A Plague of Shadows (4 page)

There were chores to do, and she was wasting time thinking of such fantastical things. Abagail gathered up some dry grass and put it into the smoker. She lit it with some of the fire, and capped it again. She needed the smoke to calm the bees.

Abagail was soon lost in the work. The bees began calming almost the instant they met with the smoke, and after a few minutes she was able to lift the lid off the hive and look inside. The bees weren’t asleep, but they didn’t seem to notice that Abagail was riffling around in the hive.

Movement at the edge of the trees caught her attention. Abagail looked up, but there was nothing there to see. Only shadows of the trees and their thick canopy.

Abagail went back to work. The bees inside the hive looked normal, but Dolan was right, there were an awful lot of dead bees around the hive. And the dead bees looked strange.

She bent closer to inspect one of the bees and noted that the black bands seemed to bleed more into the yellow bands along their body. In fact, some of the bees were all black.

Like shadows,
Abagail thought. She shook her head.
That’s silly, you’re just jumpy from the dream
.

But there was definitely something wrong with them. Abagail picked one of the blackest bees up in her hand, but the moment she rolled it over in her palm, it puffed apart, like dust kicking up in a strong wind. The breeze swirled the remains away from her, carrying them toward the house and out of sight.

Strange,
she thought. This wasn’t any kind of sickness she knew to plague the bees.

Again, some movement in the trees caught her attention, and she looked up from her work. She thought she saw a dark shape slink away, farther into the woods, but when she looked closer she couldn’t tell if she’d actually seen something, or if it was just her mind playing tricks on her.

At any rate, the rest of the bees looked healthy, though they weren’t producing the amount of honey they should be. She was careful in replacing the lid so as not to kill any of the remaining bees.

Abagail tried gathering up as many of the dead bees she could in hopes that their sickness wouldn’t spread to the rest of the hive. Most of the bees turned to dust at her insistence, but some of them were substantial enough to gather up. She took them to the fire and tossed them in, watching their little bodies spark and light up.

She gathered up the smoker from the side of the hive, but as she was turning away a flash of gold deep within the forest caught her attention.

There was no denying it this time, she definitely saw a shadow.

Silver burns them,
Abagail thought.
It’s the moon’s ore, from the Sleeping Eye of the All Father.
She watched the shadow skirt the edge of the forest. It didn’t move like regular shadows, it didn’t join the other shadows. It was darker, somehow more substantial like she would have expected a person to be, if they were all dark.
Like it’s missing a soul.
That’s all Abagail could think of, whatever this thing was, it was without a soul.

Could the darkling really be those that died when the fire came from heaven?

“Abbie, what are you looking at?” Leona asked, breaking Abagail’s concentration. She looked back at her younger sister, toiling away with carrying water into the house, spilling more of it on the ground than she was actually getting into the house.

“Leo, come on now, be careful!” Abagail said halfheartedly. But when she looked back to the tree line there was no indication that a shadow had ever been there.

All day she couldn’t get the thought of the shadow out of her mind. Abagail had just put the dream behind her, forgetting what it had shown in the recesses of her sleeping mind, but now that the shadow had come, she relived the dream as if it was happening all over again.

Eventually all the chores were done, and the sun was beginning to set. It was Abagail’s job to stoke the fire higher for the night and keep the banes that lurked in the darkness at bay. As she added the wood to the fire, a cold wind picked up, drying the sweat on her back. It reminded her of the wind from her dream. There was something different about this wind, and it unsettled her. Abagail’s stomach roiled with worry.

The wind felt of change. Abagail didn’t like it.

She was the last one outside, and the sun was sinking lower on the western horizon. It would be night soon, and the All Father would turn his sleeping eye toward them. There was no telling what would happen in the night when the All Father wasn’t watching them.

Abagail threw the last of the wood on the fire and hurried toward the house, worried that at any moment the shadow she’d seen earlier that day might bound out of the woods and claim her.

Inside she rested her back against the door, and mindlessly threw the wooden plank in place, boarding the door shut.

Dolan was already setting the table, and Abagail made quick work of washing up. At least her chores were done for the day, and after eating she could relax and unwind.

But relaxing meant that she would probably only think of the oddity of the day, and she was already unsettled enough.

“So what did you find with the bees?” Dolan asked when she slipped into her seat at the table. Leona set a large plate of potatoes, chicken, and corn before her. Abagail’s stomach growled loudly, and Leona giggled at her.

In order to stop herself from falling into her food, Abagail told Dolan what she’d seen at the hive.

“You touched it?” Dolan asked, dropping his fork in a clatter on the plate. He went to Abagail and started checking her hands over.

“Just a little,” she mumbled.

“What if it had been a darkling?” Dolan asked, looking into his daughter’s eyes. “You’d be marked now.”

Abagail felt dizzy and leaned down to inspect her palm. “Did it mark me? I was wearing gloves!”

“Do you think it’s a darkling?” Leona asked between mouthfuls.

“I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like it, but it’s strange,” Dolan said, sitting down at the other end of the table.

“But do you think it’s a darkling?” Abagail asked. Her hunger consumed her worry, and she dove into her plate of food. Even though she shoveled the food in, she still checked her hands over from time to time, to make sure no shadow was stealing over her flesh, threatening to choke out her spirit like seemingly happened with the bees.

“Is it something we should be worried about?” Leona asked. Abagail wasn’t sure if Leona had actually heard what was wrong with the bees, or if she just wanted to be part of the conversation.

“I guess we will just have to wait and see. I’ve never heard of it happening to a hive, but I can ask around in town tomorrow.”

“You’re going to ask in town?” Abagail asked around a mouthful of food. “They see darklings everywhere. I doubt that would be helpful. And if you ask in town, that might encourage the Light Guard to start snooping around here!”

“Come on Abbie, you might work like a man, but at least you can behave like a lady at the table,” her father complained, his eyebrows creasing together.

Abagail slowed down, and sat back in her chair, taking her time.

“Yes, I have to go get some supplies,” Dolan said.

“Can I go?” Leona asked.

“I have to get up early, if you think you can be ready.”

The rest of dinner passed with idle chatter, and though Abagail wanted nothing more than to rest after she’d ate, thoughts of the shadow she’d seen in the forest wouldn’t let her.

It was early the following morning when Abagail woke up. She hadn’t slept well, though she couldn’t remember what had kept her sleep fitful. Most likely dreams that were already lost to her waking mind. She stretched awake and noted that the house was silent.

They’re already gone,
Abagail thought with a yawn. There were morning chores to do, but town was a ways off, and they likely wouldn’t be back for a while. Abagail was just starting to doze off when a pounding came to the front door.

She groaned, hoped it was just her imagination, and decided to ignore whoever it was. She had just started to close her eyes again when the pound came once more.

“I’m going to kill whoever that is,” Abagail promised herself. She tied a house coat over her naked flesh and padded down the wooden hallway. The house was oddly silent without anyone in it. Through the poorly insulated wooden walls she could hear the bees buzzing outside and the chatter of birds.

“Come on Abbie, I know you’re there!” Rorick’s familiar voice intruded on the silence of the house.

At the husky timber of his voice, Abagail’s heart hitched. She didn’t care what her emotions said, or how excited she was that he was there at her door, she still promised to kill him for waking her up when she should be sleeping.

“What do you want?” she called from the middle of the living room.

“The day is before us, what more could I want?”

“Well, I want to sleep!”

“Get your lazy ass out here. I will build Hafaress’ Hearth back up while you get dressed,” Rorick said, and she heard his feet thump away from the door and off toward the fire.

Abagail peeked through the front window. His golden hair glowed in the light of the morning sun. She smiled despite her previous threats of killing him, and hurried back to her room. He would have to wait while she washed up, though she’d pretend she had just thrown something on, Abagail
never
went around Rorick without being clean.

Still, he was right, there was a whole day before them, and for a moment she’d forgotten about the dream, the darkling, the strange illness with the bees, and the room she’d seen upstairs. She slipped into a pair of trousers and a shirt, making sure it wasn’t the same ones she’d worn the day before.

Nothing could be done about her short hair, but she still ran her fingers through it trying to make it look a little less rumpled from sleep.

When she opened the door, Rorick was sitting on the porch, chewing on a long stalk of grass and staring off into the woods. He seemed not to notice her, so Abagail watched him for a moment. It was only when she was around Rorick that Abagail was aware of how much she acted like a boy and not a woman, but Rorick made some part of her
yearn
to be a woman in the ways women were in stories.

But she doubted she’d ever be one of those women, and she doubted Rorick would ever want a woman who could do just as many manly chores as he could.

“Are you just going to stand there, or are we going to take advantage of the day?” Rorick asked, turning his sparkling blue eyes on Abagail. Rorick was older than her by a year, and he was already starting to grow some of the beard that those of age could grow. It was a little premature, typically men didn’t grow their beards until they were twenty, but Rorick was going to be twenty in a few moons.

“What did you have planned?” Abagail asked, letting the door thump shut behind her as if she hadn’t been standing there all along watching him.

“Anything that needs doing around here?” Rorick asked.

“Just the daily stuff,” Abagail said with a shrug.

Rorick stood and spit the grass out of his mouth. “Well, let’s get that out of the way.”

With two of them the daily chores went fast, and before the sun was even halfway to its zenith they were headed for the woods.

No sooner had they entered the woods did they hear a familiar hissing.

“Mama Coon,” Rorick said, as if scolding the animal. The fat coon stepped out from behind a tree and lumbered toward them. Rorick produced a piece of dried meat for the wild animal who took it greedily in her misshaped fingers and ate it.

They had started calling the creature Mama Coon when they had found her two springs ago. She was pregnant, and had been caught in a trap, Dolan had said. The only way he knew that was because she was missing several toes and her teeth were broken where she’d chewed at the trap. Knowing she’d never make it on her own, they had started feeding her so she wouldn’t die. Though she was never let in either Rorick’s family’s home or Abagail’s house, she was still the closest thing to a pet they had.

“Do you ever wonder why she still hangs around?” Abagail asked, picking up the pace beside Rorick again.