Reigning in the Rain

Their love surged both on and off the battlefield, where hundreds of villagers raised their weapons against the soldiers of King Einar of KhaRel. They were merely a distraction, and while they valiantly fought on, one Leopold Dulon snuck through the back alleys of the village bearing a string-and-button fastened cloak in an unassuming gray color. Mercenaries hired by Einer to find him were posted throughout the street corners with orders to haul him back kicking and screaming if they must.

He stumbled across the street from one alley into the next, shuttering gasps for breath behind clamped shut lips. On the count of three, he dared a peek around the corner of the Inn he hid behind and startled back as a small squad of Einar’s knights dragged his prized prisoner through KhaRel’s streets. Chains clinked and clanked as they shuffled around, clasped uncomfortably tight to the prisoner’s wrists and ankles.

The sun had begun to set on the village streets, and Leopold had a date with destiny to upkeep. As the guards continued on toward him, a maiden opened the side door to the Inn with a pile of laundry to go on the wire, and with mumbled apology, Leopold rushed past her and into the doorway of the Inn. One finger flew to his lips and his eyes pointed to the streets and back to her as they pleaded for silence. The keeper busied herself with her clothesline, giving a curt nod in the direction of the guards once they presumably passed her by. The clinking faded in the distance, and Leopold released a breath he had not realized he’d been holding.

“Your Highness,” the maiden greeted coyly.

“M’lady. You have my gratitude, but I must be off-”

“Your Highness, if I may,” she interrupted, and from her own throat unclasped a silver charm strung across a piece of twine.

“What is this?” Leopold asked as the maiden pressed it firmly into his hands, curling his fingers around it.

“You give us hope, and that is more than we could ever ask of you. Please, this has been in my family for generations, a blessing of good fortune from a long-passed ancestor of mine. My love and I have no such boon to offer you except for it. Please, Your Highness. Take care out there.”

Their hands held joined for just a moment longer, and he met her eyes with a warm regard. “I will, and I will be back to return this to you and your family. You have my word.”

He bid her farewell and turned back to the street, peering around to find the soldiers gone. The sound of hooves came barreling at him, and before he could think to step any direction out of the way, a hand grabbed hold of the back of his shirt and yanked him up and into a carriage. The closest weapon to him being his dagger in the holster of his calf, he knocked it up into his hand and held it to the throat of…

“Your Highness, if you could please?”

“You could have simply greeted me, Azeman. Asked me to get into the cart.”

“Not if you want to stop Einar.”

Leopold backed his knife away, leveling his guard with a gaze. “What news of my father have you?”

“He has ordered a relocation of the execution. We must reach Eelas Keep before the setting of the sun.”

“The Blessed Lady’s Temple? He is moving the execution to the temple?”

“Einar believes our Lady may bring immense blessings to the village with a strong sacrifice at her altar. I have managed to plant a small handful of my guards at the Temple, and I have reports from scouts that Einar has left the battlefield on the outskirts of KhaRel. It seems he plans to attend the execution in person.”

“We are going straight in? Do we have the reinforcements for a siege of the Temple? What of my father’s reinforcements?”

“Well, if you will allow my being so blunt, Your Highness? Your father has no idea what awaits him at the Temple. Get comfortable, and prepare for a fight. Mikhel will alert us when we near the Temple. Maybe send a quick prayer to our dear Lady.”

Leopold did just that as the cart creaked on, until it stopped after what felt like a mile. Leopold jumped, sword at the ready, only to be pressed back down into the cart by Azeman.

“This feels wrong,” he swore. “Wait for Mikhel’s signal.”

That signal never came, for as soon as Azeman’s sentence concluded, the clashing of swords could be heard. Azeman muttered a string of curses and drew his sword, Leopold following suit. While the boy rushed to Mikhel’s aid against the handful of Einar’s men, Azeman laid down an oddly shaped pattern of dust sprinkled from a pouch at his side. Once he finished, he clapped his hands together, and mumbled a spell under his breath. The dust glistened purple as it took to the air and swirled around each attacker. They turned their attention away from the three men and swatted at it fruitlessly, and once it hit their airways, they dropped to the ground.

“Are they-”

“Goddess’s sake, boy. They are sleeping. We must be off!” Azeman warned, and Mikhel commanded his horses forward. Finally, they came to a halt behind a row of buildings nearby the Temple and the hedge bushes that surrounded its grounds.

“We travel on foot from here on,” Mikhel explained. “They’ll have a harder time seeing us coming than with the horses.” He tied the steeds to a nearby post and shushed them with cubes of sugar.

They crept up to the edge closer to them of the bushes before Azeman put an arm out in front of Leopold to stop him. Azeman held one finger to his lips, and then made some odd hand gesture, ending in a small parade of white sparkles that flittered to the dirt below and seeped beneath the bushes. Leopold, after a moment, opened his mouth in inquiry, only to be silenced by a volley of arrows coming out of seemingly nowhere. Leopold instinctively ducked until he realized how they flew over the hedge, not at him and through it. The entire time, he heard not a single shout — whether for reinforcements or injury — nor the whistle of an arrow piercing the air. The air was still, silent, except he knew arrows flew, not only because he could see them, but he could feel the wind shifting around him.

“Silencing spell,” Azeman explained, before gesturing for them to follow.

The Lady’s courtyard was a mess of bodies in various states of wounded or, in the case of some very skilled shots, death. The team of three crept past them and towards the doors of the Temple, which opened before them to reveal a platoon of soldiers, armed and ready.

“How in the-”

“It is wondrous what those silencing spells can do,” Azeman huffed politely with a shake of the head. Leopold huffed, and shook it off as he addressed his people.

“For your allyship, you cannot fathom my gratitude. You do not stand idly by while people are set to death, dishonored for living their lives on their terms instead of those of a dictator! You, gathered here in our Lady’s Temple, should be proud, and may she bless us all with safe passage home from battle.”

Their shouts harkened to a kingdom — a world — lost to senseless cruelty and bloodshed, to simpler times when people were the masters of their fate and did not abide by arbitrary, self-fashioned rules of law, and a desire to return to such a livelihood.

They started with a hundred, until they stormed through the Temple and reached the Offering Chamber. The barricaded doors did not stop them, and once they came crashing down, Leopold came face to face with not only Einar, but a couple hundred more villagers. They all turned in unison from their benches facing the altar, and Einar locked eyes with him specifically from the altar, as if he could sense his presence.

“Leopold,” he acknowledged. “Pitiful how you never seem to learn.”

“Father.” This he emphasized. He knew his father’s game — distance himself from the son he’d bore, who turned out to be so drastically different from the image he’d had in mind. Einar would not get away with acting like he did not exist, like he was not of the same blood. “Unhonorable, how you resort to murdering your own people in this vain attempt to purify and reshape your bloodline. You think this will make me change? Will make me love you?” His sword swung from its sheath and pointed in the direction of Einar’s jugular. “This is vile.”

“You are hopeless,” Einar scoffed, taking out his own knife and twirling it above the prisoner strapped to the altar. From the cursory glance of being so far away, Leopold could see bruising and plenty of sluggishly bleeding wounds to see that Einar had taken his time with this one. Now, faced with even a small army of opposers, he would not take any chances. “Sons do not love their fathers, they honor them. They respect them, and when they do not? You make them fear you!”

Azeman moved quicker than the knife could, quicker than Leopold’s understanding of the events unfolding. One flickering hand sent a stream of yellow, pollen-like dust his way, and halfway through the air, particles of dust converged to form a small hive of bees, all of which swarmed the King. “Get them! Do something!” he shouted at the congregation of people before him. They stood for a moment, before turning on Einar.

In the flurry of movement — swords swinging, arrows flying, spells being cast — one spell was cast by Azeman specifically, which undid the bindings holding Einar’s prisoner to the altar. Leopold knew his father did not have the numbers to stop him, and in a surge of energy, he sprinted through the crowd, weaving and pushing past swarms of flying limbs to reach the altar.

“Griffin!” he shouted, latching onto his shoulders and shaking, far more rough than he intended. The boy looked dead, a possibility Leopold could not grasp.

‘Dear Lady of KhaRel…I beg you, do not take him from me.’

“Grif, can you hear me, darling? Let me see those little raindrops, huh?”

‘I love when it rains,’ Griffin had disclosed to him one day. Leopold had had early swordsmen lessons, and Griffin had surprised him with treats snuck from the kitchens after breakfast had concluded. After lessons, they had snuck off with the excuse of a ‘ride around the grounds’. That ride had led them to a clearing in the woods nearby the castle grounds, where a gentle rain had started. The trees covered them for the most part, but beyond the tree line, the misty rain could be seen.

‘Your eyes look like rain.’ He had blurted it out without realizing, though he never determined whether or not Griffin realized the blush that creeped up to his cheeks at the comment.

‘Whatever do you mean by that?’ he laughed.

‘They are clear as a spring shower, yet almost cloudy in the center, like an overcast sky before the rain falls.’

He remembered the way he had pulled Griffin closer, similar to the way he did now. He pressed their lips together, relished in the taste of the fruits they’d snacked on before he pulled away and locked in on those eyes. ‘I could watch the raindrops for the rest of my life.’

Now, he wanted nothing more than to see the rain. Griffin loved the rain.

He lifted Griffin from the altar and made eye contact with Azeman across the room. Nodding in acknowledgement, Azeman disappeared into a puff of purple-black smoke that traveled through the mass of people towards Leopold.

All of a sudden, sharp, fiery-hot pain exploded in his chest, and Leopold tightened his grip on Griffin as he dropped to one knee, his father’s blade jerking in his chest with the strain.

“My lady will see the blood of the unpure shed as she desires,” Einar vowed, and twisted the sword. Leopold choked, blood dribbling down his chin. Azeman appeared in his corporal form at the edge of the altar, and Leopold could barely reach him to hand Griffin’s body over.

“Help…him…” he pleaded, before he pulled the dagger from his calf holster once again and, pulling away from his father to drag the sword from his body, used the last of his energy to half-spin and slash out, dragging the razor-sharp blade across his throat. As Einar floundered, choking on his own blood and desperately trying to ebb the flow from his body, Leopold struck one more time — straight through the heart. Unlike his father, he didn’t miss.

Their combined blood poured over the altar, painting it scarlet. The lines etched throughout it long ago filled like dug-out rivers during a rainstorm.

‘Griffin,’ Leopold remembered. He looked up, and found Azeman standing over him. Leopold jumped up, but the sorcerer held him down firmly, hands twinkling green.

“Grif-”

All at once, his vision swirled with black and green and…’gold?’ The air shifted, and those channels of the altar began to glow a fierce shine, and as though creating a passage to the afterlife, everything flooded that gold color before, like a burnt out star, it all went black.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“King Leopold awoke a week later!” the innkeeper told the children surrounding her as she regaled them with tales of the kingdom. They had, of course, asked for the story of the Two Kings, while the innkeeper gladly began to recite. She remembered that bold, but shy, kind boy who had pushed past her into her tavern that day, begging her to not blow his cover.

“What happened to Griffin?”

“He survived, of course!” One of the children scoffed, rolling her eyes at the boy who asked. “That’s the other King’s name!”

“And if you see the great King Griffin, tell him to pay Mrs. Esmee a visit,” the innkeeper’s wife laughed heartily from behind the counter. “He owes me a three-nights’ fee!”

“And I promised you I would return to pay my debts. Yet here you are, sicing children on me!”

The children gasped and jumped up, swarming the dashing young man who walked through the door, adorned in a black tunic and trousers with a scarlet cloak adorned with the Lady’s tree, the symbol of KhaRel.

“King Griffin!” the children shouted, before they composed themselves just a little at the urging of Esmee clearing her throat and giving the King a gentle bow. The children followed suit before they began throwing a million questions at him.

“Now, now, children. I apologize, but I merely came to pay my dues. It is important to keep your promises, after all,” he reminded them, dropping a pouch of coins on Esmee’s desk.

“M’Lord,” Hattie inquired from the back of the room. “How is His Royal Highness? Will he be attending the festival?”

“He would not miss it.”

Griffin turned to face his husband in the doorway of the Inn. The sunshine outside illuminated his fair skin and golden-colored hair. Leopold smiled, throwing one arm over Griffin’s shoulder, making the other scowl and try to hide in his arm. He could feel Leopold’s smirk from his hiding spot, and emerged from the hidey-hole, resigned to his husband’s antics.

“Personally,” Leopold addressed the children before looking into Griffin’s eyes. “I hope there’s a little rain.”

And rain there was. The kingdom of KhaRel, as most, did not know only sunny, warm days. But, the Blessed Lady always gifted them a rainbow to make up for the storm clouds.