Forgotten Embers

19. The Letter

Avera followed Blackridge back through the hidden door and into the narrow corridor, retracing the halls they had come down. The cramped corridor seemed to devour the light which disappeared suddenly and without warning, and all turned to darkness when the door shut behind them. She kept close behind him, the maurium crystals lighting their path. They walked in silence as they went, and they continued on through the dark halls of the now familiar castle.

Lord Blackridge was still giving off a quiet air of intensity which Avera found somewhat intimidating, and she found herself thinking how glad she was to have his favor. Avera felt her mind begin to wander, still swirling with the events of the day. Questions and conversations warred with simple observations and distant memories of home.

"Lord Blackridge," she said at last, "is my father really conspiring against the state?"

"Avera," he said with a sigh, "your father is a good man, faithful to the King. He is a champion of justice. That is why he came here, and that is all he's ever done here." He spoke softly and with empathy.

"But what of these accusations of treason?" she asked him, her eyes feeling the burden of tears.

"Avera," he said, "not everything is as it seems here. Your father is a good and decent man with a good and decent heart. He had to flee for his life, because I couldn't get to him in time, and don't believe anyone who says otherwise."

"You... tried to help him?" she asked, her heart trembling.

"We were friends," he told her. "I was the one who asked him to come and work for us. I felt responsible for his well-being."

'You were... he never told me who.'

She remembered the day the letter came. Her father was on their porch repairing a wooden rocking chair when a special courier came, a military man from Pyre dressed in full regalia.

"Tyberion Ibori?" the man asked.

"Yes?" her father replied, and the man extended the letter to him. "What's this?"

"A letter for you, sir," the man informed him. "Communications from Pyre."

"A letter? Who is it from?" her father asked out loud, but the man remained silent as he stood and waited. Her father opened the envelope and read the lines of the letter. "...Ridiculous."

"Not at all, sir," the man said. "He was quite serious."

"Daddy, what is it? Who's it from?" she had asked him, tugging at his shirt, her face turned upwards towards him.

"An appeal to my patriotism... from an old friend, but I thought he'd made up his mind to have forgotten me," he told her, patting her curly haired head.

'I wonder what went on between them, why they didn't speak for all those years. I don't want to be rude, but I do wonder...'

"What the Inquisitor said," she began with hesitance, "is it true? ...about the blood."

His eyes shifted back to her, then looked away again. Twice he did this before closing his eyes, but still there was no answer from him.

"I heard the story of a man named Blackridge once," she told him, speaking softly as she aired her thoughts. "I understand he killed a lot of people."

"That's old history, unfit for a new world," he coldly informed her. "Besides that, the man is dead."

They continued on down the hall in silence, Avera fighting to escape her settling gloom over the uncertainty of her situation, which was troubling her quiet mind when Blackridge suddenly stopped as if to say something of some importance.