Niam was worried. For the past week Bug had repeatedly told him that something in the woods had been following her. “Well, follow it back!” he said more lightheartedly than he felt. Bug had been through enough and he didn’t want to add to it. This was probably just her imagination. She punched him in the shoulder.
“Hey! You’ve been hanging around Davin too much!”
“I can’t go chasing something that’s following me. I’m too small,” Bug complained.
“It’s what I’d do,” Niam replied with a wolfish grin. “Besides, I don’t want to hear any of this ‘too small’ talk from you.” Bug looked down and tried to smile. It was a sad smile, but still a smile, and Niam had been working hard since Corey’s death to help her find it again.
On this day he walked alone with her from the Sartor estate to her home near Joachim’s manor. A cold wind pushed itself against his jacket, and he put his arm around his little friend to protect her from the blustering eddies pushing and pulling from different directions. Around them, the last of the acorns clinging to tree braches spilled at irregular intervals, and the sound they made resembled someone (or something) keeping pace with them in the brittle underbrush. All Niam wanted was get through the woods and into the open where safety waited. Involuntarily he shivered. Maybe it was Bug’s fearful refrain, but there had been times lately when he too felt a pair of eyes boring into him, hadn’t there?
“It’s cold,” came her small, miserable voice from behind a long scarf wrapped around more of her face than her neck. Niam laughed silently at the comical effect. She stopped just as he led her past the forest’s edge and onto the well tended landscape of Joachim’s property. One of the count’s sentries waved a friendly greeting to them, and Niam felt himself relax.
“You’re safe, now,” Niam said warmly.
Bug crinkled up her nose and hugged him for what must have been the tenth time that day. Niam looked down at her and pushed windblown strands of hair away from her eyes. “You okay girly-fish?” he asked—for probably the tenth time that day.
“Long as you keep giving me nicknames,” she told him.
“Every day of my life.”
“What if it’s that thing that’s been hunting people?” she asked, chewing at her lip.
Niam led her to a mound of hay set out for the horses. He sat down with her cross-legged on the scratchy bedding. The sun’s afternoon rays were golden and warm on what could have been a perfect winter day had it not been for the creature menacing the countryside. “It’s called a trall,” Niam reminded her, “and the trall used to be Jalt.”
Though Bug already knew all of this, she liked to make him repeat bits of the story, as if by repetition he were somehow able to control the situation by controlling the story. “It seems like the trall is being pushed farther and farther toward the Korse Mountains,” Niam reassured her. “That doesn’t mean anybody’s safe yet, and that’s why you have to have somebody with you whenever you go out. The estates are all full of guardsmen and the towns and roads are constantly patrolled now.”
“But tralls don’t use roads like we do,” Bug said fearfully.
“Exactly my point,” Niam’s voice was serious.
“I promise,” Bug said. “I won’t go anywhere alone.”
The expression of fear still pulled at Bug’s face. Niam was frustrated that there was nothing he could do to allay her fears. After a few moments of thought, he said, “Jolan Kine told me one sure way you can tell if you’re being stalked by a trall.”
“What’s that?” she asked, her eyes big and circumferenced by anxiety.
“Those times you felt like you were being followed and watched, did you smell anything?”
Bug looked down, searching her memory. “No . . . why?”
“They stink. Horribly.”
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. They are foul—all matted in waste and gore. You’d smell him and know without a shadow of a doubt.”
Bug’s face lightened a little. “I didn’t smell anything.” As she said this, another thought must have crossed her mind, because her mouth puckered and her face darkened once more. “What about Salb or Card?”
“Card is locked up and Bode’s been heard bragging about running Salb out of town to Kalavere,” Niam said, and Bug must have heard the sour tone in his voice as he spoke because she said, “He’s a real humanitarian.”
Niam chuckled.
“You’re going back to the bad man’s house soon aren’t you?” she asked hopefully.
“In just a few days,” Niam said, feeling a mixture of fear and eagerness thrill through him where it settled in his stomach. “Jolan Kine’s injury took a lot longer to heal than any of us expected, but with luck, much of this will be done before you know it.” And as Niam said this, he prayed that it was so. Almost a month had passed since their initial foray into the sorcerer’s manor. Joachim was throwing fits over the fact that they couldn’t get into the basement until now.
“My dad says people are scared. That they want that place burned down and cleansed, and they say that the trall will keep killing until the sorcerer is dead.”
Niam wanted to be there when that happened. “He has to be brought to justice—and he will be. There are a lot of people cleaning up the mess he left behind.”
From beyond the stables, a deep, distant voice called out for Bug.
“That’s Dad,” she said.
Niam helped her up and walked her all the way home. On his return, he decided to go slowly back to Maerillus’s home. Soon he needed to make a trip back to his house for his thicker coats. The thought made him sad, though. For a long time now, the house had felt empty, even with his parents there. With them away on business for the count, the place would be as empty as it felt.
As Niam walked, he imagined what it must feel like to be Bug. She had been afraid of Bode’s gang since as long as she could remember. Now that there was something that seemed to have stepped out of her worst nightmares running loose in the Lake Valleys, her world had only gotten larger and more terrifying.
Little wonder she was afraid something was following her, but as he stopped and listened, all he heard was the pop of acorns striking dead leaf litter as they fell. Still, he felt a chill travel down his back that was more then just imagination. There was something out there. Something other than the trall. He sensed it.
Bug had only a very limited idea of what was out there. Truth be told, he wanted her a little scared. That fear might keep her from doing something foolish. People still reported that Ravel had been spotted lurking around less than reputable swill houses in Old Flood and Havel’s Dock, places far enough away from Pirim Village to remain one step away from being captured again.
The forest was darkening and the wind sharpening its cold claws against the hard rimes of frost yet to coat the land. Niam moved on. All around him the wind rustled dry leaves, lifting clumps and sending them scattering noisily like unseen ghosts kicking up the thick carpet with malicious glee. Niam looked forward to the day when he might be able to enjoy the forest sounds once more without drawing darker feelings from the shadowy places within his mind. Ravel was out there. The trall was still out there. People were dying. And worse—Kreeth was out there somewhere. Everyone across the Valleys now felt a sense of terror, especially as the sun began to set. When the trall did not have to hide from the light of day, it did most of its killing.
Niam returned to the warm, brightly lit Sartor manor where the scents of bread and roast wafted from the kitchen. Over the next day, a dusting of snow fell across the Valleys. Above the surrounding hills, the Korse Mountains rose, their jagged peaks capped in snow like daggers of ice gleaming in the sun. Yet on the ground between the Sartor and Joachim estates ran footprints too obscured by the win
ds for anyone to tell whether they were from man or beast. In the shadows, a pair of eyes watched, patient and cold.