“I killed three men in the palace,” he admitted to Minnie. He took a deep breath that hovered on the edge of becoming a sob. “They were going to kill me; they were going to torture me and kill me. All because a stupid mirror broke – how does that make it right to kill me?” he asked in a painful, rhetorical manner.
“You killed three men?” Minnie was taken aback by the confession momentarily, then heard the pain in Silas’s voice. She reached over and placed a comforting arm around his shoulder, drawing the two of them together. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You saved yourself, and anyone who worked in the palace of Ivaric is a bad person. I don’t blame you – in fact, I’m impressed, astonished, that you were a prisoner, killed three interrogators, and escaped! That’s the greatest story in the known history of the campaign against Derith!”
“How did you do it?” she couldn’t help herself from asking the difficult question. Even though Silas claimed to have killed the giant hyena while his wagon had been in the mountains, he’d not given any evidence to anyone that he was a warrior of any stature.
“It wasn’t me,” Silas felt safe enough to admit. Minnie’s arm around his shoulder was the kindest gesture he’d known since he’d left his own parents. “My knife is magical; it has been ever since we were in the cave together. It came flying into the room by itself, and it set me free, then it did everything while I just held it.
“In just a couple of moments it took care of everything. Really!” he exclaimed, as he saw the incredulous expression on her face.
“It was the cave, the gasses in the cave,” he tried to explain. “They changed things. They changed my eyes, and the streaks on my chest. And the knife too. The gasses in the cave made things different; that really happens,” he tried to reason. “The Wind Word Speakers get their abilities when they go in a cave under Krusima’s temple at Heathrin, and breath in green gas,” he explained.
“Really? That’s how it works?” Minnie was astonished by the revelation.
“That’s it. Students at the academy study for years and years to prove they can learn all the codes and protocols and postings, then they get selected to go to the temple and be made into Speakers. That’s what I was hoping to do before I got assigned to this caravan,” he spoke simply, without regret or self-pity.
“I’m sorry you lost that because of us, and that you’ve gone through so much more because of us,” Minneota spoke with genuine sympathy. She still had her arm around his shoulder, and squeezed him tightly.
“I’m happy here,” he admitted shyly. “I like traveling with the caravan. I was angry at first, but now I think it was the right thing for me to do. As long as I stay alive,” he added with a chuckle.
Minnie laughed too. After a moment, she gently removed her arm. “I’ll go see Prima. I believe we’re far enough away from the city gate that we’re not going to be caught tonight. Maybe we can pull aside to get some sleep, then get moving again tomorrow – it still would be a good idea to get out of Ivaric quickly if we can.”
She left the wagon and rode her horse the short distance ahead to Prima’s wagon. Just minutes later, she appeared on her horse again.
“Prima’s going to pull over for the night. Pull your wagon in behind his,” she briefly spoke to Silas, then rode her horse further along the line of vehicles to spread the news and instructions.
They ate bread and dried meat that night, as Prima decided to not build fires, and he set out a full slate of guards to keep an eye open for anyone who might be sent from the city to pursue the caravan.
“You take the second shift,” Ruten instructed Silas. “So that we’ll have some time to talk.”
Silas agreed. Later, he felt as though he had hardly placed his head down before he was awakened to serve his shift with the guard duty.
He and Ruten walked the perimeter of the camp ground, striding slowly due to Ruten’s inability to see the features of the ground as well as Silas.
“Have you always had such good night vision?” Ruten asked.
“I don’t think it’s particularly better than anyone else’s,” Silas replied, thinking back to his days in Brigamme, when he and the other children had stopped playing tracking games in the evening when the forest turned too dark to follow paths and clues. He hadn’t been able to see or track in the dark any more than anyone else. For a moment, he let his memories wander to thinking about Tagg and Forna, his friend and cousin. They were probably off on their first tracking assignments already, using that unique Brigamme ability to follow an assignment through any set of circumstances.
He shook his head and recalled his attention to his present time.
“Maybe those strange-colored eyes of yours are the difference,” Ruten speculated. “We’ll have to remember to rely on you when we need someone who can see in the dark.”
They continued their patrol, Ruten taking Silas’s advice on where to step and what to avoid in the darkness, while he listened to Silas retell his story about his adventure in the palace basement.
“That’s quite a weapon,” the guard seemed to accept Silas’s claims. “So you’re saying that you don’t know how to handle a blade otherwise?”
“Well,” Silas felt irritated by the implications of the question, “I can carve and cut pretty well. I lived in a forest village, you know.”
“Sure, sure,” Ruten dismissed Silas’s evasive quibble. “But in a battle?”
“I,” the boy paused, “well, no, not much.”
“That’s fine,” Ruten assured him. “And for where we’re going for the next few weeks, there’s no need to know blade work anyway. Avaleen and Amenozume are hardly brawling pub crawls.”
It turned out that Prima had a different opinion when it was his turn to hear Silas’s story the next morning. Silas’s wagon resumed its position in the back of the caravan when the group pulled back onto the road and began to drive southwest towards Avaleen, the city and nation ruled by a council of nobles adjacent to Ivaric. The ride to Avaleen was expected to take several days, and when Prima rode back to visit with Silas and hear his story, he instructed that the boy should spend those days and more learning how to handle weapons, including the sword.
“I’m partial to the battleax myself,” Prima reflected, “but you don’t have the upper body strength to wield one, so the sword it is.
“You may not always have an enchanted knife on your hip to protect you. Did you say that the son of Lord Derith himself saw you?” the leader asked.
Silas nodded his head.
“So the prince of the land knows who killed his interrogator? He’s going to remember those purple and golden eyes of yours, isn’t he?” Prima emphasized his point.
Silas nodded again.
“We need to help you protect yourself. Ivaric isn’t going to let you roam freely around the continent without paying a price; his lordship believes he can’t afford to look weak,” Prima emphasized.
“You can start training with Ruten and Sareen tomorrow,” Prima declared, satisfied that he had addressed the problem.
“Sareen will teach me swordwork?” Silas was astonished. He had no doubt that Ruten was a masterful swordsman, but nothing had led him to believe the girl was an accomplished fighter.
“No,” Prima laughed. “She’s just begun taking lessons from Ruten herself. A girl that pretty needs to know a few tricks to defend herself from time to time. I want to watch out for my people – that’s why we have a master like Ruten in the caravan, and that’s why we’re going to educate you two young people.
“Mind you now, you’ll still be responsible for maintaining your wagon and doing your work in addition to the training,” Prima concluded.
“You’ve got quite a story; don’t go spreading it around. Most won’t believe it, and those that do will repeat it endlessly, giving Jarvis and Derith clues to your whereabouts,” the man stood to leave the wagon and return to his horse’s saddle. He clapped a hand down affectionately on Silas’s shoulder for a moment, then departed.
Silas chewed on his lip as he contemplated Prima’s revelation. The boy had assumed that escaping from the city of Eric was all that he needed to do to be safe. To hear talk of being hunted and pursued by a revenge-minded dictator was disturbing at the very least. The thought of sword lessons was intriguing though, even if Silas had come to have mixed feelings about Sareen, and whether he really wanted to spend so much time with a girl who was pretty but also self-absorbed.
He absent-mindedly scratched his chest, then thought of the slice that Shide the interrogator had given him, the one that had turned yellow and purple. Silas wanted to see it all, his whole chest with the full width of the colored streaks. He remembered the fragment of broken mirror he had stashed in his pack days earlier. The reflective piece of glass would be sufficient to let him observe his torso.
Hron placidly pulled the wagon without direction from Silas as the boy energetically looked around in the bed of the wagon, seeking the stout leather and canvas bag he had relied upon since leaving Heathrin. He soon found the bag and lifted it to the bench where he could sit to use it.
His shirt came off quickly, and then the large mirror fragment came out of the bag, and Silas held it out at arms’ length and angled it to reveal the pattern on his skin.
Except that was not what the mirror revealed.
Chapter 20
At first, the large mirror fragment in Silas’s hands seemed to have a dark reflection. The piece of glass was relatively thick, with one portion where the glass was slightly wavy along a long straight edge that Silas assumed was an original edge of the glass before it broke.
The reflection didn’t reveal Silas’s chest; it was much darker than he expected on a bright morning. He squinted and looked closely at the dark glass, concentrating and focusing. Suddenly, the mirror lightened and revealed images, vaguely hazy images that were clear and legible, yet also slightly translucent.
And they were not the images of Silas’s chest, or the wagon, or any of the surrounding area at all. The mirror was showing a partially obscured view of the inside of a large building, one that showed open space and indistinct objects stacked in the distance.
Silas put the mirror down, then rubbed his eyes and forehead as he considered the strangely problematic mirror. He picked it up again, but found to his confusion and relief that it was only a mirror once more, showing him the reflected scarred lines of color on his chest that he had wanted to see.
The boy stared at the mirror for some time, not really looking at the reflection in it, or even looking at the mirror itself. He was staring absently into space as he tried to explain to himself what he had seen. The mirror, like his blade, and like himself, had been in the caves beneath the mountains, and had been exposed to the colored gasses that had filled the passages. The gasses had perhaps done something to the mirror, something that he couldn’t explain, and something that he didn’t want to speak of to anyone else. He knew that the idea of a piece of mirror being altered by the gasses seemed fantastically improbable, and he knew he had already called too much attention to himself through his recent changes. If Prima was right about Ivaric wanting to hunt him down, Silas didn’t want to add another single iota of news about himself to float about as more gossip. He would keep the mirror’s peculiar behavior a secret.
He turned and carefully maneuvered the shard of glass back into his pack, then resumed holding the reins while Hron continued to hold his pace in line with the others in the caravan.
That evening, after they moved past the frontier outpost that marked their safe departure from Ivaric lands, Ruten came in search of Silas.
“Put that animal in the corral, then meet Sareen and me for your first lesson with the sword,” Ruten instructed the new student.
Minutes later, he did just that. Ruten handed him a long stick, one that had apparently been only recently picked off the ground, for it still had bark on parts.
“Take off that too-fancy knife of yours,” Ruten directed, “and give it to me. I don’t want it to get in the way.”
Silas obliged him, and looked at Sareen, who was standing nearby, holding a stick in her own hand.
“She’s had a couple of lessons already,” Ruten noticed his glance. “You two are going to be pretty even to start; we’ll see if one of you can pull ahead of the other. But for now it makes it easy to pair a couple of new fighters together in practice.”
“Why is he fighting anyway?” Sareen asked. “I know you told me I’d have to scare off old fat men who make passes at me – what’s his reason? Are old ladies going to make passes at him?” she smiled.
“He escaped from the Ivaric palace, and the lord of the land doesn’t like that,” Ruten said bluntly. “He needs to know how to stay alive.”
On that sober note, he began instructing them both in how to grip their swords, and how to hold their wrists.
“We’ll have to get something with more weight – these sticks are too light, but for now they’ll do,” Ruten muttered.
The two pupils stood side by side for the next half an hour as Ruten instructed them in the movement of the sword, and made them practice and learn his commands.
“You better go look after your mule,” Ruten told Silas after a brief pause. “We’ll do more tomorrow.”
Silas paused to evaluate Hron’s condition. He had no sense that the animal was distressed.
“He’s fine; we can keep going,” he dismissed the suggestion.
“How can you know that from here?” Sareen asked skeptically.
“I just know,” Silas answered. “I don’t feel anything that makes me think he’s in trouble. I don’t hear him. And I know he was fine when I dropped him off.”
She looked at him from the corner of her eye, then shook her head.
“He seems to know his animal pretty well. We’ll let it go,” Ruten accepted Silas’s judgement, and they resumed practicing, with new positions so that they faced one another as they followed the directions from their instructor.
“Okay, now,” Ruten altered the practice after a few minutes, “stand closer to one another.”
Each of the two took a small step inward.
“Closer,” Ruten commented. The pair both looked at him, then edged closer.
“Go on,” Ruten urged. “In a real battle, you’re going to face situations where there’s physical contact. As far as Sareen here goes, this is a part of exactly what this is all about.
“We’ll show her how to break the contact,” he explained matter-of-factly. “Go ahead and press up against her.”
Silas felt himself blush, as he pressed closer, and felt his chest make contact with the girl’s.
“Now, Sareen, swing your sword around like this, and raise your knee up here – gently!” Ruten used his hands to guide the defensive gestures.
Silas flinched at the simulated contact, and grimaced.
“Did it hurt?” Sareen asked with real concern, ceasing her motions and placing her free hand comfortingly on Silas’s shoulder.
“It didn’t hurt him lass, don’t you worry,” Ruten answered for Silas. “It’s just the thought of what it could have done that was enough to make any man wince and have nightmares.
“We’ll work on that some more some other time. You two go back to your positions for fencing, and we’ll resume there,” Ruten judiciously decided to alter his training regime.
And so the journey through the countryside passed over the course of the next several days. Silas found himself and Sareen spending a great deal of time with Ruten during the evenings, and eventually even the mornings, as the caravan traveled through sparsely populated countryside on its way to Avaleen. Silas found that he began to grow comfortable with the stick he used, and could mimic the moves that Ruten modeled, but he doubted that he would be able to handle a true blade as effectively when the time came.
“How long is the distance from Ivaric to Avaleen?” Silas asked Minnie one day, as she rode up and down the train of wagons while they passed throug
h a forested plain.
“It’s about as far from Heathrin to Ivaric,” she provided a considered answer, after a pause. “Why?”
“It seems like it’s a longer journey than the first one, and that’s without falling into a cave,” Silas grumbled.
“It’s the same distance, but it is a longer journey,” Minneota confused him with her clarification. He looked at her with a quizzical expression.
“Prima is taking us on backroads and unmarked routes. He was concerned that Derith would send patrols on the usual routes to look for us – you!” she emphasized. “So he’s keeping us away from eyes that might reveal our location before we get to Avaleen.
“You’ll be safe there of course; there’s no love lost between the neighboring nations,” she assured the boy. “No warrant from Ivaric will lead to trouble in Avaleen – on the contrary, they might celebrate you!” she smiled, then rode along.
A day came when the caravan rode from a quiet country lane onto a wider road, one that carried other traffic, and it pulled into an empty pasture next to a small village.
“We need to earn some money,” Prima explained as the wagons were directed into various locations to display their goods. “Silas, put the tail down on your wagon and put the small mirrors out for display – but not the big ones.”
“How much should I charge if someone wants to buy one?” Silas asked. He had no idea of what prices were fair for the goods he had conveyed so far across the continent.
“I’ll send Sareen over to help you figure out prices. She’s been with us for enough sales to know what to do,” Prima provided a solution to the problem, and walked on to speak to the next wagon.
Silas had experienced a great deal of time in Sareen’s company in the course of the journey. They’d been in close physical proximity throughout their lessons, but Ruten had always been within inches of them as well, and had always focused their attention exclusively towards his lessons. They’d not had time to speak privately to one another, though Silas had been alternatively ribbed and ostracized by the other males of the caravan, who assumed he was on very familiar terms with the lovely girl.
The Mirror After the Cavern Page 16
