Ellas - A dozen years ago
Kane
‘Kane. Kane!’
Anna’s voice, faint and distant, hardly reached through the pounding of blood in my ears. My one hand was clenched in a fist, my fingers straining to breaking.
The other held a knife, a black, wickedly sharp, and deadly knife; it had formed in my hand at the instant my anger surged. Normally, I had control over such things – I had to will my knives to come to me. But not with anger such as this; now, I had almost no control.
‘Kane! Look at me!’ Anna commanded, as she placed her hand on mine, on my knife hand.
As I slowly I turned to Anna, fury contorting my face, I saw the bewildered and astonished look on her face, and something else, something she had never shown before – fear. It was plain there on her face, and in her eyes.
‘What is it? What is wrong?’ Her voice, too, held that same fear.
I turned back from her and let my gaze fall on the girl before me, the girl who had backed away until she almost overturned the kettle, the girl who’s face showed no fear, the girl who held a knife in each hand.
Slowly, I took her in from head to toe.
That she was the woman Carthia there was no doubt. But she was a young girl, the girl that her brother, Joram, loved so very dearly; the sister that he had taken grave hurt to find, the sister that I had promised to find.
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Could this girl, this young yet obviously fearless girl, do as the woman, Carthia, the woman that she would become, had done to me.
As I watched her, my thoughts of such a short while ago came back to me – It has not happened yet. I can be there… I can stop her. And with those thought a calmness came upon me, pushing away the anger and rage as if it had never been. Anna’s doing, a small part of me said. But where the calm came from was of no real importance – what mattered was that I was rational, and could think again.
‘Let the knife go, Kane,’ Anna said, gently. ‘You too, Carthia. Put your knives away. The danger is past… whatever its cause.’
My knife faded to mist at my bidding. They would at times of extreme urgency, come to me before I consciously knew that they were needed, as they had today. But until dismissed, they would remain.
The girl gasped as the knife vanished, and stepped back bumping into the bubbling kettle and upended it over the cook fire. A cloud of steam and ash boiled up into the air just as the girl stumbled, falling backward toward the boiling mass of fire and soup.
I grasped her hand and pulled her upright, and for an instant our eyes locked.
It was only seconds, and yet in those few seconds I saw what I had seen so very long ago; the eyes of an honest and goodly person – the very look I had seen in Carthia’s eyes mere moments before she sent me back, mere moments before she commanded their death.
And as I looked into those eyes, my mind lived again those final fateful moments from so very long ago – The woman Carthia as she spoke the words, ‘All is not as it seems.’ The wave of anger that flooded the air from the Watcher; the horse, the war horse almost flinging the man to the floor, the horse that was my horse, Bright, and the man, Tomas, the frightened young man that had only moments earlier taken Bright from me.
The revelation came to me then. In an instant all the pieces fell into place.
Tears filled my eyes. ‘They did not die,’ I whispered, and then louder, ‘They live.’ And as I almost crushed the girl in an embrace, I said loud enough for the whole world to hear, ‘You did not kill them! It was all an act… just an act.’