The Shattered Vine (10 page)

Jerzy called on the quiet-magic without conscious intent, the saliva
filling his mouth until the sense of belonging became a physical taste, a ripe, full flavor of healvines, the spicier, darker fruit of firevines threaded like veins, the weathervine mingled within: a tart, pulpier flavor, carrying the salt of sea winds and a hint of yellow fruit, then a much lighter, brighter flavor, like a voice heard distant in the night. . . .

And, at the back of it all, tangled deep against the bones of his throat, the unmistakable jolt of unblooded vines.

The knowledge came to him, carried by the aroma of that blend. All there, carried within him. Part of him. Waiting—wanting—to be used.

He could do this. He could—he was—enough. Not himself, but what he carried, what he crafted. He could cleanse the land, protect his people . . . be a threat to Ximen’s plans.

Jerzy shuddered, swallowing the magic back down, refusing to let the euphoria overwhelm him, distrusting the feeling. Distracted, he almost missed the sensation of the ground beneath him surging, dirt and stone replaced by the yawning sensation of roots, thicker than he was, wider than the seas, stretching not from him to his yards but everywhere all at once, spanning the distance, deep into the heart of the earth-stone beneath their feet.

It was, he realized with a shudder, the same sensation he had felt when he cleared the air back at the village, leaving him sweating and shaking, the same and yet more, underlying the taint, deeper and stronger, not drawn by his decantation but drawing him in, salivating with the need to consume
him
.

It was thick, and dense, and powerful, and . . .

And old. Deep and old, and he was drowning in it, feeling it fill him up from within. . . .

“Jer!”

The worried shout roused him from the dizziness, and he grabbed hold of the wagon’s side with one hand, reaching automatically for the flask at his belt with the other even as he swerved to see what Ao was yelling about. The field to their left was clear, just a softly sloping hill covered with sheep—who, even as he watched, scattered, the two
children watching them scattering as well, the sound of low yips in the air indicating the presence of herd dogs, as well.

Jerzy swung to the right, his side, but the road was clear there, too, as well as behind them. His eyesight seemed almost impossibly sharp, taking in the smallest of details, while his mind felt muddled, as though he had just woken from an unquiet sleep. Kaï had the road ahead covered, his blade out and ready, even as Jerzy heard Ao pull back the thick bowstring and notch a bolt to it. Where was Mahault?

Then a sharp cry from above dragged his attention back to the sky. Three, four dark figures coming out of the cloud, circling low—no, high, but falling quickly, shaped like raptors but larger than birds should be, pinions ragged, talons and necks angled to strike.

And with them, driving down out of the freshening sky, the taint of enemy magic, unmistakable even as Jerzy moved his hand away from the flask and grabbed in the wagon bed for his cudgel. His hand closed around the polished wooden heft just as the first of the too-large, misshapen birds reached them.

Glossy black, almost glittering in the sunlight, built like some gods-forsaken cross between a tarn and the giant seabirds that had glided over the ship each dawn, their wings spanning nearly Kaïnam’s height across, their claws larger than Jerzy’s own hands and tipped not with a bird’s talons but metal-sharp blades, one of them raking across Jerzy’s face before he could raise the cudgel to defend himself.

A horse screamed, and he heard Mahault swear, then the twang of a bolt from Ao’s bow released into the air. Jerzy landed a hit with the cudgel, and the creature flapped its wings but did not retreat.

“What are they?”

“Don’t know, don’t care,” he heard Ao say, even as the trader braced himself more firmly in the wagon bed and rearmed. “Jer, if they’re magic, can they be killed?”

“Anything can be killed,” Kaïnam said, but his blade, limited to his immediate reach, was useless in the dive-and-wheel attack, and his horse so terrified it almost unseated him.

“Jer?” Another bolt released, this one hitting with a fleshy thunk, even as Jerzy swing the cudgel up and hit something hard and muscled. He couldn’t see where Mahault was, or how she was faring with her shorter blade, the birds wheeling around for another attack as though they shared a single thought or were directed like a pack of hunting dogs.

“If they’re magic, it will take magic,” he said, panting. That was how it had worked with the serpents. “I can weaken them; then you can cut them down.” He hoped.

“Under the wagon.” Mahault’s voice, ordering him, even as her smaller hand took the cudgel from his grasp, her body checking his, knocking him to the ground even as he was rolling underneath the relative safety of the wagon.

A sudden memory: a wagon, shattered in two, the bodies of slaves lying broken as well, some dead, others dying . . .

Jerzy refused the memory, staring up at the narrow length of iron that ran along the bottom or the wagon, connecting the planking and giving it strength. Sturdy. Strong enough to carry their belongings. Strong enough to keep him safe—but not for long. He needed to . . .

He needed to bring the beasts down out of the sky, where they had the advantage, to where Mahl and Kaïnam could finish them off. Grounded, the beasts were no match.

A flash of panic filled him, burning away the last of the groggy sensation, then the knowledge of what he needed to do, and how, came to him: healspell, turned inward, to draw vitality away, tearing at the life that animated them, hard and fast so that they fell from the sky. Anti-healing. Something not-done but . . . possible.

Had the knowledge come from the Guardian? Jerzy had no time to reach for reassurance. He heard a grunt of pain, the smack of horseflesh against the wagon, rocking it on its wheels. Another thwang of the bowstring, and the scream, the terrible scream of an unnatural bird as it swooped to attack. Not being able to see was worse than seeing, unsure what was happening outside his temporary hiding place.

Jerzy called the quiet-magic even as his hand reached for the wineskin to augment it, and give him full strength. No time for subtlety or show: he uncorked the healwine and brought it to his mouth, spilling some over his lips in his haste. It stained the ground underneath him, the dry-packed dirt soaking it up. Instead of the usual smooth, warm fruit, he tasted harshness, as though the magic knew what he was about to do and was resisting being used in such a fashion.

“Forgive me,” he whispered, unsure if he was asking the wine, or the birds, or Sin Washer himself. “Into their bodies, rise. Inside their bodies, break. Go.”

The spellwine backwashed on him, resisting, choking him until he spluttered, but he could feel the magic working,
felt
it hit the creatures, sliding under their feathers, pricking into their flesh the way Lil salted meats for dinner, drawing the vitality out of them, magic drawing magic to itself. His magic, matching the taint measure to measure, not trying to fight it directly but clinging to it so that it could not cling to the bird’s flesh any longer, dropping out, falling and dissipating . . .

He could not see the battle, but he could
feel
it working.

“Now!” he heard Mahault cry, her voice fierce and terrible, and then the singing of blades cutting air and the far more terrible sounds of them meeting flesh, meeting and diving, and the heavy thump of things falling, until there was silence, and the low coughing of someone throwing up over the side of the wagon.

“Jer?”

“Yeah.” He rolled out from under the wagon—on the side without the puddle of vomit—and came face to beak with one of the grotesque birds. In death it still looked terrifying.

“You all right?”

“Yes,” Jerzy responded, before realizing she wasn’t asking him. He climbed to his feet, hauling himself up with a hand on the sideboard, and peered at Ao.

“I’m fine,” the trader said, sounding embarrassed. His hair fell limp in his face, and there was a smudge of dark blood across the bridge of his
nose, making it look even more lopsided. But it wasn’t his blood—more of that dark, gooey liquid was splattered over his arms and the blanket, where a bird had fallen on him, and died.

Jerzy stared at the blood, thinking . . . he wasn’t sure what.

“The serpents didn’t have blood,” he said. The only blood shipboard had been Ao’s, thick and sticky on his hands and clothing. It wasn’t Ao’s blood this time; Jerzy looked again to make sure. “We cut them open and they were solid flesh.”

Ao was too busy mopping himself up to hear, and Kaïnam was cleaning his sword over in the grass, but Mahault looked at him, her eyes still battle-bright. “Does that mean something?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know . . . anything.” His legs were still wobbly, but he managed to turn and kneel down next to the bird on the ground by the wagon, looking at it without touching. It was clearly deformed, as though someone had taken its flesh and pinched and pulled cruelly, re-forming it, stretching the beak into a sharp, rending tool, hammering the claws out on a blacksmith’s forge.

The malaise in the land was subtle. This was not. A weakness, a failure in their enemy’s work? Jerzy didn’t know. He couldn’t think, not there, not right then. He got back up and rummaged in the wagon for something to gather the creature up in, finally dumping the last of their dried meats and using the burlap sack to scoop the bird-beast up, careful not to touch it with his hands any more than was necessary, then retied the top and went to attach it to the nearest horse’s saddle—Mahl’s horse, carrying the lighter weight. The beast, who had managed not to bolt during the fight itself, shied away from the sack, so Jerzy sighed and slung it into the wagon itself, careful to keep it away from the spellwines they still carried.

“Our watcher is still there,” Kaïnam said, returning to them. His voice was low and casual, as though commenting on how far they had yet to ride, but his narrow face was ashen and his eyes a little too wide for true calm. “The coward saw us being attacked and did nothing.”

“They don’t care if we live or die,” Mahl said, and her voice had a
definite tremble in it. “Only that we don’t ally with someone else. Keren was right. Everything’s changed.”

The watching Washer-spy was the least of Jerzy’s concerns just then.

“How did those things find us?” Ao wondered, some of his normal vitality returning. He took a long drink from a waterskin, spitting red-colored phlegm over the side of the wagon onto the dirt, then splashed some more on his face. “Or was it coincidence. ‘Look, people, let’s try and eat them’?” His expression was doubtful, as was Mahault’s. Kaïnam, as usual, was unreadable.

“It felt me,” Jerzy said. “Out on the ocean, it couldn’t find me, the same way I couldn’t find him. But here . . .” It seemed hopeless; if the other Vineart could do so much, could send magic so fiercely, so secretly, how could any stand against him?

The sensation he had felt just before the attack was connected to the malaise festering in the village, which in turn connected to the continued unease he felt below his feet, he was sure of it.

He didn’t speak further of it to the others and they, used to his sudden silences when it came to magic, didn’t push him. While Ao sat guard, his crossbow at the ready, Kaïnam and Mahault dug a shallow pit by the side of the road and dumped the remains of the creatures into it.

Jerzy knew they should do something more, to ensure the corpses would not be dug up by dogs or other scavengers, but there were no rocks large enough to be useful but not too large to lift, and he did not want to use magic just then, to seal the ground more tightly. He certainly did not want to try the single drop of growspell he had anywhere near the creatures, even dead. Instinct told him that to poke at it again, here unprotected on the road, would not be wise.

When what little they could do had been done, the four started back down the road, each wrapped in their own thoughts, all intent on putting as much distance between them and the location of the attack as possible, especially as the last remnants of daylight faded entirely and the air turned a shadowed blue.

Jerzy took up the reins of the wagon again without comment, while
behind him Ao rearranged the contents that had been disturbed during the fight, drawing the canvas cover back over them and fastening it securely before settling himself in a corner, and, to all intents and purposes, falling asleep. Kaïnam reclaimed the vanguard position, his body alert to any threat either around or above, while the clop of hooves told Jerzy that Mahault was doing the same behind.

“Be careful,” he heard Kaïnam say. “Things come out in the dark that would avoid daylight.”

Jerzy stared at the road, but did not see it, his thoughts chasing after each other, chewing on their own tails. The sense of being salivated over had come when he let the full force of his legacies fill him. The attack came soon after. Too soon? The beasts had found them, not by chance but malice. Jerzy had been identified as a threat, identified and . . . hunted?

Unlike the sea beasts, those birds had not merely followed along a shoreline until they came to a target: they had flown, looking. But not randomly; Jerzy had watched enough birds flying over the yards to know that a bird, no matter how twisted, did not fly randomly, but watched the ground, followed known trails and likely spots for a specific sort of prey. There were other, easier targets, had all these beasts wanted were food, or violence.

He had spent so much time wondering who and why, the how had seemed without purpose: magic, of course. But once decanted, once used, magic slipped away; as he had warned Ao, magic did not last. Even a master Vineart could not follow the magic back to the one who had used it: Magewine could identify the crafter, but that was all. It was not a pigeon, to return from whence it came.

Something else, then. Something that used the magic, but was not itself magic? That could reach across oceans, burrow into a distant land, bring illness and identify threats?