Blade Archer ~ Thirty-Two

[annarti.livejournal.com]

Before his crossed legs on his rooftop lay his dagger, a copper coin, a mug and a fork. The mug and the fork had been gifts from Ronanen when he had first moved in, and he hadn’t had the heart to tell her he didn’t plan on cooking anything himself. The dagger and the coin were both his own.

In his hands he held four scraps of parchment, each with a single word printed on it in Ronanen’s precise hand. Ronanen had been teaching him to read for a week now, so he should be able to match each of them up. The top strip of paper was still little more than a tangle of scribbles. They were familiar scribbles now, but he hadn’t yet memorised them well enough to hear them as sounds and words in his head.

‘You know it has to be one of those four things,’ Ronanen gently pushed him.

Kael shrugged. ‘Coin?’ he guessed, looking up hopefully at her.

Ronanen shook her head with a patient smile. ‘Now you’re just guessing. Here.’ She reached across his arm and held her fingers over all but the first letter. Her palm was warm against his knuckles. ‘Do you remember what this one sounds like?’

Kael glared at the letter. Raykinian letters all looked something like how the mouth looked when forming them, Ronanen had explained. This one was two curves, one at the top bulging down, the other at the bottom bulging up, and they crossed in the middle. He pressed his lips together like the two curves and hummed the ‘M’ sound he hoped the letter represented.

‘That’s the one,’ Ronanen replied with a grin in her voice. She took her finger from the other letters but kept her hand over Kael’s. ‘And the rest?’

‘Well, it has to be the mug, right?’

Ronanen nodded. ‘But I want to hear you say it.’

Kael took a breath and tried not to let it out as a frustrated sigh, then returned to twisting his tongue to form the shapes on the paper in his fingers. Finally, he had all the pieces matched up with their objects.

‘You’re progressing. It just takes patience.’ Ronanen grinned. ‘Which is something you lack, sometimes.’

Kael shrugged. ‘Helps to have the right teacher,’ he reminded her.

Ronanen smiled and kissed him briefly. ‘Why doesn’t the army teach you to read? They took you on knowing you couldn’t, right?’

‘Beats me. Not worth their time? Guess their reckoning is that if ye’re signing up for something what ye knows has reading, ye’re expected to find out a bit of that yerself.’ He shrugged again. ‘Teaching us to be warriors, not scholars. Why should a warrior have to read, anyway?’

‘Maps,’ Ronanen argued sensibly. ‘Your general’s orders. Peace offerings from your opposite party.’

Kael shook his head. ‘I ain’t got no plans of going that high. Only the generals that do any of that stuff anyway. The rest of us just follow.’

She shuffled to kneel behind him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. ‘What about reading menus at fancy restaurants?’ she teased. ‘Or all the names of different beers in pubs, or the different grades of silk and spices at the markets?’ Her hair fell against his face as she rested her chin on his head.

Kael chuckled and reached a hand up to stroke her hair. ‘Maybe,’ he admitted coyly. ‘If I get in a high enough Company that I’ll be buying that sort of thing.’

‘Of course you will.’ She kissed him again on the neck.

The sun had set behind the palace, changing the red stone cliffs from gold to grey.

‘About time to be getting ye home,’ Kael pointed out.

Ronanen laughed and squeezed him tighter. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ she whispered. ‘I asked Papa if I might stay the night. Here, with you.’

Kael’s spine shivered. ‘He said yes?’

Ronanen giggled, her head rubbing against his in a nod. ‘Mhmm. Obviously nothing, well, nothing untoward, but I trust you.’

‘Yeah. Yeah, of course.’ He turned and caught her face in one hand to bring her towards him. ‘Completely trustworthy,’ he murmured against her lips. She smelled of exotic perfumes, warm and spicy, and he could feel the flutter of her heartbeat under his fingertips where he rested them lightly against her neck. He kissed her tenderly, allowing her to set the pace of their private evening.

He knew when she said she trusted him, she meant more than that. She had convinced her father of the same and, whether willingly or not, he had given Kael this chance. He wouldn’t dare do anything to break it. Besides, he thought as his eyes drank in Ronanen’s shy but slightly cheeky smile, he could never hurt her. He would never lose her trust.

It wasn’t until they were curled together under his blankets in the back room, her back rising and falling under his arm as she slept, that he realised he might be doing just that. How long had he been lying now about his family’s death? He’d never told Ronanen how his mother had died. She still believed Elara was alive. He did it to protect her, he’d thought, as though keeping her innocent would keep the killers from coming after her.

He curled her hair back from her face and lightly kissed her ear as he shifted uncomfortably. He’d tell her tomorrow, he resolved. If this year was going to go as he planned, he had to start with the truth.

It was still dark when he awoke. The fogginess in his mind and the itchiness in his eyes told him it was still far too early to be waking up for the day, but awake he was. Ronanen shook beside him. She was cold, he thought, and pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, but then he heard a muffled sob and a sniff.

‘Rona?’ he croaked, propping himself up on one elbow to try and see her in the darkness. ‘What’s wrong?’

She choked on a sob, and he could feel her curl away from him. He lay down again beside her, pressing his chest against her back and hugging an arm around her waist.

‘Rona, what’s wrong? Where d’ye hurt?’

She shook her head and cried more audibly. ‘Your family,’ she managed to squeak out. ‘They hate me.’

Kael’s eyebrows shot up as he started at this admission. ‘No!’ he told her. ‘Course they don’t. They love ye. Mama did especially, she was always saying how ye was the best thing’s happened to me. Where’d ye get the idea they hates ye?’ Even as he asked, he knew the answer.

‘Then why haven’t you taken me to…?’ Ronanen’s voice broke into unintelligible weeping as she buried her face into the blanket.

Kael could only pull her closer in comfort as his mind raced. Now was probably not a good time for the truth, he quickly realised, but what other fabrication would make sense but for the one Ronanen had already created?

‘It’s true, isn’t it?’ she pushed.

‘No. Look, Rona…’ He trailed off, sighed and rested his head briefly against his shoulder before he drew himself up. ‘I ain’t been totally honest with ye. And it’s not because of me family not trusting ye or anything.’

He heard her shift as she rolled to face him, and her sobbing ceased at this new information. ‘What is it?’ she asked, her voice still tight.

‘It’s not… I dunno. I guess pretending to you kind of meant I were pretending to meself, too.’ He sighed again, tying his fingers in knots in the blanket as he tried to word what he knew he needed to say. ‘Remember the night when we was mugged, and the guy got away? Well, he weren’t just trying to mug us. That was the same night Ma died, and, well, when Ma died, she didn’t just… die. She was killed.’

‘What?’

‘And so was Elara and her husband. And Ynuk’s wife, too, all on the same night.’

In the darkness, Ronanen was silent with shock.

Kael swallowed, and some detached part of his mind was amazed to observe that his eyes hadn’t started prickling with old hurt. Had he gotten over it that quickly, or had he just numbed himself to it all now? When he spoke again, his croaky voice seemed like a whip crack in the blackness. ‘Ynuk was chasing after them what killed Pa, and he got close enough to ‘em that they figured they should hurt ‘im. Bad.’

There was a brief moment of silence before the blanket rustled with Ronanen’s movement and she threw herself at him. Her arms clung to him more tightly than she ever had done before. Her hands were cold and shaking against his back.

‘I should’ve told ye,’ he admitted heavily as he stroked her hair.

Ronanen shook her head, apparently still unable to talk or even to cry.

‘Whatever Ynuk’s got himself wrapped up in, I don’t want nothing to do with it, nor him, neither. I seen what they did. They’re not doing it to my Rona. Promise.’

The healer nodded, and then Kael could feel her tears begin to fall.

~ ~ ~

I have a chapter by chapter outline sorted for the rest, woo! My aim is to do the rest of this story back in NaNo mode, giving me a deadline of June 3. I did have this chapter done last night but then the internet died when I was going to post it, so count this one for yesterday.