A Home in the Hills

by Robert J. Crane

  Jasen hesitated. “Uhm …”

  Longwell said, “Have you nowhere larger? With a light source, perhaps?”

  Rakon stepped inside. He pointed at a wall.

  Jasen leaned to glance around the corner.

  A single shelf sat in the corner. Upon it, a half-melted candle leaned lazily inside a lantern, wax dripping down it in pale streaks that puddled on the shelf. A few drops of it had resolidified and drooped from the shelf’s edge. A cup filled with long sticks of wood stuck out, which Jasen recognized as some variant of the matches Burund had acquainted him with on the Lady Vizola. Instant flame with but a strike.

  “Your light,” said Rakon. To Jasen and Alixa, he said, “Your dog will be comfortable in here with you too, will it?”

  “She’s not a dog,” Alixa said.

  Jasen cut in: “She’ll be comfortable, yes. Thank you.”

  Rakon nodded. He stepped out, pushing past Jasen. Then he said to Longwell and Huanatha, “This way—let us find someplace to speak. I, and the other captains, await your tale with bated breath. Of course, there is the matter of your stick …”

  “It is a spear,” said Longwell, the first hints of irritation bleeding through his voice.

  “A spear, yes, of course. Well …”

  They disappeared around a corner—and Jasen and Alixa were alone—except for Scourgey, who cowered at Alixa’s heel.

  They dawdled awkwardly. Then: “Well …” said Jasen, and he wandered into the dim room, “I suppose this is where we’re staying for … a while.”

  “Hmm,” said Alixa. She sat down on the bed.

  “I guess I’ll light the candle,” Jasen said.

  It wasn’t easy. The shelf was high enough that Jasen had to stand on tiptoe. The wick was black and lumpy where it hadn’t been trimmed in a long time. The matches didn’t want to light, however they were perfectly happy to snap clean in two when Jasen grew frustrated and struck them harder. In the end, he had to hold a half-match delicately between his thumb and forefinger. When eventually a flame coughed into life at its tip, he quickly touched it to the wick. It didn’t light for a couple of seconds—then, just when the match had grown short enough already that Jasen was on the verge of blistering his fingers, the candle finally came alive.

  Jasen blew out the match.

  The room hardly seemed any lighter at all.

  Funny to think of how things had changed. Weeks ago, he’d thought the Lady Vizola a grim place to be—too tight, somewhat damp, and everything so easily thrown about by the waves. Now he would have given anything to be back aboard it.

  No … not quite anything. That bargain he reserved for Terreas. But not today’s Terreas, the one of fire and ruin, ash and dust, but a Terreas of years past. One green and alive, bordered by fields and mountains, vibrant with happiness.

  The Terreas he’d lived in before his mother had gotten sick and died.

  Jasen touched the pendant around his neck again, murmuring a quiet thanks to his ancestors. If the Prenasians had searched him, manhandling the way they had with the Lady Vizola’s crew … Jasen didn’t want to think of the pendant vanishing into the pyre on the island they were leaving behind.

  The last time he’d spoken to Alixa—really spoken to her—had been the first night on the island—when he’d thought, just for a moment, that he’d seen his mother, lingering out by the rocks by their makeshift camp.

  Now they were alone again, and Jasen found he didn’t really know what to say.

  His best was a lame, “Are you all right?”

  He knew his cousin well—and so he knew that he was very likely setting himself up for one sort of response: a furious, explosive rant.

  Yet, surprisingly, it did not come. Alixa only sighed. Bowing her head, she closed her eyes. Her fingers pressed at the corners of them, squeezing the bridge of her nose.

  She loosed another rattling sigh. “How do you think I am, Jasen? After everything that has happened to us this past—how long? Weeks? Months? I’ve lost track of time, honestly.” She shook her head. “My parents are dead, all my brothers—and I haven’t even a clue how long it has been since then.” And she lifted her head again, looking at Jasen through exhausted eyes. “How do you think I am, Jasen?”

  He hesitated, just shy of the open doorway.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last.

  “It’s fine.” Then, after a brief pat of Scourgey’s shoulder—“No, it’s not fine, of course it’s not. Not fine at all. But it is what it is.” Another sigh. It came from her like a last breath, no part of her working to hold it back, as though her lungs simply gave up the air.

  “In the past two days, we have been defeated by Baraghosa a second time, stranded, and now captured by blue-skinned men who keep man-eating trolls as pets,” Alixa said. “I’m trying to tell myself that things can’t get any worse—but every time I tell myself that … when the mountain exploded and destroyed the village, when we left Shilara behind and plunged into the sea, after the Lady Vizola rescued us, and so on, I am now sure that they can always get worse. And furthermore I’m certain they will. I just can’t imagine what that might entail, at the moment.”

  “Things won’t get any worse from here,” Jasen said. He hoped he sounded at least halfway convinced of that, which would be much, much more than he felt.

  Alixa regarded him with a skeptical look. “Mm.”

  She said no more—and so, after a long pause, Jasen finally said, “So … what now?”

  “What do you mean, ‘what now’?”

  “What do we do? How do we get out of this?”

  “Get out of this?” Alixa looked at him with the weary eyes of someone who had chased around a madman for far too long. “We’re two children, without weapons, outnumbered by blue-skinned men who live for war, and their army of—of pet trolls, who Huanatha said had teeth made for eating men—probably alive, going by how these things usually work. And you want to—what, mount an escape attempt? Here?”

  “No,” said Jasen quickly. It hadn’t been on his mind, no. But then, he hadn’t had long to think about things. “I don’t know what we can do. I just know we need to do something.”

  “We’re always doing something,” said Alixa. “That’s what got us into this whole mess in the first place.”

  Jasen’s eyebrows knitted. “What do you mean?”

  “Following Baraghosa to the Aiger Cliffs, out to his island … even our excursion to Wayforth, that was us trying to do something instead of nothing.”

  “Our trip to Wayforth saved us,” Jasen said.

  “Yes, it did,” said Alixa, “but look where we’ve ended up now. We were spared a quick death under a mountain of fire and rubble in favor of a slow, painful one sailing halfway round the world with anyone unlucky enough to happen upon us—and all in search of a crooked sorcerer who probably didn’t split open the cratered mountain at all.”

  Jasen was quiet. If Baraghosa were to be believed, then he hadn’t had anything to do with the mountain’s destruction. What was it he’d said? That the scourge avoided entering Terreas because they’d detected the fate that would one day befall the village, the same as they could smell death upon Jasen. Baraghosa had not seen it coming—he’d missed it, he claimed.

  Unwilling though he was to admit it, Jasen believed he’d spoken the truth.

  That did not change things though. It was still imperative that Baraghosa be stopped. Perhaps now more than ever, with his spellcasting, whatever its intended purpose, complete.

  “We should just wait things out for once,” said Alixa, “rather than inviting more badness to fall on our heads.”

  “Badness has fallen on the heads of Shipmaster Burund and his crew,” said Jasen, “because of me. They’re captives because of us. Do you honestly expect me to stand by and do nothing?”

  “No,” said Alixa with another sigh, “but only because I know you too well.”

  “I have to do something.”

  “You’re up against an en
tire war galley. Just wait, for once, Jasen. Please.”

  He pursed his lips.

  Alixa was bowing out. He could feel it. She’d been reluctant from the beginning, and now that she knew that Baraghosa wasn’t responsible for the loss of Terreas, she no longer wished to fight.

  Jasen was alone again.

  He needed to convince her otherwise. He needed her—needed all of them in the battle with Baraghosa again, and more on top of that. Whatever the number of hands needed to defeat the sorcerer, however many were required, be it dozens, hundreds, even a thousand-strong army … Jasen needed to amass them.

  And it began with his cousin once again.

  “Baraghosa may not be guilty of destroying Terreas,” Jasen said, “but he killed Pityr. He took children from our village every year.” Dying children, in some cases—but Alixa had not heard this, like she had not heard the revelation that Jasen was dying too, and he did not mention it. “He is not an innocent man. He may not have killed our families, but he is no good.”

  “And so we have to chase him around the world and get innocent people hurt—or worse, killed—in the process?”

  Jasen opened his mouth to retort—

  Alixa cut him off. “I just want to mourn my family, Jasen.” She said it with a quiet, weary desperation, and the words cut through him like a blade through the chest, silencing him before he could say another word. “I want to grieve. I want to plant myself somewhere green and find a life of my own. And I can’t. Not while we’re doing this.”

  Her eyes glistened with tears. She smeared them away with the heel of her palm. Then, patting Scourgey one last time, she rolled over on the bed and faced the wall.

  “Alixa—”

  “I’d like to be left alone, please.” There was a quiet finality in how she said it.

  Jasen watched her back, watched the rise and fall of her chest. She wasn’t crying, not properly; they were just breaths, in and out, in and out, her lungs filling with the scent of this strange new place they were in, all sour and woody and wrong.

  Scourgey perched beside the bed. Mouth open, her tongue lolling, she looked out at everything and nothing with her black, coal-lump eyes. Whatever was going through her head—well, Jasen couldn’t begin to fathom. Probably just happy to be on solid ground—and maybe, if she had the intelligence to be cognizant of it, trying to push aside the fact that she found herself once again on the water.

  “I’ll just … go then,” Jasen said weakly.

  But he had nowhere to go. And so, although he pulled the door closed, he found himself stationary. No sense, after all, in wandering and getting lost.

  Instead, he lowered himself to the floor and rested his head against the door, eyes closed.

  Distantly, he could feel the sway of the sea.

  The war galley was moving. Taking them away from Baraghosa’s isle. Onward to … wherever.

  Alixa could not be right. To stand still, to just wait to see what happened … it was madness. They needed to keep moving forward, keep taking steps. Jasen was dying, damn it. If he stopped now, he might never start again.

  She didn’t know that though. None of them did. It was a secret—between Jasen, Baraghosa, and Scourgey. He trusted the scourge to keep it.

  Himself? He was less sure.

  No, he would not stop now, would not cease moving forward.

  Or so he told himself. But he remained there, planted at the base of the door to his shared quarters with Alixa, and his thoughts circled and circled—and he took no steps forward at all.

  8

  Jasen woke the next morning, surprised. In part, he was surprised that he had slept at all: last night, slumber had seemed out of reach.

  The other source of his surprise was Alixa—or rather, her absence. She’d left their quarters.

  Scourgey remained.

  Jasen dragged himself out from under the thin bedcovers. Evidently the night had been a troubled one for the both of them. The covers lay in a tangle around Jasen’s hips and knees, knotted between them like a seeded bread from the bakery back home.

  Home. A wistful pang echoed in Jasen’s chest at the thought of it. It seemed present in Alixa’s thoughts as well, a heavy anchor on her heart.

  Need to keep moving forward, he told himself. Can’t stop moving. Not now.

  Scourgey looked particularly morose this morning. Although she’d cheered somewhat upon leaving the rowboat, that the war galley was now moving was undeniable. There was a gentle sway to its movement, not as pronounced as that of the Lady Vizola—this ship being much larger—but enough that Jasen was aware that the galley had left the isle of Baraghosa behind.

  Where exactly they might be headed to—well, that was a question in need of answering, hopefully as soon as possible.

  Sitting up, Jasen rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He gently rubbed Scourgey’s head. She smelled particularly bad this morning, enough that Jasen noticed it even now that he was accustomed to her deathly, rotten scent. The tang of putrefaction rolled off her, almost misting in the air—a side effect of her stress, Jasen figured: she lay sadly at the foot of the cot, quivering at every soft rise and fall of the galley.

  “It’s okay,” Jasen said. “We’ll be back at port soon.”

  If Scourgey believed him, Jasen couldn’t tell. But then, if she did not, Jasen would not blame her. He hadn’t the faintest idea either. For all he knew of the Prenasians’ plans, they might be seabound for months.

  He hoped not. Every day at sea was another that Baraghosa grew more distant—and a day nearer to putting his plan, whatever it might be, into action.

  Baraghosa’s plan. What might it be? A sorcerer had limitless potential, and Jasen’s imagination suddenly felt incredibly constrained. All he truly knew was that Baraghosa was not a good man, and that he had promised to commit sins of his own—but that was enough to propel Jasen onward.

  Rising, he did the best job he could of smoothing out the creases in his clothes, and then, with a last pat on Scourgey’s head, he headed out.

  Navigating the mazelike interior of the war galley was something of a nightmare. Twice, Jasen got turned around—at least, he was fairly sure he’d been turned around. Everything looked so familiar, with its repetitive design, so even then he couldn’t be certain that he’d managed to double back on himself. He only knew that it hadn’t taken this long to find the stairs leading to the top deck.

  The sun was low to the horizon when Jasen stepped out. The war galley was still in the fog enshrouding the isle of Baraghosa, and so the orb of yellow-white light was smeared at the edges. But the fog was dissipating, slow and sure. In another day or two, they might be through it altogether.

  The top deck was heaving with people. Prenasians, tattooed and inky and barely clad, oversaw the Lady Vizola’s crew—who, chained together by metal shackles about the ankles and wrists, and hardly dressed, were arrayed in lines. They were scrubbing the deck, bowed low to it, wire-bristled brushes in each fist. Back and forth, they went, back and forth.

  Another smaller task force was separate from the rest. Burund and Kuura were among them, and Hamisi too, Chaka, and one of the older shipmates from the Lady Vizola. Prenasians, one of the rowboat captains among them, oversaw them as they picked over a folded sail—a spare, most likely, since all the oblong ones Jasen had seen yesterday were still in position on the towering masts.

  The most prominent watcher was a giant troll, skin daisy-yellow. It stood over to one side, its hulking shadow casting a long, dark bar across the galley’s deck that almost blended into the wooden boards. It had a particularly miserable look upon its face.

  Huanatha approached, slow and steady across the deck as Jasen watched the proceedings in horror.

  “It is a dire sight,” she remarked in a low voice.

  “What are they doing?” Jasen asked.

  “Been put to work,” said Longwell from just behind him. The sound of his voice startled Jasen. The dragoon sat on the deck behind Jasen—without his lanc
e. The stubble on his face had grown a little longer. Gazing glumly at the Lady Vizola’s crew, he pursed his lips and said no more.

  Huanatha glared across to the captain overseeing Burund’s group. “The shipmaster, repairing holes in a sail, like a common deckhand—pssh.”

  “He was a deckhand, once,” said Longwell. “It is work he is familiar with.” Still, there was a note in his voice that suggested he, too, was struggling to reconcile himself to the situation.

  Jasen watched them. Huanatha was correct: Burund’s group were repairing holes. Jasen he could catch their occasional glints of needles in the sun, dazzling little flashes of brilliant white light. And there was the pile of material they were using for patches, if holes were too large to simply stitch back together.

  Burund was going about the job methodically with his usual stoic expression, eyes down.

  Hamisi, separated from Burund by Kuura and the other shipmate whose name Jasen couldn’t recall, had not adapted so easily. His jaw was clenched, a hard, solid line in the dawn sunlight. And he glared up at the Prenasians around him. Barely going a quarter of the pace Burund was, he gripped his needle tight—weighing it up as an improvised dagger?

  A mad thought, if he were considering it. Too many Prenasians, only one Hamisi. And then there was that troll. Its size suggested it was not the fastest thing—but Jasen had seen them move on the isle of Baraghosa.

  “Have you seen Alixa?” Jasen asked, trying to wrestle his gaze from the Lady Vizola’s people. A terrible guilt ate at him as he watched them, even the ones who were working on tasks that they would have upon their own ship—there, after all, they would not have been chained and forced into doing so.

  “Below deck,” said Longwell.

  “She wasn’t in our room when I woke.”

  “Maybe she’s eating.” A pause. “Or being seasick.”

  A cacophony of noise made Jasen jerk round to see—

  The rowboat captain overseeing the sail-repairing taskforce had turned his back. Jasen could only imagine it was the briefest, slightest of twists away from the men who he stood over.