Terry Goodkind - Debt of Bones

Abby had searched relentlessly, but she had been unable to find her father, her husband, or her daughter. She had no intention of giving up. She had resigned herself to the knowledge that if she didn’t find them, she would die with them.

She had found captives tied together and staked to trees, or the ground, to keep them from running. Many more were chained. Some she recognized, but many more she didn’t. Most were kept in groups and under guard.

Abby never once saw a guard asleep at his post. When they looked her way, she acted as if she were looking for someone, and she wasn’t going to go easy on them when she found them. Zedd had told her that her safety, and the safety of her family, depended on her playing the part convincingly. Abby thought about these people hurting her daughter, and it wasn’t hard to act angry.

But she was running out of time. She couldn’t find them, and she knew that Zedd would not wait. Too much was at stake; she understood that, now. She was coming to appreciate that the wizard and the Mother Confessor were trying to stop a war; that they were people resolved to the dreadful task of weighing the lives of a few against the lives of many.

Abby lifted another tent-flap, and saw soldiers sleeping. She squatted and looked at the faces of prisoners tied to wagons. They stared back with hollow expressions. She bent to gaze at the faces of children pressed together in nightmares. She couldn’t find Jana. The huge camp sprawled across the hilly countryside; there were a thousand places she could be.

As she marched along a crooked line of tents, she scratched at her wrist. Only when she went farther did she notice that it was the bracelet warming that made her wrist itch. It warmed yet more as she proceeded, but then the warmth began fading. Her brow twitched. Out of curiosity, she turned and went back the way she had come.

Where a pathway between tents turned off, her bracelet tingled again with warmth. Abby paused a moment, looking off into the darkness. The sky was just beginning to colour with light. She took the path between the tents, following until the bracelet cooled, then backtracked to where it warmed again and took a new direction where it warmed yet more.

Abby’s mother had given her the bracelet, telling her to wear it always, and that someday it would be of value. Abby wondered if somehow the bracelet had magic that would help her find her daughter. With dawn nearing, this seemed the only chance she had left. She hurried onward, wending where the warmth from the bracelet directed.

The bracelet led her to an expanse of snoring soldiers. There were no prisoners in sight. Guards patrolled the men in bedrolls and blankets. There was one tent set among the big men—for an officer, she guessed.

Not knowing what else to do, Abby strode among the sleeping men. Near the tent, the bracelet sent tingling heat up her arm.

Abby saw that sentries hung around the small tent like flies around meat. The canvas sides glowed softly, probably from a candle inside. Off to the side, she noticed a sleeping form different from the men. As she got closer, she saw that it was a woman: Mariska.

The old woman breathed with a little raspy whistle as she slept. Abby stood paralysed. Guards looked up at her.

Needing to do something before they asked any questions, Abby scowled at them and marched towards the tent. She tried not to make any noise; the guards might think she was a Mord-Sith, but Mariska would not long be fooled. A glare from Abby turned the guards’ eyes to the dark countryside.

Her heart pounding nearly out of control, Abby gripped the tent-flap. She knew Jana would be inside. She told herself that she must not cry out when she saw her daughter. She reminded herself that she must put a hand over Jana’s mouth before she could cry out with joy, lest they be caught before they had a chance to escape.

The bracelet was so hot it felt as if it would blister her skin. Abby ducked into the low tent.

A trembling little girl huddled in a tattered wool cloak sat in blankets on the ground. She stared up with big eyes that blinked with the terror of what might come next. Abby felt a stab of anguish. It was not Jana.

They stared at each other, this little girl and Abby. The child’s face was lit clearly by the candle set to the side, as Abby’s must be. In those big grey eyes that looked to have beheld unimaginable terrors, the little girl seemed to reach a judgement.

Her arms stretched up in supplication.

Instinctively, Abby fell to her knees and scooped up the little girl, hugging her small trembling body. The girl’s spindly arms came out from the tattered cloak and wrapped around Abby’s neck, holding on for dear life.

“Help me? Please?” the child whimpered in Abby’s ear.

Before she had picked her up she had seen the face in the candlelight. There was no doubt in Abby’s mind. It was Zedd’s daughter. “I’ve come to help you,” Abby comforted. “Zedd sent me.”

The child moaned expectantly.

Abby held the girl out at arm’s length. “I’ll take you to your father, but you mustn’t let these people know I’m rescuing you. Can you play along with me? Can you pretend that you’re my prisoner, so that I can get you away?”

Near tears, the girl nodded. She had the same wavy hair as Zedd, and the same eyes, although they were an arresting grey, not hazel.

“Good,” Abby whispered, cupping a chilly cheek, almost lost in those grey eyes. “Trust me, then, and I will get you away.”

“I trust you,” came the small voice.

Abby snatched up a rope lying nearby and looped it around the girl’s neck. “I’ll try not to hurt you, but I must make them think you are my prisoner.”

The girl cast a worried look at the rope, as if she knew the rope well, and then nodded that she would go along.

Abby stood, once outside the tent, and by the rope pulled the child out after her. The guards looked her way. Abby started out.

One of them scowled as he stepped close. “What’s going on?”

Abby stomped to a halt and lifted the red leather rod, pointing it at the guard’s nose. “She has been summoned. And who are you to question? Get out of my way or I’ll have you gutted and cleaned for my breakfast!”

The man paled and hurriedly stepped aside. Before he had time to reconsider, Abby charged off, the girl in tow at the end of the rope, dragging her heels, making it look real.

No one followed. Abby wanted to run, but she couldn’t. She wanted to carry the girl, but she couldn’t. It had to look as if a Mord-Sith was taking a prisoner away.

Rather than take the shortest route back to Zedd, Abby followed the hills upriver to a place where the trees offered concealment almost to the water’s edge. Zedd had told her where to cross, and warned her not to return by a different way; he had set traps of magic to prevent the D’Harans from charging down from the hills to stop whatever it was he was going to do.

Closer to the river she saw, downstream a way, a bank of fog hanging close to the ground. Zedd had emphatically warned her not to go near any fog. She suspected it a poison cloud of some sort that he had conjured.

The sound of the water told her she was close to the river. The pink sky provided enough light to finally see it when she reached the edge of the trees. Although she could see the massive camp on the hills in the distance behind her, she saw no one following.

Abby took the rope from the child’s neck. The girl watched her with those big round eyes. Abby lifted her and held her tight. “Hold on, and keep quiet.” Pressing the girl’s head to her shoulder, Abby ran for the river.

There was light, but it was not the dawn. They had crossed the frigid water and made the other side when she first noticed it. Even as she ran along the bank of the river, before she could see the source of the light, Abby knew that magic was being called there that was unlike any magic she had ever seen before. A sound, low and thin, whined up the river towards her. A smell, as if the air itself had been burned, hung along the riverbank.