To celebrate Winter Magic week here at Here Be Magic, I've got a spooky snippet of supernatural things happening on a snowy mountain pass. This is from
THE TEARS OF THE ROSE, the second Twelve Kingdoms book.
As the
morning progressed, a feeling of uneasiness nibbled at me, then began taking
greater bites of the peace of mind I tried to maintain. Shadowy shapes seemed
to move in the corner of my eye, then vanished when I looked directly. The hair
prickled on the nape of my neck, tingling as the White Monk’s magic had.
Sometimes snow sifted down from the
branches and the wood creaked when a hand of wind fisted through the limbs high
against the wintery sky. It seemed other things moved there, too. Wrong things.
My memory flashed onto those strange oily creatures that had invaded Ordnung
when the Tala attacked and came after Andi. I tried to get a better look, but
they were like the childhood monsters that disappeared when you lit a candle.
“What do you see?” the White Monk
asked, riding close, speaking for my ears only.
He said it in a serious tone, not as
if I were being a silly girl, but as if I might see something he didn’t. Still,
I hesitated to say anything. “I…I’m not sure.”
“Don’t think. Describe.”
That helped. “Shadows? Like a cloud
when it crosses the sun, that kind of chill when it touches my skin. Flashes of…something
out of a nightmare. Like the kind you have when you’re a kid and it’s mainly
that you don’t quite understand what it is you’re afraid of.” I shivered.
He only nodded and pushed aside the
hood and cowl, head bare to the cold while he studied the landscape. “I can’t
feel it,” he said finally. “I thought I might.”
I opened my mouth to ask what he
meant, but his horse sprang ahead into a trot until the White Monk reached
Graves. They halted our procession, Graves squinting up at the trees and then
back at me. They fell into a discussion, heads close so none of the rest of us
could hear. Finally Graves shook his head and we moved forward again. The path
grew steeper and narrowed, so we rode two abreast, Marin falling behind us.
The White Monk rode at my side,
looking grim, his blade drawn, resting on his thigh. “Do you have a dagger?” he
asked in a conversational tone.
“Me? Glorianna no. I’d likely prick
myself as anyone else.” He didn’t say anything to my standard joke. I suppose
it wasn’t funny to a man like him. “Why, what’s going on?”
“Graves is a bold soldier, but he
was a poor choice for this. He wasn’t part of the Siege at Windroven, nor the
last attempt at Odfell’s Pass. Neither he nor his men mixed with Ursula’s Hawks
on the journey from Avonlidgh, so he knows nothing of what they encountered.
Fools.” His frustration filled the air, grit from a whetting stone.
“But you did?”
He laughed, under his breath and
without sound. “I do my research.”
“And what did you find out?”
“To take the unseen seriously. And that
the Tala aren’t the same as humans. ”
Oh. “Is that who you think I’m
seeing?”
He lifted one shoulder. “I wish I
knew. If we could combine my knowledge with your senses, we might get
somewhere.” Absurdly, given how much tension he radiated, he grinned at me,
that scar hitching the lip on one side, eyes bright. He looked…happy, of all
things. “Guess we’ll have to figure it out as we go, huh?”
I didn’t know how to reply to that.
Such an odd man, that this was fun for him.
“But you expect them to
attack—that’s what you told Graves.”
“I think they’re aware we’re here,
and we have the advantage because you can sense them. We should use that
advantage.”
“Maybe we should go back.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
No. Even though fear nibbled at the
edges of my mind, I didn’t want to give up, just because I saw some shadows. They
hadn’t made any overt threats. Besides, Andi invited me.
She
didn’t invite the rest of them, however. Only me.
“Why can I see them?”
He sighed out a long breath of a
person practicing patience. “It’s in your blood, Ami. Your sister is the witch
queen of the Tala—did you think you had nothing of that in you?”
I had thought that. Until Lady
Zevondeth showed me how to work the spell by using my blood. Maybe that’s why
she wanted to keep our blood in her little vials. Like keeping keys that fit
certain locks. “I can’t work magic,” I reasoned, thinking it through, “but my
mother’s blood gives me certain access, a kind of sensitivity.”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“So why did you think you would?”
“What do you mean?” He seemed to be
surveying the woods, but I sensed the evasion, a shifting silver thread.
“You said you hoped you’d feel it.”
The realization dawned on me. “Are you—is that why you can do what you do?”
I’d tried to be oblique, but he
flicked me an irritated, burning glance, then returned his attention to the
woods and shadows. “If I were, if I could live in paradise, why would I be
living this life of exile in the Twelve Kingdoms?”
“I don’t understand why everyone
thinks Annfwn is so wonderful. If it’s really paradise, why haven’t I heard
more about it?”
“Consider your upbringing.”
“How so?”
“You were raised in a bubble. Your
father, far more than most parents, controlled what you knew of the world—as who
he is, he had total control of your world, and made sure you only knew what he
wanted you to, until you married and left home. After that…”
“What?”
“You went from one bubble to
another.”
“You talk about me as if I’m some
hothouse rose.” I meant to score a point, but he considered that thoughtfully.
“An apt analogy. Beautiful.
Precious. Protected. Meant only to be touched and seen by a privileged few.”
Like Hugh had treated me, too. And
worthless outside of that. He didn’t say it, but I smelled the weedy accusation
beneath. It rankled, but I couldn’t argue with it. We fell silent. Snow began
to fall, as if forming from the fog between the trees, fat flakes that landed
on my horse’s hide and lay quivering before melting into nothing.
With a whoosh, a clump of snow
landed off to the side and I started, my nerves twanging. The conversation,
though uncomfortable, had been at least distracting.
“So what didn’t my father want me to
know?”
The White Monk glanced my way, a
quick assessment, and went along. “Only you can be the judge of that, but
consider who he is. He placed his seat—the High Throne that was the trophy of
his Great War—at the back door to Annfwn, as close as he could get to it
without violating his pledge to your mother. Between his forces and the
landscape, no one goes in or out of Annfwn without his knowledge. He cut it off
from the rest of the kingdoms. If he couldn’t have it, no one would.”
It made a weird sense. I remembered
minstrels thrown out of court for singing the “wrong” songs. I was framing my
next question when something that wasn’t the wind soughed through the trees,
strumming my nerves so they sang in response.
The soldiers ahead halted. We were
against a steep wall on one side, a drop-off on the other, and the curve of the
path kept us from seeing where Graves led the group.
Odd grunting noises floated down,
disturbing in their formlessness.
The White Monk slid off his horse,
holding a silencing finger to his lips, and gestured to Marin to go back down
the trail. The soldier next to her shook his head—but obeyed the rule of
silence—and pointed emphatically to show his desire to go forward. His fellows
agreed, showing their impatience to help in the restless stamping of their
horses’ hooves, an urgent cadence pressing them forward.
But we blocked their way.
The White Monk held up his hands in
a gesture for me to dismount. So pressed together were we on the narrow trail
that it forced our bodies into contact. Despite my tense nerves—or maybe
because of them—that frenzied desire for him, complete with dark fantasies,
leapt through me. I stepped away as fast as possible, but took the hand he held
out, following him past the horses, smashing myself against the snowy stones to
ease past the soldiers’ mounts.
We reached the clear space just past
them and the White Monk pressed his blade into my hand. “Use it if you have
to,” he said. Moving fast, he returned to our horses and, as near as I could
see, moved his ahead of mine, nodding for Marin to slide hers behind his, pressed
tight against the cliff wall. She’d been too stout to slide past as we had.
Freed, the soldiers trotted past in
single file. Too fast, and perilously close to the cliff’s edge, for one
horse’s hoof slid off the uneven rocks, unbalancing them both. For a
heart-stopping moment, they hung there, teetering on the brink. Then, with twin
shrieks of terror, they fell together, horse and soldier, plummeting down to
the far canyon below.
I cried out with them, taking an involuntary
step forward, as if I could somehow catch them. The White Monk clamped me
against him, hand over my mouth. I sobbed, tearlessly, of course. He pressed
his cheek against mine. Not in remonstration, I realized, but in mute sympathy.
Dampness made them slide together and I looked at him to see silent tears
running down his face. Marin had her hands clamped over her eyes, as if she,
too, wished she could unsee what had just occurred.
The White Monk released me and urged
us down the trail to a place where we would be less likely to be knocked off
into the crevasse.
We waited. I opened my mouth once to
ask what the plan was, but the White Monk made that gesture of silence again. I
didn’t see why. By his own estimation, the Tala already knew we were here. We’d
been talking until the attack, so it made no sense for us not to talk at all
now.
Still, I followed along. Do you trust me? he’d asked, and for no
good reason, I did.
After a while, the White Monk stood
and, taking his blade from me and motioning for us to stay put, crept up the
trail again. I nearly protested. We hadn’t heard any sounds, not even those
odd, soft grunts, for quite some time. He returned fairly quickly.
“They’re all gone,” he told us
without preamble, crouching in front of me, “even the horses. You need to make
a decision.”
“What does ‘gone’ mean? Dead? Did
they all go over the edge of the cliff, too?”
He shook his head. “Vanished. The
snow is scuffed, but there’s no sign of the men or the horses. No bodies. Just
gone.”
