There are things that you would rather not be joked about yourself, aren’t there, Amelia? There are things that make you go strange.
Roos was ahead once more, and the drizzle was building into a steady rain. His ridiculous bear fur would start to stink again in the rain. With his eyes downcast and his trudging gait, the image of him in the rain sent a wave of pity through Amelia, which mingled with her shame, so she trotted to pass Choson and join Roos. As she passed, Choson caught her arm and spoke to her in a low voice.
“You will not torment him again,” Choson said.
“No, I won’t.” She pulled her arm free.
“I spoke to him after your trick. You should know, your choice of prank was unfortunate,” Choson said. “I had guessed enough of how he came to be wandering so far from the Wittewold, from small words of his here and there—”
“Get to the point.”
“He has not been entirely forthcoming about his past. If you heard his tale as I just have, you might understand,” Choson said. “And you might think twice before making fun at his expense.”
Amelia hurried to catch up to Roos and called out to him. He did not slow or turn as she drew level with him and touched his arm.
“How do you like the sword?” Amelia said.
“It is fine magic,” Roos said.
“That’s all you have to say?”
He grunted, still not meeting her eyes.
“Tell me about the bear skin. Where did you get it?” she said.
“It was my father’s.”
“He gave it to you for this quest?”
“No. I took it.”
“You stole it?”
“No… no. He died.”
“Oh,” she said, and a sinking feeling came through her gut. It had all the trappings of a tale that would make her feel worse. “I’m sorry. How did he die?”
Roos took hold of each of the trinkets and trophies that rattled and bounced against him as he walked. “This bearskin, which my father won in a lone hunt, I wear to remember his strength, though I have it not. The doll belonged to little Leti, daughter of the wolfhound breeder. She was kind, so I carry the doll also. This brass orb, it was the smith’s. He kept useful things in it. All these things are of my people.”
“Did all these people die?”
“Yes. There was an attack.”
“How did you survive?”
“I tried to fight, but I am weak. They knocked me far down, into the snow. I was buried in it, and nobody found me. I awoke too late.”
The rain began to fall harder, its drops the size of peas. In the waning light, they could not see far into the grey haze made by the sheets of rain.
“Who attacked you?”
“Another tribe. They coveted our lands, for there was fine hunting. My father offered to allow them visits, but they refused. Their tribe came the next day in war furs, with weapons of steel and tooth and claw. My village was not ready. I was not ready. I was not strong.”
“I thought you came all this way to prove yourself ready to be chief?”
“You won’t understand. It is our way. My father died, so I now am chief, though I am chief of nothing but a burned village. I am not worthy, not yet. I came this way to prove myself. My father’s spirit walks with me, and with him I can be brave, be strong.”
“I hope the sword will help.”
“Maybe it will,” Roos said, smiling, before his expression turned dark again. “Little Leti was alive when I woke. I sang to her as she lay dying in my lap. I sing it by the fire sometimes. The choking sound you made when you did that foul trick—it was like Leti. I was back by her side today.”
“I’m sorry. I should never have done it,” Amelia said.
He waved his hand. “You did not know.”
“What can I do? I feel wretched now. Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“It is done. You have given me this sword, that is enough. Now we go to Wilhelmina and learn from her, then on again to the road we go.”
“Can you forgive me?”
“You are forgiven already. It is myself that I cannot forgive.”
They were silent after that. She lay her hand on his arm briefly, and then let him stride ahead. There were many branches and bushes in the way, and Roos held them all aside for her. As night came on, they were still traveling, and Roos sang softly to himself in a tune that she recognized. Though it was in his native tongue, she could distinctly hear the word, ‘Leti.’
****
They slept well, but briefly, in a crude shelter that Amelia magicked out of branches under a fallen log. It kept half the rain out. Choson, though, slept through to his pre-dawn watch with ease. The compulsion to keep an open eye on Gillis through the night was long behind him. They had become cordial companions as the days passed, with Gillis always offering small kindnesses and answering whatever question on the slave trade Choson could think to ask. The mistrust Choson had borne earlier had seemed prudent, but following Gillis’ fainting spell after seeing the robe, Choson saw that it was as everyone had told him. Gillis was older and unable to adjust to life cast out from the only home he had known. Every strange look and half-truth spoken by him since their meeting made more sense once Choson saw Gillis in this way. The man only needed time to find his feet out in the wild.
The ever-present rain, borne on fretful gusts, slapped them front and back, and by mid-morning it was mixed with stinging sleet. Progress was made with their heads bent low, their vision limited to the ground before them. As the sleet hammered against Choson’s breastplate, he was glad to be thus attired. Aside from his exposed face, he was dry. The others had a worse time of it, but he could do nothing to help. They trudged along with their fingers jammed in their armpits. At one point, Amelia yelled over the wind that they were close.
They reached the top of a hill where the woodland ended. Beyond it was a series of bare hills upon which rivulets of icy slush and mud ran around tough grasses. Amelia called for them to stop and pointed to the distance. They retreated to the cover of the trees, though Choson saw nothing. Eventually, in the brief moments when the rain and sleet slackened, he could see a distant cloaked figure hunched forward against the weather. The figure walked east along a path where the hills were gentler. Wilhelmina’s home was to the west, so they waited for the stranger to be east and well out of sight before continuing.
“A local?” Choson asked.
“Most likely,” Amelia said.
“Is it not unusual for them to be out in this weather?”
“Let us not fret over every stranger we see,” she said. “That was surely a farmer with a poor sense of the coming weather, or else they had somewhere to be urgently.”
“Why have us hide, then?”
“I said let’s not fret, not let’s be incautious. Come on.”
They went on, avoiding the path and therefore the gentler way through the hills. The way left to them was steep, slick with mud, and frustrating. They took to using crude walking sticks that they drove into the earth to make their ascent, and then again to slow their scrambling slide down the other side. The first such hill had been the worst, because the treacherous shifting ground surprised them. Soon on the next hills they had some measure of practice with the climb, though they were splattered head to foot in mud. All the while the freezing rain came down. There seemed to be no end to the miserable climb, as hill after hill there was no sign of their destination. They could not even rest in the dales, where the water sat in foul, icy puddles.
Soon they were on their hands and knees, pushing or pulling each other up. Choson no longer cared to prevent grit from scraping his poleyns or getting in the crooks of the armor. He would gladly ruin every surface of the suit if it got them out of the cursed hills one moment earlier.
They reached the top of the hill and found themselves overlooking a small stone building with a thatched roof, which was perched on a smaller hill than the one they had climbed. Amelia gave a small, joyful cry and t
old them it was Wilhelmina’s home. They slid down the hill with new energy. Choson was eager to be out of the terrible sleet, which was now more ice than water. They made a desperate run to the front door of the building, thick grasses and weeds underfoot tripping them and the driving sleet nearly blinding them. They reached the building and Amelia, springing forward ahead of the others, pounded on the door. It was unlatched and swung inward, revealing a room that was in total darkness. Amelia froze, then looked around at the others.
“Wilhelmina?” she called. Her voice was higher than usual.
She entered, and the rest came in after her. They could see nothing.
“Wilhelmina? Where are you?”
The light spilling in from the front door showed only a bare floor. Amelia felt her way to the far wall and tore away a cloth covering from one of the windows. Her feet left darker spots on the floor where they had brushed aside the dust. The room was empty there too. Choson’s eyes slowly adjusted and he saw that, aside from a single sheet of yellow paper in the corner, the room was entirely bare. Amelia hurried to the paper and picked it up.
“It’s blank,” she said.
“What happened?” Choson said.
“I—I don’t know.”
“Pauloce’s death happened,” Gillis said.
“What of it?”
“Without him, perhaps she had no reason to stay,” Gillis said.
“I never did know what kept her here,” Amelia said. “She always deflected the question. Said something about doing the right thing often being unpleasant.”
“She saw herself as a guardian,” Gillis suggested. His expression was inscrutable.
Amelia nodded, staring at the blank page with an unfocused gaze.
“So the quest has failed,” Roos growled. His head brushed the ceiling as he paced around.
“The quest to get out of the sleet, however, was a great success,” Choson said. He crossed to the window. It was made of thick glass, and the sleet striking it burst into flecks of ice that slid down and melted as they went. A grim smile came to his face—it was not only the sleet that struck a barrier and melted away into nothing. All his attempts to find the truth, in all these years after Jun’s death, had been little more than fading flecks of glass on a windowpane. Like the rest, this search had come to nothing.
“This is a hidden message,” Amelia said.
“What does it say?” Choson said, his eyes still on the glass.
“I can’t tell yet. It won’t reveal itself easily, but I can sense it is there…”
“Who could it be for?”
“It is for me,” she said.
“You are certain,” Gillis said, not in question.
“Yes. That much I know.”
She paced the room, muttering a string of incantations punctuated with bursts of foul language. Much of the dust was kicked up by her movements, and the light filtering through the window showed the air was now clouded thickly with it. Choson watched the motes dance. So it was another delay, another diversion. Another stretch of days’ travel elsewhere, with the chances of confronting Min-Yu growing all the slimmer. Hope had glimmered for him, for a time, but even at its brightest he never considered what he would do if he met her. Would he charge at her, sword aloft, cursing her for Jun’s fate? If they spoke, what could he say? None of it could return Jun to him. He was as Amelia was now: pacing and directionless, cursing enemies and evil fortunes, devoid of purpose. The lone thought that stoked hope once more was Gillis’ offer. Perhaps if they could free even one slave, there would be purpose again.
“Oh,” Amelia said, and she stopped dead in the center of the room. “Of course that’s it.”
She pricked her finger with a dagger tip and shook a drop of blood on the paper. Instantly the paper drank the blood, and large curling lines erupted across the page. It was over in seconds. The page was covered in writing. Amelia’s gaze darted across the page, her mouth thinning to a mere line as she reached the bottom.
They asked her what it said, but she paced again, reading it slower with her lips framing the words.
“I have to go alone,” she said.
“Where?” Gillis asked.
“It is not far. She is in hiding near here.”
“Why alone?” Roos asked.
“She left the note for me. Saw my coming in her augury, and here she’s underlined no other guests,” Amelia said. “She has, apparently, many important things to tell me.”
“I am loath to have any of us go out alone,” Choson said.
“That is my feeling,” Gillis said. “We ought to stay together at least most of the way to her place of hiding.”
“It can’t be done,” Amelia held up the page. “She said the trail she left will reveal itself to me alone, and if others come along the path will scatter. We need to see her with haste.”
“Go, then,” Choson said dryly. “We will await you in this crypt.”
“Oh, don’t be dramatic,” Amelia said. “I’ll enchant something that will put you at ease.”
She tore four finger-width strips of cloth from her sleeve and, sitting cross-legged, chanted while rubbing pinches of metallic powder into each of them. They glowed blue for a moment, and then she stood and offered one to Gillis, Choson and Roos in turn.
“Tie them around your fingers,” she said, and they did. “Now watch.”
Taking out one of her daggers, she held it up to her throat. Choson felt the cloth pinch tightly around his finger, and as Amelia put the blade away, the cloth loosened.
“It’s rudimentary, but it’ll do,” she said. “I don’t have the time to make them tracking cloths, so don’t go wandering away from this building. If there’s danger to any of us, we shall all know of it. Satisfied?”
Choson nodded.
Amelia adjusted her belt and satchel, and felt each one of her dagger handles as though checking they were all in place. “I will be gone two hours at the most. Once I find out where she is, then I’ll return and we’ll visit her together.”
She pulled the door closed as she left, and they sat against the corners of the room in the half-light. The sleet was gone now, but the rain was still falling on the thatch roof in a gentle hiss. Though there was dust, the room had no cobwebs, nor did the roof have any leaks. Strange for a room so long abandoned, Choson thought. No-one spoke. Choson felt a tension in his gut that worsened the longer they stayed. They had fled through woodlands and scrambled over hills, always checking over their shoulders, only to come and sit in that confined room and wait.
A shadow crossed the window.
Chapter 17
Once Amelia was on the trail, which carried her north where the hills were gentle, she did not deviate. The magical trail was easy to follow, and came with the sensation of something familiar, just outside the edge of recall. As she focused on the feeling, there came waves of fragments that at first would not merge to a whole. It was Wilhelmina making herbal teas that steamed up the windows, it was the clean linen hanging from lines among braids of garlic and bunches of sage, and the vanilla-scented pages of her books. Amelia experienced none of it with her physical senses, but with the inner, magical one. Stronger than the familiarity was the mantle of warmth that settled over Amelia despite the rain. She finally knew its meaning. Wilhelmina was calling her home. To stay.
She passed into a straggling line of straight-backed pines, shed of their needles and groaning like wounded men. They provided no shelter from the rain. Every minute or so she checked the cloth tied around her finger—it was no tighter than when she had left. The needles crunched underfoot. A tiny thrill ran through the small hairs at the nape of her neck, and she turned, but there was nothing save the rain and the trees. She hurried on. The trees grew thicker now, and were intermixed with squat, gnarled oaks that gave her cover from the rain as she passed under them. There was a footstep, then the scrape of a boot on bark. She turned in a full circle, dagger in hand, but again there was nothing. The wind picked up and the trees shrie
ked and moaned as it bent them. She ran. The Blood Magic was pulsing now, and she felt her feet pulled along as though a puppeteer had her on strings. The warmth became a feverish heat and she passed through the rain as though it was not there. At first she resisted it, but the smell of Wilhelmina’s old books sharpened in her mind even as the strange feeling took her over. She let it pull her along.
She barely looked where she was going. She slid down a gravel bank, arms flailing for balance, until she reached the bottom and stopped. There, in a depression ringed by gravel, was a bent, black-barked tree surrounded by a small, neat garden. The rain did not fall in the depression. Gone, too, was the feeling of being watched. There was only quiet peace here. She approached the tree and reached a hand out to the bark. Her hand passed right through to a door made of straight timbers and, feeling around, she found a handle, but did not turn it.
Suddenly, she felt a small pinch on her finger. She held up the cloth tied around it, and peered closely at it. Already it was slack again. Had she made a mistake with the enchantment, or was there some danger to the others? She held her breath with her gaze fixed on the cloth. When it did not tighten again, she let her hand fall and took hold of the door handle once more. She could not rid herself of the feeling that something was wrong, however. As she turned away from the gnarled, black tree, she felt a tug on her cloak from behind her. She took a few more steps, and again felt as though invisible hands pulled on her sleeves, her ankles.
“I have to go, Wilhelmina,” she murmured. “I’ll be back soon. Promise.”
The tugging stopped, and as she made her way to the gravel bank, she felt a push in the small of her back. It may have been her imagination running freely, but it had almost had a reproachful tone. ‘Fine. Go,’ it seemed to say.
The Tyranny of Shadows Page 20