Sacrifice: The First Book of the Fey (11 page)

Of that he was certain.

TEN

Her hands were gnarled and they ached with the cold. Eleanora winced as she gripped the stale bread crust and snapped it in half. She put the smaller half aside for her midday meal, scraped the crumbs into her dry palm, and took a bite from the larger half. The bread crunched beneath her remaining teeth. She shuffled to the door, opened it, and spread the crumbs on the walk.

She was never so hungry that she couldn’t share with the birds.

The sun was out for the first time in days. Its light shone like diamonds through the leaves of the trees. Although the land around her small home was still a mucky swamp, she had faith that it would all dry soon. Maybe then she could walk to Coulter’s cabin and see if she could get him to cut her some wood. Someday she might even be able to pay him for his help.

Then she closed the door and went back inside. The single room was dark and colder than the outdoors. She hadn’t made a fire since two nights before, when she’d cooked the last of her stew and then slept in the fire’s warmth. She was saving her remaining stack of wood, although for what she wasn’t sure. Part of her thought she was saving it to keep herself warm on the night she died.

She had no delusions that she would live much longer. A body as old as hers could not take the starvation and the chill. Her clothing hung about her like blankets now, and she could see all the bones in her arms. She was glad she did not have a silver glass so that she could see what suffering had done to her face.

Drew had always thought she had a beautiful face.

But Drew was six months dead, and she would not be far behind him. She had never before realized how much easier life was when there were two to share the misery. He would have found some dry wood while she would have dug roots to feed them.

She missed him more than she had ever thought possible. They had fought from the day they’d met, but they had loved with equal passion. And he had never once blamed her for the lack of children just as she had never blamed him for his inability to farm or to keep sheep. He had been good with his hands, and in the end the neighbors had bargained for his services: a dozen eggs in trade for a repaired wheel; a month’s worth of bread for a well-built chimney. She had been living off the last of that charity since he’d died. But when the rains came, the charity ended.

She ate her piece of stale bread, washing it down with a glass of the rainwater she had collected during the night. The water was cool and fresh and sweet. Even the rain brought good things.

Perhaps she wouldn’t wait for the mud to dry. Perhaps she would slog her way over to Coulter’s. It didn’t matter if her skirts got muddy. They were old anyway, and she no longer had anyone to impress.

She swallowed the last of the bread, then pulled open the door again, expecting to scare the birds. Instead she was the one surprised. The crumbs remained, littering the walk. No four-pronged footprints marred the surface of the mud. In the rain the birds had swooped down as soon as she’d tossed the crumbs to them. They had flown overhead as if they’d expected the early-morning ritual.

But they hadn’t swooped this morning, and she had been too preoccupied with the sun to notice. She glanced at the trees, the raindrops glistening on their wet branches. The birds should have been singing in the sunlight. Now that she thought about it, she realized she hadn’t heard a bird since she’d woken up.

How odd. How very odd.

You must listen when nature whispers in your ear,
Drew said. She turned to thank him before realizing that he spoke with the voice of memory. A thousand times each day her mind caught her like this: she would look with a sudden warmth filling the cold places in her heart, only to discover that what she had seen or heard had not been Drew.

Until he died, she had never realized how much a part of her he had become.

The trees, slender birches and mighty oaks, suddenly seemed menacing as they towered above her. If she went a few feet inside the forest, the darkness would overwhelm her. The darkness and whatever had spooked the birds.

No wind, no rustlings of small animals, no sound except the Cardidas half a mile behind the cabin, burbling its way to Jahn. The river never quieted for anyone.

The river. She turned toward it. Sunlight reflected off the brown water, sending ripple lights like stars into the sky. During the night she had awakened, cold and damp on her side of the pallet, arms reaching toward Drew, who was no longer there. The rain had been falling steadily. Through its persistent patter she had thought she’d heard voices on the wind. She had sat up, straining to hear if one of the voices was Drew’s, hoping that perhaps he was coming back for her. But they had sounded far away and unfamiliar, and after a while she’d convinced herself that they were simply a trick of the rain.

Perhaps they hadn’t been.

She shuddered. No sense in making anything up. She needed to see for herself.

She grabbed her shawl off the peg, then left the cabin and closed the door behind her. The mud sucked at her shoes, seeping into the holes in the soles. She walked around the crumbs—the birds might want them if they came back—and headed deep into the forest.

No one had walked the path in days, and the mud flowed like a river. After a few yards she tried walking on the grass, but discovered that it was mostly marsh. Her luck was better with the mud. At least its depth was consistent.

The trees towered over her, blocking the sun, dripping water as if the rain had never stopped. The sound of drops hitting the ground and of her own feet squishing through the muck were the only sign of life. It was as if she had awakened to an empty world.

She passed the lean-to Drew had built as a blind. All the neighbors used it in the fall and winter when game was scarce, even though hunting in those woods was strictly forbidden by the King. The King never traveled out this far. He didn’t suspect that his own people were poaching his deer, or if he did suspect, he didn’t seem to care.

She had never walked this far into the woods before without startling some animal.

Her legs were tired, even though she had walked only half the distance to Coulter’s cabin. She was in poorer health than she had thought, being unable to walk even a short way without losing her wind.

She suspected her discomfort came from more than old age. The chill she had awakened with that morning had settled in her bones, and she rubbed her hands over her brittle arms as she walked.

When she reached the fork in the trail, her skirts were wet and heavy. She stopped and leaned on the damp bark of a birch tree, bumping it just enough to send a spray of water down on her head. In the distance she heard voices. She frowned. They were as faint as the voices she had heard during the night, the words unintelligible. Then she heard a man shouting. Coulter, telling someone to go away. His words ended in half a cry.

She picked up her skirts to run back to her own cabin when she heard the woman’s scream. She recognized it. The same scream had come from her own throat when she’d seen Drew’s lifeless body, white and bloated from the river.

By the Sword, she couldn’t abandon that. She had no reason to save herself. She had nothing left. But Coulter and his wife, Mehan, had a baby. They had a vegetable garden and weaving and a small flock of sheep. They were young. They had everything Eleanora did not.

She made herself turn and run toward the sound instead of away from it. Her legs wobbled, and she had to go slower than she wanted. Her bones were fragile; all she needed to do was trip and break something. She would be able to help no one then.

As if she could help now. Perhaps it wasn’t as bad as she thought. Perhaps Coulter had merely injured himself and his wife was too young to understand the difference.

Mehan’s wails were growing. So were the voices. A male voice, speaking Nye, dominated.

She reached the edge of the clearing and stopped. Her face was flushed and she was shaking. She had to grab a tree to keep from falling over.

The Coulter cabin was before her. In the yard stood over a dozen men, slender, tall, almost willowy, wearing pants and a thick leather shirt of a style she had never seen before. They were all dark and had faces that were beautiful and terrible at the same time. They were standing over the body of Coulter, his skin stripped as if it were a dress being torn up for rags, his blood seeping into the muddy earth.

His wife, Mehan, was on her knees beside him, holding his head, which was yet untouched, and wailing at the top of her lungs. Eleanora clung to the tree, her gorge rising. She made herself take small breaths to settle her stomach. She would deal with her distress later when she had a moment alone. When she had time to think.

One of the men stepped forward and grabbed Mehan by the hair. He spoke in a soft voice, and Eleanora caught her lower lip. That was not a man, but a woman. A tall woman who dressed like a man. Eleanora glanced at the remaining strangers with new eyes and realized over half of them were women.

Her stomach turned, and the meager breakfast she had eaten came back up. She tried to retch quietly, using the tree to block herself from the group, hoping that they hadn’t heard. Women. Women never participated in war. In the uprisings and revolts of her childhood—even in the Peasant Uprising in which her father had fought—the women had tended the homes, suffered with the wounded, but had never, ever turned weapons upon another being. She had not thought it within a woman’s nature.

She ripped a leaf off a nearby bush and used it to wipe her mouth. She was light-headed; the image of Coulter’s destroyed body appeared before her each time she closed her eyes. If she wasn’t quiet, she would end up like that. She might, even now.

She peered around the tree again. Some of the strangers were pointing in her direction, but the leader was shaking her head. They were having a serious discussion in a guttural language she did not recognize, and the discussion concerned her.

Eleanora waited until they looked away, then slid sideways into deeper brush. Her years in the forest had taught her silence. She could move without cracking a twig or disturbing a bush. Another skill she owed to Drew. She thanked him under her breath.

Mehan was still sobbing, her hands resting on her husband’s body. She was repeating his name over and over as if it would bring him back. The woman holding her hair yanked it, and Mehan’s head jerked back. The strangers continued to argue, and finally a small one came forward, his features coarser than the others, flatter somehow and shorter. He was dressed in brown, and his face was smeared with blood.

The woman holding Mehan spoke to him, and he chuckled. Then the woman ran her hands down Mehan’s arms, and Mehan screamed as the flesh pulled away. The small man caught it as if it were a special treat and stuffed it into an oversize pouch that hung from his belt.

Eleanora watched in stunned fascination. They had special powers. The woman had no weapon, and yet she pulled the skin from Mehan’s bones as if she had used a flaying knife. They hadn’t got to the cabin yet, but when they did go inside, they would find the baby and, poor innocent thing, he would die as his parents had, a slow, excruciating death.

She could do nothing for Mehan. She was an old woman with barely enough strength to walk through a forest. But she might be able to hide an infant, even for a short while, even until the bloodlust faded.

Only she had little time. Mehan’s screams might save her child. Eleanora hurried through the woods to the back of the cabin. Coulter’s cabin was big enough to have three rooms, and two springs ago he had added the luxury of a second door. He had done that so the summer breeze could cool the hot kitchen, never foreseeing that it might save his child’s life.

She hoped it would.

She prayed as she had never prayed before, making a compact with the Holy One. She had never much believed in God—she had seen too much in her long life to find the promises of the Words Written and Unwritten to be anything more than hope—but at this moment she needed the hope. She needed all the help she could get.