Awakener

by J. C. Staudt

  Migo was missing from his stall.

  “He’s gone,” she cried. “He’s gone, Jeebo. We must go after him.”

  “We cannot leave the girls here by themselves. Stay with them. I’ll find Westhane.”

  Alynor would sooner take part in the search, but Jeebo was right. She couldn’t bring Ryssa and Vyleigh with her at such short notice, and she dare not depart them at a time like this. “Very well. Please hurry.”

  Thunder rumbled across the sky.

  “The rain will come soon. Take the girls inside. Lock the door and don’t open it until I return. I know you’re capable of holding your own against many a foe, but I fear there are darker beasts out there than we’ve yet to encounter.”

  “Just find Westhane and bring him back to me.”

  “He can’t have gone far,” Jeebo said, fitting his saddle over the spotted old gray gelding he’d named Tawner. “I’ll check down by the pond first and on the forest path thereafter. I’m certain to find him in one of those two places.”

  “Let us hope my son is as predictable as we believe he is.”

  Jeebo bridled his horse and led the animal outside by the reins. “I’ll return as soon as I can.”

  “Go with the gods.”

  Jeebo mounted and took off across the field at a gallop.

  Alynor watched him go, praying he wouldn’t find Westhane too late. The boy was fine, she was sure. He could handle himself. Yet fear nagged at her all the same.

  The sky darkened with the coming storm as Alynor hurried back to the cottage and brought the girls inside. Lightning crackled over the south pasture, trailed by a blast of thunder that rattled the dishware on the shelves. She barred the door and drew the shutters, then lit a candle and pulled a heavy robe about her shoulders before sitting in her high-backed rocking chair. Vyleigh crawled into her lap for a snuggle while Ryssa fidgeted with her favorite poppet on the floor.

  “Where is Westhane?” she asked.

  “Jeebo’s gone out to get him.”

  Rain pattered on the thatching, starting slow and growing to a downpour. She held Vyleigh close, her thoughts teeming with unease. How far had Westhane gone? Were Darion and Draithon caught in these same storms, facing these same strange incidents involving plants and trees and animals? What about Kestrel and his family in Cliffside Harbor? Surely the presence Jeebo spoke of hadn’t reached that far.

  A heavy knock startled her from her thoughts.

  It’s them, thank the gods, she thought with a sigh. She set Vyleigh on the floor and rushed over to lift the wooden bar.

  When she pulled the door open and stepped aside, no one entered.

  Three hooded figures stood on her doorstep.

  Her breath stopped short. She glanced at her daughters, then back at the three figures. The wooden bar was propped in the corner. If these visitors had designs on entering unbidden, she wouldn’t have time to shut the door and bar it before they intervened. “Hello?” she asked, her voice wavering.

  “Good evenfall to you, madam,” said a congenial male voice from beneath the leftmost hood. “I must apologize if we’ve given you a fright.”

  “Not at all,” she lied. “Who are you?”

  “We are but simple travelers on our way to a meeting of some import. I wonder if we might take shelter under your roof and wait out the storm.”

  “There’s a barn just across the way,” Alynor said, pointing. “You’re welcome to lodge with the animals until the rain lets up. I’m afraid we haven’t much room in here.” She glanced back again to check on the girls, who had stopped playing to stare in silence at the figures in the doorway.

  The speaker’s cowl swiveled side to side. “I’ve no objection to your kind offer, only… it would appear you are alone, and with beds to spare. Will the master of the household not return this night?”

  “He will. He’s on his way back even now. He and his men are—are hunting. I’m certain they turned for home when the rain started.”

  “I see.” The hooded man paused for a long moment as if studying her. “Forgive me. I’ve neglected to introduce myself. I am Sullimas Pileit, a priest of the goddess Yannui. These are my associates, also priests of the goddess, Norne Sigurdarsson and Maaltred Furiel.”

  Priests, thought Alynor. Strange occurrences in nature, and now three priests appear on my doorstep. Surely the implications could not be attributed to mere happenstance. She squinted out into the rain-soaked darkness. There were others, standing or pacing in the muddy field. How many, she could not say. She saw one, two, three… and then the hooded figure drew her attention once more.

  “And you are… ?”

  “Stoya,” she said. “Stoya Lyrent.” She had not used the name in a long time, yet saying it gave her a strange, oddly comforting feeling.

  “Madam Lyrent, I am sorry to have bothered you. If it makes no matter, I believe we shall indeed take you up on your offer. The barn will suffice. We thank you for your generosity.”

  Alynor couldn’t wait to close the door. She didn’t care where they went, so long as they didn’t enter the cottage. “Think nothing of it. Make yourselves at home.”

  Sullimas turned to go, then paused. “Eh… one more thing, if I may.”

  Alynor held the door open despite her every desire to the contrary. “Yes?”

  “Your husband’s hunting party. How many do they number?”

  She hesitated. “Several. I hadn’t thought to count.”

  “Guess. If you would be so kind.”

  “What concern is it of yours how many they number?”

  Sullimas turned toward her again. “I should like to know what we’re up against.”

  Alynor’s heartbeat quickened. “Up against? How do you mean?”

  Even through the blackness beneath the priest’s hood, she swore she could see him smile. “All traitors must pay for their crimes.”

  Alynor slammed the door and threw herself against it. “Your spells, Ryssa. Cast them. Now.”

  Ryssa was on the verge of tears, but she did as her mother instructed.

  Alynor began casting too. She expected to feel the weight of at least one of the priests against the door at any moment, but such resistance never came. Instead it was the voice of Sullimas from outside that reached her as she sang the final sigils of her spell.

  “Mistress Ulther, I presume? I was not certain it was you at first. You’ve given yourself away, of course. So I will offer you fair warning. Should you act rashly, it will not end well for you. Come out, and you have my word we will bring this to a quick conclusion.”

  As it happened, Alynor was ready to come out. “Are you prepared, darling?” she whispered.

  Ryssa hoisted Vyleigh into her arms, one child carrying another, and nodded.

  Alynor flung the door open, took the mage-song in hand, and realized with sudden dismay how faint the awakened bundle was. She thrust out her arms to deliver a barrage of white flame, but nothing happened. There was no flame; the mage-song died in her hands as though it had never been.

  The three priests backed away and lowered their hoods. The one on the right, a man with thinning dark hair and a trimmed beard, held aloft a fist-sized orb of dull green glass. A black maelstrom churned within the orb, visible even through the rain and darkness. He pushed a hand toward Alynor.

  The storm inside the orb lurched, and a heavy force struck her. She stumbled backward a step and looked down, thinking herself wounded. Though no weapon had pierced her, a stiffness began spreading through her chest like a bloodstain. It soaked her arms and legs until she couldn’t move a thing save her head.

  “I hope you hadn’t planned on going anywhere,” said Sullimas. “We’ve much to discuss.”

  “Leave her alone,” demanded a voice from across the clearing.

  Westhane and Jeebo emerged from the treeline, soaking wet atop their horses. Bleary streaks of moonlight filtered through the thick cloud cover to illuminate them as they reined up and pulled loaded bowstrings to their cheek
s. Alynor stowed that moment away in her mind. From there, everything happened too quickly.

  Westhane’s yearling colt, not yet trained in the subtleties of bearing a rider, gave a start. The arrow slipped from Westhane’s bow and sailed into the grass a fathom shy of the priests. One of their accomplices, a man with long dark hair wearing a patchwork satchel, stepped out from the shadows of Triolyn’s cottage across the way. He raised his bow and loosed an arrow in reply.

  The sound of the shaft sinking deep stole Alynor’s breath.

  Westhane lowered his arms to his sides. His new shortbow, the one Triolyn had made him, slipped from his fingers. His eyes met hers across the distance. Brown eyes, like his father’s. They glimmered briefly in the silver moonlight before his brow descended into a frown. “Mother?”

  Jeebo looked over at the boy and screamed. He turned his aim on the archer and loosed an arrow that struck him in the thigh, then spurred Tawner into a charge and stripped the scimitar off his back. The archer cursed and drew another arrow from his quiver, but Jeebo was on him. The scimitar sang as it snapped the archer’s bow in half on its way to his skull, cleaving a deep red gash across his face from nose to ear.

  Jeebo swung his blade round to deliver a second strike as he rode past, this time down through the archer’s shoulder. The man floundered on his feet and toppled into the mud, writhing. As Jeebo was on his way toward the priests, a nimble feminine figure leapt from a tree into the saddle behind him. Jeebo elbowed her in the ribs, but she tossed an arm round his neck and yanked his head back. Before he could escape her, the woman’s other hand came up in a blur of gleaming steel.

  Her elbow jerked sideways.

  A red tide gushed from Jeebo’s throat to splash the front of his tunic and bathe Tawner’s gray mane. Jeebo dropped his sword and slumped back against her. She took the reins from his limp hand and soothed the horse to a halt. A burly man wielding a broad axe, who’d stepped in front of the priests to await Jeebo’s charge, eased.

  Alynor felt the stiffness of the priest’s spell leaving her body. She wanted to scream, but she could not summon the will. Instead she snatched up the nearest weapon she could find, a blunted old iron short sword Draithon had trained with when he was younger, and flung away the scabbard.

  Charging through the rain with her skirts bunched in one hand, she reeled back and swung at the green glass sphere with all her might. The blade struck the sphere and knocked it from the priest’s hands. To her dismay, the sphere landed in the mud with a smack, whole and unscathed.

  Her next blow struck the priest across the forehead and sent him off his feet. She stabbed Sullimas in the stomach, but his heavy cold-weather garb hampered the blunted blade. The old man stumbled backward with the force of the blow, clutching his belly.

  Alynor was about to strike the third priest—the bald one—when something came down hard on her head and drove her to the ground. Her vision blurred, but she could make out the silver-haired dwarf standing over her, brandishing a flat-faced hammer in his left hand.

  “Got her,” the dwarf bellowed in a self-satisfied tone.

  “Enough,” said Sullimas, lifting a hand from his wound to find it wet with blood. “We’ll want hostages when the Warcaster returns. Take her inside.”

  The dwarf grunted as he bent to take Alynor under the arms. His teeth were crooked, his breath sour with drink. He dragged her into the cottage and tossed her to the floor. Her head throbbed and her vision swam, but she became aware that Ryssa was still standing beside the hearth with Vyleigh in her arms, frozen in fear. When the dwarf went back outside, the girls hurried to their mother. They were asking questions, but Alynor could not seem to line up a thought, or even to understand what they were asking.

  “Westhane,” she whispered, reaching for the doorway. Try as she might, she could not find her feet. All she could do was lay there and watch her baby boy lean sideways and slide off his saddle.

  Chapter 8

  Dark clouds and heavy rains had stifled the hunt for days, and the weather seemed unlikely to relent anytime soon. Draithon was seated on a high wooden platform in a tall joab tree, his hood soaked with a long day’s rain, when an enormous male elk with antlers as thick as saplings plodded into view over a nearby rise. Each antler branched to seven points, making it the largest bull Draithon had ever seen. The meat from an animal this size could feed everyone in the hamlet for six weeks.

  Draithon closed his eyes and relaxed his senses, preparing himself with affirmations of success. He’d seen too little game thus far, and he would not squander this opportunity. The platform, built by Triolyn years ago, gave a soft creak as he rose to a standing position. The elk meandered along the rise, appearing not to have noticed.

  Drawing an arrow from his quiver and fitting it to his bowstring required several minutes of patient, unhurried movement, so as not to spook his quarry. Trees and branches obstructed his line of sight, but there was a clear path ahead if the animal kept moving in its present direction. Draithon aligned himself with the clearing and waited, bow held at the downward ready.

  He froze when the elk lifted its head to take a scent on the wind. It lost interest after a moment and wandered closer, nosing through a patch of fallen leaves after something on the forest floor. Draithon slowed his breathing and prepared to draw. He knew better than to do so until the animal turned away, so he waited.

  Minutes passed.

  Finally the elk moved into the clear and turned, its body quartered away from him. Draithon lifted his bow and drew the string in a single motion, like he’d practiced with Master Triolyn time and again. He forced a deep breath to slow his pounding heart. Steady now, he told himself, nervous with excitement. Don’t rush the shot.

  Sighting down the shaft of his arrow, he found the place behind the elk’s front leg where its heart and lungs pumped beneath its ribcage. Then he lifted his aim, just a hair, to account for the distance. If only Master Triolyn were here to see how well I’m doing, he thought. Westhane will eat his words when I ride into the hamlet with those antlers strapped to my saddle.

  The thought of such impending acclaim stoked Draithon’s nerves all the more. A fever came over him, his blood running high in anticipation of the kill. As he held the bow at full draw, waiting for his pulse to settle, his arms began to tremble. He exhaled and prepared to let fly.

  When he sighted down the shaft again though, his aim had drifted a touch to the right. He frowned and adjusted. Then he second-guessed himself and overcorrected. He’d never held a draw this long at practice, and the strain was escalating quicker than he’d anticipated.

  He was about to release when the elk took a step up the rise, forcing him to correct once more. The trembling in his arms graduated to a shake, and he found himself holding his breath against the bow’s pull weight. His focus began to evaporate, and the animal’s shape dimmed to a brown blotch against the hillside. By the time he realized he could no longer maintain the draw, it was too late to change his mind.

  He loosed.

  The arrow floated aloft for what felt a very long time. The elk flinched at the sound of the bowstring and dug its hooves into the earth. By the time the arrow thunked home in the ground between its legs, the animal was already on the move. It darted up the hill and disappeared over the rise.

  Draithon mumbled a curse and climbed down from the tree to retrieve his arrow. Father and Master Triolyn would be disappointed when he came back empty-handed for the fifth day in a row, but there was little he could do to remedy that. The woods were growing dark, and his chances of seeing another elk or deer before sundown were slim.

  Westhane was right and Father was wrong, he thought as he searched the hillside for his arrow. I’ll never be any good at this sort of thing. It’s no use whether I study the proper techniques or practice all the day long. I’m just not the athletic sort.

  At last Draithon located his arrow and plucked it from the earth. A scatter of leaves fell away. Beneath them he noticed what appeared at firs
t to be a chunk of ordinary stone. When he looked closer, he saw scoring on one side, as if someone had marked the stone with a rudimentary tool. He picked it up.

  It was roughly ovular in shape and grayish-white in color, with two sides like a flattened egg. The back face gave off a sheen as if polished, while the front bore those strange grooves. There was something distinct about them. Perhaps Father would know more.

  When he returned to camp, Darion and Triolyn were waiting for him.

  “We’ve been waiting for you,” said Darion. “Master Triolyn made a big kill today. We need you to come and help us pack it out.”

  They gathered their tools and headed off toward the killing site. All the way there, no one asked Draithon whether he’d taken any game that day. He’d been dreading the tale of his missed shot, but in some way this was worse—that they held so little faith in him they didn’t need to ask.

  When they arrived in a deep streambed flanked by high eroded walls of rootbound soil, Draithon was surprised to find a big black boar with brindled fur lying on a beach of pebbles beside the water. The boar was fat and heavy, longer than a man from hoof to snout. Its tongue lolled from a gaping mouth where dagger-length tusks jutted from its bottom lip.

  “She was a stubborn girl,” said Triolyn. “Chased her for nigh on a league before she gave out. You can see it wasn’t the cleanest hit. The overgrowth is thick this year. Thicker than I’ve ever seen it.”

  “I’ve noticed that too,” said Darion. “You did well enough despite the setbacks. This kill alone will be large enough to fill out the rest of the smokehouse. One more this size and we’ll be set for winter.”

  Draithon stood by in silence as Triolyn skinned and gutted the animal. They quartered and packed the meat for carrying, submerging each parcel in the icy stream as it was made ready. Together they were able to haul the whole take back to camp, where Darion hung the hocks, ribs, loins, and bacon from the smokehouse rack using strong twine. They worked until after dark, then settled by the fire to take their supper.