Bruce Blake: Heart of the King

He hadn’t noticed the tyger standing to the left, partially hidden behind the blackened walls of a broken down hovel. The beast’s voice startled him and he jerked his head away, pausing a second before peeking through again. When he was sure it was the white tyger, he heaved one leg through the opening.

“What are you doing h-?”

“Stop. Go no further.”

Graymon stopped and looked at the tyger, wide-eyed.

“What? Why?”

“You should not enter this place.”

The tyger sauntered out from behind the fallen building, its easy grace and unhurried movement calming Graymon. With the passing of the initial fear he’d felt when he dreamed of the beast, the tyger’s presence made him feel protected. The great cat halted a few paces away and Graymon thought he felt its breath on his face, warm and moist. The feel of it brought goose flesh on his back and a shiver along his spine.

“But why not? It’s only a dream.”

Graymon’s was surprised by his own words. He didn’t think he’d ever had a dream in which he knew it was a dream before waking. What did it mean? The tyger growled in the back of its throat, a low rumble Graymon felt as much as heard; the sound diverted his attention from the dream’s lucidity.

“More than a dream,” it said.

The tyger bent its head toward the fallen buildings; Graymon followed his gaze. At first, he saw what he’d seen before: burned wood and ashes, splintered boards, fallen walls. He opened his mouth to ask the tyger what he was looking at when he saw the first body. Instead of a question, he gasped.

The charred arm could easily have been a part of the wreckage-a burnt chunk of wood or blackened stone-but the body he now saw it was attached to was less damaged than the arm, though not little enough for him to know if it belonged to man or woman, adult or child. The person wore no armor, so this wasn’t the casualty of a battle fought between armies, but a villager in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Graymon wrinkled his nose and looked away. Outside another hut, he spied a second body, this one unburned-a woman lying face down in the mud, her stained dress pulled up to mid-thigh, her legs a mess of bruises.

She wasn’t there before.

He saw other bodies, too: men, women, children. Graymon hadn’t noticed them before, yet they were strewn across the courtyard, lying in doorways, propped against walls. He glanced from one to the next at the pained expressions on their faces, then looked away quickly from wounds and burns lest they turn his stomach. He didn’t want to vomit or cry and reveal weakness to the tyger, yet found himself curious about what happened here, about these people.

He hefted his other leg through the hole to sit in the opening, feet dangling above the ground. The tyger took a step forward to block him. Despite his curiosity, he didn’t want to get any closer to the corpses; the pretty, dangerous woman’s undead soldiers had given him reason to distrust a dead person’s ability to stay that way.

His thought changed when he saw the only body clad in armor.

Graymon leaned forward, squinting to see better. The soldier’s armor seemed familiar to him. He stared, trying his best to see the man better, but his face was pressed to the ground, his features hidden. The tyger moved, but Graymon didn’t look away from the man to see what the beast did or where it went.

The man lifted his head.

Blood ran down his face from a wound above his right eyebrow; one eye was closed, the other swollen and purple. Dirt stuck to his cheek and the long, braided beard hanging from his chin brushed the ground. Graymon stared, mouth open, as the man looked at him.

“Daddy!”

Graymon pushed forward, intending to rush to his father’s side, but his feet didn’t touch ground. Instead, he was falling. His father disappeared, the village and tyger disappeared, leaving only him and the air rushing around him and nothing else.

Graymon clamped his eyes shut. The rush of wind tossed his hair, air buffeted his face. He fell for a long while, eyes shut the whole time, until the wagon hit a bump, jarring him awake. Graymon opened his eyes.

The darkness left him feeling disoriented and nauseated. He opened his mouth to call his Nanny, but the rumble of the wagon’s wooden wheels on uneven ground brought him back from his dream to reality. He sighed deeply to settle his belly and shifted on the uncomfortable boards of the wagon’s floor.

He’d been awake for a minute when he noticed it wasn’t as dark as he first thought. He turned his head.

A slight glow emanated from the woman, an undeniable aura of light around her. She sat on the bench where Graymon had spent much of the trip, regarding him with a look like Nanny used when he said something she found amusing. The boy held his breath when he saw her.

“Hello, Graymon.”

He stared at her full head of red hair, the freckles tossed carelessly across her cheeks. This wasn’t the same woman responsible for his captivity in the rickety cart surrounded by decaying soldiers, but he didn’t know her. He didn’t say anything.

“Don’t be afraid. I’m a friend.”

I’m still dreaming.

The woman’s smile widened; she held her hand out in an offer of comfort. Graymon peeked at her fingernails to see if tiny scenes of horror and death danced across hers like they did on the fingernails of the other woman, but there were none. Instead, the woman’s nails were unpainted and trimmed short. As he looked at her hands, he realized he could see the floorboards of the wagon through them.

I’m still dreaming.

He shrank away, holding his arm protectively against his chest. When the woman saw he wouldn’t take her hand, she took it back and leaned forward. Her smile faded and her eyes found and held his.

“The tyger of your dreams is coming,” she said. “But he is a man.”

“A man?” He never saw a man in the dreams, only the tyger.

“Yes. A good man. He has dreamed of you, too.”

“Really?”

Graymon surveyed the wagon’s confined space, half-expecting to see the tyger or the man waiting in the shadows to reveal himself at a word from the ghostly woman. He saw no one. When he looked back to the woman, she was nodding.

“Yes. He is coming to rescue you and keep you safe.”

Graymon’s eyes widened.

“To take me back to my da?”

“If that is possible.”

This is a good dream.

The woman smiled again, though this time the expression held a wistfulness it didn’t have before. Graymon smiled back.

“He will be coming soon. Watch for him.”

“But how will I know him?”

“You won’t need to. He’ll know you.”

Graymon nodded. The light around the woman dimmed, her form faded. Before disappearing, she raised her hands and wiggled her fingers at him. He waved back. A second later, she was gone.

What an unusual dream.

He rested his head against the floor of the wagon, wondering what other dreams this sleep may hold. As his head touched, the left wheel of the cart hit a deep rut, rattling boards and jarring Graymon’s arm. Pain shot through his shoulder and into his chest; he cried out. The pain and the sound of his own voice startled him and he sat up, staring into the darkness.

It wasn’t a dream.

Khirro’s eyes fluttered open to see the washed-out blue of an autumn sky above. It calmed him, though whatever he lay upon pushed against his back, hard and uncomfortable.

I’ve been here before.

He recalled laying on the stairs of the Isthmus Fortress, when King Braymon saved him from a dead soldier’s rusted axe, then tumbling down the steps and nearly killing himself. Khirro closed his eyes and concentrated on remembering what happened after the fall down the stairs. Through his hazy and indistinct memory, the Shaman’s face came to him, then a soldier he once thought his friend. All at once, everything came back, and he saw his companions, their trip and sacrifices, their deaths. Everyone dead except him and Athryn.