Chapter Nine
What was that all about?” Maryam demanded when Roanna finally said it was safe to stop.
“I saw something.”
“You saw something, all right. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d been sipping kethna.”
Simo explained what he had seen, and the rest agreed they had all heard the rumble.
“What did you see?” Simo asked. When Roanna described the man in her vision, he gave her a curious look and asked, “How do you know Hath Kael?”
The question startled her. Until this moment, the warlord had been little more than a name, an evil rumor whose armies ravaged the land, plundering villages and killing residents, leaving a wake of decimation.
“I … I don’t,” she replied.
“You’ve never seen him?” he pressed.
She shook her head and he appeared perplexed.
“Simo has seen him,” Maryam volunteered. “Or at least he says he has,” she added with a snicker.
“I asked, because you described him perfectly, right to the folds of fat across the back of his skull and the details of his earring.”
“How do you know him?” Roanna asked.
“I escaped from his service several weeks ago,” he said. When she continued to stare, he explained, “There are only two ways for a man to escape death when Kael conquers your city. Either you join his army as a warrior, which I’m not, or enter into servitude.”
He rolled up a pant leg revealing a scar around his ankle.
“As his army was preparing its retreat after Obah Sitheh beat them, a sympathetic smith took mercy and severed my shackle. Then, when Kael’s army fled west, I went north, traveling until Duval found me.”
He pulled his right ear forward, revealing the tattoo of two joined links of chain.
“Unless I can find a way to remove it, I’ll be in someone’s service for the rest of my days. You wouldn’t care to, would you?”
When she furrowed her brow, he explained, “It’s not all that hard, really. All you need is a good sharp knife and a sound stomach. After excising the skin with a circular cut, you staunch the bleeding with a compress of …”
“Stop! I don’t want to hear it.”
Simo laughed before his expression turned sour.
“I thought as much. It’s what everyone says.”
“You don’t think he was coming after us, do you?” asked Sylene.
Simo shook his head.
“If he were, he would have caught us by now. The point is, he was riding, and it wouldn’t have been nice if he had discovered us, even if it were purely accidental.”
Maryam tried turning the talk to Roanna’s vision. To avoid that particular tack, Roanna suggested they examine the half-dozen boxes that were still on the bed. To everyone’s delight, two contained food. To Roanna’s, the rest contained dresses—things she thought she might wear if she could ever find a way to dispose of the leathers and bathe. Oh! How she longed to be clean and look like a woman again.
Still, it was not easy to keep all talk away from war. Smoke tinged the sky a sickly orange, and there was no escaping the smell of burnt buildings. All around, as far as they could see, columns of smoke rose skyward. Even now as they ate, the tang of incineration tainted their palates and made everything taste foul. Roanna could not tell if the contamination were real, or if everything tasted that way because her nostrils were polluted.
“How much farther?” she gasped, seeking to turn her mind from her upset stomach and failing digestion.
“We’re nearly there,” Sylene replied and grimaced as she returned a half-eaten piece of deleth fruit to the box it came from. “Do you see the stand of trees at the crest of that hill?” she asked, pointing to a ridge a mile or so distant. “After the road takes us past, it winds down into a valley. At the bottom, it follows a dry river bed for almost five miles until it reaches the turnoff to my home.”
Out of habit, Roanna attempted to peer forward in time, hoping her earlier vision marked a turn toward her recovery. Unable to summon anything, she raised her eyes skyward. The absence of smoke on the way they were heading raised her hope that Sylene’s home would still be standing. Perhaps she could even sleep in a bed.
She was reflecting on times when she had her own roof to sleep under, but snapped back to the present when the image of her daughter imposed itself.
Pandy appeared to be dressed in animal skins and was riding through mountainous terrain atop a beast Roanna could not identify. It seemed almost ludicrous. Was this a vision, she wondered, or merely the product of her distressed mind? All at once it was gone and she found herself afraid. In this world, where every land was at war, what chance did a girl Pandy’s age have on her own? Only the dimmest hope that they might one day reunite kept her from tumbling headlong into despair. As painful as it was to do so, she tucked the picture away, only to feel how much her hand hurt. She uncurled her fist to see droplets of blood seeping from the four red crescents her nails had dug into her palm.