Plight of an Empire

Chapter Twenty Five: Runa

Thebis, Hermuna

A throbbing pain in her head was what roused Runa on this morning.  Not the ringing of bells or banging of pots like the mornings over the past few weeks, but her own body telling her that she should give up.  She didn’t even know what she was doing here anymore.  The past fortnight had been filled with nothing but pain and torture.  If she wanted this, she would have never left home.

Home, she thought bitterly.  She had no home.  This old stable was a place to sleep but it was no home.  Not even in Elis Rock did she feel truly at home.  Did she ever have a place to call home?

She turned over in her bed of hay, never opening her eyes, and felt for the hard steel of her knife.  Her last remnant of the only place she had known as home.  Every morning, she would wake up she would pat her knife.  It gave her the energy to get through the day.  She liked to think that it stole her mother’s energy and whenever she touched it, she absorbed some of her mother’s energy.  Soon that energy would be gone and her mother’s soul would be left to nothing.  That alone put a smile on her face every day.  But still, every night she came back she thought about driving the steel into her own heart.  Perhaps that was her mother’s shade at work.  She always figured Maelys had a dark soul.

The light patter of footsteps made her eyes shoot open.  They were very light.  If it was not completely silent, she would not have heard them at all.  “Areone.”

The footsteps stopped.  “Good morning, Runa,” said Areone’s cheery voice.  “I was unaware you were awake.”

Yeah right, Runa wanted to say.  But instead she said, “I just woke up.”  Her voice was still rough from sleep.

“How are you feeling?”

Her heart jumped.  This is a trap.  She had learned that the hard way.  If she told the truth and said no, she would be drilled on her lessons so that she could ‘have a short hiatus’, but the questions were never easy and if she got one wrong, Areone would whack her with a bamboo stick.  She still had the welts on her legs from that day.  But if she were to say she was fine, Areone would drill her on combat as if she could feel no pain.  So she said, “I could be worse.”

Areone giggled.  She had a beautiful giggle that could make anyone else who heard smile along with her.  But it was her giggle Runa watched out for.  She never knew what that giggle really meant.  “You could always be worse.  But in this case, it’s good!  Because that means I can take you fishing today.  So dress warmly.  Spring may be here, but nobody has told the river that.”

Runa followed her Guide outside the abandoned horse stable she had been placed in during her training.  Looking over her shoulder, Areone shot her a mischievous smile.  A smile that sent a shiver down her spine.  Then she shot off into the crowd of the marketplace.  Runa took off after her, weaving in and around the patrons of Thebis.

“Watch yerself!” one man shouted when she bumped into him.  But she didn’t take her eyes off the moonlight hair trailing behind Areone as she flowed into the river of the  crowd.  She was like a leaf, moving gracefully stop the water, while Runa moved like a stick tumbling through the currents.  Ever so slowly, she lost sight of her Guide among the tumultuous movement of the marketplace.

She came to a stop in the middle of the wide road, scanning for Areone.  Instead she was met with shoves and curses.  “Get out of the way, boy!” one homely woman with a wide girth a several chins spat as she shoved past.  Runa grabbed a loaf of bread out of her bag without notice and ran off, hiding her prize beneath her jerkin.

She was not fed by the Cult.  Instead she was taught how to pilfer her meals.  Areone could do this masterfully.  Her hands were agile and swift.  She knew just when to grab it and go.  “It makes for great practice,” she had told Runa the first day in the city.  “Just make sure you don’t get caught.  Jail is unpleasant from what I’ve heard.  Plus, they’d figure you out to be a girl quick enough and believe me, you don’t want them knowing that.”  Her words had made Runa recall her time spent in the slums of Elis Rock—how many rapes she had witnessed.  It didn’t matter if you were a boy, girl, young, old.  She had seen it all, hiding in the shadows, clutching her knife to her chest, praying they didn’t come for her next.