If Crows Know Best (Mage of Merced Book 1) (7 page)

CHAPTER 9

It grew dark enough that I had to grasp a handful of Wieser’s scruff to avoid falling on the way back to the cave. We found Virda, Annora and Morie huddled together at the back of the sanctuary, all wide eyes in pale faces. The three of them fell on me, all gabbling at once, more than I could stand at the time. “For sake of sanity, let me sit down!” I managed, and tried to hold Morie away from my legs so I could walk the rest of the way in.

I told my story, and heard from Annora and Morie of sneaking back to the cave after the soldiers pursued me into the forest. Then I endured Virda’s scolding me for keeping them waiting on tenterhooks while darkness fell—though both she and Annora agreed I could hardly have done anything else.

“We’ll go to the next cave tomorrow, just as soon as there’s enough light to see our way. I’ll have to go a longer route to keep checking the pass, but these men today seemed to be scouts. More will be on their heels, I reckon.” I took a pull on the hot tisane I had been handed, and blessed Virda for thinking to bring it along.

###

Annora and Virda made ready to go in the quiet dawn, while Wieser and I made sure our route was not strewn with Keltanese soldiers lying in wait. We found no sign among the trees and boulders, and the two from yesterday were not patrolling the meadow when I slipped down to check. In silence, we set out, with Murr in his traveling basket after a brief tussle. A pair of owls called to one another across the ravine we skirted, and knee-deep mist eddied among the pine trunks as we passed. I was not prone to fancy, since much used to walking in the woods and being on my own. But the morning felt eerie, and I kept turning to look behind us, unable to shake the feeling we were watched from the shadows. Wieser seemed unsettled as well, ears pricked and nose working, casting across the trail.

We drew close to the second cave when a mob of crows took wing from the tree tops just before us, cawing and flapping, creating startling noise where all had been so quiet moments before. One broke off from the half-dozen of his fellows, and dived at us. The great glossy black wings beat before Annora’s face, and she flung up an arm. I swung at the bird with my walking stick, and I nearly caught Annora across the cheek. She ducked, and the huge bird dropped to the ground at her feet, shaking back its ruffled feathers. It turned its head to look first at her, then at me, cocking its head.

“Is this some message from the wild things for you?” I said, staring down at it.

“What can it want?” Annora said, trembling.

It hopped closer and shook its wings. The others still circled above, calling.

I watched it through narrowed eyes. “I thought hawks were the messengers for the gods. Hawks and owls.”

The bird now hopped up and down and made a gargling noise. Annora got down on her knees before it, while Morie hid her face in Virda’s skirt.

“Crows always think they know best,” Annora said as she stretched out her hand toward it. It lunged at her and stretched its neck to peck at her fingers. I swept the staff across its path as Annora snatched her hand back. Its bright eyes flashed.

Indeed, what did it want?
“I want us out of sight until we can get into the cave. All of you go into the brush here.” I pointed. “I’ll go ahead and see if our messenger is trying to warn us of trouble.” Though unsure why this thought came to me, I chose not to stand exposed in the woods staring at the crow’s undecipherable expression any longer. When Annora stepped away to part the limbs and push back the foliage for Morie and Virda, the bird rose and settled on a low branch at my left shoulder.

“My plan suits you, does it? Come on then.” And it did, gliding from branch to branch as I walked with Wieser, as silent as we could be over the pine needles and twigs. Just as I came to the rise where I could view the cave entrance, the bird dropped at my feet. I took this to mean I must stop, and froze there with Wieser at heel. The crow flapped up to the top of a boulder on my left. I crossed behind the stone and clambered up to overlook the cave.

There, where the trees were spaced farther apart below my vantage point, two mounted Keltanese soldiers watched two more men in long dark cloaks slowly walk towards each other, then away, holding some sort of sticks or branches out in front of them as they paced. It looked to my eyes as if they measured or marked out distances along the ground, conferring every few passes while gesturing at the earth. The mounted men watched the walkers but did not scan the ridge. Or look up at my boulder, thank the gods. What purpose could there be to this … survey? They faced away from my cave’s mouth, concealed amongst grey tumbled stones. The party would have to actively explore to find it there. But, they were too close for us to gain safe entry unnoticed.

The crow hopped closer to peck me on the shoulder. I glared at it in fierce silence, for its heavy beak delivered a sharp blow. I sank back below the top of the boulder, and rummaged in my vest pocket for a bite of bread for our sentinel. For although ill-tempered, it had saved us from walking into threat. I did not offer it from my hand, though. I set it on the granite for the bird to snatch up, which it did at once. It followed as Wieser and I slunk away, and made our way back to the others.

###

“Two choices,” I said when I crouched beside them in the thorny brush. “We can return to the first cave, or go on to the third and highest. I don’t know if we can rely on Annora’s messenger to keep us forewarned of more men.”

“The crow didn’t come for me,” said Annora.

“No,” Virda agreed, “that was for you, Judian. You’re so like your mum, you have her gift. I’ve always thought it would show soon.”

She might have been speaking some queer foreign tongue, what she said made so little sense to me. “My mum’s gift? Annora’s the one gifted with animal ways.”

“Oh, your mum knew such magic. She had skills greater than anyone here-abouts. You’re coming into it now, is all. The crows came for you. You called them.”

“I’d have called a bear to eat the soldiers, not a crow to mystify us all.”

I glanced at Morie to find her with Murr’s basket planted on her lap, her chin propped on the handle. Her eyes moved from Virda to me and back again.

“You never knew about your mum? I knew right away from the sorts of herbs in her garden—” Annora began.

“Stop. Tell me more later. I’m sure to recall this bit of news. Now, I have to get you somewhere safe.” I tried to steady my breath. “We’re going to head for the highest cave, and sort things out from there.”

Without questioning, they all rose and followed me, including our crow. His fellows had flown off. He continued his lope from branch to branch beside me, interspersed with higher flights circling above the tree tops. Wieser continued to sniff the light wind, and I tried to concentrate on leading my band of females through the forested slopes.
Later
, I thought.
Find out about Mum later
. There was no room in my head, no room at all, what with all the images of marching soldiers in my mind.

###

We reached the uppermost cave without encountering the Keltanese, by skirting wide from the second cave site. I could see no sign of trespass, when I, and my stealthy dog and crow, scouted ahead. None had visited, disturbing the cave or its stores. This cave was the largest and deepest of the three, with corners lost in inky black shadow and even more tumbled rocks to clamber over at its mouth. Also, likely the least accessible of the three to any prying searchers.

I brought us all within, and set the lantern where its glow did not reach the front. Virda replenished the offering gifts, Annora brought out dried fruit and nutmeats, and Morie released Murr from his basket. He puffed up like a dry milkweed pod on catching sight of the crow perched on the craggiest rock pillar. The crow shook its wings at him, cackling like a chuckle.

Wieser sniffed all the corners but found nothing to perturb her. I called Wieser to me, to come along to the spring close by where we could fill our jugs and add to the water I had stored earlier.

“Don’t go!” Morie ran to me, Iggle clutched to her chest. “What if they catch you?”

“Nobody’s going to catch me—nobody’s looking for me. They’re looking for … well, I don’t know what they were doing, but they weren’t hunting for folk. Or tracking. Looking at the lay of the land, maybe.”

I explained what I had seen in answer to inquiring looks from Annora and Virda. Virda clapped a hand to her mouth and said, “Gods’ mercy!”

“Do you know what they were about?” I said.

“Mages. Sorcerers. In the lands my sons sail to across the sea, there are such sorcerers. My boys have told me about them, plotting the lines of power in the earth, the ley lines. They use the pathways for their magic. There are storm-casters, who can make the ocean winds shift to blow ships off course and change the currents. Sailors fear them.”

I had not heard of such powers. “We aren’t on the sea, though.”

She shook her head. “That’s what the boys know of mages. They work their magic on land, too, overseas. Why they would be on our mountain, I cannot guess.”

“And observed by the Keltanes while they plot the ley lines in our land? Would the Keltane sovereign bring them here?” Annora wondered.

“I have more questions than we can number. I’ll get water. No fire tonight, not until we can be sure smoke won’t be noted.” As I turned to go, the crow took wing, also. I nodded, glad of the extra eyes even though the walk was short to the spring.

Once Morie had fallen asleep on Annora’s lap, for her earlier comfort with sleeping on her own little ledge abandoned her in this cave, I raised the question of my mother working magic.

“How is it,” I asked, “that neither Da nor Wils have ever said anything about Mum being able to call animals or heal them? I only remember her doing what all the farmwives do to care for the land and creatures.”

“You remember your da seemed to know what I could do with the wagon team, when we had only just met,” Annora said, drawing Morie’s cloak closer about her narrow shoulders and smoothing her curls.

“Your uncle came up and talked to him about your skills. And Wils couldn’t still his tongue about you, either,” I argued.

“Yes, and Wils told me about your mum. She had many gifts.”

Virda laughed quietly. “Fenn thought the world and all of your mum, Judian. She helped me with some of my births after she came to the mountain, and I helped her when all of you were born. She had the way, and I knew some of her children would, too. The gift comes of need, sometimes. You favor her the most, to my eyes.”

I could remember what she looked like, in a faded kind of vision. Morie was only just walking when Mum died. She had been helping a sick family in the village, a year with bad lung-fever. She took the fever and died down in the village, would not come back home to be nursed for fear of carrying the illness to us. All the family she was helping died, too, and the home had to be burned. I missed her so much, I thought I would go mad from it. I couldn’t remember much what Wils and Da were like, but Morie cried for her often in those days. Virda came to live with us for some months after, to care for her while we all did field work, since Morie was too little to spend all day outside. I just remembered working and feeling hollow inside day after day.

“If I have this gift, how do I learn to wield it to keep you all safe? Who teaches someone so gifted how to use it?” I said finally.

“My gran taught me. I had not shown it yet, when my mum and da died,” Annora said. “I can show you things I know, but the crow came to you, Judian, however you called it.”

And how had I called it? For I could think of not one thought or desire that had been in my mind to bring it. “So, did Wieser come to you, or to me?” I said at last.

“To you, I must think, looking back. She seems always to center on you. You’ll learn what skills you have as time goes by,” Annora said.

“I need to know now. I hope I can learn faster because my need is pressing.” I looked at Wieser dozing by Virda’s feet, and the crow perched above us on its rock, staring into the dark distance with its feathers fluffed. “And you’d all better hope I prove to be a quick study, too.”

CHAPTER 10

Annora taught me how to call a fish for supper as the days passed. It mostly involved lying on the stream bank with my hand aching in the cold water and “seeing” the fish swim into my grasp. An essential bit was thanking the fish for making itself our meal, similar to the way Da thanked a stag for being brought down for our table at the conclusion of a successful hunt.

Sometimes the magic worked, and sometimes it didn’t. Wieser watched impassively. The crow seemed amused by my efforts, if that is what one could reckon by a great black bird cackling and clicking its beak while it stepped to and fro.

I would have preferred to depend on a sharp spear. Not just for the fish.

Annora also instructed me to gather spider webs to staunch a bleeding wound, and what herbs to crush in what reagent for treating stomach complaints, wheezing, trouble passing water and a whole host of other ailments I had never heard tell about.
It’s a wonder people don’t tip over dead at every turn
, I thought, as I pressed dew-spangled webs onto a square of linen.

I groused as I tried to learn it all, unsure how any of it would help with soldiers shooting arrows at me—until I thought maybe my mum would be the one teaching me if anyone had known how to cure lung fever that year.

###

The highest cave being too far east, I could not overlook the pass every day to check for the invasion’s onset. I expected snows to close the northwest route any day, but still the weather held, cold yet clear. I worried we would run out of food. I worried about the stock foraging for themselves at our place and at Virda’s. I wanted to take Wieser and the crow down with me to gather more supplies and check on the animals, but Annora and Virda would not hear of being left with Morie in the cave waiting to see if I made it back.

When the last bit of flour had been baked as a stick of bannock, and only a couple of dried pears remained in our tin trunk, there was no denying we must make a foray, at least to the middle cave.

Virda and Morie were persuaded to stay close to the cave and check the deadfall traps I had set. Annora and I set off with Wieser between us on the path. The black shadow of the crow spiraled across the track as the bird circled and banked over our heads.

Careful approach to the cave below raised no caws or hackles. My feeling of being watched on the way up from the first cave did not haunt me again. We found the cave the same as I had left it, and we took everything we could carry. Before we departed, I stepped into the sparse trees, where the mages earlier paced along the ley lines. I had no sensation of anything uncanny, nor any residual sense of menace from their having been there. The horse droppings left by the soldiers’ mounts were of an age to suggest they left the same day and had not returned.

“Annora, can you feel anything amiss here?” I gestured her to come closer.

She walked to where I stood, shifting the packs of dried squash and barley meal in her arms. “I would have to stay here quiet for a time before I could feel the deep power. But I don’t sense anything disturbed or rankled.”

“Whatever they were doing, they must have done it and gone on. Where to, I’d like to know. Tomorrow, I’m going to come down again, and check the pass. Don’t look at me like that, I have to know what’s coming, or I can’t do what Da charged me with.” I had determined my next step, and would not allow her to turn me from it. Quick-minded as ever, Annora did not try to talk me around, and quietly held up for me when I told Virda my plans.

I prepared to set out early with Wieser and the crow, with my walking staff now decorated with a shed black feather from my winged lookout.

“Your bird needs a name,” Morie informed me.

I drank the last mouthful of my morning tisane, blessedly still hot. “Maybe you’d like to pick his name. You did fine with Murr and Iggle. They like their names. Wieser, too.”

Morie gave the crow an assessing look, returned in kind. “His name is Gargle,” she pronounced.

When I snorted, she said, “It’s that noise he makes. Murr says “murr” when I pet him.”

“What does Iggle say?” I teased, but Gargle seemed to suit the bird. He came when called by name, though not to put too fine a point on it, he had made a habit of accompanying me anyway on my forays. I did like a name better than calling him “the crow.”

Gargle, Wieser and I took our leave, and I realized as I walked into the misty morning that both my animal aids were solid black. Although, I had never been one to believe in omens, as a rule.

The woods were full of the usual bird calls and squirrel chatter, and it struck me then that the forest where we holed up in our cave had been unnaturally quiet since our arrival. I would have to talk to Annora about it when I returned.

I became more cautious as I drew close to the pass overlook, though I neither heard nor saw any person, on foot or mounted. When I peered over the edge, keeping my head in shadow to avoid being backlit, I seized Wieser’s ruff in shock—below us lay earth churned and pocked by countless hooves. When had so many mounted troops passed? Had they swept through on their way to the village and to Bale Harbour? Or were they now encamped in our orchard? Wagons could not have negotiated the steep pass, only pack trains could have done. Plenty of supplies and men could be reflected in the ravaged dirt, certainly.

Where are all those horses and their riders now?

“Gargle, can you fly where I tell you, to look for soldiers? You’d be less likely to get shot at than Wieser, I think.” He turned his head to look at me with one beady eye. “How would you tell me where you found them, though? There’s that to surmount. I’d go look myself—” He leapt and pecked my foot. “That even hurts through the boot, you know.” I rubbed the spot. “What am I going to do if I find them, anyway? Better we get back safely to the cave and lay low. The food’s replenished. We can hold out there.” I grasped my stick, and had at least the presence of mind not to stand up in plain view on the ridge. I kept low to hitch back into the cover of boughs behind me, and thus lay out of sight when I heard a voice a scant few trees over say, “I swear I heard someone talking just now,” in Keltanese.

Gods, was that what the peck had been for? And Wieser, just as frozen as I, had given me no signal of a man nearby. Or, I had not looked at her as I chatted about the pass. Out loud. To animals. I gritted my teeth and called myself every kind of fool, though silently now.

Gargle commenced his gurgling, muttering sound and flapped toward the voice. And scald me if he didn’t sound sort of like a person, at least enough that a second voice said, “There’s your talker, I think.” I heard Gargle shake his feathers and click his beak, then mount to the sky, cawing raucously.

The first voice laughed and said, “Maybe it’s one of the mages transformed. I heard they can change into beasts and go about. I wish they would go back where they came from. In truth, they make me feel queer whenever they’re close by. As if someone’s at my shoulder, but never there when I turn to look.”

“Ah, you’re queer enough, whether mages are nearby or not,” said the other. “Come, back on the loop.”

I heard fading sounds of them departing the cliff.

I lay in the cool boughs and blessed Gargle, and all the gods in turn, and Wieser for not barking, and my da for making me learn Keltanese. Time passed, my heart began to slow and my guts to untwist. It was a long while before I could move, though. Wieser lay beside me, while Gargle returned to perch above us, and devour a weasel carcass he brought back with him. If he’d have wanted, I’d have cooked it for him.