Page 63 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

On his right, coming over the Kells from the west, three or four clots of dark matter, indistinct because of the light and the wispy streakiness of the skies. He paid the flotsam no mind until a skein of cloud parted and they were nearer. Larger than he’d guessed; now he could see they were still rather far off. But gaining in speed; and gaining on him, slicing toward him in a wide curvet like hounds let loose on the side of a meadow, and he the fox already moving broadly down its middle.

He used the force of his thumbs to press the wood of the broom pole down, and as if possessed of a mind, or as if it had become part of his own body, the broom obliged, and he lost altitude in a hurry. The larger creatures would have a hard time adjusting their speed and height, he thought, and he was right; they were less nimble. But the air below was thicker with the water vapor and breath of forest. What they’d lost in maneuverability, the hunting birds made up in greater weight; they plunged toward him.

Farther, and he dropped farther still, each time catching some small advantage, to lose it within a few minutes. The four birds now penned him in the air: two keeping slightly forward and below, one coming on his left. Above—he could feel it with his peripheral judgment rather than see it—the final one. And closing in fast, to judge by the pair of shadows that he could see racing along the flatlands below: his shadow and his pursuer’s.

There was nothing to lose by an attempt to buck sideways and zigzag; with luck two of the dedicated missiles might collide, and each one knock the other unconscious. But the broom didn’t seem responsive enough. A small amount of jerking up and kicking back made little difference. The farther the drop, the slower the broom’s response: the more resistance put up by the moods of the climate.

Now above the horizon the jackal moon was staring. It had risen as Liir had descended, and their relative positions were reversed. It was the head of a predator on the crouch, and he was the prey trying lucklessly to make it to a mouse hole of one sort or another.

The first attack was of talons, so Liir thought, eagles? Massive eagles—and the second attack was by a tooth or a beak, which might have meant anything. It ripped off the cape as if calmly unknotting it. Then Liir turned to beat at the creature with his arms, since encounter was inevitable, and he came face-to-face with a flying dragon. Roughly the size of a horse, with wings of black and gold, and a venomous eye of gold shot through with black where red should be.

The other dragon neared, and the two of them made their nab neatly, tossing Liir between them as his clothes shredded and his voice raveled. Then, having worried him at last from the broom, they let him fall, and retired with their spoils.

The Emperor Apostle

One Plus One Equals Both

1

HE HAD HAD EVERY INTENTION TO DIE, and music had forbidden it. He’d been netted by melody not so much beguiling as nagging. That’s what he thought, when he could think about it. Though it was another few hours or days (he couldn’t count either) before even this much came clear to him.

What he remembered from before his fall from the sky was imprecise at best, and its emotional character muted. Panic over the sight of a girl being slung from a burning bridge…disgust at realizing what Shell had been up to in those cells at Southstairs. Consolation at seeing a stag at the far side of a field in early autumn. Panic, disgust, consolation—cheap souvenirs from a holiday. Emotions were portable and obvious: small savories of a life, suitable for kicking his mood upswing or down as the moment required. False, somehow.

But he and his memories alike had awakened into a new capacity of pain and grief. He had awakened to find himself alive again, damn it. Couldn’t he even fall from a great height and expect the comfort of a quick death? Need Feckless Liir march on yet again?

Though marching was hardly what he was doing, in literal terms, as he tossed, and kicked the sour blankets in this abandoned mill building or industrial outpost, wherever it was she had taken him.

The girl was named Candle, she said. She spoke t

o him colloquially in Qua’ati.

She brought him water from a well outside. He could hear the squeak of the pulley as the bucket went down, came back. She brought him nuts and moss apples, which gave him a stentorian diarrhea at first, but cleaned him out and started him up again, and before long he was able to sit up. Then get up and piss in a pail. Then walk to the window and rub a shaky hand against the dirt on the glass, and circle a clean space with his palm, and look out.

His resting room was off the kitchen of a small compound: a few stone domestic buildings connected to dependences built at right angles to one another. In the yard he saw the laundry cart to which Candle and that ferociously old maunt had dragged him. Now the donkey was unhitched and was grazing nearby in an overgrown orchard, braying opinions about nothing in particular. Within a couple of days, out on her scouting adventures, Candle had come up with a hen, too, and once the hen grew familiar with her new home, there were eggs in the morning.

“Is it a farmhold?” he asked her.

“It was once,” she said in her half-a-voice. “Old apple trees in the woods, and dozens of barrels in a shed. I think it had been a cidery. But it seems to have been fitted out for industry of some sort since. I’ve found a…a heap of machinery standing in the high main barn. It’s been hacked with sledgehammers and I can’t guess what job it was meant to perform. When you can get around better, you can tell me what you think.”

Beyond the orchards and a few overgrown pastures, as far as he could tell, they were surrounded by a forest. By day it was the color of a hundred fawns, every afternoon brighter as more leaves fell and the light sank nearer to the ground. By night, owls hooted, and in the ceaseless wind the branches made sounds like coughing.

He dozed much of the day and lay awake next to her much of the night, when she fell into a sound sleep. She showed no sign of restlessness. But then, he couldn’t play an instrument to trouble her dreams. The domingon, if that’s what it was called, hung on the wall like an icon.

“Why did you rescue me?” he asked her. She couldn’t answer the question; she seemed not to understand the concept of rescue, though the word in Qua’ati could mean nothing else. “Who are you?” he tried, another way of posing the earlier question. The reply, “Candle,” nothing else, gave him something close to comfort, but it was not comfort, quite.

Another time he asked, “Why did we flee that place?”

“The old maunt told us to go. She said they would hunt for you sooner or later.”

“They? Who?”

“Perhaps I misunderstood. Anyway, she said you were in danger. She had heard tell of this abandoned place and gambled that the donkey would find the way. Indeed, it did.”

“I am still in danger? Then I’d have been safer if you’d let me die.”

“I didn’t cause you to live or die,” she said. “Don’t give me credit for skills beyond me. I played music; you remembered. Music will do that. What you remembered—that was within you, and nothing to do with me.”

But he wondered, as he grew stronger. So many of his memories included an offstage trickle of melody, like marginalia embroidering a page of manuscript. He hardly recognized himself in the glass of the window, when at night he took a candle to the black pane to see who he was now. Gaunt, and stubbled, almost palsied with the weakness of the infirm. Had her playing helped him to remember his life as it had been lived, or had she enchanted him with music and given him a false past?

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