Chaos Rises

A
Far-Knowing
tale

By Melinda Brasher

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 Melinda Brasher

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Chaos Rises

About the Author

Far-Knowing Sneak Peek

Other Books by Melinda Brasher

By Melinda Brasher

Hala was picking rumpelberries the day she
accidentally summoned the hill tiger. Two buckets, almost full.
Hands slippery with juice. Stomach gurgling guiltily from the
sour-sweet feast. Nothing on her mind but the warmth of the sun and
her mother's rumpelberry tart. Rumpelberry soup with cream.
Rumpelberry sauce on venison.

She'd just discovered another bush when the
guttural warning sounded behind her. She whirled, berries flying
from her hand, as a flash of dull orange blocked out the trees.

Pain seared her arm, where she'd lifted it to
block her face. The beast's teeth dragged through her flesh until
they ripped themselves free. Only then did she realize what it was:
a real hill tiger. It glared at her through red slitted eyes, its
black gums pulled back from three-inch fangs.

She swung the berry bucket at its head. It
hissed and she screamed, but she kept swinging. Berries pelted down
on them as the tiger's paws slashed through the sunlight and tore
at her skin. She lashed out with a foot, so hard the tiger jumped
away, arched its back, and hissed again. Then it was gone, running
off so fast she hardly even saw it bolt. She didn't let go of the
bucket's handle until the birds started singing again and the blood
from her arm had begun to mix with the ruined berries on the
ground.

Hala retold the story at least a dozen times
that day, while the healer worked patiently on her wounds. Her
brother wanted to know how fast it could run, and how thick its
muscles were. Her mother demanded to know why she'd gone picking
berries alone in the first place, though Hala insisted that
thirteen years old was practically grown up. Her father grilled her
for details of its location so he could organize the other
villagers to keep watch with him through the nights to come. But
the healer kept asking pointed questions about the hour
before
the attack, and what she'd been doing and touching
and thinking about, and if she'd been particularly calm and
content.

"You think she's got the gift?" the
blacksmith asked with a smirk. "Of summoning hill tigers? That's
useful."

The healer ignored him, and focused on Hala.
"Do you often see animals when you're outside the village?"

"Sometimes."

"Do you have vermin problems at home?"

"Are you insulting my housekeeping?" her
mother huffed. "Might I remind you that you haven't dusted those
books of your since before the mountains rose from the plains?"

"Your housekeeping would have nothing to do
with it," the healer said, then stopped her questioning. But the
seed had been planted, and its roots were growing in Hala's head,
blotting out the pain in her arm.

The village had nearly thirty families, if
you included the outlying farms, but only one trained mage: the
healer. She herself admitted she was better at herbology than
magecraft. The blacksmith's gift was probably greater. He certainly
acted like it, going around lighting fires with his glare and
casting embarrassing suggestion enchantments on anyone foolish
enough to submit.

The handful of other villagers with the gift
couldn't do much more than enchant their bread to taste sweeter or
make themselves look younger on nights when the village held
dancing in the green. No one she knew had ever summoned
animals.

All night, consciousness ebbing and flowing
with the pain, Hala hoped it was true. Being a magic-wielder was
something. Not as good as beauty or wealth, but something. And Kreg
would finally notice her—Kreg who liked to sneak around doing his
clever mischief under the protection of spotty look-away
enchantments. Maybe she'd be brave enough, one day, to tell him
that his spells never worked on her. She never looked away, since
he was the most interesting thing in the whole village.

By morning she'd convinced herself that every
squirrel or butterfly she'd ever seen had come in answer to her
summons. She tried to summon critters all day, as her mother made
her lie in bed and drink broth. Not so much as a fly came within
sight.

When she felt better, she begged the healer
to train her.

"Never been any good at summonings," she
replied. "I'd only teach you enough to get you in trouble."
Nevertheless she tried, over the months, to impart a bit of
magecraft, especially when it became clear that the hill tiger
hadn't been a coincidence. First it was a bat in the middle of the
day, squeaking and frantic. Then a baby hedgehog that wobbled after
her as if confused who its mother was. Hala tried to pinpoint when
it happened, or why, but it seemed to have no pattern. The healer
would sigh. "There's always a pattern. You just have to see it.
Find your essence. Work with it."

By the time she turned fourteen, animals were
popping up everywhere. They'd wake to find that the neighbor's cow
had broken through their fence again and was eating the vegetables.
She got used to walking with cats twined around her legs, and
acquired a history of bee stings so long not even the beekeeper
could rival her. But it was never much more than an accident.

"Stop!" her mother would yell in frustration
as she shooed away a hungry weasel or brought her broom down hard
on a nest of hoarder spiders that hadn't been there before.

"I'm not doing anything," Hala would protest,
even if the house had just filled mysteriously with gnats or rats
or poison frogs. The problem was, if Hala actually wanted a hungry
weasel or poison frog, nothing ever showed up.

She didn't even like animals all that much.
They were dirty, and smelly, and she didn't know how to relate to
them once she'd summoned them. Nevertheless, becoming a shepherdess
seemed the logical thing to do, since the creatures followed her
about even when she wasn't trying to summon them. The arrangement
worked pretty well, except when she lost one. She didn't dare face
the villagers until she found it. Once it took her six days,
despite trying her hardest to summon it.

At least her gift wasn't a total loss. Three
days after her sixteenth birthday, she'd managed to accidentally
summon a magnificent stag, right in front of half the village, and
even if she never could help find their lost dogs, they still
talked about the huge buck. Best of all, Kreg had started talking
to her. He loved to hear the story of the hill tiger and loved even
better to tell his version of the encounter with the fifteen-point
stag.

"So proud and strong, he was," Kreg often
said. And once, when they were alone in the woods at dusk, looking
for another, he sighed. "If I were an animal, I'd be a stag."

Hala thought a raccoon was more his style,
him with the pranks and the tricks and the sneaking around.
Sometimes he even took her on his escapades, creeping into a
friend's house one night and hiding everyone's socks, painting a
silly face on stern old Farmer Torik's milk cow, hiding beetles in
the local bully's bed. They did it all under Kreg's look-away
enchantments that only worked if no one was watching out for them.
And after a while, people were always watching out for Kreg.

He never teased her for her inability to
manage her magic, like some of the other villagers did, and soon
she found they could laugh together about her inadvertent visitors.
When she accidentally summoned a traveler's horse one afternoon,
summoned it so insistently that it threw its rider and broke down
the door of Hala's house, Kreg was the one who ran for the healer.
He was the one who later charmed the ruffled traveler into not
calling on the baron's soldiers to settle the matter. And he was
the one who spent all the next afternoon helping her father fix the
door.

When out alone with her sheep, she couldn't
help hating the beasties a little, since they took her away from
Kreg. Nevertheless, if they stayed too long in her little field
near the village, they'd graze it to stubble, so she often took
them far beyond, spending a few nights in the rocky hills where
others rarely grazed. She'd strap a bedroll to her back and sleep
beneath the milky light of the stars, a knife close at hand in case
her sleep thoughts summoned a badger or a rock rat or—worst of
all—another hill tiger. Most nights nothing worse interrupted her
sleep than a few biting insects or curious winged things she never
saw.

One clear evening, however, just as she was
drifting off to sleep, she heard a whuffle near her head and felt
hot breath against her ear. She tried to get up, but the bedroll
tangled around her legs and she found herself on hands and knees
facing down a wild boar. Its evil eyes glinted behind the curving
foot-long tusks. She grabbed for her knife and slashed at it, but
it simply tilted its head sharply, slicing one tusk against her
knife arm. She pulled her arm back, bloody, and kicked away the
blankets that trapped her, jumping over to the fire ring, where
she'd left a few long sticks. The boar didn't charge. Like so many
other summoned animals, it looked rather dazed, inclined to stay
where it was until it assessed the situation. She waved her arms
and her firewood stick and stomped her feet and yelled at it to
leave, but instead of bolting, it began nosing around her
campsite.

It found her bag of provisions, gulped down
the ham with one snort, gnawed on some carrots, found them not to
its liking, and left slivered bits of bright orange in a three foot
radius around the now-slobbery bag. Finally, Hala charged, stick
brandished. It turned, flipping its runty little tail, and charged
into her flock of dozing sheep.

"No! Stop!" The first bleating sheep tempted
the boar into hideous mischief, as it ran back and forth like a
madman, scattering every last one of her sheep.

When finally the boar disappeared, so had her
entire flock.

She wrapped the cut on her arm and wandered
the rocky hillside for hours, ardently thinking of her flock,
trying to summon them. Three popped up nearly immediately, feet
muddy and eyes blank. Most of the rest trickled slowly in, along
with a white owl and a chubby rodent that kept just at the edge of
her sight. She slept for a while, uneasy, waiting until morning to
look for the last few wayward sheep. It was nearly noon by the time
she found them all.

That's why she was late that day. Why
darkness fell before she even came within sight of home. Why she
wasn't there with everyone else when it happened.

She'd just about decided to spend another
night on the road and make her way home in the light. Then she saw
the glow. A red sunset where the sun had long gone to sleep.

"What's that?" she asked Patchy, the
followingest of her followers. Patchy baaaed conversationally. The
village hadn't planned any bonfire celebrations.

"Hurry up," she called to the sheep behind
her, and picked up her pace.

The muted glow grew murkier as she walked,
clouded now with plumes of black smoke she was starting to smell.
Stinky and Stumble refused to go any closer. She left them behind.
At the crest of the last hill, she looked down at what should have
been her village. All she saw were flames leaping skyward. She
could hear the screams now, screams for help and mercy.

She dropped everything and ran, the tinkle of
her flock's bells fading behind her. Even Patchy hung back. The
village disappeared in the trees again, but the glow didn't. Nor
did the screams. Or the smoke that burned her eyes.

She broke free of the trees into one of
Farmer Torik's fields, one that edged every year closer against the
houses of the village. Hands on her knees, bent over and gasping
for breath in the acrid air, she stared at Torik's house, now a
blackened frame against a yellow-orange inferno. Behind it she
could barely make out the ruins of her friend Epi's house above
their tiny shop. The blacksmith's place blazed higher than the
rest. Lights and shadows wavered and thrashed before her stinging
eyes. Flames of blue—almost purple—wove themselves through the
nightmare.