The Amber Legacy (26 page)

‘She’s got a rat in her vest,’ Liz informed them.

The man’s expression shifted to mild surprise. ‘Take the rat out,’ he said.

‘Why?’ Meg demanded.

He produced a dagger. ‘Take the rat out.’

Frightened, she levered Whisper up until the rat’s black head poked out of her vest.

‘Hurry up,’ the man ordered. ‘Put it on the floor.’

‘Don’t hurt her,’ Meg begged.

The man grabbed at Meg and ripped Whisper out of the vest, but he yelped and dropped the rat when she bit his hand. His colleagues kicked at the rat as she landed, but missed, and Whisper scampered under a table.

‘Leave her alone!’ Meg pleaded, and moved to intercept the men who were chasing the rat, but two grabbed her.

‘Get her out of here,’ the leader ordered. ‘Digger, kill the rat.’

Meg struggled in vain, but they were too strong, and she was bundled out the door and into the waiting coach. The dark-haired prostitute laughed as Meg was dragged past, yelling, ‘Four men at once is a bit greedy, lovey! You should share!’

‘
W
ho are you?’ she demanded. She was sitting on a wooden floor in an empty farmhouse room. A solitary lantern flickered on a broken shelf. Cobwebs adorned every corner. Four men, arms crossed, were guarding her. ‘What have you done with Westridge?’ The men smiled cruelly.

When she tried to get up, they pushed her down. When she tried again, they pushed her down again, and the man who had been speaking throughout warned, ‘Try it again, and I will hurt you.’

‘I’m a guest of Queen Sunset,’ she blurted.

The men laughed, and their leader sneered, ‘Better if you were the Queen herself,’ making a motion with his thumb of cutting his throat. His unshaven stubble, the scar across the bridge of his nose and his narrow dark eyes made him appear incapable of soft emotion.

Meg waited, her fear rising as she contemplated her fate. Westridge was dead. He had to be. His soldiers would have no idea what had happened. She was alone. But who were her captors? Why did they take her? It was obvious they’d been waiting for her, but why? Her bum was numb. ‘Can I please stand up?’ she asked.

‘No,’ her captor growled. She shifted to ease her discomfort, but stopped when she heard a light rhythmic tap on the door. ‘He’s here. No light.’ The lantern was snuffed, plunging the room into darkness. The door opened and boots shuffled on the floorboards.

‘Is she unhurt?’ asked a deep resonant voice.

‘Yes,’ her captor answered.

‘Meg Farmer. That’s your name, isn’t it?’ said the deep voice.

‘Who are you?’ she asked tremulously.

‘Who I am is of no consequence to you.’

‘What sort of answer is that?’

‘The only one you will get here.’ A pause followed. The voice said, ‘You killed Treasure Overbrook.’ Her fear rose and she began shaking. ‘Treasure was the finest warrior in Future’s army,’ the voice continued. ‘His armour was crafted with magical spells to ward bladed weapons. He rode out under the protection of Future’s Seers. And yet you, barely old enough to be a woman, hiding in the enemy’s ranks, brought him down when no man could. How is this possible?’

‘I don’t know,’ she murmured weakly.

The voice swore, and said, ‘You
do
know. You are much more than you pretend. I can feel it,’ and Meg felt the familiar tingle along her spine that came with magic. ‘You are an aberration, and aberrations must be destroyed.’

There was scratching at the door. The voice was silent. The scratching came again, insistent. ‘Check it,’ the voice ordered.

Feet shuffled and a sliver of pale moonlight appeared in the doorway. ‘There’s no one here.’ A man yelped and swore.

‘What is going on?’ the deep voice demanded.

Another man cried, ‘My face! Something—’ and he screamed.

Escape!
Meg felt the word in her head—not really as a word, more an imperative.
Escape!
She shuffled blindly towards the sliver of light, but bumped against a man’s leg. Someone else screamed.

‘Light the lantern!’ the deep voice bellowed. ‘Where’s the girl?’

Boots shuffled. As she reached the door, Meg heard glass shatter and another cry of pain followed by swearing. She wrenched the door open and scrambled out, using moonlight from a window to find the exit. A moment later, she was in the open and running. Shadows loomed and a creature leapt and knocked her down. A wet tongue lashed her cheek. Arms held her. She started to fight, but a voice harshly whispered, ‘Easy! It’s me, Longarm!’ The familiar voice quelled her terror enough to calm her instinct to keep struggling. And Sunfire’s tongue almost made her laugh.

She heard loud voices, looked around and saw four men emerging from the farmhouse, framed in torchlight. ‘She can’t be far!’ one yelled, and Meg recognised the leader’s voice. ‘Find her!’

Westridge’s Group were kneeling and standing in formation, bows loaded and aimed at the house. Longarm bellowed, ‘Drop your weapons! We are the Elite Mounted Archers!’ The response from the men at the farmhouse was immediate. They scattered. Bows thrummed. All four men fell. The torch rolled along the ground and went out, leaving the moonlight to illuminate the dead.

‘There were five,’ Meg said. ‘There’s another one still in there.’

‘Swords!’ Longarm ordered. The metallic scrape of blades leaving sheaths whispered through the night. ‘Alive if possible,’ Longarm told the men, and sent a group of ten forward. Meg went to follow, but
Longarm stopped her. ‘If he makes a fight of it, you could get hurt. My colleagues will get him.’

‘Who scratched on the door?’ she asked.

‘When?’

‘That’s how I got out. Who came in?’

‘No one went in,’ he explained. ‘Sunfire led us here. He went into the house, but he ran out again before you came out.’

‘Sunfire? But how did he know where I was?’

‘He tracked you. We followed him. He’s a bloody clever animal. You’re lucky he can do that.’

Meg bent to hug the dingo. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t want you to come,’ she said, tears in her eyes. Sunfire’s nose touched her cheek, but he wriggled free, as if he was embarrassed by the excessive attention. ‘And Leader Westridge?’

‘Back in the village,’ said Longarm. ‘They tied him up in the stables after beating him pretty badly, but he got free somehow and came and got us. And he suggested Sunfire might find you.’

Meg couldn’t believe her luck. She looked towards the house, as a soldier emerged. ‘No one else in there, Longarm,’ he reported. ‘Place is empty.’

‘But there was a fifth one,’ Meg insisted. ‘I saw him. At least, I heard him.’

‘Then he’s got away very quickly,’ said the soldier. ‘The house is definitely empty.’

‘Search the others for clues as to who they are,’ Longarm ordered. As the soldier headed off to carry out the instruction, Longarm said to Meg, ‘Did you get any idea who they were?’

‘They knew who I was,’ she replied. ‘Are you sure the war with the Rebels is over?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Because they were after me for killing—for killing the blue knight.’ Sunfire nuzzled her leg, and a weight
dragged on her trousers. She looked down to see the shape of a rat beginning to climb the fabric. She scooped up Whisper and held her to her chest. ‘I thought you were dead.’

Longarm stared in disbelief. ‘You mean the
rat
even followed you out here?’

Meg laughed. ‘I had her with me when they captured me. I thought they were going to kill her, but they must have brought her too.’

Leader Westridge was very badly beaten and bloodied from head to toe. His left arm was broken and his face swollen from the bashing. He had a nasty cut across his back from a sword, and lacerations across the base of his skull. Meg felt queasy when she saw the extent of his injuries in the lantern light. ‘I need a big bowl of boiling water and clean rags,’ she told Longarm. ‘And then I want everyone out of this room, except you. You can help.’ Westridge could only open his right eye. He tried to speak when she bent over to check his left ear, but his bruised mouth was painfully swollen. ‘You’ll feel better in the morning,’ she promised, but inwardly she was nervous. She knew she had the Blessing for healing, but she was still uncertain of the extent to which she could apply the skill. Westridge’s injuries needed tending, and quickly. She was also feeling guilty that he’d been injured for her sake. She owed him, just as she’d owed Wombat.

When the water and bandaging materials arrived, she set to cleaning the wounds, fighting her squeamish responses when she found bone jutting from Westridge’s broken arm. She carefully stripped the man of his upper clothing, with Longarm’s help, and had Longarm pass her fresh cloths as she worked. When she was satisfied the wounds were clean, she turned to Longarm and said, ‘This part will seem strange to you. I’m going to
apply the Blessing to heal your Leader. You can stay to watch if you want. I don’t know how well it will work.’

‘I’ll stay.’

Meg nodded. She looked down at Westridge’s battered face and smiled, and he blinked his right eye in response. She placed her hands on his arm and concentrated, imagining the arm whole and unbroken.

The next day, as they travelled, Longarm would tell his colleagues that he saw a pale amber glow emanating from Westridge’s arm under Meg’s hands, and that same glow reappeared each time she laid her hands upon the injured Leader’s damaged tissues. The glow was faint, but he’d seen it, and it had looked like a late Shahk sunset when the clouds hide the sun. She repeated the process several times on each injury, and especially on Westridge’s face. And when she finished, exhausted and wanting to sleep, Westridge was already asleep, but his skin was as unblemished as the day he’d been born. The Blessing was successful. She asked Longarm to help her to a tent, where she collapsed, with Sunfire lying protectively beside her and Whisper curled beside the dingo.

She was thinking that it had been some time since she’d dreamed, and she was arguing with herself that she only dreamed when she was rested, not when she was exhausted. It felt absurd to be debating with herself in a dream, and yet she was.

Then she felt the presence of a shadow. There was only a sense of a shadow, not a real cause of it. On a hill above her, she saw a figure in a dark blue robe, taking aim with a bow, at her. Sunfire was running up the slope towards the blue figure. Whisper appeared on her shoulder and said, Now would be a good time to use your Blessing, and vanished again. Puzzled by the
rat’s message—not because it was a message from a rat, but because it was spoken in feelings not words—she stared at an arrow that was streaking towards her chest.

Westridge slept solidly throughout the following day, his wounds healed but his body exhausted from the trauma, so his men rigged a stretcher between two horses. Longarm insisted they ride armed for defence, and they passed through many villages before reaching a site outside the town of Yellow Plains where Longarm decided to make an overnight camp.

Dream fragments returned to Meg throughout the day as they journeyed across the rich farmland. She wanted to decipher its content, knowing that what she dreamed could well portend an event in her future, so she reasoned through the possibilities. What she knew for certain after Broadfields was that she now had enemies who were hunting her for slaying Treasure, and at least one, the man with the deep voice in the farmhouse, was a person with the Blessing—a Seer. Her dream warned her that a Seer would kill her. Perhaps Sunfire and Whisper in the dream represented friends who would risk their lives to protect her.

That evening, Westridge regained consciousness. When he emerged from his tent, Longarm and the men were amazed. Westridge stretched his arms, grinned, and told them he felt refreshed and alive. He knelt before Meg, who flushed with embarrassment, and proclaimed, ‘Whatever generosity Her Majesty bestows upon you, my lady Meg, I pledge my life to serve you in any capacity you so name.’ He looked up. ‘I owe you my life. It is yours to command.’

She turned away from his gaze, only to see the rest of the Group staring. She looked down again, because he remained on the ground before her, and stammered,
‘Get up. You don’t owe me anything. You were hurt and I did what I could do, nothing more. Get up.’

Westridge rose. ‘I meant what I just said.’ Then he ordered his troop to set up a duty watch, and left Meg to herself.

Later, as they ate by the campfire, he asked Meg what had happened after his beating, and listened attentively to her version of the events, fascinated by her account of the fall of darkness in the farmhouse and the subsequent outbreak of confusion. ‘Someone came in,’ she said, ‘and then the Rebels were yelling and fighting. That’s how I escaped.’

‘Longarm assures me that no one went in until after you came out. We can guess that your dingo scratched on the door, but he came straight out before you.’

‘Then what was in the room?’

Westridge shrugged. ‘Maybe they started fighting among themselves. They got confused in the dark.’

‘I’m certain the one who never came out was a Seer,’ Meg confided.

‘How can you be sure?’

‘I felt his magic.’ When Westridge’s face registered a lack of understanding, she explained: ‘Every time magic is used, I get a tingling sensation along my spine. I got that in the farmhouse. Someone told me that only Seers have the Blessing.’

Westridge still looked perplexed, but he nodded as if he understood, and said, ‘If there is a Seer involved, then Queen Sunset will need to know because it means that there are still insurgents among her people. We’ll need to hurry tomorrow. I’ll dispatch riders ahead to warn the Queen.’ He rose and went to speak to Longarm.

The Queen’s Elite Mounted Archers were on the road by sunrise, and they rode at an unbroken pace across
the countryside. Even when afternoon rain settled in, they kept riding, and only stopped late in the evening in the shelter of a small wood on a hill above a large town that nestled on the banks of the River of Kings. ‘That’s Princestown,’ Westridge told Meg, as they looked down on the town lights. ‘We’ll be in Port of Joy this time tomorrow evening, all going well and Jarudha guiding us. Eat quickly, and get your sleep. We’ll be up again before daylight.’

Meg stayed to study the dark landscape after Westridge retired, sheltering from the soft rain beneath the broad boughs of a large pine tree. The pine smell was a new experience, not the familiar eucalypt of her home village. Trees, scenery, animals—everything was different. It was hard to imagine that Summerbrook was almost a fortnight away to the north-east, and unknown to the people living on the land below.

Through the rain, she glimpsed clustered points of light scattered across the dark landscape, each cluster denoting a village or town. She had sat on the hillsides around Summerbrook at night, listening to the nocturnal world, waiting for Sunfire to return from his hunt, and the only lights beyond the handful of house lamps of the village were the moon and stars. Here the villages and towns were so close together that some were less than a half morning’s walk apart. Now that she knew she was a day’s travel away from the capital city that she’d only ever heard described in stories and ballads, she felt a sudden sense of loneliness and an encumbering fear that she would never see Summerbrook again.