In Wilder Lands

by Jim Galford

  “Some spirits are too weak to even try to come back, or they give up for some reason. These often do not come with the body. We may as well have a stone in the circle for all it matters in that situation.

  “Ghohar is willing to at least try to come back if we provide the conduit. He is waiting for us to show him the way back, using the circle as the guide.”

  Asrahn reached over and stroked Ghohar’s forehead. As she touched him, the wounds closed slowly, giving his body a more natural look. Soon he appeared as though he really could be sleeping.

  “His body is as well as it can be,” she noted, tapping Estin’s hand again. This time, Asrahn shifted to the far side of the corpse, as though to watch Estin. “Now it is up to you. His spirit will come to anyone’s calling if he desires it, but if it is you, it will relieve him of the fear that you both died.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Speak to him. In there, he can hear you. He will not remember what happened, but he will know that he is dead. Ask him to return. He will know if he can and will likely step back into his body. Then, all I do is tend to him like any other injured.”

  Steeling himself, Estin gazed up at the floating transparent wolf-like figure. Ghohar stared back at him, as though waiting.

  “I am sorry, Ghohar,” he said to the ghostly shape. “Please come back to us. Everything is safe now. The necromancer is gone. Asrahn has healed you.”

  The spirit perched atop its own body, examining the corpse as though looking for remaining injuries. Apparently satisfied, Ghohar’s spirit turned its attention back to Estin.

  Floating as though walking, the spirit knelt in front of Estin. Though it was unable to speak, Ghohar’s spirit reached up and pointed at his own face, gesturing to the heavy wrinkles around his eyes, then to the grey fur that lined his chin and whiskers. He then leaned forward and touched Estin’s face, though Estin felt nothing more than a shiver.

  Ghohar’s spirit then turned to Asrahn, touching her hands gently as though in greeting. He then bowed low before her, then faded and was gone, even as Asrahn gasped.

  “What just happened?!?” Estin demanded, rolling onto his feet, frantic as he checked Ghohar’s corpse. It was still cold and lifeless. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Asrahn said sadly, shaking her head. “Ghohar felt that he had lived long enough. That was his way of saying goodbye. He likely wanted to be with his family.”

  “What was the point of all this then? Why did we try?”

  “You cannot make a spirit come back against its will, child. Ghohar made his own decision. Taking that choice away from him is at the heart of what it means to be a necromancer.”

  Estin swore and kicked the cup of liquid away from him, spraying it across the room.

  “How could you do this?” he demanded of Asrahn as he stood and grabbed the tent’s flap. “How could anyone want to do this more than once? I just watched a friend die, not just to the necromancer, but at my own hands, while I was trying to save him. I have no desire to ever see that again.”

  Rushing from the tent, Estin very nearly ran into Feanne, lurking in the darkness outside.

  “Out of my way,” he snapped, trying to keep from tearing up in front of her. “I need to be alone.”

  “You missed the most important part of that in there,” Feanne said firmly, pressing her hand on his chest to stop him.

  “What?”

  “You saw your friend die, yes,” she told him, blocking his escape. “You also got to say goodbye to your friend, when you should have been denied that chance. Without Asrahn, you would have seen nothing more than his bloody remains.”

  “Is that better or worse?” he asked, wiping at the tears that he was losing his struggle against. “With him killed, I could be angry at the Turessian. Now, I just feel like I have failed.”

  “Which is better is up to you,” said Feanne, lifting her hand off of his chest and lowering her head respectfully. “I cannot make that choice for you. What I will tell you is that if I cannot save my kin, I would give anything to say goodbye. That is not something I am able to do and have regretted it more times in my life than I care to admit.”

  Estin relaxed a little, seeing his own anger and fears mirrored in Feanne’s eyes.

  “How often have you gone through this?”

  Feanne winced and turned away from him, walking into the night. Though uninvited, Estin followed her.

  A short distance out from the tents, Feanne spoke again, though she had not looked up to see that he was still with her.

  “My sister was killed by poachers when we were very young,” she offered, taking them out of the circle of tents and into the woods. “Besides having watched her die, I have the blood of many others on my hands. Every time, I watch Asrahn and others with the gift say their farewells, but I can only talk to the air and hope the person hears me. It is never the same. On occasion I can glimpse the spirit in the circle, but it is rare.”

  They stopped a short ways out in the woods, where the chill night was quiet, aside from bugs making their creaking sounds and the occasional crackle of the melting ice. Estin took a seat as he tried to figure out what to say.

  “Do you ever wish to be a healer?” he asked her eventually, but even in the dark he saw the gleam of her teeth as she grinned.

  “As much as it pains me to not be a healer, I am what I need to be, Estin. I have said before that we all need to learn what we must to survive out here. What I do for the pack is not popular, but it has saved us more times than I care to admit. My place is in protecting the pack, no matter the pain that causes me.”

  “Such as losing a mate?”

  Feanne snarled audibly, but otherwise did not react at first.

  “I lost no such thing,” she finally answered. “May I ask what story you were told?”

  Estin fidgeted in the dark, trying to remember what little Sohan had told him.

  “They say that you let your mate die to save the pack. There hasn’t been much more than that.”

  With an angry flick of her tail, Feanne knelt in front of Estin, grabbing his chin with her fingers.

  “Please listen and listen well. A mate is more than someone else’s declaration that you belong to someone you have not met. This is something that my father failed to understand when he gave me to another fox-breed when I became an adult. I was to be his, despite having other…plans…for my life.

  “The goal my father had in mind was to bring together our pack with another group of wildlings from the far south. They wanted a life-mating to seal the deal. I was apparently the price of that pact. it was a good plan for everyone except me…but I was not asked.”

  “Why didn’t you just run away, or refuse the arrangement?”

  “Things are never that simple,” she replied, flopping back into a seated position. “In most wildling packs, if an arrangement is made—usually only by the one to be mated, but there are rare cases like mine—then it may normally only be broken by someone proving themselves more worthy by combat for the female. I had no desire for any other male, so asking someone to fight for me was pointless. I did what I had to and accepted the arranged mating.

  “The group that was bringing my mate to the ceremony was early…which was good for us, not for them. We were raided by poachers that day. My father ordered me to go to my would-be mate and work with his people to save them, while our camp fended for itself.

  “I must be honest, I had no feelings for that male’s kin or for him…I never really knew them. If you were given the choice of fighting to your death to save a stranger who would claim ownership of you, or letting that stranger die to save your own people, which would you choose?”

  Estin leaned close to her face and whispered, “You were a stranger. Where would you be if I left you?”

  Feanne snapped her head back away from him and stood up quickly.

  “I made the choice that I had to. Many lives were saved, but I’ll carry the guilt of every life I failed to sav
e for the rest of mine. You need to decide what you will and will not put yourself through to be able to live with what we see out in the wilds.”

  “Or I could go back to Altis and be executed.”

  “Or that.”

  Feanne stood before him for several minutes, her face taught as she watched him. He gave her nothing to work with and soon she touched his shoulder and left, heading towards the woods, rather than the tents.

  The cold and damp ground froze Estin’s backside and tail as he sat there, staring up at the rising moon. He could not even put to words what he was trying to sort out, but he remained on the dirt hill, watching until the moon passed over him. The moon’s passing seemed to prod him to get up and he, struggling with the emotional weight on his shoulders, began to slowly walk back into the camp.

  He passed the few patrols the pack always had out in the woods, though he barely saw them out in the trees. They were far more stealthy than he was and better trained for the woodland environment. Beyond them, he moved through several armored warriors, including Ulra, all of whom were relaxing within the camp, but on duty in case a call came up from the outer patrols. These wildlings were the strong, the tough, and the most willing to go toe-to-toe with the enemy if the camp were attacked. Again, he reminded himself, he certainly did not fit in there.

  All his life he had raised himself to run away and hide. Now, looking around at the dozens of wildlings, he found that there was something worth staying for. Something worth defending. He just had no idea how to do it and felt entirely helpless having watched Ghohar die without having any means to aid him. He had thought he could manage himself with a weapon, but twice he had failed his companions, first with Varra and now Ghohar.

  Frustration and anger welled in him, both things that he had been forced to ignore growing up. Being an outcast who can be skinned by others without remorse tended to be mind-numbingly frustrating, but he had no choice but to endure and accept. He had learned to do so quite well, he felt, but the threats were always against his own person, not against others. Anyone else’s plight was something he could easily ignore. Now, all of his nightmares—the hunters, the walking dead, all of it—was very real and hurting people that he had begun to care about.

  Without realizing it, he found that he had wandered the length of the camp and now stood before the tiny tent that had been set up for him. He felt his shoulders sink as he lifted the flap and looked inside.

  The tent was more than he had been able to call his own back in Altis. Ten feet of dry ground where no one was trying to stab him in the face with a sword was practically a mansion to someone from the slums, but this place had always felt empty. The city had been awful, but there were people everywhere, often in much the same position of life as Estin. The dry quiet of his tent had made him wonder many times what those others were doing now and what he should be doing.

  These were not even people he particularly cared about—the pushy prostitute from the tavern district, the grocer near the temple who screamed and yelled about Estin being vermin but still left him food every night, and even one of the city guards that had “accidentally” let him escape more times than he could count. These were not good people, not even people he would help in a pinch, but they were the faces that came to mind. He remembered how they had looked, but his mind raced, showing him these same people with rotting flesh and that hateful blank stare that the walking dead had fixed on him right before it tried to rip him apart. Whether he cared about these people specifically, he could not in good conscience allow more to end up like those at the caravan. Possibly like Varra.

  The thoughts made Estin’s stomach churn and he knelt by the tent flap, retching with the image of desiccated corpses marching through the city, tearing the citizens apart. In each death, he saw Varra’s face as the life left her.

  Tapping his forehead against the dry ground, choking with anguish, he sobbed and went over the fight in the woods yet again in his memories, finding dozens of mistakes he had made. He found a thousand ways that he believed he could have saved Ghohar, but his rational mind kept reminding him that this was just not true. It was simply a miracle that either of them had survived, but guilt plagued him that he could have done something different.

  Gasping for breath as he knelt, Estin raised his head and looked into the tent. There was nothing in there that would quench his heart’s tears, aside from curling into blankets and drinking a small keg of ale that had been left for him. He knew neither sleep or beverage would help at this point.

  Estin sat up, moving his sword so that he was not sitting on the blade, when his hand fell on the bag and scroll-tube he had taken from the wagon. The bag of coins and tools he threw into the tent, but he pulled the tube from his belt and turned it over in his hands.

  The wood itself was engraved heavily with symbols and flowing patterns in a thick lacquer that had been painted many layers deep. He doubted that the wood would be easily damaged by rain or could be cracked even from a heavy blow, without destroying the contents.

  Upon examining the caps and the intricate lock, Estin began to wonder what would be so valuable to protect in this manner. Even in the duke’s keep, there were few individual items that he could picture being worth a case of this expense. It would have been far cheaper to simply hire more guards to protect it.

  He pried at the caps, finding them sealed perfectly. Without opening the lock, he doubted he could find out what was inside and whether it had anything to do with why the Turessian had attacked the wagons.

  Estin tipped the tube end over end, examining the lock from different angles. He had picked many in his fairly inept life of crime working for Nyess, but they had always been simple and poorly-made. This one made his head hurt to even figure out how the pieces fit together inside. He was certain that half of the pins he could see inside were misleading and intended to break off or jam the lock if mishandled, but it was far beyond his skill to determine how best to proceed.

  He sat there for some time, staring at the tube and wondering if he really cared enough to find someone else to open it. At one point, he set it aside, finding his thoughts quickly sinking into sorrow for the deaths he had witnessed that night. It made him feel sick to his stomach and he grabbed at the scroll casing once again, trying to immerse himself in something, in the hopes that it would at least keep his mind busy.

  Eventually, he knew it was beyond his ability to even guess at how to proceed and he was losing his battle against his thoughts. Estin decided that he needed to find someone else who might be able to work on it, both for the extra set of hands and for someone to talk to, other than his own dark thoughts.

  Estin climbed to his feet and slowly walked into the quiet camp, hearing only occasional smatterings of conversation among those who were still awake.

  At first, he was not sure where to turn for help. The majority of the residents of the camp were from the wilds and had little dealings with the cities. That meant their knowledge of locks was likely far less than his own.

  A thought came to mind, giving Estin some direction. When he had first come to the camp, he had been instructed to present himself to the pack-leader Lihuan. At the time, Estin had been forced to wait an hour to speak with the man, as he had been in the middle of a lengthy tale about his escape from slavers when he was young. It had been dramatically embellished, including a young and gorgeous female, many elaborate battles, and travels over deserts and mountains. What stood out in Estin’s mind was a section of the story where Lihuan had claimed that he had been forced to free himself and his lover from not only their own chains, but had also managed to free many of the elders of the camp who had been enslaved with them. That meant he might know how to handle a lock.

  Estin had given little thought of Lihuan since his arrival, as the pack-leader was generally busy either entertaining the younger members of the pack with his tales, or on his way to deal with one reckless youth or another who thought they were better suited to leading the pack. Three times al
ready, Estin had watched the old fox soundly trounce contenders as young as Estin, usually using trickery and manipulation, rather than strength. Once though, Estin had watched in shock as Lihuan had torn a young badger up badly, showing an agility that he never would have guessed of anyone his age—though Lihuan had made no public appearances for a day or two afterwards, likely to recover.

  Before he had finished thinking through his few meetings with Feanne’s father, Estin found himself already at the entrance to the tent, surprising himself.

  Estin stood before the tent for longer than he meant to, debating whether this was worth intruding on Lihuan. He had no other idea of where to turn for advice. If anyone in the camp might have the knowledge to help, or might know a locksmith or skilled thief, Lihuan was likely the only one.

  After finally getting up the nerve to go in, Estin stepped up to the tent’s entrance and spoke up.

  “Lihuan,” he called out. “It’s Estin. I need to talk.”

  “Let him in,” said a calm voice inside—Lihuan’s he recognized—sounding well awake and fairly unsurprised. Estin could only guess that he had been smelled as he approached.

  “Kiss my hairy backside,” muttered a deeper male voice, as the tent flap was thrown open.

  The dwarf Finth stood in the opening, glaring out at Estin. His beard hung raggedly, and a thick collar was fastened around his neck, though it was just buckled and could have been easily removed.

  “What by my jiggling ass do you want?” demanded the dwarf, crossing his arms over his chest. “His royal fuzziness is really busy.”

  “Let him in, dwarf,” ordered someone farther in the tent where Estin could not see. “Don’t make me repeat myself again, or I’ll turn you over to the young rabbits. They did say that they needed extra hands with collecting firewood…and I hear they like to dress up their playthings in the same way human children treat dolls.”

  Finth glowered and shoved a thumb at the inside of the tent, muttering something unseemly under his breath.

  “Get inside, monkey,” he grumbled. “His lord high fur-bag has commanded it.”