“Tell me the names of your friends,” Dagmar demanded.
“Peck and Quinn of the King’s Village. We saw the woman. We didn’t know she was yours.”
“But you knew she was not yours. You knew the sheep were not yours,” Dagmar said. “Find your friends. Come to the temple and take your just punishment. If you do not, your sentence, when you are found, will be death.”
Bayr set the man on his feet and released him without a word. The man toddled down the hill like a drunken sailor on board a shifting deck. Ghost felt the grass shift beneath her feet as well, and closed her eyes, awash in sudden dizziness.
The next moment she was being swept up, and she cried out, certain she was falling. Then Dagmar’s arms tightened around her, and she realized she was being held.
“I w-will c-carry her, Uncle,” Bayr offered.
“See to the sheep, Bayr.” Dagmar sounded close to tears, and Ghost opened her eyes. Bayr had already turned back to obey his uncle.
“I will see to them,” she insisted, but her words whistled past her lips oddly. She was panting, her fear distorting her voice. She tried again. “It was only fear that made me lightheaded. I am not harmed,” she reassured him, concentrating on her speech. He had begun to move swiftly toward the temple walls at the top of the hill.
His arms tightened but he didn’t slow. “You just can’t feel it yet.”
“Feel what?”
He snorted, as if she’d simply proven his point.
“You are carrying me again,” she complained.
“I am. Thankfully we don’t have as far to go this time.”
“Put me down.”
“No.”
“You are a keeper, not a pack mule.”
“And you are a shepherdess, not a soldier. That didn’t stop you.”
“I will go back to my cottage,” she insisted.
“You will not. Not ever again.”
His vehemence shocked her into silence, but only for a few minutes.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked.
“To the temple.”
“I don’t want to be seen, Keeper.”
“Your hair is bound, and your face and clothes are covered in blood,” he barked. “No one will see the color of your skin.”
She closed her eyes and covered her face with hands that had begun to shake. She heard the gate swinging open, heard the call from the wall, the questions and alarm being flung at the keeper, but Dagmar didn’t slow as he made his reassurances to the curious and concerned. The sound of his stride changed as dirt became cobbles and, beyond the cover of her hands, sunlight became gloom. Then the air cooled and the sounds slipped away, and Ghost peeked through her fingers in wary wonder. She had never been in such a place. The smell of incense clung to the beams and the floors, to the rock and the relics, and she begged again to be put down. Such a place required dignity.
Dagmar set her on her feet, but he did not release her. She could only stare at the soaring columns and the endless stone, the light filtering down from colored glass over arches and angles that stole her breath and raised the flesh on her arms. With the prickling came pain, and she realized some of the blood that soaked her sleeve belonged to her.
She gasped, and Dagmar’s hand tightened at her waist.
“Come. Please,” Dagmar said, urging her forward. He led her through one door and then another, winding his way to a room that contained vials and tinctures in long rows. A low wooden table laden with hooks and blades made her hesitate, but Dagmar led her to a long bench and bade her sit.
Shallow cuts crisscrossed her arms. The man with the whip had found his mark, but she’d hardly felt the tearing of her flesh. She hardly felt it now.
“They are just sheep, woman,” Dagmar whispered, his eyes on her wounds. “You are not required to die for them.”
“I am nowhere near death, Keeper.”
“You were very near death today,” he murmured. “Those men who attacked the herd are well acquainted with it. What happened today will happen again. I am surprised it has not happened before.”
“It has.”
His eyes snapped from the water he was drawing from a nearby pail.
“I have always frightened them away. I can be quite terrifying to look upon.”
His pale gaze turned glacial.
“Are keepers healers?” she asked, eager to speak of something else.
“It is one of the ways we make ourselves useful.” He washed the blood from her arms and then covered the oozing welts and lacerations with his hands like he believed his palms could close them.
“What are you doing?”
“I am asking the gods to close your wounds.”
“Does that work?” Her doubt rang in her question, and he raised his eyes to hers, a slight smile on his lips.
“It doesn’t ever hurt to ask. But the runes work better than anything. In some regards, they too are like prayers. The gods—or the fates—decide whether or not they are answered.” He wetted his fingers in the blood that oozed from her deepest wound and began to paint shapes on her arm. It tickled, and she squirmed.
“Shh,” he murmured. “Hold still.” She did, her stomach fluttering oddly, her eyes on his bloody fingertip drawing pictures on her skin. He drew one at her wrist and another near her shoulder.
“Are those runes?” she asked, breathless.
He nodded once, whispered something in a language that she didn’t understand, and then, dipping his fingers in a bowl of water, he wiped the drawings away.
“What did you say?” she pressed.
“I asked that all the poisons be kept from your wounds. It is a rune that works well on rodents and all creeping things.”
“They weren’t runes of healing?”
“Your body is very adept at healing itself if all invaders are kept out.”
“Invaders?” she whispered.
“It is the invaders we cannot see that are the most deadly.” He stepped away. “I will draw the runes again tomorrow when we change your bandages.”
“Why did you not just leave the runes in place?”
“We draw the runes, ask the gods to acknowledge them, and then we erase them. They are sacred . . . and powerful. And we do not share them.”
“If you leave them, I might learn them,” she said, understanding dawning.
He nodded once. “It is the way we guard the power. Runes are forbidden to all but the Keepers of Saylok.” He paused and then said with great emphasis, “But the keepers are not the only ones with power.”
She met his eyes and frowned, not understanding.
“You do not speak to the sheep, but they listen to you,” he said, his voice soft and his eyes steady.
Ghost scoffed. “It is not listening . . . it is obeying. Or . . . trusting. I have always been good with animals.”
“You said they feel your emotion.”
She cocked her head. He was intent on something, but she could not fathom what.
“Remember the horse the day of the coronation? You said he reacted to your emotions,” he said.
“You remember that?”
“Yes. I’ve thought of it many times since while watching you with the sheep. That gift . . . or ability . . . is the same power that fuels the runes. It manifests itself in many ways and in many people. If you had been born in Saylok, you might have been a supplicant.”