He fell down for the fourth time.
Cadayle ran toward him, but Bransen stubbornly waved her off. Trembling every inch of the way he managed to get over onto his belly and up to his knees. He did well to hide his grimace as he noted the sympathetic and concerned look that passed between Cadayle and Callen.
They were on the road north of Delaval, heading north-northwest along the bank of the majestic waterway that had recently been named the Masur Delaval. Though this northeastern bank was considered the “civilized” side of the river, the road, or trail actually, hardly showed any such signs. They were only three days out from Delaval Town, in a region untouched by the war, yet it was hard to call their path a road. Uneven, muddy, and littered with the large roots of the great willows that lined the river, the trail could trip up any but the most careful traveler. Every step proved a test of courage for Bransen, who stubbornly carried his soul stone in his pouch and not even in his hand, let alone strapped to his forehead.
Resting on his hands and knees to reorient and catch his breath, Bransen fought the urge to slip his hand into his pouch and produce the gemstone. He noticed a pool of red liquid and only then realized that he had slammed his nose on that last fall, splitting his lip as well. He spat a few times, red spray flying from his mouth.
He felt Cadayle’s hand on his back and reminded himself that she loved him, that she was concerned for him, and rightly so.
“Don’t you think that’s enough for the day?” she asked quietly.
“W … W …” Bransen stopped and spat again, then reached for his pouch. He would have fallen over with the movement except that Cadayle caught him and held him steady. She grabbed his flailing hand and gently guided it to the pouch and the gemstone, then helped him bring the stone to his forehead.
“We’ve barely covered two miles,” he protested in a voice clear and strong. Indeed, the sudden change shocked even Bransen.
“We should try to cross another five before dusk,” said Cadayle. “We’ll not go another single mile at our pace, and if you truly injure yourself …”
Bransen turned his head to eye her hard.
“I understand,” she whispered to him, “and I know your reasoning. I wouldn’t dare pretend that I have the right to disagree. But I beg of you to measure your pace, my love. You are tormenting your body more than it can take. You’ll need more than the soul stone if you break your knee, and where will that leave me and my ma?”
“My patience is long gone with this creature known as the Stork,” said Bransen.
“But mine is not.”
Still holding the gemstone tight against his forehead, Bransen leaped up to his feet, catching himself surely and with incredible agility. He was the Highwayman now, the rogue who could scale a castle wall of tightly fit weatherworn stones. He was the Highwayman, who could challenge a laird’s champion in battle and win.
Bransen pulled the gemstone away. Immediately, he swayed. He caught himself, though, and kept Cadayle at bay with an upraised hand. Then he stubbornly put his gemstone back in his pouch and let it go.
He took a step, awkward and unsteady. He nearly fell over, but he did not, and he even managed to glance back at Cadayle to see her and her concerned mother exchanging frowns.
Hand shaking, arm flailing, Bransen managed to get his fingers back around the precious gemstone. He brought it forth and collected, too, the black silk bandanna he used to secure it to his forehead.
“I did not wish to end with a stumble,” he explained, securing it in place. He managed a strained smile, one that undeniably showed Cadayle and Callen that he was surrendering for the day for their benefit and not his own.
“I will be as patient as I can,” he promised his wife. Despite his frustration his words were sincere.
“I love you,” Cadayle said.
“With or without the gemstone,” Callen added.
Bransen licked a bit of blood from his lip.
How could he be so fortunate and miserable all at the same time?
And how, he wondered as he brought his hand up to check on the security of the gemstone, could he both appreciate and resent its healing magic? The soul stone freed him from his infirmities, made him whole—heroic, even. And yet at the same time it trapped him and held him dependent to its powers.
He wanted to be free of it, but he could not tolerate the reality of that freedom.
“You are better than you were before you found the soul stone,” Cadayle said. She waved her hand at the rough and root-strewn trail. “This ground trips you up, perhaps, but in your youth the flat grass of the monastery courtyard often left you on your face.”
“Ki-chi-kree,” Bransen said.
“The promise of the Jhesta Tu,” Cadayle agreed. “You will overcome this infirmity.
“You already have,” she added. Bransen eyed her curiously. “You defeated it with your spirit long before you found any real control of your limbs. To others you were the Stork, some in jest and some in earnest sympathy. But you have always been Bransen. And you will always be Bransen, with or without the soul stone, whether or not you need the soul stone to walk a broken trail.”
Bransen Garibond closed his eyes and took a deep breath, blowing out all of his frustration in one great exhale. “I never knew my real father,” he said, and Cadayle and Callen nodded, for they knew well the tale. “He studied the Jhesta Tu. He has been to the Walk of Clouds. He copied their book—the same book that Garibond taught to me when I was young. He will have answers.”
“Or he will show you where to look for them.”
Bransen nodded, his smile genuine, and genuinely hopeful. “Garibond told me that he went to Chapel Abelle in the North. If I can find him …”
“Bran Dynard was a good man,” Callen said, stepping up beside her daughter. “I owe him my life as surely as I owe it to Sen Wi. He knew why I was put out on the road to die, and why I carried the bites of the serpent. He knew that his superiors in his Church had witnessed my execution and had, with their silence, condoned it. And still he fought for me against the vicious powries, and he hid me away at great personal peril. You are much like him, Bransen. You carry his integrity and his sense of justice. Physical strength is nothing when weighed against that.”
“I will find my physical strength,” Bransen replied. “It is there—the soul stone shows it to me. I will overcome this infirmity.”
Callen nodded. “I would never doubt you, and double blessed am I to have been saved by your father and again by you, the Highwayman.”
Cadayle walked over and took Bransen’s arm. “Five miles?” she asked.
“That would make seven for the day,” said Bransen. “And we will do seven tomorrow.”
Cadayle tilted her head back to get a better look into her stubborn husband’s eyes.
“Two without the gemstone?” she asked.
“Two and a half,” he replied flatly.
Callen’s laugh turned them both to regard her, standing with Doully’s reins in hand. “And they say that my walking companion brings a reputation for stubbornness,” Callen remarked, shaking the donkey’s lead.
All three were laughing, then, and even old Doully gave a snort and a whinny.
FIVE
Foul Chaps We’d Be
It called to him from the far corner of the darkness, a continual growl, a rolling “r.” Finally it broke and rewound in its timbre like a wave flowing over itself just offshore.
It grew again in resonance and filled Cormack with its mournful vibration, beckoned him forward in the darkness. He followed, a purely instinctive and unthinking move. He knew not if the sound would take him from the abyss, nor, locked as he was in a state of near emptiness, if he even wanted to come forth from the darkness.
At that moment Cormack didn’t want anything. He just was. A moment of pure existence or of nothingness, he couldn’t tell. But the rolling “r” pulled him forward as if walking him to the edge of a cliff. He stepped off and fell through the blackness. His
eye cracked open, and crystalline brilliance stung him. Sensations returned, and with them consciousness.
The light was the sun, sparkling off the water. The taste in his mouth was sand, for he was facedown on the beach. The sound was a song, a powrie chant.
With great effort Cormack rolled his head to the side.The bloody-capped dwarves were huddled in a circle, their arms locked over the shoulders of the next dwarf in the ring. They turned their living wheel in perfect cadence, a few steps left, a few back to the right, all the while singing:
Put me deep in the groun’so cold
I’ll be dead, ’fore I e’er get old
Done me fights and shined me cap
Now’s me time for th’endless nap
Spill no tear and put me deep
Dun want no noise for me endless sleep
Done me part and stood me groun’
But th’other one won and knocked me down
Put me deep in the groun’so cold
I’ll be dead ’fore I e’er get old
Spill no tear and put me deep
Dun want no noise for me endless sleep
Cormack tried to lift his head to get a better perspective, and only then did the monk realize that he had been tightly bound, his hands painfully drawn up against his back, the rough weeds tight into his wrists. More than those shackles, though, loomed the noose of pain shooting through his head. As soon as Cormack got his chin off the sand, he dropped it back, grimacing all the way, as hot fires erupted in the back of his skull.
He closed his eyes tight and tasted the sand and tried hard to growl through the burning agony. He wanted to reach up and grab at the spot, but he couldn’t wriggle free his hands.
Gradually it passed, and the powrie song continued, and their huddle circled left and right, just off the beach. This time Cormack slowly rolled his entire body instead of trying to lift his head alone, and he managed to gain a better perspective on the powrie dance. He realized only then that the dwarves were circling a particular spot, a particular thing. As he considered the words of their ditty he solved the riddle.
Cormack held his tongue, not wanting to risk interrupting the solemn ceremony. It went on for a long while until finally the ring of dwarves opened, revealing a cairn of piled stones. Still singing, the cadence marking their every movement, the dwarves turned as one so that they were no longer shoulder-to-shoulder, but formed instead a single file as they marched around and then away from the grave of their fallen comrade.
“So, are ye awake then?” the leading dwarf asked when they reached the beach and began to disperse. “Was thinking ye meant to sleep the whole o’ the day.”
“Better for him if he did, what?” the second dwarf added in a sinister voice indeed. “Better for him if he’d listened to his fellows and done run to their home o’ rocks.”
“More fun for us that he didn’t,” another put in, stepping out of the line and pulling his red beret from his hairy head. In the same movement the dwarf drew out a curved, serrated knife, its gleaming blade already marred by blood, and Cormack knew that he was doomed. Powries—bloody caps, as they were known—wore their most prized possession on their heads, and those red berets, through some magic that no race other than the dwarves understood, shined more brightly with the blood of fallen enemies. The intensity of a beret’s hue constituted the powrie badge of honor, of rank and respect.
The dwarf with the knife approached. Cormack tried to hold steady his breathing, tried not to be afraid, as he glanced all around for his Abellican brethren.
But they were not to be seen. They were in the rock chapel, as the dwarf had proclaimed, and Cormack couldn’t even free his arms to defend himself.
The tall and willowy woman burst from the forest, the wide leaves of the many ferns and low plants slapping against her bare legs as she rushed along the sketchy path. She had hurried from her village, intending to perform the midday service, the Fishermen Blessing, as her station demanded of her. As soon as Milkeila cleared the last brush and viewed the rocky expanse to the beach she knew that her service would be delayed, however, for none of the fishermen were in the water. They stood upon the high rocks, staring out over the calm lake to the southeast. Moving out onto the beach and toward those rocks Milkeila understood the distraction, for the sounds of battle, the sharp crack of sticks, the occasional cry of rage or pain, drifted across the flat water to her ears.
“Chapel Isle,” one of her kinsmen said to her. She knew that already from the direction of the sounds, referring to the small and rocky island upon which the Abellican foreigners had built their simple monastery.
“The monks are longing for their homeland again,” another fisherman said with a derisive snort, and others snickered at the thought.
Milkeila brushed from her face her thick hair, a rich brown hue that highlighted red before the sunrise and sunset, to peer intently into the fog, though she knew that she would see nothing definitive at this distance across the misty lake. Only on breezy days, when the perpetual fog was blown clear at various intervals, could the people of Yossunfier, this island, catch the slightest glimpse of the monks’ home, and even then, it was nothing more than an indistinct blur in the distance.
There was simply too much mist this day, as almost every day.
“Better the powries than the monks,” another of Milkeila’s kinsmen remarked. The others grumbled their agreement.
Milkeila remained silent and did well to hide her discontent, for she hardly agreed. Nor had it always been this way between her people of Yan Ossum, Clan Snowfall, and curious southern Vanguardsmen who called themselves Brothers of Abelle. When the monks had first appeared at the lake they had befriended the barbarians, particularly the shaman class, to which Milkeila belonged (though back then, she had been merely a young and eager student). Many of her kin had quickly become disenchanted with the Abellicans because of their insistence that their way was the only way, that their religion was the true religion, and their demand of adherence to that strict order and rituals.
Milkeila’s hand moved up to brush the necklace concealed under her more traditional one of claws and teeth and bright feathers. Under her smock the young woman kept a ring of gems, stones of varying color and type and magical property, given to her by one of the younger monks. She glanced around guiltily, knowing that her people would judge her harshly if they ever discovered her secret—and the other secret: that she was privately meeting with that young monk, being tutored in the general ways of Abellican gemstone magic. And much more than that.
The sounds of battle increased across the water.
“Looks like they have a good row going,” one of the barbarians said. “We should prepare the boats and paddle in behind the fight. The pickings will be easy. Perhaps we could even go right to their stone church and throw the foolish Abellicans from the lake once and for all.”
Others mumbled their agreement, but all present knew the impracticality of the suggestion. No raids could be executed without the proper blessings of the shamans and the careful planning of the elders, and none of that could happen in short enough order for this impromptu mission to occur. Still, the eager nods reminded Milkeila that she and her few rebellious cohorts were playing with danger here in their secret relationship with the Southerners, particularly Milkeila; she was shaman and had dared to take Cormack as her lover.
“Maybe the powries will do our work for us,” the same man said after a few heartbeats, when enough time had passed for all of them to recognize the impracticality of his previous suggestion.
To hear her people cheering for powries over fellow humans left Milkeila cold. The Abellican monks had crossed a dangerous threshold early on, one they had stepped over by choice and not heritage. In insisting that the barbarians elevate the teachings of Abelle over their long-standing, traditional beliefs, the monks had, in effect, openly declared themselves heretics and had been branded as such by the elders and the shamans.
Milkeila recalled the day when she
had warned the Abellicans about their unacceptable path and winced in her mind’s eye to remember Brother Giavno’s angry retort. “What do we care if our ways offend you?” he had roared. “Your place is in hellfire while heaven awaits the followers of Blessed Abelle!”
Milkeila hadn’t known what “hellfire” might mean, but when Giavno had assured her that she and her people were doomed to sit in eternity beside the likes of the dactyl demons, she had fathomed the point of his rant quite clearly.
Fortunately not all the Abellicans were of similar temperament as that unpleasant one. Some of the younger brothers, one in particular, were quite open to the possibilities that there were other explanations and traditions worth exploring in sorting through the mysteries of life. Of like mind to Milkeila and her small group of friends, who often wondered about the world beyond the borders of the mist-covered lake, a world upon which they were forbidden to venture.
“Be safe, Cormack,” the shaman whispered under her breath, her hand brushing her shirt above the necklace of magical stones, and in an even lower voice, she added, “My love.”
The serrated blade was barely an inch from Cormack’s throat when another dwarf grabbed the arm holding it.
“Nah,” that second powrie said, tugging the first dwarf back from the bound human.
“I won’t cut him wrong that his blood’s spillin’ too fast!” the first assured the others. “Let him die slow, and we’ll all get our caps in the puddle, what?”
“Nah, ye’re not for cuttin’ him at all,” said the other, and he moved in between the knife-holder and poor Cormack. He glanced back at Cormack as he did. Cormack realized from the dwarf’s recently busted nose, blood caked on his thick mustache, that this had been one of his opponents before the glacial trolls had arrived on the scene.