Raven's Shadow (Raven #1)(15)

"So what do you want to do, if not bake?" asked Willon, betraying his foreignness with the question. No Rederni would have suggested that he do anything else. "Would you go back to fighting if there were a war to be had?"

"Not soldiering," Tier said firmly. "I've killed more than any man ought - the only product of warmaking is death." Tier took a deep breath and closed his eyes briefly as he thought. Maybe it was seeing his little valley again on his morning ride, but something inside of him vibrated like one of Ciro's viol strings when he finally said, "I'd like to farm."

Willon laughed, but it was a comforting laugh. "I'd not think that growing crops would be much more permanent than baking bread - just takes a bit longer to get to the final product."

But it wasn't. It was different. Tier stopped walking so that he could encompass that difference in words that didn't sound as stupid out loud as they did to himself, stupid but true.

"I've known farmers," he said slowly. "A lot of the men who fought the Fahlarn were farmers, fighting for their lands. They are as much a part of their lands as flour is a part of bread." He shook his head at himself and grinned sheepishly because it sounded stupider out loud. "The land is immortal, Master Willon, and a farmer has a part of that immortality."

"So are you going to be a farmer?" asked Willon with interest.

"And marry and breed?" Tier said lightly over the longing Willon's words produced. "Not likely." He began walking again, though they'd passed the bakery a while back. He had no desire to go home yet. "There's not a woman in Redern who'd marry me and let me go farming. I know the money farming brings in and that bakery brings in ten times as much - and it would break my family's heart."

"Farmers don't make much," agreed the master trader. "But if you look around you might find a woman who'd rather be a farmer's wife than live in the village under the tyranny of her neighbors."

That night Seraph got up out of her cot in the small room they'd given her and climbed out of the window into the garden that backed the house, her blanket serving as a cloak. The solid walls made her feel closed in and trapped. Most of her nights had been spent in tents rather than buildings.

She found the bench that had served as her bed on more than one night since she'd chosen to stay here and lay down on it again to look up at the stars.

She needed to go. These people owed her nothing, not the food she ate or the blanket she wrapped herself in. She did not belong here. She hadn't heard the argument that Tier and Alinath had while she swept the front room, but she'd heard the raised voices.

Tomorrow, she would go. In two weeks or three she would find a clan that would take her in.

Resolute, she closed her eyes and willed herself to sleep. A long time later, exhaustion had more success than her will and she relaxed into slumber.

A rotten tomato hit Arvage's shoulder while the solsenti boys bounced with nervous bravado. Didn't they know that the old man could kill them all with a touch of the magic he knew? Didn't they know that he and Seraph had spent the better part of the past two days banishing a khurlogh, a demon spirit, that had been preying on nighttime visitors to the town well?

Instead her teacher's arthritic fingers touched the mess on his shoulder and transformed it into a fresh, ripe tomato.

"My thanks, young sirs," he said. "A rare addition to my dinner."

The scene faded as Seraph stirred restlessly in protest of the old memory. She quieted and her dream took up again at a different point in time.

Her father's fingers petted her hair as she leaned against his knee, half-asleep in the aftermath of a full meal and the warmth of the nearby fire.

"The entire clan gone?" her father said, a small tremor in his bassy voice. "Are you certain it was the Imperial Army?"

Their visitor nodded his head wearily. "As far as we've been able to determine, the last village that they passed through complained to the commander of the imperial troops stationed nearby. Told them that the Travelers kidnapped a pair of young women. The troops came upon the clan and massacred them from grandfather to day-old babe. Turns out that the women were taken by bandits - the imperial troops found them on their way back to the village."

They buried Arvage in a wilderness glen, just as he had wanted. Seraph herself had thrown in the first, symbolic, handful of earth. He'd died trying to work magic that he could no longer harness because the pain in his joints broke through his fearsome control. He'd known the risk.

In one of those things possible only in dreams, Arvage stood beside her while her father and brothers buried him.

"It is our task to take care of them or die," he told her. "Our purpose is to keep the shadows at bay for the solsenti who are helpless against them. This is a Raven's task before us, and I am Raven - as are you. You aren't old enough and I am too old, but we do as we must."

Tier hadn't lived in the comfortable safety of the village long enough to sleep through small noises in the night. He'd heard Seraph go out, as she often did, and he'd gone back to sleep afterward. But he'd awakened again.

He waited for the noise to repeat itself, and when it did he pulled on his pants and slipped out his window to the garden where Seraph whimpered in the helpless throes of a nightmare.

The man was from the Clan of Gilarmist the Fat, running a message to another clan. He'd flirted with Seraph's oldest sister and died in the night. Her sister died the next morning, drowning in the fluid that they couldn't keep from filling her lungs.