Magic's Genesis- The Grey

by Rosaire Bushey

  “Or escape,” offered Lem. “Musta fallen through the ice.”

  Cargile looked to his men to see if they had any other theories before carefully searching the boy’s clothes. He found several bits of string, a few feathers, and a small, much-used knife which he placed on the dock. Using a piece of hemp canvas, he gingerly rolled the boy up and onto a small makeshift pallet Josen had put together. As veterans of several campaigns the soldiers knew how to bury people, even if they couldn’t care for them. The men carried the pallet inland and set to work digging a shallow grave in the still hard ground and covered the body with rocks.

  Cargile gathered the contents of the boys’ pockets and after Josen and Bracknell finished with the grave, they gathered around the fire where Cargile passed the items around for everyone to examine. The items reminded him of something, but nothing he could put his finger on. Likely, it didn’t matter. Any family the boy had was likely dead in Thrushton. There were no suspicious holes in the body that would point to murder. It was just bad luck and a poor decision to cross the lake.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said Barn, the eldest of the drivers. A short man who had become hunched from sitting over a set of reins for more than 30 years, Barn was quiet and known within his trade as being an honest man who wouldn’t take a half copper more than his load was worth. It had made him enemies among the less scrupulous wagon masters, but it won him many friends among those who paid for the service. Lydria knew from her father that silent patronage had kept him alive on at least two occasions. “I’ve seen many a bundle of supplies and weapons loaded onto and off my wagons, and unless I’m very much wrong… he walked to Josen’s tent and picked up a short arrow meant for the small cavalry bow the man had tied to his saddle. He handed the arrow and the pocket’s contents to Cargile.

  “There was a bowyer on the island who did work for the king’s troops supplying arrows and some of the nicest bows you’ve ever seen. It was likely he had made the arrow you’re holding now, but I don’t know his name,” Barn said. Josen studied the items and his own arrow and after a moment’s consideration provided Wynter’s name.

  “There are only a few bowyers worth a silver in Bayside and most use feathers from the wild turkey that roam the countryside,” Josen explained. “Wynter used mostly goose feathers. It’s possible this boy knew Wynter.”

  With the matter settled, the company ate the fish Lem had caught and sat by the fire for a long time speculating on what may have happened and what the situation on the island was now. “There’s nothing we can do about it,” Cargile announced. “We’ll make our report when we return to Bayside. We can’t do much for the dead, but the living need sleep.”

  THREE

  The next day they left the docks and continued their journey, their path curving to the northwest following the taper of the lake into a flat land of fields marking the subtle beginnings of a steady incline into a series of small hills.

  Small stone walls carved grey scars into the landscape in the flat space between the lake and tundra to the north. Generations of farmers divided the land into small holdings. While nominally part of Wesolk, the northern areas, including the tundra and the small fishing villages in the more northern wastes, were free, but had been given the protection of Wesolk to spur trade and prevent hostile kingdoms from creating holdings in the sparsely populated area.

  In the summer cows grazed among the red clover, wildflowers and the patches of wild blackberries that created their own thorny barriers in the flats, but now they buried their snouts in the ground, gathering what early spring grass they could find. Across the fields to the west and past the Folly, the woods were largely unexplored. Steven’s Folly was meant to be a first tenuous step into expanding Wesolk’s reach. To the north past the fields, the flat land continued, and forests became less dense as the ground slowly turned to tundra and eventually perpetual frost and snow.

  As the western hills began to take over from the lowlands, their travel along the road slowed as mud gripped the horses’ hooves and sucked at the wooden wagon wheels. Small paths broke off the main road leading to farms where women and boys chopped and stacked wood for their homes and for large fires in small buildings near the wood line among stands of maples.

  On the third day after leaving Lem they started to notice the incline toward the hills. The pitch of the land meant less pooling of water and so while the ground was slick, it wasn’t as bad as the thick mud that had slowed them previously. However, the trail narrowed as it entered a forest that grew thicker as they moved further from the shore of the lake. Lydria knew the trail well enough to understand they were within two to three days of the Folly. They would travel and sleep under these trees until they reached a clearing that was the beginning of a series of small farms leading to hamlet outside the garrison.

  In the morning sun, the buds were just starting to open in the trees and soon the forest road would be covered under a canopy of leaves and feel much more confined. Lydria was enjoying the warmth of the sun that filtered through the trees onto her face and arms when she felt a subtle shift of the horse underneath her. Her father and the soldiers noticed it too – as Bracknell started to put some space between himself and the others. Lydria calmly stroked the brown coat of her horse, “you feel it too, don’t you,” she said quietly to the animal. “There’s something out there.” As she spoke Cargile lifted his hand, telling the wagons to stop. It took several moments for the horses and wagons to stop their movement and for the creaking of wood and leather to fade.

  Lydria looked at her father not daring to move the two horse lengths to his side. He cupped a hand to his ear, but she heard nothing. That was the point, she realized. No birds, no slight movement of small animals in the undergrowth – even the breeze seemed to have stopped. It was spring, and the smaller animals searching for food wouldn’t be so easily silenced by a small group of people and horses.

  Cargile motioned for Josen and Bracknell to take out their bows, but he needn’t have bothered, the pair were already sliding their weapons to the fronts of their bodies and pulling their first arrows from the quivers by their sides. The wooden shafts of the arrows scraped against the sides of the hardened leather quivers and seemed to scream into the distance even though it was a small noise. Josen’s attention was drawn to a spot in the trees and Lydria tried to follow his gaze. She caught a glimpse of movement that was followed by the sound of an arrow striking home and then the sound of Josen falling from his horse. After that the forest was full of sound.

  Bracknell spurred his mount and bolted forward, missing by a heartbeat a second arrow that buried itself in a tree after his passing. Cargile shouted orders for the group to take cover. Putting the wagons between themselves and the forest where the arrows had come from, the wagon drivers and women took cover, looking to Cargile who had turned his horse behind a wagon and was removing everything that hung from his armor that might get caught in a bush or hinder his movement. The soldier was murmuring to himself as he worked, counting Lydria realized, and he offered his daughter a smile a wink to reassure her, but his lips never stopped moving.

  Lydria understood his plan. They couldn’t continue with a killer in the woods at their backs so he and Bracknell were going into the woods to find the archer. He motioned with his hands that he wanted her to get the group to the Folly.

  The archer was shooting from a slight rise in the woods, so Cargile and Bracknell would be running uphill, but from different directions. Bracknell had moved down the road and would have, Lydria knew, dismounted and started moving toward the assailant. Cargile’s job was to wait a certain amount of time and attack from the front to give the archer an immediate threat to focus on. So long as the archer were on his own. It wasn’t the best plan, but Lydria knew it was the fastest plan to execute in an ambush. Now all her father had to do was not get shot.

  Cargile sprinted off up the hill and into the trees never running in a straight line for more than three steps and passing behind as many t
rees as possible on his way up the hill. Lydria saw two arrows sink into trees within a stride of her father passing them, but she was able to discern the archer’s general location from the flight of the arrows and yelled directions to her father based on forest landmarks like a fallen elm or a large boulder.

  Her shouts caught the attention of the archer who sent a shaft in her direction. Lydria ducked her head behind the wagon wheel she knelt behind as an arrow buried itself in the rim of the wheel she was holding. The arrow didn’t sound like it impacted the wheel at first. The noise wasn’t the sharp solid sound she thought it would be – it was as though the arrow hit a waterlogged wheel and not the dry wheel she was gripping with her left hand – was still gripping with her left hand. As Lydria tried to move her hand, a sharp pain told her an arrow had caught at least one of other fingers. Peeking around the wheel and looking up, she saw the arrowhead had all but removed her left index finger, going through the bone and pinning the finger to the wheel by a small chunk of skin. Not being able to move her finger Lydria pulled out the arrow and brought her hand near her chest, watching as the wreck of flesh above her knuckle pulsed blood. With little choice, she took a small blade from her belt and finished the arrow’s job, slicing off what remained of her finger, trying to stifle the pain growing inside her. Without thinking why, she wrapped the finger in a piece of cloth and put the loose digit in pouch and set about wrapping her blood covered hand. While she did, she saw the arrow she had dropped by her knees and noticed for the first time it was made with goose feathers.

  Lydria was tying off the bandage on her hand when she heard her father speaking with Bracknell in the woods as they came down the hill. Their tone suggested the danger had passed and several minutes later three men made their way down the hill, the two soldiers flanking a thin man being held and pulled along by his biceps. As they walked toward the wagons Cargile saw his daughter’s blood-stained and bandaged hand and pushed the prisoner forward, tripping him at the same time so that the bound man landed face-first on the hard-packed path. “Are you hurt badly,” he asked.

  “Just a finger,” Lydria responded, deciding not to tell him she had lost it completely. With Josen dead and the murderer caught, any additional revelations at this point might push her father to institute ‘field justice’ here and now. She didn’t think he’d be wrong for doing it as the man had obviously killed Josen, but though her father would never admit it, killing people didn’t sit well with him.

  Cargile at home was a different person than Cargile in camp. He had terrible dreams and woke in cold sweats, sometimes shouting, sometimes swearing, sometimes swinging, but always, when it was over, crying. Always. He taught Lydria by, and he lived by, black and white principles. His dreams, he believed, were merely a black and white response to those decisions. The price one had to pay for the actions they took.

  Cargile and Bracknell inspected the prisoner’s bonds and tied his ankles. Setting him by a tree away from the main group before checking on the drivers and women and then tending to the task of wrapping Josen’s body in a blanket and gathering shovels to dig another grave.

  Lydria took a short sword from her horse and sat by a tree near the bound man to guard him until her father or Bracknell decided what to do with him. It was likely that he would be bound further and secured to the inside of one of the wagons and taken to the Folly. Lowering herself slowly with her right hand so as not to hit the tender flesh of her left hand, Lydria remembered the man’s name. Wynter was short for a man, but still several inches taller than her. His face was gaunt and hollow, it was the face of a soldier who had spent too much time in battle, too much time without food, and too long without a night uninterrupted by violence and pain. The skin around his eyes was dark, limp and deep-seated, but they were focused. His brown eyes moved back and forth around the camps, settling for a moment on a person or thing, and then moving on. Wynter was taking in details, and Lydria tried to follow his glances to see what he was looking at.

  The group was small, weapons were few, and most of the company could be disregarded in a fight. It was obvious they were from Bayside based on the uniforms of Cargile and Bracknell and the direction of travel and loaded wagons would make the Folly a likely destination. As Lydria watched him return again and again to the wagons, she thought he was estimating how little money the group had as there were no carriages, no tables or chairs, none of the trappings that go along with traveling nobility. There were no servants. He then turned his attention the forest and Lydria noticed the stillness in the woods, like a shadow descending among the noise. There were still no birds singing, and no small animals moving in the underbrush. Looking down from where they had come, there was a gap in the trees that showed a meadow in the flatlands. Cows could just be seen through the gap, like looking at a farm through a hole in a fence. It was a lovely scene, Lydria thought, although it was odd the cows were lying down in such fine weather.

  Lydria’s gaze left the cows and moved back to Wynter who was closing his left eye and working his way through camp again with only his right eye open, as if sighting an arrow. The man took no notice of her as tried to guess his age. He was not young – the beard covering his neck was streaked with grey and it was full along his jawline and chin but mostly ignored his cheeks. Finally, as she moved up Wynter’s face to his eyes, Lydria noticed that he noticed her.

  His gaze was empty. Despite his methodical accounting of the camp, his eyes betrayed no emotion. They were the eyes of the hunted, who knew the end game and only waited for it to play out. “Yes, I will kill them all, dear,” he said, looking directly at Lydria. “I’m a killer, a murderer.” His eyes never left Lydria’s and his face was expressionless, as if he were reciting words back to someone.

  “Who are you talking to?” Lydria asked, gripping her sword hilt more tightly than she was taught and looking at his bound hands and feet which hadn’t moved. He wasn’t trying to escape.

  “Oh, I’m talking to her,” he said. “She wants me to kill you all and I have to do it. I don’t have a choice. She won’t leave me alone otherwise. I owe her that much.”

  Lydria opened her mouth to ask who the woman was, but before she said a word, Wynter’s eyes grew wide as if startled, his pupils enlarging and crowding out the brown to leave his eyes nearly black. Lydria followed his gaze to the meadow beyond the trees and a growing darkness in the sky that left a trail of dense smoke in its wake. “You have to let me go,” were the last words she heard.

  FOUR

  Lydria opened her eyes and raised herself to a sitting position and sneezed. Her nose and throat were dry and clogged with dirt. She stood up and held a finger to her nose to clear each nostril and then cleared her throat and spit up more dirt. Around her the forest was mostly gone. The sky was dark, as dirt and dust fell from the sky. Her body ached from being thrown but it was difficult to say how far, as points of reference no longer existed.

  The devastation was immense. In army sieges, she had seen acres of land burned by retreating forces and then made worse by conquering ones who tore it up with feet and hooves, filth and waste. But nothing prepared her for what was left of the rolling hills and the gap that opened to the meadow so far away. Trees for furlongs were lying on the ground as if pushed down by a giant foot making a path in the forest and a deep trench stretched from the distant meadow to end in a pit nearby.

  Lydria staggered in the direction of the pit and halted halfway as a wave of dizziness washed over her. She reached a hand to her head and felt blood, she was still reeling from the impact and noticed her footsteps were almost silent – everything, in fact, was muted. The only sound she heard clearly was the rapid, deep thumping of her heart. Staggering on, she tripped over half-buried tree branches and ducked under the roots of pine trees that reached out for the sky. Stopping briefly to clear her nose and throat again, Lydria rested her hands on her knees recoiling from the pain of her finger as it lanced into her knee and looked away from the pit. The trench that had devastated the
forest was at least a hundred feet wide, and the walls of the trench got deeper until when she reached the pit, she could see the bottom at least ten feet below at the bottom of dirt walls that were nearly vertical.

  As she cleared her nose again, the smell of soil and bark reached her, and the sun hung in the sky like a dull yellow smudge, hidden behind the dust that continued to fall. Lydria pulled a cloth from inside her tunic and tied it around her face. How did she survive? There was no sign of her father or Bracknell, or the others. No horses, no wagons, no fire, no tents, no bodies – nothing except an upturned forest.

  The dull crack of a branch startled Lydria and she jerked her head up to try to find the sound, excited that she had heard anything at all. Across the crater before her she saw a movement, and a shadow. Hope grabbed her, and she stood on her toes hopeful to see something more telling. Someone was still alive, and finally she made out the blurred silhouette of a figure through the falling debris - dropping to its knees in the unnatural twilight. The figure raised an arm and dropped it again. Hoping it was her father, Lydria shifted her weight in preparation to run around the rim of the crater to join him, but instead, her weight triggered the collapse of the crater wall and she tumbled to the bottom.

  The fall seemed to take far longer than the mere seconds it must have been, and when she came to a stop she lay on her back coughing and staring at the brown sky above her. Within a minute of her fall, from the corner of her eye, Lydria saw something slide down the far side of the crater wall from where she fell.

  Pushing herself to her knees, she noticed the figure stumbling toward a blue glow at the center of the crater and she started moving toward it herself, forgetting the danger the unknown person may pose to her. At that moment, for reasons she didn’t understand, the only thing that mattered was reaching the glow. Crawling on her hands and knees, oblivious of the sticks and rocks and the driving pain of her left hand, she neared the crater’s center and lunged.