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III: Truth and Terror
Evening fell like an axe.
As the shadows grew longer, her fear grew deeper; the menace in the village seemed palpable to her when she hurried home from the market. She met no one's eyes, but she felt the weight of their stares, darker than the growing shadows.
She didn't want to go to the gathering. But when Jaton knocked on her door, it became clear she had no choice. His wife waited with him, a grim smile twisting on her mouth. An escort, they said, for a young girl alone.
Guards, she knew, for a young girl with magic.
So she walked between them like a prisoner, feeling dazed and numb and frightened.
The gallows waited in the square. She could hear the gleeful, excited hum of conversation that ran all around her. Did they know, or did they only suspect?
It might be all right, she told herself, but knew it for a lie.
But the dream, another, darker voice whispered. The dream that comes to you every night. You will die. You know it.
I know it, she thought dully. Goddess bright, I know it and I cannot stop it.
oOo
"Don't you think it should know how to walk at least?" Bruna said. Her brown eyes scorched Kel with her contempt. "Instead of striding along. Like a man."
"I'd rather stride than shuffle like someone had tied my feet together," Kel bit out and immediately regretted it. She shouldn't have answered. That was acknowledging that the 'it' they referred to was her. It was letting them see they were irking her.
"Oh!" One black eyebrow arched in mock horror. "So it does have a voice. But it doesn't seem to realise what it's saying."
The other girl with her giggled. She was a vapid, pretty thing, insipid in lavender silk that was cut low and long. Kel shouldn't have envied her big confused violet eyes or glittering, empty smile, but she did.
For all the parts of her that loved the thrill of a fight, the wind rushing in her hair when Peachblossom charged the quintain, there were the other parts that quailed at the thought of mud and shivered at the thought of Neal of Queenscove's clear green eyes.
"Does it have anything else to say?" Bruna drawled, beginning to circle Kel with tiny, delicate steps. She held her skirts up, so as not to trail them through the imaginary dirt on the pristine floor. "Or is that the limit of its intelligence?"
I will not give in...
"Bruna!"
Kel wouldn't have thought she would actually be glad to see the lovesick Faleron, but she thanked Mithros and wondered if it was too much to hope he'd written some truly horrendous poetry.
Faleron's smile was sweet and bright. "There's to be jousting on the practice courts soon. I - that is we," he corrected, "...would like you to watch."
"I'll think about it," Bruna said off-handedly, fanning her hand out to examine her nails. "I'm very busy."
"After all," Kel put in, her voice mild, "she has paying customers to attend to."
Bruna went a shade of scarlet that Kel had only seen on sunrises. "You—"
"Kel!" Faleron said, his handsome face aghast. "How could you say that?"
Had he really thought all the nasty comments Bruna and her pack had been making were jokes? He'd happily have pounded Joren for the same insult to her, but passed of Bruna's malice as humour.
"It was easy," she snapped back. "I just looked at that witch and inspiration struck me."
"Kel!" His mouth was hanging open.
Her hazel eyes were no longer dreamy but fierce as a firestorm. "We've established that's my name." She glared at Bruna. "Maybe you'd do well to remember it."
The noblewoman's face didn't look so lovely now, twisted with anger. Her vapid companion was gazing about blankly, as if she didn't quite understand what was going on.
"I shall report this to your knight-master!" Bruna declared in a furious flurry.
"Go ahead," Kel said coolly. "It was worth it. Do your customers say the same?"
And she walked away before the wrathfully mouthing courtesan could reply.
Thank you Mithros, she thought, for letting me speak my mind to that witch. She smiled.
oOo
"You have come to hear the truth, because you are right-thinking men and women."
It would have been better if the executioner had shouted, if there had been anything in his voice except calm and darkness. He made it sound so reasonable. He made it sound just.
"And the truth is this. There is a plague that walks among us. It is a disease that we have destroyed, piece by piece. But the final shreds of it crouch in the shadows, trying to defeat us by stealth. We must not allow this. We must wipe out those cursed with the Gift, not to save ourselves, but to save them."
Those pitiless black eyes razed the crowd, and when they passed over her, Andrea felt dizzy. His words came to her as if underwater, filtered through a haze of dread.
"And these monsters, deformed not in body but in spirit, cannot understand that we are saving them. They will fight, and they will kill; but know this...whatever they throw at us, we will save them all the same, and choke the poison from them."
He held up the noose and the crowd murmured in approval. She could see the change in them beginning; they no longer seemed individuals but one shadowy mass, bestial in their emotions. She saw anger on their faces, and hate too: those she expected. But there was another emotion on every face, one that she did not expect.
Fear.
Goddess bright, they feared her.
Am I so terrible? she wanted to cry. Is that what I am to you – a monster?
"I have found the last that cowers in our midst. And I shall seek it out, and we shall take the curse from it. Not because we are cruel. But because it is right and just and merciful!"
The crowd stilled and Andrea felt the tiny knot of tension inside her begin to build, to unfold like a flower, until a scream was knotted in her throat. She swallowed it back. She did not dare move.
She saw his hand lift, scorching a trail across the crowd. They drew back like dark curtains, revealing the cobbles, revealing the future she had known must come.
He pointed at her.
oOo
"What were you thinking, Kel?" Lord Raoul of Goldenlake sighed. His expression was somewhere between resignation and amusement. "Bruna of Farbrook? Of all the people to make an enemy of..."
"I got tired of her comments," said Kel stubbornly.
He had found her in the stables, angrily forking hay from the loft; so angry, she even forgot her fear of heights. The moment he appeared, the rush of anticipation in her stomach had nearly caused her to fall – Bruna had carried out her threat.
But even chaff-flecked and grimy, she kept her head high and her hazel eyes firmly fixed on her knight-master. He was, as ever, imposing in his gleaming armour, but Kel was one of the few people not to be overawed by him.
His stare intensified abruptly. "What comments?"
She shrugged, nervously washing her fingers in her palm. "All week, they've been following me. Saying...things." She swallowed. She hadn't realised how much all those verbal stabs had hurt.
"Things, Kel?" Raoul's voice was gentle. He gestured for her to sit down.
"About girls being knights. The usual." If she thought about it too hard, it made the back of her eyes tingle with suspicious warmth. "And other things."
"Things you aren't going to tell me, I take it. Can you prove any of this?" His eyes were serious; he believed her, but others would not.
"The boys heard," she murmured darkly. "But...they thought it was a joke. They only see what they want to."
"That's the case with most people in this life, I'm afraid," Raoul said, his bass voice a soothing rumble. "I'm sorry, Kel. You'll just have to take whatever punishment Bruna gives you. But...some advice."
She looked at him and saw the glint of mischief was back in his eyes. "Sir?"
"Next time you take it upon yourself to tell Bruna the truth...make sure no one else can hear you."
She grinned despite her gloom. "I will."
oOo
Her paralysis broke and Andrea turned to flee.
Hands seized her, rough and tight as pincers. Jaton's wife wore a savage grin, her nails digging into Andrea's skin.
"No, no, lass," she crooned. "You'll not be leaving that way."
"Let go!" she shouted and tried to wrench away to no avail. "Please, don't!"
In answer, a howl rose from the crowd, a wordless cry that held the promise of blood and death and darkness.
Andrea thrashed, managing to land several slaps and kicks on the people who held her. But inch by reluctant inch, yard by painful yard, the gallows loomed. The gallows – and him.
Those cold eyes met hers.
And she was held by what she saw in them. She was falling into a chasm, black as the grave, and not even her golden fire could bring light. His eyes swallowed her whole and dragged her down, down, down.
Where something was waiting for her.
Something ancient and formless crouched in the soul of this man. Something evil.
And oh, Mithros shield her...
Something ravenous. It called to her, and she saw with uncomprehending dismay that he too had magic. Not the Gift; she knew what that felt like, but something else. Something other, black and awful-
The contact broke: she felt the scrape of rope on her neck – they were tightening the noose, and her hands were bound behind her back. It was happening. It couldn't be happening, but it was.
She screamed.
oOo
This was not the sort of dream Ryan Talver was used to. His dreams were city dreams of narrow alleys and narrow escapes, of taverns and dicing dens and markets, of noise and bustle. He had never seen anything like this little village, these still, empty-eyed people, and her...
He saw the girl, with her wide, golden eyes like pieces of the sun cut down from the sky, and a thought rang in his head like a bell.
I know you.
And then he saw the gallows, and the man beside her with eyes that opened up onto huge and horrific and inhuman, and fear shot through him.
I mustn't let you die.
And then he felt something inside him uncoil, hot and flaring and furious. Impossible, incredible blue light streamed from his hands towards the girl, and words were carried on it, words he was sure he hadn't thought of.
We are bound.
oOo
The boy appeared out of nowhere.
Tousled dark hair made his face look thin and almost vulnerable, but the easy, graceful way he stood belied that. And his eyes – his eyes blazed blue, hardly human at all.
Yet he was somehow more real than anyone in this place, even though every sense she possessed told her that boys didn't just appear, and they certainly couldn't walk through trees the way this one was as he started towards her.
His words burned through her.
We are bound.
Blue fire seared from him: and something in her answered. Her Gift boiled out of her, a wash of golden light that lit the dim dark square with the intensity of dawn. And she answered him.
We belong.
Gold and blue met and meshed and exploded; the air screamed.
Chaos erupted as the villagers fled. But the shadow man did not move: his hand closed on the lever that would open the trapdoor.
The green fire exploded outwards.
oOo
Silence as his vision went green until Ryan could no longer see the girl, or the executioner, or anything except wave after wave of pure jade like that seemed to lap over his senses for endless time.
Slowly the magic cleared away. In its wake were still forms, bodies blown down and limp as ragdolls.
Even the executioner had been tossed aside. What Ryan had seen in that ma's eyes had shaken him to his bones, and he only prayed that he would never awaken.
His eyes sought the girl – she was there, her hair disarrayed, wrenching one hand out of her bindings. Her eyes were wide – when she looked at him, her expression was horror or awe and he didn't know which.
They were joined somehow, she and he, joined by their Gifts.
"Get out of here!" he shouted at the girl, who seemed dazed. She was lifting the noose from her neck with hands scraped red from the hemp, her mouth trembling with a kind of desperation. "They're waking up!"
"Who are you?" he heard her say. A tiny, shaky voice. "What have we done?" She stared at the bodies. "What have I done?"
Ryan ran forward, but the world rippled suddenly, uncertainly. What was going on?
I'm waking up, he thought with horror. No, I can't! I have to stay and look after her...it's important...
"Get out of here!" he shouted as the world seemed to draw away from him, fading into mists and obscurity. "Do you want to hang? Get out!"
And as he felt himself awake, he desperately hoped that she had listened.
oOo
Andrea stepped from the gallows, not understanding why she was doing, only that the boy had said she should, and he seemed to understand what was happening. She could barely think, except for one treacherous idea that circled her head over and over like a hungry shark.
You used your Gift to hurt them...you used your Gift to kill.
She drifted through the bodies like a ghost. There was Jaton, arms akimbo, face frozen into a mask of horror. Had he deserved it? Had the shadow man been right about her after all?
She stumbled through the labyrinth of bodies, out to the woodland that lay all around the village. She was a killer, a—
"The witch is escaping!" It was that voice, that dreadful dark voice and it was furious. Andrea turned to see the executioner totter to his feet, obsidian eyes had fixed upon her. He was a few hundred yards away, nothing more. "There, there she is!"
Other rose too, clumsy as clockwork dolls. Their eyes turned to her.
And she did not dare stay any longer. No matter what was out there in the wide world, it could not be owrse than what remained for her here. Without another thought, she ran – she ran like she was running down the wind, like she was running from the night itself.
But like any true predator, the shadow man gave chase.
oOo