The Warden

Chapter 11

He's going to die! Lady Kyla screamed in her mind, since screaming out loud would probably get her killed. Like most things. And if he doesn't, I'm going to kill him.

She had followed the Domrae boy since he had left Hyrbn. It appeared he would follow a northwestern route as to skirt the Bay of Muth and then angle back east toward the kingdom's capital, Elafino. And at his current pace, he would arrive sometime next year.

The average man could cover the distance between Hyrbn and Haimlant's capital, in some four weeks traveling off the trails as Masis was. In far less time if the person went on the roads, perhaps a fortnight. If the boy had been able to travel by what those fools, the mages, called the lines, he would have arrived in the capital in less than a day.

She growled, clawing her fingers in front of her eyes. How by Manu could he be the one?!

Both Werold and Wilo remained silent, but she could have sworn a faint chuckle tickled at the back of her mind. It was easy for them to laugh. They did not have the task of turning this mewling stripling into the savior of Haimlant.

At this rate, the fool of a boy would finish off his supplies some fifty miles from the nearest settlement and from what she had seen from his general morale would more likely lie down and wait for death than hunt for more food.

After a few days, Lady Kyla held very little hope for the boy.

At times, tears would burst from him and he would spend half the morning wrapped in his bedroll, shaking as sobs came again and again, to gag out his mouth. Other times, he would sit atop his horse, eyes vacant, and hardly direct the beast, passing sights that Kyla knew would have fully arrested his attention less than a week ago. His lifelight, tarnished with despair, appeared more like a mud puddle—sludge-like—than that burnished star it once was.

Kyla could well imagine, glaring at the boy's absent expression, how the past kept pulling him inward, downward. Like a whirlpool, she pictured it dragging the Domrae whelp under memory's turbulent surface, drowning all rational thought with sadness and guilt.

Those two pesky emotions could destroy a person. Lady Kyla knew that fact all too well. After she had killed her son, that duo had tried to take her. Tried to rob her of purpose. Of the last traces of her humanity. She had killed them too.

She shivered as an image of her son, cradled in her arms, life draining from his body, surfaced in her mind. He had smiled at her through the pain and thanked her. Thanked her for killing him. For freeing him. He had thanked his own mother for ending his life.

Her eyes pricked. Enough! Kyla thought, clenching her teeth. Enough.

A twig snapped, pulling her attention back to Masis. When had she stopped watching him? She grimaced, not able to answer the question.

Masis' horse had misstepped, snapping a branch. Of a sudden, his eyes filled with consciousness and then sharp confusion as he glanced around him. His expression drooped as a memory glazed his eyes again, tears leaking pathetically down his cheeks.

His emotions ruled him. Kyla would break him of that. First, she had to stoke the fires within him again.

Kyla sniffed, frowning. And then the real work will begin.

At this point, Kyla had kept a running tabulation of everything Masis would have to improve on.

First and foremost among them: awareness. Even when not befuddled by grief, he did not pay enough attention to his surroundings. Not the terrain. Not the lay of the land. Nothing. All these things determined how one would best engage an enemy. Scents, even his nose could have detected—the hint of some rotting carcass, the rank of fox scat—clearly did not register with him. Tracks went unnoticed—both animal and human. Smoke curling up from amongst the trees a league off failed to leave an impression.