Dagger's Point (Shadow series) (13 page)

Jael had forgotten the stinking slime caked on the front of her tunic. Tanis, still shaking, thrust her away, squinting at her in the moonlight.

“Baaros, you’re a mess,” he said, his eyes widening. “What happened? Are you all right?”

“Durgan came after me while I was bathing at the stream,” Jael told him. “He’s dead. I came after you as soon as—well, as soon as it was finished.”

“That’s how you got here so soon after she changed,” Tanis murmured, his face dead white in the moonlight. “Durgan— Baaros help us, he didn’t try to—”

Jael shook her head and grinned.

“I don’t think he was interested in anything but dinner,” she said.

“But what
were
they?” Tanis whispered.

Jael raised her eyebrows.

“That’s right, you came from the east,” she said. “But hadn’t you ever heard stories of skinshifters?”

“I thought that was just a story,” Tanis said dully. “I never supposed they were real.”

“Real enough to nearly kill the both of us,” Jael said, chuckling. Then she got a whiff of the stench of her own clothing and wrinkled her nose. “Fehhh. Real enough to ruin my clothes, too.”

“A skinshifter,” Tanis repeated, a look of new horror in his eyes. “And I laid with her—with it—” He barely turned aside in time before he vomited again and again, continuing to heave even when his stomach was long emptied.

One of the guards stepped over, as ichor-spattered as Jael herself. He gave Tanis a sympathetic glance.

“Lady Acorn, we’d best go back to camp,” he said kindly. “I wouldn’t like to think their kin are nearby.”

“Uh-huh.” Jael picked up Tanis’s belongings, but Tanis was too numb to do more than wrap himself in the blanket, although Jael made him slip his boots back on. They stumbled back to the camp, Jael trying not to look at the gory and misshapen bundles the guards were carrying back.

They were greeted at the wagons by the stench of burning flesh and Karina’s grim face.

“Put those on the fire,” she told the guards. “Cloth and all. All your clothes as well.” She turned to Jael and Tanis. “Your clothes, too, and that blanket. There’s a bucket of water by the fire, and soap. Wash yourselves and your weapons and stay there in the light.”

Jael was already stripping off her slimy tunic, but Tanis clung to his blanket.

“What are they doing?” he asked her, his voice low. “What’s the matter?”

Jael dropped the tunic and started on her trousers.

“She didn’t bite or scratch you, did she? Even a little?” she asked Tanis. “Even the smallest bite or scratch can infect you sometimes.”

Tanis’s eyes widened with horror, but he shook his head.

“I don’t think so,” he said hesitantly. “Not even when we were laying together.”

“That’s good.” Jael examined her boots critically. “These should be all right. Don’t worry, Tanis. They just want to check us for bites or scratches, and wise of them, too. Just to be safe, when we get to Gerriden we’ll find a mage to examine us. It’s only a day away, plenty of comfortable time for a cure even if we were infected.”

Tanis shivered violently at the thought, but he followed Jael to the fire, throwing the blanket into the flames as if glad to be rid of it. Jael, Tanis, and the three guards eagerly scrubbed the last of the gore from their skins, Karina bringing fresh water for them to rinse. Even Tanis, still frightened and miserable, appeared untroubled by modesty as Karina inspected each of them, frowning over a cut on a guard’s leg.

“How’d you get that, Eran?” she asked.

“I think it was Danik’s sword,” the woman sighed. “But I can’t be certain. I’d be obliged if someone’d burn it for me.”

“I’ll do it.” Karina laid the blade of her dagger in the fire until it glowed red, then drew the flat of the blade down the cut. Eran gritted her teeth and cursed, but she held still until the entire wound had been seared.

“When we reach town, I’ll find a mage to check that,” Karina told her. “As you took that cut in my service, I’ll pay the cost.”

The merchant turned to face Jael.

“I can thank you that those shifters are dead and the rest of us still alive, and don’t think I’m not grateful,” she said slowly. “But I trust you’ll understand when I ask to see the color of your blood.” She drew the other dagger from her belt and held it out to Jael, hilt first.

Jael took the dagger and inspected the blade. It looked clean enough. She spit on the metal and wiped the flat against her bare hip, one side and then the other, before she cut her thumb slightly, holding it up for Karina to see the red blood welling there.

Tanis reached for the knife, but Karina took it instead, seizing Tanis’s hand. She scrutinized the bandage on his forearm, then cut it off, shaking her head over the wound.

“The bandage was clean, and I can see from this your blood’s red enough,” she said. “But I don’t know as I’ve ever heard of anyone tumbling a skinshifter and surviving, so there’s no saying whether you could be infected or not. You’ll go to your tent, young Caden, and there you’ll stay with a guard outside. And tomorrow you’ll stay well in my sight until we reach Gerriden. Acorn, you can tent with me tonight.”

Jael shook her head.

“Thank you for your concern,” she said. “But I’ll stay with Caden.”

Karina frowned darkly.

“Are you sure? If he’s infected—”

“Then we’ll pay for two cures instead of one.” Jael shrugged.

Karina shook her head and sighed, but said nothing more. Jael picked up Tanis’s clothes and the dirty garments she’d discarded before her bath and followed Tanis back to their tent. Tanis slowly dressed, and Jael reluctantly pulled her dirty clothes back on. Until she bought more, she had nothing clean to wear.

When Tanis finished dressing, he curled up mutely under the blankets, facing away from Jael. Jael frowned and laid her hand on his shoulder. He started violently at her touch.

“Thank you for staying,” he said, his voice almost inaudible. “You don’t have to.”

“I know. I’ll stay anyway, unless you want me to leave.” Jael rubbed his shoulder. “Want to talk about it?”

Tanis didn’t answer, but Jael saw his head shake in the darkness.

“Do you want me to go?” Jael asked gently.

Tanis shook his head again, to Jael’s relief.

“All right.” Jael rummaged through her kit, hoping her father had possibly put in a sleeping potion, but there was none. Jael found her cup and stuck her head out of the tent, waving the guard over.

“Does anyone have something stronger than wine?” she asked hopefully, holding out her cup. “We won’t drink out of anyone’s flask, but it’d be a blessing to help Caden get some sleep.”

The guard would not leave his post, but he called Eran, who had a flask of brandy. Eran poured Jael’s cup full, then winked at her and swigged heartily from the flask herself.

Jael crawled back into the tent and touched Tanis’s shoulder again.

“This’ll take the taste out of your mouth and help you sleep,” she said. “Can you drink it?”

Tanis scrubbed vigorously at his face with his sleeve before he sat up, and Jael diplomatically ignored his puffy eyes. Tanis drank the brandy without a word, gulping it down as if it were water and then coughing helplessly.

“All right now?” Jael asked softly.

“I suppose I won’t know that until we reach Gerriden.” Tanis wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“I know. I got Durgan’s blood all over me. I’m scared, too,” Jael admitted, and when Tanis at last looked up, she could see the relief in his eyes.

“You are?”

“Of course I am.” Jael managed a grin. “At least you’re human. Can you imagine what the shifter curse might do to me?”

“Baaros protect us.” Tanis croaked out something that was probably meant to be a laugh. “Guess we’d better find out what mage Karina’s sending that guard to.”

“Guess we’d better.” Jael crawled under the blankets next to Tanis. “How about if we let
my
shoulder get numb for a change?”

“Thank you.” Tanis’s whisper was so soft that even Jael barely heard it, but Tanis let her draw his head to her shoulder. Jael felt a suspicious dampness on the shoulder of her tunic, but she ignored it, as she ignored the shaking of his shoulders under her arm until he finally fell asleep.

Sleep came harder for Jael. It had finally struck her—gods, she’d fought a
skinshifter.
The thought made her shiver. But she’d fought and won. She hadn’t fallen over her own feet, she hadn’t dropped her sword, she hadn’t gone all stupid in the battle, she hadn’t tripped over roots running to help Tanis. She’d fought against a
skìnshifter
and she’d
won.
She and Tanis, maybe every person in the caravan, were alive because of it. And tonight Tanis needed
her
to hold
him.

This was how her mother felt after battle—scared and shaken, maybe, but proud and
right.
This was how a warrior felt—a
winning
warrior, Jael reminded herself sternly, as she realized the loser might well not feel anything at all. Just as she’d come close, much too close, to feeling nothing at all. Suddenly her pride vanished, and she felt very small and alone in the darkness. Then Tanis snored softly, and Jael was somehow comforted.

Not alone. And frightened or not, perhaps not so small, either, after all.

V

“That’s it,” Tanis said glumly, dropping the pitifully small purse on the bed between them. “We’re in trouble.”

Jael peered into the pouch and stirred the coins with her finger, hoping against hope that a few Moons might peep out from under the small pile of coppers.

“Isn’t there
anywhere
we can change a Sun or one of the gems without someone getting suspicious?” she asked with a sigh.

Tanis sighed, too.

“There’s no money changer in a town as small as Willow Bend,” he said. “The innkeeper gave me a look when I paid with a Sun for our room, and that was our last Sun, too. Now we’re down to the jewels. There’s certainly no place we could sell a gem here. And even though there’s nothing much to steal, if the rumor gets about that one of us might be a thief, we’ll likely be thrown out of the inn, too.”

Jael shook her head dismally. They’d been stranded in tiny Willow Bend for six days already, and according to the innkeeper, they’d just missed the only caravan that traded supplies west, taking a chain of rafts slightly south and west to Tilwich. It’d be at least half a moon cycle, likely more, before the rafts returned, and even then it would be some time before they departed again.

Jael and Tanis had been taken aback when the merchant train they’d been traveling with arrived in the tiny village that appeared to be little more than a small cluster of huts. There were no shops; the villagers gathered and bought their wares directly from the wagons. There’d been no possibility of buying more journey food; it was late spring, and most of the villagers had long since eaten the dried meat and fruit they’d put up for the winter before.

Even if there’d been supplies aplenty to be bought, Jael and Tanis had few coins left. The towns had become so small as they’d moved west that there were no opportunities to sell gems or change Suns to fill their purses. Jael realized unhappily that they should have changed the rest of their gems to silver and copper nearly a month ago in Gerriden, but the gems were lighter and easier to conceal in their clothing, and carrying all that coin would have meant suspiciously heavy and bulky purses.

Jael had thought that while they were passing through the woods, they could gather and sell those leaves, roots, barks, and seeds commonly used by mages. The woods were seemingly un-harvested, and Jael had been delighted to not only replenish her stock of medicinal herbs, but to gather such rare plants that she’d been certain they could line their purses well on her harvest. After leaving Gerriden, however, Jael had been unable to find a single mage to whom she could sell her wares. Tanis had queried an innkeeper about this seeming anomaly and was told that the farther west one went, the more poorly magic worked.

“Duranar the Pale once passed this way,” the innkeeper had said, “and he was one of the greatest mages to walk the land. But magic turns sour here in the wild lands, and he went south.”

So Jael had earned no coin at all, and her carefully harvested treasures had been wasted.

Nor had Tanis been able to replenish their hoard of small coin by thieving. His arm had healed nicely, and the mage they’d consulted in Gerriden had drawn a little of their blood, chanted over it, and pronounced them both free of the shifter curse—Jael had professed such nervousness that she’d had to leave the room before he cast the spell—but Tanis had been so shaken by his encounter with a skinshifter that his thieving had suffered terribly. He’d taken only one poor purse in Gerriden’s market and was nearly caught doing that; after that he’d stopped even trying. He stayed well away from the brothels, too.

Jael had hoped the situation would improve in Manan, the only city marked on Shadow’s map to the west of Gerriden, but Manan had proved to be much smaller than Jael had hoped, hardly more than an overgrown village. The one money changer in the city had seemed so shifty and sly that Jael and Tanis had thought it unwise to show him any large coin or gems.

As they moved westward, the towns became smaller and smaller and poorer and poorer, and the roads became narrower and rougher and wilder, and the merchant caravans became more and more suspicious of a young merchant and an elf wanting to travel west into savage country. Wagon trains went heavily guarded, and even then one caravan fought off two bands of highwaymen in the four days Jael and Tanis traveled with them. Jael and Tanis were informed they were fortunate to even find an inn in Willow Bend; there was one there only because a number of northern trappers brought their pelts down the Willow River by raft to trade, and because of the bad stretch of river just south of Willow Bend, they often stopped at the village to rest before proceeding south to Tilwich.

Their only good fortune had been in the wealth of legends that survived in the west. Many of the older villagers had heard of—or seen themselves—Shadow’s “ghost folk” some two decades before. Sometimes memories were vague and stories often conflicted, but Tanis carefully noted each location on their map, and Jael was relieved to see that the course of the Kresh remained a relatively straight line. She and Tanis were still on course, if they could only manage to continue westward. There were stories aplenty, too, about Duranar the Pale and the Book of Whispering Serpents, and it seemed universally believed that Duranar had gone south toward the coast—far out of the way of Jael and Tanis’s course.

More worrisome to Jael was Tanis’s wary withdrawal since his horrible encounter with Cesanne. She’d been amused at first when he’d shunned Gerriden’s brothels—small wonder, after all—but now, nearly a moon cycle later, at supper tonight he’d utterly ignored the rosy-cheeked and buxom innkeeper’s daughter, Illse, who’d brought their meal, even though the girl had flirted outrageously with Tanis and had bent so low while placing his bowl of stew before him that her ample bosom had nearly tumbled forth into Tanis’s face. Tanis had looked, all right—

gods, even
Jael
had looked—but he’d only blushed furiously and devoted his attention to his meal.

“Choices,” Tanis said slowly. “We can hope the innkeeper will take a gem and not talk too much about it and try to stay here until the cargo rafts come back and are ready to leave for Tilwich again.”

Jael shook her head.

“We’d likely be murdered in our beds first,” she said glumly.

“We can go west on our own.”

“And get murdered on the road instead of in our beds,” Jael said. “Or starve to death instead, since we can’t buy supplies, or stop to hunt all our food and make no progress west.”

“We go back east until we can replenish our supplies and our money and come back when the cargo rafts are ready to leave, or stock ourselves well enough to go on by ourselves overland.”

“We can’t be sure when the rafts will be back,” Jael said patiently. “And we’d have to go far back east, maybe as far as Gerriden, to change the gems and stock ourselves well enough to go on our own.”

“We hire guards to escort us to the next village, whatever that is,” Tanis said with a sigh. “After the Willow River, we’re off the map.”

“We’d have to pay the guards in gems, and then we’d
still
be murdered in our beds,” Jael retorted. “Besides, I don’t think there
are
any guards for hire in a town this small. If there were, they’d have gone downriver with the cargo rafts.”

“Then there’s only one choice.” Tanis shrugged. “We spend the rest of our coin to pay a trapper to take us downstream to Tilwich. It’s not on our map, but since all the trappers say they trade there, it must be large enough that we can get some money one way or another and buy supplies. Supposedly it’s only a day or so by river, so the coppers we have left should be enough to pay for the trip.”

“I don’t know,” Jael said doubtfully. “I don’t like to go south out of our way. How will we get back?”

“Ride along the river, or pay a trapper to ferry us back up,” Tanis told her. “If the land’s clear enough, we can simply strike out west overland from Tilwich. According to the innkeeper, it’s mostly hills and scrub around Tilwich, although the forest gets thic south and west of there.”

Jael was silent, thinking. Could they buy a raft and try to ride the river to Tilwich by themselves? Well, yes,
if
they had enough money to pay for a raft, having no idea of how to build a proper one themselves, and
if
they had enough knowledge of the river and of river travel and exactly where Tilwich was. Tanis was right; it really was the only choice.

“All right,” she said. “Are there any trappers in town now?”

“Just those three who took the room upstairs,” Tanis said gloomily, jerking his thumb upward. “Letha and Bergin and Nilde. But I heard Letha at supper tonight saying they’d be leaving tomorrow morning for Tilwich.”

Jael grimaced. Letha was a coarse, unkempt woman whose over-loud conversation was liberally seasoned with oaths. Bergin was an even coarser and larger fellow whose grimy black hair formed a ragged curtain through which he peered rather vapidly. Nilde was a smaller, quieter woman; unremarkable in appearance and demeanor, there was still something about her that Jael did not altogether trust. The three made so much clamor in their room at night that they might be having a jolly-tumble or slaughtering each other for all Jael and Tanis could discern.

“All right,” Jael said again with a sigh. “If those three are all there are, then I suppose we’d better talk to Letha.”

Listening, Jael and Tanis could easily locate the three trappers in the public room downstairs. Letha and Bergin were laughing raucously at some jest, but they stopped when Jael and Tanis approached their table. Nilde only gazed at them warily.

“We understand you’re bound for Tilwich,” Tanis said hesitantly. “We’d like to hire passage downriver with you.”

Letha leaned back in her chair and swallowed a gulp of ale.

“Well, we’re indeed bound for Tilwich,” she said sarcastically. “What else is there in this mule-humping wilderness? Passage for the two of you, eh?” She eyed Tanis and Jael critically. “Well, you don’t look too heavy. No more’n five-six bags, though.”

“What about our horses?” Jael protested.

Bergin guffawed, and Letha waved him to silence.

“No room for horses, youngling,” she said mildly. “And you can’t ferry horses down rough river on an open raft anyway. Better sell ‘em. You can buy horses aplenty in Tilwich.” She turned to Tanis. “But I haven’t heard no offer. This may be the ass-end of the world, but nobody rides my raft for nothing.”

“Wait, now,” Jael insisted. “Our horses—”

“We’ll pay twenty coppers,” Tanis told Letha. “Surely that should be enough for two extra passengers on a trip you’re making anyway, and downstream as well.”

Again Jael started to argue—they had only thirty coppers—but she was silenced by a warning look from Tanis.

Letha chuckled.

“Twenty coppers? I wouldn’t let you
look
at my raft for that hereabouts. Four Moons, and not a copper less.”

“Two Moons,” Tanis countered.

“Three, or find your own way to Tilwich,” Letha said, shrugging. “We’ve a full load of pelts and no need for your coin if we don’t want to take it.”

“All right,” Tanis said reluctantly. “Three Moons. But only one now, and two on arrival in Tilwich.”

Letha shrugged again.

“Good enough. We can scarce spend it on the river. But I’ll see the coin before we leave. We’ll not be cheated, boy. And be at the river and ready at dawn, or we go without you.”

“We’ll be there,” Tanis promised, then dragged Jael away quickly before she could protest further.

“Just stop there,” Jael said hotly when Tanis pulled her out the door of the inn. “What gives you the right to say we’d sell our horses without even asking me first, and to promise money we haven’t even got?”

“Jael, look,” Tanis said in answer, gesturing at the Willow River.

Jael crossed her arms over her chest stubbornly, but she looked. The light was dimming, but the Willow River looked much as it had every day since Tanis and she had arrived in Willow Bend—wide, calm in the deep parts, but white foam showing where rocks lay beneath the fast-moving water.

“So?” Jael demanded. “There’s no real ferry, true, but the man who owns that large raft would take us across.”

“Right, so we get to the other side,” Tanis said patiently. “You and me and our horses, and no supplies. We could likely make it to the next town, or the one after that, or the one after that, but what are we going to spend to buy food when we get there? Either we go south to Tilwich or we decide that we’re going to hunt and forage our own food from here until—well, until we get wherever we’re going. We’re going to lose the villages soon enough, but I’d much rather have a good store of dried meat and such when we do. We have no way to know what kind of land we’re going to cross. What if it’s desert? We need supplies, and there’s nowhere to get them but Tilwich, and there’s no way we can boat horses to Tilwich on that river.”

Jael stared at the broad expanse of the Willow River, hating it. Tanis was right and she knew it; that didn’t make the thought of selling the horses any less bitter. They were almost
friends.
But even if they could ride the horses all the way south to Tilwich, there was no guarantee they could get the horses across the river once they got that far. Unless there was a road approaching Tilwich from the east, there would likely be no ferry. Merchants boated their goods south from Willow Bend to Tilwich, or north from the southern cities.

Jael had one last argument to make, however.

“How do we know there’ll be horses to buy in Tilwich?” she said. “Or are you planning for us to
walk
west of there?”

“Letha said we could buy horses aplenty,” Tanis told her. “Someone in the area must be raising them, or maybe merchants can get horses to Tilwich on those big boats north from the coast. But you can be sure I’ll check Letha’s word against a few other people before I’d sell our horses. It may be nobody here would buy them anyway.”

Well, there was that. Jael nodded and sighed.