Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (3 page)

Tyrissa pressed her temporary advantage, seizing
the top of the wurm’s upper jaw with her free hand. Slowly, she inched her
fingers over the edge of what passed for lips and between the stone-like teeth.
The wurm tried many times to snap its jaws shut, but the broken fragment of the
spear kept its mouth lodged open, frothy saliva drooling down its neck.

Pulling with all her strength, Tyrissa yanked the
head of the wurm upward, nearly bending it to a right angle around her knee.
For an instant they stared at each other, glossy black beads against blue
sparkling in fury, hunter and hunted. She had a clear view to the back of the
wurm’s throat. Tyrissa gripped her knife tighter and drove it deep into the
beast’s mouth, her arm scrapping against the bottom row of teeth and opening up
fresh cuts. Her attack struck bone and sent a shock of pain through her wrist.
Jerking her arm back within the creature’s mouth she made another thrust aimed
further back and higher. This time she hit soft flesh and a spurt of hot blood
washed over her hand, mixing with the wurm’s foul-smelling saliva. The wurm let
out a pitiful squeal as the knife slipped into its small brain and its
struggles shifted from violent resistance to nervous, residual twitches.

Tyrissa untangled herself from the wurm and
rolled away to lie on her back. Panting as if she hadn’t breathed through the
entire ordeal, she craned her neck to look over at her brothers. Sven was
wide-eyed and covered in mud from the chest down, but otherwise in one piece.
Oster looked impressed and a touch frightened.

Lying there, arm coated in wurm blood from the
elbow down, the rest of her body splashed with mud and new-found exhaustion
Tyrissa said, “
Now
we can go home.”

It took the better part of an hour to return home
by way of the winding but still well-traveled ‘Hunter’s Trail’, as Tyrissa
called it. Their catch, while not overly heavy, was cumbersome and required all
three of them to carry. The delineation between civilization and wilderness was
sudden, the Morgwood vanishing around them to become pasture with aged stumps
poking out among the grass. Tyrissa couldn’t help but frown at the constantly
advancing boundary of Edgewatch Village, but the feeling passed as the close
embrace of the forest was replaced by the warm familiarity of home.

With each passing year, Edgewatch ‘Village’
became more of a misnomer. The original village, built around an old hilltop
watch tower nestled within the edge of the Morgwood, was now but a small
section of a much larger town growing in the cleared fields south of the hill.
With the exception of the weather-worn, pyramidal-roofed stone temple to the
old Morg gods, every standing building in Edgewatch was less than twenty years
old, built after the butchery of the Cleanse by survivors of the original
village and the flood of refugees from the surrounding area.

The Jorensen home stood among the relatively
older upper section of town, a ring of fifteen homes built around the original
village green with its massive, preserved fir tree in the center. Anchoring the
north and south points of the ring were the temple and the crumbled ruins of
the watchtower that lent the town its name. In the afternoon shadow of the
great fir, Alli Forran, the lead schoolmistress, had a class of about a dozen
younger children sitting in two rows, each with a lapboard of brown wood for
the day’s lesson. The trio drew some looks as they crossed the village green,
though only the smaller children granted any lingering attention. Tyrissa had a
reputation for emerging from the forest looking like hell with a smile on her
face. It was considered some approximation of normal.

Their house looked much like the others in the
ring: a square, single story built of sturdy Morgwood lumber, painted white with
green trim, strengthened in places by locally carved stonework, and topped with
rust brown tiles from the forges of Greden, the Morg capital city. A smaller,
matching building containing her father’s wood-working shop sat nearby at a
prudent distance. They took few chances given the fire hazard the stacked wood,
sawdust, and lacquer of his trade posed. The sound her father sawing away at
his work drifted out of the open double doors of the workshop. It was one of
the most comforting sounds Tyrissa knew.

The instant they reached the front stoop of their
home with its pine green door framed by an arch of gray stone, Iri Jorensen
displayed her preternatural (or perhaps simply a mother’s) sense of knowing exactly
when her children returned from misadventure, and opened the door. Somewhat
darker in hair and skin than her daughter and husband from her southern Morgale
blood, Iri silently assessed her three disheveled children and their prize, her
face flickering between relief and mild disappointment.

Today, Iri wore traditional Morg women’s garb, a
simple white blouse with well-used metal buttons and green skirt. Not so
traditional was the matching length of green cloth tied around her head like a
bandage, cutting diagonally across her forehead and covering her right eye
before wrapping down below the ear.

It must be one of her bad days.

“Hello mother. We brought dinner!” Tyrissa said
in as cheery a voice as possible while letting the wurm fall to the ground with
an unceremonious thud. Oster sighed behind her, grateful to be relieved of his
majority of the carried weight. The wurm landed with its head pointed up at
Iri, mouth agape, tongue lolling out one side like a panting dog. Charming.

Tyrissa received a hard, accusatory stare from
her mother’s eye. She could see the lower end of the scar peeking out from
below the makeshift eye patch. A deep and surgically precise cut ran through
Iri’s eyebrow to partway down her cheek and the wound should have blinded her,
yet she could see perfectly fine on good days. Whenever Tyrissa asked about it
her mother would say, ‘I received it in the Cleanse and it never healed
properly,’ and would elaborate no further despite Tyrissa’s repeated attempts
to learn more. Iri’s entire generation bore such wounds and scars: the shared
mark of Cleanse survivors. Few, however, were as peculiar as her mother’s eye.
Though Tyrissa’s latest growth spurt gave her a few inches over her mother, she
still felt shorter out of sheer presence.

“I see. Thank you.” Iri’s eye bounced between the
wurm, Tyrissa’s bandaged arm, and Sven’s mud-caked clothes. The three of them
had stopped at a stream on the way back and attempted to clean Sven up, but
there was only so much that could be done for it. Iri’s expression softened
into a small, soft smile. Tyrissa inwardly cringed at promise of a future
tongue-lashing.

“Well, don’t just stand there, take it down to
Hileg’s. Tell him he may keep a few cuts for himself and Mirra. Then clean
yourselves up and
try
not to have any further… adventures before dinner.
If at all possible, Tyrissa.”

Hours later, Tyrissa sat behind their house at
the crest of the hill, catching the faint scents of her mother preparing dinner
mingling with the sharp smell of the herb-soaked bandages wrapped around her
right arm. The book lying in her lap,
The Women of Amonzae
, was
unopened. She’d read it cover to cover many times, the stories of the jungle
dwelling society of warrior-women always thrilling, but glossing over how such
a society functions for more than a generation without men.

Instead, Tyrissa gazed out over the lower section
of Edgewatch and kept watch for Liran’s return. A larger ring of homes were
built around a second common green, the houses similar to the ones at her back,
but packed closer together. The lower green currently had a swarm of children
kicking around a leather-bound ball, the game utterly lawless. It was a common
sight, as youth far outnumbered adults in Edgewatch or any other Morg town,
with most families having four or more children. Tyrissa had no shortage of
friends and playmates growing up, though only Oster was capable of keeping up
with her in the forest. Everyone else wasn’t interested in ‘a bunch of trees
and trails’. She sighed at the thought. Most times it seemed only her eyes were
drawn northward while everyone else looked south.

Past the lower green, the Fjordway cut through
the new center of Edgewatch, an ancient road that ran from the central Morg
cities in the west to the rugged port towns nestled among the fjord-riddled
coasts to the east. Shops lined the road, along with the
Forest’s Respite
,
the town’s inn and stables. Beyond the inn was the spire-topped roof of the
schoolhouse. Tyrissa was glad to be done with
that
place. Beyond that
stood yet more rows of homes, some still skeletal frames in the midst of
construction with stacks of recently felled and cut lumber beside them.
Edgewatch had become the primary waypoint for traders traveling the Fjordway
after the Cleanse. Most of the other villages along the trade road were gone,
with little left but bad memories haunting the burnt and rotted husks of
abandoned homes.

Her eyes followed the road eastward until it
vanished among the trees. Tyrissa had only read about the fjordland, never seen
it for herself. At this point, her imagined view of staggering cliffs and
countless secret inlets probably outdid the real thing, the fantastic
landscapes of her adventure stories coloring her view of reality. Still,
wanderlust itched at the back of her mind. Whether the Morgwood at her back or
the fjords up that road, she wanted so much to just be
away
. Direction
mattered little.

A large, cream colored horse with puffs of snowy
white hair around its hoofs lumbered to a stop behind one of the shops lining
the road. It pulled a narrow red wagon with a tall man seated on the driver’s
bench. He was dressed in out-of-place dark colors with a close cropped crown of
blonde hair that matched Tyrissa’s.

Her book tumbled to the grass as Tyrissa sprang
to her feet and broke into a sprint down the hillside. She cut through the ball
game, a brief addition to the chaos, shouts sounding in her wake. By the time
she weaved through the houses and reached the wagon, Liran was already haggling
with Jorill, a pudgy shopkeeper nearing sixty with only scattered strands of
hair above his ears and a gray tangle hanging from his chin. Tyrissa waited,
catching her breath and allowing Liran to finish his business. Her brother wore
a loose but handsome coat of black and blue, the colors of his merchant guild.
On the back, sewn between his shoulders, was a circular patch of concentric
circles in the same company colors with a silver coin at the center. ‘Khalan
North Trade Company’ was stitched around the outermost ring of the company crest.

“Eleven chiefmarks, boy,” Jorill said. “We
already get supplied with herbs once a week from Greden. Don’t think you can
get a little extra because you used to live here when you were a lad, snatching
candies when you thought me or the wife weren’t looking.”

“I wouldn’t dare think of it Jorill! But I don’t
think you have spices from the Khalanheim markets. Ever had
rajspice
?”
Liran removed the stopper from a small jar of reddish-brown powder. Jorill
leaned in for a sniff and came away looking thoughtful.

“This traveled some two thousand miles to get
here. Khalanheim’s markets contain pieces of the entire world, and I’m bringing
a piece of the world to you. It’s not just rare, it’s unique. I’d say that’s
worth a ‘little extra’. It’s still a discount from what you’d pay to someone
from the capital for anything like this. I’ll even knock a few off the price as…
delayed payment for those candies. Fifteen chiefmarks.”

Liran spoke faster than she remembered, some of
his words seasoned with an unfamiliar accent. He had been gone for almost two
years now, leaving for the city of Khalanheim to further his career with the
Khalan North Trade Company. That was on top of the years he spent bouncing
around Morgale’s cities, working with the local branches of the company and
visiting Edgewatch once a season at best. To Tyrissa the cities of the south
sparkled in her imagination like diamonds just over the horizon. Khalanheim and
Gardula, Imperial Rhonia and Tillmoore. Liran got to see them first hand and she
couldn’t help but feel a small surge of jealousy whenever she thought on it.

Jorill wrapped up their haggling duel with,
“Sure, fifteen. Welcome home, boy.”

Liran lifted a small padded crate from the back
of the wagon and handed it to the shopkeeper. He saw Tyrissa standing here and
lifted a finger, asking her to wait a moment longer. All that remained in the
wagon bed were a travel pack and another smaller crate of jarred spices, likely
a gift for their mother.

“You have a great evening Jorill. I’ll come by
for payment tomorrow.”

Jorill grunted in assent and carried the crate
through the backdoor of his shop.

“I find your priorities confused Liran,” Tyrissa
said crossing her arms in mock disappointment. “Honestly, two years and you’d
rather make a few marks before seeing your dearest sister.”

Liran had the decency to send his sharp,
appraising eyes downward and look chastised, all the while still bearing a
charming smile that implied a constant, private joke. The other girls always
told her how Liran was ‘the pretty one’. Tyrissa didn’t see it.

“Call it a merchant’s nature, Ty. It can’t be
helped, only indulged.”

Liran stepped over to her and they embraced. Upon
pulling way he looked her over and said, “My how you’ve grown, a
lmost
as
tall as me now.” Tyrissa would have to dispute that later, as they were clearly
eye-to-eye. Liran’s face was sun bronzed from the trip north, a long journey
through the vast emptiness and supposed dangers of Vordeum. The last two years
had been kind to his beard, finally filling in the gaps and patches that
haunted him from youth.

“What happened to your arm,” Liran motioned at
the fresh bandages around her forearm and hand.

“Dinner,” she replied with a wicked smile.

“I’ll let it be a surprise,” he said with a
laugh.

“Is this horse yours?” Tyrissa patted the mare’s
neck and traced her hand along a splash of white running down the snout. This
far north, horses were a rarity, the property of lords and the king, a symbol
of wealth. Most Morgs used
kaggorn
as haulers, the burly beasts slower
than horses and hardier against the fierce Morgale winters.

“The Guild’s, but at least she makes me look all
the more impressive.”

“She’s beautiful.”

Liran chuckled and said, “I suppose. The novelty
wears off quick when you’re around them for enough time. Maybe I’ll take you to
the caravan while it’s camped over in Tav and you can get your fill of them.”

“I’d like that.”

“I thought you might. Let me stable Izzy and
we’ll head home.”

The Jorensen family sat hand in hand around the
table and dinner began with ten seconds of silence for the ten silent Morg
gods, a practice done more out of tradition than reverence. The Cleanse
shattered what remained of anyone’s faith. What good were nameless gods that
cared nothing for their people in their darkest times? Tyrissa ticked the
seconds off in the back of her head, paying more attention to the feel of her
father’s hand in her left and Liran’s in her right, the contrast of calloused
versus smooth, of wildly different paths in life.

Ring-shaped wurm steaks lay in a stacked line
atop a central platter ringed by a smattering of side dishes, mostly summer
vegetables and a plate of pungent
kaggorn
cheese. Everyone save Sven had
a glass of premium mead from the western Morg city of Stalven, the drink
stained a murky blue from the berries used in its creation.