Page 21 of Tethered Thrones

The man before us was at least a stone taller than Atlan, who was always the tallest in a room. Atlan stood immediately to greet him, and I flinched as the panthera unfurled himself and drifted until he was lying in Jia’s lap. My hand trembled slightly, but he was well and truly tamed. Even more so than my nocs, who looked ready to strike at any moment.

Hah! Who was I kidding? We lived together as equals, as much as possible: me and my men. However, this panthera, this Zihan, was nothing more than a pet. It was astonishing.

“Atlan! Those bastards will be here soon. I knew we should’ve taken the longer path below the mountain. What a mess.”

“Secondary, it’s fine,” Atlan said, and my eyebrows shot upward. That was an elite status. Spymasters, emissaries, and a handful of generals. I was the only first rank, but very few in the armed forces held the title of secondary.

“Oh, mother’s mighty wave, return me to your watery grave,” he whispered, a sailor’s saying, as the stranger’s dark brown eyes found mine, flecked with gold that resembled the sun. “Zihan wasn’t joking when he said he scented the chosen one was near.”

His voice was brutally deep, like gravel tumbling over cobblestone. Krish wrapped his arm around Atlan’s shoulder as I stood, then hooked it lower as I drew close, around my junior’s waist, and I frowned. His waist-length, wavy black hair fluttered in the wind, and he was wearing a matching white fur-lined tunic with heavy fur boots. But I noticed his skin was tan, permanently sun-kissed like the islanders far south residing on islands in the Shakmir Sea.

The rank two soldier was packed with muscle and smelled vaguely of salt. A tank of a man not fit for the delicate statecraft of most rank two warriors I’d met. I swept my eyes back up to meet Krish, and he smiled. They were upturned, his smile mischievous, a feline appearance resembling the panthera wrapped around Jia’s feet.

“The great rank one, Batu Sun. The Noc Slayer,” a reptilian glaze shadowed his dark and stormy eyes that lit up with the thought of me slaughtering nocs. “You’re shorter than I thought you’d be, but otherwise, just as I’d imagined during my training days.”

“Krish! Respect,” Jia and Atlan scolded at once, and I couldn’t help but laugh. I thought instantly I would love to get to know him more, but the fate of the world hung in the balance now. I didn’t have time to chit-chat for much longer. And the sun was beginning to set.

“Where is the boy? I gave him to the mothian before the batbeast flew them all to safety,” Krish said, panic overtaking his features. “Gods, Atlan, I didn’t know he’d followed us this far into the wilderness.”

“Is this the boy?” Clem asked, and Krish’s face lit up, the rustling of unwrapping cloth filling the air.

A sharp inhale of breath from my nocs sent the hair on my forearms on high alert as a tiny wail filled the air, the whining of a young child that sounded too similar to a newborn infant inpitch. Too high, and… no, it couldn’t be, but I heard the sound of clicking that most certainly wasn’t coming from Clem.

I gasped, turning to see Clem holding up the child in question, who looked no more than five years of age. He had large, solid black eyes and, more shockingly, three sets of tiny arms wriggling about. He grabbed at Bracken with two, squeezed Clem’s upper hands holding him, and the other two dangled by his side.

Kiar threw himself away from it, and Hadi’s face, for the first time, glazed over in slack-jawed shock. Even he couldn’t muster up the appearance of indifference at the appearance of a child noc.

“Put him down, mothian,” a new voice called, and Hadi tried to drag me behind him, but I shrugged him off.

Atlan, Jia, and Krish were at ease, and the panthera was quiet. This was another one of their so-called friends.

What the fuck is going on?

“Where were you two!?” Atlan barked, eyes narrowed. His tone would be nagging if his eyes didn’t flicker with hatred. “Damn you, Nguyen! Damn you, too, Shizumi, for going along with that nonsense. You drew those monsters to our master. If you didn’t want us to leave that way, you should’ve told us clearly it was a nightwing nest, not spoken in your—yourfuckingriddles!”

I blinked. Atlan wasn’t one to curse. Maybe these were foes, not friends after all.

Two straw hats appeared, and they were wearing matching monk attire. And when the tallest tipped his head upward, I gasped.

“We were nearby, watching your reunion and assessing if it was worthwhile to lose our heads for your foolishness to save that dying man. But then we saw the chosen and heard thescreams of the child. We had no choice but to come. Be grateful. You’d be dead by now if not for us.”

His voice wrapped around me like a whisper, as if chanting an incantation, and the air blossomed with the heady scent of incense. It was the monk from Tsuki’s temple, the one who had hidden his footsteps in the snow and told me the right words to say.

He removed his hat to reveal the downy jet-black feathers of a nightwing, sharp golden gaze holding mine with a manic expression, all bared fangs, that I had to assume was an attempt at a grin.

The smaller noc, still very tall, removed his hat, and another brutally scarred face greeted me with deep-set black eyes that reminded me of stars set in the night sky. He tapped his black walking stick, tail twitching to and fro, and electricity burned the ground around him—a lightning rod held by a black-furred rat like our former prison guards. I shuddered as he grinned.

“Don’t mind this zealot, chosen,” he addressed me, and I squared my shoulders, stepping in front of Atlan, who was still seething. Krish and Jia busied themselves, making a point to ignore the newcomers.

Another commotion, a blur zooming under Atlan’s spread legs, then around me, and the crawler-like child scrambled into the rat’s arms, cooing, “Big brother!”

The disgust and confusion must’ve shown on my face because the rat–Shizumi, was it?–chuckled. But one side of his face was stiff, like he’d had a stroke, and made the laughter look more gruesome than it should.

“Don’t mind Thiên. He thinks everything taller, and male is a brother right now,” the rat nodded to the nightwing, who hadn’t looked away from me yet.

“And he’s a bit of a blowhard regarding his goddess, but he means well. I didn’t think you’d survive, but I suppose you trulyare the mortal meant to join light and dark and redeem this world and the other…”

After that, a stony silence filled the air, and a more burdensome stone settled in my gut. This was too much to process, too much all at once. I had to anchor myself to this moment and the next steps, not concern myself with child nocs, hidden villages, and monks who used black arts.

---