Eldric Chronicles: The Bonded

Book One

Chapter Four: Odyn's New Beginning — and the Start of Something Complicated

The guest quarters smelled of cedar and morning air.

Odyn stood just inside the doorway of the room and looked at it with the particular attention of someone who has recently spent an extended period in a space that smelled of mold and cold stone, and for whom the contrast is not subtle. The room was modest by any palace standard — a low table, a window that opened onto a small private garden, simple furnishings chosen with evident care. A vase held three stems of something he didn't recognize, pale and slightly fragrant. A selection of books in multiple languages occupied a low shelf. Near the window, a set of meditation cushions had been arranged to face the garden.

Someone had thought about this room before they put him in it.

He stood with that observation for a moment. Then he walked to the window and looked out.

The compound's training yard was visible from here — not the large primary yard he had glimpsed on the way in, but a secondary space, smaller and more informal, where three students were currently running through forms under the direction of an instructor who corrected their angles with the unhurried authority of someone who has given these corrections many times and has not yet lost patience with the giving of them. The students' movements were crisp, their footwork considered. He watched the forms unpool from memory — the weight shifts, the extension angles, the moment before each sequence where the body gathers itself — and his hands moved without his entirely meaning them to, fingers tracing the familiar shapes at his side.

He stopped them.

Behind him, someone cleared their throat.

He turned. Alan Kyocera stood in the doorway with the expression of a person who has been standing there long enough to notice something and is uncertain whether to mention it.

"Your room is right next to the training yard," Alan said. He offered this information with the slightly careful quality of someone who has rehearsed a natural-sounding delivery and is mostly achieving it. "You could watch from here, or — my father says you're good. If you wanted to join."

Odyn looked at him. "Perhaps when we know each other better."

Alan nodded, absorbing this without evident disappointment, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Then Alan said, "There's food. My mother — Yui. She made enough for considerably more people than us, which is something she tends to do when she's anxious. Which is less often than you'd think." He paused. "I say that so you'll understand that the amount of food is significant."

Something moved in Odyn's expression that was not quite a smile but lived in the adjacent territory. "I'll join you shortly," he said.

Alan nodded again, and left.

Odyn turned back to the window.

A sanctuary, Ichihana had called it, in the dark before dawn. He had repeated the word quietly to himself — testing it, the way one tests weight-bearing surfaces before committing to them. Sanctuary. A place to be safe. A place where the defensive posture could theoretically relax, at least enough to allow the person behind it to breathe.

He was not yet sure he knew how to relax a defensive posture. He was not sure, entirely, that he should. They had been kind to him. They had risked themselves for him. Both of these things were true, and he held them carefully, and he also understood that six weeks of captivity had not been his first lesson in the unreliability of apparent kindness, and that the appropriate response to evidence was not immediate trust but continued observation.

His father had taught him that.

His father had also taught him that continued observation of people who consistently demonstrate honor eventually produces something that can be called trust, and that refusing to arrive at that destination was itself a choice with consequences.

He thought about this for a moment.

Then he went to wash his face and join the family for breakfast.

The meal was, as advertised, substantial.

Yui Anuyachi had the quality of a person who expresses hospitality through action rather than statement — she did not make much of the food she set out, or of the care that had gone into its preparation, but the care was self-evident. She watched Odyn without watching him, in the way of an experienced host, noting what he reached for and what he hesitated over and adjusting the conversation accordingly, keeping it moving in directions that did not require him to explain himself.

He was grateful for this more than he would have said.

Lilian sat across from him and ate with the complete, unselfconscious focus of a five-year-old for whom meals are logistical rather than social, Mr. Fluffles positioned beside her plate with an air of patient participation. She looked up at Odyn occasionally with the unguarded curiosity of someone who has not yet learned that sustained staring is impolite, assessed him with what appeared to be satisfaction, and returned to her food.

"You have blue hair," she said, between bites, as if confirming something.

"I do," Odyn agreed.

She considered this. "I like it," she said, and returned to eating with the finality of someone who has rendered a verdict and moved on.

Kazuya, at the table's head, ate with one hand pressed lightly to his bandaged side — the wound from the night before, managed now, not severe. He spoke with Seth about logistics Odyn filed automatically: approaches, timetables, the question of what Sato's next move would likely be and how much time they had before the answer to that question became urgent. Alan ate quickly and listened to everything with the particular focus of someone who is aware they are not officially part of the planning conversation but intends to be useful to it regardless.

Ichihana sat to Odyn's left.

She ate neatly and without particular interest in the act of eating, which Odyn recognized as the behavior of someone whose mind is elsewhere. She was watching the compound's main yard through the open screen door with an expression he was beginning to identify as her default thinking face — a slight inward quality to her gaze, the rest of her features held in careful neutral. Occasionally she would glance at something in the training yard, and the quality of the glance was analytical rather than casual.

He found himself watching her watch things, and recognized this as an interesting development.

She seemed, at intervals, to be aware that he was observing her, and to have made the deliberate choice not to react to it, which was itself a choice he respected. They were, in this way, doing the same thing to each other in parallel, and both of them knew it, and neither of them had yet decided what to do about it.

After the meal, while the adults dispersed toward various preparations, Ichihana lingered.

"You were watching the morning forms earlier," she said. It was not a question. She said it the way she said most things — as information offered plainly, without the social softening that would have turned it into something that required a response.

Odyn looked at her. "You were watching me watch the forms."

"Yes," she said, without apology or adjustment.

A beat of silence. It was not uncomfortable. It was the silence of two people assessing the coordinates of a conversation before deciding where to take it.

"Your students have good footwork," Odyn said. "The one in the center drops her left shoulder slightly before she commits to the strike. She doesn't know she does it."

Ichihana's gaze sharpened — a fraction, very brief. "I know. I've been trying to correct it for three weeks." A pause. "She knows it now, technically. She just hasn't made the connection to the muscle memory yet."

"Awareness precedes adjustment," Odyn said. "My father says it takes twice as long to correct a habit as it took to form it."

"Your father sounds like my father," Ichihana said. Then, after a moment: "Would you show me? How you would address the correction."

He looked at her.

She looked back.

It was — he could not quite identify what it was. Not quite a challenge. Not quite a request. Something between the two, with a quality of genuine interest underneath it that was different from the way people had expressed interest in him for the previous six weeks, which was entirely the wrong kind of interest entirely.

"Perhaps later," he said. "When my ribs object less strongly to the idea."

Something shifted in her expression — a small, quick thing, gone almost before it registered. He identified it, after a moment, as the look of someone who has been reminded of something they had been deliberately not thinking about, which was his condition, and which had now been named aloud in a way that required acknowledgment.

"Does it hurt badly?" she asked. The question was direct, not delicate, and for that reason landed more comfortably than delicacy would have.

"Tolerably," he said.

She nodded. "I can help with that, if you want. I know healing protocols. Not advanced — Lilian is the one with the real gift for it in our family. But tolerable can become better."

He looked at her for a moment. Then: "Later," he said again. "When I've had time to settle."

She nodded again and said nothing further, which he appreciated. She had offered and he had not refused — he had deferred, which was different — and she understood the difference, and did not push.

He was beginning to think she understood quite a number of things that people her age were not generally expected to understand.

The afternoon found him at the window again, watching the compound go about its business in the way places go about their business when they are lived in rather than merely occupied. He had slept for two hours — not planned, his body simply made the decision without consulting him — and woken with the strange, displaced disorientation of someone who has slept without expecting to, in a space that is safe enough to allow it.

The realization that it had been safe enough came second, slightly after the disorientation, and arrived with its own quality of strangeness.

He had not slept without interruption since before the forest.

He sat with that fact for a while. Then he got up and went to see what the compound was made of.

He moved through it the way he moved through everything new — systematically, without obvious purpose, his attention spread wide and unhurried. The compound had a logic to it that revealed itself gradually: the training yards were positioned to receive morning light, the residential buildings faced inward toward a central garden space that functioned as a kind of communal quiet. The walls were old but maintained. The security measures — he noted them automatically, filing each one — were numerous and layered and, at several points, more sophisticated than their surface appearance suggested.

They have been thinking carefully about this place for a long time, he thought.

He found the main training yard in the early afternoon, when the junior students had cleared out and the yard held only three senior members of the clan running through paired drills. He sat on a low wall at the yard's edge and watched.

After a few minutes, he was aware of someone sitting beside him.

Ichihana had apparently decided that sitting near him without explanation was a reasonable thing to do, and he found he did not object to it. She watched the drills with him in companionable silence for a while, and he noticed that she was not simply watching — she was analyzing, her eyes tracking specific details with the focus of someone building something in their mind.

"The taller one telegraphs his defensive pivot," he said.

"I know," she said. Then: "How do you correct a telegraph that comes from the hips instead of the hands?"

He considered. "You make them practice the correction until the trigger changes. The hip moves because it's compensating for a commitment problem in the forward weight — they're not committing to the strike cleanly, so the hip is trying to hedge. You fix the commitment first, and the telegraph usually goes with it."

Ichihana was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "Commitment first," in the tone of someone adding something to a list.

"Where did you train?" he asked.

"Here. My father and my mother both. Some time with the Roshigumi's instructors when Father and Seth are in agreement about something, which is less often than either of them would prefer."

"And the barrier technique you used last night. That was formal instruction?"

She looked at him sideways. "You want to know if it was good or lucky."

"I want to know what I was working with when I reinforced it," he said. "I was operating on instinct in the tunnel. I would like to understand what the structure was that I was supporting."

She was quiet for a moment — a different quality of quiet from before, less the silence of someone deciding how much to offer and more the silence of someone genuinely processing a question they had not asked themselves yet.

"My mother's lineage," she said finally. "The specific configuration is passed down in her family's teaching. It's a containment design — it doesn't deflect, it absorbs and disperses. The geometry is..." She made a shape with her hands, three-dimensional and specific. "Like this. Rather than a wall."

He studied the shape she had made. He thought about the feeling of it, in the tunnel — the way his energy had found the existing structure and moved into it rather than across it, which had been the instinctive response. He had been working with the geometry without knowing what it was.

"Efficient," he said. "The absorption means it doesn't generate counter-force. Nothing to detect from the outside."

"That's why Mother's family designed it that way," Ichihana said. There was a careful quality to how she offered this — not boastfulness, which he would have noticed, but a specific kind of pride that was about the lineage rather than herself. "We don't advertise the defensive capability we actually have."

He understood this. Strategically and in several other senses.

"Your magic and mine," she said, after a pause. "In the tunnel. That was — unexpected."

"For me as well," he said.

"Not unpleasant, though."

He thought about this. The way his energy had woven into hers in the tunnel had been — precise was the word, in a way that surprised him. Not the slightly rough join of incompatible systems but something more natural than that, as though the underlying structures were from different languages of the same root.

"No," he agreed. "Not unpleasant."

She nodded, as though this confirmed something. She did not say what. He filed it.

The conversation that evening, after dinner, was the kind his tutors had called significant — meaning one where the information delivered was not incidental but load-bearing, where understanding it changed the shape of other things.

Kazuya gathered the family in the main room after the meal, with Seth present and Alan and Odyn included without particular ceremony. He spoke about history — the Convergence Crisis, the alliance it had produced, the years of exchange that followed, and then the other thing.

The Betrayal Years.

Odyn listened with the stillness he had developed for receiving difficult information without showing the receiving of it. He was good at this. He was, by the time Kazuya finished speaking about Yaigiri Sato and the seven years of bloody conflict that followed his crimes, aware that he was doing it more effortfully than usual.

He knew parts of this history. His parents had told him the broad outline, in the measured, careful way that they told him about all dark matters — enough to understand, framed in ways that acknowledged pain without dwelling in it. He had not known the specific shape of it. He had not known about the young elves who had come to Earth to learn and not gone home. He had not known that the Anuyachi clan had fought beside his people when most humans turned away.

He looked at Kazuya across the room. He thought about the man coming into the compound for him. He thought about Adir vael, spoken in the dark. He thought about Ichihana in the tunnel, holding her barrier past the point of comfort because someone needed it.

He thought about how his father, the High King, had told him once that the measure of a person's character is not what they do when it is easy and profitable but what they do when it is difficult and costs them something.

He did not say anything. He sat with it.

Ichihana, across the room, was watching him with the peripheral attention she used when she was trying to be unobtrusive about observing something. He was aware of it without looking at her.

After a moment, she looked away, back at her father.

"We won't let them down," she said. She said it the way she said most things — directly, without performance, the way you say something when you mean it and don't feel the need to decorate it. "We'll show them that some of us remember what friendship means."

He heard this.

He did not respond to it. But he heard it.

The night was quieter than the previous one in the specific way of nights after nights — less charged, the acute danger past, the world having settled back into its more ordinary texture. Odyn sat in the garden outside his room with his back against the cedar wall and looked at the sky.

The stars were wrong.

Not wrong in a way that distressed him — simply different, the specific familiar patterns of Arkynor's night sky replaced by a different arrangement, a different reading. He had been aware of this for weeks, in the abstract. He looked at it directly now, for the first time, with the compound quiet around him and no immediate emergency requiring his full attention.

He let himself feel, for exactly as long as he permitted himself to feel it, how far away home was.

It was a large feeling. He held it carefully, the way you hold a lamp in wind, and when he had held it long enough he set it down with intention — not suppressed, simply filed, moved to the category of things to be addressed when address is possible rather than things to be managed at the expense of present function.

His father had taught him that too.

He heard the garden's side gate open and did not look up — he had heard her footsteps on the path, knew them by now from two days of proximity.

Ichihana settled cross-legged on the stone at a comfortable distance from him. She had a small lamp with her that she set down between them, and she was looking at the sky with the same quality of attention he had been giving it.

"Different stars," she said.

"Yes."

She was quiet for a while. Then: "Does it make it worse? Seeing the sky be wrong?"

He thought about this with the seriousness it deserved. "It makes it true," he said finally. "There's a difference."

She considered this. "True as in real, or true as in honest?"

"Both," he said. "I knew I was far from home. Seeing the sky confirms it. Confirmation isn't the same as the original pain — it's colder. More useful."

"Useful," she repeated, and it was not quite an echo — it was the tone of someone turning a word over, examining its facets.

"I know," he said. "It doesn't sound like the right response to a thing like that."

"No," she agreed. "But I think I understand it."

He looked at her then, briefly, and she looked at him, and there was a moment of the specific quality that belongs to two people who have just realized they process things in a way that is unusual and similar, and do not quite know what to do with that information.

He looked back at the sky.

"My cousin will come for me," he said. It was not doubt that had made him not say it before — it was the particular superstition of people who are raised to understand that stating a hope too directly can feel like demanding something of the universe that the universe may decline to provide. But in the quiet of the garden, under the wrong stars, it seemed like a thing worth saying. "She is not the kind of person who leaves things unfinished."

"What's she like?" Ichihana asked.

He thought about Khanna — her stubbornness, her enormous loyalty, the way she expressed affection primarily through showing up and refusing to leave. The time she had held a training ground position for six hours past the agreed endpoint because she had decided the lesson wasn't over yet. The way she looked at him sometimes, like she was quietly daring him to try leaving again.

"Tenacious," he said. "She is approximately the most tenacious person I have ever met, including both my parents, and my parents are each quite tenacious."

The corner of Ichihana's mouth moved. He noticed it.

"She sounds like someone you count on," she said.

"Yes," he said.

"Good," she said simply. She picked up her lamp and stood. "Rest. Tomorrow my father wants you examined by the healer — apparently 'tolerable' isn't a medical assessment." She looked at him with the expression she had worn in the compound's corridor: direct, uncomplicated, offering rather than asking. "And if you want someone to watch the morning forms with who won't say anything unless they have something worth saying, I'm usually there by the fifth bell."

She walked back across the garden to the gate.

He watched her go.

"Ichihana," he said.

She stopped.

"In the tunnel," he said. "You said: we're here to help. You said it simply. Without qualification." He paused, organizing what he meant to say. "I had been in that compound for six weeks. I had not — heard anything like that, in that time."

She was quiet for a moment.

"I know," she said, and her voice had a different quality than usual — still direct, still unhurried, but with something under it that was a little less composed. "I could see it on your face."

She went through the gate.

He sat with the sky for a while longer, and somewhere in the sitting, the feeling he had been unable to name since walking through the Anuyachi compound's gate settled into something he could identify.

It was not comfort, exactly. It was not safety, entirely, though it contained elements of both. It was something more specific than either — the particular feeling of recognizing, in a place very far from home and under the wrong stars, that you are in the presence of people who see you, and that this is rarer and more important than almost anything else.

He let himself feel that too.

Then he went inside and slept.

Several thousand kilometers above, the Starweaver continued its careful descent through the atmosphere.

Lady Lailah Albanar stood at the observation window and watched the planet curve away beneath them, its surface resolving from abstraction into geography — the particular green and blue and brown of it, the irregular coastlines, the shapes of mountains visible even through cloud cover. Earth. A world that had given her people both the best and worst of what other peoples could offer, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes from the same people.

She thought about Kazuya and Yui.

She thought about what they had risked, and what they would continue to risk, and what that said about them — what it had always said about them, since the day she had first met them during the Convergence Crisis, when they had been young enough to be terrified and composed enough to function anyway.

She thought about her nephew, somewhere below in the compound those two people had built.

He will be alright, she told herself, with the particular firmness of someone who has decided to believe a thing not because certainty is available but because the alternative is not useful. He is strong. He got that from both sides.

Khanna appeared at her shoulder.

Her eldest was studying the planet below with the specific focused attention of someone managing a great deal of feeling through the disciplined channel of tactical assessment — an approach that Lailah recognized because it was one she had invented and taught, and watching her daughter use it was simultaneously gratifying and slightly heartbreaking.

"How long?" Khanna asked.

"We land in the third hour," Lailah said. "The Anuyachi's hidden approach vector has been confirmed. Lynnia will begin the ward synchronization in the next twenty minutes."

Khanna nodded. Her jaw had a set to it.

"He's alright," Lailah said. It was almost the same thing she had told herself, but with the specific weight that the same statement carries when it is offered to someone who loves the subject of it more acutely even than you do.

"I know," Khanna said. She did not sound entirely convinced. "I know he is. I just want to see it for myself."

"You will," Lailah said. "In a few hours."

Khanna was quiet for a moment. Then: "When we see him. Don't make it — don't let it be formal. Whatever the protocols say."

Lailah looked at her daughter. She thought about six weeks. She thought about a five-year-old girl with crimson hair reaching through the trees. She thought about her nephew, who had spent six weeks being as alone as a person can be, and was now in a compound full of good people who were not his people, and who was, she suspected, handling all of it with more composure than was strictly healthy.

"No," she agreed. "Not formal."

Khanna nodded once, quick and decisive.

Below them, Earth waited — complicated and imperfect and full, as it had always been, of people doing both terrible and extraordinary things, sometimes in the same night, sometimes from the same hands. The Starweaver continued its descent, its crystalline hull catching the thin light of early morning, and in the Anuyachi compound far below, a young dark elf slept under the wrong stars with something small and persistent lodged in his chest that he had decided, provisionally, to call hope.

End of Chapter Four

Next: Chapter Five — A Reunion and a Rivalry: The Elves Arrive