Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (The Fey Series)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Andre came down the aisle that Matthias had walked on. Matthias’s throat was dry. He hadn’t heard the door open. He hadn’t realized he was concentrating that hard. But it made sense.

  “Smell something odd?” he asked as Andre walked.

  Andre stopped, sniffed, and shook his head. “Candle wax, a bit too much polish. Nothing else.”

  Matthias frowned. Were his senses that much more finely tuned than Andre’s? It seemed strange to him. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “I could ask you that,” Andre said. “I have never seen anyone worship here by sitting on the floor.”

  Matthias again resisted the urge to stand. Andre made him nervous. His piety seemed so pure compared to Matthias’s scholarly approach to religion. His ignorance was equally irritating, and his recent friendship with the Rocaan even more so.

  “Come here,” Matthias said again.

  Andre came closer. His shoes squeaked on the polished floor. Matthias’s feet were cold. His entire body was cold. Andre crouched beside him.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  Matthias bit back an angry retort. “Nothing. I found this. Touch it.”

  Andre extended one finger and pushed on the carpet. It made a slight squishy sound. He glanced at Matthias as if confused, then brought the finger to his own nose and sniffed. “Blood,” he whispered. “In the sanctuary?”

  Matthias nodded. “We need to find out what has happened. I want you to assemble the staff as well as all the Auds and Danites who are assigned to this place. I will speak to the Rocaan and gather the Elders. Between us we should find out who saw anything, if anyone did, and who is missing, if anyone is.”

  Andre wiped his finger on a dry spot on the carpet, as if he couldn’t stand the feel of blood against his skin. Matthias watched him, then asked, “Did you see anything?”

  Andre started as if he hadn’t expected Matthias to speak again. “No,” he said. “Except you. I just got here.”

  Matthias nodded. Someone had to have seen something. Someone had to know what caused the blood. Perhaps an Aud was injured. Perhaps someone had driven an enemy from the building.

  “Do you think the Fey did this?” Andre asked.

  Matthias looked at him, not willing to hear that thought, but now that it was out, it chilled him. “I hope not,” he said.

  “It could be a miracle,” Andre said hopefully.

  Matthias smiled. “There have been no miracles for hundreds of years.”

  “Life is a miracle,” Andre said primly.

  “Perhaps,” Matthias said, “but I prefer to think of it as business as usual.”

  Andre shot him a look that Matthias had never seen before. Something cool and calculating lurked behind the man’s eyes. “It is a miracle,” he repeated, but for the first time since he had known Andre, Matthias didn’t believe him.

  Matthias stood up. His perceptions were probably off, thanks to the desecration of the sanctuary. The Rocaan would be heartbroken, and Matthias wasn’t sure the old man could handle more upset. He seemed not only distant, but a bit crazy these days, as if he heard the word of God when no one else did. The Rocaan’s actions worried Matthias. Porciluna hadn’t mentioned a meeting of the Elders recently, but Matthias kept expecting him to. With this new crisis it became even more important for the Elders to be unified.

  “Get an Aud in here,” Matthias said. “Don’t let anyone touch that spot.”

  Andre nodded. He stood too, and for a moment Matthias considered telling him about the bone. But then he decided that the detail could wait. The Rocaan would need to know first.

  Matthias retraced his steps down the aisle. Andre went out the Danite door toward the back, the one the Rocaan always used when he conducted the ceremony himself. Matthias took one more glance at the sanctuary. The blood smell was stronger than it had been before. He didn’t know what had happened there, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to guess.

  He didn’t like the idea of anything going wrong in the Tabernacle itself.

  When he reached the doors, he stopped to grab his sandals. His feet were icy cold, his toenails blue. He suspected the reaction was as much from fear as from the chill in the room. He had lied to Andre: the incident was probably Fey related. He had spent some time studying the incident in the dungeon tunnels with Lord Powell and Stephen. There had been blood there, too, and bones.

  Just like the invasion. In the barracks, the morning of the attack, a guard had discovered bones littering the floor, and another body beside them. A few other sites had found bones, some very close to the palace. Monte, head of the guards, had guessed that they were somehow connected to the Fey, but whether the bones belonged to dead Fey who had been completely destroyed by the holy water, or whether the bones were human, no one could say.

  Bones and blood. Bones and a body. His grip tightened on the prize in his pocket. Something had happened there, and someone had cleaned it up. He was determined to discover who.

  He ran a finger along the carvings on the door, touching the sword held aloft by the doomed Roca. The Roca was in profile, his features grim. His eyes, though, did not look human because the wood did not have real expression. What did the Roca know that they had forgotten? What gave Him all the power, the ability to be remembered, to be Beloved by God?

  Matthias leaned his head on the door. For the first time in his adult life, he wished that he had real faith, not knowledge. Because, for the first time in his life, he was beginning to understand that only faith would get him through.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Solanda cocked her head. The voice mewed again. She sat on the side of the road and washed her face with her right paw. The sound didn’t come from the forest; she heard the voice inside her head. She sighed. Shape-Shifters often had spillover magick from the other disciplines, but she had never experienced it before.

  The trees seemed impossibly tall. The sunlight filtering through them had a sparkly quality. Birds chirped behind her, but the birds near her were silent. She didn’t mind. She hadn’t been hunting. She had been heading to the Shadowlands.

  The voice had been bothering her since she’d left Jahn. At first she thought she was being followed. Then she realized that the voice was saying nothing, just making small whimpering sounds. Panicked sounds. It called to her, warning her that she was missing something important.

  She dug her paw into the corner of her eye and rubbed hard, getting the dirt out. She didn’t have to return to Shadowlands right away. Rugar always let her follow her own whims. He already knew about the Doppelgänger appointments; he didn’t need her for more than errands anyway. And this latest errand was done. If this voice turned out to be a simple trick on the part of the Mysteries, she would come back as quickly as she could.

  Better to get this voice out of her head.

  She stood up and looked both ways before she continued down the path.

  The way to the Shadowlands was along the river. But the voice urged her to go north, away from the river into the forest. The path had originally been an Islander travel route, rarely used now because of the Fey’s stronghold there. Few Islanders had lived in these parts in the first place, and most were gone by the time the Fey had arrived.

  The farther north she went, the more the path narrowed with disuse, although footprints were carved into the dirt—probably formed with the mud that had been so thick from the rains. She passed a small wooden building—not a cabin, but something that she would have thought a lookout station if the Islanders had been military people. The wood was worn and weathered, and the roof was falling off. Obviously it hadn’t been used since the Fey had arrived. She wondered what it was originally for. The path forked there, and she was about to follow the better-traveled portion when she glanced at the other fork. No. She needed to see what had been abandoned first.

  The unused part of the path slanted downhill, and its smoothness eased her aching pads. She had walked too far without resting or eating. The quiet of this place almos
t made her turn Fey, but then she remembered the story of Aio, the Shape-Shifter who had got too comfortable and was slaughtered shortly after returning to two-legged form. It was a cautionary tale Domestics told Shape-Shifter children, but it had saved Solanda many times.

  She would heed that memory now.

  She moved into a patch of birch trees, their white bark welcome contrast to the green of the forest around them. The path had grown even narrower, and blades of grass pushed up through the dirt. No one had come that way in a long time.

  The path descended another small hill, and she found herself in a clearing. The grass had grown tall, and brambles thick as weeds threaded through the trees. A cabin stood in the center of the clearing, its door open, its furniture broken and scattered on the lawn. Other Fey had been there before her and had probably taken all useful items into the Shadowlands.

  She found a path under the brambles, glad for her feline shape, and a cat’s ability to make itself twice as small as it should be. She winced as her stomach brushed against thorns on the ground. She pushed with her hind feet and dug her claws into the dirt ahead of her until she made it into the clearing. Then she stopped, picked the thorns out of her belly with her teeth, and washed her face again before surveying the ground around her.

  Scattered pieces of wood and broken pottery hid in the tall grass. Wooden nails were embedded into the ground, many point up, and she had to avoid them to keep from injuring her paws. She sniffed the destruction, looking for the voice that had led her there.

  Then she saw the skeletons.

  They were in the middle of the clearing, and the grass had grown around them. The woman’s was sprawled a few feet from the man’s. Her clothing was tattered and hung on the bones, rotted and chewed by bugs. A few strands of hair still remained underneath her skull, which was forced back as if she had been screaming when she died.

  The man was crumpled, his bones scattered as if an animal had got to them. But she knew no animal had. The marks on the bones came from Foot Soldiers indelicately lifting skin, muscle and blood from a dying being. Sloppy work. She would have to report it to Rugar.

  Islander skeletons: she could tell from the inelasticity of the rib cages, the firmness of the bones.

  And they had been dead a long time. Not a fresh kill. Probably dating from the First Battle for Jahn. Some of the units had not fought in Jahn—which would explain how they knew about such an empty place to put the Shadowlands at all.

  The voice in her head was silent: she was supposed to be there. But the skeletons told her little more than the obvious, that an Islander couple had lived there and the Fey had killed them. She left them to disintegrate in the tall grass and made her way to the cabin itself.

  The steps remained, but they were covered with dirt and animal tracks. She stopped to investigate. Beneath the dirt was a black stain. The blood had been so heavy at one time that it had seeped into the wood. No amount of rain would wash that stain away.

  She climbed to the top, slowly, uncertain of what she would find. The inside of the cabin was dark and smelled of dust. Mice had left tracks in the dirt on the porch, and the tracks mingled with those of various birds. A much larger catlike animal had left pad prints twice the size of hers along the porch’s edge—it had disdained the steps and leaped to the porch from the ground. All the tracks led inside and then out again. Apparently nothing left to steal.

  But she sniffed the air again for good measure. With all that activity, the last thing she wanted to do was startle some huge animal that ate cats. The cautionary Shapeshifter tales also warned of Shifters who had got themselves in a bad situation, without time to change to a more conducive form.

  She smelled nothing different, so she went inside.

  Most of the furniture was gone, leaving only bare floor with more tracks. Some of the tracks were human and Fey—she recognized the print of Fey boots and felt her suspicions confirmed. Much of the interior had found its way into Shadowlands.

  The cabin had a large front room, and two branching rooms. There was an economy of design she had not seen in many buildings there, and an attention to comfort that was rare in Jahn. The fireplace was centrally located between the front room and the kitchen, and the windows made the room feel lighter than it had from the outside. It must have been a pleasant place to live, in better times.

  In the back, the kitchen had a door leading to what must have been a healthy garden. Some plants still grew untended, their leaves intertwining with the weeds. The pantry door stood open, and a small hearth stove stood off to one side—a luxury in a cabin this size, and one she was surprised that her people hadn’t stolen. Perhaps they hadn’t had a means to get it to Shadowlands.

  She felt odd there, as if she were missing something. She went back into the front room and then into the first side room. It had been a bedroom. The furnishings were gone, but the headboard was still nailed to the wall. She stared at it for a moment, wondering what sort of life the people who had lived there had. Had they been happy so far from others? Had they liked their comfortable house? They had certainly died in prolonged pain, a price she would not like to pay for anything. She had seen the Foot Soldiers work, and it disgusted her. She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to actually suffer their touch.

  A slight breeze rustled through the uncovered window, carrying with it the scents of grass and dry air. She looked up, sniffed, but smelled nothing unusual.

  The voice in her head was still silent. If she hadn’t felt its presence so strongly, she wouldn’t believe now that it existed. But it did. And it wanted her to know—something.

  She left the bedroom and crossed the small hallway to the other room. It too was empty. Sunlight reflected off the dust-covered floor, a large yellow patch that made her want to lie down, rest, and warm herself. But she didn’t. The anticipatory feeling was stronger there, as if she was close to something.

  In this room nothing remained on the walls except a small stain on one side. On closer inspection she noted that the wood was darker there, as if the sun had never faded it. The stain was about a foot high and a yard wide, as if someone had kept a long board against the wall. But she could tell no more from it. If this was what she was supposed to seek out, she had no understanding of its meaning.

  She stood for a moment in the warm sunlight, letting it caress her fur. This was a side trip, one that she didn’t entirely understand.

  She sighed. She would go back to the path and follow it in the direction she initially headed, to see where it led. Then, if she found nothing of consequence, she would return to the Shadowlands.

  Her tail twitched at the thought, sending dust motes through the air. She watched them glisten in the rays of sunlight—and then she saw something in the corner. Reluctantly she got to her feet and padded over.

  She had to blink in the sudden darkness, hating the contrast between the sunlight and the rest of the room. The chill air against her fur made her shudder. She approached the corner slowly, almost on her belly, jumping each time she saw a dust mote move. The cat part of her had control, and the Fey part of her felt a slight embarrassment, as if her behavior were completely unseemly.

  Finally she reached the spot and peered ahead, half-tempted to switch to her Fey form so that she could see more clearly. The object was round and half-hidden in shadow. She couldn’t tell if it was the rolled-up body of a dead mouse, or something more sinister.

  With a tentative paw, she reached out and batted it.

  The thing rocked and she jumped away, her feline reflexes taking over. She sat and stared at it for a moment before realizing that her paw had not touched fur. It had touched wood.

  A thread of relief ran through her. She had suspected, since the Fey had arrived on Blue Isle, that the Islanders had more powers than they let on, and that someday a Fey would touch something—a dead body, a bit of food—and die as hideously as they did when touched by the water poison. That was one thing she liked about traveling in her feline body: her ave
rsion to water was considered natural.

  She got up and approached the thing again, this time batting it harder with her paw. The thing rolled toward her and hit her front legs. She sniffed it, getting the scents of dust, dried wood, and something else, something that might not have been noticeable to anyone else.

  Baby sweat.

  She batted the ball away from her and noted an entrance hole and an exit hole marring the ball’s perfection. Someone had made this. She could imagine a stick going through it or a string, something to make this a plaything for a very young child.

  A baby.

  The voice in her head was beginning to make sense now. But she didn’t inspect the ground that closely. The child might already be dead. The skeleton of an infant would be harder to find than one of an adult.

  She batted the ball around the room for a moment, enjoying the rolling sound of wood on wood. Then she let it roll back into its corner—the house must not be completely level—before she went outside.

  A baby.

  This changed things. The Foot Soldiers knew to capture babies instead of killing them, but if they hadn’t found the child, it would have starved to death on its own. If it could crawl, it might be in the yard. If something else had killed those people, the child would be dead as well.

  But she suspected it wasn’t dead. If the child lived, she would find it.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  The Rocaan held it in his palm—a tiny, thin bone about the size of the tip of his thumb. A stringy bit of matter—flesh, muscle, he wasn’t sure—still clung to its end, as if that would indicate who it came from. Or what. He leaned back in his chair and shivered despite the heat of the fire roaring in his fireplace. He had been cold for almost a year now, and he suspected that the cold did not come from the outside.

  The tapestries were fastened over the windows. He hadn’t allowed the tapestries away from the windows since the invasion. His memories of the bodies in the courtyard had spoiled the view. An Aud now came in every morning to light all the lamps, illuminating the etchings on the walls.