Through the Woods — Song of Arventis, Part Three
Arventis Tests His Mettle Against the Elements During His Escape from Dellin
The bubble of Arventis’s daydreams, filled with music worthy of his hatred for Dellin, popped when he stepped through a curtain of fragrant spider-palms and onto a dusty red road. Not good. He darted back behind the cover of leaves. He couldn’t risk traveling the roads. Not with a war on, and him an able-bodied man (minus the bruises), his writ of exemption eaten by a pig or in the silver-vicer Giovik’s pocket, or, if he was honest, gambled away on a bad hand of cards.
He back-tracked far enough for his bushwhacking to escape notice on the road. Thrice he called on the Sea Spirit to swallow up the webs of dense green that tangled and tripped him. His progress north was slow. At sunsets, he bedded down in the rotting detritus of the forest floor, the camps crawling with insects. On more than one night, he heard the clank of metal plate and stomp of horses as armies passed on the near-distant road. Sleep came in spurts, leaving him haggard during the day for his treks.
The dairy berries he’d been sent off with by the druids lasted him a day. The dense biscuits, five. By his seventh day of tromping his way through the vines and trees of Dellin’s interior, full of chirping insects and hidden wildlife, his stomach played a melody Arventis half respected. If he survived, he would try to replicate it on his lute. “The Sounds of Hunger,” he’d call it, and invite the rich merchants and gentry to see him play it in the slums of Bergot. It would make for a terrific marketing spectacle. But he had to make it out of this barbarous, terrible country.
He stumbled on. He summoned every ounce of strength available to him, all born from a determination to get out of Dellin. To get away from the version of himself he had been here. Perhaps, and the thought only lighted on him for the space of a heartbeat, perhaps the hatred for Dellin had grown a speck irrational. But it was all he had left.
Another agonizing series of days and nights passed, until, as in the pig sty, Arventis laid on his back and hefted a sigh full of regret. An exhalation bitter as bark. He laid there, cursing the spirits. How cruel to make him die in, of all places, Dellin.
But then, on a wisp of wind, his nose caught something. Wood smoke. Burnt hair. Not tarry and unpleasant like the burnt hair of a razed village, but the savory scent of a carcass over a fire. He roused himself. Everything he had, all of the hate smoldering in his heart, he stoked to a glorious blaze. He pulled himself to his feet and lurched toward the glorious smell.
So many days traveling, he must have passed over the border into Bergot. The thought flitted through his head for a moment before thoughts of food chased it out.
He picked up speed. Saliva wetted his mouth. Hope peeked its shimmering head from Arventis’s chest. Warm food, a bed. A country other than Dellin. Salvation!
These were his dreams as he stumbled, half-crazed, into a camp brimming with Dellish soldiers. Cook fire smoke taunted Arventis, chiding him for his eagerness with its delicious smells. The circle of soldiers around the cook fire stood, startled at his approach. One reached for a spear. Another shouted at him, “Halt, strange forest man!”
There would be no escape. Even the prospect of a hot meal and a bed could not console the fact that he would now march with the soldiers of a country he despised. He sucked in a breath, then he shit his pants and fell on his face.
If you stuck around this long, hopefully you enjoyed the story and didn’t simply finish it out of spite. And if you liked it, do my ego a favor and throw some claps, maybe a response, or a follow my way.
Arventis has a long journey ahead of him. I can promise music (on the page), violence (on the page), and disease (on the page, as well as in my own body on occasion). New chapter every Thursday.
