There was coolness to the air on his right, where the ghost stood, like the mist from a waterfall on a warm day. Then he was through the gap and looking down into a little hollow formed by the roots of the trees.
The hollow was full of bones.
Oliver had expected that, honestly. It made sense. He spent a nervous moment checking for extra skulls, just in case the farmer’s wife had been luring travelers here to murder them, but there was only one. And it’s not as if she didn’t have plenty of opportunity to see us dead before now.
Scavengers had disturbed the bones, but most still seemed to be present. Rags of cloth were still draped over them, long faded by rain and rot.
“Oh, hell,” muttered Trebastion behind him.
“It’s her grave,” said Oliver.
“No,” said Trebastion. “It’s her bones. She doesn’t have a grave. Nobody buried her.”
From the corner of her eye, Oliver saw the farmer’s wife nodding.
“Do you think that’s what she wants?” asked Oliver softly.
Trebastion nodded. “It’s what most of them want,” he said. “That and justice. But I think it’s been so long now that justice is off the table.”
The ghost nodded again, a rueful expression crossing her face.
“Let me,” said Trebastion. “I’ve got some experience with handling skeletons.”
He knelt down beside the bones. His long fingers were surprisingly gentle as he straightened out the jumble of bone. The ancient rags fell apart as he touched them. Had they been red once? Oliver could not tell.
I hope he doesn’t feel like he has to make a harp out of it.
Fortunately, he did not. He moved the bones into a rough human shape, setting the skull into place on a pillow of moss.
The ghost watched intently as he worked. Oliver kept watch out of the corner of his eyes. She’d been benevolent so far, but what if she was expecting a blood sacrifice or something?
Trebastion finished his job and pulled his coat off. He glanced at Oliver. “You say she saved me?”
This did not seem like the time to argue that it had been a joint effort. Oliver nodded.
Trebastion laid the coat reverently over the skeleton, tucking it in around the collarbone. He sat back on his heels and began to sing.
In the trees, in the trees
Her spirit still walks
In her kirtle of red
In the trees, in the trees, in the trees
Trebastion nodded. He picked up two sticks and cut a strip off the bottom of his already ragged shirt, tying it together into a crude cross for a headstone.
By the time he had finished, there were only three of them left in the hollow with her bones.
“I hope your song isn’t accurate any longer,” said Oliver, as they left the grave.
“Me, too,” said Trebastion. He scrubbed at his face with his hands. “I wish I’d known her name.”
“Do you think she died from the smoke?”
“No.” Trebastion shook his head. “One of her leg bones was broken. I don’t think it was scavengers, or they’d have dragged it away. I think she probably broke her leg, and no one was here to help her.”
Oliver glanced back over his shoulder, at the gap in the trees slowly vanishing behind fern and bark. “So, she decided to help people who needed it.”
Trebastion nodded. “There’s a lot of songs about people who go the other way and start trying to punish everybody who didn’t help them.”
“Which probably proves that ghosts are like everyone else,” said the armadillo. He flicked his tail against Oliver’s shins. “Come on. We’re not far from the foothills now, I don’t think. I can smell open spaces.”
11
The armadillo’s nose proved accurate. The way got steeper, going up, and the trees began to thin out. By mid-day, they were standing on a weedy slope, looking down at the forest.
Oliver had never been so glad to see emptiness. He wanted to run around with his arms out, for the sheer novelty of not running into anything. Trebastion let out a whoop and did a little dance. The armadillo vanished into a thicket of pokeweed, then re-emerged, licking his lips.
“I never want to go into a forest again,” said Trebastion. “I am done with forests. Forests are now off my list for the foreseeable future.”
Oliver gazed up the slope. He hadn’t really given any thought to where in the Rainblades he was going. The Cloud Herders lived here somewhere, according to the old wizard, but he hadn’t been more specific than that.
A child of lowlands, it had not really occurred to Oliver that mountains were very large and a whole mountain range was larger yet. When he looked up, he saw stony cliffs and steep hillsides draped in green, but no people.
“Now where do we go?” he muttered.
The armadillo heard him and came trotting. “I suggest we follow the smell of sheep.”
“Sheep?”
“There’s old sheep dung here.” The armadillo scuffed at the ground with a claw. “A fair amount but dried out. If you’ve got sheep, you’ve got shepherds. We just have to find where the sheep are, and we’ll find the shepherd.”
“You think the shepherd will be one of the Cloud Herders?”
The armadillo shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. I do think that if you’ve got magic people who control the rains living in the area, anyone local will probably know where they are. For self-preservation, if nothing else.”
Oliver considered this and had to admit that it was a good idea. Everybody in the surrounding towns had known where the old wizard lived, and there was only one of him. “Can you smell where they went?”
“I’m an armadillo, not a bloodhound.” The armadillo began to pick his way up the slope. “I suggest we start walking and look for sheep.”
It took another day to find signs of sheep. They stuck to the edge of Harkhound in case they had to duck into the forest again. As little as any of them wanted to spend more time in the trees, Oliver had to admit that the steep slopes of the Rainblades were not a place he’d want to wait out a storm. The wind made sleeping on the hillside a chilly prospect, so they kept the green line of Harkhound in view.
Twice they saw animals at a distance and got excited, before discovering that the creatures were mountain goats. They were handsome animals with short black horns, but they did not belong to anyone except themselves.
Oliver spent the long hours replaying that moment in his head when he had tied Stern’s shoelaces together.
It was such a strange thing to fixate on. He knew that. He should be thinking about the men who had died. But somehow it was this one moment that kept rattling around in his head, like a dried pea in a bowl.
He hadn’t thought about it. He’d just done it. And I’d do it again. Of course, I would. He was bad. He was a murderer who sacrificed his own people to the ghul.
He didn’t feel guilty about it, not like he had with Bill, or even the men who the ghuls had killed. But it still seemed to him that he should have thought before he did it. He knew he could kill people. He knew that the spell might be a death sentence with the ghuls there. And yet he hadn’t thought at all.
There should have been a moment when I stopped and thought and knew what I was doing and thought about the consequences. Shouldn’t there?
Adults always told you to stop and think about what you were doing. Oliver hadn’t thought. He hadn’t had time to think. It was a man’s life hanging on that spell and he knew it was a man’s life and yet he hadn’t thought at all.
If you knew that someone might die if you did something, shouldn’t you think about it first? Even for just a moment?
It worked out, said the armadillo in his head.
What if it hadn’t?
Humans. You beat yourselves up for failure and you beat yourselves up almost as bad for success. Feh.
Possibly that was the only thing to be said about the matter, but Oliver could not help worrying at it like a sore tooth.
It was appr
oaching mid-afternoon on the second day when Trebastion pointed and said, “Are those more goats?”
Oliver followed the line of his arm to a dozen small white shapes. They looked different than the goats, but it was hard to tell from such a distance. “Maybe?” He rubbed his lower back. Walking on the uneven slope for hours was leaving him sore in unexpected places. Having sore knees and hips made him feel strangely old.
They scrambled across the slopes toward the potential sheep. The hills were not smooth but folded up in odd places, so that they often had to go hundreds of yards out of their way to get somewhere comparatively close at hand. It took a long time and they were both short of breath. Oliver had to stop and pick up the armadillo several times.
Sheep glanced up incuriously at their approach. They were much whiter and softer looking than the ratty cream-colored sheep Oliver was used to. A ram with spiraled horns and deep gray streaks stood out from the rest like a storm cloud. All of them had wispy white feathering on the back of their legs like draft horses.
“Those are sheep, all right,” said Oliver. “Now we just need to figure out where the shepherd is.”
Someone cleared his throat loudly. The armadillo sighed.
The shepherd leaned against a stone, not so much hidden as extraordinarily still. He was tall and tan-skinned, with a lean face and thick white hair. He did not look old, despite the color of his hair, but that was not the most extraordinary thing about him.
He was covered in swirling lines, tattooed or painted, Oliver could not tell, and the lines glowed brilliant blue, the color of a summer sky.
“Damn…” breathed Trebastion. “Will you look at that?”
Oliver’s vision of mystical figures standing atop a stone did not quite mesh with the man in front of him, and yet… He’s a herder, and those tattoos are definitely magic. The man’s aura was a thread of vibrant blue light.
“Are you a Cloud Herder?” asked Oliver.
The man inclined his head.
Oliver glanced over at the sheep. They looked puffy and white, like clouds, but they were most definitely sheep. He felt a sudden stab of alarm. What if they don’t know anything about the rains? Everybody in Loosestrife just knew that the Cloud Herders controlled the rain, but it’s not in any of my books. What if this is one of the things the old wizard didn’t explain?
The Cloud Herder said, “You are far from home.”
“Yes,” answered Oliver. “Um… hello?”
The Cloud Herder paused, perhaps puzzled by the conversation happening out of order, or perhaps simply amused. He nodded. “What brings you here?”
“I came to get rain,” said Oliver, bracing himself for disappointment if the man said, “What does that have to do with me?”
The Cloud Herder’s expression did not change, though the blue lines around his mouth seemed to pulse slightly. “You want us to send our clouds to pasture in your skies?”
That sounds… promising? At least he’s acting like it’s possible?
“Yes, please,” said Oliver.
“Why?”
Oliver swallowed. “Err… because we need them?”
“Do you?”
“Yes. Very much. Um. The drought is very bad right now. People are going to die.”
“Death comes to all people in time,” said the Cloud Herder.
Oliver had no idea what to say to that. He hadn’t expected to have to have this conversation quite so quickly, and he didn’t know how to explain to this tall, blue-slashed man that he should care that people were suffering, that it mattered and he could fix it and if you could fix things, you should because otherwise there was no point to anything, you might as well just be ghuls or people like Mayor Stern.
He squared his shoulders and opened his mouth and the Cloud Herder held up his hand. “Enough.”
“But—”
“I will take you to the Rain Wife. Plead your case to her, not me.”
Oliver licked dry lips and nodded.
Oliver knew cattle better than sheep, but he was surprised to see that the Cloud Herder was willing to walk away from his flock. Then the painted man whistled and one of the largest shaggy white shapes separated itself from the flock and jogged toward him.
It was a dog. It had heavy jowls and a great ruff like a lion’s mane. There were three glowing blue lines in its left ear. Oliver wondered if they were to identify the dog as belonging to this particular Herder or if there was something else about them.
“Watch them,” said the Cloud Herder to the dog.
The dog sat down. Its gaze was sharper than any dog Oliver had ever met. A familiar, like Eglamarck? His own familiar was keeping well back, ears flicking worriedly.
The Cloud Herder turned and walked away. Oliver and Trebastion hurried after him.
The Cloud Herder village was not far away, though Oliver did not see it until they were nearly on top of it. The buildings were complicated structures of felted wool and weathered gray wood, nearly the same color as the hillside. They looked like flowers or folded paper, with multiple angled roofs and eaves. Smoke drifted from narrow chimneys and was lost in the white sky overhead.
It was a quiet place. Oliver nearly overlooked the people the first time, and then wondered how you could possibly overlook someone six feet tall and covered in glowing blue lines. And yet they moved quietly, and their voices were quiet and when he spotted someone, even if they were sitting in plain sight, it was a shock.
He counted half a dozen of the Cloud Herders, sitting on the front steps of the houses. Most of them carried drop spindles and it was by those small motions that his eyes were first attracted to them. Two children sat on the ground beside one of the buildings, playing a game that looked like marbles, but even their voices seemed muffled, as if they were a long way off.
“Forgive me,” said Trebastion, walking beside the Herder, “but… ah… those glowing lines… how did you do that?”
His voice seemed very loud. For the first time, though, the Herder smiled. “It is the cloud milk,” he said. “We tattoo ourselves with it.”
Oliver glanced around. All the adults were heavily tattooed with the ink. The two children had blue dots on each cheek.
“I bet you never have any trouble finding keyholes at night,” said Trebastion, clearly envious.
“There is enough darkness in the world,” said the Herder. “We do not add to it unless we must.”
He stopped before the tallest of the structures and gestured them inside. The drape over the doorway was heavy woven cloth, pale gray and rough against Oliver’s fingers.
The interior of the building was lit by lanterns filled with the glowing blue cloud milk. Oliver wondered if they were literally milking clouds—which, at this point, was not even the strangest thing he had heard of—or if it was some other substance simply called cloud milk. Then he caught sight of the Rain Wife, sitting at the far end, and stopped thinking about anything else at all.
She was very fat, and her face was round, with heavy jowls like the dog on the hillside. Blue ink spiraled across the backs of her hands and down her forehead. Her aura burned like a brand in the dark. Despite the smoothness of her skin, he guessed from the lines around her eyes that she was very old.
They were lines of laughter, not sorrow, and Oliver dared to hope for a moment, but his eyes were caught by the enormous shape behind her.
It, too, was a face, but a woven one, at least five feet high. It had a suggestion of nose and ears, but no eyes or mouth. Then the Rain Wife raised her hand, and shapes suddenly scurried down from the ceiling and onto the woven face, forming the eyes and mouth and eyebrows.
“Welcome, young mage,” said the Rain Wife.
The scurrying shapes rearranged themselves in long lines so that the face smiled, and the eyes squeezed up.
“Oh, damn,” whispered Trebastion, “they’re spiders.”
“Does that surprise you?” asked the Rain Wife, clearly amused. “We are both weavers. And spiders and rain go togeth
er, you know.”
“If you kill a spider, it will rain,” said Oliver, through dry lips.
“So, they say. But it has not worked for your people, has it, young mage? That is why you have come, is it not?”
“Yes,” said Oliver, tearing his eyes away from the spiders. “Yes, it is. There’s been a drought.”
“So, you came here, to ask for rain.”
“Yes.”
On the wall, the face showed its teeth in a laugh. Oliver stared at it, a detached part of his mind admiring how it was done. There were a dozen types, from very small, dark ones to big yellow-and-black ones as big as Oliver’s hand. The largest spiders were extending their long front legs, making a dark U-shape outline around each tooth, while their bodies formed the darkness inside the mouth. It was really quite impressive, except for the bit where his skin was trying to crawl off his body.
“You’re a mage,” he said. “Aren’t you? And those spiders…”
“My familiars,” said the Rain Wife. “Like your scaled friend there.” The spiders grinned at the armadillo. “I suspect that you would consider most of my people mages, in fact, though few of them are terribly powerful by an outsider’s standards.”
“I’m not very powerful either,” Oliver admitted. Maybe that was foolish to admit, but he suspected that it would be far more foolish to try to lie to the Rain Wife.
“Powerful enough to have made it through Harkhound,” said the Rain Wife. “That place is not patient with weakness.”
“I think we were lucky,” said Oliver.
The face laughed again.
“Luck is worth something.” She shrugged. “Well, then. To business. What will you give me, young mage?” asked the Rain Wife. “To give you the rains?”
Oliver’s heart sank. Of course, the Cloud Herders wanted something. Everyone wanted something. Rain had to be incredibly valuable, didn’t it? People would die without it. And here he had come, stumbling and foolish, without jewels or gold, with only a handful of copper coins, thinking that merely asking would be enough.
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