Glimpses: A Collection of Nightrunner Short Stories Page 6

  ***

  Ireya stayed with him for nearly a week, hunting in the daytime and making love to him by night, then disappeared as she always did, returning just before the food ran out.

  “I’m going to marry you, Ireya,” he whispered to her as they lay together one night. “You’re going to be my wife.” He wove his fingers with hers. “Do you understand? Leave with me?”

  She looked down at him and their joined hands, then laughed and kissed him. “My talí.”

  By the time she left this time, he was well enough to go out and watch her trudge away. Her snowshoes sank deep in the glistening fresh powder and kicked up little puffs of it as she disappeared up the slope toward a small pass between two jagged peaks. There must be a town up there somewhere. Next time she went back, he meant to go with her.

  But when she came back again, she wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, the subject quite clearly scared her. “No, no! Kill you.”

  “Ireya kill me?” he asked, certain he wasn’t understanding her.

  She shook her head, then took up the sharp stick they used and drew a figure and pointed to herself. That was her. Then she quickly scratched out four more the same size with bows, and two larger ones. Pointing to the four, she told him, “Mine. They kill!” and poked him in the chest with her finger.

  Her people would kill him. For the first time in weeks, he thought of all those stories he’d heard. Why had she befriended him, if it went against the ways of her people?

  “All right, then,” he sighed. “No go. You leave with me when my arm is mended.”

  She kissed him for that, but her eyes were sad. He didn’t have the words to ask her why.

  ***

  The bear came several more times that summer, and Alec’s father hunted it but came back empty handed each time. Winter came, and the bear went to sleep under the snow as it always did. His father always seemed happier in the winter, even though life was harder. They set their traps and sold the skins of the muskrat, otter, mink and fisher in the towns.

  But summer came again, and with it the bear.

  His father took Alec back to the Coney, where the boy earned his keep sweeping and working in the garden and stables for Carsi, the innkeeper. In return he was allowed to sleep with her two young sons, who were a little older than he was, in their little airless room under the eaves, where the mice rustled through the thatch close overhead each night.

  The boys, Ors and Olum, played with him when he wasn’t busy. They went berrying in the forest meadows, and fishing and swimming in the river. He enjoyed it, but began to worry about his father. He’d never been gone this long before.

  ***

  There was only one rider this year, the tall leader Amasa had seen before. The Hâzadriëlfaie was a cagey man, and it was clear he knew he was being stalked even as he stalked Amasa.

  When Amasa did find a safe place to sleep, he dreamt of Ireya and what had happened that long ago spring. The last time she came to him in that cave had been a few weeks after the splint came off. They made love in the musky furs and then she began to cry. When he begged her to tell him why, she took his hand and placed it on her belly. The message was clear enough.

  “Baby?” he asked, throat tight with emotion. A child!

  “Yes,” she whispered, weeping. “Kill. They will kill!”

  “Kill the baby?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you have to come away with me. Leave with me!”

  She rested her head on his broad chest and nodded. “Leave with Amasa.”

  But the next morning she was gone again.

  He never knew if she’d changed her mind or gotten caught going back for more supplies. It didn’t matter. He was strong enough now to track her, and he did, all the way up a side pass so narrow he could hardly squeeze through, to a huge valley beyond. There were scattered stone cottages and farms all the way up its length, to what looked like a town in the distance, perhaps Fay Tast, as she’d said to him that first day. Looking down from the heights, he could see riders and carts on roads, and when he crept down through the forest for a closer look, he saw they all wore the same blue-and-white head cloth—sen’gai, Ireya called it.

  He had no intention of being killed before he found her, so he skulked for weeks like a wolf in the night and finally caught sight of her in the yard of an isolated farmstead not far from the narrow pass. He watched for days, but she was never out of the cottage without an escort—brothers, most likely. At night she slept in a room with iron bars on the window.

  He crept to her window late one night and scratched softly at the shutter. Her face appeared there an instant later and the look she gave him was one of horror.

  She reached out through the bars for his hand. “Leave!” she whispered frantically.

  “No. Not without you!”

  “They kill you, Amasa. They kill me! You leave!”

  “I’ll kill them!”

  Her hand tightened on his. “No, Amasa. No kill mine!”

  He could tell by her tone that she would never forgive him if he killed her kin, even to help her. “Do they know about me?”

  “No,” she whispered. “They wait, to see the baby.”

  “To see if it’s Tír.” He’d learned that word, the one that meant ‘outsider.’ “And when they do?”

  “Leave,” she pleaded softly, but he could see tears shining in her eyes as she turned away and closed the shutters.

  But Amasa didn’t. He came back night after night, but her answer was always the same. The bars were set in mortared stone. There was no getting her out that way, so he could only skulk and keep watch and bide his time.

  Never once was she allowed further than the well, and not once alone. He’d come to recognize the four brothers, and the parents who lived with them. As spring gave way to summer Amasa narrowly evaded the brothers time and again and watched Ireya’s belly grow round and heavy under her long tunics.

  On a warm summer night the sound of a woman crying out in pain drifted up the hill to where he sheltered in the trees. Creeping down, he found too many people out in the yard to get to the window, but as the cries continued, he guessed that his child was being born, here, among his enemies. He sat in the tall grass at the edge of the forest, keeping his lonely vigil among the crickets and weeping for them both.

  He was there when the sun came up, and saw Ireya slip from the silent house with a tiny bundle in her arms. Her feet were bare, her skirt bloody, her face a mask of desperation. She was making in his direction and saw him when he started down to meet her. She waved him back to the trees as she ran through the meadow and up the slope toward him. She was nearly to Amasa when her brothers came riding after her with bows.

  Reaching him, Ireya thrust the swaddled infant into his arms and gasped, “Leave! Leave, talí!”

  And before he could stop her, she turned and ran back the way she’d come, arms thrown wide, as if she could stop the arrows from finding him. Amasa watched in horror as she fell, then turned and bolted for the narrow pass. All he could see of the tiny babe in the swaddling was a red little face and eyes as blue as his own.

  ***

  Amasa tracked his Hâzadriëlfaie hunter that summer, and his hunter tracked him. It was only a matter of time until one of them won the contest.

  The Maker must have known Amasa’s sorrow and taken pity on him. It was the month of Ireya’s murder when, one morning just before dawn, he met his pursuer face to face. Amasa was not helpless and unarmed today, as he had been seven years ago.

  The Hâzadriëlfaie man was mounted, and couldn’t get his bow up in time before Amasa shot him through the lungs. Slumping over his horse’s neck, the man kicked the beast into a gallop and tried to escape through the trees.

  The blood trail was easily followed for a tracker like Amasa. He found a bloody bow on the ground at midmorning, and a discarded pack soon after. Just as the sun tipped down from noon, he found the man dying on the ground in a small clearing, horse nowhere in sight.


  Bow drawn, Amasa came closer. The man eyed him calmly, though he must have known he was looking at his own death. “You do not understand what you do,” he whispered with the same accent Ireya had had. His lips were foamed pink with lung blood, his chin crusted with it. “The child—” More blood bubbled from the corner of his mouth as he tried to speak. “Cannot be—”

  “The child is,” Amasa growled.

  “More will come—”

  Pain and hatred and old, old sorrow boiled in Amasa’s heart as he spat in the man’s face, pulled his head back by the hair, and slit his throat.

  The rest of the day passed in a strange sort of fog, but when it cleared in the late afternoon he was covered in blood and a hide very much like a bear’s was nailed to a large tree, scrapped and brain-tanned. The skinned carcass hung by its heels from another tree, gathering flies.

  Let those who would come see that.

  ***

  Alec was sweeping out the stable yard when his father appeared at the gate, dressed in new clothing and thinner than the boy had ever seen him. He had a string of fox and mink pelts on his belt.

  “Papa!” Alec cried happily, running to him. “Did the bear get away again?”

  “Not this time, child.”

  “You killed it! Where’s the skin? How much can we sell it for?”

  “It was no use for selling,” his father replied. Kneeling in front of him, he held Alec by the shoulders for a moment and gazed down at him with an expression of such fondness as Alec had never seen before. Then he saw the tears in his father’s eyes.

  “What is it, Papa? What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed.

  His father smiled. “Nothing, Alec. Not a thing. Go gather your things. We have traps to set.”

  By The River

  Seregil leaned over the riverbank and examined the welt swelling across his left cheekbone. Angry eyes glared back up at him through the red and yellow leaves drifting past on the current: You’ve failed again. Failed at court. Failed at wizardry. Failed at the assassin’s craft, failed in your own birthright...Blood on your hands, but you can’t even make a dishonest living.

  He dipped his left hand in the water, blotting out that accusing stare, and held it to his sore cheek. The old saying was right: hunger was a harsh master and a poor guide. It had been stupid, trying to pick the purse of a merchant in a rat hole river town full of thieves, worse even than trying to cheat those sailors at Isil two days earlier. They’d proven a good deal more clever than they’d looked, and taken everything he had—horse, sword, money, cloak, boots—before beating him senseless and dumping him on a garbage heap outside the town walls.

  The merchant in Straightford had been clever, too. He must have paid some wandering drysian to charm his purse; the strings had tightened around Seregil’s wrist the minute he touched silver. The man had friends on the street, too, who’d been quick to come to his aid. Seregil had barely avoided another beating, and escaped by throwing himself off a bridge into the raging river that swept through the center of the town.

  He looked down at the tattered remains of the purse still clinging around his right wrist. The silken bag had torn as he fought his way to shore, and what coins it had held were lost. The charmed purse strings still bit into his flesh, too tight to pull off, and he had no knife to cut them. If he hadn’t failed at all Nysander’s lessons, he reflected sourly, he might have had the wit to break the charm.

  Then again, if I’d had any knack for magic, I wouldn’t be here, alone, barefoot and starving, in the woods at ass end of nowhere among stupid, ugly, flint-hearted Tírfaie, would I?

  He sat back on his heels and gazed around, hating this foreign landscape almost more than he hated himself at the moment. The river, the road, the thick forest on every side, it wasn’t so different from the lands of his father’s fai’thast, yet it was.

  He could go back to Rhíminee, of course; never mind all his tearful parting vows. Nysander had wept, too, when he’d left that last time, and begged him to stay, but Seregil had earned no place among wizards, only derision for his bungling.

  He probably could have a place at court again, if he was willing to humble himself; he was still Queen’s kin, despite the disgrace that dogged him. They’d find him some new menial office to fill. The debacles of his failed scribeship and Orëska apprenticeship would fade in time, and rumors about him and the prince. People wouldn’t always laugh behind their hands when he passed.

  Yes, they will.

  The autumn sun was sinking fast now and he was too exhausted to go any further. And why bother? He’d been running away for months now, not going toward anything. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d actually had a destination.

  “Piss on that!” he growled aloud. He drank some water to calm his empty belly, then looked around for shelter. Nothing in particular presented itself, so he hobbled up the hillside to a copse and hunkered down against the sunny side of a fir tree, trying to find a comfortable angle between the roots. The sun was almost touching the distant mountain tops. The gentle breeze was going cold and finding the rents in his ragged coat and breeches. Shivering, he pulled a foot up on his thigh and gingerly picked at a sharp stone lodged in his heel. The bottoms of his feet were filthy and covered in small scratches and cuts. As a child he wandered the forests of Bôkthersa on bare feet well callused and tough, but those days were long gone.

  Better for you to have taken that boatman’s offer in Isil, the mocking voice in his head went on. At least you’d be under a roof. He’d probably even have stood you a tavern meal after, if you’d played him right ...

  A wave of despair washed over him. Not for the first time, he wondered why he hadn’t done as the others had years ago: filled his pockets with ballast stones and thrown himself overboard that first day of exile, when his homeland slipped away under the horizon behind the ship.

  The glint of sun on water winked at him through the trees below. There was nothing to stop him from doing it now, except that he was too cold, too tired, and too miserable to muster the energy it would take to walk back down to the bank and throw himself in.

  ***

  He must have nodded off. Otherwise a Tírfaie would never have gotten as close as this one had. As it was, he just had time to throw himself into a nearby clump of caneberry bushes before the man stepped from the trees less than twenty feet from where he’d been sitting. Scratched and shaken, Seregil peered out through the thorny stalks, watching the intruder stroll up the hill.

  The last glow of sunset was at the man’s back, casting long shadows in front of him. All Seregil could make out at first was a tall, broad-shouldered figure, with a long scabbard swinging heavily against its left hip.

  The man halted near the tree, then looked around. “Hullo?” A young, deep voice, colored by an accent Seregil couldn’t place. “Don’t be scared, girl. I won’t hurt you.”

  Girl? Seregil allowed himself a sour smile. Stupid, blind fool of a Tírfaie, just like all the others. By the Light, he was sick of the whole lot.

  All the same, this one had gotten dangerously close, and Seregil couldn’t move now without being heard. Looking quickly around, he found a fist-sized rock in reach and gripped it.

  The fellow turned slightly and the light struck his face. He was man-grown but still young by Tír reckoning. His face was strongly boned, and freckled as a trout’s sides. Coarse auburn hair hung in an unkempt mass over his shoulders. A sparse, coppery moustache drooped over the corners of his mouth and his cheeks and chin were thatched with stubble. His battered corselet and worn boots marked him as a wanderer of some sort, at best a caravan guard; at worst, a bandit.

  Harsh experience had taught Seregil something of reading faces; this man was not stupid, not at all. All the time he was gazing about, he seemed to have an ear cocked in Seregil’s direction. He knows I’m here. Seregil gripped the rock, bracing for an attack. If he could surprise the man, stun him with a well-placed blow, then he could escape, perhaps even with the swo
rd and that bundle the man had over his shoulder. He didn’t look the sort to travel without food or flints.

  But the man just stood there a moment longer, then shrugged. “Suit yourself, girl.” With that, he dropped his bundle and set about gathering sticks and tinder for a fire.

  Sprawled on the damp ground, Seregil watched with growing suspicion as the fellow struck a spark with his knife and a flint and kindled a good blaze under the tree. When it was burning well, he rummaged in his bundle and brought out a small iron pot and a few cloth-wrapped parcels. Leaving his supplies by the fire, he headed down to the river with the pot.

  It was tempting to make a dash for the supplies, but it was obviously a ruse to draw him out. Seregil stayed where he was, and presently the man came back with his pot and some green ash sticks he’d cut at the riverbank. He rigged up a fire hook with some of them and set the pot of water over the flames. Then he sharpened another stick with his knife, unwrapped the parcels, and fixed a large chunk of yellow cheese and some sausages on the stick to toast.

  Soon a mouth-watering aroma spread over the little clearing. Seregil’s stomach, empty these past two days except for river water and what little he could forage, let out a long growl.

  As if he’d heard, the man called out, “More than enough for two here, girl. From the glimpse I got of you, I’d say you could use something solid under your ribs. And a blanket, too. I won’t ask to share it with you. I swear by the Flame and the Four.”

  Seregil remained where he was, hating the man even more.