“Oh, ye gods!” Laz suddenly understood. “With some sort of ghastly flux of the bowels, in truth, that drained him, and a fever came with it. I was sure he’d eaten spoiled food. He never ate what I did, because ordinary food wasn’t pure enough for him. Whilst I feared for my life at first, I never fell ill myself, so I assumed it couldn’t be an actual sickness.”
“I see.” Neb’s color began to return to normal. “Well, I have to assume the same. He must have eaten somewhat that had turned or suchlike. Where did you bury him?”
“I didn’t. I took his body to the temple of Bel just outside your town, the one on that little hill on the other side of the river. When he was dying, he begged me to do that, so he could have the proper prayers said over him.”
“No doubt. The priests hold their prayers in high esteem.”
“They buried him among those trees on the hills.”
“And then you came to town for the market fair?”
“I did. The temple sent a delegation, like, to bless things.”
“So they buried him on the hill.” Neb’s voice trailed away. “I wonder . . .”
“What?”
“Well, when it rained, the runoff from that hill flowed into the river upstream from the town. That river’s where a lot of us got our water.” He paused, chewing his lower lip in thought. “But you never felt ill yourself?”
“Only queasy at the poor fellow’s symptoms. You might ask Dallandra about all this.” Laz felt a trace of dweomer cold run down his back. “Somewhat tells me it might be important.”
“I’ll do that. My thanks.”
Neb strode off, leaving Laz profoundly uneasy. At the time, he’d been convinced that Tirn the priest’s special food, kept too long in his saddlebags, had been the cause of his illness. But what if it hadn’t been? Could the young priest’s corpse have been the source of the corrupted humors that had ravaged Trev Hael? May the gods forgive me! Laz thought. I should have buried him by the road and been done with him! Yet he himself hadn’t fallen ill. And, ye gods, I even wore his clothes! He could comfort himself with that thought, that if anyone should have been a victim of spreading corruption, it would have been him.
“Ready to ride, scribe?” Rhidderc put a welcome end to his thoughts.
“I am. Let’s get on our way.”
As they rode out, following the track the messengers had left through the high grass, Laz glanced back for one last look at the Westfolk camp. Somewhere among those tents were Sidro and Pir. He wondered if he’d ever see her again, and the wondering wrung his heart.
Branna stood at the edge of the camp and watched Elessario feeding the changelings. Although, at some forty years old, Elessi still had the mind of a child, she was in most respects an ordinary child, who loved her mother, made friends, listened carefully when someone spoke to her, and made much loved pets out of the alar’s dogs—unlike the changelings. As soon as they were old enough to run, speak a few words, and feed themselves, they wanted nothing more than to live apart and never be touched by anyone again.
Yet had they left the alar, they would have starved, died from accidents in the wilderness, or even been eaten by the wild animals that terrified them far more than they terrified ordinary children. The older ones, some eight souls in all, trailed along with the alar in a small crowd of their own kind, surrounded always by an absolute horde of Wildfolk. Only Elessi could speak to them, and she was the only person they would answer. “Princess,” they called her, those of them who had chosen to learn to speak.
Twice a day Elessi gathered food from everyone in the camp and took it out into the grass. The changelings would come running and gather around her to grab handfuls from the various baskets she carried. As they sat in the grass they looked like ordinary elven children, pale-haired with beautiful faces if always a bit dirty, and huge cat-slit eyes, but they wore odd scraps of clothing, most of it torn and stained. Their parents had given them all decent clothing only to see them rip it, twist it, rub grass and mud or even blood upon it in oddly misshapen decorations. Branna had never seen any of them smile.
That morning Elessi had invited Branna to come with her. “They should know you,” Elessi told her. “If I am sick, will you feed them?”
“I will,” Branna said. “Will they take the food from me?”
“If I say so. So they have to know you.”
While they ate, the children kept glancing Branna’s way. The four girls looked frightened, three of the boys looked angry, but the fourth boy stared out into space as if she didn’t exist. As they walked back to camp with the empty baskets, Elessi commented on it.
“That was bad,” she said. “Basbar wouldn’t look at you.”
“His name is Basbar?”
“He says so.” Elessi shrugged. “It doesn’t mean anything, but names don’t have to mean anything, do they?”
“They don’t, no. If one of the changelings gets sick, do you think they’d let Neb help them?”
“They wouldn’t, not yet.” Elessi considered this with a small frown. “They need to know Neb, too.”
“I’ll ask him if he’d like to come with you next time.”
“My thanks.” Elessi grinned at her. “I’d like that.”
Neb was more than willing to let the changelings grow accustomed to him. As he remarked to Branna, they all had hard lives ahead of them.
“What’s going to happen when they grow up?” he said. “And have children of their own?”
“I hadn’t thought of that. I wonder if the children will all be changelings, too.”
“It seems likely. I’ll discuss this with Dallandra.” Neb paused, thinking. “I should have asked Laz if the Gel da’Thae ever give birth to children like this.”
“Laz is gone?”
“Off to hunt for the dragon book.”
“Did you thank him before he left?” She laid a hand on his shoulder.
“I did.” He turned his head and kissed her fingers. “You were right. I needed to do that.”
“That gladdens my heart to hear.”
“I knew it would. Ye gods, you nagged me enough about it!”
They shared a laugh.
Branna had entered their tent to find Neb gathering up his herbal supplies. The two gnomes, the gray and the yellow, were attempting to help him, but their aid soon devolved into throwing packets of herbs at one another. Branna banished them back to the etheric, then picked up the packets and returned them to Neb’s sack of medicinals.
Since she, too, was studying herbcraft, though not as intensely as he, Branna joined him when he went to the tent where Dallandra had set up her improvised surgery. Most of the injured men had healed enough by then to get outside to the sunlight, but Hound still lay on his blankets. When they knelt down next to him, he woke, yawning, and turned his head to look at them.
“How’s the arm?” Neb said.
“It aches,” Hound said, “and it’s hot and swollen.”
Neb swore under his breath then began to unwrap the bandages from the wound. As soon as he got them off, Branna could smell the corrupted humors.
“It’s gone septic,” Neb said. “Well, we’ll have to do somewhat about that.”
“Don’t cut off my arm!” Hound tried to sit up then fell back, shivering with fear. “Ye gods, how can I live—”
“Hush now!” Branna laid a hand on his forehead. “That’s the last resort, and there are lots of things we can do first to treat it.”
“Indeed,” Neb said. “Branna, will you start a fire over on the hearthstone? I’ll need hot water. I—” He abruptly stopped speaking and stared at the filthy bandage in his hand. “Ye gods!” he whispered. “There’s some live thing on this.”
Branna looked, saw nothing but pus and old blood, then opened her sight. Sure enough, the matter on the bandage had an aura, only a faint reddish glow, but a sign of life nonetheless.
She studied the wound, a deep gash in pale flesh, sticky and green with dead matter. Even if the wound had
been giving off some sort of emanation, Hound’s own aura glimmered bright enough to blot it out.
Neb grabbed a clean strip of linen and began to wipe the pus away from the wound. This new bandage also gleamed with the sign of something alive. As the air touched it, however, the glow faded, though it never completely vanished.
“So!” Neb said. “I don’t know what’s inhabiting you, Hound, but we’re going to get rid of it.”
“Fleas.” Hound attempted to smile. “They be that what lives on hounds.”
Neb patted him on the shoulder, then turned back to her. “Branni, the herbwoman in our town had us boil things that the sick had used. She thought we were balancing humors, but by all the gods, I’ll wager we were killing whatever an infection is.”
“Here now!” Hound tried to sit up, but Neb pushed him back down. “You’ll not be boiling my arm, will you?”
“Of course not!” Neb said. “I’ll be putting on herbs that’ll kill whatever these things are.”
If he can find the right herbs, Branna thought. The idea that some live thing too small to be visible was feeding on wounds seemed incredible to her, too grotesque to be believed. She had to remind herself that when it came to healing, Neb’s lore was far greater than her own. Aloud, she said, “I’ll fetch water, and then start that fire.”
“My thanks. If you could find a skin of mead, too? And maybe fetch a couple of the men.”
“Here!” Once again their reluctant patient tried to sit up. “What have you in mind to do to me?”
Neb shoved him back down. “Do you want to lose that arm, or do you want me to heal it?”
Hound moaned and lay still, a gesture Branna took as capitulation to the healer’s superior knowledge. The two gnomes materialized, one on each side of Hound, not that he saw either, and shook their heads in a mimicry of sad pity.
A small pile of twigs and scraps of firewood stood ready beside the hearthstones in the middle of the tent. Branna grabbed an iron kettle and hurried out with her gray gnome skipping ahead of her in the warm sunshine. She went upstream from the camp to fill it where the water would be clean. Not far from the tents she found Mic, sitting on the bank. He had a handful of pulled grass which he was throwing, one stalk at a time, into the water.
“What are you doing?” Branna said.
Mic yelped and let the remaining grass fall onto the ground. “My apologies,” he said. “I was just thinking how life snatches our friends away from us, just like the water takes that grass.”
“Ah. You’re thinking about Kov.”
“I am, truly, and Dougie as well. Perhaps Dougie even more, because we’d ridden together back in Alban.”
“Well, they both had a harsh wyrd.” Branna knelt and tipped the kettle into the water. “It’s very sad.”
“I’ll carry that back for you when it’s full. It’ll do Kov’s soul no good to have me sitting about like a fool or laggard.”
“More to the point, it’ll do you no good.”
“True enough, true enough.” Mic sighed and stood up. “Let’s see what I can do to keep myself busy and useful. That’s the dwarven way, not all this sitting about.”
Branna handed him the kettle, then found mead and a pair of burly Cerr Cawnen men to hold Hound down when Neb poured the liquor on the wound. Fortunately, the patient fainted early in the procedure, allowing Neb to clean and stitch with only minimal help. The Cerr Cawnen men had left, and Hound had settled into a more normal sleep, when Dallandra entered the tent.
“Richt told me that you’d found infection in the lad’s wound.” Dalla paused to sniff the air. “Ah, mead! That should wash out the corrupted humors.”
“More than corrupted humors were at work.” Neb turned and gave her a brilliant grin. “I think I’ve solved it, Dalla. I think I know what causes these infections, and I’ll just wager it’s true for illnesses as well. Here, let me explain what I saw.”
Master and apprentice left the tent, talking together in low voices. Branna and Mic cleaned up the filthy bandages, then put them in the kettle of water to boil. She slopped in some mead from the leather skin for good measure. As she watched, the last traces of the reddish aura glow disappeared, leaving only the dead matter of the bandages themselves.
“If living things are crawling on those,” she said, “I want them dead.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Mic said with a shudder. “Hard to believe, though I’d wager Neb knows more about it than I.” He sighed, glancing around him. “I’ll just be seeing what my poor niece is up to, then.”
“You’ll be brooding about your cousin, more like!”
Mic left without answering. With a sigh of her own, though this one expressed exasperation, Branna considered cleaning up the mess around Hound’s bed, then stormed out of the tent. Nearby she saw Neb and Dallandra surrounded by her four apprentices, all of them talking fast as they questioned Neb. Branna strode up to them and nearly shouted out her words, “I beg your pardons!”
Everyone turned to look her. Ranadario, in fact, took a step back.
“I’m not a servant,” Branna said with a toss of her head. “Neb my dearest, if there’s some nasty thing living on those dirty bandages, hadn’t you better clean them up when you’re done with them?”
Neb flinched and looked down at the ground. “So I had,” he said. “My apologies. You’re quite right.”
Branna strode off again, but she was thinking, That’s another reason why I married him—he’s not an honor-bound warrior. He can admit it when he’s wrong.
After a hot dusty afternoon in the gold chamber, Kov was more than ready for a swimming lesson. He stripped off his clothes except for his loin wrap, laid them neatly on his bed, then hurried outside to join Jemjek.
They walked a good ways upstream to the bend in the river that marked the shallows. The sun lay close to the western horizon, casting ripples of gold like coins on the river. A light breeze rustled the long grass along the bank and cleared away the last of the dust and gold-greed from Kov’s mind.
“It’s good to get outside,” Kov said.
“It is,” Jemjek said. “Water be good.”
At the sandy beach, caught in the river’s bend, they paused to watch the water flowing and rippling. About half-a-mile downstream the timbers of the bridge cast a tangle of shadows across the river. Yet despite the peaceful afternoon, all the birds abruptly fell silent. Over the murmur and splash of the water, Kov heard a drumming sound.
“What be that noise?” Jemjek said. “The sky’s clear. Can’t be thunder.”
“It’s not,” Kov snapped. “It’s hooves, horses, and here the bastards come!”
Like a black wave of flies heading for dead meat, distant riders were trotting through the tall grass. They were coming from the north and riding in such good order that he knew they had to be Gel da’Thae, not Deverry men.
“Get down!” Jemjek shrieked. “Into the water!”
The Dwrgi slid out of his tunic, grabbed it in one hand, and dove into the river. In swirls of light and bubbles he transformed. The tunic billowed like foam beside the six-foot-long otter he’d become. Kov dashed after him and slipped over the bank into the thick stand of water reeds. He could only hope to hide since his flesh couldn’t transform. In the shallows he stood with his nose just above water and peered through the reeds. What he saw turned him cold.
Horsekin, all right! Regimental cavalry such as he’d seen at Zakh Gral, a troop of them, no, a regiment formed up four abreast, hundreds of them, trotting down the riverbank, heading for the village. Dust plumed as the steel-shod hooves cut down the grass and pounded it into raw dirt. Kov heard something rustling the reeds behind him, nearly screamed, and turned to see Jemjek beckoning to him with one paw.
“Swim!” His mouth’s new shape turned the whispered word into one long hiss.
“Wait!” Kov hissed back.
Jemjek shook his sleek wet head “no” and turned around to dive back into deep water. Kov had a brief thought
of taking this chance to escape. With no clothes but a loin wrap, no food, not even a knife, he squelched the thought as soon as it appeared. In the gathering twilight his hiding place worked well enough. No one even looked his way as the regiment trotted onward down the river.
The last of the cavalrymen passed by just as the sun sank below the horizon. Behind them, traveling at a more dignified walk, rode two women on white mules and a small squad of retainers, one of whom carried a banner embroidered with Alshandra’s bow and arrow above a row of letters in the Horsekin alphabet. The women wore leather tunics painted with Alshandra’s blazon as well. Priestesses! Kov thought. So, this regiment had some important job at hand. He could assume that they’d come for the bridge. The only thing he could do was watch them take it.
Kov let the priestesses and their squad get past him, then stood. He could see some riders heading across the bridge and others swarming into the village. Moving a bare yard at a time, he began to wade downriver through the shallows. Once he came within sight of an escape tunnel, he would dive and swim into it, but at the moment he wanted his feet on earth, even though it was only slippery wet sand.
Ahead of him in the twilight a sudden red glare bloomed. A huge lick of flame leaped up toward the sky. The Horsekin had fired the village. Kov’s rage flared up to match the black plume of smoke that twisted upward, spreading in the evening wind. How dare they! How dare they just ride in and destroy! And what of the village folk? Had they all gotten underground in time?
By then he was close enough to see horsemen milling around on the downriver side of the burning village. The light from the flames picked out the priestesses’ white mules as they conferred with a pair of officers. Most of the regiment had spread out, doubtless to ensure that no one would offer resistance. In the dancing glare, Kov could see the dark hole in the riverbank that marked an escape tunnel some hundred yards ahead of him. The river reeds, however, were thinning out. He would have to strike out for clear water and swim. He crouched down to wait till the light dimmed. The flimsy huts of the fake village would burn fast and briefly.