Page 10 of Rise of a Fallen Man

Chapter 3

Salas

The year I turned seventeen, Lady Lana fell ill. The healing witch she hired to treat her determined that the cause for her illness was a spotted mite’s bite.

This type of mite lived exclusively around the water caves, where Lady Lana had regularly sent her husband for calming treatments. Eventually, she had him committed to the caves permanently, on the basis of his untreatable high temper that she claimed put her and her son in danger if they continued to live under the same roof with Lord Ciric.

As a devoted husband, however, the lord sent his wife flowers every year for her birthday. Most of the flowers were the sweet-smelling water lilies that grew around the caves and just happened to be the preferred habitat of the spotted mites.

Some said it was an unfortunate accident that even after a thorough inspection, a mite had sneaked into a flower and bit Lady Lana when she received the bouquet. I chose to believe that Lord Ciric got his revenge in the end. It made me feel better to think that there still was some justice left in this world.

The lord died shortly after Lady Lana fell ill, and she didn’t have it in her to shed even a single tear for her husband.

Just as calmly, she had informed me about the death of my father a year prior. She said he’d worked himself to death, then gave me a night off from her visits to mourn him. Just one night was supposed to be enough, in her opinion, before she snuck into my room the following night again.

As she slept in my bed that night, I thought about how easy it’d be to place a pillow over her face and end it all, both for her and me. No one would even miss her. Not her son, whom she terrorized more and more the older he got. Not her older daughter, who’d moved out of her mother’s house the first chance she got.

Yet I let Lady Lana live that night and every night thereafter. It wasn’t the fear of prosecution that stopped me, not even my innate disgust for cruelty and murder, but the dread of complete and utter loneliness. My father was gone. And now, by some perverted, disturbed twist of fate, my tormentor was the only person in the world who cared whether I lived or died. Without her, I’d have no one.

Only after she got sick and her condition deteriorated did she stop visiting my room. Instead, she ordered me to visit hers daily. The nature of our encounters had also changed. Instead of her lover, I became her caregiver. I brought her food, read books to her, and helped with her baths.

“You’re a good boy, Salas,” she said one afternoon, lying in her bed, as I was reading her a fun, lighthearted novel. “But you’re a wicked boy too. No woman will ever want you but me. You have to take good care of me because without me, you have no future.”

Until the day she died, Lady Lana believed she would recover. I shed no tears when she died, but on the day of her funeral, I felt irritable and upset. Against my every intention, Lady Lana had become a part of my life. A dark, rotten part that I should be glad to get rid of. Yet her death left a gaping hole in my existence with nothing to fill it in.

She was the only woman I knew intimately, and I missed the intimacy. Not just the sex, but also the touch, the company, the falling asleep next to someone. Ours had been a twisted relationship, but it was the only relationship I’d had.

The moment the dirt covered her casket, her daughter informed me I was no longer welcomed at the manor. Apparently, the word about “my wicked ways” had spread, and the heiress worried that my tarnished reputation would cast a stain on her brother, Lord Emil, and ruin his marriage prospects.

I was shown the door.

By now, I’d gained several skills, some more useful than others. I could read and write, fence, dance the waltz, and take care of the sick from feeding to bathing them. My math skills were far superior to those of a common man. And I still remembered how to fire up the forge and assist a blacksmith.

At seventeen, my strength rivaled that of a grown man. I’d heard there was plenty of physical work available for a pay. I didn’t shun from hard labor. What I didn’t take into account was how far the word of my reputation would spread.

The daughter of Lady Lana refused to give me a character recommendation, and without her good word, every door I’d knocked on in search of work closed in my face.

In the middle of the bitter winter that year, I realized quickly that if I didn’t get out of the cold soon, I’d simply freeze to death on the side of the road somewhere.

“Get off my property. You’re a loose man,” the woman behind the last door I knocked on growled at me like a dog, protecting her house from me as if I were the sin reincarnate. “The place for the likes of you is in the fun house.”

At that point, “fun house” sounded better than “dying from cold and hunger,” so I found out where it was, then walked for an hour to get to that town.

By the time I reached the high fence of the fun house, I couldn’t feel my feet inside my boots or my fingers inside my gloves.

A man of about forty opened the gate. He huddled into a thick scarf, the wind blowing a few long hairs over his otherwise bald skull.

“What do you want?” He gave me a measuring look, taking in my well-made clothes.

“Work,” I croaked.

His water-blue eyes focused on my face.

“Do you know what we do here?” he asked. “Have you done this kind of work before?”

A gust of wind and snow forced me to hide my face in the raised collar of my coat before I could answer.

The man cursed the weather under his breath, then opened the gate wider.

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