Something is wrong!
Her heart pounded; she was drenched in sweat. She sat shivering in her bedroll in the gray light of pre-dawn. She grounded herself and reinforced her shields, then sent out searching tendrils.
There was nothing nearby. Nothing. But the terror was as palpable while she was awake as it had been in her dreams.
Where is this coming from?
Wolves howled in the distance, the echoes ringing up the valleys from far down into the lowerland.
Lowerland? Where the village is? Why?! In the winter, when they have no food, when the cold and ice force them out of the wilds toward the flocks, of course they migrate toward the village—but in the midst of the most abundant spring in years?
Something
was
wrong.
Faia shivered again.
Faljon says, "A goose on the grave/means that grain has grown there." That is all it is—bad dreams, the wolves hunting an animal that has fled downland, every bit of it is my nervousness.
Still, she pulled off the necklace that her mother had given her and slipped the wolf talisman off it. She ran the chain through her fingers. The chain was an old piece, a
kordaus
or scrying cord her mother had used for years, decorated with thirty-three round, incised beads of varying types of stone, bone, wood, and metal, no two alike. Faia could feel the reassuring tingle of power in it. She closed her eyes and calmed herself, while the beads slipped across her fingertips with soothing steadiness.
One caught, and the comforting rhythm ceased. She opened her eyes and looked at it.
Black iron. Disease.
She winced, then closed her eyes again, centered, breathed deeply, reached inside herself.
Click, click, tick, clack, stop.
Red-stained clay. Death.
Faia's hands began to tremble. One final time, she began her rounds of the beads, begging for the reversing bead, for some sign that things were as they should be.
Click, tick, click, click, tink, click... stop.
Polished white shell.
—Home!—
And the wolfsong echoed up from the lowerlands, foreboding, deadly.
Goddess of Life, what am I to do?! The lambs are too young to take all the way back to the village yet—and I could be reading this wrong, or it could mean nothing, even yet, except the reflections of my own fears. That I read disease and death at home could be meaningless. Sometimes, after all, the beads do not work—at least not for me.
Faia shivered, trying to decipher the import of the wolfsong in the valley. Knowing the languages of animals was not among her talents.
Then inspiration struck. Baward had planned to leave Bright a week after she left, moving his flock of goats along a harder, faster route to the Haddar Pass pasture so that they would meet there. She and her flock were only two days from Haddar Pass.
With Baward would come information—and, she hoped, peace of mind.
She held that thought close to her heart and tried to banish her anxieties.
He is three days late. That can only mean he is not coming.
She sat nestled between the two sheltering stones, her wide-brimmed hat covering her neck, her
erda
staked like a tent over her. Both dogs crowded in beside her, understanding that their duty was temporarily suspended. Diana and the sheep and their lambs huddled miserably, their backs to the wind and the blowing, chill rain that gusted and spattered in erratic torrents. As long as the weather held, they would not go anywhere by choice. A tattered gray cloak of mist hid them from view at intervals, then parted to reveal them still in the same stodgy clumps, commiserating with each other. When the fog hid them for too long, Faia Searched to check their positions, drawing the power of the earth into her and linking with the flock. With her eyes closed, she could see the bright glow of each sheep, a glow that meant life.
Faia peered through the early twilight, still praying to the Lady that Baward would arrive. But when she Searched for him and his flock, which should have made a huge glow to her mind's eye if he were anywhere near, there was nothing but darkness.
He has been detained by the birthing of his flocks, or some sickness among the beasts. A wolf attack. Nothing serious. Or he forgot the time we agreed upon.
The excuses didn't ring true.
Come morning, lambs or no lambs, I am going home.
Several lambs died in the forced march, and the ewes dropped weight, fretted, balked. A mountain lion attacked, and won a weary ewe from Faia, at the price of one of his eyes. Her body ached, the dogs complained—and the premonitions never left her.
But if the return trip was bad, her first sight of Bright was worse.
From the hilltop on which she had last stood long weeks ago, she saw the village frozen in the cool, brilliant sunshine—the dark, blank eyes of houses stared vacantly at each other from across lifeless streets. She heard the silence that told of a smithy stilled, children hushed, farmers leaving all the fields for fallow, the market closed.
No smoke
, her nose told her. Not from the cottages, not from the baker's ovens, neither from the kilns nor the washers' fires nor the dyeing vats; not from cookfires. But the air
was
scented—the reek was heavy and cloying; sweet, putrid.
Deathstench.
And on the cobblestone streets and in the pastures, Faia's eyes registered still forms. Unrecognizable, they lay scattered in piles of red and gray, bloated, tattered, with gleams of white.
Then the sheep clustered together, bleating terror, and huge dark monsters shot from the edges of the forest, and for a while Faia could not ponder the meaning of the motionless village.
The attack was not wolf madness, but wolf boldness. They had come, had taken what they wanted without challenge, and they had grown confident. Now they wanted her sheep.
Now they wanted her.
The sheep—stupid sheep—scattered in a dozen directions. A few made it to the woods intact; more, as they broke from the flock, were hamstrung or gutted or had their throats ripped out. Diana, poor old goat, stood her ground, horns slashing, and cloven hooves flying, but she was overpowered, too. The dogs darted and blurred, flashes of black and white amid the bulk of gray—and first Faia saw Chirp die, with his neck crushed between one wolf's massive jaws, then Huss screamed, and Faia saw her, her teeth still latched to a big bitch's throat, with her belly opened and her guts dragging in the dirt.
The pack leader, silver-tipped-black and immense, faced Faia and strode stiff-legged forward; head down, ears flat back, pale, cold eyes gleaming. His lips drew back from yellowed teeth. He rumbled a warning growl as he advanced.
She clutched her staff, and her belly tightened with fear. There was no time to reach for the slingshot and the studded wolfshot. She made a quick thrust at the beast with her walking stick that caught him in the teeth. He danced back, and crouched for a leap, his eyes fixed on her throat.
Lady, help me!
Faia drew the earth's energy, thinking it into her staff, thinking,
Give the staff strength!
And somehow, she was outside of herself, and staring down at the massive black wolf and the tall, rangy girl who faced him off with nothing but a brass-tipped walking stick.
At the same instant, she was inside herself, and the strength was there—earth-strength, Lady-strength, confidence. Faia, stilled inside, deadly calm, swung the staff up as the wolf lunged and caught him across the chest; the impact of his great weight flung her backward a staggered step. But light flowed from the staff around the wolf, blazing green fire. The wolf screamed, its voice for a moment disconcertingly human. Then he crumpled to the ground and was still—unmarked, stone dead.
At the scream, the other wolves vanished into the forest, disappearing like the memories of shadows.
And Faia was left with the remains of her flock—clumps of white and bloody red—and the mangled goat, and the dogs, two motionless bundles with ripped and dirty fur that blew in the chill wind. And below her lay the village.
Her feet moved slower and slower as she approached her cottage. The stench, which had only blown in suggestive eddies to the top of the hill, was inescapable in the sheltered valley. Faia took two of her scarves and wrapped them around her face. The wolves had been at the village. Carcasses of horses and cattle lay on the road and in the street, Baward's goats in their pen, all their bellies ripped and tattered, the entrails gone, decay well set in. All of them lay where they had fallen, while vultures glared at her as she passed and flapped their wings in threat. She abandoned the idea of making any attempt to clean the carcasses up. And as she drew closer, she could see things that had not shown up from the hill. Rats were everywhere. Doors hung partway open, and flies roiled out of them—the sound of the village was the sound of flies.
Faia's own door was closed, and that gave her hope. She opened it, and inside, things were in order. There were no flies; the deathstench was muted and obviously not coming from the house. Sunlight filtered through the oilskin windows onto the table where Mama's healing bag lay, empty of supplies. There was no fire in the fireplace, but the wood was laid by the side, ready to start. And Mama had some weaving spread out.
"Mama?" Faia called, walking across the main room toward the weaving. "Mama, are you here?"
Then Faia studied the weaving more closely, and bit back panic.
It is the same piece she was working on when I left, and there is almost nothing done!
And her eyes admitted to the other details she'd been denying. Dust coated the tables, the plates that lay out—every single surface in the two-room cottage.
Her throat ached, and her eyes began to burn.
"Mama?" she whispered, and walked into the bedroom.
Her mother's bed was neatly made, her clothes lay stacked in precisely squared piles on the rocking chair, where her mother
never
left clothes, and on the clothes pegs, everything was present except for her mother's red celebratory dress. Both her house shoes and her boots were stacked under the pegs.
What do you have on your feet, Mama?
Faia's pulse began to roar in her ears.
She turned and began running, screaming "MAMA!" as loudly as she could. She flew outside and around the house and down toward the shed and her mother's garden.
She has to be in the shed
, Faia told herself.
Mama has to be in the shed.
But that was not where Faia found her mother.
The earth was still soft, still unsettled over the grave on the hillside, and garlands of flowers, now withered, lay in disarray. Faia studied the wood plaque with blurred eyes, fighting belief.
Those are her symbols. The healer's wand, the weaver's shuttle, the mother's circles.
And though Faia couldn't read the words painted underneath, she knew what they said.
Risse Leyeadote.
"Mama," Faia whispered, and knelt in the soft earth of the grave, and wrapped her arms around herself to fight back the tears. "Oh, Mama—I did not come back in time. I did not get back... Mama..." And then she collapsed, and lay stretched in the dirt on her mother's grave, as close as she would ever be to her mother again.
It was much later that she was able to pull herself away from the grave to walk through the village. The reek of decay was worse in some places—and finally, timidly, Faia entered her sister's home. The smell was horrible, and flies were so thick she hit scores of them every time she waved her hands to keep them out of her eyes. She pulled the scarves tighter around her nose and mouth.
Inside, the beds held the family—though Faia had a hard time recognizing them. A few days dead and badly bloated, with skin gray and edging into the bruised purple of decay, they bore the marks of agonizing disease. She could make out the mottling of pustules and open sores on each of them—Kasara; her bondmate Sjeffan; Liete, their oldest son; Vaurn, the toddler. The splashed brown of vomited blood stained the floor. All lay clutching their stomachs.
Plague!
Faia fled the cottage, bile burning in her throat. She pulled the scarves away from her mouth and vomited, then leaned weakly against the house. "Dead. All of them—Mama, Kasara, the kids, and surely my brothers, too, or these would have been buried...."
Unbidden, an image rose up in her mind—a pale, gaunt, coughing man with his face covered in red spots—
Not pimples, but Plague!
—the man she had passed the day she left Bright for the highlands.
He killed all of them,
she realized, and knew then that her mother would have been one of the first to die.
Mama would have tended to him, even once she knew he had Plague; would have tended to the rest of the village, too, as long as she could have. She probably could have isolated him, too, and prevented most of the deaths—except that the man was a trader, and the winter had been hard and boring and lonely for the villagers; and a little amusement, a little interest, a new face, must have exposed most of Bright to the stranger before it became apparent that he brought disease.
So Mama, exposed early and a lot, died early. At least she had a grave,
Faia thought.
At least she was spared the indignity of rotting in her bed, like the rest of my family.
Faia shuddered as the eyes of rats studied her with speculative hunger, calculating—waiting. She flinched at the hum and buzz of the flies, at the patient smiles of the vultures. She wanted out of Bright, to be well and far away. But hope had not entirely deserted her.
Has anyone survived?
she wondered.
She closed her eyes and Searched, sending desperate tendrils to the farthest corners of the village. At first, she got nothing but the dim backglow that indicated the rats, insects, cats and birds who had inherited the village. But on the far side of Bright, past the baker's ovens, she finally picked up a solitary glow, unmoving but still blazing yellow with life. And she, who thought her heart had died from despair, felt a final surge of hope.