Accidental Sorceress (Hardstorm Saga Book 2) Page 17

  When the sun rose, I stopped in a small glen but did not start a fire. I lay on the bare ground. The tiger lay next to me and warmed me with her heat. She even put a paw over me, as if I were her cub she was protecting.

  Orz sat with his back against a tree, as if on guard duty. Truly, I could not remember ever seeing him sleep. He was so silent and still that, after a few moments, I forgot about him.

  Since the trees had no leaves, I could see the sky through their gnarly branches. I looked up at the gray winter clouds and thought of Batumar. Grief flooded my heart. He had given his life for me and a handful of little beggars. He had lived with honor and had died with honor.

  Someday, the Kadar would be singing songs about him at a feast, about him and the siege of Karamur. I’d had no great love for the Kadar when I had first come to them, but now I hoped with a desperate hope that they would survive to sing such songs.

  I fell asleep to the sound of the tiger’s snoring and dreamed dark and disjointed dreams, remembering none when I woke past midday. Yet I carried their weight, feeling anxious as we continued.

  Any food I could forage, I shared with Orz, who would not touch me, not even for victuals, but accepted whatever I placed on the ground for him.

  If we came across herbs, I gathered them and hung them from my belt, but the pickings were slim. As we walked in companionable silence, my thoughts turned to another journey, one I had made with Batumar’s mother to free him when he had been captured by the enemy. We had walked through a similar forest to this. We had been nearly captured more than once. At night, to keep safe, we had slept in the trees.

  But despite all the danger, we had reached Batumar. And we had all made it safely back to Karamur, the fortress city.

  I had doubts aplenty when Batumar and I embarked on our journey through the mountain, but once we passed that test, I had gained heart and expected this adventure to end in success. I had expected the journey to be difficult and dangerous, but I trusted Batumar’s great strength to achieve our goals. Why would the spirits send him on a quest just to fail?

  I railed against the injustice.

  We walked through the same kind of woods as the day before and kept going long after dark, staying in the forest but within sight of the road. When we came across a creek, we drank. At least we had the flask I had given Orz outside Ker. This he now returned to me, along with the handsome bowl Graho had carved.

  I turned my attention to finding food. We ate roots and leaves, and the grubs I found under the rotted bark of a tree. I had the sack the men who’d attacked me had left on my head, but what little food we found, we ate, so the sack remained empty.

  We crossed a large clearing of waist-high dead grasses. I collected an armful as we walked. More woods waited for us on the other side.

  As the sun went down, I pulled deeper into the trees to start a fire, and Marga padded off to look for prey. Orz drew closer and sat on the other side of the flames. He cut a dark and tragic figure.

  From the pile next to me, I took four or five strands of grass and rolled them into thin rope, adding and adding for length, then made a light but strong net from the grass rope, weighting the edges with stones.

  “I can use this to hunt tomorrow,” I told Orz.

  He watched from under his hood as my fingers worked, without ever raising his gaze to my face. His fingers twitched on his lap, mimicking mine. He had lost the rags that had bound them before. For the first time, I saw that his bones were at all the wrong angles. Not as if they had been simply broken, but as if they had been broken over and over again.

  My throat tightened with sympathy. Since I knew Orz would not answer, I did not ask how he had gained those injuries.

  The tiger returned late, when all the stars were out in the sky. Her maw was clean, her side flat. We all went to sleep hungry, for the dinner of grubs Orz and I had shared had been nowhere near enough to fill our stomachs.

  In the days that followed, we fell into a routine, walking in the woods, stopping at dusk so the tiger could hunt, then moving on at first light. She liked the dusk and dawn hunting hours the best, and was content to walk with us most of the day, then sleep next to me and keep me warm most of the night.

  Each night, Orz sat leaning against a tree. Maybe his back was as damaged as his hands were and having the tree’s support was easiest for him. Now and then, I did catch him sleeping.

  Many times during the day, I caught him looking at me, which he could do without lifting his hood, since the burlap material was threadbare indeed. I still had not seen his face. What little his hood did not cover was hidden by a growing beard. I suspected that, like his fingers, his features were most terribly ruined.

  We had been traveling for five days—during which time I caught half a dozen small birds with my net—when we saw the first group of refugees on the road, heading toward Ker.

  The tiger had gone off into the deep woods to investigate some strange noise or smell. Only Orz was with me.

  We stopped and watched from behind a stand of evergreen bushes as the group of seven staggered forward. Three ragged women walked in front, one staring in front of her numbly, one grunting with exhaustion at each step, the last one crying. Four men brought up the rear of the column, looking back frequently for danger, pulling loaded wooden skids behind them. There were no children.

  Only when they passed did I spy a gray hand hanging out from one of their bundles and realized they were not pulling their belongings. They were pulling their dead. I counted the lumps. Six bodies lay fully wrapped in strips of cloth that were stained with dirt and old, black blood.

  Five dead, I realized as they stopped. The sixth, an old man, was wrapped in a blanket, but his face was free. He still lived. As the group stopped, he moaned loudly. The women crouched around him while the men took up guard positions.

  I signaled with my hand to Orz to stay where he stood. He shook his head. Another bit of new communication we had not had before. His jaw worked. I waited for him to say something.

  When he did not, I said, “I must help.”

  He shifted forward, as if he intended to reach for me.

  I stepped away.

  His hand immediately dropped back to his side. He hung his head.

  I wished I could somehow fully communicate with him, and swore to try when I returned. His tense stance, the bend of his head, the set of his jaw, said he was desperate to tell me something.

  I would find a way to understand him. But for now, I turned my attention back to the road and the refugees.

  Since the men all had swords, I hesitated another moment before stepping forward, but at last the old man’s cries of pain pulled me out of my hiding place.

  The men rounded on me.

  I smiled at the group, stopping but a few steps outside the edge of the woods. “I am Tera, a traveling healer. I bring no harm.”

  The bunches of herbs hanging from my belt gave credence to my words.

  “Are you alone?” the tallest of the men asked, his pockmarked face grim. He spoke a mixture of Selorm and some other language. Since I understood Selorm well, I could guess the meaning of his words.

  “Yes.” Admitting that was a great risk, for I just admitted that I had no protection and they could do with me as they wished.

  They knew this also, understood my gesture of trust, and responded by lowering their weapons, a goodwill gesture of their own.

  “We are in need of a healer.” One of the women spoke from behind them. “Help us, mistress.”

  The men parted, and I drew closer. They all had the look of hunger about them, all lean bodies and chapped lips. I had no food to offer, but Ker was within reach, and they could forage on the way like I had. They would not starve now until they reached the city.

  Water was another matter. I caught them watching my flask with open interest.

  “There is a creek a short distance from here,” I said in Selorm, and pointed out the direction from which I had just come.

  Th
ey seemed to understand me without any trouble. Two of the men collected everyone’s flasks and hurried off.

  I stepped up to the old man. The women drew back. I folded the blanket aside, and I could see the source of his pain at once. His clothes had been burned away completely in places, melted into his skin in other spots.

  His injury must have happened some days ago, because there had been time for his wounds to become infected. I uncovered him a little more to see the extent of the damage but found little to encourage me. His legs too had been burned.

  One of the women crouched next to me, tears rolling down her dirty face. “Soldiers burned the village down. He was trapped in our hut. Please, mistress, help my father.”

  My breath caught. Emperor Drakhar’s hordes had not settled in to wait out the winter, then. How long before they reached Ker? Before they reached Ishaf? Before they found a way to open Dahru’s Gate?

  “How long have you been on the road?” I asked.

  “Ten long days.” The woman took the old man’s frail hand, patted the liver-spotted, wrinkled skin, the gnarled fingers that ended in yellow, brittle fingernails that still had black soot under them.

  Ten days. In ten days, at most, I would reach the end of peace and cross into war-torn lands. From now on, I had to watch for marauding soldiers who would cut me down as soon as they set eyes on me. I would have to be thrice as careful as I had been up to this point.

  But for now, I turned my attention to my patient, my heart sinking. I could not take on his injuries and still go on with my journey. I would need food and shelter to heal. I had neither. And I had to find Lord Karnagh. I needed him to help me save my people.

  Batumar, if he were with me, would have told me not to even consider it. He would have forbidden me taking on the pain. I did not make the decision as easily as that, but I did have to make it at the end.

  I had some jalik, an herb used on burns, but for this man… “He is too badly hurt to be healed,” I said quietly.

  The woman cried harder.

  I reached for a different medicine. “All I can do is ease his pain and make his passing gentler.”

  She fell on her knees and took my hand to kiss it, covering my skin with her tears.

  “We need to make a fire,” I said.

  Two women immediately stepped off the road to gather tinder and kindling; another tugged a bunch of dry branches into a pile. In a short while, I could see a flame, and soon we had a good beginning of a fire.

  The men did nothing through all this time but kept their guard positions, looking backward more than forward. I understood. They lived in fear that the enemy would catch up with them.

  I carefully selected my herbs, found two flat rocks in the road, and ground the dry leaves, then gathered the results into a piece of cloth. When the men returned from the creek, I asked for a flask and tied it to a green branch, then held it over the fire. While we waited for the water to boil, I showed the old man’s daughter how much of the herb mix to put in.

  “Make one flask of medicine each day,” I advised, “and let him sip it throughout the day. You have three days’ worth here.” I handed her the small bundle.

  She nodded with a sob, understanding that her father would not live past three days. In truth, I doubted he would live even that long. He was closer to the world of the spirits than to ours.

  “We have nothing to pay you with,” one of the men said, ducking his head in shame.

  “No payment is required.” My eye caught on their bundled-up dead. “But might you have boots you have no need of?” I winced, embarrassed to be asking.

  At this, the old man’s daughter tugged the boots from her own father’s feet before bundling him back up in the blankets. “He will not need boots to walk with the spirits, mistress. He would want you to have them.”

  I accepted the gift with many thanks, then glanced toward the woods, wanting to go back to Orz before he decided to show himself. But even as I wished the men and women well on the rest of their journey, before I could take my leave, a group of soldiers rode up the road from Ker, raising a cloud of dust behind them.

  The refugee men stood in front of their women in a protective half circle but did not draw their swords this time. They did not want to provoke a fight, just to be ready should we be harassed.

  I hoped the soldiers would pass without stopping, but they halted as they reached us. The captain questioned the refugee men about the enemy, their numbers, and their whereabouts.

  I listened with interest. I should have done this, I thought. Batumar would have.

  When the captain was satisfied, about to leave, he looked over the women. His gaze halted over me. I was dressed differently, had dark hair that contrasted with their blonde braids. His gaze settled on the herbs hanging from my belt.

  He looked to be a battle-tested man with more than a few scars on his face and the tip of one ear missing. He was stoutly built, thick-necked, wearing quality armor that combined metal chain with hardened leather.

  “Who are you?” he demanded.

  “Tera, the traveling healer.” I hoped he would be satisfied with that and they would move on.

  Go, ride, move, I pleaded silently with the men. And, with a last speculative look in my direction, the captain turned his horse back to the road, ready to leave us at last.

  But Marga chose that moment to walk out of the forest.

  The horses reared and tried to bolt, some succeeding, carrying off three soldiers. Another two were thrown from their saddles, their horses galloping back in the direction of Ker.

  Some of the remaining soldiers pulled their swords, others readied their lances.

  “No!” I cried, darting toward the tiger, stumbling on the uneven ground, catching myself and lunging forward again.

  And when I reached her, I threw my arms around her.

  Chapter Eighteen

  (Captured)

  Marga growled at the danger, her muscles tightening, ready to attack the men who were poised to attack her. Then somehow Orz was next to us. I blinked. How had he moved so fast?

  Never mind that now… I stepped in front of them and shouted at the soldiers, my heart wildly scrambling. “Stop!”

  But the soldiers were frozen already. They stared at me, stunned, eyes wide, breath held.

  The captain gathered himself first. “Weapons down.”

  His men lowered their swords but did not put them back in their scabbards.

  The captain watched me with renewed interest from atop his wide-backed battle horse. He rubbed the silver-shot stubble on his chin. “So, you are the sorceress they speak of in Ker.”

  “I am a traveling healer. A Shahala.”

  “The Shahala do not bond with tigers. The Selorm do. But you do not look like a Selorm.” His tone said he best not catch me again at lying. “And even among the Selorm, their women do not bond with the beasts,” he added thoughtfully.

  I said nothing. He would not believe my words no matter what I said. I counted on the fact that he was heading away from Ker, obviously on some mission. He was unlikely to turn back just to deliver me for trial, no matter what accusations the soothsayer had brought against me.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Regnor.”

  He scoffed. “Through battlefields?”

  “Around them if I can.”

  “Are you a spy?”

  Oh, for the spirits’ sake.

  But his sword arm was relaxed. I did not think he contemplated immediate attack, so I relaxed a little too. “A moment ago, you accused me of being a sorceress.”

  His eye glinted. “I am now thinking a sorceress would make a good spy.”

  “I spent most of my time in Ker in the camel yard, and most of my time at the camel yard with the removing of a worm from one bad-tempered camel. What important information could I have gained from that?”

  “A worm, you call it?” He contemplated my choice of word. “People say you cast out a dark spirit that possess
ed the camel.”

  “Did you see this great dark spirit?” I asked. It had been a fairly giant worm, the largest I had ever seen but, nevertheless, it had been a worm.

  He shook his head. “I wish I had. But I heard terrible tales of it. It devoured a man standing too close. A hundred men had to subdue it to burn it in the fire.”

  I gaped at him. No such thing had happened! I had been right there. “The men who burned it are like fishermen with their catch.”

  “Mayhap.” The captain nodded. “Some men do exaggerate their battles.” He paused. “The city fathers did not like the tales. They ordered the camel burned this morning to ascertain that no part of the dark spirit remained within the animal.”

  My breath caught. Sadness flooded me, for the life of the innocent animal and for Makmin, the caravan master. He loved that camel more than some men loved their children.

  The captain said, “Some think you put the dark spirit into the camel, then cast it out to gain some kind of favor with the city. Mayhap you thought the city fathers would set you up in a tower.”

  “I asked no payment,” I pointed out, then shook my head. “What do you think?” He seemed like a sensible man, as old soldiers often were.

  He shrugged. “The caravans are forced to new routes to go around the armies. The camel might have caught something strange from some exotic beast.”

  After a moment, he added, “I once had a horse that died. I cut him open to feed my men. We were surrounded up in the mountains, had gone without food for days. But inside the horse was a nest of white snakes, a wriggling mess. We did not eat any of the meat.”

  I relaxed a little more. The captain did seem to be a man of some sense.

  Until he said, “I could believe your tale about the sick camel. But I see you now with the tiger. And you have a hollow for a companion. You have power beyond what is given to ordinary healers.”

  He raised his hand when I would have objected.

  I respectfully held my silence, even as my heart beat faster, dread and fear nipping at my heels. Antagonizing him would not be to my advantage.