Aster Wood and the Book of Leveling (Volume 2)

by J B Cantwell

  “If you ever take off like that again, I’ll hunt you down and beat you bloody. You understand?”

  “Yes, Mum.” Erod smiled.

  She shoved him away from her and turned back her cooking.

  “Who’s this bug you’ve brought in?” she asked.

  “Just someone I picked up along the way,” he said, his eyes smiling in my direction. “Actually, Mum, we need to call the clan together.”

  “What for?”

  “We’ve come across some things that Aster here needs to find answers to.”

  “He needs answers? What about our answers?” Her fist sunk into a lump of dough the size of a basketball that had been resting on the counter. The air that had gathered between the fibers of wheat puffed out in a whoosh, like the air being let out of a balloon. Her massive arms kneaded the flattened mass, expertly working the dough and folding it over and over as she went.

  “We have some of them, too. And,” he looked at me for approval for what he was about to say, but he didn’t wait for it before he spoke, “he’s got gold.”

  Her hands froze atop the mountain of dough, and the room went silent.

  “What?” She turned around and fixed her hard gaze on me.

  “It’s true, Mum,” he said.

  “How’s this?” she asked me.

  I opened my mouth, to say what, I didn’t know, but Erod saved me.

  “It’s a story for the elders and the clan to hear together,” he said.

  “Seein’ as he’s sittin’ in my house, I think it’s a story I’m ready to hear right now.”

  “No, Mum,” he said firmly. “Tonight he will tell his story, and I mine.” Erod stifled a yawn. The warm cottage combined with our lack of sleep over the past couple of days was catching up with us, but my eyes remained open and alert.

  “We need rest, Mum.”

  She glared at him for a moment, her eyes flitting angrily back and forth between us. But then her stern face changed from anger to understanding. The hard edges remained, as if a moment ago she had been talking to a boy, and now a man.

  “Go on then,” she said, removing the long apron from her front. She hung it next to the stove and headed for the door. “I’ll be back.” She left the mound of dough, unfinished and forgotten, on the counter, and closed the front door firmly behind her.

  Erod lay back on a couch of sorts that sat up off the floor and groaned loudly at the relief of resting his muscles. That left me with the lumpy mattress in the corner.

  “Will we be safe?” I said as I sat down. I pulled a wadded blanket from the floor over my legs. It smelled like a barn.

  “Safe enough,” he said, his eyes drooping. “I told you, they’re afraid of magic.”

  “And you ain’t no ordinary man,” I said. He smiled.

  “Nope.”

  But as he drifted off to sleep I wondered how this clan was going to react to our arrival here. I dug my hand into my pocket and felt the smooth outline of the gold medallion. Before I first traveled into the Fold, I never would have thought a piece of gold could be worth so much. I would have to hold onto it tight.

  But just how tight, at that moment, I never would have guessed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Hours later, the front door to the tiny hut banged open, and my eyes flew wide. A freshly killed deer dangled from the shoulder of a man at least eight feet tall. Its blank, black eyes cast an empty stare around the room as he turned to close the door behind him. He dropped the carcass to the floor like nothing more important than a bundle of soiled rags, and in two strides was at the foot of the couch where Erod lay, snoring loudly.

  The man lifted his foot and shoved Erod roughly. His only response was a snorting sound as his slumber was temporarily disturbed. He shoved him again, harder this time, and Erod’s eyes squinted in the dying light of the day. He raised his hands to his face, rubbing it blearily as the man came into focus before him, and then he smiled.

  “Pa,” he said.

  “Hmph,” the man said. “Get your arse up off that sofa and go clean the deer. You got a lot of work to make up after what you pulled.”

  I backed myself up against the wall, trying to stay invisible, not knowing what to do. If these two came to blows inside this tiny hut, I was sure to be squashed flat.

  Erod stared at him blankly for a moment, and the slightest hint of disappointment crossed his face for just an instant. Then he laughed.

  “Yeah, alright,” he said. He motioned for me to follow him, and as I did so the man settled himself heavily into one of the wooden chairs around the small kitchen table. I may have been fast, but the more time I spent around Erod, the smaller I felt. With the introduction of his father, a man I felt sure could have broken me into two with no more effort than snapping a piece of kindling, I was filled with the intense desire to disappear entirely.

  Erod didn’t introduce us, and he didn’t wait for me to help him with the deer. In one long motion he grasped the two back legs of the animal and threw its body over his shoulder. A thin trail of blood dripped from its neck, trickling onto the wood floor, but Erod paid it no notice. He heaved open the door to the cottage and stepped out into the late afternoon sun, me skittering along in his wake.

  He stopped as we exited the small house, breathing deeply and then catching my eye.

  “My Pa,” was all he said. I nodded.

  He moved off to a large tree that stood twenty paces from the house. Rigged up to one of the lower branches was a thick, metal hook, a fat ring of rope hanging from its end. Erod held the animal’s head and thrust it through the noose, which tightened as the deer was released from his back. He gave a long sigh with the lifting of the weight from his shoulders, and stood back to admire the catch.

  “Good hunter, my pa,” he said. “See how there’s only one wound, here along the throat.” His fingers moved over the neck of the dangling carcass, briefly pausing over the almost unnoticeable hole in the skin. He looked at me for my approval. I quickly nodded, trying to keep my mouth closed, despite my horror at this situation.

  I had never hunted before, and though I had helped Kiron some with the preparation of chicken meat for our travels to Stonemore months before, I had done most of the work after the actual killing had occurred. Now I was faced with the dead animal itself. A month’s worth of meat, to be sure, but still in his furry clothing, uncut and unprepared, his tongue lolling out from one side of his mouth. I gulped.

  “Grab me the knife,” Erod nodded towards a large tree stump a few yards away. Several tools lay on its surface, and I grabbed what looked like the sharpest of them and returned it to Erod.

  With a precision and quickness I hadn’t expected, he slashed down the belly of the deer from throat to pelvis. The stomach and intestines of the once beautiful creature sagged out of the gash, and Erod’s hands expertly caught them before they splattered to the ground.

  I almost lost what little food remained in my stomach. I turned away, the sight and smell of the chore overwhelming to me.

  “Ah, so now you’re gonna be a baby, are ya?” he said. I gulped again, trying not to be sick. “If you plan on eating, you ought to learn how to do the work. Get back over here.”

  I turned my head, unwilling at first to look at the carnage that lay behind me. But Erod had moved the long lump of intestines away to the other side of the tree, and looking at the animal now was more easily stomached. Soon, he stripped the skin off the giant beast, and after that I had less of the sensation that I was ripping apart an innocent forest creature and more that I was simply participating in what needed to be done to survive.

  For the next hour I was Erod’s errand boy. After skinning the deer, he began the long process of butchering the meat into segments manageable for cooking. Soon, I was running back and forth between the skinning tree and a tall drying cabinet that stood next to the house, carefully sorting and arranging the meat on the racks in preparation for preservation. By the end of it all I was exhausted, but I also felt oddly acco
mplished. Watching Erod handle the deer had taught me the basics of a skill I never would have had the opportunity to learn back on Earth. Meat was a rarity at home, with so little viable grass to feed the animals. But here, while I might find hunting to be an unsavory task, I felt my stomach give an unmistakable rumble of hunger upon the completion of the butchering chore. I was truly looking forward to dinner.

  Erod wiped his hands, stained red from the work, onto his dark pants and expertly threw the knife into the tree stump, where it stuck firmly.

  “Walk around before supper?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “Sure.” I felt less nervous than I had this afternoon. More accomplished and, unmistakably, taller. I wiped my own stained hands on my pants and fell into step beside him.

  At the tree, nobody had bothered us. Erod’s family home was on the outskirts of the village, and perhaps not everyone had yet heard about his return. But as we approached the heart of the place, in full view of the inhabitants, we were greeted with a variety of responses. Some shuttered their windows as we walked past. One older woman even spat in our direction before closing the wooden covering with a snap.

  Others were friendlier. Some smiled tentatively, and occasionally someone, usually a man, would shout out a greeting to Erod. After several people did this, something that had been nagging at me all day floated up to the surface.

  “Why do they talk like that?” I asked. He glared in my direction. “I mean,” I stumbled, “why don’t you sound like them? You grew up here, didn’t you?”

  Erod heaved a heavy sigh.

  “I’ve never quite fit here,” he said. “It’s been told that, when one is born with the curse, as I was, you can tell from the moment he opens his mouth to speak. Even a toddler can give himself away with just a few words, for those that escape him are rarely of the native tongue. Just as when I speak now, just about anyone can see I’m an outsider.”

  “I don’t think having power makes you cursed,” I said. The sliver of power I had that allowed me to run, where on Earth I could barely walk without getting winded, I considered a precious gift.

  “It makes you cursed here,” he said. “My parents, when they heard the strange, formal speech coming from me when I was a babe, taught me how to blend in, how to speak like the others of our kind. I figured out how to hide my powers for a long, long time. But I was born…different than my people in many ways.”

  “Is that why you left?” I asked, looking around at the glances of the villagers as we walked, some friendly, some mean. “I mean, aside from the girl.”

  He shot me a glance, but his face quickly shifted from suspicion to humor.

  “As if a girl could be the reason I would leave my childhood home for the great beyond,” he said. Then his face fell, his eyes fixed on a small house up ahead as we walked. “There were others, magical folk, who came before me in our history. But none of them did us any good. Just about every one turned to the darkness over the years, unleashing their foulest on those closest to them. When I started to feel it, I guarded it inside, certain that if I just held it back, kept it close, that I would be able to stay here.

  “But magic, well, it comes out of you, whether you try to hide it or not. And one day,” Erod’s gaze stayed fixed on the tiny house, his eyes both faraway and intense. “One day, it did.”

  “What happened?”

  “What usually does,” he said, stopping and turning to me. “At least, to those of us who manage to hold onto the good as well as the magic. She was in danger.” He looked up at the cottage again. Behind the window glass, a flutter of white trailed past. “And that was it.”

  “You saved her, and now she hides from you?” I asked. I, too, stared at the house now, willing her to show herself.

  “I expect she doesn’t have much choice,” he said, tearing his eyes away. He put his hand on my shoulder and turned me away from the place. We walked on.

  “When it happened,” he continued, “her father was right mad. Looked just like an angry bear as he barreled down on me, threatening to kill me. Of course, there wasn’t much he could do. Druce doesn’t hold the magic in him, and neither does anyone else in the town. At least as far as I know. Without it, he couldn’t really touch me.

  “But the damage was done. Their fear is too great, and even though I had saved one of their own, some would argue the most important one, they wanted me gone. I knew it. They knew it. So I left.”

  “That’s so unfair,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But they’ve experienced a lot over a long stretch of time. It can be hard to shift people’s minds away from what they know, especially when danger’s involved. To them, it was only a matter of time before I turned, too.”

  “But you didn’t turn.” I looked up at him sheepishly. “Did you?”

  A wide grin broke across his face and he chortled. “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  I saw the people differently now as we made our way through the town. I had feared them this afternoon, but now I felt both a sort of pity and an anger towards them at the same time. How could they do that to one of their own? Just shut him out because he might turn evil someday? Anybody might. And in doing so they had lost the opportunity to have him among them. To allow him to use his gifts to help everyone.

  “Where did you go?” I finally asked, my mind finally coming back to where he had left off.

  “Well, you heard my ma. The sea. It’s a natural place for people like us. We live up here in the mountains, but we’re raised on the water. From as young as I can remember I’ve been sailing on the sea, be it on a two-stick raft or a mighty ship, like the one you and I met on.” He lifted his head in the direction of the ocean, breathing in the cool mountain air. “It was easy to hide what I had out there. And besides, nobody would have cared anyways. That’s the funny thing. The thing that got me sent from my home and family would’ve had the opposite effect out in the wider world.”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  He shook his head, lowering it from the breeze. “No. There’s all sorts of targets a man can wear. Some say you’re dangerous, some say you’re desirable. I wanted neither on my back.”

  We had come back to his family’s house, and as he opened the door to go inside, I paused and looked behind at the town we had just come through. In the distance, back on the other side of town where the tiny cottage of Erod’s love sat, I could swear I saw another flutter of white, before that window, too, was shuttered tight.

  Inside the room was sticky and hot. But my feet had barely crossed the threshold before I was knocked backward against the wall.

  “Get OUT you filthy traitor!“ came a loud, angry voice. The sound of pummeling fists permeated my head, and I crossed my arms over my skull to protect it from what I was sure was an attack against me.

  But the attack was not meant for me. In a flash, both Erod and the man with the fists were shoved out the door again.

  “I told ya to keep it outside!” Erod’s mother yelled, brandishing a large pot in one hand as though she intended to smack one of them over the head with it.

  The two men wrestled in the dirt, punching and kicking at each other. Erod’s mother, satisfied that they would not disrupt her kitchen again, turned her back and walked away. I stared, mouth gaping, at the ferocity of the fight in front of me. They grunted and swore between punches, beating each other bloody until finally, several minutes later, they both lay on their backs beside one another, their chests heaving.

  Erod’s father stood in the door behind me, and his sudden presence made me jump.

  “You boys about done?” he growled. They didn’t answer, but Erod turned onto his side, spitting out a large mouthful of blood onto the ground. The man beside him groaned. Erod got to his feet and stumbled towards me. I backed up, alarmed at his appearance. One eye was quickly turning black, and blood flowed from both his nose and mouth.

  “That,” he panted, “is my brother, Egon.” He pushed past me into the room beyond.

 
; Egon rolled to his feet and stumbled forward after him. He was in even worse shape than his brother, with two black eyes and a face so bloody I couldn’t tell where it was flowing from.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” Erod’s mother had appeared again, and she blocked the doorway entirely with her wide frame. “You know the rules. Family fights go outside.”

  “He ain’t in the family no more,” Egon snarled, trying to push past her.

  She shoved him roughly away, and for a moment I realized that, though she was much older, she was clearly much stronger than her son.

  “You wreck my kitchen and you won’t be in the family no more.” She crossed her arms over her chest and glared at him. He spit at her feet, and amidst the bloody mass a single white tooth stuck out.

  She slammed the door in his face.

  Both Erod and his father sat at the small table now, Erod holding a wet rag over his damaged eye.

  “Had that comin’,” his father said. Erod snorted and blew his bloody nose into the rag.

  Soon, the three settled down, and Erod’s mother began barking orders.

  “Plates,” she said to her son, and he hoisted himself up from the table and removed a stack of dishes from the shelf. I noticed that he set five places at the table, not four.

  “Is he coming back?” I asked, glancing nervously at the closed door.

  “If he wants to eat,” said Erod’s mother. She moved around the table, slopping down large servings of meat and soggy vegetables onto the plates. I recognized the deer meat, and my mouth filled with saliva. Next to each plate she placed a large chunk of bread.

  Nobody waited to start in on the meal. Erod and his father attacked the food immediately, as though they hadn’t eaten in a month, and soon his mother was slurping it up as well. I picked up my spoon and took a large mouthful. The meat was delicious. The green, slimy vegetables less so. But I did as the rest and dipped my bread in the thick gravy, which made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable.

  When the door banged open, I was the only one to bother to look up from the table.