Dawn of the Dreamsmith (The Raven's Tale Book 1)

by Alan Ratcliffe

  The captain stood silent. Inside the hall, his crew had got a fire going. He was pleasantly surprised to see they had stacked the bodies before one of the hearths, and the thick smoke from the flames was being blown straight up the chimney. Robbed of their prize, the gulls had dispersed, and peace once more reigned within the walls of the Crag.

  “When you were below, in the cellars, how did you survive, lad?” asked the captain suddenly.

  “I told you,” the young man replied, confused. “I hid.”

  “I mean, did you eat?”

  “Well, yes. The cellar below the Archon’s room leads to those beneath the kitchen. I found food.”

  “How much?”

  “I wasn’t exactly taking stock!” Caspian began hotly, then caught the look in the captain’s eye. He sighed. “There’s lots down there, rooms full of barrels; salted fish, apples, vegetables, meat hanging off hooks. Why, are you feeling peckish?”

  “No.” The captain stared thoughtfully into the distance. “Enough to feed six men for many weeks, by the sound of it. Shame to let it spoil.” He whistled, and the two sailors came over. They looked questioningly at Caspian, but said nothing. “Go with the boy, he’ll show you to the cellars ‘neath the kitchen. Bring out as many barrels as the hold can carry. We’ll take them down by the lift.”

  “Where we going, cap’n?” asked Jan.

  “Tonight, home,” he replied, ignoring the insolent tone. “Tomorrow, we sail south.”

  With that, he turned and stamped back towards the gatehouse. He would first check the elevator and make sure it was in working order, then return to the Havørn to relay further orders and make preparations to leave.

  He now felt, more strongly that ever, that what had transpired at the Crag was of grave importance, and somehow the half-drowned initiate he had pulled from the sea and sent on his way was involved. He didn’t yet know why the peaceful Brothers had been massacred, but hopefully the elder’s letters would reveal more during their voyage. For now, it was important to carry word of the attacks to those in authority. Far to the south, a month’s voyage or more, was Bloodstone, the Legion’s coastal stronghold. It was as good a place as any to start. From there, they were even just a week or two away from the capital, Ehrenburg, and the ear of the emperor himself.

  As he stood on the cliffs overlooking the small shape of his ship below, the sun at last shone through a break in the clouds, and the rain began to lessen. The sight did not cheer him. There were more dark clouds on the horizon.

  The storm is just beginning, he thought.

  CHAPTER 7

  Cole wondered if it would be possible to find two more different guides anywhere in the whole of Callador, and how long any such search would take.

  In the four days after leaving Westcove, he’d spent one in the company of an amiable, if coarse, old man, who had regaled him with anecdotes of his past and obscene shanties – which had been as much of an education to him as any of the training he had received on the Crag.

  In the three days since, the journey had been very different. Raven was a taciturn, brooding companion, a far cry from the bluster of his previous guide. She was constantly alert. Her head, topped by distinctive black short-cropped hair, moved from side to side like a pendulum as she scanned their surroundings.

  She rarely spoke, and on the occasions she did it was a terse reply to a question he’d asked. However, acutely aware that his presence was tolerated rather than welcomed, Cole kept these to a minimum.

  “Where are we going?” It was their first day together, and they picked their way through dappled woods. Behind them were the rolling foothills that he had been heading towards only that morning. Eventually, those foothills became the Dragon’s Back; the vast range of mountains that served as a border between the north and the rest of the Empire. While he was grateful that Raven had agreed to escort him back to civilisation, it rankled that with every step he was travelling farther from his destination. The mountaintop bastion of Frosthold was but a name to him, yet he keenly felt the urgency of reaching it.

  “Hunter’s Watch,” Raven replied. “It’s a small town, near the western edge of the Spiritwood. You should be able to find a guide there.”

  It wasn’t difficult to understand the sentiment she’d left unsaid; that their association would not be long-lived. “Do you have business there?” Cole asked.

  Raven was silent for a few moments. “Some,” she said eventually. “I will take you to the town, but there is something else I must do first.”

  “You have to see the people that hired you,” said Cole, trying and failing to keep the smugness from his voice. He’d been thinking on Raven’s words to him that morning and, after seeing her in action, it hadn’t taken too long for him to mentally add the word ‘bounty’ to ‘hunter’.

  But instead of admitting her profession or chiding him for his correct guess, as he expected, her brow wrinkled in puzzlement. “Nobody hired me,” she said.

  Cole threw up his hands. “Then why did you follow us? Why did you kill those men?”

  “Do you wish I hadn’t?”

  “What? No, of course not, I...” he tailed off, red-faced, when he saw that she was smiling at him.

  Raven watched him for a few moments longer, then her eyes returned to the forest path ahead. “I was searching for something,” she said.

  Cole recalled the gold chain she had taken from the old man in the clearing, and hastily tucked away inside her armour. “The locket,” he said, half to himself. “It must be very valuable.”

  His companion’s cold blue eyes watched him carefully. “It’s the most precious thing in the world.”

  That exchange would turn out to be their longest conversation for the next three days. Raven didn’t ignore him as such; she still continued to wait for him whenever he fell behind, albeit with poorly concealed impatience. It was more that she didn’t feel the need to pass the time with words. She answered his questions, though never at length, and eventually Cole stopped asking them altogether. If Raven felt any curiosity about his own situation, or his reason for seeking passage into the mountains, then she didn’t show it. For what seemed like the first time in years, Cole felt entirely unimportant. Surprisingly, he found it refreshing.

  In his early years among the Brothers of the Crag he had been just another boy, no different to the young faces that regularly arrived from every corner of the Empire, to be trained in the ways of the Order and eventually sent back into the world to spread their word. But, once his abilities had begun to manifest themselves, from that moment he had been marked as different. He was the only one of the novices – though he had never formally been given that rank – to work with one of the senior Brothers, as he had with Merryl. Sensing his otherness, his fellows had held themselves apart, with few exceptions. Cas had been one such. The Brothers, for their part, seemed to walk on eggshells around him. Elder Tobias had been the only one of them to ever attempt to discipline him.

  Perhaps he had not helped his own cause, he reflected. Had the treatment of the others convinced him that he was better than the rest? If he was being honest with himself, the answer was probably yes. Was his attitude towards the other novices, like Ulf and Eirik, bravado or arrogance? At the time, he had felt as though he was unfairly ostracised and forced to defend himself. But now, he wondered. It was an uncomfortable thought.

  And so it went. Cole was left with his own thoughts as they plodded on through the woods. Where there was a path, or whenever the trees thinned a little, they rode side by side. The rest of the time, they travelled in single file, picking their way carefully around protruding tree roots or the burrows of various woodland creatures.

  In the middle of their first afternoon together, they came across the paved road that ran unbroken between east and west. The only one of its kind in the north, he’d been told at the Crag. Raven stopped there for a time, gazing up and down its length, from horizon to horizon. It appeared entirely empty to Cole. Apparently reachin
g the same conclusion, Raven spurred her black stallion into the trees opposite, eschewing the road altogether. Yet another contrast between his two guides, he noted.

  Each night, as darkness fell, they made camp. Raven would not permit Cole to build a fire, so instead they fashioned what meals they could from the cold provisions she carried; chiefly salted pork and hard, thick biscuits of unknown provenance.

  “Maybe we should walk to Hunter’s Watch, and spare the horses,” observed Cole one night, as he chewed bitterly on the dry food. “If the soles of our boots wear out, we could just make new ones from our breakfast.”

  Raven said nothing, but in the dim, silvery moonlight, Cole thought he saw her smile. He thought wistfully back to the hare his previous companion had caught, but Raven did not seem inclined to hunt for supper and Cole had no idea himself where to begin. However, the following day they rode past a thicket of summer-brambles, their branches bent under the weight of plump purple berries, the juice of which was as dark as ink. Cole stopped and picked as many as he could, filling every pocket of his cloak. Raven bridled at the delay, but thanked him later that evening when he shared his harvest with her.

  The previous morning, he had been woken by a fat droplet of water landing in his face. He stirred, to see the rain falling all around them, and puddles beginning to form. Raven was already awake and moving around the camp, gathering up their packs and checking the saddles and harnesses of both horses. Her thick black cloak was wrapped around her shoulders, its hood pulled down low over her face to keep out the rain. Cole had been using his own for a blanket, and he hastily pulled it around himself.

  That had been a miserable day. The rain fell steadily without a break, and it seemed that every time he passed beneath a tree, a load of large drops that had collected in the canopy above was dumped onto his head. The dampness made the slick leather reins chafe his hands. Already stiff from the cold, by the afternoon he could barely move his fingers. His legs and back suffered similarly, and he found himself longing for the smoky hearth of the Wolf’s Head or, even better, the Brandts’ warm, welcoming kitchen. If he closed his eyes, he could almost smell the hearty aroma of Freyja’s mouth-watering stew. His stomach rumbled at the memory.

  Never the most genial companion, Raven’s mood that day seemed to mirror the darkness of the clouds above them. His questions had been met with surly grunts, and their camp was barely out of sight behind them before Cole gave up any attempt at communication. The mood as they stopped that night was frosty, but it was such a relief to be off his horse that Cole barely noticed. After a typically meagre supper he wrapped himself beneath his cloak without a further word. If ever there was a day he was more pleased to see the back of, he couldn’t recall it.

  This morning when he awoke, Raven was gone.

  Cole sat up hurriedly and looked around the small camp. His companion’s cloak lay on the ground still, as did the pack that served to both carry their provisions and act as a pillow. The black stallion was still tied to a low-hanging branch, next to his own chestnut mare. All was as it had been the night before, except the black-haired woman had vanished.

  Alarmed, Cole jumped to his feet. Aside from the soft whickering of the horses, he couldn’t hear anything to raise his suspicions. Nevertheless, he decided against calling out, still unsure whether Raven had simply left or been taken.

  His fingers groped for the handle of the knife at his back. However, in the cold light of morning, and facing an uncertain threat, it looked woefully inadequate. He slipped it back inside its sheath, and crept quietly to the black stallion. Glancing occasionally around at the clearing, he searched among the weapons attached to its saddle. He ignored the bow; he had been an average student of archery at best on the Crag, but even if he had been reasonably skilled he felt that moving targets would be a different proposition entirely. Instead, he took the small wooden crossbow. Just point and shoot, he thought. He spent a moment weighing up the longsword, but decided against it. It would be an awkward weapon to wield in the close confines of the forest, with trees on every side. Instead, he drew one of the short blades Raven had used in the battle against Dirk and his sons from its sheath.

  With growing disquiet, he noticed that the second blade was missing.

  Cole was still trying to decide what to do next, when he heard a crash in the forest behind him. He listened again, trying to decide where it had come from, when he heard a female voice cry out.

  Not delaying a second longer, Cole plunged into the forest in the direction of the sound, his fingers shaking as he tried to load a bolt into the crossbow. As he ran, his toe snagged on a tree root, and both flew from his hands as he stumbled. He swore, and scrabbled among the dead leaves lying thick on the ground. The crossbow he found quickly, but of the bolt there was no sign. He swore again. There was another crash, closer this time, and Cole raced off again towards it. Yet, as he ran, Cole instinctively knew that something was wrong. Why are there no other voices? he wondered.

  He reached a cluster of large oaks and stopped, panting from his dash through the forest. It was from here that the noises had originated, he was sure of that, but there was no sign of Raven nor any attackers. He span around anxiously, looking in all directions. The carpet of leaves on the ground looked undisturbed, except where they had been kicked aside by his own boots.

  At a loss, Cole was about to return to their camp, in case unseen attackers were already circling back around to plunder their possessions and mounts, when there was another crash above his head.

  He looked up.

  On a long, sturdy branch some fifteen feet off the ground, Raven was balancing. She had stripped off her leather armour, which he now saw was stacked against the bottom of the tree trunk, and was dressed instead in just plain linen undergarments. She stood lightly on both feet, one in front of the other, perfectly still. Then, as he watched, she arched backwards until her hands touched the bough. She lifted her body, her movements flowing like water, until she was upside-down, her legs forming a perfect parallel to the branch. Next, she lifted an arm, until she was balanced on just one hand. In one smooth motion, she continued in the same direction, righting herself and landing lightly on her feet once more.

  Cole could only stare, slack-jawed, as she grabbed the short blade, the twin of the one he was carrying, from a cluster of branches above her head, then performed a dizzying series of spins and back flips. The branch shuddered as her feet thudded onto the wood time and again, but she remained perfectly balanced at all times.

  Finally, she dropped off the branch. Cole’s heart leapt into his mouth as she caught it in her hands. Using the momentum generated by the fall, she span around it once, then let go at the top of the arc. As she fell, she tucked in her legs to perform another flip, then landed gracefully not five feet from Cole.

  “You’re awake,” Raven said. She was breathing heavily, but otherwise looked unaffected by the exertion.

  “Yes, I... um.” Cole’s mind was blank. He was suddenly acutely conscious of the sword in his hand, and offered it to Raven hilt-first. “Can you teach me,” he asked. “To be like you, I mean?”

  “A woman?” Raven grinned. After her grim demeanour of the previous day, the sight of it caught Cole off-guard.

  “No,” he replied, his cheeks burning. “It’s just... I’ve never seen anyone move like that before. I saw you fight and you were fast, but how did you learn to do that?”

  Raven shrugged. “Practice.”

  Close to, and without her armour, Cole could now see that across her arms and legs was a network of scars. Some long and thin, others wide and ragged. One ran all the way around her throat beneath the jawline. All were faded. “You have seen much battle,” he observed.

  Raven frowned and strode to the armour stacked nearby. “Who has not?” She gathered up the chestpiece, greaves and high boots. The first time Cole had seen the armour in daylight, he realised it wasn’t black at all, merely shades of dark brown and charcoal, reinforced here and there wit
h woven metal rings. Only her cloak was black, matching her hair. “There are only two types of people in the world; those that don’t know how to fight, and those that mourn them.”

  “I would like to learn, if you would teach me.”

  Raven regarded him coolly. Finally, she tossed him back one of the short blades. “Have you ever wielded a sword?”

  “Once or twice,” replied Cole, swishing it experimentally through the air a few times. “The second time I was even holding the right end.”

  She laughed. It was probably the first time he had heard that sound, Cole realised. Her laughter was surprisingly high and melodic. “It’s a start, at least.”

  Raven began to walk around the tree trunks, gazing up at the branches. He watched her, standing uncertainly with the sword. “What should I do?” he asked.

  She found what she was looking for, and patted a thick branch just above her head. “Take off your boots,” she said.

  * * *

  “Tip your head back, like that, and press down here.”

  It was later, back at the camp. Raven had helped Cole into a sitting position on the ground, and offered him a handful of rags to help stem the flow of blood that gushed from his nose.

  “Dank you,” he replied, trying to smile through the hot, burning pain in the middle of his face.

  The fight had gone about as well as could be expected. Which is to say, not well at all. However, judging from his – admittedly limited – time in her company, Cole appeared to be in the small select group of people that had met Raven and lived. He decided to take some measure of comfort from that fact.

  It had begun simply enough. With almost feline agility, Raven had swung herself up onto the branch she’d found. It was nearer to the ground than the bough he had seen her train on earlier, and thicker too. It looked far easier for someone less skilled to balance on. In turn, he removed his boots and clambered up to join her. Their swords they left leaning against the trunk.