Beyond the Lanterns — Crowns and Spirits, Tome I
By B.J.P. Bisoneaux
A 1,000-word short-story adaptation from Crowns and Spirits, Tome I, by B.J.P. Bisoneaux. BISONARTZ.
The axe struck crookedly and lodged in the log. Bernhart Wolvenhart stared at it. Winterark's instructors had taught him to meet a sword with steel and a challenge without hesitation. None had warned him that timber could humiliate a prince. An exiled prince, he reminded himself.
Behind him, Jet stacked wood. Before him, a girl watched with the solemn disappointment of an expert. She could hardly have been eight. “You swing angry,” she said.
Bernhart looked down at the axe. Anger had carried him from the judgment hall into the exile sled, across a continent of frozen ruins, and through Lycoris Bay's gate. It had not warmed the shelter or filled the stove. Apparently it could not split wood either.
The girl showed him how to let the blade fall. He adjusted his stance. This time the log opened cleanly. “Less stupid,” she pronounced. Jet appeared to find this a more impressive judgment than anything delivered by Winterark's council.
Bernhart gathered the halves. For weeks, he gathered whatever Lycoris Bay needed carried. Fuel. Timber. Nets stiff with ice. His hands roughened inside the worn gloves his grandmother had sent. Roofs required reinforcement; gutters required clearing. Here his name could neither feed a household nor keep its walls standing. That had been Ysolda Marr's first lesson. The woman who kept the settlement alive had inspected his exile papers, then asked what his name was useful for. He was beginning to understand the question.
Jet found errors in the storehouse ledgers. Sakes joined the healers. Rouik made the children laugh. Bernhart learned to work until exhaustion left little room for the forged letter, his estranged wife's testimony, or the family faces watching him leave. He had admitted the disobedience. He had never admitted betrayal. Out here, innocence was another thing that could not light a stove.
Then the hunting party found the tracks. Each print pressed a hollow into the snow broad enough to cradle a man's head. Bernhart knelt beside one. Beyond the northern flats, a ridge vanished into drifting mist.
Jet stopped behind him. “No.”
“I haven't suggested anything.”
His friend looked from the print to Bernhart's face. Apparently the suggestion had traveled without words. Garran, leading the hunters, said the tracks were fresh. Rouik considered their size with an interest Sakes plainly wished to discourage. Something enormous was moving near homes, children, and walls already burdened with winter. Bernhart could not look at the tracks without seeing the people behind those walls. They followed them over the ridge.
Mist lay in the hollow beyond. At first the white shape inside it seemed another rise of snow. Then a horn moved. The Icebeast stood watching them. Frost clotted its great white coat. Amber eyes burned beneath its horns. Bernhart felt the sudden, ridiculous smallness of his weapon, his body, every brave intention that had brought him down the slope.
Garran lifted his rifle. A smaller shape moved behind the beast. The cub tried to step and stopped. Old wire tightened around its leg. Bernhart saw the snare, the wounded limb, the mother's lowered head. What the hunters had taken for a threat had a reason to be afraid.
“Don't.”
Garran kept the rifle ready. If the creature charged, none of them would have much time to reconsider. “It thinks we trapped the cub,” Bernhart said.
Jet's whispered observation about being innocent of this accusation almost reached him. Almost. Bernhart was looking at the mother. He lowered his weapon. The growl traveled through the ice into his boots. He took a slow step, then another. Every instinct shaped by sword practice urged readiness, resistance, force. But the girl beside the woodpile had been right. Anger could ruin even a simple stroke.
Sakes came after him. Of course he did. Bernhart had tried, in the judgment hall, to claim their punishment for himself. Jet had refused him. His friends had chosen the supplies, the road, the refusal to leave people behind. They were still choosing.
Now Sakes knelt beside the cub with cutters in his hands. The wound was deep. Bernhart watched the mother instead. She stepped closer, filling the space before him until the hollow seemed to contain nothing else. Behind them, Rouik murmured something about the quantity of animal.
The wire snapped. The cub stumbled free. Its mother stood over Bernhart. Her breath washed his face. He could see frost caught in the fur, the living brightness of the amber eyes. His weapon remained lowered. There was no command he could give that would matter now.
He held still. The beast looked into him. Then she turned, nudged her young toward the mist, and followed it away.
For several breaths nobody moved. Jet arrived with the expression of a man who had endured an argument with death and disliked its manners. Garran called the rescue stupid. Bernhart could hardly dispute it. But the cub was free.
Bernhart could not tell whether courage had brought him into the hollow or whether he had simply been unable to bear another creature condemned for what fear made people see. He knew only that walking away had become possible for the mother and her young. Sometimes a useful thing was smaller than victory. Sometimes it left no enemy lying in the snow behind it.
They returned to Lycoris Bay carrying a story that reached the settlement faster than their footsteps. By nightfall, Bernhart had apparently wrestled the Icebeast. Rouik had helped. Jet's contribution had become indispensable. Sakes threatened them all. Bernhart let the telling grow around the fire. People looked at him differently now. Their attention no longer returned immediately to the court he had lost. He had become someone they could place within their own small, stubborn world.
Later, beneath the stars, Maurice asked why he wanted to return to Winterark. Revenge? Power? Bernhart looked toward children carrying kindling and men repairing a roof. “Because people were abandoned.”
The road home remained hidden. Here, at last, he could see the work before him.
Continue the story in Crowns and Spirits, Tome I.
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