Raven's Strike

Benroln muttered an excuse and dropped back to talk with someone who would listen to him with a more sympathetic ear.

“The knives aren’t so bad,” said Tier. “They’re just not up to the standards of the clan’s smith.”

Seraph watched him closely. “What’s wrong?”

“My knees,” he lied. She saw too much with her clear-eyed gaze. “They’ll be fine.”

He would lose her, he thought. She would stay with him for a while because the children needed her and because she’d given her word to him. But the boys were young men already, and their daughter was no longer a helpless child. How long would his love cage her from the life she was born to?

She’d grown into a woman who could deal with the responsibilities she’d come to him to escape. She was Raven, and he thought perhaps for the first time he understood what that meant.

“We can stop for a while and give your knees a chance to rest,” said Seraph. “Brewydd could probably use the rest as well.”

“No”—he shook his head—“Brewydd is tired, but all she has to do is sit on Skew until we make it back to camp. As for my knees, I just walked too far today. My knees will be fine. No fun, but a long way from unbearable.”

Unbearable was that he could see no way to hold Seraph without destroying her; by comparison his knees were nothing. “I’ll be fine.”

Midmorning the next day they came to a crossroads, and Benroln called a halt. As soon as everyone had stopped he strode directly to Tier and Seraph.

“We are called to the southern fork,” he said in a tight voice.

Seraph smiled at him. “Is this the first time?”

Benroln nodded jerkily.

“Some leaders never hear the call,” she told him, then glancing at Tier, she explained. “When the clan’s help is needed, the leader of a clan knows. It spoke to my brother. He told me it’s like a whisper or a tugging string.”

“A string,” said Benroln, his face a little flushed. “It pulls my heart. My father said his father had it—but I never really believed.”

“You go on then,” said Tier. “We’ll continue west on our own. It’s not far now.”

Benroln’s face lost the absent look it had held. “You have to come with us. Without you we have only me and the Healer. Brewydd says that there is another Shadowed.”

Tier looked around. “I see a lot of people. Surely you don’t dismiss everyone without an Order as useless?”

Benroln gave a huff of frustration. “You know what I mean.”

Tier nodded. “I do. But I have a young daughter staying with my folk—who’ve no magic at all. Now, when my sons were chasing the Shadowed—”

“We don’t know he was the Shadowed,” said Seraph.

“All right,” agreed Tier. “But if he wasn’t another like the U

“How do you know that he knows anything at all about your daughter? The wizard, Shadowed or not, was in Taela—that’s a long way from Redern.”

“The Path had someone watching our family,” Tier told him, feeling a trace of the anger that he’d felt when he’d first found out. What if they had decided to steal away one of the children instead of him? What if he had died? Would the Path have been able to pick off the children one by one? The thought brought an urgent need to have his family together, where he could keep an eye on all of them. He needed to get to Redern.

“He knows about Ri

“You’ll find a way to do what you are called to do without us,” said Seraph.

He

“Perhaps He

Jes had jogged over to see what the delay was, Gura at his heel. The big dog had been reluctant to let any of them out of his sight since they’d gotten back from killing the mistwight, and tended to race back and forth from one of his people to another—sort of like Jes.

Before Benroln could reply to Tier’s suggestion, Jes shook his head, and said positively, “He

Tier raised his eyebrows, hiding the worry he felt about the budding relationship between Jes and He

He

Lehr looked up, saw Jes, and asked, “Why are we stopped?”

Jes felt the weight of everyone’s attention focus on him; their fear tangled with curiosity beat upon him. He didn’t like it, and neither did the Guardian. He dropped his eyes to the ground and tried not to feel them or notice how they backed away.

“Benroln is called south,” he told the ground. “We’re going on to Redern because Papa is afraid that the Shadowed might try and hurt Ri

The Guardian agreed with Papa. He also believed that the man they had chased was a Shadowed one, not just shadow-tainted.

Jes missed the first part of what He

“No,” Jes said, but that was all he could manage around the Guardian’s growl, unheard by anyone else.

Jes agreed with the sentiment, but was certain that the Guardian’s telling He

“Why don’t you take him away from everyone,” Lehr’s calm voice soothed him, too. “You’re not going to get any sense out of him with all these people around him.”

He

“I need you to come with us,” he told her.

She patted him on the arm—a motherly gesture—then crossed her arms in front of her chest and turned away. She found something interesting in the bark of a tree and traced patterns on the rough surface with a finger.

“You’ll be fine,” she told the tree, though Jes assumed she was really talking to him. “There’s no need for me to come with you. I’ve repaid the debt I owed to your mother for tricking her into killing Volis the priest. We’ve seen to it that the Secret Path won’t be killing any more Travelers and stealing their Orders.”

Jes stared at her back. Did he mean nothing to her? Of course not. She’d been kind to him, rescued him, and in the process kissed him. Doubtless he wasn’t the only man she’d ever kissed.

How could she care for him? Had he forgotten what he was? A madman who alternated between being a simpleton and a ravening beast. He should count himself lucky that she didn’t run screaming.