ZEPHYR: Reborn With A God System

CHAPTER 7 - THE SHADOW OF VORTHAK

The horn sounded again, closer this time and I made my choice without knowing I was making it.

I could not run. Not really. Sable was unconscious in my arms, bleeding through the strips of cloth I had wrapped around her arm, and even if I had dropped her, even if every smart bone in my body had screamed at me to drop her and go, the forest was full of ears now, and a running boy leaves a trail. A thinking boy leaves a plan. I carried her to the biggest tree on the slope, into a hollow between its roots where the shadow sat deep even at noon, and I laid her down as gently as I could.

"If I die for this," I told her, and she was too far gone to hear me, but I said it anyway, "you had better be worth it."

I pressed her short blade into her hand so her fingers would not forget it, and I climbed back out into the light, and I waited.

While I waited, I did the things a boy does when he has decided not to survive quietly. I filled my lungs and made myself breathe slow. I looked at my palm, at the warm scar, and I said to the voice inside me, without sound: if you brought me to this forest to die in it, you chose a strange way to keep your vessel safe. The voice did not answer. It never answered when it was busy weighing me, and I was beginning to understand that my whole life now was a series of things weighing me.

The horn sounded a third time, and this time it did not stop.

He came with two hunters… Later I would understand what that meant, but in that first moment I only felt it; the horn had stopped, and three of them walked into my hollow. The two flanked wide and silent. But the one in front, the young one, walked straight down the slope with his hands loose at his sides, and I knew before anyone told me that this was Kael Vorthak.

He was my age. That was the first wrong thing about him. Sixteen, and he moved the way the old masters in the practice yard moved, like a body that had finished learning fear a long time ago. He was not big, neither was he armed loudly, just a long knife and something dark folded across his back. He stopped eight paces from me, tilted his head, and looked at me.

"So the stream," Kael said.

But I said nothing back to him. "The stream moved against its current." He crouched, slowly and touched the wet mud at the edge of the hollow, and rubbed it slowly between two fingers. "I have hunted in these woods since I was nine. Streams do not do that." He looked up at me. "And markless boys do not shout warnings from the top of a slope in a voice like a rockslide. That was you. Why?"

Because she was dying, and nobody came for me either. I wanted to say but I looked past his shoulder and said nothing while Kael watched me quietly.

Then he finally said "Lift him," he said to his hunters, without breaking eye contact with me. "Our ghost wants to be brave. Bravery is heavy. Let us see how long he holds it."

I had beaten a monster in the dark with a magic knife and a wall to bounce off. I want to be honest about what happened next, because Zephyr Veyne does not lie to himself, not anymore: I never landed a real blow. Kael took the practice of my first swing off the back of his wrist without looking at it. My second he answered with a flat of his boot in my knee that folded me sideways. The third swing I threw, the one where I put everything, the anger, the stairwell, all of it, he read from my shoulder before my arm even moved, and his fist arrived in my ribs like a falling beam. I went into the dirt, and the world went gray at the edges, and the voice in my head said; [ Warning: the clans are watching. ]

"Get up," Kael said in a low voice "You have it in you. I watched the mud fight for you. Get up, and show me."

I got up, because I would rather die standing than kneel in front of anyone, ever again. I got up, and I threw myself at him with the warmth gathering in my palm, water rising off the wet ground around my fist, and for half a heartbeat his eyes went wide, and his shadow moved.

It slid up his arm like a second sleeve while the sun stood still, and his knife came down at me, and I knew, in the last instant, that I was dead but before the knife could hit me she threw herself between us.

Sable came out of the root hollow, bleeding, half dead, screaming a word in her clan tongue that I did not know and would never forget. She did not strike him down. She only put her small body in the path of the blade, and her short knife caught Kael's arm as she fell against him, turning his stroke just enough that it cut empty air instead of my throat. Kael staggered back a step, more from shock than the wound, and stared at her.

"Sable. STOP." For the first time, Kael's voice cracked. "You are Vorthak. Blood spilled outside the trial law marks you. You know what the Mother will do."

"I know," she said, and got up slowly between me and him, her arm hanging, her blade still steady, "what she does to the ones who run. I've been living in it since spring. Come and add to it."

The two hunters froze. Kael stood very still, reading her, reading me, reading the arithmetic of it, a bleeding traitor and a markless boy, against himself and two men who had watched him walk into that hollow like a lord.

Then his eyes went to my shadow. My own shadow had gone strange, sliding a half heartbeat out of true, darkening at the edges the way his had darkened up his arm. The system spoke, low:

[ Foreign bloodline observed. ]

[ UMBRAL VEIL: partial unlock. ]

[ Godspark: 12 - 15. ]

Kael looked at that shadow for a long time. Then he did the one thing I had not put into any of my plans. He stepped back and lowered his knife.

"Enough," he said quietly. "We are leaving."

"Kael," one of the hunters started.

"I said enough." And then he turned to me before continuing "Zephyr Veyne. My clan has spent sixteen years looking for something. My father says it will look like nothing, a thing with no mark, and pass every eye by." He picked a fold of his sleeve straight, and his dark eyes settled on mine, and I understood that I had just been moved from one list to another, from forgotten to hunted. "Today I watched a markless boy bend a stream and borrow my own bloodline in the middle of a lost fight. I think you are what we have been looking for."

He turned around and turned to smoke between the trees before I found my breath.

"Run," the voice inside me said, tired and quiet. "They know now. Run."

Sable swayed, and I caught her arm over her shoulder, and the two of us stood in the ruined hollow, and bleeding. Somewhere behind the walls of Obsidian Fort, the trials went on without us. And far away in the deep of the forest, Kael Vorthak walked back toward his clan with the only testimony that could not be unsaid: a markless boy who was not markless at all.