Horded - Kingdom Gone Book 2, page 4
But as far as she could tell there hadn’t been any violence. The gobelin hadn’t attacked. While Jaymi and his friends skittered toward the well, she traipsed across the stones to the back of the old woman’s audience. As she joined the crowd, a few of the townspeople noted her. One moved a step in the opposite direction. The cooper frowned. His wife sniffed and looked rapidly away. Molton Fayer, however, smiled nervously and reached up to touch, very briefly, the brim of his felt hat.
Maera looked to her feet and bit her lip. Jaymi. But he hadn’t the time or opportunity to talk to his father since they’d arrived. They’d already discussed the idea, apparently. So his father either had already agreed to the plan or would easily enough. Oh, she needed air. The courtyard grew hot and uncomfortable at the thought. If Jaymi and Molton Fayer had their way, she’d be married, a permanent resident of Ramstown, a mother…married.
The old woman cackled and started over. “He was green! And big as an ox. At first, I thought he was my…an imp Tinker, but he said it plain as day. Gobelin.”
Maera stepped backwards. The stones felt as if they moved, tilting and making her legs wobble. The weaver’s wife was so excited she’d nearly blurted out her association with the Gentry publicly. What did it matter? The curious part was why it mattered. Maera was used to people afraid of magic, but this town danced on both sides of the line. Publicly paranoid and privately dependent. At least in Westwood, nobody hid it.
Except she didn’t want to think about Westwood. She lived in Ramstown now. She’d be married here and raise Jaymi with his father. Something jarred her. Cold pressed against her seat, but she didn’t remember sitting down. The courtyard swirled, blurring into a gray whirlwind. In the distance, someone called her name.
“Maera? Maera! Dad!” Jaymi’s face blocked the swirl of buildings. He blinked at her, eyes bright and lips pursed. “Are you okay?”
She meant to say yes, but her voice stopped in her chest. It hurt, she realized, that lump that formed when she imagined life married to his father, to a complete stranger, a man she didn’t care one way or the other for. It ached in a spot right behind her ribcage. Looking at Jaymi hurt too. She’d wanted to help him, but how could she? She might deserve punishment, but she was far too cowardly, too selfish, to take it on for his benefit.
“Did she fall?” Another voice drifted down on her. Jailor Fayer. He knelt beside his son and looked into her face from only a foot or two away. “Are you all right, Maera?”
No one in town called her by name except Jaymi. No one talked to her directly unless they were ordering food or telling her what to do, and then it was usually, “You there,” or “Hey.” She felt warm suddenly, and her hands trembled. When Jaymi’s father looked at her, she had no choice but to drop her gaze away.
“I’m fine.” She mumbled it or her voice slurred. She didn’t feel right, either way. The world pressed in around her.
“She needs air. Jaymi, step back. Get those boys away.”
Feet clattered behind her, beside her. She heard voices, but they hissed in distant whispers. The crowd had found a new excitement and she feared it had her name all over it. It wouldn’t help that Molton had run to her aide, that his hands lifted her now, taking her by the shoulders and steadying her against his body. It wouldn’t help her, at least. The rumor mongers would adore it.
“I think I need to sit.” Maera tried not to look at Jaymi’s father, but the man had hold of her at the moment, and as he steered her toward the well, she stole a peek. He wasn’t homely exactly. He had twice her years, no doubt, but his eyes were soft brown, and his nose only flared a tad, tilted up a bit too much at the end. His dark hair bore grey streaks, but those hadn’t won the battle yet, and the man’s hands were soft. He reminded her a bit of her father, of the giant blacksmith who bellowed louder than his furnace but could clean a scraped knee without hurting.
“Here,” Molton’s voice was gentle as well. She imagined she could win him over as she had her dad, manipulate him the same way if she so desired. It made her stomach clench and threaten to evacuate her small, mid-day bowl of stew. “You boys move aside.”
He sat her on the lip of the well opposite the inn and the place where the Gentry hand had delivered a parcel just that morning. Fayer’s hands steadied her, but as she stared across at the spot, trying to imagine where the pocket lay, she felt dizzy.
She’d been inside a pocket once. Now she squinted, tensed against another wave of nausea and tried to see where the barrier was. Her human eyes couldn’t do it. When Satina had opened the way for her, it had looked no different than the space around it. Inside, however, she’d seen more than she guessed her kind should. She’d seen enough to remember the colors.
She dreamed them now, and the drab world she woke to each morning added to her penance.
Her eyes watered from the looking. She put her hands down on the cool stones while Jaymi’s father hovered at her shoulder, concerned, still waving the others away when all they wanted was to swoop in and see the show. Behind the dizziness, something pulsed. It swelled like a drum, thumping steadily. Soft. Rhythmic.
“I’m okay,” she pressed the words out. “I just need a little space.”
Molton nodded understanding. He touched his hat again and stood, but concern still lined his expression. His eyes overflowed with it. Though he obeyed her request, he also assigned himself to crowd control, circling and sweeping the townspeople back from the well with calls of, “Give her some room,” and “She just needs a moment.”
The nausea washed away. It took her vertigo with it and left behind only the soft rhythm, thrum, thrum, like water moving back and forth. Maera felt it in her veins and scanned the assembled town folk for any sign that it was not just her. The song rose in volume, filling her head. It couldn’t be ignored, and yet, around her the crowd whispered and laughed without notice, kept back by the efforts of Molton Fayer and his son, who’d enlisted a few of the other boys to help.
They left her alone, sitting on the lip of the well with the pulse screaming in her mind. Thump. Thump. She shook her head and looked for the pocket with blurry vision. Something pulled at her, told her to look, to stand up. Her legs obeyed and, for a moment, she teetered beside the short stone wall as if she might tumble into the shaft. The pulsing held her fast, however, and she steadied like a pillar, rigid as stone in its grip.
A gobelin stepped out of thin air.
Maera knew instantly what he was, though she’d never seen one. She knew it, but her legs still moved. She stepped in his direction, sidled around the well and tried to hear the words falling from his thin, pale lips.
He was barely green at all and taller than she’d expected. Taller than her at least though, perhaps, shorter than most men. His clothes left more skin exposed than a human would have tolerated. He wore leather and bits of cloth, but the moonlight glinted off his chest and bulging upper arms. His lips moved again, speaking a word she didn’t understand. She could see the tips of sharp teeth when he talked, a row of bones strung around his neck.
“Tir talus.” His voice purred, low and with a touch of gravel.
Someone in the crowd shouted. “Gobelin!” The townspeople began to scream.
“Tir talus.” He repeated it and moved toward her. His eyes burned like candles, bright yellow. His high cheekbones made shadows on his jaw.
Maera felt the pulsing quicken, thrumming, singing. She heard Molten Fayer shout, “Back! Stop!”
Feet pounded, but the gobelin leapt. He stood beside her in a breath and the song grew deafening. A second, darker green creature bounced into view. She saw it hopping up and down behind his shoulder, pulling on his straps and clothes and shouting a single word over and over. “Torg, Torg, Torg!”
“Tir talus,” the pale one said as if that explained everything. Then he grabbed Maera around the waist and pulled her into his arms.
Chapter Six
Tal should have let Rulak’s men devour him. Death by chewing would have spared him participation in his brother’s folly.
He stomped to the edge of the castle pocket and snarled for Torg to use the crystal again. When he focused on their camp, on the safe well with the corpse of a white stag adorning its carpet, Torg only grunted and refused to take him up on the offer.
Conceding despite his instincts, he flicked the view to the other well, the one that lay at the heart of a human village. They crossed close together, careful not to tumble from the tiny space on accident as he had. He poked the crystal out again and it reacted immediately, newly dusted and ready to oblige. The wall rippled and displayed a scene far from the empty courtyard that Tal had encountered. This time, no solitary hag guarded the well. This time, the humans swarmed the courtyard like fleas.
They kept back from the stone structure in its center, though, and Tal felt a measure of satisfaction at that. He’d scared them. The old woman had told her tale, and Tal was fearsome in her eyes, at least.
A younger female stood alone beside the well, but she looked sickly. She stared blankly into space. Tal nodded and set his shoulders back proudly. “You see, Torg,” he began. “Too many of them now to…”
“Tir talus.”
“What?” Tal tilted his head to one side. He couldn’t have heard that correctly, except his brother repeated it.
“Tir talus.” Torg set his jaw and stepped through the pocket wall and out, directly into the courtyard full of humans.
“Dung!” Tal watched the images vanish. His brother held the crystal and now both had crossed into that world. “Humping unicorns!”
Torg could be filled with arrows by now. His blood could stain the drab, gray cobblestones of a mortal paving. Tir talus, great ancients, Torg had gone mad. His luck had finally run out and he, pathetic unblessed Tal, would have to attempt a rescue. He clicked his teeth and growled at the moon. He stamped one boot against the thistledown and stepped through the membrane.
The screech of human shouting tore at his ears. They’d gone rabid, had probably devoured Torg by now. Not that he didn’t deserve it. But no, there was his brother, all in one piece and posing beside the well, completely in the open and ready to be skewered.
Tal dove for him. He snatched at the back of Torg’s cuirass, but his brother stepped forward, and he was dragged along toward the woman who now stood swaying at the brink of the well.
He clawed at Torg’s tunic, at his belt. He leapt into the air and howled in his brother’s ear. Torg couldn’t hear him. He’d been possessed by the human, a witch obviously. She stepped out to meet him, and though Tal shouted, Torg paid him no attention. Luck had abandoned them both. It had delivered them into the hands of an enemy greater than steel.
“Tir talus,” Torg said. Lies. The human had him ensorcelled. The one thing that could rob a gobelin of his senses, and now his brother thought he’d found it here in this waif of a mortal.
Tal heaved against him. Torg only grabbed the female. He pulled her close. He kissed her and the courtyard stopped moving. Time held and everyone fell silent. Even the children hushed and stared. Tal might as well have been ice. He couldn’t move. The sight of gobelin and human locked in an embrace stole his own mind away. Lies. The horror of it captivated them all.
It only took a moment before someone broke free. It hardly mattered which one. An arrow blossomed in his brother’s shoulder, and Torg flinched from the impact. He dropped his grip on the woman and turned, blocking her with his body and exposing his chest, his vital organs, to another strike.
Tal slammed into him. They both staggered forward, and a man in the crowd screamed as the woman fell aside. She wobbled toward the well mouth, but Torg spun, snagged the front of her dress with one hand and hauled her to her feet again.
“Torg!” Tal screamed at him. Gobelin blood trickled from the shaft in his shoulder. It dripped to the human’s stones. “We have to go!”
Torg’s head swung in his direction. His confused expression softened as he recognized Tal, as he came back to himself. The tips of his white hair dragged through his wound, turning crimson. The pain registered at last. It drove lines into his forehead. Behind them, ahead of them, to all sides, the crowd woke and began to shout. Tentative steps, but ones that could bring steel or arrow down at any second, rang against the stones.
“Go?” Torg’s frown deepened.
“NOW!” They couldn’t wait to argue. He’d only come a step or two from the pocket. Tal pulled hard on his brother’s straps and dragged him away from the woman. She stood like a statue in the moonlight. Torg didn’t struggle. Perhaps the blood loss had countered his lunacy. He stumbled along in Tal’s grip and only tensed when they slid through the barrier.
Tal continued on, tweaking the membrane to return them to their well and their kill rather than return to thistledown and the threat of enemy gobelins. He’d had enough of foes for one journey, and his whole attention needed to fix on saving Torg from his madness.
His brother slumped onto the grass beside the dead stag. He leaned his once lucky back against the ancient well and stared at the moon as if dumb. Mindless. The witch’s spell still held him in its sway.
“I’ll rekindle the fire.” Tal ignored the predicament for the moment. They should have gone back to the horde immediately. They still could if they moved quickly, but Torg was in a state. It would look poorly for them both to show up with him babbling about a human. It would shine doubt on their claim about the prophecy, too.
And he had less doubt about that by the moment.
“Tal,” Torg stirred and dropped his eyes from the sky long enough to look confused again. “Why are we camping?”
“Can’t go back like this.” Tal dug through Torg’s catch bag and retrieved his spare shirt. He enjoyed tearing it. His brother’s cloth could make his bandages. The shirt could pay for his stupidity. He winced when Torg plucked the arrow free, but his brother seemed not to notice the pain. “We need to sort you out, Torg.”
“I’m fine.”
Tal snorted and handed over the fist strip of shirt. He drew his knife from his belt and cut the second tear before ripping again. They didn’t have salve, but could at least wrap the injury until the healers had at him.
“I need to go back, Tal.”
“First light. The horde will only think we’ve had a good hunt.” They had in fact, and also a very good reason to be late. Rulak’s men at the glade. A gargoyle bowing to him, and the castle…still standing and waiting for its rightful protectors.
“I have to get her.”
“Dung.”
“Tal.”
“Dargh!” He held up the knife and shook it from side to side. “You’ve got a spell on you.”
“Tir talus.”
“She’s a human!” Tal shrugged the idea aside and dug a shallow divot. “Most likely a witch of some kind.”
“It is tir talus, Tal.” Torg’s voice drifted toward dreamy. It sounded like he did right before an adventure when the idea still glistened with more fantasy than danger. “It feels—”
“I don’t care how it feels,” he growled. “You want to get yourself killed, fine. I’m wrapping you up and keeping camp.”
“Camp is good,” Torg sat up straighter and looked a little more like himself. “We should camp.”
“Prett will be able to help you.” The horde healer could cure anything but death and, some days, Tal suspected that as well. “He’ll cast this off. You’ll be back to normal and then we can worry about Rulak and the castle.”
“The prophecy.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t need Prett.”
“Human.” Tal spat the word. He dropped his knife and glared at his brother. “She’s a human.”
“It’s not like it’s never happened before.”
Tal growled and clicked his teeth. He reached into his belt pouch and removed a slim metal cylinder. His other hand fished a wisp of thistledown from the bag they’d collected. He laid the stuff in the center of the twigs, pressed the tube tip against the fluff and whispered the word that triggered the device.
They’d found it in a ruin when they were boys, found it together. Like they did everything.
“Is that what you want, Torg?” He stared across the sparks, across the first flames leaping. Once, long before the Final War, a gobelin had found a human tir talus. Legend insisted neither of them had survived their peoples’ reaction. “To end like that did?”
“It doesn’t mean it will always end badly.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I feel it, Tal.”
“Dung. Unicorn dung. You’re under a spell. Tir talus isn’t…it isn’t this.”
“How would you know?”
Torg whispered it, but the question carried. It slammed into Tal like a blow and left a ghastly silence in its wake. How would he know? How would the cursed brother know, the one who’d never know the heart’s beat, who couldn’t possibly know it?
He pictured the Guardian, the field of down and the gesture he’d taken for a bow. If it meant anything, what did it matter? No one would believe that Tal could answer the prophecy. Now that Torg thought his heart’s beat belonged to a human, no one would believe either of them.
He watched his brother lolling against the well with wide, lovesick eyes aimed to the stars. Torg had lost his mind, lost his senses. He looked even more the fool than Tal. And if that was luck, he thanked the cursed star he’d been born under that he’d never had any.
Chapter Seven
Maera’s room was the last one on the side of the inn that fronted the courtyard. The end chambers were smaller by half. They were the ones the innkeeper lent to his staff when he had any. She’d let Molton Fayer escort her to the building but stopped him and the crowd from following her inside by feigning ill. The jailor had believed her, had stepped in to champion her cause after the assault. He’d labeled it an assault and the town had no choice but to run with the idea when their law so vehemently believed it. Maera left them all downstairs, climbed the steps with weak legs and took the hall at a snail’s pace.
