11
A high, tortured howl woke Vi Sovari from a dream of Kylar fighting gods and monsters. She sat up instantly, ignoring the aches from another night on rocky ground. The howl was miles away. She shouldn’t have been able to hear it through the giant sequoys and the deadening morning mists, but it continued, filled with madness and rage, changing pitch as it flew with incredible speed from the Wood’s center.
Only then did Vi become aware of Kylar through the ancient mistarille-and-gold earring. She’d bonded Kylar as he lay unconscious at the Godking’s mercy. It had saved Cenaria and Kylar’s life, and now Vi and Kylar could sense each other. Kylar was two miles distant, and Vi could feel that he held something of incredible power. She could feel him reaching a decision. The power departed from him, and he felt an odd sense of victory.
Suddenly, it was as if the sun were rising in the south. Vi stood on shaky knees. A hundred paces away, at the enormous sequoys of the Dark Hunter’s Wood, the air itself turned a brilliant gold, radiating magic. Even to Vi, untrained as she was, it felt like the kiss of a midsummer’s sunset on her skin.
Then the color deepened to reddish gold. Every dust mote floating in the air, every water droplet in the mists was a flaming autumnal glory.
When Vi was fifteen, her master, the wetboy Hu Gibbet, had taken her to a country estate for a job. The deader was some lord’s bastard who’d made himself a successful spice merchant and decided not to repay his underworld Sa’kagé investors. The estate was covered with maples. That autumn morning Vi moved through a world of gold, carpeted with red-gold leaves, the very air awash in color. As she stood over the corpse, she had mentally retreated to a place where glorious crimson leaves weren’t paired with pulsing arterial blood. Hu beat her for it, of course, and to those beatings Vi had mentally acquiesced. A distracted wetboy is a dead wetboy. A wetboy knows no beauty.
The howl ripped through the wood again, freezing her bones. Moving fast, terribly fast, it Nigh changed pitch higher and then lower and then higher, all in the space of two seconds, as if it were flying to and fro faster than anything could possibly move. Everywhere it went, it was followed by the faint, tinny sound of rending metal. Then came a man’s scream. More followed.
There was a battle in the wood. No, a massacre.
All the while, the wood pulsed with magic. The flaming red was fading to yellow green and then to the deep green of vitality, the scent of new grass, fresh flowers.
“Kylar has given it new life,” Vi said aloud. She didn’t know how she knew, but she knew Kylar had put something into the Wood—and that something was rejuvenating the entire forest. Kylar himself felt invigorated, well in a way he hadn’t felt in the week she’d shared the bond with him. Whole.
Vi felt something wrong behind her. Her hands flashed to the daggers at her belt. Then she was on her back. Even as air whooshed from her lungs, a crackling ball of blue energy hissed and spat through the air where she’d been standing a moment before.
The most Vi could do was gasp, trying to catch her wind. It was several blind seconds before she could sit up.
Before her, a man wrapped in dark brown leather put his foot on a corpse’s face and wrenched a dagger from its eye. The corpse was wearing the robes of a Khalidoran Vürdmeister, and black, tattoo-like vir were still twitching under the surface of his skin. Vi’s savior cleaned his dagger and turned. His feet made no sound. A multitude of cloaks, vests, pocketed shirts, and pouches of all sizes covered the man, all of them horsehide, all tanned the same deep brown and worn soft from long use. Twin forward-curving gurkas were tucked into the back of his belt, an unstrung scrimshawed short bow was slung over his back, and Vi could see numerous hilts protruding from his garments. He unlaced a brown mask that concealed all but his eyes and pulled it back around his shoulders. He had an affable face; wry, almond-shaped brown eyes; loose black hair; and broad, flat features with high cheekbones. He could only be a Ymmuri stalker.
Stalkers were reputed to be the greatest hunters of all the Ymmuri horse lords. They were said to be invisible in the forests or on the grassy steppes in the east where the Ymmuri lived. They never shot prey that wasn’t running or on the wing. And they were all Talented. In other words, they were grassland wetboys. Unlike wetboys, they didn’t kill for pay but for honor.
And f*ck me if there isn’t more truth to the stories about them than there is to the ones about us.
The stalker folded his hands behind his back and bowed. “I am Dehvirahaman ko Bruhmaeziwakazari,” he said with an odd cadence that came from growing up speaking a tonal language. “You may . . . hearken? . . . call, yes, call me Dehvi.” He smiled. “You are Vi, yes?”
Vi rose, swallowing. This man had snuck up on her—a wetboy—and thrown her to the ground easily, and now he stood smiling and friendly. It was as unnerving as having a blue ball of death pass inches from her face.
“Come,” Dehvi said. “This place is safe no more. I will escort you.”
“What are you talking about?” Vi asked.
“Magic . . . calls to? asks to? hearkens to? the demon of the Wood.” Dehvi wrinkled his nose. Vi knew what he meant, but she wasn’t sure what word he was looking for.
“Beckons!” he said, finding it. “That beckon means death.”
“That call,” Vi said, putting his words together slowly. Magic called the Hunter. The Vürdmeister had used magic, and Vi was Talented. The Hunter might be coming.
The stalker frowned. “These word give me difficults. Too many meanings.”
“Where are you taking me?” Vi asked. And do I have any choice? Her body relaxed to Alathea’s Waking and her fingers dipped casually to check her daggers on their way to brush the dirt from her pants—except the daggers were gone.
The stalker regarded her coolly. Clearly she hadn’t checked casually enough. “To Chantry.”
He turned and knelt beside the corpse, muttering under his breath in a language Vi didn’t recognize. He spat on the man three times, cursing him not with foul words as Vi cursed, but actually commending the man’s soul to some Ymmuri hell.
“You wish to go?” Dehvi asked, offering her the daggers.
“Yes,” Vi said, taking them gingerly. “Please.”
“Then come. The demon hunts. Is best to leave.”