The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series)

by Trish Mercer

  People always wanted a rector when tragedy struck. Distraught, they suddenly remembered snippets of The Writings, warm feelings, and the notion of a Creator that they’d encountered long ago when a grandmother dragged them to Holy Day meetings as children. Suddenly they needed that comfort and a shoulder to cry on. Rector Yung had the dampest shoulders in all of Edge.

  He knew exactly what they were experiencing, the realization that someone they were used to waking up to each morning was no longer there, and never would be again. It’d been seven years since he lost his wife who simply didn’t wake up one morning. He knew what to say to someone in that same distressing position and, more importantly, what not to say. He was happy to be so needed, but equally discouraged as to the reasons why. Yung didn’t know the majority of the people he was asked to comfort, but each embraced him as a dear friend when he finally departed.

  Yung had just left the home of an elderly man who feared the pains in his chest were a sign he was about die. The rector patted his hand and listened to the man’s regrets until he finally fell asleep. A doctor confided to Yung that the man was merely suffering from the stresses of the past several weeks, but he seemed much calmer once he unloaded all of the past misdeeds that weighed down his mind and heart for too many years.

  But before that, Yung had been at the Shins.

  Word of what happened to the High General and Mrs. Shin flew through the village like mosquitoes from the marshes, and Yung hastened to the Shins to find the family predictably in anguish. Mrs. Shin had asked him to offer a prayer for them, and for her husband, and for Shem who was trying to chase him down—

  That’s when Yung knew he’d have to go back into the forest. It was now the middle of the night, but already he’d delayed delivering the news.

  It was at moments like this that he missed his wife even more. While the rector had a knack for seeing into a person’s heart and guiding them out of their worries, his wife had the ability to see into the forest and find the fastest way through it. He never understood how she did it, and she didn’t understand how he couldn’t. Perhaps it because he was so much at home in the world it was almost as if he’d been born there.

  Rector Yung sat down on a log and sighed. Hopeless. He couldn’t even see the stars above him to discern where he might be. Not that he’d know how to even if he could see the stars . . .

  He looked down at the ground, peered closer to what was next to his boot, and chuckled.

  “Of course!” he said out loud. “Everything’s changed! You, my friend,” he pointed to the hole in the ground, “are supposed to be venting right now. I’m only a few dozen paces away.” He looked up at the sky, nodded a thanks, and headed up the slope and over a gentle ridge.

  “Well, hello boys!”

  The men in green and brown mottled clothing—six of them asleep, six others sitting around a tiny fire and chatting quietly—jumped in surprise.

  Yung sauntered down to their fire and pulled up a log as the men stared at him, astonished.

  The waking men rubbed their eyes to focus on the unexpected visitor, and one of them found his voice. “Yung!”

  “Yes?” he said easily, rather enjoying the fact that he shocked someone, for once.

  “What are you doing here?”

  Yung sighed. Enough fun. “Boys, there’s been some trouble. Big trouble.”

  “And where’s Shem?” asked another man, slightly panicked.

  Yung sighed again. “And that may be even more trouble.”

  Ten minutes later a man sprinted through the forest with the most worrying news he’d ever delivered.

  ---

  Instead of stopping at the next station before Idumea, Perrin and Shem rode to the fort at Pools, Perrin gesturing once to the road that led to Gizzada’s.

  “If we had time, you’d be amazed,” was all he said as they rode toward the fort.

  Colonel Snyd was at home sleeping, but Captain Despertar was on duty that night. He was obviously startled by the sudden appearance of the colonel and the master sergeant, and stood up from the desk in the command office, trying to force the sleep that wasn’t supposed to be there out of his eyes.

  “Colonel! What a surprise. I had no idea—”

  Colonel Shin extended his hand to shake his. “No one knew I was coming. Sit down, please,” he said coolly.

  The captain sat and Perrin took the same chair he had just a few nights before. “I have some questions about the night our caravan was attacked.”

  The captain nodded, turned to a cabinet behind him, and retrieved a file. “All we have is right here, sir. And may I add, I’m very sorry about your parents. We just got word a few hours ago. Everyone is on high alert.”

  “Except in this office, I see,” Colonel Shin murmured. He opened the thin file and started reading while the captain looked down nervously and resisted the urge to rub his eyes.

  “What’s this?” Colonel Shin demanded. “The captured Guarders were in your custody for only a few hours? Then they were retrieved at dawn. By who?”

  He handed the top page to the master sergeant who scanned it. Colonel Shin looked at the paper behind it and didn’t find the answer he wanted. He gave a pointed look to the captain who was trying to think of how to phrase it.

  “The . . . the general. From Idumea. The other one. General Cush. He sent Colonel Thorne, and his men took the four Guarders we captured.”

  The master sergeant sighed and looked over to the file in the colonel’s hand. “Doesn’t look like they got anything out of them.” Now he gave a disappointed look to the captain.

  “I recommend talking to Colonel Thorne,” Despertar suggested.

  “I intend to!” Colonel Shin snapped. He threw the file on the desk, scattering pages over the floor, and left with the master sergeant.

  That’s when the captain finally rubbed his eyes and cursed that he traded the major shifts that night. He didn’t find out until later in the morning that two of their best horses had been replaced by smaller, exhausted messenger horses, and that for some reason new Master Sergeant Oblong—while seen near the stables but not assigned to them—had a smug smile on his face all morning.

  ---

  Normally Gizzada’s was closed for the night, but this was no ordinary night.

  Bad news flies quickly, into the elitist establishments and also into the lowliest. Gizzada’s happened to be both—one in the front, the other in the back.

  Just before the midday meal rush, Sheff Gizzada heard the news from a few shocked officers and, stunned himself, could do nothing else but sit in the back half of the restaurant for the rest of the day and well into the night.

  He didn’t sit alone. Enlisted men filed in and out in record numbers, wanting verification and shedding a few tears themselves. It wasn’t so much that they knew Relf or Joriana Shin personally, but as a figurehead the High General had been around for all of their careers. He was a solid, honest man, and those were becoming rare.

  But the tears shed behind hands shielding faces were more for his son, the silverest brassy who bought rounds of ale for the enlisted men. It happened not even two weeks ago, but news spreads.

  News also grows. The night the Shins were there, Gizzada had counted just over two dozen enlisted men. But now it seems as if half of the enlisted men in Pools and the garrison in Idumea—easily several hundred—had also “been there” that night, singing with the brassy and meeting his family. And by the middle of that long dreadful night, every man considered himself part of that family as well.

  That was probably helped along by the ale, Gizzada considered later. He’d opened the tap and told Margo to take the night off. The boys needed to drown their sorrows freely in peace. They especially appreciated the free part.

  At one point Gizzada took down the sign advertising his simple menu, scratched off the word “Gizzada” in front of “sandwich,” and with a burned stick from the fire wrote, “Shin.”

  “That’s the new name, boys. My first Large
Gizzada sandwich was actually created for the younger Shin, years ago. He was out at the forest’s edge, trying to track down some noise—never did figure it out. He’d missed his breakfast and midday meal, so Mrs. Shin ordered me to make him a couple of sandwiches. I put everything on it I could,” he remembered fondly to a packed and silent room. “He told me later it was the best thing he ever ate, and that I should sell them in the marketplace. So later I did. In honor of all Shins—generals and colonels—the sandwich is now a Shin.”

  The men held up their mugs of ale in honor, and a weepy Sergeant Oblong patted Gizzada on the back. His shift was coming up before dawn, and he needed to get back to the fort.

  He was still thinking about generals and colonels and fathers and sons and sandwiches when he strolled through the back door of the stables and noticed a movement in a dark corner. Training told him to draw his weapon, but instinct told him to quietly see what it was.

  Oblong didn’t have time to tell Shin about the sandwich honor, or to officially meet the master sergeant he remembered Shin telling him was his best friend. They looked as if they’d had a fight with a barn which they’d obviously won, and now they needed horses to get to Idumea.

  Oblong put his fingers to his lips, gestured for the men to wait outside, then found Snyd’s favorite horse, and his second favorite horse, and led them quietly out of the dark stables.

  Shin patted him on the back, the master sergeant winked gratefully at him, and off they rode.

  Oblong stood at attention, saluting, for a full minute after they were out of sight.

  ---

  The Administrators would most likely not be in their offices until mid-morning. That was Perrin’s evaluation, and the reason Shem used to force him to rest for a few hours before they made their presence known in Idumea.

  They were in a barn that didn’t appear to have been used for some time, but there were old bags of oats suitable for Snyd’s horses to feed on. Shem had taken Perrin’s sword and long knife, and ordered him to rest for a while.

  “You need sleep too, you know,” Perrin said to him, lying down in the straw.

  “I need to watch you more, though.” Shem sat near him.

  Perrin’s voice was calm as he closed his eyes. “You can trust me, Shem. If something happens to me, Mahrree and the children will be alone. The only man I could ever imagine taking care of them would be you. But then again, I don’t think I could tolerate any man marrying my widow, especially you. I’d find a way to haunt you in that bedroom you just made.”

  “I’ve no doubt you would,” Shem chuckled nervously. “And I don’t think I could bear Mrs. Peto as a mother-in-law, anyway,” he tried to lighten the moment. “She was there nearly every day while we worked on your bedroom, giving me bad advice, telling me what I was doing wrong . . . you’re a braver man than I am.”

  “Then I guess you wouldn’t want to marry her, either.” Perrin sounded almost as if he were smiling.

  “What?”

  “The night you brought her to our house after the land tremor, well, there’s something you don’t know about that . . .”

  When Perrin finished mortifying Shem about Mrs. Peto’s fleeting fancy for him, Perrin sighed. “I could be a builder too, Shem.”

  “A builder?”

  “Just give it all up. Be a builder. Feels good to create, not destroy.”

  Shem was thoughtful for a moment. “But we need you as a colonel. Not all that you do is destructive, Perrin.”

  “I had it all figured out, too, a few days ago,” Perrin continued as if not hearing Shem. “When I thought my parents—” He stopped.

  Shem searched for a distraction. “Do you know what this reminds me of, Perrin?”

  “No, Shem, what does our lying in a barn remind you of?” Perrin’s tone was a touch impatient.

  “Not so much the barn, but . . . the time you failed to train the cook properly.” Shem smiled into the dark.

  “The cook?”

  “The one that transferred over to Scrub a few of years ago? He cooked because cooking was the only thing he could do? Not really qualified to do that, either. His chicken stew was, well, hard to forget and for all the wrong reasons. I don’t know why he thought mushrooms belonged in everything. Stews, breads, cakes—”

  Perrin grunted in response to get him to continue the story.

  “That accident was one of the oddest things I’ve ever seen.” Shem chuckled softly. “We tried so hard to teach him. No matter how much I worked him and how much you trained him, he could never manage to hold that sword steady.”

  “I’ve tried unsuccessfully to forget him,” Perrin sighed. “Scrawniest thing I ever saw. No muscle. Still don’t know how he managed to fall on me.”

  Shem chuckled again, trying to make it sound natural. “If I hadn’t witnessed that accident myself, I would’ve sworn he was a Guarder in disguise sent to get you. But he truly was just that clumsy. Horrible gash. And I think he was more traumatized by it than you. He kept saying over and over, ‘I’ve stabbed the major!’”

  “And how does this barn remind you of that?” Perrin asked, a little hotly.

  Shem sobered. “I remember one of those nights when you were in so much pain that you couldn’t sleep. Must have been the second night, when all those stitches in your side started turning red.”

  Perrin ran his hand along his liver where the white scar remained. “That was a bad night,” he whispered. “Mahrree was so anxious. She’d never seen so much of my blood before. She never left my side, trying to care for me. Refused to let me stay at the surgeon’s. You sent her upstairs to bed so she could finally rest,” Perrin recalled, “and you stayed on a chair next to me while I was on the sofa. We talked all night, didn’t we? You told me the most ridiculous stories to distract me from the pain. Even something about putting a piece of moldy bread on the stitches to prevent them from becoming infected.”

  For just a moment, Perrin’s voice sounded a little lighter.

  “I still think of that each time I see bread gone moldy. Peto came out of his room that night, remember? He didn’t dare come near me—I think my moaning worried him—but he sat in his doorway listening to your stories. Must have been about four years old.”

  Shem smiled. “He fell asleep there, too. I put him back in bed just before Mahrree came down in the morning.”

  “You stayed for five days and nights, didn’t you?” Perrin said quietly. “Supposed to have gone on leave, but you spent your leave at our house helping Mahrree, instead of visiting your father. I still need to apologize to him in person about that some year.”

  Shem waved that off. “He didn’t mind. Mahrree had the surgeon’s assistants so riled up none of them wanted to stay around for long after checking you each hour. I was just glad the timing was right so I could stay and help her.”

  “You’ve always done more than just ‘help,’ Shem,” Perrin whispered, a slight tremble in his voice. “I remember earlier that year when my father sent me all over the world training the fort commanders. Mahrree told me how you put yourself on guard duty every night at our house while I was gone for those weeks. You even spent one night in Jaytsy’s room when there was a bad storm and she was missing me. Jaytsy never thought Mahrree was ‘strong’ enough to keep away the thunder,” Perrin smiled briefly at the memory. “But you were strong enough. Mahrree said it wasn’t until you lay down on the floor next to Jaytsy’s bed that she finally felt safe for the night and went to sleep. You’ve always been there for our family, Shem. You’re more of a brother to us than any real brother could have been.”

  “My pleasure,” Shem whispered.

  “Someday I hope to tell your father in person how much you’ve done for us. Maybe I’ll have to get down to Flax or Waves again. He won’t be taking any more trips, will he?”

  “He still feels bad about that,” Shem told him. “The one time you go all the way down there to train the fort commanders, and my sister takes him to Coast for a week! As if he doesn’t
see enough salty water in Waves. It’s been what, about ten years now? He’s still talks about meeting you some day.”

  “The one time I had the opportunity to do something for you and him, and I missed it,” Perrin said. “We just take and take from you, and you just keep giving to us.”

  “It’s not like that at all, Perrin,” Shem said diffidently. “You’ve given me everything. You’ve given me a family in Edge.”

  “As long as that satisfies you, Shem. You’re a man who doesn’t ask for much.”

  Shem squirmed. “Perrin, I mentioned that night when you were hurt so long ago not because I wanted you to compliment my desperation to feel like I belong to a family, but because I wanted you to remember that time. I was as worried about you as Mahrree was. She said that injury was worse than what you suffered when your back was slashed in the forest almost five years earlier.”

  “But that scar’s more impressive,” Perrin said in a pitiful attempt to be light-hearted.

  Shem chuckled obligingly. “It is, I agree. But that gash to your liver cause you so much pain, and there was nothing we could do for you but stay by your side and be with you while you suffered.

  “But you made it through, Perrin,” Shem said earnestly. “You endured it, and eventually improved. The last time I saw your scar, it was barely visible. Tonight’s a lot like that. You’re enduring a tremendous pain, and I’m terribly worried about you. But you’re a strong man, and you’ll get through it. I wish I knew more of what to do to help you, but no matter what, I’ll stay by your side until you heal.”

  “I know you will,” Perrin whispered. “Thank you. I have to confess I was hoping you would follow me.”

  “And stop you?”

  “And help me. Again,” Perrin said darkly.

  Shem stiffened. “Help you with what, Perrin? What do you want me to do?”