The stonebound heir, p.1
The Stonebound Heir, page 1
L.A. Barnitz
Little Hawk Books
Silver Spring, Maryland
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Cover Art: Cristina Bencina • cristinabencina.com
Map Illustrator: Sarah Waites • theillustratedpage.net/design/
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Interior Design: Ross A. Feldner • newagegraphicsonline.com
Author Website: https://laurabarnitz.com
The Stonebound Heir/ Little Hawk Books, LLC. — 1st Edition: June 2024
ISBN 979-8-9906420-1-0
For those who seek out wonderous worlds, real and imagined.
The Houses of Saatkulom
House of Duran: led by Maharani Valena Sandhyatara, Duran’s descendants became Saatkulom’s ruling house in the thirty-first generation. House members are known for their skills as healers. Their insignia is the upright blade.
House of Avani: led by Master Jalil Komalratra. House members are renowned as educators, historians and keepers of the shared chronicles. Their insignia is the owl.
House of Tilan: led by Master Ketan Karmika, also known as Crowseye. The house specialties are engineering and mining. Their insignia is the wheel.
House of Hansa: led by Madam Gayatri Prabhugita, the youngest of the Seven leaders. The house is known for music, art, and making textiles. Their insignia is the swan.
House of Vaksana: led by Master Jordak Dharmavyadha, also known as the wolfmaster. The house is known for hunting and agriculture. Their insignia is the anar tree.
House of Duvanya: led by Master Darius Palika. The house commands Saatkulom’s defenses and their insignia is the bear.
House of Satya: led by Madam Parama Azumirga. This house originally ruled Saatkulom and is known for its wisdom and spiritual leadership. Their insignia is the chinkara.
Part 1
Chapter 1
With each swing of the axe, sweat trickled down Sid’s face and back. His own stink disgusted him. Cutting wood had been one of his chores from the time he had been strong enough to hold an axe, and he hated it more than anything in the world. His daydreams were colored by vague plans of slipping into the ale house the next time he and the red giant took game to the village. He had decided he would deliver the proprietor’s venison personally and tell him he was looking for work.
“I’m a good worker, yessir,” Sid mumbled. He cleared his throat and deepened his voice. “As trustworthy as they come,” he said, taking another swing at the last tree he had felled in the forest that morning. “A willing learner.” Thwack. “Can I handle coin?” Thwack. “Of course. I can do sums in my sleep!”
After a couple of tries, his lines improved, but he felt the words weren’t sufficient. Putting aside the axe, he picked up a branch and mimed how he would throw the venison down on the bar as if it were nothing. This enactment was in its second rehearsal when he noticed a woman hardly a stone’s throw away. His speech died on his lips.
She stood in the forest’s shade, just beyond the felled tree he had been breaking down. Sunlight had managed to reach one slender hand pressed to her chest, and the light caught upon her rings. He met her eyes, which glittered as bright as her ornaments. How long has she been standing there, and how much has she heard? He dropped the branch and tried to think of what to say. Words were not coming.
Finally, she tilted her head and said, “I hope I am not disturbing you. I did not intend to interrupt your work.”
“N-no,” he stammered, coming to his senses and giving a small bow. “I mean, you’re not disturbing me, Madam.”
One of the woman’s dark eyebrows arched upward. “Do you know who I am?”
Sid thought, I know you’re rich and beautiful, but all he did was shake his head.
“I am Valena Sandhyatara of the House of Duran, Maharani of Saatkulom.”
Saatkulom, the Seven Houses. Sid had never met a tinker professing to be from that faraway realm, much less its ruler. Why a rani from Saatkulom would be in the Western Woods puzzled him, but whether she spoke truly or not, it was plain she was of far better standing than him. Blood rushed to his cheeks at the thought of the nonsense he had been saying and how badly he smelled. Kneeling with head bowed, he stared at the forest floor. The silence between them stretched out until he could not resist the urge to look up.
Too well-dressed to be a villager, too well-spoken to be a common bandit.
A small smile twitched at the corners of her lips. She ordered him to stand.
What if she is a rani? Trying to make himself as tall as possible, Sid’s heels barely touched the insides of his boots.
“Are you lost, Maharani?” he finally spat out, and a stream of words followed. “I could lead you, and your party, I mean, to the village. Help you, I suppose. I know the road that goes to Mephistan and…and even the trails to the north.”
She laughed a little, and his heart hiccuped at the clear, silvery sound.
“I am not lost, I can assure you,” she said. Blue slippers peeped out from under the hem of her long skirt, and she glided toward him as if she walked on a floor of marble instead of uneven ground covered with brush and splintered pieces of wood. “I am seeking a few recruits who are willing to work hard. Do you know any youth in this area who might be willing to join service in Safed Qila? Have you heard of our capital? You see, I have employed many of our denizens on another project. Quite a magnificent project, though it costs me dearly. I find that we require more people—servants, stewards, artisans, miners, guards—practically every occupation.”
“Yes, Maharani. No.” Sid shook his head, dizzy with the realization that this might be a great piece of luck, and squandered luck was an insult to the ancestors. “I mean, there are some people in the village, not many, but I, for one, am seeking such employment.”
“I see,” she said. She stood hardly an arm’s length from him. “Are you the kind of young man that the Seven require? Intelligent? Willing to learn the skills necessary to preserve our realm?”
Sid knew the right answer but again words fled from him. He nodded. For cycles he had wished for a life where he had a chance of escaping these woods and proving he could be more than a woodcutter. He knew he could, no matter what others might say.
“All those who serve are duly rewarded, but since the last season of fly fever we have not recruited youth from families who need their members’ strength at home. Would your family not miss you?”
The word “rewarded” rang so loudly in his head, Sid almost didn’t hear her question. “I, uh, yes, I suppose, but they won’t mind me joining your service. It would be an honor.”
The woman pressed her lips with one finger as if she were considering a complex equation. “But surely your parents won’t want you to leave them?”
“I don’t have parents,” Sid said, quickly, and he was immediately struck with worry that he might have to explain his circumstances to such a degree that the horrible dullness of his life would end this conversation. “I have a guardian, and he’s good to me, but my mother died when I was very small. I never knew my parents.”
“How terrible to lose your family so young.”
If there was even the tiniest chance that she was telling the truth, he couldn’t miss this opportunity.
“Maharani,” Sid said, “if you will have me, I know I would serve you well. A lifetime here would not suit me half as well as guarding your realm for a day.”
“Of course you want to join our defenses. Every boy does. What is your name?”
“Sid Sol, and I’ve completed fourteen sun cycles.”
“Sid Sol,” she said softly.
The air pulsed with heat. The woman pushed back her long dark hair, revealing a brass brooch shaped like an upright blade on her shoulder. She pulled a pouch from her pocket.
“Should you join my service, this is your first cycle’s wage,” she said. “There is no guarantee you will be invited to become a defender, but you will serve the realm for better or worse for a full cycle. Give this to your guardian. It may ease your leaving.”
“Thank you. I will, Maharani,” he said brightly. “If I go right now, and collect my things, I can return here before nightfall.”
The woma
That gave Sid pause. Could she be a slaver planning to kidnap me? But why would a Mephistani offer me gold and give me a choice?
With a warm smile, the woman released the pouch to him, and he bowed again before starting toward the trail home. Remembering his axe, he returned to retrieve it and bowed to the woman several more times before he finally hurried away.
The weight of the pouch in his hand made him happy. At last, something was happening in his life! Who knew who this woman was, but coin was coin. He would have to do some spying to learn who she was and who was in her party before they met in the morning.
Yes, the woods witch would agree with that.
The witch visited their cabin from time to time when she sold medicines in the nearby village. He was certain she’d be pleased he was “thinking before acting”—a phrase she often repeated—even if his thinking was still a few steps behind his hopes and dreams.
Too bad she isn’t around to offer advice today, Sid thought, but he had bigger problems. Much bigger.
His guardian, Red, was a giant almost twice the height of an Ascaryan, and Sid feared that he might not be as excited about the prospect of his leaving as he had told the woman. Not that Red became excited about much of anything, but there had been something in his guardian’s grunted response when Sid had recently proposed working in the village ale house that made him suspect he might not support this venture either. And when Red said no to something, it was nearly impossible to get around him.
How am I going to explain this?
Sid tucked the pouch of coins far down into his pants pocket. He had the whole night. He didn’t have to blurt everything out at once. No. I have to find the right way to tell him.
At the edge of the clearing where their cabin sat, Sid slowed down and made an effort to hide his excitement. By the time he entered the open doorway, he was the picture of weariness.
The red giant, so called by everyone in the Western Woods because he was a giant and because of his wiry reddish-brown hair, was straining the evening’s milk through a cloth. Without so much as glancing at Sid, he said in his deep, slow voice, “Was the wood brittle or tender?”
“Mostly tender,” Sid said, stashing the axe behind the door. “I didn’t cut more than two ranks.”
“It is time to move to the northern slope.”
Sid pulled out a chair and started to sit.
“The ones that depend on you must be fed first,” Red said. “Then we eat.”
Sid sighed. He left the cabin and crossed the yard that lay between their home and the barn. Instead of feeding the animals inside, he climbed up into the loft. In the dull light of dusk he sat in the hay near the open window and dug the pouch out of his pocket. One by one, he set the coins on his pant leg. Five gold coins. Each was embossed on one side with a sun and seven stars and on the other with the word “Saatkulom.”
By the moons and stars! Three of these will see me set up my own ale house. That leaves one for Red to buy axes and whatever else he fancies, and one to keep Li suited and booted for life. What kind of fool would return these and tell a maharani no?
While he examined his treasure, a familiar voice called out from below, “What are you doing? I’m hungry, and we’re waiting for you.”
Dropping the coins back into the pouch and shoving it into his pocket, Sid leapt down through the loft door and landed on his feet with a bounce, his hands on his hips.
“What’s for supper?”
“Sticks and stones,” answered a girl half a head taller than him and thin as a switch.
Lingli’s white hair and pale skin and eyes contrasted sharply with the black cloak she wore to protect her and hide the ugly vein in her temple. Was she odd? Yes. Annoying? Yes. But no more so than the giant they lived with, Sid thought, and hardly worthy of the reactions she incited in others.
She believed herself cursed, and maybe she was, but he was done tiptoeing around her. If she had lost her spirit, it wasn’t his fault. The best thing he could do was tease and rankle her until she lost her temper like she used to.
“If you cooked that’s what it will taste like,” he said.
Lingli gave him a shove and ran toward the cabin. “You didn’t feed the chickens!”
“You’re a thorn!” Sid yelled, but she was already gone.
All evening he kept patting his pocket and wondering how to tell Red and Li about the woman’s proposition. The giant served their food without a word. Li hummed her way through supper, repeating a melody over and over with little changes as she composed it.
“Stop it,” Sid said. “You’re driving me crazy.”
“I thought you liked music?”
“Real music and a real singer are fine. You sound like a wounded rabbit.”
“Put the words to it. Then you’ll like it better,” she said, and she started humming the tune again.
“Okay, here it is: A boney maiden pale as snow, tripped on a rock and stubbed her toe. She was so blasted proud that she never cried aloud, and then she died before the cock could crow.”
“Is that the best you can do?”
“Boring tune, boring lyrics.”
“Boring Sid, boring lyrics.”
As the evening stretched on, Sid grew more restless. Each member of the household performed their chores with spirit-numbing predictability. Li cleaned their thalis and cups with ash from the fireplace. The giant twisted long stems of horse grass and reeds into bundles that he would eventually use to mend the roof. Sid sat on his stool near the door, sharpening his small axe and the giant’s massive one.
They have no idea of bigger things, no notion of the world. And they’re not even curious. They like it this way.
He watched the giant get up from his huge chair, stretch, and step outside the cabin where he spent several long minutes standing perfectly still—giantstill—and staring into the night sky.
Though everyone seemed to know about giants and have a tale to tell, Sid had never seen another and knew very little about the one he lived with. Whenever he and Li had pestered Red with questions about where he came from, the giant had only told them he had lived in a mountain in the east, and there had been a war. A war, Sid recalled, between giants and Ascaryans from Dyuvasa and Saatkulom.
Would raising the name of Saatkulom work against him when he told the giant about the woman’s offer? But that war was so long ago. If her word is true, why shouldn’t Red allow me to go? I’m not his child after all. We all must find our way in this world, and when am I going to have a better offer?
Yet the more Sid pondered how to explain, the more he became convinced that involving Red would doom the entire proposition. That the giant took his role as guardian seriously used to reassure him, but Red’s protectiveness and his obtuse answers to questions about the past had become irksome. All Red would say about Sid’s arrival at the cabin, for example, was that he and his mother had appeared in the meadow one day. He was barely weaned. She was a young woman called Afsana. Though she was afraid of Red at first, Afsana eventually brought him into the cabin and ate enough food for five men. When Sid asked where Afsana had come from, Red said she never told him.
And then Afsana died. Just a few seasons later, after coming back from the village with supplies, a fever set upon her, and she was gone within days. Red said he could not risk the fever spreading to him or Lingli, so all that remained of his mother—her body, her clothes, even her bedcovers —were burned. The only mark of her presence were her cairn on the edge of the meadow and the tributes Sid made to her before the little shrine he kept next to the hearth.
