by Shannah Jay
Day 6
The next day she moved more cautiously, and when two men on foot accosted her at a bend in the road, she was ready. As their eyes roamed over her body in a way that sickened her, she grew too angry to be afraid.
She pulled out the dagger before they had time to speak and they flinched backwards. ‘I’m very dearly bought!’ she said fiercely, her hand steady, her eyes continuing to challenge theirs.
After a fraught minute or two, one of them made a feint towards her and when she hefted the knife easily from one hand to the other, and sliced the air close to his face, he shrugged and stepped back, slapping his companion on the shoulder. ‘Ah, leave this one be. I prefer younger meat, anyway. She’s too scrawny for my taste.’
The other said nothing, but his eyes burned across the space between them and as he turned away, Karialla shivered involuntarily at the Discord madness flickering within their depths. It was alive, this madness, malevolent, like a creature in its own right. Yet again, the healer in her wondered what caused it. Was it some sort of illness that spread by touch?
Or was it something else? Was there really something evil lurking in their world?
She watched the two men stride away down the road. They looked back a couple of times and once, one of them made a lewd, threatening gesture, but she just slapped the dagger blade against her palm and stared back at him.
Not until they were out of sight did she grab her pack and run down the road in the opposite direction. Spying a track that led off to the right, she turned on to it, keeping to the edge among the straggly grasses so that her footprints wouldn’t be too obvious. She felt so uneasy, she started moving faster, then panic set in and she fled, pounding along with the pack thumping against her back. She ran until she was gasping for breath and her muscles were too heavy to move, then crawled under some bushes, shivering with reaction.
How was she to get to Tenebrak, if people were waiting round every corner to attack her? For a moment, she longed for Harmony and wondered if she should go back there, but the thought of the empty houses and the mass grave in the compost pit, made her shake her head, sadness welling within her. No, there was no going back.
Feeling exhausted, she dozed for a while beneath the bushes, but when dusk fell, she stood up and started walking.
Since it was a two-moon night, with one of the moons nearing full, there was plenty of light, so she spent most of it tramping along. Every now and then she stopped to listen, but to her great relief she met no one else.
Days 7-19
From then onwards, she wore the dagger openly and drew blood with it, too. The first time she used it in earnest, she vomited helplessly into the undergrowth once she was far enough away from her wounded attacker. To injure someone deliberately was contrary to her oath as a healer, contrary to everything she and Pavlin had lived for. But she knew she would fight back again if she was attacked. You had to defend yourself. Pavlin had been wrong about that.
You couldn’t reason with madness.
Occasionally she passed through villages, but found people surly and unwelcoming. She bargained fiercely over the price of food and took her money from a belt purse she kept nearly empty, behaving as if to part with even a single coin hurt her. She would have liked to purchase a riding nerid, but was afraid that to do so would make her conspicuous and label her as someone with money. It was a pity though. Riding nerids didn’t move quickly, but they could trot along
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tirelessly for hours.
As she napped through several broken nights when she kept waking up with her heart pounding, thinking she heard something moving nearby, she wondered whether she had been right in her decision to return to Tenebrak. Any settlement would take her in gladly, for the sake of her healing skills. You could do a lot of good in the world as a Healer of the Second Cadre.
Was it really worth facing the perils of the more populous areas, the perils that Discord kept throwing in her path, just for the sake of further training so that she could join the First Cadre? Would she even get to Tenebrak alive? She didn’t know, no longer felt as if she knew anything for certain. But something kept her moving stubbornly on.
She fell into a routine, keeping away from the well-travelled roads, using the sun to guide her roughly in a south-westerly direction. After all, didn’t they say all roads led to Tenebrak? But the further south she got, the more dangerous the roads became and with all her care, she had several narrow escapes.
She had almost decided now to abandon the roads completely and head back north through the wildwoods. Almost, but not quite. She’d always been stubborn.
Day 20
Looking for a turn-off that would take her southwards again, Karialla risked walking along a proper road of well-beaten earth which seemed to be heading mainly west. She heard a noise behind her and turned to see a pair of deleff pulling a travelling trader’s wagon, the first she’d encountered on her journey.
As they drew nearer, the man and woman in the wagon studied her and she could see the wariness in their expressions. But when the deleff continued to walk tranquilly along, the traders’ faces relaxed into smiles.
‘Give you greeting, friend!’ called the woman. ‘If you’re going our way, perhaps you’d like to ride for a time?’
‘That’s a kind thought.’ Karialla waited for them to pass her and swung up into the wagon by the rear step, glad of the canopy to shelter her from the sun. She sat on a wooden box behind the driving seat next to the traders’ little daughter, chatting and feeling more relaxed than she had done for a long time. Like nerids, deleff didn’t travel rapidly, but their steady pace ate up the miles more quickly than her feet ever could.
She spent a restful night camping with the family in a clearing a few hundred paces off the road. When they’d eaten and were sitting by the fire, she spoke briefly of her reasons for travelling then turned the attention firmly away from herself. ‘Your deleff fascinate me, Pert. They’re much bigger than others I’ve seen. How did you acquire this pair?’
She’d had little to do with deleff, though she had seen them from time to time.
The trader laughed. ‘Acquire! No one acquires a deleff. They’re their own creatures and come to you of their own accord or not at all.’
‘But what if they suddenly decided to leave you?’ Karialla pursued. ‘Nerids couldn’t pull a wagon this size.’
The man laughed again, a confident sound. ‘They certainly couldn’t. And these beauties will definitely leave me one day.’ He strolled across to pat a grey rump as high as his head. ‘When they do, I shall sit and wait. If I’m lucky, another pair will turn up within a few days and pull the wagon in their place. That’s what happened to us last time, anyway.’
Karialla studied the deleff. She’d never tried to learn about them before, having been so utterly focused on her studies and then on Pavlin. The creatures bore some resemblance to the lizards that lived under the eaves of people’s houses, but they were huge, far taller than she was. Their thick hide was covered with tiny grey scales which were almost iridescent and gave them a blurred appearance. She pointed to the knobbly ridge on the back of the nearest deleff. ‘I’ve always wondered what that’s for. It looks so—unfinished, somehow.’
‘It’s for the wings.’
‘Wings?’ She wrinkled her brow, trying to remember the little she knew. ‘Deleff don’t have wings, surely?’
‘Not usually, no. And we traders don’t talk about them. Just pray you never see them unfurl. They only do that when there’s serious trouble.’ He refused point-blank to elaborate on this statement.
‘Are the deleff very intelligent? I’ve never heard two people agree about that.’
‘Then you’ve never talked to us traders. Of course they’re intelligent. Never met a creature half as smart as a deleff. I reckon us humans could learn a lot from them. You don’t see them fighting one other, do you?’
‘Then why do they spend their lives pulling your wagons? Su
rely a really intelligent creature would prefer to live its own life?’
The whole family laughed and the little girl came up to lean against a deleff leg the size of a tree trunk and stare solemnly at Karialla. ‘Zarrel and Mersa like living with us,’ she said, in her high child’s voice. ‘That’s why they stay. My Da says if I talk to them and tell them everything, then they’ll stay interested and not leave us for a while. So I do.’
The great heads swished to and fro, then one bent towards them as if to study Karialla more closely.
She walked over to Zarrel and reached up to pat the snout, finding the skin softer than she’d expected.
‘She likes you,’ the child informed her. ‘If she didn’t like you, she’d have moved away when you tried to get near her.’
‘Where do they came from? I’ve heard people begin children’s tales with, ‘Far beyond the wildwoods, in the lands of
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nowhere, where the deleff dream their dreams . . . ’ but what does that really mean? Is there really a land beyond the wildwoods, and is that where the deleff come from, or is that just another legend, like the flying ship of the Forebears?’
‘Who knows?’ Pert grinned at her. ‘Me, I’ll stick to the eastern hills and never mind looking for any lands of nowhere, or even lands of somewhere.’ He laughed, the confident laugh of a man barely touched by Discord and stood up to find some more wood for the fire, whistling under his breath.
His wife smiled at the two great creatures which were now quietly munching some foliage. ‘For us traders, it’s enough that the deleff come to us, and we accept their help gratefully,’ she said softly. ‘Without them folk wouldn’t have our services, because nerids couldn’t pull our great wagons. And then how would you stay-put people manage, eh?
New settlements are growing up everywhere, and many of them rely on us for the things they can’t make themselves.’
‘Where are you going next?’ Karialla asked idly, a little later.
‘We were heading south,’ Mella said. ‘We’ve been trading up in the wildwoods east of Setherak for years, keeping out of the way of raiders. There are a lot of new settlements up that way now—and precious little Discord.’ She sighed gustily and exchanged glances with her husband. ‘We didn’t realise it would still be so bad down here in the south.’
Pert came to put his arm round his wife and give her a hug. ‘We were going to Tenebrak, but we’ve had a couple of bad experiences, so we’ve changed our minds. We’re going to follow this track for a while then swing round northwards in a big loop. That’ll get us back to safety again. Where are you heading?’
‘I, too, had thought to go to Tenebrak.’
Pert shook his head. ‘Too dangerous, especially on your own. My guess is that when the big factions were broken up, their members scattered and re-formed in smaller groups. They’re all over the larger settled areas now, I hear. You’d be better advised to head north or east, like we are, to the new territories. Discord isn’t nearly as bad there. You think about that, Karialla, think about it carefully. We’ll take you with us till we get somewhere safer, if you like. I don’t care to see a woman travelling the roads on her own.’
Karialla smiled. ‘Thank you, but no. I’m determined to go to Tenebrak.’ But even as she spoke, she admitted to herself she wasn’t sure any longer. She knew, however, that she didn’t want to travel on with Pert and Mella. Being with a couple seemed to emphasise her own loss.
In the morning when she parted from them, she would make camp somewhere for a few days and take time to think about her future, really think about what she wanted and how best to get it. After all, she’d made her decision on impulse, when overwhelmed with grief. Tenebrak and the Healers’ Courts would still be there a few years from now, but it might be well to give Discord more time to wane before she went so far south. Pert was right: she was vulnerable on her own. She realised he was speaking again. He seemed fond of the sound of his own voice.
‘Mind you, the deleff are starting to come back again, at least they are in the north. My eldest son was blessed with his first pair only last year. Beauties, they are, young and strong. And his grandfather’s wagon was just lying there for the taking, so he didn’t have to go into debt to buy one, even. They don’t come cheap, those wagons don’t, you know. They have to be strongly built. You can’t beat jarulan wood, for all it’s so hard to work. And they have to be made to the exact measurements, too, so we can repair them easily anywhere we go.’
Something puzzled Karialla. ‘But if the deleff are coming back, where did they go to during the Wars?’
‘Maybe they went west of the wildwoods,’ Pert said with a grin, ‘into the lands of nowhere, wherever they may be.’
Mella leaned across to pat Karialla’s hand. ‘You’ve had bad luck, lass, losing your husband like that, but you’re young and you’ll build a new life for yourself. We’ve seen the changes start. Things’ll get better now, you mark my words. Me an’ Pert just tried to do too much too soon this trip, but some of my family settled in Tenebrak and I wanted to see if they were still all right. I’ll get back to see them one day, when things are more peaceful.’
When the traders turned off the main track at a crossroads to visit a village they knew, Karialla stood watching the wagon until it was out of sight. Pert and Mella’s friendliness had been like a breath of fresh air in a musty room, and she’d slept soundly with them nearby.
Well, she must get used to loneliness again now, she told herself firmly, striding out along a track which looked little used. She had only herself to rely on.
Day 23
Three nights later, on a deserted stretch of track where grass had grown in the wheel ruts, a group of men in tattered, filthy clothing burst out of the undergrowth and took Karialla by surprise. She had been lost in thought and they knocked her dagger from her hand with their clubs before she realised what was happening.
The leader, Mallery, pawed through the contents of her pack, then stuffed everything back and slung it on his own shoulder. ‘We’ll divide this lot later.’
The other men muttered under their breath but didn’t challenge him.
He held up the roll of herbs. ‘What’s this?’
‘Special herbs. For healing.’
‘Are you a healer, then, a snirpy little woman like you? I’d like to see you heal anything bigger than a chuckle-fluff!’
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But he tied the herbs back on to the pack.
Everyone guffawed, as if he had made a good joke, and Karialla didn’t bother to insist that she really was a healer.
‘Come on!’ Mallery ordered.
She pulled back. ‘Come on where?’
The man next to her cuffed her across the head. ‘Wherever Mallery says we go. Shut up an’ do as you’re told, fool of a woman!’ He hauled her to her feet and gave her a shove.
Mallery grinned at the by-play and strode off along the track with everyone following. When they arrived at a rough camp, he called out, ‘She can cook the meal tonight.’
Her guard shoved her over towards the fire. ‘You heard Mallery. Cook us a meal, girlie. A good meal. We’ve had a busy day.’
She shook her head. She wouldn’t lift a fingertip to help such as these.
‘Shall I thump her, Mallery?’ her guard asked, anticipation lighting his face.
The leader didn’t answer, just walked across the clearing with a smile, and slapped Karialla’s face so hard he knocked her to the ground, then chuckled hoarsely as he lifted her up again by the front of her bodice and shook her like a dusty rug. ‘You can cook the meal now, or you can get beaten and then cook it. Your choice, girlie.’
The men roared with laughter.
‘You tell her, Mallery.’
‘She needs a lesson or two, this one does.’
Fear made Karialla unable to move for a moment. No one had ever in her life made her feel quite so small and helpless. Evil seemed to radiate from Mallery, who
was a huge man and even the grip of his hands was painful on her arms. She decided it was a waste of time to protest and bent to pick up the ladle. ‘Very well. But I’ll need my knife back to cut things up.’
‘We’ll cut the meat up. You want anything else cutting, you ask us.’ He gave a snort of laughter at the disappointment in her eyes. ‘You didn’t think we’d give you a sharp knife to play with, did you? Why, you might hurt yourself with it, girlie.’ Mallery threw back his head and roared with laughter, which was echoed immediately by his men. ‘An’ use some of them herbs you’re carrying in your pack,’ he said as he sat down again. ‘We’re sick of unseasoned food.’
All too soon the stew was ready. Though it smelled good, Karialla was too afraid to have any appetite. As they wolfed down the food the men began to torment her. They described in detail what they intended to do with her, laughing at her white face and trembling hands, touching her breasts as she served them, though all with one eye to Mallery, who obviously was to get her first. They seemed totally gripped by Discord madness, their eyes gleaming wildly as they joked and laughed about their capture.
‘But when you lose your usefulness, girlie,’ whispered a man sitting quietly just outside the circle, ‘we’ll kill you at our leisure.’
His voice was so soft and caressing it made the words a hundred times more frightening and she shook so much she spilled some food on the man she was serving, earning herself a curse and a kick.
When Mallery jerked his head, two of the other men joked her tormentor away from her.
‘Denny gets his turn with you last of all,’ Mallery said cheerfully. He belched loudly and winked at the man next to him. ‘When he’s finished with them, they aren’t much use to the rest of us and all we can do is bury the bits. So you’d better put your mind to pleasing us, girlie. That way you’ll stay alive.’