David Farland: Wizardborn

She climbed to the lip of the crater. It was hard to imagine a living thing that could have bored such a hole.

Firelight reflecting from the clouds showed only a yawning pit. By inclining her ear, Myrrima could hear water churning somewhere in that void. The worm’s course had cut through a subterranean river, forming a waterfall. But it was far below. If she stepped away from the hole, the sound faded.

Myrrima walked among the scree, sinking into loose soil with every step.

The ground was wet and unsettled. Bits of dirt cascaded into the crater. Myrrima’s footing shifted as if the mound might suddenly slide beneath her, carrying her to her doom. Instinctively she eased back to safety.

The destruction of Carris was doubly apparent from atop the mound. But the view revealed nothing of her husband.

“Borenson!” cried Myrrima, as she scanned the plain. Wuqaz Faharaqin and his men left the bonfire, riding east toward Indhopal.

She glanced toward Carris. Her heart leapt. Guards had set watch fires against the return of any reavers. At the broken entrance of the city, she saw a warrior with red hair like her husband’s, leaning upon the shoulder of a red-haired girl. He limped toward the city. Between the falling rain and lingering smoke, she could not be sure if it was him.

“Borenson?” she shouted.

If it was him, he could not hear her, so far off. He hobbled into the shadows thrown by the barbicans.

Carris was a bedlam as Myrrima rode beneath the broken barbicans, searching for her husband.

A week ago Myrrima had celebrated Hostenfest at Castle Sylvarresta. There, for the first time in two thousand years, an Earth King had arisen. The people of Heredon had hosted by far the finest celebration she’d ever witnessed.

As she had strolled through the concourses outside Castle Sylvarresta, brightly colored pavilions had covered the fields like gems in a copper bracelet, greened with age. The entrance to each pavilion was decorated with wheat stalks braided in intricate patterns, and wooden icons of the Earth King all arrayed in finery.

The smell of sweetmeats and fresh breads wafted through the air. Music swelled from a hundred sites around the city.

It had seemed a feast for the senses.

At the turn of each corner she met some new wonder: a jester in parti-colored clothes, carrying a wooden fool’s head on a stick, came riding past her on a huge red sow. A young flameweaver out of Orwynne drew the flames of a fire until they rose up and burst into flowing shapes like golden lilies in bloom. A woman with five endowments of voice rendered an aria so beautiful that it left the heart aching for days afterward. She’d seen Runelords joust at rings on chargers caparisoned in colors so bright that they hurt the eyes, and dancers from Deyazz wearing lion-skins.

She’d tasted rare treats—eels kept alive in a pot and cooked fresh before her eyes; a dessert made of sweetened cream and rose petals cooled with ice; and confections stuffed with coconut and pistachios from Indhopal.

It had been a day to delight even the most downcast heart.

Now as she rode through Carris, her ride provided the dark antithesis of that day.

Instead of fair provender, her keen nose registered the stink of animals, spoiling vegetables, cloistered humanity, blood, urine, and war—all made more abominable by the lingering residue of the reavers’ curses.

Instead of seductive music, she was haunted by the entreaties and sobbing of the wounded, mingled with the cries of those who mourned the dead and those who called out for loved ones.

Instead of celebration, there was horror. Myrrima rounded one corner to find half a dozen children, the youngest a girl of two, whispering words of encouragement to a mother that they thought was grievously wounded. A glance told Myrrima that the woman was dead.

A girl of twelve wandered in front of Myrrima’s horse. She had gray eyes, dulled by shock, and her dirty face was cleaned only by the tracks of her tears.

That’s how I looked at that age when my father died, Myrrima realized. Her stomach knotted in sympathetic pain.

She searched for Borenson among thousands of grisly wounded scattered throughout inns, private homes, stables, the duke’s Great Hall, and blankets in the street.

Many wounded struggled near death. The reavers’ curses set wounds to festering in unnatural ways. Gangrene set into abrasions that were only hours old.

The search was a foul chore. Nearly every private household had taken in one or two wounded. The stench of the place assaulted her senses. She could not pick up her husband’s scent among so many competing odors.

“Borenson!” she shouted again and again as she rode through the streets, her throat going raw. She began to doubt her own senses, wondered if she’d only imagined that she’d seen her husband heading into the city.

He could be asleep, she thought. Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t answer.

Volunteers worked the battlefield, hauling the dead to the bailey outside the duke’s palace. She worried that Borenson might be among them. Gaborn had said that her husband was wounded. Perhaps he’d died in the past few hours. Or perhaps someone had mistaken him for dead, and even now she might find him barely alive. She made her way toward it, and finally caught her husband’s scent.

She rode with rising trepidation up to the bailey. Thousands of corpses were laid out. Whole families marched among them, carrying torches.

The blasted grass was a gray mat. The dead lay arrayed on blankets in rows. She could smell Borenson now.

Myrrima knew that dead loved ones never look quite as you expect them to. The faces of men that die in battle become pale, leached of blood, while the countenances of strangled men turn bluish-black. The eyes of the dead glaze over, so that it is difficult to tell whether a man had blue eyes or brown. A corpse’s facial muscles can either contract horribly or relax in perfect repose.

Many a woman who has slept with a man for years doesn’t recognize her own husband’s corpse.

In the same way, when Myrrima found Sir Borenson, she did not know him by sight, only by scent.

He knelt over a dead man beneath the remains of a gnarled oak that had dropped all its leaves. His face was leached as pale as cream, and he stared down, his expression so twisted in pain that she would not have known him. Dirty rain matted his hair and covered him with grime, so that he looked like a squalid wild thing. Clotted blood from a groin wound stained his surcoat down the legs. His right hand gripped the handle of a horseman’s battle-ax as if it were a crutch.

He looked as if he had been kneeling like this for hours, as if he might never move again. He had become a statue, a monument to pain.

Only his attire identified him. He wore the same clothes as he had two days past, including the yellow silk scarf that he’d chosen to sport into battle as a sign of her favor.

A little red-haired girl knelt above him, lantern in hand, weeping savagely. They stared down at a dead man who looked so much like Borenson that he might have been a brother.

“Borenson?” Myrrima called hesitantly. All the words of comfort that she’d imagined would come so easily suddenly caught in her throat. She could not imagine a wound that would cause the unadulterated agony she saw in his face. She asked softly, “What’s wrong?”

He did not look at her. Did not answer. She wasn’t sure that he even heard. His left hand clutched at his belly, as if he’d just taken a blow to the stomach.

Acorns crunched under her horse’s hooves as she approached. As she drew close, she realized that she’d thought that he was unmoving as he knelt. Now she saw that he was trembling all over.

She’d heard tales of men who had seen some great horror and retreated so far into themselves that they never spoke again. Borenson was a warrior. He’d been forced to butcher two thousand Dedicates at Castle Sylvarresta. The deed had so demoralized him that afterward he had quit his service to his king.