Trial of Intentions

by Peter Orullian

  And what of the young ones in these Velle’s hands? The ravages of their childhood? Long nights spent hoping their parents would come and rescue them. The bone-deep despair reserved for those who learn to stop hoping. He also sensed the ends that awaited each of them. The blinding pain that would tear their spirit from their flesh and remake it into a weapon of destruction. And they wouldn’t simply die. Their souls would be spent. If there was a next life, if they had family waiting there, these little ones would never find it. They’d have ceased to be.

  Sufferings from his past.

  This moment of suffering.

  A terrible weight of sorrow and discouragement.

  Then a voice in his mind whispered the unthinkable. An awful thing. An irredeemable thing. He fought it. Silently cried out against it. But the dark logic wouldn’t relent. And the Velle were nearly ready.

  He took a deep breath, adjusted his aim only slightly. And let fly his awful mercy.

  The arrow sailed against the shadows of morning and the charcoal hues of this valley of shale. And the first child dropped to the ground.

  Through hot, silent tears, Tahn drew fast again, and again. It took the Quiet a few moments to understand what was happening. And when they finally saw Tahn standing beside the dolmen in the grey light of predawn, they appeared momentarily confused. Bar’dyn jumped in front of the Velle like shields. They still don’t understand.

  Like scarecrows—light and yielding—each child fell. Tahn did not miss. Not once.

  When it was done, he let out a great, loud cry, the scream ascending the morning air—the only vocal sound on the plain.

  Bar’dyn began rushing toward him. Tahn sank to his knees, dropped his bow, and waited for them. He watched the Quiet come as he thought about the wretched thing he’d just done.

  It didn’t matter that he knew he’d offered the children a greater mercy. Nor that he’d decided this for himself. In those moments, it didn’t even matter if what he’d done had saved Naltus.

  These small ones, surprise on their faces—Or was it hope when they saw me? They thought I was going to save them—before his arrows struck home.

  The shale trembled as the Bar’dyn rushed toward him, wearing their calm, reasoning expressions. Already he wondered what he’d do if he had these shots to take again. The bitterness overwhelmed him, and he suddenly yearned for the relief the Bar’dyn would offer him in a swift death. Then strong hands were dragging him backward by the feet, another set of hands retrieving his bow. The Far cast him into the safety of the dolmen. He flipped over and watched Daen Far captain and his squad defend the entrance to the barrow as Bar’dyn rushed in on them.

  Jarron fell almost immediately, leaving Daen and Aelos to fight three Quiet.

  Tahn couldn’t stop trembling. And it had nothing to do with the battle about to darken the Soliel with blood. It was about the way the Quiet would wage their war. About what men would have to do to fight back. Choices like he’d just made.

  Abruptly, the Bar’dyn stepped aside. The two Far shared a confused look, their swords still held defensively before them. Then one of the Velle came slowly into view. It stopped and peered past the Far, into the dolmen.

  “You’re too consumed by your own fear, Quillescent. Rough and untested, despite surviving Tillinghast.” Its words floated on the air like a soft, baneful prayer. “Have you learned what you are? What you should do?”

  Its mouth pressed into a grim line.

  Tahn shook his head in defiance and confusion. Whatever Tillinghast had proven to Vendanj about Tahn being able to stand against the Quiet, the thought of his own future seemed an affliction. He’d rather not know.

  “You are a puppet, Quillescent. Or were. But you’ve cut your strings, haven’t you? Killing those children. And for us, you—”

  A stream of black bile shot from the creature’s mouth, coating its ravaged lips and running down its chin. A blade ripped through its belly. As it fell, it raised a thin hand toward him, and a burst of energy threw Tahn back against one of the tall dolmen stones. Blood burst from his nose and mouth. Shards of pain shot behind his eyes. In his back, the bruising of muscle and bone was deep and immediate.

  He dropped to the ground, darkness swimming in his eyes. But he saw Daen and Aelos and the Bar’dyn all look fast to the left, toward the whispering sound of countless feet racing across the shale to meet the Quiet army—the Far legion come to war.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Losing a Step

  The Far people die after their eighteenth year—the age of accountability—before they can transgress. For that, it is said, providence possessed them of physical gifts—speed, grace. The logical test would then be to introduce sin, and measure.

  —Compendium on Extant Eastland Races, Ren Solas, scrivener and historian

  Mira Far woke to the sound of rushing wings. She sat in the corner shadows of Tahn’s room, where she kept nightly vigil over the young Hollows man. A man she thought she loved.

  Absent gods, I fell asleep!

  She’d never fallen asleep on watch. But she put it aside for now—Tahn was gone.

  She quickly surveyed the bedchamber, assessing everything. At this hour, Tahn usually stood by the window maintaining a vigil of his own, awaiting daybreak. The window was open, but vacant. Even his bow had been taken. He’s gone someplace else to greet the day. Sick of being cooped up. Then that sound, like many wings, crystallized in her mind: not wings, but boots on faraway stone—lots of them.

  Mira rushed to the window. The streets were filled with Far running toward the northeast wall. Beyond it, on the distant shale, came an army like nothing she’d ever seen before. Fool went out to meet them. He’d crept out without waking her, knowing she would have tried to stop him.

  Never before could anyone have crept past her without her waking. That she’d fallen asleep at all …

  She started for the door, her hands moving over her weapons, taking inventory. The absence of her second sword—the one she usually wore over her left shoulder—was a painful reminder of their days in the Saeculorum. Her broken oath. She hadn’t yet replaced the blade—not a thing to be rushed. And there was no time to do so now.

  She descended several floors of stairs in quick bounds, and got out through the rear door of Elan’s manor. Rather than navigate the thousands of Far moving toward the northern gates, she raced for the northwest wall.

  On a dead run, she signaled the tower guard, who got the gate open enough that she passed through without having to slow. Out on the hard plain, she angled north, choosing her path carefully to keep her footfalls quiet in the shadows of predawn. Off to her right, the First Legion would soon emerge from the gates, ready to advance on a great line of Bar’dyn who stood waiting.

  But it wasn’t only Bar’dyn. As she raced toward the leftmost flank, the shapes of Velle became clear in the morning gloom. Velle! Gods, no! And they were close. A hundred strides. The First Legion was still massing as the Quiet renderers began raising arms toward Naltus.

  Mira tried to quicken her step, but had nothing more to give.

  Fifty strides ahead, someone stood up near one of her people’s dolmens. In the weak morning light, the figure began firing a bow at the renderers.

  She knew the archer’s form. Tahn. Damn me, he’s not shooting the Velle.… She pushed hard toward the dark moment, knowing it would be tearing Tahn apart inside. It made awful sense. But was he listening only to his own feelings? The way he had in the Saeculorum when he shot to save her instead of the trouper boy?

  Three Bar’dyn rushed Tahn. Three Far leapt to his defense. They fought near the entrance of the dolmen, one Far dropping fast. Beyond them, the Velle were scrambling for more bodies to fuel their renderings. She cast a glance over her right shoulder. The Far legion now moved at a feverish stride across the shale, their footfalls soft, like a quiet chorus of wings. No war cries. Just silent intent. The morning would erupt soon in a clash of muscle and bone and steel. She couldn’t see the end of th
e Quiet army. The sheer number of them …

  Her legs began to tire. Fallen hell, what’s happening to me! But she pressed forward, as one of the Velle closed the distance to the dolmen. And Tahn.

  Thirty strides. I won’t get there in time.

  The uttered tones of the dark renderer carried on the wind. The indistinct words sounded of invitation, sounded like the Quiet lies spoken to Tahn at Tillinghast to lull him from his intentions.

  Fifteen strides. She bent forward, selecting her path, her boots on the shale louder than the wind. Unlike her kin rushing now to war.

  I just need to stop the attack on Tahn.

  As she closed the last few strides, someone rushed in silently from the right and put a sword through the Velle’s back. Quick and precise, the attacker pulled his blade from the body and thrust again.

  Bastard got there before me. She’d wanted to do this, to redeem herself for letting Tahn slip away unnoticed. But her neck and shoulders relaxed now that she wouldn’t have to. Doubt had entered her thoughts. Doubt she’d never had before, about things she shouldn’t have to think about.

  The Velle cast Tahn back against the dolmen stone before falling dead. Its killer half-turned toward her: Grant, the former Emerit guard from the courts of Recityv. Grant had been exiled to the Scarred Lands. He possessed the skill to run the shale quickly and quietly. Something it seemed she could no longer do. He looked back at her, a small indictment in his eyes. Maybe some sympathy, too.

  In that shared moment, she saw the resemblance. Grant and Tahn. Father and son. Both men spoke with their eyes. Grant, though, had the weathered skin and deeply lined face of a man long in the sun. There was a hardness in him that looked both earned and imposed. Scrutiny. That was the look in his face.

  She should have been there. Something had changed. She knew it. So did Grant.

  And what had changed wasn’t a mystery. Staring at Tahn where he lay, she saw in her mind the moment it had begun.

  High in the Saeculorum mountains, they’d been attacked by a squad of Bar’dyn. Both Mira and Penit—the trouper boy who’d accompanied them—had been in danger. Tahn had raised his bow with time to make one shot. A shot he should have used to save the boy. A shot he’d used instead to save Mira.

  He’d disregarded his sense of the right draw, his sense of Will, because he hoped for a future with her. But it had been the wrong choice. And his chances of surviving Tillinghast jeopardized by such selfishness.

  So she’d asked Vendanj to transfer that stain to her, knowing that she would be forfeiting the Far promise of a life after this one . Because that promise was based on a stainless life. What she hadn’t known was that her finer abilities of movement and judgment were linked to her own stainlessness.

  But Tahn had survived Tillinghast, making her sacrifice worthwhile.

  And now? Tahn had just shot down several small ones. Was he simply choosing for himself, as he’d done when he’d shot to save her? Had her sacrifice been well spent, after all?

  Don’t regret helping someone you love.

  And still, losing some of what had made her Far … it hurt. It hurt the way a child might feel when she’s no longer welcome in the company of her family.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Dark and Bright

  A blade’s greatest quality may be its reminder to us of what we have to lose, of the things we’d trade for life.

  —Colloquial expression used by Alon steel-traders, adopted by the footmen of the Alon’Itol army

  The darkness engulfed Braethen the moment he put his hand on the Blade of Seasons. With it came the silence of barrow flowers. Fear ripped through him. He gave out a worried sigh, the sound of it lost in the darkness as though he’d only thought to sigh. He existed outside himself, outside time and place. Aloneness gripped him. And yet, distantly, he knew he still crossed the plain of shale with the Sheason, Vendanj, toward the dark line of Quiet.

  It was like being in two places at once, like dreaming and being aware of the dream, yet still caught in its illusion. In the endless dark, he walked blindly, clenching tight his sword.

  Let it go! Drop the blade!

  He couldn’t do it. The paradox taunted him: The sword was causing this suffocating blackness, and yet he sensed it was his only way out. He carried it raised in front of his eyes, though he could see it no more than he could see the Quiet ahead.

  Then voices came, like the whistling of wind through winter trees, streaming around cold, leafless limbs caught high against a slate sky. In the sibilant rush, some voices murmured as though carried on those winds for aeons, others sounded close enough that he might reach out and touch their owners. But the words themselves escaped him.

  Soon even his own steps were vague and dreamlike, as he slipped further into this strange black. Then he began to lose the feel of the sword in his hand. A terrifying thought stole over him: I’m becoming part of it.

  Lost in the emptiness, he admitted he had no idea how to get himself out, nor how he would protect or defend the Sheason. I’m an imposter. Pretending to be a sodalist.

  For most of his life he’d desired to take the Sodality oath, serve with a Sheason as helpmate and friend. People had called him a fool. Everyone had expected him to follow the Author’s Way—write, study, write, teach, write—like his father, the Author Posian. Everyone respected A’Posian.

  The image of his da rose in the darkness. He could see him clearly; not the way he did in dreams, but as though he were looking at the man, wherever he was, right now. The vertigo of it put Braethen out of sorts. What unsettled him most was how much he looked like his father. Brown-red hair, with a beard more red. A reader’s eyes, as if the world itself were narrative. Taller by a hand than most men, but always slumping to look them straight. Braethen saw him sitting in a chair, on their porch, a book in his hand. It was a vision of the life he’d expected to have. It seemed to argue that Braethen was a fool, that he should be home, walking his father’s path.

  But he wasn’t an author, and his father’s books were to blame. Stories of the Sodality had captured his imagination. So, when Vendanj had come to the Hollows, Braethen had asked to join him. He’d wanted to help his friends, Tahn and the others, but mostly he’d leapt at the chance to become a sodalist. And not long after leaving the Hollows, he’d taken the oath.

  That was just a short time ago. His understanding of how to serve came mostly from books, as well as the sword training he’d had from Mira on their way to Naltus. But he had no deep knowledge of this sword, this Blade of Seasons. He was lost. He was in the dark.

  Even the image of his father faded.

  He imagined his body disappearing slowly, until the sword hung upon the air for a moment before falling harmlessly to the shale.

  Then, in front of him, the darkness began to jounce and swirl. Twisted lines of black shot across his vision and closed in around him. Soon the heavy iron of a Bar’dyn hammer would crush his chest, and he would see none of it, only feel his flesh ripping before darkness of a different kind encircled him.

  No! Braethen pushed back against the assault, trying to command the shadows. But his bluster only stirred the lines of darkness, made them tighter, like a fly caught in a web.

  Then something new: thrumming in his feet. Like the hooves of a mounted garrison galloping at full speed, the rumbling tingled up through his soles. The Bar’dyn are charging!

  Braethen struggled frantically for release, to see, to exist in one place and time. His struggle left him breathless, but still the darkness held.

  Until … a single blade of grass.

  In his mind rose the singularly hopeful image of a long, thin blade of greenery placed delicately in a vase. He saw it in sharp contrast to a drab grey hovel that huddled in a hopeless valley of endless rain. Ja’Nene. The young widow he’d met on his way to Naltus. Beautiful despite her burned face. Because of it. Her daily ritual of walking a fair distance to pluck a few long stems of grass added life and color to her colorless room.
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  Determination grew inside him with the remembrance of that simple blade of grass—an emblem he’d taken as his own. With it came the declaration—a battle cry, of sorts—that he’d found along the way from the Hollows: “I am I.”

  The silence and darkness broke.

  When the shadows lifted, Braethen saw the dull gleam of morning’s half-light on the edge of his sword. And beyond it, on the sweeping shale plain, came a host of Quiet like nothing he could have imagined. Their swift movement created a slow undulation, like gentle summer winds over a vast field of unharvested wheat.

  He caught a quick glance from Vendanj, whose expression asked a question.

  Braethen answered with a nod. I’m ready. Vendanj, though, didn’t look fit for war. The tall man hunched a bit. His short beard couldn’t hide his gaunt, hollow face. The hard eyes were weary. He’d not fully recovered from their days in the Saeculorum.

  “No Quiet breaks the line,” Elan commanded from Braethen’s left. The Far king’s words were the only ones spoken, and carried long on the plain.

  The First Legion did not slow as the Bar’dyn rushed toward them. Braethen kept moving through the silence—neither army called or yawped, each moving with grim determination, the only sound the grind of shale beneath their feet.

  Ten strides from the Quiet, Vendanj thrust up his hands, as though he would take fistfuls of sky. He then drove them at the Bar’dyn in a violent motion. From his palms shot a wave of energy visible only in the grit and stones it gathered as it rushed toward the Quietgiven. Like a powerful river current, it took down a dozen from the first line of Bar’dyn. A few did not get up. The Quiet behind them simply leapt over the bodies, coming at them on a dead run.

  To Braethen’s left, the Far danced around the attacks, striking vital blows and dropping many in the first wave.

  A massive figure surged forward, bearing down on Vendanj. He’d never seen or read about this breed of Quiet before—three strides tall, small spines of bone running like veins across its face, neck, arms, and hands. The creature reared back with a great iron flail, intelligence and intent shining in its eyes.