A/N
2 chapters combined to long 3k chap, enjoy!
Chapter 807: A Punch Worth a Thousand Plans
The Dellan trading caravan had been on the road for a week, and by now everyone in it had learned which topics were safe to bring up and which topics would start Old Martha shouting from the second wagon.
"All I said," Ryek the driver called over his shoulder, flicking the reins across the backs of the two draft horses, "is that the toll at Harrow Bridge has gone up again, and that a man could feed his family for a week on what they charge for a single crossing now, and somehow that makes me the villain of this whole conversation."
"You're the villain because you said it while chewing my salted pork," Old Martha shouted back from her perch between two crates of dye powder, her grey hair escaping its bun in every direction. "A man who complains about tolls while eating another woman's pork has no principles, Ryek, none at all, and I've been saying that since the day Master Dellan hired you."
Master Dellan himself rode at the front of the column on a brown mare that had seen better decades, and he had long ago perfected the skill of hearing absolutely nothing that happened behind him. He was a round man with soft hands and hard eyes, and he ran his caravan like his father had run it before him, which meant good pay, plain food, and a strict policy of never getting involved in the affairs of anyone who could kill him with a thought.
Which was why the four Lightweavers riding escort made him nervous, even after a week.
They had been assigned by the regional office of the Order of the First Light, three Rank 1 initiates under the command of a Rank 2 captain named Lionel, and Lionel had spent the entire journey making certain that every mortal in the caravan understood the honour being done to them.
The priest rode a white gelding at the column's flank with his blue-trimmed robes arranged just so, and when he spoke to the merchants he spoke slowly as though they were hard of hearing or dim-witted.
"The road narrows past the orchard country," Lionel announced, his chin lifted toward the horizon. "Bandits favour narrow roads. You can all take comfort in knowing that I have cleared bandits from worse roads than this one."
"Thank you, Captain," Master Dellan said, holding back a sigh because he had said those exact words fifty-four times already this week.
Two of the initiates, Pell and Joris, were just like their captain, and they rode together near the rear trading observations about the mortals in voices that were never quite quiet enough. The third initiate was different, and everyone in the caravan had noticed it by the second day.
His name was Ferny, and he was around sixteen years old, thin as a fence post, with a farmer's sunburn still fading from the back of his neck, and unlike his companions he had spent the journey actually helping.
The young man carried water when the barrels needed refilling, he held the horses when the wheels needed checking, and on the fourth day when a crate of glassware had shifted dangerously, he had steadied it with his own two hands before anyone thought to ask him and without asking for anything in return.
"You'll ruin your robes doing that," Pell had told him, watching from horseback.
"Robes wash," Ferny had replied, and gone back to work.
The other person who worked was the village boy. He had joined them three days ago, a teenager in rough-spun village clothes with mud on his boots, and he had offered a simple arrangement, labour in exchange for a ride toward the northern territories.
Master Dellan had agreed because free labour was free labour, and the boy, who gave his name as Tam, had turned out to be worth five of Ryek. He loaded, he unloaded, he mended a snapped harness strap with fingers that moved faster than Old Martha's eyes could follow, and he did all of it without saying a word.
"That boy's mother raised him right," Old Martha declared on yesterday evening, watching Tam stack the cook pots. "Quiet, hardworking, doesn't eat much. If my daughter weren't already married to that useless fisherman, I'd be making introductions."
"He's probably running from something," Ryek said. "Quiet ones always are."
"You'd know all about running, wouldn't you, the amount of work you avoid."
This afternoon, Tam was walking beside the third wagon with a hand resting on the sideboard when the wheel dropped into a rut and a sack of grain toppled from the top of the load. Ferny, who was riding nearby, swung down from his horse and helped the boy heave it back into place. Pell made a disgusted sound from further up the column.
"Thanks," Tam said.
"Thank the rut," Ferny said, dusting flour from his sleeves. "You've been carrying this caravan for days, the least I can do is carry one sack of it. Where are you headed, anyway? You never said."
"North," the boy said, and there was something in his eyes when he said it that Ferny couldn't quite name. "There's someone I need to find."
Ferny might have asked more, but at that moment Joris let out a low whistle from the front of the column, and every head in the caravan turned toward the west, where the trees had opened up along a rise in the land and revealed the estate.
Lord Kaeven's ancestral home spread across the hillside in pale stone and climbing ivy, its wings and towers arranged with an architect's eye for beauty with wide windows to let a lot of light in, terraced gardens descending in green steps toward orchards heavy with fruit, and fields beyond the orchards where workers moved.
Unseen to mortals was a concealed barrier formations layered one atop another with a mix of Radiant-Touched warriors and experienced Lightweavers on constant patrol because Lord Kaeven was a Rank 6 elder of the Order, and a Rank 6 didn’t survive to old age by trusting in beauty alone.
"Would you look at that," Ryek breathed, all thoughts of tolls forgotten. "A man could fit my whole village in one wing of that place and have room left for the pigs."
"They say his orchards produce fruit in winter," Old Martha whispered. "Blessed trees. Imagine biting into a fresh plum with snow on the ground."
"Imagine the taxes that paid for it," one of the mortal guards muttered from the rear. "My cousin farms two valleys over. Half of everything he grows travels up that hill and he's never once been thanked for it."
"Keep that talk in your throat," Master Dellan said sharply, without turning his head. "Voices carry, and lords have long ears."
What was strange, and what Master Dellan noticed even as he said it, was that the Lightweavers had gone silent. Captain Lionel, who had spent the past week narrating his own magnificence, now rode with his shoulders drawn in and his eyes fixed on the road ahead. Pell and Joris had stopped their commentary entirely, and all three of them wore the expressions of men who could sense something the mortals couldn’t.
To a Rank 1 or a Rank 2, the ambient power radiating from that hillside pressed down against their senses, and against the standing of a Rank 6 elder, an escort captain and his three initiates amounted to dirt on the road. Every one of them knew it in his bones. Only Ferny kept looking at the estate, and his expression held more sadness than awe, though nobody thought to ask him why.
The caravan didn’t stop, because the estate wasn’t one of their stops and nobody sane invited themselves onto a lord's land, and the road curved away northward through a stand of oaks, and the pale towers slid gradually out of view behind the branches, and conversation slowly returned to the wagons, starting with Ryek's opinions on winter plums.
It was almost a mile later that Ferny realised the village boy was gone.
He twisted in his saddle, scanned the wagons front to back, checked the far side of the column, and found nothing, no mud-caked boots walking beside the third wagon, no quiet teenager anywhere among the crates and canvas.
"The boy," he called out. "Tam. Has anyone seen Tam?"
"Probably relieving himself in the trees," Joris said, bored.
"We haven't stopped. He was beside the grain wagon before the estate and now he isn't anywhere."
Captain Lionel turned in his saddle just long enough to deliver his verdict. "Then he has left, initiate, which is what mortals do, and I will not be turning this column around within sight of Lord Kaeven's lands to search hedgerows for a farmhand who has already been paid in bread and distance. Ride on."
"The captain's right, lad," Master Dellan added, and to his credit he did sound faintly regretful about it. "We're two days behind schedule as it stands, and the boy settled his debt with honest work. If he wanted to leave, that was his to decide."
Ferny sighed, because they were right and he hated that they were right, and he let his horse fall back level with the grain wagon where the boy had walked, and he whispered, "Sorry, Tam. I hope you find whoever you're looking for."
That was when he saw it.
Sitting on the wagon's sideboard, exactly where the boy's hand had been resting, was a small emblem, a disc of pale wood no larger than a coin, carved with a spiral pattern that resembled a tree curling in on itself. Tucked beneath it was a scrap of paper. Ferny leaned down from the saddle and picked both up, and the moment his fingers closed around the wooden disc his breath stopped in his chest.
Blue sun energy poured off it, and not just normal blue sun energy, but Rank 4.
Ferny had stood in the presence of Rank 4 elders before, at ceremonies, at a distance, and he knew that signature the same as a farmer knows the smell of rain, but this was wrong, or rather it was more right than anything he had ever felt, because the energy saturating this little disc was cleaner than any energy he had felt before.
With numb fingers he unfolded the note and read what it contained.
Thanks for the help. Kindness is rarer on these roads than bandits. I hope this helps you more than the water barrels helped me. — T
Ferny sat very still on his horse while the caravan rolled on around him, and he looked back down the road toward the distant hillside, and he thought about a quiet teenager in muddy boots who had steadied crates and mended harnesses and thanked him for one lifted sack of grain.
It was then that he understood that he had spent the past few days working alongside a senior of the Order who outranked his captain by two full ranks and had chosen, for reasons Ferny would probably never learn, to carry grain instead.
Ferny closed his hand around the emblem, and he was suddenly very, very glad he had been raised to be nice to people.
***
I stayed in the bushes until the last wagon disappeared around the bend, and even then, I waited another full minute, counting the fading hoofbeats, because days of playing a mortal had put me back into habits of patience that I had missed.
"Why did you do that?" Tomas asked, and I could feel his confusion pressing against me. "The pretending, I mean. You flew over a whole village square in Porvale, everyone saw what you were, and then you spent three days carrying grain sacks and letting that Pell fellow talk about your boots."
"Because small changes create bigger changes, which create even bigger ones, until a flap of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world creates a storm on the other side," I explained the butterfly effect. "In Porvale, I made changes on purpose, changes I had thought through, because this is the final loop and those people deserved saving. But a Rank 4 Lightweaver flying is a beacon and not worth the trouble it brings."
"But you gave that Lightweaver your emblem. Isn't that going to change things too?"
"It is," I admitted, "and I thought about it before I did it. But Ferny seems like a good man, and good people are rare in any world. I like to help the people who help me. That emblem holds enough pure blue sun energy to push him through two breakthroughs if he absorbs it slowly, and a man with his heart could use two breakthroughs. Whatever ripples come from it, I'll take responsibility for them."
Tomas was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "My da always says a man should leave every field better than he found it, even fields that aren't his. He says it about actual fields because he's a miller and he thinks about grain more than is healthy, but I think he means it about everything."
"Your da and I would get along,” I held back a laugh.
Then I turned and looked through the branches at Lord Kaeven's ancestral home.
If events in this loop continued along their usual track, Lady Laelyn's caravan should be arriving at this estate soon, rolling up that long orchard road with Beric glowering at every shadow, and Lord Kaeven would greet them with warmth and wine and his aristocrat's smile.
None of them would know that beneath the smile, the lord had already made his arrangements, that the Lightweavers stationed here as protective escorts were pieces in a plan that ended with a Saintess candidate quietly dead before she ever reached the Academy.
It had happened in the earliest loops, before Kal grew strong enough to intervene, and Kal had told me once that Lord Kaeven and Elder Lyonis had been the ones who always found him first, back when he was weak. Not that Kaeven's plan would matter this time, because Kal was alive in this loop, and a Rank 8 with a thousand loops of grievance doesn’t leave items unchecked on his list.
"So why are we here?" Tomas asked. "This place feels wrong. Even I can feel it, and I can't feel anything."
"You saw it in my memories," I said. "Every single loop, Kal comes to this estate and kills Lord Kaeven. It's one of the fixed points on his checklist. And when Kal saved you at the start of this loop, he said one thing before he vanished. He said the name Lord Kaeven. He didn't say it to you, Tomas, not really. He said it to me, knowing I would eventually be listening to your memory of it. It was a message to meet him here."
"Alright," Tomas said slowly. "So where is he, then?"
"I'm not sure," I admitted, with Kal it was hard to—
"Now what," said a voice behind me, "is a village boy doing hiding in my bushes?"
I turned, slowly, the same speed a frightened teenager would turn.
A man stood on the path not ten paces away, tall and broad through the shoulders, his dark hair and neatly kept beard streaked with silver.
This was Lord Kaeven.
Shit, I thought, keeping my face frightened. The lord wasn't in his manor like I had thought he would be, he must have been returning from some journey.
I dropped into a clumsy bow. "Forgive me, my lord, I meant no harm, I was travelling with the Dellan caravan and I stopped to, to rest my feet, and they went on without me, and I didn't know whose land this was, I swear it."
Lord Kaeven looked me up and down, and I watched his eyes catalogue my boots, my rough-spun clothes, the mud, the whole careful costume.
"That story might be true," he said, beginning to walk a slow half-circle around me. "Caravans do shed stragglers, and the Dellan column did just pass. And yet here is the problem, boy. True story or not, I find you crouched in my hedgerow, watching my home, hidden from my road, and I have lived a long life because I have never liked it when someone hides in my bushes like some thief."
He lifted his hand, and his finger began to move through the air as he began to write calligraphy.
My eyes widened as I understood immediately what he was planning.
I was just a lone village boy on a remote road with no witnesses around. People went missing in these parts all the time, taken by raiders, taken by Sun-Touched, swallowed by the wilds, and one more vanished teenager would generate nothing except a sad shake of the head at some distant crossroads inn.
I really didn’t want to fight Lord Kaeven.
There was no way I would be able to survive against a Rank 6 without having to resort to the power of the Golden Sun, and that meant noise, which meant ripples, that wasn’t something I could afford right now.
But the math was simple.
If I held back to protect my disguise, I would die in these bushes, and dying to a mid-tier antagonist in somebody's hedgerow would be the most anticlimactic ending imaginable for the final loop of an entire world, and I refused to let this story end that stupidly.
Which meant that if I was going to fight, I had to spend my one advantage, the element of surprise, everything committed to a single opening blow, enough force to kill or cripple a Rank 6 before his defences ever finished forming.
"It is a matter of poor luck, you understand, boy," Lord Kaeven was saying as his strokes flowed, "nothing personal, but a man in my position can’t afford loose ends wandering his borders in times as delicate as these, and you had the great misfortune of getting lost on the wrong stretch of—"
The golden fist erupted out of me mid-sentence.
It burst from my chest in a flood of light, condensing in the same instant into a fist five times the size of my body, and it crossed the space between us faster than his calligraphy could close, and Lord Kaeven had time to widen his eyes, only that, before it struck him and sent him flying through the air.