He was in a tent, a dim hovel reeking of smoke. Racks hung from the poles, covered in thin strips of meat. Other racks had been shoved to the sides of the small space and haphazardly piled at the back. The unfamiliar smells of the smoking tent, damp animal hide, and the earth of the plains filled his nostrils. He was made more uneasy by an unsettling realization: he could not see in the dark. He had grown so used to it in the recent months that he had forgotten what it was like to be blind without light.
Pain and a hot, throbbing burn below his ribs soon engulfed him. He probed at the wound with his bound hands, wincing, before his vision faded.
His unconsciousness was different now than it had been after the fight. His sleep was fretful and shallow, and between feverish bouts with wakefulness, he dreamed of a whispering voice. It was familiar, cold. He dreamed it was beyond a wall, or at a great distance, but that it was trying to grow closer to him. He was unsure if he wanted it to, and yet he yearned for it to reach him.
—
When they awoke, Ahi’rea and Ruun’daruun lay for a time, speaking little. Quiet voices outside indicated that most of the camp was awake and active. Ahi’rea wrapped a fur and hide blanket around her shoulders and went out to retrieve water, medicinal herbs, and bandages. She saw her father seated by the fire. Their eyes met, but they did not exchange greetings.
When she had what she needed, she returned to the tent and found Ruun’daruun waiting. He smiled through his pain and her heart melted; he smiled so seldom. She knelt in front of him. “Let me see to those wounds.”
Ruun’daruun’s chest, neck, and face were riddled with the mysterious blackening welts Revik had given him. He sat, quiet and unflinching, as she tended to him, watching her while she worked. The rest and closeness soon had them both in better spirits.
“These will scar,” Ahi’rea announced when she finished. Ruun’daruun nodded, pleased. “I have never seen anything like it. The skin just split, and they look almost like—” she paused, considering the wounds. “Like the time Ula’han had frostbite.”
Ruun’daruun strapped on his machete scabbard, taking care not to dislodge the new bandages. “It must really be him. Even the creatures Halkoriv makes out of men can’t do such things. So much for Lasivar, the son of the hero.”
“So much.” Ahi’rea furrowed her brow. “It is strange though…” she trailed off, thinking back to the fight in the storm.
“What’s strange?” Ruun’daruun turned to her when she did not go on.
She was quiet for a moment before responding. Still she saw it in her mind: the pale flicker around Revik like a crack in the air, or the shadow of something vast and formless. “Nothing, probably. Let’s get some food. We are leaving tomorrow for the Monument to perform the Sendings.”
Outside, they ignored a few curious glances and mutterings as they exited the tent together. Ken’hra and her kinsmen had been invited to the fire circle and all those who had lost a friend or family member were partaking of their last meal before the fasting began. Ahi’rea’s father stood as they approached. He hobbled toward them and stopped before Ahi’rea, eyes downcast.
“I am sorry I did not tell anyone. When you see that I was right, you will understand. Soon, I hope.” The old man’s eyes, when he looked up, were dry and hard. “I would have gone myself, if I could have. You know that.” He set his jaw and locked eyes with Ahi’rea and with Ruun’daruun. Even to his own daughter, the apology had been a major show of deference for an elder.
Ruun’daruun bowed, but perhaps a little less than he should have. Ahi’rea, however, was still. She stared right back at her father. “He is a murderer, Haaph’ahin, and a threat. After the Sendings are performed, we must decide what to do with him.”
Her father’s eyes widened at the use of his name. He opened his mouth, but seemed to think better of his words and turned and stomped away. “May the wind guide your thoughts.”
“And yours,” Ahi’rea answered.
—
He heard the voice again. Revik could not make out its words, but he understood its meaning. It had been driven away, but it was coming back.
There was a light—Revik felt it more than saw it. When he opened his eyes, he saw a dim figure, rather small and hunched, with a walking stick. Little motes of dust flashed, hanging in the air, before vanishing as the tent flap fell shut. His vision was blurry and his head pounded. He tried to rise, but his limbs would not respond. The burning feeling around his wound felt duller. Revik was not sure if that was good or not. He tried to clear his muddled thoughts.
Captured. Captured, by plainsfolk. He remembered. He had been leading a force to exterminate them, eliminate them for good. To make the plains safe for travel, to expand the border, to bring peace to the North. Duty. He and his men had gotten word of an assault, and he had ridden ahead to stop it himself. It had almost worked. Why do I feel so weak?
Revik’s head swam. The figure shuffled closer and sat stiffly, and he heard a gentle sloshing of water. His head was lifted and a water skin was placed against his lips. He tried to turn away but the rough hand tilted his head back and poured the water into his mouth. He could not bring himself to resist once the cool liquid reached his tongue.
The girl. He remembered cutting through the Huumphar until he reached her. He remembered her eyes, blazing light through the rain and shadow. She had beaten him, somehow shut him off from his power, and they had taken him.
Revived by the water, Revik’s eyes adjusted to the dark interior of the tent. The figure before him was an old, troubled-looking plainsfolk man with wild gray hair. His eyes bored right through Revik. He got the feeling the old man was looking for something.
The old man spoke words in a language Revik did not know. Then he said, in Cheduna, “How are you feeling?”
Revik clenched his teeth. “Go to hell,” he spat. “You animals are not getting anything from me.”
Haaph’ahin nodded. “We will heal you as best we can,” he said. “We are moving tomorrow. You will have to walk again, or be carried.”
“Running will not help you. Not this time,” Revik said.
“Who are you?” Haaph’ahin's voice was a mixture of hope and fear.
Revik smiled through his pain. “Your death. I was sent to end your people. Halkoriv sent me to exterminate you. When I am healed, you will all die.” He coughed through a weak laugh. “You had better kill me now, before I am well or my men find you. And if you do kill me, Halkoriv will come here himself.”
The old man returned the smile. “We will not kill you, and we are aware of the force searching for you. They will not catch us—they never do. Not on the plains. Our plains.”
Revik could see that the old man was trying mask his fear. The army was the largest that had ventured into the plains for decades. The fires stormed the south like siege towers.
Haaph’ahin sat back, leaning against one of the tent’s three support poles in feigned unconcern. “But what I want to know is, are you Revik Lasivar?”
Revik was amused. “You have heard of me.”
“Halkoriv’s chosen,” Haaph’ahin muttered. “Yes, I have heard of you—and I knew your father.”
“You know nothing,” Revik snapped. He tried to sit and winced, falling back. His side throbbed and his head pounded. He was still for a moment and the pain faded again. “I have no family. They were killed, and I do not remember them. Halkoriv gave me everything. He told me my father was a good man, a man who would not traffic with thieves and murderers like you.”
“No family,” Haaph’ahin repeated, more to himself than to Revik. “Of course. You were taken the night they died. You were hidden. Why do you not remember them?” He was looking past Revik, through him, and Revik saw the same green light in the old man’s eyes as he had seen in the girl’s. He continued to mutter to himself. The light faded and Haaph’ahin met Revik’s eyes again. “Your mother and father hid with you in the North for a long time, and some of those with the Sight foresaw your de
ath, or that you would flee,” he said. “But not me. I saw something else. I saw that you would come to save us from Halkoriv.”
Haaph’ahin closed his eyes and grasped Revik’s hand. Revik tried to pull away but he was too weak. “Now that you are here,” the old man said, eyes glimmering, growing unfocused, “I may finally discover what happened. So many questions, for so long…”
“What are you doing?” Revik said, still trying to free his hand. The old man’s grip became a vice.
“Seeing…” Haaph’ahin whispered.
There was silence and Revik waited, unable to pull away. He felt nothing. The old man’s eyes closed and a soft green glow emanated from behind his eyelids.
—
Halkoriv stormed through his palace, leaving his doctors and healers behind him. They stopped as he crossed the threshold to his sanctum and began to descend the stone stairs. There was no rich carpet here, no tapestries. The floor was featureless marble, cold as ice. The walls held no torches and no light reached those halls. To Halkoriv, it did not matter—he had ceased to need light to see decades ago. It was one of the first things the Ancestor taught him, one of the first things Revik had learned after he had ended Cunabrel.
Once Revik had done so, had proven himself, it had been a matter of hours to teach him to unleash the powers that had lain dormant in him. The Ancestor had awakened them. It was something that had never been done before. Halkoriv had been pleased to see it work. He wondered that Revik had not discovered them before, but brushed aside those concerns, just as Revik would brush aside the plainsfolk—or so he had hoped.
Halkoriv had been consulting with his healers when he had felt something was wrong with Revik. He rushed to his sanctum, to See. After over a hundred and twenty years of life, healers were of no use. They warned him that he must address his health, but Halkoriv knew that only the power of the Ancestor would save him. Only the power of Sitis. Revik was the key. Revik was life.
Halkoriv reached the bottom of the marble steps. In the dark, he heard only his footsteps and the trickle of water. His heart hammered with the exertion of walking. His breath rasped. He released his restraint, felt more power course through him, and his heart slowed. His breath grew steady. Halkoriv crossed the black hall, a cavern in marble, and ascended the dais at its center.
Atop the dais loomed a marble throne and a marble basin beside it. Water trickled from the basin, running over the top and down the sides. Halkoriv could see the water shimmer against the marble in the darkness. I need him. We need him. He sat, and felt the Ancestor with him, here in this seat that he had built hundreds of years ago. Halkoriv looked into the basin and released his restraint. He felt the Sprit, the Ancestor, stir in him, and its icy, gossamer touch flowed through him and took hold of him. It had ceased to be unpleasant long ago. Halkoriv craved it.
He did not stir. The water’s flow increased as Halkoriv stared into the basin. His eyes unfocused, and he Saw.
—Nine—
The plains grew hot. The light armor he wore was better in the heat than the plate Draden was used to, but not by much. From his mount, he looked over the waving golden grass and listened to the dull roar of the army encampment behind him.
The army was over five thousand strong, accompanied by hundreds of carters, smiths, and other support. They awaited only Draden’s orders to move out. Before him was the north, once a vast blue sky over the limitless plains, now marred by columns of black smoke. Scouts approached, first seen only by the bending of the grasses and then coming into view one by one. Draden hoped that, this time, they would have something to report, but by the looks on their faces he feared that was not the case.
Draden wiped the sweat from his brow as the scouts came forward and, one after the other, reported the same thing: that they had seen sign of neither the plainsfolk, nor of Revik. He did not relish making the report to Halkoriv’s servant that his heir still had not been found.
“Damn you, Revik,” he muttered to himself, not for the first time. “I told you to wait.”
The first time Revik had gone out to face a group of plainsfolk alone, he had slain them all before the other cavalry even caught up. None survived to warn their kin about Revik. None survived to pass on the story. The plainsfolks’ corpses had been strung up, paraded before the army, and the men saw that they could be killed. Even still, Draden had asked Revik to at least take a few men with him the next time, to stay under guard. Revik had laughed.
He had done the same thing on three other occasions. Now it had been nearly five days since Revik had ridden ahead to battle the plainsfolk. A storm had gathered over him as he rode away. By the time Draden and a squad of cavalry had reached the outpost, the rain had cleared. They had discovered the bodies of many fallen plainsfolk, but Revik was nowhere to be found. They had met Malskein fleeing along the road and found only one other, alive, but badly wounded, inside the garrison. Neither of them knew what had happened to Revik. The man from the garrison had been sent back to Halkoriv’s fortress, at the servant’s order, to be questioned. Draden wondered if he had survived the journey.
Draden’s thoughts were interrupted by a voice. “We’d better move on with the mission without him, Count.” It was Malskein, squinting up at him from the ground. “The best way to find Lord Revik will be to force the plainsfolk into fighting. He’ll turn up in one of their camps, or not at all.”
“Thank you, commander. You’re probably right.” Draden sighed. He brushed his sweat-soaked hair off of his forehead and issued commands to move the army.
Revik had set out, after defeating Cunabrel, with one purpose: to destroy the plainsfolk and open the way to the North. Malskein and others with the most experience in fighting on the plains had been hand-picked to offer strategic advice and lead the men. The other lords had gone home, and Draden had been Revik’s choice as second-in-command. They had fought side by side since the assault on Cunabrel’s realm, when Revik had first taken his place as head of the army. Only a few months had passed, but much had happened. Draden owed it all to Revik, including lordship over Cunabrel’s old county and his title.
Revik’s plans were simple enough. The plainsfolk depended on hunting and gathering to survive and upon the frontier villages for a little trading. They hid in the plains and struck without warning, then retreated to their lands again. The villages had already been evacuated and traders were being turned away at the southern border of the plains. Groups of soldiers were hunting and killing game, poisoning the carcasses that they could not carry back.
Word came often from Halkoriv, guiding the army’s movements, warning of plainsfolk raiding parties and traps. Most importantly, the men set fire to the plains around them. Winds came up from the south, guiding the flames away from the army. Revik and Halkoriv had said it would be so. The winds did not falter.
Such power, Draden thought, a common refrain. This is it. The war will end soon and we will finally see peace. He did not pretend to understand his king’s abilities. He had heard that Halkoriv now spent nearly all of his time in solitude, concentrating on expanding his power. They said he neither ate, nor slept. Some said that he could not die. A few whispered that he was not even truly alive.
On the sixth day since Revik disappeared, word came of a small plainsfolk warparty near the army’s position. Draden gave Malskein command of a legion and rode out with him to confront the savages. Infantry pressed the plainsfolks’ position while the men on horseback rode ahead to encircle them. Malskein commanded the soldiers to stay in groups, move slowly and carefully, never run blind, never fight on plainsfolk terms. “They’re not ghosts, and they’re not demons,” he told them. “They’re not even men. They are dangerous animals that need to be put down.”
The fighting was fierce and bloody, and even against so few plainsfolk the costs were high. However, with their escape cut off and with Malskein’s experienced oversight, they had little chance in the face of the soldier’s overwhelming numbers and superior weapons and armor. Once
they were defeated, however, it became apparent that the army’s target was no warparty.
The soldiers killed thirty or more plainsfolk, but few of them were warriors. Most were too old or too young to fight effectively. When the last few remaining alive were rounded up, Draden was struck—all that remained were children, and they were sickly, as if afflicted by some disease that spared the adults. Some quaked before him and the other horsemen, but many glared at them through tears and blood.
Draden stared at them. He wondered if they were the last of a tribe. “Take them,” he said to Malskein, turning his horse to leave.
“Count,” Malskein said, “I thought you said our orders were to exterminate them.”
“So I did,” Draden answered. “These children are sick, and pose no threat. We will send them south to be cared for. Perhaps they can be brought to the light of civilization.”
Malskein’s gaze darkened. “They’re animals, sir. You can’t hope to make anything but feral murderers out of them. The order was no prisoners.”
Draden turned back and rode to Malskein, leaning in close to him. Malskein did not budge. “Are you going to obey my orders, or not?”
“Are you going to obey our king’s orders, sir?”
They locked eyes as the soldiers looked on. Draden silently cursed himself. Malskein seemed content to wait, his gaze unwavering. The barest hint of a smirk crossed his lips. Neither man moved or made a sound. What seemed like minutes passed.
Eyes still locked on Malskein’s, Draden finally spoke. “Leave them. Let’s go.” Malskein stared a moment longer, nodded, and gestured for the men to move out. He knew as well as Draden did that the children would not survive alone.
“And commander,” Draden said as Malskein turned to leave. “Never question my loyalty to our king again.”
Malskein nodded before giving a short wave to the terrified plainsfolk children and riding away.
Ours Is the Storm Page 11