Huntress (12 page)

She turned over, looking past Shae toward Taisin. She could barely make out her silhouette in the dark, but she could hear her breathing. It was uneven. Was Taisin awake, too? The thought made Kaede’s skin prickle all over with excitement. It seemed impossible that Taisin could sleep through this—every nerve in Kaede’s body was screaming for her to notice—but there was no answering sound or movement from Taisin.

Kaede lay awake for some time. She was tense from her dream. She counted her breaths, attempting to make them regular. She lost count. She listened to the sound of wind in the trees, remembering Taisin’s warnings, but she heard nothing out of the ordinary. She did not realize she had fallen asleep again until she was awakened by shouting outside. Someone was calling for Tali.

Shae scrambled up first, pushing aside the tent flap and stumbling into the dim morning, pulling on her boots as she went. “What is it?” Shae asked, and outside Con and Pol were standing, dazed, near the ashes of the fire.

“Tali is missing,” Con said, panic thick in his voice. “When we woke up this morning, he was gone.”

Chapter XVIII

I
t was Shae who found him. He was lying in a clearing barely fifty feet from their camp on the other side of the trail. Dried leaves encircled his body as if blown by a great whirlwind. He lay on his back, arms and legs spread-eagled, his face expressionless. A strange gray dust was trapped in his salt-and-pepper beard, and a thin white film had crawled over his open brown eyes. He was cold to the touch, and there was not a mark on him.

Con knelt on the ground next to Tali’s body and lifted the older man’s hand. His fingers were stiff. Con was stunned; he couldn’t believe that Tali was dead. He had survived so many military campaigns; how could he have been taken so easily, so silently, by—Con didn’t even know what had taken him. “Who—what did this?” he demanded.

All the color had drained from Taisin’s face. She knelt beside Tali’s head, stretching her hand out over his eyes. She felt nothing. There was no life energy left within him; his body was only a shell now. And she did not know whether his soul had safely traveled to the other side. The thought chilled her to the bone, and she muttered to herself, “I should have done it.”

Con looked at her. “You should have done what?”

Guilt washed over Taisin, hot and sour. “I could have—I should have done a protection ritual. Around the camp.”

Con’s mouth opened, but he couldn’t speak. A torrent of emotion battered at him: disbelief, grief, anger. Was Taisin saying she could have prevented this? He felt like he had been punched in the gut, and he had trouble breathing.

Shae squatted down beside him and squeezed his shoulder. She asked in a carefully measured voice, “Why didn’t you?”

Taisin gulped, her heart pounding. She said in a rush: “My teacher told me that I shouldn’t use that ritual except as a last resort. I didn’t know this could happen. I thought we would be safe enough if—if we didn’t leave the camp.” Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes, and she blinked them back fiercely.

“Can you do that ritual now?” Pol asked. He stood at Tali’s feet, his arms crossed.

“I can do it tonight when we set up camp. I can’t protect us as we are moving.”

“Wait,” Shae said, frowning. “Taisin, why did your teacher warn you about the protection ritual?”

Taisin drew in a trembling breath. “Because it—it might draw attention to us.”

“What do you mean?” Pol asked.

“Weaving a protection ritual around our camp would… rearrange the natural meridians. Those who are sensitive to the lines of energy would—if they are near enough or powerful enough, they would notice.”

“The creatures we’ve seen,” Con interjected, struggling to make sense of what she was saying. “Can they sense these things?”

“I don’t know. I suppose… it’s possible.”

Kaede understood, suddenly, the reason for the hesitation in Taisin’s voice. “You think that by doing the protection ritual, you’ll draw them to us.”

Taisin met her eyes somberly. “It has occurred to me.”

“But what’s the alternative?” Con asked. “Tali was—” His voice broke, and Shae slid her arm around his shoulders. Con wiped away the tears that burned down his face. “Tali was stronger, I thought, than all of us. For this to happen to him… We can’t let it happen again.” He looked across Tali’s still form at Taisin, and he noticed how young and vulnerable she looked today, with purple shadows beneath her eyes and her narrow shoulders slumping. He realized that he had been on the verge of blaming her for Tali’s death, but he couldn’t. She was only seventeen. She had done the best she could. He felt a yawning ache inside him as he said to her, “You have to do it tonight, Taisin. Whatever protection ritual you can. We’ll deal with the consequences when they come.”

Taisin’s lips trembled, but she squared her shoulders. “All right. I will do it tonight. But first, we must leave this place. And we must bury Tali.”

“Here?” Con said.

“No. This place is—it isn’t right. We must take him with us, but we have to bury him before nightfall.”

None of them disagreed. It was the worst kind of luck to leave a dead body in the open overnight—especially when the person died of unnatural causes. And though there were no signs of struggle on Tali’s body, there was no doubt in any of their minds that his death had been far from natural.

When they broke camp, they strapped Tali’s body, shrouded in his woolen blanket, onto his horse. Tali had always ridden in the lead before, but today Shae took his position and his map case. Con followed her, leading Tali’s horse, and Taisin and Kaede came after him. Pol went last as usual, keeping one hand on his sword.

As they rode, Taisin stared at Tali’s body, hanging facedown over his horse’s flanks. Part of her still couldn’t quite grasp it. How could
Tali
, of all people, have been lured away so easily? He was so solid, so dependable. Why had the Wood—or whatever was in the Wood—chosen to take him? And if it could take him, what would it do to the rest of them? The questions made her increasingly nervous, and the queasiness in her stomach rose until she abruptly pulled her horse to a halt and dismounted, running off the trail to bend over, retching. Nothing came up, but she felt like she was turning inside out, and her throat burned.

A moment later she felt a hand on her back, and Kaede was leaning over her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she gasped.

“Here,” Kaede said, handing her a water skin. Taisin tried to breathe more slowly. She was panicking. She knew she had to calm down. She heard Kaede saying to the others: “Just give us a minute.”

Taisin straightened up, feeling woozy. Her face was flushed, and her hands shook as she raised the water skin to her lips. The liquid trickled into her mouth, and she swallowed carefully. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

Kaede shook her head. “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

“Yes, there is. If I had done the protection ritual, Tali would still be here.” Taisin spoke without thinking, and now that the words were out, she was both ashamed and relieved.

“You don’t know that,” Kaede objected.

Taisin turned to face her. The dull gray daylight carved deep shadows beneath Kaede’s eyes and darkened the hollows in her cheeks. She didn’t look like the same girl who had argued with the King’s Chancellor in the Council room, demanding that she be given a choice. She looked bruised. She looked sad. “What are we going to do, Kaede?” Taisin whispered. “This wasn’t supposed to happen. What if Maire Morighan was wrong? What if I can’t do whatever it is I’m supposed to do? What if I don’t know enough?”

Kaede heard defeat hovering at the edge of Taisin’s words, and it tore at her. “You know enough,” Kaede insisted. “The oracle stones would not have chosen you if you didn’t know enough. And what’s ‘enough,’ anyway? You don’t know everything, but nobody can.” She heard herself repeating what Fin had told her on the beach at the Academy: “All you can do is make your decisions based on what you know now.”

“What I know now,” Taisin repeated. What she knew now was that this journey was much more dangerous than she had anticipated. Perhaps she had not wanted to acknowledge that before. In Ento, she had called that creature out of the baby’s body, but it was Kaede who had faced the consequences. Now Tali’s death had driven home the fact that there was a malignant force out there, and she knew she had to open her eyes and look it in the face. It frightened her, but she had never fled from something because she was afraid. Going to the Academy alone when she was eleven, leaving her family behind, had terrified her. The vision of Kaede on the beach still scared her. But she knew what to do with fear: She fought it.

“You’re right,” Taisin said to Kaede. “Thank you.”

Before she could doubt herself again, Taisin headed back to the trail, ignoring the panic that still churned in her stomach.

Just before noon, they found a roughly rectangular clearing a few feet off the path, with soil that looked like it could be broken with their makeshift tools. Taisin fitted one of their few remaining candles into a lantern and lit it, setting it on the ground where the head of the grave would be. The light was meant to guide Tali’s soul to the land of the dead. Usually sages did not perform funerary rites; that responsibility typically fell to village greenwitches or, in the cities, to specialists. But there were no specialists here. Everyone did their part.

Taisin helped Shae and Kaede dig the grave while Con and Pol wrestled with Tali’s body, dressing him in his cleanest clothes. The mysterious nature of his death was unlucky enough, but it would be even worse for him to be buried in the clothes he was wearing when he died. They lugged water from the river and washed his hands, but they could not remove the dirt from beneath his nails. They sponged off his face and neck, closing his eyes and covering them with a blindfold torn from Tali’s cloak. And then Taisin found a stone on the riverbank that had a particularly peaceful energy, and she handed it to Con.

“His death was not… natural,” she said awkwardly. “It would be best to place this in his mouth.”

He looked sick to his stomach, but he nodded. Tali’s body had stiffened by now, and it was difficult to pry his jaw open. Con feared for one awful moment that he might have to break it, but then, at last, Tali’s mouth opened just enough, and Con slid the stone between his cold lips.

Afterward, Con had to sit still, holding his head in his hands, trying not to throw up.

It was late afternoon by the time the pit was deep enough, and the light was becoming dim. Dirt smudged all of their faces where they had wiped away sweat that had risen while they dug. Tali’s body had been wrapped into his blanket again—the closest they could come to a shroud—and Con and Pol rolled it as gently as they could into the grave. The candle flickered within the lantern as if a breath had blown against it.

Con sat back on his heels and looked at the rest of them. “It’s time.”

They each scraped up a handful of dirt and, beginning with Con, sprinkled it into the grave. The sound of dirt pattering onto Tali’s body reminded Con of rain on the roofs of Cathair: hard and cold. A wave of loss threatened to engulf him; he curled his fingers into fists, feeling his nails pressing into his palms. The others began to push the loose soil back into the grave. In the background, he heard Taisin murmuring. The words were familiar; he had heard them before, at funerals. As she repeated them, Kaede echoed her, and then Pol and Shae. Their voices, low and sorrowful, lifted the words of the lament into the heavy stillness of dusk in the Great Wood.

This fleeting world:

Life passes as quickly as the morning star,

As a rumble of thunder,

A gust of wind over the grasslands.

This fleeting life:

Brief as a spark,

Ephemeral as a dream.

Soon enough we are ghosts upon the cloud.