Chapter One: Words For Binding
-Narrated by Luke Silas Orimar
In my dreams, I’m always dying.
It’s not just a recurring nightmare. It’s a haunting, and it’s always different. I’ve been beheaded, drawn and quartered, hung, skewered, even blown apart. On the night that set all nights in motion, I saw myself being poisoned.
There were four of us sitting around a table. My younger siblings, Logen and Lorelai, and a man I couldn’t recognize. His face was blurry somehow, even though the rest of him looked perfectly normal. In the dream, there were four tall, slender silver cups on the table before the stranger. He held one out to Lorelai, and she drank it before I could stop her. The little girl’s face turned blurry, and she dropped dead instantly.
When he held out a second cup to Logen, I snatched it from his hands. Without knowing why I was doing what I was doing, I tipped it back to down it myself. The gleaming edge of the vessel seemed to grow upward, black liquid at the bottom suddenly as broad as an ocean. It swallowed me up, sending me tumbling into an endless sea of darkness.
I awoke with a thump on the floor, legs still up in my bed, awkwardly tangled in the covers. Sleepy and absentminded, I freed myself from the blanket and began to straighten out my bedclothes.
This dream was different. That change was all I could think about.
After six years, the pattern to my dreams had become pretty obvious. I was so used to the nightmares, they didn’t even bother me anymore. But tonight was different. I wasn’t the only one who’d died. I’d never seen anyone else come to even the slightest harm before.
The prospect of sleep was already unlikely, and by the time I laid down again, on top of my covers, it was even more remote. Today, assuming it was past midnight, would be my shield day, as well as my seventeenth birthday.
Every knight forges a weapon on his thirteenth birthday, when he begins advanced training. He’s given a shield on his seventeenth, when he becomes a full-fledged soldier. Your shield is made for you, by your instructors. A shield generally reflects the kind of man you’ve been, and how hard you’ve worked.
Today would be a terribly hard day. Most of the time, your parents attended your shield ceremony, but both of mine had been dead for a little over six years. Lorelai and Logen were all the family I had.
Giving up on sleep, I decided to go ahead and get up. I struck a match against one of my boots, lighting a candle on the bureau beside my bed.
It’s cold, I thought as I put my feet to the icy hardwood floor The notion interrupted my musings quite suddenly. It wasn’t just a little brisk, like any summer night. This was a deep and wintry chill, almost bitter
. In June? June in Tarn was never this cold, not in this part of the world anyway.
And then the horror struck me.
My sword was gone.
I put it in the same place every night, leaned up carefully against my bedside table where it was easy to reach. Call it a result of my training, or my cautious mind, but I had to have it ready. The empty scabbard was there, the blade gone. I picked up the sheath and turned it around in my hands, momentarily stunned.
It could only mean one thing. Someone had stolen it. A deep sense of dread came over me as I looked at that table. I was almost struck stupid by the lack. Who would do such a thing?
I snapped into action, bursting from my room out into the courtyard around which the barracks were arranged. My heart pounded heavily as I fumbled with the doorknob. Something was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it yet, but something was horribly wrong.
Before I could take in anything more than my breath misting in the cold night air, I found myself swept off my feet, bowled over by a little boy. I was about to curse at him, but I found I couldn’t recall his name, so I pushed him away impatiently and stood, putting my palms to the guardrail. My room was on the third and highest floor, so I should have had a pretty good view if the thief was still nearby.
Sure enough, I didn’t have to look for long.
Illuminated in harsh white moonlight a cloaked shadow stood just twenty feet below. Pinned by some mysterious force, my sister knelt before him. I made to scream, but the words died in my throat. As I watched helplessly, my blade flashed through the air and pierced her abdomen. Once again I tried to yell, but my throat was sealed, to where I could barely breathe.
Finally finding my legs, I raced down the nearest stairs, a choked off sob slipping from my lips. I leaped down the steps five at a time, and took the final flight in one go, nearly breaking my ankles. The murderous shadow was at the gate.
Escaping.
I had two options. I could go to my sister, or I could pursue him.
Yet there were no real options.
Nothing in me could run while my sister lay bleeding to death at my feet. A haze of panic still flooded my mind. I knew I should be calling for help before he got away, but still I seemed incapable of words. My feet crunching in the dry grass seemed to be the only sound. My sword lay a few feet off, abandoned now that the deed had been done. I dropped to the ground and took Lorelai in my arms, only then realizing I was still holding my scabbard. I let it fall to the ground. The spell seemed to vanish. Only a moan escaped my lips.
She was still breathing, I could feel her ribcage as I hugged her to me. Her hands guarded a wound that was gushing blood all over both of us. I gasped. It felt like I could only gawk while I lost this precious being, the one I’d sworn to protect above all else.
“Luke…” She murmured. I feebly attempted to occlude the massive wounds in her belly and back, but she moved in equally flimsy measures to stop me. Her voice nearly imperceptible, she began to whisper what sounded like nonsense.
“Between saltwater and cumulus cloud…
The ocean is rolled back into the sky…”
“Shhhh,” I whispered, trying to lay her down so I could better dress her lacerations. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Relax…” She fought me, clutching weakly to my wrists.
“The Void above the horizon swallows all light,
Death crossed the Void to strike…”
And then, just like that, as I stared into her eyes, they went flat. All the life within her vanished, like smoke escaping an open bottle. I wanted to close her eyelids, but as I reached to pull them down, rage overtook me.
Who could do such a thing?
Who could kill an innocent child?
What made it even worse, I was pretty certain I’d been framed. She’d died by my blade after all. There was no motive, not when I loved her the way I did, but there was also no evidence to support any other conclusion. Our barracks were supposed to be impenetrable. Dizzy with anger, the night seemed to press in on me, glaring through my skin. It suddenly became hot again. I rocked back on my heels and roared with such ferocity that my throat was instantly raw.
“I swear I’ll kill you!” As soon as I said the oath, I knew it was binding me. I could almost feel the air change as the words came out. I would kill this murderer no matter what it cost me. Even if I had to die, that beast would know vengeance, and he would know it on the sword he’d killed with.
The words had echoed off the walls. The commotion was sure to bring knights running. I realized belatedly the foolishness of what I’d done. If I hadn’t been framed before, I certainly was now. I had mere seconds to make an escape.
I swept up my blade and its scabbard and dashed for the gateway, hoping that whatever ill fortune had allowed him to come and go would allow me to escape as well. I didn’t even have the time to clean off my little sister’s blood, my clothes and sword stained with it. Hand over hand, I climbed the massive barracks gate as quickly as I could, once again nearly shattering my feet as I came down for a rough landing.
In the guard tower, just to the left, I could hear a man fumbling about. He sounded as though he’d just come out of some sort of stupor. Bathed in the milky moonlight, the world suddenly spilled out before me. No trace of the murderer lurked in the shadows. I realized I would be hunting blind for someone I’d never seen.
I’d made it twenty feet when an arrow found me, digging into my shoulder with a meaty
thwock sound
. I staggered, one hand touching grass wet with dew. Gritting my teeth, I reached up, broke off the tail of the arrow, and forced myself to keep running.
Pure adrenaline was the only thing keeping me on my feet now. Behind me, I could hear knights assembling. They would track me down and kill me outright. Murder wasn’t tried among the knights. The penalty was usually instantaneous unless there was strong circumstantial evidence. In an army as tightly wound as ours, there was no margin for error, no room for dissent or crime. I would be beheaded immediately, and everyone would go back to bed like nothing bad had ever happened.
And my little sister’s killer would go free.
A shiver rolled down my spine as I contemplated my own head rolling across the damp meadow grass. I sped up as best I could, till I felt I was running faster than I ever had in all my life. I tried to force myself to think on an escape plan, and to recall every detail I could about the killer, but all I could think about as I ran into the night was the life vanishing from Lorelai’s big, brown eyes.
