by Barb Hendee
The haunting had been false—a neighboring village’s ruse to seize water rights to the stream. There had been nothing for Tris to do. With no spirit to eject or mystery of its demise to solve, he had returned again with nothing to sate his own need.
How many times had he stood here, his back to the window, surveying this silent place, this dark room, this home that was not the home he had left years ago? That choice had been better for everyone. Still, he hated having too much time to think—to dwell.
But there was nothing else to occupy him when he had nothing to hunt.
—
No fence or wall surrounded Strîbrov—only the thick, dank forest—and Mari Kaleja easily avoided the main road. She slipped through trees and undergrowth to enter the town’s northern back side and crouched near the front corner of an aging stable attached to a smithy.
The place stank of dung and char even in the cold, even after the day’s chill rain.
Her thick chocolate-colored hair was pulled back into a tail held by a leather thong darkened by years. Even so, her head was masked by a cloak’s hood pulled forward to shadow her face, masking as well any glint from a street lantern that might catch her amber eyes, which were oddly colored enough to be noticed and remembered.
Both her narrow hands were covered with worn-out gloves, stolen and then stained with oil to darken them. Her snug canvas pants were now damp from the knees down, and her shabby soft boots no longer kept water from seeping in.
She didn’t even care about or feel the night’s chill.
Dark hope brought back the heat of long hate and pain.
Was this town really where she’d finally catch “the Dead’s Man”?
Vengeance had turned to a knot like a stone in her gut. How many hints, stories, and rumors had she tracked about a man who wore black, who called spirits to himself and commanded them?
Mari reached under the front of her scarred leather jerkin, felt for the hilt of the long, narrow dagger hidden there, but she didn’t pull it just yet. Even though she’d darkened it with char from her last fire, there was too much risk that the well-tended steel might catch any light in the dark. Gripping the hilt was just a reflex after so many times of getting close, so many false leads, so many things she’d done—that others wouldn’t—just to buy the kind of blade she couldn’t steal.
It was her one treasure, waiting to be bloodied with one man’s life.
“Papa . . . Mama . . . ,” she whispered.
The pain was as fresh as the night she’d fled in the Wicker Woods.
Mari tried to let go of such thoughts in remembering the last words—the last hint—gained ten days ago from a traveling merchant:
The Dead’s Man? Yes, I heard someone mention him. He’s in Strîbrov, living over some herb shop. Not much else like it in a timber town, so you couldn’t miss it.
Releasing the hilt, she gripped the stable’s post, leaned forward in her crouch, and peered both ways. The main street was clear, so she rose and stepped out along the drier side of the road. She passed dwellings and shops, turning her head a little, though her eyes turned more in watching every side path, door, and shuttered window.
Mari paused two side paths away from the town’s far end. She veered into the deeper shadows beneath one structure’s slanted awning. There it was at the last corner ahead—the three-story building of rain-darkened planks. A sign sticking out from the dark bottom shop had one word, which she couldn’t read. That didn’t matter, for it held a carved symbol of a garlic bulb surrounded with leaves. Others might not have seen that in the dark.
The herb shop was shuttered up for the night, and she wavered. After coming this far, she hadn’t given any thought to how to get in, which floor housed her prey, or whether he was in there this night. She knew nothing about him other than his black attire and that he had power over the spirits of the dead.
Rushing in to attack blindly within his territory was stupid. Only a fool would think cunning and stealth were enough, and she’d become too cunning for that. Glancing around, she spotted a decaying shed in a side path farther on. The place just beyond it might be a candle-and-oil shop; that could be useful, if needed. She scurried for the shack, found its door had only a rope-pull latch, and tugged slowly to open it a thumb’s width.
Then she froze, listening for the sounds of movement or breathing, as the shack was too dark within for even her eyes. It wouldn’t be the first time—or twelfth—that she’d found some drunk, thief, or runaway in such a place. She’d hidden and slept in a few herself over the years.
Sniffing twice, she caught nothing of the living and slipped in with one hand under the jerkin around the dagger’s hilt. The shack was as empty as her senses had told her, other than piled crates and bulging burlap sacks. She pulled the door closed halfway and peeked out through the crack around its rope hinges toward the herb shop.
Her best option was to wait for her prey to come out. She could follow and catch him unaware in the wilderness.
Slipping a leather satchel off her shoulder, she dug in it with one hand while still watching that three-story building through the door’s crack. Her fingers found a raw carrot stolen from a garden on the edge of town.
Such food brought strength but not relief. It too often tended to bring a memory of warm food cooked by her mother, images of being half-asleep while waiting for supper beside yet another fire. Every time she was about to eat, the same memories rose again.
Those woods, that night, after she’d watched her papa die and then run away, came back to her. Half-naked, for she’d found only part of her clothing stripped away in flight, she’d crept into her family’s last camp while watching the trees all around. She saw no one and nothing, not one glimmer of those white spirits in the woods. And not the black silhouette she’d seen kill her papa.
Only a few sparks from the cook fire’s scattered coals guided her at first. Then came the dark shapes of the family’s silent wagon homes as she closed on the camp. She already knew the first body she’d find and never tripped over it.
Papa lay facedown on the wet ground and dark weeds, his woodsman’s ax lying just out of reach beyond his head.
Mari sobbed once and, in sharpened terror, quickly clamped a hand over her mouth. She twisted frantically, looking everywhere through the trees. She saw no spirits but kept looking with wide eyes that never blinked.
And how could she even see that black one—if he was still there, here—in the dark?
She collapsed next to her papa’s body, sobbing in great gasps, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t roll him over. She never saw his face again.
As she knelt there listening and looking, and not wanting to look for anyone else, she already knew she’d never find any of them alive. There might be food to find. There might be clean, dry clothes, or at least a blanket in the wagon. But all she did was curl on the ground, with her papa’s shoulder for a pillow.
She dreamed of a boy’s shape, blacker than moonless night, of ghosts white as wisps, and a hand erupting from her papa’s face. If she screamed—more than once—she still didn’t awaken until the sun came again.
On the third following day, a gamekeeper and his lad who didn’t fear the Wicker Woods shook her awake at dawn. She lashed out instinctively and screeched at them like an animal—her papa’s little “kitten” turned savage and feral.
Mari crouched atop her papa and wouldn’t let them touch him or her.
The lad ran off at the gamekeeper’s instruction. Soldiers from the nearby keep arrived. Though they looked all over, draped scavenged blankets over the collected dead, it took three of them to remove Mari. She was hauled off eventually, was later questioned but had never answered.
What could she tell them, even if that would bring back her mama and papa?
The gamekeeper tried to take her in after that, but she ran off into the dark the foll
owing night . . . to seek out more of her own people.
Mari froze in the shack, no longer chewing the raw carrot, fighting to push the memories away. The rest was useless to remember now. All that mattered now, after so many years alone in searching for vengeance, was blood on her blade. She stared at the dwelling where he lived.
Perhaps she shouldn’t wait for him to come out.
—
Tris turned toward the window, seeing only the rooftops of the silent and dark town. He knew he should try to sleep but dreaded the thought of closing his eyes. Some people believed a long and sharp memory was a blessing. He knew better.
He remembered everything from the night he was born, though that should have been impossible. So many things set him apart, made him different, but this was the thing he minded most. He remembered his mother’s love, how she doted on him and coddled him as his father looked on. If Tris’s mother had refused to see that he was different, not right, his father did not.
Father’s eyes soon clouded with mistrust—later with open dislike, maybe revulsion and fear as well. When Tris was only a year old, and his mother happily cradled him in a rocking chair, his father had burst in and walked over to stare down at them.
“Have you ever wondered,” Baron Vishal began, “if the midwife tricked us?”
Baroness Reagan stopped rocking. “Tricked?”
The baron took only one more step and halted with a glance at his son.
“She left the room with a dead child,” he said, “and suddenly returned with a living one. How do we know they were . . . are . . . one and the same?”
Baroness Reagan said nothing.
“How do we even know that is our son?” Gerold whispered.
“Get out,” Reagan said quietly, and then said with greater force, “Get out! Don’t touch him!”
Turning, the baron left in silence.
It was not the first time, but it was the last.
Tris’s mother held him close and sang to him softly, though her voice shook. And all of this he remembered now, though then he had yet to understand all the words. When language was later fully understood, so were those words.
Tris had driven a wedge between his parents merely by being born.
By the time he could walk, his father left the manor more and more, and stayed away longer. His mother did not appear to care, though her love for Tris became smothering.
One evening of relief came when he was three years old. He’d been left alone to play with toys in his room, and a movement caught his eye. White wisps rose out of the shadows to fly and whirl all about the room—all around him. He could see right through them, and he smiled at such a wondrous sight.
They felt so familiar to him, almost more real than anyone within the manor.
He was much too young to know they didn’t belong.
And then he saw the black one, so much like himself in shape, but it was so black that he could not even see its eyes. It was his size, his shape, and even sat on the room’s floor in its darkest corner away from the hearth’s light. When it rose, teetering like he still did sometimes, it walked out of the shadows but remained just as pure black.
It was like him . . . exactly like him.
The door opened and his father stepped in quickly, as if come for some urgent purpose.
Baron Vishal stopped at the sight of Tris-in-black, now halted halfway out of the shadows. His eyes widened—first in shock and then fear. He turned in terror upon his son.
The Tris-in-black did not want Father here. Somehow Tris knew this. It wanted Father gone, though it did not move. When it did . . .
Tris did not mean to make a sound, but his mouth opened with a shriek, loud and long and savage. It was like no sound he had ever heard, and yet it had come from him. Like all that he had ever seen, heard, or felt, he would never forget it.
His father backstepped but did not leave.
The black shape and the wisps vanished.
Baron Vishal stared at his son—at Tris—with the same terror on his face.
Yes, Tris had done something wrong that night, though he had not known it then.
Now, in his room above the herb shop, he stiffened at hearing a knock through the open window at the building’s lower front door. Who would come here to a closed-up shop?
Perhaps someone with a sick relative seeking help from Heil?
Thankfully, it was not Tris’s place to answer the front door, but the knock came again—and again—and again. When he stepped toward the open window, he stalled as he heard the door open. An annoyed voice was too soft to hear clearly, and so were the whispers of whoever had come.
Tris turned away, for after another empty foray into another village, he was too weary to care about whoever had come. Then he heard the footsteps coming up the inner front stairs of the building. Two pairs halted outside his door.
“Tris, open up.”
Tris exhaled—in hope and dread—at Heil’s voice outside his door. Without hesitation, he walked over and opened it.
There stood Heil in nothing but canvas trousers too hurriedly pulled on and only partly belted. His long silver hair and silver-gray eyes were starkly visible in the dark. So was a thick silver earring in his left earlobe as Tris lit a nearby oil lantern.
Somewhere past fifty years old, Heil was lean and wiry, though it was easy to tell he had been muscular in youth. He had no trouble attracting female company—even half his age—when the need struck him. He never settled on any particular one.
Tris still thanked whatever fate had brought him to Heil, who, unlike superstitious peasants, was unafraid of even the most terrifying truths. And he was the only one who had ever assisted Tris in seeking his own truths.
“How did you know I was home?” Tris asked.
Heil rolled his eyes and cocked one eyebrow. That was answer enough, but he jutted his chin over his right shoulder at someone half-hiding behind him on the landing.
“This one is persistent,” Heil said. “Though I tried to ignore the pounding.”
Tris turned his eyes toward someone shorter in the back shadows beyond the landlord. He could not make out much of the visitor, who was cloaked and hooded.
“You wish to speak with me?” Tris asked, dreading but knowing the answer. “At this time of night?”
“Are you the Dead’s Man?” the shorter figure asked, barely above a whisper. He spoke with a northern dialect and accent, but Tris followed the question well enough.
Tris’s left eye twitched. He did not know where or when that unwanted title had been placed upon him. There was no point in trying to change it, as in some ways it served what he sought for himself in serving those who came to him.
“Yes,” Tris answered, and then, “Why have you come?”
—
Mari had frozen in place as she watched from within the shack as a shabby peasant boy in a dark hooded cloak approached the herb shop. He knocked softly at first, peering around at the noise, though his face was hidden in the depths of the hood. When no one came, he knocked again.
As the knocking grew to pounding, Mari pressed her face into the door’s hinge-side crack, watching, wondering if anyone would answer, if she would get a first glimpse of her prey.
Finally, the door jerked inward, and an irritated man with silver hair stood glaring out and then stepped halfway through the opened doorway.
Was that him? He wasn’t what she’d expected, though she’d not known what to expect. He looked too old, or at least older than she’d imagined. A short argument ensued in soft voices, but the visitor was finally ushered inside. And the door shut quietly.
Mari remained crouched with her face pressed to the door’s hinge crack and waited.
And waited.
It wasn’t long, though it felt so, until the door opened again, shutting quickly after the shabby youth
hurried out and scurried down the street and the north side of town. That was odd as well, since most in this region wouldn’t come—or go—alone at night.
Mari finally released a slow breath, realizing she’d held it. What did this mean? What had changed, if anything? What should she do now?
A short while later, the front door opened again.
Mari tensed, dropping the last of the carrot and reaching for her blade.
Someone else stepped out of the herb shop.
A figure walked slowly through the town’s main way, seeming not to care about his surroundings.
Though slender and of medium height, he was obviously a man. His gait gave him away as younger than the old one who’d answered the boy’s knock. Covered in a low cloak and a deep hood, both black, both hanging heavily as if wet, he carried a pack slung over one shoulder by its worn straps. He was little more than a black silhouette, even before he passed out of the first lantern’s light.
Mari began to tremble as the figure walked slowly north the same direction as the peasant boy had gone. And she watched in stillness until he reached the far edge of town and went on without pause.
After so many years, could she really be this lucky?
Was it this easy after all this time?
As the last of him faded in the dark up the road beyond the town, Mari slipped silently out of the shack to follow. Her hand grew sweaty inside her glove where her grip tightened on the narrow-bladed dagger.
CHAPTER TWO
Mari kept hidden among the north-side trees as she tracked her quarry out on the road. The figure in a damp black cloak kept a steady pace, though she didn’t need to hear his soft footfalls to follow him. The main road was exposed to a three-quarter moon’s light, enough for her to see, if not for others.
She couldn’t guess the connection he had to the peasant boy who’d visited the herb shop. But the visit had somehow served to draw the Dead’s Man out of town, into the open, and alone, and that was all that mattered to her.
