Blackmark (The Kingsmen Chronicles #1): An Epic Fantasy Adventure Sword and Highland Magic Read online

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  Eleshen lay in the crook of Elohl’s arm in the sunlight filtering to the kitchen floor, her blonde braid woefully disheveled from their lovemaking. Her fingers splayed across Elohl’s bare chest, tracing his Inkings. Elohl pulled her closer, scenting soap and lavender upon her hair with a contented sigh. The sweetness of the afternoon had eased him, melting something of cold mountain nights like a soothing balm.

  He closed his eyes, relaxing back upon the pine boards. Something pulled at his mind. Deep blue drifted across his vision, backed by sunlight filtering through his eyelids, serenity infinite like a mountain lake. Elohl found himself gazing into those crystalline depths, the still water watching him back, as if eyes drifted up out of its fathomless blue. Scents of high tundra came to him; pine boughs and air so cold it tasted of wintermint across his tongue. A whiff of char drifted through his vision, acrid like pine resins aflame.

  Suddenly, the innkeeper Eleshen sat up. “Oh, no! My bread!”

  Launching to her feet, her half-bound corset spilling open, Eleshen practically flew to the byrunstone oven. Hauling the metal door open, she coughed at the scorch within. Elohl wrinkled his nose as smoke poured forth, coughed as Eleshen hauled four blackened rosemary loaves from the oven and unceremoniously tossed them into the kitchen fire.

  “Well, that’s that.” Eleshen huffed, watching them burn. She looked back, her pretty face full of humor. “I guess I had better things to do this afternoon than tend bread.”

  She came back and straddled him with devious intent. Elohl gave a satisfied sigh despite himself. Reaching up to stroke her messy braid where it fell over her breasts, he slid his other hand up her bare thigh, gripping the crease where thigh met hip.

  “Bread is the least of our concerns…” He murmured, enjoying her weight upon his hips.

  Eleshen leaned forward with a sweet but wistful smile, her fingers tracing his Inkings. “Are you really one of them? A Kingsman?”

  Elohl found himself smiling at her kind touch, even though smiling felt foreign to his lips. “It’s nice to not be called Blackmark, for once.”

  Eleshen snorted. “Blackmark. What a horrible slur for such a beautiful promise. A promise of everything you are... to your King.” Her fingers traced the mountain, the central star at its peak. Her touch stirred Elohl, deep below the marks, where he had tried to be cold and hard for years. Like little runnels of sunlight, she found his deepest ice, making things melt.

  “Not just to our King, but to our kin.” Elohl corrected gently. “Alrashemni. Before we promised our service to Alrou-Mendera's liege, we promised it first to ourselves. Before we were ever Kingsmen, we were Alrashemni, and still are.”

  “But your oath goes hundreds of years back.” Eleshen countered. “To be the right-hand spear of the King. To be his to call, for justice on any matter. Be it through might of arms or through intelligence of negotiation. Did you learn the Kingsmen arts of intelligence? Peacemaking?”

  “Some,” Elohl murmured, stroking her fingers, breathing into the soft curiosity between them. “I am Alrashemni, but I’m not a Kingsman. Not quite. I only reached my Seventh Seal by the time my people disappeared, a year shy of my full training. I don’t actually deserve to wear these marks.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re worn after your Eighth Seal,” Elohl’s smile was soft, “at age twenty-one. When you become fully Inked and take the Oath of Allegiance to the King of Alrou-Mendera. Only then can you be truly called a Kingsman, rather than simply born Alrashemni.”

  Elohl watched Eleshen trace his Inkings. “What do they truly mean, the marks?”

  “You seem learned on our matters. Do you not know?”

  She shrugged, tracing the rightmost star, near to an old blade-slash Elohl had gotten in his first year in the Brigade. “I know some things. Other things not so much.”

  “Our Inking is called the Chirus Alrashemni.” Elohl murmured, indulging her. “Translated it means, Dedicated of the Land, a title we receive along with the Inking when we pass our Eighth Seal. The mountain is a double-reference, both to the Kingsmount itself, representing the nation, and also to the enduring solidarity of our vow to the King and his house. The five stars are for the five tenets of Alrashemni life. Strength. Flexibility. Wisdom. Knowledge. Patience.”

  “The central star is larger than the others. Why?”

  “The central star is wisdom. In all things, we are to be guided by our deepest intuition, the inner sight of the heart, which knows before the mind.”

  “What do you mean, intuition?” Eleshen prodded.

  “Intuition drives who we are,” Elohl murmured. “Allows us to achieve wisdom in mediation. Being a Kingsman is not truly about killing. It is about negotiation, peacemaking. Violence is and has always been considered a last option.”

  “But you are trained killers. You learn killing arts nearly from birth.”

  “Yes. The sword that is honed the sharpest pierces best when a rabid boar attacks.”

  “Poetic.”

  “Practical.”

  “Had you killed anyone before you went to war? Did you kill the men who came to take you? How old were you when the Summons came? Twenty? You must be near thirty now...” Eleshen’s hand reached up to stroke Elohl’s short beard.

  Elohl sobered. These questions plagued him too deep, dipped too far, upsetting his newfound sunshine, his tenuous ease. These questions dove inside him like knives, piercing, slashing. Opening wounds best forgotten. Too many memories surfaced from each slash. Too many failures. Elohl pulled her hand gently from his face, holding it to his chest instead, what had once been lithe and young now lean and hardened by rough living and too many tortuous ascents.

  And scarred. Too many scars.

  “It doesn’t matter now.” Elohl tried to keep his voice calm, but it came out hard-edged, final.

  The pretty innkeeper’s lips pursed, fierce. “But your entire clan just disappeared after that Summons! That accusation of treason from your very own King…! And then they banished the Alrashemni children to the furthest campaigns like criminals!”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “But, they must have killed everyone, all your parents, all your teachers…!”

  “I said it doesn’t matter!” Elohl rose from the floor and unsat her with a growl, lacing his trousers. The glacier that protected his heart had shifted from the bliss of their sun-drenched afternoon, and it shouldn’t have. Roiling emotions were too close, too surfaced from the deeps, fished up by the innkeeper’s uncanny acceptance, her torpid prodding. Elohl strode from the kitchen, his heart gripping him hard. He pushed out the back door, ripping his cloak and other belongings down from the wash line.

  Eleshen was out the door in a flash after him, her shirt barely laced, her hands on his bare arms. “Please! Forgive me! I didn’t mean to upset you… Please, I just…”

  “You should learn to keep your mouth shut!” Elohl snarled in raw passion. It was a man he didn’t know, a beast of pain long submerged pulling at him, a leviathan seeking to drown him beneath that formerly-placid blue lake. Cerulean swallowed his vision, just for a moment, and Elohl felt suffocated. He took the long, slow breath of his training, then yanked his shirt on over his head. He should never have come here.

  He should never have tried to live again.

  “The Kingsmen are dead! The Alrashemni courts are empty. Leave it alone.”

  “I know, I mean, I just… Kingsmen saved my family!” Eleshen clutched her arms, at last keeping her hands to herself. “I wouldn’t be here but for them! In the raid, they were suddenly there in the night, protecting us…! My father was Dhepan of Quelsis. The King hadn’t sent aid, even though scouts knew Valenghian raiders had crossed the border. But somehow, the Kingsmen knew. They sent fifty, just fifty men and women. And fifty Kingsmen kept the city safe from hundreds of raiders.”

  Elohl turned slowly. Suddenly he could see it, her pain, just as fresh and raw as his. All from se
eing a Kingsman walk through her door this day. “The Raid of Quelsis. Fifteen years ago. Valenghians snuck through the Borderlands and burned Quelsis in the middle of the night. My father was among the fifty protecting the city.”

  “Your father?” Eleshen stepped back, her gaze flicking over his lean, iron-wrought frame, his tall stature, his black hair that shone with highlights of blue in the sunlight, scruffy beard and grey eyes. “Urloel den’Alrahel … you look like Urloel!”

  Elohl’s throat burned. “My father was Rakhan of the Court of Alrashesh. He led the defense at Quelsis.”

  “He did. He talked at length with my father, readying the plan.”

  A long pause stretched. Something had knit between them, a cord of pain, a cord of promise. Something thickened the air, of destinies intertwined. Elohl’s hand twitched. If his sword had been in his fingers, he’d have cut that cord. But though there was pain for him here, dredging up his past for a curious little innkeeper, there was also peace. Hadn’t he found it already? An afternoon of warmth and good sweat, shadows of sunlight filtering through his closed eyelids?

  “Come back inside.” Eleshen pleaded, earnest. “I could… use some help with the pots.”

  Elohl glanced at the road, noting the angle of the sun. It was long past mid-afternoon. The spring sun was already on its way down the mountain, and the shadows grew long and chill. A part of him howled, not wanting to go back out into what was sure to be a cold, hard night. Cerulean plucked at his vision. With a sigh, Elohl scrubbed a hand over his short beard, nodded his assent to Eleshen, and pushed the vision away. She reached out, taking him gently by the fingers, tentative. And with a subtle tug, led him back inside to the warmth.

  CHAPTER 5 – DHERRAN