The Pillars Of The World (18 page)

“I’ll hold your horse.”

“As if you’re going to convince him to move anytime soon,” he muttered, taking the longest way around the cottage that he possibly could. “If you petted me the way you pet him, I wouldn’t move either.” He hoped the day would come when she did exactly that. And come soon.

As he rounded the corner of the cottage, he saw the mare sidle away from the chopping block at the same moment the woman tried to put her left foot in the stirrup. Since she was holding on to the saddle, the woman got pulled off the block instead of landing on her face.

“You’re dog meat,” the woman snarled.

Neal winced. He recognized the mare as one of Ahern’s, and knew well enough how the old man felt about anyone threatening an animal he had bred and trained. The mare wasn’t one of the special horses Ahern raised, but all of his animals were prime stock.

The woman had her back to him so he couldn’t see her face, but he knew she wasn’t from one of the local families. And he hadn’t heard of a lady named Dianna staying with any of the gentry families in the neighborhood. If one of her acquaintances had a guest, Odella would have already paid a call in order to pass judgment on the stranger’s sense of fashion and family connections. So she probably wasn’t a gentry lady, regardless of what she had told Ari. But she
had
gotten a horse from Ahern, which meant the man approved of her—at least to some extent.

“May I give you a leg up?” Neall asked.

She whipped around to face him.

Neall’s vision blurred. Not everything. Not everywhere. Just her face blurred, as if he were seeing two faces, one beneath the other, the same and yet slightly different.

That used to happen to him all the time when he was a small child and his mother’s friend Ashk came to visit, but it rarely occurred after he’d come to live with Baron Felston. Well, it had happened that once, when a traveling minstrel stopped at Ridgeley and the baron had taken him and Royce to the tavern to hear the man play. And it still happened occasionally when he was at Ahern’s farm, but only when he was so tired he wasn’t thinking clearly. A crowded, smoky room or dusky light at the end of a hard day were easy explanations for a moment of blurred vision. But neither of those things explained why he was experiencing it
now
.

“You’re staring at me,” the woman said. “Do you find this amusing?” Her voice held the cool arrogance any gentry lady’s would have when caught in an awkward situation, but there was a dangerous undercurrent that made him sure she would hurt him badly if she was seriously provoked.

Shivering, Neall rubbed his eyes, then blinked a couple of times. When he focused on her again, he saw an attractive stranger. He didn’t know her, and he was equally certain he’d seen her before in a different place or under different circumstances that made her now seem unfamiliar. Like a lady’s maid dressing up in one of her mistress’s old gowns and trying to pass herself off as a lady to someone who didn’t know her. Was that all this was? A lady’s maid who could pretend well enough but still didn’t get it quite right?

“Are you amused?” Her voice had gotten colder.

Neall shook his head to clear it, then walked over to her—and tried to shake the uneasiness that increased with every step he took toward her.
Get her out of here, away from Ari, and then think it
through
. “My apologies, Mistress. I was dizzy for a moment. Here. Let me give you a leg up.” He bent slightly and laced his fingers to receive her foot.

When she didn’t respond, he looked up. She was staring at him as if he, too, seemed familiar but she couldn’t quite place him.

Finally accepting his assistance, she was mounted before the mare could decide to play any more games.

“If you’re going to ride alone, you should ride astride,” he said, checking to make sure her foot was secure in the stirrup.

“It isn’t ladylike,” she replied coolly.

“Even gentry ladies are practical enough not to use a sidesaddle when they don’t have an escort to help them mount and dismount.”

“Indeed.” She frowned a little, as if chewing over his statement.

Not a lady’s maid, Neall decided. An upper servant would know it was acceptable for a lady to ride astride, if for no other reason than knowing different garments were worn for riding astride. And she wasn’t gentry. He was certain of that. So what, exactly, was she? And why was she in Brightwood?

Neall stepped away from the mare. “Blessings of the day to you, Mistress.”

He wasn’t sure why he used his mother’s—and Ari’s—usual greeting. Maybe just to see if she recognized it as a witch’s salute rather than a gentry one.

Her light brown eyes narrowed. The look she gave him was thoughtful—and a little puzzled. She tipped her head in acknowledgment, then commanded the mare to walk on.

He watched her, moving enough to keep her in sight while she crossed the road and rode across the fields to Ahern’s farm.

Ashk, why does your face look blurry when you first come to our house?

She stared at him for so long and in such a way that, for the first time, he felt afraid to be alone
with her.

“You can see through the clamor?” she asked.

Later, he had asked his father what “clamor” meant. When told it meant “noise,” he’d puzzled for a while over why he could
see
through noise, then decided Ashk had been teasing him. Since it only happened when he saw her, he never mentioned it again.

So what was it about this stranger who was interested in Ari that made him think of Ashk after so many years?

Too edgy to sit, Dianna paced one of the smaller rooms in the Clan house until Lyrra and Aiden hurried to join her.

“Have you seen Lucian?” she asked.

“I’m surprised you didn’t pass each other going through the Veil,” Aiden said. “I guess he was feeling randy enough that he didn’t want to wait until sunset.”

Dianna stopped pacing. Couldn’t move at all now. “He’s already gone? How could he just leave?”

“He’s been doing exactly that since the Summer Moon,” Lyrra said, puzzled. She shifted her voice to a soothing tone. “I know you’ve been concerned about him becoming too . . . attached ... to this female, but I’m sure it’s nothing more than an indulgence in carnal pleasure. Besides, it will be the dark of the moon in a few more days, and then the affair will be over.”

“It’s what happens when it’s over that concerns me,” Dianna said.

“Why?” Aiden asked sharply.

Dianna took a deep breath to steady herself. “Because the woman who lives in the cottage, the woman Lucian has taken as a lover, is one of the wiccanfae. She is a witch.”

Silence.

Aiden shook his head and began to swear, quietly and viciously.

“How— Are you sure, Dianna?” Lyrra asked, sinking down on the nearest bench.

“She told me. When I was there today, I saw a pendant she wears. A pentagram. A witch’s symbol.”

“Lucian has said nothing,” Aiden said savagely. “
Nothing
.”

“I don’t think he knows,” Dianna said. “I’m sure of it.”

“That doesn’t make it any better, does it?” Aiden snapped.

“Why would the wiccanfae want to hurt us?” Lyrra asked.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to hurt a lover who had tired of you?” Aiden said so bitterly Dianna and Lyrra stared at him. “What better way to hurt a Fae lover than to destroy a piece of Tir Alainn and all the Fae within it.”

“We don’t know the Clans who are lost have been destroyed,” Lyrra protested.

“We don’t know
anything
about them. There’s no word from them, no way to reach them.” Aiden paced the room. “There are enough Fae males who indulge themselves in the human world, and if a pendant is the only way to distinguish a witch from any other human female, they wouldn’t have known the difference. What if what’s happening to Tir Alainn is nothing more than the vengeance of spurned lovers?”

“That’s enough,” Dianna said firmly. “The only thing we know about the witches is what is being sung or told in stories.”

“And none of
that
is good,” Aiden said.

“I recall that you found those songs so offensive you used your gift as the Bard to strip away the musical skills of anyone who played them.”

Aiden glared at her but kept silent.

“I agree that the witches might have a kind of magic that could close a road through the Veil, and they may be the reason Tir Alainn is in danger.” Dianna sat on the bench beside Lyrra, but kept her eyes on Aiden. “We’ve lost more Clans since the Summer Moon, and we’re no closer to finding out why. Now we have a chance to get some answers.”

“From a witch?” Lyrra asked, sounding skeptical.

“Yes, from a witch,” Dianna replied, ignoring Aiden’s succinct comments. “She’s alone and she’s young .

. . and I think she’s lonely. If we were to befriend her, she would have no reason to harm us, and might even be willing to help us.”

“If we befriend her and then discover she is a danger to Tir Alainn, what do we do then, Huntress?”

Aiden said.

Dianna felt her throat tighten. She knew what Aiden expected her to say. She knew what she
had
to say, what she would have said without a second thought even a day ago . . . before she had been told she was called the Queen of the Witches and was considered their protector.

It makes no difference. It can’t.

“If she is a danger to us,” Dianna said quietly, “then the Huntress will take care of it—and she won’t be a danger anymore.”

Adolfo tied his weary horse securely to a tree before moving a little deeper into the Old Place. It would have been better if he could have hobbled the horse and let it graze in the meadow bordering the Old Place, but his nephew’s ghost kept beckoning to him from the other side of the meadow. He was certain the ghost couldn’t leave the meadow since the body was buried there, but he wasn’t certain about how much of the meadow the ghost could walk—and he wasn’t certain how much power Konrad’s ghost might have. So the animal would have to wait until he was done with what he had come to do.

The witch who had lived here was dead—Konrad had achieved that much—and Adolfo could feel the magic bleeding out of the Old Place. But power still thrummed in the land, in the trees, in the very air of this place. It grated against his bones even as it filled him with exultation.

As he walked, he brushed his fingers against the trees until he touched one and felt a dryad’s shriek of anger as a tingling in his fingertips. He smiled. Before she could gather her small magic to strike at him, he pressed his hand against the tree and poured his own power into it, binding her inside the trunk. Taking a step away from the tree, he sank to his knees. Placing his hands firmly on the ground, he used the witch magic that was his mother’s legacy to make the connection between himself and the Old Place. Then he began drawing the power out of the land, filling himself with it until his heart pounded and his body ached with the effort to contain it. And still he took in more and more, all the while murmuring the words that would change benign power into something malicious.

When he felt full to bursting, he released it all, letting it flood out of him as twisted ropes of magic that flew toward the village and nearby farms.

He heard the dryad scream as one of those twisted ropes struck her tree and consumed her.

He felt the land shudder as he took in more of its magic and released it, changed.

Finally unable to do any more, he broke his connection with the Old Place and slumped to the ground, trembling with exhaustion.

Power no longer thrummed in the land. It was still there. Nothing could destroy it completely in an Old Place. But it was a pale shadow of what it had been an hour before, and it would never again be more than a pale shadow—unless another witch came to live in the Old Place. Or the Fae. But that would never happen. The Fae only amused themselves in this world before returning to their precious Fair Land, and by the time he was done, no female would be able to set foot on this land without being condemned as a witch, whether she had any magic or not.

“And no man shall suffer a witch to live,” Adolfo whispered, rolling onto his back. “No man shall be at the mercy of any kind of female magic. We shall be the masters, the rulers, and what little power we grant we can also strip away. So shall it be.”

With effort, he climbed to his feet and slowly returned to his horse. Opening a saddlebag, he pulled out a flask of brandy and drank deeply. He followed that with hunks of bread and cheese. His strength returned, slowly—far more slowly than it once did. But he was older now, and it took more out of him to strip power from the land.

Finishing the bread and cheese, he drank his fill from the water canteen, then poured water into his cupped hand for the horse.

“That’s enough,” Adolfo said, shaking the last drops of water from his hand and tying the canteen to the saddle.

He walked the horse out of the woods.

His nephew’s ghost now stood halfway between its grave and the border of the Old Place.

Adolfo suppressed a shudder, viciously controlling himself so that nothing would show on his face.

A twist of released magic must have struck the ghost, turning it into a nightmarish image, all the more dreadful because it could still be recognized as the young man it had been. In time, the villagers might have become used to a handsome ghost prowling the meadow. No one would be able to look on
this
without fear.

“They will pay for your death,” Adolfo told the ghost. “That I promise you.”

He turned away, aware that Konrad trailed after him. He didn’t breathe easily until he was well beyond the meadow and Konrad could no longer follow him. Mounting, he settled the horse into an easy trot. He

’d ridden hard to reach this place at the right time. Now he would stop at the first available inn to give the horse and himself a well-earned rest.

He couldn’t control what the twisted ropes of magic would do. He’d never been able to control it to that extent. He simply released it and let each rope find its mark. Over the next few days, the villagers would suffer unexplainable troubles. Wells would collapse, cows would suddenly go dry, chickens would cease to lay, a dog would turn vicious and savage a child, a healthy woman would be taken to childbed before her time and die in agony birthing a corpse.

And those ropes of magic caused transformations, taking something from the natural world and twisting it into something else. The nighthunters were formed that way. A few were always created when he or one of his Inquisitors, drained an Old Place of its magic. That didn’t trouble him since they mostly preyed on the Small Folk—or people who were foolish enough to walk through deep woods at night.

The villagers would still be reeling from Harro’s grisly death so soon after Konrad’s, and all the other troubles that would suddenly plague them would shatter any doubts they may have had about the existence of the Evil One and leave them at the mercy of what he had to teach them.

And he would teach them. In a few days, the other Inquisitors he had summoned would arrive at this village, as well as a couple of minstrels who found their purses well filled now that they played to his tune.

He would return here as the Master Inquisitor, the Witch’s Hammer, and by the time he was done purging these people of all the Evil One’s servants, those who survived would spread a story that would leave no doubt about how thoroughly the Evil One could devour people wherever an Inquisitor died.