by Eric Guindon
“And yet, you have horses and a cart, a stable for visitors, all this excess?”
“These things are needed for the business. Without the cart, my family can’t get supplies from the village.” It hurt to hear her father justify their finances to these bandits.
“Maybe my boys and I will take a look around your house and judge for ourselves if you can afford to pay more tax, maybe we will.”
“No!” Her father’s voice, firm and decisive.
“Oh ho! The man’s got some spine after all, he has.”
Kyria heard a scuffle and weapons drawn. She could not help herself, she had to look. The lead rider had his sabre pointed at her father’s throat. The Yard workers had drawn their weapons in response. Too late, she noticed one of the riders looking straight at her.
“Hey! Girl!” The bandit yelled, alerting everyone to her presence. She ducked the instant she saw him, but it was for nothing: the bandits knew she was there.
“Come out where we can see you,” ordered the leader.
Kyria peeked over the windowsill at her father. He nodded. She made her way out of the house and came around the corner to be visible, but kept her distance; she was still well away from the two groups, but close to the Rune Yard, her preferred bolt hole.
The riders eyed her with appreciation, their leering making her feel uncomfortable. One of them even licked his lips, as though in anticipation of a tasty treat. She felt exposed before them, naked despite her clothes.
“Well, what have we here?” the leader asked. He put away his sabre and rode around Kyria’s father to have a better look at the girl. “This is your daughter I wager, Frawn. She’s all grown up, isn’t she? All grown up and looking good too.” The man’s underlings laughed, one of them even whistled.
“Leave her out of this,” Frawn warned. Kyria saw he was holding his knife’s hilt.
The leader turned to his men. “Maybe we should take her, as the extra payment, what do you say, boys?” They laughed and made rude comments about what they wanted to do with their new prize.
Kyria shook with fear. She didn’t like what these men were saying; it was beginning to dawn on her that they expected to get what they wanted and what they wanted was her.
The leader of the bandits rode toward her, putting himself between Kyria and her father, but also turning his back on the Yard’s workers.
With a savage primal scream, Noram charged at the leader, his weapon already drawn. He managed to stab him in the leg as the man turned to fight him. Within seconds, everyone was involved, even Kyria’s father. He drew his knife and ran to help Noram.
“Run!” He yelled at his daughter as he charged the man. “Run and don’t look back!”
Kyria didn’t want to run, she wanted to help. But could she? Everyone was fighting because of her. This situation might not have gotten so out of hand if she had not been spotted in the first place.
This was all her fault!
If there was to be fighting, shouldn’t she be fighting for herself too? She thought.
As she watched the skirmish, she realized she would only get herself killed if she joined this battle. She had little training in this sort of combat and no weapon. If she tried to help, she would just be risking her life, the very thing her father and the Yard workers were trying to save.
Terrified for them, Kyria decided to honour what they were doing for her by running to safety. The only place she knew the bandits would not dare pursue her was the Rune Yard. She ran for the part of the fence she had burrowed under years before, hoping the hole was still big enough to pass through. She knew she had a long way to run. In her heart she was certain her only hope of making it rested on the riders being too engaged with the Yard workers to pursue her. Looking back was not something she could risk — it would slow her too much — she had to assume that she was getting away and run as fast as she possibly could.
Kyria made it around one corner of the Yard’s fence, and another, but then she heard the sound of hoofs hitting packed earth, again and again, getting closer. Kyria imagined the rider on that horse raising his crossbow and taking aim at her back.
“No!” She gasped as she ran. “No.” A whimper. But no bolt skewered her and still the hoof beats came closer. She realized the rider intended to take her alive. Images of herself as a prisoner to these bandits ran through Kyria’s mind, making her wish for the crossbow bolt she had dreaded the moment before.
The next instant she saw the hole. It was still there!
She couldn’t tell for certain, but it looked smaller, like the dirt had refilled the passage over time. Still, she hoped it would allow her to escape the pursuit that now sounded like it was almost on top of her. Was that the horse’s hot breath she was feeling against the back of her neck?
And then there was no question of where the horse and rider were anymore, Kyria was swept up in one arm by the rider as the horse drew even with her. She struggled, flailing wildly, punching at the man. The rider cursed at her to be still and slowed his horse, turning it around.
“If you don’t hold still, you’ll have a bad fall, girl!” The rider warned as Kyria landed a good blow to his ear.
“Let me go!” She yelled at him as she continued hitting him, the saddle, the horse, whatever she could reach with her fists, knees or feet.
“You’re a scrappy little-” the rider began, but stopped as the horse finished turning around. Ahead, running toward them, was one of the Yard’s workers.
“Hexel!” Kyria yelled his name. “Don’t,” she gasped for breath. “Don’t! You’ll die!” She couldn’t bring herself to say: Don’t die for me!
“Yeah, Hexel, listen to the girl,” the rider said as he set his horse to run down the Yard worker.
Hexel stopped and stood, waiting for the charging horse. He was panting and bleeding from a deep cut, but he did not look afraid.
Kyria and the rider lost sight of the Yard worker when he fell beneath the hooves of the rider’s mount. The girl cried for him.
“Hexel,” she whimpered.
“He died well,” the rider commented.
But then, from below the horse, the Yard worker swung up and behind the rider. He was unharmed!
Before the bandit had even noticed Hexel’s presence, the worker drove his long knife into the man’s back, pushing it in to the hilt. Dead before he knew what had transpired, the rider dropped Kyria and followed her off the horse a fraction of a second later. Hexel reined in the horse and rode it back to where the two had fallen.
Kyria had made it to her feet and stared at the man as he approached.
“How?” She managed.
“Hand me his weapon and my knife, please,” Hexel asked her. Kyria did as he asked while he answered her question, “I used to be in a circus, you know? And then there’s the time I spent as a horse thief . . .” Hexel grinned as he took the weapons from the girl. “You keep running. The fight’s not going well back there.”
“My father?”
“Alive, last I saw him,” Hexel told her as he rode off back to the battle.
Kyria took deep breaths to calm herself. It took all her determination not to head back to the fight.
Papa would want me to hide, she told herself.
Reluctantly, Kyria headed to the hole under the fence.
It took the girl a few minutes, using her hands, to remove all the loose dirt that had refilled the hole, but once this was accomplished she was able to enter the Rune Yard.
Unlike the last time, when she had snuck into the Yard, Kyria was not wearing a linen suit. She was careful, upon emerging on the other side of the fence, not to touch any of the runic metal at all. She wore a cotton sundress and did not know if it would protect her, so she took no chances.
Now that she was inside the Yard, what was she to do? She wondered.
How long do I wait? How will I know if the battle is over? How will I know who won?
Trying to put these thoughts aside and to occupy her mind in other ways,
Kyria decided to look for the place from her dreams. She had seen how it had changed during her disastrous last visit, but she still felt drawn to it, even if the passage to the wonderful thing from her dreams was now gone.
The desire to find the place grew stronger the closer she came to it. It felt almost like a compulsion. Kyria wondered why she felt so strongly, why she obsessed about it.
It’s all those dreams over the years, she told herself.
“No,” countered a voice out of nowhere. It was not unfamiliar to the girl; it was the same voice she thought she had heard twice before when she had been near the place from her dreams. “You come because you hear my voice,” it continued. “Although you have rarely heard it clearly.”
Kyria noticed she was close to the area, changed though it had been. She could tell by the nearby structures in the Yard, by their runes. It all looked familiar. And again, she found herself hearing the voice. It was clearer and stronger than it had ever been before.
“Come back to me, after the fight. You will be calmer then, you will need to dig here. Find me and we will speak again. For now, you must save your family and friends,” it said.
“I can’t,” she didn’t even know who she was addressing, there was no one there.
It seemed to read her mind!
“Look around the Yard for me, and let me see what you see,” the voice instructed. Kyria didn’t know how to do what the voice was asking.
How does someone let someone else see what they see?
Still, she looked around her and hoped for the best. As she scanned the area a second time, the voice spoke up: “There! The rod!”
“What?” Kyria asked. She saw nothing like a rod in her field of vision.
With patient directions the enigmatic voice brought her to stand directly in front of a heap of assorted metal sheets and smaller odd-shaped pieces of runic metalwork.
“Only the smallest piece of its end is visible, Kyria. Grasp it and pull it out from the pile!”
“No! There are runes all over it,” Kyria objected.
“Those are not activating runes, Kyria. You can touch them. You have to trust me.”
Do I trust this voice? The girl wondered. She didn’t think that she did. How could she? She knew nothing about it.
“What are you? Where are you? How can you talk to me this way? How do you know about these runes?”
The voice interrupted her flow of questions: “I can answer all those questions, Kyria, but it will take time. Something that your family does not have.”
Still, the girl hesitated. She knew rune-magic was the great tool of the Time Before. She knew it was powerful. Kyria also knew that the Time Before had ended in catastrophe, that it was because of rune-magic. The stories set in the Time Before were always very exciting, but none of them told of the monsters the runes had allowed into the world. Kyria had been taught at a young age that the runes were dangerous, that they were cursed.
“Kyria, you have to believe me. Rune-magic is not cursed. It did not cause the end of the Time Before. Please! Take the rod and save your family. It might already be too late.”
The voice sounds so sincere, the girl thought. It seems to care. What is this voice? Why does it care? Is it a monster waiting to be unleashed when I use the rune-magic to save my family? Is that its plan?
“I am no monster, Kyria,” it told her. “I am a rune-mind. A very powerful one. I am beneath your very feet, under this Rune Yard. Please. Trust me.”
If I trust this voice and take the weapon, I might save my family but unleash a monster. If I don’t trust it and don’t take this weapon, there will be no monster but then my family is doomed.
It’s not much of a choice.
Her hand shaking, Kyria reached out to touch one of the exposed runes on the rod. It did not glow. It did not activate. The voice’s information was correct to that extent. With less hesitation, the girl grabbed hold of the rod and pulled at it, trying to take it out from the tangled mess of metal it rested in. Pulling it, Kyria touched more of the runes, but still none of them activated. Grabbing it now with both hands, she wrenched at the rod until, finally, it came loose. It was strange to be handling runic metal without protection.
Kyria took a moment to examine the rod she held in her hands. It was a metal tube about a metre long with runes set into almost every millimetre of its surface. The runes were of a variety of metals, some seeming to be gold, others silver or copper. There was a socket where another piece could be attached. She didn’t know what sort of thing would be attached to this rod, but the connection point was circular and had a rune directly in it. Another feature Kyria noticed was that one part of the rod was designed to be rotated around its long axis. Many of the runes were half on the main cylinder and half on the rotating portion. When the rotating part was moved, those runes were no longer whole. Kyria wasn’t sure why the rod had this feature.
The final thing she noticed was that one of the runes located near one end had a section etched on a different piece of metal. That piece, a long thin section of metal, was mounted so that it was above the rest of the rune and could be pushed down to complete it. The metal was strong enough that the piece would spring back immediately, breaking the rune, as soon as she stopped pushing it down.
Although she did not understand the rod or its different design elements, Kyria was amazed at the detail and craftsmanship. She felt six years old again, like that time she had found the piece of runic metal that had so alarmed her parents. She stared at the rod with fascination until the voice reminded her that she needed to save her family.
“This will win the fight?” She asked, uncertain.
“Align the runes and press down the firing stud when you are ready to fire. Make sure that the other end of the rod points at your enemies. Now go!”
Kyria was done with questions. She had already wasted too much time; she had hesitated for too long. She dearly hoped it was not too late.
Running, she slid through the hole under the fence and made her way back to the scene of the fight. As she got closer, she heard no sounds of battle, no clashes of metal on metal.
She ran faster, afraid of what she would find.
But then she saw the area where the battle had taken place and stopped, stunned.
All was lost.
The bandits had won the fight.
Chapter Five:
We're All Dead Here
Kyria forced herself to go on.
I have to look.
The scene was still now. If there were any surviving bandits or workers, she saw no sign of them.
As she approached, she found the workers. First one, then another, then the rest. They were all so still wherever they lay. She had not seen her father yet, or her mother.
Maybe they got away.
But then she saw him. His body had been hidden by a fallen horse. She was startled when, coming closer, she found herself staring into his dead open eyes. She had expected them to be closed. Seeing him in this mockery of life disturbed her to the core.
“Papa?” She barely managed the word. She ran the remaining distance between them and knelt at his side. The man she had thought invulnerable, bigger than life, was dead, there, in her arms.
No!
She shook the body, willing it to be alive, to suddenly gasp out a breath and return to her, but it did not. She lay there, hugging his dead form for a time, crying, lost.
It was only when rain started falling on her, perhaps an hour later, that Kyria raised her head from her dead father’s chest. Her tears had run their course, for now. She carefully closed her father’s eyes and kissed his cheek one last time before she stood up.
Mama, she thought. She was afraid of actually finding her mother. She cannot still be alive. If she was, she’d have been here, weeping by my side.
Kyria surveyed the battlefield one more time. She accounted for all the workers. Along with them, there were the bodies of two horses and three of the riders. With the bandit Hexel had k
illed by the Yard, she reckoned that four of the riders had died.
Two survived. One of them their leader.
The girl continued her survey of the damages. Inside the house, she found dishes broken, cupboards left open and the pantry largely emptied. Her father’s pipe collection, only marginally valuable, was missing as well. Most importantly, she found no sign of her mother within.
Did they take her? The girl shuddered at the thought.
In the stables, Kyria found that the horses and the cart had been taken.
There was no sign of the girl’s mother.
“No!” she screamed, again and again until her throat burned. She took a shovel from the toolshed and, filled with rage, swung it at one of the bandit corpses. At the last instant, she twisted the shovel, missing the body.
No. I can’t take revenge on them now, they’re gone. These are just bodies, empty deserted houses. Let them rot where they lay.
Kyria instead put the shovel to its more traditional use. She began digging graves.
I will find the bandits.
They will pay.
I will find their leader.
He will suffer.
I will find my mother.
I will free her.
She repeated this to herself with each shovelful of dirt she dug. She repeated it to herself as she buried each and every worker in a grave that was too shallow to be proper, but was the best she could offer. She said it out loud when she buried her father.
Beside her father’s grave was an additional, very small and shallow one. In this hole Kyria put her books, her childish diaries, her dolls. That part of her life was over. Her books could offer no escape, her dolls no comfort.
When all the graves were filled, Kyria put a marker on each. These consisted of a plank of wood, half a metre tall, stuck into the dirt. On each one she carved the name of the deceased. For her father she wrote “Papa” on the marker. For her own grave she simply put “Kyria.”
Cold and soaked from the rain, exhausted by the labour, drained by grief and rage, the girl went to her own bed and collapsed. She had been certain sleep would claim her immediately, but it did not. Instead she just lay there, unable to sleep and unable to be truly awake. In her mind’s eye, she saw the dead over and over. When she finally fell asleep, she dreamt of her mother, of the things Kyria feared she was enduring.
