The Conqueror's Shadow (7 page)

Until the afternoon before the regular town meeting, when everything changed.

“DID NOT!”

“Did too!”

Mellorin and Lilander clambered over a small rise, each shouting at the other with childish gusto. The argument was half an hour old now and revolved around the earth-shattering issue of which of them had started the
last
argument. For it was that previous conflict that resulted in them both being sent to gather firewood for cooking, allowing their
beleaguered parents some few moments of peace. Mellorin had raised the argument—rather eloquently, she thought—that the pair of children, even working together, couldn't haul as much wood as either parent alone.

It had, of course, been utterly ignored.

Grown-ups
, she complained silently as she kicked a branch from her path and watched with angry satisfaction as it cracked against a nearby tree,
make no sense at all. If kids ran the world, we'd all be better off
.

She halted, startled, as a second muffled crack followed the first. She examined the stick, but no, only one break there. It occurred to her only then that the rustling of the leaves ahead—which she had attributed to the light breeze blowing past them—ceased the instant the crack sounded, though the breeze was undiminished.

Mellorin was a remarkably intelligent girl, and it took her no time at all to realize there was someone in the wood near them.

Clever as she might have been, though, she had also grown up in Chelenshire, surrounded by friendly, gentle people. “Hello?” she called curiously. “Who's there?”

The brush exploded in a sudden flurry of movement. Mellorin leapt back, screaming with shock and the first stirrings of fear. She saw a huge shape, a shaggy beard, and smelled the sour stench of flesh long unwashed. A sudden sharp, blazing pain on the side of her head, and then darkness.

Lilander, eyes wide, watched from deep in the bushes, where he'd fallen as his sister leapt back. He saw the big man pick Mellorin up and throw her over his shoulder, saw him move deeper into the trees, saw the large sword the man wore strapped to his back.

When he was certain the man wasn't coming back, he turned and, carefully retracing his steps as only a determined child can, made his way toward home.

CORVIS AND TYANNON STOOD
in the doorway, idly watching Rascal dance across the grass, racing from one side of his pen to the other and back again. Corvis's arm rested on the back of her shoulders,
her head upon his left bicep, her hair trailing down across his side and his back.

“Quiet,” he said to her, his tone one of utter marvel. “I'd forgotten what it sounded like.” He chuckled, then, as Rascal skidded to a stop just before the fence, sending clods of dirt to spray across the painted wood.

“Maybe we should build one of those for the kids,” Tyannon suggested. “It seems to keep the horse happy.”

“No good. The children have fingers and thumbs. They can climb.”

“True. I—”

“Lilander!” Corvis called suddenly. And indeed, there was the boy, trudging tiredly across the stretch of garden that separated him from his parents. His father began to grin, an expression that quickly fell at the sight of his son's face, dirt-covered and tear-streaked.

“Lilander?” Tyannon asked, concerned. “Sweetie, are you all right?”

“Where's your sister?” Corvis interjected, his heart racing.

“Bad man!” the boy sniffed, his lip quivering. “A bad man took Mellorin.”

The look on his face left no doubt that this was not just a child's fantasy. “Corvis!” Tyannon gasped.

“Take Lilander inside. Stay there!”

“But—”

“One of us has to stay with him, Tyannon.”

She nodded, fighting back tears of her own, acquiescing not so much to his words as to his tone. There was fear in his voice, of course, but anger as well; a slow, smoldering anger she hadn't heard in years.

Corvis set out across the garden at a dead run, pausing only to lift a long-handled spade from where it leaned against a fence post. He hefted it once, as though testing it for balance, and then he was gone, his long-legged lope carrying him out of sight before Tyannon could blink.

“Mommy?” At the insistent tug on her pant leg, she stared down into the serious eyes of her six-year-old son. “Mommy, is Mellorin going to be all right?”

“Yes, honey.” She picked the child up in her arms, cradling him to her breast and rocking slightly. “Yes, Mellorin will be fine.”

I don't know!
she wanted to scream, to him, to the heavens, to the faces of the gods themselves.
She could be dead, or worse! I don't know if she's going to be all right! I don't know!

About her—or her father
.

And she held him tightly to her, so he couldn't see her tears.

SHE'D BEEN CONSCIOUS
for some moments by now. But the disorientation, the sudden bouts of dizziness, and the pounding pain in her skull conspired to keep her from forming a coherent thought or from making any meaningful observations about where she was.

She blinked, trying to clear her vision; the side of her face was plastered with something sticky. She felt several strands of her hair on her cheek, apparently glued there by the substance she steadfastly refused to acknowledge as blood.

A deep breath, two, three, and the pain faded ever so slightly. The muffled buzzing in the air resolved itself into voices, and the voices into words.

“… a damn idiot!” was the first thing she heard. “An absolute, undeniable, as-the-gods-are-my-witnesses idiot!”

“I didn't think it was
that
big a deal,” a second voice protested. “What's your problem?”

“What's my
problem?
Have your eyes gone the way of your wits, man?
She's
my godsdamn problem!”

Mellorin knew full well who “she” was.

“No one's supposed to know we're here!” the first voice continued, building up steam for a good long rant. “Now you've gone and grabbed one of them! It'll only be a matter of hours before someone misses her and comes looking! You—”

“Oh, shut up, Brend! Just shut up! It's no big deal! They'll figure an animal got her. Besides, we'll be long gone by the time they start looking. We were about done here anyway.”

“And I suppose you plan to drag her with us?” the other man—Brend?—asked.

“Nah. We'll mangle the body a bit, make it look like wolves or something, and leave it.”

If any of the men heard her gasp, they must have attributed the sound to the wind or some woodland creature, for not a one of them so much as glanced her way.

“So,” a third voice cropped up, “if we're gonna kill the little bitch anyway, why'd you bother to bring her here alive in the first place?”

“Well, I thought we might get
some
use out of her before we left …”

“You,” Brend said, voice cold, “are a sick man, Varbin. She can't be more than twelve.”

“Doesn't make her any less female, does it?”

“Hey!” the third voice said as a vaguely face-shaped blur appeared in her fuzzy field of vision. “She's awake!”

Rough hands dragged her to a sitting position; the rest of the world spun in the opposite direction, and the pain in her head flared. Gingerly, she raised a hand to her head, discovering only then that her wrists were bound together.

“What …,” she asked weakly, swallowing around the painful dryness in her throat. “What do you want with me?”

“That,” the man kneeling before her said sagely, “is under debate.” A few crude chuckles sounded from behind him—more, in fact, than could be accounted for by the three voices she'd heard thus far. “What's your name, girl?”

“Mellorin.” She swallowed again.
Don't show fear. They can sense fear
. At least that was supposed to be the case with wild dogs, and seeing as how she had no other experience to fall back on … “What—what's yours?”

The man grinned, the expression seeming to gleam horribly on his unshaven, greasy face. His hair, dark and filthy, fell about his head and danced as he laughed. “My name doesn't matter, Mellorin.”

Mellorin tried her best to smile. “Really? That must be frustrating.”

The smile on the man's face vanished as though she'd sliced it off with a knife. This was not the way helpless victims—especially children—were supposed to behave.

A curved blade sprouted from his hand and jabbed forward, coming
to a halt just before it drew blood on the side of her throat. He was rewarded with a sudden sob.

“That's better. You shouldn't be so rude to us, young lady. When people are rude to us, it makes us upset. We tend to be rude back.”

“There are no animals around here,” she whispered, fighting back tears. “No dangerous ones, anyway. If you …” Her voice broke. “If you kill me, they'll know it wasn't an animal!”

The man kneeling before her blinked once and looked back for support. The sweaty, bearded man who'd grabbed her in the first place—Varbin, she remembered—merely shrugged. “So they'll know it wasn't an animal. We're still not planning to be anywhere near here by the time they find her. So what's the big deal?”

With a small shriek, Mellorin thrust the man's arm, and the knife along with it, away from her throat, beating on his chest with her bound hands. More startled than anything else, he fell back, staring at her. And then he reached out with his other hand and slapped her across the face, just beneath the earlier wound. Mellorin recoiled, agony racing through her skull.

“Please!” she screamed at him as the man's shape loomed over her, knife held before him. “Please don't hurt me!”

The man took a step closer to her, then another …

And then a second shape towered above her, looming tall between her and her attackers.

“She said ‘please.'” Mellorin, though nigh paralyzed with fear, sobbed in relief when she recognized the voice. “You really,
really
should have listened.”