The unused part of the path slanted downhill, and its smoothness eased her aching pads. She had walked too far without resting or eating. The quiet of this place almost made her turn Fey, but then she remembered the story of Aio, the Shape-Shifter who had got too comfortable and was slaughtered shortly after returning to two-legged form. It was a cautionary tale Domestics told Shape-Shifter children, but it had saved Solanda many times.
She would heed that memory now.
She moved into a patch of birch trees, their white bark welcome contrast to the green of the forest around them. The path had grown even narrower, and blades of grass pushed up through the dirt. No one had come that way in a long time.
The path descended another small hill, and she found herself in a clearing. The grass had grown tall, and brambles thick as weeds threaded through the trees. A cabin stood in the center of the clearing, its door open, its furniture broken and scattered on the lawn. Other Fey had been there before her and had probably taken all useful items into the Shadowlands.
She found a path under the brambles, glad for her feline shape, and a cat’s ability to make itself twice as small as it should be. She winced as her stomach brushed against thorns on the ground. She pushed with her hind feet and dug her claws into the dirt ahead of her until she made it into the clearing. Then she stopped, picked the thorns out of her belly with her teeth, and washed her face again before surveying the ground around her.
Scattered pieces of wood and broken pottery hid in the tall grass. Wooden nails were embedded into the ground, many point up, and she had to avoid them to keep from injuring her paws. She sniffed the destruction, looking for the voice that had led her there.
Then she saw the skeletons.
They were in the middle of the clearing, and the grass had grown around them. The woman’s was sprawled a few feet from the man’s. Her clothing was tattered and hung on the bones, rotted and chewed by bugs. A few strands of hair still remained underneath her skull, which was forced back as if she had been screaming when she died.
The man was crumpled, his bones scattered as if an animal had got to them. But she knew no animal had. The marks on the bones came from Foot Soldiers indelicately lifting skin, muscle and blood from a dying being. Sloppy work. She would have to report it to Rugar.
Islander skeletons: she could tell from the inelasticity of the rib cages, the firmness of the bones.
And they had been dead a long time. Not a fresh kill. Probably dating from the First Battle for Jahn. Some of the units had not fought in Jahn—which would explain how they knew about such an empty place to put the Shadowlands at all.
The voice in her head was silent: she was supposed to be there. But the skeletons told her little more than the obvious, that an Islander couple had lived there and the Fey had killed them. She left them to disintegrate in the tall grass and made her way to the cabin itself.
The steps remained, but they were covered with dirt and animal tracks. She stopped to investigate. Beneath the dirt was a black stain. The blood had been so heavy at one time that it had seeped into the wood. No amount of rain would wash that stain away.
She climbed to the top, slowly, uncertain of what she would find. The inside of the cabin was dark and smelled of dust. Mice had left tracks in the dirt on the porch, and the tracks mingled with those of various birds. A much larger catlike animal had left pad prints twice the size of hers along the porch’s edge—it had disdained the steps and leaped to the porch from the ground. All the tracks led inside and then out again. Apparently nothing left to steal.
But she sniffed the air again for good measure. With all that activity, the last thing she wanted to do was startle some huge animal that ate cats. The cautionary Shapeshifter tales also warned of Shifters who had got themselves in a bad situation, without time to change to a more conducive form.
She smelled nothing different, so she went inside.
Most of the furniture was gone, leaving only bare floor with more tracks. Some of the tracks were human and Fey—she recognized the print of Fey boots and felt her suspicions confirmed. Much of the interior had found its way into Shadowlands.
The cabin had a large front room, and two branching rooms. There was an economy of design she had not seen in many buildings there, and an attention to comfort that was rare in Jahn. The fireplace was centrally located between the front room and the kitchen, and the windows made the room feel lighter than it had from the outside. It must have been a pleasant place to live, in better times.
In the back, the kitchen had a door leading to what must have been a healthy garden. Some plants still grew untended, their leaves intertwining with the weeds. The pantry door stood open, and a small hearth stove stood off to one side—a luxury in a cabin this size, and one she was surprised that her people hadn’t stolen. Perhaps they hadn’t had a means to get it to Shadowlands.
She felt odd there, as if she were missing something. She went back into the front room and then into the first side room. It had been a bedroom. The furnishings were gone, but the headboard was still nailed to the wall. She stared at it for a moment, wondering what sort of life the people who had lived there had. Had they been happy so far from others? Had they liked their comfortable house? They had certainly died in prolonged pain, a price she would not like to pay for anything. She had seen the Foot Soldiers work, and it disgusted her. She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to actually suffer their touch.
A slight breeze rustled through the uncovered window, carrying with it the scents of grass and dry air. She looked up, sniffed, but smelled nothing unusual.
The voice in her head was still silent. If she hadn’t felt its presence so strongly, she wouldn’t believe now that it existed. But it did. And it wanted her to know—something.
She left the bedroom and crossed the small hallway to the other room. It too was empty. Sunlight reflected off the dust-covered floor, a large yellow patch that made her want to lie down, rest, and warm herself. But she didn’t. The anticipatory feeling was stronger there, as if she was close to something.
In this room nothing remained on the walls except a small stain on one side. On closer inspection she noted that the wood was darker there, as if the sun had never faded it. The stain was about a foot high and a yard wide, as if someone had kept a long board against the wall. But she could tell no more from it. If this was what she was supposed to seek out, she had no understanding of its meaning.
She stood for a moment in the warm sunlight, letting it caress her fur. This was a side trip, one that she didn’t entirely understand.
She sighed. She would go back to the path and follow it in the direction she initially headed, to see where it led. Then, if she found nothing of consequence, she would return to the Shadowlands.
Her tail twitched at the thought, sending dust motes through the air. She watched them glisten in the rays of sunlight—and then she saw something in the corner. Reluctantly she got to her feet and padded over.
She had to blink in the sudden darkness, hating the contrast between the sunlight and the rest of the room. The chill air against her fur made her shudder. She approached the corner slowly, almost on her belly, jumping each time she saw a dust mote move. The cat part of her had control, and the Fey part of her felt a slight embarrassment, as if her behavior were completely unseemly.
Finally she reached the spot and peered ahead, half-tempted to switch to her Fey form so that she could see more clearly. The object was round and half-hidden in shadow. She couldn’t tell if it was the rolled-up body of a dead mouse, or something more sinister.
With a tentative paw, she reached out and batted it.
The thing rocked and she jumped away, her feline reflexes taking over. She sat and stared at it for a moment before realizing that her paw had not touched fur. It had touched wood.
A thread of relief ran through her. She had suspected, since the Fey had arrived on Blue Isle, that the Islanders had more powers than they let on, and that someday a Fey would
touch something—a dead body, a bit of food—and die as hideously as they did when touched by the water poison. That was one thing she liked about traveling in her feline body: her aversion to water was considered natural.
She got up and approached the thing again, this time batting it harder with her paw. The thing rolled toward her and hit her front legs. She sniffed it, getting the scents of dust, dried wood, and something else, something that might not have been noticeable to anyone else.
Baby sweat.
She batted the ball away from her and noted an entrance hole and an exit hole marring the ball’s perfection. Someone had made this. She could imagine a stick going through it or a string, something to make this a plaything for a very young child.
A baby.
The voice in her head was beginning to make sense now. But she didn’t inspect the ground that closely. The child might already be dead. The skeleton of an infant would be harder to find than one of an adult.
She batted the ball around the room for a moment, enjoying the rolling sound of wood on wood. Then she let it roll back into its corner—the house must not be completely level—before she went outside.
A baby.
This changed things. The Foot Soldiers knew to capture babies instead of killing them, but if they hadn’t found the child, it would have starved to death on its own. If it could crawl, it might be in the yard. If something else had killed those people, the child would be dead as well.
But she suspected it wasn’t dead. If the child lived, she would find it.
FORTY-EIGHT
The Rocaan held it in his palm—a tiny, thin bone about the size of the tip of his thumb. A stringy bit of matter—flesh, muscle, he wasn’t sure—still clung to its end, as if that would indicate who it came from. Or what. He leaned back in his chair and shivered despite the heat of the fire roaring in his fireplace. He had been cold for almost a year now, and he suspected that the cold did not come from the outside.
The tapestries were fastened over the windows. He hadn’t allowed the tapestries away from the windows since the invasion. His memories of the bodies in the courtyard had spoiled the view. An Aud now came in every morning to light all the lamps, illuminating the etchings on the walls.
Matthias, his blond curls mussed, sat across from the Rocaan. Matthias looked odd without his biretta, like a man who had recently awakened and not yet got his bearings. His sash was twisted, and there was dirt on the shoulder of his robe. Matthias—even in the height of the battles around Jahn—had never looked this disoriented.
“You’re sure it’s human?” the Rocaan asked. He had never seen a bone before, at least not a skeletal bone. He had seen only the bones the cooks threw to the dogs that guarded the river’s edge.
Matthias nodded. “I have been around bodies,” he said. “It’s human.”
And then the Rocaan remembered: when Matthias was an Aud, he had been part of the group that had reclaimed the bodies from the Kenniland Marshes. A few had risen to the surface during a particularly bad storm, and someone had guessed—probably Matthias, based on his scholarship—that more would be beneath the marshes’ surface. All of the bodies had been dead a long time. The Rocaan had overseen the burial, but the bodies were already in their coffins. It had taken Auds and townspeople almost a month to reconstruct the skeletons they had found in the marsh. The dead, they had assumed, were part of the Peasant Uprising and had been buried in a mass grave.
“What would it be doing in the sanctuary?” the Rocaan asked, not sure he wanted the answer.
Matthias shook his head. “I’ve been wondering the same thing. The blood has me the most bothered. There were blood and bones discovered in and near the palace during the invasion, as well as in the guard barracks. This has something to do with the Fey.”
The Rocaan clenched his fist. “They leave us nothing. Don’t they understand the concept of holiness?” He closed his eyes and leaned back, wishing this would all end. They had taken so much from him. Now the only place he would be able to worship would be the tiny room from which he had first seen the Fey.
“I don’t think it matters to them,” Matthias said.
The Rocaan opened his eyes. He didn’t like sitting across from Matthias. Matthias was tall and thin like the Fey, and he was the one who had suggested the use of holy water as a weapon. He had never believed in God or the Roca, and he twisted the Words Written and Unwritten into something that could do his bidding.
Matthias should never have learned the secret to holy water. Now the Rocaan would have to choose—forcefully, decidedly—his successor before he died. Andre was a possibility; he had faith. But Andre had no knowledge of the world. That was the problem with the faithful: they refused to examine the present.
He swallowed. He set the bone in a silver bowl on the table beside him. It clinked as it fell, and Matthias winced. The man had never shown this much sensitivity before.
The Rocaan didn’t like it.
He nodded to Matthias as a form of dismissal. Matthias didn’t seem to understand the gesture.
“I will take this all under advisement,” the Rocaan said.
“Take what under advisement?” Matthias asked. “All we know is that there could be a problem in the sanctuary. We don’t even know what it could be.”
“If I hear of anything out of the ordinary—”
“You’re saying that pools of blood are ordinary now? I already sent Andre to call a meeting of all the inhabitants of the Tabernacle. If someone is missing, then we will know what happened.”
The Rocaan didn’t like Matthias’s tone. The sarcasm didn’t belong in their relationship—whatever it had become. “You shouldn’t have acted without me,” the Rocaan said.
“Why not?” Matthias asked. “All the Elders are authorized to act in your stead. We run the Tabernacle.”
“Yes, but I lead it.” The Rocaan said the words softly. He wanted Matthias to hear the undertone, to understand that things do not always go according to plan.
Matthias leaned back and pursed his lips together. He apparently heard. “Well then, Holy Sir,” he said after a moment, “I will cancel the order.”
“Do that,” the Rocaan said. He closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see anymore, to think anymore. He wanted the fire to warm him, and he wanted these days of worry to end.
The chair creaked as Matthias’s weight shifted. Then someone rapped on the door. The Rocaan sighed and opened his eyes. Matthias was standing, his hands clasped over his belly. He was looking at the door with a wistful expression as though he were a little boy gazing at something forbidden.
“Get that,” the Rocaan said, not bothering with the niceties. “I’m not available except in an emergency.”
Matthias nodded without really looking at the Rocaan. The Rocaan squinted. His assessment was wrong. Matthias wasn’t wistful. He appeared frightened. A shiver of fear ran down the Rocaan’s back. He had seen Matthias alarmed, but never terrified. What would frighten him so?
Matthias made his way to the door. He opened it and slid out, so that the person behind it wouldn’t see the Rocaan in his high-backed chair. The Rocaan brought his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose and pinched. The pain felt good. It woke him up, made him remember that he was alive. He picked up the silver bowl and stared at the bone. Someone had died in the Tabernacle. Or someone had poured blood and planted a bone in the most sacred spot on Blue Isle. A Fey ritual? Did they hope to gain power that way?
Perhaps he should ignore the King’s order and send a small ship off the Isle. Nye had a tiny band of Rocaanists who might be willing to leave the country now that it was under Fey domination. They had lived with the Fey for over three years. They would know if this was some kind of Fey trick—and they would know what to do about it.
An ache was building behind his eyes. But they would also want holy water to take with them to Nye when they returned. The Rocaanists on Nye had no real leaders. The Aud who had formed the band had died years ago, and th
ey had worshiped without instruction for nearly a decade. It had been the Rocaan’s decision to let them continue on their own, thinking it best to keep Rocaanism confined to Blue Isle. The risk he would take sending that ship out would be greater than the information he received. With some thought he would be able to learn what he needed right here.
The problem was that neither side was talking to the other. He had never even met a Fey. He had seen them only from a distance, during the invasion, when they had fought his people on the courtyard below. The Words Written and Unwritten said that any man who did not know his enemy was a fool. The Words preached knowledge at all costs. And the Rocaan had allowed them to ignore the knowledge in the face of terror.
The door opened, and Matthias slipped back inside the room. If anything, he looked even paler than before. He was winding a curl around his forefinger, a gesture the Rocaan had never seen before. Matthias nodded once, as if in acknowledgment that he was interrupting the Rocaan.
Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey Page 38