Shaman's Crossing (The Soldier Son Trilogy #1)

There was a very long silence. Then she spoke in a voice cold with outrage. “I see. You gave our son’s welfare into the keeping of a vicious savage so that Nevare would learn that his father did not always know what was best for him. Well. I have learned that lesson tonight. It is a pity that Nevare did not learn that lesson much earlier.”

It was the cruelest thing I’d ever heard my mother say to my father. I had never even imagined they had such conversations as this.

“Perhaps you are right. In which case he would not have survived long as a soldier anyway.” Never had I heard my father’s voice so cold. Yet there was sorrow in his words. Did I hear guilt there as well? I could not abide that my father perhaps felt guilt over what had befallen me. I tried to speak, failed, and then tried to shift my hands. I could not, but I could move them back and forth on my bedding. I felt my fingers scratch shallowly against the linens of my bed. That wasn’t enough. I drew a deeper breath, braced myself for a great effort, and lifted my right hand. I trembled with the effort, but I held it up.

I heard my mother gasp my name, but it was my father’s rough hand that gripped my bandaged fingers. I had not understood that even my hands were wrapped in lint bandages until I felt his fingers close around mine. “Nevare. Listen to me.” He spoke very loudly and clearly, as if I stood at a far distance from him. “You’re home now. You’re safe. You’re going to be all right. Don’t try to do anything just now. Do you want water? Squeeze my hand if you want water.”

I managed a feeble compression and a short time later a cool glass was held to my mouth. My lips were swollen and stiff; I drank with difficulty, soaking the bandages on my chin, and then was returned to my pillows, where I sank into a deep sleep once more.

Later I would learn that I had been returned to my mother’s house with a fresh notch cut deeply into my ear beside the first one for my disobedience, just as Dewara had promised. But that was not all he had done to me as I lay helpless. The barking of the dogs alerted my father that someone was approaching his manor house in the slight coolness of the early dawn. The taldi mare had hauled me up to my father’s doorstep on a crude travois made of brushwood. My clothes were in tatters, and some parts of me scraped to meat, for the rough conveyance had not completely protected me from being dragged against the ground. The exposed parts of my body were burned past blistering by exposure to the sun. At first glance, my father thought I was dead.

Dewara himself did not approach the house, but sat his mount at a distance in the dimness. When my father and his men came out into the yard to see what the disturbance was, Dewara lifted a long gun and shot Keeksha through the chest. As she screamed, sank to her knees, and rolled to her side, he turned his taldi’s head and galloped away. No one followed him, for their first concern was to get my unresponsive body clear of her dying kicks. Other than my doubly notched ear and the slaughtered taldi, Dewara left no message for my father. I was later to learn that he either never returned to the Kidona or that his people concealed him and refused to surrender him to Gernian justice. His possession of a firearm was, by itself, a hanging offense for one of his folk. That he showed it so blatantly still makes me wonder if it was an act of defiance or one that invited his own death at my father’s hands.

My injuries were numerous, though only one appeared life-threatening. I was dehydrated and burned from exposure to the summer sun, and rubbed raw from being dragged home. My ear had been freshly notched and was oozing thick blood when my father received me. A patch of scalp the size of a coin was missing from the crown of my head. The doctor summoned by my father shook his head after examining me. “Whatever is wrong with him, other than the burns and gouges, is beyond my skill. Perhaps he took a sharp blow to the skull. That may be the reason for his coma. I cannot tell. We will have to wait. In the meantime, we will do what we can for his other injuries.” And so he picked gravel and dirt from my wounds, suturing and binding as he went, until I looked like a mended rag doll.

I come from a thick-skinned and hardy folk, my father said. Healing was painful and slow, but once I awakened from my long unconsciousness, heal I did. My mother insisted that my body be kept well greased to keep air away from my burns. It did serve to keep my fingers from sticking together as the old skin sloughed off to reveal raw pink newness beneath, but lying on greased linen when every inch of my body’s surface stung was a sensation I have never forgotten. The pungent agu kept most infection at bay, but left a reek that lingered in my bedchamber for weeks afterward. The wound on my scalp healed over, but no hair grew there.