Chapter 6 Sariel
SARIEL
S ariel walked the road of Barkbent Town, ignoring the occasional glare. He had never been welcome here, merely tolerated. That was fine with him.
Faron would be received with open arms , he thought after a particularly vicious look from an old woman with graying hair wrapped in a blue bonnet.
But hopefully Faron was a good thirty miles to the south, waiting for him at Clovelly.
No doubt his brother had already made himself some friends. That had ever been his gift.
“Good day, miss,” Sariel said to the old woman, trying to imagine how Faron would have managed it. Was it just his kind-hearted nature?
“Good day, Sariel,” she responded, curt and quick as she continued with her business.
Sariel shifted Redemption across his shoulder and carried on. Enough pretending to be his brother. He had come to Barkbent for a reason, and it wasn’t to win over old women in bonnets.
At the northernmost end of the small town was a home notable only because of how tiny it was compared to its neighbors. Sariel knocked on the door, waited a few seconds, and then knocked again when he heard no noise within.
“Not here,” someone called from next door. It was a middle-aged woman named Agatha, gap-toothed and far too nosy. She stuck her head out her window. “Down to the creek, to do the wash.”
“My thanks,” Sariel said.
Not far to the east was a foot-trodden dirt path that led through the tall grass to a little bend of a creek. Sariel heard humming long before he reached it, and the sound made his heart ache. He knew that voice.
A young woman was at the creek, two baskets with her, one full of clothes, the other linen sheets.
Her hair was tied back from her face and her dress rolled up above her knees so she could stand in the ankle-deep water.
She sang softly to herself as she wrung out a sheet, hummed notes broken by the occasional word.
Her hair was a dull brown, but her eyes a livelier shade of light blue to rival a summer sky.
“Hello, Tara,” Sariel said. She startled, dropping the sheet and spinning about with a faint splash.
“Sariel,” she said, blushing. “Warn a girl next time, would you?”
“I would, if the surprise were not worth the amusement.”
She laughed, and the joy sent waves of emotions through Sariel’s chest, some good, some terrible.
“So why have you come?” she asked. “Eager to help with my laundry? Oh, and Agatha’s, too. I volunteered, don’t worry, she didn’t press me. The walk here’s become too much for her old knees.”
Sariel jammed his sword into the dirt to free up his arms and then sat by the edge of the creek, his dark coat folding over him.
“I came to say goodbye.”
Tara grabbed the sheet she’d dropped, using it as an excuse to turn away from him.
“Oh. Does… No, it’s wrong of me to ask, forgive me.”
He knew what she was wondering. Tara’s parents had died of disease five years ago, during a blight that had claimed almost one in ten people in Barkbent.
It had come swiftly, vicious in its speed and deadliness, and ended only when Sariel provided iron-beech bark for them to boil for the sick to drink.
He had left it in a simple basket on the town mayor’s doorstop in the dead of night.
Sariel did not want to be remembered, nor treated as the people’s savior.
So far as Tara knew, Sariel was a friend of her father’s, and ever since her parents’ deaths, he had funded her stay in the little home she lived in, along with a small sum every month for food and clothing. Others in the town muttered sinister beliefs at his motivations. Sariel paid them no mind.
“If you are worried about your boarding, I am not abandoning you,” he said. “I’ll pay for another full year before I leave.”
Tara scooped up the cleaned sheet and began wringing it out.
“I’ve been helping around Barkbent, I’ll have you know. I still hope to one day repay you for all your kindness.”
Sariel smiled softly at her. “If you do that, then it will have been a loan. Please, Tara. Let my kindness remain a kindness. You are worthy of it.”
She plopped the sheet into the basket and grinned at him, her clothes wet, her feet muddy, and her hair a wild mess barely constrained by the band tying it back.
“Am I, now?” she asked with a laugh.
Sariel risked a brief flash of radiance in his eyes. To the soul beneath, and its layers upon layers of memories.
Before Tara, she had been Monica.
Before Monica, she had been Lily.
Before Lily, Rose. Before Rose, Amanda. Before Amanda, Ginnie.
Names after names. Lives after lives. Different faces.
Different smiles. Centuries upon centuries of change, but that same soul, that same piercing link to his past. Moments from each and every one danced in Sariel’s mind, visible if he reached out with his gift of radiance.
Sariel felt his insides tremble, and he grabbed his sword.
“I must travel eastward with my brother,” he said, standing. “I suspect it may be several years before I return. When I do, I hope to meet the good man lucky enough to have earned your affection.”
“What if it ain’t no man?” she asked. “What if it’s a lass that stole my heart?”
Sariel ripped his sword free of the soft soil. “Then I pray she is equally worthy of it.”
He turned to leave, but Tara was faster. She darted out of the water, crossed the grass, and wrapped her arms about him, her face pressed to his back.
“Stay safe, will you, Sariel?”
He turned, saw her looking up at him with a youth and life that threatened to pull his mind hundreds of years into the past, to his very earliest memories walking the land of Kaus. An even older face. The first name.
Isca.
Sariel hardened his jaw.
“I promise,” he said, and brushed a bit of her wet hair away from her face. “Goodbye, Tara.”
The path between the town and the creek was not long, but it still felt like forever as Sariel walked it, the distant sound of Tara’s singing a spike to his heart.
Barkbent was just large enough, and near enough to the main roadway linking the iron-beech trade, that the town had a decently sized tavern with two rooms for rent. Sariel paid for one, found a seat by the fire in the commons area, and began the lengthy process of drowning himself in alcohol.
The late-night hours came. The commons area steadily filled with men darkly tanned by their work in the fields. What had been a quiet, somber evening turned raucous as the beer flowed and the first songs began. Sariel listened, his chest constricted and his mood foul.
Damn you, Eder, for all this nonsense , Sariel thought. He wanted nothing more than to spend the next few decades living unnoticed in the west. Have we not all had our fill of building empires?
As the night wore on, and Sariel started on his fourth glass, he noticed inquisitive glances from a nearby table.
Four men, all farmers, he believed. Unlike the others in the commons, they were dour in mood and not prone to song.
Sariel felt a sinking feeling in his stomach, but before he could leave, two of them stood from their chairs and approached.
“Sariel, right?” the younger of the two asked. He sported a mustache much too thin to be worth keeping, and an equally unimpressive stubble on his chin.
“It is,” Sariel said, in no mood to banter. “Why come to me?”
The older one took a seat opposite Sariel at the table without asking.
Like the youngster, he grew the hair out on his upper lip and chin, though thicker and grayer.
He’d lost his left hand at some point, and he settled the rounded ball of his wrist at the end into his right palm.
His eyes matched the dark color of the soil at the creek.
“Because no one carries a sword like that without knowing how to use it,” he answered.
Sariel’s dragon-bone sword leaned against his shoulder, the tip pressed into the floorboard. He glanced at it, then glared at the older man.
“Your name?”
“Strom.”
“Listen well, Strom. I am no mercenary to be hired. Leave me in peace.”
The younger man slammed his fists into the table.
“Then don’t do it for money,” he snapped, loud enough that other patrons nervously glanced his way. “Do it because it’s the right thing to do.”
Sariel’s glare withered the man. Strom cleared his throat, equally displeased by the outburst.
“Rude as Mikel’s outburst might be, you should know we are hard-pressed here in Barkbent.
King Bentley lives a hundred miles away in Vendom and has appointed his son, Mortimer, to rule the southern half of Argylle in his stead.
He is a brute, greedy in his taxes and a bully when it comes to any who might challenge his rule.
We’re lucky not to starve each year, but the day comes when we will not be so lucky. ”
Sariel knew of Bentley and Mortimer Casthe, of course. He’d looked into them over the past few years, to ensure neither would bother Tara here in Barkbent.
“I am no stranger to Argylle,” he said. “Why tell me this?”
Mikel and Strom shared a glance. No one knew much about Sariel. Some thought him a trader, others a former knight or guard who had fled west. Sariel let them talk, so long as they also let him be.
“Because we thought you could help us,” Strom said. “When hiding our coin didn’t work, we started fighting back. Not much, just arrows from the trees on the forest pass, but we need to do better. Mortimer won’t back down. We all know that, and we’re not the only town looking to see him gone.”
“War’s coming,” Mikel said. “And the Casthes are fools, provoking Princess Isabelle as they are. But if we act now, we can split off near half the kingdom and pledge ourselves to Isabelle’s cause.” He crossed his arms. “So will you help us? Or is that big sword of yours just for show?”