Beguilement

Chapter 2

Last year’s leaves were damp and black with rot underfoot, and as Dag climbed the steep slope in the dark, his boot slid. Instantly, a strong and anxious hand grasped his right arm.

“Do that again,” said Dag in a level whisper, “and I’ll beat you senseless.

Quit trying to protect me, Saun.”

“Sorry,” Saun whispered back, releasing the death clutch. After a momentary pause, he added, “Mari says she won’t pair you with the girls anymore because you’re overprotective.”

Dag swallowed a curse. “Well, that does not apply to you. Senseless. And bloody.”

He could feel Saun’s grin flash in the shadows of the woods. They heaved themselves upward a few more yards, finding handgrips among the rocks and roots and saplings.

“Stop,” Dag breathed.

A nearly soundless query from his right.

“We’ll be up on them over this rise. What you can see, can see you, and if there’s anything over there with groundsense, you’ll look like a torch in the trees. Stop it down, boy.”

A grunt of frustration. “But I can’t see Razi and Utau. I can barely see you.

You’re like an ember under a handful of ash.”

“I can track Razi and Utau. Mari holds us all in her head, you don’t have to.

You only have to track me.” He slipped behind the youth and gripped his right shoulder, massaging. He wished he could do both sides together, but this touch seemed to be enough; the flaring tension started to go out of Saun, both body and mind. “Down. Down. That’s right. Better.” And after a moment, “You’re going to do just fine.”

Dag had no idea whether Saun was going to do well or disastrously, but Saun evidently believed him, with appalling earnestness; the bright anxiety decreased still further.

“Besides,” Dag added, “it’s not raining. Can’t have a debacle without rain.

It’s obligatory, in my experience. So we’re good.” The humor was weak, but under the circumstances, worked well enough; Saun chuckled.

He released the youth, and they continued their climb.

“Is the malice there?” muttered Saun.

Dag stopped again, bending in the shadows to hook up a plant left-sided. He held it under Saun’s nose. “See this?”

Saun’s head jerked backward. “It’s poison ivy. Get it out of my face.”

“If we were this close to a malice’s lair, not even the poison ivy would still be alive. Though I admit, it would be among the last to go. This isn’t the lair.”

“Then why are we here?”

Behind them, Dag could hear the men from Glassforge topping the ridge and starting down into the ravine out of which he and the patrol were climbing.

Second wave. Even Saun didn’t manage to make that much noise. Mari had better land her punches before their helpers closed the gap, or there would be no surprise left. “Chato thinks this robber troop has been infiltrated, or worse, suborned. Catch us a mud-man, it’ll lead us to its maker, quick enough.”

“Do mud-men have groundsense?”

“Some. Malice ever catches one of us, it takes everything. Groundsense.

Methods and weapon skills. Locations of our camps… Likely the first human this one caught was a road robber, trying to hide out in the hills, which is why it’s doing what it is. None of us have been reported missing, so we still may have the edge. A patroller doesn’t let a malice take him alive if he can help it.”

Or his partner. Enough lessons for one night. “Climb.”

On the ridgetop, they crouched low.

Smoothly, Saun strung his bow. Less smoothly but just as quickly, Dag unshipped and strung his shorter, adapted one, then swapped out the hook screwed into the wooden cuff strapped to the stump of his left wrist, and swapped in the bow-rest. He seated it good and tight, clamped the lock, and dropped the hook into the pouch on his belt. Undid the guard strap on his sheath and made sure the big knife would draw smoothly. It was all scarcely more awkward than carrying the bow in his hand had once been, and at least he couldn’t drop it. At the bottom of the dell, Dag could see the clearing through the trees: three or four campfires burning low, tents, and an old cabin with half its roof tumbled in. Lumps of sleeping men in bedrolls, like scratchy burrs touching his groundsense. The faint flares of a guard, awake in the woods beyond, and someone stumbling back from the slit trenches. The sleepy smudges of a few horses tethered beyond. Words of the body’s senses for something his eyes did not see nor hand touch. Maybe twenty-five men altogether, against the patrol’s sixteen and the score or so of volunteers from Glassforge. He began to sort through the life-prickles, looking for things shaped like men that… weren’t.

The night sounds of the woods carried on: the croak of tree frogs, the chirp of crickets, the sawing of less identifiable insects. An occasional tiny rustle in the weeds. Anything bigger might have been either scared off by the noise of the camp below, or, depending on how the robbers buried their scraps, attracted.

Dag felt around with his groundsense beyond the tightening perimeter of the patrol, but found no nervous scavengers.

Then, too soon, a startled yell from his far right, partway around the patroller circle. Grunts, cries, the ring of metal on metal. The camp stirred. That’s it, in we go.

“Closer,” snapped Dag to Saun, and led a slide downslope to shorten their range.

By the time he’d closed the distance to a bare twenty paces and found a gap in the trees through which to shoot, the targets were obligingly rising to their feet. From even farther to his right, a flaming arrow arced high and came down on a tent; in a few minutes, he might even be able to see what he was shooting at.

Dag let both fear and hope fade from his mind, together with worries about the inner nature of what they faced. It was just targets. One at a time. That one.

And that one. And in that confusion of flickering shadows…

Dag loosed another shaft, and was rewarded by a distant yelp. He had no idea what he’d hit or where, but it would be moving slower now. He paused to observe, and was satisfied when Saun’s next shaft also vanished into the black dark beyond the cabin and returned a meaty thunk they could hear all the way up here.

All around in the woods, the patrol was igniting with excitement; his head would be as full of them as Mari’s was in a moment if they didn’t all get a grip on themselves.

The advantage of twenty paces was that it was a nice, short, snappy range to shoot from. The disadvantage was how little time it took your targets to run up on your position… Dag cursed as three or four large shapes came crashing through the dark at them.

He let his bow arm pivot down and yanked out his knife. Glancing right, he saw Saun pull his long sword, swing, and make the discovery that a blade length that gave great advantage from horseback was awkwardly constrained in a close-grown woods.

“You can’t lop heads here!” Dag yelled over his shoulder. “Go to thrusts!” He grunted as he folded in his bow-arm and shoved his left shoulder into the nearest attacker, knocking the man back down the hillside. He caught a blade that came out of seeming-nowhere on the brass of his hilt, and with a shuddering scrape closed in along it for a well-placed knee to a target groin. These men might have fancied themselves bandits, but they still fought like farmers.

Saun raised a leg and booted his blade free of a target; the man’s cry choked in his throat, and the withdrawing steel made an ugly sucking noise. Saun followed Dag at a run toward the bandit camp. Razi and Utau, to their right and left, paced them, closing in tight as they all descended, stooping like hawks.

In the clearing, Saun devolved to his favorite powerful swings again. Which worked spectacularly bloodily when they connected, and left him wide open when they didn’t. A target succeeded in ducking, then came up swinging a long-handled, iron-headed sledgehammer. The breaking-pumpkin sound when it hit Saun’s chest made Dag’s stomach heave. Dag leaped inside the target’s lethal radius, clutched him tightly around the back with his bow-arm, and brought his knife up hard. Wet horrors spilled over his hand, and he twisted the knife and shoved the target off it. Saun lay on his back, writhing, his face darkening.

“Utau! Cover us!” Dag yelled. Utau, gasping for breath, nodded and took up a protective stance, blade ready. Dag slid down to Saun’s side, snapped off his bow lock and dropped it, and raised Saun’s head to his lap, letting his right hand slide over the strike zone.

Broken ribs and shattered breathing, heart shocked still. Dag let his groundsense, nearly extinguished so as to block his targets’ agony, come up fully, then flow into the boy. The pain was immense. Heart first. He concentrated himself there. A dangerous unity, if the yoked organs both chose to stop instead of start. A burning, lumping sensation in his own chest mirrored the boy’s. Come on, Saun, dance with me… A flutter, a stutter, a bruised limping. Stronger. Now the lungs. One breath, two, three, and the chest rose again, then again, and finally steadied in synchrony. Good, yes, heart and lungs would continue on their own.

The stunning reverberation of Saun’s targets’ ill fates still sloshed through the boy’s system, insufficiently blocked. Mari would have some work there, later. I hate fighting humans. Regretfully, Dag let the pain flow back to its source. The boy would be walking bent over for a month, but he would live.

The world returned to his senses. Around the clearing, bandits were starting to surrender as the yelling Glassforge men arrived and broke from the woods. Dag grabbed up his bow and rose to his feet, looking around. Beyond the burning tent, he spotted Mari. Dag! her mouth moved, but the cry was lost in the noise.

She raised two fingers, pointed beyond the clearing on the opposite side, and snapped them down against her armguard. Dag’s head swiveled.

Two bandits had dodged through the perimeter and were running away. Dag waved his bow in acknowledgment, and cried to his left linker, “Utau! Take Saun?”

Utau signaled his receipt of Dag’s injured partner. Dag turned to give chase, trying to reaffix the bow to its clamp as he ran. By the time he’d succeeded, he was well beyond the light from the fires. Closer…

The horse nearly ran him down; he leaped away barely before he could be knocked aside. The fugitives were riding double, a big man in front and a huge one behind.

No. That second one wasn’t a man.

Dizzied with excitement, the chase, and the aftershock of Saun’s injury, Dag bent a moment, gasping for control of his own breathing. His hand rose to check the twin knife sheath hung under his shirt, a reassuring lump against his chest.

Dark, warm, mortal hum. Mud-man. We have you. You and your maker are ours…

He despised tracking from horseback, but he wasn’t going to catch them on foot, not even with that dual burden. He calmed himself again, down, down, ours!, down curse it, and summoned his horse. It would take Copperhead several minutes to blunder through the woods from the patrol’s hidden assembly point. He knelt and removed his bow again, unstrung and stored it, and fumbled out the most useful of his hand replacements, a simple hook with a flat tongue of springy steel set against its outside curve to act as a sometimes-pincer. Tapping out a resin-soaked stick from the tin case in his vest pocket, he set it in the pinch of the spring and persuaded it to ignite. As the flare burned down to its end, he shuffled back and forth studying the hoofprints. When he was sure he could recognize them again, he pushed to his feet.

His quarry had nearly passed the limit of his groundsense by the time his mount arrived, snorting, and Dag swung aboard. Where one horse went another could follow, right? He kicked Copperhead after them at a speed that would have had Mari swearing at him for risking his fool neck in the dark. Mine. Fawn plodded.

Now that she was finally coming out of the flats into the southeastern hills, the straight road was not as level as it had run since Lumpton, nor as straight.

Its gentle slopes and curves were interspersed with odd climbs up through narrow, choked ravines that slashed through the rock, or down to timber bridges replacing shattered stone spans that lay like old bones between one impossible jumping-off point and another. The track dodged awkwardly around old rockfalls, or wet its feet and hers in fords.

Fawn wondered when she would finally reach Glassforge. It couldn’t be too much farther, for all that she had made a slow start this dawn. The last of the good bread had stayed down, at least. The day threatened to grow hot and sticky, later. Here, the road was pleasantly shaded, with woods crowding up to both sides.

So far this morning she had passed a farm cart, a pack train of mules, and a small flock of sheep, all going the other way. She’d encountered nothing else for nearly an hour. Now she raised her head to see a horse coming toward her, down the road a piece. Also going the wrong way, unfortunately. As it neared, she stepped aside. Not only headed north, but also already double-loaded Bareback. The animal was plodding almost as wearily as Fawn, its unbrushed dun hair smeared with salty crusts of dried sweat, burrs matting its black mane and tail.

The riders seemed as tired and ill kept as the horse. A big fellow looking not much older than her actual age rode in front, all rumpled jacket and stubbled chin. Behind him, his bigger companion clung on. The second man had lumpy features and long untrimmed nails so crusted with dirt as to look black, and a blank expression. His too-small clothes seemed an afterthought: a ragged shirt hanging open with sleeves rolled up, trousers that did not reach his boot tops.

His age was hard to guess. Fawn wondered if he was a simpleton. They both looked as though they were making their way home from a night of drinking, or worse.

The young man bore a big hunting knife, though the other seemed weaponless.

Fawn marched past with the briefest nod, making no greeting to them, though out of the corner of her eye she could see both their heads turn. She walked on, not looking back.

The receding rhythm of hoofbeats stopped. She dared a glance over her shoulder.

The two men seemed to be arguing, in voices too hushed and rumbling for her to make out the words, except a reiterated, “Master want!” in rising, urgent tones from the simpleton, and a sharp, aggravated “Why?” from the other. She lowered her face and walked faster. The hoofbeats started again, but instead of fading into the distance, grew louder.

The animal loomed alongside. “Morning,” the younger man called down in a would-be cheerful tone. Fawn glanced up. He tugged his dirty blond hair at her politely, but his smile did not reach his eyes. The simpleton just stared tensely at her.

Fawn combined a civil nod with a repelling frown, starting to think, Please, let there be a cart. Cows. Other riders, anything, I don’t care which direction.

“Going to Glassforge?” he inquired.

“I’m expected,” Fawn returned shortly. Go away. Just turn around and go away.

“Family there?”

“Yes.” She considered inventing some large Glassforge brothers and uncles, or just relocating the real ones. The plague of her life, she almost wished for them now.

The simpleton thumped his friend on the shoulder, scowling. “No talk. Just take.” His voice came out smeared, as though his mouth was the wrong shape inside.

A manure wagon would he just lovely. One with a lot of people on board, preferably.

“You do it, then,” snapped the young man.

The simpleton shrugged, braced his hands, and slid himself off right over the horse’s rump. He landed more neatly than Fawn would have expected. She lengthened her stride; then, as he came around the horse toward her, she broke into a dead run, looking around frantically.

The trees were no help. Anything she could climb, he could too. To get out of sight long enough to hide in the woods, she had to outpace her pursuer by an impossible margin. Might she stay ahead until a miracle occurred, such as someone riding around that long curve up ahead?

He moved faster than she would have guessed for a man that size, too. Before her third breath or step, huge hands clamped around her upper arms and lifted her right off her pumping feet. At this range she could see that their nails were not just dirty but utterly black, like claws. They bit through her jacket as he swung her around.

She yelled as loud as she could, “Let go of me! Let go!” followed up with throat-searing screams. She kicked and struggled with all her strength. It was like fighting an oak tree, for all the result she got.

“Well, now you’ve got her all riled up,” said the young man in disgust. He too slid off the horse, stared a moment, and pulled off the rope holding up his trousers. “We’ll have to tie her hands. Unless you want your eyes clawed out.”

Good idea. Fawn tried. Useless: the simpleton’s hands remained clamped on her wrists, yanked high over her head. She writhed around and bit a bare, hairy arm.

The huge man’s skin had a most peculiar smell and taste, like cat fur, not as foul as she would have expected. Her satisfaction at drawing blood was short-lived as he spun her around and, still without visible emotion, fetched her an open-handed slap across the face that snapped her head back and dropped her to the road, black-and-purple shadows boiling up in her vision.

Her ears were still ringing when she was jerked upright and tied, then lifted.

The simpleton handed her up to the young man, now back aboard his horse. He shoved at her skirts and set her upright in front of him, both hands clamped around her waist. The horse’s sweaty barrel was warm under her legs. The simpleton took the reins to lead them and started walking once more, faster.

“There, that’s better,” said the man who held her, his sour breath wafting past her ear. “Sorry he hit you, but you shouldn’t have run from him. Come on along, you’ll have more fun with me.” One hand wandered up and squeezed her breast.

“Huh. Riper than I thought.”

Fawn, gasping for air and still shuddering with shock, licked at a wet trickle from her nose. Was it tears, or blood, or both? She pulled surreptitiously at the rope around her wrists uncomfortably binding her hands. The knots seemed very tight. She considered more screaming. No, they might hit her again, or gag her. Better to pretend to be stunned, and then if they passed anyone within shouting distance, she’d still have command of her voice and her legs.

This hopeful plan lasted all of ten minutes, when, before anyone else hove into sight, they turned right off the road onto a hidden path. The young man’s clutch had turned into an almost lazy embrace, and his hands wandered up and down her torso. As they started up a slope, he hitched forward as she slid backward, shoved her bedroll out of the way, and held her backside more tightly against his front, letting the horse’s movement rub them together.

As much as this flagrant interest frightened her, she wasn’t sure but what the simpleton’s indifference frightened her more. The young man was being nasty in predictable ways. The other… she had no idea what he was thinking, if anything.

Well, if this is going where it looks, at least they can’t make me pregnant.

Thank you, stupid Sunny Sawman. As bright sides went, that one stank like a cesspit, but she had to allow the point. She hated her body’s trembling, signaling her fear to her captor, but she could not stop it. The simpleton led them deeper into the woods. Dag stood in his stirrups when the distant yelling echoed through the trees from the broad ravine, so high and fierce that he could barely distinguish words: Let! Go!

He kicked his horse into a trot, ignoring the branches that swiped and scratched them both. The strange marks he’d read in the road a couple of miles back suddenly grew a lot more worrisome. He’d been trailing his quarry at the outermost edge of his groundsense for hours, now, while the night’s exhaustion crept up on his body and wits, hoping that they were leading him to the malice’s lair. His suspicion that a new concern had been added to his pack chilled his belly as the outraged cries continued.

He popped over a rise and took a fast shortcut down an erosion gully with his horse nearly sliding on its haunches. His quarry came into sight at last in a small clearing. What… ? He snapped his jaw shut and cantered forward, heedless of his own noise how. Pulled up at ten paces, flung himself off, let his hand go through the steps of stringing and mounting and locking his bow without conscious thought.

It was abundantly clear that he wasn’t interrupting someone’s tryst. The kneeling mud-man, blank-faced, was holding down the shoulders of a struggling figure who was obscured by his comrade. The other man was trying, simultaneously, to pull down his trousers and part the legs of the captive, who was kicking valiantly at him. He cursed as a small foot connected.

“Hold her!”

“No time to stop,” grumbled the mud-man. “Need to go on. No time for this.”

“It won’t take long if you just… hold her… still!” He finally managed to shove his hips inside the angle of the kicks.

Absent gods, was that a child they were pinning to the dirt? Dag’s groundsense threatened to boil over; distracted or no, the mud-man must notice him soon even if the other had his backside turned. The middle figure surged upward briefly, face flushed and black curls flying, dress pulled half-down as well as shoved half-up. A flash of sweet breasts like apples smote Dag’s eyes. Oh. That short rounded form was no child after all. But outweighed like one nonetheless.

Dag quelled his fury and drew. Those heaving moon-colored buttocks had to be the most righteous target ever presented to his aim. And for once in his accursed life, it seemed he was not too late. He considered this marvel for the whole moment it took to adjust his tension to be sure the arrow would not go through and into the girl. Woman. Whatever she was.

Release.

He was reaching for another shaft before the first found its mark. The perfection of the thunk, square in the middle of the left cheek, was even more satisfying than the surprised scream that followed. The bandit bucked and rolled off the girl, howling and trying to reach around himself, twisting from side to side.

Now the danger was not halved, but doubled. The mud-man stood abruptly, seeing Dag at last, and dragged the girl up in front of his torso as a shield. His height and her shortness thwarted his intent; Dag sent his next shaft toward the creature’s calf. It was a glancing hit, but stung. The mud-man leaped.

Did this one have enough wits to threaten his prisoner in order to stop Dag?

Dag didn’t wait to find out. Lips drawn back in a fierce grin, he drew his war knife and pelted forward. Death was in his stride.

The mud-man saw it; fear flashed in that sullen, lumpy face. With a panicked heave, he tossed the crying girl toward Dag, turned, and fled.

Bow still encumbering his left arm, the knife in his right hand, Dag had no way to catch her. The best he could do was fling his arms wide so that she wasn’t stabbed or battered. He lost his skidding balance on her impact, and they both went down in a tangle.

For a moment, she was on top of him, her breath knocked out, her body’s softness squashed onto his. She inhaled, made a strained squeaking noise, yanked herself up, and began clawing at his face. He tried to get out words to calm her, but she wouldn’t let him; finally he was forced to let go of his weapon and just fling her off. With two live enemies still on the ground, he would have to deal with her next. He rolled away, snatched up his knife again, and surged to his feet.

The mud-man had scrambled back up on the bandit’s horse. He yanked the beast’s head around and tried to ride Dag down. Dag dodged, started to flip his knife around for a throw, thought better of it, dropped it again, reached back to his now-twisted-around quiver, and drew one of his few remaining arrows. Nocked, aimed.

No.

Let the creature keep running, back to the lair. Dag could pick up those tracks again if he had to. One wounded prisoner would test the limits of what he could handle right now. A prisoner who was, most definitely, going to be made to talk.

The horse vanished up the faint trail leading out of the clearing that paralleled the course of a nearby creek. Dag lowered the bow and looked around. The human bandit too had disappeared, but for once, tracking was not going to be any trouble. Dag pointed to the girl, now standing up a few yards away and struggling to readjust her torn blue dress. “Stay there.” He followed the blood trail.

Past a screen of saplings and brush lining the clearing, the splashes grew heavier. By the boulders of the creek a figure lay prone and silent in a red puddle, trousers about his knees, Dag’s arrow clutched in his hand.

Too still. Dag set his teeth. The man had evidently tried to drag the maddening shaft out of his flesh by main force, and must have ripped open an artery doing so. That wasn’t a killing shot, blight it! Wasn’t supposed to be. Good intentions, where have we met before? Dag balanced himself and shoved the body over with one foot. The pale unshaven face looked terribly young in death, even shadowed as it was by dirt. No answers now to be squeezed from this one; he had reached the last of all betrayals.

“Absent gods. More children. Is there no end to them?” Dag muttered.

He looked up to see the woman-child standing a few paces back along the blood trail, staring at them both. Her eyes were huge and brown, like a terrified deer’s. At least she wasn’t screaming anymore. She frowned down at her late assailant, and an unvoiced Oh ghosted from her tender, bitten lips. A livid bruise was starting up one side of her face, scored with four parallel red gouges. “He’s dead?”

“Unfortunately. And unnecessarily. If he’d just lain still and waited for help, I’d have taken him prisoner.”

She looked him up, and up, and down, fearfully. The top of her dark head, were they standing closer, would come just about to the middle of his chest, Dag judged. Self-consciously, he tucked his bow-hand down by his side, half out of sight around his thigh, and sheathed his knife.

“I know who you are!” she said suddenly. “You’re that Lakewalker patroller I saw at the well-house!”

Dag blinked, and blinked again, and let his groundsense, shielded from the shock of this death, come up again. She blazed in his perceptions. “Little Spark!

What are you doing so far from your farm?”