Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One (4 page)

A good rain
might have washed it away, but it was still home. Kael wondered what people
from other lands might think of it. How would it compare to the endless blue
ocean, or the gentle wave of grain fields? He watched the clouds roll overhead,
covering the tiny houses in one shade of gray after the next, and almost
smiled.

The sun rarely
shined on Tinnark. But when it did, people complained.

He knew he
couldn’t put it off any longer. He would have to leave the forest eventually:
it was too dangerous to travel through the woods without a bow. As he jogged
down the slope, he didn’t look back. He knew his days among the trees were
over, but he refused to let the mountains see how much it hurt him.

Next to the
hospital sat the small, one-room cabin he shared with Amos. No one else wanted
to put their home nearby because they believed it would invite ghosts across
their thresholds. So they had the land mostly to themselves.

He pushed the
battered, weatherworn door open, listening to the familiar creak of its hinges.
Amos promised that he would talk to the blacksmith about having them fixed …
nearly a decade ago. But they spent so many of their days and nights at the
hospital that things like creaky hinges went forgotten.

Now their hearth
had more dust than ash, the holes in their roof went un-mended, and it all
smelled faintly of mold.

A small family
of mice had taken up residence under their floor planks. When he opened the
door, they scattered — making off with the bits of straw they’d been
busily nicking out of a hole in his mattress. Their little feet tapped against
the floor as they scurried into their den. He could hear them muttering to one
another while he tried to find a place to hide his quiver.

In the end, he
stuffed it rather unceremoniously under his bed, deep in the shadows. The
shafts of light filtering through the roof were too weak to find it. And he
figured that the mice would eventually become numerous enough to carry it off
on their backs, anyways. So without giving too much worry to it, he left the
cabin and made his way down the dirt road to the hospital.

He opened the
door and wasn’t at all surprised to see that the beds were nearly full. Most of
the patients were fishermen— the snow melting off the summit made the
rivers swell this time of year, and made fishing all the more perilous. Many
nursed broken arms or sprained ankles and groaned as they shifted their weight.

In a shadowed
corner of the room, a group of young women sat around one of the cloth-covered
tables. They held their noses and grimaced as they sipped from earthen cups,
pausing every now and then to scratch at the sickly green splotches on their
necks. They must have gotten into last night’s blueberry stew.

In the
mountains, even the most unassuming berry had to be cooked — raw, their
juices had a poison in them that settled in the throat and spread to other
victims through coughs. Amos called it thistlethroat, and the remedy was one of
the most unpleasant tonics in his cabinet.

Kael knew he’d
been right to choose a different pot.

Just beyond the
coughing women was a man who looked like he’d tangled with a beehive: the skin
on his face was red and taut, stretched across the sharp lumps of his swollen
cheeks. He moaned unintelligibly through his puffy lips, and Kael stopped to
put more ointment on the stings. He’d read that in other regions, the bees
actually lost their barbs. But in the mountains they could go on stinging a man
until he crushed them ... or died.

He finally
discovered Amos in the back of the room, tending to a boy with a large cut on
the top of his arm. Though his hair was gray, Amos’s brown eyes were still
plenty sharp. Hardly a thing went on in his hospital without him knowing about
it.

“Don’t pick at
those stitches, young man! Do you want it to turn black and rot off?” he
snapped.

The boy jerked
his hand away from the wound and his eyes filled with tears.

“I didn’t think
so.” Amos wrapped the boy’s arm in a clean white bandage and then gave him a
serious look. “No more climbing on rotten trees, all right?”

The boy nodded
stiffly. And as he left, he held his arm far to the side — as if it might
fall off at any moment.

“Don’t forget:
you’re to come see me again in one week. Tell your parents,” Amos called after
him.

No sooner was
the boy gone than a fisherman stumbled over to take his place. He grimaced and
leaned heavily on his companions — who supported him on either side.

Amos looked him
over. “What happened here? A bruised knee, a twisted ankle?”

“No. Thorns,”
the fisherman grunted. “I was standing on a rock and when I threw my line, my
boots slipped out from under me. Fell flat into a patch of brambles, I did.”
His friends turned him around, revealing the dozens of thorns that peppered his
back. They poked through his shirt and left little rings of blood around each
one.

It made Kael’s
skin itch to look at it, but Amos just rolled his eyes. “Oh for mercy’s sake.
You look like an oversized hedgepig.” He led them to the nearest table and
spread a clean sheet over it. “Lay him out here — no, on his
stomach
, boys! I shouldn’t have to pull
them out through his lungs.”

When they had
him situated, Amos forced a cup of sharp-smelling tonic down the fisherman’s
throat. He was soon snoring peacefully.

“This shouldn’t
take long. I’ll send him home when we’re done,” Amos said, shooing his
companions out the door. When they were gone, he walked past Kael and said
without looking: “Bring me those tweezers, will you?”

He’d worked with
Amos long enough to know exactly which tweezers he meant. They were a pair with
grooves cut out of them: perfect for gripping onto the smooth surface of a
thorn.

“I’m going to
pull these out, and I want you to dab the blood dry as soon as they’re free,
all right?” Amos said.

Kael got a clean
cloth and held it next to the first thorn. Amos’s hands shook a little as he
latched the tweezers onto it. But he furrowed his brows in stubborn concentration,
and his hands became still. “Ready?” he said, and Kael nodded.

With one sharp
tug, Amos wrenched the thorn free and Kael pushed the cloth over the wound. He
thought there was an awful lot of blood, and he heard Amos mutter a curse under
his breath.

“Hooknettle,” he
grouched, holding the thorn up for Kael to see.

Hooknettle was
one of the nastier mountain brambles. Its thorns were shaped like a fisherman’s
hook: with one barb at the tip and another on the side. The barb at the tip dug
into flesh while the other latched on, making it nearly impossible to pull free
without taking a sizable chunk of skin with it.

“I don’t have
time for this.” Amos dropped the thorn into a bowl, reached behind him and
grabbed another instrument. It was a long, thin rod of metal that he used to
pull debris from deep wounds. He latched onto the next thorn and stuck the rod
down into the puncture. This time when he pulled, the barb came out cleanly.

It took them
hours to remove all the thorns, clean the wounds and bandage them. “Well if
that wasn’t the biggest waste of my time …” Amos let his sentence trail into a
string of grumbles as he finished the last bandage. While he scrubbed his hands
in a bowl of water, he locked his sharp eyes on Kael. “See? If you hadn’t been
here to help, it would have taken me all blasted week. I wish you’d give up
this hunter nonsense and take your place as a healer.”

They’d been
arguing about his future since the day he turned twelve. Usually, Kael would
cross his arms and remind Amos that hunting was his dream, and he had a right
to face the Trial of the Five Arrows. But not today.

“Healing is your
love, not mine,” Kael said. He knew the words sounded hollow the second he
spoke them.

Fortunately,
Amos didn’t seem to notice. “You shouldn’t scorn your gifts, boy. You have a
knack for healing. And sooner or later you’re going to have to face it.”

He hated that.
He hated hearing it. So what if he had a knack? It didn’t change the fact that
his heart didn’t beat for it. He didn’t care about herbs or salves — he
wanted adventure! He wanted to fight, to defend the realm. Deep in the pit of
his soul, Kael was a warrior.

But Fate told it
differently.

“I’m going to
dinner,” he muttered. He didn’t wait for Amos to follow, but went straight out
the door.

*******

The noise in the
Hall was deafening — but then dinner was always the loudest meal of the
day. When the sky finally went dark, the Tinnarkians would put their boots up
and celebrate. Sure, they may have limps or scrapes or arms in slings, but at
least they’d managed to live through the day.

Long tables
fanned out from the middle of the Hall like rays from the sun. A huge bed of
coals burned in a hole cut out of the floor and a dozen pots hovered above it,
their bubbling contents suspended by iron spits.

This was where
all the food in Tinnark wound up: the pot. Most days, it was a mushy stew with
thick brown broth. But stews with berries in them usually turned a murky gray.

Kael chose the
shortest line and grabbed a clean bowl off the serving table. There were few
jobs for girls his age. Besides getting married and having children, about the
only other thing they could do was cook. When he stepped up to the pot, the
girl who ladled his stew plunked it down without a care, splattering it across
his boots.

He was used to
it. The girls teased him about his skinny limbs just as much as the boys did
— though never to his face. At least with a punch, he could stand tall
and take it like a man. But the girls waited until his back was turned before
they flogged him with their laughter. Which he thought might’ve hurt worse than
a blow to the gut.

The hunters
claimed the seats closest to the fire — which meant Kael had to pass them
anytime he went to get a meal. He tried to ignore their jeers, but then Laemoth
stuck his leg out to trip him. He skipped over it — and Marc shoved him
for dodging.

Hot stew sloshed
out of his bowl and onto the front of his tunic. They laughed, and normally he
would have been ready with a clever retort. But tonight he had worse things to
worry about. So instead, he ignored their name-calling and went straight for
his table.

Amos and Roland
were old men, which meant they didn’t have to wait in line for food. By the
time Kael made it to the table, they were already arguing between spoonfuls.

“You know what I
saw this morning?” Roland said as he leaned over his bowl, his wiry gray beard
nearly dipping into the broth.

“I can only
imagine,” Amos grumped.

“A raven sitting
outside my door. I walked out and there he was, staring me down with those
beady black eyes. And of course, you know what that means —”

“You’ll have to
clean the droppings off your doorstep?”

Roland frowned
at him. “No. It means we’ll have company tonight.”

Amos snorted.
“Company? You know as well as I do that there hasn’t been a traveler in Tinnark
since before either of us was born.”

“Mayhap there
would be, if tales of your crotchety ways hadn’t seeped down the mountains and
scared them all off.”

Kael knew there
was no point in trying to interrupt them. Roland and Amos had been friends
since childhood, and now that they were old widowers, neither had anything
better to do than grump at the other — or heckle Kael.

When Roland
noticed him trying to sit quietly, he grinned through his beard. “What have you
got?” he said, his voice as rough as his calloused hands.

Kael put a
spoonful of stew in his mouth and grimaced as the flavors hit him. “Rabbit and
blackberries.”

Roland laughed.
“It’s quail and pine nuts for me. Amos?”

“I don’t know.
Leeks and salmon.” He didn’t like Roland’s game. He’d lost his sense of taste
years ago — which was perhaps why his tonics were so notoriously foul.

“Salmon?” Roland
dipped his spoon into Amos’s bowl. His dark eyes roved while he chewed. “That
isn’t salmon — it’s hog, you crazy old man!”

Half of what the
hunters caught was dried and stored for winter; the other half was prepared and
tossed into the pot — without a care as to how it all might taste
together. Rabbits and blackberries certainly wasn’t the worst mix he’d ever
had.

“How did it go
today?” There was a glint in Roland’s eye — a glint he always got when he
had the chance to talk about hunting. The joints of his fingers may have been
too swollen to draw a bow, but he still had the heart of a young man.

“Not well. I
didn’t come back with anything,” Kael said, keeping his eyes trained on the
table. It wasn’t a lie, but when he saw the disappointment on Roland’s face, it
felt like one.

“Aw well, that’s
all right. Sometimes the forest is mean, and sometimes she’s less mean. But at
least she weren’t mean to everybody: Marc and Laemoth brought home a whole sack
of game
and
a deer.” He grinned and
elbowed Amos, jostling the stew out of his spoon. “A deer, this late in the
season. Can you believe it?”

“I’m amazed,”
Amos grumped as he tried his bite again.

Roland arms
crossed over his bony chest. “You ought to be. The elders think it’s a good
sign for us. They think the winter won’t be so harsh this year.”

“Do they? Well
my joints tell a different story — it’s going to be as cold and miserable
a winter as ever in these blast forsaken mountains, mark my words.”

Roland laughed.

While they
argued over the next thing on their list, Kael sat in silence. He was grateful
for the noise in the Hall, grateful that they couldn’t hear the sounds of rabbits
and blackberries waging war in his stomach. Dinner was coming to an end, and at
any moment the elders would stand and ask anyone who had business to approach
them. That was the moment he was dreading.