The Blood of the Land

by Angela Korra'ti

  Out here the light was somewhat brighter, though the moon rode blurred behind winter clouds, and the breeze bit with the promise of snow to come. Over the water she could see the far shore, an indistinct line of bare-branched trees that she supposed was exactly like the one on her side. But, closer still, another line of trees crowned a strip of land so small that it barely deserved to be called an island. The river split itself to flow round it on either side, and the nearer fork seemed to Dorcas to be no wider than a strong man could swim—or a strong woman. She sighed, rubbed a hand across her face, and forced herself to stay upright. There would be no rest for her and Caleb, not yet, not till they put many more miles and the slave hunters behind them.

  “I don’t see no boat,” Caleb said, coming up behind her.

  “I stashed it so it wouldn’t be in plain sight.” That was Elias, coming up on her other side. But his voice sounded strangled, as if he could barely utter the words, and Dorcas turned to look at him. He stood rigid, gazing with stricken eyes out to the tiny island, and a muscle twitched in his check. “Y’all are going to have to head over there without me. I can’t go another step.”

  Somewhere far behind them, back the way they’d come, voices rose up in the trees; with them came the baying of dogs. Dread gripped Dorcas, and she saw it rise in Caleb’s face, too. “Then where the hell did you put the boat?” Caleb demanded.

  He had the right of it too, for though her Caleb had no Power of his own, he had a way of understanding what was before him. “You mean just that,” Dorcas said to Elias, who still stood unmoving, sweat beading on his brow in the moonlight. “You can’t move another step, can you?”

  “It’s the Warding.” Elias gave a harsh little giggle that was closer to a sob. “My land is tainted with blood and I can’t even...” Then his head snapped up. There was no color left in his face to lose, but his jaw dropped and Dorcas saw him strain where he stood, as though unseen chains held him fast. One last word escaped him, in the tiniest of whispers. “J-jenny?”

  Back in the trees another voice roared out over the barking of the hounds, “They came this way! Got their scent!”

  “I don’t see ’em!”

  “They can’t be too far ahead!”

  Galvanized, Dorcas seized Elias’ arm with one hand and his face with the other, but no matter how she pressed she couldn’t get him to turn his gaze to her. Then Caleb gave a cry and pointed, and shock rolled up from within her, threatening to drown exhaustion and dread alike. The moon’s radiance, thin trickle of light though it was, was enough now to cast a silvery sheen down on the little island—and in the heart of the trees on its nearest bank, she spied the shape of a woman. Dorcas couldn’t see much of her from a distance, what she wore or what her face was like. Yet she could see the moonlight shining right through her as though she were made of mist.

  And she could see grief breaking out across the face of Elias Sutherland, enough to tell her he was looking now at his Jenny. His wife, she thought. Her healing Power recoiled in her, as if the shape on the island revolted it somehow, and that was all Dorcas needed to tell her she was looking on no one alive. If that shape was Jenny Sutherland, Jenny Sutherland was dead.

  Behind them, though, the dogs began to howl. Before either she or Elias could react, Caleb whirled and seized the gun from the other man’s slack fingers. “I ain’t letting them take me back!”

  “Caleb, no!”

  Before he could fire, three shots rang out from the trees. One dropped Elias, catching him high in the shoulder and spinning him around to fall face down to the earth. Another caught Caleb and sent him sprawling. Dorcas felt the third slice the air a hand’s breadth from her ear; with no other choice, she froze where she stood, holding her hands up and out to either side and cursing under her breath. Her Power churned. God in Heaven, she’d just healed Elias Sutherland, and now she despaired of being able to heal him again. Or Caleb. She didn’t dare glance at either man, but she could feel the ground beneath her feet humming as it drank in their blood.

  The men advancing with their guns and their hounds commanded the rest of her attention. Five of them in total, and she knew all their faces, but only two mattered: Harriman Tucker, the foreman of the McCreary plantation, with iron-streaked red hair and a face that looked like a father’s, weathered and hard. And Josiah McCreary, tall and lean and carelessly handsome, but with a knife-sharp smile and eyes that held no light.

  “Dorcas McCreary,” he said as he stepped forward, crooning as if to a wayward child, “you’ve led me on a merry chase.”

  Her skin crawled at the sound of his voice, and it took all she had to keep from screaming. “I will thank you, sir, not to call me that,” she hissed. “That name is no name of mine.”

  “Oh, but it is, darlin’,” McCreary said. There was no disgust in his face, no derision or contempt, and for Dorcas that was almost worse than if he’d been openly hostile. “You’ll take what I give you, whether it’s a name, clothes on that pretty brown back, or food in your belly.” He reached her, looking her up and down, and only then did she see what lurked just behind his eyes: hunger. Without warning he seized her, continuing, “And if I want to put a baby in that belly instead, you’ll take that too. You think you won’t, you’re deluding yourself.” Dorcas struggled in his grasp, repulsed, and his only reply to that was to pump another bullet into Caleb’s form. As Caleb howled, wrenching Dorcas’ heart, McCreary finished blithely, “Don’t make me shoot him again.”

  “Josiah, for the love of God, restrain yourself,” Harriman Tucker said through gritted teeth. “Your father wants them back in working order. That doesn’t mean rutted, raped, or dead!”

  Two of the other men chortled, and one outright guffawed while McCreary himself turned back to the older man. “You may be my father’s foreman, Harry, but in case you’ve forgotten, you don’t command me,” he replied, with steel in his voice.

  His attention was off her for but a moment, but it was all the time that Dorcas needed. Her hand whipped out the knife with which she’d cut the bullet from Elias Sutherland; for him and for her Caleb, who both lay bleeding at the river’s edge, she thrust the blade straight at McCreary’s shoulder. If blood was what it took to keep her and Caleb free, then blood by God she’d take—

  BLOOD

  The word was never spoken, yet it screamed across Dorcas’ nerves nonetheless, and resounded through her skull in a voice she did not know. Around her the men jolted, even as her knife bit at McCreary’s flesh and made him whirl back to her, his fist flying out to clout her across the jaw.

  BLOOD UPON MY EARTH

  A woman, Dorcas realized as she tumbled backwards to slam into the riverbank. Her head struck the earth, and for an instant she could do nothing but lie stunned and wonder if the lash of grief and fury that assailed her senses was the voice of Jenny Sutherland. An instant later, Elias’ anguished shout confirmed it.

  “Jenny! Jenny honey, no—don’t—”

  THEY SHOT ME ELIAS

  One of McCreary’s men cried out; who, Dorcas couldn’t tell. It wasn’t important, not when she needed all her strength to roll over, to evade Josiah McCreary’s frantic grasp and reach Caleb’s crumpled form.

  “What the hell are you doing, witch?” McCreary snarled—words he’d hurled at Dorcas before, but this time his gaze was pointed away from her, out to the water. And for the first time since Dorcas had been sold to Josiah McCreary’s father, she saw her master’s son’s eyes fill with fright.

  THEY SHOT YOU

  Chill wind rushed in over the bank, and with it rose the river itself: long, snaking ropes of it, uncoiling towards McCreary and his men, snaring each in a noose of strangling, silted water. The two dogs bayed in terror, backed away from the river’s edge, and then bolted away into the trees. One of McCreary’s men tried to follow them, only to drop convulsing to the earth, his hands clawing at his throat. The other two, the men whose names Dorcas had never known, keeled over gasping in his wake.

  Do
rcas threw herself over Caleb, her hands seeking to connect with his wounds while she prayed her body would shield him from the wrath ascending from the river. She barely dared to lift her head, yet her gaze came up nonetheless, just in time to see the figure walking over the water. With every step the shape gained color and detail, yet when its feet touched the earth Dorcas could still see through it to the trees beyond. Blood gleamed all along the bodice of its ragged dress, and blood stained the entire right side of its shattered head.

  MY BLOOD SETS THE WARDING

  The figure snapped its arms up high to either side, and with that gesture, two new tendrils of water lashed out to engulf Harriman Tucker and Josiah McCreary. Through a mask of blood, eyes that might once have been the blue of April skies shone now in no color Dorcas could name, except perhaps a hue of vengeance.

  BY BLOOD AND WATER DIE

  Tucker went down beneath the onslaught, writhing as he fought to gasp for air; McCreary not only kept his feet but leapt towards the specter approaching him as well, and his pistol spat fire at Jenny Sutherland’s ruined head. She did not slow in her mustering of the river, did not even twitch as McCreary’s bullets passed straight through her. Then she turned her baleful gaze upon him. Her hands, white as ash, snapped together before her. And the river tendrils churned, gathered themselves in the air, and plowed like cannon fire straight into McCreary’s chest.

  Dorcas didn’t see him fall. But she did hear his scream, high and thin and strangled, as he tumbled backwards out of her line of sight. Flinching at the sound, she hunkered down low over Caleb and tugged him frantically up into her arms. “Don’t let go of me,” she breathed. “Don’t you let go, you hear?”

  He murmured something indistinct in reply, something she thought might have been the Lord’s Prayer. But he also clung to her, hard enough to let her know he’d heard her, and that was all that counted.

  Two feet away, though, Elias was moving, and Dorcas shot him a horrified glance as he struggled to his knees. His pain washed over her with the same force with which Jenny had hurled the water—and it was to the figure that had once been Jenny that he cried out now. “Jenny honey—don’t—for the love of God, they’re human! They’re human!”

  Some part of Dorcas took bitter issue with that, though she didn’t dare voice any such notion, not when she risked angering the thing that had come across the water. But Jenny paid her no heed. At the sound of Elias’ voice she faltered, her hands lowering to hang at her sides, limp as bedraggled weeds. Her predatory stance didn’t change, but her head slowly canted round to Elias, and something like cognizance creased the features caked with blood—cognizance, and behind that, grief.

  they shot you

  Her mouth never moved, yet her words hung in the air nonetheless, plaintive now, almost small. As they echoed, one of McCreary’s men gave one last gasp and lay still. Tucker rolled over where he lay on the sodden ground, coughed once, and then retched across the rocks. Jenny ignored them both. When Josiah McCreary stirred, though, her head whipped back to him; around her, the river surged back to life.

  SLAVERS MURDERERS RAPERS NOT WORTH PROTECTING NOT HUMAN

  McCreary’s other two men twitched, and then they too went still. Tucker raised his head, and even from a distance, Dorcas saw fear and shock in his eyes, saw his lips moving with the same prayer Caleb babbled into her shoulder. McCreary himself lurched upright, and the sight of his face made her blood run cold. It was vacant now, dead as Jenny Sutherland’s, save for the first glimmerings of madness.

  “Devil,” he mumbled, soft at first, but rising in volume and stridence with every step. “Whore—harlot! Swear to God I’ll break you—!”

  He lunged, not at Jenny, but at Dorcas.

  She had no time, and could only think to react by flinging a hand towards Elias, desperate to reach him to shield him as well as Caleb with her Power. Elias paid her no mind, bent in his turn on reaching the unearthly figure that had once been his wife. When his palms connected with the earth his own Power flared, as exhausted as Dorcas’ own, and no match for the volley of river mud and water Jenny hurled at McCreary. Blow after blow she struck him; at last he crumpled, wheezing, to the ground.

  And at last, painfully, Elias hauled himself to his feet and seized Jenny’s bloodied, battered form. The bullets had passed through her, but her husband’s hands did not. She keened as soon as he touched her, such energy roiling around her that Dorcas had to look away, though she couldn’t block out the sound of Elias’s desperate voice. “You can’t, Jenny honey—the magic ain’t for killing our own kind!”

  he’ll rape her he’ll kill her she can’t kill him they’ll never let her go if she kills him

  Dorcas froze. The words didn’t frighten her as much as the sudden realization that what they said was right. She was able to kill Josiah McCreary; she’d dreamed of it more than once, each time he’d laid hands upon her or any of the other women his father owned. Drained though she was and three breaths away from fainting, she was sure she could find it in herself to pierce him with her magic, and stop his heart cold in his chest.

  But she couldn’t. Never mind the sermons of the white preachers, who proclaimed thou shalt not kill. It was bad enough already that the McCrearys already thought her a witch. If she took his life, she’d have to kill the others too—and if none of the men left the river alive, then she and Caleb would be hunted for the rest of their days.

  Would they fare any better if Jenny Sutherland’s specter did the killing?

  Not if, she realized then in a burst of dread. When. There was no echo of life in any of McCreary’s other men, though Harriman Tucker was still conscious, backed up against a tree in his fear and was even now fumbling for the gun he’d dropped when he fell. But Josiah remained the nearest threat, and as he gagged and tried to fight his way back upright, Jenny thrust out her hand to inundate him once more. All the while, she keened.

  LET ME KILL THEM ELIAS TOOK ME FROM YOU TAINTED OUR LAND TAINTED OUR MAGIC HUNTERS SLAVERS KILLERS

  “Humans,” Elias whispered, and then his Power surged, calling up wind that gusted in circles round him and Jenny both, ripping through the water-tendrils she summoned from the river. Jenny threw back her head, her mouth gaping now as she screamed; then her ghostly form began to fade. Wind that was no wind rushed over Dorcas, a gust of cleansing Power that drove the empty echo of death back across the water. What remained of Jenny Sutherland went with it, and as silence fell along the bank, Elias Sutherland collapsed.

  For two scant breaths Dorcas froze. Her Power was faltering now, drained to the dregs by the need to close the holes in Caleb’s leg and side where McCreary’s bullets had torn through his flesh. From physical exhaustion alone, her muscles screamed. But Caleb held fast where she faltered, raising his head and pushing at her to get her to move, to do what must be done. “Go, woman,” he whispered. “Inle won’t give you rest till you do.”

  That was enough to shift her, though she nearly sobbed at the stiffness of Caleb’s motions as he pulled away from her. Yet even as she crawled for Elias, Dorcas heard Harriman Tucker bark out, “No. In the name of God, no!”

  She had to stop then, and for all her Power’s urging, force herself to pull with awkwardness slowness to her feet, hands out once more as she faced a white man with a gun. The McCrearys’ foreman was closer now, his pistol at the ready, but the gaze he riveted on her held none of the lecherousness of his young master’s. His face was haggard, his eyes dark with barely repressed fear. Not vile like Josiah McCreary, Dorcas thought—but no less dangerous.

  “In the name of God,” she begged, gesturing at Elias’s broken form, “let me heal this man before he dies too!”

  “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain, girl,” Tucker intoned. Sweat beaded along his brow, a faint glistening of moisture in the moonlight. “Do not claim His power while you call upon your own heathen gods!”

  “Does it matter what gods I call when a man is dying?” Dorcas snapped. “Shoot me and have d
one with it, then! You already done gone and murdered a woman tonight, what’s one more? Especially a black one!”

  It was foolish talking back to Tucker, for more than one slave had been whipped for it on the McCreary land, and he stood armed and panicked now. But Dorcas was weary beyond reckoning. Her Power still shrieked. And all at once she didn’t care about the risk of the foreman shooting her. She half-knelt, half-fell down at Elias Sutherland’s side, her hands afire anew as her palms sought the places where his life’s blood was oozing forth.

  Elias, though, seized both her wrists before she could touch him. “No,” he croaked. “Ain’t got nothin’ left. Let me go to her. I’ve got to free her from the blood. Let me go.”

  By rights she should have denied him; her Power demanded release, and her conscience bewailed the thought of giving free rein to yet more death. It didn’t matter that Elias was white, or that she knew barely anything of him. She knew enough: that he was a good man who’d risk himself to aid the likes of her and Caleb. And that he had Power, like her. Because of that, she pulled back her hands and whispered, “Go to your Jenny, Elias.”

  And because of what little she knew of him, as his last breath left him, Dorcas wept. The magic in the earth and river shifted with his passing; it would have been all too easy to let herself follow it, to claim the rest and succor it offered and to the white man’s hell with anything else.

  But she wouldn’t do that to Caleb. Couldn’t, not when Harriman Tucker had a gun drawn upon them both.

  With an effort that made her tremble, Dorcas lifted her head. Caleb was sitting up, and though gray tinged the deep rich brown of his cheeks, she was certain she’d stopped his bleeding. McCreary remained in an unmoving sprawl. The sight of him should have made her want to retch, but not even the wrongness that had been Jenny Sutherland’s shade—or what it had done—could make her sorry that her master’s son was gone.