The Dark Ferryman (3 page)

Lara dropped the tent flap back into place and retreated to her own blankets, kneeling upon them, rather than lying down. She bowed her head in meditation and stayed until dawn.

A merciless sun beat down on the queen’s finest.

“I want to understand how you could lose an entire army.”

Rivergrace looked across the landscape to Lariel Anderieon who sat on her hot-blooded Vaelinar-bred horse, her wrists crossed casually at his withers, her easy posture belying the irritated tone of her voice. The
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mare pawed the ground, telegraphing her rider’s annoyance. The bulky general being addressed merely held himself quiet, waiting for the queen to finish. “We were hot on Diort’s tail.” Lara stared down at a valley baked by an unseasonably fierce late autumn sun, floodwaters having left a slick of clay over the basin, now crackled and dried like tile over what had once been fertile fields. The river which had cut through, bringing its life with it, was gone, the bed nothing more than a cut in the soil, pebbles and sandy bottom gleaming. Its source had been broken within the stone foundation of a narrow pass which had once protected the valley. “First Sevryn, now this. Was it easy to lose an army?” The sun glittered off her mail, and she shook her head, her hair falling loose from the jeweled net which had bound it, silver-and-golden tresses tumbling down to her shoulders. She put a hand up to retrieve the net and yank it aside, frowning at Osten whose horse flanked hers. The general’s face wore his perpetual weathered grimace, his expression pulled by the great scar which cleaved his face in two, a death blow meant to do more than scar him but which, miraculously, had not. His voice rumbled in reply.

“Not as easily as it might appear, Lara. We know Bistel harried them down from the north, and sign pointed them here.” Osten stood in his stirrups, easing his body a moment, before settling back onto the saddle. “And we know the Galdarkan’s been here.” He surveyed the damage done by the war hammer Rakka where it had split the valley and the small pass which had once guarded it wide open, sending the brook which fed its fertile valley into a flood before rock slides had shut it down altogether. They could see the fractured lines running through the valley floor up into the meager hills where the village perched on hummocks and hills. The stone spine of the mountains ringing the area, barely tall enough to be called such, lay bare with chasms chiseled open in a web of flaws. It was not the first time Diort had struck his hammer and the Demon within had thundered open the very bones of the world. But why here? What would he gain by loosing the Demon here? A few heavily laden carts trudged from the devastation, a handful of family members to each cart, the pitful survivors of Abayan Diort’s attack. Others had either already fled or joined Diort’s army in fear for their lives. Lariel’s hand twitched on the reins in distress, and her horse tossed her head in a nervous response.

“I know he’s been here. It’s where he’s vanished to that concerns me.” Her gloved hand cut the air. “I want someone down there to talk to the villagers.” She looked to Rivergrace. “You have Dweller upbringing, you know the farming life, but you can promise them nothing. I know this will go against your grain, but hold your tongue. They think we Vaelinars can heal all that is wrong with their world with our magic, and curse us whether we do so or not. If we helped everyone who pleaded for our magic, we would create a world full of beggars who refuse to do anything for themselves. I won’t have you contribute to that.”

Her brusque request shook Rivergrace and scattered her thoughts about Sevryn’s disappearance in the night. “But—” protested Grace softly.

“Rivergrace,” Lara answered softly. “No one can heal the earth here. All we can do is find Diort and put a stop to him.” She put a heel to her horse’s flank. “Stand down the men. More than a handful of us will panic them. Grace, come with me.”

Pursing her lips in quiet obstinacy yet obeying Lara’s order, she reined her mare after the queen, and they descended down into the valley. The beautiful red-and-gold leaves of autumn had fallen, but the flood had drowned their glory in mud, and the horses soon trotted over baked silt, puffs of dirt greeting the strike of each hoof. Rivergrace looked down, feeling the water below which had sunk into the earth—deep, still water. Spring would bring the life back to this land again, but the people who had lived here couldn’t wait through a harsh winter in that hope and with the fear that the demolished pass which they could easily have guarded against raiders and Bolgers was now laid wide open, a shattered gateway into their midst. All but a few had already fled.

Lara signaled a dismount as the carts and their Kernan drivers halted, looking at them with expressions both frightened and curious. Rivergrace slid to the ground, one hand on her mount’s neck. She wondered if any of these farmers and tradesmen had ever seen a Vaelinar before, thinking from the widening of their eyes that likely they had not although they’d undoubtedly heard many things about them. She knew what they would see, a tall, handsome folk with tipped ears and eyes as bright as gems with streaks and specks and whorls of color within color, eyes unlike any ever seen before on Kerith. Those eyes were not native to Kerith, belonging to a people some God or forbidden magic had flung into their world centuries ago for reasons the Vaelinar could not remember and the races born to Kerith had no way to discern. She knew what they thought if they thought the worst of them: invaders, slavers. She took a deep breath, feeling the old manacle scars prickle high on her wrists. All but faded, the pain could still chafe at her now and again. Vaelinars were often no kinder to their own than to others. Hammered onto Kerith, they had suffered no less damage to themselves and their culture than this valley had from the Demon Rakka. She dropped the reins of her horse into a ground-tie and stepped away, letting a soft smile curve across her lips, hoping it would ease the looks she faced.

Lariel had been ill at ease, and no wonder. The Vaelinars were strangers in the lands of Kerith, their existence here at the forbearance of the native peoples. Or perhaps not forbearance, perhaps they’d supplanted those originally in control here. Yet they weren’t exactly conquerors, although they were treading a fine line there. The Vaelinars had brought with them intelligence, experience, and magic, and used all they had to establish new domains among those who had been born here.

Rivergrace had been isolated from her people for most of her young life and had only recently started to know them intimately, her previous view of them that of her adopted family of Dwellers who had long protected her from her strange beginnings. Vaelinars guarded each other’s backs from the native peoples of Kerith, yet within their own society they could be vicious and deadly as the assassins sent after Lara proved. The queen faced not only murderers from within but civil war from without. Her own seneschal Tiiva, head of her household staff for many, many years, had sent death after her before disappearing. Did Lara think that Tiiva had conspired with Abayan Diort? If she did, the Warrior Queen hadn’t confided that to Rivergrace, but there was a doggedness about this pursuit that suggested it.

Grace didn’t understand the politics of the Vaelinars and took what solace she could in the countryside, looking at it with the eyes of a Dweller as Lariel and Osten approached the head of the raggedy caravan. Her feet took her wandering off to the side, to the bed of the river that had been, and she knelt there, reaching out. She sifted the pebbles and soft dirt and sand, thinking of the fish that had swum in the river once, their fins fanning the sediment, of the water cold and harsh in the winter and soft and languid in the summer. There were prints on the far side bank, from animals which had come to drink as if not believing the water had gone. A wilted weed tangled across her palm, drying out, dying, as the whole valley would, slowly. Rain and runoff might fill this riverbed again, but . . . she looked up. The hammer strike had shifted the rocks in the hills to block the water from the river, and she doubted it would ever run true again. Like high desert land, rain would fall here and sweep away, disappearing into porous, infertile sand that would not, could not, hold it. The river’s source spoke to her from the depths of stone, a wounded presence that struggled to be free, to be whole. She sighed.

A tiny sigh echoed hers, and she looked up into a small, oval face. A hand reached past hers to finger the dirt. “Grampa says we hafta leave because of the river. Without the river, we can’t live.” The Kernan lad looked askance at her, brown eyes crinkling a little at the corners, as if she were too bright to watch directly.

“He says that, does he? He’s probably right, don’t you think?”

“Probably. He’s awful old, and you don’t get that way bein’ stupid.”

She smothered her reaction. “Indeed. I’m going to walk up. Would you like to come with me?” She stood, dusted off her hand, and held it out to him.

He studied it, then her. He wove his fingers into hers carefully. “You’re not like the others.”

Rivergrace nodded. The bane of her life. She was, and she wasn’t, like the other Vaelinars. She wasn’t sure if he meant that she did not wear mail and carry weapons like the others, although she did have a short sword slung on her left hip. With the eyes of the young, he might be able to see that imperceptible aura that she wasn’t quite Vaelinar, and was most definitely not anything else of Kerith either. Not a tall and arrogant Galdarkan, the nomadic guardians bred by the long-ago Mageborn race, nor a humble Kernan who populated these lands in the greatest numbers and certainly not a short and sturdy and boisterous Dweller. They began to walk up the riverbed toward the broken landscape, leaving behind the elder Kernans telling what they knew of events to Lara and Osten.

“I’m Barton,” the lad said.

“I am called Rivergrace,” she answered, half-listening to him and half-listening to something dancing on the wind, the voice of the water if it had such a thing.

“They came a few days ago,” he offered. “Lots of Galdarkan lived here, they came out to listen to him. Grampa said only a fool doesn’t listen to a man with a sword if he wants to talk before using it.”

They skirted a fall of granite and slate. “Then what happened?”

“He said . . . Diort . . . that we had to leave. Come with him or leave by ourselves, that it wouldn’t be safe.”

“Not safe?” But it was Diort who’d splintered open the pass which held the village close, as if a wall had been built by nature to cozen them. “Did he say why?” She paused to help him up a boulder as they began to climb cautiously over the edge of the rockfall. Pebbles skittered after them as they moved upward.

“Grampa muttered something about Mageborn and badlands. Stuff I don’t understand.”

Nor did she, yet. She did know that when the elder civilization, the Mageborn, warred and the Gods of Kerith stripped the magic from them in angry retribution, backlash currents of chaos anchored into the lands where the Mages had established their kingdoms. The badlands to the east, the wastelands of those wars, expanded and contracted erratically except where the Vaelinar lord Bistel’s holding of Hith-aryn seemed to keep the tide at bay. The great aryn trees the Vaelinar had brought with them in seed and staff sprang up in groves like windbreaks and bent their limbs against the chaos like a shield. Here, though . . . she was uncertain how close or far they might be to an errant spear of wasteland. The wasteland was rumored to move, to devour. But did it? Would Diort have lied to them to force them into his alliance? What good had it done him to destroy their farms and village here? Or did he intend to destroy something else along with it?

She said to Barton, “But your grampa didn’t go with them.”

“Nope. We’re Kernan. A lot of Kernan went with ’em, too, but he said, soldiering brings trouble, and no matter what a soldier said about glory, he still needed a farmer to fill his gut.”

“I see.” The corner of Rivergrace’s mouth tugged. The Kernan sounded much like her Dweller foster father Tolby. They reached a high point, where she could look up at the smallish peaks the river had once tumbled from before running down into the valley. She still could find no sense in Diort’s destruction, although the aryn trees bordering the rim to the north stood withered as though winter had already swept through savagely and they but hanging on until the spring. Too early for that, she thought, they had only just dropped the few leaves they would let go at the season’s turning. Aryns were mainly evergreens, although they did shed a few golden leaves from their deep green boughs at autumn’s touch. Did the aryns falter here? And if so, why? They were far enough from the edges of the badlands. She frowned at that as she considered what had been river and had become flood. She pushed the aryns out of her mind as her senses attuned to the pitch of the roots of the water. Fire answered instead to her shock, heated tongues licking the inside of her mind. It leaped at her awareness of it. It wanted her to release it, and she shivered at its intensity. She took a deep breath to clear her thoughts before seeking for the water which was her Talent, her affinity, and part of her soul. It came, quietly, wet and silken as she called it, and she listened to see where water ran deep in the ground about her, also ready to answer.

Barton waited long moments before saying, “You’re listening, aren’t you?”

She gave him a look of surprise before answering, “Yes.”

“I’ll be quiet, then.” He squatted down, balancing one elbow on a knee so he could cradle his chin in his palm, and he stayed there, with the patience of those who are used to farming, where seed doesn’t sprout overnight nor great things happen in a single day.

Grace perched on a ledge. Tilting her face, she could feel moisture on the slight breeze that stirred. She was not that high, or far away from Lara and her guard, but she could look down and see that they were still deep in talk, with a little bit of hand waving and gesturing, as they gleaned details and dropped persuasions of their own. She wasn’t sure if they even knew she had wandered off, but undoubtedly they did. Little escaped Lara’s notice.