The man was looking out, south and west toward where Xain and the children were hiding out of sight. He leaned forward, straining to find them, when Loren charged with a cry.
The Shade wheeled, grasping for his sword.
Chet attacked, his staff cracking down on the man’s shoulder.
The Shade fell in a heap, and when he saw Loren standing above him with an arrow drawn, did not try to rise.
“Mercy!” he cried. “Mercy, I surrender!”
“Fetch the others.” Loren had heard cries of mercy from the Dorsean villagers while they were being slaughtered by the Shades and found her heart unmoved by the man’s pleas.
Soon Chet returned with Xain and the children. The wizard stood looming over the Shade. Loren kept her arrow trained, her draw half-relaxed.
“Where are your companions?” said Xain.
“I have none.”
At once Xain knelt, wrapping his hand around the man’s arm. Flames sprang to white-hot life, and Loren heard the sizzling of skin.
The man screamed. In Xain’s other hand appeared a knife, and this he pressed to the man’s throat.
“Where are they?”
“Xain,” said Chet, a warning in his voice.
Loren met his eyes and shook her head.
“I lost them,” said the Shade, gritting his teeth as he spoke. “A summer storm struck the coast, and its thunder frightened my horse. By the time I regained control after he bolted, I could not find them.”
“Where are you bound, and for what purpose?”
“North, to find them again.”
“And us?”
The man did not answer. Flames licked him again. Sweat beaded Xain’s face, and she knew it did not come from the fire. This must be taking a terrible toll on his strength.
The Shade screamed again, and this time he had an answer.
“We were searching for you! We sought a girl with green eyes, a wizard, and two children besides. I saw you from afar and knew you matched the description.”
“What were you to do when you found us?” Flames died in Xain’s hand, but Loren could still smell the cooked flesh and burnt cloth beneath.
“Stop that,” said Chet.
“Chet, take the children away from here,” said Loren.
“What?” He looked at Loren in disbelief.
“Take them,” she said. “Quickly.”
He looked a moment longer and then ushered the children away. He returned just moments later, while the Shade was still answering Xain.
“We were not to engage you in battle. We were to send two messengers at once if we saw you—one west, to find our captain, and another south, to the Seat.”
“The Seat?” said Xain. “Who is your master there?”
“I do not know.” He saw the baleful look in Xain’s eye, and his arm flinched. “I do not know! I swear it! Our sergeant knew, but she never told me. Only the messengers would have the name, and only if they were sent.”
It sounded like the truth, and just the sort of cunning Loren would have expected from Rogan. Xain studied the man, and it seemed that he thought the same.
“I believe you,” he said, and then he plunged his dagger into the man’s neck.
“No!” Chet rushed forward. Loren stepped into his path, stopping him with her hands on his chest.
“It is done. You can do nothing.”
“He surrendered. That was murder!”
Xain looked up at them, eyes dark. “Mayhap. Or justice. Have you forgotten the screams we left behind? I have not.”
The man’s fingers grasped at his throat, trying to close the gaping hole. An ugly crimson seeped between them, staining the already-dark sand beneath him. Loren wanted to look away but could not move her eyes. She wanted to join Chet in admonishing Xain but had no place. What had the Elves said? The Nightblade. The one who walks with death. She thought they had meant she carried doom with her, but mayhap they meant Xain.
“I have forgotten nothing, wizard. But your sort of justice is the kind that brings war and death to all the nine lands in the end.” Chet looked at Loren, eyes filled with fury, silently urging her to join him.
“He had no choice,” she said. “We could not have let him go south to tell his brethren where we were.”
Loren loathed his expression: the shock and disappointment. Most of all, she hated the sadness and sorrow. Loren was almost as surprised as Chet to hear the words leaving her lips. Had she not once spoken the same? Did she not believe as he did? She once had. But now she was no longer certain.
“We had best move on,” Loren said, turning away from them. “Let us return to the horses. Quickly, for the night will not be long in coming.”
nineteen
They finally stopped to see the glowing fires of a town far ahead. Loren guessed they could reach that horizon with a few more hours’ ride.
“Let us stop here, and reach the town tomorrow,” she said.
“We could ride after the moons rise and get there tonight,” suggested Xain.
“And then what? We could not find a ship at night. And if the Shades have come this way they might have gone to the town and then could hear of our presence before we managed to leave.”
He nodded, saying nothing more, and they found a spot near the shore to camp. Loren would not let them start a fire, for finding the Shade that day had made their pursuers seem altogether too near.
She took first watch and sat it atop a dune overlooking the water. Staring down, she could see the forms of her friends sleeping in the silver moonslight reflected off the water. One of the shapes moved then rose and climbed the dune toward her. Her heart sank, seeing Chet. She did not wish to face him now. But as he neared, she scooted to let him sit on the sandy slope beside her.
He sat silently at first, and she avoided his eyes. Instead, Loren relished the cool breeze wafting in off the water, for the summer was much hotter here in the north. But she held no illusion that preferred their silence. She could see it in the nervous twitching of his hands, the way he often turned his head toward her then away when she was not looking.
At last she found herself growing impatient. “Out with it, Chet.”
He folded his hands over each other. “That man today. The one that Xain killed.”
“Yes. I was there.”
“I do not blame you. Neither of us could have stopped it. But I did not expect you to speak against me.”
“Did I speak against you? With the deed done, there was nothing to be said. We had to carry on.”
“You did not only urge haste, Loren. You said the wizard had no choice. Those were never words I thought to hear from you. What he did was wrong. The man was our prisoner, and was half-dead from lack of food and water besides. He was no threat.”
Loren stayed silent. In truth, she did not know how to answer.
Chet turned toward her, edging closer.
“I know you agree with me. Yet you spoke in Xain’s defense. You cannot tell me you have grown as bloodthirsty as the rest of them.”
“It is no thirst for violence. It is wisdom. We cannot leave enemies all about us, aware of our plans and intent on our harm. I have done that ever since leaving the forest, and it has brought only tragedy to my friends. And myself.”
“You would never have said that in the Birchwood.”
She looked at her hands, fidgeting in her lap, fingers twisting about her thumbs. “Perhaps not. I used to think as you do. Always I would chastise the others when I saw them as violent, when they would kill or urge me to take a life. Still, I will not do it with my own hands.”
“That is not enough, and you know it. I think you were right before.”
“But I am responsible now—for them, for the fate of both Mystics and Shades.” She looked at him, his light brown hair glistening in the moonslight. “For you as well. Those who hunt us will kill without a second thought. You saw that yourself. I may not approve, but neither can I stop to slap the wrists of those who would embrace v
iolence to answer mayhem.”
He looked back out across the Bay, and Loren could see from his twitching jaw that he was barring harsh words. She did not like to see such frustration in his eyes any more than she cared to see him eye her with pity or sadness. If she were to see herself six months ago, she would have looked at Jordel in much the same way.
“I have known you all my life, and most of yours. I was there when your father . . . when he treated you as he did.” His fists clenched. “Often, I was on the brink of raising my own hands to stop him, however I could. Always you warded me off, either with words or the look in your eyes—eyes that have always been able to say so much, even when I felt like I alone could hear them. And it enraged me. You never lifted a hand to him yourself. If you had, no one in all the nine lands would have whispered a word against you. You had every right. And yet you did not. I thought it foolish for a time. I felt the way you say you feel now.”
Chet swallowed, drew a breath, and continued.
“And then I grew older, and somewhat wiser, or so I thought. I felt I finally understood why you acted thus. Because to raise your hands to him, or to lift your axe and end your father, forever, would be to lower yourself to his level. If you killed him, though anyone would have called it justified, you would only have beaten the man by becoming just like him. And that was far, far worse than suffering at his hands. That was how I stilled my own while watching you suffer all those years. I knew you were winning your victory by proving yourself the better person, though it might take all your life to do so. Or so I thought. Was I wrong?”
Loren wanted to say that he was. Since leaving the woods, she had seen so much—Damaris’s slaughter of the constables, Auntie’s horrors in Cabrus, the awful battle in Wellmont, and Jordel’s death in the Greatrocks. The world seemed filled with evil, far more potent than her father’s simple, stupid hatred that rotted his soul to the core. She could bear that evil forever if she had to. But Loren could not stomach the thought of letting a much greater evil envelop the kingdom she called home.
And yet she wondered, what good would it do to defeat those dark forces if doing so meant she must invite the darkness into herself? She still believed that those who killed when they thought themselves right soon turned to killing when it suited them. That was perhaps the source of all the wrongs that plagued them now; for even Rogan had a curious light of righteousness in his eye, when slitting the villager’s throat and soaking the dirt with his blood.
“I do not know the answer you want. Or rather, I know what you wish me to say but know not if I can do so with any ring of truth. I have seen so much and traveled so far. Now I am tired.”
“Forget the road. Forget what you have seen. Try to remember how you felt when you lived with me in our village. And try to remember why.”
She cast her mind back to childhood, when Loren’s father first pressed her into his labor, when she had felt the crushing blows of his fists for the first time. She remembered fleeing the work, and his beatings, escaping into the woods with Chet to sit in a clearing and listen . . .
“Mennet,” she said. “It was Bracken’s tales of Mennet. I was a young whelp and wished great harm upon my father. Bracken listened then told me of Mennet, the thief who could bring down a king without spilling a drop of blood. Yet now they tell me Mennet was nothing more than a legend.”
“I do not believe that, nor do you,” said Chet. “And even if it is true, why should we care? I have heard it said that even false tales have value.”
“But how can we know the gold from those stories told to scared little children hiding from their parents in the woods?”
“Is there no value in that?” Chet reached out and took Loren’s hand, as he had never done before, for it was always she who reached for his. “The value of a tale is what we take from it. The choice is ours. That is one lesson I learned from none of Bracken’s tales—or mayhap all of them. That belief kept me from falling into despair as I grew older, and I thought you might be something more than only my friend. When I wished to wed you, though your parents would never have let me.”
She held his hand and felt his thumb dragging across her palm. Then, on instinct, Loren leaned across the space between them, touched his cheek, and met his lips with her own.
The shores rustled below them, and the wind whispered. The moonslight sang a song that seemed sweeter than the rest.
Loren pulled back, relishing his smile, for she had put it on his face.
She smiled herself then stood.
“I suppose I have much to think upon. But we will be no good to the others if neither of us sleeps. I find myself weary, so I will leave you to the watch. Wake me when the moons are straight overhead.”
Loren descended the dune and away from Chet.
It was a great while before she could sleep.
twenty
Xain recognized the town as they drew nearer and told them its name was Brekkur. They could smell it long before they could make out the guards who stood above the gate. It was a fishing village, and the pungent odor wafted far upon the coastal winds.
The walls were wooden, not stone, and looked newly built. “That is likely because the village is growing,” said Xain. “Many such towns wax and wane with the seasons, and in summer find themselves full of fishermen. Then they take down their walls and erect them farther out, only to draw them near once winter sets and their citizens flee for warmer climes.”
They found little resistance at the gates. Loren guessed that the towns must have received no word of the Shades marauding across the kingdom. It seemed an ill omen that so wanton a slaughter could be carried out with not so much as a whisper of warning to reach the coastline. But then again, they had seen only the killing of a rather small village, and likely that was of no great consequence to the kingdom at large.
They soon found themselves making their careful way through many shacks and stalls placed against the ramshackle huts that were the town’s mainstay. Behind each stood old vendors, leaning forward to hock their wares to Loren and the others. Most had fish, but many offered hooks, nets, and lines.
“Do they think we are fishermen?” Gem said, sniffing as one particularly odorous old woman came too close.
“Most who come here are,” said Xain. “In summer, these places are like farms for seafolk, who spring up from nowhere to ply the sea and return with bounty, which is then brought across the nine kingdoms in preparation for winter.”
“But fish will not keep that long,” said Annis. “Even in the kitchens upon the Seat, which were often stocked with ice, they did not last long.”
“They do not need to,” said Xain. “When food is suddenly plentiful, and may be traded for, citizens in every direction may turn their attention to other things. And so for a while, Dorseans near the coast eat mostly fish while they turn to crafts like smithing and clothes. Thus summer is a happy time for the common folk, for they may turn their hands to things of beauty rather than the meager business of survival. Though you would likely have never noticed in your fine halls where food was always plentiful and you never had aught to do but your embroidery.”
The words came surprisingly harsh, and Loren looked at Xain with worry. He ducked almost as he spoke, and flinched from Annis as if ashamed. His shoulders were shaking in the stiff sea breeze, and Loren guessed the sickness was wracking his body harder than normal. Annis, for her part, kept quiet and refused to look at him.
Loren had suffered no ill effects from eating the magestone on the night the Elves had visited her. The next day, she had mayhap been weary, but that might have been from the fright of seeing those otherworldly creatures. She had had no cravings for the stones, nor had she felt any insanity creeping into her mind, the way it had crept into Xain’s. It seemed that illness struck only stone-eating mages—or mayhap her other guess had been right, and the dagger somehow protected her. Either way, Loren’s relief was great.
They reached the docks soon enough, and Xain inspected the shi
ps with a practiced eye. Loren had not forgotten when they sailed on a riverboat down the Dragon’s Tail or how skilled the wizard had seemed with boatcraft. She had wondered then but was grateful now. He passed several smaller boats immediately but spent longer studying a large ship with its sail unfurled for cleaning. Then he inspected the waterline and turned away, shaking his head.
They were riding slowly down the docks, in no particular hurry, when they came to a great ship with twin masts. Loren found it breathtaking, though she knew little of ships. It towered above them, and a great wooden ramp ran down from its deck to where they stood on the dock. Upon its prow was fixed a carving of an eagle, wings folded as if diving, though it pointed straight ahead, its beak split in a scream.
“You’ve an eye for ships, I see,” came a voice.
Loren looked down to see a solid-looking man on the dock before them. He had spoken to Xain. Curled yellow hair covered his head, from the top down to the great bushy beard that tickled his chest. His shirt seemed too small, sleeves buttoned tightly around thick muscles, browned by the sun. His breeches and tunic were faded, clearly from long wear and ocean wind.
“This is your vessel?” said Xain.
“He is,” said the man with a nod. “The Long Claw, we call him, and I have commanded him across the Bay, and beyond, for nigh on a dozen years.”
“You are a man of Dulmun, judging from your speech and its make.” Xain spoke with curious interest, his voice more alive than it had seemed in weeks.
“You have an eye for many kingdoms, I would guess.” The man stood forward and offered a hand toward Xain on his horse. “I’m called Torik.”
“A pleasure, Captain.” Xain placed his hand in the larger man’s but said quickly, “Gentle, if you will. I have taken a spell of something on my journey, though ’tis nothing catching, I assure you.”
“A man must be bold to admit his ailing,” said Torik with a grin. “Though I cannot say as I would let such a man on my crew.”
Shadeborn: A Book of Underrealm Page 12