Traitor to the Blood

by Barb Hendee

  Wynn had tiptoed around Magiere until her own anger and anguish got the best of her. She was tired of being polite or bursting into bitter disputes that made her feel petty. In this moment she did not care about broken trust or good manners.

  "Oh, yes, I mean it!" she snapped back. "We need only enough to get us to Venjetz, and we can replace all of this. Look at that little girl. She is having a decent supper tonight, and we will provide it!"

  Wynn expected Magiere's assault to begin, but instead she cast a glance toward Leesil and fell silent. Chap trotted to Wynn's side and barked once at Magiere for "yes." Wynn flinched, almost pulling away from the dog's closeness before she could stop herself.

  "He is on my side," she said to Magiere.

  Helen and the other women looked on in tense silence.

  Leesil got up from his stool and came to Wynn, quietly whispering in her ear, "The next village will be exactly the same. And the next."

  His expression was dispassionate, but the sadness in his eyes washed away Wynn's anger.

  "I do not care," she told him. "You said we should do what we can in the moment."

  "All right." He stepped back. "Magiere?"

  "Why ask me? You three have made up your minds."

  Despite Magiere's annoyance, Wynn knew she would help and then never bring it up again.

  Wynn turned back to Helen. "We need knives for chopping as well as the pot."

  The village women set out to fetch the necessary items. No one smiled or muttered thanks, but rather hurried in a way that suggested this miracle might vanish if they did not move quickly enough. Leesil picked up a bucket and went to seek a well or rain barrel for water. Wynn followed him, and, alone outside, she grabbed his arm.

  "Why is it so hard for you to assist these people?"

  "Because I helped do this to them." He turned away, and Wynn saw only his tan profile in the dusk. "And nothing we do here will change anything."

  He pulled free of her grasp and turned his back to her. Wynn watched him walk a slow and even gait down the village's main way. She was silent only because she did not know what else to say.

  Chap slipped out the smithy's back door as meal preparations heightened to a flurry. Wynn had returned to oversee the work, but Leesil had not come with her. Sad frustration on the little sage's face made Chap wonder what passed between them while outside.

  He circled around their wagon and along the smithy's side until he spotted Leesil walking slowly up the main way. A quick touch upon Leesil's mind found it empty.

  Chap could not read thoughts, only memories surfacing to consciousness, and Leesil's mind was devoid of such. Most sentient beings had brief flickers of the past passing just below their awareness at any time. But even those were not present in Leesil. He held them down, shutting out everything.

  Which was worse—suppression or immersion—to block all that was past until it welled up to consume one, or to dive into it and drown? Leesil was becoming a danger to himself, and Chap was at a loss for how to care for one of his charges.

  Grass and leaves rustling and the sound of clicking branches chattered in the wind.

  Chap lifted his head with perked ears and stared across the main way to the woods beyond the village. He felt them again. His kin, the Fay, called for him, demanding his presence among them.

  He wrinkled his snout.

  More talk was not needed. Perhaps he was corrupted by flesh, as they claimed. How could he not be, living encased in it, limited by it as compared to what he had once been among his kin? Or perhaps he had gained a perspective they did not possess. Either way, now was not the time for more of their admonishments.

  Before their presence touched his spirit, Chap clung to the world around him. From sounds the wind made in the trees to the gritty touch of earth under his feet and the smell of the smithy's forge fire, Chap filled up his senses. With these he shut out his kin.

  The presence of the Fay thinned and hided from around him.

  Chap look backed down the main way. Leesil was gone, perhaps turning aside through the village to wherever the common well was located. Anxious concern over Leesil's foray into his past brought Chap his own memories.

  He remembered being "born" into flesh.

  The majay-hi were an old breed that ran among the elven forests. Intelligent compared to other animals, and intuitive beyond most, they were marked by long silvery fur of varied shades and crystalline blue eyes. They were sensitive to life and its balance or imbalance, and thereby sensed its unnatural opposite—the undead. But there had not been a majay-hi like Chap for so long that even the elves did not remember.

  Not since the humans' Forgotten History and the war between the living of the world and the Enemy.

  In the conflict's final days, a number of the Fay chose to defend the world of their making by taking flesh. They also wished to keep their presence unknown to most. Some of them entered the unborn young of animals, so they might live in flesh and blood. Among other forms chosen were the wolves of the forestlands. When the war ended, the conflict won but the world in ruins, the born-Fay remained bound in flesh. Some took solace in one another.

  For decades they drifted near many forest settlements, and then gradually gravitated toward the varied lands of the elves. Rarely, a small group lingered near an elven clan for a time. One night, a female ready to give birth lumbered into an elven village, and they took her in. Her puppies were not Fay, but neither were they wolves. The first litter was born with coats of varied shades of silver-gray and crystalline eyes, unlike the wolf forms of born-Fay.

  And these first ones mated, and the females gave birth to a second generation.

  From these descended what were called the majay-hi, an ancient elvish word Wynn simplistically translated as "Fay-hound" or "hound of the Fay." The original born-Fay, though long-lived, passed away once [heir mortal flesh gave out. The descendants or their flesh still thrived in seclusion, roaming the elven forest as one of its natural guardians. Though more than animals, the majay-hi were but a shadow and a whisper of the original born-Fay.

  Since the Forgotten History, no Fay had chosen to be born in flesh— until Chap.

  One moment—or one eternity—he was with his kin, singular and many, all in one. In an instant, the first measure of time in his new awareness, he was a wet, squirming pup struggling against his siblings for a place to nurse from his mother. His birth was his own choice, for once again the Fay needed one of their own among mortals.

  Unlike his brothers and sisters, he was fully aware of who and what he was. His first emotion was loneliness. His second was fear in isolation. Though flesh made him one of the litter, he was apart from them in his awareness. And apart from his kin, the Fay, lost in a prison of flesh.

  Gone was his "touch" upon the essence of any thing in existence, to both know and be all that it truly was in its innate nature. He had only this body now. Gone was also his awareness of eternity as a whole, and he lived in "moments," one after the other. Even memory of his place among the Fay became mute and cloudy. For a living "mind" could never hold full awareness of all that was the Fay.

  At first his small body seemed so useless. It took many days and nights before he understood the "how" and necessity of walking on legs. Then he was running before his siblings stopped falling on their snouts. He gained his first reprieve from grief and panic over all that he had given up.

  He learned the delight of whipping grass and wind, the joy of mother's tongue on his stomach, and the comfort of sleep and food. There was also wrestling with his brothers and sisters. He learned compassion when he tried not to exploit his greater sentience by winning too often.

  Memories were a thing for the living, limited and fragile. Not like the awareness within the Fay that Chap just barely… remembered. Like anyone's memories of an earlier past time.

  And Leesil hid from his.

  Chap stood alone outside the smithy, his frustration mounting. Part of the purpose he carried into flesh was to bring L
eesil to Magiere, to save her from the Enemy. But what of saving Leesil?

  Intimacy of body and spirit bonded them, but the bond now grew fragile as Leesil stepped farther into the past. Perhaps Magiere was all there was to keep him from being lost in the past he struggled against. Chap was uncertain how to foster this. And how much could Magiere herself face of what she learned of Leesil in this place the humans called the Warlands?

  Something tugged on Chap's tail, and he jumped, startled.

  A smudge-faced girl with bone-thin arms grasped at his switching tail with a wide grin. Chap turned about, sticking his nose into her. Beneath her burlap dress he felt the ridges of tiny ribs and the swell of a bloated belly. Prolonged hunger had begun to deform her.

  Chap glanced once down the main way, but Leesil had not returned. He pushed at the little girl with his head, herding her toward the smithy's front door and the busy preparations for a hot meal.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  As Magiere pulled Port and Imp to a stop outside of Venjetz, she wished Leesil had warned them of the markers lining its outer wall.

  Heads in varied states of decay were spitted on regularly spaced iron spikes high on the stone. One iron crow's cage hung from the rampart upon a chain, the body within rotted and pecked down to exposed bone. The dangling cage was more unsettling than the other warnings. A dead man's head on a spike was still a dead man. Anyone locked in a crow's cage would still be alive. For a while.

  Leesil sat silently beside Magiere on the wagon's bench, as if the heads were common things not worth noting. She looked away from the crow's cage but found herself staring at one skull, denuded of flesh, with hollow black holes for eyes and jaw dangling low.

  This is the world my Leesil was born into.

  Wynn choked as she averted her face. Magiere wasn't one to coddle the sage, but she reached back to pull Wynn's hood over her eyes.

  "Don't look up," she said. "We'll be inside soon."

  "Traitors," Leesil said, watching the crow's cage spin slightly in the low wind. "Or those he accused as such. Cold weather keeps the stench down. In summer you can smell it before the walls are in sight."

  Magiere knew the "he" Leesil spoke of was Darmouth. She kept up her calm front, though she still worried over Leesil's strange withdrawal since entering this land.

  "Pull your hood forward, around your face!" she told him. "Maybe no peasants have mentioned your eyes, but there may still be a guardsman or two left alive who'd remember a half-elf."

  Chap whined and shoved his head across the wagon's bench between Magiere and Leesil.

  "Get down," she told the dog. "You attract almost as much attention as he does."

  Chap dropped back into the wagon's bed, turned a circle, and curled in the corner below the bench. He lifted his head with perked ears, looking to Wynn, but the young sage had her own head down. When he whined again, she looked over at him. She was strangely hesitant, but then crawled across to cuddle next to him, burying her hands in the fur of his back.

  Magiere braced herself to enter the warlord's capital. When she clucked to Port and Imp, and they rounded the curve of the city wall, there was a line of six carts and wagons waiting to enter. As they drew up at the back of the line, she caught sight of vehicles waiting inside to exit. The two-wheeled cart in front of her was filled with grain sacks.

  "Venjetz is the center of trade within this province," Leesil said, his face hidden inside his hood. "They buy or sell almost anything here, but you need to show reason for entering. Written permission from the military is required to set up residence. Artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters— anyone with tools and a skill—are accepted. Peasants aren't allowed in except to trade their harvest. They're given two days to finish and get out."

  "Why is this?" Wynn whispered.

  "The city would be overrun with refugees, more so now, I'd guess. There aren't enough necessities to support thousands with no skills. If you can contribute, you're accepted. Otherwise you're leaving… one way or another."

  He fell silent as Magiere drove their wagon up to the gatehouse. A young guard in a leather hauberk with no crest or surcoat approached them. He eyed Port and Imp briefly, running his hand through Port's lush coat.

  "Fine horses," he said. "What's your business?"

  His tone was short but not rude, and Magiere held up an empty canvas sack. "Passing through. We need to resupply in your market."

  Leesil had told her what to do. She opened their money pouch to show the guard its contents. Leesil had removed most of the coins before they arrived, especially any gold that was left. Commerce bringing currency to the city was welcome, but too large a coin purse would be suspect.

  The guard glanced into the purse, nodded, and waved her through. And so they entered the city where Leesil grew up.

  Magiere wanted to take his hand but let him be for now. In the last few nights he'd barely touched her as they fell asleep. His thoughts were lost somewhere here in his past. She could follow him to this place, but she couldn't find where he hid inside of himself—hid from her.

  They passed a large stable on the left. Straight ahead was a row of eateries, inns, and two taverns, all positioned to be found easily by travelers. Most folk either walked about or traveled in wagons. Motley-garbed soldiers patrolled on foot in twos and threes, while only a few with better armor rode horses.

  Venjetz had grown over many decades upon a plateau among the hills. To the city's northeast side, Darmouth's square-block keep rose into sight above the rooftops. The most heavily populated cities, like Bela, were settled upon rocky rises of land with the castle and grounds dead center at the top, towering above all else. Here, Darmouth's keep rested offshore in a large lake, with its front portal connected to the shore by a fortified stone bridge. It would be a hard place to siege.

  Magiere glanced over her shoulder as Wynn lifted her head to look about. The sage was still pale but crawled over to sit behind the wagon's bench.

  "How did they build a keep inside of a lake?"

  "It wasn't built in the water," Leesil replied. "More than a century back, a self-titled king named Timeron had it constructed on dry ground. Several streams and a small river up in the mountains were then diverted. Water flooded in to surround it."

  "Oh," Wynn replied, and looked about the dingy city. "Where do we begin?"

  Leesil fell quiet for a moment. "My old house by the lakeshore."

  Magiere glanced at him with doubt. "It's been eight years. Someone else will be living there, if the house still remains."

  "It'll be there, and I need only a moment inside."

  She pursed her lips and hoped he wasn't planning to steal into someone else's home. Chap whined and began pawing at Wynn's pack.

  "Wait, please stop," Wynn said. "He wants to tell us something."

  Magiere snorted in disgust and didn't pull in the horses. "Probably about food, no doubt."

  Wynn retrieved the "talking hide" and rolled it out in an open space in the wagon's back. It was a large squarely trimmed hide on which were painted rows and columns of elvish symbols. To "speak" with his companions, Chap would point to the correct symbol and Wynn would translate.

  "Not necessarily," Wynn replied. "He may have advice concerning Leesil's plans."

  Magiere peered over her shoulder as Chap pawed the symbols, and Wynn followed with her eyes.

  "Oh, Chap!" Wynn blurted out, and snatched up the hide. "He smelled sausages back there and wants to stop."

  "What did I tell you?" Magiere said.

  "Why do you always think of food at the worst possible times?" Wynn griped at the dog.

  Chap returned her a whiny growl and a lick of his nose.

  Wynn grew serious again and leaned closer to Leesil. "Will there be any more… anything like outside?"

  "Only at the keep walls," Leesil replied, "if someone of importance was recently tried and executed."

  "A trial?" Magiere asked.

  "A figure of speech," Leesil ans
wered. "Bodies left within the city would be a health hazard. Darmouth enjoys warning all who enter, but he wouldn't risk spreading disease here. But be careful, as the military has a free hand in Venjetz. No one questions their decisions, even if a death is involved."

  Wynn huddled back down. In midafternoon, the air was still cold enough that they could see one another's breath, and hers was quick and shallow.

  "Head for the keep and the lakeshore," Leesil said, motioning Magiere forward. "Then down Favor's Row. It's where Darmouth's favored are housed, meaning those kept close under his watch."

  Magiere clucked the horses into a side street, carefully avoiding citizens walking along the way. It hadn't occurred to her that Leesil might have grown up in the shadow of a keep, as she had in Chemestúk. For some reason she'd pictured him living on the forest's edge, though she'd never asked him about it. It made more sense that he'd remained well within reach of his lord and master.

  They passed dwellings and shops, and wove through a small open market filled with croaking hawkers selling wares and the warm smells of meat pies and sausage. Chap groaned in misery, but everyone ignored him as the wagon moved on.

  Wynn sucked in a deep breath as they emerged onto a wide cobbled road running around the lake. Magiere frowned at what she saw.

  Ahead was a two-story gatehouse to a masoned bridge running out into the lake. Two more high archways marked its span outward to the four-towered block keep sprouting from the water to four or five levels in height. It wasn't the castle of Bela or even the Droevinkan grand prince's stronghold, but it made a weighty impression. The bridge was wide enough for a wagon with room to spare. Where it met the keep's portcullis there appeared to be a lowered drawbridge connecting the fortification to the bridge.

  Soldiers paced the bridge, and more were atop the gatehouse and the two arches along its reach to the keep. A few were out along the cobbled road, but none paid undue attention to their wagon.

  "Turn left," Leesil instructed, gesturing with one finger. "The fifth one down, but don't stop until I tell you."