Dark Spirits by R.J. Price

Author:R.J. Price
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 'romance, love, magic, warrior, queen, honour'
Publisher: R.J. Price

Chapter Twenty-Three

Aren watched Danya descend the steps with books in her arms. The healer smiled at Aren when she came down off the last step.

“Rewel is fuming up top, probably going to visit you later and insist you tell him what you’re hiding,” Danya said. “The only thing I could think of that would cause such oddities is if you had been infected by one of the living stones, but I think the stones are dead now and he wouldn’t believe it.”

“Living stones?” Aren asked.

“Queen’s stone, bloodstone.” Danya nodded twice, then frowned. “There are a few others, if only I could recall what…” The woman trailed off, eyes roving over Aren’s face. “Why do you look like you’re about to go hunting for a man?”

“No reason,” Aren said. Though she would have to have a conversation with Av. Queen’s stone had filled the cave that she had stumbled into while running from Worl, and she also knew that it caused consumption. When Av had asked about her health at his father’s home she had assumed it was because being near the living stone might cause another bout of consumption, not because it would cause something else entirely. “What are those?”

“These?” Danya smiled again. “These are books on the rights. These were the start of trying to define honour. Something happened and for whatever reason they wrote down the rights so that outsiders would understand why we behaved the way we did and didn’t care when a warrior gutted a man with his own shoe.”

“His own shoe?” Aren asked.

“It was an armour-plated shoe,” Danya stressed, setting the books before Aren. “You might know the rights by a different name or by feeling alone. There’s right to claim, which by the sounds of it Av did for you, the right to stumble, right to life, right to death. On and on. Though I don’t find the others all too necessary these days.”

“Let’s start with the right to claim,” Aren said, picking up one of the books.

They were surprisingly small for being honour books. She opened the page and found the book to be marked as having been transcribed and translated from an older text. Given the age of the book in her hands, Aren guessed the older version was written in a language no one left alive could read.

“The right to claim says that anyone of rank can claim anyone else in order to save them. It’s mainly used by warriors to claim queens who are in hiding or working themselves to death because they think they know what is best. The right to claim is almost never voiced to the one who is claimed and in true claims, the warrior doesn’t know why he’s claiming the queen,” Danya said almost too quickly for Aren to understand.

“Queens hid?” Aren asked.

“Yes, oh yes. It is only in the era of the short-lived queens that your rank has been raised to boast what it is. In centuries past queens could pass as commoners until they were thrown into a rage.

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