Witchlanders (14 page)

“The witches say the danger is over,” she went on. “Maybe they got that part right.” Ryder shook his head. “Fine then, think of Pima. She's lost so much. First Fa, then Mabis. If she loses you, too . . .”

“Mabis isn't dead,” he snapped. “Don't say that. There was no body. And Dassen . . . Dassen is still organizing searches. . . .” He looked away. He shouldn't speak about
Mabis out loud. It made something inside him threaten to break, like a dam holding back water. “You and Pima should go back down to the village as soon as you can. Dassen will take you in. I don't want you staying here—with these people.”

There was a pause.

“No,” Skyla said.

“No what?”

“Just no. I'm not leaving the coven.” A spark of anger flared in her voice. “I'm not going to spend my life washing cups at Dassen's just because you've decided to die some stupid death.”

“You'd let Pima live with people who say Mabis tried to murder a whole village?”

Skyla's pale eyes flashed. “This place is good for her—you'd see that if you thought of anyone besides yourself. She'll have friends her own age, and she's learning things, and there's plenty of food here.”

“She's miserable!”

“She'd be miserable anywhere. She misses her mother.” Skyla stood up and paced the floor, hugging herself against the cold. “Pima could do a lot worse than grow up a witch, Ryder. What else can she become? A farmer's wife? The witches were wrong about Mabis, I can see that. But not all witchcraft is wrong.”

Ryder sheathed the Baenkiller and stood up. “Until
Mabis gets back, I am the head of this family,” he said, softly but firmly.

“No!” she said, her voice just as firm. “If you want to be the head of this family, you have to be here.”

Ryder gritted his teeth. It was too simple to believe that he took after his mother and that Skyla took after Fa. At that moment his sister was all Mabis—stubborn, hard as iron. Ryder had that vein of iron in himself, too, and recognized it when he saw it.

“You just want to be a witch yourself,” he grumbled. “You don't care about Pima.”

The hard look on her face turned to pity, and she tried to take his arm. “I wish I could explain it to you, Ryder. I wish I could make you understand.”

“I understand. You want to see the future and have everybody bow at you.”

She sighed and turned away, and he could see that she was biting back more harsh words. She leaned out over the railing. After a while, he came to join her, both of them looking out into the frigid blackness.

“Oh, look!” she cried. As they watched, the chilling clouds parted, revealing a patch of brilliant sky. They both stared—stars were a rare sight in winter. Ryder knew he should be moved. “Yulla says that when the Goddess made the world she threw the stars into the sky like a casting, and that the witches of old could read a person's
destiny in the stars the same way they read the bones.”

“Any star tries to tell me my destiny, I will wrench it from the sky.”

Skyla laughed at that. “Of course you will.” She slipped her arm through his and put her head on his shoulder. Below them on the mountain, the branches of bare trees clicked together in the frozen wind.

“You'll need tinder and flint, I guess,” she said after a while, “and a better pair of gloves. I know of a storage shed not far from here. There is no guard.”

He nodded. “Thank you.”

“If there really is a black magician out there, he'll stop your heart with a curse and feed your body to his dread-hound.”

“Sounds like a story of Dassen's.” But after all Ryder had seen, Dassen's stories didn't seem so far-fetched anymore.
Never mind,
he thought. The Baenkiller could stop hearts too.

“You look different in the starlight,” Skyla murmured, looking up at him. “Your face is hard as stone.”

“Not the stars' fault,” Ryder said. “They're gone.” He pointed at the blank sky, but his sister's eyes didn't leave his face.

“Ryder—”

“Let's go,” he interrupted, tired of talk. In his mind he was already over the border, tracking the Baen, making him pay.

When you sing the winter keys, do not forget: They are also singing you.

—Baen saying

CHAPTER 10
HAUNTED

Don't go to sleep.

Falpian sat cross-legged on the rug, trying to keep his eyes open. A fire crackled in the grate. The wind rattled the glass in the small, square windows. Outside there was nothing but blackness and snow, hurrying down, hurrying down. His shoulders drooped, and his tired mind drifted from one thought to another. He was thinking about being buried in snow. How soft it would be. Like a down coverlet. At home he used to watch the snow from his window; it fell into the sea and disappeared. Here was different. It had been coming down all day and into the night. Great drifts were inching up the sides of the house, erasing him.

Falpian sighed. He should be sinking into real down coverlets right now. He should be letting sleep cover him in drifts. The humming stone sat on the floor in front of him. It seemed to stare at Falpian like a malevolent gray eye. He
stared back. The stone was average-looking. Only a few lines of writing scratched over its surface distinguished it from an ordinary river rock. After a while, Falpian's vision began to blur, and the object became part of the intricate pattern of the rug, like a gray island in an ocean of curling embroidered waves.
Don't go to sleep!

In one corner of the room, Bo snorted but didn't wake up. He lay with his legs splayed open and his belly showing. Lucky dog. Falpian rolled his head in a circle, listening to his neck crack. He shook out his shoulders. Might as well begin. Praying was a last resort; he'd tried everything else.

Falpian leaned forward and blew a long, even breath over the humming stone. Nothing. He tried again. This time he felt it awaken. As yet, the stone made no sound that he could hear, but in his corner, Bo opened one eye.

Hesitantly Falpian tested his voice. A note. Then another. As he sang, the stone on the floor began to release its own distinctive humming—
thrum, thrum, thrum
—so far, so good. The dog was fully awake now. He crouched low to the floor and looked up at Falpian with round, intelligent eyes. The humming of the stone grew louder. On the mantel, a set of little iron figurines twisted back and forth with the vibrations. Still good. Falpian didn't know why he was so scared—he'd done this a hundred times—but something had happened to him in the four days since
the chilling, something he couldn't understand. Not even singing could quell the rising panic in his heart. Sometimes he even thought it made it worse.

Falpian's voice merged with the sound of the stone, getting stronger and more confident, one note winding around another. He was ready now. In a booming voice, he began the low, sad notes of the prayer for the dead.

The song struck him, as it always did, as too beautiful. It had no words, only sounds. They should have been harsh and ugly, full of grief. But they weren't. It was painful the way the prayer made his heart lift. Here at Stonehouse, Falpian had learned to love singing as never before, and the guilty joy of it made his voice ring in the night like a sad and beautiful bell.

My brother,
he thought as he sang.
I feel your angry spirit. I have been selfish, reveling in my newfound magic when I should have been in mourning. I have not sung you half as many prayers as you deserve. I know that you must be the presence I've been feeling on this mountain. I know that you must be sending me these dreams. But please, what has happened to make them so full of malice? I will go mad of them. Please . . .

A wall of feeling struck Falpian in the chest. Hatred. Pure hatred. For a moment he was somewhere else entirely, not Stonehouse, but some dark, cold place. He looked around, terrified, but all he saw was blackness. He reached out a hand and felt snow. Falpian stopped singing, and the
vision abruptly faded. On the floor, the humming stone was still vibrating.

This was wrong, all wrong. The song of the stone should have begun to fade as soon as Falpian closed his mouth, but instead it grew louder and louder, rising in pitch until it reached a deafening whine. Falpian put his hands over his ears. Bo was running around and around the room, his huge gray body knocking over chairs, making the candles teeter on the tables. Falpian could see the dog's jaws opening and shutting, but his bark was swallowed up by the piercing shriek of the stone.

There was a loud bang from one of the windowpanes, and the humming finally stopped. Falpian sat wide-eyed in the abrupt silence. He rubbed at his arms, still cold from the brief vision he had experienced. What had happened? He'd studied the principles of magic nearly all his life, but had never heard of a humming stone doing that—not with only one singer. He poked at it tentatively. The stone was hot to the touch, and there was a small burned spot on the rug. He got up and examined the window by the door. A diagonal crack split the thick, bumpy glass. Had the sound of the stone done that?

In the bedroom, Falpian caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror: dark circles under his eyes, black hair greasy and wild. He looked haunted. He climbed into bed with his clothes on and pulled the covers around him. Bo started
to bark again. Falpian could see him through the archway of the bedroom door. His paws were up on the sill of the cracked window. Bark, bark, bark, as if there were something out there in the blackness. The dog looked back at him wistfully; clever as he was, he couldn't work the latch to the outside door with those big paws.

“Go to sleep, Bo.”

Falpian pulled the covers over his head. Let the dreams come; he didn't care. Being awake was getting to be as bad as dreaming.

Squinting into the morning, Falpian pulled shut the door of the stone cottage. The cold air bit his face, and his white breath was torn away by the gusting wind—but at least the blizzard of the night before had finally stopped. Chilling clouds tinged the world lavender, even the snowdrifts. Falpian missed the sky already—he missed blue—and winter had only just begun.

Bo bounded away from him, oblivious to the cold. A dreadhound was made for snow: long, shaggy coat for warmth, big snowshoe paws. He found his favorite tree and lifted one leg. Too late, Falpian remembered the chamber pot still sitting under his bed. He'd never realized how many little annoying tasks servants had been doing for him all his life. He'd empty it later.

It was the dog's fault he was up so early. Falpian had
slept, actually slept—two hours at least. Bliss. He could have gone on and on for days. The dreams hadn't come. Nothing had come except a numbing white sleep. But Bo—stupid dog—had dragged all his covers off, had breathed doggy breath into his face, slobbered doggy slobber.

“Come on back now. It's too cold. You can hunt later.” Maybe Falpian would be able to get back to sleep, back to that numb white place. Bo looked at him with knowing eyes but didn't come. He rubbed one of his long saber teeth against a sapling; he was a lazy dog, but he always kept his teeth sharp.

“I know you understand me, bad thing.”

Bo wasn't listening now. His pointed ears were swiveling back and forth as if he had caught some impossibly dim sound. He took a long sniff of the air. Then, without warning, he took off, kicking up sprays of snow with his powerful hind legs.

“Bo!”

As Falpian followed through the powdery drifts, he thought of the night before, of that wall of overpowering hatred he had felt when he tried to pray. Humming stones didn't do that, not on their own. There was definitely some sort of angry presence in these mountains.

“There was nothing I could have done to save you,” he pleaded to the cold air. But if Falpian's brother was listening, he made no sign.

The dog was digging at the back of the house. He'd paw at a drift for a little while, sniff, look around, then dig at another—like he was looking for something. From the corner of his eye, Falpian caught the gleam of something metal and stopped short. A sword. A sword was leaning against a tree.

For a long time Falpian didn't move. Dreams were one thing, but this was something real. Solid. Could it have been there all along? he wondered. Could it have lain so close to the house all this time without his noticing? That seemed impossible. He turned a circle where he stood, but could see no footprints other than his own and the dog's. They were alone.

With new energy Falpian pushed forward through the drifts. He picked up the sword and brushed off the snow. It was a beautiful thing, worthy of his father's collection. Falpian pulled it from its leather scabbard and admired the blade—Witchlander make, without a doubt. He was about to slip it back into its sheath when, from out of the snow, something grabbed his boot.