The Blood Sigil (The Sigilord Chronicles Book 2) (3 page)

She didn't want to shut down his advances completely—Who knew when a devotion as strong as his might come in handy?

Colin beamed. "It's probably not like the parties in big cities, but we know how to have fun. There's plenty of great food. Amos Bish buries and smokes three whole pigs just for the occasion! And there's games and music and the boat races, the archery challenge and there's a corn maze. Oh, and there's a wagon pull. I won that last year." He said the last part with no small amount of pride. Confidence looked good on him, Cailix thought.

She shook her head, banishing the image of his good looks and focusing on more immediate needs. She needed to get to the other side of the range, and she didn't want anyone—especially Colin—to see her go.

"Tell you what, Colin," Cailix began, facing him again, this time with full control of herself. She needed him to do something for her, and that meant she was in control—always the safest thing for her. "If you help me with something, then I might consider going to the harvest festival with you."

He lit up, smiling from ear to ear, leaning forward a little. "Name it, I'll do anything."

"It's getting a little late in the season for apples, and Miss Orla has been talking about how she'd love to make a few more apple pies before the season passes," Cailix started but Colin put a hand on top of hers. She gasped a little and pulled her hand away. She wasn't comfortable with being touched, least of all by Colin.

"Say no more, Cailix," said the young man, bounding to his feet. "We have dozens of trees at the back of our property just at the edge of the hills. There's more ripe apples than we can use. I can pick you a bushel full."

"Oh that would be fantastic," Cailix said, laying on her most persuasive tone and smiling as widely as she could muster. The smile was artificial and her cheeks hurt from the effort, but it was enough to get the job done.
 

Colin smiled back, wiping damp bits of grass from his pants. "I'll bring the bushel by tomorrow morning in the wagon. We can go to market together, since I hear you all are bringing a load of grain."

Cailix stood, itching to leave. "Thank you."

Colin bowed his head, bent his knees, and stretched his hand out to the side. "'Tis my pleasure, my lady."

Cailix couldn't help but giggle a little. He looked ridiculous.

"What?"

"My Lord, you've just given me the most flawless, womanly curtsy. The only thing you're missing is a dress."

His cheeks flushed, but he kept his composure. "Well then, I will leave you with a simple farmer's bow instead."

"And what does that look like?"

Colin turned and bent over, stuck out his rear end, and made a
mooo
-ing noise like a cow.

She laughed. It felt strange, and she stopped it as soon as she could catch her breath. The laugh wasn't planned; wasn't part of the script. She could lose control if she let things like that continue.
 

As she watched him cover the plateau with long strides, she pondered the boy. Simpleton or no, there was no pretense about him. He was who he was, no matter who was watching, even if it was a girl he wanted to take to the harvest festival. Urus was the only other person she had ever met who hid nothing beneath guise or artifice.

Convinced Colin had gone, she continued on her way to the edge of the plateau, where the flat, grassy plain gave way to small vertical drops of white stone that marked the beginning of the foothills.

She scanned the hills and found the stone outcropping she was looking for. Checking again to make sure nobody was around, she made a quick dash for the stone.

Taking a deep breath, she reached out and scraped her finger against the jagged rock. Thin drips of blood pulsed out of the small cut. All she needed was a few drops. She rubbed her finger on the rock, leaving a little circle of red on the white stone.

She knelt, then pressed her finger to the red dot and closed her eyes. She felt the power of the blood magic course through her veins, felt it connect with the blood on the rock and surge outward through the stone as if it were growing blood vessels of its own. She commanded the stone to recede and it obeyed.

A door opened just wide enough to admit her into the darkness beyond. She stepped through, and listened to the stone grind shut behind her. She made her way through the cave, pressing her hands against the cave walls for guidance, gradually descending into the earth below the grazing range above.

A few minutes later, as the damp chill left the air, her hand brushed against the cold iron of a sconce holding a torch. She squeezed another drop of blood from her finger onto the head and it flamed to life, illuminating a large cavern. She lit three more torches the same way and then found her favorite spot—a flat piece of rock used as a bench—and sat in it.

The room was a natural chamber connected to a network of caves that ran underneath the entire plateau. Candles and torches lined the walls and lay stacked on boxes and wrapped in hay to keep the moisture out. In here she had stored bushels of stolen fruit, loaves of bread, cheese, bottles of wine, even a few chunks of salt pork. Across from her stone bench lay a box with coins, silver place settings, and other valuables she'd stolen that might be easily turned into money. All of this was just in case she needed to escape in a hurry; all for when inevitable came to pass.
 

Nothing was permanent, Cailix had learned long ago. As nice as the Jepps family seemed to be, it wouldn't last. It never did. They all eventually got sick of her, or died like the monks had. She couldn't count on anyone to take care of her; she had to do that herself.

After washing down a few pieces of bread with a slurp of wine from an open bottle, she got up and made her way to the back of the room, a spot where three adjoining tunnels connected to the chamber.
 

There, hanging from a hook in the ceiling, was a sheep, cut from neck to pelvis and legs bound, a bucket below filled with dark blood, another bucket holding the entrails. The animal had wandered away from the herd and followed her to the cave entrance a few days before. Not wanting it to lead the other sheep or shepherd dogs to the cave, she had killed it.

She couldn't just let the blood go to waste. Blood held power, and power could not be wasted.

She stared down at the bucket of blood as she stirred it with a finger, entranced by its color and viscosity. She took a step back and summoned the blood, the power locked within it calling to her, drawing her in as much as she drew it toward her.
 

The surge of power drummed within her, amplifying the rhythm of her pulse. The blood drifted up out of the bucket and swirled like a little tornado in mid-air. She wondered how long the blood would still be usable after its animal host had died.
 

I'll try again tomorrow,
she thought.
And the next day and the next until I know the limits.

She sat back down on her stone bench, lost in the beauty of the swirling blood vortex.

Miss Orla had told her that she wasn't to use magic. Cailix remembered, and she knew the rule, but this was one she wasn't going to obey. Without magic, without the power of blood, she was just like everybody else—
simple
. Without power, she would be as vulnerable as everyone else, and she couldn't have that.

She smiled as she commanded the blood to float around the cave. It formed into the shape of a bird, flapping its wings, sailing in a circle around the perimeter. Not a single drop of blood spilled onto the floor.
This
was what power felt like.

Power was safety. Power was everything.

Chapter Three

"Hol, from your palace in the beyond," Goodwyn prayed on his knees on the floor of the decadent room at the Maelstrom Inn. "We beseech you to care for our dead warriors, to grant them safe passage to the underworld and give them weapons with which to wage great wars."

"You don't still believe in any of that nonsense, do you?" Therren asked, lying on one of the two beds in the room, staring up at the ceiling made of dark wood that had been polished to a shine.

"Why shouldn't I?" Goodwyn asked, then whispered another prayer, bowing his head three times.

"Because of all the things we've seen, the things we've done. You still believe the gods are real?"

"I have to," he said.
All those Kestians
, he thought.
They can't just be gone. They have to be somewhere, even if it is the afterlife. It can't have all been for nothing.

He got up, pulled back the inner shutters on the window, and slid aside the outer pair of red clay shutters, admitting a three-story-high view of Niragan, the capital city of Acederon. The cityscape sprawled for miles in every direction, a flat sea of bustling activity and homes. In contrast, the city he now called home, Waldron, seemed like little more than a barnacle growing outward from a mountaintop. They had been in Niragan for only a day, but already Goodwyn loved every inch of the city he had seen so far.
 

The cold air bit at his face while the heat from the fireplace warmed his back. The mix of heat and cold on a day this clear and filled with sun was wonderfully bizarre.

He gazed out at the houses and businesses that seemed to bob up out of the water, the canals and tiny waterways appearing between them as if by accident. The early morning sun bathed everything in its light and glinted off the tin roofs of a slum to the south. Smoke drifted up from nearly every chimney he could see. Most of the buildings in this area of the city were short and wide, accommodating shops and storehouses and their owners and their families above. To the west, the size and majesty of the buildings grew as they neared the city center and its castle.

"We should get downstairs. The commander has probably been awake for hours," Therren said.

"Wait," responded Goodwyn. The world became an overlap of different images, and he was suddenly aware of multiple futures, all there in the room with him. In one of these overlapping shades of futures to be, he saw a pigeon drop through the window and bounce off his future chest, an arrow protruding from its eye.

Goodwyn leaned to the side, and a moment later the real pigeon plunged through the window and bounced off the floor, an arrow having plucked it from the sky.

"Your quobber thing is getting better, isn't it?" Therren asked.

"It's called
quiver
, remember? Murin calls it
quantum viewer
," Goodwyn said, strapping on his suzur and two dagger belts. "It's happening more often these days, but I wouldn't say it's been getting any more useful. Avoiding being hit by a pigeon doesn't seem like all that beneficial a power."

Goodwyn recalled the day he had first met Murin, the tall, grey-skinned man in simple robes. He had been as mysterious and full of secrets then as he was now.

Therren vaulted off the bed and flashed him a devilish grin. "Does your power show you what I'm about to do?"

"I don't need my power for that, and you'd better not with this window open."

"You're no fun," Therren said, fastening his sword belt and sheathing both of his boot daggers.

"We can't risk anybody seeing. We have no idea what people here would do, and we'd get worse than a culling if the commander found out about us."

Therren pouted. "When are we going to stop hiding? Can't your quobber see a day like that?"

"It's
quiver
," Goodwyn said, punching his friend in the shoulder. "And no, I can't see it. But that doesn't mean it won't happen, only that there are too many paths from here to there."

"Or no paths," Therren added. They plucked their wool cloaks from their hooks and left the room in silence.

They stepped into the common room of the inn, their arrival triggering instant silence, everyone stopping what they were doing to stare at them. When they had first come to Waldron, Goodwyn had grown used to people staring at him because of his dark skin and strange weapons, but this look was different. Everyone in the room had fear in their eyes.

"Just smile like Aegaz told us," Goodwyn whispered through gritted, smiling teeth as he shrugged into his cloak.

"They're staring anyway."

"Just keep walking," Goodwyn whispered again.

They made their way among the tables and awkward glances, then stepped out onto the patio, where several tables had been arranged in a line with their chairs facing the canal, each with a small iron pot filled with hot coals in the center.

"Commander," Goodwyn said, giving the traditional Kestian fist-to-the-chest salute, Therren doing the same. Aegaz sat at one of the tables, sharpening a few of his blades, a half-eaten breakfast of eggs and bread left on his plate. Four empty mugs and a fifth one still filled with steaming coffee took up the remaining room on his table.

"Boys," Aegaz said, not looking up from his blades. "Though I suppose I should stop calling you that. You've acquitted yourselves like fine warriors of late."

Goodwyn and Therren each sat at their own table. Goodwyn never got tired of the canals. An entire city with so much water that most of its roads required boats. Born in the desert as he was, the sight of so much water never failed to fill him with awe.