One of Kip’s men found the stolen jewelry, all of it arrayed neatly on a table in one of the houses, as if asking to be taken by whoever came along.
The young children who had been allowed to live had been left with plenty of water and food.
But still. From everything they could tell—the war hounds had trouble with abstracts like units of time, but their handlers could make certain estimates that were confirmed by other trackers and evidence—the massacre had happened three or four weeks ago. These remaining children shouldn’t have still been alive.
Not that all of them were. The war hounds led them to fresh graves. Small ones.
“Someone’s been taking care of them,” Tisis said. “They’re too young to have survived this long by themselves.”
Men and women from Kip’s retinue were trying to comfort the children now, trying to engage them in play. It worked with a few. Others were still too traumatized to do anything more than mechanically chew the food offered them.
“What I’m taking you to see may be the answer to who’s been taking care of the kids,” Winsen said. “Or maybe he was part of the murdering. Hell, maybe both.”
They rode up the main track away from the empty village for a few minutes, and then cut over into farmland, passing through apple orchards that had been tended until recently.
They rode up a hillside orchard to where the top flattened out.
Who massacres a village, doesn’t take any loot, doesn’t burn anything, and kills everyone except the kids too young to speak? Why would the White King hide what he’d done here? He’d massacred other cities and deliberately left people alive to spread the tale.
And why did the name of the town seem familiar? Kip was certain he’d heard it before, but he must not have thought it was important at the time, because he hadn’t locked it in his memory.
“How’d you even think to come way out here?” Kip asked Winsen.
“Big Leo said something about this place from his parents’ traveling days with their troupe. I wanted to get away from the brats’ crying and thought I’d find some quiet out at these ruins. Didn’t expect this.”
They emerged from the orderly rows of trees into a wide clearing. It was almost a perfect circle. Even the great limbs of the old apple trees had been trimmed long, long ago to not intrude into the circle. Younger limbs did intrude, though, telling a tale of uneven husbandry or failing respect for old tradition.
In the center of the grassy circle stood a stone plinth, a few feet across and only as tall as a man. It was no great monument. Oddly, the earth around the base of the plinth was freshly cracked, as if something restless lay beneath it.
On top of the small plinth an adolescent sat cross-legged, hands draped over his knees. He was olive-skinned, with his raven hair in a short ponytail, naked to the waist, stringy rather than merely skinny, a leather band tied around one bicep, and wearing the deerskin trousers of a Blood Forest hunter. But in one relaxed hand he held a hell-stone dagger that was surely worth more than two fistfuls of rubies.
It appeared he’d been using the dagger on himself, for his body was encrusted with blood old and new in shades of scarlet and crimson and brown. He’d striped himself, perhaps in ritual mourning, lines down his forearms, lines on his face. Cuts deep enough to scar but not to maim, with older wounds poulticed but the blood not washed from his skin nor from his cruor-encrusted trousers.
Fresh blood coursed down his forehead into his left eye. The boy didn’t look up as Kip dismounted and came forward. Kip gestured for the others to stay back.
They ignored him; everything about this young hunter spoke death.
Some intuition held Kip back from speaking. He came before the young man and sat on the ground, legs akimbo in deliberate imitation, as if he were a disciple at the foot of his master.
I thought he was young. I was wrong.
The boy had eyes as old as a great oak that has seen the leaves brown and fall a thousand times, blossoming from green to grave, from bower to bier, leafy souls soaking the soil and feeding the tree again, like a cannibal hungry for the fruit of his own body.
Kip sat still, staring up at him. The old young man looked at him with the patience of the zephyrs chewing a mountain down, a quick form with a slow intent. The blood obscuring his left eye reminded Kip of the Parian tradition of the eye of mercy and the eye of justice, the good eye and the evil.
With the shedding of blood comes blindness.
And slowly, Kip’s mimicry became imitation, and imitation became communion. Communion not with each other, but each settling into the cold embrace of time and their mortality, separate souls in the night, but the same night, different journeys to the same end.
And then, as the blood dried on the young man’s obsidian blade and on his face, he became slowly familiar.
A swirl of the wind brought the young ancient’s wild scent to Kip’s nose, and suddenly Kip was gripped by blank, black fear. He was sitting before one of the most dangerous men in history.
Voice raw, Kip said, “Greetings, Sealgaire na Scian, Daimhin Web.”
Daimhin’s chest stopped in midbreath. Then, in a rocky voice like a man waking from a too-long slumber, “She said you would know me, Guile.”
Like a rusty lock cracking open at the key that was Daimhin’s name spoken aloud, Kip remembered the man’s card, all of it: touching the white stag with his very hand, the village braggart who disbelieved him, the unrequited love, the hunt, then coming home to the village burned to the ground by the White King’s outriders.
After that came the memories in blood: the hunting of men, dressing them like wild game, hung upside down, skinned and drained of blood to be found by their comrades outside their very tents. He remembered a dozen cruel games invented to terrorize the invading Blood Robes.
Who was the woman who’d told him of Kip coming?
“The Third Eye,” Kip said.
“She sent her message with this. It’s some leather I’ve never encountered.” Daimhin gestured to the armband he wore above his bicep. “It intrigued me more than her words. Arrogant, I thought her. She claimed to see the future. But how dare she tell me what to do? I have become a god of vengeance, a spirit of the forest. She bade me come here. To stop this. Then she begged. Words as wind to twist my will.”
“What is it?” Kip asked.
“Not snakeskin, nor any reptile known in these lands. I came here not to obey her but hoping she might tell me more. Perhaps this was some new animal to hunt, to test myself against. Perhaps I might lose my taste for hunting men. But it’s not done that. I’m like a wolf that takes one lamb and then cannot help but raid for sheep, no matter the dangers.” He fingered that leather band around his bicep, but Kip was too far away to see anything strange about it. “By the time I came, I was too late. Another village massacred while I was gone hunting.”
“Like your home village was. But Apple Grove this time,” Kip guessed.
Daimhin nodded bloody guilt.
“Why’d he do this?” Kip asked. Taking a village’s livestock, burning a few huts to halt resistance, taking a few men or women, Kip could understand why an invader would do those . . . but this? Both recklessly insane and secretive.
An invader doesn’t want its massacres to be secret. No one’s intimidated by a massacre they never learn about.