Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1)

by Michael Watson

  “We’re hardly welcome here. There’s no need to provoke the locals further."

  Tsellien nodded, glancing to the sky. “True. Not the welcome I expected, yes?” She gave Tyrissa a short bow. “We must go. Thank you, Tyrissa. When we return through here, I would like to speak with you at length."

  "I’d love that,” Tyrissa said, dozens of questions already popping into her head. “Good luck out there."

  Tsellien seemed amused by this.

  "Yes,” she said. “Luck."

  Chapter Four

  The aurora sparkled at the peak of its violet phase, the light tinting another perfect summer afternoon. Tyrissa and Oster weaved their way along a path even less trod than usual for the Morgwood, many miles north of their home. Stems of undergrowth crossed the path and slapped at passing arms and legs, the trail below their feet crumbling, reverting to natural forest floor. Oster had made the error of agreeing to help Tyrissa with a ‘quest’ before asking what it entailed. Tyrissa held him to his promise, but gave no other details beyond how far, how long, and needing an extra person to carry ‘it’. She would have preferred to bring Liran, but he had business back at the caravan.

  “Ty, can you at least tell me what we’re looking for?” The only hint to his sister’s intentions was the handsaw clipped to her belt, the tool bouncing along with her overconfident stride.

  “Ranger rule of the forest number eleven, ‘There are as many secrets as trees’”, Tyrissa quoted with as much wisdom she could muster. The Rangers were experts in every aspect of living off of and within the forest. They also didn’t number their rules. That was her addition to make it sound more impressive, and just may become canon. There sadly wasn’t anyone left to tell her otherwise. The order disappeared when her parents were still children.

  “That’s not really a rule. It’s more of a saying.” Oster audibly puffed every third word while the trail scaled an incline. Tyrissa slowed her pace, remembering that few were as practiced at navigating the shifting terrain below their feet as she.

  “You… I… well, anyway, this is one of them,” she said pointing ahead to the flattened top of the hill. There stood a tree unlike any other in the Morgwood. Its trunk was as large as a bull kaggorn at the base and it soared over a hundred feet high, a patriarch lording over the thin neighboring conifers. A thicket of gnarled branches spread out along its entire height, each bearing an array of broad, green leaves that would rustle in the wind rather than sigh. The dry and rotted leaves of previous years coated the forest floor, cushioning the final steps of their approach.

  “A steeloak,” Oster whispered in awe, running his hand over the tree trunk as if to gain assurance that it was real. The bark was a deep gray color, lending it a metallic appearance.

  “This is what I want my new staff to be made of. It’s supposed to be unbreakable once it dries.” Tyrissa scooped up a fallen twig from the forest floor. The twig didn’t even hint at snapping as she coiled it four times about her index finger. When released, it sprang back into its original shape. She tossed it over to Oster. He admired it in his palm for a moment before tucking it away as a keepsake.

  “The manuals talk of the rare steeloak tree growing in the areas near the Fjordway. I’ve been looking all summer for one. Papa will love working with it.”

  “A gift within a gift,” Oster said.

  “Exactly,” she said, her eyes scanning the lowest branches of the tree. “Give me a boost.”

  Tyrissa glided up along the trunk of the steeloak, smoothly scaling the maze of branches. Each hand hold and foot placement felt as solid as rock, the bigger forks of the tree immovable from the seemingly minor extra weight of the girl. She ascended most of the way up the steeloak to find a branch of the right length and girth, about twice the width of her wrist and long enough for a proper Morg staff. Upon finding one hanging easily in arm’s reach above a wider branch, Tyrissa settled in, her legs wrapped around the trunk below. Only then did she look down to see that the ground was visible only in swaying patches through tree’s layered, leafed fingers. Tyrissa had to admit that she was at a reckless height, even by her standards.

  She unclipped the handsaw from her belt. It was an older, unused one from a dusty storage crate in her father’s shop. No prized tool, it wouldn’t be missed in a normal day’s work and was quite replaceable. Tyrissa went to work with the saw, and found that even when alive the steeloak’s possessed an unnatural toughness. Flecks of gray dust fell like snow upon her upturned face as she sawed away. Like all of her siblings, she’d helped out in her father’s shop, and knew that a cut like this should have been quick. Yet, it took nearly ten minutes to saw through the relatively thin steeloak branch, with multiple breaks to rest her aching arms. After a few final strokes, a splintering crack ripped through the air and the branch fell away. Tyrissa watched it slide and crash through the lower reaches of the tree waiting for it to get stuck, but her future staff flew true all the way to the ground. She took that as a good sign.

  Oster’s voice called up, “I got it!”

  Tyrissa replaced the leather guard on the handsaw, noting how dull the blade was after one session with the fabled wood, and re-clipped it to her belt. Shifting her weight, she made to climb back down the tree but paused, finally taking note of the view.

  From her vantage point in the swaying heights of the steeloak’s upper branches and with the tree itself at the crest of a hill, Tyrissa could easily see over the tops of the common pine and firs of the Morgwood. The forest stretched northward as far as she could see, a green carpet that rolled over hills and sharp ravines, broken only by the jagged peaks of the Norspine Mountains and a few large lakes that glittered in the sun. She caught such views daily, but every once in a while took a moment to relish them. The sense of belonging never waned, no matter how hard she tried to push it away. About to turn back to the task of climbing down, Tyrissa’s eye caught a dark blemish in the expanse of forest. Atop one of the foothills, miles more to the north, there was an area of felled trees and raw rock as if a landslide had swept through.

  No, that explanation felt wrong. Tyrissa squinted against the distance, wishing she were closer. Among the devastation rose a spire of stone as black as a midnight without the aurora. Tyrissa stared, blinking a few times against the midday sun, waiting for her imagination to stop trying to fool her. The spire remained quite real and not some visual trick of a rock formation. It could only be manmade, in a place where there should be naught but nature.

  Oster called up at her, breaking the brief spell that held her attention.

  “Yeah! I’m coming,” she yelled back. Tyrissa took one more look at the strange spire, memorizing its location and promising herself that she would investigate it another day. It lay a few more hours away, through rough terrain at the back of a long valley. She eloped for a day last summer to ‘survey’ the area and a route came to mind immediately. It was the same direction she sent Tsellien’s party well over two weeks ago. They hadn’t returned back through Edgewatch, much to her disappointment.

  I’ll go alone, she thought. This will be my discovery.

  Days later, the Jorensen family held a modest celebration at midday for Tyrissa seventeenth birthday. Afterward, they each went about their separate business. Liran, once again, had to return to the caravan for a few days, her father had orders to fill (including Tyrissa’s) and her brothers had afternoon lessons and apprentice work to attend to. Tyrissa was free to curl up in one of the two upholstered armchairs near the cold and clean fireplace of their living room. They were dark blue with a pattern of curling leafed vines, the colors faded from age and use. The cushions were thin in spots but raw nostalgia kept the chairs comfortable, a constant, quiet presence in their household for as long as Tyrissa could remember.

  Here, Tyrissa dived into Liran’s gift: a pristine copy of Tales from Across the North, a collection of adventure stories edited by one ‘Giroon the Great’. Tyrissa skipped the rambling, self-important introduction and scanned t
hrough the table of contents. She was thrilled to find that while she had already read a few of the stories, the majority of the book was new to her. Liran had chosen his gift well. Her brother made a tradition out of giving her a book on her birthday and this one would more than make up for last year’s breaking of that tradition.

  Tyrissa flipped through the book, skimming the pages for a place to start, torn between stories about the Golden Legion of the ancient Rhonian Empire and the heroic pirates of the outer Felarill isles before settling on a tale from the journeys of Calad Stoneshield, an Earth Pactbound and one of her favorites. It detailed his adventures in Morgale during the clan era, long before even the idea of a unified kingdom arose, and fit into a gap in the chronology of Calad’s stories that she had already read. It quickly became clear why her Morg-printed books skipped this particular section of the hero’s life. The stories were unkind to her people, likening them to simple forest and mountain dwelling barbarians. ‘Yellow haired savages’ with ‘ghostly-pale skin and ignorant, animal eyes’ were common descriptors. Tyrissa read on in a mix of discomfort and illicit thrill. The story was hundreds of years old but still haunted her with the question of ‘Is this how southerners see us?’ News of the unreal savagery of the Cleanse probably only reinforced the idea.

  Time vanished into the pages, Tyrissa only noticing its passage when she had to light an oil lamp against the descending dusk. She could hear her mother bustling about in the kitchen, preparing the evening meal. Her journeys were broken only by her father settling into the matching chair.

  “Evening, Ty,” he said.

  “We need to talk,” Tyrissa said, meeting his eyes over the top of the book. Her father still wore his working clothes and was speckled with persistent bits of sawdust, but his face and hands were clean.

  “We do,” he agreed. Tyrissa caught sight of her mother’s silhouette turning away in the darkened doorway to the kitchen. She marked her place in the book and set it aside.

  Her father nodded and skipped the introduction as they both knew this chat would be a continuation.

  “Ty, you must find your place and you need to make a realistic choice. We’re still rebuilding from the Cleanse, there’s no shortage of jobs and trades that need hands. Your mother may encourage you towards ‘proper’ tasks, but after so many losses we can no longer afford to adhere to the old customs of gender.”

  Some abandonment of the old ways Tyrissa welcomed. The idea of her as a maid or seamstress or mother was laughable. Even with her overly packed imagination, some things were beyond her ability to visualize.

  “You don’t have to choose right away,” he continued, “but you need to decide what you really want, what your place in the world will be.”

  “I already know what I want.” This type of heart-to-heart talk wasn’t new, just more urgent. She couldn’t put it off much longer. It felt so unfair. She was supposed to follow a calling, but no, not this or that.

  “Ty, the old ways are gone. They were dying when I was your age and after the Cleanse… well, many things changed after that.” Her father leaned his head back against chair, eyes raised to the ceiling, as if staring through the wooden beams and tiled roof to the sky above. His eyes took on a rare and distinct cast when he remembered those troubled times. All the blood and steel and death and near-pyrrhic triumph glinted there in the reflected lamplight. Tyrissa had seen the scars on her father’s back and chest and arms. They were cuts from blades, a couple of arrow wounds, and a single set of parallel scars from the claws of some creature not detailed in any of her ranger manuals. Together they formed a timeline of his experiences during the Cleanse. He saw so much, all not far from their supposedly ‘safe’ home in Greden, the Morg capital that had weathered the storm better than most.

  “We came so close to destroying ourselves,” he said. “After that, of course we traded the ways of the forest for the comfort and safety of the south.” Despite the familiarity of the talk, Tyrissa could hear an earnest timbre in her father’s voice, an absence of the previous occasions’ patronizing tone. “Don’t think that we’ve honey-coated the Cleanse for the children. Over the years in your schooling you’ve been told every sordid detail needed to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.”

  “I know, papa.” Tyrissa couldn’t forget the long, terrifying lectures given by her schoolmistresses over the years about the Cleanse, Morgale’s five years of pure hell. A war between old, nearly meaningless clans, followed by a scattered, seeping corruption of hearts and minds. Then came the emergence of countless Pactbound men and women fueled by daemonic magicks. Neighbor killed neighbor and roving mobs murdered anyone suspected of being ‘touched’, only for more daemons to appear alongside bands of forest dwellers firmly under their sway. Villages burned and towns emptied in a vicious cycle of self-inflicted genocide broken only by King Horald’s armies, guided by rumored divine providence. His justice had the same brutality, but it was an effective, directed brutality. The Pactbound were exterminated, and you could look someone in the eye without wondering if they were one of them.

  “We rebuilt this town as a wall, a way of shielding us from the past and as a monument to better times. It’s not an exercise in denial but a form of therapy, a restoration of life’s order. Your mother and I, our generation needs to cling to something. For Iri it’s a desire, misguided or not, to see you live a life she was denied.

  “Then what is she hiding from me?”

  Orval sighed. “Her choice, Ty. She will tell you when she feels ready. Though I must admit I’m surprised you haven’t been hounding the other veterans in the village about it.”

  “I—” she stopped herself short, considering the why. “It seemed too personal. The way they look at her, or rather, not look at her makes me think they don’t know the truth either. I’d just get their versions.”

  “Showing more maturity already,” he said with a smile. “Now, enough of this grim, adult talk, this is a joyous occasion. My little girl is no longer little, and no longer a girl.”

  Orval stood and went to the door. There, he retrieved a staff propped against the doorframe. So absorbed was she in the book, Tyrissa hadn’t noticed her father bring it inside. Their talk and the stories of her new book vanished from her thoughts as her heart jumped in excitement.

  “I thought it would be a few more days,” she said, the words rushing out.

  “I pushed your order to the front,” her father said as he reentered the pool of lamplight. “The mending of chairs and building shelves can wait for this.”

  He held the staff up horizontally in his weathered upturned palms.

  “For you, my daughter, on the day of your rise to womanhood.”

  Tyrissa sprang up, smile as broad as it’s ever been, and accepted the weapon with a little bow. The storm gray wood was smooth, pristine. Three bands of polished steel were set into the staff, a long one at the center and two narrower bands at either end. Tyrissa took a few steps back and gave her new staff a few slow, experimental spins and swings. The balance was exquisite, though it was little long with room for growth.

  Tyrissa laughed and threw her arms around her father in a tight hug.

  “It’s perfect. Thank you, papa.”

  They embraced in silence for a moment before Orval said, “I wish you’d tell me where that tree is.” There was a touch of hunger in his voice. He could make a fortune from that tree, given the rarity of steeloak lumber. A woodworker with nigh-indestructible products would be well off indeed. Her father wasn’t greedy, but was a business man all the same.

  “You just said how you’ve had to leave the old ways behind Papa. That tree belongs to the forest and those who still follow old paths.”

  He pulled away, hands on her shoulders, and gave her the look of a man who just outwitted himself.

  “That I did,” he said nodding, beard curling around that small smile of his. “That I did.”

  Chapter Five

  Tyrissa awoke before summer’s early dawn, her
mind too full of anticipation to sleep any further. She craned her neck back and looked up at the tall thin window set into the wall above the head of her bed. The aurora’s hazel light filtered through the thick pane of glass, promising clear skies. Lying there in the near-darkness, she smiled to herself. Today would be the day she traveled to the distant, beckoning spire that she’d spied from the steeloak’s branches.

  Fighting down the excitement that jolted away any lingering lethargy of sleep, Tyrissa lay still and ran her eyes over her darkened bedroom. It was small and narrow, partitioned off a few years ago (at her mother’s insistence) from the much larger bedroom now shared by Oster and Sven. Her room was just large enough to hold a bed, a stout storage chest and the proper level of privacy for a young lady. Two built-in shelves lined the dividing wall with twenty-three books in a neat row upon the upper shelf: Tyrissa’s collection of adventure tales, myths, and a pair of well-loved ranger almanacs. Each was a treasured gift, a hard earned purchase, or simply ‘borrowed’ on a very long term basis. Tyrissa listened for the sound of other early risers, but heard nothing but her own breath. Today was the day of rest after all, and the Jorensen household was still. It was time.

  The would-be explorer sat up, threw aside her quilt and peeled off her night clothes. Her skin broke into goose bumps against the cooled night air as she sprang out of bed and padded over to the storage chest. It opened without a sound (she had oiled the hinges a few days ago to be certain) and she grabbed the bundle of clothes set aside the night before. Tyrissa pulled on her outfit for the day, consisting chiefly of a faded green shirt with short sleeves that stopped just below the shoulder and her favored pair of earth-tone trousers that were, week by week, becoming a bit too tight at the hips.

  As she blindly worked her belt on, Tyrissa mentally ran through the contents of the small pack attached to the belt. It held a fair amount of jerky, nuts, dried berries, and bread pilfered from her mother’s pantry and an empty water skin. There were also a few matches, a length of bandages, and an extra pair of woolen socks.