Author’s note: I’ve got a pivotal chapter for you this month, readers, with some big revelations, and a plot point based on a mechanic from the Pokemon games, but hey, this is Fantasy, so let’s not talk too much about that second thing…
Previously on Saga of the Jewels…
Seventeen year old RYN’s hometown is attacked by General VORR of the Empire and everyone he has ever known is killed. Just before Ryn’s father dies, he gives Ryn a ruby which causes him to project fire. Ryn is captured by the Empire and meets another captive, Princess NUTHEA, who has the ability to project lightning. Nuthea explains to him that the Empire have learned of the existence of twelve Primeval Jewels which grant the ability to manipulate different elements, and are searching for them. The Imperial vessel where they are being held is in turn attacked by a pirate airship, and the pirates capture Ryn and Nuthea. The lead pirate, Captain SAGAR, agrees to escort Nuthea back to her homeland, and to spare Ryn’s life, in exchange for the promise of gold, gemstones and beautiful women upon her safe delivery. They land in the port city of Ast and recruit an engineer called ELRANN. Ast is then attacked by the Empire, who are using the Fire Ruby to invade the continent and search for more of the Jewels. Ryn, Nuthea, Sagar and Elrann flee the city together, but are then attacked by a bounty hunter, VISH. They manage to subdue the bounty hunter but Nuthea is gravely wounded in the process. Ryn beats Sagar to the hunter’s mount and rushes Nuthea to the nearest town where he finds a healer, CID, a mysterious old man who saves the princess’s life with his arts and asks to join the traveling party, saying that he believes it is the purpose of ‘the One’, the god that he and Nuthea each worship. On leaving the town the party is pursued by an enormous dog-like monster driven by a troop of Imperial soldiers. The party manage to escape with the help of Vish, who fights on their side in exchange for Cid supplying his poppy-seed habit. Cid reveals that he was once a member of another adventuring party who set out to find the twelve Primeval Jewels, but failed. The party press on the capital city of Sirra, where they ambush some Imperial soldiers and steal their uniforms in order to sneak onto a sleeper train bound for Nuthea’s homeland. They make it aboard successfully, but then Ryn gives them away when he comes face to face with General Vorr on the train and is unable to prevent himself from attacking him. The party are thus forced to escape from the train by leaping into a river it is passing…
Cold constricting around his chest. Rushing noise filling his ears. Current pulling him along, fast. Nuthea’s hand gone. White spray everywhere, vision obscured by water, white spray again. A mouthful of water. Another. Get me out of this water! I hate water! A gulp of air, by sheer chance, enough to keep fighting a few moments longer. Being dragged downwards by the weight of the armour. Frantically kicking his legs and flailing his arms around to try to prevent the downwards drag. Panic. Not knowing how to swim.
A scrap of sound.
“--he is! Help him out, now!”
A hand grabbed Ryn by the arm and yanked hard against the direction the current was taking him.
Pain flared in his shoulder and he thought his arm might pop out of its socket, but Ryn cooperated with the hand and tried to pull himself in the direction it tugged him all the same, to reach round with his other hand...
Another hand found his other arm, and pulled.
And then he was up and out of the rushing water, being hauled onto a grassy riverbank by Sagar and Elrann.
They released him and he fell to the grass with a thwap, landing face-down. He tasted soggy earth. He never thought the taste of it could be so sweet.
“--stupid pup!” Sagar was saying. “Why didn’t you tell us you couldn’t swim?”
“Yeah, farmboy!” Elrann joined in. “Why shouldn’t you be able to swim? It’s not like there aren’t any rivers or lakes in Efstan! It doesn’t make any sense!”
Ryn raised his head. Like him, they were completely soaked. Sagar’s hair hung like curtains over both his eyes and his ponytail stuck limply to his neck. Elrann looked like more of a typical girl for once, her purple hair seeming much longer than usual when wet and plastered to the back of her head.
Ryn ignored their jibes. He couldn’t help himself from grinning at them, so glad was he still to be alive. “There wasn’t really time to think it, let alone mention it, back there. And what can I say? For some reason I’ve always had this funny thing about water... Never been so keen on it...” Nuthea, he thought. “Nuthea!” he said, looking around frantically.
“I’m here,” Nuthea called from further up the bank. Cid and Vish were with her too, all of them dripping wet.
“Were we followed?” Ryn asked, standing up and surveying the river, the grass, the hills.
“No,” said Cid. “I think we took the Imperials completely by surprise. The train carried them off before they had a chance to react. Even if they stop it and back up, that will still take quite a long time. And as soon as they leave the tracks they won’t be able to travel any faster than us, since they don’t have any alternative means of transport, as far as we know. But all the same, we should get as far away from here as we can as quickly as possible, just in case.”
“You are correct in that,” said Vish. “They did not follow immediately, but they may still try to. And they had Elpis with them. You should get moving.”
They trudged up the riverbank together. A light breeze blew cold against their wet bodies, chilling their clothes inside the Imperial armour they still wore, and a shiver ran up Ryn’s spine. Before they had jumped from it, the train had been wending its way through a green, grassy, hilly country in which they now found themselves. They traipsed to the top of the nearest hill to get their bearings. The sun was still climbing in the bright blue sky, and West, in the direction it was heading, the hills stretched out as far as they could see. In the East, the hills grew to snow-capped mountains.
“Does anyone know where in Mid we are?” said Ryn.
“We’re in Zerlan!” exclaimed Elrann at exactly the same time. “I’d recognise those mountains anywhere! We must be in the foothills of the Pelna mountains, which border Imfis and Manolia!”
“That would make sense,” said Cid sagely, nodding. “The train would have had to go through the mountains on the border to get into Manolia, and would pass through Zerlan briefly just before it got there.”
“Look!” said Nuthea, pointing.
Over the hills, in the East, close to the mountains, its source obscured by one of the larger hills in that direction, was an unmistakable plume of steam, its tail getting slowly further and further away from them.
“They haven’t turned back,” said Nuthea.
“Of course not,” said Vish. “You are merely an irritation to them, not a distraction worth diverting their whole course for.” He still says ‘you’, not ‘we’, Ryn noted. “Though you should not assume anything. They may still have sent someone after you.”
“Like that Lady Shadowfinger?” said Nuthea. “‘Elpis’?”
“Perhaps.”
“We really should keep moving then,” said Ryn, beating Sagar to it, who closed his mouth and frowned.
“Which way?” said Elrann.
“Towards Manolia, of course,” said Nuthea.
This time Sagar got there first. “But we’ll never catch up to that train now--they’ll beat us there, princess, and invade before we can arrive to warn them.”
“Not necessarily…” said Nuthea.
They all looked at her standing sopping wet at the top of the hill.
She bit her lip. Once again Ryn got the distinct impression that she knew more than she was letting on.
“Alright,” said Sagar exasperatedly, “come on, princess--give up the goods. What are you not telling us?”
“I--” started Nuthea.
“She can tell you while you are moving,” said Vish, his grey eyes scanning the hills. He began to walk, and everyone followed, except--
“HOLD ON!” yelled Elrann.
They all stopped and looked round at her. Her cheeks had turned nearly as purple as her hair. Nearly.
“You should not shout so loudly, girl…” hissed Vish.
“Aw, hush up, bountyhunter. If anyone sneaks up on us I’ll just shoot them like I shot you. What nobody seems to have remembered is that while we may still have our weapons and our lives, thank Yntrik, we’ve all lost our packs. It looks like a good day or two’s hike to those mountains, and then we have to get through them, and I for one ain’t too sure our wilderness survival skills are up to a high enough standard to get us through all a’that without any supplies. I say we head to a Zerlanese settlement first and get stocked up--hopefully none of you were so dumb as not to keep your coin about your persons, like I did. I reckon I’m familiar enough with this part of the country that I could sniff out a town out for us, sooner or later.”
“Um, it’s not entirely true that none of us have any supplies...” said Cid, swinging his satchel around to the front of him by its strap. “I managed to keep hold of this during our escape, and as well my healer’s provisions it has a little food. I’ve checked it, and since it was sealed up the contents are all dry and intact, despite our little swim.”
The twitch in Vish’s face did not escape Ryn’s notice.
Cid pulled some waybread, salt beef and a bit of cheese out of his bag. His eyes roved round the group. “Did anyone else manage to hold on to anything?”
Nobody volunteered. They all seemed, indeed, to have lost their packs and supplies during the chaos aboard the train.
“Ah,” said Cid.
A strong pang of guilt went through Ryn’s stomach. But it was soon swallowed up by hatred as he remembered what had led him to reveal himself on the train. Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr.
“Well, that settles it, then,” said Elrann. “Instead of South-East, we first go North to find a Zerlanese settlement to restock. Princess-girl can explain why we’re not in a rush after all on the way.”
Nuthea’s mouth dropped open. “I never said that we were not still in a rush. I just said we were not in as much of a rush as you might think. I want to carry on in the direction of Manolia--”
“Princess!” Sagar snapped. “There is no way we can make it through those mountains with just a bit of bread and salted meat! Not even just the two of us could manage that! You’ve employed me to do a job, but I can only do it and deliver you safely to Manolia if you are still alive!”
Nuthea opened her mouth again, but then something flickered in her eyes and she went tight-lipped. “Hmph,” she said. For once, she had backed down. Even she seemed to see the sense in what Elrann and Sagar were saying.
Ryn was torn, though. Vorr was heading South-East, not North. At the same time, he thought, he needed to stay alive as well in order to be able eventually to get to Vorr and kill him. And he still wasn’t strong enough--if nothing else, their most recent confrontation had shown him that. He needed to train more on the way, to get stronger, to get better with his sword. And maybe it was the shock of what had just happened, maybe it was the cold water, but now he began to doubt seriously for the first time whether he would ever be able to kill Vorr. The man was just too strong. Too powerful. He shook his head. No. Don’t think like that. You will get strong enough to kill him. Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea...
Ryn blinked. By the time he had finished thinking all of this, the others had already walked off down the hill. He ran to catch up with them.
As he ran, he tripped over his feet, stumbled a few paces, then lost his balance completely and fell. He twisted his body round to cushion himself against the impact on his side, but the hill was so steep that he rolled down it, turning over several times. He crashed into Sagar from behind, taking the skypirate’s legs out from underneath him, before managing to put his hands out and scramble to hold onto the grass, raking the earth with his fingernails to come to a stop at last.
Sagar was on him at once, flipping him onto his back, kneeling on his arms, cutlass drawn already, holding the blade to Ryn’s throat.
“You stupid pup!” Sagar yelled, his face red with fury, spittle flying from his mouth and dampening Ryn’s cheeks. “What in the seventeen hells do you think you’re doing? It’s your fault we got into this mess in the first place! Because you couldn’t control yourself when you saw that Imperial general! I told you before that if you ever pulled something like yanking me off that chocobo again I would end you, and this comes godsdamn close! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t slit your throat right now!”
The others were yelling at Sagar to get off him, but Ryn couldn’t hear them properly. All of his attention was taken up by the curved, glinting blade pressing at his adam’s apple.
He had been in this position before. He was trying to remember how to get out of it...
“I…” Ryn croaked. “I’m... sorry, Sagar… I…”
Something inside him lit. He had had enough of this.
This time he felt his eyes catch alight, and the whole of his vision--from the shining cutlass blade to Sagar’s sneering face--turned red and orange, transfigured by fire.
He didn’t know how to project the flames from his eyes.
Instead, as the heat rose up through his chest, Ryn realised he was about to repeat something that he had learned to do back on the train.
“FIRE!” Ryn roared, and flames leapt from his mouth straight into Sagar’s face.
The skypirate screamed and leapt backwards, dropping his cutlass and clutching at his face. He kept screaming as Ryn got to his feet, still hot with anger and seeing red.
The screams turned into “You bastard! You bastard! You burned me!”
Sagar took his hands away from his face. Ryn couldn’t completely tell in his fire vision, but it looked scorched, darker than usual.
Nothing Cid can’t heal, I’m sure.
The whole of Ryn was on fire again. He threw a fireball at Sagar--just a small one, not big enough to seriously harm him, just burn him a bit more.
Sagar saw or felt it coming and brought his hand across his body, making a movement as if to bat the fireball away. A rush of wind issued from his hand, blowing the fire to one side and causing it to dissipate into the air.
That only renewed Ryn’s rage. He chucked another fireball at Sagar, no longer caring how big it was, then another and another.
Sagar blocked each one with his air projection, fanning them away in gusting flickers. But only barely.
On his scorched face, the skypirate’s singed brows tipped back above widened eyes and his jaw went slack.
That’s right, thought Ryn. Make him scared. Make him pay. Make him stop bullying me.
“Boltaaaaarrrrraaaa!” someone shouted.
A stab of shock lanced through Ryn. The pain entered at his back, but in an instant spread to every point in his body.
He cried out.
The pain passed, but before Ryn knew it he had lost his concentration, and his fire vision and aura were gone, steam hissing up from him.
What the hell?
“You both stop this at once!” someone was saying in a raised voice behind him.
Ah. Nuthea.
“I’ve had just about enough of this, from the pair of you!” Nuthea carried on. She lightninged me. She actually lightninged me. He turned round to listen to the rest of his telling off.
Nuthea was shaking with fury and her eyes had doubled in size. “I can’t believe you! I’ve got a highly important mission to carry out and the two of you can’t stop squabbling! We’ll never make it to Manolia if we kill each other first! You both need to just grow up!”
Ryn crossed his arms. “He started it,” was all that he could say after a moment. He knew it sounded childish but he was still smarting from being briefly electrocuted by Nuthea and it was the best he could come up with at short notice.
“Well, I finished it. Now apologise to each other, both of you.”
From the way that Sagar was sitting on the ground, Ryn guessed Nuthea must have hit him with the lightning as well. His face was back to normal. Cid knelt next to him, tight-lipped with disappointment, so the healer must have taken care of it.
Their eyes met, and Sagar scowled, flashing anger at Ryn.
But, Ryn realised, it was no longer the scowl of a superior. It was the scowl of an equal.
At least he had achieved something. He probably should apologise for burning the guy’s face though. At least to make Nuthea happy.
“Sorry, Sagar...” Ryn said.
A long moment passed as they held each other’s gaze. Rage seemed to jostle with obligation in Sagar’s brown eyes.
Eventually Sagar looked away and mumbled something completely inaudible.
“What was that?” asked Ryn.
“I said...rrrrrrsry.”
“Pardon?”
“SORRY!” Sagar shouted. “There! Are you satisfied now, princess?”
“Reasonably,” said Nuthea. “Now come on, both of you, everyone. We have places to be.”
“This travelling party is a joke,” said Sagar as they began to climb another hill in a direction that Elrann indicated. “You’re right, princess, we’ll have all killed each other before we have a chance to get back to your homeland.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t be too hard on us,” said Cid. Disappointed, but still optimistic, then. “We did just manage to elude the grasp of practically an entire Imperial battalion and several Morekemian officers together, in spite of the circumstances. That is no small achievement, and took a great amount of both teamwork and skill.”
Ryn’s shoulders eased a bit and his spirit rose at that. When you put it like that, things didn’t seem so bad.
Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr. Stay with Nuthea. Even if she had just hit him with a lightning bolt. He was surprised that he hadn’t been more lastingly hurt by that. There had been a brief shock of pain, but then he had been fine. He hadn’t even needed Cid to heal him, like Sagar had. He wondered why that was. Was she able to control the strength of her attacks? Nothing she had said before had seemed to indicate that… Though if she was, why had she hit Sagar harder than him?
Really, there were other things more pressing on his mind.
“So Nuthea,” he said, “can you explain to us why we’re not in so much of a rush to get to Manolia any more?”
“Yeah,” joined in Elrann. “What gives, princess-girl? For ages you’re all like”--she put on a refined voice in mock imitation of Nuthea--“‘I must return to my homeland to warn my people of what the Emperor has learned’, then all of a sudden now that we’re nearly there, you don’t seem so bothered. What gives?”
Nuthea took a while to reply, and for a moment they were walking only to the sound of their own grunting and panting as they made their way up the hill. But eventually she broke her silence.
“As you know, we are currently in Zerlan, though very close to the border of both Imfis and Manolia, in the Pelnian mountains.” Of course she was going to tell them through a lecture. “Just beyond the mountains, in the Iflama forest where the Manolian peninsula starts to jut out from the Dokanese mainland, there is a huge, fortified wall. It is not very wide, because it does not need to be to span the width of the peninsula, but it is tall, and thick, and extremely well defended. The train will have to stop at the station of a town outside of this wall. I am sure that my countrywomen will have got wind of the Empire’s invasion of Dokan by now, so they will have barred entry of the train through the tunnel that passes under the wall, especially when a battalion of Imperial soldiers appears in Plessa station. It will take Vorr time to work out how to get past this wall, and all that time he will be sitting at Plessa station with his troops, and for all we know he will be amassing more there. But now that he has beaten us to it, our goal is not speed, but stealth. We will need to sneak through or around the soldiers in order to get past the wall before they do. Then finally I will be able to deliver the information that the Emperor has found out about the Jewels to my people, before Vorr can get to them.” She took a deep breath. Her lecture had been punctuated by a lot of huffs and puffs as she climbed the hill.
The rest of them took a moment to let this sink in. Then Ryn said, “Alright… so we need to sneak past the Imperial troops...again. It’s a good thing we’ve still got this Imperial armour, even if we’ve lost our helmets. But what do we do once we reach this ‘wall’? How will we be able to get past it without revealing ourselves to the Imperials on this side of it?”
“Yeah, he does have a point there, princess,” said Sagar, to Ryn’s surprise. Perhaps Ryn should set his face on fire more often…
“That’s the reason I’m not in as much of a rush any more,” said Nuthea, determinedly looking at her feet as she walked and refusing to meet any of their gazes. “I...I know of a secret passageway through the wall. A secret entrance and exit. We will be able to sneak into Manolia through that.”
“Okay,” said Elrann, “well that makes a lot more sense now. But I think it makes all the more sense for us to be restocking our supplies here in Zerlan before we carry on. There’s no way we could even get to the Manolian border wall on what we’ve got left.”
“I agree,” said Cid. Sagar and Vish nodded their assent too.
Ryn didn’t see any reason to protest. Which meant that in a moment he could ask Nuthea about some other things that had happened on board the train which had been starting to bother him...
They reached the crest of the latest hill and took a moment to catch their breaths in the crisp air. This hill was higher than the last and afforded them an even better view of the surrounding country. To the West and North, more hills, stretching back to the Imfisi plains they had traversed on the train. To the East and South, yet more hills, yes, but instead of eventually flattening out, they rose to become the snow-dusted Pelnian mountains. Wending its way down from these was the thin blue ribbon of the river they had jumped into to escape from Vorr. The plume of steam from the Sirran train the Imperials had commandeered had long disappeared.
Ryn could not hold in his questions any more. “Why did we end up needing to jump off the train?” he asked of the world in general. Then he rounded on Cid, addressing his next few questions to the old man. “Why did Nuthea’s lightning bolt not do more damage to Vorr? You were worried about that before it happened. What do you know that we don’t?”
The old man chewed his cheek. Everyone looked at him expectantly for an answer. Everyone except Nuthea.
“Something,” Cid said eventually, “now, that I had only suspected before.”
Ryn couldn’t help from feeling that the old man was only pausing for dramatic effect. “What?”
Cid sighed. “The Jewels, when a person touches them, impart alignment to the element they are associated with. That’s why a person who has been touched by one of them can manipulate and project that element, and isn’t harmed by it.”
“We know that, old timer,” said Sagar. “Come on, skip to the new stuff.”
“I’m getting there. When my former companions and I were collecting the Jewels before, we developed a theory about this elemental alignment, but we never had the opportunity to test it properly, and we never dared test it on each other. The theory we came up with was that, when a person touched a particular Jewel, not only did they gain the ability to manipulate that element, but they also gained a certain affinity with that element. Somehow, their body became attuned to that element and came to bear some of the properties of that element. And from various anecdotal incidents, we came to speculate that with this affinity came certain weaknesses and resistances to the other elements.”
“Put it in plainspeak, old timer,” said Sagar.
“In other words, a person aligned to a certain element will be especially weak to attacks from certain other elements, and especially resistant to attacks from certain other elements. The most obvious one is that people who have touched the Fire Ruby would be especially susceptible to attacks from those who had touched the Water Sapphire, as fire is vulnerable to extinguishment by water. But in turn water is highly vulnerable to lightning…”
“And fire is resistant to lightning,” said Ryn slowly, seeing where Cid was going. “That’s why Nuthea’s lightning bolt didn’t hurt me more. That’s why Sagar needed you to heal him, but not me. That’s why Vorr and the officers touched by the Ruby hadn’t been hurt more by her lightning back on the top of the train.”
“Indeed,” said Cid. “As far as we guessed, fire isn’t completely resistant to lightning, but it is partially resistant, from what we observed. And interestingly enough, it didn’t quite seem to work the other way around. Lightning alignment does not grant resistance to fire–far from it–so fire seemed to be the dominant element in the pairing. It was only a theory, and like I say, we didn’t have a chance to test it out properly before, since nobody but us ever had any elemental powers before, and we didn’t want to test it by attacking each other, but now that you’ve done that it does seem to confirm--”
“Do the Empire know?” said Nuthea all of a sudden, briskly. The colour had drained from her face completely; her skin was milk-white. “Do the Empire know?” she asked again, even more urgently.
“I don’t see how they could,” said Cid, putting his hands up in reassurance, “unless they have access to lore that we didn’t. Although recent events may have given them an inkling…”
“We’ve got to keep moving,” said Nuthea. “Fast. We need to find a Zerlanese settlement as soon as we can and restock our supplies, and then move on to Manolia.” She had started to hop from foot to foot. “Come on, everyone!” She seemed to have turned even whiter, were that possible, and had started to shake a little.
“Now hold on, princess!” said Sagar. “All of a sudden we’re in a rush again? What’s with all the urgency?”
Ryn knew.
“Don’t you see?” said Nuthea, pleadingly. “Vorr and his Officers are heading for Manolia, with the Fire Ruby, and they have resistance to lightning! The primary defence method of my people won’t even work against him! And he might even know this now!”
“Arrrrggh!” Ryn cried out with frustration. The mention of the General’s name had lit the flame of his temper again, and hate burned in his chest at the memory of being caught and tortured by him. “Damn him, he’s just too strong! Even with all my practice I still couldn’t beat him! He’s invulnerable to fire, and now we know he’s virtually invulnerable to lightning too!”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Cid. “Vorr is powerful and devious.”
“I hate him!” Ryn went on, unable to contain his outburst and not caring. “I hate him for killing my parents and burning down my hometown and for stealing the Jewel from us!”
“Come on, Ryn,” said Nuthea, still agitated too, “let’s go, then! That’s why we’ve got to get to Manolia ahead of him: to warn my people and stop him from taking another Jewel!”
Ryn remembered something else. In the heat of his outburst, he couldn’t hold back his questions any more.
“Nuthea, what did Vorr mean when he said to you on top of the train ‘you’ve been helpful enough already by betraying your homeland’, anyway?”
Now Nuthea froze.
They all looked at her.
She didn’t speak for a long time.
When she did, she said very quietly, “I didn’t think you’d heard that…”
“No, I heard it,” said Ryn slowly. “How couldn’t I? He said it loud and clear. I just hadn’t had a moment to ask about it until now. What did he mean?”
Nuthea looked at the ground.
Ryn’s guts went suddenly cold, the heat vanishing as quickly as it had come. Slowly, a chill crept up from the base of his feet to the top of his head, gripping his heart tight on the way. Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr.
Stay with Nuthea?
He heard himself asking another question. “How did Vorr find out about the Jewels in the first place? It wasn’t just a coincidence that he attacked my town, was it?”
“No,” said Nuthea very quietly, still looking down. “He knew about the Fire Ruby before he attacked Cleasor.”
“How?”
The cold was freezing fear in the pit of his stomach.
“He knows because I told him.”
Shock tore through Ryn. His mouth fell open.
“Wh… what?”
Still Nuthea refused to meet his gaze. “He knows because I told him,” she said quietly through the tears that started to stream down her cheeks.
“Why? When? Where?”
The others stared at her from where they stood, stunned to silence. Even Sagar didn’t offer any comment, but seemed keen to hear whatever Nuthea had to say next.
Nuthea took a deep breath and brushed the water from her cheeks. It took her a little while, but eventually she started to tell them the tale. “There… there never was an undercover mission to Imfis… What happened was that I ran away from my homeland because I was due to be wed in an arranged marriage, and I didn’t want to be; I wanted to see the world and go on adventures. So I ran away, and disguised myself, and made my own way travelling. I got as far as Sirra, but one night I was staying at an inn there, and I met this man...”
A horrible premonition came into Ryn’s imagination.
“...he bought me some drinks,” Nuthea went on, “and somehow I let slip that I was a Manolian princess...”
“Why would you do that?” Ryn said.
“I don’t know!” Nuthea nearly started to sob again, then choked it back. “He was very charming, and he had a very flattering way of talking and I… I suppose I wanted to impress him… When I told him I was a princess he was very interested--”
“Course he was,” said Sagar.
“--he was very interested, and he started asking me things about my homeland and my people. And then… then he started asking me about the Primeval Jewels. Somehow he had heard of them, and he started to ask me what I knew, and I told him… I told him…”
Nuthea petered out as she looked back down at the ground. She didn’t seem able to bring herself to say whatever she had been going to say next.
“What did you tell him?” said Ryn. But he realised he already knew.
Nuthea raised her gaze to Ryn’s. Her lip quivered.
“I told him what I knew about the Jewels. I told him that the Lightning Crystal was in the Manolian capital and that the Fire Ruby was hidden in a small town in Efstan called Cleasor.”
Ryn reeled, and had to put his arms out to stop himself from falling over. The world had begun to spin. He felt himself sit down on the ground with a bump.
“I…” said Nuthea. “I’m sorry I lied to you. To you all.”
Nobody else spoke. They just watched Ryn.
“Say something, Ryn,” Nuthea implored him.
Ryn’s mind caught up with his body.
“Do you mean to tell me…” he said slowly, quietly. “Do you mean to tell me that the person responsible for the Morekemian Emperor finding out about the Jewels, for Vorr coming to my hometown to find the Fire Ruby, for the death of my mother, for the death of my father, for the destruction of my hometown and the death of everyone I’ve ever known is...you?”
“I’m sorry!” Nuthea burst out again. “I don’t know what came over me! I had been drinking wine, and Vorr is...Vorr is actually quite attractive when he’s not in his armour and you don’t know he’s an Imperial soldier… He must have been in there off duty, or on shore leave, or something, in his regular clothes. And he...he noticed me, and he was trying to...ingratiate himself with me... ”
The world was still spinning, and it span faster. Ryn’s stomach turned over; he worried he might be sick. “You mean you…?”
“No!” said Nuthea quickly. “No. But I did get to talking with him. After I told him who I was, and then about the Jewels, he overpowered me straight away and took me back to his airship, where he threw me in that cell. I’m sure he would have tortured me, but by that point he had already gotten out of me everything I knew. I’m...I’m so sorry, Ryn.”
The nausea receded a little, leaving only...cold.
“Ryn, I--”
“No, stop,” said Ryn. He stood up shakily. “Don’t waste your breath.” This was all too much. “I need to be by myself for a little while.”
He stumbled away from the group, down and round the side of the hill they were on. The whole time he walked he felt numb. And yet, underneath the numbness, somewhere in the pit of his stomach, Ryn was vaguely aware that something else was stirring in him, fighting to make itself known.
When he knew he had walked down and round enough of the hill to be out of sight of his companions, he sat down and wept.
The ocean of grief that had been sealed up inside of him burst forth all of a sudden, flooding him. He had had to keep it pressed down in order to escape the Empire, find a healer for Nuthea, sneak onto the train with the others, fight Vorr. He had not allowed himself to feel it fully. But now it had grown too much, and the grief broke its dam. He buried his face in the grass so that nobody would hear him, however far away they were, as it came out through his eyes in hot tears, through his chest in big, heaving sobs, through his mouth in muffled shouts of pain and anger at Vorr, at the Empire, at the world, at the fact that everyone he had ever known had been killed, but he alone had been left alive.
At Nuthea.
Mother. Father. Hometown. Find Vorr. Get Vorr. Kill Vorr.
Get away from Nuthea.
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