Thornhold - Elaine Cunningham [7]
He felt the old despair now, a shadow in the memory of his father’s deep, ringing voice intoning, ‘When you hear the Dessarin sing just so, it is time to turn off the road.”
Dag Zoreth pulled his horse’s reins toward the south, tugging so sharply that the beast whinnied in pain and protest. But the horse followed his command, just as the heavily armed men behind him waited obediently on the eastbound road to Tribor.
He rode for several minutes before he got his bearings. The old path was still there, marked not by the passage of feet and horses, but by the slender trees that grew in the once-open space. It was remarkable, Dag Zoreth mused, how fast a tree could grow once it was out from beneath the heavy shadow of the older forest.
A song slipped into his mind, unbidden and unwelcome. It was a marching song, an old hymn of praise to Tyr, the god of justice. His father had often sung it to mark the passage to the village. The path and the song were of like length, his father used to say. Dag Zoreth knew that before he finished humming the final chorus, the forest would give way to a clearing, and the village would be spread out before him.
A small, cynical smile tightened his lips at the thought of actually giving voice to the song. He doubted that his own god, Cyric the Mad, had much of an ear for music.
But habit proved to be stronger than caution. As he rode, Dag recalled the verse and marked out the measure in the silence of his mind. When the remembered song was over, Dag Zoreth did indeed find himself in the clearing he sought. Along the edges young trees had made great strides toward reclaiming the forest.
Dag Zoreth slid down from his horse. He was unaccustomed to riding, and the trip had introduced him to a legion of unfamiliar muscles. Though the journey from his home in Darkhold had been long and hard, his body had adamantly refused to take on strength and muscle. There was nothing wrong with his will, however, and he thrust aside the throbbing pain as a lesser man might flick aside a fly. He left his horse to graze and began to circle the clearing.
The site was familiar and strange all at once. The buildings were gone, of course, burned to the ground in that terrible raid more than twenty years ago. Here and there he caught a glimpse of charred wood or scattered foundation stone under a tangle of spring-flowering blackberry brambles, but the village of his birth was irrevocably gone. And lost with the village was the heritage Dag Zoreth had come to reclaim.
Frustrated now, he looked around for something, anything, that would provide a market The years had changed him even more than they had altered the forest, and he no longer saw things with the eyes of a boy who had yet to weather his seventh winter. Then, his whole world had been comprised of this tiny village in the foothills south of Jundar’s Hill. His world was wider now and vastly different from anything he could have imagined during his years in this sheltered enclave different from everything, of course, but the raid that had ended his childhood.
Dag Zoreth took another long breath, massaging his temples with both hands as he dredged his memory. A sudden, sharp image came to him: a red leaf framed with jagged points, drifting lazily down, and then disappearing against the brighter crimson of his brother’s shattered chest.
He spun on his heel, quickly, as one might retreat from some chance-glimpsed horror. Tilting back his head, he scanned the treetops. There had been an oak tree over the place where his brother died. There were oaks in plenty, but none of them looked familiar. Perhaps he should have come in autumn, when the leaves turned color. He smiled slightly at the foolish thought and shook it aside