Blood Tempered: Book 1 of the Sword Monk Saga

Blood Tempered: Part 15

They arrived at the ruins of Myed by mid-morning. Nestled between grassy hills, with a crystal clear stream flowing down the center of the dell, it was an idyllic place for a village. Caida could still see the smoke rising, hear the screams of the women and children of the village as the reavers had descended on the village after slaughtering the men in the fields. Almost no one in Myed had been able to afford a horse; the fields had been plowed with oxen. And so no one had been able to get word to the village before it was too late.

Caida remembered it all, all too well. He'd been sick, sick enough not to be in the fields that day. He remembered hearing the screams. Snatching the boar spear from the wall, running to the door. His grandfather blocking the door, swinging a pot down on his head. The world disappearing. Waking up some unknown time later in the root cellar, where his grandfather had hidden him. Walking out in the late evening sun, through a village burning, full of the dead.

Even after so many years, Caida knew the shame of the survivor.

They rode through what was left, overgrown with bracken, and did not stop.

"Was a village here," said Olvera. "What was it? Myed? Myos?"

Caida shrugged. He would not share this with Olvera. Perhaps if he had been alone he would have walked the foundation stones of his father's cottage, of the inn. He might have walked the green and remembered chasing fireflies in the evening light and drinking small cider straight from a glazed jug chilled in the stream. But not with a stranger accompanying him.

Would those responsible ever be made to pay? At one time, Caida had sworn to be the one to bring justice to those responsible. But he had only been a boy, and the intervening years and his heartfelt vows to the Order had cooled that raging fire.

But looking on the few, overgrown remains of his early life, Caida realized that the fire of outrage had not gone out inside him, however low it currently burned. It most likely never would.

And so they rode through, unspeaking, to another, fresher place of slaughter.

~ ~ ~

The scouts had stacked the bodies and burned them. The remains of the pyre were cold, and full of bones and bits of armor. Olvera poked through them, briefly, a morose expression on his face.

"I don't know what I expected to find here," he said. "The dead are dead, and cannot speak. If the scouts found anything, they didn't bother to share it with anyone before they, too disappeared."

Caida, ignoring the funeral pyre, had been studying the ground, which was rocky and dry and sparsely covered with knee-high, yellowing grass. One tuft of grass had been tied, and the top of the tuft bent to point southeast.

"I hate to contradict you, sier, but I think someone did indeed leave us a marker."

Olvera walked over, saw the tuft, nodded. "I do believe you're right, monk, and it pleases me to be corrected. What lies due east of here?"

"Not much. Rolling plains, the occasional copse. No habitation. Nothing until Thunderhead."

"Thunderhead?"

"An abandoned fortress. Perched on the Gods' Balcony, guarding the Steps."

"Perhaps abandoned no longer, monk."

"Perhaps not."

Olvera sighed. "I hate riding on assumptions and suppositions. We may well be wrong." He squatted down, pulled idly at the tuft. Picked up rocks and tossed them away. Caida watched, impassive. When Olvera turned a flat stone over to reveal a cloud scratched into the bottom, and feigned a passable imitation of surprise, Caida knew without a doubt that the man had known all along where they were going.