Chapter 3: 3: A Promise

When Dachran’s tale was finished, he let out a long, slow breath. His head slumped. His fingers slackened.

Wren thought for a moment that he had died, but an inhalation a few seconds later told her otherwise.

“Well, then,” he said. “Now you know my true story.”

Wren frowned at him, working through everything she’d heard. She gave due consideration to his situation and to all the tact that good manners demanded of her. Finally, she settled on a response. “I don’t think half of that was true,” she said.

Dachran’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Eh?”

“I think,” said Wren, doing her best to be as respectful as possible (which was to say, not doing tremendously well), “you ate two-day-old meat and dubious mushrooms, hallucinated a mythical stag talking to you, and fell over and got yourself impaled.”

Dachran’s mouth gaped. “Then what happened to Alister?”

“He probably got weirded out by the mind-altering substances and went home.”

“And how do you explain this?!” Dachran demanded, gesturing to the bough sticking out of him. “This is the antler of the Greyfeather Stag!”

“Dachran, that’s a stick.”

He blinked down at it. “Oh. Well, perhaps it’s transformed so as to prevent any wrongdoers from harvesting it for its magical properties.”

Wren decided to let him have it. “You know what? I can’t prove it hasn’t.”

“Exactly,” said Dachran with a satisfied smile. Then his expression turned serious, stony. “Listen, Wren. I’m done. This is the end of me; we both know it. Let the last story people hear of me be a good one, eh? Let me have that, for the tale to be one of magic instead of a stupid man coming to a stupid end.”

Wren examined his face and found nothing there but a sincere wish to be remembered well. As someone who had been better than he really had, perhaps. She found she couldn’t deny him that. “Of course.”

“Good,” said Dachran. His demeanour was more hurried now, as if he knew he didn’t have long to finish every outstanding matter he had left to resolve in life. He reached into a pocket inside his coat and withdrew a folded letter, which he pressed into Wren’s hand. “Take that to… to Myrinna. Cotton Mossford.”

“Cotton - what is that, a person’s name?”

Dachran didn’t answer. “And… and my body should… should be left here, I suppose, to feed the hills and the woods and the creatures. I should give something back, shouldn’t I?”

Wren held up her hands at that one. “Honestly, I don’t think I’d be up for moving a corpse anyway.”

He nodded. “That’s… that’s reasonable.” His hand flicked out with surprising speed and grabbed the letter back from Wren; he unfolded it, pulled a stick of charcoal or some other writing implement from another pocket, and scribbled a few words of an addendum, tongue out, eyes flicking between the paper and Wren. Then, apparently done with whatever additions he’d made, he folded it back up and passed it back to her. “Myrinna. Cotton Mossford. Promise.”

“I promise,” Wren said, almost automatically. It just seemed unthinkable not to agree to a dying man’s last request.

Dachran sighed in relief, nodding. Then he gave her a quizzical look. “Where… where are you headed, anyway? All this way from Din?”

Wren stared at him for a second, then shrugged and sighed. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I was thinking of going to World’s Beginning. Like people do, you know, just to go and look off to the horizon and… and think about what they want to do, and maybe work out what I want to do. Cos I don’t think I just left Din purely not to be there anymore, that’s not a goal or a motivation. You can’t base your life on what you don’t want to do, right? Not forever, anyway. And, you know, I’m a grown adult now. Have been for a decade, and still haven’t managed to figure out what I’m doing. Only that I’ve been sticking in the capital, in the family business, because it felt like what I should do, but it was never what I wanted. I just don’t know what I do want.” She took a deep breath. “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, you know?”

She looked at Dachran. He was, indubitably, dead.

Wren sighed. “Because you’re not going to tell anyone else, I guess,” she muttered, and reached out to close his eyes.

~~~

She left his body there, as he’d requested - which was a relief, because after even a few moments of wondering whether it would even be possible to move, she decided it definitely wasn’t. Not with a great big branch sticking out of him, even if she’d been willing or able to hoist the dead weight of a man who must have been half her weight again.

This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

Despite the imminence of his passing, Dachran had certainly taken his time with his story; the sun had well and truly set. Wren didn’t much feel like continuing on her way in the dark, but neither did she particularly want to set up camp too close to the man’s body. It might have been his wish to let his corpse feed the creatures of the woods, but Wren would rather not be too nearby when those creatures came out to claim it.

So she resolved to keep going just until the next copse, or perhaps a little cave in the side of a hill. Somewhere she could take shelter. She had a torch, at least, so she wasn’t in total darkness.

As she crested a hill, one that might have had the most beautiful view in the world but was surrounded at that moment by nothing but blackness (which was, she thought, peculiarly beautiful in its own right), a sound reached her ears. A clear crackling, like icicles crushed between rocks.

She turned, and there behind her was a white stag looming out of the darkness, its antlers fanning and forking like paths leading to a hundred cities, or perhaps choices leading to a hundred futures. Its legs were long, thin, but strong; its short fur was perfectly clean. Grey-blue eyes fixed her and held her.

“What did Dachran say?” Wren whispered to herself. “Hold its gaze. Give it the respect it’s due.”

She didn’t know if she could have looked away even if she wanted to, but she steeled her expression, made herself meet its eyes firmly, and squeezed all her muscles to stop herself from shaking.

“I promise to be respectful of these lands,” she said, “and all that live here.” Then, not sure why she was doing it, she lowered herself into a short bow, keeping her eyes on the stag’s, and pointed back in the direction from which she’d come. “The one who disrespected you has left his body as an offering.”

The stag’s head turned, glancing back towards the site of Dachran’s final rest. Then it looked back at her, gave one shallow nod, and walked off into the darkness.

Wren held her breath for a few seconds after it had gone. Finally, she let it all out in one huge puff. Her heart beat heavily in her ears.

Did that really just happen…?

There was no time to investigate the scene to be sure, even if she had been able to see well enough by the meagre light of her struggling torch; she needed to find somewhere to shelter for the night, and quickly. So she hurried onwards, pulling her coat around herself against the cold.

Her luck turned: just past a gap in a low wall of elegantly assembled stones of all shapes and sizes, she found herself walking alongside a steep hill. And, she saw as she walked, her torchlight falling softly upon the landscape an inch at a time, in the side of that hill was a shallow cavern beneath a natural archway of stone. She tucked herself inside. Small, but it would suffice.

From her backpack she took a thick blanket; she tucked the backpack into a nook in the wall, lay down and pressed her body against the back of the cave, and pulled the blanket over herself. In a few moments, she was asleep.

~~~

Morning came, bringing a sense that nothing of the previous day had truly happened. That it was all some strange dream, or a half-remembered tale of a place very far away and very long ago - so far, in fact, that nothing that had happened there could ever possibly reach out to affect her in the here and now.

And yet, Wren knew from the folded letter tucked into her coat pocket, it had happened. Some of it, at least. She still wasn’t sure about the Greyfeather Stag, even though she had no reason to doubt what she’d seen with her own eyes. Magical things happened all the time; mages altered the mundane order of the world on a daily basis; legendary beasts did indeed roam the land; those things were simply true and known to everyone. Then again, knowing that creatures of myth were real and that people ran into them fairly frequently didn’t make it any less of a shock that she should have done it, that it should have happened to her. Million-to-one things happened every hour of every day to someone somewhere in the world, but to her?

She shook her head in vague disbelief, then grimaced and stretched out her aching neck. Then it was time for a quick, basic breakfast of simple things wrapped in packets of oiled paper - most of which had been good quality and in pristine condition when she’d left Din a week or so earlier, but had since got somewhat squashed (and mostly eaten, of course) - and then she was on her way again.

The problem, of course, was that she was now doubly unsure which way she ought to be going. When she reached a peak with a good view in all directions, she withdrew a small map from a side pocket of her bag and unrolled it, comparing the simple sketch to the topography.

“Started in Din, obviously,” she muttered, tracing her route with a finger. The most common pilgrim’s path from Din to World’s Beginning - a point on the south-western coast, where it was said one could see out over the ocean for miles - was drawn in a thick orange line, but she thought she’d gone off that almost immediately. She named the counties she knew she’d passed through: “East into Hartunstrict, south to the coast, east again into Cragcliff. Stuck on the coastline for a bit, but then had to come a little way north after a while, and now I’m in the Greyfeather Hills, which means I’m in Nievenden now. And there’s a wiggle in the coastline that way and a river over there, so maybe I’m about…” She thrust a finger at a point on the map that she thought roughly corresponded to where she was, but really could have been ten or fifteen miles off.

“Mostly done,” she told herself. “Just need to keep going west to Ruddanwell - obviously take a bit of a detour slightly north so as not to go too close to Acorton - then south-west until you get to… well, the furthest point in that direction, and then…” She sighed. “And then just hope your whole life comes together, I guess.”

She peered at the map, which bore the names of a few major cities and towns, but not an awful lot of detail.

“But on the way, I have to find Myrinna, whoever that is. And whatever a Cotton Mossford might be. But Dachran said nothing about where to go…” She rolled up the map and slapped it into her palm a few times. “He knew where I was going, though, so he must’ve thought it was somewhere along the way. Maybe. Then again, he was dying and probably on hallucinogens.”

Wren let out a long, exasperated sigh.

“Upend your life, she said. It’ll be fun, she said.”

Then she shook her head.

“Nah. You knew this wasn’t going to be easy. But you had to do it anyway, didn’t you?”

The map went back in her pack. She knelt and retied the laces on her boots. Then, with a deep, determined breath and a quiet nod to herself, she continued on her way.