Raven's Shadow rd-1

by Patricia Briggs

  “I don’t like leaving Rinnie alone,” said Lehr as he led Seraph through the partially plowed field.

  “She’ll be safe with Gura,” Seraph said, though she wasn’t happy with it either. “And Jes will be back soon.”

  She’d certainly be safer at home than investigating a place that might have been Shadow Blighted. If Seraph hadn’t needed Lehr’s help, she’d have found some way to leave him behind, too.

  Jes, she’d found excuses to send off with Hennea. The forest king’s territory extended on either side of the trail to town, but Jes thought that as long as he was with her the forest king wouldn’t stop Hennea a second time. The geas had obviously been very painful by the time they’d left—Jes could get Hennea back to the temple sooner than if she had to find her way herself.

  So now she only had to risk one of her children to find out if Hennea had been right. Tier was alive. Seraph was too much a Raven to allow herself to believe it without more proof, but even so, the thought thrummed through her. She would have the chance to save him, as she hadn’t been able to save Ushireh.

  “There’s two places I could pick up the trail,” Lehr said. “But knowing Jes, I thought that it might be shorter to follow the path he took with the forest king than to try and follow the trail he made bringing Hennea back.”

  “You’re the Hunter,” Seraph said. “I trust you.”

  Lehr stopped where the field turned to forest. “The forest king came here,” he said, but he didn’t immediately start on the trail, just stared at the ground. “Are you certain that I’m a Hunter? Papa could… can track as well as I can.”

  He didn’t look at her as he spoke.

  Lehr, she thought, saw beyond the power to the cost of acknowledging his Traveler blood. He knew that a Falcon could never belong to Redern.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said gently. “We just need to track Jes to where he found the girl, then follow her trail to where… where the huntsman found whatever he found.”

  “Right,” he said and started through the forest.

  Seraph followed Lehr’s rapid gait with an effort, but made no complaint. The afternoon was well spent and he would need light to track. Whatever he hoped, she could feel the hum of magic as it passed from him and seeped into the woods around her. She had learned basic tracking skills herself, but she could see no sign of bent grass or footprint in the trail Lehr followed—she doubted that anyone but a Hunter could have followed the forest king through his own territory.

  But she said nothing of it. Lehr would have to accept his abilities in his own way—or not.

  When Lehr began a steady jog, Seraph left off her musings and concentrated on keeping up with him. He ran a mile or so before dropping back to a walk in a glade of wild wheat edged by forest on three sides and a formidable rock formation on the other.

  “I think this is where Jes picked up the girl,” he said, glancing around at the ground. He turned his back to the stone formation and knelt in the thick, spring-short grass. “There are several sets of his tracks. Do you see how much deeper Jes’s print is here than it usually is?”

  A branch moved behind his head. Seraph hissed a warning and called her magic.

  “Now there is no need for that, Raven,” said the man who rolled nimbly out from under a particularly thick area of foliage that gathered in front of the stone formation. “It is you who have invaded my home, not the other way around.”

  Lehr got to his feet and dusted off the knee of his breeches. “Mother,” he said. “This is Jes’s forest king.”

  He looked more like a grubby farmer fallen on hard times, thought Seraph. The tunic he wore was patched on top of older patches. His feet were bare and his hands were the knobby-knuckled, dark-nailed hands of a man who had worked the land.

  She’d always wanted to see Jes’s friend, and on any other day she would have had a number of questions for him. But nothing mattered except Tier.

  Seraph bowed her head shallowly so she could keep her eyes on him. “We are sorry to disturb you,” she said. “We are following the woman’s tracks to the place where my husband’s horse died.”

  “You won’t find it trying to track her from here, Hunter. I didn’t bring her by ways you can follow.” The forest king grinned, revealing yellowing teeth that looked sharp, and his eyes stayed cold and watchful. “The place you speak of is outside my realm, but you can follow the girl’s tracks starting from the big waterfall. Let me loan you a guide.”

  He turned and looked at the brush behind him. It shuddered briefly then a rangy vixen emerged. Seraph felt no magic, though beside her Lehr stiffened as if he heard something odd, but the vixen stared at the bedraggled forest king as if he were talking to her before setting out at a trot without looking at Seraph or Lehr.

  The forest king waved his hand at the fox. “Follow her—she won’t wait.”

  “My thanks.” Seraph bowed again and started out after Lehr, who was already headed deeper into the forest.

  It was chilly near the falls where the cold river water was pounded to vapor at the bottom of its descent. The fox shifted nervously while Lehr paced by the river. The moment he found Hennea’s trail and knelt beside it, she left without waiting for gratitude.

  Lehr rose to his feet and set out at a gait scarcely slower than he’d used to follow the fox. Even so, the sun was low when they broke free of the trees at last and began climbing a narrow path up the rock-strewn side of a mountain.

  “Lots of traffic here,” said Lehr, pointing at a rock scored by a shod hoof. “More than usual for such a remote place.”

  “Hennea was here,” Seraph reminded him. “The huntsman and his men.”

  Lehr shook his head. “More people than that have been here. Some of the tracks are pretty faint, but I’d say five or six horsemen were here a month or more ago. Their tracks go up the mountain and back down again. Isn’t that what we’re looking for?”

  Seraph nodded. “If you find anything that might have belonged to them, a bit of cloth or hair, get it for me.” She wiped the sweat from her face to clear her eyes. “I can use it to get more information.”

  “Like you did from Frost’s bridle,” Lehr began moving again, but only at a walk. His change of pace might have been to allow him to observe the tracks more clearly, but Seraph suspected it was more likely to allow her to catch her breath.

  They didn’t slow long, and after a few miles Lehr seemed to forget she was there. The trail he followed snaked across the foothills and into the crevices of the Ragged Mountains.

  Seraph’s calves ached, then burned as they hadn’t since her Traveling days. Farming was hard, but climbing at a jog in the mountains was a different sort of work. Lehr didn’t seem bothered by it, even though he wore the pack she’d filled with things they might need.

  When Lehr stopped, she wondered if he were finally getting tired, but then she really looked at where they were.

  The deer trail they’d been following had widened into a piece of open level ground as big as the kitchen garden. In the center of the cleared area, a waist-high white rock with an unusual flat top broke through the dirt.

  The grass in the clearing was knee-high, unusually tall for this time of year this high in the mountains. It carpeted the ground in dark bitter green, except for a large mound of disturbed earth to one side, a burial mound large enough for a horse.

  “Why did they bury the horse?” asked Lehr.

  “Sometimes,” said Seraph, “the Blighted Places can recharge their magics. The bodies will tend to attract people or animals, and it’s best to get them safely buried. There are also stories about odd things happening to the bodies of people who die of Shadow Blight—things that don’t happen if the bodies are safely buried.”

  “Weren’t they afraid of the magic?”

  “Maybe,” said Seraph. “There are a lot of Rederni who can sense magic—especially the ones who spend a lot of time out in the mountains. Maybe because in earlier times, when the Shadowed’s hand was heavie
r on the mountains, the people who couldn’t sense the Blighted areas didn’t survive.” Tier had said that he could sense such places—she pushed hope away and said, “There isn’t any magic that I can feel now—likely the huntsman felt the same. Take a look around, would you, and tell me what you find.”

  Lehr nodded, then stopped. “Do you believe her, Mother?” he said, his voice tight. “Do you believe Papa might be alive?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, because it was the answer that would hurt him the least. Seraph took a deep breath. “This doesn’t feel like one of the Blighted Places to me. Hennea said there was old magic here, but I can’t sense it.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I think I would sense anything that had lasted here from the time of the Shadowed’s Fall, especially power still strong enough to kill.”

  “So this is not a shadowed place.”

  Seraph nodded slowly. “A month is long enough to dissipate solsenti magic,” she said, and then forced herself to point out the obvious to both of them. “Just because it was not old magic that killed here, doesn’t mean that those solsenti wizards of Hennea’s didn’t kill Tier outright. I need you to look and see if you can tell what happened when Frost was killed here. Remember to look especially closely for any scrap of hair or clothing that I might be able to read.”

  She moved back to the edge of the clearing as he began to quarter it thoroughly.

  “The clearest thing I see,” he said at last, “is that something burned here. You can see where the earth was scorched—the patch goes all the way around the grave—see here where the grass is a bit shorter?”

  She nodded.

  “It looks to me that there have been three groups of people here recently,” he said. “The most recent was Jes’s Hennea. She walked the meadow, just like I did, stopped there”—he pointed to a place just to the right of the large stone—“and stopped again to press her hand into the dirt mound. Then she left. The party who came before her, was here a few days ago—three horsemen. One of them was the huntsman—see the way that off fore is angled?” He didn’t look at her so Seraph didn’t bother shaking her head. “That’s the horse he was riding when he come to tell us what he’d found.”

  “The earliest group, though, is what we’re interested in, and they worked at hiding their tracks. They were here after the snow started to melt—so no earlier than a month and a half ago. I can’t tell you how many of them there were here for certain, but they were here about the same time as Papa.”

  Lehr gestured for Seraph to follow him and led her to the far side of the clearing, through a thicket of elderberry, to a stand of trees.

  “He saw them, Mother,” said Lehr. “He stopped Frost here for a while and watched them, maybe for as long as a quarter of an hour. See how Frost stood here, shifting her weight?” He turned and walked back the way they came without taking his eyes from the ground. “Then he walked Frost out into the clearing. There was no fighting, or scuffle that I can see. But Frost’s prints are lost in this burnt area.”

  He glanced around again. “I can pick up the tracks of the other men lower down and backtrack them.”

  “We’ll do that if necessary,” said Seraph. “Did you find anything they left behind?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. I’m sorry I couldn’t find out anything more. Are we done now?”

  “Just beginning,” Seraph answered. “Give me your pack,” she said. There was a camp shovel tied to the back and she took it. “Now we dig.”

  “You’re looking for something that can tell you what happened?” asked Lehr. “Like the saddle or Papa’s pack?”

  “If there’s something to read, I’ll try—but mostly I’m looking for the human bones the huntsman buried with Frost.”

  Before she set cold iron to earth, she touched the dirt, trying to find the old magic that Hennea had spoken of. “There’s death here,” she said. “Sudden and painful.”

  “Papa?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Seraph replied, rubbing the grains between her fingers. “Ravens are not necromancers.”

  She got to her feet and started digging with the shovel—refusing Lehr’s help. This was not something for children, no matter that the child in question was a foot taller and almost twice her weight.

  She dug until the metal edge of the shovel blade bounced off bone. They hadn’t buried Frost very deep—but a horse is a large animal. Scraping gently with the blade, she pushed away dirt and saw, beneath a coating of soil and ash, the familiar pattern of Frost’s dapples.

  “Let me, Mother,” said Lehr, taking the shovel from her.

  He shouldn’t have been able to read anything from her face, but he was almost as sensitive as Jes or Tier. She was too tired from the trip here, from digging, from hope and fear to fight him.

  “If we’re lucky,” Lehr said as he began digging, “they’d have set the skull beside the horse and not beneath her.” We don’t have ropes and horses to move Frost the way the huntsman did.”

  “I can move her if we have to,” said Seraph—not as certain as she sounded. “But I’d rather not add more magic here until I’ve sifted all the information the grave contains.”

  He probed the disturbed ground and uncovered, little by little, Frost’s poor burnt corpse. As the huntsman had said, her head and neck had been charred to the bone with just enough tissue to hold the vertebrae together. But the hindquarters were almost intact—left that way by the chill of the mountain spring. There was only a faint odor of meat turning rotten.

  “How did the bridle survive?” asked Lehr after he’d cleared a space around the blackened skull of the horse.

  “There are spells that only attack the living,” said Seraph. “I think that the damage to the bridle was secondary—the spell burnt the horse, and the burning horse burnt the bridle in turn. Hold up, there’s the saddle blanket.” Part of it, anyway. Where the saddle had been was gone, leaving only a black scorch mark on Frost’s back.

  She knelt and touched the cloth. Nothing. She whispered words of power, but they slid past the saddle blanket and sank deeply into the soil as if something sucked them down and ate them. And deep below the surface of the earth, something very old stirred then subsided, its sleep too deep to be awakened so easily.

  Cautiously she withdrew her magic, letting it die down until it no longer fed whatever it was that waited beneath. She looked again at the flat-topped stone and saw that it could have served as an altar. She felt the dirt again and looked at the deep green grass. Blood had once flowed over the altar, enough blood that generations later the grass still fed upon it. Hennea had been right, there was old magic here—older than Shadow’s Blight.

  This was not a Blighted Place. If any mage tried to set a trap here, the magic would be eaten by the same thing that had eaten hers.

  “Mother?” Lehr asked, pausing in his steady pace to look at her.

  “Something’s waiting here,” she said. “But it had nothing to do with any recent deaths. It’ll likely lie here until your grandchildren are dust unless it’s awakened.”

  “What about the blanket?”

  Seraph shook her head. “Nothing. I need the skull. I’ll be able to tell if it’s Tier’s.”

  His shovel hesitated before he resumed his search, widening the cleared space around the horse.

  Seraph cleaned the dirt from her fingertips absently and watched as Lehr at last unearthed a fire-blackened human skull, set near the horse’s neck bones.

  Gently Lehr took the grim thing into his hands and handed it to her. Seraph stared at the wide brow and looked for a hint of familiar features. Had Tier’s front teeth been so square? She couldn’t tell. There was no jaw bone to give the skull balance.

  As she’d told Tier, necromancy was not something Ravens used—but it was prudence rather than ability that stopped them. Meddling with the dead was no light thing. If her need had not been so great she’d have left it alone.

 
; Her fingers told her nothing; the bone could almost have been a stone in a field that had never felt a human hand, so little of its past stayed with it.

  She set it down and touched Frost’s skull. Nothing. Someone had deliberately cleaned these bones as they’d cleaned the bridle and saddle blanket. No random magic could rape the memory of life from a bone.

  She picked up the human skull again and sent more magic seeking through it. A bridle or a blanket could be cleaned of lives that brush past it, but not even a great deal of magic could clean away a whole lifetime completely. There had to be bits of it left, if she tried hard enough.

  Beneath her fingers she felt a tentative response. She pressed the cool bone to her forehead and left it there a long time as she sought to touch the faint pulse of experience.

  The sun was setting when she placed the skull gently beside Frost’s.

  “This man was not Tier,” she whispered around the throbbing pain in her temples. “He was a Traveler, dead of a blade, not magic fire—and he died somewhere far away, though not long ago.”

  “It doesn’t mean that Papa’s alive,” he said, obviously hoping she’d contradict him. “Someone tried to make us think him dead with the skull and Frost’s body—but they might simply have taken his body away, or taken him off to kill elsewhere.”

  “It only means that Tier probably didn’t die here,” she agreed, fear and hope both held in firm control.

  Lehr began filling in the grave, skull and all, and Seraph thought about what she knew.

  “Lehr?” she said finally.

  “Hmm?”

  “These people who killed Frost took a lot of trouble to obscure their tracks. They weren’t good enough to fool you, but they tried very hard. If you hadn’t seen their tracks below, would you have noticed them here? If we were looking for Tier’s remains rather than evidence that he was taken?”

  He frowned, “Maybe not.”

  Seraph nodded. “I think they knew about you. They were careful to take Tier outside of the realm of the forest king—I think they knew about him as well. They cleansed Frost’s body and the leather and cloth, leaving them no past for me to read. They spent a long time trying to make that skull silent—and almost succeeded.”