Raven's Shadow (Raven #1)(46)

"How did the bridle survive?" asked Lehr after he'd cleared a space around the blackened skull of the horse.

"There are spells that only attack the living," said Seraph. "I think that the damage to the bridle was secondary - the spell burnt the horse, and the burning horse burnt the bridle in turn. Hold up, there's the saddle blanket." Part of it, anyway. Where the saddle had been was gone, leaving only a black scorch mark on Frost's back.

She knelt and touched the cloth. Nothing. She whispered words of power, but they slid past the saddle blanket and sank deeply into the soil as if something sucked them down and ate them. And deep below the surface of the earth, something very old stirred then subsided, its sleep too deep to be awakened so easily.

Cautiously she withdrew her magic, letting it die down until it no longer fed whatever it was that waited beneath. She looked again at the flat-topped stone and saw that it could have served as an altar. She felt the dirt again and looked at the deep green grass. Blood had once flowed over the altar, enough blood that generations later the grass still fed upon it. Hennea had been right, there was old magic here - older than Shadow's Blight.

This was not a Blighted Place. If any mage tried to set a trap here, the magic would be eaten by the same thing that had eaten hers.

"Mother?" Lehr asked, pausing in his steady pace to look at her.

"Something's waiting here," she said. "But it had nothing to do with any recent deaths. It'll likely lie here until your grandchildren are dust unless it's awakened."

"What about the blanket?"

Seraph shook her head. "Nothing. I need the skull. I'll be able to tell if it's Tier's."

His shovel hesitated before he resumed his search, widening the cleared space around the horse.

Seraph cleaned the dirt from her fingertips absently and watched as Lehr at last unearthed a fire-blackened human skull, set near the horse's neck bones.

Gently Lehr took the grim thing into his hands and handed it to her. Seraph stared at the wide brow and looked for a hint of familiar features. Had Tier's front teeth been so square? She couldn't tell. There was no jaw bone to give the skull balance.

As she'd told Tier, necromancy was not something Ravens used - but it was prudence rather than ability that stopped them. Meddling with the dead was no light thing. If her need had not been so great she'd have left it alone.

Her fingers told her nothing; the bone could almost have been a stone in a field that had never felt a human hand, so little of its past stayed with it.

She set it down and touched Frost's skull. Nothing. Someone had deliberately cleaned these bones as they'd cleaned the bridle and saddle blanket. No random magic could rape the memory of life from a bone.

She picked up the human skull again and sent more magic seeking through it. A bridle or a blanket could be cleaned of lives that brush past it, but not even a great deal of magic could clean away a whole lifetime completely. There had to be bits of it left, if she tried hard enough.

Beneath her fingers she felt a tentative response. She pressed the cool bone to her forehead and left it there a long time as she sought to touch the faint pulse of experience.

The sun was setting when she placed the skull gently beside Frost's.

"This man was not Tier," she whispered around the throbbing pain in her temples. "He was a Traveler, dead of a blade, not magic fire - and he died somewhere far away, though not long ago."

"It doesn't mean that Papa's alive," he said, obviously hoping she'd contradict him. "Someone tried to make us think him dead with the skull and Frost's body - but they might simply have taken his body away, or taken him off to kill elsewhere."

"It only means that Tier probably didn't die here," she agreed, fear and hope both held in firm control.

Lehr began filling in the grave, skull and all, and Seraph thought about what she knew.

"Lehr?" she said finally.

"Hmm?"

"These people who killed Frost took a lot of trouble to obscure their tracks. They weren't good enough to fool you, but they tried very hard. If you hadn't seen their tracks below, would you have noticed them here? If we were looking for Tier's remains rather than evidence that he was taken?"

He frowned, "Maybe not."

Seraph nodded. "I think they knew about you. They were careful to take Tier outside of the realm of the forest king - I think they knew about him as well. They cleansed Frost's body and the leather and cloth, leaving them no past for me to read. They spent a long time trying to make that skull silent - and almost succeeded."

"No one knows about the forest king," said Lehr, turning over the last spade of dirt. "But Hennea said that whoever sent the letter to the priest knew what we are."

"Yes," agreed Seraph. "How did they know, not only that I am Raven, but exactly what my skills are? Most Ravens cannot read the past in an object. These men knew what trail Tier would take home - and it's not the way he left."

Lehr frowned. "Not even I knew what path Papa takes home. He kept it quiet because the furs are worth a lot of money - did you notice that there is no trace of the furs? They would have been packed over Frost's hindquarters, which weren't even scorched."

"No, I hadn't noticed," said Seraph. "So thrifty of them."