Dark Magic (52 page)

The lich’s staff hovered over him. Inches from his face, the Black Jewel stared down at him as a snake might examine a trapped mouse.

“Fulfill your part, foolish half-breed, or I will have you this instant! Give me your magic hair.”

Trev searched his pockets for a knife, but had none. He scrabbled amongst the debris at his feet, but found nothing but squirming bones. Finally, something nipped at his fingers. The exposed skeletal bones of a militia man who’d died here long ago had arisen with a dagger in its grasp. It was rusty and ancient, but Trev grabbed it up and sawed at his hair.

“Your time is up, child. Accept your fate.”

“Wait!” cried Trev. He could not cut his hair with the edge, as it was too dull and rusted. But he lowered the blade to his scalp and cut away a hunk of flesh and hair together. Trev’s teeth were set with pain, but he did not scream. He handed the mess to the outstretched, bony hand.

“What’s this?” asked the lich, holding up the bloody lock.

“It is my magic hair,” said Trev.

“Ha!” roared the lich again. “Fool, it is not magic!”

“But my mother said—”

“Then she is a bigger fool than thee!”

The bony hand extended, and the Black Jewel came down toward Trev’s bleeding head. He knew this was his last moment upon this green world. He wondered what the next would be like.

The Jewel stopped and did not descend to kiss his forehead. Instead, it withdrew. “You
did
believe
your hair was magic, didn’t you boy?” asked the lich.

“Yes, I’ve always been told that.”

A long hissing sound erupted. Trev did not know what to make of it.

“You have frustrated me as few have in centuries.”

Suddenly, Trev understood. “You cannot take me, as I did not play you falsely. Is that it?”

“Yes, child,” said the Dead King, retreating from him. “I’m so glad I could give you this lesson today. Perhaps the next time we meet, you will not be so fortunate, and the learning will go harder for you.”

“I hope not.”

The dead-thing chuckled again, and shuffled away from him. When Arawn was gone, Trev found the bones that grappled his feet weakened their grip and he was able to free himself and run home.

Chapter Seven

Life and Death

Brand’s first child was a son named Cadmon. Two years later, his wife became pregnant again with twins. The twins were difficult for Telyn to carry, and Brand found himself wishing Gudrin or Myrrdin were around to help. He sent a letter off to each, but Gudrin offered him sagely advice, without her presence. He was hardly surprised, as she had a kingdom of her own to run. From Myrrdin, he got no response at all. To his surprise, Tomkin responded after learning of the situation. He’d been away in the land of Eire for some time now, and Brand had not thought to ask him. The Wee Folk lord sent a wise-woman midwife to aid with the birth when the day came in early spring.

The midwife was named Sofia, and she stood barely two feet tall, but she bustled about with such energy people tended to duck and wince when she entered a room. Sofia always seemed to be found standing upon chair backs and tabletops rather than the floor. Brand found her fascinating, as he’d never seen a female of the Wee Folk before. They were famously reclusive, staying in their homes, usually under a Deepwood oak or high up in a Deepwood tree house.

Quick of movement and wit, Sofia was less wild than males of her folk. She was almost practical, and never short-tempered. When the day came to deliver the twin girls, she’d built up a poultice in a pot that was almost as big as she was. Brand helped her carry it upstairs where Lanet fussed around Telyn, who laid sweating and puffing on her birthing bed.

“All wrong, the way you folk do things,” complained Sofia. “A bed? What kind of a place is that for a woman to have a child?”

All along, Sofia had requested Telyn tie her wrists to a tree and squat outside to have the child. Telyn had considered it, but the River Folk women had been scandalized at the very concept of such a lack of modesty and overruled the tiny midwife in this detail. She’d never gotten over it, however, and brought it up constantly.

“It’s all wrong, lying flat on your back. Don’t know why you girls relish the pain so much.”

Lanet rolled her eyes at Brand, who smiled, kissed his wife’s sweaty forehead, and ran out of the room as fast as he could. He felt instant relief when he closed the door behind him. He was worried, but he had faith in Sofia. The woman had reportedly managed a thousand births in her long life.

Brand walked out into the apple orchards. It was early spring, and the trees were blossoming. The scent in the air was fine, but when the winds came, sometimes his nose tickled. Jak followed him out into the orchard and offered him a slice of cheese he had cut free of a hunk he was carrying.

“Did you ever think we would get to this point in our lives, Brand?” Jak asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“Here we are, fathers five times over between the two of us. Yet we still live on our parents’ home isle.”

Brand chewed his cheese and nodded slowly. “I do
still love it here,” he said. “But Jak, I’m leaving soon. After the babes are born and hale.”

“I know,” Jak said. “You’ve muttered and packed and planned all winter long.”

It was true, it had been no secret. The Haven had been quiet for some time now, and Brand wanted to get to the task he’d vowed he would: to rebuild Castle Rabing.

“Are you sure it’s worth the effort, Brand?” Jak asked.

Brand sighed. They’d had this talk a dozen times before. Strangely, it was not Telyn who forever tried to dissuade him from frittering away his fortunes upon a ruined castle in the badlands beyond the borders of the Haven. It was his brother Jak who took that role.

“Jak,” he said. “Don’t you want to see the River Folk grow and take root in new places? We once carpeted this land with villages, farms and castles. We had seaports and mills. Forges produced tools, weapons and armor comparable to those made only by the Kindred now.”

“And what a great deal of good it did our ancestors back then, didn’t it?”

“Is that it then? You fear to reach for our glory days?”

It was Jak’s turn to be annoyed. “You could just take down a dozen of these apple trees and build a second house, you know—if that is the matter.”

“It’s not about the size of your house, Jak! There are still two empty rooms upstairs, even with both our families living here. And I could always build a new wing, if that was the worry.”

Jak shrugged, looking down. “You could at least wait until next spring. Your family will be stronger then.”

“It’s now or never, Jak,” Brand said. “Soon, I’ll grow too comfortable. And Telyn might well have another child by then.”

Jak frowned fiercely for a time. Finally, he spoke up again in resignation. “All right, I’ll not try to turn you from this path, Brand. I know when a Rabing man has made up his mind there’s no convincing him otherwise.”

They clasped arms, and parted. He was glad to have his brother Jak’s neutrality, if not his blessing. He vowed in his heart to move forward. Someday, it would be his turn to offer his brother’s family a place to stay.

As Brand walked back to the house, he heard a scream that rose up and up until it filled his ears. He knew the scream—it was Telyn’s voice. He ran up the stairs, and despite Lanet’s hands trying to stop him, pushed past her.

Telyn lie on her back, her knees up and bare. Her face was as white as the pillows beneath her. The bed between her legs was bright red and pooled with blood. Standing in the center of the blood puddle was the tiny midwife, Sofia. Her boots were soaked, and her bare arms were slick and stained. She worked with unnatural rapidity. Her fingers seemed to glow—no, to
shine
. What was it she had? A needle and thread?

“Get out! Do not disturb me, axeman, or I’ll lose all three!” Sofia cried without so much as a glance over her shoulder at him.

Brand felt Lanet’s small hands, pushing him out into the hallway. He staggered back out of the room.

“We’ll do all we can, Brand,” Lanet said to him. Her voice was ragged. He could see tears glistening on her cheeks.

His mind turned to ice as he realized what the tears meant. Lanet was already mourning, already grieving for a sister-in-law lost.

Lanet pushed the door closed in his face, and Brand raised his fist to hammer at it, but halted himself. He must allow the women to do their work. He longed to reach for his axe, to cut something down—anything. But he fought with his emotions. This was a problem he could not overcome by force.

Brand went downstairs on numb legs. Jak brought him a mug of something that steamed and smelled of alcohol. He gulped it without a thought, and it burned until it made him cough.

Long hours passed, and Brand awakened in his chair with a lurch, thinking a cat had jumped upon his lap. It wasn’t cat, he saw, but Sofia who stood there, smiling.

“Life and death are twins you know, in the lore of the Wee Folk. They always come close together.”

“Telyn?” he asked, unable to breathe freely.

“She lives.”

“The twins?” he asked, daring to hope.

“Two fine girls. One is small, but both should make it,” Sofia said.

Brand’s head lolled back and he released a great sigh of relief. “I thought—from what you said about life and death—never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

“What are their names to be?” Sofia asked, watching him.

“Two girls? We agreed to name them Taffy and Dee,” he said, and he chuckled, shaking his head. The names seemed silly to him now.

“There is one thing,” Sofia said with a gentle voice.

“Tell me.”

“She will have no more children, axeman. I had to seal her womb to stop the bleeding.”

“Oh,” said Brand, nodding. He thought to himself it was a small price to pay for Telyn’s life. “I thank you for coming, lady. We are forever in your debt. Without you, I think tragedy would have visited this house tonight.”

“Just goes to show,” said Sofia, “there is plenty of grief in the world. There is no need to go looking for it.”

He frowned at her, not sure what she meant, but nodded in approval anyway. She bounded away to check on her charges upstairs.

Brand wondered what she had meant by her comments and had intended to ask her in the morning. But by the time the sun next rose, Sofia was gone, and he did not see her again for many long years.

* * *

Brand did as he’d promised. When summer came, he packed up his family, hired a swarm of retainers and workmen, and headed out to the ruins of Castle Rabing. It became apparent within the first month the job was tremendous and could not be done by his few score craftsmen. It would take a lifetime. He wondered that his folk could have ever built such a fortress in the past. There must have been a vast number of humans available as workers then. Tenfold what the Haven could boast now.

He sent a letter to Gudrin, requesting Kindred aid. He would pay in coin, of which he had plenty from past adventures. Ever interested in work and coin, the Kindred workers came to his call. A thousand of them swarmed the land and it became a chore just to feed them.

Brand and Telyn took up residence in a large tent out on what would someday become the village common—when such a village was built. Today, the village was nothing but a mass of canvas tents and cookfires. Brand had grand plans, however, and no one could dissuade him from them.

Events proceeded apace. Within a month, a wagon train loaded with stone blocks arrived from distant quarries in the Black Mountains. It was the first train of many. The Kindred fell upon the bricks and worked with a frenzied pace no human could match. They had been mixing mortar for days, and now they employed it, troweling a thick coat between each cut block. The outer walls were three feet high within a month. By the second month, they were a dozen feet high and growing still. Brand had specified the walls must encircle an area big enough to hold all of Riverton—should the folk from that place ever need the protection. Just outside the limits of these wide-running walls was the mound where he had defeated Herla and gone to treat with the Fae on many occasions. It would not do to have the mound
inside
the walls of course, as it would give them far too tempting a route to circumvent his defenses. He placed two towers along that section of wall and planned a separate gate, in his mind already naming it the Fae Gate. He hoped to see a great deal of trade between the mound and his castle in the years to come. Caravans might well ply the route.

As autumn began the wall was twenty feet in height. The top of the structure was finished in most places, crenulated and built with stairways for easy defense by archers. Towers stood at six strategic points, and the following year would see the building of the front gatehouse down near the river. At that point, Brand would invite folk from far and wide to settle here and farm the lands around. The swamp would be drained with banks and berms built to keep it at bay. The flooding rivers would be put back into their ancient courses where they had flowed in centuries past. Brand looked forward to the day they would build his central keep, and Castle Rabing would stand proudly again.

* * *

It was later in the year, as winter approached and the walls had been built that the first inkling of troubles arose. Grasty came to his attention with his sock-like hat in his blocky hands. Grasty was the Kindred foreman of the Workers Clan. He had only one eye, which squinted continuously. The other had been lost in a metalworking accident decades earlier. Brand marveled that Grasty could see at all, but he seemed to miss little.

“Milord, I’ve a problem and a solution to offer,” Grasty said.

Brand nodded and smiled. This was the sort of thing he’d hired the Kindred for: they were intrepid and reliable. “Tell me both together, man!”

“Well,” began the other, directing his single eye at the ground, “there are certain elements of the land here…that had best be dealt with.”

“Out with it!”

“There are—openings milord. In the ground beneath us. The dungeons of this place run deep, and harbor foul things.”

Brand nodded, touching his chin which now bristled with a heavy, dark beard. He had found shaving regularly became tiresome in this rustic environment. His piercing blue eyes stared at Grasty. From the other’s manner, there was more to this than he was saying, and there were elements he expected Brand not to like.

“Grasty,” he said, “I’m not going to become angry. I’m intensely pleased with the work of your clansmen. You have done ten years work in a single season. Tell me plainly what the matter is.”

Grasty looked up and attempted a smile. Teeth that looked like they belonged in a horse’s mouth revealed themselves. “Very well. The matter is there are
creatures living below this castle, as I’m sure you know. We can’t very well build a wall to keep out invaders if they have a warren of tunnels below us.”

Brand frowned. “I know there are catacombs beneath us. Are you saying they are—inhabited? That these things you refer to are—dead-things?”

Grasty nodded solemnly.

“We’ve known of this all along,” Brand said. “What has changed to bring this matter up now?”

“I sent down a few explorers, sir. Just to have a look about, mind you. One can’t very well build a castle without knowing what the foundations look like.”