A Sterkarm Tryst

by Price, Susan;

  “I gan,” Joe said, and jogged back to join Kaitlin, who held a horse. “They’re no ours,” he said to her. “They be Changelings.”

  Together with the horse, they made for the compound’s gate. The horse wasn’t happy to be leaving its herd mates and stamped, shaking its head. Joe withdrew a little and watched, amazed, as his tiny woman managed the big lump of muscle.

  The card Joe had taken from Chitra’s pocket opened the gate. He tried to ignore the corpses pinned to the fence, but their closeness pinched his flesh into goosebumps. He picked up a broken arrow and used it to wedge the gate open, pounding its broken end into the ground with his boot.

  Kaitlin led the horse through the gate. Joe, looking back, saw that Changeling Per had coaxed his horse onto the ramp. Well, if they ever accepted that they couldn’t go through the Elf-Gate, the compound gate would still be open, giving them a last chance to escape. You just couldn’t help some people.

  He hoped they’d remember to fire the gate before they left. If the Elves hadn’t come through and killed them first.

  Kaitlin held the horse’s head while he hauled himself clumsily into the saddle, and then he gave her a hand up as she used his foot to mount in front of him. He put his arms around her and squeezed. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horse.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him, smiling, shaking her head, but not understanding. He hoped it wouldn’t be the last joke he’d make.

  28

  16th-Side A:

  Wild Country

  Per May • Andrea • Joan Grannam • The 21st Siders

  Pushing the rifle barrel away from Mitchell’s head, Spender said, “Leave it out, for God’s sake.”

  Burnett grinned and withdrew. Spender continued his medical checks, feeling the pulse at Andrea’s neck. He put his head on her chest and listened. Raising his head, he said, “Waste of a bullet anyway. She’s a goner.”

  “How come?” Reynolds asked.

  Spender looked at the vomit staining Andrea’s mouth and clothes. “Poison? She ate some funny mushrooms maybe.”

  “The girl said they was all sick,” Norton reminded them.

  Spender ignored him. “She won’t survive the night out here.”

  Reynolds considered. If you come across our Ms. Mitchell, Patterson had said, nobody’s going to cry if she ends up a bit wholemeal. Reynolds took that to mean dead, as in, brown bread. Of course, should he ever be called to answer for the death, Patterson could argue he’d meant healthy, since wholemeal bread was very healthy.

  Question was: To put a bullet through Mitchell’s brain or leave her to die by herself? “That’s a sure thing, is it?”

  Spender shrugged. “Her hands and legs are cold, her pulse is hardly ther … She’s done for.”

  “Okay. Leave her.” Reynolds turned away. In street fighting, women and kids were just more enemies who might kill you, and killing them was something that had to be done sometimes. But he didn’t have to be happy about it, and why waste a bullet if Mitchell was no threat anymore. He had to decide what to do with the other prisoners.

  The Sterkarm was easy. He went back with them. The girl … Reynolds looked at her again. What a bloody waste to kill that. God, she was fit.

  She reached toward him, saying, “Krank, hun air krank. Vair sa god—”

  “What’s she say?”

  “Sick,” Spender said. “She says he’s sick.”

  Out of nowhere, Norton said, “Plague.”

  Reynolds saw the other men’s faces change. Trust Norton to cause trouble with a single word. The men were prepared to face hardship, injury, and death, probably because most thought nothing serious could happen to them. Plague was something else: an insidious, fatal sickness that they couldn’t fight or run from. It panicked them.

  “It’s not bloody plague,” Reynolds said, even as a leper’s bell rang in his mind.

  “There’s something up with ’em,” Norton said. “They all had it. All of ’em except her.” He pointed at Joan. All of them looked at her, and saw her tremble, and retch, and sink to her hands and knees.

  The men backed several paces off, and looked at one another. Norton was right. The men they’d shot had been vomiting and staggering. Mitchell was dying. Young Sterkarm was sick. And now, so was the girl. The thought of snogging her no longer enticed.

  Reynolds made himself stay where he was, though he wondered if he’d already caught the sickness. He looked at Spender.

  The paramedic shrugged. He’d thought Andrea poisoned, but many illnesses started with vomiting and diarrhea. Cholera. Dysentery. The Black Death, too, for all he knew. It probably made sense not to take the prisoners back to Patterson, where the sickness could spread to them all.

  “Get back here!” Reynolds said to the other men, who had retreated still further, without orders.

  Per Sterkarm, curled on the ground, moaning. The girl continued to retch.

  “You want the plague, good luck to you!” Norton said, taking a few more steps away.

  “I feel really sick in my guts.” Avery said. “Anybody else?”

  “For fuck’s sake!” Reynolds said. “It’s not bloody plague!”

  “We should leave ’em, shouldn’t we, doc?” Norton called. “Not take ’em back. We’ll all go down with it!”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Spender said. “And it’s not plague.” But they heard uncertainty in his voice.

  “How do you know if you’re not—” Norton stopped and gasped. “I know I’m not breathing right.”

  Reynolds couldn’t tell if Norton’s fear was genuine or if he was trying to engineer a return to base. Some of the others were on the edge of running. He found himself stepping away from the prisoners, as if his body was thinking for itself. Something had nearly killed Mitchell and made the other prisoners sick, that was certain. They didn’t know what. It could be some rampant germ.

  They’d all had jabs before leaving 21st side, but jabs couldn’t save you from everything. This might be some particularly nasty, hairy Sterkarm bug. It must be, to have made the Mitchell tart so sick. She loved getting down and dirty with the Sterkarms, so if she wasn’t immune … It might be something unknown 21st and incurable.

  Spender, clinging to the authority his paramedic training gave him, said, “It might be something they’ve caught from us, something they have no—”

  “Then Mitchell would be okay,” Reynolds pointed out, and Spender had no answer to that. Feeling suddenly lonely, Spender closed the gap between himself and the others.

  Taking that as a signal, Reynolds moved back, too. But his conscience bothered him. “We can’t just leave ’em—” He raised his rifle.

  “Don’t kill ’em!” Norton was so passionate that they all looked at him. “If you kill ’em, the fleas’ll jump onto us!”

  They stood in a rough half-circle, looking at one another. “Shoot ’em from here,” someone said.

  “Fleas can jump miles, you doughnut!”

  Avery clutched his stomach, retched, and spat on the grass.

  “Move on,” Reynolds said and moved on himself without a backward look.

  The others followed eagerly.

  Joan Grannam

  Joan sank down on the grass, weak with relief, and watched the Elves jog away. She was glad to stop pretending to retch. It made her throat sore.

  Her trembling was genuine. She hugged herself, trying to keep still, but still she shook with a mixture of fear, weariness, and cold. She tried to speak but could only cough. “Elven be gone,” she managed.

  Per shifted a little where he lay, groaned, and laboriously hoisted himself onto hands and knees. Joan watched eagerly, a smile coming and going from her face. She’d been brave and clever, hadn’t she? She hoped for praise.

  Per coughed, spat, and crawled toward her—and past
her, without appearing to notice she was there. Slowly, with effort, he crawled to the sprawled and filthy body of the Elf-May. Reaching it, he lay down beside it, and embraced it.

  Loneliness pierced Joan. She stared across the valley, her throat and heart twisting within her.

  Mistress Crosar • Davy Grannam

  Across the valley, screened by birch and fern, Davy Grannam watched as his mind worked on why the Sterkarms had allowed themselves be caught in the open.

  The Sterkarm men had staggered even before the Elves caught them. They’d seemed falling drunk. But if they weren’t … Then they were sick.

  That would explain why they staggered across such an exposed hillside. Maybe a dash across open ground had seemed the best chance, until someone of their party had collapsed, and they’d been trapped.

  Aidan leaned into Davy with an inclination of the head, drawing his attention to the fact that the Elves were running away. This was surprising. Joan was the only one of her party still moving, and yet the Elves ran away.

  As Davy and Aidan looked at each other, wondering, Mistress Crosar sighed and rose stiffly to her feet. Her skirts, spreading, rustled leaves and grasses. She said, “I mun gan to my brother’s daughter.”

  Sandy Yonstone dared to put his hand on her arm, as if to pull her back. She looked at him and he quickly withdrew his hand.

  “Mistress, bide awhile,” Davy said. “Lass be fine. Let Elven take themselves off.” She remained standing—to show, he guessed, that she took no orders from him. He murmured, “Mistress, you’ll be seen.” She huffed then and slowly sat.

  Davy looked past her to a place higher up the hill, where two of his men crouched among the leaves. Catching their eyes, he nodded toward the Elves. “When you catch ’em, gift ’em a few shafts.”

  They grinned and scrambled away, bows and quivers bumping on their backs. When they loosed their shafts, the Grannams on the valley’s other side would take it as their signal. The Elves would find themselves in a sharp shower.

  Mistress Crosar still stared across the valley. “Davy, we mun gan to her.”

  “Never fret, Lady. Soon as Elven gan, we gan.”

  Aidan looked around, surprised by something in Davy’s tone. He saw how Davy looked at the old woman, and turned away to hide his smile. If there was ever again a chance to sit by a fire with friends, then he had something to make them laugh.

  Joan Grannam

  The Elves had vanished among the hillside’s folds and Joan could no longer see them, but the bodies of the Sterkarms they’d killed lay below her. She’d only smeared the mouth of their drinking bottle with a little—a wee scraping, hardly any at all—of wolfsdeath. They would have recovered if the Elves hadn’t shot them.

  A thin, cold wind blew and she shuddered in her damp chemise. It made her long for her home and the Yonstone Tower: warm places where servants brought food or hot drinks and where there was no danger or heartache.

  She stood, suddenly determined to walk, there and then, back to the Yonstone Tower she should never have left. For an eye’s blink, she was full of energy, strong, and decided—and then realized that she didn’t know which way to go. She could retrace a little of the route but would soon be lost among the hills and moors and bogs. She might meet with Elves or Sterkarms … And even if she found her way to the tower, she’d be greeted with, “Oh, here’s the lass who sided with Sterkarms and ran off with them.” She sank down again, more sad and weary than ever.

  What a mess. She’d only meant Andrea to get sick. If she’d stopped the other men drinking from the flask, it would have seemed suspicious. … She couldn’t be blamed because she’d never meant any of them to be that sick. She’d only wanted Per May to see the Elf-Bitch spewing and heaving and sweating … And see Joan being so kind and knowing so well what to do. That was all.

  How could she have known that so little wolfsdeath could be so powerful? How could she have foreseen that Per would kiss Andrea, all filthy and sick as she was, and become ill, too? How could she have known that the Elves would appear?

  She wasn’t at all to blame for everything going so wrong. But maybe it would have been better to have stuffed the wolfsdeath roots in her own mouth and chewed them up. The roots were still in her pouch and she was fumbling with the fastening when movement lower on the slope caught her eye. Men—two men—three—no, four—picked their way up the slope toward her.

  She had jumped to her feet and drawn breath to warn Per that the Elves were coming back before she realized that the men weren’t Elves.

  She knew them. Leading was Davy, her father’s captain. Behind him, a man whose face she also knew, though not his name. She saw, with a sickening jolt of true alarm, that the third man was not a man. That stocky, determined figure was her aunt. Sandy Yonstone trod close behind her.

  Oh, for Sandy to see her like this, stripped almost to her skin! And her aunt—oh, her aunt would be so angry!

  Twisting around, she looked for Per Sterkarm. There he lay, hugging his Elf-Whore.

  Spinning back, she saw her aunt again, closer now. Joan pressed both hands to her mouth—and snatched them away when she remembered handling poison. She had an impulse to run to her aunt and let her shout and slap, but put everything right, too, as she had no doubt her aunt would.

  A far stronger urge was to run to the top of the hill and over it and go on running through seven kingdoms. Her aunt was angry. She was always angry, over every little thing, so what must she be like now? And Sandy, who had looked at her admiringly, would now despise her. And she didn’t want to see what the men would do to Per.

  “Master Sterkarm!” She scrambled across the hillside toward him. “Wake up! My aunt—Grannams!”

  That name broke through Per’s muzzy half-dreaming state. He pushed himself up on one arm, his face still milk white. Awkwardly, he clambered to his feet, trying to focus enough to follow Joan’s pointing finger. Heaving in a breath, he turned to find his weapons, staggered, and fell onto his outstretched hands.

  Joan’s heart ached to see him preparing to fight when he could hardly stand. It was up to her, she saw, to defend him. Turning away from him, she bounded downhill toward her aunt.

  Mistress Crosar

  Mistress Crosar stumped along breathlessly, head down, and was annoyed when Sandy Yonstone touched her sleeve. Halting, she glared at him. “What?” He nodded toward a spot higher up the slope.

  She looked and saw Joan. They were closer now, and she saw just what a show of herself the girl was making. Mistress Crosar’s hands went to her hips.

  Joan stopped short, knowing that if she went closer, she would be slapped.

  Mistress Crosar studied her, angrier with every blink of her eye. The girl was bare armed and bareheaded, all but naked. Her thin shift, filthy, wet, and torn, clung to her, showing everything she had. Her hair, loose, tangled, muddied, was full of twigs and leaves. The daughter of Richard Grannam, Laird Brackenhill, and she looked like a tinker’s whore. “What be this?” Mistress Crosar demanded. “Be this thee? This be thee, be it?” Anger robbed her of words, yet compelled her to speak. “What be this, madam?”

  “Oh, Father’s Sister!” It was a sob of anger, frustration, even sorrow.

  “That’ll be right!” Mistress Crosar shouted, too furious for sense.

  “Whisht,” Davy said. Who knew who overheard all this noise?

  Sandy Yonstone had been uneasy about interfering bet­ween aunt and niece, but now unfastened his cloak. Running up the hillside, he wrapped his cloak around Joan.

  Mistress Crosar, furious, turned her back on her niece.

  Davy, seeing that the women were attending to their own affairs, unslung his bow and quiver and dropped them to the ground. Aidan copied him. With a scraping of iron, they drew their swords and daggers and made their way toward Per May. Their hands were entirely steady. They separated, to come
at him from different angles.

  “We come!” Aidan called out. “We dare!”

  Chapter 29

  21st Side:

  Dilsmead Hall

  Mick

  Dilsmead Hall was some distance out of town, surrounded by fields. A bus dropped Mick near its gate, on what passed for a main road in that part of the country. The fields were empty, but there was loud engine noise from somewhere. He couldn’t see its cause.

  He studied the hall’s gate from across the road. He walked on, crossed over, and sauntered past the gate, taking in what he could while trying to look like a bird-watcher.

  There was a barrier to stop vehicles and a small cubicle with a guard. Beyond that, a long drive led toward a large house. He considered just walking past the guard with a wave and a smile. It might work. But if it failed, that was security alerted for the rest of the day.

  He took a long stroll around the hall’s outer wall. It was a big place. The engine noise came from inside the grounds. Sometimes it quietened, or stopped altogether. They were madly revving up something in there.

  The wall was old, of red sandstone, and not much more than head height. There were no spikes or barbed wire on top of it. Of course, there could be all sorts on the other side. Man-eating dogs. Man traps. Crocodile moats.

  He learned that a country lane ran along one side of the hall. Behind it, and on the other side, were only field tracks.

  Now, if he’d designed the security, he’d put most of it where an intruder was least likely to be spotted: by the open fields and hedges.

  He returned to the lane. A car passed him, but only one.

  There was a road sign, on legs: Hall Park Lane. It had been placed right against the wall and was partly obscured by weeds. He ran at the wall, got one foot on the sign, and heaved himself up. He felt his age, but cycling had kept him fit and he dropped down on the wall’s other side.

  He landed in long grass and nettles. Crouching there, he waited for claxons to blare and guard dogs to arrive. He heard only the revving of that big machine.