Act I: Scars
A Novella set in the Vault of Orendathos
Written By: Jonathan Chandler
Primary Art By: Evan Scale (https://www.facebook.com/Evan.Scale.Art/)
Map By: Kaori Bruna
Chapter Three
Scene 1.1
They had to trust the boy. They had no other choice. But as the night fell, and the chill came with it, the growing fear in Galdaya and Agatha’s chests grew hard to ignore.
“It’s just the hole in the wall,” the headwoman tried to drily joke. The druid girl didn’t so much as acknowledge the words. She just looked out through the hole in the study wall and out to where Macthal had passed out of the shadow of the village. “The night chill,” Galdaya tried to finish. She shook her head, caught herself grinding her teeth and stopped with a snort.
It helped that her face hurt where the short, constantly drunk Berg had hit her. It gave her an excuse to be quiet. She touched her right cheek and winced. It was already swollen. She sighed through her nose and, somewhat spitefully, took solace that at least she wasn’t the broken mess that was the Savv who had been thrown through the wall. That man still lay amidst the rubble of the second story wall, slightly twisted at an awkward angle. Someone from the village, one of the many curious—then furious—people about at the time of the initial commotion had said the man would live. But no one had bothered to help the warrior, or even to adjust his body into a more comfortable position amidst the wood and plaster and brick.
Galdaya held no allusions as to why that was. A glance at Agatha—blanket about her now, covering her torn clothes and making her disheveled hair and headdress harder to care for—was all it took to understand the villagers’ feelings.
The headwoman had tried to glare down at a few of the frontier farmers, to keep them from kicking the battered and unconscious Savv to death the moment she’d told everyone what had happened. They hadn’t needed her to say aloud what they were all now facing. Every villager knew the stories of the raiders.
Galdaya had left out the details of how close that reality probably was; how close the army of raiders could be and how Macthal had raced off to stop them knowing what had happened here. But her glare and common sense had probably made those things clear also. The looks on the farmer wives’ and likely soon to be fleeing merchants had been full of heavy thoughts that stretched their mouths downwards and creased their foreheads.
“Agatha, dear,” Galday tried again, mostly to pull herself from the mire of fears that threatened to make her as still as the druid herself. “The roof here isn’t safe. I’m surprised it hasn’t fallen in at the edge here already.” The druid shivered and clutched her shoulders from beneath her blanket, a little more fiercely than she already had been. The headwoman placed her own hands over Agatha’s and tried to share what presence of mind she had to give. “Let me get you back to your da. Imagine if he hears what happened from someone who wasn’t there?” She tried to smile in the druid’s periphery, then felt stupid for thinking it would help. “What would I say if he comes barging in my office, without you there to defend me? Hm?”
It wasn’t funny. And the shivering breath Agatha let out wasn’t a laugh. Galdaya managed to move her out the smithy any way. But the girl stopped where the main road was marked with the fresh marks from the Savv’s dark bastyr, walking as if in a trance to the edge of the village before letting herself be taken back.
As if Macthal would be there, if she went looking, Galdaya thought, not liking why she knew. Her husband…she never found him by looking in the night, like some hopeless maiden.
“Do you…” Agatha’s voice was the kind of quiet that came from trying not to sound mewling. Galdaya felt a strange sense of nostalgia, bitter for its age, come over her from hearing it. Thoughts of her husband looking at her as they both kneeled at Treyad’s altar at the temple, coupled with thoughts of her son being born, both made the headwoman swallow hard on phantom tears of her own. She was too on edge for such thoughts right now. And it was obvious the druid maiden needed someone to keep her steady.
The superstitious thought that Agatha might end up listening to trickster spirits if they continued to just stand silently together made Galdaya’s mouth work. “What is it?” There were stories of druids that lost themselves to low points in their lives and let the whispering wind drive them mad as it teased them.
Agatha’s brow grew stern and she took a breath. “Do you think he’ll come back?”
Galdaya almost laughed. She stopped herself. But the girl’s question was so normal compared to what the headwoman had been imagining. Even with the danger Macthal faced, it was the danger most fighters did. Gods, I feel old, Galdaya thought. This day has been too full of strange seemings and odd omens. I feel like someone’s grandmother.
“You worried about that hard-headed boy?” Agatha’s lips thinned, but she didn’t answer. “You know he practically destroyed my smithy, right?” The druid looked back and up toward the hole in the smithy wall, as if seeing it for the first time. The faintest smirk might have shown on her face. Then she shook her head.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Galdaya frowned. Agatha looked to the unconscious man in the street.
“Where’d the confidence you had before go?” Galdaya tried to sound a little teasing. “He’s your Shepherd, isn’t he?”
Agatha humored the headwoman with a passing smile.
It left Galdaya empty.
“I’m not worried like that,” Agatha said. “I’m worried that he’ll—that something like him will come back. But it won’t be him….”
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Scene 1.2
She’d wanted to say the girl was speaking nonsense. She’d wanted to. Instead she’d taken Agatha to the temple and endured the wave of mixed emotions that the girl’s da nearly exploded with when he saw her.
Belated fear, anger, solemn joy, and bitter worry had all poured out of the large man like rain from the belly of a storm cloud. All of them had pushed Galdaya closer and closer to that edge she’d stepped back from while standing next to Agatha before. She’d felt again the fear for herself and the druid, who’d happened to be there when the Savv had come to collect their fell metal from the smithy, as they’d been trying to figure out what Macthal might have seen in the inky ingot.
Galdaya felt a wave of prickliness climb up her arms, from her fingertips—an echo to the angry rush she’d felt wrestling with Berg and seeing Ratsic yank Agatha to the library by her hair.
She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again with the slowness of someone with a headache clutching the inside of their skull. She was happy for the night, both because the chill drove her to keep walking homeward and because there was no one on the street to stop her with questions she wouldn’t have been able to answer. The quiet, the open Vault above, the dark of the trees at the edge of the great wood…it all went on with its business as if a storm weren’t on the horizon for the village. Galdaya could pretend to do the same—almost—with their help.
That pretending didn’t last though.When she saw light leaking from the smithy entrance her brow furrowed once again. She’d told everyone to go home when Ratsic arrived, so she didn’t understand why there was a forge lit again. Especially since it had taken an exorbitant amount of wood and effort to light them again, at all. The spirits had been angry, the headwoman was unsettlingly sure, after what had happened with the ingot. It had been like the fires had been afraid to come back. Sparks would fly from flint, only to disappear. Tongues of flame would taste wood, but ultimately turn to smoke.
Looking at the upper wall where the Savv had been thrown through brick, then back to the lighted entry of the smithy proper, she found her weariness soon mixed with anger. Is the world trying to ruin me? She complained to herself, thinking of the costs for the repairs and coupling them with what she’d owe Gralt and the other woodcutters for all the fuel. And now someone’s burning more?!
“Do you have any idea the day I’m having?” She started, rounding the way into the smithy and fully intending to grab whoever had disobeyed her orders by the scruff. She’d been ready to haul them out onto their ass, but then she saw that the fool she intended to aim all her day’s fury at was her own flesh and blood.
“Worse than mine?” Muinn asked, with all the acid his battered body could muster.
“Muinn?!” Galdaya said, blinking repeatedly and trying to understand what she was seeing. “What in Underlands happened to you?” By the fallen creatures below the world, her son looked terrible.
He was leaning on the brickwork that extended from the first forge, across from the entrance. The weakly dancing light, stoked by the boy’s grimace born efforts to push fresh wood into the flames, illuminated the headwoman’s son like she imagined the evening light might outline a ghost. His clothes were ripped in several places—most cleanly at the collar—and his face was a mess of purple swelling and dried blood. His lips were split in places. When he grit his teeth, his gums look cut. His handsome face, so much like his father’s, looked like a bust made by drunken hands and angry fists.
Then the headwoman saw the hand he was using to move the woodcuts to the fire.
“Your fingers,” she said, after her sharp intake of breath. Then the spell of shock from first seeing the boy was gone and she stepped forward with purpose.
He snatched his crippled hand away from his mother as soon as she went to touch the nearly right angle fingers there.
“No!” He shouted—half in pain and half full of that angry acid again.
“What do you mean, no? Boy, your hands are important. We have to set and splint those fingers, unless you wan to—”
The most intense glare Galdaya had ever been given by her son clawed its way out from the shadow of his swollen brow and cut her off.
The cut of firewood that had been in Muinn’s head, clattered hollowly on the ground, having been dropped awkwardly on the stack beside the forge. The boy looked down at his hand, mangled as it was, then looked back at his mother.
“I can’t believe you’re lecturing me,” he said, his voice almost flattened by a frustration Galdaya didn’t understand. The headwoman shook her head and reached back out to her son’s hand.
“I’m not lecturing you,” she said.
“You are,” he said. “You’re going to. That’s all you ever do with me.” He went to get more wood, wincing with a hiss when he brushed his broken fingers on the pile.
“Son—“ Galdaya started, her voice unsure if it should come out scolding or worried. It came out hotter than she intended, either way.
“Don’t touch me,” Muinn said, flinching away from his mother again. He brushed her shoulder briskly as he walked around her to go back to flames of the forge. Galdaya could only blink a moment, anger instinctively rising, but being met with increasing confusion. She couldn’t understand what could make her son act like this. It made her chest ring on the inside.
He’d grown easily irritated lately, she felt. But he never shirked his work or chores. He so rarely talked back that she’d occasionally thanked Treyad he’d never gone through a rebellious phase while she’d struggled and strained to keep the village going.
But where was the god of order and law now?
Nothing was making sense today.
“Muinn, we don’t have the fuel to be running the fires late in the night like this,” Galdaya tried. She kept he voice calm. Right now wasn’t the time to fight or argue with her son. She wasn’t in the right mind to deal with a young man’s moods. “You won’t be able to get the fire really started by yourself anyway.”
Muinn clicked his tongue, but picked up the blower that was prepped opposite the wood pile at the forge’s base. He heaved the heavy wood and linen tarp into place at the at the base of the flames and started grunting while opening and closing it in great heaves. The image of a ghost going about empty motions grew stronger in Galdaya’s mind. She shook her head.
“I can get it burning,” the boy said, looking at her sidelong and maybe taking her gesture the wrong way.
“Son. You can’t. Not right now.”
Each pump of the blower set the low flames flaring, but they never stayed that way. In fact, they almost seemed to shrink, the more effort Muinn put in. He seemed to forget that he needed someone else adding more wood as he went and that just recklessly working wasn’t going to end in anything more than wasted sweat.
Galdaya watched Muinn’s brow knit together painfully, but he wouldn’t stop.
“You have to stop this,” she said, closing the space between them, slowly. Muinn started panting with effort, his face darkening in spite of the orange that cast all his bruises in sharp relief. Shadows under his eyes that his mother hadn’t noticed before seemed to grow deeper, the longer he worked.
“I won’t stop,” he grumbled between breaths.
“Why not! You’re hurt. You’ll make it so no one can set those fingers back in place. And you’re acting crazy!”
“He wouldn’t stop,” Muinn said. “He wouldn’t stop for anything. He’d keep trying.”
“You’re not making sense. Who in Underlands are you even talking about?”
“Him! The same one the whole village can never stop talking about. The same one that you always let hang around the forges—and now da’s forge!—even though you made me sweep the place for years before you let me touch a hammer!” Bitterness was in every word, so deep that the headwoman felt a nonsensical stab of guilt.
Galdaya opened her mouth but was stopped before she could speak when Muinn loosed a yell and suddenly threw the blower aside.
It didn’t take long for the fires in the forge to eventually die in the silence that followed. Whatever curse that damned ingot had released now ate away at what little effort the fyre spirits put in to eating. The crackling embers hissed, seeming almost disgusted to the headwoman. She looked at her son’s increasingly shadowed face. Galdaya’s own face twitched through expressions of frustration and, slowly, a kind of understanding—as much as she could muster.
“Muinn…I don’t think you understand.” Not about Macthal, or why he’s being talked about.
“I never do,” the boy scoffed. “I never will. That monster gets everything. Everyone loves him, from the manure covered farmers, to the damned druids.”
Galdaya narrowed her eyes at the last. “He’s kind to them, like I taught you to be. He helps them.”
“Ha!” Muinn’s voice cracked. “That doesn’t explain why people who have seen what he’s capable of don’t run from him. Agatha’s seen with her own eyes what he can do. Yet, look at her! If her father gave his fool blessing—”
“Agatha has her own mind,” Galdaya said. “And her own heart,” she added on intuition. Muinn spat to the side.
“He’ll probably be made headman one day, even though his mother’s a witch and his father’s nothing more than a cripple that pretended too long to be something he wasn’t.”
Galdaya clenched her fists. “You need to watch your mouth, son.” Muinn glared at his mother.
“I have watched it! For years! I’ve kept quiet since I watched him break my friend’s bones when we were just kids. I kept quiet while you all forgave him and kept him and his snake oil mother a secret from anyone that could have done somththing about them. And I was even quiet when you made me apologize to him for what I supposedly made him do!”
“That’s not why you were punished!” You have to know that, the headwoman thought.
“Spare me. It’s like you were all under that damned witch’s spell. She probably put whatever curse is on these forges. Gods know why. Only they could know why she’s even here, instead of wherever her blood hails. By Underlands, she probably is the one that killed da—”
Galdaya’s hand whipped out before she could process what her son had just said. The sound of the smack across Muinn’s face was deafening in the dark.
The headwoman had stared down killers—fought for her life just today! Yet, she was suddenly thankful for the dark that hid her son’s scowl of hurt and anger. She was sure, from the instant of hollowness in her chest and the mist of sweat on her brow, that that anger was hot enough to sear.
But the silence that weighed on both of them couldn’t be allowed to drown them. Galdaya, thinking about the sight of Macthal as he stood, uncertain in the street by the smithy, couldn’t let herself bow to this horrendous day. The anxiety that had been plain on Macthal’s face, as he worried over how he’d have to use the strength that made the village—all of us—so afraid of him, spoke loudly in the headwoman’s mind.
That anxiety said many unkind and truthful things about the kind of people the village had been to the boy. It called these people the real monsters—after all he’d done for them, with his mother and father. It called Galdaya’s son a monster, jealous and fearful. And it called the headwoman worse things for letting her son become what he was. She swallowed hard, biting down the pain her son’s last comment had dredged up from the pit of her stomach.
She stifled the pain and the self loathing for having thought the same things, out of grief, so many years ago. Then again for—maybe secretly—holding that against Cadi…and her husband.
“There are reasons for everything,” she said, hearing the words echoed by her conscience, for all her past ill wishes and all the times she’d looked the other way with her son.
“Gods damn your reasons,” Muinn practically growled, tears no doubt in his eyes. “How long did you say I had to wait before I could work da’s forge?” Galdaya felt her heart drop. Muinn dug deeper with the edge in his words. “How long till you let Macthal in? No reason will make that fair.”
Suddenly there was the sound of a slow, pointed clapping that chased away the sound of blood in Galdaya’s ears. Her skin tightened on her frame as the tingling sensation of being snuck up on washed over her like the first spray of a cold rain.
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Scene 1.3
“I apologize,” came the almost silky, predator deep voice of the bear sized man Galdaya and her son turned to see. He was taller than the headwoman, with shoulders that bulged with the roundness of heavy muscle. This look persisted despite seeming softened by what appeared in the Vault lit dimness of the smithy entrance to be over the shoulder furs and hide armor straps. The wood of a massive bow was slung over his shoulders, along with a quill of arrows whose feathered tails looked like they were made from the down of a creature both lizard and bird. The base of each feather glittered in the night, as if made of reflective scales there, where they met the arrows’ shafts.
A chain necklace of gold links caught the starlight as he chuckled amiably, accenting the sounds of his meaty hands clapping together. On the necklace was a medallion with a ruby set at the center. The stone was shaped like a small flame, a mirror to some of the runes on the forge below the smithy; like those that sporadically decorated the tapestries and displays in the temple. Galdaya vaguely recalled Agatha once making a wooden version to place over a sick child’s head when it slept. It was meant to improve one’s strength somehow, the young druid had claimed.
Galdaya made a confused face. The man at her home’s doorway didn’t look like he needed any extra muscle. But then she noticed again the bow, and how thick it was. Oak trunks would fear it.
On the man’s hip was a curved sword, like that of every Savv, except it was seemingly wider and decorated by faceted jewels that glistened like the feather scales on his arrows. Galdaya saw no warrior braid, but the way he stood, the way his head sat a little cocked back on his shoulders—as if all things were beneath him—told her he was a man in charge. Feathered braids told other warriors how many men a Savv had pledged to his word. But this man, his posture lax, his voice steady and polite, he didn’t feel the need to tell anyone anything that the pressure of his presence didn’t already say.
“Yes, I apologize,” he repeated. He stopped his clapping and stilled his apparent amusement. “I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“But you did,” Galdaya said, standing as tall as she could and moving between the partially silhouetted man and her son. Muinn clicked his tongue at the gesture, but only moved a bit to her side to avoid being shielded. “In case you couldn’t tell, the smithy is closed for the day. And I have enough problems as it is right now.”
“Yes, I apologize,” the man said easily. He snapped with one hand, almost like it were a shrug for someone else. Galdaya winced at the arrival of light from several torches, carried by Savv warriors who had gone unnoticed behind the central man’s frame. Then the new warriors, silent and grim faced, spread out within the smithy to evenly disperse the light their master had ordered them to make.
There was none of the grumbling or bickering, or even boyish horseplay the headwoman had grown used to seeing among such men over the years. Their eyes were hard in a very different way compared to young fighters who mostly liked to get drunk and start brawls. These men were personal attendants. They were veterans; vassals.
What does that make the man they follow? Galdaya’s mind wondered, a shiver passing over her like rain over a grave. What is this man doing here?
“That should help us all feel more comfortable, what with your forges cold for the night,” said he bearish man, smile handsome under brown eyes with hawkish wrinkles.
“That wasn’t what I was saying,” Galdaya said. The man’s smile broadened, apparently genuine amusement returning. Then he bowed his head slightly and put a huge hand over his heart.
“I apologize again, then,” he said. He raised his head, his long, straight brown hair having flowed practically over his shoulders, where it wasn’t bound up in a single bun at the back his head. “I’m afraid I’ve had something of a day myself and it must be making me a little…addled. The quick ride here probably didn’t help things either.”
Quick ride? Galdaya wondered, her heart starting to beat a little faster.
“…Yeah, well, sorry for your troubles,” she said. She leaned to the side some, to see past the big man, and saw in the street more warriors and their bastyr all gathered and moving with purpose. What their purpose was, the headwoman didn’t want to guess—no matter how easy it would be. She could only hope that the warriors outside weren’t as terrifying as the ones around her. Where is Macthal? Frightening images of what could have happened out past the hills flashed through Galdaya’s mind.
“Thank you for your kind words. They mean more, given that they come from a kindred spirit.”
Galdaya shook her head clear of all the disturbing thoughts and watched with confusion and growing panic as the man meandered like a tired friend into the smithy proper. He found an improvised seat on an anvil a few paces away from the mother and son. Then he deftly, and all too casually, unbelted his sword and shrugged off his massive bow, before placing them both beside his seat.
It didn’t seem at all odd to him that he was a stranger in someone else’s home and that his setting aside his weapons did nothing about the weapons still equipped to the eight warriors in his service.
And the several dozen or more outside, some quieter part of Galdaya insisted on reminding her, quickly counting the torches among the village streets.
“I don’t think I’ve known you long enough to be ‘kindred’,” Galdaya said. “I don’t know you at all.”
The man tilted his head, after looking up from his effort to massage his supposedly saddle weary legs. He looked like a puzzled, long haired sheep dog, with his full beard and mane. Or he would have, if the innocent look had reached his eyes.
Galdaya frowned and felt her brow start to hurt from the weight of every casual pause the man let play out.
“Now that was rude of me,” the man said. “I’d assumed it was obvious.” He waited, presumably to let Galdaya catch on to whatever he was implying. When she didn’t, he sighed and waved a hand like he were waving away hard feelings between them. “It’s alright. The boy didn’t inherit much from me. Sometimes I wonder at the relation myself. But every now and then he—not unlike your own blood, it seems—shows how hard-headed he can be and then I can’t deny that he’s mine.”
The man nodded toward the entrance and Galdaya followed the gesture to see a sneering, obviously battered, familiar person looking back at her.
Leaning heavily on his right leg, clutching his oddly sagging right shoulder, and wearing stained bandages that were once visible through the tear in his clothes, Ratsic stood as if he’d just managed to pull himself upright. He huffed and cursed under his breath. He was almost like the vision of a vengeful deadman from some horror story. Lit as he was by the torches, the effect was worse.
But it wasn’t Ratsic’s pitiful form that made Galdaya break out in a cold sweat. It was what his appearance meant. What it meant about Macthal; about the village; about her and her son….
As if he’d waited for those thoughts to settle on Galdaya’s face, the apparent father of Ratsic continued speaking. He still sounded like a friend, a little weary from the road; like whatever he said was somehow at the mercy of Galdaya’s judgement.
It wasn’t. By all the iron and the blood of all the men present, it wasn’t.
“I’m here on my son’s behest,” the man said.
“For what?” Muinn spoke up, indignation in his voice making Galdaya’s chest feel like a spike was being driven into it. “The forge is closed, obviously. If you and your men are here for an order, you’ll have to wait for it like every other chief and his clan.”
Galdaya put one hand forcefully on her son’s chest. He teetered on his feet a little and looked at his mother, offended. The headwoman tried with every fiber of her being to get the reality of the situation through his skull with a look.
“What, ma? They can’t just walk in here like they own the place. And I don’t remember anything happening to mr. ugly, with the one eye, when I last saw him.”
You weren’t here this evening! Galdaya screamed internally. Did you even see the other side of the smithy, when you were marching in here with devils in your eyes?
Out loud, Galdaya said firmly, “Quiet. Now.” Then she forcefully moved the boy behind herself with her hammerer’s strength. Muinn was jerked back with surprise on his face.
Turning back to the smiling man on the anvil, Galdaya said, “You’re the chiefs’ chief that your son always talked about.” The man nodded smoothly, with a slow blink of condescension. Ratsic scoffed where he stood and spit at his side. Galdaya’s left brow twitched, but she ignored both slights. “The High Chief that the rumors have been talking about lately.”
“One and the same, good woman,” the man said. “Killer of the Balarex of the Mounds, devourer of the eastern clans, and Master of Mounts, according to the Horned Elders of the northern steppe.” He rolled his eyes and made a shrug motion at all the titles. Then he put his chin on one of his maul like fists. “But none of those things matter. I’m here as a humble customer and father. You can call me Maltimor, as my friends do.”
Galdaya swallowed. The Balarex was a monster of feather and scale that stood thirty feet tall and was said to walk on eight legs the size of tree trunks. Stories of it had reached the village, like those of so many other monsters, after it had broken a town and merchants spoke of blighted people dying ugly deaths. The creature’s breath was some kind of disease ridden thing. The Horned Elders were a more distant rumor, from far north. But like the monster, they were always spoken of with a fearful respect, being supposed druids that had tamed Savv clans around them with the might of the spirits at their command.
…This man is talking of legendary things…yet I believe him? The thought of the man’s arrows and their peculiar fletching was on thing. But there was more to the instinct in Galdaya’s gut, telling her to listen. All the stories a woman could hear from drunken men should have dulled Galdaya to such boasting. But there was too much ease with which the man put on such titles, like they weren’t so much mantles of authority as they were mere traveler’s cloaks, discarded and replaced with a whim. They didn’t mean anything to him, beyond the fact that they were true.
“Well Maltimor, I apologize for my lack of respect earlier.”
“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m sure my son didn’t necessarily paint for you a good picture of who I could be. You’re, of course, forgiven.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re very welcome.”
“Father,” Ratsic said, voice ragged. “Are we here for shit small talk?”
“You shouldn’t be here at all,” Muinn grumbled, Galdaya clicked her tongue.
Maltimor barely turned his head toward his own son. The move was quick, almost quick enough to allow the shadow of distaste on the High Chief’s face to vanish before Galdaya could catch it. Almost.
“I think I know why you’re here,” Galdaya said, quicker than she meant to.
“Oh?” Maltimor questioned, seemingly in earnest, despite his right hand coming to rest on the wrapped bundle that was tucked into his belt. There was little doubt in the headwoman’s mind what the bundled object was.
“Yes. But I wasn’t lying about the smithy being closed for the night.”
The High Chief’s smile faded to a smirk; his eyes unreadable, but searching. The headwoman would not bring up Macthal or what could have happened between him and Ratsic—nor what did happen earlier at the smithy. She could only hope that the boy she sent out into the unknown was still alive. Her guilt was bile in her throat in the meantime, but the threat of torch bearing warriors in a village made with so much wood demanded her attention now.
“Surely you could be persuaded to wake some hammerers and fill an already promised order.”
Galdaya shook her head. “Like I told your son—and as you probably can tell from the look of the ingot you gave me through him—there is nothing more I can do. Especially now. The fires in my forges have been smothered.” And by something in that ingot.
“Hmm.” Maltimor switched which fist he rested his head on. Galdaya didn’t fail to notice how the seemingly casual gesture drew the eye of every other warrior, who moved their hands to their hilts.
“A-also,” Galdaya added, sweat on her brow, yet fearful of using any excuse that wasn’t the truth under Maltimor’s glare. “As a parent, you understand that my son is my priority. He’s obviously been through something like your own has.”
Maltimor grunted, then he sat up straight while making a swaying, weighing motion with his head.
“I’m fine, ma,” Muinn said, still not understanding and chafing against his mother’s protection.
“No, son. I think you mother is right,” Maltimor said, turning his hawkish gaze to Muinn and staring just as the bird would watch a hare on the steppe. “In fact, I think she is exactly right.” Galdaya ground her teeth. “I think you and my son have been through the exact same thing this day. Or rather, I think they’ve had the misfortune of meeting with the same person.”
How long was he listening at the doorway? The headwoman cringed.
“He’s a monster,” Ratsic and Muinn corrected in unison, under their breath.
Galdaya grimaced. Maltimor laughed. The sound was half hearted, but full from his chest and therefore just as demanding of silence as any words would have been.
“I’ve said this to my son many times, in one way or another, but it seems he’s not the only one whose fallen into the trap of weakness.” Maltimor made the tired face of a father well taxed.
Amid the bruises on Muinn’s face, Galdaya saw his eyes narrow at those words.
Maltimor chuckled again. “Before you get angry again, boy, try thinking about why you’re angry. Before you let that anger go to waste over things like fear and pity, anyway. Just one man’s advise. After all, I’m here to deal with that very ‘monster’ you and my boy have come to be so afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” Muinn said.
“Shh,” Galdaya tried.
“Oh, won’t you let him speak, good headwoman? It’s your son after all. And let me help. The sooner your son is well again, the sooner you can help your customer’s requests, right? You work. I’ll talk with him.”
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Scene 2.1
Maltimor looked over the space, his eyes tracing the runes that intricately covered the strange green stone and the places where the fire would be built. He took in the details of the hammer set in the alcove near the great iron door and made an effort to look impressed by it all. It wasn’t too difficult, though his life’s experience had increasingly insured him to being over awed.
He scratched his chin and stroked his beard in apparent thought and raised an eyebrow when his gaze fell on the young man beside him.
Muinn. That was what the boy’s mother had called him, when Maltimor had asked that her son not be sent away while the magic forge was fired.
The High Chief smirked at the glare the boy gave him, remembering the strained expression on the headwoman’s face that had pleaded for mercy.
Smart woman, Maltimor thought now. She knew that, regardless of how Maltimor claimed to want to help the angry young man, the High Chief was really flexing his authority. He looked over to where the headwoman worked with Maltimor’s warriors to build a fire that fought against being roused. She snuck glances past the sweating men that were constantly running upstairs and back with more wood to feed the fire. Maltimor would smile each time, politely waiting beside her son, like an escorted customer awaiting his finished tools.
Shame the boy didn’t inherit that head of hers, Maltimor thought. He gave a look to where Ratsic sat in exhausted discomfort, on the stairs in front of the door, roughly to Muinn’s left. Real shame, the High Chief sympathized.
“I don’t get it,” Muinn said, breaking Maltimor’s reverie with a scowl. “What’s so funny?”
“Oh,” Maltimor said, meeting the boy’s stare and making him flinch by reaching an arm around his shoulders. “Many things, young one. Many things.”
Muinn wrested himself from Maltimor’s grip. He tried, anyway. An awkward few seconds of the boy jerking his whole body and not getting free showed that it was Maltimor that actually chose to let the boy go, in the end.
“Nothing’s funny about you and your raiders invading my da’s forge and dirtying it with your horse dung covered shoes.”
“You better watch yourself, shit stain,” Ratsic said. “My da ain’t gonna to baby you like your ma.”
Maltimor narrowed his eyes at his son, but said nothing. Ratsic wasn’t wrong. But neither was he right. And the lack of ability to grasp such nuance was what always disappointed the High Chief most about his youngest child. Even his sister, limited as Maltimor felt Tora was by her sense of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’, understood that it was not only strength applied, but strength implied that gave a chief power. A threat spoken and not carried out was worse than useless. It was like a promise unkept. And a man becomes nothing to those who don’t trust his word.
He could only have gotten his loose mouth from his mother.
“I don’t care what your da does or doesn’t do,” Muinn said, admirable in the way he stuck his chest out. “Except for how he keeps ignoring me and my ma.” The boy turned away from a snarling Ratsic and looked up into Maltimor’s predatory glare. “You don’t own this village. I don’t care what other people call you. You aren’t the chief here.”
Maltimor found that he didn’t need to force the smile that stretched across his face then. The boy shrank a little beneath it, but he visibly fought to keep eye contact long enough to impress the High Chief. The master of Savv looked between his son and the boy once more and thought about how, maybe, there was actually a positive to bullheaded ignorance. At least when it was directed properly. At least when it was made into a tool for someone that knew the truth of things.
“You make an interesting point Muinn,” Maltimor said. He made a slightly exaggerated face of concern, as if he’d been told about something he’d genuinely missed. “ I am not called the chief here.” He looked about the room a little, but really watched the headwoman’s boy from the corner of his eye. The young man’s face gained the slightest amount of puzzlement. “Yes,” Maltimor mused. “I don’t see any of the things that would mark this place as my own. No banners with the Three-Claw mark. No hanging monster skulls from the terrors killed in my name or by my arm.” The High Chief shrugged and leaned back on the wall behind him, as if giving up his search. “There aren’t even any concubines waiting to be called from the corners at a whim.”
The boy’s face reddened slightly at the last comment and his opening mouth closed again. Muinn then frowned, probably trying to find the thought that Maltimor’s well timed note had pushed aside.
That was when the first true tongues of flame started growing within the dome of the enchanted forge, distracting Muinn entirely. Maltimor closed his eyes and crossed his arms in a small measure of satisfaction. He let the sounds from the boy’s mother ordering the warriors about fill the room. When the High Chief felt the heat of the forge flicker, he opened one eye and made sure to give Galdaya a silent order to keep going. Then he looked back to Muinn, who was already looking at him in frustration.
“It’ll never stay lit,” Muinn said. “We told you.”
“And yet,” Maltimor said calmly, gesturing with a hand for the boy to survey the scene before them again. “You’re mother continues to work.”
“Only because you threatened her,” the boy mumbled.
“Did I? I don’t remember doing that.”
Muinn’s face twitched, then he clicked his tongue. “You did.”
“Hmph. You will believe what you want. But you know the truth. Not a single threat left my lips. My sword was never drawn. My men barely looked at you or your dear mother. I have been kind, patient, and clear about my intentions. That is all.”
Muinn’s brow furrowed more deeply and Maltimor watched the boy’s jaws grind behind his thin lips.
“Hmm. You don’t understand something?” Maltimor asked innocently. The boy took his turn to cross his arms, but without any of the nonchalance required to avoid looking exactly like the child his words proved him to be. “It is simple, really. You’re thinking right now about how the presence of my men, the fact that we carry swords, and that I call myself threatening things are all threats in themselves. I know. Most men think as you do.” Muinn looked cuttingly at the High Chief, likely thinking he was being insulted. Maltimor shook his head with a raised hand; offered a kind of apology.
“I mean to say that it is a quality of men to know the measure of things around them. To know what is dangerous is to know how to survive in the world.” Maltimor paused to look meaningfully in Muinn’s eyes, disarming the boy a little. “It is a good trait. Proof you are growing up. Unlike certain others in this room.” A look past Muinn and toward Ratsic earned the High Chief a scoff from his son, but a smirk of validation from the headwoman’s boy.
“So, I was right, then,” Muinn said.
“Well,” Maltimor said. “You weren’t wrong. But you weren’t right either.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Sounds like you’re just saying things. Like you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth.”
Maltimor smirked and shook his head, taking the boy’s near shoulder in hand. He stood like a father, or perhaps an uncle, giving a lesson. “I used to feel the same way, when my father and brothers used to tell me such things. It all sounded like riddles. Like in those annoying parts of the stories, where the druids or wise mages always seemingly said two things at once and called it wisdom. A load of horse-shit, I’d call it.”
“Yeah,” Muinn said reluctantly. But Maltimor noted that he didn’t try nearly as hard as before to move the High Chief’s hand from his shoulder. “So, what? You calling yourself a druid?”
“Ha! Do I look like the spirits are my friends? How about the gods? This face of scars speak to you about good fortune?”
Muinn was quiet as his eyes looked over Maltimor’s better and better illuminated face in the growing forge light.
“No,” he said eventually, a kind of growing uneasiness creeping into the boy’s tone when he really got a look at the High Chief’s suddenly—and only momentarily—cold stare. “You’re as ugly as most of your men,” he tried to recover.
“Indeed I am,” Maltimor said flatly. “Yet here I am, with my men and your mother following my intent as easily as a mage might turn the wind.” He made a hand motion, imitating the breeze. He smirked and made his tone amiable again. “So how can that be, if what I say is true, and I have threatened no one? How could I have become what so many call me if all I did was talk from two sides of my mouth—like an old druid? There has to be something about me, right? There must be something about me that makes things the way they are.” He turned away from the boy and made like he was seriously pondering this apparent mystery. And, probably, without meaning to, the boy mirrored the behavior, turning his eyes down to try and piece things together.
“No need to think too hard, my boy. I’ve really already given the answer.”
“Huh?” Muinn looked up, now frustrated for a different reason than the presence of Maltimor and his ilk.
The minds of those so eager to grow up are so easily corralled, Maltimor mused. He often wondered if he had been the same when he was younger. But he knew the truth of that. Of course I was. Until I took my life as my own.
“Think about it. You’re obviously a smart kid, whatever your mother might think of you.” Maltimor paused to let that sink in, then continued. “Here, I’ll give you a hint: It is not me that gave me all those titles….”
Muinn looked to the men now starting to see the reward for their efforts in the building of the flames. Then he looked to Maltimor and, to the High Chief’s pleasant surprise, to his own hand of broken fingers.
“They follow you because…” Muinn’s face turned sour, realizing what his next words would imply about himself and about Maltimor. “Because they know you are dangerous. You don’t need to threaten. You are a threat.”
Maltimor slapped the boy in the back with an approving grin. “Exactly, my boy. Exactly.” He chuckled, his eyes closed in order to avoid revealing how slightly annoyed he was to have to explain. “I don’t have anything here, or in your village, to mark what’s mine. Yet everything moves as if it were being molded by my hands. It all moves as the wind from a storm, rabbits from falcons, or—” He stood taller to loom a little over Muinn as he noticed Galdaya hesitating to try and start firing the twisted ingot. She winced and continued on as Maltimor did with his lesson. “Or as smart young men like you might flee from monsters that break bones and wound pride.”
The weight of those words made Muinn’s shoulders sag and the shame of realized weakness made it so the boy could no longer meet the High Chief’s gaze.
“Don’t take it so personally, boy. It is the way of things for the weaker to fall before the strong. To bend and break in their hands. There is only ever the hunter and the hunted. And then those willing to bow to avoid being the latter. Today you were hunted. But the good news is that you have found a hunter greater still who is willing to help you salvage that pride your father and mother passed down to you.”
Muinn looked up at the High Chief, his face hard, but with the red in the firelight dancing on the wet in his eyes.
Nearly there, Maltimor growled in his mind, like a wolf hiding at the base of a lonely and barren tree, waiting for the cornered squirrel above to gather its courage. “My son was dragged away from the scene of where he should have remedied our mutual problem, earlier this night. But when I and my men passed through that place, that other hunter was gone. I’d like to correct that imbalance.”
“What can you do?” Muinn asked.
“It is what I will do, Muinn. The monster that hurt you and my own son is going to be punished. And if I can’t find him, then the parents that made him will pay for him.”
“Is that a threat?” The boy asked, no sarcasm in his voice. Instead there was genuine curiosity. Then came the haunting of a daydreamed want on his face.
I may not have had to try so hard, Maltimor thought.
“It is the way of things. What is mine has been damaged. And I am not a thing to be hunted. Sometimes the world has to be reminded of this. It can be almost as hard headed as my son.”
Ratsic snorted. Maltimor only gave him a look to silence him and set the man grumbling. Muinn slipped into thought, for his own part, and he and the High Chief lost some moments watching Galdaya fail to melt the ingot. Maltimor, not gifted with an mage’s Sight was fascinated by this effort in futility. He could swear the flames burned around the ingot’s twisted presence in the jade dome. It seemed no amount of enchantment could change the disposition of the fire or make melt the inky dark of the ingot.
Maltimor pursed his lips and grunted.
Just what am I supposed to do with this gift of yours, witch? The High Chief thought, thinking about how he might need to find a way to trap the oddly dark haired mage he’d so far allied himself with. Something to make her stop speaking in riddles, like those in the stories he’d just spoken about, and give him answers. But could I trust those answers, given how she kills for her magic. Is she even a mage? The woman had been a good advisor in several campaigns of war in the north. But she spoke only when she wanted. She gave council only when she deigned to appear before the High Chief. She was strong willed. She was a mystery. And only her having been one of many mercenary figures to start to appear before Maltimor, as he crushed chief after chief on the steppe, had saved her from suffering the full weight of the High Chief’s scrutiny.
…A problem for another time….
“See,” Muinn said. “My mother told you. It won’t melt. And I’ve heard how it won’t break from any hammer.” He breathed out a harsh sigh. “There are some things you can’t change. Can’t understand. Hunter or not.”
“Hmm. Well, that won’t do,” Maltimor said. And not just because he wanted the ingot shaped and wanted the once menacing magic it had had to be freed somehow. He also needed the boy—because he’d already been able to tell that the headwoman would break before telling him what he needed to know about his quarry. He needed Muinn to reveal where lived this skeletal monster-boy Ratsic had told him about.
Galdaya looked at the High Chief, a stern look of reluctant pleading on her face. Maltimor turned to the boy. Then he eyed the ingot’s twisted shape and had a thought.
“How did you warp it in the first place?” He asked, not caring if either the boy or his mother answered. He was already letting his eyes pointedly slide to the intricately designed hammer, in its altar like alcove.
“It takes more than are here to use it,” Galdaya said, preemptively. Muinn clicked his tongue.
“She means it takes one particular person to use it,” the boy said.
“You mean this monster of yours?” Maltimor asked, an eyebrow raised. Neither Galdaya nor Muinn answered that. But, like his other question, the High Chief hadn’t really been looking for an answer. He nodded to himself and began walking purposefully toward the hallowed hammer, his fists opening and closing like the talons of a falcon great enough to hunt men.
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Scene 2.2
Galdaya knew it was impossible. She knew it. Just like she had known the fire would leave the ingot cold.
He won’t be able to lift it, she thought, watching Maltimor march like a beast that had never met its equal. She was certain he was about to do just that—meet his match. Yet, the closer he got to the hammer, the more something shook in the headwoman. The more her certainty became less solid; more a ghost of itself in the face of someone that exuded so much more.
Like a pond washed away by the tidal force of an ocean, her self assurances about how Maltimor’s attempt would end disappeared. And then Galdaya was sure of nothing, except, by the snatches of the conversation she’d heard between the High Chief and her son, that Maltimor was after blood; after Macthal, Cadi, and poor Andin.
Galdaya looked over all the warriors who now stood with different tired versions of tempered awe at their master. She saw her son’s face join the turning of the others and grimaced. Then she cringed to look to her side, where the twisted ingot lay still and lifeless.
But is it lifeless? Or is it sleep? The questions came unbidden to the front of the headwoman’s mind. She hadn’t sensed the foul magic that Macthal had no doubt seen and seemed to have spoken to. But she’d felt her heart race, her blood chill, and her senses strain themselves as if she had been surrounded by killers in the dark of a deep night. She’d felt an instinctual fear unlike anything she’d ever felt before. Now her body was feeling echoes of that straining angst as if on reflex.
The fire still hadn’t melted it. The spirits were probably just as afraid as Macthal had said they’d seemed to be before. Afraid. Disgusted. Even now.
The ingot had been full of foul magic then.
…So it still must be, Galdaya’s intuition told her. The inky thing no longer burned cold to the touch. The odd scars it had left on the headwoman’s fingers didn’t tingle and itch. But the spirits still avoided it, all the same.
“The more I look at this, the more impressed I am,” Maltimor said, his tone for some reason not at all as impressed as he claimed. Galdaya tore her eyes from the ingot and took a few steps away from it, toward the High Chief. One of the warriors nearest her pressed a hand into her chest to stop her moving. She looked at him with with as much stern offense as she dared. The warrior only offered the barest smirk and looked down to where Galdaya held a pair iron tongs that could easily have become a club.
Galdaya frowned and moved the warrior’s arm, forcefully. Then, after bristling at the way he only blinked slowly at her, she turned to look again at the back of Maltimor.
“It’s supposed to have been made in the age of kings,” she said. “It took more than ten men to lift it when it was found again.” Yes, some insidious part of her whispered to herself. If you repeat what you know, maybe it’ll remain true.
“And the monster boy,” Maltimor said, arms crossed and his head tilting this way and that to look the hammer over from every angle. “He lifted it on his own, despite that bit of folklore?”
Galdaya felt herself frown more deeply, but it was Muinn that answered the High Chief’s polite dismissal of the headwoman’s warning.
“He isn’t normal,” Muinn said. Galdaya looked after her son. Why is there hope in your face? She didn’t understand, or didn’t want to understand how deep Muinn’s hatred had grown toward Macthal. “His mother’s a witch and I think—”
“Muinn!” Galdaya practically barked.
“What, ma? He’s going to need to know. Not that I expect him to be able to do anything about it.”
“What are you saying? Do you want to put them in danger? The people who’ve held this village together at the worst times?! There almost wouldn’t be one without them!”
Muinn looked down with clenched fists at his sides. “What about us, ma? We’ve worked. Da worked until he died, building this village’s reputation; earning the weight of our name.”
“Don’t go there with me, Muinn. Not again. Cadi—” Galdaya cut herself off, biting her lower lip for having said the good mage’s name aloud. A glance to Maltimor didn’t show that he’d taken particular notice, but he had to have heard. “She did her best for your father. Not everything can be fixed, once it’s broken.”
“Yeah,” Muinn muttered, fists shaking. “Well, I’m not looking for anything to be fixed.”
“Stop that,” Galdaya said. “You’re making your hand worse.”
“I don’t care!”
Galdaya’s throat seemed to close in on herself. She couldn’t break the silence that followed Muinn’s shout. Only one man in the room could break that quiet.
“It sounds like you care a lot, boy,” Maltiomor said, cooly. He looked sidelong at Muinn as the headwoman’s son looked at him, face red with anger in the still crackling firelight.
“What I do care about is how everything that should be mine was taken from me by some freak son of a witch and a wanna be hero.” Muinn forced himself to stand straight but seemed unable or unwilling to change the color of his face or the scowl seemingly etched there. “And I’m not stupid. You’re not going to just punish the freak and his family for what happened to your son.”
“I did call you smart, didn’t I?” Maltimor asked rhetorically.
“You’re going to want this village as your own.”
Maltimor was quiet at that.
“What you told me about why people follow you made me realize that. So, before the freak takes away even my own home, I want to make a deal.” Maltimor smiled at Muinn’s words. Galdaya felt her stomach sink and opened her mouth to intervene. The boy didn’t know what he was dealing with.
“Mui—” Her voice was cut short by Maltimor gesturing a cutting motion with one hand and a warrior grabbing her by the body and mouth in response. A second man had to help the first when Galdaya fought, but they ultimately had her trapped and silent, in a moment. Muinn had closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see his mother struggle, but he said nothing on her behalf.
“I don’t know if…if I want them dead,” Muinn admitted. Galdaya saw Maltimor frown at that, but the expression disappeared before Muinn opened his eyes again. “But this village was my family’s before it was theirs. And even if we have to be under your thumb, I want that back.”
“But,” Maltimor said.
“But, I’ve seen what Macthal can do. And I can imagine what a witch can do.”
“So you want me to prove myself,” Maltimor said, displeasure so ingrained in his tone that Galdaya felt her spine shiver. Muinn said nothing. He didn’t have to. He only had to stand his ground.
Why do you have to look so much like your stubborn father now?
Maltimor scratched under his chin, then he turned his eyes from Muinn and back to the hammer; to its runes and skeins of precious metals. He reached out and ran the back of his right hand along the grip and made a thoughtful sound.
“You know, I can understand how you feel, Muinn,” The High Chief said, his voice suddenly wistful and distant. “The me of today, of course, knows your feelings as an unpleasant memory; a reminder of why I am who I am. But reach far enough back and every bear was once a cub, every wolf a pup, and every falcon a chick. All of them were once things that could easily be crushed under club, under boot, or between finger and thumb.
“You didn’t know that you were weak, though, by the way you grimace now. From a young age you’ve known your place as a kind of prince in this little kingdom of farmers you claim to own now. But then a snake grew in your fields and, overtime, made itself known to you.” Maltimor paused and lashed out with his right hand to secure the hammer with a grip so firm that Galdaya heard his knuckles crack.
At first, nothing else happened. She heard the High Chief’s voice tense from obvious effort. She could swear she saw his back muscles bulge through his light armor, but the hammer didn’t move.
“Now, you thought yourself better than this snake. Like any man in the face of a real serpent, you felt that you stood over it and that, no matter how it grew, you would always have that position your birth allowed you. You’re the son of the village’s headman, apprentice to your mother, who is one of the greatest forge masters for leagues. How could a freak and the son of a—what did you say—witch and fake hero? How could someone like that be a threat to an heir?” Maltimor waited, as if for an answer. “Well, you’ve learned better haven’t you?”
Galdaya wanted to bite the man’s hand that was covering her mouth. She wanted to tell this ‘master of Savv’ to give up and stop embarrassing himself. She wanted to tell her son to wake up and stop this playing into the game Maltimor was manipulating him with.
Before you break something else that can’t be fixed.
Unfortunately, that was when there was a short crimson flash of light on the wall in front of Maltimor. It seemed to come from him and bathed the hammer and its alcove in a light not unlike that of blood splashed upon them both. Not a breath afterward and the headwoman felt her whole body tense to see the hammer shift.
“This monster of yours grew, like all snakes do and began to take bites out of your kingdom. It took your reputation under its shadow, probably took whatever maiden your virgin heart’s been pining for, and even took your mother’s approval.” Maltimor snorted to himself. “You’ve got nothing left now. Other than the knowledge that you are weak, that is.” The High Chief heaved on the hammer. There was another flash of crimson, followed by a flickering, less intense glow. Then the hammer was free, held aloft by Maltimor’s one hand and ready to do the man’s dark work.
Galdaya saw that Muinn had the same look of awe that she knew was on her own face, minus the dread that should have come with it.
“Hmm. Yes. I was like you,” Maltimor said with the widest, most savage grin Galdaya had ever seen on a man. He was lit by the fire and the hot glow of the rune on his medallion, the latter of which the headwoman was unsure how she could see lit at all. She wondered at how it was so powerful as to be as visible as Macthal’s silvered eyes in the dark.
Maltimor was terrifying. He looked like a creature from the Underlands. He was a devil with devilish plans and the devilish might to carry them out. The gods should have struck him down when he had been a cub—a chick in whatever foul nest he was born to. Galdaya knew that in her bones. Yet….
“I was like you once,” the man went on. “But I was like this monster of yours, also. I had everything taken from me when I was barely out of the womb, by the mothers of siblings jealous of me and the right to my father’s lands that I would have. Then I was left to grow and walk and be stepped on until I saw that I too could bite. Until I saw the truth of the world around me and chose to become that truth myself.”
The triumphant looking man made a motion with his hand and Galdaya was moved aside, further from the forge and the ingot. She struggled a little, but the animal part of her wanted to be as far away from the metal and what was about to happen as she could be. So, truly, it wasn’t a struggle at all.
Maltimor moved with slow steps down the stairs to the central forge’s pit and continued is self congratulatory lecture.
“One brother who cut me. One sister who stole from me. Two more that killed parts of me. And one eldest brother that recognized what I was too late. All of them this serpent before you ate, before I look my father’s life and all that was his into my hands.”
The hammer of Mu rose, still held in only one hand where Macthal had needed two. Then down it went, the silver face racing downward—the scraggly and sickly face of famine and war without justice, in the druid’s reckoning. It crashed into the twisted ore.
The fire of the forge went out. The ruby rune on Maltimor’s talisman died at the same time and Galdaya heard the hammer crash and clang to the ground.
She felt herself get dizzy, but she couldn’t make herself breath. She couldn’t make herself move. She was a deer in front of a hunter and she wasn’t even sure if the hunter was there anymore.
But then she felt her hand scars tingle in a wave. She felt her every sense strain, unable to touch what they all knew was now nearby once again, and she heard Maltimor start to laugh in the dark.
“Boy,” he said, his voice loud in the dark and somehow occupied silence. “Have I proven myself?”
“Y-yes,” Muinn said.
“Well?”
“Uh. They are named Cadi and Andin. They live outside the village, technically. On the edge of the forest…there’s a cottage. You can’t miss it, once you’re shown the path.
“Good. That confirms some things. Including the name of the Shepherd I’ve heard about. Funny that he’s the father of the boy, the snake of the village that bit my son.” Galdaya didn’t like how the man phrased that. But she still was being kept from speaking. There was the sound of metal being moved and cloth being wrapped—likely around the tainted ore. Then Maltimor said, “I will call this…Wyrmthfel.” He chuckled. “Slayer of snakes.”
“And our deal?” Muinn asked, confused. Galdaya cringed.
Maltimor chuckled again, though more grimly than before. The headwoman knew what the High Chief was going to say before he bothered to break her son’s foolish plans in the process.
“Did that snake of yours make a deal with you as it ate everything you had?”
“Wha—” That was all Muinn got out. Or at least that was all Galdaya had the chance to hear before she heard Ratsic’s laugh and felt something hit her in the back of the head.
After that, her only thought was: Son, what have you done?
Vault of Orendathos 