Harbinger Read online

  “There goes Kael the half-breed, the curse of Tinnark.”

  He wanted so badly to prove them wrong, to silence their whispering forever. And because of that, he’d been forced to make the worst decision of his life. His heart began to pound just thinking about it, the hand that held his bow sweat freely into the leather grip as the memory rose unbidden.

  In Tinnark, a boy’s twelfth birthday was a time of celebration: it was the day when he would claim his bow and take his place among the men of the village. But for Kael, that day had been just as miserable as any other.

  His birthday fell on the first snow of winter — a day so cursed that families went to great lengths to make sure their children were born nowhere near it. As he’d made his way to the front of the Hall, alone, every eye in Tinnark was upon him. Most people watched him pityingly. The old women shook their wrinkled heads as he passed and whispered:

  “You poor, Fate-forsaken child.”

  Which did nothing to ease his nerves. By the time he’d made it to the elder’s table, he could hardly breathe. He stood with his arms pinned to his side and waited.

  Brock, the eldest, bent his gray head and addressed him with a parchment-thin voice. “The day has come, boy.” His hand shook a little as he rested the knobs of his fingers on the table in front of him. “You’ve earned your bow and your place in the village. But now you must choose: will you take a full quiver and accept the position we assign you? Or will you endure the Trial of the Five Arrows?”

  At the time, Kael thought it was a difficult choice.

  Boys who chose the full quiver would learn a trade like smithing or fishing, and they were often assigned to the same trade as their father. For Kael, it would mean being doomed to the life of a healer.

  Healing was Amos’s trade, and he was exceptionally good at it. But while Amos seemed to enjoy reading thick, dusty tomes with titles like What to do if You Lose a Limb, Kael thought he’d rather put an arrow through his foot and find out for himself.

  No, healing was simply not for him. He needed to do something a little more adventurous, a little more exciting, and even though he knew it was folly, he couldn’t help but dream of becoming a hunter.

  The hunters of Tinnark worked throughout the seasons, enduring every peril of the changing land to keep the storehouses full. They were the strongest men, the fastest and the best shots. The elders believed they were Fate’s chosen — set apart by trial and tasked with the responsibility of keeping Tinnark alive. And for that, they were treated like Kings.

  But the elders never assigned anyone the position of hunter: it had to be earned through the Trial of the Five Arrows.

  “What have you decided?” Brock said.

  Kael knew what everyone expected him to say, and he knew what he should say. But when he opened his mouth, that wasn’t what came out. “I want to face the Trial.”

  Gasps filled the Hall — and Kael thought he could hear Amos groaning among them.

  Brock snorted in disbelief, but somehow managed to keep his face serious. “Very well. The rules of the Trial are simple: you have five arrows and five years to slay a deer. Bring the carcass back to Tinnark, and you will earn your place among the hunters. Fail, and the elders will assign you a more … fitting, trade. May mercy guide your fate.”

  The years had passed in a blur and now Kael needed mercy more than ever. He was only a breath away from his seventeenth winter, and at this point he had no other option: he must succeed. That’s why he’d been so careful this time, why he’d scoured the forest for tracks and followed them here.

  He was perched high in the bend of a giant oak and a wide-open grove yawned out in front of him. Acorns littered the uneven ground beneath him and their shadows, elongated by the feeble light of the morning, made the earth look pockmarked. Fall was coming fast and the leaves were starting to shrivel on their branches.

  There weren’t many things Kael’s skinny frame was good for, but hiding was one of them. He found there wasn’t much difference between the width of his twiggy arms and the nearest limbs.

  He’d hung his rucksack where the foliage was the thickest. It was bursting full of small game: rabbits, squirrels, and a few unfortunate geese. He wasn’t a steady hand with the bow, but he’d been so intent on learning how to hunt that Roland, Tinnark’s oldest hunter, had taken pity on him.

  He was an old friend of Amos’s, and most believed he was a strange man. But nevertheless, he saw something in Kael that all the others missed: potential. It was Roland who taught him the art of trap making.

  Kael was good with his hands, and Roland said his mind worked in a way few did. It only took him a week to master the simple snare, and a few weeks more to understand the more complicated ones. And Roland was so pleased that he’d taken him on as an apprentice of sorts — teaching him everything he knew about the forest.

  Though the iron sky did its best to hide it, Kael knew the sun was rising. Soon the carcasses in his rucksack would begin to smell — warning everything within a mile of his gruesome intentions. He wagered he had only a handful of minutes left to wait, and he was thankful for it. He thought he might go mad if he had to sit still any longer.

  Roland often scolded him for being impatient. “The prey isn’t going to jump into your lap, boy,” he would say, throwing his hands up in exasperation. “And it isn’t going to stand politely by while you lock an arrow on it. The woods aren’t going to give you a perfect shot — you’ve got to make one.”

  Kael knew this. Somewhere, deep down, he knew there was a proper way to hunt. He just wished the proper way wasn’t so rump-numbingly dull.

  When a few moments passed and nothing exciting happened, his eyes wandered back to the Atlas. He turned the next page and ran his hand across a map of the Kingdom. He traced the deadly points of the mountains with the tip of his finger. Halfway up the tallest mountain was Tinnark. It wasn’t originally marked on the map, but Roland put a tiny dot of ink where he thought it was.

  Nestled in the very center of the Unforgivable Mountains was a bowl of green land. It was marked simply as The Valley, and Kael found he envied the people who lived there. Green was a rare color in Tinnark: if the ground wasn’t frosted over, it was usually cracked and brown.

  A flick of movement drew his eyes back to the grove. He glanced over the top of his book, not really expecting to see anything. And then he froze.

  A young buck had materialized out of the trees. Now he stood just a stone’s throw away, nibbling on acorns, his neck arched and his nose nearly touching the ground. Spring must have been good to him: his ribs were completely hidden beneath his meaty flank.

  Even as his heart thrummed with excitement, Kael knew finding a deer was only half of it. Perhaps anywhere else in the Kingdom, the deer were slow and stupid. But in the mountains, they were as cunning as any man. Roland swore they were descendents of shapechangers — the tribes in the Grandforest who could take the form of beasts. He thought the mountains must have cursed them to live forever in their animal forms.

  Kael wasn’t sure he believed that, but he couldn’t argue with the fact that the deer were blasted hard to catch — he’d once scared one off by just the thought of sneezing. So even though he was yards away, he drew his arrow from its quiver a fraction at a time.

  It was his last one, his final shot at freedom. The other four had been dashed against rocks or buried in the flow of savage rivers. He couldn’t hunt like the rest of his peers, with their sure feet and explosive speed. He could run for miles without having to stop for breath, but he couldn’t chase a deer and shoot an arrow at the same time.

  So he’d had come up with a way to lure the beasts in and face them when he was at his greatest advantage. It was an elaborate trap: he chose this particular grove for the abundance of acorns, this particular tree for its thick cover of foliage, and this particular branch for the angle of his shot. All he had to do was loose the arrow, and the force of the earth would do the rest.

  There was absolut
ely no way he could botch it up. This deer was his.

  He nocked the arrow and leaned forward, squinting to see through the tangle of leaves. The buck was giving him his flank: the largest target Kael could’ve hoped for. He drew the arrow back and his heart pounded furiously against his ribs.

  In the thrill of the moment, he forgot about the Atlas. As he pulled the string towards his chin, the book slipped out of his lap. It clattered through the branches, its pages flapping loudly as it struck what must have been every single limb on its way down. When it finally tumbled to earth in a heap of twigs and leaves, Kael looked at the deer.

  It was too much to hope that the beast hadn’t heard.

  He stared at the tree, his meal forgotten. His white tipped ears stood like sentries, his wet nostrils flared. His head spun away and Kael knew his body would follow. He’d melt into the trees, taking all hope with him.

  He’d searched for weeks and not seen a deer — what if this was the last one he ever saw? If he didn’t fire now, he might never get a second chance. This was it.

  He leaned forward and fired blindly. He tried to watch his arrow as it left the string and whistled after the deer, but then leaves sprung up in front of him and blocked his view.

  That’s when he realized that he was falling.

  He followed the Atlas’s path, striking branch after unforgiving branch and flailing helplessly as the earth pulled him downward. When the leaves finally gave way, there was nothing but the ground left to fall through. The world went black.

  *******

  The first time he blinked, everything was a fuzzy mass of brown. A few blinks later, he could tell what was a tree and what was a bush. Slowly, all the feeling returned to his limbs. He half-wished it hadn’t.

  His elbows and knees stung. He could feel bruises rising up on his back. His head pounded in protest. He felt like he’d been tied in a sack with an angry mountain lion.

  Above him, the shattered branches hung on by thin strips of white sinew. If he could hear them speak, he imagined they’d be swearing. He reached out and found the Atlas lying next to him. Remarkably, it was still intact. A little crumpled maybe, but readable. When he tried to roll over, something dug sharply into his rump and the small of his back. He reached under him and tugged it free.

  The ache in his skull made it difficult for him to focus on what he held. Three outlines danced around, crossing over one another until his eyes managed to lock them down.

  Oh no.

  He brought it closer to his face and his mouth dropped open when he realized he wasn’t imagining it. He forgot about the deer, he forgot about his arrow, he forgot about how much pain he was in because none of it mattered anymore.

  For there, cradled in his hands, was his bow. Only it wasn’t a bow anymore: it was two pieces of broken wood held together by a string.

  No amount of mercy could save him now.

  Chapter 2

  An Unfortunate Twist of Fate

  This was worse than being an outcast, worse than being teased about his skinny arms and mixed hair — worse, even, than failing the Trial. No man in the history of Tinnark had ever broken his bow. It was unheard of, un-thought of. Fate herself couldn’t have devised a more wicked thing to happen to someone.

  And yet, it’d happened.

  He was no craftsman, but he knew it couldn’t be fixed. The weapon was snapped at its grip and large splinters of it littered the ground around him. At that moment he wasn’t thinking about how vulnerable he was, sitting in the middle of the forest with naught but the hunting dagger at his belt. He was worried about what he would tell Amos.

  A starving mountain lion could rip him to shreds, but Amos could do worse. What he didn’t have in claws and teeth he more than made up for in words. He’d never raised a hand to Kael, and yet a tongue-lashing from Amos still made him sore.

  Then there was Roland, who wouldn’t say a word and still somehow manage to flog him. He’d just let his mouth sag, let his shoulders go slack and let Kael boil alive under the disappointment in his eyes.

  Between the three of them, he thought he’d rather tell the mountain lion first.

  He turned the bow over in his hands and let his mind whir on through the protests of his aching body. There was only one thing he could do if he wanted to keep his bow a secret: he’d have to go before the elders tonight, tell them that he’d failed the Trial, and then take whatever trade they gave him.

  Whatever would happen, it would be better than the truth. At least a healer was still a man.

  When his mind was made up, he jumped to his feet. A likely looking patch of briars grew next to where he’d landed. He leaned over them and dropped his poor bow directly down the center, where the thorns were thickest. He circled the patch once, just to be sure, but he was certain that no one could wander by and see it.

  No sooner was he finished than a loud voice bellowed from behind him:

  “Well, if it isn’t the Twiglet.”

  Two men materialized out of the forest. One was exceptionally tall, the other was exceptionally short. They were both undeniably ugly.

  The tall one’s name was Marc. His smile looked like a wolf’s snarl, and lately he’d been sporting a patch of hair on his chin. He had a deer carcass draped across his massive shoulders, fresh blood caked the wound over its heart. He smirked as Kael’s eyes wandered up to it.

  “Recognize him? He’s the latest deer you shot at and missed. Good thing we happened to be around, or Tinnark might have gone hungry.” Marc shook his head and his face became a mask of pity. “What’s it like to be a failure, Twiglet? Must be hard, I imagine.”

  The short one, Laemoth, wore his hair in a long braid down his back. He crossed his stocky arms and jerked his head at Kael. “Eh, he’s used to it by now. If he ever did something right, it’d probably kill him.”

  Kael had grown calloused to their bullying. Marc and Laemoth were only a season older than him and turned twelve the same year he did. But by the time they were thirteen, both had killed deer and joined the hunters — something they never let him forget.

  He wasn’t surprised to find them in the grove. No matter how he tried to cover his tracks, they always followed him and killed the deer he missed. To them, it was a game. What did surprise him was the fact that they weren’t already sprinting back to Tinnark, yelling from the tops of their lungs that he’d broken his bow.

  Perhaps they hadn’t noticed.

  He was suddenly aware of the empty quiver on his back and the bare feeling across his shoulders. If he didn’t keep them distracted, they might sprout a brain and figure out that his weapon was missing. “Yeah, and I’m sure the elders would be thrilled to hear that you wasted the whole morning tracking me down,” he said, as casually as he could with his stomach twisting the way it was. “I wonder what happens to hunters who don’t feed the village?”

  Marc let the deer drop to the ground. He crossed the space between them in two long strides and grabbed a fistful of Kael’s shirt. “Go on and tell them, Twig — and I’ll snap you.”

  Though he thought he could have gone blind from the stench of Marc’s breath, Kael stubbornly met his glare.

  Marc was seriously considering knocking his teeth out — he could read it in the flint of his eyes. But though he was a stupid oaf, Marc was no fool. After a tense moment of glaring, his lip curled and he shoved Kael away with a growl.

  “You know we wouldn’t forget our chores, especially with winter so close,” Laemoth said. He walked among the debris of Kael’s fall, picking through the shattered branches, looking for something. When he found it, he grunted in triumph. “What have we here?” And he held the rucksack full of game high in the air.

  Marc snarled in delight. “Well, would you look at that? We’ve done good today. I’m sure the elders will be pleased.”

  Kael knew he shouldn’t pick a fight he couldn’t win, but anger boiled up to the top of his head and blocked out all reasonable thought. He stomped over and grabbed a fistful of
the rucksack. “Hand it over.”

  Laemoth laughed in his face. “Or what, Twiglet? What are you going to — ompf!”

  Kael’s fist struck his mouth, cutting his sentence short. Laemoth stumbled backwards and pressed his hand to his lips. When he saw the bright red blood staining his fingers, he let out a roar. He dropped his half of the rucksack, drew the hunting knife from his belt, and charged.

  It was a good thing Kael thought to hold the pack to his chest: Laemoth’s knife went through the surface, wounding rabbit and goose but getting nowhere close to his skin. Marc shoved him aside before he could strike a second time.

  “You can’t kill him.”

  “Sure I can! I can rip his heart out and blame it on the wolves! No one’ll ever find out —”

  “The old man will,” Marc said, keeping his voice low. “He’ll know we’ve done it. And he’ll get us for it.”

  The anger in Laemoth’s eyes vanished, replaced immediately by fear.

  Mountain people were notoriously superstitious. Roland wouldn’t step outside if it rained while the sun was shining, because he believed it meant the spirits of the dead were passing through the village. He also wouldn’t leave his bow strung overnight and cringed every time he heard an owl screech.

  The Tinnarkians also believed that healers could pass through death’s door and trade for souls. Everyone went out of their way to respect Amos because if they slighted him, they were afraid he might retrieve their souls when they died and plant them back in their dead bodies.

  And while that wasn’t entirely true, Kael didn’t see the harm in letting Marc and Laemoth believe it.

  He made to run off when Marc grabbed him by the shirt and pinned his arms behind his back. “Keep it in the stomach. We don’t want anyone to see the bruises.”

  Laemoth cocked his fist back and Kael knew what was coming. If he’d had any muscles in his stomach, he would have tightened them. But as it was, Laemoth’s punch sailed through his feeble defenses and knocked the wind out of him.