Witchlanders (2 page)

His sister looked up at him with somber eyes. Her pale eyebrows stood out against her brown face, and even in the dim light, her hair glinted like polished metal.

“You can't go now. You're not supposed to interrupt a witch's reading once the bones are thrown.”

“What witch? What reading?”

Those eyes again. His sister looked like Fa sometimes with that wise look. “Maybe . . . maybe she really can see the future. Maybe something bad is going to happen. Shouldn't we know?”

Ryder swallowed his annoyance. He knew all he needed to know: Throwing the bones was just his mother's
excuse for taking the flowers, and the mad visions she had afterward were not the future, just the inside of her own bewildered mind.

“You really are getting gullible, Sky,” he said, and before she could stop him again, he strode into the main room of the cottage.

Mabis's head snapped up when he entered. In spite of himself, Ryder was taken aback. Her yellow hair was loose and tangled, and her eyes glittered strangely in the firelight. His recriminations died on his lips.

“Do you see it?” she asked, gesturing to the casting. Her voice had a kind of fragile hope, as if pleading to be believed. “Someone has arrived. There's a stranger in the mountains.”

“Go to bed now,” he said. “Please.” His mother just stood there, swaying slightly.

The walls of the cramped cottage seemed to lean in on him. No one had put the cheese away, he noticed—good market cheese he'd bought for a treat, not their own homemade. Dirty wooden plates were stacked by the door, waiting to be washed in the river. Mabis had sent her children to bed insisting she would clean up, and Ryder had been so tired from his other chores that he'd decided to believe her.

“Mabis,” he said firmly. “Listen to me—we need you
now. The hicca will freeze on the stalks if we don't get it harvested.” He crossed toward her. “I can't do everything. The chilling could come any day.”

“Watch your feet!” Mabis took his elbow. “Watch out for the bones.” She gestured to the floor. “Try to see it, Ryder. Just try. Start with the anchor bone—the small one—that's the key. See how it touches the shadow man? Place the pattern in your mind and the vision will come.”

“Mabis, you're talking gibberish.” She never did this, never tried to teach her children how to read, though Skyla had often asked to learn. Mabis had always said the witches made it all up, so why bother to pass it on? “Don't you understand? If you don't help with the harvest, we might not have enough to eat this winter.”

“The stranger in the mountains is just the beginning. Terrible things are coming.”

“Stop it! Stop it now. You sound like a madwoman.”

She turned away from him in disgust. “Your father would have believed.”

Ryder frowned, stung by the bitterness in her voice, as if he were the one disappointing her. Could it be that she really saw something? He let himself consider the idea for just a moment before shaking his head.

“No,” he said firmly. “If throwing the bones were real—which it isn't, you've told me a hundred times—but if it were, then there would be witches in the coven doing it
right now, doing it better than you. And if there was something terrible coming, they'd tell us—they'd have told us already. Isn't that why they're up there? Isn't that why we pay our tithes? So they can guard the border and keep us safe?” Mabis had stopped listening to his argument and was looking blankly into space. “Mabis?”

Her eyes startled him when she looked up; they were so bright and blue and wild. “I see the future,” she whispered. “I'm seeing it right now.”

“You're not.” His voice quavered a little. “Stop it. You're not even looking at the casting.”

“A great witch doesn't need bones. I can see the future written in the flecks of your eyes.” She touched his face with cold hands, holding him by the chin. “Stay still. I almost have it all.”

Worry stabbed through him. She was like a feral creature gazing out at him from a deep wood, seeing and not seeing. It frightened him. He should have gone to the river every day and made sure every bit of that weed was gone.

“An assassin is coming.” She seemed alarmed now, afraid. “An assassin in the mountains. Right across the border. He mustn't succeed!” His mother's gaze left his face and slid to the table by the fire. “Just one more flower and I'll know everything.”

“No,” Ryder said, stepping away from her. “No. This is nonsense.” In three long strides he crossed the room and
gathered up every one of the black blooms.

“What are you doing?” Mabis stumbled forward and bones scattered. Ryder looked around the small room, flowers in his hands. His eyes lighted on the fireplace.

“Don't!” she shouted. Lunging forward, she lost her balance, bones under her feet. She fell heavily onto one knee. Ryder seized the opportunity and tossed the maiden's woe into the fire. The black trumpets hissed and popped, sending sparks up the chimney.

Mabis struggled to her feet and ran toward him. “I need them!” she pleaded, sounding desperate. Just in time, Ryder grabbed her wrist and stopped her from plunging her hand into the flames. Mabis turned on him. Her face, lit by firelight, was twisted with rage. Before Ryder could do anything, she slapped him across the cheek. Hard.

Silence.

Skyla rushed in from behind the curtain. “Mabis, stop it!” she cried. But by then there was nothing to stop. Mabis was leaning against the fireplace, avoiding their gaze, her breath coming in shallow gasps.

“Do you see?” Ryder hissed at Skyla. “This has nothing to do with the bones, with the future.”

His sister's eyes were wide with fright. From the sleeping area, Pima's voice came loud and shrill.

“Maba, I want Maba!”

“Just go help Pima, will you?” Ryder told his sister.

“I'll go,” said his mother. Her voice was small, and she still didn't meet his eyes.

“No! Pima can't see you like this.”

His mother winced. Skyla took a breath and nodded, then went off to comfort the crying four-year-old. When she was gone, Ryder turned to his mother. “This has got to stop.”

“I'm so sorry,” she said. She sank to the floor with her back against the wall.

“Sorry,” he repeated, putting his hand to his cheek.

He dropped down next to her on the floor, and for a while neither of them spoke. Outside, trees creaked in the wind. The stones of the fireplace were warm against his back. He tried to hold on to his anger, but as he sat there he felt it slipping away from him, leaving a hollowness in his chest. Skyla was singing softly to Pima in the other room—a lullaby of Fa's—and without warning, a feeling of loss pierced him. He'd become used to it since Fa died, surprise attacks of emotions that came out of nowhere, left him breathless. But he realized it wasn't his father that he was missing so painfully at this moment. It was his mother. His mother as she used to be. Mabis had been like iron once. She'd been like stone. Nothing could break her. And he'd felt entirely safe.

Slowly Mabis got to her knees and reached for something under the table. One of her bones, the smallest one,
had skittered there in the scuffle. She tossed it into his lap before sitting heavily back down.

“What's this?” he said.

“You're right. It's got to stop.” Her eyes were already beginning to clear. Maiden's woe gave Mabis a burst of frenzied vision, but the effect soon dissipated, leaving her moody and tired—until she took more and it all started again.

Ryder picked up the fragment of black bone. Unlike the others in the set, this one had no marks scratched into it. It was a piece of vertebra most likely, but it was so worn he couldn't tell from what animal it had come. He'd never noticed it before, had never cared enough about his mother's bones to distinguish one from the other, though they'd sat on the high shelf above the kitchen pots all his life. His mother had always been so quick to deride them, to belittle anyone who believed they had something to reveal. “I don't understand. Why are you giving this to me?”

“It's the anchor bone,” Mabis explained. “It's very old. A casting wouldn't work without it.” She pressed his hands around the small black knob. “You keep it for me. Without it, I won't be tempted.”

The meaning of his mother's words began to dawn on him. Could it be that simple? Could hiding this little thing really keep his mother away from the maiden's woe? He
should have thought of it before. He would have tossed the whole set of bones into the river if he thought it would stop her from taking the flower.

“And you were right about something else,” she said. “The witches in my coven, they must see the assassin too. I've got to speak to them about it. Ryder, we've got to build a firecall.”

“What? Tonight?”

“Please, I won't be able to stop thinking about it. . . .”

Ryder was about to refuse. He knew the witches wouldn't come, wouldn't allow themselves to be summoned by the village fortune-teller. But then, maybe being ignored by the witches was just what his mother needed to bring her back to herself. He glanced at the shuttered window for any sign of light slipping in between the cracks. As yet, dawn hadn't reached them, but he was beginning to suspect he wouldn't sleep again that night.

“And if we build this call and the witches don't come, will you promise to stop all this? Will you face the fact you can't see any visions in the bones?”

Mabis smiled, and Ryder could see the black stains on her teeth. “I'll promise anything you like,” she said. She pulled herself up from the floor, brushing the dust off her dirty reds. “But the witches won't ignore a call from me.”

*  *  *

On the other side of the border, Falpian Caraxus watched the column of greenish smoke rise up over the shoulder of the mountain. Dawn was breaking. Behind him, his father's men hovered around cooking fires, rolling up blankets or talking softly over last cups of steaming tea, careful not to disturb his thoughts. Some had already taken their leave with a nod or a silent bow and were leading their horses down the steep path.

Falpian stood in the dewy grass on the edge of the plateau. The mountains were a stunning sight. The zanthia trees had changed their color, turning every peak to crimson.

“The witches are in their reds,” he said to himself. Here, so close to the border, it was easy to see how the Witchlanders could believe in Aata and Aayse, the witch prophets. Even the red trees seemed to honor their customs.

Bron, his father's kennel master, came up quietly beside him, his great shadow spilling over the lip of the plateau. “Firecall,” he grunted, frowning up at jagged peaks.

Falpian hadn't considered that. At first he'd thought the rising smoke must be a funeral pyre, but then he remembered that Witchlanders didn't burn their dead; they buried them in the ground, or worse, preserved them in dank catacombs.

“Black for war, green to gather, red when the coven is under attack,” Falpian recited. He turned to Bron. “Some
witch calls for a gathering with that smoke. Do you think they know something?”

Bron took a moment to answer. “What is there to know?”

“I'm not a fool.”

After another pause the kennel master said quietly, “It's always best to assume the witches know every move we make. And every move we're going to make.” He turned to Falpian now, as if to use his face to make the point. Falpian was used to the cruel scars that slashed from left to right across Bron's features—souvenirs of war—but seeing them now made him flinch. Witchlanders were a vicious people.

“Maybe I should just go home with you,” Falpian suggested hopefully. “These are dangerous times.”

“Are they?”

Behind them on the plateau, some of the others had noticed the smoke and were murmuring and pointing. They were young men mostly, too young to be veterans of the war like Bron, too young to remember when the fire-calls all burned black.

“It's all right!” Bron shouted, but his words were for Falpian as much as for them. “I expect a call's a common enough thing in these parts!” In a lower voice he went on, “There's nothing to fear. The witches won't break the treaty.”

“I don't want to go back because I'm afraid,” Falpian snapped. Bron raised an eyebrow at Falpian's tone. Although
a servant of Falpian's father, he demanded respect from someone so young. “I'm sorry, Bron. It's just . . . I should be home. I should be training with the others.”

“Others?”

“Why do you pretend not to know what I'm talking about? There wasn't a spare bed the day we left—there were even boys sleeping in the stables.”

“Men have always sent their sons to your father to learn their battle skills.”

“Never so many sons as this year.”

Bron pursed his lips and stared out at the scarlet mountains as if he enjoyed the view.
He must be under orders,
Falpian thought.
He'd tell me if he could.

“We'll await you in the gorge,” someone said to Bron, and the last of the men and horses began to make their way down the path.

Falpian watched the last horse disappear and felt a weight settle over him. Soon Bron would leave as well, and Falpian would be alone, alone at Stonehouse for a hundred days with only the dog for company—and even Bo's company couldn't be counted on. He was off chasing rabbits now, enamored of his new freedom.

Of course, Falpian would want for nothing during his stay. His father had sent crates of poetry, bags of flour, jars of honey, barrel after barrel of dried fish—everything he'd need and plenty of things he wouldn't. Somehow
the man could make even bounty seem like a slap in the face. In the old days he would have told his son to live by his wits, that hardship would make him strong; he would have scoffed at the idea of reading poetry and insisted Falpian study logic or military history. Now he didn't seem to care.