by Colt, K. J.
The sound of a footfall behind me was all the warning I had. I dropped my burden and leapt to one side, dodging none too soon as a thick cudgel descended where my head had been mere seconds before. Rolling to my feet, I slid my knives from their wrist sheaths… and became vividly aware of a powerful stirring at the back of my consciousness. An unfamiliar, inner voice seemed to be hissing instructions at me, only I couldn’t make out the words. Startled, I nearly froze in my confusion, but hesitating at this moment would mean death. I shoved the distracting voice aside and dove for my attacker with the single thought of silencing him before he alerted others. He clearly hadn’t anticipated I would choose to attack him directly, and I could have caught him with a blade squarely in the chest then. But I stayed my hand at the last possible second. This enemy had a familiar face. Not a foe, but one of ours. Resid.
I hesitated, and the outlaw seized the opportunity to launch another blow at my midsection. He hadn’t put his full strength behind it, but when his cudgel connected with my ribs, the force still knocked the breath from me and sent me reeling backward to slam into the wall of the shed behind me. Pain raged like fire up my injured side as my adversary lifted his club for another swing, this one aimed at my head. Again, the whispered commands hissed through my mind, and I could almost make them out this time. I dodged Resid’s swing, felt the wind from it whistle past my ear, and staggered sideways, the pain in my ribs slowing my movements. I tripped over Brig’s sprawled form and reeled backward, attempting to keep my legs under me, knowing if I allowed myself to meet the ground, the fight was over. I would be finished as surely as Brig was. Brig, who had been sold out by a comrade, a man he believed he could trust.
The angry thought sent a surge of strength through me. I regained my balance and lashed out with one booted foot, catching Resid in the belly. My enemy doubled over, and I dodged in to swipe my twin knives at him. I aimed for his throat, but he turned his head at the last instant and I dealt him, instead, a shallow slash across one cheek and a deeper stroke into the side of the neck, inadvertently finding an artery. A dark fountain of blood spewed outward.
An approving murmur seemed to come from somewhere in my head. Was it my magic speaking to me? That had never happened before, but I had no time to puzzle over it. Resid, stunned and weakened, stumbled toward me still. He moved awkwardly, and I had no difficulty ducking beneath his next onslaught and slashing across the wrist with which he held his cudgel. The weapon fell from his fingers, and I moved easily in to open his throat with my blades. My enemy collapsed at my feet, and I felt no pity. He should never have turned on Rideon. Or at least, he should not have killed Brig in the bargain.
Looking down on Brig, a wave of misery washed over me, and in this sudden bleakness, my original plan felt useless. But I had gone too far to turn back now. I pushed aside my weariness and the throbbing pain in my ribs and knelt again to haul at Brig’s shoulders. I wasn’t sure if it was the exhaustion or the burning in my side, but the dead man now felt like a load of bricks, and for all my efforts, I couldn’t have dragged him to the cart if the simple act could have restored his life. Giving up, I sat and leaned my weary back against the rough wall of the shed and rested my head in my hands, scarcely aware of the tears slicking my cheeks.
That was how Terrac found me. Unconsciously, I sensed his approach even before I felt his hands gripping me firmly by the shoulders and raising me to my feet. I didn’t bother to resist.
“You can’t sit here crying,” he said. “The fire has spread to the barn, and the Fists are distracted. If we’re ever going to escape, this is our chance. Get up.”
Ordinarily, I would have been angry at his ordering me around, but I was empty of any emotion now except pain. What did anything matter anymore, when things could never be right again?
I didn’t realize I was sobbing until Terrac snapped, “Be quiet. There’ll be time for grieving later. But for now you have to do what I tell you or we’ll never get out of this alive.”
I obeyed and stopped my bawling, only because it felt like too much trouble to argue. I allowed him to lead me to the onion cart, where he told me to stand at the horse’s head and keep hold of the bridle.
“Don’t move until I return,” he ordered and he left me there. He disappeared around the shed and returned a few minutes later, dragging Brig’s lifeless body along behind him. I kept my eyes forward but listened to the muffled grunts and sounds of him struggling to lift the heavy corpse into the back of the cart. He didn’t ask for my help, which was good because I didn’t know that I was in a condition to give any. Lost inside my own wretched world, nothing of what occurred in this one seemed of any significance.
There was a heavy thud as Terrac achieved his goal, and then he was beside me again, snatching the horse’s halter and leading the animal forward. I shuffled alongside the cart because I knew he would prod me if I didn’t, and we moved away from the hold yard with its crackling blaze and out into the night. Terrac never tried urging the horse to speed but gently coaxed the nervous animal every step of the way. We moved with nothing like stealth as we lurched along with our creaking, rickety cart, and in a different time, I would have been amused by our pathetic retreat.
But despite our clumsy flight, no enemy shouted or came running in pursuit as we put distance behind us. Terrac kept us well away from the road, and we slogged our way along over uneven, rocky terrain. I decided my throbbing ribs weren’t broken as I’d first supposed, but walking was still little short of agony. It was only sheer willpower pushing me forward and that will was more Terrac’s than mine.
The rain made our journey doubly miserable, and even when it abated, it left behind a deep clingy mud, making walking difficult. Twice the wheels of our cart sunk into the mud, and it took both of us pushing to break free again. Slowly I came back to myself a little. After the second halt to free the cart from a mud sink, I broke the long silence between us.
“So how did you escape?” I asked the question because it seemed I should, not because I truly cared to know. “The last I saw of you, you were being dragged into the house by a handful of Fists. I didn’t think you’d get free of them alive.”
“I’m glad to know you considered that when you sent me in,” Terrac said coldly. “It took me some time to realize this was how you planned things all along. That you fed me to the wolves intentionally.”
“I didn’t do it for myself, if that makes any difference to you.”
“It doesn’t.”
“It wasn’t personal, Terrac. It was for Brig. I had to give you up.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “Don’t think I didn’t see your reasoning or feel its implications. You put Brig’s rescue ahead of the safety of the ‘cowardly boy priest’ because you believed his wellbeing was the more important of the two. His is the life of value.”
“Was,” I interjected miserably, but he appeared not to hear me.
“I thought we were friends, Ilan, but I should have known better than to trust someone like you.”
“Yes, maybe you should have,” I snapped. “Maybe this friendship should never have begun. What common ground could there be between a worthless woods thief and a high-minded priest-in-training? Does it occur to you for a moment that if you had been different, I might have put your life first? But it’s difficult to care about someone who doesn’t stand up for himself or anyone else, who never shows a sliver of courage or confidence when you need it.”
I sensed I hurt him, even if he didn’t show it. A long silence stretched, and when he spoke again, his voice was emotionless. “I bumped a log from the fireplace when no one was watching and caught the floor rushes afire. They were so dry they went up like kindling, and I slipped out during the confusion.”
It took me a moment to remember what he was talking about. “And what did you tell them, that they allowed you to sit unwatched and unbound?”
“Exactly what you told me to say, that I was a good priest and an honest man. Your words came back to me w
hen they questioned me, as I suppose you intended them to. I invented a story of how I was traveling late along the road when the storm blew up and upon seeing the light in the window of the hold house, decided to stop and beg shelter for the evening. I approached stealthily at first because the place had an abandoned look and I feared I would stumble upon thieves or other dangerous folk trespassing.”
He shrugged and added, “The Fists said I had too ‘soft’ a look about me to be a cutthroat, and besides, I had the mark of the church to lend credence to my story.”
He indicated the pale scar of the priesthood branded on the inside of his forearm.
“So they decided I was harmless,” he said. “I was permitted to share their fire and what food they had, which was decent of them. They didn’t seem like bad men.”
“Oh no, not bad men at all,” I said sarcastically. “They’ll sit down to share a bit of bread with a stranger, and they’ve got pretty shiny armor and better polished manners. But what they did to Brig, oh, that was purely incidental.”
He frowned. “I’m not saying they were right in the way they treated him, but let us remember Brig was an outlaw and well aware of the penalties he would face—”
“Penalties?” I broke in, unable to contain my anger. “Penalties! Did you see what they did to him? Stop the cart! Walk back there and take a look.”
“I didn’t mean—” he tried to speak, but I wouldn’t be soothed.
“I said take a look! I want you to see, to know what your ‘decent’ heroes did to him.”
I could feel the tendons standing out on my neck and the hot blood rushing to my face, but I didn’t care. I suddenly realized I needed to smash something. Anything. Terrac’s face would do.
But he didn’t give me an excuse. Drawing a deep breath as if to steady his emotions, he said, “I think we’d best speak no more on this. We’re both weary and at the end of our tethers, and further discussion will only lead to more hasty words and later to regrets.”
I said, “I’m in the mood for hasty words and regrets, and I’ll speak on as I please.”
“Then I refuse to stay and listen.”
He quickened his pace to move ahead of me, effectively ending our discussion, for I couldn’t muster the stamina to keep up. I suspected he knew my aching ribs made quick strides a torment.
We kept up our forward progress, passing along the edge of a shallow wooded ravine sometime late in the night. I was lost deep in my dark broodings so that I didn’t immediately notice when one wheel of the cart got too near the edge and began to slide in the mud toward the downside of the gap. Not until I saw the cart tilt sharply sideways did I realize it was about to fall.
“Terrac!” I shouted. “The cart!”
But it was too late. The rickety cart skidded further in the muddy earth, and Terrac dove out of its path no more than a second before the entire cart flipped over and tumbled down the hillside, dragging the struggling horse after it. I stood rooted to the spot as both cart and horse disappeared into the darkness below. I could hear the rig crashing through the trees on the way down, the awful screams of the horse plunging helplessly after it, and finally the thud as they hit bottom.
I didn’t wait for more than that. Ignoring the pain in my side, I threw myself recklessly over the steep edge and began scrambling down the hillside. I heard Terrac clambering after me, but as he paused to pick his way more cautiously than I did, I reached the bottom before him. I first discovered Brig’s body, thrown from the cart. Nearby, the gray horse was tangled in its harness and half-buried beneath the rig, but still alive and screaming shrilly as it thrashed to free itself from beneath the wreckage. Its movements gradually quieted, growing feebler as I approached, and I saw at a glance it wouldn’t survive.
I heard the noisy approach of Terrac behind me and left him to put the animal out of its misery. I could handle only so many gruesome tasks in a night. I turned my back on the scene and tried not to be aware of what happened, which was difficult because Terrac had to interrupt my unawareness twice, once to request the use of my knife and again to inquire where he ought to place the blade for the swiftest result.
The cart, I determined next, was beyond repair. Both wheels were shattered, not that that particularly mattered with no way to bring it out of the ravine and no horse to pull it even if we could accomplish that feat. I climbed back up the hillside, collecting as many scattered pieces of the rig as I could find, and heaping them into a pile. Terrac helped me lift Brig’s remains gently onto the top of the heap. Then the priest boy wisely withdrew to a copse of pines on the far side of the hill, leaving me alone with my grievous task.
I gathered an armful of brush, the driest I could find on such a damp night, piling it carefully around the body, and removed my ragged old cloak, using it to cover Brig’s face. For lack of a better parting gift, I laid one of my long-bladed knives across his chest. I remembered the strange bow I still carried and briefly considered leaving it instead, but somehow I was reluctant to part with it. Anyway, it hardly made a fitting gift either. There seemed nothing more to be done, and so I used my flint stone to set fire to the smaller bits of brush, managing after several tries to coax to life a fitful flame. The fire spread reluctantly over the rain-dampened kindling, but at length, the entire funeral pyre was wreathed in flames.
I sat at the edge of the circle of firelight that penetrated the night and watched the blaze consume Brig. Whenever the flames threatened to die, I added more brush until I had a tall bonfire raging. The heat warmed my face and the smoke burned my eyes, but I didn’t move back. After a time, I reached behind me and, for no particular reason, pulled out the bow to examine.
It was a finely crafted weapon, making it all the stranger that I discovered it in an abandoned barn. The pale wood looked and smelled freshly cut and took on an almost living glow beneath the firelight. It took me a moment to realize the carvings spiraling up the limb weren’t random designs, but strange runes unlike anything I’d ever seen. I had a peculiar feeling, looking at those runes, almost like the stirring of magic I felt when sensing another life nearby. Maybe I would ask Terrac later if he could decipher the unfamiliar form of writing. He was the scholar, not me.
But hard on the heels of that thought came the memory that the priest boy and I weren’t exactly on friendly terms at the moment. I glanced at the burning pyre, and loneliness washed over me as I remembered the one person who cared for me most, the only friend who knew about my forbidden talents, was now gone forever. In the face of that, everything else lost significance. When I looked back to the bow, there appeared to be a forlorn sense to its unreadable runes that matched my pain.
It was a mark of the strangeness of my mood that I didn’t flinch this time when the bow began to glow orange and gold. I felt it grow warm in my hands and pulse like a stilled heartbeat throbbing suddenly to life. Inside my head, I seemed to hear its quiet moans of anguish, perhaps echoing my hurt, or maybe crying out for some loss of its own. Either way, the result was oddly comforting. I continued tracing my fingers absently up and down the runes as I watched the flickering flames.
My grief grew muted, and while there was a chill loneliness in my heart, an ache of regret beyond words, I shed no more tears for my loss. It was as if with the death of Brig my own essence had abandoned me as well, leaving me incapable of feeling anything but emptiness. Was this how Rideon had grown so cold? I felt a sudden surge of understanding for the man, an understanding that had nothing to do with sympathy or affection.
Trying to shake this alarming change, I dug deep inside myself, seeking some spark to prove who I was still hid within, but it was like reaching into an empty shell. I dipped into a chasm of nothingness, sifting blank thoughts and meaningless images through my fingers in search of something I knew should be there. Even my unease at this discovery was a quiet, distant thing, as if I were merely a witness, observing myself through another’s eyes.
I felt older, emptier, and vastly changed as I sat hunched befo
re the flames, lost in thought, until the fire burned low and a pale dawn came to chase away the stars.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I WATCHED TERRAC WARILY THE following morning, but if he was still angry over my betraying him to the Fists, he gave no sign of it. It took us all of the following day to find our way to the place in the wood where the trees never greened. Here, the rest of our band had set up a temporary camp after evacuating Molehill and Red Rock. It was nearly dark by the time we stumbled on the outlaws a few miles upstream of the creek leading to Red Rock Falls. The gathering was large, the combined number of both our camps crowded together into the temporary one.
Immediately on arrival, I felt a pervading sense of gloom hanging in the air. Until now, we thought ourselves impervious to attack, hidden as we were deep within the safety of Dimming’s shadows. But our confidence had been shaken, and we were all acutely aware of the danger that might break over our heads at any time. No one knew as yet what had become of our homes at Red Rock and Molehill; the only thing we could be certain of was that it was unsafe to return. Rideon moved among the outlaws, planning with them, seeking to lift their confidence. Wherever he had been, spirits lifted, but it was obvious it would take time for us to recover our former self-assurance.
I had to give an explanation for my disappearance, and as my story quickly spread through the gathering, I was hailed as a kind of hero. No one appeared to care that I had set out to save Brig and returned without him. What mattered was that one of their own had struck a blow back at the Praetor’s men. A dozen times over, my attack on the Fists was declared the most daring and bold deed anyone had ever heard of from such a youngster. Suddenly, men who hadn’t so much as given me their names before today were clapping me on the back and congratulating me around the campfire.
