Crucible Read online

  But that was four people vanished with no sign.

  Wild beasts left signs. Bones, clothing, tools—even when the body was dragged off, there was always something left behind. Four folk missing with no sign meant it wasn’t a beast.

  Herald Arvil had been riding trails through the woods north of Rabbit Hole, searching for whatever had taken those folk.

  At that moment, he was trying to relax in Graya’s saddle, attempting to leave himself open to anything that might tickle his weak Farsight. Open to impressions, but ready to slam his Gift closed if anything nasty came sniffing—perfectly centered and poised to shift in whichever direction he needed to go.

  All the while trying to ignore the feeling that something was about to jump out at him, right now!

  . . . Now!

  . . . Now!

  . . . Now!

  Just relaxing enough to keep his heart from pounding right out of his chest was difficult when that alarm in the back of his mind was constantly shrieking.

  Graya tossed her head just enough to shake her reins and get Arvil’s attention.

  “What now?” he asked, pulling his focus back to the physical world and looking around. “If you saw a sweetheart tree and expect me to climb the thing to get the shoots off the top for you again, you can forget it. I don’t care if you do try bucking me into the next stream we cross. I’ll be ready for you, and—”

  Graya snorted and shook her head again, cutting off his snarking. He could feel her haughty derision like an aura around her. There was nothing Giftish about it, just partners who’d been together for nearly twenty years and had come to know each other’s moods.

  “What, then?”

  Graya changed gaits to an alternate-lead canter that had her skipping for a couple of steps. That meant “Camp soon?” And Arvil realized that the sun, while never completely visible in the thick woods, seemed to be shining from right overhead. It was noontime, or close.

  “You smell water?” he asked.

  Graya nodded.

  “All right. It’ll be good to get off your knobby back and rest my aching butt.”

  That got him a snort and a light buck that he was absolutely expecting. He snickered and patted her neck.

  They came to a break in the trees before too long, a relatively flat spot where the thick, springy loam made a comfortable place to sit. He focused on the suitability of the spot, the way the narrow green leaves of the surrounding foliage—shivering a little in the light breeze—were not at all ominous when you looked at them directly.

  He found a stream running down a little gully less than two minutes’ walk away—even with his rolling limp, courtesy of an old break that had healed a bit crooked—and before long they both had a long drink. Graya grazed while he pulled out his packets of dried meat and flour and salt and put together a quick camp stew over the small fire.

  “I don’t know if I’m going to be able to sleep tonight, feeling like this,” he said, his voice low.

  Graya huffed out a breath, and bumped his shoulder with her nose.

  “I know, stupid time to mention it when we’re a day and a half’s ride from anywhere. But still . . .” Arvil stared down at the chunky brown sludge in his bowl. He was hungry, but his stomach was knotted, likely from the stress of riding through a forest that felt as if it’d grown eyes and teeth and clawed arms that he could feel brushing past his skin but couldn’t actually see.

  “Of course I’ll survive it. I’ll probably even drop off to sleep eventually. My bones feel heavy enough to drag me down into the dirt. It’s just my mind that won’t stop jumping and gibbering.”

  Graya took a fold of his sleeve in her teeth and gave a gentle shake.

  “What?”

  She tapped the ground with one hoof, and Arvil scowled at her. “Why couldn’t the Lady give us Mindspeech?” he groused, as he always did when it came to this. He reached over to his pack and pulled out a wax tablet and stylus.

  Graya huffed and started tapping while Arvil counted, running mentally through the alphabet as they went. When Graya stopped for a moment, he wrote down the letter he was on. Then she started over.

  Slowly, she spelled out PEOPLE WOOD AFRAID.

  “Yes, the folk in Rabbit Hole were afraid of the woods. It’s no wonder they were, with people vanishing—”

  Graya cut him off with a neigh and a hard stomp that left a hoof-shaped imprint deep in the loam.

  “The folk were very afraid of the woods. You’re right, they were. Of the woods, not of whatever monster they imagined was eating people. You think they felt what I’m feeling—” Graya cut him off with a huff and gave an exaggerated shudder. “Right, what we’re feeling. Granny Shay said the woods had grown unfriendly lately, but I thought she was just . . . you know, just meant because of the disappearances. She meant it literally, and I didn’t hear it.”

  He ate a few bites of stew while pondering.

  Everyone who’d disappeared had been in the woods for a reason. No strollers, no lovers, no children looking for posies or chasing butterflies. Folk were staying out of the woods unless they had to go. Granny said it’d happened “lately,” and Arvil wished he’d asked exactly what she meant by that.

  Granny was a day and a half back, though, so all they could do was continue on.

  By midafternoon, Arvil felt he was about to go mad. Something was keeping him tense, making him constantly expect an attack.

  “Maybe we can use it like a compass? Move into the fear, find whatever’s at the heart of this?”

  Graya snorted and gave a full body shiver, but then she nodded and picked up her pace a little.

  The light was just turning orange beyond the green canopy of forest when they came to a fork in the trail. Arvil really didn’t want to turn off onto the narrower track.

  “I think that’s it,” he said, leaning away from the dark, overgrown gap in the trees.

  Graya stamped and nodded again, then huffed and turned, shouldering her way through whenever the branches grew too close together.

  “Narrow,” said Arvil. “Feels abandoned.”

  Graya snorted and shoved her way through half a dozen saplings.

  The saplings were a kind Arvil hadn’t seen before. They oozed something that stank, and it clung wherever it touched. A bolt of panic shot through him, and for a moment he was sure it was poison, and they’d both die gasping, and the beetles would come out of the underbrush and chew into their bodies while they were still alive and they had to escape, turn around, just tell everyone to stay out of the woods, who went into the woods anyway, it was deadly and dark and—

  —and then it wasn’t.

  Graya neighed and pranced a few paces, then tossed her head and neighed again.

  “I feel it too,” said Arvil. “Or, I don’t feel it now. It’s like it was raining fear and then it suddenly stopped.”

  He laughed and felt lighter. Even though the sun was setting, the woods felt brighter, friendlier. The track they were following didn’t look as narrow or as menacing.

  “Well, then, let’s see where this leads.”

  The track wound through the darkening woods. Visibility grew shorter and shorter, but Arvil didn’t have a lamp, and there was so little space between the tree branches—occasionally none—that a torch would only set the wood afire. Graya picked her way gracefully through the shadows, around rocks and thickets.

  Finally, the way in front of them opened out, and leafy barriers vanished into black emptiness. Graya’s hooves rang on stone. Flat stone. Arvil dismounted and felt the smoothness of flagstones under his hide boots.

  “It feels like a courtyard,” he said. “There must be some kind of building ahead.”

  Graya whuffled agreement. Arvil secured the reins so she could walk without tripping over them, and they both moved forward.

  The space was large, a
nd they paused for a minute so Arvil could light a torch. When he held it up and looked around, a building appeared out of the darkness before him.

  “Tower,” said Arvil. He walked up to it, then paced along the shallow curve of the wall, following it with one hand. “Big one.”

  He expected to have to leave her outside, but when they found the entrance, it was tall and wide enough for a Companion. There wasn’t even a door—just a doorway, a huge arched opening in the stone wall of the tower, with splinters of rotting wood scattered about it, and darkness beyond.

  Arvil stepped through the doorway and tripped over the change in the floor, from dirty stone to smooth wood. He nearly fell, his arms flailing for balance, the torch gone. He whirled around, and what he saw shocked him into a dead stop.

  He was teetering at the top of a stairwell, a narrow spiral stairwell of gray granite with steps barely as wide as his shoulders. Oil-soaked torches burned at intervals in wrought-iron brackets high on the outside wall, lending their smoky smell to the air.

  From behind the heavy ironoak door at his back, he could hear a Companion squealing in rage, and the thud-thud-thud of hooves against thick wood. From somewhere below, he heard the echo of quick, heavy boots on the steps.

  Shock dimmed Arvil’s vision for a moment, and he struggled to focus, thinking, No, impossible, I can’t be here!

  For he knew exactly where he was, and when. Ten months into his internship, he and Herald Jinnia had called upon Halrid, lord of a patch of territory in southern Valdemar. There’d been rumors of trouble in the area—rebels—and they’d come to see whether Lord Halrid needed assistance.

  Shock and a flood of memories had drawn Arvil’s attention from what he was doing, and he found his body bounding down the narrow staircase, just as he had all those years ago.

  He remembered going down before, remembered what’d happened, and panic rose in him. His bad leg throbbed in recalled pain, a lasting souvenir of that chase.

  With focused effort, he stopped, his hands on the walls to either side, and looked down.

  He knew now that there was at least one trick step. If he could avoid it, he might be able to catch Halrid and change how their next encounter had gone.

  Arvil tried to step carefully down, but as soon as he started to move, his body took over and plunged down as fast as it could, quick-stepping with his fingertips skimming the walls. The panic returned, and he forced himself to stop again.

  He stood there, shaking. He didn’t want to do that again, didn’t want to relive this. If he couldn’t change it by going carefully down the stairs, then he’d go back to Graya, find Jinnia. They could ride to fetch help, bring troops in strength to put down Halrid’s uprising with so much less loss of life and property.

  And he might save his leg.

  He turned on the steps and started to climb. His body obeyed, and soon he was back at the top, facing the heavy wooden door. On the other side of the granite wall, it was hidden by a tapestry just behind Halrid’s thronelike chair in his great hall. He could see a huge crack in the ironoak, and one of the hinges hung by a single bolt. Graya screamed from the other side, furious and desperate to get to him.

  He knew she’d break through soon, but it wouldn’t help. She was too large to manage the narrow spiral stair.

  This time it would be different, though. He yanked open the door and dashed through—

  —and Graya’s cries cut off. There was no tapestry, no throne, no furious Companion.

  He stood in a familiar classroom at the Collegium, the history classroom with its maps and shelves and wooden desks. Students—familiar, but so young—crowded around Arvil’s desk, where he stood staring at the paper in Herald Kevran’s hand.

  Kevran was saying, “You can’t deny this is written in your hand.”

  Arvil said, “It looks like my hand, sir, but it isn’t. I swear I didn’t write that, never saw it before.”

  “It was down on the floor between your feet, where you could see it easily enough if you slumped a little.” Kevran stared at him hard, his stern face a picture of anger and disappointment. On the paper was written answers to the exam they’d been taking. Herald Kevran and the whole class thought he’d cheated.

  A flood of shame burned through Arvil. He was thirteen and new to the Collegium. He thought he’d made some friends, but everyone in class was staring at him, glaring or smirking or scowling, the crowd in gray and rust, pale green and blue, united in condemning him.

  He’d thought he was doing well, thought he was making a place for himself, but he’d never felt so alone as he did that day.

  Arvil knew he’d be exonerated—he eventually had been at the time, but this was another scene he didn’t want to replay. Whether he was dreaming or caught in an illusion or had somehow been . . . what? Fetched through time? Whatever was happening, living through it once had been enough. He bolted for the door to the corridor—

  —and was suddenly on Graya’s back, riding down a rutted road near the Rethwellan border. The sky was dark and pouring rain, droplets whipped into his eyes by the wind. He was somewhere else, somewhen else, and again he knew exactly where.

  Up ahead, around a turn, the road narrowed and bushes had grown right up to the verge on both sides. Bandits crouched in wait, looking to ambush the next traveler to come along. They’d set upon him in the dark, not realizing at first that he was a Herald, and one of them had shot—was going to shoot—Graya.

  No. This was another place Arvil didn’t want to be, another time he didn’t want to relive. He kneed Graya around, ignoring her querying whinny, and they rode back up the road—

  —except he wasn’t outside, he was walking across a brightly lit tavern, a trencher full of ribs and gravy in one hand and a brimming tankard in the other, on his way to a table away from the chill near the door.

  Then he caught sight of the most beautiful man he’d ever seen, and his bad leg collapsed out from under him. With a startled cry, he measured his length on the tavern floor.

  The day came back to him as he flailed and sputtered to his feet, babbling apologies to the folk whose clothes he’d soiled with beer and gravy. He was so embarrassed—by his twenty-eighth year, his leg hardly ever gave him much trouble. He limped, yes, but it wasn’t weak, nor was it overly clumsy, most of the time. So of course it’d chosen right then to rebel.

  Amid the curses and complaints, the gorgeous man was laughing, but not in a way that made Arvil feel bad. Because it was Embry, whose heart was as fair as his face, and this was the day they’d met.

  It could have gone better, and Arvil’s face burned with shame over his flop-footed clumsiness for most of an hour. But the outcome had been grand, and in that place, at that time, Arvil was willing to go along.

  They introduced themselves, and Embry called for a serving girl to bring cloths so everyone could wipe themselves down. Arvil ordered a second supper, and the girl brought it to him with a smirk, saying it’d be less work for her than letting him fetch it himself.

  Arvil relaxed onto the hard bench, smiled across at Embry, and let the scene play out. If he let his body go, it did exactly what he’d done, said exactly what he’d said, these six years ago. The scene flowed on, talking and smiles, a brief touch of fingers across the smooth plank table, and just as he felt the shame passing, a heavy, dark fog filled the room.

  Arvil yelped in surprise and groped for Embry’s arm. He had no idea what was happening or whether it was dangerous, but before he could look around, the fog faded and vanished. He was walking across the room, trencher and tankard in his hands, and as he thought, again? he saw Embry and stumbled, falling with a splat to the floor.

  He was tempted to let the scene play out again. Maybe a few more times. He could relax, enjoy the food and the company, get his bearings.

  But it wasn’t real. He’d already done this once—twice now, actually—and Graya was o
ut there somewhere. He hoped she hadn’t had to live through the bandit ambush again. Or if so, that she’d figured out that she didn’t have to live through the whole thing, that she could retreat before the arrow found her.

  The tavern was warm, the food was good, and Embry’s company was a comfort and a delight. The shame that flowed through him after his fall was easy to push aside. But he needed to leave.

  The problem was, he didn’t know how.

  He could walk out the door, of course, but that’d just take him to some other scene from his past. He needed to get out of his memories, not travel farther in.

  Letting his body carry him to the table with Embry, eating his second supper, he pondered the scenes he’d come through.

  They seemed to be getting better. Less painful, less embarrassing, less hurtful all around. Maybe if he just kept going, followed the memories back as they grew happier, he’d eventually get what he wanted and be back at the tower with Graya.

  It was only an idea, but it was all he had, so he decided to try.

  He stood up from the table and headed out the door—

  —back to the dark, rain-washed road, heading for the bandit ambush.

  Good, at least he was going in the right direction. Maybe whatever was taking him through his own past had just been waiting for him to figure out what was going on. He turned Graya and trotted back up the road—

  —which took him back to the tavern.

  He cursed and forced himself to stop right there in the middle of the floor, before he could stumble over his feet and fall flat, then turned away from where he knew Embry sat and made for the tavern door. He set his trencher and tankard down on an empty patch of table and left—

  —and walked out onto the street in front of his family’s workshop in Haven. He was trudging down the street with a mattock over his shoulder.

  Arvil stopped and looked at the heavy tool, excitement racing through his heart.