by Ben Spencer
Emmaline’s eyes went to the old woman. She was struggling back to her feet. She looked fragile, old, and, for the moment at least, bereft of power. But then the boy emerged from the dew oak, his eyes green cinders, and the old woman was made anew, hoisting herself upright and mouthing unheard invocations.
A swell of noise. The Massaporans came to violent life. A song of death in their throats. They tore after the Rugarder as one, ready to sacrifice themselves to bring the beast to its knees. But the priest and the horse were a seamless and powerful machine, and together they navigated the encroaching madness, forging a path with brute, efficient force: the horse blasted through what flesh and bone the priest couldn’t circumvent, and soon the pursuing host was on their heels.
Within seconds they had cleared the village edge, and tore into the woods.
7
An endless blur of timber. The eastern sun an incandescent prisoner behind wooden bars. Promises of death backed by arrows thudding into bark. The persistent, percussive thump of hooves like scattershot hail on a tin roof, fast on flat ground, slower on uneven terrain, never letting up, ever heading south. Massaporan faces fading like apparitions in the trees. The priest keeping the horse on a road bed that vanished only to rematerialize time and again. Smaller, weaker horses, falling back. The priest’s arm like an iron bolt shutting Emmaline in captivity. And then, when the imminent danger had faded, the unceasing sameness, hours of it, galloping cantering trotting, until they came upon a chattering brook and the priest slowed the horse first to a walk, and then to a stop.
The priest lowered Emmaline to the ground, not ungently. The blood in her body reclaimed abandoned outposts. Nearby, two grey squirrels played tag to a windy melody. Emmaline was thirsty, oh so thirsty, and the brook was enticing, so she walked over to it, stooped down, and took a drink. When she glanced up, the priest was kneeling beside her, filling his canteen. His pallor, she noticed, was considerably worse than before. He fixed her with dead eyes.
“The old woman took the stone you stole from me?”
She nodded. She was afraid of the priest, but having nearly died so many times these last few days had somewhat dulled her capacity for fear.
The priest sighed. He sunk into himself: it was like watching a speeded-up version of a mountain eroding. “That was her in the flesh,” he said, looking away from Emmaline. “The Raven Queen. Now I know who I’m up against.”
Emmaline said nothing. But she remembered the way the old woman had touched the priest, and how his face had turned ashen and his knees had buckled. It reminded her of when the old woman had touched her, and how, with a single word, she had brought death to Emmaline’s doorstep.
She wondered if the priest was dying but didn’t realize it.
The priest spent the next ten minutes tending to his shoulder. He made no effort to remove the arrowhead, instead pouring what looked to Emmaline to be whisky over the wound, and gently poking at the flesh surrounding it. Emmaline sat by the brook, taking the occasional drink from time to time. At last the priest put the flask of whisky away and stopped worrying at the wound. “Doshensa needs to have a look at this,” he muttered to no one in particular. He turned to Emmaline. “I will not harm you, girl. You have done me a great wrong, but, because we are both children of the Bronze Titan, I will not take my revenge. I will return you to Mossbane, and hand you over to those who know you. And that will be the end of it.”
“You killed my father,” she said in response. The words weren’t premeditated, but now that she had spoken, she knew that she wanted to see his reaction.
The priest looked Emmaline over as if he were seeing her for the first time. His eyes went dark again, caverns of inscrutable thought. “Did you see the boy when you were there?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“And what did he look like to you?”
“He looked like a boy,” she lied.
The priest frowned at her. “That boy will grow into a monster. He will kill any settler of Harrish descent by the thousands, if not the tens of thousands. Your father’s job was to stop that boy being born. He failed in his task. Had he willingly turned over the Saving Stone, I would have spared his life. But he refused. So I took his life, and I took the stone, and I would damn well do it again.”
“You failed too,” she spat at him. “It’s been over a year, and the boy is still alive.”
He grabbed her by the wrist, lightning-quick, and jerked her in the same rag-doll fashion that he had jerked the sacrificial boy back in the village. Her bones rattled inside her body like a baby’s toy. By the time her brain had sloshed back into place, the priest was gripping the index finger on her left hand. He snapped it in two like a raw carrot.
“I will break every bone in your body if you so much as speak a word about that boy once you are returned to Haven! Do you understand me? I will kill that boy! And as far as you are concerned, he is already dead!”
She heard his words, but the meaning was lost in a tsunami of pain. She might have screamed had she not lost her breath. She bit the inside of her mouth hard enough to draw blood, reflexively at first but then on purpose, the metallic taste gnawing at her senses until she could locate the flavor inside the shocking pain, and she focused on that, the taste of blood. Now that she was in control of herself again, she refused to scream or cry out. The blood swirled inside her mouth until the wave of pain crested and crashed, and then she laughed a jagged little laugh, knowing the top half of her finger was dangling and lost. It seemed funny to her. Then she spit some of the blood on the ground, and repeated herself to the priest once more.
“You failed too.” And again. “You failed too.”
The priest raised his hand as if he meant to strike her. But then the light of anger went out in his eyes and he looked like a lost boy, scared of the truth of what Emmaline had said. Without speaking, he grabbed Emmaline roughly, carried her over to the Rugarder, and mounted up.
They resumed their journey south.
In the cool of the evening, they approached a Massaporan village. A group of Massaporans hurried out to meet them. They wore wary but accommodating looks on their faces. Upon laying eyes on the priest and seeing his wound, they hurried Emmaline and the priest into the village proper.
Once inside the village, the priest and Emmaline dismounted in front of a wood and clay house. A middle-aged man adorned in large, pale-white feathers emerged. The man looked disconcerted when he saw the priest’s wound.
“It’s not our doing, I hope?” the man asked the priest in polished Harrish.
“It is,” the priest replied.
The priest dismounted from the Rugarder, as did Emmaline. She noted that the ashen look in the priest’s face had deepened. Behind the fleshy mask of his face she thought she could see the outline of his skull.
The man with the white feathers urged the priest to follow him into his home. The priest assented, but then, with a start, he remembered Emmaline. He turned to the nearby Massaporans and commanded that they keep close watch over her while he was gone. The man with the white feathers translated. Then the two of them disappeared inside.
Emmaline’s four keepers, men all, stood around Emmaline in an awkward silence, their eyes flitting everywhere except her face. Except for one. He was a short fellow with inquisitive eyes, and when he exchanged glances with Emmaline, she thought he looked like a mouse, albeit one with bushy eyebrows. She assumed that he was weak because of his size, but then out of the blue he spoke to the others in a jarring, combative tenor, causing everyone to jump, Emmaline included. The others mumbled replies suggesting that they were uninterested in tangling with this strange, short man. He responded by barking at them a little more until they said nothing at all. Seemingly satisfied that he’d ensured their silence, the man pointed at Emmaline’s broken finger, wanting a closer look.
She raised it in the air for him to see.
The others turned away. Mouse man, on the other hand, engaged in a series of clipped little head bobs
that bespoke both enthusiastic concern and a ferocity of spirit. Then he put his index in the air and motioned for Emmaline to wait.
He returned minutes later holding two pieces of thinly shaved jorkwood, fine twine, and a leather-skin pouch. He held the pouch out for Emmaline, and then pantomimed that she should drink. She did. The clean, clear bite of corn alcohol scorched her throat. She took two swallows and tried to hand the pouch back. Mouse man spurned the pouch, motioned that she should drink more. Though her vision was already swimmy, she did as he suggested. Her throat burned again, but this time her body lightened. As she came back into herself, she thought she saw her soul flit away from her like a restless butterfly. She caught her soul with her right hand, and smiled at mouse man to celebrate the feat. He nodded as if he’d seen it too.
Or so she believed.
Mouse man motioned for her to give him her left hand, the one with the broken finger.
She complied.
When he set her broken bone back into place, the pain rang clear and light in her head like a morning bell. When the bell stopped ringing, she looked down at mouse man’s handiwork. Her finger was a corpse inside the coffin of jorkwood, and mouse man was dabbing the jorkwood with a sticky, sap-like substance. Finished, he took the twine and tied it around Emmaline’s finger while pressing it against the sticky substance on the jorkwood. Then he made clever little knots in the twine that looked like coils of snakes. When at last he was finished, Emmaline’s finger, though badly pained, felt secure inside its splint.
“Thank you,” she said. She felt that she needed to offer him something more than her appreciation. But the only gift she could think to offer was her name, so she offered him that. “Emmaline,” she said, pointing at herself.
He nodded to indicate that he understood. Then he stuck his own finger at his chest.
“Twichi,” he offered in turn.
After setting Emmaline’s finger, Twichi insisted that she follow him home. The other men charged with watching over Emmaline took umbrage when Twichi led her away, but he flicked his wrist at them and made sucking noises with his teeth until they stopped.
Twichi lived in a small log house near the village edge with his wife and two small children. His abode had a symmetry and sturdiness that put the others Massaporan houses to shame. Emmaline had a strong suspicion that he had constructed it himself.
After meeting Twichi’s wife and children—the wife had the look and mannerisms of an industrious beaver, while the kids, who appeared to be between two and four years of age, seemed possessed of an inexhaustible energy—the first thing Emmaline noticed was the triangular symbol that she had seen in the Deer King’s village, carved into the log that hung over Twichi’s front door. Drifting in a pleasant corn alcohol haze, she walked over and touched the symbol, remembering too late what had happened the last time a Massaporan saw her affect the mysterious mark. She flinched and withdrew her hand upon realizing what she was doing, but, when she turned to see Twichi’s reaction, he was not only unbothered, he appeared to encourage her: he nodded his head approvingly and, between fits of chewing on the shoot of an unknown plant, said “Weesh, Dachahelu, weesh, weesh.”
She wished they spoke a common language so that she might unburden herself of a few questions. She started to say something in Harrish but she lost her words in the overripe, late-evening sky. The familial atmosphere was affecting her: she realized in an inebriated epiphany that she wanted nothing so much as she wanted to belong. For an instant, her thoughts turned melancholic as she reminisced on Oostri, Clay, and Seywa, and the way that Shayo had betrayed her. In short order her father and brother appeared, their faces flashing perfectly clear for a moment, only to be lost again, and once more become blurred, smudgy memories. Yet another memory rose from the mists. The boy. The Deer King. He stared up at her with large, wanting eyes, a perfect, pristine memory. In that instant she felt a connection to him like an electric shock thrumming the core of her being.
She was still thinking of the boy when the priest and the man with the white feathers approached. They would have caught her unaware had Twichi not stood up and walked over to meet them. The priest’s shoulder was dressed in white bandages, doubly covered by billowing vestments. He looked marginally better than before, but his eyes were still far-off, and his face remained a pallid recess. Emmaline stared at him. He did not stare back.
Twichi and the man with the white feathers exchanged a series of hushed inflections. Even in a lower register Emmaline detected Twichi’s matter-of-fact, confrontational lilt. The man with the white feathers responded tit for tat. When it was over, the man with the white feathers turned and addressed Emmaline in Harrish.
“You will stay here with my nephew and his family tonight. In the morning we will escort the priest across the border to Mossbane. You will go with him.”
The man with the white feathers didn’t wait for a response. Guiding the priest by the shoulder, the two of them turned to go.
Twichi awoke Emmaline in the cool dark of the morning, in the hour before the birds sing awake the sun. He made her corn cakes and potatoes over a fresh fire, then urged her to quickly eat. He stared intently at her while she ate. It seemed to Emmaline that he had something he wanted to say, only the language barrier was getting in the way.
She finished eating minutes before sunrise. Daylight brought with it the priest and the man with the white feathers atop the Rugarder and a dapple grey, respectively, ready to move south.
Seeing the men arrive, Emmaline turned to say goodbye to Twichi, but he was already walking away. The mystery of his kindness continued to baffle her, but there was no time at the present to unravel it.
The man with the white feathers offered Emmaline his arm. When she grabbed it, he swung her onto the horse. She had assumed that she would ride with the priest, but it appeared the man with the white feathers wanted to spare the priest the labor of riding tandem.
At first the trip resembled her flight with the priest from the day before, an endless parade of blood elms, dew oaks, and supple jorkwoods, but after a couple of hours the forest welcomed less imposing types of timber, white poplars and snow birch and a multitude of saplings. There was a change in the air as well: earthy zephyrs replaced the sweetly crisp winds of Wolfresh. The wind batted familiarly at Emmaline’s face. After more than a year away, she was almost home.
She glanced ahead at the priest. He was drawn up around himself like a cave. She thought again of the old woman’s touch, and wondered if the priest was being slowly drained of his life force by a magic that would kill him once he crossed the Havenese border.
I hope so, she thought. He deserves to die.
They entered the outlying areas of Mossbane mid-afternoon. The priest and the man with the white feathers grew more alert, stacking their spines in the saddle. Emmaline hadn’t seen the priest’s face the entire ride, so she couldn’t tell if he was faring better or worse than before. They rode past a handful of outlying houses without being noticed, but then, when they were perhaps a quarter mile from the town proper, a farmer saw them and stole ahead.
By the time they entered Mossbane, a crowd had gathered along the main thoroughfare. Everywhere Emmaline looked, familiar faces filled in the gaps, rekindling flames of memory in Emmaline’s mind. Every countenance wore an expression of bewilderment. Emmaline’s name rang out. Emmaline searched the crowd and saw Regina Houghton among the assembled, calling for her. Emmaline gave an awkward little wave in return, not knowing what else to do.
The man with the white feathers brought his horse to a stop, as did the priest. To Emmaline’s surprise, the man with the white feathers spoke.
“I am Doshensa, healer and one of the seven Koeceti of the Wolfresh nation. As such I am authorized to travel outside of Wolfresh and speak on behalf of my people, as is stipulated in the Wolfresh-Potter Accord. Kern, great priest of the Bronze Titan, came to me in search of treatment for a wound that he had suffered at the hands of a renegade group of Massaporans kno
wn to worship Dachahelu, more commonly known in the Harrish tongue as the Deer King. I now return him safely to a land beyond the borders of Wolfresh, and into the arms of a people who keep the faith of the one true god, the Bronze Titan.”
The one true god? Emmaline remembered Twichi proudly showing her the symbol of the Deer King carved into the front of his house. Were there Massaporans who worshipped the Bronze Titan as well? Or was this all a ruse for the citizens of Mossbane’s benefit?
Doshensa’s horse stepped backwards, and flipped its restless tail. Doshensa continued, “To show that no terms of the Wolfresh-Potter Accord have been violated, I ask the priest to attest that he remains in possession of a Saving Stone.”
Without saying a word, the priest reached into a hidden pocket in his vestments and brought out the Saving Stone. Emmaline caught a glimpse of his face in profile: he looked damaged, like an egg with a crack. He flashed the stone at the crowd with a look of contempt. Then he hid it away again.
Doshensa nodded solemnly as if this had been a moment of great import. Satisfied, he turned and grabbed Emmaline around the waist, helping her dismount. Once she was off, Doshensa’s dapple grey began pacing this way and that. It was difficult to tell if the horse was behaving at Doshensa’s urging or by its own volition. “Now I take my leave,” Doshensa said. “See that the priest is cared for.”
Doshensa turned his horse to go, but before he could, a voice rang out from the crowd.
“Is the Deer King dead?”
An uneasy quiet descended, like the sound of carrion birds lighting on a carcass. Doshensa played his response masterfully, turning to the priest, and, in doing so, directing the attention of the crowd toward the priest as well. Emmaline’s gaze followed everyone else’s.