The Gathandrian Trilogy 03 - The Executioners Cane

that seem to reach for Ralph and hold him back. He is struggling for breath. Always the dream is like this, and always he fails to overtake his quarry.
    This time he sees something different in the dream, and the fact of it gives Ralph a greater determination to win. The sky over the trees is neither black nor the darkest of blues, but a deep and fiery red. Strangely it feels hot though the colours are a long way distant. His father is framed by them. He doesn’t know what it means in relation to the dream but he has to draw closer to it in order to follow his father.
    It’s hopeless. Already his father is gaining ground on him, and Ralph knows the chance to confront him even in this world of fantasy will soon be gone, again. Another flash of red in the sky draws his glance and he sees a spark of fire falling down upon him. Memories of the flames he’d endured on the mind-executioner’s journey jolt him backwards but in the depths of his thought he hears his father’s voice: stand firm when danger strikes. And he does, the warm feeling of loss surprising him. He never liked his father, but he can’t stop thinking about those words, said so often. The words of a soldier.
    So when the fire falls, Ralph reaches upwards to grasp it, experiencing the sensation of dream-heat on his skin, and the sudden knowledge his father is close by, after all, and has never perhaps been far. He opens his mouth to talk to the man, though he can’t yet see him, but the noise he brings forth, half groan and half shout, wakes him and he opens his eyes, gasping and coughing, to see the unfamiliar grey shape of one of his guest-rooms shimmer into place around him.
    The lack of his father is the first thing to pierce him and he curses his own foolishness. The man is dead and vanished from the land, by the stars’ sakes, and there can be no reconciliation until his own time has come, and perhaps even not then depending on which legend he chooses to follow. The second sensation to burst upon him is the fact that the crimson heat remains. It is in his head and on his skin, an echo of ruby where his gaze meets the night. He stumbles upwards, ignoring the now-familiar pain which shoots through his leg, and the window seems a long way distant.
    When he reaches it, he blinks. He sees nothing obviously wrong outside; the night is cold but no more so than he expected, and the courtyard is empty. All he can hear is the occasional wood-owl and, further away but not far enough for his liking, the long cry of a wolf on the hunt. He waits a while longer but then decides he is nothing but a mind-fool driven by childish dreams, and he is about to return to bed and, gods and stars willing, sleep when something deeper snags at the edges of his thought. It is the crimson sky he dreamed of.
    Ralph takes a chill breath and stares into the distance. There is a glowing over the fields beyond the village. His fingers grip the jagged stone at the window frame and he draws in a breath again, sniffing the air like a hound about to be loosed onto a valley-fox. He can smell smoke and knows at once what he is seeing is real, not just an echo of his dream. Though his mind too is fiery-hot and it is as if there is a greater power etching the knowledge of flame into his consciousness.
    He curses and half-runs half-limps to the corridor outside. The fields are burning and he must rouse what people he has left in order to tackle the destruction. This must be Jemelda’s doing and it almost makes him break his stride to imagine what rivers of hatred towards himself and the Lammassers must flow through her blood to bring her to this act of terror.
    By now, the Lammas Lord is clattering down the stairs, hearing the faint woof of his remaining house-dog as it stirs itself in the empty hall. He gathers the cloaks and cloths from the broken table and runs outside. He cannot afford to give in to pain now. He must fight for survival. In the courtyard he yells for Frankel, stumbles across the stonework towards the kitchen where the servant must surely be and pulls aside the curtain.
    The cook’s husband is already standing and clutching a fire-torch in hands which tremble. He is dressed in a thin woollen tunic, and Ralph thrusts one of his own cloaks at him.
    “Come, we must go to the fields. The seeds will be burning,” he snaps but if he thought Frankel would show surprise, he sees none. The servant merely nods and follows him. He will not keep Ralph’s pace, no matter the