Sheft climbed the ladder to his loft and crawled onto his straw mattress. The cut on his chest stung, and beneath him his parents spoke in angry, hissing voices. He couldn’t make out the words, but knew they were arguing about whatever it was he had done.
It grew dark, and the voices petered out. All was silent below. To his right, a knothole in the floorboard glowed from the fire lit room beneath. He rolled onto his stomach and peered through it.
His mother, alone now, moved about. Her form disappeared from view as she headed toward the hearth. A gurgle and clink told him she had added water to the stew and covered the pot for the night. He was hungry, but there was nothing for it but to lie back and cover himself up.
The little owl that lived under the eaves gave out its sad hoot.
Or was it the owl? Maybe it was the baby mewlet.
Sheft bolted upright. Could Squeak still be alive under the leaves?
But he was too afraid to go out and see. It was night, and the Riftwood was much too close. All the tales he had heard about what lived inside the old forest jumped into his head. Tales of wraiths and voras, of luniku moths that laid their eggs in your ears, of a snake-brown stream that was never seen twice in the same place. But what scared him the most was the thing that crept out of the tales and into their everyday lives: the black mist.
On certain nights, it gathered itself out of the darkness under the great trees and found its way across the Meera River. It crawled over fields and sniffed around houses, trying to find a way inside. Sometimes it rose from the root cellar beneath your house, or seeped up through the floorboards, taking monstrous shape next to your bed.
They called it the Groper, because it had no eyes.
Sometimes it changed into the beetle-man, and then its name was Wask. Wask was a flesh-eater, and it could see.
Uneasy, he pulled the blanket up to his chin. What if Squeak were all alone in the dark, weak and shivering in the cold? He needed help. Now, before it was too late.
“Come with me,” he whispered to the boy whose name began with T.
Sheft wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and crawled through the black rectangular opening in the floor. Halfway down the ladder he stopped and glanced at the door to his parents’ room. It was closed, and he heard nothing beyond it. The fire in the hearth was banked for the night.
“Shhh,” he whispered.
He padded to the door and reached up to lift the bar. The hinges creaked, but after a moment, satisfied his parents had not heard, he slipped outside.
Frigid air struck his face and he blinked against the glaring brightness of a full moon hanging just above a cloud bank. It cast shadows everywhere, in a confusing welter of stark black and white. Nothing looked familiar.
He shivered and drew the blanket closer around him. Over the fields and across the Meera, the Riftwood rose up like a big, ever-threatening storm. The barn seemed far off. He thought of his warm bed, but the call he’d heard pulled him forward.
The ground felt damp and cold under his bare feet, and he was afraid he would step into icy pools that had not existed during the day, but which seemed to have formed during the night. But they were only moon-shadows, lying motionless because there was no wind. Nothing moved. No night-beetles stealthily pulled themselves out of the earth.
He turned the corner of the house and crept after his long shadow, keeping his eyes fixed on the base of the big, silent star-nut tree.
What was that? He stopped to listen, but heard nothing but his own heart thumping.
“Maybe we should go back,” he whispered.
But he couldn’t. Not until he was sure about Squeak.
The leaf-covered spot lay not far ahead. When he got there, a quick investigation told him the baby mewlet was still safely dead. He exhaled his relief.
Suddenly a warning jangled in his head. Something was coming over the fields. He felt it, a chill on his arms. He heard it, a rustling in the night. And then he saw it. From the crooked, rectangular shadow of the barn, a black ground-mist was emerging. It poured silently into the moonlight like a rivulet of poison. His stomach clenched.
Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. The Groper had no eyes. If he didn’t make a sound, if he didn’t breathe or move a single muscle, it wouldn’t know he was there. He stood perfectly still, trying to keep his shadow from trembling on the moonlit ground.
Like a monstrous hand, the leading edge of the mist crawled toward him. Barely two strides away, it halted, and lifted three long, foggy fingers. Like sensitive feelers, they turned from side to side. Then, as if it had detected something, the hand rustled through the dead leaves to the spot where he had bled. The fingers hunched over it and scrabbled eagerly at the soil.
As if it were eating.
Sheft’s heart pounded so loudly the mist must have heard. The fingers reared up, pointed directly at him, and stiffened.
An icy knot formed beneath his ribs. It clenched tighter and tighter, crystallizing into his abdomen and spreading through his entire body. He froze.
With heart-sinking inevitability, the moon slid into a cloud bank. Encased in ice, he couldn’t see, couldn’t move, couldn’t swallow. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid.
Leaves rustled.
With startling suddenness the moonlight rolled back. The misty appendages, like a three-headed snake poised to strike, stood only inches away from his bare foot. His toes tingled, about to be touched.
The strange ice that had formed inside him seeped into his head. It numbed his thoughts, froze the back of his throat.
Don’t breathe. Stay very, very still. Ice gripped him, yet his hands were sweating.
The Groper hissed, like a long slow chill. There was something here it didn’t like.
The fingers drew back; then slowly, one by one, withdrew into the body of the mist. As silently as it had come, it flowed backward, into the shadow of the barn. The blackness there momentarily increased with its presence, then ebbed away.
It was gone. He took a deep, tremulous breath.
A faint chittering sound pulled his eyes to the ground. The spot where he had bled teemed with night-beetles as big as acorns, their busy brown shells glinting in the moonlight. Something cold crawled over his foot. A beetle. Its horny mouth parts clicked and its antennae whisked back and forth. Wildly, he shook it off and ran.
Back in his bed, he shivered beneath his blanket and rubbed his foot over the place where the beetle had crawled. The strange ice inside him took a long time to thaw.
He dreamed the beetle-man crept after him as he ran in terror through moon-touched dream-fields. His own footsteps followed him, and they were packed with roots; and just when he thought he was safe in the loft, the beetle-man rose from the black rectangle beside his bed, chittering.
Chapter 2. Hidden and in the Dark
The voices of his parents awakened him in the morning. They must have been standing at the bottom of the ladder because he heard them clearly.
“I’ll be taking Sheft into the village today,” his father said.
Sheft’s heart jumped in excitement. He’d never been to At-Wysher; Mama always said he wasn’t old enough.
“The villagers won’t like it,” his mother answered.
“That is regrettable, but they’ll have to get used to his appearance.”
Sheft’s excitement winked out. What was wrong with his appearance? Wavy reflections in a window or shadowy images in a bucket of water never showed him much, and he never thought about what he looked like. Maybe he was ugly.
With that thought, the memory of last night flooded back. A part of him wanted to tell his mother about it, but another part didn’t. Sometimes it seemed he had two mothers, and he was afraid of the second one. That one would watch him with cold, appraising eyes, would call him “S’eft.” That one would stand in the vegetable garden for long periods of time, the wind blowing her skirt, and search the skies above the Riftwood.
That one might slap him if she heard about the mewlets, or knew h
e left the house at night, or thought he was making it up about the Groper. He didn’t want to tell that one about the blood and the mist and the beetles.
But then there was his real mother. When she returned, he’d feel forgiven. She would read to him in the evenings from the red book of tales while he sat on her lap on the nodding chair. Twining a lock of his hair around her finger, she would laugh call him her little hayseed.
Hoping he’d find his real mother, Sheft rolled off his mat. He felt strange: light-headed and so shaky he could hardly put on his shoes. What was wrong with him? Clutching the rails to steady himself, he climbed down the ladder. At the bottom he turned to look at his mother. Backlit against the window, she stared down at him. Her face was a rayed shadow, like a storm cloud blocking the sun, and he knew he couldn’t tell her anything.
After breakfast, Father hitched Padiky to the wagon and they headed into At-Wysher. His stomach fluttered as they rumbled down ruts and then onto the Mill Road, where people were working in the common fields. They straightened up to watch him pass, and their eyes were like hard, dark stones.
It was even worse in the village. The man who loaded their wagon with bags of seed gave him sour looks. Then they took his mother’s frying pan to Rom the smith, so the cracked handle could be repaired. Sheft offered a shy smile to Rom’s son Gwin, a big boy who worked the bellows; but Gwin only made a face at him. Tarn stopped at another shop to pick up a pair of leather boots and left him waiting in the wagon. A man walking by spat at his feet. Why were they treating him like this? Tears burned the back of his eyes, but he blinked them away.
Tarn had just climbed up on the seat next to him when an old lady with straggly grey hair approached. His father nodded curtly to her. “Priestess.”
Her sharp look raked over Sheft’s hair, bored into his eyes, and then cut to Tarn. “How dare you,” she hissed. “How dare you parade your sin before Ele’s people!”
His father placed the boots behind him in the wagon. By the way his lips tightened, Sheft knew he was angry, but when he spoke his voice was calm. “My wife and this child are no sin. I married Riah in the Temple of Ul in a perfectly legal manner.”
“Your so-called wife is a foreigner, likely a harlot from the streets. You consorted with a heathen in Ullar-Sent and this”—she jerked her pointy chin at Sheft—“is the misbegotten result! What you did is against Ele’s express command.”
“As interpreted by you. The time is past when the priestess of Ele can dictate who people can marry. This is an old argument, Parduka, and the council majority agrees with me.”
“You mean Dorik and his ilk. They are not devout. They trample upon our traditions. But some of the elders still follow the way of truth. I warned your father not to allow you to go to Ullar-Sent. I told him you would return full of pagan notions. But no, he would not listen, and you came home with godless foreigners and an outlandish craft.”
Tarn stiffened. “If you are referring to my paper-making business, that is a respectable occupation that allows scholarship to be disseminated and ignorance dissipated. And more of both, I am sure you agree, needs to be done in this town.”
She grasped the edge of Tarn’s seat like a hawk clutching a branch. “It is the goddess who must be obeyed, not scholars. It is she who must be pleased, for she is our only protection against Wask. I will not see the people of At-Wysher endangered.”
“Nor will I. Good day.” Tarn flicked the reins, and Padiky moved on.
“I will be watching,” she called after them. “With Ele’s eyes, I will be watching.”
The old lady’s stare burned on the back of Sheft’s neck, but he dared not turn. One glance at his father’s rigid face told him he should ask no questions. He only wanted to go home.
His father, however, announced, “I’m thirsty. We’ll get something to drink at Cloor’s.”
They approached the door to the alehouse. Above the entrance hung a row of tiny, shriveled heads, mewlet heads. Sheft hung back, but his father dragged him inside. Everyone in the crowded room fell silent when they entered, and he walked through a tunnel of stares as Tarn steered him toward a long table in front of the hearth. There was room on the bench for only one person, so he sat stiffly on his father’s knee, and soon a tankard appeared. Tarn took a long drink, and slowly the men turned away and conversations resumed. Glances continued to flick toward Sheft, but no one said anything to him.
A man with a fat stomach resumed speaking. “…and I never heard a thing. Ele knows the hairs on the back of my head stood straight up when I saw it in the morning. One of my prize calves, crawling with night-beetles.”
“Last night, you say?” another man asked.
“Yep. The night of the full moon.”
Sheft froze. It was a night he wanted to forget.
The second man frowned. “That’s when Lola’s baby died.”
“So?” Tarn remarked, lighting his pipe. “The child was born sickly, Blinor.”
“True,” Blinor went on, “but I saw something last night too. Mist creeping out of the river and curling around my mill. I watched it from the window at the back of my house, but I didn’t say nothing to the wife.”
A big lump formed in Sheft’s throat, hard to swallow down. The mist hadn’t gone away, hadn’t returned to the Riftwood. It had gone into the village.
“You gotta get them Holy Guards from Parduka,” a third man advised. “Them fabric tubes filled with soil blessed by Ele. Lay ‘em agin’ the door cracks, Delo, and nuthin’ll creep in at night.”
“I had Holy Guards,” the fat man named Delo protested, “but it got in anyway.”
A cackle issued from someone sitting on the chair nearest the fire. “Hee, hee, hee! That’s our Groper, all right.” An old man turned to look at them, and one of his eyes stared from behind a milky white film. “But he’s come out a little early, I’d say.”
“It ain’t time for the Rites,” the miller muttered in agreement. “Not for months yet.”
The old man grinned in a way Sheft didn’t like. “Wask’s been getting restless. For years he’s been getting more and more restless.” He stared pointedly at Sheft. “Ever since foreigners come into town.”
Tarn put his tankard down with a thump and met the old man’s gaze. “What foreigners, Pogreb? I don’t see any foreigners here. Mist comes off the river and a sickly child dies, and you start harping about foreigners again?”
A man with a long nose nodded. “I wouldn’t mind a few foreigners. What’s wrong with new customers?”
“They don’t fit in,” Pogreb said darkly. “They don’t understand about the Rites.”
The Rites. Sheft didn’t know what they were, only that he’d find out when he was old enough. The word hung over the room like a shadow. Year after year, the morning after the Rites, he’d glimpsed a long cut on his father’s arm.
The man on the other side of Tarn was Dorik, who’d come to their house from time to time on council business. He was the Holdman, the head of the council of elders. Now he stood up and jabbed a finger at Pogreb. “Something bothers you, Pogreb, bring it up at the next council meeting. Meanwhile,”—he grinned and looked around—“drinks are on me.”
Enthusiastic cheers greeted this remark, and in the midst of them Sheft caught the glint of Dorik’s eye as it briefly met Tarn’s, as if something unpleasant had been avoided. In the bustle of mugs being lifted and refilled, no one looked his way as Pogreb got out of his chair, hobbled around the table, and bent to stare into Sheft’s face. One dark eye surveyed him, but the other, barely visible under the mucus-like film, seemed as cold and dead as a ghost’s.
“Our Groper is looking for something,” he hissed. He bared his yellow teeth in a ghastly smile. “Hee, hee, hee! What do you think it wants?”
Sheft shrank back against his father’s chest and, with another cackle, Pogreb shuffled away.
Farther up the table, the miller pulled out a knife and began showing it to those around him. “Got it at the last marke
t-fair in Ferce,” he said. “See these here swirls on the hilt? Gives it a better grip.” He passed the dagger around so the men could feel its weight. Some tried it out with slashing motions in the air.
At the sight of it, Sheft stiffened. It reminded him of his father’s awl, and what he had done with it, and what happened after that. The room seemed to darken. He saw only the dagger, as if it flashed against a black background. The sharp blade stalked closer, getting larger, until it glittered on the table in front of him. It felt as if the point were pressing against his stomach.
“Pick it up,” Tarn ordered.
Sheft hid his face against his father’s shirt.
Tarn twisted him around. “I said, pick it up.” He put his big hand over Sheft’s and made him grasp the hilt.
Fear made him squeeze his eyes shut. Laughter rippled around him.
With a muttered oath, Tarn took his hand away and the blade passed on.
All the way home, his father stared fixedly at the road and said not a word to him.
When they got back, he hid in the barn until his father went into the fields and his mother was busy in the kitchen garden, then he darted inside the house. He had to see why the villagers glared at him, why they spit at him. Feeling guilty, he crept into his parents’ bedroom, pulled out the box under the bed, and took out the mirror his mother kept there. It was a precious thing, not for children to touch, but he did it anyway. He looked into it.
He had never seen such a face. His parents and the villagers all had beautiful brown eyes, not these frightening silver eyes that stared out like a fish’s. Everyone else had rich chestnut hair that gleamed in the sun, not these pale, straw-colored strands that fell over his forehead. Is this why his mother called him her little hayseed? Was this really him?
He touched his hair, his eyes, and the hand in the mirror did the same. This was what the priestess saw, what Pogreb saw: the sin, the misbegotten thing.
A chill ran through him. He was all wrong on the outside. That meant there was something even worse on the inside, an ugly thing that leaked through: blood so disgusting it drew the beetle-man. He thrust the mirror back in the box and shoved it under the bed. There it should stay, hidden and in the dark.
Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One Page 2
