by Kyra Halland
“Is that true?” Haglan demanded. He gave Lainie’s arm another jerk.
“I didn’t do anything! I was just sitting there, minding my own business!”
“You should have seen her,” Jervis said. “There was this fog around her, like a dark power from the Underearth. An’ her eyes, they was pure black.”
Silas had never told her what she looked like when she used the Sh’kimech’s power, but she remembered when he and Carden had been possessed by them, the waves of dark power that seemed to roll off of them, the shadows in their eyes. Was that what she looked like? The thought made her shiver.
More hands, from Lainie’s crew and the other two, were crowding around. “What happened?” some of them demanded. “Is it true what he says?”
Jervis grabbed her other arm, the one Haglan wasn’t holding. “It’s true!” he shouted. “I say we hang her right now, before she can work her dark wizardry!”
A few men spoke up, wanting more proof, but they were shouted down by the majority. Several more men grabbed Lainie by the arms and the back of her coat and started dragging her towards a stunted, twisted pine tree growing out from the slope nearby. It was just high enough for a hanging. Lainie fought and thrashed in their grip, but they were too many and too strong, and she couldn’t get free. One man came running over with a rope. Desperately, Lainie tried to call up her power for an attack, but the sight of the rope clouded her mind with panic and the thought that the mages would find out about her power got in the way of putting her whole effort into it. Magic came to her hands, then flamed out and dissipated, unshaped. The mild shocks and flares of heat only enraged the men even more. “Enough of that, bitch!” one of them shouted as he cuffed the back of her head.
Inside her, the Sh’kimech reared up again. Their cold power flowed into her arms, and her vision darkened. How dare that mortal filth lay hands on our Sister! they raged, their words blending into her own thoughts. How dare they lay their hands on her, that filth, infestation, she could destroy them, all of them…
No. She couldn’t let the Sh’kimech take control of her –
But if she didn’t, she would die horribly, hanging from a tree, and Silas would be left helpless and alone –
“Stop.”
At the single commanding word, everyone suddenly went still. Hope flared inside Lainie. The dark mist of the Sh’kimech over her vision cleared, revealing a man in finely-made brown clothing standing before the gang of trail hands in the wildly dancing light of their torches and lanterns.
Lainie’s relief at being saved turned into a cold lump of dread in the pit of her stomach. It was the mage who had attended Orvin’s death and burial, the mage she had come to think of as the boss mage. And now he knew about her power. She pushed the suddenly silent Sh’kimech back down beneath the layer of Wildings power and made sure her own power was completely suppressed.
“What is this?” the mage asked. Contempt dripped from his voice.
“This bitch used wizardry to stampede the cattle!” Haglan said.
The mage gave Lainie a slow look up and down. She tried not to look as scared of him as she was, lest he think she had a guilty conscience. “I suspected you were a mage,” he said, “though I’ve no idea how you managed to hide your power all this time. Either there’s hardly enough of it to notice, or you’ve been using an exceptionally well-made shield, and I very much doubt it’s the latter.” He addressed Haglan again. “What happened was not intentional magic, but uncontrolled, as might happen if a poorly-trained mage were startled.”
“I told you that was what happened!” Lainie said. There was no point now in trying to deny what she was.
“Don’t matter if it was on accident or not,” Haglan said. “She’s a wizard, and she stampeded the herd, and we’re going to deal with her the way we deal with wizards in the Wildings so she don’t cause any more trouble.”
“So get out of our way,” Jervis added.
“Unfortunately for you,” the mage said, “we are no longer in the Wildings. We have crossed the summit and are now on Granadaian soil. In Granadaia, as you surely must be aware, it is death for a Plain to lay hands on a mage without permission.”
“You think you’re man enough to stop us?” Jervis demanded.
The mage surveyed the gang around Lainie, ten men or more. “I’ll admit, fighting you by myself might cause me a bit of difficulty. But I see that my comrades are no longer needed to maintain the shield against the stampede and are headed this way.” A glow of deep green light came to life in the mage’s hand, shining brightest around the gold ring he wore on his right forefinger. Before the events of the last several days, Lainie would have found it hard to believe that a mage could stop a stampede and still have enough power left to threaten a gang of angry Plains, but after seeing him and the others hold back the flood and then the landslide, she knew not to underestimate a fully-trained Granadaian mage.
The hands stood in sullen silence as five or six other mages walked up and stopped to face them. Finally, Haglan swore. “You don’t want her hanged, you tell her she better not try any more mischief, or law or no law, we’ll make damned good and sure she can’t.”
“We will make it very clear,” the boss mage replied. The hands let go of Lainie and walked off, grumbling, then the mage turned to her. “You were startled. Your training is inadequate, if you lost control of such feeble power so easily.”
Lainie bit her lip. She wanted to tell him there was nothing wrong with her training, thank you very much, but, somehow, he didn’t seem to have any idea how powerful she was, or even who she was, and it was best to leave it that way. “It won’t happen again, sir.”
“In fact,” he went on, “I’m surprised you were allowed to leave school with your power intact when you have so little mastery over it. And you seem to have embraced a thoroughly uncivilized way of life. What exactly are you doing working with these Plains?”
“I live in the Wildings. My husband was taken by Granadaian bounty hunters, and I’m going after them. Joining the drive was the only way I could get through the Gap.”
“Your husband…” another one of the mages said. They all glanced at each other.
“Of what house are you?” the boss mage asked.
“Banfrey,” she said. Not a name any of them were likely to know.
The mages shrugged at each other. “We don’t know that name,” the boss mage said. “Who is your husband?”
She stared down at her feet. “He done nothin’ wrong.”
“Listen to me, girl,” the boss mage said. “I am the legal authority over this herd. Answer my question, or I’ll hand you over to those roughnecks and give them permission to do whatever they like with you.”
They were giving her no choice. She braced herself, ready to fight if they tried to capture her. Or maybe she should let them; at least they would take her to where Silas was. But then she would be a prisoner as well. Better that than being hanged and raped and whatever else the hands would do to her, though. Either way, she was in a bad fix. “Silas Vendine,” she muttered.
The mages shared another glance. “Of course,” some of them murmured. The mage in brown gave her another quick, dismissive look up and down. “You don’t look like the sort of woman for whom Siyavas Venedias would risk everything.”
Siyavas Venedias – That was Silas’s Granadaian name. Lainie knew well what kind of women Silas had had a reputation for preferring, and she guessed the comparison was supposed to be unflattering to her. She was in no mood to just stand here and be insulted, and as long as she was in trouble anyway, she might as well speak up for herself. “That just shows how much you know,” she retorted.
“Failure to send an untrained person with magical power for proper training, taking on a private student, entering into an unauthorized marriage, and murder of another mage,” a third mage said. “Those are some very serious charges against Venedias.”
Murder? Did they mean Fazar? “He did what he thought was ri
ght,” Lainie said.
“Regardless of what he thought,” the boss mage said, “there is a bounty of a thousand gildings on him, dead or alive. If he is brought in alive, his punishment will be severe, as it should be.”
Lainie’s mind boggled at the amount. A thousand gildings; more proof that the assassination order was either no longer in effect or really hadn’t been put out by the Mage Council. And what about her? If there was a bounty on her, she should think that the mages would be taking her prisoner instead of standing there telling her how much trouble Silas was in. If there was a bounty on her, the hunters would have taken her, but they hadn’t. “I don’t care. I’m going after him. We didn’t do nothing wrong.” She stared at them, daring them to try to stop her, terrified that they would.
The boss mage shrugged. “So be it. Our job is to get the cattle safely through the Gap, not to chase after rogue mages or nursemaid errant young mages who should be in school. We will ensure that they –” he jerked his head towards the hands “– harass and threaten you no further during this journey, as long as you keep your power under control and don’t try to work any more magic. However, once we leave the pass, you are on your own. If you think you’re going to save Venedias from the judgment of the Mage Council, you’re welcome to try, but I doubt very much you’ll succeed.”
The mages turned from Lainie and walked away, quickly disappearing into the darkness of the night. Lainie watched them go, still trying to work out what it all meant. They knew who she was, which meant the Mage Council must know, too. But these mages didn’t seem interested in her except to make sure she didn’t cause any more trouble on the drive, and the hunters also hadn’t taken her. So, either the Council didn’t know what she could do, after all, or they knew and didn’t care. After Silas’s fears for her and the warnings he’d received in his Hidden Council message box, Lainie found that hard to believe, but it was the only conclusion she could come to.
“You got lucky, birdy,” Haglan growled as he walked over to her. “Now get back to work, and don’t try anything else funny. You heard what that wizard said.”
She’d been lucky all right, luckier than drawing a hand of Dragons. Praying to the Provider that her luck would hold out, she switched to Abenar to give Mala a rest and went back to searching for stray and injured cattle.
Chapter 3
AT DAWN, THE herd started moving again. The crews of the three herds that had run together didn’t try to separate the cattle out again; everyone just wanted to get out of the Gap as fast as they could, in one piece. Surprisingly, only four cattle had been killed in the stampede, and no hands or horses. The dead cattle were quickly butchered, and the meat was preserved by the mages and left in a cache for the wagons bringing up the rear of the drive to collect. Lainie couldn’t imagine how hard it must be to drive a wagon through the Gap; going through on foot and horseback was hard enough. How in the world did settlers and merchants make it through with their belongings and goods?
Now that the herds were on the downhill side of the Gap, the going was much faster and easier. A new stream, the headwaters of the Dostra River, trickled into existence, flowing along the south side of the pass. It soon widened into a creek, providing plenty of water for the thirsty cattle. The air warmed the farther downhill they traveled, though it wasn’t as hot as it had been on the Wildings side. It felt gentle, soft with moisture, a pleasant change from the thick mugginess of thunderstorm season in the Wildings and the aridness of the dry seasons. In the milder conditions, the mages were able to coax plenty of grass to grow to feed the herds, which made the cattle even happier and better-behaved.
Traces of recent flash floods and landslides marked the Granadaian side of the pass as well as the Wildings side. Lainie kept an eye open for fresh graves, even though there wouldn’t be any way to know if Silas lay in one of them. To her relief, she didn’t see any newly-dug graves, though she reminded herself that didn’t mean he was still alive. He might have been swept away in a flood or buried under fallen mud and rock, or his captors might not have done him the honor of marking his grave.
Though she was keeping her power shielded – not suppressed; she wanted the mages to be able to sense her efforts to keep her power under control and know that she was trying to behave herself – Lainie slowly came to realize that something was missing, a half-formed awareness in the back of her mind, a sense of connection to her surroundings, a familiar sensation in the air and beneath her boots, that she had never really noticed until it wasn’t there any more. She felt uncentered, untethered, as though the world wasn’t quite in its right place around her or she wasn’t quite in the right place in the world. She didn’t think this separation from the magic of the Wildings would interfere with her ability to use her own power; after all, she carried some of it within her, and Granadaian mages seemed to do well enough in the Wildings, but it made her feel even more alone and out of place, very far from her home and everything she knew.
On the fourth day after the herd crossed the summit, Lainie came around a bend in the widening pass to see the land of Granadaia spread out below in the distance. She reined in Abenar, struck by the sight of leagues and leagues of gentle hills, small clusters of trees just starting to show a hint of autumn red and gold, and farm fields marked by fences neat as pencil lines drawn on the land, all of it greener than anything she had ever seen.
What had the settlers coming from this beautiful land thought when they first saw the Wildings? Had they despaired, wondering how they could ever scratch out a living from that harsh, dry land? Or had the Wildings been beautiful in their eyes, offering the freedom they so desperately wanted?
Haglan rode over, interrupting her thoughts. “Get moving. You can gawk after the job’s done.” Lainie realized that she had fallen behind the herd. She rode on, making sure the cattle at the back of the herd kept up as it made its brisk way down the pass.
Late the next morning, the smell of the stockyards and the slaughterhouse below the pass announced that the end of the journey was near. When the herd came down out of the Gap into the foothills, Lainie helped drive the cattle to the stockyards. Then she stopped, off to the side by herself, and looked at the building made of red brick, like a bank or a rich man’s house, where the other hands were lining up to get paid. She fingered the slip of paper in her pocket, the voucher that would allow her to collect her pay for the difficult, dangerous drive through the Gap. She had earned almost as much money for those thirteen days of work as a hand made in two months on the drive through the Wildings. But her chances of rescuing Silas and getting out of Granadaia before the autumn snows closed the pass were best if she didn’t draw any attention to herself or leave behind any sign that she was there.
She took her hand from her pocket, leaving the voucher where it was. On Mala, with Abenar trailing faithfully behind, she rode away from the drive crews and the bustle of the stockyards to the road that wound down through the foothills. There, a sign told her that Sandostra was four hundred and twelve leagues to the southeast. She did some quick figuring in her head; riding her good, strong horses in alternation, and if nothing happened to delay her, she could make it to Sandostra in about a nineday, give or take a day. She ticked those days off the calendar she was keeping in her mind of how much time she had to find Silas, free him, and get back through the Gap before the snows closed it for the winter. If she made good time to Sandostra, got him away from the Mage Council quickly, and made it back to the Gap with no delays, there should be plenty of time.
Big ifs, she thought.
She could do it. She had to. Firmly turning her mind from doubts to determination, she started Mala walking forward again, headed down the road into the rich green lands of Granadaia.
* * *
COLD AND PAIN filled his body and his senses, and voices shrieking in wordless rage and agony tore at his mind. He wavered between agonized half-consciousness, his awareness veiled by darkness and pain and the voices, and an unconsciousness that provided no
relief. The cold and pain and darkness reminded him of something, but he could never quite remember what; the answer always seemed to slip beyond his grasp.
For an endless time, days or ninedays or months, he was jolted along on horseback, draped stomach-down or held in a slumped half-sitting position. With every beat of the horse’s hooves, fresh agony exploded from the gunshot wounds in the right side of his back. From time to time during the interminable journey, his captors forced food and drink into him, but more often than not he vomited what little he’d taken in back up. Shivering in uncontrollable spasms, wracked with unending pain, his mind ripped to shreds by those damned voices – the voices of the damned? – he didn’t think he would survive the journey to wherever they were taking him. The Mage Council, he supposed.
What about Lainie? he wondered during his diminishing moments of lucidity. Had they taken her too? He prayed not; he hoped with everything he had that she had kept going as fast and as far as she could. She had all their money; he hoped she would take it and get on a ship and sail far far away where they’d never find her.
Even that fervent hope had become nothing but tatters in his mind by the time he was taken through noisy, crowded streets and then dragged into a building. He could barely make out his surroundings through the pain and the veil of darkness and the screaming voices in his mind. People gathered around him, talking; their words were gibberish. He was allowed to collapse to the floor, where he lay curled up in agony.
“Remarkably effective.” With its sharp air of authority, the voice cut through the fog of noise and confusion. It was dry, throaty, and deep for a woman’s voice, though unmistakeably feminine. A man spoke, his words unintelligible; the woman answered, “That won’t be necessary. It will only make her suspicious. She’s a clever girl; she’ll think of it herself.”