Suddenly, the child raced to Baron Poll, grabbed his axe, and leapt toward them. “No! No!” Roland cried.
The girl swung the axe blade down on the green woman, and there was a dull thud.
The green woman stopped, loosed her grip a little.
The woman stared at the child. She shouted, “No! No!”
Then the green woman let him go completely, and Roland was free. He tried to scramble through the grass, but tripped and fell three paces off.
The green woman eyed him hungrily.
“No,” the child repeated. “Not him.” She swung the axe down a second time, hitting the green woman in the skull.
The green woman crouched on the ground. She looked up at the child, parroted, “No.”
The girl dropped the axe. She’d put a notch in the green woman’s skin, just the barest of cuts. Dark blood oozed from it.
The child reached down and stroked the woman’s hair at the front of her scalp. The green woman arched her back, as if pleased by the attention.
“When training a dangerous animal,” the girl said softly to Roland and Baron Poll, “you must reward it for good behavior, and punish it for bad.”
Roland nodded. Of course the girl would know about the training of beasts. She was a skyrider, after all, and would have to tend the graaks.
Roland had been the King’s butcher. As a child, one of his first duties had been to carry bones and scraps of offal to the kennels, so that beast master Hamrickson could train the King’s war dogs. He thought he knew what she was asking of him.
He backed off carefully, to avoid drawing the green woman’s attention, then painfully limped toward the dead graak.
“No, I’ll do it,” the girl said. “She should think of me as her master.”
She hurried past him, circled the lizard. Her eyes seemed blank with pain as she looked at the reptile. Then she leaned over and pulled the hound’s carcass from its jaws. It was not a small feat. The wolfhound was a huge dog that easily weighed a hundred pounds, yet the child hefted its carcass easily.
I am a fool, Roland thought. The girl is a skyrider, with at least one endowment of brawn. Despite her small size, she is stronger than I am. I had thought to save her, and instead the child saved me.
She brought the hound back, laid it at the feet of the green woman. “Blood,” she whispered. “For you.”
The green woman sniffed the hound, began licking blood from its pelt. When she seemed assured that no one would take the thing from her, she tore into the carcass and ripped into its back and haunches.
“Good girl,” the child said. “Very good.”
The green woman looked up at the child. Blood foamed at her mouth as she parroted, “Good girl.”
“You’re a smart one, too,” the child said. She pointed to herself and whispered, “Averan, Averan.” The green woman repeated her name. She pointed to Roland, and he gave his own name. Baron Poll finally came close, gave his own name. Then Averan pointed to the green woman.
The green woman stopped eating and stared blankly.
10
THE GEM
Tears of rage and pain threatened to blind Averan as she worked—rage and pain that came from seeing her graak dead. She didn’t want to seem a child, didn’t want to act like a child. But she found it nearly impossible to keep up a façade of indifference.
So after Roland and Baron Poll introduced themselves, she busied herself tending Roland’s wound, moving about numbly as if in a dream. The green woman’s fall from the sky, the shock of seeing Leatherneck dead, the horrors that she knew had occurred at Keep Haberd, all left her feeling dazed and wrung out. She wanted to scream.
Instead, she bit her lip and worked.
Averan knew that the wound in Roland’s wrist stung like a hornet when she washed it. The wound was deep, ragged, and it bled badly. She went to a well beside the cottage for a bucket of water, then poured it over him and blotted the wound. He stifled a cry, and the green woman drew near eagerly, like a dog begging for scraps.
“No,” Averan warned the green woman. “This one’s not for you.” Baron Poll grabbed the axe. The fat knight shook it threateningly. The green woman backed off.
Roland laughed miserably. “Thank you, child, for not feeding me to your pet.” Averan finished wiping the water away. Her lightest scrubbing had opened the wound again, and she used part of Roland’s tunic as a compress, holding the wound closed.
“She’s not my pet,” Averan objected, trying to hold in her own pain.
“Try telling her that,” Baron Poll said. “In half an hour she’ll be rolling over for you and trying to nose her way into your bed.”
Averan knew that they were right. The green woman had accepted her, had accepted her from the moment that she woke to find Averan kneeling over her. She was like a baby graak that way, new from its egg. But just because the Baron was right didn’t mean she had to like him. He was the oaf who had killed Leatherneck, after all.
The green woman thinks I’m her mother, Averan realized. Averan shook her head. She didn’t know what to do with the beast.
“Did you summon the creature?” Baron Poll asked.
“Summon her?” Averan asked.
“Well, it’s not a natural creature, is it?” Baron Poll said, eyeing the green woman warily. “I’ve never heard of its like. So it must have been summoned.”
Averan shrugged. Baron Poll’s question was beyond her, beyond any of them. She knew nothing of magic, aside from what one might hear from an occasional hedge wizard. Keep Haberd had seldom entertained anyone with power.
“It’s the green of fire,” Roland said. “Flames can be green. Do you have any power over fire?”
The green woman got off her haunches, went to the dead body of Leatherneck, and began to feed. Averan winced and looked away.
“No,” Averan said mechanically. “I sometimes light the fire in the hearth at our aerie; it’s all I can do to keep one going. I’m no flameweaver.”
Averan wiped the last of the blood from Roland’s wound with a corner of Roland’s tunic. “The earth can be green, too,” she said. “As is water.” She blinked a tear from her eye.
Roland didn’t answer, but Baron Poll did. “You’re right, girl, but the summoner’s art is practiced by flameweavers, not by earth magicians or water wizards.”
“She fell from the sky,” Averan said. “That’s all I know. I saw her drop out of the air in front of me. I was above the clouds. Maybe she’s a creature of the air.”
Baron Poll half-turned to look down at her. “Summoned,” he said thoughtfully, sure of himself.
Averan frowned. She had an endowment of wit, and so was a quick learner. But she was only nine years old, and she’d never studied the magical arts. “You think I am the summoner? You’re daft.”
Baron Poll was the oldest, and even Roland looked to him for counsel. He said, “Maybe so, but I’ve heard it said that the Powers have their own reasons for doing what they do. Perhaps you didn’t summon it; it may have been sent.”
That seemed just as unlikely. Roland’s bleeding had finally stopped, and the wound looked clean enough.
Averan noticed that some of the green woman’s blood was on her fingers. She dipped them in the bucket and tried to scrub the blood off, but the green stuff had already soaked into her skin, staining her hands as if she’d spilled ink, leaving irregular blotches. She supposed it would wear off.
“I’m sorry about your graak,” Baron Poll said for the third time since he’d introduced himself. “Can you forgive me?”
Averan fought back bitter tears. Leatherneck was not my graak, she told herself. It was the King’s, or Brand’s, more than it belonged to anyone else.
Still she had fed the beast for years, had groomed it and scraped its teeth and filed its claws. She’d loved the old lizard.
She’d known he was old, that he’d only had another summer or two left, at most.
She knew that she should not blame Baron Poll for kil
ling it. Brand had always said, “Never punish a beast for having a good heart. Even the kindest brutes will sometimes nip you by mistake.”
The same was true with men, she supposed. Even fat old knights who should have known better. Tears flooded her eyes.
“It is forgotten, Sir Paunch,” Averan said, trying to make light of it, trying to keep the pain from her voice.
“Go ahead, child, hurl insults if it will make you feel better,” the old knight said. “You can do better than that!”
Averan wanted to hold her tongue, but it hurt too much to keep the pain in. Still, she dared not be too rude to a lord. “If it pleases you, Sir Breadbasket, Sir Greasebarrel, Sir Broadbutt.”
“That’s better, child,” Poll said with a sullen expression.
“Though he is a baron,” Roland corrected the girl, “and should more properly be called Baron Broadbutt.”
Averan smiled weakly, sniffed and wiped her tears away, satisfied with the name-calling, at least for now.
Baron Poll asked, “Where were you going? Are you carrying an important message?”
Averan considered. It was the most important message that she’d ever carried: news of an impending invasion. “Paldane has heard by now,” Averan said truthfully. “Reavers were coming down to Keep Haberd from the mountains. By now, Haberd has fallen. I was to bear a message to Duke Paldane, but riders on force horses were also sent. Master Brand had me fly out only to save my life.”
“We found your messenger,” Baron Poll said, “earlier today. He’d had a bad fall, so I suppose that Paldane has yet to learn your news. ’Tis bitter tidings these days. The King dead, Raj Ahten advancing on Carris—all of it! Now the reavers.”
“We’re going north to Heredon,” Roland said as he sat up. “We’ll bear your news to Paldane in Carris—and then to the King, too.”
Baron Poll added, “We can drop you off in Carris.”
She remembered Brand’s warning that she should head north for safety. “I don’t want to go to Carris,” she said. “I’m going to Heredon, with you!”
“Heredon?” Baron Poll said. “I don’t think so. It’s bound to be a dangerous trip, what with Raj Ahten on the move. There’s no need for you to go. We’ll carry the message.”
“I know the way to Heredon,” Averan offered. “I know the roads, and the mountains, and I know faster ways for a man on a good horse to travel. I could guide you.”
“Have you flown there?” Baron Poll asked.
“Yes, twice,” Averan lied. She’d seen the maps, memorized the lay of the land. But she’d never even flown as far as Fleeds.
The men looked at one another meaningfully. They could use a guide.
“No, we’ve only got two horses,” Roland said. “We’ll drop you off somewhere safe.”
“I could ride with you,” Averan said to Roland. Given Baron Poll’s stomach, she could not sit double with him on a horse. “I’m small, and I’ve an endowment of strength and stamina. If your horse tires, I can get down and run.”
This was important, she knew. She wanted to get to Heredon now; she had an unreasoned and unreasonable craving to do so. Her message to Paldane was important, but her need was even more compelling. Her whole body shook with the desire. In fact, she knew almost exactly where she wanted to go. She closed her eyes, and recalled the maps: In the middle of Heredon, almost nine hundred miles north of here, beyond the Durkin Hills. Castle Sylvarresta. In her mind’s eye, she saw something that resembled a green glowing gem.
“Do you have family in Heredon?” Baron Poll asked.
“No,” she admitted. “Not really.” Yet it was important that she get there.
“Then why are you so determined to go?” Roland asked.
Averan knew that because she was small, because she was a child, others expected her to act like a child, prone to tantrums and unreasonable fits. But Averan was not like other children; she never had been. Brand had said that he chose her from among all of the orphans in Mystarria because when he looked in her eyes, he saw an old woman there. During her short life, she had lived more than others had.
“That is where I was heading,” she lied, “after I gave Duke Paldane the message. My master Brand has a sister there at Castle Sylvarresta. He hoped she would take me in. He gave me a letter for her, and money for my keep.” She jingled the purse tied to her belt.
Roland did not ask to see the letter. Words on paper were obviously above him. And Baron Poll was a lazy man. He didn’t want to bother reading letters. Averan hoped that the lure of money might hook them.
“And what of your pet?” Baron Poll asked, nodding toward the green woman. “Will she follow us, do you think?”
“We’ll leave her,” Averan answered, though something inside warned against it. What if Baron Poll was right? What if one of the Powers had summoned the creature for her? It would be wasteful to abandon it, perhaps even dangerous. Still, Averan did not see how they could bring the creature with them.
Baron Poll considered thoughtfully. In a tone that brooked no argument, he said, “We dare not take you far. I’ll drop you off somewhere safe, north of Carris if you like. I’ve got a cousin in a small town north of there. She could help arrange for your care.”
Averan was used to dealing with lords. They were often inconsiderate and never liked being told that they were wrong. Baron Poll’s tone warned her that she could expect nothing better from him.
But in her heart she vowed, If you leave me, I’ll run behind you if I must, and follow you every step of the way.
Averan ran and fetched Roland’s piebald filly, along with Baron Poll’s dun stallion, and they prepared to depart. The sun had nearly set, yet the owner of the cottage had still not come home.
Baron Poll picked a few woodpears and crabapples from the small orchard, then grabbed some turnips and onions from a garden behind the cottage. A few scrawny ducks, hatched in the past eight weeks, waddled around the front of the house. Baron Poll left them.
Averan wondered who might live here. An old woodcutter she imagined, for the orchard was too small to provide a living for even one person and the hills were wooded to the south. She wondered what he would think when he discovered his dog dead, and a graak lying beside it in his backyard. She opened the purse that Brand had given her, found that it contained not only some northern coins, but also a couple of golden trade rings like those used by merchants from Indhopal. The rings were as precisely weighted as any coin, and were struck with the symbols of Muyyatin, but could be worn on the fingers or toes, or on a string about the neck, and therefore were not as easily lost as a northern coin.
After selecting a single piece of silver, Averan laid it atop the body of the dog.
Then she sat before Roland on his mount, and she and Baron Poll and Roland raced away from the cottage, up a winding road toward the forests of the Brace Mountains.
When they left the cottage, the green woman was still feeding on Leatherneck’s corpse. She did not even look up, except to cast an unconcerned glance in Averan’s direction.
A mile farther on, the road began to climb the hills in earnest. The highway was lined with alders, their leaves going golden in the early autumn. Higher up, a few pines also marched along the hill.
The road here became a lonely place, the hillside windswept. In some places, boulders had rolled down the mountain and blocked parts of the road, so that Roland maneuvered the horse around them. This highway had been well tended a dozen years ago, but the bandits in these hills were so thick that the king’s men didn’t bother to maintain the trail any longer.
It was an hour after sunset, and Bessahan had been riding hard all afternoon, trying to catch the King’s messengers. But his horse had thrown a shoe in the woods, and he’d had to stop and fix it, wasting nearly an hour.
Bessahan found the graak by the roadside almost by chance. Near a cottage beside the road, a hefty woman stood with a battered lantern, staring at the dead reptile in her orchard. The lantern was hooded with a
cloudy ceramic that did not let out much light. In the darkness, the woman mistook Bessahan for someone else.
“Eh, Koby, is that you?”
Bessahan had a limited command of the Rofehavanish tongue. He dared not let her hear his accent, so he merely grunted in return.
“Did you see this? Someone killed this graak right here by the house, split its head clean open. There’s tracks here from a pair of horses. Was it you who did it?”
Bessahan shook his head no.
“And the damned monster killed my dog, too.” The fat woman shook her head in disgust. She was an old thing with stringy hair and a greasy apron. Bessahan had taken endowments of scent from two dogs. He could smell lye soap on her, even at fifty paces. A dirty woman who washed clothes for others.
“Whoever killed it did me no favors,” the old woman groaned. “If they’d have said to me, ‘Kitty, you want us to kill that monster in your backyard?’ I’d have answered, ‘No. You leave it alone. Killing it won’t bring Dog back to life—and you can let it have my worthless ducks, too.’ But would anyone ever listen to me? Nooo!”
Bessahan’s opinion of the woman lowered even more. She was not only fat and greasy, she talked much while thinking little.
“Well,” she asked, “will you help me get rid of it? The carcass will only draw wolves. In fact, it looks as if one has already been after it. It’s all ripped apart.”
Bessahan looked up the road. The messengers had probably gone that way, into the mountains, into the dark. But night was falling, and he wondered if they would risk the mountain trails by night. No, it would be wiser to stay nearby. They could be camped anywhere—in the orchard, up the hill.
And rain was coming. He could smell it on the wind. It might be hard to track them by scent.
He rode his horse up to the old woman in the dim lamplight. She looked up at him through hooded eyes, suddenly wary.
“Hey, you’re not Koby!” she accused.
“No, I am sorry,” Bessahan answered in his thick accent. “I am not your Koby. My name is Bessahan.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked, backing up a step, suddenly defensive.
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