Shifting Shadows: Stories from the World of Mercy Thompson Read online

  My father had torn out his throat.

  Deiniol was dying, impaled, as Dafydd had been, on the forest lord’s tines. The light dimmed in his eyes, and they fogged over with death’s touch. His presence fell from my senses. My father howled in grief, and I echoed the sound.

  I had not liked them, any of them. But they had been my pack, my family in spirit. Dafydd had led the others to our aid and given his life to save mine. I mourned them properly.

  The fae lord’s body moved, and I turned with a snarl to face another attack. He was still dead, but as ice melts into water, his body melted into the soil, leaving clothing and accouterments behind. In only a few moments, the only bodies left to rot on the forest floor belonged to my pack.

  Da tried to stand up, but the fae lord’s knife was still embedded in his hip. I nudged him ungently, telling him to quit moving.

  Then I began my change to human. It should have been harder as I had changed earlier that day, but it wasn’t. The pain was still there, but not so much of it, and the actual change felt . . . natural. Good.

  In human skin again, I knelt beside my father. It had taken too long to change, and he’d already begun healing around the knife blade—just the flesh so far and not the bone, which would have been more complicated and more painful to fix.

  “Quick, then,” I told him, and held him down with one hand and jerked the blade free with the other.

  He panted with the pain but made no other sound. He would heal now—and he wouldn’t thank me for hovering. He didn’t like being watched while he was in pain. None of my medical knowledge had ever done the werewolves much good—they either lived or they died. My experience told me that my father would live. Probably.

  A crow had landed on Dafydd, and I drove it off. In response to my growl, the fae woman made a faint, pained noise.

  I’d forgotten about her. I knew nothing of her but the taste of her blood in my mouth. I had not seen her face or heard her voice. She was nothing to me.

  Nothing but my victim.

  I did not know how long my freedom from the witch would last. Maybe if Da and I ran fast enough, we’d escape her entirely. I didn’t believe that, but it was a faint possibility. But Da had to heal—and maybe in the meantime I could be of use to someone.

  There was a fae creature of a kind I’d never seen beside the woman’s body. She was maybe half the size of a human woman, no taller than my waist. Where her dress, which was silvery blue of a fine weave, did not cover, her body was covered with a coarse green-and-gray hair that thickened on the top of her head. She should have looked grotesque, but there was a rightness, a naturalness to her form that made her oddly beautiful. She smelled female with a strong hint of power and growing things.

  Her face was human enough for me to find expression on it, but it reminded me more of a fox’s than a woman’s, an impression not dispelled by triangular ears, now half-flattened along her skull. Her eyes were overly large, and she squinted like a being more used to shadows than light, wrinkling her nose and panting half in fear and half in desperation as I approached.

  She hissed and bared sharp, weasel-like teeth and put herself between the wounded woman and me.

  “I mean no harm, little one,” I told her. “I have some training. Let me help.”

  “You would help my lady? You who hurt her?” The words were clear, if oddly accented.

  “Before I was a monster, I was a healer,” I told her. “This hurt I and my—” My what? Fellow monsters? It had been a long, long time since I’d talked to anyone but my da. It felt odd to put my thoughts into words, especially as I was distracted. “My pack. We were under duress and would not have hurt her otherwise.” A lie. I did not lie. Once, it had been a matter of pride to me. So I amended my statement to make it truth. “I would not have hurt her otherwise.”

  She looked at me. Glanced over at my da, whose hip was scabbed over. I noticed that he was changing to human himself, and I stepped a little sideways, between her and Da. He was less able to protect himself effectively when changing.

  She settled a little, as if my action had reassured her, and stepped aside.

  I stripped the fae woman’s body free of the rags of clothing our attack had left her. Her skin was darker than anything I’d seen on a human, a warm shade like a doe’s summer coat. But the ridged scars that crossed and recrossed themselves like a macabre braid were white. Some looked as though they were put on her body with a whip, but more were the result of wounds very similar to the freshly open ones we’d given her.

  In addition to the wounds from this day, there were a number of healing wounds. Bite wounds. Doubtless from the hounds that the forest lord had lost control of.

  “Will she live?” The little creature crouched beside me and reached out to pet the wounded woman’s arm.

  “I don’t know fae,” I told her. “But she’s lived through worse.”

  “She should be healing faster than this,” the little creature said. “She always has before.”

  I thought of Adda and his festering wounds, and said nothing. The forest lord’s body had gone to earth, but his clothing remained. I went to where he had died and appropriated his fine cloak, a bronze eating knife, and a flask filled with bracata—wort fermented with honey. I had found such alcohol good for cleaning wounds.

  Returning to the woman, I cut the cloak into strips and used them to bind up the worst of the wounds.

  “These should properly be stitched,” I told the little creature. “But I don’t have needles or thread. Without that, they will leave scars behind—like the other wounds have.” I frowned at a nasty mass of scars on her ribs. “Why did he do this?” I asked.

  She bowed her head. “She is two-natured, like you and her father, though not two-formed. This aspect, her sidhe aspect, is impervious to her father’s commands. But her other self is closer to the natural world and must obey him. It rises to protect her from danger or harm. Her father needed her obedience to build a thing—a powerful and bad thing. She would not do it, so he tortured her with fear and pain until the other part of her rose.”

  “He was her father?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  The fae woman looked fragile and broken on the forest floor. But to resist such treatment, to have risen again, over and over—such a one was tougher than she looked.

  “I can’t do much,” I told the fae creature. “I don’t have the supplies. I can clean the wounds and stop the bleeding and give her the chance to heal. She needs to be somewhere out of the weather. There is snow coming.”

  “There is shelter.” She bobbed her head. “And we have needles and thread. What else do you need?”

  “Honey,” I told her. “Willow bark. Water. How far away is the shelter?”

  “Shelter is not far,” she said. “Twenty minutes’ walk. If you can bring her, I can take you. And also there might other items you mention be found, an Underhill wills it to be so.” She sounded doubtful. “What is not there I can steal.”

  Promise of a shelter and supplies changed my to-do list. I finished stanching the bleeding. If the little creature could run, we could turn her twenty minutes to half that.

  “Samuel.” My da sounded tired. I looked at him, and his face was drawn and gray. The mark on his hip was still an angry red. “I’ll find you after I dispose of the bodies.”

  I nodded and wrapped the remnants of the forest lord’s cloak around myself, using the fabric to secure the flask of bracata and the knife and sheath. I picked up the woman. She was light in my arms, lighter than my wife had been, though she was taller.

  I could remember the feel of my wife’s weight in my arms, but I could not see her face. I staggered a step as my mind went blank in panic because I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember her face or her name, just glimpses of a lifetime. My breath caught in my throat with the terrible grief of loss. It had mattered a lot l
ess while my grandmother had me on her leash. I’d lost more than my humanity while in my grandmother’s hands—I’d lost my wife and my children and I had not recognized how terrible the loss was. I could not remember them, not their faces or their names.

  “You are hurt?” asked the little fae creature tentatively.

  “Yes,” I said because I would not lie. “But not in the way that you mean.”

  My father said a name that slid off my ears. He waited a moment, then said, “Samuel?”

  I must have looked a little wild-eyed when I turned to him. “She stole my memories. Stole my name.”

  He nodded once. “There will be a reckoning.”

  “Do you remember them? My wife and children?” I asked. When he nodded again, my panic eased. “As long as someone does, they aren’t lost.”

  “They are not lost as long as I live,” my father agreed. “I’ll remember them for you. Go ahead, Samuel. I’ll come by and by.”

  I nodded. I turned to the little fae creature. “I can run with her. Lead me as quickly as you can, and I will follow.”

  The fae creature ran. She stumbled a little here and there, and I had the impression that she was very, very tired. But she was quick, so it didn’t take us long before we came upon a small hut that was less inviting than my grandmother’s and looked as though no one had lived in it for years. She reached over her head and pulled a chain to release the latch. When she opened the door, I knew it for a fae residence because it was larger on the inside than on the outside.

  As soon as I stepped into it, I felt an odd, hostile personality brush up against me. Letting my lips curl in a snarl, I pulled my patient closer to me in a futile effort to protect her from something I could not detect with any of my usual senses. The odd entity paused, then slid over my wolf in an exuberant and laughing run, and I smelled, for a very brief moment, the rich scent of summer flowers.

  The little fae hesitated, then murmured, “The father is dead, so the lady is mistress here. I think we shall find what we need to tend her wounds. Follow me.”

  She took me to a large room and bade me lay the woman on a tick of straw that rested on ropes suspended on a carved wooden frame. She lit the fire in the room with a look and a word in a language I did not understand. Then left as I cut the bindings I’d put on the first and largest wound.

  I cleaned the wound with the alcohol. By the time I was through, the little creature had returned with a bronze needle, fine thread, a jar of honey, several jars of salve, and a pitcher.

  “The thread is too fine,” I told her. “It will tear her skin. I need something more like thread to stitch leather.”

  She nodded and trotted away.

  The pitcher was warm when I picked it up, and the brown liquid inside tasted strongly of willow bark. I set it aside and tested the salves, all but one of which I could identify the contents of. That one, I set aside with the pitcher.

  The fae woman’s little friend returned with appropriate thread and a bucket of water, and I began the tedious task of cleaning, stitching, and bandaging.

  The woman didn’t stir beyond a flutter of her eyelashes when I stitched up a particularly nasty tear over her hip. The worst hurt was a gash in her thigh that was too old to stitch. It would likely cause her trouble long after it healed. I covered it with a salve of fat, honey, yarrow, and comfrey that the little fae, who had shyly introduced herself as Haida, had brought back when I asked if she had such a thing.

  “It was lurking on the shelves in her kitchen,” she said, as if I’d asked for an explanation for why her kitchen could supply exactly the salve I’d asked for. “This is my lady’s home now. And it approves of you.” She gave me sharp look and a warning jerk of her chin. “For now.”

  Someone knocked briskly at the door, but before I could do much more than stand up from where I’d been kneeling beside the bed, the door opened, and my da came striding into the room where I was working. He looked at the woman, then at me.

  “Is she worth the death we have laid before her?” he asked me soberly.

  “I do not know those of yours that died today. As for the forest lord, he well earned the ending of his life and no blame to my lady for it,” Haida said. “But my lady is worthy of much. You have seen her scars.”

  “She’s been treated badly,” I told Da. “Torture over months, perhaps years.”

  Haida bobbed her head. “Yes. Torture to force her to build that which should never be made. She fought with what weapons were hers.” Then she told us the forest lord’s intent and the outcome her lady had seen for that artifact. So for years she had fought to deceive him, suffering horribly for her defiance.

  My da bowed. “A worthy lady,” he said wearily. “My da, if he were the man he was once, would have given his life happily to protect such a one. He died fighting for me, not knowing that we fought to save a woman of worth. But I do.”

  “Dafydd?” I said.

  “Your grandda.” Da grimaced. “Once, he was a power to challenge the witch, and also a good man. Adda was the youngest of us all, and his particular favorite. If he could not be moved to help him, then whatever humanity lurked inside the monster was too faint to attend to. Dafydd would have died today at my hands; instead, he died saving his grandson’s life. It is a better outcome.”

  I nodded, cleaning my hands a final time. “If I pick her up, Da, can you strip the soiled blankets and help Haida spread new ones?”

  In no time, we had the fae woman tucked back in clean, dry bedding, bandaged and treated to the best of my abilities. Being covered with dirt had not particularly bothered me when we’d changed to human in the forest, but here in the clean room, it felt wrong.

  When I requested clean water to bathe in, Haida directed us to bedrooms, no less grand than the one in which the wounded fae lady rested. Though I had seen no signs of servants here, there were great copper tubs of hot water and clean clothes waiting for us (I ducked a head into both rooms before we separated).

  I scraped away my beard with a knife so sharp that it did not nick my skin, though it had been a very long time since I had shaved. I washed my face again in an astringent that hadn’t been on the table beside the bath when I started shaving.

  Clean and dried, I put on the plain-made clothes left on the foot of the bed. The stitching might have been simple, but the fabric was rich and fine. If it felt odd to wear clothes again, it felt odder still to wear boots after so long barefoot.

  But when Haida called us to the kitchen to eat, I did not think again about either boots or clothing. The food was plentiful and hot—and tasted fit for gods.

  I almost felt human again.

  For three days, Da and I took turns watching over the fae woman, Haida’s lady, who did not wake, though several times she stirred. We poured cups of willow-bark tea and clear meat broth down her as often as we could. The second day, fever made her restless and me worried.

  On that day, just after midday meal, I felt the witch’s collar tighten around my throat. My da growled and surged to his feet while I dropped to my knees. Haida grunted, and the witch’s call faded.

  “It is a strange kind of magic,” she said. “Powerful, and my power is limited. I will try to break it.”

  NINE

  Ariana

  She awoke in her own bed when she didn’t expect to awake at all. She blinked and tried to get up and her body revolted—she felt the beast stir within her. She subsided hastily, breathing through her nose as she tried to remember what happened.

  Her father . . . his missing hand—and then the beasts who came to his call. Not his hounds, with their overwhelming aura of terror, but these wolves who needed no magic to invite fear. She remembered teeth and snarls and . . . nothing. She was weak and vulnerable, empty of magic.

  Unfamiliar feet scuffed on the floor of the hall outside her door. She forced herself to sit up, expecting something mor
e threatening than the young human who bore a tray of soup in his hands.

  “Ah,” he said. “You are awake. Haida said she thought you’d be stirring soon.”

  “Who are you?” she asked as he set the tray on top of the leather-bound wooden chest. He was very tall. He had all of his teeth, and he moved well—balanced and more graceful than the humans she’d seen. He wasn’t handsome, but she couldn’t take her eyes from him. The beast inside her tried to tell her he was a threat, but the man’s movements were slow and careful.

  He dragged the chest over to the bed with a suspicious lack of effort. Humans, in her experience, were weak and fragile things prone to dying and breeding with about the same frequency. This one was stronger than he looked. The chest was heavy, and she could not have moved it on her own without magic. The beast warned her again that he was dangerous.

  “I asked you a question, human,” she said, fear making her cold.

  He looked up, and his eyes, some shade between noon sky and moonlit waterfall, met hers. The expression in them held her prisoner. I see your fear, they told her, but no harm will come to you by me.

  “I heard you,” he said deliberately. “I was just considering the answer.”

  “It was not a difficult question,” she said sharply.

  He smiled, and the expression showed her that there was such sorrow inside him it made her heart ache.

  “Not for most,” he agreed. “My grandmother calls me Sawyl. Will that do?”

  For a moment, a flash of insight caught her and she grabbed his hand where it rested on the handle of the tray while the beast tried to take her mouth and spill the True Names that she had for him: Sawyl. Samuel Deathbringer. Samuel Whitewolf. “Samuel Healer,” she said, then managed to close her lips before more escaped.