Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (6 page)

“We were certain that you had been betrayed by
your messenger, and that last night you would all have been rounded up. But it
appears we were wrong.”

Dresbourn’s eyes narrowed. “How, pray, did you
come to such a conclusion?”

“Why, young Aedan, Clauman’s son, and your
daughter arrived in town a little after midnight. We assumed you had sent
them.”

Dresbourn’s face changed colour and when he next
spoke his voice was edged with steel. “Are they among you now?”

The two children were ushered to the front where
they dismounted.

“Kalry,” Dresbourn said, his voice shaking with
anger, “stable your pony and get into the house. I’ll deal with you later.” As
she moved away, he turned to Aedan and lifted his voice so that it carried well
beyond the two of them. “Was disgracing me and insulting my guest last night
insufficient amusement for you?” His voice rose. “Did you need to bring the
whole town to my doorstep to embarrass us further? Where is your imagined
treachery, Aedan?” he roared. “Answer me!”

Aedan tried to say something but no sound escaped
his throat.

“Is anyone else involved in this?”

A noise drew their attention from the timber-shed
roof where a sooty-faced Thomas stood and clambered to the ground. He
approached with his eyes fixed on his shoes, dragging a blanket.

“Who else?”

“D – Dara is in the treehouse,” Aedan stammered.

“What! You put a nine-year-old girl out in a treehouse
during a slaver threat!” Dresbourn was shouting for the entire farmyard to
hear.

“I didn’t really send her, she –”

“Silence! You have done more than enough talking.”
He turned to the swelling crowd, “Someone go and find her.” When he turned back
to Aedan, whatever restraint he had been exercising broke. “You insolent cur!”
he shouted, mouth twisted with rage as he raised his hand and strode forward.

But something changed in Aedan’s face. There was a
flash of recognition and then his features went slack with vacant terror. He
uttered an almost animal moan and sank to the ground, cringing, arms clutched
over his head, body shaking as a dark stain spread through his trousers.

“What is this! A coward? There’s enough talk of
your hair-brained adventures, but you can’t even stand up and take a beating. You
little fraud. Revealed at last for all to see!”

The crowd began to murmur. It was an unexpected sight
– a boy widely known for his pluck now cowering and whimpering in his own mess like
a beaten dog. This was not the way for a boy of the Mistyvales to behave when
disciplined. Men frowned, women talked, Emroy smiled. A young coward had been
stripped of his disguise.

The only person there who would have guessed the
truth of what was really happening in Aedan’s traumatized thoughts was in the
stable, out of sight. Only Kalry had glimpsed the damage and decay taking place
under the tough layer of bark; only she would have known that this was not fear
of her father, not cowardice, but a brokenness that ran far deeper.

“That’s enough, Dresbourn.” Nulty had managed to
work his way through the riders and stepped in front of the fuming nobleman. “If
there is fault here then I am as much to blame. What he did, he did in good
conscience to aid you not to harm you. Surely you can see that.”

Dresbourn ignored him as if he weren’t there. “Sheriff
Lanor, I do apologise and I assure you that this delinquent will be punished
most severely. His reins have clearly been too loose. His behaviour has put our
whole town at risk.”

“I can see it was no fault of yours,” the sheriff
replied. “But what of this threat? I have never known you to house the entire labour
force in your house after similar warnings.”

“That was at my bidding,” the lieutenant said, stepping
forward. “I am Lieutenant Quin from the Midland Council of Guards. I had it on
very good authority that this farmstead was under direct and immediate risk. It
was my first priority to secure the farm and arrange defences. I had planned to
be in the village today when I will gladly discuss the matter further with
you.”

“I look forward to it,” said Lanor. “Dresbourn, I
apologise for the intrusion.” With that he gave the signal. The group of riders
wheeled and left the farmyard.

Dresbourn lowered his gaze to where Aedan crouched
in the mud. “Get my horse into its stable,” he said, hovering over each word, “and
remove yourself from my land. You will not speak to my daughter again. If I
ever find you back here you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

“Dresbourn,” Nulty said, “can I just mention that –”

Dresbourn turned his back on them and walked away.
“See that this ridiculous man leaves before he injures someone,” he said as he
passed William.

Aedan’s hands were shaking so much he couldn’t undo
the straps. He fetched the bucket to give himself more height, not caring
anymore who saw. Still, he yanked and twisted to no effect, and finally gave
up. Putting his head against the pony’s flank, he let the sobs take him. What
did it matter who saw? He flinched as he felt a hand on his shoulder, but it
was gentle, and he turned to see Kalry’s tear-lined face.

“Let me help you,” she said. She unclipped the
straps and soon had the tack neatly stored.

Aedan choked back his misery and stood in silence.

“I’m sorry, Aedan,” she said. “It’s not fair. You
were trying to save everyone and you get this …”

Aedan couldn’t speak. He dropped his eyes, unable
to look at her.

“We’ll find a way to fix it,” she said. “I’ll talk
to my father when he is in a better mood.”

But Aedan knew there was no fixing what had been
done to him this morning. He had kept the nightmare locked away, and at
Badgerfields he had been able to live free of its horror. But now it had found
him. Now it would haunt him here too, even if he were allowed back. And he
would not be allowed back.

“Kalry!” her father’s summons boomed across the
courtyard. She took Aedan’s hand in both of her own. “We’ll fix it,” she said
again, and ran back to the house.

Aedan stared through the doorway. The courtyard
was clear. Everyone had returned to the house. Never had this place seemed so
empty to him. He lived with his parents, but this was his home. Had been his
home. The welcome was over. He trudged between the buildings with an ache that
threatened to tear him asunder.

It was like pushing his way through a dead dream.

Numb.

The walking took forever. The feelings of irrational
nightmarish fear and shame drained away, leaving him empty, hollow, and tired.
So tired.

The scene played over and over, the words etching
themselves into his memories. Coward. Fraud. He would never be rid of them. But
what did it matter anymore? What did he care? There was no return from this. Finding
a trough of water, he rinsed himself. It would go poorly if his father were to
find out.

But matters were not about to improve. As he
rounded the last building, Emroy appeared from the other side, walking in the
same direction, away from the manor house.

“What are you doing here?” Aedan asked in a frail
voice, tensing, trying to hide the catch in his throat.

“I live this way, remember.”

“But everyone else is still inside.”

“I have no interest in taking any more orders.
It’s well enough for you commoners to be bossed around, but I won’t stand for
that treatment any longer.” He swung his cane at the long grass. “The lieutenant
said he wanted good visibility before anyone left. This is good enough for me.
I told him so and walked out. Say, that was quite a show you put on. Fancy
raising a whole town to fight off non-existent bandits, or did you tell them it
was a dragon?”

Aedan put his head down and walked.

Emroy’s laugh oozed smugness. “It was really
interesting to see you crumple in the mud like that. You should have heard the
people talking about it, especially about how you wet yourself. We expected
more. Well they did. I always knew.”

Aedan had no fight in him. He kept silent.

They had covered about half a mile when they heard
the first screams.

Nulty hung back from the others. After being shoved and shooed
from the farm, it was no surprise that he wanted to keep to himself.

The road cut a gentle curve through the deep hillside
grass. It was so quiet, so peaceful. But Nulty huffed and pulled his whiskers
and finally began to speak his thoughts to the dappled mare.

“There was more at work there than the fear of a
beating, Pebble. Something is damaged in that boy, and something is unsettled
in me. Am I embarrassed? No, that’s not it. Perhaps angry with Dresbourn? That’s
not it either. No, it was something else. It’s something about the lieutenant, that
look he gave Aedan at the end. It was such a strange look. What do you think,
Pebble? Am I imagining monsters?”

He reached a bend in the road. Beyond this point he
would be unable to see the farm gate which had already grown tiny with
distance. He stopped, hesitated, and then appeared to make his mind up,
dismounting and settling down on a rock while Lanor and his men walked their tired
horses round the bend and out of sight.

The two boys spun around and stared at the manor house.
The screams rose. Morning had not yet broken through and the air was still hung
with frail mist so that only hints of movement could be seen. They ran back
along the path until the shapes became clearer. There appeared to be far more
people than they had left behind at the house, as if the townsmen had returned.
But the people were not fighting a fire or securing animals; they looked as
though they were struggling with each other while a growing number fell to the
ground. And suddenly Aedan realised what he was looking at.

“No!” he whispered.

Emroy let out a wordless whimper and dropped,
trembling into the grass. “Get down, Aedan! They’ll see you and come after us
too.”

Aedan’s thoughts were a jumbled confusion of fears
and disbelief. It was actually happening. Earlier, when thinking about the
possibility of slavers and what he could do about it, it had been easy to clear
his head and arrange his thoughts. As he stared, he felt tricked by his senses.
This was either not quite real or it was too real.

“Aedan! Get down, you idiot!”

Emroy’s voice was close and unmistakably real.
Aedan’s fuzzy thoughts, still sluggish from the earlier emotional battering,
were beginning to clear.

He dropped. The grass, thick and long, hid him
completely, but he knew he had been too slow. A glance confirmed this. Someone
was running towards them.

There were hundreds of places to hide on the farm
– tall pastures, hidden gullies, tangles of bush, dense forest, interlinking
barns and lofts. Aedan tried to think. If this had been one of the war games
they had played so often, he would already have made half-a-dozen plans and
selected the best. But here he crouched, shivering like a cornered rabbit.

Then he remembered the man approaching them. The
distance would be closing. He turned to look and in so doing jabbed his neck
with the crossbow. The crossbow! He still had it.

He tore it off his back, shoved his foot in the
stirrup and began to pull the string back to the catch. He felt as if his arms
would be wrenched from their sockets though he could only pull it half way. He
heard the sound of footfall. Time was up – he would have to bluff. Slipping a
bolt into the groove he stood and pointed the bow at the man. Only thirty feet separated
them, but Aedan hoped the darkness of the morning would hide the fact that the
bow was not bent.

The man stopped and shouted in a language Aedan
had never heard, then took a step forward. He was tall, rangy and sunburned,
and his features were exaggerated by a thick, oily beard platted into something
resembling black seaweed. His strong hands were not empty. One held loops of cord
and the other gripped a light club.

None of Dresbourn’s haughty looks had ever made Aedan
feel as he did under this man’s glare. The lack of respect for the two boys’
humanity was absolute, the capacity for cruelty limitless. Aedan shuddered. He
almost dropped the crossbow and fled, but then he realised that his bluff was
working. After a few more foreign words, the man turned and ran back to the
manor house, shouting at the top of his voice.

“He’ll be back,” Emroy wailed.

Aedan’s mind was starting to orientate itself in
this strange reality. He was beginning to feel the touch of details that so
often formed the building blocks of his strategies. Position, enemy intention,
misdirection, surprise, reinforcements … He had been taught such details and
used them in threats that were imagined and games that were real. Could he not
put together a plan for a real threat? With a shuddering effort he hauled
himself from the water of his internal floundering, and stood.

He looked at Emroy – quaking, whimpering. Instinct
told him to abandon someone so clearly unfit for anything, but that was
thinking like a rabbit again. With only one, there would be no chance of
coordinating anything.

“Follow me,” Aedan said. He slung the crossbow over
his shoulder, turned off the path and pushed through the long grass. It was so
heavy with dew that he was drenched after a few yards. He turned to check that
Emroy was following. The older boy’s face was slack with terror, but he was
moving. They climbed a small ridge and skidded down the far side, directly
above a cattle pen. Aedan looked back. The tell-tale path of disturbed dew was
as obvious as a paved road. He remembered something he had once used in a war
game played with Thomas and some of the other boys.

“Run to the back of the tool shed. Wait for me
there,” Aedan called as he scrambled down the bank towards the pen.

“Where are you going?” Emroy asked, clearly
unwilling to be left alone.

“I need to set a false trail. Go!”

Emroy hurried away through the grass, leaving a
clear trail behind him.

Once Aedan had the gate open, one or two flicks of
the whip sent the cows on their way and scattered them through the pasture.
There were enough trails now to confuse anyone. Aedan sprinted after several of
the cows that were heading towards Emroy. They took fright and sped from him at
loping gallops, carving a spiderweb of dewy tracks in the grass. There would be
no immediate suspicion cast on Emroy’s trail now.

Aedan could no longer see over the ridge, but he
was sure the slavers would be approaching it at speed. He ran as fast as the
heavy waist-high grass and waterlogged trousers would allow. When he reached
the buildings, he spotted Emroy crouching against a woodpile between two logs,
each with a long axe buried in it, chips of wood scattered around. It didn’t
take much imagination to see the axes put to another purpose.

“They will search here,” Aedan said, gasping for
breath. “We need to circle round to the forest on the other side of the manor
house.”

Emroy remained where he was. Aedan knew that waiting
here would destroy any chance of sending for help. There was no time for
argument.

 “Stay if you want,” he said, “but I’m leaving.”
With that he ran out along the track that led down, away from the manor house
and towards the homesteads. It wasn’t long before he heard Emroy’s heavy
clumping behind him. The ground was hard-packed here and took little
impression. It was the perfect place to depart from the track.

As soon as the houses came into view, Aedan
stopped and turned to the deep strip of plane trees that edged this side of the
farm. Keeping his feet together he sprang as far as he could into the grass,
then repeated the procedure in a zigzag, haphazard fashion until he reached the
dry forest floor.

“What are you playing at?” Emroy said. “This is no
time for games.”

“Something my father taught me. These marks don’t
look like people walking. If they follow us, they will ignore this and think we
went down to the houses. Do you think you can land where I did without touching
anything in between?”

Emroy snorted but did as Aedan suggested, surprise
showing in his face at how much ground the smaller boy had covered with each
bound. He looked more than a little pleased with himself when he was able to
match the effort.

“Keep off the soft ground,” Aedan said, picking a
path that threaded over as much rock as he could find. By the time they had
walked a few hundred feet, the track they had left was hidden by a screen of
undergrowth and tree trunks. Aedan changed his direction and headed towards the
farm gate, picking up the pace to a brisk jog, but he had to slow down again because
of Emroy’s blundering tread. The boy crashed his way over the ground like a
blindfolded colt on jittery legs. In his defence though, plane trees made for a
noisy floor with big flakes of bark and dry twigs aplenty. Moving in silence
required quick eyes and quicker feet.

After a few hundred yards, Aedan heard shouts in
the direction of the track they had left. He stopped and waited for their
pursuers to move out of earshot – it was not worth giving Emroy the opportunity
to plant one of his hooves on a nice thick branch and announce his presence. Overhead,
a starling raised a raucous alarm. Aedan hoped these men were not attuned to
such clues. The shouts dwindled away towards the homesteads and the two boys
moved on, picking up the pace.

They jogged now as the trees began to thin and the
gate came into view. Dropping down, they crawled over the road – a double
groove carved by a thousand cart journeys – and slipped into the forest on the
other side. The cover here was far thicker. Dark oak leaves still held night’s
shadows under heavy boughs.

Emroy was peering into the dimness with
undisguised fear.

“Wait here,” Aedan said. “I’m going to get a
better look. I need to see where they are being taken.” Emroy did not object
and showed no desire to move an inch further into the forest. This was Nymliss.
His big eyes made it clear that he believed all the stories.

Aedan thought of saying something to reassure him,
but then remembered how Emroy had treated him earlier and decided against it.
He slipped into the shadows, quickly found a deer track and padded away. He
knew this particular track. It branched ahead. The left branch ran close to the
forest edge and at one point gave a view of the manor house. When he reached
the spot, he crawled forward until he could see between the leaves of a dense
bush. Earlier, the details had been hidden by distance. Now he saw the blood,
the torn and soiled clothes, the looks of disbelief, pain, and horror, the way
in which people had been turned to animals. By animals.

Many were crying. Tulia began to wail and a
heavyset man walked over to her, made her look at him and placed his fingers on
his lips. When she wailed again he whipped her like Aedan had never seen any
beast whipped. She screamed and the man repeated the gesture. This time she was
silent.

Aedan felt his composure crumbling. He drew his
attention away from her and passed his eyes over the bodies strewn across the
grass. They were all there. From Dresbourn in his fine coat to little Dara,
they lay on the ground, roped hand and foot. Some like Tulia were even being
gagged.

William, Dorothy, Thomas … he counted them off as
he recognised their forms. His breath caught and his vision blurred as he found
the tangle of straw-like hair. “Kalry,” he whispered.

One of the foreigners ran up to Quin who was
clearly in charge, and gave a brief report. Quin hit him hard and yelled in a way
that made his feelings clear though the language was foreign. He walked through
the litter of writhing bodies, kicking and stamping until he reached Dresbourn.

“Where are they?” he yelled at him.

Dresbourn’s white eyes were as blank with fear as
confusion.

“Aedan and that snobby brat who left early. Where
are they? How could they disappear? You must know where they would go.”

“I – I don’t know.” Dresbourn stammered.

Quin walked over to Kalry grabbed her by the hair
and lifted her off the ground. She shrieked with pain, and Aedan almost charged
out of his hiding. Quin stood her in front of her father and drew a knife.

“No, please!” Dresbourn cried. “I’ll tell you
everything I know.”

“I’m listening.” Quin pressed the tip of the knife
against her neck.

Aedan’s fists were clenched so hard that some of
the nails drew blood. It was only by the greatest force of will that he managed
to stay where he was. Showing himself now would aid nobody. He had to wait.

“Aedan lives three miles to the west, but if he
saw he would probably head for the town. It is possible to cut straight down
the slope. Emroy will be hiding somewhere. Eventually he will go home. His
father owns the mansion near the south-west boundary.”

Quin considered this. “Yes, Dresbourn,” he said at
length. “That sounds like an honest answer. I would not have expected you to
show any loyalty to the boys. Your assessment sounds correct, but even if the
meddlesome one does run off to town as you say, I don’t think anyone will listen
to him a second time. The other boy has the look of a coward and he will sit
tight until it is too late to do anything that might aid you.”