Disaffected

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Allabva woke up several hours later after a chilled and fitful sleep, still lying in the wagon. She had a pain in her hip and shoulder and her neck was sore, but at least she had slept. She felt certain that she would be better off for it than she would be without it. She wished she could take her gloves off and blow on her fingers to warm them up, but found that her hands were still tied behind her.

She was woken by the sun in her eyes. Blinking and squinting, she worried for a moment that perhaps Delgan’s flute had been taken from her. She twitched, and the motion moved the metal rod under her blouse, the cold object announcing its continued presence. Good. At least she still had that.

Allabva could see that she was still accompanied by three of the men in the wagon bed, and the other two men sat on the driver’s bench. Not bothering to determine if everyone was still in the same place around her, she turned over to give her sore shoulder and hip a rest and to get the sun out of her eyes. Seeing that her situation was unchanged from the night before, she willfully allowed herself to fall back asleep, the rocking of the wagon working against her.

A few hours later, Allabva woke again, this time feeling qualitatively improved in her being. Now both sides ached equally, but it was a dull ache that she could live with. She yawned through the gag she still held in her mouth and blinked to bring herself more fully into the waking world.

Looking around inside and outside of the wagon while still lying on the bed floor, she took stock of her situation. Blessedly, she had slept. It felt as though the cold must have let off when the rain did, or the sleep would not have counted for anything as far as rest went. She thanked her young legs for being able to forgive her so quickly for the jogging last night. The sun was now high, giving its light on the innocent and malevolent in close quarters.

Allabva now noted the current location of each man. They had rotated themselves. Tunbloth now drove, Halmon riding beside him. Nillan, Nolder, and Qurast rode in the bed. Nolder and Qurast were asleep.

Nillan raised a finger to his lips. “Shh, don’t wake my babies, little girl.”

Allabva watched him, wondering what his move would be.

“Hal says your name is Allabva. He also suspects that you’re from the Cleft.” Nillan looked her over again. “I would agree with that, assuming that you’re wearing your own clothes from your hometown.”

Allabva waited in silence for further probing.

“Little girl named Allabva, I am Nillan Protfund, and you are our prisoner.” Allabva wondered if Nillan would seem as dangerous as Halmon had the night before. It appeared that he carried some clout, as the other men seemed to defer to him. So far, he didn’t seem as menacing as the other man had when brandishing her own knife at her the night before.

“Of course!” Nillan acted as if he were coming to his senses. “Where are my manners?” He reached behind her head and tugged on the strip of cloth coming out of the knot at the back of her neck. The strip came untied and Nillan pulled it away, then he pulled the wad from her mouth.

Allabva worked her jaw and tongue, trying to lick the away the memory of the wad of cloth that had resided in her mouth for so many hours. It was a relief to be able to swallow normally again. While she got herself back to normalcy, Nillan continued speaking.

“I’m curious about some of the same ideas my friend had when he found you last night. For example, where were you going in such a hurry?”

Allabva merely gazed at him, wishing for a way out.

“Don’t be afraid. You won’t offend me. I just want to know for, let’s say, personal reasons.”

Allabva found the will to speak. “Where are you taking me?”

“Nah-ah, little girl,” Nillan rebuffed. “I asked you first.”

“I’d be more inclined to speak after having some water,” Allabva bargained.

“Of course, child.” He grabbed her waterskin from where it lay next to her, uncapping it to offer her a drink.

“I’m not a child.”

“What?” Nillan turned his interest from the waterskin back to Allabva.

“I’m not a child. I have reached my majority.”

“Of course you have, child. The Cleft is so quaint, isn’t it?”

Allabva sensed that Nillan was insulting her, but she didn’t quite catch the point of his remarks.

“Here’s your water,” he continued indifferently. He plopped it in front of her face.

Still tied up, she had to wriggle somewhat to position her mouth at the spout, then she had to lower her face as much as she could to the floor while she drank.

“Lovely.” Nillan flashed a cold, patronizing grin at her. “I’ll ask you again: where were you going and why?”

Allabva sighed. She would get nowhere by refusing to answer this basic question, and they would get nowhere by receiving an honest answer.

“Eastward towards Palf Glen, but I don’t know why. I already told Halmon where I was going last night.” Had she just told Nillan more information than she had given to Halmon and Tunbloth?

“Going east, we but you don’t know why. Well, we are going east and we do know why, although we’re not on the same road we found you on.”

Their conversation started to wake up the sleeping men. Allabva blinked and waited.

“We are to go to the encampment of the Disaffected,” he supplied simply.

There went that word again.

“What does it mean to be Disaffected?” She inquired.

“Ah, so she wants to know about us, despite us knowing so little about her. Hardly fair, Halmon, am I right?” Nillan didn’t wait for an answer. “Never mind. This is public information. The Disaffected are those who understand the truth of our unicorn tormentors.”

Allabva raised an eyebrow at the surprising description. “Tormentors?”

“Tormentors indeed, little girl.” Nillan’s face now took on a stern pall. “You think the unicorns are our friends?”

“Um, well, I have only ever heard of them doing nice things for people.” She thought a moment, then decided she should keep private any specific interactions that she or anybody she knew had with the Nomord. “The Nomord heal people.”

“Yup, you went there.” His expression remained serious. “Everybody goes straight there. Yes, the beasts heal people sometimes, or so I’m told. Gentlemen, what are some pernicious pleasant parables you’ve heard about the unicorns? Tunbloth, what’s your favorite?”

The driver turned his head. “Crops.”

Halmon also replied, “Grave markers.”

“Ah yes,” Nillan said sarcastically. “I have heard reports, reliable reports, that the monsters sometimes increase crop yields. I have even heard a few tales where one of the freaks stood by the graveside of a recently deceased loved one for days, continuing to call out to her living husband. And he is supposed to feel honored, of course.”

“I would think that increasing a crop—” Allabva began.

“You would, wouldn’t you?” Nillan cut in. “Yes, increased crop yields would be a good thing. That is, if you could count on it.”

“I understand that a consistent increase would be helpful, but—”

“But, exactly,” he accused. “They aren’t consistent. Any help they provide is evanescent. Tunbloth, where did you come from?”

“A failed farm,” Tunbloth said. “It’s mostly dust now. A unicorn helped us one year, then that was it. It was actually our last good crop, ever. After that year we had too much rain and a fungus took over the fields. Then we had a hot year, and the fungus dried up, leaving toxic soil that our seed won’t grow in.”

“Halmon?” Nillan prompted.

“I’m not down for that right now,” Halmon declined. “You go ahead.”

Nillan took the liberty to do so. “A unicorn stood at his mother’s grave. For ten days it returned to the same spot—”

“Eleven,” Halmon corrected.

“For eleven days it returned to the same spot every day and stood next to the grave marker. As I mentioned earlier, it called to Halmon’s father every day, not allowing him to let go of his wife’s memory and move on, extending his grief for no reason at all.”

“It changed him permanently,” Halmon informed Allabva.

“And what about you?” she asked Nillan. “Did a Nomord refuse to give you a ride on her back?”

“Do NOT trivialize this,” Nillan admonished Allabva.

Halmon didn’t want to let it go. “I just told you that my father was never the same after one of those unicorns trampled on his heart while he was mourning my late mother, and you turn around and make a joke. I don’t know why we ungagged you.”

Allabva took the criticism readily, despite the current state of affairs. “I apologize, sir. If you suffered some great ill, it is not my intent to make light of your experience. I am noticing a pattern, though—”

“And I’m noticing that you’re stuck in this old way of thinking, that the unicorns are infallible and can’t be questioned.” Nillan’s face was hard with intensity. “Now you listen to us. I came to realize that the unicorns aren’t the knights in shining armor that so many people think them to be, and I’m merely trying to educate you as well. Some of us have personal experiences that expose the monsters for what they really are. Not all of us do. Take Nolder here.” He gestured at the man, still sleeping. “He’s never had any personal experiences with one of them. He’s just a good listener and came to understand because of what other people shared with him.”

“Then what did happen to you?” Allabva asked the question with no malice in her voice, her tone honestly inviting information that she lacked.

Nillan sat chewing his cheek, looking at Allabva and seeming to consider whether she was worthy of hearing his account. At length, he decided to let her in.

“I was married. We’d been married seven months. We had promised ourselves to each other when we were very young, and I could never see anybody but her. We always played together, joked together, and as we grew up, we planned our life together. We finally got old enough to have a proper wedding, and we got married as soon as we could gather enough to buy our home to live in together. Then she fell ill. We hardly had time to establish our household a few months before she was sick. One of the beasts visited us one night, and I was eager—” His voice cracked, betraying emotion.

“I was just as eager as any other beguiled fool to help my wife up from her deathbed to come outside and meet the horned horse. She got up with my help, with great difficulty and intense pain, and came outside for the first time in three weeks. The beast was no farther away than the span of a large, dead tree that we had in front of our home. It looked straight at us—at her. It spoke to us. It asked how we were, and we told it that my wife was very ill. And then…it didn’t move. We tried to come to it, but it shied away. My wife was in pain just to be out there, unsuccessfully trying to garner favor from this animal. We had to give up and take her back inside to her bed.”

“Well,” Allabva tried to connect, “they can heal, but they don’t always—”

“The next day, the dead tree had blossoms on it! My wife died within the week after, and this stupid beast healed the tree. That’s sadistic! That cruel…cruel…” Nillan’s face contorted with anger, lacking a sufficiently weighty word to describe what he felt. He breathed heavily as he searched for the best way to express himself. “No. People think unicorns are gentle, kind creatures. I reject that. They should not live on this earth, do you hear me? If we can find a way, they need to be eradicated, period.”

Allabva stared at the man, trying to think of the proper response to this tirade. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she finally uttered.

“So sorry for your loss,” Nillan mocked nasally. “That doesn’t bring her back, does it? That doesn’t punish the stupid beast for holding out on us with a tiny help that she could have easily provided, does it? That doesn’t save other people from this same kind of torment when the unicorns lead them to believe they’re going to help, but then slap them in the face with something that can only be read as an insult.”

Allabva stayed silent.

“This is Disaffected,” Nillan waved his hands in front of his body as if showing himself for a display sample. “That is Disaffected. They are Disaffected.” He pointed to Tunbloth, then the rest of his party. “We will do whatever we can to break other people out of the blindness that we were in ourselves. A better word might be Disillusioned, not Disaffected.”

Allabva hoped to help them raise their opinion of the Nomord. “I don’t know if we can properly judge them for what they don’t do.”

Nillan wasn’t going to give up his stubbornness so easily. “If they have it in their full power to do it and any reasonable, intelligent being can see it needs doing, we can absolutely judge them for what they choose not to do.”

“Do we even know how intelligent the Nomord are? Their actions often appear non sequitur,” she tried.

“They can talk, can’t they? They understand what’s going on, but they care about it less than cats do. Cats tend to be indifferent to human suffering.”

“I’m not so sure—”

“They say you can own a dog, but you can feed a cat. A cat doesn’t care about loyalty. A unicorn actively cultivates a sense of intelligent connection just enough to be able to trample on your expectations when it hurts the most.”

Allabva didn’t reply.

“We’re going to the camp of the Disaffected. We will join ourselves with them there to build a new society. You seem to be hiding information about yourself, so you’re coming along, and we’ll find out whatever we need to, no matter how trivial your business may be.”

Allabva was glad that he didn’t appear to suspect any connection with the Nomord, but bothered by his apparent determination to be a pain to her. She leaned back hard and felt the flute rock against her collar.

“What’s that?” Nillan asked.

Allabva felt the chill of anxiety rise up inside her at the question. She didn’t respond.

“Halm, Tun, didn’t you get her valuables?” Nillan said.

“Of course. Got her money right here.” Tunbloth held up the coin purse with two fingers.

“I didn’t say money. That’s only part of it.” Nillan leaned across the space between himself and Allabva, reaching for her neck. “There’s a chain here.”

Allabva’s mouth fell open with the fear of loss. “No, it’s nothing. It’s only sentimental.”

She tried to writhe away so he couldn’t reach it, but he only followed and there was nowhere she could go. “Sit still, little girl,” he ordered, pulling the chain around so he could undo the clasp, removing it from around her neck. “This doesn’t look like nothing. Maybe this is only brass inside, but it’s at least silver plated.” He smiled a dirty grin as he inspected Delgan’s flute, betraying glee at having performed the small theft. Nillan pulled the front of his jacket away, depositing the flute and chain in an inside pocket.

Allabva rode along in the rumbling wagon, saying nothing and trying to hold back tears of anger, indignation, and sadness. The Disaffected spoke of being led along to believe there would be help when none would come. Where was Hronomon right now? Was he giving up on her because she got captured? Was he finding a new Companion for the Shrongelin now? Was he leaving her to her fate, or should she trust him to come and rescue her?