This was pretty much what all of the village youngsters were doing; the parents had discovered that if they could be with friends, they withstood it all better. So the children got rounded up after supper, divided up by age groups, and bedded down in a huddle.
Nevertheless, she asked Mayar to go snooping about and see if he could detect any incipient stirrings of a Gift. The Companions in general were much better at that sort of thing than she was.
“Who’s the old man that lives up above the pond at Stony Rill?” she asked, as if it were an afterthought. “Shouldn’t he be brought down here for safety?”
Granny snorted. “Old man Hardaker? He has no friends down here. Stingiest old rooster that was ever born. Squeezes every groat till it squeaks, goes into a fury if a crow steals so much as a grain of his, counts everything, living or dead, on his land as ’is own property. Fights the squirrels for the nuts, ’e does. They say ’e killed his wife with overwork, treated her like a slave; that I can’t speak for, it was afore my time. Sure he got no children on ’er, so I suppose he reckoned t’get work out of ’er instead. If I was a haunt, I’d stay clear of ’im. Give half a chance, he’d find a way t’bind a spirit and make it work for him, and count himself lucky that ’e wouldna have to feed and clothe it!”
Elyn smiled wryly. “He didn’t seem to be aware that there was anything amiss here in the village.”
Granny made a face. “Never believe it. ’E knows. ’E knows, and if ’e’s being haunted too, ’e’ll never let on. Gives nothin’ away, that one, not even a thought. But ’e can’t do wi’out us. We’re the only village near enough t’buy what ’e grows, an’ the only craftsmen near enough for him t’get what ’e needs. ‘E’d never leave his land t’take ’is goods t’ market, an’ never trust one of ’is ’ands t’ do it for ’im.” She cackled a little. “No doubt, that makes ’im even more sour, the ald sack!”
Well, so much for the old man. If he, too, was suffering from the haunts, he was probably blaming it on the village and would not give them the satisfaction of knowing he was afraid. Nor would he ever ask for help. And even if he did, it was unlikely anyone here would give it to him.
Elyn poked about the village a bit more and found that Granny’s opinion of the old man was universal. No one liked him. Everyone had a story about his penny-pinching and attempts to cheat them. Everyone also admitted that they did their level best to cheat him back. It was a point of honor among the young men to try to steal fruit from his orchard or poach his fish or game. There was no way of telling who had begun the acrimony, but at this point there was going to be no putting an end to it.
She managed to meet the suspect striplings and couldn’t make up her mind whether or not they would be capable of the sheer amount of work and ingenuity that the “haunting” would take. They weren’t stupid, but they also didn’t show the level of intelligence of, say, Rod, much less Alma—and that was what such a task would take, if it was a purely mischief-making endeavor and not the unconscious breaking out of some sort of Gift.
They also all seemed as genuinely terrified as their parents. Elyn was fairly good at telling when she was being lied to even without the use of the Truth Spell, and she didn’t get that impression now.
But when she met up with the rest back at the threshing barn, she discovered that Rod had already made up his mind about one thing.
“We can’t just huddle in here like a lot of scared children,” he said firmly. “And I don’t for a moment think that these are demons or ghosts. I think it’s people. In fact, I think it’s some of the villagers. Maybe some of the younger ones.”
“But, Rod!” Laurel exclaimed indignantly. “I told you that story they told me, and you still don’t think it’s disturbed spirits?”
“Wait, wait, what story?” Elyn demanded.
Laurel looked both excited and apprehensive as she turned toward their mentor. “Some of the older boys told me that around early apple harvest time, they went up to the old man’s orchard to steal fruit, like always. They heard the sound of someone digging! At night! And then they didn’t think anything more about it, except that the next day, Stony Rill was as red as blood! And it was that night that the hauntings began! They think the old man was looking for treasure and dug up a burial mound! And now the spirits are angry!”
“All the more reason to think it’s them,” Rod snorted, as Alma got an extremely thoughtful look on her face. “What a ridiculous story!”
“It’s not ridiculous!” Laurel stamped her foot and crossed her arms angrily over her chest. “You just don’t like it because they didn’t tell you!”
“I don’t like it because it’s not logical.” Rod’s chin looked even more granite-like than usual. “If it was spirits that were disturbed because the old man was digging their bodies up, why haunt the village? What did the villagers do to them? Why not haunt the old man?”
“Well, maybe they are! And they just spread out! Or maybe they are trying to get the villagers to do something about the old man!” Her eyes flashed with anger. “Just because you don’t believe in ghosts—”
Behind them, a couple of the Companions whickered as if laughing.
“Then they’ve got to be stupider in death than they are in life,” Rod countered. “Because you’d think it would be a lot easier to just appear in front of people and say politely, ‘That old man is robbing our graves, and we’d hate to have to make you miserable because of what he is doing, but if you don’t make him leave us alone, we’ll just have to make all of you as unhappy as we are.’ Instead, they’re getting nothing done except to make people terrified at night!”
Arville’s head swiveled back and forth between them, as if he were watching a game. Ryu just lay flat on the ground with his ears over his paws.
“Oh!” Laurel said, driven to speechlessness with anger. “Oh!”
“Anyway, you just stay here in the barn and tell Elyn what you think of me,” Rod said ungallantly. “I’ll be outside with Arville and Ryu and the Companions laying a trap. Because it’s not ghosts, it’s people, and I am going to catch them!”
“Wait, what?” Arville replied, looking panicked.
“If you don’t need me,” Alma said carefully. “I do have something I need to check in here.”
:Mayar?: Elyn thought.
:He asked us, and it’s a good plan. Certainly better than Laurel’s idea of holding a séance to find out what the spirits want. If it’s people, we will catch them. If it is demons, well, you will find us stampeding into the barn fast enough. And if it is spirits, we can try Laurel’s idea.: Mayar seemed quite satisfied with whatever it was that Rod had decided.
Well, she was supposed to be getting them to think and plan for themselves, wasn’t she? And they had certainly plunged into this, not only with enthusiasm, but with some forethought.
“Go ahead and set your trap, Rod,” she said firmly, cutting short any protests. “Alma, Laurel, we three will try to make enough sounds in here to make it seem as if all of us are in here.” She glanced out the open door. “If you’re going to get things set up, Rod, you’d better do so now, and then you’ll be in hiding well before sunset. I want all of you that are going to be setting up the trap to go in and out several times so that if anyone is watching us, they’ll likely lose count. Get water or wood, anything you think is a good excuse. Laurel, you and I will take care of the camp chores and make a lot of noise about it while Alma does her investigation.”
Laurel looked ready to burst with indignation, but she didn’t protest. Alma dove into the storage compartments and assembled a mortar and pestle, a couple of buckets of water, some dishes, and some other apparatus, and set to breaking up something in the mortar and pestle that made enough noise to cover just about anything.
Looking very unhappy, Arville and Ryu made several trips in and out of the doors carrying water and small amounts of wood, some odds and ends, before finally going out and not coming back again. The Companions made a more convincing job of it,
bringing in quite a good deal of firewood before vanishing one by one. Elyn shut the door after them, lit all the lanterns, and, with Laurel’s sulky help, began making noisy supper preparations. At this point, Alma was doing something inscrutable with the dishes and the water; whatever it was, it was making some sound too, so Elyn left her to it.
She stretched out the preparations as long as she could; it wasn’t easy to tell in here whether the sun had set or not. Since it was a threshing building, it was as sealed against vermin as could be managed. The food was ready in what seemed to her to be far too short a time, but there was no point in wasting it. She and Laurel ate; Alma came and fetched herself a bowl of the thick soup Elyn had made, then went back to her buckets. Halfway through the meal, she had stopped messing about with the buckets and was pounding again, this time using the pestle as a hammer against a stone, pounding something she had wrapped in a bit of cloth.
She unfolded the cloth, peered at what was in there, and then did something with it. “Aha!” Elyn heard her say.
And that was when everything exploded outside.
The long, moaning howl began. Elyn heard Ryu yelp, Arville burst out with a terrified exclamation of “G-ghosts!” and Rod shout, “Got you!”
And that was the signal for what sounded like a battle royal.
She ran for the doors, but they were both bolted again. She and Alma and Laurel pounded on them fruitlessly for a while, while outside she could hear not only Rod shouting, but the sounds of fighting, of other men shouting, of Arville and Ryu howling, of angry whinnies and hoofbeats.
:Get back!: Mayar “shouted” in her mind.
She cleared Laurel and Alma away from the doors; there was a furious kick and a crash and the door burst open.
Through the now-open doors poured a tangled heap of people and nets, some free and fighting and some not, followed by all five Companions, relentlessly driving them all inside. Arville and Ryu were the most tangled up, but there were some strangers in there too, all of them masked and draped in tattered rags that smelled like mold and rotting wood.
Masked they might have been, but they were fighters; Elyn slashed Ryu and Arville free with her sword while Alma and Laurel joined in the fight. By now all the noise had brought the villagers out of their homes and up to the barn; several of the bravest grabbed pieces of firewood and waded into the affray while the Companions circled the outside of the mob and kept anyone from escaping—
—including one masked miscreant, who, alone among all of them, was not armed and not fighting. Mayar was the one who caught him by the scruff of the neck in his teeth as he tried to get away, and kept him dangling off the ground while the rest of the gang was subdued and trussed up.
With them was an assortment of noisemakers that had produced all the unearthly howls. There were bull-roarers, a set of several predator-calls strapped together so they could all be sounded at the same time, and a contraption with a rough piece of twine that could be pulled through something like a drum-head of rawhide, producing a truly uncanny moan.
“I told you it was just people!” Rod shouted in triumph, when the last of them—the fellow dangling from Mayar’s teeth—was firmly bound and set with the rest.
By now all of the village—most tellingly, all of the youngsters, including the ones that Rod had suspected—had crowded into the barn. “Well it might not have been spirits,” Laurel sniffed, examining first her improvised club, which she then cast aside, and then her nails. “But it wasn’t who you thought it was.”
And hanging in the air was the unspoken so there!
“Let’s find out who it is, then,” Elyn said evenly, before they could start fighting again. She pulled the mask off the one nearest her, revealing a fellow with a lot of bruises, a black eye, and a surly expression. She looked at the villagers. “Anyone you know?”
Baffled, they all shook their heads. She continued to pull off masks, to similar bafflement, until she came to the last. Then came the gasps.
“Old man Hardaker!” shouted someone. The old man snarled, but said nothing. “Why would you do this to us?”
“I think I know,” Alma said in a hard voice, and came forward with that bit of cloth. “Look.”
She opened it up, and a small piece of something yellow and shining glimmered in the lamplight.
They all stared. “Great Havens,” Elyn finally said. “Is that gold?”
The villagers gasped as Alma nodded. “You know how Herald Bevins always says ‘Find the motive and you find the criminal?’ I went looking for a motive. When we were up at Stony Rill I thought I saw a little bit of gold-sand, so I started gathering up what I thought were likely bits of sand and rock. I panned this out of what I crushed up.” She grinned in triumph. “When Rod told me the story the boys had told him, I was pretty sure I was right, anyway. The old man here was digging for treasure, all right, but it wasn’t in a burial mound. And when Stony Rill turned red, it was just because he’d been washing the gold-rock. Right, old man?”
Hardaker spat in her direction.
“I made sure it was real gold by pounding it into a flake and testing it against a touchstone. It’s real, all right.” Alma beamed at the villagers. “You folks have a nice little gold mine here. And before we leave, we’ll draw you up a charter so you can all share alike in the work and the profits.”
Oh, well done! Elyn thought with pride. Get them to agree to a charter now, so that there are no quarrels about it after we’re long gone. Good thinking, Alma!
“It’s on my land!” Hardaker spat. “Ye’ve got no rights! And it weren’t me! ’Twas them! ’Twas all their ideer!”
“Oh, really?” Rod drawled.
And that was when one of the strangers finally caved in. “You demmed old bastard!” he snarled. “Sell us out, ye think?” He struggled a bit with his bonds, then gave up. “We heerd about ye Heralds. Ye’re hard but fair. Lemme tell ye what this old coot had up ’is sleeve. ’E found the gold, aye, an’ mined out ‘nuff t’ pay us with, but wouldn’ tell us where it was. Just told us to scare these turnip-heads out. An’ if’n he couldn’t scare ’em out, we was t’get rid of ’em—however.” There was a flicker of uncertainty in the man’s face then. “We nivver really reckon’d on hurtin’ no one, we figgered these clodhoppers would scare out right easy. But ... well, he was gettin’ impatient, an’ talkin’ ’bout gettin’ some’un else in here t’get rougher ...”
Now Hardaker looked both furious and alarmed. “Was just talk! Meant t’give ye layabouts reason t’do what I paid ye fer!”
“That will be enough, old man,” Elyn said impassively. “What we’ve heard is enough for us.” She looked about at the villagers. “Do you consent to giving us the same rights of judgment as we would have in Valdemar?”
They looked at one another and then back at Elyn. “Put it in that there charter,” said Benderk, finally. “I’ fact ...” He scratched his head. “Reckon it’d be better all around if—c’n ye make us part of Valdemar?”
Elyn blinked. “Well,” she said cautiously, “yes. You folk aren’t actually part of any other kingdom. But the Crown would take a percentage from the gold from your mine—five percent, if I recall correctly—in exchange for things like a Guard detachment to keep it and you safe, and for twice yearly visits from Heralds, and—”
“And we mostly trade with Valdemar an’ the Crown’d take more than that fer trade taxes,” Benderk said shrewdly. “Aye, that’ll work.” He looked at Alma. “Draw up yer charter, missy. We’ll all sign it. What’s t’be done with this lot?”
He toed Hardaker.
“As subjects of Valdemar, I can declare his land and goods confiscated and turned over to you. He and these men will be taken to the nearest Guardpost—”
:I have already passed the news up the line. Guards will be on the way in the morning. We need only stay here long enough to keep this lot locked up until they arrive.:
“—and men are on the way,” she continued smoothly, thanking the Havens for t
he swift mental communication between Companions. “Meanwhile, we will see to everything, including guarding these men for you.” She looked sternly down at Hardaker. “You, I am afraid, are going to be subjected to the Truth Spell to find out exactly how far your intentions toward these people were going to go. And we will find out exactly how many wrongs were originally on both sides.”
Some of the villagers had the grace to look embarrassed and a little guilty. But not so much so that Elyn feared anything terribly ugly was going to come out of the investigation.
“Nevertheless, I do not think it excuses the intent to drive people out of their homes,” she concluded. “That was an entirely immoral plan. Clever but immoral.”
“And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling Heralds!” the old man spat.
Elyn could only shake her head. “Let’s find a good place to lock this lot up,” she only said. “I want him confined away from the rest for his own safety.” She nodded at Rod. “Take charge of that, will you?”
“Gladly.” Rod prodded them to their feet with a toe. “ Get going, you.”
“And well done, all of you.” She finally allowed herself to smile.
And then felt a nudging at her shoulder blade, and turned to look into Ryu’s big brown eyes.
“Ru-rer row?” the kyree asked plaintively.
“Supper!” Arville said, his expression identical to Ryu’s. “We’re starving!”
Oh, kill me now, Elyn sighed.
An Unexpected Guest
by Nancy Asire
Nancy Asire is the author of four novels:
Twilight’s Kingdoms, Tears of Time, To Fall Like Stars
Moving Targets and Other Tales of Valdemar v(-102 Page 4