Jame stops just before a final object, a towering and mirrored wall reflecting the image of Bernard, but not of Jame. “The first foretale comes from you, emerging from the past and the future. All seven foretales will guide you on your final venture. And return you to me.” At this Jame’s expression shifts, as if emerging from a kiptale. “Bernard?”
Bernard’s heart lifts at his curam and he embraces Jame. They spin and squeeze each other with the smells of burned wood and fresh dew emanating off Jame’s clothes. Bernard grabs him by the head, running his fingers through his long hair.
“Jame, Jame. Forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what?”
Bernard pulls back, holding Jame by the shoulders, and smiles, looking him over, pressing his rough and aged hands to Jame’s face. “You look so young.”
“You’re only two years older than me.” Jame rolls his eyes. They don’t speak for a minor. The darkness around them ignored. The pinpoint stars above them ignored. Jame wipes his mouth. “I’m really thirsty. You have any water?”
Bernard nods and grabs Jame by the hand. “Are you angry?”
“Should I be?”
Just as Bernard is about to answer, a heavy weight presses against his legs, and it feels as if he can’t adjust them, as if some dense lump rests on the blanket near his feet, holding them down.
Jame.
His eyes flutter open. Light replaces dark. Cold air. He turns from facing the wall onto his back. He’s shirtless with marks of Brute’s claws still freshly dug across his chest, and he finds himself lying in an unfamiliar bed. His hands, wrapped in thick bandages, pulse with pain.
Everything is quiet in the room. Dark wood walls. Modest, customary furnishings. A three-drawer dresser. A circular nightstand with a mug of water and a small vial. A lamp and a bowl of cold, untouched soup. Brute sleeps, warm and curled up, at the foot of the bed. Bernard rubs the little frek with his feet from under the soft blanket. It stretches and rolls onto its back, returning to its nap. A sound of faint ticking from an unseen clock. A quiet breeze wafting through an open window, its curtain dancing with a soft elegance. The sun shines affectionately against the forest outside.
No rain. No smoke. No fire.
Jame. His heart skips. He blocks the image, too dreadful to stomach. The sight of the body covered in flames. Of the penetrating heat. Bernard’s hands burn and throb with his heartbeat. Bury the thoughts or they’ll send you.
Footsteps.
He sits up just as the door opens, revealing a handsome Radiba man curamed Logan Hunst, who was once Bernard’s neighbor, or as close to a neighbor as one gets in the sparsely populated Highlands. As he recalls, Logan is a traveler and often away on extended treks west. The sight of him suggests that Bernard is in the haynest of Logan’s mother, who was sent left only a year ago.
“Sur Babek, good morn,” Logan starts.
Bernard attempts to say hello back, as is only proper, though the words never form.
“You took quite the burn to your hands. Nearly lost them both.”
They throb. “Are we at Edith’s?” he manages to gasp.
Logan walks over and sits close, reaching for Bernard’s hands. “Yes. Though it’s my haynest now, I suppose. I never sent my approsh for coming to her arrangements last year.” While he speaks, he delicately unwraps Bernard’s bandages. “Sanet pulled you from the fire. You were lost in there. I found the both of you after following that smoke across the Lothatin.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“No, but every haynest south of Lothatin Bridge was on fire. Down the chasm a near mile. And if you ask me, it looked on purpose, but I’m not sure why. By luck, most of the forest was damp from the tormisand, which I think prevented the fire from spreading.”
Bernard winces as the bandages pull against his tender skin. “By luck?”
Logan looks up. “Apory, Sur Babek.”
“You said more haynests burned?”
“Every one I could see. Crentak’s. Travis’s. Dotted reds against a line of green and stone. Frightful sight.”
“Lincoln,” Bernard whispers in disbelief. “Any others sent?”
“Couldn’t say, but I can’t imagine not . . .”
As Logan trails off, Bernard can’t speak. In the silence, Logan peels off the last layer of the bandage. Bernard’s hands are mangled. Unrecognizable. The skin flaked and rippled, only a single finger left uninjured: the little one on his west hand. The rest are charred away or missing entirely. A sight that’s grotesque and disturbing. “What did I do?”
“Sanet says you grabbed Jame’s body. He was . . . on fire.”
Bernard looks to Logan and holds back his tears. He moves to cover his face with his deformed hands and winces, every curl and touch bringing him tremendous pain. “Who could do such a thing?”
Logan shakes his head without an answer. Behind him, from the doorway, with a bandage wrapped around her head, Sanet watches. Once noticed, she moves inside. “Are you wisnok, Bernard?”
“He should be,” Logan answers in Bernard’s silence. He reaches toward the nightstand and dips his fingers into the vial. He draws from it a thick, white oilment and rubs it into his palms. “This will hurt, but you’ll feel much better afterward, I cross.”
“Will I get my fingers back?”
Logan shakes his head. “Appize, but there’s no oilment in the hundred thirty-three that regenerates limbs.” Bernard knew. He and Jame spent many years attempting to find a cure for Jame’s legs. Oilments had come far, able to repair most any injury. Broken bones. Burns. But nothing worked on Jame, and they came to the conclusion that the offending trap must have been coated in an incurable slick, preventing its victim from fully healing. A clever tool for hunting wily emorteens, but a terrible fate for an absent-minded traveler. They once thought to purchase a pair of walking legs from the Misipit Valley but found they wouldn’t work unless Jame lost his legs entirely. A decision he refused to make. But for Jame, he led a life he loved: being at home, being away from an uncaring wilderness, and being alone with Bernard.
Logan presses his oiled hands to Bernard’s and begins to massage them. Soft at first, then with more vigor. Bernard groans. Sanet steps in closer and sets her hand on his shoulder while Brute wakes to catch what’s going on. It pads across the bed closer to the action.
And then Bernard feels a thousand needles prick his hands as if he has plunged them into freezing waters. He starts to breathe deeper while Logan continues to massage them, each stroke pressing harder into the muscle. Bernard grits his teeth, taking deep and studied breaths.
“Almost done, Sur Babek.”
The pain intensifies, agonizing. He’s ready to pull away . . . until . . . his hands feel cold and then nothing at all. His breathing calms, and Sanet squeezes his shoulder.
Finished, Logan asserts, “That should do for now.” He stands and holds his oiled hands to his side. “When you’ve rested a bit, I thought we could find a smith to help with your hands. Perhaps engineer a pair of mitts?”
Bernard’s hands glisten, crinkled and worn, with the single finger standing oddly alone. “I should lose the little one. I look absurd.”
Sanet laughs. Logan follows. Bernard huffs through his nose, holding back the thoughts. He swallows. “Approsh, Logan. Approsh, Sanet.”
Their laughter shifts to soft smiles.
“You should rest. We’ll bring you a duskmeal later,” Sanet assures him, standing with Logan.
They leave and Bernard lies down, taking stock of his new-formed hands. If that’s what I can call them. Brute, awake and wandering the room, sniffs along the windowsill before hopping down and out of sight. The room fades to quiet again. The ticking clock. The faint, weak whip of the curtain. Who would set a man’s house on fire? A community of haynests? It had to be coordinated. It had to be planned.
These were sendlefts.
The understanding of who they are, of why they undertook such an act against friends, slithers in and
out of his mind. His focus remains on these thoughts as he attempts to avoid others. It would be important now to seek these festatars out. To find them, to bring them to justice. A fitful wish for brutal revenge washes over him.
❖❖❖
At Logan’s mornmeal table, Sanet feeds Bernard a bit of noodle, some of which falls down his chin. Bernard rolls his eyes. “Have you never fed your children, Sanet?”
Scooping bits from Bernard’s scruffy and unshaven face, she answers definitively, “There’s no day on this Land I’ll have children despite what others say.”
Bernard grins, but Sanet is absolute in her statement. “I’m sure you’d make an excellent mother.”
“It’s just not my bargain, plus wanting to travel across states, I can’t be tied to a haynest and whining baby.”
Logan enters, washed and toweled. “I’ll have to double on Sanet. Traveling is no life for kids, though I wouldn’t mind bringing a little one haynest.” At this statement, Sanet bites her lip and spoons Bernard another mouthful of noodles.
Bernard talks through the hot food. “I always wanted children. We thought about heading to a children’s square someday, but there wasn’t one close enough for . . .” He trails off.
Sitting across from the others, Logan reaches for a bread roll and changes the subject. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you like, Bernard, though I’m headed back to Organsia in a few days. I’m already late as it is. Though I’m still willing to escort you to that smith before I leave, if you’d like. Perhaps once this tormisand is over?”
Bernard nods. “This is still the Peace Hours?” He studies the outside through a nearby window. What strange pacing for a tormisand. “Approsh, Logan, but I’ll need to perform arrangements . . .” He pauses, not wanting to say the curam aloud or have the thoughts. “I don’t think I can stay either.”
“Are you going to travel?” Sanet asks, feeding him another bite.
He considers the thought. Where would I go? Where is my haynest without Jame? It has been thirty years since he’d first made one in the Radiba Highlands. His parents were long left, living the last years of their lives near the foothills closer to the shoreline. He could relocate to where he grew up, to the west, near the Guloren border. That’s where his first haynest was, carved out of a large stone boulder and enveloped by trees, though he’d long since abandoned it after tormisand squalls nearly destroyed it. Marking two haynests he’s lost.
The thought creeps in unwelcomed. He was young then and didn’t bother rebuilding the first house, believing at the time that the Land didn’t wish him to remain there. Radibians live on the Flow—obligated to subsist off the Land and accept nature’s rhythm. Landscapes are their emblems, caves and outsized trees their shelters, and tormisands are the reason they stay indoors with others. Perhaps I could live somewhere else?
In his studies, Bernard read that most other states are almost inhospitable in comparison, as they’re each in a condition of solitude, governing themselves in an anomalous isolation. When friends cross borders—through a legal act bestowed by the Law of Passage—doing so without a semblance of recognition of that state’s culture and position is usually met with enmity if not one’s permanent removal.
North of Radiba is the state of Carvinga where the tenfooters dwell, a state particularly unwelcoming to outsiders. Just under six hundred years ago, the tenfooters excavated a vast network of tunnels that allow roamers and travelers passage underneath their state. An act meant to circumvent the Law and remove any intrusion into their hedonistic, barbarous lifestyle. Once they finished building the tunnels, the tenfooters soon deserted them, making them one of the wildest and most illicit areas in the hundred thirty-three.
Then, north of Carvinga, Yikshir Sands stands as an assemblage of redrock cities, each acting as sovereign over its own sect of religions. Collectively, the Councils of Yikshir convene to delegate and regulate high-held state laws.
Bernard has a harder time recalling the geography to the west. He remembers a bit of Organsia, through Logan’s exploits, where great lakes and rivers feed a massive neon city and flow into a dull-green sea. Before Organsia, there’s a state blanketed in ash from a chain of active volcaks . . .
As he ponders the Land around him, a sudden conflict of emotions develops, the cropping up of his desire to explore. A desire that’s resided in him since he was a small boy, a desire to discover the diverse Land around him and to indulge in infantility and recklessness. It is an unclaimed desire. These sorts of feelings are what sent Jame left. Had he left for haynest earlier that morn, had he not wasted his time engaging with protnuks, he would have returned hours before. Before the fires were set. In truth, had he let the neox pass unfollowed in the first place, none of this would have chanced at all. The neox did not bring him tremendous luck. They were not in need of food. There was no need to chase and hunt wild freks, bad omen or not. A careful reaction could have prevented Jame’s sending, and there was great horror in the thoughts.
“Wisnok, Sur Babek?” Logan reaches out in comfort.
“Apory, I don’t know what I need right now.” He stands, readying to leave the room. Sanet and Logan stand as well. “I just need a major.” They don’t respond, but nod in quiet acceptance.
Outside, the air is crisp. The yard lies overrun, forgotten by its peripatetic owner. Since Edith’s sending, it had become a place built for rest between feats and grand travels. He smiles at the thought of exploration. I shouldn’t smile. He walks down a narrow path deeper into the forest.
He finds a tiny pond and in it a drum of bomwigs, slimy little freks that slither and squirm, feeding on the mud and muck beneath. Bernard reaches in to hold one but remembers too quickly he has no means to grasp them. How useless is a man without fingers?
He stands and looks around. The picturesque wood rests, lush and green. Wet. The remains of a drip drip drip of rain fading. But the absence of the jarjer’s song still signals the tormisand’s looming second half.
What was he to do? Where was he to live, to stay, to be? It had been so long living with a partner who never wanted to leave their haynest. Bernard once made Jame crutches, but he never used them. They now lay in ash, burnt and forgotten. Jame wasn’t a fighter. He carried with him no sense of adventure or passion. Instead, he was sensible and kind. Welcoming when it came to matters of coupling, yet cautious and dire when anyone was leaving. Jame never was the one to go and, if it were up to Jame, Bernard would stay. Rebuild their haynest. But that’s not what Bernard wants. In some ways, Jame’s sending was . . . liberating.
I can’t think like that.
There is nothing to keep him here in Radiba, as wonderful and lovely as this place might be. He couldn’t stay. He can’t stay. Jame wouldn’t approve, but one can’t live their life in service of the left. The thoughts are there. As the thoughts will always be. There would be no hiding from them. But the decision to leave drives him to his knees.
Agony flows through the forest.
❖❖❖
Returning to Logan’s a few hours later, Bernard looks tired, covered in dirt and grim. Sanet greets him in the main room. “All well, Bernard?”
“I am, approsh, my friend.” He smiles and sits.
Logan enters a minor later with sliced neox and blue brackleberries. “Can I get you some steamed tea?”
“That would be lovely.”
Logan nods and exits.
After a minor, Bernard looks to Sanet. “I wouldn’t want to impose, but would you mind a friend in tow on your return to Yikshir?”
“Are you sure you’re able, old man?” she replies in jest.
With a faint smile, he responds, “I think these bones can handle it.”
“Well, I’m not going there directly. Not sure how long the trek will be, since I’ve another fragment of brass to find before I return.”
“Well, all the Land sits before me, and I ignored its grand adventure first by listening to careful, warning parents, then by listening to
a careful warning husband. I think it’s time I let my soul have its way.”
Sanet remains silent in acknowledgment, then answers, “Well, it would be an honor to share the Land with you.”
She raises her mug. Bernard lifts his little finger. At this, they laugh. Logan enters shortly after with tea for each.
“So, you’re off to travel with the handsome lady?”
“Once I get some usability back, I hope.”
Logan sets the mug on the table in front of Bernard, who takes it with the palms of his hands. “I think this smith can fashion you a set of mitts. Though he’ll require a steel bargain,” Logan says and takes a seat between them.
Bernard lifts his mug. “Whatever the bargain set before me, my trek is north.”
Chapter 5
SMITH TUNSTON
As the night approaches, the friends decide to play dice and drink fruin until their bodies call for bed. Bernard wins almost invariably and on occasion purposely rolls the dice off the table to change the pips in the others’ favor. His two-palm, fingerless rolls are blamed for their misfortunes, and Sanet states that his gaming skills will come useful on the road.
Later, alone in his room anticipating the end of the Peace Hours, Bernard sleeps in fits, with the white-moonlit forest glowing outside. Eager. Excited. Horrified. Nightmares and sadness blend with the lifting of his spirit, and his boyish elation struggles to free itself from a looming guilt. He rises the next morn just before the sun hits crest. Brute returns, hopping in the window and looking a tad rounder if not entirely satisfied. The quiet mornlight is odd as the Peace Hours evolve into Peace Days, which leads Bernard to hope that the whistles and sudden bursts of wind won’t hinder them from leaving. He can’t wait any longer.
Discussion of the peculiar tormisand’s pattern takes over the mornmeal table. Logan and Sanet work together to plan several protections along their trip north should squalls develop. Bernard watches them as they address each other; Logan’s eyes expose a spring affinity toward Sanet, who blushes at any waggish story or compliment he delivers her way. That boy has great landmine charm.
Advent of the Roar (The Land Old, Untouched Book 1) Page 5