J. H. Sked Page 7

  I’m getting him some broth from the kitchens. He looks like he hasn’t eaten for a month. Seiren sent on a tight link.

  Get some berry juice, too. Amber replied. She could see the first sores blooming on the drawn skin beside the boy’s mouth.

  “Elrick, ser. From Five Hands village,” the boy answered as he slipped gratefully onto the chair, flicking a wary sideways glance at the blonde hawk as Seiren slipped out of the room.

  “Have you been on the road long, Elrick?” Ariaan asked.

  Elrick smiled at him, a gap-toothed grin that was unexpectedly sunny.

  “Oh, yes! Ser,” he added.

  Amber smiled back; that grin was infectious.

  “This is Ariaan, I’m Amber. Our friend is Seiren. Don’t worry about the ser part, eh?”

  “My ma called me Ricky,” the boy said earnestly. “They call me Elrick when I’m in trouble.”

  “Do they now?”

  “Aye.” The smile melted as swiftly as it had appeared, and the boy blinked rapidly, turning towards the window to hide his tears.

  Ariaan looked at Amber, who shrugged. She had little enough experience in dealing with the average human, let alone their cubs, and Ariaan glowered at her before grasping at the reins of the conversation once more.

  “You were a while on the road, Ricky?”

  “About five day’s walking, se – Ariaan. But I got a lift this morning, on the back of a cart. They brought me into town, so they did, with a big brown horse pulling us. Everyone waved.” He smiled again, wistfully.

  He’d never ridden on a cart before, and the novelty had been almost as great as the relief to his feet, although it had paled besides his first view of a large town, and the great grey Keep that squatted above it.

  Seiren re-entered the room bearing a tray with a steaming bowl, a chunk of bread and cheese, and glass of red juice.

  Ricky stared at the tray, trying not to drool. His stomach clanged and growled at the smell from the bowl, rich and meaty. Ricky, whose experience in meat eating had extended as far as the odd rabbit that Dakron snared, and once, a taste of the young deer unlucky enough to get caught in Anna’s vegetable patch, wondered if these hawks ate meat every week.

  Seiren set the tray in front of him, and he looked up, startled.

  “Why don’t you have a bite to eat, lad, while my friends and I step outside. There’s something I need to speak to them about.”

  Ricky nodded, unable to believe his good fortune, and Seiren led the other two from the room.

  “The farmer that brought him in reported to the garrison right after he finished at market,” Seiren said. “His village is about five larna northward of Five Hands, and there’ve been incidents.”

  “What kind?” Ariaan cocked his head.

  “Animals slaughtered on some of the outlying farms. Hunters disappearing in the forest near Five Hands. The ones that came back reported strange tracks.”

  Amber felt the shock like a slap through the face. Ariaan’s face had gone so white she thought he might fall over, and from the numbness of her lips she knew she must look the same.

  “Oh, shit,” she whispered. “Seiren, are you sure?”

  He shook his head.

  “I think we need to speak to him first,” he jerked his head at the doorway. The silence from the room was broken by a long and unmistakably satisfied belch.

  Amber grinned.

  Ariaan smiled, feeling slightly better – he no longer felt like his face would break if he moved his lips, which was something – and went back inside, his seconds close behind him.

  The three hawks re-entered the room, and Ricky looked up at them, blinking owlishly.

  It was the first he’d eaten in almost three days, not counting the wild berries he’d gorged on just outside of the forest, and then paid for in cramps and cold sweat for the rest of the day. He only wanted now to curl up in a quiet place and sleep for as long as they’d let him.

  By the grim looks on the faces of the hawks, though, that wasn’t going to happen just yet, and Ricky tried not to whimper as he looked at them properly for the first time.

  Ariaan was a big man, bigger than Dakron even, with sandy blonde hair that fell to his shoulders and a broad, open face. Seiren was taller, although not as wide, but with the broad muscle in the shoulders and arms that all three, even the woman, shared.

  Ricky stared at her longer than the others. He had never seen an armed woman before, and she wore a short sword belted low on the waist. Her hair was unbound, falling in a thick black curtain to just below her waist, and she had red marks extending from her wrists to her elbows on each arm.

  Amber saw his gaze and smiled. “Wrist greaves,” she said. “They make you sweat, especially this time of the year.”

  Ricky had no idea what wrist greaves were, but nodded anyway, ducking his head so that his mousy hair fell across his eyes and peered through it, trying to study them less obviously.

  There was no mistaking them for human, not once you looked at their faces. The high cheekbones and full mouths seemed normal enough, and then you realised that the tips of their ears were sharply pointed, almost lobe-less, and their eyes were huge, great sweeping slants of sea-green colour with pupils that bisected them with jet-black arcs. There was almost no white visible, a mere framing on the very edge of the eye itself, and every few seconds a strange filming as a transparent membrane flicked over the surface of the eye itself.

  Ricky watched as Seiren and Ariaan picked chairs behind the desk across from him, Ariaan riding his backwards, and Amber drifted over to the open window and perched on the wide sill.

  His mother had had a cat, a semi-tame creature that moved with the same insolent grace and sense of self, despite numerous scars and missing half an ear. It had liked to sit and watch him do his chores from its usual place just beneath the eaves of the house, thrumming deep in its throat, blinking steadily from yellow eyes that were otherwise very similar to the three pairs turned upon him now, before nonchalantly going off into the forest and doing whatever cats like doing unobserved.

  It had disappeared shortly before his mother’s last few days in a fever dream, vanished like smoke, and he had missed it sorely, pining for the soothing purr and the graceful swagger that he could never have himself, even though it made him sneeze if he was lucky enough to stroke it.

  He placed the tray, dirty dishes stacked neatly, on the floor beside his chair, feeling them watch him.

  Oh, mam.

  Scrout had whispered tales of what the hawks did to children, to those who would be unmissed.

  None of those tales ever included them feeding their victims first, though.

  “My thanks, sers.” he said softly.

  Seiren flapped a hand. “No bother, lad.”

  “What’s happened at home, Ricky?” Amber asked.

  She thought the boy had guts – most of his elders would have been reduced to incoherence at being this close to a hawk, never mind actively seek one out.

  He had guts and he had manners, and she thought he would prove reasonably intelligent, once he lost the slightly glazed look of shock in his eyes.

  He seemed to physically shrink at her question, lower lip trembling, mild brown eyes swimming with tears.

  “Are you going to make me dead, ser?”

  “What?” Amber was stunned.

  The other two raised their eyebrows at each other as Ricky lowered his head into his hands and sobbed like the child he really was.

  Amber slid off of the sill and knelt beside his chair, slipping an arm around his shoulders, and felt him flinch, then stop himself.

  “No-one here will harm you, lad. You have my word.”

  “They said if I came to you that you’d make me dead. Because you’d say I was in-invented.”He raised his face to her, blinking miserably through the tears, and she placed her hand on the back of his neck, sending a pulse of calmness and warmth. He subsided against her, still weeping, burying his hot face against the firmness
of her shoulder.

  Infected. He means infected.

  “Were you bitten, Ricky?” Her throat was dry, and she was amazed at how normal her voice sounded. “Or scratched at all?” How calm and normal. Her mind was gibbering like a monkey on a chain, as she felt the boy’s head shake his answer against her.

  She neither felt nor smelt like his mother, nor tai Anna, nor any female he’d met, but right now that mattered not at all, and he stayed there while he hiccupped out the rest of the tale, in hard little words that choked past his throat and hung in the air of the room like poisonous perfume.

  The hawk soothed him, stroking his head, and whispering calming nonsense that followed him into the refuge of sleep, rocking him against her shoulder and staring bleakly at her squad mates as the late afternoon sun sent curious fingers into the room.

  “What do you think?” Ariaan looked at his seconds, unwilling to make the call just yet.

  Seiren laced his fingers together and frowned. “I think it stinks. Like a ten day corpse.”

  Ariaan nodded. “If he’s telling the truth.”

  Amber snorted and tossed her head.“He’s not lying. He’s terrified, poor little bastard.”

  The captain nodded again. “You scanned him?”

  “Aye. Lightly, but it was enough.”

  “He came by himself? All this way?”

  Amber nodded absently.

  “He was terrified,” Seiren said thoughtfully, still staring at his fingers. “But not of us.”

  Amber looked at her captain. “You have to call it,” she said. “We can’t leave this mess.”

  Ariaan stared at down at his hands. “I’ll call it,” he said eventually, looking up at them both. “Tonight after the meal.”

  “Where?” Amber rose and stretched, yawning lazily behind a narrow palm.

  “The closed armoury,” Ariaan said. “We’ll ride at first light; cursed if I want to muck around in there tomorrow morning.”

  The closed armoury was a slightly smaller room off of the main arms store, containing specialised equipment that would be needed for jobs like this one. Silver was expensive, and the items were kept in locked cabinets, with a formidable padlock on the entry door.

  Only a squad captain or the seconds had the authority to requisition a key.

  Amber nodded and left to pass the word to the rest of the squad, and Seiren stood up as the door swung shut behind her.

  “I’ll square Herron,” Seiren said. The armoury master regarded anyone who dared trespass in his sanctuary as a sworn enemy, and it usually took a good bit of talking to make him see reason.

  Seiren was past the point of sweet talk, and part of him was gleefully hoping the man would try to test his patience.

  Ariaan snorted in sour amusement. “Five to one she beats you to him.”

  Seiren turned back, and his captain grinned at him. “You’re not the only one unhappy about this.”

  “Bugger.”

  “Indeed,” Ariaan murmured, already running his mind back over the interview, as Seiren stalked sulkily out of the room.

  Ariaan grunted and rose abruptly to his feet, and marched grimly out of the room, wondering if either of his seconds wanted help in intimidating the armoury master.

  ###

  About the author:

  J.H. Sked currently lives in London, England, surrounded by too many books to count, a kindle, a pot plant and a long-suffering housemate.

  Her first novel, WolfSong was released in 2010 and is the first book in the Crescent trilogy.

  Contact the author on-line at http://jhsked.blogspot.com or follow on twitter : @JHSked