"Please, call me Alina," she said, with a shy glance away from my gaze.
"Alina…" I mused for a moment, and then recognition clicked in my mind. "As in, Alina the Golden Queen?"
Her eyes widened in shock. "You know the story of the Golden Queen?"
Of course I do, I wanted to say. I'm a bloody sorcerer. Every myth and legend is at the beck and call of my vast knowledge. Isn't that incredibly impressive?
Instead, all I said was, "I may have heard it in passing."
"My mother named me for her," Alina said, her voice quiet. "She wanted me to be her light against the darkness. I never thought anyone else knew the story. I told it to my children, of course." She bit her lip after this last sentence.
An interesting story, if not a particularly useful one. "I see," I said aloud, trying to keep my tone cool but engaged. "You're a brave woman, volunteering to keep the night's watch."
"Someone has to," she answered, but something about her tone struck me as evasive. I turned to look at her, and she fidgeted beneath my gaze. My sorcerer's intuition nudged me, and where I normally would have stayed silent, something about the strange power the name of the Arbiters had granted pushed me on.
"Someone with nothing to lose, perhaps?" I asked.
She wrapped her arms around her midsection, and looked away. "Please enjoy the fire, Arbiter. I must return to the watch."
Damn. I'd pushed too far. I opened my mouth to say something more, but she was already leaving, disappearing beyond a shoddy doorway. "In the morning, you'll have to tell me about this problem your village is having," I called after her, but she was already gone.
Oh well, I thought. It's not like I'm planning to stick around that long anyway.
There was just one problem… how was I going to slip past the night watch who'd welcomed me so warmly?
It was a problem I was going to have to solve when I got there. The warm fire was just too inviting; I couldn't tear my mind away from it long enough to think about how I might escape the clutches of these simple villagers.
When I woke, it was morning.
IV
I looked around, bewildered as consciousness returned. The rosy light of sunrise was streaming in through the cracks in the house above me, and the fire had almost died to nothing.
So much for my plan to escape before dawn.
"Oh, you're awake," a voice came from behind me.
Such was my surprise that I very nearly leapt out of my skin. Biting down against my instinctive reaction, I managed to squash my reaction down to only a smothered yelp, and turned around to see Alina sitting in a wooden chair a few feet away.
"Um… yes," I said. "So it seems."
Her brow creased very slightly. "I thought Arbiters didn't need to sleep."
Damn these legends and tales. "Well, that's true, actually. I wasn't sleeping, just meditating."
"You were snoring."
My mouth started to say something, but I closed it with a click.
"I've been keeping the children at bay," she said with a little smile. "All of them are desperate to lay eyes on an Arbiter, but I told them that even heroes need to rest."
"Um," I said uncomfortably. "Thank you, I suppose."
She looked at me with a sort of world-weary sadness, and suddenly she seemed much older than she appeared. Her gaze seemed to cut through me as though I were made of parchment. "You're not really an Arbiter, are you?" she asked.
"Of course I—" I started, but the look of misery in her eyes caused the words to die in my throat. I coughed, trying to clear it. For some reason, I found that I couldn't lie to her when asked a straight question. "Um. No, actually, I'm not."
"That's a shame," she said. "We had really hoped that you might be able to help us."
"Perhaps if you tell me what it is you need help with, I might be able to do something," I answered.
"No." She shook her head slowly. "We need an Arbiter."
"Arbiters aren't all that useful, you know," I snapped, my pride stung by the dismissal. "They're really only good at one thing, and that's hunting monsters. They're not particularly friendly either, I might add. Whereas, someone with my talents—"
"Your talents?" she asked.
The words of the other night watchman rang in my ears, and I choked. Coughing wracked my chest for a few moments while I expelled the saliva I'd inhaled from my airway, and she looked on with only mild concern. At last, I managed to say something that sounded like, "Yes. Talents."
She still looked skeptical, so I pressed on. "Look. You have a problem. The likelihood of an Arbiter just walking through here to help is slim to nil. I'm here now. Tell me what the problem is, and if I can do something, I will."
Why are you volunteering to help these people? My subconscious demanded. Weren't you supposed to be getting out of here?
I batted the inner voice away like an annoying fly. There was no way I was going to let the vague legends that surrounded the Arbiters hold more power than I could, not after the hell that I'd been put through in Elenia.
Alina sighed. "It's the Reaper."
"Reaper?" My mind traversed every tale and tome I'd ever read, and came up empty. "I've never heard of such a thing."
"That's what the folk here call it," she said. "It comes every month, on the three days of the full moon. Twice as tall as a man, with eyes that glow like embers in the darkness. If it laid on the ground it might be a long shadow, but upright it looks more like a tree with no branches. On the first night, it comes at moonrise, and releases its terrible hounds – we always hear them baying, that's how we know that it's coming again, and in the morning someone is always missing. The next night, when it returns at midnight…" she trailed off.
My eyes were wide with horror; I coughed, trying to drag my uncooperative expression back to neutrality, and gave her an encouraging look. "Go on."
"It's not hounds anymore," she whispered. "The second night, and the third, the missing people return to claim more… and they're dead."
A chill walked down my spine. "How long has this been happening?"
She shrugged, looking away from me. "A year, perhaps."
"A year?" I asked. "Why haven't you tried to fight it?"
"Of course we tried to fight it!" she snapped. "When we did, it cut everyone down as though they were nothing but wheat in the fields. There was so much blood… our knives and pitchforks were useless against it. The hounds—"
"All right, all right," I interrupted when her voice choked up.
She cleared her throat, and brought shining eyes up to lock with mine. "That was the night they took my children," she whispered. "All of them, dragged into the mist by those awful hounds. I could hear them screaming, but I was hurt—"
Her voice broke again, and a strangled sob tore its way from her. She fell forward, landing hard on her knees and wrapping her arms around her midsection, her blond hair obscuring her face. I bit my tongue, feeling incredibly awkward, even as my own eyes threatened to moisten at the display of utter vulnerability before me.
She shook in the silence, not making a sound as the grief overwhelmed her. There was nothing I could do to soothe such a terrible pain, and I knew it, but despite myself I slowly moved toward her and placed one hand on her shoulder. Her arm twitched as I made contact, but she didn't try to remove it.
"They came back the next night," she whispered, rocking back and forth on the floor. "Little Rory, and the twins… they came here, and they pounded on the door with their fists," Her voice broke off again as tears dripped onto the wooden planks beneath her. After a heartbreaking moment, she resumed, and her voice was husky with grief. "All I could do was keep my back against the door as they tried to break it down, but I couldn't stop crying. They never said a word. Then they were gone."
Of all the tiny villages in all of the Old Kingdoms, I had stumbled upon the one which was truly plagued by some kind of corruption. Worse than that, I'd already promised that I would do something to try and help them.
She looked up at me, her eyes bright with tears. "You're not an Arbiter. You can't help us. Why don't you just leave? I won't tell anyone. It hardly matters anymore. Soon we'll all be dead, just like the rest of them."
I drew in a slow breath and let it out again. "I need to get an idea of what this thing looks like," I said, keeping my voice low and soothing. "Do you think any of the villagers will be able to help?"
"Why?" she asked. "Why do you want to help us?"
I clenched my jaw tightly closed for a moment before speaking. "I don't know."
It was the truth.
"Can you think of anyone who might be able to help me?" I asked again.
"Maybe Palis," she said, her voice quiet and raw. "He was bitten; the night… that night, but they didn't take him."
"I'll go talk to him," I said. "Where can I find him?"
"He's the smith," she answered, waving one hand in the direction of the front door to her home.
With a nod, I rose smoothly to my feet. Almost every instinct I had screamed at me to run; the second time that I'd noticed that particular feeling since I'd met the Arbiter. Beneath all of that, though, there was something within me; a stern voice that said, very clearly: you will help these people.
When I reached the door that led outside, I looked back. Alina still knelt on the floor, with her back turned to me.
"I can't save your children," I whispered to her, "But if there's anything that I can do to avenge them, you have my word that I will do it."
Never before in my life had I made a vow of vengeance. The hairs on the back of my neck prickled as I said those words.
I realized that I meant them.
V
As I stepped out into the chill morning air and closed the door to Alina's home behind me, a vision appeared in my head: an image of the Deadmoon from the night before, looming in the sky, casting everything around it in black and grey.
It was very nearly full.
My brain did some quick mental calculations, and I muttered a curse under my breath.
Tonight was the first night of the full moon; which meant that I had only a short winter's day before the Deadmoon rose, and this Reaper – whatever it was – brought its hounds and descended upon Warsil once again.
Unless I stopped it, some of these villagers were going to die tonight.
The sky overhead was iron grey, and the brisk wind that blew through the village bore the promise of snow before the day was out. A small part of me hoped that perhaps if the full moon was invisible, the 'Reaper' might delay his visit in order to have a more dramatic appearance. Nonsense, of course, but it helped to ease the rising panic for a moment.
It didn't take long to find the smithy, located just across the snow-coated square from Alina's humble cottage. The forge was dark as I approached, but smoke curled from the chimney attached to the main part of the house.
Drawing up my courage and adopting an expression that I hoped was a stern one, I knocked on the door. I had admitted my ruse to Alina, but until it became necessary, I did not intend to allow the belief in my Arbiter-hood to dissipate from this small community.
The door cracked open, and an eye peered out. "What?"
My jaw tightened as I prepared a scathing reply, but it seemed the expression was all that was necessary. "Master Arbiter!" the voice cried in shock, and the door opened the rest of the way.
The man who stood just inside was stout, seeming as broad at the shoulders as he was tall. He peered up at me from beneath bushy brown eyebrows, a startled look on his face. It was impossible to miss the pronounced limp that he walked with as he shuffled back away from the door, holding it open for me.
With as much confidence as I could muster, I strode through the doorway, and the burly man closed it behind me. "Palis?" I asked.
"That's me," he grunted. As he spoke, I recognized the voice – it was the man who'd indirectly threatened to hang me the previous night. My mind immediately doubled down on the promise to maintain the Arbiter façade.
"I need information," I said, hoping that I sounded imperious enough. "Alina has explained the situation. She said you had a close encounter with this 'Reaper'."
"True enough," he answered. "Damn hound grabbed me and tried to haul me off, when we tried to kill the thing four months ago." He reached down and pulled the leg of his trouser up over his right knee, which was badly scarred. "Lucky not to lose it."
As I regarded the old wound, something began to prickle at the edges of my awareness. "Looks painful," I agreed, narrowing my eyes as I looked him over. There was something bothering me, but I couldn't quite put my finger on the feeling. "Can you tell me what the hounds looked like? What this 'Reaper' looked like?"
He looked thoughtful for a moment. "Hound was ugly. Big, ugly thing. Might've been a Valisian war hound once, but not anymore. Teeth as long as my pointer." He held up a stubby finger for reference.
"And the Reaper?" I prodded. Fel dogs were fel dogs. It was their master that interested me the most.
"Tall," Palis said, holding one hand above his head, his arm at full extension. "Thin. Looked like a tree, maybe, with long things that clutched the ground when it walked. Like roots."
"Did it have legs?"
He thought for a moment, and then shook his head. "Don't think so."
A frown of concentration crossed my face. He was either a very plain-spoken man with not much to say, or he was concealing something. It was hard to tell, given that the only expression on his face was one of fear.
Worse than that, the description he gave of the Reaper not only matched the vague one that Alina had given me, but it also matched not a single one of the stories and legends I'd heard, read or researched in my lifetime – and that was a large number. Nothing in my experience aligned with a tree-like monster that came accompanied by fel dogs into a village and stole away citizens. I couldn't think of a single tale that related a beast like that, but something was nagging at the back of my mind, like an annoying gnat that you just can't catch.
"Papa? What's going on?" a voice came from behind the burly blacksmith. He turned, and I shot a glance over his shoulder as he did. In an inner doorway that perhaps led into some kind of bedchamber stood a boy, in his mid-to-late teens, with the same burly physique exhibited by Palis the smith.
"Nothing, Murt," the large man said. "Go get the forge stoked for the day."
"Yes, sir," the boy mumbled, but he stared at me for a moment with very large eyes. That strange prickling sensation at the back of my neck returned, and I rubbed one hand along it to neutralize the feeling. Then the boy turned away, disappearing into another doorway beyond.
"Anything else, Master Arbiter?" the smith grunted. "There's work to be done."
Casting one last look after the boy, I shook my head. "No. That's all."
Without another word, I turned and left the smith's home, heading back out into the cold winter morning. Perhaps it had been too much to hope that I would uncover something so quickly that would lead me to the answer, but there had been no choice but to try.
If Palis had been the one with the best look at this 'Reaper', then I was going to accomplish nothing by frantically interviewing every citizen of this tiny backwater. It would be better simply to wait until nightfall, and get a glimpse of the creature myself.
I just had to hope that I wouldn't get killed in the process.
VI
A few moments later, I re-entered Alina's home. From within I could hear a sound of scraping, and when I came through the doorway into the main room, she was leaning over what appeared to be the leg of a chair with an odd-looking knife. A pile of wooden pieces sat at her feet as she worked. Shavings floated to the ground with each stroke.
"You're a furnisher," I said. My voice rang hollow in my ears.
"It was m
y husband's trade, before he died," she answered, and hers was just as hollow. "I learned from watching him."
"Did he…?" I wanted to ask the question, but the words died on my lips.
She seemed to know what I was asking, and shook her head before I could get any farther. "No. Ramun died more than a year ago, before the Reaper began to come."
A jab of pain lanced through my neck, as though someone had driven a needle into it. I yelped in surprise and swatted at what I thought was an insect, but my hand came away clean. Alina stared at me with a bemused expression.
"Sorry," I said lamely. "I thought there was a bug."
She shook her head with a little smile, and went back to shaving curls of wood off the leg of the chair.
What the hell was going on here? The pain had been fierce enough that I would have expected my hand to come away bloody, except there was no trace of injury. "Palis didn't have anything particularly helpful to say," I said, trying to bring her back around. "You were more helpful than he was, I think."
"He's not a very talkative man," she answered. "And that boy of his…"
My eyes narrowed with sudden interest. "What about the boy?"
She straightened, and waved the hand with the knife in a slashing motion. "A bloody coward, that's what he is," she snapped. "Never saw him the night we tried to fight back."
Oh really? I thought. My hand moved up to stroke along my jawline in thought. "Well, not everyone can be brave," I said.
"Once it was all over, he came on out of his house, said he'd been hiding under his bed when the howling started," she said, and the hand holding the knife trembled. "There we were, out fighting for our lives, and he was inside…"
The words started pouring out of her in a rush, and I didn't say a word to interrupt. "The boy's strong enough to pick up a shovel, he's strong enough and old enough to fight for our lives, for my children's lives, but instead he's hiding inside?" The knife slashed through the air, punctuating her words as she spoke. "We should have cut him open and thrown him to the Reaper's dogs. It would have been a mercy. At least we would have killed him first—"
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