The Bonds of Blood (22 page)

The White Lady looked to the east, and
far off in the distance they could see a shimmer of pink and orange
separated by a hue of purple casting the first rays of light over
the Mountains of Nependier.

“Alas, dawn comes, and I must depart
from you.” She beckoned them both forward and embraced them,
parting from their arms with a slight brushing of lips against
their foreheads. They felt her adoration for them slipping over
their skin from where her lips brushed, and they shivered as the
power reached deep inside of them, restoring their strength as it
had not been in days. Like a rush of adrenaline, their eyes perked
open and their bodies felt refreshed.

“Be safe, and Goddess bless.” As her
dress began merging with the water once more, she turned and
floated out into the river, now out of arm’s reach, then slowly she
descended into the fathomless depths of the river.

They watched her go, but before she was
half submerged, she turned back, her white-blond hair creating a
circle around her with its glimmering pearls. “Jovian, do not fear
the Pale Horse; it comes to us all in time.” And before Jovian
could find his voice, she slipped under the surface of the water to
become a pale glowing light that soon fluttered and then vanished
into a watery oblivion.

As the light of the sun began to
illuminate the land in steely grey, the pinpoints of fairy lights
slowly dimmed, and their light, too, extinguished as had the White
Lady of Willabanter Ford.

Before long the shock of what happened
to them wore off, and they woke Grace and Joya. The thought of the
White Lady and the fairies eventually wore away like a
dream.

At daybreak it didn’t take them long to
pack up camp, bank the fire, and prepare the horses for the journey
ahead of them.

Grace figured it was only another two
days before they reached Meedesville, and this was good news.
Apparently she knew someone there, and they would be able to find
shelter that night.

“Really it is just one more night on
the road; we should be reaching Meedesville in the early evening
the next day,” she told them during breakfast, which was being
consumed in the saddle.

“Who is this person that you
know?”

“You met her at your birthday party;
her name is Rosalee,” Grace said simply, and at the mention of the
strange woman’s name they all fell into an uncomfortable silence
that carried them through most of the day until the later hours,
near evening after they ventured away from the riverbank and
started north east for Meedesville.

“What is that?” Joya asked pointing
northward. For a while she had been looking at the looming darkness
approaching from the north, but she had before only thought it was
the encroaching night. Now, as they drew closer to it, she realized
it was not the darkening evening, but instead a massive black
fogbank looming high up into the sky, obscuring everything beyond
it. In fact, it was so black and so high it stretched straight up
into the sky, blocking out even the painted evening horizon beyond
it.

“That can’t be, can it?” Angelica
asked.

“The Shadow Realm,” Jovian said with a
shudder mingling of wonder and fear.

“Yes, I fear we are traveling next to
it for a while now.” Grace turned in her saddle and looked to the
west. “This is good enough for tonight,” she informed them leading
Holly a little to the south before dismounting.

Jovian didn’t notice until they were a
little further away from the Shadow Realm exactly how apprehensive
it had made him feel for the brief amount of time they were near
it. Now that he was further away, however, he could definitely
notice a difference in his mental stability.

“Does it always do that to people?” he
asked Grace as they finished dinner.

“Do what?”

“Make them feel so … lost?” His gaze
pressed north where the Shadow Realm was little more than a dark
haze in the distance. They were now a safe distance away, and it
was darkening enough by now that they couldn’t see more than a
lingering gloom left of the Shadow Realm.

“Yes, but we are just far enough away
that we will not have any ill effects from its power tonight.” She
took a drink of wine from her skin and puffed fiercely on her pipe
to get it going better. “Some say that if you sleep close enough to
the Shadow Realm you suffer nightmares.”

“Is that true?” Angelica asked. “When
we are in Meedesville, will we suffer from nightmares?”

“I don’t know. I never slept out of
doors when I was in Meedesville, and Rosalee’s house is well wyrded
against the powers of that forsaken realm.” The pipe lit, and Grace
was soon blowing smoke high into the air. “You mean to tell me that
none of you have ever seen the Shadow Realm?”

Jovian looked down and shook his head.
“Father never took us near it when we were traveling, and the one
time I was close to it, on the hunting trip, I could not see due to
fog.”

“Huh,” Grace grunted and fell
silent.

The night passed with light
conversation, and before long the first watch was being
taken.

Surprisingly nothing happened that
night. There was no rustling in the grass, no strange baying, and
certainly no dancing lights. The lack of activity was spookier than
dalua running rampant through their camp, and both watches passed
nervously.

Dawn the next day saw them traveling
northeast once more, and it wasn’t long before the humongous black
fogbank came into sight again. They all shivered, trying to find
something more cheerful than the Shadow Realm in their scope of
vision, but each time they pried their eyes away, they were quickly
pulled back as the fogbank eddied and swirled.

“It is almost like something is moving
inside there, just beyond the border.” Joya stated, and Grace
smiled.

“Most likely there is.” This stopped
any further conversation.

Around midmorning, a shrill scream tore
through the air, startling them all.

“What in the Otherworld was that?”
Angelica said, her hand going instinctively to her mace as she
pulled Jesse up short.

“That was a person from the Shadow
Realm,” Grace informed them and she continued to ride. “Nothing to
worry yourself about; come along.”

“What happened to them?” Joya asked as
more strangled noises drifted across the plains between them and
the fogbank.

“Occasionally someone from the Shadow
Realm tries to escape that land and come here. There are border
guards that watch the border between the Holy Realm and the Shadow
Realm to ensure that nothing vile comes out of that realm. Seeing
how the people are viewed as vile as well, they are most often shot
down when they try to make it through. It is a grizzly custom, and
belief that the people of the Shadow Realm are vile has its roots
in the Splitting of the World. Of course, the Holy Realm blames the
Shadow Realm for Spirits’ disappearance, and vice versa. At any
rate, after the guards hunt the person down, they stake them up
just past the border of the Shadow Realm. Sometimes they are not
dead when the dalua of their homeland claim them.”

Tension mounted as the foursome
anticipated another shrill scream that never came.

The fogbank was close enough now that
they could see the empty stakes placed in varying intervals in the
ground. It wasn’t long before Jovian saw yet another black-haired
person hanging from a stake at the edge of the fogbank. They had
been stripped naked and looked badly wounded. Cuts marred their
body, as if they had been lashed severely for trying to get into
the Holy Realm. It was a male, but other than that Jovian could
tell little more.

Suddenly, so quickly that if he had
blinked he would have missed it, a shadowy beast darted from the
fog bank looking much like an ape in gait. There was a sick
squelching noise, as if someone had just pulled their boot out of
mud, and the body was being dragged back into the depths of the
dark border. The hands of the man still dangled from the
post.

“What makes them want to come here?”
Joya asked, sounding as though she was fighting down the urge to be
sick.

“Would you want to live there?” Grace
asked pointedly.

Joya shuddered violently at the
question. “I guess not.”

Several times that day they saw the
horrifying image of people on stakes being nabbed by monsters and
dragged back into the darkness of the Shadow Realm, and each time
it wasn’t easier to watch. It was horrifying, and they could not
believe that the Holy Realm would actually permit something like
that to happen to another person.

“Honestly, they can’t be all that bad,”
Jovian protested as he watched a lively woman kick and scream as
she was torn from her stake and carried off into the darkness by a
large troop of shadows.

“I don’t suspect that they are,
Jovian,” Grace said. “However, far be it from any of us to argue
how things are run. Members of the Holy Realm are treated just as
badly within the borders of that land. As I said before, each realm
accuses the other for the separation of Spirit from the Great
Realms.”

“But our realms weren’t even here until
the Realm of Spirit left the Great Realms. How is it either of our
faults?” Angelica asked, not finding much sense in any of
it.

Grace sighed.

“You were there, weren’t you, Grace?”
Joya asked.

“I was,” Grace said, looking off to the
north, but they all felt as though the old lady was not looking at
the Shadow Realm, but instead a place farther off than
that.

“What was it like?” Joya pressed
meekly, but Grace did not answer right away. Finally they heard her
take a deep, wracking breath and speak.

“It was horrible,” she said in little
more than a whisper. “But please, I do not wish to speak of my
part, or the people I lost during that time.”

“Grace,” Angelica said, clearing her
throat and trying to change the subject, “you told us before that
the Splitting of the World happened because Pharoh was killed, and
war.”

“That is true,” she said.

“Then it is completely unfounded for
the Holy Realm and the Shadow Realm to feel that either land was
liable for the Splitting of the World,” Angelica
reasoned.

“The Holy Realm is thought to be
comprised of all the higher emotions of people. All of these
emotions are not good, and some of them include pride, superiority,
and domination. It is for that reason the Shadow Realm feels the
Holy Realm was at fault. Of course, they don’t think that the Holy
Realm was the actual cause of the split, but they feel the emotions
on which the Holy Realm is based was that cause. The Shadow Realm
has lower attributes, and those are what some in the Holy Realm
feel lead to the splitting.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Angelica
said, shaking her head in surrender.

Throughout the day, when they would
take a break to stretch their legs, Jovian would check the road for
a sign of their sister’s passing, as he had done every day after
they left the plantation. On occasion he would find the strange
prints of the creature that attacked him on the hunting trip, but
that was the only sign he had that Amber had been brought this way.
The problem was they didn’t completely know if those prints had
anything to do with Amber.

It wasn’t until midday, when they
dismounted for the last time, that Jovian exclaimed,
“Ah-ha!”

Eager eyes peered interestedly as he
scurried over the ground from the center of the road to the
edge.

“See this here?” he asked.

“See what?” Grace asked, waiting on a
passing wagon, and then made her way over to where Jovian was on
the side of the road.

“That depression in the grass.” Grace
squinted at where his finger guided her.

“Jovian, that is barely anything. I
don’t think that would be a track.”

“But it is, don’t you see?” Jovian
pointed back a little ways from the grass at the edge of the dirt
road where Grace could barely make out a set of human footprints
and the strange clawed hooves. “It has been a while, so they are
barely there; thankfully there hasn’t been much wind or rain here
in the last week or we would not have seen them at all.”

“But what does that mean?” asked
Joya.

“It means that whomever those prints
belong to abandoned the road before Meedesville and went around the
village. For some reason they did not want to pass through it.”
Jovian said.

“Why would they do that?” Angelica
asked.

“It is obvious that they did not want
people to see them,” Grace said. “It is also obvious that the
person that took your sister knows the area well enough to know
that Meedesville is five miles up. They would have known to abandon
the road here before they met too many people that would notice a
kidnapped woman. Not to mention that the Neferis Plantation is one
of the largest around. It is a good guess to assume that someone in
the small town would recognize her, not too many people have amber
eyes.”

“So we should follow the tracks,
shouldn’t we?” asked Joya excited that they finally had some kind
of inkling that Amber had come this way. Suddenly the memory of the
man with the gruesome hand came flooding back into Joya’s mind. The
debate of whether to tell them had plagued her thoughts for days,
but as she opened her mouth to tell them all about what she had
seen, wondering why she had not done so before, she quickly
retracted the thought. She wondered if it’d be better to make it
sound as though she had dreamt it, but she wasn’t sure which they
would believe more.