"The Thunderbeast chose us both. You need us both." The passionate certainty that flowed in his words as he contradicted the chief was palpable. Kellin felt it as a tingle down her spine. Only Keirkrad dared step forward to confront him.
"Vell," he said, "it is your not your place…"
"Deny Kellin," Vell said, "and you shall not have me either."
"Do we need you?" asked Keirkrad, limping up to Vell.
"The Thunderbeast never decreed for you to come along into the High Forest."
"Nor did the beast ask for you," Vell shot back. Gasps were heard from the Uthgardt at this verbal attack on the shaman.
"Fellow warriors were crushed under your feet last night," said Keirkrad. "Tell me, Vell, are we all to fall victim to the powers you cannot control?"
"I need you all," Thluna spat out quickly. "Vell, Keirkrad, and Kellin. All three and no less. This is my last word, and I will hear nothing more of it." Keirkrad made fists of his trembling hands and frowned at Vell as he walked away.
Soon enough, the center of camp was deserted but for Vell and Kellin. She approached the warrior, fighting to steady her own shaking hands as she did so. Why was she feeling this way? she wondered. She sensed that all of the uncertainty and vulnerability she had seen in Vell before was now gone, and she just didn't know who she was talking to.
"Vell," she said, scanning his brown eyes, which were seemingly harder and deeper than before. "I don't know how I can thank you."
"Why thank me?" he demanded. "Thanks to me, you may die, for a cause you don't believe in and a people who don't want your help. I've helped make that happen." His voice was thick with bitterness.
"I've made my own choices," Kellin said. "Vell, what happened? Do you remember anything… anything from your transformation?"
"Not much. Like a dream mostly forgotten, or a night lost to mead." Vell shook his head. "I don't think I'd like to remember more. I wasn't Vell any longer. I was something else, to whom my life as a man was nothing but a shadow of a memory. I don't even know how I found my way back home."
Kellin reached out and clutched at his hand. He instinctively pulled away, but then let her take it.
"You did the right thing. You fought for your tribe," Kellin said.
"And so shall I again," said Vell. "This is the Thunderbeast's price. It is ransoming my own soul. That's how it is assured of my service."
"Is that really how you see it?" asked Kellin. She saw a flicker of uncertainty in Vell, and this pleased her. He did not wear his dark cynicism well.
Vell's muscles tensed. "Keirkrad is right. I killed some of my own people last night-Thunderbeasts are dead by my actions."
"The blame is with the wizard who knocked them unconscious. Would not those warriors have laid down their lives to protect Sungar? That's exactly what they did.
"I can't pretend to know what you're feeling," she continued, "but I too have felt things inside me that were beyond my control. When I was a child, I felt magic flowing through me in search of an exit. To stay sane and become who I am, I needed to understand it, tame it, and make it part of myself."
"Then you're what the outside tongue calls a sorcerer?" Vell asked. "Such children have been born into our tribe in times past. They were left to die in the Lurkwood." Kellin twitched. "I don't think that was right," Vell hastily added.
"But that would have happened if I had been born into your tribe," Kellin asserted.
"Yes. You would have been deemed impure and too dangerous to live."
"Is that much different from the way things are now?"
Vell looked around the camp, where suspicious eyes ducked and hid from his accusatory gaze.
"They rejected you," he said. "You came from a world away to help, and they spurned you. Perhaps they don't deserve salvation."
"Vell!" protested Kellin. "These are your people. I wouldn't have come here if I thought that about them."
"Why did you come?" asked Vell. "I still cannot fathom it."
"What reason would suffice?" Kellin said, asking herself as much as Vell.
"Might it have to do with your father?" Vell asked.
"Most assuredly," Kellin replied. "But not in a way you might think. I never knew him as well as I wanted to, and now I've followed his ways and gone several steps beyond the path he trod. He revered your tribe above all the others. I remember so vividly the stories he told me of his time in Grunwald."
"And you won't have any such stories to tell," Vell said sadly.
"Maybe not." Her smile awakened all the dark beauty of her face. "But somehow I'm not upset to be here. In the end, I wonder if I will gain more understanding than he ever dreamed of."
Vell stood silently, then he finally allowed himself a smile. "I look forward to counting you as my companion, Kellin Lyme."
His formality brought a broad, open laugh from Kellin, and she repeated it.
"And I, you, Vell the Brown." As they parted in the fading light, each of them felt a bit stronger and a bit more certain about the task to follow.
CHAPTER 6
Sungar awoke in the dark, with the stench of human waste assaulting his nostrils. He hurt worse than from any beating he had ever taken. His flesh was ripped and torn, his ribs ached, and his mouth was dry and filled with the acrid taste of blood. The only light he could see was the flicker of a torch somewhere down the hall, its light dancing on the thick steel bars of his cage. His cell looked out on the featureless walls of a passageway.
Yet somehow, he found the strength to rage. He rose to his feet, let out a hoarse war cry, and assailed the walls and bars with his fists and feet. If anything had been near enough to smash, he would have demolished it as he vented his rage, but there was nothing, and so he slammed his weight against the bars again and again, challenging his unseen captors to come and confront him.
As his energy left him, and he collapsed into a defeated heap in his cell, it occurred to him that the bars survive the prisoner much more readily than the prisoner survives the bars.
Only a small shower of pebbles broke free from the walls where he had battered them. Sungar reached out to gather them up in his weak hands.
"If yer finished," came a whispered voice, "I'd like to welcome you. If you can call it a welcome." The voice was low and gruff and came from the cell next to Sungar's.
Sungar could barely speak-his throat was parched, his energy sapped. He leaned against the stone wall.
"Where is this?" Sungar asked.
"We're residents of the Lord's Keep. Dignitaries and other important folks guesting in Llorkh get to stay in the Lord's Keep, and so do we. I'm guessin' their rooms are nicer."
"Llorkh," repeated Sungar. "Where is Llorkh?"
"You don't know it?" said the voice. "Then I really can't imagine what yer in here for. Just who are you?"
"Who are you?" demanded Sungar.
"I'm Hurd Hardhalberd. Who are you?"
"You're a dwarf," Sungar said.
"Excellent guess," said Hurd. "And now it'd be polite to give me yer name in return."
"Sungar. Of the Thunderbeast tribe."
"Thunderbeast?" the dwarf said in surprise. "Uthgardt?" He took Sungar's silence as confirmation. "I used to meet with your people when I worked up in Mirabar. Bought yer timber now and again."
"Are we near Mirabar now?"
"No," Hurd told him. "I guess you don't get to look at maps very often. Llorkh's well on the other side of the North, nestled pleasantly among the Graypeaks like an open wound oozing Zhentarim corruption throughout Delimbiyr Vale. We're south and east of the High Forest, if that means more to you."