Only to walk into a marshy, reeking swamp of spells.
She looked in horror at the inside of her mother’s house. Evil coming from under her brother’s door had already covered most of the floor, slithered up three out of four walls, and crawled up the curtain that covered the nook where she slept. The only thing still untouched was her weaving, but the spells were gathering there as well. She supposed it was just a matter of time before they managed to overcome their revulsion of something beautiful to smother it along with the rest.
I am off to destroy the world.
Daniel’s words came back to her with unpleasant clarity. She couldn’t imagine he had the power to do that, but she couldn’t deny that he’d certainly wreaked a fine bit of havoc in front of her. No doubt he’d been happy to add to that by stirring up trouble in the village. Perhaps the villagers were already on their way—
She turned away from the doorway and walked into an immovable object. She jumped back with a shriek, then realized it was merely Lord Higgleton standing there, smiling. Before she could ask him his business, he had enveloped her hand in his beefy paws and begun to shake it vigorously.
“I’m here to thankye, Mistress Sarah,” he said happily. “Already we’ve seen a great difference in the lass.”
“Oh,” Sarah said, feeling light-headed all over again. “How lovely.”
Lord Higgleton reached not for his rather substantial dagger tucked into his belt—it was Shettlestoune, after all, and even an alderman wasn’t above dispatching the odd vagrant or villain himself when necessary—but for his equally substantial purse. He opened it, fished about in it with a pudgy finger, then pulled the drawstrings shut. He handed the entire thing over with another smile.
“I would have thanked your brother on your behalf,” he said, “but he seemed particularly determined to closet himself with the constable and I didn’t want to disturb. Mage’s business, as you well know, is always carried on more successfully without unnecessary distractions.”
Heaven help her. “Indeed, it is,” she agreed. “And how long ago was it that you saw my brother about his goodly work?”
Lord Higgleton looked thoughtfully up at the sky. “An hour, perhaps, no longer. Shall I hasten back to the village and have him fetched for you?”
“Nay,” Sarah said, her mouth rather dry all of a sudden. “Nay, though I thank you for the thought. And I wish Prunella every success tonight.”
“Her mother is forcing her to wear perfume-scented gloves to keep her from chewing on her hands,” Lord Higgleton admitted, “but we have great hopes that she’ll keep her hair out of her mouth on her own.”
Sarah managed a smile, accepted another round of profuse thanks, then forced herself to wait until Lord Higgleton was out of sight before she pulled on the drawstrings of his purse and peered inside. There was less gold than silver, but when added to what his wife had already given her, it would be enough to see her over the mountains and well on her way to somewhere else. She would have indulged in a well-deserved swoon, but she didn’t have time. Perhaps later, when she was certain she would get out of Doìre without any other visitors. She silently wished Prunella Higgleton a very happy match and turned to her own plans.
Ned was peeking around the corner. She walked over to him and handed him two silver coins. It was likely more than she should have given him, but he had served her mother for years and stayed on quite happily after her passing. She could do no less.
“Thank you, Ned,” she said honestly, “for your service to me and my mother.”
He blinked in surprise. “What do ye mean, mistress?”
“I’m off on an adventure,” she said, putting on a confident smile.
“Mage’s business?” he asked, in hushed tones.
“Of course.” And that was true, especially if that business included being as far away from mages as possible. “I think I must be off on it posthaste. I’m sure your father will be glad to have you back.”
Ned didn’t look as if he thought so, but he went because she gave him a push to start him in the right direction, then another pair of them to keep him headed that way. He looked over his shoulder, once, then frowned in a baffled sort of way before he turned and shuffled off reluctantly toward home.
Sarah abandoned any hope of going inside the house for gear or waiting to weave a cloak. She would just make do with what she’d hidden away in the barn. If she hurried, she might manage to be deep in the mountains by sunset. She walked quickly around the house, then winced as she grazed her wrist accidentlly against the wall. She paused and looked down at the wound she’d earned in her brother’s bedchamber by touching that scorched book.
... Dedtroy the world ...
She tried to laugh that off silently, but it suddenly didn’t seem very amusing. He couldn’t be serious.
Could he?
An unsettling feeling snuck up on her from behind, a little niggling something that suggested that she pay attention to what he’d said.
She considered, then shook her head. Daniel was seven kinds of fool and would destroy himself long before he managed to destroy anything else. She put her shoulders back, took a firmer grip on her rampaging imagination, and turned to the task at hand.
She walked swiftly into the trees, found a particular one, then turned and looked down at the ground as she counted the paces to the first of her hidden caches of gold.
Only to realize that no counting had been necessary.
She came to an abrupt halt and gaped at the hole at her feet. It had been neatly dug, she could say that much. Neatly and thoroughly and obviously quite carefully, for there was a pile of nettles laid tidily to one side. She dropped to her knees and reached down into the hole on the off chance that her eyes were deceiving her.
It was empty.
She would have said it was impossible, but she could see the pilfering of her funds was all too possible. She pushed herself up to her feet, then strode off to see if her next hiding spot had suffered the same fate. She looked, but she could hardly believe her eyes.
Obviously, the mushrooms hadn’t been deterrent to whomever had stolen her future.
A quick, furious search proved that every last bloody one of her stashes of gold had been discovered and plundered. Magic had obviously been brought to bear in a foul way.
She would have made a very long list of why magic vexed her and added this latest insult to the list, but she was too angry. She had gone to ridiculous lengths to make sure that her future had remained hidden. She had never talked about her plans with her mother or Ned—and certainly not her brother. She had never even hinted that she might want to live anywhere but where she lived. She likely should have left home at ten-and-five and chanced a village on the other side of the mountains, but she’d remained another ten very long years simply to make certain that when she left, she would leave with enough to begin a successful, respectable life somewhere else.
If someone else didn’t manage it first, she was going to find her brother—who she was certain was responsible for her loss—and kill him.
That, or perhaps she would slip up behind him, clunk him over the head, then tie him up until he could be delivered to some sort of mage-ish tribunal where they would surely sentence him to some sort of disgusting labor as punishment for his vile self simply drawing breath. She kicked a tidy pile of dirt back into its hole, then stomped out into the glade. She paused by her cauldron, saw the remains of her fire that had long since ceased to be of any use, then peered inside the pot. The contents were a vile, putrid sort of green.
Unsurprising.
She was revisiting the thought of going after her brother to do him bodily harm when she became distracted by a noise that wasn’t quite audible coming from her mother’s house. She looked up to see a thin stream of something coming out of the chimney, something that wasn’t smoke. As she watched, the house trembled for a moment or two, then with an enormous rumble, collapsed onto itself. Only part of one wall remained, the wall that su
pported the bulk of her mother’s bottles. There were a few of them left sitting on the windowsill, their colors rather pretty in the faint winter sunlight, all things considered.
She gaped at the ruin, then shut her mouth with a snap. Perhaps Daniel had more magic than she had supposed. And if that was the case, the farther away from him she was, the better. And the sooner she was about that, even with the pitiful coins she had in her hand currently, the safer she would be. She crossed the glade, then walked into the barn and whistled for her horse, fully expecting to see him poke his nose immediately over his stall door.
But he didn’t.
She walked over to his stall, then looked inside. There in front of her stood not a chestnut gelding, but rather a chestnut dog. A big dog, actually, that drooled. A big dog with hooves the size of halved melons.
“Castân?” she said in astonishment.
He whinnied at her.
Sarah could hardly believe her eyes. Daniel again at his work, apparently. She would have cursed him for it a bit longer, but the barn had begun to creak in a very unwholesome way. She jerked open the stall door, snatched up a blanket and a feed bag, then bolted for the open door, leaving her horse—er, her onetime horse, rather—to follow, which he did with just as much enthusiasm as he always had. He came to a skidding stop in the middle of the glade, then turned and leaned against her leg as she watched the barn collapse just as the house had. Sarah let her gear slide from her fingers, wrapped the blanket around herself, then looked at her ... dog. She took a deep breath.
“We have problems.”
He seemed to agree. Silently.
“The first of which being that I don’t have a way to fix you.”
He only looked up at her with sad brown eyes.
She couldn’t fix any of the rest of it either. She looked around herself in silent wonder at the ruin that had become her life. Almost all of her gold was gone, her home was gone, her future buried under bits of barn it would take her a week to clear away, and her brother was no doubt currently telling the villagers a secret that would have them up in arms the moment they heard it.
Then that brother would be off to raze the world with his very vile magic.
She was slightly disconcerted by the last, but she gave herself a hard shake to rid herself of any undue concern. She didn’t care what Daniel did with his unpleasant gifts. As her mother always said, when faced with difficulties, the only sensible thing for a body to do was look out for himself and leave the heroics to the Heroes. A very wise woman, her mother. Sarah started across the glade, with a spring to her step, fully prepared to take that advice as her battle plan. She had places to go, things to do, more gold to earn. Just because she was the only one alive who knew what Daniel intended didn’t mean she had to do anything about it.
It didn’t.
She realized, after a bit, that she was no longer walking. She would have preferred to blame her lack of forward progress on a dastardly spell, but she couldn’t. It was just her damnable sense of do-gooding rearing its ugly head and befouling her well-laid plans. She looked away from it, tried to ignore it, cursed it, and hoped it would go away.
To no avail, unfortunately. Her better self was obviously determined to outlast her.
She gritted her teeth and sidestepped anything to do with magic, mages, or tasks that were far too large for her. There was doing good, of course, and then there was being stupid. She didn’t lack courage, of course, or the stamina to endure a long, arduous quest, but even Heroes had to take stock of their weapons, didn’t they? She might have had the desire to stop her brother, but the truth was she didn’t possess anything equal to fighting what he could do.
Besides, she wanted a peaceful, safe house where she could sleep for hours at a stretch without a very large knife in her hand. She didn’t want peril she couldn’t see coming wrought by men with power she couldn’t fight. Surely there were lads enough left in the world to attend to her particular sort of difficulty. The task didn’t have to fall to her.
She stood there for several minutes, unable to go either forward or backward. Finally, she looked over her shoulder. Only now it wasn’t the ruins of her mother’s house that lay there, it was a vision of her own little yet-to-be-built cabin on the edge of a perfectly pristine lake surrounded by beautiful mountains. That once-safe, peaceful place was overrun by the evil she’d seen seeping out from under her brother’s door, that twisting, serpentine magic that had spread over the floor and slithered up and over everything—
The last wall of her mother’s house suddenly trembled, then fell onto the rest of the rubble with a tremendous crash.
Sarah turned away. She stood there and simply breathed, in and out. She didn’t want any of it. Not the darkness. Not the ruin. Not the magic she couldn’t hope to best—
But if not you, then who?
She wasn’t terribly fond of that voice in her head that echoed in her heart and always seemed to put her in Fate’s sights. It was the second time she’d heard it that day and that was two times too many. She was a village witch’s daughter, not a mage, nor a court wizard swathed in velvet robes and wearing a hat whose height was commensurate with his power and stature.
She cast about promptly for some pointy-hatted lad who might be willing to take on such a task. The wizard of Bruaih was three days’ journey to the northeast through mountains she would have to cross eventually anyway, true, but rumor had it he was an unpleasant and unhelpful sort, persuaded to extend his services only if a great amount of gold was exchanged. The sorceress to the south of Shettlestoune was equally skilled, but also notoriously unwilling to work for less than her full fee. There wasn’t another mage within a hundred leagues ...
She paused.
That wasn’t exactly true.
She lifted her eyes to the northwest. The western arm of the Cairngorm Mountains stood there, an impenetrable barrier between the bulk of Shettlestoune and Neroche, the city of Istaur, and the province of Meith. Rumor had it that those mountains were more unfriendly if possible than the ones to her right that separated her from the rest of the Nine Kingdoms. The forests to her left were full of ruffians and wild beasts.
And a mage.
That mage had lived there for centuries, or so it was hinted at gingerly, surrounding himself with spells and reputation and the bodies of those he’d slain for irritating him. No one braved the inhospitable path that led up to his house, at least no one she knew. Any who might have certainly never lived to tell the tale. That mage there was ancient, foul-tempered, and reclusive.
And quite possibly just the sort of man who might be bothered by the thought of her brother ruining his view.
She stood there for far longer than she should have with Castân leaning hard against her hip and the wind beginning to whisper unpleasantly through the surrounding forest of scraggly scrub oak. She didn’t want to have anything to do with mages or magic or hiring the former to see to the latter.
But, again, if not her, then who?
And if not the mage on the hill, then who else?
She took a deep breath and started up that path before she could think on it overmuch. She did look up, once, because the afternoon was waning, leaving not only the path but the lee of the mountain in shadow. She shivered in spite of herself. She wasn’t one to give credence to foolish tales told down at the pub, but she also couldn’t deny that there was nothing at all welcoming about either the mountain before her or the path that led to it.
There were other paths that led through the mountains to the northwest of Shettlestoune, but none so faintly worn as the one she stumbled along. Obviously, she wasn’t the only one who found other things to do besides visiting a mage who reputedly wanted his entire mountain to himself.
She rubbed her arms as she walked along, avoiding her right forearm and wrist. Perhaps the man could be bought. She obviously couldn’t give him everything she had, but perhaps a bit of gold along with an appeal to his sense of decency might do.
Thoug
h he was certain to have no decency. She supposed she would be fortunate to state her request before he attempted to silence her with some sort of dastardly spell.
She walked until the sun began to set, continuing up that faint path, continually brushing aside things that caught her across the face, spiderwebs of magic that she thankfully couldn’t see. Given that the mage had had centuries to perfect his spells of concealment and protection, ’twas a wonder she hadn’t run into a more impenetrable bit of business. Perhaps he saved that for those who had the cheek to actually brave his front door.
It took her less time than she wanted to reach his house, which was easily as frightful-looking as she’d imagined it might be—even in the deep shadows of sunset. It looked as if it had simply grown out of the rock behind it. What wasn’t cut from stone was built up with brick and impossibly weathered wood. Smoke from the fire-place curled upward into the frigid evening air. That should have been a good sign, but Sarah realized only then how badly she had hoped the wizard wouldn’t be at home.
She put her shoulders back and lifted her chin, refusing to entertain any more of those sorts of thoughts. She had a goodly work for the man in front of her, her coin while not much was sufficient, and she had other things to be doing. She would bring all of her powers of persuasion—and a fair amount of guilt, if necessary—to bear on the man and simply leave him no choice but to accept her quest.
She strode up the remainder of the rough-hewn path to the stout wooden door with its crude knocker. She reached out to lift it only to catch sight of her arm. The sinewy trail left by the spell had already stained the cloth of her sleeve, leaving a black spiral around her wrist and up to her elbow. She put that hand behind her back and knocked vigorously with the other.
No one answered.
She knocked again, then continued to knock until the door was wrenched open.
Darkness stood there in the doorway. Her mouth went completely dry despite her command that it not. She wasn’t one to cower, and she was unfortunately not unaccustomed to inventing reasonable-sounding tales on the spur of the moment to cover whatever exigency she might have been laboring under, but she found herself presently without a single useful thing to say.