indithar · chronicles of a bleeding world · book one

Chapter One — What Was Left Behind

Dwight came to Helmsdal at low tide, seventeen years too late.

He had walked the last stretch alone. The road from Aldenmark could be ridden in a single day, but he had left the horse behind. He did not want to ride into the village on a horse that was better than any horse anyone in Helmsdal had ever owned. It would have been the wrong kind of homecoming.

It was the wrong kind of homecoming anyway.

He smelled the village before he saw it. Salt, and smoked fish, and the particular thickness of seaweed drying on the rocks under the sun. Smells he had forgotten he remembered. His mother used to hang kelp on wooden frames outside the kitchen to dry it faster. He wondered if she still did that. He wondered if she still had a kitchen.

Helmsdal lay where it had always lain. A half-moon of low stone houses held to the coastline, the roofs heavy with tar and turf, the windows small to keep the wind out. Behind the village rose the brown hills he had thought were tall when he was a boy. They were not tall. He had seen mountains that made these hills into furrows in a field.

The cemetery sat outside the village on a low rise that faced the sea. He saw the people there before he saw his mother. A small gathering, dark clothes against grey sky. Maybe thirty of them. Fewer than he had expected. He counted again. Fewer than he had hoped.

He stopped at the gate and watched them from a distance.

He did not recognize the faces. That was the first thing that struck him, and it struck him harder than he had braced for. Seventeen years. He had lost track of what that meant. Children he had played with were now men with children of their own. The old people he had greeted as a boy were dead. His brother Aldric — he should be there somewhere, a man in his thirties now — Dwight did not know which of the faces was his.

He found his mother by her posture. She stood a little ahead of the others. She was smaller than he remembered. That could not be right. People did not become smaller. But she was.

He walked across the grass toward her.

His mother turned before he reached her. She looked at him without surprise, as if she had known the whole time he would come at this exact minute. She had her father’s eyes. He had forgotten that. He had forgotten so much.

“Dwight,” she said.

“Mother.”

She did not open her arms. She had never been that kind of woman. She nodded once, briefly, and turned back to the grave. He took his place beside her, and the others made room for him without looking at him. He noticed Aldric standing on the other side of their mother. Aldric had a woman beside him and two small children clinging to her skirts. Aldric met his eye and nodded as well. Then he looked away.

Later, Dwight thought. Not now. Not here.

The man who served as priest in Helmsdal, an old man Dwight did not recognize, spoke a few words about duty and the sea and the man who would now rest in the earth. No words about truth. No words about knowing. Only duty and the sea and the earth. That was right. His grandfather had been a man of duty and the sea and the earth. On the surface.

Dwight looked down into the open grave. The wooden coffin was simple, unsanded oak. His grandfather had built it himself many years ago, his mother told him later. He had made it when Dwight was a boy and then hidden it in the barn until it was needed. “I do not want to burden anyone,” he had said. “I do not want anyone to have to think.”

They lowered the coffin with ropes. The men who held the ropes were young, fishermen with salt-burned hands. They worked with practice. In Helmsdal everyone had done this for someone.

His mother threw the first handful of earth. Then Aldric. Then Dwight. The earth was black and damp and smelled of salt. He stood and looked into the grave and tried to feel something specific. Sorrow, maybe. Or guilt. Seventeen years. There ought to have been something large somewhere inside him.

What rose instead was something quieter and worse. A blankness. A space where the feeling should be. He could not find his grandfather in it. He could find the shape of grief, the outline, the place where grief belonged — but the grief itself was not arriving.

What is wrong with me?

He had asked himself the question before. Many times, in many places. He had no good answer. He never had.

He threw his handful of earth. It fell on the coffin with a soft sound.

Grandfather, he thought. Forgive me. I do not know how to mourn anymore.

The funeral meal was at his mother’s house. He sat at the long table he remembered from childhood and ate fish stew he remembered from childhood and drank the warm honey-brew he remembered from childhood, and he could not make any of it feel real.

Aldric’s wife was named Mara. She spoke little and watched much. She had understood within the first hour that Dwight would not be staying long, and she treated him accordingly — kindly, but at a distance, the way one treats a guest one knows will leave. Aldric himself spoke mostly of practical things. The boat. The weather. Which fish runs had come this season and which had not. He did not mention their father. He did not mention their grandfather. Dwight understood that this was Aldric’s way of not saying other things.

His mother sat at one end of the table, and she watched Dwight more often than she watched anyone else. She did not say much to him. But she watched. It was almost as if she were learning him again — or making sure he was actually there. He met her eyes a few times and smiled small smiles he hoped said I am here, mother, I am here, but he was not certain they did.

It was after the meal, after the village folk had gone home and Aldric had taken his family to their own house at the other end of Helmsdal, that his mother gave him the key.

They were standing in the kitchen. She had begun rinsing the bowls, and he had taken over without asking, because it was the only thing he could think to offer. She wiped her hands on her apron and went to a shelf high up by the chimney, a shelf he remembered as out of reach for boys. She stretched up and took down a small wooden box he had never seen.

“He wanted you to have it,” she said.

She gave him the box. It was light. He opened it. Inside lay a metal key — old, darkened brass, with a strangely shaped shaft that did not look like any key he had seen before. It was not large. It was not ornate. It was only very old and very personal.

“What does it open?” he asked.

His mother shook her head. “He did not say. He meant to. The last days.” She paused. “He had pain. He could not speak much. But he said you were to have it, and that you would understand.”

“And if I do not understand?”

His mother looked at him for a long moment. “Then you have the right not to understand,” she said. “That is what he told me once. That eldest sons always have the choice not to understand. He said he was glad he had understood. But he also said he wished he had not. Both things. At the same time.”

Dwight closed his fingers around the key. It was cool against his skin. Some part of his mind — the part that always worked, that never rested — registered something about the metal, an off-note, a wrongness. He could not name it. He could only feel it the way one feels a draft in a room with closed windows.

He pushed the thought down. Not now, he told himself. Not at her table.

“Where?” he asked.

“In his room. Under the floorboard at the foot of the bed. He showed me once, when he thought he might die sooner than he did. I have never opened it.”

“You have never opened it,” he repeated slowly.

“He said I should not. And I have learned,” she said, “that there are things in this family women are not to open. Not because we cannot. But because the knowing costs something, and the men who came before us decided we should be spared it.” She smiled. It was not a happy smile. “Possibly it is love. Possibly it is cowardice. My mother knew the difference. I have never managed.”

Dwight stood quiet a long time. He wanted to ask her so much. He wanted to ask about his father, his grandfather, all the things that had not been said in this house for as long as he could remember. But he saw her face and understood that she had given him everything she had to give. There was no more. There had perhaps never been more.

“Thank you, mother.”

She nodded once. Then she walked past him and out of the kitchen, and he heard her footsteps climb the stairs to her own room, and the door closed softly behind her.

He stood alone in the kitchen. The key was in his hand. His grandfather’s house was quiet.

He waited until he was certain his mother slept. Then he lit an oil lamp and went up to his grandfather’s room.

The room was small and clean. His grandfather had always kept it clean. A bed, a chair, a chest of clothes as old as the man himself. No books. No papers. No sign of an inner life that any outsider could read.

Dwight set the lamp on the floor at the foot of the bed. He knelt. He ran his fingertips over the floorboards, looking for the loose one.

He found it after a moment. A board that lifted slightly when pressed wrong-way. He pried it loose. Beneath was a hollow in the stone foundation, and in the hollow stood a chest — smaller than he had imagined, no larger than two fists side by side. Dark wood. Brass bands. A single lock.

He lifted it out. It was heavier than its size suggested. He set it on the floor in the lamplight and sat back on his heels and looked at it for a long time.

You do not have to open it, he thought. Mother said so. Eldest sons have the right not to understand.

He sat with the thought. He let it stay there. He tested it.

But he had walked seventeen years to understand things, and it was not in him to leave a locked chest unopened when he held the key. He knew this about himself. He feared it about himself. He put the key in the lock anyway.

It fit.

He turned it. The lock clicked, soft, as if it had been waiting a long time for this exact click.

He opened the lid.

The first thing he saw was a pendant. It lay on top of the papers. A simple chain of the same dark brass as the key, and from the chain hung a sigil — a circle with a mark inside it. He had not seen the mark before. He was certain of that. And yet, looking at it, something in his chest went cold in a way he could not explain.

He held the pendant up to the lamplight. He turned it slowly. The mark was made of three lines, intersecting, none of them straight in a way that any draftsman would have drawn them. It was old work. It was very old work. It did not match anything he had seen in Helmsdal, or in Iron Covenant, or — he searched his memory, the great rooms full of indexed memory he had spent his life building — anywhere else.

He laid the pendant down beside him. Carefully.

Beneath it lay papers. He lifted them out. They were brittle. The top sheet was a family tree, hand-drawn, many generations deep. He could see his own name at the bottom. Dwight, son of Cedric, son of Halren. He could see his father’s name, his grandfather’s name. The line went back — four generations, five, six. And then the ink began to fail. Whole sections were rubbed away, stained, unreadable. He could see fragments of names — …vyr, …thara, Veshk… — names that did not sound like names anyone in Iron Covenant would give a child.

He stared at the fragments a long time. Something in him stirred — that old pulling, that old beginning of his mind reaching for connections — and he stopped it. Not yet. He did not want it yet.

Beneath the family tree were maps. He spread them on the floor. They were worn nearly to transparency in places. They showed a coastline, but it was not the western coast. The mountains were wrong. The rivers ran the wrong way. He stared at the map for several minutes before he understood.

This is the east.

Not any east coast he had seen on any official map. Not the geography of the Hollow Marches as the histories described it, either. It was an east coast with cities marked where there were no cities. With roads marked where there were no roads. With names of places he had never heard spoken.

He sat back on his heels.

He did not understand.

He could see — the part of him that always saw could see — that the names in the family tree’s worn fragments were of the same shape as the names on the map. The same root sounds. The same way of forming syllables. They belonged together. The tree and the map and the pendant belonged together. They were one thing in three pieces.

But he could not read the names. He could not place the cities. He could not tell what the sigil meant, or what his grandfather had wanted him to do with it, or why his family had hidden these things under a floorboard in a house at the western edge of the world.

He sat in the lamplight with three pieces of something and no whole.

Helmsdal is not where we came from.

The thought arrived clean and certain, and he did not know how he knew it. He only knew it.

He looked at the pendant. He looked at the maps. He looked at his own name at the bottom of a family tree whose top he could not read.

For a moment — only a moment — he wanted to put it all back. Close the chest. Lock it. Tell his mother in the morning that he had not opened it. Walk back to Aldenmark. Find his horse. Ride somewhere else. Anywhere else. Be a man who had a key and chose not to use it.

The moment passed.

He knew it would. He had known it would when he turned the key.

He picked up the pendant again. He wanted to look at it more closely. The mark was old in a way he had no name for, and he wanted to understand the metal it was made from, the way the lines were cut, the depth of the carving. He held it up between his fingers and turned it in the lamplight, slowly, the way he had once held coins from a foreign land to study them.

The lamp guttered. A draft from the window, perhaps. The flame leaned, then steadied. As it did, the pendant caught the light at an angle Dwight had not held it at before — and across the family tree spread on the floor before him, something moved.

He froze.

It had been quick. It had been at the edge of his vision, in the place where the worn fragments of names lay rubbed almost to nothing. For an instant — for less than an instant — there had been more there. Lines. Shapes. Letters that were not letters he knew.

Then the lamp flame steadied, the angle of the pendant shifted in his fingers, and the paper was as it had been. Worn. Empty. Unreadable.

He sat very still.

You imagined it.

That was the first thought. It came in his own voice and it carried no comfort. He had been awake for too long. He had walked too far today. His mind had been doing what his mind did when it was tired — making connections that were not there, seeing patterns in the empty places.

He was familiar with this. He had learned, over the years, to distrust what his mind showed him in tired hours. He had taught himself to wait. To put down whatever he thought he had seen, and look again in the morning, and find that it had never been there at all.

He almost put the pendant down.

He almost did.

But his hand, of its own accord, lifted the pendant back to the lamplight. He turned it again. Slowly. Watching the paper.

Nothing.

He turned it the other way. Tilted it. Brought it closer to the flame, then further. Nothing.

He sat with it cupped in his palm and felt foolish. You are tired, he told himself. You are grieving. You are seeing things.

He started to lower his hand.

And the lamp flame leaned again — another small draft, the sea air finding its way through some crack in the wall — and the pendant tilted with the motion of his wrist, and across the family tree, in the rubbed-empty place above his grandfather’s name, something appeared.

Not much. A few strokes. The corner of a letter that was not any letter Dwight knew. Curves and angles that did not belong to the alphabets of Iron Covenant or any of the scripts he had read in any of the libraries he had passed through. It was there for the length of a breath. Then the flame moved again and it was gone.

He held very still this time. He did not move his hand. He did not breathe.

He waited for the flame to lean the same way again.

It did not. The draft was inconstant. The flame steadied, flickered, leaned the other way, steadied again. He sat with the pendant in his hand and watched the lamp and felt his pulse begin to climb in a way that had nothing to do with the cold floor or the late hour.

It was real.

He did not let himself think it. Not yet. He had been wrong before. His mind had shown him things before. He needed to see it again. He needed to know.

He moved the pendant himself, slowly, trying to recreate the angle. He could not. The light from the lamp was not strong enough, or his hand was not steady enough, or the angle was more particular than he understood. He tried for several minutes. The paper stayed empty.

His hand began to shake. Very slightly. He did not let himself notice.

He set the pendant down on the floor. He placed the lamp closer. He picked the pendant up again and held it directly above the worn place on the family tree, and slowly, carefully, he began to rotate it.

Once. Twice. Nothing.

The third time, as the chain of the pendant turned and the metal caught the flame at some particular angle his eye had not predicted —

— the page beneath it filled.

Not all of it. Not even most of it. But across the rubbed and damaged section above his grandfather’s name, ghost-faint and shifting like something seen through water, lines of writing rose into visibility. Names. Dates. Marks he could not read but could see, could see, could see.

He held the pendant exactly where it was. He did not breathe. The writing held.

It was a script he did not know. The letters were curved in ways the alphabets he had studied did not curve. The names were long. Some had marks above them that looked like accents but were placed in patterns that meant something he could not parse. He saw — in the place where his grandfather’s father should have been — a name longer than the Halren the family tree had recorded above. As if the Halren the family had used in Helmsdal had been a shortening. A westernization. A name made small enough to be carried into hiding.

His hand began to shake harder. The pendant tilted a fraction of a degree, and the writing wavered, faded, was gone.

He sat in the lamplight on his knees in his grandfather’s silent room with a pendant in one hand and a family tree in the other, and he understood — slowly, and not all at once — that he had just seen something his grandfather had spent a lifetime hiding. That his great-grandfather had hidden. That generation after generation of his family had carried into the western edge of the world and locked beneath floorboards and given to eldest sons who were never told what they held.

He had been looking at his own ancestry written in a language he could not read.

And he did not know — he could not know, not yet, not in this room, not in this lifetime perhaps — what it said.

The lamp flame steadied. The room was quiet. The sea outside the window was dark and silent.

Dwight knelt on the floor and held a pendant he did not understand above a paper he could not read, and felt — somewhere behind his eyes, somewhere he could not point to — the soft pressure beginning. The early shape of something opening that he would not be able to close again.

Grandfather, he thought. What did you leave me?

The sea did not answer.

But this time, the silence felt different. This time, the silence felt like something that was waiting.

Here the bound pages end. The rest of the chronicle is loose paper and lamplight, and the library will shelve it when it is ready.