He turned his head back, his gaze going up to the starlit sky. He was lying on his back. His chest ached, his hip was worse, and he had a throbbing headache.
Instinctively, Talmadge reached up for his temple, or tried to, but he found that his hands were caught beneath him. He struggled a bit, and realized that no, they weren’t caught.
They were tied.
Had the goblins won?
“Hey, he’s awake,” he heard from the side, a human voice, a woman’s voice, and no goblin.
A moment later, the woman leaned over him, looking down. “Ye wasn’t hurt that bad,” she said. “Are ye all about faintin’, then?”
She laughed at him and moved aside.
The other woman was beside him then, kneeling and helping him to sit up.
The world spun for a moment with the movement, and it took Talmadge a while for his eyes to catch up to his senses. As they focused in, the first image he saw was that of a goblin, leering at him.
He tried to fall back, but the woman held him in place. He started to protest, but stopped short as he realized that the goblin wasn’t alive, but was staked just to the side of the fire. Talmadge shook his head. He had only seen a few of these troublesome beasts over the years, all but a couple of times from afar, though he had encountered their sign—camps littered with half-eaten rodents and lizards. Every time he saw a goblin’s face, Talmadge couldn’t shake the ridiculous thought that someone had grabbed it by the nose and pulled hard, shrinking the thing’s head into a tiny, wrinkled mess, and leaving the nose and ears absurdly long and crooked.
He preferred to see them dead.
Past the goblin, one of the people he saved was digging at the ground, with another form, long and tall, lying behind him.
Digging a grave, Talmadge realized, and he thought of the man on the ground, the goblins sticking him with their nasty spears.
“So, ye finally come back to us, eh?” asked the first woman.
“I got hit in the head,” he mumbled.
“I should be hittin’ ye in the head!” the woman retorted, with more than a little ire in her voice.
The man stopped his digging and came over then, hands on hips, a scowl on his dirty, bloody face. He spat on the ground.
“All ye had to do was keep him safe a bit longer,” the woman said.
“He tried,” the woman kneeling beside Talmadge started to say, but her voice thinned and disappeared under the withering gaze of her two companions.
“I killed a goblin,” Talmadge said.
“Aye, ye did,” the man agreed. “I’ll give ye that.”
“Why am I tied?”
“Because we’re not knowin’ who ye are,” said the first woman, who seemed to Talmadge to be the leader. “Or we wasn’t, at least,” she added with a grin and she took a handful of pearls out of her pocket and began dropping them from hand to hand in full view of Talmadge.
“My name is Talmad—” he started to say.
“We know,” the woman interrupted. “Know who ye are, and know what game ye got goin’ for yerself all these years.”
“Game?” Talmadge tried to make some sense of it all. He looked more closely at the apparent leader. She was fairly tall, and incredibly skinny, with long light-brown hair and a mouth full of crooked and snaggled teeth, more than one looking more green than white. Had he seen her before at Matinee, he wondered?
Probably, he decided, though he couldn’t place her. Almost everyone out here not of the indigenous tribes attended Matinee.
The man beside her was short and barrel-chested, with a giant black beard and unkempt hair that hung below his shoulders—unremarkable among the frontiersmen, surely.
The woman at Talmadge’s side was quite a bit younger than the other two, with her red hair cropped short. She had a nasty scar on the left side of her face, from ear to chin, but Talmadge thought her attractive, with a softness about her face, and gentle light eyes.
Yes, Talmadge had seen this one the previous year, but only from afar.
“So, Mister Talmadge,” said the skinny one. “We saved yer life.”
“I joined in your fight,” Talmadge corrected.
The woman spat on the ground. “Bah, but we had it won. Only thing ye might’ve done was save Ricker, there, and ye failed at it, eh?”
“He was already down, being stabbed—”
“Shut up,” the man bellowed. He came forward, moving past the staked goblin to tower right before the seated Talmadge.
“Ye shut up or I’ll put me boot deep into yer craw, what.”
Talmadge swallowed hard.
“Shut up except for what we’re askin’ ye,” the skinny woman corrected, also moving over to stand beside the man. “Tweren’t yer good fortune to come upon us, Mister Talmadge, and tweren’t yer good choice to join in where ye wasn’t asked.”
Talmadge wanted to argue—the whole thing seemed so absurd!
But she rolled the pearls from one hand to the other in clear view then, and he began to better understand.
“So, we’re thinkin’ that it’s time for Mister Talmadge to share his bounty,” said the skinny one. “Ye’re on yer way to that lake.”
“No,” he said.
The woman kneeling beside him whacked him across the side of the head with a thick stick, pitching him over to go facedown into the dirt. Before he could even straighten out, she grabbed him by the hair and the collar and tugged him back into a seated position.
With that handful of hair, she yanked his head around to look him square in the eye, and there was nothing soft about her appearance or demeanor now.
“Whene’er I hear ye lie, I’m to whack ye,” she explained, holding up the stick, and seeming quite willing, even happy, to prove her point again.
“So ye’re going to the lake,” said the skinny woman, “and we’re going with ye.”
Talmadge wanted to scream at her. This wasn’t the way they lived out here in the wilds. They didn’t fight each other, murder each other, and especially not with someone who had come in to help them in a fight!
As tough as they were, the frontiersmen were not thieves!
Talmadge wanted to scream all of that, and yet he knew, obviously, that his protest would catch the wind and nothing more—and would probably earn him another crack on the head from the younger woman, as well!
So he sat there and shook his head, his expression dumbfounded, and full of disappointment.
“Now,” said the man, “if ye take us to the lake and behave, we might let ye live, and even if we don’t, we’ll kill ye quick and easy.”
Talmadge stared at him hard. He didn’t need to ask what would happen if he didn’t cooperate, but the man volunteered it anyway.
“And if ye’re not behavin’, we’ll roast ye, bit by little bit, until ye do.” He reached into the remaining bits of campfire and brought forth a brand, and thrust the burning end in Talmadge’s direction.
“Now what’s yer choice, boy?” he asked, or tried to, for before he had quite finished, his words became a dissipating mess of undecipherable sounds, and he stared at Talmadge weirdly—too weirdly!—and so it took the seated man a few moments to even realize what had happened, to even realize that the brute had an arrow sticking into his face, through both cheeks!
His jaw crooked from the arrow, he garbled a few more sounds and went down to the ground, trying to summon the nerve to bring his trembling hand to the embedded bolt.
The woman beside Talmadge leaped up, drawing her sword. The skinny woman spun about to face the direction of the attack, falling into a crouch, sword in hand.
And in came the attacker in a full charge, shouting and waving a small whip in one hand, a hooked knife in the other. She dived and rolled and slid in between the two rogues on her back, whip cracking, and with legs up, feet kicking.
“Khotai!” Talmadge gasped, caught by surprise and by fear for the woman. Why was she on the ground? Had she tripped?
It took him a while to properly un
derstand that this maneuver was by design, for Khotai fought prone from her back ferociously, spinning kicking, lifting up high with her legs and even lower back to drive away the two women.
She used the cracking whip as more of a diversion, but those legs were doing the damage—and more damage than Talmadge could imagine, with both rogue women bleeding from their thighs and pelvises and bellies!
For knife blades extended from Khotai’s boots!
To the side, the man struggled to his feet, ready to join in despite the arrow still sticking through his face. Talmadge rolled over and to his knees, then struggled up as the man came across. With a growl of protest, Talmadge launched himself forward into the rogue, bulling him to the side and into the remaining campfire.
The man cried out and began frantically patting at his burning clothes, and rolling about, which jarred the arrow, which made him cry out all the louder.
Talmadge fell back down and curled, bringing his arms down below his bum and up along his tucking legs, trying to get his tied hands in front of him, at least. By the time he managed that and climbed back to his feet, the young red-haired woman was down on one knee, holding at a myriad of wounds and with one arm out toward Khotai in a gesture of surrender.
The other woman had backed out of reach, and so Khotai executed a graceful lift and twist, leaping up from the ground in a practiced twirl, landing on her feet before the woman and launching immediately into a high-flying circle kick.
The skinny woman ducked and came right in, but was straightened abruptly as Khotai came fully around, whip leading and whip snapping, right across the woman’s neck. Dazed and stung, the skinny woman stumbled backward, but not fast enough as Khotai came in hard, her other hand holding the hooked knife, punching out, crushing the skinny woman’s nose with the metal pommel.
The woman’s head snapped back and she fell over to the ground and curled up, only semiconscious and groaning loudly.
Khotai spun back and rushed past the kneeling redhead, and over to Talmadge, who lifted his hands defensively and cried out, thinking that Khotai, in her battle frenzy, didn’t even recognize him!
Down came her hooked knife, right between his extended arms, slicing the bonds.
Khotai motioned to one of the fallen swords. “Keep them caught!” she said and she leaped the fire and charged straight in at the man, spinning, whip cracking.
He straightened.
She dived forward and rolled onto her back, and as she did, Talmadge noted her hand going to her waist and grabbing at something set there.
He understood when she kicked the rogue inside his knee, the knife that extended from her boot cutting in hard and sending him down and squirming, this time to stay. As Khotai leaped up, Talmadge realized that the blade was retractable, like a cat’s claws, with some kind of mechanism running inside Khotai’s pant leg.
Khotai calmly walked back from the man, leaving him thrashing and howling on the ground. The skinny woman had stopped squirming then, and lay quite unconscious in the dirt, and the red-haired woman hadn’t even attempted to stand up once more.
Khotai stopped short, though, and moved to the side, to the grave the man had been digging. She picked up a rock, a headstone, stared at it for a moment, then chuckled and moved to join Talmadge.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Not even a thank-you?”
“Thank you,” he said. “Now what?”
Khotai shrugged. “We are justified in killing them.”
“No.”
Khotai stared at him and he made sure that there was no compromise revealed in his expression. He couldn’t kill these three. He simply couldn’t.
And Khotai smiled and seemed to understand. She looked around. “There is a gully not far from here. Long and deep. We lower them down the side and leave them. We will be long gone before they can make their way out.”
“Leave them and then we go where?”
Khotai smiled.
Talmadge shook his head.
“Don’t be stubborn,” she said. “You owe me this at least. I just saved your life.”
“They weren’t going to kill me!” he insisted.
Khotai gave him a skeptical look, then tossed the headstone to the ground at his feet. It landed upright, giving the man a clear view of the inscription: “Talmij.”
“They would have left you dead under the waters of your faraway lake,” Khotai said, and Talmadge knew it to be true. “And would have explained any questions away by telling all that you were killed here by goblins.”
The man shrugged.
“Good,” said Khotai, clearly taking that as a surrender and a recognition that Talmadge would lead her to this faraway Loch Beag. “I will heat some water so we can clean up your wounds.” She paused, then added, “And theirs.”
“Why is this so important to you?” Talmadge asked as she started to walk to the fire.
Khotai turned to regard him, a wry grin on her face. “I am writing my story,” she said. “We all are. I want my story to be wide.”
Talmadge wasn’t quite sure how to take that, but this wasn’t the first time Khotai had spoken of adventures in that manner. When she was trying to convince him to go far to the east to meet with Redshanks, she had used similar words, saying that he needed to widen his tale.
The skinny woman groaned then and began to stir, so Talmadge let it go at that.
Early the next morning, the couple marched the three rogues to a ledge above a nearly vertical cliff. They set some ropes and forced the rogues down, one by one, and when the last had safely reached the bottom, they pulled up the ropes and tossed down some supplies, including the rogues’ weapons.
“You are being more generous than most,” Khotai said to Talmadge as he lowered that last bundle.
The man could only shrug and reply, “Goblins. I’ll not leave them to be slaughtered.”
“They meant to kill you.”
Talmadge just shook his head to toss aside that unsettling thought. It was true enough, of course, and he would have been well within his rights, and none would have blamed him, if he had simply killed the three back in their camp.
But he couldn’t do it—the mere thought of it horrified him. Maybe they deserved it, many would say so, but he simply couldn’t.
He would write his story, as Khotai always said, but it would be one with as few dead at the hands of Talmadge as possible.
When he finished pulling up the rope, Talmadge turned to find Khotai sitting on a stone, chewing on a long blade of grass and staring at him with a sly little grin.
“What?” he asked.
“You’ve not the heart to kill them.”
Again, he merely shrugged.
“You understand that’s why I have fallen in love with you, yes?” Khotai said.
Talmadge almost pitched off the cliff. Had a breeze come up, he was certain he would have been blown into the gully.
Khotai laughed at him and spun off the rock, twirling gracefully to her feet on the other side, and started away to the west. “Come along,” she said. “Maybe I’ll even teach you how to fight.”
Talmadge started to protest, but bit it back and let it go at that, and he was smiling too widely to even care.
Somehow and suddenly, his journey this season seemed much less daunting.
15
HIS
Aoleyn opened her sleepy eyes to discover, to her surprise, that she was back in her cot in Seonagh’s tent. The light streamed in on her face through the open flap and she lifted her arm to cover her eyes.
The night had passed, at least.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that she’d barely eaten.
“Half-cooked meat,” she muttered, trying to recall the events of that night, most of which were missing. She rose shakily to her feet.
Her head throbbed. She brought her hand to her temple, remembering—barely—the cut of the flint knife. There was no blood there, nor could she feel a scab. Had it been a dream, after all? She moved t
o the washbasin to check her reflection in its still, reflective surface.
Not a mark showed on her smooth skin.
She splashed some water on her face. “Was I dreaming?” she wondered aloud.
“Hardly,” Seonagh said.
Aoleyn jumped at the sound and whirled about.
“It was not a dream,” Seonagh calmly assured her when both steadied from Aoleyn’s leaping response. “It was a ritual, one that all Usgar girls—young women—attend.”
“What ritual?” Aoleyn asked, her voice thick with suspicion, and not a small amount of dread. “What did it mean? What was all the smoke for?”
The memories began flooding back to her, inciting more questions. The evening came again into perspective, but she could hardly make sense of what had happened. One moment stood out from the others, though, one mystery she needed to unravel.
“The markings on his chest, where did he get them?” she asked, remembering the mesmerizing play of the light across the dark inky lines.
Seonagh snorted but managed to stifle a louder and longer laugh—and only with great difficulty, Aoleyn noted. “He got the markings from us,” she said. “Why, of course. They are called spatt’rings, or tattoos. Many men are so painted, with many designs.”
Aoleyn’s eyes lit up. “We women do it? Will I learn to do that? Will I be able to make such marks?”
Seonagh nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Perhaps,” she said noncommittally. “It is one of the duties of the witches of the Coven. In time, if you are selected for that honor, you will learn that talent, yes. But it is a sacred and secret ritual, intimately tied to the magic wielded only by the Coven.”
“You used magic last night,” Aoleyn pointed out, rather harshly.
Seonagh seemed somewhat confused.
“You are not of the Coven,” Aoleyn explained.
Danger flashed across Seonagh’s eyes and Aoleyn retreated a step.
“Once a witch is ever a witch,” she said as the moment passed. “I could not unlearn the beauty of Usgar. No one could. Once you have seen truth, child, you will never forget.”
Aoleyn’s black eyes flashed, too, but with hunger.