Mortalis by R.A. Salvatore

Author:R.A. Salvatore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2009-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Merry Cowsenfed walked past her stunned, sobbing companions to the body lying in the tussie-mussie bed, a man who had come to the field outside of St. Gwendolyn only three days before. He had lost his wife and two of his three children to the plague; and now his third, a young daughter, had begun to show the telltale rosy spots. Thus the desperate man had ridden hard, and then when his horse had faltered, had run hard, carrying the child nearly a hundred miles to get to St. Gwendolyn.

He wasn’t even afflicted with the plague.

How ironic, it seemed to Merry, to see the healthiest one of the bunch of them lying dead on the flowers. She bent down and turned the man over, then spun away, dodging the flying blood, for the crossbow quarrel had broken through his front teeth, tearing a garish wound through the bottom of his mouth and into his throat.

Then Merry heard the cries, the pitiful screams of a child barely strong enough to hold herself upright. She came at the body then, barely five years old, half walking, half crawling, begging for her da. Merry intercepted the child, scooped her in her arms, and carried her away, motioning, as they went, for some others to go and collect the body.

“There ye go, child,” Merry cooed softly into the frantic girl’s ear. “There ye go. Merry’s got ye now and all’ll be put aright.”

But Merry knew the lie, as well as anyone alive. Nothing would be put aright; nothing could be put aright. Even if the remaining monks—that new one who ran through the field, perhaps—came running out and offered a cure for them all, nothing would be put aright.

How well Merry Cowsenfed knew the awful truth! She looked down at her bare arm, at the scars left over from her fight with the rosy plague. She had been the one in twenty who had been saved by the monks and their work with the soul stone. Abbess Delenia herself had tended to Merry.

“One in twenty,” the woman said, shaking her head. The monks had come out to tend dozens, dozens, yet only Merry had survived thus far. And so many of those brave and generous monks were now dead, the woman mused. Delenia and the sovereign sisters who had used their magic to help those from Falidean town. All dead, every one.

Delenia had pronounced Merry cured, and there had been great cries of rejoicing from the abbey walls, and Merry had been invited to go inside and pray. But the battered and weary woman understood the ridiculousness of the abbess’ claims that she was healed, knew that nothing could be farther from the truth. Her body had survived the plague, perhaps, but her heart had not. She refused the invitation, preferring to stay out on the field with the rest of the group that had come in from Falidean town.

They were all dead now, Dinny and Thedo and all the rest, dead like her Brennilee, and not even in the ground with a proper coffin.

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