The Seer - eARC

by Sonia Lyris

Dirina hesitated in her packing, not looking up, tone edged. “Do you have another plan, Amarta?”

  “No.”

  “The less she knows, the safer she is.”

  Dirina was right. But it felt wretched, after all the family had done for them.

  “We can’t take food from them, and we have no money. Where are we going? What will we do?”

  “That’s what I was wondering,” came Enana’s voice from the doorway.

  At that, Pas ran to Enana, and she lifted him into her arms. The tall woman walked into their room, balancing the boy on her hip. Pas turned to look at his mother and Amarta, thumb in his mouth.

  “Is this the same man after you?”

  “Yes,” Amarta said softly.

  Enana had been so good to them, taking them in at midwinter, feeding them, letting them stay. What a wretched way to repay her, leaving now, before harvest, when they were needed most.

  Amarta saw the hunter again in memory, lying there, his bow and knife a few feet away on the ground.

  Why hadn’t she taken them? She felt a fool now, thinking of it. It would have been so easy to just pick up his weapons and take them away.

  Or, she realized with a chill, she could have taken an arrow from his pack, aimed for his heart, and let it loose. Standing right over him, surely she could not miss.

  He could have been stopped, right then, for good.

  “We’re sorry,” Dirina was saying. “So sorry. The wash is half done, and Amarta dropped all the groceries from market in the woods—”

  “Down now,” Pas said very soberly. Enana let him to the ground. He ran to his mother, hugged her leg.

  Maybe the hunter would not wake at all. Maybe he lied to her about the dart not being deadly, and she had inadvertently killed him. She paused, wondering if this was likely. Reason said no.

  And what would he do when he woke?

  A dark figure in the night, a crescent moon at the treeline. He knocked on the farmhouse door. Enana’s silhouette against the lamplight from inside. His tone was apologetic, gentle. Charming.

  She felt suddenly ill.

  “We’ll go upriver,” Amarta said quickly. “Back to Sennant. Or—”

  Dirina looked a question at her.

  “Home to Botaros,” Amarta continued, making her tone as certain as she knew how, catching Dirina’s gaze. When the shadow hunter came to ask Enana questions, Amarta wanted her to have answers.

  “This man,” Enana said. “Where did you say he was now?”

  “He attacked Amarta in the forest,” Dirina said, her hand on Pas’s head. Amarta willed her sister not to say the rest, but she did. “Asleep on the ground, from poison on a dart. You said, Amarta.”

  “Yes,” Amarta said reluctantly, “But—”

  Enana’s expression turned hard. “Tell us where he is. I’ll take the boys out there and we can take care of him where he lies.”

  Hope surged inside her. Was this possible? Enana and her two sons. Big men. Surely they could take one unconscious man.

  Back at the house, the hunter in the cellar, a makeshift bolt across the door. Enana and her sons sitting at the table, discussing what to do with him, what would be right. What would be just. And then—

  They would bring him back to the house, yes, and lock him in the cellar with the apples and the preserves. But sometime before dawn—

  Enana in her bed, slumped over, arms twitching, blood trailing down her neck, the blankets soaked in red.

  He would break free of the basement. The men would die first, quickly, but Enana slowly, after being asked questions.

  And this because Enana and her family would not, could not, take the life of a man who had yet to do them wrong.

  “He’ll kill you,” she said flatly.

  “One man?” Enana snorted.

  “No,” Amarta lied. “He’s not alone this time. He has a whole band of outlaws with him, hiding in the woods.” She licked her lips, looking at Dirina. “Twenty or thirty. All armed with crossbows and swords. They’re killers, Enana. Brutal killers.”

  “But they’re only after us,” Dirina added. “You and Cafir and Loham will be safe without us.”

  Enana frowned. “But I don’t want you to go. We could hide you. The basement—”

  Amarta shook her head. “He’ll find us.”

  The tall woman looked between them both, anger sharp across her features. “No one tells me what to do—”

  Amarta stepped close and took Enana’s hands. “We must leave, and soon. So much safer for you.”

  Enana’s pressed her lips together. Then spoke, her tone low. She was still angry. “I have coins I can give you. I’ll pack you some food.”

  Amarta hid her relief as she saw the future’s tangle of threads twist a new way. Enana might live through the hunter’s visit.

  What could she do to make it more likely?

  “Enana,” Amarta said urgently. “He’ll come here. He’ll ask you questions. He can read a lie. Tell him everything you know about us. Let him in, feed him, give him drink.”

  Enana turned around slowly, her expression darkening further. “I won’t feed a killer who forces you from my house. No one comes into my home I don’t let in. Not even the king’s soldiers with their manners of goats and brains of chickens. No one.”

  Amarta’s ankle and shoulder were throbbing for attention now, distracting her. Dimly she thought she heard Enana cry out in pain, but it might be her imagination. Everything seemed to suck away her focus. “He’s worse than the king’s soldiers. Please, Enana, don’t fight him.”

  “You want me to show him hospitality, this monster? To treat him well?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is no sense in this.”

  “And,” Amarta whispered, struggling with the last of her focus to seek a toehold in the future, not just for tonight, but farther, farther, “it will be dry until a tenday before the new moon. Then the rain will come all at once for three days, then stop.” With that, Enana would know how to best harvest, when to cut the hay. If she believed it.

  “What are you saying?”

  Amarta and Dirina exchanged looks. Amarta licked her lips.

  “The future sometimes . . .” How to explain? “It whispers to me.”

  Enana shook her head, disbelief on her face. “No one knows when the rains come.”

  “Amarta does,” Dirina said simply.

  Amarta spoke again, feeling a sudden urgency. “He will come tonight, Enana, as the moon comes over the rise.” In her mind’s eye she saw it clearly, the knock on the door, Enana backlit by stovelight. “If he comes when I say he will, will you remember my words? Don’t fight. Treat him . . .” She swallowed, hating to say it, but knowing she must. “Treat him well. Tell him everything. It will go better for us if you do.”

  Enana stared at Amarta for a long, thoughtful moment.

  “Get packed.”

  It was slow going along the forest road with Amarta limping. The walking stick Enana had given them was a help, but each step was full of pain that she resolved to hide. Dirina slowed so as not to outpace her.

  The nals chits Enana had given them sat heavily in Amarta’s pocket, weighted with her guilt at the knowledge of how little the family had to spare. From the jabbing pain in her ankle to her shoulder, never mind the other places where her encounter in the forest had left her bruised and scraped, Amarta ached.

  “Do you think we have until nightfall before he comes after us?” Dirina asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “You hope? Ama, you said—”

  A flash of hot resentment went through her, hand in hand with a sickening remorse. “I know what I said. Seeing is not the same thing as knowing. And now I don’t see anything at all. Diri, everything”—hurts, she didn’t finish—“is confusing.”

  Her sister said nothing.

  “Up now,” Pas said after they had let him walk a little way. Dirina hefted him and put him on her shoulders, holding his feet, wrapped with tiny
turnshoes Cafir had made for him.

  One more thing the family had given them, which they repaid so wretchedly. The gnawing ache inside threatened to eat through her. It was as if along with the seedlings she’d planted in the fields she had also put some of her self into the ground, and now she was being torn out by the roots. “Diri, where do we go?”

  Dirina squinted at the sky and the sun. “The river. We’ll get the barge. It comes five hands past noon, so we should . . .” She inhaled. “We should hurry.”

  “Down now,” Pas said.

  “You ride, sweet,” Dirina said. “We have to go faster than you can go.”

  “I go fast.”

  “Then you’ll have to carry me, too,” Amarta said, giving him a smile. He looked at her, considered, and fell silent.

  “He will come after us, Diri,” Amarta said. “That’s not”—she said, seeing her sister’s wide-eyed look—“what I’m seeing. It’s what I’m thinking.”

  She could have prevented it. Picked up the bow. Notched an arrow. Tried again if she missed. Or used his knife on him. It had been right there on the ground.

  To have ended it right then, to be able to stay with Enana—but she had not. She prayed to the guardian of travelers and orphans that Enana would do as she had told her. As vision had told her.

  “Ama?”

  She realized that she had made a short, pained sound. “If he hurts them—”

  “He doesn’t want them. He wants us.”

  No, he wanted Amarta. “But how will we make money? How will we eat?”

  “We’ll clean, we’ll mend, as we’ve done all along.”

  That wasn’t what they had done. Dirina still thought Amarta might believe it, though, so she kept on saying it.

  “I will do what you do to earn money,” Amarta said.

  “No,” Dirina said, shocked. “You will not.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re a child.”

  “Come spring, Diri, I’m of age.”

  “Years are not enough. Your first time should not be—like that. It should be someone you like. Someone who likes you.”

  “What do you mean, first time?”

  An exhale. Then, softly, “You do not need to know.”

  “How long until I bleed with the moon, Diri? That, if not my springs, certainly means—”

  “It doesn’t. It means nothing.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “You certainly are. This would not be safe for you.”

  “It’s safe for you?” Amarta swallowed her frustration. “I’d know if it was safe. I’d be able to see before it happened.”

  “Would you, now? Really? Then why are we on the run again? You see danger when it’s right on top of you, Ama. With a man, that’s far too late.”

  Amarta wanted to say that it was more complicated than that, to explain that the hunter after them, whose eyes she had finally seen, was more dangerous than a single man ought to be. Then she looked at her sister’s thin mask of confidence, saw worry and terror churning beneath, and decided not to. “All right,” she agreed. “But I won’t let us go hungry again.”

  “We won’t,” Dirina said. Another empty promise, but she would not gainsay it. Her sister was doing all she could to get them from one moment to the next.

  Despite that vision had told her he would sleep for hours yet, she looked around furtively at the dark forest.

  She would not, she resolved, push vision away again. Thinking of the forest and her hunter, she realized that she hadn’t, really. The visions were inescapable. Like so many things in her life. Like having to leave places that might have been home.

  A sudden scratching sound made her jerk around, setting her heart to speeding, but it was only a squirrel, leaping from one tree to the next, now gone into the upper reaches of the thick canopy.

  She hoped that the inescapable things in life did not include her hunter.

  When they reached the Sennant River they turned along the road, walking past small houses and fenced pastures. Goats and sheep looked curiously at them as they passed.

  Nesmar Port was little more than a sloping bank of stony shore and a wooden dock. People, horses, and wagons were clustered thickly, some leaning on barrels, voices loud and gestures wide over piles of sacks and stacked crates. Two well-dressed women stood together, consulting a board of parchment notes as a donkey laden with overstuffed saddle bags was futilely attempting to back up from between a stack of crates topped with cages of chickens. Someone began to laugh, someone else to call loudly to children who were staring and pointing at a pair of small, oddly striped brown, black, and tan-colored horses.

  Amarta breathed relief. They had not missed the barge after all. At a large flat rock she sat gratefully, dropping her stick to the stones underfoot. She crossed her ankle over her other knee, rubbing it to try to ease the pain.

  “Ama,” Dirina hissed.

  Her sister’s gaze was intent, face tight. Amarta followed her look across the assembled crowd, not seeing the cause of her alarm. “What?”

  A single carthorse was pulling a wagon of hay bundles slowly up and away from the water toward the road. Elsewhere a man hefted a pack over his back. Two small, dusky-skinned men from some eastern tribe were securing a wagon cover.

  Amarta felt her stomach drop. “Oh no,” she breathed.

  The man with the large bundle across his shoulders, his three children pulling a handcart behind him, gave her a sympathetic look as he passed. “Sad it is, but you just now missed it.”

  “No! Are you sure?” Dirina asked.

  He pointed downriver. In the distance was a slowly receding barge, laden with wagons, boxes, animals, people.

  The man’s children looked at the two of them as they dragged the handcart behind him. Amarta saw how their gaze took them in. They would be remembered.

  “Up now,” Pas insisted, arms on his mother’s leg, looking at her intently. She sighed heavily, pulled him into her lap.

  The weight of the day, of this latest failure, settled heavily on Amarta.

  Open and covered wagons were hitched to horses, packs slung over backs and into handcarts. The donkey escaped his temporary trap and was now making his way up to the road.

  Leaving. They were all leaving.

  “What do we do?” Dirina asked, her hopeless tone tearing at Amarta.

  Would the hunter come here directly from the farm? Surely there was the rest of the countryside to search. He might go another way.

  No, the barge was obvious. She could too clearly imagine him walking through the riverside village, asking questions.

  “A woman and child and a limping girl dressed as a boy? Oh, yes, I saw them. They missed the afternoon barge. They went that way.”

  “Do you think,” Dirina asked, almost timidly, “we could—go back?”

  To the farm, she meant. The only place Amarta was sure they could not go. “No,” she said soberly.

  “Then . . . ?”

  She wanted to sleep it all away, like a bad dream. Wake to Enana calling her to the fields.

  The final crates and barrels were loaded onto wagons, bolts of cloth and cages of rabbits rearranged on top. The sky was darkening. Everyone wanted to get where they were going before nightfall.

  Nightfall. When he would wake.

  Another moment she put off looking to vision, then another. That part of her was sore as well. At last she forced herself to look and listen to what could be.

  Nothing but the chattering of people, the crunching of small stones under foot, hoof, and wheel. The smell and hush of river. High clouds caught the first hint of sunset.

  Focus, she told herself sternly, closing her eyes.

  When she found it, it was buried and crusted over, like some rusted-shut metal door that screamed to open even a crack. She fought back, pushed the question into this sorest part of herself.

  Could they wait for the next day’s barge? Find somewhere to hide for the night? Was it possible?

&
nbsp; The smallest flash came to her. Barely a breath.

  Darkness. Rough motion. The smell of horse strong under her, head pounding. Pas and Dirina gone.

  “No,” she breathed, pushing it away, not wanting to know more.

  “Then where?” Dirina asked. Almost a plea. “Ama, we have to—”

  “I don’t know!” she said loudly.

  An elderly woman gave her a reproachful look as she and her adult son, judging by his similar looks, slowly walked by. The man was breathing hard, carrying a pack as well as holding his mother’s arm to steady her as they ascended the bank.

  A slight depression in the ground, near a flowering plantain at the edge of a road. A leather-clad knee dropped down by it, fingers lightly brushing the dirt.

  “Grandmother,” Amarta said quickly, rewarded by another glare from the woman. Amarta struggled painfully to her feet, picked up the stick at her feet. “Please take this for your travels.” She held it out. The two of them paused, the woman’s expression softening.

  The man nodded gratefully, took the stick and handed it to his mother.

  “Thank you, child,” the woman said.

  “Blessings of the season to you,” Amarta replied politely.

  Dirina looked a question at her. Amarta looked toward the river.

  Only a couple of large covered wagons remained. A dusky-skinned woman checked the harnesses of a team of four gray carthorses while the other of the tribespeople loaded up bags into the other wagon.

  Standing apart from them were the striped horses, untethered, unhaltered, not even bridle or reins. Their markings were strange, with brown and orange stripes wrapping their wheat-colored hides, stretching from the tricolor fall of their tails up their backs through their manes to their heads, the fingers of stain reaching across their faces like some sort of midwinter festival mask. It was as if the chestnut-and-ginger-colored lines had been painted on their backs and sides by someone with more enthusiasm than skill.

  “Mama, look: horses!” Pas cried loudly, pointing at them. At this outburst, one of the horses looked at them. Dirina kept a tight hold of Pas’s hand as he tried to pull away to run to them.

  “What are they?” Amarta asked.

  Mutely, Dirina shook her head.