Pathfinder Tales: Skinwalkers

by Wendy N. Wagner

  "I've never seen trolls butcher anything like this," Jendara said. "Or cook anything. Have you even considered something more human?" She hesitated. No one was going to appreciate what she said next. "Like the men from Kalva. They do this sort of thing."

  He smiled kindly. "The Kalvamen haven't left their island in at least a hundred years."

  "Doesn't mean they can't," Jendara growled.

  "Don't forget that we're fishermen." The smile shrank a little. "We're out on the sea every day. If any Kalvaman wanted to set foot on this island, they'd have to take a boat, right? And if there were any strange boats around, we'd have noticed. I think it was a troll."

  One of his companions climbed into the back of the wagon. "A troll's bad enough, anyway. Let's not borrow trouble."

  Wilfric waved at the wagon's driver, who stirred up the stout mule in its trace. The wagon began to roll.

  "Keep your eyes open," Vorrin warned.

  Wilfric nodded. "Will do." He moved to the front of the wagon, taking the mule's halter.

  Jendara watched them go. "I should have gone with them."

  "Hey, we've got business of our own to attend." Vorrin jabbed his thumb back at the docks. "If we hurry, we can make it to Sorind to break the bad news about Boruc and catch the tide for Varisia tomorrow morning."

  The crew was just loading the last of the cargo onto the Milady. It was indeed feasible to make it back to Sorind before midnight. But the thought of telling Yul and Morul what she'd seen out there made Jendara wish she could stall.

  She sighed. Waiting wasn't going to making it any easier. "You're right."

  They headed down to the main dock, a long pier stretching out into waters deep enough for a big ship like the Milady. Shorter piers bristled the shoreline, filled with smaller fishing boats and raiding vessels that could moor a lot closer to shore. Jendara watched a medium-sized fishing craft ease itself up to a lower dock attached to the pier. A red-headed boy stood in the prow and waved at her. She felt a sudden pang of loneliness for Kran.

  Vorrin paused to watch the boat tie up. "Nice looking little vessel."

  Jendara smiled. His infatuation with watercraft amused her. "You should have been a shipbuilder."

  "And you're a barbarian who wouldn't know a clipper from a yacht." His eyes twinkled as he said it. He knew her well enough to know her heart had room for only two kinds of watercraft: Ulfen longships and the Milady.

  She linked her arm in his. After the horror they'd seen, it was good to be next to the sea on a sunny day with her very best friend. He pulled her closer to his side.

  "Jendara, I—" he broke off. "Your arm's bleeding."

  "It got cut back in the quarry." She frowned and pointed. "Now that's an accident just waiting to happen. That guy's trying to carry way too much."

  Vorrin looked back at the boat. The boy waited at the bottom of the just-dropped gangplank, calling back up at a knot of people. A heavily laden man staggered on the steep planks. The top crate of fish slid a little.

  "Hey!" Jendara raced back up the pier, leaping down to the lower dock.

  The boy turned his head, seeing at the last second the man behind him. He stiffened, not sure where to go. The wobbling crate tumbled free.

  Jendara launched herself at the boy, somersaulting down the dock with him in her arms. They tumbled and rolled. Jendara crashed into a mooring cleat and lay there gasping.

  The crate smashed just inches from where the boy had been standing.

  "By the gods! Lady, are you all right?" The big man put down the last crate and jogged to Jendara's side.

  She lifted her head and then let it thud back on the dock. "Wind...knocked out."

  The boy scrambled to his feet. "I'm sorry, lady. I think I crushed you."

  They offered her their hands and hauled her to her feet. She rubbed her gut, which felt tender. Up close, the boy looked older than Kran, maybe thirteen or so. He was short, but compact, and he was already grinning. She had a feeling he rarely stopped.

  The man laughed. His round belly jiggled. "That's our Rowri, crushing his rescuer." He bowed a little. "I must thank you for rescuing my young friend. I am Boruc Sanderrson, at your service."

  Jendara stepped back, her mouth falling open a bit. "Boruc? Sanderrson? But—"

  "We thought you were dead!" Vorrin exclaimed, appearing behind Jendara. He had taken the long route around the docks.

  "Dead?" Boruc's ginger eyebrows shot up. "Where'd you get that idea?"

  Jendara looked at Vorrin, uncomfortable. Vorrin spread his hands weakly. "We were just at the quarry. Every worker was killed in a horrible attack."

  "What?" Boruc turned pale.

  "Did something happen?" A woman with Rowri's coppery hair and black eyes jumped down from the boat. Freckles covered every inch of her face. She pulled Rowri closer to her. "You all right?" she murmured, just loud enough for Jendara to hear.

  The boy nodded and wriggled away. A man with his arm in a sling and an elder with the tattooed cheeks of a wisewoman made their way down the gangplank to join the group. Vorrin repeated the story of what he and Jendara had found.

  The man shook his head. "This sounds bad. We haven't had any real trouble on Flintyreach in years. Folks down in Averaka have organized patrols to keep things quiet around here."

  The redheaded woman narrowed her eyes. "This kind of attack doesn't sound like anything I've ever heard of."

  "It's been more than thirteen years, but I saw something like it once," Jendara said. "My family—my father and sister—were killed in an attack like this. Back at the quarry, we saw a man impaled and mutilated. The things that killed my father did that. And the bodies were...savaged in a similar way."

  "Eaten," the redheaded woman said flatly.

  "Yes," Vorrin said. "Right now a group of men are headed back to the quarry to collect the bodies. Or what's left of them."

  "Most of the quarry workers have families in the village." Above his thick beard, Boruc's face paled. "Husbands and wives helping on boats or working in the smokehouse. Children, too."

  The woman shot her boy a quick glance. "Those poor souls. Thank the ancestors no one ever built family quarters out there."

  The man with the sling stepped forward, clapping Boruc's shoulder. "Lucky thing I wrenched my shoulder yesterday. If you'd gone back to the quarry instead of fishing with us, you'd be dead now."

  Boruc rubbed his beard. "You're right, Sven. I owe you my life."

  "Just as Rowri owes the lady his." The old woman hadn't said a word yet, but now she stepped close to Jendara and studied her closely. Her blue eyes, the same color as the tattooed spirals on her cheeks, gleamed beneath her fringe of steel-hued hair. "What's your name, stranger?"

  Jendara resisted the urge to take a step back. The old woman barely reached Jendara's shoulder, but her fierce gaze was disconcerting. "Jendara. Lately of Sorind."

  She put out her hand, but the woman ignored it. She scanned Jendara up and down, studying her clothes and braid.

  "Mud-brown hair," she mused. "And a familiar face. If I'm not mistaken, I knew your father. Erik. A good man. Homesteaded out on Crow's Nest."

  The old woman's rudeness made Jendara bristle, but she forced herself to remain civil. "That was my father," she agreed.

  "You're much like him," the old woman said. "In face and in action. That's a compliment."

  Jendara hesitated. She still didn't like the woman's attitude, but it was clear she meant no slight. "Thank you."

  The freckled woman stepped forward. "The past is the past, no matter how much Gerda likes to speak of it." She shot the older woman a disapproving look, then smiled at Jendara. "I am glad that you're here, no matter who your father was. I am Fambra, and this is my husband, Sven. Gerda is his mother."

  Jendara shook the offered and equally freckled hand. Fambra had a strong grip, her palms as callused as Jendara's own.

  Sven spoke up. "You saved my son back there. We owe you supper at least."

  "Well..." J
endara looked at Vorrin, who cast a look at the Milady, then sighed and nodded. "Yes. Yes, please."

  Boruc looked down at the broken crate and its scattered contents. "I hope you like fish."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Jendara put down her mug of mead and pushed back Fambra's white curtain, peering outside. "The wagons have returned from the quarry," she said. "It looks like they've brought the bodies back. At least their families can have a decent funeral."

  Fambra put down the potato she was peeling. "Our clan takes funerals very seriously." She wiped her hands on her apron and moved beside Jendara. She closed her eyes for a moment, clearly upset.

  The recovery team had thought to cover the bodies with canvas, but no amount of fabric could really hide that horror. The men accompanying the wagons looked haggard and pained. Sven opened the door and raised his hand in a solemn wave as they passed by.

  Boruc made a low, choked sound.

  "It's all right, man," Vorrin murmured.

  Jendara turned to see the big man clench shut his eyes and shake his head furiously. She crossed to him and put her hand on his shoulder. She knew just what passed through his head.

  "It's never all right," she said. "It might never really be all right. The pain hurts less, but you'll still feel it sometimes."

  Vorrin frowned at her. She put down her mug. "I'm going to go help them unload."

  "Then you can give me a hand preparing the bodies." Gerda reached for a shawl on the hook by the door and wrapped it around her shoulders. "It looks like to be a lot of work."

  "I'll come, too," Fambra said. "Rowri, you finish making dinner."

  "I will," Boruc said. "I can't go out there—I may as well make myself useful."

  "I'll help you, Boruc," Vorrin added, quickly. He caught Jendara's eye and held it.

  She turned away. Maybe Vorrin was right. Maybe her words weren't the kind of comfort Boruc needed. But she couldn't see the point of lying to him. Not when he knew that he was alive and his friends were dead and only luck had saved him. She followed the other women out the cottage door.

  Of all the cottages, only Fambra's had a crushed shell walkway leading out to the main wagon road, and only Fambra's sported real curtains in the window. The rest of the buildings had an unloved look, the shutters hung haphazardly, the gardens crowding the walls themselves. Jendara looked around herself, shaking her head.

  "Don't judge it too hard," Gerda said, looking back over her shoulder at Jendara. "We're only here during the summer. The rest of the year, we're in town."

  "Averaka?" Jendara raised an eyebrow.

  Fambra nodded. "The harbor stays open all winter; never really ices up. Not a lot of good fishing, but plenty of crab and shellfish."

  "How are the neighbors?" Jendara asked.

  "Lots of half-orcs, but they're good folk. Just because they've got a little orc blood don't make them any worse neighbors." Fambra laughed. "In fact, we've got a couple of half-orcs in our clan. You'll see some in the village."

  "Your clan." Jendara studied the houses. She realized now that all the front doors were painted the same shades of blue-gray and striking green, some with clan banners waving above the lintels. When had she stopped noticing such things? She tried to remember her own clan banner. It leaped into her mind's eye, surprisingly clear after all these years: red and black and yellow running in stripes behind a crow's profile. She wondered what had happened to that banner. She hadn't kept it.

  "Clan Dagfridrung of Flintyreach." Gerda's voice swelled with pride. "We go back over two hundred years, farming and fishing on this island."

  "Aye, it's a good life," Fambra agreed. "I'm glad to be a part of it."

  They had slowed as they approached the wagon, sitting now in front of the meetinghouse. Jendara's feet seemed to weigh more with each approaching step. Wilfric and his men stood in a knot on the hall's brightly painted steps, faces gray and drawn. Their hands and faces were clean, but most of their clothing was streaked with blood or worse.

  "It was just as bad as you said it was," Wilfric said. "Never seen anything like it."

  "Were no clean battle," a man mumbled.

  "No," Jendara agreed.

  "How many?" Fambra asked.

  "Nineteen," Wilfric answered. "Your cousin Abjorn among them. And my nephew."

  Gerda touched her heart as if it hurt her. "That's almost a quarter of our clan."

  "Aye."

  She straightened herself. "This is a sign. I warned them that our clan has always been a clan of the sea and shore. What were we doing, digging in the earth? This is our punishment for turning our back on our ancestors."

  Jendara put her hands on her hips. "How can you think that? This was a random attack. No one could have predicted it."

  Gerda raised an eyebrow. "You think so?" She turned back to the men. "Have the rest of the village bring wood and rushes. We'll prepare for the ceremony here, in front of the meetinghouse."

  Fambra leaned closer to whisper in Jendara's ear. "Gerda is very old-fashioned. She lives for the past and the old ways. But she's a good healer, and the people in this village trust her."

  Jendara set her jaw. She wasn't going to argue with anyone about their religious beliefs. Not here, not now. "What do we need to do to prepare the bodies?"

  The work proved just as long and horrible as Jendara had feared. As other members of the clan brought wood and rushes, preparing the ground for the cremation ceremony, Fambra and Jendara laid out the bodies. Gerda anointed the dead men and women's brows with scented oils and washed their hands and faces with seawater. As the sun sank lower in the sky, families appeared to wrap the bodies of their lost loved ones and sing their souls onto their final paths. Some of the souls would move on to their eternal reward, but many would stay on this plane as the ancestor spirits that guided the wisewomen and their male counterparts.

  Or so the wisewomen and shamans claimed. Jendara had her own doubts about the powers of the ancestors.

  Fambra knelt beside the last of the bodies. "Look at this," she murmured, pointing at the dead man's torso. The attackers had stripped off his shirt, and his remaining skin looked pallid in the twilight. Jendara stooped beside her.

  "Here." Fambra pointed to an incision just below the man's collarbone. "This looks like a knife wound. The edges of the flesh are perfectly smooth." Her voice sounded clipped and utterly unemotional. Jendara could understand. She'd kept her own mind focused on the work at hand, cleaning the gore from each body in just the methodical way she would scrub the deck of the Milady. Whenever she thought of the mutilated figure as an actual man, rage and sorrow threatened to overwhelm her.

  "Yes," Jendara agreed. "They started the cut there and removed a neat square of flesh."

  "Nearly square," Fambra agreed. "I'd say they simply followed the line of the man's muscle."

  Jendara's eyes narrowed. "Like butchering a deer?"

  "Exactly. You just follow the outlines of the muscles and the body breaks itself up into parts." Fambra pointed to another cut, a long slash running down the man's ribs on the other side of the body. "But this doesn't look like a cut. It's more of a slash, and whatever did it was much wider than a knife."

  "It almost looks like the marks a bear claw leaves," Jendara mused.

  "Exactly. And here on the neck, the flesh looks chewed." Fambra's face twisted. "What kind of creature uses both a knife and its teeth? This makes no sense."

  "Geirr? My Geirr!"

  A half-orc woman flung herself down beside the body, tears running down her green-skinned cheeks. Fambra got to her feet, as did Jendara. They watched the woman kiss the dead man's forehead and lips.

  "That man's the father of Rowri's best friend," Fambra murmured. For the first time, tears appeared in her eyes. "Whoever did this...they deserve to die."

  Jendara stared at the rows of dead men and women, their bodies shrouded in white linen that gleamed in the last rays of daylight. The smell of spices and pine boughs overpowered the stink of death, but not
hing could hide the pain of the families gathered around their dead.

  "Death is too good for those monsters," she growled.

  Her hands balled into fists, and she felt the old familiar heat rise in her tattoos, the marks of the bloodthirsty pirate goddess.

  Death would be too good—but it would be a pretty good start.

  paizo.com #3236236, Corry Douglas , Aug 10, 2014

  Chapter Four

  Invitation to a Hunt

  The last hint of sunset's lavender melted into the sea, and the stars brightened in the black velvet of night. Not a cloud moved in the firmament; not a breath of wind stirred the air.

  "Going to be cold tonight," Jendara mused to no one in particular, and Vorrin put his arm around her shoulders. They stood on the edge of the crowd with the crew of the Milady. Most of the sailors hailed from Varisia, Cheliax, or farther, but none would stay on the ship during a funeral like this. The dead commanded respect.

  Jendara turned back to the funeral site. Torches burned in a rough circle around the massed dead and the people who had come to morn them. Gerda stepped onto a log so everyone could see her.

  "My people," she began. Her voice rang out over the silenced community. A child sniffled, but went quiet. "We gather today to send our brothers and sisters into the hands of our ancestors."

  Jendara's fingers curled into her palms, the nails nipping at the skin. She hadn't gone to her father's funeral. She supposed that some time after she'd alerted friends on Flintyreach about the attack, they had sent out a wisewoman, or possibly even a priest of the stag god, Erastil, to perform some kind of ceremony for the dead. Jendara had burned the remains she'd found and buried her father's body in a stone cairn. That had been funeral enough for her.

  Gerda continued speaking, but Jendara only heard the vague rise and fall of her voice. She thought back to the altar her father had built on Crow's Nest. He had believed so strongly in the power of the ancestors. It would pain him to know she had lost her own faith in them.