The Bone Cave

by Sarah Remy

  “And why’s that? My lord.”

  “Long enough, and thin, and sharp,” Avani said, grimacing. “It’s the dagger on the belt again, is it? The killer used what was close at hand: Farrow’s own tool. I suppose that’s what pierced his heart.”

  “How can you be sure?” demanded Russel. “What spell unmasks a killing blade?”

  “At least two that I know of,” answered Mal. “But in this case all it took was better light and a more thorough search. I found this rolled beneath a fold of fox pelt, both ends still tacky with Farrow’s blood.”

  Although the crop had been laid down in neat rows with enough space between for a man to haul water mostly unencumbered, the wheat was clearly damaged, bent just above the ground where two days earlier Kingsmen had trod, hunting. The search party had made a good job of ruining the wheat in their search. Mal waited while Avani squatted to examine an entire stalk laid flat across several others. Where growth had been kicked free of the ground severed stems were already withered. Five or six sheaves, still fresh enough as to be worth salvaging, lay crosswise atop the desiccated chaff.

  Overhead the sky was turning from gray to pale blue, the sun waking.

  “What are we doing?” Russel ventured bitterly. “Surely you didn’t ask us out at sunrise for a stroll. Beaumont canvased Farrow's fields top to bottom and found nothing. Take a squint. There’s nothing here but good dirt and Farrow’s livelihood lost.”

  Mal tapped the blunt end of Farrow’s awl against his thigh. “I assume you’re taught tracking in the army, corporal?”

  “Aye, some.”

  “Any good at it?”

  “Enough to get by. Better than, mayhap. Chased a tribesman down from the edge of the divide all the way north of the Black Coast, once. Four days of our nose to the scrub but we ran him to ground in a tavern near the sea, hauled him back to Wilhaiim over the pommel of my saddle. He never once said a word, even when they marched him off to be hanged. But he knew well enough what I was saying when I called him a sneaking bastard.”

  Mal thumped Farrow’s awl against his leg again: once, twice. His exasperation dripped into Avani’s skull. She glanced away, pretended to study the field so he wouldn’t see her dismay.

  “As Mistress Farrow is no desert tribesman and I’ve given you a head start,” Mal told Russel, “I hope this will take fewer than four days. Avani’s already seen it, though she hasn’t put the pieces together. She’s more shepherd than huntsman, more islander than farmer.”

  Russel struck one thumb against the pommel of her sword in counter rhythm to the awl’s restless beat. Mal went still. Russel nodded, point made. Then she raised a brow in Avani’s direction.

  “My lady?”

  Avani shook her head, at a loss. “There’s no sorcery at work here, not that I can tell.”

  “Begging your pardon,” said Russel. “It’s not mage-work, it’s the crop. Lord Malachi is quite right: I should have seen it at once, had I known what we were about.” She bit off the last two syllables. Mal only smiled, outwardly affable. “There’s two sets of tracks, see? The greater from Beaumont’s long walk, north to south and mostly straight with it.”

  The soldier brushed between Mal and Avani and crouched. “Here, look. These are more recent breaks, the damage fresh. Someone walked here within the last day, back and forth along the same path. As early as last night, if I’m any judge at all.”

  “You’ve good eyes,” Mal granted. “What else?”

  Russel cupped her chin. The faint sheen of perspiration already marked her face. Avani knew the soldier couldn’t be comfortable in her livery but would speak no complaint.

  “There are prints in the soil,” Russel reported after a moment. “Blunt toe, square heel. Not a boot—a villein’s clog. Mistress Farrow, you said.” She blinked up at the vocent, mouth tight. “Do you mean to say these are her tracks?” she inquired, accepting Mal’s hand upright with ostentatious grace.

  “She’s passed thrice back this way,” Mal replied, speaking not to the soldier but to Avani. “Since Farrow’s murder. Each time to the cottage and then again into the field. Most recently she walked into the crop before sunrise this morning, and there she hides.”

  “And you know this—” Russel faltered.

  “Because he waited and watched these two days,” Avani guessed. “Goddess take you, Mal. To what end? And why didn’t you say so?”

  “More to the point, why isn’t she yet in the stocks?” demanded Russel. “For eluding the king’s inquiry, if not murder?”

  “Farrow’s wife is no killer. As for the stocks—” he swept Russel a bow “—I’ll leave that to you, corporal. You didn’t think I required your company simply for pleasure’s sake?”

  Russel ignored the jibe. “Will you show me where she’s gone to ground or have you returned across the sea entirely worthless?” She showed her teeth in vexation. “My lord.”

  From even a short distance the stump seemed unremarkable but for its size. Avani thought the oak must have been ancient as the faraway mountains when wind or worse finally sheered it in half. Black scars disfigured the old boll, evidence of crop burning and lightning both. Where the trunk had torn asunder jagged points rose into the sky, wreathed in yellow vine. A thorny blackberry bush grew around the stump’s base between the tops of roots as thick around as Avani’s torso. It was far too large to drag from the earth even with a team of horses and sturdy chain. Farrow had planted his crop around the trunk, straight lines of wheat curving to either side of the boll before resuming their regimented march.

  It was clear from the disordered crop that Beaumont’s Kingsmen had not neglected this far corner of Farrow’s field. They would have seen the stump as a curiosity, and mayhap looked past it to the low stone wall that divided Farrow’s land from that of the nearest neighbor. But the goodwife’s more recent tracks led straight as a pin to and from the stump, disappearing into the spiny shrub.

  Andrew’s ring flashed an uneasy yellow against Avani’s breastbone. An answering sparkle woke on Mal’s finger. Mal twisted the jeweled signet on his finger, muttered a quelling word, and quenched the fire in both stones.

  “There’s no danger here,” he promised, answering Avani’s unspoken concern. “They’re but responding to a lesser magic within.”

  “Within,” Russel repeated. “Surely you don’t mean within the tree?”

  “Oh, aye, there’s a way through the scrub. There are two bushes, not one, with space in between. It’s the angle that fools the eye, and guards the stump,” Avani reported, charmed by the ingenious planting. Forging ahead, she discovered that if she turned sideways and held her breath she could just scrape between the long thorns as she sidled toward the stump. “And a channel between the old roots. I wager it’s hollow inside.”

  “Have a care!” Russel warned but Mal, close on Avani’s heels, only laughed.

  “Do watch your step,” he cautioned in her ear while his amusement buzzed in her head. “The ground is uneven.”

  They stood in a sylvan crown, ringed all about by hoary wood, jagged points open above their heads to light and heat. The walls of the stump were blackened, the boll long ago burned out. Ferns grew in a verdant rug below their feet, fronds high as Avani’s knee and thick as to obscure the ground. The plants were damp and sticky with sap, dewy despite the dry air.

  While Avani and Mal and Russel stood shoulder-to-shoulder, there was room yet for perhaps one more person, and they were not uncomfortably close. Candle stubs, most burned down to tallow nubs, littered a natural burl shelf halfway up the stump wall. Someone—Farrow or his wife, Avani assumed—had wedged a fur coverlet and a spade into a niche of blackened wood; a woodsman’s hatchet was buried blade-first into the wood above the spade.

  All in all it was a canny lair so long as the weather stayed fair. Avani couldn’t fault the goodwife her choice of retreat.

  “Beaumont will kick himself for a fool,” Russel said, “and lash the poor sods that missed this.”

&
nbsp; “Let’s not be quick to lay blame. It’s cleverly done, isn’t it? And up until last evening partially concealed by a ‘look-away’ glyph not dissimilar to the one tacked onto Farrow’s threshold.” Mal scuffed the toe of his boot in the ferns, revealing splinters of shingle. “I unraveled the charm.”

  “That’s impossible,” protested Russel. She looked more impressed than alarmed. “And dangerously heretical. No wonder the temple rejoiced to see your kind burned.” She turned about, thoughtful. “This isn’t recent. Someone’s used this place, off and on, for quite a while. That pelt’s Farrow’s work.”

  Mal didn’t reply. He was once again watching Avani. She could feel his scrutiny within and without, a badly restrained agitation.

  “There’s more here,” she said, pulse racing with his expectation. She’d forgotten how his enthusiasms stoked her curiosity. They were well matched in that, and she wouldn’t deny she’d come to anticipate a challenge. “What more?”

  “Bethink the Widow’s hearth,” suggested Mal, once again in her ear. “The hidden places, the oldest ways.”

  She gripped Andrew’s ring. The stone was warm to the touch, but the light in the jewel still slept: not sorcery, then. On a hunch she dropped to hands and knees, crawling childlike through the sticky ferns, palms sinking into moist loam, while Mal grinned and Russel gaped. The smell of the fertile soil reminded her unpleasantly of the dark traps set by Siobahn and the sidhe together. Almost she recoiled, but then her seeking fingers found something rough, foreign beneath velvety fronds. Startled, she sat back on her heels, hastily parting boisterous ferns for a clearer view, and discovered a latticework of weathered sticks lashed together with pieces of old hide. Beneath the framework a dark pit fell away into the earth; ferns grew up from the brink of the hole, efficiently screening both grille and precipice.

  “Shit,” Russel groaned. “Fancy that. Looks deep, deep enough to kill a person, if she fell through. One of Farrow’s animal traps?”

  The lattice wasn’t heavy. Avani lifted it out of the fern. She passed it to Russel, who turned it over in her hands, examining the workmanship. Then the soldier stilled and cast a wary glance at the earth.

  “Hear that?” She let the grate fall to the ground. “Someone’s down there. Listen; do you hear?”

  Startled, Avani paused at once to listen but then shook her head. The morning was quiet but for the sound of birds in the field beyond and the slough of fern against Mal’s boots as he stepped closer. He lifted a brow in Russel’s direction, dubious.

  “There’s no one near but us three,” he said, “living or dead.”

  Russel glowered. “Drop down your witch light,” she insisted, edging toward the maw. “I hear weeping; I’m not mad! Could be the goodwife fell to her husband’s own trap.”

  “And replaced the lattice neatly as she fell?” Mal suggested, amused, but he lifted both hands in supplication when Russel growled.

  “It takes but a moment to be sure.” Avani lay down on her stomach in the wet and stuck her chin over the edge of the hole. Immediately Mal crouched, fisting a hand in her salwar.

  “In case it starts to crumble,” he said, stalling her objection. “The ground here is very wet. I’d hate to lose you down the hole. Anything?”

  “Ai, it’s a bloody big pit.” Avani wrinkled her nose at the fetid air in the shaft. “I can’t tell how far down it goes. Goddess, what a stink. The walls are dripping plant and mud. Here, let me send a light—”

  She gasped in alarm when a clod of dirt broke beneath her elbow, tumbling into the hole. Mal dropped Farrow’s awl and clutched at her shoulders with both hands. Russel stepped slowly back from the perimeter, still muttering imprecations.

  “I’ve got you,” Mal told Avani. “I won’t let you fall. But be quick about it; the ground here is more volatile than I supposed.”

  Once he might have yanked her away from jeopardy and attended to the task himself, and in far less time. Now he waited, outwardly patient, while Avani conjured starlight from thin air and sent it spinning down into the shaft. For a moment there was nothing but shadow and crumbling stone. The shaft was not as deep as she’d first assumed; too deep for man or animal to climb back to freedom, the pit was more teardrop than straight oubliette. Avani’s mage-light reflected in small starbursts off the streams of water trickling onto the muddy floor, and in the flat black eyes glaring back at her from the depths.

  “Ah, hells.” She felt it when Mal caught his breath. She couldn’t help but do the same.

  “Well?” Russel demanded, impatient and triumphant at once. “Didn’t I say? Here, I saw a coil of good rope back near the henhouse. She’s been down there hours, poor thing. I’ll just run and—”

  “Not Mistress Farrow,” interrupted Mal, grim. When Russel rushed the hole he stopped her with a barked warning, “No, stay back!” The magus scooted away from the edge of the shaft, dragging Avani with him, but not before she watched a clump of soil and fern plummet through her mage-light and onto the barrowman crouched in the pit. The sidhe hissed, and Avani marveled that Russel could have mistaken such a ferocious sound for grief. “Go and find that rope, Corporal. We’ll be needing it.”

  Chapter 10

  Gossip was better than bread and mead in the royal barracks. Word of the strange happenings on Farrow’s homestead spread like spring plague. Murder was one thing, unusual but not unheard of in and around a city Wilhaiim’s size, but a barrowman captured alive was so unlikely as to be widely dismissed as impossible. A sidhe sighting so near the flatlander capital was rare enough; in spite of Renault’s cautionary tales most of the court gave no more thought to barrowman tunneling beneath their city than they did mice in the royal granary or rabbits in the crop. Mice and rabbits were easily and cleanly dispatched by those wise in the ways of vermin, and so it was not at all surprising to Liam that the nobility, for the most part, turned a stubbornly blind eye when Malachi and four of Lane’s best cavalry walked the sidhe at lancepoint through Wilhaiim’s emptied streets to the palace, there to wait upon the king’s justice.

  One of the lesser sidhe, the barrowman was pale and clammy of skin, not much larger than a human child, and gone skeletal with hunger. It limped over cobblestone, caught between four sharp iron spearheads, bound wrists to throat to ankles with a length of thick rope. It was naked but for the trapper’s cap askew on its head, outwardly sexless. It made no sound at all as it walked. Liam, standing in the scant shade beneath the eaves of a shuttered house, couldn’t help but shiver.

  Mal paced behind the cavalrymen, seemingly uncaring of the horses’ dancing hooves. As if by force of will he chivvied the animals along, both the white-eyed, snorting geldings and the barrowman. Even the proud soldiers in their high saddles seemed diminished beneath the magus’s glinting gaze. Angry yellow flame danced in the ring on Mal’s finger.

  “Ishtipachas. I never thought to see one, much less two, in my lifetime.”

  If Baldebert intended ambush, he was disappointed. Liam was not an easy person to sneak up on. Still, he gave the admiral credit for trying.

  “I’ve nothing in common with that animal,” Liam said, while the barrowman strained against rope and bared sharp teeth at cavalrymen and gray stone buildings alike. “Do you intend insult?” Not for the first time since his bones had lengthened he appreciated the growth spurt that allowed him to look down even on his betters. He used it to his full advantage now, throwing a threatening shadow across Baldebert.

  “No insult at all,” Baldebert replied. He’d disguised himself neatly, binding his yellow hair beneath a kerchief, switching out gaudy captain’s togs for plain sailor’s tunic and trousers; a pirate prince become common as any other swab passing through Wilhaiim on his way to port. Liam wondered if the king’s guard had yet noticed their ward had slipped the noose. “We both know if not for your innate advantages you’d have died on my deck a day out of Roue.”

  “Lord Malachi meant me no harm. I’ll thank you to shut your mouth on our private business or
I’ll shut it for you.” Liam had reason to know that for all his friendliness, when it came down to it Baldebert was a formidable foe and could likely beat him bloody. But a man had to defend his honor.

  Baldebert’s smile turned down at the corners but he bowed his head in acknowledgement. “I’ve no quarrel with you, lad, so long as your loyalties and mine own coincide.” He turned away from Liam to watch Mal and the sidhe. He wrinkled his nose. “I can smell the demon even from here. Like a wound gone to gangrene. And I hope you’ll forgive me if I say they should have left it in the earth to rot.” He settled with his shoulders to gray stone, slouching. “What’s the purpose of keeping it?”

  “Study,” Liam said. He looked away from Baldebert’s knowing grimace and down at his hands, only to wince at the scars standing like condemnation on his flesh. He tucked his fists behind his back.

  “There are ways,” Baldebert said after a moment, when the sidhe and the worried horses and Wilhaiim’s magus had disappeared around a street corner leaving an uneasy silence in their wake, “of disguising scars you’d prefer hidden. I can show you, if you like.”

  Liam felt cold, and then much too hot. “I’ve nothing to hide,” he protested, loud enough that the shutters rattled again in clear warning. Liam pushed himself off the wall, out of the shade, and into the steaming streets.

  “Neither had I,” Baldebert replied calmly as he followed after, “when Khorit Dard took regular delight in blackening my eye with his fist or bruising my young shins with the flat of his sword. I killed him for it, in the end, but before that I learned how to hide evidence of his beatings for the sake of my pride.”

  Liam hurried so as not to lose sight of Mal’s back. Baldebert stuck tight as a barnacle on the belly of his beloved ship but for once had the sense to keep his opinions to himself. The streets began to fill again as sidhe and cavalry passed through each quarter, but with cautious business, full of whispered concerns, and glances cast palace-ward. The court might spare no thought for monsters, but the common folk, whether merchant or villein or soldier’s wife, knew better the danger lurking just to the other side of Wilhaiim’s white wall.