Fatemarked Origins Volume II
Short Stories from the Four Kingdoms
David Estes
Copyright 2017 David Estes
Kindle Edition, License Notes
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For the questioners and the e-mailers and the book discussers.
Map of the Four Kingdoms- Circa 532
1: Bear Blackboots
2: The Beggar
3: Heinrich Gäric
4: Shanti Parthena Laude
5: Viper Sandes
Acknowledgments
A sample of SOULMARKED, Book 3 in the Fatemarked Epic by David Estes
Map of the Four Kingdoms- Circa 532
To view a downloadable map online: http://davidestesbooks.blogspot.com/p/fatemarked-map-of-four-kingdoms.html
1: Bear Blackboots
The Northern Kingdom- Circa 352
Back then, he wasn’t known as Bear Blackboots. Back then, he was just Henry, a boy of sixteen, undersized for his age, timid and quick to tears.
On this night, the tears wouldn’t stop falling, a waterfall of despair, streaking his pale cheeks so smooth he might’ve been a boy only ten name days old.
His mother had been sentenced to die. And die she would, on the morrow, burned to ash by fire as western law required for condemned sorceresses.
The thought drew a fresh wave of tears from his eyes, blinding him as he stumbled along the dark, stony corridor.
She is all I have. What will I do?
“Hurry up, boy,” the dungeon master growled, shoving Henry from behind. He tripped, almost falling, but managed to steady himself with a hand on the rough wall. Heat washed over him; he’d almost plunged headlong into a torch. He squinted and jerked away, the thought of fire on skin bringing bile to his throat.
I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to see her, I just want to go home…
It was too late. He was already here, manhandled to the front of the cage holding her. They called her the Black Witch. They called her the Western Oracle. They called her Evil Incarnate. Once, she had been known as the first of the Three Furies, a Wrath-loving woman who advised the king on spiritual matters. Henry knew her only as Mother, the woman who kept him safe, who fed and clothed him, who comforted him when he awoke sweating and screaming, in the throes of one of his night terrors.
“Dear Henry,” his mother said now. Her dark hair was unwashed and greasy, hanging in listless curls to her shoulders. Her eyes were a rich brown, flecked with forest green. She wore a dirty brown dress. The dress she would die in.
(Already, the other Furies and their followers, the furia, had adopted the practice of dying their own hair red to distance themselves from their condemned leader.)
Her long spindly fingers reached through the bars, trying to touch Henry, to wipe away his tears. Even as a prisoner, she thought it her job to comfort him.
“Mother, no,” Henry said, shaking his head. However, his actions belied his words, and he fell into her arms, letting her cradle his head in the crook of her shoulder and chest.
“Hush, sweetness, for the night carries a weight of its own enough for all of us.”
Her words, as always, felt like a wash of warm breeze on his skin, melting through him, calming his heartbeat and nerves. She was doing it again, using something unnatural, something that went against the Laws of Wrath, to make him feel…right.
Nothing was right.
He wrenched himself back, tearing his small-framed body from her grasp. His feet tangled together and he tumbled backwards onto his rear, the stone rough and cold through his baggy trousers.
“Henry,” his mother cooed. “You fear me too?”
He bit back tears, swallowing hard. “Never, Mother, I could never.”
“Come here.” Once more she held out her arms.
He wanted to. Wrath, how he wanted to.
“I can’t,” he whispered, the words seeming to rip out his breath as they escaped his lips. He felt empty inside. Numb.
“Henry?”
He looked down, inspecting his feet, those narrow, short boots that were small enough to fit a child. Two years earlier, his mother had had them custom made for him by the best bootmaker in the realm, a man named Vaughn. Henry still hadn’t outgrown them, a fact he was teased about mercilessly by the other boys his age.
“Touch my hand, Henry,” his mother said, and this time it was a command. No, he thought, not a command, not exactly.
A spell.
He began moving forward, marveling at his mother’s power. Who can cast a spell with naught by a few words? And if she can, why doesn’t she save herself, melt down the bars, break through the walls? Perhaps the Furies are right. Perhaps my mother is too dangerous to live.
He hated himself for thinking it.
Of its own accord, his hand reached out to meet hers. He stared at it, willing it back, but his body was no longer his own. Her fingers were surprisingly warm as they threaded through his.
This was what she had become. It had all started when they’d gone on a journey south, beyond Phanes and Calyp, sailing across the Burning Sea, all the way to Teragon. “A journey of revelation,” his mother had called it.
She’d never been the same since.
“Henry,” she said, her eyes pouring into him, as if they were liquid copper, seeming to fill his entire field of vision. “I need you to gather my notes, my prophecies, to hide them across the kingdoms. They shall not be found until their appointed time.”
He wanted to speak, to say all the things he’d been feeling, to release his anguish, his fear, his desperation, but his mouth was sealed shut. Again, his dark thoughts about his mother returned. No one should have that kind of power, should they?
Not that it mattered—he knew he would obey, as he always had.
His mother’s eyes rolled back into her head.
He wanted to look away—please look away—but couldn’t, his eyes tethered to hers by a force he knew he might never understand.
She spoke, the timbre of her voice deepening, like someone else was communicating through her:
“Their hearts will fail, their lives will end,
But yours will last, it will extend,
Beyond all measure, on land or sea,
From skin to skin, from teeth to teeth.”
The dungeon master growled something unintelligible, stepping forward. On the edge of Henry’s vision, he saw the man freeze. The hunched prison keeper strained to push forward, but an invisible force held him back.
She is doing it. Does she control us all?
His mother continued speaking, the second stanza of what was sounding more and more like one of her poems, her prophecies.
“Fang of wolf and fur of bear,
To warm, to change, to save, to tear,
A climb to the mount, a jaunt through the wood,
Their fates will be yours, to help them is good.”
With a swiftness that took Henry’s breath away, his mother’s eyes rolled forward once more. She blinked. Whatever force held him to her was gone, and yet he refused to pull back, to let go.
Like so many of her other words, Henry didn’t know what these ones meant.
All he knew was that something had ch
anged forever. He could feel it in his bones, in the beat of his heart, in the breaths pulling themselves in and out of his lungs. He could feel it in the silence and in the growl of the dungeon master as he was released.
“Enough!” he snapped. “Your time is up.”
Henry clung to his mother, forcing the man to pry his fingers away one by one.
“Mother?” he said as he was dragged away. “Mother?”
She said nothing, watching him go.
And then she was out of sight.
Three years earlier
When Henry and his mother had departed on their journey south to Teragon, he had been excited. No, more than excited. He was going to see the world! He’d loved seeing the jealousy on the faces of his tormentors, the obnoxious youth of Knight’s End who built themselves up by tearing him down. Most of them would never leave Knight’s End, much less go on a real voyage across a real sea. Their jealousy had grown even greater when they’d learned Henry and his mother were departing with the king’s full blessing.
And, for a while, the experience had been everything Henry had hoped it would be. Riding in a horse drawn carriage along the Western Road, stopping in famed wayvillages like Restor, teeming with travelers, merchants, and outlaws; hiring seats with a floating barge company that roamed the Spear, riding the currents all the way to the ocean; boarding a large merchant ship and riding the tumultuous waves over the Burning Sea…it had all been so wondrous that Henry hadn’t even minded the seasickness.
Now Henry wished he’d never left home.
At first, Teragon’s capital city, Shi, hadn’t been so bad, its red-skinned, copper-haired people welcoming, clamoring around Henry and his mother everywhere they went. The Teran men wore their hair long, occasionally braided down their backs, while the women’s hair was shorn short, sometimes all the way to their scalps. In their own way, they were a beautiful people. The sights were beautiful, too, their dwellings resembling arrowheads, constructed of timber and rope, thatched with large frond leaves. Everything was new. The food, a contradictory mixture of spicy and sweet, was delicious. Their rituals, which involved little clothing and seductive dances, made Henry blush, all the more so because his mother sat right beside him. And yet he’d loved every minute.
Everything changed when his mother got down to business, her true purpose for the journey—revelation, as she’d said.
She met with a man. His name was Carona, and he was Teragon’s equivalent of a Fury, a holy man. Though the Teran people knew nothing of Wrath, their god, Absence, was known to speak to Carona from time to time.
Henry was not permitted to attend his mother’s meetings.
When she returned each day, there was something different about her, something foreign. Though she looked exactly the same, her hair and eyes the same color, her skin the same shade, there was no mistaking the changes. She spoke differently, for one, her words charged with something Henry couldn’t quite describe. When she spoke, it was like he couldn’t not listen, like she held some power over him.
She felt almost like a stranger.
He didn’t like the way it made him feel, but she was still his mother, his only friend, and he ignored the feelings, doing his best to remember that she was the same woman.
It got worse.
The first time he awoke in the middle of the night to find her on her knees, swaying side to side, murmuring indecipherable words under her breath, he was so scared he hid under the covers and pretended he was back in Knight’s End.
The second time he tried to wake her, only to find her eyes rolled back in her head. He ran back to bed and, once more, dove under the covers.
The third time, he sat beside her, closed his eyes, and listened.
Her words sent chills down his spine. She spoke of another war in the Four Kingdoms, one that would tear the realm apart for more than a hundred years. She spoke of corpses, of cities running red with blood, of wild beasts tearing soldiers limb from limb. She spoke of death and destruction and the end of the world.
The next day, Henry asked his mother how she knew these things.
Her eyes widened. She didn’t even know she’d spoken of them, a thought that scared Henry more than anything. “It’s working,” she said. “Carona’s god holds great power, and he bestows a portion on me.”
Henry didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but before he could ask, his mother instructed him to write down everything she said the next time it happened.
Henry did, sitting beside her in the firelight with quill and parchment, writing furiously so he didn’t miss anything. It helped, the writing. It was something to focus on, rather than the meaning of her words.
In the morning, she read over his notes, nodding and murmuring and adding notations in the margins. “War is coming,” she said, when she’d finished.
Henry shook his head. “Mother, there is peace. Can’t you see it? We would not be here otherwise.” It was true. None of the Southroners had accosted them at the southern border. Trade between the four kingdoms was flowing like the waters of the Spear. The rulers of each realm were content with the land and wealth they had. War was a thing of the past.
“It has already started,” she said, ignoring him.
Henry knew there was no arguing with his mother, and anyway, what was the harm? She could think what she wanted—it wouldn’t change reality.
“There has to be a way to stop it,” she said, pouring back over her notes. Henry watched her for a while, but it was as if he no longer existed, naught but a ghost. Finally, realizing she didn’t need or want his input, he left, wandering aimlessly through the village.
Well, not so aimlessly, perhaps, as eventually he found himself outside of Carona’s holy circle of huts, the temple. In the center of the circle was a wide hole in the ground. Henry approached it, peeking over the edge.
Nothingness poured from the space, a blackness so complete it seemed to suck the light from the air around it. Henry stumbled back, suddenly scared of falling to his death. After a few moments spent gathering his nerve, he scooped up a rock and moved toward the hole once more. He reached over the edge and dropped the stone, craning his ear and listening. Seconds passed. Then minutes. Then hours, the sun sinking to the horizon, spilling fingers of red ink across the orange sky. Still he listened, desperate to hear something. The plop of the stone hitting water. The clink of the rock bouncing off the bottom. Something. Anything.
Instead, the only sound was wind whistling through the circle of huts.
And then a voice: “Absence.”
Henry rolled over, spinning around—
One leg slipped over the edge of the hole and a portion of the ground cracked under his weight, tumbling away—
The earth seemed to pull at him, the depths of nothingness like a giant hand grabbing his ankles and yanking—
He was falling.
He was dead.
No, worse than dead, Henry thought, his mind racing. He would never land, falling forever and ever through utter darkness, until his stomach closed in on itself from lack of food, until his body shook and trembled from thirst, until his heart stopped beating in his chest.
Even after he died, he knew, his corpse would continue its endless descent.
Whoosh! His fall reversed course as a strong hand grabbed his shirt and flung him upwards, tossing him back onto solid ground, where he landed with a thud that pounded the breath out of him. Carona, the priest, stood over him. His skin no longer looked bright red, darkening to deep crimson as night fell. His long, coppery hair was tied in three places, a long rope that twisted over his shoulder, angled across his chest. “You must be careful around Absence. She is an unforgiving god.”
Henry struggled to breathe and talk at the same time. “What…have you…done…to my mother?”
The man cocked his head to the side. His skin was so smooth it could have been marble. “Done to her? Nothing, youngling. I have simply opened a path that was hidden from her. She has chosen to go down it.
Or perhaps the path has chosen her. Either way, she is destined for great things. She has the favor of two gods now, which is two more than most can claim.”
Henry sat up, his breaths coming easier now. “She’s becoming paranoid. She’s rambling at night.”
Though the man tried to hide his surprise, Henry saw the slight twitch of his cheek. “What does she say?”
“I don’t know,” Henry lied. His mother could tell Carona if she wished to.
“Mmm,” the man mused. “Perhaps she is ready for the Words.”
“What words?”
“They are not meant for your ears, youngling. Now go, your mother needs you.”
Henry stood and started to leave, but then stopped. “Does the hole have a bottom?”
“Absence has no bounds, no beginning nor end. It is and it isn’t. It takes away but only after giving in equal portion.”
Henry struggled to make sense of the man’s words. “So don’t fall in?” he said.
“Don’t fall in.”
Henry returned to his mother, who had set aside Henry’s notes and was preparing dinner like it was any other day. She didn’t ask Henry about his day, and he didn’t tell her what had transpired.
Three years later
Thinking about their journey to Teragon three years earlier, Henry felt like his entire existence had been dictated by his mother’s decisions. Until now, that had never really bothered him, even if he sometimes felt scared by what his mother did. But now he was angry. As he watched her being tied to the pyre amidst a barrage of jeers and thrown fruit, he wished he was stronger, more capable, a master of his destiny rather than a follower of hers.
He wished he could save her.
Is it too late?
Even in her last words to him, she hadn’t given him a choice. She’d fallen back into prophecy or sorcery, or something in between—he wasn’t certain. And, he knew, as she took her last breaths, she would expect him to search her words for meaning, to carry on her life’s work, no matter what the cost to his own.