by Will Bly
Raven’s Bane
A Dark Compass Novel
Will Bly
Copyright © 2019 William Blydenburgh
All rights reserved.
To my wife. Like our children, this book is a result of our dedication to each other.
Contents
Chapter 1: Ithial
Chapter 2: Taking Care
Chapter 3 Trapped Rat
Chapter 4: Oaken Barrels
Chapter 5: Lightning Strike
Chapter 6: Decisions
Chapter 7: A Modest Proposal
Chapter 8: King Rat
Chapter 9: Hanging Garments
Chapter 10: Hunting Mushrooms
Chapter 11: On the Blight Side
Chapter 12: Kay’s Honor
Chapter 13: The Unkindness of Ravens
Chapter 14: The Digger’s Fog
Chapter 15: Not Your Time
Chapter 16: Luthbrook
Chapter 17: The Largest Apples
Chapter 18: The Breath of Nature
Chapter 19: On the Other Hand
Chapter 20: It’s a Wash
Chapter 21: Hatchet
Chapter 22: An Empty Keg
Chapter 23: Time to Talk
Chapter 24: Oceanic Depths
Chapter 25: Barnabas
Chapter 26: South Again
Chapter 27: An Overdue Nap
Chapter 28: The Cavern
Chapter 29: Carry On... Carry On
About the Author
Connect with Will Bly
Chapter 1: Ithial
Ithial struggled to lead the pair of oxen along their grimy path. The ground was saturated with recent rain, and mud sucked at his boots. Tilling the mud was difficult work, but failure was not an option. Behind the boy and oxen strode the lumbering and ever looming presence of his father. Once work began, his father never allowed it to stop until it was finished to satisfaction.
A root grabbed Ithial’s foot, and the splash of soaked earth greeted his stomach. The wetness brought the cold, and the cold compounded his misery. Three faces looked down as he regained his lost footing: those of the two oxen he was leading and that of his father. There was a remarkable resemblance in apathy among all of them, blatant enough even for a six-year-old to notice. Ithial had grown used to the indifference; the shadow of it nipped relentlessly on his heals ever since he stole his mother’s place in the world.
Ithial thought he could see a frown tremble at the edge of his father’s mouth. Was that a hint of disappointment around his eyes? It relieved Ithial to witness a semblance of feeling surrounding his father’s hard gaze.
Gone. The rain washed any trace of emotion from the man’s face. Ithial wondered whether he had seen any to begin with or if it was all in his mind.
Stone-faced, his father beckoned from his lofty position. Ithial set his jaw and struggled to rise. The ground sucked hard at his boots for they were entrenched deeply. The right leg pulled free, boot and all. The left released with no such luck. His foot raised clean off the ground, and his boot remained sucked into the muddy vortex. The brown hole contracted as an anus would, and the hole disappeared. Taken aback by the surprise of a bootless foot, Ithial lost his balance and stepped backwards, his sock wet with slime and grit. He bent down to retrieve the boot from its mucky grave.
A current of air whistled above him. It seemed to be a breeze of wind at first, but Ithial soon recognized his father’s sigh.
Ithial finally yanked his boot from the ground and stood pleased with his retrieval. He looked up and found his father striding away.
“Finish up before you come home.” His father threw a hand up without even turning around. “See the job through.”
Ithial stood, saturated with the comfort of dirty water. A dull sensation pressed at the inside of his forehead like a tendril of an unseen creature. A knot stretched the skin of his throat. He took shorter breaths as the thing grew. It was a scream of defiance, and it threatened to earn him a beating should it escape. He bent over and brought his hands to his mouth. The thing came out in a muffled gag of mud and misery.
His father hadn’t heard. He was gone.
◆◆◆
The apathy of Ithial’s father paled in comparison to the hatred of his brother, Halfur. Ithial finished his grimy task and returned home to find his brother sitting on a cut tree stump in front of their log-stacked dwelling. The home proved modest at best—not nearly enough room for Ithial to escape the torments of his brother.
Halfur sat with his back against the wall, dramatically outstretched with a hand over his full, fat stomach. His bedraggled red hair fell like snakes over his pudgy cheeks and thick neck. His eyes, choked with swollen skin, contracted into beads of blackness—blackness in which there were no souls to be found nor any glimmer of kindness.
Ithial truly hated him. He wanted to kill his brother. He fantasized about it every day. He wanted to remove that smile. He wanted his brother to feel what he felt, the pain that seared through him body and spirit, a soul subjected to eternal flame.
Halfur opened his eyes and smiled as Ithial came to stand before him. A bowl of mush pretending to be food sat at his feet. Potatoes, perhaps. Halfur stretched in an overly long and loud fashion, then sat forward with his hands on his knees.
Ithial looked on with disappointment while hidden anger scratched at his skin.
Halfur hacked and hocked inside his throat until presented with a suitable sack of mucus, then bent over farther and let it drop into the bowl. “This...” He picked the bowl up, jabbed two of his fingers into it, mixed, and extended it generously outward to Ithial’s dismay. “This is yours. Your dinner.”
Ithial widened his eyes at the bowl. He kept his gaze low, careful to avoid his brother’s eyes. Fear kept him alive. Fear kept his brother at bay. Challenging Halfur resulted in violence. His brother had to feel control, and as much as Ithial yearned for control of his own, his instinct to survive always won out. Show fear. Cloak yourself in it.
“Hey, look at me when I speak to you.” Halfur snapped his fingers.
“I am.” Ithial made his lips tremble.
“Obviously not well enough or I wouldn’t have to say anything, would I?”
“No, sorry,” Ithial whispered.
“Look at me.”
Ithial hated that he knew this wouldn’t go well. A situation with no answer. He slowly lifted his eyes to meet his brother’s gaze.
“You look angry. Are you angry?”
Ithial shook his head.
Halfur stood up. “Are you lying to me?”
Ithial shook his head and looked away.
“Don’t look away from me. I know you’re not angry. You’re just hungry, aren’t you?”
Ithial shook his head again.
“What’s that?”
“No.” His heart raced.
“No what, you aren’t hungry? Or are you not-not angry? Are you angry, after all? Or angry and hungry? Let’s find out.” Halfur held the bowl up to Ithial’s face. “Eat it.”
Ithial chose passive resistance as the only route available to him. He turned his head slightly away from the bowl. “I’d prefer not to.”
“What’s the matter? Looks perfectly fine to me.”
“I guess I’m feeling a bit nauseous, is all.” This wasn’t far from the truth. Ithial’s stomach turned in knots.
“Nauseous, huh? You’ve been working hard. Bet you need something solid in the stomach, is all.”
“I think dry clothes first might help.”
“Tssk. Tssk. Should trust your older brother more. I know what’s best.”
And just like that, Ithial found himself pinned to the floor face-down, crumpling under the strength and weight of his brother. The bowl slid in front of him.
Halfur grabbed a handful of Ithial’s hair and tugged hard.
Pain shot up around his scalp. His face lifted just enough for the bowl to come under his chin. The pressure hit him in the back of the head. His mouth and nose smashed into the bowl. The rim pressed against the ridge of his nose—he heard a sickening crack. The threat of death dulled the senses, and Ithial felt numb. He couldn’t breathe. Dizziness set in. Blood mixed with the mush. He panicked at the thought of drowning and threw his body any way he could. He arched backward and even managed to slightly unseat his brother, but Halfur, the professional torturer, lifted the bowl as Ithial reared back. Some of the blood porridge fell out and onto the ground, but not enough to remove the threat. As Ithial’s vision began to dim, he freed his arm and reached back to his brother’s face.
Then came the heat. Unbearable at first, welling in his chest. It shot through veins to his hand. The burn escaped his fingers.
Halfur fell back and screamed in pain. The bowl dropped to the floor.
Ithial stood to face him, breathing uneasily.
Halfur’s hand raised to his cheek. A grotesque burn graced the area. Ithial couldn’t suppress his smile as Halfur’s eyes watered with tears. The smile disappeared quickly, however, once Halfur opened his mouth. “Father! Father! He did it again!”
The hair stood up on the back of Ithial’s neck. He turned toward the house and listened to the thumping of the floorboards. The door swung open.
◆◆◆
The crowd delighted in watching justice. Ithial hugged the whipping pole, while his father readied a switch he had broken from a nearby maple tree. Ithial knew the branch would be thin and flexible for maximum bite. Halfur stood frozen in the crowd, his face menacing and serious. No smiles or smirks—just ice and the desire to witness extreme suffering.
Ithial found a meager bit of solace when he spotted Elythia in the crowd. Elythia was the only person that was ever nice to him. She was a year or two older, the sister to one of his brother’s rotten friends. She might not have done anything particularly kind in the true sense of the word, but she was kind as in not belittling, bullying, ostracizing, or showing any recognizable display of hostility. When she regarded him, he neither saw her eyes full of malice or empty with apathy. She treated him splendidly normal, showing virtually no indication of being aware that he was a loser, an outcast, a piece of trash that blew in the wind and yet somehow went nowhere.
He yearned for her and in a way felt that perhaps this punishment would be a good thing. Maybe she’d pity him—even comfort him in some way. He saw her nurse a fledgling bird once. Maybe she would do the same for Ithial. Put his head on her lap and tell him it would be all right.
The branch cracked, the flesh of his back split, and a tear fell from his eye. Being punished seemed to be the only time he could will himself to cry. For that, at least, he was grateful.
◆◆◆
Ithial’s sight blurred as he opened his eyes. He laid out in an empty square, alone with his pain. This counted as the sixth time he’d been punished for using magic and certainly seemed like the harshest. Magic proved his second shortcoming. A violation of all things virtuous. He killed his mother in childbirth, and he was born with magic. Two heinous, unforgivable acts in the village of Shade’s Point. Two heinous, unforgivable acts in the eyes of his father.
His back tingled against the breeze. He pictured just how mangled it must have appeared. Couldn’t be much better than the bloody mess in Halfur’s mucus bowl. He shifted onto his knees. The movement pulled at his ripped skin. Shards of pain shot through him. Nothing he hadn’t felt before. Nothing he wouldn’t feel again—pain and fear were normal things. He figured someone had to suffer for the sake of normalcy.
He stood and his skin stretched more. He squeezed his eyes tight and winced away the pain.
A loud whisper traveled across to him. “Ithial!” Elythia stood a little way off, secreted away next to a shut-up dwelling. She waved him to her.
He obliged, shuffling through the mud in torn clothes. His shirt was in an irreparable state—he pulled away what was left of the loose fabric. Littering might bring on more punishment, so he kept the rags in his hand.
Concern colored her amber eyes as she wrung her hands together. “Come with me,” she said as she disappeared around a corner.
He followed best he could, hobbling and hanging his arms like some kind of ghoulish slave. His muscles torn and tired, Ithial battled through the fatigue and pain as she led him away from town and into the woods. She walked toward a shortcut he knew of that led to a main road. Does she want to leave with him? Leave this dreadful place? The thought sounded dumb, but he didn’t care. The suffering, the torture… Maybe this was what he gets out of it… Maybe…
He lost her among the trees. He huffed and walked on, weaving through the brush and pressed past a thorn bush that choked the way ahead. He laughed bitterly. What’s a few thorn bush wounds compared to what he just endured? Not much longer he found Elythia sitting on a rock in a small clearing.
The look of concern on her face twisted into something more confusing. Her eyes darted around before meeting his. “Ithial…” she said, “I’m sorry… They threatened me. I’m so—”
A familiar evil laugh erupted behind him, the triumphant sound of a child trapping their first animal. Halfur, arms folded and chin cocked upward, looked especially pleased with himself. “Quite the show you put on for us, little brother. To take that punishment and walk all the way out here. We were going to bet on whether you’d make it, but no one thought you would even come.”
Twigs snapped and ground-fodder crunched as shadows moved around the edges of the clearing. Halfur’s horrible friends, no doubt. They moved in closer, surrounding him, holding thick branches and rocks. Four boys in all, including Halfur. Elythia’s brother, Jarod, stood near her, keeping her from leaving. The other two were twins, Lott and Hoff, tall and lanky both, especially in comparison to Ithial’s stocky brother.
“Was the torture not enough?” Ithial asked. “Please, brother. Have mercy, please. I’ll make it up to you.”
Halfur snortled and pulled up his low-hanging shirt. The action revealed a hilt which he withdrew from his waistline. A long, sharp dagger, thin in its deadly design. The blade meant to stab deep over a small area. Ithial shivered at the thought of being run through with the weapon. It would surely plunge into his front and erupt out of his back.
Halfur crept toward him. “You are no brother of mine. You think you are so strong with that magic of yours. Think you can just cheat and burn me.” He put his hand to the burnt spot of his cheek and continued, “What good are you to me? Why keep you around anyway? You want mercy? I’ll give you mercy. Put you out of your damned misery!”
Ithial backed away from his brother as far as he could without coming into range of the others. He tried catching Elythia’s gaze to silently cry for help, but she kept her eyes on the ground. As lonely as his life had been, he had never before felt so alone. In that moment, he went somewhere far away. An island of darkness. Is this how one dies? Is this me saying goodbye?
Ithial met his brother’s eyes. Who would he say goodbye to? And to what? You can’t go if you have nothing—nothing to say you’ve actually existed. He wondered just how little his absence would impact the village. He pictured Halfur marrying Elythia. His fists tightened.
He shuddered and found himself back in the clearing, surrounded by those who stood in the way of his chance at life. It began as a patch of ice between his shoulder blades and spread outward like a frozen spiderweb.
They stared at him as if he had four arms.
Halfur sneered. “You weird bastard. You don’t belong—”
Ithial charged his brother headlong, deafened by the sound of his own scream. He planted his shoulder into his brother’s ribs and drove him to the ground. Ithial hoped to strike fast enough that Halfur wouldn’t have the leverage to swing the dagger down. The approach worked. Halfur’s knife-arm fell back as
he hit the ground. Ithial pinned the wounded arm like a wriggling snake. His brother punched him in the back, but Ithial was numb to pain.
Halfur clutched the dagger mightily, refusing to release his grip. Ithial leaned forward and bit his brother’s hand into submission. His teeth sank into fingers, scraping on bone. The brute howled in agony as the dagger fell to the earth. Ithial grabbed the dagger and used it to murder the hand that had caused him so much pain and brutality.
The punches in his back became pleas for mercy and freedom. Still, he stabbed the hand until it couldn’t move anymore. The broken fingers and perforated palm twitched, unresponsive to any requests Halfur might make of them.
“Now…” Ithial stood up, bloody dagger in hand. “Now you can have a look.” He turned on the others. “Drop them!”
They dropped their sticks and rocks.
“You three, down on your knees. Here!”
Two of them obliged.
Jarod stepped forward in front of Elythia, but stood in place.
Ithial ran at him and feigned a stab at the boy’s face. As Jarod’s hands went up to protect his face, Ithial lowered his aim and drove the dagger deep into his victim’s kidney.
Screams of pain echoed. The lanky boy crumbled to the floor in an instant. Ithial thought the screams were loud enough for the village to take notice. Spurred on by the adrenaline and clarity of the moment, Ithial ran the dagger straight through Jarod’s neck from side to side. The scream cut off in grisly fashion as a fountainous expulsion of blood burst forth from the boy’s mouth.
Elythia whimpered, her eyes wide with shock.
Halfur had passed out from the previous assault.
The two others stayed frozen in compliance, kneeling in the middle of the clearing.
Such weakness. The choice had been made. Time for them to die. She’d be last.
Ithial placed a hand on the shoulders of each of the twins. He didn’t want to just kill them—he wanted to see them suffer. He hated them, perhaps more than he hated his brother—the ones who followed blindly. He hated followers worse than all. His hate stretched along his skin and passed through his palms. He stood back. The two smiled briefly, thinking they had been spared, but their smiles turned to desperation. Something was wrong.