Page 47 of Death's Mistress (Sister of Darkness: The Nicci Chronicles 1)

“After the spring rains, the water ran high, and the current was swifter than I remembered it. I couldn’t see how far the kittens had drifted, but up ahead around a curve in the stream, I spotted just a flash of the onion sack bobbing up before it sank down again. I tripped on the mossy rocks and slick mud, and I fell into the water, but I didn’t care. I splashed deeper, wading along, sweeping my hands back and forth ahead of me as I tried to grab the sack. I caught weeds, cut myself on a tangled branch, but the sack had drifted along, still under the water. I couldn’t hear the kittens anymore, and I knew it was too long, but I kept trying. I sloshed forward and dove ahead until finally I caught the sack, wrapped my fingers around the folds of rough cloth. I had it!

“Laughing and crying, I yanked it out of the water and held it up, dripping. It was waterlogged and heavy. Rivulets of stream water ran out of it, but I stumbled to the shore and sprawled up on the bank. With my numb, bleeding fingers I couldn’t pull open the wet knot closing the sack. I tore at it with my fingernails, and finally I ripped the fabric. More water gushed out, and I dumped the kittens out onto the streamside.

“I remember saying ‘No, no, no!’ over and over again. Those poor, fragile kittens flopped out, slick and wet, like fish from a net. And they weren’t moving. Not a one of them.

“I picked them up, pressed gently on them, blew on their tiny faces, trying to get them to respond. Their perfect little tongues lolled out. I couldn’t stop imagining them mewing for help, trying to breathe, dragged under the cold water. They were so young and hadn’t even known their own mama, so I knew they had been crying out for me and my mother. And we hadn’t saved them—we hadn’t saved them!”

Bannon hunched his shoulders and sobbed. “I ran as fast as I could. I tried to get the sack from the water—I really tried! But all the kittens were dead, all five of them.”

Nathan listened with a compassionate frown. He stroked his chin as he sat on his rock next to the campfire. “You tried your best. There was nothing else you could have done. You can’t carry that guilt around with you forever. It’ll kill you.”

As Bannon wept, Nicci watched him intently. In a low voice, she said, “That’s not what he feels guilty about.”

The old wizard was surprised, but Bannon looked up at Nicci with remarkably old eyes. “No,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Not that at all.”

He laced his fingers together, then unraveled them again as he found the courage to go on. “I found a soft spot under a willow near the stream, and I dug out a hole with my bare hands. I buried the kittens and placed the wet sack on top of them, like a blanket that might keep them warm in the cold night. I piled rocks on top of the grave, so that I could show my mother where I had buried them, but I never wanted my father to find out where they were or what I had done.

“I stayed there for a long time, just crying, and then I made my way home. I knew I could never hide my tears or my wet clothes from my father. He would probably beat me for it, or maybe just look at me with smug satisfaction. At the time, with the kittens all dead, I didn’t think he could hurt me any more and I was tired of running.” The young man gulped. “But I came home to find something far worse.”

Nicci felt her shoulder muscles tense, and she braced herself. Bannon spoke in a bleak voice, as if he no longer had any emotion in the memory. “After he drowned the kittens and came back to our cottage, my mother was ready for him. She’d had enough. After all the pain and suffering and fear he had inflicted on her, the murder of those poor innocent kittens was the last straw for her. When he staggered through the door, my mother was waiting.

“I saw the scene afterward, and I guessed what happened. As soon as he entered the house, she held a loose oak axe handle like a warrior’s mace. She attacked my father, struck him in the head, screaming at him. She nearly succeeded, but it was only a glancing blow, enough to draw blood, perhaps crack his skull—and certainly enough to make his anger erupt.

“In a futile effort, she tried to hurt him, maybe even kill him. But my father snatched the oak handle from her hands, tore it right out of her grip, whirled around—” Bannon swallowed. “And he beat her to death with it.” He squeezed his eyes shut.

“By the time I came home from burying the kittens, she was already dead. He had smashed her face so that I couldn’t recognize her, couldn’t even see the usual parts of a face at all. Her left eye had been pulped, and broken shards of skull protruded upward, exposing brain. Her mouth was just a ragged hole, and teeth lay scattered around, some of them pounded into the soft meat of her face, like decorations.…”

His voice grew softer, shakier. “My father came for me with the bloody, splintered axe handle, but I had nothing to defend myself with, not even a sword. I threw myself on him nevertheless, howling. I … I don’t even remember it. I hit him, clawed at him, pounded at his chest.

“This time the neighbors had heard my mother’s screams, worse than ever before, and they rushed in only moments after I arrived. They saved me, or else my father would have killed me, too. I was screaming, trying to fight, trying to hurt him. But they pulled me away and subdued him. By that time, most of the fight had gone out of my father. Blood covered his face, his clothes, and his hands. Some from the gash on his scalp where my mother had struck him, but most of the blood belonged to her.

“Someone had raised the alarm, and one goodwife sent her little boy running to town to get the magistrate.” Bannon sucked in a succession of breaths and kneaded his fingers as he stared like a lost soul into the small campfire before he could continue. Overhead, a night bird cried out and took flight from one of the pine trees.

“I couldn’t save the sack of kittens. I couldn’t prevent my father from drowning them, but I ran after him, nevertheless. I waded into the stream and tried to catch them before it was too late. But I always knew it would be too late, and when they were dead I wasted precious time burying them and crying over them … when I could have been there to save my mother.”

He looked up at his listeners, and the empty pain in his hazel eyes struck a deep chill even in Nicci’s heart.

“If I had stayed with my mother, maybe I could have protected her. If I hadn’t gone chasing after the kittens, I would have been there. I would have stood up to him. I would have saved her. She and I would have faced him together. The two of us could have driven him off somehow. After that night, my father never would have hurt me again. Or her.

“But I went to save the kittens instead. I left my mother behind to face that monster all by herself.”

Bannon stood up again, brushed off his pants. He spoke as if he were merely delivering a scout’s report. “I stayed at Chiriya long enough to see my father hanged for murder. By then, I had a few coins, and out of sympathy other villagers gave me money to live on. I could have had a little cottage, started a family, worked the cabbage fields. But the house smelled too much like blood and nightmares, and Chiriya held nothing for me.

“So I signed aboard the next ship that came into our little harbor—the Wavewalker. I left my home, never intending to go back. What I wanted was to find a better place. I wanted a life the way I imagined it.”

Nathan said, “So you’ve been changing your memories, covering up the darkness with fantasies of how you thought your life should be.”

“With lies,” Nicci said.

“Yes, they’re lies,” Bannon said. “The real truth is … poison. I was just trying to make everything better. Was that wrong?”

Nicci was sure now that Bannon Farmer had a good heart. In his mind, and in the way he described his old lie to others, the young man was struggling to make the world into a place it would never be.

When the wizard placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder, Bannon flinched as if in a sudden flashback of his father striking him. Nathan didn’t remove his hand, but tightened his grip, like an anchor. “You’re with us now, my boy.”

Nodding, Bannon smeared the back of his hand across his face, wiping away the tears. He

straightened his shoulders and responded with a weak smile. “I agree. That’s good enough.”

Even Nicci rewarded him with an appreciative nod. “You may have more steel in you than I thought.”

CHAPTER 35

Rain and gloom set in for the next four days as they traveled higher into the mountains. The mornings were filled with fog, the days saturated with drizzle, and the nights accompanied by a full downpour. Low-hanging clouds and dense dripping trees kept them from seeing far into the distance, and they could not gauge the high and rugged mountains ahead of them. Eventually, Nicci knew they would find the high point and look down into the lush valley that lay between them and Kol Adair.

Nicci walked along wrapped in a gray woolen cloak the Lockridge innkeeper had given her, which was drenched and heavy. Bannon and Nathan were just as miserable, and the sodden gloom weighed on them as heavily as the young man’s reticence.

On the fifth night out of Lockridge, the downpour increased and the temperature dropped to a bone-penetrating wet cold. Nicci was pleased to find a thick wayward pine, a pyramid-shaped tree with dense, drooping boughs. For those travelers who knew how to identify them, wayward pines formed a solid, reliable shelter in the forest. Richard had shown her how to find and use them.

Nicci shook the long-needled branches to disperse the collected beads of rainwater, then lifted the bough aside to reveal a dark and cozy hollow within. “We’ll sleep here.”

The wizard found a comfortable spot inside under the low overhanging branches. “Now, if you could just find some roasted mutton and a tankard of ale, Sorceress, we’d have a fine night.”

---