Page 67 of Silverbow
“That’s…that’s barbaric,” she spluttered.
“No,” he answered tightly. “Barbaric would have been to rip the air from their lungs, boil their blood, or grind their bones to dust. I suppose we could have also brought the guard towers down on their heads.”
Enya stared in horror.
“I do not do what I do lightly,” Colm said quickly. “Rest assured, I would not use my gift to alter your mind.”
“Wish you would,” Bade grumbled. "Would be a lot quieter."
Enya’s insides knotted. “How is it no one has collared you?”
“We mastered our gifts long before your king invented his collars. They can be…silenced when needed,” Colm answered.
Enya swallowed, still reeling at what Oryn revealed them to be capable of. “Is that something you can teach me?”
“No. And you don’t need it,” Oryn answered. “The godsung gifts are not sensed in the same way the pure godsongs are.”
“But you can sense it.”
“That seems to be an anomaly.”
An anomaly. A curiosity in the roll.
She was still mulling that over when they stopped for the night to make camp off the side of the road. Her new companions moved with practiced efficiency, stringing a picket line and seeing to their horses. Bade left his horse, a gray called Cle, to Aiden and stalked off into the grassland with his bow.
Colm threw a log down from a bundle he carried behind his saddle. Enya let out a yelp and leapt back when it burst into flame. She clutched her blanket roll to her chest, looking between the three demi-elves. Aiden gave her a sweeping bow, eyes dancing with delighted amusement.
“Fire wielder, at your service, Lady Silverbow.” He threw his blanket roll down beside Enya’s. She toed hers with a boot, widening the space between them. Aiden snorted. “How do you like sleeping rough, my lady?”
“It’s better than not sleeping at all,” she grumbled.
Colm, fussing over a teapot and a waterskin, looked up. “If your dreams trouble you, that is something I can help with.”
“Are you a Dreamwalker?” She asked. It seemed campfire stories were coming to life all around her.
“My spirit gift allows me to do many things,” he said, and Enya shuddered, remembering the glassy eyed look worn by that guard. “Dream wards are simple wieldings. They fade with the dawn.”
Enya pushed a loose strand of too dark hair behind her ear. “I’m fine.”
Colm nodded and turned back to the tea.
As the soft snores of the demi-elves filled the night around her, she found sleep came easier. But in that sleep lurked things she tried to avoid. Brigands chasing her through Greenridge Forest. A cottage burning by the sea. The scar faced man with a cudgel, swinging for her. The lash of the wagon driver’s whip. The face of the woman in Innesh. Thetwangof a crossbow. Pain exploding as the bolt ripped through her chest.
Enya sat up, gasping, hand scrambling for the place the shaft had been. She found only her shirt, crumpled beneath her fingers.It was just a dream.Around her, four faces peered at her from where they sat upright in their blanket rolls.
“S-sorry,” she stuttered.
They turned and scanned the night before settling back one by one. She lay awake for what felt like hours, listening as their breaths sank back into the deeper rhythms of sleep.
***
Enya scrubbed her eyes with her hands just before dawn to find Oryn and Colm already sitting around a crackling breakfast fire. She stalked from the camp.
The flat grassland of Berdea Plain offered little in the way of privacy. In every direction, there was nothing but a sea of knee high green grass that disappeared into the horizon. Here and there, the land was marked with a boulder or a lone, scraggly tree. It was for one of those far flung trees she made. When she turned back toward the camp, she found Oryn waiting for her part way, hand resting on his sword hilt. A muscle ticked in his jaw.
“Don’t go so far I can’t sense you,” he ordered.
She scowled, pink creeping into her cheeks. “That’s kind of the point.”
