by Jenna Rhodes
“I don’t think they are.”
She dropped a corner of the blanket. “What?”
He squatted down close to her, his heat joining with hers, and for a moment she felt almost comfortable. “They’re trappers, yes, but they also have a relationship with the trees. I’ve been watching them set up for the winter. We’re north here, quite a bit north of the capital, and winter hits early here, so they’re preparing for it. I’m not sure what they’re doing, but it looks like they’re bleeding the trees.”
“What?”
He shrugged. “Your father is the farmer, the orchardist. I surrender to your expert opinion.”
“I . . . I don’t have one. Tree’s blood, I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“I’ll take you down to the outer edge of their range, but the thing is, they have tasted the sap and don’t care for it. I think it’s been tainted, by deep water, from their reaction. It’s not extreme enough to do more than sicken them a bit, but it’s in the trees. In anything that grows.”
“Sap,” Rivergrace repeated. She turned the thought over in her head. “It’s nothing I’m familiar with, but if their ground water is corrupted, that I can handle. It would present in the sap, although what they’re doing—I can’t begin to guess. The river we’ve been at, I haven’t detected much. It has to have gone deep, into the soil and rock. We know rivers run below, and the tainted source must have gone that way. We would have to search for where the water went underground. That may take a few days.”
“Then we can start today and be prepared to produce a miracle for them to accept us.”
She stood and began to fold her blanket. “A curse to drive them away and a miracle to bring them back. What have we walked into?”
He put his arm about her waist to draw her close. “Whatever we find, it only reinforces what you knew to begin with: Quendius has to be stopped, and Trevilara with him. We can’t let the two of them bring wholesale death to Kerith. To our friends. To our family.”
She gifted him a tremulous smile at that. “You’re right. I may need reminding again someday . . .”
“And I’ll be here to do it.”
“See that you are.”
He grabbed the blanket she tossed him, and began to snub out their campfire. The rains had not yet begun in these highlands on a steady basis, and he wanted no spark or heat left behind them. It made for difficulties if they had to return to a previous campsite, but he would cope with that if necessary. Better than trying to outrun a wildfire. They were packed in short order, Grace waiting for him with her hand stroking her horse’s soft muzzle and the animal affectionately nuzzling her back.
He led them out of the highlands by a gentle, circuitous route, unwilling to meet any of the trappers before he was ready. It took them three days of searching before they found the headwaters which went underground in the forested area. Grace knelt by the burbling river, wide and still, not at its height by any means because the rainy season hadn’t swelled it yet, and even that season would give way to the spring melt-off. It was odd to see it, though . . . this flat, lazy river flowing and polishing rocks in its bed before ducking under a ledge and disappearing. He stayed back a few paces, mindful that the ground must be far more porous than it looked, to have swallowed up a river.
Grace dabbled her fingers in the water. She nodded to him. “It’s been corrupted, or a tainted source flows into it somewhere along the way, but this river has gathered from many others, so the fouling is diluted.”
“We need to head farther upstream, then?”
“If I am truly to cleanse it, yes. I can possibly put a . . .” She stood and considered the spot, head bent to one side. “I might be able to put a filter on it, but that doesn’t remove the problem.”
“You can locate the taint, though.”
“Of course,” she said faintly. “Eventually. I’m not sure we have that much time.” She stretched her neck, looking overhead at the dismal sky with gray clouds lowering over them. They crouched over them, slow-moving and settling in. Eventually it would rain, then rain harder, and perhaps even sleet. They could both feel it in the gathering chill.
“One more night upstream, then, if it’s all right with you.”
She nodded. “I think that’s reasonable.” She put one hand, fingers still dripping from the river, to her shroud of threads and souls. “I should know how close we are by then.” She swung up and guided her horse upstream, Sevryn riding at her heels. Before nightfall, he found proof that their fur-trapping clan roamed over more distance than he’d thought: dinner struggled in a simple snare before he put an end to it and field-dressed it.
“That was someone else’s meal.”
“The snare is old. Weathered. I gather that, although the clan comes this far, it’s not often, or it would have been gathered up long ago. I won’t reset it, it’s not fair for whatever game it catches. This fellow was only in it for a day or so. Any longer would be cruel. I’ve seen animals chew their paw off to escape.”
Grace shivered. She could sympathize with the creature’s desperate need for freedom. The cuff marks from her childhood had faded into barely discernible scars, but she knew the feeling. She dreamed of it sometimes still, when night was at its deepest. She was lucky that such dreams often included her Bolger friend Rufus: big and burly, forge-scarred and more animal than mortal, except when you looked in his eyes. She did not remember Quendius from her enslaved days at the forge, but Rufus remained vivid in her memories. By Kerith measuring, he was old now, extremely old for a Bolger, and she wondered if time had taken him away from her. He, too, had ligature scars on his wrists and ankles and would have had the courage to gnaw himself free if that had been all it took.
Sevryn tapped her on the chin. “All right?”
“Just thinking.”
“Aye, I can tell. Not much farther tonight, is what I’m thinking. What do your souls tell you?”
She considered them. She had worn that cage for long enough that she could forget it for long stretches of time. Now that she focused on it, a deliberate pull alerted her into the wilderness. “That way.”
“Then that way it is.” Sevryn settled on his horse. “I should make a lean-to tonight. It’s going to rain, or worse. Lead the way.”
She turned her horse in the direction her anchor tugged her but did not find the source before Sevryn demanded a stop so that he could start a fire, and she put the kill up to roast while he lashed branches together for a shelter. They put the horses under a heavily branched tree and hobbled them there after letting them graze till dark. The branches bent to their shelter lent a clean, sharp odor as well as some protection against the elements and they had barely finished their meal when the rain began pattering down. It grew heavier until, in the middle of the night, she awoke to find Sevryn hunched over her, protecting her as the rain turned to hail, its knuckle-sized pellets finding their way to pummel them. It stopped almost as soon as it started, and Sevryn let her go with a short sigh.
“Are you hurt?”
“Bruised a bit. Nicked my ear, I think,” and he put a hand up to the side of his head and brought a finger away slicked with a bit of blood. “Nothing much, for all that.” He went to check the horses.
“They’re all right but a bit disgusted with the weather.”
She laughed at that. “Did they complain?”
“Oh, very much so. I gave them each a big handful of grain to help them get over it.” He pushed in under their blanket again. “Oh, good, you kept it warm for me.”
“Warm as I could.”
She put her cheek against his shoulder. He smelled of horse and wood smoke and the pungency of the evergreen. “We turn back tomorrow.”
“Unless you hit on it, seems best.”
She mumbled something under a yawn and settled back down. The rain began again, but this time a soft, gentle patter that
comforted her as she slipped back into dreams.
• • •
“This way.”
He did not ask if she were certain. He turned his horse down the small freshet, a gurgle of water down the hillside that branched into the headwaters they were surveying. Its contribution to the overall river seemed negligible, but he could see along its banks how sterile it had become, how the growth was yellowed and blackened as if poisoned by the very touch of the water. If she couldn’t cleanse it, it should be dammed off, but he hadn’t time or tools to dig an earth-dam, and no desire to spread the contamination into another area. It ate at the forest, bit at it like a sharp and hungry animal. All the rain in the world would not wash this bitterness away.
Rivergrace brushed past him, giving her horse its head, and he let her go, all the while listening for under sounds in the area. Trevilara had thought it necessary to corrupt the water this deep in the wilderness. Why? What might they ride into, while in pursuit of its beginning? What strategy had the queen had behind poisoning this desolate land? The only answer could be that it was not as desolate as they believed, and danger lay in that presumption.
He watched her back, as he had for so many days since following her across the bridge to Trevalka, and she led the way as quietly and deliberately as she had always done. As though knowing the worry and vigilance he maintained. As though respecting his discipline to follow and protect. They rode a long way in silence, the sun slanting through sullen clouds overhead, the forest floor steaming as rain from the night before evaporated before their eyes.
Then Rivergrace put her hand up, halting her mount. “I’m going on foot.”
“You found it.”
“I think I might have.”
He slipped down and ground-tied their two horses together, before joining her. She moved across the ground as quietly as she could, nowhere near the stealth of a Kobrir assassin, but doing a fair job of it otherwise. A natural mulch lay over the forest bed, and old needles and twigs ground under her steps. She cut away from the brook they’d been following, following an elbow he could not see but she felt and eventually came to a pond, ringed by stones that, if not hand-cut by men, had at least been laid out in a circle round it.
“It’s an old shrine.”
Rivergrace looked to him. “You get that feeling, too?”
“I do.” He went to one knee. “A very long time ago. The moss, the sediment at the edge, hasn’t been disturbed in a century or two.”
“And the pollution is weak but definite.” She began to strip, her flesh immediately going pale and pimpled from the cold. “I should not be long.” She fastened their climbing rope about her. “Two tugs, bring me up, no matter what.”
“Always.”
She tried to smile, but she was shivering too hard and her teeth chattered. Grace ducked her head and jumped in, disappearing below the murky waters almost immediately. Sevryn squatted down, trying to see her figure and losing it, as if the pond had swallowed her whole.
It would do to spit her out as suddenly, he thought. It would gain no victory by trying to keep her captive.
The stone under his knee looked flatter than the others. The moss growing over it slid away from his questing fingertip. Indentations sank into the stone. He rubbed the growth away, to expose the lettering.
Weather-worn, he could barely read it. Exalted Trevilara day 3278 Spirit of Water.
Sevryn ran his fingertip over it again. Yes, that was it, best as he could read it. He had no idea what the day would be today, but he thought he could safely say that the stone had been exposed to the elements for at least two centuries.
Exalted. Lifted to godliness? Riding to her powers on the backs of her people, as Rivergrace had told him? As a Spirit of Water, no less, although he knew her for her Fire. He leaned close to see if he had missed any engraving, but the rope came to life under his knee and he quickly began to reel Rivergrace up and out of the pond.
She surfaced, spitting and coughing, a sickly yellow-green light clenched in her fist. As he brought her to shore and out, she began to cocoon it in the threads she spun from her own essence and anchored it.
She coughed raggedly a few more times before managing, “That should do it.”
“It’s been here a while.”
Grace nodded. Shaking vehemently, she reached for her clothes and dressed as fast as she could. “I think this one was, for lack of a better term, wearing out.”
He waited till she dressed and hunched over under their blanket before showing her the stonework.
“So there is where she became a River Goddess.”
“So it seems.”
As he had done, Grace traced her fingertips over the stone. “She poisoned it so that no one could usurp her power, at least not from here.”
“She could have been deposed?” Sevryn turned his head to examine the dark water pond.
“Once. Not anymore, her strength has gone beyond that of a simple fount. Once, if we’d gotten here soon enough, we could have toppled her.”
“But surely you weakened her today.”
Grace shrugged. “I don’t know. And I think we’d be fools to hope so.”
He took her arm to help her over the ground, as she shivered and quaked so violently she could hardly walk. “You need a fire.”
“N-not he-here.”
“Inland a bit. Out of sight. If this is a shrine, there might be eyes on it, even if no actual visitors.” He hugged her close, feeling her chilled form even through her clothes.
And candlemarks later, the fire did not seem to have helped her much. He finally built the fire up much higher than he would have normally, in hopes of bringing the color back to her cheeks and the shakes out of her limbs.
What the immense fire did bring were hunters out of the shadows, eyes narrowed, and hands on weapons as they ringed the two of them. By blade and bow, they surrendered.
Chapter
Twenty-Three
“YOU WOULD SET our woods on fire.”
“You can tell better than that,” Sevryn spat back. “The pit is cleared. Ringed. Far enough from the canopy that even sparks cannot spread easily. Smoke and flame yes, for she is fairly chilled. Death might come to us, but not by fire. I’m more worried about a cold deep in her lungs.” He met the narrowed stare with one of his one.
The speaker lowered his bow a bit. Grudgingly, he returned, “You might have a bit of the woodsman about you, but not much.”
“I’ll give you that. I’m a gutter rat.”
“Who knows how to build proper fires.”
Sevryn shrugged. “One learns.”
“What are you doing out here, so far from your gutters?”
“Staying away from our dear queen.”
The bow jerked up, sharp arrowhead targeting the breadth of his chest. The speaker, a bearded and shaggy-headed man who appeared to be lean and wiry under his buckskins, did not growl, but three of those flanking him did.
“What do you say of Trevilara?”
Sevryn spread his hands out, palms out. “Only that I feel better the farther I am from Her Majesty’s fiery temper.”
A short stout man to the rear of the group muttered, “Do not we all.”
“Ssssst. ’Tisn’t wise to speak ill.”
Sevryn looked down. “Even the ground has ears, aye?”
“Oh, it does. More than you know, gutter rat.”
Rivergrace stirred, a little noise in her throat, a clearing, a sound of impatience. Sevryn swept a hand to her. “Gentlemen, this is my lady Rivergrace.”
She stepped back as all attention swept to her.
“The cold one.”
“Indeed. She has a gift of water, but nearly drowned herself earlier today.”
The bearded leader looked keen. “Oh? Fell in?”
“No.” Rivergrace shrugged the blank
et off her shoulders, letting it drop to the ground. She tucked her hair behind her ears, each one deliberately, exposing the gentle swoop of their tips. “I could feel a taint, a curse, in the water.”
That brought louder mumblings from all but the beard. His hands tightened on his bow, and string and wood creaked as he did.
“What do you know of curses?”
Rivergrace put her chin up. “I know dark water. I know how it sickens the land, how it poisons the people and animals who might drink of it. I found the curse and pulled it out, from a pond not far from here.” She pointed back the way they had been. “It is sweet water now, and when it goes underground, it will stay sweet, wherever it flows.”
“You can do this.”
“It is done.”
“Why?”
“Would you leave a thorn in a limb to fester? Would you leave a gash open to corrupt the rest of your flesh? Would you let a baby starve or find a wet nurse to suckle? We live as wisely as we can, don’t we?”
The bearded man watched her, his dark eyes like coal, his face lined from decades in the elements, harsh wrinkles etched deeply. He jerked his head. “Rimble. Go down and check the pond.”
“And have the runs for a week?”
“Do it. Use the proof stone if you must.”
Rivergrace moved a little, barely brushing Sevryn. From the corner of her mouth, she whispered, “A stone that will turn color at poison?”
“The Kobrir had them. Once tainted, they have to be cleansed, but they can be useful.” While Sevryn had no doubt their captors heard Rivergrace’s slight voice, he knew they wouldn’t hear his, because he pitched it for her ear and hers alone, his Talent shivering around the words.
Rivergrace nodded in comprehension. She said, louder, “Use your stone. It will show the pond is cleansed.”
Rimble, who turned out to be the short and sturdy fellow, set off with a grumble which could be heard until long after he disappeared from their sight. Sevryn made a note to himself that sound carried farther in these woods than he had expected. If the fire hadn’t drawn attention to them, then simply talking would have, sooner or later.