Seeklight

Daenek drew away from the window. Asleep, the Lady Marche moaned softly. The villagers were always saying it, thought Daenek grimly. He stood in the doorway, clenching the frame in both hands. That they’d come for me some day. He glanced at the old woman in her bed. She knew, he realized. Tomorrow I’ll be seventeen years of age. Or would have been.

He wiped his damp hands on his shirt as he walked down the stairs. If Istep outside, he told himself, before they begin to pound on the door, she won’t awaken. An uncomfortable feeling moved under his ribs. She could have warned me, though. I could’ve been long gone, running, before my time was up—

The mounted subthane formed a bulky nucleus surrounded by his men. They seemed too thin to be of the same species, but the flat planes of their faces were like the bones under the subthane’s jowls would be. As Daenek stepped outside the house, carefully pulling the door shut behind him, he heard the large man’s voice break off in mid-sentence to his men.

The subthane’s equine, a circle of white showing around its wildly staring eyes, bucked and reared beneath him. His face flushed with anger, the subthane clouted the animal near its ear with a solid blow from his gloved fist, then spurred it forward towards Daenek. His men men followed, forming a rough V behind him.

Daenek looked up at the coarse-pored face of the subthane.

Rivulets of sweat had formed in the creases and folds of his skin.

Only once before had Daenek seen the man, across the length of the village marketplace, but even from a distance the sense of something like the odor of blood had been apparent. Now, the subthane was rubbing the back of his leather glove over the bristles on his chin.

“Well, Daenek,” wheezed the subthane, sounding pleased. The skin of his cheeks tightened as his lips drew apart in a parody of a smile. “Are you so surprised at our coming? Don’t you know?

Didn’t anyone tell you?” He glanced quickly at the laughing faces of his men on either side.

Beyond the half-circle of equines and men, Daenek could see the stalks in the field bend with a light breeze. “I know why you’re here,” he said quietly, looking at but not seeing their faces for a moment. He noted a dark bank of clouds cradling the morning sky at the horizon. “But take me someplace else and do it,” he said, focussing upon the subthane again.

“Oh, but it’s not that simple, boy.” The subthane lowered his head beside the neck of his equine. “You’ve got a choice to make, you have.”

Daenek took a step backwards from the malicious grin. “I don’t care how you kill me,” he said. “Suit yourself.” I’ll die, he thought, without knowing the truth about my father’s death, but I’ll die—like him, maybe.

“Kill you? We don’t want to do that, boy,” the subthane said gleefully. He sat up in his saddle and beckoned the militia captain over to himself. The man reined his equine closer to the subthane, then took a small black case from a pouch dangling on his saddle and handed it to him.

“Just look here.” The subthane snapped the case open and, holding it by its lid, thrust it in front of Daenek. “What do you see?”

He suspected already what the shining chrome tube in its plush-lined niche was, and said nothing.

“You see,” said the subthane, holding the case in the crook of one arm and stroking the object inside it with his forefinger, “we take this little gadget and put it against your head, right up over the ear. And not even a drop of blood, but no one ever worries about you again. Because everything in your head is all chopped up and muddled around. Harmless.” He laughed. “Have you ever seen that idiot that works in the quarry? The one that look like a shaved ursine, and never talks?”

Daenek nodded slowly, feeling his eyes draw into slits as he looked at the grinning face.

The subthane’s smile widened even further. “He used to be a very powerful man. Your father’s right hand. But the thane’s been dead a long time, and the big man had one of these put up to his skull.”

A spasm of rage and contempt welled up inside Daenek. “If those are my choices,” he spat out, “then I’d prefer a knife.”

“Ah, but maybe I lied when I said you had a choice, boy. I really want to see how one of these things—” He fell silent, his eyes looking up and past Daenek.

The Lady Marche was standing in the doorway of the house, Daenek saw as he turned around. Her face was white with the strain of moving under her fever, and the hand that gripped the silver head of her stick trembled. “You are a day too soon,” she said in a tone of fierce authority and loathing. She raised the point of the stick at the subthane.