It was less than two hours until midnight of Long Night - the moonless last night of the year - when the rider slowly entered the quiet courtyard of the almost forgotten inn that was home as much as any place could be home now. More than the inn, home was the small room above the stall to which the great white stallion made his way himself, without direction. It was a room that, in better times, had served as accommodation for grooms or guards, it was simple but she had made it comfortable for herself.
She, though actually few people would have or could have guessed that she was female from simply looking at her, with her clothes cut in the practical fashion of a traveler, leather pants and high boots topped by a leather vest over a warm shirt, a thick traveling coat and even thicker hooded black cloak completing the outfit.
If the face revealed when the hood was pushed back by gloved hands was beardless, it was still of the kind that could have belonged to either a young man or young woman.
What would have tilted most people's opinion towards male were parts of the outfit usually not associated with females, in the form of bows and arrows and swords and knives. The latter two she usually kept equipped for instant use.
She wouldn't need them here, she knew, putting away everything but the one weapon she always carried, the blue shimmering, silvery-white "ice blade," that she sometimes thought she had paid for with her soul. The only thing she might call an heirloom; the only thing left from a time she could not remember...
Pushing those thoughts aside as she always did she decided brooding in solitude was not what she needed this of all nights. She adjusted the sword in what had become her trademark fashion across her back, hilt rising above her left shoulder. She adjusted the cloak again, as well, for protection against the biting wind that had not stopped when the snow had, earlier that night, for the brief walk across the courtyard to the common room of the inn.
She knew who she would find inside, maybe two dozen or so of the about one hundred people who would regularly use the inn and others like it. She even knew who most likely would be there on that particular night. Some of them - a few - had, over the last half dozen and one years, won her trust and absolute loyalty. Feelings she knew were returned.
They were the few people who might be - could be, if families could be made up by choice - considered the closest she had to family, kin by choice. Her only choice: like everything from the years of her childhood, all memories of her family were gone.
Her oldest memory was waking up some day in the dark, a dark that had been temporary blindness as a result of a head injury; her fear to never see again, before sight slowly returned. Then the relief that - leaving her loss of memory aside - the worst result of whatever she had survived was a scar high on the left side of her forehead, usually hidden by her unruly hair.
Hair of pure white to rival freshly fallen snow, which had earned her, together with her sword, the nickname of "Ice," the name she used for what was now her business, one that involved weapons and brains and sometimes working with her companions, though mostly she preferred being on her own.
As she had in the five years that followed her recovery, at a mixture of orphanage-school-cloister-military academy and more that she somehow had ended up at, and graduated best of those raised her year. The inn had been the place she'd been advised to go to, then, by her mentor, as a place for people who needed her talents to find her, to meet others like herself.
As she did, though still keeping mostly to herself, observing more than talking, even when in company. When she accepted company at all that is, instead of avoiding it.
As she did again after she entered the room, answering nodded greetings with nods of her own, but waving away gestured invitations to join people here or there. That gesture a little apologetic when she sent it to "Fire," the only other female in their group at their old school - for want of a better word - and her only female friend.
Fire and Ice, she thought, torn between amusement and disdain, both caused by how easily people judged, based on appearance, and how wrongly: between them, it was her own temperament that tended to flare up like flames while Fire was the advocate of reason.
She made a small "later" gesture to her, meaning "tomorrow" really, then went to the place she always occupied during Long Night, the wide window sill on the far left of the room, upholstered with pillows, that let her look up at the castle high above the inn.
She looked up briefly when a servant approached her with a cup of hot spiced wine, nodded acceptance when he indicated the sender as a man seated in the darkest corner of the room, blending into the shadows as if trying to live up to his nickname of "Shadow”. Someone she sometimes thought was an outcast even in their company of outcasts, yet had become one of those who she trusted most.
Some, she knew, feared him, not because of his skill at arms, but for the tarot deck he always carried. Unique cards no one had seen anywhere else in their design, which he would almost constantly play with, but sweep up immediately if someone else tried to catch a glimpse at a game. Cards that, the few times he allowed someone to look, always seemed to herald events those concerned might have preferred not to know about, or their outcome.
She was curious sometimes what the cards would show should she ask him to lay them out for her, but she never asked. Her future would take care of itself; what she really wanted to know was her past. That she would have given a great deal to know. Not that she expected any cards to tell her that; or the cards' owner.
That he knew a great deal about the past in general she had found out almost as soon as she had met him, her first Long Night at the Inn, when she had sat where she sat now, had stared up at the great dark silhouette on top of the mountain, the deserted castle that had once ruled the valley of the inn and everything else within sight.
"What happened there?" she had asked, when he had appeared silently at her side, offering a first cup of the hot spiced wine she was again drinking now.
"Who knows," his first answer had been, "no one is left to say for sure, they say. Or if anyone is, they are not telling their tale."
He had handed her the cup, drank deeply from his own as she took a small sip from hers.
"That was the oldest House," he had said after a long pause, "the line longest unbroken; the only line traced down from the old High Kings. They could have ruled - they should have, they had the legitimacy, the authority, the only House left that did - but they chose not to. Maybe, by then, the oldest was too old, an old man who had more interest in his peace than in a crown."
"There were others that wanted to rule though, many," he continued, "but none with an undisputed claim. Which left them all with but one way: to gain that claim through alliance; marriage, more precisely. She was thirteen then, they say, the only daughter of that house, still only a child, though by law old enough to be betrothed at least... which they also say she was bitterly set against, so much that she refused to even hear about it, much less meet any of her would be suitors. So one of them, they say, took matters into his own hands, to take by force what he could not be agreement."
"What really happened..." he shrugged. "It was only days after that that anyone found out that something had happened at all, when some vassal came to pay the usual New Year's respects and found nothing but death. Though not the girl, she was not among those killed. But neither has she been seen again."
"A dark story for a dark night," he had said finally after another pause, then saluted her slightly rising his cup, "To better tomorrows."
He had wandered off after that, had left her alone to stare at the castle as if the force of her look could reveal answers. She sat wondering what that night had been like - the night people usually spent up all night, celebrating with lights brightly lit to fight off the darkness, dressed up and disguised to mislead evil spirits - at the castle. What "the girl" had been like.
Something she had done every year since then, without much success, though sometimes imagining glimpses of a young girl in her mind, dressed up, disguised for sure, for once dressed up as she would have loved to be always, the outfit of a warrior, not the cloyingly sweet dresses she usually was supposed to wear.
A young Defender of the Realm, dressed up in all gold and white, long and short sword at her hip, the twin ice blades crossed behind her back, throwing knives in almost every spot they could be hidden on her person, two attendants carrying ornately gilded versions of the longbow and the asymmetrical horse archer's bow...
She had to smile when those images appeared again as she made herself more comfortable with pillows behind her back, much amused by the image: only a young girl's imagination could have come up with a "uniform" like that, it would have made her the instant target of any attacker who set eyes on her.
As it had made her, she thought suddenly, knowing it had been like that even when not knowing where the thought came from, for the dark green clad figure that suddenly appeared out of nowhere, to try to grab her, and then yelped in surprise as she slashed at him with one of the knives.
Cursed as he tried to grab her hand, shake the knife out of it.
His efforts interrupted by a shout from a few meters away.
"What are you doing? Leave the boy, damn it, it's the Princess we need; we get her, we get the rest, come on."
"The little b*****d cut me!" the furious answer of the first intruder, cut off again by the other.
"Fool you to be careless enough to let him," the derisive answer. "Just knock him down, damn it! Come!"
The last an order clearly, the first man turning with a snarl at the presumed boy, who jumped back as far as "he" could, but not far enough to completely escape the blow that hit "his" temple, send "him" spinning into the arms of yet another man.
Another attacker, she thought first, as a hand clamped down firmly over her mouth, but the next words told her otherwise.
"Your highness," a voice breathed softly, "be quiet, don't struggle; we have to get away. You have to. If they don't get you, all will be well, whatever else happens."
"Princess," the man repeated insistently, when she tried to free herself, "Princess Emaleya, please, you must come. You must escape them, that is the only hope. Come! Now! There is no time."
Not for anything, it seemed, not even a change of clothes. Only a rough bandage for the bleeding cut on her forehead after they reached the stable, too large stable boy clothes over her party outfit. The swords that came with it hastily fastened to the saddle of her black mare.
Herself thrown on the horse's back, then a group of them, 10 or 12 maybe, bursting out of the stables in a wild run, breaking up in pairs once they reached the woods, the evergreens she loved heavily weighted down that night with snow from a storm that had lasted for days, branches hanging lower than usual whipping them in their passage, dumping cold snow on them.
Sounds behind them all too soon; her companion, the same one who had rescued her first, drew his horse up and jumped off, drew his sword.
"No!" she cried, only too well aware - she was the daughter of warriors after all, even though she was not supposed to engage in those arts herself - that the kind of sounds behind them did not announce help, "No, this is madness. Get up, we..."
"YOU," her attendant answered fiercely, "YOU have to get away. Now GO."
He hit her mare, when she still hesitated, with the flat of his blade, sending the animal of in a wild gallop.
That, someway, somehow, had ended at the place where she had woken up later; a place, she realized now, that must have had been prepared long in advance, for such a case, and her mare trained to get her there.
Her mare, her attendant, she thought slowly and even more slowly remembered where she was now.
She was reminded of the present yet more intensely when she felt a tarot card drop lightly in her lap.
She heard someone - "Shadow" she saw, when she briefly glanced up - say very quietly: "Would I be right, Your Highness, if I were to assume that some, or maybe all, of your memories have returned tonight?"
She shook her head, not in answer to the question, just dazed, confused. Without meaning to, she picked up the card.
One of the Great Arcana.
Death.
She looked up at the man.
"Who are you?" she asked, barely audible.
Written by Aoi Chi Hi
Colour art by Churg
the other art is by me
