wry smile wandered across her face as she thought back over the screaming, over the smoke and flames, to a boy and a sunset. When her world crumbled into ash, it was a small comfort to think there might be another in the world to hold her hand. Her eyes turned from the grass just as she got the blush under control.
"But..." she began, breaking the fairytale.
Aldrin nodded with her, "But we still have a sword to find, and an army to find, and an Empire to stop."
"Yeah," she agreed.
And you're still a prince of Ostero
, Ciara thought, while she was a homeless sandworm.
The prince ruffled through his splitting pockets and extracted the cookbook, stuffed with a handful of maps. He'd been checking it regularly, as if the lands could shift uncontrollably under him at any moment. The assassin would eye him up every time the book appeared but say nothing, which Aldrin appreciated. As Kynton kept unhelpfully pointing out, this was the prince's backyard. How could he possibly get lost in it?
But an iota of fear gripped his intestinal tract that there was a growing chance they weren't headed in the correct direction. Admitting it however...
Ciara inched towards him and looked down at the book splayed across his lap. "Are there any landmarks it points to?" She noticed the uncertainty rising off the prince whenever anyone asked if they should turn left or right, but didn't want to shatter his slowly rising self-esteem.
"None that are familiar. There is talk of a 'really good fish shoppe that my Nell got the boiled squid from and I ordered the chips though they were a bit soggy.' But the rest is quick pen scratches of rocks, trees, and I believe a small man in a top hat with a cane." Aldrin twisted the most ancient of the maps around, designed by Cartographer the Third, who was actually a bloody awful mapmaker, but he didn't have much choice given his name. Parent's had a terrible habit of shoehorning their children into careers. No one's gonna have their horse shoed by a 15 stone man named 'Matchstick Girl.'