Sindar's Choice
What was Sindar's Choice? Neither Elona nor Antonio understood what was happening, so they stood where they were. The soldiers of Ashatra, the moment the king's command fell, closed in on the two of them and carried out their orders.
As Kazan had ordered, they cut Antonio free of his bonds. Elona was taken by the hands and pushed back twelve paces, yet she still stood at the very front of the crowd, for every soldier had withdrawn those same twelve paces.
A circular clearing opened in the palace garden, ringed by men. Inside it stood only two: Kazan and Antonio. What is he trying to do? Elona found the courage to ask Grand General Tortan, who stood beside her.
"What is Sindar's Choice? What are you planning to do?"
"Sindar is one of our nation's guardian gods."
Tortan answered in a flat, unhurried voice. Out in the clearing a soldier approached the two kings, took Kazan's longsword, and gave each of them an ordinary dagger. Even from a distance, Antonio's hand shook pitifully as he received his.
"He is the god of wind and death. No mortal may dare ask Sindar to choose. The only one who can demand a choice of a god is one who has risen to a god's own station: the rightful king of Ashatra, and no other."
"Then to receive Sindar's Choice means..."
Someone struck blade against shield, hard enough to crack the air. With that ringing clash of metal, Antonio lunged at Kazan, dagger in hand. He had trained with the sword since his days as a prince, and his body was not clumsy, but he was nowhere near enough to match Kazan. Kazan slipped the point with ease and drove his own dagger in at terrible speed.
"Agh...!"
"Brother!"
The cry tore out of Elona before she could stop it. She hated Antonio. She had wished, more than once, that he would vanish, that he would die. But she had never wanted him tortured like this before everyone's eyes.
Antonio's right arm had been opened in a long gash. Blood pattered from the wound as he shifted the knife to his left hand, and his unsteady blade cut empty air again. At his leisure Kazan swung and laid open his side, then drove the dagger into his back and wrenched it free in a spray of blood. It was an execution, utterly one-sided. This is too cruel... The thought had barely formed when she remembered the dream of the night before. That night's Kazan had said the very same thing to her. That she was truly cruel.
The dagger fell from Antonio's hand. It had not so much as nicked a single strand of Kazan's hair, and it was mottled with its owner's blood. Antonio sank down with a struggle and coughed blood in wet, choking bursts. Kazan looked down on him with a cold gaze.
"Sindar has chosen you. I will grant you no last words."
At that brief sentence of death, Elona felt her heart stop. The words last words made Antonio's eyes fly wide with terror.
"S-stop... I was wrong... Help me, help me, Elona! Elona!"
He thrashed, ugly in his desperation, calling for his younger sister. In the instant Kazan lifted the blood-soaked dagger, Elona remembered with perfect clarity something he had once said.
He had been drawing a strange pattern in the dirt with a twig, saying that people wished for the gods' gentleness and mercy. Then, in a lonely voice, he had added:
"But sometimes we also wish the gods would be endlessly harsh in our place."
With a thin hiss he scored a line through the heart of the pattern and flung the twig aside.
A sound thick with déjà vu snapped Elona back to herself.
The ground was soaked red from end to end. Antonio's body lay where it had fallen, still as a log. Kazan dropped the spent dagger onto the earth.
The moment she understood that it was over, her eyes met his. They were the same color as the blood soaking the ground. He watched her, and he cried out as if to make certain she saw.
At Kazan's declaration the soldiers of Ashatra roared. Amid that heat Elona felt a chill. The king of Ashatra who had trampled Parsion was unmistakably the Kazan she had sent away seven years ago. Yet across the long years apart he seemed to have become an entirely different man. Far too cold, too merciless, burning with revenge. Yes. Revenge.
Empty-handed now, Kazan was walking toward her. His ivory clothes were blotched dark with Antonio's blood. Those red eyes fixed on her alone, and Elona could not breathe. Too late, she understood that she had missed the most important fact of all.
Kazan was alive. And he had come back to Parsion.
To take revenge on everything that had driven him into despair.
"Last princess of Parsion."
Twenty-seven-year-old Kazan reached for her cheek. Elona could not tell whether the wetness smearing beneath his fingertips was her own tears or Antonio's blood. Only his voice remained clear, seared into her like a brand.
On the third floor of the Farcion Royal Palace, the bedchamber Elona had used until her confinement was exactly as it had been. She washed the blood away in the bath, changed into a clean nightgown, and stepped slowly into the room. The events of a single day were already more than she could bear, and coming back to her old chamber dragged up the nightmare of the night before until her mind swam. What in the world happened?
Dazed, she sat on the corner of the bed. Her head was full of questions. Kazan was alive. How? Brother said he killed Kazan. Seven years ago...
Had Antonio been lying? Several people claimed to have seen him kill Kazan. Had they all joined the lie to save his face? At the time he had not even been king, and his reputation had been poor. That possibility was almost none.
And even if he survived somehow, how did Kazan become king of Ashatra? That boy truly had nothing. He was a slave... Elona did not know Ashatra's ways in any depth. But by any ordinary measure, how could a man who had been sold into slavery rise to a throne in a country torn apart by princes fighting for the crown? Not without some tremendous power.
There is so much I want to ask. If I ask, will he answer? She didn't think he would. Elona let out a long sigh and covered her face with both hands. In truth, the first thing she had to do was something else entirely. I have to apologize to him.
As she had seen in last night's dream, the worst conversation of her life, the one in this very room, had been their last memory of each other. She resented the coward she had been. Why had she been so shameless? However desperately she had wanted to escape Antonio, she had trampled the heart of a man who had given her his whole life, and she had not even said she was sorry.
Perhaps Kazan's return was a god giving her one more chance.
Then the bedroom door opened without a knock. She flinched and looked toward it.
The one who entered was Kazan himself.
He shut the door and went not to the bed where she sat, but to the table, setting something down with a heavy thud. A bottle of liquor, brought, it seemed, from the victory feast that had gone on all evening. Without so much as a glance at Elona, he began to remove his ceremonial cloak. The sound of leather cords loosening, of cloth crumpling, set her nerves on edge. I have to say it now. She rose from the bed and took a step toward him.
"Kazan, there's something I want to say to you."
His hands, folding the cloak, stopped. Only for a moment. Ignoring her, Kazan opened the bottle. Did he not want to speak to her at all? Elona searched his face, then went on anyway.
"For the past seven years, I thought you were dead. By my brother Antonio's hand."
Kazan still did not turn. Instead of an answer, the sound of liquor pouring into a silver cup filled the room, and Elona pressed on.
"The last conversation we had in this room. Do you remember it? I told you I couldn't trust you, and I... I gave you a truly, truly deep wound."
Emotion surged and closed her throat. She had to pause for breath. Confessing a regret that had knotted inside her for so long was unbearably hard.
"I thought that was the end, that I would never see you again. You have no idea how much I regretted it these seven years. Every night I dreamed of you. Every morning, when I opened my eyes, I wished you were beside me. If I had known you were alive, I would have gone looking for you long ago. I didn't even know, and I only wasted the years. For wounding you with those words, I am... I am so sorry."
She managed, at least, to hold the tears back and finish. Elona looked at Kazan, barely keeping down the feeling that she might cry. Hope was rising in her chest that she might at last be freed from a long nightmare.
A thin, scoffing breath of laughter reached her.
Had she misheard? Elona doubted her own ears.
"Elona."
Kazan spoke her name. She stared at his back, caught in a strange unease.
"Y-yes. Kazan."
His unreadable gaze rested for a moment on the fire in the hearth. He lifted the filled cup to his lips. The spirit on the table was a fierce one, yet he emptied it in a single swallow. Watching the hard working of his throat, Elona felt how unfamiliar he had become. There was nothing boyish left in him. He was a grown man.
At last he set down the empty cup, turned, and looked at her.
"I have imagined this moment for a very long time."
The look in his eyes made her flinch and step back. Red eyes burned at her with hunger, like a beast on the hunt.
Something is wrong. The thought came, and he began to walk slowly toward her. Firelight wavered through the room and made his frame seem larger still. When the pressure rolling off him threatened to crush her, he drew close and spoke in a low voice.
"This moment. The moment I took power into my hands, brought down the country that reduced me to a slave, and brought you before me."
Elona retreated until the bed struck the backs of her legs. There was nowhere left to go, and Kazan arrived before her eyes.
"Through hundreds of nights, thousands, I thought and thought again. When you finally stood face to face with me, what would you say?"
A foreboding rose in her, and she wanted to cut him off. Her lips only trembled. She could not bring herself to speak. Kazan studied her anxious face.
"I hoped, a little. That you might tell me some truth capable of turning my heart. Some secret I never knew. But..."