The Stolen Prince (Blood for Blood Book 1) (3 page)

They passed by the corridor that led upward to the Keepers’ School and the Temple to the Master. Kara paused and leaned into the corridor, hoping to spy on a keeper or two. They were a curious group of men and women—the only ones who existed outside the hierarchy of birth and order. Any Alem could become a keeper, whether they were the son of a duke or the daughter of a prostitute. It would be the Keepers of the Past that were teaching in the school now—the Keepers of the Past concerned themselves with genealogy, birth order, the history of the Alem, and all the records of the past.

“Your Highness, they’ll want privacy,” Sarita said.

“Shh,” Kara said. She thought she heard something. She leaned a little farther into the corridor and heard a keeper’s booming voice.

“There are three types of keepers. Keepers of the Past. Keepers of the Present. And the very rare Keepers of the Future. They stand apart, serving the Master as they record all things that take place among the special and sacred Alem.”

Kara smiled, remembering the lesson fondly. She wanted to go up to see the Keepers of the Future—her personal favorite. They were such interesting, loony old people. The other keepers often dismissed their stories because they told stories outside of Alem, or even Terra, history. They often made false predictions about the future. One of their favorite stories of the future to mutter about, and one that Kara loved to hear, was the legend of a man who would be given two gifts of porting from the Master and would
unite all power
. Whatever that meant. This story defied so much of the Alem’s exceptionalism that it was disregarded by most, but Kara loved the whispers of it. She felt a kinship to its forbidden and secretive nature.

She listened some more, hoping the Keepers of the Future might hint at the story of the legend as they recited the familiar lesson of privilege. Unfortunately, they stayed true to the normal story of privilege and blessing. The keeper continued his lecture, “We Alem are blessed and special because we have the gift to port using air. The Master has granted us this advantage, this most abundant source of energy, because we are superior above all other races.

Kara yawned, bored suddenly. Who cared about such gifts if you could never use them? She thought wistfully about the dagger against her leg, and she was struck with the urge to fight. She ignored the urge and bowed out of the corridor, where Sarita and Azure waited. If they were impatient, they didn’t show it. They continued walking to the queen’s corridors.

“So, Azure. Sarita tells me the Su do not wear tattoos like the Alem. That the Su have no ranking. Is this true?”

Azure coughed, looking briefly uncomfortable, and glanced toward Sarita. “We are ever grateful to serve the Alem. It does not matter in what capacity.”

Kara noticed he evaded the question, but the subject of tattoos made her suddenly think of the Terra. “The keepers say the Terra wear barbaric tattoos along their arms and hands, showing off how many men they have killed. I saw it on a slave once.” Kara shuddered, thinking about the dark purple scars she saw on the slave in the yards and what they must have meant. “Do the Su have any tattoos at all?” Kara hoped Azure would answer like a normal person, instead of the servant he was performing.

“We are not killers, Princess, unless we are made soldiers by the king. We do not keep track of who we kill,” Azure said simply.

“That’s not really what I asked.” Why wouldn’t he talk to her like a friend? “I know the Su aren’t beasts like the Terra. I just wanted to know if you have tattoos.”

“We have our own customs,” Sarita said. “Just as any other race.”

Kara didn’t want to let it go. She goaded Azure one more time. “Sarita said that a handmaid working for a duchess is just as important as one working for a princess. I bet being a member of the Neel family is something special…”

“It is a great honor,” Azure said.

Kara shivered. Her old friends were treating her as coldly as the corridors.

They were at the queen’s quarters, and Azure bowed and stood outside the door. Sarita pulled away the curtains that were hung over the door to keep in the heat. She knocked softly on the large oak door.

“Come in.”

CHAPTER THREE

Only the sound of Skeet’s chewing broke the quiet dawn.
The village is small
, he observed as he spat out another chunk of dandelion roots. There were only two rows of houses, a tower, and the unmistakable broken loop of slave huts. Stretched behind the huts were the farms, gardens, and roads that went west to the Citadel of Atmen. The morning mist was just starting to gather around the village.

This is the best time for an attack
, Skeet thought. Most villages did not anticipate an assault early in the morning, just hours before sunrise. They always expected one in the middle of the night. A handful of guards milled around the slave hut, but their numbers looked manageable, even easy. Skeet motioned for the other members of his pack to get to their positions. He spat out the last root and looked back, irritated.

Where is Hakon?
He knew these raids made his brother uncomfortable, but it was still a part of training. A fit of rage swirled inside of Skeet, but he pushed it down.
Let your rage be at the air–burners
. If the raid didn’t go well, his entire pack could be captured by the Alem and become slaves. He wouldn’t let that happen. He adjusted his hood, veiling his face. He was dressed in skins and furs, with a thick hood extending up his neck and circling round his face. His feet were bare, so he could feel the earth—its familiar pulse comforted him, gave him confidence.

Skeet put a dagger in his right hand and a rock in his left. He made sure his bow and arrows were tied securely to his back. He was fighting without a spear tonight. This wasn’t a hunt. They intended to get close. He turned around and motioned to his brothers—the other men his age in their pack. A few of them had ziffs, wolves that had been domesticated long ago by the Terra people. They were more docile than their violent cousins and made good pack animals and fighters. Not everyone in the group could vanish like Skeet. Most of them could zip, and those who couldn’t had a portling, an animal companion that could zip, such as a ziff or smaller rodent.

“Link!” Skeet instructed. He turned around, his back to the air village. The two boys nearest Skeet grabbed each of his arms. The others in the pack linked to them, until they were in a tight circle. Skeet was a vanisher, which meant he could only port to somewhere he couldn’t see, a place held in his mind but outside his real vision. Skeet had memorized the spacing of where the guards stood. Fortunately it was an open field, and he wouldn’t risk vanishing his companions into a tree or wall. He concentrated, seeing the field in his mind, and then he was there, taking all ten of the boys in his pack with him. Using the power of porting took the energy of the earth, and his hand was now empty where the rock used to be. He used his free hand to pull his bow from its string at his back.

Skeet heard the shrill bark of a ziff as the pack began their attack. He didn’t look back to see the fate of the guards when he heard the sound of daggers meeting flesh. He ran toward the slave hut and kicked down the door. Several frightened faces greeted him. In the dim light, Skeet counted at least two dozen Terra slaves, all women and children.

“Move and they’ll die.”

There was a whimper. Skeet’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he saw five guards, each holding a child with a knife at the throat. Skeet felt a thrill and smiled. He loved a challenge. He dug his bare feet into the earth beneath him and pulled up his bow and the arrow. The arrow struck between the eyes of the man that had spoken. In the split second after shooting his arrow, he vanished to the dark space behind the other guards, using the dirt below him as fuel to vanish. His dagger struck through the man’s back, and he was able to kick a third man aside. Their few moments of shock had given him precious time, but there were still two guards holding children.

Fortunately, some of the pack had already followed him inside the hut, and one of them was a zipper, able to port where he could see. The zipper was upon the remaining guards in a flash, jamming one in the side with a dagger and another over the head with the remainder of a rock he had used to zip.

“Go!” Skeet shouted to slaves. They ran outside, where they were greeted with a group of boys who had been designated to rescue them. They grabbed slaves and seemed to pop out of the air, dissipating in the mists, carrying a slave with them one by one into the forest and then returning just as quickly to grab another.

“Attack the beasts!” cried a voice in the distance.

Skeet spun toward the voice to see a group of villagers coming toward them. They carried a crude assortment of knives and swords. These villagers hadn’t necessarily wronged them directly, and Skeet knew that to kill them outright would bring more blood on their heads by the Master. The code didn’t call for their deaths. Then again, they had enslaved
his
people. The remaining pack turned to Skeet for instruction.

He wouldn’t risk the vengeance of these villagers’ blood, but he wanted to leave them with fear. “Wound them only. Until all the slaves are free,” he shouted. Turning to the boys with ziffs, he said, “Open these other huts! Kill guards or soldiers on sight.” Two boys ran toward the other huts, where some of the group was already headed. Skeet gestured to three others, and they ran toward the villagers.

He sliced into the first man he saw, jabbing his dagger along the side of his torso. It made the man drop, but it wouldn’t kill him.
Hopefully
, Skeet thought. He kicked back a woman carrying a pitchfork, causing her to fall into a child behind her. Skeet hated when they brought children out with them—it just showed how selfish they were, the Alem, the air people. They hoped to strike pity in their hearts with innocent children, so they wouldn’t hurt the adults.

It didn’t work. The Terra did not feel a great amount of pity.

Skeet jabbed a free arrow in another man’s arm. He bent down and grabbed a handful of dirt. A man swung a sword at him, but he wasn’t strong enough to pierce through Skeet’s thick furs. Skeet grabbed the man and ported behind his own back, to a place he couldn’t see. He aimed low, hoping that when he vanished, the man would be ported into the earth. Skeet’s aim had worked, and the man’s feet were trapped in the earth, while the remainder of his body remained above ground. The man gave a shout of pain and terror. Now his feet were gone, taken by the earth that killed them.

Skeet heard a cry behind him—it was one of his own men. He spun and saw one of his brothers getting jammed by a sword along his side. Skeet ran through the crowd of villagers, swinging carelessly as he went, cutting the surface of faces and arms and hearing screams as he ran. He reached his brother and turned on the attacker, an elderly man with a rusted sword.

Skeet swung and grabbed the elderly man close in a strong hold. “Life for life. Wound for wound. Give for take,” Skeet said ceremoniously. He kicked the man behind the knees, causing him to fall. Skeet wrenched the man’s sword from his hands and lifted it high.

“You animals will pay for this,” the old man said with surprising courage. Around him, the screams and cries of his fellow villagers broke the quiet of the morning. “We will destroy you.”

Skeet let his sword fall, letting it slice through the side of the man’s torso and into the earth, pinning him to the ground. “Blood for blood,” Skeet said. He removed the sword, grabbed his brother, and ran toward the remainder of the pack. All the huts were opened, and the last of the slaves were being zipped back along the path deep into the forest. Skeet grabbed a zipper’s arm, and vanished with his wounded companion back through the forest to the horses. They were already departing with the other slaves.

Skeet examined the wounds of the boy. They were deep, but there was hope for him. Skeet sighed. Even though these small raids did little to decrease the air people’s oppression, and they couldn’t hope to free all of the captured Terra, it did good to hope. Hope was enough for now.

CHAPTER FOUR

“I know he’s still alive,” Queen Sabola said softly, looking at Kara, pleading. She had a feeling, that familiar knowing that she felt when she thought of her children. She would know when one of them had died. Kara looked at her with skepticism. Sabola was sure Kara felt nothing for her older brother—he was gone. She had never known him. Perhaps she missed him in her imagination, but not in reality. He was a phantom that haunted the past, this entire house, and this entire kingdom.

Sabola held her stomach unconsciously, rubbing her hand across her belly, the way many pregnant women do. She thought of her unborn child—the child she knew was a boy. Her mother had said she had the gift of foresight. It was always in little things, nothing truly prophetic, if anyone believed in the prophets anymore. The Keepers of the Future had verified her gift long ago, naming her part of their order—though they believed it had little bearing on the affairs of the kingdom. She had known her oldest son, Hakon, would be a boy, just as she had known Kara would be a girl. And she knew the baby now in her womb would be a boy as well.

That would upset things.

King Arden had been in mourning for almost nineteen years. A cruel and angry mourning that had brought more death than Sabola was comfortable thinking about. Over the past decade, he had appeared to move on. He had stopped the war, content to punish the Terra as slaves. He had trained Kara as if she were a boy, and he concerned himself more with the future affairs of the kingdom than his poisonous revenge. But Sabola understood his grief wasn’t just rooted in sentimentality; it was about hierarchy as well. The laws were strict, and if Arden did not have a son, his kingdom would be forfeited, would fall into the hands of someone outside his direct bloodline. It wouldn’t be long before the line of Arden would become a thing of history. Sabola had always thought these rules of succession were stiff and cruel, but she began to understand them now. The ability to port, whether by zipping or vanishing, was decreasing in every generation of the Alem. King Arden was a direct descendent of the air conquerors, those who traveled from the homeland to settle here. The closer an Alem was to a direct descendent of that first royal line, the greater the likelihood that they would have the gift, the power to port.