The Resistance: The Fourth Book of the Fey (Fey Series)

by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  They wanted all the land planted.

  Luke saw how the years ahead would work: The Fey would demand more and more produce from the Islanders. The produce would be shipped off Blue Isle or used for ships that passed by on their way to Leut. Islanders would get less and less of the food, and some would die off. Then the Fey would realize they were losing their forces, and relax a little. This interconnected relationship would go on until the Islanders couldn't remember a time without the Fey directing their every move.

  He saw it so clearly, and he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was because of his father. Maybe it was the stories Scavenger told about the life the Fey had created for the conquered in other countries.

  Maybe it was just Luke's fear, building on itself

  He had reached the farmhouse. It was quiet. No one stirred and no lights burned. He had hoped he had waited until the right time to travel unseen. He was moving about late enough. Now all he had to do was hope that it wasn't too late, that he would get back before sunrise.

  He crossed behind the house, past the well, and on the outside of the nearest field. This neighbor planted hay, although he still had hay bales rotting in his field from the year before. King Nicholas's policies hadn't always been good for farmers, and so many had suffered when trade with Nye was cut off. His neighbor had hoped to sell the hay as feed to stables in Jahn, but obviously that wasn't going to work.

  Luke had heard that Jahn was gone.

  He couldn't quite believe that. He couldn't wrap his mind around the destruction of an entire city. But he also knew the Fey were capable of it. Scavenger once said the Fey saw cities as places that caused dissent, and were better off destroyed, leaving the outlying areas where men couldn't gather and resist.

  Little did the Fey know.

  Luke worked his way silently around the hay bales. They smelled sharp and pungent, and beneath the hay odor was the scent of rot. The smell tickled his nose, and he felt a sneeze building. He put a hand over his mouth, hoping to hold it off, but to no avail. The sneeze came. He managed to stifle it with his hand and throat, but the sound still seemed explosive in the quiet night.

  He crouched against the bale. Nothing moved. No lights were lit in the farmhouse, and he heard nothing on the nearby road. Maybe no one had heard him.

  Maybe if they had they had thought it something else.

  He let his breath out slowly. Another urge to sneeze came over him, and he moved away from the hay. The strong smell was causing the problem. If he got far enough away, he wouldn't sneeze again.

  The hay field seemed huge in the darkness, the bales rising like small hills against the black night. His heart was pounding hard against his chest. He didn't know what he would say if the Fey found him. That he was stealing his neighbor's hay? That he was sabotaging his neighbor's crops? That he couldn't sleep?

  They would believe none of those responses.

  And neither would he, in their place.

  The only thing he could do was not get caught.

  He finally crossed a small drainage ditch that separated his neighbor's property from the one that the Fey had confiscated. That neighbor, Antoni, had planted a series of small trees as a border between the properties. The trees were bushy and not much taller than Luke. He used them for cover, careful not to shake the branches.

  He had no idea what kind of the magick the Fey here had.

  He used the trees until he could see the farmhouse. There were lights inside,and Fey guards on each door. He didn't see the telltale dirt circle or the floating lights that indicated a secret hiding place — the kind the Fey called Shadowlands. He had been inside one of those places just once. It had been like being in a box that floated on air. Everything was gray inside, and unchanging.

  His father had lived like that for years.

  Luke never wanted to be captured in a place like that again.

  The third captive, Ort, had been tortured to death there.

  Luke shuddered. He stayed within the shelter of the trees and made himself think.

  He needed a strike against the Fey, something that would surprise them and damage their psyches.

  He had no magick and neither did his friends. Also, he had to make sure that none of them got caught. A flat-out attack would not work. The Fey probably expected it.

  He needed something more subtle.

  He had to find that here.

  There didn't appear to be any other Fey about besides the guards and the ones inside the farmhouse. Apparently the Fey had somewhere else that they were keeping the troops. This had to be an outpost, a garrison in charge of keeping the farmers in line.

  It would be vulnerable to things most farms were vulnerable to: fire, flood, pestilence. The Fey themselves could be killed. But all of this would have to be accomplished without a direct attack.

  He squared his shoulders. He had to explore the grounds. Even something small would upset them. Maybe something small would upset them more than something large.

  But he had to find the right thing. Attacking a guard would be expected. So would seizing weapons. He had to hit them in a way that would profoundly affect them and would show them that he understood how they operated.

  He needed a perfect strike.

  And he wouldn't be able to find it from the trees.

  He slipped onto the edge of the unfilled field. He had never felt so vulnerable in his life. The darkness didn't feel as thick here. He could see the dirt, see the house itself, with the light coming from the windows, sense the guards.

  The guards. He didn't know what kind of equipment they had.

  He didn't know what kind of magick they had.

  Could they sense him, too?

  Scavenger had never told him about any Fey with that sort of ability, but then Scavenger didn't talk about all aspects of the Fey. His father hadn't mentioned that either. In fact, his father had said the Fey usually relied on magickal constructs to keep them protected: the charmed opening to the Circle Door into Shadowlands for example, or Shadowlands itself.

  The Fey were rarely in situations where they needed guards. The leader of a troop was usually a Visionary who could create a Shadowlands. But the Black King had probably arrived with too many troops for him to create Shadowlands for all of them. And Luke doubted that the smaller units, the ones guarding the rural regions, had Visionaries in charge.

  He was sure there weren't that many Visionaries.

  In fact, Scavenger had said that Visionaries were rare.

  Rare.

  Luke swallowed and crossed the back of the field, moving closer to the house. He had lived on farms all his life: he knew how to get from one place to another without making much noise. He was thankful that Antoni didn't have any animals, because animals always stirred. He hoped that there were no Beast Riders among the Fey either, because they might stir as well.

  There were two tall trees at the back of the house. They served as a windbreak. Antoni had planted others near the front, but they weren't nearly as tall. Luke might be able to use the trees somehow, but he wasn't certain how. Climb them and listen to the Fey plan? They usually didn't discuss plans in groups. Throw something from the branch to start a problem inside the house? Attack from the trees?

  He didn't like any of those ideas.

  He stopped behind the first, and gripped the rough bark. His heart was pounding. He'd never reconnoitered Fey before. He'd approached them only that one time, twenty years before, and then attacked.

  And the attack had resulted in his capture.

  His fingers dug into the bark.

  He couldn't think about that. Thinking about that would distract him.

  He had to find something.

  The barn was to the south of the trees. A guard stood in front of its door as well. Were there troops sleeping inside? No one seemed to be sleeping in the house. What else did the Fey have to guard? Infantry carried weapons, but they usually carried them on their own persons. Many of the other kinds of Fey were weapons.

 
; Prisoners? Were there prisoners in the barn? Prisoners like his father had been?

  Luke's heart started beating harder. He knew of no one missing from his local circle. Even Antoni and his family were working another farm. The Fey had killed no one around here, and captured no one so far as Luke had heard.

  But he didn't know the fate of his father and Coulter and Scavenger. Could they have been captured again? He had thought they got free, from the stories he had heard. They had attacked an entire Infantry troop two weeks ago. Somehow Coulter had stopped them, and they had fled.

  Luke had assumed they were safe.

  But what if the Fey had captured them? Would they bring them back here, this close?

  Or were there other prisoners?

  And why would the Fey take prisoners at this late date?

  To make them work? To experiment on them like they had on Ort? To turn them into weapons like they had with Luke himself?

  Suddenly his fear turned into anger. They had no right to mess with innocents.

  Freeing prisoners would be precisely the kind of hit he had been looking for.

  Precisely.

  But it would take work.

  And before he could even make the plan, he had to make sure the barn held prisoners. The last thing he wanted to do was to bring in a small untrained group of farmers and have them walk into a meeting with the Black King.

  He had to get past that guard. He had to see inside the barn before he made a decision.

  The tough part wouldn't be sneaking inside the barn; he'd done that many times as a child. The tough part would be crossing another open expanse of ground, this one closer to the farmhouse, with guards on both sides.

  But he could do it.

  He knew he could.

  FORTY-FOUR

  Adrian was shaking as they went up the trail. His eyes still hadn't adjusted to the dark. He could only follow the black shape that was Coulter ahead of him.

  Still, Adrian glanced behind him to see if the others followed. He wasn't sure why they would; Coulter had attacked them quite hard. But he didn't trust them. And he should have.

  Oddly enough, he should have.

  His feet kept slipping on rocks. This trail, if indeed it was a trail, was thin. Coulter was moving fast, too, as if he felt that something were pursuing them.

  "Coulter," Adrian said. "I can't see well enough to keep up with you."

  "Sorry," Coulter said. He immediately slowed down. Adrian caught up, close enough to feel the warmth of Coulter's body and smell the slightly sulphuric odor that had accompanied the fireballs.

  "You worried me down there," Adrian said, and then frowned. The words had come out before he'd had a chance to think about them. But now that he'd spoken then, he felt that he should go on. "I've never seen you act like that."

  Coulter shrugged. Adrian could see his shoulders move against the darkness. Black against black. What an interesting sight.

  "What were you doing?" Adrian asked.

  "Trying to recruit him to our side."

  Adrian felt cold. Coulter had never done anything like that before. Coulter had been a loner all of his life. It had taken Adrian months to get Coulter to warm to him, and then years to get Coulter to trust him. And even then, Adrian wasn't certain how close Coulter felt to him. Yes, they did talk, and yes, Adrian felt like Coulter's father in many ways, but not in all ways.

  And Coulter had kept the distance, not Adrian.

  "Gift would never have stood for that," Adrian said. "You know what this man has done."

  Although Adrian wasn't sure he disapproved. He wasn't sure at all. Jewel, even though she had been King Nicholas's wife, had been as evil as the other Fey. More so, in fact, as far as Adrian was concerned. She had imprisoned him, sent Ort away for torture, and used his son as a weapon.

  "Gift would approve," Coulter said, his voice tight, as if Adrian's criticism had hurt him. He made his way around a boulder, then put out a hand to help Adrian. Adrian took it. "He needs all the help he can get in fighting his great-grandfather."

  Coulter's hand was not hot, as Adrian had expected. It felt cool. Coulter's magick had always baffled him.

  "Fighting his great-grandfather?" Adrian was confused. Of course, the former Rocaan would fight the Fey. There was no question of that. But to that man, Gift was Fey. "Do you know who that man was?"

  "Yes," Coulter said. They had made it around the boulder. He dropped Adrian's hand. "He's the other one."

  "The other — ?" Adrian's frown deepened, and then he remembered the conversation. It had seemed so long ago, even though it had been less than a month. It had been the night that Gift had shown up on the farm. Coulter had felt him coming.

  Coulter had also felt something else. He had been staring at the ground, and he had said something strange:

  Instead of two of us here, there are three.

  "Of course there are three," Luke said. "You, me, —"

  "No," Coulter said before Adrian could shush his son. "It's all energy. It's like Links or trails. The energy holds things together, too. I can feel it, like you can feel sunlight."

  Adrian tightened his grip on Luke's shoulder. "Three what?"

  "I can feel the Isle," Coulter said. "There's always been me, and someone else like me."

  "Who?" Adrian said.

  Coulter shrugged, his shoulders moving against the night sky. "I don't know. Someone far from here."

  "And now there's a third?" Luke asked.

  Coulter nodded. "To the south. Where the Wisp came from."

  "What does it mean?" Luke asked.

  But Adrian knew. It was all the Fey ever really talked about, all they thought about. The reinforcements had finally come, and somehow they had breached the mountains in the south.

  With an Enchanter.

  What had Rugar called Enchanters?

  The most powerful of all Fey.

  "The former Rocaan is an Enchanter?" Adrian asked.

  Coulter stopped. He stopped so fast that Adrian bumped into him.

  "That's the former Rocaan?"

  "Yes," Adrian said.

  "How do you know? You weren't religious."

  "I didn't recognize him," Adrian said. "It's just that one of those men called him Holy Sir, and the old woman called him Matthias. The honorific title for the Rocaan is Holy Sir, and the name of the Fifty-first Rocaan, the one who abdicated, is Matthias. He disappeared. What better place to hide than here?"

  "And he hates Fey," Coulter said softly.

  "He does that," Adrian said. "So much so that he murdered Gift's mother."

  "I should have recognized him." Coulter shivered. They were standing shoulder to shoulder, and Adrian felt the shudders run through him.

  "How?" Adrian asked. "He left the Tabernacle before you came to the farm. There's no way you could have seen him."

  Before that, Coulter had been in Shadowlands. Adrian was one of the few Islanders Coulter had ever seen.

  "When I — saved Gift," Coulter said, and in that simple phrase he had left out so much. He hadn't just saved Gift. He had repaired Gift, bound Gift to him, and made sure that Gift remained alive. "I saw him. Gift saw what was happening to his mother. I saw that man put the poison on her head."

  Poison. The Fey term. There was so much that Coulter got from the Fey. So many of his perspectives, so much of his world.

  "But his face was bandaged below," Adrian said. "How could you have known?"

  "Bandaged because Leen attacked him," Coulter said.

  And then Adrian remembered. Leen had said something about killing the Islander who had killed Gift's mother.

  They hadn't realized he had lived. Adrian wondered how that was so. What had happened on that bridge?

  That was the same night that Coulter had said he had felt a third Enchanter. Coulter had known that the Rocaan wasn't dead, but Coulter hadn't realized that the Rocaan was the second Enchanter.

  Coulter's shaking had moved to Adrian. "You said he was just like you," Adrian s
aid. He had to make certain he was clear about this.

  "He is."

  "He's an Enchanter?" Adrian asked.

  "That's a Fey word," Coulter said.

  "But he is, isn't he?"

  Coulter nodded. "I thought we could use him. I thought two Enchanters against the Black King's one. It would be perfect."

  "So you brought him to you?"

  "No," Coulter said. "He just showed up."

  The chills Adrian had felt earlier had returned. "He just showed up?" Adrian asked.

  "Yes," Coulter said. Then he leaned his head down. He rested the edge of his skull against Adrian's. It was a small touch, but it showed that Coulter needed comfort. "He said he was searching for the Fey. He was looking for Gift."

  "But he didn't know who Gift was," Adrian said. "Not when you said Gift's name."

  Coulter brought his head up. Adrian felt the sudden lack of pressure, the removal of the small warmth. "That's right," he said. "He didn't."

  "But he knew that there were Fey about. He had heard about it?"

  "He was following their trails. Like I can do. That's what I was doing on the farm the night Gift arrived. Remember? I was looking at new trails."

  Coulter's voice had a ragged edge.

  "I remember," Adrian said. He glanced over his shoulder. His eyes had become more accustomed to the dark. Shadows had become more distinct. But there still wasn't enough light to see clearly. If someone were following them, he wouldn't be able to see until they were close.

  "We need to keep walking," Coulter said, and his words echoed Adrian's thoughts exactly. "We need to get away from them."

  "They'll follow," Adrian said.

  "And we'll be ready," Coulter said.

  "You can keep them back?" Adrian asked. He didn't want them near Gift or Leen. He didn't like the way the group had talked about "tall ones" or the Fey.

  "For now," Coulter said. He sighed deeply and then started up the trail again, going slowly enough for Adrian to follow. He glanced over his shoulder. There was no one behind him.

  At least, no one he could see.