25. Lunch With Cannibals
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| "Detail 2" by Junalik |
To
his surprise, the rovers didn’t attack. They invited him back to their
campfire. Shrugging, he accepted—was he any better than they? He found
their lack of either resentment or awe oddly refreshing.
“Do you know who I am?” Kavio couldn’t help but ask them.
The
noseless, earless one grinned. “I don’t care, Exile. Don’t you
understand? This is your chance to escape who you are, become who you
want.”
In
their camp, they had a captive, some toothless old man, whom they’d
tied to a tree. Taking turns, each rover sliced a piece of flesh off the
old man’s thigh, ignoring his piteous howls, then tossed the meat on a
rock in the fire and ate it.
“We
eat first,” the leader, the earless one said, “Then we dance and invite
the fae to eat the rest. Who says you have to be a Tavaedi to dance?
The fae don’t care who serves them, or how well you dance, only that you
do.”
None
of the three had magic in their auras, save for a few wild, random
glimmers born of strong hates and brooding envies, but— and this was
kept secret for this very reason—fierce emotion alone could do damage if
combined with dancing, especially if the fae were involved, never mind
blood sacrifice and dark bargains. When my Father looks at me, thought Kavio, is it these men he sees?
“So you’re hexers,” Kavio said, “as well as cannibals?”
The two exiles kept chewing. Their noseless, earless leader stopped.
“You’re not going to join us, are you?”
Kavio smiled apologetically. “No. I’m going to free the old man. You’re going to try to stop me. Then I’m going to kill you.”
The
leader hefted his spear, which spurred his companions to do the same,
but Kavio was already moving. Weaponless, it took him several minutes
and cost him an ugly punch to the ear to kill all three rovers. He
untied the old man and asked if his clanhold was far. The old man
scrambled away, too terrified to answer. Pursuit seemed more likely to
scare than help him.
He
couldn’t desecrate the dead, even bandits, so he searched near the main
path until he found a smaller path which paralleled it, a trail marked
as Deathsworn by a black megalith capped by a skull.
To
trod the path of the Deathsworn was to join them, or join the dead, and
they in turn, were forbidden to taint the paths of ordinary men. The
Deathsworn were neither fae nor exactly human, though they had once been
human. The fae couldn’t see them. The Deathsworn recruited from all
tribes and belonged to none. They were not allowed to involve themselves
in tribal wars or clan politics. They performed a gruesome job, and
most people loathed and…
***
TO BE CONTINUED
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