Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

Helter turned back toward the group. “I sent Arl down the path to see if there’s anything to report.”

  “Arl?” Eleanora stepped gingerly near the garden. She stopped beside Helter. “He’s little more than a boy.”

  “He can hide as well as an old woman,” Helter snapped.

  She flushed. “I’m not ashamed for what I did, Helter. I saved a child’s life. Now it’s up to you to save your lives. These creatures are heartless things—”

  She stopped. A rustling from the wood made her start. She whirled, making herself dizzy again, but this time she managed to stay upright.

  Arl was crossing the clearing with a Danite beside him. The Danite was not one Eleanora recognized. The Danite who supposedly managed the kirk near Daisy Stream hadn’t made rounds to this area in over a year.

  “They’re horrible things.” Arl stopped at the edge of the meeting circle. His young face was pale, but his eyes had a faraway look Eleanora had seen only in the aging. He leaned on the Danite.

  The Danite was thin and almost as young as Arl, his hair cut close around his skull, his black robes dripping wet and his feet covered with mud. He clutched a small bottle.

  “Coulter’s dead,” Arl said, “just like Eleanora said. The bodies—” His voice broke and he shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

  “Where is the woman?” the Danite asked.

  “Here,” Eleanora said. Her dizziness had receded a bit, but she didn’t want to take a step forward. She bowed her head and waited, fearing that he, too, would censure her.

  He came close and touched her forehead with wet fingers. “You are Blessed,” he said. “Not many see the Fey and live.”

  “You know what they are?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I rode in from Jahn to see if they had attacked the countryside. The city is under siege, but we have been driving them back. They’re demons. Holy water destroys them.”

  “He killed those remaining at Coulter’s with a splash of water,” Arl said. He glanced at Helter. “Good thing, too. They were going to come for me.”

  “I told you to hide,” Helter said.

  Arl wiped a shaking hand across his brow. “They knew that Eleanora had been there. They knew she took the baby. They thought she would be back, so they had scouts in the woods. The Religious Sir arrived just in time.”

  “What are these creatures?” Vy asked.

  “Demons,” the Danite said in a patient tone, as if she hadn’t understood him the first time. “They came in boats from across the sea, but they have magick, and the boats have since disappeared.”

  “Why would the Roca allow this?” Eleanora asked.

  “The Roca has provided for His people, for those who believe.” The Danite held up the vial of holy water. “This is all I can spare for you now, but let the boy come with me, and I will have him return with more blessed water on the morrow. We have placed some outside the city, for country use. And there will be more. One of the Elders promised that when the Fey menace is gone from Jahn, we will send Danites and Auds through the countryside with vials of holy water in case the demons come again.”

  Helter turned to Arl. “Are you willing to go with him?”

  Arl nodded. His eyes were shadowed, his face drawn and worn. He looked twice as old as he had when Eleanora had arrived that morning. “No one else should have to see those horrors. I—I know what to avoid now.”

  His gaze met Eleanora’s. They shared ghosts now. Ghosts and terror.

  “Is the baby all right?” he asked so softly that Eleanora could barely hear him.

  “He’s fine,” she said, knowing how important it was to touch life after that kind of carnage. “Lowe has just got him to sleep.”

  Arl smiled. Then he touched the Danite’s arm. “Come, let’s go see him and get a bite to eat.”

  “And then we’ll have to go,” the Danite said. “Those demons won’t wait for us. They’ll come here as soon as they can.”

  They headed to Helter’s cabin, already a team, a force against the creatures that invaded their land.

  Eleanora watched them go. Helter sighed, then looked at her. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I should have listened.”

  “I know,” she said, finding a bit of strength in his words. “But should haves don’t matter anymore. We have to find a way to protect ourselves.” And soon. She didn’t have the heart to ask if the boy and the Danite had made sure they hadn’t left a trail. She didn’t want to know if the Fey would find them easily.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Her Vision made her dizzy. Jewel shook her head and took a breath. Silence held her. She recognized him after the Vision. She had seen him change; the clothes he wore now were the ones he’d put on after killing the man in the courtyard.

  But she didn’t have time to think about her own situation. The Black Robes coming through the door, the stench of rot that had been part of her earlier Vision, and the miasma that rose with the glistening water the Black Robes spread decided her. Jewel’s body went slack. The men who held her could do with her what they wanted, but she had to save her people. Shima had been right. This was a place of death.

  “Run!” she cried in Fey. “Run for your lives!” The Fey around her looked shocked. Burden raised his head, his mouth open.

  “Run!” she said again. “Those Islanders behind you bring death. I saw it! As the daughter of Rugar, I command you! Run!”

  The man from her Vision shook her a little. Silence tightened his grip on her arm. Suddenly she knew what she was feeling from him. Fear. He was terrified. She couldn’t recognize it on his strange face.

  Burden came toward her, but she shook her head. “I am lost,” she said to him directly. “This time you must listen to me. Get these people out of here. They will die otherwise.”

  He had to hear the command in her voice. He had to understand that she wasn’t speaking as his friend or as a frightened Infantry soldier but as his future commander. He nodded, then raised his sword above his head.

  “The Black King’s granddaughter says to flee!”

  The Black Robes were coming closer. Silence pulled on her arm. He said something in Islander to the man beside her, the man from her first Vision, and together they pulled her toward the stairs.

  She slid in blood, stumbled over bodies. She wasn’t used to moving without her arms, moving without power. Silence did not look at her. His Islander face was slender, with a hooked nose and longish blond hair. Perhaps she had been wrong. Perhaps she had taken an Islander for one of her people in the confusion following her vision.

  “Silence,” she said quickly, not looking at him but looking at Burden’s back. “Silence, if that is you, squeeze my arm three times. Otherwise, I will fight this with my people now.”

  The squeezes were quick and light: one, two, three. The man from her Vision looked at her with puzzlement. He said something to Silence, who snapped a response.

  Four dead Islanders lay at the base of the stairs. Another was sprawled along the stone steps. The stench was following them, combined with thumps and screams of agony. Fey screams.

  The hair on the back of her neck rose.

  She stumbled, and the man from her Vision held her up. He seemed to know her, too, and was as protective of her as she had felt of him. Silence glanced over his shoulder, biting his lower lip. The man put a gentle arm around her back, and she recognized his touch.

  “We are taking you to the King,” he said in Nye.

  “My people are dying down there.”

  “Be glad it’s not you.”

  More bodies had fallen on the stairs. Most of the Islanders were below and had seen the fight. The cries went on, many cutting off abruptly. One Fey Infantryman crumpled in a doorway, dead from sword wounds. She opened her mouth, preparing to warn the Fey up there, but there were none. Either they had heard her, or they had already retreated.

  Retreat. It was not a Fey word. She closed her eyes and let the men drag her up yet another flight of stair
s. The Fey did not retreat. She wondered if her father was alive to know of it. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to be alive or not: to preside over such a defeat would destroy him, and yet she could not imagine life without him.

  And here she was allowing herself to be taken to their King. With Silence beside her. He was one of the best. She had to trust him to save her. She couldn’t trust the man from her Vision, no matter how much she was drawn to him.

  The men were talking in Islander again. She wished she had a Doppelgänger’s skill to absorb the language immediately. She wanted to know what they were saying, and she couldn’t ask either of them.

  The man’s voice rose a bit and Silence shrugged. They rounded yet another corner and went up another flight of stairs. The tapestries had been torn off the windows there, and there were no bodies. The steps grew narrower and sharper. They were no longer in a public place.

  They passed a handful of Islanders coming down the stairs. All of them bowed—to the man? to Silence?—she wasn’t sure.

  “Who is this man you allow to touch me?” she asked in Nye to the man from her Vision.

  He smiled. She had never seen him smile before. His beauty made her gasp. The heavy bones and the odd shape to his features gave him a strength she found appealing. “What?” he replied in the same language. “Are you no longer curious who I am?”

  She was curious about all of this, about why she had even allowed herself to be taken when her people were dying below. Burden would have told her that the Black King’s granddaughter had to survive. Silence had shown her that without saying a word. But she had always been a fighter. Perhaps, after seeing their King, she would have some wisdom to take back to her father, if he lived.

  “How far away is this King?” she asked. “Doesn’t he monitor his own battles?”

  “He has never fought one before,” the man said softly. “We are not a warlike people, as you are.”

  The condemnation in his tone stopped her from asking further questions. Silence said nothing. The stairs continued to wind round and round. Her limbs were tired. She hadn’t realized until that moment how much effort she had put into the fighting.

  When they reached the top of the flight of stairs, the man beside her stopped. Five guards stood in front of a large wooden door. The man from her Vision spoke to them, and they bowed their heads. The Islanders had shown respect to him, not to Silence. She resisted the urge to look over her shoulder.

  She didn’t have to. One of the guards opened the door, and the men led her inside.

  The room was large and dust-filled. Papers were crumpled on the floor, and footprints traced the dirt. There were no windows, but if she strained, she could hear the cries from below. The walls, then, weren’t all stone. A long table filled the center of the room, surrounded by chairs and benches.

  There were three men in the room that she didn’t recognize. One was a Black Robe clutching a bottle. She caught her breath but didn’t allow herself to move away from him. Show no fear—one of the first rules of capture. Fear is weakness. The second was an old man with stubble on his chin. His watery blue eyes peered at her as if she were a great curiosity.

  The third was a slender man with dark-blond hair and blue eyes. He was younger than she’d expected. The man wasn’t tall, but his grace made him seem taller than he was. He wore pants and a loose shirt as if they were uncomfortable. His gaze kept shifting to the man from her Vision, and she could feel his barely contained joy.

  She glanced at the man from her Vision and felt a start deep within her. He was a younger version of the man across from her.

  “I suppose you had a reason for bringing me here,” she snapped in Nye, looking at the man who held her.

  “Have manners,” he said in return. “I am presenting you to the King.”

  “Well, then, present me. Which of these cowards is your King?”

  At the word “coward” the grizzled man and the Black Robe took a step backward. If she had ever needed confirmation of her suspicions, she had it now. The third man was the King.

  “I am King,” he said in Nye. “My name is Alexander, and I would take your hand as is our custom, but Stephen here says you people can kill with a single touch.”

  “If that were true,” she said, not willing to give away any secrets about Fey magick, “your son would be dead.”

  A brief look of horror crossed the King’s face as he glanced at the man who held her. Anger swept through her—anger at herself. She had held the Prince of Blue Isle and had failed to use him. She should have known whom she held when the peasants were willing to die for him.

  The King questioned his son in their own language, and his son shook his head.

  “And you,” the King said to her in Nye. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Jewel.” They knew nothing about her people. They would not know who she was just from her name.

  “Jewel. As in something precious? Or is that a translation?”

  “Jewel,” she said in Fey, and then translated it into Nye. “Jewel is my name in Fey. For a period our people named their children with real words in the L’Nacin custom.”

  “The conquered live on in the conquerors,” the man the King had called Stephen said.

  She did not answer. She didn’t even look at him, but out of the corner of her eye she kept watch on the Black Robe. His grip on the bottle was so tight that his knuckles had turned white. She could feel behind her the tension in Silence’s body.

  “What are you going to do with me?” she asked.

  “My son thought you were important enough to bring to me,” the King said. He leaned against the table and put a foot on the bench. “Who are you, Jewel?”

  The Prince hadn’t taken his hands from her. She glanced at him sideways and found him watching her. Her heart thumped. Linked by Vision to a Prince she had never met. How strange to be in this place.

  “I am merely a member of the Infantry.”

  “He says the others have placed some importance on you.”’

  The Black Robe brought his bottle to his chest as if his movements depended on her answers.

  She shrugged. “Our group leader was outside. I am second in command after her.”

  “No,” the Prince said. “They treated you with more respect than that.”

  She snorted. “You are isolated here. You are judging my people’s actions by your people’s standards. You know nothing of our customs. Leaders of all stripes, even those born of the moment, receive respect.”

  “You could have killed me,” the Prince said. “You did not.”

  “I was a fool,” she said.

  The Black Robe uncapped the bottle. He spoke to the King. Stephen bit his lower lip and stared at her. The King looked from the bottle to her.

  “I think,” Silence said in Nye—the first words he had spoken since they had entered the secret room, “that we should discover who she is before we use her as an experiment.”

  She stiffened. She couldn’t help the response. She hadn’t Seen her own death. Weren’t Visionaries supposed to be able to do that? But she had Seen the Prince leaning over her, asking her if she was all right.

  The Prince tightened his grip and pulled her closer. “What does that stuff do?” he asked the Black Robe.

  The Black Robe answered in their language, and the Prince’s face paled.

  “We know nothing about these people,” he said in Nye. He wanted her to understand, although she didn’t know why. Perhaps so that she would know he was sparing her life again? “Killing her would accomplish nothing. But learning their customs from her would prepare us for the future.”

  The Black Robe spoke to the King. The King shook his head. Then he put an elbow on his knee and leaned toward her. “The Danite says that he isn’t sure what a single drop would do. He suspects it won’t kill you. He says a splash will most certainly kill you. He suggests that we torture you if you don’t talk of your own free will.”

  “And he calls himself a man o
f God,” Silence said.

  Jewel took a step backward into Silence, warning him to protect himself. Fool. Couldn’t he see that taunting them would get him nowhere, would only make them suspicious of him? They already knew the wrong things about Fey power. They might guess he was not the right man.

  The Prince steadied her, then frowned.

  The Black Robe spoke sharply to Silence. Silence responded in the same language. The Black Robe’s face flushed.

  She ignored them as best she could. She kept her gaze on the King. “You haven’t discovered if I will speak of my own free will yet. Why do you talk of torture so early?”