Kelc lay on the ground, his side aflame from the shallow cut his father gave him, his face pulsing from the elbow he’d taken to the chin and the blade to the forehead. “Imbecile,” he wheezed, meaning himself and his father.
He’d pushed it, he knew, trying to appear the strong Symean. Tears tried to well in his right eye, but Kelc blinked them back. “Of course he’d greeching test it.” He pulled in a deep breath, causing his side to flare even worse. “Like a greeching wolf,” he grunted, forcing himself onto his left side. “I threatened…him.” Kelc sat up, knowing that he needed to stitch the cut up, knowing his father would bar Shaia from coming to help him. “And he attacked.” He sucked in a measured breath. “How can I be greeching surprised?” he mouthed as tears again sought to ooze from his eyes. He again forced them back.
Kelc gained his feet slowly, blood running freely from his right side, past his arm which he pressed to his wound, and down his leg. “Hells!” he spat, not because of the pain, but because of his realization.
It felt good to impress his father. I actually thought he respected me. The thought mocked the young man. I’ve been so busy, he thought, putting on these airs of strength and confidence… “Hells,” he growled through gritted teeth. “He never saw me as anything more than before. And today he made sure both of us remembered it.” He pictured his father’s scowl, looking down on him while he pinned his own child with the tip of a sword. “A true Symean,” Kelc grunted as he stumbled through his first few steps.
“Symea,” he breathed, the word a profanity in his mind. “Mindless,” he muttered. “Worthless.” He staggered toward the house. “I wish it would just be gone.” The impression of a smile visited his swelling lips. “And take father with it.”
Kelc reached up carefully, putting as little stress as possible on the still-tender wound on his side while he brushed Macy, currying her carefully, drawing the brush along her in broad slow motions while Freska looked on from the next stall. He’d volunteered to take care of the team before his father thought up any other, less enjoyable duties for him.
Normally, Shaia or his mother would comb the horses and feed them, but they had enough to do, jarring and preserving fruit, the last apples to be found at market.
Macy nickered as Kelc caught her ear under the brush, quietly offering a complaint.
“Sorry, girl,” he muttered, turning the brush away from her ear, “I haven’t done this in a long time.” He patted her shoulder before running his hand over her withers and down her back, enjoying the strength that lay just below the smooth brown fur. “You are beautiful.”
Kelc carefully drew the brush down the horse’s body, running gently over her rump, particularly when nearing her gaskin, which sometimes caused her to become edgy. “It’s okay,” he reassured her, “I’m just gonna brush you out. Get this hay and grass out of your coat.” He eased the brush along her coat as he spoke, eliciting no response at all from the horse.
“Kelc!” His father’s voice cut through the chill morning air. “Saddle up Freska. Shaia will need her to ride to the Gallat’s,” he said as he neared the stable door.
The Gallat’s had a son a year older than Shaia though Kelc couldn’t remember his name. What he could remember was the boy’s eyes: dark, beady and angry. His face flushed at knowing Shy would be there to consider marriage, though he doubted that she would be soiled during her first meeting, taken advantage of. That would cost money and would be very unusual.
“Did you hear me, boy?” Varrl snapped as he leaned into the stable, only his head and one shoulder passing the door.
“Yes, sir.” Kelc knew he sounded disrespectful as soon as he spoke.
“Watch it, boy. You need me to thrash you again to remind you of how you should speak to me?”
Almost without thought, Kelc ripped his skiver from its sheath and spun, hurling the black steel. As it flew he felt the spirit that fell from the blade, vicious and intense. He could sense it as though it was sentient.
He urged it, at first, to take his father in the forehead, to split his arrogant thoughtless skull and drop him, dead, on the stable floor. Almost instantly after the skiver left his hand, however, fear spiked his heart and he yearned for the blade to miss, to fall to the floor or miss wildly, but it didn’t.
It smacked into its target tip first, burying two and a half knuckles of steel, standing out in the morning air with little more than a shiver.
Varrl looked at the dagger, planted in the stable door just before his heart, the honed tip of the weapon beginning to jut through the other side of the wood.
“Hells and blood, boy, what’s gotten into you?” asked his father, his words quick and his tone atypically calm.
Kelc stood, terrified, unable to speak, one hand clutching the curry comb and the other waiting on his sword should he need to defend himself. He forced himself to breathe after it became obvious that Varrl would not immediately charge him. The two stared at each other, Kelc stunned and Varrl, as he was accustomed to, waiting for an answer.
“I’m busy,” the young man finally offered.
Varrl scrutinized his youngest son for a moment, most of him still hidden by the stable door. He glanced again at the black skiver, aimed at his heart, its intent obvious, and then he smiled.
“Busy,” he said as if tasting the word, and smiled again. A genuine offering of mirth from a man that Kelc had seldom seen break his oppressive demeanor. In fact, Kelc had never witnessed his father smile as he did now, not even with Kreggen. The boy’s fingers tightened on his sword as chills coursed through him, standing seemingly every hair on his body on end. A snort of laughter burst abruptly from the older man though he immediately squashed it. “So you are,” he said with a nod. “Saddle the horse as soon as you can.”
With that, Varrl disappeared from the stable, pulling the door closed behind him.
Kelc stared at the closed door, waiting, his breath coming in shallow pulls. He shook his head minutely, unable to accept his father’s behavior, unable to fit it into any pattern that he understood.
“What in the greeching hells is going on?” One moment his father wants to pound him into the ground and the next he is sharing some inexplicable Symean joke. Kelc glanced back at Freska, but the horse offered no insight, her head down, her rubbery lips snatching more hay from the stable floor. “Skeesh.”
The young man immediately walked into the tack room and plucked the smallest saddle from the peg and inspected it for any cuts or breaks, running his hand along the edges. As much as he disliked the idea of sending Shaia to see a suitor, he still loved her and wanted the ride to be comfortable.
He spun back to the horses and Shy stood there, the stable door open behind her. “Hells, Shy!” Kelc’s mood helped little in dealing with yet another surprise.
“My, Kelc, you do seem a bit jumpy,” she said, her small smile turning instantly into a frown. “Perhaps because you’ve been avoiding me and plotting with father.”
“Shy!” Kelc hissed, tossing the saddle he held into his sister’s unready hands as he leapt to the door and closed it. “Take care!” he snapped. “Father and the Warden have asked me to help catch you at being a practitioner, because you are the only one they have left to suspect.”
“I know,” Shy answered, moving the Freska and placing the saddle atop her. “Mother said that was how they would get you to break. They are still after you, Kelc, or are you so busy being a ‘good Symean man’ that you can’t see the noose slipping around your neck.”
“Me?” barked the young man. “No. Shy, they are…”
“Kelc,” she snapped, her eyes boiling, “father could kill mother and I right now and the warden would say nothing of it except that we must have deserved whatever punishment father offered.” She pulled a deep breath into her lungs. “I ride to another household where a pig of a man may bed me for a silver,” she seethed, “to see if he enjoys me enough to enslave me for the rest of my life.” She marched up to her little brother and banged
the palm of her hand into his already sore forehead, causing him to wince. “They are going to kill you, you fool. They merely wait for you to show some sign that it is okay. And by the way father just walked across the yard whistling, I might guess that you gave him exactly what he wanted.”
“He…smiled after I hurled a dagger at him.” Kelc chewed on his top lip nervously. “Shy…” He looked at the ground. “I am a fool.”
“You are,” she said, causing him to look up. When he did, she kissed him, lingering there, taking his mind completely off of his troubles. His face flushed and his blood surged before she backed away. “But you also have the ability to survive them, if mother is any judge.” Shy hugged her brother hard. He could feel her body pressed against him. “And if you must flee this place, Kelc. I am going with you.” She leaned back enough to look him in the eyes. “That is not up for question.” She kissed him again, this time much shorter. “Now, let’s get Freska ready so that I can convince Pellek Gallatson that I am less fit to be his wife than you are.” Her smile offered warmth and more, leaving Kelc little option but to smile back at her as he moved to tighten the saddle.
“Shy,” he said, considering her words and the truth obvious in them. “Thank you. I’m not sure what I would do if I lost you.”
“You’d get yourself killed,” she said, smiling brightly. “And Symea would breathe a sigh of relief.”
His sister climbed atop Freska as Kelc finished testing the belts, making sure they were secure. “Lead me out,” she said. Kelc smiled up at her, drinking her in, hope and foreboding at war in his heart. He grabbed her calf and gave it a squeeze before taking the leads and guiding Freska out of the stable.
The winter air washed over him in the yard, causing him to shiver instantly. “See you in two days, little brother,” Shaia said as she took the reins. “Watch father like a Grey Hawk. Something is happening though I can’t tell you what.”
“I will. I know what you think, Shy, and I know it’s right,” Kelc answered, glancing quickly about the yard. His father worked in the shed thirty paces away, his grumbling audible. “Watch out for yourself. You, I would not do without.”
With a last lingering look at her brother, Shy smiled, dug her heels into Freska’s flank and headed south.
A mix of hail and snow plunged furiously from the sky. It piled first against the buildings and the northern side of each headstone, the gusting wind carrying some of it sideways, allowing it to pelt Kelc in the face.
“Hells,” he muttered as he raised his cape up over his mouth, barring the freezing air that came with the blizzard. Snow snuck into the hood and froze him for an instant before it melted, further soaking the back of his neck. “Greeching…” The sentence fell into grumbling.
I wouldn’t even be out here, he thought, if father hadn’t forgotten to cap the silvering. Doing a check on the inventory earlier in the day, Varrl only remembered that he’d left a barrel unsealed once the worst of the storm hit.
And worse still, Shaia was supposed to be riding home in the midst of this. That thought really angered Kelc. Either she would now have to spend an extra night with the foppish Pellek Gallat or she already rode in the midst of this foul storm. In either case, Kelc hated it.
He reached the cleanhouse almost by accident, nearly running into it, so heavy and blinding was the snow. “Greeching skeesh!”
Kelc felt the stone wall, sliding his hand along it as he moved toward the door, taking some measure of comfort in the solid structure, while holding a practically useless lantern in his other hand. Part of him recognized how intimidated he’d been trying to walk through the opaque whiteness of the storm now that he had some reference to where, exactly, he stood. “Damned storm,” he barked, feeling suddenly confident as though he’d bested a foe.
But the storm answered with an outburst of its own, the wind gashing in along the side of the cleanhouse with enough wintry force that Kelc’s throat burned from the cold even as he hunched against the building to avoid being tossed off his feet. “Hells!”
“Flee!” Kelc couched his chin into his shoulder as he searched for the speaker, irrational as it seemed to him. There is no way, he thought, as his eyes scoured the white.
“No way.” The words had been little more than a whisper. The wind pounded him and his own heartbeat filled his ears as he fought to gain the cleanhouse door and yet he heard a whisper? “No.”
“Flee!” So near to him sounded the voice that he spun awkwardly to catch the speaker, raising the lantern before him while losing the wall and falling to his back, left to stare up into the unforgiving blizzard overhead. In mere moments he scuttled back against the cleanhouse wall, the stone holding him up, but now he drew freezing air into himself, fighting back the sense of terror that seemed to pool about him.
“Who are you?” he called, his voice nearly failing him until anger leant him some strength. “Who in the greeching hells are you?” He ran a hand along the ground and found the lantern, seemingly still intact.
“Flee, fool!” If a person wanted to be heard by Kelc in the midst of the storm, their lips would have to be pressed to his ear. He lurched away, crawling along the ground on his knees, his left hand shooting out every reach or so to make sure the wall remained. When it didn’t he turned, finding the door in mere moments. “Flee!”
He jumped to his feet and fumbled with the door latch, his frozen hands seemingly little more than ungainly clubs on the ends of his arms.
“Kelc!” yelled a voice so powerful that his body vibrated from the force of it. “Flee!”
The lock came off and fell to the ground and he threw the latch, snatching the lantern and diving into the cleanhouse and out of the wind. He struggled to breathe as he hooked a foot on the door and jerked it. Just before it closed, it stopped as though it struck a rock.
Kelc flipped over, desperate to lock the storm out, but he saw nothing that could have stopped the door. He’d suspected the fallen lock. He grabbed the door handle and tugged it, but it wouldn’t move.
“Too damned stupid to save!” roared the voice, the rage it held weakening Kelc’s knees. “Run!” But he couldn’t.
“Leave me be!” he begged, giving the door a final jerk as he dropped to the floor. The wood smacked into the stone jamb and though the wind continued to assail the cleanhouse, the intensity of Kelc’s fear dimmed. He reached up and lowered the bar, locking the door from the inside before he dropped to the floor, flat on his back, to regain his breath. “Hells,” he rasped, his fear ebbing as he rested in the yellow light of the lantern. “What…” he began, “or who?”
The thought that Shaia might have sent the message sprung up in him. She had offered the same sentiment before she left. She basically assumes we will have to flee, he thought. “No,” he murmured. The voice, the feel of the wind, had been male. “Or maybe it’s in my head,” he said. “The more I feared the worse it got. Hells.” Everything’s just a guess. He stopped his mind and sat up, knowing that he could not satisfy himself with any explanation. “I hardly need another greeching unknown. Just more confusion.”
He sat up tentatively, his eyes on the door that still vibrated as the wind struck it. After watching it for a while, he climbed to his feet and backed up until he brushed against the body board. He then scooted along it until he could reach the open barrel of silvering.
The top sat nowhere near it. All his life Kelc’s father had told him to pry the top loose and then only slide it open a wedge to make sure of the amount, and now, the top rested on the pigment shelf, completely removed. “Don’t question me, boy,” Kelc growled, knowing how his father would answer, “I do what I do because I have years on you.” Kelc snorted, venting some irritation and anxiety.
He picked up the lid and fit it to the top of the barrel before wrenching the tie strap down and locking it into place.
He tapped his fingers on the now-sealed barrel of silvering, suddenly aware of the fact that he had completed what his father sent him to do and equall
y aware that he’d been away a long time to do it. He needed to go back. He unconsciously turned and took a step towards the door before halting himself. “The storm.” It took only a few moments before another gust ran up against the cleanhouse, rattling the door. “Skeesh.”
His father would threaten and lecture, maybe even hit him, but Kelc understood that. He had been through it before. A storm that threatened him, terrified him… That, he could not risk.
Kelc climbed atop the body board, using the lower stop beneath his heels to push himself along until he lay on it like a tilted cot. He hated this place. He’d prepared Henna Lanch and fought Margin Lanch here and now a blizzard robbed him of all courage, or somehow reflected to him his own cowardice. He clenched his fists, knowing Varrl would beat him and knowing he would let him.
“Flee,” he muttered. “To where? Greeching Reman, where this sort of thing is normal? Like buying a cottage in the Hells.” He bit off his words, afraid that even they might somehow bring a response from somewhere. “Flee,” he whispered again before drawing in a deep breath. He only knew of two ways to flee this place.
His hand slid to the skiver on his belt, feeling the ice cold metal before rising up to clasp his other hand over his stomach. Kelc had never given much consideration to killing himself despite the beatings and broken bones. “Never,” he breathed, feeling oddly Symean.
Instead, he allowed his eyes to close so he could listen to the storm. The door bolt still crossed the door so if his father came looking for him, he’d have some warning beforehand since he’d have to let Varrl into the cleanhouse.
Dread of Spirit: Rise of the Mage - Book One Page 18