Accidental Sorceress (Hardstorm Saga Book 2) (25 page)

“And then?”

“Lord Karnagh decided to ride out and lift the siege from his neighbor Lord Brooker’s castle. He rode out with five hundred men and fifty tigers.” Tomron shook his head. “We waited for his return, but he did not come. Not one captain came back, not one tiger, not one man.”

“You?”

“I had been left behind to guard Regnor. When we had no news of Lord Karnagh in a full mooncrossing, I took a team of the most faithful men to find him, sixty of us.” He gestured at his friends. “The six you see here remain.”

We walked in silence for a moment before he continued. “We ran into a great enemy force. We could not go forward, and since the enemy surrounded Regnor once again, we could not go back. We awaited the night in the thick of the woods, then we crept down to the river. We hung on to bloated corpses and floated away.”

“Then came to Ker.”

“We wanted to find fighting men we could join,” he said heavily.

“What do you know of the warrior queen who holds the last free Selorm city?”

“Only what I heard from refugees. They say the enemy nearly had the city of Ralabon when the Queen of Habor showed up with her royal guard. She had been pushed out from her own land. She was looking for shelter, somewhere to regroup her warriors, walls they could retreat behind to defend themselves. She cut through the army outside Ralabon in a surprise attack, and her warriors joined forces with those defending the castle.”

I thought carefully as we walked. “Do you think Lord Karnagh might be in Ralabon, sealed in by the siege?”

But Tomron shook his head. “If a Selorm lord was present, the foreign queen wouldn’t be leading defense.” He paused. “Ralabon is to the east of Regnor, Lord Karnagh’s seat. He had marched west with his warriors, to Lord Brooker’s aid.”

“Then we shall go toward Brooker’s Castle ourselves.”

At once, Tomron protested that they had already tried that and could not get through enemy lines, but I pointed out that they had been a force of sixty men then; now we were but eight. Our small group had a much better chance of proceeding unseen.

Soon the forest thinned, and we came across a dip in the ground and settled into it for the night. What wind blew through the trees blew over the top of us. I had spent more comfortable nights, but our discomfort was bearable.

Despite having a tiger along, Tomron set sentries.

Marga sniffed around and made her noises. And, to my surprise, Orz was making some noises back, guttural, deep sounds that rumbled up from his chest. Almost as if they were talking to each other.

The tiger did not go off hunting. She must have hunted well and filled her stomach the night before, for her belly appeared still rounded.

I slept next to her for heat, the men under blankets, all in a bunch. I gave one of my blankets to Orz, who kept himself apart.

We rose at first light, ate sparingly, then pushed forward.

Tomron sent Fadden and Baran to check the road. The first enemy soldiers, or rather their deaths, were reported back in a short while. Fadden and Baran dispatched the three enemy scouts. The element of surprise had been on our men’s side.

The sun had long passed its zenith in the sky by the time we reached the first village, little more than a ruin. Most of the huts had been burned.

We saw no people, but some from the village must have survived, for the fallen had been buried. No decomposing bodies littered the streets.

“I met refugees on the road before Captain Witsel caught up with me,” I told Tomron. “They might have come from this very village.”

He stayed by my side but sent his men to spread out and check through the charred huts for things we might be able to use.

They returned empty-handed. “Stripped clean,” Atter reported.

Marga had been sniffing around the well but suddenly lifted her head and gave a warning growl.

“There are people at the edge of the woods up ahead,” Tomron said without looking that way.

I looked, but all I could see were yew bushes.

The tiger growled again.

Our small team pulled back to the middle of the main square, the men’s hands near their swords. But when the bushes began to move and people stepped out, they were not enemy soldiers.

I sang a spirit song to Marga to keep her by my side. Her ears twitched. She did not attack. She seemed to have an uncanny ability to sense whether I considered someone friend or foe. But her thick tail swooshed from side to side in the dirt.

A dozen villagers limped and staggered toward us, mostly older men and women, two little girls among them. They were of shorter stature and darker hair than my Selorm guards, cheeks sunk in, clothes torn and dirty. They seemed greatly cheered by the tiger.

“They are Seb,” Tomron told me under his breath. “From the native tribes of this land.”

“Is the war over?” the oldest of the women inquired in the same language that the refugees I had met on the road had spoken.

She had a bent back and a shuffling walk, her joints stiff with rheumatism, her thinning hair in a stringy bun at her nape—that disheveled, desperate look of those whose lives had been upended.

Tomron looked to me as if awaiting my response.

“Not yet, Grandmother,” I said, and stepped forward.

Marga moved with me, staying close, taking a protective stance.

The wide-eyed little girl who was hiding behind the old woman’s skirts peeped up. “Why does the tiger go with her?”

She probably expected Marga to be bonded to one of the Selorm men.

But before I could explain, Orz stepped from the ruins of a granary he’d lumbered into earlier. The villagers drew back at his dark figure as he came to stand beside me, his head deeply bowed as always.

Some of the women backed toward the woods, looking ready to disappear.

But Tomron pointed at me and said with his voice full of authority, “The Lady Tera is a high sorceress. The hollow is her servant.”

I was about to protest, but the fear was lessening on the gaunt faces around me, replaced by curiosity, then acceptance when I said, “His name is Orz. I did not create him, and I will not create others,” I added, in case they worried that I came to suck out people’s spirits for magic. “He will not harm you,” I finished.

Orz backed away and dropped his shoulders, dipped his head even more than usual, and I stifled a smile, for I knew he was trying to do his best not to appear threatening.

Men and women came to me and fell to their knees, some kissing my hands, others my boots. They gained such joy and encouragement from news of my sorcery that I decided to wait at least a short while before I disabused them of the notion.

Instead, I gestured around. “What happened here?”

The old woman spoke again. “The Kerghi came. The men they cut down; the women and girls they chained up to send back to the empire as slaves. The boys they took to be pressed into their dark army.”

Her eyes glazed over with grief. “Only those of us they left for dead escaped. We hid in the forest, but we do not dare light any fires. And we are all too slow to hunt, either too old or too injured.”

I asked them about the small group of refugees I had met on the road who gave Orz his boots, but they did not know a family like that. There must have been many other ruined villages.

“We are going to Brooker’s Castle to find Lord Karnagh,” I said. “But we would like to rest here. Do you have a camp we might share for the night?” I did not wish to stay out in the open in the village. The main road passed too close by.

The villagers led me forth with deep bowing and many smiles. The two young children each grabbed on to a bundle of herbs hanging from my belt, as happy as if they were somehow blessed by that small connection.

We did not have to go far to reach the camp. I would have walked past it if walking on my own, for they had only the least they required to keep living. They had no tents or huts here but slept in holes dug in the ground, which they covered with branches.

They had no food that I could see.

They led me to the middle of their clearing and gestured for me to sit on a log. I glanced back at the Selorm, who had their own provisions, same as I. “Let us share what we have.”

The men did not protest. If anything, they appeared relieved as if they had worried that I would not allow them to share.

After we ate, then drank fresh stream water, I washed my hands. “Let me see all who are sick here.”

They lined up before me, all twelve, minding each other, those with the most severe injuries first.

I began by setting a dislocated arm that should have been set days before, my work made more difficult by the overgrown swelling. The old man did not cry out. I bandaged his shoulder as tightly as I could, then told him not to move it for several days.

Then I treated a young man’s stump—he lost half of his arm in battle. After that came infected stab wounds, and way too many burns.

Night fell by the time I finished, having the satisfaction of knowing that the people around me were in less pain now than when I had arrived at their village.

Marga went off hunting. We set sentries. But when Marga came back a short while later, dragging half a mule deer to me as a gift, even the sentries lay down to rest.

In the morning, we shared some bread. Baran chopped the half deer into two quarters, then wrapped the meat in leaves. He tied one package onto his own back; the other was taken by Hartz.

We did not discuss the villagers joining us. They simply fell in step.

As before, we moved to follow the road from the woods, at a distance. Tomron and the others were soldiers. They had marched on roads; the network of roads was what they knew. They did not know the hidden creeks and valleys enough to navigate by them.

But the old woman, Hilla, said, “I know the pathways of the forest, my lady. That might be a safer way.”

So I told her to lead us, and she did.

We reached the next village toward the end of the day. The huts here too were all destroyed. But this time, three times as many survivors eased forth from their hiding places to meet us. Here too, I had to assure everyone that Orz would not steal their spirits. Since they could see that all others in our traveling group were yet hale and not running in terror from the hollow, they believed me.

The tiger they accepted at once and without question.

“How did this many survive?” I asked the village leader, a miller.

“A child had wandered off into the forest, my lady. Many men and women ran to find him, spurred by the pleas of his crying mother.” He pointed at one of the women, who held a little boy close to her chest.

Then he continued. “While we were searching for the child, the enemy came to the village but missed the rescue party as we had gone far into the woods. By the time we returned toward dawn the following day, all we found in place of our homes was smoldering ashes and scattered bodies.”

These villagers had been living in root cellars and offered us shelter there. They even had fires, which they kept hidden below the ground. We roasted the deer, and all ate well.

Come morning, as we left, the new people joined us.

“If we meet enemy soldiers, I cannot protect these people,” I told Tomron, worrying a bundle of herbs with my fingers as we walked. “Do they know that?”

“We are at war. They will meet enemy soldiers one way or the other. If they are by your side, my lady, you can heal what harm might befall them.”

I would try, if I was not cut down myself.

We followed an animal trail through the woods. Tomron pointed out deer and wild boar droppings, which the tiger sniffed with interest.

Our growing rag-tag tribe walked in groups of twos and threes. Since we had children and old people with us, we did not move as quickly as I could have with the original six soldiers. But since the path through the woods was shorter than following the road, I thought we might yet reach Brooker’s Castle even faster.

The Selorm soldiers and the tiger hunted as we went. The rest of us foraged. We did not have much food, but enough for each day, so that nobody went hungry, which was more than the villagers had had for some time. They were happy, one after the other coming up to thank me.

“I gave them nothing,” I told Tomron when he joined me later.

“You gave us all a shared purpose, my lady.” As he walked, he was sharpening a straight branch as long as he was tall.

The soldiers were making simple hunting spears so at least all the men could be armed. The spears were shaved to a point, then the point hardened in fire when we stopped to rest—not much, but better than nothing, according to Tomron.

“A good purpose can give a man reason to live,” he said now. “A good leader can bring a soldier out of the very grave to fight again.”

As he dropped back to check on the end of our long column, I pondered his words. If I gave people a shared purpose, they gave me a sense of strength. They were here because of me, so I could not be weak. I could not grieve for what was lost. I could not turn around or lie down to die when I thought of Batumar and my heart broke over and over again.

The people followed because they had someone to lead them. And I led because there were people behind me whom I could not leave to their fate.

Thus we went from village to village, collecting up the left behind, the maimed, the frightened. As we marched on, I talked to each and every person, asked them what they knew about Brooker’s Castle, about Lord Karnagh, about the great endless woods, even about strange plants that were unfamiliar to me because they did not grow on my island.

In the evenings, I healed the sick, then told stories to the children. Most of the adults gathered around us too, which was becoming more and more difficult. After each village we passed, we needed a larger and larger clearing for our night camp.

The men and women grew strong from regular meals and regular rest. Some felt safe enough to sleep through the night for the first time in a mooncrossing or more. They were greatly heartened by having a sorceress and a tiger and a magically recovering hollow among them.

And Orz
was
recovering. His gait improved. He carried himself differently. I began to wonder if he was yet as old as I had first suspected him to be. He joined the men to help with tasks but never strayed far from me and never uncovered his face. He never spoke to me again either.