A/N
2 Chapters combined into 1 longer chap, enjoy!
Chapter 808: The Monster Wearing Muddy Boots
The caravan was moving along the orchard road heading north and to anyone who might have been watching from the side of the road, like a farmer leaning on his fence post with nothing better to do, they would have looked like what their papers declared them to be, which was a modest merchant company that was just going about its business and had nothing interesting about it at all.
Beric had personally selected each of the wagons himself, choosing old ones that had real honest wear on their axles from years of actual use. He had made his guards remove anything on their persons that had any shine or polish to it and instead made them wear patched leathers that hired caravan muscle typically wore because that was the image they needed to project.
The old guard had even gone so far as to rub actual dirt into the paneling of the second wagon with his bare hands because he thought the wood was looking too clean and new compared to everything else.
One of the younger guards had laughed at him for doing something so seemingly pointless but Beric knew that assassins and people with bad intentions on the road were those who noticed small details like a wagon door that was too clean compared to the wheels and axles around it.
Beric rode at the front of the caravan right now and his eyes were constantly moving across the treeline on both sides of the road, looking for any sign of trouble, because trouble was something that was always present on the roads in these times and you could count on it like you could count on the sun rising.
Three days ago, a group of raiders had tried their luck against the caravan at a river crossing, about twelve of them, hungry looking men who had rusted old spears and had looked at the mismatched armor and decided the caravan was going to be easy to take from.
They had been wrong about that.
After a few clashes, Beric's guards had sent them running even though he made sure his people fought sloppy on purpose, swinging wide and shouting too much. After all, a merchant caravan that fought well was a merchant caravan that drew the attention of those higher beings that they were desperately trying to avoid.
The Radiant-Touched attack two nights ago had been the real test.
A scout had come out of the treeline at dusk with blue light bleeding through cracks in his skin, he was one of those poor souls whose bodies had taken in more blessing than flesh could hold, and he was clearly sent here as a suicide attacker.
Beric had handled him personally and had burned the body afterward making absolutely sure there was nothing left behind that whoever had sent the scout could use to track the caravan and figure out what exactly they were protecting.
All things considered, the journey so far had gone better than he had dared to expect, and he distrusted that feeling with every bone in his body, because good fortune on the road was a debt that the road always collected eventually.
And he couldn’t afford for that debt to be collected because seated in the second wagon behind him, reading a book about medicinal herbs, was Lady Laelyn Vareyn, Saintess candidate of the Order of the First Light. There were people in this world who would empty a treasury to see her dead before she ever reached the Cerulean Spire.
"Captain," called Korin from the rear wagon, "my back teeth have been rattling loose since the last village, and I've been dreaming about a bed that doesn't have wheels under it. Tell me again how far we've got."
"Under an hour," Beric answered, and he heard the small cheer that went through the men. "Lord Kaeven's estate sits past the next rise, beyond the orchards. You'll have your bed, and a hot meal besides, and if the lord's kitchens are anything like they were the last time I passed through, you'll be complaining about your belts instead of your backs by morning."
"Now that's what I’d like to complain about," Korin said, and the men laughed.
The thought of the estate ignited hope in Beric’s chest.
Lord Kaeven was a Rank 6 elder of the Order and an old ally of House Vareyn, a man who had dined at the family table, and his lands were warded with formations that Beric couldn’t begin to understand and patrolled by Lightweavers who could handle a dozen of his guards without drawing a hard breath.
What he was looking forward to the most was the reinforcement, because Kaeven had pledged a group of Lightweavers to escort the lady the rest of the distance to the Academy. Beric had served long enough to know his own limits, and he had made peace with the truth that a mortal soldier, no matter how well trained, was a candle standing guard against a storm when the enemy was godlike.
"Beric." Lady Mara's voice came from the second wagon.
She had pulled the curtain aside and was leaning out with her greying hair pinned severely back and her expression arranged into its permanent state of dignified suffering. "If your men must sing, could you instruct them to choose a song where I am not able to hear every single word? There are ears in this wagon that were raised properly."
"I've heard worse from the kitchen staff," Laelyn’s laugh drifted out from behind her.
"You should not have heard anything from the kitchen staff, that is my point, your grandmother would have had opinions."
"My grandmother taught me three of those verses."
Lady Mara made a sound that conveyed the collapse of civilization, and withdrew behind the curtain, and Beric caught himself smiling under his beard before he smoothed it away and went back to watching the trees.
"Beric." Laelyn had taken the place at the curtain, and her expression carried none of the amusement from a moment before. "Were you able to get any proper sleep last night? And I would like the true answer, please, because Korin tells me you took his watch as well as your own."
"Korin talks more than he watches, which is why I took his watch," Beric said.
She kept looking at him, and he kept his eyes on the road, because the true answer was one he had no intention of giving her.
The truth was that sleep had become a country he no longer wanted to visit, and it had been that for weeks now, since before this journey had even been planned. Every night, somewhere in the black hours, the dreams found him, and they were unlike any dreams he had known across his life, because ordinary dreams dissolved when a man woke, while these dreams stayed. They came back night after night with details that never changed, and a soldier learned to distrust anything that repeated itself with that much discipline.
In the dreams there was a battle in a valley he had never seen, ringed by autumn forest, with an impossible tree in its center that rose past the clouds, and in the dreams he was fighting, though his body burned with a white light that no mortal soldier had any right to carry.
He remembered, though remembered was the wrong word for something that had never happened, the pressure of a woman's power hammering against him in waves, a woman whose eyes glowed the same blue as the noon sun, and he remembered the shield that snapped out of his own skin to meet her, light pouring from a mark below his ear that he did not have.
He remembered wrapping his arms around her from behind while she screamed at him, and he remembered saying goodbye to Lady Laelyn, saying it had been the honor of his life, and then the dream ended in whiteness so total that he woke gasping with his heart slamming against his ribs and his hands searching his own chest for a wound that was never there.
He had died in that dream. He died in it every time. And around his death, in the fragments that surrounded it, there had been madness beyond anything the priests ever preached about, a golden giant taller than a watchtower standing over the grass, elders throwing light across the sky in colors that had names and colors that did not.
And there was a boy. In every fragment, at the center of every fragment, there was a servant boy who fought like nothing Beric had ever seen or imagined, and in the dreams, Beric had followed him and had died protecting a plan that boy had built.
But none of this was real.
It was a man's mind playing tricks, especially an old man's mind carrying an old man's fears about the young lady he had sworn to protect, and Beric had been fully prepared to dismiss the dreams as just dreams, but then, two weeks ago, shaving before a polished bronze mirror in the servants' wing, he had turned his head and seen the mark.
It sat below his left ear, exactly where the dream put it, a pattern of fine interlocking lines that no ink had drawn and no brand had burned, pale against his skin, and he had stood there with the razor forgotten in his hand for a very long time.
Beric had scrubbed at it until the skin went raw and it had remained. He had told no one. And one night, alone in his quarters and feeling like an absolute fool, he had closed his eyes and reached for it the same as he did in the dreams, pushing his will toward it, asking it to wake, and nothing at all had happened.
"Beric?"
He realized the silence had stretched too long, and he reached up without thinking and rubbed at the spot below his ear before he caught himself doing it, and he pulled his hand down and put on the competent expression he had worn for the years of standing behind the Vareyn family.
"I'm fine, my lady," he said. "Old men sleep lightly, that's the whole of it. When we reach the estate tonight, I'll sleep so deep they'll need a war horn to raise me for breakfast."
Laelyn studied him for a moment longer, and he could see that she didn’t believe a word of it, because she had been reading him since she was a girl small enough to hide behind his cloak, and she had watched him rub his neck the same as she had watched him do it a dozen times this past week.
But she also understood him well enough to know when a door was closed, and he was grateful beyond words that she chose to let it stay closed, because there was no version of the truth he could offer her. What would he even say? That her captain of guards, the man responsible for her life, had been dreaming of his own death in a war between three suns and had woken up marked by it?
She was days from the Selection that would decide her entire future, carrying the weight of her house and the memory of her grandmother into a spire full of people waiting for her to fail, and she didn’t need to spend a single thought worrying about whether the old soldier at the front of her caravan was losing his grip on his own mind.
He would carry it alone. Carrying things alone was his job.
"You are a terrible liar, Beric," Laelyn whispered, "and I mean that as a compliment to your character."
"I'll take it as one, my lady."
Lady Mara reappeared at the curtain beside her, apparently having decided the conversation had gone on long enough. "While the two of you settle whether the captain sleeps, perhaps someone could tell me whether Lord Kaeven still keeps that dreadful peacock. The last time I visited, the creature screamed through the entire night beneath my window, and I swore before the Blue Sun itself that if I ever returned, I would demand a room on the far side of the…"
The world broke.
Something came out of the sky from the direction of the rise ahead, moving faster than Beric's eyes could properly hold, and it struck the lead supply wagon with a sound that he felt in the bones of his face, a flat and enormous crack of splitting timber.
The bed of the wagon burst apart into planks and spinning wheel fragments, the canvas cover tore free and sailed sideways into the orchard, and the draft horses screamed and reared against their ruined harness while crates of dye powder ruptured across the road in clouds of drifting crimson and deep blue that hung in the air over the wreckage.
The object, the thing that had done it, plowed a trench through the packed dirt of the road for another ten paces past the destroyed wagon before it stopped, and Beric saw with a lurch in his gut that it was a man.
Lady Mara was screaming, the guards were shouting, and Beric was already off his horse with his sword clearing its scabbard, his body performing the drills before his mind had finished catching up.
"Inside, get inside and down!" Mara's voice cracked through the words, "Laelyn, get down, get away from the window, oh light preserve us, get DOWN," and he heard the curtain torn shut and the thump of two bodies pressing to the wagon floor.
"Shield line!" Beric bellowed. "Korin, left flank, Dane and Ossel on the wagon, nobody moves past me, crossbows up and eyes on that treeline!"
"Captain, what in the burning hells was that?" Korin said, his voice thin, his blade wavering in his grip. "That came out of the sky, Captain, men don't come out of the sky…"
"Eyes forward and mouth shut," Beric said.
The figure in the trench was trying to rise. Its arms shook beneath it, pushing against the churned earth, collapsing, pushing again, and one of those arms bent in a place where arms didn’t bend, and as the dust and dye powder drifted and thinned Beric got his first clear look at the ruined face, and his heart skipped a beat.
It was Lord Kaeven.
He had dined in the man's hall. He had watched him greet Laelyn's father with both hands clasped, had seen him lift a cup to House Vareyn's health, and the last time Beric had laid eyes on him, Lord Kaeven had been a tall and unbreakable presence in fine robes with silver threading through his dark beard, a true Rank 6 elder of the Order.
The thing in the trench wore that same face above a body that had been broken in more places than Beric could count, robes scorched and shredded, one whole side of him caved inward, blood running freely from his mouth into his beard, and his eyes, when they lifted, held an animal panic that no elder of the Order should ever have been capable of feeling.
"Kaeven," Laelyn's voice came from behind the curtain and Beric heard the wagon door begin to open. "That's Lord Kaeven, Beric, he's hurt, we have to…"
He crossed to the wagon in three strides and put his hand flat against the door and pushed it shut again, and he met her eyes through the gap for the half second before it closed. "You stay inside, my lady," he said, low and hard. "Please."
"Captain," Dane called from the wagon roof, his crossbow tracking across the orchard rows, "orders, do we advance to the lord, do we hold, what's the call?"
"We hold." Beric planted himself between the wagons and the wreckage, sword up, and he made himself say the next words loudly enough for every man to hear them, because they needed to understand exactly where they stood. "Everyone stays back and stays sharp, and nobody plays the hero. Look at him. Look at what's left of him. That man could have killed every soul in this caravan without rising from his dinner, and something just threw him through the air hard enough to shatter a wagon, so whatever did this to a Rank 6 of the Order is nothing we can fight, do you all hear me, nothing. If it comes for the wagons, you run the lady east through the orchard and you do not stop, and you leave me behind without a second thought."
Everyone became silent. Korin's knuckles were white around his hilt. Somewhere beneath the wagon, one of the horses was still making a high and terrified sound. And then the mark on Beric's neck caught fire.
It began as heat and became pain within a single breath, a deep and pulsing burn beneath his skin that flashed in rhythm, and he clamped his free hand over it with a grunt that he couldn’t fully swallow, and beneath his palm he would have sworn he felt light trying to get out.
The bushes at the roadside parted, and a boy walked out of them.
He came calmly, brushing a leaf from his sleeve, and he looked like nothing at all.
A village lad of maybe sixteen or seventeen years in rough-spun clothes with dried mud on his boots, dark-haired, slight through the shoulders.
But what made Beric catch his breath was that he knew this face.
He knew that face the same as he knew his own scars. It was the face from the dreams, the boy at the center of every fragment, the one Beric had followed and died beside in a valley beneath an impossible tree.
The boy from his dreams was real, and was standing on the orchard road, and had just beaten a Rank 6 elder of the Order so thoroughly that the man could no longer hold himself up out of the dirt.
The boy didn’t so much as glance at the wagons or the raised crossbows or Beric standing there with his blade up and his hand clamped to his burning neck. His attention rested on Lord Kaeven, and when he spoke his voice was soft.
"You were going to kill a lost village boy in your hedgerow," the boy said. "No questions, no thought, nothing personal, those were your own words. A child gets separated from a caravan on your road and your very first instinct is to erase him because loose ends are inconvenient in delicate times." He shook his head slowly, watching the elder struggle. "I keep wondering how many times you've done it before today. How many travelers went missing on this stretch of road over the years and got blamed on raiders and Sun-Touched while you sat in that beautiful house with your blessed winter orchards."
Lord Kaeven's mouth worked. His lips shaped the beginning of a word, a plea or a threat or a bargain, Beric would never know which, because what came out instead was a wet cough and a spill of dark blood down his chin, and his one working arm trembled beneath him.
The boy lifted one hand and made a small, almost gentle gesture, a closing of the fingers.
Every fallen leaf in the ditches and the orchard rows around them rose off the ground at once, thousands of them, and they streamed together through the air into a single tight ribbon that flashed once and passed through Lord Kaeven's neck without slowing.
The elder's head came free of his shoulders and rolled into the trench his own body had carved.
"No—" Laelyn's cry tore out of the wagon and the door slammed open behind him.
Beric moved without looking, his arm sweeping back to catch her and hold her against the wagon's side, her fingers gripping his sleeve, her breath coming in shocked pulls, and he kept his body squarely between her and the boy, and his sword up, for whatever meaningless comfort a length of steel offered against someone who could execute an elder with dead leaves.
The boy finally turned toward them, he looked at the wagons, at the guards, at Laelyn's white face over Beric's shoulder, and sighed. "I wish you hadn't seen that," he said, and he sounded like he meant it. "And I wish we could have met differently than this. Believe it or not, I had a much gentler introduction planned."
He started walking toward them with hands open at his sides, and with every step he took the mark beneath Beric's palm burned brighter, the pain climbing past anything the first pulses had promised.
White heat drilled down through muscle toward bone, and light began leaking between his clenched fingers, and Beric heard himself make a sound through his teeth, and then his legs simply gave, and the road came up to meet his knees while Laelyn cried his name and his sword rang against the packed dirt.
Through the blur of it he saw the boy stop dead in the middle of the road, saw the young face crack open into surprise, his eyes fixed on the light pouring from beneath Beric's hand.
"That mark," the boy said. "How do you still have that?"
A/N
Have a nice weekend!