Redemption of Thieves (Book 4) (2 page)

I winced at the reminder. “If they confessed all they knew, why were they hanged? Didn’t Kipp admit to being a member of my circle, one of those performing a valuable service to the Praetor and the Provinces?”

Terrac frowned. “You’re trying to discover how much we know about your goings on in the forest. I’ll be cooperative because I believe the Praetor wishes you to have the answer to this question. Your friends, when captured, have received and will continue to receive the same treatment as any other criminals, despite their recent good deeds for the province. My lord believes this will spur their determination to better perform the tasks ahead of them. You, their leader, are an exception because you must be permitted to come and go freely while reporting to the Praetor. But the rest of your unfortunate circle remain under the threat of death should they fall into our hands.”

I swallowed my outrage to ask, “And suppose my friends refuse to accept these unfair terms?”

“Should they refuse to follow you into the Praetor’s service, they ought to know this. Our lord is not a man to defy lightly. I know him well enough to assure you that if any of you were to mock him with a betrayal, he would make hunting down and destroying your band his greatest priority. Do not place too great a faith in your ability to evade his reach. He would throw every Fist and mercenary soldier he could muster into your dark woods until he had exterminated you to the last. You don’t want to feel the fire of such a man’s fury.”

Little could he know I had felt it before. Images came to mind of a burning cottage, a line of horsemen riding down my father, my mama pressing a brooch into my hand…

I shoved the memories aside.

Terrac was saying, “But, there is no reason for despair. The Praetor is as merciful as he is vengeful, and if you do all he demands, pardons may be granted to those who merit them.”

“Those who merit…?” I knew then that all of us were doomed. The Praetor would never give up his hold on us. We might spend countless years in servitude and the Praetor would forever hold those pardons dangling over us.

I tried to set aside that problem for another day. My first task was to free Fleet and I’d been advised of only one way to do that. Suddenly, I had a thousand tasks on my mind, all of which needed to be carried out at once. I didn’t realize I was walking away from Terrac without a word of good-bye until I came to the great brass-bound doors that led out of the keep. By the time I looked back, my one-time friend was gone.

It struck me then that I had failed to ask him the one question that had been teasing at the back of my mind throughout our encounter. Why was he wearing my brooch? The one my mother had given me so many years ago and which had disappeared from my possession when Terrac left Dimmingwood?

I couldn’t imagine why he would have stolen the object, but of one thing I was sure. I wanted it back.

Over the following week I reestablished contact with the remnants of the old circle through Kipp’s brother, who had once been our messenger. It was essential to open the old lines of communication again because I had no other means of passing information between me and my comrades. Rideon’s ban from Dimmingwood was still in effect and I wasn’t ready to risk his wrath yet.

I was painfully consciousness of the balance I must keep between service to the Praetor and loyalty to my old band and its captain. With Rideon on one side and the Praetor on the other, to stumble would mean my death.

The Skeltai raiders were a more distant threat but every bit as real as the other two. There was also the unknown mage I had yet to unmask but whom I suspected of being the Praetor. My enemies were growing in number and sorting foes from temporary allies grew more confusing by the day.

But one night I forgot all this. I was restless, lying in my cot aboard the river raft, where I was staying with my friend Hadrian. Every time I closed my eyes, memories rose unbidden to tickle the back of my mind. Memories of faces and voices I hadn’t seen or heard in a long, long time. A dizzy sensation overtook me and I smelled the scent of plum blossoms.

I opened my eyes and found myself atop a grassy green ridge. Looking down one side, a small village spread out before me in the waning evening light, smoke rising from the chimneys of the country cottages and chickens pecking around the yards. A deep calm pervaded the scene and I felt it lap over me. I was at peace. I looked over the other side of the ridge and there I saw a lonely cottage nestled in a shallow valley. There was a meadow of waving grass behind the cottage and a stand of trees leading into a forest fronting the farm. A dilapidated barn leaned near the house, a broken-down wagon out front. Inside a small enclosure nearby grazed a horse.

Drawn irresistibly toward the cozy little homestead, I traveled a lightly worn path down the ridge and into the valley, weaving in and out of a row of plum trees covered in pink blossoms and emitting a sweetly familiar scent.

The ground shifted under me and I found myself no longer on the path but approaching the front porch of the cottage. It didn’t seem strange this should happen. Another shift and I was walking in the open door.

Everything around me was familiar, the room, the furnishings. The big bed in the middle of the room and the crackling fireplace over which something was cooking. I looked for my little bed tucked away in the corner, but it wasn’t there. In its place stood a wooden cradle and in that cradle something moved.

Approaching cautiously, I peered over the side and saw an infant, only a few months of age, lying amid a pile of thick, soft blankets knitted in a pattern I recognized as one of Mama’s. The pale-skinned baby turned its head, which was covered in tufts of silvery hair, and looked up at me with solemn grey eyes. Somehow I knew I was looking at myself.

I felt no sense of alarm at what I was vaguely aware should be a startling turn of events. Somehow this, like everything else in this place, felt perfectly natural.

“Do you think she’ll be safe here? Will any of us ever be safe again?”

I turned at the female voice.

I wasn’t alone anymore but stood alongside a couple looking down on the baby. He was tall and dark bearded, she pale and silver haired, her long tresses drawn back to reveal delicately pointed ears. It was startling to see Mama so young. Had she always looked like that? So much like … me?

Da put his arm around her. “Nothing can touch us here.”

The sound of his well-remembered voice made my eyes sting.

“I’ll make sure of that,” he continued. “The villagers are mostly magickers and they’ve accepted us. We’ll be away from prying eyes in this place.”

“But your family…” she protested.

“Are far away and they don’t know we have a child. Even if they did, what does it matter? I’m sure
his
anger has cooled by now—”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“If I thought otherwise would I have settled us in the same province?” he asked.

She shook her head, as if she had heard this argument before. “You know how hot his anger is, how he hates my people, especially now that I’ve stolen you away. He swore to hunt us down after your abandonment and he’ll never rest until he does. Not while he believes you’ve betrayed him.”

He smiled and kissed her neck gently. “I had to follow the bidding of my heart.”

“But look what it’s gotten you, at the danger it’s placed us in. Yes and maybe other magickers too. What has our selfish, reckless love done?”

Tears trickled out the corners of her eyes and he moved to comfort her. Neither seemed aware of me. I was so near they might have reached out and touched me, but instead, they looked through me as though I were a ghost.

Was I? Had I died in my sleep and wandered into some strange afterworld where I was forced to repeat scenes from my life, reliving each moment from the beginning, watching but never participating? And this was a scene from my life. I had no doubt about that. Somewhere in the distant past, this conversation had happened before.

For the first time I felt troubled, as if I were witnessing moments I wasn’t meant to see. Not the grown me anyway. The baby in the cradle saw all and looked on, unblinking.

I backed away, suddenly desiring to be somewhere, anywhere, else. The cottage felt close, the air oppressive. I thought I had come home but I was wrong. This wasn’t my home anymore. I shouldn’t be here.

I was reminded forcefully of a time I had seen Brig shortly after his death. Had strayed into some grey memory of him where I’d felt briefly comforted before recognizing the wrongness of what was happening and pushing his flickering image away.

I pushed now and was swept up in a dizzying sensation and the world around me shifted.

I awoke to find warm sunlight streaming over me and Seephinia cooking breakfast.

* * *

I told Hadrian about my nighttime visit to the home of my childhood.

“I have heard of such dreams,” he told me. “Many magickers are prone to them, though I myself have never experienced one.”

“It wasn’t a dream,” I said, unsure how I knew that. “It was real. Everything I heard and saw… at some point all of it really happened. I think I strayed into some sort of…” I hesitated, looking for a word to describe it.

“A magical rift,” he supplied.

“A what?”

“A tear in the fabric of time and possibly of distance as well. There are rumors such things exist, but again, I’ve had no personal experience with them.”

“I think I’ve experienced one of these
rifts
before,” I said and told him about the occasion after Brig’s death when I had seen a vision of my friend.

“At the time I thought I was losing my mind or seeing a ghost,” I finished. “But now I realize it felt the same as what happened last night. Like I was truly seeing Brig in a real moment of his life. Maybe even from a time before I knew him.”

“It’s possible,” Hadrian agreed. “I suppose we’ll never know the truth. Not unless you think you can stumble into one of these rifts again. Can you?”

I thought about it. “I don’t think so. It’s not something I can control. Both times it’s happened, it just came over me suddenly. I didn’t seek it out.”

“Not consciously anyway,” he suggested.

I didn’t want to think about that. My conscious mind had enough to deal with right now without worrying about what mischief my subconscious was up to.

I changed the subject and suggested we go out fishing with Seephinia’s young nephew, Eelus.

* * *

I didn’t have long to brood over my new discovery of magical rifts.

The following day a distraction came in the form of a visitor showing up on our doorstep. The old peasant hag, dressed in a baggy skirt with a frayed shawl drawn over her head, was peddling tin pots. She was the tallest old woman I’d ever seen. Even with her shoulders hunched, she towered over Seephinia in the doorway.

When the ruckus began, I was at the back of the hut, pouring with Hadrian over an old map of the Dark Forest I had procured from a traveling fur trader passing through Selbius the day before. I wasn’t sure why I had taken up the idea to study the lay of the Skeltai lands, but felt it couldn’t hurt my position to know my enemy’s home ground. The map was shriveled and worn, drawn out on a bit of cured hide, and I had only the word of the trader that any of it was an accurate portrayal of what lay on the other side of the provincial border. I suspected the villages and habitations marked on the map were outdated and so focused my attention on landmarks, committing them to memory. Hills, lakes, and forests didn’t change much over the course of years.

I was dimly aware of Seephinia at the door arguing with someone, but paid scarce attention until their quarreling grew louder. Annoyed, I looked up from the map spread over a low table to find the source of my distraction.

The ragged old woman in the doorway bore a long stick across her broad, crooked shoulders from which dangled a collection of rusted and dented pots and pans. Even as she disputed with the river woman in a reedy, high-pitched voice, she shoved her way into the hut.

Seephinia’s face darkened dangerously as she protested in the tongue of the river folk, but the old peddler wasn’t to be dissuaded.

“Look here, old mother,” Hadrian interrupted, hurrying to settle the argument, “we appreciate the quality of your excellent goods, but I’m afraid we have no need of pots or pans at present.”

Ignoring him, the old woman slung closed the curtain over the doorway and let her collection of wares fall to the floor with a clatter.

Seephinia sputtered in indignation but Hadrian held her back. “Perhaps you didn’t understand me,” he tried again.

His words cut off abruptly as the old woman straightened to her full height and threw back the hood of her shawl to reveal a mane of wild, red hair over a youthful male face. Ridged scars zigzagged his cheeks but the disguised man’s lips were drawn back into a familiar grin.

I sprang to my feet. “Dradac! How did you get here? Who told you where to find me?”

He laughed. “You left instructions for reaching you with Kipp’s brother. As to the how, you see that for yourself. No one looks long at a cantankerous old peasant woman selling a load of dented crockery.”

I tried to be stern. “Those instructions were for emergencies, Dradac. I expressly forbade anyone but the messenger to risk coming here in person. If you want me to remain leader of the circle, you must pay attention to my orders. Terrac’s Fists obey him better than any of my followers listen to me.”

He looked confused. “Terrac’s Fists?”

I had never explained to Dradac and the rest of my outlaw friends the connection between Terrac and the Praetor’s soldiers and I wasn’t about to now. “Never mind. Just don’t do this again,” I growled.

“Maybe it will relieve your concern if I tell you I’m acting in accordance with your orders even now,” he said. “It’s nothing less than an emergency that brings me here. A Skeltai scout was seen materializing near the woods settlement along Beaver Creek.”