Ryan

“You’re in danger, boy.” Sometime after Ryan had passed out, the Auld had bound his hands and feet and thrown him over the back of a pack horse like luggage four days before. And, alarmingly, Ryan wasn’t the first one to receive such treatment; the Auld had another unconscious victim—just a lanky kid, really—slumped over a third horse, though he wasn’t trussed up like a harvest goose.

“You still haven’t told me why you’ve got a drooling kid slung over your horse,” Ryan asked, not recognizing the boy. Which said a lot, because working at the inn, Ryan had made a trade of memorizing faces. “He steal your goat or something?”

The Auld glanced over his shoulder at the sleeping kid. “He is my legacy.” His eyes met Ryan’s. “As you will be. The seeds of a new family.”

Ryan blinked at the drooling kid. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen. Surely the old man couldn’t be saying what Ryan thought he was saying. “That’s…uh…no, I don’t think so.”

Ryan had tried to escape three times already, slowing their progress towards their unknown destination by almost a day, but Wynfor had since bewitched the horses into total docility and the hemp rope holding him in place might as well have been iron from whatever magics the old man had worked into it. “Your entire family was killed, boy. It’s our responsibility to propagate and avenge them.”

Yep. The old man was saying what Ryan had thought he was saying.

Ryan laughed nervously. “Yeah, that requires participation you’re not gonna get, buddy.”

Completely stoically, the old man said, “Your seed can be obtained in more ways than one.”

Ryan’s mouth fell open. “Did you just…” He shook himself, realizing the old man was probably still upset about the escape attempts and trying to put him off-guard. “Look. Why don’t we go back to the inn and talk about this? We’re obviously not headed to the Spyre—we’ve been going north for four days. Everybody knows the Spyre is west of the Idorion.”

“Our family was destroyed. Butchered. We need to regroup, replenish, then return when we can skin Taebin and Laelia Vethyle’s smug faces and hang them on our hearth.”

That was an image Ryan didn’t need to imagine. He lifted his head to look past the two pack horses at the Auld, incredulous. “Skin their faces? I’m an innkeep.”

“You’re my nephew. You will learn to fight, because our family is at war.”

Ryan laughed uncomfortably. “Listen, I know you don’t believe me, but you can’t be family, okay? My mom’s worried sick back at the inn,” Ryan said. “And my dad drowned in the Idorion right after I was born. You left the only other family I had for dead in the hallway of the inn.”

Wynfor gave an utterly derisive snort. “That wench wasn’t ‘family.’ She was a Vethyle retainer, and she’d betray you to her masters the moment she realized they’d pay her weight in sparks to have your head.” He kicked his horse forward, making the other boy’s horse jump to catch up, rolling the kid’s head towards him with the abruptness.

The kid’s face rolled to face him and Ryan took a moment to actually look. He didn’t like what he saw—the kid’s eyes were closed and his face was pale and gaunt, but with a little color and a few weeks of hearty stew, he looked like he could have been Ryan’s brother.

Fighting chills, Ryan quickly thought of something else. “Why’s he unconscious?”

“He asked too many questions,” the Auld said calmly. He was paying more attention to the road than to Ryan.

“Seriously,” Ryan said. “He hasn’t woken up for days.”

“And he might not wake up at all,” Wynfor said. “Be silent.”

The casual manner in which Wynfor spoke of family and then casually dismissed him in the same breath was starting to get on Ryan’s nerves. “You know, I didn’t realize that ‘old fart’ was an honest-to-gods smell until riding downwind of you for the last four days,” he said.

“That’s the horse cock you’re smelling,” the old man said distractedly, without even looking. He had stopped them on a rise and had twisted on his horse, frowning down at the river valley behind them.

Ryan grimaced at the horse’s genitals, which happened to be only a foot or two from his face. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s dirty old man. It’s just got that aroma, you know? Kind of like toe cheese mixed with soap? I hear the more you scrub, the worse it gets.” In between having his perfectly reasonable questions rebuffed, Ryan had kept up a constant monologue on the old man’s bathing, eating, and breathing habits pretty much since he’d woken up strapped to the withered old bastard’s horse, but unfortunately it hadn’t yet appeared to have gotten under the royal prick’s skin.

“Damn it,” the old Auld muttered, looking at something behind them. “How in Ariod’s ashes did she find our path?”

Ryan lifted his head to look.

Immediately, his heart clenched. A few hundred feet down the path, a pale, bandage-wrapped Saeby was riding Old Hag, looking at the ground, following them. “Shit.” He raised his voice to a yell. “Saeb—”

“Quiet!” the Auld snapped, making a cutting gesture that somehow shut off his ability to use his vocal cords. “Curse the gods. I don’t have time for this. Come.” He veered his mare off the road, and both Drooling Boy’s and Ryan’s horses obediently followed like sheep.

Ryan’s heart thundered as the old man led them into the grove of aspens—not because he was worried Saebrya would pass them, but because he knew she wouldn’t. And he had no doubt in his mind that the Auld, seeing that normal means wouldn’t keep her at bay, would kill her to keep his secret. From what he knew of Ganlins, they were more of the common people than the other Aulds of the Spyre, but this man was unmistakably bitter, jaded to the point Ryan wouldn’t be surprised if he had forgotten how to smile.

And now Saebrya was riding up the road after them, alone, a young woman standing between an Auld and his secret mission to make Ryan and some nameless kid sniff horse testicles.

Confirming his fears, the ancient Auld slid from his saddle and unslung a bow from over his shoulder. Nocking an arrow, he aimed it at their backtrail.

Saeby, Ryan thought in agony, watching her come trudging up the road after them, head down as she scanned the ground, Old Hag plodding like the twenty-year-old mare she was. Go back. He’s going to kill you…

Saebrya

There were two Aulds that had taken Ryan, not one. It had been an awful revelation, and one that had almost made Saebrya turn back once she realized there were not two, but three different shades of silver essence spattering the ground, but the thought of losing Ryan was enough to keep her plodding along, ready to embrace whatever end lay ahead rather than face life without a friendly face.

Saebrya had been following the three silver trails for hours already that morning, wondering why she had thought she could ever catch up with Aulds on fancy Spyre horses while riding an ancient nag like Old Hag, when she thought she caught movement high on the hill ahead of her. She squinted, but her long-distance vision had never been the best and she couldn’t tell if it was a trio of bears, rocks, sippers, or horses. It didn’t help that she was tired, and Mum Omstead hadn’t packed enough food for four days of travel. To keep herself awake and distract herself from the hunger pangs, she had been trying to decide what she would do when she found the Aulds that had taken Ryan.

She really only saw two outcomes. Either she was going to have to kill the Aulds to ensure they never came back for her friend—unlikely, considering her weakened state from the sipper storm—or she was going to have to die trying. Obviously Ryan was out of the picture somehow, either unconscious or bespelled, so she had no one to count on but herself.

It was an odd feeling, riding out to commit murder. She’d grabbed a knife from the inn kitchen—the sharp one they used for butchering pigs—and the cloth-wrapped bundle now settled like a heavy lump against her side.

Saebrya didn’t want to kill anyone, but the mere fact that Ryan hadn’t told anyone he was leaving meant that he had been taken against his will. Anyone who would take a grown man somewhere against his will was world-wise enough to understand there might be dangers involved.

And, unfortunately for the Aulds, Saebrya had a feeling she was a lot more dangerous to them than they could imagine. It had taken a long time for her to come to that realization, but after her encounter with the Vethyle hunting group over a decade ago, she’d spent eleven years thinking about it. She had come to the conclusion that what she was seeing had to be veoh, and that, for some reason, she could not only see it, but could tear it apart as easily as ripping strands of a spiderweb.

Which meant she could win this, as long as she caught Ryan’s abductors by surprise. And she knew from experience she would catch the Aulds off-guard when she broke their first spells, which would give her a limited amount of time to strike.

A few minutes later, she looked up from the trail again, and this time there was no question—there were three horses. They had slowed to traverse a steeper, rockier section of trail, giving Old Nag a chance to catch up. Saebrya hesitated, however, when she saw that two of them had a limp body slumped over their backs, and they were being led by a man on another horse. Ryan, it seemed, wasn’t the only one the Auld had abducted. The other victim was wrapped in a blanket, very little of him visible except his head and feet.

About the same time Saebrya saw them, the man on the lead horse abruptly brought his animal to a halt and turned back to look at her. Saebrya froze, all her plans of killing the old man evaporating the moment she saw his face.

He looked like Ryan. An older version, but the resemblance was utterly unmistakable, even from this distance.

A moment later, the near-white silver fluid gushing from the old man began to take the form of a couple horses while a veil of shimmering liquid draped itself around him and his cargo.

He knows I’m following him, Saebrya thought unhappily. And he’s trying to lead me away.

On anyone else, it would have worked, but to Saebrya, the two illusions that continued up the road just looked like strands of molten silver strung together in the shape of horses. Saebrya watched the Auld lead the real horses into the forest, then come to a halt in the aspens and turn to watch.

He thinks I’ll walk right past, Saebrya thought.

And then, in a moment of clarity, Saebrya realized that was exactly what she should do.

Why give her advantage away before she was ready?

With that in mind, she kept her head low and continued on, following the Auld’s lure as he expected her to do. She passed the point where the silver tracks of veoh veered off into the aspens, hesitating only a moment as she thought about Ryan slung to the back of a horse, the prisoner of a stranger. It took a monumental act of will, but Saebrya kept herself from looking, for she knew that would end the game. Whatever else was going on, Ryan had to be alive. Dead things didn’t make veoh.

That thought was enough to keep her going, pretending ignorance. Feeling the Auld’s eyes on her, Saebrya rode ahead, following the horse-shaped veoh, until they’d gone out of sight, then she veered off the path and swung wide, hanging back in the forest, watching the road.

The Auld didn’t follow. Frowning, Saebrya waited for over an hour, but he never came. Reluctantly, she returned to the road and went looking for his trail, thinking he had doubled back and was now headed out of the mountains.

Near dark, she returned to the trail of silver where he had entered the aspens. The lack of light made Ryan’s trail stand out vividly like liquid moonlight against the grass and underbrush, making it impossible to miss.

The Auld had never left the trees. Once she had continued up the path, he had taken his victims farther into the aspen forest, to a small clearing deep within the grove, and then spent several minutes in one place—she could surmise as much by the way Ryan’s veoh had puddled into a small pond in the center of the grove. And then the Auld had disappeared.

Saebrya dismounted and examined the area on foot. There was one place where the Auld had put his hand to a tree—his silver palm-print was still clearly visible, even hours later.

Saebrya squatted and frowned at the tree up close, touching the Auld’s palmprint on the bark in confusion. There were three tones of silver in the tree, one light, one darker, one almost black, and they seemed to light up a path straight into the roots. It wasn’t the entire tree’s root-system that had taken up the silver color, however—it was just a single path to the east, a single root that connected the grove of trees together.

Straightening, Saebrya peered east, towards the Idorion forest, then glanced around the grove once more. Her gut was telling her that Ryan had been in that tree, as ridiculous as it sounded. She knew Aulds did odd things, things that couldn’t be explained by the common man, but to be inside a tree? She couldn’t wrap her head around it.

Yet, after an hour searching for any other explanation and finding none, Saebrya had to assume the Auld had somehow taken her friend through the tree’s roots to escape. With that in mind, hungry from the lack of food, exhausted from the lack of sleep, she got back on her horse and started following the roots to the east. While she had been huddling on the trail, waiting for them, the Auld had been putting even greater distance between them.

Just a few more miles, Saebrya thought, looking at the night falling around her. Just a few more, then I can rest.