Stonewiser (30 page)

“What happened here?” Sariah asked Mara, who walked beside her by the tumbling cart.

Mara's round face broke into a grimace of pain. “Misery. That's what. It started a year ago. A sickness came and took my daughter-in-law and two of her babies, leaving my son, the two girls and me untouched. My son kept trying to grow the grain. We had orders from the Shield coming due and they were already suspect of us because we hadn't welcomed them to our lands. The weather turned queer, cold like the chill some days, hot like a blaze some others. How can a farm endure with weather like that?”

Up ahead, Delis scouted the road while Malord rode the hitched horse, leading the cart through the muddy lane. The three girls, Mia, Roxana and Clara were sitting on the cart's front bench, jabbering happily. Sariah listened to Mara, but she kept an eye on Delis.

“A few months ago we discovered the reason for our misfortunes.” Mara glanced at the nearing house. “The rot came. What the sickness hadn't done, the rot did in three days. Targamon's tenants fled, abandoning their houses. With no hands to work the fields and the orders due, we were ruined. My son, sick with grief, fell on his own scythe. The girls and I remain. What else can we do? This cart is the whole of our stock to pass the chill. It's coming, and people say it will be a long one. That's why I risked the trip to Ellensburg.”

“I'm sorry for your troubles. You've had a hard burden to carry, all by yourself.”

“It's Meliahs’ will, I suppose. I'm not sure what will happen to us. In compensation for the failed orders, the Shield took all of our seed. If we can't deliver next year, we'll lose our right of autonomy.”

“What's that?”

“It's the Guild's permit, the sanction that allows us to hire independent laborers to work the farm and harbor them under our protection. If we lose our right of autonomy, I fear we'll lose our land and they'll evict us shortly after that.”

Plague, the rot and the Shield. Mara's story was a nightmare come true.

“Do you want to take a look?” Mara asked.

“At what?”

“Why, at the rot, of course. It's just yonder, on the other side of the fence. It won't take but a moment.”

“But the girls, the wagon—”

Skirts hiked to her knees, Mara was already climbing over the stone fence.

Sariah sighed. “Wait here,” she said to Delis and Malord. “Keep an eye out for the Shield. I'll be right back.”

She followed Mara through a small meadow where the red-capped robins’ song cheered the land.

“I've heard Domainers are very good with the rot.” Mara puffed up the slight incline. “Very good indeed.”

Sariah kept her mouth shut. She was surprised to see so many birds, flowers, trees and bushes. Even the weeds were suspect to her eyes. The rot usually destroyed those first.

“Where is it that you and your folk are going?” Mara asked.

“We're following a trail. North of here.”

“There's nothing north of here, only the mountains. The Bastions, they call them. They can't be crossed. It's the end of the Goodlands, the end of the world, some say. Other than wild beasts, I can't imagine what you think you may find there.”

“How far away are these mountains?”

“Seven days’ hard walk, maybe six in good weather.”

“That's closer than I thought.”

“Not far enough if you ask me. You have no business going there.”

“Be that as it seems, they appear to be in the general direction in which we're going.”

“What a shame,” Mara said. “I kind of like you folks. People tend to die or disappear over there. Do you know the hounds that Meliahs fashioned to nip at Menodor's heels? Well. That's where they dwell.”

“Isn't that more like a legend?” Sariah asked politely.

“Not when you've seen the dead and the injured as I have. I'm telling you. It's an evil place. Don't go there.”

Sariah tended to scorn superstition, but the cold shiver that ran the length of her spine filled her with an eerie sense of foreboding. Maybe when she set up Leandro's game again, the beam would point in a different direction.

“I can't help but wonder why you'd want to go there,” Mara said. “I hope it's not foolishness on your part. I know your kind. I've seen them come and go in my time.”

Her kind
? Perhaps the old woman was a little off-kilter.

“Don't play dumb with me.” Mara stopped in her tracks and pulled something out of her pocket. “I know who you are.”

The folded parchment in Mara's hand fluttered in the afternoon breeze for a few moments before Sariah took it. She gave it a cursory reading. By the rot. That's why the woman had known her name.

“Where did you get this?”

“There were several of those going around town.” Mara took the parchment back. “Are you going to tell me you don't know what this is?”

“I know what it is.”

“And does this journey to the Bastions have anything to do with it?”

“I'm not sure. Maybe.”

“This is no time for maybes, stonewiser. An awful lot is at stake. You don't intend to leave it at this, I hope?” Mara waved the accursed parchment in the air.

The woman's smallish blue eyes probed her like a hard poke to the shoulder. Sariah couldn't quite understand. Who had devoted the time and effort to do this? And why? Who stood to benefit from it? And why should Sariah care about what Mara thought? Mara was a stranger, a passing acquaintance, one of many whose lives and livelihoods depended on… what? The unity of the Bloods? Stone truth? Her?

Of course not. There were millions like Mara in the Goodlands, in the Domain. She couldn't mind each one of them. Not with the stones calling as they were, not with her service requiring the whole of her life. Mara and her grandchildren were just a pebble on the road, a quick goodbye in a string of fast farewells.

“Here we are,” Mara said. “And there it is. By the bushes.”

By the bushes? The rot typically killed those quickly. She was only a step or two from a large cluster of chokeberry when she finally got a whiff of the rot. Following her nose, she pushed the bushes aside, shaking a few red purple berries from the low branches. The bush was still making fruit?

The rot was on the other side, not the enormous black sores she was used to seeing in the Domain, but rather a cluster of six or seven tiny lesions spread over a small area, gurgling quietly beneath the weakening sun. The poison in it was a tea-colored brown, in marked contrast to the dark rot she knew. Sariah was no land healer, but she had been with Kael long enough to have learned a few things.

She twisted the bracelet around her wrist until it hurt. Generosity's link landed on top. She gritted her teeth. She was in a hurry. She didn't have the time or the resources. This was just one of a thousand rot cases, small, unimportant, isolated. A tiny stumble in the long journey. That's all Targamon Farm could be to her. It struck her forcefully and rather unfair that she had come here. Because standing there before this mild interpretation of the land killer, she realized that Targamon Farm could be saved from the rot.

“Ugly plague, isn't it?” Mara's blue eyes were intent on Sariah's face. “Do you reckon there's something you could do about it?”

Sariah looked away. “I doubt it.”

They were almost to Targamon's main gates when Sariah noticed Delis, ambling towards the side of the road and then disappearing into the brush. Without missing a step, Sariah scooped her sling out of her weapons belt and tucked her hand in her pocket, grasping a good-sized stone. It was but a moment before the first floundering figure hit the road head-first at Rodney's hoofs. A second screeching shape was flung from the trees and came to rest on top of the other. A third addition to the tangle of arms and legs followed, this one delivered directly onto the heap by Delis's indelicate paws.

“Three,” she said. “Spying on us. Following along.”

Sariah stared at the pile. Two men and a woman dressed in rags looked up from the mud, a combination of angry, affronted and mismatched looks. Domainers. Young ones at that.

“Who are you?” Sariah asked. “Why do you follow us?”

“They do that all the time,” Roxana said. “They're always looking, circling like buzzards to steal our stuff.”

“That's not true.” A young man bolted to his feet. “We don't want your stuff.”

“You want to destroy us and take our land.”

Fists clenched, the lad started towards Roxana. “You blabbering little witch—”

Malord reached from atop the horse and caught him by the scruff of the neck. “We don't hit people in the Domain. Not even when they deserve it.”

“Roxana, dear, where did you hear such lies?” Mara asked.

“The widow told me. They bring plague. And rot. It's in their spit.”

“I'm a Domainer,” Mia said. “You said you liked me.”

“Use your head, child,” Mara said. “Don't you remember? The plague and the rot came before these people arrived. Say nothing more. You're embarrassing yourself.”

From his perch on the horse, Malord released his grasp on the kid and glared at the Domainer trio. “What are you doing here?”

“Same thing you're doing here,” the young man said.

“I'm the Domain's gathering wiser.” Malord's mismatched eyes, his title, and perhaps most importantly, his tone of voice, granted him irrefutable authority over the chastened rascals.

“We were guarding the road,” the lad said, “looking out for the Shield.”

“You're far from Panadan.”

“How do you know we hail from Panadan?”

“Panadanians like to use onyx for memory stones.”

The young man clutched the stone on his neck.

“Orm of Panadan would have a fit if he knew you were here,” Malord said. “Does he even know? Did you ask permission to come to the Goodlands?”

“We're not going back.”

“How many of you are there?” Sariah asked.

“Many.”

“Ten, twenty, a hundred?”

The kid kept his stubborn silence.

“I reckon they're about eighteen,” Mara said. “They're squatters at the Siguird Farm.”

“We're not squatters!” The young woman shot to her feet. “We're under the widow's protection. We bought a parcel of land from her a week back. We paid good coin for it.”

“Is that so?” Sariah said. “A parcel of land? Did she give you a stone or a parchment saying so?”

The three exchanged puzzled looks.

“I didn't think so. How are you going to manage with your coin gone and the chill coming?”

The young man's chest swelled like a puffing hen. “We're Domainers. We'll manage.”

“You're as clumsy as hobbled oxen,” Delis said, “as easy to catch as stunned cockroaches.”

Sariah took in the shabby trio, the tattered rags they wore for mantles, the dirty faces, the bony limbs. Somewhere in Panadan a mother wept for this frail-looking young woman and a father agonized over the fate of his sons. Sariah fathomed she could hear the trio's empty stomachs grumbling. Or was it her stomach growling?

“What are your names?”

The girl spoke up. “I'm Ginia. These are Rig and Harsten.”

Somewhat regretfully, Sariah handed the girl four shaggy hares they had caught along the way. “Take these.”

The trio stared at the hares on the string.

“For dinner,” Sariah said. “You roast them. Like fowl. In the fire?”

“Oh, yes, we know how to do that.”

“You said you were keeping watch for the Shield,” Sariah said. “Why?”

“The widow likes to know when they come,” Rig said. “And we don't trust the Shield.”

“That's wise of you. Did you see any?”

“Several Shield patrols have been on the road today. The last one we saw no less than an hour ago, setting a night camp over by the crossroads.”

Curse her luck. She couldn't call the beam tonight if there was a Shield patrol camping so close. They would be on Targamon as soon as they spotted the beam. She hated to waste the time, but Kael was right, she had to wait until it was safe to call the beam. They couldn't find the tale if they were all dead.

Mia climbed down from the cart and neared Rig, a reedy lad of perhaps fourteen, a gangly assembly of long limbs and curly black hair.

“Your leg. It's bleeding.” She pressed her scarf against the boy's knobby knee. “I'll make it better.”

Rig blushed like a roseroot.

How she hated to abandon these Domainer youths to their scant devices. How many Domainers were in the Goodlands now? How many would perish from starvation this chill? Lacking knowledge and experience, how many would be tricked, abused, misled, persecuted and outright killed?

Well, if she couldn't call the beam tonight, she might as well do something else, something fruitful preferably. “Where is this farm? It's nearby, yes? I'll need to speak to the widow. If it's true that you paid her coin for land, I'll make you a stone of property.”

The trio's eyes widened.

“But if I find out you didn't pay the widow for land, if you're squatting, stealing, or harassing her, then you will return to Panadan. Your kin must be worried sick. I expect you to be men and women of the oath.”

The three heads bobbed in unison.

“Now let's see. We have, what? Three more hours of light? Malord, won't you take the girls to the farmhouse? Delis, you can keep watch. Can you two boys run fast? I thought so. Stay with Delis. Bring word to us if you spot trouble. Ginia, come with me. Mara, I wonder, will it be too much to ask for an introduction to the Siguird widow?”