Echoes by West Michelle

Author:West, Michelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: bard, novella, assassin child, essalieyan
Publisher: Rosdan Press

Darkness. Always darkness. Everything began when the shadows were too dense. Sound. Scuffling, the huff of breath that speaks of shock; silence. But something woke him as he lay across the mats in the dormitory. There was little light, but as the old man had promised that light had become enough to see clearly by with the passage of time.

There was blood on the floor. The mats were slick with it. It dripped from two blades, and as Kallandras rose, those two blades came round. He knew that he could not take his eyes off these two, but his gaze slid past them anyway, risking death for a glimpse of death; his own death. The deaths of his…brothers.

Mikal’s hands were wet. Torval’s chest, also wet.

Kallandras shook his head in denial—just as he had shaken his head when wind had carried the sounds of his family’s death. He had thought that he would never have family again, and he had found the promise of something more. But that promise would never be fulfilled—not by the boys here. He reached for his blade, practice blade.

“You don’t stand a chance against the two of us,” Mikal said conversationally. But he did not look at his hands, or at the sleepers who would never wake. Their bodies were still—of the injured, they at least would not be carried off and put down.

Torval’s eyes were glinting as well. His hands were shaking.

They were not, Kallandras realized, madmen. They were frightened, and they had chosen this way to appease their fear.

As if they could hear his judgement, they said, “But we don’t have to fight. Help us, Kallatin, and there is room for you when the masters come tomorrow. They said three.”

He said nothing. But with their words, the room’s focus changed. If they wanted help, they had not yet finished their work. He saw them at a remove of years: inefficient. Emotional. But in the Labyrinth, he had also been both of those things.

When he spoke his voice filled the room; there was no space that escaped the command he put into the words.

“WAKE!”

They did. Not a shred of sleep remained; they were on their feet in an instant. Some rolled, hands hunting for the blunted weight of practice blades. Some leaped.

They were quicker than he had been to take in the events that had occurred while they slept. There were cries of dismay, of anger, of outrage—but there was no room for fear.

Not theirs.

“You would have done the same!” Mikal shouted, as he backed toward a wall. “They’re going to choose in the morning—they’re going to pick who lives and who dies!”

“And you thought you’d help them?”

“I didn’t come here to die!”

“None of us did,” Kallandras said softly. He lifted his weapon. Blunt. Heavy. “You betrayed us.”

“There is no us!”

Kallandras stepped forward. At his back, there were a handful of boys; he was not sure how many. More than two; probably four, judging from the way Mikal and Torval had chosen to stand.

“You have no right to judge us.

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