Inconnue #2

[cdybedahl]

After only a bit over half a year, here's the second chapter of Inconnue. The first chapter is here. It's smut-free original (well, not fanfic, at least) fantasy-type stuff.

Inconnue

Written by Calle Dybedahl

Chapter 2

The day was dry and chilly. Little clouds of road dust rose where Crel stepped, slowly settling down again behind her. She was grateful that the road wasn't often travelled. If it had been, she would've been covered in dust raised by passing horses and wagons. It was a tiring enough trip even without that.

The fields the road cut through were shading into green as early spring shoots rose from the dark soil. In the distance, she saw a line of women working their way forward pulling up weeds. One of them looked her way, but she pretended not to notice. It was best to not to be in contact with anyone. Not even at that distance.

The sun rose higher in the sky, and the miles passed under her boots. Shortly before noon, she could see the village overseer's manor straddling a hill. A little after that, the village itself came into view around the foot of the hill. It was a prosperous village, with many well-built houses. Fully half of them were painted, in bright red or white. Beyond the hill there was forest. Next to the road, at the very edge of the village, stood the inn that was Crel's destination.

She kept her eyes down when she entered its yard. Not only because it was wisest, but because she'd become unused to being around people. Vayria was the first person she'd seen in months, and the dozens that milled around the inn unnerved her. She hoped she could finish her business quickly and be off. Entering the main room, she sat down at an empty table with her back to the wall and waited.

"Crel," a voice eventually said. A tall, thin woman was standing in front of her. She had an apron on, and the sleeves of her blouse were rolled up to the elbows.

"Hello, Cvo," Crel said. "How's business?"

"Hectic, with the festival coming up," the woman said. "Can't spare you much time, I'm afraid."

Crel looked up.

"The festival?" she said. "Is that now?"

"Starts day after tomorrow," Cvo said. "I'm nearly full up here, so you can't have a room. But if you have something nice to sell me, I can throw in an extra mattress in the maids' room for you."

"I came to see Moina," Crel said.

"Ah," Cvo said. "I think she'll be here later. She'll be playing at the overseer's feast, so she spends most of her time up in the mansion. Comes down to eat here most days, but I can't promise anything."

Crel untied the strings that held her backpack shut and fished out a small bottle of pale green liquid.

"I've got this, if you're interested," she said.

Cvo was a sharp trader, but a small twitch in the corner of her mouth told Crel that she was more than a little bit interested in the bottle.

"Maybe," Cvo said. "What is it?"

"Come on, Cvo," Crel said. "You know stingmoss wine whem you see it."

Cvo licked her lips.

"Is it good?" she said.

"Oh yes," Crel said. "A thimbleful of this will have you dreaming for a full night or more."

"What do you want for it?"

"Food and somewhere to sleep from now until the festival ends. And I want to sleep somewhere warmer and with less rats than the maids' room."

"You can have the loft over the smithy. Will that do?"

Crel handed the bottle to Cvo.

"That will do fine," she said. "Let Moina know I'm here if you see her, will you? And I'd like some lunch."

The hours passed. When it became free, Crel moved to her favourite table in the dark corner furthest from the fire. There she sat, slowly eating sausages and bread and drinking the inn's quite passable beer. With the festival close, there were even more people than usual. It made her feel skittish and on edge, but with her back to a solid wall and mostly hidden in darkness she got by. Waiting she was used to. She closed her eyes and rested.

Time passed, until the noise of a chair being pulled up to her table made her pay attention to the world again. She opened her eyes. A tall, curvy woman with shoulder-long black hair sat across from her, smiling. She was dressed in colourful clothes, and a lyre hung in a strap across her back.

"Crel," she said. "It's been too long."

"It always is," Crel said, unable to stop a bittersweet smile from gracing her lips. "I hear you're playing for the overseer."

Moina's eyes flickered away.

"She pays well," she said.

"And you couldn't say no to her even if she didn't," Crel said. "Do you want something to eat and drink? My credit with Cvo is good at the moment."

Moina's gaze snapped back to meet Crel's.

"Oh? How good?"

"Not good enough to meet your rates, I'm afraid," Crel said.

"I could give you a discount," Moina said. "For a night."

Crel shook her head.

"Thanks for the offer," she said. "But no. The Grass would have both our asses before sunrise."

"I guess."

Moina turned her head to adress Cvo, who was walking past the table carrying food-filled plates.

"A decent dinner?" she said. "For the both of us? On my tab?"

Cvo nodded and hastened on.

"I said I could pay," Crel said.

"I know," Moina said. "But I want to. I bet I can afford it better than you can anyway."

"I don't have much need for money out in the woods."

"Still. I want to."

For a few moments they just sat looking at each other.

"So why did you come here," Moina finally said, "if not to see me?"

"Oh, I did came here to see you," Crel said. "And for something else as well."

"What?"

Crel quickly looked around, trying to see if someone was listening. Nobody seemed to be. Which didn't mean much, really.

"I need to see the Grandmother," she said.

Moina looked surprised.

"Why do you think I know where she might be?" she said.

Crel raised an eyebrow.

"I hear things," she said. "I remember things. I add things up."

"Are you staying here tonight?" Moina said after a few moments' thought.

Crel nodded.

"Be in the courtyard at midnight."

Crel nodded again.

"So," she said, "what have you been up to apart from landing a lucrative job?"

Moina smiled and started to talk.

The midnight air was cold and clear, and the stars looked balefully down on the two women walking across the fields. They both wore heavy cloaks, and would be very hard to recognize from any distance at all. Even so, Crel didn't like walking right in the open like this.

"Are you sure this is the best way?" she said, keeping her voice low. "Anybody who looks out over the field will see us!"

"That's the point," Moina said. "This is the path the smugglers use. If we're seen, we'll be taken for them."

In the forest on the other side of the fields, they turned off the path and headed for the hill holding the mansion. Again, Crel wondered if they were on the right track. But this time she didn't ask. Moina should know what she was doing.

But even so, Crel made sure her knife was loose in its scabbard. Couldn't hurt to be as ready as possible. Even if they were on the right path, unexpected things might happen. What they were doing was as illegal as things could get, so even just a sleepless villager taking a walk could be disaster.

"Here," Moina suddenly said.

Crel looked around. She didn't see anything that might hold a person. In the distance, she could hear the sound of feasting at the mansion.

"Where?" she asked.

Moina pointed at a spot of darkness at the foot of a large rock. Crel looked closer, and saw that it was a hole.

"Down there?"

Moina nodded.

"Tunnel. It goes into the hill. I'll watch here while you see her. You'll have to crawl the first bit. Go left at the fork."

Crel did as she said. She crawled the first bit, where the tunnel was dug through wet earth and its ceiling held together by the roots of the trees above. It was narrow and dark and smelled of clean, fertile soil. It ended into a natural fissure in the stone under the hill, a leaning crack into more darkness with a floor of packed earth. Crel held her lantern up high, and its light flickered and played over the rough stone walls. The way they slanted made her feel like it was she, not they, that was off the vertical.

The walls were dead, devoid of growth. Her eyes kept checking for any sign of moss, lichen or fungus whether she wanted to or not, from long years of habit and training. Her old mistress had got that into her. She'd sent Crel out on errands passing by places where she knew that interesting things grew, and if Crel came back without at least a sample there'd be a lecture or worse coming. After a few seasons of that, it happened that Crel came home with things in her pockets that she had no memory of having put there. Then, her mistress had been pleased. "We'll make a real herbalist of you yet," she'd said. "In time."

Eventually, the passage widened into a cave, from which firelight came. She smelled cooking food and wetmoss tea. She hesitated just outside the light.

"Don't be shy, child," a voice said from inside the cave. It was an old, frail and tired voice. The Grandmother's voice. Crel screwed up her courage and walked in.

"It's me, Crel," she said.

"I know," the Grandmother said.

The cave was furnished like a hut. There was a bed, a fireplace, cupboards, drying racks, a workbench and plenty of skins to sit on. Mushrooms and herbs were frying in a skillet over the fire. Smoke gathered at the top of the high cave, staining the walls black.

"I'm sorry to bother you," Crel said. "But I had a strange visitor, and I need your advice."

The Grandmother looked every bit as old as she sounded. Her skin was brown and leathery. Her hair was long and the palest white. Her hands looked like claws, and her eyes were smooth opalescent white.

"Are you hungry, child?" she said. "If you are, find a couple of plates and fill them up for us. If I was alone, I'd eat from the skillet, but one still feels the urge to treat guests better."

Crel opened random cupboards until she found plates.

"You remember the crystals you gave us? The ones that would turn colours in the presence of magic?" she said.

The Grandmother nodded.

"Well, one of mine just did," Crel said.

The Grandmother turned her blank eyes on Crel.

"Really?" she said. "Are you sure? The tint can be hard to spot, sometimes."

"It turned solid black," Crel said. "I threw it in the fire, like you said."

The Grandmother stopped with a forkful of mushroom on its way to her mouth.

"Black?" she said. "What did your visitor look like?"

"An athletic woman," Crel said. "Very strong, much stronger than people should be. She seemed not to know that was unusual, and she wore a guard captain's jacket."

The Grandmother lowered the fork back to the plate and let it rest there.

"What was her name?" she said.

"She claimed not to have one," Crel said. "I called her Vayria."

The Grandmother frowned. She put the plate aside and got up from her pile of blankets.

"Did I ever tell you what the crystals are?" she said. She opened a cupboard and dug out a leather pouch. From it, she took a clear crystal like the one Crel had planted under Vayria's bed.

"No," Crel said. "At least not when I heard."

"They're training tools," the Grandmother said. "From a school in the far northern mountains, a school that doesn't have a name either. A school that the Dark One and the sorcerers don't want people to know about. They hide it well, few ever hear of it."

"A school for magic?" Crel asked. It sounded preposterous. Humans couldn't learn that.

"In a way," the Grandmother said. "They trained us to be receptacles for magic. That's what the crystals were for. We'd open ourselves as best we could. The Teacher-Sorceress would fill us with power, and we would try to retain it for as long as possible. Every bell a human teacher would hold a crystal near us, and if it took a tint we were doing well."

"Receptacles?" Crel said, amazed. She'd never heard anything about the Grandmother's history before. "Why? For what?"

The Grandmother was silent for a few moments.

"The sorcerers may be immortal," she said. "But their bodies aren't. The energies they handle make them age even faster than ordinary people. A host rarely lasts more than five decades."

"You were to be these... hosts?" Crel said. "What would that have done to you?"

The Grandmother threw a crystal to Crel, who caught it.

"It would have killed us," she said. "Our minds right at the start when the sorcerer took over, and our bodies later when they wore out."

"How did you get away?" Crel asked.

"Luck," the Grandmother said. "If you can call it that. I was one of the best in my year, and eventually I was put through the Receptacle Ceremony and made ready to become a host. But there were a few unusually good years for the sorcerers, and the next time one of them needed a new body she judged me too old to be suitable."

The food forgotten, Crel looked at the crystal in her hand. It stayed as clear as it'd been when she grabbed it. For a moment, disappointment rose, but it went away just as quickly as it came. She didn't really want to get involved with things magical.

"So Vayria carried magic," she said.

"If the crystal really turned solid black, she must have been a sorcerer," the Grandmother said.

Crel frowned.

"She can't have been," she said. "If she was, my farm would've been flattened and I'd be in prison or dead."

"All I can tell you is what I know, child," the Grandmother said. "I can't explain what happened. Maybe things have changed in the years I have been in hiding. Maybe humans have started carrying real magic. Maybe the Dark One has brought something new into the world. Maybe something else."

"I guess I'll never know," Crel said. "This sounds like things I'd rather not mess with, so I'll just go back to my farm and my wines and my potions. Live on in as much peace as I can."

The Grandmother sat back down and resumed eating.

"You may not have that choice," she said in between bites,

Crel looked at her.

"What?" she said.

"You gave her a name," the Grandmother said. "That ties you to her. Whatever happens, your life is tied to hers."

"I just wanted to call her something!"

The Grandmother shrugged.

"Names are powerful."

Crel swore.

"It need not mean much," the Grandmother said. "It may just be something like that in fifty years she will return to your farm to die."

Crel shook her head.

"I'm in the resistance, weak as it is," she said. "And now I'm connected to something magic. I find it very hard to believe that nothing would come of that."

The Grandmother stayed silent.

"I have to try to find her," Crel said.

"Take Moina with you," the Grandmother said.

"I can't. She's got a good life here, I can't pull her away from that."

"She's resistance too. She'll welcome a chance to do something."

"I'm not doing a resistance thing. I'm just trying to sort out things for myself."

The Grandmother smiled narrowly.

"As you said, there is a connection between resistance and magic here," she said. "Out of this, a miracle may spring."

Crel stood up.

"If a miracle is going to happen, it'll happen just as well if I'm alone as if I mess up Moina's life too," she said.

She walked out of the cave before she could hear the Grandmother's response.

Two robed and cowled women walked into an empty yard surrounded by burned-down piles of rubble. Further out, soldiers kept watch.

"This is the place?" the taller of the women said.

"Yes," the other one said. Her robe was a deep burgundy red, and her face pale as if it rarely saw the sun. "This is where she lived."

"And died."

The taller one's robe was so dark red it was almost black. Unlike her companion, her skin was a dark brown. Her hair was black, and cut very short.

"No," the pale one said. "She didn't."

The tall one's gaze snapped to the pale one's face.

"What?" she said. "Explain."

"A few days ago, we discovered a fake entry in a guardbook. Further investigation showed that a prisoner was missing. A prisoner whose description closely matched hers."

The tall one looked at the rubble pile.

"The bones," she said. "They were the prisoner's."

"We can't be sure," the pale one said. "Not without the assistance of a Seer-Sorceress."

"How certain are we now?"

"I had my people look at the scene again," the pale one said. "And now when we knew something was suspicious, we noticed that the position of the burned bones look like the person burned was tied up at the time."

"I have no doubt that you investigated further than that."

"A few witnesses saw a woman matching her description leave the city through the eastern gate on the morning of the fire. After that, we have nothing. It's been far too long for any physical tracks to remain."

The tall one pushed her cowl back.

"She'll have headed north," she said.

"Almost certainly," the pale one said. "And in time, we will find her."

"So why have you dragged me out here?"

"The day when we find her will come a lot sooner if we get assistance from the Order of the Blades of Grass. And I didn't want to talk about this inside the Citadel."

The tall one nodded.

"Probably wise," she said. "And we will help you. I will send the word out tonight. Do you want her accused of anything in particular?"

The pale woman shook her head.

"Enemy of the Dark One will do just fine. It's even true, in a way."

"Well, then," the tall woman said. "I guess we are done here?"

A nod.

"Oh, and Sina?" the tall one said.

The pale one looked up.

"You owe me one."

[Poll #762055]