Why had he ever left the road?

Excuses sprang to mind at once, but he swept them away with a deep breath of sweet, clean air. You could hardly call this a path. It was more a game trail that threaded along the riverbank. Several times, Charlot had to utter withering words to pass at all. All was as it should be.

The red mist thistles were in bloom and their tiny crimson petals had the look of silver when the sun caught them. The brilliant red briars lined the trail, filling the air with the scent of singed roses. As Charlot strolled past the smell lured him into a favorite memory.

He remembered a girl with coppery hair and blue eyes walking along a path with him as he named the plants, and she repeated each after him. No matter how she tried, she could not pronounce mist thistle. The best she could manage was “missile.”

He hadn’t laughed at her, but he must have raised an eyebrow or perhaps turned the corner of his mouth, because she flew into a fury, slapping him and shouting. He’d had to grab her by both wrists, and then she’d kissed him, taking him completely by surprise.

He’d taken her there, in the shade of the mist thistle tree, her copper hair splayed upon a bed of emerald segen moss. Her blue eyes were astonished as he slipped into her. She never looked away. He remembered her sinking into the damp earth as they coupled, and when it was finished, they were both covered in bits of fragrant green moss.

It was his first time, but it surely wasn’t hers. They’d held hands as they walked back to town. Unsure what to do, Charlot had spoken the name of a plant, but she did not repeat it. So, they walked in silence the rest of the way. With every step, he hung between joy and uncertainty as if he strode upon the lip of a ravine.

At the edge of the fence, he’d kissed her, and she kissed him back. He’d wanted to ask her to meet again, but the words would not come. She smiled at him, and it sunk in and pierced his heart, sure as a dagger slipping between his ribs. She walked along the path to her farm and hadn’t looked back.

That was long, long ago. Standing now on the river road that ran along the Cormorbo, Charlot tried to remember the name of the girl, but he could not. There were so many other memories tied to it, ones he didn’t want to recall, but it was too late now.

Most of all, he could remember that she hadn’t been ashamed or embarrassed afterward. She carried what they’d done like a jewel in her pocket. He could see it only for a moment, shining behind her secret smile, in the subtle languor as she tilted her head. There was some mystery she knew, and he wanted it for his own, wanted to be that light and free. But there were no more walks in the forest, no more kisses. For that was the eve of the razing.

Charlot was born in Berel, a village that had once sat a hundred and fifty leagues northwest of Yarlsbeth on the banks of Ruddy Run. The river was a different color of muddy in spring, summer, and fall. In the winter, it froze into a line of white ice.

There was little trade, farming was hard, and winters were brutal. Still, Berel’s greatest asset was its remoteness. No one else wanted to take the land from them. The hamlet was far from the warpath of the Wyrth legions that raged south along the coast, sacking any town that could be sighted from shore.

It was far enough from Yarlsbeth that no tax collectors or army conscriptrs ever came through. The endless wars of the southern provinces and northern tribes never quite reached them. Before that night, Charlot had never seen a man slain or even a sword drawn in anger.

Yet, war finds its way in, no matter the distance or the walls built against it. The day after he loved the girl with the copper hair on a bed of emerald moss, Charlot thought himself a man. He ignored his morning chores and slipped off into the woods, spending long hours weaving a wreath of mist thistle.

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Even as a gangly youth, Charlot had an artificer’s care. This was no clumsy gesture but a tightly braided, perfectly executed wreath that might have been the work of the best weaver in town. He’d arranged the needles by color from lightest to darkest, so there was a subtle gradient radiating out from brilliant crimson at the center to a dark currant at the fringe. His hands were scratched and swollen from the stinging sap, but he carried his work with great pride, certain his craftsmanship could win her heart.

Charlot was a league away when he smelled the smoke. He ran up the winding path, worried someone’s barn had caught fire. Through the trees, he spied a great plume of black smoke rising from the village, and when the wind shifted toward him, it carried a wretched stench. Soon he would learn it was burning flesh.

Charlot never dropped the wreath as he ran up the hill to the ruins of Berel, and he clutched it tightly as he surveyed the destruction. The thorns dug into his hands so deeply that he bled, but he could not feel them. The village was gone, utterly annihilated.

Every building had been put to the torch. Most were nothing but blackened timbers and rubble. The thatch roofs and wood-slat walls had all burnt up. He barely recognized any of it. The midwife’s house where he’d been born had collapsed. Only a single center-beam stood smoldering like a brand.

The longhouse, where men played roke and bawled with laughter in the evenings, was just an uneven wall of shattered stone that had collapsed in segments where the mortar had burnt and burst. There were no voices, no animal sounds, and even the birds were silent. He heard only the crack of smoldering flames.

When he tried to recall the day, it was as if the haze surrounding the town had seeped into his skull to fog his memories. He could remember darting from body to body in the ashes looking for the girl, for his father, for his friends. In those bloody ruins, he found he could not distinguish one burned body from another–they scarcely looked human.

The dead were all headless, that was how he knew it was the Wyrth Legion. When they sacked a town, they decapitated everyone and carried their skulls back to Urth’Wyrth in sacks, sacrificing them to the volcano.

He never found the girl. He did not know if she had been taken or killed, or if he should pray for one outcome over the other. His eyes were so filled with tears and smoke that he could barely see. He staggered about the village, turning over bodies, shutting his eyes again and again, unable to wake from the nightmare.

Charlot found his father’s body in the town square, beheaded like the rest, but Charlot recognized the tattoos and missing finger on his left hand. The old man had gone down fighting–lying with him were two legionnaires whose armor had been melted into slag and fused together. Their heads were gone, too. Urth’Wyrth cared not where his sacrifices came from.

Charlot’s father had enough wounds to kill a bear, but Charlot remembered screaming at the body, demanding to know why the old man hadn’t stopped this, why he hadn’t seen it coming.

“WHY WERE YOU SO WEAK?” he’d screamed and, of course, the dead man could not answer him. He’d thrown the wreath at his father’s headless body and fled, running back to the woods, wailing until he could barely breathe.

For weeks after that, his only memories were disconnected flashes of being alone in the wilderness, scavenging for food, weeping inconsolably. Something in him had broken, and it had taken a long time to heal. He’d finally emerged from the woods skinny and covered in insect bites, wild as a badger, stumbling onto the cabin of two outcast Yarlee woodsmen.

It was a miracle they hadn’t killed him. He was so crazed that they had to tie him up in their smoking shed and coax him back to humanity with bits of food, like he was a stray dog. Of course, their motives were anything but pure.

The memories that followed were unpleasant ones, and he shook his head, willing them to go away. He blinked, realizing he’d been stumbling along for better than an hour, totally lost in thought! Lucky he hadn’t walked right into the river. It would have served him right for being a sentimental old fool. After all the years that had passed, all the power and wealth he’d gained, he was still defenseless against the scent of a simple flowering vine

Then, he saw a cloaked man in the brushes with a bow drawn, just a few paces away from him. For an instant, Charlot’s eyes were locked on the man’s face. The ambusher had a wicked scar like a second eyebrow above his left eye. The moment broke, and Charlot jammed his hand into the pocket of his robe, sliding on Nemonullus. Where he should have had a spell ready, there was only the name of the girl from so long ago.

“Brandylaine.”

The ambusher let his arrow fly.