Page 20 of The Blight of Hollowmire

I pause, suddenly overcome with the thought of my mother standing in my empty chamber, taking in the open lock, upturned drawers, and the abandoned bed. I do love her, just as I love my father and all my sisters, even beneath our petty squabbles—even when they drive me mad. Perhaps that has always been the most inconvenient truth of my life—that I love fiercely in a place that prefers gentler attachments.

But love is not obedience.

And if this prophecy is real—if there’s something in me that could unmake what I cherish—then ignorance won’t save anyone. It certainly won’t save me.

I adjust the straps of the pack, settling the weight of the book more firmly against my back, and step onto the road beyond the walls.

The mud and mosses cling to my boots as though the earth itself would prefer I stay where I have always been. Behind me, the castle rises in silhouette against the sunset, its towers sharp against the pink and golden-orange canvas of sky with its scrape of violet clouds, its windows flickering with movement.

For forty years I have waited for someone to tell me who I am allowed to be. Today, I am finished waiting.

Whether the Blight Mother is my fate or my doom, I am going to determine the shape of it myself. I refuse to let anyone else decide who I am allowed to be anymore. And I won’t be contained for the comfort of those who fear what does not bend easily in their hands.

My plans might not be well thought out at this point, but they are mine nonetheless. From here, I can hear the cry of alarm rise up from the castle, undoubtedly because they have checked all the usual places where the little rot-tainted one would scurry off to and found them lacking. And yet… I don’t hurry.

Now that I am outside, swaddled in the cool embrace of the bog mists, I find a sense of peace I’ve longed to achieve. It is a peace that only arrives when you accept what your instincts have been trying to tell you for so long. It is time for a change, Vireth. It is time to find everything you’ve been missing—everything you’ve been wanting.

Find the fortune teller. Understand the prophecy. Make peace, perhaps, with the Blight Mother. Apologize for nothing.

I walk towards the bog, into uncertainty, into whatever waits beyond the treacherous pools, and for the first time in my life, the uncertainty feels less frightening than the life I have left behind.

5

Renard

By the time the sun sets on the third day on the road to Hollowmire, I am certain I’m being followed.

Magnar is skittish, dancing in and out of the long, slanting shadows that dapple the forest floor, his breath coming sharp and visible in the chill of early autumn. Despite my layers of wool, leather, and armor, the cold seeps into my bones as deeply as if it were already winter.

We are already deep within the Verge. There is no moment of crossing, no ruined archway or standing stone to mark the place where sensible land gives way to this slow, watching wood. Instead the change seems to happen unnoticed, until one looks up and realizes the birds have gone quiet and the leaves underfoot do not crisp so much as sigh—and it’s far from a comforting sound.

The canopy here is a riot of dying color—gold gone bruise-dark at the edges, red deepening toward the brown-black of dried blood—yet nothing about it feels like the satisfying end to harvest season or the calm, restfulness of winter setting in. The crisp leaves above shift in the sweeping breezes, whispering against each other that there is more to this forest than meets the eye.

Suddenly, Magnar’s ears pin flat. He shies sideways so abruptly that pain shoots from my left hip down to my knee. It’s an aching reminder that I’m much more used to walking alongside his plow these days, and I no longer ride as easily as I once did. The years of hard armor and harder ground have taken their due from my body in small, persistent tolls. I grit my teeth against the discomfort and steady him with a hand that is not as unshakable as it used to be.

“Easy,” I murmur, throat tightening around the words. It would be useless to ignore the fear needling me—a thousand tiny threads of wariness and unease, weaving together to form a tapestry of memory from the last time I was this deep inside the Verge.

Memories of what hides in these woods are more terrifying than anything I might now face down. I could endure wolves, bandits, even a ravenous bear packing on weight for hibernation. But I know that’s not all that lurks here, and the things that my mind has fought to purge from my memories—from my nightmares—wait just beyond my awareness. Is it worth it to carry on with the fate of Valehar resting on my fatigued shoulders now? Of course. Yet my unease persists all the same, swirling the nausea in my gut, leaving me with a headache and a mouth sucked dry of moisture.

It is nigh impossible to shake the sense that whatever tracks us does so without haste, mayhap even without hunger, as though my progress is merely an interesting diversion in a long and patient afternoon.

The ground is carpeted with fallen leaves, but they are riddled with damp and quiet beneath Magnar’s hooves. There are dry-looking puddles of earth that would swallow us whole if we were to step into them, and more than once I have to dismount to lead him across the patches that look solid but shiver and shift under his weight.

My back protests every time I swing down, and worse when I climb up again. When I was younger, I could ride from dawn to dusk, gut and slash with my heaviest broadsword, and sleep on bare earth without complaint. Now, however, after three nights of broken rest and a diet of simple rations that are far from satisfying, my joints scream with every sudden movement and my hands tremble faintly as I grip the reins. I miss, with a shame that sits particularly sour in my chest, my lumpy but comfortable mattress, the worn quilts sewn by my wife’s nimble fingers. I miss waking to the sound of hens and the cow’s familiar lowing rather than to silence so complete it presses against the ears.

It feels like a cliché to admit it, but my exile suits me better than court ever did. The farm is almost easy in its hard work, devoid of the constant anxieties of whether or not my blade enacted the right violence against the right people—the moral complications of court swirling around in my gut like sour ale. My farm is honest, even if the roof on the manor house leaks when the spring rains arrive in a deluge, or the kitchen garden becomes overrun with aphids or white mold and the cabbages are riddled with worms every other year. The aches at the end of the day are earned, not inherited from old battles or political miscalculations. I feed who I can. I hitch my impressive warhorse up to a humble plow for wheat and oats and peas. I muck stables, I repair fences. But gods, I sleep.

That is, when the nightmares give me a bit of respite. Still, even those aren’t as visceral as they used to be, and half the time I wonder if the terrors are actual memories or figments of a guilt-thick imagination.

Incredibly, I am still here, riding back in service to a kingdom that has already taken more from me than I’ve had to give.

Arden’s voice dogs me more persistently than whatever moves in these trees. You owe Valehar more than a single field, Renard. As though I haven’t already given it enough blood. As though he has not taken everything else.

As though the king—my king—did not die with my name still on his lips, not as an accusation but as a trusted friend. Something dull and heavy pulses in my chest, threatening to distract me from one of the more dangerous rides of my life.

I tighten my grip on the reins, the leather creaking softly in protest. Arden—the Regent—had worn his grief like a suit of glittering armor, convincing in its splendor, if not in its authenticity. He spoke of curses and failing borders, of the starvation shambling along Valehar’s long-neglected edges, of villages thinning like hair on an old man’s crown. He spoke, too, of redemption, though he dressed it in his palatable, yet false, language.

An end to exile. A restoration of title. A chance to do real good, Renard!