Krea looked around the room, half expecting a tree to sprout through the roof or something equally as heinous. Nothing happened.
The mage chose a thin, red leather thong and reached forward. Krea jumped. After a slight pause, the mage sectioned off a small chunk of Krea’s hair. “Remember the perfection of three,” she explained, dividing the section into three parts. As she spoke, Arie wove the leather string and hair into a braid. “Birth, the beginning. Life, the journey. Death, the transition.” When she finished the braid, Arie wrapped the leather thong around the end with several quick knots and tied it off. She then sectioned off another segment on the other side and braided in another thin piece of leather. “The might of three: water, ice, mist. The Essence of all life.” Arie wove a blue thong into that braid, then sectioned off another braid at the back of Krea’s head. “The completion of three: Child, Mother, Teacher. The cycle of woman,” Arie finished, knotting a brown thong to tie off the last braid.
Krea sat stone still through the entire process. It wasn’t until Arie sat back on her heels that Krea realized she had been holding her breath. She patted her head and smiled. Nothing bad had happened. Just braids in her hair. Braids that felt strangely right. Like they should have been there all along.
The mage grabbed a handful of leftover thongs and placed them in Krea’s hands, pausing as she did to eye the bloodred brand that now marked Krea’s left arm. “These are for you,” she said. “As you notice examples of the divine three in your life, add a braid or replace one that is already there. You will find strength in Nordu’s perfect plan as you watch for her miracles in creation.”
Krea took the thongs and waited. Everyone was staring at her. Nobody moved; they just stared. After a few seconds, she asked, “Now are we done?”
The mage nodded and smiled.
Relieved, Krea looked down and noted again the splattered blood marring the beautifully detailed patterns of the blanket. “I’m sorry about your blanket. I will take it to the river to wash it.” Krea climbed to her feet and started to gather up the cloth, but Arie stopped her.
“No, no, no. Your blood is the mark of something important. I have no desire to wash myself of it. Leave the blanket.”
Krea glanced over at Sorin for support, but he just shrugged. She stretched the blanket back out onto the floor and looked over at Dane, who was suddenly staring up at Arie with such dread she actually felt sorry for him.
Arie turned to Dane. “And now we must deal with you, my young friend.”
Dane stared back in bleak silence.
“But I’m afraid this ritual will not be for observers.” Arie wiped her hands on her long brown dress. “This is for the morni and me alone.”
Sorin nodded, but he didn’t move. Krea followed his gaze and saw why. Dane’s face was frozen in fear. Sorin was about to reassure him when the mage handed the caller his sword and not so subtly bid him good-bye.
“You can pick the boy up tomorrow after the morning meal. He will be ready and waiting for you.”
“I uh…,” Sorin stammered, not quite sure what to say. Apparently the mage’s instructions were as much a surprise to him as they were to Krea. He clearly hadn’t planned on picking Dane up at all. “We have no mage in Trasdaak to teach him,” Sorin explained, choosing his words with great care. He seemed to dance around when speaking to the mage. Maybe she could throw sunballs, too.
Arie shook her head. “No, Caller. Nordu’s plan is becoming much clearer. The child is to stay with you. I’m not sure where you are to take him, but he is to stay with you. Of that I am certain.”
“Milady,” Sorin protested, “I can’t train him. I know only the simple magic of nature. You know my abilities. He is an elemental wizard. He needs proper training or he…”
Krea’s open-mouthed gasp brought Sorin’s argument to an abrupt halt. Arie’s displeasure was just as obvious. Dane was a wizard? She looked over at him. He didn’t look like a wizard. He looked like a skinny little pelt to her, but then, how many wizards had she known? Maybe they all looked just like him.
“Caller, how could you have wandered so far from the path? Have faith. Be here after the morning meal to retrieve the child.”
Krea stared in silence at the mage. Who was this woman, and how had she known what to say? Hearing the words he had delivered with such venom to the faerie-born spoken back to him stopped all further protest. He managed a nod, then headed for the door without looking up. Dane’s weak protest barely slowed him down.
“You’ll be fine, Dane,” Sorin assured the boy from the door, sounding hollow and unconvincing. “You have nothing to fear from a mage.”
Krea wasn’t sure if there hadn't been a cutting undertone to his comment, but if there was, the mage remained unperturbed. “Until the morrow,” Arie said just before closing the door behind them. A bar of wood dropped into place in a curt dismissal.
They both stood staring at the closed door. Sorin finally strapped on his sword and began picking his way out of the impossibly dark grove. “Well, Krea,” he said when they finally rounded the wall. “We may as well get back to the inn and see what’s left of our belongings.”
Krea glanced up to see if he was serious, but the night hid his face. After a second’s thought, she hurried to take the lead.
Chapter 14 – Acquisitions
When Krea and Sorin finally arrived at the small inn, they found the main hall bustling with activity. The evening meal had long ago been cleared away, but men continued to linger over their mugs, picking at the bread plates and boasting of their accomplishments. Krea had seen similar scenes often enough. Now and again a booming voice rose above the din of voices, but it would soon fade away to be replaced by another across the room.
The number of nobles dotting the room—flanked by their guards, of course—surprised her, but then she reminded herself that she wasn’t in the sort of establishment that usually housed her class of people, knowingly or otherwise. In fact, the clientele was so confident in the safety of their surroundings that not even the guards gave Krea and Sorin more than a passing glance as the two made their way along the wall to the massive tapestry that hid the stairs. With one notable exception.
In the farthest corner from the door, a young noble and two guards sat at a table too small for the three of them. His hair was too blond and his clothes too clean for a traveler as he watched their progress with keen interest. They drank from large pewter mugs, but the mug hiding the noble’s face didn’t tip as he drank. He was more interested in hiding his face than downing the content. The taller of the two guards glanced from Krea to Sorin and back to Krea. A shadow moved under the table. The light was too dim to be sure, but Krea was confident the movement had been a kick.
She flipped her hair so it fell forward to hide her face and peered sideways at the noble. He and his guards suddenly seemed as oblivious as everyone else to her arrival, and Krea was just about to dismiss what she had seen when the noble picked up his mug and looked directly at her over its rim. Only years of working the streets of Trasdaak kept her from jumping out of her skin. Instead, she kept her pace as if she had seen nothing and joined Sorin on the stairs.
Once they were on the upper landing, Krea started to speak, but Sorin's hand stayed her comment. He yanked his glove off with his teeth and tossed it back to Krea as his sword slid from the sheath. Yellow light from the scattered lamps glinted off his blade with each silent step he took toward their door. Krea followed his lead, drew her knife, and opted for stealth. With her back against the wall, she kept enough distance to stay clear should Sorin decide to swing.
He paused at the door. His sword shifted to one hand, and a sunball appeared in his wood palm. Light flooded the dim hallway. One shadow in the hallway seemed to linger a little longer, but she couldn’t get a good look at it around Sorin. He nodded toward the door. Krea pulled the latchstring. The door swung inward on silent hinges. With the light from Sorin's sunball filling the room, Sorin stepped inside.
K
rea waited.
Nothing happened.
When she finally decided to chance a peek around the doorway, she found Sorin, sunball in hand, scouring the room. He used his sword to turn over the cots and sent the rays of the sunball shooting into every corner. Only after he had circled the small room twice did he resheath his sword and wave Krea in.
“Who was here?” she asked.
“I don’t know. No one, I think. I just had a bad feeling. Go check our things.”
She wasted no time searching her pack for the money bag, and was both relieved and surprised to find it exactly where she had left it. Still, she was sure she had seen that noble watching her. Based on Sorin's reaction, he had seen it, too. If they were not after her money, what else could they possibly want?
“You did see them watching us, right?” she asked.
“I saw them.”
“What did they want? They didn't take my money.”
“How should I know?”
“Well, you obviously know more than I do, or you wouldn't have come in here with a sword in one hand and a sunball in the other. I couldn’t tell, but it looked like someone may have been in the hallway.”
Sorin opened the wick on the lamp before walking over to the window. “It's not a sunball, Krea. It's focused Essence. We call it a rendo.”
“Whatever. You were going to use it to kill something, so you must have thought something bad was going to happen.”
“I don't know what they want. It could be nothing.”
Krea watched Sorin secure the shutter and decided to try talking to him again about the mage. He had walked the entire way back in hostile silence. “What will happen to Dane?”
Sorin finished with the shutter and started flipping cots back over. “He will be fine.”
“You keep saying that. What did you mean about him being an elemental wizard? What is that, and why did the tree give him a burl? I am going to keep asking until you finally talk to me.”
Sorin continued arranging the room to his satisfaction, but he finally spoke. “Exactly what I said. He is an elemental wizard. He doesn’t know it, of course, but that’s what he is. As to the burl, I can’t explain that one. His element is clearly earth, but I don’t know what purpose the burl will serve.”
“But aren’t wizards…” Krea broke off. She didn’t know what to say. She had never even seen a real wizard before. She hadn’t been sure they really existed before today. “Aren’t they…”
“Extremely powerful,” Sorin said, dropping a blanket across the straw mattress. “They are gifted with magic beyond imagination, limited only by the element they serve, and they are born only when the moon overpowers the sun, turning the day to night, and even then, only one is born. Never two.” Sorin finished arranging his cot and turned to Krea. “You need to see to your bed. I am bone-weary. The lamp is going out in a few minutes, and you will have to make up your cot in the dark if you don’t hurry.”
His threat moved her into action, but she was still thunderstruck by his casually given explanation. “But why is he thieving, then?” she asked. “And how is it that you just happened to pick him up?”
Fully clothed, Sorin climbed in under the top blanket and dropped his head down onto his bedroll. “He doesn’t know what he is,” Sorin mumbled into the blanket. “Or, I should say, he didn’t. He will after tonight. Hurry up with that lamp.”
Krea was silent for a moment as she stared yet again at the strange design on her arm, but Sorin’s grunted complaint prompted her back into motion. “I guess he’s lucky you found him,” she said, finally lowering the wick until the lamp went out.
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Sorin grumbled.
“What do you mean?”
“I have told you before. The goddess has a wicked sense of humor.”
After pulling off her borrowed slippers, Krea slid onto the surprisingly soft mattress and considered the day’s events. So, the little pelt was a wizard more powerful than Sorin, or even a mage. How would that knowledge change him?
Slowly, her mind turned back to the mage and finally to the strange cobbler woman. “Sorin,” she ventured, hoping he wasn’t going to threaten to have her moved to the stable for waking him.
His ready reply told her that she wasn’t the only one pondering the day.
“Why did you call that woman faerie-born? I thought you said that magic people and humans can’t mix their blood.”
Sorin rolled over. “They can’t,” he explained, no longer speaking into his bedroll. “That’s not to say they can’t coexist.”
Krea had no idea what he was talking about.
“The woman was very human,” Sorin explained. “But she had been raised by faeries. Judging by her behavior, I suspect she was raised by tree nymphs.”
“Wow.” She had heard stories about such things, but she hadn’t believed them any more than she had believed in wizards. She clearly had a great many things to learn. “She didn’t seem human.”
Sorin grunted. “She had a command of faerie magic. I’m sure it keeps her and her husband well fed, but she was only human.”
“How come there aren’t any wizards or faerie-born in Trasdaak?”
“Trasdaak is near the border,” Sorin explained. “It is farther from the old places. Ryth is very near the Nayli, a forest that hasn’t lost its magic to the draining souls of mankind. I would expect to find such things in Ryth. Maybe not an elemental wizard, but certainly changelings and faerie-born. Once magic has touched you, has run through your veins, feeding your spirit and warming your soul, you can’t stray far from it. Magical things stay near their source.”
“But you were in Trasdaak,” Krea pointed out.
Sorin was silent for a moment, shifting again on his cot. “Aye,” he answered finally, but Krea could hear a sadness in his tone that she couldn’t explain. “Now go to sleep. Tomorrow will be a long day.”
Krea rolled over and tried to imagine life among a grove filled with tree nymphs. She wondered how the faerie-born woman came to be there in the first place, but as sleep invaded her thoughts, the hawthorn trees of her imagination turned to huge, towering pines. She looked down from among their slender tops to see a small stream winding through the forested valley. A tiny fish jumped, and before she knew what she was doing, Krea jumped after it.
She crashed through the branches. They snapped under her sudden weight, and as she fell the stream grew larger and larger. She slammed into the water so hard she couldn't breathe. Her body ached. She tried desperately to get a breath, but water closed in around her. Her small hands grabbed at the water in vain. It ran through her fists and continued to suck her down. Something grabbed her shoulder. She struggled away from it, but it held firm. She was still struggling with the newest threat when Sorin’s voice brought her reeling back to the small room.
“Krea!” he demanded, giving her another shake. “Wake up.”
With a jolt, Krea sat up, panting as she took in the room now faintly lit by the dawning sun. It seemed like only moments had passed, yet it was already morning.
“What were you dreaming?” Sorin asked, watching her closely.
Krea wiped her damp forehead and blinked up at him. “I was falling through the trees again,” she explained. “I was falling and falling, but this time I hit the water. It was swallowing me, pulling me under.” Even as she explained, the dream was fading from her mind. “Just a dream,” she said, and pulled back her covers to rise. “Why is it so cold in here? I thought you closed the shutters.”
“I did.” Sorin stepped away as Krea scrambled from the cot to check her pack. “It’s all there,” he said, strapping on his sword. “They didn’t actually break in, but they tried. Not sure if it was me or your dream that scared them away. Grab your gear and let’s go.”
###
When the stable boy brought the horses out, they looked as clean and shiny as when she had first seen them in Trasdaak. Sorin checked their feet and Caldir’s leg before dropping his sadd
le into place. Apparently satisfied with what he found, he gave the eager stable boy another shol and paid the stable master the rest of their board.
“Did you lose your guide?” the man asked, accepting the payment.
Sorin shook his head. “No. Actually, I need to shift these packs around. The boy will be traveling with us.”
The keeper raised an eyebrow in surprise. “I have several mounts for sale, if you have need of another animal,” he offered, gesturing toward the small corral adjacent to the stable.
“I think these two will do fine,” Sorin said as he pulled Krea’s packs off the back of her saddle and began rearranging them to fit across the front. “I think managing one unskilled rider provides all of the adventure my age can manage. Besides,” he added, giving the stable master a knowing smile as he patted Caldir affectionately, “this one listens to me, unlike his riders.”
The man smiled back. “Fair enough. Safe journey, then.”
“My thanks. If I should come through Ryth again, I will seek you out.” The men clasped forearms, and Sorin turned to finish lashing the last pack to his mount’s saddle.
“Why does he have to ride with me?” Krea asked. “I don’t want that little pelt clinging to my tunic all day.”
“One of the reasons he is riding with you is because you weigh less than I do, but the biggest reason is because I don’t want him clinging to my tunic all day, either.” With that, he mounted his horse and pointed down the road. “I will go get our clothes and collect Dane from the mage. You go to the cobbler. Then meet me at the supplier that was across the street. I don’t want to see an escort of guards with you this time.” He waited for her reassurance, but she merely trotted off down the road.
The faerie-born woman was arranging the entry when Krea stepped inside the small shop. As soon as she saw Krea, the woman excused herself and hurried behind the curtain. Krea picked at a few scraps of leather lying by the door and eventually wandered over to the counter to admire a pair of boots. The craftsmanship was unlike anything she had ever seen. Even the detailed stitching looked like it belonged on a gown, not a boot. Something about them seemed odd, though. Krea ran her fingers along the supple leather, not even imagining that the boots belonged to her when the woman suggested Krea try them on.
Hand and Talon (World of Kyrni Book 1) Page 21