It was an attack. She had no doubt of that. But what? Who? She thought of the sorcerers, and fear scuttled down her back. But how would they know her? How would they find her? Not the sorcerers. Wizards. Who else had reason to hate her that way? She glanced over her shoulder with a sudden sense of someone watching, fumbling inside for her elusive power, a weapon to defend herself.
Nothing. Just as when the nokulas had attacked on the way to Veneston.
“Chodha!” she swore, pushing to her feet. Fear pimpled her skin as she scrambled back onto the path, turning toward Koduteel, fleeing like a rat with a cat fast on its heels.
Chapter 6
Reisil slipped and skidded along the path, coming dangerously close to the cliff’s edge. Still she did not slow down, depending on the march of ancient jack pine, white spruce, junipers, and bare-twigged tamarack to keep her from falling into the bay. She flung herself through a narrow notch between a rock shelf and a flourishing cluster of bittersweet, still wearing its deadly wealth of scarlet berries. On the other side, she ducked beneath a low-slung limb, sliding on the slippery stone as she straightened, losing her balance. She cried out and twisted, arms flailing. She caught one arm around the low limb, hanging there as she scrabbled for purchase on the path below.
It was this accident that saved her.
Even as she clutched the limb, an arrow pierced her cloak and stuck fast in the wood beside her forearm. Reisil stared at the vibrating black-and-white fletching for a bemused moment, too surprised to realize she was being attacked. She screwed her head around to look over her shoulder.
Her pursuers swarmed silently down the path, their faces hidden beneath closefitting gray scarves wound tightly around their heads. So quickly did they move, so well matched to the storm-gloom was their apparel, that Reisil couldn’t count how many of them there were. At least four. She saw the glint of knives and the curve of bows. In only seconds they would reach her.
Reisil fought for footing, kicking and sliding on the rock. Her grip slipped, and she fell, ripping her cloak free and landing hard. Instantly she rolled under the limb and scuttled on her hands and knees down the path. She reached the narrow notch and lunged to her feet, shielded by the rock shelf. She wasted no time checking how closely they followed. Heart caught in her throat, her lungs constricted and she careened along the path, grabbing branches and brush for balance. With every step, she expected to feel an arrow driving through her chest.
She raced past the point where she’d sat communing with Saljane. She might lose them if she could make it to the Fringes, but it was still half a league away, and she had to cross an open slope in between. They would have no difficulty shooting her then. She didn’t dare trust her magic against them.
Her legs felt sluggish. Her lungs screamed agony, and her throat was an icy ache. Behind her she thought she could hear footsteps closing in. She sobbed, yanking her cloak free from where it had caught on a wind-twisted bush. An animal whine escaped her chest as she struggled up a steep rise. Her feet slid from beneath her, and she caught herself on a juniper branch, crab-crawling upward on her hands and feet.
Lady help me! she cried silently as she topped the rise.
The Lady did not answer. But something did.
It swept over her in an appalling maelstrom of black rage. Aimed at her, for her. Single-minded, unswerving, fanatical.
The attacker from the cliff’s edge.
It crashed over her mind, smothering in its boiling fury, dragging her under and under.
Reisil screamed.
She choked, struggling against the frenzied tide. Only the long months of unremitting diligence in segregating her mind from Saljane’s made it possible to sever this alien connection.
But she could not so easily rid herself of her body’s spasming reaction. She gagged. She vomited, bitter juices spattering her cheeks and running over her chin to stain her cloak. She kept running, instinct goading her. But that rage stayed with her—like clots of worms twisting and sliding beneath her skin. Her legs began to shake, and she slowed, everything inside her shrieking to run faster. Faster!
Reisil stumbled down the fork leading from the bluff and around the eastern wall of Koduteel into the Fringes. Not far now the open greensward where she could not hide, where her only hope lay in crossing far in advance of her pursuers. And still she slowed, her entire body beginning to quake.
But deep within, she felt something kindle, something that responded to the brutality and rage, something that was feral and cruel. It flickered and swelled, hot and greedy. It streaked along her bones, heat licking her nerves with scorching strokes. Her hair rose on her arms and neck, and unformed, unbounded energy crackled around her fingers. A red fog blurred her vision. Her tongue grew parched and she could not even blink, so dry were her eyes. She felt her skin burning, felt her lips splitting, smelled the acrid stench of burning hair.
Ruled by the thing growing inside her, Reisil lurched to a halt. A savage joy blossomed in her chest. Her magic had answered her need at last.
Reisil turned, licking her lips. Her chin dropped, and she hunched her shoulders. She swiveled her head back and forth slowly, scanning the path behind from beneath lowered brows. Her nostrils flared. Her fingers flexed and curled.
Movement. She jerked her head up. Blurry shapes moved on the path, where she thought the path ought to be, for she could no longer see it through the veil of red sweeping across her vision. Her lips peeled from her teeth. She brought her hands forward fingers spread, holding them straight before her. The magic flew from her like a bolt of lightning, blood scarlet.
There were no flames or crash of thunder, no screams. Silence congealed. Crickets and birds alike froze in place, camouflaging themselves in stillness. Even the booming of the harbor cavern muted.
Reisil swayed. For a single, exquisite moment she felt unalloyed jubilation.
Then the veil dropped away, and she came to herself. She smelled the sour odor of vomit staining her cloak. She felt a breeze on her cheek, icy, like the whispering kiss of a soul-shattered rashani. A chill swept her, prickling the hairs on her legs.
Dear Lady, what had she done?
Reisil retraced her steps. She reached the foremost of her attackers. All that was left was a mound of ash, vaguely human shaped, like a gray shadow cast upon the ground. Already the wind was eroding it. There was another one a few paces back and to the left, and one more to the right.
Reisil crouched to the ground, elbows on her knees, laced knuckles pressed hard against her lips. She wanted to cry, to shout and to beat the ground with her fists.
The wind picked at the ashes. For the second time since the Blessed Lady had gifted Reisil magic, Reisil had used it to kill. More than that. To annihilate. And both times it had been like riding the storm winds with Saljane. A wild, dreadful ecstasy. She ground her knuckles against her teeth. What was she that she should savor killing so?
Another thought struck her like a blow from an executioner’s ax.
Was it her own fault that she could not use her magic to heal the plague victims? Deep inside, would she rather kill than heal? She had never felt much remorse for destroying the wizard circle. She had believed it was the only way to protect Kodu Riik. But was it? Couldn’t she have disabled them somehow and left them alive? And these men—certainly they had wanted to kill her. But was that reason enough for a healer to kill?
She could argue that she had no choice. That the power had taken her, that she had no control over its use. And that would be true, Reisil acknowledged scornfully. She had feeble control at best. It was no justification. It was an indictment.
A memory tickled in the back of her mind and pushed upward, flowering like a thornbush in her mind. The damage you could do . . . The Demonlord’s words had accused her, and she had defended herself, certain she would always serve the Lady faithfully. But now she was not so certain.
Her gaze swept over the three dissolving shapes. She had erased all evidence of who and what they
were. And she had laughed. She could go and chase the other one, for certainly there had been at least four. Had the other twisted an ankle in his chase and been left behind, saved by luck? Or did he even now train his arrow on her exposed throat? Reisil lifted her head, chin elevated, inviting the unseen hand to loose its arrow. Nothing happened.
She stood, staring up the path. If she went to Sodur now, she might meet that last assassin. Everything in her revolted from the sudden eagerness at the thought. Disgust curled her lip.
But there was something worse. If she went to Sodur, she would have to tell him what had happened. He would congratulate her, proud that she had brought her magic to bear on her enemies at need. He would see it as a triumph, a ray of hope, a justification for his plotting. She couldn’t hear that. She glanced down at the smudge of gray beside her. It wouldn’t be true.
She turned and hurried down toward the Fringes, her throat tight with a strangling sense of failure, of fraud. Healing someone, even to mend a cold or start hair on a bald pate—that would be a ray of hope for Kodu Riik. Not this butchery.
Clinging like fungus to the curve of Koduteel’s northern wall, the Fringes was comprised of sprawling neighborhoods made of ramshackle buildings and squalid tents built from jumbles of patchworked and broken materials. They were arranged in twisty, clustered knots, each neighborhood split by narrow, zigzagging crevices that served as walkways and streets. The neighborhoods shifted constantly like the shore dunes east of the city, so that no road was ever in the same place it had been, and houses and people disappeared with alarming ease.
Reisil descended the rocky switchback along the lee side of the bluff, following the curve of the towering east wall. She pulled up her hood and huddled deep inside the folds of her cloak.
The track jerked and meandered down the steep pitch, stitching in and around strips of scree and low hummocks of rock seamed with moss and grass. There were no trees or shrubs for a quarter of a league around the walls, providing a field of fire for archers. The wall itself was pocked and blackened in places where the Patversemese had laid seige. As the trail brought her close to the wall again, Reisil patted the rough stone. Battered and pounded, the walls had held.
The Fringes smelled oppressively of manure, human waste, lye, fish guts, and acrid smoke. Children and dogs scurried through the fetid maze like ants, each as flea-ridden and filthy as the other. Their fathers worked paltry crafts, many without arms, or legs, or hands—scars of the war. Their women were equally scarred. Many in ways no one could see. Each day, sometimes twice a day, the women hiked a half a league over a steep, snow-covered ridge to the river. To discourage vagrancy, the Fringes were not permitted a well. Starvation and disease ran rampant there, and every day one or two rag-wrapped bodies were carried to the lych-ground northeast of the city.
For a while, Reisil was content to wander through the sprawl, winding around fires, dodging thin, bleating goats, carefully stepping over uncovered midden trenches. As always, she found herself both saddened and inspired by the strength of the Fringes’ denizens, the joys they wrenched from their sere lives. Tattered children, feet wrapped in rags, chased each other in a game of tag, laughing, cheeks blushing red as ripe apples. A cluster of women chatted and giggled and tied limp red ribbons in the hair of a young bride. A father taught his son the art of tying knots, the son beaming at his father’s praise. A young man presented his beloved with a wooden pendant in the shape of a dove.
The towers along the wall marked Reisil’s passage as she worked her way through the sprawl: Sunrise Tower, Ahalad-kaaslane Tower, Horn Tower. Far down the wall, past the Iisand Gate, she could see the blue cone-shape topping Talis Tower. There was a family camped below there that she had promised to visit again when time permitted. She turned her footsteps in that direction.
As she walked, she nodded absently to those who greeted the stranger in their midst, noting with dismay the ragtag bits of green affixed to a great variety of shacks and tents. Knobs of painted wood, ribbons, rags, even grass and moss. How could they keep wearing it when the nobles and the other ahalad-kaaslane hated her so?
She stopped at the edge of the Iisand’s road to wait for a midden wagon to pass. The teamster slouched on the box, his hands stained yellow by his cargo. Inside the wagon, Reisil heard a thick sloshing sound, and then the wind shifted and she caught the stench full in her face. She gagged and pressed her hand to her mouth. The teamster smiled a black-gapped smile and snickered.
“Never mind,” said a thick, scratchy voice beside her. “Happens that way sometimes. Remember to hold your breath is all. Makes a body grateful to have a head full of cotton.”
Reisil smiled at the snub-nosed, squinty-eyed man who crossed the road beside her. His nose was dripping. He swiped at it with his sleeve, shaking his head.
“Sure wish the Lady would invite spring to Her table,” he said. “Been passing this cold back and forth among the whole family. Third time I’ve had it. Can’t get any sleep for all the snoring. And my wife—” He shook his head and coughed, spitting a gob of greenish phlegm onto the rutted road. “She got a nursling. Poor itty-bitty is so stuffed up she can hardly suckle. Wife’s pulling out her hair.”
Reisil didn’t hesitate. “I’ve some things here that might help. If you’d like,” she said, showing him her pack.
He stopped, examining her shadowed features within her hood. “Can’t pay,” he said, his fleshy face flushing.
Reisil gave a faint, emphatic shake of her head. “There’s no need.”
Finally he nodded. “All right. Anything to get some sleep. Name’s Tillen,” he offered over his shoulder as they walked. “Right there.” He directed her between two sagging tents. Better than many, his home had two wooden sides. A patchwork blanket of wool was supported by the walls and a framework of gnarled branches, creating a space high enough to stand inside. Tillen waved at Reisil to follow after as he ducked through the low opening.
Inside was gloomy and thick with smoke. Three children huddled under blankets close to the low flames of the fire, arms and feet wrapped in strips of cloth. Their mother sat opposite on a square of wool, cradling a wailing baby. She raised red, swollen eyes at their entrance. Seeing Reisil, she hastily jerked up on the shoulder of her lowered tunic to cover her pale, milk-heavy breast.
A dog barked in the corner where he was tied. The younger of the two boys, eight years old, Reisil guessed, scurried from beneath the blanket and went to crouch beside the thin, flop-eared animal. The boy stroked the dog’s bristly black head to quiet him, watching Reisil, his nose and upper lip red and chapped.
Tillen went to his wife, grasping her shoulder with a gentle hand. “Suli, I brought some help.”
He glanced meaningfully at Reisil, who unslung her pack as she circled the fire and knelt beside the exhausted woman, noting her hair, dry as straw, her concave cheeks, thick breathing and dry, rasping cough.
“I’ll need some water—boiled,” Reisil said to Tillen.
“Kes and Mara aren’t back yet,” piped a hoarse young voice from the folds of the blanket. Then before her father could respond, the girl, all angles and bones, unfolded herself. She was about twelve, with a wide forehead and pointed chin and lank hair. Like her brother and father, her nose was running, her upper lip chapped red. “All we have left is for washing. I’ll see if Mer Wilka has any.”
She snatched up a pot from a makeshift sideboard and ducked out of the tent.
“May I?” Reisil asked, stretching her hands out to take the baby. Suli cast a fearful glance at her husband and then reluctantly passed the infant to Reisil.
Reisil bent and pressed her ear to the tiny boy’s chest, and then turned him over and did the same on his back. Though his breathing was stertorous, his lungs did not have the liquid, bubbling sound Reisil feared. As she examined him further, Reisil was pleased to discover that the patchwork swaddling was free of fleas and dirt.
The girl returned, setting a pot of water over the fire. Reisil set abou
t ministering to the family, providing lozenges for sore throats, an unguent for congestion, a thick infusion of meadowsweet, wormseed, and willow bark to ease pain and congestion, and a chamomile ointment for the chapping. She worked quietly and without any attempt to use her magic. The ashes of the dead assassins swirled in her mind, and she feared what she might do.
At last she settled the woman on a pallet beside the fire, the baby nestled close and suckling at last. The other children snuggled against her at Reisil’s orders, warming each other and their mother beneath shared blankets.
“I’ll come back in a day or so,” Reisil told Tillen, stepping out of the tent more than an hour later. “But you need to find some good food. Bread, fish, something.” The look she gave him was apologetic. Certainly if he had food, or the means to get it, he would have. She did not want to be the one that suggested he butcher the dog, though its protected station inside their home meant he knew someone else would, if he were not careful.
“Fish are running far from shore these days, and a body has to go a far piece for crabs anymore. But I’ve got the dog. Good tracker.” Tillen shrugged. “Since Suli’s been sick, haven’t wanted to leave her alone—things get bad here sometimes. But she’ll be easier now. I’ll head out in the morning. See what game there is. Wapati are still foraging low, since it’s been cold. With the dog, I usually bring something back.”
Reisil nodded, understanding now how the man could keep his family in such comparative splendor. She inwardly winced at the irony. But it was true. They had clothes and blankets, wood and a substantial shelter. More than many.
“Anything I can do for you? Where you headed?”
“I’m looking for a young couple with a son. Liitsun is the husband’s name.”
Tillen nodded. “Know ’em. Came last fall from Poldmari in the Dume Griste spur. Lot of blight fallen on that family. You going to see the boy?”
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