Kurt
Fort Rodric, Pelgate
Most of the refugees from Kell had stopped at Dhernas Keep. They had streamed through its narrow black gates, until the panicked officer at the watch had ordered them shut. After that they had pitched up outside, a new township of rough pavilions and tents spreading out along the broken rock of the Soulstone-era embankment that forcibly abutted the River of Sleep and had once marked the fuller extent of the old city. A hardy, wearier few had gone on. Of them, a fair few had taken the High Pass, never mind the enclosing winter and the warnings of dragon hybrids and undead in the Broken Crags. In the Free City of Forge there’d be sanctuary. And better, there’d be work. A future.
Kurt hadn’t believed a word of it, and neither had Sarb. They had always been alike, he realized. Their last months apart had only made them more so. As world-weary and bitter as each other. Kurt was not sure he approved of the change, but he was alive. They were both alive and he would not tempt the gods now by asking any more of them than that.
Only a very few had carried on south and west into the lowlands. They crossed, unremarked, into the occasionally contested border country sandwiched between Dhernas, Pelgate and Frest, funneled like many an eastern aggressor between the Mountains of Morshan and the Ashen Hills towards the great bastion at Fort Rodric. A world removed from the rich iron mines of the Broken Crags and Forge that landscape was, and many empty miles still ahead to the farmlands of Pelgate’s Velvet Plains. It was just bleak grassland and scrub soil, as though Kell had extended its southern toe and added its own familial claim to the disputed border.
Rune-marked obelisks occasionally broke from the Ashen Hill to their right and stood watch, shepherding their westward trudge. Who had built them and who had marked them, no one knew. Dragons. Darklanders. Elves. No one gave it enough thought to care, except to shudder as they passed under their graven warnings.
At the last settlement before their destination, a walled village of a few dozen houses that one of the furtive locals they had passed earlier that day had called Koniston before fleeing into the hills, the path forked.
To the north was the baronial capital, and the mines that were its lifeblood, the village existing there solely to provision them with beef, tallow, and labor in exchange for Forge coin.
The other way went west.
The majority turned wearily at the fork and climbed upwards into the Ashen Hills.
They left just two men behind.
Sibhard stuck his spear into the ground. It had become less a weapon than a walking cane these past weeks on the road. “Is this far enough?” he said, the same question he’d been asking since Castle Kellar.
Kurt shook his head as he watched the others disappear into the hills. In his bones he knew it would never be far enough. He could not envisage the day when he would be able to stop looking over his shoulder.
“Further west,” he said.
“Until when?”
Kurt turned from the north road and looked up. Sibhard stood beside him silently. The inhabitants of Koniston stared sightlessly back from the tall stakes on which they had been impaled. Crows sat idly on their shoulders and cawed. Kurt set his jaw, resting his hand on the hilt of Hamma’s sword.
He would not lose hope now.
“Until we run out of west.”