It took all of her remaining energy to move off the path and make her way through the underbrush to where Maud sat. Once she had seen Jenna start in her direction, the bird had calmed, folded her wings, and waited.
Jenna did not know the source of the certainty she felt. She knew only that she did not wish to take those last few steps. But she steadfastly went on.
She saw his feet first, twisted in an awkward manner that should have been unbearably uncomfortable. She was shaking now, but made herself take that last step.
And knew immediately that Latham would be no longer concerned about comfort or its lack. Or anything else in this life. He had been nearly hacked in half.
Jenna went to her knees, fighting nausea. She had seen such horrors before, yet somehow this seemed worse. Perhaps because of the quiet and peace she’d had on the mountain. The quiet and peace she had had no right to, not while this was what was happening to her people.
Maud fluttered her wings, seeming suddenly anxious. Jenna paid her no attention as grief seized her. Latham. Sweet, good-hearted Latham, who had taken no more joy in anything than in the children of the Hawk clan. Latham and his silly dog. The man who could always be counted on, who had never been heard to raise his voice in anger. Who had built her own cradle, who had carved her countless toys as a child, as he had for every Hawk child.
She vaguely registered the raven’s increasing restlessness as she fought to slow her raging thoughts. Why had she left? Why had she not been here, perhaps she could have done something. Perhaps she could have saved him, stopped him from whatever it was he had left the safety of the glade to do. As the Hawk, she could have ordered him to stay. She could have prevented this.
“Hurry.”
Jenna blinked. Maud’s hoarse cry had sounded so much like the word it startled her out of her anguish for a moment. The bird took flight, darting deeper into the trees, then returning, then darting back in the cue for Jenna to follow.
Jenna knew she could not afford to give in to her grief now. Latham was beyond her help. She could not even take time to bury him properly, and it tore at her. But she had to get home.
She stood up.
Maud cried out, urgently this time. It did not sound like a word this time, but the imperative note could not be denied. Jenna ran quickly toward the bird, who led her into a thicket of trees so dense she had to fight her way through.
It was not until she paused for breath that she heard the ominous sounds. The chink of metal, the thud of heavy horses’ hooves. Crouching down, she peered out from the heavy corner of the thicket.
Two abreast, they rode past, armor shining, horses snorting and tossing their heads as if in protest of heavy hands on the reins. An endless double column, pair by pair they came; each wearing the unmistakable insignia of Druas, a coiled viper. She had never seen a force so huge. Nor had she ever seen one so flush with arrogance; their laughter and crude talk echoed through the trees as they bragged of men slain and women raped and children broken and thrown aside to die.
This was what she had left her people to face. She was the hereditary leader of the Hawk clan, yet she had left them to deal with this, while she . . . while she . . .
Despair seized her. She had been wrong when she’d thought she never should have stayed with Kane.
She never should have gone to him at all.
Chapter 15
“ ’TIS NOT YOUR fault, Jenna.”
She registered the words vaguely, still wondering why she could not cry. Not a tear had she shed, even when she had reached the perimeter of Hawk Glade to find Latham was just the latest in the grim parade of death that had gone on inexorably in her absence.
Just as it had been when she had buried her mother, and her brother, she could not cry. It was as if all her grief had somehow frozen inside her, and lay there still, unmoving, a solid lump of pain that would never go away.
“Jenna?”
She shook her head, then focused on the speaker. Cara was no longer the ethereal golden beauty she had once been. She looked gaunt and haggard, watching Jenna with eyes that had seen too much, revealing a soul that had grown old far too quickly. She had been the first to spot Jenna and had run out to meet her, bearing the grim news.
“You can say this?” she asked gently, wonderingly; Cara had lost her uncle and her sister during Jenna’s absence; the last of her family left to her was her small brother Lucas, even now clinging to her leg, his eyes wide and stunned looking.
“What could you have done had you been here?” she said with a fatalistic shrug.
Her tone was so lifeless Jenna was startled. It took her a moment to realize the cause; Cara had given up. She could see it in her eyes, could see that she only waited now until her turn to join her murdered loved ones. She wondered if all had given up.
“Does the glade’s protection still hold?”
“It does within the glade itself. It is those who venture out into the forest who have perished. But they know we are here, or at the least that something is. And they are growing angry that they cannot find us. Each day they tighten the noose around us. Soon they will walk into Hawk Glade itself simply because they have searched everywhere else. Then all will be lost.”
Jenna conceded that was possible; even the magic could not prevent someone who chose or was ordered to overlook the apparent impenetrability of the glade, or began to hack their way through it, from finding it.
“You did not mention the storyteller,” she said. “Does he live?”
Cara shrugged again. “We do not know. He disappeared again, and has not returned yet. We think each time he goes that he will be killed, but he returns. He has done the same so often that we have come to think he will always return.”
“When did he go last?”
“A week, perhaps more. He’s been especially unpredictable of late. Ever since you left, he’s been gone nearly as much as here. We never know when he will go or return.” Cara’s tone did not change, but she looked at Jenna with a vague semblance of curiosity.
“I see you did not find Kane the Warrior. So he is but a myth, after all?”
Jenna took a deep breath. It was time to begin. To do what she could to put what she’d learned to use.
“He is not.”
For the first time she saw a spark of life in her friend’s eyes. “He is not?”
“He is a man . . . unlike any I’ve ever known.”
“But he would not help us?”
“He could not. Not directly. He cannot leave his mountains and live.”
She saw the questions hovering and hastened to divert them; there were things she could not tell, would not tell. Kane had not asked her to keep silent, but she would nevertheless not spread his story to all.
“You must help me gather the clan. We must plan.”
“Plan? Plan what?”
“Our strategy.”
Cara looked bewildered. “Strategy?”
“Kane could not come with me,” Jenna said. “But he taught me what we need to know. The only way our small clan can hope to hold what is ours.”
“Jenna, I don’t know if anyone who survives has the will left to try. You don’t know how it’s been while you’ve been gone. Druas has brought in the biggest force of men anyone has ever heard of—”
“I know. I saw them.”
“Then you must know we have no hope of defeating them.”
“Yes. So we will not try to defeat them. Only to divert them.”
Cara looked even more bewildered. “What do you mean?”
“Gather the clan. I will explain to everyone.”
THERE WERE SO few left, Jenna thought, fighting not to let her misery show. So few of the once-populous clan left to battle such a powerful foe. Yet they had taken so eagerly to her plans, plans that now seeme
d silly to her in the face of the huge force she had seen on the road. Yet when she had told them the ideas for harrying, harassing, and annoying the enemy had come direct from the legendary Kane, they had taken heart and hope and scurried off to do her bidding.
Even Evelin had been willing, had in fact looked pleased at having a part.
“I’ll be more than glad to give them a taste of pain and cramps and spewing stomachs they’ll not soon forget,” she said as she lingered to give Jenna a hug of welcome, more than a trace of fury in her normally placid expression as she spoke. “ ’Twill take my mind off worrying about Latham.”
Jenna’s breath caught. She had, incredibly, forgotten for a moment that they did not know.
“Latham . . .” She could not go on.
“I wish we could call him back, now that you’re safely returned to us.”
The image of his bloody, torn body stole Jenna’s ability to answer for a moment. She could not bear to tell of his gruesome death, not yet. Let them cherish the hope that he would return for a while longer. The knowledge weighed heavy on her heart as she asked what she had been wondering since she had found him.
“Where . . . did he go? And why? It was agreed all should remain in the glade unless there was urgent need.”
“He felt it urgent, and we could not stop him. You know he loves you as his own child.”
Jenna gasped. “Are you saying he went . . . for me?”
“He hoped to find you on your way back, to help you, guard you now that Druas has called in such a huge force.”
She moaned, low and harsh, the image of Latham’s sprawled body now a thing she knew would haunt her forever in the most awful of ways.
“Do not take alarm, dear,” Evelin said. “He left but this morning, and we made him swear if he did not find you he would not remain out through the night. He will return before midnight, and since you are safely back now, he will not venture out again.”
Jenna’s stomach knotted fiercely. She brushed off Evelin’s concern at her sudden paleness, and bade her get about her task, praying the woman would leave before she betrayed herself completely. The moment the healer was out of sight, Jenna turned away, began to run, then staggered.
A strong arm caught her, steadied her. She looked up, meaning to give a hasty command to be left alone. And stopped before the words could be said.
“Tal?” she whispered.
“Easy, child. You are . . . disturbed.”
He tilted his head then, and she saw the sheen of silver as the moonlight touched his hair. The storyteller. It had been a trick of light, then, light and those eyes that were so like Tal’s.
“You’re back,” she said, unnecessarily.
“Yes. Come, you must sit.”
“I . . . cannot. There is much to do.”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but you have come a long way. You are tired, and your soul is weary of battling itself. Rest for a short while.”
She stared at him, then let him pull her gently toward her own cottage. It had been kept scrupulously clean in her absence; present or gone, she was still the Hawk.
She watched as the old man bustled about, starting a fire and putting water on in preparation for one of Evelin’s relaxing teas. He was rather more hunched over, and moved more like the old man he was than she remembered, and she wondered that she ever could have mistaken him for the vigorous, vital Tal. Yet there was a resemblance, and no denying that their eyes were uncannily alike.
“Have you relatives up in the mountains?” she asked suddenly.
He went still, then looked over his shoulder at her. “None that I am aware of.”
She’d expected that answer, after what Tal had told her. But she’d felt compelled to ask anyway. “I just thought . . . I met someone there who reminds me strongly of you. So much that I thought he might even be your son.”
The storyteller’s face became expressionless. “I have no son. Nor will I ever.”
There was a bleakness in his voice that went far deeper than the admittedly joyless words he spoke. He said no more, merely poured the water that seemed to have heated very quickly and poured it into an earthen mug over Evelin’s leafy mixture. He stirred it, then handed it to her.
He waited until she had taken a sip and lowered the mug before he spoke.
“You did not tell anyone of Latham’s death.”
She nearly jumped. “You . . . know?”
“I returned along the same path.
“Oh. Of course.”
“I buried him. And his dog alongside him, as he would have wanted.”
Gratitude flooded her. “Thank you. I wished to—”
“I know, Jenna. You had no chance and no time. ’Tis taken care of.”
He gestured her to drink, hushing the thanks she would have continued with a shake of his head.
“I . . . found Kane,” she said at last when her cup was empty except for the leaves in the bottom.
“I know.”
“You returned in time to hear the plan, then?”
“I know it,” he assented. “ ’Tis a good one. The best that can be hoped for, as things now stand.”
Jenna sighed, wishing she did not feel so utterly weary. “I had much time to think, on my journey here. Too much, I fear. But I have decided something.”
“You do not sound as if you like your decision.”
“I do not. Nor will the clan. But I see no other choice.” She took a breath, then let it out slowly as she tried not to yawn openly. “If this does not work . . . we must leave Hawk Glade. I cannot see them all die in defense of a place. Kane was right. Life is precious and short, while the land is eternal, and cares not that men die for it.”
“You have gained wisdom as well as knowledge on your quest, Jenna.”
She did not wish to talk about what she had gained, did not wish to even think of it. “I only hope the clan will see it thus. This has been our home for so long . . .”
“Yet not forever. They came from one place to here. They can do it again, if need be. Your forever is not in a place, Jenna. It is in your heart, your blood, your spirit.”
Again she thought of Tal and his wild promise. And then she felt a wave of longing for Kane so powerful it nearly made her moan aloud. She closed her eyes against it and felt an odd spinning. She felt herself being eased down to lie on something soft.
“Rest, Jenna,” the storyteller said quietly. “Rest.”
She was asleep before she could protest that she had no time for rest.
KANE’S OWN CRY woke him from the throes of the nightmare, and he sat bolt upright in a cold sweat. Again it had come to him, that bloody, vicious dream in which Jenna, dying, cried out to him for help.
It mattered not that he knew she would die before she would voice such a supplicating plea for herself; she would beg on her knees for her people, and well he knew it. Better than anyone, he knew it, he thought grimly as he shoved his hair back out of his eyes.
It seemed like forever since he’d awakened in the night to feel her soft warmth beside him. Since he’d awakened so full of a consuming ache that he could not stop himself from reaching for her. He’d convinced himself then that it was merely a man’s need, too long denied, nothing more. But since she’d gone, since he’d returned to his solitary bed, he had no longer been able to dismiss it as merely carnal compulsion. Not when he ached to simply hold her against him, to feel her slender body pressed to his as she slept safely in his arms.
This was bad enough, but somehow the days were worse, when he would walk a familiar path only to think of Jenna as she had once walked it with him, as he would pass the tree they’d used as a target and he thought of her determination, as he passed the cliff she had climbed and he thought of her fire.
And he fought against admitting
that it was not her presence in his bed that he missed, a relatively safe admission for a man so long alone, but that he missed her presence in his life.
And then the horrors had begun to haunt his nights.
“Only a dream,” he muttered to himself as he had so many times before. But this time it would not let go, and he had an odd feeling of being connected to the bloody scene he’d just dreamed. “A dream,” he repeated, almost fiercely.
Not for long.
The words rang in the air with the strength of his own conscience, which had been plaguing him to near insanity in the past few days since Jenna had gone. He tensed; he had sensed no presence within the cave, but the words had come in a voice not his own.
They will soon be found, Kane. They have held him off, but the warlord grows angry.
The use of his name had him looking rather wildly around the cave, searching. He found nothing, although every corner was lit enough to see by the faint glow of the fire’s embers.
Your tactics have worked, but they are too few. The warlord has brought in too many mercenaries from the far north, and longbowmen from the south.
Tal. It was Tal’s voice; he could not deny it. If he’d known any of the common oaths of protection against sorcery he would have uttered it; but he’d never bothered to learn, since he’d never believed in such things.
Do not choose now to reverse your acceptance, Kane. Jenna is in danger.
Kane’s stomach knotted. “She is . . . ?”
Alive. In body. But I cannot speak for her heart and spirit if her people are destroyed.
“Can you not help them?”
He couldn’t believe he’d said it aloud, but his self-reproach ended abruptly when he got an answer.
I cannot. The spell of Hawk Glade is much stronger than any I’ve ever felt. My powers are useless here. I can do only the simplest things. Such as fire, and this.
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