Raven's Strike

The Guardian looked around the silent town. “I’m not sure that is a good thing.”

Lehr had been feeling the same way, but he wasn’t going to admit it. He tried to dismiss the eerie feeling of the town as a side effect of Jes’s Order—but if that were so, why did he have such a strong urge to move closer to his brother?

He kept his eyes on the road, trusting that the Guardian would keep watch so that he could concentrate on following the traces the clan had left as they walked on the narrow, cobbled streets.

They came to an i

“Wait here a moment, I want to check something,” he said then disappeared inside the stables. He was out almost as quickly as he was in. “The horses are all dead,” he said briefly. “Killed, but not by disease. They’ve been dead at least a week judging by the maggots. No effort made to butcher them. There were a couple of people in there, too. One dead of stab wounds, the other of disease. I didn’t get close enough to tell how long they’ve been dead.”

“Let’s find the Travelers and go home,” said Lehr, increasing his pace down the road. He didn’t think they’d find the Clan of Rongier the Librarian alive, but he had to find them anyway. He owed Brewydd that much.

As they got farther into Colbern, the stench grew worse. There were barricades across some of the streets, futile stacks of household goods to keep plague victims away. They saw scavenger birds, rats, and once, a feral dog, but no people.

They found Rongier’s clan in one of the small squares of land left open for grazing and forage of such animals as the townspeople kept. The Guardian knelt beside the first body and sniffed, without touching.

“They’ve been dead for a week, more or less. Like the horses.”

Lehr crouched by a woman who lay facedown, her pale hair reminding him too closely of his mother’s. She, like the rest of Rongier’s clan, hadn’t died of plague. They’d been killed by the people they had been trying to help.

He touched her hair—as long as her face was downward, she was a stranger. “Someone thought they might carry the disease like the horses you found in the stable, and, I suppose, the cats, dogs, chickens, and goats we haven’t seen.”

He turned her body over gently, as if she might be hurt if he were too rough. He’d seen her cooking beside his mother, and straightening the shirt on a toddler, but he didn’t know her name.

He rose to his feet and walked by the bodies, putting names together for the death roll ru

Lehr could tell by the dead villagers who surrounded him—and by the way his body had been mutilated—that the clan leader had given good account of himself.

“Isfain,” said the Guardian in such an odd voice that Lehr looked up. Isfain, he remembered, was the one who had been set to watch Jes when he’d been held by the foundrael.

“Are you all right?” Lehr asked.

The Guardian nodded. “I thought I wanted him dead,” he said, then walked on to the next body. “Kors.”

They were all dead, men, women, and—heartrendingly—children. The red-haired twins who had always been up to some mischief or other were laid out formally, their throats neatly cut. The toddler who had sucked her thumb whenever she caught his gaze was crumpled in a little broken ball.

There were townsmen among the dead here, too. A few armed with swords might be guardsmen, but most of them had been armed with cudgels or tools. Desperate men do desperate things, was one of Papa’s sayings.

Lehr turned from the body of a dead man who held a sharp saddler’s knife and almost stumbled over a woman’s body.

Her ice-blue eyes had gone to the crows, but he recognized the sharply defined nose and wide mouth. Igraina, who had taken special delight in ordering him about and used the opportunity to flirt with him gently. Beside her was the clan smith, Lehr couldn’t remember his name, but he remembered the man’s shy smile.

By the time they were finished, the Guardian was leaving frost behind on the ground where he walked. Lehr couldn’t tell if it was because he was angry or sad. There was no one left for the Guardian to defend or to seek vengeance upon. From the empty streets they’d seen coming through the city, the people who’d done this were most likely already dead.

The one person they didn’t find was Brewydd. Lehr didn’t find that a hopeful sign. Doubtless she’d been out trying to heal someone when the madness had taken the townspeople.

“There are too many for us to bury,” said Lehr helplessly. “But we can’t leave them like this.”

The Guardian stared around them. “I remember… battlefields thick with bodies. Honorable soldiers who deserved better than to be carrion for the vultures. Come here, Lehr. Beside me where you’ll be safe.”

Lehr got as close as he dared, until the cold of his brother’s talents bit his fingers, and dread made it hard to breathe. Cornsilk flattened her ears in distress, but she stood beside Lehr. Apparently they were close enough because the Guardian began singing, a strange atonal sound more akin to a wolf’s howl than to any song Lehr had ever heard.

It hurt Lehr’s heart, and the tears he’d been fighting fell from his cheeks as if he were a child no older than Ri

The ground shook beneath his feet in answer to the Guardian’s song.

Magic surged up through Lehr’s feet in a sudden, almost-painful wave that left his ears tingling. All around him the earth broke open around the bodies of Travelers and townsfolk alike and swallowed them down, leaving only turned earth to mark where they had been.

The Guardian’s song ended.

“What—” Lehr abandoned his question and set his shoulder beneath Jes’s as his brother, pale and sweating, started to fall. Jes sobbed hoarsely as Lehr helped him to a crude bench beneath a small maple tree.

“Shh,” he said, kneeling in front of him, wishing he could do more. But Jes had pulled away from him as soon as he sat on the bench, and Lehr knew that no touch of his could comfort his brother. “They’ll feel no more pain now, Jes. Nothing more can hurt them.”

Jes raised his dark eyes. “So much sorrow,” he gasped. “Brewydd, I think. Nearby.”

Lehr remembered then that Jes was an empath.

He stood up and looked around slowly. If Jes felt Brewydd hurting, it meant she was still alive. His eyes fell on a small covered cart that could be pulled by hand or horse—Brewydd’s karis.

He put Cornsilk’s reins in Jes’s hand. “Hold her for me,” he said. “She’s probably unhappy, too, Jes.”

His brother leaned forward until his forehead rested against her front leg. The mare turned to lip the back of his shirt.

Deciding he’d left Jes cared for as best he could, Lehr made his way to the karis—mindful to avoid the places where the earth was soft.

When he opened the door, he was met by the smells of illness. Brewydd took up so little space he almost dismissed her as an odd lump in the bedding before she moved.

“You came, boy,” she said. “I worried you would come too late, but then I felt the earth welcome her children home by a Guardian’s call. I knew you were here then.”

He gathered her into his arms and took her out into the sunshine, hoping its warmth would aid her. She looked as though she’d lost half her body weight since he’d seen her last.

“We should have come with you,” he said. “Ri

She reached up to touch his cheek, then patted it gently, and he realized she was blind.

“Who knows what would have happened? That is already written, boy, and not for you or me to change.”