Part One

Chapter One

“Father, why have you forsaken me?”

Thunder cracked from the blackened, outstretched sky and rain fell in sheets upon the naked skin of Set’s broken and mangled body.

“Have I not jumped at your behest? By your will, I leapt!”

“Shut up and die quietly!” yelled the soldier from down below. The soldier wore a breastplate of polished silver with a golden wreath inlaid upon her chest just below the neck. She thrust a spear into Set’s ribcage with her strong hand. Blood rushed from the wound as she withdrew, seeping down his abdomen and soiling the white loin cloth deep red.

“Father, why?”

Set’s strength slowly left him. His head fell, arms extended and wrists bound on either side to a wooden post. Rope chaffed and tore into his skin.

“ Father. Father, you say? Is your father here?”

“Raven, you torment me in life. Must your incessant questions pester me in death?”

“Death? You are not dead. I stand upon your head in this very moment so surely, you are not dead.”

Set threw his head back and the one-legged bird hopped up onto the wooden post that bound his wrists.

“ As I say and as I see, we can repeat this dance to make it three, if thou desire it.”

“Let me die in peace, damn you! Your misshapen form shall not be my last sight before passing from this cursed life.”

The bird hopped back onto the top of Set’s head. “ Then make it three, make it three!” the raven croaked.

“Damn you, Raven!”

“ You see? What father wills his son to suffer thus, upon this wooden cross, planted in the earth like a tree? A tree you are not!” the raven said, hopping up and down on top of Set’s head. “You are not, you are not!”

Three nights passed above the well-trodden dirt road, soldiers below trading post and blows at Set’s expense with whips and sticks and rocks and blunted arrows. They laughed and jeered and toasted mugs of ill-gotten brew, surely stolen from the nearby village. Firelight appeared beyond the hills.

“Three days, three nights. Can you see the firelight? It calls you, does it not?”

“I have no strength left to fight you, hell-spawn. Take my eyes if it please you. Take my tongue, my ears and drown out the sound of your blabber with mine own screams!”

The raven hopped closer along the wooden post until it stood beside Set’s ear. “You will scream, indeed. Hell does not beckon me. Where I call home does not exist below, but above. Think on this, my love.”

Metal slammed against metal with a CRACK , jolting Set from a deep slumber. Tearing the sheet from his body he jumped up in his bed, sweat glistening across his forehead and upon the back of his neck.

“It is well past morning, my love. Think on this, I have told you time and again and your father cannot abide sloth.”

Set looked around the room, disoriented as he counted familiar objects. His mother pulled back the curtains to his right showering blinding light into the bedroom.

“Mother!” he yelled, shielding his eyes with his forearm.

It must have been a dream, a nightmare. His mother grabbed at the sheet and tore it from the bed. “Get up! Get up!” she yelled. “Your father is waiting for you in the stables and you know how he gets when you are late. You are to help him break in the new horse Jessenia brought in last week. That wild beast already broke a stable boy’s wrist last night while you were snoring like a pig here in your room.”

His senses returned to him and proper memory rushed to the forefront. The brumby, the wild horse that he was supposed to help his father saddle. “I’m late!” he yelled, jumping off the side of the bed and leaping down onto the floor in a harried rush of sudden energy and realization. “He’s going to have my head on a spike if I’m late again!”

“You can’t very well tend to the horse in that state,” his mother said, looking down at Set’s loin cloth as she bunched up the sheet and tossed it onto the floor for noon laundry. “The maid set out a fresh pair of riding pants on the chaise along with your boots and shirt. Tell her thank you on your way out.”

Set hopped across the floor with his bare feet slapping across the polished wood surface and kissed his mother on the cheek. “Thank you, mother!”

“Not me, the housemaid!”

With that, he ran across the room, grabbing his clothes and boots before bounding through the doorway and down the hall.

I can’t believe I’m late, he thought. Again!

He pulled his pants on as he ran, skipping for a moment and threading his foot through the left leg. Socks and boots, one after the other and then he rounded the stairs, shirt in hand.

Reginald Bigby announced himself with discipline rather than words. Starched trousers and finely brushed houndstooth spoke well of his pedigree, long welcomed at houses of comparable stature and quality, house Forsyth being the height of that grand mountain of service. “Young Master, late again?”

“Sorry, Bigby! I must hurry or father will have my hide on the wall!”

“Indeed, Young Master. Quite right,” he said, shooing Set onward with gloved hands.

Set threw his shirt over his head and poked his arms through both sleeves. “Tell Ms. Lawrence I said thank you for putting out my clothes will you, Bigby?”

Before he could answer, Set was out the door.

Ms. Lawrence stepped across the threshold from the kitchen and stood beside Bigby, looking at the door as it eased shut on its hinges. “Was that the Young Master?”

“None other,” he said with a smile that pointed the tip of his mustache upward in a jovial grin. “He said, thank you.”

Ms. Lawrence was a heavyset woman but she had a way of carrying her weight that held the gaze of stable boys and ranch hands alike. That being said, her true love found itself in the calling of service, particularly in tending to young Set Forsyth whom she looked after since his birth.

“What a sweet boy he is,” she said before turning on her heel and returning to the kitchen.

“Indeed,” Bigby said.

Cold mountain dew drew up into the sky hours before Set stepped upon the hillside’s beaten path down toward the stables. His younger brothers, Folorn and Joden managed some of the more menial tasks around the country estate. Feeding the pigs, tossing seed for the chickens, turning out the salt lick for the cows, tasks of a nature more accommodating to young boys their age.

At eighteen, Set found himself having graduated from such menial labors into a smaller circle of heightened trust and respect that came with retrieving wild beasts. There were turkey, wild pheasant and duck, even the occasional buck if his father had the proper team for it.

Buck retrieval required a series of measures only suitable for peasantry due to the severe risks which accompanied haye construction and the formation of beating brigades, long human walls of smashing pots and pans and horns meant to drive bucks into the pre-staged netting of the haye.

Above all, Set Forsyth enjoyed the privileges which came along with acclimating wild horses. For it was this task that enabled him to engage with Jessenia.

Jessenia Mallory arrived at the Forsyth Estate a short while after Set’s sixteenth birthday. Much to his surprise, the scent of a woman nearly twice his age negated all wonder of teenage explorations about the town. Even Sarah Livewell, pride of Kensington Academy metamorphized into a testament of hideous grotesquery following Jessenia’s serendipitous interruption into Set’s once limited reality.

Jet black hair streaked down across her shoulders. Dark brown eyes nearly black as coal beneath the shade of her brooding brow gave her face a look of resolute determination that Set found difficult to look away from. He often caught himself staring from afar as she worked a brumby inside the corral. Set preferred standing on the other side of the wooden fence in those early days, one foot propped against the bottom rung as he leaned forward and gripped the top posts with both hands.

He liked to imagine that his hands possessed the strength to hold the reigns of such a beast while Jessenia worked the brumby with the horsemanship wand. She moved lightly in her tall leather riding boots with one hand behind her back, one step leading directly into the next with a fluidity that demanded attention and emulation whether it be a horse or a man for that matter.

“Jessenia!” he yelled as he ran up to the edge of the stable. “I’m sorry, I must have slept in again.”

“Young Master, good morning. No apologies necessary. Your presence is welcome upon your arrival, naturally.” She smiled and gave a slight bow. “The new brumby is still in the stable with your father.”

He turned and waved as he thanked Jessenia but in so doing, his full attention still focused on Jessenia’s lingering gaze, Set slammed his boot into a protrusion in the ground. He lunged forward and as his face skidded into the grass he thought, surely, that rock did not exist in that spot the day before.