Chapter Eight
Theo
The next morning, we all gathered at the stairway that bent down from the door of the castle. For hours, we waited under the scorching sun for the king to come down.
I met a man within the thousands around me who stood fearless among the shivering. He had broad shoulders and a scar that started from the top of his neck and went as far as the center of his stomach. His upper body wasn’t covered and neither were his eyes. They were fearless. I could see the rage that oozed from them, and I wished to know what fear was under that.
I hadn’t seen the man in the village before, and when I asked him where his home was, he looked up at me and said, “I have no home.” He paused while scanning my eyes and added, “Don’t we all?”
“I have a home back in the village,” I said, “right under the range of mountains and above the valley.”
“You had a home,” he responded coldly. “Your home now is wherever he takes you,” his raspy voice blurted as the king stepped down the stairs.
I couldn’t help but stare at the king’s face as he observed the crowd that waited for him. He had one eye that was blue and the other was a light shade of gray. One side of his face was burned and many scars surrounded it. His blond hair fell in curls on his shoulders, and his slight beard was like tiny thorns that protected his face.
It wasn’t how I pictured the king would look. I had expected something far more breath-taking, but I guess he took my breath away because of the power in his eyes and the scorn that was like a shadow to his cape.
He spoke no words. He looked behind him at the crowd one last time before getting inside the carriage. The king’s Hawks told us to follow them, while other Hawks surrounded us, ensuring that none of us would come near the king as they led us outside the castle.
Our carriages waited for us outside. The slim-figured men who were supposed to stay at the castle drove the carriages. We reached a river that the carriages couldn’t pass. They drove us to the narrowest part of the river where there were rocks that made it a little easier to pass.
I stood eyeing the river and all that embraced it. A trout floated above the water, going with the flow of the river, and I knew that a fish that flowed that easily was dead.
I was caught in the admiration of the beauty of the flowers that erupted around the river. Some were purple roses, like the ones by the willow tree.
“Stand still and you’ll die, fellow.” A man’s hands fell on my back as his words shook me out of my contemplation.
I turned around, and the man who I had met back in the castle was behind me with a grin on his face
“They remind me of something dear,” I responded with sincerity, even though I thought no one could ever understand how I felt.
“You mean someone dear, don’t you?” he asked with assuredness, breaking my assumption into pieces.
My eyes wandered back onto the gaze of the roses. For a moment, I saw her standing there, her ruby-red hair falling around her and her eyes catching mine.
The man began walking away toward the rocks that were our way to cross the river. I walked behind him, slowly falling back into reality’s stillness.
“Her name is—” I said as I caught up with him.
“Do you love her?” he asked, interrupting me.
“I worship her existence. I wait for the night’s dreams like the flowers wait for the sun’s rising, only to see her blurry image in a dream.” The heartfelt words flowed out of my tongue.
“You could’ve just said you loved her, you know. It would’ve expressed the same thing,” he responded sarcastically.
“Love is an amplification, an intertwining of all the other pulses that make all the other emotions, so it’s only fair we speak of it dramatically that we not forget that the essence of love is to be breathless and taken away by it,” I said while I jumped after him onto the first boulder of rocks in the river.
He was still bent on one knee, recovering from the jump when I landed on both my feet and made the next jump.
“Your legs are strong,” he shouted. “You must run a lot.”
“I just keep my eyes on the next move.”
“Might wanna keep them on the current one,” he said. “You don’t wanna die thinking of a moment that will never come, do you?”
“Why do you think of death so much?” I asked him.
“It’s the only truth we know, isn’t it?” he replied.
“That’s one way to romanticize death, but isn’t life as much of a truth as death is? Isn’t love, too?” I asked him, starting to enjoy the conversation with the mysterious man.
“Life and love are uncertainties. Death is the one and only certainty. We are all going to die, but I’m not sure any of those maggots have lived or loved a single moment that passed,” he said loudly while his arms stretched at all the men crossing the river around us.
I took a moment of silence to contemplate what he told me. It made me wonder. But more than wonder, it made me feel blessed. Unlike all the others around me, I had a purpose. I was devoted to finding Elise and not to the king. So, while my mind was always occupied with thoughts of finding her, their minds were occupied with the past, with the homes they would never return to.
We crossed the river and entered the forest at the break of noon. All the animals fled when we entered.
I learned that the man’s name was Seth and that he was one of the hunters who brought the animals back to the king’s castle.
He told me that he used to steal most of the cattle and keep them for himself. He stayed in a cave up one of the mountains that overlooked both the castle and the village.
When the sun came down, the Hawks told us to stop and light fires. Some of the men went to hunt, and the rest stayed to start the fires. I went with Seth and some other men, and we caught three deer that Seth killed on his own.
The man was faster than any deer, and his reflexes were unlike any other man I had ever seen. When we went back and sat by the fires, he and I sat away from all the men and talked.
“Does your body ever change when you are angry?” I asked him, feeling comfortable enough to ask yet aware that I would never confess my secret to him.
“You mean like yours does?” he asked me with a smirk.
I hesitated. I didn’t know how to respond to that. I looked at him and laughed it off.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“I told you I lived on the mountains. I see everyone and everything. I know you wander by the valleys and that you turn into a dragon and fall on your face. Who do you think brought you up that day you fell?” he told me and left me speechless.
I was probably in delirium when I woke up the night he was speaking of. When Bernard was killed, I fell but I never wondered how I made my way up again.
“You have a gift, Theo,” he told me, breaking the silence. “God knows I only feel safe now because I know your power exceeds any danger that we might face out there.”
“It could be a curse,” I told him. “It took me a long time of controlling it before I believed it might be something more than a curse.”
“If you have a benevolent purpose. This power you have will help you achieve it, and if your purpose is dark, nothing will stop you either. What’s your purpose?” he asked me.
“I want to find her and bring her home,” I nearly shouted.
“I know about that, but what about our dear old Harold? You don’t want to take that one out?” he said laughing.
“Sh!” I was afraid we would be heard. “I can’t kill a man and certainly not one whose goodness or evil I can’t judge.”
“You’re wise. I’ll give you that. But you’d be a fool if you think that anything is good about him. The man is evil, and I won’t speak of what he does or will do. You’ll see for yourself,” his voice went down to a whisper.
“I surely did already,” I smiled.
“How so?” he asked me.
“There’s no need to talk about it,” I responded, feeling the heaviness of my heart start to tickle my folded knees.
“Are you afraid of the pain of remembering?” he asked me.
“I remember it every day and night. I just never talk about my pains. I’m selfish with them. I like keeping them to myself,” I told him.
“Well, if that’s so, I’ll tell you my pains. Maybe you’d relate, and only then would we have both spoken of our pains. You don’t need to say a word,” he said.