A Warrior's Path: Book Five of Saga of the Known Lands, page 1
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
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CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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About the Author
Note from the Author
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
A Warrior’s Path: Saga of the Known Lands Book 5
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Copyright © 2023 Jacob Nathaniel Peppers. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical without the express written permission of the author. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.
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This is to my wife, Andrea. My partner. My helper and friend.
As we travel through life together,
You watch the path so that I might close my eyes and dream of dragons,
And I am grateful to you for that, as I am for so much else.
I love ya, babe. It’s been a heck of a ride so far but hold on tight—
We’re just getting started.
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CHAPTER ONE
Matt was alone.
He stood in a castle full of dozens of servants and guardsmen, all eager to do his bidding. He stared out his castle window at a city of tens of thousands of men and women who called him king…
Yet he had never felt more alone.
It was as if he stood not within the walls of his castle but instead within the confines of a cell, one in which the bars were growing closer and closer. Soon, it seemed to him, they would crush him. And considering how he had been feeling lately, considering how his dreams had been plagued by madness and horrors, he was not so sure that would be a bad thing.
He turned at the sound of a door opening to see Healer Malden. The old healer bowed as he stepped inside, carrying a small bag. “Forgive me, Majesty, for taking so long,” he said. “I’m afraid all my apprentices are sleeping.”
“I’m glad someone can,” Matt said. “And please, if anyone needs forgiving its me—I should have waited until morning, shouldn’t have woken you. Only…” He shrugged, not really knowing how to finish. The truth was he had woken in the middle of the night in a terrible sweat. He had done so before, of course, many times since Emma, the Feyling, had possessed him. But lately, these awakenings—and his dreams—had been different. Worse.
He had not woken just to a feeling of general unease, but in a state of panic, gasping for breath, shaking with terror. As with the other times, he could not remember the particulars of the dream, could remember no more than vague pictures, what might have been faces and forms of all kinds. Dozens, hundreds of monstrous figures of all shapes and sizes, sneering at him and baring their teeth.
That terror, those images, had cast him out of his bed, banishing any thought of renewing his sleep, driving him here, to the healer’s chambers.
“Think nothing of it, Majesty,” Healer Malden said, offering him a tired smile. “I find that the older I get the more sleep I need, and the less I manage. It is as if my ancient bones, knowing they approach their end, begrudge me each moment of sleep, wishing not to waste any time. Had you not come, I would have awoken soon anyway.” He shrugged. “Still, if cracking knees and hairy ears are the price of making it to old age, then they are ones I pay gladly. After all, many of my contemporaries followed the army during the Fey War and were not so lucky. Had they still the faculty of speech, I imagine they would have far worthier complaints than lack of sleep.”
“Still,” Matt said. “I am sorry.”
The healer waved the apology away, moving forward and offering the bag he carried to Matt. Matt took it, catching a strong smell of several herbs even before he opened it to reveal ground up leaves. “What is it?” he asked.
“A mixture of several herbs, all of which should serve to help you, Majesty. There is valerian root, of course, along with lavender and chamomile.”
“Something…minty, too,” Matt said.
The healer bobbed his head like a duelist acknowledging a point. “You have a good nose, Majesty,” he said. “There is also some spearmint and peppermint, both of which should serve to give more shape to your dreams, to make them more vivid, while the thyme—”
“More vivid?” Matt asked, feeling a brief swell of panic. “Forgive me, Malden, but that’s the last thing I want.”
“Perhaps, Majesty,” the old healer said apologetically, “but now, as is so often the case, what we want and what we need are rarely the same. You see, there is nothing man fears like the unknown. And while you cannot remember your dreams, while they do not have shape and substance, they remain something to be feared, feared in the same way a man might fear a dark, unfamiliar room. But give the same man a lantern, pull back the curtains and let the sunlight in…”
“And the room isn’t scary anymore,” Matt finished. “It’s just a room.”
“And the dream just a dream,” the old man said, smiling. “I’ll instruct the Mistress of Servants, Madam Olaphasia, on the proper way to make the tea, so that she might show her charges. It needs to be taken once at night, before you sleep, and again in the morning.”
“And…this’ll help?” Matt asked, frowning doubtfully, for tea seemed a small thing when held against those monstrosities which had driven him from sleep.
“It will, Majesty,” the healer said, giving him a small smile. “Problems with sleep can often seem bigger than they are…we make them bigger, you see, Highness, for in the night, in the dark, everything seems worse than it really is.”
“So…it isn’t a big deal?”
“I make no claims of that, Majesty,” Malden said. “I mean only that you need not fret—the tea will work. What fears you have are natural, but they are also unnecessary. Children, after all, do not often see ghosts in the daytime, do they? They see them in the dark, in those moments when sleep has begun to creep in but has yet to fully claim them or, alternatively, in those moments when they have begun to shake off their slumber but have not yet fully rid themselves of the vestiges of their dreams. Such is the same with what plagues you. The tea will help, Highness. You will sleep, and you will dream, and within those dreams you will find that there is naught to fear.”
Matt nodded, feeling a little better now. It was the man’s confidence, the way he was so sure. Matt didn’t just feel better. He felt…even a little embarrassed. A child who saw a tunic hanging on a chair and made of it, in the darkness, a monster come to eat him up. He sighed. “Thank you, Malden,” he said. “I…I feel foolish.”
“There is never anything foolish, sire, about the man who seeks help. But there is plenty of foolishness in the man who does not.”
Matt nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll leave you now. I apologize again for interrupting your night.” He opened the door then paused. “May you sleep well.”
“May we both, Majesty,” the old man said, bowing his head.
Matt gave the man a weary smile and left.
He passed several servants and guardsmen in the castle hallways—more of both than he normally would have. Since the murder of the serving girl, servants had been set to working in pairs, and the guard patrols within the castle had been doubled, both at Commander Malex’s suggestion.
None of those he passed seemed to think anything odd of Matt being out at so late an hour, only bowing as he passed. But then, w hy should they? After all, Matt had spent many of the last nights wandering the hallways when the nightmares drove him from his bed. He’d told himself, at such times, that he had risen because he needed to tend to the needs of his body or because he already felt well-rested from sleep but neither of those things were true, and he knew it.
The truth was, on those early mornings or late nights, he had not risen from his bed—he had fled from it. Fled from the unclear images he could ill-define from his nightmares, images that seemed to fade and vanish even as he tried to examine them, leaving only a vague color in their place, a lambent emerald that flashed in his mind from time to time, an impression of it, this all-consuming green, driving into him, through him. That and one other thing.
A steady, rhythmic beating, as if the beating of some great heart. A beating that had seemed to come from inside him, that had seemed to shake his body, his soul.
But it was nothing. He knew that now. As Malden had said, such night terrors might be caused by any number of things, chief among them stress. And if anyone had reason to be stressed, who better than the king who had sent his father and uncle on a suicide mission to the Black Wood, who had been visited, only days ago, by an assassin coming to his room and, before that, been possessed by a Fey creature?
Oh yes, there were plenty of things over which he might worry, plenty of things that might turn his dreams into nightmares. So he told himself to relax, that the tea would work as the healer said it would. He was still telling himself as much when he reached his quarters and the two guards stationed outside bowed.
“Majesty,” they said in unison.
“Vorrun,” Matt said, offering one of the men a smile, for they had become well acquainted over the last week. “How are the children?”
“As much hellions now as ever, Majesty,” the man said, grinning. “Thanks for asking.”
“Of course.” Matt turned to the other guard. “And Blake? The new wife? Everything is well, I hope?”
The man nodded. “Of course, Your Grace. My Addy, she’s mad at me just now, but I’ll sort it out.”
“I hope so,” Matt said. “My mother, she used to tell me that I would be alright in marriage, just so long as I understood that my wife was always right. Even when she’s wrong.”
The two laughed. “I’m just now startin’ to learn that myself, Majesty.”
Vorrun, the older of the two, sighed, shaking his head. “I been tryin’ to tell ‘em but some folks got to leap headfirst into the fire ‘fore they decide it’s hot.”
Matt laughed. “Well, you two have a goodnight.”
“You too, sire,” Vorrun said. “Sleep well.”
Here’s to hoping, Matt thought as he walked through the door, closing it behind him, but the truth was he felt better. Speaking with Malden had done much to allay his concerns and what little had remained had largely been brushed away by his brief conversation with the two guardsmen. Malden was right. Sometimes, the dark could play tricks on people, that was all. In the night, in the stillness, it seemed anything was possible, that the shadows could move, that they had teeth.
But it was just a child’s fancy, nothing more, one which he was far too old to entertain. He fixed the tea according to the healer’s instructions, then drank. It tasted better than he had expected and soon he was finished, lying back down in his bed.
His eyelids were heavy, and so he closed them. Malden had told him that the fear he felt upon waking was only a fear of the unknown, the same fear a man might feel upon hearing a branch fall when wandering through a dark wood. An innocuous sound but without being able to see it, to know it for what it was, he might imagine it was anything. The footfalls of some monster come to claim him, perhaps.
But it was only a branch, only a sound.
It was only the darkness.
So he told himself, as he lay there, his breathing slowing, feeling as if he were slowly sinking into the bed by degrees as the tea took hold.
And then, in minutes, he slept.
And in his sleep…
He dreamed.
He felt as if he floated, as if he was being carried along by some invisible tether, dragged through the star-lit darkness of the sky. On and on he went.
Beneath him, so far beneath him as to appear like little more than toys, were cities and villages, homes and people. All those people of the Known Lands, it seemed to him.
And then whatever force pulled at him tugged him farther, beyond the Known Lands, where the great expanse of the Black Wood seemed to stretch on forever, into the horizon and beyond it. Great sentinels of trees, their shadowed limbs reaching out as if clawing at the world, meaning to tear and rend it. And somewhere, from up ahead, there was a sound.
A beating.
A beating like that of some great monstrous heart in a cavernous chest, one of a size with the wood itself.
Thump.
A beating so powerful it seemed to shake his very being, inside and out as he was dragged farther into the wood.
Thump.
Each beat was louder than the last as he drew nearer to the source of that thundering, earth-shaking beating.
Thump.
As he sailed farther through the sky, he began to think that it was the beating that pulled him after all. That great heart. He could not see it, but he felt from the sound that he must see it soon. It had to lie somewhere near, up ahead beyond the trees or in the mist that seemed to cover the ground beneath their canopies, blocking it from view.
He was carried onward.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Faster now, a staccato rhythm, so powerful he felt as if he would be torn apart, that he would surely burst into thousands of pieces, each piece carried away like fallen leaves in a high wind.
Just when he thought he could take no more, just when he was sure that the invisible force that pulled at him would indeed rip him apart, that it meant to rip him apart…
Silence.
A silence that, following that thundering beat, felt deafening. He was being pulled forward no longer but left to hover high in the sky. It was beautiful up there. High enough that the problems of man and beast were as nothing. High enough that the stars shined like great lanterns in the firmament, and the air was crisp and clean. High enough that, for a moment, he was able to forget about everything.
He forgot his fears, his worries, and his shames. Forgot, too, his obligations, his desires, his dreams. There was nothing but him and the darkness and the stars. Even the Black Wood, at this distance, lost much of its menace.
As he hovered there for what might have been minutes or weeks or years, he forgot even himself. At least in so much as he might have considered himself separate, apart from everything. He was not separate—he was part. He was everything, and, at the same time, he was nothing. There was something very freeing, very comforting about that.
He even found himself smiling, and the stars seemed to twinkle brighter, smiling with him.
That was when he moved.
Abruptly, he was hovering no longer—he was falling. Plummeting through the air, yet there was no sound, and he did not feel the wind rushing by his face. Felt nothing at all. He screamed, but he could not hear it. There was only the silence and him.
Not a part of everything after all but only him, or at least if he were a part then he was a part cast off, discarded as if of no worth.
He fell…and he fell…and he fell.
And then, suddenly, he fell no longer.
He froze in the air a hundred feet above the midnight canopy of the Black Wood. And then whatever force had propelled him pulled him forward, slowly now, and while the tops of the trees, coupled with the mist, blocked most of the forest floor from view, he caught snatches of it here and there. And in those brief spots, he saw movement.
Creatures of all sorts and sizes, some as large as houses he’d seen, stalked through the forest beneath him. None seemed to mark his passage above their heads, yet despite that, despite the fact that he hovered a hundred feet above them, far out of their reach, Matt felt a wave of revulsion and fear pass through him.
