ELEVEN

I led Torch from his stall. Duck had given all he had, and Torch was the only other horse I trusted not to run when the spirits came. He'd been trained as a warhorse for Kith, so he'd stand for things any sane horse would run from. It also meant he'd be testy with anyone but Kith on him. I was hoping he'd remember me from when I'd helped train him.

I talked to him while I put Kith's saddle on his back and tightened the cinch. "It's partly for him, you know. If someone doesn't step in, he'll die. So you're going to have to bear with me, just for tonight. Quiet, now, I don't want him back here. I don't want him to know what I'm up to, or he'll fight for the wrong side."

I adjusted the stirrups, untying the laces, pulling the leather shorter, then retying the laces with the speed of long practice. There was an old waterproof cloak hanging at the back door of the stables. The deerhide it was made from was still soft and pliable despite its obvious age.

Leading Torch, I walked out to the small run behind the barn. The field wasn't much, just enough to let a horse stretch his legs a bit. It was surrounded on four sides by buildings, but there was a narrow alleyway between it and the fourth building. While I'd been in the stable, the rain had turned into a downpour.

Wandel's mare was turned out. She raised her head briefly, but when she saw it was only us, she dropped her muzzle to nibble at the overgrazed stubble covering the ground.

Torch stiffened and blew air when I mounted.

"Come on, Torchy. You know me. I'm not stealing you, just borrowing you for a bit." I kept my body loose and my voice soft. If I got nervous now, he'd fight. I was counting on some very old memories to get us through this.

His dark-tipped ears flattened and released, signaling his uncertainty. He stomped a front foot impatiently, then lifted both off the ground briefly. On Faran's Ridge lightning struck again; I tried not to pay attention.

I asked Torch to move forward. He hesitated before crossing the field in a stiff-backed walk. I set him through his paces: slow walk; speed it up; shift his front quarters to one side or the other; then turn attention to his hind legs. We sidepassed left, then right. By the time we'd worked into a canter, he'd decided I belonged on his back. I collected him and stopped him at the corner where the stable met the inn. By taking the diagonal across the field, I could work up enough speed for him to jump the fence.

I set him at it. We'd take the fence at the opposite corner. It would make the obstacle he had to jump wider, but it would give him half a stride more landing room. It was no wider nor higher than jumps I'd taken on him before. But I hadn't taken him out in a thunderstorm.

Torch danced with eagerness, knowing, as horses will, what it was I intended to ask of him. He took the fence handily, resenting it when I asked him to slow to a walk.

I intended to take him through the village by the alleyways; if we trotted, someone was sure to hear us. It would be best if no one saw me, especially riding Kith's horse.

The alleys in Fallbrook twisted around more than the roads - which weren't exactly the King's Highway. Some of the alleys were cobbled, and the heavy rain made them slick.

I rode around the edge of someone's storage shed, then down a gully into someone else's backyard. That's when I heard voices ahead. There were a number of people talking quietly. Torch stopped almost before I asked him. I couldn't see into the next yard because of a bramble rose hedge and a sharp rise to the ground.

I was still trying to remember who lived in the next house when someone screamed.

I leaned forward, and Torch climbed the steep, mud-slick surface of the alley at a flat-out run. The hedge continued around the alley end of the yard, but it was lower, and Torch popped over it without slowing his headlong flight.

There were six or seven people in the yard. One of them was down, rolling from side to side with something dark and furry on his back. In the two strides it took Torch to reach the man's side, I saw that the animal was one of the odd creatures I'd seen in the Fell bog.

Pikka, that's what Caefawn had called it. I jumped off Torch's back while he was still running and used the momentum to lend strength to the blow I struck with my cedar staff. It hit the creature in the ribs with a satisfying crunch.

The pikka shrieked and, unlike the hillgrim, it let go and turned to face me. Pig-sized, intelligent eyes assessed me as I appraised it in return. Growling low in its throat, the pikka paced back and forth, looking for a path to me that would elude the bite of my staff. I backed away, little by little, trying to lure it from the fallen man.

Pikka used magic to go undetected.

If I'd been riding Duck, the second pikka would have killed me. As it was, I heard Torch squeal and felt the ground shake beneath his hooves. I turned my head just in time to see him strike another pikka behind me. My lapse in attention gave the wounded one time to slip past the cedar staff and attack.

I turned farther away from it, and the pikka grabbed for the nape of my neck. It got a mouthful of hair and cloak instead. I dropped over backward, on top of the pikka, jerking loose the frayed strings that held the cloak to me. I rolled over without shifting my weight off the animal. Its sharp claws and sharper teeth were, for the moment, tangled in the tough old cloak. I tried to reach for my knife, but when I loosened my hold on the cloak, the pikka's struggles increased and I had to take a better grip. I could see my knife, touch the haft with my elbow, but it was tantalizingly out of reach.

And then it wasn't.

The knife slid out of its sheath and onto the cloak. Despite the thrashing of the pikka, the knife traveled smoothly up the cloak until I could shift and snatch it up.

Knife in hand, I looked across the wet grass to the pikka's victim. It was Poul. He'd rolled over onto his stomach and his eyes were on mine. He gave a short, painful nod, then his eyes closed as he grimaced in pain.

My left hand held the pikka's head against the ground while my knees on its shifting shoulders kept it relatively still. I drove the blade of my knife into its throat through the cloak. I stayed where I was until the creature was still.

I looked up and saw the people who'd been gathered in the neat garden. I had to laugh at the irony. The pikka had interrupted a meeting of magic-haters. Poul's mother was there, and the smith's wife. I wondered if the smith knew his wife was involved with the people who'd killed his brother. No, I'd forgotten, he'd been told it was the raiders. Perhaps it had been - or the fetch, or any one of a number of deadly creatures. The pikka weren't the only things invading the valley.

I couldn't help but wonder if the smith's wife had found Touched Banar a burden she could do without - a grown man who couldn't tie his own bootlaces without help. Had she encouraged these people to kill him?

Since everyone was too scared to come closer - scared of me or the pikka, I didn't want to guess - I left the pikka's cloaked body and hurried to Poul. Poul, who'd saved me by using magic to give me the knife.

Poul lay limp, but I could see his chest rise and fall. His shoulder was a mess. Someone should have been trying to stop the bleeding while I was fighting the pikka. He'd lost a lot of blood.

I could almost hear Gram's dry voice saying, "The bleeding will ensure the wound is clean - if it doesn't kill him."

I stripped out of Caulem's green tunic, wadded it up, and pressed it into the wound. Poul's mother knelt on Poul's other side and pulled off her apron. She ripped it into strips and began wrapping the cloth around his shoulder over the tunic, to hold it in place.

"It's bled freely enough to take care of most chances of infection," I said, my voice sounding shaky to my ears. "My gram would tell you to leave the bandaging alone for a bit to let the bleeding stop."

"I've been tending my menfolk long before you were born," she said in the same sour tones she'd always used to hide her soft heart.

I backed away from Poul, glad he wouldn't die - at least not today. My cloak lay in the mud where I'd thrown it. Like me, it was covered in blood. Clad only in Caulem's thin linen undershirt, I shivered in the cold.

I couldn't look at any of the people in the yard. They were the core of the hatred that threatened the village every bit as much as the bloodmage and the earth spirit. I couldn't bear it. So I walked to the pikka Torch had killed. Kith's horse had done a fair job at pounding it flat. I took a close look at the wounds and noticed blistering where Torch's iron-shod hooves had touched flesh.

I pulled the cloak off the one I'd killed. This one had taken far less damage. Long, black fangs showed through lips pulled back by death. It looked more like a small bear than a dog or cat, but its face was narrower. The pikka's side was caved in where my staff had hit it. It would have died soon even if I hadn't managed to slit its throat.

Someone threw a dry cloak around my shoulders. I looked up to meet Poul's mother's eyes.

"I've got to go," I said abruptly. "I have business to attend to. Someone might get the priest - he and Koret have been studying the new creatures that've been plaguing us. Tell him that I think it's a creature the hob called a pikka."

"We'll take care of it," she said.

I looked away and nodded. "Thanks. If more show up, you might try fighting them with steel. The hob says that some of the wildlings are sensitive to it."

Torch was waiting patiently, his rump turned so he wasn't facing into the rain. I looked him over for wounds as best I could in the dimming light. His legs and underside were covered with mud. He didn't limp when I walked him out. I swung to the saddle and settled the cloak so it didn't interfere with riding.

"Aren," she said.

I looked up.

"When people are hurt and scared, they do stupid things. Cruel things."

I thought about Touched Banar and glanced around the yard at the people clustered about Poul, people who almost certainly had something to do with Banar's death. The smith's wife looked up and met my eyes briefly.

I rubbed my face wearily, heartsick, and said, "I hope that thought comforts you, madam." I was going to do something evil myself - who was I to judge these people? "I hope it comforts me, too."

I think she would have said something more, but I leaned forward and Torch lifted into an easy canter, then popped back over the hedge.

I called the spirits of the bog first, thinking it was only just to follow the order Caefawn had laid out. Ghosts, with their ties to bloodmagic, I would leave alone.

The ground gave off sucking sounds as I stepped closer to the bog. My call was strong, driven by my anger and by my hatred of the kind of person I was soon to become. My call echoed in my head like a shepherd's horn.

The noeglins came, not just one this time but all of them. As my call strengthened, I could feel them inside my head, a great, dark wave of maliciousness.

I'd learned a few things about magic from the hob - rituals to twist for my use. I held up a branch of mountain ash, what Caefawn called rowan, stolen from a tree in someone's backyard. My knife in one hand, the branch in the other, I said, "By rowan and iron I bind you to me. By iron, rowan, and the bit of you I hold, you will obey my words."

The slight breeze wafting across the bog stilled for a moment as I spoke.

"You will await me at the eastern entrance to the town tomorrow at dawn. There's a two-story cottage"  -  where I'd been sleeping - "with moss growing on the roof and a maple tree set to the north of the main doorway. You will stay there, in the attic, until I call for you."

I waited until all the protesting was done before sending them off. I kept something of them inside me, imprisoned in that cold part of my mind. Evil, I thought, not cold. To fight evil, I had to become evil myself.

I tested the power I held. It wasn't a tithe on what the ghost had offered. But the ghost was old, older than the manor, maybe older than the hob's long sleep - and she was gone anyway. I couldn't use ghosts. The bloodmage used death magic, and he was more experienced than I - a valid excuse, but not the real truth. I just couldn't forget Touched Banar's ghost cuddling against me as if I could protect him. They had been human once; the newer ones could be people I knew. I couldn't expose them to the evil I was doing.

Torch shoved his head against my shoulder, and I turned to find him wet with sweat and white-eyed. I patted him consolingly, trying to ignore the noeglins' presence in my mind.

"Come on, Torch," I said. "It'll get worse before it gets better."

So I called the widdles from the gardens and houses, the afanc and fuath from the river, and the frittenings and groggies from the woodlands. Locking them in their own cells in my mind until I thought I might go mad with the screaming, the piteous weeping, the insidious seep of evil.

The sun finished its run in the west, and the weariness of its setting bore down upon my shoulders. But Fallbrook couldn't afford to have me give in to fatigue.

The last of the groggies left my sight. Dizzy with the taste of power, unable to concentrate from the noise in my head, I turned toward Torch and stumbled forward. I didn't see the woman holding his reins until I was near to touching her.

She stood in the open, letting the pale light from the moon touch her face so I could see it better. Her face was ashen, the stubborn mouth tight with fear and sorrow. Her eyes held a wildness, like a trapped wolf. There was something strange about those eyes, and I stared at her until I picked it out. Her pupils were pinpoints, though the night should have opened them until her dark brown eyes were black as night.

I recognized her, of course. "Fetch," I said, though for some reason it was hard to twist my lips around the word.

She smiled, putting Torch's reins into my hand. As soon as the reins left her hands, Torch's ears flattened and his eyes rolled so that I could see the whites. He pranced until I stood between her and him, but he was too well-trained to pull against the bit, though he shook with fear.

"I waited for this," she said, sliding the hand that had held the reins to my cheek. She stepped nearer and pressed her body against mine, her mouth to my mouth, kissing me wetly. "Waited to find you tired and alone." She whispered it in a lover's voice against my lips.

I stood stiffly in her embrace. "Oh, sister," I said, fear tightening my spine. Belief and fear were her weapons: fear of death and pain. "You mischose your time." And I took her with the knowledge I had gained this night. I stole her essence and locked it with the gates of my mind. It was easy because I feared myself far more than I did her.

I was becoming a bloodmage. I'd come to understand it wasn't just the deaths that made bloodmagic so foul, but taking without repayment or consent.

I gave her the same direction that I'd given the other spirits this night, and she replied, "I am with you." Then she faded into nothing.

I mounted Torch and he caught my fear, dancing and snorting until I thought I'd never get him headed home. I could hold nothing more. The meeting with the fetch left me shaking in spasms close to sobs. I was so powerful that I didn't even need to fear a creature such as she.

What I held imprisoned in my mind tainted me until I wanted to wash in the waters of the river, though I knew I would never be clean again - because I wanted the power I held, wanted to roll in it and throw it into the faces of those who'd killed Touched Banar. Here, I wanted to say, here is what you should fear, not the poor god-stricken man whose worst deed was less than a dust mote to my mountain.

The trapped spirits moaned, but the fetch laughed with my laughter while tears slid down my face.

Torch was swaying with weariness when I brought him back to the stables in the dark. I wasn't any better. The spirits under my control wailed and shrieked pleadingly until I wanted to scream at them to be quiet.

Instead, I curried and rubbed Torch until he was clean and dry. I led him to his stall and grained him. I sat down on a bench and leaned against Duck's stall. Daryn's red gelding blew gently in my hair before wandering back to the shadows of his straw-filled box.

Though I fought against sleep, fearing the trapped creatures would escape, my eyes closed...

... running through the trees in the dark, faster than humanly possible, the pounding of feet, pulse, and the mad joy of the chase. Ah! This was more gloriously fun than anything he could remember in a long time. Ducking roll to dodge an arrow from nowhere that sent him halfway to the bottom of the mountainside he'd been climbing - all the better to avoid capture.

Careful not to go too fast and get ahead; they might give up...

Intense red-hot agony as an arrow took Caefawn in the knee. His fall twisted the arrow inside the wound, which popped and cracked heartrendingly.

Daryn sat on Ducks back, shaking his head.

"You should have told me your nature before I married you. I would have known then that you would be the death of me, for that is the nature of all your breed."

I tried to talk, to explain that it was not my fault, but somehow the mounted figure turned into Poul cradling a wrapped infant in his arms.

"My son," he said proudly, dismounting and walking closer so that I could see what he held.

When I reached out to open the blankets, there was nothing but the tiny skeleton I'd last seen in Auberg.

Ani came from behind me, pushing me away. "Let me tend the child now, you'll make him cry."

I tried to explain that there was only a skeleton inside the blankets. But before I could finish, she turned back to me. The flesh peeled away from her face.

Poul cried out in horror and ran from her, leaving me alone with his dead wife. My sister.

"It's fine, dear," she said calmly, patting the blanketed baby that rattled every time she touched it. "I'm dead, too. Eaten by the pikka."

Rain began to pour down, slicking my hair to my head.

"Here," said Caefawn, his left leg scarlet with blood from knee to boot. "He won't cry if I hold him."

The arrow was still there in his knee, and it wiggled when he walked.

"Let me get that out for you," I said, kneeling in front of him.

"No!"

But I had already taken hold of the arrow and pulled it out. Lifeblood pooled on the floor and wouldn't stop, no matter how frantically I tried to seal the wound with Caulem's green tunic.

Caefawn reached down and touched my face. "Be at peace. Never you mind, sweetheart. Just remember my name is Neklevar; it means "light in the darkness." Someone should remember the name of the last hob."

"What does Caefawn mean?" I asked, hands wet with his blood. I took one red finger and traced it down my cheek, drawing one of the runes Wandel and I had found carved into a rock on Hob's Mountain.

He touched the rune gently, then his hand fell strengthless to his side. "A caefawn is a trader who tricks people out of their money. He sells a pot for a copper, but when you take it home, it turns into a feather and flies away."

Caefawn turned into a falcon and took flight, spraying me with blood. I followed him, running as fast as I could. But there was no sight of him when I came out of the trees and into a clearing. The earth spirit's snag sat there with the spirit upon it.

He leaned down toward me and said, "What are you doing here?"

I knelt before him, covered in the hob's blood, and lifted my hands. Blood pooled in my cupped palms and dripped to the ground.

"I see you've been busy, speaker," said the earth spirit, leaning nearer. "Look at what you've become."

I cried, for he said what I already knew. The tears turned to rain and thunder, and I became a pikka, feeding on the bodies of my dead.

I awoke in the early dawn with the taste of fresh blood in my mouth, and threw up on the ground. Shaking, I opened Duck's stall and took a mouthful of water from the bucket suspended on a hook near his manger. The wailing in my mind continued unabated.

Luckily I hadn't fouled my clothes. Ignoring the noise in my head, I used a forkload of hay to clean up the mess I'd left. I was just finishing when Kith walked through the door.

"If you'd asked, I'd have loaned you Torch," he said.

My mind was too busy to allow for clever replies, so I just nodded and leaned against the wall. I must have looked really bad, because he walked up to me and put his hand on my face.

"Not sick," I said, "just tired." My face felt stiff, and my mouth felt cold and slow. I wanted to bathe the stink from my soul.

"Rescuing Poul from a... what was that word? Pikka?"

I nodded, regretting it almost immediately. The movement brought a rush of pain to join the shouting.

"Merewich swears it's a wolverine, though he's never seen one with curly, black fur."

I grunted this time; it was safer than moving my head.

"Where were you going in such a hurry that it couldn't wait for the rain to let up?" He stepped close to me, touching my collarbone with his hand, staring into my eyes. I wondered if my pupils were pinpoints like the fetch's. "Aren, what's wrong?"

I don't know what I would have told him, but just then the alarm bell rang. Kith hesitated, then turned on his heel and ran.

I could just manage to walk, if I did it slowly. I set the pitchfork aside and picked up the cedar staff from where it had fallen on the ground while I slept. One end was black with dried blood.

By the time I left the stable, there was a fair crowd around the bell. I edged toward the front. Merewich, looking old and frail, stood several paces before the villagers. Behind him, Koret waited silently.

Facing them... us, was Rook mounted on a big, nervy gray. On each side of him were two men, also well mounted. Rook had a nasty cut on his lower lip and a bruise on the side of his face.

"... bought our services in the war," he explained. "But the lord was killed, and the side we fought for was losing. The other side had no need to hire, and ours had no money. We knew - the captain knew - if we continued, we'd be dead in a month at the outside. So he took us raiding."

Rook took a deep breath and continued. "It was something he'd done before, though not recently. There were enough former bandits in our midst that those of us who wished to protest were outnumbered. There weren't many." His horse shifted restlessly.

"Bastards!" spat Talon. The smith broke free from the crowd and took several running steps forward. "Killed my brother, who wouldn't hurt a fly."

Kith slipped out of the crowd behind Talon and touched the big man on the shoulder, whispering something to him. I couldn't tell what it was, but Talon relaxed a little. Perhaps Kith had blamed Banar's death on the wildlings.

Rook's gray tossed his head, dancing a bit. When Rook saw Talon had finished, he continued in the same calm voice. "When he saw this valley, the captain decided we'd stay here. It was small with few defenses. He fancied himself lord of the manor, I think. Before anyone could change his mind, the earthquake hit, and we were trapped here."

"If we agree to accept your offer, what guarantee of behavior do we have?" asked Merewich in the long silence following Rook's narrative. "Many of us have lost family to you."

"The hob suggested we camp outside the town for now," replied Rook. "We'll send no more than two men at a time into the village unless there's an alert."

"At which time you fight for us," Merewich stated, the doubt in his voice obvious. "Let me ask those whose families suffered the most from your predations. Jarol? You lost your brothers in the fighting at the manor."

"Aye," replied Jarol's laconic voice from somewhere behind me. I was dizzy, so I didn't turn to look at him. "But I've another brother, a wife, and two children. Happen I would be happy if the fighting stopped."

Jarol was a mild-mannered fanner, slow to anger. A clever man, too. I wasn't surprised by his reply. Nor would Merewich have been. That Merewich called upon him told me the headman wanted this truce, and was too smart to jump enthusiastically at it until the village was behind him.

"Aren?" asked Merewich without looking at me.

He took me by surprise, for I'd no idea he'd noticed me - besides, who would listen to me? "About what, exactly? I just got here." The spirits I held, sensing my preoccupation, chose to fight for their freedom again. I could have drawn on the strength of one and held them all. I felt the power gathered for the asking, but I chose not to ask. Instead, I drew on the remnants of stubbornness that were all mine to use.

"Aren?" Merewich frowned, turning his head.

Kith shouldered his way to my side and gripped my arm, but I shook him off irritably. "They've come to ask for truce," he said. "Their captain is dead, deposed by this man." He nodded toward Rook.

"She's the one who warned us when the creatures attacked us from the hills," said Rook after a moment. "It's because of her actions I thought we stood a chance of sharing this valley."

I nodded my head. That was right. Silly me, they'd killed my family and... I bit my lip to clear my head. The impulse to cry "Kill them all" came from the blood lust of those I held and not from any need I had for revenge. Revenge I would save for the bloodmage. At that thought the spirits grew silent, but there was an eagerness now in their waiting stillness.

For now, I had to think. I was a speaker; that should mean something here, too. If only I could think clearly. I had a talk with Kith once. He'd said something about the men he'd fought with...

"Fighting men learn to follow the man who leads them - not just orders, but obedience." My voice was slurring a bit, and I had to overpronounce everything so my audience could understand me. "They have to know what he wants and do it before he asks - otherwise they will die." That much was true. "They cannot afford to ask themselves if what he wants is right or wrong, not if they want to survive. If they cannot fight together, they will die. Just like Fallbrook."

Poul's mother was there, and I met her gaze. "The deeds of the mercenaries must fall upon their captain's back." Each person is responsible for his actions, I thought. But there was too much guilt here. If we didn't give some of it to the dead, we would all drown in it.

I took a deep breath through my nose. "Their captain was a ravening beast - I saw him slay one of his wounded out of hand. The mercenaries had to follow his lead. Would you blame a herd dog for following the directions of the shepherd?" I looked at Rook. Who would have named a blond man for a raven? Perhaps it was all the sparkly things on his clothes. Steady, Aren, I thought, keep your mind on the business at hand.

"This man is a decent man. I have seen that." I paused, looking at the smith's wife, Poul's mother, and the others who'd been in the yard when I'd killed the pikka. "You all understand what it is to do a wrong thing because you feel you must." Suddenly I was so tired I could barely form the words. "Let us have peace."

There had been magic in my words, but I couldn't tell if it had done any good. I was too tired to worry about it.

Merewich called another's name, but I didn't hear who it was. Merewich would make peace if the villagers let him. I worked my way through the crowd toward the stable.

The morning sun was rising, and I had a place to be.

P/S: Copyright -->www_novelfreereadonline_Com

***