Arcadia
The forest was a jewel, lush and green. In spring, cool showers sparkled in between spells of warming sun. In winter, soft snows settled gently, trapping heat to the ground so the weather ranged no colder. In autumn, brisk breezes rustled the dead leaves and cooled the summer sun. And now, at the height of summer, occasional light rains were a refreshingly cool break from the delightfully balmy heat. At any time of the year, you could expect maybe a few days of exceptional weather; a week or two without rain in summer would lead to a few blisteringly hot days and then a thunderstorm to clear the air, a torrential downpour could be expected once or twice in spring, a howling gale in autumn would subside quickly whereas in winter it would blow into a fully fledged snowstorm, but a week or more of calm weather would follow, as if to make up for it. The forest always returned, quickly and quietly, to it’s blissfully idyllic existence.
The forest ranged over many hundreds of miles, most of it dense deciduous trees with sparse ferny undergrowth over undulating hills like a crumpled blanket, criss-crossed with small brooks and streams. The inhabitants of the forest ranged from small songbirds to hawks, squirrels to foxes, mice to deer. Although it was never quite quiet, it was very rarely noisy.
Truly, it was a jewel in the crown of Arcadia, or would have been if the crown of Arcadia hadn’t been buried sixty years ago and what remained of the kingdom placed under the capable hands of the Old Duke. The forest had been his retreat, his hunting paradise, and was still enjoyed as such by the Young Duke, often known simply as the Duke. No one used her given name anymore, or really bothered to remember that she was a woman.
As was her habit of a morning, the Duke stood, graceful and perfectly still, on the porch of the most beautiful of her father’s hunting halls. It had rained briefly before dawn, she knew, partly by the light pattering on her window that had merged with her awakening and partly by the freshness, the slight smell of damp, that greeted her here but a step away from the forest. She tried not to focus on any particular part of the image before here, merely soaking in the atmosphere, the ever present, ever shifting and beautifully textured green, the fall of sunlight between the trees, the gentle sound of the few last drops of rain trickling to earth.
Something was wrong.
Approaching from behind, Teiharo noted the sudden change in the Duke’s body, almost imperceptible, but a tightening of every line as readable as the rising of hairs on the back of your neck.
“My Duke?” He fought the urge to whisper it. The graceful woman didn’t move, even the slightest bit. It was obvious she had heard his footsteps coming, but there was a brief pause while she assured herself that her deduction was correct.
“Teiharo, someone’s been here in the night.”
“Xander arrived very early this morning, my Duke. He came by horse.”
“I know. I recognised the prints as one of our own. Someone else has been here. Two people at least came close to the house, on foot, but at least three horses stood over there by the tall ash.”
Teiharo slowly moved level with the Duke, his eyes searching the ground before them. She was indeed right; the footprints of at least two, possibly three, people crisscrossed the ground before them. Moving delicately with the kind of grace and elegance few Arcadians could dream of, he picked his way around the prints and moved over to the ash, noting a broken branch, a few bruised ferns, and a smattering of prints.
Eventually, he picked his way back.
“Ziang?”
“No. The numbers are right, but Ziang wear heavy boots and their horses are shod.”
“These horses were unshod? Can we be sure they were horses?”
“The prints are heavy and the walkers were also unshod. Woodsfolk, probably Woodsmen, as anyone else would not have left such obvious marks.”
“They came very close for Woodsmen.” The Duke still hadn’t moved. Teiharo understood her implicit question.
“There is a Kami trace.” He lowered his voice, even though there was no one else around, out of habit. “Green and brown. Boar like. It came by, heading past the hall on it’s way eastward, about twenty minutes ago. These prints are older, sometime towards the end of the rain this morning.”
“Unrelated?”
“Most likely.”
“Good.” Finally, the Duke turned to face Teiharo, who dipped into a bow automatically. She inclined her head slightly in response. “What’s for breakfast, Teiharo?”
“Bacon and scrambled eggs, my Duke, and I think Ainee is frying mushrooms as we speak.”
“We better get there fast, then, or Xander will eat it all.”
“He wouldn’t dare, my Duke.” Was Teiharo’s reply, although in actual fact, he wasn’t at all sure.
Following the Duke back into the building, he was struck, as he always was, by her grace and strength. He had tried, for so long, to thing of her as others did; merely as the Duke, a strong and capable leader, intelligent, resourceful, polite and charming. But some deep, undeniable part of himself couldn’t help but notice that she was also incredibly beautiful.
Her father, the Old Duke, had been a typical Arcadian much like Xander or Ainee – tall, broad in the shoulders, with long legs, delicate feet and hands, and a heart shaped face. She’d inherited much of her build from him. Arcadian women, however, tended to run to fat, the men having little to none, whereas the Duke had kept her slim, athletic figure of whipcord muscle with a smooth layer of softness over the top, a slight roundness of figure, a gentle fullness of breast and thigh that she had inherited from her mother. Her mother… her mother had been Sounen, from the icy lands to the west, a trophy brought home from a long campaign in the name of the Arcadian throne. The Old Duke had been charming to her, openly smitten with her beauty, and the woman whose name Teiharo had never asked after had obviously not considered a marriage such a bad thing. She’d died in childbirth, the Duke cut out of her dead belly some two or three weeks before time. Her blood had not only evened out the worst points of Arcadian composition but also bleached the colour from her child; dark eyed albinos like the Duke were only found in cross-cultural births. The Duke’s skin was as white as paper, her fingernails opaque and milky coloured, the long, dead strait hair inherited from her mother so white it was almost translucent. Only her eyes, those almond shaped, long lashed eyes, were the dark brown of cherry bark.
Today she had chosen to wear a loose shirt of unbleached cotton, the cuffs unbuttoned, and a rich brown waistcoat over caramel coloured breeches tucked into her riding boots. The simplicity and elegance of the designs – the way the perfectly fitted waistcoat followed her lines, the way the sleeves billowed around the movements of her arms as she walked, the little curlicue of dark brown embroidery down one side of her thigh – they suited her so well, made her look so graceful and solid. When attending to her duties in the cities, she wore black and royal blue and crimson – colours that made her appear as some terrifying spectre, as though she wasn’t real, couldn’t be real. Teiharo preferred her like this.
Walking down the hallway behind her, he caught his own reflection in one of the elegantly framed Woodskin mirrors that lined the corridors to add to the illusion of forest-like light and depth within the hunting hall. As always, he turned his face away, unwilling, if not outright ashamed, to face the dreadful reality of his Ziang mother or the glaring mark that spoke of darker heritage.
His oval face, almond shaped eyes or strange, china-like skin were not, in themselves, unpleasant, although they were easily recognisable traits that tied him to the Arcadian’s most common enemy. Even in his mother’s land, without the mark, he would have been outcast for the pale gold colour of his hair, the creamy jade of his eyes. Such things were rare if not unheard of, and strange – the eyes may have gone unnoticed, and with his hair stained black, as he had once done, he may have survived. But the livid, poison green marks tattooed on one side of his face since he was a baby shone clear to everyone who knew how to read such signs, and spoke of the shame of his birth, the travesty of a thing that had fathered him. He remembered, so vividly, explaining to the Old Duke what the symbols meant. The rain pouring down around them as, in full battle armour, the old man had ridden up to talk to a ten year old urchin boy with a marked face and a Ziang sword worthy of an emperor in his hand. Two vertical rows of emerald marks, down his face – forehead, just under his eye, by the side of his mouth, temple, cheekbone.
Evil
Tainted
Unclean
Kami
Child
And how his heart had swelled when this armoured foreigner had told him that only the last two were true, and that he should be proud of them. That he was more than worthy of the sword he carried. The sword the Kami had carried to the doorstep on the hour of his birth. His father’s sword.
He still carried that sword, with its green tasselled binding and inlaid scabbard, through the broad green sash that tied in a complicated knot at the back of his waist. The rest of his clothing was more typical of Arcadia – the loose green shirt with button up cuffs from wrist to elbow, the riding boots and earth coloured breeches – but the sash, the sword and the deep brown wrap-around waistcoat that hung to his knees spoke of his native country, as did the bindings on his left hand. Arcadian archers, dealing with oak longbows, guarded their fingers with cloth, if at all. Only the speed and power of the lacquered Ziang composite bow required the leather guards. Teiharo was so used to them he rarely took them off.