Aveline (12 page)

“I am thrilled to be out of the city but
also worried,” Arthur assured him. “My father and his advisors have
been at odds, and I suspect a shift in the alliances of the
families around us, which makes this year’s hunt ill timed.”

“How is this different than any other year?”
Warner retorted with a small laugh. “They are at odds when food is
scarce and lovers when we return victorious laden with meat enough
for three winters.”

“True,” Arthur said. He hesitated to speak
of something far more private, even though he trusted these two men
with his life. After a moment of internal debate, he charged ahead.
“I have been plagued by a dream for the past month. It makes me
believe it is not a dream but a … vision. I have them from time to
time.” He glanced at both men, waiting for one of them to judge him
and relaxing when neither did. If anything, Warner was studying him
in concern while Leaping Deer appeared curious. They were more
comfortable with him discussing his strange abilities than he
was.

“Please tell me you do not see your death,”
Warner whispered.

“No,” Arthur said quickly and reached over
to squeeze the hand of his longtime guardian and lover. “Nothing of
the sort. This dream is so bizarre, I have feared revealing it even
to you. There is little sense to it, and I have tried to decipher
it through reading and seeking general counsel from the
clairvoyants Father permits entrance into the city. But the meaning
of this dream eludes me, and I cannot speak to anyone else about
the specifics.”

Warner waited, his blue eyes glued to
Arthur’s face.

“Perhaps, Leaping Deer, you can help me
interpret it,” Arthur said.

“Me?” The native lifted his eyes from the
fire. “I am not the one possessing magic.”

“You make my
deformity
sound
pleasant.”

“You deny the gift your gods have given you.
In the Free Lands, you would be beyond the wrath of your father,”
Leaping Deer reminded him.

Free Lands.
The mention of the legendary place earlier by his
sister made Arthur pause. How she overheard the slaves talking, he
did not know, but she often picked up on information he wished she
had not. The existence of the Free Lands was one of those trinkets
of knowledge he did not wish her to possess. At least, not yet, not
until he had verified they existed. She was too frail to be led on
and then disappointed if he discovered they were not real. He would
rather wait until he knew with certainty.

“I hear talk of the Free Lands but have
never met anyone who has visited them,” Arthur said.

“If they are as wonderful as we hear, who
would leave?” Warner asked.

“True,” Arthur agreed. “But then how would
we know they existed in the first place?”

Warner turned his attention to Leaping Deer.
“Have the people of your village visited the Free Lands?”

“No,” was the response. “The tribal elders
have spoken of the Free Lands to the north for many years, but no
one has ever ventured that far to see if they exist. It is believed
that there are far worse dangers than the forests, plains and
Ghouls that lie between us and the Free Lands. Perhaps we have
never heard of anyone returning from them, because no one who
sought them reached them in the first place.”

I need them to be
real,
Arthur thought. Leaping Deer’s fears
had been repeated to Arthur by everyone he asked about the Free
Lands, including the clairvoyants he was only allowed to speak to
in passing. Under the watchful gaze of his father, Arthur had
little opportunity to pursue the questions burning hottest inside
him and instead was forced to play his part and seize any chance
presented to him to further his quest for knowledge.

But the older Tiana became, the less time he
had. Their father had rebuffed both the council and the pressure
other wealthy families put on him to marry her off and cement an
alliance between powerful families, as was traditional. When she
turned eighteen, people would begin to suspect she was disfigured,
if their father did not announce her engagement to one of the many
available heirs from other families wishing to climb the social
strata.

“Your dream,” Leaping Deer prodded him.

Arthur blinked out of his
thoughts. “Nightmares are more accurate,” he said. “Do not laugh at
me, either of you!” He gave them looks of playful warning,
self-conscious of sharing the odd dream. “No matter what dream I am
having, a native man will appear and begin chasing me. He’s not
from the Apache or Navajo or any of the nations with whom your
tribe, or our city, is at peace,” he said to Leaping Deer. “This
native is different, and if you ask me why, I am uncertain what to
say. I
know
it,
just as I know which direction we must go to hunt game.”

“Not all of the first peoples were destroyed
with the Old World. It is said there are a few very old tribes from
the Northeast, where it is winter for nine months a year,” Leaping
Deer said. “It is possible you have made contact with one of their
holy men in your dreams.”

“I hope not,” Arthur said with a snort.
“This man is not like us. He takes on the form of a bear sometimes
and a wolf at other times and still other times, a horrible
creature I have never seen before and cannot even begin to
describe.” He paused, recalling the dream, before continuing. “But
he finds me no matter what dream I am having or where I am in my
dream. When he appears, everything changes, and I return to the
same place every time.”

“Where?” Warner asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” Arthur admitted.
“In every dream, I am running from him across the plains, but I
cannot identify which grasslands these are. A place I have visited?
A place far away?” He shook his head. “I am always in a
prairie.”

“What else do you see?” Leaping Deer
asked.

“Spring is in the air, a little cool, yet
warm enough not to need furs or a cloak. The grass is high, the
wind strong, and the full moon is above, bright enough to make the
grass glow silver. I run, and he chases me, sometimes in one of his
animal forms, sometimes in his man form. In his man form, I can see
he is crippled. One of his legs is only half a leg, and he wears a
contraption that allows him to move like a normal man. This …
contraption,” he made motions in the air, uncertain how to explain
the awkward sight from his dream, “is covered at all times in black
leather. Whether he’s an animal or a human, one of his legs is
always black, which is how I always know he is the one pursuing me
no matter what form he takes.”

Arthur paused. His audience was completely
enraptured. Warner appeared concerned, but it was Leaping Deer’s
narrowed gaze that alerted him something about the dream was of
particular interest to the tracker.

“I started calling him Black Leg,” Arthur
admitted, a little sheepishly. “This magic that lets him change
into animals, and lets him track me, no matter where I am in my
dreams, and which pulls me back onto the prairie in Spring, is
contained in his leg.”

“His leg is magic?” Warner echoed, brow
furrowed.

“Yes. I know it sounds comical or bizarre,”
Arthur said. “But his magic is stored or … maybe just exists in his
leg. I cannot rationally explain it.”

“And Black Leg appears in every dream?”

“Every one for the past month.”

“Does he ever catch you?”

“Never. He never comes closer than that
tree.” Arthur pointed to a tree ten feet away. “But he never stops
trying, either.”

Leaping Deer was frowning fiercely.

“What is it?” Warner asked the tracker.
“Does this mean something to your people?”

“According to the spirits of my ancestors …”
Leaping Deer began and then winked.

Warner’s face flared red, and Arthur
chuckled.

“We are not all mystics and shaman,” the
native said. “But, Arthur, there are two elements of your dream I
recognize. The first scares me less than the second. You frighten
your children with tales of the Ghouls, and we tell our children
stories about skinwalkers, men who can turn into bears or wolves or
similar.”

“But Ghouls
are
real,” Warner insisted
and then sighed at the tracker’s patient smile. “Ah. So are
skinwalkers.”

“When the Old World ended, a lot of strange
things happened. Skinwalkers became as real as the Ghouls.”

“If skinwalkers are anything like Ghouls,
how can anything else frighten you more?” Arthur exclaimed. “I have
seen the forms a skinwalker takes. I would rather meet a
Ghoul!”

“What frightens me more: this man who chases
you in your dreams really exists,” Leaping Deer said. “He is a
boogeyman among my people. They fear speaking of him, lest they
become his next victim.”

Arthur’s stomach twisted. He had sensed the
dream was not entirely fiction but hoped he was wrong.

“He is from the far northeast, or the south
or perhaps even the west. No one knows, except he is the last of
his kind, a legendary bounty hunter who invited the dark spirits
into himself so he could seek vengeance on those who murdered his
family,” Leaping Deer said. “In the meantime, until he can find
them, he is hired by wealthy natives to hunt down and kill the
descendants of the Old World and the invaders who stole our lands
from us long ago. He has killed other natives, too, and worked for
men of all nations and colors. He serves any master willing to pay
his price, and he never accepts money as payment.”

“What else is there?” Warner exclaimed.

“No one knows except those who pay him. They
are sworn to secrecy.” Leaping Deer shrugged. “It is also believed,
and widely ridiculed, that the dark spirits he invited into his
life live in his leg. If you have seen this, Arthur, without
knowing the legend, maybe it is far truer than anyone thought.”

Silence fell, and Arthur’s heart began to
skip beats. The part of his dream he did not reveal was that he was
not himself when he was running. He had long, blond, wavy hair and
wore a sleeping gown. Tiana had been the one fleeing the bounty
hunter, not him.

“He is said to be ruthless, violent and
invincible, and his magic leg protects him from harm. He has never
failed to find his target,” Leaping Deer continued.

“What would he want with Arthur?” Warner
spoke in a hushed tone. “The natives do not trust us, but if they
wished to kill someone, why Arthur and not his father?”

A better question: why
Tiana?
Arthur mulled.

“Shall I ask my ancestors?” Leaping Deer
asked dryly.

Warner shook his head. “We have no enemies
outside the city that we know of. Do we?”

“It might be possible the natives have hired
him, perhaps thinking if they can topple the Hanover’s, the city
will crumble. Our truces of the past generation have pleased no
one, inside the city or out,” Arthur said. “Or, maybe our enemies
within the city hired him to unseat my family. The fact someone
wants me dead does not surprise me. My family has built up a long
list of people who would like to see us gone over the past two
hundred years. But the man chasing me in my dreams …” he drifted
off, more disturbed after Leaping Deer’s explanation than he had
been waking from each dream. “… every night, Warner. He is there
every night.”

It was one of the reasons behind Arthur’s
search for a guardian for his sister. When she turned eighteen,
Tiana’s continued existence would become a larger challenge.
Matilda and members of other ambitious families had always hated
Arthur’s sister, but it was his father he feared the most. Tiana
could not be married off when she turned eighteen for fear of
someone discovering her deformities, and this caused his father a
political problem. Arthur did not have enough faith in his father
to hope for another creative solution to the issue of Tiana. A
quiet assassination made the most sense.

However, a native with one black leg would
not go unnoticed in a city that did not welcome natives in the
first place, which meant Tiana faced potential threats from at
least two directions.

With the Winter Hunt looming, two months
before Tiana’s birthday, Arthur grew concerned about leaving his
sister vulnerable in her own home. Amongst the nightmares of being
chased by Black Leg, Arthur had also dreamt nightly of a young
woman of mixed heritage standing beside his sister in front of the
window in Tiana’s room, overlooking the city. The girl had not been
among any of the slaves, and Arthur’s search hastily expanded from
the outer city residents to those of the inner city. When his spies
uncovered the identity of the girl, he was confronted with another
problem. How could he place Tiana’s life in the hands of the Devil?
By the rules of the Guild, an assassin-in-training would not be
permitted to protect Tiana without the leader’s permission.

Even if it had been possible to arrange for
Aveline to become Tiana’s protector, how did Arthur welcome the
daughter of a mass murderer – both of whom were rumored to have the
blood of the devil in their blood – into his home? His and Tiana’s
own faulty breeding was the reason Tiana could not leave her
room.

Or was it the blood of the devil that would
protect Tiana? In his discreet pursuit for more information,
carried out by faithful slaves, Arthur had found no other
explanation as to why Aveline was special, aside from her demon
blood. At the last minute, a clairvoyant had slipped him a tip
about the pending death of her father, the day before the hunt, and
advised him as to how and where he could contact her. Aveline had
possessed no other choice but to accept the only position that
would guarantee her life.

One of Arthur’s visions had been accurate,
and it scared him to consider the other might be as well.