Caged Warrior Read online

  Table of Contents

  Information

  CHAPTER ONE Stolen children

  CHAPTER TWO Hunting

  CHAPTER THREE Company

  CHAPTER FOUR A warrior's apprentice

  CHAPTER FIVE Mission at Kaid Pah

  CHAPTER SIX The journey begins

  CHAPTER SEVEN Hockheba

  CHAPTER EIGHT Punishment

  CHAPTER NINE The city of Posita

  CHAPTER TEN The deal

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The fight

  CHAPTER TWELVE Putt

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Visitors

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Tests

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN A family

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN The village of Qaryat

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN On the other side of world's end

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Jadoog

  CHAPTER NINETEEN The search

  Contents

  Information

  CHAPTER ONE Stolen children

  CHAPTER TWO Hunting

  CHAPTER THREE Company

  CHAPTER FOUR A warrior's apprentice

  CHAPTER FIVE Mission at Kaid Pah

  CHAPTER SIX The journey begins

  CHAPTER SEVEN Hockheba

  CHAPTER EIGHT Punishment

  CHAPTER NINE The city of Posita

  CHAPTER TEN The deal

  CHAPTER ELEVEN The fight

  CHAPTER TWELVE Putt

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Visitors

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Tests

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN A family

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN The village of Qaryat

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN On the other side of world's end

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Jadoog

  CHAPTER NINETEEN The search

  Other books by the same author

  Talk to me, 2016

  Waking up to reality, 2016

  Sunlight, 2017

  Copyright © 2018 Désirée Nordlund

  All rights reserved.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Stolen children

  Avia sat by a large boulder on the slope and watched the sunset over the mountain landscape. Under the pearlescent yellow painted by the sun, the verity of moss and stunted bushes made the valley shift in gold-green and brown. Higher the lavender gray dominated, patched with shiny white patches of snow still surviving the summer. Not far away to the north mountains rose like harsh, unyielding cliffs surrounded by a skirt of eroded rocks and pebbles.

  She sipped from her water skin. She needed more of that these days. Not all things coming with old age were pleasant. She sighed. Not much she could do about it. Avia cooked her meal on the ember. It took its time, but it was worth it. When there was no reason to hurry, food got to take its time. Not only did it taste better but it also became that quiet, relaxed moment of a day which most likely had been acute, stressful or trying. This day had not been intense, just long, and her feet were tired.

  Tomorrow she would cross the pass at the end of the valley and reach the village of Peragri where she would meet her grandson. There was a road leading there, but Avia valued her solitude. Especially when she knew the upcoming days would offer too little of it. She tried to visit him once a year, though she was not a person whose life worked well with reoccurring events following a pattern. This time it had become almost a year and a half.

  She wondered if Arica would be angry. It was not a pleasant thought. If her daughter wanted her to be there with them more often, she would do well not to express so much anger. Avia was far too willing to take on other missions than force herself to come if she felt she was not welcome. Probably Arica meant for her mother to feel welcome, but Avia thought her daughter’s need to be frustrated with her proved her wrong. It was not a matter of being welcome but a question of expected duty towards an offspring. A duty Avia neglected in her daughter’s eyes. Arica had a family of her own and managed life superbly without her mother’s company. She could not care less about Avia’s presence.

  Avia flipped the meat of the rabbit to the other side. Expected duty, yes, it sure was. Even from her kin. Farmers, like her daughter, carried a lot of burdens, upholding traditions just for the sake of them. She knew traditions were important to most people, though she did not care much for them herself. For her, traditions were part of the prison she wanted to stay away from. It was a limitation, in no way helping you to be your true self or learn anything new. If it had not been for dear Putt who had caught her heart from the start, it was not likely she had bothered to come as often as she did.

  Another thing farmers took great pride in was taking care of their elders. The old generation, as they called them, was expected to stay with one of their children and do nothing but being taken care of. Avia did not pretend she was young, but she refused the meaning of “old” being out of date, of no use. And even if she was of no use to anybody, why then be a burden? When she still could find things to learn, even if it was only for her own wellbeing, she had no wish to sit down and be spoon-fed.

  No, she did not believe in the life of the farmers. Their dependence on the weather to survive had led to strange ideas about how these things could be mollified. From Avia’s point of view, they lived their life in an illusion. It was unfortunate that her daughter had chosen that life. Love was independent of profession, of course, but she would not have thought that she and her husband had raised a daughter that would ever leave her fate in the weather. Yet she had fallen in love with a farmer, and they had preferred his way of life to hers. Life was strange. Avia took the rabbit from the ember and took a bite. Guess that was the whole point with my idea of life, she thought. That it was supposed to be strange.

  Avia was a tall skinny woman, still lithe but less of muscles than she used to have. Someone fighting her would be surprised about her strength, though. She did not have a jaw-breaking fist or rib-cracking arms, but a subtler power in her muscles. One of stamina and persistence. She won any fight with a young and passionate warrior, attacking by impulse going for the quick wins.

  Her face was narrow with high cheekbones and raven eyebrows. Her hair was still hazel-brown. The color of her eyes was in between those two. Her hands were strong and sturdy of years of spanning a bow and fighting with swords. She mastered two blades, one in each hand, but she could use a bow or a knife just as well, whatever the situation demanded. As a warrior, her life was doomed to be stranger than most. A warrior at her age was even odder and admirable, causing her to be an unwilling celebrity in some areas. From that point of view, her harsh, demanding daughter would be a pleasant break from all people out there who gazed at her with sparkling eyes. Though out there she could be rude or unpleasant if she was in no mood for socializing. To arrive at Peragri meant no such escape was possible. For the next few days until she ran out of energy she was expected to be charming and jolly.

  Already on her way down the pass, she felt something was not as it ought to be. Later she asked herself why she got that feeling and figured it must have been something in the air, a burnt smell traveled far from a large fire with boosts of smoke high in the air. The village of Peragri was no longer there. What she faced was a burnt down leftover of what was once a group of about thirty homes. Smoke was still rising from the ruins, and she could feel the heat as she walked down what used to be the main path between the buildings, the bow in her hands with an arrow ready. There was no movement or signs of life. Whoever had done this thing had left or died.

  She stopped in front of the place where her daughter and grandson had lived. If someone had been inside during the fire, there was no chance of surviving. The house was burnt to the ground. She put the arrow back in the quiver and walked inside the sinister skeleton of charred logs. Everything was blackened and reshaped to diminished remnants. She poked among the various debris on the floor with th
e tip of her bow. It was hard to tell what was what. Were Arica and Putt, and her always-so-skilled son-in-law, Bov, among these shattered scraps? She had seen many things in her life, and burnt bodies were one of the most unpleasant things to face. What could be left of them if they had been inside the house? Some people burned their dead on pyres. They knew how to make them so hot that not even the bones were left afterward. Had it been that hot? In that case, she would never know if they survived or not.

  Her eyes wandered around the area. Where would you hide if you were inside a house on fire? A wooden house that would burn for granted. Her glance settled on the fireplace. The one solid thing still standing due to its fireproof function. It was as black as everything else, but it had stood firm to the flames that ate everything around it. It was a wide and high construction, large enough to stand in. Her daughter had been an excellent cook, and her husband had built her a fireplace worthy of her cooking skills.

  They had, however, not been standing. Huddled inside, hugging each other, were two bodies, burnt down to the bone. Avia knelt and looked closer. It was two, not three, and they were adults. Putt was ten and could hardly be tall enough to be taken for an adult. She watched the black, grinning skulls. One of them was most likely her daughter. She saw her daughter’s skeleton, the inside of her body. Things no one was ever supposed to be exposed to.

  As a warrior, she would not have survived as long as she had if she was easily upset or quick to panic. There had been too many deaths on her long journeys for her to have any hopes it was a dream or something that could be undone. The reality was there with her all the time in an almost inhumane way, denying her a shield or comfort, exposing her to the facts in front of her eyes. Her only child, her dear Arica, was dead.

  She had no idea how the farmers took care of their dead. Was it likely that they used their treasured arable land to dig holes and bury bodies? She was pretty sure they did not build pyres because wood was not something they had an abundance of, but it was not that obvious with the soil. It was easy to think of it as a way to make the ground impure as well as something that would make it more valuable. There was logic in both. On one of her missions far up in the mountains, she had met people who fed the animals with their dead. No matter how repulsed she was, it was logic in those traditions too. They had neither wood nor arable lands. Just grass and squatty bushes. And if you believed a dead body no longer belonged to your dead loved one, then why not?

  She walked to the outskirts of the village to search for some clues to proper actions. The path forked, and Avia took the left one leaving the view of the fields and turning towards the hills. She had barely got the village out of sight when she found large piles of stones in neat rows. The cairns were oval in shape, and further away grass had started to grow between the rocks and even further away there were humps completely covered in grass. This was the village graveyard, of that she was sure. The farmers covered their dead in piles of stones. No arable land ruined and they had plenty of rocks without other use.

  She returned to her daughter’s house and the remains of Putt’s parents. As she took a blanket from her pack and as gently as she could, she moved the bodies onto it, she wondered where Putt might be. Had he run? Had he been caught by whoever who had burned the village? Was he somewhere in the ruin as a charcoal skeleton? Avia carried the corpses of her daughter and son-in-law up to the burial site and began the tiresome work to cover their bodies with stones. She left them together, as they died, with the hope it did not offend any living or dead by doing so. It did not feel right, to her, to separate them. Not that she had cared much for her daughter’s choice of a husband. He had had an annoying way of showing himself able of everything. Everything he thought was needed for a prosperous life; telling her indirectly in every breath what he thought about her lifestyle. No, she did not care for that man at all. But Arica had, and they had died in each other’s arms.

  The work was tiresome. Loads of stones were needed to cover the remains. When she sat down to drink some water, she saw movement among the boulders. She jumped to her feet.

  “Putt?” she called out but got hold of her bow. Someone peeked out from behind a rock.

  “Come out here in the open, where I can see you!” A young woman appeared. Then two men, one with just a few straws on his upper lip, the other a decade or two older. All three of them had the same type of clothes the peasants in the village had worn. Their faces had a haunted look Avia had seen so many times before. They were survivors - the survivors. And they would probably ask themselves the rest of their lives why they had made it through when so many others had not.

  “Don’t shoot us” the younger man begged. She lowered the bow, but still with the arrow in position.

  “Can we help you with that?” the woman asked and pointed at the burial. “They were my neighbors.” Avia eyed the woman. If she had lived next door, she ought to have seen her on her visits, but the face was unfamiliar. On the other hand, she had never bothered to find out who lived in any of the other houses in the village. Peragri was never a possible future mission. Being there was another world. One without danger and upcoming jobs.

  “If you were their neighbors, you should know their names.”

  “Bov and Arica” the woman replied. “I’ve seen you in the village before. Who are you?”

  “Her mother.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? For me having Arica as a daughter?” She saw the confused face and regretted her attitude. There was no need to be a bitch with claws. She returned the arrow to the quiver. These people did not constitute any danger.

  “I’m sorry for that remark,” she said. “A bad habit of mine. Thank you for your support. If you want to, I can help you bury all the others as well.” The other three relaxed and approached. Together they continued working on the cairn.

  “Any idea what happened to their son, Putt?” Avia asked.

  “They took the children,” the older man said.

  “Who did?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Hunting

  Avia moved as quickly as she could manage following the trail of the bandits winding itself uphill, further into the mountains. They were not hard to follow as they had not bothered to cover their tracks. She was a skilled tracker, but even a child could follow a trail across a snowfield. And the higher she got, the more snowfields she found and could see their path a long distance ahead. The vandals who had burned the village and taken the children were too far ahead of her to catch up with them before sunset.

  She had spent most of her life on a traveling foot, ready for any sudden turns and unexpected happenings. She traveled light and carried nothing she could not lose. Belongings did not concern her. Even if she lost her knife, she would have food and fire by nightfall. Her clothes were made for this kind of situations. They were more functional than picked for their good looks. Leather pants and boots allowed for maximal mobility and protected the legs from thorns and such when passing through bushes and stunted vegetation, something that helped when she improvised routes. A short leather jacket protected her torso in the same way, and there were no straps or buttons to get stuck in. Her hair was collected in a bun to keep it away from her face. She had had it short for a period as a young warrior, but it had turned out less practical. To keep it short it needed to be cut from time to time, and it was not easily done by yourself. And if not maintained, it soon ended up in her face but too short to be kept away. Though experienced, she had not spent much time this high up. The lack of vegetation made her exposed. A freezing wind from a glacier pouring out from a connecting valley reminded her she had no coat. The only blanket she had had was now in a grave.

  The three survivors had claimed it was of no use to follow the plunderers and blamed her for leaving her task to help them bury the rest of the dead. They cursed her for prioritizing the living before the dead, she thought. Did they realize this or were they just too shaken to see things clearly? Her grandson Putt could be alive a
nd a prisoner, and they wanted her to stay and take care of the dead. No way, dear citizens of Peragri. No way. No dead had ever returned to her and complained to her for not burying them properly. If Putt were alive, she would try to save him. Her daughter was dead and it was nothing she could do about it. She could do something for the boy.

  In her missions she had learned how to follow men on the move, from a distance, catching up, as well as close surveillance without being discovered. She remembered one time she had been caught, scouting a camp of armed men. It was before she had reached any lethal skills with her weapons, but had a young person’s lissome body, making her useful as a scout. She had been brought to their leader knowing it was not likely for her to see another sunrise. The man had asked where they found her. When he heard from his ashamed soldiers that she had been as close as their tents before they had spotted her, he had laughed. Then he had said it would be a waste of rare talent to kill her. Instead, he had brought her back to the camp from which she came himself and asked for negotiations, seeking peace. He told her own leader to take care of her, that she was a singular adroitness, but was not likely to stay loyal for long. She had thought he would make her an offer to stay with them instead, but no such thing came.

  She didn’t know how the negotiations went. She left the camp, ashamed, both of being caught and for the praise. It was only later she realized that his words about her loyalty had been more than true. When he had said it, she had thought about it as an insult, that she could be bought to change coats or work for two at the same time, but that was not what he had meant at all. She was not loyal to a cause for long. She was paid, did a job, and did so with expertise, but the cause for which she worked was rarely hers. If some cause by chance caught her interest, it would not last. She would never have a lifelong passion for anything.

  The time when she sneaked up as close as the tents to survey a camp was long gone. It may have been a display of some talent, but it had also been stupid. You did not get any good view that close and so low to the ground. And the closer you got, the smaller area to guard for those in the camp, the bigger risk to get caught. She had been extraordinarily lucky that time. She had had no intention to push that luck since then and favored smart before bold. So Avia watched the tents and the men she had followed from atop a giant boulder. The mountains amazed her. She had had this grand view and seen further than the vandals possibly could have reached. Yet she had almost stumbled into their camp where they had settled in a depression behind a ridge.