Chapter One: Pt. 6

When he was gone, it was almost like the spell that kept them quiet was broken.

“What are we to do?”  The question rippled through the crowd. Governor Patek raised his hands for silence.

“We shall have a meeting in a quarter-mark! Those who wish to join should come to the Black Swine!”

The villagers scattered swiftly, each to bring their own home the news.

Tarrant stopped one of the boys his age.

“What happened?”

“Red Oak Falls was attacked! The raiders might be coming here next! Leggo, I gotta go tell Da about the meeting!” Tarrant let his friend leave. He watched as Efrain casually strolled away from the well towards the road, tugging on Buttercup’s reins.  He was not heading toward the tavern, like the others. After a brief battle with himself, Tarrant caught up to him.

“Aren’t you going to the meeting?” He asked. Efrain glanced up at the burly youth’s suspicious expression. He wondered if the kid still had more growing to do. Must be the country air, or possibly a family trait, though the lad threatened to outstrip his own father in height and muscle.

“Shouldn’t you be heading home?” Efrain said, moving further down the road in the opposite direction from the smithy. Tarrant flushed.

“I thought you’d want to know what they say. At the meeting.” He mumbled.

“There’s no point to it.” Efrain batted Buttercup’s face away as the horse drooled on his shoulder. He brushed of the drool and bits of grass. “Stop that.”

Tarrant’s steps faltered. Then he caught his pace again. “I know you’ve only been here a year, but you’re part of the village too!” Efrain halted, hearing the wariness in the kid’s voice.

“You misunderstood. What I meant was, they’ll be talking about what to do. I already know what I’m going to do, so there’s no purpose in listening to everybody else debate.” Buttercup took advantage of Efrain’s distraction and cropped a tuft of grass.

“So what are you going to do?” Tarrant asked. His suspicion was equal to his curiosity.

“Why don’t you go on, kid. I’ll see you after the meeting gets out.” Efrain patted Buttercup’s neck, then mounted the placid gelding. “Oh, and could you tell your father that I’ll need to rent one of his rangers this evening?” With that, Buttercup was nudged into a slightly faster amble down the road the messenger had left far behind. Tarrant stared after him, then sighed and ran back through the town to the smithy. The strange farmer was a puzzle he didn’t really have time to figure out, not with all the rest of the day’s events.

When he could no longer be seen from the village, Efrain guided Buttercup off the road and into the woods. With this new development, he needed to contact Sam, and he could hardly do so with somebody watching. The trees were tall and slender in this part of the woods, unlike the tangled depths and monstrous oaks farther into the rifts of the hills. They were also spaced out enough so that the light filtered well between the leaves and fell all the way to the ground. It dappled the surroundings in stark evening shades. But the shapes of the shadows were too still, without a single breeze to set the light dancing.

The Breath usually fled before him, leaving a wake that was fairly noticeable in stillness such as this. But the inder were absent today, something Efrain had never before experienced. The inder were everywhere. They were more prolific than gnats, and stirred the air by the swarms of their invisible presence.  They gathered around humans to feed, and could be felt as a small stirring of wind. That’s why Efrain preferred to call the little pests “the Breath.”  The Hakon, whose land this was, a race of fair, northern people, called those minuscule inder zephyrs. To the south, the Kabir called them the Dovev, which meant “whisper.” And that’s what they did, whisper incessantly, a never-ending susurrus that could drive a person to madness.

Which would explain the jairo. You’d have to be mad to allow the inder, or the gods as most people believed them to be, to feed off of you constantly. Or perhaps the inder battened onto those who could become jairo from the time they were defenseless children, like that poor waif who spoke to him earlier. Milla. If the kid could already speak to the village kjell and hear them in return, she would probably rise in the ranks of the jairo easily.  They would have to send her off for formal training soon, though, before the kjell came to depend on her too much. Like all the other little jerolin, the novices of saintliness, she’d be cloistered from the outer world and the inder who would attach to her and grow, until she was old enough and informed enough to choose an inder for herself.

Perhaps after her schooling she’d come back to Lindenford, Efrain mused. The relationship between her and the local kjell might already be too strong to set aside for service as one of many jerolin or jairo to serve under a shemal. Efrain’s lip curled reflexively. He despised the bloated, corpulent beings worshiped as the most mighty of gods. They had no subtlety, only overwhelming power provided by their followers, and a simple premise they all could agree on. Kjell, the more personal gods, usually had multiple traits and expressions, and could answer the dreams and prayers of the followers individually. The only thing that a shemal was useful for was a mass miracle, directed by the high jairo. Individual prayers were lost amid a welter of others.

Still, people were, and always would be drawn to power. Efrain could not stop the bleating masses from following the shemal like sheep to the slaughter any more than he could foster belief. And if there was one thing Efrain was NOT, it was a believer.

Knowledge did not count as belief. And Efrain knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what inder really were.

Though there were exceptions to every rule.