Chaos Rises

by Melinda Brasher



  Chaos Rises

  A Far-Knowing tale

  By Melinda Brasher

  Copyright 2014 Melinda Brasher

  Table of Contents

  Chaos Rises

  About the Author

  Far-Knowing Sneak Peek

  Other Books by Melinda Brasher

  Chaos Rises

  By Melinda Brasher

  Hala was picking rumpelberries the day she accidentally summoned the hill tiger. Two buckets, almost full. Hands slippery with juice. Stomach gurgling guiltily from the sour-sweet feast. Nothing on her mind but the warmth of the sun and her mother's rumpelberry tart. Rumpelberry soup with cream. Rumpelberry sauce on venison.

  She'd just discovered another bush when the guttural warning sounded behind her. She whirled, berries flying from her hand, as a flash of dull orange blocked out the trees.

  Pain seared her arm, where she'd lifted it to block her face. The beast's teeth dragged through her flesh until they ripped themselves free. Only then did she realize what it was: a real hill tiger. It glared at her through red slitted eyes, its black gums pulled back from three-inch fangs.

  She swung the berry bucket at its head. It hissed and she screamed, but she kept swinging. Berries pelted down on them as the tiger's paws slashed through the sunlight and tore at her skin. She lashed out with a foot, so hard the tiger jumped away, arched its back, and hissed again. Then it was gone, running off so fast she hardly even saw it bolt. She didn't let go of the bucket's handle until the birds started singing again and the blood from her arm had begun to mix with the ruined berries on the ground.

  Hala retold the story at least a dozen times that day, while the healer worked patiently on her wounds. Her brother wanted to know how fast it could run, and how thick its muscles were. Her mother demanded to know why she'd gone picking berries alone in the first place, though Hala insisted that thirteen years old was practically grown up. Her father grilled her for details of its location so he could organize the other villagers to keep watch with him through the nights to come. But the healer kept asking pointed questions about the hour before the attack, and what she'd been doing and touching and thinking about, and if she'd been particularly calm and content.

  "You think she's got the gift?" the blacksmith asked with a smirk. "Of summoning hill tigers? That's useful."

  The healer ignored him, and focused on Hala. "Do you often see animals when you're outside the village?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Do you have vermin problems at home?"

  "Are you insulting my housekeeping?" her mother huffed. "Might I remind you that you haven't dusted those books of your since before the mountains rose from the plains?"

  "Your housekeeping would have nothing to do with it," the healer said, then stopped her questioning. But the seed had been planted, and its roots were growing in Hala's head, blotting out the pain in her arm.

  The village had nearly thirty families, if you included the outlying farms, but only one trained mage: the healer. She herself admitted she was better at herbology than magecraft. The blacksmith's gift was probably greater. He certainly acted like it, going around lighting fires with his glare and casting embarrassing suggestion enchantments on anyone foolish enough to submit.

  The handful of other villagers with the gift couldn't do much more than enchant their bread to taste sweeter or make themselves look younger on nights when the village held dancing in the green. No one she knew had ever summoned animals.

  All night, consciousness ebbing and flowing with the pain, Hala hoped it was true. Being a magic-wielder was something. Not as good as beauty or wealth, but something. And Kreg would finally notice her—Kreg who liked to sneak around doing his clever mischief under the protection of spotty look-away enchantments. Maybe she'd be brave enough, one day, to tell him that his spells never worked on her. She never looked away, since he was the most interesting thing in the whole village.

  By morning she'd convinced herself that every squirrel or butterfly she'd ever seen had come in answer to her summons. She tried to summon critters all day, as her mother made her lie in bed and drink broth. Not so much as a fly came within sight.

  When she felt better, she begged the healer to train her.

  "Never been any good at summonings," she replied. "I'd only teach you enough to get you in trouble." Nevertheless she tried, over the months, to impart a bit of magecraft, especially when it became clear that the hill tiger hadn't been a coincidence. First it was a bat in the middle of the day, squeaking and frantic. Then a baby hedgehog that wobbled after her as if confused who its mother was. Hala tried to pinpoint when it happened, or why, but it seemed to have no pattern. The healer would sigh. "There's always a pattern. You just have to see it. Find your essence. Work with it."

  By the time she turned fourteen, animals were popping up everywhere. They'd wake to find that the neighbor's cow had broken through their fence again and was eating the vegetables. She got used to walking with cats twined around her legs, and acquired a history of bee stings so long not even the beekeeper could rival her. But it was never much more than an accident.

  "Stop!" her mother would yell in frustration as she shooed away a hungry weasel or brought her broom down hard on a nest of hoarder spiders that hadn't been there before.

  "I'm not doing anything," Hala would protest, even if the house had just filled mysteriously with gnats or rats or poison frogs. The problem was, if Hala actually wanted a hungry weasel or poison frog, nothing ever showed up.

  She didn't even like animals all that much. They were dirty, and smelly, and she didn't know how to relate to them once she'd summoned them. Nevertheless, becoming a shepherdess seemed the logical thing to do, since the creatures followed her about even when she wasn't trying to summon them. The arrangement worked pretty well, except when she lost one. She didn't dare face the villagers until she found it. Once it took her six days, despite trying her hardest to summon it.

  At least her gift wasn't a total loss. Three days after her sixteenth birthday, she'd managed to accidentally summon a magnificent stag, right in front of half the village, and even if she never could help find their lost dogs, they still talked about the huge buck. Best of all, Kreg had started talking to her. He loved to hear the story of the hill tiger and loved even better to tell his version of the encounter with the fifteen-point stag.

  "So proud and strong, he was," Kreg often said. And once, when they were alone in the woods at dusk, looking for another, he sighed. "If I were an animal, I'd be a stag."

  Hala thought a raccoon was more his style, him with the pranks and the tricks and the sneaking around. Sometimes he even took her on his escapades, creeping into a friend's house one night and hiding everyone's socks, painting a silly face on stern old Farmer Torik's milk cow, hiding beetles in the local bully's bed. They did it all under Kreg's look-away enchantments that only worked if no one was watching out for them. And after a while, people were always watching out for Kreg.

  He never teased her for her inability to manage her magic, like some of the other villagers did, and soon she found they could laugh together about her inadvertent visitors. When she accidentally summoned a traveler's horse one afternoon, summoned it so insistently that it threw its rider and broke down the door of Hala's house, Kreg was the one who ran for the healer. He was the one who later charmed the ruffled traveler into not calling on the baron's soldiers to settle the matter. And he was the one who spent all the next afternoon helping her father fix the door.

  When out alone with her sheep, she couldn't help hating the beasties a little, since they took her away from Kreg. Nevertheless, if they stayed too long in her little field near the village, they'd graze it to stubble, so she often took them far beyond, spending a few nights in the rocky h
ills where others rarely grazed. She'd strap a bedroll to her back and sleep beneath the milky light of the stars, a knife close at hand in case her sleep thoughts summoned a badger or a rock rat or—worst of all—another hill tiger. Most nights nothing worse interrupted her sleep than a few biting insects or curious winged things she never saw.

  One clear evening, however, just as she was drifting off to sleep, she heard a whuffle near her head and felt hot breath against her ear. She tried to get up, but the bedroll tangled around her legs and she found herself on hands and knees facing down a wild boar. Its evil eyes glinted behind the curving foot-long tusks. She grabbed for her knife and slashed at it, but it simply tilted its head sharply, slicing one tusk against her knife arm. She pulled her arm back, bloody, and kicked away the blankets that trapped her, jumping over to the fire ring, where she'd left a few long sticks. The boar didn't charge. Like so many other summoned animals, it looked rather dazed, inclined to stay where it was until it assessed the situation. She waved her arms and her firewood stick and stomped her feet and yelled at it to leave, but instead of bolting, it began nosing around her campsite.

  It found her bag of provisions, gulped down the ham with one snort, gnawed on some carrots, found them not to its liking, and left slivered bits of bright orange in a three foot radius around the now-slobbery bag. Finally, Hala charged, stick brandished. It turned, flipping its runty little tail, and charged into her flock of dozing sheep.

  "No! Stop!" The first bleating sheep tempted the boar into hideous mischief, as it ran back and forth like a madman, scattering every last one of her sheep.

  When finally the boar disappeared, so had her entire flock.

  She wrapped the cut on her arm and wandered the rocky hillside for hours, ardently thinking of her flock, trying to summon them. Three popped up nearly immediately, feet muddy and eyes blank. Most of the rest trickled slowly in, along with a white owl and a chubby rodent that kept just at the edge of her sight. She slept for a while, uneasy, waiting until morning to look for the last few wayward sheep. It was nearly noon by the time she found them all.

  That's why she was late that day. Why darkness fell before she even came within sight of home. Why she wasn't there with everyone else when it happened.

  She'd just about decided to spend another night on the road and make her way home in the light. Then she saw the glow. A red sunset where the sun had long gone to sleep.

  "What's that?" she asked Patchy, the followingest of her followers. Patchy baaaed conversationally. The village hadn't planned any bonfire celebrations.

  "Hurry up," she called to the sheep behind her, and picked up her pace.

  The muted glow grew murkier as she walked, clouded now with plumes of black smoke she was starting to smell. Stinky and Stumble refused to go any closer. She left them behind. At the crest of the last hill, she looked down at what should have been her village. All she saw were flames leaping skyward. She could hear the screams now, screams for help and mercy.

  She dropped everything and ran, the tinkle of her flock's bells fading behind her. Even Patchy hung back. The village disappeared in the trees again, but the glow didn't. Nor did the screams. Or the smoke that burned her eyes.

  She broke free of the trees into one of Farmer Torik's fields, one that edged every year closer against the houses of the village. Hands on her knees, bent over and gasping for breath in the acrid air, she stared at Torik's house, now a blackened frame against a yellow-orange inferno. Behind it she could barely make out the ruins of her friend Epi's house above their tiny shop. The blacksmith's place blazed higher than the rest. Lights and shadows wavered and thrashed before her stinging eyes. Flames of blue—almost purple—wove themselves through the nightmare.

  And then, with a wrench to the gut, she realized that the shadows writhing before her weren't shadows, but people. Human forms waving their arms in desperation, scratching at thin air, pulling each other one way then the other.

  And right at the edge of the field, on the road that led straight into the village, stood a figure, a dark silhouette against the flames, tall and still.

  "Help!" she tried to call to him, but her voice lay trapped inside. Her mother was in there somewhere. Her father. Her little brother. Epi. Uncle Nak. Kreg. Why didn't they just run? Run straight out into the field where she huddled like a rock? But they remained among the burning buildings, scrambling all directions but outward.

  She turned again to the figure on the road, the figure who stared, unmoving, into the fiery chaos before him.

  "Sir!" she cried, and this time her voice escaped and crossed the distance between them. He spun. She stumbled forward, toward him and the village.

  She could hear the crackle of the fire now, and make out words shouted in terror.

  "I see the woods," someone yelled.

  "Papa!"

  "Run to the woods!"

  The dark figure's shoulders drew back and the field around her burst with blue-purple flames that rose high into the night and then disappeared, the light blinding, the flash of tremendous heat sucking the breath out of her. She toppled sideways into the stubbly charred stalks of Farmer Torik's fields and pushed herself to her knees in time to watch the figure stretch out his arms, as if holding a giant ball of wool between his hands. She could feel the utter strength of his concentration, almost as if she were an empath, not a powerless weasel-summoner. Then he raised his head to the sky and lowered his arms.

  The screams changed timbre. "It's gone again," she heard.

  "Which way?"

  "Papa!"

  From her knees she watched as a beefy man—Butcher Yul?—neared the field that would mean his salvation, and began to swat at the empty air with a blanket, as if hammering at a wall. Another figure began to run toward freedom, then swerved off and circled back into the flaming center of the village.

  What was this? It couldn't be…she'd never…could it be an enchantment of some sort? A dark, ugly, deadly spell like nothing she'd ever seen, not from the blacksmith, not from the healer, not from the travelling mages who came through every so often.

  "Reveal yourself!" the stranger's voice boomed out, and for a moment she wanted nothing more than to obey.

  "No," she whispered to herself. "No, no, no." She crawled away from him, trying to clear her mind, trying to think.

  He was her rescuer. He would make everything better.

  No. He'd trapped everyone she loved inside a burning village.

  He could help save her family.

  He'd done this to her family.

  The rough ground dug into her knees. She focused on that and kept crawling, away from him, toward her house, which she couldn't see beyond the flames, but which must surely be burning too. As if summoned by her imagination, mage fire burst from the ground to her right, not five feet away. She switched direction but the brief columns of flame followed her. Could he sense her? If so, she'd never be able to hide from him.

  But magecraft took concentration, especially this much at once.

  She closed her eyes and focused her thoughts like the healer had told her to. She formed a picture in her head of the most vicious, biggest hill tiger she could imagine. Hungry and territorial. She aimed her thoughts at the hills behind her, calling, pleading. It had never worked before, with anything but Patchy and some of the other more pliant members of her flock. She didn't know how it could possibly work now. But she tried.

  Pain streamed through her, heat like knife blades. Her hair lit up the sky with fire. She beat at her head until the flames went out. A sick sweet odor choked her as she crawled off again, dizzy.

  Hill tigers were too solitary. Too rare. She focused then on the mice and bats that plagued her so often when she didn't want them. Of course they wouldn't obey her summons now. The air remained empty of wings, the ground free of scurrying feet. She zigged and zagged across the field, bloodying her knees and her palms, only a few feet ahead of the fire he called down on her.

  Finally she thought of
her sheep, heading slowly home somewhere behind her. Patchy's mottled face. Beetle's moist nose sniffing her hand. Applesauce and Stinky and Carpet. She called up a picture of Stumble, who hardly stumbled anymore, running toward her like a deer. Be specific in your thoughts, the healer had told her. She pictured Stinky's one black leg, Onion's torn ear. Find the calm inside you. She forced her heart to slow down and pushed her fear down into her feet. Search for your essence. Your power will be there. The healer described her own essence "like ferns I can't see, and mint." One traveling mage, after admonishing her on the rudeness of the question, relented and said that his sounded like water crashing on rocks. The blacksmith had laughed. "Fire, of course." But the only fire she felt now was mage fire, and it was on her skin, not inside her. The flames were gone by the time she opened her eyes, but the pain remained, searing deep into her left arm, still burning. She dove behind a tiny tool shed, put her sleeve to her mouth to try to block the smoke, and took three long breaths, all while pleading with her sheep to come home, begging them with tears, tempting them with treats, petting Patchy's head. The pain was so bad she thought she might faint. Something hit the tool shed and the voice of the dark stranger cut through the night. "You'll never get away, girl." The screams from the village echoed inside her, where she was supposed to be finding the calm, finding her essence. All she felt was a swirling love for her family, her friends, and the boy whose lips she had not yet touched. That wasn't her essence. But she seized on it and called with it to her sheep. The fire-lit night wavered around her, and just as things were going dark before her eyes, she heard a bleat. The stomping of little hoofs. Dozens of them.

  "Patchy," she shouted out loud.

  "Come out, girl," yelled the stranger, "or I'll make you regret it."

  The stomping grew louder. Then they appeared, their wool glowing in the light of the giant flames. She peered dizzily around the tool shed, which was now on fire too, and for a moment couldn't see the man. She'd expected him to be much closer, following her with his bursts of flame, but he hadn't moved from where she first encountered him. She knew it. He was concentrating too hard.

  Something moved behind her and she swung to see Patchy, who reached out as if to lick her face. She stood. Nearly her whole flock jostled each other in confusion behind Patchy. Now it was just shepherding tricks, not magic. She staggered around behind them, beating at their rumps, clapping her hands, herding them around the shed and toward the stranger.

  Fire burst across the flock. They squealed like pigs but she shouted "yah" at their backs and ran straight at the mage, herding them in front of her. The stranger let off another volley of flame, and then an icy blast of pure terror crashed over Hala, like something external, pushing its way in. The sheep bleated but kept on going, like sheep tended to do once they'd started. Hala gasped for air and nearly turned away, but she grabbed the tail closest to her and let the sheep drag her along. After a moment, the fear eased and she yelled "yah" again.

  The man backed up a few steps, then kicked at one of the sheep. By then he was surrounded, their dense sheep heads butting against his legs. He stumbled a little and the sounds from the village changed again, like during her summer swims at the lake, when her head came above water and the noises that had been blurred before became words, voices she recognized.

  "There's the road!" someone yelled.

  "Straight up there!"

  "Run!"

  One of her sheep fell over. Then another. The stranger, face still in shadow from the hood he wore, kicked at another sheep and then let out a boom of laughter. "Very clever, girl. I'll have to add anti-livestock measures. My thanks for the highly instructive evening." Then he flung his hand toward the sky, and a pillar of blue-purple mage fire shot twenty feet in the air. When she tore her eyes away from the fluttering tips of flame, he was gone. The fire blazed and the sheep milled and she should have seen where he'd gone, but the flaming village pulled at her attention. This made Kreg's look-away enchantments look like child's play.

  As soon as he was good and truly gone, taking with him his magic, the villagers started streaming out of the flames.

  "Here," Hala yelled, throat raw. She waved her arms. "It's safe here!"

  Butcher Yul reached her first, carrying his son in his arms, dragging his daughter behind him. The girl called for her mother and tried pulling away, but the butcher just sank to his knees, wrapped his children in his arms, and wept.

  "Mama?" Hala called as she helped the villagers stumble to safety. "Papa?" She found them in the crowd, wild-eyed and singed, but alive. Her brother didn't even have a shirt on, or shoes, and he was looking around as if he'd lost something. She pressed them all into her arms, though her burns flared at the faintest touch.

  "Circles," her father mumbled.

  "What?"

  "Couldn't see the way out. We were just turning in circles."

  "Like a bug in a mixing bowl," her mother added.

  Hala looked at where the stranger had been standing. "There was a man…" she tried to explain. "He was holding you in somehow. He…he laughed." The echo of that laughter chilled her, despite the flames roaring where once the village had stood, despite the heat of her own damaged skin. Had her sheep's disruption actually amused him? What kind of monster would take pleasure in this? Butcher Yul was still weeping, and someone shrieked in pain nearby.

  "Where's Epi?" she demanded of her parents.

  Her mother shrugged helplessly and wrapped her brother in her arms.

  "Epi?" She pushed into the crowd of villagers and soon spied her best friend. "Epi? Are you hurt?"

  Epi shook her head, but in the darkness her eyes gleamed wildly.

  "Have you seen Kreg?" Hala asked.

  "He saved my grandpapa. Broke the door and everything." Epi coughed and bent over, arms braced on her knees. "I was screaming for grandpapa and Kreg was looking for you and he found me and it was glowing everywhere, stripes of flame in the air, no one could find the way out. Kreg broke in and dragged grandpapa outside. It was horrible."

  But there behind her Hala could make out Epi's parents and her grandpapa, huddled together, alive. Kreg would be unsufferable now, repeating his heroics to anyone who would listen, pushing the tale of her hill tiger out of his repertoire. She had to smile, despite everything.

  "I think he's over there." Epi pointed.

  "Kreg!" She could see his head now, hair sticking out all over like a thistle. When she made it to him, she held him tight. He was breathing fast, and for a moment she thought it a sign of his happiness to see her. He pulled away, stumbled two steps sideways, and put a hand out for balance. She grabbed his arm to steady him. "Sit."

  They settled on the ground, but his shallow breaths still beat a frantic rhythm.

  "I heard what you did for Epi's grandpapa," she said.

  "Yes. He…" Kreg blinked. "He couldn't trap that pesky mouse."

  "Mouse?"

  "I got him, though. The bucket trick."

  "Kreg, I'm not talking about your famous mouse victory." That was weeks ago. "Tonight…you saved him from the fire."

  He coughed, gagging for a moment, and a trail of spit snaked down his chin. In the faint light it looked almost black. He wiped it away. "Yes, the fire," he said, every word punctuated by a quick breath. "Do you think we should go back in?"

  "Of course not. Kreg, can you breathe more slowly? It's over. You're safe."

  He just shook his head, shaky bursts that matched his breathing. "Can't." He put a hand to his chest and pushed on it.

  Her own breath started to match his, as she tried to think, dizzy with fear and the throbbing pain of the burns. She yelled for his parents. She yelled for the healer.

  "Drowning," Kreg gasped. He took her hand and started making wobbly swimming motions in the air.

  "No," she whispered. "There's no water here. We're not drowning."

  His eyes darted back and forth. "The lake?"

  "No, we're not at the lake."

  Then hi
s parents appeared, and the healer, who pushed her aside, telling Kreg to count to three with each breath. He tried, but the wheezing only came faster. His mother began to cry. The healer scrambled in her satchel for a pungent cream she rubbed under his nose, and for a moment she thought it was going to work. But only for a moment.

  Someone else called for the healer, terror in the plea. She looked back and forth, then closed her eyes and put her hands around Kreg's neck, lightly, where Hala knew a mage like her could sense his essence. When the healer opened her eyes, she shook her head, closed up her bag, and rose.

  "Wait!" Hala grabbed at the healer's arm. "Please."

  "There's too much damage." She wouldn't look at Hala, but ducked away toward the other voices in the darkness that needed her.

  Kreg's father scooped him up, though Kreg was almost as tall as his father now, and carried him farther away from the smoke still billowing behind them. Hala followed, step after step, and so did Patchy, bleating soulfully as Kreg coughed and gagged. Finally, surrounded by woods, Kreg's father's strength gave out.

  "The air's clear here, love," Kreg's mother whispered. "Breathe deep."

  He only clutched at his chest again. Hala couldn't see much in the darkness, but his eyes caught the light of the stars every time they fluttered open. Hala took his hand.

  "Remember the stag you summoned?" he wheezed. "In the green? Fifteen points. Magnificent. I'll never forget."

  Hala nodded in the darkness, but couldn't speak. She closed her eyes. Like the healer advised, she tried to find peace within, stillness beyond the throbbing of her heart, the sound of Kreg's life ebbing away. She pictured a stag, taller than the biggest horse she'd seen, antlers forked like lightning, nose black, eyes big and glossy. She tried harder than ever, because now she knew she could do it. The sheep had answered her summons, after all, and driven away the monster who had done this to them all. She focused inward. Her essence had always danced away from her, like a name she couldn't quite remember. Nothing danced now. Instead, some part of her drifted, swayed. Could her essence lie within the motion itself? Eyes pressed closed, mind on the stag, she let herself drift.

  "Look!" Kreg exclaimed, his voice stronger for a moment.

  Hala opened her eyes. There, not twenty feet away, regal between two straight trees, stood a stag, ghostly in the darkness

  "Bigger than before!" Kreg gasped. It wasn't true. He was smaller, younger, but maybe that made him curious, because he didn't bolt. He sniffed the air, then stepped carefully toward them, out of the shadow of the trees to where the starlight illuminated him. He shook his antlers, but not in challenge, then stepped closer. They all stared. Kreg's mother's tears stopped. The stag looked at Kreg, and Kreg looked at him. For long moments all was still. Then the great animal made a huffing noise, turned, and ran gracefully back into the darkness and the woods.

  Kreg's breath no longer came in ragged gasps.

  It no longer came at all. But his lips had curved into a smile of awe.

  Hala lay her head on his chest and cried, huddled there with his mother and father, as Kreg's essence slipped away through the night, carried on the back of the stag she had summoned.

  They buried him, along with four others, in a dawn laced with scarlet, while the village still smoldered. Beetle and Stinky were dead too, and many of the villagers couldn't yet breathe normally. The healer wasn't sure they ever would. Burns and cuts scored swaths of exposed skin, and several people's heads remained in a fog that went beyond the fear and the grief and the thinning smoke.

  The villagers said their words of goodbye, and then began drifting away into silence.

  The healer laid her hands on Hala's shoulders. "You found your essence. You used it for good. We all owe you our lives."

  Hala stared numbly at the graves. "I couldn't help them."

  "Oh, but I think you did. Easing death is a gift too."

  Hala wished she could blot out the beekeeper's tears of relief that her children were safe, even as she lay dying. She wished she wouldn't see Kreg's face everywhere she turned, even if he had smiled, there at the end. She wished the stag had stayed, because if it had, maybe she could have remained forever in that moment with Kreg. Hala wished many things that could never be.

  "What of the man who did this?" she whispered. "What if he tries it again?"

  "I don't know." The healer pulled Hala close. "Maybe the baron's men can find him. Stop him." Smoke floated into the sky, just like her maybe.

  "Hala?" Her brother had appeared out of nowhere, his voice small, lost.

  Hala shook herself and focused on her brother.

  "Tell it to me again," he said. "The story of the hill tiger."

  Hala held her brother's hand and took a deep breath. "I was picking rumpelberries that day. I had two buckets, almost full…"