“We would not be warriors if we lived in fear of what others might do to us!” Turanaki exclaimed.
Egrin ignored the hotheaded forester and addressed Voyarunta.
“Great Chief, I did not come here to incite you against the empire, but to warn you, as a friend and neighbor. I also came to ask Lord Tolandruth to return home.”
Miya drew in a breath sharply, but Kiya nodded with satisfaction. She had guessed as much.
Voyarunta pondered what he’d heard. No one, not even the fiery Turanaki, interrupted the chief’s cogitations.
“The Dom-shu will keep to their forest,” Voyarunta said at last. “As for the Son of My Life, he will do as the gods guide him.”
“I will listen for their counsel,” Tol said, giving the expected answer. Under his breath, he added, “Though I doubt they will speak to me.”
He picked up the bearskin and took his leave of the chief. Miya and Kiya followed. Egrin departed more slowly, as dignity demanded. It would not do to appear to be fleeing the unfriendly climate.
Outside, the cool air was balm to the old warrior’s sweat-drenched brow. Fog was rising in the clearing, and the glimmer of firelight from the surrounding huts looked like amber stars in the mist. Arriving at the sod hut, Egrin found Kiya sitting on the split log that served as a stoop. She barred his entry.
“Husband’s gone to bed. Don’t wake him.” She cut off his protests, saying, “He sleeps so little and so poorly, rest is a treasure to him.”
Giving in, Egrin seated himself next to her. He asked how she had fared over the past six years of Tol’s exile.
Kiya was a formidable woman. She had grown up in a tribe that trained her to fight and suffer without complaint. So when she did not reply right away, Egrin did not press her. He adjusted his position slightly so he could rest his back against the hut, and waited. She would answer in her own time.
The story was a painful one. Miya, Tol, and Kiya had departed Daltigoth in the depth of winter and in the teeth of a snowstorm. Miya was ill with milk fever, and the newborn Eli was no more than a mewling newt wrapped in furs. Tol had sustained terrible injuries at the hands of Nazramin’s personal gang of thugs, the Wolves. Kiya managed to bring them all across the snowy land to the Great Green. Once they reached the Dom-shu village, she’d slept for two days and nights.
Tol was shamed by the beating, and grieved the loss of Valaran, now consort to the new emperor. He remained indoors for many days, but as winter grudgingly relinquished its hold on the forest, so too did Tol emerge slowly from the white silence of his despair. He hobbled around the village, loosening muscles stiff from disuse. His terrible bruises turned yellow and faded. Unwilling to live on the charity of the chief, Tol sought a home of his own. The repair of an empty hut gave him purpose, and once it was done, the sisters and Eli joined him there.
His injuries healed, Tol took up a stone axe and cut firewood. Every swing of the axe made his arms and back sing with pain, but he would not stop. Each blow was a strike against Nazramin. Every cord split were Wolves’ heads cleaved by his sword. After he had killed his enemies many times over, the silent rage in him began to pall. It was too bitter a flavor to nourish Tol. He had purged the fury in his heart by this regimen, while he built his body up even stronger than before, and for a noble reason: bettering the lives of the forest folk.
The Dom-shu had always fed their fires on windfall limbs or punk wood, neither of which burned very hot or long. Tol introduced them to hardwood, cut green, dried, then split. Heat was no longer a rare luxury for the Dom- shu. Cold retreated from the village. Disease, fostered by poorly cooked food and damp living conditions, was greatly lessened by the simple introduction of good firewood.
Tol also planted wild onions, strawberries, and rabbit-cabbage in a small but neat garden plot beside his hut. The tribesmen, who normally hunted game or combed the forest for berries, roots, and nuts, were puzzled by the grasslander scratching the raw earth, but before long, Tol was gathering food not ten paces from his hut. The Dom-shu had thought farming something that could be done only on broad, open spaces. Tol showed them they could grow food in the forest.
Younger Dom-shu men sought his knowledge of war, but this Tol would not share. They already knew how to defend their homes. To know more would only tempt them to fight beyond the forest, and that was the path to destruction.
One warrior tried to goad Tol into fighting, hoping to make his own reputation by besting the grasslander champion. Tol endured his many insults in silence rather than kill the fool. Unhappily, the warrior would not give up. In the village square, he made the mistake of tormenting young Eli, injuring the boy in the process, and the foresters finally glimpsed the warrior Tol had been. He slew the foolish challenger with a single blow of his axe. No one ever challenged Tol again.
When Kiya finished her tale, Egrin weighed what he’d heard against the memory of the man he’d known.
“Is he happy here?” he asked.
“He is calm. He is not happy.”
Tol did not sleep well, Kiya explained, but often roamed the woods alone at night. No Dom-shu would ever do such a thing; they feared the spirits who walked abroad by night. And Tol sometimes stayed away two or three days. He would never say where he went during these extended absences.
“It isn’t the honors or wealth he misses,” Kiya noted. “It’s her. She belongs to his enemy, the man who had him beaten and humiliated, and it eats at him like a festering wound.”
“He must return with me. There’s no one else who can lead the hordes to victory against the nomad and bakali. No one else commands the respect he does. No one has his vision, or his…”
Egrin groped for the proper word. Kiya supplied it: “Luck. He’s lucky.”
“No longer.”
They turned. Tol stood in the dark doorway behind them.
“My luck is gone,” he said flatly. “I used it up when I left to pursue my private vengeance against Mandes. I was the Emperor’s Champion, but I abandoned Ackal IV to the evil plots of his brother. Nazramin staged everything like a playwright, and I handed him the throne of Ergoth as if I’d been magicked to do so.”
Egrin rose and gripped Tol’s shoulder. “Luck isn’t wine, drunk up then regretted! Come back with me, Tol! Only you can save Ergoth. Do so, and the emperor will have to make amends!”
Tol removed his old friend’s hand. “It’s not my fight any more. Let the empire fall.”
Chapter 3
From the sparse woodland, the town of Juramona wasn’t much to look at. An agglomeration of buildings, some stone but most wooden, clustered around the base of a large, man-made earthen mound on which stood a palisaded citadel. The town wall was weathered timber, strengthened at intervals by squat stone towers. Here and there outside the walls were piles of rough-hewn granite blocks. Grass grew tall around the stones. While marshal of the Eastern Hundred, Egrin Raemel’s son had begun to convert Juramona’s wall to stone. After he was forced from his post by Ackal V, his successor allowed the ambitious plan to languish. Given the current state of things, no one was likely to disturb the blocks any time soon.
Crouched at the base of a leafing poplar, Zala surveyed the scene. Her journey from Daltigoth had been nightmarish. The countryside between the Caer River and Juramona was infested with roving bands of nomads. Too many times she had to watch from concealment as marauders laid waste to farms, sacked caravans, and put hapless Ergothian captives to the sword. It grieved her, but she could not risk entanglements that would delay her progress.
She stared at the gates of Juramona and pondered how best to enter the town. Night offered the best concealment, but it was only now midmorning. She dared not waste an entire day waiting for darkness. Not only did her commission require speed, but the nomad warbands were gathering nearby. Juramona might be attacked at any moment, making her mission that much more difficult.
Eventually fate, the gods, or sheer luck provided what she needed. A convoy of wagons came thundering down the western road, together with an escort of half a hundred cavalry. The wagons were drawn by teams of
