James Axler - Homeward Bound

You could almost taste the fear when Nathan Freeman led the strangers into the hamlet. Many of the inhabitants were asleep, but most of those were quickly awakened by the noise that greeted Ryan and the other three.

Nathan brushed aside any discussion about whether the baron should be told, and Ryan did what he could to reassure everyone that they would be leaving early in the morning. They were taken to a barn, clean and dry, with ample fresh straw for all four of them to sleep in comfort.

A woman carried in a tray that held cups of warm goat's milk and four wooden bowls containing thick vegetable soup. Her hands trembled as she served them.

They all fell asleep quickly. Ryan awoke only once, around two, when he thought he heard the sound of a horse's hooves, muffled. Though he lay and listened, the sound wasn't repeated, and he was soon asleep once more.

They rose early in Shersville, and had breakfast by eight o'clock. Ryan had risen earlier, only a few minutes after a pale dawn. He'd pulled on his high combat boots and tucked his pistol and panga in their sheaths. As he walked out of the barn, he nearly bumped into the tall well-built figure of Nathan Freeman, who stood patiently in the deep shadow of the wooden building.

"Good morrow, Master... Thursby." The hesitation before the name was so slight that most men wouldn't have noticed it at all.

Ryan noticed.

"Morning, friend," he said.

"The others awake?"

"No."

"I'd like a chance of a talk, Floyd."

Ryan looked at the young man, noting the peculiar dark shade of his eyes, so dark it was almost black.

"Now?" the older man asked.

"Too many would wonder. After we've eaten. There's bread and there's eggs... and everyone is about their own business. Then we could walk to the river and talk together. Yes?"

Ryan nodded. "Okay, Nathan." He wondered whether he should ask him about the horse he'd heard leaving the village during the night, but decided it wasn't worth it.

The bread was newly baked, crusty and delicious, its top covered with small, crisp seeds that burst with flavor. The eggs were scrambled with butter and a mix of herbs. Even Jak Lauren, who was not normally a sturdy trencherman so early in the morning, devoured three helpings, wiping grease from his chin and looking longingly at the platter that crackled and spit over the open fire with more eggs.

"Fucking good," he said, belching, earning a reproof from the middle-aged woman who'd been serving the breakfast. She rapped him over the back of the head with the heavy wooden ladle.

"A loose tongue is an affront to an honest woman," she said.

"Where's this fucking honest woman?" he retorted, grinning impishly at her, delighted to see the hectic spots of angry color that sprang to her rounded cheeks.

"By the Blessed Ryan, I'll...!" she began, then put her hand over her mouth and turned away from them, gathering her long skirts and darting into one of the huts.

The four friends sat in silence, looking at one another. It was Jak who broke the stillness.

"Hear that, Mr. Thursby? Hear what old crone said?"

Ryan nodded slowly. Somehow, it didn't surprise him. He knew from plenty of other primitive double-poor Deathlands communities that odd religions were the norm. If Harvey Cawdor was the obscene tyrant he seemed, it made a kind of bizarre sense that some of the older locals might still cherish the name of the vanished son. It was something he needed to think about. And maybe talk to Nathan Freeman about. He stood and went to join him.

They sat side by side, on the bank of the narrow, twisting river. Nathan had said that it didn't have a name. It was just "the river." That was all it had ever been. As there was only the one, it didn't need to be called anything.

The water gurgled over round moss-green stones, forming small pools where delicate silverfish weaved and darted. Ryan watched them, leaning back against the sun-warmed bole of a toppled beech tree.

"Good feeling, Nate," he said.

"Not many of those within a country mile of Front Royal and the Cawdors. Father, mother and devil brat."

"Tell me a bit 'bout the ville and the Cawdors. I don't know this region well."

"Don't you, Master Thursby?" Freeman asked with an odd insistency. "Sure 'bout that, are you?"

"Course. You lived here all your life?"

"Yeah. Father was a local man. My mother came to Shersville when I was around three years old. Never rightly found where we'd been till then. Traveling some was all she'd tell me. Died when I was still a boy. Neighbors raised me."

"The Cawdors?"

"Run the ville since the long winter, so the oldsters say. Old baron died around twenty years back. Whispers tell of his being choked by Lady Rachel. But..." He allowed the sentence to drift off into silence. "There were three brothers. One good, one bad and one... one that just up and vanished, Master Thursby. He was... I'll come to him last. There was Morgan, who was everything good. Murdered by Harvey, who now runs the ville, who's every evil you could set your mind to. A gross and perverted bastard who shadows the earth he waddles over. Married to slut Rachel. One son, Jabez Pendragon Cawdor. Has every stinking, rotten part of both his parents in him. I can't... There aren't words for someone like him."

"The other brother?"

"Ryan Cawdor. Fifteen when he disappeared. Word was of an attempt on his life. That left him... Swift and vengeful boy, they say. Some think him rotting in the moat, like many another. But a lot of honest folks still think that one day he'll come riding in from the west on a stallion of pure white. He'll slaughter the Cawdors, take back the ville and the sunshine days will come again to all in the Shens. What d'you think of that, Master... Thursby?"

This time the hesitation was plain.

"What do you think about this missing brother, Master... Freeman?" Ryan dragged the pause out even longer.

"I think that I believe some things and not others. You know?"

"What?"

"I believe he escaped. I believe he lives. I don't believe in the dreck about a white stallion or a blaster that fires golden ammo. No!"

"I heard a tale, Master Freeman."

"Tell me." The young man picked up a handful of dried cones from a nearby pine tree and flicked them underhanded into the water, staring after them as they bobbed and leaped through the shallows and falls of the narrow river. He kept his face turned away from Ryan.

"Morgan Cawdor, they say, had a woman, and the woman bore a child after the death of her husband. Murdered, we agree, by Harvey. A son, I heard. The mother was mutie."

"She was..." the young man began, pale face flushing, dark eyes glaring. He threw the rest of the cones into the water with a barely controlled viciousness.

"She was what? I heard she was a woman with the power of seeing. If there had been a son, could he have inherited that?" He waited a moment, then answered his own question. "Perhaps."

"They say that Ryan Cawdor was desperate wounded when he fled the ville."

"Do they?"

"They say that a blade from Harvey's fist took out an eye, neat as a stone from a ripe plum — so they say — and opened a cut that ran from eye to mouth along the right side of the boy's cheek."

Then he turned and looked straight into Ryan's good eye, a fierce intensity in his glittering black eyes.

Neither man spoke for several heart-stopping seconds.

The moment broke into shards of crystal time as a voice wafted to them from the trail that led to the village.

"Nate? You there?"

"Yeah."

"Seen Tom?"

"No. Saw him late last night. Not this morning. Why d'you?.."

"Missing. Horse gone an' all."