by Kyra Halland
And she was going to have to fight men like this to get Silas back. At the thought, uncertainty gnawed at her mind and gut. Silas was strong and skilled, but it had never occurred to her before that his strength and skills weren’t unusual for properly-trained Granadaian mages, even though he had never given her reason to think there was anything special about him. She was powerful but nowhere near as skilled at using and managing her power as these mages, and she was alone while there were five or more of the hunters…
She squashed her doubts. No matter how powerful and skilled the people who had captured Silas were, she had vowed with Silas’s blood and Wildings soil to get him back. So, somehow, she would just have to be smarter and stronger and better than them.
As the herd climbed higher in the pass the rest of that day and the next, the ground grew steeper and rockier and the mountainsides loomed in closer. Lainie had heard that no A’ayimat lived in the mountains of the Spine, and indeed she hadn’t seen any sign of them this whole time, not even the feather-hung wooden stakes that marked the safe passage through their territory. It seemed so strange to be traveling through mountains without a thought for the blueskins, and Lainie couldn’t help watching for movement in the shadows and the A’ayimat’s watchful gold eyes. There were no signs of groviks, either, for which Lainie gave thanks every day. She had only seen one of the beasts up close once in her life, and that was one time too many.
The narrowing pass forced the herd to string out over a longer distance, and its winding curves hid the front of the herd from the back. In the rocky soil and cold nights, not even the mages’ spells could coax much grass to grow. As well, the Gap River dwindled down to a mere stream as they approached its source, so water was in short supply. Hungry, thirsty, and tired, the cattle grew balky, and, more and more often, the hands had to climb down from their horses to push the most reluctant animals along.
“Does it ever get easier?” Lainie asked Orvin as she set her shoulder to an especially stubborn bossy’s flank to get her moving. This high up, the air was so thin that, even used to hard physical labor as Lainie was, she found herself dizzy and short of breath.
“Worse,” Orvin gasped, pushing as well. His round, pink-cheeked face had turned red and he was breaking out a sweat, even though the air was cool. “Up – to summit. Better – down.”
The cow finally decided to move, and Lainie and Orvin walked over to head another one around, that had decided downhill was the way to go. Orvin was still heaving for breath.
“You okay, Orvin?” Lainie asked. “Need to sit down for a bit?”
“I’m – fine,” he said. But his face was even sweatier, and he had gone from flushed to pale. He stopped, pressing a hand to his chest.
“You sit down right now,” Lainie said, alarmed. She had seen more than one older hand die of a sudden seizure of the heart back home on the ranch, and Orvin did not look good.
“Maybe –” He clutched at his chest, then fell to his knees and vomited.
“Orvin!” Lainie cried. He collapsed onto his side and lay still, his face gray and drenched with sweat. Lainie knelt beside him and felt the pulse in his neck; it was rapid and wobbly. “Someone help!” she shouted. “Orvin’s heart’s gone out! Where’s the mages?” She wished desperately she knew how to fix this with magic, but she didn’t. This was much higher-level healing than anything Silas had taught her so far. “Get the mages! Orvin’s real bad!”
The other hands crowded around as Lainie rolled Orvin onto his back. Sometimes pushing in a steady rhythm on a man’s chest could get his heart going right again. Lainie put her hands over his heart and started pushing with all her might, putting her full weight behind it, but Orvin had a lot of muscle and fat on him and she couldn’t get enough pressure going. One of the other hands, a big man named Ameris, pushed her aside and started working on Orvin’s chest. She gripped Orvin’s limp hand as tears ran down her face. “Where’s the mages?” she cried out again.
Finally, one of the mages, the one who had spoken to Haglan about the storm, appeared. “Help him!” Lainie pled.
The mage squatted down next to Orvin and felt his pulse, then set a hand over Orvin’s mouth, checking for breath. “There’s nothing to be done.” He stood up again.
She couldn’t believe it. She refused to believe it. “You didn’t even try! There has to be something – you’re a mage –” Then she remembered that a real Wildings Plain person would say wizard, not mage. “Wizards have to know something about how to heal this!”
“There are some things that can be done for such conditions, if they aren’t too severe,” the mage said dispassionately in his clipped accent. “But in this case it’s too late. He’s gone.”
“Why didn’t you come sooner, then?” Lainie demanded. She sniffed hard and pushed her arm across her eyes to wipe away the tears, but they kept coming.
“That isn’t what we’re here for.”
She could hardly believe her ears. “Not what you’re here for? Helping the hands if they fall sick isn’t your job? No wonder they –” she caught herself “– everyone hates wizards so much! Cold and heartless, hardly even human!” The old fear reared up inside her; was that what she was fated to become, an unfeeling monster with no heart and no soul? She had to believe that wasn’t true, but even she and Silas had been tempted to turn their backs on helping Plain folk. Never, she vowed. No matter what, she would never be like that.
“We are here to protect the cattle that have been purchased at great cost,” the mage said. “Should one of us reduce his power trying to save the life of a man who probably cannot be saved, and then a flood or landslide were to strike, we would be unable to protect the property we are charged with protecting – or the rest of the crew. It is not that the death of one man is of no concern to us, but magic is not limitless and we must use our resources in the most effective ways.”
Still holding Orvin’s hand in hers, Lainie wept, but didn’t say anything more. She knew that what the mage was saying was true; there were limits on what magic could do and how much it could be used. And she knew that men who showed the signs Orvin had shown could almost never be saved. But at least the mage could have tried. If she knew more, she could have tried harder to save him.
Haglan, the mage, and Ameris all checked Orvin to confirm that he was dead. Then the men dug a grave over against the right-hand slope, among the others that marked the difficult path, and buried him. Lainie sat weeping, too stunned and heartsick to help out. Orvin had been a kind man, her protector and her only friend on the crew; he had been looking forward to seeing a new grandchild, born a month or so ago while he was on the drive. But now he lay dead in a lonely grave on this cold, high trail, far from his family. In her mind she saw Silas shot and crumpled and bleeding in the dirt, and pictured him dying of his wounds and likewise buried in a rocky grave in the Gap, to lie there cold and alone while she never knew what had happened or where he was. She thought of Garis Horden and Verl Bissom lying in the hard dirt of the Bads, and Adelin Horden’s grief, and her brother Blake, shot through the heart in a gunfight that had nothing to do with him only a few months before he was to be married, and she didn’t know how much more sadness she could bear. The spirits of the dead lived on in the Afterworld, she knew that, but that wasn’t the same as being alive and safe with the people who loved them.
When Orvin was covered with dirt and rocks and the grave marked with a circle of stones, the mage who had attended his death said the proper prayers to the Gatherer, and the other hands added their own few words in tribute. Lainie still couldn’t speak for crying, so she offered only her tears.
* * *
ORVIN’S DEATH LEFT the whole crew in gloomy spirits, but the herd still had to keep moving. The rest of that awful day and the next, the way got even steeper and more difficult, and the herd’s movement slowed down even more as it ran up against the next herd ahead, which was making its own laborious way up the narrow, steep incline to the summit. Lainie pushed and prod
ded and shouted at the unhappy cattle, burying her grief for Orvin and fears for Silas in the work. She just wanted to get this trip over with and find Silas and have him back safe and sound with her, even if she had to fight the hunters who had taken him, or go all the way to the Mage Council in the great city of Sandostra or even to the far end of the world.
The day after Orvin’s death was Darknight. Haglan called a halt earlier than usual, some distance short of the summit of the pass. The herd ahead of them was still straggling its way up, slowed in turn by the next herd forward. On Darknight, Haglan said, it was better to stop early to get the cattle settled and to allow a safe distance between the herds in case of stampede. All the hands were on duty all night, with only short breaks.
This high up, the night was freezing cold, so Lainie was wearing the warm sheepskin coat Silas had bought for her in Bentwood Gulch last winter. As she sat in Mala’s saddle, watching over the restless cattle and trying to keep warm, she hoped that Silas’s captors hadn’t let him freeze when they were going through the highest part of the pass. They had taken him alive; that had to mean they wanted to keep him alive.
Near about midnight, ready for a break from watch, she went to the campfire, where a pot of chickroot brew was keeping hot, and poured herself a cup. Carefully holding the tin cup in her gloved hands, she sat down, resting her back against a large boulder. She sipped her drink as it cooled, and looked up at the stars, shining brightly in the clear, moonless sky, closer than she had ever seen them before, and wondered where Silas was. Barring floods and landslides, and if they’d been able to squeeze their way past the herds up ahead, he and the hunters could be out of the Gap by now. Had Silas had a chance to see the stars like this as they crossed the summit?
A sharp pang of missing him struck her heart. The only other time in her life when she had felt this entirely alone had been that long night in Aktam and Kesta’s hut, when she was a prisoner of the Ta’ayatan clan. She remembered waiting for Silas to come for her and wondering if he was even still alive, as she wondered now if he was alive. Her mind went to Orvin’s burial, but instead of his face, it was Silas’s that she saw the dirt pelting down upon until it was covered.
Where was he? Was he alive, or was he buried in a cold, lonely grave somewhere in the Gap? She would have given anything in the world, anything at all, to be lying beside him in their blankets tonight, looking up at the stars. She remembered the stars above that small meadow high in the Great Sky Mountains where, in a frenzy of magical hunger, exhilaration at surviving the ordeal beneath Yellowbird Canyon, and irresistible attraction to each other, she and Silas had first made love. Her eyes stung, and the stars blurred. She tried to blink the tears away, but they spilled down her cheeks, warm on her cold skin, and she dug her fingers into the ground to try to bear the painful loneliness that threatened to crush her heart.
The Sh’kimech within her stirred, and the place on her breast that she had marked with Silas’s blood and the earth of the Wildings burned icy-cold. The ancient beings’ cold touch flowed through her arms to her hands; drawn by them, more of the Sh’kimech mindsoul seeped up from the ground into her body, unimpeded by her gloves. In her loneliness, she almost welcomed their company.
Sister, said two echoes of the same voice, why do you mourn? Why do you leave us?
Her tears flowed freely. They cut out my heart and took it away.
The cold, grasping tendrils of the Sh’kimech’s mindsoul wound through her emotions, her body, her womanly parts. Not having bodies, the Sh’kimech did not join together for pleasure or procreation, but she could sense the stirring of a very dim memory of the time long ago when they had still had bodies and had done such things. We will be your heart, they said. Stay with us, be one of us, and you will never mourn. We will give you all the power, all the companionship, all the pleasure you could desire.
No, she told them. You call me Sister, and in a way we’re kin, but I’m not one of you. I was born to walk on the surface of the world, in the light, with the man I love.
You may keep him with you. If you come to us, you will never lose him again.
The thought of safety, of never being scared and lonely again, pierced her heart with longing. But that wasn’t how it would really be. Once the Sh’kimech had her, they would use her to destroy those who lived on the surface of the world. She would be a weapon of devastation, doomed to eternal cold and darkness. No, she said again, more firmly. That isn’t what I want.
But, Sister –
Rough hands grabbed her. “What sort of no-good gods-damned wizardry are you up to?” Jervis yelled.
Panic exploded from Lainie in a burst of dark power. The ground shook and rocks bounded down the mountain slope. With a terrified bellowing, a thousand cattle rose to their feet and started running.
He frightened you! He dared to set hands on you! Let us destroy him! the Sh’kimech clamored at her.
No! she shouted frantically in her mind. Go back to sleep!
Her anger and the sheer force of her will pushed them back where they belonged, the ones from underground sinking back beneath the earth, the ones inside her retreating to the place where she kept them buried. The darkness that had fallen across her vision faded, and she stared in horror at the mass of frightened cattle scrambling up the rocky slope towards the summit of the pass. The reason for the fears about stampedes in the Gap became very clear; narrow as the pass was here, there was nowhere for the hands and their horses or the slower cattle to get out of the way and avoid being trampled.
Even worse, the stampede could spread to the herds ahead of them. And once the cattle made it over the top and started running downhill, they would be even harder to stop and more cattle, men, and horses could be killed. The hands out in front of the herd would have their work cut out for them, trying to stop the stampede and stay alive at the same time. All Lainie could do, here at the back, was follow the cattle to make sure none got left behind.
“Don’t you ever touch me again!” she said angrily to Jervis as she got to her feet. “Come on, we got cattle to look after!” She ran for Mala and mounted up, took Abenar by the reins to make sure he didn’t get lost in the confusion, and rode after the cattle. Jervis joined her; in a stampede, personal feuds were no excuse for neglecting duty.
Some cattle had lost their footing on the steep, rough ground or were just too scared to move; Lainie and Jervis got them going so they wouldn’t fall too far behind. In her fury, Lainie only snapped at Jervis if she had to speak to him at all. She would rather have ignored him altogether, if their work had allowed it.
Up ahead, the scared, angry, bellowing cattle from Lainie’s herd ran into the herd in front, jammed up in the highest, narrowest part of the pass. Cattle bellowed and scrabbled at the ground with their hooves, trying to push their way through, then the bottleneck popped open and both herds of cattle began thundering across the flatter curve of the summit and down the other side. Lainie and Jervis rode behind, nudging along the slowest cattle and watching for dead or injured men and animals. Lainie was relieved to see, in the dim starlight, that no bodies of cattle, horses, or men lay in the wake of the stampeding herds. A brief image came to her mind of thousands of terrified cattle running all the way down the Gap and out the mouth of the pass, and she had to bite back a burst of hysterical and wildly inappropriate laughter.
Lainie and Jervis reached the summit, then came over onto the downhill side. Up ahead, the herds were pouring around a curve between two cliffs that loomed darkly in the moonless night. From beyond the curve came the sound of bawling and pounding hooves as the next herd up also panicked and started to run. Lainie came around the bend to see all three herds trying to push as fast as they could through the narrow canyon. In the distance downhill, ahead of the foremost herd, a curtain of a dozen different colors of power unfolded across the pass, sending shimmering light back up through the dark divide.
It was a shield – but cattle running into a shield would pile up and be crushed between
the shield and the cattle behind them. Lainie watched, her heart pounding in her throat, as the cattle at the front of the stampede ran into the shield and then through it. The shield seemed to stretch as the cattle passed through. Beyond the translucent wall, Lainie could see the darker shapes of the cattle that had gone through the wall of magic, walking now, slowed by their passage through the shield. Behind them, running cattle bunched up and slowed down before passing through the shield, but because the cattle ahead of them were still moving, there wasn’t the pileup that Lainie had feared.
Gradually, the panicked cattle slowed down and came to a stop. Carrying lanterns and torches, the hands of all three herd crews began looking for injured cattle, men, and horses and calming the last few cattle that were still trying to run. From up ahead, Lainie heard several men’s voices raised in anger above the shouting of cowhands and mooing of distressed and confused cattle. Haglan and the other men from her crew approached, pushing their way through the herd towards her and Jervis. She braced herself for trouble and looked at Jervis, wondering if he was willing to admit his part in the disaster. The faint starlight and approaching lantern light revealed a smirk on his face. “You’re in for it now, you wizarding bitch,” he hissed.
Haglan reached them first. He grabbed Lainie by the sleeve of her coat and pulled her down from Mala. She stumbled as she landed, then righted herself. “You stupid birdy!” the boss shouted at her, shaking her. “What in all the hells did you think you were doing?”
Her face flamed, and embarrassment and fear made a tight, burning knot in her chest. “It was an accident. Jervis grabbed me. He startled me.”
“You know what she is!” Jervis protested. “She’s one of them wizards that was causing trouble for the northern herd. I know, I was with that herd. She was fixing up to do some kind of wizardry. All I did was stop her!”