Heart of Time (Ruined Heart Series Book 1)

by Skye MacKinnon

  I frowned while he chuckled softly.

  “And what has that got to do with me?”

  “Well, you might want to think about doing a different act tomorrow night. Not that yours wasn’t good today, but I’m thinking of putting together a slightly different show for the day after tomorrow. I’ve also told the dwarves to think about juggling flaming torches, or at least something other than their usual axes. Then we’ll not only have spectators from other villages, but maybe people who’ve already seen us will come again if we promise them some surprises. Agreed?”

  “I guess I’ve got no choice. I’ll have to practice tomorrow though, and need the tent for myself for a few hours.”

  “That shouldn’t be a problem, Marco and Cino can practice outside anyway. That’s settled then. Great.”

  I nodded and turned towards the door, but he softly grabbed my arm.

  “One more thing.” He leant towards me, almost whispering. “When you were doing your performance, I noticed some white highlights in your hair. You may want to dye your roots again before we get to Hawkfair. Now, tell me, how bad is the beer here?”

  2

  Travelling People

  People whose lifestyle is nomadic. They are usually found travelling the Plains and the Plenty, with some reaching places as far as Silverhaven in Wildeshore. Generally, the travelling peoples spend spring, summer and autumn travelling the lands, and take up more permanent residences in the Free Cities during winter. Most travelling people consist of one or more families and their kinsfolk. Children are seen as capable of working together with adults on daily chores as well as participating in evening performances. Some travelling people rely on animals to entertain their audiences, while others resent this way of life and prefer to showcase the skills of their family members and other members of the cast. Originally, most travelling people stem from the Southern countries, some of which no longer exist, and therefore those families consider themselves at home on the road itself.

  - The Definite Guide to the People of the World

  Once I left the inn and its stuffy air, my head became clearer. There were clouds moving across the sky, hiding the stars that had shone so bright earlier tonight. It wasn’t far to the camp outside the village, but there were no street lights showing me the way. There were small, stocky houses all around me, obstructing the view. They all looked the same. I stopped for a moment to contemplate the direction I had to take. I didn’t have a clue. I’d never found it easy to remember directions, but this was different. The memory of walking to the inn seemed irrecoverably lost within my head. Maybe Luca was right and I did indeed have one pint too many.

  “May I assist you, young lady?”, a kind voice asked me. An old woman stepped out of the shadows around me, leaning heavily on a walking stick. Her white hair was tugged back by a dark blue kerchief, but a few strands had come loose and framed her lined face. She smiled, and cute little dimples showed on both sides of her mouth. In some way, her motherliness reminded me of Mara.

  “I would be very grateful if you could point me in the direction of the travellers’ camp”, I replied politely.

  “You’ve lost your way? You’re not the first one, nor will you be the last. Come, walk with me, my house is close to where you want to go.” With that, she turned without looking back whether I was following her. I smiled to myself. Just like Mara.

  For her age, the old woman was walking pretty fast. After looking back one more time to see if Luca might have come out of the inn by now, I began to follow. When I caught up with her, she flashed me a smile.

  “You look to be the same size as my granddaughter. She moved away from here last year, together with her fiancé. I’ve still got some of her clothes tucked away in a box, but I’m worried they might attract moths if they stay with me any longer. They could fit you, maybe you’d like to try some of them?”

  I shook my head. “I should be going back to our camp. I’ve got to get up early tomorrow morning, there’s so much practising to do. But thank you very much for the offer.”

  She sighed and turned her head to look me in the eyes. Her smile had gone and had been replaced by a sad frown.

  “I understand. It’s just, with my granddaughter gone and her mother dead, I’m all alone in the house, with no company save a few chickens. Evenings alone can feel so much longer than those with company. My house used to be filled with noise and laughter, with children running around, skylarking and always up to no good. Now it’s empty and cold. I only use two rooms, the others are always shut, their closed doors reminding me every day of my loneliness. When children move out, they not only leave an empty nest. The emptiness brings a coldness and loneliness into the house. They take with them a piece of their mother’s heart, leaving a wound that will close but never stop hurting. The children will become mothers themselves, but they will not know of the pain until their own children leave home one day. It’s a pain that can be found in each new generation, yet every mother thinks she is alone with that pain. And now I have not only my daughter’s, but also my granddaughter's things packed in chests and boxes. Though I do not see what’s in them, there’s sadness and loneliness pouring from them whenever I catch a glance of them.”

  She took a deep breath, steadying herself. When she spoke again, her voice shook a little less.

  “But don’t mind the pains of an old woman. Let’s get you back to your camp. See the house up there, at the end of the road? Once we’re there, you’ll be able to see the lights of your campfire.”

  Her words made me feel guilty. Yet I was tired and wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed go to sleep. But still, if it were Mara, I would not like to see her in this way. So against my gut feeling, I decided to go with the old lady. After all, it was just to look at a few clothes, how long could it take.

  “I’m sorry if I offended you. I’m tired and I didn’t think. But I would love to have a look at those clothes, if the offer still stands.”

  Her face lit up immediately. Smiling broadly, she offered me her arm and on we went.

  At the end of the road, a large house beckoned. There was no light shining through the windows, but in the hedge around it were the flickering lights of fireflies. The garden looked untended, with weeds growing freely among the bushes. Even in the darkness, I could see plaster crumbling on the outside walls. The woman took a key out of her pocket and turned it noisily in its hole. The door cringed in its hinges when she pushed it inwards. Darkness welcomed us. The air inside was stuffy and smelled of dust. The elderly woman shuffled along from the hallway through a door on her left, feeling her way around the room. When she stopped, I could hear her busying herself with flint and steel, until a tiny spark shone through the room. Soon, she had a small fire going in the fireplace and ignited a small lantern for us. The fire’s flickering light illuminated the stone walls around us. There was only one window in this room, with a dust-covered curtain above it. An armchair was standing in front of the fireplace, next to a small side table. On the other side of the room, a shelf containing a few dishes leant heavily against the wall. It looked like it would fall apart any minute. The entire room seemed empty and unoccupied, except for a break in the dust line where we had walked.

  When I had met the old woman, I had judged her to be a clean and tidy woman. If that was true, then she hadn’t set foot into this room in months. Then why would she go in here with me? There were no chests of clothes that I could see. Maybe they were in another room. I opened my mouth to ask her, but suddenly there was something weird about her. She was still standing in front of the fireplace, but motionless, with unseeing eyes. Her chest was no longer moving with the intake of a breath; her right hand held the lantern without any movement at all. It looked like she had just stopped.

  And then, suddenly, the scratching started. A noise that came from above me, from the ceiling. I looked up, but there was nothing to see. It sounded like claws scratching on the wooden floor of the attic. Then, thin spirals of dust began to float
down from the ceiling. I moved back to the wall, trying to keep both the frozen woman and the rest of the room in full view. Feeling my path along the wall with one hand, I slowly moved towards the door that would get me out of this frightful room. The old woman still hadn’t moved. My hand glided along the wooden panels that made up the wall, then there was nothing, finally, the door. Walking backwards I took a step back into the hallway. And felt something thin pierce against the space between my shoulder blades.

  “If you move, you’re dead”, a harsh voice whispered behind me. A gloved hand was put on my shoulder, and I was shoved back into the room I had just exited. The fire was still flickering softly, but the old woman was no longer standing beside it. She was lying in a heap on the floor, unmoving. All colour had left her cheeks; she was as pale as the crescent moon outside.

  I was pushed into the middle of the room. There was the sound of a second pair of feet behind me, then a man clad in black and wearing a woollen black cape stepped into view. He pulled the armchair further towards the fire, then sat himself down on it, not even wasting a single glance on the dead woman beside him. He lay the long knife he had been carrying across his knees. The fire’s glow danced on the bright metal and its reflection created a thin line of light across the man’s face.

  “Welcome”, he says with a mocking nod of his head. “Thank you for joining us.” His voice was soft, almost feminine, yet his tone reminded me of sharp metal and cold ice. With a single fluid move, he threw back his hood. His pale face glistened in the fire’s shine, his dark eyes fixed on my own. There was no hair on his head, instead broad dark red stripes ran over his skin, ending in sharp spear-shaped ends just over his eyebrows. A single red line went down onto the root of his nose. His facial markings made him look wild and dangerous. His piercing eyes lay deep under his brows, his nose a thin sharp line dividing his face. There was a white scar on his left cheek, which made his smile look uneven and wild. He had shaved his beard off except for a thin goatee. He looked as terrifying as any man I had ever met.

  In my head, I was trying to understand what just happened. Had I been careless? How had the old woman who had breathed and talked only moments ago become a cold and stiff corpse? There was no sign of life when I was looking at her now, and somehow her pale body seemed to degrade quicker than it should. Small stains were appearing everywhere on her body, some light blue, some violet. While I was staring at the old woman’s corpse, those blotches became bigger, they started to flow together, until all skin close to the ground was coloured in a mixture of purple and pink. At the same time, small blisters began to appear on her pale skin and her body seemed to grow. Her torso increased in size, her belly becoming more and more bloated. Her arms and legs swelled and stretched until she no longer resembled a human form, but a shapeless balloon. The stink coming from the bloated corpse was making me nauseous, and I would have swayed were it not for the knife held to my neck. When the stretched skin began to rupture at a multitude of points, I could no longer watch her sped-up decomposition. I closed my eyes. Still, tendrils of that horrible smell reached my nose, making me gag. Inside, I was raw and blistered from seeing the poor woman’s fate, and wanted nothing more than to curl up and cry. Better even, forgetting what I had just seen. But I knew then that the image of her bloated, oozing body would stay with me forever. There was a noise that sounded like air escaping a balloon, and after, the small popping sounds of her fingernails falling onto the hard wooden floor. I recoiled from thinking what her body might look like now. There were no distracting thoughts to be found within my head, only an overpowering fear of what might come now.

  The old woman was dead, nothing I could do about that, as much as it hurt me inside. But I was still alive. For how long? I carefully opened my eyes, avoiding looking at what was left of the friendly old woman. Although, had she ever been there at all? Or had it all been a trick to lure me here, into this abandoned house, with no witnesses, and no one to help me. She had seemed all normal, like Mara. And then it struck me. She had seemed a little too much like Mara. The old woman’s daughter was dead, as was Mara’s. They were about the same age. They spoke in the same, flowery way. Was I trying to see a connection where there was none, or was there indeed a link that I had not seen before?

  “One day, we will all look like this. A stinking puddle of fluids is all that remains. Our dreams, our hopes, our convictions - gone. No matter how long we’ve lived, no matter what we’ve done, in the end, we’ll all turn to dust.” The man looked at the old woman’s remains and smiled smugly. “Or slime.”

  He turned back to me and looked me in the eyes. Somehow, he seemed to see straight into the depths of my soul. His cold and calculating look told me that he had deliberately waited for me to see what happened to the woman’s body. He was using her to showcase his power and ruthlessness. The message was clear: This is what happened to people that got in his way.

  “Are you afraid to look at her? The lovely old lady that you trusted only moments ago? Come on, look at her. Look at what’s left of her.”

  I resisted the temptation and continued to stare at him. I was as frightened as I had ever been, but I fought hard not to show it. Not to give in to that monster.

  “Make her”, he said to the man standing behind me and motioned towards the old woman’s corpse with his head. When the other guy grabbed my hair in his fist, I became painfully aware of the knife point touching me between my shoulder blades. I didn’t think it had broken my skin yet, but the touch of the cold metal hurt. The man behind me pulled on my hair and shoved me forwards, closer to the fireplace. The knife left my back and was suddenly held to my throat. It pressed against my skin, and the new position made it clear that one simple movement could end my life. With his other hand, the man directed my head until I had the choice to either look at the rotting corpse or close my eyes. I decided to do the latter.

  “I said, make her look at it”, the man repeated. This time, there was ice in his voice. There were fingers groping their way around my face, feeling for my eyes. The man was wearing thick leather gloves. Two fingers pressed against my eyelids, heedlessly squeezing my eyes. It hurt, but I did not want to open my eyes.

  “Step back,” the soft voice said impatiently. The pressure on my eyes ceased. The cold blade on my throat disappeared. Blue dots appeared before my closed eyes, I swayed slightly. Without the touch of the man behind me, I seemed to be unable to stand. Too much had happened, too many unexplainable things. There was a tiny hope still in my mind, the thought that this was just a bad dream, nothing more. Just a bad dream. But the single drop of blood running down my throat where the knife had kissed me was proof that this was real.

  Suddenly, there was someone touching my face again, placing one finger on my left brow and one on the soft spot below my eye. Someone with fingers as hot as glowing coals. I cried out and recoiled from the touch, but the fingers did not disappear. They were burning through my skin, hurting in a way that went deeper than a simple flesh injury. A second hand touched my face, with fingers crawling across my cheek until they reached my right eye. The pain was too much to take, my knees gave way and I fell to the ground, my hands clutching my burnt face.

  “So you really are the one the gypsy boy talked about. You’ve got magic, yes, but I’m not sure you’re worth the trouble. You’re pathetic.” His voice came through a fog of pain.

  I pulled my knees to my chest, making myself as small as possible. Yet I could still feel the burning hot fingers on my face. They were there, touching me, hurting me. I opened my eyes. There were no hands on me, no one standing in front of me, no one touching me. But I felt scalding hot fingertips burning on my cold skin. I made myself even smaller, trying to hide away from the pain. Dimly, I heard someone laugh in the background. I didn’t care. The pain was filling my mind, there was no energy to focus on anything else. Every passing second stretched into infinity, becoming as long as a day. Never-ending pain, this was my present, my past and my future. If there was a future.<
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  Then, suddenly, the pain vanished. It left an aching feeling of emptiness. I could still feel where the fingers had touched my face, like a shadow left on a wall after the person it belonged to had left the room. I stepped away from the fogginess that inhabited my mind and cautiously began to extend my senses. The wooden floor I was lying on was cold, I could feel the small bumps below me where branches had once grown on a tree. My back was warmed by the small fire burning in the fireplace. It crackled as a piece of bark broke off from a log. The more I went back towards consciousness, the more piercing the penetrating smell of decay got. It filled my nose and mouth until I could no longer smell anything else.

  Again, there was laughter. It was not a happy noise. Slowly, I managed to move into a sitting position. My head hurt, and I could still feel the echo of burning fingerprints on my cheeks and brow. I raised my eyes and looked around the room. The man who was obviously the leader of the two was still sitting in the armchair by the fire. He was leaning back against the softness of the chair, seemingly relaxed. The other man had moved and was now standing behind the armchair, his arms crossed over his chest. Finally, I could see his face: it was the black-eyed man from the inn.

  With both men standing by the fire, a quick glance over my shoulder confirmed that the door was now left unguarded.

  “You don’t have to look that way. You won’t be leaving without us, sweetie, I can promise you that.”

  I mustered all the courage that I had left, and asked, “Why are you doing this?”