Crucible (24 page)

The barrier appeared as a physical lattice surrounding Torec. He shouted wordlessly, grasping at the structure.

“The key to this spell is minimizing distractions,” her grandfather said. “It is much easier to take on another's vitality when he can't retaliate with his own spells.”

A cord of magic appeared at Torec's chest, writhing through the air toward Gareht's outstretched hand. Torec screamed as it yanked him against the barrier.

As the cord connected with her grandfather's hand,
Kweilin realized she was watching a reenactment of her brother's death. Tears blurred her vision, and Torec's pale face became Mareth's. His screams as the cord tore at his chest became her brother's guttural cries.

She blinked, and the face behind the red lattice became her father's.

“
You
murdered them!” she screamed.

“I lent them their lives to begin with, pet. But when the village needed me to keep my position as patriarch, I took their vitality back.”

:Stop him!:

Kweilin tore her magic up from her core. Every drop of it came under her command as it hadn't for six months, ripping through her own fear-formed barrier with the force of her fury.

She flung it in a disc at the cord connecting her relatives. The cord cracked like a whip, and Gareht staggered back with a shout.

Kweilin caught the flailing end of the cord, tying it off with her magic and shoving it back toward Torec. Adrenaline pumped, and she reached the barrier in three bounds.

“Stop!” her grandfather shouted. He rushed up behind her, his anger palpable.

Kweilin crashed her magic-encased fist through the barrier.

The barrier broke into shards, and she closed her fingers around Torec's light.

“
Live!
” she commanded.

Fierce pain shot through her belly then, and she fell to the dirty floor, moaning.

Her grandfather's fingers dug into her shoulder.

“Don't touch her!” Torec shouted. A flash of orange and a searing heat swooped over Kweilin's head. Gareht's high-pitched scream mixed with the stench of burning flesh, and the pressure of his fingers disappeared.

The pain in her belly wasn't receding. She knelt on the
floor, tears pouring down her cheeks, her arms around her stomach.

“He's gone, he's dead,” Torec said. “I cast a spell, and . . .”

Kweilin became aware of him shaking her. “I've killed her, my baby,” she sobbed. Everything inside her was crumbling. She'd killed her daughter.

But her grandfather . . . he would have killed Torec. Her only nephew, all she had left of her brother. What could she have done but stop him?

The Companion approached her, freed of her prison at her captor's death. The white muzzle pressed against Kweilin's side, firm but gentle.

:She lives, friend.:

Warmth spread in Kweilin's core, and a faint rhythm beat under her hand.

Her daughter's heartbeat.

Trembling, Kweilin lifted her hand to grasp Torec's.

“What do I do now, Aunt Kweilin?” he asked. He was trembling, too.

The Companion walked over to stand beside him, and his trembling lessened.
They strike a fine picture,
Kweilin thought.
Chosen and Companion.

“You will go to Valdemar and be a Herald. It's what you were always meant to be.”

“And leave you?”

Kweilin climbed to her feet and smiled. “Someone of the line needs to keep the village running. I don't see why it has to be a
male
heir.”

They embraced, and Torec climbed into the Companion's saddle for the first time as naturally as if it were the thousandth. Kweilin stood in the stable doorway, hands on her belly, watching them ride into the night.

Tomorrow, she would begin preparations for Gareht's funeral. The village would be saddened but unsurprised. He was very old, after all. Too old, it turned out.

Kweilin closed her eyes and remembered Mareth and
her father once more. She vowed to never again remember their appearance in death, only their faces as they had lived.

Standing there in the swirling snow outside the stable, she made a second vow.

Her life would belong to the village from this day on. To her people, her husband, and most of all, to her daughter.

Her vitality would flow down the line as it should. It would never be the other way around.

The shadowed woods near Lake Evendim stretched across the hills, a cool, green layer of quiet. It felt like waiting, like that pause before something bursts out. Something dangerous, or frightening, or maybe just startling, but
something
. The beat when everything has stopped and whatever is out there is gathering itself, right before whatever is going to happen happens.

Except it didn't.

That pause went on and on and on, anticipation stretching out and out until nerves wanted to snap, but just kept stretching.

Herald Arvil had been riding trails through the dim, green woods north of Rabbit Hole for the last day and a half, searching. An herb-healer had gone into the woods collecting, something she'd done regularly for years, and her father before her, but she hadn't returned home.

Before that a hunter had vanished, and a trapper. And five months ago, the twelve-year-old son of a charcoal burner had been sent by his father to fetch a Healer when the man was felled by the black cough. When a woodcutter found the man four weeks later, near to death and with no sign of the boy, they assumed he'd been taken by some beast of the wood.

But that was four people vanished with no sign.

Wild beasts left signs. Bones, clothing, tools—even when the body was dragged off, there was always something left behind. Four folk missing with no sign meant it wasn't a beast.

Herald Arvil had been riding trails through the woods north of Rabbit Hole, searching for whatever had taken those folk.

At that moment, he was trying to relax in Graya's saddle, attempting to leave himself open to anything that might tickle his weak Farsight. Open to impressions, but ready to slam his Gift closed if anything nasty came sniffing—perfectly centered and poised to shift in whichever direction he needed to go.

All the while trying to ignore the feeling that something was about to jump out at him, right now!

. . . Now!

. . . Now!

. . . Now!

Just relaxing enough to keep his heart from pounding right out of his chest was difficult when that alarm in the back of his mind was constantly shrieking.

Graya tossed her head just enough to shake her reins and get Arvil's attention.

“What now?” he asked, pulling his focus back to the physical world and looking around. “If you saw a sweetheart tree and expect me to climb the thing to get the shoots off the top for you again, you can forget it. I don't care if you do try bucking me into the next stream we cross. I'll be ready for you, and—”

Graya snorted and shook her head again, cutting off his snarking. He could feel her haughty derision like an aura around her. There was nothing Giftish about it, just partners who'd been together for nearly twenty years and had come to know each other's moods.

“What, then?”

Graya changed gaits to an alternate-lead canter that had her skipping for a couple of steps. That meant
“Camp soon?” And Arvil realized that the sun, while never completely visible in the thick woods, seemed to be shining from right overhead. It was noontime, or close.

“You smell water?” he asked.

Graya nodded.

“All right. It'll be good to get off your knobby back and rest my aching butt.”

That got him a snort and a light buck that he was absolutely expecting. He snickered and patted her neck.

They came to a break in the trees before too long, a relatively flat spot where the thick, springy loam made a comfortable place to sit. He focused on the suitability of the spot, the way the narrow green leaves of the surrounding foliage—shivering a little in the light breeze—were not at
all
ominous when you looked at them directly.

He found a stream running down a little gully less than two minutes' walk away—even with his rolling limp, courtesy of an old break that had healed a bit crooked—and before long they both had a long drink. Graya grazed while he pulled out his packets of dried meat and flour and salt and put together a quick camp stew over the small fire.

“I don't know if I'm going to be able to sleep tonight, feeling like this,” he said, his voice low.

Graya huffed out a breath, and bumped his shoulder with her nose.

“I know, stupid time to mention it when we're a day and a half's ride from anywhere. But still . . .” Arvil stared down at the chunky brown sludge in his bowl. He was hungry, but his stomach was knotted, likely from the stress of riding through a forest that felt as if it'd grown eyes and teeth and clawed arms that he could
feel
brushing past his skin but couldn't actually see.

“Of course I'll survive it. I'll probably even drop off to sleep eventually. My bones feel heavy enough to drag me down into the dirt. It's just my mind that won't stop jumping and gibbering.”

Graya took a fold of his sleeve in her teeth and gave a gentle shake.

“What?”

She tapped the ground with one hoof, and Arvil scowled at her. “Why couldn't the Lady give us Mindspeech?” he groused, as he always did when it came to this. He reached over to his pack and pulled out a wax tablet and stylus.

Graya huffed and started tapping while Arvil counted, running mentally through the alphabet as they went. When Graya stopped for a moment, he wrote down the letter he was on. Then she started over.

Slowly, she spelled out
PEOPLE WOOD AFRAID
.

“Yes, the folk in Rabbit Hole were afraid of the woods. It's no wonder they were, with people vanishing—”

Graya cut him off with a neigh and a hard stomp that left a hoof-shaped imprint deep in the loam.

“The folk were
very
afraid of the woods. You're right, they were. Of the
woods,
not of whatever monster they imagined was eating people. You think they felt what I'm feeling—” Graya cut him off with a huff and gave an exaggerated shudder. “Right, what
we're
feeling. Granny Shay said the woods had grown unfriendly lately, but I thought she was just . . . you know, just meant because of the disappearances. She meant it literally, and I didn't hear it.”

He ate a few bites of stew while pondering.

Everyone who'd disappeared had been in the woods for a reason. No strollers, no lovers, no children looking for posies or chasing butterflies. Folk were staying out of the woods unless they
had
to go. Granny said it'd happened “lately,” and Arvil wished he'd asked exactly what she meant by that.

Granny was a day and a half back, though, so all they could do was continue on.

By midafternoon, Arvil felt he was about to go mad. Something was keeping him tense,
making
him constantly expect an attack.

“Maybe we can use it like a compass? Move into the fear, find whatever's at the heart of this?”

Graya snorted and gave a full body shiver, but then she nodded and picked up her pace a little.

The light was just turning orange beyond the green canopy of forest when they came to a fork in the trail. Arvil really didn't want to turn off onto the narrower track.

“I think that's it,” he said, leaning away from the dark, overgrown gap in the trees.

Graya stamped and nodded again, then huffed and turned, shouldering her way through whenever the branches grew too close together.

“Narrow,” said Arvil. “Feels abandoned.”

Graya snorted and shoved her way through half a dozen saplings.

The saplings were a kind Arvil hadn't seen before. They oozed something that stank, and it clung wherever it touched. A bolt of panic shot through him, and for a moment he was sure it was poison, and they'd both die gasping, and the beetles would come out of the underbrush and chew into their bodies while they were still alive and they had to escape, turn around, just tell everyone to stay out of the woods, who went into the woods anyway, it was deadly and dark and—

—and then it wasn't.

Graya neighed and pranced a few paces, then tossed her head and neighed again.

“I feel it too,” said Arvil. “Or, I don't feel it now. It's like it was raining fear and then it suddenly stopped.”

He laughed and felt lighter. Even though the sun was setting, the woods felt brighter, friendlier. The track they were following didn't look as narrow or as menacing.

“Well, then, let's see where this leads.”

The track wound through the darkening woods. Visibility grew shorter and shorter, but Arvil didn't have a lamp, and there was so little space between the tree
branches—occasionally none—that a torch would only set the wood afire. Graya picked her way gracefully through the shadows, around rocks and thickets.

Finally, the way in front of them opened out, and leafy barriers vanished into black emptiness. Graya's hooves rang on stone. Flat stone. Arvil dismounted and felt the smoothness of flagstones under his hide boots.

“It feels like a courtyard,” he said. “There must be some kind of building ahead.”

Graya whuffled agreement. Arvil secured the reins so she could walk without tripping over them, and they both moved forward.

The space was large, and they paused for a minute so Arvil could light a torch. When he held it up and looked around, a building appeared out of the darkness before him.

“Tower,” said Arvil. He walked up to it, then paced along the shallow curve of the wall, following it with one hand. “Big one.”

He expected to have to leave her outside, but when they found the entrance, it was tall and wide enough for a Companion. There wasn't even a door—just a doorway, a huge arched opening in the stone wall of the tower, with splinters of rotting wood scattered about it, and darkness beyond.

Arvil stepped through the doorway and tripped over the change in the floor, from dirty stone to smooth wood. He nearly fell, his arms flailing for balance, the torch gone. He whirled around, and what he saw shocked him into a dead stop.

He was teetering at the top of a stairwell, a narrow spiral stairwell of gray granite with steps barely as wide as his shoulders. Oil-soaked torches burned at intervals in wrought-iron brackets high on the outside wall, lending their smoky smell to the air.

From behind the heavy ironoak door at his back, he could hear a Companion squealing in rage, and the
thud-thud-thud
of hooves against thick wood. From somewhere below, he heard the echo of quick, heavy boots on the steps.

Shock dimmed Arvil's vision for a moment, and he struggled to focus, thinking,
No, impossible, I can't be here!

For he knew exactly where he was, and when. Ten months into his internship, he and Herald Jinnia had called upon Halrid, lord of a patch of territory in southern Valdemar. There'd been rumors of trouble in the area—rebels—and they'd come to see whether Lord Halrid needed assistance.

Shock and a flood of memories had drawn Arvil's attention from what he was doing, and he found his body bounding down the narrow staircase, just as he had all those years ago.

He remembered going down before, remembered what'd happened, and panic rose in him. His bad leg throbbed in recalled pain, a lasting souvenir of that chase.

With focused effort, he stopped, his hands on the walls to either side, and looked down.

He knew now that there was at least one trick step. If he could avoid it, he might be able to catch Halrid and change how their next encounter had gone.

Arvil tried to step carefully down, but as soon as he started to move, his body took over and plunged down as fast as it could, quick-stepping with his fingertips skimming the walls. The panic returned, and he forced himself to stop again.

He stood there, shaking. He didn't want to do that again, didn't want to relive this. If he couldn't change it by going carefully down the stairs, then he'd go back to Graya, find Jinnia. They could ride to fetch help, bring troops in strength to put down Halrid's uprising with so much less loss of life and property.

And he might save his leg.

He turned on the steps and started to climb. His body
obeyed, and soon he was back at the top, facing the heavy wooden door. On the other side of the granite wall, it was hidden by a tapestry just behind Halrid's thronelike chair in his great hall. He could see a huge crack in the ironoak, and one of the hinges hung by a single bolt. Graya screamed from the other side, furious and desperate to get to him.

He knew she'd break through soon, but it wouldn't help. She was too large to manage the narrow spiral stair.

This time it would be different, though. He yanked open the door and dashed through—

—and Graya's cries cut off. There was no tapestry, no throne, no furious Companion.

He stood in a familiar classroom at the Collegium, the history classroom with its maps and shelves and wooden desks. Students—familiar, but so young—crowded around Arvil's desk, where he stood staring at the paper in Herald Kevran's hand.

Kevran was saying, “You can't deny this is written in your hand.”

Arvil said, “It looks like my hand, sir, but it isn't. I swear I didn't write that, never saw it before.”

“It was down on the floor between your feet, where you could see it easily enough if you slumped a little.” Kevran stared at him hard, his stern face a picture of anger and disappointment. On the paper was written answers to the exam they'd been taking. Herald Kevran and the whole class thought he'd cheated.

A flood of shame burned through Arvil. He was thirteen and new to the Collegium. He thought he'd made some friends, but everyone in class was staring at him, glaring or smirking or scowling, the crowd in gray and rust, pale green and blue, united in condemning him.

He'd thought he was doing well, thought he was making a place for himself, but he'd never felt so alone as he did that day.

Arvil knew he'd be exonerated—he eventually had
been at the time, but this was another scene he didn't want to replay. Whether he was dreaming or caught in an illusion or had somehow been . . . what? Fetched through time? Whatever was happening, living through it once had been enough. He bolted for the door to the corridor—