Light in the Darkness

by CJ Brightley

  “She did,” Silas said. He still had trouble believing it himself, that this untrained young woman had been able to command those dark, powerful beings when he had nearly been overcome by them.

  The wiseman nodded. “Not surprising, since her power is kin to ours. I doubt someone with only Grana magic could have done it.”

  “What if she hadn’t been able to?” Silas asked. “The raiding party we met at the bottom of the canyon refused to help, said it was our problem to solve.”

  The wiseman shrugged. “And so it was. If you weren’t able to solve it, we would have dealt with the Sh’kimech ourselves and then found another way to make you Grana folk pay for letting that man trespass on our lands. Now, where is he? You agreed to hand him over to us.”

  Silas took a deep breath. This was going to be tricky. “He’s dead. I killed him. He’s buried in a cavern beneath the mountain.”

  One of the warriors in the camp looked at him, golden eyes narrowed in suspicion. “An easy lie to tell. You could have let him go.”

  “Not a lie.” Silas unbuttoned his inner coat pocket and took out Carden’s gold ring. “This is his mage ring.”

  The wiseman touched it with the tip of his forefinger. “It does have power, or did, once.”

  “You could have taken it from him to fool us,” the warrior said.

  “It’s impossible to take a mage’s ring from him without his consent as long as he’s alive. Here, try to take mine.” Silas held out his left hand, where he wore his own silver mage ring. The warrior reached out to take the ring. At his touch, sparks jumped from the ring, and he cursed and snatched his hand back.

  “And no mage would ever weaken himself by giving up his ring once he’s earned it,” Silas went on. That wasn’t quite true; a mage might give up his ring if he was desperate enough. But the A’ayimat didn’t need to know that. Anyhow, Carden hadn’t been that desperate; he had believed until the end that he could win, and he had seemed the type who would rather die than surrender. “He’s dead. I killed him and took his mage ring, and now he lies buried beneath the mountain. Keep his men, if you want, but let my companions go.”

  “Hey!” Teebers, the miner who had been in the tunnel with Mooden, protested. “You can’t leave us here!”

  The wiseman spoke to the warrior in their own language. The warrior answered sullenly, then said to Silas, “I still don’t believe you, but our wiseman does.” He gestured at the miners. “Take them with you. They eat too much, anyway, and they stink.”

  “Hey!” Teebers shouted again.

  “I don’t want them,” Silas said. “But they’re free to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you won’t attack the settlers in the valley?”

  The wiseman and the other men who were gathered around carried out a longer discussion in their own language. Not for the first time, Silas wished he knew the A’ayimat trick of understanding any language that was spoken to them.

  The warrior who had spoken before turned back to him. “Not this time. But if it happens again, we won’t be so patient.”

  “I think I can safely say it won’t happen again,” Silas replied.

  ALTHOUGH IT WOULD be easier and safer to walk down the upper canyons than to ride, Banfrey and Dobay weren’t well enough to make the long trek on foot. Silas and one of the A’ayimat helped them onto their horses, which had been brought to the camp and cared for, and the A’ayimat offered Lainie one of their sturdy mountain ponies, telling her to let it go when they reached the valley and it would find its way back home.

  “Mr. Vendine, sir?” Mooden came over to Silas as they were preparing to leave. “I just – I hope you know, Mr. Vendine, none of us meant no harm by working for Mr. Carden. We didn’t know he was a wizard or that he wanted the ore for wrongful things. An’ none of us set hands on the girl. So we ain’t going to be punished, right?”

  There were severe penalties for Plain folk who knowingly assisted rogue mages, but Silas doubted that any of these miners were guilty of anything worse than greed and stupidity. The one who deserved punishment was Gobby, whom Silas had left unconscious or possibly dead – he hadn’t had time to check or to tie him up – in the tunnel outside the cavern where they’d been mining. “No, you won’t be punished,” he said. “But be more careful who you decide to take money from, next time.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Vendine, sir,” Mooden said, relieved nearly to the point of tears. “Thank you, sir.”

  With Lainie leading her borrowed horse and her Pa’s horse by the reins, Silas leading Dobay’s horse and Abenar, and the freed miners trailing after them, the group left the A’ayimat camp and started on the long trip back down Yellowbird Canyon to the Bitterbush Valley.

  16

  SILAS, THE BANFREYS, and Dobay reached the Banfrey place early in the afternoon the next day. Silas left Dobay and the Banfreys there, with many heartfelt thanks and handshakes from Banfrey and a bare nod from Lainie. When he got back to town, his rented room was as he had left it. He dropped off his gear and Carden’s mage ring there, confirmed with the landlady that Carden had been rooming at the Rusty Widow, then went next door to the saloon. He told the saloon owner that Carden was dead, then invoked his authority as a mage hunter – which meant next to nothing here in the Wildings, but at least proved he wasn’t just a common thief – and asked to be shown to Carden’s room on the second floor of the saloon. He usually preferred not to reveal his true occupation, but sometimes it was necessary, and anyhow, everyone in Bitterbush Springs already knew he was a mage and had shown that they weren’t inclined to mess with him.

  “You can’t take anything,” the saloon owner said in response to Silas’s request.

  “If I find evidence against Carden for the Mage Council, I have to take that,” Silas said. It was part of his job, and the more evidence he presented, the larger the payout for stopping Carden was likely to be. “But I’ll leave everything else alone.”

  Agreeing to that, the owner led him upstairs to the lavish two-room suite Carden had been renting. Silas shooed out the handful of house ladies who seemed to have taken up residence in the suite, then searched the rooms. In the bedroom he found an expensive black leather valise, which held spare clothing, a message box kit, and a sheaf of documents. The documents were letters of credit good at the banks in the Wildings that had connections to Granadaian banks, authorizing the payment of funds to Arbrey Carden. The letters were signed only with an inked stamp in the form of an elaborate “A”. Clearly, this mysterious “A” was the person or group who had been funding Carden’s acquisition of the ore. Silas could ask about the letters at the bank here in Bitterbush Springs, but he doubted any Wildings banker would know who the “A” represented; it would just be a mark, or, at best, a false name, on their lists of depositors.

  The silver message box was square, like Silas’s Hidden Council message box, but with markings he didn’t recognize. From the markings, it might be possible to track down the silversmith who had made the box and learn who had commissioned it. He opened the box; an unopened note lay inside. He unfolded it. You have failed to answer my last three messages, the note read. I demand that you enlighten me on the current state of the project, and explain your silence, or else funds will be cut off and your association with the project terminated. The note was unsigned.

  Silas sat on the bed with the note in one hand, the message box in the other, and the letters of credit next to him. He really wanted to know who Carden’s backers were and what they were doing with that ore. He briefly considered answering the note and taking the message box with him, to see if he could learn anything else.

  Then he discarded the idea. If he let whoever had been giving Carden his orders know that something had gone wrong, that would give them the chance to hide their tracks. Also, the location of a message box could be traced. Going by the amounts of money involved, this matter could reach to the highest levels of Granadaian mage society, and, no matter how curious he was, he had no desire to g
et himself mixed up in a mess like that. He had done his part by stopping Carden and preventing the harm he was doing in the Wildings. If something was going on in Granadaia, that was the Mage Council’s problem, not his. All in all, it would be best to shake this from his feet and move on.

  He left the clothes and the valise, items of real value in the Wildings, for the landlord to use or sell, however he saw fit, and put one of the letters of credit in his coat pocket, so he could identify the “A” sigil if he ever came across it again. On the backs of two more letters, he copied the markings from the message box, and pocketed them as well. Then he took the message box and the rest of the letters downstairs with him. At the stables next door to the boarding house, he borrowed a shovel from a puzzled stable hand and buried the message box and the letters deep in the muck and dirt of one of the stalls.

  Back in his room, he took his own message boxes from their hiding place in his pack. He wrote his report to the Mage Council, describing Carden’s activities and the megalomaniacal madness he had fallen prey to, fueled by the power in the ore, and giving an abbreviated version of the fight in which he had killed the renegade. He didn’t mention the Sh’kimech; as far as he was concerned, the Sh’kimech were strictly a Wildings matter, none of the Mage Council’s business. He also made no mention of the A’ayimat’s involvement in the matter, and he said nothing about Lainie. Difficult though that situation was, he still didn’t want to turn it over to someone else who would force the issue with no care or concern for her.

  He folded one of the letters of credit with the drawings on the back inside the spelled sheet of message paper on which he had written his report, tucked them into the message box with Carden’s ring, and worked the spell that would send them to the Mage Council’s message chamber.

  His report to the Hidden Council included details about his dealings with the A’ayimat and the nature of the ore. He also described Carden’s message box and the note, and folded the other letter of credit on which he had copied the message box markings inside his report. The Hidden Council would discreetly look into the activities of Carden’s backers and let him know if they posed any further threat to the Plain people of the Wildings and whether he should investigate some more. Again, he made no mention of Lainie. Although the Hidden Council would be more sympathetic to her dilemma, they would still feel bound to uphold the training law.

  His reports sent, he lay on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He had successfully stopped a very dangerous rogue mage, but for some reason the victory didn’t seem complete while he still didn’t know what to do about Lainie. He went over the options again. He could keep trying to persuade her to go to Granadaia voluntarily, but that looked more and more unlikely, especially since he couldn’t seem to say anything to her that didn’t make things even worse. Or he could carry her away without her consent. No one would be able to stop him if that was what he decided to do, but it would be a violation of her rights and freedom and of everything he believed in.

  He didn’t even like the idea of her going to school in Granadaia, which only made it harder for him to force himself to force the issue. The instructional system built on the twin pillars of competition and humiliation would likely destroy her. She was too different, in itself an unforgivable sin in the Granadaian schools of magic. She was too free-spirited, and felt things too deeply. She would almost certainly either be so broken that the only thing to be done with her was to Strip her after all, or twisted into something that would horrify her.

  Then there was Burrett Banfrey. Silas had found himself genuinely liking the rancher. The man had lost nearly everything – his childhood home, his family, his son – to mages. Losing his daughter would destroy him, and Lainie would be devastated at being separated from her father. Silas just didn’t have the heart – or lack of heart – to do that to them.

  But if he left her for someone else to deal with, there would be nothing to stop that other mage from doing the harm to her that he couldn’t bring himself to do. And the consequences if their disobedience of the law was discovered would be serious for both of them. Not to mention the danger that she could be hanged, now that the whole Bitterbush Valley knew she was a mage.

  She had said she would rather be Stripped than go to Granadaia to train in magic. It was certainly her right to make that choice, but he could never do that to her, or ask someone else to do it. It would destroy her as surely as hanging or the Granadaian schools would.

  But untrained mages, especially ones as powerful as Lainie, were a danger to themselves and everyone around them…

  His thoughts chased themselves around in circles while he thought of a young woman, a pure beauty like a desert flower, with wide hazel eyes and a shy – and sometimes not so shy – smile, and recalled the passion they had shared in that starlit mountain meadow and how it had been the best thing that had ever happened to him, and knew less and less what he should do.

  ONCE SHE WAS home and had her Pa comfortably settled in bed – though not without argument – Lainie took a long bath and slept the rest of that day and all the next. When she woke up the day after that, she lay in bed for a long time, remembering her adventure with Mr. Vendine and that night in the meadow, and wishing things could be different. Then she told herself sternly she could wish her life away and it would never do her or anyone else any good, and it was time to get up and get on with her life.

  She cooked breakfast and cleaned up, then she patched the clothes Pa and Dobay had been wearing when they were shot. She wished she could make new ones for them, but try though she might, she had never been able to sew a piece of clothing that anyone could wear without looking like a ragamuffin. At least she was good at sewing on patches. She had heard tell of a machine of foreign invention now being made in Amber Bay, far away on the west coast of the Wildings, that could sew. Some seamstresses used them now to make the ready-made clothes that were sold in the mercantiles faster and more cheaply. If she had one of those machines, maybe then she could stitch a seam worthy of the name, maybe even sew herself a dress someday.

  The mending done, she started working on the beans for that night’s supper. She sat at the kitchen table, picking through dried beans to sort out the moldy ones and bits of dirt and gravel. Without the distraction of sewing, her emotions started churning around inside her again, and she tossed aside the debris as though it had personally offended her.

  She didn’t know if Mr. Vendine was still around. It didn’t seem likely that someone like him would stick around Bitterbush Springs for days, waiting for her to make an impossible choice. More likely, he had gone off hunting the next rogue mage and had sent a message to the Mage Council in Granadaia telling them about her, and one day someone would come to either take her away or destroy her mind.

  Not that she would let them. She would fight them, and she knew that her Pa’s ranch hands would fight them as well. If it came down to it, she would die before she let them take her away and turn her into someone like her grandmother.

  It was just as well if Mr. Vendine had left, she told herself. It didn’t matter to him what happened to her. She had been silly to hope that what had happened in that mountain meadow meant anything to him, that it was anything more than that magical hunger. And anyway, who was she to talk? Hadn’t it only been the hunger for her, as well?

  Her hands slowed in their task as, despite her best efforts, she found herself unable to deny what she already knew. It had been more. Mr. Vendine – Silas – was the nicest, handsomest, most interesting man she had ever known. He cared about Plain folk and risked himself to protect them from his own kind even though there was no thanks in it for him. He was kind to her, and treated her like someone worthy of respect. And, more than that, he was the man who made her spine tingle and her senses glow, just as if he was the hero and she was the heroine in a penny-thriller novel. It had been wrong for her to do what she had done with a man she wasn’t married to, she didn’t deny that; when no one was looking, she had made a prayer f
or forgiveness and an offering to the Joiner, whose gift she had wantonly misused. But it had also felt so natural, so comfortable, as though she was made to be with him like that.

  It was all water down the creek, though. Her life was here, and she would make it a good one, with or without handsome mages coming into it, breaking her heart, and leaving her behind. Soon she would tell her Pa that she was ready to marry Mr. Dobay – she hoped Dobay wouldn’t mind too much that she wasn’t a virgin – and she would have her kids and work her ranch, and she would bury her power so deep inside of her that no other mage would ever find it and force her to go away to Granadaia.

  She also wouldn’t let the folks here in the valley make her cower in her house, afraid to show herself in her own hometown. The whole way home, and as she settled him in bed and then checked on him, her Pa had kept saying that she had to be careful now, she must never go into town alone, but only with him or Dobay or one or two of the hands, or preferably not at all.

  Well, to all the hells with that. She threw a moldy bean aside so hard it bounced off the table and went skittering across the floor. The people of Bitterbush Springs were her people, more than any mage could ever be. She’d been born here, had lived here all her nineteen years. This was her home. She belonged here, damn it; she had as much right to be here as anyone. More than that, she had saved the people of the valley from the monster that Carden would have become under the Sh’kimech’s control. And Mr. Vendine had helped, and had also saved them from the blueskins. They had to understand that not all wizards were bad.

  She suddenly felt restless; she couldn’t stand to look at those damned kitchen walls another moment. She and Mr. Vendine had saved this valley, damn it. And she had never done anyone any harm. They had to see that; she was going to make them see it, no matter what.