Ravinor

by Travis Peck

  “Daeris!” she said in greeting, anxious for details.

  “Lady Moira,” the captain said. Then he answered her unasked question, “I fear that Deepbrooke has suffered a terrible fate. I have two squads patrolling out to the north to ensure we have warning if the Taker-spawned beasts come our way.”

  Moira nodded. She had known from the number of people who showed up in the ravinor dream that the village was gone, but she had held out hope that maybe Daeris would find the one young man who might have survived the attack and the dream. She felt her good spirits abandon her. She nearly stumbled as the despair and grief she had been feeling when she woke crashed back into her.

  Daeris, seeing her discomfiture, but misreading the reason for it, patted her shoulder. “We’ll be safe here. I have alerted the workers, and all the guardsmen are here except for the two patrols. It will take more flocks than however many attacked Deepbrooke to get to us here.”

  “I know,” Moira said in a quiet voice. Her mind was aflutter with a sudden idea. What if she could discover where the ravinors were from the dream? Was it possible? As fast as it had struck, she dismissed the thought. The people who were turned vanished so suddenly that she would not have the time to try and glean any information from them as she was able do with the humans first entering the dream. Even though that idea was unlikely to succeed, the seed had been planted for her to consider any way that she could help the people there, or in the physical world. She had for so long simply went along with the dream as a passive witness, but what if she could do more? Something had happened when she called out to the young man, she knew it, though, she had been wrenched out of the ravinor dream as a result. She resolved then that the next time she was pulled into the dream, she would try to do more than simply witness.

  She shook herself back to the present. She was holding two empty buckets and staring into the water that filled Helia’s trough. Luckily, Prayg and Daeris had not noticed her lapse. The two were talking as the stablemaster rubbed down the mount the captain must have ridden while he had been out scouting. Moira retrieved Helia and brought her back to her clean stall.

  With Prayg distracted by the captain, Moira decided not to ask for another task, but rather, to begin one herself. She retrieved the brush and comb hanging from nails on the front of her horse’s stall. Moira began to groom Helia, even though she scarcely needed it. The mare seemed to enjoy it, allowing Moira to work while thinking of how she could change what happened in the ravinor dream.

  For the first time in her life, she was actually anxious to enter the dream again, despite the horrors within. I am tired of witnessing, she thought with grim determination. I want to keep them from taking one more soul! Moira raged within her mind. She had been a calm and thoughtful child. At sixteen, she was still mild-mannered, and rarely exhibited any temper. But now she felt herself moving from fear toward the dream to anger. Anger at the queen, and especially the Shadowman, who she felt was the more present during the dream than the temptress queen.

  Helia snorted at her as she found herself combing out the mare’s mane too vigorously. She had allowed the fury in her mind to translate to the world around her. She apologized to Helia, who accepted graciously once Moira offered her another carrot. The mare would accept almost anything so long as another treat was forthcoming.

  She heard a light knock at the stall door and Prayg walked in. “Prestyn and Petyr are helping a mare foal right now, and it’s a difficult one. Would you be willing to run a few horses through the training yard while I oversee the birth?”

  “Of course!” Moira loved training the horses. The only task she enjoyed more was running them through the area outside of the gates, but she had been able to do that several days ago with Helia, the night of the horrible ravinor dream. She felt her vitality return. Helia snorted again behind her, and she knew the horse was jealous. She gave her mare one more handful of carrots and stroked her muzzle.

  “That mare of yours loves carrots more than any horse I’ve ever seen, doesn’t she?” Prayg said, his eyebrows crinkling with mirth. He had two children and several grandchildren, too, but Moira knew that, in truth, he had even more; all of the horses on the estate were as children to him. He had chosen the matches between sire and dam, assisted with every birth, as he was doing now, and then tended and trained each foal until it was time to find a match of their own. Each one was different and had their own distinct personality that Prayg seemed to delight in.

  Moira practically skipped out of the stable after closing up Helia’s stall to go to the training yard. A young colt, no more than three years old, was already saddled up and ready to enter the yard. Moira effortlessly vaulted up to perch atop the saddle on the eager young horse. She kicked her heels in, and the colt shot off.

  Moira whooped with excitement, which only encouraged the enthusiastic colt to add more speed. Moira guided the colt around the yard a few times to burn off some of his energy before more focused training could begin. The colt reared up after a circuit and pawed at the air with his hooves. Moira held on as she had been taught and decided he might need a few more laps. The colt was happy to oblige and sprinted around the circular yard with gusto.

  For the next few candles, her only thoughts were of enjoying the wind rushing past her unveiled face and reveling in her own, and her mount’s, exhilaration as they trained.

  ***

  Moira finally felt recovered from her terrible dream. Running the horses, and otherwise helping Prayg in the stables—and avoiding her mother—had done wonders. After she had bathed and dressed, Moira retrieved her current journal from its hiding place, in her father’s library, and began to fill in the names. She had always had a good memory, and the ravinor dream was so intense that she could not force herself to forget the names of the people she had witnessed have their souls wrenched away from them.

  One name in particular kept popping into her head. Lerius. She had no way of knowing if he had been turned or not. When people disappeared from the dream, it could only mean one of two things. One of the outcomes was vastly more likely than the other—being turned. The other, much more rare and precious, meant survival. But not everyone who survived had to run the whole gauntlet of the ravinor dream in order to escape. Moira prayed to the Giver that Lerius had been delivered back to his body hale and human. She wished there was some way for her to discover if someone in the dream had actually survived or not, or better yet, for a way for her to save them from it.

  Dinner was a quick but unpleasant affair. Not because of the food, of course. Her father, frugal in many ways, liked his meals to be of the highest quality and had hired a master chef—who frequently butted heads with Mistress Arina—from Styr to make it so. The unpleasantness was centered around her mother and her henchwoman, Lara.

  It was only Moira, her mother, Lara, her father, and Evin for dinner that evening. Daeris was still making sure their defenses were capable. He had ridden to the north to get the reports from the patrols he had dispatched earlier to give warning if any new flocks threatened the Geryn land. Moira missed Daeris. Her mother seemed to be a little less nasty to her when he was around, and she swore that Lara had romantic designs upon the man. He had confided in her that he could not stand the woman and loathed her nearly as much as Moira did.

  Daeris had risen in her regard since he had made that comment. She didn’t think that Daeris particularly liked her mother, either, but the captain was wise enough not to voice that opinion, even to Moira. She could not tell how Evin felt about either woman, and she would never find out. Evin was a consummate professional and was always courteous and polite.

  Her father was quieter than usual as he brooded over whatever concern was foremost on his mind. Possibly the ravinor attack on Deepbrooke, or perhaps the cost of wool in Aerilyn—with Father, it was hard to tell exactly what was troubling him.

  While her father was silent and distracted, and Daeris absent, it fell to Evin and the three ladies to converse. She loved Evin like a second
adopted grandfather, with Prayg filling the first vacancy. She felt sorry for him as her mother and Lara rebuffed his attempts at starting up a conversation. The steward’s hearing was starting to fail, and her mother and maid would purposefully change the volume of their voices in mid-sentence on a word or phrase just to fluster the man. Moira did her best to always repeat what the two women had said to the steward, but her mother would tell her to hush while the adults were speaking.

  Moira fumed at that comment. She had come into her majority, albeit recently, when she had turned sixteen, but her mother refused to consider her an adult until she was married properly; a scenario that her mother and Moira knew wasn’t one that was likely to happen because of her malady. Her mother delighted in reminding her of that.

  So far, her father had stonewalled any efforts that the lady of the house had made to marry Moira off to whichever man wanted the Geryn connections for his own and was willing to overlook her terrible scarring to get them. Her father, Giver bless him, had stood firm in his position that his daughter would choose who she married, and when. He had said that the Geryn fortune was doing just fine without pawning their only daughter off to be used as some bargaining chip. Moira loved to recall the shouting match between her parents when her father had finally settled that one.

  Dinner proceeded with a reticent Lord Geryn, who did not attempt conversation with anyone except to ask for a plate to be passed along to him so he could skewer another slice of roast. Moira sat silently fuming, not daring to look up from her plate lest she see her mother’s smirking face. Evin did his best to keep up the talk with the two ladies, who continued their juvenile and petty game at the old man’s expense. Moira saw that even Evin’s politeness was wearing thin by the time dinner came to a close.

  As soon as her father got up from the table to excuse himself, Moira scrambled out of the dining room and muttered, “Excuse me,” as she bolted away from the company of the Two Wenches, her most-favored moniker for her mother and Lara. Evin, despite his age, was right on her heels as he made an equally quick exit from the dining room.

  She raced upstairs to her bedroom and shut the door behind her with a sigh of relief. If her father was less preoccupied she would have asked him to look at the stars again, but as it was, she didn’t dare to leave her room. Moira could not tolerate seeing her mother and Lara without losing her temper with them. Instead, she decided to read.

  Her father indulged her voracious appetite for books of all different subjects. She had stacks of them that revealed great detail about the lives and peoples from all over the world: Styr, Zhurak, the Rhyllian archipelago, and even Abin-Lin, far to the west. She loved to read about different places and cultures and longed to visit them one day if she ever got the chance.

  If she was ever able to get out from under her mother. Moira wondered, again, if she had been born pretty if her mother would have been a nicer person. She had trouble imagining that. She and her mother had been at odds from as far back as she could remember. Though Moira felt horrible for thinking it, she often found herself wishing for her father to end his marriage so that they could both live in peace. She honestly did not know why her father put up with her spiteful mother. Was it guilt over some past transgression? Mother had been the unfaithful one, as far as she knew. Had her father strayed? Moira shook her head at such thoughts. They did little good, and it made her feel like she was trying to find fault in others. A trait that she did not want to have in common with her mother.

  She chose a book from a dozen new ones that her father had brought for her when he came back from his last business trip—not the one cut short by the ravinor attack on Deepbrooke. The book was an in-depth study of the Zhurakite Sultanate. She had only recently become interested in learning more about their fractious neighbors to the south, and Styr’s most bitter rival.

  It was only due to her father’s prestige that she was able to get these books. Most people gave a wide berth to anything that had to do with the sultanate, lest they be seen as treasonous sympathizers. But her father was unconcerned about how his loyalty to the empire was perceived. He even decorated the home with a few items that he had procured at great expense from their southern enemy.

  Moira immersed herself in the book, excited to learn more about the mysterious land. She only interrupted her reading to light the lantern in its sconce that hung over her reading desk as the room darkened; otherwise, she stayed focused on the information before her.

  Moira was amazed by what she had learned so far. She found out about the first sultan’s rise to power thousands of years ago, and the unbroken line of his descendants that ruled after him. Ylomar the Great, he was called. From what she had read, the first sultan had been a genius, but one with an insatiable lust for power. He had risen from nothing. He was purported to be the son of an izhaki herder; the large, yet docile, wool-bearing pachyderms the size of a modest house. The future sultan was ruthless once he committed himself and his brilliance to his goal. He carved out a place of his own in a land that had been teeming with quarrelsome warlords for generations.

  Through a feat of impressive innovation, he trained fifty izhaki to follow his battle commands. Ylomar turned out a force that could tear down the walls of any of his contemporary warlords’ keeps. One by one, he subjugated his foes. Ylomar and his trained izhaki, with only a small human army, had eliminated all threats to his rule in the region where he had grown up. As more of his rivals fell, he began to finally draw some allies from neighboring regions. Fifteen years later, after constant campaigning, Ylomar declared himself sultan and formed the Zhurakite Sultanate.

  Moira wondered if Ylomar had been a pig tender, instead of an izhaki herder, whether he would have attempted to become a warlord. His innovation to use the large, normally placid beasts of burden for warfare had changed how the peoples of his land would fight in the future. Now the izhaki were renowned beasts of battle, and its image decorated temples and official buildings throughout the sultanate, not to mention being emblazoned on the armor of its soldiers, and even imprinted on the Zhurakite currency.

  Fortunately for Styr, the boats needed to transport the izhaki must be quite large and were too cumbersome and ponderous to carry such large beasts across the treacherous waters that separated the two oft-warring nations. Styr’s naval forces were swift and deadly and could easily pick off the few lucky transport vessels that managed to survive the crossing’s storms and high seas that ravaged the southern coastline of Styr. Even Styr’s well-trained legions would have great trouble defeating an invading army spearheaded by the now fearsome and bloodlusting izhaki of the sultanate.

  By the time she had finished reading of the establishment of the sultanate, her eyes were tired and it was well into the night. Time for bed. Moira looked forward to the dream tonight—not the witnessing of souls succumbing to the ravinor dream—but rather because she was eager to experiment with the dream itself. She harbored the hope of aiding people in the dream and doing whatever she could to hinder the Shadowman’s actions there—and the queen’s. She gave a prayer to the Giver to lend her strength and readied herself for sleep.

  Sleep came quickly thanks to her long day working in the stables. Soon, Moira fell into a deep slumber, and then she found herself in the ravinor dream.

  ***

  As always, Moira was floating above gently swaying grasses in a field that seemed to go on forever in all directions. There but not there, she thought she felt the wind that was blowing the long reeds of grass to and fro on her imagined skin. Her cloudy eye worked just as it did in the waking world, and the grassland was filled with small swirling vortices of color.

  Moira’s presence drifted above the ground like a lily pad on the surface of a pond, swaying gently with the movement of the water, but never moving far from its original location. She searched the land for any people, but it was empty. Then, in a blink, there were perhaps a dozen people in the field that had popped into view. Looks of surprise dominated their faces at the unexpect
ed terrain.

  Mayi, a seamstress, had a look of consternation at her sudden change of scenery from whatever place she had been before. Her new location had to be better, though, as she had been attacked by a ravinor and her physical body was languishing there—hopefully, in a sickroom with a nice bed and a caregiver hovering over her. Just as likely, she could be lying on the side of a road by the remains of her family, her body struggling to fight off the infection. But the real struggle would take place here in the ravinor dream; her soul the prize. Mayi was near two others, a man and a woman, but she could not see them even though they were within a few paces of one another. A strange feature of the dream. Everyone faced the dream alone.

  Moira kept looking for any children, praying that none were here; this time, she was able to give a sigh of relief—or what passed for a sigh in the dream—by their absence. By the relatively small number of people in the dream this night, and the few glimpses of details she was able to glean from the victims, she surmised that a caravan had been waylaid by a small flock of ravinors.

  Her guess was confirmed when she saw Uligar. He was an elderly man, but years of transporting people and goods, loading wagons, and controlling teams of thick-bodied drafthorses had filled out the man’s shoulders and arms. A considerable belly spoke to his overindulgence of food and drink, also that his profession required him to sit for long periods of time. Uligar was married to the much younger seamstress. Moira snatched the information from the ether. Their children had been lucky; she discovered that they had stayed home with their grandparents, though she could not tell from which town their parents had left or where they had been bound. Thinking of the young ones the two parents would be leaving behind if they turned, Moira vowed to do her best to save them from the dream.