We left Pryd Town, banished and glad to be. With war raging between the lairds there would be no easy passage, of course, but the ease with which I turned away from the road to Entel to the more hospitable lands surprised me, even as I justified it to Cadayle and her mother. Pretty words, grounded in logic and honest fears, made the change in course an easy sell to my companions, but no amount of apparent justification could hide the truth from me.
I changed course, delayed my journey to Ethelbert dos Entel and beyond, because I was afraid.
This is no new epiphany. I knew when I changed paths the true reason for my hesitance; it was not based in the many fierce soldiers Laird Ethelbert has spread across the land. Even as I offered that very reason-“too dangerous”-to Cadayle and Callen, I recognized the lie.
And now I accept it, for what is left to me if I travel all the way through the deserts of Behr to the land of the mystics only to find there that there is no deeper understanding to be gained? What is left to me if I learn that I have progressed as far as I can ever hope to climb, that the shadow of the drooling, gibbering Stork will never be more than a stride behind me?
My condition dominates every aspect of my life. Even with the soul stone strapped to my forehead, focusing my line of chi, I wage constant battles of concentration to keep the Stork at bay. I practice for hours every day, forcing deep-seeded memories into my muscles so that when they are needed they will hopefully heed my call. And yet I know that one slip, one break of concentration, and all of my work will be for naught. I will bumble, and I will fail. And not just in battle. My concerns run far deeper than simple vanity or even the price of my own life. I cannot make love to my wife without fear that she may birth a child of similar disability to my own.
My one great hope is to be free of the Stork, to live a normal existence, to have children and raise them strong and healthy.
And that one great hope lies in the Walk of Clouds and nowhere else.
Is it enough to have the hope, even if it is never realized? Would that be a better existence than discovering ultimate futility, that there is no hope? Perhaps that is the secret-the hope-for me and for all men. I hear the dreams of so many of the folk, their claims that one day they will go and live quietly in a peaceful place, by a stream or a lake or at the edge of the mighty Mirianic. So many claim those dreams throughout their lives, yet never actually find the time to execute their plans.
Are they afraid, I wonder, as I am afraid? Is it better to have the hope of paradise than to pursue it truthfully and find that it is not what you expected?
I laugh at the folly and preposterousness of it all. Despite all of my worries, I am happier than I have ever been. I walk beside Cadayle and her mother Callen and am warm and in love and loved.
My road at present is west and north. Not to Ethelbert dos Entel. Not to Behr. Not to the Walk of Clouds.
– BRANSEN GARIBOND
ONE
The Would-Be King
Small and thin, Bransen nevertheless walked with the stride of a confident man. He wore the simple clothing of a farmer, breeches and shirt and a wide-brimmed hat under which sprouted tufts of black hair. He carried a thick walking stick, too thick, it seemed, for the fit of his fine hands. But it, like the hat-like the man himself-concealed a great secret, for within its burnished wood was a hollow, and within that hollow a sword, a fabulous sword, the greatest sword in all the land north of the Belt-and-Buckle Mountains. Fashioned of wrapped silverel steel, decorated with etchings of vines and flowers and with a handle of silver and ivory that resembled a hooded serpent, the sword would grow sharper with use as the thicker outer layers of wrapping were nicked or worn away.
It was a Jhesta Tu blade, named for the reclusive mystics of the southern nation of Behr. No detail of the sword had been overlooked, not even the prongs of the crosspiece, each resembling smaller snakes poised as if to strike. For to the Jhesta Tu, the making of the sword was a holy thing, a signal of deeper meditation and perfect concentration. This sword had been fashioned by Bransen’s mother, Sen Wi, and whenever he held it he could feel in its details and workmanship the spirit of that remarkable woman, long dead.
A simple wagon pulled by two horses and a donkey tethered behind rolled beside him on the cobblestone road, driven by a woman who commanded Bransen’s attention so completely that he was caught off his guard when another woman walked up beside him and tucked his silk bandanna up higher under his hat.
Instinctively, Bransen’s hand snapped up to catch the wrist of the older woman, Callen Duwornay, his mother-in-law. He turned to her with a smile.
“I like the way you look at her,” Callen said to him quietly, motioning with her chin toward her daughter. Oblivious of Bransen’s stare, Cadayle sang while she steered the wagon.
“She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen,” Bransen replied quietly enough so that Cadayle couldn’t hear. “Every time I look at her she seems more beautiful still.”
Callen flashed him a wide smile. “A man looked at me like that once,” she said. “Or so I thought.”
Though she smiled her voice was filled with wistful-ness and a hint of regret. Bransen understood the latter all too well, for he knew Callen’s sad tale because it was intricately and intimately entwined with his own.
Callen had been in love once, but not with her husband. She met her soulmate after she had already been given in marriage, without choice and without say, as had been the custom twenty years before in Honce. The revelations of her adulterous affair had brought her a death sentence. As per the brutal Samhaist tradition, young Callen had been “sacked”-placed in a canvas bag with a poisonous snake. After being bitten repeatedly, her veins coursing with deadly poison, she had been staked out at the edge of Pryd Holding and left to die.
Bransen’s mother had come upon Callen on the path and intervened, had used her Jhesta Tu magic to draw the poison from Callen and into her own body. But unknown to Sen Wi she was with child, with Bransen, and the poison damaged him severely.
Thus he kept close his second secret, concealed under a bandanna that he wore under his hat. The bandanna held in place a soul stone, a hematite, a magical gemstone enchanted with the Abellican powers of healing. While wearing that stone Bransen could walk normally with confidence. Without it he reverted to the clumsy and awkward creature often derided as “the Stork.”
“Your lover betrayed you,” Bransen said, but Callen was shaking her head before he ever finished.
“He had no choice. He would have been killed beside me if he had either denied or confirmed the affair.”
“That would have been a noble deed.”
“A stupid one.”
“Speaking the truth is not stupid,” Bransen argued.
Callen grinned at him knowingly. “Then throw away your hat and draw your sword out from that log you call a walking stick.”
Bransen chuckled, accepting her point. “What was his name?”
Callen shook her head. “I loved him” was all she would say. “And he gave to me my Cadayle.” She looked past Bransen then to her daughter. In that moment Bransen saw more clearly than ever the resemblance between Callen and her daughter. They had the same soft, wheat-colored hair, though Callen’s was showing gray now, and eyes of similar brown hue, though rare were the times Bransen had seen Callen’s eyes sparkle as they did at that moment, as Cadayle’s always did.
Bransen followed her gaze to his beloved wife. “Then I forgive him his cowardice, whatever his name,” he said. “For he gave me Cadayle, too, I suppose.”
“As your mother gave you to her. As your mother gave life itself to Cadayle by saving mine when I carried Cadayle in my womb.”
“When my mother carried me,” Bransen said, looking back at his mother-in-law.