Blackwood Marauders

by K. S. Villoso

  “The village is under attack, you see. We were sent by Duke Iorwin.”

  “I’ve heard of Iorwin,” the ka-eng said. “Blackwood. Gred Blackwood’s son. Oh, Gred was a despicable man. He tried to send a lumber company to try to strip the woods near the Blackwood Gap. Didn’t stop even when he’d lost many good men to the chasm.” The good humour fell from her face.

  Luc realized he was treading on delicate waters. “He didn’t succeed,” he said carefully.

  The sister shook her head. “The elders near Blackwood wouldn’t let him. Played tricks on him to get him to stop. I knew the man who led the assault. Clever fellow. Got Gred’s men to believe they were being attacked, too. Said—”

  “Sister,” the other said. “Hush.”

  “What? Look at him. He’s frightened silly already.”

  Luc crossed his arms. “Are you saying there isn’t an attack on the village?”

  “Dear boy, must I lecture you on history? Such attacks haven’t happened in well over a century because of your glorious hero Agartes. He pushed the creatures deeper into the woods. There aren’t as many now as there used to be.”

  “But there’s still some,” Luc said.

  The sisters fell silent.

  ~~~

  The ka-eng had a boat on the lake shore—a leaf-shaped, brown thing that could probably fit four people if it had to, but only if it had to. Luc had to sit on one end while the sisters—who were slender enough to sit side-by-side comfortably—took the other end. They drifted down the bank, rolling against a sudden gust of wind, before the sisters dipped the oars into the water and they began to move at a more urgent pace.

  “There are missing children, though,” Luc said as the boat rocked with their perfectly timed rowing. “It can’t just be a coincidence. Nearly every village on the edge of the woods, all the way to Cael, have reported missing children these last few months. It worried Duke Iorwin enough to hire us.”

  “Couldn’t spare the soldiers, could he?” the first sister snorted.

  “Oh, like he could answer that,” the second one said. “He’s clearly the servant boy. Probably sharpens the swords and polishes the boots.”

  “I’m actually the representative,” Luc replied, not knowing why he said it.

  “What’s that?” the first sister asked.

  “Is that kind of a leader?” the second one added.

  “Never mind,” Luc murmured. The woods were becoming a blur against the fog as they continued down the lake. In the distance, he thought he saw something descend on a mountaintop before disappearing behind a thick mass of clouds.

  The first sister paused from her rowing to flex her wrist. “Missing children are always blamed on every little thing,” she said. “Back in the day, they claimed it was the Jinsein builders. Jinseins liked to kill children, they say, and pour their blood around bridge posts to keep them stable. Said it appeases their gods.”

  “That’s not true,” Luc replied. “My father is Jinsein. That’s—”

  “Like I said,” the sister continued, giving him a glance. “Every little thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the parents were at fault and Duke Iorwin decided to take advantage of an unfortunate situation in order to make himself look good. Blackwoods tend to do that.”

  “Your father is Jinsein?” the second sister asked. “You don’t look it. Eyes are all wrong.”

  “I was a foundling,” Luc replied.

  “Oh, you poor thing.”

  “Now I really want to sleep with him.”

  He felt himself blush. “These villagers are hiding something. We intend to stay here until we find out what.”

  The sisters rowed silently for a few minutes.

  “I suppose it won’t hurt to tell him,” the first sister finally said. “He’ll find out soon enough, anyway.”

  It was the second sister’s turn to rest at the oars. She smiled at him, her teeth showing. “We do happen to know about the villagers’ children. When you live as close as they do to these woods, it’s impossible for us not to brush up against each other. They came all the way out to the foot of the mountain on the other end of this lake, you know, to call for us.” She craned her head back. “They laid out offerings at the shrines near the mountain path. Delicious food, butchered animals.” She wrinkled her nose. “As if such things can bring back what they’ve lost.”

  “Desperate people do desperate things,” the first sister said with a sigh. “We explained to them that we knew nothing of what happened to their offspring. Three lovely waifs—two boys and a girl, so it seems. Ten years, and eight. So young. They said they had gone up to the seven falls. Not the first time a youth has slipped over the edge of those cliffs and gone all the way down, seven ways. They didn’t want to believe us. Said they had looked at the bottom of those falls already and found no bodies.”

  “When they finally left us, we grew curious and eventually came all the way out here to investigate ourselves. Three weeks we’ve been here now.”

  “Four,” the first sister corrected her.

  “Truly.” The ka-eng flicked her ears. “Perhaps it’s best we show you what we found.”

  “Since that is what you came out here for,” the other said. “And you’ve been so cooperative so far.”

  “And so respectful. You never even once referred to us as ancient or elderly.”

  “Should I have?” Luc asked dubiously.

  The sisters snorted. “No,” the second said. “Definitely not. We’re young…ish. For our people. I am, anyway. She may not look like it, but she’s getting on in age.”

  They rowed the boat towards a small bank, filled with pebbly sand that looked like bird eyes—nearly yellow, with black dots in the middle. Luc helped push the boat into land and sat at the edge while the sisters picked up their skirts and clambered off. He waded into the water after them, pulling the boat behind him until most of it was out of the water.

  He didn’t recognize the part of the forest they were in, but he thought he could smell smoke against the misty air. He tested it with his tongue before hurrying up a series of steps made of flat rocks. At the top, the sisters turned to him and placed their fingers on their lips. “Silence,” the first one said, “would be wise about now.”

  He slowed down and nodded.

  The path narrowed down between two rock faces, which was covered with fine moss thick with dew—dew, not frost. He ran his hand over the droplets, rubbing his fingers together before pressing the moisture over his lip. He would’ve expected it to be a lot colder deeper in the woods. In fact, he had expected it to be barren—to find the whole place teeming with life took him completely off-guard.

  They reached the bottom of a pool. A single waterfall dropped like a veil over the steep, black cliff. “This is where the children disappeared,” the second sister said, pausing near a large boulder. “There are other pools as you go up the path there.”

  Luc stopped at the edge of the water. He touched it and pulled back almost instantly. The water was warm. He felt himself grow nauseated as he caught a whiff of the scent of rotting meat. He turned around and thought he saw bones near the bank.

  “It’s not what you think,” the first sister said, noticing the look on his face.

  “I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to think,” he breathed. He steeled himself and slowly approached the bones. They were cracked, the marrow gone. He took another step and spotted something fleshy, half-buried in the mud. Flies hovered over the surface. Flies in the winter? He held his breath as he kicked it with his boot.

  The flies scattered, revealing what was clearly a pig’s head.

  The memory of what he had found in their own goat pen returned to him. He glanced back at the sisters. “I don’t understand.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” the second sister asked. “We’re standing on feeding grounds.”

  He grimaced. “Of what?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know,” Luc said. “My folks ne
ver spoke of these things.”

  The first sister smiled. “Some think that to speak of them gives them power. Not everyone, of course, but enough—enough that so much knowledge was lost over the years. There’s a saying among us that translates to, ‘As unclear as the Kags are about what walks amongst them.’ Put two Kags in a room and you can never get them to agree what these things really are. Beasts, some will say. Mindless entities, others will argue. Demons.” She glanced up. Luc automatically followed her gaze and saw several wooden dolls hanging from the leafless tree above. “Gods.”

  “Feeding grounds,” Luc murmured. “Or a shrine?” The figures were symbols of Yohak. He wouldn’t be surprised if they were made of oak, which was sacred to the god.

  “In this case? Same difference.”

  “So the villagers have been feeding this…thing…while worshipping it?” He bit back against the distaste in his mouth.

  “That’s our understanding,” the second sister said. “We believe that when they realized they would get nothing from us, they turned elsewhere. And in their mad search, they found this…creature. They left it an offering. It took it. They’ve been leaving one every few days since.”

  “They wouldn’t admit it to us,” the first snorted. “They’re ashamed of it. They should be! What did they think was going to happen? That if this thing had taken their children, it would bring them back, maybe playing a pipe while it toddled along behind them? Foolish, childish fancies.” She pointed at the mud, where there were thick, deep swirls that reminded Luc of hoofprints, except much bigger. “We don’t know how much intelligence these things have, but it’s been coming back for their offering. Each day and it grows bolder, hungrier. Bigger.”

  “What do you mean bigger?”

  “Do you have a pond in your farm?” the second sister asked.

  Luc nodded. “I don’t know what that has anything to do with this.”

  “You must’ve seen that how some of the same kind of fish are bigger than others. When there is an abundance of food, fish will keep eating, keep growing…” She stretched her hands out. “Until they die, anyway. These things don’t die naturally. We believe they don’t even need to eat.”

  “So what’s this, then?”

  “They don’t need to eat. It doesn’t mean they don’t like to eat. The elders aren’t sure themselves. Strange powers brought them here. Our texts do not mention them at all, and they can only be found here near the plains—not in our mountains, certainly.” She sniffed. “What the villagers are doing—they’re inadvertently lending this thing strength. Last season, it was the size of a man. When you mercenaries came along weeks ago—”

  Luc cleared his throat. “Wait. Weeks? We only came yesterday.”

  “Is that right?” the sister asked. “Am I misremembering?”

  “Perhaps he is misremembering,” her sister replied. “It was at the start of the season.”

  Luc shook his head. “You’re both mistaken. I wasn’t in the woods for more than a night.”

  The sisters smiled at him, but before they could say what was on their minds, they were interrupted by what sounded like a squeal.

  “Well,” the second sister said. “Seems like we’re just in time for the show.”

  A villager appeared on the other end of the path, dragging a frightened pig through the mud behind him. The pig was frantically trying to run the other way, digging its trotters as it shrieked its displeasure. The villager cursed it with every step, kicking its rotund belly with his boot every time it refused to budge. Only when they reached the end of the pool did the villager look up and notice Luc and the ka-eng.

  The fear on his face multiplied. “Blessed Yohak,” he murmured, making the warding sign of the god. “But you’re dead. They said you were dead.”

  Luc stepped towards him. “I’m not.”

  “Blessed Yohak,” the man breathed, falling to his knees.

  Chapter Ten

  Luc reached out to grab the man by the shoulders. He was solid, and the unwashed stench of him was real enough. If Luc was a ghost, he was almost sure he wouldn’t be able to feel him at all. “Do I sound like a ghost?” he asked.

  The pig started to tug at its rope again. The villager seemed to come to his senses and got up to yank the creature back towards him. With shaking fingers, he reached for a tree branch and began to tie the rope around it. Once he had tightened it, he turned back to Luc with an expression that seemed to make his sunken face even paler.

  “You’re that boy who arrived with the mercenaries,” he said, swallowing. “You went out into the night, they said, and never came back.”

  “Not never,” Luc replied. “I’m here now.”

  The man glanced at the ka-eng. “The ancient ones found you.”

  “Not this again,” one of them murmured.

  “If I had a coin for every time…” the other began.

  “Are my companions still in the village?” Luc asked.

  The man nodded. “They’re still camped out on the field. The village elder gave them a bag of grain to keep them happy, and they’ve been patrolling the edge of the forest this whole time. They didn’t want to go into the woods since…since you disappeared.”

  Luc wondered if he would have been less cooperative if he hadn’t been so convinced that he had just come back from the dead. He decided to take advantage. “Explain what you’ve been doing here.”

  The man swallowed. “We’ve been making offerings to the Holy One.”

  “Why?”

  “For protection. For our other children. For everything.” He wiped his face, although the movement only seemed to rearrange the mud and dirt on it. “We offer the Holy One food and prayers and it leaves us alone.”

  “I can understand the sentiment,” Luc said. “But surely this isn’t going to lead anywhere. You’ve been giving it the last of your livestock, haven’t you?”

  After a moment of hesitation, the villager nodded.

  “How could you be that frightened? You’re risking your own food supply for superstition.”

  “It’s not superstition. We do what we must to protect ourselves.”

  “You could’ve asked for help.”

  The man licked his lips. “We did. Why else did you think our name was on that list?”

  “Yet when that help arrived, you people refused it.”

  “Because it took too long,” the man whispered. “We lost more children after that. Four more. Your reports didn’t say that, did it?” He glanced at the ka-eng. “We never told the elder ones, either. We knew they would disapprove.”

  “We do,” the ka-eng told him. “You’ve encouraged it to venture this close to the woods, and then stay here.”

  “You don’t understand what it feels like,” the man hissed. “To not know what to do or who to turn to, to scream into the wind and know that no one cares. No one cares. Duke Iorwin has always ignored our pleas. When the locusts finished off the crops…when the storms came to destroy our houses…why did we expect we would get help this time? I went up to the castle myself to beg for his assistance. I didn’t see him—he sent out a servant to take my plea, and then I was all but thrown out without a word. That was the start of spring. The blossoms haven’t even begun to creep out then. What is it now? Winter? So long. One of those children was mine. My daughter. There was no body, but I buried her toys out in the back with the same flowers she planted that season.”

  “Oh, gods,” Luc breathed.

  “I knew nothing would bring her back, but I have others to protect,” the man continued, wiping his face. “After we lost more of the children, one of the men suspected the creature creeping about the first waterfall, so we left a pig in exchange. And it was gone the next day. So we started doing it more often. And we’ve lost none since. And so…” He cleared his throat, as if the sudden admonition of weakness was too much.

  “So you give it what you can while you slowly starve to death,” Luc said.

  “We don’t have a choic
e,” the man whispered.

  “Why don’t you just leave?”

  He stopped as one of the ka-eng touched his arm. It was the second sister. “I’m sorry,” Luc murmured, realizing what she was trying to say. “I guess you can’t just leave like that. This is your home.”

  “Where would we go?”

  “But surely you know this can’t last forever. Sooner or later, you’ll run out of offerings. And then what?”

  “And then what?” the man repeated. “Don’t think I haven’t asked myself that all this time.”

  ~~~

  Up until that moment, Luc had always imagined that his life back at the farm was normal for poor, simple villagers, a far cry from the affluent city folk or even some of the ones from Crossfingers. Some years they struggled through the winter with nothing but grain and potatoes to eat. The last few years, Luc had taken to chopping firewood to sell in the village just so he could sneak in meat into the stew pot once in a while.

  But there was struggling, and then there was sheer helplessness. And he didn’t really think he knew the difference until he saw the look in the villager’s eyes. After they lost their goats, Luc had filed a report with the guards and received, at the very least, a sympathetic ear and a promise that they would keep an eye out for things. Crossfingers was directly under the king’s command and Luc couldn’t imagine them ignoring locust infestations, let alone missing children, for so long. And as for Luc and his family, their father had often spoken of needing to head back to Port Bluetree and live with Uncle Ian if things ever became too much to handle.

  There had always been a way to escape. Even what he was doing now was an escape of sorts. His problems suddenly seemed to pale in comparison to what Toskthar faced, and he let the man walk away with a nagging sense of guilt that he had allowed things to get this far.

  The first ka-eng sniffed. “You should follow him, perhaps. No getting lost for you this time. The village is just down that path. It’s marked and everything.”

  “What do we do?” Luc asked.