Within

by Aaron Bunce

  Greta lay on her back, her arms straight out to her sides, as if waiting to embrace someone. Roman choked and fought to hold back the tears. Had it not been for her outfit, Roman wouldn’t have recognized her. She was in the same ruined state as the animals all around her. Her hair, which had always been so long and beautiful, hung in wispy strands, and her skin looked like withered parchment.

  The sight of Greta withered away, lifeless, and discarded like an animal stabbed into his heart. He saw none of the love and vitality that drew him to her in life. What was once Greta was now lost forever. The tears leaked through, sliding down his cheeks. Roman never felt so alone.

  “Why?” he sobbed. Is this to be my life, to watch all those dear to me torn away?

  His insides started to ache as he wiped his eyes on his sleeve. He clenched his jaw. His muscles instantly started to knot and bunch up. His hand hovered over her body, wanting, needing desperately to touch her one last time, but he didn’t dare, he couldn’t.

  With his hand extended over her, Roman felt a twinge in his stomach. It felt nothing like hunger pangs, no it had a darker significance. He knew what was coming.

  He looked to both of her hands, his thoughts flashing back to the finger and the knife in the hallway. The pointer finger on her right hand was gone, like the missing piece to a morbid puzzle. The ring she usually wore was gone.

  Roman grimaced at the sight and then his stomach knotted. The same old pains reared their head, at the least opportune time. He rocked back on his feet and almost fell over. This time it was different, the pain stabbed deeper than before. As Roman clutched at his stomach, waiting for the pain to subside, a wicked thought passed through his mind.

  She was murdered. Someone killed her.

  Roman didn’t know where the thought came from, but it felt right. His gut twisted again, and his mouth started to water, so he spat on the ground. The pain peaked, and Roman’s vision blurred. He feared that he would black out in the middle of the field. A field scattered with the desiccated remnants of life.

  Roman forced himself up. His blood felt like ice water in his veins, and he suddenly wanted to be as far away from that spot as possible. With one hand wrapped around his troublesome stomach, Roman backtracked through the grizzly pen, staggering blurry-eyed toward the fence.

  He limped past the barn. He glanced inside out of habit, his eyes rising to the hayloft door that hung ajar. A hand wrapped around the door and behind that was a small face, curtained by curly brown hair. His vision was still blurry, so he blinked frantically. Deep down inside he knew what he saw.

  “Alina!” he shouted, but she had disappeared back into the shadows. Roman’s heart skipped a beat at the realization that Greta’s youngest child was alive. That sweet, quiet little girl, who had her mother’s bright hazel eyes, was alive!

  As badly as he wanted to get away, Roman felt compelled to find her, and to keep her safe. She was the last person that resembled family to Roman, and he couldn’t comprehend leaving her behind after what he had found.

  Tusk paced around him in circles and remained strangely quiet. Roman entered the barn, and Tusk stayed close to his side, but when Roman mounted the bottom rung of the ladder, he took Roman’s trouser in his mouth and pulled him back.

  “Let go, boy. Tusk let go,” Roman hissed as he tried to break the dog’s hold on his pant leg. Tusk wasn’t simply being playful. He knew him better than that. He knew the dog was scared.

  His pain was finally fading, so Roman made his way up the ladder, skipping every other rung. He poked his head over the final rung to look around, before stepping out onto the loft. Other than several large piles of last harvest’s hay, the loft appeared empty.

  “Alina, it’s Roman,” he called out. His voice wavered. When there was no immediate reply, Roman stepped off of the ladder and made his way around the right side of the first pile of hay. The wedge of light spilling in through the crack of the loft door splashed with golden brilliance on the large straw colored piles.

  “Alina, it’s alright to come out…its Roman,” he said again, trying to sound friendly. He had no idea if Alina understood what was going on, but he had no doubt she was scared.

  He reached the back wall and turned past the furthest pile. “Alina, come out. It’s Roman.” His voice didn’t travel far in the stuffy, still air.

  He turned, mistakenly looking outside. The bright sunlight stung his eyes, and when he turned back into the loft, everything was one giant shadow.

  Alina had become so adept at hiding that during games of hide and seek Roman struggled to find her. The hayloft had always been one of her favorite spots.

  Something rustled in the hay, it could have been a rat, but Roman knew better. He ducked around the last hay mound, willing his eyes to penetrate the darkness of the loft. “Alina, its Roman, come out.”

  He heard another shift in the crackling hay, only this time it was louder. It came from straight ahead. Roman put his back to the open loft door and crouched down. He would reach in and pull her out. He had done it so many times before.

  The floor creaked behind him. Already spooked by the gruesome scene outside, and fueled by the barn’s horribly still air, Roman spun around.

  The still figure stood paces away, her face a horrible mask of pain and fear. She moved so fast he barely had time to react.

  “NO! Wait...” He cried, but staggered back, the wind driven forcefully from his lungs as the tines of the pitchfork jabbed painfully into his side, beneath his ribs. Roman staggered back, his breath gone. He clutched at his side, lurching back as the rusty pitchfork swung in again.

  Alina stepped into the light cascading from outside. Her knuckles were white around the grayed handle, her expression like a surreal carnival mask. Her round cheeks were smudged with tears and dirt, and her large eyes were bloodshot and bulging. It shook Roman to his core. He saw nothing of her sweet, gentle nature.

  Roman’s stomach gave a spasm, and he was finally able to draw breath. His head cleared a bit, and he found his voice.

  “Alina I’m here to…” Roman started to say, but as soon as he spoke a wild glimmer flashed in her eye and she charged. The girl jabbed hard with the pitchfork. Roman was caught off guard and barely dodged aside. A strangled cry escaped her lips. Setting his feet, Roman lifted his hands to plead with her but had to dodge another jab at his tender midsection.

  Why is she attacking me, why won’t she listen? He thought, searching for a way to calm the girl.

  “Alina, I’m here to help you,” he said, trying to talk her down. He kept his voice low.

  She jabbed at him again, and he danced out of reach. Roman tried to grab hold of the tines, but Alina wrenched it free with surprising strength.

  A sharp pain shot through Roman’s side, and he struggled to catch his breath. His legs grew heavy. He reached out again to grab the pitchfork, but his hands grasped only air. The tines flashed in, and he was too slow.

  The pain blurred together. Blood covered his fingers, and there was a strange buzzing in his head. Roman stepped back awkwardly, his foot catching on a raised board. He back peddled clumsily in a desperate attempt to regain his balance, but it was no use.

  He twisted as he fell, landing hard on his ass. His momentum rolled him over, right out the open loft door. He couldn’t get his hands around to grab the ledge, it all happened so fast.

  Then he was falling, a strange rushing noise filling his ears.

  Chapter 10

  Far from home

  Before leaving home, Dennah’s father warned her that the road makes a person weary.

  What a horrible understatement.

  It wasn’t just the lack of a soft bed or a roof over her head. But it was also the hunger. It gnawed at her relentlessly. The satisfying food, because it wouldn’t last, was eaten first. That left them with dried meat and tough loaves of crusty bread.

  As a caravan guard, Dennah’s life had become the road. It wasn’t the profession she would have chosen. But in t
his case, it was chosen for her.

  A winter thaw back, her father wound up short at tax time. Both of her parents were too old to serve, and there was no extended family to ask for help. Her six brothers already served Lord Kingsbreath in one capacity or another, so Dennah, who was desperate to avoid seeing her parents arrested, pledged to service.

  Dennah hadn’t been angry, but she wasn’t thrilled either. After all, they had sacrificed to provide for her, and it was an opportunity to repay them in kind.

  When she first left home, she expected the worst. Typically, young women pledged to the Earl’s service served as a chambermaid or kitchen wench. That was what her family had intended, unfortunately, things took a far more complicated turn.

  To settle a debt with Lord Thatcher, the Earl of the Lakes, Dennah and a host of men and women had been traded to Silma instead, arranged and delivered to satisfy the balance.

  She learned that Karnell province was in dire need of fighters, so Dennah was inducted and trained as a soldier. It was far from the work she had expected, but as she quickly learned, it was work she was well suited to.

  Blessed with her father’s sturdy build and her mother’s grace, Dennah quickly proved to her peers and instructors that she was more than a capable fighter. She had taken quickly to the sword, surpassing many of the young men in her class. She was, however, a woman, and found few friends amongst her peers. Female guards were rare. Women allowed the opportunity to showcase their talents as soldiers were even rarer.

  During the quiet moments, Dennah dreamt of returning to her family in gleaming silver armor, as a valiant knight of the legendary Silver Guard. Or take up her post, protecting the Council in Ban Turin, the realms’ largest and most sophisticated city. And yet, with all of her potential, she knew the odds were not stacked in her favor.

  To feed her doubt, most made it clear from the start that she did not belong. The young men she trained with either came from families with money and influence, or they came in chains. Either way, they didn’t like the idea of serving with a woman, especially one who could best them sparring.

  She took the disappointing truth in stride. She would never be more than a common sword, a spearman, or in her case, a caravan guard. No finely crafted plate armor, no “truth beheld” indoctrination before the Council of Lords. No, she would spend her days protecting wagons loaded with food or other men’s gold. Not what she could consider work rich with adventure or honor.

  “Caravan guards aren’t soldiers!” she stormed after finding out. “Hand-me-down armor and an old rusted sword. The small sack of gold in pay each turn is hardly enough to live decently by.”

  Dennah smoldered for a long time afterward. She had to watch the young men she bested during weapons training polish their freshly forged swords, pikes, and armor as they prepared for duty throughout the province. When they knew she was listening, the others would boast, bragging and laughing while they celebrated.

  Dennah didn’t even have the benefit of friends to confide in. After all, a woman in most men’s eyes had no business holding a sword, so she found little sympathy.

  The caravan drivers were a solitary lot and preferred to stay clear of the soldiers. Her fellow guards were another story entirely. Many constantly drank, wasting themselves to exaggerated levels of stupor and slothfulness. She watched several of them pawn off their swords and other gear for cheap wine or prostitutes.

  In a caravan of men, she was the only woman, and there was nothing flattering about the way they jeered at her. The more they drank, the more obscene the gestures and comments became. She had already been told “tis yer duty to lift our spirits. Come on, lift yer skirt. After all…the road’s a mighty lonely place.”

  After the first few towns, Dennah learned to drift to the back of the wagons, where several young men tended pack mules. They quietly and diligently went about their work, and that was okay with her.

  She tried to strike up a conversation with one of them, a young man named Folkvar. He wasn’t much of a talker, but after a while, Dennah got him to open up. His story was much like hers. He was from Jorgenhald, where his father worked as a butcher and his mother a maid in the magistrate’s house. When his father was jailed for robbing a group of traveling clerics, Folkvar’s mother was left to support his entire family.

  Having celebrated only twelve name days, he was not strong enough to hold a pike or lift a sword, so he was assigned to the Earl’s stable master. For as long as his service to the Earl lasted, Folkvar could hope for no better. Despite his position, Dennah found that Folkvar kept a surprisingly upbeat view of things. They quickly forged a close friendship.

  Dennah found peace there for a while until her Captain rode back and pushed her to the front of the caravan. He was a large, dim man everyone called Bull, “due somewhat to my larger than normal stature,” he’d say. “Or, more realistically because he had the intellect of one,” she would joke when no one was listening. She had yet to learn his real name and found that she was in no hurry to.

  Bull took to drinking and gambling with the others. It became clear to her early on that he was more than willing to turn a blind eye to their general depravity, when not engaging in it himself.

  The caravan consisted of a dozen wagons, each pulled by a team of large draft horses. Several wagons were already heavily laden with sacks of gold, silver, copper, and other valuables surrendered for the Earl’s tax. Half a dozen mules followed that, laden with sacks of cloth and clothing.

  Her journey started in Jorgenhald, skirted south around Lake Madus, stopping in every small town and settlement along the way. The time on the road was tiring, and they were well into the longest leg of their journey.

  Bardstown, their last stop, rested on the southernmost extent of Earl Peedmont Thatcher’s lands. Once they had concluded their business there, they would turn north again, to Jorgenhald via the eastern Lake roads.

  Dennah came to enjoy the changing scenery and architecture that defined the different communities. She was surprised at how much the culture differed from town to town. As they traveled further into the southlands she started to pick up on different accents as well. They were subtle changes that only she seemed to care about.

  Dennah’s excitement came bubbling to the surface a few sunsets back when she spotted the ruined remains of an ancient building in the distance. The ruins had been too far away to see clearly, but they were intriguing nonetheless.

  She remembered pointing it out excitedly to another guard, but he brushed her off with a glare. “Ain’t going sightseeing, do your job!” Her face flushed with anger and embarrassment.

  To her delight, she spotted another ruin the following morning, this one much closer to the road. The structure, even in its advanced state of decline, was unlike anything she had ever seen before. She wanted to run off and explore the relic.

  “Spotted the old ones, heh?” a wrinkled old wagon driver next to her wheezed.

  “Who built them? Have you ever seen it up close? How old are they?” the questions tumbled out of her mouth before she could stop herself. Dennah slapped her hand over her mouth when the old wagon driver’s eyes grew wide.

  “Goodness, Girlie, how long you had them bottled up inside? You could have exploded!” he laughed. Much of the Dennah’s bottled up tension melted away.

  “Dalan ruins,” he said. “This whole land is covered with them if you know where to look. Or that’s what mine told me a whole lotta thaws ago. I reckon that building was sitting there empty long before your great, great, great, great-grandfather stepped off the boats,” he added, scratching the whiskers on his chin.

  “But what made them leave?” she asked.

  “Don’t rightly know,” he said, removing his hat to scratch his head. “I talked with a fellar once; he used to trade hides to the dwarves outside Pinehall. He said they mentioned a war long ago, but them short leggers wouldn’t say much more’n that.”

  She spent the next several hours talking with the old wagon dr
iver. He insisted she call him Tadd. They swapped theories, taking turns spinning tales about the ruins.

  They stopped to rest the animals a short while later. Dennah’s stomach rumbled, and worse, the food in her pack did little to sate the hollow, rumbling pit in her stomach. She had quickly come to hate anything salted. Unfortunately, that was all that remained in her pack. If you washed down each bite with a small drink of elderberry wine it was edible, but hardly a meal.

  Sitting under a large shade tree, Dennah licked the salt from her fingers and cursed the continued rumbles in her belly. She daydreamed about savory venison turning slowly, roasting on a crackling fire. A mug of her father’s favorite mead and a loaf of her mother’s dark bread served soft and warm, fresh from the oven.

  She reached up subconsciously and wiped her mouth to make sure she wasn’t drooling. She tried to get her mind off of food, so she watched her chestnut mare, Freckles, graze on a nearby patch of grass. The jittery little horse flicked her tail, scattering flies that hovered around her hindquarters.

  Tadd hobbled by, leading his team of draft horses out to graze before ambling back to lay down in his wagon for a nap. She marveled at his ability to sleep anywhere, at almost any time.

  A large group of men sat a short distance away, tucked between two wagons. Bull and several of the guards played a card game, likely swindling coin from a pair of young wagon hands.

  “Mind if I join you?” Folkvar appeared around the tree.

  “No, not at all…here, sit here,” she said, scooting over to make room for him by the tree. Folkvar smiled and moved to sit, but someone grabbed him by the shirt and flung him aside.

  “Hey what are you doing?” he cried out in surprise.

  “Boys don’t sit with ladies. They lay wif the animals,” the greasy-haired guard slurred dramatically.

  “Leave him be,” Dennah objected angrily, but he wasn’t listening.

  He kicked poor Folkvar in the rear end as he was trying to stand. The young man fell forward again, face first into the dirt. The guard burst into fits of laughter. The larger group of men turned and joined in, laughing at the dejected horse-hand as he spit and picked mud from his face.