A Warrior's Burden: Book One of Saga of the Known Lands

by Jacob Peppers

  “Ferrimore?” Maeve said, frowning. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Nor would you have,” Cutter said. “It isn’t on any of the maps—only a few hundred people if that. Still, it will get us out of the Black Woods and give us time to figure out our next move. Now come on—we’ve wasted enough time already.”

  ***

  Maeve watched her prince’s back as he led the group of them out of the Black Woods, and she wondered at many things. She wondered at why he had just assumed they would follow his plan without bothering asking their opinions on the matter. Wondered, too, based on how she and the others did exactly that, if he were wrong to do so. Most of all, she wondered if she was a fool. Probably, she was. After all, who else would so easily fall back into the rhythm—a rhythm which had gotten her and the others exiled with a price on their head to beggar kings—of following a man such as he?

  She told herself, though, that this time was different. Years ago, she had followed her prince—the man who now styled himself as Cutter—for several reasons. For one, he had been her prince, after all, and to have disobeyed him would have been treason. Another part had been swept up by the force of his personality, but now, walking in the quiet of the Woods, the only sound that of her and her companions’ footsteps, she had to admit to herself that there had been another reason, too.

  Yes, her prince had been eager for bloodshed, had seemed to wish to drown in it. He had been brutal and cruel and callous, preferring to prove his right through the strength of his arm and the keen edge of his axe. And while she had hated him for that—still did, in fact—she realized that she had not been so very different. After all, no matter how much she might like to look on the past and find herself blameless, she could not help but admit, at least to herself, that she had enjoyed the reputation they had carried with them. A reputation which had meant that men and women fell prostrate at their approach, men and women who scrambled to do their bidding and went to great lengths to avoid saying or doing anything that might cause them offense.

  In short, they had been like kings and queens traveling the land, not respected, perhaps, but feared, and sometimes it was not so easy to tell the difference between the two. But if that were true, then why did she follow him now? She wanted to believe it was because of the boy, this confused, frightened youth who had no idea what was happening, why he was being hunted, for Cutter had obviously neglected to tell him. Not that such a thing was surprising, for Cutter had always preferred bellowing war cries to having quiet conversation, and even at the best of times it was difficult to get more than a few words out of the big man unless those words were threats or gloating over one corpse or another—there had been many over the years.

  She looked at the boy now. He was alive—that much Cutter had managed, but she could say no more than that. He walked with his shoulders slumped, his head down, on his face an expression of quiet panic and, behind that, of some great loss. She did not know the exact details of that loss but knowing Cutter—and his brother Feledias—as well as she did, it did not take much to imagine it.

  She slowed her pace until she came to the back of the line where the boy walked. “I’m Maeve,” she said, offering her hand.

  The boy started, looking up at her and gave her a sickly smile. “I-I’m Matt,” he said, taking the offered hand and giving it a weak shake.

  She gave him what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “I know.”

  He frowned. “How do you know, though?”

  She opened her mouth to answer then glanced up to see that Cutter had turned back and was watching her, his cold blue-gray gaze seeming to see into her thoughts, then he turned and started on again, saying nothing. Maeve turned to the boy, giving her head a shake. “Best if I let him tell you that.”

  The boy rasped a laugh without humor. “He’s not much for telling people things, I think.”

  She smiled again, this time the expression feeling more natural on her face. “No. No, he is not.”

  They walked on in silence for a few minutes then, the boy clearly having questions, but she not wanting to press him, to let him ask them in his own time, in his own way. Then, “You knew him, then? A long time ago?”

  Maeve considered the question. “I knew him as well as anyone did, I expect,” she said finally.

  The boy nodded. “What was he like?”

  She turned to regard the big man, once the greatest warrior of their people, their prince upon whom all of their hopes had relied until he had become bloodthirsty, a danger greater even than their enemies, and she frowned. “Much the same, I expect,” she said slowly. “But…angrier, perhaps.”

  The boy blinked at that. “Angrier? I don’t want to argue, but I have a hard time imagining that. He pretty much always seems angry now. Angry at me, in particular,” he finished in a mumble.

  Oh, you poor boy, Maeve thought. “Yes,” she agreed, “but it was a different kind of anger. A different…there was a time, Matt, when Cutter’s fury was a terrible sight to behold, when he burned like a great flame, one that threatened to sweep over the entire world.”

  “Oh,” he said softly. “And…now?”

  She shook her head slowly. “He is different. Still angry, yes, but it seems a cold anger, one that waits instead of rushing in…and to be honest, I do not know if that is better or not.”

  The boy was looking at Cutter now, and she saw something in his gaze that worried her. It was not adoration, not exactly, but it was not far from it either. She saw the need in his gaze, a need she understood all too well for she had felt it too, once upon a time. That, too, had been one of the reasons why she had followed the man. And that need, that desire to find his approval for reasons she could not understand, even now, had brought her no end of grief.

  She wanted to tell the boy that, to try to reassure him that there were other places out there, better places, better people in which he might find that approval, but now was not the time, so she only walked on. Walked. And worried.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Fey are not people and to think them such would be a great mistake.

  They are beings from another world, another place.

  Yet, there are some things that they share with mortals.

  Joy, for instance. Friendship too.

  And of course, anger. That, perhaps, most of all.

  —Excerpt from “The Workings of the Fey” by Scholar Kelden Marrimore

  Eventually, they reached the edge of the Black Wood, and Maeve breathed a heavy sigh of relief to be out from underneath the boughs of those great trees that seemed to mark each step they took, to tally them as transgressions that would one day be paid. It was a short lived relief, however, as she was confronted with the undeniable fact that, once again, she had fallen into the role of following what was perhaps the most dangerous man in the world—to his enemies and, if the past was any indication, his friends as well.

  Chall, too, showed obvious signs of relief, grinning widely and staring up at the sky as if he’d thought to never see it again. Even Priest wore a small, contented smile on his face, though the truth was that, in Maeve’s experience, the man nearly always did. It was as if he thought the world were some magical place of wonder and joy, when from what she could tell, it was by and large an elaborate torture device created by malicious gods.

  The youth, Matt, seemed much as he had before, worried and scared and beaten down, though perhaps with some small spring in his step. The only one who seemed to have taken no notice that they had left the Black Woods behind was Cutter. The big man only continued to trudge down the path with a walk that somehow seemed weary and threatening at the same time, as if he could do with a good nap but was more than willing to shatter any obstacle that had the misfortune to find itself in his path before then.

  Maeve thought it was funny how fifteen years could pass and a woman could find herself in almost the exact same circumstances she’d thought far behind her. Or maybe it wasn’t funny at all, but one of those cruel cosm
ic jokes which, if it elicited laughter at all, elicited the kind that sounded so very much like screams.

  They’d traveled for less than an hour when the fields of grass began to change to crops, corn and wheat. Maeve recognized them well enough from her time spent working—or, if she was being particularly honest with herself, hiding—in her garden. She expected to see men and women bent at the labor of working the crops, but the fields were empty, devoid of any life, the only sign that people called the village home coming in the sign of pillars of smoke rising in the air ahead of them.

  Minutes later, they crested a ridge, and she was able to see what must have been the village of Ferrimore that Cutter had told them about. Or at least what was left of it. As she stared at the distant village, Maeve realized that the columns of smoke she’d seen, ones she’d taken, at the time for evidence of fires lit to fight off the chill of winter’s bite, had, in fact, a far grimmer source.

  As she and the others stood there gazing at the smoking husks of what once had been homes and shops, she realized why she had seen no men or women working the fields. Those who might have were no doubt far too busy at repairing their homes. If, that was, they were alive at all.

  “Fire and Salt,” Chall breathed beside her. “What happened here? Is it…is it Feledias? Did he somehow realize we were coming?”

  Cutter grunted. “I don’t think so.”

  Maeve frowned, for she had been having much the same thought as the mage. She turned to regard the big man. “If it wasn’t Feledias, then who? Who would have done th—”

  “Come on,” Cutter said grimly, and he started down the path leading toward the village.

  “Are you…are we sure that’s a good idea?” Chall asked, his unease clear in his tone. “I mean…this place doesn’t look like a great one to take shelter in just now. Perhaps there’s another—”

  “There isn’t another place,” Cutter said, turning to regard him. “Not for miles. Unless, that is, you want to take your chances with Valaidra.”

  Chall winced, glancing to Maeve as if for help, but she had no help to give, felt just as confused and unnerved as the mage, and after a moment of silence Cutter nodded. “Let’s go,” he said, and he started toward the village once more.

  Left with no other options, Maeve and the others followed. As they drew closer to the village of Ferrimore, Maeve began to pick out more signs of destruction. Most of the village’s buildings had been made from stone and so still remained, though few were those that were not charred and scorched from flames. Their roofs, though, most which would have been made of straw or wood, had not fared nearly so well, most completely gone while a few seemed to have retained some small bit of their materials.

  And if the sight of such devastation—though what might have caused it she couldn’t imagine, the only one who might have seeming to be Cutter who, as usual, chose to remain silent—wasn’t enough, there was the smell which clung to her nostrils. Smoke, yes, but something worse than that, a smell she had not smelled in some time, one she had hoped to never smell again. Blood. A lot of it.

  The youth walking beside her paused, glancing into the field beside the path. “Maeve?” he asked. “What…what is that?”

  Maeve stopped, following his gaze, and saw a form lying in the field, partially obscured by the grass. Partially, but not completely. A corpse. A woman’s judging by the size, though the grass made most of her identity a mystery. Maeve had seen such corpses before, the remains of battles, ones which stood as mute argument against those who managed to be alive following such a battle, which lay in silent accusation of any who might claim the day a victory. A quick glance around showed other such forms in the grass on either side, lumps of fabric that, obscured as they were, might have been taken for no more than clothes—most blood-stained, which had been scattered about. She took the boy’s hand. “Best not look at them, lad,” she said softly as she led him on down the path after Cutter who, while he could not have failed to notice the devastation and the bodies, did not deem it worth pausing to notice.

  The boy hesitated for a moment but then he allowed himself to be led away and, a moment later, was walking past her, lost in his own thoughts. “I don’t like this, Mae,” a voice said softly from beside her, and she glanced over to see that Chall had walked up. “Not at all. Something’s happened here. Something bad.”

  Maeve glanced sidelong at him. “Oh?” she snapped. “Cast a magic spell to figure that one out, did you?”

  Chall recoiled, obviously hurt by the harshness in her voice. “Sorry, Maeve,” he said, “I only meant—”

  She sighed, waving a hand dismissively. “I’m sorry, Chall. You’re right, of course. I don’t like it either.”

  The man nodded but said nothing else, perhaps worried that to do so would be to risk her ire once more, and Maeve watched him drop back to walk with Priest, scolding herself. The man had wanted reassurance, that was all, and instead she had bitten his head off. The problem, of course, was that she had no reassurance to give, for she felt the same worry that had been writ so plainly on the mage’s face. And not just worry, either, but guilt. Guilt for how she’d treated the mage, yes, but not just that.

  She felt guilt for the village—or what was left of it—before her. Felt that, somehow, she and those with her were responsible for it. She had no proof, could not imagine how that could be the case, but that did not change the way she felt, did nothing to answer the guilt roiling through her, guilt which she could see on the mage’s face as well. She’d felt such guilt before, of course, but had thought she’d left that behind her along with her old life. Say what you wanted about being married to an ass of a husband and spending your idle hours knelt in the dirt tending a garden which never seemed to produce well no matter how much you tried. Boring, maybe, but no one’s life depended on whether or not her tomatoes grew well.

  Worry and guilt, yes, but as she stared at Cutter’s back, the man walking on toward the ruins of the village, either not noticing or not caring about those bloody lumps scattered in the fields around them, she found that she felt something else, too—anger.

  Before she knew it, she was speeding up her pace until she was walking beside the man who had once been her prince. He turned, glancing at her, his expression unreadable, before turning back to the trail. “You know something,” she said, not bothering to try to hide the accusation in her tone.

  “A few things,” he said. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  She frowned. “Something about this, I mean,” she said, waving her hand in a gesture meant to encompass the village and the corpses scattered about it like broken dolls.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  She waited, thinking there would be more, but the man said nothing else, only walking onward.

  Maeve felt her anger rising to a boiling point. She glanced back at the others, the youth with his pale face, his lip trembling as if he were on the verge of tears and just managing to hold them back; Chall walking with his shoulders slumped as if he carried the weight of the world on them and looking little better. The man might act as if he cared for nothing but ale and whores, but Maeve knew it to be a lie, one he closely guarded, for the man’s problem was not that he did not care but that he cared too much.

  Even the normally unflappable Priest looked troubled, his eyes roaming the fields and each corpse as if he meant to commemorate them to memory. All of them, then, affected by the grim scene. All, that was, save for Cutter whose expression betrayed nothing—except perhaps impatience. “Well?” she demanded, her anger overriding a caution which would have normally warned her off of talking to the man in such a way, for she had seen how the man dealt—nearly always with a bloody finality—with people who he felt disrespected him.

  But while many aspects of the man before her felt infuriatingly the same, it was clear that the years had worked some changes in him, for he only glanced at her, his expression not one of fury but one which was still unreadable. He studied her for a moment, as if
thinking, then he seemed to make a decision. “Did you notice the corpses?”

  She glanced back, making sure that the others were out of earshot, then leaned close. “Of course I noticed them,” she hissed. “How could I not? Corpses are a lot of things, but they’re generally not subtle.”

  He gave a single nod, seemingly oblivious to her anger. “And did anything about them strike you as odd?”

  “Call me crazy,” she said, “but I’m always a bit put off by an entire village being slaughtered.”

  “Not an entire village,” he said.

  “What?”

  He nodded his head in the direction of the village, and she followed his gaze to see figures moving about the smoking ruins in the distance, and she clenched her fists at her sides. “Oh, right. So a few survived. Well, that’s okay then. Maybe we should have a celebration, throw a party.”

  “You’re angry with me,” he said, with no more feeling in his voice than if he’d been commenting on the weather.

  “And here I thought I was hiding it so well,” she said. “You know, an entire village—sorry not an entire village, but a damned far amount of it from what I can see—has just been slaughtered. It might do you good to show a little bit of damned feeling.”

  “And would doing so bring the dead back to life?” he asked. “Would it close their wounds and take away their grief?”

  “That…well, no.”

  “Then what good would it do them?”

  “You’re right,” she said, “why bother, you know, being human? Better to be some unfeeling brute who doesn’t pay attention to anything at all, is that it?”

  “I pay attention, Maeve,” he said softly. “Now, the corpses. Have you looked at them? Closely, I mean?”

  Maeve wanted to snap at him then, to tell him that, as a general rule, most people, human people, avoided looking closely at corpses whenever possible. But she didn’t have the energy, felt exhausted, so instead she only sighed, turning to glance around the fields again, searching for one of the unfortunate souls who’d been slaughtered. It didn’t take long to find one, this one the body of a man who appeared to have been in his fifties. “Yeah, they’re dead,” she said. “I don’t see what—” But she paused then, her words failing her as realization struck.