The Name Toma
The coarse hemp bandage bit firmly into the palm of my right hand.
I had wound it crossing between the fingers and up around the wrist some six layers deep, then tucked the tail end inward to knot it. Beneath the fabric's base, three dark-red veins pulsed, but with the thick wrapping of coarse, stiff-woven cloth, it looked for all the world like the battered hand of a laborer who'd hurt himself doing rough work.
That was the first rule of concealing the Stigma.
It had been exactly one month since I slipped out of the Imperial Capital.
Veronica's blockade, said to be strung across the entire southern highway, turned out to pass off more blandly than I'd feared. The urgent directive that came down via imperial magic communication was written in grand terms—root out the "critical national asset" and "dangerous material removed without authorization." Yet the lowly soldiers manning the checkpoints hadn't even been told what they were looking for.
To their eyes, I was nothing more than an utterly common itinerant herb-seller with a worn leather pack, hacking out a dry cough.
A few coins pressed into a hand as passage toll, and once my baggage—the bronze mortar and dried roots—cleared inspection, the barrier bar lifted without fuss. However tight the web the princess had spun, those holding the net could not filter out a shadow whose name they didn't even know.
Sitting in a creaking wooden chair, I looked down at the table.
Of the three brown glass bottles I'd pulled from the inner pocket of my pack, the first two were already empty. Emptied along the road over a month of walking the southern mountain roads, to press down the rupturing pain in my sternum.
All that remained on the table was the third and final bottle.
I pulled the stopper and held it up to the light.
Roughly thirty drops of painkiller left.
One drop each morning and evening, that was exactly enough to last a fortnight. Within those two weeks, I would have to comb the cliffs and crevices around this valley myself and find local poisonous herbs capable of numbing the pain. If the medicine ran dry, the arithmetic of my remaining time would collapse entirely.
A heavy weight pressed down on the center of my chest.
A sensation like something gouging at the back of my sternum with an awl.
The cold scent of iron lingered at the back of my throat. Even hundreds of leagues from the Imperial Capital, the remnants of the Demonic Sword were still gnawing at the wall of my heart. But thanks to the vast physical distance now between Elena and me, the paroxysmal pain that had once leapt and stuttered through my pulse with every breath had quieted.
The rate at which my lifespan was draining had settled into a stable zone.
The sensation of the three curses inside me colliding, chilling my body heat and devouring my soul, was still there—but at least I could hold on, conscious, until this autumn came.
I drew the bronze mortar toward me.
Inside it sat wild ginger and wild garlic roots, dug up at dawn from the base of the rock mountain behind, along with chopped stalks of wolfsclaw grass.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Each time the pestle struck the bowl's bottom, a pungent, bitter-green smell of herbs rose to fill the narrow room.
This was Barum Valley, tucked into a deep crevice of the Empire's southernmost mountain range.
A secluded village ringed on all sides by sheer cliffs, so remote that outsiders' footsteps rarely reached it. At the edge of the hamlet, where several dozen old log houses huddled together, I had acquired a vacant, weathered hut and opened its doors as a general store and apothecary.
My true name, erased. The new alias I'd taken: Toma.
A common, rough-hewn name of the Empire's southern backwaters—one the valley's old folk could roll off their tongues without the slightest strain.
Midway through grinding, putting my weight into the pestle held in my right hand, a faint warmth spread beneath the bandage on my palm.
Residual energy from the Stigma.
The dregs of mana once used to draw out and purify others' suffering seeped subtly along the surface of the bronze pestle as it crushed the roots.
The deep-green herb juice flashed, in an instant, with a faint golden shimmer and turned into a clear, viscous fluid.
I narrowed my eyes and stopped grinding.
The energy that had leaked into the herbs was vanishingly small—a mere fragment, not even a hundredth of ordinary healing magic—but the juice had grown far too clear.
The Stigma's control slips now and then, it seems.
Whenever the three curses collided inside me, mana bled out. I had only meant to make a ordinary poultice for aching joints, and the medicine might have come out needlessly potent.
But I had no strength left to climb the mountain and gather herbs again. Every breath sent a sting deep between my ribs. I scraped the crushed pulp together and divided it into three small clay jars.
Clack.
The wooden plank door slid carefully open.
"Young Toma, are you in?"
A bent-backed old man, stooped like a drawn bow, shuffled over the threshold leaning on a bark-stripped staff. This was old Goran, the hunter said to have spent his whole life setting traps on the village's western side.
Goran clutched his knees and dragged his legs along.
"Looks like rain's coming—my kneecaps are aching so bad I can't take a single step. You wouldn't happen to have more of that foul-smelling root powder you gave me last time?"
"Just finished grinding it, sir."
I held out one of the clay jars I'd set on the table.
"Twice a day—once when you rise in the morning, and once before bed, spread thin around the knee. If a hot flush rises up, just cover it with a cloth."
"This one looks a bit clearer than the last batch."
The old man peered into the jar and sniffed at it.
"I adjusted the ratio of herbs a little. These grew in the shade of the rock mountain, so they're less fragrant."
"Is that so. A skilled young apothecary moves in, and the village's old folk reap the benefit."
Goran rummaged in his breast pocket, then laid a dried wild rabbit pelt and two worn copper coins on the table.
"Not much for medicine, but take it. You can trade it for a bowl of salt at the market down the mountain."
"Thank you, I'll accept it gratefully."
I pocketed the coins and hung the rabbit pelt on the wall. The old man tucked the jar preciously into his breast, took up his staff, and stepped out. Watching his retreating back as he crossed the threshold, I rinsed the bronze mortar clean with water.
Life here was monotonous and quiet.
The villagers knew me as a sickly young man who had studied a little herbology in the Imperial Capital before his health failed and sent him down here to convalesce.
My days passed in using the miscellaneous herb lore picked up during my days as a lowly healer to brew digestives, styptic powders, and bruise salves, and taking corn or potatoes or firewood in return to scrape by.
All I had to do was pass the time quietly until autumn, and on the day my curse reached its threshold, walk into the cliff cave at the very back of Barum Valley where no one would find me.
That would be the end of my mission of quarantine.
Two days later, early in the afternoon.
The apothecary door burst open with a violent bang.
Bang!
"Toma! Young Toma!"
The man who kicked his way through the door was, astonishingly, old Goran—the same man who two days ago had barely managed to walk, staff in hand.
The old man stood bolt upright on both legs, staff tucked under his arm, panting hard. His weathered face was flushed red with excitement.
"What is it, sir?"
I rose from my seat, wiping my hands on a hemp cloth.
"Look at this! Look at my legs, I say!"
Goran hiked up his trouser leg and rapped his knee loudly.
"A knee joint that couldn't bend for ten years straightened out like it was nothing! I rubbed on that salve you gave me last night and went to sleep, and the black ache that used to bore into the bone washed clean away! This morning I walked three whole circuits of the foothills without my staff!"
The old man's voice boomed through the apothecary.
"What in the world did you do to that medicine? That's no mere plant root! It's a hundred times better than that temple holy-water dregs the lord's physicians sell at such prices!"
I stared at the old man's leg.
The chronic inflammation and the traces of old blood clots that had once ringed the knee joint were gone entirely.
The Stigma's residual pulse, was it.
A grim premonition flickered through me. No matter how good the herbs were, curing the old man's chronic arthritis in two days lay beyond anything medicine could explain. The Stigma in my palm must have seeped into the salve without my knowledge, and a faint healing miracle had manifested as a result.
Drawing attention was the very thing I had to guard against most.
"Sir, please lower your voice."
I chose my words in a calm tone.
"The soil here in Barum Valley soaks up mana unusually well, so the herbs' potency comes out stronger than normal for a time. There is nothing remarkable about my remedies."
"Nonsense! I've lived seventy years in this valley and I've never once seen herbs like that!"
Goran, with no intention of listening, drew a silver coin from his pocket and set it on the table.
"Our daughter-in-law sprained her wrist and can't work the fields. Just one more batch of that salve. I won't stint on the money!"
"...Very well. Please wait a moment."
Clicking my tongue inwardly, I picked up the mortar.
From now on, when grinding herbs, I would have to use only my left hand—not the right, where the Stigma was carved. Unless I diluted the potency to less than half, there would be trouble.
But the rumor spread faster than I expected.
From the village chief with his aching back to a woodcutter who had sliced his finger deep on an axe, five villagers knocked at the apothecary door before the day was out.
I cut the herb content to the bare minimum and mixed in plain oil for the salves I handed out, but by then the story of "the miracle-working young physician from the Capital" had already fanned out across the whole valley through old Goran's mouth.
The look in the villagers' eyes when they regarded me had changed, subtly but surely.
The wariness once reserved for a mere outsider herb-seller had vanished, replaced by a careful, warm deference—the kind one shows a treasured guest the village cannot afford to lose.
For someone who had to stay hidden, it was an exceedingly troublesome and dangerous current.
Just as the sun began its slow, slanting descent behind the western rock mountains.
A clamor of rough hoofbeats rang out along the unpaved dirt road that cut across the valley's mouth.
Clatter, clatter, clatter.
The peaceful silence of the village was torn apart in an instant by the sharp ring of iron and the shriek of horses.
I cast my gaze through the gap in the lattice window.
Six or seven riders on horseback came kicking up dust as they entered the village outskirts.
They wore not the proud armor of the Imperial regular army but rust-red breastplates and crude iron-studded leather coats. Sloppily honed longswords and maces swung at their hips, and thick coils of rope and bundles of iron chains hung from their saddles.
Private conscription gangs—the kind the southern lords kept for their own use out on the frontier.
"Everyone, out here! Now!"
The hulking man at their head yanked hard on his reins and lashed the wooden fence at the village entrance with a heavy whip.
Crack!
Planks splintered and flew into the dirt.
"By decree of the lord! Martial law has come down from the palace, and a supplementary conscription order has been issued to the Southern Defense Force! Every man between fifteen and forty, without a single exception, crawls out to the square!"
The conscription officer's hoarse bellow shook the valley.
Villagers turned ashen and dove into their houses; women's screams and the wailing of small children erupted from beyond the fence lines.
Private conscription gangs bore the name of soldiers, but in truth they were little more than legalized raiders. Fill your quota or they stripped your grain and livestock—and some would drag off even small children to sell into mine labor.
The hoofbeats ground over the gravel road, closing slowly.
The lead officer's horse snorted up a cloud of dust and halted.
Directly in front of the old wooden sign of the apothecary that stood at the very edge of the village outskirts.