Where Serpents Strike (Children of the Falls Vol. 1) (29 page)

“The realm is not as bad off as some claim.
Orkrash is a bastard after his own agenda, that much is for sure,
but those kingdoms loyal to him are getting on just fine.”

“And the ones that don’t?”

Merek didn’t say anything, but his mind went
immediately to Aberdour. Rumor was the Black King’s army had
completely destroyed it. Regardless, it wasn’t anything Merek
wanted to talk about.

“Awlin?” he asked. “Who gave you those scars
on your back?” As soon as he asked, he regretted it. He wanted to
know, but at the same time he knew where the conversation might
lead.

Awlin’s smile faded. “Oh, you saw those? I
almost forgot they were there.”

“Was it Adairous?” he asked.

“He only ever whipped me that one time,” she
said.

“What did you do?”

Awlin started to say something, but then her
lips broke into a wide grin. Her eyes glinted like she was about to
tell a good joke. “On Efferous the word for mop sounds very much
like the word
catchyamish
, which is what they call a street
cat, an undesirable cat that smells bad and is mean and nobody
wants. In fact, young boys are often paid a rosi or two by
businessmen who want the catchyamishi in their area killed off.”
She waved her hand as though shoeing away a fly. “Anyway, so one
night Adairous was hosting an extravagant banquet in honor of the
visiting matrona, a vile woman named—”

“Romola Duplicara,” Merek said. “I know of
her.” He smirked. “There’s a rather risqué painting of her I’ve
seen in a wizard’s tower in Malium. She’d love it.”

“I can’t stand the woman,” Awlin said. “The
other servants were terrified of her as well. One girl was so
nervous that during the serving of the meal she spilled the serving
dish all over the matrona’s lap. The girl would have been whipped
had it not been for me.” Awlin looked sheepish, her smile appearing
again as though the punch line was coming. “I went to the matrona
and tried to ask her if she wanted a mop to clean up with.
Apparently, I called her a smelly, undesirable cat instead.”

Merek laughed. “I take it nobody thought
that was funny.”

Awlin’s eyes widened. “You don’t make jokes
about Romola, even if they are accidental. Adairous didn’t want to
whip me. I always thought he had a soft spot for me, actually. But
he had to make an example lest he risk losing favor in the eyes of
the matrona.”

Awlin’s story amused him, and she told it
with a noticeable degree of understanding born of humility and
kind-heartedness. Awlin had never been one to hold a grudge.

Still, Merek found the humor of her story
overshadowed by his guilt. His sister may have found a way to laugh
it off, but she had yet to confront the man who was truly
responsible.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice
cracking.

Awlin’s eyebrows cinched together. “It’s all
right, brother. The scars have long healed. I’m just so happy to be
here with you now and to be going home to see mama and—”

“You don’t understand,” Merek said, as his
grief muscled his confession to the surface. “It’s my fault this
happened to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s my fault you were sent away, Awlin.
You were taken from our home and sold into slavery because of
me.”

She huffed. “You’re exaggerating.”

“No. I’ve been meaning to tell you this for
a while.”

He closed his eyes and took a breath. Here
it goes.

“I tried to steal some coins from what I
thought was an old man, but he was actually Brutas Cathal, one the
most famous knights in all of Edhen. Instead of turning me in he
offered to train me. Mother and father were thrilled, of course. A
member of the Viator family, a knight. How exceptional.”

Awlin smiled. “I remember. I didn’t know
that Sir Brutas had caught you trying to steal, but I remember the
day he honored you before our family. Mother and father were so
proud.”

“Have you ever heard the name of Kruach?”
Merek asked. “Do you remember hearing about him?”

“The gladiator?” she asked.

“That was me.”

Awlin’s face was blank at first. Her head
cocked to one side, pondering, examining his eyes as though trying
to catch him in a lie. “I didn’t think it was honorable for a
knight to fight in the arenas.”

“It’s not. When mother and father found out
what I was doing with the skills Sir Brutas had taught me, father
shunned me. I brought dishonor upon the whole family. He made me
leave.”

She gasped. “He can’t do that. Only a
patriarch has the right to strip someone of their namesake.”

“Father didn’t care. And I didn’t know any
better at the time. I was too angry, too eager to prove that I
wasn’t worthy of their rejection. I thought if I won enough glory
in the ring, that maybe… I don’t know. Maybe somehow I could win
them as well, but in the end I just ended up losing more.”

Awlin’s full attention was fixed upon him
now, her eyes unblinking.

“I became a drunkard. I found pleasure in
the deepest circles of the morally deprived. One day, during a
jousting match, I, um…” An ember formed in his throat that took his
words for a moment. Merek fought down the tears edging at his eyes
before he continued. “I was too drunk to fight. A man who doesn’t
show up for a match is a worthless man. I would have lost all the
credit I had earned for the name of Kruach were it not for my
squire, a boy by the name of Quinn, barely fourteen years old.” The
tears were coming now whether Merek liked it or not. “Quinn
pretended to be me. He put on my armor, took up my shield, and
fought in my stead. I was passed out at the time or I would’ve
stopped him. There I was, a grown man shamed by a lad who knew more
about the meaning of honor than I ever did. The next morning I
found out that his opponent had skewered him through the neck with
his lance.”

Awlin’s silence could’ve shattered Merek’s
eardrums. His mind filled with memories of that awful day, of
waking up to fists seizing him, guards beating him, and the
heart-broken family of young Quinn demanding his execution.

“Father was going to give me to the
authorities, but not before I took the blood march,” Merek said.
“Father wanted our family name absolved of the sins of his
rebellious son before they had me executed for Quinn’s death.”

Awlin’s eyes shut and a single tear trickled
down her cheek. “Men have died taking the blood march.”

“I know. I was too afraid to take it. And so
I ran away.” Merek’s head dropped as he sobbed. His stomach knotted
because at last he had come to the part of his story that he feared
the most. He collected himself and looked up at his sister,
thinking of those horrible scars on her back. “Quinn had three
older brothers, and they wanted revenge. When they couldn’t find me
they went after you.”

Merek kept talking, but at this point his
words didn’t matter. He could see in Awlin’s eyes that she already
knew the rest of the story—taken from her home in the middle of the
night by three men, whisked away to one of Turnberry’s harbors, and
sold like a cheap whore to the first slave ship bound for Efferous.
Her expression changed from shock, to horror, than sadness and
tears.

“I’m so sorry, dear sister,” Merek said. He
slid off the log and fell to his knees, intent on begging her for
forgiveness, but her hands caught him by the shoulders before he
could kneel. She pushed him up and threw her arms around him,
hugging him in an embrace he didn’t deserve. “I’m so sorry,” he
said again, crying into her chest. “I will never forgive myself for
what happened to you.”

Awlin stroked the back of his head and said,
“Then I will do it for you.”

He looked up at her. “What?”

“You’ve punished yourself enough,” she said.
“The scars on my back are no more your fault than they are
mine.”

“How can you say that?” he asked. “How can
you forgive all that I’ve done?”

“Because you’re my brother. I love you.”

With Awlin’s arms around him, Merek felt a
peace envelop him that he never expected to find. His mistakes
became a memory, and his crimes insignificant in the face of
Awlin’s willingness to look past what he had done.

The atmosphere around the campfire changed
over the next several moments and Merek and Awlin talked until the
embers of the fire were a calm red. He tossed a couple more logs on
the coals and lay down on his blanket to look up at the stars.
Awlin was quiet for a long time, and Merek began to wonder if she
had drifted off to sleep.

Then she said, “Merek, did you ever
marry?”

“Why of all questions to ask me would you
think of that?”

“A good sister wants the best for her big
brother.”

“No. I never married. Don’t suspect I ever
will.”

“Can’t find many brown haired, brown eyed
girls on Efferous can you?” She giggled, eyes crinkling in the
firelight.

He smiled, a mental picture of such a woman
forming in his mind. He did like the brunettes.

Merek lay awake for a while afterward,
listening to the crackling of the campfire and the scampering of
distant nighttime critters through the forest. He still couldn’t
believe Awlin’s response to his admission of guilt. Though she had
looked appalled during his story, and though she cried with him as
he confessed, her response was the one thing that he never saw
coming.

After a while his thoughts went to the
cabin, one of only a few safe houses he had left. If he couldn’t
get in there and retrieve his gold, he and Awlin would not be able
to afford a ship ride back to Edhen.

He did have one option, however, and it was
tucked in the pocket of his tunic in the form of two milky white
gems. He had already used four of them to buy Awlin’s freedom, an
act that had startled him when he thought about it a couple days
later. He was now in debt in the worst way possible to the most
ruthless high king ever to rule Edhen. Even if he and Awlin were
able to afford passage home, Merek doubted he would be able to
return. He was a wanted man now. He could take Awlin home, but, in
the end, he would have to leave.

Eventually Merek slipped into a light sleep,
waking many times to the forest sounds and the jarring thoughts of
his own bleak imagination.

After dawn, he and Awlin ate a few bites of
what little provisions they had, watered their horses by a nearby
brook, and set off north toward the town of Faltonia.

A quiet place, Faltonia was rich with jungle
greenery and strong stone homes occupied by craftsmen,
seamstresses, carpenters, masons, and other talented tradesmen. The
town had little to offer passersby. Other than the resources
produced by its inhabitants—resources that were almost always
carried away and sold elsewhere—the town had nothing that attracted
visitors

Merek led Awlin along the outskirts of the
town and into the jungle woods. He steered north through many
fertile farmlands sectioned off by rows of emerald shrubs, flowery
trees, and trickling brooks.

Leaving his horse in the woods for a few
moments, Merek crept through the jungle underbrush and peered out
into a small clearing where a simple single-level cabin sat, a dark
square box in the midst of a rich verdant utopia.

He knew right away that something was wrong.
A path of tall green grass to the right of the single-level
structure was bent in the wrong direction as though a horse or a
man had traipsed over it. The front door wasn’t shut and the native
birds were far too quiet.

“What is it?” Awlin whispered, as she sat on
her knees behind him.

The door to the cabin scraped open and a
black viper stepped outside onto the warped wooden deck. He stood
there a moment in black leather and chain mail, examining his
surroundings as he munched a piece of dried meat.

Merek’s gut twisted. His safe haven was
gone, his gold out of reach. His return journey to Edhen with Awlin
had stalled yet again. Merek’s mind ticked through the possible
ways the soldier had tracked him to this location, but there was a
number of possibilities. Patryk might have told them, or another
one of Merek’s collaborators, though there were few who knew about
the cabin. Merek wondered if he had slipped up. Perhaps over the
last two years of sneaking around Efferous and making the rich a
wee-bit poorer had resulted in a few loose threads that he had
failed to cut off.

However the cabin had been found, it didn’t
matter now.

The soldier squinted in the late afternoon
sun, his eyes searching the field. He looked like he was following
a routine, one he had already done many times, which made Merek
wonder just how long the soldier had been there. He probably wasn’t
alone either, which made it even more possible that the cutaway in
the floor under the table had been found, the gold pillaged.

Merek waited for the man to wander back into
the cabin before moving away from his perch. He took Awlin by the
hand and, staying low, led her back through the underbrush to where
they had left the horses.

After Patryk’s death in Slavigo, Merek had
abandoned the grumpy old horse his friend had loaned him and
purchased two new horses with the money he had collected from the
stolen purses at The Pit. The problem now was he needed money. He
spent a moment debating in his mind about going after the gold
anyway, wondering if he was skilled enough to take on the black
viper and anyone else hiding inside. Without knowing for certain if
his gold remained where he’d hidden it, however, he couldn’t
justify the risk.

With the presence of the black vipers having
put some fear into him, Merek led Awlin back toward Faltonia. Once
they were in town Awlin ventured to break the silence and asked him
where they were going.

“Just follow me,” he said.

Merek sauntered his horse up to a storefront
with a broad window made of small square glass panes set in a
bowed-out wooden frame to make a larger view. The shop belonged to
a jeweler whose wares were on display through the glass.