Chapter 6

Another adventure that Lex lured me into was when he was obsessed with taming a wild animal. I tried to persuade him into capturing a mouse or anything that is small and will not hurt anyone, but he had already made up his mind about it. He was going to catch a Lynx kitten.

I was afraid of cats. They hissed and spat at me whenever I was around one, and that time was no different. We had a bit of trouble finding the lair, but when we had found it we had no problem capturing a kitten.

The kitten cuddled in Alexander's arms, but when he gave it to me — oh, I was so afraid — it started making those mewling, crying sounds a kitten makes when it wants to its mommy. And the mommy came.

The only thing we managed to get that day was bad and deep scratches from the Lynx mother. When I came home my mother cleaned up the cuts. She had been worried about me all day, and she frowned at me when I came home.

"Why do you keep seeing him, Amram?" she said more than asked.

She never approved of my friendship with Alexander. I could see why. Sooner or later he would be king, and I would mean nothing to him. I would just be a happy memory, which he would never think of again.

"He will never see you."

He does not see me.

When I left the sick-tent I was instantly spat on by an ugly man with a deep scar over his cheek. The drool slid down my own cheek, and I knew that it was not only saliva in the glob. I wiped off the spit, disgusted by the sight when it fell onto the ground.

Then I seemed to disappear in my mind. I watched at the guy's back, he walked away, and this strange and funny feeling in my chest seemed to expand. It felt... good. I had never felt it before... But then I knew that it would slowly kill him or me if I would not consume to it. It felt rather good, to be somewhere deep and dark — it was a twisted place in my mind. I loved that feeling.

The scarred man fell to the ground, clutching his chest over his heart. Strangled sounds came from his throat. I had everybody's attention by then. It was so quiet that you could hear a needle drop, and even more.

"Amram that is enough", a voice slipped through my haze of hate and a hand slapped my face.

The stinging pain on my cheek and lips brought me out of my trance. I had no idea how much time had passed, but the man that I had done something to seemed really relieved, and so did everybody else. I was now the one that worried.

"Deathbringer", I heard someone whisper. There was a low mumble in the crowd watching me. I think they were all afraid. And so was I.

Bea took hold of me and walked me out of the crowd. "Go to the Moonsisters..." she said very sternly. She seemed mad at me, I could tell from the frowning eyebrows and the twist of her lips. Was she afraid of me too?

"What..."

"Go now, Amram."

So I went... And I wept all the way.

"That's her, over there! Can you see her? She almost killed a man by just looking at him..."

The gossip consumed everybody. And mainly I was the juiciest subject on the agenda. Over the next few days I walked and stumbled, tried not to look back. I was scared to look anybody in the eyes, afraid of seeing hate or — even worse — pity. And it seemed to me that, though I was the hottest topic to talk about, people avoided me.

The only ones who had talked with me were Goovar and Bea. I did not care so much about anyone else, but it would have been nice to make a friend closer to my own age. Bea was nice to me, but I feared that after the accident she had closed her mind from me. We rarely talked.

Goovar was a different matter. She seemed almost painfully too caring of me. I liked it... but I suspected she wanted something from me. She had more than once invited me to her tent at darker hours of the day, but I always nicely declined. I was not sure if what she wanted from me was something I was willing to give her, or any other woman.

Five days from the day I had almost killed a man with just my looking at him, I had the dream again, the dream of the fortress and the tower where I fell down on my back. But this time, I climbed upwards the ladder, but I fell down when I had reached the edge. And I could see Vicdaen standing above me. He looked at me with a hard and still frightened look on his face. The same look Bea had given me when I was named Deathbringer.

The Wilijies were retreating. They were not forced to retreat; they did so without us humans even posing a threat to them. There had been no attacks. There were rumours about a Wiliji in the camp — I thought it was Vicdaen, but I was not so sure. He would hardly give away his heritage — not when there was a war going on against the ones like him. He would not survive a second.

So, if not Vicdaen, who was it? No one knew. I only hoped that it was not him.

When the Wilijies retreated we marched further into their land. We left the desert landscape behind us and walked right into a jungle. This part of Veriton, I remembered, had been a lovely countryside when I and Lex visited Veriton. Now everything was overgrown, the fields had been conquered by fast-growing poplars, the original trees desperately fought for light against the clinging ivies — a battle lost. The now muddy roads had once been straight and hard. The air was hot, fuming and wet.

Bugs irritated everyone, but they annoyed the soldiers the worst. The insects found ways into their armour, and not so few times several cohorts halted, trying to sustain the preferred march rhythm. The Moonsisters league were untouched by the winged creatures — well, not me — by just saying a small spell a few girls had made the majority of the Moonsisters invisible to them. I, on the other hand, had big troubles. It seemed they attacked me more badly than the soldiers.

They giggled and made faces. I hated them, and after a few moments the giggles stopped to be replaced by an eerie silence. I heard Goovar speak the same spell as the girls, so I was freed by the flying monsters. But by then the girls had turned their heads away from me, and they seemed to not speak for ages.

Eventually the army halted. By then we were all sweaty, and especially the girls wanted to bathe. The jungle smelled like wet rotting grass and raw meat. It made your stomach clench of the thought of food.

"I have never felt a stench like this. Is a jungle supposed to smell so?" a girl asked her friend.

By then I could hear the rumour spreading lively through the army. It went from one cohort to the other. I went to ask Goovar about it.

"What are they talking about?" I asked her.