She could not see what was wrong at first. The diffuse gathering of villagers, dancing, singing, trading stories, had become a dense knot of crowd, gathered to watch something terrible that she could not see. She heard cries and questions. She tried to shoulder through a wall of burly men and farm-strong women, and thought about the behavior of flocks.
The Hidden Schools studied such phenomena intensely. They sponsored chairs where skullcapped seers sat to peer down from the lower balconies at starlings over sedge fields, black lungs breathing in the sky. Murmuration, nuisance, swarm, murder, parliament, each group of birds responded to wind or threats or food with behavior no less complex than that of single beings in a single skin.
After all, what was an animal—you, your kid, your dog—but an association of smaller creatures to whom a grain of sand would seem a monument, as united in their own way as those starlings, locusts, rooks, and crows?
As above, so below. Call a group of starlings a murmuration. Call a group of cells an animal, a plant, a person. Call the entity that is a group of human beings a god.
And the small god that was Edgemont was afraid.
Once she thought of it like that, she could model its dynamics, and knew where to step. There were holes in any crowd, and currents she could use. She found one and let it bear her forward, and at last when people pressed too close for her to move, she lit her glyphs and pushed. They parted before her like the sea in a mystery play.
And there stood Connor, with a wounded man in his arms.
She felt surprisingly calm. She realized, surrounded by former classmates and not-quite-friends staring on in terror that she felt more at ease in a panicked crowd than she had felt making small talk in the town where she grew up.
Set that aside for now. Think of them as clients, if it helps.
She ran to Connor—she may have called his name. He sank to his knees and settled the hurt man down. The crowd clustered close. She ordered, “Stay back.” She did not use the voice of Tara Abernathy the schoolteachers’ daughter, and her face wore an expression they’d never seen. They obeyed.
The man was ashen with pain, bleeding from his stomach and from raw welts around his wrists. Pulse rapid and shallow, breath wet. Gods, Tara hated pretending she was a doctor. She saw old man Braxton closest in the mess, holding of all the damn things his tambourine, but still sober enough for her purposes. “I need clean water and clean rags. Needle. Thread. Bandages. Go.” He went. Connor’s side was wet with blood. Not his. “What happened?”
“I was on watch. This guy ran up out of the Badlands like the whole world was after him. Fell ten feet from the wall.”
“Not one of ours.” It was half a question. There were new families in Edgemont since she left, though not many.
He shook his head. “They must have taken him. He got away. Those wrists look like they’ve been tied with rope.”
“Wire,” she corrected. “Raiders?”
A nod. His eyes wide. “A storm’s building out there, Tara.” She could see it, too. Mountains of cloud to the west, carved from the dark by green lightning. He was afraid. Good.
Grafton Cavanaugh burst through the circle. “What is this?” Then he saw the body. “Farnham.”
“Raiders, Dad. He got away, and they’re coming after him.” Tara was ready for the big man to sneer, but for once Grafton Cavanaugh seemed selfless, genuine, concerned. He shouted orders to the crowd, rallying the militia, and they moved out to the wall. Connor looked to her. He wanted to stay, he had to go. She remembered what he’d said in the canyon. Always running away. What was running away, now? To follow his father to the wall, or to stay here by her side?
“Go,” she said, and he went. Tara missed him, but who had time to feel things anyway? She worked to stabilize the client. Farnham. Where had she heard that name? Oh yes. The Farnhams were one of the Blake’s Rest families. She’d seen this man before. He’d been ten years younger then, and not dying. But Blake’s Rest meant—
Dawn and Ma and Pastor Merrott reached the front of the crowd at once, and Ma and the Pastor ran to kneel beside Tara. Dawn drew up sharp, her face a mask. Farnham shifted on the ground and his eyes focused and the desperation in his features took on a new and personal edge. Dawn advanced, wooden. Tara thought about broken ribs and dead goats, and about the clean-burning anger she’d sensed behind Dawn’s will to learn the Craft, to get out, to leave Blake’s Rest and the Kathic plains behind and be someone, anyone but the girl who’d worked that farm.
But she had also watched the others die, dragged away by monsters. She heard their screams. And here was young Farnham.
Perhaps she wanted him dead. But it was one thing to want and another to see the man there bleeding and broken and scared.
“Dawn,” Tara began, and would have finished, stay back, but Dawn stepped forward like a puppet and knelt by Farnham’s side, just out of that trembling hand’s reach. Tara recognized her brittle stillness: great engines locked gears inside Dawn’s heart, strength pitted against strength generating stillness and heat. Or else that was Tara projecting herself onto Dawn, and that silence was mourning, or anger she was choking down, or fear. Or an entomologist’s detachment, watching a specimen writhe.
Tara turned to Merrott. “Pastor. Can you help him?”
His hands glowed golden on Farnham’s chest, but his brow was damp and he looked weary. “Not while the guards draw our faith.” Without his blessing, Cavanaugh and the others would be left with their bad homemade armor on the wall, facing Raiders. Sheep before wolves. “I can dull his pain.” Which was a genuine help, Tara reminded herself as her first thoughts ran more uncharitable courses: ah yes, so I’ll just do it all myself as usual, and, you see, this is why I don’t trust priests. Though she technically was one. She’d never tried to heal anyone with Seril’s power, but there was a first time for everything. She tried to open her heart—but the prayer line was full of sand and howling static, and clouds choked the moon.
Gods. Always so damn situational.
“Coming through!”
That was Braxton, with the bandages. At least this was proceeding as she had foreseen. “Keep it up,” she told the Pastor. Braxton was sweating but he’d brought an armful of clean cloth that would serve, and a jug of water. Her social reflexes thanked him, while the rest of her planned the operation. She could use her work knife—which would mean pulling a blade of moonlight from her heart in front of all these villagers. Not to mention the shadows, the cold, and the dimming stars.
But, hells, they’d spent all day looking at her as if they expected a show. Might as well give them one. They were afraid, and they didn’t trust her, but she had no time for gentleness. Farnham was dying—and while she might be tempted to say good riddance, she wasn’t about to let all these Coopers and Braxtons and Learys and Cavanaugh cousins watch her fail.
She was about to speak when Dawn screamed.
Farnham’s trembling hand snared her wrist. Black oil bubbled from the wound in his stomach and climbed his chest to his arm, sinking hooks into his flesh and reaching for Dawn. The curse’s white threads seethed beneath the black, and more threads turned in Farnham’s eyes. Merrott recoiled as if from a snake. Ma tried to drag Dawn away but Farnham would not let go. Dawn was lost in panic, prying at the man’s grip. She broke two of his fingers but he did not notice. His mouth split in a mindless grin.
Curse tendrils lashed at Dawn, barbed and dripping. Tara grabbed them.
She did not realize what she was doing until it was done. The curse strained against the glyphs on her palm and around her fingers, writhing fishlike, clawing her. The pain struck, electric and searing, but she could not let go, would not let the curse take Dawn.
This was her fight. This was a thing she understood as she had never understood this town, as she had never even understood her parents: this hunger, this darkness, this desire to possess. It was the seed of Craft. She tried to crush the curse, to deny it, but it crawled through her fingers, up her wrist, up her arm. Her glyphs tried to armor her in shadow, but not fast enough—the curse found a gap above her elbow, and pierced her, and began to saw.
She gritted her teeth against the pain as it moved inside her. Her cry was lost in others’—Edgemonters recoiling in terror as strands of curse slipped free of Tara’s grip and reached again for Dawn.
Then, from the depths of her fear, Dawn laughed—hysterical, haughty, furious, mad. Her eyes burned white, and shadow rolled from her.
Time did not work the way it should. Gravity suspended. Hunger claimed Tara, her world the inside of a cold cold mouth, as the tongue convulsed, as a gullet crushed her and dragged her down.
Screams somewhere. Not hers. She would have been screaming, though, if she could just remember where she left her voice.
There was no law in this place but need, and will.
Good thing she had plenty of both.
She willed Edgemont into shape around her. She willed the Coopers and the Braxtons and the Learys and Cavanaughs and the abandoned banjo and Ma and Merrott and Dawn. Her glyphs burned, and her knowledge cast its own shadow, deeper, dense, controlled.
The darkness broke and the village green snapped back: torches, bonfire, grass, stars, storm clouds, Coopers, Braxtons, Learys, Cavanaughs, banjo, Ma, Merrott. Dawn.
Farnham was a skeleton, sinking in a bed of ash.
Black dust slipped from Tara’s skin, leaving a burned trail between her glyphs. Blood welled from the pit the curse had dug into her arm. The pain lingered, and with it fury and fear.
Ma. Gods and demons, Ma had been right there at the heart of it. There she was. Shaking her hands where they’d touched Dawn’s skin, not with the panic of a cold burn, just the instinctive recoil of a woman whose shower had, without warning, forgotten hot water was a thing.
Dawn was laughing, crying, both. She looked up at Tara with a victor’s wild disbelief.
Behind her stood the crowd. Staring. Afraid. Tara heard that fear bloom into anger. Edgemont gathered away from Tara, away from Dawn, the blind god taking shape.
Tara knew these people. She had grown up beside them.
She knew what they could do when they were angry.
Sand whipped through the air. Behind her, storm clouds charged the wall. She heard bowstrings, and the first cries of pain. The attack had begun.
Gods, her arm hurt. Her wound throbbed as if it was alive. Not a good sign.
She forced herself to her feet. Blood dripped down her arm, stained her shirt and jacket, fell from her fingertips to spot the soil. She marched through ash and the dead man’s body to Dawn’s side, and helped her up. Tara’s moonlight and silver work knife burned in her grip, and in its light she saw her blood-streaked hand veined with black. The pain could wait. She boxed it up for later. She had to be an icon now, image more than flesh, implacable, furious, and pure. “Dawn is my student,” she told the town. “She just saved your lives. Show some gratitude.”
She did not face the crowd. She faced Mrs. Leary first, then Nell Ott, then grizzled John Thibodault, then Vaughan Braxton. She could have shouted into the echoing silence to no effect and never touched the heartless god they’d formed between them. But not one of them could stand alone against her.
She was done pretending to be weak, to be like them, to be anything other than what she was. Her wound burned and bled. She wanted to make something suffer, and if she wasn’t careful, it would be these people she’d grown up beside. Fortunately, there were other options to hand.
She pulled Dawn to her feet. “Come on,” she said. And, to the Pastor, still staring at Dawn and the skeleton and the ash on Tara’s shoes: “You, too. All of you. We’re going to the wall.”