Song Of Mornius Read online

  Song of Mornius

  Book One of The Talenkai Chronicles

  Diane E. Steinbach

  Dedication

  With love to my mother, Jeanette E. Steinbach, for her unfailing belief in me, to my Aunt Eve and Uncle Warren Luy for their encouragement, to Lynne Haase Shanholtzer for her devoted friendship and support, and to the wordsmiths Judy, Doranna, Damon, Kit, Jo, Elenora, Susan, Hannah, and Esther for their advice along the way.

  And to you, Stephen R. Donaldson, for inspiring me to write in the first place.

  In memory of the real Justin Tinsley, who wowed us all with his spirit, his courage, and his smile.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank my content editor, Dr. Debra Doyle, Ph.D, also my line and copy editor, Judith Tarr, as well as editors Bethany Pennypacker, Starshadow, and Elizabeth Wright for helping me to make my first novel shine. Thanks also to the talented artist, Jason Moser (cover art and interior illustrations—maverickdesignworks.com), and to Paul D. Hoffmaster III (back cover photo) and Jeremy S. Bancroft (artistic input) for their advice and support.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  DAZED, GAELIN EXAMINED his hands. His knees were folded to the side where he sat, the red pool widening across the floor. He slanted his gaze to the ax on his lap, the rivulets of blood sliding along the edge of the weapon he cradled.

  The silence dragged out while he gaped at the wreckage his fury had made in the little room. A shaft of dusty light from the cabin’s tiny window flooded in above him, brightening as the morning sun climbed to breach the mountain.

  “Gaelin, run!” the ringing voice repeated inside his head.

  With painful stiffness, he braced the ax’s head on the floorboards and pushed, drawing his body into a crouch over its wooden handle. He stood, swaying as he lurched to the blood-spattered door.

  “Run,” he told himself, his fingers fumbling to release the latch. “Move. Do it! Run.”

  The wind struck his face as he hurried out, the chill air clearing his thoughts. He blinked, dazzled by the dawn’s white brilliance on the frosty ground. Dragging the ax, he stumbled from the dwelling his stepfather had taken by force, to thrust himself toward the remains of the barn.

  Reaching the heap of rotted boards, he squatted beneath the sagging entrance, rounding his shoulder to avoid two of the five nails he had not been able to bend.

  He saw his bed, a long cattle-feed trough he had filled with leaves and straw, sitting against a wall below the cracked rafters. “I need you, Father,” he called. The ax thumped the soggy floor as he knelt next to his nest to frantically dig through the debris within. “I can’t do this alone!”

  “Run!” said the voice again in his mind, and Gaelin nodded, grasping at last the highly polished wood of his staff. He yanked it from the moldering straw, raising its heavy crown to keep its bluish gem from the floor.

  “No one can take you from me, now,” he addressed it, recalling how his mother had told him the heirloom’s name the day she had died. “Mornius,” he repeated, stroking the iron talons encasing the stone. His head bowed, he hunched over his knees, his matted hair swinging to cover his face. “I can’t believe I murdered him! I’m—”

  “Trust me in this, Gaelin,” the voice in his head interjected, “you must run.”

  For a moment longer, he hugged the staff, mesmerized as he peered into the depths of its multicolored crystal. How many times had he slept on his makeshift bed, transfixed by a sliver of moonlight through the splinters above him? He had heard the staff then, too, which had been his only friend, speaking to him in the dead of night to instruct him about the world.

  “Father,” he said to the staff Mornius’s mysterious occupant, and not for the first time. “I need you with me.”

  “I am,” the voice avowed through the turmoil of his thoughts, and Gaelin lifted his head. He raised his staff, braced it in front of his knees, and stood.

  “Where shall I go?” he asked the jutting timbers, the flattened half of the ancient barn where the structure had struck the trees, ending its long-ago plummet from the sky. He frowned as he glanced at his blood-soaked gray tunic and worn leggings, the only clothing he possessed to protect him from the cold.

  There was the beaver cloak above the trapdoor leading to the cellar, he recalled, and his stepfather’s woolen hat. To get at them, he would have to reenter the little house and walk across its floor. I can’t go back in there, he thought wildly. I won’t be able to— He gulped as he envisioned himself tripping to land on something soft and still horribly warm.

  Gaelin ducked low to exit the barn and trudged the way he had come, clenching the ax’s gory haft in his right hand as he gripped Mornius in his other. He faltered as he neared the eerie silence of the ramshackle cabin, his knees threatening to buckle.

  Arriving at the front window, he stopped short. With a grimace, he rubbed his itchy chin along the collar of his tunic—to scrape the drying blood from his beard. He caught a salty tang, and tilting his neck, he heard it—a faint buzzing of insects from beneath the door.

  He staggered back, the cabin and barn spinning around him as he flung aside the ax. Then he bolted, sprinting past the woodpile and into the forest, pelting as hard as he could. Down the steep slopes he ran, sliding and leaping below the stunted bluebark trees and into the moaning wind, desperate to escape the scene of his crime, the site of Seth Lavahl’s murder.

  His lungs burned in his chest, and still he pushed on, thrashing through clove-leaf, the plants staining his sleeves purple. A tree root tripped him, snagging the toe of his boot. With a yell, he pitched forward, rolling to land on the crinkly leaves with his legs spread. Through a haze of fatigue, he studied the trail in front of him sinking out of sight into the undergrowth below, a narrow track stamped out by deer.

  Gingerly he massaged the base of his thumb, feeling ag
ain the ax’s splintered handle against his palm. He raised his knees to his chest, light pulsing from his staff beside his feet, flashing out from Mornius’s gem.

  As his breathing steadied, he peered through the boughs overhead, squinting at the sun’s blur above the trees.

  I’ll never have to see it again. He glowered at the thought of the cabin that had been his prison, the only building he had known, other than the barn, for nineteen years. As if from a distance, he heard the pulse of Mornius’s power rustle the leaves and then felt the heat of the staff’s fire reach his spine, the magic’s bluish tendrils clearing his sight. The sensation was familiar. Not too much, he reminded the spirit in his staff. Or you’ll make me ill.

  Reaching out, he caught Mornius’s wooden shaft and shook it once to quell its fire, grunting with satisfaction at the strength in his arm. He had worked hard to prepare for this, to build up his body to escape from Seth Lavahl and have the chance for a normal life.

  “To get away,” he said, “not kill! Why didn’t I flee after he fell? I could have just run!”

  He scowled at the path before him. “Now I deserve to die,” he said, eyeing the winding track that no longer promised freedom for him, but death. “I killed someone!”

  He shifted to his knees. His staff’s iron-shod heel rang hollow on the trail, reminding him how close winter was. With a shuddering sigh, he lurched to his feet and once more ventured downward, and as the byway sloped sharply to the right, gravity hurried him faster, thrusting him blundering and out of control through the fern-stalks.

  He groaned in relief when at last the grade leveled out, and then spied a drop-off to his right with a jagged line of treetops jutting up from below. “There should be a trail down there leading to Kideren.” He shivered. “With its people and . . .”

  Rubbing at his forehead, he hastened across a narrow meadow, slowing as he sloshed his way through a frigid stream. He breathed deeply, struggling to remember a conversation from a summer ago with Delbert, his eldest stepbrother. After Delbert and his younger sibling, Jax, had rebelled against their overbearing father, Gaelin had approached the older boy.

  “What’s it like to live in a town?” Gaelin had asked, and to his surprise, Delbert had responded.

  “Kideren’s people,” Gaelin whispered to the brooding trees, his brow furrowed as he recalled Delbert’s description. “Governed by”—he paused, fighting to recollect—“Enforcers . . .”

  He toppled back, his shoulders colliding with a low-hanging branch. In his mind, he saw figures in black flowing garments cluster around him, their features resembling his stepfather’s, all of them pointing at his face, their furious cries demanding justice.

  “I deserve it,” he said to the gemstone in his staff. “However they decide to punish me, you will allow them!”

  He broke once more into a jog as the sun reached its zenith above, turning his thoughts to more pleasant things as he descended the narrow path—the year he had spent plotting to break out and his efforts to improve his endurance. The constant chores were not enough. He had forced himself to race up the steep mountain, to run and jump carrying armloads of wood.

  It’s my fault she died, he thought as he remembered his mother. If I hadn’t been born, she’d still be alive!

  Gaelin halted to position the staff, bracing its heel on the ground below him while he climbed down a rocky protrusion. He grimaced, recalling himself at eight years old, meeting Sareh, his mother, for the final time in the barn’s concealing shadow. Never would he forget her tears as she gave him the heavy staff.

  “This was Garrick’s,” Sareh had said, stroking his hair and holding him close, “the father you never knew. He never fought with this, Gaelin, but your great-grandfather’s father did. Mornius—that’s its name. I kept it hidden for you in the ravine.

  “Gaelin, Seth knows!” she had warned him. “I don’t know how, but you must hide this again before he sees it. No matter what happens, never let that bastard or his sons near it. Promise me!”

  Gaelin started as the drumming rain brought him back to himself, and the growing awareness of how far he had traveled. He jerked to a stop, glimpsing above the treetops the swollen black clouds, their edges tinted orange by the setting sun. Peering through the misty boughs in front of him, he spotted blocky shapes in the twilight. Kideren! he thought. It has to be!

  As he squatted behind his staff, he gasped when three rain-blurred figures briefly appeared, sloshing through the mud as they crossed between the two closest buildings.

  Fear locked him in place. Then the deluge’s chill reached his bones, forcing him at last into motion. His muscles quaking, he ventured through slimy puddles and over a narrow path of stone to press his palm against the rear of the nearest building.

  Again he froze, gaping at the traces of red on his fingers, at his scarred wrists, and the clove-leaf’s magenta stains on his tunic’s gray sleeves. At least the blood’s washing away, he thought, glancing at his soaked-through clothes. But not fast enough. I look like a killer.

  He cringed as the water pelted his shoulders and head and trickled down his back. Cautiously he crept around the side of the building, collapsing at the base of its checkered green-and-white front.

  The citizens of Kideren veered from the stony path, preferring to splash through the muck as they passed him by. Their gazes were averted, shielded from the sight of him helpless in the storm. With a soft groan, he sank onto his rump on the drenched stones, hunching forward to hug his knees.

  He cowered when a man in leather armor loomed before him and knelt down, his wide belt creaking. Gaelin, turning his face from the stranger’s concern, focused on his elbows where they rested on his knees, and on the pinkish rain sluicing over his wrists. Without delay the stranger gave him a tap.

  “Hard times in Kideren, aren’t they?” the man called, his voice projected over the storm.

  Gaelin slanted his gaze at the man’s gentle expression and then ducked his head. He studied the bruise on his thumb, the pale white gleam of his knuckles beneath his freckled skin.

  “You’ll freeze out here!” The man bent close, water trickling in rivulets along the boiled hide of his armor. “It’s getting dark. Why aren’t you home?”

  “I don’t have . . .” Gaelin thumped his soggy shoulders against the building. “I’m not from—”

  “What’s this you’re covered with?” the man interrupted, catching the tainted rainwater dripping from Gaelin’s sleeve in his palm.

  “Blood,” the man said, sniffing what he held. He tipped his hand, flicking the red-tinged liquid onto the stones. “What happened to you? I see bruises, but where are you bleeding?”

  Gaelin glanced up, forcing himself to meet the stranger’s regard. “Seth Lavahl,” he said over the hissing rain. “I was trying to escape! He wanted to kill me!”

  The stranger frowned and leaned closer. “Kill you? Lavahl’s just a drunk. Mean, yes, but I can’t imagine he would—”

  “He kept me on Mount Desheya! He killed my father and stole his cabin . . . forced my mother to be his slave! He killed her!”

  Bending down, the stranger probed Gaelin’s shattered cheekbone. “You’re talking about the smith, am I right?” he asked. “I had no idea he had a stepson.”

  Eyes closed, Gaelin nodded.

  “Why would Lavahl kill your mother? Or you, for that matter?”

  Shifting uneasily, Gaelin wrung his hands. “I tried to escape; that’s why. When he cornered me, I grabbed what I could—the ax he had left on the table.”

  Gaelin grunted as, quick as a blink, the man snatched up his wrist, then pushed back the dripping sleeve of his tunic. At the stranger’s touch, he shuddered, watching how the man traced the jagged scars marring his skin. “Years,” said the stranger, his quiet voice barely audible, and Gaelin, feeling his face go hot, jerked free.

  “Please. I must see the Enforcers. I left him dead on the floor! I can’t return to that . . . place.”

  “We’ll so
rt it out later,” the man replied. “Get up, now. You’ll catch your death, sitting here!”

  Arms, firm and gentle, raised him to his feet. Gaelin tottered, but the larger man supported and turned him, after which they shambled like comrades through the rain.

  Chapter 2

  THE PERSISTENT RAPPING of knuckles on the wooden surface before him jerked up Gaelin’s head. Bewildered, he peered through a haze of exhaustion at the man seated opposite him across the little table, a man in his early thirties, he guessed, who had been kind enough to rescue him from the rain.

  “I said,” repeated the stranger, with an air of dwindling patience, “I’m Terrek Florne, son of Lucian. My father owns Vale Horse, the Stonebrook Dale ranch. We’re south of Kideren. You can see the border of our land through the trees beyond the city. And you are?”

  Gaelin gripped his staff, tipping it to vertical as he strove to meet his companion’s forthright gaze. Again his weary mind reeled, pulling him out of the present to show him what he had done—how his stepfather had tried to run after flinging the chair at him and how he had leapt to pursue and kill the older man.

  In his mind, he saw Seth Lavahl toppling onto his stomach and dragging his body through a swath of his own blood. Gaelin remembered standing over the dying man, his arms rising and falling, the warm red fluid splashing his neck, the sound of splintering bone in his ears.

  “You are?” the stranger repeated.

  Gaelin focused again on the other’s bearded face. “Lavahl. Gae . . . lin,” he said. After years of being called “runt” or “it,” he had left his real name far away, in another time.

  He risked a furtive glance at the steaming bowl before him, his stomach twisting into knots as he leaned back, staring at his lap. He studied the bruise on the hand he held out of sight under the table. He could almost feel the ax’s haft in his grasp, the weight of the weapon lending momentum to his strokes.

  With a shudder, he raised his head, blinking to clear his vision. In the tavern’s amber light, his benefactor’s eyes were hazel, he realized, and not brown, filled with motes of fire, a fierce determination belying his kindness.