Cale gathered his reins, stopping the horned animal under a large spreading tree. Then, slipping off, he called out to the others to come back.
Mashal rode up, a frown creasing the scar across his heavy face. “What in the blazes are you stopping here for?”
Something’s wrong.” Reaching up, Cale pulled Haemas to the ground. The ebari squealed and rolled its four black eyes.
Haemas wavered on rubbery legs for a moment, then backed up to the comforting solidness of a tree. The forest seemed alive with hunger and crafty, confident stalking.
The rest of the men forced their now plainly nervous beasts back to Cale and Mashal. The white-haired old man dismounted and gripped his reins tightly in his one hand as his ebari tried to bolt into the forest. “I don’t like the feel of this,” he said in a low voice to Cale.
She had a sudden strong impression of sleek muscles and powerful, curving claws. She looked to the rear again.
“Holnar! Tie those ebari down or we’ll lose them!” Cale threw his reins to the old man, and reached for the long bow across his back. “Mashal! You watch after our guest here!” Eyes trained on the overhead foliage, he notched a red-fletched arrow into his longbow.
The big man grabbed Haemas’s left wrist and pulled her away from the panicked animals. A split second before she heard the low snarl, she knew where the stalker was. She looked up into the arching branches that shut out the sky.
A sly gleaming blackness curled up there, radiating hunger while it studied them with calculating yellow eyes. She felt the hunger in its crafty mind . . . and a surprising sense of familiarity. Somehow, it seemed to know her.
Mashal gasped. “That’s the biggest silsha I ever saw!” He released her wrist to notch a white-fletched arrow into his own longbow.
The silsha snarled again. The ebari strained against their reins.
The old man had tied off several of the shaggy animals to a tree, but the largest ebari refused to go any closer, shaking its horned head back and forth in its frenzy to be free. Holnar stumbled and the ebari dragged him out from under the tree before he could drop the reins.
A streak of gleaming black hide flashed from above, knocking the dappled ebari to the forest floor. Cale stood ready with his bow as the two creatures thrashed together. Holnar lay stunned against a large knobby root a few feet away.
Watching the struggle, Haemas found no room in her mind for her own fear. The predator’s sense of excitement and impending victory overwhelmed her. She inched closer as the ebari kicked one last time. The black silsha raised its bloodstained muzzle and snarled defiance at the men surrounding it.
Holnar stirred and groaned. Cale took careful aim, then froze as Haemas darted between him and his target.
Locked into the silsha’s yellow gaze, she felt they were intimately connected, as though this beast had come just for her. From behind, Cale called, “Mashal, get her highness out of there!” Off to the side Holnar groaned again and the animal flattened its small tufted ears at the fallen man, rumbling low in its throat.
Find . . . hunger . . . protect . . . anger . . . hunger . . . find . . . its thoughts beat relentlessly at her mind.
She stroked the shining midnight coat. Eat.
It lowered its long, sharp-muzzled head and tore at the ebari’s soft underbelly. Resting one hand on its strong-muscled back, Haemas felt its warm breath as it tore into its meal. Dimly, she heard the others dragging Holnar back out of the way, then realized they were moving the remaining ebari out of sight into the forest too.
She ran her hand across the length of the satiny coat. Let the chierras go, she didn’t need them.
After it had finished feeding, it snuffled warm breath gently into her face, asking her for something, or to do something. She couldn’t quite make it out. Puzzled, she held the massive head between her hands and gazed deep into the molten yellow eyes. What?
A sudden whoosh just over her head made her jump as a red-fletched arrow narrowly missed the black beast. Screaming its defiance, it leaped into the tangle of intertwined trees that roofed the forest.
As she jumped for a limb to follow it, an arm snagged her from behind. Struggling blindly, she fought until she was dizzy and breathless.
Cale lowered her to the leafy ground under the tree. His normally tan face gone white, his blue eyes staring at her. “Mother above, below, and beyond!”
Mashal seized his arm and pulled him back. “This demon’s spawn is crazy!”
She paid no attention. As the black creature moved out of her awareness, she began to have room once again for her own thoughts, and in those thoughts came the realization that, for the first time since she fled the mountains, she had linked with something outside of her own mind.
* * *
The little idiot might at least have had the grace to fall off a cliff, Jarid thought testily, stepping out of the portal just above the Barrier on Kith Shiene. He’d tried killing her at least a dozen times in the last ten years, though. The whelp always had such damnable good luck.
Tightening his shields, he thought that he’d like to know exactly how she had gotten past the Barrier anyway. It should have been the end of her in that condition.
And she wouldn’t have gotten away at all, if it hadn’t been his uncle’s chierra seneschal, Pascar, who’d spoiled everything at the last moment. Well, the idiot had paid in full measure for that mistake.
Now it was left to Jarid to tie up the final loose end. If the Council ever got its collective hands on Haemas Sennay Tal, he wasn’t sure his tampering would hold up to trained inspection.
Feeling the Barrier seethe about his mind, he ducked his head and scrambled down the slope. Tendrils of pain kept seeping in through weak spots in his shields, forcing him to patch as he moved and not pay enough attention to his feet.
Every time he slipped, he determined the pale-eyed little skivit would pay for this when he caught up with her. On the far side, he stopped to catch his breath and drew the map out of his pack. He was still a long way from the spot he’d marked last night after his Search.
He stuffed the map into his pack and decided to hike on down to Lenhe’ayn. It would be the middle of the night before he got there, the perfect time to “liberate” one of their horses.
“THAT ONE’S bred out of the Highlands for sure.” Holnar gestured with his stump at the girl. “All the really powerful families live up there.”
Leading his restless ebari through the shadow-filled forest, Cale glanced up at the pale-haired girl riding silently in his saddle. Her strange light-gold eyes stared straight ahead, seeing nothing, as nearly as he could tell.
“There’s no telling what you’ve got hold of, when you’re dealing with the likes of them.” Holnar spat into the brush. “Watch out the lass don’t mess with your head, same as that beast.”
Cale looped the reins tighter around his wrist. “If she could do that, she would’ve been at it already.”
“Has it occurred to you there’s something not quite right about her?” Holnar felt the back of his head gingerly, then kneed his ebari up to the front of the line.
“It’s occurred to me there’s a lot not right about her,” Cale muttered at the old man’s back. Two whole days now, he thought, and not a word, not even a sound out of the brat. It wasn’t natural. They talked, at least everyone said they did. Of course, he’d never gone up to a Lord personally and tried to have a conversation. In fact he’d never even seen one up close before, but everyone knew they didn’t spend all their time talking in their heads.
He wondered uneasily just what he had gotten hold of.
Mashal dropped back to walk beside him. “I’ll lay you odds she called that thing down on us!”
A skeptical look spread across Cale’s face. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No?” Mashal glared up at the oblivious girl and lowered his voice. “Thi
nk! Have you ever seen a silsha around here this time of year, or one so big?”
“Well—”
“The Mother-take-it thing knew her, I tell you, and she knew it.” He stumbled over a root and scowled. “You saw how it was. She meant to go with it!”
Cale sighed. When he’d first got a look at those Kashi eyes, the girl had seemed like a bit of gold on the hoof, so to speak. A quick ransom note, a few bags of gold, he’d thought, and no one would ever be the wiser.
“You should have let her go with the damned thing. She’s naught but bad luck and here you are, taking her straight back to our homes and families!”
That raised a sore point that didn’t bear thinking about. Cale winced as Eevlina’s jowly face floated into his mind.
“Leave her deep in the forest for the Old Ones,” Mashal insisted morosely. “Admit it, you haven’t got the faintest idea where to sell her. For pity’s sake, Cale Evvri, she don’t even talk.”
“A female that don’t talk,” Cale mused. “An interesting concept, at any rate.” He twitched the girl’s leg. “Don’t you agree, prize? A female that don’t yammer on all day at a fellow should be worth her weight in gold.”
The impossibly light eyes flicked down at him for an instant, then she was lost in her own world again. Her indifference nagged at him, infuriating and yet worrying at the same time. He brushed a leaf out of his hair and scowled. What exactly did go on in their heads anyway, these high-and-mighty folk from the mountains? Could she be talking to them right now, calling them down to take her home? “Go on with you, Mashal,” he said uneasily. “You’re just jealous. I caught her and I’m going to sell her.”
The heavy-set man snorted and jogged through the brush up to Holnar’s ebari, catching onto the stirrup to help him keep pace.
“Just see if I don’t then!” he shouted at Mashal’s back. “I bet you a horse that I sell this whelp back to their high-and-mightinesses before the season is out!”
The look of triumph Mashal threw back over his shoulder gave Cale the squirmy feeling that perhaps this was going to be harder than he had thought.
* * *
Kevisson fingered the hard roundness of the obsidian ring in his pocket and repeated his question.
“A light-haired lass, you say, my Lord?” The homespun-dressed woman squinted up at him from the ground. Her weathered face was strong, her brown eyes wary. “We do shelter many who pass this way. Just how long ago would that have been?” You yellow-eyed oaf, her mind added for good measure.
Kevisson plucked a vague impression of a slender young girl from the surface of the woman’s thoughts. He smiled reassuringly at her broad chierra face. “Two or three days at the most. My youngest sister has run away and my mother is quite worried. Are you sure you haven’t seen her?”
“Your sister, my Lord?” Your sister, my foot and ankle, too! Her face skeptical, she picked up her skirts and swept her arm at him. “Come inside and I’ll tell you what little I do know.”
Kevisson swung down from the black Lenhe mare he’d borrowed. A second woman in homespun, this one younger, appeared to lead it around the back. He followed the first woman into the gray stone keep, bending his head as he went through the doorway.
“I am Idora, first among the Sisters here at the Mother’s shrine.” She indicated he should sit on the simple wooden stool before a wide cooking hearth. “We’ve nothing fancy here.”
Kevisson sank onto the offered seat. “My sister?”
“Yes, the poor young one.” Idora sat on a second stool and retrieved a bundle of knitting. “I found her on the mountain early one morning when I were returning from a difficult lying-in clear on the other side of these woods. She were fair-haired all right.”
Kevisson picked up a figure from Idora’s memory: Haemas Tal, bruised and feverish, exhausted.
“So quiet, she were. The poor thing never made a single sound the whole two days she were here.” She never told what were done to her, if that’s what’s on your high-and-mighty mind.
He leaned forward. “But she’s not here now?”
“No, my Lord.” And I wouldn’t be telling the likes of you if she were! “We meant to return the lass once she were better, but something scared her off.”
Kevisson sifted carefully through the old woman’s surface thoughts, but the image eluded him. “What was that?”
“I never knowed, my Lord.” Probably the thought of you chasing after her! “Something troubled her sorely late one afternoon and she slipped off the same night. We never seen her again.”
“Do you know where she went?”
Thank the Mother, I do not! Idora shook her gray-haired head resolutely.
He listened at her thoughts for a moment, but could find nothing helpful, just a confusing combination of resentment and concern. “Did she leave anything behind?”
Idora considered. “Her clothes,” she said finally. “They was all torn and bloodied from the mountain.” Her chin lifted. “They was ruined. I’m sure the young Lady didn’t want them no more.”
“Of course,” he said quickly. “It’s just the sentimental value they would have to my family.”
There’s not one ounce of decent sentiment in your whole clan! “And which family is that, my Lord?” Idora stopped knitting and looked at him craftily out of the corner of her eye.
“Monmart.” Kevisson thought how scandalized his mother would be at having her name dragged into this affair.
She put aside her ball of gray wool and the knitting needles. “Not a Highlands House, is it?”
Snobbery even in this humble place. Kevisson smiled thinly.
“Wait here, my Lord.” Idora disappeared through the back door. A few minutes later, she reappeared with an armful of soft gold and blue cloth.
He picked up the gold overtunic, noting the ripped, bloodstained shoulder, then examined the loose blue breeches with both knees torn out. Touching the clothes she’d worn so recently heightened his impression. Her face swam into clearer focus in his mind, pale eyes, high cheekbones, a delicate high-bridged nose.
He folded the clothes and felt in his pocket for a coin. “You have been a great deal of help, Sister,” he said, pressing the silver hexagon into her palm.
Little enough for the likes of you! Idora’s mouth set stubbornly. “This be far too generous, my Lord.”
“It’s a gift for the poor, Sister.”
“Well, then.” The coin disappeared. “It would be a sin to refuse.” She resumed her knitting.
Kevisson unfolded his legs and stood up, wincing a little at the saddle-stiff muscles. Getting soft, he chided himself. “Good-by, Sister.”
“Good day, my Lord.” And may the Mother take you before you darken Her door again!
* * *
Idora watched the stranger ride away. Mounted on a real horse, too, she thought angrily. The cost of that beast’s grain would have fed a chierra family for a year.
“What was all that about?” Knyl asked in her soft voice, staring after the Kashi’s back.
Idora’s mouth straightened. “The Mother has not seen fit to tell me yet, but I feel She has special plans for the light-haired lass.”
“But she ran away.” The younger woman opened her apron and tumbled out the whiteroots she had just dug for supper.
“She went into the forest,” Idora said. “Straight into the Mother’s arms.” She thought for a moment. “But with the likes of that one after her, it’s a good thing I asked the Mother to send a shadowfoot to protect her.”
Knyl’s dark eyes grew big. “A silsha?”
“Just wait until his high-and-mightiness tangles with that.” A gleam of satisfaction crept across her middle-aged face. “In fact, I wish I was going to be there to watch.”
* * *
Ignoring her bound wrists, Haemas turned over on the hard ground, away fro
m her captor, and closed her eyes. A sense of the silsha’s dark sleek strength lingered. She concentrated on the link to the world outside her own head, savoring what she’d thought was gone forever. She could feel the ebari’s thoughts around her now: tired, hungry, and still a bit nervous. Then she shut them out, trying to picture, instead, the silsha’s compelling yellow gaze. It had seemed to want something from her. She wished she knew what.
The low murmurs of the men standing the first guard, the hiss and crackle of the low fire, the whisper of the evening breeze through the branches all faded away, and the darkness carried her into sleep and a dream . . .
She stood at the dining room door, her palm pressed to the satiny wood.
Jarid turned his light eyes to her, eyes so much like, yet totally unlike her own. “Come in, Cousin.”
She glanced at the long table. “Where’s Father?” Only Alyssa, her stepmother, and Jarid, the orphaned son of her father’s sister, were waiting to eat.
Something was wrong. Pascar, the old seneschal, moved quietly around the huge table, lighting the tall, twisted candles for the evening meal. Jarid’s eyes followed him impatiently. “Out!” he demanded as the last flame took hold. Pascar dropped his brown chierra eyes and bowed, then closed the door behind him.
Haemas slid into her accustomed place. Jarid lounged back against the intricately carved wood of his chair and stretched his arms over his head like a carnivore limbering for the hunt. “You want to know where your father is, skivit?” He winked. “Why should you care? He’s never had any use for you.”
Alyssa’s amused eyes gleamed over the hand she used to mask her smile.
Haemas realized her own hands were clenched around the table’s edge. With an effort, she dropped them back into her lap. “I don’t believe I’m hungry,” she said faintly, holding her shields very tight so no sense of her unease would escape. “Please excuse me.” Nodding to her stepmother, she began to rise.
HM01 Moonspeaker Page 5
