by Kara Timmins
“I don’t believe you,” the Vaylar said.
“You keep saying that,” Eloy said. “Your belief makes no difference either way. The truth is what it is.”
“The Omnacom said this land is ours.” A sound like a plea was seeping into the Vaylar’s words through cracks in his conviction.
“It’s not.” Eloy’s voice was cold. He had strung together many words to make a lie, but those two were truer than anything he had ever said.
“I don’t believe you,” the Vaylar said again. Whatever thoughts had gone through his mind seemed to have been enough to soothe his doubt.
A rustling noise brought Eloy’s attention to where Neasa had nudged her way to the front of the crowd.
“I can show you,” Eloy said as he looked back at the Vaylar, “if you’d like.”
“I don’t believe you can,” the Vaylar said.
“Can someone please bring me my bag?” Eloy asked the crowd, his eyes locked on the Vaylar.
Eloy sensed someone break away from the group and heard the quick thump of their footsteps in the mud as they ran toward Eloy’s camp.
Eloy looked at Neasa who shifted her gaze between Eloy and Malatic with a confused crimp in her brow. Malatic stood up, moved to her side, and whispered for a long time, but the crease didn’t smooth. Eloy looked back at the Vaylar.
The murmuring of the crowd grew as they waited for the bag. Those who had heard Eloy tell his lie passed it back to those who couldn’t hear the conversation. As the realization hit that everything they had—their lives, their land, and their families—rested on Eloy’s believability, the talking stopped. Everyone watched the two men in the center.
Eloy ended his staring game with the Vaylar when someone pushed through the group and held the bag out to Eloy. Eloy followed the arm, covered in drying blood, up to the man’s face. The man looked the same age as Goodwin—the softness of youth just barely holding on, but the innocence in his eyes was long gone. Eloy wondered if there had been innocence there the day before. He wondered if Goodwin would have been different after this battle. Thinking about Goodwin caused heat to spread inside of Eloy again. He had let the pressure off the wound that Goodwin’s death had inflicted, and it would bleed until he pushed it down. He imagined the cold air that he inhaled freezing the parts of him that ached. He needed the numbness of frostbite.
“Thank you,” Eloy said to the young man.
The man nodded and moved back into the crowd, his distant stare lost among the many like it.
“You keep your power in your satchel?” the Vaylar asked with a smirk.
“No,” Eloy said, “but there’s no way for me to give you the power I have in here.” He tapped the side of his head. “I have other things I use to give my gift to others.”
Eloy looked over at Neasa before opening his bag.
The berries from the forest of Valia looked as round and unblemished as they had the day he had found them. He put one in the palm of his hand and marveled at its simplicity. When he looked back to Neasa, her look of confusion was gone. Her lips were pressed and puckered, and she shook her head so slowly and subtly that no one but Eloy could see it.
He had a sense of what she was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing. They had no idea what would happen if someone ate the fresh berry. Gwyn knew what would happen when someone used the dry, processed version, and even that would kill a person who didn’t have the abilities to handle its magic, but as far as Eloy knew, no one had experienced one like the one he held in his hand.
The Vaylar looked bored at the sight of the berry. Eloy held it out to him.
“Take it,” Eloy said.
The Vaylar looked around as if to find someone to stop the joke.
“You want me to take a berry?” the Vaylar asked.
“Yes,” Eloy said. “And I want you to eat it.”
Neasa made a noise at his side, a groan at the back of her throat as she tried to keep her protest inside.
Her concern put the Vaylar at ease. Inadvertently, Neasa had made it look as if she was concerned about revealing too much. The Vaylar held out his hand, and Eloy dropped the berry into the center where it rolled from side to side before it settled.
The Vaylar kept his arm held out before him as he looked at Eloy.
“Go ahead,” Eloy said. “Eat it.”
The muscles in the Vaylar’s outstretched arm didn’t even twitch.
“If I wanted to kill you,” Eloy said, “I would’ve done it where we fought. What purpose would I have to bring you to our camp and poison you with something I keep in my bag? I need you to see the importance of what I am saying. You need to see that you don’t belong here.”
The berry might kill the Vaylar, or maybe the berry wouldn’t do anything. Both options meant they were further away from finding a solution to the encroaching problem of the Vaylar horde.
Eloy heard Neasa take a deep breath as the Vaylar put the berry in his mouth. His features twisted as he chewed. The people looking on whispered to one another, getting only shrugs and head shakes in response.
“Water?” the Vaylar asked through a cough. He drained a full pouch of water and regained his composure.
A bird flew overhead and cut through the watchful silence with its oblivious call. Eloy scanned the Vaylar for any signs of change, but he held the same form of cloistered hostility that he had had from the beginning of their conversation.
A blush of humiliation grew in hot patches over Eloy’s skin as the uneventful moments dragged on. If nothing happened, the only thing he had succeeded at was feeding their enemy a piece of old fruit in front of a group of tired and worried people.
“This power of yours is no power at all,” the Vaylar said. “You should’ve killed me with the others. The purpose of this display doesn’t make any sense to me. Kill me now or don’t. None of your decisions matter.”
Eloy would have taken the man’s words into consideration if it weren’t for the way the last words slurred out of his mouth.
Neasa brought her hand up to her lips and watched the Vaylar with wide-eyed fascination. If she was apprehensive before, the only thing she exuded now was pure curiosity.
“I . . . I . . . can . . .” The Vaylar trailed off as the strength in the upper half of his body failed. His head fell forward, his back rounded, and his face planted in the mud.
“Is he dead?” Malatic asked after another long bout of silence.
The Vaylar’s back rose and fell sporadically. He wasn’t dead. Eloy pulled the Vaylar up by his shoulders. The body was limp in his hands, and Eloy expected to see the man’s face slack, but it wasn’t. The Vaylar had his eyes open, his focus moving to follow action that wasn’t in front of him.
Eloy leaned in, as if a closer view could give him some insight into what the Vaylar was seeing. Just as Eloy got closer, the Vaylar opened his mouth into an unnaturally wide gape and unleashed a scream that filled the air with horror. The scream sounded borne of life-altering sorrow—the cry of a parent who lost their child, the wail of seeing a loved one cut down. The Vaylar howled like someone who had lost the boundaries used to understand existence. The cry was worse than the wails of death. Eloy had heard those; he had heard it come out of his own mouth. The sound that came out of the Vaylar was the shriek of a man whose mind was being cracked.
Everyone in the area took an instinctive step backward. The scream went on longer than seemed possible, longer than a man’s air supply would allow under normal circumstances. Many of the onlookers had their hands pressed to their ears, and some were reaching for their weapons by the time the Vaylar finally stopped. His body pitched forward to the ground again.
The crowd gave a collective sigh in the reclaimed silence. The people at Eloy’s back stepped closer together. Some had the look of wild fear in their eyes, but there were more who looked enraptured and curious, their pa
ins of the day, both inside and out, forgotten for the moment.
“What in all the sun-touched land was that?” someone in the crowd asked.
The Vaylar started to twitch and flap his arms in the mud. The slapping made the Vaylar looking fishlike, out of place.
Neasa and Malatic looked at Eloy, their eyes wide and mouths open as if they wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words. Killing the Vaylars in battle was one thing; poisoning and torturing them was something else. Eloy nodded and reached for his sword.
Just as he was about to unsheathe his weapon, the Vaylar sat up again.
This time, he didn’t scream. His eyes were open again, but the icy blue that characterized the Vaylar people was gone. The whites of his eyes were gone too. The Vaylar looked out of two orbs filled with twisting smoke encased in a starry night sky.
“The one in motion is next in a line, but not at the head and not the last,” the Vaylar said in a voice much deeper than the one he had used before. “A link in a net, pulling together the desired purpose.”
“Does that mean anything to you?” Malatic asked Neasa and Eloy.
They both shook their heads and looked back at the Vaylar.
“You’re almost on the other side of this,” the Vaylar said, his voice different than the deep rumble, but still far from normal. “If you find the right steps, you’ll find the way.” The message was directed at Eloy.
No one listening would find much value in the words, but for Eloy, the importance was not in what was said but how the Vaylar said it. It had been a long time since Eloy had heard the cool tempo, the confidence and assured way about it, but he had come to know the owner despite always hearing it out of different mouths.
He had no doubt the voice belonged to Amicus.
Eloy took his hand off the sword and held his breath. He had wanted to hear that voice so many times before. Too many thoughts and feelings clashed in his head, clamoring for attention, from anger to relief, so he ignored all but one: assurance. He had to keep going.
The Vaylar dropped his head again. A line of saliva dropped from his bottom lip and stretched to the ground before a torrent of fluid spilled out after it. The sickness spread around him in a black puddle, its color dark enough to offset itself against the mud. The man groaned with a voice that was his own. The agony of the noise was simple and human. His head wobbled as he tried and failed to lift it and look ahead. When he finally managed to compose himself, Eloy saw that his eyes, though bloodshot, were back to their icy shade of blue.
“What did you see?” Neasa asked as she dropped down to a crouch and looked into the Vaylar’s drowsy face.
The Vaylar opened his mouth and then closed it again before his attention wandered somewhere in his own thoughts.
A man with brown wavy hair caked in mud stepped forward and stood behind Eloy. “Well, that was a spectacle. What’re we supposed to do now?”
“We send him back to the Vaylars,” Eloy said, “and hope he convinces them to turn around and go back to wherever it is they came from.”
“That’s it?” the same man asked. “We’re going to rely on a man who is now drooling?”
Eloy stood up and faced the man. “You’re right. It’s not enough. We can’t fight them off. If there are as many as he says there are, and I believe he told us the truth, then we have to think of something else. Can someone take him back in the direction of the marshes?”
Two fighters stepped forward, picked up the Vaylar, and slung his arms over their shoulders. Eloy watched them disappear through the trees toward the battle site before he spoke again.
“That Vaylar told us a lot that we can use,” Eloy said. “We may not know much about who we’re up against, but we do know they’re people who value magic and magical foresight.”
“Do you have those powers?” a woman leaning against a tree asked. “I mean, what was it you gave him? I saw his eyes. That was something magical.”
“I’m not,” Eloy said. “That was just a gamble and some dumb luck. I learned from a friend that the berry I gave the Vaylar had power, but my friend wasn’t sure what it would do. I have no idea what just happened to that Vaylar or what he saw, but I hope he saw enough to make him believe that I have more power than I do.”
Malatic moved to Eloy’s side. “Then we just have to keep with that plan. We have to make the Vaylars believe that we all have more power than we do.”
“Then the question becomes,” Eloy said, “how do we do that?”
Neasa walked around the ashy fire pit, crossed her arms over her chest, and looked out into the dewy gray of the forest. “The same way places of real magical power do it. There’s a reason only a few people are willing to go into the forest of Valia. People are afraid of it.”
“But the Vaylars have already been in this area,” Eloy said. “They know this forest doesn’t hold dangers.”
“That’s right,” Neasa said, “but we can make them believe it’s here now. They’re going to know there’s a threat when their scouts don’t come back.”
“What do you suggest?” Malatic asked.
The tired faces of many fighters looked back and forth between Neasa and Eloy as they waited for one of them to give the answer that would save everything, and then the people were only looking at Eloy. He looked upward and set his sights on the swirling gray wisps of clouds that hung low and moved fast. How many times had he waited for someone to give him answers on where to go or what to do? Enough times that he knew how desolate the lack of a guiding voice could be. There was a way to get through this—there had to be—and he was going to figure it out—for them.
He thought about the times when he had been most afraid. Surviving his first battle at the Bowl. Waiting in the loft with Corwin at the salt flats. Walking through the forest of Valia.
Each moment had held different threats, but they all had the same grip in his memory. When were the moments the worst? The fear was the greatest at the Bowl when he and the others were walking out over the white bridge, not knowing what they were walking toward. The worst moment at the salt flats was when the sun had set, and he knew he couldn’t get down to the hatch and get underground. His mind didn’t know what to expect, so it imagined and expected everything. But the memories of the forest of Valia made the key component of all three experiences clear.
The most daunting feature of the forest was what lurked just beyond the boundary of the lantern light. The sense of the unknown things on the other side of the boundary of light, waiting for a break in the glow, hanging just out of reach like a nightmare, had been the worst part. The obstacles that had seemed the most insurmountable were the ones when he was facing the unknown.
“We have to play on their senses,” Eloy said as he brought his attention back to the others. “Hopefully, the Vaylar who ate the berry will go back and plant the seed of doubt in the right minds. If he tells them what happened here, they won’t know what they’re dealing with. We can use that uncertainty. We can feed that fear by making them believe that whatever is waiting for them in this forest isn’t worth the risk.”
“What do you mean by ‘play on their senses’?” Malatic asked.
“We can use something with sound or—” Eloy said as someone from the crowd cut him off.
An older man stepped forward and stood next to the fallen tree. “The hum of the battle funeral has always seemed eerie to me. If they aren’t familiar with it, it might throw them off.”
“What does that sound like?” Eloy asked.
“I’ll show you,” the man said. “We don’t really use it anymore. Many of those from my area who used to honor it aren’t around to do it anymore.”
The man took his shield off his back and placed it on the ground, its edge rounded upward to make it bowl-shaped, which Eloy had never seen in a tool for defense before. The man squatted next to his shield and removed his sword from its
sheath. The blade still had a layer of dark brown flaking blood across its silver surface. The man wasn’t interested in the end of the sword that had been so important earlier in the day. He took the leather-wrapped hilt in his hand, pointed the blade skyward, and ran the leather grip around the rim of his shield. The hum started low after the first pass around the hilt and got louder with each rotation. The hum grew into a ring that felt like it spilled through the air like water. It wrapped around Eloy’s head. If Eloy hadn’t been looking at the source, he could believe that the resonance was a song from another realm.
“That’s it,” the man said as he stopped.
The hum hung on the air for a few moments as the vibration continued to ring through the metal.
“I’ve never heard anything like it,” Eloy said.
The man stood up. “If you haven’t heard it, I’m willing to guess these Vaylars haven’t either. There are a few more of us old fellows who have the right shield . . . and a few more who didn’t make it through the day who won’t mind if we borrow theirs. It’s really something when you get more than one going. If you put some water in the bottom, it changes the tone. The different tones together will definitely send a message.”
“Thank you,” Eloy said as he put a hand on the man’s shoulder.
“You’re welcome,” the man said. “If those bastards turn around, my thanks will outweigh yours. I’ll tell the other members of my people what we’re doing.” The older man disappeared back into the crowd.
The rest of those who had gathered waited for direction, their next move to help with the new part of the challenge.
“We have time to take care of those of us who’ve fallen,” Eloy said. “Let’s not leave those we have lost today to the mud. While you’re with them, remember our plan and try to think of things that might contribute to the illusion. I know you’re tired. I’m tired. Every part of me is tired, but we have to get on the other side of this day. Our work isn’t done yet, and we have to keep moving. The Vaylars will come by morning, and we have to be ready for them. Think with me. Plan with me. Remember the parts of your history that have been lost to disuse, and let those parts of yourself aid in saving us all. The Vaylar said we are powerless. Let’s show him he’s wrong. We’ll find our way.”