by C. Greenwood
“Then you fear a consequence, an attack of some sort?” asked Hadrian.
Calder said, “The Drejians are a fierce and violent people, and they have the dragon, Micanthria, on their side. I do not know what they might resort to if their threats go unanswered. I fear for the safety of this village.”
“What sort of precautions have you taken?” I asked.
“We have a magical web extended around our perimeters and would be instantly aware of anyone approaching or attempting to enter Swiftsfell. This same defense warned us of your coming.”
“You made no efforts to stop us,” Terrac pointed out.
“I sensed no ill purpose in your party and was intrigued to see what brought you to our village.
“And now that we are here,” I said, “we would like to offer our help.”
“We would?” Terrac repeated incredulously.
Calder looked startled, Hadrian merely thoughtful.
“Our enemies are not the sort you would wish to make your own,” Calder cautioned.
I thought of Myria, my grandmother, and knew I already had a tie to this place and its inhabitants that could not be undone. I said, “I would like to learn more about these Drejian neighbors of yours.”
Calder smiled, as if amused by my refusal to be warned. “Very well, my young friend. I may have something to help you find the information you seek.”
His hands moved among the dusty stacks of books on the table. Even deprived of his sight, he seemed able to tell the books apart by their positioning and the feel of their covers. After a brief exploration, he withdrew one volume from a stack and offered it to me.
“This is a collection of Drejian tales and mythology and, if memory serves, contains some true historical accounts. Its study may bring you a clearer understanding of the Drejian culture. Because knowing your enemy is half the battle.”
* * *
I spent all morning and afternoon at the house. I studied the book from Calder, and for a while I listened to Hadrian interviewing the village head. Then when Terrac gave in to the pleading of Calder’s small grandchildren, I watched him play games with them. It was amusing to see because he usually lost.
I declined invitations to stay for dinner because I had spent too much of the day away from Myria already. I should be using every opportunity to get to know her better.
When I stepped out the door and started toward my grandmother’s cottage, I discovered the weather was no longer as pleasant as it had been in the morning. The sky was overcast, and the wind sweeping down the canyon carried the chill of evening.
Reminded of the storm during yesterday’s crossing of the invisible bridge, I looked across the divide to the cliff on the far side. And froze, midstride.
A figure stood there at the edge of the cliff. He was only a dark, indistinct blur in the distance, his cloak swirling around him in the wind. But I did not need to see his features, the face that had been so hauntingly familiar when he had tried to kill me that day by the river.
Chapter Four
My enemy was motionless now, but I could feel his eyes on me, and with the help of my new augmenter I sensed his menacing presence in a way I could not before. The half-healed wound between my neck and shoulder smarted at the memory of his arrow’s graze. We stood like that, staring at one another across the long gap, until a footfall from behind made me jump.
But it was only Terrac.
“What’s wrong? What are we looking at?” he asked, joining me at the rail of the walkway.
I nodded toward the stranger across the divide. “It’s the one who tried to kill me the other day. He’s found us here.”
Terrac followed my gaze, but even as I spoke my would-be assassin stepped back from the rock’s edge, disappearing from view.
“He was there,” I insisted at Terrac’s questioning look. “I think he is looking for some way to cross to this side.”
“Let him look. He’ll never find the bridge. And even if he did, I wouldn’t let him get to you.”
He put a comforting arm around me. But I still could not shake the dread the sight of that dangerous stranger inspired in me. Suddenly, Swiftsfell no longer felt like such a safe place.
“You’re shivering.” Terrac removed his coat and slipped it around my shoulders. I did not tell him it wasn’t the cold wind that made me shudder.
“I’m fine. Anyway, I had better get back to Myria. She will wonder why I’ve been gone so long.”
“I’m beginning to think you prefer the company of Myria, Hadrian, and even that musty old Calder to mine.”
He was teasing, but I sensed discontent behind his words. He had not been himself since our arrival here. Was it the proximity of so many magickers? He was used to Hadrian and me, but maybe he did not trust these villagers. With suspicion of magickers so prevalent, maybe it would be strange if he was comfortable in this community.
I try to reassure him with jokes as we walked back to Myria’s cottage. But when he briefly kissed me goodnight and left me at the door, I was still aware of an unspoken awkwardness between us.
Again I looked across the canyon to the far side, but the menacing stranger remained hidden from sight. Was he watching me even now?
I shook my head. I would not worry about him. The villagers had that magical “web” Calder spoke of, and it would trigger a warning if an outsider attempted to enter the village stealthily. As long as that remained in place, I had nothing to fear.
Nonetheless, when I went to bed that night, I set up my own web of magic to alert me if anyone besides Myria and I moved around the house. Then I settled down to sleep in my cot before the fire. Temperatures had continued to fall, and the night was cool. Myria had given me a blanket, but I preferred snuggling under Terrac’s coat, which I had brought home with me. It smelled like him.
As I turned over, trying to get comfortable, something stiff, with pointed corners, crumpled in the coat’s inner pocket. I slipped a hand inside and fished out a folded sheet of parchment. It occurred to me fleetingly that its contents might be private. But surely if they were, Terrac would not have left them for me to find. Besides, before setting out on this journey, we had made a pact not to keep secrets anymore.
Giving in to my curiosity, I unfolded the letter and crept closer to the fire. Under the flickering glow, I made out what seemed to be a brief log of our travels, noting the dates and locations of our various stops. Most of it was devoted to our arrival yesterday in the magicker village.
Numbness sweeping over me, I folded the report and replaced it where I had found it. I wanted to deny what I had seen and silence the dark thoughts racing through my head. But I could not. There was no question that the note was written in Terrac’s hand. He had taught me my letters when we were just a pair of younglings, and I knew his familiar script as well as my own. Neither was there any possibility of misinterpretation.
No, it didn’t matter how much I wanted to disbelieve. There was no doubt what I had in my possession and just as little doubt for whose eyes it was intended. Terrac was recording our travels, and in particular our encounters with magickers, for the Praetor. His ambition had long been his weakness, and now he was using his relationship with me and even his friendship with Hadrian to make himself invaluable to his master. To the one man who most despised natural magickers and had made it his mission to destroy us. It didn’t matter that the Praetor was technically my master too these days, that I was sworn to his service on eventually returning to the province. In my heart, he was still my enemy, the one responsible for the death of my parents.
And Terrac knew this. Yet he would spy for the man, betraying me in the process, knowing I would never approve his actions. His change in mood since our arrival in Swiftsfell made sudden sense now. He knew and I knew that he continued to serve the Praetor, but we had thus far avoided conflicting interests. Swiftsfell would change that.
I shoved Terrac’s warm coat off me, letting it drop to the floor, and replaced it with Myria’s spare bl
anket. The wool blanket smelled faintly musty, as if it had been stored a long time in a trunk, but I didn’t care. I lay awake for hours, wondering what I should do. I could not allow Terrac to make that report.
* * *
My dreams that night were a jumbled mixture of Terrac, the Praetor, and the mysterious stranger who was tracking me. As I had done a thousand times before, I relived that long-ago night when my parents had been killed. Only as the child version of me fled the burning house and the chaos in the yard, escaping into the safety of the trees, she looked back to see Terrac among the Praetor’s soldiers. Terrac watching and approving as they cut down Da and trampled Mama beneath the hooves of their horses.
I woke in a sweat and lay in the shadows beneath the dying glow of the fireplace, trying to calm the pounding of my heart against my ribs. The dream wasn’t a true representation of events. Terrac would have been only a child all those years ago and had been nowhere near the place where it happened. Still, it was hard to shake those images from my mind or dispel the feelings that came with them.
When I eventually slipped back into a fitful slumber, I saw the cloaked stranger in my mind’s eye. I saw him scaling the far side of the canyon and looking for a way to cross the rushing river.
He was getting closer.
* * *
The next morning, I tried to distract myself from my worries by delving further into the book Calder had loaned me. The Drejian tales and histories within were strange and might have been interesting at another time. But I could not concentrate on them now
Myria told me over breakfast that she would be harvesting hucklefruit in the high field all morning. She asked me to join her, and I agreed, although it was a confusing invitation. I had not seen any place in Swiftsfell that might be worthy of the name “field,” and I couldn’t see how crops could possibly grow down the face of a cliff.
But Myria smiled mysteriously and assured me I would see for myself in good time. Then she led me away from the breakfast table and into her room, where she opened the trunk at the foot of her hammock.
She said, “If you are going to work alongside the local women, you might as well look as if you belong with us.”
She withdrew a colorful costume from the trunk, a dark gold dress with long, split sleeves and matching leggings. After giving me a sturdy pair of thick-soled ankle boots, she clipped a jingling belt of looped silver rings around my waist.
Then she stood back to examine me. Her eyes were misty. “These things were worn by your mother when she was your age. After she left, I never had the heart to throw them out or give them away. But it is right that you should have them now.”
For the longest time, the only thing I’d had of my mother’s was the brooch she had given me on the night of her death. I wore it often, pinned to my collar. But it had represented my Da’s side of the family, the house of Tarius. This was different because it was hers. I felt closer to her, wearing her clothes.
At the same time, I had never dressed in anything so garish. The skirt impeded my movements and was altogether impractical, but at least I approved of the boots, which were better suited than my own to the rocky terrain.
Myria plaited my silver hair over one shoulder, the way I had noticed many of the Swiftsfell girls wearing theirs, and when she was done I looked remarkably like the portrait of my mother looking down on us from its place on the nearby shelf.
The final touch, as we left the house, was to grab a pair of long sacks to be looped with string over our shoulders. These were for collecting the hucklefruit.
Outside, the cool temperatures from the night before persisted, but at least the wind had died down and the sun was bright.
My grandmother and I joined a handful of other women and children who carried sacks like ours and were heading the same direction. Apprehensively, I watched the others clambering easily up the rope ladders that scaled the rock and led high above the roofs of the village. Despite her years, Myria scrambled after them with ease born of long practice.
I swallowed my doubts and struggled along behind, trying not to look down. I had never scaled anything higher or more complicated than the elder trees back in Dimmingwood, and my feet kept tangling clumsily in the rope webbing.
I was out of breath by the time I reach the end of my climb and pulled myself over the cliff’s side and onto solid ground. Here the high field spread before me. Although the name summoned images of waving, golden grass, the field was more like a carefully cultivated garden with row on row of tall green stalks or smaller patches of berries and mushrooms.
Myria explained that the field was tended by the women and children of the village, while the men fished with nets in the river far below. Between the field and river, the people here were able to supply their own food through the year.
“Even in the cold winter months?” I asked.
She explained that the hardier plants could survive in any season, especially with the right help. She motioned me to join her, kneeling amongst a patch of brown-leaved creeping plants. They looked dead or close to it, but when my grandmother spread her hands over them, they revived before my eyes, the withered leaves and stems filling out and turning a lush green.
“This is your gift,” I realized. “You help things grow.”
She smiled agreement and took my hands in hers. “You try.”
She spread my hands, palms down, over the plants and talked me through the mental techniques. But despite my best efforts at following her instructions and drawing the magic through my dragon-scale augmenter, I could not seem to do what she had.
“Some lack the aptitude for it,” Myria said. “Do not be discouraged. You are skilled in empathy, and you may have other talents waiting to be discovered. Maybe something like this.”
She made a rolling motion with her hand, and suddenly a glowing orb of light appeared, hovering over her palm.
Impressed, I asked, “Why do you make that motion with your hand?”
“The flourish is unnecessary but is how I learned to do it when I was young. Some magickers keep those early habits and find them helpful for remembering the accompanying mental exercises.”
“Like a child learning sums by counting on her fingers?”
“Exactly. Would you like to try it?”
I hesitated. I had not found the chance to discuss any of this with Hadrian. Did it matter? I decided it didn’t.
With Myria’s help, I made several attempts and finally succeeded at summoning a tiny ball of light. It was fainter than hers and disappeared the instant I lost my concentration, but I took it as a victory. Next my grandmother tried to instruct me in summoning lightning, but the best I could manage was a small spark.
Realizing the other harvesters were watching us, the children giggling at my clumsy failures, I gave up and turned my attention to the simpler work of collecting the hucklefruit. It was good to lose myself in such a simple activity. But I could not stop my mind wandering as I worked. I thought of the mysterious enemy I had spotted watching me last night and felt suddenly exposed on the cliff top.
Then my mind moved in a still more troubling direction. What was I going to do about Terrac and my discovery of his secret?
“You should speak to him,” said Myria, as she worked at my side.
“What? Speak to who?”
“I may be aging, but I am not blind, granddaughter. Yesterday all was well between you and your young man. But today your thoughts are troubled. I imagine you only came to the field with me in order to avoid him in case he were to come looking for you.”
I smothered a flash of irritation, not at her but at myself. “Am I so readable?”
“Only to someone who cares enough to look. Anyway, I think you are done running away from your problem.”
“Why is that?”
She smiled. “Because the problem has come to you.”
She nodded to where the wall of green stalks ended, and sure enough, Terrac was there.
How had he known where to f
ind me?
He looked so casual as he approached that my anger flared at the sight of him. How could he smile like that when he was lying to me? I made up my mind in a split second and stalked down the row to meet him. Ignoring his greeting, I produced the report I had been carrying with me for just such an occasion and waved it beneath his nose.
“Tell me the meaning of this,” I demanded. “I found it in your coat last night.”
Recognition flickered in his eyes, and something else. Irritation. “What did you do? Search my pockets?” His tone was cool.
Mine wasn’t. “You left it where I could easily find it. It didn’t take much looking. Anyway, I’m not the one whose actions need defending. At first I could not believe what I was seeing. I wanted to think there was some better explanation than the obvious.”
His jaw set in a stubborn expression I knew all too well. “A better explanation than what? If you have some accusation to make, I deserve to hear what it is.”
“Do not insult me by pretending ignorance. You knew what you were doing was wrong, or you would not have attempted to keep it secret. You’re spying for the Praetor.”
Conscious of the curious attention we were drawing from Myria and the other onlookers, I lowered my voice. “When we get back home, you plan to report the location of this magicker village, even though you know it could endanger Swiftsfell.”
His expression became unreadable. “There is nothing secret about this place or the people in it. If the Praetor wanted to learn about them, he could get his information anywhere. And nothing in my report will hurt your grandmother or the other people here. This province is not even under our Praetor’s authority.”