Chapter Thirty-One. A Harvest of Sorrow.
Thirty-One
A Harvest of Sorrow.
When I wake up again, the morning has finally arrived.
All of the windows and doors leak threads of the dawn’s light, the closed shutters not nearly as tightly fit as I thought.
Merc and the horse are gone, but his pack and his leather surcoat are by the door next to the saddle, so I know he hasn’t left me.
Or at least … I can’t imagine he’d leave without so much of his gear.
Rubbing my eyes, I get to my feet and stretch, my bones realigning themselves in a series of pops and snaps.
As I look around, my face registers the subtle currents of the drafts in the room, and it feels good for my nose to be unfettered, my eyes to be unobstructed, my skin to feel the air, even with all the ash.
When I bring up my hand to brush some wisps of hair back, another part of the turban unwinds, and on reflex, I start to pull the length over my forehead and nose.
I stop myself. And tuck the soft fabric back into the twist from which it came.
Then I go for the door, following the path of footfalls in the soot made by Merc going in and out during the night.
With the early daylight coming in so many kinds of gaps, it’s impossible not to properly notice the overturned chairs, the dishes that are broken, the things that have been scattered around.
Whoever owns—or owned—this house left in a hurry, which is what one would do when a fire has broken out in your neighbors’ places and you want to save as much as you can of your things.
Even though I don’t know the people, I picture the merchants who traveled to my village, and pray they’re okay.
A gust of wind blows against the house, whistling through the seams, and making the shutters vibrate against their—
One of them rips open, and light pours in.
The massive blood splatter is to the left of the doorway, under the window.
Most of it’s on the floor, but there’s a splash up the wall that speckles the glass panes …
as if someone with many injuries was thrown there on a surge of great violence.
Most of the stain is brown, indicating that a number of days have passed since the incident, but what marks the window remains a brilliant, bracing red.
Fates, that was a tremendous amount of blood. And with a feeling of piercing dread, I pivot around—
My hand rises to my mouth and locks on. There’s another stain over by the hearth, big as a puddle in a lane after it’s rained for nearly a week.
Right where I’ve been sitting all night long.
With a feeling of foreboding, I walk over to the stairs to the second floor.
I fear what I’ll see up there, yet I can’t stop my feet as they mount the creaking, soot-dusted steps.
Rounding the rough-hewn bannister, I look across an open, raftered space that’s streaming with sunshine.
Another set of shutters has blown open …
so the rust-stained quilts on the tiny bed and even smaller crib are cruelly visible.
The parents were killed downstairs. The children up here.
Did they hear their mother and father fighting off the intruders? The breaking of furniture and the scattering of things down below?
Squeezing my eyes shut, I moan in the back of my throat, and my descent back down the stairs is a trip and fall that nearly lands me on my head. With a shuddering shamble, I bolt out the door—
The ruination from the fire overwhelms me.
In the shadows of the night, when I was worried about being ambushed, it was bad enough. But now the devastation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and all I can do is imagine the heat and the flames, the people and animals panicked and fleeing and burning alive …
Except that’s not the way it happened, was it.
And when I put it all together, I’m even more horrified.
Across the narrow lane, a beam of sunlight at a low angle rounds the corner of another house that’s managed to survive … and the brown marking on the stucco beside the door is highlighted as if something unseen is demanding I pay attention to the symbol.
The sloppy swirl was made in a counterclockwise direction, given where the brush ran out of blood. The drips that flow down from the design suggest it was done in a hurry, and I know, even before I pivot around, that the same marking is going to be beside the door I’ve just come out of.
It is.
As I turn to the lane we rode in on, and look at all the burned-out shells, I don’t need to inspect any of the other surviving structures to know that they’ve been marked with the symbol as well. It’s an S and a P, intertwined.
Salvation and Protection.
I’ve only ever heard about the dark-magic warning before.
Supposedly, it’s made with the blood of a goat or other cloven-hooved animal that’s slaughtered in a prescribed way.
What it means is that someone came through here, killed the farmers and their families, along with all the livestock, and then marked the little community as contaminated with evil.
And everything was burned to the ground because when they stacked the bodies and doused them with the same oil used in the lamps in Mr. Lewis’s pub … the fire was so hot, so intense, so big, that it spread throughout the buildings.
The goal was to incinerate the people’s remains, not the houses.
“Merc…?” As I call out, it feels as though I am forever saying his name in that pleading tone of voice. “Where are you?”
I have to find him. I cannot be alone in all of this revelation, though surely he knows what’s transpired here, too.
Assuming he hasn’t left me.
As I set to walking, ash squeaks under the soles of my slipper shoes, and the smell of faded smoke and dead bodies becomes all that I know, the noxious combination staining the insides of my nose and dripping down the back of my throat.
Falling into a run in spite of how stiff I am, I try to outpace the stench.
And then I don’t think any more about it … or anything else.
I pass by the final two houses and a long view to northwest unfurls before me. But instead of the fenced-in grazing pasture and then the outer rolling farm fields, it is the lone figure standing in the midst of the grass that draws all my attention.
Merc has his back to me. His black hair is waving in the wind that blows into him, and he’s bathed in the golden light of the dawning sun, the broadsword in his hand glinting silver.
Beside him, our horse is cropping great yanks of green blades, tethered by a lead line looped around his chestnut neck.
I’m tempted to call Merc’s name, but something chokes the syllable in my throat.
I’ve never seen the man so still, and I worry he’s spotted something dangerous off in the distance.
I scan the horizon, all the way to the slopes of the snowcapped mountains to our west. The sheer breadth of the vista is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and a sense of vertigo threatens to upend my balance.
There is nothing moving in the landscape. Nothing coming at him … or me.
Meanwhile, he just continues to stay planted there like a statue, his focus unwavering, that eerie lack of motion making me wonder if he’s noted the symbols by the doors, knows what they mean—and is disturbed by where we’ve had to rest the night.
Yet that makes little sense. He’s a mercenary who’s traveled anywhere and everywhere to maim or kill on behalf of whoever can pay him most. He has seen such violence before, in one form or another.
May have even committed it from time to time.
As moments pass and dread curdles my gut, I figure I should leave him be. But I should know better than to think I can be sensible when it comes to the man. Unable to stop myself, I step through a fence’s open gate and proceed into a pasture that’s intersected by a sluggish stream.
He doesn’t turn toward me. Not even as I surmount the rounded back of a rickety bridge, my steps causing creaks as I cross the crystal-clear water.
The horse hears my approach, however, and cranes his neck around for a brief, disinterested glance—before he resumes his vigorous munching with a nicker.
And still Merc doesn’t seem to notice I’m here.
Pausing to look around again, all I see between us and the mountains are fields planted with crops that were not harvested before the first frost that hit this territory mere nights before, the gourds and melons bruised and browned out, the leaves shriveled up—
Merc drops the lead and starts walking away, as if in a trance.
When he gets to the two-rail fence that contains the farming plot, he sheathes his broadsword, ducks through, and continues over to the first of the planted rows.
Crouching down, he pushes his hand into the dark soil.
As clumps fall through his fingers, his head rises again to the distance.
Wherever he’s gone in his mind, it’s not for the company of others to witness. And because of this, I cannot turn away. I circle to the right, until I catch sight of his profile—
The anguish on his face carves new features into the planes and angles I’ve become so familiar with. He seems twice his age now, and exhausted to the point of illness. Instead of bending down by choice, he appears crushed by burdens so heavy, even he can no longer bear their weight.
A single tear trembles at the corner of his scarred eye, tangling in his long black lashes.
And I’m wrong. His gaze isn’t on the horizon.
It’s on the crops. He’s staring at the cultivated rows of plants, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say he was regretting the loss as if he were the farmer who had nurtured it all—
The tear makes its escape and travels the slope of his cheek into the hollow underneath his hard jaw. He doesn’t brush it away, even as it slips down the side of his throat. He doesn’t seem to notice he’s crying any more than he does me or the horse.
The image of him staring out with such yearning over that which had been carefully tilled and tended should have been touching.
Except he’s not a farmer. He’s dressed for war.
And those plants have borne food that is now inedible because the people who should have harvested and consumed the vegetables are all dead.
So it’s a scene of sorrow and loss, a cautionary visual of what happens when violence enters a community.
“What ails you,” I say softly.
Merc wheels around, and for once, his hands don’t go for his weapons and he makes no aggressive response. He puts his arms up defensively, bracing for blows, and in the process, falls backward into one of the rows, crushing the shriveled leaves and rotten vegetables.
As he shrinks away from me, I almost meet his eyes—and for once, it’s not what I don’t want to know about a person that saves me. I want to afford him some privacy.
But it’s too late for that, isn’t it.
“I’m sorry.” I fan out my hands, and try to look unthreatening. Not much of a stretch, really. “I’m … I was just worried about you.”
All he does is stare over at me, like his mind is fighting the reality that’s just intruded on wherever he was.
Later, much, much later, I will reflect that this is where I started to fall in love with him.
At the moment, I’m too concerned to think much about what I’m feeling.
All I know with surety is I have suddenly seen that he and I have something in common: Underneath my cloak and his strength, we are not as dissimilar as I thought.
He, too, suffers in his own way.
“What are you doing here.” Merc’s voice cracks and now he scrubs at his face like he’s trying to get feeling back in it. “Why are you—”
“I saw that the horse was gone.”
“And you thought Julion is right about me and I took off.”
His head turns toward the field once more. When he doesn’t say anything, and makes no moves to get to his feet, I take a few steps in his direction.
“Talk to me, Merc.” As a strand of white hair waves into my face, I pull it away with impatience. “How can I help you.”
It’s a while before he answers: “I was a farmer, once.” He digs his hand into the soil again and clenches another fist full of the rich, dark crumble. “Before … I became something else.”
“You don’t have to live and die by the purchased sword.” There’s no response to that, so I press, “Can you not return to the north? Surely there is vacant land in the place I know you love. I heard the longing in your voice when you spoke of the mountains and the trees there.”
His reply, when it eventually comes, is low and carries a kind of defeat that I do not associate with his strength: “You know nothing of me.”
“You’re wrong.” When he shakes his head, I counter, “I’ve only been able to survive as I have by judging the people around me, especially the men. And you can decide where you go and what you do, more so than most people.”
“There is no going back for me.”
I think about what he said to me in the tunnel. “Then make a different forward.”
“I can’t.”
“Why.”
“Because of you.” He casts the soil aside, surges to his feet, and impatiently brushes his palm off on the seat of his britches. “I’ll meet you back at the house. We leave soonest, but the horse needs to eat more.”
Maybe that’s true. That’s not why he wants to stay out here alone, though.
“All right.”
While I turn away, his vacant expression as he looks toward the horizon haunts me, the kind of thing I know I will never forget.
Both of our veils have dropped.
But only one of us is prepared to acknowledge this.