The Blood of the Land (2 page)

She could have almost laughed at that—not for the strange words Elias Sutherland was using, incongruous against his earthy drawl, but for the simple fact that he called her ma'am. Like she was a lady, and never mind the color of his skin or hers. And for that one sign of grace, Dorcas thought she might risk trusting him a little further.

“We heard men in the woods. They're after you, ain't they?”

Elias nodded once, heavily, his eyes shuddering closed with an exhaustion that echoed through Dorcas' own limbs. “Slave hunters. They come for me and shot me,” he rasped, “'cause they know I've been helpin' your folk. Tried to rip me off my land and poison it with bloodshed. Took my house. I made Jenny run, a-and Jesus help me, I couldn't even go with her!” His hand drifted up to the shoulder Dorcas had healed, and he shuddered, hard. “Should've just gone ahead and let me bleed, ma'am. Should've just let me bleed.”

“We can still do that,” Caleb said. But the edge had left his voice.

“No,” said Dorcas. “He's a friend to us. You got a gun of your own then, Mister Sutherland?”

His eyes came open again, dark with doubt. “Yeah. But I ain't got too many shots left. Two or three.”

“That'll be enough, then, if you use them wisely,” Dorcas answered, certain in her bones that what she was about to utter was in the right. “We're going north. You want to come with us?”

One end of Elias' mouth curled up, though that small twitch of his lips held nothing of a smile. “I can't,” he whispered. “The land's screamin' at me, and I-I can't Ward it proper, not with so much blood... but it won't let me go.” Then he paused and eyed them both. “But I was supposed to help you both. This barn is mine. I ain't rebuilt it yet from the storm that ripped it apart last summer, but it's good for hidin' things. Was waitin' on two to come for what I buried in the corner.”

Dorcas blinked and then felt a surge of hope. Whatever else he was, if this man was their conductor, then maybe she and Caleb still had a chance. “Where?” she breathed.

“Northeast corner.”

It took no time to find what had been promised: the cache of jerky and hard tack, covered over by a light layer of earth and canvas. There was nothing special to mark the spot, no religious sign or marker to betray whose bounty they were taking; Elias had done his best to draw no attention to the spot. She couldn't quite bring herself to pray in thanks, for she'd never figured out if the white men's God existed. Or if her mother's own tales of praying to Inle for a blessing for her child—the only explanation she'd ever had for her healing gifts—were the true ones, instead.

But all the same, she paused a moment to touch the ground where the rations had been buried, and tried to infuse the earth with a spark of what energy she had left. When she came back with the satchel slung over her shoulder, she clasped Elias's shoulder in gratitude. “This pays me back proper for the healing. Are you sure you won't come with us?” She hesitated, and then finished, “Maybe we could catch up with your Jenny.”

Still Elias shed no tears, but even in the dim light, Dorcas saw his eyes shining hot and wet. “I don't think so, ma'am,” he said. “But I'll go with you as far as the river. I left you a boat, too.”

Once they got on the move Caleb made a point of putting himself between her and the strange white farmer, yet he might as well not have bothered, for Elias Sutherland barely seemed to notice either of them once they fled the shelter of the barn. As he'd promised he did have a gun, a rifle that looked as ill-used as he, which he carried with such negligence that Dorcas had to wonder if he could shoot it at all.

What with the way his Power streamed around him like a shroud, though, she wondered as well if he'd even need to.

His face was bone-pale against the darkness, the face of a walking ghost, and as they slipped out through the trees Dorcas felt that Power of his leaving tendrils of ragged silence in his wake. The natural sounds of the night, the rustling of the wind in the trees and the incessant murmur of crickets, died away as Elias passed. Their own footsteps seemed to make no noise at all, no matter how heavily or lightly they trod. And, brave though he'd been in their dash off the McCreary plantation, Caleb's hands trembled each time he took hold of hers to help her over a log or over a rough patch in the trail they were following to the river. Her beloved had never pretended to understand where she got her gifts from, but he'd accepted them, revered them even.

Elias, though, disturbed him down to the bone. She could tell, for the Warder man disturbed her too.

Whatever Elias was—white man or farmer, Warder or one of the irunmole in her mother's stories—he kept with them like a shadow until the trees began to thin and the silt-rich odor of the river rose up on the wind. No pursuers came after them, though they took no chances that such luck would hold for long. They each moved as fast as they dared, and both men kept doubling back to hide their trail. Thus it was Dorcas who first broke through the cover of the trees to spy the curving twist of the Kentucky River before her.

Out here the light was somewhat brighter, though the moon rode blurred behind winter clouds, and the breeze bit with the promise of snow to come. Over the water she could see the far shore, an indistinct line of bare-branched trees that she supposed was exactly like the one on her side. But, closer still, another line of trees crowned a strip of land so small that it barely deserved to be called an island. The river split itself to flow round it on either side, and the nearer fork seemed to Dorcas to be no wider than a strong man could swim—or a strong woman. She sighed, rubbed a hand across her face, and forced herself to stay upright. There would be no rest for her and Caleb, not yet, not till they put many more miles and the slave hunters behind them.

“I don't see no boat,” Caleb said, coming up behind her.

“I stashed it so it wouldn't be in plain sight.” That was Elias, coming up on her other side. But his voice sounded strangled, as if he could barely utter the words, and Dorcas turned to look at him. He stood rigid, gazing with stricken eyes out to the tiny island, and a muscle twitched in his check. “Y'all are going to have to head over there without me. I can't go another step.”

Somewhere far behind them, back the way they'd come, voices rose up in the trees; with them came the baying of dogs. Dread gripped Dorcas, and she saw it rise in Caleb's face, too. “Then where the hell did you put the boat?” Caleb demanded.

He had the right of it too, for though her Caleb had no Power of his own, he had a way of understanding what was before him. “You mean just that,” Dorcas said to Elias, who still stood unmoving, sweat beading on his brow in the moonlight. “You can't move another step, can you?”

“It's the Warding.” Elias gave a harsh little giggle that was closer to a sob. “My land is tainted with blood and I can't even...” Then his head snapped up. There was no color left in his face to lose, but his jaw dropped and Dorcas saw him strain where he stood, as though unseen chains held him fast. One last word escaped him, in the tiniest of whispers. “J-jenny?”

Back in the trees another voice roared out over the barking of the hounds, “They came this way! Got their scent!”

“I don't see 'em!”

“They can't be too far ahead!”

Galvanized, Dorcas seized Elias' arm with one hand and his face with the other, but no matter how she pressed she couldn't get him to turn his gaze to her. Then Caleb gave a cry and pointed, and shock rolled up from within her, threatening to drown exhaustion and dread alike. The moon's radiance, thin trickle of light though it was, was enough now to cast a silvery sheen down on the little island—and in the heart of the trees on its nearest bank, she spied the shape of a woman. Dorcas couldn't see much of her from a distance, what she wore or what her face was like. Yet she could see the moonlight shining right through her as though she were made of mist.

And she could see grief breaking out across the face of Elias Sutherland, enough to tell her he was looking now at his Jenny. His wife, she thought. Her healing Power recoiled in her, as if the shape on the island revolted it somehow, and that was all Dorcas needed to tell her she was looking on no one alive. If that shape was Jenny Sutherland, Jenny Sutherland was dead.

Behind them, though, the dogs began to howl. Before either she or Elias could react, Caleb whirled and seized the gun from the other man's slack fingers. “I ain't letting them take me back!”

“Caleb, no!”

Before he could fire, three shots rang out from the trees. One dropped Elias, catching him high in the shoulder and spinning him around to fall face down to the earth. Another caught Caleb and sent him sprawling. Dorcas felt the third slice the air a hand's breadth from her ear; with no other choice, she froze where she stood, holding her hands up and out to either side and cursing under her breath. Her Power churned. God in Heaven, she'd just healed Elias Sutherland, and now she despaired of being able to heal him again. Or Caleb. She didn't dare glance at either man, but she could feel the ground beneath her feet humming as it drank in their blood.

The men advancing with their guns and their hounds commanded the rest of her attention. Five of them in total, and she knew all their faces, but only two mattered: Harriman Tucker, the foreman of the McCreary plantation, with iron-streaked red hair and a face that looked like a father's, weathered and hard. And Josiah McCreary, tall and lean and carelessly handsome, but with a knife-sharp smile and eyes that held no light.

“Dorcas McCreary,” he said as he stepped forward, crooning as if to a wayward child, “you've led me on a merry chase.”

Her skin crawled at the sound of his voice, and it took all she had to keep from screaming. “I will thank you, sir, not to call me that,” she hissed. “That name is no name of mine.”

“Oh, but it is, darlin',” McCreary said. There was no disgust in his face, no derision or contempt, and for Dorcas that was almost worse than if he'd been openly hostile. “You'll take what I give you, whether it's a name, clothes on that pretty brown back, or food in your belly.” He reached her, looking her up and down, and only then did she see what lurked just behind his eyes: hunger. Without warning he seized her, continuing, “And if I want to put a baby in that belly instead, you'll take that too. You think you won't, you're deluding yourself.” Dorcas struggled in his grasp, repulsed, and his only reply to that was to pump another bullet into Caleb's form. As Caleb howled, wrenching Dorcas' heart, McCreary finished blithely, “Don't make me shoot him again.”

“Josiah, for the love of God, restrain yourself,” Harriman Tucker said through gritted teeth. “Your father wants them back in working order. That doesn't mean rutted, raped, or dead!”

Two of the other men chortled, and one outright guffawed while McCreary himself turned back to the older man. “You may be my father's foreman, Harry, but in case you've forgotten, you don't command me,” he replied, with steel in his voice.

His attention was off her for but a moment, but it was all the time that Dorcas needed. Her hand whipped out the knife with which she'd cut the bullet from Elias Sutherland; for him and for her Caleb, who both lay bleeding at the river's edge, she thrust the blade straight at McCreary's shoulder. If blood was what it took to keep her and Caleb free, then blood by God she'd take—

BLOOD

The word was never spoken, yet it screamed across Dorcas' nerves nonetheless, and resounded through her skull in a voice she did not know. Around her the men jolted, even as her knife bit at McCreary's flesh and made him whirl back to her, his fist flying out to clout her across the jaw.

BLOOD UPON MY EARTH

A woman, Dorcas realized as she tumbled backwards to slam into the riverbank. Her head struck the earth, and for an instant she could do nothing but lie stunned and wonder if the lash of grief and fury that assailed her senses was the voice of Jenny Sutherland. An instant later, Elias' anguished shout confirmed it.

“Jenny! Jenny honey, no—don't—”

THEY SHOT ME ELIAS

One of McCreary's men cried out; who, Dorcas couldn't tell. It wasn't important, not when she needed all her strength to roll over, to evade Josiah McCreary's frantic grasp and reach Caleb's crumpled form.

“What the hell are you doing, witch?” McCreary snarled—words he'd hurled at Dorcas before, but this time his gaze was pointed away from her, out to the water. And for the first time since Dorcas had been sold to Josiah McCreary's father, she saw her master's son's eyes fill with fright.

THEY SHOT YOU

Chill wind rushed in over the bank, and with it rose the river itself: long, snaking ropes of it, uncoiling towards McCreary and his men, snaring each in a noose of strangling, silted water. The two dogs bayed in terror, backed away from the river's edge, and then bolted away into the trees. One of McCreary's men tried to follow them, only to drop convulsing to the earth, his hands clawing at his throat. The other two, the men whose names Dorcas had never known, keeled over gasping in his wake.

Dorcas threw herself over Caleb, her hands seeking to connect with his wounds while she prayed her body would shield him from the wrath ascending from the river. She barely dared to lift her head, yet her gaze came up nonetheless, just in time to see the figure walking over the water. With every step the shape gained color and detail, yet when its feet touched the earth Dorcas could still see through it to the trees beyond. Blood gleamed all along the bodice of its ragged dress, and blood stained the entire right side of its shattered head.

MY BLOOD SETS THE WARDING

The figure snapped its arms up high to either side, and with that gesture, two new tendrils of water lashed out to engulf Harriman Tucker and Josiah McCreary. Through a mask of blood, eyes that might once have been the blue of April skies shone now in no color Dorcas could name, except perhaps a hue of vengeance.