The High Road (On Hold)

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen

“Damnation!” Connad shouted, throwing his shortsword at the hardening winter earth with some force.

“By Reman, Connad, calm yourself!” Jevar replied. “Where could they have gone? Learo’el is not so big that they could go anywhere we couldn’t find them.”

“Where could he have taken her, that is the question,” Connad muttered. “He made a promise that he wouldn’t do this!”

“What do you mean by that?” Jevar asked, suddenly turning on the man who was his friend. He stood, his expression confused and hurt, on the point of violently attacking something, or someone. His best and closest friend was gone, and this man spoke of promises?

“I’m sorry, Jevar,” Connad told him with what was apparently meant to be a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but the man’s arm was shaking so violently that it was less than helpful. “I knew I should have told you, but I did not want you to hate Kevon. I thought that he was a good man; I thought that he had changed.” He shook his head, his eyes filling with tears.

“What are you talking about, Connad?” Jevar kept his voice calmer now than before, though he felt like to burst with the anger that he felt. Connad the Swordhand was supposed to be a hero, a man that lesser folk could turn to in their need. Now, when Jevar was facing a crisis, he was near to openly weeping. He had never seen Connad this way before.

“Kevon spoke to me the day he arrived here,” Connad said, “of something that he had done many years ago. He told me of urges that had come to him during his time in the army. He had raped women before, women that were the enemy, though he did not stop after he left the army.”

Jevar could not believe what he was hearing. He had been right about this man Kevon! He had known that there was something not right about him, but Ellie had not believed him. And know Ellie was gone, in the hands of a man who was a rapist. “We’ve got to get her back, Connad. If anything happens to her, I will personally tear out that bastard’s throat!” With that, he bolted across the now snowy lawn to where it bordered an alleyway.

“Not if I get him first, Jevar!” Connad bellowed, charging on behind him.

Kevon crunched a pile of straw into a ball in his hand, his mind racing with worry over what he had done. Sullenly, he clenched and unclenched his fists over and over, mulling over his actions with terror and excitement. Would he do what he took her for?

There was a soft whine from where the girl had crumpled into ball, her tears mingling with the dirt and straw of the floor to make a filthy mud below her pretty face. The tops of her arms were bruised from where he had grabbed her, but that was only a minor flaw amidst such beauty. Would he do what he took her for?

They would be looking for him, he knew. Connad would not stop hounding him for the rest of his life. He loved the girl Ellie as he would love a daughter, and he would not rest until her captor was dead, even if he were an old friend. The boy, too, had greater feelings for the girl than he let on. He had seen the way he looked at her over dinner, and especially the sadness that had overtaken his expression when he was not allowed to come out to look at the stars with them. They would have roused the whole city before dawn, and they would scour the settlement and the whole countryside until they found him.

“Damn it,” Kevon muttered. He had made a promise to a friend, his closest friend from childhood. They had pulled pranks on the whole of River’s End, laughing and playing all throughout their earliest years. This would destroy all that they shared, he was certain.

“This is your fault, girl,” he told her, his words coming before he could think. “For more than five years I have been free of this. I followed the laws, paid my dues to society. I was a good man.” He cursed again, throwing his ball of straw at the wall of the barn with some force. They were only three miles outside of the city, in the shell of a barn belonging to an old, abandoned farmhouse. It was nearing the dawn, and it would not take long for them to be found.