Chapter One: Candle and Moon
Being the first chapter of Silent Skies.
CHAPTER ONE: CANDLE AND MOON
What does ‘Tuthervarr’ mean?
‘Well, a Tuthervarr is a hero,’ you might answer. ‘A fierce warrior, the bane of all that is wicked.’ And you would not be wrong, though you would not be wholly right either. You see, it was a clan, a family, before it became anything else.
Let me take you back nearly three months to tell you how Boden, the son of a Tuthervarr traveller and a Taranor orphan, came to be sitting with the company by that campfire and what he was remembering when his imagination turned that orange juice into blood, and the wind into a whetstone.
Twelve nights had passed since his father’s departure.
Boden held the whetstone to his sword, moving it in tight circles that gradually looped their way down the grey edge, emitting a high, gravelly sound in a ceaseless whine. He sat in a wooden chair pushed slightly away from the living room table, his blade flat across his knees. Every now and then as he worked, he glanced up at the candle on the table to check the approximate time—drawing on midnight. Burning slowly down the black wick, the flame cast a flickering spell over the inner walls of the cottage.
Through a window, the round moon cast its own pale spell. The calm, steadfast glow met the dancing, desperate candlelight on the soft surface of a heavy tapestry across the room. In this strange mixture of light, the colours and forms of the tapestry were obscured, though the golden bordering of tiny capital Ts still stood bold. T for Tuthervarr. Boden found himself staring at the tapestry, as he often did when thinking of his father and heroes and quests—his ancestors’ legacy.
Absorbed by the tapestry, he did not notice his mother enter the living room from the hallway. Not until she passed before him and took a seat across the table did his pondering cease. When their eyes met, the whetstone stilled. Mother and son looked at each other in silence for a few minutes, candle and moon making battlefields of their solemn faces.
‘What are you thinking, Boden?’ Sphire asked.
Boden took a breath, assembling his thoughts. ‘I know three of the methods,’ he began, lifting his sword and whetstone to the table. ‘I can defend myself in the Wolfwood. I know the path he takes to the northern thickets where he hunts. I know the signs of the Mountainwood—the snow gum and alpine ash—and I will not venture there unless his tracks clearly lead me.’
Sphire nodded slowly as Boden trailed off. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Your father has taught you three of the Seven Sword Methods, though you know as well as I do that you have not mastered the third. And you know as well as I do that your father can defend himself—’
‘Two is safer than one,’ Boden broke in.
‘Two is louder than one,’ Sphire said.
They went quiet again for a breath. Distant howling and the calls of screech owls forced their way through cracks in the windowpane and the door.
‘What is he doing?’ Boden whispered. ‘This is the thirteenth night since he left.’ The boy’s eyes flicked briefly to the tapestry. ‘Does this have anything to do with the heirloom?’ he asked.
Sphire tensed, the blue rings around her pupils going hard as crystal. Boden had never understood why she did not speak of the Tuthervarr heirlooms.
Forcing herself to relax again, Sphire said, ‘When he returns, you may ask him. You should get some more sleep. We’re going to shift the cattle further south to better feed tomorrow morning.’
Boden thought that if their heirloom was at all involved in this, it made the situation all the more dire.
Sphire stood and headed back into the hallway. On the way past, she bent and hugged him where he sat. ‘He’ll be back,’ she whispered.
Boden lingered, brown-and-orange-ringed pupils staring for a while at the sword before him, at the flickering candlelight that chased the pale glow of the moon across the steel. Sitting, wondering, waiting, Boden found himself swiftly sinking again into that horrid nightmare that had plagued him for the last few nights. Being half-awake, he mostly remembered and only partly fell back in.
The blade of his sword was a magnificent ruby red. He stood by a small campfire, drawing the sword by the dancing light. There were enemies—shapeless shadows—watching from the outer darkness.
His weapon was then ripped from his grasp by some invisible wind. It went flying into the gloom of the woods. He left the circle of the campfire’s light to search the woods for it. He knew that his father was ahead of him, somewhere, as he was following the man’s tracks. As he wandered in the dark, his father’s trail steadily became fainter and fainter. Eventually, the tracks disappeared in a swift red river, swept away by the water rushing past like blood from the neck of a slaughtered beast. Kneeling on the banks of the river, Boden felt a frozenness growing in his bones.
Boden shivered himself awake again. His heart was beating faster in the memory of that dreadful feeling. His eyes went from the grey sword to the burning wick to the twilit tapestry to the door of the cottage.
He would not leave his mother to tend the cattle alone, but he could not leave his father to face the dangers of the woods alone, either. Sitting, wondering, waiting, the boy had a sudden urge to act on a half-formed plan that had been hovering at the edges of his mind for a few nights.
Boden reached slowly up and bound his hair in a knot behind his head. He took his belt and scabbard off the backrest of the chair beside him. Quietly he stood and put the belt on. Quietly he picked up his sword and slowly sheathed it, allowing only a muffled echo of the whine that the whetstone had created to escape. Quietly he lifted the latch, opened the door and left the cottage. He did not even bother to put shoes on—he rarely did when traversing the familiar terrain about his parent’s cottage.
In the yard, the poddy calf that Boden had adopted the responsibility of feeding, Belle, was resting with her back against the garden gatepost. She looked up at him with a glossy black eye that reflected the spell of the candle flickering in the window behind him. He reached out to scratch her neck. Half-asleep, the calf caught one of his fingers in her mouth and sucked it absently, some part of the animal knowing that the sight of the boy meant bottled milk warmed by the fire. This brought a weak smile to Boden’s moonlit face.
‘In a few hours,’ he murmured to her, and he moved on through the garden gate to the stretch of patchy grass that reached towards the woods.
Between the cottage and the Wolfwood, there was a mound of three smooth stones, all stark white in the moonlight. The stones were oblong, taller than a man and wider than a cow carrying twins. From the heart of the jumble of ancient stone, there grew an ebony tree older than the Wolfwood itself.
These were the prayer stones. For countless generations, citizens of Iantal had come to this hill to stand on the stones, face the ocean beyond the woods and ask.
And Boden was climbing onto one of the stones, which lay on its side.
Exhausted of options—and terribly afraid—the boy had come here to pray. He had not been taught how to pray. He did not even know the name of the god the Iantalian people had prayed to here. He knew the names of the violent gods of the sea—and these Taranor deities, his parents had warned him, should not be worshipped. Boden suspected, though, that they did not even worship Oldone, the god of the Old Way.
Yet here he was, standing on the prayer stone barefoot with the quiet wind ruffling his shirt. The spell of candlelight was behind him, peeking through the window of the cottage, and only the steadfast enchantment of the moon remained on his features, turning him pallid and indistinct.
As he searched for something to say, he heard some beast in the woods howl—quite close. A look of consternation made its way across his face as the call was answered, closer still. Then he heard something racing through the woods, crushing sticks and breaking thin branches as it ran.
No wolf would be so bold.
The wind gusted through the trees towards him, carrying the complicated mark of the Wolfwood in late spring—the pollen of ancient red gums, ironbarks and pine needles—and that strange sound of a desperate or foolhardy creature.
Boden knew what it was like to walk the Wolfwood with his father at night.
The tall, gnarled trees loomed overhead like black roses, open wide even though it was dark. A canopy of murky leaves blocked out the moon and the stars, and his eyes strained in the gloom. He felt littler than he was amongst the imposing giants and the menacing sounds of the woods—boughs creaking and groaning as he cast his gaze about, unknown animals scratching fretfully at the forest floor in close shadows.
His steps broke twigs and crushed leaves, masking, in those moments, the sounds of the other occupants of the woods. Knotted trunks, unkempt bushes, and fallen tree limbs made odd shapes that his imagination turned into ugly, spiny monsters.
Nothing raced in the Wolfwood. Everything was sneaking and sinister and lethal. What is this thing bold enough to crash through the woods like a bull?
The howling, and the rushing creature, grew louder and closer still as Boden strained to see what was happening. Heart pounding in his chest, Boden squeezed his eyes shut in sudden, sorrowful, terrified exhaustion. A tear fell trembling down his cheek, and a plea fled from his mouth like a rabbit pursued by an arrow.
‘Please,’ he said softly, ‘bring my father home.’
Boden heard some growling beast break free of the woods and opened his eyes. A wolf, short and thickset like a young boar, with a coat that was a strange ruddy red even in the moonlight, was tearing across the turf from the woods at a sharp angle. The thing’s eyes were bright, piercing and full of guile.
The beast meant to intercept the other creature that was crashing through the woods, Boden was sure. Just as this realisation dawned, his father—the desperate, bold bull that was storming through the woods, Harros Tuthervarr himself—emerged from the darkness of the trees.
The red wolf had the angle of its interception dead-on. No sooner had his father left the woods than the growling beast met him, teeth clamping down on his lower left leg and wrenching his feet from under him.
And as the man wrestled with the monster, awkwardly trying to fend it off with a thin rapier not designed for such close quarters, Boden came flying from the prayer stone. The boy hit the uneven ground and rolled his ankle, nearly tripping over but just saving himself with a hand on the cool earth to push upright again.
He drew his sword, and as he came upon the struggle, he plunged it into the beast’s thick hide, forcing it off his father. He missed its heart, though, piercing its stomach instead. The wolf howled in rage, whipped its head around and latched on to his left hand. He let go of his sword, shouting wordlessly.
The pain flared up in a huge, searing wave as the wolf pulled him by his arm, this way and that. Then Boden’s right hand found the hilt of his sword, still in the beast’s writhing side, and he jerked it out. With a heavy strike, utterly lacking the elegance of his father’s methods, he severed the wolf’s head, pulling a spike of pressure and pain through the hand that the head remained attached to.
Boden fell to his knees, short of breath and shaking all over as the bone-chilling howls rose again from the woods, not far off. He dropped his sword, going still as his gaze latched onto the lifeless eyes of the head hanging from his hand.
Foreign, bony fingers gripped a fistful of Boden’s tied-back hair. They were not his father’s fingers. So sure that the man was Harros, Boden had not given even a fleeting thought to the fact that his father did not own a rapier, nor would he wield such a weapon in his left hand as this stranger did.
‘Well, you’re the boy, then,’ said the man, crouching beside Boden. The sentence was like sword grass—smooth with sharp edges.
Looking up, Boden took in the man’s colourless features. A gaunt, sneering face peered at the boy with cold Taranor eyes—pale blue irises surrounded by red fire. In an effortless, practised motion, the man ran the blade of his rapier across the open top of the scabbard at his belt, smearing and dislodging some of the gore that was snagged on it. When the point reached the opening, he drove the blade home, heedless of the smeared blood. He then reached out and picked up Boden’s bastard sword with similar elegance.
‘Harros finally parted with this pathetic thing, I see,’ the man continued, shaking his head in disgust as he examined the grey steel of the blade. He chuckled. ‘If the old fool had taken it with him, he might have actually managed to kill me—poor as the blade’s steel is.’ He turned his merciless, amused gaze on Boden. ‘We … ran into each other a few nights ago, in the Wolfwood.’ He gestured in the direction of the howling darkness. ‘He’s after clues about the heirlooms. I’m after clues about the heirlooms. You know how it is.’
Though his movements were fluid, he grimaced as he made them. Squinting in the uneven light, Boden could see not one but two wooden shafts embedded in the man’s left thigh—broken-off arrows. And Boden recognised the arrows, for he had helped his father shape them.
The man stood again, groaning. ‘Come on, then,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and see what sort of quiet life—sorry, what sort of quiet lie—your father has been building for himself these past twenty years—’
Boden cut the man short with a gambit for escape. The boy caught hold of the man’s injured leg, on the inside of the knee, at the same time as kicking the man’s other leg with his bare heel. The man’s legs buckled, and he came down with a roar of pain and fury. He landed one knee on the wolf’s head, forcing its teeth further into Boden’s arm.
As Boden screamed in agony, the man punched him with the fist closed around the bastard sword.
‘Boy,’ hissed the man, ‘I’ll cut your fingers off one by one right here if that’s what it takes to show you you’re beaten. If you want to keep those fingers, just come quietly. I might even let you live to see the end of the night if you’re not too much trouble.’
The pain in Boden’s hand was blurring all his other senses, so his only response was a whimper. When the man leaned back into a crouch again—off the wolf’s head—Boden whispered, ‘The head. Please, help get this thing off me.’
The man cocked his own head, looking at the blood dripping from the wolf’s severed neck. After waiting a few seconds, he said, ‘No. I think it suits you.’
The man got to his feet, grunting again, and yanked Boden up by his hair. He then began to limp, with a little of his strange poise attached, towards the cottage, pulling the staggering boy along behind him. To take some of the weight off his left hand, Boden cradled the wolf’s head with his right.
As they went, the man continued to talk. ‘Those nuisance adlets aren’t supposed to attack me, you know,’ he said in a conversational tone. ‘I serve the same master as they. Well, the same sorcerer who summoned the vark from Cthartarus—the vark that breed and leash the adlets.’ He chuckled, motioning to the head hanging from Boden’s hand. ‘I suppose you’ve got to expect one or two to break the leash every now and then. The rest are probably headed south, as they should be, for Baror. This one just wanted a bite on the way to the banquet.’
Boden looked down at the dead eyes and the bloody teeth. Its ruddy coat and stocky stature made sense now. It was not a wolf after all. His father had told him about these beasts. Bred by the vark in Vonhoroth’s Second War to hunt down dwoems, they were fiercer than most wolves—and cleverer. His father had said their minds were nearly human—in the way that a madman’s mind could be brutish. They moved by the bidding of the vark, and under the spell of the full moon, their savagery increased tenfold like the ocean frenzied by a storm. If what the man said was true, then the village of Baror was in grave danger.
The stranger pulled Boden towards the spell of candlelight that yet flickered through the cottage window, still speaking as he did so. He seemed to enjoy the sound of his own brittle voice.
‘Yes, it is beginning,’ he said. ‘Vonhoroth is finally taking his revenge on the sanctimonious Taranor. “Hypocritical traitors of the vilest order,” I have heard him say. Myself, I couldn’t care less. I see the senseless Taranor as I see your father, boy: plagued by delusions of grandeur and devoted to that sickening kind of redemption that spawned your mother from the Taranor … the virtue of the Tuthervarrs and the redemption of the Taranor … naive optimists, the lot of them. I will lecture your self-righteous father on this—one more time.’
The stranger reached the door of the cottage and began to wipe his shoes leisurely on the doormat as he spoke. Then, after reversing his grip on Boden’s sword, he knocked on the door—four polite, solid taps with the spherical pommel.
After a moment of silence, Sapphire’s voice came from the other side of the door.
‘Harros?’
Judging that she was quite close to the door, the stranger winked at Boden and planted the heel of his boot just below the latch. The lock broke and the door flew inwards, knocking Sapphire over. The stranger stepped into the room, still pulling Boden by his hair.
‘No sudden movements, my dear,’ he said as he stepped smoothly past Boden’s mother, thrown to the floor by the door. ‘I have promised your son that he might survive the night if you aren’t too much trouble. You wouldn’t want to spoil that for him, would you? It would be a rather sudden and tragic end for one so young.’
The stranger stopped in the middle of the living room, taking a moment to look around with only semi-interested eyes. Boden’s mouth dropped open as the man’s features were brought under the trembling spell of the candle. His clothes were soaked in blood, dripping from the hems and drying in bits on his shoulders. His hair was black and dishevelled, probably drenched in blood also.
After peering briefly down the hall, the stranger shrugged and took a seat at the table. He finally let go of Boden’s hair as he did this. Boden slumped beside his mother on the floor. Sapphire had half risen when she saw the beast’s head that was closed over Boden’s hand. Her eyes fixated there as mute horror overcame her features.
As the door swung shut again by its own weight, the man leaned Boden’s sword against the chair beside him. He drew a belt knife. He pulled the candle towards himself and held the knife’s edge to the flame. Without looking at Boden and Sapphire, he said, ‘Come, have a seat, you two. We’re going to wait for Harros now.’ He chuckled. When they didn’t move, a wave of frothing rage passed over his face. ‘Have a seat!’ he repeated.
Boden and Sapphire struggled to rise. Sapphire had gone pale, even in the candlelight. But, as they sat at the table, Boden’s eyes had some spark—some hope—returning to them. His father was not dead, as some part of him had begun to believe against his will. His father’s long absence was coming to an end. Harros was returning home.
The stranger saw this glint in the boy’s eyes and sniggered. He then turned his attention back to the candle. To Boden’s astonishment, the candle’s flame had turned blue, and the edge of the knife’s blade was glowing red as he moved it slowly across the heat.
The fragile spell of the humble candle—and even the steadfast spell of the full moon—fled before this new, unnatural blue enchantment. The stranger’s spell was hot to the point of overwhelming, filling the room like the sweltering suffocation of a wildfire.
(END OF CHAPTER.)
Thanks for reading the beginning of Silent Skies!
The rest of this book is not yet available, but if you’re interested in reading more about this world, I do have a completed novella here on Substack set about fifteen years before the events of this book. It takes about an hour and a half to read, and the beginning can be found here:
