Bloodstone (11 page)

Rees swung toward him, but the voice, quieter now, cut across his retort. “Sheathe your weapons and prove what you say.”

The two Master of Nolar’s men exchanged glances. Rees lowered his bow. With a flick of his hand, he returned the arrow to his quiver. Pumble straightened slowly and sheathed his sword. He backed away from the boy who hunched like a stone on the ground. Both men turned slowly, scanning the trees.

“There,” Rees said. “We’ve done what you asked. Show yourself.”

A low chuckle rumbled around the clearing. It was near, Mirianna thought, yet not near—at once behind her gelding’s tail and, a heartbeat later, echoing from a wall of aspen trunks. It was deep, reverberant, and full, and the sound of it sent shivers into the well of her stomach—long, spiraling shivers that ended in sudden flares of blue light. For one breath-stealing moment, she thought the lion had returned, but the voice, speaking again, was somehow different. And definitely masculine.

“They don’t know what they’re asking, do they, Gareth?”

The boy’s head twitched upright. His already pale face blanched. “N—no, sir.”

“Pity.”

The drawled syllables hung in the stillness, thrumming not in the ear but along Mirianna’s nerves. Beside her, Rees stiffened. The odor of his sweat, hot and pungent, rushed at her nostrils, followed by something more subtle, yet chilling.
It’s only the night. It’s only the night,
ran through her mind like an incantation.
It’s only the night and the Wehrland.

“If you’re bound for Ar-Deneth—” The voice startled her with its sudden, precise closeness. “—you’ve come too far north.”

Mirianna’s gaze searched the shadows between spruce trunks. Beside her, Rees shifted in his saddle. She sensed him lean forward, and knew he, too, peered into the darkness after a voice no longer as large as the trees.

“You’ll find a path to the right as you leave this clearing,” the voice continued, the tone cool now, humorless. Even brusque. “Follow it about a league to a single large willow. The trail to Ar-Deneth runs past the tree.”

The words hung in the following silence like the memory of sound in a vacant corridor.
There should be more,
Mirianna thought.
Shouldn’t there?

Confused, she looked toward Rees, but he was staring into the darkness, fingers still gripping his bow. Her gaze skittered to the boy who, standing now, hugged a stick to his chest with both hands. Not a stick, she realized, but a staff.
He’s blind. No wonder—

Tolbert coughed. The plaintive sound brought her attention to him, and to the dry cold that had long ago crept into her feet and turned them to stones in the stirrups.
I haven’t made his tea. He’ll cough for hours if I don’t.
She glanced at the fire, saw how the flames had dwindled now the kindling was spent, and cleared her throat.

“
Might we,” she spoke to the wall of trees, “share your fire until dawn? We’re cold and the trail will be easier to—”

A twig snapped at her side, the pop ricocheting through the clearing.

Mirianna jerked around. Her gelding sidestepped with a squeal. A shape darker than the shadows detached itself from them. The gelding shied from it, half rearing. The animal blundered into Rees’s horse and staggered, throwing Mirianna sideways in the saddle. With a little gasp, she flailed at the saddle pommel, trying to right herself. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a phantom shape sweep toward the animal’s head, saw the gelding’s eye roll and flash white. She caught a handful of mane just as the gelding coiled back on its haunches.

She expected the plunge. She didn’t expect the sudden stop that flung her against the gelding’s neck and drove the saddle pommel into her stomach. She clung there, feeling the gelding quiver beneath her while her breath sawed in and out. When she could close her mouth, Mirianna pushed herself up. The gelding back-stepped, whinnying.

“Whoa,” said a voice. “Steady.”

Mirianna blinked. Her horse had no head.

Dry mouthed, she stared at the blackness slicing across the animal’s neck only inches above where her face had lain. Logic told her someone had thrown something—a cloak?—over her horse’s head. But logic couldn’t explain the shape now standing next to the gelding’s missing head, a man-sized tower of blackness. If she could discern even a hint of nose or chin, she could take the shape for a hooded and cloaked man, but what should’ve been face staring up at her was as blank as a wall of unpolished jet. A trickle of cold sweat crawled down Mirianna’s ribs.

“This is the Wehrland,” said the voice, welling unmistakably from the blackness scant inches away. The head turned as if surveying her companions who seemed somehow frozen although she knew, logically, the whole incident occupied no more than seconds. “You’d do well to be out of it.” With a sweeping gesture, the figure stepped away, and blackness slid like a magician’s robe from her horse’s head.

The gelding snorted and back-stepped. Mirianna snatched at the reins and pulled them tight. To her left, the figure still stood, barely visible against the wall of trees. Then, as suddenly as it had emerged, it blurred into the shadows.

The clearing erupted with sound. “Mirianna!” Tolbert trotted to her side. “Are you all right?”

“What in the name of the Dragon was that?” Rees rode up with his bow still clutched in his hand.

“I’m fine.” Mirianna squeezed the hand her father stretched toward her. It was cold, but her own was colder. Freeing hers, she tucked it inside her cloak before its tremor gave away her lie. Deep within her stomach and heart and spine, her body still vibrated like a sounding board. Sensations rushed and tumbled one upon the other, making her flushed then chilled. She was frightened, terrified, yet—somehow—calm.

“I’m fine,” she repeated, this time to Rees who was riding his horse in a circle around both her and Tolbert.

“Bloody Wehrland,” he muttered, reining to a halt between them and the line of spruces.

“Hey!” shouted Pumble.

They turned at the note of panic in his voice.

“The boy!” He waved his sword frantically at the fire pit. “Where’s the boy?”

Mirianna stared. In her mind’s eye, she could see the boy as he’d last appeared, frozen and clutching his staff. Now, the place where he’d stood was vacant. “He’s gone,” she whispered.

“Dragon’s blood!” Tolbert breathed.

“They were here,” Rees snarled. “Someone was here. Look, there’s the damned fire! Somebody had to build it.”

“I don’t care.” Pumble tugged his charm from his tunic collar and backed away from the empty circle of light. “I know what I saw, and I’m leaving—now.” He seized his horse’s reins and mounted.

Rees hauled his horse across Pumble’s path. “What in Beggeth do you call yourself? A coward? Look at you—running from a few shadows in the night.”

Pumble sat with his amulet pressed to his lips. His face glistened like a full moon on rippling water. “When it comes to the Wehrland, yes.”

“I think that’s wise,” Tolbert said. “We have directions. I suggest we use them.”

“Do you think they’re true?” Rees retorted. “Look at who—”

“They’re true.” Mirianna’s voice carried around the clearing though she was sure she’d no more than mouthed the words that had bubbled, unbidden, to her lips. She flushed, startled by their certainty.

Rees swung toward her, his face livid. “Now, don’t you start—”

“Even if they’re not true,” she blurted, “what have we got to lose?”

“Right.” Pumble urged his horse around Rees’s mount. “We were already lost.”

“If this path goes downhill, it’s going in the right direction.” Tolbert motioned to Mirianna to follow him out of the clearing.

Keeping her eyes fixed on the chestnut’s tail, she heeled her horse, maneuvering it around Rees. His horse jerked its head up and, for an instant, she thought he would cut her off. Instead, he sat immobile as stone while, one by one, they passed him and rode out of the clearing.

After Pumble had located the trail, and her father assured himself it led downhill, she heard the slow thud of hooves as Rees rode silently into place behind her. She felt his gaze burning at her back, but she didn’t turn. Nor did she speak. Heeling her horse, she followed her father down the path that, somehow, she was certain would lead them to Ar-Deneth.

****

Gareth rolled over and sat up slowly. The pressure on his shoulder had eased with the slow fade of voices, but he hadn’t attempted to raise his face from the moss until the weight lifted completely. Now he ran a hand down his shin, feeling gingerly over a lump forming across it halfway to his ankle. There was a companion lump on his other shin. The mark of a tree root, he discovered as his hand explored the ground on which he sat.

The vapor of spruce pitch hung thick in the air. Needles pricked at his cheek when he shifted forward, and he brushed them away. He was in the trees now. He knew that well enough. What he didn’t know was how long he’d lain there. It seemed like hours, yet it couldn’t have been more than minutes since the intruders had awakened him, and even fewer since the Shadow Man had snatched him from the fire pit and flung him face down here.

A bit of breeze licked up his back. Gareth shivered. Under his cloak, his tunic stuck to his skin. He peeled the fabric away and shivered again. Shifting his weight, he tried to untangle his cloak and wrap it around his body.

“Are you hurt?”

Gareth turned toward the voice. The Shadow Man spoke from perhaps two arm-lengths away, standing, Gareth decided. “No, sir.” He rolled to his hands and knees and started to rise.

“Here.”

Something hard nudged his shoulder. Gareth grasped it, found familiar indentations in the wood under his fingertips, and recognized his staff. He clung to it for a moment, holding on with both hands, leaning on it like a child leans on his cottage door after a wild run home in the dark.

“Get up, boy, and saddle the horses.”

Gareth raised his head. “Do you—do you think they’ll be back?”

There was the clunk of tankard against pot, the delicate patter of sand grains drizzling from a lifted pack, then the Shadow Man’s voice paces away. “I don’t intend to wait and see.”

The shivers that had retreated to Gareth’s stomach and coiled there, broke over his body again. He was not home. He had no home. He was here in the dark, in the wild, terrifying place called the Wehrland, indentured to a shadow. He rose slowly, muscles he didn’t know he possessed aching in protest. “Yes, sir.”

****

The Imposter of Nolar woke with a start. He was sweating, and his nightshirt had molded itself to his back. Flinging off the bedclothes, he sat up. His heart galloped in his chest, pumping like that of a man in the throes of coupling. Tightness in his loins told him he’d been dreaming of just such a pastime. With the gem cutter’s daughter, no doubt. That randy cock, Rees, by practically mounting the girl, had planted in his mind the feel of her young body writhing beneath him.

For a moment, he wondered if he should have chosen Pumble as his medium. The Imposter of Nolar grimaced. That sack of gelatinous fat was too slow, too stupid for his purposes. Rees would have to do, for now.

A sensation of heat in the middle of his breastbone captured his attention. He tugged the pouch free of his nightshirt and shook the crystal into his hand. It lay in his palm like a coal, hot, dark, and glowing faintly orange at the ragged edges.

The Imposter of Nolar’s skin crawled. With a wordless gasp, he flung the crystal to the bedding. He scrabbled against the carved headboard and crouched, back pressed to the wood, staring at the knot of blackness filling the column.

It isn’t possible! He can’t have survived! No one could have.
He himself had survived, but it was the crystal that had saved him—the crystal column and his knowledge of it.

The Imposter of Nolar straightened, emboldened by the thought. The sons of Koronolan were only human, after all—pathetically, stupidly human. Even if the Dragonkeeper had survived the destruction of Drakkonwehr and the fall of Herrok-Eneth, the curse should have made his life a living hell.

The Imposter of Nolar smiled. Even the Demon Master of Beggeth couldn’t have laid on a better curse. And he’d done it in a matter of seconds, too. In the seconds that mattered before Drakkonwehr and the pit erupted around them.

He peered at the crystal again as the glow went out of it. The darkness within dissipated, like a cloud of smoke caught by a breeze. It lay like a column of water on the bedding, its facets reflecting what little light seeped between the window shutters.

He spoke a word, and colors rippled from the ragged edges. He reached for it, found it cool to the touch, and slid it into his palm
. What did you see, Rees? What did you really see?

If the Dragonkeeper were alive, that would alter things—but not too much. He still had the crystal and the Dragon Chant that ambitious little slut had stolen for him years ago.
The fool! If only she hadn’t reached for the gems too soon.
Well, he would have new ones when Rees returned. And he would have Master Brandelmore’s bride.

He smiled, picturing himself asking, “Well, my dear, would you like to ride the Dragon?” She could hardly refuse. No woman alive could resist spreading her legs for a chance to couple with the Beast. Even if it killed her.

Just before dawn, Pumble located the single willow and the trail running beside it. The group turned their weary horses westward and followed the path down into a valley and along a river—the River Ar, Tolbert said between coughs. As milky green as the glacier it sprang from, the Ar rushed headlong over rocks, chilling the riders with vapors still rising from its little falls, vapors the sun wouldn’t burn away for hours yet in the narrow valley depths.

The cold—and the dampness—seeped into Mirianna’s extremities, penetrating to the bone. She didn’t complain because the frequent mental reminders to flex her fingers and curl her toes kept her from dwelling on the night’s wealth of unanswered questions. The voice still lingered around the edges of her consciousness like a dimly remembered dream.