Shattered Shields - eARC

Starlight and Ash

A Runelords Story

David Farland

As the knights of Mystarria rode through the Dunnwoodin evening, all grew quiet. Avahn knew that her guards rode in silence in part because they were weary to the bone and, in part, because they feared the Toth.

The creatures were still a mystery.

They’d appeared two days ago, floating in the Carroll Sea on great gray ships that appeared to be carved from stone. The boxlike vessels were like nothing any human would construct.

What the creatures wanted, no one knew for sure. There was no way to communicate with them; they had not tried to parlay.

Instead, some of them merely stepped off their ships and walked along the bottom of the sea, and then climbed out along the coasts only to set fields of crops afire.

Winter would be hard, Avahn knew. Famine was coming.

* * *

An animal cry rose in the woods, like the keen of a hound—desolate, bereft.

A shiver raced up Dval’s spine as his mount leapt forward a pace. He whirled to see King Harrill upon his warhorse, the gray color of cold ash spotted by snow. The king gazed upward, hazel eyes blank, brow crinkled, and merely wailed like a trapped animal.

The dark pine boughs overhead echoed the cry and diffused it, so that the wail seemed to both rise from the ground and descend from the sky. “Mehrel?” the king called to his dead wife. “Mehrel?” He stretched his hands out, palms outward, begging heaven for succor.

Eleven-year-old Dval had never seen a man so broken.

He knew that King Harrill suspected Dval of the queen’s murder, though Dval’s only crime was to have found her dead. That, and to have been born into an enemy clan, to have been born a Woguld.

Among the Woguld, grief was for children. True men did not wail like this. Dval wondered if such excesses were common among these day-lighters, these Mystarrians.

From the corner of his eye, he studied King Harrill. The man was hefty, short, and unimposing, with old muscle going to fat. He wore a deep blue riding robe over his breastplate, and no helm, only a simple crown carved from oak, polished smooth and darkened by age over the centuries. Aside from a haughty bearing, nothing suggested that he was a king.

He began to blubber and sniff, wiped his nose with one sleeve.

Dval’s own father had been found murdered six months earlier, yet Dval had never wept for him like this. Dval wondered if he should have wept.

No, Father would not approve. It is not wailing that he would want, but vengeance.

So far, Dval had not been able to grant his father vengeance, or shed tears on his behalf.

Dval looked to the king’s retinue to see their reaction to this mad howling.

Ahead and behind, the king’s knights rode with hunched shoulders, faces forward, as if distressed to hear the king’s outburst. Their mail jangled with each plop of a hoof.

So, it is not common even for these savages to cry.
Dval suppressed a mocking grin. Mystarrians were no better than animals.

Weariness tugged at Dval like an undertow. The air so close to the sea felt thick and wet in his throat. Even in broad daylight, he rode through a landscape that seemed more shadow than leaf and tree.

Twisted pines brooded above, keeping the road in perpetual gloom. He could feel the trees all around, as ancient as legend, moldy and rotten, like King Harrill himself. With the dying of the day, linnets had begun to flutter upward, wings of amber flashing in the slanting light, glimmering like garnets. The woods smelled of mold, decay.

The king noticed Dval’s smile, and whirled. “
Warum starren Sie
?” the king hissed, flashing his teeth.

Dval did not understand his uncouth tongue, but guessed at the question. He answered proudly, knowing that it might cost him his life. “I see a king who cries like a girl.” He did not hide the contempt in his voice.

The king growled and pulled a long dirk from his boot-sheath, waved it threateningly, though he was well out of reach.

Dval urged his mare forward, ignoring the mad king’s glare.

* * *

“Father, stop!” Avahn cried. She rode next to Dval, painfully aware of the older boy’s color as they passed through a crop of sunlight.

Dval had a Woguld’s skin, white as a swan, with long silver locks and eyes so pale green that they were almost colorless. For two hundred years, his people had warred with Mystarria.

“Oh, am I to take orders from a child now?” the king demanded.

“What I ask,” Avahn said softly, in order to appease him, “I ask out of love. Spare him. Dval saved my life. I am in his debt.”

Dval’s stomach growled, and she realized that no one had offered him food since his capture. Yet he showed no sign of fatigue. He held his back straight, head high—every bit the warrior, from a race of warriors.

King Harrill’s voice cracked like a whip: “Don’t get too comfortable with that…
grosse wurm
at your side.” The epithet
grosse wurm
was a slur used when speaking of the Woguld. Their skin was the sickly color of giant earthworms found in Southwest Mystarria.

Avahn had just turned nine. She was not used to her father’s unsteady temper. She’d been sheltered at court, raised among nannies, learning the lore that every princess should know.

“I want to keep him, Father,” she pleaded. “He fought back the wolves again and again.” Her father bit his lip. “Please? I never ask you for anything.”

“It’s not so simple,” her father grumbled. “He’s not a pony or a bear cub.” He gave Dval a dark look, and the king’s entire demeanor changed. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “How do we know that he’s not a spy? If I do as you bid, take him to court, train him as a guard, he’ll learn our deepest secrets. He could kill you in the night.”

“What more does he need to do?” Avahn asked. “The world is falling into ruin, what with the Toth. Shouldn’t we plan on fighting our real enemies?”

Her father grimaced, glanced at the boy, with the hood of a green riding cloak pulled protectively low over his eyes, his long tan loincloth and moccasins, and the deep-blue tattoos of a tree winding up his right leg. Dval couldn’t be more than twelve, Avahn felt sure. He wasn’t a warrior, out to learn the kingdom’s secrets. He was hardly more than a child.

The king stiffened, as if he’d come to a decision. “There is only one way that the boy can prove his loyalty: he must betray
his
own
people. He must lead our troops into the Woguld’s underground strongholds and help us wipe them out.”

Avahn’s heart hammered. It seemed impossible. He could prove his loyalty only by being disloyal to his own people? “But—”

Her father cut her off. He said firmly, “His people have rejected him. He owes them nothing.”

Avahn glanced at Dval to see if he reacted, but he merely stared ahead. He showed no sign that he understood.

In her mind’s eye, she remembered the archer in the woods, his silver elk’s mask gleaming in the sun, its antlers wide, as he drew an arrow on his crimson bow. She heard the whistle of the arrow as its goose feathers winged through the air.

Dval’s own people had tried to kill him—simply because he’d saved her life. Perhaps it was true that he no longer owed them anything, but she doubted that he would turn against them.

“Train him then,” Avahn begged. “Let him learn to love Mystarria, make it his home. In a year or two, perhaps he’ll do what you ask.” She said this last only to appease her father, not because she believed it.

“I’ll not have that worm in the palace,” King Harrill affirmed.

“Take him to the House of Understanding then,” Avahn suggested. The House of Understanding was more than a house, of course. It was a great school near the Capitol. In ancient days, it was a school where lords and soldiers trained at an inn, but soon grew in reputation so that one building could not contain it all. Now there were dozens of “rooms” to the house; entire buildings and arenas where one could specialize in various crafts. “He can train in the Room of Arms to develop his fighting skills, and he can learn our language in the Room of Tongues.”

The king did not answer.

The forest had begun to thin ahead, and suddenly a war horn blew, deep blats that sounded like three sharp barks.

Immediately, Sir Adelheim, her father’s captain, pulled his horseman’s battle axe from the sheath on his back and charged ahead. Her father reined in his own mount, which leapt a pace, eager to join the fray.

“Stay back!” Avahn’s father warned her as he reached for his own battleaxe.

The horses danced in place, and the troops that had been riding behind charged forward, their faces set like stone, drawing weapons as they streamed into the forest.

Avahn peered forward, straining every sense. She smelled ash, and realized that they were coming out of the Dunnwood. She smelled smoke—not the smoke of a campfire, but of burning fields.

She spotted a tree that had been blasted by lightning, stripping it of bark. She remembered this place. Ahead, a small town named Moss End hugged the woods. It had an ivy-covered fortress, quaint but stout, while a beautiful stone bridge arced above the river. A trio of inns hugged the shore near the forest, while on the other side of the bridge squatted rows of ancient cottages, their roofs piled with heavy straw thatch.

Ahead, warriors’ cries echoed through the wood, and for several moments Avahn listened to the sounds of battle. Soon, Sir Adelheim came cantering back on his black destrier. As the sun dipped behind the mountains, darkness deepened, almost as if he brought the night with him.

“Milord,” he called. “A few miles ahead—we’ve been attacked!”

Here?
Avahn wondered.
Why would anyone attack Moss End?

* * *

Dval rode from under the ancient trees after sunset, just as stars had begun to come alive in the dying day, lanterns swinging in the rafters of heaven. Beneath the shadow of the old forest, they came upon the site of a massacre.

Cottages lay in ruins beside the road, roofs ripped off as if by a tornado. Stone walls from fine hostels had been shoved inward, and a bit of smoke still wound up from the rubble of hearths.

Of the fortress, an ancient tower, only a pile of rubble remained.

In the courtyard lay a woman, her belly ripped open and guts strewn all about. A child was not far away from her, and she reached toward its corpse. Nearby, Dval spotted the head of a knight, still in its helm with visor down, staring blankly from the roadside.

All had been murdered, as senselessly as his father had been murdered.

Seven red hens raced from the courtyard at the approach of the troops.

Dval had never seen such destruction. Last night, he’d witnessed the fires burning from the mountains and had wondered if the folk of Mystarria were at war. But this was like nothing he had ever imagined.

“
Kommen hier
!” a soldier shouted at the backside of the ruins, and other soldiers raced toward him across the green, past more bodies. Behind the fortress, Dval came upon one of the king’s champions, the hill giant Bandolan. The giant stared down at a monster.

“Toth!” the savages whispered in hushed tones, some of them aiming war lances down to a dead creature at their feet. “Toth.”

Dval stared, amazed. The beast looked to be two times taller than a man, but it was nothing like a man. It had an exoskeleton covered in thick gray hide, much like that of a reaver, but it was thinner than a reaver. It had four legs and two long arms, each of which ended with three talons and a thumb-like claw.

Its head was large, with a bony plate fanning out from the skull. On the end of the plate were wormlike philia, with which it tasted. In life, the philia could stand up and move, much like snakes rising to peer about. But now that the creature was dead, they hung limp.

The creature’s long jaw had dozens of fangs, and a purple tongue filled its mouth, but did not extend to the teeth. It had nine air-holes on each side of its snout.

In many ways, it resembled a reaver’s head, but there was one amazing difference: reavers have no eyes. This creature had four. They were nothing like human eyes. One pair was as large as Dval’s fist, its surface a bloody red. A smaller eye just beneath it was purple-black.

There were few plants or animals that had adapted to living both in the underworld and the outer world. Obviously, this was a creature of darkness that could still somehow see in the light.

The Mystarrians backed away from the monster in terror, like children, but Dval had lived most of his young life in the underworld among his people’s burrows.

He was familiar with the plants and animals that grew deep underground, where heat from thermal vents allowed life. There were huge worm-like glue-mums there, and strange spider-like creatures, and cruelest of all, the reavers.

But this was something new. “Toth,” he repeated aloud.

He crouched down near the creature’s abdomen. It had been crudely hacked with axes, and the air vents there were broken and fouled.

He sniffed at its rectum, trying to catch the creature’s “death scent,” and smelled something very much like lavender and rotten garlic.

The Mystarrians sniggered.

* * *

“He’s a butt sniffer,” Sir Pwyrthen jested. “I’ve got a hound that does that to me.”

Avahn stiffened in embarrassment for the Woguld, but said nothing.

Dval stood up straight, strolled around the creature. He reached toward a soldier who held a spear, gave a hand-it-hither gesture. The soldier smiled dubiously, gave the Woguld his spear.

Dval took the spear, went to the creature’s thorax, leapt in the air, and tried mightily to plunge the spear into the monster’s exoskeleton. But even with three tries, putting all of his weight behind the blow, he could not break the beast’s skin.

The men laughed. Captain Adelheim joked, “It’s dead enough, boy. Give it up!”

Most of her father’s men were runelords with endowments of strength. Perhaps they would have not had such a tough time piercing the monster’s hide, and so they mocked Dval’s efforts.

But Avahn’s father leaned forward on his mount, peering into the gloom. The boy took his spear, stood back, and plunged it beneath the creature’s forearm, into its armpit, and this time the spear entered a good foot.