Other-Song, Chapter Seven: What Happened on the Road to Thalyrest
The seventh chapter of Other-Song, my serialized novel-in-progress
Other-Song is a serialized fantasy novel-in-progress. It’s a tale of disenchantment, of abusive technology, of heresy, and of a world hidden in plain sight.
This is the seventh chapter.
In the first chapter, “The Last Party, The Last Song,” Lurian, bastard son of the Hornynal family, serves as a party hosted in honor of his brother, Trendal, attended by the Queen’s nephew, along with many other nobles. The Fel’lal musician he hired for the evening, his friend Tri’aln, plays “the last song” on the instrument, which destroys it. Just before it is destroyed, the lights in the hall suddenly flash brightly and every glass in each guests hand shatters as Lurian looks at them. He is then ushered out by the queen’s nephew through the darkness, who speaks cryptically of a heretic.
In the second chapter, “A Bastard and a Heretic,” Lurian waits outside until all the guests have gone, and then sneaks back into the house to gather things in order to leave. Details of his life unfold: her mother had seduced her husband’s brother and then framed him for rape — a plot to gain control of Horynal manse. While packing for the journey, his mother yells at Lurian from the other side of the door, and then curses him as a “heretic.”
In the third chapter, “The Question of the Wells,” Lurian, traveling without light, becomes lost on the paths near his childhood home and twists his ankle. Stumbling about in pain, he passes out for a short time before continuing on and encountering a strange well. In a series of remembrances, significant parts of his childhood related to questions about the nature of such wells unfold. His older brother, Trendal, claimed the Fel’lal sacrificed children there. The drunken house cook, on the other hand, claimed the Fel’lal made insignificant offerings to them. Later, Erol, a nervous tutor, just before being fired, cryptically confirmed their were offerings at the wells but not of children. Thirsty, and recalling Tri’aln’s dismissive assurance that the wells were just full of water, Lurian drinks from it.
In the fourth chapter, “The Herb-Merchant’s Guests,” Lurian awakens in a strange house with no memory of the previous two weeks. He learns from the other guests — Rylan, Katrin, and Rhi — that he was “prophesying” on the paths after drinking from the well. Tri’aln had found Lurian and brought him to the house of a local herb-merchant, who then drugged him so he could sleep off the effects of the well. The other guests in the house are all friends of each other; Rylan, the son of the herb-merchant, is particularly insistent that Lurian returns with them because of what he believes Lurian can do: “will.” Despite the strange circumstances and their evasion of his questions, Lurian agrees to join them on their return journey to the city of Thalyrest.
In the fifth chapter, “A Matter of Academic Interest,” Tri’aln arrives at the home of a man, Terrance, who is currently visited by two other friends. The three men are quite drunk, and Terrance is very angry with Tri’aln for showing up unannounced. From the ensuing conversations, it’s learned that what happened at the Horynal manse is now quite known, and Tri’aln is wanted by the Enforcers. She convinces the men to help her leave the city in return for wyrd-stones, to which the men seemed addicted. Agreeing, they help her past a guard only to find out that Tri’aln never intended to make good on her part of the bargain.
In the sixth chapter, “Of Witches and Nuns,” Katrin, Rylan, Rhi, and Lurian prepare for the journey to Thalyrest. Lurian and Rylan are to disguise themselves as female Solacebringers and Katrin helps them with their costumes. Rhi discusses her misgivings about Lurian’s presence to Janyr. Lurians prophetic babblings have confirmed to Rhi an earlier prophetic vision about her own lover’s death related to the same figure he mentions: “the nightwitch.”
Chapter Seven: What Happened on the Road to Thalyrest
It happened too quickly, too suddenly. It shouldn’t have happened at all.
Katrin was trying to see through the thick blood covering her eyes. She wiped it away with her sleeve in careful, slow movements. She still couldn’t see the men, their voices too far away and mingled with Rhi’s weeping pleadings. She couldn’t hear Lurian, and she didn’t think she would ever hear Rylan again.
She tried to still her breath to listen. Light rain pattered on the stone before her. Wind rustled the new leaves on the high branches to her right, while to the left the Thale pushed hard against its banks, swollen with spring thaws and rains.
Ahead, at some distance, she heard them speak, their voices more even now, and more confident.
“...went that way, I think.”
“...the other one?”
“Check their bags — probably medicines.”
At least they weren’t looking for her yet, maybe still didn’t know she was there. She pressed herself closer to the rock and timidly touched the burning pain on her brow. She felt skin, loose and no longer well-attached. She pulled her hand away and looked at the blood covering her fingers.
“E’s gone. Leave him. Take the girl, though.”
The vertigo from the loss of blood gave way to aching despair. Rylan “was gone.”
“The other two?”
“Tell the tower. They’ll find ‘em. That horse ready?”
“Give me a second. Saddle’s stuck.”
The men would be riding south to Thalyrest. That’s what they’d said, hadn’t they? “Seizing order. Lost a horse. Give it over on behalf of the Council….”
And then Rylan, the fool: “But our grandmother can’t walk!” In his own voice, forgetting the falsetto, forgetting the disguise.
The men would be riding south, towards Thalyrest, directly past her. She couldn’t see them, couldn’t see herself. But they would see her as they passed unless she moved.
“Leave the saddle on then.”
“It's a woman’s saddle. I’m not riding that way.”
“Hurry up, then.”
Katrin bit back the pain and tried to decide what to do. She had lost one of her scarves from the habit in the struggle, but she still had the cloth belt that had tied the robe together. Katrin risked shifting herself over, pushing against her shelter so not to stumble into their view, and then she fumbled with the knot. Her hands were still wet with blood, her fingers slipping and sticking, her short nails giving no purchase, and, doubled over like this, she could not loosen it.
She reached for her knife just as she heard the rustle that made them shout warning to each other. “He’s over there!”
Two pairs of boots running heavily over the ancient stones of the road toward the tree-line, away from her. They’d seen Lurian, then. He would not last long.
Katrin exhaled deeply, slipped her knife behind the cloth, and cut it and the two fingers she’d used to hold the belt. More blood, more urge to scream against the pain. She bit her tongue instead.
She had told Rylan to bite his tongue, to say nothing if they were stopped, to keep quiet and silent and let her speak for them. And he had listened to her the first time, at least.
Only a few hours before these men, they’d come upon what she’d foolishly thought the worst possible meeting on the roads after the Galnwyd. Seven Solacebringers — real Solacebringers, not disguised heretics like themselves — traveling north to Woric together by foot. They had wanted to talk, to speak to the Abbess, to receive her blessing. Katrin had thought quickly: they would know the Abbess of Woric, and of Arenhall and Coryl, so she told them the Abbess was from the most unlikely place possible.
The lie worked better than Katrin had expected.
“You come from Inyr? You survived the plague? But what about the quarantine?”
Katrin hadn’t meant to give the women hope, and she could feel Rhi’s disappointed eyes burn into the back of her head. Still, Katrin had rummaged through all her memory of the island’s tragedy for anything to make her story more believable.
“We are all that is left,” she announced, pleased with how those words sounded on her lips. “We are taking the Abbess to Thalyrest for final rest.”
“Then we will come with you,” insisted their leader, kneeling upon the ground before Lurian’s horse. “And I shall thank Melys every waking moment.”
“Do not get too close,” Rhi interjected, relieving Katrin of the knot of the deception. “We are not free of the plague.”
The holy woman did not move from the ground, her faith rooting her in place. “We will not shun our sister.”
Katrin watched Rhi with urgency, hoping she might find some better way to dissuade them than she could manufacture so quickly. Rhi and her sister Mara grew up in an one of their cloisters. She knew their ways better than Katrin, but that same experience had made her reluctant to lie to them.
“She does not will it, sister.” Rhi’s voice was even, but tinged with a guilt that passed for authentic apology. “We will not endanger anyone else with the crime we have resolved to commit.”
The kneeling woman said nothing, but raised her head to await further elaboration from Rhi. The others, the actual Solacebringers, gathered tightly together to witness the miracle of Inyr, tensed their stances.
“We do not have writ. It is the last wish of the Abbess to look upon but not enter the great Cloister of Thalyrest before she gives herself over to the peace of death. You must understand her insistence that no one else be incriminated in our act — she does not wish anyone come to harm over her violation.”
Katrin’s tremulous heart slowed considerably when the holy woman nodded her head. “Then Melys has truly smiled upon us. But let us at least share thanks together?”
“Of course,” Rhi smiled with relief. “It is a sorrow to all of us that our Abbess has lost her voice, for it was a gift none would be blamed to covet. But may I suggest we recite her favorite, the Third Litany of Gratitude?”
Katrin smiled at Rhi furtively. Rhi had insisted they all learn several short prayers in the event of such a meeting, and had just suggested the shortest of them. The holy woman nodded and they began. Lurian, as the mute, plagued Abbess of Inyr, merely mouthed the words, while both Rhi and Katrin chanted with full voice to cover Rylan’s possible mistakes.
When the words were done, the tearing faces of the Solacebringers of Thalyrest looked at ease, taking their leave silently and continuing their pilgrimage to Woric, hearts grateful to have met the last Abbess of Inyr.
But now, the last Abbess of Inyr — Lurian — was fleeing from Council Enforcers while Rylan lay dying or dead, Rhi screamed in pain, and Katrin searched desperately for a way to survive.
She bit back the agony pulsing through her head. She held the cloth against the wound above her eye, tied it tightly above her right ear, pulling with it a bit of hair. She couldn’t tell if the cloth staunched or merely soaked up the torrent of blood, but she could now see a little better.
The voices of the two men who’d pursued Lurian into the trees called to each other in muffled shouts. She thought they were far enough away that she would not be seen by them if she edged her head up over the rock. Only the third might see her, but then she heard his voice, calling away from her:
“I’ll Call. You two are useless.”
One of the Enforcers had wyrd-training. She dropped back down quietly and panicked. Katrin had seen countless Callings before. Enforcers used them to stop fleeing suspects, or to force someone resisting them to drop their weapons. Much more limited than the Telling that Mara and Rhi could do, but none of them would be able to resist it.
Still, Katrin saw a thread of hope. He wasn’t a wyrdwright, so he’d have to focus to Call, and he’d be tired after. Also, from what she’d seen, only a wyrdwright could Call more than person at a time. So, if the other two Enforcers didn’t return immediately, she could rush this one before he’d finished, while he was too focused to notice her. And if she caught him right at the moment he was most focused, she might even be able to kill him.
Katrin watched the Enforcer’s body stiffen, and she shuddered in disgust. He looked like a man close to release, tensed and rigid, thought and feeling suspended in the moment before forcing his will into another.
She was about to rush him, then remembered something else. Even if she did manage to kill the man, the other two would hear his screams and rush back to him. His death wouldn’t be enough — they’d kill her after, then kill Rhi, and then find Lurian and kill him, too.
Despair filled her, then flowed away just as forcefully as she clung to a new possibility.
She imagined herself otherwise. Decrepit, fragile, translucent skin pulled too tightly over some bones, sagging putridly over others. She kept the cloth tied around her forehead, but loosened and let fall the long priest’s cloak and unbuttoned the shift underneath. It would be easier to make him believe if her clothes matched the part.
The other men still weren’t coming back, and the Enforcer, enraptured in his Calling, didn’t hear her approach. Katrin got closer and closer, tried to stare at him and not to look into the forest, nor at Rylan’s body in the grass, nor at Rhi’s crumpled sobbing form.
She couldn’t have Changed the smell of her, could not have masked her scent with the nauseating aura of putrefying flesh and softening bone. Janyr had taught her the plants for that — bog blossoms, or several mushrooms buried in a jar for three months. Still, the vision might be enough, and she could at least mimic the gurgled voice of the Wasted.
She was just behind him, close enough to touch him, close enough to hiss and cough the only words she could think of.
“Help me,” she rasped, wetly. “The Fathers have mercy.”
The Enforcer stopped his Calling, letting drop the wyrdstone from his hand. His expression was first confusion, then shock, then suddenly disgust and terror as he looked at the diseased woman.
Just then, Katrin reached for his arm, smearing her blood on his skin.
His face paled. “You!” he shuddered. “Get away from me!” He pulled his arm away from her grip, but she held on. He hadn’t recovered his strength yet, was still in half-ecstasy, weak, vulnerable, his body reeling with the sudden interruption of the Calling.
She coughed, spitting as much as she could. “I lost my stomach … two days … I can’t eat.” She was working from memory here, the foul despair of a woman she’d once tried to help. That dead woman came alive again in her voice, her rasping, her fear.
The Enforcer was still reeling, disoriented. His fear would turn to murder soon enough, he would loosen her strangely strong grip, would soon bludgeon the plague-ridden woman clinging to him into darkness and silence.
He pulled his arm violently away from her, but she released her grip just before he expected her to, unbalancing him. She had no hope of pinning him, but she pushed against his faltering leg anyway, sending him to the ground with her body almost on top of him. The Enforcer could easily have broken her neck if he’d had both arms free. But he’d fallen on one of them, and Katrin’s weight added enough pressure that she suspected he’d broken it.
She didn’t think upon the men pursuing Lurian into the woods, nor the imminence of their return. She didn’t think upon Rylan’s unmoving body, or Rhi’s spasms in the grass. She plunged her short knife into the Enforcer’s leg, just below the knee. The blade slowed through muscle and stopped at bone, going no further, eliciting brutal screams from the man.
He threw her off of him in fury. The cloth belt couldn’t staunch the blood from her head now, which was gushing forth in thick torrents into the grass. Her head swam, her eyes grew dim.
It shouldn’t have happened so quickly, so soon, Katrin thought, as the world fell beneath her.
She thought she felt the ground open under her body, the wet dirt tangled with roots accepting the warm life issuing from her wound. All life danced about her, a slowly increasing revolution with her in the center. She and everyone she’d ever known wondered together whether she would die or only sleep, if life would simply ebb into the hidden wells beneath the stones or gush forth in one final blow.
She saw them all, herself and all the others, and smiled sadly.
It shouldn’t have happened at all, she mused with them. But it did. And this bed, this thick, wet green blanket, this dim light, would let her finally sleep.