Eli stood at the open window of their inn room, facing the empty street.
One spark hovered outside the closed door behind him, watching the hallway and the stairs. The other drifted just above the inn's roof. He tasted the crisp night air through that one, and heard the gates slam shut when the last, heavily-laden villagers returned from the bandit camp.
In the room behind him, Lara bathed. She'd gone first because she'd leave nothing worse than sweat and trail dust in the bathwater. He'd leave it pink with gore.
"There aren't enough people," she said.
"Hm?"
"You want to ask how I know sothing's off," she told him. "It's because there aren't enough people. Empty houses, overgrown gardens. There are maybe a half-hundred people here. In a village big enough for three tis that?"
He hadn't wanted to ask, because he'd noticed the sa thing. "It's hard to tell, in place like this. Seasonal labor changes things."
"Seasonal labor lives near the crops."
"Oh, good point," he said.
A shock of cold water splashed his back. He yelped and spun. "Oy!"
"Are you patronizing ?" she demanded, glaring at him. "You already thought of that, didn't you?"
"I wasn't patronizing you." He leaned against the wall, enjoying the sight of her in the bath. "I was humoring you, there's a difference."
Her eyes slitted. "I took you by surprise."
"Huh?"
"Just now. When I splashed you."
"Yeah?"
"You're such a prickle."
"And you're not making sense," he said. "Go to sleep."
She opened her mouth to respond, but yawned instead. "Yeah."
He sotis forgot that she didn't have troll blood. She'd kept up with him in the forest, but they left the forest a five-day ago. And today had been long. Crossing Ehrat, getting abducted by bandits. Threatened by a bloated brood-ferret. And then ... everything else.
She'd dropped a lot of the bandits herself, even if the only one she'd killed was Bo. And that had been a rcy.
After she fell asleep, Eli soaked in the cold water for too long, then stood in the tub and poured the rinse buckets over his head until he looked mostly human. He stretched out on the bed beside Lara, enjoying the luxuriant plushness of an actual mattress. Listening to the sounds of the sleepy streets. Murmured conversations, the chunk of a gravedigger's shovel into the earth, the nicker and stomp of the bandits' horses, now in the town's stables.
The spark outside the window showed him the rust moon, a pale orange half-circle. Too pale to present a threat. Thank the Drears. He had enough problems, and--
Lara thrashed in her sleep. She whimpered then said, "No, don't!"
"Shhh," he murmured. "It's okay. You're having a nightmare."
Her gray eyes sprung open. When she saw him watching her, she gasped in fear. "No, no!" She clumsily flailed at him, trying to shove him away in her sleep. "No, not the no!"
"It's okay, Lara." He retreated to the edge of the bed. "Shhhh, go back to sleep."
A glimr of recognition showed in her eyes. She paused, then half-smiled, a shaky sort of midnight smile. After a mont, she laid her head in the pillow and fell back asleep.
Eli stood beside the bed with his heart pounding like he'd run up a mountain. That look of dread on her face had cut him deeply. The fact that that was her most truthful response to him. That in the middle of the night, with every scrap of politeness and charity stripped away, she saw him as a horror.
ek.
Huh. He'd figured she'd called him that from 'Cloaked-in-ekness,' but maybe in so secret byway of her heart, the na also revealed her dearest wish for who he'd beco. Soone gentle, calm. Harmless. Perhaps even dryn.
Poor girl. Dood to another disappointnt. She should've brought him to the trolls.
A feast greeted them the next morning, when Lara finally woke and finished her hair. Not a huge feast, but a nice spread: a steaming pot of cracked wheat boiled in honeywater, a platter of minced mutton and beans, loaves of olive bread with bowls of olive oil for dipping.
Eli stayed away from the mutton while gorging himself on everything else. He didn't know when his appetite for at would return but ... not yet.
"Morning, ek," Winina said, as she sat beside him. "Don't fancy mutton?"
"Uh," Eli said.
"Dryn n abstain from at after battle," Lara explained.
"Is true?" Eli asked her in dryn.
"No," she said in the sa language, then in Iolian she continued: "But apparently they eat entire loaves of olive rye."
"It's good," Eli said, to smiles from the handful of people who'd joined them.
Reserved smiles, that soon disappeared. Whatever was wrong with the village, they couldn't keep the worry from their eyes.
So he set aside his second bowl and said, "Tell us about the rcenaries."
"Tell us about you." Arcuro brought him another tankard of ale. "Passing though on the way where?"
"We wanted to see the olive trees," he said, then gave a little shrug. "We're interested in trees. We heard they're remarkable."
"That they are. My mother's one of the first to find them. Going back almost thirty years now. She and so old Ehratians found them during pilgrimage to see their holand."
"You do that?" Eli asked.
"Young idiots," Gertrud said, around a mouthful of beans. "We were drunk on history and second-hand pride."
"Well, this particular batch of young idiots," Arcuro said, putting his hand on his mother's shoulder, "stumbled onto the first of the olive groves."
"Trees like nobody'd seen," she said.
Arcuro nodded. "Nobody knew why they grew that big or fruitful--to this day, nobody knows. Sothing in the soil. Took years to test they were safe. The olives, not the province. The province still gets hit four, five tis a year, with broodfall. The ward is weak here."
"Took more years," Gertrud said, "for my wife to convince the capitol that Eraht oil is a delicacy, not a curse. Of course, one taste was enough to sell you on that, ek."
"I'd best check again," Eli said, soaking a slab of his bread in the bowl of oil.
"Ha. Yeah. My wife--Angel rest her--could charm the cold outta snow, that woman. She turned our oil into a luxury commodity."
Arcuro patted her shoulder, then told Eli and Lara, "In the twenty years since then, we've kept the oil flowing."
"What about the moons?" Lara asked.
"We ... take precautions. Every new town is built around an old Drear shrine. The biggest of them."
"The do in the center of town?"
He nodded. "It's dangerous, but this is our holand. We hunker down and wait it out. At least, that's what we did until she ca."
"The Bloodwitch," Lara said.
"I'm surprised you've heard of her," Winina said. "People don't like saying her na in case one her 'risen' overhears."
"The bandits talked pretty freely." Lara set her tankard aside. "And one of them--Bo--he told ek that she's gone silent. That's why he sent them riding to the Weep, to look for her." She shifted her gaze to Eli. "How long ago since he heard from her?"
"Three days," Eli said. "Four, now."
Nobody spoke.
"He got nervous," Eli continued. "She's never left her pets in his keeping that long. She needs to touch them to raise them, he told , and to give them orders. But they rember her commands, at least for a ti. Such as the one to obey him. He worried they'd forget that, if enough ti passed. 'I'm like them,' he told . 'I follow her commands till she gives a new one.' And the last command she gave him was, she wanted every one of you dead. You made common cause with the rcenaries, and you needed to pay the price."
"Tell us about the rcenaries," Lara said, echoing Eli's words.
"There's no need to burden you with that," Arcuro said. "You've done so much already. You just ca here to look at the trees and you ... you've done so much."
"There's that pride again," Gertrud said. "Ehratians, we'll starve smiling before we ask for a crust of bread."
"A lady from Leotide City hired the rcs," Winina told Lara. "Lady Brazinka. Fine-looking woman. Proper noble, you know? The kind that, she knows she's better than you, so she doesn't worry about proving it. She'll get her hands dirty in a kitchen because she ain't afraid it'll make her look common."
"Why'd she co?" Eli asked.
"To get rid of the witch, that's what we reckon. She--she must've heard the witch attacked one of our caravans. Sent half the town fleeing."
Eli and Lara exchanged a look: that explained the missing people. Though maybe not the oppressive feeling.
"And started making demands," Winina continued. "Serve her alive or serve her dead. Shimyn, uh, that's the witch's given na, she's turned into sothing worse than brood."
"You know her," Lara said.
"Aye," Gertrud said. "She was one of us, once."
Silence fell. Eli ate another olive, and across the room soone rattled a handful of tiles then threw them on the board.
"Thirty years ago," Gertrud finally continued, "she was one of us who found the trees. She always had a touch of the mage in her, you know? I figured she Flared young, and nobody noticed. Happens more often than you'd think."
"You'll have to excuse my mother," Arcuro said, with an apologetic grimace. "She has this idea--"
"Shut your curly head!" Gertrud snapped. "Shimyn was a sister to . Sweet, dreamy girl. Then we--we ventured too close to the Weep and a fever took her. The Weep bleeds magic, you understand?"
Eli nodded politely.
"No you do not," Gertrud said. "And for three weeks, we forced water in Shimyn's mouth, keeping her alive while she shivered and ranted. When she recovered, we thought we'd beaten the Celestials themselves. We drank and screwed and sang. She never was the sa though. Never was right, after that. Took ten years before she disappeared. Into the night. Gone."
"Into the Weep," Winina said.
"Aye, and another ten before she started sending things out of it. Her 'risen.'"
"And that's why the lady brought rcenaries?" Eli asked. "To clear out the Bloodwitch?"
"That's right," Winina said.
"No it ain't," Gertrud said.
"Sure it is. Look what she done."
"Not why she ca though."
"Then why else did she co? To watch the harvest?"
"I don't know why, but it wasn't that."
"She ca with a rcenary company, " Winina told Eli. "Stopped here for a handful of days. Sending out scouts. Making preparations. Including, once they saw the rumors were true, they sent for, uh, irregulars. Another ten, fifteen fighters. Then they advanced to the forward camp."
Eli sipped his ale. So there was only a single company of rcenaries, and they'd all be protecting the lady.
"What happened next?" Lara asked.
"This isn't their burden," Arcuro told Winina, grabbing an empty bowl. "They've done enough. We've asked strangers to sacrifice enough. They're dryn, for vale's sake."
Gertrud raised a hand, and the others fell silent. "They haven't co back," she told Lara. "Two dozen hard-eyed soldiers, along with a mage who my gut tells walks three of the paths. They haven't co back."
"But what--"
"The lady sent her pigeon for help," Gertrud interrupted. "And it will co."
"It will co," a few of the others repeated, like a prayer.
"You take your man," Gertrud told Lara, "and you bring him ho. I saw what he did to the bandits. There's sothing sleeping inside him that shouldn't be roused. You give him a dozen little bark-skinned babies, girl. You keep him close, you keep him safe, and you make sure he never has to stay away from at again."
Ten minutes later, Eli found Fern standing untethered outside the stable, enthusiastically chomping her way through a pile of what looked like dead thorn-bush.
"Godsdamned old woman," he grumbled to Fern. "Sothing sleeping inside . What does she know?"
"Everything?" Lara suggested, stepping forward to join him.
"Oh, so dryn babies have bark skin?"
"Almost everything."
"Why won't they just tell us what happened here? This isn't just that more than half the town fled."
"They're trying to protect us."
"Yeah. Why?"
Sh started to answer when his spark caught sight of a figure in the little town square, the one with the olive tree. Sitting on a bench, looking at the ground.
"What is it?" Lara asked, seeing his expression change.
"That man," he said. "The one who lost his son."
Eli went and sat next to him and didn't say anything for a ti.
Then he said, "I'm sorry. I should've been faster, I should've stopped them, I should've ..." He swallowed the lump in his throat. "I'm sorry."
"The witch took the children," the man told, still looking at the ground. "After the rcs left, her bandits stole our children and brought them to her."
"No," Eli heard himself whisper.
"They said we'd see them again," the man told him. "After she killed them, we'd see them again."
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