Bone Magic (2 page)

They gradually
left their cottage doorways and drifted closer, until she had a
crowd around her. A little boy pointed at the short sword on her
hip and said, "Girls don't use swords. Why do you have a sword? I
thought you had a bow."

"I'm not very
good with a sword," she told him, "but it's nice to have
options."

He frowned,
confused. "Why don't you just shoot them with arrows?"

"Well, I might
run out of arrows. Or people might be too close to me."

"I bet you're
not so tough without your bow."

At first she
took it for another question. She turned, looking for the speaker,
and found the fat man from the road shoving his way through the
crowd toward her. The cudgel in his hand was splintered by her
arrow, but it looked solid enough. He raised it high as he came at
her.

She moved
instinctively, springing toward him, catching him under the chin
with the edge of her hand. He gagged, his hands came down, and she
plucked the cudgel from his grasp.

His friend, the
skinny boy with the axe, was right behind him. The boy backed away,
his free hand up in a placating gesture. The rest of the crowd
melted back with him, leaving Tira by herself with the fat man in
the middle of a ring of shocked villagers.

"Marko! Marko,
are you all right?" The heavyset woman who had been weeding her
garden shoved through the crowd and rushed to the fat man's side.
Marko was on his knees, his head slumped forward, his hands
clutching his throat. Tira could hear him breathing. He was taking
great, hoarse, rasping gasps, but the air was getting in.

"He'll live,"
she said, and laid the cudgel across her shoulder. "Does this
imbecile live here?"

"He lives just
out of town." The boy with the axe was speaking. "I'm his
neighbor."

Tira ran her
eyes over the crowd. They were shocked and confused, but a few
faces showed the first glimmerings of anger. There were at least a
dozen adults in sight. Things could get ugly if they decided she
was a threat.

"Does he attack
innocent travellers a lot?" she asked, emphasizing the word
innocent
. "He's not a very good highwayman."

The boy with
the axe seemed to be taking on the role of village spokesperson.
His face was as long and thin as the rest of him, but his eyes
looked alert and intelligent. "Marko didn't mean any harm," he
said. "We've seen your tracks in the woods in the last few weeks.
When some of the children disappeared, we thought it was you."

"I just got
here," Tira told him, pitching her voice so the whole village could
hear. "I'm passing through. I've never seen your village before,
and I don't have your children." She thought of the prickling
sensation she'd felt on the back of her neck. "There's someone else
in the woods. I'm just an innocent traveller."

The boy with
the axe surprised her by saying, "I think she's telling the truth.
She could have killed us all on the road with her bow, but she
didn't. And she wasn't being sneaky, she was just riding along. I
think someone who was stealing children would be sneaky."

Marko, his
voice barely above a whisper, said, "Well, I still don't like her."
That drew a few chuckles, and just like that, the tension drained
out of the crowd. Tira handed the cudgel to Marko and he used it to
lever himself to his feet. He limped away, leaning on the heavyset
woman, and the villagers dispersed.

Tira was
watering Daisy at the river when she became aware of footsteps
scuffing through the grass behind her. She turned to see a bearded
farmer approaching, with the skinny boy, now minus his axe,
trailing behind.

"I guess it's
high time someone welcomed you to our town," the farmer said. "My
name is Banek. I'm the High Mayor of Raven Crossing."

It struck her
as an absurd title. Even calling this little village a town seemed
pretentious, but she nodded gravely as if she didn't find it all
ridiculous.

"Tira Archer.
I'm pleased to meet you, Mr. Mayor."

"Just Banek,
please." He shuffled his feet, cleared his throat, and looked up at
the sky.

"Was there
something else, Banek?"

"Well,
actually, yes." He cleared his throat again. "The others tell me
you were looking for work."

She nodded.
"I'm hoping to earn the price of a meal."

Banek scratched
at his beard. "Well, yes. We might be able to do a bit better than
that." She waited patiently while he fidgeted, and finally spoke in
a rush. "We'd like to hire you to find those missing children.
There's three of them, they've been gone since the day before
yesterday, and it's not the first time this has happened. We want
you to bring them back safely, and we want you to find out who's
doing this, and make them stop."

"I want to
come!" the boy blurted. Banek and Tira looked at him, and he turned
red, but he squared his shoulders and kept talking. "I know the
countryside, I know what the children look like, and they know me.
I can help!"

"No, Tam," said
Banek, "your place is here."

"I won't get in
the way," Tam said desperately.

Tira shook her
head. "Forget it, son. I work alone."

"But I can..."
His voice trailed off as he took in her expression. Finally his
shoulders slumped and he turned away.

Banek shrugged.
"The exuberance of youth. I remember how it was. I set out to find
my fortune, walked for ten miles, and had to walk all the way
back." He smiled at the memory. "These three didn't wander off,
though. Two of them are sisters. Sarina and Salina. Sari's nine,
Lina's ten, and they fight like badgers. No way either one of them
would go very far with the other. The third one is a boy. Mikail is
twelve, and he'd die of embarrassment if anyone saw him with
girls." Banek gave a grim chuckle. "No, wherever they are, it
wasn't their idea."

She took the
job. The pay was dreadful, four silver crowns, and not a bit of it
in advance. They advanced her a meal, and that was what finally
decided it for her. Banek gave her thorough descriptions of all
three children, and told her where Mikail had last been seen,
fishing on the banks of the river at a bend half a mile upstream
from town. There would be no usable tracks, she knew. The hamfooted
villagers would have trampled every bit of spoor into the ground by
now. Still, she set off in that direction with the sun low in the
sky, the anxious best wishes of the villagers echoing in her ears,
hoping against hope that she might find something.

Tam was waiting
for her at the riverbend. He was riding a fat pony, with his axe
strapped across the back of the saddle along with a bedroll. He
wore an often-patched cloak that was much too big for him, and a
determined expression.

Tira sighed.
"Go home, son. You're not coming with me."

"I can help
you."

"I doubt
it."

"How do you
know that?" he demanded. "You don't know a thing about me!"

"I know you're
a child," she said. When he opened his mouth she raised her hand to
stop him. "When was the last time you shaved?"

"Yesterday," he
said, with a touch of pride.

"And the time
before that?"

He reddened a
bit. "I'm no child."

"You're no
soldier, either. Look at you! You're armed with a wood axe, and
you're riding a pony, for pity's sake."

He didn't
answer, but his eyes went to the mule she was riding, and the look
on his face spoke volumes.

"Okay, never
mind the pony," she told him. "Suppose we find whoever took those
children. Whoever it is, they won't be too happy with us. You could
get killed."

"That's my
problem," he said. "Not yours."

She nodded,
conceding the point. "Well, you and that axe won't be much use in a
fight, and I've seen how you move through the forest. You're not
much good as a scout, either. You say you know the country, but
what's the farthest you've ever been from this spot right
here?"

He squirmed in
his saddle. "Twenty miles?"

Tira shook her
head. "So you won't be much use as a guide, either." She pulled her
hat off, raked her fingers through her hair, and put the hat back
in place. "Name one thing you can contribute that I need." She
glared at him, and he grinned.

"Breakfast."

"Pardon
me?"

His grin
widened, and he leaned forward, patting a bulging sack tied in
front of his saddle. "I've got bacon, a small loaf of bread, a sack
of beans, some salt, six of last year's potatoes, half of a ham,
and an onion. Oh, and a cook pot, too."

She stared at
him, her determination fading with every passing second. "You
should really go home, son."

He shrugged.
"It's too late now. After I stole all this stuff?" He patted the
sack. "Ma would skin me. No, I've got to come back covered in
glory, with those children in tow, or else I better not come back
at all." His voice quavered a bit at the end, but his face showed
nothing but stubbornness.

"The road to
glory is littered with corpses, son. You're apt to be one of
them."

He shrugged.
"Nobody lives forever."

Tira grinned in
spite of herself. "All right, you win. Let's go."

Tam's face
split in an ear-to-ear grin, and he wheeled the pony around.
"Fantastic! Which way are we going?"

Ultimately they
headed back up the same road Tira had used to reach Raven Crossing.
There were half a dozen farms on the far side of the village, Tam
explained, and none of those farmers had seen a thing. Beyond a
two-mile circle around the village the forest had never known an
axe, and while cross-country travel was not impossible, it was
difficult at best. With three uncooperative children in tow it
would be a nightmare.

"Who are you
people?" Tira asked. "Why do you have a village in the middle of
nowhere?"

"It's a town,"
Tam said, a bit defensively.

"I've seen
towns. Believe me, it's a village. What's it doing in the middle of
a forest, on a road that gets almost no traffic?"

He shrugged.
"Maybe the logs?" When he saw her confusion he elaborated. "Every
spring when the river runs high, the log drivers bring a load of
logs down from Carmody. This is the only place the river crosses
the road for, I don't know, a hundred miles? They buy supplies, and
Mr. Carver in the town buys some timber, and a trader comes through
every summer and buys the logs from him." He paused, looked at
Tira, and frowned. "What's wrong?"

"We're being
watched," she told him. "I can feel it." Her eyes scanned the trees
on either side. She had seen or heard something without realizing
it, was only aware of it as a prickling sensation on her neck. She
closed her eyes and racked her brain, trying to figure out what the
clue had been.

The flap of
wings made her open her eyes. A raven came winging out of the
trees, flapping lazily as it flew along above the road.

Birds. That was
it. She had noticed a pattern in the birdsong around her. A patch
of woods where the birds were quiet, because they had noticed a
hidden watcher.

"Come on," she
said, wheeling Daisy around and heading for the side of the
road.

Tam hurried to
catch up. "Where are we going?"

"I don't know.
But keep up."

They rode down
through a low ditch and up into the trees. At first the undergrowth
was quite thick, but away from the road, where the summer leaves
would form a thick canopy overhead, the underbrush thinned. The
hooves of Daisy and the pony were silent on a carpet of last
autumn's fallen leaves. The sunlit road was a bright strip behind
them, the shadowy world around them filled with a hush that made
Tira think of a temple.

There was no
one in sight, and no sign that anyone had been there. Tira stopped
when she could no longer see the road, and doubled back. Finally
she sat perfectly still in Daisy's saddle, just breathing, letting
every detail of the scene soak in. Tam was beside her, clearly
struggling to restrain his curiosity. She ignored him.

Motion caught
her eye.

She swung down
from the saddle and walked through the old leaves that filled the
spaces between the great trunks around her. The same tiny movement
caught her eye again. She took a couple more steps and dropped into
a squat.

"What is it?"
Tam asked.

Tira pointed to
the stalks of grass in front of her. Several stems were slowly
rising, like an arthritic man standing up. "Someone was here," she
said. "Someone stood on this tuft of grass just a few minutes
ago."

He squatted
beside her, peering blankly at the grass.

"No horse," she
said. "A horse would leave signs. There's no hoof prints, no
droppings." She glanced back at the path Daisy and the pony had
taken through the trees. The fallen leaves were clearly disturbed,
the moist layer beneath showing as darker splotches where it was
exposed. Tam's footprints showed clearly. He had scuffed through
the leaves, turning them over or brushing them aside.

Only Tira's
tracks were invisible. She hadn't been trying to hide her
footprints, but she was light on her feet and cautious by habit,
setting her feet down with unconscious care, making little sound
and leaving the ground undisturbed.

The watcher was
someone like her, then. Someone with a light step, at home in the
forest.

Someone
impossible to track.

"Bring the
animals," she said. "Stay well back." Then she uncased her bow and
strung it, and walked deeper into the forest, scanning the ground
and the underbrush.

Sometimes she
was almost sure she was on the right path. The leaves were slightly
disturbed, in a pattern that was only noticeable over ten or
fifteen feet of ground. Any one leaf might have been moved by wind
or a squirrel, but taken all together it showed the path of a
walking person.