Aoleyn crested the cliff face, to see the fire and six people, two women and four men, visible in the light about it, including Mairen and another member of the Coven named Connebragh. Laoch Tay Aillig was there, and a couple of others with him, but they were back in the shadows and she couldn’t recognize them from this side of the fire. The last man was Brayth. He sat before the fire, wearing no shirt, nothing at all from the waist up.
She focused too intently on the gathering, though, for as she came up over the ledge, Seonagh’s levitating magic left her and she very nearly fell on her face, catching herself awkwardly to turn her tumble into a less-than-graceful stumble.
She had already felt very small, a girl again, when she recognized these powerful Usgar, and now the poor girl blushed fiercely and wanted to simply run away.
But she didn’t. She righted herself and stood silently, if uncomfortably, and waited with as much composure as she could manage for Seonagh to come up behind her.
Even then, everyone continued to stare at poor Aoleyn, and those looks seemed to her to be growing more judgmental. She didn’t understand until Seonagh nudged her, rather forcefully, toward the fire. When Aoleyn looked back in surprise, Seonagh led her gaze to the pouch on her belt.
The girl flushed red, even more uneasy, for she had forgotten all about the seeds. She quickly and roughly pulled the bag off her belt and fumbled with its drawstring, finally getting it open so she could spill its contents into the fire. She nearly dropped the bag into the fire as well, but managed to catch it just at her fingertips. “Sorry,” she whispered, not to anyone in particular, and indeed, no one seemed to hear or care.
And a moment later, Aoleyn didn’t care either, for as soon as the seeds hit the fire, they burst, casting off a pink haze, a sudden blast of heat and smoke that caught Aoleyn full in the face. She coughed and sputtered and stumbled backward to sit on the ground. She didn’t actually mean to sit down, but suddenly the world had become very bendy, and standing was no longer an option. She felt as though she might throw up, but she held it down. Her eyes couldn’t seem to come into focus. She saw the man who was sitting across from her reach out over the fire pit, holding something red, a slab of meat, which he dropped onto a stone in the center of the fire.
Aoleyn couldn’t make sense of it, and felt utterly lost here, yet no one spoke.
After a moment, the man reached his hand across the fire, toward Aoleyn. She gazed at the arm, and then his bare chest, and saw something unexpected. Brayth’s torso was intricately tattooed, delicate lines weaving all about. The light from the fire danced across his chest, mesmerizing Aoleyn. She thought them beautiful. She thought them profound. Brayth spoke, but she did not hear his words; whatever was said was not as important as those tattoos.
She felt a prod from behind, from Seonagh, and when she lazily looked up, the woman’s scowl snapped her back to her senses.
The man spoke again, a single word: “Corc,” the old word for a knife.
“Oh, yes,” Aoleyn said, fumbling. Finally, she grabbed the flint knife from her belt and placed it upon Brayth’s open palm.
Suddenly, his other arm came forward, directly across the fire, caring not at all about the wisps of flames that seemed to almost encircle his forearm, and he grasped Aoleyn by the wrist, and not gently. She tried to pull away, but the man was much stronger than she, and he easily yanked her in closer. He brought the knife up to the side of her forehead, and again she tried to shy away, tried to fall back from the sharp edge of the flint, but she could not.
Then, as suddenly as he’d lunged at her, he withdrew. She felt the slightest trickle of blood dripping down from her right temple, tracing the line of her high cheekbone, and all the way down to her chin. Reflexively, her tongue flicked out to taste her own blood, but she kept her eyes locked on the man. He took the knife and brought it to his own temple. Aoleyn saw the red stain on the blade as he moved it.
Her blood.
Then there was more redness, on his face, his own blood. On the flint blade, they mixed. He reached again into the fire, to the piece of meat cooking on the stone slab. In a series of practiced movements, the tattooed warrior stabbed the meat and lifted it to his free hand, held it aloft and adeptly cut it in half.
Brayth took up one half of the meat, and beckoned for Aoleyn to do likewise. Aoleyn hesitated—the fallen half of the meat was out in the center of the fire pit, surely she would burn herself trying to grab it!—but Seonagh prodded her from behind again, hard. Hesitantly, she reached out, expecting to feel the biting flames.
But she felt no heat. Her hand shimmered, a white glow surrounding it. Aoleyn paused for just a moment to consider this strange luminescence covering her arm. She took the meat between her fingers and brought it to her mouth. With the warrior holding her stare with his own, they each took a bite.
Seonagh said something Aoleyn did not quite hear, then stepped forward and tossed something into the fire—more of those seeds! A huge burst of purple smoke rose up into Aoleyn’s face, and suddenly the world warped and bent again, even more so, and she could not hold her balance, and she was only slightly aware that she was lying down, and then not aware of anything.
* * *
“You must never!” Innevah scolded her son, trying to keep her voice down. The woman glanced all about, panicked, as if she expected a host of Usgar demons to crash into the tree-cave and drag Thump away to be tortured and murdered.
She rubbed her face, trying to find some measure of composure, as she looked back to her discovery: a broken branch as thick as two fingers and fully as long as her arm, with its end sharpened wickedly—even with a barb whittled in to prevent easy extraction.
She looked at her son, unable to form any more words in that moment of horror, and just shook her head. Then she grabbed him and pulled him in close for a desperate hug.
“I don’t like what they do to you,” he whispered.
Innevah pushed him back to arm’s length.
Thump painted on a determined expression, full of hate, his young eyes promising death.
“They will do far worse if you strike at them,” Innevah warned. “Do you understand me?”
The boy started to look away, but Innevah shook him hard. “Do you understand me?” she repeated emphatically.
“I won’t,” Thump replied.
“Promise me.”
The boy nodded.
“You made this to stab a man, yes?” the woman asked, and she managed a smile. “Because of what you saw?”
Thump shook his head, but she didn’t believe him. Not at first, at least, but then she recalled something else about that difficult night a month before.
“Was it for the young girl?” she asked, her expression one of horror.
Thump seemed genuinely confused at that question.
“The girl who took you out that day…” Innevah started to clarify, but Thump waved his hands frantically and shook his head.
“No, no!” he said. “No.”
Innevah looked at him curiously. “Was she mean to you?”
The boy swallowed hard and shook his head, slowly at first, but then emphatically.
“Did you enjoy your day with her?” Innevah asked very seriously, enunciating each word to stress the importance of the question and of Thump’s honesty here.
Several heartbeats passed before Thump answered, “She named me Bahdlahn.”
Innevah’s expression showed that she did not understand.
“Thump,” the boy explained. “But hoofbeats. Running deer…”
“Yes, yes,” Innevah said, catching on, for she knew the word. “But why would she give you that name when your name is known?”
The boy glanced down, and Innevah reached out and took him by the chin, forcing him to look her in the eye.
“They mock me,” he said quietly.
“This girl mocked you?”
“No!”
Innevah began to catch on, and she sucked in her breath as she considered the
humiliation her tactics had forced upon her son. Surely that was better than the alternative, particularly in the coming years, perhaps even months, when he came to manhood, when the Usgar would surely murder him. But still, the woman did not dismiss Thump’s current pain; she understood that what was being demanded of her poor boy was beyond what anyone should have to endure. His entire life had been a carnival of horror and humiliation.
She pulled him close and hugged him again, in no small part because she didn’t want him to see the tears pouring out of her eyes.
“She was nice to me,” Thump whispered in her ear, and Innevah heaved a great sob.
But suddenly, she shoved him back once more as terror engulfed her.
“Did you talk to her?” she asked.
The boy shook his head, but unconvincingly.
“Did she hear you talk? Does she know the truth?” Innevah pressed.
Thump swallowed hard.
Innevah’s first instinct was to slap him, to scream out in terror that her son had just signed a terrible death sentence. But she stopped short and fought for composure. She couldn’t undo whatever had happened, and she really didn’t want to put more trauma on the poor boy.
“No, you must never. Never!” she told him through gritted teeth. “You are stupid! Do you understand? They must never know!”
Thump stared at her blankly, and the pain of seeing that drove an emotional spear right into the poor, broken woman’s heart. She reminded herself that this was for the good of her son and repeated slowly and clearly, “You are stupid.”
14
ROUGH AND TUMBLE
He wasn’t afraid to let the raft he had constructed continue its meandering way along the river at this particular point, even though night had fallen. Talmadge knew this area well, and knew that this late in the season, one that hadn’t seen much rain, the river would hold no secret rapids.
So he glided along enjoying the stars, believing himself safer than he would have been with the raft secured along the banks. The wolves wouldn’t come out onto the water, after all, and he’d hear a bear or a huge elk long before it got near to him.
His eyes slowly closed, his head drooped, lulled by the rhythmic flow and the trilling and croaking frogs. Of all the things he liked the most about the open and unsettled lands were the sounds of the night. They blended together and swirled around, like the leaves of a thick tree in a gentle breeze. Only rarely did these nighttime symphonies sound a note discordant—the last scream of prey caught, or the insane yipping of the thick-necked hyenas chattering before dinner over a fresh kill.
The frogs answered from bank to bank. The night birds cooed mellow crescendos to the river’s soothing drone.
The shriek of a metal sword skipping off a stone …
Talmadge’s eyes popped open. He tried to sort out that last noise, or was it a dreamed sound?
A shout sounded on the right-hand bank, then a grunt and a curse in a language Talmadge did not know. The man struggled to his feet and gathered his long pole, straining his eyes in the darkness.
He saw the light of a campfire, just back from the river to the right, the north, and heard a continuing, rising commotion.
A big part of him just wanted to float by. This wasn’t his fight! But he heard a man cry out, “It got me!” in such desperate tones that Talmadge could not turn away. Into the river went his pole, and with the gentle current, it was no trouble for Talmadge to push the raft toward the riverbank.
He found a rocky eddy where it was easy to put in, and dropped the pole and leaped off the raft before it had even secured itself against the stones.
He stumbled in the muddy ground, but managed to pull his battle-axe from his back as he made his somewhat cautious way toward the fire and the apparent fight. He noted forms then, a couple of humans and smaller ones, ones that looked like older boys, perhaps.
“Goblins,” he said, crashing through the brush. Before he had even cleared it, he came upon one of the ugly creatures brandishing a pair of hooked knives. The green-skinned humanoid leaped in surprise, swinging about, and launched a wild flurry of spinning arms and slashing blades that got nowhere close to Talmadge. The goblin’s long ears, too, waggled wildly, its head gyrating, and Talmadge deduced that the whole of the motion was meant to present a wall of ferocity, was meant to intimidate and confuse.
But Talmadge had heard enough about goblins to recognize the ruse, and so he waded straight in. His overhead chop stopped the waggling and dancing as his axe buried into the monster’s skull.
A yank brought the sharp sound of cracking bone as Talmadge charged past, into the firelight. He took a quick survey of the scene, noting a trio, two women and a man, forming a triangular defense against a bevy of darting and stabbing goblins.
A fourth frontiersman, a long and lean man, lay on the ground some distance to the side, squirming and slapping his arms about desperately. He bled from a number of wounds, and with more incoming as a group of several goblins rushed all about him, spitting and cursing and stabbing down at him with their spears, which really were no more than sharpened sticks.
“To us, friend!” one of the women called, spotting Talmadge, and he started that way. Only a step, though, for he realized that they would never get their formation to their friend in time—a point driven home as the end of a goblin’s sharp stick was driven home, right into the eye of the poor soul lying on the ground.
How he howled!
And how Talmadge roared. He veered straight for the fallen man and through the small campfire. He kicked at it as he crashed through, sending embers and small burning logs flying at the goblins, and he followed the wall of sparks into their midst, sweeping across powerfully with his axe, sending them leaping back.
Back and forth, Talmadge whipped his weapon, shouting all the while, trying to buy some time for the fallen man’s friends to join in. He glanced back at them briefly, to see their progress halted by a volley of thrown spears.
“Just take the hit,” he mouthed under his breath, for none of those feeble weapons had any weight to them or any real power behind the throw.
Talmadge slid his hands as far apart as he could on his axe handle, and turned back just in time to see a spear thrust aimed for his gut. He swept his hands down and to the side, knocking the stab off target, then punched back with his left hand and the butt of his axe. He loosened his grip with that leading left hand, and when the punch fell just short, the goblin bit at him.
But Talmadge gave it a mouthful of axe handle instead, sliding the shaft through his loosened fingers.
The goblin’s head snapped backward and it staggered back to trip over the fallen frontiersman.
From the left side came another goblin, but Talmadge just grasped the axe midhandle with his left, let go with his right, and swept it out to fend.
And from his left hip, he drew his short sword, a weapon that had been with him since the day he had walked out of his dying hometown. He roared and leaped forward, straddling the fallen man, stabbing and slashing and hopping about to keep the remaining four goblins at bay. The one on the ground tried to rise, but a thrust of the short sword laid it low, and Talmadge tugged his weapon back just in time, and fortunately at just the right angle, to knock a thrown spear aside.
The now-unarmed goblin cursed.
It should have fled.
Talmadge leaped at it. The goblin managed to sidestep the sword. The blade attack was a feint, though, coming in slightly to the left of the goblin and forcing it back to the right. Focusing on that thrust, the goblin managed to jump right under the head of the descending axe.
Talmadge whirled about and screamed at a goblin driving a spear into the man on the ground. Purely on reaction, he flung his axe, on target, but the weapon hadn’t fully come around to dig in, and just bounced off the creature. That was enough to send it running, especially with Talmadge charging in fast behind.
The frontiersman paused only long enough to scoop up his fallen weapon—that was his p
lan, at least, but even as he bent for his axe, he felt an explosion of pain just behind his hip that sent him staggering forward and to one knee.
He glanced at the wound, to see a dagger sticking there, but he hadn’t the time to go for it as a pair of goblins came in at him hard, spears thrusting.
He got stabbed in the forearm before he could sweep that arm and the axe aside, and traded hits the other way, a spear coming at his chest with his short sword catching a goblin in the throat, gashing it from ear to ear.
A finer weapon would have driven hard through Talmadge’s thin leather jerkin and deep into his lung, and would have likely spelled the end of the man. Even as it was, the weapon stayed in place, embedded through the shirt and into Talmadge’s flesh, painfully against his ribs.
He tried to slap at it to dislodge it, but was instead forced to bring his sword up before him to try to block another incoming missile. This time it was a stone, a heavy one, and it tipped off the metal blade and bounced off the side of Talmadge’s head.
The world was spinning then, but the man knew that he could not simply lie down and huddle in pain. More goblins came in at him, or went past him, and only after many sweeps and stabs, hitting nothing at all, did Talmadge realize that they were in retreat and wanted no part of him, or of the other three humans, who had broken through the encircling ring.
“They should’ve stayed,” Talmadge managed to say, dropping his axe and reaching tentatively for the spear sticking into his chest. He started to finish, “They could have won,” but ran out of breath. He looked back to see that the trio were hovering over their prone friend, who was no longer moving and covered in blood, and paying Talmadge no heed.
Talmadge looked at the gash running the length of his forearm.
He felt like he would throw up.
He felt like he would faint.
He chose the latter, rolling down into the dirt, welcoming the darkness.
* * *
He wanted to open his eyes, but it took a long time for his body to agree. He could feel the heat of the fire before he actually saw the orange glow, then lolled his head to the side to see it more clearly.