In the corridor, I meet Sir Leyont. He looks concerned, crumpled documents in his hands.
— Leyont de Mortvel! — I exhale, trying to catch my breath. — I was gathering berries and saw knights from Kriver. They move so... purposefully. Is the prince coming to us?
Leyont raises his head, and I see anxiety in his eyes, which immediately turns to wariness.
— Knights? — his voice becomes harsher. — Not like bandits?
— No, real knights, in armor, with coats of arms. Too... organized.
Leyont is silent for a long second, and in that silence, something ominous is heard. He rubs the bridge of his nose with his knuckles, as if trying to erase invisible pain.
— No, Loyn. No one is coming to us, — he folds the documents, hiding something important. — Go to your mom.
In his voice sounds not just busyness. In his voice sounds fear. And that scares me more than the sight of foreign knights on our land.
Because when adults start to fear, children are left only to pray.
Now I stand like with a painted bag, only instead of a bag—a lonely pouch with a handful of berries, and in my chest—even more questions. Adults... always everything foggy and meaningful with them. "Up to my ears in work"... Maybe those very works are connected with those who supposedly "aren't coming," but somehow very purposefully crawling over our mountains?
I go to the kitchen, where it smells of bread and herbal decoction—a tiny island of peace in a sea of vague forebodings. There it's warm, there Mom will smile her quiet smile, the one that hides fatigue. And maybe tell something about the past, when the world was softer, and shadows shorter.
In the air hovers something more than the aroma of berries and forest dampness. Hovers a premonition of changes that will come with those foreign knights flowing over our hills like inevitable fate.
And I, a boy with a handful of berries, already know deep down that my childhood ends with this crimson sunset. Ahead—time of choice between word and sword, between wisdom and force. Time when I'll have to understand that greatness is measured not by the shine of armor, but by the ability to preserve humanity even when the world around becomes cruel.
Each gathered berry was a particle of a huge mosaic of fate, where truth, as always, hid in the unspoken.