Farlanders' Law (The Rose Shield Book 3) Page 17

  Raker extracted the knife from the crajek’s carcass and waded through the ferns, the goddess floating at his side above the damp fronds like a ghost. “This one succumbed to a snake bite,” she said, hovering above the fetid corpse. “He lasted eight torturous days, swollen like a bladder.” Raker didn’t question her summary. This one too had served up a hearty meal, and they’d leave it for the insects to finish.

  Jafe scratched his scalp. “I’ll never understand your kind.”

  “Not my kind,” Raker replied. The recent influx of strangers in the deep swamp rankled him. Strays were nothing new, usually enterprising rivermen attempting to harvest the prized luminescence for the Influencers’ Guild. It proved a hazardous endeavor. If they filled their jars at the swamp’s edge, it lacked the intensity of color. If they sought the inner channels’ richer waters, no one ever saw them again.

  These forays differed. They’d encountered a handful of stragglers during Harvest, few over Winterchill and more than he cared for with the return of warmer weather. Some explored the fringes and retreated. Others followed the rafts from the tier city and poled in wide circles after their quarries before giving up. A few had wandered farther into the wet world and died, some with the help of his spear. These two had traveled close to the village.

  “Your world changes,” the goddess said as they returned to Whitt’s raft. Raker took up a pole while Jafe hunted crajeks with his spear, and Whitt scooped up river rats with a net, something he’d seen Dina do with success. The rats that once were the bane of the rafts now roasted six to a spit.

  Raker eyed her. “Nothing stays the same.”

  Jafe grunted his agreement.

  The goddess lounged on the water, her hair loose and flowing from her head like trails of stardust. The luminescence carried her along as she stretched and pouted, rose gracefully and pirouetted before him in a white mist. She twirled as the raft neared the village, and blew through him with an infusion of lust that split his face with a smile. “Don’t tempt me.”

  “What?” Whitt asked.

  “He talks to the wraiths again,” Jafe said with a shrug.

  They tied up to the other rafts, and the goddess led the way up the hummock to the cookfires. Darkest Night marked the middle of Springseed, a night of fires, feasting, and spirit tales beneath the damp canopy. Raker sat on a stump, unsheathed his knife, and dug a piece of wood from one of the many pockets adorning rafter clothing. This carving would be a crajek, easy to bite on for new teeth.

  Leena tended the fire, steering the girl away from the flames. Rose ran on chubby legs, leading with her chest and perpetually on the verge of falling on her face. “Help Whitt with the rats,” Leena said, out of patience.

  “Bit dats,” the girl said. Whitt scooped her up and tossed her in the air, eliciting squeals of laughter.

  “She laughs easily.” The goddess reclined on the ground by Raker’s feet, snaking her arm up his legs. “Remarkable considering her history. A normal child would be an anxious ruin. Yet, this one adapts.”

  “Leena and Whitt care for her.” Raker looked for Jafe. The mud-smudged rafter told stories at another fire, Mati sitting on his shoulders.

  “Hmm.” The goddess tapped her chin with a finger. “Perhaps, you are right though I am convinced it’s her gift. Imagine one hatched with natural influence, not the abomination of the tiers. One who intuitively and unconsciously sways the hearts of all she meets.”

  “What are your plans?”

  “Undecided.” She rose and curled around him. “She’s untrained. Her abilities are innate but uncultured. She’ll learn them like she learns her language, naturally and without undue effort.”

  “Is she the one they’re after?”

  The goddess craned her neck and licked his ear. “They want the child to access the mother; the queen’s influencer is their prize.” She hummed a pleased sigh. “They have no idea of this little one’s power. Observe the petty men and women playing games beyond their ken as if they rule the planet. Their reasoning is naive and grandiose at the same time.”

  Raker shrugged her off, irritated by her nonchalance and incendiary scheming. She merely coiled and unspun at his back where she wrapped her arms around him and whispered in his ear, “The mother will be Ellegeance’s downfall. The child will be the reason.”

  ***

  Whitt sat on the bank near his raft, his bare feet in the water. Springseed drifted into Summertide, and soon Harvest would gild the caliph leaves in shades of platinum and gold. The witchwood’s red canopy would deepen, and ice would lace the channels, yet for the waning season, the water remained rich with warmth and light.

  Leena drifted nearby with Mati while Raker and Jafe hunted a wild boar they’d tracked to the hummock. Rose squatted in the mud between Whitt’s knees, her toes in the water. She dipped her fingers in the luminescence, watched it retract and rush in, gathering to her skin. He’d done the same long ago at the stream above the stead with Mouser and Catling, and neither he nor Rose tired of the game.

  He loved her cleverness, how hard she worked to learn words and songs and how to do things, always aiming to copy what others did. A wisp of a child, even for an Ellegean, she tried twice as hard, diligent to the point of tantrums and tears. It occurred to him that she thought of herself as a rafter, adapted to the wet world of the swamp—the food and mud, the sway of the rafts, the wariness necessary to survive in an environment where, at her size, she was prey more than predator. He wondered when she’d notice that she wasn’t tall or spotted, white-haired and three fingered, that her eyes shone like gray steel and her ears were round.

  Her fingers poked at the water. She splashed and made a deafening screech that cleared the trees around them of birds. “Birt.” She turned to gaze at him and smiled, her nose wrinkled as she washed him with a wave of love.

  His heart melted, but he pressed his hand to his chest. “My feelings are mine.” Like a swamp-spider, his fingers crawled up her arm and tickled her neck. “Yours are yours. I love you and feel your love in my heart without your help.” She smiled and did it again. He bumped his forehead to hers. “No wonder everyone spoils you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Whitt,” Jafe murmured behind him.

  Whitt shifted into a crouch and picked up Rose, a finger to her lips. He hopped from the bank to his raft, then to Leena’s and deposited Rose in the central pen. “Take them to the village.” Leena nodded, placed Mati beside Rose, and snatched up her pole. Whitt slashed through the bindings holding the rafts together and gave Leena’s craft a shove.

  “A boat.” Jafe twisted and pointed with his spear. Raker edged among the trees farther up the hummock, the black patch covering his ruined eye deepening a baleful scowl.

  Whitt grabbed his weapon and followed them up the slope. On the other side, they waded through a channel and traversed an island of soggy earth and snaking roots. Jafe aimed ahead with two fingers. Whitt crept forward and pressed himself against an arbor of caliph roots. He peered around a massive bole at the boat tethered to an overhanging branch. A lone man sat on the center thwart, gaze riveted on the crajek lurking off the bow. This time it wasn’t Colton.

  A staff cracked and thumped. Jafe bellowed. Whitt spun and ducked. A knife arced at his face, the swing high and slow. His arm snapped up, knocking the thrust aside as he stepped in and slammed his staff into his assailant’s jaw. Raker knocked the man’s legs out from beneath him and shouted a warning.

  Whitt whirled, bringing his staff around. It thunked into a towering root, jarring his arm. The fellow from the boat clambered up the bank, his dagger mirroring a flash of sunlight. Whitt twisted into the open, free of the root’s entanglements. He swept his staff into ready position confident with his overwhelming reach. The man circled left, eyes flickering to the fight beyond Whitt’s shoulder. A trained guardian, Whitt knew the trick and resisted the urge to look. Ready for the charge, he whipped his staff around and pounded a hip. It flipped up under the man’s expos
ed chin and snapped around for another crack that missed when his attacker staggered backward into the channel.

  Wild-eyed, the man scrambled to the bank. Whitt thrust the butt of his weapon into the unprotected chest. The man half-yelled and half-pleaded as he splashed to his back into the glittering water. He rolled to his hands and knees and clawed at the mud, his knife lost. “Don’t,” he yelled at Whitt’s raised staff. “Please.”

  Whitt stepped back. The crajek in the water waited. “How many of you?”

  The man didn’t have time to answer.

  “More coming,” Raker shouted. “Go.”

  From the hummock’s western edge, another five men threaded through the trees and brush, two with bows. Raker and Jafe had three muddy fighters groaning at their feet, and one bled a river from a gash to his groin. A scream spun him again as a powerful set of jaws dragged the man on the bank into the channel.

  “Run,” Raker shouted.

  No third order required, Whitt charged after Raker and Jafe, his feet squelching in the sodden soil. They loped to the island’s other side and traversed the channel. “Warn the village,” Raker said, turning to hold the enemy at the water.

  “No! Keep moving!” Whitt yelled. “They have bows.” An arrow flew between them, rustling the undergrowth’s leaves. A second rapped into a tree. He bounded up the bank with Raker, hard on Jafe’s heels, vaulting roots and weaving between the witchwood. “We should split, run them in circles.” An arrow sliced into the ground. “Lose them in the swamp.”

  No need to reply, Jafe and Rake split off to his left and right. Whitt plowed through the ferns, leapt from the bank where his raft drifted and landed in waist high water. He slogged to the opposite side well before the crajeks could swim him down, struggled up the bank, and threw himself over a log to catch his breath and listen.

  His pursuers paused at the channel, murmuring about directions, the stirred up mud in the luminescence, and the probable presence of predators. Whitt crawled on his belly, came face to face with a snake as thick as his wrist, and froze. He slinked backward into a squat and slowly raised his staff, pushing the triangular head aside. The snake twitched and coiled. He positioned his free hand and snapped, grasping the creature below its jaws. Before it curled around his hand, he yanked it from the ferns, stood, and flung it toward the men. It splashed into the channel. He bolted across the hummock and swung south. He would lead them, lose them, and they would die before discovering a way out.

  The sky mellowed into plum ribbons by the time he reached the floating village and found Raker digging a barbed arrow out of Jafe’s thigh with his bone-handled knife. The pain had to teeter on unbearable, but Jafe limited his complaints to an occasional wince. Rose sat on his chest, cooing and leaning forward to give him kisses. Leena looked up at Whitt and nodded. Influence.

  This once, he would let the girl play with her natural talent. How could he discourage her impulse to ease pain? If only the whole world were so tender.

  When Raker pulled the arrowhead free, Leena filled the wound with rich luminescence and wrapped it in camgras cloth. Whitt held Rose on his lap, and they ate of their cold supplies, a fire too risky. The entire village shared the tension, vigilant and hushed.

  “She says you should go south.” Raker sat on his crate, whittling something new with long, careful strokes.

  “Leena or the river?” Whitt asked.

  “She knows more than we. Three men escaped the swamp and more will return. They won’t wait for another Winterchill to pass.”

  “The Far Wolds are equally dangerous, and I’m a fugitive. I can’t keep Rose safe there.”

  Raker removed his eye patch and rubbed the hollow socket. “They’re coming with a larger force. They don’t seek us; they seek her.” He replaced the patch and turned his rafter’s green eye on Whitt. “She says the Farlanders need you in the south, and you will risk everything and everyone if you stay.”

  “What does she know about the trouble there?” He didn’t believe Raker invented his wraith, but the man’s sanity was questionable at the best of times. “How does she know?”

  Raker’s gaze drifted to the glowing water and the fog shuffling between the trees. “She’s not the river, Whitt.” He leaned forward and whispered, “She’s the planet.”

  ***

  Raker delivered Whitt and Rose south to the end of the flat swamp. A day’s climb through eldergreen forests brought them to the waystation at the convergence of the Slipsilver and Blackwater. Whitt purchased fare up the Blackwater on a barge delivering bales of camgras for processing into oil, common cloth, paper, and fermented brews.

  Rose spent most of her traveling time on his back in a pack he’d crafted from flexible vines that stiffened as they dried. He’d lined it with soft hides that he’d painstakingly stitched together, ragged work but effective. She wore Mati’s lynx hide-all, and though too large for her, it kept her cozy from head to toe. She peered out over his head, fists gripped in his hair, occasionally soaking him in drool. When on the loose, she rewarded the crew’s smiles and punished frowns, pouting when Whitt admonished her. She knew better than to use her influence on him.

  He purchased supplies in the Mur-Vallis market but chose not to linger and headed into the countryside before dusk fell. The night skies brightened with each passing day as the moons waxed and the season waned. Harvest ambled closer, and this far south, the cold winds breathed through the trees. Snow often raced Winterchill down from the Fangwold… and won.

  This time, he trekked closer to the old stead, near enough for a view from a ledge where the pewter needles of eldergreen parted. The place looked in good repair, the roofs whole and forest cut back. Someone had tended the garden and planted terran apple trees, but the pens that once sheltered Scuff’s piglings were in disrepair.

  He wondered if old Abbett still lived, if his neighbor thought he might return, if whoever lived and worked the farm would claim it as their own. He wouldn’t blame them or argue the right to do so. For a long time, he stood there, missing his family. A gentle trickle of happiness filtered into his consciousness, and he shook his head. “My feelings are mine,” he said, though he appreciated the gesture.

  “Ose down,” Rose said. “Down, Bit.”

  “Not yet. Soon.” He turned and hiked into the foothill’s tall timberland.

  They camped at the cliff’s base, and Whitt lay awake most of the night, staring blankly at the moons that bathed the land in pearly light and fretting about the morning’s treacherous climb. Rose curled into his side, her mouth open, little body wiggling and kicking in her sleep. Did she miss the subtle sway of the raft or hammock? The security of Leena’s care and Mati’s companionship? She seemed content with his company, and he liked that.

  Come morning, he rolled their supplies in a blanket and tied it closed with a long length of rope intending to pull it up after him. He tied the free end to his belt and took his time scaling the slope of loose rock, holding on with his hands and testing each foot before trusting it with his weight. Rose sat quietly in her pack on his back as he narrated their progress, an effort to comfort her that he found equally comforting.

  When he reached the ledge, he heaved the blanket up, hand over hand. “One down, two to go.” He looked up at the hand and foot holds.

  “Ose, down, Bit.”

  He chuckled and pointed. “Rose up.”

  “Down.”

  “First up, then down.” He put his hands and his right foot into the first holes and lifted, his left foot seeking the next hold. His hand reached up, and a wave of terror rushed through him. He grabbed the rock and hung on, dizzy and afraid to move, words fleeing his head. He extended his toes downward, slowly, terrified he’d fall, though all reason told him the ledge lay inches away. The fear dissipated, replaced by pleasure, and his foot touched stone. He leaned his forehead on the rock wall and breathed. He was in big trouble.

  “My feelings are mine,” he said gently. “No influencing.”

  Fear a
nd sadness filtered through his skin.

  “Happy feelings today,” he suggested in a cheery voice. “You can make me happy as much as you wish.”

  “Down. Bit, down.”

  “No, Whitt and Rose have to climb up.”

  “Down, down.” She began to cry, and her misery washed over him like a drenching rain. Reaching behind his ear, he stroked the little face. His choices ran from bad to worse. He couldn’t get her drunk or knock her on the head. For half an insane heartbeat, he considered tying her up, leaving her on the ledge, and hoisting her up after him. A terrible idea.

  If he recalled correctly, the problem with influence—or advantage, depending on one’s perspective—was that as long as an influencer could see him, she could share her distress. So, what if she couldn’t see him? Covering her head or blindfolding her wouldn’t work. He could turn her around in the pack and hope for the best or walk around the mountains.

  “Here we go.” He slipped off the pack and propped it against the rock wall. She smiled as he lifted her up and hugged her. Then he quickly repositioned her so she faced the rock and wrestled her wriggling legs back in through the holes.

  “No, no, no, no, Ose down.” She threw her head back and wailed.

  “Happy feelings,” he instructed and sighed. At least, it worked. Out of her line of sight, he avoided her anger, fear, and misery. Otherwise, he’d have already jumped to his death. He squatted and hooked his arms through the straps. “We’re going to do this as fast as we can. I’ll tell you a story.”

  He started up the wall, telling a story about loose pigs wrecking a Brightest Night supper, food flying up in the air, and a skinny girl named Rose dancing in a white shirt that hung to her knees like a dress. He ignored the other Rose who hung off his back looking down at the precipitous fall and screaming.

  ***

  Brightest night waxed and waned, heralding the onset of Harvest, and the mountains welcomed the change of seasons with a frosting of snow. He passed their sack of supplies from one hand to the other and ambled through the forest beside a white and wild cascade. Rose demanded stories, her nose and cheeks pink with cold. He’d told her all the true tales of his life, all Wenna and Zadie’s fanciful romances and fairy tales, and then invented his own silly narratives that half the time didn’t make any sense.