“And if I did?” she asked, challenging.
“Did you give him the fancy?” When she looked at him warily, hurt gave way to the first stirring of anger. “Royce didn’t keep silent about that, Ari. I knew he was coming here, and I knew why.”
“It wasn’t Royce.”
“Then who?”
She leaned against the table, looking weary. “No one you know. He’s not … He’s not from around here.”
Neall closed his eyes for a moment. There was mercy in that. At least he wouldn’t look at every man in Ridgeley and the surrounding estates and farms and wonder if that was the man who was using Ari.
“Answer me this. Was he …” Impossible to ask. Impossible not to. “Was he kind?”
She relaxed a little, but still watched him too closely. “Yes, he was kind.”
“That’s good, then. That’s good.” He was feeling too many things — jealousy and pain … and relief that Ari would not dread this stranger’s return. Because he would return. The saddlebags that hadn’t been taken made that clear. If he continued to return until the dark of the moon …
He swallowed hard to ease the constriction in his chest. “Ari, if you should find yourself with child —”
She shook her head quickly.
“If you should find yourself with child,” he repeated stubbornly, “and he won’t stand with you … then I will.”
She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. Or as if something familiar had suddenly turned strange.
“You would do that? You would take a husband’s vow for another man’s child?”
“Your child,” he said fiercely. “Yours. And if I was the man who was raising it with you, it would be mine as well no matter who sired it.”
“Neall …” she whispered.
“Don’t answer yet. Just know that I’ll stand with you. You don’t have to be alone.” Needing to escape, he strode to the open door.
“Neall,” Ari said, moving toward him. She kissed his cheek. It was the kiss of a friend, and it hurt him because he wanted it to be so much more. “Blessings of the day to you, Neall.”
His arms came around her, holding her tightly against him. Ari, Ari, my heart, my life. Could he really leave Ridgeley without her? Or would he also be leaving so much of himself that he would be little more than a ghost?
He couldn’t think about that. Not now.
He eased back, stepped away. “Blessings of the day to you, Ari.”
It took effort, but he kept his stride easy and even as he walked to where Darcy was tied. The outward calm might have fooled Ari, but it didn’t fool the gelding. Darcy danced in agitation. He held the gelding to a walk, waved at Ari, who was still standing at the front door, then eased up enough to let Darcy trot.
As soon as he was safely out of sight, Neall turned Darcy and headed back the way he’d come. But not to Brightwood. He needed another reason to be on this road in case he passed someone and the person mentioned seeing him to the baron. He wasn’t feeling steady enough to cope with the tenant farmers he had to see that morning, but there was one place he could go where the feelings he couldn’t hide yet would be noted but not commented upon.
He sent Darcy galloping over the fields to Ahern’s farm.
Chapter Ten
Death called her.
Morag hesitated, then reluctantly signaled the dark horse to stop. She didn’t want to answer. In the two days since the Summer Moon, she had continued traveling south through the eastern part of Sylvalan, even though she was no longer sure she wanted to continue. In those two days, she had led too many souls to the Shadowed Veil so that they could go on to the Summerland. It wasn’t sickness that had killed so many in the villages she recently had passed through. At least, not a sickness of the body. But something had crept through those villages to give Death such a bitter feast. Hard deaths. Cruel deaths. Burnings. Hangings. Drownings. And that young girl, that child, who had been …
Morag bit her lip, tried to draw a mental curtain across that memory.
There were other deaths in those places as well. Squirrels and sparrows. An owl. A fox. The rotting, partially eaten bodies surrounded clusters of dead trees. Even in warm daylight, there was something about those dead trees that made her shiver.
She had begun this journey in order to see this part of the human world and gain some understanding of the people who lived here. She had seen more than she had bargained for. She had seen too much. Now she needed a quiet place to rest and renew herself.
But there was no rest here, as she’d hoped there would be. This was one of the Old Places. She could feel the difference in the land and knew it was so. But she also felt a heart-deep despair, very much like what she felt in people gathered outside a sick room when a loved one was suffering through the last hours of living.
Death called her.
Morag closed her eyes and opened herself to Death’s message.
This was not a gentle dying. This was not a soul contained in a body that had lived a full span of years and was ready to return to the Great Mother. Desperation and pain were coming toward her. And fear.
She urged the dark horse forward through the shadows of the old trees.
Gather your own kind, Morag. Let the human world be.
If none of us who have the gift offer to show them the road to the Shadowed Veil, how do the humans find it?
They don’t.
Are you saying they have no souls?
Aye, they have them. Crippled, withered things as hard as stone. You’ll only break your own heart if you try to help them. But you’re still young, and you don’t believe it will be that way. I once felt as you do now. And I broke my heart on stone. You’ll do the same. I can see it in your eyes. It’s glad I am that you’ll show me the road to the Summerland before that day arrives.
That will be a long time from now.
No. Death has become an attentive lover. I won’t see the seasons change again, and when I take my last breath, you will become the Gatherer in my place. You’re the strongest of the Fae who are Death’s Servants, so the name, and the power, will be yours. You will become Death’s Mistress. The others who have this gift can take a spirit once the body has breathed its last breath. But you will be able to gather the spirit from living flesh. You will have the power to kill.
The shadows under the trees thickened. Morag shivered.
There were places in the human world that were so thick with ghosts the land always felt cold. And there were stories the Fae bards sang about human battlefields.
There was one in particular that, having heard it as a child, still haunted her.
According to the bards, two great forces of men had come together on a battlefield. It was never told why they had come to fight. It didn’t matter. They had come to that place, and as the fighting began, the one who had been the Gatherer in that long-ago time had felt Death’s summons. Taking the form of a raven, she flew over the battlefield, gathering the souls of those who would not survive their wounds and were crying out in agony. But the war chiefs on both sides knew what she was, and they both decided that if she couldn’t gather the souls of their men, Death would not be able to touch them and they would know victory over their enemy. When she flew over them, the war chiefs shouted to their best archers, who loosed their arrows into the sky. A handful of arrows pierced her. As she fell, dying, the souls she had gathered in her wings fell with her to become ghosts on the battlefield. Her own spirit, in raven form, flew away to the Summerland. The war chiefs, now certain that they had cheated Death, threw themselves and their men into the battle. The slaughter was ferocious, and the land turned red from the spilled blood.
The song said that no man walked away from that battlefield, and that no Fae who had the gift to be Death’s Servant had ever returned to that place to gather any souls. And it said that the ghosts of those men were still fighting that battle, over and over and over, and if a person stepped onto that land, he would hear the clash of swords an
d the battle cries and the screams of horses and the desperate pleas of the dying. Over and over. And never would it end.
Why am I thinking of that story now? Morag wondered. Reining in the dark horse, she studied the meadow beyond the last trees. There were no shadowed places there to indicate Death’s presence outside of the Great Mother’s circle of beginnings and endings. But …
There was anger coming toward her. And there was power herding that anger the way dogs herded sheep, driving it toward some completion. That power felt almost Fae, but it wasn’t Fae. And it didn’t belong to the Small Folk. It wasn’t clean magic, whatever it was.
But it was familiar. This is what still lingered in those villages she recently had passed through.
Death called her.
She urged the dark horse forward at the same moment a woman burst from the trees on the other side of the meadow. The woman ran as best she could, heading straight across the meadow for the trees that were the border for the Old Place, but there was something wrong with her legs that kept her from taking a full stride.
A moment later, a pack of men burst from the same trees, their faces filled with such ugly emotions they looked like they were wearing twisted, obscene masks. Most of them carried clubs. Some just held a rock that filled his hand. Behind them rode a young man dressed in a fine black coat. His face shone with an unbearable ecstasy.
As soon as she saw him, Morag knew he was the source of that other power. He reminded her of a septic wound, full of pus. Rotten.
Before she was out of the trees and galloping across the meadow, the men had caught the woman and pulled her to the ground.
Fae horses had silent hooves, so there was no sound to cover the woman’s screams, or the sound of rock and wood against bone.
Morag used no glamour to soften what she was. As she rode toward them, one of the men glanced up. He dropped his club and pushed against the other men, trying to back away.
“It’s one of the Fae!” the man cried.
“It doesn’t matter!” the young man in the black coat shouted. “There’s nothing she can do!”
Isn’t there? Morag thought as she rode toward the men. Rage flashed through her, flooding her until it was the only thought, the only feeling.
Her own power lashed out, striking the young man in the black coat. She gathered his soul, held it for a moment, then released it. That moment was long enough to sever the link between body and soul. She watched his body fall from his horse. His ghost stood nearby, too intent on trying to retain control of the men to notice.
Seeing the ghost, a man screamed, “She’s the Gatherer!”
Dropping their clubs and rocks, the men bolted for the trees.
Morag didn’t pursue them. Reining in close to the woman, she dismounted and knelt beside the still body. The woman wore nothing but a torn, sleeveless shift that fell to her knees.
Morag looked at the travesty that, not too many days before, must have been a healthy body. She wondered what had been done to make the woman’s legs look that way — and she wondered how much courage it must have taken to try to walk, let alone run, on those legs. She saw burns on the arms. She saw the swollen left hand that was full of broken bones. She saw the holes in the woman’s face where something had pierced her cheeks. She sensed the damage that had been done inside the woman — damage that would never heal well enough to make living anything but a prison.
The woman opened pain-glazed eyes. She tried to speak, but her tongue seemed too swollen to form words. Had it also been pierced?
“Who?” It sounded more like air being forced out than a word.
Before Morag could answer, the young man’s ghost spoke.
“They may have run, but I’m not afraid of you,” he said. “Your time in the world is done. After we rid the world of her kind, we’ll also rid the world of yours. Then men will rule as they were meant to rule, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us.”
“Nothing?” Morag asked softly.
He smiled at her, and she knew with unshakable certainty that he was a man who reveled in inflicting pain. He was a man who found controlling and manipulating others the most intense form of seduction.
“Nothing,” he said.
Her only answer was to look at the ground behind him.
His smile wavered. He glanced down, then cried out as he reached for his body. His hands passed through it.
“You bitch!” he screamed. “What have you done?”
She ignored him. Her rage had come and gone as swiftly as a violent storm, leaving her cold and exhausted. But there was still work to do. She looked down at the dying woman.
“Gath … rer?”
“Yes,” Morag said, touching the woman’s head gently. “I am the Gatherer.”
“Sum … merland. Please.” The words were slurred, the effort to say that much horrific.
“I’ll take you to the Shadowed Veil.” Her power reached out again, and she quietly gathered the woman’s soul. As the link between soul and body unraveled, the woman’s breath came out with a relieved sigh. It was the last sound, the last movement she made.
When Morag rose to her feet, the woman’s ghost stood beside her.
Feeling awkward, Morag asked a question she had never asked before. “Should the body be taken somewhere?”
The woman shook her head. “The Small Folk will take it home and give it to the Mother.”
“Home?”
The woman looked at the trees Morag had been riding through before Death had called her. “The Old Place is … was my home.”
Morag felt the land darken, as if thick clouds had formed a shroud around the sun. “Come.” She turned toward the dark horse but didn’t mount. Not quite looking at the woman, she said, “Why did they do this to you?”
Sorrow filled the woman’s ghostly eyes. “Because I’m a witch.”
Witch. The word seemed to echo through the meadow.
How many of the young women that I have taken to the Shadowed Veil would have given me the same answer if I had asked?
“Come,” Morag said, mounting her horse. The woman’s ghost floated up to ride behind her.
“Wait!” the young man’s ghost shouted. “What about me? You can’t leave me here!”
Morag looked at him. “Yes, I can.”
She urged the dark horse forward. It cantered across the meadow, not back toward the Old Place, but toward a break in the trees.
Unlike the roads that crossed the Veil into Tir Alainn, the road to the Shadowed Veil would open anywhere when one of Death’s Servants summoned it. She could have opened that road right in the meadow, but she hadn’t wanted the young man’s ghost to be able to reach it before it closed again. So she rode out of the meadow and continued until she was well out of sight. Unless they were released by someone who had the power to set them on the soul’s road, ghosts were held to a place. Since he had died in the meadow, he would be able to wander all through it, but he could never go beyond it.
And she would never return to it. She would take the witch to the Shadowed Veil and then head west, deeper into Sylvalan. She would return to the Midlands, to the part of Tir Alainn where her own Clan dwelled, and there she would finally rest for a while.
You’ll only break your own heart if you try to help them.
The one who had been the Gatherer before her had been right about that. Let the humans take care of themselves, if they could. But the witches … Ah, the witches. That would require some thought.
When she got home, she would ask the Clan bard what he knew about the witches. And she would ask where the Bard was staying these days. If anyone had the answers she was seeking, it was Aiden.
Chapter Eleven
After coming down the road through the Veil, Dianna skirted the edge of Brightwood, keeping to the game trails, where she was less likely to be seen. It would have been easier to simply cross the meadow to reach the cottage, but she had a stop to make first in order to make her plan work. Her mare was too disti
nctive for anyone not to notice, and the glamour that successfully masked the Fae when they wanted to appear human never quite worked on the horses. So she would get a horse that wasn’t so obvious — and she knew who would give her one. At least, she thought he would.
Her chest tightened at the thought of approaching him.
Crossing the road, she let the mare ease into a slow canter over the same fields she’d ridden through at the Summer Moon.
She didn’t understand the Fae Clans in the west of Sylvalan who spent as much time in the human world as they did in Tir Alainn. There was something … uncomfortable … about being around members of those Clans. They were more feral, and darker in intent, than the rest of the Fae.
No, she didn’t understand them. She understood even less a Fae who had forsaken Tir Alainn completely to live out his life among these humans. If he wanted to pretend to be human, he should at least give up the title he had held for three generations so that someone else could stand in his place. Oh, he’d accepted any challenges for the title over the years. He’d won every one of them — and his challengers didn’t always survive.
What made her most uneasy was that she wasn’t sure how much deference she could demand from him. She wasn’t even sure there was anyone who could make demands of him. And because of what he commanded, he could be a dangerous enemy for human and Fae alike.
There really wasn’t a choice. She was concerned about Lucian, and pretending to be a human gentry lady really was the simplest way to find out what she needed to know. Which meant getting the loan of a horse. Which meant approaching the Lord of the Horse.
Reining the mare back to a sedate trot, Dianna wove the glamour magic around herself while she was still far enough away from the farmhouse that no one would be able to make out the face behind the human mask. She’d dressed carefully in a riding habit that resembled closely enough the garments worn by gentry ladies. The glamour simply completed the illusion.
A few moments after trotting into the yard, she realized the glamour would fool no one here.