Betrayals (36 page)

“No!” Ruhl whispered, horror twisting his features. “That can’t be true! … They can’t be free … and together again!”

“But they are, and all of that is thanks to you,” Kambil contradicted, his tone cold and unforgiving. “Right now we’ve simply taken away the privilege of calling yourself High Lord. For every three days they remain uncaught, another level of nobility will be stripped from you. If they continue uncaught long enough, you’ll find yourself lower than the lowliest peasant. At that point you’ll be thrown into the street to beg for whatever you need to keep yourself alive, and the district you’ll be begging in will be one of the ones which were part of your former holdings. Your people will be called to carry you out again now, but you’ll return here in three days to find out just what your new status is. Do you understand me?”

Ruhl’s nod was as jerky as the Mardimil woman’s had been, but it was a good deal more brief. The man now looked devastated, and when Kambil rang for his bearers he just lay on the litter without moving. Once he was removed Delin expected the next person to be brought in, but the servant didn’t reappear and Kambil and the others stood and stretched.

“That’s it for now, but we’ll have to discuss possible future moves in addition to those already set in motion,” Kambil said to the three people near him. “You, Delin, aren’t included in that, so you have my permission to return to your wing. When we want you again we’ll send for you.”

The others smiled with clear amusement as Delin obediently got to his feet and headed out of the room, going back to his wing as he’d been ordered to do. His inside self raged with impotent anger over being treated like this, but that was perfectly all right. Kambil would expect him to react that way, and above all else he needed to act the way he was expected to.

Just as he had when he’d been in his father’s complete power. He’d always acted just the way he was supposed to, and his father had never discovered the tiny, private part of his mind that planned and plotted a fitting revenge. That tiny part was now alive again, and somehow, some way, it would find the path to freedom for him just as it had before. And, as he had with his father, Delin now lived for the time when vengeance would be his….

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Lorand sat on the coach seat, Jovvi’s sleeping head against his shoulder, wishing he, too, could be asleep. He wasn’t far from total exhaustion, but right now there was something required of him that had to be done. They’d been driving for two hours at least, but still hadn’t found a safe place to stop and rest.

To Lorand’s extended talent, the night was far from quiet. Even in the rain life continued its cycle, as those who prowled the night did so with mild complaint rather than with gusto. Every life-form out there was busy, either hunting, or growing, or warning of danger, or simply healing in sleep. Sleep … that would have been nice … the way Naran had also fallen asleep … and the way Tamrissa was fighting not to….

Suddenly Lorand’s head snapped up, sleep no longer the foremost thing in his thoughts. The area they’d just reached… the feelings of the animals around here were just that much different from normal, the normal of empty woods and nothing of human habitation. Here the prowling or resting animals were uneasy and cautious, which ought to mean—

“Rion, tell Lidris to stop the coach,” Lorand said out his window, the words Rion had probably been waiting for. The other man had been riding his horse close to the coach, using his Air magic talent to keep himself dry. “I think there may be a farm or something around here, but I don’t know exactly where.”

“There should be a way to find out,” Rion responded, then called to the coach driver to stop. Alsin Meerk also rode on the coach, Lorand knew, his horse tied to the back of it. The man had continued to look disturbed and deep in thought, and it was possible that he rode on the coach with his man so that the two could talk. Lorand wasn’t much of a judge, but Alsin Meerk seemed to need someone friendly to talk to very badly.

When the coach stopped, the following wagon naturally did the same. Those on horseback had been riding in various positions, either near the wagon, behind it, or ahead of the coach. Now everyone came together, and Lorand put his head outside the window.

“There should be some sort of human habitation on the right side of the road,” he told everyone. “The problem will be finding the way to get to it in this darkness, so I’d like to try an experiment. If those of you with Earth magic will try to link with me, we can search for what would be an unnatural opening in the trees. I take it you all understand what that would feel like?”

“I do,” Meerk said as he climbed down from the box, his words joining the agreement of three others on horseback. “How do you want to do this?”

“Open yourself to the power, then reach out with it in my direction,” Lorand said, speaking to all of them. “I have no idea whether or not the link will work, but we should try it before we do something else.”

Lorand didn’t mention that the only something else would be his Blending with his groupmates. Blending was extremely draining, and afterward most of them would be good for nothing but falling down and sleeping. This way something might be accomplished without leaving their strongest protection weak and useless.

It was obvious when the four other users of Earth magic opened to the power, just as obvious as the fact that Meerk was the weakest of the group. The other three really were Highs, and briefly Lorand wondered if their relatively fresh strength would overwhelm him when they tried to link—or if his weariness would be the reason the experiment didn’t work. And then their power and talent touched him, and more than new strength flooded into him. His own talent was magnified in some way, at the very least twice as great as it was normally….

“There it is,” Lorand said, distantly aware of the same words coming from the other four people in the link. “A crude road cut into the woods about a hundred yards ahead, but more overgrown than a road that’s used should be.”

They broke the link then so that those on horseback could ride to where the road began, and Lorand had another surprise. The new strength he’d been given had ebbed only a little with the breaking of the link, which meant he’d now have less trouble doing what was needed to make them safe.

Meerk went to his horse rather than climbing back up on the coach, and then their little convoy followed those on horseback. The road they’d found would have been passed without the least notice, thanks to the darkness surrounding it and the fact that it had begun to be overgrown. Other riders came up to join those with Earth magic, and the way light flared in the darkness and rain said that those others had Fire magic. When they turned off onto the road, they would not be traveling blind.

It took quite a few minutes of cautious traveling before they came to an area that had once been cleared for cultivation, and then another stretch of time before they reached buildings. Somewhere in the darkness Lorand could tell that there was a small herd of cattle, but the feel of pigs and chickens was scattered all over the place rather than centered in specific spots.

And the buildings themselves…there seemed to be three houses on each side of a larger-than-usual barn, but none of them showed a light. At that time of night the occupants should be asleep, of course, but their arrival was really too noisy to be slept through. And then Lorand realized that there was nothing in the way of indications of living beings inside those houses….

“I think this place is deserted,” Jovvi said, obviously having seen the same thing Lorand had. “I wonder why they didn’t take their livestock with them.”

“I wonder why they would build six houses and a barn, then tarn around and abandon it all,” Lorand countered. “Something about this place just doesn’t feel right….”

Shouts came from up ahead, and Lorand had the distinct impression that something had been found. A rider came galloping past the coach to stop at the wagon, the woman on the horse riding with one hand to her mouth. That confirmed the uneasy feeling Lorand had, and Jovvi looked positively alarmed. But they didn’t find out what was causing the uproar until Rion came riding back.

“Until a few moments ago, I had convinced myself that I was no longer innocent,” Rion said in a wooden voice, his face pale in the glow of the small ball of flame which Tamrissa had set in the air beside him. “Now…now I wish I truly were still innocent, as the price of worldliness is at times much too high.”

“Rion, what is it?” Jovvi asked very gently, and Lorand had the impression that she touched Rion with soothing and loving concern. “What did you find that caused such an uproar?”

“The people in this place… they didn’t leave,” Rion answered, his voice now filled with pain. “Alsin Meerk suggested that this farm was established so far away from everything else because the people were tired of working just to provide the nobility with more income. So they decided to take unclaimed land and work only for themselves, but clearly the nobility found where they were. They …”

Rion’s voice faltered as he shook his head, very clearly unable to go on. But by then Valiant had joined him, and their groupmate’s face wore an expression of furious and unrestrained rage.

“Those animals couldn’t allow six families to escape from them and set up on their own,” Valiant growled, not quite looking at anyone. “It would have given other people ideas, and that they certainly didn’t want. So they made an example of these people, hangin’ each family from crude gibbets put up outside their houses. Men, women, and children, even two infants. They’ve been hangin’ there for some little time, certainly as a warnin’ to anyone who came to see how the ‘escapees’ were doin’. One look tells it all.”

Lorand felt shock so great that he couldn’t speak, simply holding to Jovvi as she shuddered against him. Tamrissa had one hand to her mouth, as though to hold back physical illness, and Naran wept silently. What Valiant and Rion had just said was beyond belief, far too savage and inhuman for it to be real. There had to be a mistake of some kind….

“My father’s farm,” he found himself saying. “Could that be the real reason he didn’t want me to leave? Because he had to produce a certain amount in order to keep the nobility happy? And to let the rest of us live? But he never said that the farm wasn’t his alone …”

“We’ve got to destroy them,” Tamrissa’s voice came then, calmly reasonable with only a hint of hysteria to it. “The entire world changes with every day and everything new we learn, and every change makes things worse. They kill and maim and destroy and enslave, and no one does anything to stop them. We have to do something, or we’re no better than those butchers are.”

“We will do somethin’,” Valiant assured her, but his voice was too grim and hard to be soothing. “Right now we’ve got to take those bodies down, then we’ll all spend the night in that barn. In the mornin’ we can have a mass cremation, and then talk about the details of what we’ll do. This is more than the last straw …”

Lorand nodded and began to leave the coach to join them, but Rion quietly told him to stay where he was before turning his horse to follow Valiant’s already retreating mount. The new strength that Lorand had found was now drained out of him, so he made no attempt to argue about staying in the coach. He simply felt a vague sort of impatience, wanting his full strength back so that they could begin to avenge six families of people who had sought for nothing but their freedom….

Lidris climbed down from the coach and more of the men and some women came from the wagon, and even Tamrissa and Naran went to join the grisly cleanup effort. Even so it took quite some time, but finally Lidris returned to mount the coach box again and urge the horses forward. They were brought to the front of the barn, where Rion waited to open the coach door.

“The coach and wagon will be put behind the barn, and the horses stabled in the back half,” Rion informed them as he helped Jovvi out then turned to give Lorand a hand. “That leaves an adequate amount of space for us humans in the front half, thank whatever Highest Aspect there might be. If we had to stay in any of those houses, I think most of us would have elected to sleep in the rain.”

“I know I would have,” Lorand said as he turned to close the coach door. “Staying in one of those houses would be an inexcusable intrusion, considering that the owners of those houses were brutally murdered. Is there anything left that Jovvi and I can help with?”

“No,” Rion began with a faint smile and a headshake, but his gentle denial was overridden by someone else’s much stronger opinion.

“Yes, there is something the lady can do,” Meerk said as he strode over, his expression totally unlike anything Lorand had ever seen on the man before. “Once everyone is in the barn, she can make certain that there are no more spies among us. Once that’s taken care of, I’ll describe what I’ve been thinking about to everyone together.”

“What sort of thing have you been thinking about, Alsin?” Jovvi asked, a faint frown line between her brows. “I can see that it’s caused you a good deal of pain, but that’s all I can see.”

“I’ve come to the conclusion that I deserve the pain,” Meerk said, apparently forcing himself to discuss something he hadn’t been able to before. “Everyone kept telling me that I was being a backward fool, seeing myself as more noble than the nobility because I refused to use their methods to defeat them. And that was the way I saw myself, as someone too nobly upright to lower himself. I was even willing to have people believe me too frightened to fight, rather than letting them know that I was really too good a person to indulge in such bestial tactics. I’ve now discovered that I’ve been lying to myself.”

“So you’ve reversed your former position,” Jovvi said with a nod, leading them all into the barn and out of the rain. “Are you sure that that’s what you really want to do?”

“I’ve known it’s what I should do for hours, only I kept finding excuses not to,” he replied, looking down at his feet rather than at them. “I even tried to get Lidris to remind me what I believed our aims ought to be, but Lidris has been doing his own thinking. We assured each other that we would continue to do things the right way, and then we got here …”