In Between Blood

 

Hiba Toor

 

Daastan Publishing 2023

 

First Published in Pakistan by Daastan PVT LTD

House # A-41, Madni Street, Lala Rukh, Wah Cantt, Punjab 47040

 

www.daastan.com

www.meraqissa.com

 

Text copyrights © Hiba Toor

Book Design copyright © Hiba Toor

Edited by: Mariam Rizvi

 

The moral rights of the writer, illustrator and editor have been asserted.

 

All rights reserved

 

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or distributed in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

 

ISBN 978-969-696-898-6

 

Printed and bound in Pakistan by Daastan Printing Solutions

 

To my mom, dad, and my sisters.

I wouldn’t be here without you.

 

Foreword

Writing is hard, for both writers that have already spent their entire lives writing, and for writers who have never adapted themselves to the late-night writing schedules before. In Between Blood is a work of fiction, a story enrolled with fantasy worlds and characters brought to life by a high school student.

What I like most about Hiba’s book is how conflicted the characters are. You never really know who to cheer for when it comes to this story. She writes her characters like one would spend their day. There are times when the characters act questionably, and say things that confuse even the readers, and there are times when you cannot help but sympathize with them and hope that everything turns out good.

The story follows a rivalry between two siblings, but the characters and their stories are what intrigued me. Each sentence, every dialogue and all of their actions have a story of their own.

Mr. Taqweem Anwar

Gen Secretary, Karwan Development Foundation & CEO MediaWeaver

 

Prologue

 

Novah runs his fingers across the blade of the dagger in his hand, the end of it like the sting of an insect. He renders, refusing to let his eyes rest. He is inside the carriage, his heart hidden beneath the fabric of his tunic and his back stiffen and scorn. The sun has chased him all the way in, desperate to touch all his features; the ends of his light hair, the green and grey of his round eyes, the fine line of a fading scar drawn across his pale nose and the cut of his cheeks. His arms are bare after his elbows, exposing the red flush and freckles drawn across his pulse for the warmth to cherish. 

The dagger in his palms weighs heavier than anything he has ever held. He sets it aside rigidly on the seat beside his left thigh. The air is hot but his heart feels damp. The light of the sun caresses the window frame, golden and lucid. He comes here, beyond the court of his Kingdom  where he once rested, to bid his parents a last farewell. It should feel nostalgic, should it not? It is his home, after all. The carriage’s glass window gives a vigilant view of his hometown, its life anomic and plain and pitiful just like he had left it about seven years ago. They have traveled through the forest that rests between the Kingdom  and its coast. He looks away. The land holds too many memories he would much rather not drown in. 

He, instead, rests his eyes on the auburn boy sitting in front of him. The curtains pushed aside creates a thin line of its shadow on his face. He is looking at Novah, deeply concerned. He is the boy who had come to Novah in the barracks where he was staying with dreadful news. He was drenched in sweat; every inch of his black tunic was wet; it was as if he had bathed in the rain with all his clothes on. His gaze had held a sudden sort of amity that Novah recognized. It was then, as he saw his eyes that he knew, this boy had come for him. Your parents are dead, and they have left you no fortune but two siblings for you to take care of.

He took his time to bring him the news. His parents have been dead for about a week now, resting six feet under the ground with their children rotting under the swindle light of the sun.

Novah rests his head back. This boy has misshapen brows, he notices. He looks just a year older than him, broad shoulders and sharp dark eyes resembling the shadow made across his nose all the way to his jaw.

“Novah,” the boy says, brow raising for how long Novah has been staring at him. “That is your name, am I correct?” He nods only, not trusting himself to utter the right words. Then again, what would the right words even be? Thank you for telling me that my Ma and Pa passed away, I hope you have a good life.  

“Novah,” he calls him again, a little softer this time, the syllables running slowly on his lips. He has a soothing voice. “Your parents often talked of you.”

He would rather not do this. He would rather not talk of his parents at all. The thought of missing out on all the years that he could have been with them just to become something that is suffering now is rather tiring. If it were not for the twins, he would rather just bury himself with his parents. “If you do not mind me saying,” the boy says and against all soreness, Novah looks at him with eager eyes, “your siblings, the twins, they look nothing like you.”

Good. Novah never liked the way he looked. His eyes are too bemusing, the shade has no name, and his hair is wearisome like a dried out golden river. He does not like the way he stands out, the freckles on his cheek are too friendly and his thin smile is too inviting. He would rather be someone unimportant and someone who is not heard of. Intimacy does not come contended for his kind. His kind is safer in the sinister dark. Corrupted Aurelians. Those who mend and shift souls of both the living and the dead, whilst the other Aurelians mended painless things like the wind or the fire you pushed on a hearth. The world would have been so much better had he not been born a monster. Novah would give anything just to sway the waters of the world or the light that hid behind the clouds or the fire that would burn the trees or the wind that touched him everywhere he went. He would sell his soul just to stop recognizing the souls of others. It is better to be at the mercy of a monster than to be a monster yourself, or so he believes.

The carriage halts and the two of them almost fall from their seats. Novah steadies himself and looks outside. He has his fingers tightly wrapped around the dagger. He can see children fighting and playing under the pellucid sky. Back in the Royal court, it was as if the towers of the palace forbade everyone to look at the sky. The moon was never there, in his sight, just the stars far too away from each other and in the day, the sun would be so unfamiliar. Today, the sun has its gaze on Novah, compelling him to step outside and so he does. He takes another look at the boy who is still sitting, waiting. Come with me. He wants to say. I cannot do this on my own.

The wind is the same as he once felt it in his home. He steps outside, his feet drowning in the ground beneath him. He feels like a child again. He tries to render on his memories. He looks left and then right, peering at the town around him. The houses here are far too simple for someone who has spent seven years in Aurelia’s Royal court. The kids are dressed in rags and tunics too big for them, the women wear no diamonds for the sun to slip on. “Come,” the boy says. He is standing beside him, pointing at where Novah’s home once stood, now rusted. 

It has been a day of their travel, but Novah feels like he had been sitting in that carriage for weeks. It is as if he has decayed already. His life is yet to thrive, but hope has already perished. He does not speak as the boy takes him to his house. His chest aches at the thought that he has forgotten most of his way around the town. The path looks slightly better than they had before, he thinks, and there are more trees than there once were, but these are all just specks of his memories. He remembers nothing vividly. He had already forgotten his mother’s eyes and how sweetly she spoke. He has already forgotten the way his father would teach him how to hide what he truly is. An Aurelian far too remorseless to be pardoned to live amongst the people this simply. He has already forgotten the friends he once made, and he has forgotten the people he grew up with. 

He relies on the one memory he has brought with him and looks at the dagger that is hovering inside his satchel, a little too horned but dear to him, nonetheless. Ezra. A training guard as loyal as a man’s dog. It was all fun and games between the two of them. Ezra was Novah’s best friend and a clement companion. They were twin flames, training together to become guards. Novah would say he has a leash around his neck for how desperate he was for his reputation. Despite that, the two of them went far back for Ezra to savor Novah’s despair and dolor for what he is. Novah looks at the dagger now as you would look at a loved one demised. 

A voice breaks his stance. “Was it a gift?” 

They have reached home, his home. The timber walls are dull, and the brittle porch still stands, welcoming him back. Looking at it makes him feel a blend of homesickness and yearning. 

Novah swallows. “How did you know?” He has kept quiet for so long that his lips ache along the words.

The boy offers him an earnest smile. “It was just a hunch,” he says. 

The door of his house opens abruptly, and a woman steps out. She is dressed in such dreadful attire with her red hair tightly knotted in a bun, looking like a bird’s nest. She looks like she has not seen the face of water for months now. Her neck is soaked enough for Novah to make sight of the stains from a mile away. The boy walks towards the woman and says something in between the distance he has left. Novah follows him and settles his feet on the stairs of the porch. 

The woman lunges forward and presses a pair of keys in the boy’s hand. “I hope to have my money by tomorrow’s end.” She strolls beside him and on her way, she barely gives Novah a glance. 

Novah allows himself to ask, “Who is she?”

The boy slightly turns pink with the keys clutched inside his palm. “A caretaker,” he explains, “I asked her to take care of the twins while I was away.” 

Novah nods. He feels ashamed of asking. Of course, the boy enrolled a caretaker to look after the kids as he went across Aurelia to break the news to him. He wonders how this boy knew his parents enough to know about Novah, the child they preferred to keep quiet about. His parents could not afford the world knowing that he was their son. The son of two twisted people. It would have meant a life compelled with a vile title. 

He wonders if this boy knows. “Your name?” Novah can barely breathe the words out, but it is a start. The boy is opening the door that the woman had so tightly closed. He smiles at Novah, exposing the way his cheeks haul up and how his eyes slightly curve upward. 

“August,” he offers. 

His house starts with a hallway that leads to the open room. The hearth at its right has no fire in it and the air reeks of dust. The sun is barely breathing through the windows and the walls are on the verge of tears. Novah should feel welcomed, but the wind is only mocking him for coming home so late. He thinks of his parents and all the ambitions they had him believe in. He walks across the room and the boy walks in along with him, halting at the doorstep of the bedroom that belonged to his parents. He glances inside as if he is checking for something then leans on the doorframe before he looks at Novah, a plaintive smile, and curious eyes. He is wearing a dark commoner’s attire painted with the color of his eyes. He looks like a man brought to him by those who mend miracles. Do such Aurelians exist? Novah would have known. 

“My parents,” Novah murmurs. “How did you know them?”

August’s smile turns from something cheerful to something forlorn. His hair looks different now that it is inside. There are no shadows inclined on his eager features and Novah allows himself to look completely at him and nothing else. 

“They took me in when I was barely a kid,” he says, “They did not replace you, but they did replace everyone who ever did me wrong. They brought me up as one of their own. Consider this just an act of respect. I hold no reliance on you, I am merely doing this for all the years your parents showed me love.”

Novah’s breath hitches in his throat as if he has swallowed thorns. This boy may know more about Novah’s own blood than himself. His morals demand him to believe otherwise but he cannot help it. Envy spreads in him like poison and he must bite his tongue from drifting away. He raises his chin as an act of modesty before himself. 

He asks for his siblings, the only people left for him to smile upon. “Where are they?” He keeps his voice rather polite because this boy, August, did not do anything to deserve the distaste that Novah is feeling. The distaste that he should be feeling for the world instead. 

August leads him to the room behind him. He walks in like he belongs here. How can he not? This home welcomes him more than it is welcoming Novah. He feels like a King who has stepped in between the ruins of his palace and what is left of his crown. It is like visiting an old and abandoned sea you once loved to dance on. The waves do not move along his eyes anymore. Now, they wait for him to leave.

There is a bed at the furthest right and Novah can hear the way his mother would call after him every time he refused to sleep. The walls are whispering to him or her. She would run after him across the room, chanting his name like it was a prayer. He tears his eyes away from the walls and looks at the one who is here. He misses the way his life once surrounded him. Even at the court, as he trained to become a guard, he had the comfort of his past. A past that is now rusted. He had the knowledge that no matter where he went and no matter what he did, he would always have his Ma and his Pa to go back to and now here he is, broken and drowning in his own faith and his hope.

The world pleas him to give it another chance. He hears a baby cry. 

August is standing at the bed’s front, leaning down just a little bit. His dark lucid locks fall on his sunless skin. The collar of his coat is crooked, but he does not seem to care. He is too busy smiling at the sight below him. 

Novah lets himself relax. Two kids, twins, a girl, and a boy, barely two days in this world, are laying down on the comfort of the white sheets of the bed. One is sleeping and the other is greeting August like an old friend. She smiles at him, and Novah feels something beside his heart breach. He walks towards the edge of the bed, not daring to get too close. 

“You were right,” he tells August, holding the fabric of his worn-out sleeves, “They do not look like me at all.”

August has his fingers cradling the girl’s hair until she reaches out and grabs his forefinger, wrapping her small palm around it and holding on for dear life. Novah is looking at August more than he is looking at the twins.

“This girl,” says August, “She may not look like you, but she resembles you in every other way.”

Novah drops his arms. “Surely, she does not,” he says. He walks closer slowly, step by step and aches at the way tiny eyes are looking at him. The girl’s eyes are just as green as his, a wild gradient, but it is the only thing she has of him. Her hair is of a darker shade and her cheeks are not as thin as his. The way her skin is flushed reminds Novah of their mother. Her nose is round and small, and her lips frail. Her skin is fairer and her smile brighter. She is the loveliest thing he has ever seen.

“You misunderstand.” August is looking at Novah now. 

The boy is sleeping carelessly beside the girl, the slightest bit of drool across his cupid’s bow. Novah tries to make way to see the look August has on him.

“Like me?” He asks softly. August nods and the look in his eyes is clear now. It was the expression Novah wore when his father first told him. “You know,” Novah accuses. It is less a question and more a disclosure.

August looks back at the twins, cheeks elated with a red shade. “I am sorry if you feel-”

“No,” Novah stops him and before he can change his mind he says, “It is alright.”

He thinks of his parents, alone in this world, surrounded by whispers. He thinks of how sorrowful they had been for his absence may have broken them. He thinks of everything that this boy has done for them, all these years, confined under the roof that once hailed before him. 

He looks at the twins. “And what of their names?”

“Your mother would often talk about it, but they were yet to name these two,” he replies and his voice calms down with every breath. “You- you can name them if you want. It is only right.”  It is not right. It is not right at all. 

“No,” he says, “you should be the one to name them. You have been at their side more than me.”

“Their side?” August smiles just a little bit. “They came into this world two days ago and besides, you are their brother.”

Brother. The word sounds so absurd when said aloud. Whatever has he done to deserve any of this? 

“This is your home more than it is mine,” he says, and it is the bitter truth that has made itself a home in his dull heart. 

August purses his lips. “Do not say that.” Here, in the dark, his eyes are like the waters at the far end of a well, his skin is drunk on solace, a simple one, but as the dusk greets the two of them, August’s smile is all that is vivid. It comes to him like a wave. Perhaps, the waters are asking him to stay. 

Novah had thought of his future often and whatever his mind had fabricated, this was never it. He would have never thought that this was how his life would turn out. It is as if all souls, each one of us, are a grisly sort of museum, carrying all the memories that we make along the way. Some of us, we like to create art using the colors that this life has offered us and some of us, we like to toy with words to bewitch the world. Some of us like to use our voice, quite literally, to sway the way the others hear the world. But all of us wish to leave behind a museum in which this world can walk. We wish to make memories bright enough to keep our museums alive.

“We will live as equals then,” Novah says, “If that is what you want as well.”

“What do you mean?”

The sun is setting a path back home, making way for the moon and the stars but it may rain tonight, for all tragic ends happen in the rain or so he believes. The wind is rocking the twins in their sleep, their eyes barely open. 

“I do not think that I can do this alone,” he admits ghastly. 

August smiles. “Then I promise you this,” he says, “No matter what happens, I will stay here for as long as you want me to.”

Novah closes his eyes. He does not know what he wants but the lie of the land demands him to hold onto another hand, before he breaks completely. He may not want any of this, but he needs this. As vile as it may sound in his head, he needs his siblings. 

August pushes his head to the side. “Now,” he says, “Shall you name them?”

“I already told you-”

“No. No oddities.”

Novah frowns. “It is not odd for me to say that you deserve to name them.”

The girl yawns and her voice fill the room like sunbeams entering a dead forest. She pushes her fist at the sheets beside her. A small puffy nose with flushed and freckled skin. She has closed her eyes and Novah cannot help but smile at her. It may not rain tonight after all.  “It is a simple agreement,” he says, “There are two of them. Each of us can name one of them.”

That makes August laugh. “Very well, then. I shall name the boy and you can name the girl for she takes after your father and- well- you.”

Like him. Not a guard, not someone walking the world in disguise. Not someone loyal to the throne. Like him. Like a corrupted Aurelian. Like a monster. 

August continues, “As for the boy, he takes after your mother.”

“A healer?” Novah ventures.

“Yes”

“How do you know?”

August turns a little pink over the sharp bone of his cheeks. “Your mother told me not long ago.”

“How did she know?” Novah is talking over his own heart now. 

August blinks. “I-” he stutters. “I do not know?”

They are laughing now, the two of them. It all feels like years ago when Novah was just in his armor, brushing his hair to his side. It all feels like years ago when he would roam the palace halls with his head held high, and sleep in the barracks with such a bewitching future to look forward to. He stood in the throne room as the Queen made her vows and promised him that he would make such a fine man and an even greater guard. He was ten when he left home. He is seventeen now. To his surprise, there are no regrets. He feels no pity for himself. He can only smile now in the memory of his family. It may take some time, but he shall not turn away from this life.

“Rodger,” August says after quite some time. The sun has set, and the moon is here. She is smiling at the four of them. “Rodger Elias. Is that a good name?”

Novah smiles. “I think it is better than what I came up with.”

August arches a smug brow. “Tell me.”

He looks at the girl. “Sally,” he says.

“I do not think it is worse-”

Novah talks over him. “It is because when I first looked at her, the child in me told me she looked rather silly. I believe if I name her silly people will make fun of her, so I think it best to change one letter.”

August is looking at him as if he has haunted the moon.  “Well, this is a wondering surprise,” he says, “I would not have thought of your humor as something so drained.”

Novah is not holding back his breath anymore. He is not biting on his tongue to stop himself from talking. The night is awake. The wind surrounds him like mercy. It is as if his parents’ ghosts are hugging him, bidding him a fatal farewell. He wishes he could see them for the last time and even though his hands can just mend their souls back to existence, he will not break the promises he has made. He will not become what he is. 

August grabs his wrist and brings him closer. “Here is to Sally and Rodger,” he cheers immaturely, “The Elias twins with eyes I cannot quite understand.”

Novah laughs with his head now and despite the cold, his skin feels warm. It feels pleasant. Maybe there is an Aurelian out there trying to mend his hope.

“Here is to Sally and Rodger,” he repeats. May they have a better life than mine. “May their stories end better than a tragedy.”

 

PART 1:

 

Aurelia’s most wanted

 

Chapter 1

 

D

arcel met Sally three days before he drowned himself to his death. 

You would think that the story ended there, with a life completely decayed and death with its novelties in its hands but the world has always liked to take things away from him. First, it was his family and that night, it was his escape from this cruel world itself. Life felt like a burden to him, a burden he had no strength to hold anymore. If you asked him what he saw nine years ago, Darcel would say a monster and nothing else, but today he has his deceased heart in his hands, and he has already written her on it. The world seems so carved and ceaseless now that he is dead. It is such a twisted tale, but he thinks of it as inevitable as death itself. He thinks to himself that if he were to die, who would tell the world the story of the girl with emerald eyes? Who would read the words that he has to offer? His life has been reaped like a sickle slithering through glass but for as long as she still breathes, Darcel will fear no blade nor scythe. He tries not to think too much today. Dead and buried, it should be, but the modernity of life does not bargain with Sally.

He knocks on the plain white wall two times before deciding that there are no secret passageways hidden in this basement. The walls that surround him are stained and damp, and the smell of dead mice has filled the air. For a man who claims to have more riches and jewels than the nobles themselves, his house is like a dying graveyard. Darcel should know, his own body is a ruin on its own. This man sure has bad taste in décor along with a terrible sense of stability. The doors are crooked and at the end of the hallway, the stairs are too steep. The architecture is stinging Darcel like an open wound. He reaches out the door and squints his eyes under the sun. He is out of the basement and into a garden of dead flowers. Darcel makes his way to the peasant houses, drenched in agitation. The door is too thick and too big for his thin skin. The veins on his hand pop up as he turns it. Every inch of his skin itches as if spiders are dancing all over him. He looks over his shoulder to make sure no one is following him. He has been led to a room with hay stashed at its door. Earthenware pots and pans are thrown down on the linen of grass below him. He walks, knees drooping and mind begging for an ounce of sleep. It is a short length to cover but he groans. For a person whose heart does not beat and blood does not flow, Darcel is like an old man trapped in a sixteen-year old’s dead body. He is a night’s person, and the morning taunts him. The sunbeams and sunlight are too much for his dead eyes. 

The servants are working at this time of the day. Working for him. The man who stole Darcel’s family’s fortune. This man is a gambler and a thief who has only ever given orders. He stole from Darcel like it was child’s play and there is only himself to blame. This man is a liar and a manipulator and a fat man with a fat smile. However, Darcel should be immune to wits and wagers for she is like that as well. He looks around for what seems to be hours. The end from where he came is now on the opposite side. There is only one place he did not look. He turns the knob of the last door, and the creak is too loud. He drops his lips and looks back one last time. No one has followed him. He closes the door with both his hands. He drops his back at the door and lets out a relief of a breath. Ironic when he has no lungs to work themselves. His hands ruffle through his own murky hair, and he can swear he just saw an ant sprawl across his fingers. Mud and silt are caught on his boots. He wipes it out on the dirty carpet beneath him. This room looks like a storeroom that has not been used for ages. Dust and spider webs is all that fills it.

And a few dozen boxes and stashes of gold.

His ears ring as he hears footsteps approaching from outside; too heavy, and too loud to belong to a girl. He is still facing the gold. Candlelight and torches are all that keep this room luminous amidst the vile dark along with the slightest bit of sunlight that makes its way through the thin windows. The fire on the torches creates sinister silhouettes on the auburn brick wall. He has his eyes on the flames when the door opens. The sounds suggest that there are two men that have approached him. Darcel swallows. 

“I cannot help but wonder,” he says, bothering not to look over his shoulder, “How come you prefer not to tell anyone your name.” The words are for the trader. The trader who steps forward, just beside Darcel’s line of sight. The trader who brings his sorry excuse of a sword and places it over his shoulder. The trader who is wearing an embroidered silk gown with fine jewels embedded in his puffy sleeves. Darcel sighs. He has left his coat back at the inn where he is staying and is now dressed in a white tunic with a sleeveless dark sweater to cope with the lack of warmth in his blood but either way, the cold of Aurelia is unmerciful. He feels a sudden chill go through his spine. 

The trader comes near him, exposing all he is. “Search behind the boxes,” he orders to the man behind them, giving away his obnoxious voice. He pushes Darcel’s chest with his sword, silently demanding him to get near the wall. The other man searches around the boxes like a dog digging for a bone. 

“I was under the impression that your hastiness is too proud to be spending your precious time in the peasant houses,” says Darcel. The man narrows his eyes, improperly annoyed at the fact that Darcel has figured out what his foolishness had called a witty play. He had, on top of his lungs, told everyone how he despised the hallways that smelled of a fish market beside his inn. He had ordered no one to get in or out of the peasant houses unless his words applied and the world believed him, knowing that this land was the last place where he would go. The world kept quiet about the houses, pretending as if they did not exist at all. So, what better place to hide all the gold and all the jewels? 

“You, sneaky little brat,” the man hisses.

 “I would be lying if I said I am not impressed.” He would not be lying but along with his curving smile, he is only buying time. His lips give away no pleasure, but his smile is tinted with a gust of wit. “If only you knew how to seal away those lips of yours.”

“Silence!” the man snaps and raises his sword higher, resting it under Darcel’s chin. The blade is cold, but it is not something he is not used to. He flinches, barely, just enough to give off the impression that he is scared. He is not. 

The man sniffs in disgust. “Where is that little pet of yours?”

Darcel’s jaw is sharp. His smile dies out. “I would not say that if I were you.”

“I am not scared of her.”

You should be. 

The wind howls like a wolf under the moon and the candle lights go out. The sunbeam through the thin window is all that remains, such a broken light to fill a broken room. The gold and the jewels shine like the eyes of a demon in the woods. The man keeps his bloodshot gaze on Darcel like a predator hunting for its prey. He dares not look away as he pushes the sword deeper. Darcel only smiles. Another bit of movement and it might rip his throat apart, from the center like a plum but death is just another injury for him. The man grits his teeth, waiting for his peasant to say anything for he will not look away, but the room has grown hauntingly silent. 

“Nequam!” he yells. Worthless. 

But no answer comes. Darcel rests his head on the wall behind him as he keeps his focus on the man who looks somewhat shivered. He calls out to the peasant again, but it is only the wind who answers. The color of his auburn face has gone pale in two shakes of lamb’s tale. “What did you do?” 

“Me?” Darcel huffs. “You are the one who mocked her.”

The man stays expressively still and silent as the two of them wait for the wind to speak again. Darcel feels the silence grow inside of him. He thinks of himself. He thinks of where he is and where he stands. He tends to live inside of his head most of the time. It is never too late to mend. Us Aurelians do it relentlessly. His mother would often speak words that held better meaning in the tales he read and sometimes, his mother’s innocence was as ruinous as it was ignorant.

Thinking of his mother has always weakened what is left of his heart. He has grown into a man whom his mother would hate, and the thought has haunted him for quite some time now. He stays up at night, wondering, what if his mother were here today? What would she say? Would she excuse his imitation of greed to fit in this requiting world or would she look away, refusing to recognize the son she had once loved?

Stubbornly or irresolutely, there is no use wondering. 

He looks down and tries to distract himself, not knowing how else to wait for her. His eyes trail to the ring on the man’s right hand, forced on the knuckles of his thumb. He ventures the jewel on it, a dark and vicious ruby. It reminds him of the fire that took his family away, a dreadful memory embedded in mind.

He looks the man in the eye and says, “That is a woman’s ring.”

“You seem to be talking a lot for someone who is under my sword,” he replies sheepishly. 

“Do not get used to it. I am only in a good mood today.”

The man parts his lips to speak, the gaps in his teeth awfully visible but before he can speak, there is a loud noise that fills the pondering silence. Without beating a lash, the man runs towards the door from where Darcel had come just to fall on his back when she embraces quite a dramatic and quite a grand entrance. Sally Elias. Aurelia’s most wanted thief. A vacant lie. What is she really? The truth is far worse.  The paper faces do not know what she looks like. Her smile and her hair are covered with her dear dark cloak. 

The man runs towards her for she holds no weapon, but she shall not need one. She dodges him easily, leading the man to the door just for it to smack him and he groans. He may try to run away but whatever the cost, he will not leave the gold behind.

“This was a distraction!” the man yells. His voice is utterly annoying. “Nester!” Darcel assumes that is the peasant’s name. He looks at Sally to get a glimpse of what she has done with him. All he sees is green hidden behind dark, resembling how she had looked the first time he met her. She walks towards the man swiftly. He is crouched down on the floor. She slightly raises her chin and the man yells, dropping the sword, holding on to his waist with both his arms.

“What are you doing?” he asks through a breath, and she only puts both her hands at her back. She smiles. 

“Where is his money?”

The man yells inside his collar. “Take the gold if you-”

“We do not want the gold,” Sally says simply, voice as soft as a rose’s petal, “We want his money back.”

Darcel stands aside and only watches. He always does. The way she carries the wind at her feet and shifts the fights at her will. The common folk that live in the marketplace never understand how she seems to untangle breathes with her hands at her back and that is what makes her so deadly. If only the people were taught their history, they would know what she really is, but alas, the tale of corrupted Aurelians holds no meaning in this side of the Kingdom . Perhaps, that is a good thing. Sally keeps her face hidden. The world is only allowed to see her eyes, as keen as a dagger that may pierce the ground. She fights with her hands at her back, smiling her way through the enemy’s misery but if only the world knew of her drenched heart. 

Darcel has seen it. He has seen her without her cloak, and he has seen her with her eyes driven soft. He shall not bow to the whispers of the people. Behind this wicked surface of a monster lies a girl biting down the desperation written in her palms.

The man’s eyes have gone red. She has ceased his will to hide. She is bending his soul and the pain will only endlessly grow. He is yelling in his stomach, his body slowly trembling. He picks his head and gasps, looking at her with teary eyes.

“Stop,” he pleads, “I will tell you. I- I will tell you where his money is. Stop. Please.”

Sally lets go of her arms and the man lays down, hurdling in a ball. “Tell me.”

The man does not hesitate. “Her. It was her.”

“Who?”

“My niece,” he gasps. He looks away. Darcel can tell he is lying. 

Sally blinks. She brings her hand to remove the mask, exposing her distasteful smile. “Your niece,” she laughs. “Out of all of the things that you could have done with the money, you gifted it away?”

The man gets up and sits on his knees. He huffs, in surprise.

“Us traders, too, have a heart for our blood.”

“Right.” Sally rubs at her eyes. “And where is your niece?”

“You are stupid if you think I will tell you that.”

Sally nods, considering his reasoning. She opens her mouth to speak but inevitably, the room grows silent. She closes her eyes and purses her lips. The man is cowering, but Darcel knows that Sally is just slow when it comes to words. “We,” she starts, “We can-” she stops and looks at Darcel.

“Expose,” he offers.

“Exactly. We can expose you very easily now and when word gets out-”

The man frowns. “You are an illiterate,” he observes.

Sally stops. “I beg your pardon?”

The man stands up slowly and Sally lets him. He registers her hands and neither of them, Sally nor Darcel, knows what he is thinking. There is a frightening sort of look in his eyes and he is trying to hide it. “The vegetable shop,” he says finally.

Darcel expects Sally to ask what he meant when he called her an illiterate because she does not know what it means but she only crosses her arms and asks, “The vegetable shop?”

“Yes. The one near the worthless book shop.”

Darcel frowns. Book shops are anything but worthless.

“Right,” Sally says and heads for the door.

“Wait,” Darcel says, “Are you just going to leave him here? What if he is lying?”

Sally looks over her shoulder at the man and her soft eyes go despicably dry. She opens the door with her eyes still on him and both Darcel and the man gasp. The peasant. He is just reclining there, his lifeless body and his eyes white and open. His color has turned to a dusky sort of dull blue and Darcel feels like throwing up. There is no sign of blood anywhere. 

There never is.

“I think he knows very well enough,” she says, “That if he is lying, the gold in here will not be the only thing I melt. Surely, he would not want to go down the same path as his little mate over here.”

Being two kids who knew neither talents nor manners to sell, Sally and Darcel decided it was easy to just steal. The two of them had come to the marketplace to make up for all that was lacking in their home. They needed all that a simple home would ask for. They needed a fortune small enough for them to feed themselves. August was sick and Rodger forsaken. Sally promised that they would only steal once but as life showed them how simple and effortless it was to be something improper, the two gave in to the unseeming habits that they had adapted. Being two kids who were just kids, the world was never kind. They were deceived too, lied to, and betrayed by those who promised them a future. 

The world is cruel. It has taught them how to fend and fight for themselves. Darcel has only ever been good at making up stories and telling tales. He was good at lying. He is good at lying and Sally is good at being what she is, a monster. When her bloodline compelled her to believe that using her abilities would only bring harm her way, the world turned the table mercilessly. It was always easy to kill and mend the undead. It was always easy to be immoral. It is always easy to be immoral, is it not? 

Darcel follows her, giving the trader one last look. He remains still, letting go of the breaths Sally had stolen from him. They are outside the peasant houses now. Sally pulls the hood of her cloak over her head and the sun only gets to reflect in her eyes. She halts when they reach the streets and looks at Darcel.

“Why are you in a good mood today, Darcel?” she asks, fingers tapping on her forearm as she stands on her heels, her smile rather obtrusive. He considers replying. He considers telling her that he has written words worth of half of a tale sufficed. Half a book, you can say. 

The first tale that Darcel had crafted was a tale of people who lived amongst the clouds, hippy beings with hippy cloud dresses. His mother was his first audience. His brother and his father were his second. Now that they are gone, Sally is the one who lends her ears to him. Even though she does not know how to read, Darcel prefers her to be the only one who gets to see his fondness for words. However, he tends to keep the news to himself for a little while longer. Instead, he questions her. “So, you were there. Why did you take so long?”

“When it comes to the element of surprise, patience is a virtue,” she says, “Is that not what you said when I asked you to read what you wrote the other night?”

“I am astonished at the fact that you understood what I meant at all.”

“You lost me.”  

“It means surprised.”

“Right.” Sally shrugs. “I knew that.”

Darcel lets out a low laugh, mind quivering over the knowledge that Sally does not know what the word virtue means either, but he smiles at her weird attempt of whatever this is. Whatever the world carves for them, Darcel has always tried to keep up with her. It is strange. He is different when he is with her.

“You also said something else. Wait, I think I remember.”

Darcel lets her take her time, as she swallows her cheeks, biting the insides like a child. He has never been fond of talking so he lets her do it for as long as she pleases.

“The world makes easy peace for the evil,” she announces, “Is that what you said, or have I made a fool of myself again?”

He raises his brows. “Close enough. I said pace. Not peace.”

“Same things, are they not?”

“Hardly.” It is a habit that comes to her often, repeating his words from memory even if she does not know what most of them mean. Darcel tries to hide his content and says, “I would not call us evil though.” It is more a sentiment to himself than to her. 

“The people back home would.”

Do their words matter? Of course, they do. Sally has spent her childhood at the end of the Perelian’s terrain, in between the Kingdom  and its coast. She has respect for all the mockery in her people and she shall hear out every word they have to offer. Aurelians who live there are devoid of manners. They do not have the luxury of any sort and they do not have the courage nor fortune to afford the simplest of education. Except, education is not something light for Darcel’s kind. He is a Perelian or at least he was one. Perelians are long gone but their history remains. 

He is a Perelian by blood, but his heart belongs to Sally’s land, however improper the people may seem. Before she was married off, his mother had lived in the same terrain as Sally. She was fond of the sea and would often travel all the way to the coast just to see the seagulls. That is how she caught his father’s eye, driven towards the sea just like a Perelian: menders of all the waters in their world. Darcel’s father would call her that, a seagull. Just like Sally, she could neither read nor write so Darcel’s father would help her. 

The days that he has spent reading to Sally, even the simplest of words, has had him on chokehold, driving him painfully saddened as the memories of his mother haunted him. His father’s straitening anger and gracious heart, along with his mother’s gleaming eyes. Their alluring faces slowly leave his mind. He wonders if the reason that his memories are fading is because he is growing old. 

Or it is because he is deceased.

They have reached the gravel streets beneath sunlight and noise. The marketplace of Aurelia, however filthy and loud, is just another home for these two thieves. Sally holds her hood above her head tightly. Golden brown locks are gently placed on her forehead, just above her thin brows. They walk beside walls and huddle in corners, avoiding anything. 

Darcel bows down to her level. “Why the heavens are you smiling?”

Distant cries and baffling screams of common folk rings in his ears like endless beats of a big drum. Sally shrugs as her tiny feet cross the street. She flexes her fingers in broad daylight.

The priceless ring on her finger glints more that all the gold that they have left behind. Her porcelain cheeks puff in merriment and he parts his mouth. “You stole it,” he states, nonplussed. 

“Do not sound so dull. This ring right here means three meals a day for as long as we are here.”

Darcel’s eyes confuse him when his vision blurs. There are too many people, and it is too bright. “I am not so sure about that.”

“It could cost us nillions-”

Darcel scowls. “The word is million,” he says, “And you give that hypocrite too much credit. I bet on all a diamond is worth that this diamond is not even real.”

She spreads her arms wide and huffs. “Oh, ruin all my fun, will you?”

Sally follows down the path back to the inn where they are staying and right there, inside the collar of his coat, where no one shall see him, Darcel lets himself smile just a little bit.

The ring did not, in fact, cost them millions. 

“This,” the girl squeaks as she hovers the ring a little higher in the air, balancing it in between her tiny fingers, “This is not a ring.” Sally drops her arms on the desk. She has her cloak removed, bare and dressed in only soft futon and trousers. Her hair is worn out like it always is, and Darcel is more used to this sight than green eyes hidden behind black.

“Are you blind?” she asks the little girl, struggling to keep an accent. “This is a ring. Cannot you see?”

The girl drops her eyes. “Maybe, but this diamond is not worth how much you claim it to be. This diamond is not even a diamond. It is a rusted metal painted with silver and agony.”

“I am an artist,” says Sally, running her hand through her hair, “And I assure you that never in my life have I seen such paint.”

Darcel pulls her further into the crowd behind them, leaving the poor girl alone. He is close now, close enough for her to understand his wailing whispers. “At this point, we are just embarrassing ourselves. Let us use the gold coins that August has given us. I believe I have a few left on me.”

Sally crosses her arms, slightly nudging another in the crowd. “We still must find the woman who stole your money and blame me if I say I do not have the strength to steal and kill twenty guards.”

“Then what do you suggest we do?”

“Have this woman believe that this metal is worth one meal at least.”

“She has no use of metal,” he says, bringing his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. “How about this? We do not eat tonight at all.”

Sally looks at him like he has slapped her. She parts her lips and gasps. A little too dramatic if you ask him. “I am not going to sleep on an empty stomach.”

“For heaven’s sake, Sally! You go ask her for a loan and I shall find us a seat.”

She considers him, eyeing him like her nature demands her to. She has such wolf eyes; they always seem to eat him up. “Why cannot you talk her into giving us a loan and I find us a seat?” she asks through half eyes.

“You know I do not like talking to people.”

The Blue Inn can be considered heaven for thieves that spare the Kingdom  frontline and prefer the midst of the marketplace. The Inn offers closure and shelter for those who vow to steal from the Inn itself and Sally has always liked to steal spare. They go by different names when hidden under their masks. Everyone, each of the town’s folk recognizes them separately. Malum. Diaboli. Daemonium. Each meaning is more gruesome than the last. But here in the Inn, they are just two thieves, trying to make their way through this entity.

Trying to find a place to sit and dine is like figuring out some vast contrivance. The food is served under the Inn and heaven forsake the people here are like wild beasts. There is the smell of rum and wine and a baffling sort of scent. Darcel figures that it is soup, possibly. Chatter fills the crowded room. Laughter and mimicking, fun and further. Mere folk run around like pride of freshly fed lions, chattering like old adults trying to make the most of their time. Spider webs hang at every corner of the ceiling and dust is settling itself on the dining room and the cabinets that hang at the head of the desks that are home to those who work in this Inn. He finds them a place to sit at the far end of the middle of the room, close enough to hear any sort of bother and far enough to avoid any gust of trouble. The people are unnecessarily loud. 

Darcel has met many that prefer the sounds of gossip and greed fly around but he himself prefers the silence of the night. The minutes of his life when only him, his words and his muse breathe in the dead before dawn.

Sally comes with her head held high, looking down at everyone with a face plastered with cement but as soon as she sits down, her lips curve upward. She places her back on the wooden chair and relaxes. “Guess what,” she says.

“You killed her.”

“No,” she grimaces, “She did not give me a loan, but she did give me something else.”

He bobs his head to the side. “A curse?”

“Pity, Darcel.”

She stretches her arms and legs like a cat, showing off the faded fabric of her sleeves. They are rolled up, the bare bandages underneath. She had always liked wearing gloves, but she prefers something opaque to cover her crawling scars now. She would rather not see the sight of blood at all. It scares her. It reminds her of something she wishes to forget. The bandages end at the bone on her wrists. 

Scars are such pretty things. They resemble pain in a poetic manner and as he believes, pain is a beauty on its own. She carries the weight of such poetry on her arms. They are cruel reminders of what she did to herself. She painted pretty pictures on her arms after what happened to him. He is the reason she is a thief today; he is the reason she has such vile morals, and he is the reason she fears blood like a child would fear the dark. 

I did not know where else to go.

 He remembers. He remembers all of it. He remembers the way the rain slammed his windows shut that night only for her to come knocking on his door. He remembers the way she had held her gaze and the way she had been trembling under the full moon. I did not know where else to go. Darcel does not find life infuriating now that he is dead. He just finds life vacant now. It is only his debt that keeps him from peeling off his skin again. His debt to Sally. 

Even though he has felt out of touch with his heart for years now, he tells himself, again and again, that at least he has a purpose to go on. What good will it do to leave this world when you have been pleaded to stay a little longer? He has the promise of protection, however immoral it may be, and he has the promise of an alliance. He tells himself that, even if he can no longer feel, at least he has someone at his side who can. 

All these years living a dead life with her has only taught him how frustrating this world really is, but he shall not leave. Not yet. There is still a debt to be paid. A life for a life, as it should be. 

There is a man who is standing at the tableside with a cigar in between his fingers. Darcel looks up to him then at Sally.

“Sally Elias,” the man says, “What a pleasant surprise.” His voice is thick, and his nose stretched out over his bright face. He bows his head slightly and offers her his free hand for her to shake it. Sally does not.

“Do I know you?” she asks him instead. At times like these, Sally talks with such a formal accent, resembling how he used to talk, the boy whose death has caused the death of so many more. The boy who has drawn this path for Sally to blindly follow. 

“I am afraid not, but I do know you. You are the astray guard’s sister, are you not?”

And there it is. His name. Darcel tries to render on why his mind is convincing him that he has seen this man before. He holds his waist with the hand that Sally had refused and a cigar with the other. The name that has escaped his lips only makes Sally get up from her seat and push her way across the crowd. Darcel taps at the wooden table once and then twice before he gets up to follow her. One moment, they seem to be living as children would, simply, but the next, life gets so bitter. Pain is such a sullen sort of mockery and a cluster of embitter words that the world pricks you with for all times it saw you smiling. 

“I suggest that you do not do that again,” he tells the man on his way out. He is not used to fending for her given how she is quite capable of fending for herself, but it feels so unfair letting her fight this alone. If anything, Darcel misses him too.

The street is now empty outside. Sally has made her way under the moon. It is only half bare tonight. She stands there, in the middle of the path outside the Inn. The night sky has turned into a reminiscing shade of blue. It is as if it is going to rain. All tragic ends happen in the rain. He would always say that so carelessly.

“Sally,” he calls out to her.

“Leave me alone.”

Darcel crosses the street just enough to get close to her. The street beneath him is cold even though he is wearing boots. The weather here is as bizarre as the color of the sky that changes its mood so easily. “Stop this foolish behavior, Sally. Come, we must eat.”

Sally drops her face, and the moon no longer catches her gaze. Waves drifted too far away and if there is anything that has a home inside of what is left of his heart, it is the sea. 

“Tell that man to go before I have his head,” she says simply.

There is no use tugging at her mind now that she has been reminded of all of it. The freckles on her nose have dried out and her eyes have turned from something soft to something deadly. Blood is all his name reminds her of and tonight she will haunt before she lets herself forget so maybe, it is better to let her go. Sally moves around and he knows she is going to the room that they are staying in. “I am not hungry,” she murmurs along her way. 

Darcel closes his eyes, body dropping at how his words hold no use, but he still turns around. “There is no use in denying any of this.”

The night above them watches how two kids stand stranded from whatever their homes once were. It is funny how quickly the clock turns. The time is bitter tonight. The moon watches the two of them as well, such a tainted smile she is giving. It is a shame. Darcel has always been in love with the moon but on nights like these he can only look at her and ponder on the existence of all these tragedies. He tries to bite back his bitter words, but his teeth are not sharp enough.

“Your brother is gone, Sally,” he says and watches as the color drains from her cheeks. “Novah Elias is dead.”

 

Chapter 2

 

D

arcel pulls his sleeves down all the way to his knuckles. There is the taste of flames and summer lingering on his tongue. He runs his hand through his tousled hair and winces. He is wearing dull white attire with a black topcoat and his eyes burn with the sickness of the sun. The world mocks and laughs at him as he glares at himself in the broken mirror near the fruit shop in the marketplace. He remembers his face being golden and lucent. It looks rotten now, like a dead fruit or a rusted wedge of metal. His skin is depleted. He looks pale and surreal, as a ghost would. He looks dead.

He recoils at his withered grey eyes, tracing his fingers from his brows to his sharp jaw as he looks back and forth from the broken mirror on the brick wall to where Sally is standing in front of the shop. She has one hand on her ear and the other aggressively thumping on the wood in front of her. There is chattering and yelling about the marketplace and Darcel can even hear animals crying. She has been in a dry mood since last night, getting angry easily. Darcel knows there is no point in waiting for her to apologize or to ask for an apology.

He walks towards her, hands in his pocket and leans in. “I do not mean to sound childlike, but this tunic is making me want to peel my skin off,” he says, and all Sally does in return is stare at him mulishly. Darcel pulls at the fabric over his chest, willing to distract her from the mud of memoirs in her head. 

She pushes forward and tugs at his coat, forcing him to stand alert, and smooths his collar. “That is what you deserve for wearing such a crinkled shirt,” she says dryly.

“Your vocabulary upsets me.” His eyes flicked to the crease between her brows. She does that when she is tired. “I could not find anything else in black.” It is a sneaky attempt for her to joke around and make fun of him, but Sally only turns towards the empty shop again. He will be lying if he says he does not regret saying what he said the last night. Stop this foolish behavior, Sally. Guilt can come so easily sometimes. What if he apologizes? Will it do any good?

Instead, he asks, “What is taking the woman so long?”

“Heaven knows.” 

Sally leans on the woodenware of the shop beside him and sighs. The two stand there surrounded by awful noises. Darcel brings his arms to rest beneath his heavy head. He has always felt suffocated in between too many people and now, he just feels trapped. He glances to his right. Sally is squinting her eyes under the light of the sun, the burnt freckles on the tip of her dainty nose remarkably prominent. They look like brown constellations that are dancing on her skin. 

It is after a while when she reaches out for one of the vegetables displayed in the shop. A fresh and round tomato.

“Please tell me that you did not pick that up to eat it bare.”

She plays with it like a ball, throws it in the air and catches it in mere seconds. “I picked it up because I want to rub it on your face.”

“I see that you are still mad.”

The sun shines a merciful gradient shade on her light brown hair, and it makes her look equally petty and pretty. Sun kissed, he would rather say. The crimson color on her cheeks and the little lift of her bones makes her look ethereal. The pale skin of hers compliments her dark green eyes, deep as if they are emeralds embedded inside of her. It is the wildest shade of green he has ever witnessed. One moment they are light and the other moment they are dark but as a writer like him would say, they are divine all the time. Sally painted herself with a traditional look, a sleeveless brown blouse over her white tunic and trousers that belong to Darcel.

Speaking of Darcel, he is wearing a long coat even though the sun blazes through everything tonight. He has adorned himself with long boots and even longer gloves. Every inch of his skin is covered except for his face and his hands.

Heavy footsteps approach. “You two,” a rough voice speaks from behind them, raspy as by thorns. A man dressed in baggy clothes with thick greasy hair and just as greasy skin. He comes to them with expecting eyes. He looks at a piece of paper in his hand and then at them. Has he figured our identities out? Darcel wonders.

“What do you two think you are doing stealing tomatoes from this old woman?” he asks them but with his one eye closed, he grins like an idiot.

“It is honestly her fault for leaving the shop unattended,” says Sally.

This man has a belligerent scar underneath his left eye and that is why he is having trouble opening it. “Do any of you kids happen to be Sally Elias?”

Sally groans, pushing her head to the side. “Not again,” she whines.

“I am pretty sure you know which one of us is Sally,” Darcel says, his voice an attempted imitation of respect. It is a girl’s name, Sally. How could the man not know?

“Sally,” he says, and bows his head. “Forgive me for I do not know your last name. He forbids himself from telling anyone.”

That gets her attention. Sally holds onto her forearm and stands up right now. She has thrown the tomato away. “He?” she asks through her curious cat eyes.

He is looking at the crowd of people that surround them. “Do you kids know why our Kingdom  is called Aurelia?” he asks, seemingly talking over himself.

Darcel cringes at the man’s way of making small talk but he sees Sally tilting her head. Eager to know more, she is. That is how it has always been. She stops spinning like the world when someone says anything remotely regarding her brother. This man has not spoken of her last name, nor has he shown any speck of recognition but sometimes even words as him and you seem to get her attention if spoken in such a manner. Desperation surrounds her throat as if it is ready to choke her. She will gladly take whatever the world offers her if what it offers are specks that shall lead her to the answer to the question that has driven her mad. Who killed him? Who killed Novah? Darcel is curious too, why shall he lie, but Sally is more than simply curious. She is off her own head, fraught and forlorn. 

Darcel leans forward. “It is because Aurelia means golden,” he says. “The righteous and moral color of our Kingdom .” He shrugs. “Or so the nobles seem to believe.” 

He chews on his own dry lips and looks at Sally. Let us get out of here. She gives him an unripe shake of her head. No, not yet.

“Who are you?” That is Sally. 

“The woman you are looking for isn’t a sales lady. She is a noble, a woman you can never find,” he says as he sticks out his chin, his feet barely dangling from his body. Darcel has a few inches on his man. He looks down at him and winces. 

“Let us go, Sally,” Darcel says it out loud now. 

Sally looks to the crowd of people to her right. She shall choose her words wisely but there is only so much wisdom you can get when you are Sally Elias. “I will not ask you again,” she warns. “Tell me who sent you here.”

His rough tone and his rough attire have given him away. Plain and poor, he seems to be. He is low on money. Darcel thinks. Someone bribed him. But who? And why? He wants to push the man away, but he knows that there is something hidden in those yet to be spoken words. His head seems to be speaking ahead of him but a distant voice in his mind whines. I want to go home.

This man puts one of his hands in the pocket of his trousers, as if searching for something. He takes a step towards the street. “I shall be on my wa-”

Sally steps forward. Darcel did not even see her take out her dagger. She has the face of a wolf, her hair, and her smile, devious and cunning. There is a false smile that engages her lips as she quickly puts the dagger in front of the man’s stomach. Darcel feels a quick shudder go through his spine. The heat has faded away from his skin. 

It is the same speck of irritation and fear on his face. Darcel has seen faces like his go through his line of sight one too many times now. The man keeps his eyes front, but Darcel can feel his posture weak and afraid. There are too many people for Sally to twist the dagger, but it is just an act. She does not need the blade. A twist of her hand and the man shall see his end. 

Sally opens her mouth to speak but before she can say anything, the man tries to work his legs. He tries to flee. She lets him, but before his meek legs can take him anywhere, she pushes him in the shop, over the desk and over the tomatoes and cabbages. They grab no attention as the three of them corner themselves behind the stall of such a small open shop. 

She hovers the dagger over his throat now and Darcel hears the man swallow as he just watches from afar. He remembers the first time he had met her, bathed in the moonlight and he wonders, often, every time since, what anyone would think when they look at her for the first time? What do they see? Do they notice her bewitching eyes first as he had? Or do they see her Cheshire smile? Many people would think that they know everything about her for how petite she is but everything that they know is wrong. Sally is a predator hidden in silver smiles and aureate eyes. 

She sighs and shoves the dagger a little further. She would not dare cut his throat open, but he does not know that. “Tell me who sent you here,” she roars, her voice is heavy now as if she speaks from the depth of her throat, forcing the ache out. 

The man coughs, trembling and Darcel can see sweat swimming down his temple. “It is always knives and knives,” he whimpers. 

“This one will not hurt you if you tell me what I ask of you.”

“You shall not have your answer either way,” he manages, “The man- he refuses to show his face. I do not know what business you and this man have but I am not lying when I say I do not-” He fiddles with his hands and when Sally leans back a little, he reaches out for his pocket and pulls out a piece of paper- no- an envelope. “I was only making small talk. He wanted you to have this.”

Sally takes hold of the envelope immediately and pulls it over her head. Darcel sighs and takes the letter from her. She drags the dagger near his face and keeps it there. “Leave,” she whispers. 

Darcel stands there, his palms hugging his waist as he watches the man get up. His body melts in relief, his face no longer stiff. He runs for his life and Sally makes her way out of the shop. 

“That was devastating to watch,” she says. Darcel has never been ignorant of blood, murder, or other evil heretics the Kingdom  had to offer but he knows that no matter how many years pass, he will never really get used to her. 

“Did you really have to go that far?” he asked her, voice kept mild. “He is going to tell the guards and-”

“He will be dead by then,” she says and lets out a sharp laugh. Her eyes have turned to a darker shade as the sky has painted itself orange. 

“He probably already is.”

*

 

“The Royal court?” he asks, narrowing his eyes. “You are saying that the woman has fled to the Royal court?”

Elcho looks through the thin frame of his glasses, his brown eyes mixing with the sun on the glass. “I had reckoned that a man like you would be smarter than this.”

Darcel pushes his back on the wood behind him and sighs, his skull going numb with the cold. He thinks of Sally who is still sleeping upstairs, eyes shut as if no one else has ever led a simpler life. He looks at Elcho in disbelief but if he has learned anything within the years he has spent in the Blue Inn, it is the fact that this old man has no cells of humor inside of him.

“How did she even get inside?”

Elcho takes a sip of his tea before he answers. “The court offers tours to foreigners this time of the year, it is quite easy to get in if you ask me. Surely, the guards will not let you lay a step in the Royal family’s chambers but this woman, she just needed a place to hide with your money. I doubt that she is keen on meeting the King and Queen.”

Darcel bites the inside of his cheeks. “Then I am on my own am I not?” he asks. “You will not help me?”

Elcho regards him with only a curve of his lips. It is the most that he can offer. “As much as I would like to say that I shall help you,” he says, “You know us traders do not like to involve ourselves with anything regarding the court.” He says the words like they are bits of poison. He spits them.

“Very well then,” says Darcel as he gets up. There is no point in hurdling any further. “I think it is best if I leave it to karma.”

“Not a wise decision, I tell you.”

He sighs. The room he is sitting in is the cleanest in this Inn. It has a tainted scent of a garden, you can say. The wood on its floor does not reek of a deceased sight. Elcho sits behind his table. A map is carved on the wall behind him. Darcel remembers being a kid and trying to drag his finger across all the places he wanted to go. Now, he would rather just rest in one room for the rest of his morbid days.

He speaks after a quiet pause. “What would a wise decision be, then?”

“You and I both know that karma does you no favors.”

“Well, it is too bad I cannot go to the court myself.”

Elcho says nothing.

“No,” murmurs Darcel. “No one is going to the court.”

“It would be nice to see the halls, you know. For once, you may not need to imagine.”

Elcho is deranged if he thinks that Darcel holds any sort of longing for the court of his Kingdom . He may have read of princes and Princesses dancing in ballrooms with fancy attires and seldom gold in between their delicate fingers but he shall not bow to their mockery. Tours. Such a feisty excuse for them to show off their fake decency, and all in the name of charity. 

Where was their decency hiding when their fellow Perelians were left in numbers of none? What of the families that had been shattered in the fire that day? Darcel has been left just to witness their ignorance. Only her, she knows what he really is. He turns the doorknob slowly. “I will think of it,” he says and does not wait for Elcho to answer.

The memory is faint but somehow still alive in his mind. 

Ever since Darcel was a kid, he would puff his cheeks in merriment every time his father brought him a book from the outskirts of Aurelia. Whether it was a tale or just an anecdote, he was in love. He was a child with a bright spirit and even brighter skin. He was a child who ran on the sand beside the sea barefoot. He would make his mother listen to his father as he read to the two of them. He would savor every word as if it were a meal of a lifetime. He would wake his mother early, just to take her near the sea and she would always smile through her sleepy eyes. He still remembers the cold nights and the votive candles on his mother’s bedside and how he would stay up at night learning how to read, and as the years went by the little boy who once found his heart in words grew up to be the one who wrote them.

His family lived near the beachfront of Aurelia. The people were not even considered part of the Kingdom . Perelians, they would call themselves. It was a simple word emanated from both Perennial and Aurelians. The people lived near the coast for centuries, mainly because of what gifts they were given. Abilities to mend and shift water as they pleased. Abilities that Darcel believes do not exist anymore. If they had, could they not have saved his family from the fire or is it he who deserves the blame? After everything, does Darcel really deserve a second chance?

His brother was putting on his shoes on the porch that day. He had just learned how to tie his laces. He was smiling so widely, his cheeks elated with a pink flush. Darcel stood at his side as he waited. He was a quiet boy with a loud smile. He picked at his own fingers, eagerly patient. He still remembers his mother’s words as she spoke from behind them. She was huddled in her brown shawl, her black hair spread across her shoulders. Close the stove as you come back. They told her that they would be gone till sunrise. I am going to bed. The night is cold. Take your coat as you go. The two of them only nodded their heads. They did not take their coats, nor did they come back home as sunrise greeted them. They were kids too stubbornly in love with the sea to focus on anything else. 

The sky met the water in his eyes and the sun was amidst the crimson and the cerulean. They stared in awe, the two of them stood as their shoulders brushed. He saw the glint in his brother’s eyes, and he still remembers how he learned that that glint was what had consumed him. Love likes to take and take and take, and the funny thing is how it is never enough. No matter how much you offer it, love will always demand more of you. The sea. Darcel’s brother was in love with the sea and what the sea demanded of him was something that cost him lives.

There were no waves that dawn. The water was silent, but it was as silent as it was pretty, breathtaking, alluring. The alluring sea was watching the two of them. It was waiting. Waiting for them to find out what they had done. Screams surrounded and when Darcel and his brother looked over their shoulders, they saw smoke. He remembers his brother running back and before he pushed himself on his feet he said, Stay here, I shall come back for you.  

It was the last thing he ever said to him.

Darcel was just nine years old when his family died in the fire. He walked through the map of Aurelia for days, surviving on nothing but water. It was a wintry night when a woman found him curled up in old clothes resting his head on a broken wall. She had spoken with such a golden voice, he almost thought that he would not have to be afraid any longer. A raw hope of nothing but bad omens. She was a trader, a criminal with a pastel disguise. Darcel had read stories of the orphans who would eventually get their happy endings. He still wonders when he will get his happy ending.