Shifting Loyalties

by Melissa McShane

  “Let’s hope that’s enough,” Dianthe said. She lay back on her bedroll with her arms behind her head. “I don’t know what we’ll do if…”

  Sienne, too, felt afraid to put that contingency into words, as if that might make it come true. She put on a new shirt and sighed at how clean she felt. “I’m going to wash this. Do you have anything that needs cleaning?”

  Dianthe shook her head. Her eyes were closed, and her face had begun relaxing into sleep. It was one of those things Sienne envied about her, her ability to fall asleep anywhere in the space of two breaths. She let out her first snore as Sienne left the tent.

  The Adornos were still working at the soup pot, which smelled of hot water and nothing else. Kalanath had disappeared, probably to hunt more game. Alaric was tending to Button, talking to the animal in a low voice. Perrin sat in front of the men’s tent, his eyes closed and his hands loosely open on his knees, meditating. He had prayed for blessings earlier that day, so this must be purely for the sake of communion. Sienne wondered, as she often did, what the avatar’s voice sounded like. Maybe it was an actual voice only Perrin could hear. Or it could be thoughts that sounded like his own internal monologue, but different enough to be recognizable as such.

  She took her shirt a short distance away, rinsed it, scrubbed it, rinsed it again, and held it up with her invisible fingers while she heated the remaining water soaking it to evaporate away. It was peaceful, mindless work that would be monotonous if she did it for a living.

  She listened to the noises of the forest: the inevitable birds she never could identify, twittering at each other in challenge or courtship; the whoosh of the wind in the tops of the trees, high above, that sent occasional needles down onto her head; and the nearer sounds of people moving around camp. No speech; after five days they’d refined their system to a wordless harmony. Her fears for the future dwindled into the distance and hardened into a resolve not to let moments like this go.

  That night, they ate rabbit soup in the same companionable silence, then sat around the fire in a bubble of light and warmth and listened to Lucan tell stories. He was good, professional quality, and he knew stories Sienne had never heard before: “The Owl and the Nighthawk,” or “Swallowing Stones,” or the haunting “Grizel and the Howlers.” Sienne wasn’t sure she believed howlers were real, but Lucan swore the tale was true.

  “Howlers are born from the places of magical contamination in the Empty Lands,” he said now, continuing the friendly argument they’d started the day before. “It’s said that a man or a woman witnesses horror, the death of a loved one maybe, within one of those places, and the horror takes hold of them and turns them into something evil. And then they can’t not be drawn to where tragedy will occur, like sniffing out blood.”

  “Knowing the future is the province of the avatars,” Perrin said. “I think it unlikely they are willing to grant such powers to inhuman creatures.”

  “Animals have senses humans don’t,” Lucan said. “How do birds know how to fly north in summer? I don’t think howlers sense the future so much as they pick up on people’s fear and anger. And far too often fear and anger turn into violence.”

  “They don’t sound dangerous, anyway,” Dianthe said. “Sad, maybe. Standing outside windows and howling like a werewolf.”

  “They do far more than that,” Jaceus said. “A howler’s wail makes your blood congeal with terror so you can’t do anything but cower or flee. The ones they don’t just tear apart, they make mad with lust for the flesh of their own kind. And once their victims have killed, they become howlers themselves.”

  “See, that just sounds like a story to frighten children,” Dianthe said. “It’s almost too terrifying. A howl that makes you frightened, maybe, but when you add cannibalism, it’s too much.”

  “You didn’t believe in carvers, either, until we encountered them,” Sienne pointed out.

  “That’s true, but they also turned out to be different from the legends,” Dianthe said. “If there are howlers, they’re probably not as bad as the stories make them sound.”

  “Our people—I mean, the people in our settlement, they stay well away from anything that howls in the night, just in case,” Lucan said. “Maybe the stories aren’t entirely true, but the least of them are enough to make us wary.”

  “Yes, because things that howl in the night might be dangerous even if they’re not howlers,” Sienne said. “There’s something dangerous. Were-creatures, I mean. Maybe howlers are imaginary, but there’s plenty of evidence that werewolves and the like are just vicious.”

  “They defend their territory just like humans do,” Jaceus said. “Protect the pack. Nothing vicious about that.”

  “You must never have seen were-creatures,” Alaric said. “They’re quick to aggress given the slightest provocation, and sometimes with nothing we’d call provocation at all. And since they’re barely more intelligent than an animal, their attacks are particularly cunning.”

  Jaceus and Lucan exchanged glances. “We’ve seen were-creatures,” Jaceus said. “They’re more intelligent than people give them credit for. They’re capable of learning human words, for one—not many, but enough to communicate on the level of, say, a four-year-old child. And humans have attacked them so often over the centuries, is it any wonder they’re quick to retaliate?”

  Kalanath scooted closer to the fire and extended one arm. “That is the bite of a werebear,” he said, turning his arm to display a pale ring of scars around one biceps. “A team I was with three years ago went into the wilderness seeking salvage. We do not—did not attack the weres, but we entered their territory unknowing. They killed some of us before we fight them off. That is not intelligent. Or, to say, intelligent creatures know danger and act, for good or bad, by how much danger it is. We were not dangerous.”

  “It’s not always easy to tell when something’s dangerous,” Lucan said. “Haven’t you ever fought anything simply because it might be a threat, and the dangers in being cautious and dead outweighed the possibility that you could be wrong?”

  “Sometimes,” Alaric said, “but with most creatures, human experience tells us how to react. Carricks, for example, are deadly no matter how cautious you are in approaching them. And were-creatures are the same. There are stories of people finding them as cubs and taming them, but mostly those are just stories.”

  “You think they’re evil, then,” Jaceus said.

  “Not evil. They lack the human capacity for choosing good or evil. But dangerous, certainly.”

  “I agree with that,” Lucan said. “But we’ve settled the Empty Lands, and that’s where were-creatures call home. We have to learn to live with them.”

  “Or clear them out,” Sienne said. “I’d be afraid to live near weres, especially if there were children in my village.”

  “I’d hope it didn’t come to that,” Jaceus said.

  Dianthe yawned. “I’m off to bed,” she said.

  “Me too,” Sienne said. “Probably to dream of howlers, thanks.”

  Lucan, who’d looked very grave, smiled at this. “Dream of how Grizel found a way to defeat them, and ended their torment.”

  “That’s more cheerful.”

  But sleep eluded her. She lay wakeful in her bedroll listening to Dianthe snore, which was normally a soporific sound, but tonight put her on edge like a saw cutting through metal. Finally she rose, put on her boots, and crawled out of her tent. As an afterthought, she removed the ash wand from her pack and tucked it into her belt. She’d carried it the whole time since finding it and occasionally made an effort to work out what it did. Now was as good a time as any for another trial.

  Perrin, pacing the far side of the fire, said, “Is something wrong?”

  “Can’t sleep. I’m going for a walk.”

  “Do not go far.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll stay within sight of the fire.”

  She summoned her magical sense of true north and walked southwest, away from the camp, until t
he fire was a dim glow at her back that did nothing to illuminate her surroundings. The sound of her footsteps was louder in the darkness than the daytime, her feet crunching across the needles and sending up whiffs of crisp pine scent wherever she trod. Insects chirred a constant high-pitched whine in the background, so pervasive she was only occasionally reminded of it when the wind brought it more loudly to her ears. She turned south and began walking around the camp, mindful of her promise to Perrin.

  She took out the wand and examined it. In the dimness, all the crystals were dark, though eight of them were darker than the others. She touched each one with her index finger. Simply waving the thing had no effect, which was probably for the best, but it left her none the wiser as to how it was activated. Averran had refused to tell Perrin what it was, and Perrin had only said the avatar thought it would do them good to figure it out themselves. So Sienne kept trying. Sometimes wands had a command word, but that could be anything. Or it might require a combination of gestures. Or maybe the command word had to be thought.

  “Go,” she said, brandishing the wand. “Begin. Start. Commence.” Nothing. She couldn’t remember how many of those she’d tried before. “Open. Yield. Comm—no, I did that one.” Open. Maybe…

  She held the wand flat on her palm and closed her eyes. There was a small magic, not a spell, that let her open her spellbook directly to any spell she wanted. It wasn’t faster than turning the pages by hand, at least not for someone who knew her spellbook as well as Sienne did, but if her spellbook were across the room, she might use invisible fingers to bring it to her and use the opening magic to make it be open to the spell she wanted when it arrived. With a thought, she turned the opening magic on the wand.

  It twitched in her hand. She opened her eyes. The crystals were glowing with a soft blue-green light, all but the eight dark ones. Carefully, she reversed her grip so she was holding the wand to point away from her. The radiance didn’t falter, but its rich intensity made it look as if the wand were hollow and the crystals were holes drilled into it to let the light at its core out. She waved the wand tentatively. The crystals left trails of light in their path. She tried again, waving the wand harder.

  A jolt like a hard puff of air struck her. One of the crystals went dark. And every noise stopped.

  Sienne froze in place. The sounds had cut off sharply, not dwindled away. She looked up and saw the trees move in a silent wind. So the wind hadn’t just died, and probably all the insects hadn’t fallen over dead. Fear that she’d been struck deaf hit her, intensifying when she couldn’t hear the sound of her labored, terrified breathing. She made herself calm down and thought. It couldn’t be deafen, because how stupid to create a wand that turned on its holder, which meant…of course. Silence. A perfectly ordinary confusion. The wand had cast silence on the area, and if she walked far enough, she’d come out of the effect.

  The lights had faded back to nothing, and the wand looked just as it had, except that there were now nine dull, black stones instead of eight. Sienne started walking back to camp and tried not to feel unnerved at the total silence. Just to be sure, she tried singing a few notes of a wordless melody. She felt her vocal cords working, but again, no sound emerged. She walked faster. Damn, she should have kept track of how many steps she’d taken. She could experiment later. Now she just wanted to be back in the world of chirruping insects and hissing breezes.

  The firelight glowed more brightly as she approached, turning the tree trunks into black exclamation points against its ruddy glow. She realized two of the trunks were actually shadowy, dark-skinned people just as her foot came down with a crunch on pine needles. The insect chorus came alive once more, sounding like a shriek after the unnatural quiet. “—won’t listen,” Lucan was saying to Jaceus. “We’ll have to try—”

  Jaceus held up a hand. “Sienne,” he said. “We didn’t hear you.”

  They both looked so furtive Sienne was instantly suspicious. “It’s a spell called silence,” she said. “You’re not out here plotting something nefarious, are you?”

  “Why, were you snooping on us?” Jaceus said.

  That made Sienne feel defensive as well as suspicious. “Of course not.”

  “We were just talking about what to do when we reach the ruin,” Lucan said. “We shouldn’t go in with you, but you’ll need us to show you where the settlement is when the job is done. For the rest of your pay.”

  It was so smooth he had to be lying. Sienne hesitated, debating whether to call him on it. Finally, she said, “Once we see the ruin, we’ll know where to have you wait to be safe.”

  “Of course.” Lucan and Jaceus regarded her with dark eyes. She stared back at them, willing them to break. Neither moved. It was Sienne whose nerve finally cracked.

  “I think I can sleep now,” she said. “Good night.” She moved wide around them and hurried toward the fire, and Alaric’s tent. With only a brief wave for Perrin, she ducked inside. Kalanath was a dark lump on the far side, sleeping as soundly as he usually did, but Alaric came awake the instant she put a hand on his knee.

  “Sienne?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Sienne whispered. “I just caught our clients outside camp, acting very suspicious. They claimed they were having an innocent discussion, but why wouldn’t they have it in their tent?”

  “Did you hear any of what they said?”

  “Just a few words. Something about how someone wouldn’t listen, and they’d have to try…something else, I think.”

  “That could mean anything.”

  “I know. I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I.” Alaric took her hand and ran his thumb across the back of it absently. In the dimness, she could barely see his face, but he had the still pose that meant he was thinking hard about something. “We’ll have to be alert for signs of treachery. It’s possible their story about a ruin is to lead us into a trap. They were pretty adamant about wanting to hire us specifically.”

  “I’m so angry. I liked them.”

  “It could still be nothing. We just have to be careful.” He cupped the back of her head with his free hand and drew her close for a kiss, his lips soft and gentle on hers. She returned his kiss, letting go his hand to caress his cheek. He made a little noise in the back of his throat that never failed to drive her wild with desire, and she pressed herself against him and felt him chuckle against her mouth just before pulling away. “It’s been too long, sweetlove,” he said.

  “It’s only been six days.”

  “An eternity, then. Go to bed before we do something that will make Kalanath profoundly uncomfortable.”

  “I am already uncomfortable,” a voice said from the far side of the tent. Sienne giggled and scooted out backwards.

  She was taking off her boots before she realized she’d forgotten to tell Alaric her other news—that she knew how to activate the wand. It was good news and bad: good because silence was not in her spellbook, bad because it seemed one had to be a wizard to turn the thing on. So much for someone else having magic to hand. She also didn’t know how useful it would be. She hadn’t measured it exactly, but she knew the wand’s silence affected a larger area than the spell, so there was that.

  Dianthe might appreciate it, since if you cast silence on a person, it moved with them; that would be useful to someone who relied on being able to move stealthily. And silence could stop a wizard casting spells, since it effectively stopped one from speaking. She fell asleep trying to work out how to avoid having it cast on her.

  11

  A storm rolled in late the next afternoon, prompting Alaric to call an early halt so they could make camp before it rained. Sienne kept a close eye on the Adornos, but they behaved exactly as they had the whole week previous—friendly, helpful, and open. She didn’t quite start thinking she’d imagined things the night before, but she did feel that perhaps whatever secrets they were hiding weren’t dangerous to her friends. Alaric didn’t behave as if he suspected anything, eithe
r, but she knew him well enough to recognize that he kept a careful eye on the cousins all through their rather damp meal. Tomorrow they’d discover whether their caution had been justified.

  They traveled all the next day through the rain-soaked trees, which smelled more strongly of pine when they were wet and made the air feel cool and comfortable. Sienne walked beside Button, who stepped out smartly, as if the air invigorated him, too. She patted his neck. “This has been a nice journey, hasn’t it?” she told him. “No monsters, just a pleasant stroll across the hills and through the forest. If you—”

  Button lurched, stumbled, and went to his front knees, crying out in fear and pain. Sienne gasped and stepped back, her mind filled with the image of Button coming down on top of her. Button’s hind legs collapsed, and he made another horrible shrill cry of distress.

  Then Alaric was there, kneeling beside the animal. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. He just fell.” Sienne joined him and watched as he felt along Button’s front legs. Her eyes swept the ground, seeking something that might have tripped the donkey.

  “I think his leg is broken,” Alaric said.

  “There is a hole here,” Kalanath said, prodding it with his staff. “It is not large. Bad luck.”

  “That’s terrible,” Lucan said. He and Jaceus were standing well away from the companions, who’d clustered around the fallen Button. “Does that mean you’ll have to kill him?”

  Sienne sat back on her haunches and regarded the two. She thought they might be afraid of Button, however ridiculous that seemed, because they never touched him and always walked wide of him when they camped. Maybe it was just the tension of seeing Button in pain, but that comment struck her as odd—like they didn’t know what usually had to be done for a donkey with a broken leg.

  “That will not be necessary,” Perrin said, nudging Sienne to the side. “The rest of you, ease his burden by removing our things.”