Vengeance

by Gail Z. Martin

  “Are you calling me a dog?” Rigan joked, gently rubbing the knots out of her back and shoulders.

  She batted at his arm playfully. “You know what I mean. He worries about you, and he blames himself for what happened to Kell.”

  “That wasn’t his fault,” Rigan defended quickly.

  “I don’t think it is, but he does. And be honest—until we stop fighting monsters every few days, one or the other—or both—of you end up battered enough to need someone sitting up to make sure you keep breathing.”

  “If we’d stayed in the city and had been courting, I might have asked you to marry me by now,” Rigan said, liking the way Elinor arched her back as his fingers dug into the tense muscles.

  She snorted. “Do you think Parah would have allowed that so soon? Huh. She liked you, I’ll grant that, but she didn’t think much of rushing into things. Gave me more than one lecture about girls not taking their time. Parah would have wanted us courting at least half a year before she would give her blessing.”

  “Well then, I’ve only got three more months to wait,” Rigan teased.

  Elinor leaned against his shoulder, and he pulled her close. “I’ll lie with you, Rigan Valmonde, when we can steal a few moments here and there, hiding in basements and running from the law. But when we marry, I want a proper handfasting and a real house, and a shop where we can make our living, instead of being vagabonds.” Her tone was light, but Rigan knew the sentiment was real. “I’d like to be respectable again.”

  Rigan tipped her chin up until he could look in her eyes. “I’ll give you that handfasting and a house, although I’m not sure I can promise respectable. I’m an outlaw, you know. And a witch.”

  “That’ll do,” she replied, and the warm glint in her eyes told Rigan other thoughts had driven away the lure of sleep. “Let’s find somewhere we won’t be bothered, and you can court me some more.”

  “You up for doing a little exploring?” Corran leaned against the doorframe, barely within the circle of light cast by the lantern on the table. The hidden underground rooms beneath the monastery ruins were always dark, like it had been when they fled into the tunnels beneath Ravenwood. Rigan grudgingly adapted to the perpetual darkness, though he found that the ventures outside in the sun dramatically improved his mood, despite the risk of being caught.

  “Turn up another monster?” Rigan looked up from his manuscript. “Did Aiden sense some more ripples?”

  Corran shook his head. “Aiden’s picked up on something, but he isn’t sure what. Have you—felt—anything strange lately?”

  Other than having dreams about the piyanin? “No. What’s going on?”

  Corran moved into the room and leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “Aiden says he can sense something that’s not right, concentrated in a few places near where we’ve fought monsters before. But it isn’t like the ripples when there are creatures. He thought we should look into it. Polly, Mir, and Ross headed to check out some new ripples, so Trent and I wanted to go take a look at this ‘not right’ thing—and figured it’d be good to have a witch with us. That leaves Aiden and Elinor to hold down the base.”

  Rigan nodded. “Sounds good. Yeah, let’s go. I could use a little fresh air.”

  They rode for several candlemarks, and Rigan gradually recognized the location. “This is close to where we fought those black dog-things with the red eyes, isn’t it?”

  “Real close,” Trent replied. “Aiden said he started to pick up his ‘not right’ sensation after we handled the dog-monsters.”

  “Was it off before the monsters, or only afterward?” Rigan asked.

  “He wasn’t sure,” Trent said. “The ripples might have drowned out any other impressions. Or they might not have anything to do with each other.”

  Rigan gave him a skeptical look. “When do things ever not have something to do with each other when it comes to magic?”

  “Can you pick up anything?” Corran asked.

  Rigan reined in his horse and shut his eyes. He sent tendrils of power down into the ground and recoiled, nearly losing his balance.

  “What’s wrong?” Corran asked.

  Rigan shook his head to clear it. “The land is sick… tainted. I reached down to anchor my power and—it was like sinking my hand into a week-old corpse.” He shuddered. “Let me try again, something different.” This time, Rigan focused on the air, and while he still felt an echo of wrongness, the connection was not too uncomfortable to maintain—at least for a while. He reached out with his senses. “Over there,” he said, pointing to a clearing not far off the road.

  They tethered their horses and walked cautiously toward the meadow. “Everything looks wrong,” Trent said as they grew closer. The tall grass lay flattened as if a force from the center of the clearing had pushed outward. The ground and plants were blackened and dead.

  “It feels wrong,” Rigan said in a voice barely above a whisper. “Not just dead, but like everything’s been leeched out of it.” He looked at the withered plants as words failed to convey what his magic told him. “If you burn ground, crops can come back. There’s still life in the soil. But this… the land has been fouled so completely; I don’t think anything will grow here again. It’s… cursed.” He glanced down. Unconsciously, they had all stopped several feet short of the edge of the dead zone, as if instinct warned them to go no closer.

  “Why would someone place a curse on a meadow?” Trent asked, utterly confused.

  Rigan shook his head. “It’s really hard to explain. I don’t mean someone truly hexed the land, but something not only killed what’s here now, it poisoned the ground.”

  “So—why?” Trent repeated.

  Rigan frowned. “Destroying the ground might not be the main intent, maybe a consequence. We found monsters near here. Beast-like monsters, more like what you fought in the city. Maybe this is where someone conjured the monsters.”

  “Seems like a strange place for it,” Corran said.

  Rigan shrugged. “Not really. We don’t know how the conjuring is done—only that blood magic is involved. That’s shunned by most people, so a practitioner would want to be somewhere he—or she—wouldn’t be likely to get caught. But summoning monsters doesn’t do any good if there’s no one to kill, and there are some villages close by.”

  “I don’t understand,” Trent said, looking out over the ruined land. “Back in the city, it made sense, in a sick sort of way, for the Lord Mayor to want to keep the people afraid, keep them obedient. But out here?”

  “The villages serve the needs of the Merchant Princes, working in the fields and vineyards,” Corran replied. “Why would someone in power need to send monsters against them?”

  “We’re missing something important,” Rigan said. “We still don’t have all the pieces. Do you remember what I said, back before the fight in the city? That I thought maybe blood magic unbalanced a natural force, and the monsters had something to do with fixing that—the real Balance? Aiden and I—”

  Rigan’s heightened senses from the magic still active and grounded through his body gave him the last-second warning he needed to dive out of the way of a crossbow bolt. “Watch out!” he shouted to the others as he rolled away, drawing his long knife. He raised himself up on his elbows, hidden by the tall grass outside the flattened circle, and peered toward where the shot had been fired.

  With reflexes honed from hunting monsters, they fell back to their training. Corran belly-crawled left, Trent went right, and Rigan breathed in, called his magic to him, and strengthened his connection to the air. He listened with his power, seeking their attackers. The taint from the land behind him interfered with his focus, making it difficult to get a clean read. Rigan stretched out his senses, verifying that Corran and Trent were in position.

  He rose from cover only as far as necessary to aim. Two men armed with crossbows ventured into the clearing from the treeline. They held their bows angled toward the ground, looking for motion in the high gras
s, anything that would give away their quarry’s position. Rigan called to the wind, and the grass stirred to one side, far away from his brother or Trent. Both of the men turned to fire toward the motion.

  Rigan stretched out his hand and sent a thin bolt of energy crackling toward the nearest bowman. He dared not use fire lest he set the whole field aflame, but the lightning would do. The bolt struck the man in the chest, sending him to the ground, where he lay still.

  Before the man’s companion could get a new fix on his target, Rigan sent a blast of wind to send all of the grass bending and dropped down, crawling to a new position. A few moments later he heard another quarrel discharge and strike the dirt, then a strangled cry that turned into a pained grunt.

  When he raised his head, he saw that Trent had tackled the stranger and disarmed him, holding a knife against the man’s throat. Rigan reached out again with his magic, searching to assure there were no other attackers lurking in the forest.

  “Clear!” he shouted, rising to his feet. Corran also rose and put the point of his sword to the chest of the injured bowman, in case he had any intention to come to his comrade’s aid. The man lay still, eyes closed, and looked to have lost consciousness. A seeping burn covered his left shoulder and upper arm. Rigan walked over to join the others, standing next to Corran.

  “You want to tell us what you and your friend meant, shooting at us?” Trent demanded from the man he held pinned.

  “There’s a handsome price on your heads,” the man replied in a strangled voice, careful not to press against the blade. “We’ve been watching the roads. Had your descriptions. Figured if caught the three of you, we could find the rest.”

  “You figured wrong, mate,” Trent growled.

  “Who hired you?” Corran asked.

  Even in defeat, the bounty hunter barked out a laugh. “With a bounty like that, didn’t need no one to hire us. And the bounty comes from the Crown Prince himself.”

  Rigan wondered if he looked as shocked as the others. His mind reeled. The Crown Prince?

  Motion and a glint of silver broke through their surprise. Rigan glimpsed a blur, and then Corran knocked him to the ground, covering him with his body. Rigan heard Trent curse and heard a scuffle, then silence.

  “They’re dead,” Trent called.

  Rigan grabbed Corran by the shoulders to roll him away and gasped as his left hand came away wet with blood. Corran groaned and flinched away from the contact.

  “Corran?” Rigan wriggled out from under and sat up. A knife stuck out of Corran’s upper arm, and blood soaked his sleeve.

  “Son of a bitch threw his knife,” Corran rasped.

  At me, Rigan realized, pressing his hand against the wound and pulled the knife free. Corran gasped in pain, and Rigan tore his own shirt over his head, wadding it up to staunch the flow of blood. “He was aiming for me, wasn’t he? And you—”

  “I had to,” Corran said through gritted teeth.

  “If that knife had caught you a little more to the side, he might have had you through the heart!”

  Corran looked up at him, resolute, though his eyes were bright with pain. “You saw it, Rigan. I couldn’t take that chance.”

  “Saw what?” Rigan looked around, noting that Trent had dispatched both the bounty hunter he had captured and the injured man with a slice to the throat. They were just another kind of monster, I suppose.

  “The piyanin. You saw… the omen.”

  Horror accompanied comprehension. “You got between me and the knife because of my dream?”

  Corran closed his eyes. “I couldn’t risk losing you. Already lost Kell, Jora, Mama, Papa. Can’t lose you, too.”

  Rigan swallowed hard, anger and gratitude warring inside him. “And you thought I’d be all right with you getting hurt instead? Dammit, Corran! It’s no different for me than it is for you.”

  “Not taking any chances,” Corran groaned.

  Rigan muttered a curse and helped Corran to his feet. Trent had already searched the bodies of the two bounty hunters, relieved them of anything useful, and rolled the corpses closer to the dead zone.

  “If anyone finds them—and I don’t think the local folks come near that circle—it’ll look like they were beset by thieves,” Trent said, wiping his hands on one of the men’s cloaks. “Unfortunately, if the bounty’s that high, they won’t be the only ones who come looking for us.”

  They made their way back to the horses, with Trent keeping watch and Rigan occasionally casting out with his magic to see if anyone else was nearby. “I guess this means we’d better move on for a while, to one of the other ruins,” Rigan said ruefully as he made sure Corran got up to his saddle. “Damn. I’d gotten to like this one.”

  Trent shrugged. “We can always come back after some time’s passed. And from the maps you’ve found, there are plenty more monasteries to hide in, enough that it’ll keep quite a few bounty hunters busy trying to search them all, if they even get it into their heads to look there.”

  “I don’t want to be the one to tell Polly,” Rigan said, swinging up to his horse. “She throws things when she’s out of sorts, and she just got the kitchen the way she likes it.”

  Chapter Nine

  “We don’t like strangers nosing around the village.” The speaker glared at the three outsiders who stood on the darkened road.

  “We came to help,” Ross replied, meeting the man’s gaze.

  “We handle things ourselves, always have.” The man who spoke looked to be about ten years older than Ross, perhaps in his mid-thirties. He had the broad shoulders and strong arms of someone who had worked outside all his life. A medium-sized, well-behaved dog with speckled fur sat quietly beside him.

  “And yet, your cows are still dying,” Polly snapped. “We can stop the monsters.”

  Two other men flanked the leader, both strong and fit, farmers or farmhands, Polly guessed. “What do you know about monsters?” the man on the left of the leader asked. He resembled the speaker, but his hair was light instead of dark, and a few years younger. Brother, Polly thought.

  “We do this for a living,” Polly replied, ignoring Mir’s warning glare. “Hunt monsters. We’re good at it, which you can see because we’re still alive. Now—about your cows—”

  “How did you know about the cows?” The man to the leader’s right regarded them suspiciously. His thinning hair and the squint lines around his eyes made him look much older.

  “Because we’re just that good,” Polly snapped. The three men looked confused at Polly’s take-charge manner, and Mir chuckled.

  “She’s telling the truth,” Mir said. “We do hunt monsters, and we’re good at it. And I bet, you’ve tried to kill the things that are coming after your cows, and it hasn’t gone well. Am I right?”

  The leader hesitated for a moment, then finally nodded. “We’ve set traps, moved the cows to different pastures, and shot it with arrows. Nothing works.”

  “What does ‘it’ look like?” Ross asked. The three men remained blocking the road that led to the village, but their stance had shifted. They were still skeptical and defensive, but Polly sensed real curiosity and maybe a glimmer of hope in the men’s expression. Best of all, they no longer appeared to be looking for a fight.

  “It’s as solid as a sow, but faster and taller, and the face is all wrong,” the leader said. “All squashed in like a bat, with a crumpled nose and ears that lay flat back.” He shook his head. “Don’t look like nothing natural.”

  “That’s because it isn’t,” Polly replied.

  “Look, we can tell you more about the monsters later,” Mir said. “But I’m betting you’re out here for the same reason we are—to get rid of that thing. So why not let us do our job, and we’ll explain later.”

  “What’s it to you? Why do you care about our cows?” the blond man asked.

  “Like she said, it’s what we do. The fewer monsters out there, the better we all sleep,” Ross replied.

  “Can you do it?” The ba
ld man gave them an evaluating once-over. “You’re an odd set. That girl’s no more than a—”

  “That ‘girl’ knows what she’s doing,” Polly said, her voice dropping to a deadly growl.

  “She’s much more dangerous than she looks,” Mir said. “Don’t make her mad, if you value your balls.”

  “I think you’re all crazy,” the bald man retorted.

  “Then what’s the harm in letting us get ourselves killed?” Polly shot back.

  The three men turned to speak to each other in low tones. Mir and Trent exchanged a glance, while Polly stood with her hands on her hips and wished she had brought her long-handled wooden spoon in addition to her hunting knives. She would have enjoyed smacking all three of the village men upside the head.

  “All right,” the leader said. “Hans and I will go with you. Belan will go back to the village and round up the rest of the men.”

  “No.” Ross shook his head. “No one else. Too many people to get in the way. Frankly, you’ll be targets, and you’ll get one of us killed. If you could have handled this yourself, you wouldn’t still have the problem. So we do this our way, or we leave you to it and go help someone else.”

  Once again, the three men conferred, and then the leader turned back to them. “I don’t like it, but I’ve seen too many of our friends get hurt trying to kill this thing. Taken a few blows myself,” he added, pushing up the hem of his shirt to reveal four long parallel gashes, recently healed, across his chest.

  “You were lucky,” Mir said. “I’ve seen one of these rip out a man’s ribs.”

  The leader paled at that. “Didn’t feel lucky when I was bleeding out. I’m Stev, by the way.”

  Polly’s group gave their names but offered nothing else. “What about Belan?” she asked, indicating the dark-haired man. “Is he coming with us? Because if not, we need to make sure he isn’t going to cause problems.”