Bleda walked out through the open gates of Drassil. There were a dozen paces of near-darkness as he made his way through the arched tunnel beneath the battlements and gate-tower, and then he was stepping out into the last rays of daylight, the sun a pale glow above the trees of Forn. Before him spread the field of the dead, a road cutting a line through the cairns that filled the plain. Bleda took a deep breath and marched on.
He’d looked down upon these same cairns from the tops of the battlements many times, knew that they sheltered the fallen from that day that the world changed. The day the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim had broken free from the Otherworld and become flesh.
But those same cairns had looked different when viewed from so high above, like pebbles cast upon a cloth of green fabric. Now, though, they rose to either side of Bleda, tall as him, some taller, looming, filling his world, pressing in upon him.
So many dead! Has there ever been such a battle, with so many killed?
They were covered with moss and lichen, earth filling the gaps between stones, grass and weeds growing, snails and slugs and other things scuttling between the slabs of stone. The wind sighed through them, sounding like a thousand voices, whispering.
And what would the dead tell me, of that dread Day of Wrath? Deeds of valour, of courage and honour. Of murder and slaughter?
For a moment he remembered another battle, figures on the ground like ants, the Ben-Elim swooping down upon them, screams drifting up to a young boy on a hillside. He shook his head, scattering the memories like flies, returned to the cairns and their whispers of the Battle of Drassil.
Bleda had heard the tale many times, of how the Ben-Elim’s allies were hard pressed and overwhelmed on the plain by the greater numbers of the Kadoshim’s forces. Led by the black-hearted King Nathair, if Bleda remembered right. A man who rode to battle upon the back of a draig, a fearsome beast that was all but extinct in the Banished Lands now. The Kadoshim had been the first through the portal from the Otherworld, and so had filled the skies, diving down upon the beleaguered allies of the Ben-Elim, a warband from the western realm of Ardan, wherever that was. All Bleda remembered about them was that they were led by a beautiful queen, fair as the sun.
Edana.
The Kadoshim had fallen upon them like a plague, spreading their slaughter. But the Ben-Elim had been close behind, throwing themselves through the portal from the Otherworld, risking all, as Jibril frequently told Bleda and Jin in their lessons, in a desperate bid to save the good people of the Banished Lands. Asroth had been defeated, frozen, the Kadoshim routed, their allies slain or scattered, and so had begun the Age of Lore. The Protectorate of the Ben-Elim.
The reign of the Ben-Elim, whatever they like to call it.
Bleda glanced up at the sky, pale and open now as he moved beyond the reach of the great tree’s canopy, and imagined the Kadoshim and Ben-Elim up above, blotting out the sun, swooping and spiralling in aerial combat. He could almost hear the echo of their battle-cries, their death screams, the explosions of turf as they crashed to the earth in ruin.
It must have been a sight to see.
And then he was through the cairns, the first trees of Forn growing tall either side of the road, thickening as he walked on. The world changed about him in just a few steps, becoming a place of twilight and shadow, of scratching branch, shifting light and rustling leaf. Birds called and insects chittered, wood creaking.
A forest is louder than I ever would have imagined!
He’d rarely set foot outside Drassil. He was allowed to: there were no restrictions upon him as a ward of the Ben-Elim. He was treated as an honoured guest rather than a prisoner, even if Jin said otherwise, so he was at liberty to walk out onto the plains around Drassil, or even into the forest, though he was hesitant to do so. He did not want to do anything that would make the Ben-Elim doubt him, or bring shame on his Clan. Bleda knew that the cords around him were not thick rope or heavy iron. They were bonds of duty and honour and threat, and they bound him more tightly than anything fashioned by man. He knew if he tried to leave, to escape, to flee back to his kin, that he would be responsible for breaking the peace between the Sirak and the Ben-Elim. He would not do something that would shame his kin, or bring the wrath of the Ben-Elim down upon them.
‘You must be strong,’ his mother had said to him all those years ago. And he had tried to be, every single moment from that day to this one.
Some days that is harder than others, he thought, lifting a hand to his throbbing face. One eye was still closed from his beating, and he could still taste blood. And he was walking with a limp, a pain in his hip. He knew it could have been worse.
Would have been worse, if not for Riv.
He knew her name. A lot of people lived within the walls of Drassil, many thousands, but after five years you tended to know most of the people around you. Especially the ones that spent time on the weapons-field, which he frequented most. He often went there just to watch others train when he was not being taught, or listen to Jin mock them, and he had noticed that Riv seemed to spend more time there than the others. Certainly more than her training regime required her to be there.
She confused him; she was clearly skilled with many weapons.
Though not the bow!
A warrior dedicated to her craft, and brave. But so weak, as well. She had literally no cold-face, didn’t even try, and her control over her emotions was obviously just as brittle.
I should be grateful of that weakness today, as she saved me from a worse beating. Maybe even my life.
There had been a long, terrifying moment today when he’d thought that they were going to kill him, as he had fallen to the ground from a dozen blows and felt their boots slamming into him, the weight of them pressing down upon him, suffocating.
And then she had been there: Riv, snarling and spitting like a wolven in a sack.
‘Tonight, in the forest beyond the field of cairns,’ she had said to him, and so here he was, though he was not quite sure why he’d come. Inquisitiveness, yes, and there had been something in her eyes and voice that suggested this was important, somehow.
What does she want with me?
‘Over here,’ a voice said in the darkness.
Bleda stopped and stared, saw a shadow detach itself from the trunk of a giant oak. It waved an arm at him.
He left the road, skidding down a gentle incline as Riv stepped out into a beam of light. It caught her fair hair, highlighting threads of gold.
‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said, a vulnerability on her face, in her eyes. Her nose was swollen and red, dried blood crusting one nostril. A reminder that she had paid a price for helping him on the weapons-field earlier that day.
‘Why would I not?’ he asked, frowning. He owed her a debt of thanks.