REAPERS - Book Three: Wild Gods

1

STAVE 15

Wonjin was of grit, and gone faith, and broken oaths and bones. The hateful arrowslinger rode through the thornlands with a bow in his one fist and a hatchet in the other. Far older than any man not helped by unnatural means, his face was untouched by age. But his eyes told of his true miserable span. The ylf had lived the length of three human generations, long enough to watch his beloved home cut down by Mankind. And now some brazen band of the stinking hairfolk had snatched his own daughter Nsurri. Silent and skillful Wonjin sought out the raiders, tracked them through pestilent moors until he found their dripping den. Dispatched the humans with bolt and trap and venom before the blackguards knew any comprehension of the ambush. Wonjin made jerky of the butchered slavers' flesh and ate their livers rare, as he would a hornbuck's, washed down his gullet with beer brewed from the acids of their guts.

The wayfinder did not ask his daughter what had been done to her while in the clutch of the hill-devils. He could smell the stink of mankind within Nsurri's belly. Knew she had likely been seeded with bastard hillic spawn. Half-man? Not his own grandchild, not on this mortal plane. And so the bitter sylvan of unshakeable and awful code strangled the precious life he had come to save. Nsurri's neck felt to him as fragile as a fawn's. Wonjin left her body in the dirt, forever cursed as the murderer of his own daughter and unborn grandchild—or so he reckoned.

Yet old Wonjin had reckoned wrong. His daughter had inherited her share of inborn grit. Broken Nsurri clung to sweet, frail life, her soul pinned between the here and the After, still bound to that limbotic innocent which incubated in her fragile womb—and perhaps given strength by it. But she was paralyzed, helpless, her brain dimmed by theft of air. A lost ship adrift in the far black and icy seas. The unborn child was doomed to wilt and die never knowing what or why, the sun never once toasting its face, wind never lifting its hair, fruit never kissing its lips, love never crushing its heart—if not for a lone dubious savior who came upon the ditch Wonjin mistook to be a grave when he left two generations of his own kin for dead. 

— • —

The vagabond Murden was a deserter of war but not for reasons of conscience or fear. The turncoat meandered where his tattered mind led him and that was no place where othermen bid he report. Murden found the nameless ylfen maiden there in the hole, bereft of mind—but still her heart softly beat and her lungs weakly breathed. Murden fed Nsurri (though the drifter knew not her name) and bathed her in a nearby wash, alert for crocatoi and eece and other things that slithered and slew. Alas, he did not conduct these kindnesses for the sake of altruism—but rather for base and wretched lust. Murden kept the comatose woman to his vile self for those long months as her belly slowly grew. The human seed within her that Wonjin so reviled took firm root and bloomed.

Murden made for a poor midwife, but nature nonetheless took its course. The youngling came into the world pale and silent the eyes already wide. At the birth of her only child, Nsurri let her body go. Gasped her last breath and went unburdened into the unending night. Murden kept Nsurri's material remains in an earthen hole for sick pleasure until her corpse was too far claimed by rot. Desperate in need of coin and winter shelter and food, the wretch sold the offcast orphan to a sinner of the road he knew well and hated more than that.

This fell tricksman of the backways was known as Grendyll, himself thought to be tainted by some sylvan forefather's poison blood. He paid Murden for the child with a handsome deathslaked dirk and a palmful of sooty coins and, to top the generous haul, a wicklebrim hat taken from a man once of wealth but now poor as any other dead. The truth, Murden would later come to learn, was that the blade had been implicated in murderous crimes and the coins were counterfeit and Grendyll had once shat in the hat.