Kiyun looked up. “Raiders,” he called softly. He stood and studied the town, absently kicking aside one of the clubs.
“Looks like a trial block got out of hand,” Gamon murmured to Dion.
Soberly, she nodded. They dismounted. Dion knelt by the two bodies, studying them. Then she sat back on her heels.
Wolfwalker? Hishn called. The smoke you smell is harsh and old. Leave this place with me.
I need to stay. Don’t worry. There is no danger here.
But the gray wolf snarled. There is death in your nose.
And in my eyes. Dion couldn’t help her answer, and she almost flinched with the strength of the howl that Hishn sent up from the forest. The massive wolf moved then, back to the street, following Dion’s voice.
Gamon caught a flash of face at another window as the gray wolf loped into town. He started toward the house but had barely put his hand on the gate when the door opened. A stocky man stepped out. Behind him, a woman and two youths peered out from the doorway. The farmer had a sword in one hand, the steel newly cleaned and oiled but the blade itself too small for his grip. He held it firmly, but as if it were a tool, not an extension of his arm. “And who will you be?” he asked finally.
“Gamon Aikekkraya neBentar,” the older man answered first.
“I’ve heard of you,” the other man returned. “A weapons master, you are.”
“Ah, Moriko, I told you someone would come.” The woman’s voice, low as it was, sounded hard to Dion’s ears. “I told you we couldn’t hide. And one of the weapons masters here. We’ll all be blamed, for sure—”
“Quiet,” the man said harshly over his shoulder.
“What happened?” Gamon asked soberly.
“Raiders,” he said shortly, “as any fool can see.”
Gamon ignored the bitterness in the farmer’s terse words. “When did they strike?” he asked instead.
The farmer regarded him for a long moment. “Near dawn,” he said finally. “They were waiting in the hills for first light when we went to the fields for the second planting.”
“How many?”
“Fourteen, fifteen. Maybe more.” Moriko glared at one of the gutted houses. “I wasn’t exactly counting their pretty faces.”
“You drove them off?”
The farmer eyed the older man. Finally, he said, “They caught us off guard. Killed two; wounded nine or ten of us. Might as well have killed Lege, too, for all that they’ve left him a vegetable.”
“Do you have a healer?”
“Not anymore.” Moriko’s voice was flat and hard as Gamon’s. “Yrobbi was grabbed by a raider. Had a heart attack and died on the spot. Raiders would have killed the old man anyway—they went for his circlet as if it was gold till they realized he was a man, not a woman.” The farmer shrugged. “They were looking for someone specific, I guess; he just happened to get in the way.”
Dion tensed, and Kiyun, beside her, laid his hand on her arm. She didn’t seem to notice, but Hishn’s snarl turned toward the big man. Slowly, Kiyun removed his hand.
“We sent word to every village months ago,” Gamon told the stocky man sharply. “You were to keep a watch posted at the relay stations and a few archers on duty at all times. Where were your archers? Why didn’t the watch stations warn you?”
The farmer’s eyes narrowed. “We’ve always been ignored by the raiders before this, so our archers were in the fields, planting, with the rest of us. They have families to feed too, you know.”
“They had families to guard—”
“Our crops,” the other man cut in, “had to go in before the rains came so that the soil didn’t clot up. Roots can’t grow through clotted soil; they grow around the clods instead, and that kills the roots later—dries them out like bread when they’re exposed to the summer heat. Our archers know that as well as any of us.” His eyes darkened. “And it was just for half a ninan while the weather held. Four or five days—anyone would have taken that chance if their livelihood depended on it.”
“Even if their lives depended on doing something else?”
The man’s lips tightened, but he didn’t answer.
“So you figured the raiders wouldn’t know that you had dropped your guard for the planting,” Gamon said, disgusted. He pointed to the bodies. “What about those two?”
The other man shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable.
Gamon just looked at him. “They lie here, in front of your house. Are you willing to take the responsibility for that yourself?” From the doorway, the woman listening wailed softly.
Gamon brushed Moriko’s sword aside and took his arm, pushing the farmer to look toward the bodies that lay in the street. The farmer jerked free. His wife almost flew from the doorway, but Tehena moved like a flash between Gamon and the house, giving the other woman a look that stopped her in her tracks.
“These weren’t trial-block deaths,” Gamon said flatly.
The other man swallowed. “Lon— Some of the men got angry. Things just got out of hand.”
“You mean you had a lynching, not a trial. Why?” Gamon demanded harshly. “Where was your village Voice? Where were your elders?”
“Elder neBalrot was sick,” Moriko retorted. “Two of our women and three of our men were taken or killed. We’ve got four farmers out of action for at least a month, and plantings on which we depend for survival. Yrobbi would have been killed if he hadn’t died on his own. And the only reason his intern wasn’t killed, too—they were looking for anyone with a silver band— was that Asuli isn’t one to help with the plantings. She hid beneath one of the porch stones when the raiders hit us in the fields. And it’s lucky for us that she did, because without her there would have been no one to tend to our wounded.”
Tehena snorted. “So you made the raiders pay for your hurts by beating these two to death? Now that’s a civilized response.”
“Lon neHansin started it,” the man snarled back. “He threw the first rock.”
“The first rock? How many did you throw after that? And how many did your mate throw?” Gamon cursed under his breath. “You’re no better than the raiders themselves. Go on, hide in your house. Pretend you didn’t have anything to do with it. It won’t help you. This lynching will crawl around in your heart and fester till it rots your insides out. It’ll eat at you until you look over your shoulder every time you turn around. Every time you swallow, the rot will grow in your throat till it chokes you as dead as you beat these two men. They may have been raiders, but they were still human beings.” He kicked a stone toward the man. It rolled to a stop at Moriko’s feet, and the farmer jerked back from it.
“No one,” Gamon added forcefully, “deserves to die this way. And no one with a soul should ever have a hand in killing another man this way.” He gave the villager a hard look. “Where are your wounded?”
Moriko struggled with his own anger, holding his voice.
Gamon cursed again under his breath and turned away.
The other man let out an oath. “You,” he snarled at Gamon. “You turn back to me now.”
Gamon half paused and looked over his shoulder. His expression was not warm.
But the farmer wasn’t daunted. Moriko took a step toward Gamon. “You’re a fine one to talk, neBentar. Oh, it’s easy for you, isn’t it, to come in here and judge our lives. You think you can tell us what’s right or wrong, what we should or shouldn’t have done. But you’re not the one who had to make the decisions. You’re not the one who has to live with what happened. We made our decisions based on things that you, in your distant town, with your high-and-mighty training, don’t have to consider—like how we’ll feed our families, come winter, if the crops don’t go in the ground now.” He spat to the side. “You, with your fancy sword and bow—where were you when we needed another archer? Where were you when the raiders came? We’ve lost brothers and sisters and sons. You’ve lost nothing here. But you stand there with the … the gall to tell us we were a little bit rough on the raiders who killed our daughter
s and sons? Who the hell do you think you are to judge us when you don’t live here?”
Gamon’s voice was dangerously calm. “You think we have to live here to understand what you did? You think proximity defines what is right and wrong?”
“It sure as hell defines who gets to make the judgment of it.”
“I disagree.” Gamon turned away again.
The villager grabbed the older man’s arm. Like a gray wolf himself, Gamon whipped his arm in a tight circle, catching the farmer’s wrist in a flash and twisting so that the stocky man went down hard to his knees. The man’s mate cried out, but Tehena grabbed her arm. For a moment, Dion’s vision flickered: It was Aranur who held the man, not Gamon. It was Aranur’s voice that rang in her ears. The link between Hishn and Dion was thick with both their mates, and the wolf’s longing swamped her. She sucked in a breath, but Aranur’s icy gray eyes hung in her sight. Then his straight black hair faded to gray; his lean, strong hands became gnarled with age. And Gamon stared down into the villager’s face until the other man went pale from the pain.
“Do you feel this?” Gamon said softly. “This is proximity. What does it mean?”
“I don’t know,” Moriko gasped.
“It means pain, man. It means that I take advantage of you and cause you this pain—or more. I could push a little and break your wrist. I could push a lot and break your wrist, elbow, and shoulder all at the same time.” He stared down into the farmer’s eyes. “If I do break your bones, for no reason other than that I want to do so, is this act right or wrong?”
“It’s wrong, damn you.”
“Whether I do this to you or your mate, or to the farmer in the next town, does it change the lightness or wrongness of what I do?”
“No,” the farmer gasped. “For moons’ sake, let go—”
“So proximity to the act has nothing to do with the act itself.”
“All right, all right, I get your point. Please—”
Gamon released him. Abruptly, the man fell to his hands and knees. When he looked up, his dark eyes were raging with suppressed fury. “You son of a worlag.”
“Yes,” Gamon agreed.
The farmer got slowly to his feet, his wrist cradled in his other hand. “Now what?”
“Now we tend to your wounded.”
“Just like that? You come in here, spout your truths, berate our actions, bully us, then say you’ll tend to our wounded?”
“What else? You expect us to set up your trial block for you? Put you before your own elders for the lynching with which they probably helped?”
Moriko’s face tightened.
“Your wounded?” Gamon prodded.
“You’re fighters, archers.” The farmer almost made the words a curse. “You have nothing to offer our wounded.”
“We’re fighters, archers, swordsmen—yes. But—” Gamon indicated Dion with his chin. “—she is also a healer.”
The man looked at Dion, then at the wolf. “Healer Hashiacci?”
“Healer Dione,” Gamon corrected flatly.
“Dione? I thought … We heard …” Moriko struggled to contain the anger that still colored his voice. “I didn’t know,” he said finally, to Dion. “But with Yrobbi dead, we … need you. We’d be honored by your presence.”
She nodded, not trusting her voice.
“Jorg neSecton was hurt badly—that’s his house there.” He pointed shortly. “You can see the corner of the roof sticking out from behind the bakery. And Lege—he took a bad blow to the head. He’s in the next hub over, second house around the commons. Asuli’s with him, I think. There are others, but they’re not so badly off.”
Dion nodded again, then went to her dnu and pulled her healer’s pack from her saddlebags. Moriko watched her move, noting the limp that still clung to her walk. Gamon gestured back at the street. “Get some people together. Bury or burn your dead.”
The other man eyed Gamon stonily. “I’ll do it,” he said, “because it has to be done, but I’d keep quiet with the others if I were you. You weren’t here, and you don’t have to stay to deal with what happened. We don’t need your words rubbed into our ears like salt in a wound.”
Gamon’s expression didn’t soften. “Truth in willing ears is sugar on the peach. It is the unwilling ear that needs honesty.” He met the farmer’s eyes steadily, as if to reinforce his message, then finally turned away. Dion went with him, her healer’s pack slung over her shoulder. Tehena and Kiyun, ignoring the farmer, led the four dnu to the central commons, then made their way to the commons house, where they would wait till Dion was done.
Left behind, Moriko watched them for a long moment before turning to his mate. She eyed him warily. She could see the fury that laced his clenched fists. When he gestured for her to go down the street and help get some others together to build the funeral pyre, she moved with alacrity to do it.
When Gamon and Dion reached the first wounded man’s house, Gamon knocked on the door. They could hear a child crying inside, then quick footsteps, and the door opened. The woman who answered looked pale and worn. “Yes? What do you want?”
“There’s a healer here,” Gamon said shortly. “She’ll see to your mate if you wish it.”
Dion pushed back her warcap so that her healer’s band was visible. There was no mistaking the intricate silver patterns and blue-stone inlay of its simple circlet, and when the woman saw it, her face cleared. “Oh, may the moons bless you,” she cried in relief. “It was too much to hope that a healer would come in time. Asuli—our intern—has done what she can, of course, but Jorg was hurt badly—very badly this time. This way, Healer. Come in. I’m Cheria. Jorg, that’s my mate, he took a cut on his thigh, and one on his ribs—I don’t think that’s too serious—and he’s had a knock on the head, but it’s the cut in his thigh that worries me. I nearly fainted when I saw all that blood—” She stopped abruptly as Hishn padded inside. She caught the violet of Dion’s eyes. “Healer… Dione?” she asked. “The wolfwalker?”
Dion nodded briefly.
The taller woman made the sign of the moonsblessing, then moved quickly to a curtained doorway. She pulled the fabric aside. “Our intern, Asuli, stitched him up and put the salves on, but we didn’t know what else to do. I’m just trying to keep clean bandages on him. I’m afraid—” Her voice broke off as she caught sight of her daughter’s face peeking around the corner of the hall. She lowered her voice. “He’s so pale, Wolfwalker. And the swelling—his skin is so tight on his legs…”
Dion moved to the bedside and sat by the man who lay against the dark blanket. She felt his head and checked his eyes, then took a pulse. As she ran her hands over the man’s body, lightly feeling the wounds within, Hishn came and sat beside her. The gray wolf sniffed the unconscious man, then looked at Dion. His blood is slow in his veins, the wolf sent.
Dion nodded absently. “His blood leaks from inside.”
“Wait in the next room,” Gamon said to Cheria.
The woman hesitated, then ducked through the blanket as if afraid to watch Dion work. “Lori,” they heard her say to her child. “Go on down to Perix’s house for me. I need that basket of thread she keeps upstairs.”
“Can you do it?” Gamon asked quietly.
“It’s not as bad as she thinks.”
“But?”
“He is bleeding to death, slowly, from the inside. He’ll be dead by dusk if we don’t do something now.”
“Dion, you are strong enough to do this now?”
Dion’s face shuttered like the houses outside.
“Doesn’t matter if you are, eh? You’ll do it anyway.”
“It’s my stubborn streak,” she told him.
“I hadn’t noticed,” he said sourly. “Do you need anything?”
“Just silence.” She sighed at his expression. “I can do this, Gamon. It will be a simple healing, and I’ve done almost nothing for ninans except treat some of the wolves for fever.”
“I thought you usually only treated
parasites and gashes in the Gray Ones.”
“It hasn’t been a good year for them either.”
The older man frowned slowly. “Dion, while you were still… recovering, Gray Yoshi killed one of his own yearlings. Did it right in front of Aranur and me. Aranur said the yearling had to be sick. Was there fever in Hishn’s pack?”
His voice broke off as Cheria moved in the next room, and Dion shook her head, nodding meaningfully at the curtained doorway.
Gamon nodded, but his eyes were watchful as she began to work.
She fell silent then. As if in a trance, she and the wolf sat unmoving, unblinking, almost as if they no longer breathed. Dion’s hands hovered over the man’s leg, not quite touching the stitched gash. Minutes passed. A shadow crept into Dion’s blank face like a slow change of seasons, and Gamon could see where her hands were no longer steady as she held them out. “Get out of there, Dion,” he breathed, watching the pull of physical weariness fight the needs of the mental healing. “Gray One,” he said sharply. “Pull her out!”
As though Hishn heard him, she growled sharply. Dion started, blinked, and focused again. Gamon helped her to stand, and Hishn gave him a baleful look, but he nudged the wolf back with his boot. “Go on, you gray-eared mutt,” he said. “The day your wolf-walker can’t heal a simple gash is the day I hang up my own sword and retire.” He ran his hand through his graying hair. “And all nine moons know I’m too young to retire, council seat or not.”
Dion snorted. “If that’s what it will take to get you off the council, I should fumble a healing deliberately. All nine moons know that the other elders would appreciate it.”
Gamon grinned without humor. “Ah, yes, but guess who I’d recommend for my replacement?”
“Don’t even thing about it,” she warned sourly. “There’s not a chance in all nine hells that I’d bind myself to a council even more than I already am.”
“Kiyun served his term. Tehena served hers, though she fought it like the plague. I’ve served two terms already to make up for the decades I avoided it. What makes you think you can escape your fate for so long?”
“The wolves, Gamon. They’d never let me step into such danger.”
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