Taking Flight

“I ran away the day before yesterday,” she said. “I couldn’t … I mean, I wanted to see Abden and stay with him. I found him this morning, and he said that I couldn’t stay there, that they didn’t have any way to take care of me, but I hung around and tried to think of something, because I couldn’t go back home. And then the scout came back and said a caravan was coming, so they all rode out to meet it, and I ran after them, but when I got there they were all dead, and you two were there and nobody else was, and I didn’t know what to do, so I followed you.”

She looked up at him. “And here we are,” she said.

He looked down at her. “How old are you, Asha?” he asked.

She frowned. “Not sure,” she said. “Nine, I think.”

Not sure? Kelder started at that. How could she not know how old she was?

He pushed that aside and said, “Nine’s too young to be out on your own.”

“I know that,” she said. “That’s why I came to stay with Abden!” She sniffled. “And he’s gone now.”

“So shouldn’t you go home, then?” Irith asked.

“No,” Asha said flatly.

Kelder looked at Irith, who shrugged, tossing her hair delightfully.

“What are you going to do, then?” Kelder asked.

Asha looked down at the table. “I don’t know,” she whispered.

“What would you like to do?” Irith asked.

The child looked up again. “I’d like to find that caravan and kill everybody in it! They killed my brother, and he wasn’t going to hurt anybody!”

“You don’t know that,” Kelder said. “Or at least they didn’t know that. And he was going to rob them, wasn’t he? That might well hurt them; they make their livings trading, they could starve.”

Asha glared at him and said nothing.

“Being a bandit is a dangerous business,” Kelder pointed out. “Your brother must have known that.”

She turned away.

“Killing them wouldn’t help your brother any, you know.”

“Nothing can help him now,” Asha said bitterly. “He won’t even get a decent funeral.”

“Well,” Kelder said, considering that, “maybe we could do something about that, the three of us. We could go back and build a pyre for him.” The prophecy was running through his head-a champion of the lost and forlorn, honored by the dead. “We don’t have a theurgist or a necromancer to guide his soul, but at least we could set it free.”

“No, we couldn’t,” Asha said.

“Why not?” Kelder asked, puzzled.

“Because,” she reminded him, “they took his head.”

Kelder had completely forgotten that unsavory detail. Asha was quite correct; as he had noticed, the caravan had taken all the bandits’ heads, impaled on pikes as a warning to other would-be attackers. That was standard procedure for thieves, Kelder knew, but he had never before considered the religious consequences.

If someone died and nobody burned the body, the soul would be trapped for weeks, or months, or even years, unable to fly free and search for a way to the gods of the afterlife. It would be prey to ghost-catchers and night-stalkers and demonologists, who respectively enslaved souls, ate them, or used them to pay demons for their services. That wasn’t just theory; there were enough ways for magicians to communicate with the dead that the exact nature of ghosts was well-established.

And one established fact was that you couldn’t burn a body properly unless you had at least the heart and the head. It was better to have the whole thing, but the heart and head were the absolute minimum.

Cutting off a thief’s head and posting it suddenly seemed like a rather nasty custom.

It also, it seemed, offered an opportunity to do something that was a very clear and definite step toward achieving his promised destiny. If he were to champion Asha, who was undoubtedly lost and forlorn, by freeing her brother’s soul, he would doubtlessly be honored by that dead soul; that was a good part of his fate right there.

It would also impress Irith, which he wouldn’t mind at all. He could be a hero to this little girl and her dead brother, at any rate, and without slaying any dragons or doing anything else all that dangerous.

“Maybe,” he said hesitantly, “maybe we could get his head back somehow.”

“Are you crazy?” Irith said, even as Asha looked up at Kelder with dawning hope in her eyes.

That was not the reaction Kelder had hoped for. “I don’t think so,” he replied, a bit defensively. “I mean, why couldn’t we? They don’t need them all, just for display!”

Irith frowned, opened her mouth, then closed it again.

“You are crazy,” she said.

Kelder glowered at her-this was not at all the reaction he had expected, but he was not about to back down now in front of Asha, after getting her hopes up-and especially not with part of the prophecy at stake. “It wouldn’t hurt to ask,” he said. “What harm could it do? You know that the caravan is here in town, we both saw it…”

Asha suddenly became very attentive indeed, and Irith sighed.