Chapter 3: The Road to Vanderlay Castle

If I remember correctly when I set out with my father and my four brothers on that fateful day, it was my first time traveling farther then the next hamlet. Even when my brothers had traveled to the city, or to my uncle's, I had always been made to stay behind. This time was different. This time would mark me for life and be one of a handful of events that would define me as a person and as a man.

The actual trip to Vandelay Castle was otherwise an unremarkably boring and miserable experience. Being the first time I was able to travel alongside my brothers and father, you might think the company easy. It wasn't. The mood remained somber the entire journey. A grim aura hung over my father, though I was too young at the time to recognize the lingering scent of death that even then had started to plague us.

At the end of that road awaited one of the terrible of nights, something you may have heard of. The Pogrom of Vandelay Castle. I was quite lucky to survive to see dawn after that notorious night, though with how bland the actual to reach there was, you never would have guessed a date with destiny lay at the end of the path.

I digress, please have my sincerest apologies.

Within an hour of us being on the road, the family farm left far behind us, the sky turned dark, the clouds pregnant with rain. The dark skies and grey clouds a reflection of the troubling mood among us. Caused in no part due to the worry about the summons, worry about each other, and fear for our mother and sister, who also set off to shelter elsewhere in the meantime with kin. Even the horses shared in our anxiousness.

A certain kind of misery set in upon us as we traveled once the rain started, and the cold and wet soaked into our clothes. Our suffering was only eclipsed by the concerning malaise that set heavy upon my father's conscience as whatever secrets he was keeping from my brothers, and I weighed heavily upon him.

I do not mean to talk ill of the dead, but that was one of the many mistakes my father made on that trip. His sons shared in his burdens and shielding us from the truth did none of us any fathers. With this, I have long cautioned in response, whatever dark things trouble you in the night, face not these nightmares alone so long as you can help it.

The frantic nature of our traveling further compounding everyone's general level of bitter unhappiness, though I will commend my brothers, unlike myself, not once did I hear from them a single complaint as we traveled. Not when the cold set in, not when they started shivering, and not even when the horses became stuck in the mud.

Our pace was reduced to a mere crawl as the already poor conditions of the road further deteriorated, a pace slowed further as the horse's hooves became mired in the mud. What should have been a relatively straight forward journey of mere hours was drawn out as the road become increasingly impassible. Even as the mud slowed us, and the rain beat down on us, my father forced us forward.

Each of our faces was pale from the cold as the wet set into our bones, even then our father would still not stop. That is when I knew whatever the summons meant, its implications were far beyond the norm. My father hardened in a way towards us I had never seen it before. The secret my father kept was dire enough that he refused to seek out shelter from the storm.

The drive my father showed completed eclipsed the few other time I had seen a similar look, when an early winter storm threatened to destroy much of our crops, or even when my sisters went wandering in the nearby glade without telling anymore. No, this was something different altogether, the drive of duty was set in his face, something I was too young back then to understand.

We trudged through the mud, in the wet and in the cold for the better part of the day and well into the night before my father finally checked on us. My brother's and I half-frozen from the cold, shaking and shivering. A wet cough settling into our chests rattling with wheezing breathes. He finally relented and let us stop. I was glad for that; it was doubtful that we could continue safely without lasting harm. Even then I could tell the stopping bothered my father greatly.

Stopping beneath an oak canopy we made a shelter for the remainder of the night. The thick leaves providing cover for the rain and had remained dry enough to find fuel for the fire. My brothers and I tended to the horses and gathered wood as we could while my father made a fire for us with his flint, as it roared into life, we huddled desperately around it, shivering, as the horses whined equally miserable as we were. Pulling at the leather tethered that secured them to the tree.

Progressively I grew warmer beneath my wool cloak as the fire banished away some of the chill, but the night was still full of hardship as my brothers and I took turns feeding the fire throughout the night. My father without hardly saying a word set off into the forest around us. I remember the look he gave, one look, one command. "Stay here. Stay safe." He did not return until the morning.

When the light of dawn finally came, I was not surprised to find my eldest brother had taken with fever, his eyes swollen from sickness, a heavy cough in his lung, and yet my father still had not returned. I tended to the fire and tried preparing a small meal of hot soup with a few turnips and wild berries I had found, whilst my other brother tended the eldest, waiting for our father's return.

When finally my father did come back, he returned with lemongrass in his hands to make tea for the lot of us. A tea to relieve some of the sickness that had settled in. He still had the same driven look on his face but mixed in with his determined look, I thought I could discern a faint impression of guilt. But it was not on me to assume. After we drank the tea, my father revealed to us what he had been doing during the night as he gave to each of his sons an oak club fashioned from the limb of an elder tree. The wood stained from the rowan berries he had ground into the surface of the wood, with a silver nail pounded into the club and a pummel of twisted iron twine.

Gravely, reverently he gave each of us one of the clubs, presented carefully and upon exchanged placed a kiss on each of our foreheads in blessing. "These are for you my sons, the last of the Sons of Salem. Upon thee, I grant the blessing of the father and give you the blessing of the forest, the hearth, and the earth. It is time you know the burden of destiny we journey towards."