The Brotherhood (The Eirensgarth Chronicles Book 1)

by Philip Smith

  ◆◆◆

  Robert ducked behind a nearby stack of crates. He’d searched up and down two rows of buildings with no success. The villagers were beginning to trickle back into the longhouses and cottages in small groups of three to five people sporadically. Sneaking around was becoming more and more treacherous the deeper he headed into the village, but by the stockade wall, it was still relatively deserted. He crept about as quietly as possible, wishing he had some eucalyptus balm to help him steady his breathing

  “Come on, Paige,” he hissed to himself in frustration.

  Suddenly he heard the soft crunch of leather soles on the rocky path. He gripped his spear with sweaty palms, licking his dry lips. He didn’t know what to do if the stranger was a foe; he would have to be fast, and dispose of the threat as quickly as he could. He took a deep breath and slowly peeked around the corner of the boxes.

  His veins immediately turned into a hot, untamable wildfire. A tall man covered in a forest green cloak was stealing his way to the wall. Slung on his back was a limp body. Robert tried to make out features, and felt his heartbeat skip.

  The limp body was Paige. The sight of her wearing a dress distracted him. The white dress was dirty and tattered in several places; her blonde hair, which appeared to have been done up at one point in the evening now cascaded down her back like an uneven laxen waterfall. The boiling sensation in his veins continued tenfold.

  The cloaked figure looked around warily, summarizing the situation. Seemingly satisfied, he backed up a few paces from the wall. Robert knew if he were to move, he had to move now. He took one more deep breath, then leapt up behind the man with the ferocity of a wild animal, spear leveled at him.

  “Put her down,” Robert bellowed. The cloaked figure whirled around surprised. The dark green hood concealed a face save for a pair of eyes that reflected the moonlight back at Robert like a cat.

  “What’s in your head, boy?” the figure retorted in a low voice.

  “The notion to waste you,” Robert growled through gritted teeth.

  The figure pulled back his cloak a bit to let one arm free. It was covered by a tooled leather glove that reached all the way up the forearm, covering everything but the tips of the fingers. Robert raised his spear to the defensive stance. It’s large, polished head illuminated by the moonbeams that reached down from the sky like white fingers from the heavens clutching at the earth.

  “Don’t be a fool. If I wanted you dead, I’d have left that guard to put an arrow through your skull.”

  “Even so,” Robert said, sidestepping to try and circle the stranger. “I don’t know you from Eya, so I’ll be thanking you to put the lady down now.”

  The glowing, silver eyes narrowed.

  “I think not,” the stranger said in a low whisper.

  Robert could stand it no longer. He rushed the stranger, spear down and ready for action. In the span of time it takes a hummingbird to flap a wing, the man threw up an arm to deflect the blow. He stepped out of the way, as a long, thin blade slid out the back of the glove about a foot long. He had only to swing his arm to deflect the spear as Robert charged past him.

  Robert caught the deflection well. He dared not strike too high for fear of hitting Paige. Balancing on the ball of his right foot, he swung around again, aiming for the cloaked figure’s legs. This time, the man managed to jumped high enough to make it over the spear, landing nimbly and spinning his other leg out to catch Robert square in the jaw with the sharp heel of his riding boot.

  Robert reeled back as lightning bolts of pain shot up his face and stung his cheeks. How he was able to do that without dropping the princess, Robert couldn’t explain. Robert shook it off and readied himself for another lunge, but the figure made no effort to advance. Rather, he held up his forearm and retracted the blades into the glove, making a dash towards the stockade wall. Robert pursued him, stumbling forward as he willed his head not to ring with pain.

  The figure kept running at the wall, no escape in sight. But to Robert’s astonishment and horror, he heard the figure shout out something in what sounded like elvish as he leapt straight into the air and soared effortlessly over the stockade wall, dropping soundlessly down on the other side. Robert’s heart stopped. The man had just hopped over a wall at least four times his own height, and he’d done it with the ease one might take if climbing a short, insignificant staircase. Robert broke into a dead run. He didn’t care if the now sleeping villagers awoke and chased him. All he knew was Paige was in the arms of some unknown runner, and this runner apparently knew enough magic to help him soar effortlessly over vertical wall at least fourteen feet high.

  Robert knew he himself would never be able to scale the wall like that; he only knew rudimentary magic, and he was no good at climbing. He bounded back down the wall opening he had crawled through twice now. He ran as quickly as his legs could carry him.

  As he neared the hole, he saw Dinendale running towards it as well from the other direction.

  “Did you find-” the elf started, but Robert cut him off.

  “No time! Magician… princess… over wall...” he gasped, lunging through the door. He came out and saw a green cloak vanishing into the forest a bowshot away to their right down the fence wall. Robert took off at a dead run, with Dinendale right on his tail. Once more they found themselves crashing through the woods, traversing wherever the cloaked magician went. Up and under logs they ran; around boulders, through spider’s webs and bursting past vines they flew on wings of fury fueled by their male instinct to protect.

  On and on into the highlands of the Wild they ran. Dinendale began to feel his exhaustion catch up with him as they bolted on into the forest. The mysterious magician led them with a sense of direction and purpose, and something dawned on the dark elf.

  “Where is he taking her!” Dinendale shouted to Robert.

  “His gravesite if I have any say!”

  “Eöl!” Dinendale called. “Don’t you find it strange that he is running in the same direction we-”

  His words were cut off as a tree root sprung up out of the ground on its own accord and hooked them both under their feet. Dinendale felt a branch the size of a caber smash into his forehead as he rolled down the steep incline. Robert was in the same condition, cursing the entire way down as if he’d been through something like this before.

  After what felt like an eternity of bumping and crashing through the slope of a deep ravine, the two rolled to a halt at the base of the basin, moaning as they pulled themselves from the grass. Dinendale looked up as a pair of boots halted at his nose.

  “You could have just marched in like the rest of us. You could have been normal. But nooooooo! You had to make, yet, another grand entrance! And you, Robert!? Twice in one night? Really, you have got to get your head looked at, Mate.”

  Dinendale looked at Duelmaster as his brain’s groggy gears attempted to catch up from the fall. His head felt like it might explode. Robert tried to stand but sank down again instead, cursing out in pain.

  “Paige?…” Dinendale called out, bleary in the eyes and slurring his words like an old sot in a tavern. His days as a slave had sapped him of nearly all energy, and the running, combined with the blow to his head by that tree branch finished off any reserve energy he might have held. After a moment of swirling surroundings and fading vision, he slumped back into a state of sluggish unconsciousness.

  ◆◆◆

  “If I had a silver half-tinny for every time someone in this company passes out, I’d have more money than the Shahir himself by now!”

  Paige felt her eyelids flutter open so see Duelmaster tapping his foot in annoyance, staring down at her.

  “Duely!” she cried out, struggling to stand up. Suddenly a hand was at her elbow, easing her to her feet. It was Hanburg, dressed in a maroon red coat with a thick wolverine fur collar and brass buttons. His round nose was cherry red in the frosty air of the morning, and he was quick to place the wool blanket Paige had been laying on around
her shoulders as she staggered to her feet. Judging by the light about them, it was nearly dawn.

  “Where did I.... how...” she stammered, tears welling up in her eyes. She reached the back of her neck and felt a gauze dressing sealing off Locamnen’s cut.

  “There there, lass, you’re ok now. We’re all here!” Hanburg soothed, wrapping her in a huge, warm bearhug. She sobbed a few times, grateful tears washing her smudged face as her heart swelled with relief. They were all here. Din and Robert lay sleeping under the large oak tree to her left, Twostaves, Jesnake, Duelmaster, and Broadside sat about packing up gear back into packs from large sacks Hanburg had brought to the glade the day before.

  “Hanburg, thank you. Thank you so much!” she sobbed, squeezing him back tightly.

  After a brief hold on the embrace, she released him and ran over to where Robert and Dinendale lay asleep, dropping to her knees beside the elf. He stirred at the noise, cracking his brown eyes open slightly and blinking even in the dim twilight of morning. It took him a moment of grunting and blinking to finally focus in on Paige’s face.

  “Princess?...” he mumbled feebly. Then the realization of what his eyes beheld apparently jolted through his brain and he sat bolt upright, grasping her shoulders, eyes wide. “PRINCESS! By the Creator, you’re alive! And here! But, how!?”

  “I don’t know,” Paige said, smiling. Dinendale took her face in his hands, her soft cheeks flushing slightly against the rough texture of his palms as he looked into her eyes, a look of absolute relief and gratitude washing over his face. He wiped away a stray tear from her cheek with his thumb before embracing her in another solid hug.

  “Great, glad to see you’re safe and sound after all,” muttered Robert as he stretched, waking from his own slumber. Paige hopped up and embraced him as well. He stiffened uncomfortably for the briefest moment, then wrapped her in his arms and returned the hug, squeezing her tight.

  “I‘m so glad you are both unharmed, “ she said. Robert grunted, gingerly reaching up and touching a lump on his forehead which had turned purple.

  “Well, almost unharmed,” the princess chuckled. She gave both of them one more hug for good measure before collapsing back into a sitting position and turning so she could see Hanburg and the others.

  “We thought we’d lost you when that devil took you and ran,” Dinendale choked out composing himself quickly. Paige nodded.

  “I thought I was a goner as well,” she admitted, lightly touching the bandage on the back of her neck. Her last memories came flooding back, and her face screwed up in confusion.

  “But… when last I saw Locamnen, he had a sword sticking out of his chest!”

  She quickly reached up and felt several spatterings of dried blood still on her jawbone.

  “See!?” She pointed to her cheek. “This is from him. He should have been dead. How could he have made off with me after I’d succumbed?”

  “It wasn’t Locamnen that we were chasing!” Dinendale urged.

  “Then who?” Paige asked, bewildered. A soft cough sounded off behind her, and both of them looked over at Hanburg. He cleared his throat again and nodded in front of him, to the left of Paige and Dinendale.

  Upon a log, not ten paces away, sat a stranger that looked somehow familiar to Paige. He was almost as tall as Dinendale, with an average build like Duelmaster. He had pale skin, with hardly a blemish on it. His hair was a shaggy, dirty blonde, except for a silver streak going through the middle, gleaming in the sunlight. He had a young face, yet wisdom that comes with great age etched into his eyes. The man wore a pair of leather knee-high boots dyed a deep maroon color with a knife and sheath sewn into the side of each one, housing antler-handled daggers. He had two more identical knives and sheaths sewn onto his belt, which was buckled over a pair of moss green trousers. His shirt was woodland brown, covered by a leather doublet and buried under a forest green cloak and hood that draped over his shoulders like moss on a tree. Additionally he wore full length leather gloves the color of walnut wood. Intricately tooled, they covered his whole arm from the elbow to the second knuckle on his fingers, the thumb being fully enclosed and well padded.

  The man carried an almost indifferent, sullen air about him. He sat on the log, whittling on a stick with one of his belt knives, making no noise and offering no commentary. Paige looked from him to Hanburg and back again.

  “Who the blazes are you?” Robert demanded after a moment of silence. The man ignored him for a moment, cutting a smooth, clean sliver of wood off the stick he whittled on. The curly wooden discard floated gently to the soft, dewy grass below, bouncing briefly on the carpet of clover before settling into the tangled mess of greenery.

  “They call me ‘the Woodcarver’ here in the Wild.”

  “I’ve never heard of you,” Robert countered.

  “The Wild is a big place, boy.”

  “Who are you calling boy!?” Robert demanded.

  The man looked up and stared at Robert with unblinking, crystal clear eyes which immediately caught Paige’s attention; they were clear as a pair of polished diamonds. Right now they were illuminating the pine-needle green of his cloak. When he glanced over at Hanburg, they shifted to a dark reddish brown. Paige suddenly connected the dots and gasped aloud.

  “You!”

  He looked at her, his crystal eyes reflecting back white as they alighted upon her dress, dirty as it may be.

  “You were the man who spoke to me in the longhouse, the first day we were captives here!”

  The man nodded, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly in almost a half-smile.

  “Aye, that was me.”

  “Wait, you’ve met this guy before?” Robert asked incredulously.

  “Briefly. We had so much going on in all the excitement honestly I’d forgotten all about it!”

  “It is good to know I made an impression, m’lady,” Woodcarver chuckled.

  “Ha! ‘Good to know’ my bodacious backside!” Broadside snorted, waddling up closer to the group and inserting himself into the middle of the cluster of conversing individuals. “Still doesn’t explain who you are or what you’re doing here, now does it?”

  “No master dwarf. I suppose it does not,” the stranger smiled, sheathing his knife. He looked at Paige with those eyes that appeared to be made of glass. “I told you m’lady; you have friends even in this dark place.”

  “Enough of the cryptic talk. Why are you here? And why did you help us?” Dinendale scrutinized. “I’ve seen those eyes before, but not on a human. Warlock? Sorcerer? Out with it, man!”

  Paige was surprised by the hint of venom in Dinendale’s tone. She looked at the man curiously as he smirked, tossing his whittling stick off into the woods and dusting the shavings off his lap. He placed his fingertips together thoughtfully as he regarded the dark elf with interest.

  “Just a humble magician, that is all,” he said, smiling for the first time. Dinendale seemed unsatisfied with that answer.

  “Natural born human magicians have been extinct for three centuries,” the elf said, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “With all do respect, Dinendale Faoris, son of Aedard, till a month and a half ago, I thought the Dark Elves of the Cullodren bloodline were also extinct.”

  Paige had no idea what any of that meant, but by the shock on Dinendales face, she gathered it was something that Dinendale had not expected this stranger to know. He was in a shocked stunned silence, struggling to get to his feet as he stared at the man in disbelief.

  “How do you know those names,” the elf said evenly. The man actually chuckled, standing up and gesturing to the entire group.

  “I know all of you. I know who you are and where you come from. I know what it is you seek to do!” he laughed. The Brotherhood all looked uneasy and suspicious as he walked circles around Dinendale and Paige. He scanned the princess up and down with a coy smile.

  “I also know what you carry, princess.”

  Paige looked hard into his mesmerizing eyes.
He glanced down at her feet, then back up at her face.

  “Left moccasin, I believe?”

  “What?”

  “Your left boot, my lady,” he said, bowing his head slightly in respect. “I believe you are currently housing something of great value there.”

  Jesnake, who was by now back in his mail armor, stepped closer, nonchalantly playing with one of his throwing knives, eyes fixed on Woodcarver. The others all shifted uneasily as the magician stared expectantly at Paige. She hesitated, unsure of what do do. Should she acknowledge his assumption, or try and play it off? Something told her he was completely sincere in his statement, and that he would somehow know if she tried to fib her way out of admitting her precious scroll was stuffed in her moccasin.

  “How do you know I have something in my moc?” she asked, trying to read the stranger’s expression. He smiled again, taking a step forward.