Shadeborn: A Book of Underrealm (12 page)

“Yes, dark as the night. He called himself Rogan. He asked us for a girl, a girl in a black cloak, and . . . and something else.”

Loren’s throat had gone bone dry. She swiped the back of her sleeves across her eyes and continued in a shaking voice.
 

“What then? How did the fight begin?”

“There was no fighting.” The boy sobbed harder. “He gathered us together. We told him we knew nothing of the girl, and he started killing us. We tried to run, but they chased us. All but the children.”

Chet stared at the boy in horror. “What did he do with them?”
 

“He took them, saying he was their father now. Some tried to fight him, those whose children he tried to take, but he and his men killed them. When I tried to help, they . . ."

The boy bit his lip and sucked in his breath, but then he broke down and began to cry again. Loren put her hand on his shoulder, one of the few places on his body the Shades had not mangled, and the only comfort she could think to give him.
 

“I told him I did not know where she was, that none of us knew where she was,” he said through falling tears. “Finally, he told me he believed me. But he did not stop. He never stopped.”

His cries eventually subsided, and Loren leaned forward, fearing his death. But his lips moved again, barely able to whisper.

“Who are you?”

Loren could not answer past the tightness of her throat.

“Are you the girl?”

She swallowed her lump. “Yes.”

“The one he sought?”

“Yes. I am sorry. I am sorry.”

He turned his head away from her. A short while later, his chest shuddered before he lay still.

Chet came to Loren’s side and put a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off and walked away. He let her go, slowly turning and going back to the others. Loren walked out of the village on the west side, the forest’s edge to the west, shaking as silent tears painted her face.

In fury, she stared off between the trees. She wished they were there, Rogan and the Shades. All of them. Let them fight her now and be done with it. Who knew how many villagers were being murdered throughout the forest? What death had she rained upon her homeland by inviting this reckless scourge upon the wood?
 

A small voice of reason that sounded like Jordel told Loren she could not hold herself responsible.
 

But the white-hot anger in her gut refused to listen.

She stayed there, alone, until the tears passed and the sun had practically set. Then she returned to the others, circling wide around the village so she would not have to pass through the death and blood. They had retreated into the trees when she found them and were sitting silently in a circle. The children were staring at the ground, while Chet stared at nothing. Even the wizard looked grim, his mouth soured with more than its usual bitterness.

“We will rest here for the night,” she said. “The Shades have come already. They will not be back, at least not for a time. We will ride before first light.”

“Should we . . . I mean to say, the corpses . . ." said Gem.

“We cannot bury them all, not without many days.”

“The Shades will have done this in other places,” said Chet.

“I imagine they have.”

“Can we not warn them? Or can we not, at least, give the Shades reason to pursue us instead of killing innocents who have never heard our names?”

“How do you mean to stop them, Chet?” said Loren, growing angry. “We could march into their midst and offer ourselves for sacrifice. But as long as we are outside their grasp, they will hunt for us wherever they think we might be found.”

“So you mean to let them?”

“We do not let them do anything,” said Xain. “Did we invite them into the Birchwood? Did we tell them where to find this village? Did we tell them to put their swords to the throat of innocence?”

Chet shook his head. “There must be something we can do.”

“There is not,” said Loren. “We can only flee, and survive, to someday deliver our greatest stroke.”
 

Loren thought about leaving Wellmont with Jordel, while the city was under siege. Others had begged the Mystic to stay and aid in Wellmont’s defense. He had refused and grew angry when pressed. Loren had thought him somewhat heartless at the time. Now, at last, she understood. Wrath was a mask, a bandage meant to staunch the festering wound of his guilt. Doubtless Jordel would have fought upon the walls of Wellmont and given his life to defend the city without a second thought. But he had known, or suspected, that a greater battle lay over the horizon, and so he needed Xain to survive. How long must he have traveled the nine lands with that burden, letting evil go unchecked in the service of stopping a far greater power?

Loren looked at them all, at Chet and Xain and the children, their faces turned to her, angry and hurt and expectant.
 

She set her jaw and squared her shoulders.

“I will take the first watch. All of you rest. Even you, Xain. Tomorrow is another long ride toward an uncertain end.”

fifteen

The following days passed like bitter winter months: cold, plodding, and lingering in their minds long after each long day was behind them. None spoke often, laughed, nor told any jokes, for the memories plagued them. They slept a few hours at a time, when neither the sun nor the moons were high to guide their way, and often as they pressed forward their heads would sag against their chests, only to snap upward at a jostle in the road.

Xain’s condition was growing slowly worse, and though Loren tried not to pay it much mind, she could not ignore it. Fortunately, it was not as bad as it had been in the Greatrocks. Then he had been driven to madness, half the time forgetting who and where he was, and the other half filled with a murderous rage that he sought to unleash upon Loren and the others. This was more of a quiet wasting away, a slow breaking down of his body. Loren often saw him wincing at dismount, and his skin had been bruising with barely a brush. But he spoke no complaint and always matched her pace. So she concerned herself only with the road ahead.

Five days after they found the village slaughtered in the Birchwood, they came at last out the northern side of the forest and down into the kingdom of Dorsea. Earlier that day, Loren noticed that the trees were shorter and sparser, less hearty than those in the south. The ground turned brown and brittle, the horses’ hooves kicking up dust that took long to settle.

Dorsea itself, when they reached it, was much the same. The land was not quite mountainous, but rolling and hilly as far as the eye could see, browner than it was green. The scant vegetation came in small, scrubby bushes and spindly trees, sucking what water they could from the earth.

“To the west and to the south, Dorsea is much like Selvan,” said Xain. “But here, it is half a desert. The acreage may be tilled, but not easily, and so the people are as hard and stubborn as the land upon which they feed themselves. Still, adversity has made them somewhat kinder than their western and southern brethren who, like all fat and happy people, turn their eyes outward to what more they can claim for their own.”

“I know much of Dorsean greed,” said Loren. Chet nodded.

“You speak with much dramatics and little truth,” said Annis, rolling her eyes. “Why, I met many merchants from Dorsea and members of the Dorsean royal family. They were no more or less crafty than any other inhabitants of the High King’s Seat. Those from Selvan included. You are a gem among women, Loren, and you seem a decent enough fellow, Chet, but you must know that not all people are so good and kindhearted as you.”

“It is foolish to claim great knowledge of all people when you have spent your life upon the Seat,” said Xain. “It could be said, rather, that the wealthy and the powerful are much the same from one kingdom to the next, though the people they rule may wildly vary. But this is idle philosophy, and we have little time. Let us press on.”

They were in open territory, in a land Loren knew little about. Xain took to guiding them now, for he had traveled Dorsea well as a young man.

“Do not tell me you hail from this kingdom,” said Annis in surprise.

“It is hard to say where I hail from,” said Xain, “especially since my first answer would have been the Seat until recently, and they will no longer claim me as their own. But I was born in Wadeland to the east, though I left is as a child when my parents found I had the gift of Elementalism.”

“And how did they find that out?” Gem leaned forward. “Were you bandying about the stables when you accidentally set the stable boy on fire?”

Xain chuckled—an odd sound from him these days, and one Loren welcomed. “Nothing so crude as that, though I can hardly blame you for thinking so, since you are a commoner and know little of the wealthy. When a child of royalty nears his fifth year, he is required by law to see a representative of the Academy. Wealthy merchants, such as my parents, pay in coin for such a representative to visit. These men know how to test for the gift and put the child through a series of trials meant to uncover if any of the four branches have presented themselves in strength.”

“I took the trials,” said Annis, sounding as if she were trying hard not to boast. “They found nothing. What do they do, I wonder, if a child shows the gift of more than one type of magic?”

“That is impossible,” said Xain. “We are gifted with but one—even the most powerful among us.”

Xain fixed Loren with a look. She thought, as he must be thinking, about the Lifemage, the Necromancer, and the two branches of magic that had been hidden for centuries.
 

How did the wizards of the Academy detect them, if ever they did?
 

Loren doubted if they would ever know.

sixteen

They made camp on the wide plains of Dorsea that night. They found a crag of a hill in the midst of the flatlands and settled down to the north so that it might block their fire’s light from anyone who would follow them out of the Birchwood. Loren knew there might be Shades in Dorsea already, and they might be spied from the west or north. But as they had seen no sign of their pursuers for days, the warmth seemed worth the risk.

Chet took first watch. Loren half expected Xain to volunteer, as he so often did these days, but the wizard looked weary and worn. Once they built a fire, he curled up in his bedroll and slept. Loren hoped that was a hopeful sign. When he had suffered from magestone sickness in the Greatrocks, he had gone through a time of great anguish and pain, followed by a bone-weary exhaustion. If he had reached that point already, it meant his recovery from now on would be less taxing.

Loren’s thoughts were still much occupied with their fight in the Birchwood, and she imagined it might give her a sleepless night. But the summer’s warmth and the fire’s soft glow lulled Loren to slumber, deep without dreams or black thoughts. She woke feeling refreshed, more so than she had in all the many miles of their journey since Northwood, and as relaxed as if she had spent the night on one of Mag’s softest mattresses.

Then she saw the moons, and realized with a start that it was still the middle of the night.

Loren looked about in confusion. Had a noise woken her? If so, it was gone. Only dying embers glowed, and the others were all curled in their blankets. The world was silent, save a faint whisper on the air and far-off birdsong.

Loren lifted her head and saw Chet sitting by a rock near the edge of camp, head bent into his chest, asleep. She sniffed in annoyance. It was foolish, and she would have words with him in the morning. For now, she would take watch and let him sleep. They were all of them weary.

But then Loren rose and saw the Elves.

There were six of them, glowing in the starlight only a few paces away from her sleeping friends. She knew them at once from a lifetime of tales told in nighttime whispers. It was said that to speak of the creatures too often might invite their wrath. Stories came from survivors, of which there were few. When humans came upon Elves in the nine lands, they rarely lived to tell the tale.

They were white of skin and clothing, the color of snow everywhere except their hair. That was raven-black and long, spilling down to the smalls of their backs and wafting gently with their every movement. They wore no armor and carried no weapons, clad in robes and dresses of white, the edges frilled and floating as though underwater. Even their eyes were white, a thin and ghostly gossamer with no pupils or irises, so that it hard to see where they were looking.

Except that they were looking at Loren, and somehow, in the deepest part of her soul, she
knew
it.

She was frozen, unable to move a muscle. What should she do? What
could
she do? She thought to rouse the others, get the horses so they could ride for their lives. They were powerless if the Elves should choose to harm them—even Xain, were he at the height of his power, and he was far from that now. Elves could not be reasoned with, they could not be talked out of slaughter if that was there intent. Indeed, so far as she knew. And no one had ever spoken to Elves or learned their words.

She could not run, not now. They could never move fast enough. Even if Loren left the others to save herself and run for Midnight, they could be upon her in an instant. The Elves would kill Loren, and all the rest of them, if that was their whim. And she could do nothing to stop it.