The Ossard Series (Books 1-3): The Fall of Ossard, Ossard's Hope, and Ossard's Shadow.

by Colin Taber

  Part II

  -

  A Sea of Hope

  Chapter 10

  -

  The Comfort of Pain

  -

  Sef hurt all over.

  For starters; from crushed toes to a fractured bone at his hip, but that wasn’t all, for in between those injuries he sported a shattered kneecap and legs broken in several places. Gashes and grazes wrapped such wounds in a layer of bruised and bloody flesh.

  Sef hurt all over, and that was just his legs!

  He was barely aware of anything but the pain, though he did feel the warmth of Anton by his side. A few breaths were all he took while he was conscious, before again passing out in the dark.

  Sef hurt all over, but to do so meant he lived.

  How many times he awoke with his thoughts drifting through a moment or more in such a dazed state he’d never know. What he did know was that he could feel the pain, and that was good, because it meant he was alive and healing. Better still, each time he awoke he could still feel the warmth of Anton beside him, his friend also spared and being miraculously renewed.

  Thank you, Juvela!

  Soon, he wouldn’t pass out because of the pain, but overcome it as Juvela’s healing continued to bring the both of them back. For now though, he would sleep, and with that groggy thought, his mind settled back into darkness.

  -

  Sef awoke, consciousness coming to him as he turned over in his sleep. The motion sent pain shooting through his shoulder and spidering out along cracked ribs. He chuckled with a soft voice at the hurt, for it was felt and took away his breath, but after so much of it, what he suffered now only came as a mild discomfort.

  “Are you awake?” asked Anton from beside him in the dark.

  “Yes, and you?”

  “So it seems.” The former inquisitor let out his own laugh. “It’s good to be home, isn’t it?”

  Sef chuckled afresh, and then groaned as he made to stand. He managed it, but only slowly, and by grabbing the wall for support. Once up, he found he could take small clumsy steps and carry his balanced weight, but his legs were too stiff to do much more.

  Anton’s voice came from below, “Are you standing, you show off?”

  “So it seems.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to be outdone by a hulking Fletlander!”

  Anton made to get up, struggling a little more than Sef had in the dark, but he managed, the sound of his breathing gaining in height.

  Sef reached out to help him.

  “Never mind, if you can do it by yourself, so can I! Besides, the arm you’ve grabbed is broken.”

  Sef laughed. “So’s the hand grabbing it!”

  Anton joined in the laughter. “For that matter, so are my legs and most other things.”

  Sef patted him on the back as he reached his goal.

  Anton chuckled. “Careful you big oaf, I imagine my back is also broken!”

  They laughed again and fell into an awkward embrace. After a moment they stepped apart, both marvelling at their survival.

  It was Anton who spoke first, “How much longer can we go on taking these beatings?”

  Sef shrugged in the dark, his stiff limbs and thick joints accommodating the move as best they could. “I don’t know, but after that last one, I think it’s safe to assume our captors will be expecting to come down later only to find bones.”

  “You’re right. They don’t care whether we survive, which means we’re out of time. If we’re going to get out of here, it has to be soon.”

  Sef nodded, knowing it was true. “All we’ve got is that blade.”

  “And our current immortality; I wonder if that’s a tool we can use?”

  “Interesting point: If in getting out of here, breaking a few bones on the way isn’t a problem, I wonder what avenues that opens up?”

  Anton offered, “Or spilling a little blood; I’ve just had an idea, not a pretty one, but a risk that might be worth taking.”

  “Blood? You mean blood magic?”

  “Yes, I studied it in the Inquisition.”

  “Studied or tried?” Sef asked.

  “Only studied back then, but...” and his words trailed off.

  “But?” Sef prompted warily.

  “I tried it, just a bit, when I broke the curse that was silencing you when we were up on the roof. I wanted to help, and I was already bleeding, thinking that neither of us might survive what was coming, so I spent some of my essence in an effort to free your truth.”

  Sef was at a loss to hear of such a thing. Finally, he said, “Anton, what a risk! While I thank you, it was a crazy thing to do!”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s done now.”

  “Nonetheless, I’m grateful,” and his voice choked, “but you say that you only used it a bit, yet you all but passed out. We’d need to do something more to escape.”

  “True.”

  “They say it’s easier to destroy than create.”

  “Yes, that bursting a curse is like crushing an egg, easy compared to making one. Still, blood magic remains an option.”

  “It’s dangerous, that’s why they call it the magic of the desperate!”

  “Sef, look around you; we are the desperate. If you want some hope, we’re going to have to make some. Combined with Juvela’s healing, it’s our best chance.”

  “Maybe. I suppose we’d begin to heal as soon as we began.”

  “It’d at least go some way to help balance out some of the cost; her healing flowing in as we spent our lifeblood. We’d still have to be quick to find somewhere safe to recover.”

  Sef sighed and with a sullen voice said, “If we’re going to do it, it needs to be soon. Despite the evidence to the contrary, I think her gifts are failing. I can feel it: Something’s wrong with her.”

  Chapter 11

  -

  The Green-Race

  -

  Winter became easier to bear, not just because of the warmth to be found in the canyon courtesy of its hot pools and steaming brooks, but because of its offered bounty. Beyond its fern-sided glades lay fertile soils brimming with ripening foods. Such generous yields ranged from vine-given melons and grapes to a wide array of edible roots. Many of the trees also bore an array of berries, nuts and fruits.

  On our second day there, Grenda toured me around and decided to take me further into the heart of this special place. She said, “Follow me and stick to the path. Your people are treating the place gently, but if we aren’t careful – there being so many of them – they’ll trample it into dust.”

  Pedro and Maria were with me, along with Kurt and Baruna, Marco, and our parents, too. I asked, “Where are you taking us?”

  “To the heartwood.”

  “It’s not in this canyon is it, for I’ve been all over it looking for a place of power?”

  Grenda looked to me. “You’re right, of course, though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you’d be able to sense such a thing.”

  “Where is it?”

  “This isn’t the only canyon; there are others that open up further back in the foundations of the hills. The hot streams have carved all this and made it possible.”

  We walked the length of the first canyon, following its twists and turns. Sometimes it widened to be two hundred paces across, and in others grew tight and narrow, stepping up alongside the rise of rapids. The surrounding lush greenery, warm mists and rich soils were constants, as was its lifeblood, the hot steaming streams. All of it was beautiful.

  About us, the canyon walls rose sheer to reach impressive heights. Part way up some cliff faces sat narrow green terraces, often with trees and vines spilling over. Caves yawned open in other places.

  Looking about, I couldn’t help but picture that the canyon might have once hosted people – and perhaps should again. That’d be a touchy subject, and one I’d have to approach carefully.

  After a while, we reached the canyon’s end to find a cave from which the main stream spilled to gush
through rough and quick. Steam also tumbled out of the cave, billowing in great clouds, rising as it escaped as though a mythical dragon laired within.

  Grenda led us in. “The stones are slippery, but there’s a handrail to your side. The path isn’t long in any case, so we won’t need lamps. Just watch your footing.” She then stepped into shadow.

  With a quick look to the others, I followed. Behind me came Baruna, then Pedro, followed by Marco whose spectral figure helped throw out some light – if it of a cold blue – then came our parents. My husband carried Maria; she was mesmerised by Marco’s glow.

  Daylight shone from the exit up ahead, looking to only be fifty paces further on. As we moved, we all had a turn at gasping in surprise as we slipped or nearly lost our footing on the narrow and slick path. Each time we grabbed at the handrail to save ourselves, our exclamations thankfully lost under the song of rushing water.

  The light ahead had a green hue, coloured by the rich foliage of trees. As we reached the exit, we could see that the path ran around the edge of a wide steaming pool, before disappearing into a wood that filled the width of the new canyon.

  Grenda waited for us. “Come, we’re nearly there.”

  I took a deep breath as I came into the light, relishing how fresh and free the air was, coming laced with the aroma of mint. “I’m looking forward to this. I have been ever since I first heard of it.”

  She smiled, but it was a sad thing. “It’s a shame we couldn’t have seen it alive. Neither the Prince nor I come here much, as both of us find the glade too sombre.” Grenda then led us along the path as it followed the pool’s edge, before it disappeared into the woods.

  The woodland was home to many trees and crowded with undergrowth, a place both dark and dense. It was like another world, a place marked by gnarled and moss-covered trunks, unlike anything I’d ever seen or imagined.

  And there was something else, something beyond the visible...

  I noticed a thrumming in the celestial, something that overwhelmed my efforts to be numb to that world of souls. The pulse came rhythmic and soft, like a heartbeat.

  Life’s haven...

  I stopped and asked, “Grenda, do you feel it?”

  Our group slowed as she stilled and paled.

  Baruna gave a confused nod; she could also sense it. “There’s something out there?”

  Grenda turned and started down the path ahead. “Impossible!”

  “What is it?” Angela asked.

  I answered as we followed, “It’s the heartwood.”

  Grenda picked up speed, rushing down the path, stumbling with age. She charged on heedless, becoming desperate.

  About us, the wood grew thicker, from a place of deep green into something dim where not even the sky or canyon walls showed through. And then, suddenly, we spilled out into a wide clearing.

  The heartwood!

  The edge of the glade was marked by a ring of silver-trunked trees, their boughs starting high above our heads, from where they reached up, as if praising what lay at their core: The mother of the rosetrees.

  The mother tree stood sporting jackets of weathered bark, faded and dry. It rose as seven trunks out of the soil, the great thick shafts forming a spreading ring around a centre of mulch. Tired and tortured, cracked and scarred, they abruptly ended as jagged stumps.

  Standing like a giant bouquet of bones!

  We slowed as we set foot on the clearing’s mint lawn, except for Grenda who continued to rush ahead. Stepping forward, I could see that five massive stones lay on their backs about the mother tree, amidst deep humus. The humus had been fed by the ages, made of fallen leaves and spent petals, but more so over the last century by shed twigs, bark and branches.

  Grenda, now breathing hard, scrambled up the closest knee-high stone to get something solid to stand on as she examined the tree.

  I led the others onto the same slab of stone, seeing us close enough to touch what remained of the mother of the rosetrees.

  The trunks leaned out, each thicker than Pedro’s chest. They all sprang from near the centre of their circle, and then reached away from each other, like spokes on some strange wheel, only to turn upwards as they headed for the heavens. None rose higher than four paces.

  Grenda handled the trunks, examining them with finger and eye. As she did, she whispered, “I can sense it, it lives! Something’s happened, something connected to your arrival!”

  The others looked to me, so I figured it was time to come clean with the truth – or what we knew. “Grenda, we called up four rosetrees on our way here, on the road from Ossard. It was on the valleyside of the Cassaro, not far east from Goldston.”

  She stopped her fingering search to look at me. “We?”

  “Me,” I corrected. “And the four of them grew at a very fast rate, seeming to root and regenerate from the rosewood timber used in the cart we travelled in. The last we saw of them, they were spreading alongside the slope of the valleyside.”

  “I don’t understand? Why would you be able to do such a thing?”

  I pulled the seeds out of my pocket, the five that I’d taken from the young trees growing on the road. I passed them to her. “I’ve been told – but not seen it for myself – that they’ve since been felled by the cultists of Ossard and the ground salted.”

  Grenda’s face paled.

  I went on, “If that’s true, none of it was in vain: Before we moved on from that camp I collected these seeds.”

  “This must be a jest, it has to be! The rosetree has been dead for over a hundred years! How could it return?”

  I had no easy answer.

  She shrugged at my silence, and then her brow furrowed. “Just to seed and then to be taken so cruelly away?” Her doubts grew, those of a tired and worn woman, one who had become lost and lonely.

  And almost hopeless...

  I said, “The rosetree returned because it wants to live. It may’ve only lasted for a few days, but it did it to try and take the valleys back – and gave me seeds to ensure yet another chance.”

  She looked at the seeds as they sat cupped in her wrinkled palm.

  As gently as I could, I said, “Plant them and see if they take.”

  She wiped at a tear with her free hand before looking back to meet my eyes. With hope she whispered, “Returned to grace the vales again...” her words trailed off, she just didn’t know what else to say.

  I offered, “If you’ve doubts consult the Prince. He’ll know them for what they are.”

  She closed her fingers over them protectively. “That’s a good idea.” Tears ran down her tired cheeks. “I thought it was us having to give you gifts of healing, but it’s as they said; you are our hope-bringer.”

  -

  We stayed until sunset, waiting for people to gather as word had been sent. So, as the sky coloured in gold and orange, with flashes of red on the higher clouds, over a thousand of our own sat on the mint lawn, while many more stood at the clearing’s edge. The Prince arrived with dozens of his own kind, and so Grenda and he talked.

  At times I was asked to tell them some detail or other of how I’d got the seeds, so I did, honestly and openly: Of how I purged myself of the power I’d gathered in my soul-feeding, using it to reawaken the Liberigos, and, in the process, set the rosewood timbers of the cart to sprout.

  Finally, as the light began to fade, I was summoned back to them one last time. The Prince asked, “Juvela, you give us a priceless gift, but we cannot agree on what to do with it. Still, it comes from you, so what would you suggest?”

  I looked about that circle of ghostly faces and to Old Grenda. “I’ve had no training in this, I can’t rightly say.”

  “But you called the rosetree forth from dead wood, you have more right in this than any – and perhaps wisdom waiting to take root?”

  “Grae ru,” his people chorused.

  Grenda said, “Some think we should plant them all here, others say one seed here, and the others should go each to a different vale?�
�

  I said, “I think we need to seed them elsewhere, all of them.”

  Surprised, the Prince asked, “Not here, where of all places it belongs?”

  I could see that they’d misunderstood. “While the heartwood here may’ve been all but dead, it is alive and now rousing. Whether it’s recovering by itself or been called back by me or the seeds, I can’t say. Regardless, you don’t need to put a rosetree here because the mother tree remains and will soon provide more seeds.”

  With my words, they all turned to look at the rising trunks of faded bark, now just silhouettes in the dying light.

  Grenda said, “I can feel something, that’s true, but there’s no sap in those trunks and nothing vital in its limbs?”

  I walked between them, drawn by a need, as if something was calling to me like a newborn babe crying out for its mother. At the edge of the stone platform, I stepped down to the space between two thick trunks and peered into the heart of the tree. There, I squatted down and began to run my fingers through centuries of humus.

  Reveal yourself!

  My own gathered people roused at my movements, edging closer.

  The Prince and his fellows, along with Grenda, each watched where I dug. In the silence, as people seemingly joined in holding their breaths, I could hear it; the soft rhythm of a pulse. It was something not in our physical world, but rolling from the celestial.

  There was something there, and each time I touched the soil it strengthened. The heartwood lived!

  Around the centre, buried under renewed soil, I found a hollow where rot had eaten out the core of the tree where the seven old trunks all met. I brushed the humus away to finally reveal a red shoot.

  And it would climb to stand for an age!

  Those near me cried out as the young shoot stood free.

  The sound of their awe rolled back as those behind also saw it and whispered the truth.