by J. C. Hendee
Finding the right words, just simple ones, had been so hard to do. Those words would cost him everything he had, but what did that matter if they gained him what mattered most? When he stepped out of the broad passage that spiraled down through the settlement's seven vast underlevels, he froze at the head of yillichreg Bâyir—Limestone Mainway.
Only every stone column down its center held a huge, steaming crystal high above to illuminate the way in pools of yellow-orange light, for this was poorest level of the whole seatt. He looked a little rightward and made out the one vubrí on a dingy banner above the old framestones of a small archway.
KÌNNÉBUY, or “The People’s House.”
That cheag’anâkst, or greeting house, was where Fiáh'our had first trapped him after a final failure with Skirra.
Karras faltered again. Rather than go on to face why he had come down here, he went to peek into that place.
Inside were many rughìr standing or sitting upon benches in crowding around the tables within the huge inner hall. Perhaps too many too early, for when he had come down, dusk had not yet settled over the mountain. A low rumble of voices filled the place around the broad stone platform, but no one strode about it in a bluster telling tall tales of unbelievable exploits.
Karras clung to the framestones with one hand as he looked for faces he recognized. It was hard to pick out anyone.
He spotted Gän first, once again dressed in the white vestment of a shirvêsh to Skâpagi, the Guardian. The shirvêsh's beard was once more trimmed in a clean line along his jaw. Hopefully he felt more like himself and not what he had become—again—out on the frontier.
Below Gän sat stern Lêt’vöulsat, his head propped aside on a hand with his elbow on the table, and his face was covered in a glower. There was no sign of his long, heavy spear, and he was dressed down to only a faded blue tunic. The old cohort of the blusterer still had that bulky, bowl of a helmet on his bald head. Perhaps his discontent was for another sitting nearby.
That unknown one sat with his wide back toward Karras and gestured wildly in raising a tankard by its top with one big hand. He slammed it on the tabletop, foam sloshed out, and another sitting across the table with both hands folded on another tankard top started slightly in annoyance.
It might have been Lêt'vöulsat's brother, but Karras could not remember a name and looked about the rest of the hall. There were so many here and for only one reason that he could reason.
No one had heard anything of Fiáh'our in almost half of a year.
This had never happened before from what Karras had learned. The people loved him, and he loved them, enough not to have willingly left them for so long.
Karras had never wanted his apprenticeship; neither did he want it to end this way. And between the two, there was only a dark, cold pit like… like falling into stone.
When his gaze swung back, Gän was watching him, wide-eyed and startled. The shirvêsh cocked his head and waved him in, but Karras shook his head and mouthed “not yet.” By the time Gän's brow furrowed in puzzlement, Karras had backed out.
He headed down the mainway before he lost his nerve. This was the last chance for the only life he still wanted. Down one dark side passage, he stood frozen before a dingy open doorway looking in upon a little known smithy.
There were now three assistants busy about the dark place lit by the glow of coals in the open forge. Only that showed any change inside the smithy of the Yêarclág, the Iron-Braid family, but Karras watched only her.
How many times had he seen Skirra pull a mule shoe, chain link, or sometimes part of a weapon red-hot from the forge? How often had he stood there before speaking and listened as she clanked something down upon the anvil and set to work with her hammer? Each strike pierced his ears as it scattered sparks.
She was still the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. As fiery as her forge and her own sweat-soaked hair. As dark and grim as the soot smears upon her face. As unyielding but certain as the Meá from which she had made his weapon's heart.
Karras felt suddenly weak in holding Skirlan and quietly leaned it against the door's frame. About to speak, she cut him off in turning to pull the chains of the forge bellows. Smoke and sparks sucked up the soot-blackened tin flue over the forge, and when she turned back to take up tongs and hammer…
“I want your name,” Karras barely breathed out.
Skirra never looked up. No one else in forge room appeared to notice, and she pulled an iron bar from the coals. She set the glowing metal upon the anvil and struck it.
Karras flinched as sparks flew. He knew he had not spoken loud enough to be heard, but saying those words at all had been so terrifying, and not because of what they meant.
Skirra raised the hammer again.
“I want your name,” Karras pleaded a second time.
Skirra's hammer stalled in mid-air as she looked up, plainly annoyed at being interrupted in her work. That scowl blanked the instant she saw him outside the doorway.
“Karras?” she asked, as if uncertain, and the hammer settled upon the anvil with a soft click. “Do you need repairs on—?”
She stalled, peered at him, and blinked.
“Your beard is gone,” she said half-certain, and then nodded. “It is… better… more like you. So, does Skirlan need tending after…”
Skirra stopped short. Something close to worry crossed her fine smooth features.
“Have you heard something… of Fiáh'our?”
Karras was too caught between fright and something else she had said. Males of his people were not supposed to be beardless, yet she had thought him better without a beard.
Had she seen him since his return? How and where? He quickly cleared his thoughts and repeated a third time.
“I want… your name… your family name.”
The three workers stopped whatever they were doing, and the whole forge room was silent but for the click and wheeze of the bellows and flue.
Skirra only stared at him, her sooty, sweaty, smooth features flattening to no expression at all, as if she did not understand.
His intention could not have be clearer to her.
A name of honor meant much to his people, and everything to some. In most marriages, the female took the male's family name if her family's honor were equal or lesser to that of the male's among all families, clans, and tribes. This was the tradition.
It meant nothing to him—less than a defaced brass buckle, its only true value to serve those in need.
The workers stared between him and her, and he watched her breath catch over and over.
She believed one of her ancient ancestors had done something horrible—unspeakable. That had cast her and hers into a dishonor like no other and kept them in these depths.
And this as well meant nothing to Karras, even in ignorance of it. All that mattered was her, and so he began again.
“I want your—”
“I heard you!” she gasped out.
Her eyes wide and unblinking, she stared at him as if he had cast some newer horror upon her. Numbed by her reaction, by not knowing how or why, he stood frozen too long before taking a step.
“No!” she whispered.
Karras froze again as her breaths shortened and his stopped.
Skirra looked about in panic and noticed those three workers.
“Get out!” she snarled at them. “Leave!”
They scrambled to get through the door, and Karras stumbled back out of their way and into the passage's far wall. He did not see which way they went and began to shake.
Skirra just stared at him. Her breaths were visibly short and quick beneath her pained and frightened eyes, and he did not see how he could have caused that.
“No,” she choked out again. “I will not… cannot do that—”
Karras cringed and quickly turned up the passage.
He did not hear the whispers of the workers huddled beyond passage's end in the mainway, and in his flight he barely heard her shout
.
“Karras? I cannot—I will not—do that, not…”
He rounded into the mainway under the workers' stares. His heart pounded so much in his ears that he never heard she said next.
He did not want to hear anymore.
As dim as that great tunnel was, it was too glaringly bright to him. He did not think of an arranged marriage, of a way of life once loved that had lost its meaning, of fleeing both, or of giving up everything that no longer mattered.
In a word from her—no—he had lost everything that still mattered for the final time.
Karras did not realize how far he shuffled along the mainway, until something—someone—snagged his tunic's shoulder. Even then, he tried to go on.
Gän'gehtin stepped in front of him and held him back by both shoulders.
Karras did not even notice that he had stepped past the greeting house's entrance. Had Gän been watching for him? He stared blankly at the young shirvêsh, unable to even speak.
Gän'gehtin cringed this time. He looked up the mainway, blinked slowly, and grew visibly sad in shaking his head.
Karras had talked little to anyone about Skirra in the last year, but enough that the shirvêsh out of anyone might guess what had happened again.
“Come inside,” Gän whispered, tugging on him.
Karras tried to pull away.
“No,” Gän said, and Karras cringed that word. “Come inside,” and the shirvêsh pulled harder. “No one should be alone… in whatever kind of grief.”
Too numb to argue, he was pushed into the archway. He stalled again, for the sound of so many low voices careening off stone walls pounded at him.
“Go on,” the shirvêsh urged behind him. “To share the griefs of others can ease the weight of our own.”
Adrift without purpose, Karras shuffled inward but stopped again after a few steps. Everything looked the same as when he had paused here shortly ago, though pipe-smoke had now thickened into a haze. But it all seemed different, as if once again he did not belong here.
It was not that this place was too low for him, as he had once thought. He felt too low for it. How could he share their grief in not being able to bear his own, now more than doubled in his loss everything… of her?
“You start,” Gän said behind him.
Karras looked back in confusion.
“The telling,” Gän added. “You should start.”
Karras stared ahead down the aisle. That round stone platform standing boot-high and some seven or more strides in diameter was still empty.
Was that why they were all here?
He back-stepped, but Gän pushed him onward, again and again, right up to the platform's edge. Had the hall grown quieter? That was worse. If he did not do something other than stand there, the whole place would be staring at him.
If he did do something, everyone would be staring at him.
Fear and grief were a terrible mixture. All he could think of in facing that platform was the first night he had been trapped by Fiáh'our in lost hope. The old man had been full of himself that night in strutting about the platform and bellowing another telling before a cheering crowd.
Karras grew frantic. He could not do that, never that, not now.
When he looked back, Gän was gone. In sharpened fright, he quickly spotted the shirvêsh back near Lêt'vöulsat. The older warrior no longer frowned but stared angrily at the rotund, loudmouth sitting nearby. And the hall grew even quieter.
Gän frowned in shaking his head at Karras. With arms folded, he flicked one finger toward the platform.
Karras turned back and hesitantly stepped up on the stone's edge. There he froze, afraid to look up at anyone—everyone—looking at him. This was too much cruelty in one night.
After too long in that stall, he heard someone start chuckling. The only one he dared look for to escape all others was Gän but the shirvêsh was not watching him anymore.
Gän'gehtin stared wide-eyed and flat-faced toward the aisle's far end, his mouth partly open, and Karras dared to follow that gaze.
What he saw was like a stab through the heart.
Within the arch's shadows, orange light from outer pillar crystals haloed dark red hair with shimmers like glowing coals. It was not until she hesitantly stepped into the reach of the hall's lanterns that he truly believed it was her.
Skirra froze and glanced to both sides, for when Karras had turned to look her way, so had many others along the aisle. He heard more do so about the hall by the creaking of benches. Then he saw something else.
In her hand was his weapon.
He had forgotten it when he had fled. Was that the only reason she had followed him? He did not need that extra misery, nor the reminder of her in that weapon she had made.
Karras wanted to flee, but there she was, blocking the only way out.
Skirra took another step, narrow-eyed and vicious under all of those eyes but still not looking at anyone. Garbed in her smith's darkened leather apron and rolled up sleeves of a sweat-soaked tan shirt, even her glistening face was marred by forge smoke. Soot on her face was streaked down her cheeks, from black-irised eyes alarger than most rughìr.
She kept her eyes down, though he saw the clench of her jaw in striding toward him. She was halfway down the aisle when she dared to raise her eyes.
All of that ire flooded from the smooth curves of her face and left some strange anguish as she kept on, drawing nearer and nearer. Was it to return Skirlan, or was there something else?
What greater misery could she heap upon him now? Her last words to him still echoed in his head.
I cannot—I will not—do that, not…
“Not to you,” Skirra whispered. “Not ever to you.”
She stopped right below him and looked up, right at him. He saw those streaks on her soot marked face for what they were, as her eyes glistened and welled wet in meeting his.
Why had she been crying, she of all people? What could he have done to her this time?
All of the pain he saw made him wither for having worsened that, somehow, no matter how much she had done to him. And confusion in his head made him sick and dizzy.
“To me?” he mouthed back without voice.
She grew blurry in his own sight for an instant. And he was still uncertain why she had come to him. All he had wanted in the end was to be with her in her life.
Skirra lowered her head, looked left and right, and a bit of spiteful fury came again at being watched. But when she looked up at him…
“I cannot do that,” she repeated so softly, “not to you.”
For barely a flicker, had she smiled sadly, painfully at him?
He was too afraid to believe she had. Was all of this because of whatever dark secret in her heritage that she would not share? And he almost slipped again in demanding to know.
“Go on,” she mouthed.
He was lost again until she cocked her head with a glance at the platform beneath his feet.
Karras did not want take his eyes off of Skirra for fear she might leave. Then he heard creaking benches and other restless sounds about the hall. Someone scoffed, rumbled something, and began to snicker. All that was clear in the drunken chortle was some rude mention of his own name, and….
Skirra turned toward that voice. Venomous spite flushed her cheeks and a vicious narrowing of her eyes forced out a last tear.
Karras was about to look as well when he heard—and saw—her grip tightened on Skirlan's haft. And now he was scared by what she might do with his own weapon. He quickly stepped down and grabbed the weapon's haft above her hand before he followed her gaze.
Lêt'vöulsat's face wrinkled in outrage. The old warrior suddenly reached up and grabbed the far edge of his helmet. In one motion, he swung it the other way without looking.
Even then Karras did not see the face of that drunkard. The helmet connected with a clank-clunk. That big rughìr, whoever he was, tumbled off out of sight as Gän quickly back-stepped to avoid being taken down as w
ell.
Gän let out a disgusted sigh clearly heard in the silence. If he and Karras had little else in common, they at least shared disgust for how crude some of their people could be.
Lêt'vöulsat slapped his helmet back on with a growling sigh and a sharp nod to Karras. And by the time Karras turned back, Skirra's ire had half-cleared and she was looking at him.
Go on, she mouthed again.
He still did not know what to say as he looked around the hall. And now she was only one with whom he wanted to talk now.
Skirra frowned at him.
He had never done anything like this, but if it had to be done…
Karras stepped up on the platform's edge and looked about the hall.
“I did not know him first or best,” he began, “but supposedly I knew him last…”
He did not know what more to say. Hopefully someone else would and could take his place and soon, for now he had somewhere else to be.
“For all his flaws,” he went on, though he only looked down at Skirra, “Fiáh'our was—is—still the best of us… in us… as if he rose straight from the bones of the earth.”
Skirra nodded once to him and never looked anywhere else, even when he stepped down beside her. It did not matter that nothing had been settled between them as yet, or that he still faced what his family expected of him in a fate he did not want.
All that mattered was that she had to come for him this time. That was more than a sliver—a shard—of hope; that was everything that mattered.
Other Works
by Barb Hendee and/or J.C. Hendee
About “Pending” Works:
This indicator within brackets is used for works confirmed for release within six months following the release of this text. [Other works not listed may be released before a listed pending work.] Where a specific date of release is known for a pending work herein, that release date is presented instead.
The Noble Dead Saga
by Barb & J.C. Hendee
Series/Phase 1
