Valkwitch (The Valkwitch Saga Book 1) (9 page)

Tyrissa staggered through the rows of stumps at
the boundary of Edgewatch the next evening, limping up to the wall of gray
stone that ringed the sheep pastures of the Grossen family. The relief of
familiar sights and smells was enormous, lightening two days’ worth of hunger
and pain and back-of-the-mind fears. Still, as one of the shepherds raised a
cry calling for aid, Tyrissa collapsed against the rough stone wall. She was
spent, too exhausted, too numb to go any further. This was enough. She made it
back.

A flurry of activity and attention from neighbors
followed. On came the questions and the relieved platitudes of people at a loss
for words and, under it all, the suspicious whispers. Tyrissa waved away their
offers of bringing her to the physic’s home.

“Rest and food,” she said. The physic would find
curiously little to heal. Someone brought water. It was gone in seconds. Aside
from the persistent dull ache in her foot, Tyrissa was mostly just exhausted.

Liran was the first of her family to arrive,
looking like he’d slept even less than she had, his hair far from its usual neatly
combed and styled state. She threw her arms around him.

“Quite an entrance, dearest sister,” he said,
voice glad but laced with weariness.

“Just help me home, Liran,” Tyrissa managed to
say with a weak smile.

They crossed the upper green to their home,
Tyrissa with one arm over Liran’s shoulders, the other using the staff as a
walking stick. The steeloak weapon could splinter and disintegrate tomorrow and
Tyrissa would still be satisfied with it. In the span of three days it granted
her a lifetime’s worth of comfort and support. The only mistakes were her own.

Iri raced up to them in front of their house.
Tyrissa blinked in surprise at her mother. She wore trousers and boots, and had
the look of someone who had been tromping through the forest all day. The cloth
over her eye was black. Despite all she has seen, this seemed the most unusual.

“Gods’ graces, Ty what happened to you?”

“I’m fine, mother. I look worse than—” Tyrissa
was interrupted by Iri’s hands going to her cheeks. At the touch, she felt a
slight surge of warmth and a flash of light at the edge of her vision. Her
mother hissed in alarm and drew back sharply, her face a sudden mask of deeper,
renewed worry. She wrapped one pensive hand around her necklace charm and
Tyrissa could see faint, lingering glimmers of light seeping out from between
her mother’s clenched fingers.

“Liran, take her inside. Get her whatever she
needs. I-I’ll bring in your father and brothers from their search. We all must
talk once Ty has had a chance to rest.”

The Jorensen family gathered in the living room,
the dying light of sunset setting the windows afire. Oster and Sven had been
sent outside, her mother deeming their ears too young for the talk to come. For
a while, no one said a word. Iri paced the length of the room, alternating
between spinning her charm in one hand and running her hands over her face and
threading her fingers through her hair. Tyrissa sat in one of the pair of old
blue chairs. Her father knelt on the floor tending her injured foot, rewrapping
it in fresh bandages. With each passing hour, the wound faded and healed,
though it still burned like Hell from the daemon’s touch and was difficult to
walk on. How Tyrissa was able to get all the way home was becoming a blur of
numbing pain and obsessive focus on placing one foot in front of the other.

“Tell me exactly what happened. Every word they
said, every answer you gave. The more we know about whatever Pact you agreed to
the better.” Her mother arrived at the Pact conclusion faster than Tyrissa did.
She knew without asking, and wouldn’t explain what happened when they touched
outside, only muttering a ‘Not yet.’

Tyrissa told them everything she could remember.
When she described the fight with the daemon her mother’s face softened. She
reached out a hand, perhaps to comfort her daughter, but drew back, instead
gripping the charm again. Seeing that pained Tyrissa the most. The details
between her death and rebirth were now vague impressions attached to the
underlying desire to ‘Prove Herself Worthy’.

“I remember the promise, the Pact, the color
silver, and Tsellien’s face.” Tyrissa finished her retelling.

“A poor way to make a deal,” Liran said. He sat
on a dining room chair, leaning back on the rear legs against a wall. “You’d
think the Outer Powers would be more specific with their recruits.”

“Tell me about it.” Tyrissa said. She could feel
the Pact if she sought it out, like a near-unnoticeable itch in the back of her
mind. It was subtle and passive, but somehow binding.

Her mother paced through the center of the room
during Tyrissa’s retelling, saying not a word. “I knew they would be trouble,”
she said finally. “But I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“You said she was like Kavelis, Iri,” her father
said from the other blue chair.

“Yes. She said she was ‘a sister’ of Kavelis and
that there was unfinished business that we missed during the Cleanse. It sounds
like they were successful in that, even if it cost their lives and us a
daughter.” Iri’s voice matched her hard, absolute choice of words.

“So Tyrissa is like them?”

“That’s possible, but we can’t be sure. I can’t
tell one type of Pact from another. Especially when daemons are involved. It
could be an elaborate trick, a deception. It’s in their nature.”

Tyrissa was sure, knew she had to be just like
Tsellien, even if that meant next to nothing to her. “Mother, who is Kavelis?”
she asked.

“Curious about that myself,” Liran added.

Their parents exchanged a knowing look. Iri
nodded and took a seat on the long padded bench across from the blue chairs.
She brushed some imagined bit of dust from her trousers, then folded her hands
and sat with a straight back. Iri said nothing for a few seconds, eyes
downcast, thinking. When she spoke, her voice was firm and clear, as if trained
for this moment.

“Kavelis was the oft-rumored ‘divine warrior’
that aided King Horald in his conquests during the Cleanse, the angel that
delivered us from the daemonic corruptions that wracked our people. While she
was no
angel
, she was Pactbound of some kind. She cared more about
ending the corruptions than we did. She spoke and acted with such a ruthless
fervor, we were almost as afraid of her as the daemons.

“She came to the future king in the darkest days
of the Cleanse, when it seemed we were forsaken to destroy ourselves. She said
she would end the daemonic corruptions, but needed compatible
volunteers,
and only women. I was compatible, one of twenty. Kavelis did something to our
eyes and hands, some share of her magick that allowed us to see Pactbound or
identify them with a touch. Like what happened outside. Then she disappeared
into the forests and mountains, hunting the sources of the corruption on her
own terms.

“As for myself and the nineteen other women, we
became Horald’s bloodhounds, his inquisitors, his
witches
, traveling
with bands of soldiers to root out the daemon-touched. We became the secondary
focus of all the hate and fear of those times. I would point… and people would
die. Sometimes whole villages. Sometimes old friends. Neighbors. That was my life
for two years, at the front of the worst of the Cleanse. People know about the
King’s Seekers, but few had any idea of how we were so effective.”

The room was still, the air heavy from Iri’s
words. For years Tyrissa thought her mother was holding back heroics or some
personal tragedy. This was both and worse than she could have imagined.
Anything that remained of her past curiosity or resentment dissolved into
sympathy and respect.

“Mother, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

“It’s in the past,” Iri said. She rubbed her bad
eye through the cloth. “Most of it. You probably have questions?”

A thousand and one
, Tyrissa thought.

“Were you ever wrong?”

Through her entire story, her mother’s voice had
been steady as the mountains. For the next two words it wavered.

“Nobody’s perfect.”

Tyrissa felt a pang of shame, and tried to change
the subject.

“What was Kavelis? What sort of Pact did she
have?” She sounded like nothing Tyrissa had ever read about in her stories.
Pactbound were bound to Elements like Fire or Earth or Death, or to the will of
daemons.

“I don’t know. I met Kavelis all of three times.
The first when she declared me ‘compatible’, literally pulling me off the
street in Greden. I saw her a second time when she gave us this… ability and
one last time two years later to thank us and remove it. That was a somber
reunion. Only half of us survived to the end. Obviously the removal didn’t work
very well and since then my eye has never been quite right.” Iri looked down at
her hands as if seeing them in a new light. “I suppose that goes for my hands
too. For all her mysterious magick Kavelis
was
only human after all, and
she said that we were an experiment. I think she wasn’t sure if it would work
at all. Desperate times and all that.”

Tyrissa had a wealth of unknowns, but suddenly no
more questions. A short silence fell over the group.

“What’s our next step,” her father said, always
the pragmatist.

“Tyrissa can’t stay here,” Iri said. “The current
King’s Seekers will start their check of the smaller towns any day now. They
always come through with the census men at the end of summer. They aren’t aided
by pact magicks, but they’ll still find out about Tyrissa.”

The census men were so innocuous. Tyrissa only
ever saw them as funny men obsessed with accurate counts and bearing stacks of
ledgers. They worked with a methodical and fanatical, if polite, determination,
as if the stability of the entire kingdom rested on their shoulders. They were
shadowed by a single man or woman with a distinctive silver eye stitched to
their cloaks. That one never said a word, merely observed. Suddenly they
weren’t so innocuous. As for the Seekers, well, they kept the King’s Law: no
Pactbound. How they enforced that law was vague. Tyrissa had never heard of
anyone violating it.

That would leave a neighboring nation, but as
Tyrissa envisioned a map of Morgale she remembered there simply
weren’t
neighboring nations. Beyond the borders of the kingdom lay only wilderness
dotted with scattered towns that clung to ancient roads like the Fjordway.

“The caravan leaves in a few days,” Liran said.
“I can take Ty with me to Khalanheim. What’s more, as we were leaving the city,
the rumor mills began to hum with talk of a ‘mystic’ that can remove pacts.
There was a lot of noise about one of the senior Stone Shapers leaving their
order.” That was likely all rumor. Tyrissa hated being cynical, but the tales
were all unified on one thing: once you take on a Pact it is for life.

Iri sighed. “I don’t know Liran, Khalanheim is so
far away, and you have to cross the Vordeum Wastes.”

“Far away is what Ty needs. Khalanheim is less
safe than Morgale for the average person, sure, but its worlds safer for
Pactbound. The danger of the wastes is overblown. After all, I’ve done it twice
now. I’m still standing. Regardless, Ty will be safer there. She won’t be a
fugitive, and will be able learn more about her new… situation. Perhaps even be
cured, if rumors are to be believed.”

“They rarely are,” Iri said. “But you’ve sold me
on the idea, as is your way. Tyrissa?”

“I’ve always wanted to see Khalanheim.” The idea
of removing the Pact gave her dual flicker of hope and disgrace. Last night’s
wholesale acceptance suddenly felt premature.

“Then it’s decided. You two need to leave
immediately. Tonight.”

“Can’t we wait a few days to tend to her foot?”
her father asked.

“No, it must be tonight. There were too many eyes
on us when I reacted with Ty’s Pact. You know how they look at me, Orval. The
lingering fear and resentment… they will talk. It must be tonight.

Classic,
Tyrissa thought. With the aurora
at a weak, fading hazel, a nighttime departure would be a under cloak of
darkness. Perhaps her mother had an unintentional flair for poetic adventure
after all.

“Liran, ready your mare and wagon. Orval, help Ty
pack up. I’ll gather some food for the trip to the caravan,” Iri said,
standing, “and bring in the boys for their good-byes. We’ll tell them that your
injuries need the attention of a physic in Tavleorn and that you’ll be away for
a week or so.”

“They aren’t so naïve as that mother. What
happens after a week when I don’t come back?”

“Then you’ll be away on the caravan and we can
tell them the truth. Come, on your feet. We’ve much to do tonight.”

Iri dealt out their tasks with a stoutness
Tyrissa had never seen before. Her mother’s bearing, the solid, unflinching
look on her face and the crisp way she spoke were such radical departures from
the distant, private woman she grew up under. It was as if Iri Jorensen became
someone else. Or perhaps, someone she used to be.

Outside, the early morning hours crept by.
Tyrissa managed to catch a few hours of sleep while they all prepared for her
and Liran’s departure. Soon she would leave all that she knew for a world she’d
only read and dreamed about. However, she had enough time to leave a parting
gift.

Tyrissa sat on her bed.
Tales from Across the
North
lay on her lap with a small, blank sheet of paper atop it. On the
floor next to her feet sat a pack, filled with clothing and a handful of useful
possessions for the journey. She had only read about half of
Tales
thus
far, and it would be the one little luxury she would bring along.

She addressed the note to her father and wrote: