“How much would you be willing to split for them?” A Fan merchant in brocade robes rubbed gem encrusted rings on his fingers as he oggled Rowan and Farrow at my shoulders.
I regarded the orange shaded man under aloof lids. Charcoal grey straight hair hung to the top of his shoulders, as seemed to be custom with a class of Fan. He had a little black hat on that indicated he sold textiles. He was the third Fan of that type today to ask. I twisted my head, flashing the chains and blood-red, jeweled dangles in my ears as I looked back to Rowan’s profile. It was a subtle bid to show I was noble and worth money. Filigreed caps were newly pierced into place at the tips of my ears. Rowan had come back to the inn with a bag of adjusted jewelry from the gems we’d lifted from Wallace’s room and decided it was time to make me look like the prince I was.
“How much?” I asked Rowan as I traced the edge of his cloak, flashing the full of his collar and the moving tree of gold. “Would a continent even come close to your value?” I floated the question softly, dripping admiration with every syllable. The merchant turned grey when he saw the collar, the shimmering movement of metal rising and falling. That collar was working the best trick I could ask for. No one knew of a wizard strong enough to enchant metal, let alone a person outside of royalty who could afford that much gold to pay one to encircle an entire throat. A gold clink, as Rowan explained after the first merchant, could buy a house outright in any town. I had used two for each of their collars. They would look like highly positioned royal slaves to any merchant who saw those moving images. Then there was the leather one I had placed on Quamire that had a set of labradors chasing each other around it. Who would pay that type of clink for an animal other than someone who had too much wealth. Someone noble.
I turned an eye to the merchant, looking him up and down once more. “I don’t think your king is willing to sell me his throne and another’s, is he?” I asked the merchant with a sly smile, a couple of my sharp teeth showing. I traced the back of a finger along Farrow’s cheek, drawing attention to the fact he had the skin of royal Karamide and a golden collar to match Rowan’s. The man swallowed and shook his head, realizing he was talking to someone well above his station. Rumors would swirl through the mountain village and down the foothills back to the Empire. They would know soon where their little heir-to-the-throne had gone off to. And that he’d acquired a hornless Rugoshi and a royal Karamide as slaves. A mercenary and a prince. It would be a declaration of war by the time it reached them.
I had burden-beasts at hand, but the mountain villages could not afford much in the way of transport outside of the strong backs on overworked slaves. The system grated at me in a way that felt overwhelming. There was no manner by which I alone could overcome it. I reflected back to my high school history classes in the midwest and had to admire the roll the people in the underground railroad played and the abolitionists who made their way to government seats held up their fellow men when it made poor financial sense to do so. In the end it left me wondering more and more about the skeletons I was meant to summon and if that too was encroaching into an ethics dilemma I should think more on.
In my musings, I found I had been staring at the stitching on Farrow’s quiver while we walked through the wide main street that allowed Ravur to not run into people. I had spent the better part of an afternoon figuring out what it would take to make the bottom of the quiver Farrow carried into a limitless space container. I did not trust what remained of our packs out in the open after having lost a good shirt and the worn pair of boots I liked to someone in the last village who had pilfered them. This augmentation to the quiver helped relieve Rowan of much of his heavy plate. He walked in his chain mail and a thick, dull cloak that draped over his shoulder, his sword at his hip. Farrow, dressed similarly, had his archer’s bracer and his bow and quiver to show what his function was. We had decided it would serve better to walk in the open as them escorting me rather than try to be furtive and draw more attention for the secrecy.
Rowan had put me in black and red with silver trim, something ostentatious enough to declare me different from the rest – a floor length black leather cloak lined in silky black fur paired with pitch black pants and a coordinated skin tight type of black shirt more often worn by the Faybar. It was one of the styles from two villages back that I had mentioned fleetingly that I liked the look of. He had given me a raised eyebrow of disbelief. When I explained it had a lot to do with how the boning in the bodice felt like a deep hug rather than the loose scratchy wool of the Yujin tunic, he begrudgingly accepted my explanation. It had corsetry built into the waist and a cutaway across the chest. Initially I thought it lewd, but after seeing enough of the Faybar of all genders in that village comfortably wear them around others, I finally got over my nipples being seen whenever my cloak was off. It seemed to leave an impression of good will with the Faybar that a Yujin would wear it. And that had already gotten us discounts at a number of food stalls between the last two mountain villages and this one.
I hated that the outfit brought attention to me. More that I couldn’t hide behind my hood where I didn’t have to look at everyone. It took longer for me to shutter off their truth, and some had made me flinch enough to have Rowan reaching for his hilt.
After lunch at a market stall, refilling our rations, and finding a new bag to replace Farrow’s lost one from the river, we pressed on. Rowan wanted to camp at the top of the mountain, rather than risk an inn in this village. He didn’t want to stay after having been approached by three Fan already for me to sell him off. He suspected that it would be safer not to be trapped in an inn.
I came out of my ponderments when I tripped over a rock in the road and made an undignified flounder of myself. Glancing around, I was pleased to find the street vacant of onlookers. It occurred to me that I had no idea where we were other than a smooth path leading out of the village and further up into the pass towards Blij. What did make me nervous of this road, for it being empty of people, were the cairns lining both sides of the dirt path. Tiny towers of stacked rock were jammed into every undulation all the way to the end of the curve. Glancing up the cliff to the switchback, I found more cairns above us.
“Rowan?” I asked when we had passed by the second switchback up the tight cliff climb and there were yet more cairn towers. The village had already reduced to tiny pebbles hidden under a swath of broadleafed trees below us. There were too many cairns for a village of that size unless the path had been memorialized for more than a couple of centuries. But I hadn’t seen any village house that would indicate an age that could justify that many cairns.
He looked up to what I was staring at. “Yep.” He checked Lis’s saddle tack as we walked. If the cairns weren’t going to worry him, then I guess we would just keep hiking. Ravur was enjoying nibbling at the little plants growing along the side of the road rather than being pressed forward at a clip all day. Quamire though was giving me pause to our ascent. He kept flicking back and forth between Rowan and Farrow for head scritches, which was rather unlike him. I knew something was wrong when he willingly sought me out for the same reassuring attention. He tolerated my presence by feet on a good day.
“What’s up, Quamire?” I asked the creature. A gut level nausea seeped in. He pressed his blocky, buttercream scaled head under my hand and insisted that I keep it there as we walked. His wings, regularly tucked up at his side like a duck, kept slipping from their position to flutter, as if to fan off heat. Quamire’s lower haunches sunk, and he slowed to tuck behind me. “Hey Rowan, Quamire’s being funny.”
Rowan glanced back and furrowed his brow, studying his companion. He slowed and waited on me to come astride. Farrow collected Ravur’s lead, staring at Quamire. Ravur shook her head, frustrated. Farrow tripped after her. She backed away, tugging at her lead to be freed. Lis stamped in protest. It wasn’t so much they didn’t want to keep moving, but that they didn’t want to be stopped there.
“Easy, easy, lady, easy.” Farrow cinched up on Ravur’s lead to keep her wide head pressed against his chest. She snuffled into his shirt, calming under his hand. Her tail whipped back and forth in agitation though.
“Fan cremate their dead, right?” I asked the two.
“All religions of the Peoples require it.” Rowan turned to study the cairns that traversed the whole of the cliff above and bellow us.
“Then these are just memorials, right? Not bodies?”
“If a group doesn’t follow the religions, then these could be bodies.”
“Why would they do that?” I crept in close to Farrow and Ravur, Quamire following my lead.
Rowan shrugged. “Not all villages follow the official religions. But,” he knelt next to a close cairn covered in moss and small fern-like plants growing in the mountain mist. He cleared off some of the dirt and overgrowth to reveal that the cairn stack was buried in the ground. “I don’t think these are graves for the village.”
“What makes you think that?” I peered around Ravur’s chest, but had no desire to get close to that jumble of rock. I had relaxed my vision long enough to see too many blue whisps curling about in the thickening fog and mist, and too many Mander slithering about the cairns. Evenings come fast on the backside of a mountain. The fog turned dense as we stalled there on the road, and with the fog came the silence. The wind stopped. Little daysingers disappeared, and none of the nightsingers came out to break up the stifling atmosphere.
“A symbol on the understone. This one next to it also has one cut into it.”
“Does it seal a body?” I asked. Maybe that was where the blue wisps were coming from.
“No.” His tone wasn’t improving my sour stomach.
“Gonna keep being cryptic there, boss?” Farrow’s slitted pupils had turned into massive black orbs in the descending dark.
“They were blood bound. They won’t rise.” Rowan ran his thumb over the little hatchmark on the stone.
“Then why the blue wisps everywhere?” I whispered as more and more wisps layered the cliffside, creating a bobbing tapestry of winking stars beneath the mist.
Rowan pulled back from the cairn. His face sallowed. “If they buried anyone not properly blood bound, they might rise.”
“Blood bound?”
“Part of the blood magic for making slaves. The soul gets stuck to the owner. They don’t rise, as long as the owner is alive or cremated.” He tugged Lis back to box us in between the large creatures’ bodies.
“This is a graveyard for slaves?” That sour note in my stomach burned up the back of my throat uninvited.
Rowan nodded silently and jutted out his chin to indicate we should move on. Farrow pulled out a fat-dipped torch and lit it. With the fog becoming palpable, the torch did little more than to create a gold bubble around us. It was slow work navigating our way up the switchbacks for more than a couple of hours. A bright shadow in the midst of a luminescent dark sea.
And the nausea kept growing. A shake came and went in my digits. That sinking feeling like I hadn’t eaten enough trailed along my insides. I tugged, fighting to lift my leaden feet as we crested the top of the cliff.
The fog sat thickest there at the edge. It slithered and quaked as if alive. An undertone of red that I first dismissed as Farrow’s guttering torch raised the hair on the back of my neck. Ravur and Lis refused to continue on. Quamire growled at it. Farrow hissed. He grabbed for Rowan to stop him and missed. The fog surged. The torch died. I couldn’t see the end of my nose. And then all at once, the fog disappeared in its entirety. Rowan was laying on the ground, unresponsive as the last of the fog funneled into him in one gasp. Stars winked on, inverting the flickering sea from below to above. Farrow and I rushed to his side.
“Rowan! Rowan!” Farrow tapped Rowan’s face and shook his shoulders. “Wake up. Rowan!”
Fifteen seconds of unresponsiveness. Rowan dragged in a staggered, deep breath. His eyes snapped open. And they were a deep blood red with slits. Farrow fell back from Rowan and scuttled to put distance between them.
“Skull Hart?” A deep voice asked that wasn’t Rowan’s.
- Copyright Chapel Orahamm LLC. Do not reproduce this writing or art in any form.
- No AI was used in the making of this webnovel.
- I do not consent to the use of my writing in training any form of AI.
Chapel Orahamm 