The Very Best of Kate Elliott (8 page)

The moon shouldered up out of the east, round and bright, the full moon on which she was to have been wed. The moon could not lie. Half a month had passed since the night of the sword moon. The witch had woven a path between that time and this time, and they had ridden down it.

A whistle shrilled. Standing at the edge of the stones, Kereka saw the witch, standing now and waving to catch her attention. Trusting fool! It might well be easy to kill her and take the bearded man’s head while he was injured and weak, before the witch fully healed him, if he could be healed. She could then ride back to her mother’s tent and her father’s tribe and declare herself a man. She knew what to expect from a man’s life, just as she knew what a woman’s life entailed.

So what kind of life did these foreigners live, with their sorcery and their crossbows and the way they handed a shovel from one to the other, sharing the same work, maybe even sharing the same glory? It was a question for which she had no answer. Not yet.

She went back to the litter and grabbed the leather tow lines. Pulled them taut over her own shoulders and tugged. Like uncertainty, the burden was unwieldy, but she was stubborn and it was not too heavy for her to manage.

Could she trust a witch? Would a witch and a foreigner ever trust her?

Pulling the litter behind her, she walked across the charred earth and down through the tall grass to find out.

L
EAF AND
B
RANCH
AND
G
RASS AND
V
INE

A HAND POUNDING ON her cottage door woke Anna, just as it had that terrible night almost three months ago. Jolting upright, she wiped a hand across her mouth as if to wipe away the taste of fear and grief but it did not go away. Beside her on the wide mattress, her two youngest children slept like the dead, and she was glad for it. No sense in cringing and stalling; the bad news would come whether now or at dawn, and she did not want the children to wake.

From the other room, where she had long slept with her husband, rose a murmur of voices: her daughter and her new husband waking to the summons.

She wrapped her well-worn bride’s shawl over her shift and padded to the barred door. Pointless to bar the door, really, since she had left the glass window unshuttered. The light of a full moon bathed the plank floor in a ghostly light, enough that she need not grope for a precious candle. By the measure of the shortened shadows, she knew it was barely past midnight.

She set a hand on the latch.“Who is there?”

“Anna, it is Joen. No trouble here, but I need you at once.”

Her brother’s familiar voice calmed the pounding clamor of her heart. She let him in just as the door into the other room opened and Hansi stuck his head out, holding a lit candle in one hand and his butchering knife in the other.

She said, “Holding a light in the darkness means the other man can see you but you can’t see him.”

Hansi chuckled. He was a good-natured young man, slow to take offense to his pride. “My apologies, Mother Anna. Is that Uncle Joen I hear?”

“It is,” said Joen,“and I would ask you to get everyone dressed.”

Anna grabbed Joen’s thick forearm.“I thought you said no trouble.”

“There’s been a skirmish fought in and around West Hall. Rumor says the Forlangers are involved. The family should hide in the caves until we are sure they’ve moved on.”

Anna’s daughter Mari appeared beside Hansi, resplendent in her bride’s shawl and so heavily pregnant that she lumbered. Her face was solemn as she took the candle from her young husband and examined first her mother and then her uncle by its smoky light.

“We’ll get the children up and go at once,” Mari said.

Hansi brushed his fingers down Mari’s forearm, and the gesture of affection made Anna glad all over again that her daughter had found a good man.

Joen nodded, shifting his crutch. His empty trouser leg swayed. “Take provisions, everything you can carry and cart, but be quick about it. But I need you, Anna, if you will. There are dead and wounded at West Hall.”

She turned on him, her mood gone bitter at once.“I will sew up none of those cursed Forlangers. They can die in their own rot.”

“Truly,” he said, patting her shoulder, “but it was General Olivar’s men they fought.”

“That changes matters then. For the sake of the general, I will do everything I can to help. I’ll get my things.”

Now that she was awake, the sour morning taste was rising in her stomach, a reminder that her husband’s death had not left her entirely alone. But she did not speak of it. Mari suspected, but it was ill fortune to count on the harvest of fruit that might not ripen. If the gods willed it, then they would bless her with his last child.

Hansi rousted the children as Anna dressed and afterward collected her bag. She kissed them all and left, Joen shifting impatiently as he waited. The full moon bathed the world in a glamour. She had many soft memories of this time of night, for summer’s tide had washed her youth in many sweet meetings. But now he was dead.

The houses of the village sprouted in clusters along a cart track that led to the tavern and the temple and, most magnificently, the new market hall built under the supervision of General Olivar ten years ago. She had to measure her pace to allow Joen to keep up without it seeming she could easily out-stride him and, because he was her older brother, she dared not joke with him about it; he would take it amiss, for he had been a soldier for ten years under the general’s command before he had lost his foot.

Her husband would not have cared. His sense of humor had never failed, even as he was dying of a rotting wound her herbs and wise nursing could not heal.

The treacherous Forlangers had the king’s ear and bragged that they were his most loyal subjects. But out here beyond the King’s City people knew them for the greedy, cruel mercenaries that they were, always ready to steal from villages wherever they guessed the king would not notice. Only the general and his men stood between the villages and the raiders.

Someone had lit the crowing cock lamp atop the market hall’s steep roof. This beacon called to the folk hurrying forward now, carrying their children, cages with chickens, and bags stuffed with grain and such produce as they could carry. It was not late enough in the season that beasts had been slaughtered for the winter’s meat, so the older boys and girls were being dispatched to drive the animals out to the far pastures where they might hope to bide unseen until the danger was past.

The headman’s daughter, standing among a cluster of whispering women, saw Anna and broke away from the others to meet her.

“Mistress Anna, if you will, can you go with my husband to West Hall? He is taking ten men.”

“If the Forlangers walk the road, ten men will attract their attention. Give me your brother as escort, and we’ll go through the forest. He knows the woods as well as I do. No Forlanger will see us.”

“But alone, Mistress? My brother is no help in a skirmish. He will just run away and hide, but hiding did not save him then and will not now.”

“He is braver than you think. Anyway, we cannot fight the Forlangers with swords and spears. If we have our wits, then that is our weapon against them.”

The cool autumn night air did not bite, but summer was irrevocably gone. Because it had rained the day before, the leaves slipped instead of crackled underfoot, making it a quiet passage. With a clear sky and the moon’s merciful light a bounty laid over the world, they did not bother with a lantern. Both she and young Uwe knew the nearby animal trails well enough that the full moon gave them all the light they needed to follow familiar ground. She kept her eye open for night-blooming woundheal, at its strongest here at the end of the year and especially under a full moon, but saw none of its pale blossoms.

Uwe slipped in and out of shadow ahead of her. The young man was light on his feet and very shy. He glanced back now and again to make sure she was on the right track, for there were places in the wood where a person might fall into harm’s way and never know until it was too late to climb out.

That was the way of the world: usually the worst was already on you before you knew your throat had been opened and you were bleeding out. So her husband’s death had come, its end determined before she had even known he was injured.

Ahead, Uwe halted, a hand raised in warning. Anna stopped, careful with her feet as she felt a branch bend beneath her shoe, shifting carefully so as to make no noise.

Men’s voices shattered the silence with shouts and a ringing clash of weapons. Sound carried oddly at night, seeming both near at hand and yet impossibly distant. Uwe merely shrugged and began walking again. This trail swung away from the main road and around the back of Witch’s Hill to the back pastures of West Hall’s cultivated lands. No one liked to go this way. As they neared the haunted clearing that sheltered Dead Man’s Oak, Anna listened for the hooves of the Hanging Woman. All she heard were the last dying shrieks of a skirmish away north, then nothing at all except for the wind rattling branches and the chirp of a night-sparrow in a nearby tree.

Maybe the Hanging Woman walked elsewhere this night.

As they entered the big clearing with the oak, Uwe slowed his steps until he was walking beside her, keeping her between him and the ancient tree. An old reddened scar like a ring around his neck marked him as one of the few who had survived an encounter with the Hanging Woman. The meeting had changed him, for no one could meet the Hanging Woman and not be changed.

Uwe grabbed Anna’s arm, fingers a vise.

A body lay propped against the oak’s gnarled trunk.

Uwe shrank back into the brush, but Anna knew better. You never retreated from what could not be changed. What was the point? If the Hanging Woman came, you could not hide from her.

Anyway, a sword rested on the ground at the body’s feet, and the Hanging Woman always took weapons for she was a scavenger of lives. As Anna moved into the clearing, she crumbled a bit of dried lavender in her outstretched hand, letting its dust sweeten her steps, taking no more than three steps at a time, pausing between to whisper the prayer that the old woman of the wood had taught her. “Moonlight make a shade of me, daylight make me whole.”

So she came to the oak untouched. Its trunk was as wide as her cottage, and its bark wrinkled and knobby. The huge branches of the oak draped like arms waiting to crush her if she did one wrong thing.

The body was that of a soldier. He was alive, unconscious and bleeding, and at first glance, seeing an officer’s sash bunched up across his chest, she thought he was a wounded Forlanger. She hefted her walking stick to bash in his head before he woke.

But then the light changed, shifting through the branches to illuminate his face clearly: an older man, dark hair sifted with white. A face she knew and would never forget, although she had only seen him once in her life, on the day ten years ago when the market hall had been dedicated and given over to the village.

She would never forget the crookedly healed nose, the scar on his cheek, the metal brace he wore on his left leg. She knelt cautiously and eased the bloody glove off his left hand: yes, his left little finger was missing, as it said in the song—
He was last to get on the boat and yet all the Forlanger wolf got of him was his smallest finger.

The wounded soldier was General Olivar.

Struck down and somehow abandoned or lost by his own men.

She was so stunned that she sat with a grunt and pressed both hands to her belly, panting softly as she tried to gather her scattering thoughts. Ten years had aged him, as it had aged her: ten years ago her eldest child Mari had been a mischievous girl always singing some silly song, her eldest son had still been alive for that was before the shivering sickness had taken the boy, and her two youngest not yet even born.

A hoof-fall sounded, gentle as mist, and then another.

So the Hanging Woman announced her coming.

She looked up.At the edge of the clearing Uwe hid under an evergreen bitterberry shrub, crouching with arms wrapped around knees. All she could see of him was his face like a frightened baby moon. Moonlight collected in the open space as magic into a bowl.