Post by rainstormamaya on Sept 19, 2009 8:59:58 GMT 10
Title: Forcing Their Hand, Chapter 1
Summary: Daine and Dren would probably have had to leave Snowsdale at some point anyway; joyful obscurity doesn’t happen to people like them. The bandits precipitated matters.
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Family, Conflict
Series: Immortals, but AU- Interesting Times.
Warning: Battle.
A/N: Part of my AU; this is how Daine and Dren escape Snowsdale.
***
When the bandits came, Snowsdale was not ready for them.
Living outside the village, tucked away from villagers who liked to talk scandal about Sarra Beneksra and her misbegotten twins, Sarra, Benek and Sarra’s son Dren enjoyed a measure of warning, enough that Sarra could raise protections about the house, but they still only had one thought in their heads: Gods be thanked, Daine is not here. Daine was Dren’s twin, the younger by a few minutes, and she and Dren shared a knack for animals and skill with longbow and sling, but just now she was at a farm belonging to one of her mother’s friends, far away enough that she would have no idea of the slaughter her family were about to face.
Dren knelt behind the family’s cart, overturned in front of the house’s front door to form some kind of cover from which he could fire. His mother knelt beside him, her eyes on the bandits prowling around the outer limits of the wards, and when he looked at her she smiled at him. She was quite calm, her blue eyes steady and warm. She laid a gentle hand on his arm, above the leather arm-guard, and said quietly: “I love you.”
He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak, and he didn’t understand how his mother was not afraid.
Sarra looked at the bandits. “I will take the wards down before they break, and then we’ll have some element of surprise.” She toyed with the thread in her lap, planning the spells she had never been able to teach either Daine or Dren. “You’ll have to shoot to kill, love.”
Dren nodded again, and stroked the orange fur of the small ginger cat crouched beside him, tense as if she stalked a mouse. She had been Dren and Daine’s ever since she was a kitten: the twins had tried to raise the entire litter once they found them, with the mother cat thin and starved, but the other three had died. Sarra said it was a miracle that even this kitten, Claws, had survived. “Hush,” he whispered. “Hush.”
Claws rubbed her head against his hand.
“On my count of three,” Sarra said calmly. “One.”
Dren notched an arrow.
“Two.”
He drew back the string.
“Three.”
The wards vanished. The bandits were motionless for a split second, astonished- there was half an hour’s wear left in them according to their mage –and then Dren’s first arrow found its mark, and they yelled and charged.
Dren never fully remembered what happened next.
***
Dren woke up in the headman’s house with a thumping headache and bandaged hands.
“Owww,” he said experimentally, and discovered that his throat was painful, his lips cracked and dry, and he was very thirsty and weak.
“Dren, lad?” The headman’s wife bustled into the room and sat down beside him. “Goddess be thanked. We thought you were never going to wake up, so we did.” She picked up a beaker of water and carefully lifted him up, holding the beaker at his lips so he could sip a little water.
“How... long?” he said with difficulty.
“Three days. Gi’ or take an hour. You came round once or twice, and we gave you a bit o’ water and honey, but then you dropped right off again. Pale as death, you were.” She bustled around him, straightening blankets, putting a cold cloth on his aching forehead. Dren was startled; he’d never had so much kindness from anyone in the village in his life and neither had Daine. He said so.
The headman’s wife, Maida, looked slightly guilty. Daine and Dren had been familiar sights in the village since they’d been old enough to hunt together and sell the meat to the villagers, and Dren had only been found quickly because the butcher –who had had a lot of deer and rabbit carcasses cleanly shot and gutted from them, and whose sons had been delivered by Sarra- had insisted that they ought to see what had happened at the farm. “There now, lad, you shouldn’t talk so. You lie quiet a moment.”
Dren did as he was told, and lay quiet, trying to remember. He knew he’d killed three or four of the bandits outright, he remembered his mother kneeling beside him furiously knotting and looping thread, the faint rose of her Gift gleaming, he remembered... fire...
Choking smoke (notch draw fire) and death and flame (notch draw fire) scream and yell (notch draw fire) pain, fear-
He gasped, and sat straight up in bed, making his head ring painfully, sweat starting on his forehead as he shook convulsively. “Daine,” he sobbed, “Ma, Grandda...”
He had no more recollection of any of them. Where were they?
When Maida came back into the room she found her patient sitting up and trembling. “My ma,” he blurted at her. “Daine. Grandda. Where are they?”
Maida looked extremely uncomfortable as she sat down again and began to spoonfeed Dren broth. “I don’t rightly know as I should tell you.”
“Tell me,” Dren begged, “please!” and because he was just a boy, thirteen years old with pleading blue eyes, lacerated fingers and a burnt left hand, she told him.
“Your ma and grandda... Well, they’re dead. I’m sorry, Dren.” She patted his arm awkwardly as he tried to keep back tears, biting his bottom lip. “You killed three o’ the bandits, and your ma did for a few more, but one o’ the last ones killed her, and they torched the farm. It din’t all go, but some did, an’ a beam fell... your grandda never had a chance. Poor old Benek.”
Dren was crying now, tears rolling freely down his face and leaving dirty tracks. Maida wiped them away as best she could, looking helplessly at the boy. “You kep’ shooting, far’s we can tell. An’ when you ran out of arrows (Master Darensra collected ‘em, all he could find and weren’t brok’n) you picked up a burning chunk o’wood and attacked some wi’ that. We think, we don’ know... we found you lyin’ face down in the stream wi’ your hand all burnt and your fingers bleedin’.” She put down the bowl of broth and picked up Dren’s hands gently, showing him bandages on his fingers and on his left hand. “It’s a mercy the stream i’n’t deep ‘t all there, or you’d’ve drowned.”
“Daine?” Dren choked out.
Maida hesitated, laid his hands down and picked up the broth again, but Dren dodged the next spoonful. “Where’s Daine?” he demanded.
There was a long silence, and then Maida said quietly: “We don’t know.”
“What?”
“She came back yestere’en,” Maida said, still quiet, “just as it were gettin’ dark, an’ some o’ the men met her just outside the village an’ tol’ her what happened, tol’ her you was alive, but sinkin’. She came here, with that wicked pony of hers, and she stood at your bedside and looked at you an’- Goddess be my witness, I never want to see that look again. All dead an’ cold. An’ then she kissed you goodbye an’ went away into the woods without sayin’ a word, nor taking a single weapon, even though we tol’ her there was wolves in the woods, and we could all hear ‘em howlin’.”
Dren was silent.
“She’s probably dead, lad.”
Dren’s hands closed into slow, painful fists on the sheets.
“You just think about gettin’ better, Dren. Another night o’ decent sleep an’ you’ll do fine,” Maida rattled, disliking the quiet steel in Dren’s eyes as much as she had the emptiness in Daine’s. She, along with most of the village, liked Dren better than Daine- he seemed far more, well, normal to her, as a lad of his age should be only more polite, and he was a good hunter and a brave boy and a credit to his Ma, not that she deserved it –but at that precise moment, he frightened her. “Tomorrow you c’n get up, an’ some o’ those bandages can come off an’ you can start to think about salvage. There’s a goodly lot of your things mostly untouched.”
Dren nodded, but said nothing.
Daine, he called, searching for the warm presence that had always told him his twin was nearby. Daine. What he found frightened him. It was not that she was not there, but she was closed off to him, her mind one cold purpose, fixed on one objective and one only.
It reminded him of the times they had been out hunting, and there had been wolves nearby.
***
Dren had only just been allowed up when the women returned. Maida’s pretty thirteen-year-old daughter, with finger marks on her wrists and haunted eyes, Yolanda who ran the tavern with her husband, and all the other womenfolk of Snowsdale the bandits had carried off- they stumbled into the village after dark, a petrified huddle trailing down the main road. Everyone rushed to greet their lost daughters and sisters and wives, and Dren followed slowly, hoping to see Daine- but it was no use. She wasn’t there, and if he was honest, he had already known that: his twin was still almost lost to him, unreachable.
He moved through the crowd till he reached Maida and her daughter Inna. It parted as he passed, people moving to let him past, the returned women shooting him odd looks, inching away from him as if they were afraid. “Inna?” he asked, trying to get the girl’s attention. She was clinging to her mother and sobbing now, but even though he could see she was upset he needed to ask this, he needed an answer. It was probably hopeless; he couldn’t think why Inna would know where Daine was, but still... “Inna? Inna! Sorry, Maida- Inna, have you seen Daine?”
Abruptly, silence dropped into the gathering and spread outwards, flowing quickly out to every corner of the crowd. They moved away from him almost imperceptibly, leaving him alone in a little space; evidently everyone knew something he didn’t, something that had been communicated in the few moments before he joined the group.
“Daine,” he repeated, turning, looking desperately into every face. Too many of them would not meet his eyes. “My twin, Daine. Has anyone seen Daine?”
A brief hesitation. Then Yolanda, her face recently marked with a whip-weal down one cheek, spoke. “Aye. Aye, we have.” Her tone was curiously heavy and flat.
“Alive or dead?” Dren demanded.
“Alive,” Yolanda said reluctantly, “but-“
“Mad,” Inna piped up, her voice clear and merciless. “Dren, your sister’s run mad.”
“What? No!” He whirled, and stared at the girl. She was half an inch shorter than him, and her soft reddish hair was matted with dirt and blood.
“Yes,” Inna said, and then words poured out of her in a rush. “We saw her. She was with the wolves, the wolves! They came an’ killed the bandits, all of ‘em, an’ she was- just wild, Dren, wild, she ran with the wolves like she was one of ‘em!”
Like she was one of them. The words clattered uncomfortably in Dren’s head, like the time when he’d knocked a clay dish to the floor and it had shattered into a thousand sharp pieces, like the silence between the crash and the recriminations. He couldn’t help the immediate, instinctive association, couldn’t help remembering the way Daine had felt when he’d reached out for her, just to know where she was, and not been able to touch her: the single focus of her mind, sharp and concentrated, like a predator.
Like a wolf.
He remembered, too, the empathy Daine had always had with animals. He was pretty good with them, true, and together they had nursed a fair few back to health and managed Cloud, Daine’s irascible pony: sometimes he could even swear animals understood him, but it wasn’t like that for Daine. Daine knew they understood her, and even if she had learnt to say that it was just a child’s silliness to protect herself and Dren from being called unnatural, anyone with eyes could see that she was quite certain that when she spoke to animals they listened. She would help anyone out for animals’ sake: help deliver lambs or calves for free, try and save a pony from lockjaw, work out why chickens were so badly off their food. Dren had seen her whistle down birds to amuse and distract the butcher’s little son when the butcher’s wife was in labour- to be fair, he could do the same thing, if not as easily, but he never did it in the market square in full view of all the villagers. It was hardly the way to seem like you could be normal, to blend in and survive.
So if Daine could coax the birds out of the trees and discover an unsuspected nest of rats near the chickenhouse, could she –believing her mother and grandfather to be dead and her home half-destroyed, with no welcome in the village and seeing her twin brother unconscious with little hope of ever waking up- enlist the wolves to do one last service for the people she had grown up among? The answer was all too probably yes, Dren realised as he stood there, stock-still and staring at Inna, who was becoming uncomfortable. He turned away from her a little, his face a blank mask of shock, the wheels of his mind turning slowly. If Daine was alive... She might be. The wolves might have let her be, if she’d had any control over them. So he would have to find her. Even if she was insane- maybe it had just been a brief fit. If she was still mad, he’d take her away from here, find a place somewhere. He could certainly still hunt and fish, and he knew what his mother had taught him of herbs and plants, edible, poisonous and medical. If she hadn’t lost that knowledge in madness, so did Daine. Maybe if they went south, into Tortall where commoners had more of a chance... Or maybe they could pick up work at the horse fair in Cría. It would mean travelling. Was Cloud still alive? They could take it in turns to go on foot, save Cloud having to carry them both, unless Daine was badly hurt in which case she’d have to ride. He’d have to get away in secret, of course- how long would he need to recover? Not much longer, surely, but if the villagers wanted to find Daine and bring her in themselves that might force his hand, and he was up against time- he needed to find her as soon as possible in case she was injured. Salvage- Maida had mentioned some of their things were still useable. How many? What would he need?
Dren was making mental lists, a habit that had served him well for years and had kept him out of trouble, when he realised that the butcher was talking to him. “Dren? Dren, lad?” He spoke kindly, because he remembered that Sarra Beneksra had saved his wife’s life while Daine distracted his older son from the screaming and blood of the messy birth, and Dren had brought them meat and herbal tisanes which tasted foul but built up your strength for weeks afterwards. He also felt pity for the boy now; Veldren Sarrasri was a by-blow with a severely unnatural sister, and he wasn’t exactly normal either, but the blank, destroyed look on his face spoke vividly of grief.
Dren looked up at him, and noticed that the returned women were melting away to their homes. “Yes?”
“Well- we haven’t made a decision, but... Your sister’s mad, Dren, she’s a danger to herself.”
“Something oughta be done,” declared the headman, apparently deciding that since the butcher had got Dren’s attention without bloodshed it was time he took charge. “We have t’track her down, lad.”
A cold spike jammed itself into Dren’s spine, and he took an involuntary gasp. Fury, but the watchers mistook it for astonishment. His hands started to curl into fists, but that hurt too much, so he stopped. “I... Why? To kill ‘er?”
There was a brief pause, and the headman shrugged. Dren nearly throttled him. Didn’t he understand he was talking about a person’s life? “If it’s what’s needed, lad. I don’t think she’s really Veralidaine any more. The women say she’s... insane. There’s nothin’ anyone c’n do for ‘er. ‘Twould be a kindness. Mayhap she’s come to ‘er senses, but I doubt it.”
Dren was silent for a long moment. He couldn’t rescue her from a full hunt alone, not if he was among them, so he had to arrange not to take part and he had to know when. “Tell me when an’ I won’t be there. I can’t hunt my own sister.”
“Fair enough,” the headman agreed gruffly. “Tomorrow, at dawn. We meet in th’ square.”
Dren nodded shortly. Tomorrow? Too soon! His fingers were still damaged and sore. He could probably shoot if he tried. He’d have to go looking for her anyway, and pray he found her before the hunt did. He’d have to leave well before dawn...
They seemed to be waiting for him to say something. He swallowed. “I... understan’.”
“Good lad,” the headman said with perceptible relief. He was well aware that if Dren had chosen to fight for Daine, he could probably take out a solid chunk of the remaining men of the village with that bow of his before they brought him down, and while Dren’s assistance to find his unearthly sister might have been useful, they could probably do without it well enough. It had always been unlikely that Dren would help: the bond between that pair was strong, even for twins, and he would find it hard to believe that any sanity Daine had ever had –the headman was not convinced on this point- had left her.
Dren resisted the temptation to smash the headman’s face in, nodded again, and turned and walked quickly back to Maida’s house, shoulders hunching under the weight of the stares and pitying looks that followed him. Maida was waiting for him in the doorway.
“I’m sorry about your sister, Dren,” she said softly.
Dren made the kind of grunt that usually got an admonition from his mother to speak decent Common. His mother, who was dead.
He tried hard not to cry. Maida patted his shoulder gently, and propelled him to the room in which he’d been sleeping. “Inna’s asleep,” she told him. “I gave ‘er a sleepin’ draught. D’you want one? Either way I’ll wake you for supper.”
“Yes please,” Dren said. He felt suddenly very tired, and he thumped down on the bed, eyelids drooping, but his mind was working double-pace, racing through unpleasant recollections and images. He kept thinking about his family: his mother and his grandfather, who were dead, and his sister, who might be. He still remembered only fragments of the bandit’s attack, although a few more had come back to him since he had first awoken. He remembered the farm animals, attacking the bandits as if possessed, the sound of a crash and part of the house collapsing, most of the structure holding firm because of all Sarra’s spells but just enough falling in to kill Benek. He didn’t remember his mother’s death, but he remembered seizing a knife from a dead body and ducking under the reach of an axe to jam it straight into a bandit’s throat; unscientific, but effective. He remembered blood. He faintly remembered carrying the little cat Claws to the stream to give her water, but she must have been dead, she was so still, so why had he done it?
Most of all he remembered pain, and then Maida came and gave him the sleeping draught, and everything was gone in soft, sweet blackness.
***
The girl known as Daine lay in the shade of a bush, naked and cold and slowly coming down from her grief-stricken, wild magic-driven frenzy, and shivered into sleep.
She dreamt of a badger, but she forgot.
***
Summary: Daine and Dren would probably have had to leave Snowsdale at some point anyway; joyful obscurity doesn’t happen to people like them. The bandits precipitated matters.
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Family, Conflict
Series: Immortals, but AU- Interesting Times.
Warning: Battle.
A/N: Part of my AU; this is how Daine and Dren escape Snowsdale.
***
When the bandits came, Snowsdale was not ready for them.
Living outside the village, tucked away from villagers who liked to talk scandal about Sarra Beneksra and her misbegotten twins, Sarra, Benek and Sarra’s son Dren enjoyed a measure of warning, enough that Sarra could raise protections about the house, but they still only had one thought in their heads: Gods be thanked, Daine is not here. Daine was Dren’s twin, the younger by a few minutes, and she and Dren shared a knack for animals and skill with longbow and sling, but just now she was at a farm belonging to one of her mother’s friends, far away enough that she would have no idea of the slaughter her family were about to face.
Dren knelt behind the family’s cart, overturned in front of the house’s front door to form some kind of cover from which he could fire. His mother knelt beside him, her eyes on the bandits prowling around the outer limits of the wards, and when he looked at her she smiled at him. She was quite calm, her blue eyes steady and warm. She laid a gentle hand on his arm, above the leather arm-guard, and said quietly: “I love you.”
He nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak, and he didn’t understand how his mother was not afraid.
Sarra looked at the bandits. “I will take the wards down before they break, and then we’ll have some element of surprise.” She toyed with the thread in her lap, planning the spells she had never been able to teach either Daine or Dren. “You’ll have to shoot to kill, love.”
Dren nodded again, and stroked the orange fur of the small ginger cat crouched beside him, tense as if she stalked a mouse. She had been Dren and Daine’s ever since she was a kitten: the twins had tried to raise the entire litter once they found them, with the mother cat thin and starved, but the other three had died. Sarra said it was a miracle that even this kitten, Claws, had survived. “Hush,” he whispered. “Hush.”
Claws rubbed her head against his hand.
“On my count of three,” Sarra said calmly. “One.”
Dren notched an arrow.
“Two.”
He drew back the string.
“Three.”
The wards vanished. The bandits were motionless for a split second, astonished- there was half an hour’s wear left in them according to their mage –and then Dren’s first arrow found its mark, and they yelled and charged.
Dren never fully remembered what happened next.
***
Dren woke up in the headman’s house with a thumping headache and bandaged hands.
“Owww,” he said experimentally, and discovered that his throat was painful, his lips cracked and dry, and he was very thirsty and weak.
“Dren, lad?” The headman’s wife bustled into the room and sat down beside him. “Goddess be thanked. We thought you were never going to wake up, so we did.” She picked up a beaker of water and carefully lifted him up, holding the beaker at his lips so he could sip a little water.
“How... long?” he said with difficulty.
“Three days. Gi’ or take an hour. You came round once or twice, and we gave you a bit o’ water and honey, but then you dropped right off again. Pale as death, you were.” She bustled around him, straightening blankets, putting a cold cloth on his aching forehead. Dren was startled; he’d never had so much kindness from anyone in the village in his life and neither had Daine. He said so.
The headman’s wife, Maida, looked slightly guilty. Daine and Dren had been familiar sights in the village since they’d been old enough to hunt together and sell the meat to the villagers, and Dren had only been found quickly because the butcher –who had had a lot of deer and rabbit carcasses cleanly shot and gutted from them, and whose sons had been delivered by Sarra- had insisted that they ought to see what had happened at the farm. “There now, lad, you shouldn’t talk so. You lie quiet a moment.”
Dren did as he was told, and lay quiet, trying to remember. He knew he’d killed three or four of the bandits outright, he remembered his mother kneeling beside him furiously knotting and looping thread, the faint rose of her Gift gleaming, he remembered... fire...
Choking smoke (notch draw fire) and death and flame (notch draw fire) scream and yell (notch draw fire) pain, fear-
He gasped, and sat straight up in bed, making his head ring painfully, sweat starting on his forehead as he shook convulsively. “Daine,” he sobbed, “Ma, Grandda...”
He had no more recollection of any of them. Where were they?
When Maida came back into the room she found her patient sitting up and trembling. “My ma,” he blurted at her. “Daine. Grandda. Where are they?”
Maida looked extremely uncomfortable as she sat down again and began to spoonfeed Dren broth. “I don’t rightly know as I should tell you.”
“Tell me,” Dren begged, “please!” and because he was just a boy, thirteen years old with pleading blue eyes, lacerated fingers and a burnt left hand, she told him.
“Your ma and grandda... Well, they’re dead. I’m sorry, Dren.” She patted his arm awkwardly as he tried to keep back tears, biting his bottom lip. “You killed three o’ the bandits, and your ma did for a few more, but one o’ the last ones killed her, and they torched the farm. It din’t all go, but some did, an’ a beam fell... your grandda never had a chance. Poor old Benek.”
Dren was crying now, tears rolling freely down his face and leaving dirty tracks. Maida wiped them away as best she could, looking helplessly at the boy. “You kep’ shooting, far’s we can tell. An’ when you ran out of arrows (Master Darensra collected ‘em, all he could find and weren’t brok’n) you picked up a burning chunk o’wood and attacked some wi’ that. We think, we don’ know... we found you lyin’ face down in the stream wi’ your hand all burnt and your fingers bleedin’.” She put down the bowl of broth and picked up Dren’s hands gently, showing him bandages on his fingers and on his left hand. “It’s a mercy the stream i’n’t deep ‘t all there, or you’d’ve drowned.”
“Daine?” Dren choked out.
Maida hesitated, laid his hands down and picked up the broth again, but Dren dodged the next spoonful. “Where’s Daine?” he demanded.
There was a long silence, and then Maida said quietly: “We don’t know.”
“What?”
“She came back yestere’en,” Maida said, still quiet, “just as it were gettin’ dark, an’ some o’ the men met her just outside the village an’ tol’ her what happened, tol’ her you was alive, but sinkin’. She came here, with that wicked pony of hers, and she stood at your bedside and looked at you an’- Goddess be my witness, I never want to see that look again. All dead an’ cold. An’ then she kissed you goodbye an’ went away into the woods without sayin’ a word, nor taking a single weapon, even though we tol’ her there was wolves in the woods, and we could all hear ‘em howlin’.”
Dren was silent.
“She’s probably dead, lad.”
Dren’s hands closed into slow, painful fists on the sheets.
“You just think about gettin’ better, Dren. Another night o’ decent sleep an’ you’ll do fine,” Maida rattled, disliking the quiet steel in Dren’s eyes as much as she had the emptiness in Daine’s. She, along with most of the village, liked Dren better than Daine- he seemed far more, well, normal to her, as a lad of his age should be only more polite, and he was a good hunter and a brave boy and a credit to his Ma, not that she deserved it –but at that precise moment, he frightened her. “Tomorrow you c’n get up, an’ some o’ those bandages can come off an’ you can start to think about salvage. There’s a goodly lot of your things mostly untouched.”
Dren nodded, but said nothing.
Daine, he called, searching for the warm presence that had always told him his twin was nearby. Daine. What he found frightened him. It was not that she was not there, but she was closed off to him, her mind one cold purpose, fixed on one objective and one only.
It reminded him of the times they had been out hunting, and there had been wolves nearby.
***
Dren had only just been allowed up when the women returned. Maida’s pretty thirteen-year-old daughter, with finger marks on her wrists and haunted eyes, Yolanda who ran the tavern with her husband, and all the other womenfolk of Snowsdale the bandits had carried off- they stumbled into the village after dark, a petrified huddle trailing down the main road. Everyone rushed to greet their lost daughters and sisters and wives, and Dren followed slowly, hoping to see Daine- but it was no use. She wasn’t there, and if he was honest, he had already known that: his twin was still almost lost to him, unreachable.
He moved through the crowd till he reached Maida and her daughter Inna. It parted as he passed, people moving to let him past, the returned women shooting him odd looks, inching away from him as if they were afraid. “Inna?” he asked, trying to get the girl’s attention. She was clinging to her mother and sobbing now, but even though he could see she was upset he needed to ask this, he needed an answer. It was probably hopeless; he couldn’t think why Inna would know where Daine was, but still... “Inna? Inna! Sorry, Maida- Inna, have you seen Daine?”
Abruptly, silence dropped into the gathering and spread outwards, flowing quickly out to every corner of the crowd. They moved away from him almost imperceptibly, leaving him alone in a little space; evidently everyone knew something he didn’t, something that had been communicated in the few moments before he joined the group.
“Daine,” he repeated, turning, looking desperately into every face. Too many of them would not meet his eyes. “My twin, Daine. Has anyone seen Daine?”
A brief hesitation. Then Yolanda, her face recently marked with a whip-weal down one cheek, spoke. “Aye. Aye, we have.” Her tone was curiously heavy and flat.
“Alive or dead?” Dren demanded.
“Alive,” Yolanda said reluctantly, “but-“
“Mad,” Inna piped up, her voice clear and merciless. “Dren, your sister’s run mad.”
“What? No!” He whirled, and stared at the girl. She was half an inch shorter than him, and her soft reddish hair was matted with dirt and blood.
“Yes,” Inna said, and then words poured out of her in a rush. “We saw her. She was with the wolves, the wolves! They came an’ killed the bandits, all of ‘em, an’ she was- just wild, Dren, wild, she ran with the wolves like she was one of ‘em!”
Like she was one of them. The words clattered uncomfortably in Dren’s head, like the time when he’d knocked a clay dish to the floor and it had shattered into a thousand sharp pieces, like the silence between the crash and the recriminations. He couldn’t help the immediate, instinctive association, couldn’t help remembering the way Daine had felt when he’d reached out for her, just to know where she was, and not been able to touch her: the single focus of her mind, sharp and concentrated, like a predator.
Like a wolf.
He remembered, too, the empathy Daine had always had with animals. He was pretty good with them, true, and together they had nursed a fair few back to health and managed Cloud, Daine’s irascible pony: sometimes he could even swear animals understood him, but it wasn’t like that for Daine. Daine knew they understood her, and even if she had learnt to say that it was just a child’s silliness to protect herself and Dren from being called unnatural, anyone with eyes could see that she was quite certain that when she spoke to animals they listened. She would help anyone out for animals’ sake: help deliver lambs or calves for free, try and save a pony from lockjaw, work out why chickens were so badly off their food. Dren had seen her whistle down birds to amuse and distract the butcher’s little son when the butcher’s wife was in labour- to be fair, he could do the same thing, if not as easily, but he never did it in the market square in full view of all the villagers. It was hardly the way to seem like you could be normal, to blend in and survive.
So if Daine could coax the birds out of the trees and discover an unsuspected nest of rats near the chickenhouse, could she –believing her mother and grandfather to be dead and her home half-destroyed, with no welcome in the village and seeing her twin brother unconscious with little hope of ever waking up- enlist the wolves to do one last service for the people she had grown up among? The answer was all too probably yes, Dren realised as he stood there, stock-still and staring at Inna, who was becoming uncomfortable. He turned away from her a little, his face a blank mask of shock, the wheels of his mind turning slowly. If Daine was alive... She might be. The wolves might have let her be, if she’d had any control over them. So he would have to find her. Even if she was insane- maybe it had just been a brief fit. If she was still mad, he’d take her away from here, find a place somewhere. He could certainly still hunt and fish, and he knew what his mother had taught him of herbs and plants, edible, poisonous and medical. If she hadn’t lost that knowledge in madness, so did Daine. Maybe if they went south, into Tortall where commoners had more of a chance... Or maybe they could pick up work at the horse fair in Cría. It would mean travelling. Was Cloud still alive? They could take it in turns to go on foot, save Cloud having to carry them both, unless Daine was badly hurt in which case she’d have to ride. He’d have to get away in secret, of course- how long would he need to recover? Not much longer, surely, but if the villagers wanted to find Daine and bring her in themselves that might force his hand, and he was up against time- he needed to find her as soon as possible in case she was injured. Salvage- Maida had mentioned some of their things were still useable. How many? What would he need?
Dren was making mental lists, a habit that had served him well for years and had kept him out of trouble, when he realised that the butcher was talking to him. “Dren? Dren, lad?” He spoke kindly, because he remembered that Sarra Beneksra had saved his wife’s life while Daine distracted his older son from the screaming and blood of the messy birth, and Dren had brought them meat and herbal tisanes which tasted foul but built up your strength for weeks afterwards. He also felt pity for the boy now; Veldren Sarrasri was a by-blow with a severely unnatural sister, and he wasn’t exactly normal either, but the blank, destroyed look on his face spoke vividly of grief.
Dren looked up at him, and noticed that the returned women were melting away to their homes. “Yes?”
“Well- we haven’t made a decision, but... Your sister’s mad, Dren, she’s a danger to herself.”
“Something oughta be done,” declared the headman, apparently deciding that since the butcher had got Dren’s attention without bloodshed it was time he took charge. “We have t’track her down, lad.”
A cold spike jammed itself into Dren’s spine, and he took an involuntary gasp. Fury, but the watchers mistook it for astonishment. His hands started to curl into fists, but that hurt too much, so he stopped. “I... Why? To kill ‘er?”
There was a brief pause, and the headman shrugged. Dren nearly throttled him. Didn’t he understand he was talking about a person’s life? “If it’s what’s needed, lad. I don’t think she’s really Veralidaine any more. The women say she’s... insane. There’s nothin’ anyone c’n do for ‘er. ‘Twould be a kindness. Mayhap she’s come to ‘er senses, but I doubt it.”
Dren was silent for a long moment. He couldn’t rescue her from a full hunt alone, not if he was among them, so he had to arrange not to take part and he had to know when. “Tell me when an’ I won’t be there. I can’t hunt my own sister.”
“Fair enough,” the headman agreed gruffly. “Tomorrow, at dawn. We meet in th’ square.”
Dren nodded shortly. Tomorrow? Too soon! His fingers were still damaged and sore. He could probably shoot if he tried. He’d have to go looking for her anyway, and pray he found her before the hunt did. He’d have to leave well before dawn...
They seemed to be waiting for him to say something. He swallowed. “I... understan’.”
“Good lad,” the headman said with perceptible relief. He was well aware that if Dren had chosen to fight for Daine, he could probably take out a solid chunk of the remaining men of the village with that bow of his before they brought him down, and while Dren’s assistance to find his unearthly sister might have been useful, they could probably do without it well enough. It had always been unlikely that Dren would help: the bond between that pair was strong, even for twins, and he would find it hard to believe that any sanity Daine had ever had –the headman was not convinced on this point- had left her.
Dren resisted the temptation to smash the headman’s face in, nodded again, and turned and walked quickly back to Maida’s house, shoulders hunching under the weight of the stares and pitying looks that followed him. Maida was waiting for him in the doorway.
“I’m sorry about your sister, Dren,” she said softly.
Dren made the kind of grunt that usually got an admonition from his mother to speak decent Common. His mother, who was dead.
He tried hard not to cry. Maida patted his shoulder gently, and propelled him to the room in which he’d been sleeping. “Inna’s asleep,” she told him. “I gave ‘er a sleepin’ draught. D’you want one? Either way I’ll wake you for supper.”
“Yes please,” Dren said. He felt suddenly very tired, and he thumped down on the bed, eyelids drooping, but his mind was working double-pace, racing through unpleasant recollections and images. He kept thinking about his family: his mother and his grandfather, who were dead, and his sister, who might be. He still remembered only fragments of the bandit’s attack, although a few more had come back to him since he had first awoken. He remembered the farm animals, attacking the bandits as if possessed, the sound of a crash and part of the house collapsing, most of the structure holding firm because of all Sarra’s spells but just enough falling in to kill Benek. He didn’t remember his mother’s death, but he remembered seizing a knife from a dead body and ducking under the reach of an axe to jam it straight into a bandit’s throat; unscientific, but effective. He remembered blood. He faintly remembered carrying the little cat Claws to the stream to give her water, but she must have been dead, she was so still, so why had he done it?
Most of all he remembered pain, and then Maida came and gave him the sleeping draught, and everything was gone in soft, sweet blackness.
***
The girl known as Daine lay in the shade of a bush, naked and cold and slowly coming down from her grief-stricken, wild magic-driven frenzy, and shivered into sleep.
She dreamt of a badger, but she forgot.
***