“I get to kill it,” she said with a grin. She had re-read the wurm section in her old ranger manuals a dozen times in the last few days, memorizing the instructions and diagrams. All it takes is one quick stab in the right place to kill a wurm. It should be easy.
Tyrissa sheathed the knife and walked over to the pile of fish. She chose a smaller one and tossed it to the middle of the raeg. It landed with a wet smack and sank into the muck. The three youths watched, waiting for their prey to make an appearance. Soon, the surface of the pool quivered and a guttural gulp swallowed the area around fish.
Tyrissa let out a short laugh.
“Right! Let’s do this. Sven stand a little to the side.”
The three took up their positions. Sven and Tyrissa stood a few steps to either side of Oster who stood at the line in the earth. Tyrissa funneled her buzzing energy into rotating the spear in her hands, feeling the friction of the wood turning in her palms.
This should work, she thought. Lure, net, and stab. That’s all.
Oster paused with his arm pulled back to throw the hooked fish into the pool. “Does anyone else find it funny that we used worms to catch fish and are now using fish to catch a wurm?” He gave a small grin, pleased with himself.
“Throw the fish dummy,” Tyrissa said, wishing she had thought of that quip first.
Oster skipped the fish across the surface from the edge of the raeg, backing away once it came to a stop, dragging the bait across the top layer of moss and mud. Nothing happened, the raeg was still. He shared a shrug with Tyrissa, and repeated the process.
“Maybe it’s full,” Sven suggested.
Halfway through the second cast there was another gulp from below that missed the bait by inches. As Oster dragged the line across the surface, a bulge of mud rose and followed the fish like a giant, seeking finger of the earth. It inched up to the edge, and hesitated as the fish passed onto dry land. Tyrissa waved her hand downward, and Oster let the bait come to rest halfway between the pool and the pile of fish. He dropped the fishing rod and took up the emptied staff, brandishing it at the moving mound in the raeg.
The wurm emerged onto dry land in an explosion of mud. Its head was a pointed snout with bony ridges on either side that bore sunken and beady black eyes. Thin, flexible plates lined its body under a clinging layer of mud. It was five feet long, a foot wide, and much larger than Tyrissa expected.
As planned, the wurm ignored the three youths, instead snorting at the air before undulating towards the bait. They stared at the beast, transfixed. They’d all heard stories of wurms and eaten the occasional hunted one, but seeing one alive and writhing across the forest floor was something else entirely.
“The net! Now!” Tyrissa’s command snapped Sven to attention and he threw the net from where he stood. It spread properly in the air but fell short, a single weighted corner hitting the wurm with a pitiful thock. Provoked, the wurm abandoned its free meal and surged towards Sven, stopping partway and twisting its body around, whipping its tail as a bludgeon with surprising speed.
That wasn’t in the book, Tyrissa thought.
To his credit, Sven jumped over the wurm’s tail, but was bowled over when it recoiled back around. The boy landed hard on his side and cried out in pain. He pushed himself up on hands and knees and tried to back away. Right into the raeg. Sven screamed and struggled against the sucking mud, hands scrabbling against the soft earth. There was nothing firm to grasp at the pools edge, and he only managed to draw himself downward to the waist.
“Oster! Help him!” It happened so fast that neither of them had moved.
Tyrissa stepped forward, flipped the spear around, and smashed the butt against the wurm’s snout. It turned to her and opened its mouth to reveal a single row of widely spaced teeth that looked like carved points of stone, ancient arrowheads. Mouth agape and hissing, the wurm surged towards Tyrissa in a brutish slither as alien as a snake’s but with none of the grace. She hopped back a few steps, spinning the spear around to face down the creature’s charge, waiting until the critical second when the wurm was just the right distance away.
Tyrissa yelped something resembling a battle cry, crouched low, and thrust the spear into the wurm’s open mouth. The creature twisted at just the wrong moment, dodging a fraction of an inch out of the way of Tyrissa’s strike. The thin spear point struck nothing but the earth, the shaft grazing against the wurm’s jaw. The wurm turned and bit down on the spear, narrowly missing one of Tyrissa’s hands. Thrown off balance by the sudden weight, she pushed herself away, falling backward to the soft ground.
The wurm closed its jaw around the spear, snapping off both ends. It lay still for a second, struggling with the chunk of wood lodged in its mouth. It coughed and hacked, trying without success to eject the spear fragment. Tyrissa glanced beyond their supposed prey to see that Oster had pulled Sven out of the raeg. She spared the briefest thought to abandoning the idea, settling for a lesser meal. Instead, Tyrissa sprang to her feet, drew her belt knife, and jumped atop the wurm’s back.
As soon as she was atop it, the wurm began to contorting wildly, thrashing about in every direction. Tyrissa held on, wrapping her legs around the beast and stabbing at its back in quick jabs with her knife. Her strikes left only superficial scratches against the wurm’s thick skin. The wurm’s tail lashed around in circles, causing the two combatants to roll away from the raeg. They came to a stop against one of the trees ringing the clearing, Tyrissa on top. She shifted her weight and managed to plant a knee against the wurm’s back, trying to pin it down. It must have been a sweet spot on its spine, for the creature’s violent spasms weakened.
Tyrissa pressed her temporary advantage, seizing the top of the wurm’s upper jaw with her free hand. Slowly, she inched her fingers over the edge of what passed for lips and between the stone-like teeth. The wurm tried many times to snap its jaws shut, but the broken fragment of the spear kept its mouth lodged open, frothy saliva drooling down its neck.
Pulling with all her strength, Tyrissa yanked the head of the wurm upward, nearly bending it to a right angle around her knee. For an instant they stared at each other, glossy black beads against blue sparkling in fury, hunter and hunted. She had a clear view to the back of the wurm’s throat. Tyrissa gripped her knife tighter and drove it deep into the beast’s mouth, her arm scrapping against the bottom row of teeth and opening up fresh cuts. Her attack struck bone and sent a shock of pain through her wrist. Jerking her arm back within the creature’s mouth she made another thrust aimed further back and higher. This time she hit soft flesh and a spurt of hot blood washed over her hand, mixing with the wurm’s foul-smelling saliva. The wurm let out a pitiful squeal as the knife slipped into its small brain and its struggles shifted from violent resistance to nervous, residual twitches.
Tyrissa untangled herself from the wurm and rolled away to lie on her back. Panting as if she hadn’t breathed through the entire ordeal, she craned her neck to look over at her brothers. Sven was wide-eyed and covered in mud from the chest down, but otherwise in one piece. Oster looked impressed and a touch frightened.
Lying there, arm coated in wurm blood from the elbow down, the rest of her body splashed with mud and new-found exhaustion Tyrissa said, “Now we can go home.”
Chapter Two
It took the better part of an hour to return home by way of the winding but still well-traveled ‘Hunter’s Trail’, as Tyrissa called it. Their catch, while not overly heavy, was cumbersome and required all three of them to carry. The delineation between civilization and wilderness was sudden, the Morgwood vanishing around them to become pasture with aged stumps poking out among the grass. Tyrissa couldn’t help but frown at the constantly advancing boundary of Edgewatch Village, but the feeling passed as the close embrace of the forest was replaced by the warm familiarity of home.
With each passing year, Edgewatch ‘Village’ became more of a misnomer. The original village, built around an old hilltop watch tower nestled within the edge of t
he Morgwood, was now but a small section of a much larger town growing in the cleared fields south of the hill. With the exception of the weather-worn, pyramidal-roofed stone temple to the old Morg gods, every standing building in Edgewatch was less than twenty years old, built after the butchery of the Cleanse by survivors of the original village and the flood of refugees from the surrounding area.
The Jorensen home stood among the relatively older upper section of town, a ring of fifteen homes built around the original village green with its massive, preserved fir tree in the center. Anchoring the north and south points of the ring were the temple and the crumbled ruins of the watchtower that lent the town its name. In the afternoon shadow of the great fir, Alli Forran, the lead schoolmistress, had a class of about a dozen younger children sitting in two rows, each with a lapboard of brown wood for the day’s lesson. The trio drew some looks as they crossed the village green, though only the smaller children granted any lingering attention. Tyrissa had a reputation for emerging from the forest looking like hell with a smile on her face. It was considered some approximation of normal.
Their house looked much like the others in the ring: a square, single story built of sturdy Morgwood lumber, painted white with green trim, strengthened in places by locally carved stonework, and topped with rust brown tiles from the forges of Greden, the Morg capital city. A smaller, matching building containing her father’s wood-working shop sat nearby at a prudent distance. They took few chances given the fire hazard the stacked wood, sawdust, and lacquer of his trade posed. The sound her father sawing away at his work drifted out of the open double doors of the workshop. It was one of the most comforting sounds Tyrissa knew.
The instant they reached the front stoop of their home with its pine green door framed by an arch of gray stone, Iri Jorensen displayed her preternatural (or perhaps simply a mother’s) sense of knowing exactly when her children returned from misadventure, and opened the door. Somewhat darker in hair and skin than her daughter and husband from her southern Morgale blood, Iri silently assessed her three disheveled children and their prize, her face flickering between relief and mild disappointment.
Today, Iri wore traditional Morg women’s garb, a simple white blouse with well-used metal buttons and green skirt. Not so traditional was the matching length of green cloth tied around her head like a bandage, cutting diagonally across her forehead and covering her right eye before wrapping down below the ear.
It must be one of her bad days.
“Hello mother. We brought dinner!” Tyrissa said in as cheery a voice as possible while letting the wurm fall to the ground with an unceremonious thud. Oster sighed behind her, grateful to be relieved of his majority of the carried weight. The wurm landed with its head pointed up at Iri, mouth agape, tongue lolling out one side like a panting dog. Charming.
Tyrissa received a hard, accusatory stare from her mother’s eye. She could see the lower end of the scar peeking out from below the makeshift eye patch. A deep and surgically precise cut ran through Iri’s eyebrow to partway down her cheek and the wound should have blinded her, yet she could see perfectly fine on good days. Whenever Tyrissa asked about it her mother would say, ‘I received it in the Cleanse and it never healed properly,’ and would elaborate no further despite Tyrissa’s repeated attempts to learn more. Iri’s entire generation bore such wounds and scars: the shared mark of Cleanse survivors. Few, however, were as peculiar as her mother’s eye. Though Tyrissa’s latest growth spurt gave her a few inches over her mother, she still felt shorter out of sheer presence.
“I see. Thank you.” Iri’s eye bounced between the wurm, Tyrissa’s bandaged arm, and Sven’s mud-caked clothes. The three of them had stopped at a stream on the way back and attempted to clean Sven up, but there was only so much that could be done for it. Iri’s expression softened into a small, soft smile. Tyrissa inwardly cringed at promise of a future tongue-lashing.
“Well, don’t just stand there, take it down to Hileg’s. Tell him he may keep a few cuts for himself and Mirra. Then clean yourselves up and try not to have any further… adventures before dinner. If at all possible, Tyrissa.”
Hours later, Tyrissa sat behind their house at the crest of the hill, catching the faint scents of her mother preparing dinner mingling with the sharp smell of the herb-soaked bandages wrapped around her right arm. The book lying in her lap, The Women of Amonzae, was unopened. She’d read it cover to cover many times, the stories of the jungle dwelling society of warrior-women always thrilling, but glossing over how such a society functions for more than a generation without men.
Instead, Tyrissa gazed out over the lower section of Edgewatch and kept watch for Liran’s return. A larger ring of homes were built around a second common green, the houses similar to the ones at her back, but packed closer together. The lower green currently had a swarm of children kicking around a leather-bound ball, the game utterly lawless. It was a common sight, as youth far outnumbered adults in Edgewatch or any other Morg town, with most families having four or more children. Tyrissa had no shortage of friends and playmates growing up, though only Oster was capable of keeping up with her in the forest. Everyone else wasn’t interested in ‘a bunch of trees and trails’. She sighed at the thought. Most times it seemed only her eyes were drawn northward while everyone else looked south.
Past the lower green, the Fjordway cut through the new center of Edgewatch, an ancient road that ran from the central Morg cities in the west to the rugged port towns nestled among the fjord-riddled coasts to the east. Shops lined the road, along with the Forest’s Respite, the town’s inn and stables. Beyond the inn was the spire-topped roof of the schoolhouse. Tyrissa was glad to be done with that place. Beyond that stood yet more rows of homes, some still skeletal frames in the midst of construction with stacks of recently felled and cut lumber beside them. Edgewatch had become the primary waypoint for traders traveling the Fjordway after the Cleanse. Most of the other villages along the trade road were gone, with little left but bad memories haunting the burnt and rotted husks of abandoned homes.
Her eyes followed the road eastward until it vanished among the trees. Tyrissa had only read about the fjordland, never seen it for herself. At this point, her imagined view of staggering cliffs and countless secret inlets probably outdid the real thing, the fantastic landscapes of her adventure stories coloring her view of reality. Still, wanderlust itched at the back of her mind. Whether the Morgwood at her back or the fjords up that road, she wanted so much to just be away. Direction mattered little.
A large, cream colored horse with puffs of snowy white hair around its hoofs lumbered to a stop behind one of the shops lining the road. It pulled a narrow red wagon with a tall man seated on the driver’s bench. He was dressed in out-of-place dark colors with a close cropped crown of blonde hair that matched Tyrissa’s.
Her book tumbled to the grass as Tyrissa sprang to her feet and broke into a sprint down the hillside. She cut through the ball game, a brief addition to the chaos, shouts sounding in her wake. By the time she weaved through the houses and reached the wagon, Liran was already haggling with Jorill, a pudgy shopkeeper nearing sixty with only scattered strands of hair above his ears and a gray tangle hanging from his chin. Tyrissa waited, catching her breath and allowing Liran to finish his business. Her brother wore a loose but handsome coat of black and blue, the colors of his merchant guild. On the back, sewn between his shoulders, was a circular patch of concentric circles in the same company colors with a silver coin at the center. ‘Khalan North Trade Company’ was stitched around the outermost ring of the company crest.
“Eleven chiefmarks, boy,” Jorill said. “We already get supplied with herbs once a week from Greden. Don’t think you can get a little extra because you used to live here when you were a lad, snatching candies when you thought me or the wife weren’t looking.”
“I wouldn’t dare think of it Jorill! But I don’t think you have spices from the Khalanheim markets. Ever had rajspice?” Liran removed the stop
per from a small jar of reddish-brown powder. Jorill leaned in for a sniff and came away looking thoughtful.
“This traveled some two thousand miles to get here. Khalanheim’s markets contain pieces of the entire world, and I’m bringing a piece of the world to you. It’s not just rare, it’s unique. I’d say that’s worth a ‘little extra’. It’s still a discount from what you’d pay to someone from the capital for anything like this. I’ll even knock a few off the price as… delayed payment for those candies. Fifteen chiefmarks.”
Liran spoke faster than she remembered, some of his words seasoned with an unfamiliar accent. He had been gone for almost two years now, leaving for the city of Khalanheim to further his career with the Khalan North Trade Company. That was on top of the years he spent bouncing around Morgale’s cities, working with the local branches of the company and visiting Edgewatch once a season at best. To Tyrissa the cities of the south sparkled in her imagination like diamonds just over the horizon. Khalanheim and Gardula, Imperial Rhonia and Tillmoore. Liran got to see them first hand and she couldn’t help but feel a small surge of jealousy whenever she thought on it.
Jorill wrapped up their haggling duel with, “Sure, fifteen. Welcome home, boy.”
Liran lifted a small padded crate from the back of the wagon and handed it to the shopkeeper. He saw Tyrissa standing here and lifted a finger, asking her to wait a moment longer. All that remained in the wagon bed were a travel pack and another smaller crate of jarred spices, likely a gift for their mother.
“You have a great evening Jorill. I’ll come by for payment tomorrow.”
Jorill grunted in assent and carried the crate through the backdoor of his shop.
“I find your priorities confused Liran,” Tyrissa said crossing her arms in mock disappointment. “Honestly, two years and you’d rather make a few marks before seeing your dearest sister.”
Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) Page 2