6. Penny
Penny
I woke on a leather sofa, buried in furs I had to dig out of to roll over and retch. Sweat slicked my body as I strained with powerful, strangling gags.
Tears made the room around me a watery blur as I struggled to orient myself. Beside the puddle of booze and bile sat a wooden bucket, completely missed. I grimaced as pain bounced between my temples, adding to the full-body aches of having spent the night scrunched in a ball.
I kept blinking until the fixtures around me became clear.
Embers smoldered in a fireplace flanked by towering bookcases.
Further down the wall, curtains were drawn tight over a large window with an armchair facing it.
And in front of me, a cluttered coffee table offered a mug of water I presumed to be mine.
Reaching for the drink rolled me off the couch where I knocked over the bucket and barely avoided landing in my own vomit.
I stayed on all fours, and my head swam as I raised it slowly.
Half a dozen books filled the coffee table, all in various states of decay.
Some were open, one on top of the other, and others were dotted with bookmarks and dog-eared pages.
I worked my way to sitting with my back against the sofa and grabbed the mug. Despite my desperate thirst, I nursed it, fearing my stomach might rebel and begin another unstoppable purge.
Memories from the previous night slowly filtered in.
Kit agreed to help. Either out of pity or an attempt to pacify me, I accepted it either way.
Whether he offered the map I had requested or a guided tour into the depths of the abyss itself, I would thank him for it.
Returning home with my father’s body and laying him to rest would make any effort worthwhile.
Only after I’d emptied the mug and set it aside did I reach for the nearest book.
We had a modest library at home, and I’d always enjoyed reading.
I wondered what sorts of subjects interested the reclusive Kit Mosel as I slid the tome off the table and into my lap.
Despite the headache pounding, I squinted at the scrawled text.
Handwritten words with dates over a decade past topped each page. It was a journal. One of Kit’s, maybe?
I glanced at the leather-bound books strewn across the table. As a writer, he was quite prolific. My eyes remained bleary from the previous night’s drink, so I had to strain to discern one word from the next. When I finally began reading, I did so slowly.
It is such a small thing, the entry began, to wear the mark of Eeus…
Before I could get further, the tome was snatched from my grasp and held aloft. My eyes went wide as they traveled up feet, legs, and chest to the face of my host, finding it as full of irritation as ever.
“You’re nothing if not predictable.” Kit looked me over before his gaze landed on the regurgitated ale soaking into the tapestry rug. He sighed. “And skilled, I must say, at doing everything wrong.”
I’d told him already he reminded me of my brother, and it was Merrick’s voice I heard now.
“Did you write these?” I gestured to the books littering the tabletop.
Kit’s stubbled cheeks washed pale. He swayed back, holding the journal he’d plucked from my grasp. “Why would you think…?” He looked down at it, then shook his head. “How much did you see?”
“Only the first line.”
Flipping open the cracked leather cover, Kit peered inside and skimmed the words. His lip curled. “I suppose I already said I’d tell you. Let you prepare yourself.” He dropped the book unceremoniously into my lap.
Dodging the puddle of puke, Kit sat on the sofa beside me. He reached over and opened the journal with a flick of one finger. “Go ahead, if it interests you.”
I squinted at the weathered parchment while rubbing my throbbing temple. “What is it?”
“A journal written by a member of the Bone Men. It details the first of the Oaths of initiation.” He tapped the page.
The words were written in a narrow, flowing script, annotated with sketches and symbols. The right-hand page was taken up entirely by a well-rendered drawing of a human spine curved like a serpent with the tailbone as its head and rib bones for wings.
“Oaths of initiation?” I echoed. “How many are there?”
“Seven.” Kit indicated the serpent made of bone. “This is the first.” He sat back, and I tracked his hand as it moved to undo the first few buttons of his shirt.
My breath caught as he tugged the left side of it open.
The exposed expanse of his chest made for a pleasant view, and I didn’t mind the tattoo, either.
A sprawling design in multicolor, it was a fiery bird with massive wings and a feathered tail, staining his skin from his shoulder to halfway down his ribs.
But the ink had texture. More than the curves and dips of Kit’s torso, it looked almost bumpy. It took longer than it should have for me to connect the skeletal drawing in the book to the mark branded onto Kit’s skin.
I hissed a breath and curled my hands, stretching the scarred flesh.
I glanced at the drawing of the bone serpent, then at Kit’s marred chest. Suddenly, it made sense why he didn’t remove his shirt when working in the forge. No doubt he would rather endure the heat than risk arrest or the judgment of any passerby who recognized Eeus’s mark.
My horror must have been plain on my face because Kit continued in a level tone. “The Oaths needn’t concern you. They’re reserved for the most zealous members, those interested in pursuing positions of leadership.”
“So, you were a leader there?” I asked, trying to reset my expression to neutral.
He shook his head, pulling his shirt closed and refastening the buttons. “This is the only Oath I completed. I never intended to complete the rest, but it seems my plans have changed.”
“Why?” I asked.
Kit shot me a sideways glance. “Hmm?”
“Why change your plans? This is my burden,” I explained. “You needn’t have a part in it.”
He pondered for a moment before replying. “They stole from me, too. It’s nothing I can get back but, if I can help you…” His head bobbed in a slow nod. “Maybe I’ll finally have some peace. ”
The journal lay open in my lap, its pages lined with endless words. Rites, and brands, and body stealing swirled through my ale-addled brain… It was overwhelming.
But I couldn’t turn back now. I owed this to my mother. To Sayla. Even to Merrick. I owed it to myself. To prove that I could do something right for a change. That I was capable of more than walking mindlessly behind a plow for the rest of my life.
“What’s the second Oath?” I asked.
Kit expelled a long breath. “A sacrifice of bones.” The vague phrasing clearly meant something to him, but I was puzzled until he elaborated. “A body. Like your father’s.”
The thought stalled me. “You think someone took my father for their initiation rites?”
He nodded. “The Bone Men are always looking for tributes to Eeus. Any they can find, and they were sparse thirteen years ago. Must be damn near impossible to find one now.”
I swallowed, tasting acid in the back of my throat. “What about the third Oath?”
Kit sighed and plucked the book from my grasp.
“On second thought, perhaps you are better left with questions than answers. No sense getting stirred up about an unlikely future.” Standing, he tossed the tome onto the coffee table where it landed with a heavy thud.
“Wash up. I’ll make coffee and get something to clean that.
” His parting nod at the vomit on the rug made me blush.
Sounds from the kitchen filled the void of Kit’s absence. Leaning forward, I peered around the doorframe to watch him fill a metal pitcher at the sink.
Only a handful of seconds passed before my attention fell to the journals.
Pitching farther forward on the sagging sofa cushions made my stomach lurch, and I stilled, swallowing carefully before grabbing the book and resting it atop my thighs.
I opened the crusty leather cover and flipped to the page where I’d left off.
It is such a small thing to wear the mark of Eeus, to have his image burned into my flesh.
The pain reminds me that to live for Eeus is to live a life of suffering.
We have become so overcome with decadence and greed that we have forgotten that the basis of existence is adversity.
There is no life without death, no light without darkness.
The scales of this world have been tipped too long and too far in the direction of abundance.
We have forgotten the humility and humanity that times of scarcity bring.
I will not allow Kit to grow in a world that hides him away from pain. No son of mine will be spared the suffering that forges a boy into a man.
Son?
Then this wasn’t Kit’s journal, but his father’s.
I read the last line again.
No son of mine will be spared the suffering that forges a boy into a man.
My parents never spared me from the consequences of my actions. Experience was, after all, the best teacher. I’d learned plenty from broken arms and bruised knees, but somehow, I doubted that was the kind of pain Kit’s father had in mind.
The smell of coffee brewing wafted to my nose as I resumed reading.
I will not allow the rot and decay of abundance to taint him.
He will grow into a man who knows full well the struggle and pain that make life worth living.
With any luck, Eeus will be walking this plane again before he grows old enough to have sons of his own.
If only my wife might have seen us then…
But her death is what brought me back to the darkness and out of the light.
Her death is what reminded me that, without pain, there can be no pleasure. Without death, there can be no life .
Kit, the son of a Bone Man. Kit, whose father wished him pain and scarcity in the name of a depraved god.
Kit, who lost his mother.
Sorrow hung heavily over me as I read on.
All is as Eeus wills it. We will meet again when I take my last breath, and we will spend eternity together in the fields of the afterlife. We will be heroes known throughout the land, the faithful followers of the almighty Eeus, the Great Equalizer, the Balancer. All will bow before us.
I jerked in surprise when Kit set a steaming mug of coffee in front of me.
“I thought I told you to wash up.” He dropped a towel to cover the vomit on the rug.
“He was your father.” It felt more profound than it sounded out loud.
As Kit settled onto the sofa, breath eased out of him like the air seeping from the cushion seams. “He was a lot of things,” he muttered.
I took the coffee for a sip and found it scalding. Muscling through a painful swallow, I set the mug back in a bare spot on the table.
“What happened to him?” I asked in the silence. “Your father?”
“He died.” Kit held his own cup with both hands, staring into the dark liquid.
My lips pulled in a frown. “I’m sorry.”
He grunted and shifted in his seat. “Don’t be. I’m not.”
My gaze dropped to the next page of the journal, but I hesitated to read on under Kit’s watchful eye.
“Go on.” He nodded at the book. “But I won’t be held to blame if you give yourself nightmares.”
I swallowed again and forced my eyes to focus on the text. It was a mammoth work. Daily logs stretched over months. Glancing at the coffee table again found the other, similar volumes piled up. It must have been years’ worth of documentation.
“How long ago did your father pass?” Kit asked after a few moments of quiet.
The question prickled my skin. I hadn’t gotten used to it yet.
In the flurry of the death, the burial, the shock of the stolen body…
I’d had many excuses not to think about the loss that drove me here.
Unlike Kit, I had always been fond of my father.
He was a constant, steady presence, who taught and guided with patient hands.
As a walking hazard to our quiet farm life, I needed more than my share of that patience.
My brother, Merrick—ten years my elder—was far less forgiving.
Sniping, cynical, and ever ready to deliver reprimand, he took pleasure in marching me before our parents to be scolded for my latest slight.
When Father laughed off my shortcomings, Merrick administered the punishment himself.
In my younger years, he exacted discipline with a switch.
As we both grew, he found he could wound me more effectively with his words.
“It’s been three weeks,” I said as though solidifying the fact in my mind. “But he’d been ill a long time before that.”
My father suffered from a wasting sort of sickness.
The kind of infirmity that took everything else from him before it finally claimed his life.
He fought it for a year until he fell in the pasture while bringing in the sheep I’d left out.
After that, he never got up again, bedfast and withering before our eyes until, one day, he was gone.
Kit hummed a soft sound. “Still fresh, then.”
The body or the grief?
I didn’t care enough to ask.
Forgoing the book, I studied Kit’s profile, downturned and cast in perpetual shadow. It struck me suddenly that the darkness I saw on him came from within, like ink bleeding through thin paper.
I could think of few things worse than voluntary branding and grave robbing, and nothing worse than being raised by a man who wanted his child to suffer.
Beside me, Kit sipped his coffee through a fog of steam.
Did I want him to change his plans back?
Maybe I should have.