ZEPHYR: Reborn With A God System

CHAPTER 6 - BLOOD IN THE HOLLOW

I woke up with my hand closed around nothing.

"Emberveil," I said quietly, to the empty room. "What is Emberveil?"

The voice was silent for a long moment. Then one line appeared in the air above me, hanging in the morning light where only I could see it.

[ It sleeps. Feed it fire. ]

"That's not an answer," I whispered back "That's not even close to an answer."

But the voice had gone back to sleep, whatever that meant, and I had learned already that it did not repeat itself. So I got up, washed, dressed, and went down to the hall, where Renn was waiting for me with bread and news.

The news was shouted before I had even sat. A crier went through the fort at dawn, and by breakfast every servant knew it: the Outer Trials had been called. Every child of the clans, every sixteen year old, would enter the forest beyond the walls when the moon waned, and they would be ranked by what they brought back. Marks would be read. Names would be spoken in the great hall. It happened once in a generation, and this time the daughter of Lady Vessral would stand at the front of it, because Nyra had trained for it since she could hold a practice blade.

I did not have to be a genius to understand what it meant for me. I was markless. The law said the markless could not be refused entry, the same old statute that had put me in the arena, but the forest was not an arena. There were no elders watching in the Outer Trials. There were no rules except the ones a boy carried in his own two hands.

"Zeph." Renn lowered his voice and leaned close over the bread he was pretending to arrange. "Don't go deep. Whatever they say, whatever the others do, stay near the walls, stay near the other kids, and come back before the second night. People don't come back from deep. And when the markless don't come back, nobody asks why."

Across the hall, at the high table, Sylene was watching me. She was not talking, not smiling at anyone, just watching, the way she had watched me at the arena, and when my eyes found hers she smiled a small closed smile and looked away, and the black beads on her wrist clicked once as she folded her hands.

I was still trying to read that smile when the leaving horn sounded, and the gates of Obsidian Fort opened, all the sixteen year olds of the golden lion walked out into the world.

The forest beyond the walls was older than the fort, older than the clans, and it did not care about any of us. The masters had marked the boundary stones at the tree line and told us the rules in four sentences: go in, bring back what the elders named, live if you can, and the ranking is by what you return with, not by what you do inside. Then the horns sounded again, and the children of the golden lion scattered into the green like coins thrown into dark water.

I had a plan, and my plan was small and safe. Follow the edges. Avoid the other kids, especially the ones from my own household. Find what the elders wanted, some root, some pelt, whatever could be taken from the ground without a fight. Build my strength the way the system wanted, quietly, slowly, and go home alive. I had done the arithmetic of my own life enough times now to know that I did not need glory. I needed time.

That was the plan. I had it for about half a day…It was the birds that warned me first, a whole slope of them going up at once from a hollow ahead, and then the sound underneath the birds, the sound I had hoped I would never hear in this life again. Somebody was fighting, and losing.

I should have walked away. Every survival sense I had, every rule Renn had given me, every lesson of my sixteen years in that fort said the same thing: a markless boy who walks toward the sound of fighting is a markless boy who dies for nothing. I even turned. I took three steps away down the slope.

Then I heard a girl's voice cracking with pain and fury, under it the laughter of the people hurting her, and something in my chest turned around and would not turn back. Because I knew that sound from the inside. I had made that sound behind the arena while Nyra's practice steel came down, and the whole world had walked past me the way I was walking past her now.

I went back fast, along the trunk of a fallen tree, to the edge of the hollow.

There were three hunters, in the gray and black of Clan Vorthak, shadow hunters, and I knew at a glance they were not boys playing at war. They moved the way water moves around stones, closing, cutting off, patient. And in the center of them, with her back against a rock and a long thin cut painting her arm red, stood a girl about my age in the same gray and black, holding a short blade in a guard that was good, very good, and getting worse by the breath. Her black hair was coming loose, her lips had gone gray, and her eyes were the most alive things in that forest.

"Come home, Sable," one of the hunters said. "The Mother forgives. The blade does not have to be yours."

"I'd rather it be mine," the girl said, and laughed at them, actually laughed, bleeding and cornered, she's laughing, and I understood something about her in that moment that I could not have explained if you asked.

I could not beat one of them with a sword. I had no sword. But I did not need to beat them. I needed a breath of confusion, and I had carried a whole river's worth of power around inside me since the stairwell. I found it in the water of the leaves and the hollow of the stream behind them, and I pulled, the way I had pulled in my room at night, calmly The stream came up out of its bed all at once, a brown sheet of cold water and stones that hit the three of them in the backs of the knees and put the biggest one down on his face in the mud.

To them it would look like the hillside had moved. Hunters of the shadow clan do not believe in luck, but they believe in ambush, and the hollow was suddenly, to them, a place where the ground itself had turned against them.

"BEHIND YOU!" I shouted, in a voice I pitched as deep as I could, from somewhere up the slope, and the forest shouted it back, BEHIND YOU, BEHIND YOU, and for one heartbeat nobody knew how many were hiding among the trees.

The girl did not waste time wondering. She broke left through the water, and the other two, hunters to the bone, chose the honest arithmetic of two against one fresh enemy in ambush over finishing a fight in a cursed hollow. They were gone between two breaths, silent as smoke, and the forest pretended they had never been there at all.

I stood up from behind my tree, already turning to go, because the smart thing now was distance, and I had done my good deed for the whole of my life.

"Wait."

She was on one knee, with her hand pressed against the rock, holding herself upright by will alone, and her eyes had found me through the leaves. There was blood on her teeth when she smiled.

"I saw you," she said. "By the big oak, when the water rose. You didn't even move your hands."

I said nothing but my heart was beating so hard I was sure she could hear it.

"You're the markless one," she said slowly, wondering "The Veyne ghost. Everyone says you're empty." And then her gray face went stranger still, and she reached out and caught my wrist, her grip still strong even now, and turned my scarred palm toward her, and looked at it, then she looked up at me, and said, in a whisper

"You're not empty. You're not markless at all." Her eyes were sliding shut as the blood loss took her, but she fought it for one more breath, because she had to say it, whoever she was. "You're FULL. You're... all of them..."

After that she fell forward, and I caught her, as her weight came into my arms a horn sounded, away to the north and closing, a hunting horn with a shadow clan's voice in it.

The voice inside me pulsed again then it reminded me once more [ The clans are watching. ]