Strangers Among Us

What Harm-1

WHAT HARM

Amanda Sun

Colin still remembered the night he was sold. Most four-year-olds would have questioned their father hitching the workhorse to the wagon under the moonlight, the stiff leather of the old harness creaking against the rusting buckles, the gelding stamping at the dirt path beneath his weary hooves. But Colin only pressed his hand against the horse’s lowered muzzle, velvet and warm beneath his chubby fingers. The gelding’s nostrils blew warm air against his cheek, the dark midnight world slipping away until it was just him and the smell of leather and horse hair and earth.

Most four-year-olds would have questioned why their father lifted them gently into the back of the wagon, the starlight and moonlight spread in stripes of dim white across the wooden boards, encrusted with sharp ends of hay. They would have searched the doorway and windows for their mother, standing there with a tallow candle half-melted onto the bronze holder. They might reach their hands out to her on the other side of the bloated glass pane as her eyes turned away, glossy as stones and cold as the night air. They might have wondered as her breath puffed against the flickering light, as the window went dark and the wagon lurched forward. But Colin did not wonder, because Colin did not know to wonder. He thought only of the horse’s soft nose and the wagon wheels spinning, and he made not a sound, because Colin couldn’t speak.

They rode in silence to the center of town, the hooves first thudding against the packed dirt as the farmland slowly passed, then clopping against the cobblestones, the world lit in the shadowed light of the lampposts that lined the abandoned town square. The earlier rain still glistened in tiny puddles that collected in the uneven stonework. Colin peered over the side of the wagon, watching the spokes of the nearest wheel as it whirred round and round. Not once did his father tell him he was leaning too far, that he might tip out the edge. Not once did Colin tug on the back of his father’s jacket, or ponder his hunched shoulders as he gripped the reins, slack against the flanks of the gelding that snorted into the stillness.

The wagon jolted to a stop and the spokes stopped turning. Colin’s father sat for a moment, then climbed down the spokes. There was a small splash as his boot heel landed in one of the tiny puddles, and Colin watched the drops spray onto the cobblestones, glimmering like dark beads in the moonlight. His father’s warm hands pulled him from the cart, and the boy reached out for the horse’s velvet nose. The gelding reached his muzzle toward the boy and whinnied into the cold air, but Colin’s little hands couldn’t reach him. The two slipped farther from each other as the boy’s father carried him away to the curb by the stone bridge, to the quiet row of houses without a single candle in their windows.

All was still and quiet. The only light came from the tavern, where the murmur of a tune drifted into the square from the crack underneath the wooden door. The thick glass windows filled with shadows and shapes—dancing and arguments and bartering while candlelight flickered around all of them; warmth and crowds and conversation. Colin hated crowded places. He would cry and moan and beat his fists with his eyes squeezed shut.

His father left him on the curb of the damp stone bridge. He looked at him for a moment, his gaze distant and cold. Colin didn’t notice, though, for he never looked into his father’s eyes.

“Stay here a while,” he told the boy. “I’ll be back.” And he turned to the tavern and closed the door behind him.

The midnight air was cold against Colin’s thin coat. He sat as he was told, though he longed to return to the wagon and the waiting horse. He didn’t question why he’d been left on the bridge in the night. As the moon lowered in the sky, he didn’t question why his father didn’t return. He merely sat and stared at the wagon wheel, remembering the way it whirred like a top when the gelding pulled it forward.

After two hours, when the chill had begun to shake Colin, his father burst from the wooden door, his face red and his eyes bloodshot. He seemed surprised, almost disappointed, to see Colin still sitting there. Colin did not run to him, or even look at him. He rocked back and forth, thinking of wagon wheels and velvet muzzles. His father looked from Colin to the wagon and back again, and he choked on a strange cough and blew his nose into the handkerchief he kept in the pocket of his dark green coat. Then he lifted the boy back into the spiky hay strewn across the wagon and slapped the reins against the horse’s sleek flank. The wagon jolted forward and Colin squealed with delight, because the spokes spun like pinwheels in the springtime air.

They rode up the hill far past the town, to a stronghold darker than the last swell of water that slicks over a man’s head as he drowns. Even the candles lit in the windows of that black stone fortress seemed to flicker with a dimmer light that drew shadows instead of expelling them. The horse tossed his head with each step, his mane spreading like the thick branches of the dark forest that closed in around them. He brayed low and wild as Colin’s father encouraged him toward the iron gate, where a woman waited in a long silver dress of moonlight, her brown hair curled around her shoulders like a cloak against the darkness.

The wagon stopped, but Colin’s father did not reach for him. Instead he spoke to the woman. “Please,” he said. “He doesn’t speak, and he’s not right in the head, but he’s a hard worker and he’ll be useful.”

“If he’s useful, take him home,” she said. But the father shook his head.

“I’m a farmer,” he said. “The oats failed this year, and he’s no good to apprentice as a blacksmith. Don’t think me unkind. I struggle enough as it is without having another mouth to feed.”

The branches of the dark trees pressed in around Colin, shadows gathering as the owls called to each other in the blackness of the night. The wheels had stopped, and the horse’s eyes grew large as the dark puddles from the town square. He tossed his head wildly, fighting against the harness to back the wagon down the steep path.

Colin opened his mouth and began to moan, his cries getting louder as the horse began to rear up against the tightly locked wagon box.

His father grabbed the horse by the noseband, pulling him to standing still again, and then reached for Colin, grabbing his wriggling body from the wagon as he moaned and beat the stifling dark air with his fists. He fought back the shadows, but his father only saw him swinging at nothing, and shushed his moans, not knowing that they kept away the demons that lurked in the bare branches of the trees.

“He’s only startled by the horse,” his father said. “He won’t do this all the time.”

He held Colin tightly to his chest as the boy struggled. The horse reared up again and Colin broke free, rushing to the gelding’s side. His moans stopped as he clung to the horse’s leg, as the horse whinnied and wrapped his neck around the boy. Sweat and foam dripped from the horse’s muzzle and trailed down Colin’s arms, warm and familiar. Their breathing slowed and calmed, but his father yanked him away. “I’ve told you a thousand times,” he snapped. “He’ll trample you.”

Colin whimpered. The gelding pawed quietly at the dirt.

“Please,” his father begged again. “I can’t return to my wife with him. There’s no blacksmith for miles since the old one passed, and I’ve shod Lord Kiarak’s horses for two years. I can turn the heads and hearts of the town to his rule. I’ll refuse service to those who won’t bend to the iron of his will. Please. I’ve been faithful.”

The lady in silver nodded after a moment, her dress glittering in a gasp of starlight. “What harm can be done?” she said. “We can put him to use in the vault.” She reached for a soft pouch tied around her waist and pressed two gold coins into Colin’s father’s hands.

They did not notice how the horse had calmed from Colin’s touch, nor how he stretched out his muzzle now to blow hot breaths on the boy’s fingertips. They did not think of anything but the dark trade they made in the name of charity.

The wheels spun wildly as his father raced the wagon down the steep hill and into the darkness of the night. The lady pressed her slim fingers against Colin’s shoulder, like tiny links of chain binding around his young frame. And though it was hard for Colin to concentrate, though it was hard for him to think outside of the pinwheel spokes and the horse’s terror and the curl of the black branches filled with demons, he knew at that moment that the gold had been carried home instead of him, and that he’d been sold into the service of Lord Kiarak of the midnight valley.

It was, in fact, five more years before Colin beheld the warlord Kiarak, the one those in the vault called the Black Scourge of the countryside. He spreads like a plague, they murmured to each other. Those who dared to stand up to him were cut down like men fallen deathly ill. He took the countryside, then the village, then the kingdom beyond the mountains. His reach grew and festered, but all Colin knew was the vault below his dark fortress of stone. He swept the cells and stacked the candles, emptied the chamber pots and polished the chains, and when the prisoners begged and wept for the keys, Colin never met their eyes or understood their deep cries for mercy.

“Don’t bother,” the older prisoners told the new. “He’s as black-hearted as Kiarak.”

“It’s not that,” others would say. “He’s mute and stupid, and he lives in his own world of madness.” Perhaps they thought he’d lost his mind in the darkness, or that he was too young to understand his part in holding Kiarak’s enemies until the warlord made examples of them, in the pike and head sort of way.

“Here,” the prisoners would say, “he won’t spill secrets at least. What harm can a boy like that do? He’s just a flea on Kiarak’s backside.”

But Colin grew in the shadows of the vault, his eyes downcast to the swept straw of his broom and the scuttling of spiders in the corners. And one day, the door to the vault was left open, and the light of the early evening spilled in like strands of gold. Colin hadn’t much interest in going above—his world was ordered and organized, and had he been able to speak, he would’ve admitted to enjoying the mundane sweeping and emptying and polishing. But it was the whinny of a horse that drew his sharp ears, and the spinning of wagon wheels, and the thundering of hooves shredding sod and kicking into the air in a frenzy.

Colin ascended the stairs with his broom still in hand, the bristles whispering as they stroked the cold stone walls. The courtyard of the dark towers stretched out around him.

Kiarak had returned with his troops from a raid gone awry. A soldier slumped in his saddle, bent over the neck of his horse, crimson blood dripping down the tarnished silver rows of his chainmail. Horses cried out and reared and spun in circles as soldiers grabbed desperately at the reins. A legion of riders tumbled to the ground, the stamping hooves of their horses crashing down around them and sometimes on them, followed by haunting cries that shook even the prisoners in the vault below.

And amongst the chaos rode Kiarak, towering taller than the rest. The wounded soldiers crashed around him like waves around a looming cliff. They said Kiarak’s father was a fairy of midnight dreams, for even in spite of the terror that exuded around him like an oily sheen, there was a majesty to him that made Colin unable to look away. The iron crown on Kiarak’s head fastened down a headdress that draped around him, hiding his face from view. It billowed over his shoulders like a cape of night and stars as his stallion spun in circles and bucked, trying to unseat the Black Scourge of the midnight valley.