Her mouth dropped open, until she caught herself doing it. Spirits, yes, you should have told me!
But no. He’d probably had his reasons. He always seemed to. And then, a buried memory — a word she’d found too jumbled to understand at the time, but had since heard Dacey use...why can’t you be made nekfehr? the Annekteh leader had demanded of Dacey.
The clues had been there. And so was the fact that while Dacey might give her little things to do, he clearly didn’t trust her, not clean through.
“I know it now,” she said finally. And went to climb up on the rock and look out over the mountains.
~~~~~
The timbering went well. Random problems still occurred where they shouldn’t, but no more deaths. No more accidental trappings or poisonings. Nekfehr found himself impressed with the humans’ resourcefulness, their wordless conspiracies. Questioned, Taken, the temporary vessels could only reveal their own minor actions. Yet these people knew each other well enough to make their isolated and insignificant behavior add up to something significant, indeed. One woman needing to gather poke. Another talking about root foods. And not a one of them mentioning the strange poisonous characteristics of the pokeweed. All of them, managing to look elsewhere when a hungry man tried a new food.
No planning, no discussion. No witnessing. And yet...
But such tricks seemed all they were good for. They knew nothing about their lost magics, about the suktah. They had not tended or encouraged new suktah growth. Perhaps the Annekteh had been too efficient in eradicating seer lore. These humans did not even know where the natural suktah groves grew. And surely...surely the groves had returned, after all this time.
With the suktah, the Annketeh could direct their vessels to build nekfehrta, the linking structures. And the nekfehrta, placed at intervals along the trails between established Annekteh colonies and the new lands they intended to conquer, would create the security and freedom the Annekteh needed to achieve expansion unhindered.
The suktah had to be here. Eventually, the Annekteh would find it.
~~~~~
Blaine fretted her way through the rest of the day, half resentment, half worry. Resentment — Dacey didn’t trust her, after all she’d been through with him. And worry — her family. Surely, she thought, it would be all right to creep on over to her own ridge and at least check on them. She had the blinder. The leaves would be out any day now, making it so much easier to hide on the slopes.
If he don’t trust you now, what’ll he do iff’n you risk such a thing?
But if he didn’t trust her, why should she blindly trust him? Why not do what her heart longed to do?
And still she couldn’t bring herself to it, not when she knew he was depending on her even without fully trusting her, and so spent the rest of the day on little nothings — turning the meat on the drying rack, mixing up the last of their corn meal and flour for a mid-day meal, watching Dacey finish work on the bear hide and carefully roll it up while he cooked its brains to mix with the ashes for tanning — though he said something about getting salt to preserve it until he could make a batch of oak tannic.
And why did he spend his time on some dumb old bear skin? Why he wasn’t planning and scouting, and getting ready to make some kind of move?
But she’d learned something from his quiet, and that was to watch, to observe until it might make some sense to her on her own. She finally decided he really had been depending on what Trey might have had to say, and couldn’t act without it. It didn’t make her feel any too good for walking out on the boy. She spent the evening tending to her many scrapes and went to bed while Dacey was still listening to the hounds run trail, Blue panting by her side.
The next morning Blaine rolled off her hemlock bedding before the sun peaked the mountain. Dacey was still asleep on the other side of the shelter, with all five dogs lumped around him. He sprawled on the ground, his legs stuck out from beneath his skewed blanket, his hair tickling over his face in a way that ought to have woken him. Blaine sat against the back of the shelter and drew her knees up to her chin, considering him.
He figured in her dreams these days — only they were not real dreams anymore, just snatches of disjointed moments. Shouting in her ears, the view of a hillside from way up in the trees, standing in the rain outside a trio of young pines — nothing that made any sense to her. Except that every time they showed Dacey, his eyes had that harrowed look. The trying-to-survive, not-certain-of-making-it look.
This morning his face was quiet. Blaine nibbled on a rough fingernail and wondered about him. The way he’d reacted to her question about the jimson had made it clear that the memory still pained him, and yet here he was again, facing the Annekteh, the ones who had done that to him.
Maybe she should warn him about her dreams. She had dreamt about hiding in the dairy, hadn’t she, and hadn’t it happened? She’d had strange dreams about Willum....Willum. And even if these new dreams didn’t hold anything of any sense, anything but bits and pieces...Yes, she should tell him. Standing in the rain, outside a trio of young pines...
No.
She couldn’t.
For Dacey Childers was the one who could help her people, but not if she scared him off — even if he wasn’t so easy to scare; he’d proved that. But he knew the lore; he knew how to deal with the Annekteh. He was the one who had traveled all the way up here on the strength of seeings. Her people knew none of these things, and they needed him. And anyway she’d had dreams all her life, dreams that had never meant anything, that no one ever did anything but scoff at. How much worse, if she scared him off for nothing.
She closed her eyes, rested her forehead down on her knees, and wondered how she’d feel about this moment if Dacey was killed. Then, much as Dacey must have done the previous day after her questions recalled the jimson-fear to his mind, she took a deep breath and put it behind her.
Dacey had not moved when she returned from splashing her face at the spring below the rocks. A real gone-from-the-world sleep. Blaine took the knife from where it lay by the bearskin, and found one of the hickory baskets she’d made the day before. There would be no berries for the picking this early in the season, but maybe she could find some old sumac clusters to spice up their drinking water — or maybe some hemlock. Yes, she definitely had a hankering for hemlock bark tea.
Anything was excuse enough to be gone when Dacey decided it was time to head for the clearing to meet Trey. Blaine paused as she tiptoed past the lean-to, looking again at the relaxed expression on his face. Just like that moment over Lottie’s supper the first time they’d met, she realized anew that despite his self-possessed aura, Dacey was far from her father’s age. She leaned down to straighten his blanket, carefully so as not to wake him. Then, so he’d know she’d be safe, she hissed at Blue. The sleepy hound got to his feet after only three tries and followed her out on the ridge, his tail wagging in its slow, pleased way.
Blaine made sure it was at least noon before she returned to the camp. She had managed to find some sumac after all, and she held forth the basket as a kind of peace offering when Dacey looked up at her.
He said nothing to her, and she saw no accusation in his gaze — yet there was something there that demanded an explanation. Maybe it was just from within herself. Either way, Blaine refused to give in. “He have anything to say today?”
“Plenty,” Dacey said, amusement in his voice and eye. “Most of it about you.”
Blaine set herself and the basket down and began to pick the dried bits of winter-dried leaf out of the berry clusters. “I got plenty to say about him, too, if I was the type to do it.”
“Oh, he weren’t bad-mouthing you, Blaine,” Dacey said, and Blaine looked up to confirm that she had actually heard teasing in his voice. “It was mostly questions he had. Wanted to know if there was really a bear, for one. And he asked how you’d joined up with me, and how far we’d walked, and did you slow me down.”
That one earned a snort from Blaine. “Nosy
. And sounds just like my Daddy, who probably still don’t believe I been walking the hills on my own for years, even though I bet Rand’s spilled it by now.”
“He did ask some about Mage, and how he’d got crippled up,” Dacey said.
“Means he’s nosy about everyone, not just me,” Blaine concluded. “How did he get crippled up?”
Dacey ducked his head to hide his smile, though she saw it anyway. Oddly enough, she wasn’t piqued by it. She sort of liked seeing it on him. “He was born that way,” Dacey told her. “With that back hock not bending right. The way I figure it, he has so much heart, it just sort of took it out of the rest of him.”
Hmm. Hard to act snappish after a comment like that. “Didn’t Trey have nothing to say about the Takers?” she asked, drawing herself out of Blue’s way as he came trotting past her from the woods, sticking his head in Dacey’s lap and rubbing his face on Dacey’s legs, groaning in a happy kind of way.
“Some.” Dacey slapped the hound’s sides resoundingly, and then pushed the dog over so he lay with his legs dangling loosely in the air, tilting his head backwards. His lips fell away from his face. He looked utterly ridiculous, and Blaine found herself hiding her own smile. “To be fair to the boy, Blaine, he come up with a lot for only two days. I get the feeling he already knew the answers when I first asked him. Anyway, seems there ain’t any of ’em Taken, not besides some of the strangers, and not even all of them.”
Blaine looked up suspiciously. “I thought only seers could tell.”
“Can’t, not right off. Not if someone’s just come up to you, even if you know ’em. After a few days of watching, you can tell. Them that’s Taken don’t do much thinking and actin on their own, so unless the Annekteh are having ’em do something special, they mostly act like their heads’re up in the clouds.”
Well, that made a certain sort of sense.
“’Sides that, he says they don’t stray from the meeting hall too often. They’re used to plains, not hills, and they get lost too easy. The guard patrols take the same paths each time they go out.” The words were straightforward; his expression was not.
“They don’t sound like they’ll be too hard to handle,” Blaine observed. “The look on your face don’t agree.”
“It’s that one who leads them,” Dacey said, his gaze troubled as he looked over the ridge, the direction in which she’d pointed out the meeting hall. “Nekfehr. Trey had some to say about him, and none of it good. The man’s half-mad, your people think. There’s no telling what the Annekteh can take from the mind of a clever mad man.”
“It don’t matter,” Blaine said, swallowing her revulsion. “He can’t be everywhere. We can out-do the rest of ’em in the woods.”
Dacey didn’t respond right away; his expression was distant, thoughtful. “It’s a mite trickier than that,” he said, absently reaching down to smooth the top of Mage’s head. “For one thing, they keep the kids of the meeting hall during the day — the older ones an’ a few of the mothers watch them while the folks are working. Trey said the men are in the hills, timbering, while the women try to keep up the farms.”
“Then why isn’t he timbering?” Blaine asked accusingly.
“So you’re asking questions too,” Dacey said, and grinned. She scowled back at him. “Trey and a few of the older boys have been told to see to the hunting. And to look out for sassafras groves, which if they’ve found, Trey don’t know of it. They don’t tell each other much, so’s one can’t be Taken and give away everything.”
With the men in the hills, it might be possible to get to them, make plans with them. And the boys...if they were off on their own, hunting, it wouldn’t be too hard to talk with them, either. Yet there also had to be some way to ensure the safety of the little ones. All these possibilities...and no ideas in her head, no matter how hard she looked. “What do we do next?” she asked finally.
“Next,” Dacey said, staring into the trees as his hand stilled on Mage’s head, “I need to have a look around.”
“What do you mean?” But she was afraid she knew just what he meant. He meant leaving her alone at the camp while he went off and flirted with the Annekteh. Again.
Dacey stirred and looked back at her. “Trey’s told me most of what I need to know. But I’m not familiar with your meeting hall and the lay of the land around it. I don’t know how far astray the men are timbering. I got to go have a look.”
“That don’t sound safe to me.”
“’Course it ain’t safe,” Dacey told her. “If it was safe, we’d not be having this conversation at all.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter 12
Dark confusion, dark pain, silent screams —
Dacey stumbled, so taken with the seeing that he lost track of his own feet.
Blaine screaming, Blaine terrified —
He fell, catching himself on his hands, his fingers digging into the rich, cold groundcover. When had a seeing ever hit him so hard?
Blue, roaring to Blaine’s rescue, spitted on a sword. The shelter in the background, Blaine kicking it down, struggling between two men...
Magic, coming back to these hills. Heritage finding its way home. He flicked a sluggish worm from his fingers and righted himself.
Of course it ain’t safe. His own words hung in his ears as he resumed his trek north on the ridge, following Blaine’s directions — given her best guess at exactly where they were. He was back on the trail of the Annekteh again; last time he’d been here, he’d walked right into them. Of course, he hadn’t really been sure they were here, and he hadn’t paid close enough attention to Mage’s disquiet. This time, he would watch Mage more carefully. He would watch himself more carefully. And maybe he would figure out those intense but paltry seeings before it was too late to avoid the shadows they cast.
Shadow Hollers. Once they had been full of seers.
Dacey gazed out over the hollow to the east of him, finding the double-chimney trail of smoke that Blaine had described to him. Two ridges east and south to the head of the hollow he went, Mage at his heels and the jays crying overhead. When he paused, he was looking down the hollow that held the meeting hall. Before him, to his left and right, stretched the ridges that defined the west and east sides of the extremely short hollow; they met at the crooked crotch of ridges where Dacey stood.
He hunkered down behind a young oak and the sparse cover its typically stubborn, clinging brown leaves offered, and inspected the area — slowly, his gaze barely crawling over the cleared flats along the creek, his wood sense fired high. The base of each northeast slope showed signs of hasty timbering, and the contours of the hills there were laid bare to the rain and sun. Another big tree went down as he watched, and the cry of its fall made his eyes glint a little harder. A dust cloud raised from ground that should have been damp and nurturing new growth, not dried out and scarred.
Dacey turned away from the sight. The men were locals interspersed with dark-clad plainsmen — obvious even from a distance simply by their lack of exertion.
Inaccessible allies and bored enemies; he could touch neither.
The meeting hall sat nearly at the mouth of the hollow, nestled in a protective dip between two points of the west slope. It was on one of the biggest flats he’d seen in this region, with the creek fairly wide and flowing into the Dewey River, the bright shine of which he could see from here. Half of the mildly sloping flat was swampy, filled with sycamore and willows and tall dead trees. The higher part stood cleared for a small fenced pasture that butted against the hall. Just barely visible to him was the barn that sat higher up in the little dip; the projecting point of land rose before him to hide all but one corner.
A breeze from the north pushed against them, and Mage lifted his nose, whining deep in his chest. With the next breath he would have broken into a howl, and Dacey gently put his hand on the dog’s nose, lowering it and cutting off the noise. Mage ducked his head down and whined: a different, wanting-to-please noise.
&nbs
p; “Good boy,” Dacey murmured, running his hand down one of the long, soft ears and giving it a gentle tug.
Two men came out of the front door of the hall, armed with steel that glinted spears of sunlight at Dacey. They started up the point on the far side of the hall from Dacey, and headed north, away from him. He could see their well-trod path scarring the hillside — evidence that Trey had been right; the plainsmen followed the same patrol each time they went out. There was a similar pair of paths following the ridge on south of the hall, and along the opposite ridge, too.
Although the spring buds were finally broken, they gave only a tint of green to the hills, and didn’t provide any cover. The men would have to be well out of sight before he moved on. Mage, unable to understand the delay or Dacey’s preoccupation, butted his master with his head and nose. “Shh,” Dacey said. “Anyone’d think you were dumb ol’ Blue, carrying on like that.” But his hand traveled to the dog’s back and rested there.
He waited until he could no longer see the patrol, and even then, moved at a stalking slow pace. Slowly, while the sun climbed high enough to push the shadow of the east ridge down the contours of the west, he worked his way to the closest point, and looked down on the hall.
They had made themselves quite at home, he thought, his eyes ranging over the few men playing at swordfight in the space before the building, moving on to encompass the ruckus at the stables behind the meeting hall, where one of the mules expressed its opinion of the shoeing process. The noises carried clearly uphill, and he could hear the loud hiss of steam as the blacksmith shoved a shoe into the bucket of water next to the forge. The man holding the mule was abusive to both animal and farrier. Plainsman.
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