The De'Nauguath Chronicles - Book 1: The Summoner's Daughter

Chapter 11: Convergence

The western foothills of the Kinyavas

Devna had been sure to pack his own provisions – poisonings weren't impossible among monks with grudges. Rokka had even guarded him while he had picked food from the kitchens.

The order had made true on their promise to raise him to adulthood, just like they promised all boys deposited at the gates. He had never once missed a meal, been hit, or been punished by spending a night without a roof over his head. The Order's obligation was fulfilled. They had made a written edict for his new assignment in Krócia, but the paper held little power over him. Clare monks seldom kept track of those on the other side of their walls. There were always unwanted children or secret births or lame toddlers.

Devna needed time to erase the old routine away. He knew he wouldn't last long in the real world as half a man and half a monk. Despite his education, he was a middling teacher. He was a poor liar, quick to maneuver but also quick to forget, so his own tales became tangled before his finished telling them. Healing was his true weapon. No one would refuse kindness to a life-saver.

After much nagging and conniving, Rokka had secured enough rumors to cobble a map together for Devna. Biyaño had more than one incentive. It was remote, but it was said that it also had heavy guards in the surrounding areas. Few places on Adica sounded safer. The trouble was only that most who had ever been there and returned to tell the tale had only found it by accident. All anyone knew was that it was some miles on the other side of the Kinyavas, nestled near the southern elbow of the great mountains.

There were no goodbyes. He was more grieved for those in the infirmary than his fellow monks. It had pained him to turn away new charnel air sufferers, but it had pained him far more to watch no less than eighty people die in barely three weeks. The lucky ones' hearts gave out in the night. The unlucky ones lingered long after Devna had announced to them that they would probably be the last of the afflicted to be treated in Clare. His eyes still burned when he thought about it as he hiked along.

The council hadn't ordered Devna to stretch to that extreme, but it was immediately plain to him that no one would take over his place and be diligent to the point of ragged, all for people who usually had a tiny chance of thriving once charnel air had taken hold. Clare would always offer healings, but only to those who could actually be healed – and, ideally, those who didn't need to occupy a cot for long intervals.

It had already been a fortnight or more since his unassuming disappearance. His supply sack gradually shrank. He enjoyed setting his own schedule for sleep and travel, but he had to admit that he was more and more lost. One day, no later than the second hour of the afternoon, he finally paused to look at his little makeshift map. His main concern had been getting distance between himself and the monastery, but he was well past that now. It was time to be practical.

He found a decent spot to stop by, near a great wall of a hill. He removed his monk's hood. It stank of ten hours' hiking and its warmth was utterly pointless in the daylight hours. He took out his compass again, certain that he was well drifted from the right way by now. He peered at the needle and sighed. He was at least twenty miles wrong. The rock fields inland were vaster than he'd anticipated, so he had veered east to get around them. Now he was near woodland, at the edge of a forest, where it was harder to position the sun and too dark below the trees to place his direction by moss growth.

He sat down on a massive exposed root of a gnarled tree and drank from his canteen. The temperature was stubbornly rising despite the presence of vegetation – although that vegetation wasn't entirely healthy. Cool forests were dark green, and there might have been warmth from the forest floor as well, courtesy of various layers of rotting leaves. Even the few shafts of sun that came through the thick, great trees burned his face.