by Kyra Halland
After the initial battle, which left all the men and a number of women and children dead, the A’ayimat had rounded up the survivors, trapped them in a building, and set the building and the rest of the town on fire. Ned had managed to remain hidden in the stable; his father, brothers, and one sister had been killed in the first attack, and he had seen his mother and youngest sister driven into the building.
“It looked like a hundred blueskins between me and them,” Ned said, breaking down again, “but I should have tried to help them. Even if I got killed, I should have tried.”
Before Silas could think through his rage for an answer, Lainie whispered, “I’m so sorry.” Her hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists on her knees, and tears rolled down her cheeks. She would know in some measure what the boy was suffering; she still mourned her brother Blake’s death in the crossfire of a gunfight, and still blamed herself for not being there to protect him with her magic. Likewise, Silas guessed it would take Ned years, or a whole lifetime, to forgive himself for not saving his family, even though it would have been impossible, or for being alive while they were all dead.
“You okay, son?” Silas asked when Ned’s sobbing finally quieted down.
The boy sniffed, wiped his eyes with a ragged, dirty shirtsleeve, and nodded.
“Thank you for telling me about it,” Silas said. “That’s the most we’ve heard yet about what happened. Let me ask this, now – do you remember seeing anyone else, any strangers, around town that day or in the days right before?”
“No, sir. Sometimes there’s travelers and vagabonds that pass through town, but we hadn’t seen none in almost a month.”
“Thornwood was a pretty small town, right? Everyone knew everyone else’s business?”
“Yes, sir, pretty much.”
“Can you think of anything anyone might have done to provoke the blueskins? Even without meaning to?”
Ned shook his head vigorously. “No, sir. No one did anything. We never go in the hills. No need to, nothin’ in them but thorn trees an’ snakes an’ blueskins, far as anyone knows. We keep to ourselves, an’ treat others how we want to be treated.”
“No drunks or braggarts prone to doing foolish things? No drunk cowhands in town for an evening?”
“No, sir. We’s holy-pathers. We don’t even have a saloon in town.” His voice faltered. “Didn’t, I mean.” He looked like he was going to start crying again. Lainie handed him a cookie from a packet Mrs. Murrison had given them, and he busied himself with that.
When Ned finished the cookie and had a hold of himself again, Silas asked, “Did the blueskins in the hills here know about you folks’ beliefs and ways?”
“I don’t know. We never had much to do with them, or much talk with them. Sorry I can’t tell you more.”
“It’s okay. I’m going to ask them some questions, and that’ll be one of them.”
The boy’s eyes widened again. “You’re gonna try to talk to some blueskins? You’re awful brave.”
“We’ve talked to them before. The ones we’ve met, well, they would no more murder folks like this unprovoked than your people would have provoked them. I want to get at the truth of what happened, and if this gang of renegade wizards is behind it, we’ll stop them and see justice done on them no matter what it takes.”
“I want to help.” Ned’s voice took on a hard edge.
They did need help, but a scared kid with no mage power couldn’t take on this fight. “You already did,” Silas said. “More than you know. You can bunk with us tonight, then tomorrow we’ll take you over to the Double Circle M. They’ve taken in a couple of other kids who made it out; I’m sure they’ll look after you. Maybe you can find work there.”
“Thanks, Mr. Vendine. That’s mighty kind of you. I’ll pray to the Defender and the Avenger every day for you. And when you do get those bad wizards, come back and tell me, so I’ll know my kin are avenged.”
“We’ll do that,” Silas promised.
Chapter 13
THE NEXT DAY, with Ned riding on Abenar behind Silas, they headed over to the Double Circle M ranch, about fifteen leagues north-northwest of Thornwood. Lainie’s heart ached for the boy, mourning the sudden and terrible loss of his whole family and blaming himself for not being able to save his mother and little sister. She knew the feeling too well; she still regretted that she hadn’t been with Blake on the day he was shot so she could have protected him with magic. But the guilt for his death, she now knew, lay squarely at the feet of Elspetya Lorentius, who didn’t seem to care how many lives and families she destroyed for the sake of her ambition. And that was where the blame for Ned’s family’s deaths belonged, too. One day, Lainie hoped, he would come to understand that.
At the Double Circle M, one of the hands recognized Ned as well as Silas and Lainie from the drive and went running for his boss. As the other hands gathered around, curious, the rancher came over and invited them into the house. Ned related his story again, more calmly this time. The rancher and the other two children who had escaped answered Silas and Lainie’s questions, but didn’t have anything new to add to what they already knew.
At the rancher’s insistence, Lainie and Silas spent the night there. The next morning, as they were getting ready to leave, Lainie drew Ned aside. “Don’t blame yourself,” she said. “What happened wasn’t your fault. It’s those wicked wizards who are guilty. Remember, your family is watching you from the heavens. They know you would have saved them if you could, but they wouldn’t have wanted you to die too. So live a good life, and remember them, and tell your children about them so they won’t be forgotten.”
Tears swam in Ned’s eyes. He turned away and scrubbed at them with a fist. “Yes, ma’am,” he said.
Silas glanced over at her and gave her a nod. Lainie had thought all day yesterday about what to say to Ned, and had told him the things she would have found comforting herself if someone had said them to her. It wouldn’t bring his family back, and he would still spend years wondering what might have happened if he had done something different. But it placed the guilt where it belonged, and would give him a comforting thought to hold on to through the days and months and years ahead.
After making their farewells, Lainie and Silas rode back to Thornwood to continue their investigations. There wasn’t anything to see in Thornwood that they hadn’t already seen, so they headed up into the hills just east of town. It was risky to venture into A’ayimat territory, especially with tensions running high, but with some luck and the A’ayimat’s unusual tolerance for Lainie, they hoped to stay out of trouble and get more information.
The Thorntree Hills were low, rocky, and dry, sparsely vegetated except for scrub grass and the thornwood trees they were named for. It was a hard place for people to live, but it seemed like the A’ayimat could squeeze out a living just about anywhere as long as it was in the hills or mountains.
Lainie and Silas rode up a shallow gully into the hills, passing the sticks hung with white feathers that marked the boundary of A’ayimat territory. Usually, an A’ayimat sentry was keeping watch within sight of the markers, but Lainie didn’t spot one today. Maybe they figured there was no need for one, with the town gone. Lainie’s rage at the cruelty of the massacre boiled up again. She didn’t know if she would be able to speak civilly the next time she saw an A’ayimat. What could possibly justify trapping women and children in a building and burning them alive?
Several measures up the trail from the markers, two sticks hung with strings of beads and blue-dyed feathers stood upright in the ground next to each other. Lainie and Silas halted beside them. In all of Lainie’s ventures into A’ayimat territory, she had never seen markers like these. “Do you know what those are?” she asked Silas.
He shook his head. “Never seen anything like them before.”
Lainie climbed down from Mala to take a closer look. As she crouched before the hip-high markers, an A’ayimat guard emerged from a thicket of thornwood trees on the hillside
. He held a short, curved sword in each hand, ready to attack.
“Grana settlers, looking to die,” he growled.
Lainie stood up and Silas dismounted from Abenar. Both of them held their empty hands outstretched to the side, signaling that they intended no threat. The guard looked from Lainie to Silas, then at Lainie again with a long, piercing stare. She felt a jumbling in her mind as the sentry used his own magic to learn who she was. She didn’t care for the intrusion, but she didn’t try to stop him. She had nothing to hide. She wasn’t the one who had murdered innocent settlers.
“You’re the ones we’ve heard of,” the sentry finally said. “The settler wizard whose power is kin to ours, and her husband, the Grana wizard who respects our ways.”
“That’s us,” Lainie answered, biting her words short as she tried to be polite and hold back her rage.
“Why are you here, intruding on our grief?”
Their grief? “We want to know what happened. Why you attacked the town.”
“Why we attacked the town?” Bitter despair darkened the guard’s voice. “Why don’t you ask the ghosts of the settlers what they did?” He pointed to the markers with the blue feathers. “Or the ghosts of these two daughters of my clan, only nine and twelve winters old, who were murdered by settlers from the town? And just killing them wasn’t enough; they were violated and abused in every possible way before they died.”
Lainie couldn’t breathe. She felt sick. “Oh, gods,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.” No wonder the A’ayimat had been so angry. Two little girls, raped and murdered…
“That’s… Damn,” Silas said, his voice choked. It was another moment before he went on. “We’re hunting the people who did it. They’ve done a lot of evil things, but this is the worst.”
“No need to hunt them,” the sentry said. “They’re all dead, as you know if you saw the town.”
“What makes you so sure it was people from the town?” Silas asked.
“Who else would it be?” the sentry snapped. “When we found the girls’ bodies here, we also found tracks that led to a house in the town. Our wiseman investigated the trail, and found a second trail in the magic beneath the earth, left by lust, hate, and violence. That trail led to the same house. So. Think of our children, tortured, ravaged, and murdered by your people, and tell me we were wrong to take revenge.”
“You weren’t wrong to want revenge,” Silas said. “Killing’s too good for men who do things like that. But you didn’t do anything besides follow this trail to the house? You massacred a town full of people just on that evidence, without even talking to anyone in the town?”
“There was no need to talk to anyone. The trail was clear enough.”
“How much do you know about the people who lived in that town? Did you know anything about them at all? Did you know they were peaceful, honest, hardworking folk who tried to walk uprightly before the gods at all times?” His voice rose with his anger. “Before you slaughtered them, did you even stop to think it might have been someone from outside the town? And even if it was someone in this town, why kill the children as well?”
“What does it matter?” the sentry demanded. “Grana settlers raped and murdered A’ayimat children and Grana settlers paid the price.”
“It matters, first of all,” Silas retorted, “because the settlers in other towns are angry and talking about attacking your people in return –”
“Then there will be a war.” The sentry gave him a merciless grin. “And then we will cleanse our land of all you intruders.”
“And,” Silas went on, “it matters because while you killed innocent people, the men who raped and killed those little girls are still out there somewhere and they’re probably going to do it again because war between the A’ayimat and the settlers is exactly what they want. And when the settlers are all dead, do you think they’ll leave your people alone?”
The sentry shrugged, but he also shifted his eyes aside, looking uncomfortable. “What does it matter to you what Grana folk do to my people?”
“We don’t want war. We want the Wildings to be a safe place for everyone who lives here. We mean to stop the people who did this before it goes any further. What else can you tell us about what happened?”
“I’ve told you all there is to tell.” The sentry pointed to the ground by the markers. “That’s where we found the bodies and the trail. You can see for yourself, and then you can leave. If you disturb our mourning again, we will kill you.” He disappeared back into the trees.
Lainie realized that her fingernails were digging painfully into her palms. She forced herself to unclench her fists and detach her thoughts from the horror of what had happened here. If she and Silas were going to catch up to the murderers and stop them before this happened again, she had to think clearly. “Do you know anything about trails in the magic in the earth?” she asked Silas.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he said.
Lainie knelt by the markers again and dug her fingers into the thin snow and gravelly dirt. She could detect mages by the impressions their power made in the lines of magic flowing within the earth, but she had never sensed emotion in those impressions. The A’ayimat could do it, though, so with her Wildings-born power, she should be able to as well.
She extended her mage senses into the ground and found the layer of warm amber power that flowed just beneath the surface. She traced the flow of magic; Silas was a distinctive eddy in the power right next to her. A ripple a short distance away was probably the sentry. But she didn’t pick up any emotion, even now that she knew to look for it. Probably, as with all shows of magic, these trails of emotion would fade after a while. She hoped it wasn’t already gone.
She shifted her mage senses this way and that, examining the power from different angles and from inside and out. And then, with a change in perspective, like looking at a cloud and then suddenly seeing the shape of a rabbit or tree in it, a feeling of bloodlust, carnal lust, and contempt brushed the edge of her senses.
She jerked back, her mind reeling at the savagery of the emotions. An impression came to her mind of men who had been assigned a horrible task, who were excited about it instead of reluctant to carry it out. Had the details of the plan been given to them, or had they just been told to provoke an attack in whatever way they could think of? Either way, she felt sickened by the evil she had touched, even faded as it was.
She tried to set aside her own emotions. Carefully, with distaste, as though being forced to put her hand into a pile of stinking offal, she touched the trail with her mage senses and followed it for as long as she could stand it. That odd but definite sense of direction she felt in the flow of magic beneath the earth told her that the trail did indeed lead to the town.
She withdrew her mage senses from beneath the ground and sat drawing deep gulps of clean, fresh air.
“Well?” Silas asked.
“I found them. It’s – it’s horrible. They liked what they were doing.”
“Gods-damned sheepknocking bastards. All the more reason to catch up with them.”
“Yeah.” She refocused her mind on the task at hand. “The trail does go to the town, but I still can’t believe anyone there would have done such a thing. Or if it was strangers, that no one noticed them.”
“I wonder…” Silas trailed off, his face furrowed in thought. “Would it be possible to lay a false magical trail?”
“Good thinking. I’ll look deeper and see what I can find.”
Lainie reached into the earth again and angled her mage senses to catch the impressions the killers’ thoughts and emotions had left in the earth-magic. She went a little deeper through the foulness, looking for more layers that might indicate a second trail –
Confusion, pain, shame, fear, and more pain slammed into her, still raw and powerful after more than a nineday. Stunned, Lainie flinched back but couldn’t break away from the onslaught of emotions. Terror, agony, and bitter, bone-deep sorrow at the knowledge that t
hey would never see their mothers and fathers again, they would never grow up –
Lainie wrenched herself free of the echoes of the girls’ deaths. Her stomach heaved; she clapped a hand over her mouth and scrambled away, not wanting to desecrate the place of their memory by being sick on it. She made it a couple of arm-lengths away before her stomach heaved up the little she’d been able to eat that morning.
The convulsions went on and on, driven by anguish and horror. Finally, the worst of it passed, and Lainie found herself on her hands and knees, sobbing. Silas was crouched next to her, holding her steady. She sat back, wiping her eyes, and he handed her a water flask. She rinsed her mouth and spat into the snow and dirt.
“You okay now?” he asked.
“Yes… no. I don’t know. I felt their deaths.” More sobs rose up inside her; she fought them back, to keep from falling apart again.
Silas hissed an Island oath under his breath and held her closer. “Oh, darlin’.”
“I’m scared it’s going to happen again,” Lainie said. “This was just one town. She won’t stop at that. It’ll be like you said. She’s going to kill more children and destroy more towns, and she won’t stop until the whole Wildings is at war.”
“She’ll stop. We’ll see to it.”
Lainie nodded and took a deep breath, steeling herself. “I’d better go back in and look some more.” She turned back towards the memorial markers, but Silas touched her shoulder.
“Don’t,” he said. “Let me try. I don’t want you to go through that again.”
She nodded, relieved though she hated to admit it. She hated leaving it to him, but she just couldn’t face that again.
