Divine Travails of Rats

Metamor Keep

 

Divine Travails of Rats

by Charles Matthias and Ryx

 

 

Pars III

Descensum

 

 

Tuesday, June 22, 724 CR – Early Evening

 

“Charles Matthias Sutt, you stop right there young man!” Misanthe's sharp bark cut through the air with the snap of a catapult's release. Charlie bristled but did not slow, catching the heavy wooden door and shoving it behind him. They were upon him like magpies; first his father and now, before he could find any refuge in his own chambers, his mother; relentless in their pursuit of him.

“Do not call me that!” He yelled at the emptiness of the foyer before him though intended for the vixen, his adoptive mother, who slipped deftly through the door before it crashed shut.

“Charles Matthias Sutt, you stop! Stop right there, right now, and tell me what in the dark dream that was all about?” She challenged in a harsh growl as she caught up to him in the main hall of the Sutt residences of Metamor Keep. She caught at the sleeve of Charlie's shirt and hauled him up short. With an irritated hiss past his teeth Charlie stopped and turned on his mother.

“Don't call me that!” He snapped again, his ears and whiskers back, his tail lashing furiously behind him. Misanthe met his angry gaze glare for glare, her vulpine tail motionless behind her diminutive frame as he turned to face her. Her tapered muzzle, teeth gleaming, came only to his chest forcing her to look up.

“Call you what, young man?” Her growl was a low churr, one full of warning and menace. He had heard it many times in the years of his youth, when he had overstepped himself in some way that displeasured her, and it often heralded the application of a willow switch to his backside. Despite her petite stature she had not hesitated to mete out just discipline when it was warranted to such a degree that the child Charlie had often wished that it had been delivered by his father instead. But he was deaf to the warning in her tone and could only hiss a growl and throw his hands in the air.

“Matthias!” He bellowed furiously, leaning down until he was almost nose to nose with the vixen, his blue eyes wild. “I am not a Matthias!” He slapped his breast with one hand releasing a cloud of tourney field dust. “I have never been a Matthias, and I never shall -” Charles' outburst chuffed into shocked silence as his head was turned by a surprisingly strong slap across his muzzle. Misanthe may have been small, and a Duchess, but she was not averse to menial labor and it showed in the strength hidden under her lush russet pelt. Stunned, Charlie clapped a hand to the side of his muzzle.

“Don't you dare, Charles, belittle the blood from which you sprang!” She fairly snarled up at him, the tip of a black claw wagging an inch from his startled nose. “You have no right to treat your father as you did out there!” Her arm swung to point back behind herself toward the distant tournament field.

Rubbing the side of his muzzle Charlie scowled. “He's not my father,” he groused with a back-eared, flat-whiskered scowl.

“He is,” Misanthe growled warningly. “As much as Malger is. Moreso, even. He loves you no less for being a Sutt.”

“How can you say that, mother?” Charlie railed. “He gave me – no! No, he sold me away!” He waved his hands helplessly with a loud groan of anger. “For a ghost!”

Misanthe rocked back on the pads of the paws hidden beneath her voluminous skirts and sighed, her ears and whiskers backing as she blinked. “No, Charlie, he did not.” She sighed slowly with a shake of her head. “He resisted the very thought of it with all of his being.”

“He did not!” Charlie protested. “I've seen his dreams, his memories. He sold me, like a cull, for the ghost of my dead – brother.” He hissed the last word short, loathe to admit he had a brother, alive or dead.

“I know full well what he did, Charlie, I was there.”

Charlie's brows knitted with a scowl. “Malger was there. Nocturna was there, bargaining for me like a damnable fishwife. You were not in the dream with them, but in the waking world watching over them.” He crossed his arms and glowered down at her with an expression perfected only for youthful rebellion. “You countenanced this?”

With a frown Misanthe nodded slowly. “I was not a Sutt then, Charlie. I served your father, I did not tell him what to or not to do.” Her fingers brushed his arm lightly. “That you are a Sutt is one of Charles' greatest regrets, Charlie, and it pains him still, even after fifteen years. He feels he failed as a father, having lost both the eldest and youngest of his firstborn. You should not denigrate him for your having been brought into our family. He had little choice.”

“But,” Charlie argued, his anger cooled but his frustration hardly lessened, “he bargained with Nocturna for my very soul. He gave me to her – to you. Why would he do that?”

“Because he must, for you. As for why, that is a question I cannot answer, my son.” Turning about Misanthe strode back to the door. “I was not in the Dream, and for months afterward even Malger would say nothing about it to me. Charles never has, it was that upsetting. If you want to know more, you need to ask him. But don't press; you've seen his memories, his nightmares. If they are so unpleasant now, imagine how they impacted him when he was living them.” Grasping the door latch she drew it open. “As well, you need to find him and apologize for your childish behavior.” Wagging an admonishing finger toward him, she added, “You have many to apologize to, young man, beyond your sire. Maysin, for one, whom was left saddled and ready to bear you from the field and you left her there, neglected as if she were merely a common horse.”

Charlie tightened his hands into fists, hiding the wince from the prick of short claws. “I don't want to hear it from Father. Why should I listen to it from the one who gave me up?” Misanthe glared, a tightening of the eyes and a subtle lifting of her jowls that only a mother could perform for her children. “Why should I listen to my sire?”

Her voice held that steely edge of disapproval, but there was a soft gentleness too, as though her reprimand had been given in full already. “You cannot know about this in part, Charlie. Your sire is the only one who knows the rest. He will not force himself on you, he loves you too much for that. You must go to him. And it would be best for you, young man, if I were not to find you here again until after you have spoken with him.”

With that final promise, his adoptive mother swept back out the door, leaving Charlie all alone in the main hall of their home. He stared at the door for more seconds than he could count, simmering and smarting. Charlie pulled the short chewstick he'd brought with him to his teeth and gnawed as he tried to sort out his thoughts.

Behind him he heard a door opening – likely one of the servants going about their task and pretending not to have overheard the entire confrontation with his mother. Charlie was in no mood to be disturbed by them either. The stick between his teeth he stormed out of his home and then through the passages of the Keep.

He found the tower stairs after only a few turns and began climbing. To keep his mind from everything else he counted the steps as he usually did. After only a hundred he lost count, but in the exhaustion from climbing so many steps at the very least he had a brief respite from his anger.

After several minutes of climbing Charlie at last emerged onto a balcony overlooking Keeptowne to the south. He collapsed into a stone seat as the wind picked and clawed at his fur. Formerly belonging to an old astronomer of Metamor who'd vanished the year before his birth – some bird named Channing – the balcony was warded to prevent anyone from accidentally falling to their death. It was not used much anymore and so Charlie had taken it as his personal hiding place when he wished solitude.

He could clearly see Keeptowne and its streets, and in the distance the tourney fields, the High Box, and all of the festivities. Beyond that and down the hill was the town of Euper but he only could see its edges. To his right Metamor river snaked through the folds of hill and forest, while the valley opened up before him, the woods retreating in favor of farms and pasture. Only the faintest of echoes from the city could reach him at so high a height and that day, the sun glimmering above the western mountains as it descended in its evening course, he could hear only the wind crying against the stone.

And then, lowering his face against the cold railing, Charlie could only do the same. His chest heaved with sobs as all of the anger melted into sorrow.

 

He wasn't quite sure how long he'd remained there crying, but eventually he'd been able to lift his head and stare out over the city as he chewed his stick into splinters. Charlie could not think clearly and for a time, admiring the city and pondering the joys and struggles of its inhabitants was all he could do. Despite the activity of the festival, there were always many coming and going from the Keep itself. These he watched in particular, hoping he might recognize his father amongst them.

He finally found Malger in the company of many rats. Charlie winced as he saw his father riding back to the Keep alongside his sire and the rest of his kin. So small they were from such a height, but even at that distance he could see the weight of years piling upon their shoulders. His sire was haggard and slumped in the saddle, with his mother by birth putting her hand to his side to steady him. Or perhaps merely to comfort him. He should not judge too quickly.

As he stared down from a bird's loft upon his kin, hurting as he did, he could not help but remember other happier moments with each. He could easily see the beaming pride in his father's face the first time Charlie had helped him defeat a nightmare plaguing the people of Metamor. Both in the Dream and without his father had held him tight in pride and love. He had boasted of his exploits to his mother and younger sister, his words a cornucopia of never-ending accolade.

How well he could recall the first time that Malger had invited him to play music with him and his friends. He had felt so small and intimidated, but he'd held the flute tight in his little hands and blew such gentle and delightful notes that all of them were forced to applaud. Malger had smiled to him, and even kissed him on the brow. And he remembered why he'd chosen to play the flute that day – it was his father's choice in instruments and he wanted to be like his father.

But Charlie did not have such memory of Malger alone. Well could he remember the many visits he had made to the Glen in his youth while his birth family still lived in the tree. He remembered climbing that tree up into its high branches with his sire and his brother Erick. He had been afraid at first because he wasn't used to such heights, but his sire had been so gentle and told him he could hold onto his back if he got scared. For his sire Charlie would prove he wasn't scared and jumped from branch to branch with both of them without stumbling and without once complaining. But still at the end he had held tight to his sire who also kissed him on his brow.

And then, as Charlie stared out over the sky above Keeptowne, he could not help but remember what his sire had done for him when he was ten. The dragons Lindsey and Pharcellus had come to Metamor for a time, and they had even visited the Matthias family while Charlie was also visiting. They had just moved into the new Keep in the Narrows and so much of the land was stripped to provide wood and stone for construction. His sire had surprised him by arranging for the two of them to take a ride on the back of Pharcellus. His sire had even held him out in his arms so he could pretend that he was flying instead.

Charlie sighed as he lost sight of his father and sire and the rest of the Matthias clan as they disappeared within the Keep. Yes, he admitted to himself, he did love his family. What son wouldn't? But his first father had sold him and now he learned that Nocturna had sought him in particular. Was that why he could see into dreams? They had always told him he'd been born with the gift, but what if it had only been given by Nocturna herself at that moment?

He had no answer for the question, only more hurt. And yet, to the very man who had caused this hurt, the very man he both loved and felt such fury toward, this man, his sire, a rat like himself, was the only one who could provide him the answers. And to this man his mother bid him apologize.

Charlie stewed over these thoughts and many others for a candlemark more before finally forcing himself to his feet. He turned from the balcony and the view of Metamor and started in search of his sire.

Even as his feet carried him down the cold, stone steps, his tail bumping and sometimes dragging across their age-worn surface, he was forced to admit that he had no idea where to find his sire. Was he in one of the many rooms of Long House with the rest of his family weeping as he confessed to them what their elder brother had meant with his outburst? Or was he hiding somewhere else in the Keep, too ashamed to admit to them his guilt?

Like you? He could almost hear Bryn's snort in the rebuke.

I don't have anything to be ashamed of!

Even as the self-righteous retort welled in his mind he felt anew the tenderness in his cheek. He lifted one paw and touched the flesh where his mother's paw had struck him not one hour before. As much as he hated to admit it, she was right. If he wished to be a man then he had to act like a man.

Charlie swallowed and continued down the steps. Narrow windows let in just enough breeze to keep the air fresh and cool. Through some the slanted light of the sun cast shafts of golden brilliance against the inner wall of the spiraling stairs. No lamplighter would climb these steps as there were no lamps to light. While his eyes were sufficient for what little starlight would penetrate those narrow windows should he change his mind and linger longer, he would rather descend the tower while he still had the sun.

His hands fell to his sides and gripped the loose fabric of his trousers. His claws dug into the seams and his incisors yearned once more for a stick to chew, but even should he return for the splinters he'd left on the tower floor above they could not sate him a single bite. Instead his teeth chattered beneath quivering jowls, his whiskers a trembling blur of white at the bottom of his vision.

The stairs stretched beneath him as endless and as changeless as any place in Metamor could be. He both hated it and savored it. Part of him wanted to get speaking with his sire over with so he could find Bryn and maybe Sig too and get drunk at one of the taverns. Another part of him wished to forestall seeing his sire again for as long as possible.

Just what do you hope to learn from him anyway?

He sighed and lowered his snout, his pace slowing. I want to learn the truth.

You know the truth. Dreams cannot lie to you.

He tightened his grip on his trousers, claws tearing a hole in the expensive fabric. “But they don't show everything either.” He picked up his pace, focusing his mind on that one truth, the one he could never deny. It stilled his anger and piqued his hunger. If there was more to know as his father and mother assured him, then he would learn of it no matter what he had to do.

There is another reason you go to your sire. He could hear his mother's voice with her at once gentle but stern reprimand. You have to apologize for your poor behavior.

It may be the last thing he wanted to do, but his father and mother, Duke Thomas, and all of his tutors had taught him better than that. He would be a man and do the right and noble thing.

Even if there is absolutely nothing your sire can say to deserve forgiveness for what he did to you.

Charlie swallowed bile and kept on walking down the steps.

It took him only a few minutes to reach the bottom of the tower stairs; an atrium with braziers on either side brought the room and doorway into the rest of the Keep. He took a deep breath and glanced at the walls, tail thumping down the last of the steps behind him. “Kyia, I don't know where my sire is. But if he is in the Keep, can you bring me to him straightaway? You have my gratitude either way.”

He chastened himself for that last bit of equivocation but what was said was said. Charlie walked to the doorway at the end of the atrium and stepped through. Beyond was a short hall that turned to the right only twenty paces ahead. The sun shone through the tall windows on his left and he blinked uncomfortably, shielding his eyes with one arm for a moment before they adjusted to the brightness. He cast his glance at the floor where it was darker; the sun had already ventured far enough to the west that its rays could not strike the floor.

At the very least, he noted, he had the hallway to himself.

He walked as quickly as he could. Not because he felt rushed, but because he feared he would stop walking again. And that is precisely what he did when he rounded the corner to come face to face with the ornate arched doors leading into the Follower cathedral. He blinked as his eyes roved across the sculpted bronze scenes set into the doors of key moments from the Canticles. Though Kyia could have fashioned more intricate and grander designs if Bishop Hough had asked, the youthful prelate preferred to commission the design as a parish community. The final panels depicting the ascension of Yahshua at the apex of the double doors had been finished last year, and to that scene his eyes lifted.

The bronze Yahshua was risen in the air above the assembled apostles whose stylized faces gazed up in awe, arms lifted over their heads in wonder and worship. Surrounding Yahshua were angels ready to welcome Him into the Follower Heaven. One arm was lifted up to the welcoming angels while the other was lowered in invitation toward the men below. No wonder Bryn was so adamant in his faith; the Follower god invited them to come with simplicity, ardor, and love. The offer was always open; the invitation would continue to be made.

Charlie lowered his eyes, sucked in his breath, and marched to the doors. There were too many Keeper scents to tell if his sire had come this way, but it seemed reasonable to suppose he had sought solace in the arms of his faith. Charlie carefully drew one of the heavy doors open and stepped through as quietly as he could. There was always a parishioner or two kneeling in prayer in the sanctuary and he didn't want to disturb them. He was surprised to find over a dozen gathered toward the front of the sanctuary near the rail but only two near the doors. Of those two, he barely saw his fellow rodent next to the gargantuan reptile attired in heavy black mail with a red cross whose arms were all the same length stained onto the rings. The mail was split down the back so it could actually be removed as it was impossible for anything to be lifted over his head with his wide frill and three horns blocking the way.

One yellow eye in the head that weighed as much as Charlie opened and slid toward him, a gray beak in the midst of his mottled brown scales creaked open a wordless command. A massive hand lowered from where it had been folded in prayer to touch the small rodent's back. The mouse at his side was garbed in a black robe with a cowl hanging against his back that covered him almost completely apart from his long feet and tufted tail poking out behind him as he knelt. His ears were as large as the rest of his head, and a bushel of white whiskers graced his graying snout. And on his robe as a stain of blood was a crimson cross.

At the touch of the giant reptile's hand, the mouse lifted his head, his fingers tangled in prayer beads, and looked first to the sentinel and then to where the sentinel watched. Charlie grimaced but nodded to the Questioner who rose from where he knelt after making the sign of the yew toward the high altar and tabernacle.

Unsearchable green eyes met him. “Young Lord Sutt, you are here seeking your sire?”

Although Charlie was not a stranger in the Cathedral, he usually only came when invited by his friends to celebrate some special moment in their lives or on some errand for his father. Although he could not be certain, this might have been the first time he had come to the Follower Cathedral in Metamor of his own accord. Knowing that, he could not fault Father Felsah's inquiry.

“Aye, I am,” he replied in a quiet voice to match the jerboa's own.

Felsah nodded and turned his snout toward a pair of doors at the rear of the sanctuary that led to choir practice rooms and storage chambers for the Cathedral. “Your sire has been here for some time. Why do you seek him?”

“As if you don't know? There are matters we need to discuss; privately.”

His sharp retort did not register on the jerboa's face, but Sir Zachary's heavy eyes narrowed suspiciously. “That you shall have, but your sire is not alone. He was joined a few minutes ago by Master Abafouq. You will want to wait outside until they are finished.”

A faint smile graced the edge of his snout. He had always liked the Binoq mage and felt a measure of sympathy for him ever since the first time he had stumbled into one of his dreams of his home deep beneath the mountains. But why would it be he that would come visit his sire and not Kimberly or one of his siblings? Why were they not here with the Baron to give comfort?

“Thank you,” Charlie said with a quick nod and a turn toward the choir door. Felsah clicked his tongue against his teeth in reproach. The rat turned back with a glance. “What?”

Felsah's eyes flicked toward the altar. “Would you enter and leave any other house without showing honor to her master?”

Charlie chided himself for forgetting that show of respect. He bent one knee toward the tabernacle and straightened. He glanced at the jerboa with one eye, but Felsah had already returned to his place kneeling at the three-horned knight's side. The rat continued toward the choir door, pausing just outside to listen.

At first he heard nothing beyond except the faint shuffling of soft-booted feet behind the door. There was more noise from the stirring of the few at prayer than there was on the other side of the door where his sire and Abafouq lurked. His legs began to pain him from standing still for too long but he kept listening. As Charlie lifted one leg to stretch it out, balancing on the other and with one hand gripping the crenelations along the door frame, he heard somebody other than his sire sigh on the other side of the door.

“Well, I am not seeing any magic that is unusual for you. Being you is unusual enough! When I look at you, and I am thinking that it has always been this way since the belfry, I see the magic of the Curse, the Sondeck, that little touch of the Wind Children, and the spells I imbued you with so you could, as stone, be living. That is all I am seeing on you, Charles.”

“Really?” That was his sire's voice. Charlie's claws dug into the stone as he pressed his ear so close against the door that his cheek was flush with the banded hickory it had been fashioned from. “Nothing has changed at all? I thought surely you would see something.”

“You speak as if something has happened to you, other than your dramatic ejection from the tourney this afternoon.”

“I suppose I deserved it.” His sire's voice was suddenly pained and then all went quiet; for a moment he cursed Abafouq's poor choice of words. But the Baron was not silent for long. “It started happening a few months ago. Whenever I have changed into stone with any injury, that part of my body does not return to flesh with the rest of me. At first it was little cuts I received; enough to worry me, but not enough to worry anyone else. Last month I was in an accident and I broke my leg. The flesh... the flesh is fine, but beneath it... I think the bone is stone. It does not move as fast as my right leg anymore.”

Charlie swallowed, remembering how his sire had seemed to favor his left leg in the fight. And that one vicious cut across his chest. His stomach tightened.

“And today after I stopped my son, well... see for yourself.”

Even as the Binoq sucked in his breath, Charlie felt a mix of shame and righteous indignation. He wasn't the one who had bargained away his eldest son's soul. He must have turned his heart to stone to do so horrible a crime, what difference did it make if the rest of him did as well?

“Hmmm, can you feel my finger touching your stone flesh?”

“Aye, I feel that.”

“And you are able to move even the parts of you that are stone?”

“Aye, I can do that too.”

“Then it may be that whatever protection you were having from Akkala to keep you flesh is starting to go away. I will be studying this if I have your permission to so do. I would like to see you transform into stone and back again; perhaps there is something there that is keeping your injuries from taking on flesh again.”

“I've kept this from my family up until now. I can hide these from others, but not from Kimberly or my manservants! Kimberly will hold it in her heart and never speak of it, but my servants... I fear that all will know of this ere the year closes.”

Abafouq's reply was quiet again, and uttered only after several seconds of thought. “I do not think that is what you really fear.”

“Nay, I fear it, but it is not what scares me. Abafouq, you saw me before when I was stone and forced to live as stone. Away from the mountains I could almost pretend to be normal. I had to force myself to smile and to laugh and I had to pretend to sleep when I was not on watch, but at least I wasn't tempted to a mountain's slumber anymore. If I return to stone, and with no way to become flesh again for the rest of my life, I fear what I may end up doing. I fear the temptation of mountain to stone!”

“I will do what I can for you, Charles. Perhaps Jessica and our other friends can help unravel this mystery. That is, if you be providing permission for me to tell them.”

“Please, if you think they can help. I asked for you because you know more about stone magic than anyone else.”

“There is Master Murikeer,” Abafouq pointed out. “He lived for a time with a spirit of the mountain and learned many secrets.”

“I count him amongst my friends; speak with him too. But you are the one who gave me the ability to move and speak as stone. Who better to take the first look?”

“You speak true. Now before I go, show me your change and I will watch what happens to the stone.”

Charlie closed his eyes and waited, doing his best to keep still. For nearly a minute he heard nothing but the creaking of wood beyond the door. One of the Followers gathered to pray coughed. Sir Zachary shifted his tail about and thumped it against a stone column. Otherwise he heard only the rise and fall of his breath and the pounding of his heart.

“Your change is a confusing thing. Even Metamor's Curses make more sense to me than this.” Abafouq's already higher pitched voice almost squealed like a frightened mouse. “The stone I always see when I study you becomes... how am I thinking... more solid... more present. And when the flesh returns the stone recedes. It is like a glacier in summer. It withdraws some, but it can still be felt. And there are some places where the sun does not shine as brightly that the glacier does not withdraw. These places are like this; the stone is not withdrawing”

“Well that is something at least,” Charles said with a long sigh. “A place for you and the others to begin.”

“To begin, aye,” Abafouq agreed. “Are you needing anything more?”

“Nay, thank you, Abafouq. I will remain here for now.”

“If I see Kimberly or your family?”

“Tell them I am fine and will rejoin them tonight.”

Charlie heard them embrace, and then realized that the Binoq would be leaving by way of the door he had his ear pressed against. With a twist that would have delighted Vidika, Charlie moved from the door to hide tail and all behind a stone rail between two columns. A statue of Mother Yanlin treading upon a serpent greeted him there, and he felt a reproving glance from Sir Zachary who was still watching him. If his behavior were too disruptive that giant would ask him to leave, and if he refused would snatch him up and carry him out like a sack of potatoes.

From out the choir door stepped the small man-like creature known as a Binoq. His stout but light frame, and a stature smaller than the rats, made him distinctive even in Metamor. Neither was he a midget nor a child, but something that a human eye would recognize as different even if they could not say why. Charlie watched him walk toward the Questioner. They shared a few whispered words that he couldn't discern. And then Abafouq bowed his head respectfully toward the altar and headed out the main doors. His gaze cast briefly to where Charlie hid and he offered a sympathetic smile. Before Charlie could react he was gone.

Felsah was watching him too. The jerboa gestured to the choir door with an outstretched paw and a bland expression. Charlie felt like a fool, but he still rose and maneuvered around the columns and rail for the private altar toward the choir door. Abafouq had left it ajar, but only the glow of a lantern around the edges was visible beyond. Charlie put one hand to the wood, took a breath, and pushed it open.

His sire sat on a long bench with his back to the door. His fingers retied the laces of his tunic while his tail shifted about on the floor. His scalloped ears lifted at the creak of the door hinge. “Father?” He turned his head to the left, and what had been an expectant expression faded like butter left in the sun. His features drooped as one as his eye met Charlie, softening but never leaving him. His voice, soft and sad, could only murmur, “No; son. Come in... and shut the door.”

Charlie took a step closer, pushing the door shut behind him. He did not take another step into the room. The chamber was wide with a series of raised platforms like steps in a ladder for the choir to stand on, cabinets for instruments, robes, candles, and music. The walls were more of the same gray stone familiar in Metamor, though the surface of several walls had been covered by plaster and painted with intricate frescoes depicting scenes from the Canticles. Charlie's eyes did not linger on them long enough to discern which ones. All he could do was return his sire's regard.

Baron Matthias let his gaze lower to the floor and his tail. He sighed. “I suppose you are here for an explanation of what you saw in my dreams.”

Charlie knew he should mention how he had also come to apologize, but those words would not leave his throat. His fingers trembled and he felt his claws pricking his palms again. “Aye. My father,” he emphasized the word with an iciness he knew he should not feel, “has told me some of it. But there was a lot he did not know. If I want the truth I must hear it from you.”

His sire nodded and sighed. Slowly he turned so that he was half-facing Charlie. The top half of his tunic was still open, and there where the laces were undone, he could see a sliver of granite marring his brown-furred chest. The banded steel from the ruin of his shield had pierced him there moments before his sire had changed to stone, grabbed his arms and forced him to his knees. His claws dug further. “Your chest.”

Charles lifted one hand and touched the bit of stone in his flesh. “It is nothing for you to worry about. I am sure you saw Abafouq leave me a moment ago. He and my other friends will help solve this mystery. They understand you know, my son, what happened that night better than anyone else. They went through the same thing themselves.”

“They gave up their children too?”

Charles winced and shook his head. “Not like that. Please, Charlie, I love you and have always loved you. But what happened to me back then, what I almost became... it is too horrible to contemplate and so most of the time I try to forget it. But I cannot shut it out of my dreams. I hoped you would never stumble upon it and would grow up knowing you were loved by two fathers, one who gave you life and loved you from afar, and one who formed your life and loved you up close. This is... this is the most painful thing I have ever had to do.”

“More painful than giving me up?” Charlie found his gorge rising and he had to force himself to unclench his hands lest his claws draw blood. “Explaining yourself to the son you wronged is more painful than selling me for a favor from a god?”

“No. What is so painful is making you share what I had done. I did not bargain you away because I did not love you. I bargained you away because I was a monster who would tear the world apart from heaven to hell and leave it in ruin for one more moment with Ladero.”

Charlie wanted to sneer but there was something in his sire's voice and manner that kept his tongue in check. He had heard his sire boast before, and had heard him tell foolish tales to children who were easily swept away by his lyrical gifts. But this time he heard only an earnest seriousness in his sire's words. Ludicrous exaggeration it may have seemed, but the baron meant it exactly as he said it.

“You are not hiding anything from me anymore. What happened sixteen years ago? Why did you bargain me away like you did? I deserve to know the truth.”

“Sit then and I will tell you everything.”

“I do not want to sit.”

“Please come and sit, Charlie. It is a very long tale and you will regret it if you try standing for its length.”

Charlie took a deep breath and then walked toward the other end of the bench. He straddled the bench, letting his tail slip off the side facing the door, so he could face his sire. The baron resumed lacing his tunic and then slipped a fresh red vest over both shoulders. Once he finished, he offered Charlie a faint smile, but one that did not expect anything in return. He then reached into a pouch dangling from his side and withdrew a pair of short chewsticks. “You will want this as well.”

He accepted the chewstick, smelled that it was fashioned from cherry, and muttered his thanks. Even though his teeth ached he did not gnaw right away; his eyes and thoughts were too fixed on his sire. The Baron took a deep breath and then asked, “Do you remember three years ago, after returning from Sutthaivasse with your father, how you spent a week in the Narrows with your brothers and sisters and finally cajoled the story of my adventures from the year of your birth?”

“I remember,” Charlie admitted with a long sigh. It had been the longest stretch he had spent with his birth family since his first trip to Sutthaivasse with his father at the age of seven. It hadn't been intentional; violent storms had washed out the road and made travel hazardous. He'd enjoyed the chance to go exploring in the caves beneath Matthias Keep with Erick and Bertram, to play songs for his younger siblings, and to have a break from all of his studies. But his sire's tale of that great evil in Marzac had been mesmerizing. He had heard many of the details before, but just as his father could weave a tapestry for the heart with his songs, Master Murikeer an illusion for the eyes with his magic, and his mother a festival for the tongue with her delicacies, so too could his sire conjure adventure for the soul with his words. “I still think you should let some bard immortalize it in verse and song!”

The baron's smile increased, a genuine smile pleased with his son's enthusiasm for the tale even three years later. But it faded before his next words left his tongue. “I did not tell you all of the story. Marzac, the power within it, did not die with the destruction of the Chateau. Nor with the destruction of the three weapons. It lingered on in my friends and I. It was a... corruption that had touched all of us who went to Marzac. This corruption took on different forms in each of us, but its goal was the same. What had been there, spilling into our world and killing it, wanted us to open a way for it to come back to our world and do it again.”

Charlie frowned and nodded. “Master Rickkter has told me some of this two years ago.”

“He did?” His sire's expression filled with surprise and confusion. “Why did he do that?”

Charlie grimaced and narrowed his eyes. His sire had managed, without even beginning his tale, to relax him with a few words of introduction. He was not going to be so easily lulled by a storyteller! “A hyacinth. I brought one back with me from Sutthaivasse at his wife's suggestion. He did not take kindly to the surprise gift.”

His sire's expression almost brightened into a laugh. “I had not heard about that! I can imagine Rick's ire. So you have heard of the hyacinth that nearly destroyed Jessica. Well, that same corruption that poisoned her mind against her friends and sought to take new life through that hyacinth struck all of us. It tried to convince Lindsey it was the child of the man who she had wanted to take as a husband. It came to Kayla in the form of a dead dragon and attempted to get her to place him in control of Rickkter's body. It appeared to James in the form of a bell; nine tolls against a man and it would have been born from their flesh; eight were struck against me before he was stopped and rejected its evil.

“For Jerome...” His eyes grew distant and he quickly drew the sign of the yew from forehead to chest. “For my friend Jerome it came as enemies chasing him into darkness. It wanted him to hide from everything, and would have convinced him to pull all the world asunder to find some place to be safe. In the end he turned away from that to return to his duty as a Sondecki and he nearly ended up a mindless beast. As it is...” Matthias shook his head and sighed. “No more of that. Who have I missed? Ah, Abafouq who was just here!

“My friend Abafouq was tempted to destroy his own people in order to make them take him back. He would have crushed all of their councils and traditions and set himself as arbiter over a new Binoq culture, one based entirely around the darkness growing inside of him. And Guernef, ah, the one who saw me tempted by mountain dreams, he was tempted to give Abafouq a home by forcing him to walk the Paths of the Sky as he once did. A surprise that none of us would have expected of the Kakikagiget of the Nauh-kaee! In the end Abafouq accepted the judgment of his people, painful as it was and still is, and returned here to Metamor. Guernef gave up his desire to have his friend at his side in a place inhospitable for him and brought him back to Metamor. I hope he visits again soon; he is missed.

“You know of Jessica and what the corruption made her do. It tempted even the Åelf, ancient and wise, with dreams of returning his people to what Prince Yajakali considered their rightful place above humankind. And yet at every stage of the corruption doing as it wanted seemed to us the right thing to do. With unerring cunning and cruelty it clouded our judgment until friends became enemies, goodness seemed to us as evil, and the acts of evil seemed righteousness itself. And always, like all corruption, it used something that was good against us.

“For Lindsey it used the love of a mother for her child to enslave her. Kayla's love for Rickkter blinded her to the dragon's malfeasance. James's unrequited love for Baerle turned into obsession and a belief that his dearest friends were stealing her from him. Jerome's desire to protect our family from the other Sondeckis made him paranoid of everything around him. Abafouq's love for his home brought him to the brink of destroying that home. Guernef's love and sympathy for his friend nearly made him destroy his friend. Andares's love for man drove him to the brink of asserting domination of man. And Jessica's heartfelt desire to help those suffering with ruinous curses nearly made her make all who suffered the curse her slaves.

“This corruption spoke to us in words, feelings, impressions, and in ways so subtle that none of us realized what was happening to us until it was nearly too late. Even knowing what had happened to our friends was not enough. We still fell victim to it. We still fell short. We still showed our weakness and our need for redemption.” Matthias closed his eyes and shook his head. His claws dug into his trousers at either knee and he flecked his jowls as if he wished he were gnawing.

“The first time I heard it speak to me, it wasn't in words, but a sense, an impulse. It was the day I returned from Marzac. Garigan led me to your brother's grave and in my weeping I knew deep down, some horrible possibility. As I put my hands on his grave, as I felt the grooves and roughness of the stone marker, I knew as if it had been seared into my heart like the Shrieker's hand seared into my face, that what had happened was not the way things should be. The injustice was so gross that it could not be allowed to stand. This was not the misery and wailing of a father in grief; this was the certainty of a god thwarted.”

Matthias took a deep breath and turned away for a moment, staring off behind and to his left, as if he expected his eyes to pierce the stone blocks to where the altar and tabernacle reposed. In a very quiet voice he added, “Your mother told me, Lady Kimberly that is, that in the last hours of Ladero's life she sought the aid of Lothanasa Raven. Raven arrived in the final minutes, and even though Garigan valiantly struggled to hold your brother together, no aid came from Akkala until the moment after he was sundered.”

His sire's eyes dampened and he rubbed them with the back of one hand, “Forgive me, son. Just thinking of it...” Charlie nodded, preferring silence to any other acknowledgment. The few times he had seen either his sire or his real mother speak of Ladero they had always begun to cry. A part of him wanted to reach out and clasp his sire on the shoulder to steady him and show empathy. But then a scowl crossed his jowls and he remained where he was. His paws reached for the chewstick Charles had given him instead. Through lowered lids, cool and distant, he watched his sire regain his composure while his incisors worried at the end of the cherry stick.

After several long seconds of eye rubbing and deep breathing, Baron Matthias let out a sigh. “I suppose you are wondering what this has to do with what you saw. I will get to that soon. A little more and I will describe it. After Akkala appeared she told your mother that Ladero had to die to save me. When she told me this that February, I was filled with a wrath that, if not for my family and friends there at my side, would have seen me tear the trees of the Glen apart. But that was only the beginning. The corruption took its time to prepare me. Its efforts were focused on Kayla at the time, and after her it went after my other friends in turn. But all the while it was twisting my mind and readying me for how it wished to use me.

“During the plague I was separated from you, your siblings, and your mother. I was heartbroken and mad with fear that I would lose all of you too. Every morning I would find myself before Ladero's grave. I would turn myself to stone and merge with his marker as if I could bring him back that way. I didn't understand why I couldn't let go of my loss, but it was the corruption making his death more and more present to me, and making his absence more and more painful for me.

“It was abated some after Jessica remembered that she could speak to Misha through a spell gem and we used it so I could see you and the rest of our family. But it was not gone. During my convalescence after James cracked my ribs and my jaw, I had plenty of time to ponder what could be done to return my family to the way it should be. At first I just believed that it was about bringing all of you home, but even after the quarantine was lifted and we were reunited, I felt that ache the corruption had planted in me. I felt an emptiness even in my family. Slowly, even you and your siblings, and even your mother, meant nothing to me as long as Ladero was dead.”

Matthias lowered his snout and traced the sign of the yew slowly from forehead to chest and shoulders. “My new duties as a knight for the Glen and surveying the Narrows gave me ample time to continue to ponder away from all of you. But it was not until the corruption of Marzac failed to ensnare Jessica and the second hyacinth was destroyed that all of its preparations came to terrifying fruition. On the fifth of May, 708 Cristos Reckoning, Jessica destroyed the hyacinth root and branch. One week later I made the bargain you glimpsed and challenged the powers of Heaven and Hell for Ladero's soul. It only took seven days for the corruption of Marzac to turn me into a loathsome and murderous beast.”

Charlie bit through the chewstick, splinters showering his breeches and landing even on his tail curled about his feet. Simmering in his anger, he nevertheless leaned forward as his sire began his tale.

 

 

Sunday, May 6, 708 CR

 

The ground was muddy and the air felt heavy after the long night of rain. Thick clouds that seemed at times to only barely surmount the mountains flanking the valley promised more rain that day but the morning was clear if cool. They would all have enough time to return home before the skies decided to soak their fur with another deluge, but not if they dallied the morning away.

Charles stretched and then checked his attire for dirt and stains. He brushed off the dirt from his breeches and was grateful not to find any stains. When he looked up, James was there with an intent gaze, offering the rat his buckler and sword. “Good morning, Sir Charles.”

“Thank you, James,” he took the buckler and sword, and then leaned the sword against the wall. There were not many rooms for travelers to spend the night at the Kingfisher's Brew, the tavern that Christina and Lester operated overlooking the lake not far from the barracks, but they were comfortable and afforded them a measure of privacy that they could not have expected in the barracks. Charles and James had taken their room together, as had Rickkter and Kayla; Murikeer slept in a room by himself. Dallar's men stayed in the barracks where they were most comfortable. For a moment he wondered if he would see them again before they returned to the Glen.

“Aren't you going to take your sword?” James asked, staring between the blade propped against the wall and the rat who'd put it there. There was a vague look of alarm in his eyes.

“Not to Liturgy. It's Sunday and until we have a priest in the Glen, this is the best I can do.”

The donkey lowered his ears and then bobbed his head up and down as understanding dawned. “Of course. I should have thought of that.” He began unbuckling his own sword. “I guess we won't be breaking our fast right away.”

“No,” Charlies replied, feeling the donkey's eyes stay on him the entire time. He walked to the window and pushed the shutters out, letting the cool morning air, damp but fresh after the rains washed all of the streets clean. James was always attentive, but why so much that morning?

Because you are the only one not yet touched by Marzac. They will all be watching you, convinced you are about to fall to the corruption.

He nodded to himself and took a deep breath. “I asked Master Lester last night when Liturgy is held here. We'll know once they ring the tower bells.”

“I hate bells,” James muttered under his breath. “Which tower?”

“Baron Barnhardt's. They're still repairing the old church but it's in better shape than you'd expect after seven years without a priest and two sieges!”

“That's right,” James nodded as he set his sword on the bed and then redid his belt buckle. “I'd forgotten you visited it with the Bishop just before the snowstorm and plague.”

His knees felt weak at the sense of loss and barrenness that flooded his heart. So close... he had come so close to losing the rest of his family, crippled though it was already. He closed his eyes and whispered a quick prayer for strength. “Aye. Please don't mention the plague again.”

“It's been gone a month.”

“A month in which everyone manages to find some excuse to tear me from my family!” He could not hide the exasperation in his voice. “Misha, Malisa, Marzac, not to mention strangers with silly ideas that must be taught anew. Ah, forgive me. I think I'm still tired from last night.”

“And sore?” James suggested. Charles gave him a cross look at which the donkey laughed. “Sorry! I won't mention that again either.”

But the rat felt a lightness returning and a soft chuckle escaped his throat. “Rick and I probably deserved it. We...” Both of their heads turned when the clear ringing of the tower bells tolled, rolling through the air with an authoritative insistence as irresistible as the tide. Charles smiled and stretched his arms behind his back. “It's time for Liturgy.”

 

 

The Cathedral in Metamor had been provided by the Keep itself, although given its many mysteries there were some who wondered whether it had been there all along but in wait for the time when it would be needed. Charles had worshiped there many times before his banishment to Glen Avery, and apart from the ancient and vast expanse of the affectionately named Sundial Cathedral in Sondeshara – so called because the shadow of the central spire swept out the hours of the day along concentric circles marked in the brick for each of the principal feast days of the year – he had never seen a church grander in scope or beautiful in glass, statue, and art.

The church in Lake Barnhardt was large enough to accommodate the several hundred townsfolk, farmers, fisherman, and shepherds living in the surrounding countryside. Despite its vaulted ceiling and pillars to support the vault that divided the chamber into three ranks, with side altars at either side of the arms of the cross layout, and the addition of numerous tapestries to illustrate where once frescoes had been painted but since desecrated, Charles felt as if he were in a small, modest church. This made the Liturgy all the more intimate as he could clearly hear Father Malvin intoning the prayers, even the ones that were meant to be silent and which he could never hear Father Hough chant.

That intimacy at some moments helped him feel a deeper draw to the wellspring of grace that was Yahshua his true lord and His blood spilled for the salvation of souls. But at the same time he felt somehow exposed in that smaller setting where everyone could see everyone else. Though he was known to the people of Lake Barnhardt he did not know them as well as they knew each other. He felt their eyes like fingers prodding him and their whispers like needles jabbing him as he passed.

What were they studying? What was there to study? His eyes ever strayed to the yew on which Yahshua hung, face contorted in suffering, though no complaint left those precious lips. A prayer welled in his heart, eager to understand and eager for the sort of peace he had once known. But with so many watching him, he could not concentrate and the prayer remained hidden within. He bent as low as he could, kneeling not so much to worship but to hide from the regard of others. Even James at his side seemed to take more notice of him than he did the priest.

Those eyes, those staring, probing, searching eyes, scraped him raw like a knife across a fish's scales. What could they want from him?

Some, your land. Others, your prestige. And the rest, to hound you until you break.

Charles was so wound tight, so pummeled by glares, that he missed the Consecration and Elevation, and had to be nudged by the donkey at his side when it came time to come forward to receive the Host. For a moment, kneeling before the youthful priest – Malvin, though suffering the same curse as Hough and a hand shorter, managed to appear as if he were just old enough to be admitted to orders – he felt a simple peace and gratitude as his eyes lifted past his snout to Yahshua nailed to the Yew. By the time he left the altar railing and returned to his place, his unease returned. He could not help but notice everyone watching him as he moved, especially the ones who weren't even looking at him.

He wasted no time in leaving the little church as soon as the recession was complete.

You will not get far.

“Sir Charles,” a warbling voice called to him from the front of the church. The rat turned and saw a brightly dressed newt flanked by a pair of ministers and a quartet of soldiers; one of the ministers was a snake with a flat, diamond-shaped head who appeared quite uncomfortable even in the relatively moderate May weather. A human man dressed in similar attire only a few paces behind the newt watched the lakeland lord with uncertain concern. The newt smiled, the effort stretching his mottled brown and green flesh. Everything about him had a damp look. “If you have a moment, there was a matter I wished to discuss with you.”

James paused at his side and lifted his long ears. He was glad the donkey chose to wait with him. Still, they were but two in the face of eight. “I am at your service, milord.”

Baron Robern Barnhardt smiled and with a wave of plump, sticky fingers, stepped past the soldiers and ministers on his way down the steps to the mostly stone road in the center of his lakeside city. Even the man who had been his wife before the curses had forced them into chastity did not move to follow them. Charles could not help but feel suspicious. Had he been wearing his vine he was sure it would have twisted to avoid the newt's slimy touch.

But Baron Barnhardt made no move to touch him, merely gestured for him to walk alongside him down beside the church where there were fewer idle eyes. James started to follow but Charles waved him back. If the baron would leave his retinue behind, then he would give him the courtesy of treating with him as man to man.

“Sir Charles,” Barnhardt added more softly in his croaking voice. Standing at his side, he could only look at the rat with one of his googly green eyes. “You have distinguished yourself as one of the finest warriors in the valley in the last two years. You are well deserving of your title.”

“Thank you, milord.”

“And it is most agreeable to see another Follower named a knight here in Metamor.” Barnhardt swept a bulbous arm toward the church wall and buttresses. “You are welcome here in my land as often as you wish to come. I hope we see you and your family more often.”

His family. His heart ached to be with them again. All of them.

Charles nodded and did his best to smile. “You are quite gracious, milord. This is a lovely city and I hope we will be able to spend more time here.”

“I am glad to hear it! But,” the newt said, his wide head tilting toward him, “there is something distressing me about your knighthood.”

“The fief of the Narrows, perhaps?”

Barnhardt's green eyes and oblong pupils narrowed. “The Narrows, indeed. That land does not belong to Baron Avery to dispose of as he wishes. It belongs to my family. My people have used it for hunting and herding for generations. It is unfortunate that he would bring you into the middle of our dispute.”

“I am not interested in your dispute.” Charles let the smile vanish from his countenance. In its place hardened a firm moue, with narrowed eyes. The scar over his right eye folded with menace. “I swore an oath of fidelity to Baron Avery and have accepted responsibility for that land. I will neither forsake nor shirk my duties to this fief. If you wish to discuss arrangements for your people to use this land, I am willing to discuss them. But I am not going to discuss whose family owns that land. As far as I am concerned it is now mine to manage and protect.”

Barnhardt said nothing for several seconds as they continued to walk alongside the church, reaching the rear and turning the corner behind it. The church blocked even the impression of the sun through the clouds and so they were cast in a permanent gloom that clung to the narrow street like mold or rot. Charles felt a strange vulnerability.

But the newt's voice was affable, if obviously disappointed. “You are frank and forthright and for that I commend you. And for that I am grateful. But my claims cannot be dismissed by your oath; I am confident that you understand that.”

Charles took an extra step to hurry them to next corner. Barnhardt matched him a moment later, his wide face and oddly malleable lips souring for just a moment. “Do what you think is right and proper,” Charles suggested as they stepped back into the wan light on the other side. “I will do the same. But until the day that I learn that the Narrows are not my fief, I will defend them from all who would despoil them. That is my oath, Baron Barnhardt.”

“I expect nothing less.” The newt flexed his fingers and his frown deepened. “But for now I fear you will have to excuse me; even on a day as damp as this my skin is drying out again.” He turned to face Charles with both eyes. “I sincerely hope that when next we speak we will have more pleasant things to say. For now we know where each other stands. I bid you a good day and a safe journey home. Eli's blessings be with you.”

The tone was civil and genuine so Charles could only respond in kind. He waited for the Baron, his wife, soldiers, and ministers to leave the church yard together. The snake minister cast a look over his shoulder as he slithered across the tightly-fit stones, but Barnhardt paid him no more mind. Charles ground his incisors together and wished he had a chewstick with him. Instead he bit the corner of his sleeve and gnawed at the cloth, quickly tearing a gash in the cuff.

James gave him a querulous glance when the rat returned. “It's nothing to worry about. The Baron wished to discuss my responsibilities as a knight on the border of his lands.”

“You don't look like you enjoyed what the baron had to say.”

Charles gave the donkey his best smile and gestured to the road that led to their Inn. “Let us talk of more pleasant things then, such as breaking our fast and heading home.”

James offered him no objection.

 

 

On returning to the Inn, Charles and James gathered their things and their horses. After a short meal of plank-seared fish they bid farewell to their friends, none of whom had yet returned to Metamor along the soggy and mud-ridden roads, and then joined with Murikeer the mage who was also on his way back to the Glen. The three of them rode out of the Barnhardt gates beneath a gray sky. The city and the surrounding lands were quiet with all the Followers safe in their homes for their Sunday rest. The loudest sound was the sucking mud at their horses' hooves. Even the song of birds was muted as if they warbled from beneath the lake instead of flitting from tree to tree at its shore.

Murikeer was content to ride in silence as Charles would have been, but James seemed to feel the need to fill the air with his discommodious discourse. “Do you think we'll arrive at the Glen before the rain soaks us to the bone?”

The skunk lifted his monochromatic snout, while like-hued tail bushed behind him from the dampness in the air. “Last night's storm is still in the air, but it may spare us yet. Yonder trees will provide some cover.”

Charles nodded as they followed the road up the slowly rising slope into the hills overlooking the lake. Fields stretched on either side with farms and flocks, while forests penetrated from the cracks in the hills. To the east the land did not rise with the road but rolled gently beneath a canopy of trees beginning to grow their summer green. By the time they reached the Glen the land would fall away sharply to the east, but for now the tops of the trees were still above them.

“Did you sleep well, master Murikeer?”

“Bad dreams did not trouble my sleep, if that is what you mean.”

James's ears lowered, while Charles frowned. The skunk's words seemed to suggest that something else had bothered him. Though his wife knew Murikeer better than he, he'd never known the talented young man to be evasive in his speech.

“I still see the bell sometimes.” The donkey's expression was filled with a loathing and an anger that only a man besotted and betrayed could understand.

“Did you see it last night?” Charles asked. He hadn't recalled hearing the donkey toss or turn.

“Aye, but only once. I don't know when it was. I laid staring at the ceiling for an hour, I think, before I fell back asleep.” A self-conscious look of embarrassment filled his eyes; he flecked his supple lips as if cursing himself. “But they're just nightmares; they're nothing you need frighten yourself over.”

“Marzac should frighten us all very much,” Murikeer pointed out. “Is it possible the bell is not wholly destroyed?”

“It didn't feel the same.” James' ears bobbed from the back of his head all the way to their tallest pose and back again before falling lazily outward from the sides of his head. “When I saw it before I was enchanted by its power and by its claims to want to help me. Now... now it feels like a menace thwarted but with no more power to do me harm. It's like a lone Lutin screaming from the other side of a gorge; there's not a lot it can do except give voice to hate.”

“Let us hope then, that you are right.” Murikeer blinked and stared at the end of his snout. Charles narrowed one eye, and then felt a drop bounce off his ear, cool and wet. He folded his ears back close against his head and lifted his snout to the sky. James and Murikeer followed his lead.

“I fear we are not going to escape a drenching. Those trees ahead should give us shelter, unless some spell of yours can keep us dry.”

Murikeer stretched one paw out to test the air while shaking his head. “I cannot keep all the rain out, but beneath the trees I should be able to spare us what slips through their boughs.”

“Then let us make as much haste as we dare.” So saying, Charles nudged Malicon, encouraging the pony to walk a little faster through the muddy hillocks in the center of the lane. James and Murikeer fell behind him along the somewhat drier path where wagon wheels had not churned the earth. The patter of rain drops brushed snout, ears, tails, and steeds.

 

The morning rain did not even last an hour, but the trio waited it out beneath a copse of trees at the top of a hillrise. Lake Barnhardt was not quite a mile to the south so they spent the time hiding beneath a spell of the skunk's to keep them dry as they watched the rain lather the lake. It rippled beneath the gentle pelting from the skies, rocking the many boats who still plied her waters. But the shower was over soon enough and they continued on their way, slow as it was through the muck and fresh mud.

By the noon hour they reached the lands that Baron Barnhardt claimed as his own but which belonged to Charles to administer. A grim smile played across his snout as he swept one arm across the vista to their west. Short cliffs rose to the north, while rolling hills framed the entrance to a combe that spread out as it neared the mountains. The deepening gloom of the sky made it difficult to see the mountains, but he knew they were there.

“This is now my land. One day I will build a fortress here and merchants from Metamor will find safe passage all the way to Hareford at last.”

“That is rather ambitious,” Murikeer noted, riding a little closer to get a better view. “I thought you loved your home in the Glen.”

“I do.” Charles leaned back in the saddle and then repositioned his tail with his free arm. Malicon's slow but heavy gait rocked his tail back and forth atop the pony's flanks. “But this is my responsibility now.” In a quiet voice he added, “No matter what Barnhardt thinks.”

“Is that what the Baron was arguing with you about?” James asked, his eyes searching the land that now belonged to his friend.

“Aye. He still claims it belongs to his family. I am sure at some point that this matter will go before Duke Thomas to be resolved. I am confidant that his grace will recognize my claim.”

No one could deny your claims.

“I have heard a little of this dispute,” Murikeer cautioned, laying a conciliatory paw on the rat's arm. “It has persisted for as long as any Glenner can remember. I do not think it will be resolved in one day.” Charles glanced down at the slender fingers resting upon his wrist, each tipped with a narrow but surprisingly stout claw in dire need of a file's touch.

“Probably not,” Charles admitted, frowning at those claws when he considered that his own were very similar, and in a similar state of roughness. Surveying his property had lent him to use his claws, rendering them ragged, but he imagined that Murikeer had less cause for his claws to be in such a sorry state. “But after all I have done for Metamor, I cannot imagine he would not recognize my claim.”

“For Baron Avery, to whom you have sworn your sword.” The skunk tightened his grip reflexively as his mount swayed to step over a log fallen across the trail. Charles felt the touch of sharp claws pressing into fur. With a short twitch he pulled his arm free and then let out a hiss when, as he had feared, sharp claws and soft flesh disagreed with the motion.

“Ahh, ouch! Ware your claws!” He drew in his injured wrist with a glare down at the welling of blood from the small gash. “You've cut me, Murikeer.”

The young mage's ears backed in consternation as he, too, gazed at the dark blood staining Charles' fur. “Forgive me. I still tend to forget how sharp my claws get if I don't file them regularly.” Murikeer produced a white cloth from his satchel and reached for Charles' bleeding wrist. In softer words the skunk added, “I fear you are too confidant; the tangle of claims on this land is thick and his grace may be loath to offend his vassals by choosing against them. I am just advising you be cautious and restrain your confidence and your ambition. Please, let me clean that for you.”

Charles relented and allowed the skunk to dab the small blot of blood at the top of his wrist. The wound stung, but it was no more serious than the many cuts he'd received just from forging paths through the tangle of trees and culverts on his land in the last month. When the skunk was finished cleaning the wound, he wrapped the cloth around a small stone and returned all of it to his satchel with a care that seemed unusual.

You should worry about what mischief Murikeer intends. He's suspicious of you; they all suspect you. They are wrong, you are not that weak.

Charles ran his furless fingers across the wound and scowled for a moment before turning his gaze back to his land. “Your concern is, I confess, well-placed. But until I hear otherwise from Duke Thomas, I must do what I know to be right and proper, and to fulfill my duties to the land I have been granted as my fief. Have you not also begun to repair and rebuild the place that Baron Avery bequeathed to you?”

“That is different,” Murikeer noted with a faint laugh. “No one else claims my lands as their own.”

“We shouldn't argue,” James suggested, head tilted back and gazing at the sky. The clouds above churned and continued to darken. “We're going to get more rain soon.”

Charles noted the sky and twitched his whiskers. “Then let us continue. My lands can wait for another day.” Murikeer offered no argument. Holding one hand to his satchel to keep it from bouncing he urged his mount to a quicker pace. A shimmer hung in the air above them coaxing the patter of drizzle to fall a short distance away from them as they followed the flanks of the young mage's mount. The sucking of mud at hooves and the heavens grumbling was all they heard for the next hour.

 

The rain returned in earnest shortly before they reached the Glen, shrouding all but the nearest trees behind a gray, hissing pall that not even Murikeer's magic could entirely keep at bay. His magic was aided by the limbs of the trees towering overhead to shield them from most of the downpour but they were still damp by the time they dismounted and went their separate ways. James asked the rat if he needed him for anything but Charles demurred, assuring him that he just wanted to spend the rest of the day with his family and that, the skies depending, they could resume their exploration of his land on the morrow.

He stabled Malicon and took a few minutes to clean some of the mud from his pony's hooves and hocks. Thankfully the hay and oats he'd stored there the day before were still fresh. While Malicon gratefully sated his hunger, Charles removed his gear and cleaned them as Sir Saulius had taught him. He felt some measure of peace in the performance of such simple acts. Being a knight meant that his was a warrior's life and a leader's life. He did not need to skulk in darkness nor pass unnoticed in the brush. But he did need to have a union, a partnership even, with a horse.

That thought made him smile and step to where Malicon fed. The roan pony lifted his head and stretched his neck toward the rat, a confident gleam in his eyes. Charles stepped closer with a pleased laugh, wrapping his arms around the pony's neck even as his long head pressed into the rat's back. “Thank you, my friend. I should go see my family now.”

Malicon whickered and lipped his shoulder, biting him there affectionately. He gently pushed the pony off and then stroked one paw down his neck a few times. “Enough of that now, Malicon. We will ride again tomorrow.”

His pony did not make him linger any further and so Charles braved the rain one last time, racing from the stables to the door of his home between the roots of the redwood. He felt the squish of mud between his toes, and felt it sink beneath his claws. But the warmth beyond his door made him forget such discomforts immediately.

“Charles, you're home!” his wife exclaimed with delight as she stood up from her needlework beside the hearth. A pleasant fire burned within casting a burnished glow about the room. Four of his five children scampered about the floor in some game of their own devising. The fifth was not there. His heart shuddered and his knees trembled as he remembered that his fifth would never be there. How could he have forgotten that?

You never were able to say goodbye.

Charles pushed that thought aside to bend down and scoop his four living children in his arms as he stood in the doorway, rain slashing behind him and soaking his tail which had not yet slipped through. A chorus of delighted squeaks filled his ears and he nuzzled each in turn, whiskers amidst whiskers, their bright eyes filled with his face.

“Oh, I am so happy to see you all!” he exclaimed as he lifted them off the floor in his arms. Their legs and tails dangled in the air, the latter trying to curl about his chest as their feet dug into his wet tunic for some purchase. “My you have grown so much since I saw you yesterday morning!”

“Get the monsters, Dada?” Erick asked with an excited squeak.

“Did you?” little Charles chimed in, paws gripping his shoulder with a boisterous energy.

“Aye, we defeated the monsters and kept everyone safe. They made a satisfying whump when they hit the floor! Which is what I'm going to do to each of you!”

They squealed excited delight as he swung them down toward the wooden floor quick enough that their head and ears almost brushed the elk-skin rug at their feet. Tails prodded his chest and sides as they frantically sought purchase. He slipped his arms back and dropped them one by one onto the floor from the mighty height of a single hand. As their tail and rear struck the rug and warm wood beneath they offered another excited squeak that would have made a normal human's ears hurt. But for rats it was just one more chorus of family life.

“Dada, my pretty dress,” little Bernadette said, even as she lay on her back, paws gripping the edge of the green kirtle she bore. Little Baerle bore the same kirtle in blue. His two of three sons were each wearing short leggings that came to their hocks, with loose-fitting tunics that they would grow out of over the next few months, both of a similar plain brown fabric.

“Oh it is very pretty, Bernadette,” he replied, leaning forward to apply a gentle kiss with the top of his snout atop her head. He then turned to Baerle who had rolled into a seated position, little paws holding the tip of her tail as if it were a stuffed doll. He stroked the back of her head and then kissed her too. “And you look very pretty too, Baerle.”

“I love you, Dada,” Baerle said, her soft blue eyes filled with joy.

Charles felt as if he should burst into tears. His children loved him dearly and he them. It ought to be enough to sooth the loss of the one, but he knew his arms could hold more, his ears should hear more, and his heart should capture more than just the four before him. He hid the tears that wanted to blossom from his eyes by grasping all four of his little ones remaining in his arms again and hugging them close. “Oh, I love you all too!”

Of course he heard Kimberly rise from her needlework, but he still enjoyed the gentle touch of her hand on his back, the soft prick of her claws, and a hush of her breath against the back of his ears. “Welcome home, Charles. I will bring a wash basin for your muddy paws.”

“Thank you, my lady. And something hot to eat. All of this rain has chilled me.”

Kimberly brushed her snout against his and he leaned into the touch. Then she patted their children on the head before making her way to the kitchen. Charles set his children down again and leaned back to keep from toppling his muddy paws and ankles onto the clean floor. “Now why don't you fi... four go and find a place to hide. Once your mother has helped me clean my paws, I am going to come find you!”

They squeaked their delight at the idea and scampered off around the room and then up the stairs toward their rooms. He took a deep breath and laughed. Only yesterday, for a few hours, he had been nearly that young in body and mind. A bit stronger still thanks to his Sondeck, but just as mischievous and prone to trouble. At least his rump wasn't sore from the spanking anymore. That would be a trifle embarrassing to explain.

Kimberly returned a moment later carrying a small basin filled with water and a towel over her shoulder. He sat down and dipped his feet in the water, scrubbing the mud from his toes and claws, then dried each with the towel. She watched him and in a quiet voice asked, “Why were you needed?”

“Jessica planted a hyacinth; the corruption of Marzac nearly took her. But we arrived in time, the hyacinth was destroyed, and all is well again. We couldn't be told why we needed to come or we would have forgotten to do so. That was the power of the hyacinth. But it is gone now.”

“Marzac. I hate that place. It has done such terrible things to us.”

Its power is broken now.

“Its power is broken now,” Charles said with a quick nod. “And for that we can all be grateful.”

She sighed in relief and wrapped her arms about his chest. Her head rested on his shoulder. “I feared for you.”

He sighed with a smile and put his hands on her arms and held her close. “I am fine. I fear always for you and our children when I must go. I will make sure you and they will always be safe.”

“We are safe here at the Glen,” Kimberly replied, an unasked question in her voice.

“I know. But I have my new lands to tend. One day we will live there, and I will make sure that we will all be safe there too.”

She smiled and stroked one hand down between his ears. “Go find your children before they get into mischief. I will ready you something warm to eat.”

He pulled her into a tight embrace and then the two of them stood up together. “I love you, my lady.”

“I love you too.”

They held each other for a few more seconds before they stepped apart. Kimberly opened the door and flung the muddy water out of the washbasin, before shutting it and carrying basin and towel back to the kitchen. Charles stepped toward his armor tree and removed the sword at his side, though he would wait until he had rounded up his children before removing his mail shirt.

“Here I come!” he shouted up the stairs, taking them one at a time, left hand brushing along the wooden wall, eyes bright with the game.

Remember, you only need to find four children, not five.

He nodded to himself, his smile faltering a moment as he climbed the steps.

 

 

Late evening with the sun set and the sky dark with the last remnants of the day's storm, Charles leaned against the balcony railing high up in the trees, gazing at nothing. His scalloped ears turned to the sound of his wife's toe claws against the wooden steps; she would join him in moments in their lofty vantage amidst the massive redwoods. The strong scent of needles mixed with that of his children and the last remnants of horse embedded in his tunic. To this he detected a bit of hot tea climbing the stairs too.

He smiled, grateful for a day with his family, bereft of any responsibilities save their delight. His snout broadened with mirth as memory of being a child himself just yesterday returned. He could still feel the enthusiasm of scampering beneath the tables, tangling with Rickkter who he just knew he had to best at everything cause none of the grown ups understood how naughty the raccoon really was. And then later, after they were adults, the deep certainty that he had to show the bear Christina deference and be obedient to her lingered still which made him feel somewhat awkward when he ordered ale at her husband's tavern. But the innocence and simplicity of his brief return to childhood, and the manner in which it ended with Rickkter over Christina's knees getting his rump smacked by a meaty bear paw while he whimpered in the corner sore from where that paw had struck his rump moments before, brought a laugh from his throat even as Kimberly crested the top of the stairs with two mugs of steaming tea in her paws.

“You sound cheerful,” she remarked as she settled in next to him, offering the mug in her left hand. He accepted it and wrapped his right arm about her shoulders.

“Just remembering things. It is good to be home again. And I'm glad that storm is finally breaking up. I bet we'll be able to see stars in a hour or two.”

Kimberly leaned her head against his shoulder, one large ear brushing the scar across the right side of his face. He did not flinch. “That was a sweet little tale you told them about what you did.”

He lifted the mug to his snout and lapped at the tea to test its heat. The flavor was bitter at first, but sweetened with spices he'd known in his youth. She'd used the chai and black root he'd blended from the spices he bought from Peacock's Feast in Metamor a few days ago. He could feel the desert in those scalding drops. He grimaced and blew across the mug, steam rippling away and into the pleasant night air. “That's a little too hot still.”

“You said the chai had to be hot to make good tea.”

“Aye, I just thought it had sat longer. Do not fret. I think my tongue still works.”

“Not enough,” Kimberly prodded with a gentle laugh. “Charles, what really happened? With Jessica?”

He smiled and tightened his grip, pulling her close to his chest. His claws pricked at her kirtle as he pondered his words. “In truth it was Weyden who saved her. She planted a hyacinth in Lake Barnhardt; it was making us all forget things. She'd attached spells to it that turned us all into children. While the titanic battle of wills was engaged above between husband and wife, I and everyone else was playing in the barracks under the watchful eye of three experienced mothers. I acted and thought like I was seven years old again. I was even without my training and used my Sondeck to try and throttle Rickkter. You would have laughed to have seen us romp. Poor Rick doesn't want anyone to know about it; please don't mention this to anyone. It'll embarrass him and everyone else.”

Kimberly blinked a few times and then blew across her tea. She turned her head so that she could see his expression clearly with her left eye. “Was Misha there?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“Then you might be able to keep the secret.” They both chuckled knowing what the one-eared fox would do should he learn of their age regressed adventure. Kimberly's tail rubbed against his own and he rested the toes of one foot over her own; as long as their toes were they could hold feet almost as well as holding hands. She rested her mug on a flat stretch of railing and then let her husband draw her in closer to his chest. “Is that how our children will be?”

“Mostly. They'll be a little easier to handle without the Sondeck, except La...” he caught himself and tensed, letting his wife slip out of his arms as he stepped back, some of the tea spilling over the side of his mug and burning his hand. He ignored the burn and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. He felt her paws slip beneath his tunic and find his bare chest. She did not need to grip his fur to draw him back to the railing.

“I'm sorry,” he murmured softly. When he opened his eyes he could see that tears had blossomed in hers. He set his cup next to her own, then pulled his wife in close, arms wrapping tightly about her back. Her arms slipped beneath his vest and tunic, pushing it up against his shoulders. He loosened his grip a moment to shrug the vest off and yank the tunic over his head and toss it on the wooden floor of the balcony. Likely some Glen scout was either feeling embarrassment or should be just then but he didn't care.

He wrapped his arms, bare but for the brown fur that coated them, around his wife who nestled against his lithe but strong chest. He could feel her whiskers trembling and pulsing against his fur, and as she shook with the sudden spike of grief, he felt his heart brim with indignation.

You never stop missing those stolen from you.

Nay. And he certainly wouldn't either.

Charles held his wife for perhaps a minute before she pushed back, wiping her cheeks with her paws. “I'm sorry, Charles. I know how much you wanted to train him.”

Even those words felt like a knife wound to the chest.

Is that all she had to say about having your youngest and most precious son stolen from you?

He swallowed and tightened his grip on her sides, but did not force her back into his chest. “I love you, my lady. You did what you could. More than I would have asked. It's not your fault the Lothanasi would not help. It's not your fault.”

Garigan did say that he suggested sending for them a few days earlier.

“I love you, Charles. I... I miss my little boy.” Fresh sobs erupted from her throat. Charles felt a tremble creep into his arms.

In a voice so quiet even he could not distinguish the words he murmured, “I barely knew him.”

“He asked about you,” Kimberly choked between her cries. “Once he learned to say what few words he knew, he always asked about you.”

You will see him again.

“I will see him again,” Charles assured her, leaning forward to nuzzle her snout. “And so will you.”

She nodded, letting herself fold into his chest again. He cradled her close and shut his eyes tight, fighting back the tears. Together they stood, quiet but for their trembling and the grinding of their teeth. The steam rising from their tea ebbed.

Crying won't bring back your son.

“Crying won't bring him back, my love,” Charles echoed. He stroked one hand down the back of her head, rubbing his thumb behind the soft flesh of her ear just the way he knew she liked. “Come now,” he said in a lighter tone, “last night I was being spanked for being a naughty child and now we do this to ourselves?”

She blinked and looked up at him. “You were spanked?”

“Quite well in fact, and I probably deserved it. Would you rather not hear of that as we drink the tea I made for you?”

Kimberly's eyes brightened and, despite the tears still standing in those eyes, a smile formed on her snout. “Aye. Thank you, my love. I'm sorry.”

“I know.” He bent down and reclaimed his tea which no longer steamed. She turned to the railing and, after picking up her mug, sipped carefully at the tea. A grimace crossed her features and he chuckled again. “Do you not like it?”

“It is very bitter.”

“It gets better. If it is too bitter a little honey will help.”

She gestured at his chest and then at his tunic still deposited in a pile behind him. “Your shirt?”

He glanced at it, and a gleam came to his eye. “I will pick it up on our way back down.”

“You'll catch bad airs like this!”

His smile broadened as he stepped to her side at the railing, not caring for the moment who else saw his naked chest. His tail found hers and tried to entwine together as best they could. “Then you will have a wonderful excuse to keep me from riding out to the Narrows in the morning.”

Kimberly laughed, nearly spilling her tea over the side of the railing, but he steadied her hands. She stared out into the darkness of trees and little lights. A long sigh escaped her chest and with it breathed her words. “I love you.”

“And I you.” He nuzzled the side of her head and in a low voice whispered, “Now what I'm about to tell you, you cannot tell anyone, even Baerle, or my hide will not remain attached to my body for long. Because I was not the only one who got a spanking last night.”

Her smile remained all through his tale. The mugs of tea warmed their hands and with every sip reminded him of home.

 

 

Monday, May 7, 708 CR

 

Charles opened his eye and the world came into focus before him. The thin bedsheets were tangled around his legs and tail as if he'd been turning in his sleep. Beside him reposed his wife, her downy tan fur along her cheeks suffused with a soft smile as of a dream whose odor of sweetness persisted into the first glimmers of consciousness. Charles pondered in vain what he had dreamed of but only the silence of the early morning before the sun's rise replied. If not for the beastly eyes he now bore he doubted he would have even seen his wife only the stretch of an arm away.

A sullen disquiet seemed to persist in the air as he blinked and twitched his whiskers. A faint whiff of the chai from the night before clung to the fur on his snout. The musk of the hearth fire and their own odors drowned everything else out. But all of it felt thin too, almost insubstantial. Not a dream, though for those few moments as he lay there, the rat languished in the uncertainty.

And even as he grasped the edge of the linen sheets and worked his feet and tail loose for a moment he felt as it were a stranger's hands reaching out to clasp the covers. Before him he glimpsed a pair of thin hands with long fingers tipped with short, sharp claws, each of which sprouted short, dense fur at the wrists that thickened along the arms. Those hands twisted and moved, subtle in their art, with a care about their claws so as not to tear the fabric. He marveled in that brief moment before he realized that those were his paw-like hands, and his claws, and his will guiding them.

Charles took a deep breath, flexed his fingers to savor the feel of them returned, and then pulled his legs and tail free from the winding grasp of linen. He eased himself off the bed and lifted right hand to his forehead. And there his hand stopped for several seconds as he pondered what it was he was attempting to do.

Your duty.

Clarity returned in full at last and Charles smiled. There would be time for his morning prayers later. His hand lowered, scratched gently over his bare chest, and then spread outward in a quick stretch. He cast a quick glance back at his wife who still enjoyed the nepenthe of sleep. For a moment he reached out to wake her, but then drew back his hand. She should enjoy her sleep; once the five... four children woke she would have precious little of that.

As a long, quiet sigh escaped his snout, his paws searched through his clothes chests for something suitable to wear.

 

Kimberly began to stir as Charles slipped his suit of chain mail over the linen shirt he'd selected. He tugged at the hem to keep it from bunching in the rings even as his ears turned to listen to his wife as she shifted about in the bed. A slight smile creased his jowls as he heard her yawn and stretch. Charles draped his vest over one arm and gathered a sword, buckler, and small knapsack in the other. For a moment he paused at the door to listen for his children too but they were all sound asleep.

He stepped outside into a wet and cool morning. The sun had risen but had not yet crested the eastern mountains suffusing all in the forest with a gray veneer. Mud coated the ground and his toes sank into it as soon as he stepped out. He splayed his toes as wide as he could to give himself purchase and worked his way around the large roots framing the entrance to his home toward the stable Saulius' knight friends had built for him last winter.

Malicon, his roan pony, greeted him with a whicker and a scrape of hoof against paddock wall. Charles draped his buckler and tabard across the stall and hoisted a bag of grain over his shoulder. He filled Malicon's trough and while the pony contented itself, his eyes fixed upon something dear to his heart.

In the corner of the stables where one of the roots of the massive redwood in which his home dwelt emerged through the wooden slats only to disappear into the earth before reaching the opposite wall nestled a sinuous green vine of ivy along which broad leaves stretched and delicate purple blossoms grew. His eyes warmed, his breath exhaled with sweetness, and his muscles relaxed as a gracious peace touched him.

This vine had been a gift to Charles from the Wind Children of the ancient and magical Åelfwood. Who the Wind Children truly were he did not know. The little smile that had teased the corners of his snout now sketched an inchoate laugh. They had made themselves known in a swirl of dried leaves, acorns, and loose twigs that had danced about each of their company one by one. Their own faces and shapes were reflected back to them in that whirling cascade of mulch, much to each of their delight and wonder.

But the Wind Children had paid special attention to Charles who at the time was living stone whose only hope of returning to flesh remained in the future. They had circled his body many times, testing every granite crevice and almost, were it possible, tickling him with their effervescent touch. And when they finally continued on whatever course creatures of wind fancied to set he had been surprised to discover this vine growing from his back just above the base of his tail.

There it had remained for roughly five months, nourishing in some esoteric way from his granite body and then later his body of flesh once that had returned to him. It had curled from his back around his chest, and the back again, working upwards toward his shoulder and neck with a gentleness that impressed him deeply. So deeply in fact that the thought of any harm, even a bruise coming to that vine had filled him with a wretched horror.

Nor was it like any other ivy. Twice already it had come to his defense. The first time had been while they were laboring through the Marzac swamps; another plant had attacked them, attempting to transform them into a panoply of grotesque yellow flowers for its tempting garden. How well Charles could remember the sight of poor Lindsey who'd been first attacked, his face and chest unfolding into large petals collapsing against the water's fetid surface. But the vine had stretched from his body and choked that ensnaring plant until its vegetative fury was sapped and it released them all.

The second time had been in his fight against his old friend, corrupted by Marzac, Krenek Zagrosek. It had tried to choke him too but the fires of Marzac had burned the vine badly, ruining its flowers and fronds until only a fraction of its length could be saved. For two months he'd let it grow in his flesh again so that it might regain its former strength. And often he had felt its gentle embrace like a guiding and grateful hand as he navigated the dangers they had faced.

Charles loved and trusted the vine given him by the Wind Children. Even after learning that he could remove it from his flesh without bringing it harm he only rarely did so.

Until he returned to the Glen and showed it to his wife.

The rat's smile dimmed as a moue spread to take its place. He could understand his wife's discomfort with his ability to turn his flesh into living stone – he was frightened by what being stone could make him do and tempt him to do – but there was no harm whatsoever in the vine. It was nourished by him, and nourished him in return with its care and protection. It had never meant him anything but blessing and even now, as he gazed upon it as it climbed the far wall of the stable, its roots digging into the earth as they had once dug into his back, he could see its leaves stretch toward him, beckoning him to let it slip once more into his flesh.

She really does not understand this and many other things.

Charles grimaced and knew it was true. Kimberly did not understand the vine or the granite body he'd been gifted with. She had only ever understood his Sondeck abilities as another form of magic that let him be very strong and one of the Keep's elite warriors and now knight of the Glen.

She does not understand how you miss Ladero.

He choked back the sob he had not allowed himself the night before. Malicon lifted his head and snorted curiously at him before returning to his trough and sumptuous grain. In all those months of journey away from his family, how often had he spoke of the great joy he knew was waiting for him back home? How often had he spoken of his Ladero, his son with the Sondeck and the training he yearned to give him?

And in his heart he knew he would never have a bond with his other children, no matter how much he truly did love them, as he would with Ladero.

Charles shook his head and ground his molars together, claws pressing into his palms. His son was dead. He could not change the past. That was the lesson that he had learned from Marzac – the past could not be changed.

Only the future.

And he bore the emblems of his future already. He unclenched his paws and lifted a claw to pick at the metal links of his chain mail. He had duties as a knight now and that meant surveying the Narrows to learn their secrets and to determine how best to use the land. It had only been a month and a half since he had been invested, and his duties to the Glen had precluded him from spending as much time learning his fief as he would prefer. At least this week Baron Avery permitted him to do as he wished.

But as his claws ran along the smooth rings and his ears noted each clink of metal on metal, his eyes remained upon the vine whose leaves beckoned him closer with a strange sort of urgency. Slowly he brought his mind back to bear on the Wind Children's gift and his wife's discomfort. He would never dream of suffocating his vine beneath a suit of mail, but there was little reason he couldn't slip the vine over his armor as long as the root could sink into the flesh above his tail. Kimberly wouldn't see him until after he returned in the evening and so she didn't have to know.

Perhaps, despite herself, she may be right. Marzac used objects to drive your friends apart from those who loved them.

Charles had been about to walk toward the vine when that thought came to him. He stopped and narrowed his eyes, glancing back once toward Malicon who was nearly finished with his grains before returning his attention on the vine. Its leaves beckoned and the blossoms turned toward him, opening and closing like grasping hands.

Kayla had the swords.

He nodded slowly as he recalled the dragon blades, so helpful in their fight against Marzac, being twisted in his friend, the skunk's, mind until they coerced her into surrendering herself to the mad dragon Vissarion. His heart shuddered as he remembered seeing her in Rickkter's chambers, stretched and long, sinuous like a serpent with legs and vicious jaws, with only patches of fur remaining to show her true self. How quickly that which had once been trusted had twisted her mind!

James had the bell.

Even as the vine's leaves invited him closer, like a harridan's commanding finger, his mind turned to his donkey friend who had been consumed by a cracked bell. It had been forged in Glen Avery by their blacksmith Malloc and had never even traveled to Marzac. Yet through it Marzac had exercised devastating and nearly fatal control over his friend, twisting him to hate those who loved him and save but one stroke he would have killed Charles. One hand lifted to rub at his jaw, which on the coldest of nights ached still, where that bell had cracked the bones.

Jessica had the hyacinth.

He ran his tongue along the back of his incisors and then through the gaps on either side. As the vine before him moved of its own volition, that hyacinth, in its final moments had done as well aching to embrace Weyden and doom them all. In those precious minutes before Jessica and Weyden had left, Rickkter had pressed them for details; the image of that flower writhing in ravenous hunger haunted him. The hyacinth had been planted to help Jessica manipulate the Curses and in the end it had manipulated her, reducing all of them to children unable to fight back.

Kimberly does not understand, but she may be right about the vine.

Charles sighed and ground his molars together. The end of the vine detached from the wall and angled toward him. “I'm sorry, my friend. Whether I like it or not I have to listen to my wife.”

The vine seemed to struggle even more and for a moment he feared it would uproot itself to ensnare him. Charles wrapped his paw about the hilt of his sword and glared, heart burning. “Do not make me do this. Stay there and do not touch me. I will protect myself.”

His threat did not appear to convince the vine which was now stretched across the tree root, over half of its length uncoiled from the stable wall. Charles' scowl flared into a chittering growl as he ripped the sword from its sheath. The screech of metal on metal was so strident that even Malicon popped his head up, ears backed in alarm. “I warned you!” Charles snapped, giving the blade a quick underhanded swing; a cloud of dust erupted before his paws.

Stricken as if slapped, the vine recoiled and crouched against the stable wall. Charles exhaled and lowered his snout. “I'm sorry. But I cannot take chances.” He gently returned the sword to its scabbard. He then wrapped his arms around Malicon's neck and pressed his snout against the pony's head. Malicon jerked his head back a little at first but a moment later yielded to the rat's embrace. He ran his fingers and claws through the pony's mane for several seconds.

A slight smile touched his snout at last. He stepped back and took a deep breath. “Let's finish getting you ready and go find James. We have a lot of riding ahead of us today.”

Malicon stomped his hooves in approval.

 

 

Charles gestured to the mountains rising up sharply from the end of the shallow combe into which the Narrows fed. Beside him James admired the hills and the rocky promontory between the mountains. “What do you think?” Charles asked him as he shifted about in his saddle to keep his tail straight. They stood a-horsed on the top of the southern ridge overlooking the combe and the culvert that climbed into the mountains. Pines, aspen, birch, and larch clung in patches to every hillside except for a bare patch of rock thrust outward from the promontory.

“It looks like it will be difficult to get to,” James noted with a frown. His long ears fell back along his mane. “This looks like a terrible place for a road.” His lips stretched toward the shallow combe beneath them which ran eastward from the promontory.

“The walls here are shallow enough civil engineers can level this ground. We shall want to cut these trees back anyway to keep out brigandage. The wood will be good for homes tools, and fires. The land can then be cultivated.”

“It's going to be a lot of work,” James noted, his frown deepening.

“I know. I'm hoping to convince Gibson to come out this way tomorrow to help plan the work.”

“Gibson? The frog? I thought he was just a merchant.”

Charles grinned around his incisors and patted the donkey on the shoulder. “That's the idea. He can help estimate costs. He also knows a thing or two about good roads and homes so he can help draw up some of the plans. I can then discuss those plans and estimates with Julian who can help me determine how to finance everything! But, if we can find the money, what do you think of that promontory? It seems ripe for a stone keep to me.”

James stared at the promontory nestled at the base of two mountains and overlooking the end of the combe through the middle of the Narrows. At one time it may have been a route for water, but now it was more a shallow ditch that cut across the western half of Matthias' contested lands. To its north the ground gradually rose until reaching the towering redwoods of the Glen. To its south the hills dwindled until they flattened out at the edge of Lake Barnhardt. After only a month of study, Charles knew that this was by far the best defensive position in all the Narrows.

He also liked the idea of it being at the foot of the Dragon Mountains; perhaps later he could ask the stone's permission to shape it into a home and fortress for his family and those who would come to live on his fief.

But the donkey could only shrug. “I suppose once you clear out those trees you can. I'm sorry, Charles, I'm not very good at this.”

“You didn't think you were good at swinging a sword a year ago either,” the rat pointed out with a short laugh. James appeared to blush at the praise. “I want you to imagine this area leveled out and cleared, imagine it as if you were a rider coming up this new road. Before your amazed eyes you glimpse the stone wall there sectioned into an inner and outer bailey, towers spaced so they can see and reach everything about, with both mountains rising up on either side like giant ears, and between them a keep standing like a diadem atop a crown. Just imagine it.”

“That does sound impressive, Charles. It will take years!”

The rat laughed again. “As I've promised to Lady Kimberly! She is not ready to leave the Glen yet so that keep had best take several years to complete or she'll skin me and use me as a rug!”

The bizarre image made James chuckle with a short bray. But the laugh was cut short by the sound of something small coming through the brush to their south. Rat and donkey turned to watch as a lamb, no more than five months old, ambled out of the woods and began sampling a patch of clover. James blinked and stared into the woods. “Where did he come from?”

Charles grimaced and relaxed his grip on the hilt of his sword. “There are meadows south of here. It must be a Lakelander shepherd.”

Scare him away.

He ground his molars together, and dragged his sword from its scabbard as loudly as he could. The screech of metal startled the lamb who bleated in alarm and backed up, eyes wide and ears back in fear. Charles nudged Malicon forward; the pony, uncertain, obeyed his command and began stomping his hooves.

James hissed in surprise. “What are you doing?”

“Scaring him,” Charles snapped. “He needs to learn not to leave his flock, and that foolish shepherd needs to learn to take better care of his charges!” He waved his sword in the air and screamed at the lamb. The lamb bleated all the louder, now too frightened to even move, little hooves rooted in the clover patch.

“Charles!” James replied, a strange sort of defiance in his voice. “Stop that! It's just a lamb.”

“And it will be a dead lamb if doesn't return to its flock!” Charles swung one leg across and jumped from Malicon's back. He then jumped forward, swinging the sword down and to the lamb's side. James also jumped from his steed, but instead of coming to his friend's aid, he grabbed the rat by the wrist when he raised his blade again.

“It's just a lamb!”

You are right, but show deference to your friend. The lamb is scared enough.

Charles grimaced but nodded. “You're right. I'm getting a little carried away.” He sheathed his blade and lowered his eyes to the lamb who still bleated in terror. At least it learned never to leave the flock again. But what of the shepherd?

As if in answer to his question they both lifted their heads when a much heavier tread shuffled through the trees and brush, emerging a moment later. A broad shouldered bull with dark-gray hide, sallow eyes and a weight of years equal to their own stepped forward with a crook in one hand and a frightened expression on his snout. He did not even seem to see the rat and donkey, kneeling down and scooping the lamb into his arms crooning, “There you are, little Ewar. Where were you off to? You are safe now.”

The lamb continued to bleat for a few seconds, eyes never leaving Charles as he scooted with his hooves deeper into the bull's arms. But the bull's gentle stroking along the lamb's back calmed him quickly.

Charles straightened and slipped his hand from James's distracted grip. “Good afternoon,” he said with a nod to the bull who towered over him. “I am Sir Charles Matthias and these are my lands. Who might you be, good shepherd?”

The bull had his snout lowered to his chest as he consoled the lamb. His gaze rose slowly and stared at the rat as if surprised to see him. “My name is Silvas, milord. This is Ewar. How may we be of service?”

“I suggest you maintain better control over your flock. You are fortunate your lamb found us and not a wolf pack.”

“Thank you, milord.” Silvas ran the thick nail of his thumb beneath the lamb's chin. “Saved a second time.”

James blinked. “A second time?”

“Ewar nearly died at birth, milord. But your servant warmed him in the cold.” The lamb bleated contentedly now.

He is on your land.

“These are my lands, Master Silvas. What are you doing here?”

Silvas's reply was bereft of pretense. “Pasturing the flock; I have always pastured them here in the Narrows. My father did too, and his father before him.” His voice was slow and heavily accented in the manner of the meanest commoners who had little education and, likely, even less comport with others to smooth out the roughness of their speech. The bull, Charles could tell, had shared more words with his flock than he ever had with people. He replied slowly, confused by the inquiry as if his presence in the Narrows was as any other rock or tree; a part of the land. Charles' questions struck him the same as they may have were he questioning a tree about its presence in a forest.

He is on your land.

Charles grimaced and narrowed his eyes. “Are you a Lakelander?”

“Aye, though I only see the lake when I bring the flock for shearing.” Ewar kicked his legs a moment as if something had startled him. Silvas frowned and whispered soothing words to the lamb to calm him. “Pardon me, milord. If you have no need of me, I should return to my flock.” He touched the knuckle of his free hand to his brow and bobbed his head toward the unexpected visitors.

“These are my lands now,” Charles cautioned the bull. “Return to your flock. We will discuss this again later. Good day to you.”

Silvas nodded to them both and, carrying the lamb in his arms, disappeared back into the woods, lowing a wordless tune to call his flock. Charles watched him go for a moment before shaking his head and turning back to Malicon who was also sampling the clover. “James, is there something wrong?”

“I cannot believe you just did that.” The donkey murmured with a scowl, his tall ears splayed back. Narrowing his eyes James tilted his head and peered at his friend. “Charles, are you hearing voices.”

Nay, of course not.

“Nay, of course not.”

“Is there something you can't let go of? Like my bell or Kayla's swords?”

He could not help but think of the vine. But the vine's call he had resisted. “There's nothing. James, it is not Marzac, if that is what you fear. I just... I made the wrong choice with the lamb. You were right, I shouldn't have threatened him; he should have run away instead of cowering. At least his bleating brought Silvas.”

James flecked his lips and lowered his ears, his posture relaxing. “You scared me.” He waved one hand toward the undergrowth through which Silvas had disappeared. “There are peasants throughout the land, Charles. They've been here, likely for generations. Before the Curse, before Nasoj, and certainly before you and Lord Avery's gift of this fief.” The donkey exhorted with a frown. “You should not mistreat them just because their homestead was already here.”

He will tell the others. They will become suspicious of you.

Charles nodded and then lowered his snout at the rebuke. “I had not seen him during my earlier surveys. I was simply surprised, that was all. It won't ever happen again.” He grabbed the saddle and reins and hauled himself atop Malicon. “Let us head back for the day. I think we have been out here long enough.”

And all the while they rode back, in silence but for the clopping of hooves and the snapping of branches, Charles felt the donkey's eyes boring into him. He simmered and hunched, wishing for some excuse to make his friend go away.

 

 

Tuesday, May 8, 708 CR

 

The trip back to the Glen suffered several detours and delays as the path Charles choose ran through a narrow ravine that had been blocked by several downed trees. By the time he reached home it was past time for the evening meal and his children were nearly ready for bed. He slept fitfully and woke well before morning, sore and suffering that strange disconnect he'd felt the previous morning.

He was able to fight through the fog and dress himself. Only this time his paws did not carry him toward the stables; rather he found himself wandering across the Glen commons toward the small graveyard within the northern trees. The towering sentinels swayed like masts at sea and the muddy earth gripped his paws like a thousand clawing hands. For a moment he felt as if he were going to drown, his throat clenching shut so tight that he felt claws digging at his collar only to gasp in surprise to discover that they were his own.

All of that even before his eyes glimpsed the familiar stone cross marking his son's grave.

Charles stopped and stared without seeing for several seconds, noting rather the pink specks amidst crystalline shards in the granite marker, the moss covering the earth, and a butterfly with iridescent red and green wings crawling across a wildflower sprung up before the marker. The rat flexed his hands, beginning to feel the cool, morning air through them. His whiskers trembled with a breath of wind. His tail dragged through the soft coating of moss.

And then is heart tightened and he fell to his knees, eyes overflowing with tears. A sob clutched his throat which he fought to hold back as he bent over, claws hammering into the earth while his snout dove into the moss. He rubbed his head from side to side, moistening the cold ground with his tears.

He is not here anymore. His flesh is a feast for worms.

Charles dug his claws into the moss and growled deep in his chest. A fury built in him to challenge the sorrow. He ripped at the moss covering his boy's body, tearing huge gouges free and revealing the loam beneath.

You cannot find him here.

He paused, shutting his eyes and squeezing a tear from each. The tear from his left eye slid down through his cheek fur and was lost within. The tear from his right eye gathered in the ruined flesh beneath where it pooled for a moment before dropping silently into pile of moss in his hands.

What would others say if they saw you digging up the grave?

Charles took several deep breaths to gather his wits. But the racing of his heart would not slow but beat loud like the thundering footfalls of a charging army. The trembling in his flesh, born of grief and rage, neared palsy.

Stone does not feel so.

The idea seemed as plausible as anything else. He willed his flesh to granite and granite it became. With it his breathing and heart stopped, and his skin hardened until it trembled no more. At ease and cold like the earth, Charles stretched forth his hands to straighten the moss he'd torn. It would never be the same, but at least a cursory glance would reveal nothing amiss. Slow and methodical, he smoothed out the gouged earth and greenery until he was satisfied.

A stone arm stretched out and latched onto the center of the cross marker showing his son's grave. Jeweled eyes fixed upon that bit of stone, even as his hand sunk within its form. But the marker was silent as if there were no tenant remaining. Charles probed the grave for a few fruitless minutes before drawing back his arm and slowly letting the cold granite melt into soft flesh again. By the time the basalt vein had returned to scar-flesh, the rat had turned his back on Ladero's grave and was walking toward the commons.

“Eli, help me,” he murmured beneath his breath, eyes casting heavenward into the verdant boughs and snatches of dawn blue sky. They glimmered with the wind, providing only a cascade of color in reply to his prayer. Charles opened wide his mouth, tongue slipping out through the gap between his incisors and right molars to dangle breathless and moist, thirsting for something he could not name.

He smelled the sharp musk before he heard the touch of his clawed feet on the soft earth. Charles closed his jaws but did not turn. “Garigan?”

“Aye, master. Are you all right?”

“I will be.” He closed his eyes and let his snout drop slowly to his chest. He flexed his toes as he breathed, the earth pressing in beneath his claws. “How long have you been watching me?”

The ferret standing a short distance behind him clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and whistled through the gap where his front teeth had been carved out. “Since just before you visited... your son.”

“It was the first time in... two weeks now. I have never let such a long stretch pass.” He half-turned and saw his friend and fellow Sondecki garbed in scouting attire with a green sash tied about his upper left arm. Over a year ago Charles had gathered with Jerome and Krenek to raise the ferret to the rank of Green; now Krenek was dead and Jerome had been corrupted by some strange beast mage far to the north and Charles rarely had the time to dedicate to his Sondecki charge. His presence was always comforting.

“I often visit where I spread Shelley's ashes,” he murmured with a brief sideways glance toward the mountain peaks in the west. “I know it is not the same, but...”

“You understand the pain,” Charles finished for him.

“Aye. Is there anything I can do for you, master?”

“If you are free, keep me company for now.”

“I shan't be missed. Are you going to go to the Narrows again today?”

“They are my lands now. I do have a responsibility to learn them and protect them.” Charles grimaced and then nodded. “I am going to ready Malicon and then go see if James is ready to ride. You can come with us if you'd like.”

“As far as I am able,” Garigan replied and then ducked his head once in a sinuous contortion only a ferret could perform. He then stepped to the rat's side and offered him a smile. “Let us see to your steed together, master.”

Charles cast a quick glance to the Heavens in gratitude before continuing on his way to the stables.

 

 

Garigan and he spoke a little as Charles brushed Malicon's coat and readied his tack. He avoided looking into the corner where his vine lurked, though he did catch a glimpse or two of the curling green leaves almost whimpering in their call to him. Rat and ferret spoke of the sorts of training they would do later that summer, as well as pondered what could be done about Jerome when he finally returned to Metamor. Of the latter neither had any inkling of what really to expect and so Charles' ideas were guesses and hopes more than anything else. But of the former Charles had many plans; plans he had born in his heart not for the ferret but for his own son.

Try as he might he could not stop his heart from wandering back to the grave. Halfway through sentences his voice would trail into silence, punctuated by snorts from Malicon for him to continue or new questions from Garigan meant to jar him from unpleasant reminiscence. Even attempts to speak of his four living children only made him miss the one more deeply. After several such lacunae the ferret asked him instead of the Narrows; of his new land Charles had no difficulty speaking.

Both of them were surprised when, while the rat was still securing the saddle to Malicon's back, they heard a pair of hooves walking toward the stables. A moment later James appeared in the doorway with a grave expression on his snout, but friendly eyes. “Sir Charles! I'm glad I caught you; we cannot go to the Narrows today. Oh, good morning, Garigan, I didn't see you there.”

“Good morning, James,” Garigan replied, stepping back a pace as Charles climbed over the paddock door to brace his friend.

“James! What do you mean we cannot go to the Narrows today? Has something happened?”

“Nothing ill for the Glen at least. A messenger arrived a short while ago with a message for us. Jessica, Kayla, and Rickkter are on their way here now to meet with us. It's Tuesday.”

Charles and Malicon chuffed at the same time. “I thought we agreed we did not need to meet this week. We were all together at Lake Barnhardt only a few days ago.”

He doesn't trust you.

“I am sorry, Charles, but I sent for them. I fear for you. What happened yesterday...”

He betrayed you.

Garigan frowned and turned to the rat, one claw plucking at the green sash about his arm. “What happened yesterday, master?”

And the seeds of doubt spread.

Charles sighed and shook his head. “You may as well join us, Garigan. We are meeting because of the corruption of Marzac. It's touched everyone else so far; all except me. I don't relish repeating the story and I will have to tell them what happened. You can hear it then.”

“That seems fair.”

“Thank you.”

James lowered his ears and stepped closer. “How are you this morning, Charles?”

“Well enough. It seems I'll have a good excuse now to spend most of the day with my family.”

“And no fallen trees to block your way,” the donkey added with a smile that slowly brightened his face. His long tail swished behind him and he took another step closer, lifting one arm as if asking whether he could embrace the rat in a brotherly hug.

You must allay his suspicions as best you can.

Charles chuckled and then obliged him, returning the hug with a few pats to the donkey's back.

“Well, if I'm not going anywhere today, I will break my fast with my family. James, Garigan, you are both welcome to join us.”

Garigan smiled with an arched eye. “A chance to watch you and Lady Kimberly try to keep four little rats still long enough to eat? I'd be honored!”

 

 

Both ferret and donkey were put to good use at the Matthias table by helping to spoon a porridge of oatmeal, sausage, and berries into their designated child for the morning. None of his children appreciated being spoon fed and would rather stick their hands into the porridge and then stick their hands in their mouths, or on the table, or on each other, or anywhere else to make a mess. All the while they squeaked with all the power in their lungs, repeating the handful of words and phrases that they knew – a list that grew day by day – with the most frequent being, “Nay!” and “Don't wanna.”

There were no quiet meals in the Matthias home.

Charles felt immeasurably better when his eyes were kept on his youngest daughter little Baerle while he fed her, but when they swept over the rest of his family, he felt that nagging emptiness return. Why couldn't there be a fifth child here? Why did he have to die?

Because the gods did nothing.

He hated both the question and the answer and so kept his focus on helping his little girl who waxed cooperative and sweet one moment and the next offered so shrill a squeak that his ears rang. He wondered anew how Kimberly was able to maintain any order at all in their home.

It's easier for her with only four instead of five.

He nuzzled his daughter's head fur between her ears to keep his morose thoughts at bay.

 

There was a little time before their friends from Metamor would arrive and so Charles opted to visit the merchant Gibson whom he hoped would help him determine what he would need to cultivate the Narrows. Gibson had once owned the house in which Charles and his family lived but had built for himself something closer to the lake to better suit his and his family's amphibious nature. Just as the Matthias family were rats, Gibson's family were all frogs.

Both Garigan and James accompanied him down the winding track to the small lake called Spring just south of the Glen commons. At first he was glad of their company; now he felt as if he were being crowded and wished they would let him handle this errand on his own. He said nothing though and focused on the task ahead.

Gibson's home by the lake was beneath one of the massive trees overlooking the water, with a little enclosed path down to a boathouse; a small row boat bobbed lazily where it was tied. Squatting over the dock with a pair of oars in his arms was the merchant frog. His yellow eyes brightened when he saw them and his large mouth opened wide. “Sir Charles! James, Garigan, to what do I owe the pleasure?” His throat bobbed in a pleased warble.

“I've come to ask for your help, Master Gibson,” Charles replied. “I intend to cultivate and protect the Narrows and wanted your advice on what I will need. Could you be of assistance?”

The frog turned the oars over with his webbed hands and bent his long legs as if stretching them. “I would be glad to help. Perhaps I can come by your home later this afternoon and we can discuss it then?”

If you agree you will not be able to protect the Narrows today.

“I was rather hoping we might be able to ride out there this afternoon if that would not be too much trouble for you.”

Gibson croaked and did his best to grimace. His jawline was too firm to form proper expressions but the disappointment was clear. “I'm afraid I cannot leave the Glen today. But tomorrow I can. Besides, if we discuss it this afternoon we can make better plans for tomorrow. I have a great deal to prepare before I head to Metamor next month for trading. I hope you understand, Sir Charles; I mean no offense to you.”

Charles bit back his disappointment and irritation. “This afternoon will have to do then. I should be free by then.”

“It is a beautiful day, finally warm enough for my taste. Do you mind if I bring my son with me? It'll be the first time he's been able to enjoy the Spring.”

“Of course. I will see you this afternoon then.” Charles turned and nearly bumped into both ferret and donkey who stood right behind him. They both backed up and offered apologies, but he forced a smile and shook his head. “Let us go wait for our friends!”

Hopefully they will understand. But do not trust in it.

All the way back up the hill to the Commons, even though the frog warbling a disjointed tune as he stowed his lake gear was the only one making any noise, he could hear James's scrutiny. It wasn't a feeling, but an actual sound, a vibration echoing from his narrowing eyes, lowered ears, and the flexing of his supple lips. Charles stepped faster in vain to escape it.

 

 

It was midday before a pair of wagons arrived from Metamor bearing his companions on the journey to Marzac. In addition to Jessica and Kayla there was Rickkter whose expression at being carted for five hours was as sour as swamp water, and another skunk whose expression couldn't have been happier. In fact, Charles recalled, he had never seen the archer Berchem with as broad and genuine a smile as he bore now on his return home.

Charles, James, and Garigan met them in the commons. The rat smiled and waved as they rode in. James waved as well until he saw Berchem; the donkey then scowled and crossed his arms. “Too bad, they fixed him.”

“You know he'll never go near Baerle again,” Charles chided gently.

“That doesn't mean I have to like him.” James dug one hoof in the soft earth. “Or forgive him.”

“You don't want to be the jealous man the bell tried to make you either.”

James lowered his ears at the rebuke, but after a moment to stew he began to nod his head. “In sooth.” And then more quietly he muttered, “He'd better not join us.”

Berchem and Rickkter took the lead on the horse drawing each wagon while Jessica and Kayla rushed to greet them. The hawk's golden eyes sparkled with delight and she enfolded the rat and then the donkey within her wings, beak rubbing against their snouts in a warmth that she did not usually express. “It is so good to see you both again! I cannot tell you how much I owe you both. These last few days... it is like I am newly hatched!”

Charles laughed as he picked out a black feather that had caught in his mail shirt. “I do not believe you were hatched a first time.” Both Garigan and Kayla chuckled.

“How are you doing, Charles?” Kayla asked as she gave him a quick embrace.

“I am feeling all right. It is good to have my friends here in the Glen for once! Now you know what James and I feel like every other Tuesday having to trek down to Metamor.”

Kayla cast a glance at the raccoon leading a horse and wagon toward the Mountain Hearth. “And poor Rick has to return in a few hours! It's why we opted for two wagons. Jessica and I plan to stay the night and return in the morning. Where's Murikeer?”

“At the Mountain Hearth seeing to a private room for us to meet. We should join him there once we're ready.”

Berchem angled along the commons so that he came a short distance from them. His smile faded some when he saw the donkey, but he quickly returned his glance to the rat. “Sir Charles, I have you and James to thank as well for my rescue from my own stupidity.”

“All gratitude should go to Weyden,” Charles replied with a shake of his head. “In sooth we did very little that day.”

“He has my gratitude and more. As do you both. Forgive me for what I have ever said about either of you.” The skunk lifted his gaze to James and his eyelids lowered in shame. “And anything I ever said about Baerle.” He grimaced and cast his eye down. “Or did to her.” His long, monochromatic tail danced behind his head a moment, assaulting them with the faintest whiff of his potent musk. “Sir Charles, where might I find Baron Avery? I wish to return to service here; I expected to see him on our arrival.”

“Baron Avery is up north in Hareford discussing defense of the northern woods and the Gateway with Nestorius and Sir Dupré. He should be returning late tomorrow or Thursday morning if it rains again.”

Berchem nodded. “Jessica, Kayla, I will secure the wagon and horse and then I will journey to Hareford myself. Thank you for allowing me to accompany you back.”

Jessica extended a wing toward him even though he was well out of reach. “It was our pleasure, Berchem. Travel safely and may all the gods smile on you.” The skunk smiled, nodded his head to them, and continued after the raccoon.

James scuffed a hoof and glowered after him until Garigan nudged him in the ribs. The donkey brayed in surprise, and then turned to their friends and stammered, “Well, um, I'm sure Master Muri has a room prepared for us. You must be, uh, famished after your trip. Master Jurmas makes excellent food and should have some prepared too.”

Kayla laughed and gave the embarrassed donkey a hug. “Lead on then. It is good to be together again.”

As they walked Charles cast a sidelong glance at the glowering raccoon. “Rick, why didn't you mask him?” He asked in a quiet aside when they were closer. Rickkter glanced up with a twitch of his ears and one eyebrow. “His scent?” Charles cupped his paw over his nose, the acrid scent still hung, subtly in the air. The raccoon's eyes glinted with pure mischief.

“What, you think I didn't?” His ringed tail twitched and flicked and the gleam of sharp teeth flashed past the gray and black fur of his muzzle. “At least, for our benefit, if a little does get past the spell now and then.”

Charles blinked as he stewed on that for a moment. “You masked him for us, but not himself?”

Rickkter shook his head. “Nope. He can stew in his own stink, as far as I care. At least until he's far, far downwind and the spell fades.”

 

While the extensive caverns in which Lars brewed his many beers, ales, and wines were more fitting for clandestine encounters, there were a few private rooms in the Mountain Hearth that were far more comfortable, well-lit, warm, and easier to find. Murikeer, who was very good friends with the proprietor of the Inn, and James who worked for him a few days a week, had no trouble arranging for the use of the most private. They had only to shutter the windows and cast a few incantations to keep their words from falling on idle ears.

James and Jurmas brought platters of food for them to enjoy; once the clopping of Jurmas' cloven hooves receded down the hall, Rickkter shut the door and barred it with a quick spell. “There, now we won't be disturbed.” The raccoon glowered at the rat who sat down in the center of the long table and sampled a wedge of cheese. “So, what's this I hear about you showing signs of Marzac?”

It was a misunderstanding.

“It was a misunderstanding,” Charles began after setting the sharp cheddar down on his plate. Garigan sat next to him on his right with a warm concern in his face. James stood on the other side of the table passing out plates and bowls for everyone. Jessica perched next to him and across from Garigan, while Kayla sat on the other side. Murikeer reclined at the rat's left with a warm biscuit in his paws, which his one eye studied in between glances at Charles.

And a mistake on your part.

“And a mistake on my part,” Charles continued with a long sigh. “Yesterday, James and I were exploring the Narrows, the strip of land between the Glen and the Lakeland that is my fief. While there we encountered a young lamb and no sign of any shepherd. I dismounted, drew my sword, and proceeded to frightened the creature.”

You hoped to alert the shepherd with its cries and to teach it never to leave its flock again.

Charles grimaced at the look of shock in both Jessica and Kayla's eyes. Rickkter narrowed his while Murikeer merely twitched the tip of his striped tail. “I hoped to alert the shepherd with its cries, which is exactly what happened. I also hoped to frighten it enough that it would learn never to leave its flock again. That remains to be seen.”

“Seems like an effective tactic to me,” Rickkter mused with a grunt. Kayla jabbed him in the side with a claw.

“That's a horrible thing to do to a poor little lamb!”

“Lambs that wander away get eaten. He's lucky it was Charles who found him and not some wolf pack.”

“I said the same thing yesterday,” Charles noted.

Murikeer grinned, little fangs revealed beneath his jowls. “Is the world coming to an end or did you two just agree about something?”

The raccoon grimaced but made no rejoinder. “I am merely saying that it does not sound as if this is enough to conclude Charles is under the sway of Marzac.” His eyes narrowed as he turned on Charles. “But it is enough to give us pause. Threatening a lamb, no matter how good for it, does not seem your way, O rat knight.”

They would not trust you anyway. You are the only one who has not been corrupted. They expect it of you.

“I'm the only one here, of those of us who journeyed south, who hasn't felt Marzac's touch,” Charles pointed out as he picked bits of cheese loose from the wedge. He rolled a morsel the size of a knuckle back and forth between his claws. “Anything I do, any lapse of judgment I make, any of it, is going to be suspicious. Maybe I just made the wrong decision.”

“Perhaps,” Jessica said with a slow nod. She offered Kayla an avian smile when the skunk cut free a bit of freshly cooked salted beef and set it on her plate. “But we have to be sure. We've all felt what Marzac did.”

“Most of us,” James corrected.

“Most of us, aye. We felt it. We know how horrible it truly is. It's going to poison your mind against us and everyone else close to you. I know I didn't trust any of you by the end; I thought I knew better and yet I still fought when you tried to stop me. If Marzac is corrupting you, then it will convince you that we cannot be trusted. Please, Charles. Trust us.”

She's right. Tell them everything.

Charles popped the cheese in his snout and nodded. “You're right. And that means first I need to apologize to you, James.” He turned to the donkey and gripped his shoulder with a warm, humble smile. “I was irritated by your concern the other day. I thought you were being overly nosy and suspicious of me and I let it get the better of me. Please forgive me. You were just trying to protect me.”

James's ears lifted in surprise, and then lowered a little to either side, dark eyes relaxing in delight. His supple lips spread with aplomb and he gripped the rat's shoulder in his hoof-like hands. “Forgiven, Sir Charles. I am honored to be your friend. You were there for me when Marzac tore my soul apart. I'm here for you.”

“Thank you.” He tightened his grip and then turned back to the rest. “I suppose I should say that there is a weight on my heart that has not gone away ever since we returned. My boy Ladero. He was a Sondecki like Garigan and I, and I told you all many times on our journey to Marzac how much I looked forward to training him in the years ahead. But I am not alone in suffering. My wife still weeps for him too. The night we returned she wept for him. It is... it is a terrible thing to lose a son.”

He felt a tear dripping down his cheeks. He rubbed them with his sleeve. “Forgive me.”

Kayla stretched out one arm and laid her paw on his. “We understand, Charles. It is terrible.”

“Is it tempting you?” Rickkter asked, his eyes focused on him and at the same time turned elsewhere. “Your dead son, that is.”

Charles shrugged. “Trying to undo his death is exactly what Marzac would want me to do. I cannot change the past.”

You have said enough to assure them. Let them debate amongst themselves.

The rat took a deep breath and then picked up the wedge of cheese. “Well, that's all I can think to say. Have you been studying me magically?” This he asked of both Murikeer and Rickkter.

The skunk nodded, his snout set in an unpleasant moue. “Studying and finding nothing.”

“We saw nothing on anyone else either,” Rickkter pointed out. “It doesn't mean anything.”

Charles ate the cheese quietly as the mages discussed ways they might test for the taint of Marzac. Both Jessica and Kayla offered their opinions on what the taint felt like while they had suffered it. Charles listened carefully to their description of a presence that had inhabited them, one that counseled at first and then controlled them so that they surrendered their very will to that other. Kayla shuddered as she recounted the voice of the dead dragon calmly and with a faux warmth that had seemed so real at the time persuaded her to give up more and more control of her own body until she was a prisoner of the dragon within a cocoon of scaly flesh taking her life from her. Jessica admitted that it wasn't until the very end that she realized that the hyacinth itself was talking to her and guiding her steps; the more she relied on it, the more she did exactly what it wanted.

“James,” Rickkter said as he chased a bit of beef around his plate with his knife. “You are closer to Charles than any of us. Is there anything you have seen him particularly attached to lately? Is there something he cannot give up?”

The donkey pondered that while the rat kept quiet and unobtrusive. But his friend could only shake his head and then shrug. “I cannot think of anything, but he's never been very attached to anything except his family and the vine.”

“Where is the vine?” Kayla asked, noting for the first time that its curling leaves were not poking out of his tunic.

“Against one wall of the stables,” Charles relied after swallowing a sip of mead. “My stables that is.”

“When was the last time you had the vine on you?”

He frowned and tapped his chin with his claws. “At least two weeks ago. I thought about bringing it with me a couple days ago, but I thought it best to leave it where it is lest it act as a focus for Marzac's taint like Rick's swords, James's bell, and the hyacinth were.”

“And your family?” Rickkter pressed.

“I visited Ladero's grave this morning. The first time I have done that in a couple of weeks too. And as for my wife and my other children, I would die to protect them.”

They asked him a few more questions about his family. The raccoon posed the most impertinent questions but with the threat of Marzac hanging over his head Charles was not going to object to them. He did his best to answer how he felt and the longer the conversation lasted the more at ease his friends appeared to become. Both Kayla and Jessica looked uncomfortable with some of Rickkter's questions, and even Garigan simmered at their implications. Eventually Murikeer held up one paw and shook his head.

“I think that's enough. We aren't going to learn anything more today.”

Rickkter bobbed his head a few times and then skewered the last of the beef with his knife. His eyes narrowed as he sniffed the morsel a few times. “I'm satisfied anyway. I don't think the corruption has a hold of you yet, Charles. But that doesn't mean we let our guard down. It could come at any time.”

“Agreed,” Jessica squawked, her eyes intent as she studied the rat. “I don't see any of the darkness on you, certainly not what I saw in myself in those final moments before we destroyed the hyacinth. If it is there, it is quiet.”

That is good. But if you start hearing voices you will alert them.

“That is good,” Charles said with a relieved smile. “But if I start hearing voices I will alert you all!” He sighed and shook his head. “I don't want to suffer what you each endured.”

“I didn't really know I was hearing a voice speaking to me until the end,” Jessica cautioned. “It could already be speaking to you and you might not even realize it.”

They ought to be able to magically see that by now if it were truly happening.

“You ought to be able to magically see that by now if it was truly happening,” Charles replied with a slight shrug. “But maybe even there Marzac can hide.” He put the last of the cheese in his mouth, chewed with his molars, swallowed, and chased it all with a long draught of mead. “Well, what are we to do about it? Rather, what do you intend to do about it? I think the best thing for me to do is to continue with my duties as if nothing were amiss.”

“And it probably is,” Rickkter agreed though he could not dislodge the grimace on his snout. “As for the rest of us... James, Garigan, Murikeer, you are closest and I hope you'll keep an eye on the rat – Ow!” He glared at Kayla who'd jabbed him in the side before continuing, “Keep an eye on Charles and let the rest of us know if he does anything out of character. I have only a little time left before I must return to Metamor. Muri, if you do not mind, I would rather enjoy a brief tour of your new home on my way out.”

Murikeer blinked and rose from the table. “I'd be happy to show you, Rick.”

Together the skunk and raccoon left the room, with the Kankoran casting a meaningful glance over his shoulder at the rat. Kayla chased after him a moment to give him a little kiss on the cheek before the two embraced. Once the two mages had left and Kayla returned to her place, Charles leaned back a little on the bench with a smile. “So, is there any news of our other friends?”

 

 

Neither Rickkter nor Murikeer reappeared so after an hour of discussing more mundane affairs, James summoned Jurmas that they might clean the room. Charles gave his friends a brief tour of the Glen before retiring to his home. Kayla and Jessica were eager to give Kimberly company leaving Charles and Garigan to their own devices for a time. He took the opportunity to perform some Sondecki exercises with the ferret though he only performed the simplest he could think of that would still challenge his student as it was hard for him to keep his focus. Garigan managed all of them as if he had known them the whole of his life.

An hour later James, accompanied by Baerle the opossum arrived to join them. At that point his children finally woke from their afternoon nap and decided that their guests were perfect for practicing climbing. But the real mischief didn't begin until a half hour later when the merchant Gibson arrived with son.

The frog opened his large mouth in a wide grin and croaked, “Good afternoon, Sir Charles. It is good to be here in this home again. So many memories. And this here,” he gestured at another much younger frog who stood on awkwardly long legs with his arms wrapped about his father's knee, “is my son Bertram.”

While the pair stood in the doorway with Charles holding the door in welcome, James and Garigan stood near the hearth with their arms locked together to make themselves a faux mountain that the children were trying to climb, Kimberly sat with her needlework showing Jessica and Kayla the tapestry she was making for her family now that her husband was a landed knight, and Baerle was in the kitchen preparing something for them to eat as the afternoon hours faded into evening. All of it came to an immediate stop with the frogs' introductions.

Charles' children squeaked in unison, their little paws clutching at James and Garigan's tunic and breeches – and in the case of Erick one of the donkey's ears – launching the next moment into the air and then across the floor as if they were a single mind in four bodies. Little Bertram, standing no higher than a rat's knee, stared at the deluge of scampering rats with panic in his large yellow eyes. Behind them James and Garigan gasped in relief as little claws no longer dug or tugged at their flesh, while Kimberly, Kayla, and Jessica all looked up from where they reclined.

The four little rats rose on their hind paws – in their haste they still scampered on all fours and showed no inclination to stop – and squeaked in delight and welcome toward, not elder frog, but the little boy making his first visit to another family. “Welcome!” They squeaked in near unison. “Come play!”

Gibson bent low and patted his son's back. “They're friendly, Bertram. Go play with your new friends. Dada will be right here.”

The little boy slowly let his green arms unclench his father's leg, and a moment later took a tentative wobbly step toward the four rats. And then he dropped to all fours for a split second before bounding into the air with a single push from his sizable legs. He leaped completely over all four of Charles' children with a high-pitched croak. For a breathless moment the four little rats could only stare in awe at how something even smaller than them could jump to so impossible a height and then they were climbing over each other to take up chase of their new friend who continued to madly hop about the room, on top of furnishings and other people as he kept one leap ahead of the rats.

Gibson slapped one thigh with a hearty, croaking laugh. Kayla helped Kimberly secure her needlework while Jessica spread her wings to keep the little frog from jumping into the middle of it. Baerle, who emerged from the kitchen with a tray of meats, cheese, potato, and some sweet smelling dip, immediately rushed back in when the leaping frog nearly leaped into the bottom of the tray. Garigan and James tried to catch the little frog and the rats to help calm them down, but even with Garigan's astounding mastery of the Sondecki powers, the best he could manage was grasping at the air and hoping he could snatch an errant tail or two.

Their home was a whirlwind of croaks, squeaks, and five little bodies tearing around the room like a pack of wild dogs. Charles sucked in his breath to bellow a command to his children to behave when he noticed the child Bertram do something unexpected. The frog hopped on top of the arm of one chair and twisted his body to peer behind him. The rats rounded the back of the chair, dark eyes eager with merriment at the chase. The frog croaked at them in a taunt and then leaped across the chair to where Kimberly sat, and then leaped again directly through Jessica's startled legs.

His children were not tormenting a scared frog. They were all playing together.

Five at play again. But this fifth is not yours.

“Well,” Gibson said as his throat sac vibrated with continued laughter, “it looks like our children are friends already. I'm so glad to see it. Bertram needs friends and room to jump after spending his first winter cooped up in our home by the lake.”

“He seems to have made some with my children,” Charles noted, keeping the edge out of his voice. In a very quiet tone he added, “They once had a fifth to play with.”

The fifth child should be Ladero. Not some interloper.

The older frog glanced at the others in the room and croaked, “Well, as we are apparently quite welcome in your home, I do believe introductions are in order; I do not believe I am known to all of your guests.”

Charles, in the moments when the squeaking of his children permitted his voice to be heard, introduced the frog to both Kayla and Jessica. The rest lived in the Glen and were familiar with the merchant. Kimberly asked after his wife Natalie and he reported that she was well and doubtless worrying over her son's first outing among other Glen children. Bertram was two months younger than the little rats and while he could hop with ease, he had not yet spoken a word through his croaks and cries.

“Is he aging more like a human child then?” Kayla asked as she and Kimberly put the heavy tapestry away in a cupboard whose latch was too high for the children to reach on their own.

“Perhaps,” Gibson shrugged his shoulders. “It is so hard to tell when they are born like we are. Natalie would probably know better. Now, I saw yon opossum archer bearing a tray of delightful morsels as we entered and before our children set to play. Will you be offering your guest a chance to sample such morsels and a libation to make their passage more pleasing?”

Baerle had in the meantime removed the many items from the tray and at that moment emerged from the kitchen with only the tray in hand. This she set on the large table on the wall next to the kitchen doorway. “Forgive me, Master Gibson, Sir Charles, but I'm bringing them out one at a time so I don't spill it all.”

The frog croaked another laugh. “A sensible solution! Carry on!” He then turned to Charles. “So, good knight, you wished to discuss your new land and plans for it? Have you drawn any maps? And have you anything I might write with?”

The circling chaos continued as both fathers found a mostly quiet corner where they could discuss the Narrows and Charles' plans for it. Gibson listened and took notes about roads, fortifications, and the materials and labor needed for each though he freely admitted all of his estimates were wild guesses and that he'd need to see everything for himself to make a proper estimate for the time and money required to bring the rat's vision to life.

Eventually, Kimberly, Kayla, and Jessica managed to calm the five children down by putting on a little magic show for them. Kimberly spun some witchlights in the air, making them dance around and gently bop each of her children and Bertram in the nose. The children pawed at the brilliant lights which always slipped through their fingers, even the partially webbed fingers of the little frog. Kayla added a little dazzle by bouncing balls of fiery warmth back and forth, but these she kept well out of reach of the children as she did not know how to make them harmless yet. Jessica provided the most colorful of shows by fashioning illusions of various animals in every color they could imagine. The five children huddled together as if they were all brothers and sisters and watched amazed.

Charles tried not to watch; each time he saw one of his children even laughing with the little frog he felt his heart seethe.

How could they let that frog take Ladero's place even for one day?

He had no answer to that. Politeness alone dictated that he say nothing of it.

Why does no one else see what you see?

As Gibson rattled off more figures to help Charles realize the scope of his desired transformation of the Narrows, Charles glanced surreptitiously at his wife and his friends. All of them were busy watching and entertaining the five children; their faces were filled with delight and laughter. They either didn't realize how grievous an offense it was for little Bertram to mock them with the absence of their fifth child, or they approved of his supplanting the empty place left by Ladero's death in his family.

They must not understand. If they approved, they could not truly be your friends, and yet they are your friends, aren't they?

He buried his fury deep in his heart. A fire burned within. Somehow, in the days ahead, he would have to make sure that little frog never came into his family again.

This is Ladero's place.

And Charles would make sure everyone knew it.

 

 

Wednesday, May 9, 708 CR

 

Charles awoke as if climbing up from a deep well into a black cave where only a crack in the wall brought any light. He struggled against the enclosing darkness first in anger and then in panic when for all of his flailing he could not reach that one surcease from terror, the shaft of light piercing the bitter night. Stones tripped his feet and walls crushed his arms and chest as he scrambled from the well and through the cave. His feet were then fast caught, swallowed by the stone as if by a python, slurping up across his legs and tail, dragging him back away from the crack.

Something unseen struck the stone and he felt himself come free. He gripped a hand, cool to the touch and porous like mist, that guided him about the obstructions and turned his fearful heart to one of merciless focus. The goal of light was before him and nothing could prevent him from reaching it.

Charles put his hands to the crack, slipping his claws through and heaving with all his strength. The crack widened and beyond he recognized the ceiling of his bedroom.

The crack flashed a moment of darkness and he knew he was staring out his own eyes as they blinked. The ceiling swam away and he witnessed the quilt of his bed pushed aside by his arm. Familiar legs and tail slipped from the mattress, and, like a passenger in his own body, he watched himself stretch and then don his attire for the day.

It was only when he secured the rat-head buckler about his waist that he felt sensation return to his flesh. And with the awareness of the warmth of his room, the dimness of the light, the gentle breathing of his wife who had not yet stirred from sleep, the distant sleeping of his children and his guests, the scent of candlewax mixed with the odors of several animals, and the feel of wood beneath his paws, finally returned to him control over his own body.

Charles left his chambers and then his house, not wanting anyone to see him after that strange fugue. He slipped into the stables, prepared feed for Malicon, and then busied himself mucking out the stall. One hand swatted the flies who objected to his presence, while the other worked the pitchfork. His lips moved, tongue seeking the words of a prayer. Nothing came to him, only the beastly awareness of what surrounded him and the task at hand.

By the time he'd finished the rat felt like himself again. He had half a thought of telling his friends who were doubtless waking from their well-deserved slumber in the guest rooms of his home about the strange disconnect he felt both this morning and the previous two.

If Marzac were controlling you, it would not relinquish its control.

Charles smiled at the thought, comforted and confident again. He offered Malicon a gentle hug around his neck before leading the pony into his freshened stall. “I'll be back for you a little later this morning. We're going to ride to the Narrows again today, my friend.”

Malicon lipped at his ear and whickered his approval.

 

 

After breaking their fast together, Kayla and Jessica bid them a fond farewell and started on the long ride back to Metamor. James promised both of them that he would keep a close eye on Charles and if he couldn't be there that Garigan would be. Charles promised to let them know if he felt the corruption touch him in any way. They lingered long enough to watch the wagon disappear down the road to the south before claiming their mounts and heading down to the lake to fetch Gibson.

The frog was awkward in the saddle, especially since he required the use of parchment and ink if he was to catalog all that he saw of the Narrows and the rat's plans for them. Despite those difficulties he proved a competent rider and did not slow either rat or donkey down as they traversed the forest paths through the clefts in the rock where the Glen overlooked the Narrows. Once they reached the Narrows proper he did bid them wait while he reviewed his notes from the night before as his large yellow eyes studied the land. He asked Charles questions about where he imagined roads, bridges and the like should be, offering suggestions from time to time to ease the financial burden or to point out the engineering challenge of his requests.

But for most of the day he was altogether agreeable and the trio were soon awash in possibilities for the wild land bordering both the Glen and the Lakeland. They reached the mountains in the west and the outcropping on which the rat envisioned his keep sometime in the early afternoon. Gibson professed some discomfort at the dryness of his skin so they paused there for a short time and made a fire. They cooked some sausage to eat, while Gibson heated some river water and used it to moisten his green, warty flesh. Once they had eaten and their companion was comfortable again Charles pointed out all that he'd tried to show James two days before.

They did not encounter anyone else in their travels though nearly every hour they saw some game from a distance. By the early evening as they returned to the Glen with a very satisfied frog, Charles noticed that James appeared far more at ease and that comforted him. Even if only for the moment, his friend finally seemed to have realized that there was no cause to fear the corruption. Truly the power of Marzac must have been spent by the hyacinth.

Two surprises awaited him as he returned home with both James and Gibson in tow. The donkey had no intention of leaving his side and he had promised the frog another meal in gratitude for his help. But he had meant only Gibson and not his wife and supplanting son. Both he found in his home. Natalie conversed with his wife Kimberly as they reclined on his couch sipping warm tea, while Bertram hopped about the room with his children scampering after him, sometimes even catching him and trying to hold onto his legs as he leaped high into the air. His croaking laughter and the delighted exclamation offered by Gibson on seeing his son and wife there felt like a lance rammed up to the pommel into his heart.

The second surprise was his wife. About her neck she bore a pendant he'd never seen before, with a sturdy silver strand fixed to a vaguely purplish river stone. The stone was so plain in comparison to the necklace holding it up that he found his eyes drawn first to it and then to his wife's snout and eyes. She stared at him for a single moment with an apprehensive fear whose origin he could not guess. One paw lifted to clasp the stone and the moment passed, her smile returning and brightening her entire face, dark eyes, pink ears, and tan fur, all of it brimming with a warmth that always drove him to greater acts of love.

Charles blinked a few times before managing to force a chortle from his throat. “I didn't realize we were having so many guests.”

“Oh, the children had so much fun yesterday that I thought we should have little Bertram over more often. He needs playmates too. And Natalie has helped me ready something new and interesting for our supper tonight.”

Gibson tilted his head back and sniffed through the small nostrils above his maw. “Are those... honeyed crickets?”

The lady frog pouted. “Oh, darling husband, you weren't supposed to spoil the surprise!”

Charles was about to offer some rejoinder but found himself surrounded by his children. He scooped the four of them up in his arms and nuzzled them as they excitedly greeted him and grabbed at his face and whiskers. The little frog Bertram looked up at four dangling tails for a moment before he hopped over to his father and wrapped his arms about his leg. Gibson reached down and hoisted him into his arms to hug him against his chest.

“Crickets? That sounds horrible.” James asked in disbelief, sticking his tongue out as far as it could go.

“They're quite good,” Gibson assured him.

“And you are a frog.”

“Aye, that I am. But you would do well to try them anyway.”

Charles hugged his children one more time before setting them down. “Go clean your hands and then you can have something to eat.” The four of them excitedly scampered up the stairs without that fifth interloper. At least Gibson was holding his son tight; he would have to find some excuse to keep them away.

But it was not there that his eyes settled. All of it seemed to be a distraction compared with the gaze of his wife. She stared at him with searching eyes, seeking the answer to some unknowable question. All the while her hand rested atop her heart, the amethyst stone wrapped tightly within. Charles met that gaze, suspicions roiling within his heart that could not be spoken.

What is that stone?

But a question could. “What is that stone? I've never seen it before.”

Kimberly opened her paw so that she alone could look at the medallion, if even she could see it around her snout. “This? Oh, nothing. Just something I fancy.” And with that she slipped it within her bodice so it was no longer in view.

She's lying to you.

“I see that,” he replied, and then forced himself to turn away. “It has been more than a decade since I last ate a cricket. We used to enjoy them in Sondeshara, so for me at least, glazing them with honey sounds absolutely wonderful.”

And though they were very crunchy and sweet to Charles, and though James's expression of complete disgust was one of the most ridiculous and exaggerated facades he'd ever seen the donkey bear, and though his children demanded his attention, and though Gibson reported on the tallies of his estimates for his Narrows plans, he could not help but stare at his wife's bodice and eyes even out of the corner of his own for the remainder of the evening.

She lied to him and he would know why.

You will. Obey your heart and you will.

And that thought, every time it came to him, made him smile.

 

 

Sir Charles Matthias walked down a long road. Barren pines, dead with shriveled needles strewn at their base, lined either side of the road. A brittle sun cast a pale scorching heat that made his paws sweat and thrust his tongue from the side of his snout like a panting dog. A pallid quiescent air smothered everything. Hard, sharp-edged rocks were mixed into the cracked earth beneath his toes, and he winced as they gouged his flesh. A trail of blood drops sizzled behind him.

In the distance he could see a mighty tree. Many of its branches hung dead, bereft of their leaves. But there were a few which still glimmered green which made the tree the only living thing he saw in the burned out wasteland around him. The road led toward it and so he stayed on the road, wincing as every step squeezed another drop or two of blood from his scarred paws.

He could not recall when he had started walking along this road, nor what he left behind. All the rat knew was that he did not dare turn around. Something waited there. Something malevolent. Something ravenous. He must have been frantic with fear at some point to have so incautiously run along the road to escape it. It was not hard to avoid the jagged rocks which slashed his flesh, but a running rat would skewer himself in short order.

Charles frowned in the miserable heat, pondering what could have frightened him so greatly as to risk running. He could not recall. He contemplated turning and facing whatever lurked behind him. The still air was broken by the slightest of mists across the back of his neck. His blood ran cold, heart clenching in his chest. He picked up his pace, whimpering at the pain of his bloodied paws.

After a few minutes the rat was able to regain control of his fear. Nothing had come for him. Nothing had touched him. It had only been a brief, almost non-existent brush of wind and not the breath of some monstrous thing slavering at his neck. For what could survive in this desolate and utter ruin of land?

As if in answer to his question he caught sight of something poking up from beneath a charred pile of pine needles at the side of the road ahead. Charles cautiously lowered himself to all fours and crept toward it, tail lifted behind him to keep it from scrapping against the volcanic rocks. Rheumy and discolored, it emerged from the layer of needles like a mutilated wolf trap. Charles kept a slight distance as he brushed the needles free.

What emerged from the desiccated foliage was a half-digested cadaverous husk. At the top was a disgorged pile of shattered bones, the marrow sucked dry from the glinting ribs and limbs while a skull leered at him with lips of tattered flesh. Beneath it, beginning at the waist was a putrefying, gangrenous mass that had once had fur and walked on two legs like a man. The overripe and almost rubbery flesh made his stomach clench and one paw went to his snout to hold back the contents within. His eyes trailed to the long, thick tail that was gnawed and wormy. What had once been vibrant with life was now bloodless and mouldering beneath the protective cover of dead needles. Freed of its sepulchral foliage, the wounds sizzled as the suffocating heat made them cook and seep with a scent so repulsive and poisonous that he could no longer thwart the quivering of his gorge.

Charles stumbled away on all fours, back aching but unwilling to rise. Tears burned in his eyes, drying before they reached his cheeks in the miserable sun. He lifted his snout to look for that one sentinel that offered hope in the perfidious wasteland. The massive tree still stood, watching but indifferent, inviting but ever distant. He scrambled on.

Walking on all fours did provide him the advantage of giving his hind paws a rest in turns. First Charles would favor his left leg, tucking it back against his belly as he charted a winding path through the rock-strewn road. And then when the misery in his right grew too intense he would scurry with his left paw down instead. Apart from the initial discomfort in his back he felt nothing incongruous with his four-footed posture. Likely he'd become more feral in appearance, animalistic despite his anomalous size. The numbing fear of the kangaroo's corpse and the brush of air on his neck from what lay behind him kept him from worrying about his shape.

His parched throat hungered for water so much that as he continued on his way, he began to lick the sweat from his fore paws. Sticky and bitter with the dust of the road, it did not slacken his prurient thirst. Nowhere did he see any signs of pools to dip his snout into. And even if he did he knew that they would be sulfurous and would kill him, either from the burns on his flesh or the fire in his belly. Either way, he would end up like that putrid corpse half buried behind him.

Over the endless hours of crawling he saw six more corpses along the road, the bodies all in varying states of decay and digestion. He did not dare investigate any of them. The vomitous bile caked his throat and threatened to freshen itself with each disfigured corpse. But as he neared the tree, the one thing even half-alive in this blasted and hellish landscape, he could not help but ponder what had happened to those seven who'd come before him. Had they tried to turn from the road and the tree to which it lead only to be devoured by what lurked behind them? Or was he unwittingly running directly into the mouth of the beast lurking in the tree?

Though the only sound he heard in all that serotinal blight was the crunch of dust beneath his limping paws, he could not help but feel a heavy tread following him, a vibrato growl of something monstrous edacious for his flesh. And more. This thing, eldritch and abominable, would not be sated with mere matter, but would savor every mote of his spirit, chewing on his substance with hellish perfidy until nothing at all remained of Sir Charles Matthias.

His only hope was in the tree.

Charles continued, eyes set only on that tower of wood, branch and leaf.

He saw no more corpses as the hours trickled past. His thirst and hunger only increased. The tree swam in his vision. He felt weak from blood loss. The blistering heat set his flesh to trembling with palsy. But to turn and give up his quest was madness that ended only in dissolution.

Before he quite realized it the road ended at the base of the tree. The roots stretched for almost half a mile in every direction, and between these walls rising twenty feet or more, the road wound, delving within. Charles followed, savoring the shade it provided, and enjoying the feel of soft earth beneath his paws. Charred twigs littered the path, but these were easily swept aside in the ever narrowing passage.

Where the roots met the trunk of the tree an open door invited him inward. Charles stepped through and collapsed onto a soft carpet stretched over the wooden interior. His tongue, dried and swollen, stretched from his gasping jaws, while his paws trembled and curled, blood still trickling from the gashes in his hind paws. But the coolness of the air within and the softness of the carpet could not relieve his agonies.

“Charles!” a familiar voice gasped from the other end of the cavernous chamber. He blinked his eyes and stared into the darkness, shapes beginning to resolve themselves. It looked like his home only stretched with wide empty spaces between furnishings. Rushing to his side was his wife, dressed in a russet gown marred with scorch marks where a fiery rain had struck her. Nestled in her bodice was the purple stone medallion and it glimmered in the unremitting sunlight streaming through the open doorway. But for the nonce he paid it no heed, preferring instead the ewer of cool water she poured across his tongue.

“You finally made it,” she said with a deep relief in her voice. “I thought you'd turn back like the others.”

Despite the water his tongue still hurt too much to speak. He stretched out a foreleg and to his delight discovered it was once more an arm. With this he reached up and stroked his wife's snout ever so gently. Her whiskers thrummed beneath his touch.

“Let me bandage those wounds. Wait here.”

Kimberly rushed back into the deep gloom of the chamber while Charles panted for breath, control returning to his body bit by bit. His eyes spied four children waiting and watching, fearful of the doorway, but hopeful in their glance toward him. For the first time, Charles gazed back along the path, but apart from the drifts of fallen twigs gathered against either root, there was nothing back there to be afraid of. Yet in the brilliant and sickly light, staining the jagged edges of the roots a faint crimson, there was something to fear. Something was out there. He should shut the door, he knew it, but could not make his body move toward it again.

His wife returned with salve and bandages and set to work on his feet. His four children emerged from the darkness, their faces curious and anxious. He tried to smile to assure them but could not. Instead he tried to mouth some question to his wife. Nothing came from his throat but painful coughing.

“Only you can save us, Charles. I love you.” She washed his feet with the cold water, gripping his ankle with one hand to steady his trembling legs. The fire of the wounds felt like glass jabbed and dragged across his back. He beat his fists against the ground and screamed into the carpet.

The salve cooled the pain, and about this she tied the bandages so tight he knew he could not walk again until the wounds were healed. Instead he crawled, dragging his legs with him, away from the door and into the interior darkness. It welcomed him with a coaxing assurance. His children remained where they were, with his eldest going so far as to lie down and fall asleep. Something whispered just out of sight, like a tickle at the back of his neck.

He quivered in a heap as Kimberly finished the bindings on his feet and disappeared back beyond where his children reposed. A dry wind drifted through the open door, hot and scorching his throat, full of dust and ash. He quivered at each brush as if spectral hands caressed his flesh, intoxicating and voluptuous in their intimate touch. Charles pushed himself deeper into the chamber.

Along the root walls framing the path to their door he could see embers scorching the wood. Crimson and angry, they stank of sulfur and decay as of a thousand mangled corpses left to rot in a pit. Vapors swayed in the open doorway like sashaying dancers, seductive and incorporeal. Charles tried to scream for his children to run, but his tongue would not leave the roof of his mouth. The stygian phantasms were not nearing the portal into his sanctuary yet lingered with perverse interest just beyond beneath the desolated rust spewed sky.

And yet, despite their mesmerizing allure, loathsome in their sightless and pulsating intangibility, Charles' gaze pierced through them to the shadowed thing he now glimpsed gibbering down the path between the roots. Its gurgling breath was the rumbling of borborygmus from the belly of a nameless terror, all slime and mucous oozing from its many slobbering jaws. Wretched and yammering, it crept down the path, shape obscured by the phantasms through which it passed.

Charles, hapless and fighting to bite back a vomitous mass which threatened to erupt from his throat and spew across his tongue, jaws, and chest, clawed at the wooden floor, stretched toward the door. Its edge ever a breath from his claws he vainly gasped, his eyes ever remained on the obnubilated horror encroaching down the path. A foul odor wafted through the doorway, full of quagmire and primordial slime. And yet his children and now his missing wife persisted in their insouciance, watching from the shadowed interior without expression, if not, in the case of the one, sleeping.

A sharp pain forced the rat backward from the doorway. Through the wooded floor thorns thrust upward, long, baleful, and glistening as if poisoned. The spikes gathered around the entrance, but spread inward, from the walls, the ceiling, and the floor, driving Charles backward deeper into the gloom away from the stagnant light. From each spike sprouted more thorns, until each teemed with millions of razor-sharp needles.

Charles scrambled back as quickly as he could, though the bite lacerated his tail as hapless it slid across one of the falcate spikes. A soundless scream ripped ragged from his throat as the pain revealed itself with an oozing smear of blood along the length of his tail. Frantic, he pushed with his agonized feet and managed to scramble toward where his wife had disappeared, back away from the entrance, the vaporous silhouettes in the pallid light, and the gibbering thing writhing down the path to his door.

Piercing the veil of dancers, the bulbous thing emerged in the doorway. With a crimson aureole around a large, flat head grayish and heaving, three mouths opened beneath five large simmering yellow eyes. It shambled on seven legs, and stretched eleven pseudopoidal arms in every direction. Green warty skin dominated its limbs and every exposed surface – there was no way to tell whether it had either chest or back.

Charles gasped in horror, even as it leaped across the maze of spikes and tendrils of pain flowing from the doorway like aeolian poison. His youngest daughter, Baerle, screamed as it landed near hear and flung out a long, pink and leprous tongue at her. She tried to claw away, but the monster dragged her back, the ichorous muscle wrapped about her waist, searing her flesh. Its many arms grabbed her limbs, contorting her into a tight ball while one of its jaw spread wide. Her screams were cut short as she was shoved head first into that cavernous maw, wriggling and writhing even as tight lips closed down across, sealing her within a fiery tomb. The head warped as muscles pressed down, mutilating and jellying his little girl.

Kimberly cried and rushed from out of the shadows to protect little Erick who cried in terror. “Charles, only you can save us!” His wife exclaimed, as the gibbering beast lumbered toward them. But there was no weapon at his side, and his feet were in so much agony he couldn't even force himself to stand and brace the monstrosity. Blood loss made him dizzy and weak. The pitiless beast croaked in enormous repugnance, opening the wide maw into which his daughter has disappeared to reveal only smears of red amidst the gangrenous cavern within.

He waved to his wife to flee and get the rest of his children out of there. Even though he could not stand, he turned to the beast, dragging himself between it and his family. With all his strength, he pushed his quivering flesh upward until he was crouching on his knees. Those throbbing jaws, vast and malicious, puckered with an ineluctable menace. And then it bunched its legs beneath its disgusting mass and leaped over his head.

Kimberly screamed once, as both Erick and Bernadette bawled. The bloated monstrosity wrapped his wife in its arms and enveloped her head within one of its maws, while the other two crushed her chest and legs. Charles pushed up with his legs to try and leap after the beast, but felt himself struck when its fixed lips closed around his wife's neck in a spray of blood.

“Charles! This way!”

He turned his head away from the weeping of his children to see a strange light in one corner. There, before a strange whirligig in the floor, was another young rat. This one was white-furred with a black hood covering head and back as if he bore a cape. He felt his heart skip a beat when he recognized him.

A scream pierced the air from every direction and then with a whisper it vanished as if a hole had been punched through the substance of the tree. His other children still wept as the slobbering amphibian masticated the remains of Kimberly's flesh. Standing before him, beckoning him closer was his lost son Ladero.

Charles wept of his own, rushing as quickly as his drained and scarred body allowed him. Ladero nodded and motioned for him to quicken his pace. He felt the tendrils of thousands of wisps tugging at him to keep him back. Through them he pushed, caring not for their perfidious touch. Beneath Ladero the ground spun away in a cyclone descending down through the floor as if some vortex were sucking them down. Yet Ladero remained standing even as he fell, as if the ground itself were the illusion and only he remained fixed in a fluctuating world.

The hellish beast behind him croaked at the sating of its unrelenting hunger, even as his other daughter gave a shriek when her body was plunged into the abyss of one of its maws. Charles closed his eyes in horror at the slurping, gelatinous crunching that followed. He dove forward into the vortex, arms stretching after his boy as they plunged away from the house and its horrors, spiraling ever into a deeper darkness in which the brilliance of his son's fur and the glimmering of his eyes became clearer and starker.

He stretched out an arm to snatch him out of that sucking spiral, when everything shook and broke like a stone thrown through glass.

 

“Dada! Dada!” A voice echoed in his ears. Charles blinked and in the darkness broken only by the deep crimson of the cinders in his hearth, he realized he was laying in his bed with one of his children at his side trembling and clutching the fur of his chest.

He blinked and pushed himself into a sitting position, one arm wrapping about the little boy he recognized as his eldest. “Little Charles? What's wrong?”

“Dada!” The little boy whimpered. “Your dream scared me!”

Charles blinked again, confused by his son's choice of words, but knowing fright when he saw it. He wrapped his son in his arms and rocked him back and forth, while Kimberly slept fitfully at his side, though she did not stir. “It's all right. I'm here. I'm here.” He cooed to his little boy as the rat child trembled against his chest. Beside him Kimberly calmed and began to rest peacefully.

 

 

Tuesday, June 22, 724 CR – Evening

 

“Wait, wait,” Charlie waved one paw to stop his sire's lengthy recitation. Already he'd had to get up and stretch twice as he listened to detail after detail without ever once getting at what he really wanted to know. But something in that nightmare unsettled him, leaving him trembling and on edge as he listened. The Baron appeared frightened and at times had to be coaxed to continue. But with the waking and comforting of his one year old self, something had finally become clear to him. “I remember that dream. I remember it.”

Baron Matthias grimaced and narrowed his eyes, though one of his paws still trembled and clutched his trousers so tightly that he was tearing a hole into it. “I'm surprised to hear that. You don't seem to remember anything else of that time.”

“I've had that dream, nightmares of it. Not in many years now. Father helped me overcome it...” He shook his head. “But I don't remember the frog monster scaring me. It was something else...”

“Do you remember?”

Charlie shook his head, and then scowled. “Nay, and nor do I want to.” He let a little of the anger simmer in his voice. “You aren't telling me of the deal.”

“I am almost there,” the Baron assured him with a grimace of his own. “At this point I was already a slave to Marzac and did not know it. It now looked for an opportunity to use me. I will spare you some of the details for there are three days left until the deal was made. And there is much to be said after that as well.”

“So far all I've heard tell of is some voice telling you what to say.”

“And do.”

Charlie grunted and stretched his neck from side to side to work out a little kink. “I suppose it told you to give me up in the deal?”

His sire grimaced but did not say anything for a moment. His eyes turned inward and he slowly shook his head. “Not quite. But if you let me continue you will understand shortly.”

Sometimes he hated his sire's penchant for storytelling. He had an irritating habit of withholding the most important piece of the tale until just that moment when it had to be revealed. But until that moment he could not be forced to divulge it; even to the son he gave away who desperately sought the truth it was still a nugget that could only be shared at the right moment.

Still, everything he'd said up until now was supposedly important. He schooled his heart and bid his anger restrain itself as he settled in to listen to more. “Well then, go on. Tell me.”

Baron Matthias nodded his head and with a deep sigh, continued.

 

 

Thursday, May 10, 708 CR

 

James had patrol duties of his own for the next three days. Given that he was accompanied by the opossum Baerle it came as no surprise when he asked Garigan to take his place at Charles' side as the rat continued to survey the Narrows. The frog merchant Gibson accompanied them one more day to review some of the details about new bridges, roads, and fortifications that the rat intended so that he could refine his estimates and note what he should look for on his journey next month to Metamor for the trading season.

The weather was fair though cloudy much of the day. Apart from spooking a pair of does and hearing the skittering claws of squirrels the forest was quiet and peaceful. Charles' mind was not, dwelling on the nightmare that had ensnared his soul from which his eldest boy had woken him. He tried not to ascribe meaning to dreams as more often than not he could not remember them moments after waking, and the few he did were so nonsensical that if he wrote them down even his friends in the Writer's Guild would have thought him mad. Yet he could not shake the feeling that there had been some meaning in what he'd witnessed in that desolate realm.

But despite his best attempts he could not puzzle out its contents and so contented himself with discussing plans for his fief. The Narrows may not have the tall trees of the Glen nor the broad lake that sustained Barnhardt, but it had its natural beauty through gently rolling hills framing narrow ravines where fissures of water cascaded their way to the lake and river to the south, with a widening combe that ended in the mountains where a defense could easily be mounted against any attackers. Good land suitable for his family for generations to come.

On their return to the Glen they were met by one of the most gregarious of all Glen Scouts. The pine marten surprised them by dropping down from the tree branches above with one leather-gloved paw wrapped tightly about a length of rope which had been looped through a metal buckle attached to his belt, allowing him to hang upside down without dangling like a beast in a trap. He narrowly avoided having his head lopped off because this was something both Charles and Garigan had come to expect from him. Gibson leaped from his saddle in alarm and landed in nearby bushes with a loud croak.

“Marcus!” Garigan snapped, though there was no anger in his voice. “You have to stop doing that!”

The pine marten grinned, thin lips drawn back to reveal numerous sharp fangs, and an impish glee filled his eyes. “But it's so much fun surprising my friends!”

“And if we were being followed, you would have just revealed where our scouts hide! You should know better.”

Charles laughed and turned to help the frog back into his saddle. Gibson croaked as he brushed the brambles from his tunic and breeches, wincing as he plucked a thorn from the warty skin along his left arm. But that was the extent of the frog's injuries other than the ruin of his pride and self-composure.

Marcus grimaced a little at the rebuke, but gestured with his free hand at the woods. “But there wasn't anyone. We would have seen. Aren't you glad to see me?”

The ferret stared at his fellow musteline and finally shook his head with a laugh. “I suppose I am. So what news have you to tell? Or are you hankering for mischief and thought to see how high a frog can jump?”

Marcus's eyes flashed toward Gibson and his smile broadened, tail whisking back and forth behind him even though it too dangled upside down. “Oh, I thought for sure he could manage twenty feet. I was disappointed.”

“Twenty feet into a tree branch?” Gibson croaked angrily. “Are you out of your gourd?”

“I assure you he is,” Garigan noted with a laugh.

“But I haven't tried racing the Avery boys in what... six months?”

Charles and Garigan both laughed while Gibson climbed back into his saddle warbling to himself. Marcus smiled a bit sheepishly toward the frog, but quickly turned his attention back to the ferret. “I did want to warn you that the noble you don't like very much arrived in the Glen today. He's planning to stay a few days.”

Garigan frowned. “Which noble? I'm pretty sure there's more than one.”

The rat chortled at that, but then lifted his head in surprise when the marten spoke a very familiar name. “That minstrel Malger. Archduke Malger Sutt I think he is now. The one who was...”

Garigan rolled his eyes and waved his friend to silence. “Aye, I know who he is. And aye, I don't much care for him. Although Charles assures me I have misjudged him.”

Do not forget what else you learned of Malger.

“You have, but at least you are not without cause,” Charles noted affably. “I don't much care for that pleasure guild either. An abomination it is, but he is a better man than that now. Much better.”

There is much good that he has done.

“There is much good that he has done,” Charles continued with a broad grin that twitched his whiskers. “Tell me, Marcus, where is he staying?”

The marten gestured back up the hillside with his free hand. “Oh, at the Inn of course. He claimed the best rooms right away for himself and his retinue.”

“It sounds as if he is enjoying his title,” Charles noted with a faint chuckle.

“Oh, aye, that he is! He had some of the horses running around the commons pulling wagons earlier today. It was fun to watch.”

“The horses? Real horses or the polygamite fellows?”

“Both! He was comparing them to see how they did. I think he's thinking of hiring some of them for his house.”

Garigan frowned and then rolled his eyes. “I'm not sure if I should congratulate them or feel sorry for them.”

“I know what James would say,” Charles mused, and then shook his head. “I should greet him tomorrow morning before we journey.”

Perhaps he can be of help to you.

“Perhaps he can be of help to me.”

“That is a wonderful idea,” Gibson warbled as he caught up to them, now secure in his saddle again. “I have heard rumor of this Archduke Sutt. If he is your friend you would do well to ask him to help finance the cultivation of your fief.”

You have something else in mind, but the frog is not wrong either.

“Indeed,” Charles patted the merchant on the shoulder. “Good thinking. Well, unless you have any other news to share, Marcus, we must return to the Glen. It has been a long day in the saddle for all of us.”

The marten's eyes widened. “Oh well there's, um... there's...”

“Nothing else to note,” Garigan finished for him. The ferret lifted his head and patted Marcus on the top of his head. “I've no interest in seeing the noble, so maybe we can do a little wrestling tomorrow morning, my friend. At least before I have to accompany Sir Charles, that is.”

“Really? Oh that's wonderful! Thank you, Garigan!” Marcus flashed them all a wide grin and then scrambled back up the rope into the branches above. Garigan smiled and shook his head.

“Now there's a lad,” Gibson added quietly, but not so quietly that those in the treetops couldn't hear too, “that I hope never loses his enthusiasm. Just that he tempers it a little when I'm around!”

They all laughed as they continued on their way. And as they did, Charles pondered just what he would ask of Malger in the morning.

You know. You know.

And in truth he did. But how to say it, that was the real question.

You know that too.

 

 

Friday, May 11, 708 CR

 

“There is something I have to do before I ride out to the Narrows this morning,” Charles announced as pulled his tunic over his head. Strange hands seem to be grasping the fabric, and the feel of the cloth over his short fur seemed to take as long as a shout across the lake, as if his thoughts were a heartbeat behind his actions. The strange sense of disconnect was always the most pronounced in those first few minutes after rising from slumber. At least he could recognize his wife, despite her secrets.

Kimberly had risen moments before him for the first time that week and so he could not slip away unnoticed as he preferred. The amethyst medallion she had acquired two days before rested between her breasts as she knelt before the trunk clad in naught else but her fur. For a moment, his eyes savoring the delicate curve of her hips, the soft tan of her fur, and the lovely turn of her scaly tail, he considered doffing his tunic and drawing her back to the bed for as much as they could before the children woke.

What is the medallion?

He grimaced as his wife turned, and his eyes scoured the web-like crimson lines decorating the gem. Why would she not tell him what it was? Each time he asked she demurred. Was even her nakedness a ploy to draw his mind away from her duplicity?

And yet you love her and ever seek to bring her joy. Remember her tears.

Charles sighed and reached for his red vest. “You will love the Narrows; I think I have found the perfect spot to build a fort there.”

“Must you?” Kimberly ask as she selected a sleeveless sky-blue kirtle from trunk and laid it out across the bed. “Our home is here.”

“The Narrows is my fief. It is my duty. It will take many years to build the fort, my love. The Glen and this tree will be our home for many years yet.”

She smiled briefly though did not look at him. The witchlight she'd summoned on his stirring cast a pale, moonlit glow that dazzled in the facets of the her medallion. He winced as those shafts of light flickered in his eyes. Charles turned back to his attire, depositing trousers and his rat-head belt on his feather pillow. Both were very comfortable for riding, but also more presentable when meeting nobility.

“What errand are you going to run?”

“An errand of hope. I can say no more of it now. Either it works or it does not.”

“And then you are going to spend all day in the Narrows?”

“I must.”

She set out linen undergarments next to the kirtle and closed the trunk with a sigh. “Your children miss you. You've barely been home since...”

“I am a knight of the Glen and I have duties,” he reminded her with a note of irritation churring in his throat. “I spent Sunday and much of Tuesday afternoon with them and I will do so again.” Even with the disconnect, waning as it was, he could see the tightness gripping his wife's features before the words had finished escaping his tongue. His sudden bit of churlishness shamed him. “Forgive me for that. I will return early tonight. Our children need their father.”

All five of them.

“And that is part of what my errand is about,” he added with a smile even as he worked his legs into his trousers, taking care not to catch the fabric with his claws. “No, don't worry over it. It is nothing that's going to take me away from here.”

Kimberly lowered her ears as she slipped a linen shirt over her head. After wriggling into it she asked, “What are you going to do?”

He cinched the trousers over his tail and shook his head. “I asked you not to worry over it. If it is successful I will tell you about it. If not, then it won't matter anyway.” He buckled his belt and then stepped around the bed to where his wife focused on donning her clothes. The medallion was, for the moment, hidden beneath her white shirt, but he could still see its outline against her chest. He put his paws on her shoulders, though he only felt the warmth of flesh and the smoothness of the cloth a moment later. “I love you, my lady. I will see you in the late afternoon.”

She lifted her snout and placed a kiss on its side. “I love you, my knight. Come home soon.”

 

 

Charles gave Malicon his morning feed before heading toward the Mountain Hearth. A small crowd had gathered there that morning to surround the visiting Archduke, notably Baron Avery and his closest confidants. Charles sat near the entrance and smiled to Jurmas when he approached with one of his daughters clutched in his arms. “An egg and some juice will do, thank you,” he said when asked if he wanted anything. The deer nodded and went to procure the requested meal.

The strange sort of disconnect he had been feeling finally disappeared as he studied the Hearth common room and its occupants. At one of the long tables on the other end of the room reclined the foppish pine marten who had helped them on their return. Surrounding him were Sir Egland and Intoran, Baron Avery, Angus the badger, Alldis the deer, and Berchem. Both Alldis the chief hunter for the Glen and Berchem its chief archer appeared bored by the conversation but both Avery and Angus were eager to meet with the archduke. Charles watched but did not bother to listen.

His eyes were drawn toward a small shape lurking in the shadows beneath the table. Golden eyes stared back at him from beneath the benches, ones he almost missed because of Angus' laughing bulk. A fox. Charles chuckled to himself and contented himself with waiting until his liege and friend were finished.

Jurmas returned with a small bowl with a fresh fried egg and a tumbler of berry juice. He ate without haste and sipped rather than drank. By the time he finished his meal Baron Avery was rising from the table, along with his coterie of chief men. Charles waited where he sat, smiling to each of the four as they walked past. Berchem's return nod was polite but somewhat awkward; at least the malice he'd once sensed from the skunk was now gone. Alldis wished him a good day, but Angus lingered a moment to ask him a question.

“Malger is going to help me teach our scouts a lesson. Would you care to assist, Sir Charles?”

He smiled and finished the last of his juice. “Thank you for the gracious offer but I have matters to tend on my fief. You should join me there one day; I'd love to show you all that I've discovered.”

“I will take you up on that offer,” Angus replied, grinning widely with an array of short, sharp fangs hidden behind his jowls. “And you will help me train our scouts one day, oh knight of the Glen!”

Charles laughed and patted his friend on the shoulder. “Aye, I will. If it keeps me closer to home Lady Kimberly will approve.”

“And how do you like your lands?” Baron Avery asked as his long tail bounced back and forth behind his head. The squirrel had a mischievous glint to his eye that reminded him subtly of Baron Barnhardt's careful but pointed questions. Once more he felt like a weapon being interposed between two feuding nobles.

“They are very beautiful and bountiful, your grace. I will be riding out there shortly to continue learning the land. But first I have one errand to tend to.” He nodded his head in the direction of the marten who had not yet moved from his place between elk and oryx at the far end of the commons.

An old friendship to renew.

“And an old friendship to renew,” Charles added as both Angus and Baron Avery turned to glance at the marten curiously. “He saved my life down south once.”

Angus' smile broadened, and the rat could see that all mention of an errand had been forgotten. “That is a tale I hope you share with us someday.”

“Aye, I will do that as well.”

Baron Avery nodded and patted him on the shoulder, tail flicking as if shaking off dust. “Well, we shall leave you to your affairs. I do expect you to tell us about all that you've found in the Narrows. Perhaps there is more we can do protect that land.”

“Perhaps,” Charles admitted with a smile. He felt reasonably confidant that Glen scouts in the Narrows would provoke the Lakelanders to send troops of their own, but those were details that could be sorted later.

Once Baron Avery and his coterie had left the Hearth, Charles rose from his seat and walked toward the opposite corner where Malger waited. The pine marten smiled to him, waving him closer. “Sir Charles! It is a great pleasure to see you again. My congratulations to you on your investiture.”

“Thank you, your grace,” Charles replied with a slight bow of his head. “It was an unexpected honor, but I am grateful for it.” He lifted his eyes and met the elk's warm gaze.

“We all knew you would become a knight,” Egland said with verve and conviction. “You have a noble warrior's heart.”

“Thank you, Sir Egland.” He turned toward the oryx and smiled. “I'm sure it won't be long before you have felt the touch of blade on either shoulder and bear the title Sir!”

“A few years yet,” Intoran replied a trifle self-consciously. “I have only been a squire for a year now.”

“You are strong and accomplished. It will not be more than that.”

You have something to ask Malger and it must be done privately.

Charles lowered his eyes and voice, allowing a figure of regret to mar his good humor. “There is a matter of personal concern I must discuss with Malger, his grace. I beg pardon, but it is something I can only mention when we are alone.”

Malger nodded and stood from his seat. “I do not think we need fear Sir Charles bringing me to harm. If you would care to follow me, Sir Charles, I will escort you somewhere that we can speak without bringing temptation to idle ears!”

 

If the little fox thought she was hidden from the rat's view, she was gravely mistaken. Charles said nothing as he followed Malger up onto the second floor of the Mountain Hearth and all the way to the northern corner and the well-apportioned room waiting there. In addition to the canopied bed, large chest for clothes, wash basin, and magnificent view of the Glen from an eastward-facing balcony, there was a stone hearth around which a quartet of rustic but cushioned chairs had been arranged. Malger invited Charles to take any he preferred and the rat selected the one with the largest hole for his tail. This he slipped through with the adroitness that eight years of having a tail had given him. Malger choose the seat next to him and the little fox secreted herself underneath. Charles pretended not to notice her.

Malger stretched his toe claws as he reclined, a lop-sided smile accenting the lop-sided hat he bore between his ears. “I see you are wearing the buckler you found in Sutthaivasse.”

Charles lowered a claw and traced it over the sculpted brass ears of the rat-head buckle. “I thought you might remember it. I was quite surprised to find it. Not many lands would give the face of a rat such nobility.”

“Some in my homeland are known for a,” Malger paused as if savoring the taste of the word, or at least the thought suggested by it, “certain satirical wit. I expect you were the first to ever wear that; it had been in my family for at least two generations. The relation who had obtained it went to great lengths to ensure the giver of the gift gave no more gifts at all.” His mischievous smile returned to one of pleasure as he added, “I'm glad it has found a home where it can be appreciated.”

“You deliberately set it aside for me?”

Malger shrugged. “I may have mentioned it to someone.”

“Well, in any event, thank you. I'm rather fond of it.”

“I'm glad to hear it. So,” he straightened some and his expression turned serious, “what might I do for you, Sir Charles?”

“You may have heard that while we were down south bracing Marzac my youngest son contracted an illness particular to those with my gift. This illness grew worse despite my wife's best efforts, and then claimed his life.”

Malger took a deep breath and nodded, frowning. “I did. I am very sorry for your loss.”

“He, Ladero, had the Sondeck as I do. None of my other children have this ability. He was very dear to me and it broke my heart to learn that he was gone. Not a day goes by when I do not think of him.”

“I'm sure,” Malger nodded, a grimace fixed across his lips. “But what does this have to do with me? I can do nothing about what happened.”

The Aedra would not help you. But he does not follow them.

“None of us can do anything about what happened. The past is the past,” Charles noted with a heavy sigh. “I have no intention of trying to change the past. But the future is before us and it is determined by our actions. My family... I would do anything to protect my family.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Malger replied. “You have a lovely family to protect. Your children are adorable.”

“You've seen them?”

“At Long House during the quarantine.” His eyes darkened. “You still haven't explained what you want from me.”

In a moment. He must first know how your son died.

“In a moment. You must first know how my son died. It was late October and he was bed-ridden. Garigan, my pupil in the ways of the Sondeck, knew something terrible was happening. He could feel the tear in my son's Sondeck. It is hard to describe what it is to those without our gift, but imagine a knife inside your flesh, jabbing and cutting you apart from the inside out. That is what my son suffered from, what Garigan tried to save him from, and what ultimately killed him. Lady Kimberly... my wife, could not bear to tell me what my son looked like when they buried him. She didn't need to.”

Charles felt tears brimming in his eyes. Malger offered him a handkerchief which he took and dabbed his eyes. “Thank you. I have never seen it myself, but I have heard tales of it from my homeland. It is as if something has clawed its way out of your flesh, bursting from within to leave you a bloody ruin almost beyond recognition. It is a way to die I could not wish on my greatest enemy and yet it happened to my son and I could not be there to try and protect him from it.” He dabbed his eyes again and shuddered.

He was stolen from you.

“My son Ladero was stolen from me, Malger.”

And the Aedra who compelled you to go to Marzac did nothing to save him.

“And even Akkala would do nothing for him. Oh yes, Lady Kimberly summoned the Lothanasa in hopes that they might heal our boy. But they did nothing. And before my wife's stricken eyes she saw her son die. She still cries uncontrollably whenever he is mentioned.”

This one has seen terrible suffering in the Bradanes refugees and in the Keeper's captured, caged, and paraded as freaks. He did not withhold his hand from their aid.

Charles nodded toward the marten and then briefly glanced at the fox hiding behind his legs. “I know you are a good man, Malger, and you do not withhold your hand from those who are suffering if there is anything you can do to aid them. I know this. The fox beneath your seat is proof of it.”

Malger grimaced but slowly began to nod, shifting his legs some even as the little fox scooted back out of sight. “I have helped some, aye. And I am terribly sorry to hear about what you and your family has been through. But I still do not know what you want of me.”

Speak first of your wife's needs; it is best to allay his misgivings.

“Father Hough has assured us both that our Ladero is now in Eli's hands. But two wounds remain in my family. My wife's last moments with our boy were filled with sorrow and anguish. Can you imagine her suffering? She had to watch her boy literally torn apart and there was nothing she could do. Everything she tried ended in failure. She even called on the Pantheon for aid, something that we as Followers are not supposed to do. But nothing helped. She needs to know deep in her heart that he is well. Father Hough's word is not enough. Some token to assure her, to heal her heart is required.”

Malger opened his mouth to object again but Charles lifted one hand and bid him wait. “The other wound is mine, Malger. I wasn't there. I spent four months after he died pondering how I would teach him when I returned to Metamor. I had no idea. I have lost my son without ever once being able to say goodbye to him. And there is no way that I can without aid. That is where you can help me, Malger.”

He will not wish to.

And as expected, Malger, rather agitated, shook his head. “No, Charles, I cannot help you. You do not even know what it is you are asking of me.”

“You are a servant of Nocturna,” Charles gestured at the crescent moon medallion. “You have ways that are mysterious and hidden from men. Even learned men, those who walk in the light of their gods and wield the powers of the world as a smith a hammer!”

“I can walk in dream, aye, and I have striven far too little to maintain that secrecy I can send omens, lighten the horror of nightmares, such things as that. Perhaps I can help Lady Kimberly ameliorate the pain of that grief, for it is truly the sharpest of blades and cuts the deepest. But that is all. I cannot bring the dead back to life.”

That is not his job.

“That is not what I am asking you to do.” Charles leaned forward, claws trembling. “And what I am asking you to do I know that you can do. You've done it before. For Murikeer.” Malger stiffened and his eyes narrowed. “He told me about what you did for him, bringing Llyn's soul back for one moment in a dream so that the wounds struck in the moments before her death could be healed. I am asking of you the same thing. Bring my son back for just one dream, so I can say goodbye.”

Do not forget your wife.

“And offer my wife a token showing that he is truly well and protected by Eli, that he no longer knows the pain that she saw him suffer. This one thing will heal the wounds in our family, so that we can move on from this grief, and be the better parents our children need, and deserve.”

Malger took a deep breath and then ran his tongue along the back of his fangs. “You are asking for more than you know, Charles. What was done for Murikeer... there was a price for that. It was a gift from me because I had loved Llyn as well. I cannot do the same for you. There will be a price that you and Kimberly must pay to enter the dreams, and another to pay if you wish to see Ladero, something I cannot promise will happen. I cannot even promise that a price can even be paid for this! It is not up to me.”

It was done once. Why not a second time?

“You've done it once. Why not a second time?”

“It is complicated. I do not even know what Nocturna did to bring Llyn's soul back to say goodbye! But,” Malger held up a hand and bid him wait, “I will ask. I can see the pain this has caused you and I will at least ask. Can you wait until tomorrow to learn whether or not this is even possible?”

A day's wait is another day's agony. But it will grant you strength and resolve to do what must be done.

“I can wait another day.”

You have already waited so many.

“I have already waited so many.” Charles grimaced and shook his head. “It is an agony to me, but I will wait to hear your answer tomorrow. If it is yes, what will we need to do?”

“I will need to bring you and Kimberly into the dream so that the price can be agreed to with Nocturna. You do realize that it is Nocturna to whom you ask this favor? I do not believe a Follower such as you are to have any rapport with her.”

“That is my choice,” Charles reminded him. “And for that reason, I ask you to keep this to yourself.”

Not even your wife must know.

“Do not even tell my wife. Lady Kimberly... if she knew what I intended, would be heartbroken all the more if it failed. Whatever price must be paid, I shall pay it alone. Only then can we bring her in; only when it is successful.”

“I do not even know how I would go about that!” Again, Malger held out his hand to stifle his objection. “But I promised that I will ask and so I shall. I will convey your request in all its particulars and will tell you the answer and what must be done tomorrow morning. Are there any other details I should know?”

“Only that I ask this because I see no other recourse to ease the wounds we have suffered.”

“Most families lose children to sickness,” Malger pointed out. “Few if any ever have this chance, Sir Charles. The cost asked of you may be more crippling than any wound you feel now.”

No, it won't. There are many ways payment can be made.

“There are many ways payment can be made. I hope that we can find one suitable that will not be as fearsome as this.” Charles took a deep breath and then shifted in his seat. “That is my request, your grace. If I have your leave, I must see to me duties in the Narrows so I can return home before the evening meal is served.”

“Of course. Go in peace, Sir Charles. May you and your family walk in paths of light.”

His whiskers twitched at the suggestion, but no reply came through his lips. As quietly as his claws would allow on the wooden floor, he departed, the hope of seeing the hooded face of his youngest son kindling his heart into a radiant plume.

You will see him again.

“Aye,” he whispered under his breath on his way from the Inn. “I will.”

 

 

Saturday, May 12, 708 CR

 

For the first time in days Charles awoke without that sense that he had to awaken twice; he felt – connected; centered. Dawn was more than an hour away but he felt wholly and completely himself. Charles called to mind any dreams he had, but they slipped away like smoke broken by the wind. Even the events of the day before seemed distant with few details revealing themselves clearly. Nothing of any consequence seemed to take place in the Narrows; he and Garigan had explored its eastern extent all the way to the road that connected the Glen and Metamor which overlooked the eastern half of the valley and in the distance the haunted woods.

He blinked a few times but could not recall anything worth noting. They had returned early to the Glen and spent the rest of the day at his home. A small smile touched his muzzle as remembered playing with his children, but it did not last. A glance at his left revealed his wife's pointed snout, ears spread to either side as she lay on her back still sleeping.

False! She is a liar!

He ground his molars together and slipped from the bed. Something had happened to his wife in the days since she had acquired the stone she wore about her neck. At first she had only lied about what the stone was or from whence it had come, but now anything involving the stone ended in some manner of deflection, an evasion, anything to keep him from learning the truth.

She does not trust you.

Charles scowled and turned away to get dressed. There was only one thing that could heal the wounds of distrust and sadness that consumed his family. He hoped and hoped that he would hear the answer he deserved.

You will.

 

He tended to Malicon as was his duty as a knight, but once the pony was fed, brushed, and otherwise ready for the day, he left him in the stable with an extra portion of grain so the rat could perform one errand before either Garigan or his wife might come looking for him. James, Baerle, and the others in their scout team would return to the Glen that evening so they could not intervene. Only Garigan or his wife might try to stop him, misunderstanding and seeing darkness where there was only love.

Charles walked without even clicking his claws on the wood floors. His tail deftly maneuvered behind him without touching anything. He touched nothing, not the chairs, not the tables, not the doorjamb, not the lintel, not the counters, not even the door to the rooms within but for the barest grip upon the latch to open it. None saw him enter, for even though Jurmas was bent over the hearth preparing a fire, his ears did not note the rat's passage, nor his nose pick up his scent.

Not until he stood before the very door beyond which slept the noble marten did he dare make a noise. He lifted one hand and rapped his knuckles upon the wood three times. When no answer was heard he repeated the rapping. And waited in the dark.

He could hear the muffled sound of voices conversing beyond and then the fox's voice came clearly through the wood, “My Master bids you wait until he is properly comported.”

And so Charles did.

He will agree.

He flexed his fingers, running his thumbs across each claw in turn.

He will agree and open the dreams to you.

Charles licked the back of his incisors.

And the world beyond the dreams.

A little light blossomed beneath the door jamb, a single lantern perhaps. The light illumined his toes, short claws glimmering, but all else in the hall remained dark. He heard the sound of bodies moving, words whispered, and beastly growls. But no sound came from him.

When the door opened he blinked his eyes once at the dim glow of a single candle within, and then stepped into the doorway no further. Malger sat upon an unkempt bed naked to the waist clad only in breeks that he'd hastily donned. Misanthe stood to one side in a robe that gave her warmth and something for men to admire. He paid her no mind, focusing his gaze entirely on the dreamwalking marten.

“Good morning,” he said simply. “I am sorry to disturb your slumber, but I am meeting Garigan to ride out to the Narrows with the dawn. Do you have an answer for me?”

Malger nodded while rubbing the sleep from his eyes with the back of one hand. “Ah, Sir Charles. Good morning to you as well. Aye, I have your answer.”

He will do as you ask.

“I will bring you into the dream tonight to make your bargain with Nocturna.”

A bargain to open the ways for Ladero. You will see your son again this night.

Charles smiled in relief, his eyes warming. He let out a long sigh with that smile, his entire posture relaxing in hope. “Thank you, Malger.”

It must be done secretly. He wants it a secret too.

“I know you wish to keep what you can do a secret. Perhaps one of the caves beneath Lars' brewery would provide the best venue. I will not be able to join you until well after dark at any rate.”

Malger nodded again and stretched one arm. “And Lady Kimberly?”

Perhaps a portent in her dreams is all she needs. To cease her lies.

“She should not be disturbed unless necessary. Perhaps a portent in her dreams is all she needs. Let us find out what sort of bargain can be struck, what price will be asked, and then I will decide what is best.”

“The price will be steep,” Malger cautioned as he worked his jaw loose. “Perhaps too steep.”

The price does not matter.

Charles shrugged. “I am grateful for your concern, Malger, but I will be the judge of the price. Tonight then in the caves?”

The marten nodded again and blinked his eyes, the sleep still not quite gone from them. “I will see to the arrangements. Now if there is nothing more you may go. I have duties of my own to tend. The Light be with you and your family, Charles.”

“And with you.” Charles inclined his head to both the marten and to the fox before disappearing silently down the dark hall. Though all was dark and quiet about him, his heart beat with a fierce light.

Tonight you will see your son.

Nothing else mattered but that.

 

 

The weather turned gray early that morning and remained so throughout the day. While the air did not threaten rain, the lack of sun cast everything in a sort of pale gloom. The colors on all of the flowers, the green of leaf and grass, the blue of river and lake, all of it felt muted and sallow. All was cast in sky-sent shadow.

This did make it easier to ride across the Narrows. They took advantage of the cooler air to investigate the meadows which teemed with wildflowers, birds, and the occasional bee. Charles half-expected to find the shepherd Silvas trespassing again, but there was no sign of the bull or his flock of sheep. The land was empty.

As is everything without Ladero.

That thought sat uncomfortably in his mind like a bit of wood in his belly. He did not share it with his pupil but instead focused on exploring and learning all there was to learn about the Narrows. After their midday meal he bid them return to the combe and promontory on which he wished to build his keep. They were forced to abandon their steeds in order to ascend the rock-face but both of them were more comfortable on their paws anyway.

The promontory had a lower tier that encircled the upper heights though toward the south the lower tier vanished in a steep cliff down to the ravine below. Further to the south the ground leveled briefly before ascending back up a gentle rise that led to more forest before opening up into the meadowland they'd explored that morning. The eastern edge was also a steep cliff staring back up the combe which eventually emptied out in the rolling hills that dominated the land before the clefts through which the river cut. The northern slope was the gentlest, but so thick with trees and rocks that no horse, not even a pony could hope to fit through. Between this tangle of root, branch, and stone the rat and ferret climbed.

Garigan stood arms akimbo and surveyed the wide bowl-shaped ravine with an approving nod. “This is remarkable. The ravine walls are low enough almost everywhere. You won't have to move as much as I feared.”

Charles nodded and gestured to the northern slope. “Most of that is good solid rock. We can quarry the sections we need for the baileys, and reinforce the rest for an outer defense.”

“Might it be better to level the ground at the top of this ravine and erect your own walls?”

Charles frowned for a moment and then nodded. “It could be. I don't think we'll know until we begin to quarry the stone. Of course...”

Garigan turned and titled his head to one side. “Of course what, Charles?”

The rat glanced down at his feet, toe claws scrapping at a bit of exposed rock. “I'd like to meet the stone before cutting it. I should really have their permission to use them in a fort first.”

“Whose permission? The rock?”

“The mountains mostly,” he hooked a thumb over his shoulder at the peaks behind him. “But even stone like that will have some sort of awareness. It is not like you and I, not at all. They aren't as we would know it alive. But there is something there that I could not so callously destroy.”

Garigan laughed and shook his head. “You alone of all that I know would worry so over the feelings of stone! What can it matter whether or not the stone approves? Can it do anything but crack when the hammer strikes?”

“If it does not approve of the stone cutter, it may do more than crack, it may shatter. Or the stone that is cut out may be too brittle and will not support weight. Any number of things could be the case.”

The ferret shook his head. “But they can be anyway; that is always a risk the stonecutter takes. The good stone is separated from the bad at the quarry.”

Charles wagged a finger. “But if we have the stone's permission, every piece shall be good. I promise you that.” He turned and put one hand on a birch tree and ran his claws across the jagged white back. “These are beautiful trees. We should use the wood to make furnishings, perhaps new cradles.”

“Is Lady Kimberly expecting?” Garigan asked with sudden excitement. “I have not heard such good news.”

Charles sighed and shook his head. “Not yet. But I have hope. We deserve more than four children.”

You deserve Ladero.

“I hope you're right. But you are going to have your hands full if she has another litter.”

“Then I am even more fortunate that I have so many good and dear friends!” Charles flashed the ferret a grin and then started climbing higher over rock and root. His claws grasped the stone and pulled himself up through the tangling trunks and snaring branches. Behind him he heard the ferret chuckle before searching for his own way up the incline to the higher promontory.

Charles reached the top and spread his arms on either side as he walked through the trees. The bare patches of rock were few and far between, most filled in with hard-packed earth, and the turning of seasons upon fallen needles and shed leaves. Moss clung to the ground, and lichen to the stones. The chattering of birds continued above them with only mild retorts when they passed beneath. In the distance he could make out the towering redwoods of the Glen blocking all the northern sky. Charles stared and pondered which of them was his own.

“You do have a good view of the land from here,” Garigan noted with a pleased sigh. “I can't quite make out Mt. Nuln, but there, you can see the southern face of Mt. Kalegris.”

Charles followed the ferret's finger and smiled fondly as he stared at the mountain whose rocky peak was low enough to be free from snow. “We'll have to visit them again sometime. I don't think I've been to either since my first visit to the Glen.”

“What was that, two years ago?”

“Aye. Two years ago. Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago.”

“If not for your arrival,” Garigan pointed out as he flexed his arms by grabbing a branch and dangling, “I would never have learned to control my Sondeck. I would not even understand why I was so angry all the time. I confess I am very glad you were exiled to the Glen.”

“I certainly do not complain of it. I would have likely spent my days as a Long Scout and not seen my family for weeks at a time had I remained in Metamor. I do rather wish I could have done more patrols with them – I'd never even been assigned to a team – but that is all in the past now.”

“The Glen has been good for you. The woodland life suits you and your family.” Garigan dropped from the birch branch and frowned. “So why do you want to build a new castle here?”

“As much as I love the Glen, this part of the Valley needs a place of strength to draw the eye of our enemies. Hareford may be nearest the Giantdowns but it is easily avoided and cannot easily come to anyone else's aid.” Garigan grunted sourly at the assessment of their northern neighbors. “Lake Barnhardt is a place of strength, but it cannot reach as far north and her people little travel the roads here. And the Glen, while we rallied from it, cannot defend the Valley. You have no fortifications, only places in which to hide and from which to launch hidden arrows. That is invaluable. But a keep, here in the Narrows, would be a fulcrum on which the northern valley could rest. And so long as the Narrows are mine to tend I will do my part to make it that fulcrum.”

“Besides,” he added while leaning against the lower trunk of an elm, “the construction will bring merchants as well as laborers here to the north and that will bring wealth too.”

Garigan frowned. “Wealth has its own poisons too. I like what the Glen has become. I don't want it to become like the other towns again.”

“I had not thought of that,” Charles admitted with a frown of his own. He sighed and shook his head. “I will try not to let that happen. But I still believe a keep here is for the best. You know I love the Glen too and hope to spend many years yet living beneath her branches.”

The ferret nodded and let a smile play across the corners of his snout. “I know, Charles. I just do not want to live in a city ever again. Metamor Keep is... too large. I need my trees.”

“Oh, if...” Charles stepped away from the tree and started moving into the deeper central section of the promontory. “If I ever can bring you to Sondeshara you might change your mind. To hear the Sondlatharos sung from the rooftops at night while the stars glisten over head... that is something you will never forget. Your heart will sing even if your tongue cannot.”

Even hearing the name of the song, he could hear the ferret begin to wordlessly intone the ancient melody. Charles smiled and kept walking, quieting the inborn desire within him to join in the song. The further he pressed inward the taller the trees became until all of the branches were above his head and he could walk easily between the trunks. He found an upthrust stone and leaned against it, resting one ear against its cool touch. Covered in lichen, he nevertheless could let the tip of his fingers slip within if he so chose.

Go South.

Charles pushed away from the rock and walked toward the southern edge of the promontory. He could hear the ferret following after him; the ground at their feet was covered in moss, leaves, and needles making it near impossible even for a Glen scout to move silently. The trees came to an abrupt end overlooking a thirty-foot slope down to the base of the ravine. Trees filled in the base and spread up over the lip along the hillside abutting the mountain. If Charles walked to the mountain's edge he might be able to carefully work his way around to the meadows further to the south without having to descend into the ravine.

He peered out across the treetops trying to see if Lake Barnhardt was visible as the Glen was visible from the northern side, but he could not see it past the forests and hills between them. He grimaced and cast a glance back at the ferret. “Well, I can't quite see the Lakeland from here, but I suppose it must be off in that direction.” He pointed slightly east of south and then waved his hand. His tail snaked around the trunk of a nearby elm as the soft earth shifted beneath his paws.

Garigan squinted and stared for several seconds before finally shaking his head. “I cannot see it. Perhaps on a clear night it can be seen.”

Step closer.

Charles took another step and the ground beneath him gave out. He spread out his arms and grabbed at tree branches as he tumbled down the slope. The Sondeck filled his arms and legs as he fell, slowing his descent with each limb he was for a moment able to grab. He collapsed in a heap with a heavy whump and gasped for breath. Above him he could hear the ferret calling down to him.

When the ringing in his ears stopped he could make out the ferret's voice. “Charles? Are you all right?”

He pushed himself up, grunting from a few bruises he felt, one each on his left side, right arm, left leg, and tail. He tilted back his head and shouted. “I'm fine! Don't try coming down that way. Go around to the north and meet me here. I won't be hard to find.”

Charles could see the ferret nod and then disappear back into the wood far above. The rat picked some twigs and brambles from his clothes and then looked around. A dozen paces to his right the ground sloped upward too steeply to climb without the proper equipment. To his left the ground descended at a measured pace, while in front of him it rose gently. Everything was shadowed beneath the canopy of fir and birch. He stepped through the alternating light and dark trunks and stretched his legs and arms, working the tension loose.

His ears caught the sound of something small shuffling through the underbrush ahead and his hand wrapped itself about the pommel of his sword.

A trespasser!

His eyes narrowed and he stepped in closer, setting each paw down carefully, splaying his toes through the moss. He eased the sword from its scabbard. It made not a sound.

Ahead in the bushes.

Charles lowered his gaze and saw at the top of the rise a series of bushes growing where once a tree had fallen; what was left of the dead trunk lay rotted on the hillside below. Something stirred in the bushes. The branches vibrated back and forth for a moment and then grew still.

Strike with your blade. Trespassers should not be suffered to live.

He took the remaining steps cautiously but swiftly, making only the barest whisper of noise through old leaves. He held his breath and tensed his sword arm.

From out of the bushes sprang the creature, a thing of white and gray. A lamb. Charles hesitated.

The shepherd cannot keep his flock under control. He must be taught a lesson. Kill it.

But it's just a lamb, he pondered, remembering how upset James had become when he scared it.

And many more will die if this one is spared. Kill it now.

And then to Charles' surprised gaze, the lamb seemed to distort into something else. For a moment he saw it tilt back on its hind legs which grew bulbous and green, until that insufferable frog, Bertram was there sitting on a hooded rat. And then it was the very face of Akkala dragging the hooded rat into a dark pit, laughing the whole way. The visage continued to laugh, but now it was that bull shepherd who paid no respect to his land, mocking him; the bull still had his precious little one while Charles' was gone.

Kill it now.

Charles thrust his sword. The little lamb – Ewar was his name – bleated once.

He thrust again, the white wool now smeared red.

And again.

And again.

Charles seethed in his fury, and then trembled, unable to deliver another blow. He nudged the corpse back into the bushes and then wiped his blade clean on the ground. He sheathed his sword and then stepped back down the hillside through a facing wind. After reaching the spot where he'd fallen he leaned against one tree and closed his eyes, seeking his Calm. All was empty and dark behind his eyelids. There was nothing but a coldness, a creeping thing of night, that made him shiver even in the Spring afternoon.

You did well. It was the right thing to do.

He breathed easier and nodded to himself. The lamb was sure to fall into some misfortune. And if Silvas had to keep chasing after it, something worse might befall the rest of his flock. Best to end the temptation now so Silvas could do his duty.

A hard mercy. But a mercy nevertheless.

Very hard indeed. He took several deep breaths and forced his eyes to open. He could heard Garigan's step approaching from the east.

You are a little dazed from your fall.

“Charles! There you are! Are you all right?” Garigan asked as he rushed to meet him.

“I'm still a little dazed. I think it time we got back to the horses.”

“You need to be a little more careful there.” Garigan slipped one of the rat's arms over his shoulders and helped him walk back down the hill toward the east and their steeds. “It doesn't look like you are too injured.”

He nodded and continued to breathe heavily. “I should be fine in a few minutes.”

“Good. When we get to the ponies we'll give you something to drink and then perhaps we should return to the Glen?”

Charles didn't really want to see his lying wife, but hopefully his nocturnal plan would heal whatever breach had come between them. He sighed and nodded, stumbling along beside the ferret. “That sounds like a good plan. Thank you.”

He hoped that stupid shepherd would not find the body until they were long gone.

 

 

The pain from his bruises was long past by the time he laid down in bed that evening. The ride back to the Glen had been uneventful and he'd regained his balance even before they'd reached the ponies. He'd barely contained his fury when he saw that his wife had invited Natalie and her son over again. The interloping frog had been playing with his children and his children – his children – were enjoying themselves!

At their return Natalie collected her son that they might return home. Kimberly tended his wounds and sponged his fur clean. The bruises were not serious, and the few cuts he had were easily tended. She did note on a few drops of blood on his sleeve, but he professed not to know and she did not press. While he was tended Garigan watched the children who enjoyed the ferret's attempt to tell a story about how he'd rescued their father.

That evening James and Baerle put in a brief appearance. Charles listened to the donkey and opossum regale them with all that they had seen in the mountains to the north. Many of the passes that had been snowed and iced over during March were now clear and so they had an easy time navigating even the treacherous paths. The scariest moment had come when a pair of mountain rams had decided to chase them toward a cliff, but a show of magic from one of the younger scouts convinced the rams to run the other way. Otherwise all was quiet on their northern frontier.

Like the frogs, both James and Baerle also took their leave, followed by Garigan once the evening hour arrived. They stayed long enough to help feed the children their evening meal but once the little rats had been fed all of his friends departed. Together, Charles and Kimberly put their children to bed and then a short while later retired as well.

Charles spoke a little of his knightly duties for the coming week and Kimberly expressed her approval that they would keep him closer to the Glen. He did not ask after the rock about her neck for she wore it beneath her kirtle, but he could see the little lump in the midst of her bodice. He tried to ignore it and for the most part succeeded.

All was dark in their bedroom once Kimberly extinguished her witchlight. Charles knew precisely where his clothes were and where anything else that might obstruct his path to the door. So in quiet he waited, listening to his wife's breathing as she lay next to him. His arms rested atop the covers, fingers clasped together over his chest, while the pillow beneath his head splayed his large ears to either side. His whiskers twitched as his incisors tapped against each other. He kept his tail shifted to his right so that the end of it was already brushing the floor in anticipation.
Kimberly took her time finding a comfortable position. At first she was on her back as she usually preferred, and then she tossed onto her side, and then a few minutes later she tossed onto her other side, thumping Charles in the leg with her tail beneath the covers, before finally settling onto her back again. Through it all Charles never quivered or budged. He merely waited peering in the dark above, a dark so deep he could not even see his own snout.

But his wife's discomfort finally passed and soon she was resting peacefully. Charles waited a few minutes to be certain, then slipped from the covers and gathered his attire. He made no noise in creeping from their bedroom. A little light came through the small windows into their main room and there he donned his clothes, including a dark cloak – from his days among the Longs – that helped hide him while scouting. He pulled the hood over his ears and then crept outside, hugging the shadows where he would not be seen.

Glen scouts were some of the best in all the Valley, but Charles was a Sondecki. He kept to the shadows and crossed the commons with measured steps and quick strides. He had one advantage in that the scouts were watching the roads and forests around the Glen and not often the commons which always saw their share of hoof and paw during the day. Not so at night when most had laid down their heads to sleep trusting in the scouts to protect them from enemies without.

Charles was not an enemy, neither within or without, but still, he feared being seen and stopped. He had but one thing he must do ere he met Malger and he did not want either James or Garigan to notice. They all suspected him of Marzac's corruption, so anything he did out of the ordinary would be misconstrued. It was best if they just did not know.

He crossed the commons without raising any alarms. Charles pulled the cloak more tightly about his middle as he swept from tree to tree, creeping through the darkness as but one more shadow. There was no light in the graveyard; not only would the least sliver of a waning moon not rise until dawn, but the clouds blotted out all the stars. The only light that cast through the trees was the occasional lantern carried by a Glenner on their way home from the Inn or from the brewery after many drinks.

Even without the light Charles knew where to find his son's grave. He crept across the earth, skulking on all fours, until his claws reached the familiar stone. He ran his fingers up its cold surface, a familiar surface that he had melded into so many times before. But not this night. Instead he spread his cloak across the earth beneath which his son lay, and pressed his forehead against the stone. His tongue moved to whisper though his snout did not open. And so beneath his breath only a few words passed from snout to stone.

“I am coming for you, my Ladero.”

These words breathed again and again from his lungs, his heart, and his soul. Tears brimmed in his eyes, one catching in the ruin of his flesh before tumbling to the cross beam of the stone marker. He smeared the tear with his fingers, rubbing it firmly into the stone. He tilted back his snout and planted a kiss upon the marker.

Nothing more can be done here.

He nodded to himself and slowly eased himself back.

They will be watching this place. You must make haste now.

He crept back into the shadows and followed along the edge of the commons westward toward the Inn and brewery. Once he was close enough he slipped free of the cloak, folded it over his arms, and calmly walked through the main doors of the brewery taproom. Far too many went in and out of the taproom for anyone to take special notice, but were he to come draped in his cloak he might draw attention to himself. With noble calm and an affected air of conviviality he opened the door and stepped within.

The interior of the cave was warmly light with lanterns suspended from the ceiling and a comfortable fire crackling in the hearth. The bruin Lars was pouring drinks for the many Glen scouts who had come to wash away the strain of the day. Charles recognized many of them, but none had gone with him to Marzac or even knew of their fears of that place. A few waved to him and he waved in return, but no words were shared. Instead he passed the long tables with drunken Glenners and proceeded to the owner.

“Master Lars, pardon me, but I believe I am expected below.”

Lars turned to him and snorted, brown eyes narrowing for a moment. “Sir Matthias, of course. I gave his grace a storage room below the brewing hall that suited your needs. It is not hard to find.” He gave the rat quick instructions for which Charles thanked the bear and proceeded back out into the night.

He did not bother donning the cloak as he made his way along the southern face of the hill and calmly walked through the unlocked postern gate of the brewery. The brewing tuns within were far too large for even the mightiest to move, and the mash within too raw for any to attempt drinking, so Lars seldom secured the door. It was only during decanting from tun to barrel for fermentation that the bruin evinced any concern for his precious wares. Confidant and determined he opened the door and stepped within.

The air smacked him with an almost palpable blow; sticky warm and breathtakingly humid, with a bite that burned his nose and left his eyes watering. He hastened through the main room, all decorum lost and wholly unconcerned that any might see him – who could, unless their eyes had become inured to the torture? Reaching the far end he pulled open the double doors enough to squeeze through and let them thump closed behind him.

The caverns beneath the brewery were partly natural and partly carved out of the stone. They served primarily as storage, in an unchanging environment, for the fermentation of the bruin's numerous brews. During times of attack they also provided the Glenners a secure shelter from which to last out the attack or fight back. There was even a secret passage that emptied out into the mountains, but thankfully they had never need to use it. At least the air within was far less stifling, though was still potent with a mélange of curing scents. Charles descended two flights of short stairs before he found the chamber the bear had offered them. Standing in the doorway watching for him was Malger's servant, the fox Misanthe had hidden under the marten Noble's chair during Charles' request, and stood silently by that morning when Charles received his answer. Now she was in a more comfortably bipedal form and seemed to glow in a bronze light from within the room.

When she saw him she nodded and then disappeared within the room. Charles walked a little faster, but the hall was long and it took him several seconds to reach the chamber. The fox had eased the door so that it was only cracked. He pushed the heavy door open with one hand until it had swung wide, allowing him a view of the room beyond.

The room, like everything else, was carved out of the granite hillside. Wooden supports rose along all four walls and crossed the ceiling where a hook was fixed for a lantern. Old storage chests were stacked against the right wall while two pallets with warm quilts were arrayed in the center of the room. A single candle and a censer were set beside the pallets. The room was clean of dust and damp with a fresh smell and a lingering suggestion of wine from the two racks of small casks along the back wall. The more powerful odors were that of the fox who'd stood watch at the door and the marten who stood on the other side of the pallets watching him with a keen eye. The scent of the incense within the censer was the last odor that tickled his sensitive nose but his whiskers told him that what his eyes saw, and they felt, threw the geometry of the room askew. Narrowing his gaze he glowered at the back wall but, after a few seconds of scrutiny he decided that such mysteries would only distract him from his goal so he pushed it aside.

Charles took a deep breath. “Good evening, Malger. I am here. What must I do?”

Malger motioned for him to enter. “Step inside and lay down on one of the pallets. You will need some place to sleep if you are to enter the dreams. I will be beside you but there is no need for us to touch.” The noble marten gestured to the fox who had stepped away to give him some distance. “Misanthe is here to watch over us as we sleep.”

Why would she watch you?

“Will we need watching?” Charles asked as he stepped through the doorway. He cast a sidelong glance at the fox, favoring her with the ruined side of his face.

Malger's reply was given in a reassuring tone. “Both to ensure we are not disturbed and to wake us should something go wrong.”

Should something go wrong? Nothing must be allowed to go wrong!

Charles twitched his whiskers and snapped his eyes back to Malger. Anxious, he asked, “Can things go wrong?”

Malger nodded, but lifted one hand as if to assure him. “They can, but it is very rare.” He gestured to the fox and offered a smile to the rat that revealed all of his little fangs. “Instead of fearing what might go wrong, take comfort that Misanthe will be here so that you will not take harm should something, however unlikely, go amiss.” Malger lowered his arm and pointed to the pallets at his feet. “Please, lie down and make yourself comfortable and we can begin.”

Follow his instructions.

Charles cast one more scowl at the far wall before depositing his cloak beside the pallet and then reclining, resting his head on the pillow. He folded his hands over his stomach, lacing the fingers together; he tapped his thumb claws together as his eyes stared up into the ceiling. His ears flicked at the thunk that sounded when Misanthe shut the heavy door and threw the latch. While she snuffed the lanterns, plunging the room into darkness but for that lone candle flame, Malger used a slender reed to light the incense within the censer. Charles was briefly, and disquietingly, reminded of the dark censer that had nearly destroyed them in the belfry the very day of his departure from his home and long journey into the south.

A long journey, a long time away from family with no farewells and so much loss. But what was lost can be found. One journey is ended, a new one begins.

The thought comforted him and he stared into the weird shadows glimmering across the uneven stone above him, suggesting creatures and people in a strange sort of play of light. The rat fancied he saw herds of deer through the forest, rats dancing in the night, and the blaring of a horn splitting a stormy sky. He watched with whimsy cavorting rats take up the chase with a wild hunt that leaped the moon that sunk into a river-carved gorge. And then a thin trail of smoke rose into view and his whiskers twitched with the strangely sweet incense it carried. He breathed deep and relaxed.

As the censer began to send thin tendrils of sweet and heady smoke into the air, Malger picked up his flute and blew across the opening, sounding an experimental tone. It hung in Charles' hearing long after the musician had drawn the flute from his lips.

“Gaze into the flame.” Malger's voice became softer, more smooth; a lilting baritone that seemed to have lost the animal churr that Charles had grown not to notice in the last half decade. Now, he noticed its absence. “Listen to the melody I play and let your mind drift, but think of me as you drift; it matters not the thought, but that it will be a beacon that draws me to you within the Dream.” Charles stretched slowly upon the pallet, comfortable padded against the unyielding solidity of the rough-hewn stone floor. He turned his head to gaze upon the unwavering glow of the candle that stood between them. Malger was seated opposite him, legs crossed, his form cast in shadows and highlights beyond the flame. “Let the flame lead to calm, the calm to its center,” Malger intoned in that low, lyrical voice like a father's lullaby shushing a child toward sleep. Charles felt his body relaxing; these exercises he was familiar with and fell into almost without conscious thought. He fell into the calm, but his center seemed elusive; shadowed away and blocked from grasp. After mere moments he felt that frustration melt away and simply relaxed. His clasped hands rested upon his stomach, his thumbs rubbing against each other very slowly. Nothing else, not even the tip of his tail curled up on the quilt between his feet, twitched. His chest rose and fell with slow measured breaths to show he was alive but that was all. His whiskers didn't even flick as the incense drifted over his sensitive nose.

Malger began to trace out a slow, serpentine tune that coiled around an elusive center, a sympathetic melody on a minor key echoing the music in a fading echo. Its contour was of the gentle caress of waves upon a hull and the ever-shifting dunes of his desert home. This was no sweet inducement to sleep for babes, but a sultry enchantment, suggestive without revealing anything at all.

The rat's eyes remained alert for a few minutes, but the combination of the unwavering flame, the hazy incense, and the slow, hypnotic melody of the flute drooped his eye lids and relaxed his frame. The incense, sweet and sharp in his nostrils, lifted his mind away from all concerns. Within moments he was not in the caves beneath Glen Avery.

 

Charles looked around in confusion; the realm of dreams was far from what he had expected. It was neither nightmarish, though most certainly gothic enough, nor a bright and cheery place. It was, above all else, a rather bland admixture of gray and black, like a forest after a fire. On all sides, stunted, twisted trees blocked his sight beyond a dozen feet. Naked branches clutched at the cloud-streaked, moonlit sky overhead and clacked like desiccated bones against an unfelt gale. A single path of crushed stone, only slightly less ashed gray than the surrounding forest, meandered through the twisted brush.

Where was the tree, Charles thought. He needed to find the tree, because that was where he would find Ladero!

And where in the hells was Malger?

Not yet. You must go to her, and ask, first. You must draw her focus upon you. Distracted, the path can be sought without her wiles hiding it away.

With a moue of frustration Charles turned and began striding along the path, clutching his black traveling cloak about his shoulders. He did not know how long he walked; it seemed like days, or hours, the passage of time defied his senses while his thoughts tumbled and jumbled about, focusing more on his goal than his guide.

“Pleasant dream,” Malger opined at some point during his long hike, wandering at his side as if the marten had always been there. The flute that dangled at his hip glistened in the gray pall of the dream realm so starkly it seemed a lighthouse beacon on a clear night.

“What is this place, minstrel?” Charles groused. If this was the vaunted Dream Malger spoke so highly of and sought each night the fop could well enough keep it.

“The Dream.” Malger's tone was insufferably affable, as if the gloom and skeletal knackering of the branches was as common to him as the burbling of a brook.

“Bright damn place.” Charles gave him a sour sidelong look. He figured he would've been taken to some mighty, heavenly temple or facsimile of a king's audience; not trudging a dusty path in an ashen forest.

“Well, perhaps I should have coached you to embrace a more pleasant view in your dream?” Malger offered with a lift of his furry brows. “A vision, perhaps, somewhat less dramatic?” They stepped out onto the top of a towering spire of stone up which the path through the bracken lead. In all directions the world fell away into vague forms of mountain and valley but all were below and above were only clouds and the ever-present moon. Atop the tor was a circle of mighty stones, rough-hewn and primitive, in the center of which lay a flat stone slab.

It was a sacrificial altar from ancient times before Eli's son tamed the barbaric ways of men. Charles felt his upper lip curl at the pagan sight but he could not stop his feet their forward progress. Malger seemed not concerned in the slightest about the portent of the place they approached. Within the standing stones hearts were stilled and blood flowed in the name of ancient, heathen gods.

“This is not my dream,” Charles hissed.

His ears were backed when a voice croaked, like boulders grinding together in the depths of a mountain, “The petitioner defines not the venue.” A shadow, formless as mist, flowed around and through the standing stones opposite them. It spilled up to the heathen altar even as Charles and his guide came to stand opposite. Crashing against the stone the darkness roiled upward, like smoke suddenly stalled by a column of cold air, and quite suddenly took on a beastly, dark form.

The Star-Eyed Crone, queen of Ravens, totem of the lost Methratii of ancient Sondeshara. In the aeons when the Sondeckis were young, when Pharos ruled from their bejeweled empires of the desert sands, the dark cabal of the Methratii spread darkness across the sands. Their queen was the Raven, thief of souls, in whose eyes the stars of the Cosmos were born. Charles felt a shiver of terror race up his spine, lifting the sparse coarse hair of his tail and bush up his hackles. The Sondeckis had vanquished the Methratii, ending the rites of blood and stone!

This is the guise the pagan witch chooses! The Crone is no more. Her faithful – no more! Quell your fear, for the sake of your son!

Gritting his teeth Charles fought back the heart-crushing fear.

“You have come?” Nocturna croaked in the raven's terrifying voice.

Taking a breath Charles raised his gaze to look up at her, for she stood easily twice Malger's height, who was a head taller than Charles. Charles fell back a pace, tail dropping and eyes wide, as he gazed upon the full majesty of an entity he had forsaken all belief, and trust, in long ago. There was simply not enough room in creation for one of Her, much less an entire Pantheon of them.

And, yet, before him she towered, black as night. Grinding his teeth Charles steeled himself and strode forward, stopping before the slab that stood between them, his shadow brushing against with the moon at his back. “I have!” He forced out, his lungs shriveled in his breast as if his chest was caught in the tight fist of a titan, slowly squeezing the life from his frail mortal coil. “I seek one who has passed beyond!”

The crone towered above him, her visage cold and crushing. No stars glimmered in the sky tenanted only by the gibbous moon, but within those depthless black eyes stars glinted like diamonds in pitch. “One who has passed beyond the veil of Night, beyond dreams.” Her hand reached, thin and raptoral, black talons glistening as they clawed at the air as if to grasp the unseen with a bony hiss. “Beyond my grasp.”

Though his heart strove to pound itself free of his breast Charles strove on, unable to run even had he the thought to do so. “But you know where he may be found!” He had to learn forward against the mere weight of her presence as if it may bowl him flat where he stood. He clutched the heavy black of his traveling cloak tight about his shoulders.

“I do.” The crone bobbed her black feathered head slowly, favoring a groveling subject with her regard. “You come before me, to seek, to ask of me a bequest?” She leaned forward with each word, beak clicking and croaking voice rolling across Charles like an icy wind, until he found himself staring up the length of that dark beak like a sword hovering an inch from his nose poised to thrust. “You ask that I seek to find him?”

Charles' throat went desert dry as he felt himself drawn toward the unending cosmic depths within the frightening apparition's star-strewn eyes. He had to swallow, violently, twice before he could find his voice again. “To bring him back, mistress!” He rasped, clutching at his shirt. “I beg, please! Bring him back to me, that I may know him one last time!” Clutching his arms around himself for fear that the crone's regard might blast his dream-self to tatters he forced himself to hold her unwavering gaze. “To say farewell, to know a father's love – one last moment!”

The foundations of the bridge are laid. Where she cannot reach other paths can lead. Keep her focus upon what she desires until the path is opened and she cannot stop you.

Abruptly the crone stood, towering above him once more, her wings sweeping outward and casting the far side of the henge into darkness only vaguely defined by huge feathers. Charles felt his body sag forward and found himself resting a hand wearily against the stone. It was cold; glacially cold. He quickly snatched his hand away. “To bring him back from the Beyond place, from His grasp unto yours,” she intoned; not admonishingly, but to clarify his bequest. “A task of greatness you ask of me. The price of a soul is steep.”

“A soul lost can be found, mistress!” Charles cried out hastily, lest her regard turn from him to other things worthy of a god's attention. “I seek it, I understand the cost!”

“Do you?” Charles was sent reeling by the sudden explosion of sound. Even Malger, standing silently a short distance away, flinched and quailed at the outburst. The bracken ringing the tor cracked and rattled and the clouds vanished from the sky overhead. “He does not relinquish His claim lightly, seeker, even to one such as I.”

Steeling himself, Charles pushed his bowed back straight once more. “Ask of me what you will!”

Snapping her mantled wings down with a thump of heat she leaned forward so swiftly Charles braced himself for some dramatic end to his quest. Only, he felt a mere touch, deadly sharp but deceptively light, in the hollow of his chin. “Kneel.”

Charles lifted his chin a little but the prick of one talon, easily as long as his hand from wrist to fingertip, pressed upward more solidly. “Mistress?”

Kneel, but know that she is false. She cannot reach your lost one. Only... patience, her attention is still upon her goal and not yours.

Charles' heart skipped and, momentarily, stilled and his knee began to bend but something within him, deeper than his overwhelming need, deeper than his love for his lost son, hardened him against the baleful, star-filled gaze and the deadly threat of that talon at his throat. He straightened his knee and from that deep place uttered a single word. “No!”

She knows not what she asks. She can never truly embrace your soul, kneel or not.

“NO! My soul is given to Him, and only He can claim it!”

Rather than slice him gullet ear to ear the talon simply trailed upward, and then drew away like the teasing blade of an assassin toying with their prey. “The price of a soul is a soul in return, seeker.” With a snicker of hard edged bone she laced her fingers together over her stomach and stared coldly down upon him. “Have you one to offer, to ask such a boon, and yet be so unwilling to lay forth your own?”

You do. Look, you have with you that which can be offered in exchange.

Charles looked down at a weight in one arm and found, safely tucked into the fatherly cradle of his arm, a sleeping child; a rat child. His child. He blinked in surprise, for a moment his thoughts completely scattered. With his empty hand he reached up to brush his eldest son's brow. Could he trade one son for another? One bereft of the Sondecki gift for the one stolen from him with that inheritance?

There is no trade, for this only opens the door. The pathway is very nearly before you! Do not question what she desires, lest her attention waver.

I cannot! Even in deceit! Charles fought against himself, but his body moved of its own accord, his voice issuing forth from a throat he gave no breath to. “I do,” he intoned, shifting the slumbering burden into his arms and stepping toward the stone. Kneeling before the stone, he gently laid his burden upon it.

The crone is blind!

Charles felt his heart throb and wilt within his breast, growing brittle even as he watched himself, unable to stay his reaching arms as they bore his eldest son away. The world grayed at the edges of his vision as he laid little Charles, his namesake, upon the cold stone of the blood altar, its etched grooves eager to drink life afresh from the rat's willing sacrifice. He sensed the crone, the Raven Queen, dark goddess of the Methratii; Nocturna torturing him with a story torn from the legends of his own birthright, leaning close over him. A shadow greater than her presence loomed about him, narrowing his gaze until he could only see the slumbering visage of his son. And then, that too, disappeared in darkness with a sharp pain lancing through his ear.

 

 

Tuesday, June 22, 724 CR – Twilight

 

Charlie glared across the short space separating him from his sire, a cauldron simmering in his gaze. Charles looked back upon it calmly, with resignation. Slowly he raised a hand, somewhat surprised to see his fingers shaking. It had been nearly fifteen long, torturous years since he had looked back upon that moment, which was still as crystal clear as an event only moments past. “Aye, my son, in my blindness, I saw nothing but the goal I sought. But, you will see, you should already know, She sought you for you, not a bargaining chip or prize.”

“More like a fish,” Charlie spat, his body fairly vibrating with renewed fury. Thus far he had seen, and had borne witness to, the exact vision four times, each time suffering only minor variation. Like an omen, knelled four times, before the fall of the headsman's axe. “A prize tossed about for the whims of everyone but me!”

“Charlie, Charlie, hear me out, please?” When the youth rose he was somewhat shocked to find that his sire had risen first, and far more swiftly. “I can bar the door, son, and speak my peace.” The elder rat muttered flatly, but with contrition in his voice. “I wish... honestly and in truth? I wish I had spoke to you of this when you were five, or ten, not on the cusp of manhood and filled with half dreams and broken memories.” Charles relaxed his posture slightly when Charlie also relaxed, realizing that he could run, again.

But to where?

“Now is what you have, Charles. Make good of it.” Crossing his arms Charlie angrily sank back down upon the bench.