Harbinger: Fate's Forsaken: Book One (2 page)

A gust of wind
made the tall pines creak above him. He glanced up at their towering branches
and strained to see where their tops met the sky. The trees in the Unforgivable
Mountains were the tallest in the Kingdom — they were even taller than
the trees in the Grandforest, or so he’d read.

He was convinced
he would never know for sure.

The rough
surface of the branch he perched on dug mercilessly into his rump. A meager
layer of skin was all that separated his bones from bark, and every few minutes
he had to change positions to keep from going numb. But if his plan worked,
it’d all be worth it.

He tightened his
grip on the curved redwood bow clutched in his hand. The weapon was a lot like
its owner: plain and thin. Every male in Tinnark had the exact same bow. He’d
carry it with him always, and when he grew old and the winter frost set in his
joints, he’d retire it proudly above his mantle.

For most, the
bow was a symbol of freedom. But for Kael it was a burden — a constant
reminder of what his grandfather, Amos, referred to as his cursed
pig-headedness. And if things went wrong …

No, he wouldn’t
allow himself to think about it. Not now. Not today. Instead, he would do his
best to keep his mind focused on something else.

He kept a small
book balanced in the crook of his lap. Its worn cover lay open across his
knees, the battered pages flipped to the first. Along the spine there used to
be gold letters that read
Atlas of the
Adventurer
, but after years of being shoved into Kael’s pocket they’d faded
to nothing.

The
Atlas
began with a brief history of the
Kingdom’s six regions. He’d read it so many times that he probably could have
recited it without looking. But in the solitude of the woods he couldn’t help
but read it aloud, listening to the patterns of the words as they left his
tongue:

"Sit at my table,” Fate said to the land,

“Come roll the die and take what you can.”

The Forest stepped up, so brazen was she,

And claimed for herself the land of trees.

“I’ll call you Grand, the Grandforest you’ll be,

Your children will eat of the fruit of the trees.”

With a roll of the die the Desert did claim,

A harsh, barren land that could never be tamed.

“Fear not my child, even Whitebone when maimed,

Releases sweet juice of marrow from strain.”

When the Seas took his turn, Fate said with a cry:

“You, sweet child, are far from the sky!

May your children glean bounty however they try,

And for this my child, I’ll call you the High.”

Then the Plains made her throw and took as her boon,

A land whose lover is the white-shining moon.

“Crops and strong children will come from your womb.

Your name will be Endless, your braids never hewn.”

Then Midlan marched in, his heart all alight,

And took for himself what he thought was right.

“Your children will be of power and might,

May Kings grace your halls and war fill your sight."

But the Mountains came late; all the good land was had.

"Spurned of my brood, most Unforgivable and mad,

Your children forever in red shall be clad.

And yet unto them great strength will I add."

Though she
promised them strength, as far as Kael knew Fate had only given the children of
the mountains one thing. He ran a hand through the wild curls of his hair and
the deep red tones winked back against the faint sunlight. The elders called it
Fate’s crown, but Kael thought it was more like rotten bad luck.

The other five
regions all had a trade, and all were prosperous — except for the
mountains. They had stone, yes, and lumber and game and perhaps if a man dug
long enough, he might strike ore. But the perils were too great for any
reasonable merchant to see profit in setting up shop. So while the rest of the
Kingdom grew, villages like Tinnark were forgotten.

Forgotten, but
not lost. For while it was common knowledge that nothing good ever came out of
the Unforgivable Mountains, it was less-commonly known that plenty came into
them.

Thieves,
murderers, traitors and whole bands of outlaws flocked to hide themselves among
the cliffs. All the worst sorts of criminals knew that not even the army of
Midlan would risk chasing them through the mountains, so there they fled. The
small, battered villages scattered along the rocks were the last refuge of
desperate men. They may have come as thief lords or banished knights, but if
they stayed, the weather warped them and the dangers changed them. Their hands
grew rough from work; their skin withered in the cold.

And in exchange
for sanctuary, the land erased their heritage. It didn’t matter if his father
had the midnight of the Grandforest or the stark white of the plains: any child
born in the mountains would have flaming red hair.

The elders
thought this was part of Kael’s problem. They thought his hair might be the
reason he tripped over things so often and why he couldn’t pull his bow back
all the way. For while his father and grandfather were true sons of the
mountains, Kael was not.

He’d been
carried into Tinnark by his father — who died shortly thereafter—
and grew up knowing absolutely nothing about his past because Amos refused to
speak of it. From what he could gather, some feud split them apart long ago,
and the wounds had never really healed. Even now, Amos refused to say his son’s
name aloud, and referred to him only as
That
Man
.

All Kael knew
for certain was that he’d been born somewhere in the Kingdom, in what the Tinnarkians
referred to as the lowlands. He knew this because the red in his hair was mixed
with light brown.

The other
villagers never let him forget that he was different. They called him a
half-breed and sneered whenever he passed. He knew what they said to one
another when they thought his back was turned:

“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.