“I’m no coward,” Kelc retorted, immediately wishing he hadn’t. Be the calm one, he told himself.
“Oh, you’re a coward. The last time we sparred you told me that you’ve spent most of your life fighting yourself,” Varrl hissed, “fighting your fear.”
“Very well,” Kelc said, knowing that the only way he could help his family and serve the dead was to give in to his father’s demand. He pivoted away from the larger man and quickly gathered his sword and skiver from his room.
He sprinted back. Varrl was almost to the porch stairs when Kelc burst from the house, charging into his father’s back, swords raised.
The sword came in from one side and the skiver from the other. His father managed to get his blade out and up in front of his son’s scimitar, deflecting it, but Kelc’s dagger bit into his shoulder.
Blood welled up into the grey cloth there instantly and Varrl called out in pain. “Very well, boy! It always did come down to this.”
Kelc responded with a double thrust. Again his sword missed wide, driven there by his father’s steel while his skiver bit into his father’s exposed side, this time sinking in several knuckles.
“Kelc!” screamed his mother.
“Leave him, woman!” Varrl bellowed as he gave two steps, laboring to breathe.
Kelc pressed his advantage, again bringing both blades. His father darted to the side, trailing his steel before Kelc’s sword and then jumped back across his son’s face, grabbing his off hand and twisting it hard.
The skiver spun from his grip and disappeared in the snow, leaving him with just the curved scimitar.
Varrl immediately slashed into Kelc, but the boy brought a ferocious upswing and blasted the sword from its path, following it with a fist to his father’s face. Blood spurted out of Varrl’s left nostril as he again grunted in pain.
Kelc then spun, using the full force of his leverage and brought a two-handed cut across his father, but Varrl stepped into it and angled his blade, deflecting the powerful shot up and over him, buying time.
With Kelc out of position, the larger man drove two powerful punches into the boy’s exposed ribs and then kicked out into his knees.
Kelc gasped as his air left and then dropped to his back, his legs swept from beneath him. He brought his blade around but Varrl stepped past his fallen son and brought his own powerful shot into Kelc’s blade, ripping it from his hands. The curved sword skipped off of the icy snow once and clattered into the spokes of the wagon wheel.
“I disown you, boy!” Varrl shouted as he kicked Kelc, driving his steeled toe into his adversary’s gut. “You are no longer a member of this family,” he wheezed, kicking Kelc again, “or of Symea.” Kelc reflexively balled up against the attack but the kicks landed softly, weakly.
“Varrl!” Adda shouted from behind him, but he ignored her.
“You just couldn’t figure it out!” yelled Varrl, again kicking at his son. “You are so stubborn! So weak! Your weakness endangers all of us!”
Varrl dropped to his knees and reached both hands to Kelc’s neck, gathering his collar. He pulled his son toward him while lowering his bloody face, the left side of his mouth and chin coated with brownish red.
“Can you hear me, boy?” he hissed. Kelc nodded, still fighting to recover his breath.
“Varrl!” Adda again screamed, taking two steps to more clearly see what happened. But she could only see her husband’s back, his hands outstretched to Kelc’s neck. “Varrl!”
“Hush!” he ordered. “The boy gets what he deserves!” Then Varrl looked down at Kelc, his hands now creeping up to his throat. “You’re more stubborn than even me, boy. Too damned smart and too damned stupid. I had thought to live here after you are gone, but just as my father told me would happen, you wouldn’t be driven out. You wouldn’t leave.” A hoarse gust of laughter burst from him, a bit of blood spattering Kelc’s face. “I threatened and I beat you, but you came back for more. I brought in the greeching wardens to root you out and you waited for them, no matter how I drew it out, how much chance I gave you. And then…” Another laugh grew in him that caused choking until he could hock up and spit the blood rising from the wound in his side. “Then you disarmed Jista with the greeching power they came to find. Idiots,” his father breathed. “Greeching idiots.”
“Varrl, let him be.” Adda crept closer.
Kelc finally gathered his breath, unable to fully understand what he heard. But his father was weak. If he tried to choke him, Kelc knew he could break the hold, so he lay their panting, issuing small clouds of vapor into the icy air.
“Varrl!”
“Hush, woman. This is not your business.” Varrl sounded defeated even as he said it, his voice weakening. He looked at his son, still held by the throat in his hands. “We threatened your sister.” He sighed. “Your sister.” He shook his head slowly. “Still, you stayed. Even after the storm!” he mused, almost to himself. “I threw my voice into the storm, but you stayed. You stayed.”
“Varrl, we need to look at your side,” came Adda’s voice as she tried a different means for separating her husband from her son.
Her husband gusted another quick laugh. “Damn it all, woman. Hush!” He tightened his hands on his son’s throat and spoke in a low voice. “Kelc. Remember this. Your spirit is far far greater than your body. Don’t be afraid to let the body take the brunt of things if needs be.” Varrl focused on breathing for a moment. “And my spirit…” He smiled, a grim upturn of his lips. “Use my spirit for something noble. Take it,” he insisted, his eyes narrowing. “Use it. Something noble,” he urged. “Something Symean.” He pulled a deep breath, his eyes closed. “You’ve heard your last words from me, boy!” Varrl yelled, shocking his son with his ferocity. “Now I’ll squeeze the life from you with my own hands!”
His hands barely tightened on Kelc’s neck. Not because the younger man took his father’s hands into his own with almost no resistance, but because Varrl gave it no effort. He sat staring at his son, tears welling in his grey eyes. A smile formed on Varrl’s lips as if he suddenly understood a long-forgotten joke.
“No!” Adda screeched as she ran up behind her husband.
“Mother!” Kelc shouted too late.
The point of Kelc’s scimitar erupted from Varrl’s chest, coated in crimson. Kelc could already feel the spirit that his mother had called upon to drive the blade.
“Father!” Kelc shrieked, his senses utterly confused. “Father!”
“Kelc,” Varrl managed to say, his soft voice commanding attention. “Save your brother. He…” He drooped where he sat, his left hand leaving Kelc’s neck and rising to the blood-washed tip of the sword protruding from his chest as if he just noticed it there.
“Father,” Kelc urged, reaching up to his father’s shoulders to help stabilize him. “Kreg?”
Varrl’s eyes lifted to Kelc’s, lingering there for a moment before they seemed to lose focus. “Noble,” he said, the word riding his last breath. “Noble.”
The scene seemed frozen in time. A light flurry of snow began to fall from what had been a blue sky, dropping in on them like motes of white fluff from the hazy clouds above, moving on unseen currents of air that fluted through the surreal moment.
Varrl sat upright on his son’s stomach, his arms lax, his head nodded forward, Kelc gripping his shoulders. His back looked as if it had been painted with scarlet, though the sword still stood there, a steel spike that Adda, aided by spirit, had driven clean through him. A breeze stood some of his short brown hair up before releasing it to fall back against his skull where it collected the occasional speck of snow.
Shaia stood near the horses, her hands covering her mouth, shock etched into her face and posture. She looked as if she might still scream, the horror in her eyes palpable in the very air. She leaned against Kay, the horse’s robust form the only reason she didn’t topple to the ground
Adda looked at her husband of nearly three decades, dead by her hands. Her head seemed t
o occasionally shake as if she fought to continue looking while her body implored her to stop. She opened her mouth only to ease it closed. Her hands she held out before her as if confused about what to do next and afraid to move, afraid anything she did might create some greater wrong.
Kelc stared at his father, afraid to let him fall. His back froze as the snow melted against his body, aided by his father’s hot blood, and seeped into his clothes. His grey-green eyes stood wide open and he gulped air, attempting to reconcile the last few moments. Everything he’d just seen and heard ran against a lifetime of honed instinct. Tears dropped from the corners of his eyes, running into his hair each time he blinked, leaving an icy trail behind.
They remained that way for a time, no one sure of what to do. Anything seemed somehow sacrilegious to the moment. It was an important moment. A horrible moment. Confusing.
“Mother,” Kelc finally said, hazarding the heavy silence, “help me lay him down.” Adda did not respond. “Mother,” Kelc repeated.
She nodded as if slow, lurching forward almost mechanically. Her green eyes looked beyond her husband and son as she helped, peering to the horizon or further. Shaia, too, appeared next to her and helped lay her father in the snow next to Kelc.
“Hells and blood,” she whispered as the weight of Varrl’s body slipped from her hands. “What happened here?” She looked at her mother. “Mother?”
Adda backed up a few steps and fell onto her rump. One of her hands rose and she combed her fingers into her hair, pushing it back away from her face. “Youngest,” she said, dreamily, “I…” She shook her head. “He never…”
Kelc understood. “He never mentioned anything?” asked the young man. “Never even told you that he wanted to drive me away?”
She shook her head again.
Shaia hadn’t heard all that Varrl said. “What are you saying, Kelc? Father meant to make you leave?”
Kelc’s eyes slowly met those of his sister. “If he told the truth…” She waved the thought away. Varrl would no more lie outright than he would damn Symea. “He said that everything he did was an attempt to drive me away. He knew.” Kelc turned to look again upon his dead father. “He knew everything! I even think he could practice.”
“No,” Adda said. “I would have known.”
“Mother, he said he sent the voices through the storm. I heard voices. I’ve never felt so threatened and terrified.” Kelc scrubbed the fine ice crystals from the corners of his eyes. “He knew…”
“Why not just tell you to leave and…” Shaia waved her hands frantically, trying to rid herself of the anxiety she felt.
“The warden! Kreg, Tasher,” Adda moaned. “They can tell that sort of thing. If your father bothered to lie about helping Kelc, they’d have killed him and announced his dishonorable death. He couldn’t live with that. He wouldn’t.”
“And he wanted to remain here.” Kelc couldn’t believe it. All his life, his father had favored his brother. He’d always been harder on Kelc, especially in the last couple years. “He knew.”
“So he beat you bloody to protect you? That’s asinine!” Shaia looked from her brother to her mother. “He could have killed him at any time. Killed him! He couldn’t have been so good that he could know just how hard to pound on his eighteen year old son without killing him.”
“And both of his sons live yet without so much as a missing tooth,” Adda said, frowning. “Twenty-one years he told me that he knew what he was doing and to let him raise his sons. For twenty- one years I opposed him, stood in his way, ruined our marriage. Now Kreg is the Territorial Warden and Kelc is…” She looked to her son. “Oh, youngest!” Her tears gushed from her now. “What have I done?” She pressed her hands into her eyes. “You should have seen him when he brought you in from the blizzard. He was truly scared for you. I’d never seen such a thing. It shocked me more than your injuries. And he never even questioned the injuries. He knew. He greeching knew!”
“Mother!” Shaia said, her tears falling. She dropped down next to her mother and wrapped her arms around her. “It’s not your fault. Father caused it.”
“He planned it,” Kelc added. “He said that his father told him this would happen. His eyes at the end! He cried for the situation, because I was too stubborn to flee. He wrapped his hands around my neck but never tried to choke me. He knew you’d do it, mother. He knew!”
“Any fool could feel your power,” Adda wailed. “Of course he sensed it! Hells! When Jista took you out into the field I felt other power working on you. I even accused Shy of it, but she was indoors getting ready. It was him. Your father! He suffered this secret his whole life and because of this flame-blasted country full of hatred and fools, neither of us knew the other!” Adda ripped at her hair, bringing some of it from her head. “No!” she screeched. “How different things could have been!”
“He hid you,” Shaia said, dumbfounded, ignoring her mother’s outburst. “He folded you in Symean tradition and hid you from everyone. So…Kreg?”
“Kreg,” Adda said flatly, miserably. Yes, Kelc thought, Kreggen must also be a practitioner of some sort, if both parents were skilled. “Kreg,” she sobbed.
“Father asked me to save him,” Kelc said numbly. “I don’t even understand what I can do, nor how.” Kelc watched his mother for a moment. “Greeching Hells!” A moment from his past washed over him.
“What?” Shaia asked, her attention turning to him.
“Just remembering,” Kelc told her, as if that answered her. He thought back to the night he’d prepared Henna Lanch. His father had been drunk and said a number of odd things. “Father told me we were different. He said we were hunted here. Hells! Every word he said that night makes sense. Now…when it’s too late.” Kelc felt greater, deeper sorrow rising in him. “He told me I’d end up in the midst of things bigger than me and that he knew exactly how that felt. He lamented what he’d do when the wardens arrived.” Kelc’s voice cracked. “He said ‘Oh, what we have to do for the future.’ I thought he meant Kreg’s. I thought he meant…”
“And then he practiced the art right in front of the wardens,” Shaia said, understanding. Adda nodded.
“He was so nervous that day, pacing and wringing his hands.” Kelc’s mother sounded more stable now that he began falling apart. “I feel as if I understood nothing,” she said. “Least of all him.” She moved to her husband and laid her head on his shoulder. “So hard.”
“I need his soul,” Kelc announced, recovering somewhat. He bid me take it and use it. It is the least I can do.”
“He said that?” Shy asked, incredulous.
“He did,” Adda answered. “I heard him. Even in his last breath, he asked Kelc to use his spirit for something noble and Symean, whatever that might be.”
“Where’s my skiver?” Kelc asked, finally climbing up out of the freezing snow. “I need it.”
Shaia walked to it and reached into the snow, bringing the black dagger out. She immediately returned it to her brother.
Kelc took it in hand and turned to his father. He focused first on the blade and then his father’s corpse, where he could now see the soul laying inside, duplicating the position of the body exactly.
“Father,” he said, his voice failing him. “Father.”
The spirit seemed to awaken, easily and willingly, rising from the corpse. It rotated in the air until it faced Kelc, a roughly human shape with no features.
“Father,” Kelc said again, “enter the knife. I want you whole, as you. I will bring you out when I’ve discovered your true purpose, just as you asked of me, if that is still your desire.”
The apparition’s head bowed before the shape dissolved into little more than a cloud of haze that funneled into the skiver. The black steel heated in Kelc’s hand, cooling only after it absorbed his father’s spirit.
“So different from Lanch,” Kelc whispered.
“Once,” Shaia said quietly, “I might have likened the two of them to each other, but not now. N
ow, I don’t know what to think.” Shy leaned against her brother, threading one arm inside of his. “What are we going to do?”
“Flee!” Adda said behind them. “I will bury his body, but the wardens will arrive in a couple of days to find out why Varrl never showed up for the Norlins. You two have that much of a head start.” Kelc’s mother frowned, renewed tears dropping down her cheeks. “You’ll need it.”
“Come with us!” Shy told her. “We can all go.”
“No, dear. My place is here. This crime I will pay for.” Kelc started to argue but she waved him into silence. “Your father gave his life to give you this chance and I will do what I can as well. No argument. Now prepare, youngest, Shy! You have little time.”
Packing to leave home added another chapter to the surreal feel of recent events. So far as Kelc was concerned, things hadn’t made much sense for a season or more. Knowing the depth of manipulation of some of those events helped to a degree, but he struggled to accept his new understanding.
Even if his father held his best interest at the center of his actions, he’d still mistreated Kelc throughout his life. Yes, he’d trained Kelc to fight and kept him safe from those that sought to eliminate people with his skills, but he’d also beaten, bloodied and demeaned him daily.
“Hells,” Kelc breathed, trying to focus on packing what he needed to bring, his efforts undermined by his emotions.
He stacked items on his bed as he thought of them: A bedroll, extra clothes, his heavy cloak. His mother worked on food… “A tent! Greech! We’d be dead on the first night without that. And a lamp.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Think Kelc, or it’ll be the dumbest mistake that kills you.”
He stepped out of his room to find Shaia making her own pile in the middle of the living area. She looked up and raised her brows inquisitively.
Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One Page 21
