Harbinger

by Shae Ford

  “Next time we’ll break one of your legs. Now get out of my woods, half-breed.” With a hard shove in the back, Marc sent him into the trees.

  Every breath felt like a knife between his ribs and the world swam in front of him, but he managed to keep his footing long enough to get away. He knew full well that an unconscious man might as well be a dead one, in the mountains. So he put every ounce of his strength into a run.

  His head pounded against his ears, keeping time with the jostling motion of his legs. A strong gust of wind whipped over him, followed by a loud crack. The sudden flip of his stomach told him what was coming.

  He forced every muscle and sinew into a dive. Not a second after his chest hit the ground, a wave of dirt and pebbles rained down on him, slung by the force of a colossal oak branch as it struck the path. His speed was the only thing that saved him from being crushed beneath it.

  There was a reason the mountains were called unforgivable: they only allowed one mistake. One trip, one fall, one run-in with an angry bear — that was all a man could expect to get. So great were the dangers that even the King stopped trying to conquer them. The people of Tinnark hadn’t been taxed in centuries.

  It was several minutes before Kael’s heart stopped racing, and his legs shook as he pulled himself from the ground. But for all he’d failed that day, it gave him some satisfaction to know that he thwarted the mountain’s gruesome plans once again.

  He imagined the trees snapped their twigs and glared as he jogged away.

  *******

  When he broke from the cover of the trees, he slowed to a trot. A large boulder rose out of the ground to the left of the path, and he climbed it expertly.

  It was his favorite view of the village. From where he stood, he could see a smatter of tiny wooden houses perched on the slope beneath him. They had the triangular shape of tents, with their roofs falling from a point to touch the rocky ground. People moved between them, scurrying along the roughly cut path like beetles through wood. They carried bundles of sticks across their backs or strings of fish in either hand. Even the smallest villagers walked behind their parents, toting a portion of the work.

  Two of the houses were larger than the rest. The hospital sat at the edge of the village, close to the woods. It was the same width as an average house but roughly thrice as long. The largest building was the Hall. It stood directly in the center of Tinnark, and its roof was wide enough to hold the entire village under it for three meals a day.

  A good rain might have washed it away, but it was still home. Kael wondered what people from other lands might think of it. How would it compare to the endless blue ocean, or the gentle wave of grain fields? He watched the clouds roll overhead, covering the tiny houses in one shade of gray after the next, and almost smiled.

  The sun rarely shined on Tinnark. But when it did, people complained.

  He knew he couldn’t put it off any longer. He would have to leave the forest eventually: it was too dangerous to travel through the woods without a bow. As he jogged down the slope, he didn’t look back. He knew his days among the trees were over, but he refused to let the mountains see how much it hurt him.

  Next to the hospital sat the small, one-room cabin he shared with Amos. No one else wanted to put their home nearby because they believed it would invite ghosts across their thresholds. So they had the land mostly to themselves.

  He pushed the battered, weatherworn door open, listening to the familiar creak of its hinges. Amos promised that he would talk to the blacksmith about having them fixed … nearly a decade ago. But they spent so many of their days and nights at the hospital that things like creaky hinges went forgotten.

  Now their hearth had more dust than ash, the holes in their roof went un-mended, and it all smelled faintly of mold.

  A small family of mice had taken up residence under their floor planks. When he opened the door, they scattered — making off with the bits of straw they’d been busily nicking out of a hole in his mattress. Their little feet tapped against the floor as they scurried into their den. He could hear them muttering to one another while he tried to find a place to hide his quiver.

  In the end, he stuffed it rather unceremoniously under his bed, deep in the shadows. The shafts of light filtering through the roof were too weak to find it. And he figured that the mice would eventually become numerous enough to carry it off on their backs, anyways. So without giving too much worry to it, he left the cabin and made his way down the dirt road to the hospital.

  He opened the door and wasn’t at all surprised to see that the beds were nearly full. Most of the patients were fishermen— the snow melting off the summit made the rivers swell this time of year, and made fishing all the more perilous. Many nursed broken arms or sprained ankles and groaned as they shifted their weight.

  In a shadowed corner of the room, a group of young women sat around one of the cloth-covered tables. They held their noses and grimaced as they sipped from earthen cups, pausing every now and then to scratch at the sickly green splotches on their necks. They must have gotten into last night’s blueberry stew.

  In the mountains, even the most unassuming berry had to be cooked — raw, their juices had a poison in them that settled in the throat and spread to other victims through coughs. Amos called it thistlethroat, and the remedy was one of the most unpleasant tonics in his cabinet.

  Kael knew he’d been right to choose a different pot.

  Just beyond the coughing women was a man who looked like he’d tangled with a beehive: the skin on his face was red and taut, stretched across the sharp lumps of his swollen cheeks. He moaned unintelligibly through his puffy lips, and Kael stopped to put more ointment on the stings. He’d read that in other regions, the bees actually lost their barbs. But in the mountains they could go on stinging a man until he crushed them ... or died.

  He finally discovered Amos in the back of the room, tending to a boy with a large cut on the top of his arm. Though his hair was gray, Amos’s brown eyes were still plenty sharp. Hardly a thing went on in his hospital without him knowing about it.

  “Don’t pick at those stitches, young man! Do you want it to turn black and rot off?” he snapped.

  The boy jerked his hand away from the wound and his eyes filled with tears.

  “I didn’t think so.” Amos wrapped the boy’s arm in a clean white bandage and then gave him a serious look. “No more climbing on rotten trees, all right?”

  The boy nodded stiffly. And as he left, he held his arm far to the side — as if it might fall off at any moment.

  “Don’t forget: you’re to come see me again in one week. Tell your parents,” Amos called after him.

  No sooner was the boy gone than a fisherman stumbled over to take his place. He grimaced and leaned heavily on his companions — who supported him on either side.

  Amos looked him over. “What happened here? A bruised knee, a twisted ankle?”

  “No. Thorns,” the fisherman grunted. “I was standing on a rock and when I threw my line, my boots slipped out from under me. Fell flat into a patch of brambles, I did.” His friends turned him around, revealing the dozens of thorns that peppered his back. They poked through his shirt and left little rings of blood around each one.

  It made Kael’s skin itch to look at it, but Amos just rolled his eyes. “Oh for mercy’s sake. You look like an oversized hedgepig.” He led them to the nearest table and spread a clean sheet over it. “Lay him out here — no, on his stomach, boys! I shouldn’t have to pull them out through his lungs.”

  When they had him situated, Amos forced a cup of sharp-smelling tonic down the fisherman’s throat. He was soon snoring peacefully.

  “This shouldn’t take long. I’ll send him home when we’re done,” Amos said, shooing his companions out the door. When they were gone, he walked past Kael and said without looking: “Bring me those tweezers, will you?”

  He’d worked with Amos long enough to know exactly which tweezers he meant. They were a pair with groo
ves cut out of them: perfect for gripping onto the smooth surface of a thorn.

  “I’m going to pull these out, and I want you to dab the blood dry as soon as they’re free, all right?” Amos said.

  Kael got a clean cloth and held it next to the first thorn. Amos’s hands shook a little as he latched the tweezers onto it. But he furrowed his brows in stubborn concentration, and his hands became still. “Ready?” he said, and Kael nodded.

  With one sharp tug, Amos wrenched the thorn free and Kael pushed the cloth over the wound. He thought there was an awful lot of blood, and he heard Amos mutter a curse under his breath.

  “Hooknettle,” he grouched, holding the thorn up for Kael to see.

  Hooknettle was one of the nastier mountain brambles. Its thorns were shaped like a fisherman’s hook: with one barb at the tip and another on the side. The barb at the tip dug into flesh while the other latched on, making it nearly impossible to pull free without taking a sizable chunk of skin with it.

  “I don’t have time for this.” Amos dropped the thorn into a bowl, reached behind him and grabbed another instrument. It was a long, thin rod of metal that he used to pull debris from deep wounds. He latched onto the next thorn and stuck the rod down into the puncture. This time when he pulled, the barb came out cleanly.

  It took them hours to remove all the thorns, clean the wounds and bandage them. “Well if that wasn’t the biggest waste of my time …” Amos let his sentence trail into a string of grumbles as he finished the last bandage. While he scrubbed his hands in a bowl of water, he locked his sharp eyes on Kael. “See? If you hadn’t been here to help, it would have taken me all blasted week. I wish you’d give up this hunter nonsense and take your place as a healer.”

  They’d been arguing about his future since the day he turned twelve. Usually, Kael would cross his arms and remind Amos that hunting was his dream, and he had a right to face the Trial of the Five Arrows. But not today.

  “Healing is your love, not mine,” Kael said. He knew the words sounded hollow the second he spoke them.

  Fortunately, Amos didn’t seem to notice. “You shouldn’t scorn your gifts, boy. You have a knack for healing. And sooner or later you’re going to have to face it.”

  He hated that. He hated hearing it. So what if he had a knack? It didn’t change the fact that his heart didn’t beat for it. He didn’t care about herbs or salves — he wanted adventure! He wanted to fight, to defend the realm. Deep in the pit of his soul, Kael was a warrior.

  But Fate told it differently.

  “I’m going to dinner,” he muttered. He didn’t wait for Amos to follow, but went straight out the door.

  *******

  The noise in the Hall was deafening — but then dinner was always the loudest meal of the day. When the sky finally went dark, the Tinnarkians would put their boots up and celebrate. Sure, they may have limps or scrapes or arms in slings, but at least they’d managed to live through the day.

  Long tables fanned out from the middle of the Hall like rays from the sun. A huge bed of coals burned in a hole cut out of the floor and a dozen pots hovered above it, their bubbling contents suspended by iron spits.

  This was where all the food in Tinnark wound up: the pot. Most days, it was a mushy stew with thick brown broth. But stews with berries in them usually turned a murky gray.

  Kael chose the shortest line and grabbed a clean bowl off the serving table. There were few jobs for girls his age. Besides getting married and having children, about the only other thing they could do was cook. When he stepped up to the pot, the girl who ladled his stew plunked it down without a care, splattering it across his boots.

  He was used to it. The girls teased him about his skinny limbs just as much as the boys did — though never to his face. At least with a punch, he could stand tall and take it like a man. But the girls waited until his back was turned before they flogged him with their laughter. Which he thought might’ve hurt worse than a blow to the gut.

  The hunters claimed the seats closest to the fire — which meant Kael had to pass them anytime he went to get a meal. He tried to ignore their jeers, but then Laemoth stuck his leg out to trip him. He skipped over it — and Marc shoved him for dodging.

  Hot stew sloshed out of his bowl and onto the front of his tunic. They laughed, and normally he would have been ready with a clever retort. But tonight he had worse things to worry about. So instead, he ignored their name-calling and went straight for his table.

  Amos and Roland were old men, which meant they didn’t have to wait in line for food. By the time Kael made it to the table, they were already arguing between spoonfuls.

  “You know what I saw this morning?” Roland said as he leaned over his bowl, his wiry gray beard nearly dipping into the broth.

  “I can only imagine,” Amos grumped.

  “A raven sitting outside my door. I walked out and there he was, staring me down with those beady black eyes. And of course, you know what that means —”

  “You’ll have to clean the droppings off your doorstep?”

  Roland frowned at him. “No. It means we’ll have company tonight.”

  Amos snorted. “Company? You know as well as I do that there hasn’t been a traveler in Tinnark since before either of us was born.”

  “Mayhap there would be, if tales of your crotchety ways hadn’t seeped down the mountains and scared them all off.”

  Kael knew there was no point in trying to interrupt them. Roland and Amos had been friends since childhood, and now that they were old widowers, neither had anything better to do than grump at the other — or heckle Kael.

  When Roland noticed him trying to sit quietly, he grinned through his beard. “What have you got?” he said, his voice as rough as his calloused hands.

  Kael put a spoonful of stew in his mouth and grimaced as the flavors hit him. “Rabbit and blackberries.”

  Roland laughed. “It’s quail and pine nuts for me. Amos?”

  “I don’t know. Leeks and salmon.” He didn’t like Roland’s game. He’d lost his sense of taste years ago — which was perhaps why his tonics were so notoriously foul.

  “Salmon?” Roland dipped his spoon into Amos’s bowl. His dark eyes roved while he chewed. “That isn’t salmon — it’s hog, you crazy old man!”

  Half of what the hunters caught was dried and stored for winter; the other half was prepared and tossed into the pot — without a care as to how it all might taste together. Rabbits and blackberries certainly wasn’t the worst mix he’d ever had.

  “How did it go today?” There was a glint in Roland’s eye — a glint he always got when he had the chance to talk about hunting. The joints of his fingers may have been too swollen to draw a bow, but he still had the heart of a young man.

  “Not well. I didn’t come back with anything,” Kael said, keeping his eyes trained on the table. It wasn’t a lie, but when he saw the disappointment on Roland’s face, it felt like one.

  “Aw well, that’s all right. Sometimes the forest is mean, and sometimes she’s less mean. But at least she weren’t mean to everybody: Marc and Laemoth brought home a whole sack of game and a deer.” He grinned and elbowed Amos, jostling the stew out of his spoon. “A deer, this late in the season. Can you believe it?”

  “I’m amazed,” Amos grumped as he tried his bite again.

  Roland arms crossed over his bony chest. “You ought to be. The elders think it’s a good sign for us. They think the winter won’t be so harsh this year.”

  “Do they? Well my joints tell a different story — it’s going to be as cold and miserable a winter as ever in these blast forsaken mountains, mark my words.”

  Roland laughed.

  While they argued over the next thing on their list, Kael sat in silence. He was grateful for the noise in the Hall, grateful that they couldn’t hear the sounds of rabbits and blackberries waging war in his stomach. Dinner was coming to an end, and at any moment the elders would stand and ask anyone who had business to approach them. T
hat was the moment he was dreading.

  “Are you feeling all right?”

  Roland’s question brought him back to the present. He wiped at the cold sweat on his face and nodded.

  Roland gave him a long look, then shrugged. “Well all right. I want you to feel good tonight because I’ve got a surprise for you.” He leaned forward and his face split into a wide smile. “I’ve been talking to the elders for weeks now — battling, really. Bunch of stubborn old coots. Anyways, I think I’ve figured out a way to get you in.”

  “Get me in where?”

  Roland looked at him incredulously. “The hunters, of course!”

  Kael’s stomach sank to his feet. He felt like he was going to be sick. Whatever Roland had planned wouldn’t work, not if he didn’t have his bow. Why hadn’t he been patient and waited one more day to go on the hunt? Why hadn’t he let up and allowed the deer to get away?

  It was all too gruesome a coincidence, and it made Roland’s words sound like cotton in his ears. He only caught a few of them:

  “… knew you’d be excited … perfect timing … should go join the boys, now … elders’ll want to discuss this with the people!”

  By the time he pulled himself out of the daze, it was too late. Roland was already at the hunters’ table, laughing and shaking hands with them. Across the fire pit, Brock was standing. He held his arms wide and the Hall suddenly fell silent.

  “People of Tinnark,” he said, resuming his seat. “The elders will now hear anything you might have to say. Does anyone have anything they’d like the elders to hear?”

  And to Kael’s horror, Roland was the first to step up. “Elders, people of Tinnark. Winter is almost here,” he said.

  A few people laughed. In the Unforgivable Mountains, winter was always either here or almost here. In fact, some joked that winter claimed three of the four seasons — leaving spring, summer and fall to share.