Rafen (The Fledgling Account Book 1) Read online

  RAFEN By Y.K. Willemse

  Published by Burnett Young Fiction

  P.O. Box 1

  Clarklake, MI 49234

  Copyright © 2015 by Y.K. Willemse

  Cover design by Ruth Germon

  Interior design by Donato Toledo Jr.

  Available in print and ebook from your local bookstore, online, or from the publisher at: www.BurnettYoungBooks.com

  For more information on this book and the author, visit: http://www.writersanctuary.net/

  All rights reserved. Non-commercial interests may reproduce portions of this book without the express written permission of Burnett Young Books provided the text does not exceed 500 words.

  Commercial interests: No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by the United States of America copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and incidents are all products of the author’s imagination or are used for fictional purposes. Any mentioned brand names, places, and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners, bear no association with the author or the publisher, and are used for fictional purposes only. Burnett Young Books may include ghosts, werewolves, witches, the undead, soothsayers, pirates, mythological creatures, theoretical science, fictional technology, adult romance and material which, may be of a controversial nature within some religious circles.

  Brought to you by the creative team at Burnett Young Books:

  Meaghan Burnett & Cyle Young

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Willemse, Y.K.

  Rafen / Y.K. Willemse 1st ed.

  They have greatly oppressed me from my youth –

  let Israel say –

  they have greatly oppressed me from my youth,

  but they have not gained the victory over me.

  Plowmen have plowed my back

  and made their furrows long.

  But the Lord is righteous;

  He has cut me free from the cords of the wicked.

  May all who hate Zion

  be turned back in shame.

  May they be like grass on the roof,

  which withers before it can grow;

  with it the reaper cannot fill his hands,

  nor the one who gathers fill his arms.

  May those who pass by not say,

  “The blessing of the Lord be upon you;

  we bless you in the name of the Lord” ~

  Psalm 129, New International Version.

  For my two Fathers, heavenly and earthly, and for my dearest brother Michael. Thanks also my parents in law, especially Sue Bracefield, for her undying support.

  Pronunciation Guide

  Rafen – RAH-fen

  Lashki Mirah – lash-KIE MIE-rah

  Etana – e-TAH-nyah

  Talmon – TELL-mohn

  Torius – taw-REEAS

  Philippe – FEE-lip

  Vladimiēr – vlood-di-MEE-air

  Sarient – SAHR-ree-ahnt

  Hara – ha-RAH

  Tarhia – TAHR-reeah

  Siana – SIE-ah-nyah

  Zal Ricio ’el Nria – zahl ri-KIE-oh ahl n-REEAH

  Ruya – ROOH-yah

  Renegald – ren-e-GAH-layd

  Ranian – RAH-nyian

  Darai – DAHR-ay

  Crutia – CROOH-tee-ah

  Mio Pilamùr – MIE-oh PIE-lah-myur

  Mio Urmeea – MIE-oh er-MEE-ah

  Nazt – NAHZT

  Zion – ZIE-ohn

  Secra – seh-CRAH

  Setarsia – SEE-TAHR-seeah

  Runi – ROOH-NIE

  Kesmal – kehs-MAHL

  chapter one

  THE SUMMONS

  Rafen knew he had lost something. He just hadn’t known what it was – until now.

  He was running beneath the invisible roof of a huge cavern. The dusty air around him was filled with the light of the Phoenix Rafen could sense but couldn’t see. Skidding through rocks and stones, he glimpsed a village of tribal shelters amongst whispering trees down the crags to his left. Yet his focus was magnetically drawn to one thing: the phoenix feather he ran for. There were only four and were only ever going to be four. They drifted down through the haze ahead of the two stronger, swifter contestants before him.

  He would never make it first. He was a boy, and those he competed with were grown men.

  About fifty years of age, Fritz was long-limbed and tall. His regal face – lined with a faint ash-colored beard – had the unmistakable mark of one who had seen the Phoenix, who understood why he was wearing flesh. It was plain to see why he was in the lead.

  A few years shy of thirty, Thomas loped easily behind Fritz. His slight figure wove around the rocks, his shoulder-length black hair streaming behind him. Sometimes, Thomas’ thin build seemed to vanish altogether for seconds before appearing again.

  And then there was Rafen, frantically struggling to catch up, feet pounding the ground, sending rocks and pebbles sliding. Even though Rafen was seven, he was the height of a five-year-old because of malnourishment. His bones stuck out beneath his torn, rust red calico shirt. Beneath the smeared layer of black dust from the coal he worked with, Rafen’s once olive skin was pale and blotchy from years spent in darkness. Rafen never saw the sun, his life being spent either in the coal mine, in his cell, or in the corridors and tunnels between. How he had gotten here was a mystery. His curly, black, and terribly filthy hair fell over quiet, dark blue eyes and framed a hardened young face. He had found what his heart longed for, and was determined to have a phoenix feather.

  Even as Rafen watched Fritz and Thomas, the rod-thin figure of a sixteen-year-old swerved out from behind some rocks ahead of them. He seized a feather as it fluttered to the earth, crushing the golden barbs in his closed fist.

  Rafen’s blood burned within him. Though his legs were heavy with exhaustion, he quickened his pace. The sixteen-year-old glanced at him with pitiless black eyes, his dark brown hair whispering in an unseen wind. He stepped into the shadows of the rocks to his right.

  Fritz, who had been first until the newcomer’s appearance, caught his phoenix feather second. He clutched it to his heart, the creases in his face slipping away and his once gray beard and shoulder-length hair turning sandy.

  Thomas was still ahead of Rafen. Rafen felt like he was running through water; his own phoenix feather never got any closer. The footsteps of another unseen competitor pursued him.

  Thomas halted behind Fritz, his shoulder-length black hair tangled. He snatched the third feather from the air, a smile spreading on his pale face. New courage shone in his squinting, green-blue eyes.

  Recklessly, Rafen sprang into the air, throwing himself forward, reaching with everything in him toward that last phoenix feather falling through the air behind Thomas…

  A disorientated bang. He crashed to the limestone floor of his cell, knees searing. He was in the dark again. He glanced around with big, shiny eyes at his broken bench, the moldy handful of straw that served as his bed, and the crude door that had his cell’s only window in it. It had been a vivid dream.

  He nearly screamed. He saw his life laid out like a map and felt he understood.

  After King Talmon had killed his parents, Rafen had lived in a cell from age two upward, and at four they had branded 237 on his ankle and forced him to work in the coal mine. King Talmon of Tarhia wanted many weapons, and for that, he needed coal to feed his smelters’ furnaces. Rafen had gone with the other child workers, following the men while they picked
coal away from new tunnels in the mine. The children removed rocks from the tracks and loaded trucks with coal from five o’clock in the morning until night. Some worked the trapdoors, allowing drafts into the mine to shift explosive gases. The others told Rafen they were ‘cheats’ because they didn’t work so hard. Mining was dangerous; five children died every week in any one working division. Lucky ones received four dry crusts of bread a day, and the big ones would wrest the food off them. Occasionally, a guard would approach the children with a bucket. He would draw out a ladle, brimming with water. The children became wild … little ones were often crushed in a fight for water. Rafen had received numerous injuries, the worst of which had been a broken jaw that had taken months to heal.

  And so he had lived: 237, a little underground animal who did as he was told. Yet he itched. He shouldn’t have expected more, but he did.

  He would probably be a slave all his life. Yet he wanted a phoenix feather; he was meant to have one. Somehow, he had been cheated.

  He didn’t belong here.

  *

  The day after the dream, Rafen decided he was no longer a slave.

  “Two-three-seven! Two-three-seven!” a guard barked distantly.

  Rafen willed himself to remain perfectly still among the children crowding him in the claustrophobic tunnel. The child workers of the First Branch of King Talmon’s coal mine had been lined up to return to their various cells or recesses at the end of the day. When a number was called, the appropriate slave would fall out… if they were, in fact, a slave.

  “Two-three-seven!”

  Rafen clenched his teeth and thought of his phoenix feather – imagined what it would feel like when he had it at last. They probably wanted him for another beating, because he had worked too slowly during the day or passed on an incorrect message to another guard in the mine. However, the guard calling him wouldn’t remember his face, and unless he checked the branded number on the right ankle of each child in the tunnel, he wouldn’t find Rafen.

  “Two-three-seven, fall out!” the guard shouted, pushing through slaves.

  Those on the edges of the crowd flattened themselves against the black walls of the mine to make room for the guard, whom the pale-faced General Roger Ridding muttered something to before moving back toward his entourage of six guards.

  “Two-three-seven!”

  Seizing Rafen’s shoulders, the guard dragged him out of the crowd and slammed him against the wall. Pain shuddered through Rafen’s side, and he bit his lip with it.

  “Slaves obey orders, two-three-seven,” the guard spat, raising his hand. Rafen recoiled, though not quickly enough. The blow fell, and his cheek smarted. The guard broke off into foul language, jerking Rafen away from the wall and hurling him to the ground.

  Rafen looked up with dread. General Ridding stared down at him as if he were an insect.

  White-faced with high cheek bones, General Ridding was known for his random visits to the mines. They were never welcome. The slaves who had been tortured by his personal entourage and survived called him by his first name because they felt they had earned it. Rafen supposed he was about to earn it too. A thin dull-brown moustache, tapered at both ends, grew above Roger’s pursed pink lips. His brown hair was parted slightly to the right and swept perfectly over his pin-head. The general’s slender build reminded Rafen of one of the bars in his own cell door.

  Roger looked down his nose at Rafen.

  “Get up,” he said in terribly accented Tarhian. Everyone knew from the way Roger spoke the language that he was a foreigner.

  Rafen scrambled to his feet. Roger grabbed his shoulder and pushed him toward a shaft on the right which ascended directly into Talmon’s palace. Rafen glanced back. The smudged black faces of the crowd of children turned, watching him with blank, glassy eyes, knowing the summons portended something more ominous than a beating, because Rafen was now with the general.

  The narrow shaft led up a terribly long, steep slope covered with loose stones. Rafen stumbled over his own bare, calloused feet as the general propelled him along with long, white fingers. His entourage clattered behind them both. The tunnel opened out into a large cellar with a flat dirt floor. Roger shoved Rafen against the stone steps leading to a trapdoor and watched him scramble up. At the top of the stairs, Rafen waited while Roger commanded one of his men to open the trapdoor. Gripping Rafen’s collar, Roger dragged him into one of the guard’s rows. It was unusually cold.

  The guard’s rows alternated with the prisoners’ corridors on either side of the Main Hall. At first, the rows looked similar to the prisoner’s corridors – bleak, stone-walled, with cobbled floors. However, the heavy wooden doors led into spacious stone rooms with numerous bunks and even chairs, a rare luxury. Outside some of the closed doors sat squalid pairs of boots, old cracked dishes, or weathered buckets from which a stench rose.

  His heart lifting, Rafen realized this was simply a shorter way back to his dark cell, where he was always returned at the end of the working day. His vision flickered momentarily. He was faint from work; it would be good to rest. Philippe would come and visit him that night like he often did.

  A boot-shiner and horse-tender who lived in the barracks, Phil had originally been told to care for Rafen until he was four, the mine working age. Yet long after Rafen had turned four, Phil had kept coming back at night, smuggling extra food and conversing with Rafen. He had even taught Rafen Vernacular (better known as Tongue), the common language of the mysterious free lands beyond Tarhia. King Talmon had imprisoned Rafen alone, unlike his other prisoners who were packed into cells a dozen at a time. Phil was a beacon in Rafen’s life. He wondered what he and his friend would talk of that night.

  “Move,” one of Roger’s men grunted, kicking Rafen’s ankles. Rafen staggered forward.

  “Not that way,” Roger growled, turning Rafen around to face the end of the row that led away from his cell.

  It was worse than a beating then. It was ‘playing’. Rafen started to shake.

  On occasions, King Talmon let his guards amuse themselves in their leisure time with his slaves. When Rafen was small, the guards had taught him the Games: Taverns (dousing him in a wine barrel until he was drunk); Thirst (making him swallow quantities of dry salt, then tying his hands and feet and leaving him lying on a stone floor for hours, a bowl of water beyond reach before him), and Cleaning the Barracks (forcing him to eat horse dung).

  If Rafen ran, it would only mean worse Games. Roger pushed him through a guard’s row and through three more corridors, stopping before some roughly-hewn, double wooden doors. The wedge-like Tarhian letters inscribed on the doorframe were a mystery to Rafen, who couldn’t read.

  He had never been here before.

  Roger thumped on one door before stepping back, grasping Rafen’s shoulder. Sweating, Rafen feverishly wiped his face with his tattered sleeve.

  “You are dismissed,” Roger hissed to his entourage.

  Glancing at each other quizzically, the men departed. It wasn’t often their general personally retrieved a common slave boy, let alone did something confidential with him.

  Someone from within opened the doors, and Roger marched Rafen in. At the far end of the hall, a large slab of wood supported by two wedges of limestone served as a table. It was littered with half rolled scrolls. A figure with its back to them sat hunched over in a single rickety chair. Behind the table was another set of double doors, and on the right hand wall, a single door stood partially ajar. At the foot of this, two bulldogs and three pit bulls slavered, staring at Rafen.

  The figure rose, facing them. Rafen shivered. He only saw the king of Tarhia on his rare excursions to inspect his coal mine. Even then, the king never paid attention to individual workers.

  A little taller than most Tarhian men, King Talmon of Tarhia was handsomely built, muscular, yet slight of figure. His pale, square-jawed face was chiseled like the stony expression of a statue. Faint stubble peppered his chin, about which his dusty brown hair hung.r />
  “You may go, Roger,” King Talmon said in Tarhian.

  Releasing Rafen’s shoulder, Roger bowed and backed out of the room. The guard who had let them in made a move to shut himself in with Rafen and the king.

  King Talmon’s gaze flicked to him. “You are dismissed as well.”

  Puzzled, the second guard left the room, bowing and closing the doors behind him.

  King Talmon looked uncommonly tall where he stood at the other end of the room. Rafen tried to forget that this man owned a country. He bit his tongue hard.

  “Rafen.” King Talmon stepped to the side of the chair and dragged it around to face his slave. It scraped loudly on the stone floor. “Have a seat.”

  King Talmon was speaking Tongue.

  Rafen stood very still. Nobody in Tarhia spoke what they called “Tongue” except the noblemen – and Philippe and Rafen. And Rafen should not have known the language.

  “Do you not understand me?” the king said slowly and distinctly, his muddied brown eyes absorbing Rafen.

  Rafen backed away toward the double doors.

  “Do you not understand? Well, Rafen, arh jai ëam.”

  Rafen’s muscles relaxed somewhat when the king spoke Tarhian. He moved hesitantly toward him.

  “Sit in the chair,” King Talmon said. He did not speak the Tongue again.

  Rafen lowered himself into the chair. He had never sat on a proper chair before. It was different – nice. He stared up at the king, still slightly suspicious.

  “What do you think we are going to do now, Rafen?” King Talmon asked.

  “I do not know,” Rafen said quietly.

  “Please, guess.”

  Rafen didn’t want to think about it. King Talmon raised his hand to strike him.

  “You – you are going to kill me!” Rafen screamed.

  King Talmon smiled faintly. “Perhaps. Though not yet. What do you think we are going to do now, Rafen?”