The mass of the cat drove him back onto the ground. He swung the torch up into the stalker’s face, and it roared, digging its claws into his shoulder. Its open mouth displayed an array of large, glistening teeth. The beast snapped its jaws at the flaming stick, breaking it in half. Father whipped the stick’s remnants at the cat, aiming for the muzzle, but the beast moved like the wind, and the stick glanced off its temple. The cat shrugged off the blow then raked at Father again, trying to get its face-size paws around his head.
The sounds of struggle ceased suddenly with a howl and a squish. The forest quiet again, Mia looked to see the massive cat slumped over Father, inert. She remained paralyzed with fear as Father, bloody and battered, struggled out from under the cat. When he finally pushed the stalker off himself, Mia saw a thin, supple knife protruding from where the cat’s left eye once was. A stream of blood ran down its large head and pooled in the soft dirt floor of the forest. The other yellow eye stared vacantly into the night sky. She whimpered, curled in on herself, and lay there shaking. Bleeding from his shoulder and face, Father rushed to her and wrapped her in his arms. At that moment, Mia felt so very small.
“Are you hurt?” he yelled, then released her from a hug to poke and prod her limbs for injuries. Tongue-tied, she managed to shake her head. He scooped her up and carried her back to the lodge, where the old man was waiting at the entrance. He held a knife, sister to the one lodged in the stalker’s eye socket, and was poised to loose it into the darkness. Where he had moved slowly and deliberately before, his movements with the knife were smooth and steady.
How had he even been able to see where to throw it?
Mia shivered again and buried her face into Father’s blood-soaked shirt.
“What were you doing out there? Didn’t you hear me earlier? We came here for safety, and you wander out into the night alone! Blast it all!” Father yelled.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just wanted to help the tree.”
“What in the blazes are you talking about? It’s as if there isn’t a sensible bone in your whole body.”
Father set her on the floor and shook her shoulders. But the rage left his body as quickly as it had come upon him, and he sank onto his bedroll in a heap.
The old woman clucked at him. “Now there, Jayne, ser. We should see to those gashes.”
Father nodded sullenly. Mia watched the old woman tend to Father’s shoulder and face. He winced but remained silent as she packed his shoulder wounds with ground herbs she had mixed with a thick milky liquid and formed into a paste. Mia didn’t recognize it and wanted to ask her what the stuff was and how it worked, but she was still scared, and her timidity won out. Father no longer seemed cross, but his face look haggard and ashy, whereas hours ago it was fierce and tanned.
She’d been so scared that the stalker was going to eat her. And then she was scared it was going to eat Father. It may have too, if the old man hadn’t been quick with the knife.
“Can you teach me to use that?” she asked the old man later, after Father had fallen asleep.
“My child,” the old man said in his raspy voice, “I can show you how to throw a knife, but this one is much too large for you. You’ll have to find a craftsman who can make you a set of your own, balanced just for you. Then you’ll never want for food or protection.”
The old man was right, and she convinced Father of the idea after they’d settled into their new home.
I should have asked the old woman how to heal people instead
, she thought.
The
next morning
, Father was up and about as if he hadn’t collapsed at all. Mia wanted to believe it had all been a dream, but she knew otherwise. He whistled softly to himself as he prepared some eggs. She smelled roasting sweet onions, lard, and some of the tangy cheese acquired two days before.
“Father, that cheese cost me a rare shunt. Rare indeed.”
Might have even been able to use that at Parniff’s
, she thought. Still dressed in her rumpled home clothes, she approached the hearthroot quietly and sat at the table.
Father, on the other hand, was dressed as if he were about to go ranging.
“I rather hoped to save it for a special occasion.”
“Every dawn faced with vigor is a special occasion for me just now,” he said, giving her a pointed look.
“Indeed you have the right of it,” Mia replied, her body sagging slightly. They settled into an awkward silence, uncomfortable thoughts boiling inside her head, each clamoring for her anxious attention.
Her eyes slid around the great room of their hearthwood. She recalled their careful selection of the tree, the effort it took to hollow out the center to form their home, and the cycles of living that made it such. Her eyes moved to the lounge, where Father had slept last night. She stood up and walked over to his makeshift bed.
Even in his weakened state, he had managed somehow to pull down one of the heavy furs from the high shelf where they were stored. Those furs had traveled with them to and fro and had remained entirely unused as relics from another time and place. Folks of the tropics had no use for such trappings. The center of the fur retained the shape of a body curled into it. Mia tried not to worry. Perhaps the warm furs were responsible for his current spry state. She couldn’t lose hope.
“They remind me of your mother,” he used to say when she asked why they burdened themselves with such unnecessary items.
“Tell me more about her,” Mia would say.
“She was very beautiful” was all Father would answer to that request.
When she was ten, Father had presented her with a leather bag lined in fur. It was much heavier than the gauzy cloth packs people in Hackberry carried.
“It was your mother’s,” he said. “I thought you might like it.”
It was an aged brown, with scratches and scars here and there marking its adventures. Soft sable-colored fur lined the opening, and the letter
J
was intricately embroidered on the front in soft silk threads of green and blue, matching her eyes. Mia would look at her bag and imagine how it might have gotten a particular mark on its side. Did Mother scale a mountain to look from its peak or traverse an ocean to stand on a foreign shore? Mia had no idea whether she ever had done those things. She must have been a great adventurer, however, to come by these fur items so foreign to the tropics. Mia carried the bag with her always, even though the few hammockers about her always joked at its heft.
“Mia,” Father called from the hearth, interrupting her musings, “I’ve been thinking very long and hard about what my next words will be. I don’t say them lightly.”
Mia turned back to him. Father had set the table with the morning meal and was taking a seat. She sat across from him, her heart pounding in her chest.
“All right,” she said, encouraging him to continue.
“I need you to carry a message to the Order of Vis Firmitas in Willowslip.”
Mia recoiled at mention of the Order.
“I know what I’ve said these cycles past, but the clerics there may be able to render assistance in this matter. They have means not available to the hammock folk here in the backwaters. They’re an ancient organization that has retained the ways of old.” A viscous cough punctuated his statement.
“But you’ve always mistrusted their ways,” she replied.
“True as that may be, they may have some remedy for the spores, and I have something they may need.”
What might he possibly have that Vis Firmitas would want?
Despite her reservations, Mia grimly agreed to make the journey and carefully packed her most sacred belongings into her lapin bag, including a small notebook where she kept her thoughts, along with a lock of blond hair from her mother pressed into it. Her mother’s locket was Mia’s constant talisman, and she placed it into the bag as well. She also packed her collection of the rarer root blocks, shunts, and conduits kept on hand for repair work. A simple tropics gauze wrap contained her clothing and camping gear.
When Father handed her the missive, it was sealed with his sap mark.
“Don’t break the seal,” he instructed. “We’ll be lost if the letter doesn’t arrive intact.”
Mia thought his request odd, but she obeyed. She was scared for Father and for her own future.
Giving him one last hug and a kiss on the cheek, she leaned close and said, “You’ll look after Hamish, won’t you?”
3
Willowslip
Lumin Cycle 9499
Melia Kannon struggled
to put one foot in front of the other. Her feet had ceased to ache many kilometers back. Now she felt only the shock waves that the blocks of numbness connected to her ankles threw up her calves and into her hips. Willowslip stood off in the distance, a speck on the horizon of blowing green stalks, with mountain ranges to either side of the plain. The sight was majestic from a distance, but she had serious misgivings regarding what they would find when they reached the city. It had taken them many months to get this far, and the vastness of Lumin, which had felt to Melia so small before now, appeared as an endless expanse of land and water. From the cold Northlands, with their remote villages and estates, through the mountain pass and its towns carved from the rocks of the surrounding cliffs, they had nearly traversed the open plains. Along the way, they met only chaos, desperation, and frequently despair. Melia regretted not taking a weapon when they had left the SainClair estate.
“
I
don’t think I’ll see Senegast again in my lifetime,” she said, as she and Gerard walked among the tall grasses swaying in unison, like waves rolling across the ocean. She missed her family, her children, her hearthtree, and she worried for them all.
“I suppose that would indeed be a tall order,” replied Gerard.
“I fear all the island towns are already cut off from the main continent,” she said after a long pause. “Boats for short travel were always for the common folk, who were unable to afford a trip by baccillum. Now, whether one is poor or rich, common or storied, our tools of travel are the same.”
“Mine could use a hot soak,” said Gerard, his normally pale skin red and cracking from the merciless wind and lack of shade. He grimaced as he looked down at his travel-weary clothes, dirt caking the fine garments. “It appears my feet aren’t the only thing that could use a soak,” he added.
Melia smiled at her companion, her white teeth flashing against the brown skin of her face. She didn’t burn like Gerard, but her skin wasn’t windproof and chapped just the same. She would be glad to get out from the open pass and back to the shade of the trees.
“Perhaps islands like Senegast are better off isolated from the mainland,” she said, frowning at a jagged tear in her sleeve, courtesy of a band of distraught citizens. She’d been obliged to hide her status as a former delegate after that incident. “At least for now,” she added, deepening her frown.
Gerard nodded as he looked off to the mountain toward their right. If his mother’s letter was accurate, they were headed for its base.
“I understand why Mother did what she did,” he said finally, “but why not prepare people first? Give them time to develop larger boats and alternate means of land travel.” His words were fractured. The fatigue was getting to them both.
Melia shook her head. She pressed her arm against her side, feeling the reassuring warmth of the book against her ribs. “I don’t think it would have mattered. We—myself included—were all too attached to our comforts and conveniences. Perhaps Aris understood that a swift wrenching of the bandage was in order.”
“I just hope Willowslip is better off than the Northlands,” Gerard said, and then his left knee buckled under him.
Melia stepped quickly to his side and supported his elbow as he struggled back to his feet. She shivered against the wind and thought of the Northlands. Somehow she doubted Willowslip would be any better.
Melia and Gerard finally wound their way
down the road into town toward nightfall a few days later. The entry gate was a shambles, but at least it was open. No one paid the two newcomers any mind as they moved along the mossy roads. Melia wasn’t surprised. She and Gerard looked wretched; the long journey south hadn’t been kind. Gerard favored his left knee with every step, and Melia worried for his health. They needed quarters for the night. It had been weeks, maybe months, since she’d last slept on a mattress. She prayed at least one of the local hospitality hearths was housing folk. They moved through the disordered streets, passing fighters, beggars, vendors, shifty-eyed grifters leaning against the ruins of shops, and everything in between.
“Network connection!” yelled a man with a pushcart as they passed. “Get yer adapter conduit here. Guaranteed to restore yer connection.” That trick apparently had worn thin, as the man had no takers.
Some of the shops were boarded up and abandoned. Melia saw signs of rioting come and gone. The early chaos had subsided into hopelessness. Busted shades and bent and torn branches decorated the buildings. Some of the trees were even scorched on the outside. Nothing without a direct hearthroot had power, so all the plank structures had been abandoned and gutted for any useful materials.
Melia and Gerard stayed silent as they traversed the clamor of people and small animals before turning west at a large intersection. The road they had turned from kept north, eventually leading to the Lord’s Keep. “Keep” was an inadequate name. It was by any definition a castle and a stronghold at that. Even from their position south, Melia could see the guards standing at every corner tower, keeping careful watch. It was disconcerting, to be sure, but nothing they had time to deal with now.
“Hoy,” Gerard said, his voice raspy. “I think I see a hospitality hearth up ahead.”
“Let’s hope they have a hearth strong enough to heat a good bit of water. I have a mighty need for a bath and a cup of tea.” She took Gerard’s arm to steady him, and they continued through the ruckus toward the sign that read,
hearth share inn
.
Neither of them noticed the shadow growing long behind them, always twenty paces back.