Blood Seed: Coin of Rulve Book One Read online

  No young woman ever looked at him like that. Still trembling inside, he rested his arms on his drawn-up knees and stared at the ground.

  The confidence he had built up over the years was gone. For over a decade, ever since he discovered his power of ice, he’d practiced summoning it. It started when he learned that the Groper was seldom seen in the dead of winter because the creature seemed to be repelled by extreme cold. Then he remembered his icy terror on the night he’d first encountered it, remembered how his half-physical, half-mental reaction had produced the ice that had saved his life. He’d learned a way to re-create it.

  At first, the necessity of re-living the terror of that night and the effort of constricting his spirikai resulted in pounding headaches and constant nightmares. But it stopped the bleeding. He became skilled in the use of ice, and no drop of his blood ever reached the ground. He thought he’d succeeded, thought he’d never bleed again, thought he’d avoid making a spectacle of himself in front of others.

  But he’d been wrong.

  The sound of the headman’s whistle got everyone to their feet. The reapers stood, stretched, and headed toward their swaths. He took several deep breaths, trying to dispel the light-headedness; but before he could stand, Gwin sauntered over with Voy, snatching up his sickle on the way. Gwin’s muscular arms hung in arcs at his sides. Two lines between his eyebrows gave him a concerned look, as if he recognized a painful problem and regretted the measures needed to solve it.

  Voy stood beside him like an inseparable shadow; slyness, as opposed to Gwin’s intelligence, glinted in his ferret’s eyes. “Too bad,” he said, “you got hurt today. Too bad if it happens again.”

  As it had happened before.

  # # #

  After that first disastrous visit to the village when he was six, Sheft had become determined to find a friend. He’d asked his father to drop him off at a low place just south of the village, where children often gathered to play by the mill. Watching his father’s wagon disappear down the road, he hoped Tarn would remember to pick him up on his way back from the council meeting.

  Six or seven children stopped their games and stared as he scrambled down the embankment. As he came closer, one of them yelped and ran off. It must be his eyes, he thought, his horrible fish’s eyes, so he averted them. “Can I play with you?”

  “If you can keep up with us, straw-head,” one boy answered. He ran off, and the crowd of children followed.

  Sheft did keep up. He climbed the tree even higher than they did, walked the log without falling off, and was winning the race beside the river. Until he slipped and skinned his knee.

  Instantly the warning screamed in his mind, and the ground reared up before him. Terrified he’d be unable to stop the blood from falling and the disgusting roots sprouting, he pulled the spirikai knot too tight and summoned too much ice. Half-blind, he stiffened with cold, while the other children gaped at him.

  “Look!” one shouted. “A demon’s got him!”

  “He’s listening to it talk.”

  Two older boys, who had been throwing stones at a dead tree, ambled up. “So you’re the witch-boy,” the biggest one said. Sheft recognized him as Gwin, the blacksmith’s son. He had straight-across eyebrows, a thick neck, and stood with his hands on his hips.

  Shivering with ice-reaction, Sheft got to his feet. “I’m not a witch-boy! I don’t even know what that is.”

  “It’s a freak with dead-fish eyes,” the second boy jeered. His name was Voy, and he reminded Sheft of a sleek and dangerous ferret. “A foreigner with haystack-hair.”

  Sheft’s face burned, and he lowered his eyes.

  “Afraid of us, hayseed?” Gwin asked, thrusting his face into Sheft’s.

  He flinched at the name, his mother’s name for him, and Gwin must have seen that. “Hayseed! Hayseed!” he shouted, and then pushed him.

  Sheft tottered a few steps backward and the others caught on, shouting the name and pushing him back and forth, until finally he stumbled and fell.

  “He doesn’t even know how to cry,” Voy remarked, looking down on him.

  Gwin threw a stone. It hit Sheft on the side of his mouth, and he immediately covered the spot with his hand and squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Now he does,” Gwin said, and they all ran off, laughing.

  But he wasn’t crying. He clenched himself in ice. His mouth hurt, and his heart hurt, but he wouldn’t bleed.

  When his father came with the wagon, he immediately saw the raw spot. “I don’t approve of brawling. If your opponent is smaller, you are a bully; if larger, a fool.”

  # # #

  Years had passed, and now a bully was staring fixedly at him and thumbing the blade of his sickle. “You should go away, freak,” Gwin said. “Leave town.”

  As Gwin well knew, only criminals or irresponsible malcontents left home, or those who were cast out. Sheft got to his feet, his arm stinging and his patience thin. Gwin had always been bigger than him, and still was, but now they were about the same height. “I’m not going anywhere,” Sheft said.

  Gwin’s eyes hardened. “Too bad, piss-head. Accidents happen to foreigners who don’t belong here.”

  “I belong here as much as you do. My grandfather was council Holdman.”

  “And your mother was a whore in Ullar-Sent.”

  Sheft lunged at him, but Voy grabbed his bandaged arm. “You’re lookin’ awful pale, hayseed,” he drawled. “Can’t stand the sight of blood?”

  Sheft threw his hand off and addressed Gwin. “Get away from me. And take your shadow with you.”

  “With pleasure. But if that little cut bothers you so much, I’m wondering how you’ll manage the Rites.” Gwin showed his teeth. “It’ll be your first time, won’t it?”

  “And barely three months away,” Voy remarked. “Lots of time to think about it. You gotta handle the knife just right, you know. I’m bettin’ you won’t. I’m bettin’ you’ll have one of your fits instead.”

  Gwin leaned into Sheft’s face. “There’ll be twenty of us watching that night. Watching every move you make.”

  “Is that so?” Sheft deliberately lifted his gaze, and hiding none of the anger he felt, glared directly into his eyes.

  # # #

  Gwin took an involuntary step backward. For the first time, from only inches away, the silver eyes bored into him. They were profoundly alien. They showed no familiar brown depths, no reflection of himself, only a metallic surface he could never fathom. These eyes couldn’t possibly see the way a normal person saw. They were filmed, diseased. His gorge rose at the sight of them.

  Gwin raised his fists, eager to bloody the foreign face, tear out handfuls of the piss-colored hair. Parduka was right. Aberrations like this weren’t human. They were like something spawned in the Riftwood, like something that formed in the depths of one of its foul and stinking ponds.

  The gaze glinted with slivers of ice. A chill ran down Gwin’s back. The hayseed was possessed by a demon. He had seen it himself, years ago, when the foreigner suddenly turned rigid and the eel-eyes stared. There was danger here. More than he had realized, more than anyone realized. Under this albino veneer, a malevolent power was growing among them.

  For the good of the entire village, this thing must be destroyed.

  He swallowed to make sure of his voice. “Just watch yourself, hayseed,” he said. “Someone might mistake that head of yours for the wheat, and one day cut it off.”

  “Big talk when you can’t even keep hold of a sickle.”

  With one last glare, Gwin turned and motioned for Voy to follow him to the field. But all the way he felt those eel eyes on the back of his head.

  # # #

  The harvest resumed, and the satisfaction Sheft felt when Gwin backed away from him quickly dwindled away. There’d been something other than hate in Gwin’s eyes: The blacksmith’s son had looked at him as if he sensed black roots instead of veins inside him, as if his blood were dirt.

  As if he knew the tr
uth.

  Chapter 4. Drawing the Curtain

  The sun was lowering when the headman whistled the end of the work day. The men clapped each other on the shoulder and headed down the road to Cloor’s. Not invited, his head still feeling hollow from ice-reaction, Sheft trudged home. He found no one there, and after burning his makeshift bandage and scraping out leftovers from the pot for dinner, he headed out to the Meera.

  By day, he managed to hide what he was and endure. But he dreaded the nights. No matter how tired from fieldwork, he’d put off going to bed by carving deadfall maple or ash in front of the hearth. He made spoons, a miniature heron, a bowl; but when his head nodded and the knife fell from his hands, when he was forced to seek his mattress, the dream of the knife came again and again.

  Now, after all this time, and in the form of a sickle, another blade had flashed out of the dark and into his life. Was it was only a matter of time before it happened again?

  No. He kicked a stone into the river. He would increase his wariness, redouble his efforts, and it would never happen again.

  The ripples from the stone disappeared and the brown water at his feet slid by in glints and murmurs. The vision from this morning, eclipsed by so many tumbling events, shimmered in his mind.

  Please come, as soon as you can. The call resonated, deep in his heart.

  But come where? To do what? He strained to listen, but heard only the buzz of cicadas, the drone of a fly.

  The toll of a far off bell.

  Dreamed or remembered, distant, then suddenly, urgently, very near, it clamored in his head: come heal the wound of a distant land, the suffering of an anguished people. His spirikai swelled with the desire to assuage, to pour oil over, to heal, but the call came through the Riftwood—the domain of Wask who wanted his blood. If there was a bridge across the Meera, it went only one way. Wask’s way. Shadows from the great trees had already crossed the river and were reaching toward his feet. He stepped back.

  Yet even as he stood there, the Riftwood’s powerful beauty pulled at him. Clouds of butterflies fluttered in a shaft of sun between the trees, their wings glowing with turquoise iridescence. The forest displayed shades of green he had no name for, textures of bark he could almost feel from here, and scents of leaf and loam that brought the forest vividly to mind even when he closed his eyes. Yes, the primeval forest ate the sun and stars and harbored creatures with no names or many; but it also exuded the aura of another world, vast and timeless.

  With an effort, he turned away from it all, away from the beauty, the evil, and the pain.

  Away from a call he wouldn’t answer, from someone he couldn’t be.

  # # #

  Late that night, a black mist seeped out of the Riftwood and coiled across the slow-moving surface of the river. It came to the solitary black boulder, and its long, wispy fingers explored the depression on top. Finding nothing but a few dead insects, it flicked them angrily away and moved on. Raising its leading edge slightly off the ground, it put out its senses. It detected a faint smell—once savored, long remembered. It groped its way over the fields and found a certain spot. Excited, it tore into the ground, but there was barely enough blood to taste, and it wanted more. The mist flowed up the empty Mill Road and poured silently into the village.

  Fire-lit windows cast rectangles of light here and there on the ground, shadowed by people moving about inside, and these the mist avoided. As if the residents within sensed something, the rectangles disappeared as shutters closed.

  Parduka lay in a restless sleep in her room adjoining the silent hall of worship. In his house across the Mill Road, Dorik, the village Holdman, also tossed and turned.

  Sheft’s arm throbbed, and he dreamed of the darkened wheat field. The stalks shook and the ground chittered, alive with unseen beetles.

  # # #

  He started awake, his head filled with the nightmare. Pre-dawn light seeped through his window. He dressed, seized the spade and sickle out of the barn, and rushed down the road as the red-gold sun was rising from the deadlands. No one would be working in the common field until the morning dew had dried. His arm still stung, but he wasn’t surprised. Using ice not only brought on the dreaded reaction, but also slowed down the normal healing process and increased, rather than alleviated, the pain.

  He waded through the damp straw, searching for the place where the sickle had grazed him. There was no mistaking the spot. He looked down at a ragged circle where night-beetles had chewed every stalk down to the bare earth.

  Wask had emerged and once more found his blood.

  The feeling he was not alone made him cut his eyes to the Riftwood. He saw nothing but the shadowy recesses between the trees. Yet a presence seemed to hover there, radiating the blind determination of hostile roots. A chill of panic ran down his back.

  As quickly as he could, he cut the damp stalks and hid the bare soil before any of the others saw it. But no one appeared. The Mill Road lay eerily quiet. Only hours ago, in the night, something malicious had traversed it.

  When he got home, his mother said the reaping had been canceled for the day, and Tarn had been called to an emergency meeting of the elders. Dorik’s son-in-law had been found dead behind the Council House. And beetles had been at the corpse.

  A sick feeling rose in his throat. Like a cancer, his terror of the Groper had grown from fear of bleeding to a fear of sharp objects, and then swelled into the disgusting image of his polluted blood packed with roots. Now things had gotten far worse: now his whole being cringed from the thought that his cursed blood might be connected to a young man’s death.

  His mother looked up from the dishpan. “What’s wrong? You didn’t even know the man.”

  “I didn’t, but I know Dorik, and this would be the third death in his family this year.” Etane had told him the whole story. The Holdman’s son-in-law lost his wife and baby during childbirth a few months ago and then he turned to drink. He’d passed out once behind the smith’s and another time in the alley between Cloor’s and the butcher shop.

  Riah turned back to her work. “The son-in-law was probably drunk again. Maybe stumbled and hit his head on that outcrop of rock behind the Council House.”

  A terrible thing, he thought. But an accident. The fact that he had failed, that he had allowed his blood to reach the ground, had nothing to do with what happened in the village. It had nothing to do with that baby dying all those years ago. It had been a twin, and one of twins was usually born sickly. It was Ele’s punishment for promiscuity because everyone knew twins had different fathers.

  He spent the rest of the day out in the barn, making sure the next batch of paper had dried, carefully peeling the sheets off the screens, then cutting them to size. It was twilight when Tarn came home and reported on the Council’s decision.

  “The elders took their good old time about it, Riah, but they eventually ruled that the death was caused by drunkenness and not by Wask.”

  Putting new logs on the fire, Sheft drew a silent breath of relief while Tarn retrieved his pipe from the shelf, filled it, and tamped down the leaf with his thumb. He sat in his nodding chair, and soon aromatic smoke coiled around his head.

  “The priestess was there,” he went on, “screeching about restoring the Rites.” He shook his head. “Anyway, we put an end to that. Dorik’s faction prevailed, but only by my vote. Those against us are angry. They say the ruling was based not on facts but on the Holdman’s power to avert scandal.”

  “Scandal?” Riah asked.

  “Women’s gossip.” He waved it away. “The important thing is the priestess insisted that Ele was punishing Dorik—that the goddess allowed his family to be struck by the Groper because his ‘religious laxity’ was corrupting the council.”

  “Wasn’t he punished enough by losing his daughter and grandchild?”

  “Must I spell it out? Ele despises foreigners. Any tolerance the council shows to them, even if they have lived here all their lives, is part of the ‘religious laxity’ P
arduka sees everywhere. The priestess looks for any excuse to weaken my reputation on the council because my vote is the deciding one against her.”

  It had gotten dark, so Sheft lit the lantern and placed it on the table.

  “That is why,” Tarn added with a grim look at him, “your behavior must be impeccable, Sheft. No more causing trouble in the common field.”

  Incredulity flooded him. “I didn’t cause—”

  “I’m in no mood for backtalk. Just fit in for once.”

  Swallowing his anger, Sheft closed the kitchen window for the night. His shadow lay outside, framed in light on the ground. For some reason, the sight made him deeply uneasy. He pushed the feeling aside and drew the curtain shut.

  As he did so, something his father had said came back to him. He turned to look at him. “What did the priestess mean by ‘restoring the Rites’?”

  Tarn sucked on his pipe, leaned back, and blew out smoke. “It doesn’t matter. The council would never allow it.”

  Chapter 5. Called Forth

  The next day, Sheft’s whole life changed.

  A morning downpour had postponed the harvest again, but by early afternoon, the sun shone bright through the chinks in Moro’s barn. Sheft was helping Etane repair a partition in Surilla’s stall when he heard Ane’s joyful shout. He rushed to the doorway and saw Moro helping his daughter out of the wagon and Ane, leaning on the cane she used now, hobbling toward them.

  After all these years, their daughter Mariat had come home.

  Etane rushed forward to greet his little sister, but Sheft hung back, reluctant to intrude on the family reunion. Mariat was no longer the little girl he remembered. She was a young woman, radiant and slender. Her long brown hair swung about her as she turned from father to mother to brother and back again in a dance of kisses and hugs. Her beauty filled his eyes and heart.

  Finally, entwined in an embrace that included the four of them, Ane looked up and saw him. “Come, Sheft,” she said, opening up their family circle and extending a hand. “Give our dear Mariat a welcome hug.”