Usually, I spent my time in the farming village reading the skies, telling the farmers where and when to set seed, when to keep the soil resting. I spoke to their animals, eased their fretful minds, listened to the churn of their bellies, the twitch of their ears, the quiet secrets they kept. The farmers knew me, and most liked me. It helped that I was young and small and looked as harmless as a hedge-witch with a basket of herbs. I had the unwilling gift of seeming completely harmless. Other magisters would have had a harder time telling peasants how to feed the kingdom.
Tomas and Joyce Brack had been goat-farming for twenty years. Their cheese, theBefesticht, a dry goat cheese with red berries, was praised all over Vanhaui. Their farmhouse sat at the foot of a hill, fences tangled around it like thorn-hedges.
Tomas wore a sun-worn brown tunic with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, a cracked leather apron thrown over it and boots thick with dung and mud from the pens. His gray hair, thick as rope, was tied back in a rough tail, and his hands were lined with cuts and calluses from years of hooves and wire. Joyce stood at his side in a faded green kirtle laced snug at the waist, a strip of linen showing at her throat and wrists. A moss-coloured shawl hung from her shoulders, and a kerchief kept back hair streaked with silver and straw dust. Her palms were stained with whey and nettle from curdling milk. She carried herself with the quiet pride of someone who knew exactly what her work was worth and exactly how much blood it had cost.
They recognized me at once, eyes lighting as though I might carry a blessing with me.
“Magister Corvo, you’re here!” Joyce dipped. “Good day. Thank you for coming.”
“My pleasure.” I smiled, awkward at the formality. “Please call me Evie.” I still had not grown accustomed to being called Magister Corvo.
“Good day, Magister Corvo,” Tomas said anyway, and I sighed inside.
“Loren Vey, scribe of the Court Wizard,” Lo announced with his usual flourish. His title was grand enough to make them wary.
“He’s also my friend,” I added quickly. “And he’s enjoying his day off shadowing me.” They smiled. Good. “Was there something you wished to discuss?”
They exchanged a look, concern flickering between them like crows.
“It’s better if we show you,” Joyce said at last.
They led us behind the farmhouse with its red-framed windows to the garden where leafy greens, carrots, and beetroots should have been sprouting. Instead, we found blackness. Leaves drooped, their veins swollen, oozing an oily, iridescent liquid I did not recognise. The earth itself looked bruised, as though something had crawled up from below and sucked the colour out of it.
The sight was bad enough. The stench was worse, rank and sweet, like meat left to rot in a warm cellar with spilled honey. My stomach turned. Lo winced and looked away, his elven senses flinching. It was the same smell the city had carried for days after the riots.
“It happened overnight,” Joyce whispered. She pointed at the black tendrils creeping from the beds. “Follow the vines. They crawl out of the garden and sink into the soil.”
“We don’t know where it came from, but I’ll wager the mountain,” Tomas added, voice low. “And it… killed one of our goats.” His voice cracked, a sound that squeezed my heart.
The goats were their life. After the Breath of Death had separated them from their children in another town, they had only each other and their herd.
I met Lo’s eyes. We were both already building theories. Diseased crops happened every year. This felt cursed.
They brought us inside to a secluded pen at the end of the building.
There lay the corpse of a white goat. It had fallen onto its side, legs twisted as though it had tried to flee even in death. Its mouth gaped wide, lips peeled back from its teeth in a silent scream, a blackened tongue swollen and stiff. Vines of pitch-dark rot mapped its hide, and from those vines arms of tar had torn through the skin and rooted themselves into the soil. The ooze pulsed faintly, like a heart still beating, and each slow drip made a wet, sucking sound as it bled into the earth. Flies clung to the slick patches of fur, their wings humming low like a prayer.
I raised my sleeve to cover my mouth and nose, but the reek still slid through. My powers brushed against it before I could stop them. Pain, dread, despair. A flicker of the goat’s last moments stabbed through me. Blind terror, something pressing in its lungs, the sense of being hollowed.
Tomas and Joyce covered their mouths too. Lo stayed back, one hand pressed hard over his face. From a few paces away he watched me, knowing I felt the same foul magic as he did, and perhaps, with my gifts, even deeper.
I crouched near the carcass, studying its scars of darkness. The magic inside it coiled against mine, cold and unforgiving. This goat had not died a natural death.
And to find out how, I needed to speak to the living.
“Where are the others?” I asked, voice muffled.
“In the field by the hillside,” Tomas replied.
“Take me to them.”
They led us to the field where the goats—seventeen horn-curled, white-furred creatures—waited for us, as if eager to share whatever they knew.
Speaking with animals had been one of the first spells I’d ever learned. And, contrary to what most people liked to believe, castingit didn’t mean trading words with them. Animals had no tongues for speech, no grammar, no names. They spoke in pulses of emotion, in flashes of need, want and warning, in scents and pictures that slid into their thoughts.
I closed my eyes and reached inward, feeling for the pulse of power coursing through my veins. The arcane shifted like a serpent beneath my skin, sliding through me in threads of heat and chill, rising until it pressed against my forehead. I drew a slow breath to steady it and let the current gather, humming at the edge of thought, until it was ready to spill outward and touch the minds of the animals.
The goats flooded me with fear. They showed me the dark outline of the mountain, a shape pressed heavy on their minds. They wanted to stay here at the farm. They warned to stay far from whatever prowled those slopes. Once they had longed for the cliffs, for leaping from stone to stone, for grazing at the edge of the sky. Now this place sparked only terror and pain.
