Before You Go
(Swords with Souls)
Cover by Darren Joy
Fantasy Fiction
(Adult content)
Days pass as Lara focuses on preparing her trip to the Sword Maker. The merchant and carnival owner Haashir and his giant bodyguard Jedreck await her half a day’s ride away. The carnival owner is the only one who is allowed to bring a giant, a dwarf, and other oddities into the city. The king allows it because it demonstrates to the proper people how unlike these others are.
After the first carnival giant had died from a disorder that caused him to keep growing fewer people came to see the carnival. A year later, when Haashir met her grandparents at one of the king’s markets within the castle walls, Hasshir asked her grandfather if he wanted a job. After talking it over with their son, who years later would be her and Gwen’s father, her grandfather agreed. Her grandparents would travel with the carnival while their son took care of the homestead. Her grandfather wore a wig and fake eyebrows made from bear hair her grandmother had collected from the bark of a tree a bear had used as a rubbing post. With makeup her grandmother made her grandfather look intimidating. Her grandparents didn’t need money so Haashir collected books for them. After three years her grandparents were ready to go home.
Word must have gotten around the carnival needed a new giant. Shortly after her grandfather retired, Jedreck showed up and volunteered for the position. Jedreck was called The Warlord Giant. The king agreed to this name because he believed it reminded the people why giants must stay in their own land.
Lara remembers seeing Jedreck standing in an open space chopping wood with no one else around. His bronze skin glistened in the light rain. His long black hair blowing in the wind and slapping against his chiseled shoulder muscles and bulging chest. She was in awe. He was nothing like the giants she had seen before. They were usually thin and gangly. Jedreck looked like the perfect proper human. But that all disappeared when some proper humans walked by him.
She thought they were toddlers at first. She had told this story when the ranger Crimthann had stopped by on his travels to share news. She recalls how Crimthann had taken a swallow out of his pewter mug, wiped away the suds, and said in a very ominous tone, “There are giants I see now when I go with the collectors to drop off giants and collect propers that are much taller and stand with a confidence in their eyes that I rarely see. The same with the dwarves. Some of the new breed look like walking boulders. Their chins are held high and they are not afraid to look at the collector’s in the eyes. I don’t know if it’s from inbreeding, dwarves mating with dwarves only, or giants mating with giants only, or if they are mating with people we know nothing about.
‘It could be your fault,’ her grandfather had joked. ‘You warned them to keep their proper children hidden when the collector’s come.’
‘I did,” the ranger admitted. ‘After taking the first few sons and daughters from the dwarves and giants, and seeing the anguish in their parent’s eyes, I did warn them.’
Lara had heard so much lament in the ranger’s choked voice. She recalls her grandmother taking his hand and squeezing it. ‘Luckily, I did the job alone then,’ the ranger continued. ‘The quarter moon ears are another story. They shot warning arrows when I went to collect any propers. But I was able to tell them about the quarter moon babies left for the river to swallow. That was when the old king lived. He wasn’t as controlling or conniving as his son. A lot of what I could say and do in the past isn’t possible now.’
caedar-writing-artwork.com
Caedar Writing & Artwork 