Well of Sorrows (32 page)
Authors: Benjamin Tate
When one of the wagon wheels cracked, the driver plowing into a stone he couldn’t see in the darkness, Colin’s father reluctantly called a halt, and the wagons broke and made camp for the night. Tensions were high, men and women snapping at each other as food was prepared, as Paul and the others worked late into the night repairing the wagon wheel, cursing everything and everyone in sight. Colin and Karen settled down near one of the wagons on the grass, both ordered to try to sleep by Colin’s mother as she bustled from one end of the camp to the other. They stared up into the black, featureless sky, listening to activity on all sides—the cursing, the pounding of tools, the sharp cry of a child hushed harshly by a woman’s voice—until Colin heard Karen shift in the darkness, rolling onto her side, elbow propped on the ground.
“Are you scared?” she whispered.
Colin almost lied to her, the words instinctive. But then he thought of the gallows, of the horror of watching the wagon crash down the Bluff, of the terror of hearing the dwarren attacking, of fumbling with the ties on the wagons and smelling the smoke as the people inside cried out and scrabbled at the hides that trapped them.
“Yes,” he murmured and was shocked to hear exactly how scared he was in the roughness of his voice. His could feel his heart beating, faster than usual, and he couldn’t seem to make it slow down.
He jumped when he felt Karen’s hand come to rest on his chest, as if she could hear his heart as well. But then he realized she’d laid her hand over the pendant she’d given him, the vow.
His heart faltered.
“Colin,” she started to say, and Colin heard the question in her voice.
Before she continued, he said, without hesitation, “Yes.” He didn’t know when they’d have time to make the vow, but he knew he wanted it. They’d need Domonic to bind their blood together in the vial of the vow, to marry them in Diermani’s eyes. As a priest, he was the only one in the wagon train who could do it, the only one who had the power.
Karen was silent a long moment. He thought she was crying, but he wasn’t certain until she laid her head down on his chest and he felt the tears seeping through his shirt. He raised a hand tentatively to her head, and as he stroked her hair she nestled in closer. He could feel her trembling, could feel her silent sobs.
Eventually, he felt her grow still, heard her breathing slow. He began to drift off himself, but his mother’s and father’s voices drew him back.
“We’ll never be able to outrun them, Tom!” His mother’s voice was bitter, hard, but practical. “Not if they truly want to catch us. We’re being slowed down by the wagons, by those on foot. The dwarren have gaezels. And if what you say is true, they don’t have to worry about lugging around all of their supplies.”
“What do you expect me to do, Ana? We can’t just stop and hope to hold them off. Look at how many died when it was just a scouting party attacking us! Eleven men! Eleven! And this certainly isn’t a scouting party following us now.”
“What do the Alvritshai say? They seem rather calm about all of this.”
Colin’s father snorted. “They tried to warn us away, remember? They told us to head back west as soon as they found us. But no, we were too stubborn to listen to them.”
“Walter is.”
Colin tensed at the accusatory note in his mother’s voice, felt the same taint of hatred in his own chest. Karen stirred in her sleep as if troubled, then settled.
Colin’s father was silent a moment. Then: “It wasn’t Walter’s fault. And it wasn’t the Alvritshai’s fault either. None of us wanted to go back. We got ourselves into this mess because none of us has anything left to go back to in Portstown.”
Colin heard his mother sigh.
“What do they say now? Do they know what’s going on? Are the dwarren coming after us, as they did the previous wagon train? Gathering over a thousand men seems a little extreme to take out those of us that are left.” Bitterness had entered her voice again, and it made Colin shiver. He didn’t think they knew anyone could hear them. Their voices were soft, but unguarded. And he hadn’t moved since they’d arrived, hadn’t even opened his eyes.
Colin’s father didn’t say anything for long enough that Colin thought his parents had drifted asleep. But then: “If I understand Aeren, there’s more than one group of dwarren. This group isn’t really after us. Apparently, the groups are at war, and we’ve accidentally stumbled into the middle of an upcoming battle. We’re trapped between three forces—the dwarren we saw to the west, another group coming up from the south, from across the underground river, and a third coming down from the northeast. From what Aeren says, the dwarren have been fighting each other—and the Alvritshai—for years.”
“There are more Alvritshai out there?”
“Apparently Aeren is leading a small scouting party of his own, some kind of trial. He’s sent the others back to warn the rest of the main group to the north.”
“Why didn’t he go himself? Why didn’t he just abandon us?”
“Eraeth’s been trying to convince him to do just that, but I think he feels responsible for us. He led us to the previous wagon train, right into the middle of the upcoming battle. He intended for us to see the burned out wagons and turn back west, but he didn’t know the dwarren were gathering, didn’t expect to run into their scouting party. He’s made some type of vow to get us out if he can.”
Before Colin’s mother could respond, a low grumbling roll of thunder came from the northeast. The grass rustled as both his parents shifted position, and then his father swore.
“The storm’s going to pass right over us,” he said. “It’s going to slow us down even more.”
“But if the dwarren are fighting their own people, or they’re gathering to fight the Alvritshai, they probably don’t care about us,” Colin’s mother said. “We should be able to escape them.”
“Not if we can’t get out of their way. And right now, according to Aeren, we’re caught neatly in the middle of them all. Our only chance is to head east, as fast as possible.”
As if in answer, lightning flared, bright enough and close enough that Colin could see it through his eyelids. Thunder followed, but not closely. The storm was still distant.
“We’ll have to move as soon as the wagon wheel is repaired,” Colin’s father said when the thunder had growled down into silence. “If we hope to have any chance of escaping, we’ll have to travel all night, storm or not.”
Colin heard his mother shift, knew she had stood by the sound of her voice. “I’ll spread the word. You go check on the repairs.”
He must have dozed after they moved off, because the next thing he knew, his mother was shaking him and Karen awake, and the storm was almost on top of them.
“Get as many of the kids into the wagon as possible and then head out!” she shouted over the wind. “Stay close to the wagon!” In a flash of lightning, he saw his mother’s face, the lines of age he’d never seen there before stark, the gray in her hair he’d never noticed glowing silver as the wind blew it into her eyes and she pulled it aside in annoyance. The resultant crack of thunder shuddered in Colin’s skin as he scrambled to his feet, Karen beside him. And then darkness descended, so complete he couldn’t see his mother anymore, could barely see Karen’s face though she was standing right beside him, her hand closed about his upper arm.
“What about the storm?” Karen yelled. “Shouldn’t we wait it out?”
“There’s no time! We’ll have to weather through it!” Ana replied. Her voice came out of the night, torn by the wind, but they both knew she’d moved on to the next wagon.
Without a word, they stumbled to the back of the wagon, where two others were throwing supplies and children into the back, the older kids already inside shoving the supplies out of the way as fast as possible, the middle kids trying to quiet the younger ones, all of their faces suffused with fear in each flare of light from the storm. Lightning sizzled and crackled around them on all sides, thunder shuddered through the ground at their feet, and the wind tore at the flaps of the wagons, at the hides, at loose clothing and hair. Colin began heaving boxes and crates and pots into the wagon, while Karen helped with the kids. The only illumination besides the lightning was a single lantern sheltered inside the wagon, held by a boy who couldn’t have been more than eight. At every crack of thunder, every flare of unnatural light, the lantern’s flame seemed to dim, almost guttering out twice. The boy held the lantern as far from his body as he could.
And then the last of the wagon was packed, and suddenly a guardsman was there, on horseback. Seeing everything was ready, he bellowed to the driver, “Go! Move out!” and then he turned to peer out into the storm, into the jagged purplish lightning as it pummeled the plains. Colin saw three other wagons, saw the fourth already headed out, but they were all instantly lost as soon as the lightning ended.
“How are we going to stay together?” he shouted toward the guardsman.
The man gave him a sidelong look as the wagon began to move. “We’re not even going to try. We’ll head east, or as close to east as possible in this storm, and regroup once it’s passed.” He turned his attention to everyone, raised his voice to a shout. “Stay close to the wagon! If you lose it in the darkness, you may never find any of us again!” Then he spun his horse and trotted toward the front of the wagon.
“Colin,” Karen said, her voice sharp with warning. She grabbed his arm and pulled him closer to the wagon, already beginning to fade out of sight. The rest of the women and men in their group edged closer to the wagon as well, some of them linking arms and hands, a few keeping hold of the back of the wagon itself.
They’d only moved a short distance when, with a warning splatter of light mist in their faces, it began to rain.
“Oh, great,” Karen said, before she hunched her shoulders and bowed her head.
Colin was instantly drenched in the downpour, spluttering as the frigid water sluiced down his back. Holding Karen a little tighter, he plowed forward, keeping the wagon close to his left side.
They struggled through the storm, the lightning making the surrounding landscape harsh and ethereal, the grasses thrashing in the wind and rain, swirling like the ocean. During the first hour, Colin saw two of the wagons close by, but after that the worst of the lightning moved farther west, and any sign of the other groups in the wagon train vanished into the darkness. They were enfolded by torrential rain, by darkness, by the receding sound of thunder and the occasional crack of a strike nearby. Once he thought he saw the vibrant orange glow of a lantern’s light out in the grass, but the image was fleeting, lost in the sheets of rain before he could turn and focus on it. And once he thought he heard shouting, close, but the wind tore the sounds away.
He lost track of time, his feet stumbling over each other, over stones and ridges of land he couldn’t see, but he kept close to the wagon, reached out and brushed its side to make certain it was still there, even though he could hear the occasional creak of the wheels as they moved. At one point, the guardsman appeared out of nowhere, his horse snorting and stamping, and he shouted, “Have you seen Peg? Either of you?” When both Colin and Karen shouted no, he swore and rode past them. Colin heard him asking the rest of the group, catching only a word here and there, the rest torn away by the wind. He traded a grim look with Karen, and they trudged on. If Peg was lost, there was no hope of finding her until after the storm ended.
And they couldn’t stop. Not with the dwarren behind them. When the storm finally broke, the rain fading to a drizzle, then halting entirely, it was already midmorning, the light a pale, thin gray as clouds scudded by overhead. Colin glanced up into that sky, clothes soaked with chill water, hair plastered to his face, then turned toward Karen, shivering slightly at his side as she moved forward, but still holding tight to his arm. Her face was blank, her head bent, eyes on the grass that had been beaten flat by the rain.
He shook her gently. She turned exhausted eyes on him, her face white.
“It’s over,” he said.
The words took a moment to sink in, and then her steady footsteps faltered and she halted. She looked up into the sky, where patches of blue sky had begun to peek through as the clouds began to tatter.
She smiled. It was a weary smile, haggard and torn from lack of sleep, but it was still beautiful.
The guardsman galloped up from where the wagon had drawn to a halt at the top of a knoll. “Look for the other wagons. We need to regroup as quickly as possible. And keep an eye out for Peg. She got separated from the wagon during the storm.”
Colin nodded as the guardsman moved on, then turned to scan the horizon. To the east, the plains sloped down from the ridge they stood on, the land rumpled, before hitting a flat area edged with darkness. In the vague light, it took Colin a moment to realize that the dark stain on the plains wasn’t a shadow but a forest of trees, what looked like pines, the dark green, needled branches blowing in the wind. The forest stretched into the distance, both to the east and curving around to the south where the plains broke into low hills.
Movement caught his attention, and he tore his gaze away from the trees. “I see one of the wagons,” he shouted.
“Where?” the Armory guardsman asked, and Colin pointed as he brought his horse up to Colin’s side.
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