Just a note; there's about six hours between the first and second segment, and a few days between the second and third.
* * * * *
Quick as a striking snake, Rimmon lashed out. A spray of searing yellow light blasted into Nessa’s face and she stumbled back with a cry of rage and pain, one hand pressed over her eyes. Before Andra could think, Rimmon had seized him, and the point of a dagger was pressed to his throat.
‘Put out the Light,’ he hissed.
‘No! I will not!’ snarled Nessa. ‘You blindly serve that monster who calls herself the Dark Lady - don't you understand what destroying the Light would do? The Light is all that keeps the sea from swallowing Amanar! Forget this madness and let my cousin go!’
‘Oh no,’ smirked Rimmon, backing slowly out of the door and taking Andra with him. ‘The youngest prince of Amanar shall be coming with me. As a sign of good faith. He will be returned to you once the Light is extinguished. In what condition... is up to you.’
‘Don’t do it, Nessa!’ yelled Andra furiously. ‘I will be dead – I will kill myself before I will forgive you for putting out the Light!’
‘Be careful, princeling,’ crooned Rimmon. His lips brushed Andra’s ear, making him shudder. ‘It may come to that.’
*
‘Sound carries well over water, my prince,’ grinned Rimmon as Andra was roughly dragged on deck. ‘You may meditate on that as your cries reach the ears of your cousin. She is watching us from the chamber of the Light.’ He gestured at the tall, pale shape of the Lighthouse in the west. The harbour of Nes-Vairëad looked utterly abandoned; the inhabitants of the city had fled further inland to Nes-Amanar. Nonetheless, the Light blazed pure and white over the empty city and bay.
‘My cousin will never put out the Light, Rimmon Gaunt,’ said Andra proudly, gazing out across the sea. ‘And I will never call to her.’
‘Fine words,’ sneered Rimmon. ‘But let us see if pride will prove a good enough seal after the crew is done with you.’
With that, he shoved Andra backwards. Because his arms were bound behind his back, he couldn’t balance himself, and fell right over, into the waiting tattooed arms of the man with the eyepatch.
‘Well, almost as good as a girl,’ he grinned.
Andra shuddered.
Over the next few nightmare hours, the crew of the Dark Moon did its best to break its captive. At first, Andra struggled, kicked, bit, swore bloody vengeance on them all. By the time they were done with their sport, he was still, curled in a tight ball on the deck amid a tangle of ruined silk robes. Bruises were darkening on his face and all over his body.
I am at home. I am at home, in the throne room of the palace of Nes-Amanar. Twenty-five steps down the grand staircase, across the crescent moon of the mosaic floor to the sun. The Petal Throne on the crystal dais...
To his credit, he had not cried out once.
Even worse was when Rimmon knelt beside him. ‘You needn't suffer like this, you know,’ he said gently, stroking his hair. ‘All you need to do is convince your cousin to put out the Light.’
‘I would rather die a thousand deaths than help you destroy Amanar!’ spat Andra. Rimmon's face twisted into a snarl of rage. He seized Andra's wrist, and slipped a slender silver bracelet over his hand. It tightened, settling snugly on his wrist. What happened next was a sort of nightmare.
The warm glow of the Amanari, the sense that he had only to reach out and his people would respond, was gone. The strength of a thousand hearts and minds united behind the Petal Throne vanished from his own heart and mind. That would have been horrifying to anyone. But to Andra, who had felt their presence from the cradle, it was monstrous.
He screamed, no longer caring about pride or defiance. Pain and terror seized every particle of his mind and body, and he screamed with it, again and again and again until his throat was raw and he was a huddled, sobbing figure on the deck.
*
Even hours after dawn, the sky was blood-red, and massive scarlet-edged grey clouds were boiling in the east, filled with lightning. They seemed to be pouring out toward the sea where the Dark Moon lay becalmed on a sea turned hellish crimson with the reflection of the skies above, even though the wind was blowing west.
‘Your sacrifice has been in vain, witch-child!’ spat Rimmon. ‘The power that fed the Light of Nes-Vairëad is dead.’
‘You lie,’ the boy whispered. Days without sleep, food or the comforting psychic presence of his people had taken their toll. His usually flaming red hair was encrusted with sea-salt, and it flaked off when he moved. Sparkling grit got into his eyes and his many cuts and scrapes where they burned like hot little coals trapped under his skin. He ignored them. He was beyond discomfort now; all the pain and misery and fear and hatred had passed through the rage of a prince's broken pride and congealed into a featureless, icy mass, better than the stoniest heart.
Rimmon’s face split into a humourless grin. ‘Do I indeed? Was it not you who destroyed the power of the great mages? Was it not you who shattered half the Keystones in the world? Even now, six years after the world was changed, the bitter fruit of your culpable stupidity is being forced down the throats of countless thousands.’
Andra’s voice, husky with pain and disuse, could barely be heard over the excited yelling of the crew. ‘Vairë may fall, Rimmon. The whole Continent may fall to the sorceress who is your mistress. But the magic of Amanar is ancient, and it does not rest on the Keystones. By the will of the Amanari, the Light will continue to shine.’
Rimmon’s grin broadened. ‘Well, here is something you do not know. At dawn today, a fleet of battered ships fled the burning city of Vairë, one of them carrying Queen Ilsa. She sent word ahead to Nes-Amanar, asking for aid, but against the will of the Petal Throne and your thrice-honoured mother, the Courts of Amanar broke their vow of loyalty and refused refuge.’
Andra’s exhausted face seemed to grow a little paler.
‘Did you not wonder at the wind that came howling out of the west not six hours ago? Did you not hear the cries of despair? Did you not hear the voices of your people, whispering in terror and grief for their own foolishness?’
Andra suppressed a sob. So it had not just been his imagination. He had feared that he was going mad, but somehow this was worse. He had experienced more hell in the past four days than he could remember in his entire fourteen years, but even beside the torture, the hunger, the thirst and the sheer horror and gross indignity of being handed over to the crew to serve their pleasure, the loss of the Amanari was the very worst thing he had suffered yet. Since birth, his people had been present in his mind, a communal gathering of all the Amanari. If he had ever felt despair or doubt gnawing at him, he had only to shut his eyes and sink into that well of pure feeling and magic, strong with the power of centuries and all those who had gone before. And now it was gone. He had been cut off from that strength, the knowledge that the Amanari were united behind the royal family and the Petal Throne, only to learn that it was gone, never to return.
He wanted to scream, to sob and cry, to beg Rimmon to take it back, to make it not true. His bond with Amanar was the one pillar around which the rest of his life was built. He wanted to throw himself at Rimmon's feet and weep, anything that would make the man admit to another cruel joke. But he did not.
Children weep. Men and women endure.
‘The people of Amanar have been stripped of their magic, reduced to the meanest ghosts, and scattered to the four winds,’ said Rimmon cruelly. ‘Is that not what was written on each of the foundation stones of the six great towers of Nes-Amanar? And so your people have been swept away, exiled by your own ancestors’ magic.’
Andra shut his eyes, willing it all to be a bad dream, wishing it would all just go away, praying for death, for salvation, for anything to let it end...
‘You did not expect that, did you, my sweet?’ crowed Rimon, kicking Andra casually in the stomach. The boy's breath was knocked from his lungs, like a sort of backwards gasp. He doubled up, vomiting. ‘And you know what it means, I see. The Light shines now only by the will and efforts of that stubborn Lighthouse Keeper. But now that the Amanari are gone, she will be easy prey.’
‘You touch the Light at your peril, Rimmon Gaunt,’ gasped Andra, bile burning his throat.
‘The Light of Nes-Vairëad is no longer my concern,’ snapped Rimmon. ‘It will die of its own accord once the Keeper is gone, and others will see to her.’ He turned to the gaping crew. ‘Man the oars!’ he snapped. ‘We must be away with all speed! I have been warned – ’
A high sound split the air. Rimmon whirled around, furious. Andra was laughing; shrill, hysterical, terrified. But laughing.
‘You cannot deceive me!’ he cried. ‘Your mistress is displeased with you! You failed her! If the Light dies, it will not be because of you, but because of the arrogance of Amanar!’
‘Silence!’ shrieked Rimmon, kicking him again. ‘You will pay! You will pay in pain and blood for every day you have defied me. When we are underway – ’
He glanced over his shoulder at his men, as if just realising that they had not moved.
‘We ain’t paid to row, Captain,’ grunted the one with the eyepatch.
‘If we are to move, you must row!’ shouted Rimmon furiously. ‘We must get to the river! Or at least, for now, away from this cursed strait with its rocks and shallows, to a safe harbour in the south!’
When they still did not move, he stabbed a bony finger toward the eastern sky, blood-red and stormy-grey and lit with lightning, a roiling mass of clouds that surged west, against the wind. ‘A great storm is coming!’ he screamed. ‘Do you not see it?!’
‘We see it, right enough,’ said the man with the crooked teeth grimly. ‘And whoever called it – the witch-boy lying there or the sorceress you call mistress – we’ll never outrun it.’
* * * * *
Andra was right. Although the power of Amanar was broken and the Light of Nes-Vairëad extinguished, just as the Dark Lady intended, she was displeased with her seafaring servant. The crew of the Dark Moon mutinied, killing Rimmon and throwing his body overboard. They had intended to release Andra on Amanar, perhaps believing it would quell the wrath that had been turned against them. It didn’t. The storm caught up with the ship and destroyed it, dashing it to pieces on the rocky shallows. Heh. It seems that despite all her promises, the Lady will only favour her servants so long as they please her. Andra survived by clinging to a wooden table, and was picked up by one of the Vairëan ships a day and a half later. Although the nobility of Vairë gave the Amanari prince a chilly reception (after all, Amanar had broken its vow and basically left the people who depended on it for protection to flounder in a dark sea, hounded by wicked magic and strange sea monsters) but after hearing his tale (of being kidnapped by servants of the Dark Lady, tortured, starved, beaten, ravished, forcibly cut off from the gestalt mind of the Amanari and finally hearing that his people were reduced to whispering spirits of sorrow and regret floating on the wind) they took pity on him and he was given a new identity as an illegitimate child of Queen Ilsa, to conceal him from the Dark Lady. He is by no means the last of the Amanari, but he is the last of the royal house, and if there is any hope for Amanar’s redemption and the destruction of the Dark Lady, it rests with him.
