She stared down at the prone woman, her thoughts churning. Garry was missing, hidden from her spells. A side-effect of the artefact, whatever it was, or something else? Or… she shook her head as she heard a faint croak from the darkness. The spells would wear off and then… they’d probably pretend it had never happened. And… her mind spun as she turned to the door. If she’d stayed in the village, she would probably have wound up just like the poor woman. And she would have been exposed the moment she outlived her usefulness.
A wave of despondency washed over her. Do they even deserve to survive?
Her magic bubbled at the back of her mind, ready to cut loose, as she slipped back into the open air. The villagers were caught in a trap they’d never escape. They’d never have the chance to do anything but struggle for survival. The men would go out to the patchwork fields every morning, trying to scrabble out enough food for a few more days of life before coming home and drinking themselves into a stupor; the women would cook and clean and bear the brunt of their family’s anger before they grew too old and were sent out to die. And the children… they were doomed to grow up and repeat the cycle, time and time and time again. Her magic boiled. It would be easy, so easy, to burn the entire village to the ground and leave nothing but ashes behind. And…
Emily would never approve, Frieda told herself. There weren’t many people she cared about, let alone listened to, but Emily was right on top of the list. She’d find a way to make things better.
She sighed. The villagers didn’t deserve anything better. They’d treated her like shit, just for being the runt, before selling her to an uncertain fate. Frieda had no illusions. She’d been very lucky to be sent to Mountaintop, rather than a brothel or slave market. Not, she supposed, that anyone would have paid good money for her. She’d been a weakling, by local standards, and ugly beside. It had taken her several years of good food and healthy exercise — and magic — to grow into a young woman. If she’d stayed in the village, she’d be dead by now. No one would have taken her to wife.
“She’s gone,” someone wailed. “My child has gone!”
Frieda sighed inwardly and kept walking. It was probably a mercy. The poor girl was doomed to grow into a young women, get married off to some lout, bear his children and — if she was lucky — live just long enough to watch the cycle repeat itself before she died. Emily would have stopped to help, Frieda knew, but she… she just kept walking. Besides, it probably wasn’t that serious. The child had probably found a hidey-hole somewhere and gone to sleep. She’d done that as a little girl. Her back still had the scars.
The village fell away behind her as she kept walking aimlessly. She knew she should go straight back to the campsite, to report to Hoban, but she was lost in her own thoughts. The villagers were awful people and yet, she knew they were only doing what they needed to do if they wanted to survive. It was hard to think coldly and logically about the way they’d treated her. They’d had little choice — she really had been one more mouth to feed, one that might not even live long enough to grow into a young woman and get married off — but she couldn’t help taking it personally. It had been a mistake to return, she decided, as she shook off her funk and picked up speed. She’d stick around for another week and then…
A chill ran through the air as she crossed the boundary line. She couldn’t see the artefact, but she could feel it poisoning the land. How could Hoban not sense it? He’d told her stories of protected tombs, charmed to make diggers walk away… and forget, as they left, what they’d found… but this was different. Was something influencing his thinking? Or… or was he just determined to uncover the artefact and figure out what it actually was?
Which won’t be easy, if it dates back to the Faerie Wars, she mused. It might be completely beyond our comprehension.
Hoban nodded to her as she walked up to the site. “No sign of Garry,” he said, stiffly. “And the others swear blind they have no idea what happened to the missing tools.”
“I couldn’t find him,” Frieda said. “He wasn’t at his home, and the tracking spell simply refused to work. Again.”
“Someone is screwing with us,” Hoban growled. “Another magician, perhaps.”
Frieda frowned. It wasn’t impossible. Hoban had told her that it wasn’t the person who made the discovery who got the credit, but the person who reported back to the Archaeologist Guild. If someone was watching the dig from a safe distance — which wouldn’t have to be that far away, not in the Cairngorms — they might be planning to swoop down the moment the artefact was uncovered, kill the diggers and claim the credit for themselves. It would be risky — and the guild would probably smell a rat — but it could be done. Hell, the advance party had already vanished. The plotters might think they could get away with it. They might even be right.
“Perhaps,” she said, finally. “Or it might be someone a little closer to home.”
Hoban eyed her. “One of your old friends?”
Frieda scowled. “Ivanovo is hardly my friend,” she managed. She was surprised the headman’s son hadn’t gone whining to Hoban about Frieda turning him and his mates into frogs, even though they’d deserved it and worse. The bastard came from a society where the menfolk were responsible for their women, damn them. “But they do have a motive.”
“I see.” Hoban looked torn between the urge to demand answers, perhaps with magic, and a grim awareness it would be a severe breach of etiquette. “Why?”
“The more outsiders who come up here, the more their way of life is threatened,” Frieda told him. Hell, just by conscripting Ivanovo and his gang, the diggers had made it harder for the villagers to survive the winter. “They’ll want to do everything in their power to ensure we don’t find something that will draw more visitors.”
“We have money,” Hoban protested.
“Which is pretty useless if you don’t have anywhere to spend it,” Frieda pointed out, sardonically. “A bag of gold coins is worthless up here, so far from civilisation.”
She sighed. “I have an idea,” she said. “All we have to do is lie in wait.”
Chapter 6
Frieda knew, without false modesty, that patience wasn’t one of her virtues.
She’d spent most of her life chasing instant gratification, first in the Cairngorms and then at Mountaintop and Whitehall, because she believed, deep inside, that there would soon be no tomorrow. There was no point in waiting for something when she knew she might not last long enough for it to arrive. Even at Whitehall, when she’d known she finally had a future, it had been hard for her to learn to wait. The habit was simply too deeply ingrained in her very bones.
And yet, she had to wait now.
She sat in the hide, the hidden half-tent concealed near the dig, and waited. It felt wrong to be in the open air after nightfall, something that no one risked without a very good reason for fear of the Other Folk and other things that went bump in the night. She supposed their unknown enemies wouldn’t expect her to be doing anything of the sort, if indeed they bothered to think about it at all. It was very rare for the villagers to risk leaving their homes after dark.