The Path of Ashes [Omnibus Edition]

by Parker, Brian

  All were welcome in the Dominion. No one was turned away unless they sought to harm others; there’d been a few over the years, Freya learned.

  She was on her way to see the priests now. A messenger had been sent to rescue a special child from a war-torn land called the Home of the Lakes. He was due back this evening. Given her own past, Freya had been against the idea of taking the girl from her family at first. The priests convinced her of the dire need for the child, as she was the catalyst that would unlock Freya’s abilities. How, they had no idea, but their visions told them that the girl was important.

  As the chief of the Dominion’s new security team, Varan was present at all the important meetings. He was vehemently opposed to the rescue attempt, calling it kidnapping, regardless of the fate that awaited the girl if she stayed. He’d argued that it wasn’t their place to take the child from her family and if the girl was required, then the entire family should be given the choice to come to the Dominion freely, not taken in the middle of the night.

  The priests argued that they’d seen the hearts of the men and women that the child lived with. They’d rather die in the battle at their gates than leave their lands behind them and they would never willingly allow one of their people to leave, so it was imperative that they take the girl to save her from the atrocities that would fall upon the people of the Home of the Lakes.

  As a last-ditch, desperate bid to sway Freya, Varan brought up the fact that they’d both been abducted as children and made into slaves. It was an unnecessary reminder of the pain she’d experienced her entire life. Again, the priests argued that letting the outside world know about the People was lunacy. Normal men didn’t understand them and they’d be slaughtered.

  In the end, it wasn’t the girl’s abilities or Varan’s urgings to leave her be that made up Freya’s mind. It was her compassion. She couldn’t allow a child who’d been thrust into the middle of a senseless war to die foolishly because some prideful man wouldn’t leave his home. According to the priests’ visions, the girl would be dead before the end of the winter as her family huddled behind the safety of their walls, unwilling to go forth and end the siege. It became a much easier choice to go against Varan after she knew what the future held for the girl and she authorized the rescue.

  “Mother,” another member of her flock greeted as she walked the forest path to the priests.

  The forest was truly a magnificent place; and unlike anything that she’d ever seen before. Its remote location meant that it was spared the horrific fires and explosions that rocked the old world, leaving it mostly intact. The location, deep within the river valley, helped to keep the Dominion isolated from the problems of the new world as well.

  Freya had become accustomed to the larger trees down south when they fled from the Commerce Guild. While not quite as large as those were, the trees of the Dominion were wide and varied by type. She hadn’t even known that so many different kinds of trees existed.

  The People taught her the names and uses of all the local varieties. The mighty maple, which produced a sweet sap used to flavor foods and offered as a treat to children. The Dominion was home to the wonderful-smelling fir trees that dropped their needles to provide bedding for animals. The cottonwood, whose wood was light, but strong, had bark that the People used to relieve pain when chewed. The buckthorn was used as a laxative to help relieve swollen bowels. White oak was the preferred fuel for fireplaces since the wood burned hot for hours. They used the ash to make hunting bows and the fighting staffs that the defenders carried. The willow, whose branches caressed the earth, became baskets and traps for fish. And finally, the mighty red cedar, which was used for just about everything that the People made of wood that would sit outside since it weathered well and didn’t warp as badly as other types of wood once it was cut.

  The forest was certainly a beautiful place and she’d thoroughly enjoyed living in the Dominion, but as she neared the priests’ home, she couldn’t help wondering if her time here was ending. Somehow, the little girl was supposed to unlock Freya’s powers to heal the earth, which likely meant that she’d have to leave the pristine forest and travel to the awful places that bred sickness and decay.

  “Freya! Freya, wait up!” Varan’s voice carried between the trees.

  She turned in time to see him emerge from the woods, running. “Varan,” she replied in surprise. “What are you doing?”

  “I missed you leaving this morning so I took a shortcut through the forest to catch you. Thistle is back, is he not?”

  “He is.” She’d tried to find him when she left that morning, but had been unable to do so. “Where were you this morning?”

  “I was practicing with my sword. I was right there in the back yard.”

  “Mmm,” she mumbled. “I’ve had a lot on my mind and just missed you. I’m sorry.” It didn’t help that tensions had been high between the two of them since she decided to go forward with the rescue. It had been easier to simply avoid Varan rather than get in another argument.

  He accepted her apology and pointed toward the priests’ house. “Well, let’s get this over with.”

  “I don’t want to cause a scene inside,” Freya stated. “Can we just not fight in public about this? The girl has been rescued, she’s here and there’s no further discussion on it.”

  Varan’s eyes narrowed for a moment and then he smiled. Freya knew it to be the same fake smile he would put on for the crowds during Contests and he wore it when he was around Lucas. She hated that he did it to her now as well. “Of course, Mother. I respect your wishes in all aspects of our life here in the Dominion.”

  “Dammit, Varan. You don’t have to be a smartass.”

  “No, I’m serious. You are the leader of the People here and I’m just a fool messenger boy.”

  Here we go. He’s in one of his moods again. “Don’t start with me. You know damn well that I had nothing to do with those dreams. It was the priests who sent them to your brother, not me.”

  “And my brother died thinking there was some great destiny for me to fulfill. What a crock of shit.”

  She sighed. It was the same argument they’d had since coming to the Dominion. Varan still struggled to come to terms with the fact that the priests used him and Caleb. They’d purposefully misled the gladiators into believing that they had a purpose in life, which would be revealed when they got to their destination. In reality, they were just supposed to free her from captivity and bring her here.

  Varan’s lack of an identity in the Dominion was the main reason that she’d created his position as the head of security for the community. The position was both a boost to her lover’s psyche and a needed correction in their defenses. Before they arrived, the People relied mainly on defending their own homes, which anyone who wasn’t born and raised in the peaceful forest town knew was a bad idea. Attackers could eliminate one family at a time that way. Against the priests’ wishes, Varan trained a fighting force that now stood a slight chance against a small group of raiders.

  “Stop it. You’ve done wonders for this community and the defense force is getting better every day.”

  “We rely on isolation and our relationship with nature to keep us safe, not barbarism,” Grobahn interrupted the pair.

  “I’ve told you before, priest,” Varan hissed, “I’m likely to cut your damn head off if you sneak up on me.”

  The religious leader inclined his head slightly, “My apologies, Defense Leader Varan. I am simply excited to finally bring the two parts of the prophecy together.”

  “The girl? Did Thistle find her?” Freya asked.

  Grobahn blinked at her, his eyelids flicking rapidly over those strange yellow eyes that all of the priests had. “Was there ever any doubt, Mother?”

  “No, I—”

  “If you were worried that he would fail, why did you send him out into the world of normal men?”

  “You’ve taken my question out of context,” she answered in frustration. “I didn’t mean that
I thought Thistle would fail. What I meant was that I hadn’t heard confirmation that he’d returned with the girl.”

  “Thistle was raised as a Watcher of the Coven,” Grobahn said indignantly. The corners of his mouth turned upward in a sneer of derision at her lack of knowledge of their religion. “He would not return if he failed in his mission to rescue the child.”

  Most of the residents of the Dominion were calm and gentle, slow to action like a pond in midsummer, but the priests were intense and short-tempered, often confrontational for no reason. Grobahn, in particular, essentially bullied the congregation into following his orders. Freya often wondered at the strange juxtaposition of personalities between the leadership of the Coven and the rest of the People.

  “Forgive me,” she said through gritted teeth. “I am still learning the ways of the People.”

  He bowed lowly. “Of course, Mother. Those savages, the normal men, raised you in a land far away from our peaceful Willamette Valley. You will understand our ways over time.”

  She nodded in agreement. Time. She had plenty of time to think about things in the Dominion. “May we go see her?”

  Grobahn stepped aside, sweeping his arms wide toward the priests’ home. “You came all this way, it would be rude for me to refuse. Keep in mind, though, that Thistle had to constantly give the girl cottonwood bark to keep her asleep, so she is still tired.”

  “He drugged her?” Varan asked in shock.

  The priest’s laughter sounded like the rattling of dead leaves blown about by the wind. “It was necessary. Otherwise, she would have struggled and could have fallen to her death.”

  Freya placed a hand on Varan’s forearm to calm him. “Let’s just go meet her.”

  He jerked his arm away and stared at her. “Do you mean to tell me you approve of drugging a child?”

  “No, of course not. But, it’s done, there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  He jabbed a finger at the priest, who recoiled as if he’d been struck. “We can’t let them do this. The more we turn a blind eye to the small things, and say that it’s in the past and there’s nothing we can do about it, then the worse things will become. Freya, I’ve seen this before, that’s how Lucas’ guards got so bad. It was incremental and each time they weren’t reprimanded, it became an accepted practice. Then it got worse until… Well, you know how they were.”

  She nodded her head. “Of course I know how they were, Varan, and this is the second time in less than a week that you’ve reminded me of our past. That’s not what’s happening here. The People’s goal is to heal the earth and that little girl is the final key to unlocking the puzzle of how to do that.”

  Grobahn smiled at her statement. As they walked past she saw him stare in open hatred at Varan. So much for the People being forgiving and welcoming of all.

  *****

  “Wow, I really like this stuff,” Brandt said rapidly. “What did you say it’s called?”

  “Coffee,” Darci answered. “Be careful and drink it slowly.”

  The youth drained his cup and held it out to her. “Can I have some more?”

  “Are you joking?” Tanya asked, holding her cup with both hands to absorb the warmth. “She just said to take it easy. You’re already jittery, just like you get when you drink beer—which, if I remember right, you don’t do well with either.”

  Frederick laughed and raised his own mug in a mock toast to Brandt. “She’s right. Remember the last fall harvest festival and that lovely girl, the baker’s daughter?”

  “Who’d clearly spent her entire life sampling her father’s products,” Tanya joined in.

  “And that sheep. Oh gods, I can’t—”

  “Could you please stop discussing my dating mistakes in front of Darci?”

  “Dating mistakes?” the archer asked with an upraised eyebrow. “Do you often make a habit of dating farm animals?”

  “No!” The color rose in his cheeks, turning them red in embarrassment. “I was really drunk at harvest and mistook the sheep for the baker’s daughter—who I actually was trying to sleep with that night.”

  Darci chuckled quietly, afraid of the noise that full laughter would produce. “She must have been lovely, as Frederick said if you confused her with a sheep.”

  Brandt hunched over to stare into the fire. “Well, it was very dark,” he muttered, which caused the others to laugh again.

  Tanya excused herself so she could go relieve the morning pressure on her bladder. She walked a short distance away and put a large rock between her and the others for decency. The princess could still hear them talking, so she would have preferred to go much farther away to do her business, but Darci had been adamant that the highlands were full of hungry creatures that would love to find a defenseless traveler with their pants around their ankles.

  The trip had been uneventful so far. The Seers had given Darci a strange map, sketched by Mistress Diane when she was in the trance stage of her vision. It showed row upon row of mountains that they had to traverse as they cut northwest toward where Jade was taken. Their first target along the way was a giant lake. Then, after that, it was just a wide-open space with skulls drawn on the map. She’d drawn trees on the far side of the Skull Lands, as Tanya called the desert, with a few small humps for hills and written the word “River Valley” on the other side of the trees.

  It was enough to get them close to where the Seer said Jade was. Once they got near the forest, Darci said she could determine the final location, but didn’t tell Tanya how she planned to do it, so she just had to trust that the archer knew what she was doing.

  As she finished relieving herself, a woman’s scream pierced the morning air, echoing off the exposed red rock around her.

  “Tanya!” Frederick cried from the campsite.

  She pulled her drawers up quickly, cringing at the wetness that she hadn’t had time to wipe away, and rushed back to camp.

  “I’m fine,” Tanya replied as she walked back into the perimeter. “What was that?”

  “Mountain lion,” Darci said. “Their screams have haunted mankind for millennia. We need to get moving.”

  “What’s a millennia?” Brandt asked.

  “A thousand years,” the archer grunted as she poured the last of the coffee onto the fire.

  “We’ve been around for a thousand years?” Tanya’s cousin asked in disbelief.

  “Humans have been around for a lot longer than that—and so have the animals that hunted them in the darkness. That’s why our ancestors took away the night, flooding the world with false light.”

  The mountain lion’s scream bounced off the rocks once again. Tanya turned slowly in a circle, trying to determine where the creature was, but couldn’t get a bead on it. The acoustics of the cut they’d camped in made it impossible to determine the large cat’s direction.

  “If the lion doesn’t want to be seen, then you won’t see it,” Darci instructed. “This far west, I don’t know whether the cougars are the same as the ones around the Valley Lodge. Those are vicious hunters that will continue to track their prey until they catch it.”

  “Then shouldn’t we wait for it and kill the damn thing when it comes close?” Frederick asked.

  “No, we need to get moving. We don’t know if it’s hunting us or if it’s on the trail of something else, so it’s better to leave the area before it decides to reorder its shopping list.”

  “I’m not staying here longer than we need to,” Tanya added. “Every minute we delay, the longer Jade is with those things, scared and missing her family.”

  They finished packing their bags quickly and threw them across the backs of the horses Darci had provided for them in Creede. They turned toward the west, putting the morning sun behind them, before spurring their mounts into a gentle trot.

  THIRTEEN

  “What did you just say your name is?” Varan asked menacingly.

  The little girl looked from him over to Freya. “Why’s he mad at me?” she asked, her lower
lip quivering. She was on the verge of crying.

  Freya physically pushed Varan back away from their guest. “I’m sorry, Jade. Varan gets excited and he doesn’t know how to talk to little girls,” she soothed. She leaned in close and put her hand up to shield her face from the warrior and Grobahn. “But don’t let him fool you. He has a big, soft heart on the inside.”

  “I… I want my mommy.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be here shortly,” Freya lied, thinking it was better to try to keep her calm for as long as possible.

  The girl started crying softly. She’d been trying to be brave, but the realization that she’d been taken from her family in the middle of the night got the better of her. Freya knelt and opened her arms for Jade, giving her the option to decide if she wanted to hug the stranger or not. After a moment, she threw her arms around the Mother.

  Freya hugged the girl tightly and looked up at Grobahn. The bastard could have told them that the people in danger of being wiped out were the Traxx family. He knew of Varan’s past and the issues he had with feeling abandoned by them. To bring this Traxx girl here with no warning was a slap in the face.

  “Why didn’t you tell us who she was?” Varan asked.

  “Because it would have only increased your desire to sabotage the rescue,” Grobahn retorted. “You’ve been against this from the beginning and—”

  “He’s scary,” Jade whispered into Freya’s ear, effectively saving her from hearing their argument.

  Freya followed her gaze to where Thistle stood off to the side. “The People are just like you and me, sweetie. They just got sick and that happened to them.”