Bloodsword: War of the Leaf

Chapter 10: On the Backs of Heroes

Kora frowned as she looked around at the heavy forests that surrounded them.

“Where in the name of the Seventh are we?” she rasped out loud.  The magic of Tev’s jump gate had thrown them halfway across Quelaezaun.  Again.  Where, exactly, was another matter all together.  Unfortunately Tev was still unconscious, so he couldn’t shed any light on the matter.  Kora sighed and turned to the small fire that Feral’Sath had built on the edge of the small meadow they had landed in.

At first glance, it was difficult to ascertain the mood of her companions.  Joran, as always, sat slumped over, a thoughtful expression on his face.  For a fisherman, the Kensarthi seemed to have a lot on his mind recently.  Lax, in contrast, was jubilant and buoyant.  But, then again, the young Ajanti warrior usually was, if he wasn’t in the middle of griping about their lot.  Feral’Sath was a typical Dolomin: stony faced to the last.  Yet, if she looked hard enough, it seemed as if the black skinned Freeholder was actually happy here.

Kora glanced around again, shivering slightly.  She could see how.  If anything, this cool, temperate forest mirrored the big Dolomin’s homeland in the Mountains of the Moon.  The big Freeholder was more at home in the wilds than any of them.  Even as she watched him, he carefully propped a skewered rabbit, skinned and gutted, over the fire to begin roasting it.  It hadn’t taken the muscular elf long to slip back into old habits.

Kora sighed and shivered again.  As for her, this forest reminded her too much of the northern forests of Ajantus, her own homeland.  With massive tamaracks and govus trees, towering like giants over the rest of the forest, the Ajanti had lived high in their branches, eschewing the forest floor.  And for a purpose: Ajantus was home to some of Quelaezaun’s most feared predators, including razor cats, a cousin to the azora, and the silver bear.  The Ajanti ancestors, upon moving to the great forests of Ajantus, immediately found the trees as their refuge.

And so the short Ajanti woman found it rather uncomfortable to be on the forest floor of a forest that reminded her of the deadly forests of home.  Kora sighed and tried to relax.  It was like she could see a massive silver bear lurking behind every stump, a razor cat in every shrub, and a devil cub on every branch.  She glanced over at the sleeping Lax.  Strangely enough, he didn’t seem to have a problem with it.  But, then again, it was usually the females of their people, armed with the tree magic, which actually ventured down onto the forest floor to gather the herbs and roots so vital to the workings of their craft.  Kora had spent enough time down on the ground as an apprentice to make her more than nervous.  Especially after seeing her mistress taken by a devil cub right before her eyes.

The incident had been enough to convince the shaken elf that she should leave Ajantus forever.  For a moment she wondered what had convinced her companions to leave their separate homelands.  Feral’Sath, she knew, was taken in a slaver raid by the Mardish when he was a teenager.  But Lax had never told her why he had left Ajantus.  Nor had Joran spoken about leaving the Kensarthi and their deep sea fishing fleets.

Of course the greatest of all these mysteries was why Tev had left the relative protection of the human lands to seek his fortunes elsewhere.  The humans were a young race, considered as interlopers and barbarians by not only the Solavar and Mardish, but many of the Freeholder races as well.  They were universally shunned and avoided, called unclean and stoned for the meanest crime.  No intelligent human with a choice would venture out from the hilly forests of the human lands in the far north of Lasis’Nar.

Yet, here Tev was, looking more like an elf than any human had a right to.  Worse than that, Kora had gathered that Tev had once been a pirate on the Meridian, working with another infamous human by the name of Hammer, to raid both Solavar and Mardish shipping without prejudice.  The question was what was he before then?  Did Tev have a life at all?  Or had he always been a pirate and a rogue, playing the cultured elf while he slit elves’ purses and then their throats.