the hardest of hearts II
Arrow, the best-respected of any of the vampires investing their time in her training, went up to the platform alongside her. The two hadn't exactly bonded over Arra's preparation – there was no animosity between them, but Arrow wasn't much of a teacher. He and Mika were thick as thieves, a feat for two who were often such cold, distant men, but this had hardly helped. Arrow, from the moment he had laid eyes on Mika's new assistant, had treated her like any ordinary Victorian woman, and had always seemed surprised ever since to see her in anything but a petticoat. His forever patronizing tone of voice had grated on her; she would probably never measure up to Arrow's impressive physical standards (one of Arrow's arms was thicker than both of her legs as the situation stood), but it was all too clear that Arrow had no hope of her reaching any acceptable standard at all. He stood beside her on the platform and offered her his arm in an oddly out of place gesture of chivalry. When she took it reluctantly, he smiled down at her sadly.
"Whatever happens," he said, as the guards asked if anyone wished to examine the stones. "You have done ever so well. You can be proud of yourself."
It was like a final knife in the back. Arra knew that no self-respecting vampire would be proud to fail in a first Trial, or proud to fail the Trials at all. Larten had taken his a decade before she arrived, and he'd told her how close-run they'd been, but had honestly admitted that had he failed, he would have accepted a walk to the Hall of Death knowing that the life of a vampire was one he was not suited for. Nobody else had admitted anything of the sort to her. The clear difference of course was that Larten believed in her ability to pass the Trials, and didn't think she'd be facing that walk of shame, whereas the same couldn't be said for the others.
"Thank you for your help," Arra responded coldly, tone clipped, eyes forward as the green-garbed guard approached her. She tried not to feel around in the bag too much; fate was fate, and the luck of the Vampire Gods would guide her, if they so wished. She closed her fingers around the first stone her hand touched, and handed it back to the guard.
"Number seventeen," the guard announced to the rest of the Hall; it was surprisingly full, perhaps teaming with vampires eager to witness the first female attempt at the Trials for centuries, or perhaps just eager to watch her fail. "The Lost Trail."
It came as a wave of relief, but Arra checked herself before she allowed a smile to form under the Princes scrutiny. Of all of the Trials, the ones she feared the most were the head-to-head battles. She had prepared extensively, and mainly with Larten, for The Dual – a straight fight, no weapons, between the person taking the Trials and a selected General, both of which almost impossible tasks for her. She could imagine the selected General being Arrow, a man easily three times her size, or one of the sharply trained hunters like Vanez. She wouldn't stand a chance, and the worst thing perhaps of all was that the fight was not until the death. She would have no chance of dying during the Trial, as she would have wished, but rather would certainly face being impaled by stakes in front of all those who had not believed in her and had been proven right. It was an almost unbearable thought.
The Lost Trail was one of the simpler options, at least, for her skills. It was a Trial based on speed, strategy and focus. Given a time limit, her task was to locate and return an oval stone placed at the top of the Mountain with an X carved into the back – she needed to avoid the variety of dangerous animals on her trek, particularly bears, who often drank vampire blood from the supplies at the Mountain and turned mad, and the Mountain leopard, which, like many cats, had an infamous dislike of vampires. The range north of the Mountain's entrance was rarely explored, and with good reason – the Mountain became steeper and more treacherous at those higher altitudes, Tackling a bear or an angry leopard were tasks enough on the flatter ground, let alone while trying to avoid a fatal fall.
However, the beauty of the Trial was that there were no certainties. Arra knew she was more than capable of climbing the Mountain and retrieving the stone in far less time than she had been allocated – it was one of the few Trials where being smaller and lighter than her male counterparts might come in useful. If she were to avoid any unpleasant surprises in the form of poisonous snakes, wild bears and vicious leopards, the task could very well be one of the simplest.
Such optimism, Arra realized halfway through her ascent, had been misplaced.
She had failed to factor in the weather, or perhaps she had just been unfortunate in the harshness of the weather that night. The blizzard left her hands numb and her skin raw, and made climbing the Mountain walls far more of a difficult task – the ground was harder in the freezing temperatures and every breath of the icy air left her throat feeling cut. Her eyes felt heavy and dry, and she blinked at twice her normal speed to try to shake the snow off her eyelashes and certainly to stop them from freezing together. The wind was almost an opponent in itself, knocking her sideways if she wasn't entirely prepared for its stronger gusts, whistling in her ears and distracting her. The knife she had been equipped with was simply not enough; the ground was too tough for such a short blade, and were she to run into any dangerous beast at this rate, she would have to be so close to them to use the knife that she would stand no chance. Arra was forced to search for ways around the climb, covering twice the distance with very little time for such delay, and the running in the painful temperatures left her joints feeling ready to shatter.
Somewhere along the line, she had acquired a loyal following of wolves. She was grateful for that, in that when she was unable to climb the Mountain in the way she had expected, the wolves seemed to assist her, and take her on a route far more accessible, trotting alongside her. Equally, like her mentor, Arra had always had a vague mistrust of wolves and their sheep's clothing. Though they served to guide her and help her, Arra never took her eyes off the route herself, expecting them to lead her wrong at any given turn. She could almost hear Larten's voice in her head, telling her that wolves were nothing if not loyal, but they were only animals, as vicious as those she was avoiding if provoked, and Arra never had been one to trust easily where trust was not earned.
The younger of the wolves gave a yelp, and her head snapped around to see the source of its worry. The two other, darker pelted wolves at her side darted away from her immediately to the assistance of their kin – confirming Arra's suspicions about the fickle loyalties of beasts nicely – but she froze instantly when she saw their target. Dark purple skinned, struggling wildly against the wolves, two Vampaneze stood out unmistakably in the white landscape.
Arra froze. Suddenly without the wolves at her side she felt incredibly exposed. Vampaneze rarely travelled around Vampire Mountain for anything other than sport, and dangerous sport at that – if they were caught by the superior numbers of vampires they faced certain death. These two, travelling so far above the entrance to the Mountain, were clearly not searching for the clan, but rather they were Vampire Hunting, chasing the young and foolish who had dared climb so high away from their kin. She was suddenly the prey, separated from her pack, and they were the predators, and as she met the red eyes of one, she faced an impossible decision.
She could head back to the Mountain – the Vampaneze would be caught if she made it there, and killed for trespassing on the vampire's land, but then, even if she lived past that point, her time would certainly be up and she would have failed the Trial anyway. She could continue further north, towards the top, but they would surely catch her on the way down.
Of course, it was no choice at all. She was no coward. She would face the Vampaneze with her short knife, and she would retrieve the stone, and if she died in the process, she would be proud to have fought until her last breath. She could almost hear Mika in the wind, begging her to come back to the Mountain, but where was the pride in that?
With that, leaving the Vampaneze to continue to dispatch the wolves, Arra set off at an even faster pace. The surge in adrenaline, even more than before, warmed her limbs a little and pushed her on a little further. She couldn't help but wonder whether those two were alone. Suddenly an angry boar or a crazed bear seemed less and less terrifying in comparison with a seasoned Vampaneze. Every crunch of leaves under her feet terrified her, and every unexplained noise increased her pulse twofold as she neared the summit. Everything seemed remarkably simple now in comparison with the fact that her death had become almost a certainty. As she reached the top of the Mountain, hands bloody from digging into the rough ice, one wrist aching from a near-miss fall a little lower down and beginning to swell unpleasantly, Arra realized she had lost track of time entirely in her panic. She had no idea how long she had left, but losing track of the time was a rookie mistake. She remembered Vanez's words on the subject, time is life, and that hardly helped. The idea of escaping the Vampaneze and returning to the Mountain to be ten minutes out of time seemed horrendously ironic.
As she turned around, though, slipping the oval stone inside a muslin bag she carried with her knife at her waist, it became abundantly clear that escaping the Vampaneze needn't have been a worry for her. They were the same two, which led her to believe that perhaps there were only two of them here, but this hardly helped her. One looked bloodied and exhausted, perhaps fresh from a battle with the wolves that the Vampaneze had no doubt won, but the other looked unscathed. They were both dark purple, and in this climate perhaps they had been forced to drink the blood of a snake or a wildcat and gone mad. It seemed that way at least, the way they snarled and bared their teeth at the young vampire, spit drooling in long slathers from their chops. They said nothing, but one of them let out a low, animalistic growl, and pounced forward, dagger drawn.
Panicked, Arra dodged the first attack, but the Vampaneze had only been playing, and darted off to her left with a hyena-like chuckle. The other Vampaneze, the one who had not made to attack her, seemed too tired to do much, but held a long sword out in front of him as though this itself would be enough protection, grinning wolfishly.
They were playing with their prey before they killed it. Even these wild, mad curs had failed to take her seriously as an opponent. The sudden indignity of the way they laughed at her, the way they thought they could taunt her because she was helpless, lit her temper suddenly. Arra had never had much control of her temper, even when it would have done her good to keep her calm, and as the Vampaneze darted at her again, she swiped wildly with her knife, her aim poor in her rage, but slicing his upper arm so that it spurted blood out onto the snow in a satisfying manner.
The Vampaneze laughed again. These two really were mad, the incision seemed not even to have hurt the wild Vampaneze in the way she knew it would have hurt anyone with a reasonable presence of mind; she had sliced straight through the muscle and yet he carried on incessantly laughing and feinting forwards as though to attack her. In the way he grinned at her she could almost see herself human again, and the deep purple hue of the Vampaneze's skin almost turned the unhealthy white of her father's, gaunt and dulled from alcoholism and madness, wheezing at her and delivering her a cracking backhand, you're exactly like your mother, her slim girl's human wrists in one large brute's hand, the taunting laughter sounding exactly the same.
When the mist cleared, there was blood splattered over her white shirt, thick and dark and almost clotted, all the way up one arm. The Vampaneze's throat was slit. Her own potentiality for that kind of evil suddenly terrified her – had that been her, just then, had she just killed him? Her own blood ran cold to see the Vampaneze still shaking and convulsing on the ground, blood tainting the snow where he lay. The other Vampaneze let out an inhuman hiss, and shrunk back away from her, the fear in his eyes she had always wanted to inspire, but did not relish now that she saw it. Are you a fighter or aren't you? Vanez asked her in her mind, and then suddenly her own personal feelings about it became insignificant. These two were the enemy. Her aim was to destroy them; what kind of General would she make if she couldn't even dispatch a mad Vampaneze, let alone the mad vampires she might one day be sent to remove?
Before the other Vampaneze could escape, she quickly darted forwards, before he could expect it, slicing his arm at the elbow. Nerve cut, he dropped his sword with a cry of agony, cut short by the gurgling blood when she slit his throat like she had with his brother.
The wait at the Mountain's entrance was painful.
Arrow had been the first to let out a sigh at the state of the weather, presuming it could only get windier and colder with altitude. Mika had stood at the very front, shifting from foot to foot, arms folded. Whenever anyone except Arrow had spoken to him, he had waved them off, not caring if it had come across as rude. Even in his own Trials, he did not recall ever being so nervous. Vanez and Gavner had been chatty, trying perhaps to lighten the mood, but hadn't mentioned Arra's Trial once, perhaps not wishing to joke about the weather when it might have been the death of their friend. Larten had been the quietest of all, but had sat behind the others, redressing the wounds on his hands that fighting with her for the last few months had left him with and applying salve to his bruises. As the time ticked by, nearing the two hour limit, Mika, arms still folded, began pacing back and forth behind the guarded entrance.
"Could you try to look like you care a little more, Crepsley?" The black-haired man commented, his voice almost cracking with his nerves. "Have the decency to pretend to mind whether she lives or dies for the rest of us perhaps?"
Before Larten could respond, Arrow laid a hand on Mika's back as a comfort, and led him to stand at the left of the entrance to keep watch for his former assistant, shooting an apologetic look at the orange-haired vampire. Watching this exchange, Gavner crouched to sit with his friend.
"How are you feeling?" the young vampire asked.
"Fine," Crepsley replied evenly, scratching the back of his head. He drummed the fingers of his right hand on the ground. "It has been a long wait. She only has ten minutes left; I am surprised she has chosen to cut it this close with the time."
Gavner coughed awkwardly. "Perhaps she's lost track of the time?" he said softly, and his friend's green eyes flicked up to look at him crossly. Gavner kept his eyes to the floor after that/ "I'm just saying. The weather conditions were unexpected. It's probably made the climb a lot tougher. Just don't be too crushed if she –"
"She'll be here," Larten told him calmly. "And she wouldn't appreciate that attitude, either."
Gavner swallowed. "I am just nervous about her," he said. "I know she can do it, but everyone can make mistakes."
"She has not made any mistakes." Larten responded, and stood. "There is no need to be nervous about her, either. Start believing in her, and perhaps you will not feel so worried." He made a gesture at Mika, who was rubbing his chin in anxiety. "He does not think she can do it," Larten continued, and then smiled. "And that is why he is so worried. It is more Mika's own insecurity than his knowledge of her own capabilities that keeps him in such perpetual torment over her wellbeing."
Gavner took a moment to dissect his friends complex choice of vocabulary, but before he could get to the bottom of what he might have meant, Mika let out a roar of half-delight, half-surprise. When everyone else on the ledge looked up, five minutes left to spare, a shivering Arra, covered in blood, snow and dirt, was planting two purple and crimson heads at the feet of the guard, much to the shock of everyone around her.
"There are Vampaneze above the Mountain," she said calmly, and then reached into the bag at her waist to present the Prince forseeing her Trial – in this case, it was Paris Skyle, who was stood behind the guard – the carved stone she had been sent to retrieve. "I only saw those two, so perhaps they were alone."
The stunned silence lasted a few seconds longer until Mika finally spoke. "Did you kill them?" he asked in bewilderment, his voice oddly soft, his expression unusually confused.
"No, their heads spontaneously flew off in front of me," Arra responded sarcastically, leaning against the wall of the cave, obviously completely exhausted. "They were mad and I am not a General. Besides, they were hunting. I didn't have a lot of choice."
Larten smiled from behind the assembled group of her supporters. The way she justified it was so obviously lost on the others, except perhaps Paris, who as usual remained silent and wise. Mika hadn't asked whether she had been the one to dispatch the Vampaneze out of disgust for the killings, but merely because it had never even entered his mind that she would be capable of it. Larten had to admit, if only to himself, completing the task and killing two Vampaneze on the way exceeded even his expectations. Rather than read into it that he didn't believe her capable, her own guilt made her sensitive to the question over the morality of what she had done. It was a typical misunderstanding between the two. Mika had none of Arra's concept of morality over Vampaneze; his hatred for them was famous, he considered them vermin rather than opponents. Though she had been his assistant for many years, and though she had a capacity to be incredibly cold, it was all too clear that Mika's black and white moral stance had never rubbed off on her.
"Congratulations, Miss Sails," Paris Skyle said eventually. "You have successfully completed your first Trial of Initiation. Not only that, but you have alerted us to a danger we were not aware of above our very heads. Be assured, we will send a group to search for any other rogue Vampaneze tomorrow night." He smiled at her, and extended a hand for her to shake.
"There isn't a single General I can tackle," Arra commented, as her usual dawn training session with Larten commenced. "Think about it. I could end up with Mika or Arrow!"
"No, you could not," Larten corrected kindly, helping her to bandage her cut hands from the ice. "They exclude anyone who has helped to train you because they can't be sure that they would fight you fairly."
Arra rolled her eyes, she knew the rules. "I could get someone like Mika or Arrow," she said softly. "They're unlikely to pick someone relatively new; they're far more likely to pick someone of good standing to pit me against. No offence, but I can't even beat you."
Larten grinned. "I defeated Mika a few times, you know, I am no weakling," he said, and stepped back with his hands out to begin their fight. "There are a lot of other Trials, Arra. You are statistically unlikely to pick the only one you know you would have major difficulty with."
"If I pick it," she said, stepping up with him into the ring. "I'll die. There is no question over that. I can't fight one-on-one. I'm not even convinced I'll ever learn."
Larten put his hands down and regarded her. "You fought those two Vampaneze today, didn't you?" He asked her. "That was two on one. You always tell me that you cannot fight one-on-one, but the one time it has come up in a real, life or death situation you have won, even against the odds."
"That wasn't the same," Arra said, rubbing her temples. She had hoped the Vampaneze wouldn't be mentioned. "It wasn't really a straight fight. They weren't even really trying to fight with me; they were mad, and they were just baiting me. It was nothing like it would be in the Trial."
Larten shrugged. "Either way," he said. "You have proved that you are not incapable of fighting when you are backed into a corner. That is the most important thing."
She was silent for a moment. Though Larten put his hands back up, ready to begin the fight, Arra folded her arms, and pursed her lips nervously. "I –" she started, and then cleared her throat. "I don't think it was…entirely the right thing to do?"
Larten watched her curiously. "You sounded so guilty when you came back," he remarked. "When you were trying to justify it to Mika."
Arra looked down. "They weren't fighting with me properly," she said. "They didn't consider me a proper opponent. They were just baiting me. It wasn't really a fair fight, was it, if they weren't expecting me to fight back?"
Larten smiled. "It is their own fault if they weren't expecting you to fight back," he reminded her. "Only ever turn your back on a corpse, remember? They should have known you would not be helpless." She said nothing, staring back at him like she expected more. He sighed. "I do not enjoy killing. I think it is a little bit worrying to find someone who does, and they are becoming all too common. But the Vampaneze were mad, and they were not going to allow you to escape. You made the right decision."
"I lost control, though," Arra said, and by this time she had lost interest in the fighting entirely. She sat down, her mouth set in a grim line, her eyes worried. "I've never done that in a fight. I don't remember killing them, I just remember them being dead. That can't be right? They were mad, not evil."
Sighing, Larten sat down beside her. It was an effort not to lay a hand on her knee or put an arm around her shoulders, but she never had taken people being too forward overly well. He remembered watching her nearly decapitate a particularly handsy vampire in the Sports Hall once, and it would be incredibly inappropriate and inconvenient for that to happen to them. She looked oddly lovely, though, somehow, but then Larten supposed there wasn't a time he hadn't thought she looked lovely in one way or another. "Do not think about it now," he said. "You have other Trials to concentrate for. And if it is of any comfort to you," he said, and then, taking a risk, lay a large hand over hers, a gesture of his sincerity. She flinched, a little, but then looked up at him, eyes wide and innocently confused. "I think you did the right thing." He blushed after that, and he cursed himself for his own ridiculously pale complexion. "Ah, I know that my opinion is probably of very little consequence to you. But I think that I would have done the same, confronted with your situation today. Do not think too deeply on the morals of it; nobody will judge your actions, especially –"
"Larten," she said quietly, his opinion of surprisingly monumental importance to her, the corner of her lips twitching up into a playful smile, her fingers twining into his between them. "Honestly, shut up."
He chuckled, and, running his thumb over the bandage on the back of her hand, reached up to touch the loose strands of her hair that had escaped the ponytail, curled about the back of her neck, and then let his hand slip across to her neck, laying a few fingers across her collarbones and dragging them up, across her windpipe, jugular, along her jaw and then across her soft bottom lip, failing to find the words to tell her how lovely she was, touching the corner of her lips and then resting his hand on her pale cheek –
"Not practicing?"
Arra jumped, her hand twitching out from under Larten's, her eyes fluttering downwards instantly. Larten had never hated Mika quite as much as he did at that precise moment. Arra sprung to her feet, stretching the muscles of her arms nonchalantly. "I am too tired for a fight," she told the dark-haired General, who hadn't moved from the door. She felt oddly guilty, or perhaps it was just embarrassment, or something – for some reason, there was something in Mika's expression and the way he stood entirely still like a statue that made her feel as though she had in some way upset him. "I think I ought to rest. Unless there is something you think I need to do to prepare before my next Trial, Larten?"
Larten hadn't moved. "Ah, make sure you do not lose track of your timing," he said, running a hand through his hair. "And do not panic if one of the Trials you do not favour happens to come up. You are capable of passing anything, you should believe more in yourself."
Another uncomfortable silence followed that, and Arra rubbed her hands together and nodded. "Thank you," she said to nobody in particular, and then strode past Mika and off towards her cell without another word to either of them.
Larten stood, the silence in the empty Hall between the two men unbearable, but when he turned Mika had disappeared, perhaps off to nurse his injured pride. He and Arra, in that sense, were probably more alike than either of them realized.
if you've managed to get to the end of such a mammoth chapter, congratulations! i considered splitting it up, but really i'd like to do a chapter a trial. anyway, i'm having lots of trouble thinking of enough trials for arra to undertake and the names of them. i have one more planned, but other than that my imagination has utterly failed me. if any of you have any ideas i'd love to hear them - either in private message or in a review - i'd hate to get stuck after the next chapter! thanks so much for all reviews so far as well. :) bry