Witchlanders

by Lena Coakley

  “Please!” Ryder called out to the crowd. “Raiken, my mother saved your family with her warning. You said so yourself as we came up the mountain.”

  Ryder’s neighbor stood twisting his gloves in his hands, embarrassed by the eyes of the villagers that were suddenly all upon him. “It’s true that Mabis takes the maiden’s woe,” he said finally. “This summer I saw her in the river pulling it up. My wife saw her too.”

  “No!” Ryder bellowed. “She only did that to help her prophecy. She saved you! My mother saved you all—you’d be dead if it weren’t for her!”

  Visser grabbed him by the arm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We would have held this information back. But we cannot start another war by killing this Baen.”

  Ryder shook himself free. “You witches,” he sneered. “You sit up here, doing no work, eating our food, and for what?”

  “But are we out of danger?” Raiken asked Visser, his eyes avoiding Ryder. “Couldn’t Mabis create more of those hideous things?”

  “She didn’t make them!” Ryder yelled, shaking with anger.

  “We feel there is little chance of that,” Visser said. “She is almost certainly dead—I’m sorry, Ryder. If her own creatures didn’t kill her, the craving for maiden’s woe surely has by now.”

  Ryder looked to Sodan’s litter, wondering if he was behind all this, but the coven leader sat hunched and unmoving. Only the slight puff of his breath proved he was more than a pile of blankets. A little higher up on the coven steps, Ryder caught a glimpse of white. It was a young woman. He recognized her long braid and graceful stance—Aata’s Right Hand.

  “You!” he roared, forgetting everything else as blind fury swept over him. He leapt from the platform into the crowd.

  “Ryder, don’t!” he heard Skyla shout.

  “Stop him,” Visser cried, but the villagers parted as he ran.

  His boots thumped on the frozen ground, and in moments he had reached the edge of the meadow. Torchlight dazzled him. He passed the litter without a glance and dodged through the startled group of witches who had been watching him from a distance. A woman in red came out of one of the huts and cried out as he flew by. Aata’s Right Hand stood above him on a platform of the tiered steps, her lips parted in surprise, a glim in her hand.

  “What have you been saying about my mother?” Ryder shouted up to her.

  The girl stepped back in alarm. She wore a white coat that went down past her knees, and her long braid was slung forward in front of her. Ryder ran toward her, taking two steps at a time, but just as he reached the platform, someone grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back. Kef—he always could run fast. They struggled briefly. Then Ryder hit Kef in the chest with the flat of his hand, and Kef stumbled backward into the crowd of people who were swarming up the steps after him.

  Aata’s Right Hand stared at the scene with horror in her eyes—and something else, too. For a moment Ryder thought he saw the guilt and shame he had expected to find in Visser. Two more men grabbed him and held him back by the arms—Harkiss the blacksmith and one of his boys.

  “You’re a liar!” Ryder said to the girl, trying to pull free. “I can see it in your eyes.”

  She gave a small gasp and the glim dropped from her hands, smashing on stone. Then she turned and bolted, a flash of white.

  “Coward! Thief! Come answer for what you’ve done!”

  Ryder tried to break away and run after her, but many hands pulled him back. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the cold platform, surrounded by angry, shouting faces. He struggled, but after a while he realized it was useless, and he stopped, panting at the dark sky. The hilt of the Baenkiller jabbed painfully into his back.

  “Let me talk to him!” Skyla pushed her way to Ryder’s side. “Let him up, please! He’s just upset!”

  “I’m not upset.” He sat up. “Where is that girl?”

  “Ryder, shut up,” Skyla hissed, her voice sharp. Then, to the others: “Let me talk to him in private. Please. He’s had bad news. Surely you can understand that.”

  “You don’t believe it,” Ryder said, still quivering with anger. “Tell me you don’t.”

  “Of course not,” said Skyla. “It doesn’t make sense.” She had led him in between the huts to a large wooden building without walls—a shrine, Ryder guessed. Its sloped roof was held up by tall, thin pillars. Here, witches could perform their prayers in open air and still be protected from the weather.

  They climbed a few rough steps and walked out onto a bare floor. Ryder couldn’t see much at first; they had only one glim that Skyla carried on a chain. Wooden planks creaked under their feet. To Ryder, it seemed like cheating to kneel down and greet the earth on a raised floor, but then, he was no expert on praying.

  Skyla crossed to a low railing, hanging the glim on a hook as she leaned out over the valley. Ryder came up beside his sister, but there was little to see. It was a moonless night, and the stars were snuffed out by thick winter clouds. In the valley, all was dark. Only a few lamps and torches were visible, below them and to the left, snaking their way down the mountain path: The villagers were leaving, going home.

  Ryder turned away and sank down onto the plank floor, trying to quiet a cold rage that threatened to choke him. He pulled the Baenkiller from his back and checked for damage—it seemed unharmed.

  Skyla stared down at him, light from the glim reflected in her eyes. If anything could melt the shell of ice inside him it was probably those knowing eyes, like his father looking at him from beyond the grave. Ryder kept his attention on the sword, polishing a dull spot with the end of his coat sleeve.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  He glanced up. She probably did, and anyway, there was no use hiding his intentions. “I’ll need food. And a good knife.”

  “You’ll die.” Skyla folded her legs and settled down in front of him, putting a gloved hand on his knee. “You’ll die if you go after that Baen alone.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I heard her prophecies too. Mabis didn’t say anything about a Baen.”

  “Yes, she did—the assassin, don’t you remember?”

  Skyla furrowed her brow, considering. “But the witches—they won’t let you go.”

  “Who will tell them?” Skyla didn’t answer, and Ryder tried to read her face. Would she give him away?

  “The witches say the danger is over,” she went on. “Maybe they got that part right.” Ryder shook his head. “Fine then, think of Pima. She’s lost so much. First Fa, then Mabis. If she loses you, too . . .”

  “Mabis isn’t dead,” he snapped. “Don’t say that. There was no body. And Dassen . . . Dassen is still organizing searches. . . .” He looked away. He shouldn’t speak about Mabis out loud. It made something inside him threaten to break, like a dam holding back water. “You and Pima should go back down to the village as soon as you can. Dassen will take you in. I don’t want you staying here—with these people.”

  There was a pause.

  “No,” Skyla said.

  “No what?”

  “Just no. I’m not leaving the coven.” A spark of anger flared in her voice. “I’m not going to spend my life washing cups at Dassen’s just because you’ve decided to die some stupid death.”

  “You’d let Pima live with people who say Mabis tried to murder a whole village?”

  Skyla’s pale eyes flashed. “This place is good for her—you’d see that if you thought of anyone besides yourself. She’ll have friends her own age, and she’s learning things, and there’s plenty of food here.”

  “She’s miserable!”

  “She’d be miserable anywhere. She misses her mother.” Skyla stood up and paced the floor, hugging herself against the cold. “Pima could do a lot worse than grow up a witch, Ryder. What else can she become? A farmer’s wife? The witches were wrong about Mabis, I can see that. But not all witchcraft is wrong.”

  Ryder sheathed the Baenkiller and stood up. “Until Mabis gets back, I
am the head of this family,” he said, softly but firmly.

  “No!” she said, her voice just as firm. “If you want to be the head of this family, you have to be here.”

  Ryder gritted his teeth. It was too simple to believe that he took after his mother and that Skyla took after Fa. At that moment his sister was all Mabis—stubborn, hard as iron. Ryder had that vein of iron in himself, too, and recognized it when he saw it.

  “You just want to be a witch yourself,” he grumbled. “You don’t care about Pima.”

  The hard look on her face turned to pity, and she tried to take his arm. “I wish I could explain it to you, Ryder. I wish I could make you understand.”

  “I understand. You want to see the future and have everybody bow at you.”

  She sighed and turned away, and he could see that she was biting back more harsh words. She leaned out over the railing. After a while, he came to join her, both of them looking out into the frigid blackness.

  “Oh, look!” she cried. As they watched, the chilling clouds parted, revealing a patch of brilliant sky. They both stared—stars were a rare sight in winter. Ryder knew he should be moved. “Yulla says that when the Goddess made the world she threw the stars into the sky like a casting, and that the witches of old could read a person’s destiny in the stars the same way they read the bones.”

  “Any star tries to tell me my destiny, I will wrench it from the sky.”

  Skyla laughed at that. “Of course you will.” She slipped her arm through his and put her head on his shoulder. Below them on the mountain, the branches of bare trees clicked together in the frozen wind.

  “You’ll need tinder and flint, I guess,” she said after a while, “and a better pair of gloves. I know of a storage shed not far from here. There is no guard.”

  He nodded. “Thank you.”

  “If there really is a black magician out there, he’ll stop your heart with a curse and feed your body to his dread-hound.”

  “Sounds like a story of Dassen’s.” But after all Ryder had seen, Dassen’s stories didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore. Never mind, he thought. The Baenkiller could stop hearts too.

  “You look different in the starlight,” Skyla murmured, looking up at him. “Your face is hard as stone.”

  “Not the stars’ fault,” Ryder said. “They’re gone.” He pointed at the blank sky, but his sister’s eyes didn’t leave his face.

  “Ryder—”

  “Let’s go,” he interrupted, tired of talk. In his mind he was already over the border, tracking the Baen, making him pay.

  PART TWO

  When you sing the winter keys, do not forget: They are also singing you.

  —Baen saying

  CHAPTER 10

  HAUNTED

  Don’t go to sleep.

  Falpian sat cross-legged on the rug, trying to keep his eyes open. A fire crackled in the grate. The wind rattled the glass in the small, square windows. Outside there was nothing but blackness and snow, hurrying down, hurrying down. His shoulders drooped, and his tired mind drifted from one thought to another. He was thinking about being buried in snow. How soft it would be. Like a down coverlet. At home he used to watch the snow from his window; it fell into the sea and disappeared. Here was different. It had been coming down all day and into the night. Great drifts were inching up the sides of the house, erasing him.

  Falpian sighed. He should be sinking into real down coverlets right now. He should be letting sleep cover him in drifts. The humming stone sat on the floor in front of him. It seemed to stare at Falpian like a malevolent gray eye. He stared back. The stone was average-looking. Only a few lines of writing scratched over its surface distinguished it from an ordinary river rock. After a while, Falpian’s vision began to blur, and the object became part of the intricate pattern of the rug, like a gray island in an ocean of curling embroidered waves. Don’t go to sleep!

  In one corner of the room, Bo snorted but didn’t wake up. He lay with his legs splayed open and his belly showing. Lucky dog. Falpian rolled his head in a circle, listening to his neck crack. He shook out his shoulders. Might as well begin. Praying was a last resort; he’d tried everything else.

  Falpian leaned forward and blew a long, even breath over the humming stone. Nothing. He tried again. This time he felt it awaken. As yet, the stone made no sound that he could hear, but in his corner, Bo opened one eye.

  Hesitantly Falpian tested his voice. A note. Then another. As he sang, the stone on the floor began to release its own distinctive humming—thrum, thrum, thrum—so far, so good. The dog was fully awake now. He crouched low to the floor and looked up at Falpian with round, intelligent eyes. The humming of the stone grew louder. On the mantel, a set of little iron figurines twisted back and forth with the vibrations. Still good. Falpian didn’t know why he was so scared—he’d done this a hundred times—but something had happened to him in the four days since the chilling, something he couldn’t understand. Not even singing could quell the rising panic in his heart. Sometimes he even thought it made it worse.

  Falpian’s voice merged with the sound of the stone, getting stronger and more confident, one note winding around another. He was ready now. In a booming voice, he began the low, sad notes of the prayer for the dead.

  The song struck him, as it always did, as too beautiful. It had no words, only sounds. They should have been harsh and ugly, full of grief. But they weren’t. It was painful the way the prayer made his heart lift. Here at Stonehouse, Falpian had learned to love singing as never before, and the guilty joy of it made his voice ring in the night like a sad and beautiful bell.

  My brother, he thought as he sang. I feel your angry spirit. I have been selfish, reveling in my newfound magic when I should have been in mourning. I have not sung you half as many prayers as you deserve. I know that you must be the presence I’ve been feeling on this mountain. I know that you must be sending me these dreams. But please, what has happened to make them so full of malice? I will go mad of them. Please . . .

  A wall of feeling struck Falpian in the chest. Hatred. Pure hatred. For a moment he was somewhere else entirely, not Stonehouse, but some dark, cold place. He looked around, terrified, but all he saw was blackness. He reached out a hand and felt snow. Falpian stopped singing, and the vision abruptly faded. On the floor, the humming stone was still vibrating.

  This was wrong, all wrong. The song of the stone should have begun to fade as soon as Falpian closed his mouth, but instead it grew louder and louder, rising in pitch until it reached a deafening whine. Falpian put his hands over his ears. Bo was running around and around the room, his huge gray body knocking over chairs, making the candles teeter on the tables. Falpian could see the dog’s jaws opening and shutting, but his bark was swallowed up by the piercing shriek of the stone.

  There was a loud bang from one of the windowpanes, and the humming finally stopped. Falpian sat wide-eyed in the abrupt silence. He rubbed at his arms, still cold from the brief vision he had experienced. What had happened? He’d studied the principles of magic nearly all his life, but had never heard of a humming stone doing that—not with only one singer. He poked at it tentatively. The stone was hot to the touch, and there was a small burned spot on the rug. He got up and examined the window by the door. A diagonal crack split the thick, bumpy glass. Had the sound of the stone done that?

  In the bedroom, Falpian caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: dark circles under his eyes, black hair greasy and wild. He looked haunted. He climbed into bed with his clothes on and pulled the covers around him. Bo started to bark again. Falpian could see him through the archway of the bedroom door. His paws were up on the sill of the cracked window. Bark, bark, bark, as if there were something out there in the blackness. The dog looked back at him wistfully; clever as he was, he couldn’t work the latch to the outside door with those big paws.

  “Go to sleep, Bo.”

  Falpian pulled the covers over his head. Let the dreams come; he didn’t care. Being awake was
getting to be as bad as dreaming.

  Squinting into the morning, Falpian pulled shut the door of the stone cottage. The cold air bit his face, and his white breath was torn away by the gusting wind—but at least the blizzard of the night before had finally stopped. Chilling clouds tinged the world lavender, even the snowdrifts. Falpian missed the sky already—he missed blue—and winter had only just begun.

  Bo bounded away from him, oblivious to the cold. A dreadhound was made for snow: long, shaggy coat for warmth, big snowshoe paws. He found his favorite tree and lifted one leg. Too late, Falpian remembered the chamber pot still sitting under his bed. He’d never realized how many little annoying tasks servants had been doing for him all his life. He’d empty it later.

  It was the dog’s fault he was up so early. Falpian had slept, actually slept—two hours at least. Bliss. He could have gone on and on for days. The dreams hadn’t come. Nothing had come except a numbing white sleep. But Bo—stupid dog—had dragged all his covers off, had breathed doggy breath into his face, slobbered doggy slobber.

  “Come on back now. It’s too cold. You can hunt later.” Maybe Falpian would be able to get back to sleep, back to that numb white place. Bo looked at him with knowing eyes but didn’t come. He rubbed one of his long saber teeth against a sapling; he was a lazy dog, but he always kept his teeth sharp.

  “I know you understand me, bad thing.”

  Bo wasn’t listening now. His pointed ears were swiveling back and forth as if he had caught some impossibly dim sound. He took a long sniff of the air. Then, without warning, he took off, kicking up sprays of snow with his powerful hind legs.

  “Bo!”

  As Falpian followed through the powdery drifts, he thought of the night before, of that wall of overpowering hatred he had felt when he tried to pray. Humming stones didn’t do that, not on their own. There was definitely some sort of angry presence in these mountains.