Silver Eve (3 page)

Another feeling to push away, sweep under the mat of rigid focus. I was sick of being stoic. Still, I turned to Brown-beard with no expression to betray me. “Let the child's eyes open on their own,” I instructed. “Find something to feed him, to feed all of you. A broth is best. You'll have to make a fire. You'll have to find water, a pot. Put whatever food you can scavenge to steep. Do you understand?”

He nodded, shivering. I pushed myself from the ground.

“You are leaving?”

I nodded back. I was late enough for my own destiny.

“But you cannot leave! Not yet!” He shouted it, jumping up. “You must help us finish what we started. We—we do not know what to do. You can help.”

No.
I closed my eyes.
Let me be done. Let me finally be done.

But Brown-beard turned me to him, all nervous and eager again, and easily forgetting the boy that lay at his feet. “You
must
help,” he insisted. “This way.” And he set off at a skittish pace.

“Wait!” I called. “Take the child!” Brown-beard returned and impatiently scooped the boy in his arms as I bade him take care. 'Twould have been better to let the boy heal where he lay, but he'd have been forgotten. I wasn't even certain the man would do anything more than dump the poor little thing on some cold cobblestone. I had to follow.

I shook off the burr of disappointment, crunched over smoldering stalks and blackened leaves to the closest body for something to cover the boy. The old man there no longer needed his coat, so I slid it gently from his shoulders. I took as well the apron from the corpse of a woman.

“This way,” Brown-beard said as I neared. He led me back toward the ruin of Bern, where we laid the boy in the market square by the well, pillowing the apron under his head and draping the jacket. “This way,” Brown-beard repeated, edgy and hushed, and continued. I followed, blurring the footprints he left in the ash.

It was near the last cottage, a long garden shed at the very end of the village, one of the few structures not destroyed. Five remaining villagers mingled there, hobbled and restless, away from its shut door.

“What is it?” I asked. “Is another hurt?” I was at the door lifting the latch before Brown-beard yelped, “No!” He grabbed my wrist, yanking me back. “Not one of us! A—” He could barely name it: “A Troth.”

In perfect response, a howl curdled from the shed. The crowd gasped and stumbled closer together. Even I reeled a little at the suddenness of the revelation, the threat.
Troth.

“Wounded,” someone whispered.

“The first beast to arrive. Tamel managed to stick it with a hammer before he was killed,” said another. “It ran in there. Then the rest attacked….”

That was two days past, from what I'd learned. I straightened. “Has no one opened the door?” I asked. “Has no one looked? Where was the creature wounded?”

They shook their heads at my questions, and I shook my head back at them, upset. “You cannot leave the Troth like this.”

“We thought it would die—”

“Except it hasn't!” someone broke in. “And what if it's mended—”

“ 'Twill burst through the door and kill us all!”

“ 'Twill have its
revenge
!”

Their words scrambled over one another in fearful spurts. Six adults—four men, two women—and the little boy asleep in the market square. Seven left. A sad straggle of survivors. The Troth keened, rattling the shed, and panic shivered through those standing, fevered their stares.

“You could cast a spell to keep it inside, to keep the door bolted hard, couldn't you?” the youngest man there begged.

“She's a Healer, fool!” A second man knocked his shoulder angrily.

“A Healer, nonetheless! They weave spells!”

“A Healer is no wizard!” I exclaimed.

“But she has knowledge of
herb,
” Brown-beard announced to a chorus of gasps. He turned to me, echoing my own warning with jittery enthusiasm: “You carry things that poison, no? That thing must be parched or starving. If we mashed your herbs, smeared it on some meat—”

A woman shrieked, “Meat! When we starve?”

“There are dead things all around us,” Brown-beard hissed back. “Take your pick.”

The angry man would have none of it. “Too easy after what they've done! As painful a death as we can make for that thing!” He turned. “
You,
Mistress Healer, have you something in your bag for that?”

Someone giggled wildly in agreement, saying “If poison contorts even a little, we can pull the tools from the shed and finish it!”

“Finish
slowly
!”

“
Our
revenge…”

It. Thing.
The opportunity to pay back suffering with suffering. “The herbs are not for that,” I bit out over the ugly chatter. “You cannot ask me to take a life.” Defense, yes, but not cruelty.

“It's a
beast,
” one woman muttered.

“No more than any of us,” I muttered back, repulsed. I'd had enough of violence. I pushed past the closest man by the door and grabbed the latch. “I will finish this my way.”

No one stopped me this time; instead, they ran back a distance and fell into a huddle. They cried to me, a mix of fearful voices: “Do not let it out!” “ 'Twill kill us!” “Tear you in pieces!” “You'll be raven pickings!”

“I do not fear any Troth,” I called back. I opened the door and shut it hard behind me with grim relief. Better to face a wild brutality than a reasoned one.

The interior was dusk-dark. The windows were patches of gray from the smoke. A tumble of rakes, hoes, and shovels clotted the planked floor like jackstraws; wheelbarrows and carts were tossed upside down—the Troth had crashed into everything in a fury of pain. I could smell the leaked blood, hear his sharp panting, but I could not see him.

I kept my hand on the latch and whispered to test: “Where do you hide?”

A low growl emitted from the back shadows. Then nothing. I waited, learning by that eerie silence what I needed to know—'twas a warning only; the Troth could not attack. I let go of breath and latch, began climbing over the mess with as little noise as possible. Halfway, the stench of blood and beast stopped me cold. I swallowed, hitched a little to the left, and peered into the dimness, watching shadow resolve into form.

“There you are,” I murmured.

The Troth was horribly wounded, his left arm half ripped from the shoulder, the blood smearing him more black than red. Two days he'd lasted like that, an impressive feat. But it left him more dangerous—he'd die soon enough, but not before becoming even more ferocious in a final gasp of agony. The Troth would explode out of the garden shed just as the villagers feared and take them down. And he
would
take them down. Even one-armed, the Troth could take us all.

I studied him, wondering how a physique no greater in size could hold more strength than any human. The goblin-hunched frame; the mottled, spongy skin; the strings of hair and dagger teeth; the slits for a nose. And those eyes—they were meant for the dark. They caught the gray light in sudden gleams and flashes. It made me vulnerable that the Troth could see better and kill with a single blow. But I held my ground, held my gaze, wanting to see this foreign creature up close and wanting to
know
—as if somehow in the dim light and mess of blood I might recognize this Troth as the one who killed the young man I loved. And if I might recognize, then…

The end of the story I did not tell Brown-beard: that the Riders had saved Merith from the worst. Almost.

It was not two months since I saw the Troths leaping from Dark Wood, through the gardens and growing fields, through barn and cottage, thudding over the pretty paths that led straight to our village square. But then the Riders stormed in and…

And compared to Bern we'd been spared.

There was one slaughter, though, that stood out as breathtakingly cruel. A young man lay with his chest ripped open in the middle of Merith's market square. Raif—
my
Raif. A Troth had slain my love, whole claw.

Perhaps this Troth.

We eyed each other. The Troth was cornered; I was exposed. An unfavorable standoff, truly. For him.

In that moment, in that space of wonder and possibility, I was invincible—a strength not from knowledge of cures or fearlessness, but from rage. I had a culprit to take it out on, finally, a way to release the screams I never screamed. My blood was heating, surging through veins, flushing cheeks, quickening heart—expanding until I dominated the shed and could crush this puny creature without a flicker of movement, and in silence.

The Troth sensed it. He remained wary; those luminous disks fixed on me. I returned his stare with arrows of ice-cold fury and a fierce smile.

“I would leave you like this,” I hissed. A minute ago I'd shunned such viciousness in the frightened villagers beyond the door. Now I wished and whispered a similar curse—a glorious, livid, and far too brief curse: “I want you to suffer. I
want
you to hurt.”

His gaze stayed fixed. The Troth didn't understand me…or maybe he did. For though I might pretend I'd entered the shed with dark intent and hurl hate-filled words, Healers could not act out of malice. I could not harm, nor prolong agony. I could not even leave this creature to those villagers outside.

I could not avenge Raif's death.

Still, rage illuminated, awed me, even—pure and fleeting like a shooting star. And then it was done. Smile gone, I settled to the task of ending his suffering quickly. My eyes roamed the room for something to use. There—a scythe. Sickle-shaped, with a sharp tip, honed blade, and sturdy wood handle. It hung on the back wall. Behind the Troth.

Healer's task…
I eased forward; the Troth shifted. I stepped over a rake, and he growled—a little game of dare, with me unafraid and he so very wary—ever closer until we were face to face, my cloak almost brushing his feet. I wondered that he neither attacked nor ran—wondered if he was truly too exhausted from pain and loss of blood. But the Troth stayed hunkered against the wall, snorts of breath flexing those ugly little slits, leaving me to stretch over him for the tool. The rank breath and the stench of his grisly wound mixed in overwhelming foulness. I swallowed against it, then slowly reached my hand above his string-haired scalp. Those orbs slid up, tracked my move—

“Mistress Healer!” Cries came pounding through the shed, shocking both of us. “Mistress Healer! What happens?”

With a hideous shriek, the Troth sprang and I lunged for the scythe. Then his claws were gripping my throat and it was I who was pinned to the wall, dangling, my fingers scrabbling for the sickle blade. And still the villagers shouted for me, their terror whipping frenzy. “Hush!” I tried to yell. There was barely a voice, barely air.

He used the wounded arm, yet the Troth kept rigid hold, his snarl curling a lipless mouth over those dagger teeth. I gasped and choked and strained for the scythe, stunned at how quick it could all be over. How easy. And then I stopped struggling, remembering that moment two months back when a Troth sprang for me as I kneeled by Raif's lifeless body.

My useless wish now was the same as then:
Kill me. Kill
me.

But this Troth waited. Maybe he fed on fear and was surprised that I held none. Maybe he smelled the Healer, the herbs, and wondered what I could offer to cure. Or did he feel the same hate I did, and enjoyed that for me the pain of living was far worse than a quick death? Speculations only. The Troth was a wild thing, a killer, and I was prey. Eye to limpid eye, we stared, judged.

And there it was: the recognition that I should be killed. The creature's grip tightened; I felt the claws digging in, forcing me sideways. The back of my neck grated against the planking. My fingertips touched the scythe.
Now. Do it now.
I was begging for him to win. His good arm went up to slash—

Instinct swept in. I ripped the scythe from the hook and had it to his throat before he could finish me. The tip of the blade pierced the small, soft fold in his neck, the point where blood would flow out fastest and without sting.

How quick it could all be over. How easy. How unfair.
The orbs stared at me—no shock, just an easing of torment…and, finally, release. Then the luminous glow faded and the claws unclenched. The Troth thumped to the floor in a hiss of dark blood, and my feet touched down.

There was a moment of pure silence—even the villagers had stopped. Slowly, I wiped the scythe on my cloak and hung it back on the wall. I pressed my fingers against the splinters of wood where my nails had scraped and I exhaled…but not with relief. Healer nature always prevailed. No malice. No harm. Not even to myself.

The shouting began again.

Well, perhaps a tiny spark of malice: I clambered back over the wreckage, flung open the door, catching the villagers by surprise. They started and stumbled back, cringing with shrieks of terror, and I let them, before shouting over all of it, “It is done.”

Slowly they righted themselves, releasing fear in gasps, then choking with helpless laughter.

“You killed it!” The angry man wheezed. I nodded and brushed some cobwebs from my cloak, smearing all the Troth blood, which I'd yet to wipe from my fingers. One of the women turned to retch.

But the other woman wiped her eyes and looked at me in wonder. “How? How did you manage? You waded through our destruction, you helped, you killed…but your pretty face is so brave and still. You have no tears? No tears for sadness, or worry, or fear, or relief?”

No. I had no tears. Another thing: Healers did not cry.

“I did what you asked,” I told them instead. “I'll leave you now.” I moved away from the garden shed.
West,
I remembered, and turned in that direction, then looked back at them all. “You will not forget the boy back in the square,” I said to the man named Rafinn. “You will not forget to make a broth, to
feed
him.” He nodded. They all did.