Forget Me Not, by Juliann Whicker Page B

his anger and fury blending with his
overwhelming helplessness. He had not protected her from his
own.
    His hand slid from her
face to her neck, feeling the marks beneath his calloused fingers.
The Bashai must have had her for months to leave these layers of
pain without killing her. Scars dipped below the edge of the dress
where he could not see, but he could feel the pain in her, the ache
as sweet and singing as a blade before it separated joint and
limb.
    She gasped and pulled
away, futilely trying to put the pieces of her dress back together.
The room was hushed as everyone stared at her, the spectacle of the
ruined, mad daughter of Elsyria. None moved but one. The gardener
slid away from the celebration, his golden eyes baleful above his
frown, catching her attention.
    She pointed at him,
staring at him in dawning horror. “You told me that he was being
executed. You took me to them, an Elsyrian. Why would you betray
your own kind?”
    Her soft voice carried
through the silent crowd. The Rasha leapt to stop the gardener,
silver swords drawn and at the ready as they halted his escape. He
backed towards Balthaar, hands raised in surrender.
    Balthaar frowned at the
gardener, the man who would betray his own. He wanted his own
sword, knives, flames, to inflict the pain Hatia had suffered until
the gardener’s mind was as broken as his already black
soul.
    “ To cause the fury,” the
green-skinned Rasha replied in a low voice like the murmuring of
water. “The creature was a traitor out of hate. He wanted to see
Elsyria at war. I was there when he brought you to the camp. I
fought alongside the Dwarven outside of Elsyrian law. I saw you, an
Elsyrian maiden clothed in rags, wandering over corpses as though
they were stepping stones in a stream. I will never forget. Madness
has never been paired with such heartbreaking beauty. Balthaar was
at that battle, already making a mark for his ferocity, resistance
to the small magics, and apparent immortality, but we won the day.
We brought you back to Elsyria, broken and burned by the
Barbarians. I’ve watched Balthaar over the years fighting war after
war where he ages as little as our Rasha brothers, growing in skill
with the small mystics he doesn’t know he’s using. He has the heart
of Elves in him. I saw it when he greeted the Wind Spinner. He has
the heart of an Elsyrian and the blood of a Barbarian. How can this
be so?” he asked, turning to the High Precept as a student to a
teacher.
    Lady Perr knew him,
Maltha, the best student of the high precept, an older Elsyrian
she’d looked up to when she was younger, playing at the elder’s
feet while Maltha looked on her antics with a soft smile. She knew
the other as well, the blue-skinned Rasha who had spent time at
House Perr when she’d been a student obsessed with languages of
many countries. She’d plied Hortham with thousands of questions
that he’d answered as well as he could. She knew others, memories
of days long past, before the hundred years of war when she’d been
broken by the Bashai, her memory stripped with the dark magics
etched in her skin, betrayed by her own and ruined above all by
Balthaar’s supposed death.
    “ You never…” she
whispered, gazing up at Balthaar, resting her fingertips lightly
against his face as she felt the pulse that throbbed in
him.
    He frowned down at her,
swallowing hard as he caught her fingers in his and turned his
face, pressing his lips to her palm. He moved, holding her close to
his side, arm around her waist as he stared down the
gardener.
    “ He must pay.”
    “ We are not barbarians,”
the High Precept said in his dry voice, stepping down from the
dais. “We could never harm our own. The most we could do is exile
the creature. I fear we’ve already done that. Greetings Tharmul. It
has been an age,” the High Precept said, bowing to the gardener who
smiled cruelly back at him, showing sharp and glistening teeth
beneath a face that suddenly appeared darker,