The Art of Escape - A Recruits Story

Chapter I: The Vanishing Act

Chapter II: Sleight of Hand

Chapter III: The Pledge

Chapter IV: The Turn 

TW: allusions to childhood abuse, accusations of insanity 

[Author's note: I think I'll be drawing this serial to a close with this chapter, though there's always room for a bonus Emarynne chapter down the road! But as a character study of each of the different recruits, I'm satisfied with things for now!]

The farther north they went, the colder Ysa became.

And it wasn’t just the weather, heavy now with that crystalline, glassy edge of true winter, which had already cracked and dissolved in Haven and the balmy southlands. She could feel the black crawl of something else creeping over her with every step that bore them closer to Kianlever. The familiar home-dread, that faint, sour tang of madness that she’d kept buried deep within herself. Steadily, as the days wore on and they drew closer to leaving the protective border of Thielwood, she felt it rising like bile through her torso, the kernel of it burning in her chest, threatening to catch in her throat and strangle her.

If she fell silent as the days wore on, however, consumed with her internal war for restraint, no one else seemed to notice. After the confrontation at the nameless inn, each of her teammates had grown grim and preoccupied. Justyn was clearly dismayed—his decision to stay at the inn had led to their near-capture and the deaths of two men—and Cybele no longer bothered trying to keep the group’s spirits high, not in the face of all that was at stake. Even Daren hadn’t taken the opportunity to lambast their team leader for his mistakes, or to impress upon them all the rightness of his instincts. He had changed, slightly, since that night—or at least in Ysa’s view. It was as if he had suddenly realized he had other priorities, that proving himself the superior of the group was no longer important. Whether it was the near-death experience or something else the two Ket mercenaries had said to him that had shifted his perspective, Ysa couldn’t say.

As for Lady Emarynne Reaver, she, too, had become grave and unsmiling as they made their approach to Kianlever. They were perhaps two or three days away from the mountainous estate, which encompassed its own small town and a military outpost poised beside an icy lake. By Emarynne’s estimation, the passes should still be snowed in enough to prevent the rebels from descending on the fief… but only just. When they arrived at Kianlever, they would have only a handful of days to prepare for the coming battle. And that was only if they weren’t intercepted and caught beforehand.

It had been a sennight since the attack at the inn, and their supplies were running low. Daren and Cybele had been able to hunt for the group, a little, but hares were scarce in the winter, and the deer of Thielwood were able to vanish through the trees like ghosts. The day before they left the cover of the trees, Emarynne said stiffly, “There’s a village not far from here. Some of the people there have relatives in Kianlever. I believe that, even if they recognized us, they wouldn’t give us up to Colen Teivel’s men.”

Justyn opened his mouth, but she added shortly, “We wouldn’t be staying with them.” They had spent every night thus far camped far off the road, often with no fire to warm them, though they hadn’t seen any further signs of their pursuit so far. “But the horses need feed, and we need supplies for the final push to my home. Once we leave the forest, there won’t be much to forage or fish.”

Justyn glanced to Daren—not out of deference, exactly, but out of respect for his opinion. The Ket’s face was guarded, but he made an acquiescing gesture, touching one of his swords to indicate his readiness. Ysa thought of the man she had killed, the spike of ice piercing his eye—the black wave rose before her—before she shunted the fear back and spurred her horse onwards.

They rode towards the little village, which Emarynne called Navonlë, and as they rode, they began to pass small huts and cottages with smoking chimneys, thatched roofs, and small stone houses—sized as if to accommodate a large dog—abutting their sides or woodsheds. Ysa looked away from the little structures with a shudder, but behind her, Cybele asked curiously, “What are those little houses? I’ve never seen anything like those before.”

Emarynne cast them an incurious glance, but even Daren leaned to hear her even, clear-voiced reply: “In the North, some of the people practice a different version of the Old Faith than the one you might be used to. Many of them believe in the pagan gods like Narthax and Nante, yes, but they also worship something they call the myrkath—the household gods.”

“I’ve never heard of these,” Justyn said, ever the story-hungry bard.

Emarynne granted him a slight smile. “It’s a dying practice, steeped in folklore and old wives’ tales,” she said. “The Autarchy is particularly interested in stamping it out, so it’s not often talked about. The thinking, I believe, is that while the old gods created the world and all its peoples, they also required… little helpers, to watch over their children more closely and on a more personal basis than the major gods themselves were able to.”

“So like angels?” Cybele asked.

Emarynne shook her head. “I don’t believe so,” she said, thoughtful. “The myrkath are thought to be more like guardians who can protect or bless individual households, guarding them from winter wolves or famine, that sort of thing. They live alongside the people of those houses, unlike angels or celestial heralds.” She tilted her head towards the huts with their tiny, humble altars. “When the old gods retreated into slumber, their servants, the household gods, were said to still remain, having already been living on this plane. So now people will build shrines to attract a myrkath to their residence, leaving offerings to appease or strengthen it, and those are the little stone houses you see today.” She said it indifferently, as if it were nothing more than a quaint and simplistic tradition, which Ysa supposed was how she had to see it—a noble of the Autarchy would never think otherwise. Emarynne’s lips quirked as she added, “Some rural communities, where the local culture and folklore is very strong, revere their myrkath to the point where they’ll squabble with each other if they fear one household is attempting to poach their guardian with better offerings and methods of worship.”

“What kind of offerings do they leave?” Cybele asked, her voice eager.

Astride her horse and gazing off into the trees, Ysa winced. The sensation of a singed hand flashed into her mind, a hot loaf rescued from the fire, the red lashings of a cane against her back…

“Often it’s crusts of bread, bones from a roast pork, dried flowers or bundles of wheat,” Emarynne answered carelessly. Then she paused. “Though I remember my father rebuking a village who’d turned to making blood offerings to their myrkath one particularly hard winter.”

“This all sounds quite blasphemous,” Justyn commented, sounding rather scandalized. Ysa didn’t think he believed in the One-God, but he did know how the Inquisition viewed such matters.

“Oh, it is,” Emarynne answered, the small smile dropping from her face now. “It was this kind of religious conflict that was the basis for the War of Four Saints, the war my grandsire and the Teivels’ participated in.”

“And is it the faith of the rebels who rise up against you during the Spring Thaw?” Daren asked then, shrewdly.

Emarynne glanced away and didn’t answer.

She had left out much about the myrkath in her explanation, Ysa noted, but she couldn’t unglue her tongue enough to speak up about it herself. Besides, perhaps Emarynne herself didn’t know much more. But Ysa did. In the days since she’d left her father’s house—ever since she’d fled the North—she had pulled everything she could find about the myrkath off of the Shepherds’ shelves. Some scholars theorized that the creatures were actually descendants of the Faerie folk, the lost fey peoples of Blest: the mythological descriptions of various myrkath could be made to fit ideas of sprites and pixies, they argued. Others believed that it was the absence of the old gods that had created them; that human faith and worship had once fed the old gods’ power, as violence and Endarkened-created mayhem had fed Tapyt’s; that the gods’ strength had dimmed further as belief in them waned while they slept; that mortal worship had then turned elsewhere, some looking to the myrkath—some to the One-God, a few whispered—in supplication, and it was the power of that belief that had literally shaped the beings from the ether, granting them a real and tangible power of their own. 

But many of these texts were the product of conjecture and posturing by academics, people working from secondhand stories and arguing theory where they lacked practical experience. None of them had ever actually seen the myrkath, nor any true evidence that they really, physically existed. If a family survived a bout of cholera, or if a young maid had an easy childbirth, the people of the North could attribute their success to their household god all they liked… but the fact of the matter was, no one ever saw one. They took the whole thing on faith alone.

That was the key point that Ysa had revisited, over and over. The myrkath could not be seen by the naked human eye. They kept to the shadows, did their work invisibly. It was bad luck to attempt to catch one at its secret labors: like a rabbit, it would shy away from human observation and vanish into the air, abandoning the household forever. There weren’t many people from the North in the Shepherds’ Order, but the few who were—and who had been willing to speak with her about the myrkath—had admitted they either didn’t believe in or had never seen evidence of this old wives’ tale. Even the captain’s friend, Red Antiqua, who had been to the North, had told her he’d never seen anything like the myrkath during his travels there. His voice had been casual when he said it, but the way she asked the question must have caught his attention, for there had been a look in his green eyes when he regarded her that had made Ysa turn and flee.

Against her will, she glanced at one of the stone houses again. She saw the faint, blurry specter hovering patiently on its roof—you’re mad, no one else sees it, she was right all along—and then she looked away.  

#

When she was a child, Ysa had been swarmed by ghosts.

For a long time, she hadn’t realized that no one else could see them. Her mother had died in childbirth, and her father—Norm, staid, and flintily-indifferent to his only girl-child, the product of his first wife’s ignorance or deception—had left her largely in the care of a nursemaid while he tended to his growing business. Ysa had grown up in a wealthy manor, nearly as big as Colen Teivel’s… but it might as well have been a mausoleum, an empty monument to cold stone and silent, golden dust.

At night, she had been visited by the beings she would come to believe were the myrkath. Sometimes they kept their distance, only observing her, little more than mirage-like patches of shimmering air or shapeless, creeping shadows. Sometimes their forms were more distinct, and these were the ones who spoke to her: little creatures with pointed noises and thin, slitted eyes that glowed like coals, or long, twisting coils of smoke that hung around the rafters and laughed beneath her scrutiny.

She fed them scraps of bread and called them her friends. Sometimes the smallest and most invisible ones crowded against her in her sleep, as if seeking her warmth, drawing sustenance and substance from her earthly flesh. They had no names. Some of them were severe and proud, others creeping and shy, a few giggling and cryptic.

If she stared into nothing, the household servants said, or smiled and laughed and chided a friend who didn’t exist—then that was a mere product of her tainted Mage blood, a child’s fanciful imagination warped by unfortunate genetics. Her father would send her away if he knew—or worse, abandon her, which meant a cold orphanage or death in Korgoth. He only barely tolerated Ysa as it was. So the servants said nothing to him, and nothing to Ysa about how there was no creature who lived in their oven, no spirit who subsisted on bowls of milk and the stablehand’s melancholy.

But then her father had taken a second wife, a pious woman who’d had ambitions to become a prioress before her wealthy family married her off to a powerful arms dealer. It was she who had recognized Ysa’s curse for what it was, one night after catching her new stepdaughter conversing with something in the corner that wasn’t there. First she’d tried to exorcise the madness from the girl, inviting priests and augurs to excise the visions from her mind. Then she’d tried to beat it out of her.

When none of that worked, Ysa’s stepmother had spoken the damning words:

The Endarkened have returned. The spirits that she communes with are demons, whispering dark and profane filth in her ears. They have already invaded her body and claimed her soul. Perhaps they took her in the womb; perhaps her mother died from birthing a she-demon. They will come for us next if we allow her to stay. 

It would have remained nonsense, Ysa thought, though it was a dangerous enough accusation to cause her to finally flee. Except for the fact that she would go on to kill a man, only days into that treacherous journey south across the Torunn mountains. Except for the fact that she’d later see, with her own eyes, exactly how insidious and seductive the Endarkened could really be, once she joined the Shepherds.

Except for the fact that no one—not other Mages, not Elves or researchers or the Reach’s northern-bred Hunter leader—had ever seen anything like a myrkath.

So she was either mad—though the visions and delusions had faded the further she fled South—or she was beset by demons. For a time, when she realized she was unable to scrape up satisfactory answers, she’d told herself that it no longer mattered; that she was safe in Haven now, that she was protected and sanctified within the Order’s walls. That the darkness that had plagued her youth would trouble her no more. That the phantoms of her childhood would dissipate as she made herself well, built herself anew.

But now she was back in the North, the last place she ever wanted to be. 

And she could still see the myrkath.

And no one else could.

#

That night, Ysa crept away from her bedroll. She mumbled to Cybele that she was intent on bathing in a nearby icy stream, but really, she wanted the chance to meditate, to use the silence to stuff down the scream she could feel climbing up inside her. Daren glanced at her sharply from his seat beside the fire, begrudgingly made since they were so isolated from the road. He probably intended to rebuke her for going alone—but then she saw something like understanding in his dark eyes, and he only nodded and looked away.

Ysa had only told him part of the story, the meagerest details that might become relevant if her father did happen to be in collusion with the rebels. That was already something enough to fear: although Ysa doubted he had any interest in reclaiming her, if their paths did cross and he decided to make demands of the Order in exchange for his daughter, it could create a hairy political situation for the Shepherds. Ysa had heard plenty of stories of incensed nobles and puffed-up merchant families making claims that their precious heirs and recruited scions had been brainwashed or kidnapped by Haven’s Diminished soldiers. If her father, who had connections all across Korgoth and Karzai, decided to make trouble about her being a part of the Order… the Shepherds might decide the whole thing was more hassle than she was worth and release Ysa from service. Or worse, they would keep her, and it would lead to some conflict that would incur losses or damage. And how could she live with herself then? 

No. She had faith in her team, in her captain, in the commanders and leaders of the Shepherds, in their goodness and their competence. She was likely safe from her father with them, safe from her stepmother, safe from any outside enemy she could conceive of. 

But she could not, would not tell her friends about her madness. The Shepherds had no answers about it: she had checked, as thoroughly and clandestinely as she could manage. There were no other explanations. If they found out about her visions—her way of seeing things that weren’t there—they, too, would conclude that she was mad, and pity her, and strip her of her duties, as they pitied and patronized the mad seeress Mimir Esthin… or they would conclude that she was Endarkened-touched. And perhaps then they would kill her.

Ysa felt her gorge rise again and careened towards the river, crashing through the undergrowth at a full-tilt run. Later, after she’d lost her supper and buried the evidence in a snowbank, she sank down beside the sluggish stream, her back against a tall outcropping of rocks, and shivered. The cold hardly bothered her, and never had, the ice-magic in her blood inoculating her from its bite—but she could feel the black-red scrawl of fear and hatred falling like snowdrift over her mind. She bit her knuckles and told herself not to cry.

Perhaps the creature sensed her distress from afar. When she believed they were myrkath, Ysa had observed that they seemed to be drawn to strong human emotion, drifting invisibly and sometimes attaching themselves to people in animated debate or in the throes of grief. Sometimes it seemed that they absorbed and took on the traits of these passions, the way still lakes were shaped by the ripples made from falling rocks. Or perhaps this one had followed her party from the village with stone houses. It floated soundlessly over the river towards her, hanging in the air like a faint will o’wisp, colorless and without substance, and whispered a question into her mind. 

Ysa moaned and clamped her hands to her ears. “Go away,” she whispered, pressing her face against her knees. “Please.”

The myrkath—demon, spirit, ghost, whatever it was—was silent for a moment, puzzled. It was a new being, she sensed, only lately aware of the world around it. So far, all it had encountered were the simple peasant folk inhabiting its village: her mind and worries were more complex to it. It told her it was a hearth-guardian, a protector of both flame and good humor in the depths of black winter, keeping the vital warmth of a kitchen hearth alive even when its keepers were too ill or old to gather enough kindling themselves. It asked her why she was so cold.

Your friends have a fire, it whispered. Why then are you so afraid?

Ysa ground her teeth. Do not answer it, she told herself. Do not look at it. Do not answer. That will only make things worse.

In the next moment, the myrkath seemed to comprehend her worries—everything that had brought her to this point, everything she feared about herself and these beings no one else could see. It seemed to withdraw a bit, mimicking something like sympathy—she did not know if it could truly feel such a thing—before it said, Your father will not be among those in Kianlever.

Ysa shook her head stubbornly. Demons worked exactly like this, tempting mortals with knowledge, prying open their darkest secrets to exploit their fears and ambitions, telling them the answers they most wanted to hear in order to lower their guard or lull them into a false sense of security. The myrkath back home had often told her things with this same placid surety—how they came to know them, she didn’t know, which now she realized was also quite demonic—but it was either her own mind or the wiles of an ancient evil that tried to soothe her worries now. She gritted out, “I am not a child anymore. Begone, or I’ll—I’ll skewer you with ice!”

She hadn’t known how to use her magic when she lived in her father’s house. Now she did, and she was powerful—powerful enough to call down storms, capable of taking down a Revenant with her team when she had to—and she felt her power stirring inside her, bridling like an uneasy horse that sensed the distress of its rider.

The myrkath, however, was unperturbed. He helped them build the weapon, it continued, but he is old now, and he does not leave the city often. You have nothing to fear, so long as your friend can convince her mother of what is coming. But you will be able to meet the threat. You and your friends are stronger than you know, and when you ride down from the mountainside, the rebels will tremble before you as if you were one of their gods…

“Stop!” Ysa cried out then. “Please, stop!”

“Ysa?”

There was the sound of hasty footsteps, boots slipping through snow, winter ferns and brittle brambles being crushed in haste. From around the stony outcrop, Justyn and Emarynne appeared, wide-eyed and alert for any signs of danger. Justyn’s pistol was drawn, and Emarynne moved instantly to Ysa’s side, ever the military-trained aristocrat, her hand reaching for the knife at her belt.

They didn’t see the spirit on the river, though when Ysa risked a glance, the thing remained, patient and curious. Justyn, his eyes scanning the dark press of the forest, said tersely, “What’s going on, Ysa?”

He and Emarynne had been on another one of their evening walks when she’d left the others by the campfire. In any other circumstances, Ysa would have felt more than a little disturbed at the thought of having been nearby while they were—doing whatever it was they did on those walks, those Justyn insisted to Cybele that it was just talking—but for now she could only say faintly, “It was—nothing. I was dozing, and I… I had a bad dream. An unpleasant memory. That’s all.”

She didn’t look at the myrkath as she said it. Both Emarynne and Justyn looked incredibly skeptical, but after a long moment, the bard decided to holster his weapon; he trusted that Ysa wouldn’t lie if there was true danger abroad. He crouched beside her wordlessly in the snow, the moonlight silvering his stubble-roughed jaw; on her other side, Emarynne did the same, perching more daintily on a nearby rock.

Justyn said quietly, “I should apologize to you, Ysa. I knew you came from the North, but I didn’t consider that… that coming back here would stir up troubling memories for you. I never asked, and I admit I never thought about it, either. For that, I’m sorry.”

Ysa regarded him for a long moment. He seemed entirely serious and sincere, but…

“Daren told you,” she breathed, glancing from his face to Emarynne’s. “About my father?”

“Only to protect you,” he said gently. “He wanted us to be prepared for a confrontation—to be on the lookout for you—in case anything… untoward happened, or you were caught off-guard, and you needed our help. With anything.”

The implication being that Daren only felt equipped to help her in one sense of the word, she thought a little dryly, which was her physical protection—but when it came to emotional support, he’d felt the need to loop Justyn in on the matter. Well. In a sense she was relieved. She’d known she’d have to tell the team about her father sometime. And in a sense, Daren would have only done it because he cared.

 Emarynne, watching her face, seemed to discern that there was something more at play here than Ysa was letting on. She brushed snow from her woolen leggings and said, with something like briskness, “I understand something of how you feel, Ysa. It’s complicated, but… I have no great love of my mother, either. And my father is dead, though I wish he wasn’t, because if he was in charge of Kianlever, I wouldn’t have to come rushing back to defend it.” 

Trying to steady her breath—the myrkath had finally melted away into the night—Ysa looked at her questioningly, unable for the moment to speak.

Emarynne shook her head. “My oldest brother, Savarin, is the rightful heir of Kianlever,” she continued in her low voice. “But he was born of a different mother, and my own has made it clear that the title will go to my sister Imogín when the time comes. It’s not right, and we who love Sav fought her on it—she only altered the will after my father died—but Savarin is too noble and has accepted her decision. And she’s selfish and petty and cruel besides, and I haven’t spoken to her in over a year.” She fell silent for a moment. “I dread facing her when we arrive back home. She may believe this whole thing is a farce, the dramatic tantrum of a rebellious daughter, or even worse…” She trailed off significantly. “It’s possible that she’ll think I’ve gone mad. Perhaps the training at Fort Lagann made me overwrought. Perhaps I simply misunderstood what I saw in Colen Teivel’s study… or perhaps I’m simply making the whole thing up in an attempt to get back in her good graces. I don’t know. It certainly sounds far-fetched. I’m half-afraid that this desperate, mad dash back home will be utterly futile… or it will lead to my undoing.”

 Both Ysa and Justyn were staring at her now. If Justyn already knew about any of this, he gave no sign. His gloved hand twitched, rose as if to touch Emarynne… paused before it reached her shoulder, and fell again. Ysa looked away. Perhaps they hadn’t been doing anything in the woods except walking, after all.

 “And yet you still have to do it,” she said to Emarynne, her voice an ugly, raw whisper in comparison to the noble’s fluting tenor. “Don’t you?”

 Emarynne was looking back at her, and Ysa thought that, by the look in her green eyes, the Reaver aristocrat saw entirely too much. Just as Ysa herself once had. “Yes,” she said heavily. “As much as I may not want to.”

 Ysa closed her eyes, and for a moment the three of them sat there in silence, listening to the sounds of the benighted forest, the whisper-glide of owls winging overhead. Finally Ysa whispered, unsure of why she said it: “I… I think you’ll be able to convince your mother. And everything will be all right in Kianlever. And my father won’t be there.”

 “If he was,” Justyn said seriously, “you know that we wouldn’t allow him near you, Ysa? Or to take you back?”

 She smiled wanly at him. “I know.”

 “We wouldn’t be able to survive without you,” he added, a bit more lightly, perhaps trying to lift her spirits. “Daren would go to pieces. So would Cybele. And without you, I think the both of them would drive me insane.” He smiled thinly at her. “We don’t say it to you often enough, because you’re so self-reliant and strong, but… we need you.”

 Her heart twisted. She thought, Can I trust them? And at the same time: They can never, ever know.

 The wintry air was so still that it seemed as if the forest was holding its breath. Ysa, with difficulty, pulled in a ragged, steadying breath of her own, and Emarynne said softly, “Are you ready, Ysa?”

 The Ice-Mage stood, shaky and stiff. But her voice was stronger when she replied, “Yes.”

 Emarynne gave her a searching look, as though she wanted to pierce the veil of Ysa’s thoughts. But Justyn nodded and took the lead, cutting a path through the shadowed undergrowth back to their friends.

 Ysa followed, and she thought that the myrkath might still be there, after all, for she felt the weight of some invisible regard pressing against her back. But she didn’t turn around. She couldn’t run from them forever, but for now, she would only look at what was ahead. And then—and then she would resolve the problem herself, come what may. She had to. It wasn’t something she could escape any longer.

She stepped towards the waiting fire, a new and fragile warmth in her chest now. She felt a little less cold.