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The Hunt (Shery, Tallys, Halek's Story)
🕑 Added 2023-09-30 00:41:23 +0000 UTC[Content warning: discussions of animal death, non-explicit and non-gory discussions of animal sacrifice, mentions of blood and violence]
Part IV: Wildheart
Shery had never told anyone, but she’d once entertained notions about becoming a healer.
Not a magical Healer with a capital H, of course, but someone who worked in an infirmary, assisting physickers, perhaps, dressing wounds and nursing patients back to health after the main procedures had been completed.
The idea had been suggested to her a few times in her youth, in fact. Teachers and priests noticed her humble, caring nature, her comforting presence, her gentleness and attention to detail. At first, they’d thought she could be an animal tender: she was diligent about caring for the classroom rabbits in their hutch in the schoolyard, and it brought her quiet delight to feed and groom them: it was far more calming work than mingling with the loud, strident chaos her schoolmates represented. But there were many animals that frightened her, too—dogs and horses chief among them—and there wasn’t much money in rabbit farming alone. Later, the augurs of her local church had watched her distributing bread to the poor, helping apply salves and balms to people suffering from fever and ague, and they had commended her composure: she wasn’t like “the other girls,” they’d commented, the ones who’d flinched away or made faces of revulsion and disgust when asked to change some beggar’s grimy bandages. She showed a surprising lack of fear in those situations. And she was good at sewing, which translated to suturing. Perhaps she ought to become a nurse.
Of course, the whole notion was silly, she’d decided later. Real medical work wouldn’t always be demurely dabbing sweat away from a patient’s forehead, or changing their dressings while they sat calmly on a hospital cot, docile and meek as a lamb. It would involve a lot of high-intensity emergencies, being screamed and bawled at by other people—doctors, patients, their terrified loved ones—while working with blood and guts and infected wounds. It would involve keeping her head cool under fire, following orders and thinking logically while literally staring death in the face. It would involve losing patients—some suddenly, some not so suddenly—and a lot of heartbreak and grief.
None of which she was remotely good at.
Still, when she saw the Elven Keeper Clarin collapsing to the ground with a fount of blood sprouting from her neck, Shery didn’t think about any of this. She simply scrambled blindly forward and got to work.
Tallys would be much better at this, she thought to herself, almost absently, as she tore long strips from her skirt to form a kind of compress. But Tallys was—she didn’t know where Tallys was.
The wound wasn’t as bad as it looked (she thought; she hoped): it hadn’t damaged Clarin’s throat or esophagus, it hadn’t nicked the important artery. It was as if she’d been snagged with a glancing blow from a claw or a hooked blade, having twisted to the side at the last minute. So she could be saved—but she needed to apply pressure to stem the bleeding. “This will hurt,” Shery told the Elf, who looked at her with mute, confused green-gray eyes. Clarin nodded weakly. Her eyes were glazed, but at least she was still conscious.
Above them both, something horrifying was happening, but Shery didn’t dare to look up from where she knelt in the courtyard mud. The sounds were terrible—Halek snarling, the great black cloud (a coalescing demon?) roaring in kind, the shriek of metal and a tangle of ichor and spear and flesh and perhaps even teeth ringing out in periodic clashes. Shery had seen the blank, mad look in Halek’s eyes as he’d charged past them; either his blood-rage had taken over, or the wolf had, or both. He was not in control of himself at the moment. But hopefully he’d be able to keep the Endarkened busy while she tended to Clarin.
After what seemed an eternity of keeping her gaze focused on Clarin’s face, on the Keeper’s wound as the blood slowed to a sluggish trickle beneath the wad of cloth, the noise and clamor of the Hunter’s battle moved away. Shery only managed to look up when someone—the female barkeeper from the inn—dropped to her knees beside her and said, “What do you need?”
Shery’s hands were trembling as she pressed them against Clarin’s neck. She said, steadily enough, “Do you have a physicker in town?”
The barkeeper nodded. “I sent one of my boys to get her.” She glanced down at Clarin and said, “What happened to her?”
“I d-don’t know. I was talking to one of the merchants by the stable, and she s-suddenly came out of Elizora’s cottage… Th-there was something materializing above her—I think it attacked her—”
The spellbooks, Shery thought then. If Elizora Thackery had any forbidden tomes in her hidden cache—which was likely, given how comfortable she’d been stealing the weald-kinathscrolls—it was equally likely that the unsuspecting Keeper had stumbled across them and opened a book she really shouldn’t have, summoning a demon in doing so. There were plenty of books like that in the Shepherds’ compound, too—texts and tomes that she’d been warned away from, even in the Vaults. Red had remarked once that he would have accidentally unleashed a ghoul in the compound, if not for the Tower defenses, simply by knocking over a cursed volume with his elbow. Or perhaps Elizora had booby-trapped the stash herself.
And then the Endarkened had triggered Halek’s blood-rage, and now he was gone, lost to battle-tide and wolf-madness as he fought the thing to the death. And Tallys…
“Wh-where’s my friend?” she asked the barkeeper quietly, as the other woman lent her large, heavy hands to applying pressure on Clarin’s neck. “The Elven woman with brown hair?”
The barkeeper frowned up at her, even as her cool palms covered Shery’s. “She was shooting at the—at whatever it was for a little while. But when that Hunter howled like that, made that awful noise, she took off running like a hare.” She scoffed: clearly, fleeing was not a behavior she expected from a Shepherd, especially not one who seemed so steely and composed. “Suppose I don’t blame her. Your man looked like a monster himself, attacking that thing. His face…” She shuddered and looked away. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say hewas the werewolf, not Elizora Thackery.”
Shery didn’t bother her to enlighten her on the finer details. Shortly after that, the village healer, a stout woman clad in white whom the barkeeper referred to as “Halla,” arrived, briskly shoving Shery aside to tend to Clarin herself. From there, it was a flurry of moving the Elf into the inn, working rapidly to administer to her wound in privacy. A crowd had gathered along the peripheries of the courtyard, staring at the wreckage Halek and the Endarkened had left behind. Some of the Azure Traders hurried forward to see if Shery was injured. The front of her pale blue dress was coated in stark red blood, her stockings ruined with mud and filth. She was trembling all over; she couldn’t feel the noonday sun’s warmth at all.
There was a brief period of blankness, after that. She was dimly aware of kind voices, of someone leading her into the tavern, putting something warm into her hands. They were talking about Halek—“Should someone go after him?” “Hael no. Did you see that big demon he was fighting? That’s his job, let him deal with it”—but no one seemed to have known where Tallys had gone, except that she’d made a break for the forest.
So the deer spirit has taken her over, too, Shery thought. The Huntmaster, Hetwar, had said as much; that the kin-beast was liable to take over in sudden moments of stress or crisis or fear, at least until they truly mastered it. How long would Tallys keep running? Oh, but it was awful, thinking of her possessed, unable to stop herself and writhing silently inside of herself as the deer drove her body blindly through the forest… When she—they—got far enough away from the battle, would she return to her senses and come back? Or was she going to remain lost within herself, the way Elizora had been when the wolf seemingly turned “ascendant” and drove her to kill and eat farm animals until it was sated…?
Someone was talking to her; broad hands were shaking her shoulders lightly. Shery blinked and looked dazedly up into the worried face of Huntmaster Hetwar.
“I’ve seen to Clarin,” he was saying gravely.
Shery blinked slowly, feeling the pinch of tears in her throat. “How… how is she?”
“She’ll live,” Hetwar said. “In no small thanks to you. I thank you, Shery Acquell, Quartermaster of the Shepherds. The Sae Becha clan owes you a great debt for saving our Keeper.” He made a flourishing gesture she didn’t understand, but perceived to hold great weight and formality; she assumed it was an elaborate Elven bow of thanks, though it must have looked ridiculous, this beautiful, bright-eyed immortal bowing to her as she sat at a table, clutching a mug of tea as if her life depended on it while sitting knock-kneed in her filthy skirts. Behind him, some of the watchful merchants coughed.
Clarin had also confirmed Shery’s suspicions, Hetwar said. One moment, she was opening an innocuous-looking tome she’d found in a stash under the floorboards, hoping for a hint of where the wayward Wild Mage had gone… and the next, something dark was leaping out from within the pages, swiping at her. She’d barely deflected the blow before stumbling out of the cottage, the demon right on her heels.
And they’d just been on their way to do the same thing, Shery thought with dismay. What would have happened if Halek had lost control and tried to fight the Endarkened in the close confines of that little house? They could have all been killed.
“Yet another crime to be tallied against this Thackery,” Hetwar said, his eyes very grave. “To think she was harboring such a text… If we hadn’t been here, the idle proddings of a curious child could have led to this entire town’s destruction.”
Shery was fighting the hysterical urge to cry and scream, It’s all gone wrong, it went wrong so fast! She murmured instead, “Tallys ran away. Her kin-beast became ascendant… and Halek…”
Hetwar sighed. “I heard as much. My hunters are tracking Captain Prince now, from a prudent distance; it was not so hard to follow his trail. Whether by happy accident or intent, he led the demon away from town and into the depths of the woods to do battle with it. Judging from what little I glimpsed, the Revenant is probably dead by now; but I think his battle with the wolf will not be so brief. It won’t be safe for my warriors to approach him until he’s mastered himself again.” He took in her worried expression. “The blood-rage bolstered the kin-beast’s claim,” he explained, a tad unnecessarily. “Even if the nyrol has left him, the wolf seized control with its jaws and now won’t let go; he will still have to wrest control back from it. And he may have been weakened by his battle with the demon.”
I have to go to him, Shery thought—but what could she do? Judging by the way Halek had reacted to that overbearing merchant, her presence was more likely to provoke or aggravate him than help. “And Tallys?” she asked.
Hetwar frowned. “That,” he said slowly, “will be a harder feat. Unlike Captain Prince, who left a trail of destruction that was easy to follow, a deer is not so easy to follow—especially when she wants to stay hidden. We are looking for her, but…”
He sighed, and they looked at each other for a moment. The female barkeeper was attempting to clear the room of chattering witnesses, to little avail; Shery saw the merchant Halek had pinned by the throat loudly giving his version of events, deeming the Hunter a “crazed madman” who’d attacked him unprovoked. And, she thought guiltily, it wasn’t untrue. The man had accosted her, but only with a tedious (and unasked for) conversation about how he had his own house in Courtshore before Halek had come barreling out of nowhere to attack him. It reminded her of when older dogs knocked younger dogs down to “correct” unacceptable behavior. Not intended to seriously harm, but enough to humble. And he’d done that before they’d known about the Endarkened. Had all of it simply been bad luck, one domino leading naturally into the other?
Her thoughts felt sluggish; she had to do better than this. Where did all the dominoes lead… or what had been that first toppled tile?
Out loud, Shery said, “We need Elizora Thackery.” She could already tell that Hetwar’s failure to mention her meant their search had yielded no results. At first her mind went to the spellbooks again—but what if there was another cursed tome? With Halek out for the count, they couldn’t handle a second demon…—before she thought, There must be some other clue. What had they said? She’d fled an abusive father from the West, arriving in town with little more than her horse and an interest in migratory birds…
“Oh,” Shery breathed. She stood abruptly, startling Hetwar, and made her way over to the barkeeper, ruined shirtfront and all. The woman looked up warily from scrubbing her own bloodied hands in the sink.
“Is Elizora’s horse still in the stable?” Shery asked.
#
It would go like this, Shery said. Elizora had left her mare in the stable when she’d fled the night before. If they were right and she was a Wild Mage, and that horse had been her sole companion when she’d first arrived—the only remnant she had of her old life—then it was likely she had a tether to it, the way many Wild Mages developed a connection to particular animals or familiars that they were attached to. If Hetwar could use his Elvish abilities to speak to the horse, either convince it to lead them to Elizora or somehow reach out to Elizorathrough their connection and lure her back… she could accompany them to Halek and help him get the wolf under control. From there, they could somehow find Tallys…
Hetwar was impressed. “A mere quartermaster, you are not,” he said, raising his brows. “Do you often aid in investigations this way? You remind me of the detectives in the novels.”
Shery flushed hotly—he had to be making fun of her, however subtly. Tallys did say that the Elves often had undercurrents of meaning in their language. “I’m just trying to trace the dominoes,” she mumbled lamely. It was the organizational part of her, assembling the pieces into something tidier than their current state. But she was part of the Solar Corps for a reason. She didn’t have the stomach for this.
They went to see Elizora’s horse, a nervous chestnut mare that the barkeeper said was named Pretty. From within the shadows of her stall, Pretty stamped her feet and rolled her eyes at their approach, clearly distressed by the recent nearby battle and the obvious absence of her owner. Shery couldn’t hear the discussion that ensued—Hetwar spoke to the horse in soft, soothing tones, and after a few moments, the mare allowed him to blow air into her nostrils—before he turned to Shery and said, “She can sense and feel where Elizora is, but she can’t articulate it in any precise fashion. She will allow us to ride her while she follows the… I suppose it is a psychic link between them.”
Shery felt the blood leave her hands, and she backed away slowly. “Oh,” she said. “Um.” She eyed Pretty with dread; the mare eyed her back, probably sporting the same apprehensive expression. “I… I can’t ride.”
It was more than that, of course. When she was a young child, her father had set her atop a pony against her protestations, intending to take her on a short, sennight-long trip with a merchant friend of his (the very same one she would later be apprenticed to) in order to see how their business was run. The pony had either sensed her gabbling terror or had been provoked by some other invisible force, because it promptly bucked her off… then kicked the merchant when he came hurrying over to help, neatly breaking one of his ribs and cancelling the trip altogether. Shery had never attempted another ride since. She’d run away from home practically because she couldn’t abide the idea of repeating the experience and spending all her days abroad on horseback. Even on the journey here, she’d happily ridden in the back of one of the Azure Trader’s wagons.
Huntmaster Hetwar was looking at her with some incredulity. “I will hold the reins,” he said, in the same tones he’d used to soothe the mare. “All you need to do is hold on. Can you ride pillion?”
“I c-can’t r-ride at a-all,” Shery croaked, backing away further. “I’ve n-never b-been on a h-horse. N-not successfully.”
There was a pause at this as Hetwar obviously worked some things out in his head. Then he said slowly, “I see. But there is a first time for everything, no?”
Shery felt more faint than when she’d been applying pressure to Clarin’s neck while Halek and the Endarkened waged battle practically on top of her. Her mind was very blank as she said, “But—but—”
“I think,” Hetwar said, not unkindly, “that it would be best if you came with me. If we do find Thackery, I am a stranger to her… You are not. You might have a better chance of persuading her to cooperate with us. And without her, we cannot restore Captain Prince and Tallys’ion to their original states.”
Shery stood there, dithering for a few more precious moments, feeling the sweat gather on the back of her neck in a damp, fiery chill. She thought about Halek, the resigned way he’d accepted the reality of being possessed by a kin-beast, and Tallys telling Rafe with calm finality that she’d catch the werewolf despite his doubts. How, unbidden and unspoken of, both of them had accompanied the merchant caravan in order to provide her some measure of familiarity, comfort, and security on her first cross-country trip away from Haven. How they might have come to Holytree in half the time, and perhaps even caught Elizora without blundering into her ritual out of fear of what she’d done to Shery, if they hadn’t yielded their usual pace for her sake. How they were her friends, and how utterly ashamed she’d be if she had to write home to the Commander and tell him that both of them were running around, lost in the wild, their minds taken over by animals, because she couldn’t even climb onto the back of a damn horse.
Shery nodded. She didn’t say anything else as Hetwar stepped aside and formed a stirrup with his cupped hands. She was too busy trying not to throw up.
#
Riding a horse was much harder than the other Shepherds made it look.
Shery had always seen Lavinet putting her stallion Avonis through his paces, elegantly moving with him from a walk to a canter to a sprint, and had always thought that rider and horse almost seemed stitched together into the same seamless creature. She’d always made it look so effortless; Shery had assumed that, once you made it up into the saddle, the horse did most of the work.
Not so. In fact, scrambling up into Pretty’s saddle without screaming had been the least of her trials. Hanging on to Hetwar’s—a veritable stranger’s—waist while she slipped and slid and jolted around on the slippery leather seat without any true anchor—not rein or stirrup or even saddlehorn—was a veritable marathon. The only upside was that it required so much of her concentration that she scarcely had time to be petrified (though always she was aware of the consequences of falling off and breaking her neck).
Pretty led them not into the surrounding woodlands around Holytree, where both Halek and Tallys had both disappeared into the thickets, but towards the northern outskirts of the town, where open countryside and grassy hills stretched out in a dense green carpet. Shery was still so focused on not toppling backwards off the horse that she couldn’t take in much of the surroundings, but (what seemed like an eternity later), Pretty slowed to a halt and stood expectantly in front of what looked like a lumpy green hillock. Hetwar slid down from the saddle and unslung his bow, though he didn’t nock one of his fearsome-looking arrows yet (if he’d been a Shepherd, Shery knew, Blade would have likely eviscerated him for this breach in protocol and lack of caution). Shery, unable to get down from Pretty by herself, looked dumbly at the hillock from the horse’s saddle: it looked like any other knoll typical of the area—and there was no sign, of course, of Elizora Thackery.
Until, of course, the hillock shimmered, as if beset by a sudden heat haze… and then its image shifted altogether, revealing a simple wooden lean-to set against its base. Elizora’s face was poking out of the lean-to, her expression almost comically shocked. “Pretty?” she cried.
Then her eyes went to Hetwar, standing calmly with his bow in his hand, and Shery, squeaking in an undignified way as the horse sidled forward without her input, obviously pleased and eager to greet her mistress.
“Shery?” Elizora said. “But—how did you—” Her eyes went to Hetwar again, and her expression turned tight and miserable. “You’re from the Sae Becha clan,” she said, not without a thick undertone of apprehension. Her eyes took on a guarded, panicked look.
Hetwar inclined his head. “I am,” he acknowledged. “I come for the weald-kinath scrolls you stole from us, Elizora Thackery.”
The Mage was silent for a moment; almost automatically, she lifted her hands to catch Pretty’s reins as Shery said faintly, “Please make her stop.” Finally she said, in a tone of resigned finality, “You can have them. I… I regret ever laying eyes on them in the first place, to tell you the truth. I’m sorry I took them from you. I only thought…”
Then she shook her head abruptly. “Well. I wasn’t thinking. That’s the problem. And now a lot of people are dead because of it.”
Hetwar eyed her as Shery slid gracelessly down from Pretty’s saddle, landing on her rear end with an undignified whump. “Where are your other kin-beasts?” he asked, his tone cool and unreadable. “From the sigils we found, you had seven more aside from the wolf and deer.”
Elizora grimaced. “I got rid of them—dismissed them, I mean. As soon as the wolf was out of me, I had enough clarity and control to get rid of the rest.”
Shery, looking at her pained expression, wanted to ask how the Wild Mage could have killed the animals that provided the kin-beast spirits, and how she felt about their needless sacrifice, now that they had been cast to the winds—but she wasn’t brave enough to voice the thought. Instead, she said unsteadily, “Y-you need to come with us back to town. The wolf is still inside Halek, and the deer inside of Tallys, and they’ve become… ascendant… and we can’t find them. Y-you’re the only one who can beckon the spirits back out, so…”
Elizora looked at her for a long moment, and if she hadn’t said her name earlier, Shery would have wondered if the Mage recognized her at all. She said nothing, so Hetwar said, “What is this place?”
Elizora glanced behind her, at the lean-to. “That? It’s a shed I built for birding. It’s disguised by an illusion, so I can observe the birds’ natural behavior without their feeling… self-conscious. It ensures they don’t alter anything about their usual patterns, since they don’t know I’m here.” She threw an accusatory look at Pretty. “I never told anybody about it… for obvious reasons.”
So she could perform psionic magic, too, Shery thought, not without a cold splash of dread. All of that talk of not being able to perform a lick of magic had just been tripe. And this kind of piecemeal skillset was common for self-taught Mages. She said, feeling a bit of heat rise in her face—and perhaps her tone—“W-we found other spellbooks in your cottage. One of them unleashed an Endarkened. That’s what made the kin-beasts panic and run wild. Did you know we’d find it?”
Elizora’s brown eyes swung around to Shery’s, and she looked genuinely horrified. “What? No, I—” Then she cut herself off with a sharp hiss of breath. “Oh, gods damnit. I’d meant to get rid of that book—it came in a batch of things I bought from a shady man who trades in such things—but I could never figure out how to get rid of it safely, without the risk of someone else finding it. You can’t just burn things like that, you know, and destroying it by magical means is a long and conspicuous process. I’d been meaning to do it when I could, but it was hard to find the right time…”
“Keeping the w-wolf hidden while biting off goat necks every few nights must have kept you busy,” Shery retorted, which was possibly the most sarcastic thing she’d ever said—out loud. Then she said, with a flush, “You’ve done very irresponsible things, you know, and everyone’s suffered for it!”
It was a paltry scolding, given the scope of things, but Elizora dropped her eyes as if she were a child who’d been slapped. “I know,” she said miserably. “And I’m sorry. You just… don’t know what it’s like. Having all this power and not knowing what to do with it… I was trying to be responsible. Trying to find ways of channeling it with, with real techniques and spells and knowledge, not just letting it out whenever it wanted. When I heard about the weald-kinath, I thought, ‘Oh, but that sounds perfect, it’s what I always wanted! That’swhat my power was made for!’”
“Well, you still shouldn’t have stolen it,” Shery said frostily. “Especially from people who showed you nothing but kindness.”
Elizora winced. “I know. I’m sorry,” she said again to Hetwar, who said nothing. “But stealing it was just—I thought they weren’t using the scrolls, not in the way a Mage could, so they wouldn’t miss them, they’re just records to them, they could duplicate them when they got home. And stealing has just been—a way of life, it’s just been necessary this whole time, because otherwise—”
“You may save your explanations for later,” Hetwar interjected then. “For now, you must face the consequences for your actions. Return with us to Holytree and set Tallys Ironwood and Halek Prince to rights. Your cooperation might earn leniency from them; though it might not. But they have done nothing to you, and should not be subjected to the same madness you have undergone these last weeks.”
The shorter woman took a long breath, considering. For a moment, Shery feared that she would flee, and Hetwar would either have to shoot her down—ending any hope of restoring Tallys and Halek—or give chase and wrestle her to the ground. She wondered what she would do if it came to that. Could she grab a stick and hit the woman with it? It would probably only serve to make her angrier.
Elizora was looking at Shery sidelong, still sporting the look of a woman who was weighing her chances. “Do you Shepherds execute people?” she asked, quietly. “Or is there any chance of mercy? Give it to me straight.”
“Um,” Shery said. Well, Shepherds certainly killed people; the others didn’t speak of it much in front of her, but she’d read the mission reports, and everyone knew the kinds of calls Lunar Corps agents were expected to make in the field. She’d never forget seeing Chase, Trouble, and Halek himself trailing into the compound atrium one day, their coat-fronts, hair, and faces splattered in so much blood they looked they’d slaughtered a dozen pigs, talking so cheerfully and casually as they stamped snow off their boots that it seemed as if they’d returned from a simple shopping trip. She hadn’t dared ask whether the blood was an Endarkened’s or a human’s, either. But that was usually in the heat of battle, in life-or-death, kill-or-be-killed situations… She didn’t think Tallys or Halek would make Elizora kneel in the courtyard and lop off her head right then and there, if she came quietly. There would be an official arrest, reports to be made, probably a tribunal of some kind or at least a summary judgment, before it was decided whether Elizora Thackery would go to the Ashen Vault or hung by the neck until dead…
Feeling an unwilling twine of pity, Shery managed finally, “Y-you’ll be allowed to plead your case. At some point.”
Elizora blew out a long breath, as if she had expected this answer.
“All right,” she said finally. Her voice was heavy and resigned, her eyes flat and deadened. “Then let’s get this over with. Take me to them.”
#
Elizora was able to use her powers to call another horse from a nearby farm, so the three of them headed in the direction where Hetwar said his people were keeping watch over Halek. By the time they came clattering up, the white-haired Hunter was seated on the ground with his back to a tree, his elbows resting on his long knees, his ichor-splattered spear resting against his shoulder as he hung his head, contemplating something on the ground. Behind him, a black and greasy smear on the ground was all that remained of the apparent Revenant. Hetwar’s people lingered between the trees in a loose circle, keeping a close and wary watch on the Hunter. One of them came forward to talk to Hetwar in quiet tones; Shery caught snatches of “safe” and “not sure” while she scrambled down from Pretty’s saddle.
No one moved to stop her as she approached the Hunter, who didn’t lift his head. “H-Halek?”
Halek glanced up at the sound. She saw recognition in his gray eyes, a hint of his usual placid irony—but what issued from his mouth was a low growl. Someone yanked her back sharply by the shoulder. “He’s calmed down, but the wolf is still ascendant,” one of the Elven archers whispered.
Then Elizora was there, brisk as anything, hands on her hips. Halek’s eyes lit up at the sight of her—and not in friendly greeting—but Elizora said, as sharply as if she were addressing a misbehaving dog: “No. Bad boy. You give him back right now.”
Halek’s body locked up, his spine stiffening as the growling sound loudened. His eyes took on a wild look.
Elizora made a sharp gesture—and she must have used her wild magic to do something to the kin-beast, to suppress or control it—because Halek jerked abruptly, shaking his head as if he had water in his ears. He sucked in an enormous breath, as if he had just spent a long period underwater, before he croaked, “Thank the gods. Get this fucking thing out of me.”
“Not yet,” Elizora said tartly, just as Shery thought, with a sense of bleak panic—Wait a second, if she’s both a Wild Mage and a weald-kinath, that would give her control over other people’s kin-beasts… The plan had been for Elizora to use the weald-kinath magic to take the wolf spirit out of Halek, but what if she used her natural, inborn powers to seize controlof it? She could hold him hostage until they agreed to let her go, or command Halek to turn on them just as easily as she commanded Pretty or the horse from the farm… The Mages of the Ivory Isles had not addressed this rather deadly combination of magics, had they?
She tensed, but Elizora only said, “You don’t know where your other friend is, do you? So I can’t take the wolf out of him yet.”
“Why not?” Shery asked nervously.
The Wild Mage looked pointedly at Halek, who was glaring at her with renewed and sullen recognition, his fingers twitching consideringly on the shaft of his hraqa. “What’s better than tracking a deer than a wolf?”
#
Halek, it turned out, could pick up the scent of Tallys—or, more accurately, the scent of her kin-beast—with ease, his senses still enhanced by the weald-kinathspirit inside of him, even with the wolf itself now cowed and small and silent, tamped sharply down by Elizora’s magic. He muttered complainingly to himself while doing it—Shery heard something along the lines of “wolf and Mage and gods-damned gods controlling my every move, hasn’t anyone ever heard of free will”—and was generally more impatient and temperamental than usual (she had never been quite aware that he was capable of more passionate emotions outside of slouching lackadaisicalness and mild irritation); but he seemed not much worse for the wear after his ordeal with either the Revenant or the wolf. He told her, his voice very curt, that he did not remember much after the demon made its appearance, but that was not a foreign experience for him. Apparently Hunters retained a dim awareness of their actions in their berserker state, observing everything from a small, distant point deep within their minds in the best of circumstances, retaining a hazy, fragmented recollection in the worst… but with the wolf spirit in play, he’d simply… blanked out.
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?” he asked, glancing at her blood-soaked outfit, now a dull brown after the day’s events.
“No,” Shery said hurriedly. “Of course not! In fact, you led it away from town so you wouldn’t hurt anyone!”
“Did I?” he said absently, frowning. Then he shrugged and shook his head. “Must have been a happy accident.”
That a part of him, some strength or nobility of spirit, still could have guided his actions even in that state, did not seem a possibility to him, Shery thought to herself sadly. She wondered why that was.
Elizora, on her part, spoke little as they all followed Halek towards wherever Tallys was hiding. She kept several Elves between herself and the Hunter. Halek barely acknowledged the Mage after she leashed the wolf inside of him; but he walked with his spear in his hand, and everyone knew that if Elizora ran, there would be a hraqa planted between her shoulder blades faster than there would be an arrow.
It was late afternoon by the time they uncovered Tallys. She was resting in a forest glade, curled up with her arms around her knees while a herd of deer grazed nearby. Most of them scattered upon the group’s approach—Shery saw one doe and her fawn leaping away into the underbrush—and Tallys looked up, such a blank and startled look on her face that Shery felt her heart breaking a little. She looked so frightened, and it was not an expression that fit Tallys Ironwood well. Shery thought she couldn’t have looked so helpless even when she was a child (though she also couldn’t imagine what a child-Tallys would have looked like).
The Elf, seeing them, made as if to bolt—but Elizora waved her hand, and Tallys’s body froze in the same kind of rictus that Halek’s had when Elizora imposed her will on his kin-beast. There was a kind of wrenching, twisting feeling in the air—and then Tallys said with a gasp, “…Help me. This creature… is notcompatible with me. It keeps… fighting.”
“I’ve got it,” Elizora said simply, and Shery, looking at her sidelong, saw that considering look on her face again. Halek didn’t see it—he and Hetwar were moving forward to help Tallys to her feet—and Shery felt the sweat gather on her palms as she thought, Am I going to have to…?
To what? Elizora was clearly a powerful Mage: she could do at least three kinds of magic, weald-kinathand wild and illusion magic besides. But if Shery didn’t act quickly, if she didn’t say or do something, and Elizora used those powers to take Halek or Tallys or both under her control—then the battle had been lost, because they’d all have to do whatever she said, Elven warriors or no. So, what was her option? Knock the Mage out with a rock when she wasn’t looking? But then she definitelywouldn’t take the kin-beasts out of her friends…
She said quietly to the Mage, almost sure that no one else could hear: “You don’t have to do it.”
Elizora’s look turned calculating. “Don’t I?”
Oh, God, Shery thought. Sweating still, she said, trying not to gabble: “Y-you said you wanted to join the Shepherds; and I don’t think that was a lie. You only want training, don’t you, and education? That’s why you stole the scrolls, and had the spellbooks. What if there was a way you could still have that?”
“How? Don’t tell me they’ll still let me join, after all of this.”
No, Shery thought, she couldn’t see that happening: Elizora was a proven murderer of innocents, even if it wasn’t technically her fault, or rather her intention. And she’d lied and stolen and terrorized a town besides, dabbled in all kinds of forbidden magic, betrayed people who had been charitable to her, and sacrificed animals in dark ritual killings besides. No one could ever trust her—she could steal every scroll in the Vaults and make off in the middle of the night—even if Tallys and Halek could get over their grudges towards her enough to work with her, which Shery doubted. But…
Hetwar, from Tallys’s side, said then, “Neither the Shepherds nor Holytree have the principal claim to you, Elizora Thackery. The Sae Becha clan does.” So he’d been listening, after all.
They all looked at him, Shery with hopefulness, Elizora with a conflicted expression. “What do you mean?” the Mage asked warily.
Hetwar was looking at her with calm, neutral assessment. “You wronged us first,” he said, “and that crime is what led into all the others, so the damage done to our clan and its reputation was magnified tenfold. By right, we should be the ones who decide your fate, for without your theft of our weald-kinath magic, none of the rest of it would have happened.”
Elizora’s expression tightened, and Halek and Tallys glanced at each other as she leaned against him, their faces questioning and wary.
“What do you think should be done with her?” Tallys asked, her voice very low and hoarse—nothing like the cool, musical smoothness that Shery was used to.
“I thought it would be just if you Shepherds took custody of her,” Hetwar said slowly, looking between them and Elizora. “For you to throw her into one of your prisons, or perhaps even kill her, if that was what your laws required. But seeing her again, and what she’s capable of, I find myself thinking…” He trailed off for a moment, then resumed again. “The Castigation never happened, in our country. We are not used to living in a world where people are driven to such lengths to understand and exercise their gods-given powers. It is… a wound of its kind, I think. Yes, Elizora Thackery has hurt many people… but it seems that the hurt was done unto her first. In her eyes, she was not given much of a choice.”
Shery was silent at this, but she thought, And the townspeople love her. Will they be happy to see her imprisoned or executed, or will they be satisfied if the threat to their town is simply ended, and any possibility of it happening again is removed?
“So?” Halek said, his voice holding a tinge of impatience. “All of us have suffered under the yoke of the Autarchy; I haven’t gone around stealing things and killing people, and neither has Tallys.”
But Tallys, who had a thoughtful expression of her own, despite her obvious weariness, only said: “What are you proposing, Huntmaster?”
“Elizora owes a debt to the Sae Becha clan,” he said. “So let the Sae Becha clan take her. The punishment for Elizora Thackery can be exile. She will never join the Shepherds, as was her desire, and she must leave the lands she was born to and the town she has come to love. She will travel to the Ivory Isles under the eye of Clarin Sae Becha, whom she wounded, and put to work serving the weald-kinathmasters of our clan until such a time that her debt has been considered repaid. And we Elves are poor judges of time. That could be many long years for her indeed.” He paused, then said, looking at Elizora: “You will be under close guard, and you will not be given the freedom you might be accustomed to. But you will not be harmed, and if your servitude to our clan were to teach you how to control the ill-gotten weald-kinath magic now inside of you… all the better. For you and the world.”
For a moment, everyone listening was very still, watching Elizora and considering the terms of Hetwar’s proposal. Shery, vibrating with all of the nervous tension of a plucked string, was looking towards her friends: Tallys merely looked bone-achingly tired, while Halek looked… reluctant. But it seemed to have dawned on both of them the havoc Elizora could still wreak on them if they made the wrong move. For once, they were the prey caught in her crosshairs, rather than the other way around.
Finally, Elizora’s shoulders loosened, and she let out a long breath. “I accept the terms of your deal,” she told Hetwar. Then she called the kin-beasts out.
#
“What did it look like?”
This question was from Rothen, a very polite young merchant who reminded her a little of what Caine would be in his early twenties.
Shery hesitated, taking a sip of her breakfast tea to buy herself some time. She wasn’t the most comfortable storyteller, especially not with so many rapt eyes riveted on her as she sat awkwardly with her cooling porridge. “It looked… like… well…” She chewed her lip for a moment, trying to think of how she would describe it if she were writing a letter home. Or a mission report. She’d written a lot of those on behalf of other people, but never one for herself. “It looked like… a ghostly white flame… sort of being tugged out of their chests… as if being pulled by an invisible string. It didn’t look gentle… but from the looks on their faces, I’d say it felt like an immense relief.”
“Like pulling out a splinter,” Rothen supplied, looking very sagely as he said it.
“I suppose?”
“And then what?” another trader asked.
Shery spread her hands a bit helplessly. “And then they just sort of… dissolved on the wind.” She could have sworn she heard a wisp of a dying howl as it happened, the sound of hoofbeats through loam, but it could have been her imagination. She’d wept a little in her room afterwards, out of pity—but Tallys had been glad, and said it was a mercy for the poor beasts. At least now they were free, and could return to the natural cycle as a part of the wind and earth and rain.
That brought on another round of chatter and speculation from the other Azure merchants, who had all crowded around her breakfast table in order to press her the details of how the mission had turned out. As they turned to each other and dissected this turn of events, Shery glanced up and saw Hetwar crossing the room, heading towards the exit. Clarin, her neck bandaged heavily, followed close on his heels; she had recovered enough to be back on her feet, Tallys had said. She and three other Sae Becha Elves would be escorting Elizora—and the Azure Traders, who had been paid handsomely to keep the Mage locked up in one of their wagons—south to Courtshore, where they would charter a ship back to the Ivory Isles. Shery would be going with them, as had always been the plan. Halek—who was still sleeping like the dead up in his room—and Tallys, who was currently deep in conversation with Hetwar and the remaining Elves outside, would be returning with the rest of the tribe to Haven.
“Are you sure?” Augie, the leader of the ‘van, said dubiously when she communicated this. He had personally been a party to the negotiations that had brought her along on this trip; he knew she hadn’t been out of Haven like this before, and had guessed the reasons why Halek and Tallys had chosen to accompany them. “After everything that’s happened, I’d think they’d be more nervous about you traveling with us—erm—alone.”
Shery caught Clarin’s eye from across the room; the Elven Keeper touched her throat in acknowledgement, then gave Shery the same bow of thanks Hetwar had. She ducked her head and smiled to herself. “I think,” she said, “I’ll be able to manage.”
