The Seeker (3 page)

I pretended not to be interested, but it was hard not to be curious about anyone linked with the mysterious rebel Herder priest.

Rosamunde leaned forward again, reaching for her cordial. “I know your brother, Jes,” she said softly. I stiffened, wondering if he had sent her to spy on me. Unaware of my withdrawal, she went on. “He is fortunate to be so well thought of among the guardians. There is talk that the Herder wants to make him an assistant.”

I was careful not to let my shock show. I had heard nothing of that and wondered if Jes knew. He would have seen no reason to tell me if he did.

Jes was the only person who knew the truth about me. What he knew was enough to see me burned, and I was frightened of him. My only comfort lay in the tendency of the Council to condemn all those in a family tainted by one Misfit birth. Jes might not be burned, but he would not like to be sentenced to the Councilfarms to process whitestick until he died. As long as it was safer for him to keep my secret, I was safe, but if it ever appeared that I would be exposed, I feared Jes would denounce me at once.

Suddenly I wondered if he had engineered my inclusion on the whitestick expedition. As a favored orphan, he had some influence. He was too pious to kill me himself, though that would have been his best solution, but if I died seeking whitestick, as many did, then he would be innocently free of me.

Elii called us to move. This time I positioned myself near him, where Rosamunde would not dare chatter. The Herder priest walked alongside, muttering his incantations. We had not gone far when a rushing noise came through the whispering greenery. We arrived shortly thereafter at a part of the path that curved steeply down. Here a subterranean waterway, swollen with the autumnal rains, had burst through the dark earth, using the path as its course until the next bend.

“Well, now,” Elii said sourly.

The Herder came up to stand uneasily beside him. “We will have to find another way,” he said. “Lud will lead us.”

Elii snorted rudely. “Your Lud had better help us on
this
path—there ain’t no other way.”

The priest’s face grew red, then white. “You go too far,” he gasped, but Elii was already preoccupied, drawing a length of rope from his pack and tying the end around a tree. Then he slung the other end down the flooded path.

The Herder watched these movements with a look of horror.

Elii pulled at the rope, testing it, before swinging agilely down to the bottom of the small waterfall. Back on dry ground, he called for us to do the same, one at a time.

“We’ll be dashed to pieces,” Rosamunde observed gloomily.

The Herder gave her a dark look as one of the boys started to climb carefully down. Several others went, then Rosamunde, then me. The rope was slippery now and hard to grip. I found it difficult to lift my own weight. Two-thirds of the way down, my fingers became too numb to cling properly, and I fell the last several handspans, crashing heavily into a rock as I landed. The water soaked into my trousers.

“Get her out. The water may be tainted,” Elii growled, then yelled up for the priest to descend.

I was completely breathless and dazed from my fall, and my head ached horribly where I had hit it on the rock.

“She’s bleeding,” Rosamunde told Elii.

“Won’t matter. Running blood cleans a wound,” he muttered absently, watching the priest descend slowly and with much crying out for Lud’s help. I felt as though I were watching through a mist.

When the Herder reached the bottom, he knelt beside me quickly and began reciting a prayer for the dead.

“She’s not dead,” Rosamunde said gently.

Seeing that I was only stunned, the priest bandaged the cut on my temple with deft efficiency, and I reminded myself again that for all his youth, the Herder was fully trained in his calling.

“Come on,” Elii said impatiently. “Though I doubt we’ll make it in time now.”

“Was the water tainted?” I asked. I ignored Rosamunde’s audible gasp. There was no point in caution if I died from not speaking out.

The Herder shook his head, and I wondered how he knew—though I did not doubt that he was right. Herder knowledge was wide-ranging and sometimes obscure, but generally reliable.

We walked quickly then, urged on by Elii. My head ached steadily, but I was relieved that it was only a bump and not a serious infection. I had a sudden vision of my mother, applying a steaming herb poultice to my head. How quickly the pain had subsided on that occasion. Herb lore was forbidden now, though it was said there were still those who secretly practiced the art.

I nearly walked into Elii, having failed to notice he had called a halt.

“Through the Weirwood lies the Silent Vale,” he said. “If we are too late today, we will have to camp here and enter the Vale tomorrow.”

“The Weirwood?” said someone nervously.

“It is dangerous to be out at night in these parts,” the Herder said, “where the spirits of the Beforetime rest uneasily.”

Elii shrugged, saying there would be no help for it if the sun had gone. He had his orders. “Perhaps your Lud will cast his mantle of protection over us,” he added with a faint glimmer of amusement.

We entered the Weirwood, and I shivered at the thought of spending a night there. It had an unnatural feel, and I saw several in our group look around nervously. We had not walked far when we came to a clearing, and in the center of this was the ravine they called the Silent Vale. It was very narrow, a mere slit in the ground, with steps hewn into one end, descending into the gap. The light reached just a handspan or so into the ravine, and the rest was in dense shadow.

I understood now Elii’s haste, for only when the sun was directly overhead would it light the Vale, and it was almost at its zenith now.

We entered the ravine and descended the slippery steps fearfully. By the time we reached the bottom, I was numb with the cold, and we huddled together at the foot of the steps, afraid to move where we could not see. Moments passed and the sun reached its zenith, piercing the damp mists that filled the ravine and lighting up the Vale.

It was much wider at the base, and unexpectedly, there were trees growing—though they were stunted and diseased, with few leaves. A thick whitish moss covered the ground and some of the walls in a dense carpet. Where the moss did not grow, the walls were scored and charred, possibly marked by the fire said to have rained from the skies during the first days of the holocaust. A faint stench of burning still filled the air.

Elii handed out the gloves and bags for gathering the whitestick, instructing us needlessly to be quick and careful and never to let the substance touch our skin. Pulling on the
gloves, we spread out and set to work, searching for the telltale black nodules that concealed the deposits of whitestick.

The bags were small but took time to fill, because the substance crumbled to dust if not handled carefully. Standing to ease my aching back once I had finished, I noticed that I had wandered out of the sight of everyone else. I could hear nothing, though the others had to have been quite near. I had noticed at once the aptly named Vale was oddly silent, but now it struck me anew how unnatural that silence was, and how complete. Even the wind made no murmur. It was as if a special kind of death had come to the Silent Vale.

“Are you finished?” Rosamunde asked, apologizing when I jumped in fright. “This place is enough to give even a soldierguard a taste of the horrors,” she said.

Returning to where some of the others had gathered at the bottom of the steps, we heard voices nearby.

“What do they use this stuff for, anyway?” one asked.

“Medicines and such, or so they say,” said another voice with a bitter edge. It was the voice of the out-spoken girl marked with Herder red. “But I have heard rumors the priests use it to make special poisons and to torture their prisoners for information,” she added softly.

Rosamunde looked at me in horror, but we said nothing. I was no informer, and I did not think Rosamunde was. But that girl was bent on disaster, and she would take anyone with her stupid enough not to see the danger. Better to forget what we had overheard.

I left Rosamunde with the others, going to examine a deep fissure in the ground. The Great White had savaged the earth, and there were many such holes and chasms leading deep into the ground. I bent and looked in, and a chill air struck at my face from those black depths.

Impulsively, I picked up a rock and dropped it in. My heart beat many times before I heard the faint report of impact.

“What was that?” cried the Herder, who had been packing the bags of whitestick.

Elii strode purposefully over. “Idiot of a girl. This is a serious place, not the garden at Kinraide. Throw yourself in next time and make me happy.” I looked at my feet with a fast-beating heart. Twice now I had called attention to myself, and that was dangerous.

Suddenly there was a vague murmur from the ground beneath our feet.

“What was that?” the Herder cried again, edging closer to the steps.

“I don’t know,” Elii said with a frown. “Probably nothing, but I don’t like it. After all, we are not far from the Blacklands. Come, the sun is going.”

We ascended the steps in a single file. The Herder, who came last, kept looking behind him fearfully as if he expected something to reach out and grab him.

An air of relief came over the group as we threw off the oppressive air of the Vale. Fortunately, we had gathered enough whitestick, and we made good time on our return, reaching Kinraide early in the evening.

To my private astonishment, Jes was among those who met us, and he wore the beaten potmetal armband of a Herders’ assistant.

2

“E
LSPETH
?”

It was Jes, and I willed him to go away. He knocked again, then stuck his head in the door. “How are you?” he asked with a hint of disapproval.

Anger overcame caution. “For Lud’s sake, Jes, they’re not going to condemn me because of a headache. If you think it looks suspicious, then why don’t you report me?” I retorted, staring pointedly at his armband.

He whitened and shut the door behind him. “Keep your voice down. There are people outside.”

I bit my lip and forced myself to be calm. “What do you want?” I asked him coldly. I knew I was being stupid, but I didn’t care. Jes was the only one I could strike out at. And that, I thought, looking at his stiff face, was becoming increasingly dangerous.

“Maybe you don’t care about being burned, but I do. Much as you scorn it, caution has kept us safe until now. No thanks to you,” he added, and I was bitterly reminded that our plight was my fault. “A headache is nothing, but you know how little things are blown out of all proportion. It is a short step from gossip to the Councilcourt in Sutrium.”

“You have been made an assistant,” I said flatly, and now he reddened. A look of pride mingled with shame came over his face. “How could you?” I asked him bleakly.

He clenched his jaw. “You will not ruin this for me,” he said at last. “It is my sin that I do not denounce you. But you are my sister.”

“You would not dare denounce me,” I said. “Your own life would be ruined if it was known you had a Misfit for a sister. Don’t pretend you care for me.”

A queer flicker passed over his face, and I suddenly felt certain that this was the truth.

When he had gone, I lay back, my head aching dully, partly from tension. For all my bravado, I was afraid of Jes. There had been a time when we were close. Not so much when we were young, for he had been a dutiful son, and I too much of a wanderer to please anyone except my beloved mother. But after we had come into the orphan home system following the trial and execution of our parents, we had clung to one another. Jes had vowed then to have revenge on the Council and the Herder Faction for their evil work that day. He had wiped my eyes and sworn to protect me.

He had not known what that would entail. In those first years, we regarded our secretive behavior as a game. It was only as we grew older that we became increasingly aware of the dangers. Discovering the truth about myself made me more solitary than ever, while Jes developed a near obsession with caution. In those days, his one desire had been to get a Normalcy Certificate and get out, then ask permission to have me with him. But somehow we had drifted apart, till the bonds that held us were fragile indeed. I knew Jes had become fascinated with the Herder Faction and its ideas. But as an orphan, he would never be accepted into the cloister, so I had thought little of it.