Roads of the Righteous and the Rotten (Order of Fire Book 1) (25 page)

26

The journey back to
the east
was remarkably quiet compared to his first journey across Dragon’s Bed. He keenly recalled that eventful crossing over a year ago, when Stroan and Yuna had met their end, they came face to face with Leviathan, and Prynner’s ship had been set ablaze. Remembering all that, he marveled at how different his experience was now, huddled in the corner of a tiny trade ship, compared to all that had happened on the Lucky Dolphin. It didn’t seem that anyone was concerned with the appearance of the dragon, as if they all knew the creature slept beneath the waves. No one so much as even looked at the water, but kept to their tasks bundled in furs as the frigid air kept them awake.

“I wonder how many times they’ve done it, Asha,” Zar remarked. The camel stirred slightly in their corner of the hold, her fur brushing against Zar’s back as she shifted. “No one is fearful of the dragon
now
, it’s far too cold.” Zar adjusted his blanket then squeezed together his folded arms while pushing back into Asha’s warm body.

The three days it took to cross the Dragon’s Bed went fast, for Zar nearly slept through them. It seemed only moments after he had settled in the hold with Asha that he heard the crew above yelling for land. Zar stepped back onto Krii feeling sluggish and lazy. He had spent far too much time lying down, but the air was cold and after a brisk walk to Prynner’s cottage, his body began to liven up. After seeing Prynner liven up after placing a great bag of gold and jewels in his hands, Zar livened up even more. He loved to see good men rewarded for their goodness, especially men as humble and gentle as Prynner. It gave him solace that among all the wickedness and atrocities he had witnessed, there was a subtle fairness to the world, a few sparse moments where men actually received what they deserved.

After getting off the ship, Zar took a long bath and changed out of his traveler’s clothes and into his royal garments given to him upon his ascension to Prince of Xuul. Prynner marveled at the crimson colored tunic with the crest of Xuul etched in its center, the hooded chainmail shirt he wore beneath it, and the fancy studded leather boots and embroidered gloves that covered his hands and feet. After Zar told him of how he had acquired them, Prynner joked with Zar the rest of the time by bowing and saying “my prince” every time he addressed him.

Zar spent the remainder of the winter months relaxing with Prynner. It wasn’t until early spring when it had warmed up a measure that he readied himself again for travel and set his mind to his task. He traveled east towards the mainreach, planning to stop at Or to visit Ramla on the way before heading towards Blackwood Forest where he hoped to find Tuskin. He might even run into the man before then, assuming that Tuskin was still running around hatching plots for the preservation of the land. Zar also assumed that he was still very much a wanted man, and that the Condor apostates the Butcher and the Ghost would be after him, not to mention any guards that knew what he looked like. So, although he very much wanted to visit Barek and Shahla in the meadow, he decided to forgo the pleasure of a Fairview visit for fear of trouble following him there.

As for Or, he was not concerned. He was too far off from the populated heart of the mainreach for him to be seen and followed there. He kept low on the border of Lolia, then cut north into the hills. No one could have seen him yet, not at this point. Besides his careful maneuvering, even if someone did see him venture alone into the hills of Or, he doubted they would dare follow; even if they did dare, he doubted they could find their way down to the caverns without being killed by the labyrinth of cliffs that surrounded the place.

Navigating again through those treacherous cliffs, Zar came upon the caverns. As Asha took her usual seat outside the entrance, Zar looked into the cave’s mouth to find it completely black. There were no lit torches to guide his way.

He took a few more steps in, hoping to see a flicker of fire to guide his steps, but he found none. He could see nothing at all, nothing but black, so he turned around and returned to the outside.

“There are no torches to light the way, Asha. I can’t see a thing. Curious, I daresay. Well, I’ll need the flint and tender from your bag. Aye, and the torch.”

Zar pulled his knife and scraped sparks from the flint until the tender ignited. He held the torch over it until it caught flame, and stepped back into the cavern guided by its light.

“Ramla,” he called. “Maidens of Or. It’s Zar.”

The silence of the place was not unusual, but the lack of fires burning in the front, the fact that there was no one to be seen, and the smell that began to haunt Zar’s nostrils was very peculiar. Far more than just being an oddity, the smell was offensive. As he moved further along, the smell grew rank and sour, and Zar’s face twisted in disgust as he breathed in the fetid scent. It smelled like death, or more specifically, a rotting corpse.

He nearly tripped over an object lying in his path, and waved his torch low. There it was—a decomposing body, flies and maggots reveling in the flesh that rotted off the bones.

“Ramla!” Zar shouted, hurrying along from the corpse only to find another a few paces away. He moved quickly along. The entrance tunnel ended and Zar shuffled into the first open den area—nearly running. The room was full of the dead.

Sprawled about his feet were fetid remains writhing with worms, emitting a scent as noxious as it was horrendous. Zar looked at the mess and knew that the maidens of Or had been slaughtered. He didn’t know how, and he didn’t know why, but he knew that the decaying corpses he now stood among were the curious Maidens of Or—those silent, beautiful, mystifying creatures that would now be no more than a myth or legend, spoken by men who had never truly seen them.

Ramla!
Where was Ramla? He hurried back to her dwelling and stood aghast at the entrance to her den. There were three corpses on the ground. He approached slowly. They were decomposing too badly to indentify which one was her. Zar dropped to his knees. He saw Ramla’s face in his mind, he felt her touch, and he heard her voice. It was painful to imagine her as one of the corpses that lay before him now, foul and rotting.

Zar called out and cried.

It was a brief moment of sorrow before the anger came. Zar searched the room. He wanted to have some things of hers—to remember her by. He wanted to find a clue that would lead him to the monsters that did this.

Zar waved his torch around the room and collected items. First, he searched a rack near her bedding where she kept personal items—a few pouches, and what looked to be some jewelry. He took them all. An arrow that was still embedded in the rotting tissue of one of the corpses he grabbed also, as well as a few more arrow shafts that littered the floor on his way out.

Zar exited the cavern to find Asha looking towards him with concern. She knew something was awry, whether she had heard Zar’s shout or could feel his distress, she knew something was wrong. She stood watching as Zar, moving feverishly, threw all the items he had collected on the ground and examined them in the light. The arrows were unique— bright red fletching and the shaft stained the same color nearly all the way up to the point. His chances of finding the culprits had improved markedly. He nodded ardently and smirked, relishing the fact he had some way of indentifying the villains who had murdered his friend.

“I will find them, Asha!” Zar called. “I will find them!”

Next he looked through Ramla’s belongings, dumping both pouches onto the ground with the other items. His arms shook as he sifted through them—oracle bones, shells, two necklaces, a knife … Zar sighed looking down at them. These items were the remnants of his friend—not the rotting corpse that lay in her den. He would not remember her that way. He would remember her how she was when he last saw her—how she always was—beautiful and kind, wondrously obscure, playful, and seductive. He would remember her mystique. For as long as he lived he would remember.

On the ground before him a necklace caught his eye.

It had a simple leather string, but its pendant was a giant claw—a dragon’s claw. Zar picked it up and examined it. “Your brother Alyn.”

“Asha!” Zar called. “It’s her! Asha, this … this is the Leviathan’s claw Alyn spoke of! His mother was a witch! He told me. His sister was sent away and he gave her this claw! It was her! It was Ramla!

27

“Don’t w
orry, Asha,
we will find out who did this to Ramla—to Alyn’s
sister
Ramla. You see how small the world is? On the other side of the blue I meet the brother of Ramla—Ramla who I have known for years—who I
had
known for years. It still doesn’t feel as if she’s gone, Asha. How I’d like to scale the cliffs of Or to find her waiting in those caves, mysteriously already knowing that I’d come. She won’t be there next time, though, will she? I will never see her again. I don’t think you understand how dear she was to me. She was my friend longer than anyone else, even longer than you. I know you didn’t care for her, and I know your reasons for it, and I don’t blame you, but … I loved her.

Aye, I loved her, and
she
loved
me.

“We were alike in ways, she and I. We lived in the world, but did not belong to it. We were different from the others and we knew it. We were trying to live in our places— the places we thought were our places. That’s why I never judged her. Every person needs a place. We thought we had ours. Neither of us would change. She wouldn’t stop her dark arts for I’m certain she felt it defined her. I wouldn’t stop my wandering—I was searching for a place.”

Zar carried on about Ramla for several days until he and Asha came to the town of Palta, which lay just inside Lolia’s border. It was a small town that was somewhat turned upside down when Zar arrived as a result of a recent murder for which all of the townspeople blamed a mysterious hooded bandit they called the Scarlet Quill—an archer that used arrows as red as a summer rose.

Zar wasted no time, jumping in to investigate.

“The man was in his own home when the bandit struck,” a townsman insisted. “Left him stuck to the wall of his own cottage, bright red arrows everywhere.”

“That’s how the bandit leaves his mark,” said another earnestly. “Leaves those red arrows everywhere for us to see so we’ll know he’s been around.”

“Always hooded,” said another, “cloaked in red— never lettin’ us see his face. He just comes from nowhere, shootin’ red, then goes back to nowhere.”

Zar spoke with as many people in Palta who had seen the bandit as he could. They all told him the same thing. The bandit wore a red cloak, its hood always up, and he was only seen in passing, riding by or riding away. He followed the sightings south, deeper into Lolia, until he had come to a small village that had a key thing in common with the town of Palta—someone had just been killed.

This Scarlet Quill was near. A crowd of villagers surrounded a cottage, their eyes pulled wide, and their mouths falling open. The murder had just happened and Zar made his way through the group to get a firsthand look.

A woman’s clothes were torn and she sobbed. Zar moved his eyes off her—for she was indecently exposed— and instead scanned the corner of the home where a body was laid out and filled with red arrow shafts.

“He tried to rape me!” the woman cried through sniffles and snorts.

“Was it a bandit cloaked in red?” Zar asked.

“Aye,” the woman called.

“I’ve come here in pursuit of him. He’s called the Scarlet Quill. Red hood, red arrows—he killed a man in Palta.”

“He saved me,” the woman cried. She looked at the corpse filled with red arrow shafts. “He tried to rape me, followed me home from the tavern and broke into my cottage—tried to force himself on me. Then—the bandit— Scarlet Quill saved me. I didn’t see him come, but he was here, killed the man, and was gone.”

Zar squinted in confusion. The Scarlet Quill had saved this woman from being raped, and would no doubt be regarded as a hero in this little village. In Palta he was regarded as a villain—he had killed a man, though Zar didn’t know the reason. No one in Palta knew much about the fellow who was killed, but nothing was stolen, so it wasn’t exactly accurate to call the Scarlet Quill a bandit. Here, the woman
w
as
known. Her husband was away on business in the capital and she was alone for a spell. Only a few of the villagers there had heard of the Scarlet Quill before, two of them stemming from rumors from the mainreach.

This Scarlet Quill was well traveled and well known. His activities—namely murder—seemed to span between the mainreach and Lolia. Zar listened to as many eyewitness accounts of the Scarlet Quill as he could find, then set out to the west, following a villager’s report of having seen a red- cloaked figure riding off in that direction.

“I know it’s the opposite way of the mainreach,” Zar told Asha, “but I must find this person. When this is done, we’ll seek out Tuskin. I swear it. After this is done.”

Asha lifted her head and stepped gingerly. She was familiar with the area, and as she brought Zar into the woods her steps quickened with confidence.

“Hey! Left,” said Zar, “I pulled to the left, Asha. Wait, I know where we are! Aye, we
are
in that area. I was so consumed with this Scarlet Quill I forgot where we were. Our cache is in these woods. I could use a proper bath—and we can store Ramla’s things. Fine, then, Asha, to the hot spring.” Asha marched through the wood with her head lowered purposefully. They were about a mile away from the cache when the camel stopped abruptly in her tracks, lifted her snout high in the air and started grunting.

“What is it? Is there someone there?”

Asha swayed her head from side to side as she inhaled the forest wind, still grunting and groaning.

Zar drew his sword. “We’ll turn back if there’s someone close by,” he whispered in Asha’s ear. “We don’t need them following us to the cache.”

Then, just as quickly as Asha had started her commotion she fell calm and quiet, put her head down and continued to march forward without a sound.

“What was that about?” Zar questioned. “Is it safe? If we’re not alone here I’d quite appreciate if you told me now. Well?”

Asha remained quiet, and Zar knew by her manner that they had nothing to fear.

They arrived at their hot spring treasure cache not long after. Zar looked down into the misty pool and beamed. The steam was already relaxing him as he worked himself out of his surcoat and mail. He pulled off his shirt and sat down by the bank in the steam as he worked off his boots. He was confused to see Asha walking away into the trees, but before he could call out to her—

“Zar?” a soft voice sounded.

A figure appeared from the place Asha walked toward. The woman’s mouth fell open and her eyes sparkled. She smiled radiantly.

Zar gaped, and, as the young woman ran towards him laughing the whole way, he finally found words. “Shahla! What are you doing here?” Zar attempted a few more questions, but his words were muffled as Shahla jumped onto him, wrapping her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck, and squeezing tight. She rocked back and forth a few times before she let herself down and stood before him.

Shahla was in her undergarments. She was either preparing to take a dip in the spring or she had recently finished doing so. She had a scar on the left side of her cheek that wasn’t there before. Her hair was even longer.

“You’ve found my secret spot,” said Zar.

“Secret?” Shahla questioned, her face still lit with a smile, her shinning eyes seeming to smile the same. “Because of the hot spring?”

“Aye, because of the hot spring.” Zar grinned, looked both ways and leaned in closer. “And because of the fortune of treasure I have buried under our feet,” he whispered. Shahla smiled even wider, hopped a few times in place and burst into giggles all at once. In that moment she looked like the girl he had met ten years ago.

Shahla ran and jumped into the spring. “We have so much to talk about,” she almost yelled.

“Aye,” said Zar, chuckling.

“Where have you been?”

“The land across the sea.”

“Were you there the whole time? What was it like?

Did you see Leviathan up close?”

“Zar sat down by the bank and laughed. “Well, which question should I answer?”

“All of them,” Shahla called. “Come into the water.”

Zar looked down into the pool, at Shahla wading around in it, the sprinkles of water that drizzled over her honeyed shoulders and the white cloth brassiere that she wore which was now saturated by the spring’s hot water and very transparent. He thought for a second, and then pulled off his pants.

Zar glanced at Asha as he stepped into the pool. He wished he could speak to her now. He had done nothing wrong. Not yet. After all, Shahla had left her undergarments on, as meager as they were—a thin cotton brassiere and loin cloth—which she surely would’ve taken off if she were alone. And he, of course, had left his loin cloth on as well. They had known each other for years. It was a harmless bath.

The woman stepped around in the pool, smiling at Zar as she rubbed her hands over her body, scrubbing herself with her palms.

“And what might
you
be doing in this area?” Zar asked.

“I’m hunting a bandit,” Shahla replied.

Zar’s thought’s danced to the possibility that they were hunting the same person, but Shahla spoke before he could ask her who it was.

“Wait,” she said, sending a splash of water in his direction. “You haven’t answered
my
questions. I do believe I asked first.”

Zar laughed. “Ah, the land across the sea, Serradiia; it’s like a fairy tale. I’m certain it’s because I had never seen it before—one of the few places I had never seen before— but it’s different. Almost magical, I daresay.”

“Magical?” Shahla giggled.

“The people, the buildings, the sights. I saw up close the Twisted Pillars of Yew. I touched them.”

“The Pillars of Yew? Then you were in Xuul? You saw the Lost City?”

“Saw it?” Zar replied. “I lived there. For over a year the Lost City was my home. I ate and drank with the king and queen. I hunted with the prince, went riding with the princesses.”

Shahla gasped and beamed, and the water rippled as she moved closer to the place where Zar rested his back against the bank. “How?”

“I found a treasure keep,” Zar continued. “Bruudor’s Keep—you’ve heard of it. When I saw the Kingdom of Xuul, the way the royals care for the common folk with giant granaries they build so they can keep the people fed, the goodness and fairness of the king and queen, it was unlike anything I had ever seen before in all my life. Xuul is a kingdom not built on cruelty or greed. They mean to exterminate poverty, unite the people by creating a general currency of gold coins stamped with the head of the king. The coins were to be distributed to families and circulated throughout the kingdom. The only problem was they lacked the gold. I was moved by this effort and granted them the treasure.”

Shahla stood quiet for several moments, staring into Zar’s eyes with wonder. “How can the land be so good?”

“Xuul is no paradise, but it is unified. One land under one ruler—one people. King Aron has thousands of men in his employ. Tens of thousands. With so many hands and a clear purpose, it’s simple to achieve a common goal.”

“I knew you would do great things,” she said solemnly.

“You think I’ve done great things? I have done some good things, and some bad things, like any man, I daresay.”

“No,” said Shahla, “not any man. You’re different, Zar.” The two fell silent for a moment.

“It’s good to be back,” said Zar.

“Well, I’m glad you’re back,” Shahla said at the exact same time.

Another moment of silence passed.

“So, you hunt bandits now?” Zar asked.

The water stirred as Shahla moved even closer to Zar.

“Aye.” She rested her back against the bank beside him. “It’s been a year since I started. After you saved me—at home— Father became so worrisome. He didn’t want me to go anywhere. He was afraid something would happen to me. So I stayed in the cottage—for months I stayed there—but I wasn’t happy. I felt dead. I felt scared. I was hiding from the world. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t stand thinking about when I was taken, how I wasn’t good enough to fight back. I could’ve put an arrow through that man’s eye if I wasn’t so scared.

“I became bitter. I didn’t talk much, I didn’t eat much.

I didn’t do much of anything. I was losing myself. One day I was thinking about when I was captured, thinking about how it had changed my life, changed the person I was into who I am now. I started crying. I cried and cried until I became angry. I wanted to be myself again, but I didn’t know how. So I just jumped on Dalya’s back and rode. I rode and rode for hours. I didn’t know where I was going, and I didn’t care. I rode nearly half a day until I came to a road where bandits were attacking a traveling party. I saw the riders trying to defend themselves, and I saw the bandits killing them—killing those innocent travelers so they could take their possessions. I was so angry.

“I had my bow and quiver with me, and I pulled an arrow from my quiver and shot it so fast you would have taken me for an assassin. I don’t know what came over me, but that arrow landed exactly where I aimed and I had never felt so good about anything in my life. That bandit fell. Then I shot them all down. That’s what started it. I love the feeling of helping good people—and killing the bad ones. Now, that’s all I do.”

“Well, be careful not to judge too quickly,” said Zar. “Why?”

The woman shifted until she stood directly in front of him. Before Zar could question her response, there she was, just a few inches away, so close he could feel her breath.

He looked into Shahla’s eyes, and she stared back daringly. He grabbed her around the small of her back and pulled her close. Shahla wrapped her arms around him, and her warm skin smothered his as she squeezed around his body excitedly. Zar ran his hands from her lower back down over her bottom and up again, until one of his hands, moving almost of its own accord and with purpose, slid around to her front and played there between her legs.

Zar looked at the woman’s face and noticed she had closed her eyes, and he pulled her body up as he worked himself inside her. Shahla seemed to hesitate at first, tightening up her body and wiggling away, but Zar pulled her in close again without even noticing. The woman gasped and whimpered a few broken words, causing Zar to hesitate. He looked over her face, her eyes still closed in passion, and remained still until Shahla opened her eyes and looked at his uncertain face. She kissed him long and deep. It was all the reassurance that he needed.