Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (5 page)

The aurora sparkled at the peak of its violet
phase, the light tinting another perfect summer afternoon. Tyrissa and Oster
weaved their way along a path even less trod than usual for the Morgwood, many
miles north of their home. Stems of undergrowth crossed the path and slapped at
passing arms and legs, the trail below their feet crumbling, reverting to
natural forest floor. Oster had made the error of agreeing to help Tyrissa with
a ‘quest’ before asking what it entailed. Tyrissa held him to his promise, but
gave no other details beyond how far, how long, and needing an extra person to
carry ‘it’. She would have preferred to bring Liran, but he had business back
at the caravan.

“Ty, can you at least tell me
what
we’re
looking for?” The only hint to his sister’s intentions was the handsaw clipped
to her belt, the tool bouncing along with her overconfident stride.

“Ranger rule of the forest number eleven, ‘There
are as many secrets as trees’”, Tyrissa quoted with as much wisdom she could
muster. The Rangers were experts in every aspect of living off of and within
the forest. They also didn’t number their rules. That was her addition to make
it sound more impressive, and just may become canon. There sadly wasn’t anyone
left to tell her otherwise. The order disappeared when her parents were still
children.

“That’s not really a rule. It’s more of a
saying.” Oster audibly puffed every third word while the trail scaled an
incline. Tyrissa slowed her pace, remembering that few were as practiced at
navigating the shifting terrain below their feet as she.

“You… I… well, anyway, this is one of them,” she
said pointing ahead to the flattened top of the hill. There stood a tree unlike
any other in the Morgwood. Its trunk was as large as a bull
kaggorn
at
the base and it soared over a hundred feet high, a patriarch lording over the
thin neighboring conifers. A thicket of gnarled branches spread out along its
entire height, each bearing an array of broad, green leaves that would rustle
in the wind rather than sigh. The dry and rotted leaves of previous years
coated the forest floor, cushioning the final steps of their approach.

“A steeloak,” Oster whispered in awe, running his
hand over the tree trunk as if to gain assurance that it was real. The bark was
a deep gray color, lending it a metallic appearance.

“
This
is what I want my new staff to be
made of. It’s supposed to be unbreakable once it dries.” Tyrissa scooped up a
fallen twig from the forest floor. The twig didn’t even hint at snapping as she
coiled it four times about her index finger. When released, it sprang back into
its original shape. She tossed it over to Oster. He admired it in his palm for
a moment before tucking it away as a keepsake.

“The manuals talk of the rare steeloak tree
growing in the areas near the Fjordway. I’ve been looking all summer for one.
Papa will love working with it.”

“A gift within a gift,” Oster said.

“Exactly,” she said, her eyes scanning the lowest
branches of the tree. “Give me a boost.”

Tyrissa glided up along the trunk of the
steeloak, smoothly scaling the maze of branches. Each hand hold and foot
placement felt as solid as rock, the bigger forks of the tree immovable from
the seemingly minor extra weight of the girl. She ascended most of the way up
the steeloak to find a branch of the right length and girth, about twice the
width of her wrist and long enough for a proper Morg staff. Upon finding one
hanging easily in arm’s reach above a wider branch, Tyrissa settled in, her
legs wrapped around the trunk below. Only then did she look down to see that
the ground was visible only in swaying patches through tree’s layered, leafed
fingers. Tyrissa had to admit that she was at a reckless height, even by her
standards.

She unclipped the handsaw from her belt. It was
an older, unused one from a dusty storage crate in her father’s shop. No prized
tool, it wouldn’t be missed in a normal day’s work and was quite replaceable.
Tyrissa went to work with the saw, and found that even when alive the
steeloak’s possessed an unnatural toughness. Flecks of gray dust fell like snow
upon her upturned face as she sawed away. Like all of her siblings, she’d
helped out in her father’s shop, and knew that a cut like this should have been
quick. Yet, it took nearly ten minutes to saw through the relatively thin
steeloak branch, with multiple breaks to rest her aching arms. After a few
final strokes, a splintering crack ripped through the air and the branch fell
away. Tyrissa watched it slide and crash through the lower reaches of the tree
waiting for it to get stuck, but her future staff flew true all the way to the
ground. She took that as a good sign.

Oster’s voice called up, “I got it!”

Tyrissa replaced the leather guard on the
handsaw, noting how dull the blade was after one session with the fabled wood,
and re-clipped it to her belt. Shifting her weight, she made to climb back down
the tree but paused, finally taking note of the view.

From her vantage point in the swaying heights of
the steeloak’s upper branches and with the tree itself at the crest of a hill,
Tyrissa could easily see over the tops of the common pine and firs of the
Morgwood. The forest stretched northward as far as she could see, a green
carpet that rolled over hills and sharp ravines, broken only by the jagged
peaks of the Norspine Mountains and a few large lakes that glittered in the
sun. She caught such views daily, but every once in a while took a moment to
relish them. The sense of belonging never waned, no matter how hard she tried
to push it away. About to turn back to the task of climbing down, Tyrissa’s eye
caught a dark blemish in the expanse of forest. Atop one of the foothills,
miles more to the north, there was an area of felled trees and raw rock as if a
landslide had swept through.

No, that explanation felt wrong. Tyrissa squinted
against the distance, wishing she were closer. Among the devastation rose a
spire of stone as black as a midnight without the aurora. Tyrissa stared,
blinking a few times against the midday sun, waiting for her imagination to
stop trying to fool her. The spire remained quite real and not some visual
trick of a rock formation. It could only be manmade, in a place where there
should be naught but nature.

Oster called up at her, breaking the brief spell
that held her attention.

“Yeah! I’m coming,” she yelled back. Tyrissa took
one more look at the strange spire, memorizing its location and promising
herself that she would investigate it another day. It lay a few more hours
away, through rough terrain at the back of a long valley. She eloped for a day
last summer to ‘survey’ the area and a route came to mind immediately. It was
the same direction she sent Tsellien’s party well over two weeks ago. They
hadn’t returned back through Edgewatch, much to her disappointment.

I’ll go alone, she thought. This will be my
discovery
.

Days later, the Jorensen family held a modest
celebration at midday for Tyrissa seventeenth birthday. Afterward, they each
went about their separate business. Liran, once again, had to return to the
caravan for a few days, her father had orders to fill (including Tyrissa’s) and
her brothers had afternoon lessons and apprentice work to attend to. Tyrissa
was free to curl up in one of the two upholstered armchairs near the cold and
clean fireplace of their living room. They were dark blue with a pattern of
curling leafed vines, the colors faded from age and use. The cushions were thin
in spots but raw nostalgia kept the chairs comfortable, a constant, quiet
presence in their household for as long as Tyrissa could remember.

Here, Tyrissa dived into Liran’s gift: a pristine
copy of
Tales from Across the North
, a collection of adventure stories
edited by one ‘Giroon the Great’. Tyrissa skipped the rambling, self-important
introduction and scanned through the table of contents. She was thrilled to
find that while she had already read a few of the stories, the majority of the
book was new to her. Liran had chosen his gift well. Her brother made a
tradition out of giving her a book on her birthday and this one would more than
make up for last year’s breaking of that tradition.

Tyrissa flipped through the book, skimming the
pages for a place to start, torn between stories about the Golden Legion of the
ancient Rhonian Empire and the heroic pirates of the outer Felarill isles
before settling on a tale from the journeys of Calad Stoneshield, an Earth
Pactbound and one of her favorites. It detailed his adventures in Morgale
during the clan era, long before even the idea of a unified kingdom arose, and
fit into a gap in the chronology of Calad’s stories that she had already read.
It quickly became clear why her Morg-printed books skipped this particular
section of the hero’s life. The stories were unkind to her people, likening
them to simple forest and mountain dwelling barbarians. ‘Yellow haired savages’
with ‘ghostly-pale skin and ignorant, animal eyes’ were common descriptors.
Tyrissa read on in a mix of discomfort and illicit thrill. The story was
hundreds of years old but still haunted her with the question of ‘Is this how
southerners see us?’ News of the unreal savagery of the Cleanse probably only
reinforced the idea.

Time vanished into the pages, Tyrissa only
noticing its passage when she had to light an oil lamp against the descending
dusk. She could hear her mother bustling about in the kitchen, preparing the
evening meal. Her journeys were broken only by her father settling into the
matching chair.

“Evening, Ty,” he said.

“We need to talk,” Tyrissa said, meeting his eyes
over the top of the book. Her father still wore his working clothes and was
speckled with persistent bits of sawdust, but his face and hands were clean.

“We do,” he agreed. Tyrissa caught sight of her
mother’s silhouette turning away in the darkened doorway to the kitchen. She
marked her place in the book and set it aside.

Her father nodded and skipped the introduction as
they both knew this chat would be a continuation.

“Ty, you must find your place and you need to
make a
realistic
choice. We’re still rebuilding from the Cleanse,
there’s no shortage of jobs and trades that need hands. Your mother may
encourage you towards ‘proper’ tasks, but after so many losses we can no longer
afford to adhere to the old customs of gender.”

Some abandonment of the old ways Tyrissa
welcomed. The idea of her as a maid or seamstress or mother was laughable. Even
with her overly packed imagination, some things were beyond her ability to
visualize.

“You don’t have to choose right away,” he
continued, “but you need to decide what you really want, what your place in the
world will be.”

“I already know what I
want.
” This type of
heart-to-heart talk wasn’t new, just more urgent. She couldn’t put it off much
longer. It felt so unfair. She was supposed to follow a calling, but no, not
this
or
that.

“Ty, the old ways are gone. They were dying when
I was your age and after the Cleanse… well, many things changed after
that.
”
Her father leaned his head back against chair, eyes raised to the ceiling, as
if staring through the wooden beams and tiled roof to the sky above. His eyes took
on a rare and distinct cast when he remembered those troubled times. All the
blood and steel and death and near-pyrrhic triumph glinted there in the
reflected lamplight. Tyrissa had seen the scars on her father’s back and chest
and arms. They were cuts from blades, a couple of arrow wounds, and a single
set of parallel scars from the claws of some creature not detailed in any of
her ranger manuals. Together they formed a timeline of his experiences during
the Cleanse. He saw so much, all not far from their supposedly ‘safe’ home in
Greden, the Morg capital that had weathered the storm better than most.

“We came so close to destroying ourselves,” he
said. “After that, of course we traded the ways of the forest for the comfort
and safety of the south.” Despite the familiarity of the talk, Tyrissa could
hear an earnest timbre in her father’s voice, an absence of the previous
occasions’ patronizing tone. “Don’t think that we’ve honey-coated the Cleanse
for the children. Over the years in your schooling you’ve been told every
sordid detail needed to make sure such a tragedy never happens again.”

“I know, papa.” Tyrissa couldn’t forget the long,
terrifying lectures given by her schoolmistresses over the years about the
Cleanse, Morgale’s five years of pure hell. A war between old, nearly
meaningless clans, followed by a scattered, seeping corruption of hearts and
minds. Then came the emergence of countless Pactbound men and women fueled by
daemonic magicks. Neighbor killed neighbor and roving mobs murdered anyone
suspected of being ‘touched’, only for more daemons to appear alongside bands
of forest dwellers firmly under their sway. Villages burned and towns emptied
in a vicious cycle of self-inflicted genocide broken only by King Horald’s
armies, guided by rumored divine providence. His justice had the same
brutality, but it was an effective, directed brutality. The Pactbound were
exterminated, and you could look someone in the eye without wondering if they
were one of
them.

“We rebuilt this town as a wall, a way of
shielding us from the past and as a monument to better times. It’s not an
exercise in denial but a form of therapy, a restoration of life’s order. Your
mother and I, our generation needs to cling to something. For Iri it’s a
desire, misguided or not, to see you live a life she was denied.

“Then what is she hiding from me?”

Orval sighed. “Her choice, Ty. She will tell you
when she feels ready. Though I must admit I’m surprised you haven’t been
hounding the other veterans in the village about it.”