Sam Bowring
Prophecy's Ruin
The first book in the Broken Well Trilogy series
To my father Ian, who started reading fantasy to me when I was young and impressionable, so whose fault this all is.
Map
Part One
The Blue-Haired Boy
—
I very occasionally wonder what direction my life’s path would have taken had my birth not been foretold a hundred years before I actually emerged from my dead mother’s womb. If the prophets had not given all the necessary directions as to how I could be recognised, and what I would be, I fancy I would not have the same view now as I do from my windows. If, if, if …if there was any point dwelling on things unchangeable.
Instead, a century ago, on a certain day at a certain time, every single prophet in the world stopped what they were doing and saw my future. Forks were dropped clattering to plates, conversations halted mid-sentence, the dreams of the sleeping were pushed aside and the same vision clouded every set of eyes. What they saw: a man with blue hair who possessed the power to end the war. For which side? Unclear. How? They couldn’t say. The only other thing they knew (the way we just know things in dreams sometimes) was that I would be born within the next hundred years.
In beginning this tale, I choose the hour of that birth. I call it ‘that’ birth because I do not exactly think of it as being ‘my’ birth, as you may grow to appreciate. Be that as it may, my prophecy was alive in the world, and a race between shadow and light was being run.
And it was a dark and stormy night. Of course.
One
Moments of Fatherhood
A man stood in a hut in the forest, staring into a mirror. Lines scored his face like tributaries, feeding the purple delta beneath his eyes. He’d torn at his bushy brown beard, and tears had fallen heavily, like the rain that would come. He heard the screaming again, a high-pitched wail he’d been powerless to stop; it spiked out of memory to stab at his heart.
‘What is it?’ he asked his reflection. ‘What has happened?’
His eyes focused, and in the mirror he saw behind him reflected that which was real. Twisted sheets, sprawling limbs, blood. Her hair shining too vividly for her to be dead. His wife, Mirrow.
An unbidden image flashed into his mind: a shovel-load of dirt hitting her face. He lashed out against it, shattering the mirror. If only the pictures in his mind’s eye could be smashed away so easily.
He sat down next to Mirrow’s body. Pushing her hair back from her pointed ears, he remembered when it had been blonde, not this freakish blue. He forced his eyes further down the bed to the baby she had died expelling. The child they had hoped for these last three years. She had been so happy to discover she was pregnant.
‘Little man?’ he whispered, reaching out to touch the baby’s foot.
The baby did not stir; it just lay still, breathing quietly, eyes closed. It was a strange way for a newborn to behave, and the man did not know what to do. In his heart he believed the child would die, but his mind danced around this belief as though it were a pit full of spikes. He did not know how he would cope with double grief. He probably wouldn’t.
‘You just rest,’ he said, patting the boy. ‘You just sleep, little man. So you can wake up healthy.’
He was almost scared to touch the boy, scared his shaking hands might clumsily break whatever sinew kept the child tied to life. Why did the boy have blue hair too? Why had his wife’s turned such a colour? Again he saw dirt, her face, and he knew that leaving the terrible duty undone was driving him insane.
He found himself standing outside the hut with a shovel, asking himself where she’d like to be buried. His gaze fell on the flower garden. It was the place.
His shovel bit the soil.
Clouds gathered in the fading light and a sprinkling of raindrops heralded the storm. It could have been raining fireballs for all he cared. When it was done, he climbed out of the grave and leaned on the shovel. For a merciful time his mind went blank. Around him the storm whipped into a fury, and it took a thunderclap to stir him. The grave was beginning to fill with water. Maybe, when he put her down there, the water would cover her and he wouldn’t have to shovel dirt onto her face after all? He almost laughed.
‘How dark the day,’ he shouted at the trees, ‘when one must hope for such things! How could you let this happen? She loved you as much as I loved her, and still you let her die! Do you hear me, Vyasinth? One of your fold comes home!’
With the weight of grief making it hard to breathe, he re-entered the hut. No change with the boy, and certainly no change with his wife. Unable to bear the sight of her lying there, he bore her up and out of the hut, into the driving rain. Over the grave, he rested his face against the cold skin of her neck. ‘Mirrow,’ he choked raggedly. By the time he lowered her in, the rain had cleaned her body of blood. A long time he looked upon her, burning her features into his mind to scar them there forever. Then he began to shovel dirt.
With the grave filled, he promised that tomorrow he would bring the boy out and they would say goodbye together. ‘And when he’s old enough, I’ll tell him of you, Mirrow. Everything about you. You will not fade easily from our lives, I swear.’
If he lives, came the treacherous interior voice.
Corlas remembered the prayer she had asked him to repeat if ever she died. It had always made him angry when she brought it up, and he would gruffly inform her that she was not going to die with him around to protect her. ‘You cannot take on every danger with an axe, my woodsman,’ she’d reply. He hated that she’d been right.
The prayer was in the same language as her songs, and he’d learned the words surprisingly easily. Mirrow had always maintained that it was because of his Sprite ancestry, but he had never truly believed her. How could he? He didn’t see meaning in the way a leaf twirled to earth, or hear voices in the trees, or see faces in streams. He didn’t remember generations of ancient peoples who had gone before him – blood memory, as Mirrow called it. ‘The Lady told me I am almost pure Sprite,’ she’d said. ‘I’ve many of the old talents that are lost to our kind. Perhaps with you it was only a very distant relative who had Sprite in them and so it is not so easily seen. Yet you are Sprite nonetheless.’ And he would smile and remain silent, because he knew the idea pleased her.
Summoning it from memory, Corlas spoke the accursed prayer. The wind howled, sharing his despair, and earth blasted from the top of the grave. The trees surrounding the clearing shook violently, twigs and leaves ripping free. Sticks and stones took off from the ground and Corlas heard the whiz of objects hurtling by his ears. Underneath the wind came the whispering of unearthly voices. A chill seized him as he realised that the spirits of the wood were all around, churning the air. The fear faded, however, as, although the wind roared loudly, he didn’t feel the slightest breeze. And then, for a moment, he thought he saw her. In the fork of a tree by the clearing’s edge, some twenty paces above the ground, she stood watching. Taller than a mortal woman, with arms like branches and fingers like twigs, her face was impossible to make out in the dark. A voice spoke to him clearly above the others, seeming to come from all around …and he understood that the forest loved Mirrow as he had, and that her spirit was safe. Then the Lady was gone, replaced by whipping branches and rustling leaves, and he wondered if he had seen her at all.
Shivering, he went back inside. There, he stared at the bed for a long moment. Then he glanced from left to right. As he tore the sheets off the bed, confusion fast became horror.