Author’s Note
This story takes place in the universe of the Shadow Campaigns, at around the same time that The Shadow Throne begins. None of the other Shadow Campaigns books or stories are required reading to enjoy it, but if you’re interested in how Alex ended up in this mess, it’s chronicled in the short story The Penitent Damned, available online.
1
It’s June by the time the little caravan works its way down out of the mountains, six wagons accompanied by as many horsemen. Each wagon is full of trade goods from the Sallonaik, the great blue lake where our journey began. Half are stacked with barrels of salted fish, fat red-eyes and narrow, blue-scaled clipper. The other half carry treasures from the south, painstakingly hauled over the Worldshearts and then sailed across the lake on the long, multi-oared trading galleys of the canton cities. There is Hamveltai glass and porcelain, packed in straw; Deslandai jewelry in heavy iron strongboxes; fine cloth from Vheed and the cities of the Old Coast.
Valuable things, things people want. And me.
I ride in the back of a farm cart, along with some of the strongboxes. I have offered no hint of resistance, but the guards take no chances. Ropes bind my hands together and secure my ankles to the driver’s seat, with just enough slack so I can shift my weight and hang on when the cart tips or shudders.
I might have worked the cord down and over my feet, or scraped it apart on a nail in the bed of a cart like the hero of a romantic story. But then what? Heroes never seemed to have to think that far ahead. Even if I were to evade the half dozen armed, mounted men who surround our party, no small feat for a boy as unskilled in woodscraft as myself, then I would be afoot and alone in a lonely, hostile country. Every night, we heard the howling of the wolves in the woods. And if I were to escape my pursuers and the wolves and slow death by starvation or exposure or any number of other grisly ends, where was there to go?
That I think of escape, in spite of all of this, is a clear sign of my insanity. My demon, perhaps, wrecking the fabric of my mind. Peter is two hundred miles away and getting farther with every weary day. He is strapped to another wagon, headed to another prison.
Even if I broke free, crossed the miles, rescued him from his captors, he would not welcome me. This time, he would probably kill me himself.
***
But one cannot help but hope. So I sit, and wait, and plan. We will not be in the mountains forever. Sooner or later we will reach a wider road, and there will be towns along the way, places to lose myself and evade pursuit. I can read, write, and do sums; there is always a living to be made for someone with such esoteric skills. I will survive.
I sleep in the cart, under a thick wool blanket. Twice a day, the guards let me off my leash to give me a chance to squat in the ditch beside the side of the road or make water. They feed me, hard black bread and sometimes a handful of greasy meat; squirrel, or rabbit, or fat gray mountain birds I’ve never seen before. The outriders travel with rifles at the ready, hoping for a shot at any animal flushed by the noise of the oncoming wagons. When they miss, all we have is bread.
Tullo is a mercenary, a southerner from the League cities. He has lank, dirty red hair and a curly red beard he rarely bothers to trim. Every second or third night, he comes to my cart, already drunk, hands fumbling with the strings of his leather trousers. He joins me under the blanket and I take his cock in my mouth. I feel his fingers grip my hair and I listen to the harsh sound of his breath until he spends himself.
Afterward he lets me take a swallow from his belt skin, which is filled with a clear spirit so harsh it burns my throat, and leaves me an extra measure of bread. I eat it, huddle back under my blanket, and try to sleep.
I will survive.
***
At the base of the mountains, there is a road leading north and south, and a little town. It’s barely bigger than my village by the lake, no more than two dozen log-and-shingle buildings, but the caravan stays well clear. Most of the guards go into town, to buy supplies, while another keeps an eye on me. It might be a good time to begin my escape, but the guard seems attentive, and his rifle is loaded.
When the others return, they direct us to the north road, where another wagon is waiting in a little clearing. It’s larger than my farm cart, with high sides and a gate at the back, pulled by a pair of horses. Sitting on a high box is a big man in a stained crimson robe, a Priest of the Red, and beside him a thin, ugly fellow with a bulbous nose and protruding ears under a mop of dark hair. It is accompanied by another half dozen guards, hard-looking men in forest leathers with rifles and long knives.
The leader of our party, a man named Voryil, has a conversation with the priest while the rest of us wait a little distance away. I can’t quite overhear the conversation, but I catch the occasional word. “Demon,” he says. “Sorcery.” Voryil seems to be arguing some point, but the priest says something that shuts him up. Clearly, Voryil is outranked.
A few minutes later, the guards untie me from the bed of the cart and lead me over to the high-sided wagon, opening the rear gate so I can climb in. There is a girl in rough linens there, curled on her side, asleep or unconscious. She is small, about my age but slight and very thin, and her black hair is limp and matted with filth. She has iron bands around one ankle, secured by a chain to a metal loop in the center of the wagon bed. Before I really understand what’s happening, the guards are strapping a similar band around my leg and locking it into place with a steel pin.
Looking down at my new confinement, I wonder if I have missed my chance to escape after all.
2
I don’t remember my mother, or where I was born. I can remember, barely, arriving in Nestevyo. I was riding behind my father, gripping him hard around the middle. A second horse, following placidly behind us, carried all we had in the way of possessions. Clothes, tools, a few precious books.
We moved into a shack near the water, a few hundred yards from the village proper. I don’t know if my father paid anyone for the right to live there or not. It hadn’t been used in years, perhaps in decades, and there was nothing much left but four ugly walls and a fire pit. I remember the first night, sleeping under the stars, nothing overhead but the skeletal shapes of the rafters.
The next day, my father traded the horses to some of the villagers in exchange for help rebuilding the roof. A pack of them came over, riding in a wagon heaped high with dried grass. They were dour, suspicious men, often with their dour, suspicious sons along, and they stared at my father and me as though we were circus attractions. But they had brought ladders, and they spent all day putting up thin wooden shingles covered with mats of dried grass, fixed in place with an awful-smelling muck that looked like liquid shit. My father, though unused to manual labor, did his best to help, and in the evening he broke open a bottle of spirit he’d brought in our bags and poured each villager a generous measure.
It was as auspicious a beginning to our life in Nestevyo as we could have hoped for. Nevertheless, it was clear from the outset that we could never truly be a part of the village. In our old home in the south, where the Mithradacii tide rose high and lasted long, most of the old peoples of the world were erased. It’s easy to forget that north of the Worldshearts there are clans who never knelt to any tyrant, people whose children bear no trace of the blood of the Children of the Sun. The people of Nestevyo were descended from such stock, short and broad shouldered, with hair as black as a crow’s wing. They call us mikadvi, which means “muddy” and is appropriate enough. My father and I both had hair the color of freshly turned earth; we would be unremarkable in the lowland cities, but here in the Murnskai mountains we were as foreign as Khandarai.
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