The Seer - eARC

by Sonia Lyris

  One of the striped horses turned in their direction and began walking toward the rock on which they sat.

  “Diri . . .”

  As it came near, Dirina and Amarta quickly stood and stepped back behind the rock. Dirina pushed the excited Pas back behind her as he struggled to break free of her grip. He reached out his other hand around his mother to the horse who had walked around the rock to reach him. Horse lips and small fingers met before Dirina managed to get between them, Amarta hobbling over to help.

  “Stop that!” Amarta told the horse, who swung its head to stare back at her.

  “Ho! What do you do here?” One of the tribesmen strode over. A smallish man, light brown hair nearly the same shade as his skin, glared at Dirina and Amarta as if they had somehow caused this problem. He turned on the animal, speaking softly to it with words Amarta did not understand. The horse snorted, tossed its head slightly and turned back to Pas again, snuffling. Pas held his hand out, again blocked by his mother. Pas giggled.

  Now the man made a soft sound, a sort of warbling, interspersed with a clicking. When that didn’t work, he put a hand on the side of the horse and pushed, with no obvious result.

  At last the horse turned, slowly, but in the other direction, to take it closer to Amarta. She reached out a hand, fingers trailing across the neck and soft, warm hair, as it turned the rest of the way around. Somehow the animal conveyed an amused insolence even as it returned to the wagons to rejoin its similarly furred companions. With a snort of frustration, hands in the air, the man followed.

  “’Bye horse,” Pas said.

  A tiny, wet animal colt trembling in the early dawn, dark brown with pale tan stripes, lips hungrily searching upwards.

  “Oh,” Amarta blurted. “She’s pregnant.”

  Then, despite the pain and everything that had happened that day, she laughed in delight. A future flash of something not painful, threatening, or about to hurt her—she hadn’t realized it was possible.

  The tribesman stopped suddenly, looking between Amarta and the horse. He walked back to Amarta.

  “Why do you say that?” he demanded.

  “Take us with you and I’ll tell you.”

  He shook his head, then went back to his wagons. The larger gray horses were harnessed, and the tribespeople seemed ready to leave. The man and woman mounted their striped horses in a fast, fluid motion.

  “It’s a colt, the foal,” Amarta called out to him in a final desperate attempt. The man glanced at her, then leaned toward the woman, speaking, head motioning back at Amarta and Dirina.

  In truth, Amarta wasn’t sure about that, but it would be almost a year before the mare birthed, whereas the hunter would track them here in—hours? A day?

  Soon. Too soon.

  The man turned in the saddle to look at her again for a moment. The wagons were leaving, the striped horses following. In minutes they were all gone.

  Amarta turned her head to look at Dirina, wiping her eyes of tears.

  “It was a good try, Ama,” Dirina said, her arm around her shoulders.

  The riverbank and dock, busy and full only a little bit ago, were now empty and quiet. The sun was dipping down behind the trees. Dirina pulled Pas onto her lap and held him tight.

  “Ama.” Her sister’s voice was soft.

  Where should they go, Dirina wanted to know. The sky was now awash in red and gold and deepening blue. In another hour, perhaps two, the hunter would wake. Go to the farmhouse.

  The nightmare would begin again.

  She sought vision, but it wasn’t answering, the door shut and barred. She was too tired. Everywhere she looked she saw bitter failure.

  “We’ll be okay,” she said with as much certainty as she could pretend, though she doubted Dirina was much convinced.

  Perhaps vision would return after she’d rested. Or perhaps only when she was about to be captured, or her life threatened.

  Pas wanted down again. Sighing as if defeated, Dirina let him go. He raced around the rock on which they sat.

  “Here, give me your foot,” Dirina said.

  Amarta lay her foot in her sister’s lap. Dirina turned it gently, and Amarta yelped with pain.

  “Sprained,” Dirina said wearily. “Then you walked another hour. No surprise it is swollen and red.” She rubbed it gently for a time. Then: “We must go somewhere, Ama.”

  Amarta struggled to think of what to say, found nothing. She struggled to her feet, pain lancing through her leg as she put weight on it.

  “Ama, where—”

  “I don’t know, but we can’t stay here.”

  They made their way to the main road, Amarta’s step slow and labored. Dirina insisted and Amarta let her take her pack, put it on top of her own. With Pas in one hand, she offered an arm to Amarta to steady her. Amarta refused, limping forward. Was she not already enough of a burden?

  The main road was in shadow. Through shutters she could see flickers of lamps, stoves. Smoke rose from chimneys.

  Not for her, a home and safety.

  Pushing to walk faster, her foot collapsed under her. She fell painfully to the dirt road, hitting an already bruised knee, curling around the pain.

  For a moment she let herself weep, watched the drops fall into the fine dirt, making small puffs where they landed. If she could be so small, as small as an ant, she could sleep right there in the dirt, hidden from sight. Dirina knelt down next to her, squeezed her shoulder.

  Every moment he was closer. Beyond her not to cry, perhaps, but not quite beyond her to stand. She struggled to her feet.

  Her sister’s encouraging smile was forced and fragile. Leaning on Dirina she limped forward. One step. Then another, putting as little weight on the bad foot as possible.

  They would walk until she dropped again, she supposed. And then she would stay there until he found her.

  The sound of a horse’s hard gallop brought her head up. Dirina gently pulled her and Pas to the side of the road to get them out of the way.

  The striped horse, the dusky-skinned woman atop, pulled up fast in front of them and stopped, as if showing off. The woman slipped down off the side, strode to Amarta, bringing her sharp nose right up to Amarta’s face.

  She smelled like horse, Amarta noticed, as she stumbled painfully back in surprise.

  “You say pregnant,” the woman said. “You say this. Why?” She glanced sidelong at her horse, who looked back. “Are you a healer?”

  Amarta wondered if she could pretend to that. “No.”

  “You lie, then.”

  “No!”

  “Say then, how you know.”

  “Take us with you,” Amarta countered.

  “You run from something. Someone,” the woman guessed.

  Dirina and Amarta said nothing. Their silence was answer enough.

  “The king’s Rusties?”

  “The what?”

  “Soldiers of the king. In red and black.”

  A knife at her eye. A blade at her throat. But her hunter had worn no red.

  “Yes,” Dirina said at the same moment Amarta was adamantly shaking her head no.

  The woman hissed wordlessly in response, gave each of them a look. To Amarta she said, “She has been changed this last week. So it may be true, what you say. Did you guess this?”

  “No.”

  “You say a colt. You can predict this for all animals?”

  “Yes,” Dirina answered determinedly. But the woman ignored her, looking the question at Amarta.

  Amarta tried to remember the many times she had foreseen a baby. Goats. A few cows. Human children. She had not always been right about the baby’s sex. People wanted to be sure, but babies themselves weren’t always sure, not until later. Sometimes not even then.

  “Sometimes,” she answered honestly.

  At this Dirina gave Amarta an incredulous look. “No. She sees things truly.”

  The woman gestured at Pas. “Can he be silent, the boy?”

  At this both she an
d Dirina nodded together. But it was Pas, smiling up at the woman with his beautiful smile, who seemed to convince her. She looked down at him, considered for a long moment, petted his head, then nodded. “Come with, then.”

  Seeing Amarta limp forward, she added: “You ride.” With that, she picked Amarta up, surprising her with how strong she was. Before Amarta quite realized what had happened, she had been set atop the small, striped horse. The woman swung up behind. The horse turned an eye to Amarta, then swung her head back and gave a soft neigh that almost sounded like a laugh.

  “They wait for us,” the woman said to Dirina, who now had Pas in her arms, packs on her back. “We must hurry.”

  Chapter Ten

  This was hardly the first time that Tayre had been poisoned.

  His apprenticeship with his uncle had included a close examination of many substances that took away a person’s mind to varying degrees, including permanently. In particular, he had more than passing familiarity with the plant whose juice he had painted on the dart that he’d intended to use on the Botaros girl.

  This was, however, the first time it had happened to him by accident.

  Except that it wasn’t really an accident, despite the girl’s wide-eyed reaction when her own exceptionally well-timed twitch sent the dart into his hand instead of her leg.

  He was now convinced; against all probability, Innel had been entirely correct: the girl was a true seer.

  Tayre could feel the tincture working in his body. It was a fast, potent dose, intended to put the girl into something approximating slumber for a half day or more, which he had expected to be sufficient time to secure her in a way that even her foresight would not allow her to escape.

  Then again, the dose was measured for her, not someone twice her size, so it should not affect him as much. If he could summon decisive movement, right now, he might still reach her, hold her, disable her. Stop her from getting away.

  She was at this moment crouched on the ground, watching him fearfully, mistrustful of his slowing motions. He could turn that to his advantage, if he could act. Struggling against fading concentration and numbing limbs, he stepped toward her once, then again. His fingers loosened against his will, and the knife fell. He looked down at the foliage where it had landed and realized that the ground seemed too far away.

  “Looks like you’re going to fall, boy,” his uncle had said from the rise above.

  His ten-year-old self ’s hands were sweaty, gripping tight but slowly slipping from the branch from which he dangled, twenty feet over the ravine.

  “What do I do?” he’d asked through gritted teeth.

  “Sometimes you lose.” his uncle had said conversationally. “Thing is, if you can wake the next morning, then you have another chance to win. If you die—well. You’ve lost entirely, then.”

  Another small slip, Tayre’s grip weakening. He looked down at the steep slope below. At best, it would be a painful fall.

  “I suggest, my boy, that you figure out how to land so that you can wake tomorrow.”

  Sometimes you lose.

  With what fast-fading control Tayre still had, rather than let himself fall as his loosening limbs wanted to do, he lowered himself to the forest floor. On all fours, he considered what was most likely to happen next.

  The road was not well-traveled, so despite hours of lying unconscious, there was a good chance he would wake. The girl herself was the greatest risk; she could kill him as he lay there defenseless. If she had the will. He didn’t think she did.

  Or she could bring back others who did.

  As his thoughts slowed to an agonizing crawl, he laid himself on the ground, keeping his eyes on her as long as he could. She got up and limped away.

  Escaping him a third time.

  Tayre’s final thought was that it was a shame he had been told to bring her back alive. He was almost certain that, had he been trying to kill rather than disable her, he would not now be lying here, falling unconscious, as she fled.

  Tayre woke to wet darkness and sounds of night—crickets, high winds, and the light pattering of rain on leaves overhead. He sat up slowly and reached out to where he remembered dropping his knife. His fingers found it, curled around around the handle, resheathed it. His bow, also, was where he dropped it.

  Other than being damp from hours of lying in what was now partly mud, it was as good an outcome as he could have hoped for.

  He stood, rolling out the ache in his limbs and breathing hard to clear the headache that the tincture had left.

  It was very dark. He traced the mud and dirt road with his feet, following to the edge of the woods, in the direction she had fled. The rain slowed and stopped. Overhead he saw small patches of stars.

  No rush now. She was hours ahead of him in any case.

  With the advantage of being able to see things that had not yet happened.

  He considered this for a moment.

  Then he stashed his bow and knife under the leaves at the base of a large oak, drew a few lines on his face by feel with an oil pen from his pack in order to make himself look older and more tired than he already felt, and began his search again.

  Tayre knocked lightly, stepped back, and threw off his wet hood to reveal his face in the lamplight that came from the house as the door opened.

  The tall woman’s eyes widened as she saw him. More than the surprise of a late-night visitor; she had been warned.

  “Blessings of the season to you, good woman,” he said softly.

  She seemed undecided about how to answer this.

  Warned and then some, it seemed.

  He did not read in her face and body the look of a woman protecting children, which meant that the girl and her sister and the boy were no longer here.

  That would have been his guess anyway; the girl was used to running, and people in fear for their lives tended to repeat what they knew best.

  The woman stood aside to allow him entrance, the invitation in obvious conflict with what she really wanted to do. He stepped inside hesitantly, hands together implying supplication, head forward, shoulders slumped.

  At a table sat two men, likely her adult sons. On their faces Tayre read the simple suspicion of a stranger. So only the woman knew something more.

  He turned an uncertain, grateful smile on her.

  “Who are you? What do you want?” Her voice was hostile, charged with tension and challenge.

  He glanced at the floor, let pain and regret settle on his features. “You must know that I’m following a girl, a woman, and a young boy.” He glanced at her for confirmation, swallowed twice and went on, his voice cracking. “To whom I have brought so much wretchedness I am nightly tempted to end my life to escape my own shame.”

  On her face confusion warred with solid mistrust. For a long moment she said nothing.

  “We have food and drink,” she said grudgingly. It was an offer, but barely. An unwilling host. It would do.

  He smiled bitterly and shook his head. “They must have told you about me.” He saw the confirming flicker in her eyes. “Whatever they said, it was generous. Did she say I was hunting her? That I would hurt her if I found her again?”

  The woman hesitated. Then: “Yes.”

  He nodded, put his hand on the still-open door, as if about to leave. “I don’t deserve your kindness. Not a crumb of it.”

  Her expression had collapsed into confusion. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t claim to be a good man,” he said earnestly. “But I could set all this right, if I could only talk to them for a few minutes.”

  “Why don’t just you leave them be?”

  He nodded. “I want to. As soon as I discharge my obligation and tell them about their inheritance. My cousin has left them everything. They are wealthy now and will never want for anything again. I need to tell them this, even if it’s the last thing I do. It is the one thing I can do to make amends.”

  “I think,” the woman said, her voice hard again, “you had b
etter come in and sit down and explain yourself.”

  “You are kinder to me than I deserve. Let me tell you how it happened, and you can decide if you want to help me find them so I can repair some of what I have broken.”

  It hadn’t taken long to convince Enana of the familial misunderstanding, of the better life in store for Amarta and Dirina and the boy if he could only find them. Of the possibility of them returning here—healthy, happy, and with money.

  It was easy: they wanted to believe. Word by word he had used their expressions to guide his story. By the end of his tale, they had been interrupting each other to give him every detail from the months the girl and her family had stayed with them.

  They even let him search the small back room where he had found a small blue seashell, a strip of blue cloth, and some hairs.

  Apparently the girl had said they were going upriver to the town of Sennant, or that they might return to Botaros. Tayre thought neither of these very likely, so he would follow their trail instead, take it as far as it led.

  And the girl—how far into the future could she see? How clearly? If he decided to track them back to Botaros, then changed his mind and went to Sennant, would she foresee the one path, then the other, or only the final outcome?

  Did she see potential paths, or only the one eventually taken?

  It was clear that she was far from infallible. She might foresee well enough into the next few moments, when she thought her life depended on it, but perhaps that was all she could do. He had seen it before, people exhibiting exceptional abilities when faced with death.

  But clearly she had limitations, or he would not have found her at all.

  Still, he must rethink how to capture her. In the middle of his thwarted forest pursuit, it occurred to him that a sufficient number of capable men under his command might be able to surround her. Every arrow ready to fly could remove an avenue of escape.

  But after watching her move and twist and drop to evade, he realized it would take a good many practitioners, nearly as skilled as he was, acting in concert, to accomplish this. An unlikely gathering at best.