E for Ekhono Read online

for Ekhono

  by: Mette Ivie Harrison

  Copyright 2012 by Mette Ivie Harrison

  “Your Grace, wake up.”

  Kellin felt a hand on his shoulder shaking him none too gently. “What?” he said, sure that King Haikor had sent a guard to take him to the Tower. Where was his sword? He could use his taweyr to turn it to flames and while it startled the guard, there would be time for him to get free.

  “Your Grace, there’s an execution planned at noon. Three young boys and a girl, proved ekhonos.”

  He was at home, Kellin realized after a moment. This was his own bed, not the one in the palace. He was warmer here and the smell of the tangy salt of the sea was in the air. His own castle, small, made of the soft white stone that was found in the natural underground caves nearby, cold and veined with color as if it were living, and veined with blood.

  Here his room was hardly larger than a bed and a trunk. He lived at the top of the turret where he had begged his father to let him sleep as a boy. He had been terrified that first time, but refused to show it to his father the next morning. He had walked down the stairs shakily, but with his head held high.

  He forgot how much he loved home, when he was in the palace. It was self-defense, for if he remembered, he could not stay as long as he had to, nor play the part that King Haikor expected him to play.

  “Finn?” said Kellin.

  “Yes, Your Grace. Shall I stay to help you dress?” The serving man had been with Kellin’s family since Kellin’s father was a boy, and Finn was now stooped and bald, but he worked from sunup to sundown every day. More than that, days like today.

  “No, Finn.” Kellin looked down to see the loose linen smock he had put on the night before, a welcome change from the fine clothes he wore in King Haikor’s court.

  “We must ride swiftly,” said Finn. Finn’s brother had been executed as an ekhono when Finn was a boy. Young Finn had been forced to watch as the flames rose and his brother screamed. Death by taweyr was reserved for the king, and in any case, was not used on the ekhono.

  Twenty years later, Finn had been as determined as Kellin himself to make sure that his younger brother Kedor escaped to Weirland safely, when it was determined that he was ekhono, and that he could not hide his neweyr.

  Kellin had not intended to come home for this. He had thought he would rest, try to forget about both princesses, the one he loved, and the one to whom he was betrothed, and perhaps visit the friends from his childhood that still lived nearby.

  “Give me a few moments. I will be out.”

  “Yes, Your Grace,” said Finn.

  Kellin had asked him numerous times to call him “Kellin” instead of “Your Grace,” but Finn was a stickler for propriety. “What would your father say?” he would ask.

  But his father was gone, and he would not have approved of Kellin’s work against the king’s laws regarding the ekhono in any case. His father would have let Kedor be killed, if Kellin had not stepped in. For years after Kedor was in Weirland, Kellin continued to worry that one day his father would betray him. But the old duke had died at last, and Kellin and Finn were the only ones who knew the secret.

  And now, the princesses.

  Slipping into the trews Finn set out, Kellin thought of the young ekhono, and the fire. The king’s ekhono hunters would already have gathered the wood, enough to heat a peasant’s home for a year. The condemned would be terrified, waiting for the end.

  After a few minutes, Kellin stepped out the door and Finn handed him a rag with dirt and grease smeared on it. “Do your face well,” he said. “We can’t have anyone recognize you.”

  Kellin rubbed the rag onto his face. “I had hoped that I would change Prince Edik’s mind about the ekhono, but you must have heard what happened to the prince’s groomsmen.”

  “I heard,” said Finn.

  Kellin shook his head. “Sometimes I fear that Kedor will never be able to come home. Or any of the others.”

  “At least they live,” said Finn. “You are giving them that much.”

  But Kellin had wanted more. He had wanted Princess Issa to marry Prince Edik and change his mind. It seemed he would get the former, and not the latter. And he himself would marry Princess Ailsbet and help her keep her own magic a secret, for she was ekhono, as well.

  Two unfamiliar black horses were waiting in the courtyard. Finn always found new horses for a mission such as this. They had to be killed afterwards. It was a sad reality, but the lives of two horses against the lives of five humans would always lose. If the horses lived, they would be traced through the taweyr in them. To give them away would only bring death to those who purchased them, and perhaps lead back to Kellin.

  It was not quite light yet, just the dim beginnings of dawn on the horizon. “In town?” Kellin asked.

  “In the center square,” said Finn.

  The horses were no worse than usual, old and nearly dead anyway. But they would serve.

  Kellin leaned into the mane of the one he climbed onto and patted its neck. “Good man,” he said. “I’ll make your sacrifice worthwhile.”

  He and Finn rode together as morning came. The town was less than an hour away, and there were makeshift, wooden sheds to house the prisoners in. Kellin swallowed hard at the sight of the pyre of wood piled nearby. Had the ekhono been able to sleep at all the night before, knowing what was coming and that they could do nothing to save themselves?

  “Ready, Your Grace?” asked Finn.

  In answer, Kellin surged forward, urging the mare with his knees and encouraging whispers to use the last of her strength to get him closer. Then he slipped off and took the axe out that Finn had made sure came with them. He used his taweyr to send it hacking at the wooden doors. There were no guards awake, though Kellin saw two lying to the side, most likely drunk. They thought that no one would dare to come for the ekhono, or that the whole town agreed with the choice of execution. Even families of the ekhono were known to turn them in. They received a purse for the betrayal and for some in the difficult times, one less mouth to feed meant the rest had a chance to survive.

  The ekhono inside the shed made no sound. They had been terrified past screaming. They stared at Kellin at the door, expecting him to bring them death.

  “You three, with me,” said Kellin, nodding to the three boys. The horse was wide enough to carry them all, they were so thin with starvation and beating. The girls stood, still unsure what Kellin’s appearance meant.

  They would understand eventually, when they were free in Weirland. No time to stop to explain it now.

  “You, with him,” said Kellin, gesturing back to Finn. He helped them on, and both horses rode off.

  Kellin turned back to see if pursuers were following, but there was no one. He slowed his mare to a more reasonable pace and led the ekhono to the sea. There was a small boat waiting there. It took only a “Halloo” to call to the man who lived in a cave nearby, and was ekhono himself.

  He had returned from Weirland after many years there, determined that he would do something to help other ekhono. He lived rough, mostly on fish, as far as Kellin could tell. He stank and wore rags that were more sacks than cloth. But he was as happy a man as Kellin had ever known. He was doing what he thought mattered most in the world, and death could not frighten him.

  Kellin envied him, living in the shifting political sands of King Haikor’s court, where there was never one right answer, and always a thousand partly wrong ones to choose from.

  The ekhono man took the five children onto the boat and with a smile, waved goodbye to Kellin and Finn.

  “The ekhono hunters?” asked Finn.

  “I will punish them for failing in their duty to the king,” said Kellin. “As I always do.”

&
nbsp; “Must you be so thorough?”

  With the authority of the king as duke, Kellin would use his taweyr to cut into their faces an “E” to show that they supported the ekhono. It was disfiguring, but worse than that, it meant that they would have to slink around the kingdom, searching for the worst jobs.

  They might take their own lives. Kellin had seen some so disfigured cut their faces further so that the “E” was indistinguishable from the rest.

  “You think they deserve mercy?” asked Kellin.

  “They do not know what they are doing, Your Grace. They think they are following you and your king.”

  It stung. “So they do,” said Kellin. “And we have both betrayed them.”

  He and Finn rode back home and arrived before noon. Kellin slipped up the back stairs and into the old, flax sheets of his bed. Finn pulled up the furs around him. No embroidered bed coverings, no gold threads here. He was warm enough, and he would sleep late in the morning.

  He was well known to be a late riser, lazy and used to the habits of King Haikor’s dissolute court. No one would raise an eyebrow over that.

  “What if I fled to Weirland myself?” Kellin asked suddenly, as Finn stood at the door to leave. Why had he not thought of this before? It was the solution to everything. He could have Issa then, and she need not marry Prince Edik.

  It seemed there was no reason for her to chain herself to a boy she did not love, when the ekhono would still not be treated well under Edik.

  “You’d be safe there, at least,” said Finn.

  “But what would happen here, to my father’s estate?” The consequences spooled out like thread.

  “You know who would inherit. Your cousin.”

  “Yes. He is an idiot, but he is not cruel to his servants.”

  “He would do nothing for the ekhono.”

  “I could send you gold,” said Kellin. “And you could continue on in your work, Finn.”

  “Alone?”

  “Hire someone else to take my place.” And how long would Finn last?

  “And if King Haikor offered more for betrayal?” said Finn.

  “Find one with personal reasons to hate the king,” said Kellin doggedly.

  “Kellin,” said Finn.

  It made Kellin catch his breath to hear his name at last.

  “Who is she to make a coward of you?”

  Kellin bowed his head. Finn knew him too well. “Would it be so terrible for me to find my own happiness?”

  “At the cost of your people? Yes,” said Finn, and his voice was harsher than Kellin had ever heard it.

  “I am a slave, then. Trapped here as much as Kedor is trapped there.”

  “You are alive,” said Finn.

  The next day, in time to arrive for the betrothal, Kellin began his journey back to King Haikor’s palace. Finn did not ask questions.

  END