leagues within Hardorn, the land was blighted and empty.
Bad enough that entire villages lay empty and abandoned; worse came when his men poked cautiously through the tumbled-down buildings. The places had been looted, then demolished. But in the wreckage, Daren’s men found the remains of women and children—and
Daren had thought at first that it might have been the work of bandits—but then they had encountered another village, smaller than the first, that had fared the same. Then another, and another.
After the fourth such discovery, Daren forbade his men to even go near the places. They had no priest with them, but the mages, Quenten in particular, had felt an odd uneasiness there, and the Healers had refused, in a hysterical body, to set foot inside the perimeters.
And the land itself looked drained and ill. The rank weeds that had taken over the fields were pale, with thin, weak stems. The leaves of the trees were discolored. The only birds to be seen were an occasional crow, and so far Daren hadn’t spotted so much as a rabbit moving. It had been getting worse since the first village, and now the countryside looked to his eyes like a beautiful woman lying ravaged by plague. He couldn’t imagine how his men could bear it—many of them were of farm stock, and intended to retire to little pension-farms of their own, and to see good land like this must be making them ill.
“What do you think happened here?” he asked Quenten, as they crossed a muddy, rust-colored stream. “Is it safe to be riding on this land, do you think?”
“It’s safe enough, m’lord,” Quenten said, but only after the mage gave him a peculiar look. “Why do you ask?”
Daren looked around at the withered limbs of the trees, at the yellow grass, at the diseased cankers spotting the leaves, and shuddered. “Because the place looks poisoned, that’s why. What happened at the villages was easy enough to read—that bastard conscripted the men, took the useful women and little ones and slaughtered the rest as an example—but I don’t understand this ... and I don’t see how the men can accept it as easily as they do.”
Quenten shook his head in wonder. “M’lord, they don’t see what you see. To them it looks perfectly ordinary, except that there’s not much in the way of birds and beasts.” He looked pointedly about them, at the men marching calmly up the road in front of them, and tilted his shaggy, dust-dulled head to one side, as if waiting for a response.
Daren cast a sharp glance at him, but the young mage’s expression was entirely sober. “A glamour? An illusion?”
Again the mage shook his head, but this time he stared into Daren’s face searchingly before replying. “I don’t think so, m’lord. Is there mage-blood in your family?”
“Some, not much,” he said after a moment of thought. “Of course Grandmother’s family’s been sprouting Healers every so often, and Mother’s line was supposed to be some kind of earth-priestess—”
“Ah,” Quenten said in satisfaction. “That would be it; you have the earth-sense. Many folk with the blood of the old earth-priestesses in them have it. What you’re seeing is the land revealed to you by the earth-sense, you see what lies
Daren remembered all the rumors he’d heard about Ancar, and suddenly they began making sense. “Blood- magic to control the minds of the ones he took?” he asked shrewdly, “Blood-magic to create a reservoir of power he can feed off?” And Quenten’s eyes widened. “Blood-magic so that the land keeps
“There’s not one highborn in ten that would know that,” the mage whispered. “Keep it to yourself, m’lord. There’s some that would say that
It was Daren’s turn to shake his head. The land cried out to him in a way—and he couldn’t help it, any more than he could bring back those poor slaughtered innocents. He wanted to beg its pardon for not healing it—to beg theirs for not being there. It was foolish—but it was very real. He understood the Heralds of Valdemar far better than his brother did. He understood how it was to care for
And he also understood duty and pledges. “Right now all I care about is whether this land is safe to travel through—which you say it is—and whether or not Ancar has any mages likely to detect us here.”
“We’re working to prevent that, m’lord,” Quenten replied dryly. “And—” he looked up, sharply.
“What is it?” Daren said, reining in his horse as Quenten’s mount stopped dead.
The mage raised one hand to his forehead, his eyes focusing elsewhere. He looked for all the world as if he