“Seraph told him to guard the tent,” she said.
As she ducked through the flap he put his lips near her ear and said, “Don’t feel guilty.”
She stopped so abruptly that the top of her head collided with his jaw hard enough that she heard his teeth click.
“Why should I feel guilty for kissing a handsome young boy?” she said sarcastically, without lowering her tone at all.
To her amazement he grinned at her. Guardians didn’t grin. They smiled with pleasure while they choked the life out of some poor fool who crossed them. They bared their teeth. They didn’t grin.
“I don’t know. We both enjoyed it very much, Jes and I,” his grin widened. “And we’d like to do it again as soon as possible.”
“Here you are,” said a young man in rich clothing who awaited them in a small clearing set in the side of a hill and overlooking a twenty-acre field with a tidy cottage at the far end. “I thought you might not make it.”
Benroln smiled congenially. “I don’t break contracts, sir.”
“And besides,” said the young man, “you knew there was more gold where you got the first, eh?”
He looked too young to have been a merchant for long, thought Seraph, then she reconsidered. There was a softness in his face that made him look exceedingly young, but his eyes were sharp and old.
I’ll bet that he uses that young face of his, Seraph thought as she revised her estimate of his age upward by ten years.
“Of course, sir,” said Benroln after he laughed politely at the merchant’s comment. “This is the woman who will set the spell.”
“And this is the farm right here,” replied the merchant in a light, pleasant voice. “I want it cursed—you understand. Paid good money for a mage to curse it last year—but Asherstal still got a harvest out. I told that sorcerer I wanted nothing to grow on these fields, not even a weed. I want the other farmers to avoid Asherstal for fear whatever befell him will happen to them. I want him shamed. You’d better do the job or maybe some ill might befall you, eh? Like happened to that mage I hired last year.”
Benroln looked taken aback, and Seraph wondered if he’d believed that sweet, innocent air the merchant exuded.
“Your mage’s curse is still here,” she murmured. “Perhaps you had him killed too soon. I’ll have to take it off before I can work.”
“I don’t tell a tanner how to do his job,” said the merchant. “I just pay him for good work.” He made an odd motion with his hand that might have been accidental—but Tier had taught the boys the signs soldiers used. It had the look of one of those.
Lehr had caught it, too, she thought. He faded back silently into the night. Neither the merchant nor Benroln seemed to notice—she doubted the merchant had ever seen him to begin with.
“I’ll have to go down to the edge of the field,” Seraph said.
“Fine, fine,” he agreed. “It’s dark enough that they won’t see you. We can wait in the trees that border the field.”
He led the way down. If Benroln was worried by anything, Seraph couldn’t tell—but she thought not. If he’d been properly worried about the merchant, he wouldn’t have left Isfain and Kors to tend Jes and Hennea. More fool he, to trust a man who’d curse another man’s living.
She suspected that the hidden men were to come out when she finished to make certain neither Benroln nor she told anyone that he’d paid to have this poor farmer’s fields cursed.
Lehr wondered if his mother had caught the signal the merchant had sent. There were men out here somewhere, men waiting to kill Benroln and his mother when the merchant decided he was finished with them. Personally, Lehr wasn’t worried about Benroln one way or the other, but his mother was another matter entirely.
Lehr backtracked the merchant until he found a place where the man had waited with four others. Enough men to account for a couple of Travelers as long as they took them by surprise. Each had taken a different path.
They left no tracks that he could see, because the forest was inky-dark; not even the starlight illuminated the ground under the trees. But he knew they had been there because he could smell them.
He shuddered. What was he that he could scent a man like a dog? He drew his knife and picked a trail to follow.
When they came to the edge of the woods, the merchant motioned Seraph on. He and Benroln settled in to wait under the cover of the trees while she worked her magic.
She sat down on the ground at the edge of the field, just outside of the area of planting. She could see the weaving of magic through the soil. The mage this merchant had hired had done well; it was going to take her a long time to clean the field. Time for Lehr to find the merchant’s men. Time for Jes to be lost to the effects of the foundrael.
She began plucking the threads of the dead mage’s spell without further ado. As she did so, the familiarity of what she was doing settled around her with a feeling of rightness: this is what she had been born to do.
After a while the merchant became impatient. “I don’t see anything. I don’t pay good money for nothing—and I don’t put up with people who try to steal from me.”
“Tell him I can’t work unless he’s quiet,” said Seraph serenely, knowing that the calmer she was the worse the merchant would take it. His sort always liked to see people cringe in fear of him. She could have given him a light show, but the people her magic told her were sleeping in the cottage might be awakened. She didn’t want them coming out to investigate with the merchant’s armsmen lurking about—the wrong people might be killed.
“Come away,” Benroln said to the merchant with an air of determinedly cheerful deplomacy. “This will take a while. I brought a pair of dice with me. We can pass the time while Seraph works.”
Just as well he’d intervened before she’d pushed the merchant too far, she thought and turned her attention back to the field. Lehr needed all the time she could buy him.
Now why didn’t you work? she asked as she pulled the cursing magic away from stalks of wheat only half the size they should be this time of year. Nonetheless, with the strength of the spell she was unravelling, this field shouldn’t have grown anything more than a sprig of cheatgrass.
Night fell, but she didn’t pay any attention—what she was looking at didn’t require light for her to see. Finally, she detached the last of the spelling and, unanchored, the weave fell apart and lost its form.
The magic the wizard had imbued in his casting drifted off when the spell lost its power. It didn’t go far before it was caught firmly, and pulled back into the earth to enrich the soil. That was when Seraph realized how it was that the farmer had managed to grow wheat in this field.
There were other creatures that used magic besides the shadow beasts who lived in the Ragged Mountains. Most of them had died fighting at Shadow’s Fall. But some of them escaped.
This one hadn’t been strong enough to remove the spell, but it had done a great deal to mitigate the effects. Likely whatever it was, it had felt her meddling and was watching from nearby.
“Mmm,” she murmured, smiling in pleasure as she leaned forward and pressed her hands onto the field, sinking her hands into the soft ground where the magic held in the grains of dirt made her fingers tingle.
Seraph sent out a drift of Seeking magic again, this time looking for a creature not human. She found something almost immediately, but it was different than she expected: darkness but not shadow, somehow more natural, more elemental than the woods around her, something frightening. It could only be Jes.
The time had come whether Lehr was finished or not. She set the mystery of the farm’s protector aside and began her show.
She stood up and held both arms out theatrically, calling out in the Old Tongue. They weren’t words of power—she didn’t need them for this. She didn’t know many words of the Old Tongue, but she was willing to bet that Benroln knew even less.
Theatrics, her father would have scolded her, but her grandfather would have understood. Some peop
le wouldn’t believe in magic until it came with light and sounds.
The merchant himself had given her the idea for this, and the magic embedded in the soil gave her the power. She called light filaments to sparkle and grow like cobwebs on the wheat, dancing from stalk to stalk until the whole field glittered in light that shifted rapidly through the shades of the rainbow in waves. It was a pretty effect, she thought, though it was merely light.
But there wouldn’t be a solsenti alive who would turn their heads from the field to look behind them when Seraph’s children approached. Benroln and the merchant stepped out of the trees, but a flicker of magic held them where they were.
Now to leave the merchant in no doubt of what his gold had purchased for him. This was more difficult and she would never have even attempted it if it hadn’t been for that dark, tingling soil that ached to aid the growth of the plants rooted in it.
Slowly she raised her arms together as she pushed her magic into plants. Grow, she urged them, grow and be strong.
Stalks thickened slowly and stretched up…
A defter hand than hers touched them and straightened and strengthened; balancing root, stalk, and bearding head in a way that Seraph would not have, though she knew, from the rightness of the path of magic, that this was how plants ought to grow.
Since her magic was not needed, she glanced toward the source of the magework and saw it, sitting near a fencepost. It wasn’t much bigger than a cat, a small, mossy creature with rounded, droopy ears and large eyes that gleamed with power. Its coloring matched the earth and wood so closely that she doubted that she would have seen it if the field hadn’t been thrumming with its power.
“Earthkit,” she said softly to herself. “This farmer must keep to the old ways.”
“When he had naught but old bread and milk for his own children he didn’t forget me,” agreed a voice she felt as much as heard. “Such acts are to be rewarded.”
“Indeed,” agreed Seraph. Since she wasn’t doing anything else, she added a crackle to the lights so that the merchant and Benroln wouldn’t hear her talking to the creature. “I would not have been able to heal this so well without you.”
“Nor could I break that other spelling,” said the earthkit in its rusty voice. “But I am done now.” The magic ceased abruptly and it left in a scuttling run that her eyes could not quite follow.
The wheat swayed under Seraph’s lights, ready to harvest now—at least two months early. She lowered her arms and allowed the glitter and noise to die away slowly.
“I won’t do the work of petty criminals,” she said clearly.
“Raven,” spat Benroln. “Fine. See what happens to your children now. And as for this,” he waved a hand at the field, “You may be Raven, but I am Cormorant.”
Electricity began gathering in the air.
Stupid, stupid, arrogant Raven, Seraph thought, bitterly ashamed. A storm with the heavy wheat heads atop slender, drying stalks would be disastrous.
If she’d just left the field alone once she’d broken the curse, the earthkit would have seen to it that the wheat grew normally. She knew what Benroln was, and being a farmer’s wife she should have remembered what disasters the weather can bring.
“Benroln,” she said harshly, “you are a fool. This man has assassins in the woods—do you think they lurk there to watch the magic?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the merchant.
Benroln stopped his casting and looked at the other man.
“Why do you think that a man like this would come here without guards?” said Seraph. “There has always been a problem doing the work of solsenti who are willing to hire Travelers to make evil upon others of their kind.”
“What do you suggest?” Benroln said bitterly. “My people will starve. I tried it your way. We were driven from one place to another, sometimes by people who feared what we might do and sometimes by people because we wouldn’t do as they asked. I’ve had four—four—mermori come to me. Four more clans dead and gone.”
“Do not air our quarrels before solsenti,” she said sharply.
Benroln glanced at the merchant and bit his lip.
“Lehr took care of three of the men who were watching,” said Hennea, coming out of the woods with Gura at her side. “Jes has the other one immobilized.”
“So what do we do with him?” Benroln asked.
Jes appeared and grabbed the merchant’s hand.
“You don’t want to draw that knife,” Jes said quietly. “My brother’s over there with one of your men’s bows. No use anyone else dying tonight.”
The merchant all but collapsed at Jes’s touch, and Seraph’s oldest son relieved him of several throwing knives.
“Asherstal,” said Seraph, snapping her fingers. “The owner of this field. He has managed to survive this long; I suspect he can handle this one if we deliver him. Hennea, Jes, could you escort him there?” She turned to Benroln and said, “I need you to call a meeting of your people tonight. I’d like to tell you some things that you need to know.”
If she could persuade the entire clan to follow her to Taela, she’d have the clan’s healer for her husband when she found him. She just wished she were as good at persuading people as Tier was.
Benroln didn’t wait for her, but stomped off, angry at her, at the merchant, and at a responsibility he didn’t know how to fulfill.
When Benroln was gone, Jes said, “He bears no open wounds, Mother, but Lehr is hurt.”
Seraph nodded. “Take this one to the farmhouse and don’t get anyone hurt in the process, and I’ll do my best for Lehr.”
She waited until Jes and Hennea were halfway to the cabin, but before she called out, Lehr came. It was too dark to see him well, but she could smell the blood on him.
“Thank you,” she said. “If you had not been here tonight, Benroln and I would doubtless have been dead.”
“There are three men dead instead,” he said. “Jes tied the fourth one up before I got to him.”
“They were men who were willing to kill for no cause but gold,” said Seraph. Words were not her strength, but for Lehr she searched for the right ones. “They have doubtless killed others on the merchant’s orders. Now they will not kill anyone again.”
“When I killed them,” whispered Lehr, coming toward her, “it was so easy. Easier than hunting deer. What am I, Mother?”
“This is what it means to be an Order-Bearer,” she told him. “None of the Orders are easy. You are Hunter, and among the tasks of the Hunter is the bringing of death.”
She opened her arms, and, when he dropped to his knees in front of her, she pulled him close. He buried his face in the crook of her neck.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“Shh,” she held him and rocked lightly back and forth, as she had when he’d been a child. “Shh.”
“Someone’s waiting in front of our tent,” said Jes just as Gura gave a happy bark and ran forward with his tail wagging.
“So,” said Brewydd from a bench someone must have carried over for her. “You stopped Benroln from his folly. That’s more than I’ve managed to do.” Gura sat beside her and put his big black muzzle on her knee and heaved a contented sigh.
“Hardly,” said Seraph. “I just pointed out that the merchant he chose to do business with was a thief and a killer—and that any other solsenti he’d find to pay for the same sort of favor will probably be equally bad.”
The old woman cackled, “I never thought of that.”
“It won’t stop him,” said Seraph. “He’s obviously done similar things before; he’ll do them again.”
“Most of them weren’t this bad,” said Brewydd. “Though making certain that a village was dry a month or more in high summer, then forcing them to pay him to bring the rain is no noble deed.”
“No,” agreed Hennea dryly.
“Talk to him at this meeting tonight,” Brewydd told Seraph. “Make him understand what he does is folly.”
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“What good will talking do?” asked Lehr. “Haven’t you told him what he’s been doing is wrong? Why would he listen to Mother when he won’t listen to you?”
“Hah!” exclaimed Brewydd. “A man would rather listen to a beautiful woman than a wrinkled old crone. You, boy,” she said pointing at Lehr. “You can help an old woman to her home.”
Lehr took a deep breath, tightened his jaw, and nodded his head. When he took her arm, Brewydd patted his biceps lightly before using him to lever herself up. “Your mother teaches you well, boy. It is good when a youngling is kind to old women.” She winked at Seraph and continued to mutter at Lehr as he led her back to her wagon.
“Right,” said Seraph, hoping Brewydd could do better for Lehr than she’d managed. “Let’s go find Benroln.”
“Seraph,” said Hennea, “if you go and start attacking Benroln for what he’s done, you’ll make Lehr happy and we’ll all go our separate ways tomorrow. Benroln will still take gold from the next solsenti who wants to pay to have his neighbor’s fields destroyed, and you’ll have the satisfaction of telling them what you think of them.”
“You have another suggestion?” said Seraph.
“The Secret Path is very powerful,” said Hennea. “They claim that they run the Empire, and that might very well be true. Having more people to call on for help could be very useful.”
“I’ve thought of that,” said Seraph. “But—Hennea, I am not a Bard. Yelling I can do, but persuasion is another matter entirely. Would you try?”
She shook her head. “To Benroln and his people, you are our leader. To have me speak to them would be an insult. You can do this. Just remember that Benroln is frustrated because there’s nothing he can do to keep his people safe. Give him something to do other than rob the solsenti of their gold, some way to strike back, and he’ll forget about the games.”
Isfain was angry with Hennea, Seraph observed as she sipped her hot tea. But Hennea had told her the state she’d found Jes in, and Seraph didn’t mind seeing him grit his teeth when Hennea got too close. What chance had given Hennea the knowledge of loosing the foundrael, Seraph didn’t know, but she was grateful for it all the same.
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