eyes. They ran down his cheeks but did not reach his voice.
“I belong nowhere,” he said, and rose to his feet. “Not here, and therefore nowhere. You are afraid of me, you who more than any should understand. You talk of comfort and trust, yet all I see in the faces around me is doubt and fear. The stench of your fear sickens me.” He spat into the embers. A puff of ashes hissed into the air.
Aeglyss cast about, trying to find someone in the enveloping darkness of the hut. “K’rina. You are here. I can feel you. Will you deny me too?”
“Be still, K’rina,” said someone.
“Yes, be still,” Aeglyss snarled. “Do as they tell you. That is the way of it here: tread softly, always softly. Disturb nothing. You promised to love me, K’rina, in my dead mother’s place. Is this your love?”
Nobody answered him.
“I loved you, K’rina. Loved!” He spat the word as if it was poison on his tongue. He could not see through his tears.
“I only wanted…” The words died in his throat. He sucked a breath in. “This is not fair. What have I done? Nothing that another might not do. Nothing.”
The shadowed figures made no reply. Their obdurate will lay between him and them like a wall. With a curse that almost choked him, Aeglyss turned and strode out.
After he had gone, there was a long stretch of quiet. Almost imperceptibly at first, then louder, there came the sound of stifled sobs from somewhere in the shadows.
“Save your sorrow, K’rina. He is unworthy of it.”
“He is m-my ward,” stammered the woman.
“No longer. It is for the best. He has too much in him that is wild and cruel. We cannot free him of it, for all that we have tried.”
K’rina subsided into silence, muffling her grief.
“He’s right in one thing,” someone else said. “We are afraid of him.”
“There is no shame in that. He is stronger in the Shared than anyone we have seen in years, even if he lacks the knowledge to use that strength as he might. When he was only playing cruel games, whispering in ears and working a child’s tricks, we might overlook it. But now… the girl still cries in the night. If he remained amongst us there would be greater sorrow in the end.”
“Wherever he goes in the world, there will be greater sorrow,” said a man with wild, dark spirals etched upon his face. “It would have been better to put an end to him. Blood will fill that one’s footprints. Wherever he goes.”
The Godless World
Copyright © 2011 by Brian Ruckley
