by Tim Akers
“My lady, perhaps we have followed this trail long enough,” Sir Merret said from the head of the column. “Any god able to manifest so close to the Allfire must be too weak to bother with.”
“Or too powerful to be faced,” one of the men grumbled.
“Do you find your faith lacking, sirs?” Gwen asked. “Or are you simply tired of being in the saddle? Is that too much of a task for you?”
“My lady—” Merret started again. He was older than the rest, and had been in her father’s service ever since Gwen could remember. He was one of the few Suhdrin knights in Adair’s service.
The rest were all Tenerran, men her father had personally raised to titled rank from the various tribal villages that dotted his humble domain. The only thing that marked Sir Merret as different was his constant complaint about the dullness of Tenerran food, and his willingness to correct the baron’s daughter. Not that either habit got him anywhere.
Gwen interrupted him before he was able to get any further in his excuses.
“I am sworn to protect these lands from the pagan gods,” she said. “Not to protect them until it gets to be a dangerous business, or to run from the whispers of what a gheist might be without laying my own eyes on it.” She gave him a stern look. “I will carry out my duty.”
“Assuming you’re able to defeat the demon of this bush,” Frair Lucas said quietly. He was smiling and distracted, his eyes wandering from the company of knights to the forest around them.
What is he hiding, Gwen wondered, behind that indifferent expression?
“Frair, you are on this hunt as a courtesy to the church,” Sir Merret snapped, pulling his horse level with the priest’s tired-looking mare. “It’s not your place to insult my lord’s heir. The role of huntress is an ancient and honored tradition in the north. You would do well to offer the lady the respect she has earned.”
“I’m sure her place as the daughter of Lord Adair has nothing to do with her place as huntress,” the frair said, without either malice or conceit. Still, the whole company bristled.
“What are you implying?” Gwen said stiffly.
“Nothing. Simply that I have not seen you face the threats a huntress usually has to face.” He smiled. “And I try never to judge someone until I’ve had their weight.”
“How kind of you,” Gwen said sharply.
“Not kind—just Cinder’s nature.” Lucas raised a finger, tilting his head toward the sky. “A moment, please.”
“This is a dangerous task we’re about, Frair. If you’d rather be having a theological discussion back at my father’s castle—”
“Honestly, just one moment of silence,” Lucas said. “I think…”
The baying of the hounds, once distant and filtering through the trees, switched suddenly, and Gwendolyn stood up in her saddle. They were getting closer. She looked excitedly to the knights beside her. None of them seemed afraid, and while that could well change, she was glad to see them perhaps as eager as her. Only the priest seemed discomforted.
“It’s hardly a challenge if the beast comes to you, is it?” he muttered.
“I will take the hunt however Strife sees fit to give it to me,” Gwen answered. “You will have your judgment shortly, priest of Cinder. Men, form on me and—”
Abruptly the copse of thorns shuddered, the tightly bound tendrils shivering loudly, and then they burst aside. In an instant the unholy creature was among them, howling.
Gwen caught barely a glimpse of it before Missy turned aside, jerking her away from the gheist. What she saw was a coiled bundle of bark and stone, loping out of the forest like a wolfhound. It was smaller than she had expected, but bristling with furious energy. Its howl was the sound of tree limbs snapping, and it had claws of stone that tore up the damp earth as it barreled past. When it was gone, the air smelled like the forest after a heavy rain.
“That is not the god I was expecting,” Frair Lucas said with a tinge of disappointment.
“But a god none the less,” Gwen answered, “and I mean to answer it.”
“A second gheist in these woods?” Sir Merret said. “If Frair Lucas is to be believed, the tangled black creature that attacked Greenhall was seen on our borders. And now there are two.”
“We can worry about the details later,” Gwen said. “Merret, Hobbs, form the van. Everyone else spread out. We have to steer it away from the farms east of here. Frair Lucas, you had best stay with me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else,” he answered.
“Very good. Lads, get riding.”
Sir Merret drew his short hunting spear, tipped in bloodwrought iron from the forge-shrine at Hollyhaute, and rode off after the gheist, Hobbs close beside him. The other riders broke into the woods, crashing through bush and bramble with their armored mounts. Gwen waited until the sound of their passage began to fade. She turned to the priest.
“I am not used to having priests question my ability, especially not in front of my men.”
“And I am not used to huntresses dawdling over a matter of honor while a gheist escapes them,” he answered.
“Have you been on many gheist hunts, frair?”
“A few,” he answered, flicking his reins across his lap. “Fewer than you, I’m sure.”
“I’m sure. It’s convenient that you were traveling through just as the hunt was called, and that you knew what we should find out here.”
“Well, apparently I was wrong about that.”
“Yes,” she said. There was a moment of strained silence, then she added, “Why are you here?”
Just then the hunting pack burst through the bramblewood copse, well behind their prey. The pack was Gwen’s personal litter, dogs she had bred and trained from birth. They were cragshounds, the initial breeding stock a gift from House Malygris years ago as a sign of peace between the Suhdrin and Tenerran families. The dogs were broad of shoulder and long, with strong, muscular necks and jaws that could snap bone.
The pack flowed out of the forest like a tide of bright teeth and rippling fur, browns and blacks and whites flecked with mud. Without the scent they had fallen silent, but as soon as they emerged from the thorny bushes the pack raised a piercing cry that startled the priest, and filled Gwen with a thrill of laughter.
“Come, frair—the hunt demands our presence!” Gwen yelled. “We will talk later, rest assured.” Then she galloped down the path after her pack. It was all she could do to keep near them.
The gheist seemed to be sticking to the path now. Merret’s men had torn through already, snapping tree limbs and tearing up the sod. Gwen could see nothing of the creature’s passing, but trusted in her dogs’ instinct. As she rode, she assumed Lucas was somewhere behind her.
It struck Gwen as odd that the demon, after weaving through bramblewood and spearpines all morning, had suddenly taken the beaten path. The whole hunt had been a winding affair, with the riders working their way through marshy fens and around impenetrable hedges, trying to stay close to the prey and the pack.
Trees whipped past them, whistling in the breeze.
Something else started to twist through the breeze, a smell that Gwen had trouble identifying at first. Kitchens, maybe, or the close stone ceiling of the doma, during one of the holidays, when the priests swung their censers, trailing incense. She didn’t give it much thought as she barreled ahead, but then the sound of her dogs took on a tone of confusion.
Before she knew it, Gwen caught up with the rest of the riders. They were milling about at the crest of a gentle hill that poked its grassy head out of the forest. Gwen pulled her courser up short, trotting until she was sitting next to Sir Merret. The knight looked concerned.
The dogs had fallen silent.
“What news, sir?” she asked. “Did we lose our prey?”
“We have not lost the prey. But I’m unsure if we should proceed, my lady,” Merret answered, nodding down the hill, “on account of that.”
Their vantage point gave them a good view of
the surrounding forest, stretching away like a sea of leafy green. Not a hundred yards away, seemingly ahead of them on the path they had been following, was a plume of dark smoke. That was what Gwen had smelled, racing through the woods.
“A forest fire?” she asked.
“More,” Sir Dobbs answered. He was a muscular, balding man. His accent was thicker than that cultivated by most of Adair’s knights. “We’re right on the Tallow, beyond the Highfen.”
“That’s a village,” Gwen said. “Tallownere.”
“Aye,” Dobbs answered, “and listen.”
Gwen had been so tuned to her pack’s baying that once they were quiet, she hadn’t really been listening to the rest of the forest. Now that she put her mind to it, though, she could pick out other sounds: metal clanging dully against wood, and men shouting.
“Someone else has found our gheist,” Gwen offered.
“I don’t think so, lass. I think our gheist has found someone else.”
“What he means to say,” Merret interrupted, “is that our gheist seems to have led us here.”
“What? But why…”
“That line of trees, where there’s the break in the canopy, do you see it?” Merret asked, pointing. Gwen saw the break clearly enough, just this side of the smoke. “That’s the Tallow River, on the Suhdrin border. The border of your father’s property, and the beginning of the lands of Greenhall.”
“Halverdt,” Dobbs muttered.
“Well, why does that matter? If those people need our help, surely the duke would want us to lend a hand, wouldn’t he?”
“My blood’s from around here,” Dobbs muttered. “Ten generations, raised up here before there were any damn Suhdrins to speak of.”
“No offense taken, Sir Dobbs,” Merret said testily. “What he’s trying to say is that this is a Tenerran village, Tenerran homes that are burning, and it’s worth pointing out that this trouble, whatever it is, drew the attention of a gheist. They are the source of their own misfortune.”
“You can’t blame the people, man,” Dobbs replied. “If them dying draws the eyes of the spirits…”
“That is very rarely the case,” Frair Lucas said, still strangely calm. “I find it very odd, indeed.”
“How do we know what’s going on down there?” Gwen protested. “It could be bandits, it could be another gheist!” She took Merret’s sleeve in her hand and tugged. “We don’t know what could be happening to those people.”
“That is a Tenerran village,” he said stiffly, “in Halverdt’s land, and none of our business. We are here to hunt gheists, and to protect the lands of House Adair.”
“You may not feel the pull of blood, Sir Merret,” Dobbs answered, “but I doubt Halverdt’s men feel the same.”
“I am new to these lands,” Lucas said, rounding on Dobbs. “What exactly do you believe is happening below?”
“The gheist that you tracked here from Greenhall will have caused the duke much embarrassment,” Merret answered for the slowly seething Dobbs. “The duke will want to assign blame for that. He will look for blood to spill.”
“And he rarely cares if the blood he takes is truly guilty,” Dobbs said, “as long as it is Tenerran.”
“We are meant to be hunting gheists,” Merret whispered into Gwen’s ear, grasping her reins. “This is not our charge, my lady.”
“Then perhaps it should be,” Gwen snapped. She wrenched the reins from the old man’s hand and spurred her horse forward. “What good is it to protect the people from mad gods, if we let them die at the hands of mad lords?” She looked among her men. They were in hunting gear. No tabards, no pennants, no colors of House Adair among them.
“Cover your faces,” she said, drawing the cowl of her robe across the lower half of her features, securing it in place with a twist. “Say your prayers and follow me.” With that she dove down the hill, her courser picking up speed as they reentered the forest canopy. Her pack of dogs began howling again, and followed after. The riders were close behind. She smiled and bent herself to the road in front of her.
* * *
The bridge across the Tallow came fast, little more than a clattering span of loose boards, the river itself brown and slow. By the time Gwen was across the dogs were with her, coursing around Missy’s hooves and voicing their low, rolling growl. She heard her riders crash across the bridge seconds after she cleared it.
There wasn’t much to the village: the low wooden wall was bound with the icons of Cinder and Strife, necessary this far from the godsroad, even at the height of the church’s power. The wall surrounded a handful of small buildings. Half of the thatch roofs were on fire. The sound of yelling was much clearer now, and even from a distance she could see men moving around the village square, armor glinting. There was a great deal of screaming from what sounded like pigs in the midst of the slaughter.
A body lay in the middle of the road, just before the gate. It was a farmer, a threshing blade held across his chest. His head was caved in, pieces of skull and blood scattered across the road. She was past it before the violence of his death registered with her, Missy vaulting the fallen man’s splayed limbs without a pause.
Then she was inside the wall. There was blood, such blood, and her mind reeled. Tallownere was little more than a collection of a dozen buildings clustered around a dusty common space, sprouts of browning grass in place of a lush yard, a tumbledown well of stone and graying wood. These were the saddest sort of wattle-and-daub hovels, this one on fire, that one caved in, a man’s foot sticking out from the wreckage.
Two dozen soldiers stood in the courtyard. They were Halverdt’s men, dressed in green and gold, armor bright under the noonday sun. They were gathered around a small group of screaming women and girls, most of them lying on the ground beside the well, their hands over their heads. A line of bodies, all men, lay on the other side of the square. Butchered. It was the screaming of the women that Gwen had mistaken for pigs.
There was nothing human left in their terror.
The dogs got there first, but didn’t know what to do. They were hunting dogs, and there was nothing here to hunt. They ran around the circle of soldiers, barking excitedly, their tongues lolling. The soldiers were confused by this interruption, one of them spotting Gwen as she roared toward them. The circle parted and a man stood up from where he’d been crouched. His hands and pants were covered in blood, and a girl at his feet wasn’t moving.
Gwen swung the hunting spear out from its quiver and raised it up. She wasn’t thinking, wouldn’t believe that what she was seeing was real, was even possible.
She drew the spear back and threw.
It slid down the man’s arm, hooking into his greave and tearing flesh and chain. He roared and tore it free. Missy clattered to a stop in front of the men, trotting sideways to go around. The soldier lunged, the horse bucked, and Gwen was free of her saddle, rolling on the blood-soaked cobbles of the village square.
Her breath left her with a whump.
She tried to roll to her feet, but the impact had knocked the balance from her head, and she was reeling on one knee, struggling to stay upright while the whole world seemed to be tipping away from her. Her mask fell away, and her leg was on fire.
Then her riders were in the village. There was a great crash of metal and horse, and the remaining villagers scattered. Gwen slid away, crawling on her hands and knees to get clear of the confusion of crushing hooves and swinging blades. She found herself beside a trough and crawled over it, landing in a sty. The ground smelled, and the pigs were all dead in the mud, but at least there was no one here trying to put a spear through her head.
She watched the fight from the mud, saw Merret and Dobbs fighting side by side. One of the farmer’s wives was killed by accident as she threw herself at them. Dobbs batted aside the shield of one of Halverdt’s men and ran him through. One of her riders fell to a grievous wound, then another.
More than one of Halverdt’s soldiers met their end, but her men were a
rmed for the hunt, not for a sustained battle, and they were outnumbered. A knight came out of one of the burning buildings, flecks of ash on his black cloak. He had his hood thrown back, and wore no helmet. The gray locks of his hair were smeared with soot.
His face was incredibly still, as if he was watching a squabble between two children. He threw his cloak aside and drew his sword, a length of pitted metal that shivered in the light. He launched himself into the fight, and it became a murder, a slaughter of men and women and horses and dogs—whatever got in his way, even his own knights.
When Sir Merret saw him first, he yelled out.
“The Deadface!” he cried, and he backed away from the fight. The man killed Missy with a single blow across the mare’s broad neck—Missy who was just standing there. Three dogs rushed him, sensing something in him that should be put down, and he cut them open like melons. Sir MaeDerry, a boy who had taken his sword and his oath just the previous summer, charged the Deadface, roaring and swinging away with that great mace of his. Halverdt’s pet monster killed him with hardly a blink, MaeDerry collapsing to the mud with his belly the wrong way out, blood bubbling from his mouth.
Gwen backed herself against the side of a meager wooden building, then rolled around it, dragging her leg, though she couldn’t feel it any longer. She looked it over, and found blood streaked down the torn leather of her hunting gear. Was it hers, or had it come from one of those farmers, lying out there on the yard?
Her hands were shaking with anger, with the blade-itch and hunter’s rush, but she had lost her spears, and the dead-faced man was tearing through her men like the plague.
She scanned the yard for a dropped weapon.
It was the growling that brought her back. It was coming from the wrong direction, from near the wall. She looked up and saw the gheist, its hunched back of rough bark and stone quivering. It was staring at her with eyes that looked like shards of frozen sky. Its teeth were nothing more than broken rocks, a mouth full of grinding, splintered stone.
