Blood and Fire

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2The sky over the Queen’s Tower was overcast, promising rain. Kelwyn looked up at it with a faint frown.

“Think you can get there and back without getting wet?” said Harun, standing beside him on the balcony. He looked just as he always did, which was to say too good to be true. He currently had his fiery mane of hair pulled back in a ponytail, tied with a jade green ribbon. He was on duty, so he wore a coat of scale mail with a surcoat in the royal gold and blue over it. His hand-and-a-half bastard sword, a weapon that Kelwyn could barely lift, rode at his hip.

“Of course!” Kelwyn was on duty as well, so his tunic was in the same colors, though the trim was golden yellow, not metallic thread like the embroidery on Harun’s tunic. The messenger bag slung over his shoulder bore the royal seal, too. He no longer looked malnourished, nor unkempt, though his hair was still a bit of a tangle, it had something of a mind of its own. He had grown almost a foot over the last three years, too. Of course this now meant that he finally looked like a sixteen-year-old boy…at the age of nineteen, much to his continued annoyance. Harun was still more than a head taller than him, though the were-cat was taller than most humans too.

Harun raised an amused eyebrow at Kelwyn’s confident declaration. “You may overestimate your speed, or underestimate the rain. I suspect it will rain quite soon.”

“I’ll bet you that I make it.” Kelwyn flashed Harun a bright, cheerful grin.

“And what shall you wager?”

“Give me a kiss if I win?”

“Kelwyn!” Harun’s cheeks flushed brightly and Kelwyn laughed.

“I don’t know how you’re still resisting my obvious charms,” he said, his tone light and teasing.

Harun snorted. “You’re far too young for me. Now get on with you. If you don’t want to get wet, you need to go.”

“I could argue about that, if you’d tell me how old you are. But fine, fine, I’m going.” He spread his wings and jumped nimbly atop the stone filigree that made up the balcony’s railing. He flashed Harun another wink and a wave, and then with a leap he was off into the clouded sky beyond.

He thought about Harun as he flew. He thought about Harun a lot. The who-knows-how-much-older man had nearly literally pulled Kelwyn out of the gutter, gotten him work as a royal courier attached to the Queen’s Own, and had been his closest friend and confidant for the last three years. Yet there was always a certain space between them. No matter how much Kelwyn flirted, Harun always kept things scrupulously platonic. They barely so much as touched, much to the young avian’s frustration.

It was particularly frustrating because once in a blue moon he got some little sign that suggested Harun wasn’t entirely disinterested, like the blush that had colored his cheeks just now.

Kelwyn shook off that thought and concentrated on flying. This particular message wasn’t going far, just to one of the city’s many temples. There was no official state religion in the Eternal Queen’s kingdom, but she often worked closely with clergy in her various humanitarian projects.

Though “humanitarian” was a funny word, in a kingdom ruled by a non-human, where thirty percent of the population was non-human in some way. But there wasn’t another word for it. Language was odd like that sometimes.

Kelwyn reached the temple, delivered his letter, and was back on the Tower balcony just as the first misty drops of rain started sifting down from overhead. Harun was still there, and Kelwyn grinned broadly at him as he folded his wings. “See! Made it. So where’s my kiss?”

“I do not recall actually agreeing to your wager,” said Harun, though his cheeks colored faintly again.

“Geez, welching on me. That just ain’t right.”

“Just isn’t right,” said Harun reprovingly. Kelwyn’s street dialect wasn’t as bad as it had been, but Harun still sometimes couldn’t resist correcting it.

“Exactly, it isn’t right,” was Kelwyn’s still-grinning reply.

Harun rolled his eyes. “Come, let us report your successful delivery.” He set off through the vast tower, which tended to involve climbing a lot of stairs. The officials of the royal government were in better shape than in many kingdoms, given the amount of climbing involved in their duties. The tower was truly massive, being over twenty stories tall, and each floor of it large enough for several lodging suites or a dozen little offices. Most of the official business was conducted lower down, admittedly. Her Majesty lived at the very top, and then those of the Queen’s Own who didn’t own their own homes in the city lived on several of the floors beneath that. The assorted government offices filled the remainder of the tower.

“You gonna to be free tonight?” asked Kelwyn as he bounded up the stairs at Harun’s heels. However frustrated Harun might make him, he always valued the time they spent together.

“Sadly no. There’s a Queen’s Own meeting shortly. The southern border situation is getting dire, and there have been several confirmed sightings of undead aiding the bandits there. A long-distance courier had arrived from the south earlier today, I assume with further news about that situation, and we’ll probably be discussing a mission to find and take out the necromancer behind it.”

Kelwyn nodded, sobered by the reminder of who exactly Harun was, and what he did. Kelwyn was not part of the Queen’s Own, he was only a royal courier, a glorified messenger boy. Harun, on the other hand, was one of the small group who were constantly being asked to track down black mages, deal with rogue gnoll clans, and do anything else for which ordinary diplomacy or conventional armies weren’t suited. “Guess I can find something to occupy myself with this evening, then.”

Harun gave him a long look and said, “Stay out of trouble, Kelwyn.”

“I will, Mother,” said Kelwyn, with a roll of his eyes.

That got a chuckle and a smile from Harun. “Good.”

“Unless I get bored, then all bets are off,” added Kelwyn, just to twit Harun a bit more.

“If I have to bail you out of jail again…”

Now it was Kelwyn’s turn to blush. “That was just once.”

“Once is once too often,” said Harun, sternly, though he was still smiling. “But here’s the mail office. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He gave Kelwyn a wave.

“See you tomorrow.”

* * * *

With his heart pounding, Kelwyn hung upside down from the edge of a roof and peered in through the window of a fine mansion well up the hill. It was dark and silent inside, and after waiting for some time and seeing no signs of life, he grabbed the edge of the roof, flipped himself over, and found a foothold on the window’s sill. A moment later he’d eased the window open and was inside.

It was astonishing how many people didn’t worry about upstairs windows and balconies. Admittedly avians were rare here, most of them lived in Aerievale, to the east, but there were enough in the city that it really should have been more of a consideration.

He grinned as he began to move around the darkened suite of rooms, examining the contents by the dim light that filtered in through the windows. The sky was still overcast, so the city’s lamps and torches made the low-hanging clouds glow, casting a diffuse light over everything.

Kelwyn began opening drawers and cabinets and sifting through their contents. He was keeping an eye out for a nice bit of nondescript jewelry he could steal without it being recognizable by the owner, but mostly he was enjoying the adrenaline rush of being somewhere he absolutely shouldn’t be. He didn’t need the money he got from selling stolen goods anymore, after all. He had a respectable job.

Before Harun had found him he’d made most of his living by what was called “rooftop work” and he had been very, very good at it. Purse-cutting was an occasional sideline when the opportunity presented itself. Flight was a nearly unfair advantage when it came to slipping in through upstairs windows. If he’d been a little bit physically tougher, and hadn’t had constant troubles with other street kids taking money off him and fences cheating him, he’d have done quite well for himself. Unfortunately the storybook idea of honor among thieves was far from reality. You could get knifed for a copper penny in some parts of town, and a scruffy vagabond, like he’d been, would be run out of the nicer, safer areas.

Those days were well behind him, but he had been unable to bring himself to completely give up this thrill. He hadn’t really meant to go out tonight. He’d been honest when he’d told Harun he would stay out of trouble. But his joke about getting bored had been honest too. He had a little room in one of the subsidiary government buildings near the tower, but it was tiny and empty and very boring.

A flight over the city had seemed like fun, and then he’d noticed the mansion and remembered a bit of overheard conversation. He’d happened to deliver a message there a few days before, and while handing it over had heard a servant say something to another about their master being gone for a week, and to be sure he was given the message that day or he wouldn’t get it.

Knowing it would be empty and therefore safe had proved too much of a temptation, so now he was here, sifting through a jewelry box hidden in a cabinet in the parlor attached to the bedroom and considering if there was anything in it worth stealing.

Hearing footsteps outside the door, Kelwyn froze, his heart racing even faster. The house was supposed to be empty, especially the upper rooms. The servants might still be here, but there was no reason for somebody to be approaching an upstairs suite. Yet somebody definitely was, and he spun and started moving towards the window he’d left open behind him. It was in the bedroom, though, so he had to go through the whole of the parlor and cross the bedroom as well to get to it.

Even as he turned to flee the door swung open, and a male voice called out, “Who’s there?”

Kelwyn mentally cursed and dove for the door. He’d been being quiet! How had the stranger known he was there?

He was half way through the bedroom, sprinting now with no care for the noise, when somebody grabbed him from behind with impossibly strong hands and bodily swung him around to pin him against a wall. He yelped in shock, eyes wide as whoever it was held him in place. “Who are you? What are you do—” The man holding him suddenly stopped, staring at him.

There was just enough light for Kelwyn’s dark-adjusted eyes to make out the general features of his assailant. He seemed to be a human, of about average height—which of course made him taller than Kelwyn—with straight, light hair, probably blond, and very dark eyes. He was dressed richly, but in a foreign style, with a heavily embroidered surcoat over a long tunic rather than the doublets and hose that were currently in fashion with the upper class here.

“Maltheus?” The man’s voice was shocked as he gaped at Kelwyn.

“What?” Kelwyn gaped back. What was going on here?

“It’s you. It’s you! Oh gods, I can’t believe it.” Suddenly the hard grip pinning him to the wall loosened and the strange man lifted one hand and ran it down Kelwyn’s cheek in a startlingly intimate gesture. Kelwyn had been about to try and make a break for it, but he froze, confused and more than a little unnerved.

He got even more confused, and much more unnerved, when the stranger suddenly pressed close to him and kissed him hard. Kelwyn stiffened in utter shock, his whole body going rigid. Somewhere in the back of his mind a tiny voice expressed massive disappointment that the first time he’d been kissed should be like this and not something, someone else. Kelwyn twisted his head to the side and tried to break away from the obviously crazy person. The man tightened his grip, though, and he seemed freakishly strong for Kelwyn could feel the man’s fingers digging into his upper arm, keeping him firmly pinned to the wall.