The Nethergrim (10 page)

“Go on.” Tom smacked the flanks of the oxen. “Run!” He sprang off through the clipped low grass, too fast in the dark to see a rock or clump of earth in his way and simply hoping for the best. The oxen followed at a charge. They could easily have trampled him, but kept an arm’s length to either side.

Something flashed in the trees along the stream. Tom was nearly sure he saw a pair of eyes, bulbous and bright yellow, set too wide apart to match any creature he could name. “Jumble! Jumble, bring them!” He spared a look the other way. Jumble had done his best, but could not force all the sheep to run in the right direction. A clump of ewes followed the ram away into the dark. The clacking sounded again, farther away but louder.

They reached the yard. The farmhouse door swung open. “What is all this?” Athelstan squinted out at Tom. “What are you doing back here?”

“There’s something out there, Master. Out in the trees.” Tom looked back north. Jumble raced up behind the last of the sheep, but they were missing four at least.

Athelstan flicked a look around at the flock in the yard. He glared at Tom. “Where are the rest?”

“They’re in the pasture. I brought all I could, but—”

“You half-wit!” Athelstan reached for his whip. “Get out and find those sheep. Move!”

Tom hurried the flock into the byre, nearly bowling Oswin over in the doorway. He did not stop to explain what was happening. He turned and pelted back into the pasture, looking all about him for the missing sheep. He could hear nothing but the wind, no breathing, no clacking sounds—he could not even hear the ram’s bell.

“Where are they, boy?” Athelstan stalked down off the rise, a bent shadow in the trampled grass. “If you lose them—”

Tom screwed up his courage and plunged into the trees, searching blind, following up under the eaves as far as he dared. It was no use—they were gone.

“Where?” Athelstan’s face resolved in moonlight. The way he held the whip turned Tom’s guts to water.

“Master, I swear to you, there’s something in the trees.” Tom cringed and sidled back. “There’s something out there!”

Athelstan seized him by the collar and thrust him back toward the yard. “Get to the byre. Now.”

“Please, Master. Please, I’m sorry. I would never have left—”

Athelstan cracked the whip at his heels. “Get yourself to the byre. You run there, boy, you kneel at the post and you wait for me. You think about what’s coming when I get there.”

Chapter
9

E
dmund felt for a point of light in the sky. He drew it down. “Let the light of the stars descend.”

He wavered. There was no point—there was a point. He looked up at the spin of stars and drew an axis. “Stars attend me. Let your light descend.”

Nothing happened.

Edmund set the book on the log he used for a seat. He paced around his circle, and then back. What was wrong?

It had something to do with chords, or angles. Edmund lay back in the grass and tried to sort through what he had read before the sun went down. None of it made sense—not the ordinary sort of sense, anyway. He shut his eyes and fought to calm himself, taking each breath a little slower than the last.

The trouble was, whenever he shut his eyes he saw Katherine, and started thinking thoughts a long way away from the magical union of angles and Light.

He let his eyelids fall open. He watched the constellations wheel above.

“Let the light of the stars descend.” He raised his hands, reaching for the rhythm. “Stars attend me. Surround me. Let your light descend.”

Nothing.

Edmund glared at the sky. “Descend!”

The wind moaned and rattled through the trees. There was no point.

“Ugh.” Edmund got up and took a seat on the log. He set the book in his lap and felt his finger down the pages, past the strange drawing of seven children on the rays of a star. He found lines of text a few pages before it, inked thick and firm enough that he could read them in the feeble light:

There are words that have never been spoken, words that cannot be spoken, words that, if spoken, would shake the earth.

“What does that mean?” Edmund wanted to throw the book into the weeds. “What can that possibly mean?”

These words trace thoughts too large for the mind to hold—they cannot be grasped, they can merely be touched in the tremble of a moment. This is the language of magic, the voice of all that is, the chatter of the growing grass, the command that holds the moon aloft in the sky.

Edmund rubbed at his temples. Maybe he was just too stupid. He bent to squint at the curling script:

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything is a symbol for something deeper. For the worker of the will, the symbol is a place to begin, the outline of a thought sublime beyond all—

“You’ll go blind doing that, you know.”

Edmund startled, and looked up. “Oh—Katherine. When did you get here?”

“Just now.” She wore her hair loose over her embroidered shirt. Starlight touched her face from every side. “He’s over here, Tom.”

Tom stepped in silence from the darkness. A flock of sheep swarmed past him to surround the hillock in the middle of the pasture. Jumble rushed up barking and leapt on Edmund, licked his face and thumped his tail on the ground.

“No, Jumble—not on the book! Off the book!” Edmund grabbed for his forepaws. Jumble thought it a jolly game—he handed Edmund one paw and set the other down, once and again on the precious pages.

Katherine laughed. “Jumble—naughty boy!” She bent to ruffle him by the ears, and got a slobber on the end of her nose for her trouble.

“Here.” Tom whistled. “Get by, boy. Round them, get by.”

Jumble raced off to circle the stragglers. His barks came from down the hillock to the north, then west, then south. Tom leaned on his crook and turned with the sound, watching his flock gather in. “Why were you asking for light?”

“Never mind.” Edmund reached down to retrieve the torn corner of a page. He shut the book.

“We won’t want any light tonight.” Katherine fussed at her belt, then laid something long and slender on her lap. “If we’re to be Tom’s bodyguard, we’ll want to have our night eyes.”

Edmund gazed down in wonder. “Is that a real sword?”

“It was my uncle William’s. Papa brought it home from the wars.” Katherine drew it halfway from its scabbard. “Want to see?”

She set it on the flat of Edmund’s palms. He ran a thumb along the worn leather grip and then a finger on the simple disc pommel. The crossguard stuck out straight and unadorned, scored deep in one place where it must once have turned a very heavy blow.

“I’m glad you both could come.” Tom sat down in the grass at Katherine’s feet. “I didn’t want to sit out alone tonight, especially not here.”

Edmund followed the direction of Tom’s nervous look, south over the trees at the shadowed mass of Wishing Hill. “Your master didn’t believe you?”

“No.” Tom shifted, leaning back. His face twisted in a grimace, then he sat up straight again.

“Here.” Katherine held out a hand. “Let’s have a look at you.”

Tom rummaged in the threadbare bag at his side and drew out a stoppered wooden jar. He gave it to Katherine.

“Pull up your shirt.” Katherine drew the stopper. Tom reached back and pulled up his ratty old tunic. Some of the threads got stuck in the wet, open wounds that crisscrossed on his back.

“Oh!” Edmund looked more closely despite himself. “Oh, ugh!”

Katherine dipped her finger in the salve. She touched it around the edge of a wound. Tom hissed in, then sighed out.

“I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone in the world—but, Tom, I hate your master.” Katherine smoothed the salve along Tom’s back, following the course of a hot red welt. “I really, truly hate him.”

Edmund sat back, feeling ill. “But—did you find all the sheep?”

“No.” Tom hissed again. Katherine traced his wounds one by one in salve. The wind pushed the ash trees, one into the next.

Edmund slid his fingers around to grip the hilt of the sword. He turned the blade point to the sky. “Listen—I’ve been thinking.”

Katherine smirked at him. “Aren’t you always?”

“I mean really thinking. Maybe we should run away.”

His friends turned to look at him, brown eyes and green.

“All of us,” said Edmund. “The three of us, together.”

Tom let his shirt fall to his waist. Katherine replaced the stopper in the jar. “Where would we go?”

“I don’t know, anywhere.” Edmund raised his arms. “Free of here.”

Tom plucked up a blade of grass. He chewed on it and looked around him, up at the far peaks of the Girth, then out over the pastures. “This is home. I belong here.”

“That’s the kind of thing you say to get from one day to the next.” Edmund shook his head. “It isn’t true. There’s something better in this world, and if we have the courage, we can go find it.”

“Seeking for something better means always seeking and never finding.”

Edmund could not help but make a snort of disgust. “How long until those scars heal on your back? How long until your master finds another excuse to whip you raw?”

“Edmund, we’re fourteen,” said Katherine. “We can’t just run away—we’d end up starving on the road, or worse.”

“You don’t know that for sure,” said Edmund. “And what happens if we stay? We don’t fit here, you know we don’t. What’s going to happen when we grow up? What’s going to happen if we keep living the lives laid out for us? None of us, not one of us will ever be happy.”

Katherine cradled up the cracked and weathered scabbard in her hands. Tom let Jumble onto his lap.

“I’m learning things in this book, in all the things I read.” Edmund touched a hand to the binding. “There is a world out there, a great wide world. Seas of sand, cities of a thousand towers, courts of ebony and marble. We don’t have to stay in this place.”

“This is a good place,” said Katherine. “A safe place. A lot of people died to make it that way. We should be grateful.”

“How will we know if this place is good or bad if we never see another one? How will we know if our lives could be better if they never, ever change?” Edmund heard his voice echo back from the pasture and came to know that he had raised it too loud. “No one needs us here. If we stay, we’ll all end up stuck in lives we don’t want.”

Katherine took her sword back. “Life is not all about getting what you want, Edmund. It’s not just doing what you like and forgetting everyone who needs you. You’re just being selfish.”

“You used to want to be things, to do things!” Some part of Edmund told him to stop, but he ignored it. “You’ve changed!”

“Yes, Edmund, I’m growing up.” Katherine snapped a look at him. “You should try it sometime.”

“Oh, so you just want to sit around and wait until you get married off to some blacksmith? You think he’ll let you practice with a sword whenever you like once you’ve popped out his babies? You think you’ll ever touch a warhorse again? You think—” Edmund closed his mouth, but it was far too late.

Katherine turned away, blinking hard. “You are such a child.”

“I’m sorry.” Edmund wanted to bite off his tongue. “Please, I’m sorry.”

Katherine kept her back to him. Jumble leapt from Tom’s lap with his ears pricked up. Tom got to his feet and followed, around the log and down past the trees.

“I just hate it here.” Edmund hunched down. “I don’t want to stay at the inn, washing my father’s mugs, pouring his ale and waiting for him to die. I hate it.”

“I can’t leave Papa. If I did, I think he’d just dry up and blow away.” Katherine turned the sword over in her hands. She slid it back into the scabbard and set it down. “But I know what’s coming. It makes me so scared, I can’t sleep sometimes.”

“I just wish something would happen.” Edmund put his fists to his eyes to stop himself from crying. “I just wish—”

“Quiet.”

Edmund turned on the log. Tom stood moonlit next to Jumble, gazing up toward the summit of Wishing Hill.

“What for?” Edmund got angry again. “Tom, this is important. We’re talking about our lives, you know. Our futures. Aren’t you even thinking about it?”

“No.” Tom waved out a hand. “I heard something.”

“Heard what?” Edmund paused for the briefest of moments. “I don’t hear—”

A torn, hopeless scream drifted down from the summit of the hill. Edmund’s heart bounced in his chest.

Tom whirled on Jumble. “Stay!” He sprang off toward the trailing echo of the scream. Katherine grabbed up her sword and leapt to follow.

“Wait! Are you sure we should—” Edmund crossed the old West Road just in time to see Tom slither into the trees ahead. He plunged in behind Katherine. Branches whipped and stung at his face. The darkness hid roots and twists of ground; he tripped and cursed and picked himself up again and again. He followed Katherine on a sharp turn left, then a rise and a switchback right. Another scream sounded from above, longer and more despairing than the first.

Edmund forced his way over a fallen trunk and took a scratch across his belly from the bark of a projecting limb. He caught sight of Tom on the slope above him, pelting through the trees like a hunted deer, then lost him again. He pushed himself as hard as he could go, crunching and cracking through the brush. He swung around a switchback at full tilt and nearly crashed into his friends.

“What—” He could not get his breath. He grabbed his side. “Why have—” Then he saw it.

On the trail before them lay the figure of a boy—facedown, arms hugged in under his chest and legs splayed out. They all stood still for one moment of horror, then rushed to his side.

The boy wore a ragged tunic under his cloak and oversized breeches crisscrossed with strips of old leather to make them fit. There were leaves in his hair where his head had hit the ground. Katherine knelt beside him and shook his shoulders, then turned him over.

“Oh, no,” she said. “No.”

She cradled Peter Overbourne in her arms. Peter’s head lolled back. Tom searched down through his clothes and found a rip in his tunic. He drew his hand away, wet with blood. “A blade did this.”

“That wasn’t Peter we heard screaming.” Katherine flashed him a look. “It was a girl.”

“How did this happen?” Edmund could not keep his voice from quavering. “What’s going on?”

Tom drew his hand across Peter’s face to close his staring eyes.

“I don’t know.” Katherine lay Peter down in the leaves. “I don’t know—look around, will you?”

Edmund stumbled off along the downhill side of the trail. He caught a glint in the undergrowth. “I found something.” He reached down and closed his hand around the pommel of a knife, double-edged and sized for fighting. The blade caught the starlight as he turned it. “This is Geoffrey’s!”

Katherine stood. “We’ll go get help.”

“Wait.” Tom raised Peter’s hand to the feeble light. It was spattered with a thick, dark liquid. So was the blade—Edmund touched some to his finger and held it up.

“What is this?” The liquid was blue, near to black.

Something crackled in the heavy undergrowth across the trail. Edmund had just enough time to let out a yell before he was thrown to the ground. A figure loomed in above him. It had a dark blue, noseless face, inhumanly round, with wide-set, bulbous eyes and a flat jaw that swung open to show a row of needle teeth.