“I —” the boy said, and then quickly shook his head, his face reddening.
The leader said nothing, but crooked his finger in a distinct command for the boy to approach. It was the kind of gesture meant to shame, and in the damp twilight, the blush of the boy’s face crept down his neck, deepening.
“It was mine.” The middle-sized boy grabbed Estus’ upper arm to keep him in place, though Estus had shown no sign of stepping away from his friends. “Can’t help it none if your men done picked animal trails to patrol on. You sent us out to hunt, and by the spirits, hunting’s what we’re doing.” He tried to hold the leader’s gaze, but couldn’t. In the end, he joined his smaller friend in staring at the ground. But his expression was still more defiance than fear.
“I see,” the leader said.
“Reckon you all done stumbled into some of my snares, too,” the big youth said. “We got an unlikely number of big critters coming around this spring. Got to keep ’em cleared out or they’ll eat up all our game.”
From the back of the crowd, another young voice piped up. “I been setting some ’long my ridge, too — had some few sprung and nothing but boot prints around.” The anonymous confession prompted a number of murmured declarations; Rand hid a smile. No doubt they were all true, for the boys knew there was nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by lying. No doubt they’d talked amongst themselves of the large number of big predators in the area, and then carefully, individually, laid their traps along the obvious human trails. Any one of them might get caught, but it could never be traced to organized mutiny.
The leader seemed to realize as much. His features were mostly shadowed by the darkness, but enough light from the hall washed over his face to show the tight set of his mouth. “Your...carelessness has wasted much time. There will be no more timbering accidents. There will be no more trapping accidents.” He looked at Estus’ friend, the boy who’d confessed to setting the bear trap; with sudden, smooth strides he was in front of the boy, and had taken his chin with gloved fingers. The boy had very little time for the fear that flashed across his face; his eyes rolled up, and his body trembled with little jerks that Rand thought were pain-induced. Some kind of Taker pain. Nekfehr smiled, pleasuring in the boy’s reaction, and Rand was sure of it.
After a long, breathless moment, the leader removed his grip with the kind of disdain that Rand’s daddy used to toss dead rats out of the barn. The boy would have fallen had not his strapping friend caught and easily held him.
With that same disdain in his eyes, the leader looked around the assembly with quiet menace. “Do I make myself clear?”
He did. There was nodding; there were murmurs of assent; there were shuffled feet. In the arms of his comrade, the dazed boy blinked and stood on his own, pale in the waning light.
The men and women of Shadow Hollers, enslaved to the Annekteh, dispersed without conversation, apparently cowed. But Rand knew they were not. They had made the enemy blink and take notice.
It was a start.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 7
The cold earth shoved against her from below, bruising her hips and knees and elbows; hard wood, edged and splintered, jammed down on her from above. Crushing her, pressing against her spine, compressing her chest...while something came for her. Something looked for her, saw her, reached out to her —
She squirmed, unable to break free, unable to breathe...she sobbed in fear, tearing at the earth with her fingers, not heeding the pain of bleeding fingers, knowing only that it saw her —
And then strong arms gathered her up and held and soothed her. Strong arms and a gentle touch. Safe arms.
~~~~~
Dacey watched Whimsy snuffling mouse scent among last year’s dried grasses at the side of the cabin, and smiled at her enthusiasm. She snorted loudly to clear her nose and the noise brought her brother Chase to join the investigation.
He enjoyed the way they delighted in such small things. Watching them had passed many a quiet afternoon.
But not today, even though the morning had dawned quiet and clear, still too cold for anything but a few spring peepers and some early birds. Dacey bent to pull on his soft-soled boot, pushing his back against the door frame. There was no time for such things today, if he was going to make it to town and back before nightfall, and he didn’t want to leave Blaine alone after dark — especially after the fuss she’d raised when he made it clear she wasn’t coming with him.
Besides, he’d been wakened by her nightmares enough to know how regularly they happened. Nothing too dramatic, just small whimpers of distress that brought Blue to her side — until last night, when he himself had taken her up and soothed her back to normal sleep.
Seeings or plain old nightmares, Dacey was unwilling to have her face them alone.
He straightened, wiggling his toes to settle the boot, but his attention was on Blaine. To the side of his cabin, right above the plank-sheltered spring, there was a big old rock, and she had taken to it immediately. She sat there now, her knees drawn up to her chin, coltishly long legs protruding from the bottom of her skirts and her dangling braids brushing the rock behind her. She had fire, Blaine did — maybe too much of it. She’d been scared some by their conversation about the Annekteh, but not scared enough. Not half scared enough.
Maybe he should tell her the rest of it, the things he knew through his seeings — the moments that possessed him, awake or asleep — although not, he suddenly realized, so often as before, now that he had finally acted on them. Seeings that he no longer dared to doubt — never again — had told him what history had lost — or perhaps never known. The extent of Annekteh delight in the things a body could do — both for and to one another. Annekteh disregard for how easy it was to use up a body, how they tended simply to use folks up and toss them aside to commandeer another. Annekteh preoccupation with exploring the extremes of human emotions.
A haunting flash of ice-crystal fear hit him then, unbidden memory of just what the Annekteh could do to a man. What they had done to him. How they had come back to him in his fear and clustered around him, touching him, watching him, envious of his feelings. His hand tightened to white knuckles at the doorframe; he closed his eyes and set his jaw. No. They’re just memories. If he let the Annekteh have such power over him here and now, then they had already won, and he couldn’t allow that.
But neither could he help the shudder that passed through his body, the violence of revulsion and reaction washing through him. When he opened his eyes to the morning, it seemed to have lost some of its clean-edged purity.
His gaze fell on Blaine again, staring down the hollow and blithely unaware of his inner torment. Blue sat up the hill a piece from her, loyally joining her vigil even if he didn’t understand what it was all about. Even as he watched, the hound deliberately leaned forward, his mouth barely open, reaching for the braid that hung down Blaine’s back. Dacey shifted, deliberately; the hound’s gaze slid back to him and he froze, reconsidering, finally settling back into place with resignation.
Blaine turned and saw Dacey then, and stood in a motion that took him by surprise with its grace. For an instant he saw what she was growing into, something of elusive elegance that these hills seldom nourished. And then she was all legs and bony arms again, staring awkwardly down at him.
“Can’t see the harm in letting me come along,” she said, more frustration in her voice than challenge. “It’ll be a far piece along in my life before I ever come this way again. Or come any way again, I reckon.”
That was probably true. And it would be hurtful to tell her the truth, that he had a lot to do and little time to do it in. She was safe here, and in a few days, she’d be back to pushing herself, trying to keep up with him as they returned to Shadowed Hollers. The rest would do her good.
“There’s plenty of fixings in the cabin,” he said by way of answer, “and a goodly slab of ham hanging in the dairy. Make sure you don’t go hungry.” For she was as apt to pick at her meals as eat them ri
ght down, and he thought she’d already lost weight, pounds she couldn’t afford to do without.
She sat again, crosslegged, resting her chin on her fist. There was a stubborn, unhappy look to her light blue eyes, but she seemed resigned enough. Blue looked from one to the other of them and settled back on his haunches, trying to decide whether Blaine was staying on the rock or not.
“Blaine,” Dacey said, riding the edge of exasperation, “I got things to do.” He stopped short of saying she’d only be in the way, and so ended up saying nothing more at all. Nothing except, “I’ll be back before dark.”
She looked away and he thought maybe she’d understood those unspoken words after all. She reached out to pet Blue — not something she’d do if she was thinking about it — and shrugged, her expression full of sulk and hurt.
She was all up front with what she felt, anyway — there was no mistaking her feelings, nor her tenacity. Not like him at her age — or now, for that matter. Everything hidden. Although she was about at the age when people stopped taking his quiet nature for lack of fire, back when he’d lost his mother to a chance encounter with a drunken riverman. Back when he’d done something about it.
Dacey had the troubling certainty that Blaine was about to have her coming of age, too.
He leaned down to snag his backpack. Whimsy and her brother stopped their snuffling long enough to give him an inquisitive look, and he murmured, “Stay home,” at them. They immediately dismissed him, absorbed by their important task of hunting those dangerous mice. Dacey smiled and started off, Mage at his heels. A last glance at Blaine showed her staring back down the hollow. Ignoring him. He felt a smile on his lips for that, too, though not one she’d ever see.
He took the long way into town. It was Trade Day, unless he’d misreckoned, and by noon he had a good chance of finding his uncles along the river front. On Trade Day, clunky steamers from deeper south came and offered their goods, but mostly it was trade between locals. A fresh spring morning like this one would bring out anyone who could make it.
Dacey would be there, if later than most. The long way would take him to his Aunt Pippy, who was too racked with joint ills to make it as far as the market. She was his oldest living relative, a woman who still remembered the last of the Annekteh Ridge seers. If any of his kin had help to give him, she’d be the one. His trip on into town would be as much to warn the others as to gather information from them.
Pippy’s house perched on a rocky little point just above the creek, a spot with sparse foliage over thin soil. She sat on the porch, bundled against the chill air and painstakingly darning a sock with her misshapen hands. It was easy for her to see him coming.
“Where have you been, child?” she asked, laying the sock aside. “Your cousin Rosabel went to see about getting some deer leather from you, and you weren’t nowhere to be found.”
“Been up north.” Dacey climbed the stairs to the high-set porch, spotting one he’d like to fix. Aunt Pippy couldn’t take chances for a fall, not with her bones.
Astonishment wrinkled her papery brow. “Whatever for? Hasn’t been none of us found a need to go that way since we left it!”
“I had a need,” he said simply. He sat in the rocker on the other side of the porch from her, and stared out over the creek a moment.
Pippy gave a dry little laugh. “You always did say more with those quiet spells than anyone else with a sack full of words. You done got something big on your mind, Dacey, and now come to me with it — so you might as well spit it out.”
He couldn’t quite do that. Such a big thing, and the words to say it seemed so small. He finally settled on, “I need your Annekteh lore.”
She narrowed her eyes at him until they almost disappeared in the surrounding wrinkles. “You got a passel of needs, it seems to me. And I don’t like the sound of none of them.”
“Ain’t nothing to like.” Reluctantly, he came to it. “I been north, and I found the Annekteh there. I got to go back and do something about it.”
“My, my, my,” she said, and set her chair to rocking. After a moment, and with some effort, she pushed herself out of it and hobbled into her house. When she came out again, it was with a small pouch of thin, finely tanned leather. She pressed it into his palm. “I ain’t got much for you, son. Our folk may not have believed the Annekteh was dead, but they never wanted to deal with them again, neither, and they’d lost most their writings just like everyone else. So they came down here and tried to forget what they knowed. Your granny was the last of them that had any power a’tall. This was hers.”
Dacey loosened the pouch tie and tipped the bag so light would spill into it, but was not quite able to identify the dim, lumpy objects within.
“With those you can make a warding,” Pippy told him.
Suddenly he knew what they were, remembered hearing his granny talk of them, her words never nothing but grim. His voice was the same. “I know how to use them.”
“Nothing else I can tell you, ’cept they die like any creature, iff’n you put an arrow or blade in the right place. Not that killing the Taken is easy. Sometimes I think that’s half the reason our folk came this way — so’s they wouldn’t have to look in the eyes of the survivors, the ones the seer’s made to kill their own.” Pippy lowered herself back into her chair and looked at him, her gaze more piercing than it had been before. “What sent you north, Dacey?”
Not many would understand. But not many understood him as well as Pippy did. “Followed my dreams, Auntie.”
“Figured. That seer’s blood do find a way to get out, even if it ain’t proper magic. Son, you got to learn — you can’t fix all the ailments of the world. Better a few sleepless nights than getting yourself hurt again, or even killed.”
The skin around his eyes got tight, the way it always did at the thought of his seeings, and of the first time he’d had them. The first time he’d ignored them. “I put the seeings aside once, and my mommy died for it. I ain’t never going to live with that again.”
She shook her head, looked away, sighed. “No, son. I know you ain’t. But...keep yourself safe, d’ye hear? It’d break an old woman’s heart to hear somethingd happened to you.”
He tucked the pouch in an inside jacket pocket and stood, leaning over to kiss her soft, wrinkled cheek. “Wouldn’t do no good for my day, either,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I get back.”
He left her yard with long strides, running away from the hint of tear he’d seen in her eyes. Running, because they both knew there was little assurance that he would return from chasing down this set of seeings.
~~~~~
Blaine used half the morning sulking, and then got tired of it. She spent some time in Dacey’s garden, and when noontime came, she suddenly realized she was good and hungry. The thought of Dacey’s ham was enough to set her mouth to watering, and she abandoned the hoe — she’d been trying to loosen the soil enough for at least a small patch of peas — and headed uphill for the cabin, carrying the small bucket of lamb’s quarter she’d picked. Blue trailed along beside her, of course. Maidie sunned herself on the big rock, and Chase and Whimsy were nowhere to be seen.
Good. She wouldn’t have to contend with their begging.
She washed her hands in the tin basin set outside the door and spent a few minutes tending the braids she had ignored that morning, replaiting them, pulling the cloth strip from her pocket that she often used to bind them together at her back and keep them from flopping into her work. “All right, then,” she said to Blue. “Time to see about that ham. And I ain’t promising you none, so you mought as well not roll them eyes at me when I bring it up.”
The dairy entrance was set to the side of the cabin opposite the stove, toward the front and almost at the foot of the bed. She hauled the heavy door up and peered down into the darkness. Hmm. She definitely needed a candle — she wasn’t going to mess with his fancy lamp, not and chance breaking it. Dacey kept candles on a ledge over the window, hidden away from the
mice in a tin box. The stove still had enough coal from the night’s fire to light it, and, clutching the thick, cool column of wax, Blaine backed down the ladder into the dairy while Blue hung around the entrance and whined questions at her.
When she turned away from the ladder to face the dairy, she couldn’t help but be amazed at its size. Nearly a third of the house, dug out and shored up, it was lined with shelves on three sides. And the shelves were full, with heavily wrapped cheeses and straw covered piles of last year’s produce and rows of canned goods. Dacey was nothing, she decided, if not thorough. Or...perhaps prepared was a better word.
Prepared definitely fit him, the way nothing seemed to take him back for long. If she’d been given that Annekteh pill of fear, she’d have taken a week to stop trembling, but not Dacey. Sure, he’d had that strange reaction, and he’d been extra quiet the first few days they’d walked, but it soon gave way to what she now recognized as his regular kind of quiet.
A hot spatter of wax on her hand made her jump, more startled than hurt. Spirits, but a dark, spider-full dairy wasn’t the place to get lost in thought! She reached for the ham — hanging right out in the open where Dacey had said — but hesitated when she heard Maidie’s angry bark. Above her, Blue’s head swung away from the dairy opening; he growled.
What? she thought, and then realization crowded in on top of it — those were not what noises, they were who noises. Too soon for Dacey to be back, not that the dogs would bark at him anyway. She climbed the ladder, quick and unmindful of the further spatter of wax on her skin. At the top, she found Blue standing in the doorway, growling in an uncertain manner. Not yet sure if it was something to be upset about, she decided.
But how many strangers came to this cabin? How many people the dogs would classify as out and out intruders? She was careful as she peered out the door, for it seemed to her that they must be as rare to Dacey as they were to the Kendricks.
And then she saw him, and dropped the candle. Black leather pants, boots with padded shins — How’d they find us? Her heart beating a runaway course, Blaine clutched at the rough log wall and slid to her knees anyway. She was cornered here. There was no way to get out without being seen. She was quick and agile, but....
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