Zhutu took a breath of the frigid air. “Where did my sister go?”
Suls simply stepped forward, cutting a straight path to Zhutu through higher piles of snow off the beaten path. “They’re looking for you, Zhutu,” he said slowly. “They know what you are, and they’re coming here now. Luckily I got here first. I saw Ovihr and explained that I was with your parents. She’s gone and followed your mother.”
Zhutu’s eyes flashed back over to the piers ahead. He didn’t believe what Suls was saying. “But…Father said they would not come here. That’s why he left. And Ovihr, she…she was supposed to stay with me,” he said, confused.
Suls finally broke his stare upon Zhutu for a brief moment, moving only his eyes to the ocean in the near distance. “Your father spoke with me privately after he talked to the village council and explained what he wanted us to do.”
He came up to the boy now, towering over him like a giant, probably nearly three feet taller. He commanded, “Quickly, or you’ll be caught! You know what’s at stake.”
He started walking forward down the path towards the piers, beckoning Zhutu to follow. Reluctantly he did, ambling forward behind Suls. As they walked they passed darkened cottages and a number of evergreens and other leafless trees. The ground continued sloping downward, the sky kept raining down ice, and the wind continued to blow, sometimes gently, sometimes wildly for brief bursts of time. The entire town looked wrong to Zhutu, like it had fallen under some awful spell.
“Are they going with you?” Suls asked.
Zhutu did not look at him as he thought that question through. He eventually decided not to answer, since he did not know anyway.
“How do you know my father?” Zhutu asked Suls, walking to his right.
He didn’t look down at Zhutu to speak. “I’m a fisherman, like him. Just a fisherman with a few extra skills.” He raised the butt of his spear slightly.
Zhutu did not remember who the man was. He had certainly seen his face before—even with how many lived in Rulukan, Zhutu felt if he had not met everybody, he had at least seen them all—but he did not remember this Suls fellow from the groups of fishermen he’d seen with his father before.
“Is it true, what’s been said about your mother?” Suls asked with little emotion.
He was referring to the scourging plague that had been assaulting the nation of Scarath for a little over a year and a half now. First Mother had gotten it, and just a few days ago Ovihr was starting to complain of some of the same symptoms. Mother especially was sluggish and pained, rarely leaving her bed. Miraculously, it seemed, she had summoned the strength necessary to leave her sickbed two days ago after they their…family discovery. Again Zhutu thought furiously, not sure what to say to this stranger. “I don’t know,” he managed to say quietly. “She’s not been well.”
It was so raw, it tore pieces of him away to talk about it. He wanted to be away from this man. The wind picked up again, and he grimaced.
“Zhutu!” Like a whisper, he barely heard the shout. But it made him stop in his tracks.
Suls turned back to him with fierce eyes. “Do not stop!”
He listened intently, putting his hand to his brow and squinting his eyes in a vain attempt to spot the source of the shout.
“Zhutu! ZHUTURIN!”
He smiled. He nearly laughed. “That’s Ovihr! I hear her voice.”
He started running back toward the house. He was sure her voice was coming from near it.
“Stop!” Suls shouted.
He slowed and turned, but did not stop. Suls was running after him. Nervously he replied, “But it’s her. I heard her.”
“No doubt Ztetru’s doing,” Suls snarled as he raised the butt of his spear. The staff whipped down and hit Zhutu’s head, knocking him on his back with a grunt. His ear stung, and a small bit of blood had been drawn. He lay in the snow and felt Suls kneel down across his chest, a venomous frown coming upon him. “In seeking to leave Scarath without authorization, you have brought Ztetru’s evil upon all of us! You think to abandon your proper judgment? Is that what you wish to be, boy?”
Horrified, Zhutu sputtered pleadings for mercy as he looked up at the horrible man through tear-filled eyes. His ear stung and bled, his head felt fuzzy from the blow, and the snow beneath him was soaking his cloak and coat.
“OVIHR, HELP!” he screamed, spitting involuntarily as he did. He was utterly helpless, his bag dropped on the snow next to him.
Suls leaned on him harder, pushing the wind out of his lungs. Stabbing the wooden torch into the snow and setting aside his spear momentarily, he then pulled out a scrap of dirty cloth and began to tie it around Zhutu’s mouth. The boy could no longer scream, the cloth tying tightly across the whole of his mouth.
The door of a stone cottage nestled on the east side of the path swung open suddenly, and an old man with a long gray beard stooped out with questioning eyes. Zhutu recognized him as Old Luto. “Here, now—what are you doing?” he said to Suls.
Suls looked up at him and took a deep breath before standing up and hoisting Zhutu with him, holding the point of the spear to Zhutu’s throat. “This boy is the Shepherd!” he said with volume and disgusted temerity.
The astonished Old Luto suddenly grew more astonished. His eyes went wide and he shrunk back, obviously wanting to shut the door but unable to look away after an announcement such as that. More than once, that kindly man had helped Zhutu with sage advice during times of trouble. Now he looked at Zhutu like he had the plague. Like he was the plague. Zhutu turned and saw cottages on the other side also opening up, with men and women stepping out in surprise, wrapped in coats over their underclothes, their bedtime routines cut off by this terrible scene. Zhutu could not help but cry. This was what he had feared, had nightmares of, since three nights prior during that strange dream that had come upon him and most of the rest of the townspeople, and the following morning when his parents had informed him of the terrible truth learned from that dream—that he was one of the Shepherds.
“This boy, Zhuturin, son of Tunuzo and Letun, is a Shepherd,” Suls repeated to the emerging townspeople. Zhutu’s neighbors. “The one we have been searching for.”
One of the cottages had a mother and father standing in front—Tamuzu and Kusulu—and their three children: Sharu, Esuma, and Ztesua, lifelong friends of Zhutu’s, congregating beside them in shock, staring at him. He searched for some recognition and compassion in their faces, and instead found looks of confusion and horror. The oldest of them, the ten-year-old girl Sharu, who Zhutu remembered sharing many summer afternoons with exploring in the woods, looked at him until he caught her gaze, and then she would no longer look him in the eyes. The younger boys were not so judicial, not entirely sure what it meant that Zhutu was a Shepherd (although Zhutu could say the same), but he could still see the fear instilled in them by their sister and parents.
“We all saw the vision three nights ago, or know one who did,” Suls continued, speaking to ensure the crowd did not doubt his extreme measures against a defenseless nine-year-old boy, “and the shrouded one whose eyes we saw shining within that horrible nighttime omen is Zhuturin. This I know because not thirty minutes ago, Tunuzo lied to the village council to ward us off from finding him. This family must face justice.”
Miserably Zhutu looked into each of the people’s eyes and non-verbally pled with them to help him. He could see the adults straightening up and tightening their postures, no longer looking confused, but accepting the laws of the land in Zhutu’s condemnation. No one was ever wrongfully accused of being a Shepherd in Scarath, and the doctrine of Scarathest was clear—clearer on that point than almost any other: the Shepherds were a scourge from the outside world, one of the dark works of Ztetru, the god Kosa’s mortal enemy. Zhutu did not choose to be the most hated person in Scarath. He hated what he now knew he was more than any of these people did. And yet seeing the fallen countenances of his friends he’d grown up playing with on a near daily basis for as long as he could remember, seeing the way the mothers began to position themselves between Zhutu and their children, and their grim acceptance of the lifelong fate of imprisonment that Suls was pledging to bring him into—it all made him want to dissolve into nothingness.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ovihr. She was bounding down the path, moving near the trees, her footfalls nearly soundless in the snow. In this mortifying moment she seemed to him an angel, dressed in her white bear fur coat and small gray hat that padded her ears while letting her long, braided locks of hair fly freely. Her eyes caught sight of him as soon as he had, and a white-hot determination emanated from her. She was nearly four years older than her brother, typically carefree and uncomplicated in spite of her being at the start of her teenage years, and yet ever since that revelatory morning two days ago she had shown a grit that Zhutu had scarcely known she possessed.
Unarmed but stealthy she approached the back side of one of the cottages, unseen by all but Zhutu’s panicked eyes. Suls started pushing Zhutu down the path away from the stunned crowd, down to the docks to find Zhutu’s mother and capture her, too. This night was cursed! More than he was grateful for their concern for him, he wished they had never made these sacrifices. All this risk just for him? And unless Ovihr did something quickly, it would all end far worse for their family than if they had simply given up Zhutu in the first place.
A minute passed, and Zhutu risked turning back again—Suls would think he was just getting a final look at his old friends—and saw Ovihr burst out from the brush on the side of the pathway and tossing her mittens to the ground before leaping for Suls’s belt.
The towering man heard her approach and turned, but she still managed to grab the hilt of his sheathed sword. With a grunt, Suls used the elbow of his torch-bearing hand to thrust her away, gleaming sword pulled from the sheath but dropping from her hand in midair as the girl fell back and landed in the snow.
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