Five Stories for the Dark Months (4 page)

“You should have listened. I don’t
know what the dead are like on your side of the border, but they’re
a serious threat down here. Did Peter tell you about Damned
Alina?”

“Damned
who
?”

“She was the last of our great
witches. When you—your people, I mean—invaded, twenty-five years
ago, she knew we didn’t stand a chance—we were completely
overwhelmed. After the fifteenth or sixteenth massacre, she decided
to do something about it. It was supposed to have been the greatest
spell she ever did—and it would have been, if it
worked.”

“What happened?” said Arica,
looking interested in spite of herself

“Well, the
numbers were really against us. By the end of the war we had almost
no soldiers left—but we had lots and
lots
of corpses.” She glanced at the
two bodies on the floor. It seemed like a rather bad idea to tell
this story here, but she crossed her fingers and continued. “So
Alina, who thought herself quite clever, decided she’d make an
asset out of a liability.”

Arica blinked.
Then she gasped. “No—she
didn’t
!”

“Oh, yes, she did. Her idea was
that since we were all about to die anyway, we didn’t really have
that much to lose. An army of the Reawakened could have turned
things in our favor, you know?”

“But that’s abominable!
Reawakening is a crime against nature. That woman should have been
burned at the stake!”

“Maybe in
your
country,” Jenna
said. “I heard the junta
killed
all
your
witches.”

“That’s... that’s true.” The
Northerner’s voice had gone oddly quiet. “Well. Go on, then. What
happened?”

“Well,” said
Jenna, “of course Alina didn’t have enough power of her own to
Reawaken every dead soldier in the country, even as powerful as she
was—not
nearly
.
So, deciding that it would be worth it in the end, she put
up
everyone else’s
power, too. She poured
all the magic
in the country
into that spell. It’s why we
don’t have witches anymore,” she added, rather bitterly. “And then,
to top it all off, she cast the damned spell
wrong
.”

“Wrong, how?” Arica sounded
fascinated now.

“I think her
exact words were something like, ‘Let all the glorious fallen rise
and fight their living enemies, and drag them down into the
grave.’” Jenna smiled grimly. “I guess it didn’t occur to her that
if you’re dead, maybe you think
all
the living are your enemies. Fortunately, she also
failed to specify just
how
the dead were supposed to rise. So instead of a
ravening army of the Reawakened, we just have a massive horde of
ghosts who won’t lie peaceful.” She paused. “You’ve really never
heard all this?”

“No. Peter never went into
detail—he was a solitary man, you know, and didn’t talk much. And
in my country... well, they don’t really tell us anything useful.
All we learn about the war is that your country was the
aggressor—”

Jenna hissed.
“They
dare—”

“I know it’s not
true!
Now
, anyway.
I didn’t know before.” She shook her head. “So... anyway, the
spirits, they’re just... wandering out there?”

“Mostly they stay
in their graves,” Jenna said. “We were lucky—at least our
allies
had witches left,
and they were able to modify the spell after the dead all turned on
Alina and killed her in the first hour. So now it’s just when the
living happen by that the ghosts all rise and follow—and they fade
again when morning comes. If you can keep ahead of them that long,
then you’re generally okay.”

“I’d heard this place was rotten
with magic,” said Arica, shaking her head, “but I never quite
believed it. What happens to you if the ghosts... catch
you?”

Jenna smiled darkly. “The nicer
stories say they just get inside your head and trap you in a kind
of daydream. They want to be remembered, see, so they show
everything they did and were in life, from the moment of birth to
the moment of death. You can’t look away until you’ve seen it
all—and by that time, of course, you’re usually dead of starvation
or exposure or something..”

Arica nodded. “And the... less-nice
stories?”

“They rip out your eyes, climb in
through the sockets, and eat you from the inside out.”

Arica shivered. “May I never meet
one.” She looked down at the coat in her hands, and seemed to
hesitate a moment. Then she shrugged. “Well, I guess I’ll take my
chances. Odds are I’m not going to live long enough for anything to
haunt me, anyway.” She said this almost cheerfully, as if it were a
fact she’d had ample time to get used to. “Anyway, I swear I’ve
never seen a ghost before. Maybe that witch’s spell only works on
you Southerners.” With that, she shook out the coat—ignoring the
bloodstains—and pulled it on over her own. “There’s one for you,
too,” she said, nodding towards the other corpse.

Jenna turned. She saw now that
there was a neat round hole near the center of the dead woman’s
forehead. A pool of scarlet blood had spread out behind the
corpse’s head, like a flat, ragged pillow. Some of it had spread
beneath the body and was soaking through the good, thick wool of
the coat. “Thanks,” said Jenna, shuddering, “but I have my
own.”

“As good as that one?” Arica
said.

“Of course not.” Jenna’s coat was
an old, worn hand-me-down—Pauli had given it to her when he’d
gotten his promotion and a new uniform. The country could barely
keep its regular soldiers supplied, let alone the road-watchers who
acted as secondary defenses. “It doesn’t matter, though. We don’t
take from the dead.”

“The
dead
,” said Arica, “would have shot you,
may I remind you, if I hadn’t shot them first. Keep that in
mind—and make up your mind quickly, because we need to get
going.”

Jenna started.
“Going?
We?
Where?”

“Greenwater! The capital! I told
you already. You’ve got to come, too, of course.”

“But why?” Jenna’s head was
spinning.

“Once these two don’t report back,
somebody’s going to come see what happened to them—and they’re not
going to like what they find. We’ve already stayed too long, so put
on that damn coat—or don’t, I don’t care—and let’s get
going.”

There seemed to be
no time to argue. Jenna decided, given the events of the last few
minutes, that she’d be best off trusting the stranger for the
moment.“All right,” she said, “but we’d better go straight to
Goldenfield instead. It’s only half as far as the capital, and the
phone lines might still be up.”
And if
they’re not
, she thought grimly,
at least I’ll be among friends when the soldiers
get there.

The dead woman’s coat really was a
good one: lined with squirrel fur, and clearly almost new. And it
was very, very cold outside.

Nervous and ashamed, Jenna began to
strip the coat from the body. The corpse seemed almost boneless, as
if death had robbed it of all its solid parts. She fumbled with the
buttons, and almost dropped the body several times, but at last she
managed to retrieve the garment. She couldn’t quite stand to put it
right next to her skin, so she put her own coat on first and draped
the stolen one over it.

There was no time to pack. She
looked around the room, already mourning her possessions: her
hard-won books, her clothes, her letters. She wasn’t very much
attached to the cabin itself, but she still felt guilty leaving it
here to be ransacked by enemies. She prayed that some of her things
would survive long enough for her to come back and get
them.

There was no point in thinking
about it now. Jenna damped the woodstove and buried the coals,
hoping they’d go out without a problem. She took half a loaf of
bread and a packet of dried fish from the cupboards, and filled two
canteens with water. At the last minute she remembered to bring the
matchbox. She hoped they wouldn’t have to stop long enough to light
a fire, but it was best to be safe.

She divided the provisions in half
and gave one share to Arica, then looked around one last time. Her
eye fell on the little straw star that still lay on the table. She
picked it up, and her mother’s letter, too—if she couldn’t take
anything else, then she could at least take those. Finally, she
rolled up Peter Grant’s will and stuck it in her pocket. That would
have to do.

Arica was pacing at the door. “Are
you finally ready?” she said.

“Do you have snowshoes?” said
Jenna, ignoring the spy’s impatience.

“In the bushes outside your
house.”

“Would you grab mine from that
hook there?” Gloves, hat, scarf, and she was ready. “All right.
Let’s go.”

The wind had died, and the night
was silent. The air smelled heavily of pine and fir. Jenna took the
lantern from beside the door, and the two girls set off southward
down the road.

For a long time there was no sound
but the even scuff of their snowshoes across the snow. Though the
moon was full, trees crowded close to the road, laying it deep in
shadow. It was hard to see anything beyond the lantern’s
light.

They had just taken the fork
towards Goldenfield when the lantern began to flicker. Jenna
moaned. “It’s dying. I didn’t even think to bring more
fuel!”

“You have more
fuel?
Why on
earth
wouldn’t you bring
it?”

“You were pacing at the door!”
Jenna felt more than a little defensive. “I had no time to think.
Anyway, I thought there was more in the lantern.”

The spy huffed. “What kind of
soldier are you?”

“I’m
not
a soldier! I’m only a
road-watcher. The guard stations are all north of here—you must
have passed them on your way in.” She thought of Pauli again, and
tried to suppress the horrible thought that flashed through her
mind. “I guess... I guess some of them are empty,
now.”

Arica gave her a sympathetic look.
“We’ll get to town as soon as possible. Once your people know about
the... breach, they can send in reinforcements.” Jenna nodded,
miserable, and pressed on.

They were two miles from the cabin
when they passed the first mass graves. “This was the Bluebell
Battlefield,” Jenna said.

Arica looked around. “What
was?”

Jenna pointed at the great
snow-banked berms that flanked the edges of the road. “Do you see
those? They’re grave mounds.”

“What, all of them? Is this some
kind of cemetery?”

“If you want to call it that.”
Jenna frowned. “You never heard of the Bluebell Battle? It was the
first battle of the war!”

“I thought the first conflict was
the skirmish at Gum Creek.”

“Is
that
what you call it?
A
skirmish
?” She
found herself outraged on the part of her long-dead compatriots.
“It was a
slaughter
! Your full first line of troops against a lot of half-armed
villagers fighting desperately to protect their families... Call it
a
massacre
if you
want, but don’t call it a damned
skirmish
.”

“I—I’m sorry.” Arica sounded
genuinely startled. “I really don’t know that much about
it.”

“It was a surprise attack,” Jenna
said. “There was no time to rally the troops, even if we’d had that
many to rally. No one had any idea an invasion was coming—we’d
always been on good terms with you.”

“It was right after our royal
family was murdered,” said Arica. “We—that is, the citizens—thought
at the time that Southern assassins had killed them all. The
generals must have put it around to cement their power when they
took over—and after that we were all too busy fighting the war to
question the change in leadership.”

Jenna nodded. It wasn’t something
she’d ever heard before, but she supposed it made sense if it was
true. “Anyway, there was nothing we could do, and everyone knew it.
But of course even the peasants wanted to do what they could, so
they took whatever weapons they could find and came out to the
road. Even a lot of the older children.” She shook her head. “All
of them died, of course.."

Arica was silent. “I don’t know
what you want me to say,” she said after several seconds. “You want
me to apologize? You know I’m no more responsible for what happened
than you are."

Jenna shrugged. “Just... wanted you
to know, I guess.”

The mounds seemed to watch the
travelers from beneath their heavy shrouds of snow. Shadows pooled
oddly in the crevices between them, and lingered where the
lantern’s light should have driven them off. “Hurry,” Jenna said,
walking faster. “This isn’t a good place to be at
night.”