Brotherhood Saga 03: Death (103 page)

Rather than think about it, he rolled onto his side and stared out the window.

Distantly, he could make out the sounds of children playing in the yards behind the houses. Dogs barked, little girls screamed, and boys cried out in victory as they very likely pegged them with flying debris of snow.

“To be young,” he whispered.

To be innocent, devoid of the world; to be naïve, without the knowledge of the future; to be cold and stubborn and not at all vulnerable to love and just how horribly it could fracture one’s heart. To a child, nothing but his or her immediate future lay before them. What they ate, how late they stayed up after bed, when their mother or father brought from the town or Ornala’s center a gift of a stuffed animal or even a slight pastry—nothing, it seemed, could destroy the innocence. Therefore, children were immune, and for that Odin couldn’t help but envy them if only because he felt so horrible about his crime of passion that he felt he would be swallowed into the bed and transported to a completely different realm.

Don
’t think about it,
his conscience whispered.
Know.

Know what, exactly—the way the riddle sung, the way the words collided, the way something so elegant should have seemed simple and revealed to anyone looking upon it the source location of where the Will ran strongest in the human realm? He could make out nothing in its words, its pictures, its
grandiose scopes, for it seemed, without a shred of doubt, that nothing could be broken in disregard and divided by three from whence it came.

Maybe, just maybe, if he thought about it long and hard—with a mind devoid of emotion and a conscience full with clarity—the riddle would unravel itself, like a ball of yarn professed to a kitten who wanted nothing more to unroll it to its heart content.

Odin closed his eyes.

He took several long, deep breaths.

The door opened.

His nerves shot on end.

When he opened his eyes and pushed himself into a sitting position, he saw Virgin standing in the doorway, bearing what appeared to be a pan of pastries freshly-made and still brimming with sauce.

“I figured you were hungry,” the older Halfling said. “So I made something. For all of us.”

“You didn’t have to do that,” Odin said, locking his hands around his knees after pulling them to his chest. “Can I ask you something, Virgin?”

“Might as well.”

“Have you ever been any good at riddles?”

“Not particularly. Why?”

“It bears the Tooth of Strength and Plenty,”
Odin said,
“Broke apart in Disregard.”

“Divided in Three and W
hence it came,”
Virgin replied.
“The Ferryman upon Its boat.”

“You know it?” he asked, absolutely dumbstruck that his companion could recite the pass
age verbatim.

“It
’s on old wive’s tale.”

“About what?”

“The Ferryman, of course.”

“I… don
’t understand.”

“Don
’t understand what?”

“Maybe it
’s just because I don’t know the old legends, but who’s—“

“The Ferryman?” Virgin smiled. He waited for Odin to make any further response before settling down at the end of the bed, patting the space beside him so Odin could draw
seat himself at his side. “It’s a rather obscure legend, if you’d like to know the truth.”

“What is it about?”

“The Ferryman is a creature that is said to inhabit bodies of water that are thin enough to be crossed by canoe, but large enough to be considered terrible to swim. Supposedly, as the legend is told, it’s a creature who separates the realms of Life and Death and allows whomever is seeking it to cross through its waters—that is, if they so manage to pay the toll.”

“The toll?”

“The Ferryman only accepts silver, if you believe what the Elven myths say.”

“Is it real?”

“I don’t know. Either way, I don’t have any desire to meet it.”

The Ferryman,
Odin thought, spreading his body lengthwise along the bed and taking in the scent of what could only possibly be cinnamon buns.
Where you could be, oh silver-loving thing of death?

“Have you consulted a map?” Virgin happened to ask.

“I looked at the one they had in the book, but I haven’t looked at an updated one.”

“You know it
’s beyond a body of water.”

“Yes.”

“And you know it can’t be beyond anything more than a river. That much is for sure.”

“All right.”

“Your best guess would be to try and figure out where any isolated landmass would be.”

“Do you really think that would work?”

“I do.”

Odin rolled onto his stomach and stared at the wall opposite him.

“Our friends are waiting,” Virgin said, pressing a hand to Odin’s shoulder blade and massaging the muscles beneath his touch. “You’re so tense.”

“Are you mad at me?”

“We’ve had this conversation before, Odin.”

“I know, but still…
I’ve cheated you.”

“You haven
’t. Besides—were I upset, I would have been the first to tell you, especially considering our situation.”

“I know.”

Odin rolled back onto his back, pushed himself forward, then laced his arm around Virgin’s waist.

After leaning into his companion
’s side, Odin’s attention strayed once more to the window.

In the distance, he could faintly see a giant dog skirting around the edge of t
he yards—mounted by, who appeared to be, Carmen, who held within her hands what had to have unarguably been snowballs.

“If only I felt up to playing with them,” Odin sighed.

“Don’t worry,” Virgin replied. “Come on—let’s go eat dessert with our friends.”

Odin chose to oblige.

Dinner was prepared by Katarina and Virgin and served later that night, after the sun had fallen and Carmen had returned nearly soaking-wet
with her massive, snow-covered dog in tow. They ate, as it always seemed, silently, and by the time dinner ended, Odin did little more than trot up the stairs and to his and Virgin’s room, where his eyes immediately fell upon the sack resting in the corner of the room that contained the book that so solely ruled his life.

You know it can
’t be beyond anything more than a river. That much is for sure.

Were that knowledge true, then surely consulting a map would allow him to find the location of the Source
.

Rather than pour himself over the book
’s passages and drive himself insane, Odin paced about the room going through his and Virgin’s personal artifacts, intent on finding the one thing that had led them beyond the scope of the Great Divide and along the Western Shore.

It has to be somewhere,
he thought, biting his lips as what seemed like pages upon pages of political paperwork pooled across his hands.
You know you brought it with you.

That map had been taken from Ornala itself in his, Carmen
’s and Nova’s quest to Dwaydor during the first assault of the city. He had not—in any way, shape or form—managed to lose it, so for him to have misplaced it within a house and, sadly, a mass of drawers seemed completely unbeknown to his conscience.

Knowing that Virgin would soon return, Odin pulled the drawer out of the
cabinet and began his desperate attempt to find the map—first sorting, then discarding, then all-out
tossing
pages of parchment into the air.

Where the hell did this come from?

Either way, he had no time to consider what he was throwing.

Finally, after ages of trying, it came under his fingers and whispered of places long lost and hidden from humanity.

“There,” he whispered.

The map—hand-drawn, scrawled in black ink, complete with an index of tables at the side of the parchment where the map ended at the Hornblaris
Mountains.

After
securing the map and combing through the papers on the floor, he returned the drawer to his cabinet, took a deep breath, then seated himself at the writing desk, all the while dreading what he might find.

Relax,
he thought.
Take slow, deep breaths.

He did this fearing that were he to pour his heart, soul and intellect into this map that he may possibly fail—that regardless of his intelligence, despite the overt Ferryman indication and the fact that there
were few rivers within the Three Kingdoms, he might be unable to find such a secret location.

When Odin opened his eyes, he saw before him the world to the north and what it could possibly offer
.

Life,
the gilded thing whispered,
for one who was lost.

“To war,” Odin nodded, weighing the corners down with four paperweights he pulled from the corner of the desk.

His eyes instinctively fell to the land of the east—where, above Bohren, and directly across the Ornalan Bay, a series of small, wiry rivers made their way like stubble on a poor man’s face toward the hills they could so desperately not reach. He knew instinctively that these small bodies of water could not be what he was looking for, as each led to no separate section of land. For that, he rolled his finger to the west, where his digit met the river that cut through the Liar’s Forest and then branched out into a Y—where Ke’Tarka lay in easy sight before the expanse of grasslands that eventually led to Sylina.

It can
’t be there,
he thought, tapping the indicator where the River City lay.
There’s no landmass that could hold anything.

Besides that, humankind had touched everything that lay to the north, south, east and west of the Forked Rivers, so that left him nothing in comparison to other places.

What about…

His eyes, growing more and more weary, landed on the river opposite Felnon, then to the eventual marshland that covered the western shoreline.

“Wait a minute,” Odin whispered.

Immediately, his eyes fell to a land formation that, over time,
had split away from the Three Kingdoms.

It bears the Tooth of Strength and P
lenty.

“Broke apart in disregard.”

Divided in Three and Whence it came.

“The Ferryman… upon Its boat.”

Odin’s heart stopped beating.

Time ceased to exist.

It… can’t… be,
he thought, struggling to maintain hold on his reality as the center of his vision eclipsed into one dark tunnel.

Mad, possibly, and driven insane by the reality that this could be the place he was looking for, Odin turned the map over and began to run through the series of hand-scrawled text behind it—first the cities, then the rivers, then the islands that lay beyond the Western and Salem Seas and finally to the body of waters beyond. He thought for one terrible moment that he would not find the name of the place that he so desperately searched for, but when his eyes fell on a single string of text that lay near the bottom corner of the page, color filled his mind and his heart began to hammer
once more.

Written, neatly, in perhaps the most frantic handwriting Odin had ever seen, were the words
Sharktooth Island.

“It bears the Tooth of Strength and P
lenty,” Odin whispered. “Broke apart in Disregarded.”

And divided in three this very p
lace was, as over the ages the land that had once been connected to the Three Kingdoms had split into an island that resembled something of a tooth and bore, on all three sides, different bodies of water—first the Haunted Marshlands and the river that separated it, then the Elnan River, followed by the Western Sea that completed the formation that set it apart from the mainland.

“This is it,” Odin whispered, almost unable to believe that he had discovered the very thing the book had told him. “This is… this is…”

The door opened.

Odin nearly jumped out of his seat.

Nova stood in the threshold, arms braced along the doorjamb and eyes intent on the process playing out before him. “You all right?” the older man asked.

“I
’m fine,” Odin replied, careful to roll the map back into place as carefully as possible. “Why?”

“You
’ve been… quiet… today.”

Quiet?
Odin thought, securing the twine around the parchment before making his way back to the dresser.

“Sorry?” Odin asked.

“I expected to hear more from you tonight… considering, well, you only got back and all.”

“I
’m sorry, Nova. I’ve just been… tired, I guess.”