The Shadowed Path (27 page)

Her eyes clouded again and she turned abruptly, making her way carefully over the salt boundary and back into the tent. Jonmarc stared after her for a moment, then turned, remembering that he had not yet retrieved the lunches for which he had been sent.

He walked back to the cook circle, deep in thought. He’d had some experience with old graves and the ghosts that haunted them, and it had cost him everything he loved. He had heard stories of barrow wights, evil spirits that haunted the dead places, showing themselves to lure the unsuspecting to their deaths. Most people believed in the stories enough to steer clear of known barrows, but laughed about the legends in the light of day.

“Jonmarc! You’re late for lunch. Better get there before Dugan eats it all!” Kegan, one of the apprentice healers, called out to Jonmarc as he approached the cook fires. Dugan was a junior rigger, and both young men were close to Jonmarc’s age.

“You look like you’ve been in a fight,” Jonmarc said, taking in Dugan’s appearance. He had a black eye and scratches on one cheek.

Dugan grimaced. “It’s one of those days,” he said. “I swear, just because we aren’t setting up for a show, people are letting their tempers get the best of them. I helped Corbin break up a fight between two men over a bet gone bad, then one of the horses Corbin was shoeing broke loose and damn near trampled one of the handlers. Took five of us to get the horse back under control.”

Kegan swallowed his bite of food and nodded. “Aye, it’s the same thing over in the healers’ tents. We’ve patched up the oddest assortment of stupid injuries just since the caravan pitched tent. One fellow smashed his foot with a sledge hammer putting up his tent, and other almost lost a finger chopping wood. One of the other woodcutters brained himself when a tree fell badly, and we’ve treated about a dozen bites—horses, dogs, even the goats.”

“Folks are tired,” Dugan said, grabbing another piece of bread from the hearth before the cook swatted his hand. “We’ve done twenty shows in as many days, with no time off. Makes people testy—animals, too.”

“Tell him about the rider we saw,” Kegan prompted.

Dugan rolled his eyes. “You’ve got too much imagination.”

“Do not!” Kegan replied. Since Dugan wouldn’t oblige him, Kegan took up the tale himself. “I saw a lone rider on a strong horse ride by—the only traveler on the road past us all day, mind you.” He dropped his voice. “I think he was a highwayman. All in dark clothes, with a studded leather cuirass and a baldric, and a wicked-looking sword. He didn’t look like he was from around these parts.”

“Probably a soldier,” Dugan said with a wry expression.

Kegan drew himself up. “I know what King Bricen’s soldiers look like and they don’t look like him.”

“One of the local noble’s men then,” Jonmarc suggested.

Kegan looked unconvinced. “So you say now. But if there’s trouble, mind my words! I tried to warn you.”

Dugan gave him a friendly slug in the shoulder. “Enough of that! Folks are tired and grouchy without talk of brigands. Keep your tales to yourself, and we won’t have any trouble.”

Jonmarc wasn’t so sure about that, but he said nothing. He waited for the cook to ladle stew into the two tin bowls and hand him several of the thin hearth cakes to go with them. “I’d better get back to the forge or Trent will have an earful for me,” he said, and then paused. “Be careful tonight.”

Dugan and Kegan grinned. “You know us. We’re always careful!”

“No, I mean it. Old Alyzza says there are ghosts in those hills.”

Dugan and Kegan had seen Alyzza’s power as well, and they sobered quickly. “You sure?” Dugan asked.

“Does Linton know?” Kegan glanced around, as if he might see spirits rising from the barrows in the light of day.

“Yes to both,” Jonmarc said, dropping his voice. “Maybe there’s nothing to it. Half the time, I think she’s crazy,” he added. “But the other half—”

They nodded. “Aye, we’ll keep an eye out,” Kegan said.

Satisfied that he had done all he could, Jonmarc hiked back to the forge with the lunches. Trent glanced up when he walked in.

“Did they move the cook fires to Principality?” he asked, looking askance at Jonmarc.

“It’s a little crazy out there,” Jonmarc said, holding out the tin bowl of stew as a peace offering.

He and Trent walked away from the forge’s smoke to stand outside, looking out over the camp. “Have you heard about anything unusual going on?” he asked.

Trent frowned. “Unusual, how?”

Jonmarc shrugged. “Just… not right.” He paused and took a few bites of his stew, tearing off some of the chewy hearth cake to go with it.

Trent looked at him oddly, then nodded. “Aye. Corbin stopped by to see if I could spare you for a couple of candlemarks to help with the horse shoeing. Seems all the horses are a mite skittish today,” he said.

“Dugan said as much,” Jonmarc replied. “Had a black eye to show for it, when one of the horses got loose.”

Trent nodded. “Linton wandered in, complaining more than usual. Said it felt like a full moon, with the way people are acting. Didn’t go into details, but I figured tempers were shorter than usual.”

Jonmarc hesitated, then worked up the courage to ask his question. “Do you think it’s true? That those are barrows, not hills?”

Trent glanced at him sharply. “Who said that?”

Jonmarc recounted his run-in with Alyzza and her dire predictions. Trent said nothing as he finished his stew, then set the bowl aside and rocked back and forth on his heels as if debating how to answer.

“Hard to tell, just by looking at them,” Trent said finally. “If they’re barrows and cairns, they’re very old.” He shrugged. “Thing is, down through the ages, lots of people have died and been buried. Probably bodies under our feet no matter where we go. They don’t all get up and walk.”

True enough, Jonmarc thought. Then again, he’d heard the warnings about barrows ever since he was a young boy. No doubt, in part, they warned children not to wander off. But his own experiences made him believe that at least sometimes, there was more to it.

“Do you think they’re real? The ghosts, I mean,” Jonmarc asked, finishing the last of his stew.

Trent shrugged. “What do I know about such things? I’m just a blacksmith.” He poured some water from the bucket to rinse out his empty bowl, and Jonmarc did the same, then he handed the nearly empty bucket to Jonmarc.

“What I do know is that iron won’t bend itself,” he said. “And that we need more water from the creek. Let’s go. Work to be done. Time’s a-wastin’.”

“T
URN OUT
! T
URN
out!” The crier ran through the caravan camp, banging on a tin pot with a spoon. The sound of eight bells had just rung from the village down the road, and the supper fires were banked for the night.

In minutes, the entire caravan crew had gathered, leaving their tents, wagons, and campfires. Linton rarely sounded the general alarm, so people came with weapons and buckets, expecting either attack or fire.

“Listen up!” Maynard Linton shouted. He was a stout, sturdily built man in his early thirties, the indefatigable impresario behind the most successful traveling caravan in Margolan. Linton had no qualms about bending the law when it suited him, but he was uncompromising in his protection of his nomadic crew of performers. “We’ve got a missing child.”

Jonmarc, Kegan, and Dugan had been playing cards and drinking ale around one of the large campfires. They shouldered up to the crowd, listening intently.

“Shouldn’t be too hard to find her,” Linton yelled, his voice carrying clearly on the cool night air. “But the meadow’s pretty big. And of course, there’re the trees, we need to look there as well.”

“Who’re we looking for?” one of the men in the back asked. “Kettie, the tinker’s daughter,” Linton replied. “She’s four-years old, dark hair, wearing a pink dress.” He paused. “Everyone grab a torch or a lantern, and let’s get going. It’s chilly out tonight.”

Heading into late summer, the caravan’s crew numbered around seventy-five people, although that changed frequently as performers joined up or went on to other things. One group of men went to search the stand of trees, while two more groups headed down the road in both directions, calling for Kettie. That left a large party to search the meadow, lining up in long rows to make sure no bit of grass or gully was missed.

“Did you see that?” Kegan whispered.

“See what?” Jonmarc asked.

“The bright balls, in the sky,” Kegan said, pointing. Jonmarc was about to make a snide remark about stars when he saw what Kegan was talking about. Scattered around the meadow, pulsing orbs of blue-white light flew and floated, streaking high into the sky and then dropping to just above the tall grass, bobbing and weaving.

“I don’t know, and I’m not sure I want to know,” Jonmarc replied, remembering Alyzza’s warning. “Best to stay out of their way.”

Jonmarc looked out over the meadow. While the group made its way in a fairly orderly fashion across the flat land, searchers were avoiding the hills. Now that it was dark, they seemed to be wreathed in shadows that were darker than elsewhere.

“What’s that noise?” Dugan asked.

Jonmarc frowned. “What?” Then he heard it, a low moan that seemed to rise from everywhere and nowhere. “Just an owl,” he replied. But the moan came again, too human to be a bird.

“That’s not an owl,” Dugan said, eyes widening. “Maybe Alyzza was right.”

“None of that,” Jonmarc snapped, though his own nerves were on edge. “Keep a watch out for the girl.”

The farther into the meadow they walked, the darker the night seemed, despite their torches. Where the caravan was camped, the barrows formed a line on either side of the clearing, leaving a large flat space in the middle. But as they got deeper into the meadow, the land under their feet rose and fell in shallow hills, making Jonmarc wonder if the entire area had been a burial ground, and the low undulations were old barrows time had worn away.

The meadow was broad, and by the time the search party reached the center, Jonmarc noticed that their lines had broken down, and searchers were wandering freely without any organization. The night seemed too quiet, and when Jonmarc concentrated, he heard none of the usual night noises of owls, crickets, and the distant howl of wolves. The silence was eerie and unnatural, as if someone had lowered a clear dome over the area, cutting it off from the rest of the world while allowing the stars to shine through.

The stars. Jonmarc had looked up at the night sky at the beginning of the search, confirming the time from the bell tower with the position of the constellations. Yet now, looking into the black canopy, the stars were wrong. Jonmarc shook his head and blinked, sure he was just tired, but when he looked once more, the constellations were not as they should be.

“Kegan! Dugan!” Jonmarc shouted to his friends, who were each a stone’s throw away from him, but they did not turn, or even flinch as if they had heard.

The orbs glowed brighter as the stars receded. The moon was bright, and the meadow should have been awash in moonlight as well as the glow of the torches carried by the searchers. And yet, shadows pooled around the barrows, so dark that the torchlight did not dispel them.

A chill ran down Jonmarc’s back. The night had grown unseasonably cold. It had been a cool late summer evening when they had set out for the search. Jonmarc’s breath misted in the air. He shivered, but not from the cold. The longer they stayed in the meadow, the more certain he grew that Alyzza’s warning was correct.

A cool wind raised the hair on the back of Jonmarc’s neck as it slipped by. Mist was rising from the tall grass, faint tendrils of fog at first, then mingling with the torch smoke in a haze that blanketed the meadow and made it difficult to see more than a few steps ahead.

Jonmarc.
The voice was faint, but it stopped him in his tracks, eyes wide and heart pounding.

Jonmarc.
Louder now, and unmistakable. His heart caught in his throat. It was a voice he heard in his dreams, his memories, but would never hear again this side of the Gray Sea. Shanna, his wife, dead and buried almost a year. Jonmarc peered into the fog. He could make out Shanna’s image, recognizable but distorted, like a reflection on water.

you left us.
The voice was his mother’s. Jonmarc wheeled, catching just a glimpse of her before the fog shifted.
your brothers and I died because you left us.

“Not true,” Jonmarc murmured. “I went with father to fight the raiders. You were supposed to be safe at home.”

you called the beasts that killed me.
Shanna’s voice, echoing Jonmarc’s deepest shame and fear. He had gone into the burial caves to bring back a talisman for a mage who offered him enough gold to provision his family for a year, and that night, monsters had descended on his village, killing everyone but him. He’d thrown the talisman back into the caves, sure it had brought the beasts.

“I didn’t know,” he murmured. “You’ve got to believe me. I didn’t know.”

One by one, the images coalesced in the fog. His three younger brothers, killed by the same raiders that slaughtered his father and most of their village and left Jonmarc for dead. Shanna and her mother, who had found him and taken him in. Friends and neighbors in their village who had given the orphaned young man refuge, until the beasts destroyed everything. All because of a raider’s curse.

The ghosts surrounded him, eyes accusing, demanding atonement. Tears streaked down Jonmarc’s face as the old grief welled up anew. His intentions didn’t matter. He had failed them. Failed them all.

“I’m sorry,” he said raggedly. “I’m so sorry.”

The ghosts crowded closer, faces contorting in anger, bent on revenge. And as they grew nearer, Jonmarc remembered what Alyzza had said.

The barrow wights lie
.
The faces they show aren’t their own.

Jonmarc closed his eyes, concentrating on Alyzza’s words, repeating them under his breath. “You’re not real,” he muttered. “Shanna, mother, the rest of you, you’re not here. I buried you. I mourned you. You are dead.”

He opened his eyes, and though the fog remained, the ghosts had vanished.