The Medievals 2 Read online

  THE

  MEDIEVALS

  Book Two

  Frazier Brothers

  For our sons.

  May you always live by the distractions of your heart, seek wisdom, offer kindness, and find the words that will begin your conversation with eternity.

  {Wendolyn}

  Wendolyn is dead.

  In another life, she can still feel her young bones and hear her own breathing.

  In another life, the night sky is crowded, but her mind is clear. She is still within the familiar embrace of the Cumbrian mountains, and she still believes that Thorne is her father. Her memories are for her and her alone, and all her memories bring her comfort

  In another life, she is a warrior maiden, and she survives. But in this life, emptiness has taken the shape of her body. Wendolyn’s mind is nothing more than a swollen bruise coated in darkness. And syllables of agony no longer hold meaning.

  This is death, Wendolyn thinks.

  She is forever bound to this cold stone slab, which is now an open grave. Here, in the Memory Chamber, she is forced to exist without stars. Without the Northern Basket.

  Instead, she must endure the fracturing of her mind, the taste of metal in her mouth, the eternal numbness of her soul.

  After Wendolyn tried to escape from the bowels of this mysterious place where shrieking ghosts roam -- and after Waldron squeezed the life from the spider right before her eyes -- Wendolyn was dragged by the saurians to the Memory Chamber and strapped to the stone table.

  Since that time, Waldron has spent endless strings of hours digging through her mind, pausing only for his own purposes.

  He has grown mercurial and impatient with Wendolyn. Unlike before, Wendolyn is no longer returned to the dark cell to recover from the searing of her memories. Instead, she remains with the back of her head always touching the immovable stone, as if the table is now a part of her.

  As if she is now inanimate as well.

  At first, there was pain. Every time Waldron put his finger to her temple, all parts of her burned: from her head down to her toes. But as Waldron has relentlessly tortured her mind with his touch, the pain has faded, and now it is gone completely.

  And as the pain faded, so did her senses.

  Wendolyn has lost the feeling in her toes and her legs and her fingers and her arms, and that feeling has not returned. It is as if nothing below her neck exists anymore. And if she were asked to get up from this stone slab and walk, Wendolyn is not certain she could.

  As Waldron warned would happen with endless searches of her mind, Wendolyn has forgotten who she once was beyond her sorrow. “Likely, you will lose those memories that warm you. Slowly, but eventually, you will forget who you are beyond your sorrow and your pain. And your nightmares will become a season that lasts forever.” Those were Waldron’s cautionary words. And those words are now proving true.

  The memories that haunt her most are memories that are not her own: the gruesome murder of Waldron’s father; Waldron’s flesh burning with the hot branding iron; the silver mask being sealed to his scarred face. These memories have become the winter season that lasts forever.

  And try as she might, she can not remember the things that mean the most to her.

  Thorne is becoming only a name to her.

  The boy in the King’s Market: he no longer has a face in her mind.

  Everything vital within her is disappearing.

  Soon, Wendolyn expects she will forget even her own name. And so, without pain or a name to tell her that she is alive, Wendolyn can only presume that she is dead. And death is now a privilege.

  ◆◆◆

  “You have made this difficult, Wendolyn. It does not have to be so.”

  Waldron’s words fall into her mind, like rocks being dropped into a deep, empty well. And it is his voice that tells her that, sadly, she is still alive.

  “Why do you insist on protecting the very people that would see you banished beyond their borders if they knew what you truly were?" her masked captor asks.

  By now, Waldron knows that Wendolyn cannot respond. For days, she has been unable to speak. Not only has she lost the strength to move her bones, but she no longer has the energy to give voice to her thoughts. Her mouth is so dry that her lips are stuck together.

  But he can read her mind.

  “I do not wish harm on anyone,” Wendolyn thinks.

  “Even as they wish harm upon you?” Waldron asks.

  “They are my friends,” Wendolyn thinks, hoping to convince herself as much as Waldron.

  Waldron circles the table as he speaks, his molten laugh simmering beneath his words.

  “Poor Wendolyn," he mocks. "They are not your friends. And you know this deep within you. Were they truly your friends, they would not call you a witch and turn away from you. Were they truly your friends, they would come for you, would they not? They would fight to save you. But no one is coming to your rescue. The humans have abandoned you. They care nothing for your fate.”

  She knows Waldron is right. No one is coming for her. While she had held onto hope that the glowing petals that Thorne had sent off into the night had successfully signaled for help, that hope has been extinguished by time.

  Wendolyn's fate is now in the hands of this red-eyed monster. Whether she lives or dies, or dies over and over again, will be determined by Waldron.

  “You must know that I care for you, Wendolyn. Even as you betray me, as you attempt to escape, I still want to be your ally.” As Waldron speaks, Wendolyn searches his words for sincerity.

  “Why?” Wendolyn thinks, surrender seeping into her mind. “Why do you want this staff? What will you do with it?”

  “The question, Wendolyn, is what will we do with it?” Waldron responds. “We are the same, you and I. We are the Others. We are the Forbiddens. We have been forced to live in the shadows.”

  Distant words reach out and touch the edge of Wendolyn’s mind: “If you must hide in the day, always know where the shadows live.”

  Wendolyn has a vague memory of Thorne saying these words, words that were said when day still existed. When there was light to beat back the shadows.

  But now, Wendolyn does not simply live within the shadows. She is learning what it is to be the shadows. To be the darkness.

  “The humans,” Waldron says. “They do not deserve our mercy. They deserve only our wrath.”

  Waldron leans over her. With his right hand, he reaches out and caresses Wendolyn’s chin. It should have a chilling effect, but it strangely gives Wendolyn no sensation at all.

  “Imagine it, Wendolyn," he prompts. "Together we can be the Last Fate of the Realm. We will destroy the humans. Set fire to their lands. And then, from the ashes, a new people will rise. A people that you will rule.”

  The possibility grows in her mind, as if Waldron’s suggestion is a seed forcefully taking root within her own imagination. She sees an enchanting spray of fire emanating from her fingertips and then racing across the Nine Territories. She sees the Four Winds under her command, blowing over entire villages. She sees rain drowning the lands.

  The sight of this sweeping destruction sends a dark energy through her veins. These images of ruin call to her, excite her in a way that shocks and scares her. Try as she might to suppress the thrill, Wendolyn’s mind is alive with a seductive evil.

  But then something stops her cold.

  A face nearly forgotten.

  The eyes of the boy from the King’s Market. As blue as truth.

  “No,” Wendolyn thinks, her mind shuddering as it rebels against these dark visions. “I do not want that.”

  She turns her face away from Waldron, freeing her chin from his touch. She squeezes her eyelids together as tightly as she can, hoping t
o force out the alluring images.

  “Of course you want it, Wendolyn,” Waldron says, as if he has teased her lips with a drop of sweet juice. “You cannot deny that there is something inside of you that would relish the chance to wield your power over the humans. You and I both know that there is something fighting for life inside you, pressing its will against your skin, pushing against your mind, trying ever so hard to show itself to you.”

  Waldron pauses as he leans in, his glowing red eye seeming to penetrate her mind.

  “Do you deny this?” he asks.

  Wendolyn cannot deny it.

  She has felt the being that wants to control her. The Nameless Fear that haunts her. The monster that has awoken and now stirs within her, moving her mind to places she does not want to go.

  Waldron continues without an answer from Wendolyn: “I am offering you something no one else could possibly imagine. I am offering to bend the world to your fingertips. I am offering to fulfill a destiny that can only be yours. But to do that, I must have the staff from the Sorcerer of Light. You must show me where it is.”

  “I do not know where it is. No one told me,” Wendolyn thinks. And then, unable to stop herself, another thought slips through the transom of her mind to reach Waldron: “Even if I knew, I would not tell you.”

  Waldron’s sudden anger manifests in the pulsing glow of his red eye, a channel for his fiery emotions.

  “You will tell me!” he roars.

  Waldron pushes his fingers against Wendolyn’s forehead -- hard -- and then touches his other hand to the Rune Stone. He sends her into the memory search so quickly that she feels as if she has been dropped from a high precipice, her body weightless in the air. And then her mind is spiralling through memories, hitting them like branches on a tree as she continues downward.

  The spider dying in midair, crushed by Waldron.

  Thorne’s blood spilling into the snow.

  Leeta whispering to Etan and Landon: “Witch. The witch has found us.”

  Galen’s haunted eyes.

  Her upside-down reflection in the lake as Thorne cuts her hair.

  Wendolyn hiding in the hole she dug, hoping to evade Thorne’s search.

  The bouncing of the wagon as Thorne takes her from her home in the night.

  The first time she skinned her knee on a rock and saw blood.

  Wendolyn falls faster and faster through the memories, speeding downward through time. But as she reaches the last of her memories -- the very first moments of consciousness that she can remember -- the images do not stop.

  Instead, Wendolyn seems to fall through the very floor of her mind, and a new memory appears:

  The crooked fingers of trees invade her vision as she holds tightly to a horse that jounces wildly, its mane whipping in the air as the horse races through a moonlit forest.

  The trees are massive and red-skinned, the ancient leviathans of the Eternal Forest. A silvery rain angles down through the branches and pelts her cheeks and hair. The path is muddy, and she can hear the sloshing of the horse’s hooves.

  With one hand gripping the reins, she guides the horse down a path that forks off to the right, where the trees begin to open up ahead.

  Eeeeeee-eeeee!

  The call of a bird sends a chill up her spine, and she pulls back on the reins, stopping the horse in its tracks. She searches the trees, her eyes jumping from branch to branch. But the source of the bird call does not reveal itself to her.

  Next to her, another rider stops.

  It is a young bearded man, donning a hooded brown cloak. He sits atop the horse and gives her a look of concern, his eyes a deep shade of violet.

  “What is it, Danara? Why are you stopping?” he asks her, rain running through his hair and down his cloak.

  “A darkling. I heard its call,” she says.

  “Are you sure it was not the wind through the trees?” the man asks.

  She shakes her head. “No, Bwalen, it was a darkling.”

  As Wendolyn lies there on the stone table in the Memory Chamber, Waldron’s fingers transferring the memory from her mind to the Rune Stone, she struggles to make sense of this scene.

  The man on the horse, Bwalen she called him, is foreign to her. And the mind she inhabits, it is not hers. Nor the body: the fingers too long, the belly too heavy.

  Bwalen now scans the trees, looking for the darkling.

  Then, when Bwalen’s eyes seem to settle on a branch, he looks to her and points up into the canopy of the forest. She looks in that very direction, and she can make out the black feathers of the darkling, hiding behind the leaves of a high-up branch.

  She watches as Bwalen reaches out his hand, holding his fingers open in the air, as if calling the bird to him. And while the darkling comes, it does not do so of its own will.

  Instead, the darkling is pulled from its perch by an invisible force, its wings flapping wildly as it is drawn through the air toward Bwalen. Finally, squawking for its life, the bird finds its grave within the palm of Bwalen’s hand as the darkling seems to simply go silent, moving no more.

  “We must press on, Danara,” Bwalen urges, dropping the bird to the ground. “We can reach the Truscans by morning. They will give us shelter beneath the Tree of Ten Thousand Roots and keep us hidden from these winged spies.”

  “I cannot wait until morning,” she says to Bwalen. “We must find a shelter here, now.”

  She looks to her belly, putting a hand on the paunch that protrudes. She can feel something moving. Something living within her.

  A baby.

  Back in the Memory Chamber, the image of the belly and the pulse of the baby disappear as Waldron removes his finger from Wendolyn’s forehead.

  Wendolyn gasps for air, as if she just surfaced after being submerged beneath water for too long. She is disoriented, unsure of what she has just seen. What she has just felt.

  Two heartbeats.

  That is what she felt. She could feel her own heart beating, and then she could feel the beating heart of the baby in her belly.

  No, not her belly. Someone else’ belly. Wendolyn was inside someone else’s memory.

  “Not until now did I realize how close I was to the staff so many years ago,” Waldron says, musing on the memory they both just saw. “To think, I had Bwalen and Danara on the run. Had it not been for Bwalen spotting my darkling in that tree, I would have had what I wanted so much sooner.”

  “Who are they?” Wendolyn asks with her mind.

  Waldron angles his head as if he did not hear her correctly: “Surely, you know.

  Wendolyn shakes her head.

  “It is as I told you before: like the darklings, your people have the ability to preserve memories across generations. And all of it is stored deep within your mind.”

  Wendolyn puts together the meaning of his words: “Bwalen and Danara, they are my parents? My real parents?”

  Waldron nods.

  Her head suddenly becomes dizzy, the room spinning with her as she tries to fully grasp what she just experienced.

  Wendolyn saw the world through the eyes of her own mother, a woman she has never seen. Even more impossibly, Wendolyn touched the belly of her very own mother as Wendolyn herself was a baby growing inside of her.

  The strain on her mind is too great, the idea too inconceivable.

  “If only we dig deep enough,” Waldron says, “We can find the memories of all of your ancestors going back even further than Merlin himself. That is, if you are able to survive the journey through your memories. The deeper we go, the more likely we are to suffocate your mind.”

  “Please,” Wendolyn silently encourages with her thoughts. “Let me see them again.”

  “As you wish,” he says, touching his finger to her head, calling her parents to the front of her mind again.

  The climbing fire of a torch pushes against darkness, lighting the mouth of a cave. Bwalen, holding the torch, dismounts his horse and moves to her side, helping her down as well.

&nbs
p; “We will take shelter in here,” he says, moving her gently and deliberately into the cave.

  “Bwalen,” she says, nerves reaching her voice. “The baby is coming. I must lie down.”

  Bwalen moves quickly between the horses and Danara, making a resting place for her with blankets. He then helps her to the ground, her body resting on the blankets, her head cushioned by Bwalen’s folded jacket.

  “What now?” Bwalen asks her, unsure of what Danara needs.

  “Just hold her as she comes,” Danara says.

  “She?” Bwalen asks, surprised. “How do you know it is a girl?”

  “She has told me herself,” Danara says with certainty.

  And then she screams, pain invading the space between her legs. She lifts up her head to see if the baby is coming, her elbows pressing hard against the cold, wet floor of the cave.

  As the light of the torch flickers throughout the cave, the head of the baby crests from between her legs. It moves slowly as Danara pushes mightily, all of the blood within her body seeming to race to the baby, helping it with its passage into the world.

  And as Bwalen lifts the baby, a smile overtaking him, Danara can see the face of her newborn daughter.

  “Wendolyn,” she says. “She is our Wendolyn.”

  Suddenly, inside the Memory Chamber, Wendolyn gasps on the stone slab, turning her head from Waldron’s finger, freeing herself from the scene of her own birth. It is too much for her to comprehend: seeing her own face through the eyes of someone else.

  Wendolyn’s breathing quickens, her heart racing. She can feel the smile of her father move to her own lips, this very first image of her parents filling her with momentary joy.

  She clings to this feeling as long as she can, a tiny candle in the vast darkness that now surrounds her. But Wendolyn can only hold on for so long as her mind continues to spin, and she surrenders to the quicksand of unconsciousness, her world going black.

  {Richard}

  Who are you?” Richard asks the blindfolded woman, whose slender body is framed by the fog in front of them. The woman stands there silently, perhaps considering her answer.