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Old 07-23-2006, 10:36 PM   #109
Durelin
Estelo dagnir, Melo ring
 
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Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 3,121
Durelin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.Durelin is battling Black Riders on Weathertop.
Khamir

Nearly everything the past nineteen years was about survival, but this was also a matter of trust. This Fewerth was one who felt completely certain of the way things should be done, which included things always going his way. This wasn’t the kind of mindset that made a person very cooperative, nor trustworthy. Fewerth and the two that seemed of a similar nature who followed him around were the type of people who you could only buy the trust of. But Hadith was just a boy who felt bullied.

Khamir felt himself growing frustrated, wondering how he got dragged into a role of mediation among children, making sure they played nicely. Unfortunately they were playing with lives, with freedom, with knives and chains. Was this all freedom was? The freedom to forget just how fortunate they were to be alive, to be away from the whip? Maybe they were just like animals, so accustomed to a way of life that they could know no other unless something made it impossible for them to live that way. And it wouldn’t be impossible for them to bicker, hate, fight, steal from, and backstab each other until they were all dead.

But they weren’t yet.

“Killed him with your own hands?” Khamir inquired, barely glancing at Fewerth.

“Yessir, choked the animal.”

“The horse or the man?”

“Uh…” Fewerth began, bewildered by Khamir’s question. “I strangled the Easterling scum!”

“He did! I saw it with my own two eyes!” one of his friends piped up, “The monster came at him from behind but he was ready for him in the blink of an eye…”

The one-armed man shook his head, deciding to ignore the three fools. Already they had forgotten the bounty hunters had ridden into camp. It seemed they had agreed on some kind of story, but had paid little attention to detail when doing so. Perhaps they had assumed too much weight in their words. It was clear they thought more of themselves than anyone should. Khamir didn’t think enough of any of them to ever expect one of them to bring a slaver off his horse and manage to kill him, even with a weapon.

And so it was still hard to believe that Hadith was perhaps telling the truth. It was not so difficult to believe that Fewerth had taken the boy’s knife – what Khamir had trouble with was that a dead man was involved. Had Beloan really been that right about the boy? A trap for birds, a few deer…that was not the same as throwing a knife in a man’s back. Was this fresh-faced youth really capable of something like that? The Southron had seen many men die, he had watched others suffer countless times, but every drop of blood and lifeless body was different. And it was somehow eerie that the boy he stared at was already a killer.

“I do not think I could believe them, but I cannot yet say I believe you. Tell me more of what happened, and neither elaborate nor humble yourself. The full truth is the most believable, and I will respect you for telling it.”

He was still seated in the grass, and so he had to look up at Hadith. But looking up at the boy was not at all like looking up to him. Khamir stared him in the eye with calm severity, but without any trace of condescendence. His words were not preached, though they formed weighty statements.

“And silence, you three,” he added in regard to Fewerth, Joshwan, and Guilledean, common sense telling him at least one of them was prepared to say something denigrating about the boy. If he treated anyone like children, as Johari suggested he did, it would have to be those three.
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