The cold earth shoved against her from below, bruising her hips and knees and elbows; hard wood, edged and splintered, jammed down on her from above. Crushing her, pressing against her spine, compressing her chest...while something came for her. Something looked for her, saw her, reached out to her —
She squirmed, unable to break free, unable to breathe...she sobbed in fear, tearing at the earth with her fingers, not heeding the pain of bleeding fingers, knowing only that it saw her —
And then strong arms gathered her up and held and soothed her. Strong arms and a gentle touch. Safe arms.
~~~~~
Dacey watched Whimsy snuffling mouse scent among last year’s dried grasses at the side of the cabin, and smiled at her enthusiasm. She snorted loudly to clear her nose and the noise brought her brother Chase to join the investigation.
He enjoyed the way they delighted in such small things. Watching them had passed many a quiet afternoon.
But not today, even though the morning had dawned quiet and clear, still too cold for anything but a few spring peepers and some early birds. Dacey bent to pull on his soft-soled boot, pushing his back against the door frame. There was no time for such things today, if he was going to make it to town and back before nightfall, and he didn’t want to leave Blaine alone after dark — especially after the fuss she’d raised when he made it clear she wasn’t coming with him.
Besides, he’d been wakened by her nightmares enough to know how regularly they happened. Nothing too dramatic, just small whimpers of distress that brought Blue to her side — until last night, when he himself had taken her up and soothed her back to normal sleep.
Seeings or plain old nightmares, Dacey was unwilling to have her face them alone.
He straightened, wiggling his toes to settle the boot, but his attention was on Blaine. To the side of his cabin, right above the plank-sheltered spring, there was a big old rock, and she had taken to it immediately. She sat there now, her knees drawn up to her chin, coltishly long legs protruding from the bottom of her skirts and her dangling braids brushing the rock behind her. She had fire, Blaine did — maybe too much of it. She’d been scared some by their conversation about the Annekteh, but not scared enough. Not half scared enough.
Maybe he should tell her the rest of it, the things he knew through his seeings — the moments that possessed him, awake or asleep — although not, he suddenly realized, so often as before, now that he had finally acted on them. Seeings that he no longer dared to doubt — never again — had told him what history had lost — or perhaps never known. The extent of Annekteh delight in the things a body could do — both for and to one another. Annekteh disregard for how easy it was to use up a body, how they tended simply to use folks up and toss them aside to commandeer another. Annekteh preoccupation with exploring the extremes of human emotions.
A haunting flash of ice-crystal fear hit him then, unbidden memory of just what the Annekteh could do to a man. What they had done to him. How they had come back to him in his fear and clustered around him, touching him, watching him, envious of his feelings. His hand tightened to white knuckles at the doorframe; he closed his eyes and set his jaw. No. They’re just memories. If he let the Annekteh have such power over him here and now, then they had already won, and he couldn’t allow that.
But neither could he help the shudder that passed through his body, the violence of revulsion and reaction washing through him. When he opened his eyes to the morning, it seemed to have lost some of its clean-edged purity.
His gaze fell on Blaine again, staring down the hollow and blithely unaware of his inner torment. Blue sat up the hill a piece from her, loyally joining her vigil even if he didn’t understand what it was all about. Even as he watched, the hound deliberately leaned forward, his mouth barely open, reaching for the braid that hung down Blaine’s back. Dacey shifted, deliberately; the hound’s gaze slid back to him and he froze, reconsidering, finally settling back into place with resignation.
Blaine turned and saw Dacey then, and stood in a motion that took him by surprise with its grace. For an instant he saw what she was growing into, something of elusive elegance that these hills seldom nourished. And then she was all legs and bony arms again, staring awkwardly down at him.
“Can’t see the harm in letting me come along,” she said, more frustration in her voice than challenge. “It’ll be a far piece along in my life before I ever come this way again. Or come any way again, I reckon.”
That was probably true. And it would be hurtful to tell her the truth, that he had a lot to do and little time to do it in. She was safe here, and in a few days, she’d be back to pushing herself, trying to keep up with him as they returned to Shadowed Hollers. The rest would do her good.
“There’s plenty of fixings in the cabin,” he said by way of answer, “and a goodly slab of ham hanging in the dairy. Make sure you don’t go hungry.” For she was as apt to pick at her meals as eat them right down, and he thought she’d already lost weight, pounds she couldn’t afford to do without.
She sat again, crosslegged, resting her chin on her fist. There was a stubborn, unhappy look to her light blue eyes, but she seemed resigned enough. Blue looked from one to the other of them and settled back on his haunches, trying to decide whether Blaine was staying on the rock or not.
“Blaine,” Dacey said, riding the edge of exasperation, “I got things to do.” He stopped short of saying she’d only be in the way, and so ended up saying nothing more at all. Nothing except, “I’ll be back before dark.”
She looked away and he thought maybe she’d understood those unspoken words after all. She reached out to pet Blue — not something she’d do if she was thinking about it — and shrugged, her expression full of sulk and hurt.
She was all up front with what she felt, anyway — there was no mistaking her feelings, nor her tenacity. Not like him at her age — or now, for that matter. Everything hidden. Although she was about at the age when people stopped taking his quiet nature for lack of fire, back when he’d lost his mother to a chance encounter with a drunken riverman. Back when he’d done something about it.
Dacey had the troubling certainty that Blaine was about to have her coming of age, too.
He leaned down to snag his backpack. Whimsy and her brother stopped their snuffling long enough to give him an inquisitive look, and he murmured, “Stay home,” at them. They immediately dismissed him, absorbed by their important task of hunting those dangerous mice. Dacey smiled and started off, Mage at his heels. A last glance at Blaine showed her staring back down the hollow. Ignoring him. He felt a smile on his lips for that, too, though not one she’d ever see.
He took the long way into town. It was Trade Day, unless he’d misreckoned, and by noon he had a good chance of finding his uncles along the river front. On Trade Day, clunky steamers from deeper south came and offered their goods, but mostly it was trade between locals. A fresh spring morning like this one would bring out anyone who could make it.
Dacey would be there, if later than most. The long way would take him to his Aunt Pippy, who was too racked with joint ills to make it as far as the market. She was his oldest living relative, a woman who still remembered the last of the Annekteh Ridge seers. If any of his kin had help to give him, she’d be the one. His trip on into town would be as much to warn the others as to gather information from them.
Pippy’s house perched on a rocky little point just above the creek, a spot with sparse foliage over thin soil. She sat on the porch, bundled against the chill air and painstakingly darning a sock with her misshapen hands. It was easy for her to see him coming.
“Where have you been, child?” she asked, laying the sock aside. “Your cousin Rosabel went to see about getting some deer leather from you, and you weren’t nowhere to be found.”
“Been up north.” Dacey climbed the stairs to the high-set porch, spotting one he’d like to fix. Aunt Pippy couldn’t take chances for a fall, not with her bones.
Astonishment wrinkled her papery brow. “Whatever for? Hasn’t been none of us found a need to go that way since we left it!”
“I had a need,” he said simply. He sat in the rocker on the other side of the porch from her, and stared out over the creek a moment.
Pippy gave a dry little laugh. “You always did say more with those quiet spells than anyone else with a sack full of words. You done got something big on your mind, Dacey, and now come to me with it — so you might as well spit it out.”
He couldn’t quite do that. Such a big thing, and the words to say it seemed so small. He finally settled on, “I need your Annekteh lore.”
She narrowed her eyes at him until they almost disappeared in the surrounding wrinkles. “You got a passel of needs, it seems to me. And I don’t like the sound of none of them.”
“Ain’t nothing to like.” Reluctantly, he came to it. “I been north, and I found the Annekteh there. I got to go back and do something about it.”
“My, my, my,” she said, and set her chair to rocking. After a moment, and with some effort, she pushed herself out of it and hobbled into her house. When she came out again, it was with a small pouch of thin, finely tanned leather. She pressed it into his palm. “I ain’t got much for you, son. Our folk may not have believed the Annekteh was dead, but they never wanted to deal with them again, neither, and they’d lost most their writings just like everyone else. So they came down here and tried to forget what they knowed. Your granny was the last of them that had any power a’tall. This was hers.”
Dacey loosened the pouch tie and tipped the bag so light would spill into it, but was not quite able to identify the dim, lumpy objects within.
“With those you can make a warding,” Pippy told him.
Suddenly he knew what they were, remembered hearing his granny talk of them, her words never nothing but grim. His voice was the same. “I know how to use them.”
“Nothing else I can tell you, ’cept they die like any creature, iff’n you put an arrow or blade in the right place. Not that killing the Taken is easy. Sometimes I think that’s half the reason our folk came this way — so’s they wouldn’t have to look in the eyes of the survivors, the ones the seer’s made to kill their own.” Pippy lowered herself back into her chair and looked at him, her gaze more piercing than it had been before. “What sent you north, Dacey?”
Not many would understand. But not many understood him as well as Pippy did. “Followed my dreams, Auntie.”
“Figured. That seer’s blood do find a way to get out, even if it ain’t proper magic. Son, you got to learn — you can’t fix all the ailments of the world. Better a few sleepless nights than getting yourself hurt again, or even killed.”
The skin around his eyes got tight, the way it always did at the thought of his seeings, and of the first time he’d had them. The first time he’d ignored them. “I put the seeings aside once, and my mommy died for it. I ain’t never going to live with that again.”
She shook her head, looked away, sighed. “No, son. I know you ain’t. But...keep yourself safe, d’ye hear? It’d break an old woman’s heart to hear somethingd happened to you.”
He tucked the pouch in an inside jacket pocket and stood, leaning over to kiss her soft, wrinkled cheek. “Wouldn’t do no good for my day, either,” he said. “I’ll let you know when I get back.”
He left her yard with long strides, running away from the hint of tear he’d seen in her eyes. Running, because they both knew there was little assurance that he would return from chasing down this set of seeings.
~~~~~
Blaine used half the morning sulking, and then got tired of it. She spent some time in Dacey’s garden, and when noontime came, she suddenly realized she was good and hungry. The thought of Dacey’s ham was enough to set her mouth to watering, and she abandoned the hoe — she’d been trying to loosen the soil enough for at least a small patch of peas — and headed uphill for the cabin, carrying the small bucket of lamb’s quarter she’d picked. Blue trailed along beside her, of course. Maidie sunned herself on the big rock, and Chase and Whimsy were nowhere to be seen.
Good. She wouldn’t have to contend with their begging.
She washed her hands in the tin basin set outside the door and spent a few minutes tending the braids she had ignored that morning, replaiting them, pulling the cloth strip from her pocket that she often used to bind them together at her back and keep them from flopping into her work. “All right, then,” she said to Blue. “Time to see about that ham. And I ain’t promising you none, so you mought as well not roll them eyes at me when I bring it up.”
The dairy entrance was set to the side of the cabin opposite the stove, toward the front and almost at the foot of the bed. She hauled the heavy door up and peered down into the darkness. Hmm. She definitely needed a candle — she wasn’t going to mess with his fancy lamp, not and chance breaking it. Dacey kept candles on a ledge over the window, hidden away from the mice in a tin box. The stove still had enough coal from the night’s fire to light it, and, clutching the thick, cool column of wax, Blaine backed down the ladder into the dairy while Blue hung around the entrance and whined questions at her.
When she turned away from the ladder to face the dairy, she couldn’t help but be amazed at its size. Nearly a third of the house, dug out and shored up, it was lined with shelves on three sides. And the shelves were full, with heavily wrapped cheeses and straw covered piles of last year’s produce and rows of canned goods. Dacey was nothing, she decided, if not thorough. Or...perhaps prepared was a better word.
Prepared definitely fit him, the way nothing seemed to take him back for long. If she’d been given that Annekteh pill of fear, she’d have taken a week to stop trembling, but not Dacey. Sure, he’d had that strange reaction, and he’d been extra quiet the first few days they’d walked, but it soon gave way to what she now recognized as his regular kind of quiet.
A hot spatter of wax on her hand made her jump, more startled than hurt. Spirits, but a dark, spider-full dairy wasn’t the place to get lost in thought! She reached for the ham — hanging right out in the open where Dacey had said — but hesitated when she heard Maidie’s angry bark. Above her, Blue’s head swung away from the dairy opening; he growled.
What? she thought, and then realization crowded in on top of it — those were not what noises, they were who noises. Too soon for Dacey to be back, not that the dogs would bark at him anyway. She climbed the ladder, quick and unmindful of the further spatter of wax on her skin. At the top, she found Blue standing in the doorway, growling in an uncertain manner. Not yet sure if it was something to be upset about, she decided.
But how many strangers came to this cabin? How many people the dogs would classify as out and out intruders? She was careful as she peered out the door, for it seemed to her that they must be as rare to Dacey as they were to the Kendricks.
And then she saw him, and dropped the candle. Black leather pants, boots with padded shins — How’d they find us? Her heart beating a runaway course, Blaine clutched at the rough log wall and slid to her knees anyway. She was cornered here. There was no way to get out without being seen. She was quick and agile, but....
The open dairy beckoned her, and frightened her. To be trapped down there while he moved in...a sob escaped her throat, an echo of the very noise she’d made last night during the nightmare that now come flooding back to her. Caught in the dark, cowering from the hand that reached for her —
She broke, scrambling for the dairy, snagging her skirts on the ladder and ignoring the rip of sturdy material. Except — the candle! Halfway down she reversed course and re-emerged, stretching for the warm-wicked object that surely would have given her away. This time she remembered the dairy door, too.
It was barely closed when she heard Blue whine above her.
“Blue, no!” she hissed, but knew it was no good. Something came for her — but she’d been alone, in that nightmare. Not this time. Out she popped again, to take hold of Blue’s collar and jerk him forward with such sudden determination that he tumbled into the dairy with time for little more than a muffled yelp. Then down came the door and darkness closed in on them.
Blue whined again while Blaine huddled at the bottom of the ladder and stared anxiously at a door she could no longer see. In the darkness, he bumped up against her and sought out her hand. “Shhh,” she said, her voice squeaking slightly, “hush yourself or you’ll have us kilt.”
The man reached the cabin door, opening it slowly to walk right in. Boot heels hit the floor above her and stopped. He was looking around... seeing no one. Looking, she knew, at the hinged door in the floor. Did they have dairies in the plains? Would he think to look down here?
Suddenly she knew she couldn’t take the chance. She’d gone to ground like a muskrat to water, and she’d have to keep going. She had to find the deepest, darkest corner of this place.
The unshelved wall — it had looked like Dacey hadn’t completely finished digging there. Blaine groped along the shelf beside the ladder, cringing at the noise from the potato she knocked down. He was by the stove now, on the opposite side of the cabin from her.
There. Her fingers hit dirt, scrabbled against it in her distress. She suddenly realized she was shaking, shaking hard. Stop it, said a harsh inner voice, fighting the rising flood of hysteria in her throat. You just stop it, Blaine Kendricks.
At the top of the wall, she found what she thought she remembered — a narrow crawl space between the floor beam of the cabin and the undisturbed ground. Not a space her sister would have fit into. Maybe, just maybe, she could squeeze herself that flat. Something thudded to the floor above her head and shattered. Footsteps moved toward the dairy.
If it broke every rib in her body, she would squeeze herself that flat.
Another ripping noise, her shirt this time, and the gouge of chunky splintered wood against her skin. For an instant she was stuck at the hips, with her legs hanging down the wall and her elbows digging futilely against the damp and slimy ground. Then her fingertips found and wrapped around an old root, and she pulled — and was through. To her immense relief, once she scraped herself past the floor beam at the crawl space opening, the area opened up a little; she could do more than take a deep breath, she could get up on her elbows as she wriggled to face the door, and even hitch up on her knees a little.
And then Blue whined. He was standing on his hind legs, his nose poking in at her. Above them, footsteps made a thoughtful sort of circle around the dairy door.
“C’mon, Blue,” Blaine whispered. “Come up here with me, then. Hurry up!”
She could only imagine the doubtful expression on his face, but knew it was there, a big wrinkle above his brow and forward-cocked ears. He made a halfhearted effort and slid back to the ground again.
The man fumbled at the leather strap that served as a door pull.
“C’mon, Blue, c’mon —” first panic, then inspiration, struck. “Blue — come and get it. Get it Blue, get it! It’s back here!”
Potent words for a hound. His doubts forgotten, Blue lunged upward, making it halfway through the narrow spot in one good squeeze. No time for pained curses; she snared his collar and pulled. Forced sideways, he popped through into the crawl space, inhaling scent and determined to get whatever Blaine had holed up in here for him.
Dim light created grays and shadows as the door opened. Lying as flat as she could, as far back as she could get — which meant to the next floor beam — Blaine watched the backs of high, dark boots descend the ladder. Blue, confused and determined to get something, scrabbled around to face the dairy, rumbling in his chest.
Blaine surprised him into temporary silence by clamping her hand around his muzzle as the man reached the floor and turned around to face her. He scanned the contents of the shelves as his hands rose to his hips, irritation on his face. Blaine eased all the breath out of her body and imagined herself as thin as a skim of ice on a frosty morning.
Something looked for her, saw her, reached out to her — Blaine shook, hiding the paleness of her face against Blue’s short, slick coat, even if it did mean losing sight of the one who hunted her.
After a moment she heard the man grumble something in disgust; she heard his foot hit the bottom rung of the ladder. He was going to leave, and she would be safe. Dreams were just dreams, and she’d be safe...she clenched her hand, unmindful that it held the dog’s muzzle, wishing hard for those safe arms she suddenly remembered, the ones that took her up and ended the nightmare —
Blue whined and pawed at her hand, his tail thumping once in apology for whatever he had done to make her grip his face.
Blue, no! She tightened her fingers and shook the dog’s muzzle a few quick, fierce times, daring to peek out at the dairy.
He had heard. He had turned back, his head cocked but not certain....
But a sweep of the room must have confirmed his earlier conclusion — nothing bigger than a rat could hide here. Blaine jumped as the man abruptly jerked a shelf over, a violent move that spilled its contents across the floor and completely concealed the growl Blue could not contain. As the shelf creaked, settling unevenly, the man climbed the ladder and slammed the door down.
Darkness again. Footsteps, brisk and decisive, leaving the cabin. Maidie barked, sounding peevish, but after a moment her complaints grew intermittent and then died to a few final grumbles.
Blaine cautiously released Blue’s muzzle, and then had to dodge his tongue. “Quit!” she muttered, as loud as she dared, ducking her head between her arms. Then she had to move quick to grab him again; he was ready to bolt out into the dairy. “Oh, no. We’re staying right here.” Right here, until she felt safe enough to move again.
For now, all she could do was shake. She held the dog tightly, just glad to have something to hold at all.
~~~~~
Dacey reached town after noon, quick-footing it from Pippy’s place but stuck with the long way around. He’d head home much more directly, and beat nightfall easy enough — and if not, he’d run. He wouldn’t leave Blaine to the darkness, not in this strange place with such fears in her recent days.
Town was little more than the river front and a few buildings — one to hold the river merchants’ goods, one for gatherings and social occasions, a few to hold the blacksmith’s forge and the animals he stabled, and one for Annie’s small boarding house and its diner — not to mention a smattering of homesteads built close in to town.
As he’d expected, the street was full of Trade Day traffic. There was a boat in dock, one of the odd new steam ships that weren’t of any use further upstream. There were lots of odd things from downstream, things that were wanted but not always afforded, and other things from which the community just plain turned away. Dacey’s windows had made that trip. So had a number of pistols, loud and awkward weapons that hardly ever aimed true, and that meant a lot of fumbling with powder and ball when it came to taking a second shot.
So far, the hunters of the area had chosen to stay with their bows, snares, and knives. Now, looking at the steam ship with narrowed eyes, Dacey found himself wondering if pistols were used on the plains, and trying to remember if the Annekteh camp had had any. It would be one more thing to take Blaine’s endangered community by surprise, if so. But the Annekteh eschewed projectile weapons as a rule, and with luck they’d extended that ban to pistols.
Dacey raised his hand in return to a friendly hail as he walked the half-dried mud of the lane in front of the river, but didn’t pause, his focus on finding his kin.
Or it was, until he saw the high-booted men close to the dock. Dacey stopped in mid-stride, unmindful of the folks who were forced to take a sudden detour him and Mage. For a moment his breath caught in his chest, his sight narrowed to tunnel vision...his body remembered fear, in an instant of reaction he couldn’t suppress. Then he started to breathe again, to think. They were here! How had they —
They’d come down the treacherous river, obviously. He forced a deep breath, dropped a hand to Mage’s head as the dog tensed and growled, deep in his chest. “With me,” he reminded the dog softly. Down the river. They’d probably simply Taken a few of Blaine’s kin and neighbors to figure out how to get to the seers’ new territory — and to Dacey —
He wondered if they’d lost any men to the dangerous waters along the way — and how many were here now. The two he saw moved from trade-goods loaded to tables with river merchandise, ducking into buildings along the way. The plainsmen remained casual and natural; they even appeared to be polite.
Dacey narrowed his gaze, ever more wary...not trusting the innocuous nature of their activity as they worked independently of one another, nodding to this man, brushing up against that one, smiling and ducking their heads at the women. At first baffled, Dacey suddenly saw the pattern of it. Touch, Take, and release. They were not just plainsmen. They were Annekteh Taken. Vessels. Touch, Take, and release, so quick the victims weren’t even sure what had happened. Take and release. Learn about the area. Learn about the seers’ kin. Learn that they had nothing to fear from most of the people here — except, of course, for the one for whom they were looking.
Him.
He started walking again, slowly — watching — Mage matching his pace. One of the men drifted closer to him, one further away. Carefully, he fell in behind the closer one. He shadowed the man, ignoring the greeting from his cousin Jimsy, playing a fine line between being noticed by everyone else for his odd behavior and being noticed by the Annekteh, period. Eventually he was behind his quarry, close enough to hear the man’s meaningless remarks and salutations.
He hadn’t really understood his own intent until that point, when he discovered his hand was tight around the handle of his knife. Spirits, there had to be another way. There had to be. From behind, like an unsuspecting animal? The man before him was Taken, was just an innocent tool.
But warning meant the annektehr inside him could escape. Back to the fold in the North — or into someone else here, mostly likely, someone he’d know...maybe someone he loved.
No, it had to be nekfehr death...that which the Annekteh dreaded above all, the death of the annektehr along with the Vessel. Hating himself, hating that he was the kind of man who could even consider such action, Dacey targeted the man’s heart from the back as though he were a deer walking into arrow range. Three swift, bold strides, and his arm was around the man’s neck, pulling him into the rapid thrust of the knife at his back, through the ribs, driving up —
Dacey held the Vessel close while the man gave a spastic jerk, and another, and — with a sudden sobbing exhalation, deflated. It wasn’t until he hit the ground and quivered at Dacey’s feet that the handful of people around them began to realize there was a problem, and even then they couldn’t quite fathom it.
“Dacey, what —”
“Spirits, Dacey, what have you —”
Dacey ignored their gasps — Jimsy’s protests, the hand that reached for him — and aimed himself at the other Annekteh. The man — no, the Vessel, the enemy — must realize that something had happened to his annektehr partner, but wasn’t ready to give himself away. Instead, he was closing in on Dacey’s Uncle Sy. Touch — Dacey was running — Take — Dacey yelled a warning —
No, there was no Take!
The Vessel’s eyes widened at his failure, and as Sy jerked away and scowled at what he thought was simple over-familiarity, the man dipped his hand into his side pouch and slapped Sy on the arm.
Dacey plowed into them both, ending up on top of them; someone running up hard on Dacey’s heels overshot them all. There was too much shouting for Dacey to hear what the Vessel cursed at him, and he ignored all the hands that plucked at him. He clenched his hands together and drew back to bring their combined strength against the side of the Vessel’s face.
Then Dacey was outnumbered, and virtually lifted off his enemy. He struggled to find his feet while being tugged at from half a dozen directions, and flabbergasted exclamations hammered him. You done broke his jaw, Dacey! Are you crazy, man? Dacey! Stop!
“Sy!” It was the clearest voice, and it held shock and distress that cut through the clamor. “Sy, what’s wrong?”
Sudden silence, and the various grips on Dacey’s clothes and arms slowly eased. The Vessel lay unconscious before him; just to the side, his cousin Jimsy bent over Uncle Sy. Sy’s lips were blueish; his face grey.
“What ails him, Jim?” It was Dalkin Fleming’s demanding voice, nearly in Dacey’s ear. He should have known it was Dalkin when he got lifted right off that Vessel; few could match the blacksmith’s casual strength.
“I — he’s dead! I think he’s dead!”
Not fast enough. I wasn’t fast enough. Not quick enough with his warning. Dacey stared at his uncle’s body. I didn’t have no seeings for you, Sy.
Jimsy had something in his hands, turning it over for examination and holding it far from his face to accommodate his notoriously blurry close-vision. “A dart,” he said. “D’ye suppose — that fella —” He looked at the Vessel, and then down at his uncle, and his face twitched in a battle between grief and fury.
“What’s going on, Dacey?” Dalkin growled. He grabbed Dacey’s shirt at the shoulder and yanked him around so they were face to face, then shouted, “What’s going on here?”
Dacey looked back at him, eyes narrowed, face quiet. At the edge of the crowded confrontation, Mage growled. After a moment, the blacksmith released him and stepped back.
“Dacey,” Jimsy said, a single word of intense demand. He got up from their uncle’s side and joined Dalkin, the two closest faces in a crowd of distressed kinfolk and friends. For the most part they were still too shocked to react, but the tears were beginning.
Dacey took a deep breath. “Annekteh,” he said simply.
Dalkin spat. “Kilt ’em all, Dacey!”
“I ain’t going over that old argument with you — nor anyone. There’s Annekteh up north, and I found ’em. I come here today to get the word out.”
“You found them? Looks more like they found you.” Dalkin glared. “And in finding you, us. You want to go off on your little adventures, you better be sure to keep ’em to yourself.”
“Leave off, Dalk,” Jimsy snapped, fairly bursting with the need to lash out at someone. “If they was kilt, this ’un’d never have got to Sy.”
“Dacey’s plumb on the mark about this kind o’ thing,” Annie said, her elderly voice quivering but clear enough over the noise of the crowd. “It ain’t his fault we been running away from this day.”
“But what’re we gonna do?” That was Susannah, fifteen and easy to rile. “Granny, they’ll Take us all!”
“They’re dead, now — or will be,” Dacey said grimly. He looked at the second man, the Vessel, with the annekfehr trapped inside — only as long as the Vessel was unconscious. He’d have to be killed before he woke. Gran, I think you done told me too much. A heavy weight, Gran’s knowledge, when so few shared it with him. “And now you know to watch. They ain’t much interested in here, not yet — likely won’t be, as we don’t have what they want. They’re settling in at the hollers up north. That’s where the fighting is. Where the magic’s coming back.”
“That’s where you been,” Jimsy said, understanding coming across his plain, stubble-jawed face as the pitch of his emotions cooled. “Rosabel said you were gone, an’ I counted you as off hunting. But you was a lot further than that, wasn’t you?”
Dacey nodded. “But I was hunting, all right.” He looked down at the Vessel. “Don’t none of you touch him, less’n you’re direct of my granny’s line. An’...you got to kill him afore he wakes.” The man groaned, as if he’d heard and understood; all Dacey wanted was to be away before it was done.
“There was three of ’em,” Dalkin said, his voice holding sudden alarm. “I seen three of ’em come past my place to Annie’s last night.”
Dacey discovered his hand was bloody, wiped it off on his pants. “He’ll know what’s happened.” They all knew, all through the annektehr and the unbodied Annekteh. “I don’t reckon he’ll be easy to find, now. The annektehr may even abandon him. If he’s been Took a long time, there won’t be much left of him.” He gave Dalkin a sharp look. “It ain’t safe to have him around in any case.”
Dalkin nodded slowly. “What of you, Dacey?”
“Going back north,” Dacey said. He looked down at his uncle, a long look that held all the good-bye he would have the chance to give. “Going to try to make sure they don’t get comfortable there.”
His words didn’t seem to surprise anyone. They moved aside for him as he walked away from the spot, and didn’t bother him as he retrieved his knife from the first man’s body and wiped it clean against the shin of the black padded boot.
Blaine was waiting.
~~~~~~~~~~