Skerry swung the long blood-red cloak around himself and shrugged to feel the perfect fit. He looked over at his dear sister Rhody, standing tall and dark and beautiful with tears streaming down her high cheekbones, and reached out to touch her shoulder gently. Rhody burst into louder sobs and fell into his arms, crying her broken heart out. She had been scorned and hated and chastised before, but nothing as dire as this had ever smitten her fiery soul. She was dangerously close to hating the Crescentfolk and their king, fat old Wenceslas, who claimed greatness of his own accord. He should never have been put into office. He should have remained a suckling prince! Yet nothing her spirited heart could ever hope for would turn back the strong ironed hands of Time. The only thing to do was to remain hopeful.
And still, even this was immeasurably hard.
Rhody shuddered and cherished the cozy feeling of her body enveloped in Skerry’s tight, firm embrace. How glorious is was to have someone to lean on, to hold her when she was sad and make her laugh once more if she grew weary of the continuous plodding of life. Indeed, it was a strange thing, life was. Some vital universe all by itself. One could not help but wonder whether there was something greater out there, perhaps hidden amongst the stars or within the thick purplish green furze bushes that grew in clusters on the heaths. Some greater good, maybe, that somehow lived inside of certain people, if only the people could accept the living faith to something…or someone…they could not even see. Perhaps the whole crazy idea was just too much to ask for, far too much to hope for. Rhody could not be sure of anything as she hugged her brother, silhouetted by the crackling firelight, softly rubbing his back and feeling his muscles ripple underneath her long brown fingers. She smiled into his corded shoulder as she felt the rough material of the vest she had made him several months ago, in anticipation for the cold heath-winters. It was sturdy and good, that vest. It would last him a long while. And more importantly, it would last him until he could come home.
“If you ever come home,” she whispered shakily.
“What’s that?” her brother asked, holding her out at arm’s length. “My dear, sweet sister; whatever happens, you must promise me that you will be strong. You have been faithful to your adventurous heart all these years and have never let me down. Now comes the hardest trial. You will--you must--brave this as well, headlong! as you have all the others. For indeed, I could not do what will surely be expected of me if I knew that you, my own little sister, were worrying and suffering here in our tree on the highway. It would kill me, Rhody. You must be true to that heart I have grown to love and protect.”
“But…but what if being true to one’s heart is not the only thing we can or should be doing?” Rhody asked him. “Is there something greater, something bigger?” Skerry pauses and petted the blood red cloak. It swished along the ground and Rhody wondered randomly if she had made it too long. Perhaps he would wait until she could seam it. Yet no, for her fingers would be powerfully tempted to idle at her needle, delaying him until nightfall. She must be strong, even if it was only her shadowed heart she could prove her spirit unto. She would do that, in the very least.
“There is only us, our hearts and souls and minds, our hard work and our bright spirits, sister; unless the rumored Redeemer of the mountainside outcasts be true and living. If that be so true, then he had better show himself. I feel a restless Evil in the air and I do not like it. Surely, Northumbrio’s boiling treachery felt much like this, if not exactly.” Rhody cried out softly.
“You must not say things like that!” she implored him, sinking down to sit on her bed. He knelt and began packing his things into a roomy leather pouch, with straps to put over his shoulders. He had made it himself, during the long cold days of an ice-storm the highwaylands had endured, out of a deer he had killed and skinned himself. It was one of his most prized possessions, that and his drum. And now his long red cloak, the color of rich lifeblood. It hung over his back, shielding it from the cold that was trying to pry in through the stretched hide doorway, looking like a great wound that had opened. “Very well,” Skerry said, packing a little knife. “I will not speak of troubling things anymore.” He looked up, his green eyes brilliantly glittering in the dark reddish light. “Yet I must warn you of the danger you will be in while I am gone.” Rhody rolled her eyes up to the carven wood roof and sighed. She wished to make light of the whole morbid situation, but Skerry seemed to think otherwise.
“It is not a thing to jest of,” he told her. “You might be alone for a great long while, my dear pure sister…and, though I hesitate to say it, perhaps forever. They may kill me for the defiance to the King, and we must accept that fact if it so be the will of things. We have no part in fate. It is something we could not possible hope ever to understand, our minds are merely not capable of it! I do not want you fighting against your fate and mine. If I am to die…” he stopped, choking, and bent over his pack once more to stuff some dried fish from the nearby stream. His dark black hair fell in curls over his distressed eyes. Skerry did not want to die. He wanted, with all of his power, to work against the bloody fate that assuredly awaited him in Crescent. He was not deaf to the sentences dolled out by the jury, nor was his sister. They knew he might never return if he turned himself in to their austere ‘justice’. All of his heart screamed out for fate not to be the supreme ruler of things, that he could live his life to the fullest without any boundaries or limitations.
Suddenly his old teachings in the village kingdom of Crescent, his experiences with all the families he had lived with, came flooding back to him and he shook himself and raised his face. Rhody was no longer crying; she had clenched her jaw and looked like a fearsome warrior, mature and brave, in the dark afternoon. “If I am to die in Crescent, so be it. It will have been the will of my fate, my inescapable destiny. I am willing to embrace it with my whole heart.”
Rhody shook her head, heartbroken. “You should not have to,” she whispered. “What if there really is another way to live life?” Skerry had no answer to her persistent question. The look in her eyes, wild and defiant, and the queenly stature of her slender figure would haunt him for eternity. Finally, after remaining silent for several moments, Skerry said in a hoarse voice, “I never thought I would utter these words, but what is it to lose life? It may not be the worst thing that could happen to a man. Yet to be a man losing his life, when it has not been lived to the fullest expectation of his fate, is surely to die in the midst of a terrible sin.” Rhody said nothing. She silently arose and began packing a small deerhide pouch of healing herbs and mosses.
“These will help you, if you recall how to use them with wisdom,” she said. Skerry began reeling off the names and usages for each one, as Rhody nodded. Then her brother stood and took from behind his bed a long broadsword. It had been given to him long ago by a kindly old farmer, who had retired from his fighting days and had no need for it. “You may have a care to use it as a weapon or a tool of self-defense, young lad,” the man had said in a lilting highlander accent. At first, Skerry had scoffed at the idea of him needing a sword for defending his life. He was a pleasant boy, merry and merciful to everyone he met, but fiercely protective of his younger sister, who at the time was still learning how to mend broken bones herself. And then the terrible day came when he and his sister were brought gingerly before the local jury and court of Crescent and Warwick, in the very center square of Crescent herself. Rhody was recalled of that gloomy gray afternoon, when the soldiers came to take them away to the town. They had been playing together in the woods, jumping rocks across the gurgling stream with a few other village children. When the soldiers, in their shining armor that glinted even despite the sun, and their big sharp swords hanging heavy at their waists, she had been scared. Skerry had been indignant. The soldiers ordered the other children to go to their homes, even going so far as to push one of them aside. Rhody’s hot temper had flared at that. She had flown into the soldier, yelling for him to “leave her dear friend alone.” Then the soldier had cried out, in a big loud voice that still made her hands shake, “These two siblings have defied the King! They are to be tried at Crescent; now GO!” Rhody remembered feeling at a terrible loss when the children suddenly turned and looked at them. “We do not agree with King Wenceslas,” Skerry had said respectfully to the largest soldier in a deep voice unsuited to one so young. “We cannot live within the city limits because he does things Rhody and I do not want to do. He is a bad man.” The other children had all gasped and Rhody’s special little friend, a sweet-cheeked girl who always wore ribbons in her pigtails, had cried out and covered her eyes as if merely looking upon the rebellious girl before her would poison her sight. Then they had been hauled off before the jury, a bunch of old men with wild eyebrows and dull dead eyes who stared down at her and coughed into their musk-scented pomanders. It had given her nightmares for weeks after. To see lives looking so wasted and unhappy! She had longed to serve them grapefruit tea, a rare delicacy. One of the Crescentfolk had been a merchant to foreign lands, and while she and her brother had been living in his house with the pink-faced maid, he caught wind of her surprising medicinal abilities and had bought some dried grapefruit peeling for her tea, but would not give it to her until she promised to let him have the first cup. Laughing, Rhody had agreed, and when the lovely steam arose and tickled the merchant’s nose, he told her that it would be good for making spirits bright.
Rhody sighed and wished for some of that beautiful grapefruit tea right now. Skerry was ready to journey for Crescent. Turning around, he gave her a last warning.
“Forget not, my sister, that not all men seek to be good servants to a good fate, or to whatever they believe rules their lives. Some men may be wishing to do you harm. Never trust strange men, Rhody.” His green eyes glinted and Rhody, for the first time in a long while, felt the tiniest bit of fear towards her tall, daunting brother as the shadows settles underneath his tired cheekbones and played over the red cloak. She reached for his hand and was relieved to find it still strong and warm and calloused.
“I know it sounds heartless and untrustworthy, but you must understand that one cannot trust their lives to something so uncertain as the wild minds of mortal men.” Rhody clasped her brother to her breast again.
“I must trust only myself, then?” she asked. She did not like the idea. What a lonely stretch of life stretched out before her if nothing was to be trusted.
“For now,” Skerry said. Reluctantly, he opened the hide doorway and walked out into the fading gray sunlight. Rhody crossed her arms against the blast of cold that slapped her and her eyes grew wide when she saw what black shadows her brother was going to travel through.
Was there indeed more to life?
