The Dark Ferryman (45 page)

Nutmeg peered up at her from under the brim of her now somewhat battered looking hat. “You mean, as if they were thinking of you at the same moment you were thinking of them, and you just knew what they were doing and if they were all right or not?”

“Yes! That’s it, exactly.”

“No.”

Grace shoved at her shoulder. “No?”

“Aye, no. Keldan gets those feelings, time to time, but never me. I’m thick, I suppose. Ghosts don’t care to be teasing me because I can’t see them.” Nutmeg wrinkled her nose and fluffed her sleeve back out. “ACOURSE, you’ve always been strange that way.” She walked briskly past Rivergrace, her boots sending up a trough of water.

With a mild snort of protest, Rivergrace moved to catch up. Nutmeg’s voice trailed after her cheerfully, teasing, words that Grace couldn’t quite hear. And then, in a flash, Nutmeg disappeared.

In the blink of an eye, the river had swallowed her up. “Meg!” Rivergrace screamed. The pony reared, tossing his head, the whites of his eyes showing in wild fear. She grabbed at his bridle to keep him from bolting off. “Nutmeg!”

She saw nothing but a whirlpool of water being sucked down by the scared pony’s rigid legs. Wrapping both pairs of reins to the pony’s saddle, she waded forward. Nothing met her eyes, nothing. It was as though Nutmeg had stepped into a bottomless hole and disappeared. She dug at the water. A scrap of cloth met her touch. She grabbed at it, almost had it, before the river or perhaps Nutmeg’s thrashing movements tore it out of her grasp.

With a gulping breath, she plunged after it. The water tore at her, but she caught an arm, a hand, felt fingers tighten on her and she pulled upward, the two of them. It was her nightmare come to life, for something dragged Nutmeg downward, ever downward into an impossible watery world. She found an angry strength inside and pulled Nutmeg up with her, standing, drawing her sodden sister out of the raging current and embracing her for a moment. Then she threw Nutmeg sputtering over her pony.

Cold hands wrapped about her legs.

“Hang on,” she managed. “Don’t come after me. She’ll kill you.” And then, like that, she was pulled under and whatever else she might have said burst in a string of bubbles from her lips as the deep blue kingdom and the River Goddess claimed her. What had been a simple river churned into a seemingly bottomless lake.

She fought this time, kicked and clawed at the hold. This was no embrace she would allow. If she went down, the Goddess would have to fight her every bit of the way. They fell in a tumult of white water. She could see the woman thrashing with her, silvery blue hair and fair skin, a countenance of sheer beauty except for the hatred that contorted her features. One of the fairest of the fair, born of living water and light and life, and she roiled, a darkness coming out of her in an inky mist, enveloping the two of them.

In her dream, Rivergrace had breathed. Now, she could not. The water pressed against her nostrils and mouth, and she knew she would drown. The being which had enticed her to surrender once now gave her no chance. Death was the only gift being offered. She kicked and twisted against the other’s hold, her layered winter clothes sodden and weighing her down like an anchor, her movements slowed by the water’s pressure. She would die here. The Goddess would snuff out her life with no more regard than a waning candle. No bargains, no cajoling, no offering from the Immortals. Rivergrace felt her lungs cry for air and gashes open up on her arms and legs as the other flailed at her, and she looked through an ever-growing cloud of stained water and could feel the poison in it.

She grew weary. There would be no ending to the struggle until she gave up what the other demanded, and there was no way she could do that, for it had become an integral part of herself, such a part that she wondered if it had even come from this being or had merely been awakened by her. She had no way of knowing, but she did know that when she let go of her life, it would be ended. Unless the Goddess in her fury struck out at those she loved anyway. Unless . . .

Her lips parted involuntarily with the need to suck in air although her throat would fill with water. She could taste the foul poisoning upon them that the Goddess rained into the water from every pore of her being. Immortal corruption wrapped around the two of them as they wrestled and danced their way into the depths.

She couldn’t give up. The sheer wrongness of it struck every cord in her body, as desperate as the need for air. Water should be
life
. If not hers, then the lives of all who touched fresh water upon the land as it fell upon it and flowed through and under it. Sweet water, good water, life-bringing and sustaining water. Wind and storm might drive into flood and fury but that would be transitory. What should remain always should be a font of good. She could not allow the madness of this Immortal to destroy that. But she struggled to no avail, and her heart thumped loudly in her ears and her chest swelled almost to breaking, and Rivergrace knew she couldn’t do what she had to do alone. The River Goddess pushed against her, mouth yawning, teeth sharp and pointed as a spined eel, going for her throat. She wrapped her hands about the other and sent the last of her thoughts spiraling outward, to the sky, to the wind and sun, with a call to the one being she could think of who might help her.

She felt something shatter as she pushed her plea out. A wall perhaps, holding thoughts back from ordinary flesh such as hers, she couldn’t know. But it broke and she felt her thoughts arrowing to a destination even as the Goddess pierced the skin of her throat, and then strove again for a deeper, tearing, bite. Grace’s senses whirled, and her sight grew dimmer. She would breathe in another moment, gulping in the inky water, and that would begin her ending.

Between one heartbeat and the next, he appeared.

The only being she knew who could tame a river, the Ferryman appeared in a swirl of his dark cloak and robes, almost indistinguishable from the inky mist of corruption surrounding the Goddess. He reached out and ripped Rivergrace from her hold. He thrust her upward, catapulting her toward the surface and the sky, where sunlight danced upon the curtain of water. She broke into the open just as her body gave out and she gulped, but it was air she took in. Air and spray, and she coughed and choked and her temples pounded and her lungs cramped, but she breathed.

“Grace!” Nutmeg reached down with a sob to grasp her forearm and braced her against the pony’s stalwart body, rooted firmly in the river. Water thrashed around his hooves and their bodies.

The Ferryman rose as the river began to still. He folded his arms across his chest and came out of the water straight and quiet, but she could feel his gaze scorching over her.

Rivergrace shivered as he began to turn away from them. “Wait.”

The phantom paused. She let go of Nutmeg and took a quaking step toward him, her hand out.

“I can’t leave the river poisoned,” she said. “Even if the Goddess intends it. It’s not right. This is what I
do
.”

The cowl dipped in acknowledgment. He took her hand in his, a hand not of flesh yet solid and with feeling, and he anchored her as she sank into the river once more. She could not sense the Goddess, but corruption lay in her wake, oily and deadly. Had he destroyed her or had she merely fled, her vengeance delayed for another time? It did not matter now, it could not. Rivergrace had one thing she could do, and do well, and she bent her thoughts to it as the Ferryman held her safe with one hand.

But she did not touch the waters as she always had. As her hand dipped into them, they burst into flame. She could feel their heat, although not wicked hot, and see them spread, golden-orange and red, licking through the blue-and-gray river, as the fire devoured the staining in the water. She shook as fire poured out of her until her face burned from its heat and her hair rose about her, borne on wings of dry air lifting off the surface. The Ferryman made a noise at her side, and his hand tightened painfully on hers even as she combed the river. How could she summon a fire like this, that burned even the river?

When she broke the surface again, the water sparkled clear and clean about her. The Ferryman kept her hand in his as he took the pony by the headstall and led all of them across to the other shore. They emerged, drenched, horses stamping with squeals of relief upon solid ground. Fire rained from her as well, licking upon the grasses on the bank and she stomped the sparks out as it finally quelled.

The Dark Ferryman released his hold on her. The cowl dipped toward her as if he searched her face.

“I owe you payment for crossing. Our lives . . . I thank you for our lives.”

“No payment needed. You have already given.” He added, “The darkest Demon holds light, and the lightest God casts shadow.”

She wondered at the humanity of him, and whoever had cast and bound him as the Ferryman, an enigma even among the Vaelinars. No one knew who he had been before, only what he endured now. “What would you do if you were free?” Rivergrace touched the sleeve of the phantom. “Is there one who might have called you as my love calls to me?”

“One needs a heart to be called.”

“You must have one, you answered me. The ties which bind me to my family and Sevryn aren’t chains but rays of light which flow both ways.” Even as she said it to him, she felt it and something heavy fell away from her. Loving Sevryn could never burden her. The ties didn’t weigh her down or she them. They were light, even if they carried shadow behind them as all light did, and they illuminated her life. “May you find such rays in every river you cross.”

The specter towered over her but did not pull away from her touch. He stretched out his hand as if he would grasp hers a last time, and then stopped, motionless. A low sigh escaped from within his deep hood.

Rivergrace removed her hand, saying, “My thanks to you again, one I call friend.” She gathered her reins to mount, Nutmeg already back in her saddle, face pale white with the dread of their encounter, and for once with nothing to say.

She looked back once to the river and saw the Dark Ferryman standing there, a still dark shadow cast across the water, watching after them.

BACK IN THE DAYS when Hosmer wanted to be a member of the Guard more than anything, he’d drilled all of them in the fine arts of defense and offense and, Garner reflected, he’d learned what he had because he had to. There was no placating Hosmer otherwise. Never was a Dweller more determined to grow a tree from a rock, as the saying went. a They’d spent hours in the dusty rows of the orchard, dodging trees heavy with bud or fruit, even his sisters involved, all to make Hosmer happy . . . and give him a target. Bruises and skinned limbs, pulled hair and sore jaws, they’d learned the finer arts of warfare, according to some arcane book of guardery (was that even a word, Garner wondered) that Hosmer had obtained from Trader Robin Greathouse. At the time, he would have bet against it that he would ever need to dredge up those skills, but he would have lost. And he would have lost spectacularly, but not his life the way the Barrel brothers had when raiders and Ravers attacked on the fringe of their lands. Hosmer had fought back; he had fought back. His sisters and mother and father and younger brother Keldan had fought back, and they’d all won. They’d lost their lands but kept their lives. In the game of warfare, that made them winners.

Sweat dappled his brow despite the gloomy skies and the chill, wintry, wind that swirled about constantly without a hint of rain. A squint upward confirmed that. In the way of a Dweller, he shrugged uneasily at that. Dry, too dry, and even though he hadn’t the heart for the land and growing things that his father had, it still worried him greatly. He took a swig from his waterskin and watched as the Bolger clansman circled his pony about, readying to head back Garner’s way. Bolgers did not scare him. Raiders or nomads, craftsmen or trappers, he knew them in all their roles. Bolgers were a part of the country life he’d been raised in. Not Ravers. Ravers were wraiths of evil and murder wrapped in rags of black cloth who rode or bounded along on stilt legs, hounds of death. It had been a Raver who’d carved a hole in Garner’s rib cage, just below his heart, digging for that same heart, and it was Ravers he feared.

He slung his waterskin back on his belt and shifted his weight, and then waited along with a handful of other caravan guards wearing the Oxfort tunic. His hand slid inside his shirt where a strange object hung from a thong about his neck, an amulet of some sort he’d taken off the Raver who’d tried to kill him and died in the effort, and rubbed his thumb over it. The scar along his ribs ached now and then. It didn’t ache today. He couldn’t tell if it would ache tomorrow. But it could, and would, as if some sliver off the thing’s carapace had lodged into his bones like some worrisome thorn that he’d never shed until life carved him up for good.

The Bolger let out a whoop as he dug his heels into the side of his mountain pony and came at them. Never mind that raiders or Ravers rarely whooped a warning when they charged on you. It was the silent ambush that killed. This was practice. Garner waved his fellows aside, yelling, “Spread out, he can’t target us all that way. Let him fix on one of us, then circle him!”

They didn’t listen. Four of them scattered to their right, being right-handed and right-footed, and the clansman bore down on them. Garner gave the thumbs-up to the one who went his way, though staying a respectable distance apart, and they flanked their drill instructor even as the Bolger swung his rock-weighted bolo and brought down two men, and kicked a third as he loped past, taking him down to his knees with a gasp. The clansman let out a shout of surprise, however, as Garner and his man came up behind, with a thumping of their own that hit him square in the back.

Winners. Two alive, three eating dust, and one dead in his stirrups. That was war in this game.