by Brandon Barr
Whatever was driving her newfound strength in magic, she wanted to tap into more of it. Now that she had the three animals before her, she wanted to experiment with how she might use this new ability. Could she control more than one of the three simultaneously?
It really was bizarre being in multiple bodies. So many sensations, and for the first time, she found herself able to see through multiple sets of eyes instead of just one. The panoramic view was shocking at first, but then, it wasn’t any different than when she closed one of her own eyes, looked out at the woods, then opened her second eye. It was just adding one more again and again until that single eye expanded into ten!
First, Payetta thought of a job for each animal, then she pictured what it would look like being carried out. All at once, she sent each animal on their mission.
Payetta stood, for she had given herself a job as well. As she stood, her visual orientation suddenly went chaotic. Each animal began to move and the panoramic view turned in five different directions. It was like being the brain for five different sets of eyes all walking in different directions.
She was tempted to just close all ten of her eyes, but she refused to give in to the strange sensation. For one thing, the gist of the new skill was working. The elk was making a circle in front of the hearth, the lynx had gone up beside Payetta’s legs where she stood, the sparrow flew up and perched itself at the top of a tree, and She Grunts was marking her territory on a nearby bush.
That was also one of the perks of being inside several bodies at once. You had five bladders and five assholes. Something to take advantage of in the future.
She stood there, trying to adjust to the confusing chaos of sights. As the locus of each pair of eyes, she found that if she focused more on one set, then the chaos of the others faded into the background. Payetta switched from animal to animal until she reverted back into her own eyes.
A snarl contorted her lips. This was absolutely amazing!
She brought all four animals back before the hearth but released She Grunts completely. Immediately the skunk trotted up to her and rubbed its snout against her boots.
An old concept sprang into Payetta’s mind, one she’d been tempted to experiment with for a long time. Did she dare attempt to enter fully into another animal and leave her body behind?
What would happen to her body? That was the question that bothered her most.
A nagging fear told her she might be permanently trapped inside the animal and unable to return to her human self.
She eyed the four animals and smirked. What kind of animal would Justen prefer to be wedded to if the worst should happen?
She shook her head. It wasn’t worth it. What would be the value anyway?
Through her own eyes, she saw in the distance a large herd of elk. Some of them stood watching her and the bull she’d swiped from their herd. They seemed confused about this…why that member of their herd was behaving so strangely around a human.
Suddenly the herd broke into a run as something startled them. Whatever it was, she realized it wasn’t coming from their direction, but from behind her.
She spun.
Eight wild dogs emerged out of the undergrowth and rushed up to her at a brisk run. At the sight of her they began yapping loudly. It was the Stump Hill Dogs, one of the smaller packs in the area.
Payetta hushed them and knelt, reaching out for the alpha female. The dog licked her fingers and dug its head into her hand.
Payetta entered the dog, still maintaining control of the three animals behind her. She focused on what the dog had seen.
Her mouth fell open.
Raiders were at her Honey Hideout.
***
Each cottage and field Daeken passed was another reminder of why he belonged in such a place. He imagined what his life might be like if the Meadowlands survived this showdown with the mage and his raiders. Forty-five was not a youthful age anymore, but he was still strong. If he could find a good farmer to work for, in time, he might save enough to buy his own farm.
These were daydreams though. What he would say to Payetta when he found her was another matter.
In an odd way, he felt a paternal concern for her. She needed guidance. Her stubbornness and temper were very much like his own before he met his wife, Farrah. Prior to marrying Farrah, he had cared for his grandmother’s property until he turned thirty-one. Protecting her isolated home front from a host of enemies had been a full-time job. The isolated farm was walled in by wilderness. Their closest neighbors were a day’s ride by horse. So when thieves, brutals, ravers, or a few marauding raiders belonging to the local mage stumbled onto their property, it was his job to make sure they didn’t live to tell anyone about what they found.
When he wasn’t patrolling for intruders or setting traps, he was either helping his grandmother and her two farmhands with the crops, or he was reading and rereading the journal of his great-grandmother, Cordelia Dawn Walton, or Cory as he came to know her by his grandmother.
It was Cory, Terry Henry Walton’s daughter, who gave him a personal glimpse of the hero that he had descended from.
Daeken placed his hand against his cloak and felt the bulge of the little journal. He kept it secure on his body at all times. If he had to strip naked and choose only three items to take with him, he would take his long sword, Wickedbane, Terry’s silver bladed knife, and Cordelia’s journal.
As a boy Daeken revered Terry, and as he grew, so too did his respect for the man. Daeken took on his legendary ancestor’s mission to protect the weak as he cared for his grandmother and defended their home.
His grandmother, Sylvia, raised him when his mother died from a fever a year after his birth. His earliest memories were his grandmother’s tales of Terry Henry in a world of strange creatures called Weres and Forsaken. Daeken didn’t know exactly what these human monsters were, for his Grandmother had kept the meaning of the words secret from him. But once, his grandmother let slip that Terry Henry was an avid Forsaken hunter, and also that his great-great-grandmother, Char, was one of the Weres.
He was certain his grandmother knew what those terms meant, but she had never told him. She seemed almost haunted by the past era of monsters that she described to him in vague, shadowy detail. She had many secrets it seemed, one of which was a book she rarely took out of her ancient metal safe. When Daeken had caught her crying on the porch rocker with the old book in her hands, he’d begged her to share it with him. She refused. It had taken years of persistent asking to pull a few nuggets of information out about the old tome she kept locked away. Over time, she’d given him a handful of historical names, but all came without any context, for she was a tight-lipped old woman. The mysterious book, he discovered, was a second volume written by Cordelia Dawn Walton. A short book of family history that ended after the first decade of the Age of Madness. A few names were mentioned by his grandmother—people she must have felt were of high importance. Names like Bethany Anne, Akio, and Michael. But that was the extent of his years of probing. She preferred to tell him stories of Terry and Char, for some reason it felt safer for her.
His grandmother never did spend much time telling of the bad and evil in her stories of Terry, but instead went on at length about the people Terry saved, the hard choices he had to make, and how he faced impossible odds again and again and always overcame them.
His grandmother and his great-grandparents had somehow survived the madness that overtook the world, and most who made it through with their brains still intact remained slightly wild in the mind.
Between the journal and his grandmother’s tales, he came to realize at a young age that the world was a cruel and deadly place, and it took superhuman men like Terry to keep it safe.
Then came the day Daeken’s life was turned on its head by a newly acquired farmhand.
The first sign of what had transpired were the bloody boot prints on the porch. The size and shape of the prints told him they belonged to Tanner Morgan.
He
rushed inside the house and found his grandmother murdered, her ancient safe looted and empty. Kneeling beside the cold body of the woman who’d been a mother to him, a moral giant in his life, and his only link to his past, he couldn’t accept that another man could stab such a precious person in the chest six times and not feel anything.
That hour, something snapped inside him, transforming his deep sense of loss and pain into a black rage.
For the next two years he hunted for the murderer. Tanner Morgan was an owl-faced twenty-two-year-old with a stub for a nose and hair a reddish brown like a fox. Daeken sought revenge for his grandmother’s death, and was hungry to retrieve the precious items that were stolen. In his pursuit, he killed every brutal, raver, and raider he fell upon, managing to survive only by becoming half-mad himself. For a year he spoke to almost no one, finding water and food wherever he could scrounge it from the forests and wastelands he traveled through. In all that time, he grew bitter and angry as the farmhand’s scent staled and every outpost he entered turned up no clues as to where the man had gone.
He never found the man he hunted, and for a long time, it tormented him.
From those unpleasant memories of that dark period in his life, he couldn’t help but feel a kinship with Payetta. She too bore a powerful desire to rain down vengeance upon the man responsible for her own parent’s murders.
From what he gathered, Payetta and Justen had come to the Meadowlands for the very same reason he’d come to the little farm community of Caspian. The day he stumbled from the woods and saw the magnificent sight of a hundred farms with men and women working together to not only eek out an existence, but thrive—it was the day he realized there was still hope in the world. At first, he simply fell in love with the farmland and the life of a farmer, but he also met the deep love of Farrah.
When it all was taken away, he didn’t go and seek out the mage and his raiders who’d killed Daeken’s loved ones and burned his home to the ground. He didn’t want to go back to the way he’d been when he sought his grandmother’s killer. Instead, he went in search of hope…seeking out another pocket of humanity that he felt certain existed somewhere. He didn’t turn his back on bringing those responsible to justice, but he wasn’t going to waste his life on it. If he was ever going to bring down Krolan, the mage responsible for the wreckage he’d left behind in Caspian, he’d need support. He’d need community.
And here in the Meadowlands, he sensed a strong measure of both.
Nearing the edge of the woods where Payetta and Justen’s hideout lay not far off, he felt a tug at the back of his cloak.
Daeken spun, the silver bladed knife springing into his hand.
Standing there staring up at him was Shepherd.
A smile spread across Daeken’s face, washing away his initial surprise, and he knelt beside the child. He knew he should be harsh with the boy for running away from the family that had taken him in, but all Daeken could do was suppress a smile and take the boy’s hands in his. “Shepherd, I should be upset at you right now. I don’t know how you found me.”
Daeken wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw the boy’s lips spread ever so slightly. How the boy had tracked him made little sense, and equally puzzling was the fact that the child had managed to sneak up on him without his notice.
He put his hand on Shepherd’s head and roughed up his hair. “Well, son, come along. I guess you’re stuck with me for now.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Payetta charged through the forest like a mountain cat. They were on her territory now, tampering with her home, her land. Cluckruck was inside that hideout. If her chicken lost so much as a feather, they’d meet a special kind of ugly end.
Behind her ran She Grunts, the bull elk, the lynx and the pack of eight wild dogs. Weaving through the trees ahead of her was the sparrow.
All were under her control—fury pushing them forward, her anger pulsing through their veins.
Titannus’s raiders were going to receive the shock of their lives.
Through the sparrow’s eyes, Payetta could see a black column of smoke rising through the trees ahead. A hard lump formed in her human throat. Her legs pushed harder, the energy inside her felt boundless. Only a day ago, she’d never have imagined the strength it would take to control the number of animals she was now connected to. She would have exhausted herself entirely by the time she reached her hideout, but now she hardly broke a sweat. As she neared her home, she quieted her steps and slowed. The animals did the same, slowing and moving silently through the brush.
The acrid smell of smoke met her nose at the same time she spotted the swirling firestorm rising from the sunken hideout. Of all the hideouts she and Justen called home this had been their favorite. Nine men stood outside watching the flames that roared loud enough to mask any sound of her approach.
One of the raiders—a broad shouldered oaf—had something in his hands that momentarily stilled her heart. Flapping from his fisted grip was Cluckruck. The man laughed as the bird squawked shrilly, hanging by its feet. He held Cluckruck out to the flames, apparently making a joke about dinner. Two other raiders carried her swords, the metal blade was being inspected, while the wooden sword was being grinned over. The man holding it lifted it and snapped it in two over his knee.
A fire blazed to life in the pit of her stomach.
The animals behind her fanned out. She couldn’t contain herself any longer and her anger manifested in low growls in the eight canine throats. The raiders turned at the sound, but too late.
The dogs leapt in pairs upon the men as she ran beside the bull elk. Two of the raiders produced a bow and an arrow. Another man with a long, braided grey beard peered at her strangely. His fingers slipped inside his cloak and he drew out a handful of knives.
Before she could react, his long fingers were flicking them at a rapid speed. She sent the elk straight for him, antlers down to spear him.
The man vanished just as the Bull would have run him through.
Missed me, sang a voice in her mind. Her teeth clenched at the memory of that familiar tone.
Titannus!
She spun around, searching for the grey-bearded man. The woods around her were a chaos of animals and men. But the dogs were yelping now. And she saw knives sticking from several. One of the dark browns was on the ground, whimpering.
The man who’d snapped her sword in two, rushed toward her, his face glaring with pleasure at the sight of her weaponless hands. She summoned the sparrow down from the treetops and she took full command. Like a projectile shot from the heavens, she plummeted down between her human body and the sword wielding raider. At full speed, she angled her wings and drove up and forward at the raider’s left eye, beak like a spearhead.
His head rocked back, sword flying from his hands as he collapsed in a kicking frenzy, his fingers raking at the bird lodged in his eye socket. She swooped the man’s sword up, put her boot on the side of his head and drove the point down through his ribs.
A warning screech sounded behind her, and she turned to see the black and white streak of She Grunts fleeing past her as a sword came slashing through the air.
She ducked just in time, then jammed an elbow into the man’s ribs. He stumbled back and she swung her blade down for his thigh. He managed a desperate parry, blocking her blow. She lurched under his guard and drove him to the ground. He grabbed the tip of her sword with a gloved hand and tried to slash it across her body. Desperately she seized his arm and muscled the deadly maneuver away.
The man shoved her hard with his left and then rolled on top of her, his knee pinning her sword hand to the ground. She reached out in her mind for the closest animal ally. She Grunts had fled in panic a short distance away, but another animal was closer.
The lynx leapt to her rescue. Paws outstretched, it landed on the side of the man’s face, claws piercing skin, ripping flesh and raking bloody stripes as they exited. The raider screamed as he rolled off of her. She wrested her own sword from his hand
, kicked him in the face, then drove the blade down like a butcher knife, lodging the steel halfway into his head.
The lynx cried out beside her and she turned to see it contorting on the ground, under a blue blaze of lightning streaming from Titannus’s fingers. The mage had revealed yet another deadly tool in his arsenal. How much energy it took to use such powerful magic, she could only guess.
Pretty kitty, sorry about that, came Titannus again in her head.
In a hot fury, she spun around in search of the man, her sword tensed for a strike.
“Show yourself you bastard!” growled Payetta.
The dogs were yelping again. Three were on the ground now, one not moving, the other two writhing and whimpering. She felt both fear and rage from the animals she held in her mind. She hadn’t lost control of any of the animals, but only a fraction of her focus remained in them. The dogs were fighting entirely on their own while the bull elk cowered behind a tree. She Grunts was hiding in an old rabbit hole and the bird watched from a branch high above, its beak smeared with blood and fluid.
The flash of a knife glinted just beside her head as it cut the air with a SWISH.
She turned and there stood the grey-bearded man flanked by four raiders.
“I don’t want to kill you, young mage, your power is quite impressive. Under my instruction and Zarith Smith’s, you could rule the Meadowlands instead of defending it. I’ve never seen your type of magic before. It is a unique gift.”
Payetta glared at him, preparing herself for the moment he tried to enter her mind as he did the day before. She was hungry for round two.
“Did you forget you killed one of my friends yesterday? Or do you assume everyone else thinks as you do—that your men are just tools to be exploited. I happen to care about mine. And my animals.”
“What are men and what are animals? Are we pawns in this game of existence? Or are we masters of our own destiny? You fight with passion, and passion is for the strong, but you counteract your strength with your bleeding heart. Your love for the weak will be your ruin.”