Silence set down her pack and opened it to retrieve her garrote, then held a finger to her lips and motioned for William Ann to wait by the road. The girl nodded. Silence couldn’t make out much of her features in the darkness, but she did hear the girl’s breathing grow more rapid. Being a Homesteader and accustomed to going out at night was one thing. Being alone in the Forests . . .
Silence took the blue glowpaste jar and covered it with her handkerchief. Then she took off her shoes and stockings and crept out into the night. Each time she did this, she felt like a child again, going into the Forests with her grandfather. Toes in the dirt, testing for crackling leaves or twigs that would snap and give her away.
She could almost hear his voice, giving instructions, telling her how to judge the wind and use the sound of rustling leaves to mask her as she crossed noisy patches. He’d loved the Forests until the day they’d claimed him. Never call this land hell, he had said. Respect the land as you would a dangerous beast, but do not hate it.
Shades slid through the trees nearby, almost invisible with nothing to illuminate them. She kept her distance, but even so, she occasionally turned to see one of the things drifting past her. Stumbling into a shade could kill a man, but that kind of accident was uncommon. Unless enraged, shades moved away from men who got too close, as if blown by a soft breeze. So long as you were moving slowly—and you should be—you would be all right.
She kept the handkerchief around the jar except when she wanted to check specifically the markings nearby. Glowpaste illuminated shades, and shades that glowed too brightly might give warning of her approach.
A groan sounded nearby. Silence froze, heart practically bursting from her chest. Shades made no sound; that had been a man. Tense, silent, she searched until she caught sight of him, well hidden in the hollow of a tree. He moved, massaging his temples. The headaches from William Ann’s poison were upon him.
Silence considered, then crept around the back of the tree. She crouched down, then waited a painful five minutes for him to move. He reached up again, rustling the leaves.
Silence snapped forward and looped her garrote around his neck, then pulled tight. Strangling wasn’t the best way to kill a man in the Forests. It was so slow.
The guard started to thrash, clawing at his throat. Shades nearby halted.
Silence pulled tighter. The guard, weakened by the poison, tried to push back at her with his legs. She shuffled backward, still holding tightly, watching those shades. They looked around, like animals sniffing the air. A few of them started to dim, their own faint natural luminescence fading, their forms bleeding from white to black.
Not a good sign. Silence felt her heartbeat like thunder inside. Die, damn you!
The man finally stopped jerking, motions growing more lethargic. After he trembled a last time and fell still, Silence waited there for a painful eternity, holding her breath. Finally, the shades nearby faded back to white, then drifted off in their meandering directions.
She unwound the garrote, breathing out in relief. After a moment to get her bearings, she left the corpse and crept back to William Ann.
The girl did her proud; she’d hidden herself so well that Silence didn’t see her until she whispered, “Mother?”
“Yes,” Silence said.
“Thank the God Beyond,” William Ann said, crawling out of the hollow where she’d covered herself in leaves. She took Silence by the arm, trembling. “You found them?”
“Killed the man on watch,” Silence said with a nod. “The other four should be sleeping. This is where I’ll need you.”
“I’m ready.”
“Follow.”
They moved back along the path Silence had taken. They passed the heap of the scout’s corpse, and William Ann inspected it, showing no pity. “It’s one of them,” she whispered. “I recognize him.”
“Of course it’s one of them.”
“I just wanted to be sure. Since we’re . . . you know.”
Not far beyond the guard post, they found the camp. Four men in bedrolls slept amid the shades as only true Forestborn would ever try. They had set a small jar of glowpaste at the center of the camp, inside a pit so it wouldn’t glow too brightly and give them away, but it was enough light to show the horses tethered a few feet away on the other side of the camp. The green light also showed William Ann’s face, and Silence was shocked to see not fear, but intense anger in the girl’s expression. She had taken quickly to being a protective older sister to Sebruki. She was ready to kill after all.
Silence gestured toward the rightmost man, and William Ann nodded. This was the dangerous part. On only a half-dose, any of these men could still wake to the noise of their partners dying.
Silence took one of the burlap sacks from her pack and handed it to William Ann, then removed her hammer. It wasn’t some war weapon, like her grandfather had spoken of. Just a simple tool for pounding nails. Or other things.
Silence stooped over the first man. Seeing his sleeping face sent a shiver through her. A primal piece of her waited, tense, for those eyes to snap open.
She held up three fingers to William Ann, then lowered them one at a time. When the third finger went down, William Ann shoved the sack down over the man’s head. As he jerked, Silence pounded him hard on the side of the temple with the hammer. The skull cracked and the head sank in a little. The man thrashed once, then grew limp.
Silence looked up, tense, watching the other men as William Ann pulled the sack tight. The shades nearby paused, but this didn’t draw their attention as much as the strangling had. So long as the sack’s lining of tar kept the blood from leaking out, they should be safe. Silence hit the man’s head twice more, then checked for a pulse. There was none.
They carefully did the next man in the row. It was brutal work, like slaughtering animals. It helped to think of these men as rabid, as she’d told William Ann earlier. It did not help to think of what the men had done to Sebruki. That would make her angry, and she couldn’t afford to be angry. She needed to be cold, quiet, and efficient.
The second man took a few more knocks to the head to kill, but he woke more slowly than his friend. Fenweed made men groggy. It was an excellent drug for her purposes. She just needed them sleepy, a little disoriented. And—
The next man sat up in his bedroll. “What . . . ?” he asked in a slurred voice.
Silence leaped for him, grabbing him by the shoulders and slamming him to the ground. Nearby shades spun about as if at a loud noise. Silence pulled her garrote out as the man heaved at her, trying to push her aside, and William Ann gasped in shock.
Silence rolled around, wrapping the man’s neck. She pulled tight, straining while the man thrashed, agitating the shades. She almost had him dead when the last man leaped from his bedroll. In his dazed alarm, he chose to dash away.
Shadows! That last one was Chesterton himself. If he drew the shades upon himself . . .
Silence left the third man gasping and threw caution aside, racing after Chesterton. If the shades withered him to dust, she’d have nothing. No corpse to turn in meant no bounty.
The Shades around the campsite faded from view as Silence reached Chesterton, catching him at the perimeter of the camp by the horses. She desperately tackled him by the legs, throwing the groggy man to the ground.
“You bitch,” he said in a slurred voice, kicking at her. “You’re the innkeeper. You poisoned me, you bitch!”
In the forest, the shades had gone completely black. Green eyes burst alight as they opened their earthsight. The eyes trailed a misty light.
Silence battered aside Chesterton’s hands as he struggled.
“I’ll pay you,” he said, clawing at her. “I’ll pay you—”
Silence slammed her hammer into his arm, causing him to scream. Then she brought it down on his face with a crunch. She ripped off her sweater as he groaned and thrashed, somehow wrapping it around his head and the hammer.
“William Ann!” she screamed. “I need a
bag. A bag, girl! Give me—”
William Ann knelt beside her, pulling a sack over Chesterton’s head as the blood soaked through the sweater. Silence reached to the side with a frantic hand and grabbed a stone, then smashed it into the sack-covered head. The sweater muffled Chesterton’s screams, but also muffled the rock. She had to beat again and again.
He finally fell still. William Ann held the sack against his neck to keep the blood from flowing out, her breath coming in quick gasps. “Oh, God Beyond. Oh, God . . . ”
Silence dared look up. Dozens of green eyes hung in the forest, glowing like little fires in the blackness. William Ann squeezed her eyes shut and whispered a prayer, tears running down her cheeks.
Silence reached slowly to her side and took out her silver dagger. She remembered another night, another sea of glowing green eyes. Her grandmother’s last night. Run, girl! RUN!
That night, running had been an option. They’d been close to safety. Even then, Grandmother hadn’t made it. She might have, but she hadn’t.
That night horrified Silence. What Grandmother had done. What Silence had done . . . Well, tonight, she had one only hope. Running would not save them. Safety was too far away.
Slowly, blessedly, the eyes started to fade away. Silence sat back and let the silver knife slip out of her fingers to the ground.
William Ann opened her eyes. “Oh, God Beyond!” she said as the shades faded back into view. “A miracle!”
“Not a miracle,” Silence said. “Just luck. We killed him in time. Another second, and they’d have enraged.”
William Ann wrapped her arms around herself. “Oh, shadows. Oh, shadows. I thought we were dead. Oh, shadows.”
Suddenly, Silence remembered something. The third man. She hadn’t finished strangling him before Chesterton ran. She stumbled to her feet, turning.
He lay there, immobile.
“I finished him off,” William Ann said. “Had to strangle him with my hands. My hands . . . ”
Silence glanced back at her. “You did well, girl. You probably saved our lives. If you hadn’t been here, I’d never have killed Chesterton without enraging the shades.”
The girl still stared out into the woods, watching the placid shades. “What would it take?” she asked. “For you to see a miracle instead of a coincidence?”
“It would take a miracle, obviously,” Silence said. “Instead of just a coincidence. Come on. Let’s put a second sack on these fellows.”
William Ann joined her, lethargic as she helped put sacks on the heads of the bandits. Two sacks each, just in case. Blood was the most dangerous. Running drew shades, but slowly. Fire enraged them immediately, but it also blinded and confused them.
Blood, though . . . blood shed in anger, exposed to the open air . . . a single drop could make the shades slaughter you, and then everything else within their sight.
Silence checked each man for a heartbeat, just in case, and found none. They saddled the horses and heaved the corpses, including the scout, into the saddles and tied them in place. They took the bedrolls and other equipment too. Hopefully, the men would have some silver on them. Bounty laws let Silence keep what she found unless there was specific mention of something stolen. In this case, the forts just wanted Chesterton dead. Pretty much everyone did.
Silence pulled a rope tight, then paused.
“Mother!” William Ann said, noticing the same thing. Leaves rustling out in the Forests. They’d uncovered their jar of green glowpaste to join that of the bandits, so the small campsite was well illuminated as a gang of eight men and women on horseback rode in through the Forests.
They were from the forts. The nice clothing, the way they kept looking into the Forests at the shades . . . City people for certain. Silence stepped forward, wishing she had her hammer to look at least a little threatening. That was still tied in the sack around Chesterton’s head. It would have blood on it, so she couldn’t get it out until that dried or she was in someplace very, very safe.
“Now, look at this,” said the man at the front of the newcomers. “I couldn’t believe what Tobias told me when he came back from scouting, but it appears to be true. All five men in Chesterton’s gang, killed by a couple of Forest homesteaders?”
“Who are you?” Silence asked.
“Red Young,” the man said with a tip of the hat. “I’ve been tracking this lot for the last four months. I can’t thank you enough for taking care of them for me.” He waved to a few of his people, who dismounted.
“Mother!” William Ann hissed.
Silence studied Red’s eyes. He was armed with a cudgel, and one of the women behind him had one of those new crossbows, with the blunt tips. They cranked fast and hit hard, but didn’t draw blood.
“Step away from the horses, child,” Silence said.
“But—”
“Step away.” Silence dropped the rope of the horse she was leading. Three fort people gathered up the ropes, one of men leering at William Ann.
“You’re a smart one,” Red said, leaning down and studying Silence. One of his women walked past, towing Chesterton’s horse with the man’s corpse slumped over the saddle.
Silence stepped up, resting a hand on Chesterton’s saddle. The woman towing it paused, then looked at her boss. Silence slipped her knife from its sheath.
“You’ll give us something,” Silence said to Red, knife hand hidden. “After what we did. One quarter, and I don’t say a word.”
“Sure,” he said, tipping his hat to her. He had a fake kind of grin, like one in a painting. “One quarter it is.”
Silence nodded. She slipped the knife against one of the thin ropes that held Chesterton in the saddle. That gave her a good cut on it as the woman pulled the horse away. Silence stepped back, resting her hand on William Ann’s shoulder while covertly moving the knife back into its sheath.
Red tipped his hat to her again. In moments, the bounty hunters had retreated back through the trees toward the roadway.
“One quarter?” William Ann hissed. “You think he’ll pay it?”
“Hardly,” Silence said, picking up her pack. “We’re lucky he didn’t just kill us. Come on.” She moved out into the Forests. William Ann walked with her, both moving with the careful steps the Forests demanded. “It might be time for you to return to the waystop, William Ann.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Get our bounty back.” She was a Forescout, dammit. No prim fort man was going to steal from her.
“You mean to cut them off at the white span, I assume. But what will you do? We can’t fight so many, Mother.”
“I’ll find a way.” That corpse meant freedom, life, for her daughters. She would not let it slip away, like smoke between the fingers. They entered the darkness, passing shades that had—just a short time before—been almost ready to wither them. Now the spirits drifted away, completely ambivalent toward the flesh that passed them.
Think, Silence. Something is very wrong here. How had those men found the camp? The light? Had they heard her and William Ann talking? They’d claimed to have been chasing Chesterton for months. Shouldn’t she have heard of them before now? These men and women looked too crisp, too new, to have been out in the Forests for months trailing killers.
It led to a conclusion she did not want to admit. One man had known she was hunting a bounty today, and had seen how she was planning to track that bounty. One man had cause to see that bounty stolen from her.
Theopolis, I hope I’m wrong, she thought. Because if you’re behind this . . .
Silence and William Ann trudged through the guts of the Forest, a place where the gluttonous canopy above drank in all of the light, leaving the ground below barren. Shades patrolled these wooden halls like blind sentries. Red and his bounty hunters were of the forts. They would keep to the roadways, and that was her advantage. The Forests were no friend to a Homesteader, no more than a familiar chasm was any less dangerous a drop.
But Silence was a sail
or on this abyss. She could ride its winds better than any fort dweller. Perhaps it was time to make a storm.
What homesteaders called the “white span” was a section of roadway lined by mushroom fields. It took about an hour through the Forests to reach the span, and Silence was feeling the price of a night without sleep by the time she arrived. She ignored the fatigue, tromping through the field of mushrooms, holding her jar of green light and giving an ill cast to trees and furrows in the land.
The roadway bent around through the Forests, then came back this way. If the men were heading toward Lastport or any of the other nearby forts, they would come this direction. “You continue on,” Silence said to William Ann. “It’s only another hour’s hike back to the waystop. Check on things there.”
“I’m not leaving you, Mother.”
“You promised to obey. Would you break your word?”
“And you promised to let me help you. Would you break yours?”
“I don’t need you for this,” Silence said. “And it will be dangerous.”
“What are you going to do?”
Silence stopped beside the roadway, then knelt, fishing in her pack. She came out with the small keg of gunpowder. William Ann went as white as the mushrooms.
“Mother!”
Silence untied her grandmother’s firestarter. She didn’t know for certain if it still worked. She’d never dared compress the two metal arms, which looked like tongs. Squeezing them together would grind the ends against one another, making sparks, and a spring at the joint would make them come back apart.
Silence looked up at her daughter, then held the firestarter up beside her head. William Ann stepped back, then glanced to the sides, toward nearby shades.
“Are things really that bad?” the girl whispered. “For us, I mean?”
Silence nodded.
“All right, then.”
Fool girl. Well, Silence wouldn’t send her away. The truth was, she probably would need help. She intended to get that corpse. Bodies were heavy, and there wasn’t any way she’d be able to cut off just the head. Not out in the Forests, with shades about.
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