The Forgotten Tale

by J. M. Frey

  When Pip is riding, Kintyre, in the back of the cart, occupies his hands by weaving large, conical eel-traps out of the roadside ditch-reeds. These prove useful when we make camp by cool streams with shaded banks. Bevel’s grilled eel is something to behold.

  Bevel drives the cart when Dauntless and I ride the head, and Bevel and I swap when he becomes bored or anxious. Eventually, Wyndam gives up riding in the cart at all, and simply sits astride Capplederry’s harness. He doesn’t seem to be any extra burden to the great cat, so we leave him to it.

  Amid our sleep rolls, road rations, and cooking gear, as well as the prodigious amount of supplies and toys required to travel with a babe quickly approaching the toddler stage, is space for Pip’s writing supplies and my old travel desk. The new Excel is spread upon her lap when she isn’t entertaining Alis, and she slowly teaches herself to read our script with the children’s primers I brought along. In retrospect, never teaching my wife to read the runes of Hain before this was a mistake, but neither of us thought we would ever be in need of them again.

  On day four, when Alis is thoroughly bored of sitting in the cart, playing with Library and the other stuffies Cook had sewn for her, she starts to fuss. She is old enough and well-coordinated enough now to sit upright on her own, and so Bevel creates a sort of child-harness out of a spare scarf and lashes her onto his lap on the cart-driver’s bench. He even goes so far as to let her hold the reins. Capplederry needs no controlling and seems to take no issue with Alis tugging and waving the leads, and my daughter takes great delight in learning the phrases “Walk on!” and “Whoa now!”

  That night, Alis sticks close to her Uncle Bevel, staring up at him with worshipful adoration as he lets her stir the pot of travel stew and make balls of the last of the bread dough. Bevel keeps her safely away from the fire-warmed stone he spreads the dough balls over, and I am struck again by how fond Bevel is of Alis. I know that he has six older brothers, and that each of them have children. It occurs to me that in tying himself to Kintyre, Bevel has lost forever the chance to have children of his own.

  Unless he and Kintyre agree to allow Bevel to sire a child on some woman willing to then give up all ties to it, there is very little in the way of medical or magical alternatives in this realm for two men. My suspicions that Bevel wishes he and Kintyre had known about Wyndam earlier are further enforced whenever I see the wistful way Bevel’s gaze cuts between my daughter and Kintyre’s son.

  Not content with coming in second-best in the hierarchy of affection, Kintyre has Alis lashed to his chest by the time we are all ready to ride the next morning, the carrier wrapping so tight that Alis can only wriggle her arms and legs. She beats the back of her head against Kintyre’s chest in joy, feet dancing on the pommel of his saddle, babbling a sweet stream of nonsense that Kintyre listens to with grave attention. As we stop for our noon break, reveling in the bright, high sky and the way the humidity has crept up on us the further south we have traveled, Kintyre unwraps Alis and hefts her over his shoulder like a sack of flour. He carries her over to the blanket Pip has spread out on the side of the road, pretending to ignore her wiggly shrieks of delight.

  “See, Kin?” Bevel says as he watches all this. “You didn’t squash her at all.”

  “I was still afraid I might,” my brother says, and it’s clearly an old and well-gnawed bone between them.

  We are right at the boundary of Miliway Chipping, and the road is smooth and wide from thousands of farmers trading their grains to other Chippings, and the verge is verdant and spotted with blackberries. Kintyre crouches to show Alis how to pick the ripe ones, and then yelps.

  “Ow! I think your daughter just touched my brains!” When I look up, Kintyre is staring at Alis with horror, and my daughter is standing beside him, grinning, berry-blacked fingers filled with squashed fruit. “Those baby fingers are small. It fit right inside!”

  “Now, now, sweeting,” I say, scooping her up to suck kisses on her cheeks. “We do not shove blackberries into our uncle’s ears.”

  After lunch, Kintyre offers Alis to Wyndam, but the boy only looks away, clearly uninterested, and a one-sided row erupts when Kintyre chastises him for his sullen silence. Wyndam’s posture takes on a slumped curve of misery that I remember all too well from when I was the lad’s age and Kintyre laid into me. I remind my brother in a tone far too innocent that Kintyre himself did not speak for a full two months while his voice was changing out of sheer embarrassment. Kintyre goes red and cuts his tirade short. Wyndam regards me with a kind of small, private appreciation, and spends the rest of the afternoon shooting thoughtful, considering looks in my direction.

  Alis rides instead with me, that afternoon. And when a shrill screech rings out from the wheat field to our left, I am grateful that Alis is with me on Dauntless, and not impeding Kintyre and Bevel’s ability to draw their swords.

  Mirrors

  Solinde comes south again, into Miliway, in search of the next totem. She is strong enough now, her powers replenished enough, that she can summon not only storms, but also fogs and clouds upon which to ride. In Miliway, a colony of gnomes have overtaken a rabbit warren. Solinde stands above a small horde of them, hidden from view by the wheat that, here, in the most fertile region of Hain, is already as high as the crown of her head. Solinde feels the totem pulling at her blood, her power rushing downward into the ground. She summons a breeze and invades the mouth of the warren, slipping past and around the foul little creatures lurking inside. The air fills with the back draft and the scent of old blood and dusty rot.

  When her magic has closed around the thing, she tears it upward, through the soil. A great screaming shriek goes up, the whole colony protesting and startled and swearing revenge in a single voice. It is bloodthirsty and bitter, and Solinde flees on the wind, howling with laughter, a filthy, enchanted looking glass clutched to her breast

  Below her, she spots a young woman riding a deer on the Field Road. The maid is beautiful in all the ways that Solinde was never allowed to be when she was mortal. She hates the lass immediately, with everything that she is. Petty and vengeful, Solinde throws the mirror down. It shatters against the deer’s antlers, breaking its magic forever.

  The maiden screams. The deer rears and throws her off, shaking the shards of glass out of its fur. The gnomes descend upon them like a savage wave. Solinde calls up a cloud and hides within the dense moisture to watch the sport the gnomes make of the maiden. The girl scrambles to her feet, her slippers flying off as she flees through the dirt and between the wheat stalks. Iron pikes—this breed of gnome’s preferred weapon—fly.

  “Irtax!” the girl shrieks when the deer is felled. The beast’s eyes roll white, blood foam frothing on its muzzle as it struggles to breathe with punctured lungs. Its delicate hooves kick and flail, braining several of the least intelligent of its murderers.

  The gnomes are short enough for the girl to leap over them when they surround her, but they stab at her dress. Solinde hopes they are also stabbing the maiden’s finely formed legs, feeling a great and vengeful need to see the lass’s perfection forever destroyed, but the sharp pike-heads only shred the maiden’s overgown. Disgusted, Solinde changes the direction of the wind, so that the rest of the gnome colony will scent the fresh blood and descend upon the girl.

  But something else, it seems, smells it as well.

  The full-throated roar rips through the air, and a blur the color of sandstone leaps over the bushes that mark the delineation between the road and the field. The thing is across the expanse of field like a crossbow bolt. The gnomes scatter and regroup as some human boy clad all in black slides down the creature’s mane and yanks the maiden free. Together, hand in hand, the humans run back toward the verge, dodging iron pikes and jumping gnomes. The great creature follows in their wake, batting aside the swarming colony, but never truly managing to break free of them. There are simply too many.

  The swarm of red-hatted creatures cling to the cat’s fur, scurry at its tail, bitin
g and scratching like aggressive barbs, and Solinde laughs. The humans are cornered. Together, they try to scramble up the beast’s back. The lad expertly climbs the rigging of the cat’s harness, but the girl is less sure-footed, her feet slick with blood and dirt, and the gnomes grab hold of her skirts and drag her back down. She shrieks again, and the cat slashes claws through the gnomes that try to descend upon her, giving the maiden time to scramble to her feet and dash for the hedge.

  Another roar of fury goes up from the gnomes as their prey begins to outpace them, and then, abruptly, there is another player on the scene. It is a man on a nut-brown gelding, his blond-gray hair waving like a war banner in his wake as his mount races toward the melee. A sword flashes out of its sheath and into the man’s hand as if by magic, the pommel golden and twisted in the shape of great Urlish forge-hammers. The man is broad of shoulder, trim of waist despite his advancing years, and blood-freezingly familiar.

  Kintyre Turn! It is like the truth of his identity has become sentient and flown up into the air, clutching her around the throat. And the lad in black is the idiot boy I Dealt with!

  The unexpected appearance of he whom she hates more than any mortal in this world—save her late husband, and he is no longer in this world—shocks Solinde into inaction. She hesitates just a moment too long, and by then, the maiden who was the target of her ire has escaped, and the Turns and their mounts are cutting through and crushing the straggling remains of the gnome colony on their way back to the main road.

  Destroy him! The command rings in her head in the voice of he whom she seeks. It is not really him, no, but her memory of him, as she last saw him. When he had been young and shrill and impetuous, impotent in his ability to fight back against the wizard his father had sold him to as apprentice, and wrathful in the realization of it.

  She summons up a wind, not strong enough yet to be a twister, but building toward it fast. The wind pushes what few gnomes survive away from the verge and toward Kintyre Turn, surrounding him with a tumbling, outraged, crashing wave of iron pikes and sharp teeth. They cut and cling to both his legs and the horses’ as they pass. She teases and vexes the gnomes until they are mad with anger, lashing out at each other as much as her target.

  She is so intent on her prey that she nearly does not hear the iron pike sailing toward her in time. But hear it she does, and Solinde ducks. Her concentration broken, the whirlwind immediately dies down, and beneath her feet, the cloud shifts and threatens to dump her into the sky. Wrath and ruin on her mind, Solinde whips around to smite whatever gnome dared aim at her. Instead, she meets the determined, grim, jet gaze of Wyndam Turn.

  The lad hefts a second iron pike, aiming, Solinde now sees, not at her specifically, but at the lone cloud in the sky, the obvious place from which to assume a weather witch is controlling her vortex. Solinde had heard that Kintyre Turn was in great supply of muscle, but little of brains. Clearly, his son differs.

  The second pike sails, shredding through Solinde’s cloud, and she drops.

  She does not scream, for she has enough power to make the air dense beneath her, to slide into a cold, wet cradle. But she is weakening. She is waning. She has spent too much of herself and her power on this petty pursuit of the maiden, and it has left her with little to expend on her revenge. She realizes, with a bitter lump at the back of her throat, that she must use what she has left to flee. Flee, like a beaten hound, like a subservient wife banished into a corner by a raging, drunken husband. But it is either flee, or drop onto the ground where the gnomes will swarm her in the fury she whipped up in them, where Wyndam Turn will finish the job he began with the first two iron pikes, or where Kintyre will prove himself the merciless murderer she has always heard he is.

  She must run. Hating, hating that this is her only rational choice, Solinde screams. It breaks across the sky like thunder. Desperate, she reaches out with her power and touches the boy, Wyndam, searches out and grasps the golden thread of connection that their Deal has woven between them. There. She cannot lose him now. Even though she must run, retreat, escape, she can now come back. He broke her Sigil and sent her away before she could tie the string of connection to his finger, but the Writer has somehow seen fit to give her the opportunity to do so now. He will not slip her vengeance a second time. And then, task complete, she speeds away across the sky.

  Nine

  The scream is high and unearthly, a hundred voices being squeezed out of a hundred throats at once, atonal and desperate and harsh. It sounds like murder.

  Capplederry yowls, a rusty-hinge sound of challenge. With quick thinking that I can only commend, Wyndam reaches down and immediately unhooks the great cat from the yoke. The cart lurches to a halt and Capplederry springs forward, Wyndam clinging to his harness and grinning like a lunatic. No, like his mother.

  His sword is already bared, as are his teeth, and when Capplederry leaps over the verge and into the field, he rides the wave of the creature’s arc like the Prince of the Seas he used to be.

  Wishing for Smoke now more than ever, I instead wheel Dauntless back to the cart and quickly pass Alis to Pip, who tucks her into the corner, shushing her even as Pip unsheathes the dagger she’s been carrying at her waist all week. It is no match, of course, for Kintyre’s Foesmiter, but is quick enough in its own way. Kintyre brings Karl around to protect the cart as well, and Bevel is already standing on the seat, an arrow nocked and ready to fly. I spare a moment to be grateful that Pip is wearing leather leggings for this trip instead of a dress, so that if she must flee with Alis, she won’t trip on the skirts.

  The shriek dies away. Silence fills the air, thick with expectation. The wind rattles the wheat, and even Alis is holding her breath, it seems, gasping little hiccoughs quietly. My arm begins to shake from the weight of holding my sword aloft and prepared to strike—I silently curse myself for my two years of laziness in Victoria.

  Breath burns in my chest, but I dare not exhale for fear of alerting whatever it is that screamed—or was making some poor other creature scream—to our location. Kintyre and Bevel are still, but Dauntless and Karl toss their heads and paw the road, ready to spring into battle if need be.

  A cicada chirrups nearby, as unnerved by the silence as we are, and Pip and I both flinch. Karl knickers, bobbing his head, nostrils flared. The warriors remain still as statuary, watching. Waiting.

  A sudden, piercing shriek rends the still air, and in a heartbeat, Bevel looses his arrow. It lands with a meaty thock, and there is an angry, vicious burble of fury on the other side of the verge.

  “What is it?” Pip hisses, but no one has the time to answer, for on the other side, Capplederry rears up in the sea of wheat, roaring with fury, and hung all over with small red-and-black blurs as tall as my knee.

  “Wyndam!” Kintyre shouts, and then he and Karl are over the verge before I have time to wonder whether the horse is even trained to jump.

  Atop Capplederry, Wyndam has wound one free hand in the Library Lion’s mane and is slashing at the hangers-on with his sword. They fall easily, cut away like ticks and burrs, screaming their fury as they fall.

  “Red Caps!” Bevel shouts. “Stay on this side of the bushes!”

  I have no intention of throwing myself into a field of horrible, murderous, gnomes, and instead busy myself with sweeping the bushes and cutting down any of the wee monsters attempting to escape the fangs and blades of our compatriots. They are a veritable flock, and I can taste my heart on the back of my tongue, fear that they will swarm over the cart and dip their caps in the blood of my family becoming a rich, burning bile in my throat.

  No, I decide, defying my fear. No, that will not happen! I will not allow it! Alis, terrified by the noise of battle and struggling against her mother’s hand pinning her to the floor of the cart, starts screaming.

  It is so heartbreaking that all I want to do is throw myself over her and protect them both, and is so loud that I nearly miss the third shriek. It is closer now, and, I realize, human. It rings in my
ears, and I whip my gaze around, trying to locate the source amid the writhing bodies of the Red Caps, the flash of steel and claw, and the tall wheat.

  “There!” Pip shouts, pointing. “Forsyth!”

  I follow her finger to a scrap of yellow against the green leaves, the billow of corn silk—no, it is hair. A hand, pale and delicate, flails toward the open air, and I put my spurs to Dauntless. We trample Red Caps as he speeds toward the struggling human. I seize her wrist and yank her out of the bushes. I have enough leverage to swing my elbow under her armpits and wrench her free, lifting her up onto the saddle. She lands awkwardly across the pommel, thigh digging into my lap. Two Red Caps drop off the skirts of her dress, but another has its pike raised to strike. The woman screams and kicks, and the nasty creature clings. My arms are both filled with reins and woman, and I cannot cut it away.

  “No!” I shout, terror gripping my spine, paralyzing me with the gruesome realization that I am about to watch a person be gutted while on my own lap.

  A sudden swish by my ear makes me glad that I froze. An arrow appears, as if by magic, sprouting from between the Red Cap’s eyes. May the Writer bless Bevel and his aim. Dead, the Red Cap falls away. I wheel Dauntless and our shared burden back toward the safety of the cart. The woman winds her fingers around my forearm, shaking, and tries, at first, to cling to me when I make to lever her in.

  “It’s okay!” Pip says, sheathing her dagger to haul the woman and her voluminous skirts up amid the pillows and books. “Get up, get up!”

  A crack of thunder rips across the air, and though there is one dense thunderhead above the field, the rest of the sky looks clear. But the wind is already scudding the cloud out of sight, and whatever threatening rain the cloud contains will not fall on us here, or now.