by Travis Smith
“I left you …” The Stranger whispered, confronting at last his long-standing guilt aloud. “I left you because I thought—”
John nodded. “I know.” He patted the man on the shoulder. “You did all righ’.”
“No,” The Stranger maintained. “I left you all for dead … and here you are again.”
“Eugene fixed us up all right,” John said. “Set us on our way to help ye anew.”
“Eugene …” The Stranger mused. “He sent you to bring me back?”
“No,” Maria said, easing The Stranger’s rising concern. “He was wrong to imprison you. He knows that now, and we have his blessing to help you on your own way.”
The Stranger scoffed. “The old coot … His blessing?” He rolled his eyes at the thought of the dreadful, controlling old bastard, but he was grateful for their appearance nonetheless, so he bit his tongue.
Patrick was looking through the massive hole in the earth, observing the chaos below. Creatures still screeched their inhuman cries of mortal agony, flames engulfing many of them. The others scattered back into the tunnels, in search of other prey.
“Can they get up here?” Ian asked Patrick.
The boy shrugged.
“If they do, we’ll be ready,” Maria said.
The Stranger shook his head, still in disbelief. “How ever did you find me?” he asked. “All this way … after all this time …”
“We got word that you were captured and in Fanxel prison,” John replied. “We were posted up yonder schemin’ a plot to get you out when we heard all the carryin’ on over here.”
“Well, we are all very fortunate that you were near. We never would have come out alive without you all,” The Stranger said. He then indicated toward a sack of arrows and Maria’s longbow. “That’s quite a weapon you’ve found there.”
Maria smiled. “Just something we’ve picked up along the journey. Wanna learn?”
“Perhaps,” The Stranger said after a brief consideration.
“Come on,” Maria laughed. “Let’s get you all over to our campsite.”
9
“So how’d ya meet ’im?” John asked Patrick after introducing himself. He tipped his head adoringly toward The Stranger.
Patrick shrugged. He was eyeing the squirrelly black-haired man as he walked ahead of them with the elder. “Just happened by them yesterday. There was a hole in their cell …”
John’s face lit up at the notion of a daring escape. “Magnificent!” he exclaimed. “And ya freed ’em? Nary a guard to foil the plot?”
“Uh,” Patrick replied, “I suppose. It was more an accident than a plot, to say the truth.”
John chuckled and glanced back over at The Stranger, who, too, was walking a ways ahead toward camp.
“You know each other well then?” Patrick asked.
“Our paths crossed a time ago. We shared some adventure and peril before he left the island where we was stranded.”
“Acquaintances?” Patrick clarified. “Yet you came all this way to free him from the prison?”
John shrugged. “Protector souls cannot deny their homage.”
“Protector souls?” Patrick asked.
“Yer mother didn’t tell ya about those?”
Patrick shook his head and cast his eyes back down to his feet. “I suppose she didn’t get around to it yet,” he mumbled.
John forged on, smiling through the uncomfortable melancholy his remark had conjured. “Souls with whom yer own is bound through fate. Sort o’ like a secret guardian in the mortal realm—someone who shows up for ya when ya need ’em most … I used to think they was silly kid’s stories, but maybe there’s somethin’ to it.”
Perhaps we glorify our own worth, Patrick nearly blurted out, but then he thought of Brandon and his small band appearing through the smoke and flames in that Onton barn. “Still,” he said instead, “it’s quite a venture for someone you hardly know.”
“I think it’s bigger ’n him. Ya know who he is, don’t ya?”
Patrick tore his gaze from Ian’s back over to The Stranger. He narrowed his eyes and acknowledged a sense of familiarity in the young man’s eyes. “He said something … back in that cavern. Something about a better leader than he.”
“Uh huh,” John agreed. “Ya see the likeness now, eh?”
Patrick felt the broad wings of hope flutter in his gut anew. “He’s the king?” he asked, unwilling to believe it.
“That’s him!”
“But he’s so young?” Patrick said. “The king is old and grey in all the renderings I’ve ever seen.”
“Well,” John began, now uneasy to share frightful details to a young boy, “due to what’s gone on in Reprise, his duties came on kind o’ quickly.”
Patrick nodded in understanding. “His father was king.”
“Would’ve been,” John clarified.
Patrick pondered these words before nodding again. Two generations of king were slain, leaving only the young man before them. The Stranger hadn’t lied—he certainly had suffered loss as well. “He was right,” Patrick mused.
“Hmm?” John asked.
“He doesn’t seem fit to be a leader.”
10
The group got to the nearby campsite, concealed in a copse of low trees at the edge of the expansive desert. They each settled in around a small smoldering fire that Robert tended.
“Not much night left,” the man warned. “Better get some sleep while ye can.”
While the others spread out and lay down for rest, Patrick situated himself next to Ian, who was nestling down near his brother.
“Who’s ’at?” Gregoire asked with a sleepy smile.
“That’s John,” Ian said, more for his own benefit than Greggy’s, “and that’s Maria, and that’s Robert.”
“And I’m Patrick,” the boy offered.
Ian turned to see him seated beside the pair. He smiled. “Ah, yes, and that’s Patrick.”
Patrick lay back in the grass and gazed up at the night sky, getting lost again in its enormity after spending so long underground. He toyed with the black stone in his pocket and wondered how much Ian knew. The man seemed harmless, but Patrick had no way of knowing where his loyalty truly lay.
“What was it?” Patrick asked when Gregoire seemed to be drifting off and Ian made to lie down nearby.
“Pardon?” Ian asked.
“That circular symbol,” Patrick repeated. “Back in the cavern. What does it mean?”
“Ah,” Ian replied, as if a distant memory had just entered his mind. He spoke slowly at first, his voice barely rising above the crackle of the nearby fire. “That was in the cellar where I hid … on the night that my—my—my father … disappeared.” He knelt beside Patrick and began to trace the symbol absentmindedly in the grass. His speech hastened as he picked up steam. “I believe that this symbol is the key to rediscovering him—him and all others lost beyond the veil that separates the living realm from … the others.”
“You mean to bring him back from the dead?” Patrick asked.
“No!” Ian corrected sharply. “Blurring the lines between life and death is an—an—an unspeakable act that defies all of nature, one which carries grave and abominable consequences.” He held his hand up, as if to physically halt that line of thought before it strayed any further. “The symbol is death. But my father is not dead. Of that I am sure.”
“How—?” Patrick interjected, but Ian spoke over him.
“I have seen things,” he said as though this justified all his wild claims. “My brother and I ventured into the—the—the Hoxar Woods, and while he sacrificed his mind and soul, he allowed me to—to—to peer through the veil—to peer through those concentric circles—and behold what lay on the other side.”
“What lay—” Patrick began, but Ian cut him off again, his hushed speech rising in quiet urgency. His eyes were glazed over and seemed to emit the faintest of greenish glows.
“That symbol is death, sure—sure—sur
e, but it is also infinity. It’s—it’s—it’s death, but—but—but it illuminates boundless existence in the—the—the chasm which lay before it.”
A long silence followed, in which Ian remained on his knees, twirling his hand in the grass and mumbling incomprehensibly to himself, as though in a trance. Patrick continued to squeeze the stone in his pocket, willing himself not to take it out and observe it openly.
At last he broke the silence. “I saw it on the day … the day that I found my parents …” He nearly said dead—but that wasn’t quite right after all, was it? “The day Onton fell apart.” His voice trailed off.
Ian nodded. He looked at the boy and acknowledged his sorrow. “Ahh,” he mused, as though this made perfect sense to him.
With that, he stood and meandered over to find a spot to rest.
11
The next morning, Patrick awoke early with the sun. He blinked at its distantly familiar splendor. He could scarcely recall the last time he lay awake and watched a sunrise. Was it with Olivia? Brandon? His parents? He got up and excused himself behind some nearby bushes to relieve his bladder. The cherry-red sun peeking over the mesas across the expansive desert was unlike anything Patrick had ever seen in Onton.
Maria and Robert were sitting a short walk away, shaving rocks down to a point for arrow tips. The rest of the party was still sleeping soundly around the campsite.
“A fair morning, Patrick,” Maria greeted as he approached. “Was your slumber restful?”
Patrick forced a smile and shrugged. “I suppose my sleep will be pretty irregular for a while still.”
“How long were you in those caves?” she asked.
He looked back across the desert toward the hole through which they’d ascended the night before. “I don’t think I could venture even an estimation,” he admitted.
Maria frowned and stroked his bushy, untidy hair. “You poor soul.”
Patrick’s eyes fell upon hers momentarily. She looked in a subtle way like his mother, only a bit older. Short, clean hair with only the faintest strands of grey beginning to shine through. Warm, welcoming smile concealing rows of straight, bright teeth. An image flashed through Patrick’s mind: a glistening knife slicing through the neck below that smile; the way her cheeks were pale and sagging, devoid of their usual healthy turgor; the unbothered groan she exhaled with her last breath as her dead lungs filled with blood.
He smiled and looked back at his feet. His hand moved to the stone in his pocket. It was still there.
“I like your bows,” he observed. “Can I try it?”
“Of course,” Maria said. She picked hers up and handed it to the boy with an arrow. “If it suits you, we can show you how to make your own.”
Patrick took the bow in his hands and held it out in front of himself.
“Hold it here,” Maria said, situating his hand lower on the staff. “Now rest the arrow above this finger …” She placed an arrow atop his knuckle and fixed a notch on the other end of it to the bow’s drawstring. “Pull back here, and fire away.”
Patrick held the apparatus rigidly as Maria had affixed it in his hands. He turned and faced toward the horizon. A ball of dried weed tumbled by in the distance. He closed one eye and lined up the arrow’s tip just above the weed, accounting for some inevitable drop. The string drew back tight.
“Here,” Maria offered, pushing his draw-arm closer to his face. “It’s simplest if you pull toward your ear.”
When Patrick let go, the arrow was thrust forward with a satisfying thwip. It soared slow and straight before arcing down and sticking straight up in the mud. While he didn’t quite approach his moving target, the weapon flew in a remarkably undeviating line.
“Sensational!” Maria exclaimed.
“Mmhm,” Robert agreed without looking up from his work.
Patrick smiled. It felt nice, but he much preferred the bizarre, powerful weapons that Brandon and the other boys had introduced to him.
“You won’t take much time at all to fashion into quite the marksman.”
“Thank you,” Patrick said without much interest, handing the bow back to Maria.
“Something else is on your mind?” she asked.
“Well,” Patrick began, “you said that you had a plan? For helping him escape from Fanxel?” He gestured toward the quartet, still sleeping by the campfire’s ashes.
“We were working on one,” Maria agreed.
“Sounds like ye spared us the trouble on that ’n’,” Robert added.
Patrick nodded sheepishly as he sat on a nearby rock and picked up a stone to assist in paring to a point. “Do you mind telling me your plan?”
“What ever for?” Maria asked.
“I may want to borrow from it.”
“Well, our plan involved more than just a lone boy,” she said, not unkindly.
Patrick continued shaving down the stone without looking up. “I see …”
After a brief pause, Maria asked, “Who of yours is locked in there?”
“Of mine?” Patrick asked. “All of those people are locked in there. They are all innocent—”
“Not all of them,” Maria corrected. “Fanxel housed true aberrations before The Baron’s reign. Many of them remain behind those bars.”
“And they deserve to be tortured? Tortured and sold to work for The Baron’s men?”
“Perhaps not …”
“My friends were taken … One was killed while I lay in hiding not far … The rest were taken—I believe—to that prison. The other fell ill … and I had to leave her behind in a strange healer’s cabin. He wants me to pay for her health with coin I do not possess.” Patrick continued working on his stone. He did not look away from it as he spoke. “There is much I must do in the coming days, and it begins with freeing them.”
Maria listened and nodded sympathetically. As the boy spoke, she approached and sat atop a nearby rock. “When I was a young child, my mother used to tell me an old tale, one that I suspect her own mother told to her. Would you like to hear it?”
Patrick shrugged.
“There once was a boy who lived in a village on an island far, far away,” she began. “Each day he travelled a great distance through the jungle to greet a kindly old man who sat in a rocker behind his cabin. The old man had a market stand filled with the freshest fruits—bananas and melons and citrus treats. He’d awake each morning before dawn and painstakingly forage the trees behind his cabin to pick the fruits and bring to the market. The villagers would take his fruits in exchange for items of their own offering—scraps of clothing, decorative trinkets, bits of furniture. The boy would venture each day to greet the man with a smile and take a handful of fresh fruit to return to his ailing mother back home. His mother had lost her trade, for she was ill and dying young, and the boy had nothing to offer the man, who nonetheless smiled and nodded at him each day. So, the boy began to gather small berries and nuts on his journey to leave the man in offering. The contribution was small compared to what he took, but his purpose was pure, and nary a word did the old man utter in protest.
“One day, the boy noticed a foul-looking man stride by and take a handful of the old man’s fruit, offering nothing in recompense, nor a word of thanks. The elder looked on with benign contempt, but he was frail, and he did not shout or take action. Eventually the boy began to note this man every day on his journey, and every day the man would take from the elder, never offering anything back in return. After many days of watching this man steal from the elder, the boy decided to speak up for the old man.
“‘He works very hard for that fruit,’ the boy said to the man. ‘He is old, while you are young and fit. You should offer him something in return for his efforts.’
“The man merely scoffed at the boy and carried on his way. Still, each day, he returned and took from the old man. Each day, the boy spoke up: ‘What you do is wrong. You are stealing from this poor man.’ Each day, the man laughed and ignored the boy.
“Finally, another
heard the boy speaking out to the man. This person agreed, and she, too, told the man he was wrong. The next day when he returned, there were three others standing in wait to tell him not to steal from the old man. The next day, there were five others there to chide the man, and the next day the man did not return.”
Patrick finished sharpening his stone as Maria spoke. Though he did not slow or look up at her, he listened intently. He tossed the stone near the pile of other finished arrows.
“Do you know what that story means?” Maria asked.
“That the youth cannot accomplish anything on their own,” Patrick said, recalling how his mother would tell him that he could not help with certain things—that he would be able to when he was older.
Maria chuckled. “These stories offer varied truths to individual ears,” she agreed. “I believe it means just the opposite—that the young hold the potential to change the course of history.”
Now Patrick finally did look up and match eyes with Maria, who smiled warmly.
“It also means that evil cannot always be subdued by singular efforts,” she continued, “and if you say that your friends need help, then we will help you.”
12
By the time the rest of the party awakened, Maria, Robert, and Patrick had returned to the campsite and begun unpacking dissatisfying morsels for the group to share for breakfast. Disappointing as they may be, they were far superior to the whey and slop the inmates at Fanxel were afforded, and Ian and The Stranger both ate with grateful fervor. Gregoire ate his with the same satisfied grin he always wore, as though he’d had real and regular meals for as long as he could remember—perhaps that much was true.
“Who’s ’at?” he asked as Robert walked by to get another helping of food.
Robert tipped his head at the old man and said nothing.
“Ian put us up ’n an inn wiv a man ’at looked jus’ like ’im,” he babbled.
“I never owned no inns,” Robert replied.
“He concocts some of the most—most—most outlandish tales,” Ian explained. “Young and impressionable minds, ya know? Must’ve learned it from me.” He blew several whistling chuckles through his teeth. “Now leave them be, Greggy, enjoy this fine food they’ve brought you.”