Oathbreaker: A Dark Fantasy Web Serial

The clouds had cleared by the time we finished burying the troll, and red bled across the sky. A thin gray silt had been left across scores of miles by the ashfall earlier in the day, giving the irkwood a dour, surreal quality. A gray winter in the last days of spring.

Lisette stood from the last of the markers we'd made from river stone and shattered pieces of the old bridge, murmuring a preosta — a song of prayer. She had a soft, halting voice I felt suited the scene better than anything more dramatic or beautiful.

Nothing beautiful about that poor creature's death.

When done, the young cleric moved to Olliard and pressed her auremark against his chest, continuing her prayers, her eyes narrowed in concentration. I could feel warmth emanating from her as she worked her aura, cleansing him of both disease and malignant od that might have clung to him from handling the troll's carcass.

The physiker breathed a sigh of relief at the touch of her magic and smiled, murmuring thanks. Even those without awakened aura can still feel it if it's tangible enough.

When the girl moved to me to do the same, I held up a hand to stop her. "No need," I said. "I'm covered."

The doctor's apprentice frowned, studying me. When I didn't elaborate, she huffed in frustration. "You're the one who told me I should do this," she remarked pointedly.

I didn't want to tell her I was largely immune to disease and had my own protections against curses, and I especially didn't want the cleric to make contact with my own essence. She'd probably sense something off with it, and that wasn't a conversation I felt interested in having.

She used her power to stitch up your wounds, I reminded myself. If she was going to notice anything, she'd have done so already.

Maybe so, but it was still a risk I wasn't interested in taking. I'd get myself cleansed later if I needed to. There were other ways besides the services of a priest.

"We need to get moving," I said. I nodded toward the bridge. "Now we've buried the poor bastard who built that, it should be safe enough to cross it. Should be, mind. Your chimera warded?"

Olliard nodded. "Of course. I had her protections renewed only a few weeks ago by a warder in Isengotta."

With that, there wasn't much more to say. Olliard took another ten minutes to fuss over his beast, and I watched him add a few more small baubles to the array of charms tied either to the hog-headed creature's harness or woven into her coarse fur. Surreptitiously, I closed my eyes and inspected the wards with my own senses. They weren't the best work, but they were professionally done. They'd serve.

Lisette watched me the entire time Olliard tended to Brume. I grew annoyed with the attention and glared at her. "What?"

Burying the troll had been foul work, and between that and my taste of the creature's dying trauma I wasn't in the best of moods. My ordinary mood didn't tend toward gregarious most times.

"You're an adept," she said. "You've been trained to wield your soul."

I lifted one shoulder in a shrug. "Common enough."

Lisette shook her head slowly, more in thought than denial. "Yours isn't some layman's talent. You knew about curses and burial rites, and a moment ago… you were feeling Brume's wards. I sensed you doing it."

I shifted, uncomfortable. Damn clerics, I thought. "Surprised?"

"Yes," the novice said honestly. "You don't look the type. Sorcerer or warlock?"

I carefully set my face into a mask and averted my eyes, not wanting to give anything away. True enough, I didn't much look like your typical magicker.

I am tall, more than two meters, and broadly built, much of my weight a swordsman's hard earned muscle. I keep my copper hair long to help hide the glint of gold in my eyes, as well as my scars, and life on the move doesn't lend to regular grooming. My skin is calloused and abused by a life of violence. I've got a long face with a heavy chin, deep set eyes, and a nose many times broken.

I'd once been told I look something like a brooding lion. I'd hated that comparison. I hate lions.

I don't often get a look at myself, but I knew well enough what I must look like to these gentle healers. A brute. A killer. Hard-edged.

There were plenty of words for it, but it all boiled down to the same thing — I didn't much look like the type to know my way around an arcane conundrum. Or the type who'd even know words like conundrum.

Lisette's inquiry was a dangerous question. Sorcerers are common enough, and anyone with even a passing talent at magic could be described as such, usually if they're untrained or gained their power from some natural source. Warlocks are another matter entire. Not all are evil or draw their power from diabolical sources — the only prerequisite is to have gained power through some sort of ritualized pact or bargain — but the word still carried a certain stigma.

Especially when talking to someone trained among the clergy.

I decided for a half truth. "I knew a magician back before the war. A proper wizard. He taught me some tricks."

Lisette's frown deepened. "A magus taught you Sidhe burial rites?"

I folded my arms. "The Magi are said to be all knowing."

I could tell the girl wasn't convinced, but Olliard, bless him, chose that moment to approach and clap his hands together, startling Lisette out of her suspicion. "I think we should be set! I put a few of the charms I bought last time I had the chance on the cart, too. I've heard that wild magic can stick to objects as well as people."

I nodded. "Good idea. Cart's made of wood, and dead matter collects od like you wouldn't believe."

Olliard blinked in interest, his owlish eyes widening behind his foggy lenses. "Is that so? I'd never heard of this."

"It's true," Lisette said, a note of scholarly interest trickling into her voice. She noticed her master's interested gaze and her cheeks turned slightly pink. She adjusted a lock of yellow hair and elaborated. "It's why you find so many ghosts and fey spirits in dead trees and the like."

"Fascinating." Olliard's eyes glittered, and Lisette gave the old man a shy smile.

"Much as I love class time," I drawled, "we don't have much light left. Time to be on. I'd like to get as far from this bridge as we can before we camp."

Lisette's mood darkened again, and she pointedly turned her back to me.

We all piled onto the cart. With the sun quickly sinking beneath the distant horizon beyond the forest, we crossed the ancient, now masterless bridge.

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Night fell, drowning the forest in a deep, impenetrable darkness.

We made camp. Resting in an irkwood is dangerous and foolish, but we had no other recourse and at the very least the wards and Lisette's unique skillset made it about as safe as it could be.

Olliard lit a lantern and attached it to a long pole, which he hung over the cart to light the forest after we brought it into a small clearing off the path. The doctor lit two more lanterns and attached them to the sides of the cart, making the vehicle a little island of somber orange light within a sea of shadowy wilderness. I made the campfire.

"No insects singing," Lisette noted. Her eyes blinked sleepily and she suppressed a yawn as she wrapped herself in a blanket against the night's chill. "No owls. It's just… silent."

"Hm." Olliard patted his ugly chimera, cleaning her fur with a bristly brush as his eyes wandered the depthless black beyond the light. "Should be out of this before noon tomorrow, unless the path has been altered. Be a terrible time for elf mischief."

I closed my eyes, though I was careful not to let exhaustion whisk me away into dreams. I didn't sense any tampering with the road or the woods here. There were no illusions, no phantasms, no subtle enchantments that might cause us to lose days of time or walk off a cliff.

Even still, I didn't dare let myself sleep just yet.

I wanted to, very badly. Despite my bravado earlier, my injuries were not healed and burying the dead troll had been exhausting, painful work. Every bump and jostle of the cart after had made me feel like my hipbone was about to burst out of my skin, and my ribs ached with a dull, constant agony.

Part of me wanted to take my leave of the healers and vanish into the night, foolish as the thought was. Lisette was already suspicious of me, and there might be every chance we'd run into a patrol from Vinhithe. We weren't so far from the city still, and I would be hunted.

Would they send messengers into this other domain, this Caelfall? I hadn't heard of it before, but Urn has many small realms and little dominions tucked away in its mountains and river valleys. Would the earl's men hunt me there?

I had more immediate concerns than knights and bounty hunters, though. My eyes wandered into the dark.

Something looked back. I couldn't see it, but I felt it. I knew it well.

Knew them well.

More than my desire to get far away from the city, however, was another vexing issue. Olliard of Kell and his apprentice had saved my life. I didn't want to repay that favor by dragging them into my affairs. But Olliard's wards also helped protect me in my vulnerable state, and his ministrations helped me heal faster.

Further, parting company might not keep them safe from the dark things in these woods, both what I'd brought with me and what I knew would already dwell here.

Those glorysworn had called me blackguard. Perhaps they were right. What claim did I have to honor anymore?

Yet…

I owed them. And I wasn't in any condition to wander off alone, in any case. So instead I took out my axe, ignoring the discomforted looks the healers cast my way. When I freed the arm from its cloth bundle, Brume stirred and let out an uneasy grumble.

I took out my dagger — a long, curved piece with pale inlays near the mesh-wrapped hilt — and began to run it along the gnarled branch that formed the axe's handle. I sliced off small twigs and sharp burs, then began to shorten it down. It had grown in the days I'd been injured and unable to tend it.

"That is a very strange thing," Olliard said, swallowing. "I admit, I've never seen anything quite like it."

"It's elf make," Lisette said. She worked at a length of cloth, one of the doctor's shirts, and busied herself resewing some of its tears.

Olliard leaned forward with interest. "Ah! Is that why the handle seems… alive?"

"It is alive," I muttered, slicing a length off the branch.

"And the metal?" Olliard asked, rubbing at the wiry growth on his chin.

"Hithlenic Bronze," I said. "Alloyed with ordinary steel."

I lifted the axe, letting the light from the campfire and the lanterns glint along the crescent-moon shape of the blade. It had a dramatic hook, leaving a circular hollow between the sharp point of the lower blade and the grip. The light seemed to set the spiraling inlays to burning. Those had gold worked into them.

"It's profane," Lisette muttered, glaring at the weapon sidelong. "Something made to kill people shouldn't look so beautiful."

I couldn't disagree. We sat in silence for along while, listening to the fire and the silence of the woods.

"You should sleep," Lisette said to me after some time. She didn't meet my eyes. The apprentice healer sat with her back to one of the cart wheels, hugging her knees to her chest. She looked very tired, and very young. Younger than I'd first thought.

She was a tall girl, gangly, with a narrow face splattered in freckles and eyes just a bit too large for it. With her straw-colored hair, she looked more like some scrawny farmer's daughter than a neophyte of the Aureate Church.

My mind flashed back to the boy in the Vinhithe cathedral. He'd been even younger.

"Dangerous to sleep in an irkwood," I noted mildly. "Dangerous to dream in one."

Idly, I rubbed at the ring on my right hand with my thumb. My axe tended to, I'd returned it to its wrappings.

"Master Olliard's wards are good," Lisette assured me. "And I've blessed them myself. You should be safe."

I didn't reply, and the girl shrugged the conversation off, indifferent. Her attention wandered. My gaze fell down to my ring. The black stone swam with eddies of red, and I grimaced at the sight.

"That's a beautiful ring," Lisette said.

She didn't seem upset at it as she had with the axe. I glanced at her, then frowned and held it up, inspecting it. The ivory band was a very pale yellow, nearly white, and tiny claws evoking nothing so much as a splayed ribcage held the black stone. I'd always thought it had a rather fell look to it.

"It is?" I asked skeptically.

The apprentice nodded, tucking her chin on her knees. "It's the detail. Whoever made it had an exquisite hand. Who gave it to you?"

None of your business. I bit down on the thought before it became words. The girl hadn't done anything to deserve my anger, or create it.

"An ally," I said. "One who knows curses."

Lisette frowned. "Curses?"

Olliard spoke up from where he tended his chimera. "That's enough, Lisette. Leave the man in peace."

The apprentice blushed and cast an apologetic look at her master. The three of us fell into silence, and listened for a time to the crackling fire.

Perhaps ill at ease with the eerie silence of the woods, Olliard changed the subject. "Once you're healed, Alken, what's next for you? Not that I'd mind having a strong arm keeping me and the girl safe, but I imagine you have your own roads to walk."

His voice held a questioning note. I sensed an offer there, and almost laughed at it.

I closed my eyes, though I hadn't decided to accept sleep. "Suppose I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. How about you? What's your business in this village we're heading to?"

"I'm a traveling physician!" Olliard explained brightly. "I wander here and there, offering my services where they are needed. I have a few places I visit every once in a while. Caelfall is one such. I haven't been there since before the war, given, but I've known the people there, oh…"

He rubbed at his wiry gray beard. "Well. A long time. The preoster there is a good man."

More priests, I thought sourly. Aloud I said, "And if they did have something to do with what happened to the troll?"

Olliard fell quite a while. When he finally spoke, his words were nearly a whisper. "Sometimes, good people do terrible things to protect the ones they love. Even when the way in which they do so is misguided."

I shifted against the packs I'd stacked to lean on. No matter how I sat or lay down, no position wasn't a torture on my injuries. "You think the troll went fell? It happens, sometimes."

Olliard shrugged and let out a tired sigh. "I don't know. I try not to act without facts. Misunderstandings sometimes create the saddest of tragedies."

I arched an eyebrow. "That why you didn't just leave me to die, like your apprentice wanted?"

Olliard glanced at me over one shoulder, and there was slight reprimand in that look. "Lisette did not advocate to leave you to die. She is a kind hearted girl, for all the horror she's seen. She may growl, but she could no more leave another soul to suffer than the moons could fail to rise."

By the cart, the girl in question snored softly. She'd fallen asleep only a few minutes before.

"And what if she was right?" I asked, keeping my tone casual. "What if I am dangerous, and I go on to hurt someone after you've helped me?"

Olliard turned his eyes back to the fire and didn't reply for a while. Finally he said, "Then it would be my responsibility to stop you, and make amends for my sin."

"And you'd do it?" I asked. "Try to stop me?"

I tried not to put any special emphasis on the word try. I was curious, not trying to intimidate the man.

"I would stop you," Olliard said, very quiet. He spoke calmly, without bravado or conceit. I noted the way the firelight reflected on his glasses, obscuring the eyes behind them.

I waited, but the doctor didn't elaborate. Finally, in a lighter tone, he said, "Time to get some rest. Don't want you catching a fever now. Sleep. Doctor's orders." He turned to me and flashed a grin. "Trust me, these wards are professionally done. No mischief will find you in your dreams."

I rubbed at my ring idly as a faint smile touched the corner of my lip. "That so?"

"Well." Olliard rubbed his hands together. "If any of us are possessed or stark raving mad come morning, we will simply have to trust whoever managed to keep sane will put us out of our misery. I imagine it will be Lisette. She's far too sensible to succumb to such things."

I didn't answer, my eyes wandering back to the fire. I did need sleep. I could go longer than most without it, but one needs to dream to replenish their body and their spirit.

Only…

I feared my dreams.