A quiet night; a dying light

A Sword to save, to heal, to fight.

It was a warm night. The interior of the infirmary was uncomfortably stuffy, smelling pungently of herbs and bitter tinctures, and bodies quietly sweating upon starched sheets. One wall was lined with tall, white-painted windows, all of them standing wide open, yet no breeze stole in to stir the linen drapes hanging beside them in limp, listless folds. Oil lamps burned here and there at bedsides, creating pools of dreary brightness and yet greater warmth blooming in the gloominess of the long hall, gleaming on the scrubbed wooden floor and blue-grey stone of the walls, illuminating the long white beams of the ceiling.

There were only about five or six other patients currently residing in the ward, though the large room could accommodate thirty. As it was, the infirmary’s newest arrival had one entire end of the ward to herself.

This suited Ben just fine. He had turned the lamp beside Lady Araynia’s bed down low, the dim light casting shadows and flickering light over the young noblewoman’s eerily prone and swaddled form. Ben, restless with anxiety, felt a compulsive urge to keep checking that she was still alive: so slight was the breath from her pale lips and the thump of her struggling heart.

Just hold on a little longer, the boy begged silently.

The ward was very quiet, the other patients either sleeping or resting peacefully without any noise. The only sounds came from flies buzzing around the lamps, moths fluttering their small soft bodies against the wooden screens, and distant activity from the still-awake town. The nurses had completed their evening rounds, only checking in occasionally, and always from the far end of the room.

None had approached Araynia or Ben for some time now; Ben had the distinct impression that they didn’t feel inclined to offer her any more assistance, and were simply waiting for her to die so that they could clean up the bed.

Ben took off his red bandanna and wiped his face with it. His heart was thundering with anticipation. If he and Everine’s plan didn’t work, the noblewoman was certainly not going to survive, perhaps not even until morning.

Re-tying his bandanna, Ben waited with growing impatience.

A few long minutes later, he heard the sound of someone entering the foyer behind him; hard heels rang on the stone floor, followed by a knocking sound. The door to the ward was propped slightly ajar to let in whatever fresh air could be found. Straightening in his chair, Ben half-turned, listening attentively.

His sister’s familiar voice, overly cheerful in the circumstances, floated into the ward. A door opened, and a man’s voice responded. There followed a few more minutes of conversation between Everine and the guard in the room beyond. Ben sat stock still in his chair, muscles tense. Then, finally the voices starting moving, along with more footsteps in the foyer; they began to fade into the distance. As soon as Ben judged them to be far enough away, he moved.

Peering around the screen enclosing Lady Araynia’s bed, the boy searched the ward.

There was no sign of any nurses. No one moved. A patient at the furthest end let out a hacking cough.

Ben moved quickly. In a few silent seconds he was through the door and across the foyer. The main door to the infirmary stood wide open to the street beyond, as did the two windows. The foyer itself was well lit with wall-mounted lamps, the waiting area lined with worn wooden benches and pots of fresh lavender.

The room was empty besides himself.

Moving to one side of a window, Ben looked carefully out. Everine and the guard were over near the fountain, the one with the elegant marble statue of Lady Fate. His sister appeared to be back to her usual charming self – curled blonde hair carefully arranged, eyes and lips enhanced attractively. She wore a pretty dress now, with a voluptuous swishing skirt of crimson and green, though not much of it could be seen in her current strategic pose, perched on the rim of the pool – she may as well have been wearing nothing with all the leg visible.

The guard – a young man barely five years older than Ben – had his sleeves rolled up and was leaning over the lily pads, fishing for something in the dark water. His back was turned to the infirmary. As Ben watched, Everine said something, then pointed further in, near the base of the statue. The guard drew his sword, climbed onto the rim of the pond, then started poking in the weeds with his blade.

Careful, Everine, Ben thought, rolling his eyes. All he needed was the man to fall in and return to the building for a change of clothes!

Wasting no more time, the boy moved to the guardroom door. Unfortunately, the guard had the presence of mind to lock it behind him, but Ben was prepared. From a pocket he removed the improvised lockpicking tools that Flint had made for him. They were a bit crude, but worked: he had practised with Mekka well enough to have the task done in short order. Slipping into the room, he closed the door quietly behind him.

The guardroom was tiny, little more than a storage closet with a desk in the centre. Wooden shelves and cupboards lined the room, filled with buckets, mops, spare oil lamps and other mundane equipment. But the large chest at the back of the room caught Ben’s attention.

He set to work on it.

This lock was considerably more advanced than the one on the door, as most safe-boxes were. It was going to take longer for him to break into. He’d barely gotten started, however, when there came a sudden loud splash from outside, along with a woman’s shriek.

Startled, Ben fumbled a pick, dropping it to the floor.

Dammit, Everine!

Scrambling to reposition his tools, heart pounding, Ben tried to focus, to remember Mekka’s training, to block out the increasingly alarming sounds from outside. He could hear voices growing nearer, especially Everine’s, apologising profusely in her best fawning voice.

But the guard wasn’t stopping.

They entered the foyer, Everine still babbling, doing her best to distract the guard.

Ben concentrated. His fingers were slick with sweat, making it hard to keep his grip…

A key turned in the lock, and the door handle rattled. There was a muffled sound of surprise as the guard accidentally locked a door he thought secured. Abandoning the chest, Ben jumped up, flattening himself against the opposite wall just as the door flung open, hiding the boy from sight.

The guard opened a cupboard and rummaged around, probably searching for a towel. Ben, hardly daring to breathe in the darkness behind the door, heard the man’s voice muffled by thick cloth: “Look, miss, you’ll have to find someone else to fetch your precious damned ring! Can’t see anything in that pond in the dark!

“Or better yet,” he added, “consider it an offering to the Lady! Bound to get some good luck out of it, eh?”

“But it’s a family heirloom!” Everine, still out in the foyer, wailed. “Have you any idea how much it’s worth? I didn’t steal it from my mother’s dying, shrivelled finger just to have some bitch statue steal it ba-- ohhhhh…” There was a dramatic sigh, followed by a heavy thump on the floor.

With a gasp, the guard rushed out of the room.

Ben, risking a glance, sidled out from his hiding place as quietly as possible, and peered carefully into the foyer. The dripping guard was trying to rouse Everine, who had collapsed spectacularly onto the stone floor, her colourful dress sprawled out around her like a blooming flower.

Ben ducked quickly out of sight as the guard looked around desperately, shouting for help. When no one answered, he got up and opened the door to the ward, yelling for the nurses.

There was no immediate response. The guard started back towards Everine, seemed undecided, then rushed away into the ward, crying out once more for assistance.

As soon as he was out of sight, Everine opened first one eye, then the other, then picked herself up promptly from the floor. Glancing through the open door of the ward, she gestured to her brother that it was safe to move.

Quickly, Ben ran across the short space of the foyer, exchanging no words with his sister, only a meaningful look – then he was back inside the ward, slipping into the chair by Araynia’s bedside.

His heart was frantic now not with fear, but exultation.

Slowly, he brought the Sword around from behind his back.

Ben had seen a Sword like this one before, of course: the Sword belonging to Ferrian. His sorcerer friend had even allowed him to touch it, once. But the one he held now was… different, somehow. He’d watched Araynia carry it all through the forest from the castle. But up close, holding it in his own hands, it was… mesmerising. The blade gleamed too brightly in the wan lamplight, with an almost white glow. Twin snakes, black and white, curled up from the base of the blade, just as on Ferrian’s Sword, but otherwise the hilt was completely different. Embedded in place of a sinister black dagger were several exquisite sapphires, deep and blue as a summer sky.

Ben stared at it in awe.

The history of this Sword, the tragedy of its original owner and indeed, its current one, washed over Ben in an overwhelming wave.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

How, Ben thought, could such a beautiful and benevolent thing be tied so inextricably to such despair and horror? How could Lord Requar have utterly failed to realise the potential of the power he carried for so long? How could such a godly thing be owned by someone so twisted, and… wrong?

If the Sword of Healing were mine, Ben thought wonderingly, I would save everyone in the world with it. Everyone. One by one…

Hurried footsteps from the far end of the ward broke the trance. Hastily, Ben shoved the magnificent Sword under the bedcovers, just as the guard and three nurses rushed past. None of them spared a glance at him: all began fussing over Everine in the foyer.

Letting out a breath, Ben retrieved one more object from his pocket: a large sapphire, identical to those in the hilt of the Sword, attached to a fine, silver chain.

As gently as he could, Ben leaned over Araynia and fastened the pendant around her neck, tucking it into her gown and hiding it as best he could with her long hair. That done, he repositioned the Sword of Healing so that it lay upon her body lengthwise, the hilt resting upon her chest. Taking her injured hands, he placed them carefully upon it. Then he drew a blanket over her, covering the Sword away, tucking the covers in tightly around her.

Then he slumped back in his chair, letting out another breath of relief.

It was done.

He had delivered to Lady Araynia the means to save herself.

The rest was up to her.

And perhaps, he thought rather ruefully, considering Everine’s earlier comment, that statue of Lady Fate in the courtyard…

She felt as though she were drowning. Drowning, and burning alive at the same time. Immersed in white light so piercing it shredded skin, bones, soul, mind alike, while crushing her fragile body with a pressure that held her lungs in a cruel grip. She could neither think nor cry nor scream; there was only the pain, so huge it was like a living thing; pain, and the all-consuming, agonising, scorching white glare.

She was dying; she wanted to die, but it would not end. Her skin boiled, her hair burned away, her bones blackened and snapped, her organs ruptured and caught aflame in gory succession. The light devoured her, every piece of her being, yet would not let her go.

This was eternity. She had fallen into the heart of the sun, the centre of existence itself, where nothing could exist, least of all her. She suffered, and could not die, and the suffering was so great that it ceased any longer to have meaning.

But something did change, eventually. Nothing was truly eternal. Perhaps aeons of the world had passed unseen before it did, but the change did come: a gradually perceptible easing of the light.

Slowly it faded… so slowly, and with it the pain.

At some point, the light was almost all gone, save for a few hazy spears of it rippling around her. She floated now in water of deepest blue.

But by then, she was nothing.

She was a shell, a wasted thing, unmade and abandoned. Tatters of clothing and a few remaining strands of black hair drifted around a skeletal, charred frame. Whatever was left of her was drowning still, but she no longer cared. Gently, reverently, she sank towards the dark depths.

From the coruscating light above, a hand plunged into the water. Pale, elegant and long-fingered, it took hold of the girl’s blackened arm in a firm grip.

Then it pulled her towards the surface.

Araynia opened her eyes to find herself floating still – not underneath the water, but on top of it, staring up at wavy light patterns that reminded her of the sun reflecting off moving water. The patterns had a strange, unnatural depth to them, layered one upon another like mesmerising, twisting lace until they faded into sapphire blue infinity.

Slowly, she sat up. As she did so, the water beneath her coalesced into a flat, mirrored surface. She was here again: the familiar, soothing blue place. But she didn’t know why.

She couldn’t remember anything.

Looking around, she found she was not alone. Lord Requar sat beside her, watching.

Something about the sight of him scared her, though she couldn’t say what caused such a feeling. She knew who he was, she knew her own name, she had a feeling she knew what this place was… but nothing else. Memories lurked on the edge of her consciousness, and with them something dark, something known and yet unknown, deep and dangerous like the bottom of a lake…

No. The handsome man beside her spoke softly. Reaching out, he put a hand on her shoulder. You must not try to remember. You must rest.

Araynia frowned in confusion. But, she protested, I feel as though I have been asleep a long time. I feel as though I should know –

Rest! Gently but insistently, Requar pushed the girl until she lay back down on the floor. You have been gravely injured, he offered as some explanation. You must heal.

But…

Do not think. Heal.

His expression allowed no argument. But for all his frightening inscrutability, there was real concern on his face. Giving in with a sigh, deciding that there would be time enough for truth later, she tried to relax, lifting her gaze once more to the silent glimmers of light above her.

Heal.

“You can’t be serious?!” Ben exclaimed in shocked disbelief. He was sitting now at a table in a large, upstairs private room of The White Horse tavern, which had been given over to the Freeroamers for the duration of their stay in Meadrun as temporary headquarters. Lieutenant-Commander Raemint stood across the table from the boy, having just explained to him, with a solemn face, an audacious plan of her own that she and Sergeant Flint had been discussing while Ben and his sister were busy in the infirmary.

The Centaur’s tail flicked at a fly buzzing around her, and her head inclined as though offended. “My clan,” she declared proudly, “does not indulge in the peculiar Human habit of stating something that they do not believe, merely for the sake of amusement.”

“She means you better believe it, kid,” Flint commented from across the room. He was slouched in a chair beside one of the windows. A small side table had been pulled into position underneath the sill; on it, and indeed overshadowing it by some margin, was Flint’s huge, gleaming Eliminator crossbow; on top of that perched his hat. Flint’s leg was stretched out, his booted foot resting on one remaining corner of the table. He was carefully rolling some sort of herbaceous substance into a scrap of paper. Fishing a match tin from his pocket, he removed one with his free hand and struck it alight on the sole of his boot.

Ben frowned at him. “Since when do you smoke?”

Flint drew in a breath and puffed out an acrid cloud. “Since I watched me best mate turn into a demon-wraith over a pint,” he replied poignantly. He shook his head. “Can’t look into another ale without seein’ poor ol’ Grim’s face floatin’ in it, grinnin’ up at me.” He wiped his nose with the hand holding his cigarette.

“So that’s why you were–” Ben started coughing as the cloud of smoke wafted towards him “stone dead drunk under a table the other night…”

Flint shrugged. “Old time’s sake.”

“Flint.”

At Raemint’s scowl, the ex-Bladeshifter sighed, stubbed his smoke out on the Eliminator, and flicked it out the open window.

Ben slumped forward with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands. “This is crazy,” he muttered. His arms flopped down onto the table in exasperation. “You actually want to lure Carmine here, using Hawk as bait?”

Raemint folded her lean, muscled black arms. “Carmine will locate her fiancée sooner or later. This is a fact without question. She may well be very close to doing so. If we proceed to Forthwhite, a week’s journey from here, she will certainly catch us in the open countryside.” She shook her head. “We must make a stand somewhere, regardless, and I wish to make it here, where we have time to prepare for it, and solid walls at least for cover.” Her dark eyes were fierce. “I will not be hunted down like a fleeing rabbit!”

“But,” Ben protested, “this town is full of people!”

Raemint gave a nod of acknowledgement. “I have already made arrangements for the orderly and discreet evacuation of Meadrun. A number of families and individuals have already left, including the proprietors and guests of this tavern and several other businesses. The construction workers have been notified, and travellers are being turned away by the town guard. By this time tomorrow, the entire town should be clear.”

“What about the Freeroamers?” Ben went on, desperately. “Will there be anyone arriving to back us up?”

Raemint hesitated, eyeing him carefully. “I sent word to the Guard House as soon as you and Everine arrived,” she explained quietly. “But they will not be here for several days more. We shall not be able to rely on their assistance.” She held Ben’s gaze. “Further to that, you and your sister, and your noblewoman friend, will be leaving tomorrow with the evacuees.”

Ben stood up sharply, his chair scraping on the wooden floorboards. “Absolutely not!” he blurted out. “No way!” He shook his head vehemently. “Hawk is my responsibility! He was entrusted to me, and to Everine! I am not going to leave him behind!”

Raemint’s expression was hard. “You will be leaving this town tomorrow,” she repeated. “Or I will order the town guard to apprehend you.”

A tense, awkward silence fell as the second-in-command to the Freeroamers and the sailor boy glared at each other. Ben’s mind was racing, even as his heart plummeted, for a way – any way – around this.

There has to be something I can do! he thought desperately. After everything he, Everine and Araynia had gone through to bring Hawk to safety, pushing his lifeless body in a rickety wheelchair all the way through the mountains, putting their own lives at risk to do so…

Ben could not simply walk away and leave him now.

It wasn’t that he doubted the Freeroamer’s ability to bring Carmine down – they had been trained to do exactly that after all. But he didn’t trust that they would do everything they could to keep a mostly-dead man alive, that they wouldn’t sacrifice him the first opportunity they got. Neither Raemint or Flint knew Hawk personally. They had made no promise to Ferrian to protect him – quite the opposite, in fact. Events had gone far beyond any appeal for the doomed couple’s lives – at least as far as the Freeroamers were concerned.

Ben swallowed thickly, feeling rivulets of sweat rolling down his body beneath his clothes. The thought of attacking Carmine made him feel sick, scared him more than anything ever had. But Lady Araynia had intervened in a terrible battle between the red-haired wraith and Lord Arzath, all on her own, armed with nothing but the Sword of Healing. She was even less of a fighter than Ben or Everine was, and yet she had summoned the courage to do such a thing.

If the noblewoman was brave enough to confront Carmine, then so was Ben!

He wanted to be a part of this…

Placing a hand on the Angel-forged dagger at his belt, he said stubbornly: “I have a silvertine weapon. I can help you!”

Raemint’s expression did not change. Her voice, when she spoke, was quiet, yet harsh: “Such a weapon will be of no use to either us or to you. If Carmine Vandaris is as dangerous as we believe her to be, then you will not come close to her. You are not a trained soldier. You will not stand a chance.”

Far from discouraging or frightening Ben, her words dropped onto him like dry logs thrown on a fire. “If she’s so dangerous,” he countered, “then you’ll need all the help you can get!”

Raemint made no reply. Instead, she walked around the table and stood in front of him.

The Centaur was an imposing figure, towering over Ben. Her silvertine spear was slung across her back, long and bright and wicked. Despite himself, the boy took a step backwards, almost tripping on the chair he had vacated. He felt certain that she was about to seize him by the collar and throw him out the door, or the window, perhaps…

Flint swore suddenly, from across the room.

“Son of a bitch!”

As they both looked at him, Flint grabbed his hat and jammed it on his head. Yanking a silver crossbow bolt from its quiver, he all but threw it into the Eliminator. The muscles of his powerful arm worked as he cranked it furiously into place.

“What is it?” Raemint trotted over to stand at the window beside him.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Flint said, shifting the Eliminator so that it rested upon the windowsill, “hold onto yer goddamned hats. The party’s startin’ early…”

Ben had rushed to the second window, which offered an unobstructed view outside. Their room faced east, overlooking a damp, shadowy and slightly derelict little courtyard formed by two crumbling, ivy covered walls, the side of the tavern and the back wall of a neighbouring building. An old toolshed – that toolshed, the one no one was allowed to open – stood against the northern wall, beside an overgrown woodpile. The night was muggy and overcast with a thick blanket of cloud smothering most of the town in darkness, but the sky just overhead had thinned somewhat, allowing a hazy wash of moonlight to filter through, enough to pick out the yard below.

Directly opposite them, against the eastern wall, a black figure picked itself up off the ground.

Ben flattened himself against the wall beside the window, his heart trying to claw its way out of his throat. Even in the uncertain light the figure was unmistakable; the insect-like glint of dark armour, the damnable blaze of crimson hair…

Carmine, Ben thought in shock.

She was here.

She was here now.