by Cindy Dees
* * *
Raina peered into the stew pot, grimacing at the various skinned carcasses bobbing in the greasy water. She took a sniff and had no idea what was cooking. Frankly, she didn’t want to know.
“I’ve got some cooking herbs. Would you like me to add them to the pot?” she asked the fellow tending to the stew.
“By all means.” His enthusiasm worried her. Just how terrible tasting was whatever floated in the kettle?
She pulled out a bundle of thyme and shook some of its tiny leaves into the pot. A few bay laurel leaves, a handful of salt, and some peppercorns. That would do for now. Once it had cooked down a bit, she’d muster the courage to taste it and adjust the seasonings.
She asked Moto if he knew how his old friend Cicero fared, and the pyresti answered, “Last I saw of him, he was hale and well.”
“Please give him my best when next you see him.”
“That I will, and you’ve my word on it,” Moto replied.
While Rynn filled in Moto on the latest gossip from Dupree, the elf filled them in on the goings-on in the Sorrow Wold. The big news, of course, was the imminent approach of Maren’s Belt, which would cut through the eastern edge of the Sorrow Wold where it met the Estarran Sea.
Will asked, “Why would the Empire run the Belt so close to the water? The Merr will cause no end of problems for travelers on that stretch of the road.”
Moto shrugged. “The creatures of the Sorrow Wold, and the wold itself, will cause more trouble. I guess the Merr were the lesser of two evils.”
The Hanged Men laughed loudly at that observation, seemingly delighted to be scarier than the Merr Empire.
Apparently, a number of Imperial patrols and scouting expeditions had been seen in the wold recently. Undoubtedly, they were survey crews and foresters getting ready to clear the way for Maren’s Belt.
Moto also relayed that the governess had imposed production quotas on the guilds west of Estarra larger than any quotas seen in years. She was apparently determined to increase the region’s productivity, including the Sorrow Wold. Both Moto and Rynn seemed amused at the idea. And after having spent a day here, Raina had to agree with them.
Even the Forest of Thorns, guarded as it was by the mighty Boki, was nowhere near as scary as this place. Raina highly doubted that Syreena had any concept of how forbidding a place the Sorrow Wold truly was.
These woods were a living, breathing entity. Raina highly doubted any army or collection of guilds could tame a beast that stretched for hundreds of leagues. She knew from her study of history that others had tried. They all had failed.
“White Heart!” Moto called, startling her out of her thoughts.
She turned and straightened.
“Have you any healing left after everything you just cast?”
“My hand is glowing, is it not?” she replied tartly.
His men guffawed.
“Then fix this if you can.”
She cast her gaze downward. And blinked. A nasty, festering sore oozed on the inside of his calf, as big around as her palm. Red streaks traveled up and down from the raw, seeping wound. Alarmed, she squatted down to take a better look.
“How long have you had this?” she asked briskly.
“A couple of months.”
“Months?” she echoed, alarmed. “How’d you get it?”
“You tell me.”
“Looks like poison eating at your flesh. Did a venomous creature bite you, perchance?”
“Very good. Scorpion stung me. Big one. Regular healing hasn’t worked on it. Cures for poison haven’t worked either.”
“You’ll need enhanced healing, then. Lucky for you, I can cast that.”
“What’s that?”
“Regular magic enhanced with ritual magic.”
She glanced up and made eye contact with Moto. His eyes were blacker than the night. “You want it fast or slow? It’ll hurt either way, it’s just a matter of how much or how long.”
“I’ll take the pain the long way.”
She frowned. He sounded like he wanted the more drawn-out ordeal. An almost hypnotic look of concentration came over his face as he prepared himself to face her healing. Nonetheless, she pulled a hand-span length of thick leather out of her belt pouch and handed it to him.
“What’s this for?” he asked suspiciously.
She grinned. “I give it to women in childbirth so they don’t bite through their lips. You might want to put it between your teeth and chomp down.”
Although she’d enjoy drawing out the man’s apprehension after the scare he and his men had given her earlier, she wasn’t that cruel. She summoned the magic quickly, forming a stream of crackling light between her fingers. She touched the wound with her fingertips, and the magic jumped from her hand into the center of the wound.
Moto’s entire body jerked, arching into a taut bow of agony. Several of his men surged forward in alarm. Wincing, she bled the magic into him. Muscle by individual muscle, he gradually relaxed his body against the white-hot agony she must be causing him. Long before she had finished sending the magics into him, he’d achieved a state of trancelike relaxation. If anything, the expression on his face was akin to … peace. Joy.
She’d nearly finished the healing when he finally went limp and slumped over. It was probably for the best. The scrolls she’d been taught from said this magic took time to work its way through the bloodstream, seeking and destroying poisons throughout the body. And apparently, the process was excruciating.
She glanced down at Moto’s leg. The wound already had a thin, semitransparent membrane of new flesh forming over it. In another three minutes or so, when she finally finished trickling healing into his leg, the wound was completely gone.
Moto roused sluggishly, mumbling in an odd, elvish cadence. She frowned, concentrating on his rantings, and they began to separate into words.
“Emerald jewel awakes, flashing. Flying. Devouring.”
Raina frowned. A flying jewel?
“Kings rising, kings falling. Ah, the blood. The fire. The humanity…” His voice trailed off.
He’d done this exact same thing the last time she’d met him, prophesying then of sleeping kings and her power to destroy them all. And some of his vision had already come true. She worried that the rest of it, the part where she must wield her power with great care or else disaster would fall, might also come true. And now this? Blood, fire, and destruction as kings rose and fell?
Was this a pointed warning that the path they pursued would not turn out as they hoped?
Shivers of apprehension raced down her spine. She glanced up in dismay at the cluster of staring people around her and mumbled, “He’s hallucinating.”
Please let that be true. But the sick feeling in her belly proclaimed her wish to be a lie. Moto blinked a couple of times just then. Sat up, looking disoriented. Looked down at his leg. Looked up at her in surprised gratitude.
“Thanks be to thee,” he said in a perfectly normal tone of voice.
“You’re welcome.” She stood up. “And now if you don’t mind, I need to stir your supper. I’d hate to burn it after using my good herbs in it.”
While the Hanged Men ate and swapped war stories, Raina cleaned off her bedroll as best she could. It had been trampled in the fighting and was muddy and wet.
One of the female bandits surprised her by offering a torn and flea-bitten bedroll. “It ain’t much, but it be clean and dry. Lemme help you hang yours by the fire to dry overnight, then we’ll beat it clean in the morn.”
Surrounded by upward of thirty armed fighters, she finally felt safe enough to sleep and actually caught a few hours’ rest.
As soon as she woke in the morning, a line formed in front of her, of brigands waiting to show her their various minor injuries and infections. She was shocked to realize that none of them had access to any sort of medical treatment at all. They had not a single potion maker among them. Were she to be out here for longer, she would’ve offered t
o teach one of them the brewing of the simplest healing potions.
As it was, she methodically worked her way through their aches and pains. Truth be told, the Hanged Men weren’t so bad once she got to know them a little. A few of them told tales of being sold into slavery for unpaid taxes, others of being wrongly accused of crimes because they would not leave lands one of the Imperial guilds coveted. A few grinned and admitted that they’d deserved the hangings they’d gotten, but the majority seemed to be victims of the Empire rather than criminals out to harm it.
The Hanged Men invited Rynn and his friends to travel with them, and after a brief conference with her and the others, Rynn accepted the invitation.
They traveled fast and hard all that day and the next. The menace of the wood retreated somewhat but never fully went away. Raina couldn’t ever shake the sensation that unseen eyes were watching her. Their malevolent stares crawled up her spine like spiders, cold and poisonous.
She ventured to strike up a conversation with the gypsy cook the fourth evening over the supper pot. “So how do all of you support yourselves in these woods?”
The young man shrugged. “Raiding caravans and robbing travelers, mostly.”
Raina blinked. “Why didn’t you rob us, then?”
“Rynn, he be different. He be one of us.”
“A bandit?” Raina asked, surprised.
“No. Part of the—” The youth broke off abruptly, as if realizing belatedly that he’d almost said something he shouldn’t.
“Part of the what?”
“Nothin’. Forget it,” the gypsy mumbled.
Part of some group of some kind, she’d lay odds on it. Was there some greater union of brigands or something? She’d always pegged Rynn as a former noble, like herself, but likely of higher rank than she’d been born to.
“Is there such a thing as a Thief’s Guild?” she asked, watching the gypsy’s reaction carefully.
He looked genuinely startled and replied without hesitation, “Not as I know of.”
Hmm. What group, then?
Late in the afternoon of the following day, the guard rotation was such that she found herself walking alongside Moto.
“How’s your leg?” she questioned.
“Right as rain, thanks to thee.”
She shrugged. “So tell me. How come you choose to live in this gloomy place? Last I saw, you were a prosperous merchant passing through Tyrel a few times per year.”
He threw her a hard look. “I didn’t choose this life. Most of us didn’t.”
“Then why are you here?”
Moto was silent a long time, walking reflectively. Then he said merely, “The Empire.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s why we’re all out here. We’re avoiding the Empire. This is one of the few places left where the Kothites haven’t wrapped their claws around the throat of every living creature and squeezed the life out of it. Yes, these woods are evil, but better them than slavery.”
“I know exactly how you feel,” she replied with a tinge of bitterness.
Moto looked at her with interest. “And yet you serve Koth.”
“I had no choice but to put on these colors.”
“Join us. We could use a healer like you.”
She laughed. “I don’t think I could keep up with you. Rynn says you’re taking the pace easy because of me, yet I’m half-dead with exhaustion.”
The bandit shrugged. “We are, but you’d shape up soon enough.”
“I thank you for the offer. My situation is not yet so desperate that I need to take you up on it, but I’ll keep it in mind.”
One of the men walking point let out a cry, and the entire party jolted to full alert. Ululating, inhuman screams began to echo all around them, bouncing off the trees eerily. Raina’s eyes went wide in alarm.
“Cursed kindari,” Moto muttered. “We’re coming into one of their villages. They don’t mean us any harm. It’s just their uncivilized way of saying hello.”
The party halted.
“Here we are,” Moto murmured. “Where you asked us to take you.”
She looked around and saw nothing but black tree trunks and stunted undergrowth in the usual gloom. “Me? I made no such request. Where are we?”
He grinned, enjoying the apparent joke. “Look up. The kindari live in trees.”
She looked up. And gasped. An entire village perched high in the limbs of the giant trees overhead. Wood and rope walkways extended between the round tree houses, and she glimpsed someone swinging on a long vine from one building to another.
“Will they come down to us, or are we supposed to go up to them?” she asked.
“Depends. Friends get invited up. Strangers and those they don’t trust stay down here. With you and yours among us, who knows? Maybe they’ll think you’re a threat. Maybe not.”
“Which way do they see you?”
He glanced over at her and smiled boyishly. “Haven’t you figured out yet that I’m a pussycat?”
She grinned at him. “Now that you mention it, I was beginning to come to that very conclusion.”
A delegation of a half dozen kindari dropped down out of the trees and parlayed briefly with first Moto and then Rynn. Apparently, these wild elves were acquainted with the paxan, as well, and greeted him warmly.
In short order, a series of rope ladders unrolled out of the trees, clattering down to the ground. “Up we go,” Rynn murmured to her and their companions. “It’s a great honor to be invited into their homes, so behave yourselves.”
Uh-oh. Her friends behave? This was not going to go well.
CHAPTER
12
Eben fell into an exhausted sleep. The combination of a long day’s hike and the strenuous fight had sapped his strength. He’d given no thought to his sister or to the child Vesper on the dream plane before he closed his eyes.
Hence, his dreaming mind was shocked when he was rudely and forcefully yanked through a white fog and popped out at the same giant encampment as before, except this time manifesting directly in front of Vesper’s tent.
One of the dour armed guards holding a long pike intoned, “She wants you inside.”
No discussion was necessary of who “she” was.
Eben nodded and ducked inside the dim tent.
“There you are,” Vesper said in her high-pitched voice. “It’s about time.”
“Sorry,” he muttered. “Had a horde of goblins and monsters to fight off before I could sleep.”
“Are you injured?”
“No, but thanks be to you for asking,” he replied with a courtesy he was far from feeling. He was tired and wanted his rest.
“Come with me. Your sister will arrive soon with a delivery for me. You wanted to see her, did you not?”
That surprised Eben. “Indeed. Thank you for remembering and arranging for us to meet.” His gratitude was genuine this time.
Eben trailed along among the flunkies, unsure of what else to do. One of the creatures, an earth elemental by the looks of his stony hide, stomped along beside him.
“Why you wear shoes?” the elemental demanded.
Eben answered, “To protect my feet from injury and extreme temperatures.”
The creature lifted one massive foot and wiggled its toes comically. “But feel the earth be good. Connect to dirt. To your spirit.”
The creature had accurately pegged him as being earth aligned. Interesting. “What are you?” he asked.
“Stone elemental. Duh.”
Eben smirked. He wondered if the phantasms actually believed they were the entities whose identities they assumed. This one sounded like it did.
“You no connect to who you be. No feet on dirt, no skin in fresh air. No fingers in fire. How you know who you be under all them human clothes?”
That was a good question. Maybe he was too humanized. Maybe Leland Hyland hadn’t understood his and Marikeen’s need to connect to their core natures. Maybe that explained why he felt s
o at sea now, so … adrift.
He followed along in Vesper’s wake, pondering whether he’d sold out on himself, whether or not he was traveling the right path in his life. But how to fix it? His friends were counting on him, and he was as deeply embroiled in the quest to wake the Sleeping King as any of them. He’d resurrected once, lost his foster brother, and lost his sister as a result of it.
At least he could correct one of those right now.
“Eben!”
He hurried his steps in response to Vesper’s rather imperious summons. “Yes, my lady?”
“Marikeen approaches.”
As soon as he heard the words, he felt a prickling across his skin that followed the colored striations of his jann tamgas—the marks that appeared on jann skin when a connection to a certain element was formed. He bore the brown and gray tamgas of earth and stone strongly with only hints of white as he worked on understanding air better.
With a whoosh of wind in the heavy fog, a figure materialized ahead of them, dark in the unending whiteness. The woman moved forward gracefully but broke into a run at the sight of him. “Brother!” she cried.
He ran forward as well, wrapping his sister in a giant bear hug. “What in the world are you up to now, Marikeen?” he muttered in her ear as he embraced her.
“Play along with everything I do or say and you will be safe enough.” After the hasty warning, Marikeen stepped back, smiling widely. “It is so good to see you again at last, Eben. Where have you been, and what have you been up to all this time?”
“Searching for you,” he answered.
“Well, now you’ve found me. What will you do?”
“Take you home,” he declared stoutly.
Marikeen made a face and snorted derisively. “I am home. This is my home. And soon it will be yours, too. The things I can show you, the power you can have—”
“You do not need to recruit me, sister. I am here willingly, and Vesper has been most kind and helpful to me.”
“Really? What has she done for you?” Marikeen blurted.
“She helped me and my friends escape when we were kidnapped by Kithmar slavers.”
“Curse Anton Constantine,” she spat. “One day I will bring him and his minions low and sing for joy while doing it.” She scowled and pulled out a white deer antler from her belt. “Remember this?”