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Chapter Five



The pumpkin that had represented all of Arrdanc was back at the center of the table as they brought their supper plates to the steaming pot of dishwater by the hearth. Normally a time made lively by chatter and perhaps a bit of teasing, today was more quiet. The mood from the meal-end conversation on the nature of the world and the end of their time on the farm was too serious for a quick transition into jocularity. But Druadaen did not miss it. Instead, the promise of new possibilities left him feeling quietly eager, lighter: the way he did after they aired the house out in spring.

His father had lit the second lantern in anticipation of the approaching dusk and was bringing it to the table when he stopped and listened.

Druadaen did too…and heard a distant, furious snorting and then a whinny that sounded more like a scream.

His mother rose. “That’s Shoulders.”

His father nodded as he put the lantern next to the pumpkin and headed for the door. Once there, he paused, then reached up and took down the sword that Druadaen had rarely seen out of its sheath. It was long and sharp and too unique to have been issued by the Legions. “Stay here,” his father muttered as he opened the door and stepped outside.

“I will not!” Druadaen’s mother snapped as she rushed toward her small dresser. In the instant that her focus shifted fully to the contents of the bottom—and forbidden—drawer, he darted through the doorway, eager to see what was happening.

Druadaen stopped just a few steps beyond the threshold, so bewildered by the scene that, for a moment, he could only stare.

Their various animals had somehow gotten loose and were acting oddly. Their cats were trying to run to the house despite spasms wracking their bodies. Their two cows were lowing, trembling, and rolling their eyes as if they’d gotten into madweed. The goats were butting each other, the side of the barn, and apparently, phantoms in midair. The chickens were flying at each other in general fury.

And beyond that scene of rabid madness, Druadaen could see more animals coming: birds from the surrounding copses as well as two foxes. Even three of Heyna’s cats were stumbling toward the house, hissing at each other and the empty air.

Without looking around, Druadaen’s father said, “Back in the house.” He drew the sword and added, “Bar the door,” then ran toward the paddock that ran all the way to the stream that marked the eastern limit of their farm.

Still too surprised to react, Druadaen stared after his father, saw what he was sprinting toward: Shoulders. The big, gentle draft horse was stamping, twitching, and bolting in sudden, frenetic starts like a colt with a nervous affliction. Then it stopped, eyes rolling wide and white, as if in terror of fire, before it ran again. Shoulders’ movements became even more erratic and desperate as Druadaen’s father approached, whinny-screaming as if he were a pack of wolves. Teeth showing, the horse made ready to charge…but then swung unsteadily away, as if straining against a heavy chain.

Which seemed to break: Shoulders wheeled. Still running with a strange, broken gait—like a puppet fighting against its puppeteer—the draft horse charged up the hillock on which they’d built the shed that covered their root cellar. Druadaen’s father yelled for Shoulders to stop.

The horse’s immense head turned back once and, with a look at once sorrowful and insane, he redoubled his speed—which carried him up the last furlong of sloping grass and then over the small cliff perched above the rock-strewn stream below.

That was the moment that the chaos began to coalesce upon Druadaen and his family. Shoulders’ screams drove nails of ice into Druadaen’s marrow. His mother sprinted out of the house, yanked him back, and yelled a warning at his father: one of the cows had broken through the paddock’s light fence.

As the cow stumble-charged forward, Druadaen’s father raised the sword in his right hand, seemed to be balancing with his left as he walked slowly toward it. As if confused by the human’s stance and approach, the cow slowed, shook its head, legs growing wobbly—just as his father sprinted at it and drove the sword into its head. The long blade went in so swiftly that it had either been a lucky poke through an eye socket or an exquisitely precise thrust at the end of a long, running step.

Suddenly the air around Druadaen was filled with their chickens: flapping, pecking, furious, but hampered by sudden jerks and starts. The goats were in mid-charge when Grip, the family’s mastiff, appeared around the corner of the house and moved to intercept them. But his ears were down and quivering and his legs were oddly stiff, laboring forward as if a millstone was tied to each one.

“Lock yourself in!” his mother screamed as she ran out, spinning on the ball of one foot to give Druadaen a quick push back toward the doorway. Then she headed toward his father, drawing two long, but very different, daggers.

Druadaen felt the reflex to obey his parents pulling him into the house at the same instant his desire to help them pushed him to run after his mother. For a long second, he just blinked; the division—and the struggle—in both his heart and mind left him motionless.

His father began running back to the house, waving for his mother to turn around. Distracted, she almost failed to hear a fox streaming low over the ground toward her, but at the last moment she turned and slashed—left, then right—as it leapt. What fell was silent and half-gutted.

Bloodied, Grip limped past the open door, the now-hamstrung goats bleating insanely after him. Moving even more slowly, the dog angled toward the second cow which charged in from the direction of the barn, its head streaming red from where it had butted open the door. Jerking, frothing green, it seemed startled to discover Druadaen staring at it, and veered in his direction.

“’Daen!” his mother screamed, too far away to help.

But Grip managed to get between him and the cow—and took a hoof in the haunches, unable to dodge in time. The cow swung back, head bobbling obscenely, searching.

But the sharp kick that had knocked Grip aside had cleared Druadaen’s head just as sharply. Whether he meant to shelter or fight, he’d have to go back to the house, either to hide or get his father’s Legion-issue shortsword out of its hiding place. With ravens arrowing in like black daggers, he turned and ran the three steps it took to get back through the doorway, his mother right behind him.

And the cow was right behind her, horns lowering…before it let out a bellow of rage and pain: Grip, one leg dragging uselessly, had its tail in his viselike jaws.

Druadaen’s mother turned as she came through the doorway, daggers ready to hold off any creature that might reach it before her husband could dart through. Past her, the cow shifted and Druadaen saw Grip’s unflinchingly loyal eyes locked on his own—just before they were blotted out by a massive, muddy hoof.

The cow’s kick struck the dog square in the snout. With a crack like wind-snapped green wood, the mastiff’s head went back at an angle that would not be possible if its spine were still intact.

Choking back a sob, Druadaen dove under the table, immediately crawling toward the far side of it—and the armoire that stood out from the east wall.

His mother was screaming for his father, who did not answer. Smaller animals came at her—chickens, another fox, a racoon, a small goat—which she dispatched almost as afterthoughts. “Druadaen?” she shouted.

“Yes, Mama?”

Her head swiveled in his direction. “What are you doing?”

“Getting the sword from behind the armoire!”

She checked over her shoulder, ran toward him. He thought she was coming to scold or pull him away, but instead, she heaved on the armoire—and it shuddered forward just far enough for Druadaen to get half his body behind it and reach up to the bracket that held the shortsword to its rear.

The moment he got the hilt in his hand, he heard a scramble and a hiss at the other end of the narrow gap behind the armoire: one of Heyna’s cats. Spittle flying out of its mouth, it launched itself at him—just as he got the sword out.

The tomcat hit the blade head-on. It yowled hysterically, head shaking, blood flying on the wall, the armoire, and Druadaen. As it writhed and tried to regain its feet, he cut downward, putting an end to the threat and to its struggles.

He pulled himself out from behind the armoire, slashed at a crow that was plummeting toward him—but it was simply falling, already killed by his mother. “Get out of there! We have to bar the door until—” And then she was suddenly silent, her eyes flicking toward the arm with which she had pulled the armoire.

An asp, teeth embedded in her upper forearm, was hanging there by its fangs, curling and coiling in a frenzy. She cut through it with a single slice of the dagger in her right hand, then swept the head off with a slower, closer sweep along that arm. She took a step, staggered, grunted, “Go. Out. No good here.” Druadaen had never seen his mother drunk, but she was starting to sound that way.

He bolted toward the door, shortsword raised. He heard his mother stumbling along behind him, yelling, “Go, go, go!” As he plunged out the doorway, he readied the sword against any and all attackers—and discovered the cow charging straight at him. He dove aside and stumbled along the wall of the house, falling behind a now-ruined wheelbarrow which had been thrown against it in the chaos.

Either the cow lost track of his movement or didn’t care; she slammed into the doorway at full speed. Her already damaged left horn tore away as it ripped that side of the doorjamb off the wall. Blood sprayed as the animal pressed on into the middle of their house. From inside, his mother shouted, “Druadaen: the cellar! Run! I’m right behind you. I’ll be—”

Then he couldn’t hear anything over the smashing of wood and bellowing of the cow. The table was flung over and the lantern shattered; a sudden rush of smoke obscured the desperate struggles inside. Animals crowded to push through the blood-smeared doorway, despite the orange flame-tongues that winked and flickered through the growing gloom.

Weeping silently, Druadaen wriggled out from behind the wreckage of the wheelbarrow and sprinted up the slope toward the small shed they’d built over the root cellar.

Birds screamed after him, but they were small ones. He shielded his eyes, barely felt their savage pecking at his arms and cheeks. He looked around for his father, saw him motionless on the ground at the far end of the paddock. Apparently, several neighbors’ dogs had joined the insanity and he had met them head-on. They lay scattered around him. Whether he was dead or not, Druadaen couldn’t tell.

And did not have time to look more closely. He hit the shed’s door at full sprint, stumbled and fell on the dirt floor. He started to rise—which became a leap backward and straight to his feet; two rats were in front of him. They were unusually large, bigger than cats.

One had been staggered when the opening door smacked it in the face. But the other was hunched in readiness, its black-bead eyes glistening as it started unsteadily toward Druadaen—who jumped forward and kicked it as hard as he could.

It soared over the barrels of meal and salt lining the north wall. Which it hit with a meaty thump. It emitted an abbreviated squeak and fell behind the casks.

Druadaen was too busy snatching a jute bag off the top of a crate to see what became of it. He got the rough cloth wadded around his left hand just before the second rat doubled up and then uncoiled into a leap, gnashing furiously.

Druadaen got his hand in the way just as the rat’s long dive put it in range. The animal’s teeth dug into the fabric, chewed fast and hard. But as it did, he managed to shift his hand so as to grasp the back of its boring, biting head. He swiped his sword horizontally, just below where he had hold of it.

The cut was both imbalanced and crooked, but it still took off a rear leg and opened the rodent’s gut. He flung it away, but the moment it hit the floor, it rolled over and began dragging itself toward him on its three remaining legs, squealing in a horrible mix of rage, pain, and madness. But at the rate it was losing blood, it would never—

He blinked as something flew down into his face, claws raking. A bat, probably one that had wriggled through the gap beneath the eaves. He grabbed it with his burlap-wrapped left hand, felt it squirm around, trying to bite…but not before he smashed the hilt of the shortsword into its body. With a sound like kindling being crushed inside a tearing leather bag, the bat went limp.

He flung it away. Paused to breathe and look—and through the narrow doorway saw the roof of the house go up in a sheet of flame.

He didn’t think to be silent, might not have been willing or able to even if he had: “Mama!”

Creatures, once as familiar and welcome as pets, turned wide, quivering eyes toward him: chickens, a goat, another cat. He heard the bellowing of yet another cow coming in across the fields.

He could not survive them all by fighting. He had to escape. And there was only one way to do that.

He rolled a barrel of quicklime away from the north wall: the trapdoor beneath it was just big enough for an adult, but an easy fit for him. He grabbed the nearby pry bar, jammed its beveled end into the access notch, and stamped down on its handle. The door popped open, revealing the steep, lightless shaft down to the root cellar. He scattered lime around the opening, dove inside, turned, and drove home the bolt—just as his father and mother had taught him.

He grabbed the flint striker off the wall, checked that its spring was cocked, and turned back to light the pitch-soaked hay in the iron cresset near the top of the shaft—at the very moment a snake came squirming down through the trapdoor’s access notch.

He should have been terrified, but he wasn’t. It happened too quickly. One moment, he was face to face with a young asp, the next it was striking and he was sweeping the shortsword at it.

No neat decapitation, but as it flew away, the arc of its body looked broken and it was hissing wildly.

He triggered the lighter. The shower of sparks from the flint striker caught the pitch-treated tinder. The sudden burst of firelight revealed the asp, its blood-blackened and half-severed body coiling to strike. But too slowly. He chopped at it. Then again, and again, and again.

He might never have stopped except for the pain that flared in his left calf. He looked down, expecting to see that some of the burning tinder had dislodged and fallen on him.

But his eyes and the second hot flash of pain told him a different story: the rat he’d kicked, the one he’d presumed dead, was sinking its yellowed teeth into his leg a second time with manic ferocity and speed.

Again he didn’t think; he acted. He thrust the sword straight into the rat, not considering the strong chance he’d slice into himself instead. But for once, he struck true: the point of the sword split the rodent’s skull right down its center.

He scrambled away from it, feeling sudden exhaustion—and then a lance of pain in his shoulder.

He looked over, saw a swinging, sinuous form: another snake had followed the first halfway down through the access notch. He felt an icy flame spreading into his shoulder, saw the narrow wedge of the serpent’s head start to rear back, and hoped his father would have approved of the fight he’d put up. His limbs were already heavy and his vision blurry as the snake became motionless for an instant: the pause that was the prelude to the strike.

But instead of shooting forward, the asp was suddenly moving the other direction, thumping roughly against the sides of the notch as it was pulled back up and out of sight. A moment later, a square of late daylight appeared where the root-cellar door had been, and through it, he saw a cured leather gauntlet clutching the writhing snake. Both disappeared as the wearer of the gauntlet shouted, “No you don’t, you bastard!” A savage stomping began, a dull sound against the earthen floor of the shed above.

Then a woman was standing in the light. The silhouette was like—

“Mama! Mama? Are you—?”

“Shhhh…” wept a different voice, and suddenly—as if the world had gone black for a long moment—the face of Indryllis was very close to his. “You shall be well, Druadaen. I know what to do, I will…”

But her words seemed to fade and fuse together into distorted gibberish. Her face went away, swallowed by strange darkness, which, when it lifted, seemed to carry him along into the light. He was in someone’s wide, powerful arms, being carried aloft toward the orange glow of sunset. He looked up, tried to see across the impossibly great distance of a few inches.…

Varcaxtan’s tear-stained face was looking down into his. He said in a voice gentler than Druadaen had ever heard, “You are safe now, child.”

And then, from over his shoulder, he heard a ghostly addition from Indryllis’ spectral shadow, even though she whispered it into Varcaxtan’s ear: “As safe as fate allows.”

* * *

Druadaen’s head snapped up so quickly from where it was resting on his arms that he experienced a moment of vertigo. Through the spinning, he saw Shaananca, and shouted, “What did you do? Unlock my—my memories?”

She sat back calmly. “No. It was more like drawing aside a curtain. You yourself could have brushed it away at any time your inner mind was willing. Which would have happened soon enough.” She frowned. “And no, I did not keep your memories from you out of some foolish combination of mercy and arrogance! How dare you think such a thing, you insolent pup! I did what had to be done to save your life.”

The sharpness of Shaananca’s rebuke told Druadaen that she was not dissembling. “You mean, the memories could have killed me?”

Her face changed from stern to somber. “When you first arrived here you were so weak that—well, you were close to discovering whatever lies beyond your particular mortal coil. The venom had weakened you, enough for the rat-bite fever to take firm hold in your body. That is why you were in danger for so long; since you could not sleep, you could not gather the strength to throw off the infection.”

“Because I dreamt of what had happened on the farm.”

She nodded. “As your body was fighting to overcome the fever, your nightmares kept waking you up. You never slept more than two or three hours. So, I drew a curtain across those memories. Not a block, just a change of emphasis.”

Druadaen stared.

Shaananca explained. “Think of a landscape painting. Some of the figures and trees are in the foreground, others in the midground, others further and further in the background until they fade away. I invited your mind to store the dangerous memories as part of the distant background. But your mind went a step further and put them in a vault. I knew that might occur, but it was a risk that had to be taken. After that…well, your own mind was the best measure of when you should remember them.”

“But you didn’t wait for my mind to do that. You pulled them back up.”

“Dear boy, I bade you rest because I could tell that the memories were ready to emerge. To process the reversals and shocks of this day, your mind now requires the context of those suppressed memories. But had they arisen at night when you were alone, or in your dreams—well, that was a pain and a danger that I did not want you to have to face alone.”

Druadaen was vaguely aware of her words. “All those animals that attacked us…What would cause that? Was it the work of a faunamancer?”

Shaananca shrugged. “We do not know; it could have been. However, there are other arts that could achieve much the same effect that our sentinels observed.”

“Sentinels? You mean Varcaxtan and Indryllis?”

Shaananca nodded. “And others who…watch.” Her tone shifted into musing. “I had a discussion about such matters with a visitor today.”

“I saw you escort her as she was leaving the Archive,” Druadaen commented, hoping to surprise Shaananca; doing so was a rare victory.

“Yes.” Shaananca nodded. “I know.”

“But…you did not see me!”

“Are you so very sure of that?” Shaananca’s smile became wry. “Perhaps you should pay more attention to your own powers of observation.”

“What do you mean?” Druadaen asked.

“Did you not recognize the dignitary?” When he shook his head, Shaananca explained. “It was the Lady.” She emphasized the final word.

“Yes, I know the dignitary was a lady, but—” Druadaen stopped. “You mean the Lady? The one from five years ago, in Aedmurun?”

“The very same,” Shaananca said.

“And did she also know I was there watching?”

“She did not say.” Shaananca smiled. “But I would not be surprised if she did.”

“Why was—is—she here?”

“Research. And discussion.”

Druadaen frowned. “It must be very important research for her to travel here all the way from Far Amitryea.”

Shaananca schooled her face and voice to patience. “Far Amitryea. Am-it-ree-yuh, not Am-it-ray-uh,” she corrected. “As to the urgency of her researches?” Shaananca shrugged. “This Lady, and those who came before her, keep their affairs largely to themselves. Out of necessity, I suspect.”

“And will she be back tomorrow?”

Shaananca shook her head. “She intends to depart today. But I believe she had some final business to finish.”

“Where would I go to see her?”

“She will depart directly by ship,” Shaananca said. “However, I would not be surprised if her business will compel her to take the long route to the harbor. Through the Temple District.”

Druadaen rose quickly. “Master Archivist, I respectfully request a brief—”

Shaananca waved her hand. “Go. You are wasting time.”

* * *

Druadaen sprinted along the stretch of wall that took him closest to the Temple District and scanned the arching walkways ahead. Nothing to be seen. Maybe she was gone already…

No: there she was, appearing much as she had five years ago. She was walking quickly, already leaving the Temple District for the bay. Evidently, she had finished her business—but what had it been?

He scanned back along her path, quickly identified the cluster of buildings from which she had just emerged…and felt as though his heart stopped for a moment. He was probably mistaken, or maybe it was just coincidence…but on a whim, he headed in that direction, rather than after her.

Just to make sure.

* * *

Druadaen reached the broad alabaster stairs, streaming sweat. Wet hair hanging over his forehead, he doubled his pace as he started up the risers two at a time, sometimes three.

The guards turned to stare, but knowing him, they just nodded him on and followed his upward progress with puzzled frowns.

On either side of the white stairs were small buildings surmounted by cupolas. Each had a separate door and their only windows were arrayed in a ring around the very peak of their domes.

He kept running until he got to the tier of buildings that was third from the top. He swerved to the left, pushed through the door with the familiarity of frequent use.

Druadaen ran out of the daylight, into the brief darkness of a tiny antechamber, and then emerged into the brightness that shone down from the skylights to illuminate his father’s patientium.

It was empty.

There was, however, a faint scent of sea and sandalwood, and, on the platform where his father had lain for five years, there was a very small silver leaf.

As Druadaen approached, it crumbled to dust.


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