Wild Sign

by Briggs, Patricia

  Charles had never been much of a letter writer, but his father had. When email had replaced letters for communication, Bran had been unhappy. Because the letters were more personal, they carried scents—and handwriting, which, with certain well-schooled exceptions, were seldom just lines on a page. Here, as Tag pointed out, it was easy to see the hand holding the pen had gotten shakier and more emphatic as the days had moved by.

  “We need to find Dr. Connors’s daughter,” said Anna. “Fortunately the FBI left us her number. If we had a cell phone, I’d do it right now.”

  They’d left their phones behind. Charles was too cautious to bring traceable technology anywhere he wasn’t sure he wanted the government to know about. It did mean they couldn’t call for help, either. But Charles figured that if they found something the three of them couldn’t handle, all that calling for help would do was get their help killed, too.

  “We will call her when we get back to camp,” Charles said.

  In the meantime, they stuffed all of the letters into one of the envelopes. Then Tag produced a piece of twine to tie them together and put the resultant bundle into his pack.

  He lifted the moldering mailbag. “Do we need this?”

  Charles shook his head and Tag let the old bag fall.

  “Found it by the side of the creek over there,” said Tag, pointing vaguely south and downhill. “Don’t know what it was doing there. Maybe wild animals dragged it around. Maybe someone just dropped it where I found it. Makes as much sense as anything else I’ve seen here. I found a couple of other odd things by the creek, too.”

  “What did you find?” Anna asked as they started off with Tag in the lead.

  He shook his head, and Anna gave him a gentle shove that had Brother Wolf sharpening his gaze on Tag and stepping to a better attack position. But Tag just laughed.

  “It’s better if you see ’em. Faster, too,” he said. “I’d be all day describing, and Charles would take one look and tell me a dozen things I didn’t notice.”

  Anna gave a huff of amused agreement and slanted a look at Charles. Brother Wolf wanted to preen at her recognition of their prowess. Charles just smiled at her.

  Tag led them down the hill, toward a busy creek meandering around the side of the mountain. They encountered a path when they were about halfway there, and Charles looked back up the hill to see where it led to in Wild Sign.

  “The smallest yurt,” said Tag, answering Charles’s unasked question. “Smelled like witches, too. White ones. I didn’t go in, though, because I was still running as wolf. That yurt and the one you and Anna explored, several of the tents, and two cabins all smelled of them. Too many witches in this place to be coincidence.”

  Charles nodded agreement and Tag looked pleased.

  Someone had cleared a stretch of bank of the stream and piled stones to keep back the grasses and bushes. They had dropped a tree across the creek, trimmed off the branches, and then used an adze to flatten the upper side of the trunk and make a passable bridge.

  There were signs that the stream was a lot deeper in the spring, maybe tall enough to cover the top of the tree-cum-bridge, but it was still plenty deep. It was hard to be sure, because the water was very clear, but Charles judged it waist deep where it pooled next to the tree-bridge.

  Tag took them across the bridge and then led them off the trail to where a thicket of willows, their leaves bright autumn yellow, grew in a section of spongy ground. Someone with big claws had, very recently, ripped up a swath of waist-high grasses and young bushes to reveal the dead.

  “They killed them before they left,” Anna said, sounding faintly sickened. “These were witches. Did they sacrifice them for power?”

  Charles knelt beside one of the skeletons. It wore a collar with a two-year-old expired rabies tag and an ID tag. The ID tag read Bear. Below the name was a phone number. On the other side the tag had been engraved with a heart. Charles rested a hand on the skull and waited to see what it could tell him.

  He shook his head and met his mate’s anxious gaze. “No. Killed cleanly without harvesting anything.” There was a hollowness to the feel of creatures killed by witches in order to gain power. This dog had not been fed upon by black magic.

  They found seventeen skeletons without much effort. Fourteen dogs and three cats. Charles thought that there might be more hidden under the bushes, but there was no need to disturb them further.

  “I only discovered them because someone had spelled their grave to keep predators away,” Tag said. “Predators other than werewolves, anyway. Spell wasn’t strong, and it gave up as soon as I started digging.”

  Charles had wondered. Mostly skeletons left on the surface were scattered by scavengers. Anna was reading the collars. He stifled the impulse to stop her. He would have saved her the pain—but she was an adult. She knew what she was doing; it wasn’t his job to protect her from her own decisions.

  “Kriemhild,” she said. “One of the names given to Siegfried’s wife in the Norse sagas. I always liked it better than Gutrune, which was the one Wagner used.”

  Anna sounded like her normal self, and she was holding it together. But he could tell the dead pets had brought home the knowledge that all of the people who had lived here were probably dead. He thought so, too.

  This killing field, like the carefully cleaned composting toilets, had the feel of duty. The kind of thing a dying person might do—clean up his mess so no one else had to. Killing their pets because there would be no one to take care of their dependents—and a good person would not allow these animals to slowly starve to death in the wilderness. Or possibly they had been protecting the animals from whatever had happened to the citizens of Wild Sign.

  Charles wasn’t sure yet exactly what it said about what had happened to the people in Wild Sign. Their story was just starting to take shape for him.

  “Siegfried’s wife,” Tag was saying. “Someone liked opera?”

  “Someone liked old Norse sagas,” Anna said. “Gutrune was Wagner’s choice for the Ring cycle, and this dog was named Kriemhild.”

  “Old Norse sagas aren’t outside of the ordinary among the witchborn,” Charles observed. “Or it could be there is an anime series or heroine of a computer game with that name.”

  Anna smiled at him, a genuine smile despite the edge of sadness remaining on her face. That had been a reference to an in-joke between them. He missed a lot of pop culture references, and she liked to tease him about it.

  “If they didn’t use their deaths for power, why did they kill their pets?” Anna asked.

  “If they had to leave them behind,” said Tag, “it would be a kindness to put them down rather than let domestic animals loose to fend for themselves out here.”

  “Sounds right to me,” said Charles. That Tag had come to the same conclusion Charles had made it more convincing.

  Charles couldn’t think offhand of the exact circumstances that would allow a group of people time to clean up their camp and kill their pets before disaster overtook them—it spoke of a resignation that seemed oddly wrong. The people who had come to this mountainside and created a place where they could be safe did not strike him as the kind of people who would be resigned to their deaths. Wild Sign was an optimistic place, built with ingenuity by people fighting for a good life. The kind of people who had lived here should have fought—and there was no sign of any kind of battle.

  “Charles?” Anna said, her voice thin.

  He knelt beside her to see what she’d found: the top of a small skull, suspiciously round. A shape more common among humans than dogs.

  Gently, he unearthed the rounded skull, Anna tense beside him. He couldn’t help the sigh of relief he let out when he turned it over to see the skull supported sharp canine teeth. He kissed the top of her head.

  “Chihuahua,” he said. “And that makes eighteen.”

  She took a deep breath. “Someone needs to dig through these,” she said. “If they killed their pets …”

  “I�
��ll do it,” Tag said. “While you and Charles go through the rest of the camp.” He reached down and held out his hand; Anna took it and let him pull her to her feet. “Come on. I have something else to show you.”

  He tugged her after him without releasing her hand. Charles couldn’t tell if Tag was trying to comfort her—or himself.

  Charles rose, but instead of following them, he raised his head and drew in a deep breath, letting Brother Wolf sort through the information the air held. Outside of the normal scents of a forest, he detected the faint trace of witchcraft lingering all around Wild Sign, though that was more intuition than scent. There was acrid smoke from distant fires.

  Finally, he attended to the subtle scent he’d been catching the whole time they’d been there. He thought it had been strengthening every hour they stayed, but it was difficult to be certain. Like the feel of witchcraft, it was not quite something he could smell.

  He waited until Tag and Anna were farther away and tried again. This time he was sure it was stronger than before—and not as unfamiliar as he had thought.

  Unbidden, he saw Leah as she dismounted from her blue-eyed horse once more. He’d been close enough, holding his da’s horse next to Leah’s, that he’d caught an unfamiliar and unpleasant scent—an odor he had not perceived with his nose.

  Had it really been the same? Or was he trying to find threads between what had happened to Leah and what had happened here at Wild Sign? He wasn’t sure he could trust his memory of a trace so old. But Brother Wolf was sure it was the same … and Brother Wolf also thought they had let their charges get too far away if there was a possibility of danger.

  He hurried after Anna and Tag, who had started back down the trail. He slanted a glance at the sky. They would stay another hour, he decided. He wanted to get them away from this place before the scent grew much stronger.

  C H A P T E R

  5

  A quarter mile along the trail they came upon a sign that read Here there be Music. Charles was becoming quite fond of the signs scattered around the settlement with abandon. He wondered if the sign maker had intended a large-scale pun on the name of the town.

  Here there be signs, thought Brother Wolf with amused agreement. Signs in the Wild.

  Brother Wolf had not spoken to him in words before they had found Anna. He was pretty sure it was because Brother Wolf didn’t trust Anna to read the images he’d used to communicate with Charles.

  Our da always regretted he didn’t take the time to learn our mother’s tongue, Brother Wolf told him unexpectedly. He always wondered what stories she would have told him, what thoughts of hers he will never know. If he could have talked her out of dying had he been able to argue with her more effectively. I chose not to make the same mistake.

  Charles wondered how Brother Wolf knew that, because he was sure his da had never said so much in his hearing. Not that he remembered, anyway.

  Given the sign, Charles wasn’t entirely surprised when the trail dropped through a copse of trees and ended in an amphitheater. Most of the basin was natural, a trick of the regional geology that backed the flat clearing with stone cliff faces to reflect sound on three sides.

  But it wasn’t untouched by human hands. Nature had never gathered all of the seat-sized boulders into a circle. They weren’t large boulders; a strong human could have rolled them, or they could have used the four-wheeler he’d seen signs of. He wondered absently if they’d taken the machine with them or if it was somewhere around here, hidden in the forest, even as he registered that some of those stones had been there much longer than three years. Had Leah’s people moved them? Had there been a Native tribe here at one time?

  The tree stumps had been moved here during the time of Wild Sign, though; he could tell by the chain saw marks. The stumps had been used to fill in the gaps between rocks, as well as to form the bottom half of the arrangement, so there was a full circle of crude seating. Wild Sign folk, at least, had not used the area to perform before an audience; they’d used it to perform for themselves.

  The amphitheater alone would have been interesting enough for Tag to bring them here. But he’d had a better reason—Charles understood why he’d wanted them to see it rather than explaining. The impact was startling.

  Tag had stopped beside Charles, waiting until Charles looked at him with a raised eyebrow before speaking.

  “I said it was weird,” Tag said, and Charles reflected that Tag was a musician, too. He’d understood the meaning of what he’d found here.

  Instruments, battered by months of wind and weather, lay where their owners had left them. Guitars, a couple of violins, at least one bodhran, and a tarnished flute were balanced on the sitting stones. What looked like the remains of a bagpipe were strewn across the ground, with grass growing thick around them.

  Anna, who had gone ahead, picked up one of the guitars. The gentle motion caused the neck to separate from the body. Rain could have done that, Charles thought, swelling the wood until the glue gave.

  “It’s a Martin,” Anna told them. “Custom. Hand inlay work.” She turned it toward him so he could see the mother-of-pearl designs on the fretboard and body.

  A custom Martin was expensive to be leaving out in the weather. Without being able to play it, it was impossible to accurately assess the price, but a guitar like that started around ten thousand and could go as high as someone was willing to pay. She set it down gently, as if she was worried she might hurt it further.

  No, thought Charles grimly, this had not been some orderly exodus where people had fled the threat of predators. He didn’t know a serious musician who would have just left their instruments to rot—and not because the Martin was worth money. Unlike the careful laying out of their pets, this was disrespectful. He didn’t know what had gone on at Wild Sign, but he would find out.

  He strode forward with the intent of joining his mate, took five strides, and stopped dead as darkness sent the hair on the back of his neck crawling. It wasn’t magic, this feeling. On old battlefields, pain and blood sometimes twisted the spirit of a place until merely standing on such ground made a man’s heart ache—or caused fear to rise through his bones. In old jails and psych hospitals, the spirit was so damaged it could make it hard to breathe.

  A stride behind him, Tag swore, feeling it, too.

  Something very bad had happened here. Not, he was pretty sure, whatever had made the people of Wild Sign leave their musical instruments behind. Something like this did not happen in a season. Two years after the Battle of Little Bighorn, Charles had felt nothing while he’d traveled over that ground. Ten years later, the spirit had been so heavy with sorrow, he had stood alone in the darkness and cried for those who had been lost.

  This darkness of spirit had been here before the people of Wild Sign had decided to make this ground into a gathering place. It would have taken more than half a year to grow darkness this deep. He wondered why a group of witches would have thought it a good idea to come here. Did they have no common sense at all? How could they not have felt this?

  “There’s something bad about this place, isn’t there?” Anna asked, watching them. “I thought maybe I was just spooked because of the dead animals and the abandoned instruments.” She looked around. “I don’t like it here. What happened to these people to make this place feel so awful?”

  “It’s not the Wild Sign people,” Tag said, his voice certain. “This”—he swept a hand wide—“feels like Culloden.” Interesting, Charles thought, that Tag’s mind, like Charles’s, had gone to another battlefield for comparison. “It would take a great deal of horrible to make the deaths of forty people resonate in the land.”

  While Tag had been talking, Anna’s toe had sent something rolling on the ground. She’d bent down and picked it up—a recorder. Doubtless there were other instruments scattered about and hidden by a season’s growth of grasses. Absently she knocked it against her leg to dislodge the dirt.

  “My da said Sherwood told him there were over a hundre
d people here, and everyone but Leah died,” Charles said. He wasn’t sure a hundred deaths would be enough to make the land feel as it did.

  He closed his eyes, trying to get a better feel. He missed the little spirits of the woods who sometime gave him clues.

  Brother Wolf said, out loud so everyone could hear it, “This feels like a place where sacrifices were made.”

  Anna nodded her head. “It feels tragic.”

  She lifted the recorder to her lips, almost absently. The note rose in the air, pure and clear, the stone walls behind them pushing the sound out. Like the guitar, it was a fine instrument. Unlike the guitar, it had survived somehow undamaged from its exposure.

  Anna played a quick scale first, to check it for tune and playability—and to let her fingers get used to the hole placements. It was what Charles would have done with a strange instrument, too. You had to know your partner before you could make proper music.

  Typically, his Anna’s first instinct was to make things better, and music was always her willing tool. She started out in a minor key, trying several songs before settling on an old Irish tune. He and Tag waited where they stood, caught by the music.

  The old words sang through his head in time with her playing:

  The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

  His father’s sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him.

  It was a song suited to this time and place, with its melancholy themes of death and beauty, war and music. Charles became aware something was stirring in response to the music—something, here and now. It made Charles uneasy. He could not tell if it was something physical or spiritual. He couldn’t tell if it was for good or ill.

  He wasn’t the only one who felt it. Tag had started to sing along—had gotten as far as “in the ranks of death” before he quit singing in favor of watching the land around them with battle-honed alertness.