“Even the dream.” He dug his fingers into his knees to steady himself against the roaring of his blood. “Especially the dream.”
She shivered, a delicate motion of shoulders. “I first saw the lion after we’d been in the Wehrland a few days. After Rees tried...after he tried...”
“Yes,” he said, to spare her the memory. The effort earned him a quick glance and the briefest lift of her lips. He swallowed, thinking about how those lips would feel pressed to his—his anything! For once he was grateful for the hood, for how it hid his thoughts from her. He cleared his throat. “What brought you to Ar-Deneth? You said something about bloodstone.”
She released the crumpled homespun and locked her hands together while her lip trembled. “My father...the Master of Nolar wanted my father to make all of his wedding jewelry. That’s my father’s trade, gem-cutting.” She dabbed at her nose, lifted her head and stared at the top of the walls. “We had to go to Ar-Deneth because Master Brandelmore insisted he had to have bloodstone in every piece. Ulerroth didn’t have enough.”
“So you came after me.”
“Not exactly. Rees got us thrown out of Ar-Deneth because of you.” When he stared at her with a cocked head, she added, “He called Ulerroth a demon-trader for dealing with you.”
Durren expelled a breath. No wonder Ulerroth had thrown them out, after an insult like that. “So you followed me.”
“We tried, but the Krad made my horse bolt. And then the lion led me to you.”
“And the others followed.”
She nodded. “Does any of that help? Do you know now what’s changed?”
He studied his hands, wondering how he could explain something magical to one who had no knowledge of it. Especially when he, who should’ve known all there was to know about magic, had failed so miserably in his studies. The Sword had been his calling, always, but that was no excuse—not then and not now. He drew in a breath and let it out slowly. “A spell is like...weaving. If you make a mistake, or change something before the spell is complete, all someone has to do is pull the right thread and the whole thing will unravel. I just don’t know what thread has been pulled.”
“Or what mistake was made.” She must have sensed his sudden, sharp regard because she said with a shrug, “Well, if it’s a mistake, then nothing really is changing, is it? It’s just...a weak spot that’s wearing out. Sometimes that’s why a hole wears where it shouldn’t...for no apparent reason.” When he continued to stare at her, she flushed. “You said you broke the spell—”
“The crystal. The mage was using the crystal to make the spell.”
She scowled—there was no other word for the look she shot him from under her brows. He resisted the impulse to recoil. No one had regarded him with such ferocity in years, but now he understood how she’d survived the Wehrland accompanied only by an aged father, a fat man, and one randy cock.
“The point is,” she was saying, “you broke something. Wouldn’t that create a mistake? Like when my father cuts a stone and it crumbles because it had a flaw he couldn’t see.” Her eyes brimmed, and she dropped her head, hiding her face under a fall of curls. Slow, fat tears splashed one after another on her knuckles.
With each glistening droplet, acid leaked into Durren’s stomach. He had no experience with tears. He’d had little enough experience with women before Syryk had changed him into a nightmare. He was a warrior. And a Drakkonwehr. Those had guaranteed him plenty of experience in bed, but other than his sister and mother, he’d never had to deal with a woman on any other terms. His life had been filled with the Sword. Women had no place in it. His mother understood that, but Ayliss never—
The woman sniffled and wiped her hand on her skirt.
Durren glared at her bent head. He’d be damned if he’d let a few tears manipulate him into pitying her. He’d taken her away from her father, true enough, but the old man was a fool to have brought her across the Wehrland for a handful of gems. Even she had to admit that. Look how they’d blundered about, stirring up the Krad. They’d been lucky to escape with their lives. If he hadn’t helped them, they’d all be dead. And she couldn’t deny she was safer now than she’d been with the man called Rees.
Are you sure she knows that? said the Voice in his head.
She damned well should after last night! But the voice was likely right—in some small way. Perhaps she didn’t realize how safe she was, how protected—
Whistling penetrated Durren’s consciousness, and he realized Gareth had finished his chores. “Stop your weeping. You’ll frighten the boy.”
Liar, the Voice in his head said. The boy already knows.
He can still be frightened! I have to stop her somehow.
For your own comfort, you mean.
Shame stabbed at him again, but he shook it off and stood.
Her breath hitched, but she dashed both hands over her face. “I’m sorry.”
The boy stopped a few feet away and faced their general direction. “I was wondering, sir, if you spend all winter here, you must have a better place to keep the horses, don’t you?”
Durren expelled a long breath. “You’re quite right. There’s some pasture and a garden within the outer wall. And part of the stable is intact. I was planning to show it to you once you got to know your way around.” He breathed again while the muscles about his jaw unclenched. “Would you like to see it now?”
****
Gareth had dawdled over grooming the horses as long as he could to give them time to talk. Even though he couldn’t pick out the words, he had a fair idea what they were saying from the tone of their voices. His master’s was sometimes kindly, sometimes gruff—sort of like Ulerroth if he could imagine the innkeeper as someone who hadn’t had a lot of practice talking. Hers sounded scared and sometimes sad.
Gareth wished he could comfort her, tell her it was all right to be sad and frightened when they were far away from everything they knew, that he’d only told the Shadow Man because he wanted to help her. He didn’t think the Shadow Man wanted her to be scared. His master was just a bit...awkward around people.
He and his master were two of a kind, really. He lacked sight, but the Shadow Man lacked touch. Gareth didn’t know what Mirianna lacked—maybe her father. She was sad about that, but he understood. He would have to find a way to tell her the pain faded with time, and he mostly didn’t notice the ache until something made him think about his mother. Mirianna was a little older than he, and her father wasn’t actually dead like his mother was, so maybe it would go easier for her, but then she was a girl, and that could change things. Freth’s mood could change in a moment, for no apparent reason, and he’d always felt uncomfortable around Nell. Mirianna wasn’t like either of them, but she was still a puzzle.
She and the Shadow Man had made some sort of agreement when the Krad attacked, and now they both seemed unhappy about it, so he wasn’t sure why his master was so determined to make her stay. For his part, Gareth didn’t want her to leave. She was sort of like a mother and sort of like an older sister—like Freth but nicer, like his mother but younger. And it was nice to have her to talk to and to keep him company at night, even if she did cry.
He would probably have cried too, if he’d been alone here. From the courtyard, Gareth could sense the sheer size and dimensions of the place by the way sounds vibrated, resounded or echoed. In the enclosed spaces, the shadows sucked all warmth from his skin, their chill deep-seated, as though the sun hadn’t touched them in ages. When he laid a hand on their walls, he could feel frost beneath the gritty surface, sense the winter freeze lying close to the bones of the place. Yet other walls radiated heat, and on one part of the path to the privy, waves of warmth rose from the stones he trod. He’d paused there more than once, wondering if his senses were misleading him, but it was always the same place and always the same temperature, day or dark.
He’d have to ask his master about that, but for now he was glad to learn this place his master called home had pasture enough
for the horses as well as a garden of sorts, chickens, and a couple of kid goats who nibbled on his tunic every time he turned around or butted him gently. He’d have to set them straight about how to treat him, but maybe Mirianna could help with milking the doe, at least until the goats knew him better.
She’d followed along, leading her gelding while Gareth took the pack horse and his master led the stallion. While they loosed the animals in the pasture and explored the garden and tumble-down stable, she’d said nothing, staying just close enough Gareth could sense her presence or smell her scent, but showing no particular interest. Sadness hung about her like a heavy cloak, making her preoccupation so thick the air currents parted to flow around it. The Shadow Man, too, seemed preoccupied, answering questions, but not immediately, as if he had to be recalled to the present.
Gareth stood between them and puzzled over the auras radiating from both. They seemed to be thinking awfully hard, and now and then something passed between them, something prickly that stirred the fine hairs on his arms and made his nostrils tingle. The scent teased, never staying long enough for him to identify. He wondered if they knew what they were saying to each other, but he was afraid to ask in case they didn’t. People never seemed to understand how he could know what he knew.
****
The shelion reappeared after dusk, materializing out of the shadow of the gate. Before Durren could form a word of warning, she sauntered to Gareth where he sat by the fire and laid her large head in his lap. The boy started violently, but the weight of her head held him trapped in place.
“Don’t be afraid,” Durren said, half-rising, hand closing on the Sword of Drakkonwehr. “It’s a lion, but it’s friendly.” Don’t you dare harm him! his mind messaged the cat.
—Trust me, Durren. For once.—
He sat down, but his hand remained on his weapon.
With half-lidded eyes, the lion butted the boy in the chest and purred. His hands, which had flown up by a face gone white, lowered by increments until one grazed her fur. She purred louder and pushed her head against his palm before he could pull it away. His fingers tentatively flexed behind one black-tipped ear.
“She saved you from the Krad. Do you remember any of that?” Durren tried to make his voice neutral, to project calm in a situation that seemed to skirt disaster. If this was Ayliss, how much of the lion was in her? Was she as much lion as he was Shadow? By Koronolan, he wished he knew.
At right angles to all of them, the woman looked as shocked as Durren felt, digging her fingers into her skirt and sitting absolutely still. Whatever she claimed about the lion, she was clearly not yet at ease with the beast. Koronolan be praised that Gareth couldn’t see their faces at this particular moment.
The boy lowered his other hand and skimmed it over the lion’s shoulder. “I—I thought I heard my mother...humming then.” He swallowed, hard. “Are you sure the lion won’t...”
“You’re safe, Gareth,” Durren said with more conviction than he felt. “She obviously likes you.” Did you summon her? But he dismissed the notion. The lion had appeared to him before he’d gone to Ar-Deneth, days before he’d met the boy. Something else must have brought her.
The lion peered at him through half-lidded eyes, and then raised her head for the boy to scratch her chin.
“She’s so soft,” Gareth said. The color had returned to his cheeks, but his touch remained tentative. Against the lion’s massive head and shoulders, the boy’s limbs looked as thin and fragile as kindling.
“And so loud,” the woman ventured, licking her lips while her gaze flicked from Durren to the lion.
Durren’s nerves strained against his control. He ought to do something, but what could he do? There was no danger he could see—if he accepted the outrageous notion that a Wehrland lion could behave like a tame cat—but his whole being still hummed with warning.
Ghost’s neigh from the hidden pasture, and an answering neigh from the darkness outside the gate brought him surging to his feet, Sword drawn. “Get back out of the light!” He kicked a pot of water onto the fire, dimming it, before he spun, intending to grab the woman, but she’d already bolted past him, running not away from the intruders, but toward them!
“Papa!” she cried.
Chapter Nineteen
The old man teetered over the neck of the single horse, and his weight would’ve taken the woman down to the paving stones if Durren hadn’t broken his fall. He lowered the old man to the ground where, with an anguished sound, the woman gathered her father into an embrace. The old man lay there limp, an unconscious bag of bones and fever.
All this registered in the back of Durren’s mind while he scanned the gate, the walls, the sounds of nightfall, trying to determine if the two men were alone before he confronted the fat man perched behind the horse’s saddle. Previous glances had shown the man weaponless but for a knife, and his eyes had the glazed look of one either spell-struck or frightened out of his wits.
You took his sword two days ago, the Voice in Durren’s head said.
I remember. Rubbing the bloodstone in the Sword, he muttered, “Bluet drakkenoth, ominor ay rhoenon pek,” but the stone remained dull and dark. No magic here; nothing to fear, yet more than enough to set all his senses on alert.
“Where’s your companion?” he demanded. “Where’s the other one?”
The fat man blinked once. The horse stood with its forelegs braced apart and its nose nearly touching the ground. Sweat crusted its neck and flanks, telling Durren it had carried its double burden a long way.
“Get down.” He pulled at the fat man’s sleeve. “Gareth, come and tend to this horse.”
“Yes, sir, if you think the lion will let me.”
Durren looked back at the dimmed fire. Let him up, he messaged to the cat. He has work to do.
The she-lion yawned and lifted her head from the boy’s lap, rolling onto her side as if she had every intention of relaxing by the fire.
You brought them, didn’t you? But she only yawned again, showing a curling pink tongue and gleaming teeth.
“What’s the matter with you, Papa?” The woman brushed sparse hair from the old man’s face and rocked him. “Talk to me, please.” She cast Durren a panicked look. “He’s burning up.”
The fat man finally slid to the ground, and Durren shook him again. “What are you doing here? Where’s the other one?”
“Pumble, what’s happened to my father?”
At the woman’s voice, the fat man stirred, mopping his face with a tunic sleeve. “Krad,” he said, and regarded the soaked sleeve as if he’d never seen it before.
“Krad?” she breathed.
“He got cut...back in the fire circle, I guess. Doesn’t take much, just a nick. He couldn’t stay in the saddle. Rees was all for leaving him, but...” He shook his head and blinked as if trying to bring his surroundings into focus.
“But what?” Durren prodded. “Where’s this Rees?”
Squinting like a mole, the fat man turned, gaped, and dropped with a thump to the paving stones, the impact raising clouds of fine dust around his posterior. Grabbing a charm at his neck, he kissed it and muttered over it in a voice that squeaked.
Durren resisted the urge to slap him. Coming out of a trance was disorienting enough without the added consternation of finding oneself in an unfamiliar place, but only the fat man could know what—if anything—might have followed them up the mountain. “Stop whimpering. You’re safe as long as you tell us what we want to know. Understand?”
The fat man’s gaze skittered from the woman to the boy holding his horse and back past Durren’s knees to the woman again. “Do as he says,” she told him.
Her voice must have sounded calm, reassuring to the fat man, but Durren heard the fear in it. She clutched her father so tightly, he could see her whitened knuckles. He gave her a little nod, to show his gratitude, and addressed the fat man again. “Start at the beginning. After you left us, what happened?”
The fat man mopped hi
s face with the other sleeve. “Rees—he wanted to make distance, so after we found my horse, we rode till the old man fell off. I didn’t drop him, miss, but he couldn’t hang on anymore.”
“Where was he cut?” Durren said.
“A scratch, that’s all. Didn’t even bleed.” He licked his lips. “Just there, above the boot.”
The woman grabbed at her father’s legs, baring both to the knees. Even in the dimness the swollen, reddened area, large as a man’s fist, glared at them from his right calf.
Two days gone. Durren’s stomach contracted, tightening the knot that had formed there when the old man fell from the horse. If the old man had been stabbed outright, he would’ve died within hours. Died out there, where no one would find the bones for weeks, even years. But this—this was just as deadly, and it had come inside.
Muscles tensed along Durren’s jaw as his memory played the messy details of death and its aftermath in the courtyard, walls, and chambers of Drakkonwehr. Even now, he could detect the stench of old blood rising with the day’s heat from the paving stones. He’d tried to put the carnage behind him. By Kiros, he’d kept the place clean! And now these fools had brought Death back inside!
He was still trembling when he noticed the woman looking at him, her pinched face full of questions. Once again, he gave thanks for the hood’s ability to hide his thoughts. “Krad poison,” he told her. “It works by paralyzing the limbs.”
The fat man nodded. “Rees—I don’t know what’s gotten into him. He yelled and took the gem pouch and told me to mount up and leave the old beggar—sorry, miss, but that’s what he called him. He was going to die anyway, see? And he’d just slow us down. That’s what Rees said. He was all hot for getting back to Nolar, but I didn’t think it was right, leaving the old man like that.” He cradled his cheek with a plump, dirty hand and sniffled.
“So he hit you and took off by himself.”
The fat man hung his head. “He used to be my best friend.”
Bloodstone Page 21