That's new, Melakai thought as they drew closer. A wall of lashed logs now bordered the town, presenting a foreboding face to would-be visitors. They must have put that up in a hurry—probably after the riots. It was a poor omen, a sign that Twosides' Keeper may not be as grateful to see them as the people of Colmon or Bitterfork had been. No surprise, given the King's warnings before they'd left, but Kai hadn't expected to find a wall. When he saw it, he jumped from his own sleigh and traded places with Angbar on the lead, joining Lyseira and Seth. If there was going to be trouble, he wanted to be close to it.
A single guard kept watch on a platform behind the wall. As the caravan pulled closer, he started beneath his dun-colored furs and jerked to his feet.
"Good evening!" Lyseira called up to him. "We bring food!"
Kai could barely make out the man's face, hidden as it was behind a heavy hood of brown furs and a curtain of gently drifting snow, but his surprise was still evident. "Food?" he asked.
Lyseira smiled. "From Keswick. We ask nothing, but to leave it for you and your people."
"Let's see it," the man in the brown furs called back down. They rolled back the sleighs' bonnets, displaying the barrels of grain beneath. As they worked, a second man, this one with a fox-fur hood, appeared on the opposite side of the gate, his face equally inscrutable.
"Open the gate," the new man said.
"Don't you think we―?" Brown Furs started.
"We have nothing," Fox Furs retorted. "Open the damned gate!"
Beneath, the gates swung ponderously inward, scraping through the snow. Both guards vanished, presumably hurrying down to meet them on the ground. Kai, Lyseira, and Seth did the same, climbing down from the lead sleigh as Shaviid held the reins.
"God bless you," Fox Furs said as he came through the gate. Up close, Kai saw he was an older gentleman, his face chafed with the cold and prickly with a winter's beard. "Name's Benton." He extended his hand to Kai.
"Melakai Thorn, Crownwarden. This is Lyseira—she's the one you'll want to talk to—and her brother, Seth."
Benton shook Lyseira's hand. "Please, bring it in."
"Keeper Oscal won't like this," Brown Furs said as he caught up. He was younger, with bright, darting eyes. His own attempt at a beard looked more like a dying, patchy grassland.
"Sehk on Keeper Oscal," Benton muttered. The younger man scowled at this, his glare passing over all of them—then he turned and loped into town, quickly vanishing into the snow and the dusk.
Not good, Kai thought.
"Don't mind the boy. Thinks his piety's gonna keep him fed through the winter. Come on, bring it in."
"He'll come around," Lyseira said. Kai was sure she meant it, but he didn't share her optimism—not this time. "We've already delivered to Colmon and Bitterfork. With your blessing, we can take one sleigh to each corner of town east of the river, and the same to the west. That should make it easier to―"
"Just bring it inside and unload it here," Benton said, beckoning her through the gates. "We'll take care of it."
Lyseira's smile stumbled. "We do need to make sure everyone knows where it comes from. There's been a miracle in Keswick, a gift from Akir. Wheat growing from a fallow field, every morning since the first of Angeltear."
Benton halted. "Is that right?"
Lyseira nodded. "This is Akir's wheat, given to the new Kespran church, and King Isaic's directed us to share it with you."
"Ain't that somethin'," Benton breathed. "Well, bring it on in, I'll make sure everyone knows where it came from."
Lyseira whistled and beckoned the horses forward, then followed the guard through the open gate herself. "If it's all the same to you, we'd prefer to deliver it ourselves. We've got some practice at it, now. It shouldn't take long―"
Benton spat and turned back to her. "Girl, there something wrong with your ears? We'll do it here. That's how it's gotta be."
"We brought the grain, friend," Kai interjected. "We'll have some say in the thing."
"You might think so, but Keeper Oscal ain't gonna be happy about this. I'm not the sort to turn away food when I'm starving, but he is. You follow me? If you're looking to earn some goodwill here, you'd best start unloading it now, while you've still got the chance."
"We're not here to cause any trouble," Seth said. "If you don’t want the grain―"
Benton whirled on him. "'Want the grain'?" he demanded. "People here would kill for the grain. We're sehking starving. But if we don't get this sehk off these wagons before Keeper Oscal gets here, he will send you away with it, sure as the snow is white. You follow me? You understand?"
Seth glanced at Lyseira. Benton followed his eyes, finally comprehending that she really was the decision-maker here. "Please," he said. "You want to feed us, you've got to leave it here. All of it. Fast."
"What's going on?" Syntal asked as she joined them. "They're refusing the grain?"
"No," Lyseira said. "They're not." She turned to the four sleighs, now most of the way through the gates, and shouted, "Unload it all here! Quickly!"
The desperation in Benton's eyes eased. He hurried to the nearest sleigh, grabbing the two other men stationed at the gate to help with the job.
Kai helped direct the effort, making sure the group concentrated their work on the lead sleigh first. As the barrels started coming off, the other sleighs pulled through the gates. It was slow work without chanters using Hover to aid, but they couldn't—open sorcery would frighten the townsfolk. As the last barrel came off the first sleigh and a group began working on the next, Kai saw a new crowd of men shuffling toward them from the same road the guard had run down earlier.
No, he realized, not men—or at least not all men. Several were little more than boys. They wore a haphazard array of patchwork armor pieces—boiled leather and occasional chain shirts, but many wearing nothing more than their winter furs—and carried a similar motley assortment of weapons: pitchforks, dirks, longswords, and spears, some still bearing a hoe on the back end. By Kai's estimate there were maybe a score of them, at most two dozen, shambling through the winter slush in no particular rank or file.
At their head rode a dour man with a high, grey widow's peak, the hem of his white robes stained the color of winter ash and the God's Star at his neck glaring with ostentatious clericlight. He had an abbot's chain, but no Preserver.
Probably why he brought the town militia, Kai thought. The whole gang of them could equal one Preserver, if it came to that. He glanced at Seth, clearly unconcerned by the approaching cleric's show of force, and reconsidered. Well. Maybe.
He left the wagon to take his place at Lyseira's side. "This is nothing," he murmured. "Those men are starving. Play up the food and they'll stand down. We can imprison the cleric if we need to. Just be careful—bloodshed will turn the town against us." Already he saw a family gathered on a nearby front porch; a fervent pair of eyes peering out of a window. "They're watching."
He heard Syntal chanting behind him. He threw her a warning glare, ready to grab her if needed—the wrong move now could ruin everything—but she was just Vanishing, and she'd hidden behind a wagon first. That was good, probably. If she was invisible, maybe it would settle her nerves and she wouldn't do anything stupid. He stifled a relieved sigh and turned back to the drama on the road.
"What is this?" Keeper Oscal called from horseback. He raised a fist, signaling the group of men behind him to a clumsy halt.
"Food, from King Isaic and the Kespran church," Lyseira called back. "A gift. We ask nothing in return."
"You expect us to accept four wagons of poisoned grain? You take us for fools?"
"It's not poisoned," Lyseira retorted.
"Twosides is loyal to the Fatherlord and the true King, Jan Gregor. If you've come to kill us for that, I welcome you to try."
"All of Darnoth is buried beneath an unending winter," Lyseira said. "Akir loves us all; He gave us this grain to share with all. If war comes in the spring, it comes—but for now, please feed your
children."
Well said, Kai thought. The girl truly had a knack for this. Keeper Oscal glowered, but the men behind him exchanged doubtful looks and murmurs. Good. Keep it going.
"It's a trick!" Oscal shouted, glancing back to his men. "You think these traitors, these witches, brought you food? It's gone to rot, or they've laced it with something. This isn't a gift. It's a first strike!"
"Akir grows wheat from a fallow field at Keswick, in the dead of winter. Every morning, it produces fifty acres of fresh grains—enough to feed Keswick and all the surrounding towns. We've already gone to Colmon and Bitterfork. They're eating now, their fears of starvation behind them. This is Akir's grain; that is His purpose." An unmistakable passion shadowed her words. "I would die before I let it be used to hurt you."
Several townsfolk had ventured from their homes now, watching the exchange from their front doors. One of them started into the road in his bare feet, a blanket clutched around his shoulders.
"Get back in your home!" Oscal roared at him. "Get back!" The man halted, but didn't turn back; his eyes flashed from the cleric to the food, desperate. "What did I tell you?" Oscal went on, again calling behind him. "This is a tribulation, yes—another sign of the end times. And Akir will reward those who are faithful! But break now, give in to temptation, and you will die. This is a death trap. A trick from a devil's whore."
"Have them keep unloading," Lyseira murmured to Seth and Kai. "We'll go as soon as the last barrel's down." Kai relayed the message to one of his men, who hurried off to carry it out.
"Stop!" Oscal shouted. "Get out of here!"
Lyseira shook her head. "We'll leave what we have, then we'll go."
"You will not!" the Keeper warned.
"Please!" the man who had started for the wagons cried. "Just let them leave it!"
"It is poison!" Oscal threw back at him. "You are sheep! I am the shepherd!"
Lyseira sought the eyes of the militiamen. "We'll just leave it here. You can test it once we're gone."
"You will stop," Oscal demanded again, "or we will kill you where you stand."
Kai followed Lyseira's lead and spoke directly to the militiamen, his hands wide. "You don't have to do that. It doesn't have to go that way." Behind him, he heard his men grunting as they began to unload the second wagon.
"Enough!" Oscal roared. "Men of Twosides! Take them down!"
The men of Twosides hesitated, sharing nervous glances. A few started uncertainly forward, weapons down.
Then a brown mist rose from the snow beneath them. The militiamen's expressions flickered from doubt to curiosity to horror. Oscal's horse shrieked, rearing up and bucking him into the mist, which swallowed him whole.
Then the screaming began.
The men dropped their weapons as their flesh boiled and bled. One stared at his own hands in terror as the skin melted off them. The others ran, shrieking—and collided with each other, tripping and trampling themselves as the mist devoured them and the flesh sloughed off their faces.
On the porches and in the windows of the surrounding homes, the townspeople screamed, covered their children's eyes, and retreated. The man who had run into the street, desperate for food, scrambled back to his house just before the death mist, now rolling slowly down the road into town, could brush his leg.
The death cloud covered the street curb-to-curb and easily engulfed the entire militia group. None escaped it. Even Oscal's horse melted away, its shrieks lost in the cacophony of the dying militiamen.
Their screams disintegrated to strangled wails and wet coughing, which dissolved to stuttering, hellish moans unlike anything Kai had ever heard. In seconds, even those faded.
Then the brown mist boiled away in the winter air, and only silence remained.
ii. Lyseira
The world froze around her. All sound, all thought, all comprehension ceased. In the aftermath of the slaughter all she could do was stare.
When reason returned, when her mind finally thawed from its raw horror enough to permit cognition, her first thought was, Who did that?
Who would do that to their own people? When did the Church acquire the power to chant? Is the chanter still here? She started searching the snowbanks and frozen backyards with her eyes, looking for the enemy.
Then Angbar's voice came from behind her, uttering a single, irrefutable syllable that cracked in his throat when he spoke it:
"Syn?"
She couldn't feel the Pulse like Angbar or Iggy could, had no third ear that would allow her to sense the presence of chanting around her. Yet she knew the truth the moment Angbar uttered Syntal's name.
She turned as if caught in a dream, saw the girl appear from thin air like she'd been standing there all along. Her eyes betrayed her recent chanting, as they always did, but not in their usual way—not with ambiguous vivacity. This time they bore a shadow, as though the moonlight soaked into every snowbank and the clericlight still glaring from Oscal's blood-soaked amulet couldn't quite reach them.
"That was you?" Kai deadpanned the question, the disbelief and certainty in his voice negating each other into a deathly flat affect.
"Of course. Angbar doesn't even know that one, I don't think."
"You . . ." Lyseira could barely fit the words through her teeth. "You . . . did you see what it did?"
"Well, yes," Syntal said. "It eliminated the threat."
"The threat?" Again Angbar's voice cracked, breaking under the impossible weight of his horror. "That lot?"
"Those were the people we came here to feed," Lyseira said—earnestly, futilely, as if convincing her would even matter.
"No, those were soldiers coming to kill us."
"Them?" Kai growled. "That bunch of kids? Those cowed sods with the sharpened farm sticks? That's who you're talking about?"
"They were the town army!" Finally, Syntal's obliviousness started to buckle. A defensive tone crept into her voice. "The Keeper ordered them―"
"They were just standing there!" Kai exploded. "They didn't do a damn thing!"
"They were gonna kill us!"
"Oh, they were?" Kai spat back. "Us. Two chanters, two Kesprey, Seth, and a half-dozen of the King's men. Oh yeah, we were scorched all right." He stalked up to her, seething—she lifted her hands and he slapped them down. "They were fathers," he snarled. "They were kids. Didn't you see how they walked? Their 'weapons'? How they looked at each other? Didn't you hear the King's orders when we came here?
"You see a bunch of scared, starving townsfolk with pitchforks and you melt off their sehking faces?"
"It was the only thing I could do," she returned.
This struck him dumb. Slapped the words clean from his mouth.
"What?" Angbar stammered. "'The only . . .' what?"
"I wasn't going to just stand there and get killed."
"You had Vanished!" Angbar pled. "They didn't even know you were there!"
"You could have used the other one," Lyseira said numbly. "Put them to sleep. Or you could have at least gone after the Keeper."
"I got the Keeper," Syntal said. Lyseira just looked at her, dumbfounded.
"Or you could've just watched," Kai growled, "like the rest of us. It was a score of sehking townsmen with hoes." He shook his head. "I ought to put you down like a rabid bitch."
Again, Syntal lifted her hands. This time, Kai just laughed. "You're gonna do it again? What, you're gonna melt us all, right here in Twosides? That your plan?"
"Don't you touch me."
"I'm not gonna sehking touch you." He pointed a finger at her. "But the King will hear of this. That you can sehking bet on." He turned to his men. "Unload the rest of the grain."
Lyseira stopped him. "No." The streets had gone empty, the silence heavy as stones. Twosides could've been a ghost town . . . but she knew it wasn't. Its people were simply terrified. "Just leave it—the carts, the horses, all of it." She shambled back to the supply sleigh. Between it and the wagon they'd emptied, there was plenty of room for everyone.
"We need to leave."
They obeyed her. Hopefully the townsfolk's hunger would overcome their fear; hopefully someone would venture out and take the wheat rather than burning it or leaving it to freeze. If nothing else, maybe they would trust the horsemeat.
How could she do that? The question was a thorn in her mind, repeating endlessly against the backdrop of the slaughtered militia's screams. How could she?
And Syn's response, so cold, so brazen: It was the only thing I could do.
An hour out from town though, as they halted to make camp, the cycle broke. A new thought occurred to her, a realization with almost as much import as any of Syntal's denials: that all through the slaughter, through all the arguments and accusations that had followed . . .
Seth hadn't said a word.
iii. Seth
Lyseira asked him, that night, what he thought should happen next. Should they recommend to the King that he imprison Syntal? That she suffer some consequence for her actions? Isaic wouldn't be happy, that much was certain: he was wary of chanters to begin with, and he had been looking to ally with the Twosides folk, not murder them.
Seth shrugged and gave a non-committal answer. He misled his sister deliberately, gave her the impression that he was fine with whatever the King decided.
In reality, the maelstrom of his thoughts was too deep, too chaotic, to express.
When she tried to bring it up again the next day, he dissembled again. That second night he didn't sleep—not because he chose not to, but because his mind wouldn't let him. The Teachings spoke of peace—it was the key to all the Preservers' abilities—but peace had left him long ago. He found it only in snatches and whispers, at the heart of combat and his instant of need. The rest of the time, he languished in torment. He loved his sister but despised her betrayal of the Church. He hated the Church's methods but turning on them was like cutting out his own heart. He knew he needed Syntal—they all did—but her escalating appetite for murder appalled him.
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