Bone Magic

by Brent Nichols

  Tam was waiting for her at the riverbend. He was riding a fat pony, with his axe strapped across the back of the saddle along with a bedroll. He wore an often-patched cloak that was much too big for him, and a determined expression.

  Tira sighed. "Go home, son. You're not coming with me."

  "I can help you."

  "I doubt it."

  "How do you know that?" he demanded. "You don't know a thing about me!"

  "I know you're a child," she said. When he opened his mouth she raised her hand to stop him. "When was the last time you shaved?"

  "Yesterday," he said, with a touch of pride.

  "And the time before that?"

  He reddened a bit. "I'm no child."

  "You're no soldier, either. Look at you! You're armed with a wood axe, and you're riding a pony, for pity's sake."

  He didn't answer, but his eyes went to the mule she was riding, and the look on his face spoke volumes.

  "Okay, never mind the pony," she told him. "Suppose we find whoever took those children. Whoever it is, they won't be too happy with us. You could get killed."

  "That's my problem," he said. "Not yours."

  She nodded, conceding the point. "Well, you and that axe won't be much use in a fight, and I've seen how you move through the forest. You're not much good as a scout, either. You say you know the country, but what's the farthest you've ever been from this spot right here?"

  He squirmed in his saddle. "Twenty miles?"

  Tira shook her head. "So you won't be much use as a guide, either." She pulled her hat off, raked her fingers through her hair, and put the hat back in place. "Name one thing you can contribute that I need." She glared at him, and he grinned.

  "Breakfast."

  "Pardon me?"

  His grin widened, and he leaned forward, patting a bulging sack tied in front of his saddle. "I've got bacon, a small loaf of bread, a sack of beans, some salt, six of last year's potatoes, half of a ham, and an onion. Oh, and a cook pot, too."

  She stared at him, her determination fading with every passing second. "You should really go home, son."

  He shrugged. "It's too late now. After I stole all this stuff?" He patted the sack. "Ma would skin me. No, I've got to come back covered in glory, with those children in tow, or else I better not come back at all." His voice quavered a bit at the end, but his face showed nothing but stubbornness.

  "The road to glory is littered with corpses, son. You're apt to be one of them."

  He shrugged. "Nobody lives forever."

  Tira grinned in spite of herself. "All right, you win. Let's go."

  Tam's face split in an ear-to-ear grin, and he wheeled the pony around. "Fantastic! Which way are we going?"

  Ultimately they headed back up the same road Tira had used to reach Raven Crossing. There were half a dozen farms on the far side of the village, Tam explained, and none of those farmers had seen a thing. Beyond a two-mile circle around the village the forest had never known an axe, and while cross-country travel was not impossible, it was difficult at best. With three uncooperative children in tow it would be a nightmare.

  "Who are you people?" Tira asked. "Why do you have a village in the middle of nowhere?"

  "It's a town," Tam said, a bit defensively.

  "I've seen towns. Believe me, it's a village. What's it doing in the middle of a forest, on a road that gets almost no traffic?"

  He shrugged. "Maybe the logs?" When he saw her confusion he elaborated. "Every spring when the river runs high, the log drivers bring a load of logs down from Carmody. This is the only place the river crosses the road for, I don't know, a hundred miles? They buy supplies, and Mr. Carver in the town buys some timber, and a trader comes through every summer and buys the logs from him." He paused, looked at Tira, and frowned. "What's wrong?"

  "We're being watched," she told him. "I can feel it." Her eyes scanned the trees on either side. She had seen or heard something without realizing it, was only aware of it as a prickling sensation on her neck. She closed her eyes and racked her brain, trying to figure out what the clue had been.

  The flap of wings made her open her eyes. A raven came winging out of the trees, flapping lazily as it flew along above the road.

  Birds. That was it. She had noticed a pattern in the birdsong around her. A patch of woods where the birds were quiet, because they had noticed a hidden watcher.

  "Come on," she said, wheeling Daisy around and heading for the side of the road.

  Tam hurried to catch up. "Where are we going?"

  "I don't know. But keep up."

  They rode down through a low ditch and up into the trees. At first the undergrowth was quite thick, but away from the road, where the summer leaves would form a thick canopy overhead, the underbrush thinned. The hooves of Daisy and the pony were silent on a carpet of last autumn's fallen leaves. The sunlit road was a bright strip behind them, the shadowy world around them filled with a hush that made Tira think of a temple.

  There was no one in sight, and no sign that anyone had been there. Tira stopped when she could no longer see the road, and doubled back. Finally she sat perfectly still in Daisy's saddle, just breathing, letting every detail of the scene soak in. Tam was beside her, clearly struggling to restrain his curiosity. She ignored him.

  Motion caught her eye.

  She swung down from the saddle and walked through the old leaves that filled the spaces between the great trunks around her. The same tiny movement caught her eye again. She took a couple more steps and dropped into a squat.

  "What is it?" Tam asked.

  Tira pointed to the stalks of grass in front of her. Several stems were slowly rising, like an arthritic man standing up. "Someone was here," she said. "Someone stood on this tuft of grass just a few minutes ago."

  He squatted beside her, peering blankly at the grass.

  "No horse," she said. "A horse would leave signs. There's no hoof prints, no droppings." She glanced back at the path Daisy and the pony had taken through the trees. The fallen leaves were clearly disturbed, the moist layer beneath showing as darker splotches where it was exposed. Tam's footprints showed clearly. He had scuffed through the leaves, turning them over or brushing them aside.

  Only Tira's tracks were invisible. She hadn't been trying to hide her footprints, but she was light on her feet and cautious by habit, setting her feet down with unconscious care, making little sound and leaving the ground undisturbed.

  The watcher was someone like her, then. Someone with a light step, at home in the forest.

  Someone impossible to track.

  "Bring the animals," she said. "Stay well back." Then she uncased her bow and strung it, and walked deeper into the forest, scanning the ground and the underbrush.

  Sometimes she was almost sure she was on the right path. The leaves were slightly disturbed, in a pattern that was only noticeable over ten or fifteen feet of ground. Any one leaf might have been moved by wind or a squirrel, but taken all together it showed the path of a walking person.

  Other times she was just guessing. She chose the path that a cautious ranger might take, and sooner or later she found something that hinted that she might have gotten it right. When the ground was soft there were depressions that might have been made by human feet. Broken twigs and bent stalks of grass showed up about where her quarry would have stepped.

  She moved slowly, deliberately, her eyes always scanning for the next clue. Behind her, Tam was having a much harder time of it, veering back and forth to lead the animals around fallen logs and other obstacles that Tira could scramble over with ease.

  Finally she stopped, perched herself on a fallen log, and waited for Tam to catch up. He reached her in a few minutes, puffing and red-faced, his cheek showing a scratch from a stray branch. Daisy looked annoyed, her ears laid back against her skull. The pony took it all in stride, lowering his head to crop the spring grass as soon as Tam stopped walking.

  He took a moment to catch his breath. "Why'd you stop?"

&
nbsp; "Game trail." She gestured with her bow.

  He brightened. "Great! We'll be able to ride."

  She shook her head. "The branches are too low. We'll have to lead the animals. But that's not the problem."

  His eyebrows rose. "What's the problem, then?"

  "Tracks." She gestured at the trail. "There won't be any more tracks, and I don't know which way he went." She sighed in frustration. "That's assuming I didn't lose the trail half an hour ago."

  "He went to the left," Tam said, and she stared at him.

  "How do you know that?"

  "Spider web."

  He pointed. Sure enough, she could make out strands of silk glinting in a rare sunbeam that had penetrated the mesh of branches above. The web was large and intricate, and it completely blocked the path to the right. Nothing larger than a fox had gone that way in quite a few hours.

  As she watched, the glow on the spider web faded and disappeared. The sun was getting quite low in the sky. "We won't go much farther tonight," she said. "I don't fancy tracking a kidnapper in the dark."

  Tam looked glum at the thought of stopping, but he nodded. Tira took Daisy's reins and led the way down the narrow ribbon of path, stooping sometimes to clear low-hanging branches. After a few minutes she heard the sound of running water.

  A narrow brook wound its way through the trees, and she let Daisy drink while she scouted around. She found a hollow that would partially obscure the light of a campfire and provide some shelter if the wind started to blow. It was as good a campsite as any.

  A fire was a calculated risk, but fresh bacon was a lure too strong for her to resist. Their quarry was probably long gone, and if they got the fire out before full dark it wouldn't be visible from very far off. She sent Tam to gather firewood while she got to work with flint and steel.

  "Should we set a watch?" he asked as the bacon cooked. "Will we take turns?"

  "I'm not spending half the night awake," she told him. "We're safe enough. Whoever it is, he wants to avoid people like us. He'll run away, not double back."

  He accepted that without hesitation. After dinner Tira put the fire out, and they laid out their bedrolls on either side of the fire's coals. Tam was snoring almost immediately, but she lay awake for a time, wondering just who she was up against, wondering if she was being overconfident.

  Still, it would be a brutal journey with the watch split two ways. Her years in the military had made her a light sleeper, and Daisy and the pony would make noise if anyone tried to sneak up on them. She decided that would have to be good enough, and drifted off to sleep.

  Chapter 3

  Tam was quiet the next morning, almost gloomy. Tira, who had been travelling alone for weeks, enjoyed the silence and waited for him to announce that he was going home. It was probably his first night ever in a strange place, and from here it would only get stranger. The notion of adventure would have felt like a fine idea when he set out, but the cold light of morning after a night of sleeping rough was something else entirely.

  She shook a handful of oats in a cup to draw in Daisy and the pony. They had wandered in search of forage, but they showed up quickly enough at the rattle of the grain. She gave each animal a few oats, just enough to reinforce the habit.

  Tam built a fire, toasted fat slices of bread for breakfast, and rolled up his blankets in silence. When he turned his gaze toward the distant road Tira was sure he would break. However, all he did was pick up his saddle and sling it across the pony's back. "Maybe we'll catch up today," he said. "I hope the children are still alive."

  Tira smiled to herself. The boy had a little more character than she'd given him credit for.

  Then he reached under the pony's belly, fed the cinch through the buckle, yanked on the strap, and stumbled back as the cinch broke. He looked so comically astonished that Tira couldn't help chuckling. She reached down and picked up her own saddle.

  One strap hung crooked. She set the saddle down and knelt, looking closer.

  The cinch had been neatly sliced most of the way through.

  For a long time she just knelt there, staring into the trees, thinking about the ramifications.

  "Yours too?" said Tam quietly.

  She nodded.

  "I guess we should have set a watch."

  Tira shrugged. "I don't know if it would have helped." She stood, rubbing her arms, suddenly chilly. "Whoever did this… I'm not sure we could have stopped him."

  "What do you mean?"

  She didn't look at Tam. "He's good. He's very, very good. Light on his feet, silent, and he didn't spook the animals. If someone had been awake, maybe one of us would have a slit throat right now."

  "Well," he said, with the air of someone trying to sound brave, "at least we know we're on the right track."

  "This isn't our kidnapper," Tira told him. "This is someone else."

  "How do you know?"

  She shrugged, not sure how to explain what her instincts were telling her. This ranger they were tracking wasn't moving like someone burdened with children, and he wasn't ruthless enough to be a child thief, either. She shivered as she thought of him creeping into the camp while she and Tam slept. He could have cut both their throats and been done with them. It would have been easier, safer, than messing with the saddles.

  "Let's go," she said. "We'll lead the animals. It looks like the bridles are okay."

  "Where are we going?"

  Tira shrugged. "North, I guess. Same way we came since we left the road. We won't try to track our mysterious friend, though." She ran her finger along the cut in the strap. "I can take a hint."

  "But where are we headed?" Tam persisted.

  She shrugged again. "We're headed wherever we end up. I came up the road from the east, and I didn't see any sign of the kidnappers. No one to the west of Raven Crossing saw anything. That means the kidnappers left the road at some point. South of here it's all high mountains. So we go north, and we hope for a lucky break."

  Tam looked dubious, but he nodded. He took one cord from his bedroll and used it to secure his saddle to the pony's back. It wouldn't hold his weight, but the empty saddle would stay in place. Then he followed Tira out of the campsite and onto the path.

  It was a long, weary day. Daisy, rather than being grateful for the reduced load, was recalcitrant and grumpy, trying to graze on every dandelion she passed. Tira tugged irritably on her reins, frustrated by the slow pace. She was even more frustrated by having nowhere in particular to go.

  They followed the game path for as long as it took them roughly northward. Then they slogged their way cross-country, making endless detours around fallen logs and impenetrable thickets. Finally in early afternoon they found the remnants of an ancient road. Little remained except occasional paving stones showing through the grass, but there was nothing growing along the old road bed taller than a sapling.

  "Huh," said Tam. "I didn't know this was here. I wonder where it goes." He looked over his shoulder. "I wonder where it comes from."

  "I guess we'll find out what's at one end," Tira said. They walked through the grass for a few minutes. She could finally see for more than a dozen paces, at least in one direction, so she brought out her bow and strung it. They were eating their way through Tam's supplies at an alarming rate, and a rabbit or a buck wouldn't go amiss.

  The local animal life clearly appreciated the road as a travel route. The grass was often trampled, and Tira smiled, thinking of a venison dinner.

  Then she saw the fire circle.

  It was a simple ring of stones, blackened on the inside, with the charred remains of a fire in the middle. All around, the grass was trampled flat. Some of the grass had been cropped, and she found horse droppings near the tree line.

  "This is recent," she told Tam, feeling a rising excitement. "Someone camped here last night or the night before."

  His eyes lit up. "The kidnappers?"

  "Maybe." She ran her eyes around the site. "The camp is big enough. You would want more than one per
son if you needed to grab three children and keep control of them. At any rate, it's our best lead so far."

  They set out with renewed determination, setting a brisk pace that had Daisy braying in dismay. However, sunset caught them still alone on the abandoned road.

  It was mid-morning on the next day when Daisy lifted her head and tilted her ears forward. A few minutes later, Tira caught the distant sound of water flowing somewhere ahead. Shortly after that, the trees ended and they found themselves in a town.

  "This is spooky," Tam said, staring around. "What is this place? I've never even heard of it."

  The town was abandoned. Trees taller than Tira grew in the streets or poked their branches out through the windows of houses. There were dozens of buildings, all of them with sagging roofs or leaning walls. Many had collapsed completely.

  A stone wall surrounded the town, but it had disintegrated so completely that Tira and Tam were past it before they realized it was there. In a few places the stones still stood two or even three feet high, but most of the wall was nothing but rubble.

  A massive building held a place of honor in the heart of the town. Stone walls, largely intact, still stood chest-high. Above the stone, a few blackened timbers hinted at the structure that had once stood there.

  "What happened?" Tam said. "Where did everybody go?"

  "Goblins," said Tira.

  "How do you know?"

  She shrugged. "I don't, really. But it fits." She gestured at the forest around them. "This is prime goblin country. A war party hit the town, everyone retreated to the keep, and the goblins burned it. If there were any survivors, they packed up and left. Instant ghost town."