Haven Magic (41 page)

“Well?” asked Brand. “Will you be a slave for the next year or a free creature of the fields?”

“Thou must try to free Tomkin first!” he said.

Brand shook his head. “That would be risky. I’d suggest we try to find Myrrdin first.”

There was a long moment of silence between them as Tomkin considered the bargain. “Tomkin agrees…” he said at length, “but, since my freedom is not certain, a boon shall I claim.”

Brand glared at the manling. “You will not taste of my blood as well, you wretched creature.”

Tomkin chuckled. “No, the frog meat was enough. My wish is to see the axe…to gaze into the depths of Ambros.”

“But why?” Brand asked suspiciously. The axe twitched at his feet, roused like a growling dog.

Tomkin saw the twitch and seemed fascinated by it. Taking slow, cautious steps, he approached the knapsack. “Tomkin has reasons.”

“No,” said Brand. Suddenly, he hated the vile creature more than ever and the urge to pull out the axe and strike it dead was almost overwhelming.

“Brand,” said Telyn. “We need his help. It is a small thing. There is no danger.”

Brand blinked several times and bared his teeth. “Yes,” he growled finally. “I’ll allow it.”

Tomkin’s face split wide with a savage grin then, and the yellow light of inhuman desire shown in his black, glass-like eyes.

Not daring to touch the haft of the axe, Brand moved with great care to ease the weapon partly from the knapsack. The axe remained quiet until the Jewel at the heart of it was revealed in the gray morning light. Then it flared into heatless incandescence. Amber light glared into their faces and lit up the swamp around them. Each of them cast giant shadows upon the encircling trees. Brand squinted and gritted his teeth, but didn’t take his eyes from Tomkin lest the creature choose this moment to attempt some deception.

Tomkin was clearly not in the mood for deception. He halted his approach and took two short, blind hops backward. He hissed as if the light burned his skin. The leather sleeves of his tunic covered his eyes and only his white teeth showed, grimacing. “Stop the light!” he cried.

“I can’t control it,” said Brand. “Wait, it will die down in a moment.”

Even as he spoke, the flaring light weakened and died down to a dull, amber glimmering. Tomkin resumed his approach. He took even greater care than before. His hands worked and rubbed at one another nervously as he came close to the axe.

Brand was almost amused by Tomkin’s trepidation. “If it frightens you so, why bother with it?” he asked.

Tomkin only snarled at him and continued his terrified approach. He stood before the axe finally, or rather crouched there. The amber light of the Jewel reflected in lusty yellow glints from his eyes. A thread of saliva slipped from his sharp white teeth as he gazed into the depths of the Jewel.

Brand felt tension take hold of him. He realized now that Tomkin was a demon, an imp, a creature of darkness daring to creep forth to touch the forbidden light of day. When Tomkin’s trembling hand extended a long thin finger and snaked forward slowly to touch the Jewel, Brand made an involuntary sound of disgust and rage. Tomkin seemed to hear nothing.

“No Brand!” shouted Telyn, standing and taking a step forward. Brand looked down to see that his hand had reached down of its own accord, and now held itself poised above the haft of the axe. Right then he knew, with crystal cold clarity, that if the little devil defiled the Amber Jewel with its unwelcome touch, he would wield the axe and strike it dead for its gross presumption.

Just then the axe shifted. It was not so much of a twitch this time, but more of a lurch. Like a wounded creature trying to regain its feet, the axe heaved up its haft and left it wavering, close to Brand’s waiting palm.

Whatever spell Tomkin had been under broke then, and he leapt back from the axe like a cat springing away from a striking snake. Landing a dozen feet off, he hissed and sputtered, speechless.

Brand stared down at his hand and the haft of the axe, just bare inches apart. Sweat sprouted upon his brow.

“Brand,” came a soft whisper in his ear. “Kiss me instead.”

Brand turned his head slightly, and there was Telyn, at his side. Her hand now gently clasped his wrist. He let his arm relax and the axe dropped back to the ground in defeat. Then he turned and he did kiss his beloved, deeply.

Tomkin’s snide chuckle brought them back to themselves. “Now Tomkin sees how your second operates!” he declared, hooting with laughter. “What a novel way to distract him from the bloodthirsty spell of the axe! Impressive, it is!”

Ignoring him, Brand bent down and gently nudged the axe back into the knapsack. He unwound the straps of it from his ankle and slung it on his back. Again, it was heavy, a dead weight that pulled at his shoulders.

“Saved your life I did, Wee One,” commented Telyn.

“That might be, witch,” agreed Tomkin. “Let’s be off, the sooner to remove this accursed millstone from my neck.”

The others agreed. They gathered what gear they had and broke camp, setting off across a steaming bog. Soon they were lost in the gray morning mists.

Chapter Seventeen

The Redcap

With a curse, Brand stomped on yet another hissing snake, jumping over its writhing coils. It escaped his boot and splashed away into a bubbling pool of steamy water that showed the location of one of the numerous hot springs in the area.

“Another snake! May the River drown them all!” Brand complained.

“At least that one wasn’t so large that it chased us off!” said Telyn brightly as she sloshed by him.

Eyeing her, rather than the treacherous muck, Brand stepped upon an orange, fleshy, bulb-shaped pod. It popped beneath his heavy tread. A vile gray discharge sprayed his boots. The stench was overwhelming.

“Aggh!” he cried aloud. “I crushed another of those disgusting pods!”

“Human skulls, they were once,” commented Tomkin from up ahead. He stood lightly upon another of the large pods and tapped at it with his walking stick. His weight wasn’t enough to break one open. “Legend says that these growths are the final remains of thy ancestors. ‘Twas here they fought the Faerie upon this last of battlefields before being driven from their strongholds to the north.”

“Driven?” asked Brand. “So the Dead Kingdoms to the north are conquered ground, taken by the Faerie?”

Tomkin made an airy gesture with his walking stick. Brand wished that the pod beneath him would suddenly give way and coat him with the clinging goop inside. “That’s one view. But only the darkest of the Faerie dwell there now. Only Wraiths, ghosts, bogies and worse things….”

“As I understand it—” interjected Telyn, “—war and magic destroyed the land and so ravaged all life there that wheat won’t grow, nor can sheep graze. People moved to the Haven and settled it as a matter of choice.”

Brand grunted in reply. He was busy making sure that he stepped on nothing even more vile in these northern reaches of Old Hob’s Marsh.
The Dead Kingdoms.
That would explain why the land seemed more sickened with each step they slogged forward into the Marsh. The mud was past ankle deep and felt like cold porridge. If it was all like this, no wonder his ancestors had left their ancient homes and fled to the Haven.

“How can even the merlings like it here?” he asked aloud. “With each step the land grows worse. Wetland it is, but everything here rots and withers.”

“Few human hunters are here to break open their lodges and slay their young,” commented Tomkin. He bounded ahead, crossing two or three of Brand’s paces from one flotsam to the next without so much as soiling his boots.

“Fair enough,” muttered Brand.

Morning shifted into afternoon, then approached evening. Taking few breaks, they began hunting for a relatively dry and wholesome place to pass the night.

“What’s that?” asked Telyn, pointing off into the deepening mists of twilight. A darker shadow hulked among the skinny web-work of tree trunks.

“Looks like a building of some kind,” replied Brand. “Ruins, doubtless.”

“Better to spend the night in a tree,” said Tomkin, looking at the ruins with distrust.

“Well said for you, but I weigh more than a skinny housecat,” replied Brand. “These trees are too frail and rotten to support my weight, to say nothing of comfort.”

Tomkin only shrugged and smiled with his unsettling rows of sharp white teeth. He followed them toward the ruin, but now no longer led the way through the marsh. Brand forgave him his cowardice; he was no stout warrior, after all.

The ruin was that of a fallen tower they surmised after inspecting it in the failing gray light. Raised mounds running off to the north and east indicated that walls had once been attached to it.

“These old walls once faced the river,” commented Brand, patting the blackened chunks of stone that still protruded like broken teeth from the ground. It gave him a certain sense of pride mixed with sadness that humans had once built such structures.

Tomkin still stood at the foot of the dry land that bordered the ruin. He fidgeted there uncomfortably.

“Come on, Tomkin,” called Brand. “There seems to be nothing to fear. The knights all died centuries ago.”

Tsking in irritation, Tomkin bounded up the slope. “We’d best leave here,” he said. One of the ancient blocks of stone crumbled a bit beneath even his light tread. He skittered back from the falling stone nervously.

“Ha!” laughed Brand, putting his hand on his waist and grinning widely. “A human creation that makes the Faerie nervous! I like this place!” he declared.

Indeed, he did like it. It had a feel of home to it, a feel of something lost that he’d never felt the loss of until now, when he’d rediscovered it. The axe too, liked it here. He could sense its moods now, after bearing it for several days. It seemed buoyed up in his knapsack, almost floating of its own accord, rather than weighing him down like a great stone across his back.

Tomkin studied him closely for a second or two. He nodded curtly, making a decision. “It is a human place. Tomkin will not stay.” So saying, he bounded back down into the marsh and toward the sounds of the river to the west.

“Wait!” called Brand. “Ho there, what of our bargain?”

“Tomkin will return on the morrow!” cried the disappearing figure. Already he was only a faint moving shadow in the mists. “If a morrow there will be for thee!”

As Tomkin vanished into the fog and his voice became faint with the muffling effects of the clinging mists, he cried the final words, “Watch for redcaps…”

Telyn appeared at Brand’s shoulder and they looked together after Tomkin, who was gone. “Perhaps we should find a better place, Brand,” she said in concern. “I don’t know what a redcap is, but I don’t want to find out.”

“Nonsense,” snorted Brand. “I’ll not be put out of the only dry land in ten leagues by the words of a coward such as that.”

“Is the axe affecting you?” she asked quietly. She looked up at him in concern and he softened.

“A bit, perhaps,” he admitted, “but aren’t you curious about this place? This is a lost piece of our history. It is a part of us, Telyn.”

Telyn’s eyes traveled the shrinking circle of space that she could see in the growing darkness. She sighed. “We’d best be getting a fire going before we lose all of our light.”

“Right,” he agreed, almost giddy at the prospect. He slapped his gloves together and knocked the muck from them. “Ah, but it’s good to not be sliding with every step I take.”

They made camp quickly inside the broken tower. The walls only rose up twenty feet or so at the highest, but inside they were relatively warm and sheltered from the winds that came up along the river. They built a fire and the light flickered upon walls that had perhaps not known such a human presence for many long centuries.

“There must be a reason why we have never heard of such a place in the Haven before,” said Telyn after they had eaten such rations as they had left.

“There is,” said Brand, eyeing the walls. He reached out and ran his finger around one of the great stone blocks, drawing its outline. Dry moss peeled away at his touch. “I believe we are just outside the borders of the Haven,” he said quietly.

Telyn gasped. “You’re right. Somehow, I don’t know how, but I know that you’re right.”

“There’s no need for fright,” said Brand lightly. “Since the Pact ended, one side of the Haven’s border is as safe as the other.”

“Perhaps,” said Telyn, sounding less than convinced. She huddled forward as if trying to gather more heat from their tiny fire.

The night passed uneventfully until Brand awoke with a start sometime after midnight. He wondered groggily what had awakened him until he felt another light rapping upon his shoulder.

He turned with the beginnings of a smile. Perhaps Telyn had changed her mind about waiting and wished for his attentions, clumsy and oafish although they might be. He groped behind him, but found that Telyn was not there.

The haft of the axe shifted again, right before his eyes, rapping him on the shoulders, once, twice. Then it lay still. With a sharp intake of breath, he came more awake, but didn’t cry out. He was used to its fitful slumbering by now.

Lying there, he wondered vaguely what had disturbed it. Had a field mouse threatened the campsite? Perhaps it had sensed a low-flying owl or a croaking frog.