Patricia Briggs (10 page)

With considerable help from Wandel, I managed to get to my feet. Kith shoved his left shoulder into my midriff and heaved me up. The sudden change in position put me out faster than a candle in water.

W
HEN
I
AWOKE, A FAMILIAR TUNIC WAS BOUNCING
around under my face.

“I can walk,” I said groggily.

“No,” Kith replied firmly. “From the amount of blood you left behind, I'm surprised you awoke before morning. If I set you down and you pass out, it'll be twice the work to get you back up. We're not far from camp, Pest. Just keep quiet 'til we get there.”

Of the rest of the trip back I have a hazy memory of watching the back of Kith's calves gray in and out of my shaky vision. I really only recovered consciousness when the steady jolt of Kith's shoulder in my stomach stopped, and I started to slip off.

He muttered a word I'd never heard him use before and made an attempt to forestall my fall. I ended up on my blankets beside the small fire pit. My arm throbbed, my rump ached where it had landed on a rock, my head hurt; but overall, I decided, I would survive.

He left me and fumbled a bit through my saddlebags until he came up with my extra sweater, which he dropped over my head. The additional warmth was welcome—with the sun down, it was a lot colder. The warm tunic I'd worn into the woods was less warm when it was missing the bottom third of its length.

“Kith…,” I began, feeling much better right side up, but he stopped me with a gesture.

“Rest a bit, Pest. We need to wait for Wandel, and I need to catch my breath.” He settled down beside me and handed me a small flask. “Take a drink of this.”

I don't know what I expected—some sort of alcohol, I suppose, even though I knew Kith didn't drink strong spirits. What I sipped wasn't alcohol, but some kind of herb-laden apple cider. That and the stew they'd concocted for dinner had me feeling almost myself by the time Wandel made it back to camp with his load of firewood.

The men ate and I half-dozed by the fire. I should have gotten up and washed my bowl, but it was too much effort. When he was done eating, Kith took my bowl with him to the stream. Maybe I'd have to make sure I was wounded every time I traveled. It sure got me out of a lot of work.

When Kith returned, he sat cross-legged next to me, on the other side of the fire from Wandel. “Now tell me what happened.”

I sighed. “You already know most of it. I looked up, and there he was, the creature you found dead. I was so busy wondering what he was, that his attack took me completely by surprise.” I thought a moment. There was something odd about the fascination I'd felt for him, but it was too hard to describe, so I let it go. “He was aiming for my throat, but I got my hand in front. He bit it and shook his head like a dog killing a rat, and that's all I remember.”

“You don't remember anything about the…” Kith's voice trailed off for a moment. “About whatever it was that killed that thing?”

I shook my head. “I don't even know how badly I'm hurt. I could have sworn it nearly tore my—well, at least it did a lot more damage than it looks like.” I snatched Kith's knife from his boot sheath and slid it under the strips of cloth that wrapped my arm.

It was a mess. On either side was a deep slice that ran the length of my forearm, but the splinters of bone weren't there. It hurt when I closed my hand and started bleeding sluggishly—all right, it hurt
more
when I closed my hand, but that was all.

I'd butchered enough animals to know there was a lot more odd about my arm than the fact I knew the bones had been broken. For one thing, there should have been more blood. There were arteries close to the surface that should have been severed with cuts that deep. Without a pressure bandage, blood should be pouring out.

“When it bit down,” I said distinctly, as much to convince myself as anyone else, “it broke my arm; I heard the bones go. When it twisted its head, my arm bent here.” I didn't quite touch the wound just below my elbow.

Kith held my arm still and examined it. When he was through, he shook his head. “I can't tell that the bone's ever been broken—and right here it should have cut through an artery”—he ran his fingers over one of the cuts—“and again here. I'd say he can work magic I've never seen a bloodmage do.”

“Not that they would feel inspired to help anyone,” I said. Kith smiled at me tiredly.

Wandel opened a pouch on his belt and took out a tin before rounding the fire to my side. He took the bandaging I'd cut off and spread a layer of salve from the container on part of it.

“Put this back around your arm,” he said, fitting the bandage back around the wound.

With my assistance, he tore another strip from my poor tunic and used it to hold the bandaging in place. “From all appearances, your wounds have already been cleaned—so there's no use putting you through it again tonight. I have some brandy in my bags, and I'll clean it again in the morning. Bite wounds are always difficult to get to heal if you don't keep them clean.”

When he was finished with me, I stretched out on my blanket, staring up into the night sky. “Wandel,” I asked, “do you think that thing that rescued me was a hob? Like the runes we found?”

Wandel took up his harp and plucked a string delicately. “I don't know. I told you, I only know a song about them.” He began to play a sprightly tune on his harp, one of the kind that's difficult not to hum along with. By the third verse I was singing with the chorus. Kith didn't join in.

The gist of the song was that there was a rich farmer who owed his success to the hob living in his barn. The farmer, due to his wealth, found himself a wife from a well-to-do town family. They lived happily enough until the hob surprised her in the barn. They disliked each other on sight; she tried to rid the barn of the hob, and the hob tried to rid the farmer of his wife. The wife was clever, but the hob was more clever still: everything she tried to do to him, he turned back on her. At last the farmer stepped in, kept the hob, and got rid of his wife. With the help of the hob he found a farm-bred wife who put out milk and bread every night for the fey folk, and they all lived happily ever after.

The most interesting feature of the song, as far as I was concerned, was the detailed description of the hob: a little man with skin like old oak, eyes blue as the sky, and a head too big for its body. It sounded like my attacker, but….

“So,” said Wandel, finishing the last chord with a flourish, “the creature who attacked you could have been a hob.”

“No,” I said, suddenly remembering something. “I named the wildling that, just before it attacked me. Then after…someone”—I remembered the dark gray skin and red eyes of my vision yesterday and a tone of dry disgust—“someone said, ‘That's not a hob, Lady.'”

M
Y ARM WAS STIFF AND SORE THE NEXT MORNING
. When Wandel offered to saddle Duck as well as Torch and the Lass, I let him do it and helped Kith pack camp—or at least watched while Kith did all the work, offering unsolicited advice until he threatened to toss his shovelful of dirt on me rather than the fire pit.

By the time Wandel had tied the small shovel behind Torch's saddle, I was starting to feel better. Mounting was awkward, and Kith gave me a sympathetic glance.

“Well, at least it doesn't hurt you when you do this,” I groused as I found my stirrups.

“Yours will pass,” he replied softly.

“You're not going to make me feel guilty when I feel so bad are you?” I whined.

He laughed. “Let's go.”

After the first few miles, my arm subsided to a dull ache that I could ignore. I noticed Kith wasn't nearly as nervous today, and I wondered if the thing that had attacked me had been following us. With it gone, there would be nothing to set off his magicked senses. Maybe, I thought, but it was more likely that the day had relaxed him as much as it had me. It was hard to worry about wildlings with sharp teeth with the sun shining on your back.

It was warmer today than yesterday, and the scents of the early spring wildflowers were almost erotic in their fullness. The horses were feeling it, too; the Lass had managed to bite poor old Duck twice. He, for his part, seemed to take a masochistic interest in her. He kept trying to sneak closer to her when I wasn't paying attention. If he hadn't been a gelding, I would have thought he was courting the mare. Even Torch, the old campaigner, was dancing a bit more than usual.

It was late afternoon when we started down the slopes of the Hob into the valley where Auberg lay, about the same time that we'd made camp yesterday. From our vantage point, the town didn't look nearly as large as I remembered it—but it had been several years since I'd been there. As we started down the side of the mountain, I saw the bones of a winter-killed wolf stretched under the green foliage of a wild lilac. The climate was warmer here than it was in Fallbrook, and the lilacs were in full bloom.

The pastureland crept up the sides of the foothills of the Hob, and soon we were traveling along a shepherds' track between the rock walls that fenced the pastures. Generations of farmers had combed the rocks from the land and used them for fences and buildings, leaving behind land well-fenced and less rocky. Land that once had been poor had become, over centuries of management, rich and fertile.

The grass in the pastures here were already three times as long as the grasses in Fallbrook's fields. Even the pastures that had been recently grazed were longer than…

Torch halted, giving the Lass time to aim a nip at his rump—though even she wasn't so bold as to actually bite him.

“What's wrong?” asked Wandel before I could.

“You tell me,” answered Kith, his gaze drifting around the valley spread below us.

I followed his gaze, looking for something—but there was nothing to be seen.

“Faran's breath!” I swore, standing in my stirrups for a better view. There
was
nothing to be seen.

“Where are the cattle?” asked Wandel. “These are cattle fields, you can see where they've grazed—but they're all gone.”

“No sheep either,” added Kith softly. “Nor any people. We should be able to see the men in the fields and the people going in and out of town. Look down by that little croft. There's laundry hung to dry and half of it swept loose from the pins.”

I knew the others were thinking
raiders
. It was possible the group harassing Fallbrook was part of a larger raiding party or even an enemy army—but a feeling that chilled me down to the bone told me the answer was worse than an army. A feeling and the memory of a vision of men dissolving into ash didn't allow for so mundane an answer.

The quick glimpse I'd had of the wolf bones became more sinister. I didn't say anything, though, merely sent Duck after the other two horses as they headed down the trail to Auberg. What could I have said?

We passed the croft with the hanging laundry first. There were a few chickens in the yard: small and scrawny, half-grown chicks. The men rode past the trail to the house but, on impulse, I turned in. Kith and Wandel stopped to wait for me.

The grass was knee-deep, so it wasn't until something crunched under Duck's feet that I realized there were bones scattered here and there throughout the yard. I dismounted and kicked some of them out from under the grass.

They were clean as if someone had boiled the flesh from them—chicken mostly, though some of them might have been goose. Nearer the clothesline I saw the bones of a dog. A basket sat nearby, half full of washing.

I led Duck around the fluttering clothes. A brightly striped kerchief was still wrapped around the skull of the woman who had been hanging laundry.

Not raiders, I thought. There was no sign the woman had met an untimely end by ax or knife. It might have been a plague that killed her. There were some that swept through towns, killing entire populations. Most of those were mageborn, but some of the natural diseases could do it, too.

If this were a plague, we shouldn't go into town. If this were plague, it couldn't have happened very long ago. The bones were yellowish, almost greasy looking, with dark spots on the long bones of her arm. Newly stripped bones that had lain there for no more than a month.

I'd
seen
an army turned to bone, then ash: it hadn't been a plague. But what madman would have loosed such a spell here? Auberg was no threat to anyone.

I sat beside the skeleton and touched her wrist gently. The bones were dry against my fingers. I wondered what the unknown mage who'd stripped the land of magic bindings had done with the power he'd acquired. Duck touched the top of my head with his nose, worried about my unaccustomed place at his feet.

I closed my eyes and tried to
see
what had happened to the woman. I tried to put aside all of my speculations. For a long time, nothing came to me. Visions all the time when I didn't want them, but they were harder to call on purpose. My right leg started to go to sleep.

I heard hoofbeats approaching. Kith and Wandel must have gotten tired of waiting. I opened my eyes and turned to look….