Chapter I
In which Brénan and Tôrvan set out to seek their fortunes, only to find poverty and desolation...
Brénan al Saél and Tôrvan al Elionásen were more like brothers than co-workers. Together they had served as apprentices to Vida al Dev, the weaponcrafter of Quâldris, for the past five years, and, having just been granted the esteemed status of journeyman, were now in a position to ponder their futures. In truth, starvation seemed the most likely option for being made a journeyman was a form of banishment. Their task would be to travel from one settlement to the next selling their services to the local weaponcrafter, if there was one. If there were no weaponcrafter, they would have to keep travelling; very few villages or towns were likely to welcome vagrants or loiterers. They usually had enough of their own already.
To a stranger’s eye, they were unlikely friends. Brénan was quick and small of body, the third child of a miller who had inherited a passion for archery from his mother. Tôrvan was a hulking fellow, slow and deliberate in action and speech, a thinker not a fighter who was a child of immigrant mercenaries. During their apprenticeship, however, they had been as family to one another and now could barely conceive going their separate ways. Perhaps this is why the master had made them both journeymen at the same time. Both their families were in Quâldris, but they each saw moving back in with parents as an admission of failure. They resolved to set out together as soon as they might.
Six months before, Málnîr Sédris alrí Méleken had headed off in pursuit of an accused murderer named Keldîrian and had not been heard from since. Both Tôrvan and Brénan knew Kel (as his friends called him); they found it difficult to believe that he would murder one of the Málnîr’s guardsman, although truth be told, Kel was prone to moodiness and tended to disappear for days at a time. He and his uncle Ôrman were said to be sorcerers, not least because they were able to sell ice in summer. Not that the two journeymen had ever seen such doings in progress. Nevertheless, what with the moodiness and the rumours, Kel never had any particularly close friends.
Since journeymen, by their nature, must journey and since neither journeyman understood the difficulties that lay in their path, Brénan and Tôrvan decided to combine employment with adventure and, after reserved but affectionate goodbyes to Master Vida, and their families, headed off in the last known direction of the Málnîr. This, they believed, put them as near as could be, hot on the Málnîr’s trail. Sédris was a decent man, often called the most honourable man in the whole Kingdom of Káldôr, and would probably pay a decent reward to his rescuers. This was their half-formed plan — to rescue the Málnîr and collect a huge reward to supplement all the money they were going to make from being journeyman weaponcrafters.
After travelling several days with no luck finding employment, the pair found themselves in Aîrth, a farming village in the death grip of a drought. The people who seemed as dry and tired as the fields around them, spoke of a curse and bid the travellers pay a call on Lady Ygréna at the manor.
The manor house stood as an island of nobility in the midst of desolation,although even here the dead trees which lined the entrance and the withered vines which crept along the walls were reminders of reality. The statuesque woman who greeted them in the immaculately swept stone courtyard was clad in simple blue robes, and when she spoke, hers was the voice of quiet authority, although her face was careworn. She told of the Earl’s visit to Airth and of his commitment to help it’s people. He had heard the tale of the staff of Fanon, an artefact which had been buried in the village fields and which had blessed the land with abundance until Panaga had stolen the staff away,apparently cursing the land to its current plight.Hearing that Keldirian and his companion Emthra had followed Panaga into a cave, the Earl had persued them. None had been seen since.
