Thornhold - Elaine Cunningham [8]
But the years had changed and filtered his memories, just as the forest had closed in around his childhood home. There was no mortal way that Dag Zoreth could retrieve what was lost. Fortunately, the gods were less encumbered by issues of time and mortality, and they were occasionally willing to share their insight, one glimpse at a time, with their mortal followers.
Though he dreaded the task before him, the young priest’s hands were steady as he pulled the medallion bearing the holy symbol of Cyric from beneath his purple and black tabard. Dag Zoreth wore the colors of his god at all times, even though he knew better than to go abroad flaunting the priestly vestments and symbols of Cyric. It was Dag Zoreth’s opinion, based on his own experience and his own ambitions, that people who claimed no reason to fear and hate Cyric’s priesthood, simply hadn’t lived long enough to find one.
The young priest closed his eyes and clenched his fist around the medallion. His lips moved as he murmured a prayer for divine guidance.
His answer came suddenly, with a cruel force that slammed Dag Zoreth onto his knees, and into the past. “The hymn,” he muttered though a rictus grin of pain. “Cyric must have heard the hymn.” Then the thought was gone, swept away by more than twenty fleeing years.
Dag Zoreth was a child again, kneeling not in a new-growth forest, but in the darkest corner of a smoke-filled cottage. His small, skinny arms clutched a butter churn, and his black eyes were wide with terror as the bar on the door splintered and gave way. Three men strode in, their eyes burning with something that both repelled and fascinated the shrinking child.
One of them backhanded Dag’s mother, who had leaped forward to defend her children with the only weapon that came to hand-a long-handled iron skillet. The ridiculous weapon fell from her hand and clattered to the hearth. Again the man struck out, and his mother’s head snapped back. She went down hard, striking the hearthstone with an audible crack. Blood bloomed like an obscene crimson flower against her too-pale face. But somehow she found the strength to haul herself up, to dart past the man who strode purposefully toward the wide cradle at the far side of the room. There lay Dag’s twin sisters, shrieking with fear and rage and flailing the smoky air with their tiny pink fists. His mother threw herself across the cradle, scooping both little girls into her arms and shielding them with her own body as she cried out in prayer to Tyr.
The man drew a sword and swung it up high. Mercifully, the churn obscured Dag’s view and he never actually saw the blow fall, but he knew what the sudden silence meant. In the rough, angry exchange that followed the sword’s fall, Dag read his own fate.
He shrank back, flattening himself into the indentation his impish little sister had carved into the thick wattle-and-daub wall. It was a hiding place for her “treasures”-smooth or shiny rocks, a bluebird feather, and whatever other small wonders she discovered around the village. Dag fervently wished that his sister had dug deeper, turning her trove into an escape doot. He held his breath and willed himself to disappear into the crevice, the smoke, and the shadows.
The men searched the cottage, tossing over the chests and beds in their haste to find the boy before they were overcome by smoke from the smoldering thatch roof. They did not move the churn, probably because there was no apparent place behind it for a child to hide. Finally they gave up the search, concluding that Dag had bolted as his sister had done.
She had left the cottage well before the fire had started. Ever curious, she had gone to investigate the noise caused by the approaching raiders, evading their mother’s frantically grasping hands and wriggling through the one small window left unshuttered. Her old night tunic had caught and torn on the shutter hook. Instinctively she’d clapped her hand to the little crimson birthmark on