Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One

by Dale, Veronica

  “It’s only a book of tales!” Sheft cried. “One glance will tell you that.”

  One of the men whirled and punched him in the stomach. “Shut yer mouth!” He turned to the others. “Thinks he’s better’n us ‘cuz he can read.”

  Sheft, held by his two guards, bent over with a groan. Mariat flinched and grabbed Dorik’s knee. “You’ve got to stop—!”

  “Look at this, Dorik!” Delo waddled out of the house, gingerly holding the toltyr by its cord. “A sorcerer’s amulet. We had to cut it off him.” He flung it on top of the book.

  “Here are poisons and evil potions,” a third man bellowed. He dumped her basket of medicines and salves into the mud.

  “No!” Mariat jumped up. “Those are mine!” But with all the noise, no one heard her except Dorik, who pushed her down onto the seat.

  “Use your head!” he growled. “How will it help him if they turn on you?”

  “See here, priestess,” Olan called out excitedly. Holding his torch high, he pointed to the soggy remains of the mattress.

  Parduka strode toward it and peered at it. “By Ele’s sacred eyes. This was once a straw man. See, everyone, this bit of charred fabric? He formed an effigy, to curse and then burn!” She ran her dark eyes grimly over the crowd. “It was meant to be one of us.”

  Several men, aghast, poked through the mess with the toes of their boots, as if they searched for something of themselves in it.

  “It’s a mattress, for God’s sake,” Sheft cried. He swayed slightly, looking dazed.

  “Sure it is,” one of the men said with a sneer. “We all burn mattresses in the middle of the night.”

  “A box!” a man howled, rushing into the yard. “A locked wooden box! I found it under the bed.” He pounded on it with a rock, then yelled when he mashed one of his fingers as well as the lock.

  Another figure snatched the box away. It fell open, and a small mirror dropped to the ground. “Sorcery!” he exclaimed. He shattered the mirror under his heel. The first man grabbed Olan’s torch and ignited the box. Hooting and waving his arms, he danced around it as it burned.

  “Look!” Sokol stood triumphantly on the doorstep, holding up Sheft’s jacket. “Made of sheepskin. By Ele, how appropriate! Let’s put it on him.”

  Laughing, a group of men followed Sokol to where Sheft stood. They forced him to his knees, wrenched his arms back, and roughly stuffed them into the sleeves.

  Oh God, his injuries! Across the distance between them, Mariat saw Sheft’s face contort. She did not wince away, but felt what they did to him in her own body.

  They walked away when they were done, leaving him on his hands and knees, taking shuddering breaths.

  At least, she wailed to herself, he had a coat now. It would keep him warm. Oh God, at least it would protect the bandage and cushion his broken rib.

  Anguish filled her throat, so thick she could hardly swallow. Her beloved was innocent. He bore wounds that would have fallen on someone else. Oh Rulve, he could barely stand, yet had to bear the weight of this immense, inconceivable hatred. She knew the men who were acting with such cruelty, had known them all her life. They were good men, husbands and fathers, hard workers; yet in the darkness of this night they had become demons.

  A chill gathered in the small of her back. She looked into the dark beyond the torchlight. The leading edge of something she could not even begin to understand seemed to be stealing out of the night. An appalling evil, implacable and insidious, was creeping into their lives like—her arms prickled—the Groper itself.

  Voy came running out of the house, waving a bundle in the air. “I found this, his cloak for the Rites. I claim it, and demand to join you tonight as your tenth man!”

  Parduka looked up from the remains of the straw mattress. “Do you vow?”

  “Sure do.” He looked around with a grin. “And if I go back on my word, may I choke on my next gulp of ale.” Voy donned the cloak, and the men around him chuckled and clapped him on the back.

  A yell turned Mariat’s head towards the barn. Gwin and several others, including a grim-looking Cloor, strode out. Gwin held a large wooden box in his hands, which rattled as he came forward. He threw its contents onto the ground in front of Sheft. “Are these your carvings?”

  Beside her, Dorik stood to get a better view.

  Still kneeling on the ground, Sheft lifted his head and glanced at the pile, a jumble of wood in the shadows. He nodded.

  Parduka swooped onto the carvings, snatched one up, and stared at it, grimacing. “This was made for children!” she cried. “For innocent children!” She turned and threw the object to Dorik.

  He caught it, and Mariat saw he held one of Sheft’s toy mice. But it had been eerily altered. A black stone glittered in the eye socket.

  “Turn it over,” Parduka demanded.

  He did so, stiffened, then sank onto the wagon seat.

  The other side was even worse. The innocence of the toy’s pink ears and painted nose was slashed by a chiseled-out hole.

  “Sacrilege!” Parduka screamed. “Unspeakable abomination!”

  Mariat looked up, confused. What were they talking about? Sheft would never disfigure one of his carvings like this, but how could the priestess think it had anything to do with sacrilege?

  “What’s going on?” Tarn asked from the doorstep. The crowd of men parted to let him make his way to the wagon. In the sudden silence, Dorik handed him the carving.

  Tarn looked down at it. “Oh god. Oh god Ul.” He dropped the figure and turned to clutch the wagon’s sideboard.

  Sheft climbed to his feet, his face lined with pain. As he got a better look at what lay on the ground, a flush burned on his cheekbones. “I never did that!” he exclaimed. “And if I did, why would I leave it lying around? Can’t you see that someone planted it here?”

  Parduka bent, seized the figure, and held it up in the torchlight. “This is proof of what Gwin saw. The foreigner used this object at the fair to lure a child into his clutches. A little boy not even from our village. He forced that child to watch while he gouged out the eye.”

  Someone in the crowd gasped.

  “Such sacrilege deserves death!” the priestess shouted.

  “I didn’t,” Sheft cried. “I didn’t do—” His voice was drowned out by shouts.

  “Blasphemer!”

  “Filthy foreigner!”

  Snarling and cursing, the crowd converged around Sheft.

  But Parduka got there first. “Get back!” she cried, spreading her arms out in front of him. “We are restoring a sacred ceremony, not taking part in a slaughter!”

  Rom joined her and shouted at the crowd. “We are the Council of At-Wysher and obedient servants of Ele. We must perform her Rites with proper procedure.” He turned to Dorik. “Now leave us. We have our witness, and you have your proof. Leave us to do justice and the will of the goddess.”

  Cloor, his jaw tight, crossed the yard and climbed up beside Mariat. Dorik lowered himself onto the wagon seat. “None of you,” he said heavily, “will ever forget what you’ve decided to do here. Your days and nights, and the days and nights of your children, will be cursed with it. When you’ve had your fill of blood and darkness, when you’ve returned to your senses, then come back to the council and we will try to repair this.”

  “We are the council now,” Rom retorted, “and nothing we do here shames us or our children. We are upholding Ele’s law and giving honor to the goddess who protects us. This is the beginning of a new time, a safer time, for everyone in our village.”

  Dorik ran his eyes over the group. Mariat knew what he saw: eleven determined men and one old woman, the recipient of ancient power. Stone-faced, they all met his gaze. He clicked to the horse and pulled the wagon around.

  “No!” Mariat lunged over his legs to grab the reins. “He hasn’t done anything wrong! Don’t leave him here.”

  Cloor yanked her hands away. “Get in the back. Your father needs you.” He pushed her off the benc
h, and she landed in a tangle of her skirt beside Moro on the wagon bed.

  She scrambled to her knees and looked back. Torches illuminated the yard, where only last night she and her beloved had vanquished the beetle-man. His jacket open, Sheft struggled in the hands of his shadowy captors, while one of them waved the carving in front of his eyes. The figures shifted, a circle closed with terrible finality, and she could no longer see the side of his face or the gleam of his hair. A turn in the road hid the light.

  This could not be happening. Their life together had just begun. They were espoused. They were supposed to go on a journey together. She didn’t realize tears were running down her face until she tasted them on her lips.

  “Mariat,” her father murmured, “don’t look back. Let it be.”

  “Let it be?” she said in horror. “How can you even—”

  “I know these people,” Dorik said from the driver’s seat. “In the morning they’ll realize what they’ve done, and will come crawling back in regret.” He shook his head slightly and sighed. “It could have been worse. What’s one man, if the whole village is saved?”

  A horrible apprehension clutched at her heart. “What do you mean? What are they going to do?”

  Dorik stared steadily at the road ahead and did not answer. None of the men answered.

  A sudden rattle, loud in the quiet night behind them, startled her. It became the rhythmic beat of a pebble-gourd. They drove on, and the sound behind her faded into the growing distance between her and her own heart.

  Chapter 31. The K’meen Arûk

  The wagon rattled away, and through a haze of pain, Sheft watched the pale oval of Mariat’s face recede into the dark. The others crowded around him and blocked his view, but when he tried to see her once more, she was gone.

  But she was safe, no thanks at all to his unforgivable lack of resolve. He should have sent her away two days ago, as soon as he realized she was in the house. He should have shouted at her until she left him. But he had not. He had clutched at a dream and forced her into a nightmare.

  His guards held him as one of the black-cloaked figures kept thrusting the obscene toy in front of him. “Get that away from me,” Sheft cried. “I had nothing to do with it.”

  The man backhanded him across the mouth, so hard Sheft’s knees almost gave way. A realization hit him almost as harshly as the blow: it no longer mattered what he said or what he didn’t do. A line had been crossed, and not one of his making. Shaking, he pulled up ice to keep his lip from bleeding.

  “He can’t walk far,” one of them remarked.

  “Put him on Moro’s nag,” Rom growled.

  “Ele punished Moro by breaking his arm,” someone in the shadows said. “His family befriended this criminal, and now the son went and married a girl from Ferce.”

  “Moro isn’t to blame,” Gwin put in. “His whole family was bewitched. They are good, solid people at heart, and it’s a shame what this foreigner did to them.”

  Gwin, Sheft realized, was trying to protect Mariat. In his own way, he cared about her, and that hurt. Or was it his own status he tried to protect? He didn’t know, hadn’t bothered to inform himself about what others wanted. Tarn’s remembered face, creased with faint distaste, floated out of the dark: “You are too wrapped up in yourself to notice anyone or anything else.”

  The men pulled their hoods up and suddenly became unreal figures, chins and noses appearing and disappearing in the torch-light, casting crooked shadows that jumped from tall to short and back again. Two of the black-cloaks led Surilla forward. They shoved Sheft onto the big mare’s back, a painful procedure that left him clutching the coarse mane with white-knuckled hands. The weather had changed and a cold wind fingered his hair. Shivering, he waited as the hooded figures took a position around him, their guttering torches level with his eyes. And then he saw it: the dark circle had been present all this time, and now it enclosed him.

  Parduka pronounced the solemn invocation to Ele. The gourd rattled, shaking out its slow and deadly rhythm, and the group began their journey into the night. The restored Rites—and whatever they entailed—had begun.

  High on the great horse, he rode completely exposed, with no hood to hide his hair, no, crowd in which to lose himself. As the accused pervert who preyed on women, the monster who corrupted children, the heretic who trampled on their holiest rite, he was the sole prisoner of the torch-lit circle as it dragged him through the dark. Surilla plodded over the barren fields, every step jogging Sheft’s broken rib. Ice reaction vied with dread, and at first he could not make out the terrain beyond the torchlight that dazzled his vision. The inner warning, which had been jangling for some time, suddenly shrilled loud and clear. With a jolt of terror, he knew exactly where they were going.

  Oh God help me. Rulve, help me!

  His plea went nowhere, only stayed on the surface of his fear like water pooling over rock-hard soil. He searched frantically for a means of escape. Surilla would respond to his vocal command, but not when the black-cloak had a firm hold on her lead. He envisioned himself sliding off her back and somehow dodging through the men who pressed closely around him. The thought of what that would do to his injuries rasped through his stomach like a thorny vine, but he had to try it.

  He was gauging the distance to the ground when Blinor, close beside him, jammed his fist into his right side. Pain exploded, and he doubled over the horse’s mane with a gasp.

  “I’m watching you,” the miller said. “Try something, filth, and I’ll go after your lady-friend. Sort of like this, you know?” The big teeth shone in a leer as he ground his thumb into Sheft’s side. “And I’ll enjoy every minute of it.”

  Sheft swatted the hand away. “Leave her alone,” he said through a now swollen lip. “She has nothing to do with any of this.”

  “Whether I leave her alone or not is entirely up to you.”

  They left the open field and wound through brush. Long, deep chills ran through him, like the sibilance of the gourd. He fumbled for the toltyr around his neck, but Sokol had cut it away. A sense of betrayal rose up like a bitter flood. Just as the toltyr was becoming part of him, just as he was beginning to think he might have a destiny, it had been wrenched away. He’d lost, not so much his mother’s last gift or a pewter medallion that would give him courage, but the struggle to believe there was any meaning to his life.

  The group came to a halt. Ice-reaction spun slowly inside his head, but he could make out, barely visible in the dark, the evil bulk of the K’meen Arûk. It crouched like a waiting predator. Two men dragged him off the horse and pulled his arms behind him, squeezing the gashes on his back into streaks of fire. They bound his wrists with a rope, hauled him toward the boulder where Parduka waited, then shoved him onto the ground and tied his ankles. He sat, each quick, short breath a stab of pain, and tried to his keep his back from rubbing against the rock. Silent figures gathered in a semi-circle in front of him, their dark eyes lit up like an encroaching pack of wolves. The fear that had been thrumming in his stomach climbed into his throat, swelling all the way.

  Parduka stood over him, a hank of grey hair hanging over one cold eye. “Welcome, blasphemer, to the holy stone of Rûk.” With her gesture, the crowd formed a line in front of him. She withdrew the ritual knife from her belt and handed it to the first cloaked figure.

  His thumb testing the edge of the blade, the man looked down on him. With several swift moves, he pushed back his sleeve, cut his own arm, and smeared the blood in a rough swipe over Sheft’s cheek and mouth. With a grim smile, he wiped the knife clean on the front of the sheepskin jacket and turned away.

  The next black-cloak squatted in front of him and spit in his face. He made the cut, rubbed the bloody wound into Sheft’s hair, then pulled his jacket open and cleaned the knife on the cloth strips that held the bandage in place.

  In turn the others came, black hoods looming above him, the knife glinting, red lines welling. Shadowed figures smeared their blood on his cheek, across
his eyes, on his chest. He tasted it on his mouth, felt it drying cold in his hair, smelled it sickly-sweet all over him.

  Sokol held the knife in front of Sheft’s face, pulled his head back by the hair, then slowly wiped the blade along the side of his neck. Sheft stiffened, waiting for the sharp edge to turn, but instead the butcher kicked him, hard in the thigh.

  “That’s for my step-daughter Ubela,” he said. “What Parduka will do is for me.”

  “Sokol,” he croaked, “I never touched her.”

  Another vicious kick, this time in the ribs. He gasped, and bright dots scattered over his vision. When he could see again, the last man was handing the knife to Parduka.

  “Position him over the rock,” she commanded.

  He bore down on his spirikai. Ice. He would need ice. More than he had, more than there was.

  Hands jerked him upright, dragged him against the waist-high rock, and jammed his head sideways into the depression on top. A scummy film slimed against his cheek.

  Someone behind him bent close to his ear, but spoke loudly enough for all to hear. “Lookey there, hayseed. Parduka’s hands are shaking. Remember what happened at the Rites? Remember how the sheep screamed? How it kicked?”

  Nervous laughter spattered through the crowd.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Sheft said, his mouth pressed against the rock. “Let me go, and you’ll never see me again.”

  “You got that last part wrong,” a voice growled. “It’s you who’ll never see again.”

  Their hands sought purchase against his stitched-up back as they pressed his chest and shoulders onto the rock. Every instinct screamed to slam ice into those that held him down, as he had with the beetle-man, but too much pain, too many vivid memories of the half-butchered sheep, shook his concentration.

  The priestess raised her hand, and in it the sharp spoon glinted.

  His heart skipped, then hammered. He called out in a shaking voice to the one who seemed closest to his own age. “Temo! Don’t do this. It won’t bring your father back.”

  “Shut your mouth,” someone snarled, “or you’ll lose your tongue as well.”