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Albryan sat as silent and poised as a forest cat in the tree as the troop of soldiers passed beneath him. There were not many—around twenty or so—but he did not like this at all. They had the look of common brigands, but were better armed and armoured than such rogues had any right to be. And then there were the captives...
Behind the soldiers, at least thirty ragged prisoners trailed miserably, their feet bound in chains linking their ankles, fastened each to the next in line. Most of them were women. A few were young children, and even fewer were men who had the look of farmers, poor farmers at that. There were no babes in arms. Albryan saw the way a young girl flinched from a soldier who walked too near, and had to clench his fists against the branch he was straddling. You can do nothing for them, he told himself harshly. Your first duty is to Qwu’Mallorn. To your own people, your homeland.
Foliage shielded him above and below; Albryan needed no magic to hide himself from sight. The farmlands of the delta-valley lay behind them, and here the first ironwoods appeared in the forest. The one Albryan sat in was a true giant of the breed, with branches wide enough for a man to fall asleep on. It was almost like being back home, except that brigands such as this had never been able to pass beyond the magical barrier for long.
He was so close to home, and yet to get there, he would have to figure out some way to cross this land that was suddenly crawling with hostile armed forces. The only mercy was that apparently Arran had not seen fit to equip these with guns and cannons. But if they were merely attacking farmsteads and taking common farm-folk as captives, they certainly needed little more than sword and bow, and carrying gunpowder would only slow them down.
The few days since Albryan had camped beside the Dreaming Water with his two charges had passed in a blur. The land of the delta-valley was beautiful, dappled in broadleaf forest, sweet with native grasses and wildflowers, with lazy streams meandering through the fields in threads of blue as clear as the sky above. The mountain breezes off the high peaks now grey in the far distance kept the air fresh and cool, and every morning was crisp and new, brimming with the yet unknown.
They had forded the River Granite, which in these lowlands ran shallow and slow across a heavily silted floodplain. The river had been practically stationary at the point where they had crossed, foamy brown water sloshing over a wide pavement of the dusty pink rock for which it was named. Hills of that granite rose in the far southern distance for those who cared to look, but Albryan’s focus had been only for the east bank of the river, where a staid ironwood rose above scrubby thorn-bushes like a sentinel standing watch. It had been the last lap, he remembered thinking. Albryan was too old a campaigner to imagine that nothing could befall them in the two days it would take to reach the top of the flint hills where the magical Border began. But even he was dismayed by the speed at which everything had started to go wrong.
They had met no-one else that day. That alone had struck Albryan as passing strange, since they were travelling through the most fertile part of the valley, where rich river silt supported a thriving agriculture. But the fields beside the road had been wild and grassy, unploughed, unplanted, no labourers working the soil. Velda had noticed, he knew, being of farmer stock herself: he remembered how the sinister mood had gradually grown on the three of them. And then they had seen the smoke, smelled the foulness on the air.
Albryan swallowed bile, remembering. They had cautiously approached the ruined farmstead, his hand on the hilt of his sword all the while. There had been new furrows in the fallow meadows, mud on the rutted road. They had passed the carcass of a milch cow, half-charred and bloated, left to lie, and half a dozen dead goats. And then Velda had stumbled over the corpse of a young boy, no older than twelve, his rough tunic scarlet with blood that was still wet.
They had made a hasty retreat; the ruined farmhouse was smouldering, too hot to approach, and the thick black smoke had set them all to coughing. They had sheltered in the woods just beyond the farm. Soon enough, Albryan, scouting alone whilst the other two holed up in a cluster of thorn bushes, had detected the roving bands of brigands with their captives in tow.
It was now the third day since they had crossed the River Granite, and still they had not reached the flint hills. Albryan had not dared to go more than a few miles every night, each time directing them to move only when he was quite sure that the soldiers had made camp for the evening. They were running low on food, only bread and cheese left to sustain them, but Albryan did not dare take the time to try and hunt. And doubly, he did not dare to use any magic...
He thought of Velda, and was assailed by a flood of emotion he only barely understood. She had cried the night after the ruined farm, as might be expected of anyone who had never witnessed true warfare. Hiram had been unsettled too, Albryan knew, though the old man was more used to atrocity, having lived through the siege of Armour City.
Things were not supposed to have gone this way. He had been taking her to safety. He had not realized...
He had not realized so many things. The thought of the young woman he had found in the mountains confused Albryan so much that he had tried to put her at arm’s length whenever possible. But on that night, he had taken her in his arms to comfort her. And all the emotion from that evening beside the Dreaming Water had come flooding back, the things he had felt when she’d healed him, the way their eyes had met and he’d been unable to look away.
She was unremarkable, common-born, no special talent but for the incredible power that moved through her in defiance of all natural laws. She can undo magic. That alone made Albryan caution himself against her, knowing that this diminutive woman could not be touched by any measure of his Mage-Gift. She could take him apart simply by existing. Albryan felt an instinctive revulsion against this, even as he was undeniably attracted to her. He had never thought that anything like it could possibly exist, and could only guess at what it portended.
Albryan could match any Morgein woman in magical prowess, could match any nonmage mercenary with his sword. He would even have welcomed a rematch against Dannine Sylvaissen, preferably after a long rest and a chance to recover from the ordeal he had endured. Velda’s power, however, was something he had no defence for. And no matter how well he liked the girl, how attractive she was, with strong Vailanan features and dark enough to have sprung from the jungles of Sanghui, how much her vulnerable side awakened his protective instincts—he must remember his duty. He had to bring her to Qwu’Mallorn, bring her quickly and quietly, contain her, contain any possibility of danger. The girl had within her the power to end the war. Had she not agreed to come with him, Albryan would have had to take her by force, and as much as his heart constricted in shame at that thought, he would have done it without hesitation.
You need to focus, soldier, he told himself, as he was often doing these days. She cannot understand what the sacred forest means to you—to all who dwell within it. She cannot know what truly lies in your heart.
Because you’ve never shared that with her, stupid lout, he argued back with himself. Secrecy was a hard habit to break, and he had not wanted to scare the girl off. She had to come with him; he could sort out the rest later. An orphan from some borderland town in Svanfeld. That’s all she is. How could she ever understand?
She had saved him three times, given freely without expecting anything from him in return. The very thought riddled him with guilt, and yet he knew that all of it had been necessary. He had gone to the Svanlyn mountains on a whim, and she had crossed his path in a meeting that Albryan could only believe was predestined. She was meant to come with him. She was meant to help him. And if he had already ruined whatever was growing between them, if she ended up hating him, that was too bad. Albryan had survived worse.
The war is the only thing that matters, he told himself, perched on the wide branch watching the brigands lead their lines of shackled slaves by. He could not make a true friend of Velda, and he could not help these people.
Albryan had heard reports of fighting in this region, but he had never realized how bad the situation truly was. He knew that Dannine had occasionally broken through the magical barrier of Qwu’Mallorn and attacked a few isolated farmsteads on the very western fringe of the mother forest, but he had never considered what Arran might be doing to those who had no magical barrier to protect them, the simple nonmage farm-folk who dwelled here.
Yet the question nagged at him: why? These people were Arran’s own subjects, ruled from the stronghold of Armour City, answering to Arran’s own laws. Not to mention, some percentage of Armour City’s food stores were grown in this very area. Why would the sorcerer-king indiscriminately terrorize his own people like this? The soldiers passing beneath were human, not necrome, and they wore the blood sorcerer’s own insignia, the silver-and-white that was Arran’s uniform and standard.
More than once, Albryan had observed that Arran Sylvaissen did not really seem to care how much he spent in war or how the people of his land loathed him. He ruled by fear, yes, but some things he did simply defied logic.
Albryan had once witnessed one of Arran’s public displays of punishment in Armour City. His job had been simply to observe and report back to Thinas, so he had not intervened in what it pleased Arran to call justice. He had not intervened even when small children far too young to know anything of treason were strung up and gutted beside their parents. Albryan had remained calm when the spectators began to turn against their king, when the crowd had heaved and tried to storm the blood sorcerer and his children, and he had quietly slipped away as Arran’s soldiers began cutting into the crowd.
And he would do nothing now, when Arran was terrorizing his own people, slaughtering the innocent and raping the land, because an end to the war, the slightest chance to bring an end to the blood sorcerer and all his cruelty, was more important. Velda was more important, because somehow, Albryan knew, she held the key to all of this.
––––––––
In a sheltered cave-hollow at the edge of a low cliff where Albryan had left them, Velda lay apparently asleep whilst Hiram kept watch from the narrow cave opening. Through half-slitted lids, she could see his ragged outline, narrow face poised towards the outside, thin hands working idly as he carved an indistinct shape from a twig he had found on the ground. He had been working at this for a while now, claiming that he had been proficient at carving animals and flowers in his youth, but the skill seemed to be slow in returning.
Velda closed her eyes and pressed her face to her bedroll, moving into a kind of half-sleep where impressions floated across her mind, only lightly touching her with wisps of memory. Foremost was the thing she could not forget, the burned homestead and the dead boy.
Velda could not even remember, now, when she had first seen death. The monks of Lynborder kept herds of sheep and goats, and at some point she had even helped butcher lambs for the table. Emmett had had his pigs, and Velda was no stranger to the process that turned farm animals into chops and roasts. That had never drawn any strong reaction from her.
Worse had been the people she had watched die over the years. She had been nine or ten when she first began learning basic woundcare. She had tended minor injuries and illnesses at first, the cut on the hand from a kitchen knife or butcher’s cleaver, ankles sprained or broken from people who misstepped in the mountains, babies with coughs and colics. Some of the oldest brothers at the monastery had died throughout the years, and she had attended their corpses and even helped prepare one or two for their last rites before burial.
She had been twelve the first time she had seen death by injury, though. A farmer had fallen from his horse and gotten trampled by his own cows before he could get up. Brother Henck Smelter had gone to attend the injured man in his homestead, taking Velda and an older boy along to assist him. She remembered that day very clearly, the monk turning pale as snow when he lifted the blanket from the injured man, the way the man’s gaze had been almost totally blank, gone already though breath somehow remained in his body. How Brother Henck had spent much longer comforting the wife and children than he had attending the dying man, for as he said later, he could see at one glance that there was nothing to be done.
Farming was dangerous, sometimes, and so were the mountains, where cliff and scree and snow-covered slopes waited for the unwary to look upon them with overconfidence. But Velda knew that commonplace accidents, things no-one would ever think to be dangerous, claimed more lives by far. Infection was the single biggest killer in Lynborder, from the blades of axes and kitchen knives, and once a pitchfork some old man had put through his foot digging furrows for his tomatoes. The monks’ remedy for infection was the holy word prevention, but often by the time people came to seek their aid, it was too late for that.
Then there was the violent death of childbirth, one Velda was intimately familiar with. For a day or two, she had believed she might die after delivering her son. Her labour had taken longer than a day, and afterwards she had languished in a deep sleep, bleeding more than she should have. She had flitted in and out of consciousness, sometimes half aware of the child’s crying and Emmett holding her hand, other times halfway towards her unknown ancestors. But the danger had passed at last; no infection had come, and she had lived to see her son buried before she ever was. Other women had not pulled through. Old Stein’s sister Lissy, diminutive Kess, her friend Elna...
It had all come upon her in a rush, that moment she had stumbled over the dead child and turned him to see the face, half believing that maybe the corpse was only sleeping. It could have been her own son lying there, dark-haired and brown-eyed, perhaps from some bizarre alternative future where Ricard had lived another ten years only to be cut down by warmongering mercenaries.
That was what she found so hard to accept, that in this world of diseases and mischance someone had made the cold decision to side with death, taken a whole life without reason and thought so little of it that they left the corpse where it had fallen in the despoiled fields. Albryan had comforted her afterwards, smoothing her hair and murmuring soothing nothings as one might to an frightened horse, but he could not know that anger, far more than fear, was the cause of her tears. Even in the face of sudden danger, Albryan’s quiet competence assuaged her fear. She need not panic until he did, she knew, and so far the young soldier had shown no sign of anything more than an even grimmer determination to get back to his homeland.
Strangely, that event had helped clear Velda’s head, even as it dried up the easy conversation she had shared with her travelling companions. She felt more comfortable in silence during times of stress, and the two men had not said much to each other either. And in that silent calm, reminded how fragile was the very thing she called life, Velda had looked across the space between them to the clear eyes and stubborn lips of Albryan Lana, and suddenly realized that if he made any move close to kissing her again, she would embrace him back without hesitation.
If he ever did. If they were ever alone together again. If he even wanted to. Velda thought she had seen attraction in his eyes that night when she had pulled the blight from him, but it could just as well have been gratitude.
But that wasn’t the most important part, she knew. The point was that her heart was suddenly free to fly again. She seemed to have freed it, somehow, in her flight from the mountains. The spring sun had come out and shone upon her, and the pain of loss had retreated into the distance, no longer all-consuming.
When she thought of her husband now, her first image of him was not of the day he had died, the pallid wasted face which had haunted her for so many months afterwards. No, she saw him as he had been when they’d first met, both of them all of sixteen, wild hearts with no planned future and no duty but to live. Emmett had just found work as a common labourer on the Lester farm, and had spent all of that day digging trenches for drainage of the carrot and turnip fields. She had been running a few errands in town and was headed back towards the monastery when she saw him for the first time, straw-headed, sun-tanned, crooked-toothed and crusted with tilth, sneaking a lone cigarillo where the edge of the field met the little stream and the rutted farm road, under a drooping willow tree. She could not quite remember how that first conversation had gone, but she did remember his north-country burr when he introduced himself, holding out one dirt-encrusted hand to shake, and how she had taken it before he remembered that it was bad manners to get dirt on girls. She remembered how he had blushed and stammered then, and to cover his embarrassment suddenly blurted out, “You’re real pretty.” She had waited for the qualifier—if it weren’t for your nose—as she had heard all her life, but from Emmett it had never come.
As confusing as this new power of hers was—this undoing—she thought she could recognize in it something she had always worked for. Healing. If nothing else, the power seemed to closely correspond to her desire to heal and fix. If only it had come in time for Ric and Em, but it had come with Albryan, and for that alone she felt grateful towards him. Perhaps the gods had finally smiled upon Velda, despite a lifetime of misgivings. She knew little of the mother goddess the Morgei were said to worship, though from Albryan she had learned the name: Qwu’Kiya.
The religion Velda had been brought up to held that there were no false gods. Minor deities governed the earth and all human affairs, and the Great Father and Mother, Vezzat and Thäle, smiled down upon all. It would not be a contradiction for the goddess of the sacred forest to have brought a blessing along with her young soldier. The monks spoke often of heroes in the past who had received just such gifts, like the silver armour of Prince Edwin or the prophetic dreams of Saint Aric. The idea scared Velda a little, but more than that, it thrilled her, making her truly feel like a heroine in a song.
She must have drifted off to sleep in the end, for the next thing she knew was the gentle pressure of Hiram’s hand, shaking at her shoulder. She sat up and blinked sleep from her eyes, tucking stray hairs away from her face into her bun. The orange glow of sunset beamed through the narrow entrance of the cave, and Albryan had returned, crouching on the sandy floor and making a hasty snack of some spare bread and cheese. Hiram wordlessly handed the same to Velda to break her fast after the afternoon sleep.
“I followed the men all afternoon,” Albryan said in a low voice. “There are fewer soldiers than I thought. No more than twenty in this band. They’re Arran’s, no doubt about it.” He flicked a meaningful look at Hiram, who nodded grimly. “Silver-and-white insignia. I followed them until they made camp for the night. They have at least thirty prisoners, need to guard them. They won’t be doing any patrols tonight.” He looked between Hiram and Velda. “We have to get past them. Tonight, in the dark. We may not see such an opportunity again.”
Velda stirred. “What of the prisoners?”
For a moment Albryan looked lost. “The prisoners?”
“The folk of this land, aren’t they?” Velda pressed. “The survivors. What are the soldiers planning to do with them?”
Albryan fidgeted a little. “From what I could see—” He hesitated. “They were chained together. Indicates perhaps they’re planning to sell the captives as slaves.”
Velda swallowed, remembering. A handful of silver pawns. If the people of Lynborder had not intervened, where would she be now? Somewhere in the Dark Empire, perhaps? Or serving some pirate in a secret lair on the Sea of Calms?
“We should help them.” She was surprised that the words had escaped her lips, and yet as she raised defiant eyes to Albryan’s troubled blue-green ones, she was glad they had. Hiram, to her surprise, nodded vehemently.
“We should,” he said softly. “They do not—no-one deserves this.”
Albryan stared at both of them in turn, aghast. “Velda,” he finally said, “I’m not sure you know what you are saying. “There are twenty of these men, armed and armoured better than I am, and neither of you two even knows one end of a sword from the other. And there may well be more of them within hailing distance. Arran’s armies are numerous, and only the Goddess knows what else may be out there.”
“We are very close to Qwu’Mallorn,” Hiram said, again unexpectedly. “Two hours’ stiff walk at the most, if I can trust my estimation.”
“We could use magic against them,” Velda suggested. “Bryan, you could do something like—like that fireball I saw you use.”
“No.”
“Why not?” Velda realized that she and Hiram had said the words together. Albryan glared at them both.
“As I’ve said, we are very close,” Hiram said. “With a little magic, you could wipe out this troop of bandits, not having to worry about leaving them in our rear, and it would not be long before we were in Qwu’Mallorn and behind the protection of the barrier.”
Albryan’s colour deepened slightly against the sunset light, freckles standing out on his nose. “I haven’t told you this,” he finally said, haltingly, “but these soldiers are not our only problem. We are still being tracked by necromes.”
Velda heard a sharp intake of breath from Hiram. “How is that possible?” she demanded. “And why haven’t you told us before?”
“I knew they would not catch up with us,” Albryan said shortly. “They have no intelligence of their own, and it seems their master is not with them. But with the delay on this side of the river, they passed us a few days ago, and now they are between us and the border of Qwu’Mallorn, roaming, as far as I can tell, slightly to the southwest. The soldiers are in our path, and the only way to get to the Border is to veer north.” He gestured with his hand. “This is a longer way, yet we have no choice. Not if we want to avoid the necromes.”
Velda gave him a defiant look. “I dealt with them once. I can do it again.”
Albryan seized her hand. “No,” he said, in the kind of tone that did not entertain defiance. Velda wondered momentarily whether he used that voice for his soldiers. “We do not know for sure what would happen, Velda. You are too precious to risk in such a way.” He let her hand fall, and turned to Hiram. “As for you—do you truly want to be captured by Dannine? As I was?” His eyes blazed lightning-blue. “You would return to that dungeon in Armour City, or worse.” He began to get to his feet, nearly bumping his head on the cave roof. “I expect you both to obey me. In this, at least.”
Velda said nothing. She did not want to look at him. Beside her, Hiram stirred.
“You speak to us as you would to a pair of recruits, Albryan,” he finally said, “but I don’t recall that either Velda or I ever swore an oath to you.”
“My first duty is to my homeland.” The voice was cold, and Velda’s heart hammered defiance in her chest. She could understand fear, could tolerate caution. Yet she could not stop thinking about the boy, the dead boy she had fancied looked like her own dead son. Tears pricked at her eyes, but she blinked them away.
“Velda,” Albryan said, and his tone was suddenly a lot softer. “You must understand. If the war is won—”
“I understand,” she said shortly, and stood up herself. She did not have to bow her head to stand upright in the cave. “I understand what you believe, Albryan.”
