One Blood
King Rameth brooded as the Royal Family gathered below him. Guards and servants shuffled nervously about the assembly, bringing away horses and paperwings as his wife Sayren appeared in the courtyard and welcomed them into the castle. Here and there snatches of conversation told him how his kinsmen were doing. There were rumours of a mordicant sighting in the south-west; Tirne's prize mare foaled twins this season past; Urieth's research on communicating with the Charter Stones has hit a dead-end.
Rumours travel fast indeed, He mused, as talk turned quietly towards Samael's message and the Exile's claim to succession. Only Master Derrick seemed untouched by this news, never for a moment ceasing, even for breath, on the complaint of his two sons and wilful daughter. Rameth had been King for some eighteen years and therein was his strength, to listen and observe.
A room off the main library had been readied for the meeting and beds were being made. Refreshments were served as the fifteen men and women of the King's blood gathered around an ancient table so deeply polished that its surface resembled a dark, stone mirror. Four seats stood empty as they settled themselves; Samael and Cyrial, who were but just landing on the walls, and the twins Ruhiel and Leliel.
The Abhorsen was nowhere to be found and there was little doubt among her kinsman that the worst has come to pass, although the hope remained that their fears were unfounded and she will stride through the doors in a moment, brambles in her hair and an assortment of curiosities on a stout hiking stick.
The low babble died and even Derrick held his tongue as the King took his place at the head of the table. The Queen's place was beside him and the Abhorsen's across. The Clayr took places on the left and the Wallmaker cousins on the right, while the other members of the table took seats amongst them. Once upon a time, the council of the Royal Family encompassed all of the King's closest kin, when first King Touchstone I and his son and daughter sat with the Abhorsen and the Remembrancer and those of the Clayr under the Great Charter Stones.
And this is what was remembered:
That once they were of a ken, and came apart;
Two lines perished, one broken, one misremembered.
The Abhorsen twice dead, twice turned from Death
The ancient stone prince risen to be King
The Wallmaker begot anew from Stone and Binder
The Clayr-daughter who Sees in the rivers of Death
Now again are one,
And there was much that needed be done.
Sayren spoke.
"We have gathered for Lady Samael of the Abhorsen's Household, who wishes to petition us."
Rameth nodded. He spoke with a voice of bells that tolled deep and sombre. It was solemn and commanding, a King's voice.
"That is so. Let her come forth"
This was the cue. Three people entered in a single file, squeezing by the servants filing out. The young woman in the lead scowled half-heartedly at them and bore the tired air of one who had recently exhausted herself crying.
"I am Samael, daughter of Abhorsen Ruhiel." She met all the room's eyes when the room was cleared and the doors closed and latched.
The man bringing up the rear stepped up beside her and gave a charming little bow. "I am Cyrial, son of Rameth." Rameth returned the slightest of nods. The Family knew them.
The third was their prisoner and looked to be between Cyrial and Samael's ages. Her hands were bound to her neck by a collar of Charter Marks, an inconvenience which she did not seem to have noticed. There was a harsh sound from the table, of someone old gasping in recognition. She smiled. It was nice to be among family again.
"We bring with us Azazel, discovered attempting to cross..."
"I beg your pardon, Lady Samael," A small, golden-toned child, not a day past thirteen, rose from her place between two similarly tanned and white-blonde women in bright blue waistcoats. The child herself wore white with a silver circlet beset with moonstones on her brow. "I am Amirelle," She said in a soft, musical voice that carried clear and strong to all corners of the sombre room. "And I speak for the Clayr. It is too early to bring forth your trouble. We wait, still, for another."
There was a moment of confusion and one voice, a little louder than the rest, asked "Ruhiel? But..."
"The Abhorsen is dead. A new one must be made by the next full moon." The little girl replied, "But the Scholar is coming and she shall not be pleased if we begin without her."
A quiet descended upon the table. Finally, it was the Queen's brother Jonah who got to his feet "Child," He began patiently, forcing a wane smile. "The... Sorceress has not been with us for some twenty years. She has no care for our concerns, nor have we concerned ourselves with her cares. Why would she come now?"
"Perhaps it is because she is connected, my brother-in-law." Rameth startled everyone by speaking. "Is this not the matter of her sister's child, for whom she walked through Death to receive?"
Jonah submitted. "Aye, my brother, it is so." He sighed. Master Derrick, seated on his left, rested a sympathetic hand on his shoulder as he sat back down.
"Let us convene on other matters of the Family then, whilst we wait. Certainly there is no reason for her to take an interest in our affairs now where she has failed before." Queen Sayren was of the Royal line, though she could have easily passed for Clayr, save her obsidian eyes. "And Cyrial, don't think for one moment that tarrying might mean you won't have to find a date for Mid-Winter. You are twenty-seven, young man! If you have not found a suitable wife surely you are at least capable of finding a date for an evening?" Among her many talents in diplomacy, was her ability to slide from regal Queen of a powerful magical nation into the nagging Mother of her children in a heartbeat.
Prince Cyrial slid into his seat on his father's right hand, properly cowed and chastised as his Queen-Mother went on. "If I don't hear anything in a week I will personally set you up with the most boring princess I can find. Do you hear?"
Samael, and several other aunts, uncles and cousins, chuckled, barely able to conceal their amusement. Sassy retreated into the sidelines, now bound and ignored, to rest against the cool stone wall. She had caught the look that passed between mother and son that said it was but a charade to lighten the mood. Affection towards your fellow men; an ailment she knew and understood, but could never really, as they said, "get into".
She was just getting bored as Master Urieth explained his thoughts and research needs, when a burnt, metallic taste began to blossom in the air next to her. "Oh, for Charter's sake," It sighed irritably, barely an apparition, at Sassy's collar. "Just hang on a minute, girl, we'll get rid of that soon enough."
"It seems fairly unnecessary, especially when they're more comfortable that you didn't, Aunt Leliel." The prisoner noted calmly in the room of suddenly petrified people turning slowly to look at her. The stench of Free Magic grew stronger as the ghostly figure of a middle-aged, sour-faced woman gathered substance and took a step forward, as though through a window.
"Good day, cousin." Rameth nodded graciously in greeting, a small crease between his brow the only sign of any disdain or distress he might bear.
"Not really, Rameth. I would be here more personally except someone had seen fit to place me under house arrest, for some unfathomable reason." Leliel, or rather the Sending of Leliel, replied, straightening the magical image of her long, dark blue coat and molten chocolate curls.
Rameth looked about the table with a raised eyebrow and settled his gaze on an unflinching in-law, the sister of a dead King. "This shall be addressed, Leliel. You have my word."
"She is a Free Magic Sorceress!" The ancient princess hissed, leaning maliciously across the table. "An outcast! Necromancer! She must not interfere with us, not like she did before! We will not make the mistake of listening to you again, witch! Your idiot sister cannot protect you now."
"I would slap you silly for speaking against her, Imiral, if I were not so certain it would kill you as I am now." The edges of the Sending crackled.
"We were discussing Azazel's attempt to cross the Wall, Aunts." Samael cleared her throat politely, speaking from the place held usually by the Abhorsen-in-Waiting. Imiral sank back in her chair. The Sending sizzled in the air and looked to the girl with interest. Samael cleared her throat again, slightly embarrassed at her own audacity. "As I was mentioning, Azazel was found and caught at the Perimeter with intent to cross and enter the Kingdom."
"And why not?" Samael could not help but flinch from the testy image. "This is her home, isn't it?"
"If you remember, cousin, she was fostered into exile some twenty years ago to Ancelstierre."
"Ahh yes, Sayren, thank you. It rather slipped my mind." The Queen managed a smile for Leliel's courtesy. Though it was not without fear, the late Abhorsen's sister held her gravest respect. She did not see, as many no doubt did, a Free Magic Sorceress who had turned her back on her duty and calling, scheming treachery and atrocities in her towers. Instead, Sayren remembered a girl who tried to knock the teeth out of some guardsman's mouth for troubling her sisters with saucy names and spent a week in bed with broken bones; and she remembered the stern, disapproving face of a girl who lectured her cousins scathingly as she fixed their rascally accidents so their parents need not know what they have been up to. Perhaps this was her failing.
"We compromised once, Leliel, when you brought that abomination from Death." Sassy cringed and tried to pretend they were not speaking about her. "We compromised again and exiled it rather than execute a child, even one as unnatural as this. What will you have us now? We who are the protectors of this land, the builders of order and binders of the Dead! We let ourselves be run around to the whims of a Free Magic blasphemer and a creature of Death!"
The smell of Free Magic flared her nostrils and her little gimlet eyes bore into the sending image, as though if she bore hard and long enough, she could burrow a hole through Leliel's skull, leagues away in her grave, dark tower. Imiral was old, perhaps five or ten years over ninety, and unafraid of most things in life and death, from merely being old.
"Perhaps, with your obsession, you would like to visit the River of Death, Imiral." Leliel, on the other hand, derived her authority from an absolute unwillingness to tolerate any foolishness and claimed her right to do so from sheer notoriety.
Samael knew nothing of her Aunt Leliel except by reputation, but she knew well Imiral's foolishness and stamina to goad even the sweetest tempered of men to a rage. It annoyed her that the rest of the table sat in rapt fascination, allowing the interruption to carry on as it did, that nobody seemed concerned about the matters at hand, that the cousin-of-whom-they-do-not-speak-of, her first cousin, apparently, was giving her a sympathetic eye, and that same cousin, who was attempting to steal her birthright, the only thing she will ever receive from Ruhiel. She brought her hands down hard on the table.
"Azazel says she's the next Abhorsen!"
Author's progressively degenerating thoughts:
Huzzah! Family conferences. Fun!
Samael snaps. It's always awesome to watch pretty girls get in a rage. Awesome, like a beautiful raging fire.
Uh... I'm out of things to say.
Oh, and feel free to flame/abuse/whack me over the head for any drop in story/writing quality anywhere along this whole fic.