The Blood of the Land (3 page)

BY BLOOD AND WATER DIE

Tucker went down beneath the onslaught, writhing as he fought to gasp for air; McCreary not only kept his feet but leapt towards the specter approaching him as well, and his pistol spat fire at Jenny Sutherland's ruined head. She did not slow in her mustering of the river, did not even twitch as McCreary's bullets passed straight through her. Then she turned her baleful gaze upon him. Her hands, white as ash, snapped together before her. And the river tendrils churned, gathered themselves in the air, and plowed like cannon fire straight into McCreary's chest.

Dorcas didn't see him fall. But she did hear his scream, high and thin and strangled, as he tumbled backwards out of her line of sight. Flinching at the sound, she hunkered down low over Caleb and tugged him frantically up into her arms. “Don't let go of me,” she breathed. “Don't you let go, you hear?”

He murmured something indistinct in reply, something she thought might have been the Lord's Prayer. But he also clung to her, hard enough to let her know he'd heard her, and that was all that counted.

Two feet away, though, Elias was moving, and Dorcas shot him a horrified glance as he struggled to his knees. His pain washed over her with the same force with which Jenny had hurled the water—and it was to the figure that had once been Jenny that he cried out now. “Jenny honey—don't—for the love of God, they're human! They're human!”

Some part of Dorcas took bitter issue with that, though she didn't dare voice any such notion, not when she risked angering the thing that had come across the water. But Jenny paid her no heed. At the sound of Elias' voice she faltered, her hands lowering to hang at her sides, limp as bedraggled weeds. Her predatory stance didn't change, but her head slowly canted round to Elias, and something like cognizance creased the features caked with blood—cognizance, and behind that, grief.

they shot you

Her mouth never moved, yet her words hung in the air nonetheless, plaintive now, almost small. As they echoed, one of McCreary's men gave one last gasp and lay still. Tucker rolled over where he lay on the sodden ground, coughed once, and then retched across the rocks. Jenny ignored them both. When Josiah McCreary stirred, though, her head whipped back to him; around her, the river surged back to life.

SLAVERS MURDERERS RAPERS NOT WORTH PROTECTING NOT HUMAN

McCreary's other two men twitched, and then they too went still. Tucker raised his head, and even from a distance, Dorcas saw fear and shock in his eyes, saw his lips moving with the same prayer Caleb babbled into her shoulder. McCreary himself lurched upright, and the sight of his face made her blood run cold. It was vacant now, dead as Jenny Sutherland's, save for the first glimmerings of madness.

“Devil,” he mumbled, soft at first, but rising in volume and stridence with every step. “Whore—harlot! Swear to God I'll break you—!”

He lunged, not at Jenny, but at Dorcas.

She had no time, and could only think to react by flinging a hand towards Elias, desperate to reach him to shield him as well as Caleb with her Power. Elias paid her no mind, bent in his turn on reaching the unearthly figure that had once been his wife. When his palms connected with the earth his own Power flared, as exhausted as Dorcas' own, and no match for the volley of river mud and water Jenny hurled at McCreary. Blow after blow she struck him; at last he crumpled, wheezing, to the ground.

And at last, painfully, Elias hauled himself to his feet and seized Jenny's bloodied, battered form. The bullets had passed through her, but her husband's hands did not. She keened as soon as he touched her, such energy roiling around her that Dorcas had to look away, though she couldn't block out the sound of Elias's desperate voice. “You can't, Jenny honey—the magic ain't for killing our own kind!”

he'll rape her he'll kill her she can't kill him they'll never let her go if she kills him

Dorcas froze. The words didn't frighten her as much as the sudden realization that what they said was right. She was able to kill Josiah McCreary; she'd dreamed of it more than once, each time he'd laid hands upon her or any of the other women his father owned. Drained though she was and three breaths away from fainting, she was sure she could find it in herself to pierce him with her magic, and stop his heart cold in his chest.

But she couldn't. Never mind the sermons of the white preachers, who proclaimed thou shalt not kill. It was bad enough already that the McCrearys already thought her a witch. If she took his life, she'd have to kill the others too—and if none of the men left the river alive, then she and Caleb would be hunted for the rest of their days.

Would they fare any better if Jenny Sutherland's specter did the killing?

Not if, she realized then in a burst of dread. When. There was no echo of life in any of McCreary's other men, though Harriman Tucker was still conscious, backed up against a tree in his fear and was even now fumbling for the gun he'd dropped when he fell. But Josiah remained the nearest threat, and as he gagged and tried to fight his way back upright, Jenny thrust out her hand to inundate him once more. All the while, she keened.

LET ME KILL THEM ELIAS TOOK ME FROM YOU TAINTED OUR LAND TAINTED OUR MAGIC HUNTERS SLAVERS KILLERS

“Humans,” Elias whispered, and then his Power surged, calling up wind that gusted in circles round him and Jenny both, ripping through the water-tendrils she summoned from the river. Jenny threw back her head, her mouth gaping now as she screamed; then her ghostly form began to fade. Wind that was no wind rushed over Dorcas, a gust of cleansing Power that drove the empty echo of death back across the water. What remained of Jenny Sutherland went with it, and as silence fell along the bank, Elias Sutherland collapsed.

For two scant breaths Dorcas froze. Her Power was faltering now, drained to the dregs by the need to close the holes in Caleb's leg and side where McCreary's bullets had torn through his flesh. From physical exhaustion alone, her muscles screamed. But Caleb held fast where she faltered, raising his head and pushing at her to get her to move, to do what must be done. “Go, woman,” he whispered. “Inle won't give you rest till you do.”

That was enough to shift her, though she nearly sobbed at the stiffness of Caleb's motions as he pulled away from her. Yet even as she crawled for Elias, Dorcas heard Harriman Tucker bark out, “No. In the name of God, no!”

She had to stop then, and for all her Power's urging, force herself to pull with awkwardness slowness to her feet, hands out once more as she faced a white man with a gun. The McCrearys' foreman was closer now, his pistol at the ready, but the gaze he riveted on her held none of the lecherousness of his young master's. His face was haggard, his eyes dark with barely repressed fear. Not vile like Josiah McCreary, Dorcas thought—but no less dangerous.

“In the name of God,” she begged, gesturing at Elias's broken form, “let me heal this man before he dies too!”

“Do not take the Lord's name in vain, girl,” Tucker intoned. Sweat beaded along his brow, a faint glistening of moisture in the moonlight. “Do not claim His power while you call upon your own heathen gods!”

“Does it matter what gods I call when a man is dying?” Dorcas snapped. “Shoot me and have done with it, then! You already done gone and murdered a woman tonight, what's one more? Especially a black one!”

It was foolish talking back to Tucker, for more than one slave had been whipped for it on the McCreary land, and he stood armed and panicked now. But Dorcas was weary beyond reckoning. Her Power still shrieked. And all at once she didn't care about the risk of the foreman shooting her. She half-knelt, half-fell down at Elias Sutherland's side, her hands afire anew as her palms sought the places where his life's blood was oozing forth.

Elias, though, seized both her wrists before she could touch him. “No,” he croaked. “Ain't got nothin' left. Let me go to her. I've got to free her from the blood. Let me go.”

By rights she should have denied him; her Power demanded release, and her conscience bewailed the thought of giving free rein to yet more death. It didn't matter that Elias was white, or that she knew barely anything of him. She knew enough: that he was a good man who'd risk himself to aid the likes of her and Caleb. And that he had Power, like her. Because of that, she pulled back her hands and whispered, “Go to your Jenny, Elias.”

And because of what little she knew of him, as his last breath left him, Dorcas wept. The magic in the earth and river shifted with his passing; it would have been all too easy to let herself follow it, to claim the rest and succor it offered and to the white man's hell with anything else.

But she wouldn't do that to Caleb. Couldn't, not when Harriman Tucker had a gun drawn upon them both.

With an effort that made her tremble, Dorcas lifted her head. Caleb was sitting up, and though gray tinged the deep rich brown of his cheeks, she was certain she'd stopped his bleeding. McCreary remained in an unmoving sprawl. The sight of him should have made her want to retch, but not even the wrongness that had been Jenny Sutherland's shade—or what it had done—could make her sorry that her master's son was gone.

The sight of him, though, visibly discomfited Harriman Tucker. “Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name,” he whispered. His gaze darted from McCreary to the other men and back again, and with each twitch of his stare, his expression grew more heartsick.

“I'm sorry,” Dorcas said. Not out of pity, for she couldn't muster pity for the man, working as he did for the McCrearys. But she knew the look he was wearing, the look of a man whose world had just burned to ash around him. For that, at least, she could feel regret.

Tucker made a strangled sound that might have been amused had it anything to do with laughter. “Are you? After what's just happened—after this deviltry—you can say that to my face? These men are dead!”

“If you're going to send us to join 'em,” Caleb grunted, “then get it done.”

The gun shook in Tucker's hand; with a growl of frustration, he steadied it with his other, right in left. But to Dorcas' surprise, he squeezed his eyes shut. His face contorted in grief. Then his hands dropped, taking the gun's barrel off them, and he spun away without firing a shot. “I cannot,” he rasped. “Holy God forgive me. I cannot add to this night's death.”

Relief welled in Dorcas, though she dared not give it release, not yet. She traded glances with Caleb and then carefully stood, an inch or two at a time, until she made it to her feet. “Then don't,” she said. “End it here. Let us go.”

“He might say we killed 'em,” Caleb warned as he stood just behind her.

“But he won't,” Dorcas answered. “Because he knows we didn't. Don't you, Mister Tucker?”

That too was foolish, placing their trust in a man who served their master—but they had no other choice, she thought. Tucker stood stiff as a wall of stone, and for a long moment Dorcas watched him for a sign, any sign, that her trust might not be misplaced. Finally he canted his head to the side, casting a hollow look down to the body of Josiah McCreary. “God Almighty struck down these men,” he whispered, “and I will not gainsay Him.” Then he whirled back to them. “Go. Go now, before I change my mind!”

They might have lingered, might have helped to bury the dead; Dorcas' healer's heart flinched at the starkness of Harriman Tucker's eyes, and it seemed wrong to abandon the body of Elias Sutherland, lying there broken on the bank. Her sight blurred with weariness and tears, and her Power rippled too, tasting the last traces of both of the Sutherlands' Power in the air. They weren't gone. Jenny's rage had faded, but the sorrow remained—and so did Elias, she saw, looking north along the water. Moonlight fell down through the shape of his ghost and that of Jenny at his side, and as Dorcas spied them, Elias pointed an ethereal hand into the trees.

That's where he hid it, she told herself.

Aloud she murmured to Caleb, tugging at his arm, “Come. We've got to get that boat.”

“The Blood of the Land” was first published in the Drollerie Press anthology
Defiance
, masterminded by Drollerie's editor at the time, Deena Fisher.
Defiance
was short as anthologies go, with only three stories: my own, Joely Sue Burkhart's “Storms as She Walks”, and “Finder's Keeper” by Laura Anne Gilman. All were set during the U.S. Civil War, and all featured women in paranormal situations and how they showed their strength by rising to face their challenges.

Sadly, the anthology was short-lived. When Drollerie folded in the fall of 2011, it went out of print along with the rest of the Drollerie catalog. And since it involved the work of three authors, not just one, it could not be resurrected in its full form as easily as works by single authors. (Such as my own
Faerie Blood
, resurrected via Kickstarter in 2012.)

I have elected to therefore release my story “The Blood of the Land” as a standalone download. But I'd like to thank Deena Fisher for approaching me to be in the
Defiance
anthology in the first place, since it did give me some experience writing a short piece—not something I do often. And more importantly, it gave me a chance to do things in the Warder universe that I hadn't done before. So Deena, if you're reading this, thank you!

Also, I'd like to thank my cover artist Dejah Leger, who is as deft with her graphic design as she is with her guitar and singing. If you know Quebecois traditional music at all, you may have seen her design work—she did the design for Genticorum's album
Enregistré Live
. Moreover, Dejah's very well known in the Pacific Northwest Quebec trad community for her crankies, which are often featured when she performs as a solo artist or with her family under the name La Famille Leger. Look for her at Folklife in Seattle, or if you're in BC, at Festival du Bois! Or, look for her online at
dejahleger.com
or
lafamilleleger.com
.