Summer of Crows

by Hans Cummings

  She approached the cooking fires where two women, Magda and Silvie, eyed the bubbling cauldron suspended over the flames. Joining them, she peered into the pot. A mass of sand-colored goop roiled within.

  “Dare I ask what that is?”

  Magda snorted. “You can ask.”

  Silvie poked at the flames with a fire iron. “I think it’s supposed to be porridge. Eventually.”

  “Hm.” Aveline did not oppose porridge in principle, although presentation counted for a lot. “Oats and water. Can’t argue with efficiency.”

  “I reckon it’ll be all right if we can find some fruit.” Magda stirred the sludge with the protruding spoon. “Hopefully, what we brought isn’t all gone yet.”

  Silvie thrust the fire iron into the dirt. “Too bad there’s no cream. I heard there’s draks in the forest nearby. Do you think they have any goats?”

  “They seemed more the hunter type.” Clasping her hands behind her back, Aveline stretched. “I’m surprised we haven’t seen them yet. They told me they were going to help us.”

  “Help us? With what?” Magda furrowed her brow. “Digging holes or carrying bodies?”

  Glancing at the mine, Aveline observed two men, retching as they hauled a dripping, blackened body from the darkness. A light breeze caught the stench of putrescence, wafting it over the cauldron. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on ignoring the intermingling scents of rot and gruel.

  “Um”—Aveline swallowed rising bile—“draks can be industrious diggers, but maybe they can hunt a deer for us.”

  “Mm, or a ram.” Silvie tapped Aveline on the arm. “There’s big mountain sheep around here. Remember when my brother brought one home last harvest and it fed us all through the winter?”

  “Either would be good.” Aveline forced a smile through her nausea. “But I do appreciate everything you folk managed to cobble together to bring on such short notice.”

  “Honestly, m’lady”—Silvie lowered her head—“we can’t tell you how much it means you stayed after we arrived. You’ve been working twice as hard as anyone else here.”

  Magda nodded. “You shouldn’t push yourself so hard.”

  Shaking her head, Aveline held up her hand. “No, I must. I failed the town. I failed you. I tarried too long in taking the abductions seriously. I let myself put a lesser worth on the missing people because they were ladies of the night, vagabonds, and passing travelers.” The knight-captain wiped away a tear. “How many died needlessly because I thought less of them due to their circumstances?”

  “It’s done.” Magda put her hand on Aveline’s shoulder. “You can’t change it.”

  “But I can atone.”

  “We’re lucky to have you watching over us, Lady Aveline. You think Lord Koloman cares? He wouldn’t give us a pot to piss in.” Silvie spat when she mentioned his name.

  “Pompous bastard.” It was Magda’s turn to spit. “Do you know he kept trying to hire me even years after I told him I stopped whoring? After I was married, even. The bastard.”

  Silvie put her arm around Magda’s waist. “Then when he found out who you was married to, he propositioned both of us.”

  Aveline pinched the bridge of her nose. “Well, you should pray for the poor soul who has to explain all of this to him. It’ll probably be me.”

  Silvie giggled “Want to pray to Dolios for luck or Maris for—”

  A commotion arose on the other side of the camp. Aveline noticed people moving away from the graves, pointing and talking among themselves. She jogged toward Lieutenant Valon, grateful to put distance between herself and the stench wafting from the mine.

  Aveline observed with a mixture of confusion and awe. A thatched roof hut crested the hill, strutting forward on a pair of black crow’s feet. Soon, everyone stopped working to gape.

  “Have you ever seen the like?” Valon, standing alongside Aveline, wiped sweat from his brow. She could only shake her head in response. The hut stopped in front of the crowd and seemed to settle, in the same way a dog settles on its haunches.

  The door opened, and a familiar figure waved from above.

  “It’s Tasha!” Aveline grinned, waving both arms over her head. “Tasha!”

  Earth and vines erupted from the earth, growing skyward. Approaching the door, the mass formed into a staircase. When they reached Tasha, she fluffed her cloak, striding forward. She descended the steps, like a queen approaching her subjects from on high.

  Then she fell.

  Catching her left foot on the hem of her cloak, Tasha tumbled down the bottom half of the stairs. Aveline rushed forward, skidding to a stop on her knees in the mud as she reached her friend.

  “Everyone, keep back. Tasha?” Holding out her hands to keep others away, Aveline regarded the sorceress.

  “Ouch.”

  “Are you all right?” Supporting Tasha’s back, Aveline helped her into a sitting position.

  “I think I’ll be sore for a few days.” Tasha arched her spine, rolling her neck. “I’m not hurt, just humbled. I’m pretty sure someone sent me a message just then.”

  Aveline pulled Tasha to her feet. The knight-captain then wrapped her friend in a hug. When they parted, she held her friend at arm’s length, gesturing toward the hut with her head. “What is going on?”

  Smiling, Tasha glanced at the crowd. “I’m sure most of them could tell you. They’ve heard stories. Haven’t you?”

  Murmurs of affirmation circulated through the crowd. Valon approached, raising his hand in greeting to Tasha. “Surely you recognize it, Captain? That’s the hut of the Crow Queen.”

  * * *

  “It is, indeed, Lieutenant.” Spreading her arms, Tasha raised her voice. “The Crow Queen has returned.”

  Korbin and Revan swooped in, passing Tasha’s head and circling over the crowd before landing on her outstretched arms. After dismissing her birds, she clasped her hands in front of her.

  Clearing her throat, she glanced at Aveline. “Just go easy on me right now. I’m still learning what all this means.”

  “By the gods”—Lieutenant Valon stared first at Tasha, then the hut, before returning his gaze to Tasha—“you’re the Crow Queen? She… we… I… this…” Moving his mouth in silent confusion, words failed him. Several people in the crowd fell to their knees.

  Tasha rushed forward. “Oh, no, no, no. We don’t do that. No. I’m still just Tasha. You used to come to me for herbs and poultices.” She gestured behind her toward the hut. “I just have a new home now. A new shop.”

  She glanced over her shoulder at the hut before returning her attention to the crowd. “With legs. That walks around. And is… full of… I don’t know… I didn’t think this through…”

  Suddenly, Tasha felt the weight of the cloak. Gasping for breath, she turned on her heels and ascended to the hut. She heard Aveline call after her, and she sensed her following. By reflex, she grasped the door handle to shut it, but she saw her friend climbing the stairs and didn’t want to find out how quickly they would vanish if she closed the door before Aveline reached the top.

  “Fine, come in.” Once Aveline crossed the threshold, Tasha shut the door, then she collapsed on the bed.

  “Well, this is impressive.”

  “I remembered where it was, and I needed to start rebuilding my shop. I figured maybe there’d be something here I could use, but when I got here, it was upright again, standing on crows’ legs.” Tasha’s mind racing, she babbled about the diary and the door of light, repeating herself and talking in circles until Aveline, taking her hand, sat alongside her.

  “So, what do you do?”

  Rising, Tasha swung her legs over the edge of the bed to sit next to her friend. “I don’t know, Aveline. The diary I found tells me everything I can do with the mantle, the hut, all that. But she was dying when she wrote it, and she intended to teach all of this to her daughter. It’s like learning how to be a smith from reading stories about how Adranus forged the world.

  “Annika’s in
structions in the diary read more like anecdotes than lessons. It’s clear from the way she wrote that she knew she didn’t have much time. The diary skips from topic to topic, sometimes spending pages talking about how Annika helped someone with what she had started to describe, but she failed to finish describing how to accomplish it.”

  Aveline nodded. “You know what you can do, just not how. Or why. Or when.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Rising, she patted Tasha on the leg, then started pacing between the bed and the window. “Well, why not just help people the way you always do? Just be yourself? And when you feel like you can do more, then do so. No one is expecting you to perform miracles.”

  Tasha snorted. “They might. The last Crow Queen cured the plague that ravaged Curton. And not just in one or two people—I mean the whole town. At once.”

  Crossing her arms, Aveline leaned against the larder. “That sounds pretty hard to top. The plague was so long ago. There can’t be more than a handful of people alive who even remember it.”

  “Mother Anya. People remember their parents talking about it.”

  “Just stories to most folk now.” Aveline cocked her head, examining the basin in the central stump. “So, Tasha, how does this even work? The hut was walking.”

  Tasha slid out of bed, moving to retrieve the diary from the bedside table. Holding it up, she grinned. “That was the first thing I tried.”

  She pointed at the stump. “The whole hut is grown around that. Grown, built. However you want to describe it. I can use the basin to scry, though I haven’t quite figured that out yet. It replenishes itself, too, so I always have a source of clean water. So, I just need to climb up here”—she patted the flat edge of the stump—“and sit. I levitate above the pool, and I sort of… feel the hut as if it were me. Then, I just… walk wherever I want.”

  Aveline pushed out her bottom lip, nodding in appreciation. “Silvermane will be crushed.”

  “I know it can do more.” Tasha tossed the diary onto the bed. “Aveline, I can take the hut to the other side of the world”—she clicked her fingers—“just like that. I don’t know how—yet—but whenever the stories talk about the Crow Queen just disappearing for weeks or months at a time, she was just somewhere else. Hoseki. Nakambe. The Four Watches. I could go to the far side of the Western Wastes, see if there really is anything over there.”

  “You could give that caprikin and the faelix brother and sister a ride home.”

  Tasha rocked back on her heels. “I could. I didn’t even think of that.”

  “Where are they, by the way?”

  Tasha chuckled. “I got Raj and Jazeera a job helping Imrus sell his wares in the market. Yun’s working at Danica’s Den. Probably throwing out rowdy gamblers.”

  Aveline raised her eyebrows. “Really? Huh… I didn’t expect that.”

  “Therkla and Aerik will no doubt be very angry by the time you get back to town. She wanted her payment. I couldn’t access the funds, and neither she nor I could find Lieutenant Valon at the time, so I guess she never got paid.” Tasha shrugged. “Oh, and I spoke to Koloman.” Tasha chewed her lip as she decided how much to tell Aveline. “He wants to see you as soon as possible.”

  “That oroq woman…” Aveline pinched the bridge of her nose. “About what? What does Koloman want now?”

  Tasha gestured toward the door. “About what happened at the mine. He was haggard, Aveline. Wanted me to fix his recent nightmares, give him a sleeping draught that would keep him from dreaming. There wasn’t anything I could do, of course. I’m not an alchemist.”

  “Can the Crow Queen fix bad dreams?”

  Tasha shrugged. “I haven’t read anything about that yet. He has no idea that I’ve taken the mantle. Well, he might now. I told Alik as I was leaving. I don’t know if the old man believed me or not.”

  Rubbing her chin, Aveline moved across the room to look out the window. “Normally I would say I don’t care about Koloman’s bad dreams. But the last time I didn’t care about someone, a lot of people died in the mine. If he had regaled you with stories of his dreams of debauchery it would be different, but you said he was haggard looking?”

  Tasha nodded. “Despite his vanity, he appeared as though he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in at least a week.”

  “We have things under control here.” Aveline approached the bookcase. “Maybe see if there’s anything in any of these books or scrolls that can help him. He’s a right bastard, but if he’s not sleeping, he might make worse decisions than he normally does, and I don’t want him doing anything to hurt the town.”

  “First thing tomorrow, I’ll approach the town discreetly and see what I can do for him.” Tasha sighed. “I guess I have a lot of reading to do tonight.”

  Chapter 33

  Aveline left Tasha to her research and returned to work. While half the workers proceeded with their tasks, the other half still clustered near the Crow Queen’s hut, gawking at it while whispering to each other. She dispersed them, bidding them to resume work, then went to speak to one of Cybele’s acolytes ministering to the dead.

  The sheet covering the body clung where fluids soaked through the fabric. No number of wildflowers, of which copious amounts had been scattered in the area, could mask the odor. Wispy clouds sliding across the sky provided no protection from the merciless sun beating upon the already-tortured corpses in the field.

  Acolyte Dumitra bowed as Aveline approached. “Something you need, m’lady?”

  “How many are we up to now?” Aveline shielded her eyes with her hand, scanning she scanned the graves. Too many workers occupied the area, making counting difficult.

  “This one makes twenty-five.” Her sandy-blond hair clung to her head, matted with perspiration. “There’s at least ten more in the mine from what I hear. Lieutenant Valon has ordered more graves to be dug.”

  Thirty-five. Aveline knelt by the body, closing her eyes. “Have we been able to identify any of them?”

  “Not yet. Brother Dorin has been keeping a ledger with detailed descriptions, so we can continue the work after they’re in the ground.”

  “Good.” Aveline covered her nose with her hand in an attempt to block some of the stench. She bowed her head. I’m sorry I failed you. I’m sorry you’re going to be anonymous as we lay you to rest.

  Dumitra put her hand on Aveline’s shoulder. “It’s not your fault. No one blames you.”

  “I would. I was responsible for keeping these people safe. I failed.”

  “By that logic, you should be blamed every time a child falls and scrapes their knee.” Dumitra knelt next to Aveline, lowering her head and pressing her hands into the earth. “Blessed Cybele, Mother of Mothers, she who brings bounty to this land, we offer you this shell to feed the land and make it fertile. While we do not know the soul to whom this shell belonged, we know Aita’s shepherds will welcome them into her bosom and guide them where they belong. Glorious Anetha, give comfort to our honored Lady Aveline. She punishes herself so for events she cannot control. She watches over us as best she can, and we are grateful for her.”

  Biting her lip, Aveline took Acolyte Dumitra’s hand. “Thank you.”

  Dumitra smiled, nodding, but then her expression fell. “I think someone is here to see you.”

  Aveline glanced up. Half-a-dozen white-scaled draks approached from the forest. From the group, two, Gral and High Elder Klatt, strode ahead of the rest. Aveline headed to meet them.

  “I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”

  Gral bowed his head. “Apologies. The High Elder was not certain of your intentions.”

  The wizened drak clicked his teeth together. “With good reason. The humans of the Four Watches are not charitable toward us. I have no reason to believe you shall behave any differently.”

  “We are not Watchfolk. But I know my words won’t convince you that we desire peace. All I can ask for is patience while we prove ourselves through our actions.” Tasha’s better at t
his than I am.

  “That is what Gral said.” Nudging the younger drak, Klatt examined the freshly dug graves. “He says you told him we could live in the mine. But all of these people came out of the mine. It does not seem safe to me. Perhaps that’s why we’re welcome to it?”

  Clearing her throat, Aveline beckoned to Acolyte Dumitra. “Perhaps you could fetch Tasha for me?”

  The color drained from Dumitra’s face. “You want me to summon the Crow Queen?”

  Clenching her jaw, the knight-captain faced the acolyte. “Just think of her as Tasha the apothecary, and it’ll be easier. I need her. Please.”

  Dumitra bowed. “Yes, m’lady.”

  As the acolyte hurried away, Aveline returned her attention to the draks. “A wizard was abducting townsfolk and travelers. We dealt with him. The mine ran dry, but it’s stable. As far as I know, the main chambers are in no danger of collapse. My friend can explain what happened in more detail.”

  “We have heard of this Crow Queen, though it has been a generation or more since she last visited our people.” Klatt lifted the cloth covering the nearby corpse with the butt of his staff, recoiling when he observed the state of decay.

  “It’s an unpleasant task, but necessary. We should have retrieved all the bodies by tomorrow.” Aveline made a mental note to instruct Valon to have his men scour as much of the mine as possible for equipment used by the wizard and remove it.

  Gral turned his gaze on the High Elder. “Then it seems we are too late to help.”

  If they intended to help with the bodies, Aveline agreed. She considered another alternative. “Not necessarily. Do you have hunters?”

  Klatt sucked in breath through clenched teeth. “We do. Why?”

  “We could use some fresh meat. We’ve had naught to eat for days but oats, cheese, and jerky. My people left town with little time to prepare, and they brought only necessities with them. I don’t suppose you have any goats or cows?”

  “No.” Klatt tapped a claw against the shaft of his staff. “And in exchange for this meat, you will let us stay in the mine?”