Child of a Mad God--A Tale of the Coven

by R. A. Salvatore

  “Exactly as commanded,” Seonagh corrected her. “I need not ask anything of you. You were told to take an uamhas woman, and instead you took a child. A valuable child, at that. You knew better. You knew that you should be helped by an adult, by one of the lakewomen. But still you chose the child, simply so that you could defy me.”

  Aoleyn started to respond, but held her tongue. She focused instead on what Seonagh had just said: a valuable child? Aoleyn did not understand. The boy seemed so feeble, mentally weak. What could possibly be valuable about him?

  She thought about asking Seonagh to explain, but reconsidered before her mouth began to move. She would ask Bahdlahn himself later on, but no, she would not ask this harsh woman. And particularly not now, when Seonagh was so clearly angry and when she was trembling with so many swirling emotions.

  And Seonagh was rightfully angry, Aoleyn knew in her heart, and not just because Aoleyn hadn’t returned the previous night. Despite her protestations, her choice of Bahdlahn had been intended to give offense. It was an act of defiance, as was her refusal to return to the camp the previous night.

  Well enough, she figured. She wanted Seonagh to be angry. She wasn’t quite sure of exactly where she had found this focus, but it certainly had something to do with that pit in her chest, that anger she had felt when she had looked into the eyes of Bahdlahn’s mother. Aoleyn dropped her gaze to the floor, a gesture of submission, merely to placate Seonagh. But inwardly, she smiled.

  Seonagh took her shoulder roughly and turned the girl toward the basin. “Now wash yourself, child,” she said, her voice still edged in anger, but holding something else Aoleyn could not identify—concern, perhaps? “Then we can begin the day’s lessons.”

  Aoleyn did as she was told. She washed, she ate, she sat quietly and obediently for her lessons with Seonagh.

  Only occasionally did her thoughts drift away from the tasks at hand, her mind’s eye again seeing the stares. The red eyes, the dead eyes.

  So different, yet so alike, as if they were aiming for the dark place inside of her, but from different directions.

  The stare of Bahdlahn’s mother.

  The stare of the demon fossa.

  12

  THE BELLS

  It was the farthest east Talmadge had traveled in his life, so far that the mountains of the Barbican, which marked the western boundary of the Wilderlands, were behind him now. So far that he could ride to Ursal, the seat of power in the kingdom of Honce-the-Bear, in less than two weeks if he so chose.

  But he wouldn’t choose to do that. He was in the region known as the Wilderlands now, though it was far more settled than that to which he was accustomed. His discomfort grew with every hamlet he spotted, a fact that wasn’t lost on his traveling companion.

  “Sorry you followed me, eh?” Khotai Tsentsen asked when they set camp atop a bald hillock one night, the lights of a distant village shining in the southeast.

  “I enjoy the company,” Talmadge replied wryly. The statement was true enough. He had known Khotai for eight years now, since their meeting at Matinee, and it seemed like every passing year had them spending more and more time together, except for two years when their paths had not crossed. Talmadge did enjoy being around this woman, more than he ever expected. Her exotic looks, that strange cross between the pale Alpinadoran barbarians of the far north and ruddy-skinned To-gai-ru nomad of the high steppes, had not grown less attractive to the man. He had seen no one else quite like Khotai in all his life and all his travels.

  Talmadge didn’t think he’d ever get tired of hearing her tales of her years among the To-gai-ru, with their strange ways and culture, and every year, Khotai came back with new stories to perform—and perform, she did, as well as any bard.

  “I think you just missed me last year, more than you’ll e’er admit,” Khotai teased, for indeed, the two had not met up at Matinee the previous year.

  “Can you say any less for yourself? I came here instead of remaining at Matinee at your insistence, yes? And I’ve lost the last month of winter and the whole of spring, and I’ll lose the rest of the season just getting back to Matinee!”

  Khotai laughed at him. “If you’re to ever shrink your world from Matinee to your mysterious lake in the mountains, you’ll soon bore me,” she said. “I don’t like to be bored. Would that you might have joined me last year!”

  Talmadge winced at the thought, torn now as he had been upon the invitation, for that invitation had been left open when he and Khotai had parted ways after Matinee in the summer of 843. Khotai had told him then that she meant to go to the east with the turn of the year, all the way to the Mirianic Ocean, to the great desert city of Jacintha, in search of her father.

  As much as he had come to enjoy Khotai’s company, the thought of entering a city of thousands and thousands of people terrified the man.

  “I know. I know and I accept the truth of Talmadge,” Khotai said, as if reading his thoughts, and she waved her hand at him.

  “I am here, at least.”

  The woman nodded and smiled widely. “You’ve been invited to visit Redshanks!”

  “You were, not I!”

  “Mostly because he knew I could deliver you, and your pearls,” Khotai said. “What woman or man roaming the wilds would refuse an invitation to dine at the house of Redshanks?”

  “True enough,” he admitted, and he nodded, thinking that almost all at Matinee would lift their flagons in toast simply to learn that the legendary Redshanks was still alive, for the man had not attended the gathering in more than five years.

  “So no more of your complaining?”

  Talmadge held up his hands in defeat.

  Khotai tilted her bowl, draining the last of her stew, then tossed the bowl aside, burped with surprising volume (drawing a complimentary nod from Talmadge), and crawled about the small fire to cuddle up next to the man. She rested back in his arms, leaning back and forcing him back with her that they could look up at the millions of stars twinkling this night.

  “Tell me about the pirates,” he bade her.

  “No,” she replied. “You tell me about strange-headed fisher folk at your mysterious lake and the demons of the mountain.”

  Talmadge snorted. “I have told you of them many times.”

  “Tell me again.”

  Talmadge knew where this was going. Several times over the years, Khotai had asked to travel along with him for his yearly journey to Loch Beag.

  On more than one occasion, Talmadge had almost given in and taken her along, but always, right before he would say yes, he remembered the clo’dearche and the killing of Badger.

  Though now he mostly only remembered the gruesome sounds, the vicious lizard chewing at the corpse of the hanging man, tearing flesh and crunching bone, sounds that had chased Talmadge across the lake waters, all the way to Car Seileach.

  As uncomfortable as Talmadge was in coming to villages like the one of his childhood, he was even more unnerved by the thought of having someone, anyone, accompany him to Loch Beag ever again.

  “Your father,” he whispered. “You have not even finished your tale and you speak of places I will never see.”

  “Then go and see them!”

  “Tell me.”

  Khotai sighed loudly and launched back into the story of her great adventure, crossing the desert of Behren to the great and exotic seaport of Jacintha.

  Talmadge closed his eyes and let her words take him on that journey, and he fell asleep dreaming of water that showed no far bank, and of great sailing ships. He even heard the bells of one ship calling out, four notes repeating—ding, dang, ding, dang—in celebratory cadence.

  But no, not ship bells. Church bells, like the ones of Talmadge’s town, though he remembered them not in such exuberance, but in the low tonal peals of death.

  The man’s eyes popped open, to find that the stars were gone, replaced by the glow of predawn, to find that he was not dreaming dreams inspired by Khotai’s tale.

  Th
e bells were really ringing, in this time and in this place—or at least, in the village not so far away.

  Talmadge sat up, taking care, unsuccessfully, to not stir Khotai.

  “What is it?” she asked before she had even opened her eyes.

  Talmadge stood, hands on hips, staring at the distant structures. “I know not.”

  For all that he tried, he couldn’t get the last time he had heard the toll of church bells out of his head.

  Khotai was up beside him. “Well, let’s go find out,” she said, and started for the horses.

  But Talmadge caught her by the arm and held her back, and when she turned, her expression grew curious.

  “What is it?” she asked, but he didn’t answer, and just continued to stare at the distant village.

  “Talmadge?” she asked, confused.

  But he had told her of his home town of Westhaven and the tragedy of the rosie plague, and the bells, tolling for his family, chasing him out of town.

  “That is not a funeral peal,” Khotai said emphatically, and she grabbed Talmadge by the arm and forced him to look at her. “Those are bells of celebration.”

  Her stare more than her words broke the spell, and Talmadge blinked repeatedly, then, as she repeated her statement.

  They packed up their camp, saddled the horses they had bought from a stable on the western edge of the Wilderlands, and walked down to Appleby-in-Wilderland, the village that served as home to the famed frontiersman Redshanks.

  They found the town wide awake, with people dancing in the streets, and the markets already bustling. The name “Princess Jilseponie Ursal!” was shouted from balconies and rooftops.

  “So that’s it, then,” Khotai remarked as they walked their horses along the cobblestone streets of Appleby-in-Wilderland, following directions townsfolk eagerly offered, toward the home of Redshanks. “Honce has itself a new heir.”

  Talmadge shrugged, hardly caring—and why should he? Even in his childhood, his family had never considered themselves part of this kingdom, and indeed, had generations before headed out to settle in an area where they need not worry of kings and lords and armies trampling peasants underfoot.

  “Well, they seem to care,” Khotai returned with a snicker.

  “Do you have kings in To-gai?”

  “Warlords,” she replied. “We are nomads.”

  “Always at war?”

  She shook her head. “War with the steppes and the vipers and the lions and the roaring winds, yes. War with each other, not so much.”

  “So what do the warlords do?” Talmadge asked.

  “They lead the migrations,” Khotai explained. “They determine the scouts and guide us in pursuit of the herds. And when we come upon another tribe, they speak for us, that we can determine the hunting grounds.”

  “And what do they exact in payment from their people, these warlords?”

  Khotai looked at him as if she did not understand, and Talmadge smiled, for that was all the answer he needed.

  “Your warlords are very different from the lords of Honce, I believe.”

  Khotai didn’t pursue the reasoning. “Neither matter to us,” she agreed.

  They were at the porch of a log cabin, then, solidly built and larger than most of the other homes in Appleby-in-Wilderland. Before they had even dismounted, Redshanks opened the door and held his arms out wide and high in invitation.

  “Bah, but you’re late!” he said. “Every day before this, I been putting out extra plates and cooking a dozen eggs! I’m blaming you for this!” He rubbed his now-ample belly, jiggling the extra girth. “Couldn’t be letting them go to waste, you know.”

  Khotai ran to give him a hug and he moved gingerly toward her. He looked good, Talmadge thought, though he noted a distinct stiffness and limp in the old hunter’s step. He kept an eye on that as Redshanks led them into the house and the breakfast table, and understood then why the man hadn’t been going to Matinee.

  And sadly, why he likely would never do so again. It became obvious to Talmadge that Redshanks’s days of wandering the wilderness were long behind him. He had kept his smile, and kept his spirits high, as he and Khotai began trading stories of the last few years, but the man had aged.

  Talmadge offered to cook the breakfast as the two continued their storytelling. There was a great bond here between these two.

  Soon he was only half listening, his thoughts turning to the unlikely journey that had brought him this far to the east, and uncomfortably close to the kingdom of Honce-the-Bear.

  Suddenly something Khotai was saying caught his ear. “And you are now under the watchful eye of a new king yet again?”

  “Not so new,” Redshanks answered. “Been five years since King Aydrian made his departure at the end of an army of spears.”

  “He was killed?” Khotai asked.

  “Exiled. Taken by Jilseponie far from the lands of men, so it’s said.”

  “Jilseponie? The new princess?”

  “Named after her, but not of her blood,” Redshanks explained. “In her honor, and one she well earned, by all accounts. ’Tis a long tale.”

  Redshanks shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “It would seem that the squabbling is over. One king or another, what does it matter? Their arguments are over their own power, and with little regard to what any of us might want. It’s always been so.”

  “You came to live here, not I,” Khotai pointedly reminded.

  “I followed opportunity more suited to a breaking body,” Redshanks said with a laugh.

  “It is always about business for Redshanks.”

  “I have lived well!” he reminded.

  Talmadge brought the food to the table then, and took his seat opposite the legendary frontiersman.

  “I still do!” Redshanks added.

  “Well enough?” Talmadge asked.

  “More than that!” Redshanks answered through a mouthful of food.

  “But you are not satisfied,” said Talmadge. Khotai put her hand on his forearm to try to turn him from this course.

  He did glance at her, but pressed on as he did. “If you were, you would not have asked us to visit.”

  “A favor for an old friend, perhaps,” Redshanks said.

  “Just that?” Talmadge asked doubtfully.

  Khotai gasped a bit at that, but Redshanks took it as no insult, clearly, and laughed heartily.

  “Well…” he admitted. “You ken me too well, I fear.”

  “But why?” Talmadge bluntly asked.

  “Why?” he answered. “Opportunity!”

  “You just said you were living well. You have all that you could need. Why chase more?”

  Redshanks laughed again. “Ah, Talmadge, you beautiful peasant,” he said. “Because it’s there! Because it’s exciting! Because when I stop chasing it, well, put me in the ground and throw dirt on me.”

  Talmadge just shrugged and shook his head.

  “If you gived it a try, you’d come to see. I can show you the way, and might that you’d find a bit more smiles on that dour face o’ yours if you followed that trail.”

  Talmadge leaned back in his seat and studied the man.

  “You’ve the pearls?” Redshanks asked Khotai.

  “Just a few.”

  “Bah!”

  “Not a good year on the lake,” Talmadge lied, for it had been better than he had let on to Khotai when she had told him of Redshanks’s invitation. He had seen too much of the ways of the frontiersmen to let on about the wealth he carried so far to the east, down overgrown trails rife with highwaymen, where whispers moved faster than horses.

  Redshanks sighed and leaned back. “Perhaps a year too soon, then,” he said. “I still have many arrangements to make.”

  “What arrangements?” Talmadge asked. “What are you trying to do?”

  “Right to the point, eh?” Redshanks replied with a grin. “I like that. You’ve seen me walk. I doubt I’ll e’er cross the Masur Delaval again.”

  Talmadge
looked to Khotai, not understanding.

  “The river separating the more civilized lands,” Redshanks explained. “Your pearls bring in a great price in the city of Palmaris on the eastern bank of the Delaval.”

  “And you want me to go there?”

  “They’re your pearls and my buyers,” said Redshanks. “The fewer people I put in between those truths, the more for me and you.”

  “I have enough.”

  “There’s never enough.”

  “Why?”

  “Because more is life … excitement … enjoyment. You’ve this beautiful woman by your side! Oh, I know her charms and her skill. Would you not build a life of excitement and enrichment together?”

  Talmadge understood at that moment that he and Redshanks would never agree on what those words, “excitement” and “enrichment,” might mean. He said nothing, but let the man continue to explain the network he was setting up to funnel the goods more efficiently to this city of Palmaris and beyond.

  Talmadge took note of Khotai, and saw her genuine interest. He could accommodate that interest, he believed, without having to journey to these places.

  The three spoke into the afternoon, then went out and joined in a celebration for Princess Jilseponie.

  Khotai and Talmadge stayed with Redshanks that night, but surprisingly, to both their host and Khotai, that single day was as long a delay as Talmadge would suffer.

  Loch Beag, his yearly respite, was calling to him, and he had many hundreds of miles to cover to get there before snow covered the mountain trails.

  Talmadge made a deal with Redshanks for the pearls he had brought, and even threw in a few for free in appreciation for the man’s good intentions. He even agreed to return to Appleby-in-Wilderland in the next year or so to perhaps take Redshanks’s plans further, though he made it clear that he would not be the courier.

  “We’ll see” was all Redshanks would say to that, and slyly, and with a look to Khotai.

  Many times did Redshanks try to convince Talmadge to remain a bit longer, but the man would hear none of it, and he and Khotai were on the road back to the west soon after an early breakfast the next day.