Chapter 8: Afraid
KIANNA
Burnt walls.
Shattered glass.
It was as if her home had died from the inside out, rotting in its blood-shame, and the distant cry of a forgotten slave was the only sound for miles of the once lively Manor.
Kianna found her nerves on edge staring at it, she digged her fingers into her skin, and Azriel tugged her along, "come."
They walked around the side, the grass scorched and trudged upon from the stampede of escapees. She looked beyond the despair and saw the same green hills of yesterday. It seemed like just yesterday when her parents took her brothers and herself on a morning picnic. Those happy days were imprinted in Kianna's memory.
Watching her father dozing on the blankets next to their mother, for once at total peace as he napped. For her, as the baby of the family, this was open season. Kianna tickled the great beast of her father, a daisy brushing playfully against his leg as she wiggled her little wrist at him. She was like a baby cub flicking the mane of the Alpha Male of their pride, she was tempting his ferocious retort, but took the risk anyway.
Her mother didn't even tell her to stop, instead having a deep conversation of how proud she was of her brothers and the Fae males they were becoming, of how strong of a family they were, and such doting sons that choose to spend the time at their home instead of elsewhere.
But they weren't doting sons… her mother must have been blind, because her brothers were too busy drawing up ways to spar with the sentinels, chattering about their Hybern friends, and too busy to see how precious their time together was.
If only they had known what would happen.
"It's safe now," Azriel said as they ducked into a shattered window, letting that be their secret entrance to the Manor, "here," he lifted her over the glass, and then carried her up the stairs, silent as the grave and so they made it without being caught.
Kianna closed her eyes against Azriel's shoulder, trying to pray, but failing to get words out. Auntie Maris had said once The Mother was always watching over them, from the youngest to the oldest, she watched over all Prythian, and Kianna felt her mouth go dry at the evils The Mother had let happen in her family.
The Mother must not care because when Azriel brought her back to her bedroom, she is clutching his leg as he finally let her go, and she looked about in horror at what was left of it.
"It's alright to be afraid Kianna." The shadowsinger gave her a few moments to take in a too quiet Manor, the emptiness and destruction to the place she loved most, pools of blood had leaked in from the hallway, and she didn't want to think too much on that fact. "But your safe now," Azriel promised, his hand finding hers, and helping her feel so.
She might be safe, but she felt a great sadness to know that she could not sleep in her own room without remembering. The walls torn of the insulation, the floor racked with claws, and Willow's bed demolished in her wrecked room, the hallway was worse off, she concluded that she would have surely died if she had stayed here.
"Azriel," her voice afraid.
"Yes?"
"I can't"- She wanted him to pick her up and take her away from this place. To elongate the pain, she would feel at finding her dead family, and having to confront Tamlin… She didn't know her brother enough to even comfort him for something like this. Would he be like their father? Would he take his anger out on her? Blame her!
"Goodbye Kianna, be safe."
Kianna sucked in a quick breath at those words and latched onto Azriel's before he took off, his dark wings blocking the dawn's light from the window, the skin of his wings was bit of red up close, crimson black she decided, and extremely soft against her arm as it curtained them for a moment.
"What is it?"
She tugged on his rough hands, scared and mangled against her smooth baby flesh, "Don't leave me."
"You have to let me go," Azriel muttered her words back to her, a sly smile growing on his lips when she didn't budge from his nudge, "you don't want to see me go do you?"
She didn't know how to tell him that her Mother and Willow had kept her in a bubble all her sheltered life. Dressing, bedding, and playing with her in seclusion of others, to keep pretenses that a High Lord's daughter did not socialize with those below her station, and in that isolation, they had cursed her. She felt safe with Azriel, felt his compassion for her, a soft look that only lasted in her Mother's eyes, and that was a far cry from what she felt with her brothers.
"I don't know anyone."
"What?" Azriel frown returned, the one he had gave his friend Rhys, another Illyrian warrior Kianna assumed with the wings and Illyrian leather. "What do you mean you don't know anyone?"
"I don't have anyone." She let him make his own conclusions from that. "I'll be all alone."
"You won't be alone." He sounded so sure. "This is your home Kianna. The guards will take care of you, make sure no one hurts you, that's why there here," Azriel urged and prodded her to the door that hung on its hinges, and still she held tight onto him, "come on," he groaned, "they will take you to your brother, hurry, before they see us."
"You aren't staying with me?" Kianna felt more perplexed, "but you saved me? You saved me from the thing that came to kill my family, you are different Azriel"- she knew that with every bone in her body. Her life had rested in Azriel's hands, and he had even protected her from his own High Lord. That was more than her brothers ever did for her Mother.
"Azriel, don't leave me, stay here with me." Kianna pleaded with all her strength.
"I came with my own High Lord Kianna, I belong to another Court, your father attacked my Court."
Kianna felt her stomach drop, "we didn't have anything to do with it, why did my Mother have to die? Why did we have to suffer for his fighting?" That was the question that boiled under her skin, and she wasn't sure any answer would make it better.
"I know." He said thickly, "it wasn't right what happened," Azriel confided, "but, my presence would only make it worse for you, more people would die Kianna. I don't want that to happen,"- he grimaced the moment Kianna made a sound of surprise, shaking her head slowly at the sudden realization that he had been a part of this assault. That she was clutching onto the leg of someone responsible for her Mother's death, Willow's death.
She released him, holding her sweaty palms, suddenly anxious. "You knew this was going to happen?"
Silence hung like smoke in the dim dawn's light between them.
He didn't answer that. Instead saying gently, "He was my High Lord, I was sworn to protect and obey," Kianna shook her head in sadness, he lost the gentle, cold, hard, and inflexible, "but his bloodthirst will end with him Kianna. Rhysand will make a better High Lord, a better person, he will learn from his father's mistakes," so that man had been his High Lord. Rhys or Rhysand of the Night Court as Azriel had called him, and the news that she had been so close to her families' murderer moved Kianna with a fury she didn't know she had. Her hands balling into fist, and then her teeth sounded like grating stone in her mouth at letting him get away.
Azriel saw this. "He won't start a War after all this bloodshed. Rhysand is done with death," his fist tightening too. "I'll make sure you," he paused, "and your brother are left in peace."
She turned on him. "So, you're going to be my enemy."
"Maybe your brother's enemy," he said so simply it made Kianna take a step back. He added quickly, "Not yours."
She heard voices rising down the hallway, searching through the debris, Kianna gulped in an angry breath, "my father told me never to trust your kind, and yet… you save me, why did you save me? Hurry before they come."
"Because it was the right thing to do."
"I knew it!" That was all she needed to hear before she launched herself at his waist, hugging him tightly, "I knew you were good. I just knew it."
"Be safe Kianna," he said as she finally let him go, somberly watching him take a few quick steps, flap his mighty wings, and fly into the air, toward the light blues of the dawn sky. He made it to the bend in the trees by the time the sentinels found her. Kianna inhaled his scent that still lingered in the room, pine and soft mist, the dawn rising over the hills of the Spring Court.
"Lady Kianna."
Her brother's sentinels were pale when they found her, looking at her like she was a ghost, and for some reason this didn't scare her as much as seeing her new High Lord brother.
She let the fury at Azriel's violent actions, the bitter regret of not leaving with him, and the guilt at wanting to leave with him wash over her stressed mind like a balm.
Instead she let the disgust of his Azriel's connection to the murderer boost her confidence to meet the other survivor of this hellish night.
"Where's Tamlin? Where's my brother?"
0o0o0o0o0o0
There seemed to be no getting away from Aunt Maris dry tears and dark words "our mother once said the past is a different country. This might as well be a different world with Tagnar and my Leesa gone." There she went crying into her hands, and yet no tears. She seemed to get a greater reaction to the putrid sweet scent wafting through the curtains, "Oh, Vanir! Can't you shut that window! The girls shouldn't be smelling corpses. It's bad enough with all the blood on the walls, and now we have a graveyard to contend with. I can't tell how you can stand it!"
"Enough female! I heard you the first time," Vanir growled, shutting the curtain, and going back with his conversation with the Captain of the Guard, Dakar Greenseer. The Vallahan noble had married her Aunt at a very young age and therefore had the pleasure of giving Kianna three female cousins, Ianthe, Zinnia, and Begonia. The last that was thankfully her own age, and the other two were her major by at least thirty years, not as old as her brothers in their blooming youth, but old enough to no longer be considered children by Fae standards.
Ianthe seemed to be the ring-leader of the three, and quite stern like her father, but rather vocal when there were handsome males to entertain, "Mother please. Calm yourself before you make a fool of yourself."
"But what can be done?" Aunt Maris blew into her handkerchief, her nose dry, and Kianna thoroughly irritated at her show, and their lack of attention to her, and what her family's death meant for her. "Tamlin," her Aunt sniffled, "why can he not see us? Why must he be so cruel in this hour of need?"
Kianna's eyes went to the study's door, her father's study, and now it was Tamlin's. As was everything and every problem he denied listening to as he holed himself inside.
"He is no longer a green boy," spoke up the Captain of the Guard, "he is your High Lord, and you will speak on his behalf and name with good intent."
"She knows Dakar," Vanir slapped his back, "it's the way of woman to moan and bellow, she means no wrong in it."
"Mother, Tamlin has the right to grieve in his own way," Zinnia spoke up, the skinner and dark-eyed version of Ianthe's curvaceous and gorgeous form, she dabbed her own handkerchief around her wet eyes, "he must feel as if he is alone in the world. You shouldn't be upset with him so, we should work together to help him through-"
"Alone!" Aunt Maris screeched, "He thinks he is alone!" She scoffed, "we are his family! The only family he has now, and how can he condone this behavior without thinking of our own feelings, and there is much to tell of what we will do with all the mess the Night Court left? Oh, and the visitors," she bemoaned as if she was about to burst with all the weight of that new development. "How will we give food and house in this state when the very demon from hell was sent to ruin us and look at our High Lord's state of mind! Foul fiends coming in the dead of night, killing babes in the womb!"
"Mother, not in front of dear Kianna." Zinnia spoke up, while Ianthe rolled her eyes at all the fuss they were making.
Kianna stood from her seat beside a sullen Begonia, tired of being an invisible.
Without a single word she stalked forward to the study's door, the one her brother had roared at whomever was brave enough to attempt to enter. Her hand was sure as it turned the knob of the study's door, and her ears were deaf to the shouts for her to come back.
The door closed behind her with a click, and none came to take her back.
Kianna appraised the still dark and rather windy room. The room was worse than the outside, the walls had been torn by a talon hand, the paintings worse off, the windows were holes in the early morning, and her father's desk was thrown against the wall. In the chair, facing off against the balcony of green and rising smoke sat a golden-haired Fae, broad shoulders, long legs, and blood covered in every nook of him. He looked beaten, a dog beaten at his own butchering game.
Kianna felt as if she should be far away from him, but after Azriel's departure, all she seemed to feel was how empty she was inside. It made her mind go to mush, and her words harsh as she reminded herself that this was Tamlin, and he had fault just as much as her father.
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself." Kianna bit at him.
Tamlin's responding growl made her jump, but she didn't move an inch back to the entrance door. Thankfully he did look up before she lost her nerve, and was just as overwhelmed as she seemed to be with this reunion, those green eyes, her Mother's eyes, her brother…
Kianna felt the tears come freely now, "we are supposed to stay strong. Mother told me to stay strong no matter what, I know she told you too." She fought her survival instincts and rushed up to him, right into the width between his legs, and held tight onto his talon-less hands, then moving her hands to his blood-soaked face. "You're my brother Tamlin. Please."
She was not sure whom she was trying to convince him or herself. She just hoped he was not like their father. "Please Tam."
"Kia." He muttered, as if he just remembered she existed, and then she erupted in tears.
"I'm sorry." Kianna muttered the words over and over. Perhaps she felt guilty for wanting to leave him, wanting to take the easier way out, but she knew the words were best in this case.
His arms went around her for the first time in their lives, holding her, and she laid her head on his shoulder not daring to be the first one to let go.
How did you like it :)
thank you for reading, all my love,
Odeveca
