The Deer King: Novella One

by Ben Spencer

  She hurried down the ladder and dashed to the front of the house, where the priest lay blocking the front door. His hands, she noticed, were slick with blood, and a spray of red colored his vestments. She knelt down and patted the priest’s robes, searching for the stone. Tears and snot streamed off her. She knew that inside the cabin her father lay dead, and though she understood that there was no bringing him back, she thought that possessing the stone might open a door for her, one where she would find her father and brother on the other side.

  Her fumbling hands grazed the handle of a knife inside its sheath. Stunned, she jerked her hands away. But only for a moment. Resuming her search, she felt a hardness near the priest’s right ribcage. She slipped her hand under the vestment and discovered a hidden pocket. The stone was inside. She grabbed it.

  The instant the stone was safe in her hand, the priest stirred. His extremities slowly dredged the air, sifting for consciousness. Emmaline stood up and backed away, watching him closely as she went. The priest’s caved-in face was a swirl of dark colors. One of his eyes was closed over like a tomb. His other eye was half-open but it was impossible to tell if it was fully functioning. A black bolt of thought encouraged her to pick up the stone and smash it on his face once more, but while she was indulging the notion, the priest’s good eye expanded to three-quarters and locked on hers.

  She ran.

  3

  She was halfway to the Houghtons’ when she changed her mind. She needed to flee Mossbane entirely. Heeding her instincts, she rushed into the forest, heading north toward the creek that marked the boundary of her previous woodland excursions. Her father had always warned her never to go farther than the creek, the reason being that the Wolfresh border was that way, and beyond the creek he couldn’t guarantee her safety. But at the present moment nothing seemed more dangerous to Emmaline than remaining in Mossbane.

  She made the creek in ten minutes, then continued running for thirty more. She had heard her father comment that the Wolfresh border was farther away some days than others, but most of the time three miles did the trick. She had always assumed that what he meant was that after three miles you might run into a Massaporan. When at last she stopped running and started walking, it felt to Emmaline as though she was halfway to the Impossible Mountains, but the thought of the priest trailing her spurred her onward, toward exhaustion.

  Half an hour more and she collapsed against the trunk of an oak tree. Generally speaking, she knew how to orient herself in the woods, but she had ran too far with the wolf of fear nipping at her heels, and now she was lost. She would have cried, but her grief was too heavy; she thought that if she sat long enough against the tree trunk she might simply sink into the ground, and there be buried. Her thoughts were a black swarm of bees, her head gravity’s slave. Together, they took her under.

  She awoke to a pitter-patter of voices. A boy and a girl—both four or five years younger than Emmaline—were sitting on their haunches no more than five feet away, bouncing tinny words off each other in heavily accented Harrish, staring their fill. Emmaline’s first thought was that they were Massaporans, but upon closer inspection she wasn’t sure: their skin color was creamier and their bodies squattier than the few Massaporans she had seen. Also, they were speaking Emmaline’s language, albeit in a clipped and high-pitched brogue.

  Noticing that she was awake, the girl looked over her shoulder and called out “Ded!” Seconds later, a short dumpling of a man appeared from behind a copse of trees. His body was shaped so that it appeared he was contesting his kids’ respective claims to paramount compactness, and his skin was a dull, greyish white, which contrasted unflatteringly with his retreating red hair. He waddled toward his children in apparent good humor. To Emmaline’s surprise, his good humor didn’t disappear when he saw her, although his lips did form an astonished O.

  “What have we ‘ere?” he asked as he drew closer, his curious eyes like brass coins. Over his shoulder Emmaline saw another figure step out from behind the copse of trees. A Massaporan woman, through and through.

  “She’s a girl, Ded,” said the boy.

  The man chuckled. “She is, isn’t she?” the man said, dropping to his haunches like his kids. He had the thighs of a prize bull. “Havenese, from the looks of it. You’re too far north, dear,” he addressed Emmaline, his voice honeyed with kindness. “You’d best go home.”

  His words were a suggestion, not a command. Emmaline was frightened, but she summoned the courage to speak nevertheless. “My family is dead. And the others don’t want me there.” She omitted mentioning the priest, though he was foremost in her mind; she imagined him standing guard at the border of Haven like an avenging angel.

  The man didn’t reply, only continued studying her, weighing his thoughts. In the meantime, the woman made her way up the hill. When she approached, the man turned to the woman and they shared a look that was both a question and an answer. The woman didn’t exude kindness the way the man did, but neither did she look cruel. She simply seemed wary.

  “We’re travelers,” the man said, “heading home. We live northeast, in the country of Falls, in the place the Jindois people once called Non.” The woman grinned a minnow’s mouth at the mention of Non, her teeth filmy and wet. Emmaline knew about Falls, but she had never heard of Non. “If you want to follow us home, that’s up to you. But if you do, trail at a distance. Were one of your people to spot yeh traveling with us, they’d think we’d kidnapped yeh. So we won’t be interacting with yeh during the trip. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if we left behind some food from time to time.” A quarter of a smile remained fixed on his face. His red eyebrows wriggled like caterpillars aflame. “Once we reach Non, there’ll be a house, and food, and work. You’re welcome to stay with us if you’re so inclined.”

  Emmaline didn’t reply. Making a decision at the present moment was beyond her. But the man nodded like they’d reached a suitable agreement. Then he stood and motioned for his children to do the same. Rising from their haunches, the boy gave Emmaline an entreating look, while the girl encouraged her with a beckoning wave. Before they could signal further, their parents ushered them away, and soon the foursome was walking through the forest, backs turned toward Emmaline, headed east.

  She waited until they were nearly fifty yards off before rising. For lack of a better plan, she followed.

  The man’s name was Oostri. He had been brought to Dreyland from the island of Breek as a boy, in tow with his aunt, his last remaining living relative. At the time, it was common for poverty-stricken Breeks—meaning nine-tenths of the Breekish population—to sell themselves as indentured servants to Dreylanders. Over the years, the practice became fuzzy, so that by the time Oostri’s aunt peddled their respective freedoms, it was difficult to say if she had auctioned off Oostri as a servant or a slave. Once in Dreyland, Oostri was treated as the latter, and he spent the remaining years of his boyhood tending to the capricious whims of a plantation princeling in northwest Tiderealm. He might have been miserable, had it not been his fortune to watch the Torquecans suffering and dying in the fields, which made his existence seem pleasant by comparison. Docile by nature, Oostri resigned himself to his fate, but then came the Sundering, when the ships that had for one hundred and seventy-five years bridged Harroland to Dreyland suddenly stopped arriving, some deep, dark magic having taken hold. Within weeks, a daring slave revolution arose, and for a time it was impossible to tell whether the oppressed would win a monumental victory or if the powers that be would snuff out the uprising with a terrible might. The end result was an uneasy compromise—the Dreylanders carved out a meager home state (Chineyaco, formerly Brine) for the Torquecans who demanded their freedom, and made indentured servants out of the ones who did not—but Oostri wasn’t around to witness it: at an opportune moment, he fled into the mountains of Falls with a handful of fellow Breeks, and there made a new home, working the rocky soil that the conquering Harrolanders had forewent, living among the craggy peaks that called to m
ind his long-lost island home.

  Oostri’s children, Clay and Seywa, loved to hear their father retell his life’s story, and they insisted whenever he reminisced that Emmaline join them, and bear witness. The mother, Shayo, who told no stories of her own—she hardly spoke, let alone spun yarns—always hovered at the periphery during Oostri’s performances, seemingly preoccupied by household chores, but as time passed, Emmaline grew to believe that her presence served another purpose: she was there to ensure that Oostri didn’t say too much. On those rare occasions when Oostri dipped his storytelling cup too deeply into the well of his shared past with Shayo, she would harrumph, or sweep her broom ever closer, or sing loud enough to disrupt, and Oostri, his eyes often heavy with grain alcohol, would laugh away his train of thought, and take up another.

  Emmaline grew to love her new family, at least to the extent that she could, having lost her old one. The twins, Clay and Seywa, adopted her both as an older sister and as an arbiter of fair play: they happily turned over their many long-running disputes to her foreign judgement. She was wary of the role at first, thinking that to side with one was to alienate the other, but to her surprise she found that the loser was always as satisfied with her decision as the winner. The twins rewarded Emmaline’s adjudicating prowess with long explorations of their mountain home. Initially, the mountain struck Emmaline as one in a seemingly endless chain of mica-flecked crags, but, with the children acting as her guide, she learned its secrets. Clay and Seywa showed her the powerful stream churning below the southern slope, the splotchy groupings of evergreens where the twins played and sometimes took shelter, and the animal tracks that occasionally, when followed, yielded glimpses of mountain creatures, wildcats and bighorn goats and jacket deer but more often ground squirrels and chatter dogs and junk rabbits. There were ostensibly neighbors on the nearby mountains but Emmaline never saw them, except for one time at a distance, when Clay pointed at the outline of three men walking the slope of a mountain miles away, and said, “There’s Freskly, and Jojoy, and Yetts. They’re Breekish like my dad. They escaped with him from Tiderealm years ago.” To which Emmaline nodded knowingly, having heard the story many times.

  Oostri and Shayo each handled Emmaline differently. Oostri treated her with an affection that was a close relative to the affection he showed his children. Emmaline suspected that he had further reserves of this affection in store, but she kept them at bay by refusing to fully warm to his overtures. For every kind word that Oostri spoke, Emmaline responded with a gracious but detached deference, and in doing so staked out their relationship as transactional—hard work for food and a roof.

  Shayo, Emmaline could tell, liked this about her. No kind words escaped from Shayo’s mouth, but, on those rare occasions when Emmaline needed help, Shayo was first on the scene: she held a cold compress to Emmaline’s forehead when Emmaline broke out in a sick fever; she saved food for Emmaline when Emmaline’s chores went long; and she darned the holes in Emmaline’s clothes without complaint, the same as she did for Clay and Seywa. Shayo watched Emmaline more carefully than the others, too, but there was no judgement in her attentions, only a guarded curiosity. After a few months Emmaline felt that Shayo knew her best of all, despite the fact that they never spoke.

  Still, like the others, Shayo didn’t know Emmaline’s secrets. Emmaline was careful to keep those hidden away. The ones that resided in her thoughts were simple enough to conceal: Oostri was the only family member who asked about her past. He did this gingerly, making it clear that Emmaline didn’t have to answer if she didn’t want to. So she didn’t. As time went by, he pried less and less, until there came a day when Emmaline felt certain that he had asked for the last time, and would leave any future revelations to her discretion.

  Keeping the stone’s existence a secret was a different matter. When Emmaline had first arrived in Falls, she buried the stone under a rock twenty yards behind the family’s stone hut. But out of sight it plagued her mind, becoming, in its absence, a more distracting object than it had been in her hands. She worried that if she left it there she’d return to find it gone, dug up and carried away by a four-legged forager, or, worse, discovered by one of the two-legged creatures she lived with. So she dug it up.

  Keeping it with her at all times brought its own set of challenges. More often than not she stored it in a pocket beneath her petticoat, then proceeded to pet it obsessively throughout the course of the day, checking to ensure that it was still there. On those rare occasions when she didn’t keep it on her she hid it under the cot in her corner of the hut, but it called to her the same there as it had outside. Ultimately she decided to never put it down, a trying task but not as tiresome as letting the stone out of her sight.

  Though she possessed the stone, Emmaline was too wary of its powers to try and summon the Deer King. But about one year after her arrival, finding herself alone by the stream, she attempted her father’s trick. Turning the stone over and over in her hands and muttering the word Dachahelu, she watched with amazement as the child appeared, much changed from the last time she had seen him. His face was baby-fat full and his eyes were a hypnotic green, and on the crown of his head were tiny nubs—rough, wooden bumps. Most interesting of all was his comportment: for such a small babe, he appeared eerily possessed, a look of the ages in his eyes. While she watched the child, Emmaline felt the stone pulling west, toward Wolfresh. Unnerved, she stopped turning the stone over, and the boy disappeared.

  After this first venture, she didn’t try it again for weeks. But one day, alone in the hut, temptation got the better of her, and she summoned the boy once more. Within seconds the Deer King appeared, but so did the twins: they walked inside the hut the instant the rock revealed the young deity’s face.

  “What is that?” Clay asked with bald-faced curiosity when he saw the stone in her hands.

  Emmaline glanced down. The boy had flickered away. In her hands remained a smooth, glassy, blue-grey stone, its color like a fractured sky.

  “It’s a stone,” she replied. Emmaline’s heart played a peculiar beat. She felt exposed, but also a sense of relief. Perhaps it was best if the family knew. Perhaps she would at last tell them her story.

  The twins gathered round, full of dumb, sweet attention.

  “Is it a special stone?” Seywa asked. Emmaline thought that Seywa’s Harrish sounded like her father’s, high-pitched and metallic. It stood in stark contrast to the earthy Massaporan Emmaline sometimes heard Seywa speaking with her mother.

  “It is to me.”

  “Can I see it?” asked Clay.

  Emmaline handed it over. Instantly Clay started turning the stone over and over in his hands. For a moment Emmaline was certain that the boy-king would appear, but, without the word being chanted, nothing happened. His curiosity slaked, Clay handed the stone to his sister.

  Seywa held the stone with wary fingers, eyed it with a faint suspicion. “Mama says that bad people use magic stones to kill her god.”

  A lump formed in Emmaline’s throat. She supposed that she had known on some unconscious level that Shayo was an adherent of the Deer King, but the reality of it startled her. Scrambled thoughts overran her mind: justifications excuses reasons apologies declarations. But she didn’t reply, and the stone in Seywa’s hand remained a stone.

  “Here,” Seywa said, handing it back. “I think yours is just a rock.”

  Emmaline nodded.

  After revealing the stone to the twins, Emmaline began to feel, for the first time since arriving in Falls, like an outsider. She loved her adopted family no less, but now when she looked at them she couldn’t help but focus on how she was different from them: her skin color was different, her accent was different, her body build was different, and, most of all, the fact that her father had devoted his life to preventing the rebirth of the warmongering god that Shayo’s people worshipped was different.

  Since her arrival, Emmaline had known that one day she would leave, but now plotting her departure felt urgent
. Only she didn’t know where to go and what to do. Or so she told herself. In truth, she knew exactly what she intended to do, only that the task ahead of her felt too monumental to begin.

  She was haunted by dreams of her competing destinies. In her mind it seemed that she must either fulfill her father’s unfinished task or avenge his death. The latter consumed her: she dreamed of the priest nonstop. In her dreams she was fearless, stalking the priest with a hound dog’s abandon, howling for his blood, but no matter her bloodlust and want for revenge, it was he who dispatched her in the end, his size and experience too vast to overcome. Each time she awoke, she knew that she had already missed her best opportunity to end the priest’s life, on the day that her father had died. But the frequency of the dreams made the attempt to find and kill him seem preordained, and the ensuing outcome, a matter of fate. Perhaps, she thought, dying at the priest’s hands was her destiny.

  But she also dreamt of the boy. The Deer King. Less frequent than her dreams of the priest, the ones of the boy were decidedly more varied in tone. In one of the dreams she was playing in her old front yard with her brother and father, when the boy suddenly joined them, frolicking with a feral abandon. He was older in the dream than he was in real life, and on his head were a pair of burgeoning antlers. Shortly after the boy appeared, Emmaline’s father and brother vanished. Unable to find them, Emmaline turned on the boy, a rage like a tempest stirring up inside of her. She drew a knife from thin air and tackled the boy against the side of the cabin, but when she made to stab him he stopped her with his eyes, which were singed with a strange green fire.

  Then she woke up.

  In another she killed him. She found him waiting for her at the bottom of the mountain, presenting himself like an offering. She took a knife and slit his throat without a second thought. After doing so she discovered that she knew the way home. She returned to Haven and the old log cabin, but when she arrived the priest was waiting for her, and the dream ended as all her dreams with the priest ended.