“Belmas isn’t wrong,” Mal said, amused, “when he says it was obvious.”
“Not to me,” Avani retorted. Embarrassment made her furious, and she didn’t care if Mal saw it. “Had I need to kill a man I’d use my own sword.”
“In battle or self-defense, certainly.” Mal smirked. The flatlander graveyard was dark but for the occasional late fire beetle and the mage-light over Avani’s head. When she’d found the vocent he’d been sitting alone in the moonless night, all but motionless beneath black skies as if waiting for the stars to come out.
It didn’t escape her notice that it was Siobahn’s stone slab upon which he sat. Knowing that he still sought some comfort there only stoked Avani’s temper. For all that she believed herself a temperate person, she could not forgive the dead woman the grief she’d caused.
“But this is murder, not a battlefield killing or a duel gone all the way to mortal wound,” continued Mal. “Murder is a tricky thing.” His eyes flashed green disdain under lowered lids. “You’ve not met it in this form before, not this deliberate, cold-blooded monster, but if you continue on as you have at the king’s right hand you’ll eventually learn better than to ask stupid question of testy barons when you could ask them instead of his more loquacious housemaids and get the same answer with less offense taken.” He tapped the long fingers of one hand soundlessly against Siobahn’s gravestone. “Harder to let go the office than you expected, is it? Packed away the Hennish leather but still eager to answer Renault’s call? Not so eager to run back to Stonehill as you once were? That’s the difficulty with prestige—it’s near as addicting as magic.”
“I went to the throne room looking for you.” Avani had never been afraid of Mal. She wouldn’t let him change that now. They were of a height—the magus cross-legged on his dead wife’s stone and Avani on her toes in the summer grass—and when the magus leaned forward Avani held her ground. “You left me behind on Farrow’s land without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“Something came up. I’d finished what needed doing on Farrow’s homestead.” He smelled of apples and ire and faintly of sweat. “I wasn’t aware I needed your permission to go about my own business, Avani.”
“Ai, not mine, but certainly the king’s. He had to hear of the sidhe from a courtier and of Farrow’s death from me.”
Mal shifted away. Resting back on the palms of his hands, he turned his head to watch a fire beetle fly mad circles above the forest of old gravestones.
“You should have kept Renault from my chambers,” he said, flatly accusing, “until I was recovered, or at the very least you might have been kind and barred the door until I was back in my right mind. You and I are meant to look out for each other, or so I thought. But instead you let him in and he heard too much, saw too much. Now he won’t meet my eye or clasp my hand as brothers do. I’ve lost the king’s regard. I’ve known it since I first woke to sense and glimpsed his unease when he thought I didn’t see. I hoped that would change, that I would soon regain his trust. He’s loved me a long time, and I him.” Mal glanced sideways at Avani. “He’s a good king, and loyal man, but he’s always preferred to leave the hardest tasks to others. Now I’m the difficult task and you’re his easiest solution.”
Distress blunted the edges of Avani’s temper. “You frightened him,” she allowed slowly. “And I’m sorry for it, but you were frightening. I imagine you can’t recall. You were in a bad way. It was a . . . dangerous time.” She winced when he scowled and continued more gently. “I couldn’t have kept him from your side had I ten Kingsmen at my disposal. Renault will come around, but not if you insist in neglecting your duties. You throw his doubts too much back in his face, I think. Give him time.”
For a long moment Mal said nothing. In Avani’s head the feel of him was the threat of lightning, keen and too sharp. Avani ground her teeth against the growing tempest. Suddenly Mal chuckled.
“Sit,” he said, a challenge and a request. In the shine of her silver sphere his grin was self-mocking. “Unless I’ve frightened you, too.”
“Ai, of course not.”
So she sat, scooting up onto the edge of Siobahn’s stone. The slab was pleasantly cool through her salwar. Siobahn’s ghost was not there. Mal had seen his wife well and truly gone, had banished her from the realm of the living. He clasped Avani’s hand. Because she wanted to prove to them both that she trusted him yet, she let him. As soon as their fingers twined the pain in her skull lessened. She went light-headed with relief. It was like poison drawn from a festering wound; she hadn’t realized the entire weight of it until the burden was gone.
“You should have told me,” Mal chided. “How long?”
“Since you stepped off the ship,” Avani confessed past a lump in her throat. “The deep sea sundered our link and for months I couldn’t feel you, and then you were back and you were overflowing too much. You couldn’t hold your boundaries, not even with the ivory back on your wrists, and I couldn’t guess what else to do but catch what I could before you did damage to anyone else.” She almost asked him about Liam, then, but the pressure of his grip warned her tread cautiously. “For a time it worked.”
“Until it didn’t, because even the deepest well can’t contain an endless font.” He squeezed her fingers. His hands were warm, roughly calloused. “I’m sorry. I can’t promise it won’t continue to happen for a while yet. Things changed, in Roue. I’m still learning my way.” In the mage-light his expression was wistful. “But I can help you with it, next time. Take back what you’ve collected, so to speak. Relieve you of me.”
It was a boon to be alone again in her head. Once she’d craved the flame of him under her skin, rejoiced in the promise of their twined power, and known that he’d felt the same. Their connection had been a comfort—nay, more than a comfort, it had been perilous and sweet in turns, heady as newly forged infatuation.
Now she knew he’d been wise to try to prevent that entanglement. Now, when it was too late. Whatever it was that bound them was well and truly rooted, for good or for evil.
“Let me show you what I was about,” Mal said across their clasped hands, as his warm regard flowed, intoxicating as strong wine across their link. “While you were bending my king’s ear and worrying Baron Belmas.”
He released her hand. While she watched, awestruck, he drew a cloud of glittering fire beetles from the trees bordering the graveyard. Like tiny, pulsing stars the insects swarmed overhead, so surpassing Avani’s mage-light that she snuffed her magic to better see their beauty. She counted one hundred, and then another fifty, and then she lost track of their number.
“I’ve never seen so many at once.”
“They’re coming to the end of their cycle,” replied Mal sadly. “They’ve tonight left, mayhap tomorrow. A candle fly’s life is fleeting.”
Then he murmured a half-voiced cant, wielding the swarm like a scribe might his ink, one elegant finger a stylus, the night air a dusky canvas. He sketched rows and curves and parallel lines in the air, wielding the tiny pulsing bodies. At his command the beetles held frozen exactly as he placed them, motionless but for their flash and fade and spark again, and the desperate beating of their wings.
So taken was Avani by their allure that she almost failed to recognize Mal’s artistry. Until the starlit lines coalesced into a familiar pattern that brought to mind weary days spent under the city, walking old tunnels, sealing off sidhe doors to keep Wilhaiim safe.
“Andrew’s barrow map,” she said. “Russel and I committed what of it we could to memory. The tunnels under the city are blocked.” She squinted, pointing. “You’ve added to it, here and here. There are the passages running west and north; Whitcomb is there, and Stonehill there. But these—” on the perimeter of the tangle that was the old sidhe warren beneath Renault’s city crooked fingers reached east “—are new.”
“New to Andrew’s map and to the deep earth,” Mal agreed. “I’ve supplemented the model as I come upon fresh tunneling. Look there.” He tilted his chin skyward and a single byway began a hectic dazzle. “This passage stalls beneath Farrow’s fields, not directly below the homestead, but close enough as to make no difference.”
“You tracked the sidhe.” Avani was impressed. “The king’s soldiers and a hunting dog spent half a day walking those fields and still couldn’t regain its trail, not past Farrow’s cottage.”
“Not the barrowman.” Mal shook his head. The diminutive gold hoops he’d taken to wearing Rouen-fashion in his ears danced prettily. “The sidhe was too careful for even my methods. Farrow’s wife, on the other hand, left a beaten track a child could follow.” His brows rose in silent provocation.
“My lord!” Avani sat straight. “At least tell me: did you find the poor woman alive?”
Mal hopped off Siobahn’s slab. He dusted his hands on his thighs. His conjured map was fading, fire beetles flickering out one by one. “Farrow’s cottage, tomorrow,” he said, awarding Avani a wicked grin. “Just after sunrise, before the heat of the day becomes unbearable. Bring that corporal friend of yours; if she’s got Andrew’s map in her head, she may be useful.”
“Mal!” Avani rolled onto her knees. “For my sake, go and speak to Renault!”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Avani.” He strode away through the dark, sure-footed even without a light. “Don’t be late.”
He vanished into the night, leaving her alone with only the snared fire beetles for company. Released, the insects fell into the grass with a noise like a sudden burst of rain. They were dead before they hit the ground, starlight snuffed.
“I’m not known for an overabundance of caution,” Russel complained as she scanned the front of Farrow’s shuttered cottage. “But this smacks of perfidy.”
Avani had slept peacefully the night before as she hadn’t since Mal had been stolen overseas. The relief of it made her cheerful.
“I think it’s the way of magi, this making of teaching into a game.” She sat on Farrow’s stoop, intent on the view across the wheat. “It was like this, before, when he wanted to show me how to do a thing. I suspect he finds book learning boring.”
Russel scoffed. “Has he forgiven you, then? For stealing away the king’s favor? Because despite his courtly airs, he seems a jealous sort. Could be he plans to turn you into a trout and leave you behind in yonder pond and none the wiser.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” Avani growled. She couldn’t help but grin. “Why would he ask you along, then, if he meant to do me injury?”
“I’m told I’d make an admirable bullfrog,” the soldier replied, deadpan. Then, more quietly she asked, “You did leave word with His Majesty?”
“Aye,” Avani said, ignoring Russel’s pointed nod. “I did.”
When Mal arrived, he came up over the knoll from the direction of the cellar, step jaunty. In spite of the early hour the magus looked refreshed and as content as Avani had ever seen him. As he drew closer she saw he’d cut his hair ruthlessly into order, sheared the long waves into a cap of close-cropped curls.
“Good morning,” he said without breaking stride. “This way, into the field, if you please. Sheathe your sword, corporal. We won’t be needing it just yet.”
Avani jumped to her feet. She hurried to catch him up, then walked companionably at his shoulder. She held her tongue as they plunged off grass and into the wheat, knowing better than to demand explanation right from the start. Instead she took careful notice of their surroundings: the crop past ripening, the sheaves beginning to shrivel, the seeds to drop. The soil was springy beneath the soles of her boots, the field meticulously tended. She saw the miniature cairns here and there beneath amber stems where stones had been worked free of the dirt during planting and set aside.
“What’s that you’ve got?” Russel asked of Mal.
“Tanner’s awl,” the magus replied. “Farrow had quite a collection in his kit, as one might expect. This one is of particular interest.”
“And why’s that? My lord.”
“Long enough, and thin, and sharp,” Avani said, grimacing. “It’s the dagger on the belt again, is it? The killer used what was close at hand: Farrow’s own tool. I suppose that’s what pierced his heart.”
“How can you be sure?” demanded Russel. “What spell unmasks a killing blade?”
“At least two that I know of,” answered Mal. “But in this case all it took was better light and a more thorough search. I found this rolled beneath a fold of fox pelt, both ends still tacky with Farrow’s blood.”
Although the crop had been laid down in neat rows with enough space between for a man to haul water mostly unencumbered, the wheat was clearly damaged, bent just above the ground where two days earlier Kingsmen had trod, hunting. The search party had made a good job of ruining the wheat in their search. Mal waited while Avani squatted to examine an entire stalk laid flat across several others. Where growth had been kicked free of the ground severed stems were already withered. Five or six sheaves, still fresh enough as to be worth salvaging, lay crosswise atop the desiccated chaff.
Overhead the sky was turning from gray to pale blue, the sun waking.
“What are we doing?” Russel ventured bitterly. “Surely you didn’t ask us out at sunrise for a stroll. Beaumont canvased Farrow's fields top to bottom and found nothing. Take a squint. There’s nothing here but good dirt and Farrow’s livelihood lost.”
Mal tapped the blunt end of Farrow’s awl against his thigh. “I assume you’re taught tracking in the army, corporal?”
“Aye, some.”
“Any good at it?”
“Enough to get by. Better than, mayhap. Chased a tribesman down from the edge of the divide all the way north of the Black Coast, once. Four days of our nose to the scrub but we ran him to ground in a tavern near the sea, hauled him back to Wilhaiim over the pommel of my saddle. He never once said a word, even when they marched him off to be hanged. But he knew well enough what I was saying when I called him a sneaking bastard.”
Mal thumped Farrow’s awl against his leg again: once, twice. His exasperation dripped into Avani’s skull. She glanced away, pretended to study the field so he wouldn’t see her dismay.
“As Mistress Farrow is no desert tribesman and I’ve given you a head start,” Mal told Russel, “I hope this will take fewer than four days. Avani’s already seen it, though she hasn’t put the pieces together. She’s more shepherd than huntsman, more islander than farmer.”
Russel struck one thumb against the pommel of her sword in counter rhythm to the awl’s restless beat. Mal went still. Russel nodded, point made. Then she raised a brow in Avani’s direction.
“My lady?”
Avani shook her head, at a loss. “There’s no sorcery at work here, not that I can tell.”
“Begging your pardon,” said Russel. “It’s not mage-work, it’s the crop. Lord Malachi is quite right: I should have seen it at once, had I known what we were about.” She bit off the last two syllables. Mal only smiled, outwardly affable. “There’s two sets of tracks, see? The greater from Beaumont’s long walk, north to south and mostly straight with it.”
The soldier brushed between Mal and Avani and crouched. “Here, look. These are more recent breaks, the damage fresh. Someone walked here within the last day, back and forth along the same path. As early as last night, if I’m any judge at all.”
“You’ve good eyes,” Mal granted. “What else?”
Russel cupped her chin. The faint sheen of perspiration already marked her face. Avani knew the soldier couldn’t be comfortable in her livery but would speak no complaint.
“There are prints in the soil,” Russel reported after a moment. “Blunt toe, square heel. Not a boot—a villein’s clog. Mistress Farrow, you said.” She blinked up at the vocent, mouth tight. “Do you mean to say these are her tracks?” she inquired, accepting Mal’s hand upright with ostentatious grace.
“She’s passed thrice back this way,” Mal replied, speaking not to the soldier but to Avani. “Since Farrow’s murder. Each time to the cottage and then again into the field. Most recently she walked into the crop before sunrise this morning, and there she hides.”
“And you know this—” Russel faltered.
“Because he waited and watched these two days,” Avani guessed. “Goddess take you, Mal. To what end? And why didn’t you say so?”
“More to the point, why isn’t she yet in the stocks?” demanded Russel. “For eluding the king’s inquiry, if not murder?”
“Farrow’s wife is no killer. As for the stocks—” he swept Russel a bow “—I’ll leave that to you, corporal. You didn’t think I required your company simply for pleasure’s sake?”
Russel ignored the jibe. “Will you show me where she’s gone to ground or have you returned across the sea entirely worthless?” She showed her teeth in vexation. “My lord.”
From even a short distance the stump seemed unremarkable but for its size. Avani thought the oak must have been ancient as the faraway mountains when wind or worse finally sheered it in half. Black scars disfigured the old boll, evidence of crop burning and lightning both. Where the trunk had torn asunder jagged points rose into the sky, wreathed in yellow vine. A thorny blackberry bush grew around the stump’s base between the tops of roots as thick around as Avani’s torso. It was far too large to drag from the earth even with a team of horses and sturdy chain. Farrow had planted his crop around the trunk, straight lines of wheat curving to either side of the boll before resuming their regimented march.
It was clear from the disordered crop that Beaumont’s Kingsmen had not neglected this far corner of Farrow’s field. They would have seen the stump as a curiosity, and mayhap looked past it to the low stone wall that divided Farrow’s land from that of the nearest neighbor. But the goodwife’s more recent tracks led straight as a pin to and from the stump, disappearing into the spiny shrub.
Andrew’s ring flashed an uneasy yellow against Avani’s breastbone. An answering sparkle woke on Mal’s finger. Mal twisted the jeweled signet on his finger, muttered a quelling word, and quenched the fire in both stones.
“There’s no danger here,” he promised, answering Avani’s unspoken concern. “They’re but responding to a lesser magic within.”
“Within,” Russel repeated. “Surely you don’t mean within the tree?”
“Oh, aye, there’s a way through the scrub. There are two bushes, not one, with space in between. It’s the angle that fools the eye, and guards the stump,” Avani reported, charmed by the ingenious planting. Forging ahead, she discovered that if she turned sideways and held her breath she could just scrape between the long thorns as she sidled toward the stump. “And a channel between the old roots. I wager it’s hollow inside.”
“Have a care!” Russel warned but Mal, close on Avani’s heels, only laughed.
“Do watch your step,” he cautioned in her ear while his amusement buzzed in her head. “The ground is uneven.”
They stood in a sylvan crown, ringed all about by hoary wood, jagged points open above their heads to light and heat. The walls of the stump were blackened, the boll long ago burned out. Ferns grew in a verdant rug below their feet, fronds high as Avani’s knee and thick as to obscure the ground. The plants were damp and sticky with sap, dewy despite the dry air.
While Avani and Mal and Russel stood shoulder-to-shoulder, there was room yet for perhaps one more person, and they were not uncomfortably close. Candle stubs, most burned down to tallow nubs, littered a natural burl shelf halfway up the stump wall. Someone—Farrow or his wife, Avani assumed—had wedged a fur coverlet and a spade into a niche of blackened wood; a woodsman’s hatchet was buried blade-first into the wood above the spade.
All in all it was a canny lair so long as the weather stayed fair. Avani couldn’t fault the goodwife her choice of retreat.
“Beaumont will kick himself for a fool,” Russel said, “and lash the poor sods that missed this.”
“Let’s not be quick to lay blame. It’s cleverly done, isn’t it? And up until last evening partially concealed by a ‘look-away’ glyph not dissimilar to the one tacked onto Farrow’s threshold.” Mal scuffed the toe of his boot in the ferns, revealing splinters of shingle. “I unraveled the charm.”
“That’s impossible,” protested Russel. She looked more impressed than alarmed. “And dangerously heretical. No wonder the temple rejoiced to see your kind burned.” She turned about, thoughtful. “This isn’t recent. Someone’s used this place, off and on, for quite a while. That pelt’s Farrow’s work.”
Mal didn’t reply. He was once again watching Avani. She could feel his scrutiny within and without, a badly restrained agitation.
“There’s more here,” she said, pulse racing with his expectation. She’d forgotten how his enthusiasms stoked her curiosity. They were well matched in that, and she wouldn’t deny she’d come to anticipate a challenge. “What more?”
“Bethink the Widow’s hearth,” suggested Mal, once again in her ear. “The hidden places, the oldest ways.”
She gripped Andrew’s ring. The stone was warm to the touch, but the light in the jewel still slept: not sorcery, then. On a hunch she dropped to hands and knees, crawling childlike through the sticky ferns, palms sinking into moist loam, while Mal grinned and Russel gaped. The smell of the fertile soil reminded her unpleasantly of the dark traps set by Siobahn and the sidhe together. Almost she recoiled, but then her seeking fingers found something rough, foreign beneath velvety fronds. Startled, she sat back on her heels, hastily parting boisterous ferns for a clearer view, and discovered a latticework of weathered sticks lashed together with pieces of old hide. Beneath the framework a dark pit fell away into the earth; ferns grew up from the brink of the hole, efficiently screening both grille and precipice.
“Shit,” Russel groaned. “Fancy that. Looks deep, deep enough to kill a person, if she fell through. One of Farrow’s animal traps?”
The lattice wasn’t heavy. Avani lifted it out of the fern. She passed it to Russel, who turned it over in her hands, examining the workmanship. Then the soldier stilled and cast a wary glance at the earth.
“Hear that?” She let the grate fall to the ground. “Someone’s down there. Listen; do you hear?”
Startled, Avani paused at once to listen but then shook her head. The morning was quiet but for the sound of birds in the field beyond and the slough of fern against Mal’s boots as he stepped closer. He lifted a brow in Russel’s direction, dubious.
“There’s no one near but us three,” he said, “living or dead.”
Russel glowered. “Drop down your witch light,” she insisted, edging toward the maw. “I hear weeping; I’m not mad! Could be the goodwife fell to her husband’s own trap.”
“And replaced the lattice neatly as she fell?” Mal suggested, amused, but he lifted both hands in supplication when Russel growled.
“It takes but a moment to be sure.” Avani lay down on her stomach in the wet and stuck her chin over the edge of the hole. Immediately Mal crouched, fisting a hand in her salwar.
“In case it starts to crumble,” he said, stalling her objection. “The ground here is very wet. I’d hate to lose you down the hole. Anything?”
“Ai, it’s a bloody big pit.” Avani wrinkled her nose at the fetid air in the shaft. “I can’t tell how far down it goes. Goddess, what a stink. The walls are dripping plant and mud. Here, let me send a light—”
She gasped in alarm when a clod of dirt broke beneath her elbow, tumbling into the hole. Mal dropped Farrow’s awl and clutched at her shoulders with both hands. Russel stepped slowly back from the perimeter, still muttering imprecations.
“I’ve got you,” Mal told Avani. “I won’t let you fall. But be quick about it; the ground here is more volatile than I supposed.”
Once he might have yanked her away from jeopardy and attended to the task himself, and in far less time. Now he waited, outwardly patient, while Avani conjured starlight from thin air and sent it spinning down into the shaft. For a moment there was nothing but shadow and crumbling stone. The shaft was not as deep as she’d first assumed; too deep for man or animal to climb back to freedom, the pit was more teardrop than straight oubliette. Avani’s mage-light reflected in small starbursts off the streams of water trickling onto the muddy floor, and in the flat black eyes glaring back at her from the depths.
“Ah, hells.” She felt it when Mal caught his breath. She couldn’t help but do the same.
“Well?” Russel demanded, impatient and triumphant at once. “Didn’t I say? Here, I saw a coil of good rope back near the henhouse. She’s been down there hours, poor thing. I’ll just run and—”
“Not Mistress Farrow,” interrupted Mal, grim. When Russel rushed the hole he stopped her with a barked warning, “No, stay back!” The magus scooted away from the edge of the shaft, dragging Avani with him, but not before she watched a clump of soil and fern plummet through her mage-light and onto the barrowman crouched in the pit. The sidhe hissed, and Avani marveled that Russel could have mistaken such a ferocious sound for grief. “Go and find that rope, Corporal. We’ll be needing it.”