Once the wall was finished, crews of his men built the gates while Gurdek and then Sett took their men out on raids to compensate them for their loss at council.
Sett returned with more than livestock, tents, and goods. He brought back a woman.
Thalgor heard word of it before the main body of the raiding party reached the camp. He met Sett as he led his men through the open north gate.
Thalgor blocked his lieutenant’s path and gestured toward the woman. “We take no captives on raids.”
The woman was no longer young, but beauty lingered on her face and slender body. Great emerald eyes stared at him like those of a snared rabbit.
“She came willingly,” Sett said.
Thalgor glanced at Erwyn, who stood to one side of the small crowd that had gathered. She looked intently at the woman for a moment, then gave a small nod.
But he still hesitated to accept his lieutenant’s story. If his men began to see raids as a way to take women, everything about the battles would change. As would everything in the camp, he suspected.
Sett had no woman, but Tynor, Gurdek and his new second did. What if one of them returned from a raid with a captive woman, even a willing one? And despite Erwyn’s agreement that the woman came freely, the captive shook with fear.
While he thought things through, the woman broke free of Sett’s hand on her arm, which seemed to hold her erect, and half fell, half threw herself at Thalgor’s feet.
“Please do not send me away. He…they will find me. Kill me or sell me for a slave. Do anything you wish with me but let me be taken back to that camp.”
Thalgor quickly agreed as Sett and Tynor helped the sobbing woman to her feet. Tynor’s woman appeared and led the woman to their tent, speaking to her in low, soothing tones.
Sett gave Thalgor a questioning look.
“You rescued her. You did not capture or steal her. You and your men did well. Tonight we feast in honor of your success.”
Sett nodded and raised his sword to lead his men through the camp in the usual victory march. But he did not smile.
“A great evil lives in the camp the woman came from,” Erwyn said as she and Thalgor watched the warriors celebrate.
“Is it a danger to us?”
“Not in the time I can see. They head north to make a warm-time camp. But they take their own cold and darkness with them.”
“Is there evil magic, witch?”
He knew the answer, but wanted the assurance of her words.
“No. All witches are taught the rules of our magic and the cost of breaking them. But some men with strong witch blood, like yours, use the power it gives them to serve an evil the magic did not create. Her mind has been damaged by such a man. I will do what I can to help her, but I’m not certain that even then Sett’s love will be enough to heal her.”
“Love for a woman he just met?”
She gave a small laugh. “Have you never captured a woman because you knew at first sight you wanted her in your tent?”
He smiled. “Not a woman. A witch.”
*
The warm time was full upon them. The men tended crops and livestock. The women spent the long days at their looms. The children splashed in the pool that formed just below the point where the stream left the camp.
Gurdek and Sett lost their eagerness for battle, Gurdek because he was in charge of the food stores, Sett because of Lana, the woman he had rescued.
She seemed well and whole by day, and even into the night, he confided in Erwyn, but in the hours before dawn she dreamed dreams that woke her, trembling with terror. But she refused to come to Erwyn for a remedy.
“She says she will never let anyone into her mind again,” Sett explained to Erwyn sadly late one warm, lazy afternoon. “She will not even speak of it to me.”
Erwyn gave him an herb tea to help Lana sleep. It calmed her terror most nights, he reported later, but when the air of the warm-time night was calm and the sky clear, she still woke up screaming and lay awake the rest of the night in terror.
Otherwise the camp was peaceful, the adjustment to a settled life, if not complete, well under way.
Then one day their scouts reported a large group of warriors moving toward them from the north.
“A raiding party?” Thalgor asked Tynor, who brought the report to council.
“Too many men who move too slowly. They bring oxen with them and some carts.”
“But no women?” Gurdek asked.
“My men saw a few, but no children.”
That meant they were probably slave women, to be used by all the warriors. The council fell silent for a moment.
“Marauders?” Rygar suggested with his usual optimism.
“Too many men, too few women and oxen, no sheep.”
“What do you see?” Sett asked Erwyn.
She pushed the plight of the slave women out of her mind and closed her eyes, then opened them and shook her head.
“Only what Tynor says, the men and what they bring with them. Between my mind and theirs lies a dirty gray cloud, like dust on a windy day.”
“Another witch’s work?” Gurdek’s second asked.
She shook her head again. “I think not. Sometimes it is hard to see. I am weary from a birth this morning. Perhaps tomorrow the vision will be clearer.”
“If they don’t attack before then,” Gurdek grumbled.
“Have scouts watch them constantly,” Thalgor said. “Gurdek’s men will guard the open north gate in three shifts from dawn to dawn. Rygar, take our men to guard the rest of the wall and the three closed gates. Sett’s men will scout and carry on with normal guard duty. They will not take us by surprise.”
The others agreed and went to carry out his orders.
The cloud in her mind troubled Erwyn. She lay down after the council and hoped for sleep, but the cloud only darkened.
There was tension in the camp that night, but no fear.
Erwyn drank a tea made from an herb that might help her see more clearly before she slept, but it made no difference.
Her vision still unclear, she was searching among her things for another herb to try the next afternoon when the guards at the north gate raised an alarm.
She tried to see the battle about to take place, but the dirty cloud only closed more tightly around her. With a call to Tya and Felyn to take shelter with the other women and children, she followed the warriors who hurried to defend the camp.
But no sounds of battle rent the air. No clash of swords, no swoosh of arrows, no cries of the wounded and dying.
When Erwyn reach the warriors gathered inside the north gate, they created a path for her to where Thalgor stood with his lieutenants shoulder to shoulder across the open space.
She touched Sett’s shoulder and he stepped aside so she could stand beside Thalgor and see what had set off the alarm.
The warriors the scouts had reported stood well away from the wall, perhaps forty of them, their hands not touching the weapons that hung at their sides and on their backs. Only two men in the first rank stood with arrows notched on their bows. In front of them, two other men walked, unarmed, toward Thalgor.
The dirty cloud grew so thick in Erwyn’s mind she was forced to push her magic aside to see the men more clearly. They were both pale, with watery blue eyes reddened by dissipation. Clearly brothers, if not twins, neither seemed tall or strong enough to lead the mass of burly warriors behind them.
As they neared, one of the strangers scanned the ranks of men arrayed behind Thalgor and his lieutenants. The other focused on Erwyn with an oily smile that clenched her stomach.
“We come in peace.” The first man’s voice sent a crawling sensation across her skin.
“You have something that belongs to us.” The other man’s tone was one of arrogant dismissal as his eyes devoured Erwyn.
“Can you prove ownership?” Thalgor asked in a guarded tone.
The second man put his hand on his chest above his heart. “She has a scar here.”
> Sett gasped and dropped his hand to his sword. One of the enemy archers swung his notched arrow toward him. Sett froze, but Erwyn felt his body tremble in silent rage.
“She?” Thalgor’s voice was a mix of anger and disbelief.
“One of our leader’s women,” the first man explained.
“Why are you so sure she is here?”
“We weren’t, until this man saw him.” The second man pointed first at a man from his own ranks, his body twisted, one arm gone, then at Sett. “He swears on his life this man is the one who stole her.”
Erwyn put her hand on Sett’s arm to keep him from drawing his sword despite the arrows aimed at him. The men behind them stirred uneasily.
“You must give them both to us, so they may be punished,” the first man said.
Thalgor grimaced. “Do you think me a fool, to surrender one of my men because of a woman who may not even be here?”
“We have no wish to do battle. We only want what is ours,” the second man replied in a wheedling tone.
“What you say is yours.”
The first man looked from Thalgor’s men to his own, then back to Thalgor’s again.
“Perhaps if you come back with us to where we are camped, we could provide further proof the woman belongs to our leader.”
Thalgor laughed out loud. “If further proof is to be offered, it will be in my camp, in my tent.”
“So you can kill us at your leisure?” the second man whined.
Thalgor held out both hands, waist high, palms outward. “I pledge you shall both walk out of my camp alive.”
“May we bring our personal guards with us?”
Thalgor’s indignation that leaders would have such guards washed through him with such force Erwyn felt it as clearly as he did.
“No. Your only chance to reclaim what you have come for is to talk to me alone in my camp.”
The men turned to each other and conversed in a hurried whisper. They looked now at Thalgor, now not so much at their own men as past them, toward something beyond them to the north.
Clearly Thalgor never expected the strangers to comply with his unheard of demand. Erwyn and the men around her were shocked when the two turned back to him and said in one voice, “We agree.”
Thalgor’s warriors grumbled at the offer to allow two strangers into their camp, but the ranks opposite them stood unmoving, as if indifferent to their leaders’ fate.
“I will have a dinner prepared for us.” Thalgor turned to Erwyn and spoke quietly, as if to give her orders. “Serve us yourself. Keep Tya and Felyn both well away from these two.”
She needed no warning. She had seen how they looked at her, and remembered the terror in the face of the woman Sett had rescued from their camp.
As Erwyn walked to the tent, she spread the word for the women to remain hidden and keep their children with them. She sent Tya and Felyn to Tya’s mother, and began to make dinner.
She was brewing a special tea when Sett’s woman came in through the outer door of the scullery. In her hand was the sword Sett had used before Thalgor had given him the better one that had been Batte’s.
Lana held the hilt of the sword toward Erwyn.
“Kill me. Give them my dead body. Then they will go away without harming anyone.”
Erwyn’s heart tripped. She took a deep breath to steady herself and find words that would not wound. “I cannot.”
“You must. I would do it myself, but it must be done by another as if to punish me. They will only exact a bloodier revenge if they think Thalgor allowed me to kill myself.”
“Are they such monsters?”
“They serve such a monster. You are a witch. Do you not see what they are? Kill me quickly so they will leave.”
Erwyn bowed her head. “I cannot.”
“You are as brave as a man, I have heard. And you’ve eased death for many. Why refuse a simple sword stroke to save me and your camp both?”
“Thalgor’s warriors can defend us against these men, and you as well. You cannot think he would surrender you to them.”
“But you do not know their treachery. Kill me.”
Lana thrust the sword at Erwyn with such force she cut her own hand. Blood dripped into the tea. Erwyn pushed the sword aside and started to throw the tea out, but Lana stopped her.
“The taste of blood will please them and hide the bitterness of the herb.” Lana wrapped her cut with a cloth. “But herbs and magic will not save your camp. You must kill me.”
Erwyn looked at her with the unsettling sense she spoke the truth, at least so far as she understood it.
As if in confirmation, Lana lowered the shoulder of her gown to reveal the scar the strangers had referred to. It was not the jagged line of a wound. Someone had intentionally carved the rough outline of a bird’s head on her flesh.
Erwyn stepped back. Her head reeled with visions of the pain and terror Lana had endured at the hands of the man whose emissaries now sought to reclaim her.
Erwyn’s stomach turned so hard she needed to step out of the tent to empty it into the dust by the scullery door. Dizzy and drained, she sat on the bench by the fire and forced her mind free of what she had seen.
When she went back inside, Lana had pulled her gown back in place and neatly bound her wound.
“You see now death is better,” she said.
Erwyn spoke the first words that came to her.
“How can you let Sett touch you, after what that man did?”
The other woman sighed. “Sometimes I cannot, but when I can I would allow it out of gratitude, even if I had not come to love him. He is so different, so gentle, it hardly allows me to consider that other one a man. Sett weeps so at my scars I dare not tell him the rest, for fear it might destroy him entirely.”
“You are fortunate to have found each other.”
Lana nodded as she picked up the sword with her uncut hand and again held the hilt out toward Erwyn.
“I have known more joy these last days than I ever expected to know in my life. You need not fear I will die unfulfilled.”
“I cannot kill you.” Erwyn held up her hand to stop the woman’s immediate protest. “I am not sure whether I would if I could, but I cannot. If I murder, with or without my magic, I will lose my power. I would sacrifice much to protect you from what you have endured, but I will not surrender what I am.”
“It must be so?”
“It is a law of my magic. It must be so.”
Lana lowered the sword, her face so pale Erwyn thought she might faint, but she just took a deep breath and said, “So be it.”
Erwyn felt a faint stir in the air that warned her Thalgor and the strangers would soon reach the tent.
“If you fear to be in Sett’s tent, take the others there and go to Gurdek’s woman. She will welcome you without question and comfort Sett’s children, if you cannot.” Erwyn paused, uncertain whether to say more. But the horror she saw in her vision pushed her on. “If the worst should happen, Gurdek’s woman has an herb we use with newborns who have no chance to survive. She will know how much to use in a tea for you. But you must promise not to ask of her the act you asked of me.”
Tears filled the other woman’s eyes. “Thank you. I will not ask her that.”
She slipped out with a final “Thank you,” leaving Erwyn alone to face what was to come.
*
The man who guarded the tent pulled up the cloth that served as a door and Thalgor led the two strangers inside to the square table where he held council. The benches on the sides had been pushed against the walls, so when Thalgor sat in the great chair, the other two were forced to share the bench that faced him.
Thalgor settled uneasily onto the gilded and jeweled chair he seldom used. Made for the man who had killed his mother, it always gave him the panicky feeling he might yet become that man. But the strangers would expect him to sit in it, a message reinforced by Erwyn when she ordered the benches moved.
The less whiny of the two
men’s eyes widened when he saw the gilded chair, then narrowed as he scanned the space for further signs of wealth. Finally his eyes lit on the chest Thalgor had taken from Erwyn’s captor where he kept the colored jewels and bits of wrought gold his band had taken over the years.
“Where are your slaves?” the other man complained. “I am thirsty and hungry. You promised us food.”
Thalgor suppressed a shudder. “We keep no slaves.”
“Who does your work?”
“My people do their own work.”
“Yes, but the work of your tent? Surely a leader does no work himself.” The first man still ogled the gilded chair.
“Leading is work. My woman cares for my tent, as with any man, with the help of a girl.”
“You have only the two women?” the second man asked.
“I have only one. The girl is promised to my second.”
The man shook his head in clear disbelief.
“And the witch?” The first man pulled his eyes to Thalgor’s face.
“What witch?”
Both men laughed.
“We have enough witch blood to know one when we see her,” the second man said, “even if she were not such a tasty piece.”
Rage boiled through Thalgor. He satisfied himself with imagining their dead bodies in the dust and remained seated.
“The witch is my woman.”
“You do not strike me as fool enough to let a viper like that live free in your camp, much less sleep in your bed,” the first man objected.
“A captured witch can be bent to your will, of course,” the other man said, “if you hold those she cares for hostage.”
Thalgor winced at the reminder of how he had captured Erwyn.
“But once you no longer need her magic, or want her body, it is safest to kill her. Only fools truly believe that to kill a witch will bring on a curse,” the man went on. “And it is best done slowly, to serve as a warning to other women who might think too much of themselves.”
Before Thalgor could forget his promise and kill both of the strangers with his bare hands, Erwyn slipped in from the scullery with a tray that held three bowls of savory stew and two loaves of bread.
She had put on a light warm-time cloak with the hood pulled low to hide her face, but he saw her grimace when she came near the strangers, as if the nearness of their bodies, or their minds, caused her pain. His own head throbbed already.
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