Dawn of the Dreamsmith (The Raven's Tale Book 1) (25 page)

His two companions visibly tensed as they approached, any levity in Harri’s manner replaced by caution. Cole thought about calling out, to see if anyone inside the huts could be roused, but there was something about the stillness of the air that discouraged him.

It did not take them long to reach the huts. When they were only a dozen feet away from the nearest, Harri dismounted and crept closer, brandishing his longsword before him.

Raven followed suit and jumped down lightly from the saddle, and a second later held a blade in each hand. Harri reached the door of the nearest hut and peered carefully inside. “Hello?” he called.

“Do you sense anything?” asked Raven, joining him at the doorway.

Harri shook his head. “It is perfectly still. Either it is empty... or whatever lurks within wishes to remain unseen.”

Neither the young hunter nor his guide had acknowledged him, so with a shrug Cole clambered off his mount. When he reached them, he noticed a large stack of black bricks between the huts. “You were right,” he told Harri. “Peat miners were here.”

“Aye, so it would seem,” Harri replied. “It is very late in the year for gathering fuel, though. The bricks cannot dry in the cold and rain. Look.” He crossed to the stack and removed one of the topmost bricks. “Soft and wet. It will be no easy task to get this to burn.”

“Abandoned,” said Raven. “Whoever was here must have left some time ago.” She glanced up towards the forest above them. “One way or another.”

A shadow passed over Harri’s face, and his jaw tightened. Without a word, he ducked through the open doorway and disappeared from sight.

“Wait here,” Raven told Cole, before striding towards another hut.

Feeling surplus to requirements, Cole wandered away from the empty dwellings. As he passed the stack of peat bricks, he prodded one experimentally. It was, as Harri had pointed out, still soft and tacky to the touch. He knew little of the process of extracting the fuel, but guessed that it was a gruelling undertaking. It seemed unlikely that whoever had gathered this quantity would willingly abandon it.

Beyond the stack was a marsh, filling the horizon.
The Ice Fens, I take it
, he thought. As far as he could see, the land was a mix of still pools of water reflecting the iron-grey clouds above, interspersed with mounds of damp-looking grass. Some of these seemed to form narrow pathways between the pools.
Hopefully Harri knows the safe routes to travel.

Close by, a series of long trenches had been dug into the earth, apparently to drain away some of the water. Intrigued, he moved closer, and squatted down at the end of the nearest trench. Inside, the exposed soil was nearly black. In many places, neat, square sections had been cut out; no doubt to form the bricks that were stacked behind him.

He tried to imagine what it was like to live here, to spend his days knee-deep in the mud and marsh water, digging out the soil and shaping it brick by brick. All while working under the shadow of the forest above; distant enough to bring comfort, but too near to ever forget. It seemed to him a bleak existence.

Just then, Harri emerged from the hut behind him, followed moments later by Raven from a neighbouring doorway. “Did you find anything?” he asked them.

“Nay,” Harri replied, his face grim. “There are no signs that anyone has lived here. No clothes, food or belongings.”

“This one is the same,” said Raven. “Just empty rooms and a few sticks of furniture.”

Cole stood, wiping the mud from his hands. “Perhaps their harvest was spoiled by the weather and they just left, to return in the spring.”

“Perhaps. I hope for their sake that it was so.” Harri sheathed his sword, and glanced up towards the forest. “Even so... it is not often that one of our patrols passes this way. When I return I shall suggest to my father that must change. We sometimes forget that the influence of the Spiritwood can spread beyond its borders.”

“So, do we still spend the night here?”

“Evening is fast approaching, and this could well be the last time we have a solid roof over our heads until we reach the mountains,” said Raven. “Whatever happened here, I doubt it was anything that we need to fear. I say we make camp... unless Harri has any objections.”

The young hunter had none and, as his companions made their way to their horses to gather up their packs, Cole eyed the stack of bricks thoughtfully.

“At least we’ll be able to make a bloody fire tonight,” he said.

Cole was right about that, although Harri had spoken truly about the difficulty of the task. The peat bricks were too damp to catch alight by themselves. Both he and Raven had been forced to scour the collection of huts for kindling, while Harri went to hunt fresh game for supper.

The pair of them were able to gather several handfuls of sticks, before Raven disappeared into one of the huts to re-emerge with a wooden chair. “It looks a bit rickety,” he commented, eyeing it doubtfully.

Raven placed it on the ground, and with a few stamps of her boot reduced it to broken splinters. “It will serve to burn, though,” she replied.

“The miners won’t be pleased when they return to see that someone has destroyed all their furniture.” Cole looked around towards the spartan huts. “It probably took them a year of digging mud to buy that chair. I bet they even wrote home to tell their families.” He mimed writing on a piece of parchment. “‘Mother, all that standing around up to our armpits in rotting vegetable matter has paid off. We will no longer have to covet our neighbours’ furnishings, for now we own a chair. Inform father.’” He shook his head sadly. “It probably even had a name.”

“And now it has made the noble sacrifice in order to cook your dinner.” Raven smiled. “Truly, a prince among chairs.”

“If we weren’t surrounded just by mud, muddy puddles and houses made of mud, I’d make a boat,” replied Cole, gathering up the splintered wood. “We could lay the remains of this heroic seat inside, push it out into the marsh and set fire to it while Harri tootles something suitably maudlin on that horn of his.”

Raven giggled. It was such an unusual sound to hear from his guide that Cole was as surprised as he was gratified. He grinned widely in response, and together they arranged the kindling around a couple of peat bricks.

By the time Harri returned, the wood was burning merrily and the bricks, having dried a little in the heat, had begun to smoulder. “Good, a fire,” he said as he approached and threw a bulging leather sack onto the ground. “Did you have any trouble finding the kindling?”

Cole and Raven met each other’s eyes, and burst out laughing. Harri just stood staring at them, a baffled expression on his face. The joke had not been that funny, Cole knew, but he felt it lift the tension that had existed between them since the night of the
krigsmoot
, perhaps even longer.

“Such merriment is not often heard in these parts, so close to the Spiritwood,” Harri said, bending down to his sack. “It is good to be reminded that not all is bleak... that our duty cannot entirely rob of us what else it means to be alive.”

Cole blanched when the hunter revealed his evening’s catch. The head on which it sat may have hung limply, but there was no mistaking the feathery spike.

“A bog duck,” he muttered in disbelief. “Of all the creatures in this area you had to catch one of those for our supper.”

“Nay, not one,” Harri replied, grinning as he pulled a second limp form from the sack. “Don’t worry, Cole, the secret of extracting the venom from the flesh has been passed down from generation to generation of hunters. The light is not good, but I’m almost certain I can prepare the meat so that, Valdyr willing, we don’t drop dead where we sit.”

“Well, let’s hope so,” Cole muttered to himself, as Raven and Harri began to pluck the feathers. “I’d hate for the miners to stumble across me in the spring, frozen solid with a mouthful of poisoned duck meat.”

“They’d probably say it was just payment for the loss of their chair,” said Raven, without looking up.

A frying pan was among the belongings Raven had in her pack. She deftly diced the meat, sliced up some vegetables she had also brought and before long a stew was bubbling within. She had even acquired some dried herbs from somewhere and added them to the mix. Soon, the aroma had his stomach growling hungrily.

All the same, upon being presented with a steaming bowl, he sniffed suspiciously at a lump of meat. “Are you sure it’s safe?” he asked.

Harri glanced up. “As sure as I can be,” he replied gravely. “Usually, the process takes several hours and requires precise tools, but...” he indicated the wilds around them. “I did the best I could in the circumstances.”

Cole was almost certain by this point that the hunter was playing a jest on him, yet nothing in his manner betrayed him. He waited until the others were wolfing it down, then risked a mouthful. It was delicious, the sensation of eating a hot meal so welcome after what seemed like weeks of deprivation, that he no longer cared about what it contained. It seemed like only seconds later that he was staring at the bottom of the empty bowl.

When the pan had been scraped clean as well, Cole sat back happily. With a hot meal in their stomachs, his companions seemed similarly content. Each was lost in their own thoughts, until Harri caught sight of the green pendant at Cole’s neck. He had loosened his clothing in the heat of the fire, revealing it for the first time in days.

“You still wear that?” Harri said, pointing at the stone. “I am surprised that Raven allows it, after what passed between you at the Watch.”

“He... promised that what took place would not happen again,” said Raven, some of the earlier tension returning to her voice. Cole wondered then if it would ever truly be forgiven, if never forgotten.

“I acted rashly,” he said, meeting her eye. “What I can do... it began to feel so commonplace when I was at the Crag, I forgot that to others it must seem very strange.”

“It felt evil.” Raven shivered, despite the warmth of the fire.

Harri leaned forward. “I am still not entirely clear on what happened. You mentioned it briefly the night of the moot, but I don’t fully understand what it is that you can do, Cole.”

“It’s difficult to explain,” he replied. “There is much I don’t understand myself. All I know is that I can use the stone to go to... another place. Or, my mind anyway.”

“Where is this place? A different country?”

“No, not anywhere you would find in this land or any other. It is a place with no sun, though I can see well enough. It is neither cold nor warm, and the air is still. All around me are shapes and I know that they are people.”

“How do you know this?”

Cole shrugged. “I just do, the knowledge is just in my head. When I touch the shapes, I can see the memories that belong to that person, their thoughts. During our lessons, Brother Merryl would put himself in a trance, and I would choose memories that he then experienced in the real world as dreams.” Cole glanced nervously towards Raven. “With Raven I could not do that, but I was able to enter her dream.”

“I would rather not speak of it,” Raven said with a grimace. “It felt like I had been invaded. Violated even. I was in a dream, I knew, but I also knew that you were not part of it. I do not blame you, Cole, not truly,” she added, to his relief. “I believe you were merely curious and meant no harm.”

“Well, I still don’t understand,” said Harri. He seemed to mull on it for a few moments, before continuing. “There is a concoction of herbs our healers have knowledge of, which can be used to induce a trance in our hunters. It’s a rite of passage for the young, giving them visions that help guide their path. Its effects can be... unsettling. It seems real, but everything is just in the mind. Is that what it’s like?”

Cole shook his head. “I don’t believe so, I think it is an actual place, just not one that anyone else can reach. Brother Merryl has...
had
a theory,” he felt a pang of sadness as he corrected himself, “that when we sleep, our minds all go to this other place, a different realm. And that, somehow, I was able to go there consciously, but also step outside whatever prevents each mind from being aware of the others. That I am physically able to see and walk among them.” He sighed. “But I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, as I’ve encountered those I knew were not asleep. Perhaps there is some truth to it, though.”

“I... see,” said Harri. “And you say that you can manipulate some of these shapes you see, but not others?”

Cole nodded. “But I am not sure why that is, what links them.”

“I think I do,” said Raven. “I have been thinking on it, since leaving the Watch. You told me you could do it with ease at the Crag, but that night had more difficulty. Tell me, have there been any others you could not interact with?”

“No, I don’t...” Cole began, before recalling a particular orb, red in colour and as hot as a smith’s furnace. “Wait. There was one, the day the Archon visited. It burned, so fiercely I was not able to touch it. There was an anger there, a rage. I could feel it.”

“And who did it belong to?”

“I believed that it was the Archon’s giant, the one I fought in the training square.”

“Think back,” Raven continued. “Did this giant wear a green jewel around his neck?”

The realisation hit Cole like a slap to the face. “No, he didn’t!” he cried. Then his brow furrowed as his mind raced. “So, the crystals must have an effect on those who wear them, make them easier to... connect with.”