Entry 8

"What does he have to do with this?"

At that point, I had no idea what to expect. The name Reevan hadn't cropped up in conversation for over a decade; not since my mother grew tired of repeating the story to me every night before bed. Why my mother had decided to regale James Parson, a wayward farmboy returned home, with Reevan's practically unimportant tale was beyond my understanding.

James gestured to a copse of trees off the main road, which we hadn't moved away from after I stopped to hear him out, and both of us made our way to a well-shaded spot to sit down. Facing one another, with him resting his back against the trunk of a large oak and me a few feet to his front upon the grass, the explanation began in full.

"When the Bovicans took over Tresin, they didn't do so all at once. It started with a small scouting party, maybe six or seven people, arriving at the old wooden gate," he said, tilting his head back in the direction of the fort. "You know, the one that was so rotten that it may as well have been a fly in an invader's face?" 

"Get to the point." I remembered the pathetic attempt at a defense, of course, but reminiscing could come later. More pressing matters were at hand.

"Right." Clearly his throat lightly to ease the awkward tension hovering over us both, he continued on. "So, this group arrived at the old gate, immediately requesting to speak with a village leader. Tomlen came marching out of the inn, stone-faced as usual, and demanded to know why they had come. No one knows exactly what the group's leader said to Tomlen, but within an hour the people of Tresin were all being asked to gather in the courtyard. Something about the manner in which people were being 'persuaded' to attend left Madi unnerved," he paused for a moment, choosing to ignore my irritation at hearing him use her first name, "leading her to fake illness and be forced to stay home, lest the sickness spread to everyone else."

Frustrated at the seemingly unrelated nature of this story, I said, "James, I want to know what this has to do with Reevan. Either you get to the point, or I go back to walking away."

Realizing my annoyance, and that I was actively waiting for any excuse to escape this conversation, James quickened the pace of his retelling. "Alright, fine. At the gathering, Tomlen revealed that the group of Bovican scouts were looking for a woman. She was supposedly the daughter of a wanted criminal, and they explained that she would be interrogated and brought back to Bovica in order to help the government find this criminal. The people were confused, as many of their own had come from all across the Kyrlund. Any one of the village's women could be a suspect, but each brought up different claims and reasons as to why they weren't the one. Then, with the hopes of sparking recognition and fear into the true daughter, the group's leader told the crowd the criminal's name: Reevan of Sarvas."

Now it was my turn to be confused. Reevan, to my knowledge, had more than likely died in a failed revolt. Even if he escaped into the tunnels with the seventy survivors, food would have run out within days. Unless...

Unless the tunnels didn't all exit into that valley.

Sarvas had been hailed by the rebellion, the so-called Freehold Confederacy, as the greatest example of Bovica's failure to its own people. But what if there was more to it?

What if Sarvas was the rebellion?