Free The Fall of Ossard by Colin Tabor Page A

it.
    As the years passed, he began to talk about his experiences at the monastery, something he shared with me bit by bit. I pitied him when he told me of the season he’d spent enduring confinement in a cramped cell, it damp, dark, and cold, and with the barest of rations. That imprisonment had ended when he finally accepted and confessed his sins.
    When he talked of these things he looked to me for understanding. Never did he mention the cults, and I still couldn’t get the words out of my ensorcelled mouth to ask, but I knew he stood ashamed. I think that’s why he wanted to tell me of his bleak time in the monastery. He wanted to show me that he’d not only been punished, but that he’d accepted that he deserved to be.
    He truly was a different man.
    To see him remorseful gave me hope; maybe I could share my life with my husband and perhaps even come to enjoy it. But such remorse came couched with what had delivered it, the dogma of the Church.

    We lived in a grand old house in Newbank not far from my parents. Pedro began working for my father, acting as a liaison between his own father’s contacts and my father’s business.
    My own time was lost in setting up our household and tending Maria. I often visited my mother. We saw less and less of Pedro’s family as they realised how much of a shadow he’d become; a man with no spirit.
    All the while the kidnappings continued to not only plague the city, but worsen, yet my own magic lay stubbornly idle.

    Four years after our marriage day, I took Maria to see an Evoran herbalist down near the docks. She suffered from a regular chill, something that came on seasonally, and that I’d come to think might be brought on by the flowering shrubs that covered the surrounding valleyside.
    I took our coach and driver, Kurt, and Maria’s bodyguard, Sef, who’d joined our own household. Ossard’s children were still being stolen, the problem now so bad that it even plagued the Heletian districts.
    The thefts occurred in groups twice each season. In each group five children would be stolen, all on the same day between sunrise and sunset. Lord Liberigo had tripled street patrols and called up the militia, yet the diabolical crimes persisted.
    On the day of the kidnappings, the Cathedral bells would toll out the number of children missing with each newly discovered crime. The macabre practice meant that the people of the city knew on the fifth ring that the danger was over - until next time.
    Despite the patrols, and the offering of a generous reward, none of the children were ever found. Rumours circulated the restless city, some blaming the Evoran slave trade, others the Lae Velsanans, or witches, and on occasion even the forbidden cults of the Horned God.
    On this day, such a day of misfortune, the Cathedral bells had already rung out four times. It meant that Maria never left my sight, and that we were always accompanied.
    The visit to the old Evoran’s shop had been successful. The dark owner had sold me some herbs to stew and give to Maria as a watered broth. As I left the store, I asked Kurt to take us home via the waterfront only streets away. It had been a long time since I’d escaped the confines of Newbank, and I was eager for some of the city’s other sights.
    The coach rumbled down the cobbled street and soon rounded a bend to reach the port. On one side stood tightly packed warehouses, stevedoring businesses, and a few rough taverns, on the other the wharves busy with a maze of moored ships and labourers.
    A spectacular ship lay moored alongside one of the main piers. Its three masts stood tall, sloping gently backwards, and all cut of silver timber that caught the sun. The graceful lines of the ship meant it could have come from only one place - Lae Wair-Rae.
    Lae Velsanans!
    My Flet blood cried out at their presence, a chill reminding me of the dark history our two peoples shared. Despite it all I was curious, curious to see a Lae Velsanan first hand, and to