S Farrell - A Magic of Nightfall

“I see you in there,” she said. “Come on out.”

She expected the person to run, to flee the other way toward the lane behind the house. But the form stirred, rising slowly, and she saw in the shifting, uncertain light from the brightening sky that it was a child. He shuffled out slowly, keeping his back to the wall of the structure, his wide eyes glancing at her then darting away again. His face was smeared with mud and his hair wildly tangled.

“What’s the matter? Are you scared of me?”

“You’re the crazy lady,” the boy answered, and the voices in her head hooted with delight, Fynn’s loud amongst them. You see? They already know. Soon…

“What were you doing in there?” she asked.

The boy shrugged. “Waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

Another shrug. “Nothing.”

“Only an idiot waits for nothing, boy. Are you hiding?” She raised a finger, stopping him in mid-shrug. “Don’t lie to me, boy. I’m the crazy lady, remember? I can hear what you’re thinking?” She tapped her forehead with the upraised finger. The voices hooted again. Liar! Charlatan! “So you’d better tell me the truth: who are you hiding from?”

He looked at her suspiciously, cocking his head as if he’d heard the voices himself. “The soldiers,” he said. “The ones in blue and gold.”

“The Garde Kralji?” She spat on the ground between them. “I know them. Oh, I know them well. But why are you hiding from them? They’re not looking for you, boy, not unless you’re Numetodo.” His face twisted strangely at that, and she looked at him sidewise, rubbing at her stomach. There were strange flutterings there, and she wondered whether she was going to be sick again, or if she was feeling the child for the first time. “ Are you Numetodo?” she asked. “Is that why?”

“No,” he said quickly, but she had seen too many lies and deceptions in her life already, and she knew he was saying less than he could. She looked at him more closely, at the filthy clothing and matted hair. She could see the bones of his cheeks.

“When’s the last time you ate?”

Another shrug.

“Do you live near here?”

He grimaced. “I… I used to. Just over there.” He pointed down the lane. “But… I don’t know…” He stopped, and she saw his lip quivering. He sniffed and drew his sleeve quickly over his eyes, pressing his lips tightly together. The defiance, the refusal to let her see just how scared and frightened he was made her decision for her. She smiled at him, crouching down in front of him. It should have been an easy movement for her, but the thickening waist made her feel as if her own body were someone else’s.

“You have a name?” she asked the boy.

“Nico,” he told her. “My name is Nico.”

“Then why don’t you come with me, Nico? I have some croissants, and a bit of butter, and I can probably find a slice of meat or two. Does that sound good?” She held out her hand to him. Hesitantly, he took it, and she stood up. The voices were laughing at her, mocking her. The White Stone has gone soft as mud…

Ignoring them, she walked with Nico to her rooms.

He had never been at sea before, and he wasn’t certain that he was entirely enjoying the experience.

Niente stood at the aftcastle bow of the captured Holdings galleon, once the Marguerite and now renamed Yaoyotl -which was “War” in his own language. Yaoyotl sailed in the middle of the Tehuantin fleet; from his perch, Niente could look out over long azure swells decorated with the white sails of well over a hundred ships. Behind them, lost over the horizon days ago, was the eastern coast of his land and the foul smoke of burned and razed Munereo, now the gravepit for the Holdings’ Garde Civile, except for those few who had retreated to the Easterners’ last small fingerhold on the continent, the city of Tobarro. The army of the Tehuantin had taken Munereo, taken back all the land south and west of its walls, and had taken the ships of the Holdings fleet in the harbor, at least those that had escaped the spell-fire from the Tehuantin fleet, or that had not been scuttled by their own crews and sent to the bottom when it was obvious the day was lost. Most of the ships accompanying the Yaoyotl were the seacraft called acalli: the two-masted, lateen-sailed ships with which the Tehuantin plied the Western Sea between the great cities the Eastern invaders had never seen. The acalli could not carry the number of crew or soldiers that the square-sailed Nessantican galleons could muster, nor were they as fast, but they were far more maneuverable, especially in shallow coastal waters or when the wind was against them.

The winds of the Strettosei however, blew steadily west to east at this latitude, and the wind of their passage sighed past the taut lines holding the sails as the prows of the ships carved long lines of white water through the swells, dipping and rising and falling yet again, relentless and eternal.

A motion that still, after several days, made Niente’s stomach lurch and burn. His limbs, twisted and ravaged by the efforts of the spell he’d placed in the Easterner Eneas, ached as he tried to remain steady against the ship’s lurching. Two of the lesser nahualli stood on the aftcastle with him, watching as Niente used his bowl to perform the scrying spell; he dared not show them the weakness of his stomach or his body, or word would go to the other nahualli and eventually come to the ear of Tecuhtli Zolin, who was also on the Yaoyotl. The fate of every Nahual awaited him, the fate that may have even come to Mahri and perhaps to Talis as well: as a nahualli, every use of the X’in Ka took its toll, and the greater the spell, the larger the payment the gods demanded.

Eventually, the payment would be death.

The rolling of the ship shivered the water in his scrying bowl, rendering murky the visions of the future: that bothered Niente more than the nausea. Niente peered into the water, sloshing to the rim of the brass bowl. His eyes didn’t want to focus; the left eye, clouded ever since his enchantment of Eneas, had become worse since the assault on Munereo. He blinked, but the scenes in the bowl refused to become clear. He grunted, scowling, and tossed the water in disgust over the rear rail of the ship. The other nahualli raised eyebrows but said nothing. “I need to speak with the Tecuhtli,” Niente said. “Take the bowl back to my room and cleanse it.”

They bent their heads obediently as Niente, shuffling, pushed past them.

Niente had argued with Tecuhtli Zolin that this strategy was foolish, though he’d not dared to use that word. He wanted desperately to go home, back beyond the Knife-Edge Mountains to the great cities by the lake. Home to Xaria, his wife; home to his children. Home to familiarity.

He hadn’t been alone. The High Warrior Citlali had taken the same position, as had several of the lesser warriors. “Why should we sail to the Easterners’ land? Let us take the last city they hold here and push their bodies into the great water. Then let us return to our homes and our families, and if the Easterners return to trouble our cousins again, we’ll push them back once more.”

But Zolin was adamant. “Sakal demands more of us,” he’d declared. “It is time to show these Easterners that we can hurt them as they hurt us. If one is attacked by a wolf, driving it off leaves the wolf to attack again, perhaps when it is stronger or you are weaker. Killing the wolf is the only way to be truly safe.”

“This is not a wolf,” Niente had persisted. “This is a many-headed beast, only one small face of which we’ve seen, and we are going to its lair. It may be that it will devour us completely.”

Zolin had grunted at that. “Running from the wolf because you’re afraid is the worst strategy of all. It only gives the wolf your unprotected back.”