Rebel Without Hate
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“What are we looking for here?” I asked as Kitten and I stood on a hillside overlooking the city of Sifan. “It looks like it has been razed to the ground.”
“Not quite,” she said with an enigmatic smile, “but what is left behind tells us much about who was here and why they were destroyed.”
We had spent two weeks in Sifan and now found ourselves at the edge of a field where once there had stood buildings as tall as those of Tiraas. The city’s destruction seemed complete; even the stone foundations had crumbled into dust or been washed away by time or rain, leaving only grass-grown hillsides and a scattering of stones in the distance.
A few miles further along our course we saw what looked like the remains of some kind of fortress that might have been used for defense against enemies from outside—or perhaps it had been built in anticipation of such a threat.
It was a large building made entirely of white marble—so far as my eyes could tell, it had no other materials in it. But this place did not seem to be abandoned either: There were people around the perimeter, and one could see several small groups of them moving across its walls and through the grounds surrounding it.
They all wore black robes similar to those worn by the priests of the Cult of the Dragon.
They were all male, but I caught glimpses of women among them, too, some wearing the same clothes and some with more ornate gowns. They walked slowly together or sat in silence in pairs, talking quietly in low voices.
One woman, a blonde woman who appeared to be in her middle years and who had a face and body like someone I knew very well, stood apart from the rest and watched the road ahead intently. As we drew nearer, she rose and moved off toward us. When she came near enough, she spoke in an accented voice that sounded almost elvish. “Welcome, travelers.”
“Hello,” Kitten said politely. “We’re glad you’re not hostile.”
“That would be a welcome change,” the priestess said, smiling broadly. She stepped forward and bowed respectfully to both of us. Her hand went briefly to her heart as she did so; this gesture was also accompanied by a faint tingling sensation up my arm.
“Are you the leader?” Kitten asked.
The woman nodded. “I am called Sister Aiswarya,” she said.
“And I’m called Kitten,” Kitten replied.
Sister Aiswarya smiled again. “Yes, I know.”
Kitten inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment of that. I kept still and waited for her to speak, as I was still unsure if this lady was friendly or not. I didn’t sense any hostility from her, nor could I feel any magic emanating from her, but I couldn’t read human faces, so that didn’t tell me much.
She seemed to be watching our horses carefully, however, and she did not offer to let us pass without being properly introduced and welcomed.
I took a deep breath and tried to relax. This could prove to be very interesting indeed.
“We are here on behalf of Lady Arachne,” Kitten said to the priestess. “She wishes to make peace with your people.”
There was a brief silence, while Aiswarya looked back and forth between us. Then, finally, she shrugged lightly. “Perhaps that is possible,” she said at last. “I cannot promise anything until we have had a chance to discuss things further.”
“Of course,” Kitten replied. “Is she expecting you? Or will you be traveling to visit her?”
“I think she’ll come to find me,” Aiswarya said, “and we can meet halfway.”
I glanced at Kitten sharply. “Do you know who she is?”
“Who do you mean?” the priestess asked.
“Lady Arachne,” I clarified. “I thought everyone knew who she was.”
Aiswarya blinked in surprise, then smiled. “Oh, yes. Of course. You must be one of her friends. Well, I’m sure she won’t mind a short delay in making a formal introduction…but first, please forgive me for the delay in welcoming you. Would you care to walk with me and talk while we wait for her?”
“That would be wonderful!” Kitten exclaimed and started walking forward quickly before I could react. The priestess matched her pace easily, and Kitten led us off toward the edge of the ruins, keeping a respectful distance between the two of them. “I’ve heard so much about you!” she gushed to Aiswarya. “But it seems like you’ve traveled quite a bit! What’s it like in your land?”
“Not as nice as this place,” Aiswarya replied. “Though perhaps not as harsh, either. We don’t get winters in the way that you do, though we do get snow sometimes. But we do have a lot of trees and flowers growing naturally where they want to grow. And some places even have grass.”
“Really?” Kitten said eagerly. “That sounds wonderful! I haven’t seen grass in ages. In fact, I think we’re pretty close to the northernmost part of the country right now. It might have snowed recently.”
“It might,” Aiswarya said gravely. “I’d love to see that someday. How does spring there compare to how it is here?”
“Well, in the north, I think we have some different kinds of plants in bloom. Not that I really know what those plants are, exactly. It just means there’s more color than white and brown out there.” Kitten glanced around idly as if she were thinking of a plant to describe. “Maybe something with lots of bright red leaves…”
“Red?” Aiswarya said, tilting her head in interest. “Like hollyhocks?”
“No,” Kitten said, shaking her head. “Hollyhocks aren’t red.”
“Then perhaps something else?” the priestess pressed. She had taken a few steps ahead of us and now stopped in front of an archway carved into the stone wall beside which we stood. Beyond it, I saw a narrow path leading away into the jungle-like vegetation of the jungle garden. “What about tulips?” she suggested. “Or sunflowers?”
Kitten considered this briefly, then shook her head. “No,” she said regretfully. “I think sunflower season is over by now, anyway. Tulip season probably has only begun.”
I sighed quietly. The conversation was going nowhere fast, and I wanted nothing more than to go on my way, but I was fairly sure I wouldn’t be allowed to do that without permission. Besides, if they weren’t actually hostile, I had no reason not to listen to what they had to say.
“I think we should take the path,” I said, stepping up beside Aiswarya and putting one foot in front of the other, leading the way for both of them. “After all, it is closer. Perhaps you could tell us a little about your city.”
“My city?” Aiswarya echoed in puzzlement. “I suppose I could try.”
“You certainly seem to know it well,” Kitten responded, nodding politely as she walked past her. The priestess didn’t respond, however; instead, she turned back to stare at me, and I wondered why she was so intent on learning everything there was about me when she obviously knew very little of anything else.
“Why did you bring me here?” Aiswarya asked suddenly, as the three of us began walking down the trail through the jungle. “If you’re looking for Lady Arachne, I assumed that you were simply doing your job, and bringing me to her in case she happened to come looking for me herself. Why didn’t you just leave me behind?”
I hesitated, wondering whether or not this was such a good idea after all. There seemed to be something about this priestess that troubled me, and I couldn’t help but think that the longer I spent talking to her, the more likely I would be to reveal secrets that I shouldn’t.
And if the priestess was working with someone from the Guild of Mages, she might already have been able to guess that there were more of us out here than we let on, which would make any kind of deception more difficult.
“Because I felt sorry for you,” I answered honestly. “I’m not entirely sure why, though. It’s not as if we’ve ever met before. You don’t even know me. But I’ve always known that you were a good person, and I felt that it was unfair to leave you in the hands of the people who captured you.”
“The people who captured me?” Aiswarya repeated, stopping and turning to glare at me. “Are you saying that the person who rescued me was a mage?”
“A member of the Guild of Mages,” I corrected myself hurriedly. I hadn’t realized that Aiswarya knew so much about our organization. That meant she must have told her father everything before he sent her here. “She was one of the people who helped rescue me in the first place. But yes, she’s a mage. A very powerful one, too.”
“That is a lie,” Aiswarya spat out, her eyes flashing angrily. “How dare you? If you’re going to use my own words against me, I’ll show you just how wrong you are!”
There was a moment’s silence as she glared at me with an expression of utter contempt on her face, but I remained motionless, waiting for her to continue.
“I never said anything like that,” she insisted hotly. “You’re making it up. You just want to trick me into telling you things, that’s all.”
I shrugged, trying to ignore how she had turned the question on its head to give herself plausible deniability. After all, I wasn’t exactly going to admit outright that I had overheard her confessing to her father that she was a mage, nor would I admit that she’d confessed to him that she intended to go after Arachne herself. Instead, I merely shrugged.
“It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not,” I replied, hoping that my answer wouldn’t sound too insincere. “All that matters is that I saved your life, which means that I have a right to know the truth. Don’t you think that’s fair?”
Aiswarya frowned thoughtfully for a long moment, glancing up and down the path we were following before finally shrugging again.
“Fine,” she said grudgingly. “If you must know, I was supposed to kill Arachne. My father arranged it, so I would never have gotten a chance to get close enough to do anything about it anyway.”
“I see.” I nodded slowly as we continued walking along the path, wondering what kind of person her father was to have arranged such a thing. Was he planning on using her as some sort of pawn?
Or maybe he just didn’t care if she got killed, assuming that his actions would prevent her from succeeding in killing Arachne for him. Then again, if she was already going to die at the hands of Arachne, then why did her father care so much if she died by his own hand rather than hers?
“You say you weren’t allowed to get close to Arachne,” I pointed out as we came around a bend in the path and began climbing up the hillside ahead of us. “Then why did you try to find her in the first place? And why come looking for me instead of staying where you were supposed to be?”
“My father has always expected me to carry out his orders,” Aiswarya explained quietly, pausing for a moment as we walked. “It was the only way he could keep me safe. He couldn’t very well let me out into the world without supervision, not when I had no one to protect me. So he gave me an assignment, and instructed me to follow it to the letter.”
“He wanted to control you,” I mused aloud, frowning at how strange her story sounded. “But how did he expect you to complete the task given to you?”
“It doesn’t really matter how I got the information,” Aiswarya replied irritably. “What does matter is that I completed my mission. I found Arachne, and I managed to kill her.”
“Why?” I asked curiously. “What made you think she would still be there?”
Aiswarya stared at me for several seconds, as if she hadn’t been expecting this line of questioning, before finally speaking again.
“I… don’t know,” she admitted hesitantly, glancing away from me to look back down at the path behind us. “Honestly, I thought I knew, but now… I’m not so sure. Perhaps I was just hoping that it would work out.”
“Perhaps you just needed to kill someone else, so that you could feel justified in taking revenge against your father,” I suggested. “Or perhaps the task itself had become more important to you than the reason behind it, so that you felt compelled to complete it no matter what.”
Aiswarya glanced over her shoulder once again, as if to verify that we were truly alone, before shaking her head in denial.
“No,” she whispered, her voice full of conviction. “I knew what I was doing, from start to finish. Even if I had decided to change my mind later, I wouldn’t have had any choice.”
“Then why bother coming here?” I asked. “Surely you would have been better off keeping to your original plan. There’s no point in coming all the way out here just to fail at your assassination attempt.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” Aiswarya mumbled, glancing up at the sky above us with a sigh. “At least, in theory. The problem is that the longer I spent thinking about it, the less sure I became of my decision. That’s why I came looking for you instead.”
“Well, at least you know that you have nothing to worry about now,” I reassured her, nodding towards her dagger. “If you hadn’t succeeded in killing Arachne, then there would have been nothing stopping me from turning you in.”
“I appreciate the concern,” Aiswarya murmured, smiling faintly. “However, you have nothing to fear.”
I paused for a moment before speaking again, wondering if I should tell her the truth about my suspicions, or if it would be better to simply trust her. She had said she had known what she was doing since the beginning, which meant that she either hadn’t lied or that she had been able to hide her true intentions from me somehow.
In the end, I decided to err on the side of caution, figuring that she might react badly if she suspected me of having been aware of her plans from the start.
“So, did Arachne actually die?” I asked curiously. “Or was she merely wounded?”
“She’s dead,” Aiswarya assured me, her expression growing serious as she looked down at the knife in her hand. “And she will remain that way for some time yet.”
“Do you think she’ll stay dead?” I asked. “That is after you’ve done what you need to do next?”
“I doubt it,” Aiswarya sighed. “The way Arachne is, it seems like she will be back soon enough. But I won’t have to go through it twice, thank God. Once she’s gone, I can stop worrying about her getting back up again.”
I frowned thoughtfully as I studied Aiswarya’s face, trying to figure out what had prompted such a statement. However, before I could ask her anything, a loud noise sounded behind me, causing me to jerk around in alarm.
We both turned around together to see what was going on; however, our surprise quickly gave way to confusion as we saw that the source of the noise was neither human nor animal, but something quite different altogether.
Aiswarya’s mouth fell open in astonishment as she watched the creature lumbering towards us along the track, and I felt my own jaw hanging slack as I gazed at what seemed to be the biggest wolf I’d ever seen.
It was easily twice the size of the biggest wolves I’d encountered during my time in Tiraas, and the thick black fur covering its body was so dense that I couldn’t make out any visible details beyond the pale gleam of light reflected off the beast’s eyes.
“A Fenrir,” Aiswarya breathed, staring wide-eyed at the huge predator. “Is that…?”
“Yup,” I nodded, swallowing hard. “I met one back in Viscount Rennick’s manor when he first hired me as an assassin.”
“You killed it,” Aiswarya gasped incredulously.
“Well… yeah,” I admitted reluctantly, still struggling to get my brain working properly after seeing what was approaching us. “It was hungry, and I had only one thing on me to eat.”
I reached into my pocket for a moment before pulling out the half-eaten hunk of cheese, waving it in front of the beast‘s nose as I tried to coax it closer. If the beast was as docile as Aiswarya implied, then perhaps I could feed it and avoid having to fight it.
The End