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Dayraven smiled. He pulled up his practice sword and stood. “And how long do you suppose you’d last?” He stepped toward Imharr and, with one eyebrow cocked, whispered, “Longer than your meeting with Elfleda last night?”
Memories were all little lies strung together to confer the impression that a life had a story with its own meaning, that it existed apart from the energy whence it came and whither it would return.
Life could be harsh and brief in the Mark, but the boy’s end made no sense. A senseless event in a senseless world. Fate was mysterious and mighty, and even the gods submitted to it.
“No, Guthere,” said Urd, “it was not the elf that stirred the pucas. You should ask the priest and his masters in Torrhelm about that. He knows why the beasts are angry. Don’t you, Bagsac? Tell them about the pucas and your war.”
As he followed the path upward, he wondered why the only people he had known since his birth, his own folk, so feared him. He wondered how his father would look at him as he stood in the ring, if he would know him.
“then to slay him would be to murder one of our own. A blood-crime of the worst sort — impossible to avenge or repay.”
He would never again sit around the fire pit exchanging stories with his friends and elders nor hearken to the shaper bringing to life one of the old tales with harp and voice.
Most of it is darkness. One day the darkness will swallow them all.
Never again. I’ll see it only in my memory.
I will rid myself of this. I will take my life back. I am Dayraven of the Mark, son of Edgil, and I will wed Ebba.
In many ways, if they were caught, the price would be much higher for her simply because she was a woman.
It’s the Way that’s to blame. Full of hypocrisy, fear, and rot.
“The Supreme Priest Bledla believes Heremod’s work is important.” But you don’t, do you? We both know Heremod is a sadistic monster. And Bledla’s fucking insane.
The innkeeper’s bushy eyebrows lowered over his eyes as if to warn that the wrong answer would see them turned out on the street. At the same time, his frown suggested he knew exactly what Imharr had been thinking about his daughter.
Now, let them think they’re virtuous for hating.
“I hear Dweorg women are as hairy-arsed as the men. Must be like fucking a goat!”
“Every funeral we have now is not only for the departed one. We last survivors mourn for our lost folk as well. It’s the little ones I feel for most. The children. What will their future be when they have no people?”
Focusing on the aglak, at once he grasped its being. Strong and proud, it was a lord of the fen. A predator to many, but a tender caretaker to its young. It delighted in dark, hidden places, grey mist, soothing mud, and slippery fish and eel. Earth and water were its ancient ancestors, and in its lineage was a special fear of one creature: the human. The human with its sharp, shiny sticks and its cruel flames.
But there was a much more immediate problem. By creating doubts in Bledla, Dayraven was a threat to everything the high priest had been working towards for so many years.
How ardently they needed to believe in something, something they could submit to. Was their delusion then willful? Perhaps.
Dreams die hard, especially those sown in our youth.
Courage, they all say. What’s courage? Fear of shame, said Captain Orvandil. Forgetting the fear of death. Forgetting oneself. A soldier must let go of his will, surrender to forces around him, or he’ll go mad, run away in terror. Never think in battle. A soldier must do, not think.
His eyes, bulging with knowledge of his end, stared into Dayraven’s. But he saw more than the soldier’s dark brown eyes. The Caergilese man’s essence and emotions leapt out as Dayraven’s energy inhabited him. Death. Horror of not being. One’s story cut short.
She regards me no more than she does any other man, or horse or tree for that matter. He was not certain why that bothered him. Perhaps her indifference and her reticence added to the attraction.
“I’d be proud to have you, yet I’d never ask it. We go to our doom, and you have a life outside Adanon.”
“But you’re still human. No matter how much you hide them, you have feelings.”
