AETHORIA:The hollow king

Run

He ran.

There was nothing noble in it. There was no plan  no map in his head, no destination fixed like a star. There was only his body's oldest instinct and the sound of hoofbeats behind him and the fire still burning in his hands like something that had been waiting his whole life for permission to exist.

Durnholt fell away behind him in pieces  the smell of smoke, the bell still ringing, someone screaming his name. That last part surprised him. He had not thought anyone in Durnholt knew his name well enough to scream it.

The Greywood began where the valley ended  a hard line where the mud of Durnholt gave way to old root and stone. The trees here were enormous, ancient, the kind of trees that had been old when the first kingdoms were young. They blocked the moonlight almost entirely. Karl ran into the dark without breaking stride.

He heard the horses stop at the tree line.

"The Greywood is cursed ground," one of the soldiers called out. "Empire law says"

"Empire law says we retrieve Aeth-thieves," Calder's voice cut in, cold and flat. A pause. "But it doesn't say we have to retrieve them tonight."

Karl pressed his back against a tree trunk and held his breath. His hands were still glowing. He pressed them against his thighs and felt the fire pulse  not painful now, more like a heartbeat he hadn't had before.

"Find the hollow boy. He ran into the Greywood. I want him alive. Alive means talking." A beat. "I need to know what he is."

Karl waited until the voices faded. Then he let himself slide down the tree trunk until he was sitting on the roots, his legs shaking, his breath ragged, the glow in his hands dimming slowly to something he could almost ignore.

He was alone in the Greywood, hunted, with stolen fire in his veins and no idea how it had gotten there. He had about a night to figure it out.

— — —

He moved deeper in, because deeper was away from Calder, and away from Calder was the only direction that made sense. The fire in his hands had faded to warmth  he could not see it anymore but he could feel it, coiled somewhere beneath his sternum like a sleeping animal.

He tried to call it back. He focused on his palm, thought about flame, thought about the moment the Sear's hand had closed around his wrist. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. He pressed his palms together hard and felt faintly ridiculous.

"It doesn't work like that."

He spun around. His back hit a tree.

There was a girl sitting on a branch above him  wrapped in a dark coat that seemed to absorb the little light filtering through the canopy. She was perhaps nineteen, with close-cropped hair and eyes that caught no light at all. She was watching him the way cats watch birds: with absolute patience and approximately zero mercy.

"You've been trying for ten minutes," she said. "I counted."

"Who are you?" Karl said. His voice came out steadier than he felt.

"Someone who watched a hollow boy absorb a Sear's fire-Aeth and then run into the one forest in Veldrath where the Empire won't follow." She tilted her head. "Which is interesting, because hollow boys can't absorb anything. That's what makes them hollow."

"I'm aware," Karl said.

"And yet. Here you are. Glowing."

"I'm not glowing anymore."

"You were." She dropped from the branch with no sound at all. "Sera. That's my name, in case you were working up to asking."

"Karl."

"I know who you are. You're the hollow boy from Durnholt who just committed three counts of Imperial interference and one count of Aeth-theft. Calder's going to report you to the Arbiters."

Kael felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. The Arbiters were Solmere's hunters  bonded to tracking Aeth, able to follow a magic signature across a continent.

"What do you want?" he said.

Sera looked at him directly, and in the dark her eyes were still not catching light.

"I'm a wanted person in four of the five kingdoms," she said, as though this were a reasonable opening to a conversation. "Which means I need protection I can't buy and can't steal. You, on the other hand, are about to be hunted by people who have never failed. Unless you had help."

The trees around them groaned. Wind moved through the canopy. Somewhere deep in the Greywood, something made a sound that was not quite an animal and not quite anything else.

"What are you?" Karl asked.

Sera smiled  small, asymmetric, the smile of someone used to that question who had never once answered it honestly.

"Useful," she said. "Which is more than you can say for yourself right now."

Karl looked back the way he had come. He could not see Durnholt but he could still smell smoke on the cold air. Everything he had ever had was back there, burning.

He turned back to Sera.

"Tell me about the Arbiters," he said.

She nodded once, like he had passed a test he hadn't known he was taking, and began to walk deeper into the dark. Karl followed, because not knowing what else to do was sometimes its own kind of answer