The Onyx Throne - Book One

Mitchell awoke again when someone nudged his shoulder. He blinked his eyes and saw Lethelin standing over him.

“Rocen,” she said.

Mitchell knew that one. Wake up.

He nodded to her and, once she was satisfied that he wouldn’t fall back asleep, went off about her morning routine. He sat up and stretched. It was still dark, of course. Even without their captors, their routine hadn’t changed.

Things got a little awkward as Lethelin and Revos went off to find food for the lizard that pulled the wagon and it was just him and Allora left to tidy up. The tension between them was like a miasma they were forced to endure as they went about breaking camp. She didn’t bother casting the language spell on him because they knew what needed to be done without having to talk through it.

The job was easy enough with only the four of them and they finished well before Revos and Lethelin got back. Mitchell sat against the wagon's side eating some of their rations and watched as Allora went through her morning rituals. She faced Vish where it was approaching the far horizon, getting down on her knees and then prostrating herself. She lay that way for several minutes and Mitchell once again felt a serenity come over the camp. He tried to tell himself he was just imagining it but deep down he didn’t believe that. Gods were real in this place.

Once she was finished, she stood and went through a series of stretches that looked very much like yoga. Mitchell had dated a girl a few years ago who had been very into the activity and she’d cajoled him into joining her on more than one occasion. Once he’d gotten used to it, he found that he actually enjoyed the exercise. Of course, his ex-girlfriend’s shapely ass in yoga pants made the experience more rewarding.

What Allora was doing looked like a version of Ashtanga yoga which was all about stretching and breathing. She would find a pose and hold it for several long moments, inhaling deeply into each movement, and then move to the next pose. He was surprised to see a lot of similar forms to what he would have done back home and then figured it only made sense. Allora may not have been human but she was shaped like one and there were only so many ways to stretch a body.

He saw some of the movements give her trouble and he chalked that up to days spent in a cage, but Allora powered through it. By the end of her session, she was gliding through her forms with ease. Mitchell couldn’t help but admire her body as she exercised. Her limbs were long and powerful and the jeans that she still wore from his world were pulled tight over a phenomenal ass. He tried not to stare. He didn’t want to be “that guy”. But he couldn’t help it. Once she had limbered up, she moved with the fluidity of a dancer, her feet shifting smoothly through the sand and her arms settling gently into each pose.

After about half an hour, Allora finished up with a mountain pose, arms spread slightly at her sides, palms facing out and head back. Mitchell expected her to return to the wagon and rest but instead, she stepped over, unsheathed her sword, and then began a whole new series of exercises with the blade that was hypnotic to watch.

The movements started slow and were similar to her earlier calisthenics but clearly designed to include her weapon. As she found her rhythm, the movements became much more aggressive as though she were sparring with an invisible opponent. As Allora progressed and the motions became more intense, Mitchell began to hear her breathing coming harder. That she was fighting only air didn’t seem to matter. At the end of each strike and block, her sword stopped just as solidly as if she were coming up against another blade. In all his life, he’d never seen anyone move as she did. He’d seen demonstrations of things like HEMA, or Historical European Martial Arts, which this seemed to be similar to, but none had moved like her. She moved like someone whose life depended on her skill with the blade, not someone who was performing at a Renaissance fair.

Allora was panting as she finished and her hair was matted with sweat. She held the flat of the blade against her forehead, said her prayer, then grabbed the scabbard off the ground and resheathed it before heading back to the wagon. The stained white shirt clung to her chest and back and Mitchell got to admire the swell of her breasts and her nipples poking prominently against the fabric as she went straight to the barrel and poured a ladle of water over her head. She repeated the gesture once more and then took a long drink before releasing a satisfied breath.

“That was impressive,” Mitchell said.

Allora looked at him, perhaps trying to parse out his meaning. She must have understood well enough because she nodded and gave him a tight smile before heading to the other side of the wagon where the wash barrel was situated. He heard the sound of her disrobing and tried very hard not to imagine her body naked as she rinsed off the sweat from her workout. He failed miserably.

The sky was just beginning to lighten in the east when Revos and Lethelin returned. By this time Allora had washed and put her damp clothes back on and was lounging in the wagon bed eating a meal of nuts and dried fruits. The lizard had pulled itself out of the sand and was looking around and making noises that Mitchell had come to understand indicated hunger. He and Allora still hadn’t spoken to each other. He wanted desperately to talk to her, to say something, but found he didn’t know how to overcome the barrier that their fight had created.

Revos and Lethelin fed the lizard something that looked suspiciously like rabbits and one of the dakas which it gobbled down without bothering to chew first. Mitchell still found the beast terrifying.

He got up to stretch while Allora looked at him and then at Revos. A few words passed back and forth between them, Revos looked at Mitchell with a raised eyebrow, then back to Allora and shrugged. He pulled himself up into the wagon’s driver’s seat and waited for the rest of them to mount up.

Allora turned her eyes back on Mitchell and he saw the stones in her headband glow. He felt the familiar tingle as her magic passed over him and then she spoke.

“Mitchell, I have asked Revos to send you back. Once we can get some place safe where he can set up the circle, we will send you home.”

Mitchell was stunned. “You… You will?”

Allora looked defeated but resolute.

“You were right. What happened to you, the manner with which you came, was not of your choosing. If I could have explained it to you beforehand, if we had not been attacked, maybe...”

Her voice trailed off and her eyes went to the moon that was sinking below the western horizon.

“But it was wrong of me to bring you here. I could have defeated that last man and let you go. At the time, I feared there were more and I could protect you better here. I should have–.”

She stopped and looked back at him, her violet eyes sorrowful.

“It does not matter. We will return you home.”

“What about all of that stuff? With Milandris and Awen? What about your kingdom? What will you do?”

She gave him a sorrowful smile.

“Vish will provide a way. She has guided me this far and I have to have faith that there will be time to find someone else.”

Mitchell’s gut twisted and he couldn’t tell if it was in excitement or panic.

“Home!” he reprimanded himself. “All you’ve wanted since you woke up in this furnace was to go home! You want to go home!”

“Um… Thank you,” he managed.

Lethelin had been watching from the other side of the wagon and chose then to speak up. “You really leaving?”

Mitchell blinked at her and pulled his eyes away from Allora’s form as she crawled up to the front to sit next to Revos.

“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, if I believe her–and I’m not saying I do, mind you–but if I did, you’re supposed to be the next monarch of Awenor! You’d really turn that down?”

“I mean, it sounds like a death sentence. They’re trying to kill me and I haven’t even done anything yet.”

“Yeah, but monarch! You could kill Milandris! Drive out his soldiers. Awen would fight with you! Nine hells, so would I!”

“Are you from Awenor, too?”

Lethalin nodded. “From Varset on the coast of the Olydian. Milandris has claimed it as his capital since he couldn’t claim the throne in Lorivast.”

Mitchell climbed into the back of the wagon and Lethelin joined him. With a flick of the reins, they set off into the rolling dunes.

“How far will you travel with us?” Mitchell asked her.

“At least until the next town. Ivaran was staying well off the roads to avoid detection. Iletish takes a very hard line against slavery and my guess is he didn’t have proper paperwork saying you were criminals in Awenor. If he’d been stopped by a patrol it would have meant his head.”

“So there are towns in this desert?”

“Not a lot but along the main roads, yes.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Right now they’re heading north hoping to find a road. Might be a few more days until we do. I’ll make a decision once we get to a town.”

They rode on in silence for a while as the sky continued to lighten. A couple of times Mitchell caught Allora glancing back at him but he pretended not to notice. He was afraid of seeing that look of disappointment on her face again.

“What does it matter what she thinks of you?” Mitchell asked himself. “You don’t need to prove anything to her!”

Mitchell’s mind went back again to their brief dinner. He could still remember the delight on Allora’s face when she’d taken a bite of the burger and the look of awe when she’d drank the milkshake. She was like something that had stepped out of a dream. In a way, she had. She wasn’t from his world, after all. She was some sort of elfin knight or paladin. She wielded magic and a viciously sharp sword the way people in his world used cell phones and ballpoint pens. She was amazing and he wanted her to respect him. He wanted to be someone worthy of her respect.

“Tell me about Milandris,” Mitchell said suddenly.

Lethelin looked up from her own private thoughts.

“I can’t say as I’ve met him. We move in different social circles.”

Mitchell gave her a wry grin and she returned it.

“No, I mean what is life like with him in charge. You said he claimed your city as his capital?”

Lethelin’s face darkened as she pulled up memories.

“It was brutal at first. Those loyal to the old monarch were executed straight away. Milandris installed a puppet governor to oversee the Merchant Council and they were all made to swear fealty to him. The city guard was disbanded and its leaders were executed with the rest to be replaced with Milandris’s own men. After that, things calmed down a little.”

“Then what happened?”

“For the most part, it was business as usual. Milandris left for Lorivast to try and claim the Onyx Throne and life in the city went on. The governor, Tarlesh, keeps things running. A lot of money moves through Varset and Milandris needed the taxes to keep his mercenaries in line.”

“Ivaran was one of his men?”

Lethelin nodded her head in the affirmative. “He was a captain. He and his squad patrolled the Silver Quarter in Varset in the weeks after the coup.”

Her eyes went distant.

“My mother was quite a beauty when she was younger, you know? She used to say that she could have bonded with a councilman’s son, that he courted her for weeks before she finally made him understand that her heart belonged to another. He was so distraught at her refusal that he left Varset and joined a religious order.”

“The one she loved was your dad?” Mitchell guessed.

Lethelin gave a sad smile as her eyes stared at the empty space between them.

“He was a city guardsman. He died raiding a smuggler’s warehouse on the docks in my fifth high sun.”

“I’m sorry.”

Lethelin shrugged.

“It was a long time ago. And we were okay for money. She had her candle shop and my father’s pension. We didn’t go hungry.”

“Ivaran…” Mitchell let his voice trail off. It was obviously a delicate topic, but he found he needed to know. “He killed her?”

Lethelin’s eyes focused back on him. From the corner of his eye, he saw Allora was looking back at them as well, this time at Lethelin. It seemed she was also curious.

Lethelin didn’t answer right away. She studied him with her emerald green eyes.

Finally, she said, “From what I was able to gather, Ivaran took a liking to her. He was polite enough at first, but when she rejected his advances, he got more aggressive. One day he stopped taking no for an answer.”

Lethelin’s face hardened and Mitchell recalled the ruthless efficiency with which she’d sliced Ivaran’s face open with her blade. Her face had the same expression now.

“I got the story from one of his men before he died. Ivaran waited until after twelve bells and broke into her shop. He raped her, killed her, and then set fire to the shop to cover it up.”

“Jesus,” Mitchell said.

Lethelin cocked her head. “What’s a ‘Jee-jush’?”

“Oh, it’s…” Mitchell decided against getting into theology. Whoever Jesus might have been on earth, he was not a god here. “It’s just something we say where I’m from when we hear bad or shocking news.”

Lethelin nodded in understanding.

“Are all Milandris’s men like that? They just go around raping and killing?”

“They are mercenaries, mostly,” Allora spoke up for the first time. “Men and women from all over Tewadunn.”

“What’s that?” Mitchell asked her.

“The continent. We’re in Iletish now, which is one of the seven kingdoms of Tewadunn.”

“Some of his mercenaries are worse than others but, if they do step out of line, there’s little recourse for the people,” Lethelin explained. “Milandris and his governors would have a hard time maintaining their loyalty if he punished them the same way a corrupt city guardsman or soldier was punished. So they get away with a lot.”

“What does he want?” Mitchell asked, looking at both women. “Why go through all this?”

“On the surface, he wants to claim the throne for himself,” Allora said. “To do that, he must first kill Awen. I suspect he has other motives as well. Someone had to fund his operation, but I have not been able to find out who. They will want something in return.”

“What happens if he kills Awen?” Mitchell asked.

Allora swept her hand out at the sunburnt landscape.

“Something like this,” she said.

“Awenor would become a desert?”

“Probably not as bad as this, but long ago Iletish had an elemental that was able to keep the land healthy by bringing up water from deep below. Iletish, or as it was called then, Ilendira, had some small forests, but it was mostly vast plains and grasslands. Little rain makes it over the Skybreaker Peaks but Ilendira’s elemental was able to nourish the land and it thrived. After she was killed, the water stopped flowing. Within a generation, little was left.”

Mitchell looked out over the harsh landscape with its dry cracked ground and rolling dunes. He tried to imagine it as grasslands, similar to something like Kansas or Nebraska back home. It was difficult to picture now.

“Why would Milandris do that?”

“I hope one day to have him at my feet. I will ask him that before I kill him.”

With that, Allora turned back around and their journey continued in silence.

As the midday heat settled in, Revos called a stop and they set up camp. They recast the language spell on him and, while the mood wasn’t as tense as earlier, there was little talk between Mitchell and the rest of the party. Revos spoke with Lethelin and she recounted how she had tracked Ivaran out of a town called Adasas, where his tower was located. It was where they’d been captured. Revos was quite impressed with her cloak, which had some sort of enchantment on it that distorted her outline, and with her waterskin. It operated on a similar principle as their water barrels and would refill over time. It was enough to keep her going in the desert but just barely.

The plan was to find the road and keep heading west as they were likely closer to a town in that direction than they were to his home in Adasas. Revos said he would need a few days to set up the spell and send Mitchell back home.

Revos cast the language spell on him once more then he and Allora went out hunting that night, leaving Mitchell alone with Lethelin. They were sitting alone under the tent when Lethelin began to question him about his home.

“You must have a pretty great life back home to want to give up being Awenor’s monarch,” she said, rather bluntly.

“I mean, it’s okay. I’m not rich or anything. I’m just a regular guy. That’s why I don’t belong here. Allora needs a hero. A great fighter or a wizard or something. I’m not. I’m just… me.”

“The monarchs have always come from the common people. The spell chooses whom it will. That’s part of what makes Awenor different from most of the other seven kingdoms. Rulership is not hereditary. The last monarch was a fisherman. His village was not too far from Varset, actually.”

“And look how that turned out,” Mitchell countered.

Lethelin simply shrugged.

“He started out well enough. He was the monarch for my entire life. But I guess in the last few years he got lazy and he stopped caring about running things. Even in Varset, we heard stories of his wild parties and his sexual appetites.”

“Would you take the job if the magic spell chose you?”

“Absolutely,” Lethelin said without hesitation. Her soft red lips hardened into a determined scowl. “To have the chance to drive the soldiers from our lands I would take on the responsibility.”

“Even if it cost you your life?”

“Even then,” she said flatly. “I’m not the best citizen of Awenor, but it’s still my home. I don’t want it defiled any more than Allora does.”

“What do you do when you’re not hunting mercenaries?” Mitchell asked, shifting the subject slightly.

“I’m a thief, mostly. Occasionally, I’ll take a contract on someone if I think they deserve it.”

“You mean you’re an assassin?” Mitchell probed, his eyes going wide.

“Occasionally,” she said again, correcting him. “It’s not my primary job, but I’m not half bad at it. I’m a better thief, though. One of the best in Varset if I’m being honest.”

Her eyes twinkled as she grinned at him.

Mitchell didn’t know how to respond to that. She said it so matter-of-factly, without any hint of shame or embarrassment, that he was stunned for a moment. He tried to imagine a conversation with a beautiful woman at a bar back home where she openly admitted she killed people for money. This place was strange in more ways than one.

“Look, Mitchell,” she said “You may not have been a hero on your world, but you have a chance to be one here. This life chose you. That’s how it always happens in the stories. Some farm boy or chambermaid gets tapped on the shoulder by destiny and they rise to the challenge. This might be your destiny, your chance to become great and to save a kingdom.”

“Or I could die horribly, Milandris kills Awen, and it was all for nothing.”

She shrugged.

“You might. But, if you go home, all of that will probably happen anyway. Allora will be killed as well. She really might be the last Onyx Knight. There will be no one left to find a new monarch after she’s gone. Personally, I’d rather die fighting. Allora, too. Knights never give up. And don’t tell me she means nothing to you. I see how you watch her. You will miss her if you go. And you’ll have to live the rest of your life knowing that you could have helped her.”

She was staring at him so hard it made Mitchell squirm and he found he had no answer for her. When he didn’t respond she laid down on her bedroll and closed her eyes, leaving Mitchell to stew in his guilt and indecision.

Allora and Revos returned about an hour after sunset, just as Ithstasy was rising above the horizon. They were carrying two dakas each. Revos went over to the big lizard, feeding it his two, and Allora came over to the tent, tossing hers down. Mitchell’s language spell had worn off but, from the conversation between her and Lethelin, it sounded like they were eating fresh meat tonight instead of the dried rations.

From what Mitchell could tell, it looked like there was some discussion over who should field dress them and get them ready for the cooking pot. He deduced that Allora was saying that, since she did the hunting, Lethelin should do the prep. Lethelin grumbled but apparently didn’t feel up to arguing about it. She pulled a small knife from her belt, grabbed the two animals, and went off a few meters where some rocks jutted up from the sand and began to skin them.

As Allora headed to their wash barrel to clean up, Mitchell approached her. She looked up at him as she washed her hands, her violet eyes flat and her expression guarded.

“Can we talk?” he asked her.

Mitchell pantomimed talking with his hands, and she understood easily enough. The gems in her headband glimmered for a moment and Mitchell felt the tingle of the magic settling over him.

His hands were shaking and he was sweating for reasons that had nothing to do with the residual heat coming off the desert sand.

“You’re going to get yourself killed, you moron!” Some part of his brain was screaming at him. He shoved it down.

“Yes, Mitchell?” Allora looked at him expectantly.

Mitchell had to force his mouth to work, force his chest to push the air up so he could talk.

“I want to stay,” he said at last. “I want to help you save Awenor.”