The Humbled (The Lost Words: Volume 4) (28 page)

“You should pray. Every soul counts.”

Ewan seemed to consider it. Then he shrugged again. “So be it.”

Soon, the entire town was chanting, making Tanid that much stronger, except for some of the pilgrims already on the road, heading to war. As a bird flew, one could see dozens of convoys clogging the roads, joining others. King Sergei’s troops were there too, plodding toward northern Athesia. It seemed the Parusite leader had heeded his advice after all. Or maybe, he was sending troops for war against the Athesian empress. For the thousandth time, Tanid wished he had someone who could foretell the future. But all he could do was nourish doubts.

CHAPTER 19

N
igella had never considered herself overly social. But for once in her life, she longed for an honest talk with another adult. Sheldon was just too young.

The four Naum soldiers guarding her did not speak Continental, and all they could offer were nods and grunts and reserved smiles as they watched her work. She was not quite comfortable with their stares, but she knew she would not be harmed. These men probably did not even dare conceive illicit thoughts in their heads.

Nigella was kneeling on the hill’s slope, the grass tickling her legs. She was collecting herbs, the one thing Calemore’s soldiers could not provide for her. She had no idea how to describe the subtle differences between cat’s-ears, hawk’s-beards, and dandelions to men who had probably never seen these flowers before. Nor would she trust men trained to kill people with such a task.

She had seen very few Naum women, and she trusted them even less. While she was more or less certain of what the soldiers were meant to do, she did not know if the women would obey the same rules. Mothers were extremely protective and possessive, and they might decide Sheldon was being fed way too generously while their own babies had rations. The
children could also be troublesome and cruel, and she did not want her son mingling with them. No, Sheldon was better off staying close.

All the time, Naum soldiers would bring her fresh goods, fruit, vegetables, even wine. She lacked for nothing, except spices and the special commodities of her craft. Which gave her an excuse to leave her cabin and walk the nearby hills, watching the countryside transform.

Two months since the Naum forces had swept the land, the prospect of the foreign invasion did not look very promising. Marlheim had stopped burning, and a sizable body of noncombatants had moved in, taking over the burnt houses and scorched fields. But they knew nothing about Caytorean weather and plants, and their crops were failing. The winter would be lean, and that worried Nigella.

What if they decided her little hoard was just too delicious to ignore?

Almost daily, a new caravan would arrive into Marlheim, and another would leave, mostly men on foot, marching somewhere south. They carried weapons, and she could not mistake their intent. But she saw many families take to the road, taking their meager possessions with them. They did not look like the proud army of a mighty conqueror.

The town had hardly recovered from the attack. Shops and stables stood empty. The streets were littered with roof tiles, shards of pottery, broken masonry, and cinders. At least the bodies of dead men and horses had been cleared away, probably because the stench had been unbearable, even for these foreigners. Most of the Naum folk still slept under their wagons, while their shaggy oxen pissed and shat in the gutters nearby. Dogs were everywhere, hunting rats, chasing livestock from one improvised pen to another.

Outside the city’s perimeter, men were busy cutting trees down, building new houses, but they struggled. Nigella imagined they had done carpentry before, but not with the type of timber that grew in Caytor. The same went for all their other work. They fished in the streams, they herded goats and other hairy animals, they tried to till the cracked soil, but their effort was slow and awkward. Women were there, too, hard at work like their husbands. She had never been good at human affairs, but she could tell intimacy, even from a remote hilltop.

Sometimes, men and women alike would raise their eyes from the withered cabbage and brownish weed and stare at her, squinting their pale eyes against the harsh sun, their skin red and sweating, their bodies lean from too little food. They would look at her and probably wonder who she was and why she got to watch them laboring in the heat. Nigella couldn’t mistake their silent glare of accusation, as if all this was her fault.

So she never went down into Marlheim. She almost wanted to. Not so much as to meet the Naum people, not really. But to see up close the reality her lover was carving for her. She felt braver since Rob’s death, and the strange new nation intrigued her as much as it frightened her. But those looks stayed her feet far from the lower slopes, far from the misused parcels of onion and carrot, far from the debris and graves and slow ruin. She would not risk it.

Nigella plucked another flower and placed it one of the nine bags hanging from her waist. There were all kinds of insects crawling through the grass, lively, busy, just like the humans. Not far away, Sheldon was fencing against an invisible foe with a dried branch. In his left hand, he was cradling that present from Calemore. Sunlight would often catch in its clear depth, then shine out in a dazzling array of colors. It was
beautiful, mesmerizing, and Nigella had no idea what it was. But she had allowed her boy to keep it, for now.

As far as the future was concerned,
The Book of Lost Words
was quite skimpy on advice.

She had probably reached the middle of the text, not that she believed there was any chronology to the riddles written throughout the book. But her understanding of the words depended on reading every single line, and her progress was slow.

Sheldon was making sounds, the
ooh
and
aah
of valiant swordsmanship. Two of the Naum soldiers were looking at him, grinning. If you ignored their clothing, you might mistake them for an ordinary pair of Caytorean private guards. It was disconcerting, she thought, that people bent on so much destruction could be so similar to everyone else.

Her lower back hurt, so she straightened, massaging her kidneys, spreading the tingling sensation around. Then, she bent over again, inspecting the flowers. She always chose undamaged specimens, with whole leaves and without ants and flies burrowing through the petals and heads. When she dried them, she wanted the crushed extracts to be pure.

The vivid story of flickering images from the previous night’s reading still flashed in the back of her mind. She couldn’t put words to the sensation, but again, it wasn’t a pleasant one. Once, she had read for Calemore, ending up confused. Then, she had begun trying to figure out the truth for herself. But now, she believed their two destinies were entwined, and she couldn’t tell her own future from that of her lover’s. Whatever the book had to tell, it wove a tale of two people. And that made her work doubly hard.

She thought she had seen an empty alley in a big city, with large gray buildings growing to the side of it, windows empty like black eye sockets in an old skull, the sky boiling with
purple and silver and skimming past faster than it should. Yet, there was no wind down below, no leaves blowing across the cobbles. Nothing moved in the street.

Then, a figure was there, standing against the raging backdrop of a silent storm, and his cape did billow. She thought she had seen Calemore, but it didn’t feel like him. Still, reading through the passage had heightened her sense of urgency, her unease. As if that man didn’t belong there. Or rather, the world around him didn’t belong where he was.

The sky turned brilliant, too bright to look, and then, the city wasn’t there anymore. She just couldn’t see it. She remembered reading, words unrelated to the story unraveling inside her head, and the memory of that place was like a vaguely remembered dream, a nagging emptiness. Only later, after she had put the book away and lay dozing in the bed, Sheldon cradled in her arms, did the images float back to her, reassembling into a message. A warning.

That much she was certain of. It was a warning.

She had known Calemore would bring pain to the realms. She had never read anything that would indicate hope or healing on his behalf.
The Book of Lost Word
s had always given her discomfort, deep and primitive. But now, it was different. Worse somehow. As if he was going to make the world something else. Change it. Make it less than what it was. As if…

“Mom, Mom!” Sheldon called.

Nigella blinked. She realized she had stood up, staring west. She shook her head and knelt back onto the slope, picking fresh flowers. “What is it, Shel?”

“I defeated the evil wizard,” he said, cheerful, unconcerned. The two warriors were still watching him and grinning. One said something in his foreign tongue, and the other gave a gruff chuckle.

Nigella frowned. “Sheldon, come here.”

He shambled over, stepping over rocks with goatlike ease. “Yes, Mom?”

She pointed at the soldiers with her nose. “Stay away from those men. Do not encourage them.”

The boy shrugged. “But why, Mom?”

She sighed, wiping sweat off her brow. Working on all fours was a very exhausting task. “Because they are soldiers, Shel, and they are dangerous men. They work for Calemore, and you must keep away from them.”

“But Uncle Calemore protects us,” he objected.

She felt her blood chill.
Uncle?
“He is not your uncle, Shel.”

Sheldon shrugged again, apparently disagreeing with her. “But they protect us.”

Nigella swept a burdock from his shirt. “Just do as I say.”

“They don’t mean us any harm, Mom,” the boy insisted. “They told me.”

Told you?
Nigella felt her blood turn to ice. “What do you mean, dear?”

He pointed back at the grinning pair, without shame or fear. “I heard them talk. They asked me what I was going to do with my sword, and I told them I was going to defeat the evil wizard. So they asked me to show them.”

Must be the boy’s imagination
, was her first thought.
Or he may have really talked to them
, came the second, more sinister one.
How?

Keeping her dread and curiosity at bay, Nigella stabbed a glance at the soldiers. But they missed the venom in her soul. She was angry, mostly at herself, for not paying attention to her son. Bringing him here was a risk, but she had not dared leave him all alone in the cottage. Here, though, there
were other temptations, other problems. Unlike her, Sheldon craved companionship. He did not fully understand this war, this madness, and being exiled to the cabin, locked in with his mother, was a confusing punishment for him. She could not really blame him for wanting some attention or new friends. But not these men.

I must have daydreamed, thinking about prophecies
, she wondered, trying to keep her anxiety down. She was such a fool. How could she have let that happen?

“I forbid you to talk to them,” she snapped, perhaps too harshly.

Sheldon looked hurt. “Why, Mom?”

Nigella plucked a flower with too much force, crushing it. “Do not argue with me, Shel.” The other thought crept back into her mind. How did Sheldon understand the soldiers? Children learned languages much faster than adults, for certain, but he had barely spent time around the Naum men.

How?

She wanted to ask her son, to probe, but she wasn’t sure she was brave enough to hear his answers.

In that instant, Nigella wanted to pack her things and head back home, right then, but somehow, she found herself kneeling in the same spot, wondering. Maybe Sheldon had a knack for languages, and maybe he had learned a little of their tongue. That was a huge advantage, if she dared exploit it. Through her son, she could learn more about Naum, more about their intentions, their orders, their desires. She could learn what these men wanted, how they lived.

Only did she really dare do that? Did she dare commit herself? Her boy?

Knowing this strange nation could help her understand Calemore’s reality much better. She might steal a glimpse into
his world, into the great vision he had for the realms, for the people of the land. She might use that knowledge to complement the confusion and omens that the book offered her. Only that meant endangering Sheldon.

She would never do that.

Sheldon was sitting nearby, shoulders slouched, head bowed in that forced sadness that children used to let their elders know they were hurting. He was deliberately avoiding looking at her, but he was waiting for her to soften, just so he could act proud and defiant. Nigella wished she could indulge him—he deserved it after all the hardship she had put him through—but she couldn’t let her emotions best her now. Emotions for her son, or Calemore, for that matter.

Nigella flicked an ant climbing on her thigh and moved uphill, toward a new clump of flowers. She bent low, knees and elbows deep in the prickly, smelly grass, carefully examining the petals, the stalks, the leaves.

Her son squirmed, but she ignored him. He patted the ground, but she pretended not to have noticed. Bored and defeated, he rose, still holding that sword stick of his, but it was a forlorn gesture of misplaced manipulation.