Folding his hands upon the table, Kherron glanced around the dark, silent room before he met Sid’s gaze. The bald man hadn’t moved from his relaxed position in the chair, and he tilted his head to watch Kherron sideways. “This won’t take long,” he said, and when he neither spoke again nor took his gaze from their visitor’s face, Kherron found a sudden, urgent interest in his own hands.
Chapter 4
They’d pushed together two of the tables to make room for everyone. Kherron thought it highly unnecessary. Cor hunched over his plate and picked at the meal of stewed pork and potatoes as if he’d rather have sat at a table alone—or that Kherron had.
The first half of their supper passed in silence, punctured only by the scraping of utensils on plates and the sounds of chewing and swallowing. Then Mattheus asked, “What did you do before you set out for your journey east?” Kherron glanced up at the man, who had paused his next forkful halfway to his mouth to pose the question. The man raised his brows, as if they’d been exchanging casual conversation this whole time, and continued eating.
After a long drink of water, which served only as a moment to stall, Kherron said, “Apprentice blacksmith.” Then he cleared his throat and drank again, glancing back down at his plate. He couldn’t very well say he’d been bonded at the Iron Pit. Though he hadn’t spoken to anyone about his life there—his entire life, minus the last few weeks—he could easily guess the responses that information would produce. Surprise, pity, embarrassment, curiosity. He had no desire to answer questions about that place or about how he’d come into his freedom, if his hosts had ever even heard of the Iron Pit. Torrahs had paid the remainder of his bond in full, indebting Kherron to the man and his requests, and that had turned out to be the catalyst for both his journey and his torment.
For a moment, he felt foolish and ineffective; he’d never had to lie about who he was or where he’d been. He’d never been asked. But those sitting around him didn’t seem in the least surprised by or suspicious of his answer.
“Useful skill,” Sid said.
“No stranger to hard labor,” Nina added, repeating the words from when he’d first approached them. She did not look up from her plate but tossed her thick braid behind her shoulder.
“Any chance you’d be interested in postponing your travels for a time?” Mattheus drank from his own glass and fixed Kherron with his brown, glinting eyes. With a huff, Cor brought his fist—clenched tightly around his fork—down upon the table and glared at the white-haired man. When this garnered no response, he grumbled and resumed eating.
“I’m sorry?” Kherron said.
“The battles have taken most of our able hands,” Mattheus said, glancing briefly at Sid. “The extra manpower would be a boon to the workload here.” He offered a brief smile and scooped up another forkful.
Kherron shook his head. “I don’t quite follow.” Only when Nina raised her head to study him again did he grow fully aware of the sullen attention fallen on him, simultaneously resigned and glimmering with a shard of unknown hope.
“He doesn’t know.” Nina’s voice was low and cautious, as if Kherron’s uninformed existence had finally alerted her suspicions. Sid raised his eyebrows before returning to his meal. Mattheus turned his head briefly toward the woman beside him, then gazed at Kherron again with curious expectation.
Cor scoffed. “He doesn’t know? Just like a Westerner. Lounging about, blind to the war ravaging the Bladeshales and half the Dorynvhine.” He swung his arm in an irritated arc, which looked cramped and painful within the set of his twisted shoulders.
“I’m not a Westerner,” Kherron said, finally managing to complete the statement. He’d done nothing to provoke such animosity in the man; apparently having traveled east down the Watcher’s Road had been enough. Cor did not avert his burning gaze. “And I’m sorry.” Kherron glanced around at the others. “I didn’t know there was a war.”
“Of course not,” Cor grumbled, but he returned to his food without another word.
The only war of which Kherron was aware remained the conflict among the amarach. Though he’d never seen it, Zerod had affirmed its existence. Mirahl’s wounds and Wohl’s distracted, urgent visits were proof enough. While any battle brought devastation and death, he hoped Mattheus and Cor spoke of another, one that did not involve amarach—or him.
“It’s been almost two fortnights now,” Nina said. “Most dismissed it as the imagined stories of travelers and traders like us. Something to pass the time. Then one of our shipments didn’t make it to Imaar Village. After that, a few hamlets went missing, and one of the smaller villages in the southern Bladeshale Mountains.”
“Went missing?” Kherron asked.
“Disappeared,” Sid replied, waving a hand over his plate, eyes wide.
“Everyone,” Nina affirmed. “Everything. No homes, no buildings, no tools. As if they’d never existed in the first place.”
A hard, sticky lump formed in Kherron’s throat. This sounded far too much like the Roaming People and their disappearing huts, though they served the Roaming Lord and definitely weren’t human. But he doubted a few random, innocent villages would have any dealings with the macabre deity and his followers, who sustained themselves on others’ physical pleasures. “What happened?” It sounded like a croak.
Nina shook her head. “No idea. We went to Imaar—or where it used to be. It was on our trading route. I’ve never seen such a thing.”
“Not that any of us would know what to do if we recognized the cause,” Sid added. “We’re not soldiers. We’re not strategists. These mysteries are beyond us.”
“Lord Rattegar has sworn to end it,” Mattheus said with a nod, as if that statement were the pinnacle of truth and should end the conversation.
Sid rolled his eyes. “Lord Rattegar is a fool.” With a sigh, Mattheus looked up at the ceiling in exasperation. Kherron couldn’t help but think they’d had this conversation multiple times.
“Lord Rattegar can march his forces and as many drafted men into the Bladeshales as he wants,” Nina said. “No doubt that tactic has won him countless campaigns in the past. But I do not believe this thing can be bested by armies and sharpened blades.”
Sid shrugged, and only coming from the bald man could it imply agreement. “Hard to defeat an enemy you can’t see.”
“Nobody knows what’s happening?” Kherron asked. Both Mattheus and Sid grimly shook their heads. Their guest frowned. “What’s the war, then?”
“Hopeless,” Nina said. “Lord Rattegar’s men suffered repeated attacks, dwindling their numbers.”
“Then he drafted.” Sid fixed him with an irritated frown. “Started taking able-bodied men from Marohd, seeing as it spans halfway across the Bladeshales. Then orders went west, and the boys and men of Buroh joined him. Now he’s got his fingers stretching into the Dorynvhine Region and south towards us.”
“Took every lad we had here,” Mattheus added, glancing about the room as if seeing it for the first time. “Even the apprentices we nearly raised as our own.”
“And left me here alone,” Cor grumbled, “while the rest of you go traipsing into the Bladeshales.”
“They went willingly enough,” Mattheus continued, then pulled on his scraggly beard. “But we haven’t heard from any of them since.”
“It’s only been two weeks,” Nina said gruffly, but the small, inward twitch of her eyebrows belied her forged indifference.
“Nobody asked us for anything.” Cor hunched over his plate, glaring at the remains of his meal.
“We’re too old to be of any use, including in warfare not even Lord Rattegar understands.” Sid took a forced, angry gulp of water, scrubbing at his mouth with the back of a hand.
“He tries,” Mattheus said.
“Trying never shielded anyone from stupidity.” For the first time, Nina’s words came out in a guttural hiss, and she turned toward Mattheus with a scowl. The man merely blinked at her, but a flush rose slowly from beneath his beard a
nd up his sagging cheeks.
The woman’s words removed Kherron from the struggles of others and plunged him back into his own. He’d thought the same of himself countless times in the last fortnight. A stronger will and a pressing urge to continue—to try harder—meant nothing if one could not comprehend the forces one faced. “If Lord Rattegar doesn’t know the cause of the disappearances,” he started, feeling his hosts’ eyes all return to him at once, “what is he fighting?”
Sid scoffed with an exaggerated shrug and sat back in his chair. He ran a hand once more over his hairless head and turned his gaze to Nina and Mattheus. Mattheus raised his eyebrows, and the woman beside him said, “Something he does not understand.”
“Oh, and you do, do you?” Sid asked with a flippant wave of his hand. “You’ve solved the mystery of Lord Rattegar’s vanishing army? Of the disappearing villages?”
“I know what I saw,” Nina said, the firm press of her lips adding decades to the wrinkle lines above her mouth and below her eyes.
“Ninati Fardol,” Sid continued in a booming voice, raising his arms in mock exaltation to the ceiling beams above them. “Interpreter of the inexplicable.” Nina took a deep breath and forced it out slowly through her nose. Kherron found himself anxiously awaiting the moment she lost her self-control, and the thought of those consequences terrified him. From the beginning, the woman had surprised him with her reserve and silent observation, as if she did indeed know something others did not.
Mattheus cleared his throat. “Forgive them, Kherron,” he said with a wane smile. “Our cousin has good reason for protesting warfare.” Sid snorted. “And my sister has a vivid imagination—”
Nina pounded the table with a fist. “And you are as blind in your old age as Cor is crippled.” A smirk pulled at the corners of Cor’s mouth, and he studied the siblings—likely twins, Kherron thought—with a growing, wary interest. “I have never been wrong, and the fact that nearly thirty years have passed since you last questioned my judgment makes no difference.” They stared at each other, Nina’s chest rising and falling in rapid, angry breaths while her brother’s hands rested limply in his lap. Finally, Mattheus swallowed and cleared his throat, and Nina whirled to lean across the table toward Kherron. “I saw fire in the trees,” she told him, her eyes wide and glistening. “I saw a black cloud moving from the west. And bones.”
“What is anyone to make of that information?” Sid asked, his voice low with tension. “What does the universe want you to see in such a vision?”
“The bones were real,” Nina said. Her eyes wandered from the table to the ceiling to the back counter, as if she looked upon another scene and not the dark, airless room in which they sat. “I found them along our route, near where Imaar used to be. Small, white, sculpted, as if they’d come from some decorative pot or a ceremonial tool. Anything fetches a decent price, if you know how to sell it.” Her eyes flicked toward her brother, as if she expected him to balk at her reasoning. Mattheus said nothing. “Only when I touched them did the vision come. The fire and the black cloud were two parts of the same. One warned of destruction, the other consumed. Lusted. And then the bones were just that. I took them, but they did not travel with me.”
“Because you were careless,” Sid grunted, unimpressed by the intensity of her story.
Nina yanked up the hem of her thick leather jerkin, and the men all twitched away from her as if she’d tossed a severed head onto the table. Even Kherron averted his gaze from the pale, wrinkled flesh of her abdomen, exposed in her fervor. Part of him was ashamed by such a reaction, yet the far more distasteful prospect of viewing an old woman’s body with any amount of interest lacked the respect earned by age. She fumbled with a pouch strapped to her belt, and when she finally untied it, she shoved her jerkin back down and slammed the pouch on the table. “Look at it,” she spat. “Tell me how careless a person has to be to lose what they put in there.”
Sid frowned at the pouch, then folded his arms and sat back in the chair. The small bag of leather, about the size of Kherron’s hand, boasted two sets of drawstrings both cinched and secured with knots. Overlapping these was a wide, hardened flap of leather, buckled down the center of the pouch by a row of large copper buttons. The possibility of being robbed by a cutpurse or losing the contents of that pouch during the labors of travel diminished drastically at the sight of it.
“I may be old, cousin,” Nina added, grabbing the pouch again and sliding it back towards herself, “but my mind has not dulled.” With nimble fingers, now calmer than when she’d removed the item from her belt, she slid the buttons through their loops and untied the drawstrings. “The bones did not travel with me, and where they went, I cannot say. I only have their ornaments.” She upended the purse, and two round blue beads tumbled out and across the table.
Kherron choked when he saw them and gulped down the rest of his water. Thankfully, his hand didn’t shake, but his cup hit the table with a loud bang. “I’ve seen these before,” he said.
“Beads are beads,” Sid said with an indifferent wave of his hand. “Anyone could find them anywhere.”
“No.” Kherron reached out toward one of the blue ornaments, then thought better of it and rested his hand on the table. “She didn’t lose the bones.” When he met Sid’s gaze, the man only smirked in disbelief. Mattheus eyed him with an unreadable expression, and Cor frowned. “They belong to the Roaming People,” he said to Nina, who looked at him as if he’d just read her a dreadful fortune.
“Who’re they?” Cor asked, blinking rapidly behind his spectacles.
“I’m not sure,” Kherron said. “They’re not... normal people. I’ve been told they feed off our pleasures, and they serve the Roaming Lord.”
“Never heard of him,” Sid grumbled.
“Nor I. Some deity having to do with fire and sacrifice, maybe.” Kherron noticed the color draining from Nina’s face at his words. “But I’ve seen them. They wore bones like those you saw,” he told her, “and these beads. They disappeared, too, like that village.”
“What dealings could you possibly have with creatures like these?” Cor asked with a severe glare.
“We—” Kherron swallowed. “I had... traveling companions.” The term stuck in his throat. “We came upon the Roaming People, and the day I left their village, it vanished—”
“You stayed with them?” Nina asked, her eyes glassy with unshed tears. She looked terrified.
“Not by choice,” Kherron replied a little more harshly than he’d intended. “I knew a lot less then than I do now.” He glanced back down at the beads. “And I would not come upon them again if I could help it.” He and Nina stared at each other, and he couldn’t help but feel she pled with him for something he did not know how to give.
“This is ridiculous,” Mattheus finally said, breaking the tense silence. “My sister thinks she’s had a vision, and you do her a disservice by encouraging her—”
“I believe her,” Kherron interrupted. The fact that he now had pitted himself against the one person here who he thought supported him the most made him feel once again a complete and unwelcome stranger. The old man’s jaw worked silently in subdued irritation, his white beard swinging back and forth. “She said she saw fire in the trees. My party saw the same before the Roaming People found us.”
“And what of the black cloud?” Nina asked, breathless.
Kherron shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“But you think these Roaming People are responsible for the disappearing villages? For the men stolen from Lord Rattegar’s ranks?”
“I can’t answer that,” Kherron said, his gut churning at the realization that Nina thought he had all the answers. If only she knew what he’d been through, what yet lay before him, and how little he understood, she might never have asked. “But I think your vision was real, and I think whatever’s happening in the Bladeshales sounds much like what little I know of those people.”
“There’s something he’s not telling u
s,” Cor growled, leering at Kherron as if the man had caught him in a neatly laid trap.
Kherron turned toward the crippled man with the spectacles. Whatever he did or said, Cor would remain fully suspicious of him, and he was finished trying to placate anyone. “There’s plenty I’m not telling you,” he snapped. “And plenty you will never understand. I’ve shared all I know of this”—he pointed at the beads—“and it still means nothing. I can’t help you.” He stood quickly from the table, ready to gather his cloak and pack. He could not tell these simple people, who had nothing to do with his aim or his burden, the things he knew about Torrahs, who’d taken him to the Roaming People to fulfill some sort of odious bargain. Whatever the Roaming People were doing to the villages in the Bladeshales, it had little to do with him. His task was already too heavy, and he did not want the responsibility of leading others through their own troubles.
“Stop,” Mattheus said, grasping Kherron’s wrist. With a glance from Kherron, the old man slowly removed his hand and gestured toward the chair. “Sit, Kherron. Please.” The other men watched him, and Nina busied herself returning the blue beads to her foolproof pouch. Kherron sat, feeling both irritated and ungracious for such an emotion. “We told you we would give you food and shelter for the night, and I don’t mean to throw any man out against my word.”
“I’m grateful,” Kherron said, taking a deep breath to steady himself. “And I didn’t mean to offend.” Cor grumbled.
“We’re traders, nothing more,” Mattheus said. “And while there is much we do not know, we see plenty on our routes. It’s been decades since we’ve known anyone who could shed some light upon what my sister sees.” He and Nina shared a glance, then she broke away to fix Kherron with her brown-eyed gaze. “The knowledge is no less frightening, but it may be of some use.”
“How?” Sid asked, his arms tightly folded across his chest.
“That’s not for us to know,” Mattheus replied.
Secret of Dehlyn (The Unclaimed Book 2) Page 3