“Not our problem,” Rigan murmured.
Corran gave a snort. “It becomes our problem when they attack us. And since we didn’t kill them all, there’ll be trouble if they ever recognize us.”
“Worry later.”
Corran leaned against the cot and stretched out his legs. “I’ll worry now, thank you, if I feel like it. After all, I’ve been worrying about your sorry ass all night.”
“Magic… worked.”
Even though Rigan had his eyes shut, he could sense Corran stiffen against the edge of the cot. “Which time? The time you nearly killed yourself banishing the souls out of the hancha, or the time you almost died calling the ghosts from the burying ground?”
“Both.” Rigan’s whisper barely carried far enough for Corran to hear.
“Not again, Rigan. Do you hear me? Not until you and Aiden figure out a better way.” Corran shifted, tense with anger. “In the cemetery, when you were pulling the ghosts out of the hancha, you started bleeding from your nose, the corner of your mouth—gods, from your ears. And then when you pulled that stunt with the ruffians—”
“Smugglers.”
“—you were cold as a corpse when the spirits finally let you go. Your lips were blue, Rigan. Your heartbeat was slow, and I didn’t think you were still breathing. And then, by the time we brought you back here, you’d spiked a fever so bad I thought your blood would boil. Two days of watching you rave out of your head, burning up. Two days.” Corran’s tirade ended in a croak as his throat tightened. “You cut it too close.”
“Not going to let you die.”
Corran rounded on him. “That goes both ways, Rigan. Where does it leave me if you sacrifice yourself to save me? I won’t… I won’t survive that. Not after everyone we’ve lost. So you’ve got to find a different way. Do you hear me?”
“Fever?” Rigan’s brain felt like it had been stuffed with cotton, but the word tugged at the edge of a memory from the night of the battle.
“Yeah,” Corran said, swallowing hard. “Aiden and Elinor stayed with you the whole time, doing what they could with their potions and magic.”
“The taint…” Rigan whispered. “Blood magic leaves a residue when Rifts open. I felt it… in the hancha. When I broke the tie that bound the soul to the corpse, I felt it touch me.”
“Shit,” Corran murmured. “That’s even worse than we thought. Dammit, Rigan!”
“Not sorry,” Rigan slurred. “Do it again to save you.”
Corran growled in frustration. “I’ll have a chat with Aiden. It’s one thing to take risks, but taking on something like that without knowing what you’re dealing with is suicide.”
“No… I gambled. And won.”
“This time,” Corran snapped. “But sooner or later, every gambler loses. And that’s not acceptable. So once you’re better, we’ll work with Aiden and Elinor, see what you can find in those old books. If this has something to do with the blood magic and the monsters being conjured, then there’s got to be a way to deal with it that doesn’t almost get you killed. There has to be.”
“We’ll figure it out.” Rigan’s voice was hardly more than an exhale. He had exhausted himself again, and sleep threatened to overwhelm him. “Promise.”
Chapter Twelve
“I don’t like leaving when Rigan needs me,” Corran said as he and Ross rode for town. Two days had passed since the fight at the cemetery, and while Rigan was healing, he was still tired and weak.
“It’s not like he’s alone,” Ross chided. “Aiden and Elinor are with him.”
“They’re working on some type of scrying,” Corran replied. “If they get caught up in it, they might not think to check on him.”
“By the gods! You’re such a mother hen. Have you seen the way Elinor tends him? Your brother won’t lack for attention,” Ross said with a smirk. “In fact, he’s got every reason to stay sick as long as possible.”
Corran grinned and shook his head. “You’re just jealous.”
Ross shrugged. “Can’t say that I’d mind a night out with a pretty girl. But considering the situation we’re in, it’s not likely to happen any time soon. Lucky bastard brought his lass with us.”
“You know that was completely accidental.” Elinor had fled Ravenwood City days before Kell’s death, and Rigan believed her to be gone for good. Then the Lord Mayor’s guards came looking for hunters. When Rigan led them Below to his witch-tutors, only Aiden and Elinor had survived the treachery of a witch who had sold out to Machison.
“Still a lucky bastard,” Ross said, but his tone held no malice.
“Maybe things will settle down sometime. And then we can give up hunting and go back to doing what we used to do.”
Ross turned to look at him. “You think, after all we’ve been through, you could go back to being undertakers?”
Corran watched the road ahead of them in silence for a few minutes. “I never questioned becoming an undertaker. Mama and Papa spoke of the profession like a calling as if it were a priesthood of sorts. And, in a way, it is. To tell you the truth, I appreciate it more than I used to, now that I know something of magic. It didn’t occur to me that the grave magic we do to set the spirits at rest was really ‘magic,’ not until I saw the extra things Rigan could do, like confessing the dead. I doubt the priests can do what he does.”
“Well, there will always be dead people, and horses,” Ross said with a sigh.
“We can hear you,” Polly called back to them from where she rode with Trent. “And I am not going back to serving ale to sloppy drunks.”
“How about neat drunks?” Trent joked, earning himself a slap on the shoulder.
“Them, either. You know, we get good enough, we could all be assassins,” Polly said. “I bet they make good money, and I bet drunks don’t try to grab themselves a handful when an assassin walks by.”
Corran knew for a fact that Polly had killed one of those grabby drunks when he tried to force the issue. Kell had brought back the body with instructions to curse the spirit. At the time, Kell claimed to have been paid extra to bury the man wrong, but Corran and Rigan both figured the “fee” had come out of their grocery money, for Polly’s sake. He did not begrudge Polly her vengeance.
“You want to kill people whenever some scum like the Lord Mayor has a grudge?” Trent asked.
“Gods, no! I’d only kill guilty scum, people who had it coming to them but weren’t likely to get what they deserved.” She sniffed. “I’d be an assassin for all the right reasons.”
“Oh is that so?” Ross teased.
“Watch it, or I’ll add you to my list of people who need assassinating,” Polly warned, her eyes dancing. “It’s a very long list. Been working on it for a while now. Of course, if there’s someone you’d want done-for, I’d give you a discount, since we’re friends and all.”
“Oj and Ren save us!” Ross muttered, and Corran laughed.
Just before dark, the frantic bleating of a sheep drew Corran’s attention. “Wait,” he said, dismounting and walking over to the low stone fence where he peered into the twilight. “Someone’s staked a sheep out in the middle of a field. There’s no good reason to do that.”
“Not unless it’s meant as an offering—or a sacrifice,” Ross replied. “What was the name of the village we passed?
“Milton,” Trent said. “Sleepy little place—didn’t even have a decent inn.”
Corran glanced at his companions. “It’s still relatively early. Want to stick around and see what shows up? If the villagers are leaving an offering to keep a monster at bay, we might be able to solve their problem.”
The others nodded, and they found a shadowed copse of trees where they could tether their horses. Then they moved as close as they dared to the frightened, captive sheep and waited.
“There!” Ross hissed. Just after nightfall, a huge animal slunk from the woods. The sheep’s cries grew more frantic, but the beast never slowed, moving with the grace of a large wolf.
The creature leaped forward, the sheep bleated in terror, and then everything fell silent. They made out the shadow of the beast, rising with the body of the sheep in its jaws. Corran and the others ran toward it, circling to cut off its escape. The predator tensed, realizing it was trapped.
As the hunters raised their weapons, a short man in the work pants and boots of a farmer came running from behind a hill, shouting and waving his arms. “Don’t hurt him! Leave him alone!”
Corran stared at the man, stunned. “Get back! This thing is dangerous. We can get rid of it for you, keep you and your flocks safe.”
To Corran’s utter astonishment, the man placed himself between the creature and the hunters, shielding him with his body. Even more surprising was the fact that the wolf-creature made no move to harm the man. Corran saw a faint glow behind the newcomer, and then the wolf was gone, replaced by a naked man, skin streaked with blood, holding the dead sheep.
“A shape-shifter?” Trent murmured. “But that doesn’t explain—”
“He doesn’t hurt us—he protects us,” the farmer told them, still keeping himself between the shifter and their weapons. “We have a deal. He keeps the bad monsters away, and we pay him. In sheep.”
“He’s your pet?” Polly asked incredulously.
The naked shifter glared. “I’m no one’s pet. But it seemed to make a lot more sense to protect the farmers from those abominations and earn a regular meal than to poach sheep and always be on the run.”
Corran looked back to the farmer. “You made a deal. With a monster.”
The farmer looked pained. “George here ain’t the bad kind of creature. Before he came, we had all kinds of trouble with those big damn black hairy dogs—the ones with the red eyes—”
“Vestir,” Corran said.
“Don’t care what you call them, they were a bloody pain—carrying away our livestock, and a child or two as well. Couldn’t go do our night chores for fear of getting eaten. And then George came.”
“George?” Polly asked.
The naked man blushed slightly. “It’s what they decided to call me. My real name is rather unpronounceable for humans. ‘George’ will do.”
“So everyone’s fine with this?” Corran was still trying to imagine the farming village taking a shape-shifter under its protection. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t all that different from buying a large, well-trained attack dog.
“They are now,” the farmer said. “Took a few people a while to get used to it, but once they quit losing their cows and their sheep and their children to the real monsters, we ain’t had any trouble about it.” His eyes narrowed. “Until you came and butted into our business.”
Corran raised his hands in appeasement and sheathed his sword, nodding for the others to put away their weapons as well. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just that, usually, the monster is a problem and the village wants us to take care of it. That’s what we do,” he added.
“Well, don’t do it here,” the farmer snapped. “We like our George the way he is. And don’t go tellin’ other people about him or us. Don’t need any more busybodies poking their noses in and causing problems.” He put his hands on his hips. “Now get off my land, and don’t come back.”
Corran led the hunters back to where they left the horses, unsure whether to feel humiliated or vaguely insulted. Polly waited until they reached the shelter of the trees to break into laughter that doubled her over, tears running down her face.
“That was… amazing!” she panted, trying to catch her breath. “We go charging in like heroes, and the monster wasn’t even really a monster. And his name was George!” she added as if that was the punchline of the joke.
Trent chuckled, braving Corran’s glare. “You’ve got to admit, if it hadn’t happened to us, it would be funny,” he said, grinning. “Makes me wonder if there aren’t more smart monsters out there, natural ones that can reckon that regular meals are worth behaving.”
Corran sighed, not willing to see the humor in their debacle. “We don’t know that he’ll stay ‘tame.’”
Ross shrugged. “I’ve known people who got mauled by their own dog or kicked to death by their mule. George sounded like he knew what he was doing. He’s got a good deal. I don’t think we need to worry about them.”
Polly wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand and grew serious as she loosed the reins of her horse. “If the farmer hadn’t stopped us, we’d have killed George and put the village at risk for nothing. So we need to be more careful.”
“In all the creatures we’ve fought, Polly, this is the first time we’ve seen anything remotely like this,” Corran argued. “No one strikes a deal with a ghoul, or a vestir—or a strix.”
She shook her head. “No, of course not. But George in his human form didn’t look or sound like a savage. I wonder if he spent time among people before he went into the woods. Maybe he still does, with the villagers.”
“The wolf gets invited to dinner?” Ross asked.
“Maybe,” Polly said, swinging up to her saddle. “Just saying, we don’t need more enemies. If we get a chance to find some allies, even if they’re not quite human, it’s worth considering. We could use the help.”
Corran bit back a reply, unsure he could feel comfortable trusting a shifter. Then again, the people in Ravenwood would have burned Rigan, Elinor, and Aiden as witches without a second thought, because they were afraid. So much as I hate to admit it, maybe Polly has a point.
“We can discuss it when we get back,” he said, mounting up. “Let’s keep going. We’ve still got work to do tonight.”
When they reached the outskirts of Fenton, Corran and Ross veered off, while Polly and Trent headed for the pub. If all went according to plan, Polly and Trent would spend the next few candlemarks chatting up the locals and eavesdropping on conversations. Corran and Ross would check along the riverfront and the bay and see what they could turn up about smugglers.
“You know, I sometimes think Polly’s the most dangerous of all of us, Rigan included,” Ross said as he and Corran rode for the bay.
Corran snorted in agreement. “I won’t argue that. I intend to stay on her good side.” He grew quiet for a few minutes. “She and Kell would have made quite a pair.”
“Well, with an assassin in the family, you’d have never wanted for business,” Ross joked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Do you ever wonder how in the name of the gods the bunch of us ever ended up like this?”
Ross frowned. “Well, you and Rigan did sell your souls to the god of vengeance. The rest of us couldn’t sit by and do nothing when our neighbors kept dying.”
Corran hadn’t been expecting a literal response. Even so, the reality of their lives now as outlaws with a price on their heads took his breath away from time to time. “I hope Kell would have been proud of us,” he murmured.
“I think you know the answer to that,” Ross replied quietly.
The afternoon sun sent long shadows stretching down the wharves along the river by the time Corran and Ross reached their destination. They tethered the horses and walked down the wooden quayside. Men transferred boxes of cargo from the holds of ships into the warehouses that lined the waterfront, which would supply merchants, traders, and peddlers.
The ships that delivered to a river town like Fenton were smaller and with much shallower drafts than the sea-going trading vessels in Ravenwood’s main harbor. Those massive ships with their tall masts and banks of sails traveled back and forth across the Sea of Bakara, and sometimes beyond, to the Unaligned Kingdoms, in search of treasures to sell.
Most of the watercraft along the riverfront were fishing vessels, tied up for the evening. Their crews would go out before first light and return early in the morning with a fresh catch for the fishmongers and shoppers. Corran scanned the wharves for any sight of the ruffians they had fought a few days before, casting a glance toward the hillside overlooking the bay where they had burned the bodies of the hancha.
“I don’t see them,” Ross said quietly as they walked along the docks.
Corran shook his head. “Me, neither. Maybe they’re not from here.”
“We’re a long way from the ocean harbor,” Ross pointed out. Quite a trip to make upriver and for what? This is a fishing village, not a merchant crossroads.”
“That’s my thought,” Corran murmured. He looked around at the town. None of the shops sold fancy goods, just the necessities of everyday life. Such items usually came by wagon. Corran remembered seeing many such a load prepared in Ravenwood expressly for the purpose of being sold out in the rural areas. Few items would warrant the effort of going by boat instead. Few legal items, Corran mentally corrected himself.
The wharf smelled of fish and river water. A glance at the nearest warehouses told Corran that much of the catch was probably salted and packed into barrels if it didn’t supply the townspeople their dinner. This far out from the city, the people living in a town like Fenton either plied a trade with minimal supervision from the Guilds or worked on the lands of one of the Merchant Princes.
Which brought Corran back to the question of who had summoned the hancha.
Ross cleared his throat, warning Corran that he had been lost in thought. “There’s a gent selling fried fish and ale,” he said. “Can’t get fresher than this. What say we have a bite and see if anyone’s in the mood to talk?”
Several of the dockworkers gathered around the man selling fish from a pushcart. Corran felt his stomach rumble as they approached.
“That’ll be a bronze each,” the fish vendor said. “Gets you fish, bread, and ale.”
Corran put down two coins. “Looks good,” he said, collecting his meal and holding out his tankard to be filled.
“You come in from the city?” the vendor asked, never raising his gaze from the hot planks of fish. Corran moved aside so Ross could get his food.
“No. Rode in from Brattlesford,” Corran replied smoothly. “A friend of mine said there’d been boats in lately with some good bargains. Came down to see what you had.”
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