A Plague of Ruin: Book One: Son of Two Bloods Read online

  “What will you do now, captain?” Mirae wondered.

  “Well, I hear that the prince can use a few men at arms up at the castle, ma’am,” he replied. “So, I reckon I’ll go and see.”

  “You know that Prince Cole is a widower now?”

  Grizeo shook his head. “I did not know.”

  Mirae nodded. “Princess Niraine died of the fever as came through four winters gone.”

  Grizeo frowned. “There’s a child, isn’t there?”

  Mirae nodded again. “A girl, Princess Emilene. She would be about nine or ten years of age now, I suppose.”

  “Well, I am sorry for Prince Cole,” Grizeo replied, “and for the little girl, too.” Then he frowned. “Is Vicundium yet free?” He asked. “Does Cole govern as he pleases – or have the darkings come here as well?”

  Mirae returned his frown. “Darkings? What are darkings?”

  “You’ve not seen a darking?” Grizeo asked.

  “I know not how a darking appears, captain, so I cannot say,” Brenyn’s gran replied.

  “Well, that’s a bit of good news anyway,” Grizeo confessed; but then his features darkened again. “You would know a darking, had you seen one, ma’am. They look like demons with pale faces, all dressed in black and riding on black horses.” He lifted his hands and held them to either side of his face, framing the top of his head. “They wear these broad-brimmed, square-topped hats, and their faces cannot be seen for they wear a white mask, or maybe a cloth, that hangs in front of them. They wear long black cloaks – indeed, except for the face, they are a vison of black, top to toe.”

  “Who are they?” Brenyn asked.

  Grizeo shrugged. “No one knows, but they wield immense power. Every prince in the land fears them and does their bidding. They travel all the main roads in the south.” His face grew grim and his eyes narrowed. “The world is plagued by war and ruin, and the darkings cause it. Why? – who can say? They are evil embodied.”

  Mirae shivered at the dreadful content of these remarks but shook her head. “I’ve not seen such a creature upon the road here, nor in the streets of Pierum.” She lifted her hand and pointed. “The only road that goes to Pierum runs past our door, and Brennie and I go there once a week in late summer to sell our vegetables.”

  Grizeo drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “That’s good, that is, that darkings have not found our little corner of the world. Mayhap, we can remain free of their ilk. Vicundium is a bit out of the way, you know. Let us hope, anyway.”

  He stood and inclined his head to Mirae. “Thank you kindly, ma’am, for the meal.”

  Mirae nodded. “I thank you for the news of my son.”

  Grizeo then looked at Brenyn. “I will ask this fine fellow to fetch my horse, and I will go see His Highness about employment.” He looked back at Mirae. “Mayhap I will beg another bowl of beans sometime.”

  Mirae stood. “Come any time, captain.”

  2.

  When Grizeo had gone up the road, across the bridge over the stream and disappeared through the forest, going toward town, Brenyn opened the bundle. Inside, there was a fine sword, a shiny dagger, and a beautiful long bow with a quiver of arrows. There was also a small leather pouch containing several coins –nine gold pieces, thirty-seven silver coins, and a handful of brass.

  Brenyn examined the pile of money for a moment – a small treasure in this part of the world – and then he replaced the coins in the pouch, secured the top, and held it out to his grandmother.

  “Here, Gran, this will help us some.”

  She kept her hands at her side and shook her head. “I won’t take your father’s money,” she told him. “He sent it to you.”

  Brenyn smiled, stood, lifted her hand, opened the fingers, and gave the pouch into it. “He was your son, Gran, and you have fed and clothed his son. The money is yours.”

  She watched him for a long moment. “How old are you now, Brennie?”

  “Eleven, Gran.”

  She smiled softly and shook her head. “You think and talk like a man of thirty.” She sighed and went to the cupboard where she slipped the pouch down the inside of a clay pot which she then pushed back into the corner of the cupboard.

  “We’ll use it for the both of us, should need arise,” she stated. “And the rest will be there when you are a man.”

  After hefting it once or twice, Brenyn put the sword away, because it was too heavy, into the cabinet behind the door with the shield, but the dagger went into his belt at once and stayed there.

  Then he took the bow and the quiver of arrows and went outside to test his ability at archery.

  The bow was too tall for him to use without angling it to one side so the bottom would not touch the earth. Even so, over time, he learned to employ it. Thirteen arrows had come with it, and he practiced releasing these into straw bales that he stacked against the barn. Once he learned to shoot the missiles into a relatively small target with a measure of consistency, he went hunting.

  The first deer that he attempted to bring down was a young buck that was lying in a thicket in the heat of the day. When he set his feet to take the shot, his foot snapped a twig. The animal leapt up and bounded away just as Brenyn released the missile. The arrow missed and struck a rock behind where the deer had lain, breaking its tip and shattering the shaft.

  He retrieved the arrow and stared forlornly at the wreck he had made of it by missing the shot. Then he looked at his quiver, where twelve arrows remained, and he realized a sobering fact – he did not know how to replace them when they were ruined.

  He must become a better, cleverer, and more careful hunter if he were to make these missiles last. For he could not afford the deficit of even one. So, he practiced not only his shooting but his stalking skills as well before once again attempting to bring meat home for the larder and skins to make into leather. Gradually, his skills improved. Within a year he became extraordinarily adept at employing the weapon among the forested hills and hollows that surrounded the small farm where he lived with his grandmother.

  He seldom came back from the woodland without food for the table. By the late fall of that first year when the bow came to him, he had slain five deer, and the larder was filled with venison.

  He learned to aim for the necks of the animals, where bones were few and the arteries near the surface, thereby increasing the chance that the arrow would pass through without breaking and could be retrieved. By the next mid-summer, when he reached the age of twelve, Brenyn had become an accomplished hunter.

  That fall, with the larder full, Brenyn labored at stockpiling wood for the winter and harvesting the last of the onions, squash, and potatoes. The winter that followed was one of the coldest, harshest winters in years, but the tiny house was warm, and the larder was full. His grandmother smiled every evening as she set a bowl of stew before him that was full of chunks of real meat rather than thickened gruel reduced from the boiling of bones.

  “Your father was a fine hunter,” she told him one evening, “but I swear, Brennie – you are better, even, than he.”

  He returned Gran’s smile and then wrinkled his forehead in thought while he chewed. Lifting his spoon, he pointed out through the eastern window.

  “I’ve killed more than a few deer in those woods across the river,” he said. The spoon moved around until it pointed at the south wall of the kitchen beyond where the logs in the fireplace snapped and crackled. “Next year, I will go into the hills to the south of the Graden farm. The woods are deep there and the hills higher. That way we can preserve the herd closer to the house.”

  His grandmother studied him in silence for a moment. “You think like your father,” she said, “and you sound like him, too. You may look like your mother, Brennie, but you are your father’s son.”

  He met her gaze. “I think about them sometimes, Gran – but I am glad that you and I are here.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “as am I. There are just the two of us, but we are a family nonetheless.�
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  Outside, the night wind abruptly strengthened; tiny, hard bits of sleet rattled against the panes of the small square window. They both looked that way, out through the frosted glass and into the frigid darkness of the winter twilight.

  “Some winter, eh, Gran?” He said.

  “It’s a fierce one this year,” she agreed.

  Though fierce, the winter season proved to be short-lived, and spring came early as the days turned into the new year.

  That spring, they went into Pierum, to the town smithy, and with some of the money his father had sent, they bought a real plow and then acquired an ox from a neighboring farm. Brenyn, well into his thirteenth year of life, plowed the garden with the aid of the ox, and sowed the seed. Throughout that summer, he tended to the garden, the chickens, and sheep while his grandmother, released from all the hard labor, watched him with pride.

  Summer passed, the vegetables and wheat were harvested, and Brenyn, having turned thirteen and entering his fourteenth year of life, once more turned his attention to hunting. Though he was still not overly tall, he’d grown several inches over the winter, spring, and summer, and was tall enough now to hold the bow at the vertical.

  One crisp, cool morning he arose early, while the sky in the east was yet dark with only a hint of pink along the horizon, and dressed for a day of hunting. He intended to fill the larder and re-stock their supplies of leather just as he had upon the previous fall.

  Without waking his grandmother, he retrieved his bow, his quiver of arrows – the numbers of which had fallen to ten – and his dagger, and made his way out of the house, down over the field where his mother was buried, across the roadway, and into the darkened forest. On this day, he did not turn to the east, to descend the hollow and cross over the stream that was named Small River. Instead, this morning, he went south.

  This was new territory to him. Whose land it was, he did not know. An even smaller tributary of the river ran along the base of the hills here, separating the cultivated ground upon the gentle northern slope of that stream from the rugged, forested region to the south. People named Graden owned the farm to the west of his Gran’s place, and their cropland here extended to the banks of the stream, but all their buildings and their house sat north of the road.

  Likely, as with much of the land around the town of Pierum, this land belonged to the prince. But, if so, it was unimproved and neglected, and wild, for it consisted of steep, forested hillsides and deep hollows cut by sparkling brooks.

  Brenyn crossed the tributary stream and climbed the hill beyond, easing through brush still damp with the morning’s dew. Cresting the hill, he then descended into a gloomy hollow, where the rays of the rising sun had not yet penetrated. The recent nights had been moonless, so the deer should be moving about, browsing in the light of early morning. Turning to the right, moving quietly and stealthily, bow at the ready, arrow nocked, he made for the top of the hollow. And soon, he was rewarded.

  Near the upper end of the wooded hollow, the forest gave way to a small sloping meadow where the spring that fed the brook bubbled up from the earth. A young buck was browsing upon the bark of a thicket of willows surrounding the source of the spring.

  Staying in the shadows of the trees, Brenyn cautiously drew back the bow. The buck was turned slightly with his head lowered. Brenyn could not see the animal’s neck. He waited, with the bow bent for action, for the buck to alter its position, but it remained facing mostly away from him.

  Brenyn glanced either way along the edge of the trees but could not discern a clear path by which he could improve the angle of his shot. At last, when the morning brightened, and the buck began to lift his head, looking upslope, as if it meant to move on, Brenyn could wait no longer.

  Aiming for the thick part of the buck, behind the shoulder, he released his missile.

  The shot was good.

  At once, the young buck twitched and jumped away, racing for the trees at the top of the meadow.

  Brenyn gave chase.

  Above the spring, where the buck had entered the tree line, Brenyn found splotches of blood here and there upon the leaves beneath the trees, but not the animal itself. The blood trail topped the head of the hollow and led him down into the ravine beyond.

  Brenyn slowed, studying the ground. There was sufficient blood that he knew the buck would not escape him. He followed the blood trail down and around the point of the ridge to the north and onto the sloping ground that verged the tributary stream.

  Here, he found the place where the deer had expired.

  But the animal was not alone.

  A large youth, somewhat older than Brenyn, though not yet a man, was positioning the buck upon a grassy place to dress it. The young man had already broken the shaft of Brenyn’s arrow from the body of the buck, laid it aside, and had drawn a knife from his belt. Brenyn moved closer but the youth did not look up.

  At last, Brenyn said, “that is my kill.”

  The youth started at the sound of Brenyn’s voice and looked up, his eyes wide. Then, as he took in the slender figure that had addressed him, those eyes narrowed. Slowly, he shook his head.

  “It’s my buck,” he told Brenyn. “I killed it.”

  Brenyn indicated the broken shaft. “My arrow,” he said.

  The young man shook his head again. “Nay,” he said, “mine.”

  “You are a liar,” Brenyn stated quietly.

  Glowering with anger, the young man stood. He was tall, taller than Brenyn by several inches, and beefy, with thick arms and meaty hands. He raised one of those thick arms and pointed his knife at Brenyn.

  “You watch how you talk to me,” he growled.

  Then he narrowed his gaze further. “I know who you are,” he went on. “You’re that skinny kid from the next farm.”

  He shook the knife in a threatening manner. “You watch how you talk to me, boy,” he repeated, “or I will gut you just like this deer.”

  At that, a dark and terrible fury rose within Brenyn.

  Without thinking, in one fluid motion, Brenyn reached back, withdrew an arrow from his quiver, nocked it, lifted the bow with the arrow drawn, and aimed it at the young man’s chest.

  “Now,” he stated in a voice filled with rage, “I will show you how I slew that deer.”

  The youth’s eyes went wide once more; the knife dropped from his hands. He held out both arms, palms of his hands outward, as if to ward off the strike of Brenyn’s missile. “No – please, no; don’t kill me,” he pleaded.

  Brenyn hesitated, the arrow yet aimed at the youth’s chest.

  The young man dropped to his knees and began weeping.

  “I’m sorry – I am so sorry – please.” He hung his head and clasped his hands over his face.

  Brenyn lowered his bow and released the pressure on the string. “Why would you try to steal my deer from me?” He asked.

  The beefy young stranger collapsed upon the grass with his head in his hands. He continued to weep, sobbing, while his stout body shuddered with the strength of his emotion.

  Brenyn waited, watching in silence while the stranger wept, his bow down at his side, though he kept the arrow nocked.

  After some time, the youth managed to regain a measure of control. He sat up, wiping at his eyes, and looked at Brenyn.

  “Would-would you really have killed me?” He asked.

  “Yes.”

  The youth wiped at his eyes again and stared at Brenyn with those orbs widened. “Truly? – over one measly deer?”

  “Yes, for it was stolen from me.”

  For a long silent moment, the two boys stared at each other, and then Brenyn asked, “Why would you steal my deer?”

  Immediately, tears erupted from the stocky boy’s eyes once more. He shook his head and pointed over at a bow that lay in the grass alongside a quiver filled with arrows. “My-my father expects me to bring home a deer, but I –”

  He shook his head yet again while tears flowed down his chubby cheeks. “I can’t d
o it – I can’t get close enough to kill a deer – I-I can’t even hit one if I do get close enough.”

  “You have a father?” Brenyn asked.

  The youth wiped his eyes and stared. “Of course.”

  “Why doesn’t he hunt? Why send you, if you cannot?”

  The young man shook his head, miserable in his shame. “He wants me to help out – I’m afraid he thinks me useless.”

  Brenyn moved his eyes and studied the young man’s bow and the quiver of arrows. Both the weapon and the missiles were of high quality and exhibited the appearance of having been crafted by a masterful hand.

  “Where do you acquire your arrows?” Brenyn asked him.

  “From Crayloft, in town,” the boy answered. “Where else? – where do you get yours?”

  “I use the same ones over and over, as long as they last.”

  The youth glanced at the broken shaft, lying upon the grass. Then he looked again at Brenyn, with caution darkening his visage. “It was already broken,” he said.

  Ignoring that, Brenyn looked again at the boy’s quiver.

  “You have plenty of arrows,” he observed.

  “My dad buys all I want – for all the good it does.”

  Brenyn looked back at him. “What is your name?”

  “Graig – Graig Graden,” the youth answered. “Why? – what’s yours?”

  “Brenyn Vagus,” Brenyn replied. He studied Graig for a long moment. Then he lowered his bow, removed the arrow, and placed it back into his quiver. “You can have the deer for two arrows,” he told Graig.

  Graig blinked up at him. “What?”

  Brenyn indicated the deer. “Give me two arrows and you can keep the deer.”

  “You mean it? – truly?”

  Brenyn nodded. “And I will kill more for you, if you wish it – but it will cost two arrows for each deer.”

  Graig stared at him. “You would do that for me?”