Mother picked up the bowl the potter had thrown just for Cotton, her infant brother who had been stolen the previous season. “I’m sure I would have heard something.”
At that moment Da opened the front door. As the days turned hotter, Da had taken to wearing as little as possible. He stood there bare-chested with the morning at his back, smelling like charcoal smoke. His massive back and arms glistened with the morning sweat.
“Purity,” he said to Mother, “this beard is going to be the death of me. I’m sick of the braids catching fire. I’m not going back to the smithy until it’s shaved off.”
Sugar saw that two of his braids were indeed singed.
“Ach,” Mother said undoing the shutter latch, “they’re so handsome on you. Half the men in this village would give a finger for such a beard.”
“I don’t want their fingers,” said Da. “They can have the beard for free.”
Mother walked to the back door and looked outside. “That’s odd,” she said.
Da spoke to Sugar. “I heard the hare trap. All this time I’ve been lusting after beef. Why can’t you catch one of Galson’s steers? I’d even settle for one of the old ones.”
“There’s the matter of Farmer Galson,” said Sugar.
“Bah,” said Da, dismissing the farmer. “Make a trap for Galson as well.”
“Sparrow,” said Mother, “did you forget today’s muster?”
“None that I know of.” He walked over to her, but instead of looking out the doorway, he reached out with one of his massive arms and grabbed her round the waist. Then he nuzzled into her side and took a nibble.
“Stop,” she said and pushed at him. “Sparrow, what are those men doing?”
Da looked outside.
Midnight and Sky began barking out front. Sugar looked through the front door Da had left open. “There’s another group coming down the lane.”
Not two months ago, a group of Fir-Noy beat a Koramite woman until they’d ruined one eye and half her teeth. But Da had said that wouldn’t happen here. The louts that had beaten the woman were upland Fir-Noy. Their kind didn’t have sway in the village of Plum, and Da had the assurances of the Territory Lord on that.
However, Sugar wasn’t so sure. Years ago, a war had been fought between Koram and Mokad across the sea. The Glory of Koram lost the ability to protect some of his territories, including his settlements in the New Lands. The Mokaddians thought they could come and easily take the settlements as booty, but the Koramite colonists surprised them. They fought for eight years until Mokad realized it would be wiser to come to an agreement than spend more blood and treasure. When the lords of the Koramite clans in the New Lands signed the treaty in Whitecliff, they promised to submit to Mokaddian rule only if they were guaranteed certain rights.
The treaty had worked for a while, but that was some time ago. Now there were far more Mokaddians in the New Lands than there were Koramites. Of the nine Mokaddian clans with holdings here, a few, like the Shoka, got along with their Koramite neighbors. But many had begun to argue against the old treaty, and the ones Sugar heard arguing with the most vehemence were members of the Fir-Noy clan.
Mother had wanted to move out of the Fir-Noy lands for the last two years, but Da had a bond he was working off. If they’d left, the territory lord would have simply hunted him down.
“They’re surrounding us,” Sugar said. The men were close enough for Sugar to see the set of their mouths was bitter as garden rue.
She felt for her knife. When Sugar was a child, a gang of four village boys had tormented her until Da confronted the boys’ parents. But that didn’t end the issue. So Da took it to the village council. He demanded the boys come fight her one-on-one. Mother was furious, taking him to task for making Sugar fight his battles. But Da stood his ground.
Da himself was a fighter, and for one week he sparred with Sugar, preparing her as best he could. Then the boys had come, some grinning, some all business. They brought most of the village with them. And in the wedge field, surrounded by grandmothers, children, and dogs, Sugar had taken a beating. But the boys had not left unscathed either. There was a black eye, a bloody nose. She’d kicked one so hard in the gut that he’d vomited in the grass.
Afterwards, some of the villagers cheered for her. A few of the fathers of the boys who had started it all came and made peace. Da was satisfied. Mother was not. She would not speak to him for two weeks. But even with her heavy fury on him, Da did not give up on Sugar’s lessons. “There are those who act,” he said. “And those who are acted upon. I’m not ever going to leave you in a position again where you have no choice.”
Two years later when her moon-cycles came, Mother convinced Da he was ruining her chances of a good marriage, for what boy wanted to bed a bruiser? So he stopped teaching her how to use her feet and hands as weapons and began to teach her knives.
That was a number of years ago. She’d never had to use the knife Da forged for her protection and made her wear. Not to draw a man’s blood. Although she had let a few of the boys she’d been introduced to at Koramtown know she wore it. But mostly she’d used the knife around the yard in her chores. Now, even though she knew it would be useless against a host of men, she was glad she had it.
Mother turned to her. “Get Fancy saddled.”
Sugar moved to obey, but Da held his hand up. “No. Running will only raise their suspicions or prod them to act. This might be nothing. Leave it to me. I know how to handle these men.”
“And then it will be too late,” said Mother.
“Woman,” said Da in warning. Then he walked out the front door.
When he was only a few paces into the yard, Mother turned to Sugar. “You get Fancy.”
“Do you want saddle bags?” asked Sugar.
“All I want is a horse. The Fir-Noy are not what they once were. Too many have become oath breakers, turning their backs on the promises made in Whitecliff.”
Sugar dashed out the back door.
The troops in Farmer Galson’s fields had fanned out and were now walking as a line toward the house.
Legs, her younger, blind brother, stood in front of the chicken house, his head cocked at an odd angle and looking off into space as he did when he paid fierce attention to every sound and smell. His wild hair stood up. In his arm he held a basket of onions and eggs.
“Legs!” she said. “Get in here.”
“I can hear men,” he said.
“Move!” she said.
Holding the eggs to the bottom of the basket, Legs jogged for the back door. He needed no stick to navigate the house and yard. If he knew a place, he could walk about as if he were sighted. It was only when he was in a new place that he might stumble, or when things were lying out of place. And so they all had learned to be very tidy.
Sugar ran to the barn and flung open the door. The mare nickered. Sugar grabbed the harness, slipped it over Fancy’s head and fitted the bridle in her mouth. Then she led the horse out and tied her to the post by the back door.
The Fir-Noy stood with their hideous shields only a few paces beyond the chicken house. They’d formed up into a loose circle that ringed both the house and smithy. “Mark the horse,” one of the soldiers said.
For a moment Sugar thought they were going to shoot Fancy, but the men just stood there. Sugar rushed into the house and shut the door behind her. She ran to her mother who stood in the doorway to the front yard.
“Fancy’s not going to be enough,” she said.
Mother’s gaze was fixed on Da out in the yard, but she reached out and smoothed Sugar’s hair. “You did just fine. Now, if anything happens, you and Legs need to be ready to ride. You’ll have the most cover in the woods. So it’s straight through Galson’s fields, low on Fancy’s neck. And if someone stands in your way, you ride them down.”
Fear seized Sugar’s heart. Had it really come to this? “What about you and Da?”
“You ride them down,” said Mother. “You flee to Horse.”
Mother had always told her that if anything ever happened, she was to flee into the Shoka lands and find the farmer many called Horse. But how would she ride through that ring of men? They’d fill her or Fancy full of arrows before she’d galloped a rod.
“Do you hear me?” asked Mother.
“Yes,” Sugar said.
She looked past Da at the soldiers out front. They’d stopped a number of paces beyond him. Those with bows had strung them, and that was something fearful because keeping a bow strung all the time only ruined the bow. You never strung your bow unless you were going to use it.
Midnight and Sky barked at the men until Da whistled sharply and called them back to his side.
Two men on horseback rode to the front of the line and faced Da. The leader with the orange and blue patterns painted onto his armor was the Territory Lord, a man everyone called The Crab for his ruddy complexion. Next to him sat the District Lord. Behind them stood Barg, the butcher and harvest master of the village, holding his spear.
Da bowed to The Crab. “My lord,” he said with a grin. “Have you at last come to wrestle your humble servant?”
The Crab did not smile in return. “Sparrow, smith of Plum,” he said. “You have been accused of dark magic. We are here to take you and yours to prove that you are whole and without spot.”
Dark magic? Sugar did not believe she’d heard him correctly.
“What?” said Da.
“If you’re clean,” said The Crab, “you need not fear the ordeal.”
An ordeal was designed to flush out sleth. Supposedly, when such a creature was on the point of death or overwhelming pain, through drowning or torture, it would multiply its strength with its dark magic to save itself and thus reveal its true nature.
But how anyone could think her family was among such was impossible to fathom. Sleth were those who had given themselves over to Regret, the one Creator of seven who, when he’d seen what the seven of them had wrought, recognized that it was flawed and despised the work of his hands. To those who came into his twisted power, he gave horrible gifts—unnatural strength and appetites, odd growths and manifestations of beasts, and the power, with a touch, to steal Fire and Soul. The stories of sleth, and the hunts the righteous led against them, were legion.
The Crab reached into a pouch tied to the front of his saddle and pulled out a thin collar, almost a necklace.
“I have here a King’s Collar. I want you to put it on.” He tossed it. The collar shimmered in the early morning light, and then landed in the dust two-thirds of the way between The Crab and Da. “When it’s about your neck, you will bind your wife and children in chains.”
He motioned to a man behind him who brought up a number of leg and neck irons and tossed them to join the collar.
A King’s Collar was a magical thing, wrought by a special order of Divines called Kains; it not only prevented a person from working magic, but it weakened them and made them easy to handle.
Sugar realized the men did not come closer and bind the family themselves because they feared some kind of evil trick.
“This is ridiculous,” said Da.
The Crab’s horse danced to the side a few steps.
Then the District Lord tossed a large sack toward Da. It landed heavily on the ground. “The contents of that sack were found last evening on the banks of the Green by a group of mothers and children doing their laundry. Open it.”
Da walked over to the sack, squatted down, and pulled the mouth open.
“Whose child is that in the sack, Master Sparrow?”
Mother took in a sharp breath.
Da hesitated for a moment, then gently worked the body out. He knelt there for quite some time, not moving, not saying a word.
Then Sugar knew who was in that sack. She could feel it from the crown of her head to her toes. Her fear fled and she raced out the door.
Da turned and motioned for her to stay. “Get back!”
But it was too late. Sugar saw the baby that Da had exposed.
It was Cotton, her little brother. Little Cotton, stolen out of his crib earlier this spring. By woodikin or slavers or wild dogs, nobody knew. Yet here he was.
She came closer and saw that the body was bloated and partially decomposed. It had the lighter Koramite coloring and Cotton’s curly hair.
Cotton, their bonny little honey man.
Then Da opened the sack wider and slid the body of a stork out.
From the uncommon kidney-shaped spot of dark feathers on its shoulder she knew it was Lanky, the young stork with a wounded wing that she and Legs had found. They’d wrapped him up in Legs’s tunic and brought him home, careful to avoid the sharp yellow beak. Mother had nursed him back to health. And when Cotton was born, it seemed to think he was its brother. Mother was always shooing it away from him for fear of that long beak. And the stork would go, but only to perch on a fence post or the limb of one of the trees. It pestered them for weeks.
Lanky had disappeared the same day Cotton did.
Sugar had thought the mad bird had finally departed because Cotton had gone. But this was awful. Somebody had taken both and killed them.
Da turned the bird over. Something was wrong with the carcass. Sugar looked closer.
The bird had wings and feathers. But where the talons of the right leg should have been, a misshapen human foot curled. And where short feathers should have graced the beast’s head, patches of long blonde hair grew. And underneath that hair lay what surely was a small, twisted, but human-shaped ear.
Sugar’s sickness turned to revulsion.
“Look closely at the foot of the child,” said The Crab. “Notice the nails. Notice also the few patches on its back. That’s not matted hair; it’s the beginnings of chick down.”
Da stood, horrified.
“And now,” said The Crab, “you will put on the collar and chains.”
“Sugar,” Mother called.
But Sugar was rooted to the spot.
Da found his voice. “You think we are soul-eaters? You think we would spend our child’s soul like this?”
“What I know,” said the District Lord, “is that someone buried these two. And when the recent floods came, the waters opened the grave, tasted its contents, and spat them out.”
“My Cotton was stolen,” said Mother.
“Yes, yes,” said The Crab. “Snatched by one of the woodikin and taken to the swamps or into the wild wood over the mountains. It’s a fine story, but here he is.”
It was common enough for the Divines of the many glorydoms to draw the Fire that fueled the days of a man’s life. But not the soul. Never the soul. Sleth, on the other hand, stole Fire and soul from men and beasts. Sleth stole from humans, but because animals couldn’t tell their secrets, sleth stole most often from them. The singular nature of the soul was what gave each type of living being its distinct attributes. Consuming bits of another’s soul transferred random aspects of that soul, aspects that manifested themselves in mind and body, slowing twisting the one that had consumed it.
So if one had stolen Fire from his goat, then he would also have traces of that goat soul in the draw, and over time that soul would manifest itself. Such a thief might develop the nubs of horns on his head or a slit iris in his eyes. If one had stolen from fish, he might one day find patches of scales instead of skin. Someone who stole from his cattle might be inflamed with lust by a heifer in estrus. Someone who had stolen from a bird . . .
But this was all wrong. How could a babe steal soul?
“You cannot controvert the manifestations of sleth-work upon both bodies,” said The Crab. “Nor can you claim the child is not yours. The other Koramite children who died last season have all been dug up and accounted for. And no other has gone missing.”
The bowmen trained their arrows on Da’s heart. Some pointed their arrows at Sugar and Mother.
Barg spoke up. “You haven’t been sick in many years. And the tale your wife tells is suspect. Your dogs were in the
yard the day your child went missing. This she swears. Yet she also said they did not bark.” He motioned at Midnight and Sky. “We all heard today how they react to strangers. There could have been some charm put upon them, but it could also be the one snag in an otherwise well-spun lie.”
“Purity does not lie,” said Da.
“Then you have nothing to fear from the ordeal,” said The Crab.
“My Lord,” said Da. “I respect your office. But you are no Divine. An ordeal—”
“Master Sparrow,” said The Crab. “Would you rather I let a mob deal with the problem? This is what prudence demands. Now, pick up the collar.”
“There’s not one of you that can revive us if the ordeal turns fatal. Let us wait for a Divine.”
“That is not an option.”
Of course, it was. But they thought Da was sleth, and everyone knew you did not bargain with sleth. You never gave them any quarter. Sleth were both fearsome and wily and too quick to escape their bonds.
“You live with me all these years and suddenly conclude I’m one who could devour his own children?” Da pointed at Barg. “Who was it last autumn, after those bloody battles on the Fingers, that cast aside prudence and rowed back at night to an island crawling with Bone Faces to save three doomed friends?” It had been Da who had rowed back. Da who had saved, among others, Barg the butcher.
Sugar looked into the faces of the soldiers. There were a number she recognized. Some had laughed with Da in the yard. Others had eaten at their table. Many of the villagers of Plum had drunk ale and been entertained by Legs singing his ditties. All had accepted the water he drew and delivered to the villagers as they worked the fields, him leading his goat and cart, feeling the road as he went with his stick, but those smiling faces were gone. They were replaced by faces grim and fixed on their purpose.
Mother grabbed her arm and pulled her back toward the house.
“I’ve drunk and danced with you,” said Da. “I’ve shoed your horses. I probably fashioned most of those spearheads. You’ve nothing to fear from me. My heart is clean and fresh as well water and you all know it.”
“What we know is that all the evidence points here,” said The Crab. “And now we’ve come to the end of our discussion. If we were uplanders bent on murder, you would already be dead. I’ve done more than give you the benefit of the doubt. This is the last chance I’m giving you. Pick up the collar and irons.”
Servant: The Dark God Book 1 Page 2