Carol Berg - Son of Avonar

“I’m glad you’re here, Paulo.”

The boy trotted ahead of me. “Best keep up!”

The road stayed close to the river for a while, then angled southwest, passing through a trailing remnant of the great northern forests before breaking out into the rolling grasslands of southern Leire. I disliked the few-league passage through During Forest. The giant oaks and ashes grew together so thickly that they blocked the sunlight, leaving their lower branches bare and brittle. Little grew on the forest floor to disturb the ancient piles of rotting leaves and tangles of fallen trees. We had been walking beneath the grim forest canopy for almost an hour when Paulo stopped again.

“Riders. Three of ‘em close behind. And there’s men in the woods up ahead. Quiet.”

My skin crept. Highwaymen. Paulo and I quickly retreated into the shelter of a lightning-split oak, settling ourselves carefully so that no breaking twig could betray our presence, and so that we could not be seen from the road. Then we watched.

The three horsemen wore priests’ robes, two of them in gray, one in black with a heavy gold chain about his neck. Their horses were richly caparisoned with red and gold, blazoned with the rising sun of Annadis. Intricate decorative goldwork hung from the bridles, jingling softly as they passed.

I had little use for the priests of Leire, resenting all the years I had listened to their drivel. They taught that the Holy Twins had no interest in the daily trials of mortals, only in deeds of honor and glory that reflected their own. Priests of Annadis had sanctioned what was done to Karon and my son. I was not interested in gods who found honor or glory in such doings. And for the common folk, honor and glory meant working themselves to exhaustion, paying the exorbitant temple fees and royal taxes without complaint, and dying cheerfully in the king’s everlasting wars. No surprise that village shrines all over Leire were neglected, and the great temples deserted except on high feast days when the priests gave out alms.

The highwaymen slipped out of the trees and blocked the way of the hooded travelers just as the riders passed our position. “Hold!” commanded a short, stocky man. He wore a yellow rag tied around his head and carried a long knife. His four companions were variously armed with a cudgel, a spear, a dagger, and a crossbow, cocked and ready. “Dismount.” The priests obeyed in silence. Two of the outlaws caught the reins of the horses, while their companions stood guard on the hooded priests.

The stocky man examined the horses carefully, running his hand down the withers of a well-formed bay. “Such fine beasts are not the usual for traveling holy men. And such trappings…” He jingled the gold link work dangling from the bridle, and then strolled up to his victims and ran his eyes up and down the still figures. “Turned out quite grand for priests, are we not?” With a swift movement of his knife he snatched the gold chain about the neck of the priest in black and deftly twisted it about the long knife blade, leaving the point of his blade at the man’s throat. The three priests stood perfectly still and perfectly silent.

“Quiet lot, you are. Never met a holy man could keep from telling me how wicked are my ways, and how the Twins want my blood and my coin. Tiresome. Perhaps you’re not born to it.” He took another twist in the gold chain. “But you’ve prospered, nonetheless. Mayhap it’s time you shared a bit with the poor.”

I was prepared to see murder done—highwaymen had nothing to lose, being already condemned—but not in the way it happened. With breathtaking suddenness, the three horses screamed and reared, crushing one of the outlaws and entangling another in hooves and reins. In the ensuing confusion, the two gray-robed priests whirled about with blinding speed and precision, overpowering their guards. The one in black pinned the leader of the outlaws to the ground under the point of his own knife. With simple ease and no hesitation, the priest drove the knife home in the bandit’s chest, and then jumped up to join the larger fray.

It was over in moments. Three outlaws lay on the road unmoving. The two gray-clad priests held the two remaining highwaymen, pinning their arms behind them so cruelly that I expected to hear a bone snap in the sudden quiet. The priest in black approached the defiant captives. His hood had fallen back to reveal thin, light-colored hair and an angular face with jutting nose and brow. “You should have been more selective as to your prey, my little wolves,” he said evenly, his voice the more unsettling for its complete lack of emotion. And before the outlaws had a chance to savor a last breath, he whipped his knife across each throat. The two bleeding bodies were released and slumped to the ground.

The priest in black jerked his head around and stared into the trees, exactly in our direction. I dared not breathe until he pulled up his hood, turned, and clucked at his horse. A fallen highwayman moaned. The black-robed priest snapped his fingers. One of his fellows picked up the dropped spear and plunged it through the injured outlaw, pinning him to the road. The spear shaft was still quivering when the three priests disappeared down the road south.

“What, in the name of all gods, was that?” I shivered. The midday heat felt harsh and bitter. My mouth tasted of ashes.

“Filthy, bloody damn.” Paulo never had a lot of words.

We crept out onto the road. I told Paulo to wait for me while I stepped cautiously to each of the five men that lay on the hard-packed dirt.

“Are you loony?” said Paulo. “Get away!”

“I need to make sure they’re dead.”

“It’s only thieves.”

“They’re men.” Well, they had been men. Now they were all quite dead. Outlaws, yes, murderers themselves, no doubt, many times over. Yet I found myself with an odd sense of sympathy. If I had been empowered to choose the victors in that battle and entangle my fortune with theirs, I would have, quite irrationally, preferred to take my chances with the highwaymen.

As a child I had adored my family’s winter stays in Montevial. The crush of people and society in the city, the music and torchlight and carriages, even the spine-chilling sight of criminals hung up in cages or locked in pillories had been a thrilling change from our dull castle in the country. But now I found the stench and din of even so small a town as Grenatte made my head throb. Wagons of hay and wood rumbled noisily through the cobbled streets, and the walls of a blacksmith’s shop bulged with deafening clatter. A leather-aproned tradesman stood in the door of his shop, arguing loudly with a driver over a wagonload of hides, while a slack-mouthed girl drove a herd of bleating sheep through the square and yelled lewd insults at a man locked in the stocks and emitting a thready moan. The prisoner had evidently borne false witness; flies crawled on the bloody void where his nose had once been.

I sat tiredly on the stone steps that encircled the public well in the center of the town square, having bidden Paulo go to every inn in town, giving out the story that he had been paid to deliver a message to the person seeking a stolen white horse. The message said to meet the sender, a dark-bearded man wearing red, in the Green Lion common room at sunset, I had no intention of confronting the stranger right away, only to get a look at him. At the end of an exhausting day, my motives were far less clear than when I’d set out.

An army of beggars, the crippled remnants of Evard’s Kerotean war, groped at passersby on the peripheries of the square. The Kerotean campaign had been murderous. The Keroteans were a fiercely independent, religious people, sturdy warriors who believed their mountains were the fortresses of their god. Only the sheer numbers of bodies Evard had flung against the heavily fortified Kerotean cities had conquered them. Rumor had it that twenty-five thousand Leirans had died to take Kallamat, the city of golden-domed temples where butter lamps burned to the Kerotean god every hour of every day, a city perched so high in the mountains that men could not breathe the air. Evard had told his men there were chests of gold in every house in Kallamat, but no common soldier had ever seen a single coin of it. And the people of Leire had seen only these armless, legless, or eyeless veterans, if they saw any result at all of twelve bloody years.