The Brotherhood: Blood (22 page)

“Yes. I don’t know
why
I have to help him, but the spirit—image, whatever it was—said that I needed to be by his side. It said… it said that if I helped him, it would help me in my time of need.”

“I don’t know
what
that something is!” he cried, turning to face Ketrak.
“How
am I supposed to know how this will affect me? What happens if I don’t go?”

“Nothing. You—”

“What if my ‘time of need’ is something completely unrelated to me? What if it has something to do with you, or maybe even my wife? What do I do then?
How
will I know unless I go?”

“You don’t, son. Although if you ask me, you might’ve just been seeing things.”

“I wasn’t
just
seeing things!”

“How do you know?” Ketrak barked. “How
do
you know, Nova? I’ve put up with your delusions up until this point because I really do care about you, because I think you’re a good man and an even greater husband. Just because your father told you something in the past doesn’t mean—”

Nova snapped.

He sent his fist into his father-in-law’s jaw before he could think any further.

Horrified, angry beyond belief and unsure what to think in the aftermath of such a horrible crime, Nova remained steadfast, unsure whether to step forward or let the man be. “You
do not
talk to my father in that way,” he said, somehow able to keep his voice low and calm. “My father was the best man I ever knew.”

“You don’t know what you’re getting into, boy. You’d leave your wife, just like that, all because something tells you to?”

“It didn’t say I had to!” Nova roared, unable to contain his shakes.

The sound of his own voice forced him in but a short time to realize just how angry he was starting to become. Taking a deep breath, Nova closed his eyes, chastised himself for such behavior, then thought back on what his father had once said as a child—when, during an emotional fit, he’d said that he expressed a temper far beyond himself and should learn to control it, less it destroy himself and those around him.

“I’m sorry,” Nova sighed, stepping forward. “I’ve had problems with my temper since I was a boy, but that’s no excuse to hit you.”

Nova stayed silent. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms over his chest. “I need to talk to Katarina,” he said, “before I leave in the morning.”

He held Katarina for most of the night or paced the room and watched her sleep. Uneasy, afraid, and all the more unsure of the very decision that was racketing his mind, he tried his best to figure out just how he would tell his wife about the figure and how it told him he needed to help someone should he want to be helped, but to no avail. Always, it seemed, he would stop in midstride, or mid-thought, then slowly the pendulum would fall back into place, where it would only fall halfway before permanently resetting itself before it could actually do any real swinging.

I don’t know how to I’m going to do this,
he thought, heart halfway open and the blood spilling out through his arms.

Eyes bleary, bloodshot, aching, Nova looked out at the slowly-rising sun and tried to discern just how much time had passed between his initial confrontation with his father-in-law and the moment in which he’d tried to return to bed. Bleeding across the horizon, lighting the world with its warring rays over the mountains of a group of creatures he knew naught about, he tried to imagine just how and why the sun did what it truly did. Why, of all reasons, would such an entity rise, just to light their land? One would say that it was forced to by the laws of nature, as even though a great distance away the sun operated on the same fundamental level, but were it given a choice of its own, would it really rise every day, or once every other day?

He wished, at that moment, that it would just stay down—that the world, as dark as it was, would remain perpetually-black. Maybe then he would never have a reason to leave; and maybe, just maybe, Katarina would never wake and ask him why his eyes had lines running through them.

I’ve got to tell her,
he thought.
She needs to know what’s going on.

If anything, it wouldn’t be too hard to find the boy. He could judge, just by the visions alone, that he had to be somewhere high—in a location where structures were built well-above the ground and where towers were more than prevalent. Or, he questioned, he would just be leading himself into a wild adventure that had no answer. Maybe the boy didn’t exist at all, nor his plight or the very thing that Nova had seen.

Maybe… maybe…

Movement stirred him from thought.

Pushing herself forward, Katarina rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. She didn’t take notice of him until he turned his head on the base of his neck and looked her directly in the eyes. “Nova?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

With a deep breath and an even more unsure fault of consciousness, Nova walked to the bed and settled down beside her. He took her hand in his, offered a slight smile, then began to recount the events of last night. He explained how, after he’d woken from what he considered to be a dream, he’d seen the form of light and just how it had spoken to him. He explained of the young man’s plight, of the danger there was were he not to find and help him, and how that, were he to find this young boy named Odin, their future would likely be secured for the both of them.

“You don’t
know
how long you’ll be gone!” she cried, slapping his cheek as hard as her frail form allowed. “You don’t
know!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, not bothering to reach up and touch his face. “I don’t want to put you or your father in any danger.”

“Danger? Nova, why would you—”

“The voice said that it would be there in my time of need if I went and helped the boy, Katarina. I don’t know when my time of need will be, because it never mentioned if my ‘time of need’ would be something I would go through or something that would happen to you or your father.”

“But how—”

“Look,” he said. He took his face in her hands and stroked the tears away from her laugh-lines. “I don’t know why I have to help this young man, but for whatever reason it is, I need to go. He’s locked in a tower, Katarina. He’s all alone in the world.”

Katarina trailed off. The tears that streamed down her face was enough to tear holes in Nova’s heart—to render his soul unconquerable and therefor diminish the fact that he was, like anyone else in this world, a man, one who loved his wife so much that it pained him so to leave her stranded like this.

He needs help,
he thought, kissing Katarina’s tears,
and only I can offer it.

Cold wind battered him. Harsh feelings destroyed him.

Dressed in his thick winter coat and his long, insulated pants, Nova prepared one of Ketrak’s horses in preparation for his journey and tried his hardest not to falter in the face of such horrors. The scythe, tied near the end of the saddlebag, could be easily accessed should the need arise, while his clothes and rations lay in the bags at the side, threatening to overflow just by bearing one’s eyes down upon them. The old horse, stubborn in its own right, whinnied under the waning winter chill, just as it allowed itself to shake its head and cast its mane to the side.

Looking up, Nova trained his eyes on the window that opened up to their room and saw Katarina sitting in the windowsill. He didn’t look at her for long for fear that, should he intrude on her privacy, she might leave the windowsill and miss his departure entirely.

I’ll be back eventually. It’s not like I’m leaving her for good.

Before he could return his attention to the horse, Ketrak walked the brief distance of the field and to the stables. Almost immediately, the right side of the man’s face came into view, revealing a darkened jaw.

“Before you go,” Ketrak said, sliding his hand into his pocket. “I want you to have this.”

The mayor pushed a black sack into Nova’s hand. When Nova lifted it to examine it closer, the contents inside clinked together. “Is this—”

“Money?” Ketrak nodded. “I don’t want my son-in-law running around without any coin.”

“I can’t take this, sir.”

“
Take it,
Nova. You’ll need money to bribe someone if you decide to sleep in their barn, and you know that a bed at an inn isn’t cheap.”

“I know.” He looked down at the sack of gold, then to the man before sliding it into his pocket. “Thank you,” he said, reaching out to shake Ketrak’s hand. “You don’t know how much it means to me.”

As though grasping part of her and pulling her with him, he captured her form in the palm of his hand, then closed it into a fist and brought it to his chest.

In his heart, an ache began.

He tried to console himself with thoughts of home as he pushed his horse into a trot and to the distant fence—where, near its borders, the house hands stood, shivering in full winter attire and waiting for him to continue forward.

Sometimes, things came crashing down, while at others things apart. Often than not, however, something broke into the cycle of life and disrupted it. Life, death, salvation, imprisonment, destiny, fate, fortitude, honor, security, a man’s life and a woman’s sadness—no matter the cause, no matter the significance, there was always something to break the chain and begin it anew.

Now, as Nova led his horse down a road to a place he did not know, he took one last look back at his home, closed his eyes, then began to whistle under his breath, if only to reassure himself that everything would be just fine.

Chapter 3

“Good. Very good. Now, hold it there for a little while longer.”

Watch it burn,
the man could have said.
Watch it burn.

Suspended in midair by little more than absolute concentration and pure thought, a white ball of flame hovered between a young man and his teacher who sat idly by watching the feat before him with kind eyes and an even more rational expression. Smiling, ecstatic, and quite contrary to the emotions that his student was currently placating, the teacher gestured for the boy to raise the flame first into the air, then to his left and right before asking for it to be trailed into a figure-eight. This thing—this
grand infinity symbol—
seemed even to burn within the air after the ball of flame fell back into place and offered what many could have considered an affinity of knowledge and strength that many in the common world did not possess, for it was not taught within the normal confines outside the royal walls. It was for this reason that when the teacher told the young man to release the flame that the boy curled his hand into a fist.