“Some. They don’t range as much, since...well, they kept tangling with trap lines.” Trey’s answer was reluctant, his belief in Dacey shallow.
“Do they know everyone? Would they know if someone new showed up?”
“Reckon they would — the Taken, at least. They seem to swap knowing stuff pretty easy, an’ if one of ’em don’t know us, another ’un would. The regular men know most of us by sight, I’m thinkin, iff’n you don’t count the children.” He shifted, twiddled with the knife strap some more, an uneasy expression coming over his face; he glanced quickly at Blaine and then away.
“That’s a start.” Dacey gave a single nod, his thoughts going inside for a moment. Blaine knew the look, knew he’d be quiet with those thoughts for some time now. But he gave Trey one final look, his eyes clear in the bright sunshine. “You keep in mind — you go home and tell what you’ve learnt today, you won’t be doing anyone any favors.”
“Still think you take yourself kind of serious,” Trey said, making a face. “But I’ll keep hushed. It ain’t worth the trouble I might cause even if you ain’t no one.”
“That means Blaine’s folks, too. Don’t let on she’s alive.”
“Dacey, no!” Blaine lifted her head, stricken.
“I’m sorry, Blaine,” he said gently. “But you know I’m right. You ain’t put yourself in no safe place by throwing in with me. And we can’t give them any cause for wondering about us.”
“But —” she started. “But —” But he was right, even if he didn’t say right out what he meant. She might yet be dead before this was over.
“You mean go on letting ’em think they’ve lost two?” Trey said, scowling and unwilling.
“Two?” Blaine said blankly. “What’re you talking about, two?”
Trey’s dismay knocked the scowl right off his face. For an awkward moment he didn’t say anything, and when he did speak it was to Dacey. “I’ll keep hushed,” he repeated.
“Two?” demanded Blaine.
Dacey shook his head at Trey. “You’ve done stuck your foot in it. You’d better tell her all.”
Abashed, Trey spent a long moment staring at the ground. When he did raise his eyes, he looked more through Blaine than at her.
“It was your brother,” he said. “They used him as an example, so we wouldn’t give them no trouble. He’s...dead.”
Dead! Blaine’s hands curled into fists, scrunching up the skirt she’d been trying to free. “Rand?” she said faintly.
Trey’s forehead wrinkled. “That don’t sound right,” he said. “It was William or some such... he was the only one. That’s all it took.”
“Willum!” Her voice barely raised...but inside, something screamed. Tears spilled down a face which felt dead and strangely expressionless. “He was only a baby,” she said, as if it would make Trey change his words.
“I know,” Trey said, still not looking at her. “We all know. It’s part of what’s kept the rest of us in line.”
Dacey drew Trey a few steps away from Blaine’s grief. “You mean to tell me that’s all they’ve done? They’ve killed one child, and touched no one else?”
Trey grew abruptly withdrawn, and fiddled with the thigh strap to his knife. He deliberately kept his eyes on Blaine as she finished untangling herself, carefully and thoroughly slicing the offending branches to slivers as she ignored the tears on her face. “No, that ain’t all they’ve done. But mostly they leave us be...as long as things are going the way Nekfehr likes it.”
Dacey digested the information, shook his head — this time to himself — and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck, lost in thought. “Blue,” he said absently as the big ticked dog sniffed anxiously at Blaine and made a hesitant move in her direction; she ignored them all, dazed, taking in events like she was using somebody else’s eyes. At Dacey’s voice Blue sat next to Mage, plainly worried; Dacey gave his ears a quick, absent rub.
Blaine carefully folded her knife and climbed to her feet. She barely noticed Trey’s attention to her odd skirts, and had little interest in his comment to Dacey as she moved out of the briars. Willum. That’s all she could think of. Willum. Hardly old enough to do more harm than squash a bug and they’d killed him.
With a sudden, nearly physical blow, Blaine’s old dream rushed in on her. The trees built momentum, crashing to the ground, tangling, rolling — rushing down toward the Kendricks homestead.
Willum was there, his chubby face contorted in fear. “Blaine!” he shrieked, terror distorting his voice into a high keen.
“Willum!” she cried, and ran for him, reaching out to scoop him up as each step forward took her further and further away. “No! Willum!”
Deeply startled, she stared at Dacey. If you’ve got seeings, you’ll learn to sort them out... What other dreams had she had, the ones that seemed too real? Hadn’t he been in one? And Rand? She scrambled around her memories, trying to find visions she had once worked hard to forget. She thought...she thought —
Trey’s voice scattered the tenuous recollection, as he cleared his throat and tried to move past the moment. “I can get you food,” he said, and something had changed in his voice, as if being a part of Blaine’s grief had tipped his trust their way. “Be hard to bring much without getting questions from my ma, but I can get some. And no, they ain’t got pistols. They barely take to bows — afeard of ’em, the Takers are, even if they don’t say it.”
“Hoped as much,” Dacey said. “Can’t grab hold of someone and Take ’em, iff’n you can’t get close enough to touch ’em.”
“About them other things — well, I’ll do my best. Don’t know what good it’ll do you.”
Dacey didn’t take the invitation to elaborate. “We’ll be here early morning. Will you?”
“Can’t get away every day. I got hunting to do. And they keep track of us, sometimes.” But he nodded, and his face showed reluctant agreement.
“You’ll have time enough to hunt.” Dacey cast a concerned eye on Blaine, touched her arm, seeing if she were ready to go and practically turning her to do so even as he asked one last question. “You got any dogs?”
“Couple o’ hounds,” Trey said. “Mostly tree.” He nodded to the top of the ridge; for the first time Blaine saw a redbone, hanging back as aloof as Mage could be, watching them.
“Plainsfolk won’t know the difference. Iff’n you hear ’em asking about dogs running the hills, you tell ’em yours got loose. Don’t want ’em to wonder about mine.”
Trey nodded, and moved uneasily, and ducked his head. “I’ll come back tomorrow, then, with some food. Just don’t do nothing to change my mind ’bout you, hear?” He gestured to his dog, and headed up to follow the ridge north.
Blaine barely noticed him go.
~~~~~
Blaine spent the afternoon fiddling with the fire and trying to warm her toes, quietly crying, full of unbidden images of Willum. Willum at three, and never the chance to get any older. Willum with his bugs and boasts, all boy, keeping the whole family running to make sure he stayed out of trouble.
She simply couldn’t imagine that she would never see him again. That she hadn’t even have the chance to say good-bye, to be with her family when they’d consigned him to the ground, his young spirit to join the rest of those that lived among these hills.
Dacey foraged through the afternoon, dropping off more wood for her fire, offering a hand on her shoulder, dropping off a mess of young nettles to boil up for supper. He settled in at camp when the hounds took off after an early fox, making the hills ring, and gave her what privacy he could, immersing himself in the construction of a lean-to, pausing only when the trail cry faltered. When the hounds worked out the puzzle and took off again — even Blaine could hear it was Whimsy in front, with her clever nose — he smiled to himself and returned to work.
Blaine wiped her eyes then, annoyed and even surprised when they immediately welled up again with tears, as if off on some mission of their own and not paying any attention
to the fact that she’d decided to boil up those nettles. Blue was still off on his halfhearted chase of the fox, and Mage had long since moved away from her awkward patting to pace around the camp area, lifting his nose to the breeze and licking it to freshen the scent he winded. Pining after the chase, she figured, wiping her own wet nose.
But Mage found the scent he wanted, and his hackles rose. His head lifted, his jaw dropped just enough to let the sound out. At first she heard no sound, just a prickling at the nape of her neck. Then his voice lifted in a clear, rising moan that was at once beautiful and terrifying.
Blaine froze. She’d heard that sound before, the one that had haunted her up out of sleep and inspired her to go check on those strangers again. Dacey, too, stopped to watch his dog, wearing a grim sort of pride that Blaine couldn’t understand.
Blithely unaware of the scrutiny, Mage repeated his statement twice, then went to curl up where Dacey knelt by the lean-to.
“Why’d he do that?” Blaine asked after the quiet that followed, her voice still thick from all her tears. Only the faint, distant baying of the other hounds disturbed the silence. “I heard him before, too. Before...all this.”
“It’s just his way of saying he’s scented his prey and is ready for the hunt.” Dacey gave his dog a speculative look, one that told Blaine he wasn’t so sure as he sounded. He tossed some dried bark fuzz into the air and watched it drift with the slight breeze. “More homesteads that way, Blaine?”
“I’m still not just sure where we are,” Blaine said. “But if we’re due east of my homeplace, then north of us is the mouth of the creek and the river, and where our meeting hall is.” She imitated Dacey’s actions and watched three times as the fluff of bark floated away from the north. “I guess being up here on this ridge puts us clear, though...they ain’t gonna get none of our smoke.”
“I’m hoping not.”
Of course he’d already taken the vagaries of the wind into account. Of course. She closed her mouth tightly and vowed to quit trying to help someone who didn’t really need it. “Don’t understand why you keep me here. Ought to be a way to get me back home, secret-like. I ain’t any help to you.”
“You ain’t in the way, either,” Dacey responded easily. He gave her a wry smile, a touch of self-deprecating of humor in his eyes. “Truth be told, iff’n it was safe to take you home, I’d have it that way, but it ain’t. And having you here...keeps me from feeling alone.”
Alone? Dacey? But he was that kind, wasn’t he? He chose to be alone...didn’t he?
Then he grinned, just a little bit of tease lurking there. “Besides, you can take right good care of yourself, I’ve noted. I reckon I’ll need your help before it’s done.”
Blaine stared into the fire and didn’t answer him. She longed to be doing anything besides sitting here, thinking. About Willum. About her role in the days to come — dreading it, and at the same time, dreading the thought that she didn’t really have one.
The shelter caught her eye, almost done, with the long evening twilight dimming its back corners. Empty back corners. It seemed Dacey hadn’t thought about bedding.
That was something she could do.
“Going for bedding,” she announced abruptly, and took his big sheath knife. Circling north of the point, she went in search of hemlocks and some fine, springy branches. The north-facing slope held a grove of them, as was often the case; Blaine set to work, cutting a few selected branches from the younger trees and leaving them scattered around the grove as she went, breathing deeply of the fresh sap. When she reckoned she had enough — which she judged more by the fact that her fingers were as sticky as she wanted them to get than by an accounting of branches — she shoved the knife and sheath down against the waistband of her skirt and found a piece of forked deadwood. Dragging it from tree to tree, she jammed her boughs against the fork, hurrying as the twilight faded. When she had so many they spilled off her stick no matter how careful she was, she turned back for the campsite.
And hesitated. She’d come further than she’d meant to. And as she paused she caught a sudden lungful of spilled bowel and bloody meat, startling herself with the discovery of a deer carcass just outside the grove. Deer carcass, but not with the skin torn up and eaten along with the rest of it, but with that turned inside-out look that a bear left to its meal.
Oh, spirits. Hungry spring bear.
A low, coughing growl made her stiffen. Behind her. Unhappy sounding.
Blaine peered cautiously over her shoulder and wished she hadn’t. The sight of the bear was enough to take the strength from her legs. From anybody’s legs. It wasn’t a huge bear — downright skinny bear — but it looked big enough, staring at her from those small, cold bear eyes and making an irritated noise deep in its throat.
“Nice bear,” she said, from a dry mouth that only let half the sounds out. Stupid, the same dry-mouthed voice squeaked inside her head. Stupid, so close to a bear claim and not even knowing it. The bear stood tall on its hind legs, shifting from one to the other, clacking its jaws at her, working up some foam, nodding in a jerky, spookily human way.
She trembled, afraid to move, afraid not to. Maybe just one, quivering, uncertain step....
Wrong. The bear dropped down and snarled terribly at her, slinging its head, slinging spit.
Blaine shrieked and darted forward, her hemlock forgotten, the noise of the bear’s pursuit filling her world. Tree, tree, tree!
With the bear’s breath warming her heels, Blaine spotted the black barked spire of a small black cherry and she leapt for it, shinnying up its rough skin. No lower branches, they’d all been broken off by —
Black cherry. What was it that bears liked more than anything, would climb plenty high to get? Black cherries. And what had her daddy always told her? Bear comes around, don’t you run. Set up a ruckus, squall at it. Black bear don’t care enough to come through that.
But she’d already run. And she’d already climbed — was still climbing, fast as she could.
Oh, spirits...
She had to get further up than the bear would go. Young tree, skinny trunk...surely she could do that. Surely she could —
“Get away!” she screamed mindlessly at it, digging knees and ankles and arms against the rough bark, blessing her split skirts, and not daring to look down. The tree swayed with their weight; she ignored it...until it gave an ominous creak, dipping wildly against the slight bend in its trunk. She clutched it convulsively, squeezing her eyes shut, waiting to feel either claws or the sudden crack of the tree.
Nothing. Blaine dared a glance down and discovered the bear had stopped, too, its furry arms wrapped around the tree, for the moment looking as uncertain as she. Until it saw her looking, taking in the black glitter of its harsh coat, the soft brown of its face — even that was skinny — the furious curl of its amazingly mobile lips. Then it cared again, and lurched up at her.
I’m going to die. Either way, I’m going to die. Blaine glared downward, hurling an ineffective curse at the bear’s upturned face, kicking at its nose. It snarled back and swiped at her, snaring the heel of her boot and ripping leather — ripping the boot right off her foot. She shrieked, digging her toes into the bark as she scurried out of reach.
But her skin was torn, her arms were tired, her grip was loosening. The bear, enraged to see her just out of reach with the tree swaying in increasing, alarming circles, snarled at her, coughing hot breath on her ankle. “Gitgitgit!” she hollered, slipping down with the effort. She lifted her head and closed her eyes and bellowed, “Dacey!”
There wasn’t even a chance he would hear her.
She pressed herself against the crispy black bark and felt a new chill travel her spine as the cool handle of Dacey’s knife touched her stomach. A chill, and sudden hope. Blaine hugged the tree trunk with one arm, easing the knife out of her waistband, movement that triggered the bear into another round of frustrated threats; its wild swipe caught her hanging skirts, ripping out a chunk of material, s
ending the tree into violent movement; they both clutched at it. Perversely, half out of her mind with fear, she growled back at it. And then she slipped again, and there was no more choice —
With a yell for courage, she dropped back and drove the heavy knife down, into the bear’s eye.
The bear stiffened. It jerked and slid and fell away from the trunk, landing with a thump and crack that Blaine felt through her suddenly tenuous grip. She was nearly upside down, torn away from the tree with her effort. Only one hand was close enough to scrabble at the bark; for a moment she thought she would come down the tree and land headfirst on the bear — unmoving, was it dead? — but she managed to right herself, wrapping each limb tightly around the trunk no matter the cost to her skin. She put her face against the cool, rough bark and hugged it, hugged it until she knew she had to climb down or fall down, no matter what waited below.
Slowly, with respect for her scrapes, she descended the tree.
On the ground she fell to her knees and simply stared at the bear. It was a big, black lump of fur that moved bonelessly under her tentative shove. Dead. Tears of blood oozed down the bear’s face; the knife still jutted out of its eye, an insult. Blaine stared, and wiped her nose against her sleeve, suddenly aware of the many tears on her own face. Then she smoothed back the hair that had pulled out of her braids, straightened her homespun shirt, and stood.
“Stupid bear,” she muttered, with only the smallest sob. She kicked it. As an afterthought, she jerked the knife out of its eye socket, and kicked it again.
A joyful roar of challenge rang from the hemlocks and Blaine whirled, shoving the knife out in front of her. Blue charged out, hauling Dacey with his braided leash, and pounced on the bear, roughing it mercilessly.
Blaine dropped the knife, sagged against the tree, and covered her face with her hands, moaning. “Blue.”
“Down, Blue,” Dacey commanded. He dragged the dog off the bear, giving his collar one good shake. “That’s enough!” Blue, shaking and whining, barely managed to restrain himself, but Dacey ignored him. “Blaine, you hurt?”
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