The Great Darkening (Epic of Haven Trilogy) (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

T
he
tastes and smells of the hearth hall there in the ancient mountain palace were overwhelmingly intoxicating. The large, iron cauldrons that had been stewing over the fire were finally opened, unleashing the most delicious bounty Cal had ever eaten.

A soup of root vegetables and river fish, in a light broth of parsley and a lemony, green herb Cal had never heard of before, warmed his bruised and weary body with each delicious spoonful. A heap of fresh bread, with sweet creamed butter and the most florally sweet honey were all passed with great joy up and down the long, wooden table. Cal had eaten his fill and drank deeply of the Miller’s amber brew, and now the weariness of the last couple days was pulling hard on his heavy eyelids.

“Oh no you don’t, lad,” the Miller shouted out from the end of the table. “You don’t think you are going to go off and sleep now, do you? You haven’t yet paid for this delicious feast!”

Cal nervously looked for Elder John as a red color crept over his face. “I … I am so sorry, I presumed … well, that you...” Frustrated and embarrassed, he hung his head. “You see, sir, I have no coin to give you as payment.”

The table erupted once again with boisterous, jovial laughter, but Cal could not understand why they were all laughing at his expense.

“I could work for the meal! I could help out, once my arm heals!” he pleaded.

This only caused them to laugh even harder.

“Oh my, lad!” Clivesis finally said. “You’ll pay for it alright … but not with your coin. What good would coin do us here under the mountain? Huh?”

Cal shrugged, unsure what to offer.

“What the Miller is trying to say, son, is that we would very much like to hear your
story
,” Tolk explained while wiping the tears of laughter from his eyes.

“Aye, lad, your payment is that you play the part of troubadour,” the Miller continued, “and fill these old Poets’ hearts with a bit of wonder! Huh?”

“Old …
Poets
?” Cal asked, a bit puzzled. And yet, somehow he knew the suspicions that had been playing over and over again in his mind had indeed been confirmed. “I was led to believe that the Poets of this world had long since vanished?”

“We only vanished from that city of yours!” Clivesis pounded the table with his flagon of ale, sending it splashing with an emphatic exclamation.

Elder John spoke up. “What good is a walled city if its light is already dead? We didn’t vanish from the world, no,” he said with a tender wink, “we merely left that graveyard before it mistook us for residents.”

“Besides,” Clivesis chimed in, “those stone-necks did their best to get rid of us. We wanted to seek the light—the true light—and they only sought more timber to fuel their dull, hopeless existence.”

“Agreed!” came a slew of well-soaked voices from around the table.

“But how can that be?” Cal finally blurted his confused question to the gathered group. “That must have been four … no, five branches ago?”

If the Poets had thought Cal’s earlier questions were funny, they found this one to be downright hysterical. The shouts of laughter and merriment rang through the hall.

“Oh, make no mistake, Cal, we are the very Poets who were sent wandering by that greying city,” managed Clivesis, his face red with barely contained hilarity.

“But … the Poets who were exiled … they were all already aging, or so I’ve been told. That must make you nearly—”

“We choose not to keep track of age here in Kalein,” Elder John interrupted him, his eyes alive with the light of life.

“Aye!” shouted the Miller, “It would not do us any good to be old
and
depressed too now, would it?”

“Agreed!” Clivesis shot back with the air of a great orator. “For that might drive a man to drink! Huh, Miller?”

The table erupted yet again, and Cal’s head began to swim with the very possibility of what he was just now daring to consider.

“Now, now,” said Tolk as he puffed on his pipe from the head of the table. “Don’t tease the boy so … he asks a good question.”

Cal focused his attention on the white, bushy-browed Poet as the room grew slowly still.

“But not all questions have a simple answer, my young friend,” Tolk continued. “And it seems to me that of all the questions you will wonder about while a guest of Kalein, this age business will be of the least consequence.”

“What in the name of the THREE who is SEVEN kind of tale have I stumbled my way into?” Cal thought, a little too out loud.

“Stumble? Stumble! Well that suggests that little more than dumb luck and poor coordination are the only real forces at work here in this world,” Tolk half-scolded him. “No, my boy, there are deeper magics. And I suspect they may only masquerade as chance, so as to not frighten our fickle hearts away from our perilous assignments. But something tells me that you know that already.” He gave Cal a meaningful look.

Cal looked around at the eager, welcoming gazes of his new companions. The pain of his broken arm pulsed, but even now he could feel it lessening under the dressing that Elder John had so skillfully applied.

He took a deep breath and, knowing that he was in a safe place, a good place amongst good people, he told them his tale. He spoke of the Oweles and the dreams that haunted him, of the restitution he had been sent to make and of his time with the woodcutters.

His voice caught in his throat as he told them of the raven’s arrows, the shadow cats, and the green-eyed demon bear; his heart broke and tears lined his face when he spoke of the fall of Yasen, the hero of the North.

Cal had their complete attention as he gave full account of his journey there at the table of the Poets. When he told the rather incredible tale of how the Oweles had defeated the bear and of their message to him, a few of the oldest Poets began to whisper excitedly to themselves.

“All of this is still a bit unbelievable to me,” Cal said humbly. “But the strangest occurrence of the whole journey was meeting a witch at this old bridge that crossed the river Abonris. I cannot seem to wrap my mind around how she could have possibly come to know my name?”

A haunted chill suddenly came over the warmhearted tablemates as fearful glances were exchanged; a few seemed rather anxious, almost as if they knew something more than they had been forthcoming about.

Tolk leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands together, bringing them to his lips in a calculating gesture. He spoke with a grandfatherly calm. “My boy, did you say that you saw a
witch
? What did she … uh …
look like
?”

“Well,” said Cal, unnerved by their concern and a little unsure of his own recollection, “I saw her, but it wasn’t
just
her.”

“What do you mean, lad?” the Miller asked.

“There was a beautiful young woman with golden hair and cream-colored skin, and she was crying there at the entrance to an old, stone bridge. She would not stop weeping, and then the next thing I knew, her face contorted into a sickly old witch.”

“Tell me true though, son,” Tolk urged. “Did you see the witch herself, or just the effects of the witch upon the body of the crying woman?”

“I knew she was a witch; that was plain to me. And her voice … was terrifying.” He rubbed the back of his neck with his good hand, willing away the memory of the witch’s hold over him. “The face was not the same face as the sad woman, but it … well … it
was
the sad woman.” He squinted his eyes perplexedly at Tolk, not sure that he was altogether clear in his description of the strange encounter.

The room breathed a nervous sigh of relief, and Cal felt better for a moment.

“Very good, Cal,” said Elder John. “Thank you for remembering for us. We …” Elder John looked reassuringly to his brothers and sisters around the table, “we just wanted to be sure of the full story.”

“But she called me by my name,” Cal puzzled out loud.

“Well, what would you rather she call you?” Clivesis mischievously teased, breaking the tension for everyone. “There is a reason why we’ve each got one, lad, and some of us have a few extra.” He leaned forward and said in a mock whisper, “Though they probably don’t realize it when we call them by those other names.”

The room laughed, and Elder John rolled his eyes in an exaggerated fashion, but Tolk held Cal’s gaze with purpose; he sensed there was more to this part of the tale.

“No!” Cal disregarded the merriment of the room. “She called me by my full name, and no one but the Oweles has called me by that name since I was a boy.”

The laughter stopped, and Tolk gently addressed him. “Well son, just what is this full name of yours that desperate witches and deadly Oweles are so inclined to use as of late?”

Everyone at the table could detect the sense of fear that had crept into the young man as he recounted the story of the witch. The unknown is often the most frightening of monsters to the uninformed journeyman, and Cal, at this moment, was haunted by a myriad of snarling questions.

“But how would she know? How
could
she know my name?” Cal asked. “It just seems impossible.”

Elder John spoke up. “So help me get this straight; you were rescued by the Oweles, you made your way safe down the cold Abonris into my nets, and you are being mended and tended to by these old dreamers. Do you really believe these things are just chalked up to chance, or stumbled-upon luck? Of course you don’t. And yet, with the very same lips, you say that the old witch knowing your name, whatever
that
may be, is a case of impossibility?”

Cal felt a bit stupid, for even he could see the inconsistencies in his logic that Elder John was speaking to. Perhaps it was fear that kept him from accepting what he probably already knew about the nature of the witch and the nature of this journey he found himself on.

“Tell me you see this, young Cal?” Elder John continued. “Chance and deep magic cannot coexist in the same world together. For either she is a good guesser and you are a good swimmer, or …” he paused, scratching his bearded chin as he searched for the right word, “or else some other plot is being played out here.”

The room was quiet as all the brothers and sisters, the forgotten and unlooked for Poets, chewed on the words of Elder John. The popping and crackling of the fire in the hearth was the only sound that could be heard in this part of the mountain palace.

Cal’s thoughts raced back to that moment in the retreating forest, surrounded by carnage and encircled by the ring of Oweles.

He heard his question again.
What would the THREE who is SEVEN have of me?

And there, not in his memories, not in the echoes of past deeds … but there, under the Hilgari, in the deepest center of his mind, he heard the Oweles’ reply.

Follow
.

Cal looked up from the table and saw that Tolk had not taken his eyes off of him, still waiting with focused intensity for the answer to his last question.

Sheepishly and a bit reluctantly he spoke. “Calarmindon. That is my real name, though very few know it.”

Tolk’s eyes grew wide at the mention of the name of that little boy who held the light in his hands so many years ago.

“Calarmindon,” the old Poet whispered, almost reverently. “Tell me, Calarmindon, what kind of parents give their little boy that kind of name?”

Cal looked at the old Poet from across the table, the confusion at such a question plain as the amber day upon his puzzled face. “I don’t know,” he said as honestly as he could. “My mother and father were once Poets of a sort I suppose. At least they thought like the Poets thought and prayed like the Poets prayed.”

The gathered men and women began to exchange quizzical glances and excited whispers back and forth across the table.

A wide, childlike grin began to spread slowly across the rounded face of the old Poet, and Tolk began to shake his head, laughing with a mix of both wonder and unbelief over what he had just heard.

“It would seem to me that maybe I should have listened a little bit more intently to the words I scolded you with,” Tolk said to Cal.

“I’m not sure exactly what you mean by that,” Cal said, still confused at the old man’s reaction to his name and his story.

“Even as I lectured you of deep magic and higher purposes, I nearly missed what was really unfolding before us all!” Tolk said incredulously.

“What
are
you talking about, brother?” Clivesis asked sharply.

“And you see friends … this is why I don’t drink my own ale!” the Miller joked. “They might start saying I am as old and soaked-through as old Tolk here.”

The room erupted again with all sorts of laughter.

“Oh shut up, you old drunken fools!” exclaimed Elder John.

“It seems as though the promises of yesterday and our hopes for tomorrow may still yet be fulfilled in time for my weary old eyes to see them,” Tolk mumbled thoughtfully.

“What is it?” Elder John asked. “What do you see, brother?”

Tolk pounded his hands on the table and rose, pushing his chair out of the way. “What I see? What I see, my friends, are the workings of a magic long unlooked for.”