Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series

Smashwords Edition – 2014

WordFire Press
www.wordfirePress.com

ISBN: 978-1-61475-163-2

Copyright © 2014 David Farland
Originally published by DFE, 2014

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***

Chapter 1: A Wagon Full of Gold

Darrissea, Fava and the Hukm traveled north on mammoth back by night as they made their way toward Bashevgo, and by day they camped in the shadowed redwoods, often standing or leaning against trees in a trance-like stupor. Always they were on guard against the armies of Blade Kin.

To Darrissea, it seemed that she traveled with mixed eagerness and regret. She was eager to go north to Bashevgo, to help overthrow the armies of the slavers. Yet she knew that in all likelihood, this was a suicide mission, a futile attempt to strike down a bully who was much too large even for an army of Hukm to attack.

Darrissea quickly learned to sleep while riding a mammoth by night, so that she could remain alert during the short days, walking the perimeter of the woods on guard duty with Phylomon. Within the week they passed north of the redwoods, and entered a forest of firs so old that they were only slightly smaller than redwoods.

Darrissea enjoyed the soft humus of the deep forest underfoot; she enjoyed watching the white tail feathers of the flickers as they flapped in the shadows from ground to black limb, and her heart hammered at the sound of the leap of a startled deer.

When composing her love poems, Darrissea had always used images from the woods: “Mine is the peeping cry of the sleek-bodied otter/whistling as it rises from the sensual water.”

Darrissea felt that her body was as long and sleek as an otter’s, and often as she grew, in the fall when the mountain water still held warmth but the days were cooling, she would strip bare and swim the Smilodon River, arcing her back, letting waves play over her skin.

Ah, Darrissea knew why otters savored life.

Then again, she could imagine herself a blue heron, poised on one leg in an emerald marsh, alert for predators, ready to gobble a bullfrog’s tadpole, her wings spread like a hood as she hunted in her own shadow. No other forest animal sought as desperately to attune itself to its environment as the heron: sight, sound, touch, smell—a predator sandwiched in the food chain, always preying and being preyed upon.

That’s how Darrissea felt when gliding through the woods, searching for images for her poems, facing starvation if she did not come up with an exquisite line, a perfect word to fit the rhythm and balance of her work.

Balance. A hard thing for a young poet to achieve, especially for one who was in love with a legend.

Once, in the cold afternoon, Darrissea watched Phylomon napping on the ground, shivering from lack of warmth. She went to lie beside him to keep him warm. She curled around his back, and wrapped her arm around his shoulders, found his pale blue skin cold to the touch.

He held her hand for a moment in his sleep, and then his breathing caught as he awoke. Darrissea wanted nothing more than for him to continue holding her hand, but he turned, his pale blue eyes glittering in the shadows of the firs.

Phylomon whispered. “What’s happening?”

He did not pull away, and Darrissea wondered if it were all right, if he would give her permission to touch him. Darrissea caressed his cheek. She had never performed such a courageous act with a man. “Your skin is beautiful,” she said, “so smooth, like the skin of a salamander.”

Phylomon chuckled, but pulled her hand. “I’m too old for you, by about a thousand years.”

His voice was not cold, and his touch seemed to linger, giving Darrissea courage.

“You’ve loved other women, haven’t you?” Darrissea asked. “Couldn’t you fit in one more?”

“It’s not that easy,” Phylomon said, and then he sighed, seemed to wage an inner argument. “You’re a lovely woman, and I don’t want to hurt you. So I’ll be candid with you. Your father was a fine man, and a friend, and out of respect for both of you, I will try to explain something: I took seritactates when I was young. I remember everything about my first wife—the way she held her head to the left when she was listening carefully to music, the time she cried after I gave her a haircut, the look of pain on her face when our second daughter died in childbirth.

“When we were married for four years and twelve days, she sliced open her foot while trying to spear a salmon up on Fish Haven River, and I can still feel the texture of her fevered skin the day after.

“When we were married nine years and ninety-six days, she went into the woodshed and accidentally met a skunk that was hunting slugs. For months afterward, each time she washed her hair, the faint odor of skunk would keep me awake.

“I watched her hair turn silver, her skin loosen and sag, her bones soften and leave her hunched.

“I tried marrying once after that, when I was no longer taking memory enhancers, and though the images are much more blurred, I still remember the pain, watching every moment of our lives together and knowing how it would all end.

“To lead you on would be unfair. I need someone to share my life with, someone I can love as an equal. And though you are lovely, you are only a temporary.”

“You’re afraid to feel,” Darrissea said. “You’re afraid of passion.”

“Not the passion, only the pain that follows.”

Darrissea took his face in her hands, kissed him firmly on the mouth, but he did not respond.

“You need to find someone else to love,” Phylomon said with finality.

She shook her head, “All these years of living, and you’re afraid of life.” She needed him to think about it, to wonder if he could give a part of himself to her. She found that she was crying, and Phylomon reached up with a finger, wiped the tear from her eye.

Darrissea said, “I feel stupid for wanting you, for loving you.”

“You should never feel stupid for loving,” Phylomon said. “But perhaps you should consider what love is. If you think you love me, perhaps you are mistaken. You lost your father when you were young, and he was a man very much like me, a warrior who hunted slavers. Someone that, as a child, you must have seen as strong. Perhaps you are only in love with my strength.” He moved his hand away, turned back over, but he let her cuddle against him.

Darrissea could feel the muscular contours of his body. She kissed the back of his neck, and could not sleep.

The following night, beneath the cover of a heavy squall, the Hukm crossed paths with a large force of Blade Kin, a supply caravan with two thousand men and mammoths that pulled skids over the snow.

The Hukm attacked with clubs in total darkness. The Blade Kin were no match for the giant Hukm, who slaughtered them down to the last man while suffering only a few gunshot wounds themselves. After the battle, the Hukm seized the Blade Kin’s grain and food for their own use.

In the morning, Phylomon, Darrissea, and Fava went to the site and walked through the bloody snow, searching for weapons and clothing and food that the Hukm would not touch.

The ground was a mess, covered with bodies of dead Blade Kin thrown from the wagons, barrels smashed open and tossed aside.

Phylomon came upon four wagons of gunpowder, and set the Hukm to unloading it.

Fava spent her time peeking in wagons while Darrissea searched for food. The Blade Kin had been sleeping in or beneath their wagons when the Hukm attacked, and the Hukm gained such complete surprise that most of the Blade Kin were clubbed in their sleep.

Darrissea could hardly bear the sights.

For most of the morning, she hunted timidly, gun in hand, finding casks of frozen salted fish, barrels of rum, crates filled with manacles or shovels or nails or seeds.

The Blade Kin had planned to begin building cities and planting gardens within weeks. In one wagon, she saw several corpses strewn over boxes of hammers and tongs. One man was splattered against the back of the buckboard, and Darrissea started to leave, saw the man turn his head.

“Help,” he whispered.

Darrissea raised her long-barreled gun up and nearly fired before she saw that the man was not splattered, but merely chained to the wagon. “Don’t shoot!” he whispered. “Help!”

She leapt up into the wagon, made her way to the buckboard. The man lay almost unconscious, head hanging.

He coughed, and Darrissea took his hand, tried to see how heavy the manacles were. His hand felt freezing to the touch. He wore a simple dark red cotton tunic over leather britches, with heavy rhino leather belts and moccasins—the sturdy garb of woodsmen who lived in the Rough.

Darrissea took a hammer, beat the chains till the links broke, then pulled the man from the wagon.

He was small, human, with hair a dark reddish brown, face handsome. He peered up at her with gray eyes and a golden complexion. Darrissea could not tell what it was, but somehow, when she looked into his eyes, he seemed … miraculous, perfect. She helped him down, and he grabbed some snow from the ground, thirstily stuffed it in his mouth.

“You shouldn’t eat that,” Darrissea said, “you’re already freezing. Wait a moment, and I’ll get you something warm.” She ran to a wagon where she had found barrels of rum, and then went to a campfire where pans from last night’s dinner still sat covered with snow, and filled a pan. She carried it back to the prisoner, but he was nowhere in sight.

“Where are you?” she called, and from within the shadows of the wagon, the man answered, “Here!”

Darrissea jumped, for he was so close.

The man apologized, “I’m sorry I frightened you. I came back for the key.” Something in her whispered a warning, that perhaps he sought more than just a key, as if he had been pilfering from the bodies.

He held up a key, unlocked the broken manacles from his wrist. Darrissea was surprised to see him looking so much better, as if in the past moments he had become invigorated, somehow regained life.

He put on one of the Blade Kin’s red cloaks and a sword. Darrissea stared at the way he moved, so agile and catlike.

“I’m Darrissea Frolic,” she mumbled at last.

“Stavan,” he introduced, and he walked to the edge of the wagon, touched her hand clumsily. Darrissea gazed into his eyes, nervously, and suddenly it seemed to her that the world had gone away.

She looked in his eyes, and everything faded into pools of luminous gray.

“Stavan,” she mouthed, rubbing the manacle burns on his sore wrists. She found that she could not refrain from touching him. She’d never felt so attracted to a man.

Inwardly, she wondered.
Yesterday I thought I was in love with Phylomon. Am I feeling this way just because he rejected me?

He smiled at her, and his teeth were even, perfect, but his smile had a spot of red.

“You have blood on your lip,” she told him.

Stavan licked his lip, touched it, and winced slightly. “I bit it when I stumbled a couple of days ago, after the slavers caught me. It keeps breaking open.”

Darrissea could not understand why, with all the pain and suffering in the world, this one man’s sore lip mattered to her so. She wanted to kiss him.

He stood beside Darrissea, shyly touched her shoulder. It was an odd gesture, the kind of thing that a Pwi would do if he liked you, but not a human, and Darrissea wondered Stavin’s upbringing. She smiled at him, felt guilty for smiling when so much mayhem was going on in the world.

He sat down heavily, on the edge of the wagon, and Darrissea went into motion, setting a fire so that she could cook him something to eat. She had so many questions, and didn’t know where to begin, didn’t know if she should even ask while he was in such a condition.

“Where are you headed?” he asked at last, breaking the uneasy silence.

“To Bashevgo,” Darrissea answered.

The fellow blinked, “Oh. Will a lot of people be there?”

Darrissea laughed, “Of course.” She did a double take. The man had never heard of Bashevgo? That seemed impossible.

Perhaps he got hit on the head,
she wondered.
Either that, or there’s something
wrong
with him.

Stavan glanced around the battlefield. “Of course …” he mouthed. “I’m sorry, I’m not making sense. I … the–they captured me three days ago, and I haven’t slept.”

He wrapped his robe around his chest. Darrissea struck the match, lit the fire, and a light snow began to drift from the sky. Stavan stared away at the wagon for a moment, and then asked. “I would like to go with you to Bashevgo. We were going that way anyway.”

“We?” Darrissea asked, taken aback.

“My sister and I. The slavers killed her.”

“You were heading into slaver territory? What did you plan to do in Bashevgo?”

Stavan measured his words. “Hunting. Hunting for my father. The slavers took him,” and then he toppled to one side from exhaustion. Darrissea steadied him, and let him rest on her shoulder for support.

“Forgive me,” Stavan whispered. “I’m exhausted.”

Darrissea laid him in the back of the wagon, made a bed up from the robes of his dead captors, and watched him sleep as if he, too, were dead. She stood over him, just studying the way he took his deep breaths.

She wondered at him, a man courageous enough to go to Bashevgo to save his father.

“Stavan …” she mouthed the name over and over, and suspected that she had finally found someone to love.

***