Only the captive women who had no men or had lost theirs in the battle remained fearful. They huddled in their tent when not helping with the work of the camp.
Lana took it upon herself to convince them of the good faith of their new band. She all but moved into their tent to work with them. Thalgor joked with Sett that their women both cared more for others than for the two of them.
But Thalgor wasn’t so sure it was a joke for him.
The pain of the new additions to the camp, and the horror that filled their dreams, tore at Erwyn even when she stayed away from them and had Tya or Gurdek’s woman take them sleeping teas in her place. The evil that was done to all of them seemed to soak into her and left her weary and distracted. So much so that some days he wondered if she carried a child, but she quickly assured him she did not. He didn’t know if it was sadness or relief he felt at her words.
Finally the day came when one of his older warriors, a widower with half-grown children, asked one of the older captive women if she would like to go for a walk after dinner. His simple act was like the first drop of rain. A torrent followed.
The captive men chose to court women from Thalgor’s band, if they courted at all, perhaps to avoid painful shared memories. The men without women from Thalgor’s camp flooded the paths around the captive women’s tent. The women blossomed under the wish of his warriors for women to keep in their tents, not merely use. Soon the dilapidated old tent was empty and turned a home for one of the new couples.
The camp restored, and the captives becoming a part of them, they all began the preparations for their first dark time within the wall. The men harvested the food they grew, the women preserved it, and all prepared themselves for the dark and cold.
The dark time was when the bands wandered south and battled. And if a wandering band sought revenge on a walled camp, it would not be hard to find it. Thalgor pushed those thoughts aside and went about the task of leading his people.
Except at night. Then his dreams were filled with a great darkness he could not understand.
As the first frost came, the darkness began to invade his days as well. Just now and then, when he met one of the recent captives in the camp, stronger yet when he saw Sett’s woman. And strongest of all when he returned to the tent late at night to find Erwyn awake, so afraid of her own dreams she sought refuge in his arms.
Lana’s nightmares had returned as well, Sett confessed one day when he almost fell asleep at council. The others nodded without comment and went on with their business. But the groggy explanation left a cloud above the meeting that lingered in Thalgor’s tent for days.
One night after the stream that ran through the camp froze solid, he found Erwyn crying when he came in from his last circuit of the wall. He gathered her in his arms and soon changed her tears to need. She gave herself to him with the same rage and despair, the same need for comfort that drove him to take her. It was a time he knew he would remember, a passion so pure and shared another man might have called it love.
Afterward, as he kissed her absently along the angle of her jaw, a scream tore through the icy night air.
He barely had time to look up before a small body threw itself through the curtain that hid their bed. Ignorant of what their intertwined bodies meant, Felyn burrowed between them until her head rested on Erwyn’s naked breast.
“Erwyn,” the child sobbed. “Erwyn.”
Tya appeared at the curtain with Felyn’s cloak wrapped around her sleeping gown as if she pulled on the wrong one as she chased after the child.
“It’s all right,” Thalgor told Tya gruffly, embarrassed she should see he was naked except where a blanket luckily hid what most needed hiding. “Go back to bed. Erwyn will care for her.”
Tya looked at Erwyn, who nodded and stroked the child’s head. After Tya left, he was able to find his tunic and pull it over his head without any indecent display. Not that Felyn would have noticed, her head hidden in the soft flesh of Erwyn’s body.
He sat up and gently pulled the child into his lap so Erwyn could slip on her gown, but Felyn strained against his hands, reaching and crying for Erwyn, who finally took the sobbing child into her arms. She soothed her with sweet, musical words so like his mother’s that Thalgor’s eyes filled with a painful mist.
When the child was calm enough to speak, Erwyn asked her gently, “What is it? A nightmare?”
Felyn only shook her head, her lips tightly closed, her jaw clenched against the words that threatened to escape.
“I cannot help you, if you do not tell me what it was.”
The child cast Thalgor one quick glance, then leaned closer to Erwyn, as if to hide her words from him.
“You must take me to the Wise Witches. Now. Tonight. We must be gone from this place. You must take me. Please.”
Felyn still spoke rarely, never more than a few words here and there, but this speech was clearly said, without any hint of the childish lisp he sometimes heard from her.
Erwyn looked down at the child, puzzled. He realized she could no more read that small mind than she could his own. More proof that, despite Erwyn’s protestations of uncertainty, the child was as much a witch as she. And so her sister.
“Why must I take you there? What have you dreamed?”
“Not dreamed, seen,” the child wailed. “You must take me.” She began to sob again.
As Erwyn rocked her in her arms, she looked over the child’s head at Thalgor. He couldn’t quite read the look. Surely she didn’t intend to do as the child asked.
“It is the dark time,” he reminded both of them in a low voice. “You cannot travel so far alone, and I cannot ask any of my men to go with you and be so long from their families.”
Felyn looked at him, her strange eyes full of sadness.
“You must take me,” she said to Erwyn. “We must go now. We can make it there safely, if we are careful. Your magic will help us. Please, please. We must get away from this place.”
“Thalgor is right. We cannot go there in the dark time. You do not know how far it is, how dangerous the way. Even in the warm time I almost died before I reached their citadel.” She looked at him again, a question in her eyes. “Perhaps when the warm time comes Thalgor will give us an ox…”
“No, no! That is too late. We must go now. We must.”
Thalgor stood and ran his hand through his hair, then rubbed his forehead, where an ache had begun to build. He was about to go to the scullery to make a tea to help them sleep when Tya appeared again with four steaming cups on a tray.
Felyn didn’t protest as Erwyn and Tya urged her to drink.
He sipped his tea in the far corner of the small sleeping chamber, reluctant to leave for fear Erwyn might agree to the child’s mad demand.
Even to have her leave him for so long in the warm time filled him with an emptiness that sickened him. To risk losing her in the cold and dark was beyond thought.
The child’s head soon drooped on Erwyn’s breast. Tya led her back to their chamber.
Luckily he sensed she would return and kept his tunic on so she didn’t find him naked again.
“She sleeps,” Tya told them from the doorway. “I’m sorry she disturbed…um, disturbed you.”
“You could not have stopped her,” Erwyn assured her, and Thalgor nodded in agreement.
“What should I do if it happens again?”
“Try to calm her, listen to her if she will talk to you, give her tea, and tell me what she says,” Erwyn answered.
Tya nodded. “That will at least give you some warning.” Her face, already rosy, turned scarlet.
“Good practice,” Thalgor told her in a too hearty voice, “for when you and Rygar have your own.”
Tya smiled and took a drink of her tea.
“Go to sleep,” Erwyn said softly. And when she was gone, to Thalgor, “Come to bed.”
It was a long time before either of them slept.
For days the child’s screams interrupted their sleep. Thalgor
hoped no one outside the tent could hear, so piteously did she cry and demand to be taken to the Wise Witches.
Tya was never able to calm her, so each night the child ran to Erwyn with the same plea. And as the sun rose each day the child’s fear evaporated with the cold dark time fog.
One day Thalgor woke at dawn, his heart frozen. The child had not come. Had she died in her sleep? Fled the camp alone?
He pulled on his tunic and rushed to the chamber when Felyn slept. He pulled back the curtain to find her sitting on her bed, clearly just now awake, a sad smile on her face.
She slid from her bed and took his hand, then solemnly led him away from where Tya still slept, snoring daintily.
Absently Thalgor wondered if Rygar knew of that snore, but he had no doubt a love such as his brother’s for Tya was most likely deaf as well as blind.
Felyn sat on a bench in the main chamber, and he lowered himself down beside her.
“No nightmare?” he asked.
She thought a moment before she answered. “I saw the same vision as always. But the Witch King…”
“The Witch King,” he interrupted, then quickly lowered his voice back to a whisper. “You know of the Witch King?”
“He calls me ‘sister’.” The child frowned. “I think. It is hard to know, since I am always asleep when he comes.”
Thalgor shivered. “What did he tell you last night?”
Even as he spoke, his heart turned over, less with fear than with a certainty he did not want to hear what the Witch King had said.
“Not to be afraid. That what I saw had to happen, and I could not run away from it.” She lowered her head. “He could not promise…”
“Promise what?” Thalgor asked when she stopped.
She reached up her small hand and touched his cheek, his lips. “Keep silent,” she said in that eerie voice beyond her years. “The Witch King tells those who need to know.”
Before he could probe further Tya burst from their chamber, cheered by her full night’s sleep.
“Good morning,” she said brightly. “Are you both ready to eat something?”
Felyn became a child again. He knew he would learn no more.
He wanted to tell Erwyn about his strange conversation with Felyn, but while he made his morning circuit of the camp she was called away to a birth. By the time she returned, he and Rygar had gone on patrol with their men. When he returned late to the tent she was already asleep.
Tomorrow would be soon enough.
Chapter Nineteen
Late that night Erwyn woke him.
He thought at first the child’s nightmares had returned, but the tent, the whole camp lay silent under the frosty dark-time sky.
“What?” he grumbled, half-asleep.
“I must go to the forest.”
“Why?”
“I must fly.”
He sat up, fully awake.
“Fly where? Why?”
She sighed as she pulled on her heaviest gown.
“You have enough witch blood to see the dark cloud that lingers over the camp. Even Felyn sees it in her dreams.”
He started to tell her about the child’s last dream, but she put her hands to his lips to silence him, as the child had.
“It grows larger, darker every day, but I cannot see where it comes from or what causes it. I must fly to see. And it must be soon. Tonight.”
She quickly gathered a bag of herbs and pulled her cloak around her, waiting silently by the curtain that separated their chamber from the rest of the tent. She knew he would not allow her to go into the forest alone. He clambered to his feet and pulled his tunic on in the same movement, as if for an attack.
And an attack it was, he thought as he put on his sword. An attack on the contentment he had felt these last few days, despite interrupted sleep and the dark cloud he, too, saw in the air over them. Erwyn’s words had set off a jumble of feelings and fears he neither wanted nor understood. As he wrapped his cloak around him against the icy night air he cursed witches and witch blood, just quietly enough for her to know his anger.
But her thoughts were clearly busy elsewhere. Before they even left the tent she made herself invisible, as though her mind leapt ahead of them to the sleeping camp.
If the guards at the gate wondered why he asked them to let him out, they hid it well, or perhaps it seemed more rational a request to their sleep-hazed minds than it did to his.
Once out of sight of the camp, Erwyn appeared again and took his hand.
The night was clear, the forest strangely still as they walked in silence to the clearing. No owls hooted in the dark. No small animals rustled through the fallen leaves that covered the frozen ground. No panther called over its prey.
He built the tiny fire on the flat stone in the clearing while Erwyn drew what she needed from the bag she carried.
Soon sharp flames cut the darkness. She arranged large leaves on top of the fire. He stood at the edge of the clearing, his cloak across his face as the aromatic smoke filled the air.
When she let her robe fall to the ground and took her gown off to stand naked he could scarcely bear to look at her.
Her body was white in the moonlight that suddenly escaped the leaden clouds that covered it until then. Her beauty always amazed him but in this witch’s circle, she stunned him.
Humbled at the knowledge that she was his, he watched as she repeated the same ritual as before. When her body fell limp to the ground, he caught her and laid her gently on her gown, covering her with her cloak against the chill.
Then he lowered himself to the ground with his back against one of the trees that ringed the circle, helpless to do anything but wait.
The fire was out, the eastern sky bright when Erwyn finally stirred. Despite the heavy cloak that covered her she shivered. Great tears streamed down her face.
He knew better than to ask why, but helped her pull her clothes on and allowed her to lean on him, like an old woman, as they walked, until they came in sight of the camp. Her hand shook with effort of making herself invisible, and she leaned on him still as they passed the drowsy guards at the gate.
*
Erwyn slept all day, her dreams restless, painful.
Thalgor brought her food at sundown, then stared at her as she sat on their bed to eat. She let him wait. She knew what would happen once she spoke.
Finally she set the remains of the meal aside and stood to look him full in the face.
“The two we defeated,” she gestured toward the past, “were crows. The one who comes now is a raven. Twice as powerful, ten times as wise in the ways of battle, with strong witch blood and a mind capable of unimaginable evil.”
“Why would one such as that take those two as his lieutenants? The one died like a dog at the hands of his own men, the other died a coward’s death. If he has no better, he cannot be as you say.”
“They were his brothers, the only ones he could trust.”
“If his evil is so great, it is no wonder.” He sighed. “You say he comes here?”
She closed her eyes against the vision. “He marches this way for revenge, for blood and rotting flesh. He has half again as many men as you do and brings no women or livestock.”
“A raiding party. How long?”
He took one of her hands. She opened her eyes and touched his hair with the other.
“Three, maybe four days.”
“Can we defeat them?”
She lowered her head as her eyes misted with tears. “No.”
“Defend ourselves?”
His voice was thick with anger, but she knew him too well to feel a fear he meant for others.
“I do not know.” The words felt forced from her lips.
She knew he wished to ask more, but her eyes drooped with exhaustion. She closed them to hide her tears. He laid her back on the bed, dipped his head in salute, and left. She felt the plans for battle that already filled his mind.
Late in the night he returned.
&nb
sp; “Can you kill the raven?” he asked in a hushed voice when he saw she was awake.
Somewhere between sleep and waking she had wondered the same, and found the answer in a magic her mother had taught her, a magic from long ago, before witches and men found a way to live together. Before killing a witch brought a curse, and a witch’s power was lost if she killed. A magic now only whispered from mother to daughter, in case that war should ever erupt again.
“I can.” She refused to lie to him, despite what it could cost her. “But I won’t.”
His face darkened. At which confession, she could not tell. Perhaps at both. That magic was a secret long kept from men.
“Why not?” was all he asked.
“My gift is not for killing.”
He brushed the explanation away. “You kill after every battle.”
“I ease death.”
“Sett, Gurdek, and the others are afraid. They don’t see how we can defend ourselves against a force that large.”
She was afraid, too, but she could not tell him that.
“They wish to flee, to wander once again,” he went on. “The time we should spend in preparations for the battle they want to use to build new carts and train the oxen to pull again.”
The loss of his dream. Another cause for grief.
“What did you tell them?”
“That what they ask is impossible. They knew that, but it offered some hope. I told them you would find a way to save us.”
His words, his trust, would once have buoyed her, perhaps even only the day before. Now they were an added burden.
She wanted to cry out in pain, grief, and fear. Instead she told him the plan that had come to her while she waited for him.
“You could send some of your men to the forest, as you have done before. Once the attack begins, they can come around behind the enemy’s weakest flank.”
He thought for a moment, strategies flying through his mind.
“Are you certain that will drive them off?”
She could only shake her head. She was certain of nothing.
“Then you must kill the raven.”
“No.” Despair reduced her voice to a reedy whisper.
He grabbed her shoulders as if to shake her, but she lifted her eyes to his in silent warning and he immediately let her go.
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