Bloodstone (28 page)

“She saved you from the Krad. Do you remember any of that?” Durren tried to make his voice neutral, to project calm in a situation that seemed to skirt disaster. If this was Ayliss, how much of the lion was in her? Was she as much lion as he was Shadow? By Koronolan, he wished he knew.

At right angles to all of them, the woman looked as shocked as Durren felt, digging her fingers into her skirt and sitting absolutely still. Whatever she claimed about the lion, she was clearly not yet at ease with the beast. Koronolan be praised that Gareth couldn’t see their faces at this particular moment.

The boy lowered his other hand and skimmed it over the lion’s shoulder. “I—I thought I heard my mother...humming then.” He swallowed, hard. “Are you sure the lion won’t...”

“You’re safe, Gareth,” Durren said with more conviction than he felt. “She obviously likes you.”
Did you summon her?
But he dismissed the notion. The lion had appeared to him before he’d gone to Ar-Deneth, days before he’d met the boy. Something else must have brought her.

The lion peered at him through half-lidded eyes, and then raised her head for the boy to scratch her chin.

“She’s so soft,” Gareth said. The color had returned to his cheeks, but his touch remained tentative. Against the lion’s massive head and shoulders, the boy’s limbs looked as thin and fragile as kindling.

“And so loud,” the woman ventured, licking her lips while her gaze flicked from Durren to the lion.

Durren’s nerves strained against his control. He ought to do something, but what could he do? There was no danger he could see—if he accepted the outrageous notion that a Wehrland lion could behave like a tame cat—but his whole being still hummed with warning.

Ghost’s neigh from the hidden pasture, and an answering neigh from the darkness outside the gate brought him surging to his feet, Sword drawn. “Get back out of the light!” He kicked a pot of water onto the fire, dimming it, before he spun, intending to grab the woman, but she’d already bolted past him, running not away from the intruders, but toward them!

“Papa!” she cried.

The old man teetered over the neck of the single horse, and his weight would’ve taken the woman down to the paving stones if Durren hadn’t broken his fall. He lowered the old man to the ground where, with an anguished sound, the woman gathered her father into an embrace. The old man lay there limp, an unconscious bag of bones and fever.

All this registered in the back of Durren’s mind while he scanned the gate, the walls, the sounds of nightfall, trying to determine if the two men were alone before he confronted the fat man perched behind the horse’s saddle. Previous glances had shown the man weaponless but for a knife, and his eyes had the glazed look of one either spell-struck or frightened out of his wits.

You took his sword two days ago,
the Voice in Durren’s head said.

I remember.
Rubbing the bloodstone in the Sword, he muttered, “
Bluet drakkenoth, ominor ay rhoenon pek,
” but the stone remained dull and dark. No magic here; nothing to fear, yet more than enough to set all his senses on alert.

“Where’s your companion?” he demanded. “Where’s the other one?”

The fat man blinked once. The horse stood with its forelegs braced apart and its nose nearly touching the ground. Sweat crusted its neck and flanks, telling Durren it had carried its double burden a long way.

“Get down.” He pulled at the fat man’s sleeve. “Gareth, come and tend to this horse.”

“Yes, sir, if you think the lion will let me.”

Durren looked back at the dimmed fire.
Let him up,
he messaged to the cat.
He has work to do.

The she-lion yawned and lifted her head from the boy’s lap, rolling onto her side as if she had every intention of relaxing by the fire.

You brought them, didn’t you?
But she only yawned again, showing a curling pink tongue and gleaming teeth.

“What’s the matter with you, Papa?” The woman brushed sparse hair from the old man’s face and rocked him. “Talk to me, please.” She cast Durren a panicked look. “He’s burning up.”

The fat man finally slid to the ground, and Durren shook him again. “What are you doing here? Where’s the other one?”

“Pumble, what’s happened to my father?”

At the woman’s voice, the fat man stirred, mopping his face with a tunic sleeve. “Krad,” he said, and regarded the soaked sleeve as if he’d never seen it before.

“Krad?” she breathed.

“He got cut...back in the fire circle, I guess. Doesn’t take much, just a nick. He couldn’t stay in the saddle. Rees was all for leaving him, but...” He shook his head and blinked as if trying to bring his surroundings into focus.

“But what?” Durren prodded. “Where’s this Rees?”

Squinting like a mole, the fat man turned, gaped, and dropped with a thump to the paving stones, the impact raising clouds of fine dust around his posterior. Grabbing a charm at his neck, he kissed it and muttered over it in a voice that squeaked.

Durren resisted the urge to slap him. Coming out of a trance was disorienting enough without the added consternation of finding oneself in an unfamiliar place, but only the fat man could know what—if anything—might have followed them up the mountain. “Stop whimpering. You’re safe as long as you tell us what we want to know. Understand?”

The fat man’s gaze skittered from the woman to the boy holding his horse and back past Durren’s knees to the woman again. “Do as he says,” she told him.

Her voice must have sounded calm, reassuring to the fat man, but Durren heard the fear in it. She clutched her father so tightly, he could see her whitened knuckles. He gave her a little nod, to show his gratitude, and addressed the fat man again. “Start at the beginning. After you left us, what happened?”

The fat man mopped his face with the other sleeve. “Rees—he wanted to make distance, so after we found my horse, we rode till the old man fell off. I didn’t drop him, miss, but he couldn’t hang on anymore.”

“Where was he cut?” Durren said.

“A scratch, that’s all. Didn’t even bleed.” He licked his lips. “Just there, above the boot.”

The woman grabbed at her father’s legs, baring both to the knees. Even in the dimness the swollen, reddened area, large as a man’s fist, glared at them from his right calf.

Two days gone.
Durren’s stomach contracted, tightening the knot that had formed there when the old man fell from the horse. If the old man had been stabbed outright, he would’ve died within hours. Died
out there,
where no one would find the bones for weeks, even years. But this—this was just as deadly, and it had come
inside.

Muscles tensed along Durren’s jaw as his memory played the messy details of death and its aftermath in the courtyard, walls, and chambers of Drakkonwehr. Even now, he could detect the stench of old blood rising with the day’s heat from the paving stones. He’d tried to put the carnage behind him. By Kiros, he’d kept the place
clean!
And now these fools had brought Death back inside!

He was still trembling when he noticed the woman looking at him, her pinched face full of questions. Once again, he gave thanks for the hood’s ability to hide his thoughts. “Krad poison,” he told her. “It works by paralyzing the limbs.”

The fat man nodded. “Rees—I don’t know what’s gotten into him. He yelled and took the gem pouch and told me to mount up and leave the old beggar—sorry, miss, but that’s what he called him. He was going to die anyway, see? And he’d just slow us down. That’s what Rees said. He was all hot for getting back to Nolar, but I didn’t think it was right, leaving the old man like that.” He cradled his cheek with a plump, dirty hand and sniffled.

“So he hit you and took off by himself.”

The fat man hung his head. “He used to be my best friend.”

“And then what happened?”

“We got on the horse, the old man and me. I thought maybe I could find the way back to Ar-Deneth, but it got dark and I got lost and...” He trailed off and sat staring into space.

Durren’s senses screamed at him to load the two men onto the horse and send the animal with its burden of Death staggering back into the Wehrland. To let the Krad finish what they’d begun. The beast-men were likely trailing them anyway, scenting weakness. If the Krad slaked their appetites with these two, maybe the creatures would retreat down the mountain instead of lurking in the valley so close to Drakkonwehr. His own trail, and the boy’s and woman’s, was too cold for them to follow now, the tantalizing scent of the boy’s wound dissipated.

What’s more, he hadn’t invited this gelatinous bag and his passenger into Drakkonwehr. They were trespassers, and—hospitality be damned!—he owed them nothing.

That’s right,
said the Voice in his head.
The Shadow Man doesn’t owe them a thing.

The remark stung like cold steel.
But I do—is that what you’re saying?

Depends on whose home this is.

Acid churned in Durren’s stomach. Although the woman was only whispering, “Papa, please,” and he’d tried to shut his ears to the sound and balled his fists at his sides, the keening penetrated his hood, slicing at his nerves. The Shadow Man could turn them out into the Wehrland, but Durren Drakkonwehr—
Damn this body!
—could do no such thing.

“Gareth, tend to the horse. Get up, fat man, you can’t sleep here.” Kneeling, he scooped the old man out of his daughter’s arms and carried him to the fire.
Thank you so very much,
his mind messaged the she-lion, but she merely stretched one huge paw, showing pearlescent talons before retracting them.

****

Mirianna sponged her father all night, trying to revive him, to bring the fever down. He couldn’t die. Not from something as innocuous as a tiny scratch. She wouldn’t let him.

She rummaged again and again in the Shadow Man’s herb supply, racking her brain for recipes she’d seen the herbalist in Nolar make. She’d already spooned a bit of willow bark tea into her father’s mouth, and he swallowed it. That and the sponging made his skin fractionally cooler. She made a poultice for the welt on his leg, hoping it would draw out the poison, but she couldn’t be sure she mixed the ingredients in the right proportions.

Hours ago, the boy had fallen asleep where he sat, and she was dimly aware of the she-lion curving her huge body around the boy and pillowing his head on her shoulder. The rasp of her purr had become for Mirianna a barely noticed hum in the background, mingling with the music of Pumble’s snores. He’d sat where the Shadow Man directed him to sit, eaten a bit of dry-cake, and promptly fallen into a deep sleep.

The Shadow Man had been gone for hours. He’d slipped off after Pumble fell asleep, and she hadn’t noted his absence until now, when her eyes burned and her back cracked as if it would break into pieces. She hiccupped a sob, biting her lip to keep it from trembling. Tears would do no good, neither for her nor her father. Pushing wisps of hair from her face, she sat back on her heels and wrung out another cloth.

“You’re only prolonging his suffering. And yours.”

The Shadow Man’s words bludgeoned her heart, but Mirianna tightened her lips and blinked droplets from her lashes. She wouldn’t look up with her misery stamped on her face. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.

He lowered himself to a seat opposite. The hood that had terrified her for so long tilted and seemed to be assessing her father’s sunken features and flushed skin.

She faced the hood with her chin up. “Where have you been?” Her words accused, but what did that matter? To look upon him could kill her, but what did that matter now? Her father was dying.
Dying!
And the Shadow Man didn’t care.

He rested elbows on knees and clasped gloved fingers. The hood shifted in her direction. “I was doing what I could to bar the gate. In case they were followed.”

The firelight revealed fresh scuff marks on his boots. A shred of fabric dangled as if torn from the hem of his hood. He’d likely slept as little as she these last few days, but she hardened her heart against the thought. Anyone who’d survived the devastation of this fortress couldn’t possibly have such mundane, human needs as sleep and solace and simple decency.

“You mean, you were doing what you could to protect yourself,” she threw at him, “in case someone disturbs your precious privacy! Admit it—you’d have barred the gate against them if you could have guessed they’d come.”

He sighed. She detected in the sound and the slope of his shoulders not only weariness but a deep resignation, as if she spoke a truth he already knew. With an economical movement, he produced a pail of fresh water and exchanged it for the one she’d nearly emptied.

The gesture made tears burn her throat, but she swallowed them down before speaking. “He’s cooler. He’ll make it.”

“If he should wake, make your peace with him. You’ll not have another chance.” He stood and turned toward the deep well of darkness that was the ruin of Drakkonwehr.

Mirianna bit back another sob. He was leaving her, just like that, to deal with her misery and her pain and her grief. Alone. He would simply fade into the darkness out of which he’d come and in which he lived and moved and had his being, and she would be left by this meager fire with nothing but her two hands and a little knowledge of healing to save her father. And that after—after...

Her head snapped up and words jumped out of her mouth, words her mind hadn’t considered but arrowed straight up from the panic choking her heart. “You promised to
save
him! Remember?”

The black hood turned a fraction, and she could see it profiled dimly against the ink of the shadows beyond. A thread of unease stirred in her stomach, but she focused all of her attention on his response. He couldn’t ignore her now.