“Desperation isn’t an excuse for what he intended to do to you,” Athan argued. “I could see it in his eyes, and so could his brother. The blight’s madness had taken hold. The cold bath you gave him may’ve saved him from doing something he could never come back from. If a broken arm is his payment for staving off the blight a while longer, then it’s a price well paid.”
Dnara took in his words, but struggled to make sense of it all. “Athan, will you explain it to me? This blight you keep speaking of? I feel as if it’s a secret to none but me, and it’s making me feel so...lost in this world.”
“I can’t believe you’ve never heard of it.” Athan settled cross-legged on the leaf-covered ground, as if the talk they were about to have would be a long one. “I’ll tell you all I know, which is as much as the next man but isn’t near enough, or too much depending on how you look at it.”
“I don’t understand,” she said as her stomach took that moment to announce its hunger.
Athan let out an amused chuckle then headed over to his rucksack. He returned with a few pieces of jerky wrapped in waxed paper. “Sorry, but the hunting here is awful, so smoked briarbear will have to do.”
“It’s fine, thank you.” She took a bite of the tough jerky and chewed well. He’d added some type of spice to the meat, so it wasn’t unpleasant. After swallowing, she asked, “Is the poor hunting because of the blight?”
“It is.” He took a bite too and chewed, his brow weighted in thought. “I always prefer to start at the beginning when I’m telling a story, but with the blight, that’s a hard thing to do. See, no one’s exactly sure when it all started, or how long it’s really been going on. Some folks say a hundred years, because that’s when it started getting bad enough for common folks to notice. Other folks will say three or four hundred years, but it was sporadic, like the coming of locusts every few decades. There are also those, mostly scholars and the like, who say it’s always existed, existed but kept at bay.”
“Kept at bay?” she asked through another long chew. “How?”
“Nobody knows, not even the scholars. There’s rumors of hemlock or oranges or even goats’ blood keeping the blight at bay, but that’s just superstitious folk who’re desperate for a remedy. Heck, ain’t no oranges left, so I doubt spreading the rinds around did any good at keeping the blight from your farmland.”
“No more oranges?” Dnara could’ve sworn she’d had an orange just a few months ago, swiped from the kitchen and eaten under her favorite tree behind the hay shed.
“Not a single one,” Athan confirmed. “Well, maybe in some secret grove somewhere. I mean, it’s hard to image a whole world without oranges, but I haven’t seen one at the market since childhood, and even then they were priced well beyond the shallow depth of my mother’s coin purse.”
Dnara suddenly felt guilty for having eaten such a precious commodity and haphazardly spitting the seeds into the dirt. Her keeper had been a mage of great means, certainly, and she wondered what other rare things she had eaten without knowing their value. “You’ve said the blight affects crops and farms, but also animals? And, men?”
“That it does,” he nodded then smiled at her confusion. “Sorry, I’m probably not making much sense. It’s just strange, having to explain this to someone. I’ve never met a person, child nor elder, whose life hadn’t been touched by the blight in some way.”
“Including you?” she asked before thinking, then thought better of her prying. “Forestry is hard with a lack of animals, I would assume.”
“Yes.” His smile softened into wistful contemplation. “I’d never intended to become a forester. When I was young, I’d planned to take over my family’s farm. We grew cabbages.” He held his hands up to form a large circle. “Big, prize winning cabbages, of the darkest purple and the brightest green.”
Dnara’s nose wrinkled, having survived on a mainstay of cabbage stew and stale bread. “I’m not a fan of cabbages.”
“Neither is the blight,” Athan said with a brighter smile which faded into a sigh. “At least, that’s what Dad always said. It kept skipping our farm, see, every time it encroached. It’d take the carrot farm a few pastures over, then recede. Next season, it took the sheep. Season after, the beets. But, never our cabbages. Other farmers thought we’d made some sort of magical deal with Demroth, desperate as they’d become. I think they would’ve burned our farm that next season if the blight hadn’t finally gained a taste for cabbages.”
Athan’s expression grew dark. “I think, in the end, Dad would’ve made a deal with Demroth to save our crops, if Demroth actually exists.”
“You don’t think the Shadow King exists?” Dnara asked in a hushed, forboden whisper.
Athan blinked away the gloom in his eyes and tried to rekindle the smile on his lips, giving a dismissive shrug to her question. “Don’t know, don’t really care. Gods and legends, no difference to me. Powerful people who were probably mortal like you and me, but got remembered for things they did a long time ago. I don’t see Retgar coming down from Faedra’s Sacred Halls with blazing axe in hand to smite the blight, do you?”
Dnara shook her head but thought more on his words. Could the gods merely be people of legend from long ago? She’d never considered herself a devoted follower to any of the gods, despite her keeper’s insistence she learn about each one, but she hadn’t even the courage to question her
