Likewise, the communities thinned out, with farmers and cattle owners clustered around the different keeps and river communities. Unfortunately, that little fact exacerbated the friction between the three wizards. Par-Salian advocated staying close to the roads and paths for safety. Ladonna wanted to spend the night in an inn, where they’d be warm and wonderfully dry. Tythonnia, however, insisted on sticking to the wilderness, where they could avoid civilization and the threat of discovery.
“You’re not happy unless we’re all miserable!” Ladonna said.
Tythonnia almost growled. She was tired of that argument every few miles. Couldn’t they understand how their course helped them? What was she supposed to do? Order the elements to comply to Ladonna’s whims? Turn around because their resident Black Robe fretted?
“You can’t spend your life being pampered!” Tythonnia shot back. She prodded her horse forward.
“Pampered? I’ve lived hardships that would have killed you, farm girl,” Ladonna said, nudging her own horse forward. Her skills as a rider had improved substantially, which annoyed Tythonnia. She preferred Ladonna when she was too focused on riding to complain.
“I’m sure wearing all that jewelry is such a terrible burden!”
“Tythonnia,” Par-Salian said, “Ladonna, stop bickering!” His voice was low. Perhaps he was fatigued. But Tythonnia recognized the edge to it, the frayed nerve about to snap.
Ladonna pulled hard on the reins and wheeled her Aban-asinian about. “Perhaps if you chose a side-”
Par-Salian laughed, a bitter guffaw that cut Ladonna off and showed the exhaustion in his rain-streaked face. “Choose a side? Is that what you think? This is what I get for trying to support you both? Fine … here’s my side. How about you show that backbone the Black Robes are so renowned for and stop complaining! You do your order a disservice. And stop trying to undermine everyone’s authority! Until we reach Palanthas, you follow Tythonnia’s lead and my instructions!” He turned on Tythonnia next. “And you … take us closer to the roads where the travel will be easier, and find us a damn inn for the night so we can sleep properly for once. No arguments! I will suffer no more disrespect from either of you. Once you’ve spent another ten years within the orders, serving them to every bloody inch that I have, then maybe you can address me as an equal. Until then, I find you wanting-in age, in skills, and in manners! Now shut up. Do you hear me? And I swear … one more argument, and I’ll give you both a lesson in magic you won’t soon forget.”
They sat there a moment, their horses uneasy in the storm of rain and argument. Both women stared at Par-Salian in shock; they’d never seen him so short-tempered. Until then, he’d taken matters in stride, perhaps too much so. They could see the raw, exposed nerve now. Whether or not Tythonnia agreed with his outburst, it was no time to argue her position. She nodded her head and wheeled her horse about.
“This way,” she said. “There’s a village nearby, I think … maybe they have a barn we can use.”
A triumphant smile began to mark Ladonna’s lips, but Par-Salian silenced it with a glare. He would brook no more quibbling that night, for which Tythonnia was grateful. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could hold her temper in check. She wasn’t sure how much longer any of them could hold back. She hoped a night spent somewhere warm and dry would improve everyone’s disposition.
Tythonnia, Par-Salian, and Ladonna stared at the village in disbelief. A road eaten into the plains’ grass served as its axis. No more than four or five buildings dotted either side, likely once small shops that catered to travelers and local farmers-a trading post, a smithy, a tavern. Fire, however, had made them indistinguishable. Bodies lay in the streets, some purple and bloated in rainwater puddles, others charcoaled by the flames. The sky seemed to cry harder at the sight, and the curtains of rain drenched the macabre stage.
The three exchanged glances, uncertain of what had transpired here. In the mud lay a sword or two, and an ominous farmer’s scythe stabbed into the spine of the ground. Otherwise, there was nothing to show for their deaths, no arrows or dead horses, no signs of battle. Just corpses and the cindered remains of buildings.
“We should leave this place, I think,” Ladonna said.
“We can’t leave the bodies out to rot,” Par-Salian whispered.
“We’ll tell one of the neighboring villages,” Tythonnia said. “Hartford is a day’s ride from here.”
“Whatever killed them might still be about,” Par-Salian said.
“Exactly why we should go,” Tythonnia replied. She glanced around and was sickened by the charred body of someone too small to be an adult. A fabric-sewn rag doll, untouched by the flames, lay inches from the corpse’s fragile hand. Tythonnia looked away.
“No,” Par-Salian said. “I will not send more villagers to their doom. Not without knowing what unfolded here.”
The same thought must have crossed Ladonna’s and Tythonnia’s minds because neither of them pressed the matter. They would follow Par-Salian. He was older than both of them, and while age counted for little, he was rumored to be in line to lead the White Robes. That meant there was tremendous magic at his disposal.
Ladonna climbed down from her horse.
“What are you doing?” Par-Salian asked, his voice an urgent hiss.
“You wish to play leader? Fine!” Ladonna said. “Good leaders know when to rely on the expertise of their allies.”
Tythonnia bit her tongue as Ladonna handed her the reins of her horse. The black robe wizard calmly walked up to one of the unburned corpses as though long intimate with it. She kicked away a rag doll lying near the body and managed to turn the corpse over onto its back with the tip for her boot.
Tythonnia could not stop staring at Ladonna in that moment. There was something in her expression, the mesmerizing and lethal grace of someone utterly sure in her craft. Magic was a dance for her, sometimes the dance of a seductress and sometimes the dance of a tribal warrior. Silently, Ladonna knelt in the muddy soil and removed her gloves. With practiced hands, she clasped the sides of the dead man’s face and opened his opaque eyes with her thumbs.
Ladonna leaned in close, as though to kiss the corpse. She began whispering to it, her breath congealing as cold vapor. A trickle of mist seeped from the corpse’s lips.
The Black Robes and their skills in necromancy were renowned among wizards, and frankly, the skills of healing and resurrection powers once attributed to holy women and men were skills of the distant past, things of legends. No, she was not healing him or bringing him back to life. She was stroking the tattered veils that bordered the lands of death. She was coaxing a little of what was left back into its vessel. The corpse was no more living than an echo of the original voice.
Par-Salian blanched and looked away; necromancy was a controversial art, surrounded by its most vocal Black Robe supporters and White Robe detractors. The Red Robes remained neutral, as always, judging the situation and not the practice. Tythonnia continued watching out of curiosity because she’d never seen anyone use the magic of the dead before. It distracted her from her nagging thoughts, that there was something she should have noticed. But the whispers of the dead swelled the air, their ghostly strokes falling between the patter of droplets and finding all the negative spaces to fill. Tythonnia couldn’t understand their words, but the dead were speaking and Ladonna was listening.
Even when the corpse tilted its head up to within an inch of Ladonna’s ear, even when it reached up to stroke her face and stopped just shy of Ladonna’s cheek, Ladonna never flinched or appeared distressed. Tythonnia marveled at her bravery and had to wave a startled Par-Salian back from saving Ladonna.
Whatever Tythonnia was overlooking, however, continued to nag at her. It would not remain silent, even with all her attentions focused on Ladonna. She shook her head the same way she might shoo a fly bothering her and looked around. What was she missing? What was so important that-