“I showed you mercy, girl!” he roared. “I warned you! What must I do now, but preve—!”
A quickly formed snowball launched into his eyes, and he stumbled back, sputtering and wiping the snow away with his spear-bearing arm. Zhutu stumbled away from Suls, transfixed with awe upon his sister who sat in the snow for a brief moment, not even stopping to wipe the snow away from her bare hands. She eyed Suls down with fury, barely breaking eye contact as she rose up on her feet, her hand beginning to extend out towards the sword that lay almost hilt-deep in the snow with hilt angled upward.
Suls’s eyes went wide and he suddenly increased in anger tenfold. “Do not dare! You wield that sword, young girl, and your life is forfeit!”
With knees bent, her gaze flitted to the sword, her fingers touching its leather-wrapped hilt loosely, but waited a moment, not gripping yet.
Suls continued to rage with words that fell like rapid-fire cracks of a whip. “You would dare make a mock of our people? You pick that sword up, and I will kill you. You have made no such Pact!”
She grasped the sword and slowly lifted it in her arm, her gaze returning to meet his. With her typically unassuming and docile voice she said boldly, “My ‘Pact’ is to my brother!”
She sprang forward—that fearless girl who never had held a sword in her life—and thrust it forward to Suls’s chest. He stepped back and blocked it with a powerful swipe of his spear held in one hand. As Zhutu tried to undo the knot on the filthy cloth across his mouth that smelled of sweat, he watched Ovihr exchange blow after blow with Suls, each time being blocked and pushed back.
“Get out of here, Zhutu!” Ovihr screamed.
He finally managed to pull the cloth off his head and tossed it away. The townspeople in the cottages were alarmed, he saw; one of the fathers was now running into town to find officers. Ovihr was right; he needed to go. He started running down the path, but turned back to see Suls angrily drop the torch, putting out its light, and proceed to grip his spear in two hands. In one swift motion, he stepped forward on solid footing and thrust the spear into Ovihr’s arm, causing her to drop the sword and cry out in pain. Beyond, the mothers were hastily dragging their children inside the cottages.
Zhutu cried out on Ovihr’s behalf, but recognized what was about to happen. Suls was completely convinced that Zhutu could not be allowed to escape, and that, as Ovihr had taken up a weapon without first making the proper Pact, the girl had indeed forfeit her own life. He would kill her while defenseless little Zhutu watched.
No, he thought. He reached inward as he had done knowingly only once before, but suspected he had previously done plenty of times unknowingly. In his mind, he stepped back and looked at his own raging hurricane of feelings of primal fear, anxiety, and suspicion that had all boiled up within him as of late, and he saved that putrid brew of feelings in his mind as a sort of template.
Then he reached outward. Suls’s mind was not easy to reach. He felt he was grasping at nothing over and over and over. He even reached Ovihr’s mind before retracting away. At last he landed upon Suls and seized the man’s mind like the hollow innards of a study. There was a reddish sheen to Zhutu’s brown eyes that he barely noticed as he took a mental template that spoke “FEAR” and placed it in the middle of the mind of Suls. In a succession of instants Zhutu then commanded the mind of Suls to shape itself to this template.
The man stopped just as he was about to thrust a killer spear into Zhutu’s sister, who was presently doubled over and holding her wounded arm. His eyes seemed glassy and caught up in his own mind’s eye. The onlookers—what few remained to watch—could only see the external actions, but Zhutu knew and could feel intimately what was happening in Suls’s mind.
With only a small bit of effective resistance, his mind conformed to Zhutu’s command to adopt the template of fear, and primal instincts were stoked like embers of a fire lighting up dry logs. Memories of Suls’s built up and took shape, thoughts he’d managed to suppress, all piling atop one another. It wasn’t a large fire that Zhutu managed to create, but it was enough to make that grown man, a warrior, stop in his tracks, fear and adrenaline stopping his limbs from moving.
Ovihr gave Zhutu a troubled look like she knew what he was doing, was afraid of the fact that he could do it, and yet was grateful that he had. She picked up the short sword once more and quickly swung her arm and slashed Suls’s shin. He shouted out in pain and fell on his side in the snow.
Ovihr grabbed the fallen bag of Zhutu’s things, which he had nearly forgotten in all the chaos, and then rushed forward and came to Zhutu, handing him the bag and then taking his other hand in hers. “Come on!” she screamed. Even through the glove, he could feel the cold of her poor hands. The onlookers from the cottages were screaming too, realizing what Zhutu had done. If Suls’s words somehow hadn’t entirely convinced them, he was certainly outed now. He was the Shepherd of Scarath, the first in generations, soon to be imprisoned for life in a suffocating, maze-like dungeon where there was no risk of him ever dominating anybody, unless he escaped forever in the next few minutes.
“That man was one of the village council,” Ovihr said between breaths as they dashed with all their energy down the path through a more thickly-wooded section. “He must have seen through Papa’s story about you having gone fishing alone in the northeast somewhere. He snuck up on me and tied me up.”
“If he knows,” Zhutu said, his mind still swarming with a swirling, pulsing power that disturbed him almost as much as the fact that a man had just tried to kill Ovihr, “who else knows? Is Mama already caught?”
“I hope not, but whatever happens, you are leaving. You are never seeing a dungeon.”
They could hear faint, hysterical cries coming from Suls. He would be chasing them down even with his wounded shin. And others would come. Oh, chaos of Ztetru! What nightmare had Zhutu brought upon this place? His home. Already reeling from a devastating plague, he did not understand why this had to happen now. It would have been better if he had simply given himself up before all of this began. He could have saved his family from all of this. But there was certainly no going back now.
He did not know what to do. He clung to his sister’s strong hand and kept up with her pace as best as he could.
They burst out of the thickly-wooded section and came upon another district of stone cottages. Some had heard the screams and commotion even in the distance and were emerging to discover what the matter was. They recoiled in shock at the sight of a young girl with a bleeding wound in her arm and a sword in her hand. It was blasphemy, unheard of. At least they did not know yet that Zhutu’s very existence was a far worse blasphemy.
“Ovihr, what are they going to do to you?” he asked softly, eying the horrified people.
“They’ll stay away and let you leave in peace, if they know what’s good for them!” she said with volume for all to hear. He could see her grimacing in pain from the wound she’d received on her arm, however minor it was. But he didn’t dare suggest they stop. She would not listen to such a suggestion.
The water lay clear and placid not far from them, chunks of solid ice bobbing everywhere in the sea. Homes and shops and markets in abundance were all around them, shut down for the night. The snowfall had thinned out, and now only small, inconsequential flakes were floating down. Ovihr took a right onto the road nearest to the shore, not stopping to ask Zhutu if he still had the energy to run. She would get him to safety if it killed him, he figured with heaving, flaming lungs.
Another left brought them closer to the coastline. Sounds of the ocean waves lapping on the shore brought them some momentary calm. He heard commotion happening where they had come from. Maybe town officers were arriving, or maybe the townspeople themselves had heard the news and were mobilizing themselves.
“Stop!” someone called from behind. Ovihr turned without stopping and confirmed Zhutu’s suspicion. “Bring him to us! He is dangerous!” they yelled.
Zhutu looked at them, about five townsfolk with rope to tie up the Shepherd. Still moving forward at a slower pace, Ovihr brandished the sword at them and said, “I’m the only one who will be dangerous to you if you touch my brother! Leave us alone!”
Zhutu wasn’t sure how much violence she really was willing to commit in order to save him and how much she was bluffing, but the townspeople eyed her warily, uncertain for a moment. There was a good amount of distance between them all before the townspeople started running after them anyway, undaunted by her threats and shouting how the Shepherd would destroy their way of life if he was not contained, and she should give up peacefully before the town officers arrived.
They reached the piers and made a right, their terror heightened by the pursuit. The docks were an extended presence along the town’s coast, with a number of small or medium-sized crafts set in the water, ropes and nets scattered here and there. A few fisherman stepped out from one of the docks and shouted at them. Everyone knew. Everyone wanted to enforce the law upon Zhutu. This was the end.
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