Kared's Children - Chapter 13

The others were gathered loosely around the campfire Dox had built, but Raven and Piskin were sitting on a dry, rough log some distance away. Each ate quietly. Neither was accustomed to the tension he felt.

They watched their friends talk. They watched the string of campfires that lit the stretch of path along which the Caravan had stopped shortly before sunset. They watched the shadows and flickers of movement the other members of the Caravan cast as they moved around their fires. They looked at everything but each other.

Piskin was sharpening his stiletto, scraping the edge of its blade slowly against a whetstone in tight, practiced arcs. A sliver of grass peeked lazily from his mouth. Raven was leaning against a stone that jutted behind them and waxing the string of his crossbow, tracing minute amounts of archer’s wax up and down the string with his fingers.

They’d lost their parents when they were young, like the others, but unlike the others, each still remembered something of their parents. When they were children, they’d shared those fragments of their lives, in stress or sorrow reminding themselves that they were who they had, and forging a bond stronger even than the one they shared with their friends, for whom either willingly would have died. What either would do if he lost the other neither dared to think.

Piskin was the one who remembered the most, though Raven was the eldest. Piskin remembered the color of their mother’s hair: red, as red as Raven’s was black. And Piskin remembered her eyes: hazel eyes. When he’d talked to Raven about her, ever, he’d said she always looked at them with love. He’d said it so much and thought it so much more that he no longer knew if he was remembering it at all, or remembering that he’d remembered. The difference, he supposed, no longer mattered, because she was gone.

Raven remembered her panic and fear, her throwing them to a man from a window. He remembered pain, noise, light, and heat. His memories of their mother were mixed with his memories of their father-because, invariably, when he thought of her, he remembered their father’s rough hands as he’d picked his sons up. He remembered a sour smell, as of something burning, and he remembered having landed hard on the stones of a street.

They weren’t much, these memories, but they were all Piskin and Raven had. And they were more than Gerald had before Dox had told him the story of his real family, the night the mage had come. They were more than Shaerden had-or, at least, as far as either knew, they were, because Shaerden never had mentioned his parents. And the only thing Nartho had, he still kept, and carried with him on every trip he took: a tiny, scruffy puppet of a lion or a bear-he’d never been sure which-he’d named Lucky.

But this memory, apparently of a fire-it made no sense. They’d never been able to find any mention in Taroc’s city records of a fire that might have happened around the time they’d been born; in fact, until Taroc’s tannery had burned, which they both remembered, the city hadn’t suffered a fire in many years. That fire had started in a brothel. Though their mother may have lived there, or worked, neither believed they were that old-chiefly because they remembered what their lives had been like when the tannery had gone up in flames. Neither had reached adulthood and both had been living in a packing crate behind Paurleson Withegood’s grocery.

So if they’d been in a fire, as Raven seemed to remember, the fire must have occurred some place else. But neither remembered journeying to the city, and their earliest memories after those of their parents were of the wet streets of Taroc before they’d found that crate. It was a puzzle.