Somyellia now had to conduct the final ritual and erupt the curse they’d set. I personally didn’t bother much with her duties in this arena, but I also hadn’t really in her leg-spreading one either. Our time together was all that mattered; however, even I had learned that all “great curses” required three parts. The victim must be touched by the curser or cursers, and she and Irion had both done that at different times. The curser or cursers must lock in their work with particular gestures, as she had done at the party. Now, the final act was to be executed. It would take time and the moon at the right position.

She began her work as I grabbed my shovel and crowbar to head out to do mine.

VIII: Warhorse on the Horizon

Purpose tends to be a cruel morning, waking you suddenly and thoroughly. My dour harmony, my focused aloneness, was to be disrupted once more, and once more it would come out of nowhere, as is its preference.

One day, we had a delivery. A giant man, killed by some disease, lay on my table bloated and blue. Normally I would have commenced to working, and the larger than normal corpse would have been in the cart and ready for transport.

But I walked around the table in the same fashion that I had done with Somyellia back on Red Wolf. This cold mound looked familiar, causing me without effort to mumble near-forgotten words.

Tension filled the room, making home the places saved for the cobwebs and rodents grown fat on my occasional forgetting to close the back door.

I knew who this reminded me of, with deathly certainty. I hadn’t thought about him in ages, and he had been as dead to me as the inhabitants of the mass grave.

For a moment I wondered if it was him. But I was looking down on flabby jowls on top of a weak chin. His hair had been the same color, but coarse and curled. Just to be sure, and with some effort, I rolled the corpse onto his side. No, no giant scar on his back.

I had completely forgotten about it until using it as an identifier. My father had a deep swathe between his shoulders from a battle in the first campaign he’d ever embarked on.

He’d told of the ambushing Pelats and their crude, bony weapons. How they had skewered his horse and overwhelmed him. How he had one pinned to the ground, and how a moment before the fatal strike a sneaky Pelats opened up his back in the vain attempt to save his fellow savage.

Surviving the ordeal with a fresh trophy of tongues and charms, a field hospital repaired Father’s back, and adorning citations followed in his recovery.