by Kyra Halland
The herd Lainie would be traveling with started up the trail into the broad mouth of the pass. “Better get moving,” one of Lainie’s companions said to her. She mounted up on Abenar, to give Mala a rest, and joined the rest of the crew riding with the cattle. The mage in the blue suit was still standing by the road, talking to the enforcers; she couldn’t resist waving at him as she rode past.
The first league or so up into the pass, the way was lit by the setting sun at their backs. After so many cattle had come through this way, there wasn’t a lot of grazing left, but there was enough that the cattle munched happily as they went along, and the Gap River, flowing as a swift creek down the left-hand side of the pass, offered plenty of water.
At length, the sun disappeared behind the hills far to the west and chilly purple shadows filled the Gap. The trail boss, Haglan, a whip-thin, leathery man who was full of tales about his years working the drive since the early range-war days, called a halt for the night. The hands gathered around to eat cold trail rations and settle the night guard shifts and other crew business. Haglan divided the night watch into three shifts, two hands per shift, with himself, the seventh member of the crew, rotating through the shifts so everyone could have a night off. He assigned Lainie to the last shift, the least popular because when it was over, instead of getting some more sleep, the hands on that shift had to move right into the day’s work. Lainie didn’t complain; someone had to take that shift, and doing her fair share and more of the work might make the rest of the crew feel more kindly towards her, or at least less hostile. Orvin, a short, stocky man with a round, pleasant, pink-cheeked face and brushy gray hair, was assigned to be her watch partner. He gave her a friendly nod and smile when Haglan announced their assignment.
As soon as the crew business was sorted out, Lainie spread out her bedroll. She felt draggy and fuzzy-headed from not getting any sleep the night before and badly in need of some rest before she had to go out on watch. While she was arranging her blankets, Jervis, the hand from Discovery, came over and squatted down next to her. She tensed; by the look on his face, she had a feeling that whatever it was he wanted of her, it wasn’t just a friendly word.
“You listen to me, birdy,” he said in a low, hard voice.
She went on smoothing out her blankets, forcing herself to stay calm in the face of his hostility and contempt and pretend she was ignoring him.
“Me and the boys, we don’t like wizards,” he said. “Maybe the boss did tell us to make sure no one bothers you, but if you so much as look at one of us funny, you’ll be swinging from a tree before you know it. Though maybe we’ll have a little fun with you first.”
He stood up and walked away. Lainie remained frozen in place, digging her fingers into her blankets. An icy trickle of fear wound through her gut, joined by a slowly growing burn of anger. He had a lot of nerve, threatening her. She’d done him no harm, and it was because she and Silas had saved the herd that he had gotten a nice, fat payout on payday. It was because of her and Silas that half the hands with the northern herd hadn’t been killed by those mages who caused the storm.
She and Silas had come so close to turning their backs on helping the Plain folk of the Wildings and running away to safety. She liked to think they wouldn’t have gone through with it; they would have had fifteen hundred leagues of riding to think about it before they got to the place where the wagon caravans left to cross the P’wagimet lands, and she had already half-changed her mind within a few hours of telling Silas she would go. She knew that if they escaped to the lands across the sea, shame at running away and forsaking their ideals and the people who needed their protection would eat away at whatever peace and happiness they found until they had nothing left, and she was sure Silas knew it too, deep down. But at moments like this, it was easy to remember why they had been tempted to leave. Silas was right; no matter how much good they did, it made no difference to most Plains.
Deep inside of her, the Sh’kimech awoke, stirred by her anger. Cold tendrils reached through the thick blanket of Wildings earth-power she had wrapped around them, and a misting of darkness came over her vision and her mind.
Sister, you don’t have to let him make you afraid. We can help you destroy him – we can destroy all of them, and then you won’t have to be afraid. You’ll be free to go after the one who belongs to you.
Their hatred of the creatures who had overtaken their world swelled up and met her anger in a powerful surge of hot rage and icy malice that demanded action. Lainie clenched her fists in her blankets and fought the impulse to let the Sh’kimech have their way. If she gave in to her anger and their hate and the temptation to use their power that way, that would be the mistake that gave them possession of her. No, she told them firmly. I can handle this. Go back to sleep.
Sister –
No! If I destroy them when they haven’t done anything to me, I’ll be as bad as them. Or worse.
They were silent a moment, as though considering this. Very well. When you desire our help, we will be here. They retreated, as they had no choice but to do when she rejected their offers. The cold in Lainie’s body and the darkness in her mind and vision faded away. She finished spreading out her bedroll and lay down.
As she lay alone in her blankets, trying to sleep, the memories that had tormented her the night before returned. Over and over in her mind she saw Silas jerk forward as each bullet hit him, saw him fall from the saddle, felt and heard the scream that had torn from her throat. Encroaching sleep made the memory blur into a half-memory, half-dream where she was trying to get to him before the hunters did, but one magical explosion after another pushed her farther and farther away from him –
The sound of a high tenor voice raised in a lilting song broke into her nightmare and pulled her awake. One of the hands on night watch was singing, as cowhands often did, to soothe the cattle to sleep. He had a pleasant voice, and the song was one that Lainie liked. She recalled how, during the long drive from Windy Valley, Silas had refused to join the other cowhands in singing at night, claiming that his singing voice by itself could cause a stampede.
Longing and fear for him ripped through her. She buried her face in the blankets to smother the sound of her sobs and wept until exhaustion finally dragged her down into heavy, dreamless sleep.
* * *
THE FIRST FEW days in the pass, Lainie kept her head down, said nothing to anyone unless she had to, and did her job as best she could. Slowly, her shock and horror and grief at Silas’s capture faded into a numbness that let her do what she had to do without feeling like she would fall apart at any moment. She wondered how far ahead Silas was, and whenever the winding pass straightened out enough to let her see a good distance up, she peered ahead, trying to spot the group of hunters among the herds farther up. She constantly battled an urge to push forward; so far, the going in the pass had been easy, the ground was still fairly smooth and the rise wasn’t too steep, but the foreman’s warning and the stories she had heard about the dangers of the Gap kept her from rushing on ahead.
In the hour before dawn near the end of her first shift on night watch, she saw the shadowy figures of three men, their hands glowing with the colors of magical power, moving among the sleeping herd. The murmuring of words in the Island language and a sense of power at work filled the air, followed by the fresh scent of growing grass. Of course there would be mages accompanying the herd through the Gap, Lainie realized; this was how the pass didn’t get grazed bare with more than thirty thousand cattle passing through it in the space of a couple of ninedays. She supposed the mages did other things as well, to get the cattle safely to Granadaia. Though she never saw any sign of them other than during the early morning hours, she kept her mage ring on her wedding finger and her power safely tucked away deep down inside of her. Even if those mages had other things on their minds than capturing renegade mages, she would still rather not draw their notice.
As the herd climbed higher, the pass narrowed and the way grew rockier and
steeper. Frequently, Lainie spotted circles of fist- to head-sized stones set into the ground up against the mountain slopes, marking the graves of people who had died traveling through the Gap. Her Pa’s father, turned out of his home by his own wife after she learned she was a mage, had been one of them, leaving her Pa, a twelve year old boy, to make his way alone in a strange and harsh new land. It seemed unbearably sad to Lainie that so many people had died before ever reaching the Wildings and the freedom they had been seeking.
The summer thunderstorm season had given way to the drier weather of early autumn, but the fourth day in the pass, thunderheads began piling up among the peaks early in the day. By mid-day the clouds were dark and swollen with rain, and a stronger, cooler wind than usual had begun blowing down the pass. The hands who had made this trip before kept a close eye on the clouds and the way ahead, looking uneasy and speaking in low, worried voices among themselves.
One of the mages appeared from somewhere up ahead, riding an expensive-looking chestnut stallion. This was the first time Lainie had seen any of the mages during the day. He wasn’t an enforcer; he was wearing brown work clothes of fine fabric and understated but well-fitting cut. He rode over to Haglan; curious, Lainie drifted a little closer to listen.
“The storm covers too great an area,” the mage said in his crisp Granadaian accent. “It can’t be moved, and it’s too large to break up.”
Lainie had once called up a rainstorm by summoning together available clouds and moisture. It had taken a great deal of power and skill to cause a rainfall ten measures across that only lasted about fifteen minutes. Three fully-trained mages working together could do more, but moving or breaking apart a large and powerful naturally-occurring storm was much harder than calling up a small one.
The mage rode away towards the front of the herd. Haglan called out, “There’s going to be rain, boys. Wizards say this one’s too big to move aside. Get the cattle away from the creek and bunch ’em up in three separate groups. Those who’ve done this before show the others.”
The hands started pushing the herd towards the right-hand side of the pass, putting a good distance between them and the creek, which was certain to flood if there was heavy rain up ahead. Nervously, Lainie eyed the narrow creek bed and the closeness of the mountain slopes on either side of the pass. A very large amount of rain could flood the entire width of the pass. The slopes were steep but rocky enough that the hands could climb to safety if they had enough warning of the oncoming flood, but dozens or even hundreds of cattle could be lost, along with the horses.
Far up ahead, lightning flashed from the darkened sky, followed by distant rumbles of thunder. The gray curtain of rain veiling the peaks thickened and began descending towards the herd. Just as the crew got the last of the cattle moved over to the south side of the pass, the creek began to rise. From up ahead came a rushing sound that Lainie recognized as an approaching flash flood. Shouting back and forth to each other, the three mages rode at a gallop to place themselves a good hundred measures or more apart between the cattle and the creek, then dismounted. Shimmering amber and orange and deep green power spread from their hands to form a shield nearly three measures high along the creek. The uphill end of each section of the shield angled towards the south slope, extending between the three separate bunches the cattle had been herded into. Lainie reached out with her mage senses just enough to find more shields being cast by different groups of mages upstream and downstream.
Heartbeats after the shield went up, a wall of water nearly twice the height of a man roared around the bend in the pass, confined to the left-hand side of the pass by the magical shield. As the flood rushed past, Lainie saw the mage closest to her tense his muscles as he braced himself against the force of the water behind the shield. She tried not to think about what would happen if one of the mages, here or upstream, couldn’t maintain his part of the shield. She had heard tales of settlers coming from Granadaia being swept away in sudden floods like the one passing in front of her right now. If they had known the signs to watch out for, they could have scrambled to safety, though their animals and possessions would have been lost. But few poor Plain folk from Granadaia, said to be a far gentler and milder land than the Wildings, would have known those signs.
The storm followed the flood down the pass, sweeping over the herd with pounding rain and howling winds. Within moments, hands and animals were drenched, but the angled shields served as sluiceways, funneling most of the fallen rain and the runoff from the right-hand slope into the flooded creek behind the magical wall. Blinding flashes of lightning danced crazily from the clouds and ear-splitting thunder echoed between the mountains; the frightened animals bawled and shifted restlessly, only kept from stampeding by the constant efforts of the hands; and still the mages held their shields against the rush of floodwaters.
After what was probably no more than a quarter of an hour though it seemed much longer, the storm blew over on its way down the pass, taking the rain and wind and thunder and lightning with it. Slowly, the flood receded until it barely overflowed the banks of the creek. The mages let the shield down, and the one closest to Lainie sank to his knees, slumped over and trembling.
Looking at him and thinking of what he had just done and how much power he had used, Lainie could almost feel his exhaustion and his hunger. It could take days for the enormous amount of power the mages had used just now to replenish on its own. Would they skip their grass-growing duties in the morning in order to get some extra sleep and speed their power’s regeneration? Eating wouldn’t do the job; the amount of food needed to satisfy the hunger of magical depletion wouldn’t be easy to transport, unless they had a wagon that Lainie hadn’t seen. She also hadn’t seen any other women besides herself; would they turn to each other to replenish their power? She wasn’t completely naive, she knew that there were a few men who preferred other men over women. Were these mages like that, or was preference unimportant when you were driven by magical hunger and the need to regenerate your power quickly? Or did they rely on power-restoring drugs like demonsalts? After suffering from her own secondhand demonsalts addiction, Lainie couldn’t believe any mage of any sense at all would mess with that stuff.
“They got the shields up in time,” Orvin said, distracting her from her curiosity about the mages. “No bodies in the water this time.” Though everyone was drenched and shivering, a sense of relief hung over the crew as they got back to the normal business of herding cattle.
“Thank all the gods,” Haglan said. “That’s a sight that’ll send fear through any man.”
Into Lainie’s mind came a vision of a wall of water tumbling past behind a shield, carrying a body that had been swept up in the flood. As it passed her, the body in her imagination turned over to reveal Silas’s face. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to banish the horrifying image from her mind, and prayed to the Defender that somehow Silas would survive his wounds and the dangers of the trip and make it safely through the Gap.
Chapter 2
THE NEXT MORNING, the sky was as clear as if the storm had never happened but the ground was still wet and muddy. Usually, the mages were nowhere to be seen during the day, but today they were riding between the herd and the right-hand wall of the pass, strung out at a wide distance from each other.
“What are they doing?” Lainie asked Orvin, her watch partner, who was riding with her at the back of the herd. Unlike the other hands, Orvin was always friendly to her and willing to talk to her and answer questions, and he had been working the drive through the Gap for as long as Haglan, so he knew pretty much everything there was to know. He was a gentle, cheerful man who spoke proudly of his children and grandchildren, and a few times when Lainie was half-asleep, she had heard him warning other hands away from her bedroll. “Most of the time, you’d never know they’re around,” she went on.
“They’re watching for landslides,” Orvin answered. “It’s always a danger after a big storm like yesterday. The mountainsides get soft and lo
ose.” He glanced at the mages. “The other boys ain’t big on wizards, but we couldn’t get the herd through the Gap without ’em. If they don’t do me no harm, I’m happy to return the favor.”
“I reckon there’s wizards that feel the same way,” Lainie said, then decided, even with Orvin, even if he did know what she was and didn’t mind, it would be best to leave the subject at that.
A rumbling sound from up ahead caught Lainie’s attention. She looked over that way and Orvin said, “Here it comes.”
As the words left his mouth, a couple of measures of rocky mud came sliding down the right-hand slope. The closest mage reined in his horse and flung out his arms, his power flaring out. The other two quickly rode over to him and joined their power with his to form a shield, amber and orange and deep green, between the herd and the mountainside. A heartbeat after the shield went up, a giant mass of earth broke loose and roared down the slope. Hundreds or thousands of barrel-weights of mud and rocks and broken trees crashed into the shield. The mages and their horses staggered at the impact, but, somehow, the shield held.
The cattle let out a loud bawling and started trying to scatter away from the danger. Lainie and the other hands went to work trying to calm the panicked cows and keep them from stampeding. As she nudged cattle back into line and spoke to them in a calming voice, she thought about the fate of settlers passing through the Gap when the mountainsides decided to slide down atop them. It was a miracle that any of them had made it through alive. She stole glimpses at the mages, and watched in awe as they used the shield to push the fallen earth back up the mountainside and pack it down while drawing the excess water out of the ground to make it solid and firm again. She could barely imagine the amount of power and skill the mages were using to carry out these tasks, especially after they had used so much magic to shield the herd from the flood only the day before. No wonder mages in Granadaia were so rich and powerful, if these were the kinds of things they could do.