From Across the Clouded Range

Inside the coach, Dasen found Tethina sitting in the center of the bench at the back of the compartment. The look she gave him as he entered told him that he was not invited to sit next to her, so he sat at the front of the coach facing her. The small table that could be affixed into the middle of the coach had been removed leaving a gaping space between them that seemed like miles. Dasen settled into his seat, adjusting the cushion at his back, and turned to Tethina. She stared at him with cold, hard eyes. Her mouth was a stern line. One hand clutched the bench beneath her. The other was hidden in the pocket of her dress. Her entire body was tense as if preparing for a fight.

  Dasen sighed and cursed himself for this turn of events. He drew a breath to explain it all away but was interrupted by the sound of the window behind him opening. “We’re ready, sir,” the driver declared.

  “Thank you, Esso,” Dasen replied. He turned to Tethina. “Are you ready? Do you need anything? It will be at least two hours before we reach Lake Mithrel.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “We are ready, Esso,” Dasen called through the open slat then pulled it shut. He turned and waved out the window to his side. The crowd outside erupted in cheers, salutes, and well-wishes. Ipid and Rynn waved. A second later, Esso called to the guards and horses, and with a lurch, the coach began to roll.

  Dasen kept his attention focused out the window without really seeing the people then trees rolling past. He tried to order his thoughts, wondering how to best to explain away Tethina’s misplaced fears. He turned his attention finally back to her and was caught by the same hard stare. “Well,” he began but then did not know how to proceed. He watched Tethina for a moment, examined the way the soft fabric of the dress rested on her thin frame, tried and failed to keep his eyes from the white expanse of skin that led down to her chest, from the tan ankle that peeked out between the dress and her horrifically blood-stained shoes.

  The clearing of her throat brought Dasen’s attention back to her face and what were, if anything, even harder eyes. “You seem to be upset with me,” he started. “I think I know why, but it is all a misunderstanding.”

  Tethina harrumphed. Her hand moved in her pocket.

  Dasen drew a breath to continue, but the sound of the driver’s window opening interrupted him again. Perturbed, he prepared ask what the man wanted but didn’t get the chance. “Try not to shake the coach too much back there,” the driver bellowed. “I do 'ave ta keep it on the road." He erupted into laughter and slammed the window shut.

  Dasen’s face brightened, but he could not decide if it was from embarrassment or anger. The driver was clearly drunk, which was offense enough, but what he had said was far beyond acceptable. He considered halting then and there to dismiss the man but was not sure if any of the guards could manage the coach. In any case, he would very soon find himself out of Ipid’s employ and lucky if he could find work driving a dung cart.

  Infuriated, he turned to apologize to Tethina and was caught by a stare that set him back. Her cold eyes had turned to purest ice. Her face was chiseled, jaw clenched so her teeth might crack, nostrils flared. This was an expression of pure hatred surpassing even the one she had given Pete Magee in the village. The unbridled ferocity took Dasen’s breath away, but that was nothing in comparison to what he saw when his eyes tracked the shimmer of light between them. There, in Tethina’s outstretched hand, was the blade of a short knife.

  Dasen’s jaw dropped. He no longer considered his apology. The only thing he could think about was that knife, and he pushed himself against the wall at his back to maximize the distance between himself and its sparkling point. He watched that knife for a long time, wondering if it would soon be standing from his chest. Tethina’s knuckles were white from the force of her grip. The tip trembled, scribbling erratically in the shadows.

  “What . . . what are you . . . ?” Dasen tried to speak without ever taking his eyes from the knife.

  “Shut up!” Tethina ordered. “I don’t want to hear your excuses. Pete and his gang told me exactly what you had planned. I didn’t want to believe them. I wanted to think you were different, that Milne and Ipid were right about you, but now I see how it really is.” She brushed a tear angrily from her eye with her free hand. That motion cut Dasen almost as surely as the knife.

  “I . . . I am,” Dasen tried. “I mean, I was . . . .”

  “I told you to SHUT UP!” Tethina yelled. The knife leapt forward. Dasen pressed himself against the wall until he dared not even breathe. “I won’t be some toy for you. We won’t be doing anything to make this coach shake, and if you force yourself on me, I will find a time and I will make sure you can never do it again. Do you understand me?” Tethina shook the knife. Dasen could only nod.

  “I wanted this to work,” she continued, emotion creeping into her voice. “I really did. I wanted to believe that you could be kind and understanding. But now I see that you are just another asshole boy, just like the ones back in that Order-cursed village.”

  “Tethina, please,” Dasen pleaded. “Let me explain.”

  “Explain what? How you planned to ‘fuck the wildcat out of me’? How you planned to ‘chain me to your bed until I begged you to treat me like the proper girl I should have been all along’? How you planned to rape me right here in your coach while your driver and guards watched? Were they going to get a turn?” Tethina’s voice was sharp but tears were coursing down her cheeks. She brushed them violently away. The knife shook more erratically, but it did not yield.

  “How . . . how could you think that?” Dasen whispered. “I would never . . . I could not even imagine. How can you even think me capable of . . . .”

  THWACK! THWACK! TWHACK! THWACK! cut Dasen’s words short. Resonating from the back of the coach, the sound was unmistakable. The driver bellowed the obvious a second later, “ATTACK!” The coach leapt forward, nearly sending Dasen from his seat.

  In shock, he grabbed his bench and clung to it for his life. He looked up and found that Tethina had assumed a similar posture. Her face had gone white. All of her concentration was focused on maintaining her seat against the suddenly wild ride. The knife had been jarred from her hand and was bouncing across the floor like a wild animal. Her head shot up, face contorted in fear, and she screamed, “What was that?”

  “Arrows,” Dasen said with stunned calm. “We’re under attack.” It was only the statement coming from his mouth that brought the reality of the situation home. They were under attack. Someone had fired arrows at them, and they were now trying to escape.

  The coach hit a rut and leapt into the air, leaving its occupants momentarily weightless then depositing them back hard onto their benches. The blow was enough to break Dasen’s grip on his seat. He slid off and crumpled to the floor. His eye caught the glimmer of the feral knife. It leapt toward him and planted itself in the side of the bench inches from his head. He gasped and struggled against the shifting coach to find his equilibrium.

  When he managed to get a grip on the bench and pull himself back up, he saw that Tethina was keeping a careful watch out the back window. She held the frame with white knuckles to maintain her seat. “Four of your worthless guards just ran off,” she screamed, “but I don’t see anyone following us!”

  “The guards are going to hold off pursuit,” Dasen yelled back. Another bump nearly sent him back to the floor. “That’s their job.”

  A glance out the shaking window to his left showed trees streaking by in a green blur, nearly touching the sides of the compartment. Dasen marveled at how Esso was able to keep them on the road, but he did not want to tempt fate any longer than necessary. Struggling to maintain his seat, he pulled aside the small window to open the infamous line of communication. “What in the name of the Order is happening, Esso?”

  A rut made the coach shift ominously to its side as Dasen spoke. He felt two of the wheels lift off of the ground as he slipped down
the bench. It was only his grip on that window that kept him from landing back on the oak floor when the wheels returned to the ground with a bone-rattling thud.

  Esso was obviously having an equally difficult time holding his seat because it was several seconds – it seemed like hours – before he answered. “An ambush, sir!” His voice was breathless from the distraction of keeping them on the road. “Out of nowhere, arrows started ‘ittin’ us. Jack, Willem, Roger, and James gone back to hold ‘em. Darryl and Raif rode ahead to clear the way. I’ll keep us runnin’ till we’re sure the dangers past. Ya’ll should hang on. It’s gonna be bumpy.”

  As if responding to his words, the coach leapt from the road then slammed back down with a sickening crunch. Dasen clung to the window and heard Tethina scream behind him. Esso had tied himself to his bench but was still whiplashed. His head cracked on the wood behind him then flew forward into his own knee. His hands went limp, and Dasen watched the reins slip from his fingers. He drew the breath to yell at the driver, but the words died on his lips, drawn away by something inexplicable.

  In front of them, a black sphere appeared out of nowhere. At first, Dasen thought the blur was an illusion caused by the rattling of the coach. He blinked his eyes hard to clear them, but the vision only became stranger as the figure of a man stepped from the middle of the disk. The man’s appearance was inconceivable in every way, but Dasen somehow did not feel panicked by it. Rather, he felt an incredible calm rush over him. It was as if the entire world stopped and came into focus around the man until time itself crept by like a glacier. He used that calm to study the man, amazed by his ability to see the strange figure despite the shaking of the coach that turned all else into a blur. The man looked old with a bent back and a wild grey beard. He wore a black robe with a heavy cowl that cast deep shadows over most of his face, but his smoldering eyes and thin lips were clear through the shadows. Those lips held a broad smile as he watched the coach close on him, a lunatic welcoming death with delusional glee.

  Then Dasen realized that the man was speaking. He knew that he should not be able to hear the words over the roar of hooves, but they were as clear as an intimate conversation in a quiet room. Yet the words were not like any that Dasen had ever heard. Each of them formed in his mind as a strange rune-like shape that did not appear to follow any pattern: twisting, turning, shapeless yet formed, conceivable but utterly indescribable. The words themselves were nonsense. They had no uniformity, sequence, or structure. No sound was anything like the one before, like a hundred languages spoken at once yet none of them properly formed.

  Dasen listened to those words with a strange analytical calm that seemed to stretch for hours. He did not feel the bumps that threatened to shake the coach apart, could not feel it careening off the road as the horses reacted to the loss of the driver’s hands and the inexplicable appearance before them. The only things that existed were the runes and the words they evoked. Each rune formed and faded like a firefly in his mind until the last image slowly died to black and the last chiming of the words grew distant. With the last rune’s disappearance, his mind crashed back upon him at the same moment a ball of fire appeared in the old man's outstretched hands and raced toward the coach.

  Without thought, Dasen threw himself from the bench and felt fire sweep over him from the small window. An instant later, he landed unprepared on the floor just as it came up to meet him. The collision knocked him senseless, nearly snapped his neck, and left him writhing. That blow was followed by another as the coach careened from the road, spun, toppled, and smashed roof first into a tree. He was shot like a rock from a sling into the roof then deposited none-too-gently back against the door as the vehicle splintered.

  Lying beaten and battered against the door of the upturned coach, Dasen struggled to regain his senses. There is a fire, he told himself, you need to get out. But even that plea seemed far away and his body was not listening. Dots raced before his eyes. He could not decide which way was up, did not know where his legs were, or if they worked. Confusion overran him. The dots formed into a swirling mass of black. He struggled to hold off that creeping darkness, knew that it was the enemy, but the battle was futile. His body had already given up, and the darkness was growing stronger, overrunning his defenses. The last thing he remembered as the void claimed him was the burning heat of a raging fire.

  Chapter 11