Bloodstone (10 page)

She frowned, wondering what could’ve made her start so. She half turned, saw the blazed face of Rees’s mount and knew he still maintained the rear. The knowledge ought to have comforted her. Yesterday, it did. Now, however...

She stole a glance behind her. Rees’s eyes were like slits under the ledge of his brows and he rotated his gaze from side to side, looking first far, then near, then far again. His expression was grim, as if at any moment he expected something to spring from the meadow grass or swoop at them from the sky.

The lion?
The thought brought visions of the morning and the previous night’s events, memories Mirianna had steadfastly spent the better part of the day ignoring. Now they rushed in on her like an invading army, bringing with them all their attendant mix of emotions. Had she really seen what she thought she had? Heard what she thought she’d heard? Or was it only a trick of the night embellished by the Wehrland’s peculiar power to bend minds?

Here, with the sun beating down and the grass humming with the gentle music of grasshoppers and bees, it surely seemed no more than that. True, there had been a lion. They’d all seen the paw print. They’d all heard it scream. But speak? Mirianna puckered her lips. She had dreamt a waking dream, and there was no more magic in this land than in—

“Rees!” Pumble shouted.

Her gaze rushed to the head of their little line. She saw Pumble, one arm waving furiously, struggle to stay atop a madly plunging mount.

Rees spat out the grass stem he’d been chewing and spurred his horse past her.

Startled by the sudden shake of his mount’s head, Tolbert fumbled for the reins. “What, what’s ado?” he said, turning a bewildered face to his daughter.

Mirianna urged her gelding beside her father’s mount. “Pumble’s seen something,” she said as Tolbert smothered a yawn.

His eyes brightened. “Another lion, do you think?” He adjusted the wide brimmed hat he wore and straightened in the saddle. “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes,” she murmured without enthusiasm. She watched Rees’s horse rear, plunge sideways, and try to bolt. The Master of Nolar’s man hauled it back, but the animal kicked wildly at something she couldn’t see in the tall grass. Finally, he turned the horse aside and dismounted, handing the reins to Pumble who, still mounted, clung to the white-eyed pack animal and the tossing head of the horse he rode.

Tolbert urged his horse forward. “What is it? What have you found?”

“Stay back!” Rees held up both arms. “Don’t bring those horses any closer!”

Mirianna reined to a halt beside her father and watched Rees return his attention to a depression in the thigh-high grass. He walked two careful steps toward it, halted long enough to cover his nose and mouth with his tunic, and resumed his progress, hunching now.

Mirianna exchanged puzzled glances with her father. Her horse raised its head. The gelding’s ears flicked back and forth and it huffed. The pink nostrils flared. She felt it shift uneasily beneath her. Curious, she sniffed the gentle breeze.

Two smells assaulted her nose at once, the first clearly the smell of rotting flesh, the second unfamiliar but even more rank. Grimacing, she covered her nose as the gelding back-stepped. “What’s that?”

Tolbert wrinkled his nose. “Smells like skunk.”

“But worse,” she said, recognizing traces of a urine odor. There was something else, too, something equally pungent. Stale sweat?

The gelding tossed its head. Her father’s chestnut huffed and kicked a hind leg. Both horses chewed at their bits. Mirianna turned the horse upwind until she could breathe again. “What is it?” she called as Rees returned to Pumble’s side.

He mounted and both men rode upwind of the depression. He breathed deeply, coughed, and breathed again. “Krad kill,” he managed in a hoarse voice. “Bloody things leave their stench on everything they touch.”

“It looked like deer. Was it?” Pumble said.

Rees nodded. “Two. The Krad ripped them apart. Left the rest to rot.” He shuddered and brushed at his clothes as if something foul clung to them.

“How long ago?” Pumble said, his face pale under his tan.

“Not long enough.” Rees scowled at the sun. “And closer to Ar-Deneth than I thought they’d be.” He leveled a glare at Mirianna.

He thinks I brought the Krad. And maybe the lion, too.

The idea stunned her. She flushed hot at the memory of his groping hand and her helplessness against it, then cold at the implied connection.
I didn’t summon the lion! It was just coincidence, nothing more!
But she said, “Are we close enough to Ar-Deneth to reach it if we ride through the night?”

Rees’s eyes narrowed.

She averted her gaze from the latent heat rising again in his.
Please don’t misunderstand why I said that. I’m not afraid of you. I’m just...afraid.

“If I remember the trail correctly,” Tolbert said, leaning forward and stroking his chin, “we can’t be more than a day or two away. There’s the Bear’s Tooth.” He pointed to a conical formation of yellow stone visible along the rock wall in the distance. “It’s been some years, but I seem to remember that as a landmark before the trail bends southward.”

Rees, attention diverted, squinted at the sandstone monument. His lips thinned, but he jerked a nod. “All night and half the day—if you’re up to it.”

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” Pumble said, mopping his face, “but the sooner I get out of the Wehrland, the happier I’ll be.”

“Yes, yes,” Tolbert said, nodding. “But we’ll have to return this way, you know.”

Pumble shrugged. “Better to be halfway and know you made it, than go to sleep once more, wondering if you will.”

“What about you?” Rees said.

“Me?” Mirianna’s fingers worried the saddle horn. “Oh, I’m not tired. Let’s go. Besides,” she added, forcing a smile for her father’s benefit, “we can rest when we get there.”

“And in proper beds.” Tolbert rubbed his lower back. “This sleeping on the ground, well, I guess I’m not as young as I used to be.” He grinned sheepishly and squeezed his daughter’s hand.

Had they been anywhere else, she would have savored his admission. Here, though, a subtle alteration in Rees’s expression demanded all of her attention. It was in his eyes, but not only there. There was a movement of lips, too, so minute she could barely note the change, barely identify it. And it had begun with her father’s mention of “bed.”

Mirianna closed her eyes.
I’ll have to keep my door bolted day and night.

The man sat on a low, flat stone before a small fire. He stirred the flames with a stick, poking apart the glowing carcasses of deadfall he’d set aflame only an hour earlier.

Ghost, tethered with the pack horses, showed gray in a sputter of sparks, then vanished as the glare faded. A night hawk screeched somewhere to the west.

The man lifted his head and peered at the sky. Between long, blank shadows of cloud, he located the five-star formation of Kiros and noted its position. Two hours until the first faint bluing of dawn.

He returned his attention to the fire, spreading it still more, letting it die. It was only a small one, and he’d built it primarily for the boy.

An involuntary contraction of muscles pulled up one corner of his mouth.
What does a blind boy need with a fire?

Hah! How very droll,
said the Voice in his head.
But you know very well there are more uses for it than light.

He rested the glowing tip of the stick on a stone. A wisp of smoke, pungent with burnt sap, curled up from it toward the dark tops of aspens and spruces sheltering three sides of his campsite.

When the smoke dissipated, he looked down at a tankard nested in stones at the edge of the fire. If there was warm water left, he should drink it even though he had no intention of sleeping. They were still too close to Ar-Deneth, and he wouldn’t rest until they’d put another day between themselves and the main trail. As it was, the trail lay no more than a league to the south. Were he alone, he wouldn’t have stopped here. He would have continued until midday, rested the horses until evening and embarked again, putting as many leagues as possible between himself and the eyes of the curious before he would yield to the luxury of sleep.

If he were alone.

He glanced toward the blanket-clad figure lying on the ground an arm’s length to his left. The boy slept like one dead, his face a pasty half-moon in the fading firelight.

Take him back. It’s not too late,
the Voice in his head said. Again.

The man returned his gaze to the gray-red glow, remembering how the boy had blundered into roots, caught his hood on low branches, and finally tripped over the pack to fall, face down, in the moss. The man straightened slowly, until his elbows rose from his knees and his hands unclasped and the palms rubbed, back and forth, against the prickly weave of the fabric covering his thighs.
He’ll survive...once we get to Drakkonwehr. He’ll be safe there. We both will.

There was a sound...far off. The man froze. In the moments that followed, he heard the nighthawk screeching now to the north as it dove and fed, dove and fed. Ghost, in the darkness, huffed and was silent. There was no wind to rustle the boughs, yet he had heard...what? A rattle of stone? No, not quite that. Something else, something like...voices?

The man bolted to his feet, whirling so quickly his cloak whipped at his boot tops.

Ghost, under the spruces, raised his muzzle and, ears pricked, sniffed the air.

“Men,” the man muttered. “Fools!”

The stallion huffed again and stamped.

The man glided to the animal’s side and slid a hand under the stallion’s mane. There was just enough time to unfasten the tether and vanish into the night. When the intruders arrived, they would find only an untended, dying fire.

And a boy.

A shiver twitched along the man’s back. His gaze shot to the shrouded figure barely visible near the circle of embers. He surged two steps forward, then halted at the sound of hooves striking stone. He looked, once, toward the break in the trees and the shadows moving into it. Then, turning on his heel, he swept into the cover of the spruces.

****

Mirianna halted her horse just behind Rees and Pumble, the two men’s mounted figures silhouetted against the faint light of a dying fire.
Ah, a fire.
It would be wonderful to warm herself for a moment or two, if only to beat back the chill emanating from everything in this forsaken region.

Ahead in the narrow mouth of the clearing, Pumble leaned toward Rees. “See, I told you it was a campfire.”

“Shut up and keep your eyes on those trees.”

Even though the hissed retort wasn’t aimed at her, its tone shredded Mirianna’s remaining patience. She urged her gelding alongside Rees’s mount. “That’s a fine way to talk to him! You’ve been leading us in circles for hours. At least Pumble has had sense enough to spot the fire.”

“I don’t know where we went wrong.” Tolbert nudged his horse beside Pumble’s. He pinched the bridge of his nose, and then dragged his hand over his face. “We should have found the fork by now.”

Mirianna slapped spruce needles from her cloak and glared at Rees. She gestured toward the single blanket-wrapped figure visible near the fire pit. “Why don’t you just admit we’re lost and go ask that man for directions?”

Although it was too dark to see more than an occasional glimmer of Rees’s eyes, she sensed the weight—and heat—of his stare. “Because,” he said, speaking slowly, as if to a peevish child, “I’m not sure there’s only one man.”

Her heart thudded. This was the Wehrland, after all. “Well,” she said, stiffening her chin, “there are four of us.”

Rees snorted, but he cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hallo the camp!”

The shout echoed off the trees and faded. A horse, under the spruces, nickered. Mirianna’s mount shook its bit and replied. But the man, barely visible in the fading emberlight, lay still.

Something heavy pressed in on Mirianna’s chest, shorting her lungs of air. “He’s dead,” she breathed.

“Or faking,” murmured Pumble.

“Or a dummy,” Rees said. “Pumble, go and see.”

“Me?” Pumble’s face shone white. He licked his lips. Drawing his short sword, he rode slowly forward. At the edge of the firelight, he looked from side to side, then dismounted. He crept toward the ring of stones, scooped up a handful of kindling, and flung it on the embers. Backing two quick steps, he barked, “Hallo the camp!”

The blanket-wrapped figure jolted upright. “Yes, sir! What am I to...?”

A boy’s face, pale in the light of fresh flames, emerged from a fallen-back hood. Mirianna watched, breathless, while it looked not at Pumble, standing fully visible across the fire pit, but turned first one way, then the other, then cocked, as if listening.

Pumble glanced toward Rees. Sweat glistened on the short man’s face. At Rees’s jerked nod, Pumble shifted the grip on his sword and demanded, “Where’s your master?”

The boy convulsed like a startled animal. “Who—who’s there?” He scrabbled in the sand at his side for something Mirianna couldn’t see.

Pumble bolted around the fire pit. Rees, beside her, raised his bow.

“Don’t! He’s only a boy!” Mirianna grabbed Rees’s tunic sleeve, jarring the bowstring, tipping the arrow upward. Pumble, halfway around the fire pit, skidded to a halt and spun.

But it was not to her they looked. Nor was it her voice they’d heard, as echoes of something deeper reverberated from the aspens and spruces. “Hold!” it had said. Yes, she was sure of it. It had drowned her own plea even though she’d screamed it. “Hold,” it had said, “if you would live!”

Rees’s face, beside her, shimmered. His gaze scanned the trees even as he shook off her hand. “We mean no harm,” he said, the bow still poised in his hands. “We’re travelers...on our way to Ar-Deneth.”

“We’re lost,” Tolbert said, huddling into his cloak. “And I’m not afraid to admit it.”