It was Earth season by the time we got to Jonstown. We stayed there for a week with at the home of Jodi White Hart's family. While we were there we talked about what we should do next. Wurk and I wanted to seek out the rebels and help them. But we could also try to find out what happened to the rest of our clan. Jodi White Hart got word from a messenger that Savan the priest had died from a wound taken in battle.
We offered to help bring in the harvest while we were there, during Ernalda's holy day festival. But we worried about being caught. Our tattoos marked us as Haraborn. Wurk couldn't use his magic sword without saying the name of our clan. We didn't know if we could change or remove our tattoos, or if we wanted to. Wurk didn't know if the word to call his sword's magic could be changed.
We stayed for the holy day feast. After that we headed northwest, staying off the roads. Temerin the Younger came with us. A few days out of Jonstown we found a wounded man by the side of the road and helped him. He said he was a farmer and he had been robbed and thrown off the road with a broken leg. He came from a small village and he needed to warn them about the Tusk Riders who had ambushed him. After we used our magic to heal his leg, we went with him to his village, which was called Apple Lane. It was a small place but had a big temple of Uleria there. There were a lot of apple orchards around the village.
The people there told us they expected a Tusk Rider attack that day. We found out there was a Duck Man named Gooseberry living there. I had never seen a duck person before. We went to the inn there, the Tin Inn, and met with most of the village. They told us there were only ten or so Tusk Riders, but the village didn't have any warriors. There were only about a dozen people in Apple Lane.
The priestess of Uleria, Aileena, said she would defend the temple. She had an initiate who would help her. There was a woman named Brightflower who was an initiate of Ernalda, and a man named Postal who was an initiate of Orlanth Adventurous. Kareena Goldtalker came from another temple, the Temple of All Deities, who could use a battleaxe. A man named Hendroste raised horses there and wanted to protect his horses. Gooseberry told us his people knew a path through the Upland Marsh if we wanted to run away, but after he talked a little more it turned out he didn't know the path himself.
We thought about whether to flee that place, but the people didn't want to abandon their homes and we felt for them because we'd had to leave our homes. We offered to make them part of our community so Shah'vashak would be their wyter too and they could give of their magic power to the wyter, and I could use that to power the disruption spell matrix I had received from Orlaront Wyrmfriend.
After we did that, we made a plan for how we would fight the Tusk Riders when they came back. Collan and I would get on the roof of the inn, me with my sling and the orb and Collan with his bow. Jaryan would be on his horse, and Wurk would be on foot with the sword. Temerin the Younger stayed inside the inn because he wasn't trained much with weapons or magic.
When the Tusk Riders arrived, two of the rode to the north toward the temple of Uleria. The other riders came toward the gate of the inn yard. Wurk cast the iron hand spell on himself and then sprang at them with the last Stag's Leap spell hand speared the rider's boar with the stag antlers that grew on his head when he cast Stag's Crown. The boar fell over and its rider jumped away and fled.
Sylphs and elementals summoned by the villagers began to harass the riders. One of the sylphs managed to grab the leader's necklace, which had the three severed hands on it. I kept using Sha'vashak's power to disrupt the riders.
Because I was concentrating on that I could only see Collan's arrows shoot past me from the corner of my eye and couldn't see at all what Jaryan and Wurk were doing. The leader tried to use an ivory wand to cast something at Wurk but it didn't seem to do anything. Then there was the sound of a horn blowing and it was all over. The riders who lived and still had mounts rode away in a hurry. Their leader started to ride off too, but came back and died after Wurk taunted him and hit him with the Haraborn sword.
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