When Ravens Call: The Fourth Book in the Small Gods Epic Fantasy Series (The Books of the Small Gods by Bruce Blake (ebook reader with highlight function TXT) 📕

He raised his head, pulling his face from his palms and opening his eyes, his surroundings blurred from holding them closed for so long. The people around him appeared faint and gauzy, the grass a streak of yellow-green. He blinked a few times to clear the gummy haze, and the world came back into view.

Birk and the black-robed men were gone, no trace of them left behind. The young woman who'd embraced him sat on a log beside her companion, their hands held in their laps, bound by lengths of rope. The tall, skinny fellow stood near them while the stocky one waited a few paces away, staring up the shallow hill. He followed his gaze, found the object of his interest.

***

When days of peace approach their end,

And wounds inflicted are too deep to mend,

A sign shall come, a lock with no key,

Borne by a man from across the sea.

A barren mother, the seed of life,

Living statue, treacherous knife.

To raise the Small Gods, a Small God must die,

When stars go out, the end is nigh.

One must die to raise them all,

Should Small Gods rise, man will fall.

One can stop them, on darken'd wing,

The firstborn child of the rightful king.

The words from the scroll echoed through Danya's mind as she stared across the clearing at her brother while Fellick bound her hands.

He doesn't recognize me.

Her gaze slid to the chain attached at his ankle, its end going nowhere, as though the ability to unlock and remove it wasn't a possibility. Realization brought a pause to her breathing.

The lock with no key.

The barren mother.

The seed of life.

Facets of the scroll's prophecy materializing together? Or the results of fanciful imagination?

He isn't the man from across the sea. But he is the firstborn child of the king.

Danya shifted on the log, Evalal to her right, already bound. Fellick finished tying her wrists and stood, turned back to his partner. The princess glanced away from her brother with his hands hiding his eyes from her and focused on her traveling companion. Any concern the younger girl may have possessed before had disappeared from her face, leaving her with the same expression of unconcern with what transpired. When she saw Danya scrutinizing her, she half-smiled and leaned toward her.

"The Goddess has a plan. We don't see it, but she does."

Danya opened her mouth to respond but sighed and looked away instead. Sometimes she wished she enjoyed the same faith Evalal displayed; it seemed it might make life easier. Meeting the Mother of Death had shifted her opinion about some truth behind legends of the Goddess toward belief, but the chasm between belief and faith is wide. She'd seen more unusual—unbelievable—things since she and Teryk had found the scroll than she'd experienced in the entire rest of her days. Yet ongoing, unwavering faith eluded her.

She looked at her brother, barely recognizable with his shaggy hair and stubbled face, his clothes stiff with dirt and old sweat. He continued pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, so she watched Fellick instead. Instead of rejoining his fellow weapons merchant, the stocky man separated himself from the others. He sauntered past to stand with his back to them, directing his gaze up the shallow hill climbing away from the green wall as though awaiting an arrival. His right hand rested on the pommel of his sword, but whether doing so meant he expected trouble, or a soldier's habit, she couldn't guess.

A vague beaten trail in the grass running toward the woods rather than up the long bank denoted the path Birk and the robed men had taken when they left. No other sign of their presence remained. No one discussed their departure; they'd wandered off as though part of a predetermined plan.

Danya tilted her head back, surveying the sky. The sun shone bright on the meadow, only a few wisps of cloud remaining from the passage of the strange bird that seemed to leave a storm in its wake. She saw no other winged creature come to bring sunshine, or wind, or fog. She shook her head—one more unbelievable detail in her once-normal existence that had become filled with the incredible.

As she lowered her gaze, she noticed a tremor in the log beneath her, slight enough it might have been her imagination. She focused her attention toward it, at first thinking it a vibration caused by the Seed of Life. She understood it wasn't the case.

Horses.

Fellick must have realized it at the same time; his sword hissed from its scabbard and Danya raised her head to stare past the squat fellow, the sun glinting on his bared steel. The tremor beneath her ceased and, though the earth's gentle shake suggested several riders, she spied a single horseman guide his horse to the brink of the hill. He paused but an instant before pulling his weapon and sliding from his saddle in a manner many horsemen would have made awkward but which was second nature for a man with one arm.

"Trenan!"

XXXII  Rilum – Not So Long Ago

He didn't find them on the shore this time.

Four of them. Not so much like before. More similar to him now.

They slouched around the small clearing ringed with trees, shuffling their feet, heads drooping. Searching. Looking. Hunting. Occasionally, one stopped, bent, picked an item from the ground and put it into his mouth.

Through his gauzy vision, he realized their skin wasn't pink, but not white, either. The color of weathered canvas. Two had patchy hair, another none, the fourth's hung past his shoulders with a single spot with a handful missing. They still wore their tattered clothes, clinging to the last vestiges of their former selves as though doing so might take them back to when they knew something other than the hunger.