Orphan: Book One: Chronicles of the Fall Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  ORPHAN

  First edition. June 8, 2021.

  Copyright © 2021 Lee Ramsay.

  Written by Lee Ramsay.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Orphan (Chronicles of the Fall, #1)

  Chapter 1 | Summer, 1397

  Chapter 2 | Summer, 1412

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4 | Winter, 1413

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8 | Spring 1414

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11 | Summer 1414

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39 | Summer 1415

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41 | Autumn 1415

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73 | Winter 1415

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75 | Spring 1415

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Acknowledgments

  Book List

  About the Author

  For my parents, who showed me the road.

  For Joy, who walks at my side.

  For Jacob, who is starting on his path.

  Stories about my father are plentiful. Bards and playwrights alike have told and retold stories about him, heightening the drama and downplaying his failings to the point where I doubt he would recognize himself. Historians recorded deeds he never performed, placed him where he never was, and muddied the man’s history until fiction resembled fact. Stories among the commoners became legend, believed by many to be closer to reality than the official histories.

  Some would have you believe Tristan was a hero. He wasn’t. When faced with a choice, my father did what he thought was right – and when that was unclear, he did what was necessary. Others paint him as a villain and would have you believe he was callous, self-centered, and opportunistic. Perhaps there is a grain of truth to that perspective, but I do not believe my father was any more or less so than others I have met.

  Others scoff at my father’s name as a footnote in history’s great tapestry. This is somewhat accurate – but the tales are so convoluted that the truth has become obscured. What is certain is, at least to the commonfolk, my father made enough of a difference to live on in their hearts and minds.

  So who, in truth, was my father? I have spent years researching his past, correlating facts and rumors to understand what he did. These nuggets sketch a framework, which I have colored with stories told by those who knew and loved – or hated – him.

  “Your father once said there are neither heroes nor villains, merely those who see a need for action and do what they think must be done,” Mother told me when I was a child. “Heroism, villainy, or obscurity are consequences assigned by history and those most affected by one’s actions or inaction.”

  My father was a nameless orphan in a world where bloodlines afforded one opportunities, privilege, and reputation. Tristan believed what a person does defines their worth; destiny and fate are fabrications justifying the oppression of some and the elevation of others. Refusing to accept his lot in life, my father defined himself rather than allow others to do so. It was this belief that elevated him in the eyes of the commoners, while those who held power and position damned him.

  From all I have learned of his youth, I have drawn one conclusion: selfish frustration rather than idealism influenced many of his earliest decisions and led to acts of stupidity – with consequences for which he was ill-prepared.

  I have a letter, so often read that the ink has cracked and the paper tears when I am careless, in which he explained how years passed before he recognized how immature and naïve he had been. Along with this manuscript, where I have compiled what I believe to be the truth of his early life, I pass along his advice, should you be inclined to replicate his ill-informed mistakes:

  “The world is a grand place, my child, with much happening in it. It is natural you should want to be a part of it. Though you may think you’re ready for everything it lays before you, you aren’t. Consider well the consequences of your actions – because they may break you.”

  A.S.

  1457

  Chapter 1

  Summer, 1397

  Smoke’s greasy columns stained the sun’s face and turned the sky the hue of blood. Scorched wood, fire-blackened soil, and blistered flesh smothered the cleaner woodland scent. Distorted by the wind generated by burning buildings, the vaporous shapes resembled agonized souls rising from the charred bodies littering the ground.

  It was a sizable village – or had been. Stout pines had formed a sturdy palisade along each mile-long side. The towering posts now lay scattered on the ground, most snapped near the base and many eaten by flame. What remained of the buildings’ fallen walls and caved-in roofs indicated sturdy, if not fancy, dwellings and outbuildings constructed of stacked stone and slate-shingled roofs. The mortar in the buildings’ shaped stone walls had crumbled away under intense heat.

  An aged man stared at the devastation before him with steely gray eyes. His nostrils pinched as the polluted wind swept the stench of death into his face. The lines framing his thin lips and radiating from the corners of his eyes deepened as he scraped aside a wind-tossed strand of iron-gray hair as sooty flakes collected on his brown wool cloak. He swallowed the sourness such devastation left on his tongue as he lay the simple rucksack slung across his shoulders beside a boulder and tightened his hand on the gnarled hawthorn branch he had pressed into service as a walking staff. His step was slow as he crossed the burned-out fields surrounding the ruined village.

  Bodies, both animal and human, littered the ground. Unlike the unfortunates within the village, the corpses outside the walls remained largely untouched by flame; their deaths had come from more violent means, judging from the arrows feathering their torsos or the bloody gashes of axe and sword.

  Flies were beginning to arrive, landing on pale, blood-spattered flesh or feeding from the salted red pools in the dirt. Though corvids had not yet come to tear flesh from a macabre feast, the raucous chatter
of crows and the throatier speech of ravens rose from nearby. Their tardiness, combined with the bodies’ condition and the still-crackling flames within the village, told him the surrounding destruction was recent.

  He crossed the simple wooden bridge spanning the stream fronting the settlement and avoided looking at the bodies floating in the water. There was no need for him to examine the torn, sodden clothing around the women’s partially submerged corpses; he had no desire to see the water-darkened auburn hair floating around the heads of men and children both. These were things he had witnessed too often in his long life, and he doubted he would find anything novel about these deaths.

  Cracked timbers littered the ground around the open gates, which appeared to have been blown outward rather than staved inward. Hot wind pushed on the broken planks, raising creaks from their pin hinges. The packed dirt of the village’s paths cracked beneath his boots as he slipped through; the heat of the infernos which had consumed the place had baked the mud into thin plates too fragile to support his step.

  The old man drew the hem of his cloak over the bottom half of his face to lessen the stench of roasted hair and blackened flesh, and tallied the bodies he found as he wandered between the gutted buildings. Rumors suggested the village housed near three hundred people. In his initial survey of the fields, he had counted no fewer than a hundred and thirteen bodies – and uncovered no sign of anyone fleeing from the ruin. Several buildings still blazed too hot for him to approach, much less investigate. His final tally would no doubt be shy of the anticipated aggregate by a score or more. Certainty would only come once the embers ceased their smoking and he sifted the rubble for bone fragments.

  IT WAS A GRIM DUTY, but he had to be thorough with his accounting; several hours passed before he completed his count and returned to the village’s commons. He rested the hawthorn walking staff against the primary well’s low wall and rested his palms on the stones. His stooped shoulders rounded as he drew a deep breath and let it sigh between his lips.

  Two hundred thirty-seven, out of three hundred twelve. He tossed the well’s hinged cover open, then closed it again with a sour expression rather than draw water to wash soot and bile from his tongue. He could not determine if the child floating at the bottom was a boy or girl, and amended his count to two hundred thirty-eight.

  Gray eyes moved across what remained of the buildings as he turned a slow circle. A full quarter of the population remained unaccounted for. Some may have died in their homes, roasting in the hungry flames. Others may have suffocated as fire consumed breathable air. Those who avoided that death may have perished when the ceilings collapsed, buried by rubble when broken support beams showered the contents of second and third floors onto anyone unfortunate enough to be beneath them.

  Then, too, survivors may have retreated to cellars beneath the homes. Despite the defensive palisade’s simplicity, the presence of sizable stone dwellings told him the village was well-established and that such chambers likely existed. A cellar retreat was perhaps not the wisest place to find oneself while the building overhead burned, but it may have been preferable to facing whoever set the fires and slaughtered those unfortunate enough to be caught.

  He neither savored the thought of clearing rubble to be certain of the count nor the idea of tarrying to do so. Not only was the viewing grim and the work waiting for him onerous, but it would not be long before the carrion stench drew scavengers more dangerous than crows and ravens.

  More problematic to his mind was the possibility of escaping survivors. He may not have found any sign of it, but his lack of doing so did not equate to their inability to flee. A delay in completing his survey of the destruction would risk turning the task of tracking any such individuals into something far more time-consuming. They might gather together somewhere else; in his experience, however, those who escaped something this violent tended to scatter to improve their chances.

  He had to be sure everyone was dead.

  A crow alighted on the lip of a nearby house. An annoyed stare passed between the intruders, neither pleased to find the other. The old man eased himself to a seat on the well’s edge and favored the crow with a grim smirk as the bird croaked at him and fluttered its wings. “You can have your feast soon enough. Give me a few moments to rest, and I will get to work. Digging through all of this—”

  A ripple swept over him, a disruption of the natural energies radiated by his surroundings. The distortion would have been invisible to most, but he had been born with the gift of magic. The shift altered his perspective in minuscule ways others might have overlooked. A new element had joined the energies flowing around him, much like a few drops of dye added to flowing water. Subtle as it was, he sensed it brushing his skin. Something tickled his ear, as though he had been listening to several instruments before another added its note. A sharpness joined the reek of burned wood, and it lingered on his tongue.

  More than his senses, the disruption tickled the energies coiled at the center of his being. Blue-white and spherical in his perception, his gifts crackled like a ball of lightning when undisturbed. Now, his magic snapped and hissed as it reached out for that of another.

  Brow furrowed, he rose and peered toward the distortion’s origin. Whoever the disturbance’s source was, they were a passive rather than active presence within the weave of energies flowing around him. Had they been actively spellcrafting, the disruption within the energetic currents of the magic would have been far more turbulent. The presence he sensed was also notably weak.

  Eyes closed, he extended his perception to trace the disruption to its source. His projected mind did not perceive its surroundings in a manner ungifted people might recognize. Simple energies rose from everything – perceived as shades of green for plants or tones of brown for dirt, hues of red for fire, and blues for water. Compound patterns emanated from animals and manifested in various sensory manifestations, influenced by their health, intent, and mood.

  Paradoxically, sentient minds were the most potent and problematic presences to detect. People presented as a void in the weave, much like a stone in a flowing stream. The weave flowed around them and took on subtle variations based on the state of the individual. Ungifted minds were harder to identify, comparable to a smooth rock in a fast-moving flow. However, those born with the ability to manipulate the world’s natural energies created far more turbulence – like jagged boulders in river rapids.

  The latter of these he sensed emanating from a small house that had collapsed in on itself.

  The old man abandoned his walking staff to keep his hands free and approached the broken building with a wary step. His mind probed the structure, noting which stones’ internal structures were fragmenting beneath the strain of supporting neighbors and which timbers were near failing. An enchantment’s aftertaste and lingering scent flavored the air as he drew closer. Whoever had worked the spell had done so to keep the building from falling inward in its entirety. However, without the sorcery to support it, the bricks, stones, and beams were nearing collapse.

  His hand moved through complex motions as he collected strands of transient energy. Arcane phrases to guide his spellcrafting were unnecessary; he had long ago mastered direct manipulation of the weave and seldom needed to lend his voice to his enchantments for the effects he desired.

  Broken slate tiles from the fallen roofs rose from where they lay and clattered on the dirt as he cast them aside. Fire-eaten timbers groaned and spat embers as the old man’s magic seized them and cast them aside. Smaller stones and brickwork tumbled inward as their support vanished, accompanied by the hiss of broken dirt and ash. He paid them no mind, focused on maintaining the whole’s integrity while puzzling out the swiftest, safest way to shift the components aside.

  In a matter of moments, the hollow created by the unknown individual’s magic lay exposed. He took a steadying breath and probed what remained of the structure. It was stable, but would not remain so.

  His boots skittered on loose debris as
he stepped through a gap in the fallen wall and into what had been a small communal room within the house. Shattered crockery, glass shards, and burned and broken furniture littered the floor. Ash grayed every surface. Like the roof and the floor above, the stairs leading upward had collapsed. Partially destroyed doors led into adjoining rooms; whatever their purpose and contents had been, they had not been deemed worth protecting by whoever had created the magical bubble.

  He frowned and considered why he had not detected the enchantment in his initial survey of the village. Like the individual born to it, magic left a trace he ought to have sensed. In his experience, few people were capable of simultaneously working a spell while hiding their presence or its effect; those who could were among the most talented and well-trained minds he had ever encountered.

  As his wariness increased, the old man drew on the latent energies around him to power any enchantment he might need. His mind probed the cleared space, searching for the presence he had detected, and sensed it rising from somewhere below him. Lips pursed, he found the only likely means to reach it – a narrow doorway which stood exposed in a corner; the shelving which had hidden it consumed by the destruction which had befallen the house. Unlike its surroundings, the door remained undamaged.

  Neither enchantment nor ward stung his palm as he laid a cautious hand on the cool brass handle, though the remnants of both remained. He cautiously turned the latch in the event it was a trap. Pin hinges creaked as the door swung inward. Steep stone risers descended at a sharp angle, reminding him more of a leaning ladder than a staircase.

  His bootheels scuffed the risers as he descended, his knees and thighs protesting his cautious slowness and the steepness. Candlelight flickered from below, and the stink of sweat and blood filled his nose. Thready, ragged breathing which was not his echoed from the close walls, mixed with soft mewls.

  What he found as he entered the small, hidden chamber was not what he expected.

  Wall-mounted candelabra shed light on a narrow birthing bed draped in saffron cloth. A woman lay propped against mounded pillows, her pale skin glowing with reflected light. Long, sweat-darkened auburn hair spread across the pillows and clung to her skin. Beads of milk seeped from her swollen, bare breasts as they rose and fell with her weak breath. She was handsome, square-jawed with high cheekbones and a long, straight nose; the freckles dusting her face and body stood out darker than they otherwise might, both from the candlelight and her pallor. A newborn boy lay between her thighs, his tiny arms and legs twitching. Blood and the vernix still coated his skin, and the umbilicus remained within her.