Raven's Shadow (17 page)

“I don't know,” she said, because it was the answer that would hurt him the least. Seraph took a deep breath. “This doesn't feel like one of the Blighted Places to me. Hennea said there was old magic here, but I can't sense it.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I think I would sense anything that had lasted here from the time of the Shadowed's Fall, especially power still strong enough to kill.”

“So this is not a shadowed place.”

Seraph nodded slowly. “A month is long enough to dissipate
solsenti
magic,” she said, and then forced herself to point out the obvious to both of them. “Just because it was not old magic that killed here, doesn't mean that those
solsenti
wizards of Hennea's didn't kill Tier outright. I need you to look and see if you can tell what happened when Frost was killed here. Remember to look especially closely for any scrap of hair or clothing that I might be able to read.”

She moved back to the edge of the clearing as he began to quarter it thoroughly.

“The clearest thing I see,” he said at last, “is that something burned here. You can see where the earth was scorched—the patch goes all the way around the grave—see here where the grass is a bit shorter?”

She nodded.

“It looks to me that there have been three groups of people here recently,” he said. “The most recent was Jes's Hennea. She walked the meadow, just like I did, stopped there”—he pointed to a place just to the right of the large stone—“and stopped again to press her hand into the dirt mound. Then she left. The party who came before her, was here a few days ago—three horsemen. One of them was the huntsman—see
the way that off fore is angled?” He didn't look at her so Seraph didn't bother shaking her head. “That's the horse he was riding when he come to tell us what he'd found.”

“The earliest group, though, is what we're interested in, and they worked at hiding their tracks. They were here after the snow started to melt—so no earlier than a month and a half ago. I can't tell you how many of them there were here for certain, but they were here about the same time as Papa.”

Lehr gestured for Seraph to follow him and led her to the far side of the clearing, through a thicket of elderberry, to a stand of trees.

“He saw them, Mother,” said Lehr. “He stopped Frost here for a while and watched them, maybe for as long as a quarter of an hour. See how Frost stood here, shifting her weight?” He turned and walked back the way they came without taking his eyes from the ground. “Then he walked Frost out into the clearing. There was no fighting, or scuffle that I can see. But Frost's prints are lost in this burnt area.”

He glanced around again. “I can pick up the tracks of the other men lower down and backtrack them.”

“We'll do that if necessary,” said Seraph. “Did you find anything they left behind?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. I'm sorry I couldn't find out anything more. Are we done now?”

“Just beginning,” Seraph answered. “Give me your pack,” she said. There was a camp shovel tied to the back and she took it. “Now we dig.”

“You're looking for something that can tell you what happened?” asked Lehr. “Like the saddle or Papa's pack?”

“If there's something to read, I'll try—but mostly I'm looking for the human bones the huntsman buried with Frost.”

Before she set cold iron to earth, she touched the dirt, trying to find the old magic that Hennea had spoken of. “There's death here,” she said. “Sudden and painful.”

“Papa?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Seraph replied, rubbing the grains between her fingers. “Ravens are not necromancers.”

She got to her feet and started digging with the shovel—refusing Lehr's help. This was not something for children, no
matter that the child in question was a foot taller and almost twice her weight.

She dug until the metal edge of the shovel blade bounced off bone. They hadn't buried Frost very deep—but a horse is a large animal. Scraping gently with the blade, she pushed away dirt and saw, beneath a coating of soil and ash, the familiar pattern of Frost's dapples.

“Let me, Mother,” said Lehr, taking the shovel from her.

He shouldn't have been able to read anything from her face, but he was almost as sensitive as Jes or Tier. She was too tired from the trip here, from digging, from hope and fear to fight him.

“If we're lucky,” Lehr said as he began digging, “they'd have set the skull beside the horse and not beneath her.” We don't have ropes and horses to move Frost the way the huntsman did.”

“I can move her if we have to,” said Seraph—not as certain as she sounded. “But I'd rather not add more magic here until I've sifted all the information the grave contains.”

He probed the disturbed ground and uncovered, little by little, Frost's poor burnt corpse. As the huntsman had said, her head and neck had been charred to the bone with just enough tissue to hold the vertebrae together. But the hindquarters were almost intact—left that way by the chill of the mountain spring. There was only a faint odor of meat turning rotten.

“How did the bridle survive?” asked Lehr after he'd cleared a space around the blackened skull of the horse.

“There are spells that only attack the living,” said Seraph. “I think that the damage to the bridle was secondary—the spell burnt the horse, and the burning horse burnt the bridle in turn. Hold up, there's the saddle blanket.” Part of it, anyway. Where the saddle had been was gone, leaving only a black scorch mark on Frost's back.

She knelt and touched the cloth. Nothing. She whispered words of power, but they slid past the saddle blanket and sank deeply into the soil as if something sucked them down and ate them. And deep below the surface of the earth, something very old stirred then subsided, its sleep too deep to be awakened so easily.

Cautiously she withdrew her magic, letting it die down
until it no longer fed whatever it was that waited beneath. She looked again at the flat-topped stone and saw that it could have served as an altar. She felt the dirt again and looked at the deep green grass. Blood had once flowed over the altar, enough blood that generations later the grass still fed upon it. Hennea had been right, there was old magic here—older than Shadow's Blight.

This was not a Blighted Place. If any mage tried to set a trap here, the magic would be eaten by the same thing that had eaten hers.

“Mother?” Lehr asked, pausing in his steady pace to look at her.

“Something's waiting here,” she said. “But it had nothing to do with any recent deaths. It'll likely lie here until your grandchildren are dust unless it's awakened.”

“What about the blanket?”

Seraph shook her head. “Nothing. I need the skull. I'll be able to tell if it's Tier's.”

His shovel hesitated before he resumed his search, widening the cleared space around the horse.

Seraph cleaned the dirt from her fingertips absently and watched as Lehr at last unearthed a fire-blackened human skull, set near the horse's neck bones.

Gently Lehr took the grim thing into his hands and handed it to her. Seraph stared at the wide brow and looked for a hint of familiar features. Had Tier's front teeth been so square? She couldn't tell. There was no jaw bone to give the skull balance.

As she'd told Tier, necromancy was not something Ravens used—but it was prudence rather than ability that stopped them. Meddling with the dead was no light thing. If her need had not been so great she'd have left it alone.

Her fingers told her nothing; the bone could almost have been a stone in a field that had never felt a human hand, so little of its past stayed with it.

She set it down and touched Frost's skull. Nothing. Someone had deliberately cleaned these bones as they'd cleaned the bridle and saddle blanket. No random magic could rape the memory of life from a bone.

She picked up the human skull again and sent more magic
seeking through it. A bridle or a blanket could be cleaned of lives that brush past it, but not even a great deal of magic could clean away a whole lifetime completely. There had to be bits of it left, if she tried hard enough.

Beneath her fingers she felt a tentative response. She pressed the cool bone to her forehead and left it there a long time as she sought to touch the faint pulse of experience.

The sun was setting when she placed the skull gently beside Frost's.

“This man was not Tier,” she whispered around the throbbing pain in her temples. “He was a Traveler, dead of a blade, not magic fire—and he died somewhere far away, though not long ago.”

“It doesn't mean that Papa's alive,” he said, obviously hoping she'd contradict him. “Someone tried to make us think him dead with the skull and Frost's body—but they might simply have taken his body away, or taken him off to kill elsewhere.”

“It only means that Tier probably didn't die here,” she agreed, fear and hope both held in firm control.

Lehr began filling in the grave, skull and all, and Seraph thought about what she knew.

“Lehr?” she said finally.

“Hmm?”

“These people who killed Frost took a lot of trouble to obscure their tracks. They weren't good enough to fool you, but they tried very hard. If you hadn't seen their tracks below, would you have noticed them here? If we were looking for Tier's remains rather than evidence that he was taken?”

He frowned, “Maybe not.”

Seraph nodded. “I think they knew about you. They were careful to take Tier outside of the realm of the forest king—I think they knew about him as well. They cleansed Frost's body and the leather and cloth, leaving them no past for me to read. They spent a long time trying to make that skull silent—and almost succeeded.”

“No one knows about the forest king,” said Lehr, turning over the last spade of dirt. “But Hennea said that whoever sent the letter to the priest knew what we are.”

“Yes,” agreed Seraph. “How did they know, not only that I
am Raven, but exactly what my skills are? Most Ravens cannot read the past in an object. These men knew what trail Tier would take home—and it's not the way he left.”

Lehr frowned. “Not even I knew what path Papa takes home. He kept it quiet because the furs are worth a lot of money—did you notice that there is no trace of the furs? They would have been packed over Frost's hindquarters, which weren't even scorched.”

“No, I hadn't noticed,” said Seraph. “So thrifty of them.”

Lehr packed in a layer of dirt with his foot. “I suppose that someone could have overheard Jes talking about the forest king—but Jes seldom talks to anyone but the family. No one else really pays attention to what he says anyway. And if none of us knew what magic you could do until Forder brought back Frost's bridle, who would know what you could do?”

She waited, watching him think about it. If he came up with the same answer as she did . . .

“Bandor used to hunt with Papa, didn't he?” Lehr whispered it. “During the first years when the bakery used to have to support the farm, too? Jes was just a baby.”

“That's right,” Seraph said.

“And, after you and Papa got married, Bandor was the only one who used to talk to you. He knows a lot about the Travelers—did you tell him what kinds of things you could do?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And Bandor knows about Jes's stories of the forest king—but he doesn't believe them, Mother.”

She smiled at him grimly. “Do you know who your father thinks the forest king is? I mean aside from Jes's dealings with him?”

“No.”

“What if I told you that in a very old language,
ell
means king or lord and
vanail
is forest. If you put them together—”

“Ellevanal?”

Seraph had never seen anyone's jaw drop before; it was an unattractive expression.

“Do you mean,” whispered her son, “that Ellevanal, god of the forest and growing things,
the
Ellevanal,
Karadoc's
Ellevanal, is Jes's forest king?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Today is the first time I've met him, and I didn't ask. He doesn't look like a god, does he? But I know that Tier was convinced of it, and he told your Aunt Alinath what he thought.”

Alinath had been at her worst, telling Tier that Seraph couldn't give Jes the kind of attention that he needed. That Seraph encouraged Jes's problems by listening to his stories about his made-up friend.
A boy,
she'd said,
needed to understand that lying was not acceptable
. She hadn't liked it when Tier suggested Jes hadn't lied at all.

Seraph smiled grimly. “Bandor was there when he said it.”

But Lehr was still worried about other matters. “But the forest lord belongs here, to our forest. Ellevanal is worshiped everywhere—I mean, Karadoc has had apprentices, and there's a larger church in Korhadan.”

“I don't worship gods,” said Seraph. “You'll have to take it up with the forest king next time you meet him.”

Lehr thought about her answer, but it seemed to satisfy him because he changed the subject. “Uncle Bandor loves us, loved . . . loves Papa. He wouldn't do anything to hurt Papa.”

“So I believe,” agreed Seraph. “But you and I both came up with his name. He's become one of Volis's followers. I think that we need to be cautious around him until we know more.”

“So what are we going to do now?”

“First we'll finish here, then I have a few questions for the priest. Can you take us by the quickest route to Redern?”

“Yes,” he said. “But we won't make it before dark.”

“No matter,” Seraph said coldly. “I don't mind waking up a few people.”

Or tearing them limb from limb if she had to. Tier had been taken, alive—because she couldn't bear it otherwise—and she intended to find out where he was. And tearing someone limb from limb sounded very, very good. Let Volis face a Raven who knew what he was when he didn't have a cadre of wizards to protect him. Oh, she would have her answers from him before she slept this night.