Sons of Destiny Prequel Series 003 - The Shifter (9 page)

Kenyen concentrated, drawing up memories of his many injuries over the last five years, fighting with the members of his warband. He didn't even have to take the stick from the other shifter, let alone swing it. His left eye, still shaped like the Corredai's, blackened and grew puffy. His hair shifted, sporting not one, but two lumps. His right ankle twinged, shifting his weight to his left leg, and his left arm sagged from its socket. The elder blinked, brows lifting in surprise.

"... Either you've pretended to be injured before, boy," he murmured, "or you've been injured a
lot
, to be able to re-create it so convincingly on a whim."

Kenyen almost pointed out that if he'd had only three more shapes, qualifying himself for the rank of
multerai
, shapeshifter-lord, he'd have been put into the rotation for his warband's leadership. A last-moment twinge of caution stayed his tongue. Instead, he merely said, "I've taken a lot of damage, yes, but I've also learned how to survive it."

"Good. You'll need to be tough. Just don't
show
it. That boy down there is a weakling," the unnamed man dismissed. "Pretend to be him, and you'll get close enough to the blacksmith to be trusted. The moment you are that trusted, we'll tell you what to look for." Crossing to the bed, he whacked the frame with the stick. "Wake up, Zellan Fin Don!"

Zellan, or rather the shifter playing him, woke with a snort. Twisting onto his side, he pushed halfway up on one elbow, blinking at the two of them. "Wha...? Oh. It's time, already?"

"Yes, it's time, you lazy mutt. Go drag this son of a cur through the mud, then haul him back home to that Healer bitch and her little girl," the elder ordered.

"As for you, and Cullerog," Kenyen interjected, "keep the
real
Traver alive and unharmed. I know I didn't learn enough to imitate him flawlessly. That means I'll need more cooperation out of him."

Zellan snorted. "Are you
concerned
for him? I thought you ate people."

"Only when I'm in the mood." The words turned his stomach, but they had to be said. Kenyen didn't want to give these men any excuse to doubt that he was as much of a bastard cur as they were. "Besides, any herdsman will tell you that you always tend your flock carefully when raising them, even if the end result is an intent to slit their throats and hang them up to bleed dry."

"I'll go get that pony ready," Zellan stated, levering himself off the bed. "We can pretend it was lost when you fell, then recaptured shortly before finding you."

"What about my horse?" Kenyen asked. The elder snorted.

"That'll be your 'gift' to join us, of course. Traver wouldn't have the means to acquire such a fine steed," the stocky, older man dismissed. "He's just a farmer's boy. A dirt grubber."

"I'm expecting to get back four times what that mare is worth, off the Plains," Kenyen warned him. What he wanted to do was protest the mare's loss, period, but couldn't. That wasn't a part of the role he was supposed to play. "As it was, they barely let me keep her when they threw me out. So whatever it is you want, it had better be worth it."

"Oh, it is. If the rumors are true..." Grinning, the elderly shifter patted his flap-covered forehead with his fingers, then shooed Kenyen and Zellan out of the cottage. "Go on; you've a long ride to get back home, and a bit of a rough time dragging yourself around, making it look like you really did fall."

Nodding, Kenyen headed outside. Not to the barn, though that was his eventual goal. The first thing he had to do, however, was to clean off that... ring... hastily buried in the skin of his palm, and dredge up enough courage to apply it to the necessary spot. Being a Shifterai, he wouldn't have to actually pierce such delicate skin, but he would have to shift a small hole for it... and then remember to maintain it, so that he didn't accidentally lose said ring down one of his trouser legs later.

As dangerous as his situation was, Kenyen couldn't stop worrying over one particular thought in the back of his head.
What kind of woman, outlander or not, would
want
a man to pierce that part of himself?

The slopes of the Nespah Valley, covered in the tea plantations and terraced gardens of the various holdings claiming the land, looked like a patchwork blanket sewn from a thousand shades of living green. Most of it was darker than the paler pastels of spring, but here and there, the stone hedges supporting each terrace had been strewn with wildflowers, sending streaks of bright colors across the hillsides. Fruit and nut trees lined the ridges and the vales, waves of wheat and oats rippled in sinewy streaks, and mossy-roofed, pale stone cottages dotted the landscape.

The scent of tea perfumed the air; not quite pungent, it played the dominant scent for all but the closest of those blooms. Still, Kenyen breathed in a hundred different aromas, from the wild roses lining the hedge walls rising up on his right, to the scent of roasted beef wafting out of one of the larger homes lower down the hillside on his left. The rippling curves of the terraces and the mazelike paths between the tea hedges gave the landscape a scribbled texture; the shouting peals of children at play, racing from level to level with baskets bouncing on their arms and dogs chasing merrily at their heels, gave the sounds of the scene a happy level of chaos to match.

Not that he had control over where they were going. Zellan had picked up his own mountain pony at an inn just a couple of hours from the shepherd's cottage, hastily left behind in the need to track down the missing Traver with shifter tricks. Now he held the reins of Traver's pony, leading it and its swaying lump of Traver-shaped flesh, since Kenyen was trying to look too injured and dazed to have guided his own steed.

From the sudden quieting of the children and their wide-eyed stares as the two men passed, Kenyen wondered if he had gone a little overboard in dotting his face with scrapes and bruises. Nor did it help that Zellan had literally dragged Kenyen behind his mountain mare for several yards, scraping and muddying his borrowed clothes for verisimilitude.

Turning onto a path that rose a little bit higher, they made their way to a cluster of homes a little too big to be called cottages. This was a prosperous holding, for many of the buildings had been plastered and whitewashed beneath their slate-and-moss rooflines. It also boasted the large, stone-walled blacksmith's forge Traver had mentioned. The other buildings were surrounded by herb beds, vegetable patches, even chicken coops sitting in the middle of reed-fenced runs, but the smithy sat in the middle of a broad, flat, flagstone-lined patch. That, Kenyen guessed, was no doubt so that any fires accidentally sparked wouldn't be able to spread far enough to threaten the other structures.

As it was, the makeshift courtyard around the forge served as the gathering place for the locals. They drifted onto the flagstones, the men in gathered
breikas
similar to what the Shifterai wore on the plains, the women in gathered skirts instead of more sensible trousers. Then again, they weren't expected to pack up and ride every handful of days, following their herds nine months out of the year.

Men, women, and children alike peered in curiosity at the injuries Kenyen sported and muttered in worry when they recognized the bruised and bloodied features as those of the missing Traver. One of the older women abandoned the basket she was weaving on the stoop of her home. Bustling over to the second house from hers, she rapped on the door. "Reina! Solyn! We need a Healer out here! Traver and Zellan came back without the caravan!"

Within moments, two women emerged. They looked like before-and-after images of each other; both were slender with somewhat heart-shaped faces, both had hazel green eyes and brown hair pulled into braids, with curly little wisps that tried to escape here and there. Both were clad in faded blue skirts and matching
chamsa
tunics, their garments partially covered in stained beige aprons.

The elder one had dark, polished horn buttons holding her tunic together down her right side; the younger one had pale bone buttons. The elder had her hair braided and looped around her head; the younger wore her braid dangling down her back. Beyond that, the only difference between them was the twenty or thirty years that had weathered the elder's face.

Wiping her hands on her apron, Reina Lai Fa—wife of the blacksmith Ysander Mil Ben, according to Traver—flicked her fingers at a couple of the curious loiterers. "Well? Don't just stand there! Help the boy down, and get him into my sickroom. If he hurts half as bad as he looks, he could fall out of the saddle at any moment."

Kenyen remembered to blink and give her a dazed look, then winced and whimpered, moving stiffly as helping hands lifted him down from the saddle. His injuries were faked, far less painful than they technically looked, but he knew enough—and remembered enough, from injuries past—how to move slowly and awkwardly, as if they were much worse.

It didn't take long for him to be ushered, limping, into the home of the local Healer. The house was large enough; it had an entry hall with three doors. One led to the right, to what looked like the family gathering place; one led back to what looked like a kitchen, and the one on the left led to a smallish room with a pair of tables pushed against the walls, a couple of stools, a chair, a small hearth sheltering an equally small fire, and a cot. One of the tables was crowded with bowls, bottles, tools, and bandages in neatly but tightly spaced arrangements; the other was bare and clean, broad enough to have supported a man.

It was to the cot that he was led, not to the bare table or one of the stools. Female hands plucked at his clothes, unbuckling his belt, tugging off his boots and socks—he remembered to wince when the left one was removed from his mock-swollen ankle—and then Solyn shooed the other women out of the room, letting her mother unbutton Traver's brown tunic from Kenyen's reshaped chest. Zellan lingered in the room, the concern furrowing his brow no doubt as much from his worries over Kenyen's impending performance as from overt compassion for all those injuries.

"However did this happen, young man?" Reina asked, fussing over his wounds.

"Uh... I fell?" Kenyen muttered, matching Traver's rougher-sounding tones. He blinked and followed the Healer's movements as she hustled into the next room to the left, which reeked of the scents from a hundred herbs in various stages of preparation and preservation.

Zellan stepped into the breach. "He took off the first night out. We don't know why; we think he forgot something and wanted to come back and get it. I found his pony wandering loose, backtracked it to a ravine, and found him at the bottom of it, dehydrated. He'd lain down there all the next day, I think."

The young woman, Solyn, gave Kenyen—or rather, the man she thought was Traver—a worried look. "... Are you alright?"

Kenyen debated how to react. His own reaction would have either varied between brushing it off with humor—since he was a shapeshifter and could heal his own injuries quickly enough, given time and effort—or sarcasm. Traver, however, hadn't seemed the type to use either. He shrugged awkwardly, hissed, and supported his sagging left elbow. "I can't remember if I've had worse. My arm doesn't want to work."

Reina tutted as she came back from the herb-room, carrying a precious glass cup and a brown glazed vial. "I'm not surprised. Congratulations, it seems you've thoroughly dislocated it. We'll get these scrapes cleaned up, wrap some bandages and poultices on everything, then roll it back into its socket. But first, a pain posset. You'll need it." She poured a dose from the bottle to the cup, eyed him, and added a tiny bit more. "Drink this. Do you need me to hold it for you? No? Good."

Taking the cup, Kenyen sipped at it. The combination of herbs and spirits warned him it would be fairly potent. If he did drink all of it, without
real
pain to absorb the effects, the dose she wanted to give him would send him into a drugged daze and possibly be strong enough to lose his shape. Thinking fast, he drank about half of it, then made a face, took another sip, and held it out with a grimace.

"I... I can't... It's making me feel sick. I'm sorry," he mumbled.

Reina took back the glass, setting it on the table under the window. "If you want more, it'll be over here. If you need to vomit, there's a bucket under the bed, to the right of your legs. Solyn, start bathing that side of him. We'll also need to get his trousers and underthings off—no ogling or thoughts of twining, young lady," her mother added briskly. "He's in no shape for such things."

Solyn wasn't the only one to blush. So did Kenyen. He cleared his throat and stated carefully, "Uh... twining? I don't really... I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about."

That made the younger woman glance up at him sharply. He gave her his best helpless look and shrugged his good shoulder.

"I don't remember a lot. I mean, you both look familiar, and I know a couple things when I look at you, but... My head really hurts," he finished lamely.

Zellan spoke up again from his spot near the entry door. "He couldn't even remember my name, though he did know me as a friend when I found him. He may have had a concussion while he lay in the ravine for all I know, but it seems to be gone, now. Along with bits of the boy's memory and wits."

Stooping, Reina pried open each one of Kenyen's reshaped eyes. She peered intensely, gaze flicking back and forth, then straightened and shrugged. "His pupils are reacting normally. It's rare to lose a lot of memory in a fall. Not unheard of, but rare. It should come back, though, particularly now that he's back on familiar ground.