COUSIN MARI
The air in Encara Tossel’s private chambers is unseasonably dry and hot. Most likely the result of an overzealous servant putting too much hardwood fodder on the fire. They were nervous, the servants, in the presence of the young noblewomen staring at the map table that dominated her study for the past year. Having it here cost her the comfort of a proper reading chaise, but Encara had grown accustomed to forgoing comfort in the name of taking back her rightful place in the world. The map table glowed in the yellow light of the fireplace, shadows dancing over the carved topography of the mountains and valleys the Kingdom of Tossel controlled.
The Kingdom was ruled by her Uncle, King Ferro. After the death of Encara’s parents, and the loss of their lands to a petty warlord from the south. She and her two siblings had found themselves guests of Princess Naldi, the King’s younger sister, and their aunt. Guest was a kind way of putting it, in reality, they were prisoners. They were only allowed to stay in this castle, with their apartments and servants, because keeping them close ensured the rightful claim to their parent’s lands stayed with the King’s immediate family, or so Encara had concluded.
“Not for long,” Encara said, moving the polished marble tokens representing her elder brother’s men into the borders of their ancestral home. “It’s time we reclaim what is ours.”
Aunt Naldi told them it was too soon to act, that the mercenary band occupying Encara’s home was too entrenched to deal with directly. It was better to wait until additional forces could be freed from the conflicts in the east. Of course, there was no telling when that battle might end. If she wanted lands of her own sooner there were other solutions to be found.
Encara left the map table, moving through her apartments to the dressing room. An ornate table with a full body height vanity filled one side of the room, the other was lined with cedar racks for her clothes. The curtains to the balcony were open, as were the doors, allowing the bright silver light of the moon to pour into the space. The chill of autumn stole across the floor and past her bare legs, prickling her skin.
As she began changing, Encara caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror and, for the tiniest of moments, thought her mother was standing in the room. Freezing, the illusion passed, and the old pain crawled up from its hole. Turning to face the mirror directly, Encara took herself in, nothing the changes even a few years of adulthood brought. She remained elegantly thin, as her aunt insisted. But Encara knew that filling out her frame had done more to draw the eyes of the suitors the Princess brought around to prance and preen. Her face retained the sharp features of her mother, but her father’s hair shone like quicksilver in the light. It was long, and kept loose, neither were in fashion, and it drove Princess Naldi mad.
“She’d have a cat if she knew what else I was doing,” Encara whispered to the mirror, and pulled off her nightgown with a shudder. Dressing quickly, she slid on a pair of thick wool pants, into which she tucked her prized possession: an enchanted silk tunic. The fabric was a deep gold that gleamed in any amount of light, but the magic took the form of an investiture of steel, turning the lightweight garment into powerful armor. Over this, she drew on a wool coat, and pulling her hair out the neck of it, tucked the mass of strands into a fur-lined leather cap.
As Encara sat down to pull on her boots, a soft knocking bounced down the hallway from the door. It was a bell until midnight, no one should be disturbing her at this hour. The knock came again, three soft raps. She recognized it now, and stomping on the second boot, quickly jogged over to the heavy oaken door. Unbarring it, she pulled the door open only a small way, but it was enough: a thin arm jutted into the gap and waved frantically.
“I had a bad dream,” whined the girl attached to the arm, it was her little sister.
“That’s unfortunate, Innocent,” Encara replied, opening the door a bit more, “but you can’t always come to me when you have a nightmare.”
“You sound like Cousin Mari,” the girl sniffled, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “She’s always telling me I need to be tougher.”
“Well, Mari is a bit . . . cold,” Encara offered, diplomatically. Mari, despite being two years younger than Encara, was an old hand at courtly skullduggery. Shaking away the thought of her, Encara looked down at her sniffling younger sister, sighed, and opened the door enough for her to dart inside. “Go ahead and sleep in my bed, I’ll be back later. I have somewhere to be, and now I’m going to be late.”
“What! Is it a boy?” Innocent nearly shrieked, the plush bed forgotten as she veered to follow Encara back into the dressing room.
“No, well yes, but it’s not like that,” she knelt down and whispered in Innocent’s ear, “I’m going to see Adesso.”
“Brother? But he’s been gone for so long,” Innocent replied skeptically, “How do you know he’s really back?”
“He sent me a message, by familiar,” Encara replied, and reaching beneath the countertop of the table, pressed a switch, opening a concealed panel. Retrieving a small scroll inside, she handed it to Innocent. “This says he’ll meet me in the Amber Woods before dawn, to introduce me to other officers in our army.”
Innocent unfurled the scroll, held it up to the light, and examined it. Meanwhile, Encara retrieved a thin, silken rope from behind her clothing racks, and tied off one end to the stone balcony rail. She had used this method to scale down the side of the castle to the river below undetected in the past. Her apartments were on the far southern concern of the building, her bed chambers overlooking the river, and her dressing room the edge of the courtyard, with the river beyond. The wind picked up, bringing the scent of manure, and she heard the whiney of a horse in the stables below.
“Aunt Naldi won’t like this,” Innocent said, the scroll hanging limply in one hand. “She says Adesso is just being a fool by looking for a fight.”
“The Princess doesn’t understand what it's like to lose her home,” Encara replied, yanking the knot of the rope tight. “She’s content to sit here and enjoy her position, until she can bully us into doing what she wants.”
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“You shouldn’t talk like that about her,” Innocent said, her voice going soft as she backed toward the doorway. “She looks after us!” With that, the girl dropped the scroll and was gone, running back down the hallway to the entrance of the apartments. As Encara turned to go after her, a new figure replaced the fleeing child.
Mari Tossel was about Encara’s height, but wider of frame and softer of features, her dark brown hair was cropped short, as was the style, but they had the same hazel eyes. Unlike Encara, her face was well tanned from her extensive travels. Pulling a hand loose from her sky blue robes she dipped down to collect the abandoned scroll from the tiled floor. “You know, you should listen to your sister, Encara,” she drawled.
“That’s none of your business,” Encara said, her voice low with anger. This was bad, the plan had been for her to meet Adesso and the others tonight because neither Princess Naldi nor her daughters were in the castle. In fact, they and the elite guard should be gone on a hunting trip for another week. No time for that, Mari was here, now. “Give me that, it’s a private letter from my brother.”
Mari chuckled, and tossed the scroll, the parchment flapping as it fell to the floor. “You’re right, there’s no point in my reading the words of the dead.”
Encara throat tightened as she swallowed reflexively. “You have a sick sense of humor, Mari, you always have.”
“Who’s joking?” Mari replied, and reaching into her robes, pulled something out of a pocket. It was wrapped in a scarf Encara recognized immediately as the one she had given her brother when he left seeking aid for their cause. Flicking at the scarf’s edges, Mari unwrapped the object: It was a finger, Adesso’s signet ring still on it.
Encara tasted acid, then vomited over the edge of the balcony. Coughing, she spat on the stone floor and rubbed her vision clear with the back of her hand. “What did you do, you fucking monster!”
Mari looked almost hurt, she let the hand holding the finger drop, causing the scarf to flutter free as the finger landed. The ring keened off the tiles, and came free, rolling along the floor before falling over. “What did I do? What did I do! Hah!” she said, throwing her head back with a sharp laugh. “I’m just protecting what’s mine.”
“Protecting,” Encara sputtered, with her mind now swimming, she looked for something, anything to attack with: her eyes settled on the heavy wooden stool beside the dressing chair. “You murdered my brother, why?”
“Are you deaf, as well as dense?” Mari said, waving a hand at Encara, “I know you and your brother were planning to steal my inheritance.”
“We what?” Encara replied, taking some exaggerated steps towards the stool, as if she could barely stand with the shock of all this, it was not hard to do. “We just wanted our home back, you lunatic.”
“Oh Yes, oh your home. You two idiots. If you’d just been grateful and done as you were asked. None of this would be happening to you now.”
Encara’s hand closed around the leg of the stool, and taking a step closer to Mari, flung it up hard at her face. Her cousin was faster, back-peddling into the hallway, she ducked the stool as it crashed into the opposite wall. Mari flexed three fingers into a line and sliced the air between them. Encara saw the air distort, and raised an arm reflexively.
A bright line of pain passed through her forearm, and then a horse kicked her in the chest, or at least that was the closest thing Encara had experienced before to the blow. She could feel the enchanted tunic harden against the cutting force of the air as it lashed into her, and felt it again as she collided with the desk and vanity. The sound of glass breaking filled her ears as the mirror shattered, and new flashes of pain joined her now throbbing arm as the shards sliced against her upheld hands. Opening her eyes, she could see the blood dripping down onto the now exposed gold of the tunic, her wool coat ripped wide open.
“You pathetic fool,” Mari said, lowering her hand, “Did you forget that I, unlike you, inherited the gift?”
Encara had not forgotten, but she would be damned if she was just going to let herself be killed. She needed to goad Mari, get her to come closer. “I’m sorry, I forgot all about you, just like Princess Naldi, I suppose.”
A second wave of air, less focused but still a torrent, lashed into Encara, sending her and the already smashed table careening to the floor. Broken wood and glass landed all around her as Encara’s hip crunched into the tile with an explosion of white hot pain.
“There you go, on the ground where you belong,” Mari said, and crunched her way across the room, slowly. “You keep my sweet, kindly, mother’s name out your stinking mouth . . . To think, she was actually going to adopt you if she couldn’t find you a man. Your brother too, if he kept winning battles and gaining honor. I can’t have either of you taking my spot in line.”
Encara rolled onto her back, and with her feet, pushed back towards the balcony, all thought of offense abandoned. She did her best to ignore the bright trail of blood she was leaving in her wake. Things were making a perverse kind of sense now, Mari would have reason to fear two elders in line to inherit. That is, unless they had their own lands waiting for them.
“You’re the fool,” Encara said, sucking air at the pain talking elicited. “We were never going to take your place . . . we were going home.” Mari did not reply at first, and that gave Encara time to get a hand around the rope, and pull herself upright against the balcony. Her vision wavered as she stood up, casting the dressing room and Mari in a swirling haze of shadows and glittering glass shards.
Mari stepped closer, moving fully into the light coming in the open doors. She was looking at the ring on the floor, as if finally realizing what she had done. When she looked up at Encara, Her expression, previously one of almost manic glee, had changed to something like sadness.
“No cousin, you were the fool,” Mari said softly, “My mother was never going to help you reclaim your lands . . . she was the one who invited the Gravanik States to send a proxy to claim it in their name.”
The pain in Encara’s body gave way to numbness as she sank against the balcony’s cold surface. Her aunt, recognizing the vacuum in the kingdom’s defenses following the loss of two powerful Mages, for that was all Encara’s parents were in Naldi’s view, had willingly renounced the lands to their powerful neighbors to the south. This holding gave them a foothold from which to attack the Indigo Empire. In doing so, Naldi ensured that none of the other independent kingdoms would be able to take the region for themselves. This was the truth of it, Encara was never going to be able to reclaim her home. It was lost to her long ago.
Now, looking at Mari, she realized it was not sadness in her eyes, but pity.
“You see now, why,” Mari said, raising both her hands, fingers splayed.
“I never wanted your land,” Encara said, blinking away tears.
“I can’t take that chance,” Mari whispered, the winds rising with her power pulling away her own tears as they flowed.
Encara was already falling when the wall of air smashed into her, sending her sailing far beyond the wall of the Castle. The cloudless night sky above twinkled with only the fiercest of stars, still visible despite the full moon. They seemed so far away, and so enduring. The silken rope bit into her hand as it drew tight, pulling Encara’s sight earthward once more. As she twisted in the air, she could see the stables pass below, the outer wall of them hanging over the river’s edge. Mari’s attack had carried her clear over the middle of the river.
As Encara fell to the dark waters below. She watched the surface thrash beneath the strong winds from the north, casting curls of white foam upward. They looked like teeth waiting to devour her fading life.
She crashed among them, and darkness and cold enveloped the world.