My…father.
Eighty-SevenThe Beginning and the End, at Once.
The rest of the trip is a blur. I do what I can to respond to Merc in a way that’s appropriate, but he’s not stupid. He knows I’m somewhere far off from him, even as I travel in his wake. Except I cannot speak any of this to him. The implications are too epic and awful, and maybe he wouldn’t believe me.
I know I didn’t. I know I still try to mount pathetic, hedging excuses.
But now I know the why of me, and having seen the truth, who I am cannot be buried in my mind once more.
So caught up in my own head am I that I fail to notice that the landscape is becoming familiar, that we’re entering the trees I grew up with, and passing by the plants I foraged for, and crossing the streams I visited back when only my daily life was complicated, not all of Anathos and my legacy, too.
What finally brings me back and grounds me in the present, as the afternoon light tilts well toward the horizon, is the smell of burning wood.
It’s subtle at first, but gathers increasing saturation, until the insides of my nostrils tingle and I sneeze. Through my relentless, crushing introspection, a warning registers, but it’s not before I feel wrapped in the stench that I realize there’s only one thing that could be causing this.
I glance around in a frantic twist, and recognize our precise location.
“Stay sharp,” Merc mutters. “There’s something wrong—”
And that’s when the trees part and the horror is presented.
My village has been burned to the ground.
I release a primal scream and heel Lavante forward, as if I could do anything, as if it weren’t far, far too late.
Plumes of gray and black smoke rise out of the protective wall, as if the whole of it is a chimney. The bridge is down, but even the great planks of that crossover have been cindered, and indeed, dead, bloatedbalas, boiled by theheat, float on the fetid surface of the moat, which is much, much lower than it has ever been.
A stew cooked down by an unholy stove.
Lavante balks at my attempt to get him to go across the bridge, so the next thing I know, I’m dismounting and leaving him there, without regard to whether he’ll run off or where Merc is. I stumble down the planks, jumping from solid part to solid, while keeping my eyes on what’s ahead.
Ashes. Ruins. Cinders still smoking.
Bodies.
As I break out into the village proper, I pass the two largeSPsymbols that have been painted in blood on either side of the archway, and skid to a halt in front of the Gauntlet. The pub and lodging house is a burned-out shell, and still I step into the charred remains, reconstructing out of the destruction what once was, overlaying the memories of the bar and its crabby tender, and the working girls, and Mr. Lewis holding court at his table up by the door.
I even remember how it stood just as I left, the chairs upturned as I was searched for, Mr. Lewis sitting with a satchel and a box, untouched ale at his elbow and a lantern in front of his drawn, pudgy face.
I cover my mouth to keep from screaming, to keep the stench out, to deny everything that I’m stepping over, the tankards and plates, the silverware and nails, all that remain, but for the biggest of the support beams and the heart of the stairs.
Even though it makes no sense, I shuffle forward, tripping and falling, catching myself until my palms are black from ashes, until I get to where my little home was. Or about where it was. Some of the second floor has fallen down on the first, so I can’t really get close for the still-smoking ruination.
Tears are flowing down my face, for I know my connection to all of this now—and it’s not as a banished member of this village I grew up in.
My father is coming to find me. That’s why the demons are stalking the night. He’s looking for me.
It seems somehow fitting that this truth resonates as I come to the stairwell that’s collapsed down into a tangle so dense, it couldn’t completely burn, but certainly managed to destroy all of my personal effects. Not that any of that matters.
I have to keep going.
Spilling back out into the lane, like one of the drunks that are no more, I continue on to Mare’s. The old shoemaker’s shop is utterly disintegrated, and I think of the blankets I stole from the public house for her, and the tea I made her to ease her pains, and how she hated when I made a fuss over her, and loved every moment I spent in her company.
When did this happen, I wonder as I put my hand out and feel the heat still emanating from a metal hinge.
Last night. It happened… last night.
As I continue on, I realize I’m retracing the steps I took the evening I tried to run from the farrier, the evening Merc arrived, and everything started—
