Authors: Usman Ijaz
Rebecca stared at the bullet as though she had
never before seen its like, and very likely she had not. The bullet was etched
and marked for use only by the Legion, and it was the only mark that Alexis
could think to use.
Rebecca reached out gingerly to take the bullet
from his hand. “This ... this will buy protection for my son?” Tears welled in
her eyes.
Alexis nodded. A bitter thought came to him:
If
we succeed in our mission, yes. If we fail, you will likely be better off here
than in the world outside.
“Thank you,” Rebecca said breathlessly. She held
the bullet in her palm, as though never intending to let it out of her sight.
“It is the least I can do.” Alexis stood up then
and bid her goodnight before heading towards the hut. His eyes drifted upward
as he walked across the clearing, and he noticed that the stars were out in
their numbers tonight. The sight filled him with sorrow as memories of the past
floated to the surface. Bitter memories of home, and all that still waited for him
there.
Not for tonight, those memories,
he
thought as he unbuckled his gun belt and lay down.
For now I must focus only
on my duty and my oath.
7
They awoke early the next morning, with the sun
still a distant light in the horizon, and ate breakfast quietly, none wanting
to place more stress on this leaving than they had to.
Adrian noticed that Milen sat with none of the
normal merriment that usually shone in his eyes. He was slow-thinking, but even
he understood that soon they would depart. Rebecca left wordlessly and went
into the hut. Adrian stood up and walked over to sit down besides Milen.
“How are you feeling?” Adrian asked. Milen
looked at him, and Adrian saw the tears that swam in his eyes.
“I don’t want you to go,” Milen mumbled, it was
an oddly small sound coming from such a large man.
“We have to, Milen. I wish we could stay, we’d
like to, but we have to leave.”
“Why?” Milen asked, his eyes pleading.
Because I have a duty
,
came the thought. “I simply do, Milen.”
They sat in silence then, with the cold wind
blowing through the camp. Connor came and sat on Milen’s other side. Milen
pleaded with him not to go either. For a moment Adrian thought that Connor just
might decide not to, but then Connor looked at him, and told Milen he also had to
go. Milen wept silently.
When Rebecca came out of the house she was
carrying a small haversack.
“Here,” she said as she handed it to Alexis.
“What’s this?” asked the Legionnaire.
“A few items. There are a few blankets in there,
now you can sleep warmly at night, and I also packed some hard bread. There are
also some waterskins. It is not much, but it is something.”
Alexis looked at the haversack as though he
still didn’t know what it was - on another occasion Adrian might have found it
amusing. Then the Legionnaire looked up and said, “We can’t take this, Rebecca.
You and Milen have already given us so much.”
“You can, and you will,” Rebecca told him. Her
tone brooked no arguments.
“Thank you,” Alexis said at last.
When the time for the actual leaving came,
Adrian felt as though he wanted to weep. They stood on the bank of the river,
the raft floating lazily, and said their disconsolate goodbyes. Milen accepted
their good wishes with quiet mumbles with his head hung down. He was a giant,
but inside he would forever remain a child. Rebecca bade them well fortune on
traveling through the woods across the river safely.
Rebecca and Milen stood on the bank and watched
them go.
Alexis wore the sack Rebecca had given them
slung across his back. He gave both Adrian and Connor paddles, and then, with a
last look at the two they would be leaving, he cast off the rope. The raft
drifted out into the Rye River.
The wind rolling off the river was sharp, and
they felt it bite away at their skin through their clothes. Alexis knelt at the
head of the raft, and Adrian and Connor sat to either side, all of them
paddling against the current. Adrian and Connor both kept glancing back towards
Rebecca and Milen on the shore as they drifted further and further.
The three didn’t reach any hard obstacles until
they reached the middle of the wide river. There the current was strongest and
it threatened to carry them all away.
“Connor! Paddle harder on that side!” Alexis
shouted.
But no matter how hard they paddled, they seemed
to be only inching their way forward. As water crashed against the sides of the
raft, wetting them all, the strain on the bark ropes became too much and many
of them began to break.
“Alexis! The raft is coming apart!” Adrian
shouted.
“Keep paddling! The shore’s not much farther
now!”
Adrian looked up and saw that the shore was
indeed much closer now, but he began to wonder if the raft would hold together
that long. As he watched, one end of one of the long trunks broke away and
began to drag along the raft. Soon the other end broke away also and the branch
floated off downstream.
“It’s falling apart!” Connor shouted.
“Keep paddling!” the Legionnaire shouted back.
Adrian looked behind them, and saw that Milen
and Rebecca were gone. He thought he understood their reasoning; they didn’t
want to see if the three of them made it to the other side or drowned, to them
either one was as bad as the other, and perhaps they didn’t want to remember
the three of them in that manner.
The bark ropes in the middle of the raft began
to snap apart. Adrian understood that the entire raft could come undone at any
moment. He could feel the wooden trunks shift beneath his feet, as if they
wanted to break away from their restraints. They continued to paddle for all
they were worth.
And then they struck the shore.
It was just in time as well, Adrian saw; the
bottom of the raft had been unraveling all the while, and now one of the main
beams broke away, making the other pieces look like splaying fingers.
Alexis grabbed them both by an arm and they all
jumped to land.
“What about the raft?” Adrian asked.
“Let it wash downstream, we don’t want to give
anyone on this side a means to reach the other,” Alexis said, and pushed the
ruined raft back out into the river.
They turned and headed into the woods.
1
Aeiron sat on his throne and listened to the
whine of the four lords and one lady that had come to see him. They stood
before him, all different in their appearance and all there for different reasons,
yet he found it hard to pay attention to any of them. Some wanted him to
increase their lands, some wanted him to do something about a grain shortage,
while others wanted him to banish the bandits from the mountains.
“... the raids have increased in the past year,
my king, and I can no longer hold them off with what little men I have. I need
more!”
“Raids are no matter to me. You see, if my lands
were extended just by the slightest, I am certain that I could rid those lands
of these raids.”
“Are you suggesting, Harris, that you want to
steal my lands?”
“Quarrel about your damned raids some other
time,” snapped the lone woman. “It is the grain shortage that concerns me ...”
And so it went. Aeiron let it drift over his
head. He stared at the portly man who had complained about how hot it was, but
he didn’t voice his argument about the weather again, which was perhaps for the
good. The king looked to the seat besides his, where his wife, the Queen Jayne,
sat. She smiled at him, and some of his weariness washed away.
He wanted to tell these fools to stop bickering,
that it didn’t matter because soon there would only be one thing that need
concern them all. Survival.
If Alexis and the boy are dead, then we must all
prepare.
But he dared not voice this strong urge; he would not have panic
spreading across the land like grassfire.
Hamar and Owain’s bodies had arrived a day ago
and had been buried with all the respect that was owed them, but he couldn’t
help but wonder about Alexis. Three had left, two had returned in the back of a
wagon, but what had come of the third? Was it just that he was dead and no one
had found his body yet?
Not since first assuming the throne at the
supple age of fifteen had he ever felt so worried. As if sensing the run of his
thoughts and his desire to be away from these nobles, Nemar rushed into the
room.
“Your highness, the Krillen ... it’s glowing!”
“But, your highness ...” the Lords started in
unison as Aeiron stood up.
“You may continue your discussions with my
wife,” the king told them. “I am sure that she has been paying better attention
to you than I.” He gave his wife an apologetic smile for burdening her with
this, and then turned and followed Nemar out.
The Krillen had been in the kingdom of Grandal
for years, long before Aeiron’s reign and before his father’s. It had been
passed down from king to son, and king to son again. Aeiron had received it
when he had been hastily ushered onto the throne after the death of his older
brother. The Krillen showed what it wanted and when it wanted, it seemed, but
had nonetheless proven to be a great advantage for Grandal through all the
years and wars.
It rested in a chamber of its own, a bowl of
water on a small plinth..As Aeiron and Nemar approached, the king saw that the
water was glowing brilliantly.
“It’s Alexis,” he whispered as he looked into
the water carried from Urd’s Well.
In the Krillen he saw Alexis and two small boys
on a hilltop. They stood in a field of golden flowers that carpeted the ground
all around them. The simple knowledge that they were alive brought a small
smile to his lips.
As they watched, Alexis turned and for a moment
looked directly at them. One of the boys appeared to say something, and
Alexis’s gaze fell away. There was no sound from the Krillen, its gifts did not
extend that far, so they could not hear what was being said.
Then, as simply as it had come, the image began
to dissolve and change. What the king saw next gripped him in inexorable fear.
It was the sight of the two boys hanging from nooses around their necks, and of
Alexis being pulled onto the platform.
The image dissolved away, and there was nothing
left but a darkness that seemed to shift and move like trapped smoke.
“No,” Aeiron whispered as he stirred the water
with one hand. “No ...” The Krillen remained as calm and opaque as ever.
“Your highness, perhaps it is best to leave it
alone for now,” Nemar suggested quietly.
Aeiron looked into the still water for a few
moments longer, and then stepped back. “What does it mean, Nemar?” His voice
was soft and cracked, unrecognizable even to himself.
“I don’t know, my king. It showed us two
different sights, perhaps they are what might be?”
“Perhaps,” Aeiron said after a while.
Or that
they could follow one another
. He didn’t voice this dismal thought.
“What matters is that for the moment they are
still alive,” Nemar said.
For a few moments they lingered there, but it
became apparent that the Krillen had nothing more to show.
2
The courtyard was silent, but for the whimpering
sounds of the man and woman who knelt before the lord of Hanna, awaiting his
judgment. A small crowd of onlookers had been gathered to witness the
proceedings. They all watched with differing levels of composure.
Jonas massaged his forehead with his right hand,
but his head would not stop aching. The loud pulsing behind his eyes would
simply not go away. It felt as though his brain were swelling and in the
process splitting his head apart. His eyes throbbed, and he imagined they must
pop out of their sockets and fall into his lap any moment.
Better if they
did
, he thought miserably. They were not the ones he had been born with,
those eyes would have condemned him on spot, and he despised the fact that he
had had to change them.
He looked up from the large throne-like chair that
had been dragged out to the courtyard so that all could witness him carry out King
Jerome’s law. The crowd consisted mainly of guards and servants with a few
townspeople to further spread the tale. Jonas looked at all the faces, and
wondered if the hate he felt for them was reflected in his hazel eyes.
He saw Logan standing apart from the rest in the
shade of the outer walls, and regarded him pensively for a long time. The man
stared back like a hawk, and he might as well have been one for all the emotion
he showed.
But he’s dangerous, that one
. Jonas didn’t for a moment
believe Logan could harm him, he was simply too weak and knew too little, but
among men he was a superb killer. The man’s reasons for leaving the Legion were
his own, and he didn’t relinquish his secrets so easily, another quality that
Jonas found admiring in him, but when offered the chance for vengeance he had
come willingly enough. But Jonas felt it wasn’t just the promise for vengeance
that had drawn Logan to him. The man had his own motives.
As long as they
don’t counter mine. How much does he know?
How much has he seen and
overheard?
He wondered if it was time to be rid of the man, and then
dismissed the thought. Not yet. Logan still had his uses.