Page 21 of Tiger's Tale
“Yes. She offers a position in the government and a title of honorary boyar in exchange for saving her mother...from death.”
At those words, the Death Draughtsman smiled and summoned his underlings, saying, “Make preparations. It seems we’re going on a journey.”
6
DON’T ENTER ANOTHER MONK’S MONASTERY AND START CHANGING THE RULES
Grigor was born the eighth child of nine to wheat farmers. Of all his siblings, he was the only one to survive to adulthood. It had been a long time since he’d seen the lands of his native country, the Great Khanate State or the Golden Khanate, not that he felt any particular allegiance or patriotic feelings for his homeland.
His family had never set foot in the city of the Golden Spires or worshipped at any of the temples there. Never once to his knowledge had any of his ancestors pilgrimaged to sit at the feet of the Learned Ones to hear a reading or sipped tea and traded spices at any of the famed teahouses or markets.
No. Grigor’s parents and theirs before them and so on and so forth had always been simple folk who lived off the land. They had no ambition. No care for politics. No mind for diplomacy. Little need for coin. What they needed, they grew or raised. They were a hardened people living a hard life. Grigor was forged from the lessons he learned there.
As he worked alongside his siblings, scraping a living from the soil, sleeping in close quarters in their yurt, and watching as illness and the specter of death took them one by one, Grigor realized how quickly the candle of life could be snuffed out. When he saw exhausted acceptance on the faces of his parents as they dealt with the loss of each child, he became angry and bitter. As the years passed, those feelings of resentment turned to hatred.
For a time, it seemed to him that he was doomed to the life in which he’d been born. Then, finally, providence smiled upon him in the form of a traveling stranger.
Reflecting on the experience now, Grigor supposed he was grateful to the traveler who tempted him with a wink and wish in exchange for a day’s rations. When he passed the man his flagon of water and his wrapped lunch, asking for a stallion worthy of a prince for his wish, he didn’t expect the immediate snort and wicker coming from behind him.
When he spun at the feel of hot breath blowing on his neck and saw the most beautiful black Arabian stallion, one looking just like the dream horse he’d always imagined, he didn’t even know what to say. The horse shook its head and pawed a hoof at the ground as if impatient to be ridden. Grigor reached up to stroke its silken mane. “He’s... he’s mine? Are you sure?” he asked the stranger excitedly.
“Yes. All yours,” the man replied with a contented smile as he sucked sauce from his thumb, enjoying the boy’s lunch. He raised the sack, his mouth still full. “Thanks for the trade.”
Grigor had always been a quick child. He’d caught the man clutching the chain at his neck on more than one occasion. So very quickly, he offered, “Wouldn’t you like to have supper with us too? Perhaps you could stay over tonight? It’s a very long walk to town. It’s such a fine horse. I’d like to offer a bit more in exchange. It doesn’t seem like much of a fair trade.”
The man stood for a moment, considering the horse and the food, which was now gone. “Very well. I suppose a good meal couldn’t hurt.” He smiled amiably at Grigor. “Lead on, then, lad. Let’s get that new stallion of yours in a barn and then introduce me to the wonderful woman who makes these little cakes. They’re delicious.”
Grigor worried that his parents weren’t going to cooperate at first, but they remained as indifferent over the stranger as they were with most things in their lives. His mother reacted to the news of the horse and the stranger as she did to news of another baby—with a mixture of ambivalence, anxiety, fear, and vulnerability but ultimately with acceptance. She placed the same plateful of food before him that she did in front of Grigor and her husband and then ate her own food and headed to the curtained-off area where she and her husband slept.
As for Grigor’s father, the stranger quickly discovered the farmer to be a man of few words, who was largely uninterested in both him, his gift of a beautiful horse, and his only remaining son. It was young Grigor who continued plying the stranger with questions and with tea long into the night. And when the stranger finally slept deeply, thanks to the draught of pain powder Grigor mixed into his tea, the young boy peeled back the man’s collar and found the sliver of gold attached to the chain on his neck.
It didn’t take Grigor long to pocket that slip of gold, place a few day’s rations in a bag along with a skein of water, and climb onto the back of his new stallion. Without even thinking of the parents or the stranger he left behind, he pressed his knees into the sides of the black stallion, who trotted off through the waves of undulating wheat, the full stalks shushing softly against one another in the moonlight, and finally allowed himself to imagine an entirely different future than the one fate had given him.
When he arrived at the dirt road, he urged the horse to a gallop, holding on to the mane tightly and clutching the horse’s flanks with his legs until they grew sore and tired. When the horse slowed to a walk, he let the animal have his head and was happy when the horse came to a stop by a small, bubbling creek. Grigor slid off the stallion’s back then, stooping down to stretch and to cup his hands in the cool water for a drink himself.
Only then as he sat down by a fallen log to rest, dawn just a flicker on the horizon, did he attempt to copy the man’s actions by rubbing his fingers over the gold. As he did, he repeated in his mind a new wish for himself. This time he wanted to be a man of power, a man of influence, very different from his farmer father.
Before he could finish his wish, the creek, the Arabian stallion grazing near his feet, and the dark land surrounding him disappeared. Grigor found himself in a place utterly unlike his wheat farm and the nearby dusty road. In fact, the place he found himself was unlike anything he’d ever experienced before.
Grigor didn’t know how long he stayed in that other place, but while he was there he encountered magic and fantastical beings unlike anything he’d ever seen before. He learned very quickly that when he overcame demons or monsters or watched them long enough, he could, in most cases, learn how to steal or harness their gifts.
Only one eluded him. Outwitted him at every turn. It stalked him at night with claw and fang, but try as he might, he couldn’t find a way to trap or kill it, and somehow Grigor knew that the powers he collected from his nightmare visitor would be the most lethal of all.
When he’d finished destroying everything he’d discovered in the other place, it responded by collapsing entirely, and thrust him out. He came to himself realizing he was still near the same creek of long ago, though it now was substantially larger, as was the road.
Grigor immediately set off for home to search for the stranger, desperate to discover more about the charm, find out if there were more pieces, more lands to plunder for hidden powers and magics. But when he arrived at what was once his family farm, he didn’t see his new horse, his farmstead, or even his homeland. Instead, Grigor discovered that he’d been gone more than ten years.
Though Grigor had indeed gained much in the way of new magics and dark powers from stealing the slip of gold, he realized it had come at a cost. First, he’d lost a great deal of time—the rest of his childhood, in fact. Not that Grigor felt any remorse over that or even the loss of his family. He didn’t harbor any sentimental feelings in that regard. Nor did he mourn the demise of his country, though he wouldn’t have minded visiting the large cities before they had been changed too much by the empire.
What he did regret was the demise of the stranger. When he returned to the farm, or what had once been the old wheat farm, he found four graves that hadn’t been there before. Two belonged to his parents. His mother’s marker indicated she died in childbirth five years after he’d left. One to another sibling that was stillborn two years after he left. His father passed just a few months after his mother.
The other marker simply said “Unknown,” and the date indicated the same approximate time of his disappearance.
If that was the grave of the stranger, then he surmised it was possible that in taking the charm, he’d himself relegated the stranger to death. He wondered if the charm somehow kept the stranger alive, and made a mental note to always, always keep it on his person. Without the stranger, how was he to discover more about the charm, its origins, and find out if there were more of them?
Acquiring magics and powers had left him...hungry. He wanted more. Grigor craved it like a starving beast slavering after flesh. He slept in the ruins of the old farmstead that first evening, and when the moon rose and the wind whistled through the cracks between the posts, he heard a familiar rumble.
His eyes flew open, and he dashed to a window and looked outside. There was a flash of a tail that disappeared into the brush and a glint of moonlight on sharp teeth. A growl rattled the pebbles on the old window frame, and his heart jostled in time with them.
