The Beauty of Darkness - Mary E. Pearson Page 0,17

How had the people in the square fared, and what did they think when I disappeared? A part of me was still there.

“Tell me more about your kingdom,” I said, trying to banish my worst thoughts from my head. “Let’s not waste one more word on vermin like Malich.”

Rafe stopped his horse again, then shot a warning glare over his shoulder at the others to keep their distance. His chest rose in a slow deep breath, and his pause made me sit higher in my saddle. “What is it?” I asked.

“When you were traveling across the Cam Lanteux … did any of them—did he hurt you?”

There it was. Finally.

I had wondered if it would ever come. Rafe had never asked me a single question about those months I was alone in the wilderness with my captors—what had happened, how I had lived, what they had done—and he’d avoided any mention of Kaden at all. It was as if a fire burned so brightly inside him, he couldn’t allow himself to get too close to it.

“Which he are you referring to?”

His gaze faltered. “Malich,” he answered. “That’s who we were talking about.”

No, not just Malich. Kaden always simmered beneath the surface. This was about him more than anyone else.

“My time crossing the Cam Lanteux was hard, Rafe. Most of the time I was hungry. All of the time I was afraid. But no one touched me. Not in the way you’re thinking. You could have asked me long ago.”

His jaw twitched. “I was waiting for you to bring it up. I wasn’t sure if it was too painful for you to talk about. All I had wanted was for you to survive so we could be together again.”

I grinned and kicked his boot with my own. “And we are together.”

* * *

At night, when we could find shelter that afforded some measure of comfort, I read aloud from the Last Testaments of Gaudrel. They all listened with fascination.

“It appears that Gaudrel was a vagabond,” Rafe said.

“But with no colorful wagon,” Jeb added.

“And none of those tasty sage cakes,” Orrin mused.

“It was soon after the devastation,” I told them. “She and the others were survivors just trying to find their way. I think Gaudrel may have been a witness and one of the original Ancients.”

“It’s not much like Dalbreck history,” Sven said.

I realized I was largely ignorant of Dalbreck history. Since it was a kingdom that had sprung from Morrighan many centuries after it was established, I had assumed their view of history was the same as ours. It wasn’t. While they acknowledged that Breck was an exiled prince of Morrighan, their account of the devastation and its aftermath was different, apparently melding with the stories of nomadic tribes who gave the fleeing prince safe passage to the mesa lands of the south.

It seemed I had stumbled upon yet another history that conflicted with the Holy Text of Morrighan. Dalbreck’s account, at least as Sven told it, had a precise number to the Remnant—exactly one thousand chosen survivors. They spread to the four corners of the earth, but the strongest and most courageous headed south to what would one day become Dalbreck. Breck rallied them and laid the first stone of a kingdom that would become greater than all the others. From there it was all about heroes and battles and the growing might of a new kingdom favored by the gods.

The only things all of the histories did have in common was a surviving Remnant and a storm. A storm of epic proportions that laid waste to the land.

“I had warned Venda not to wander too far from the tribe,” I read aloud from Gaudrel’s testament. “A hundred times, I had warned her. I was more her mother than her sister. She came years after the storm. She never felt the ground shake. Never saw the sun turn red. Never saw the sky go black. Never saw fire burst on the horizon and choke the air.”

I read a few more passages, then closed the book for the night, but the descriptions of the storm lingered, and I turned Gaudrel’s account over silently in my mind. Where was the truth? The ground shook, and fire burst on the horizon. That was a truth Gaudrel had actually witnessed.

And that was what I had seen too.

When the Komizar showed me his army city, fire burst forth as the brezalots exploded, the ground shook, and the testing fields stained the sky with copper smoke, choking