Bloodstone (2 page)

She turned slowly, like one waking from a dream, and saw what had captured his attention, three riders emerging from the trees. “Papa!” she choked, and stumbled to her feet to meet him.

Tolbert slid out of the saddle and wrapped his arms around his daughter. “Mirianna, lamb, I thought I’d lost you.”

Mirianna pressed her face into his neck. She clung for a moment, then leaned back and let him look at her. “I’m fine, Papa. Honestly, I am. But you—” She plucked a cedar twig from his hair. Creases etched his cheeks, and a distinct grayness underlay his usual color. He looked every one of his years, and more. “You need to eat.”

Tolbert chuckled, but the sound broke into a cough. When he recovered breath, he hugged her again and kissed her gently on the cheek. “So, lamb, do you. So do we all, now.”

“Perhaps we can share your fire.”

In the joy of finding her father, Mirianna had forgotten Rees and Pumble, the two men the Master of Nolar had given her father as escort. And even that dark
being
which stood somewhere behind her and drew Rees’s stony glare. The Master of Nolar’s man still sat his horse, and his hand hovered near his bow. Beside him, Pumble stood, sweating, his fingers twitching over the hilt of his sword. She turned slowly in her father’s arms.

“I said,” Rees repeated, “perhaps we can share your fire,
this
time...Shadow.”

The Shadow Man stood at the rock ledge, his body as motionless as a bat captured by the sun. His hand rested on the hilt of the sword in his belt, and between his gloved fingers something glinted red. His hood revealed only a drape of cloth where his face should be, yet she knew underneath every inch of that which passed for face was turned on Rees, and the air between them stretched to a brittle thinness.

“Do with it as you please,” he said at last. “The boy and I were just about to leave.”

“Wait!” Tolbert put Mirianna aside. “I need—”

“Bloodstone?” The black hood swiveled. Her father stiffened under the weight of the invisible regard. “There is no more bloodstone, old man. Go home, while you still can.”

Tolbert shook his head violently. “But Ulerroth—”

“Ulerroth is a fool,” said the voice that vibrated along Mirianna’s nerves. “And so are you, if you stay another day in the Wehrland.”

A stallion’s shrill scream punctuated his words.

The Shadow Man spun. Below the rock ledge, the tethered horses milled, huffing. The blind boy clung to the pack mare’s halter, his face a pasty white. “Sir, I think I smell—”

“Krad!” Rees coughed, recoiling from a wave of stench that stole Mirianna’s breath.

“They must have followed us!” Pumble wheezed.

“Fools!” The Shadow Man’s faceless gaze raked from Rees to Mirianna. “I should damn you all to Beggeth, but the Krad will see to that soon enough.” He turned. “Gareth, free the horses!”

“Wait!” Tolbert said as an unearthly, high-pitched clamor erupted from the woods below. “What about us? What do we do?”

Only the hood rotated, cocking with exaggerated deliberation. “Why, you die, old man.”

Her father blanched. His grip on Mirianna’s arms faltered.

She saw the Shadow Man turn, saw the muscles of his thighs bunch as he prepared to leap down the hillside, saw, in the corner of her eye, shapes gathering along the tree line below, horrible shapes she’d seen only hours before rushing at her from a darkened clearing. With a shudder, she broke from her father’s grasp.

“Please!” She reached out to the black sleeve. “Help us!”

He recoiled at her touch like one snake-bitten. The sudden, sharp focus of his regard staggered her, but she backed no more than a step. No matter how he terrified her, he’d helped her once. She’d been led to him again, and not, her instincts told her, without reason.

“Please,” she repeated. “Help us. I—we’ll do anything.”

“Anything?”

His voice was a whisper that caressed flesh.

Mirianna’s stomach quivered. Her breasts tingled. Her mouth grew even drier.

Without thinking, she slid her tongue along her lips. Vaguely, she wondered what she’d done. And why time seemed suspended, as if everyone but she and the Shadow Man had been cast in stone and all sound arrested.

All sound except the taut, guttural repeat of his question.

“
Anything?
”

If she were sane, she would seize the opportunity to clarify, to explain, to negotiate her reply.

But even as she watched herself stand on the rock ledge and confront a shadow, she knew the question spoke not to her head but to her heart, and her heart answered in the only way it could, plainly and without hesitation.

“Yes,” she breathed, “anything.”

Ten days earlier…

The stone glinted, a red-black clot amid the usual sand-and-pebble slurry in the panning dish. The man peering at it through the eyeholes of his face-covering sucked in a breath.

At least fifty-five grains,
said the Voice in his head.
Enough to be quit of this place.

Only if it proves true.
He closed his eyes, mastering his breathing, until his hands steadied and his concentration focused. Then, with deliberate care, he tilted the dish. Water dribbled out, leaving only quartz chips, flecked granite, and sand particles clustered around the thumbnail-size stone.

With a gloved fingertip, he nudged the stone from its sandy nest and rolled it into the center of the dish.
Perfectly oval.
He blew out a breath, fluttering his face covering.
Color and shape, good.
There was but one more test. His gut knew the stone was true, but his gut had fallen for an illusion before, and he had to be sure.

Pinching the stone between thumb and forefinger, the man picked it up. Blood hummed in his ears, but his hands were steady as he set the dish aside on a flat rock. He placed the stone in the center of his gloved palm and pushed out of his mind all thoughts of what a find like this could mean. This was the Wehrland after all; nothing was ever as it seemed. With another breath, he stretched out his arm and opened his hand and its contents to the sun.

When only the black glove warmed, his muscles tensed.
This is taking far too long. It’s not—

The stone flared into translucence, transforming his palm into a pool of deep, glossy red. “Bloodstone,” he breathed.

“Let Ulerroth find the flaw in this,” he announced to the gray horse grazing on the opposite bank. The animal’s ears flicked, but it did not raise its head.

Before he could close his fingers, could tuck the stone safely away, spears of scarlet light burst from the bloodstone, slashing red across the solid black of his tunic and sleeves. Without thinking, he stared at it. Into it. And the world shifted, wrenched itself inside out, and went dark...

He saw himself crouched, as always, in a rock-hewn tunnel lit by a distant torch while smoke oozed from crevices around a massive oaken door. Tendrils spiraled upward, feeding a thick yellow haze overhead. He coughed. Sweat dripped from his hair, stinging his eyes. The sound of rushing footsteps brought him swiveling to his feet, shield up, heart pounding. His fingers gripped the hilt of the ancient double-edged Sword of Drakkonwehr, where the large bloodstone embedded in the intersection of hand guard, blade, and hilt glowed softly, a dark, deep red…

In the meadow, in the late afternoon sun and fresh mountain air, the man snapped shut his fist, sealing the stone inside, quenching its fire, stopping the nightmare before it began. Again. If only he’d moved faster to secure the gem.

He inhaled a cleansing breath, clearing lightheaded specks from his vision, before he focused his thoughts on the stone, hot in his gloved palm. “Some fool will pay a pretty price to dangle this between his whore’s breasts.” His fingers tightened at the image, but he forced them to relax. He would trade with Ulerroth, as usual. Nothing else.

I’m beyond such needs.
He stared at the trampled moss between his boots.
I have to be...by now.

Your dream woman would disagree,
said the Voice in his head.
Or don’t you remember her in the daylight?

He did, all too vividly. She was not the
form
of woman that usually filled his dreams when
this
body—this cloaked and hooded
shell
—grew hungry, but one particular woman whose face had begun taking form a scant two months ago as soon as he entered the Wehrland. That his mind had conjured a complete stranger disturbed him as much as the vision itself.

All the more reason to leave as soon as possible,
said the Voice in his head.

On the bank above, his horse shook its bridle and huffed.

“Steady, Ghost.” Rising from his crouch, he followed the animal’s pricked-ear gaze. At the edge of the upland clearing, a stone’s throw away, a large, yellow-gray shape slipped through mottled shadows. “It’s only that shelion again.”

He dropped the gem into a pouch at his waist. Climbing to the top of the bank, he watched faint movements of foliage as a Wehrland lion traversed part way around the clearing’s edge. When it reached a spot upstream of the man, it paused in a pool of sunlight and stood, black-tipped tail twitching, and rubbed its cheek against a sapling.

The man snorted. “Don’t think you’re fooling me, she-cat. I’ve been watching your every move, too.” Two mornings ago he’d first noticed the huge feline lying on a sun-drenched outcrop overlooking the stream he was panning. It had done nothing then, nothing but watch him collect garnets, gold dust, and jet. He’d seen it in the afternoon, too, a flash of yellow-gray glimpsed between bushes. And at night, the scream and the sudden flare of cat’s eyes—too close—while Ghost plunged at the end of his tether. He’d brought the horse nearer and slept with his knife beside his hand. Today, the animal had followed him here.

Being stalked irritated him. Almost as much as traveling this far into the Wehrland for a handful of gems.

“Go fill your belly elsewhere,” the man said, stooping for a rock to throw.

The big cat dropped into a crouch. Flattening its ears, it stared.

The man froze in mid-reach. His mind told him something else had startled the lion. His senses, reporting over the sudden roar of his blood, told him the animal’s gaze was fixed on something beyond him. Under his hood and face-covering, the back of his neck prickled and he listened.

Bees still hummed in the clover near his boots, but the meadowlarks had ceased their calling. His hand moved stealthily toward the knife at his belt.

At the scrape of gravel, he spun. The Krad was on him in a split second, a dark blur of matted fur. The man had only enough time to dodge the down-swing of the creature’s flint blade, to pivot sideways and thrust his own knife upwards. His knuckles hit ribs, and he jerked the weapon back. The beast-man crashed into the panning dish, flipping it into the stream. A few stones followed the dish down the bank to the water’s edge.

The man whirled, but the mountain meadow behind him was empty of anything more threatening than a quail flushed from a blackberry bush. He spun back to the creature lying in a heap on the stream bank. Its mouth was open and spittle clung to the furred chin. Under heavy brows, deep-set black eyes stared at nothing. The flint knife had broken, but the man still kicked the pieces away from fingers caked with dirt. One scratch, one nick from even a fragment of the poison-smeared blade was enough to kill, and even though the creature looked dead—

The stench hit him full in the face. “Filthy, stinking Krad!” Leaping to the stream, he plunged his gloved hand and knife into it and scrubbed away every trace of the beast-man’s blood. He had been lucky. This was the first Krad he’d encountered since entering the Wehrland, and this one was alone. Grabbing his panning dish and gear, he mounted his horse. Where there was one Krad, there was sure to be a pack.

****

The town of Nolar, east of the Wehrland
…

Mirianna dreamed the same dream again, just before morning. Her lover leaned over her, as he always did, with his strong shoulders blocking the light and his face nothing but a glimmer of eyes. Sometimes he touched her lips, but when she woke to the contact, it was her own fingers tracing the shape of her mouth, leaving her hungry and unsatisfied. Remembering the dream while she dressed, Mirianna sighed. Someday she would find the man of her dreams. Someday she would no longer have to endure furtive touches from the leering boys and men of Nolar, but would enjoy the stroke of one special man’s fingers, hands, lips, and—

She jerked open her eyes and pressed her palms to burning cheeks. It wouldn’t do if any of her father’s customers found her daydreaming. Especially if her face looked as red as it felt. They already looked at her sideways even though she’d lived among them her whole life. Just because the tailor had once seen her “brandishing” a sword in her father’s workshop, she’d had to close the shutters whenever a bejeweled blade tempted her to try its balance. The residents of Nolar apparently considered it improper for a gem-cutter’s daughter to find the weapons as fascinating as the precious stones her father set into the hilts.

Mirianna pulled a comb through her hair. What would her good neighbors think if they knew it wasn’t the weapons that drew her but the legends they figured in, the Deeds of Kiros, Koronolan and the Hero Mages, the Sword of Drakkonwehr? The stuff of dreams, they would tell her—just like her “lover”—and not fit to be part of a dutiful daughter’s day.

She finished fastening her hair—which the butcher’s wife insisted was “as thick with curls as a harlot’s”—into what she hoped was a respectable knot and returned her attention to her morning chores. Tomorrow she would see about buying straw to stuff the mattresses afresh. That is, if the butcher liked the Nolar guild ring her father had made for him. And if he paid in something other than trade.