Regardless, her priorities were clear. Food, first. Shelter. Regain strength. Then, perhaps, think about the future.
Good plan.
She collapsed.
Silence settled over the Badlands.
A buzzard descended from the dry blue sky in tightening circles, like a wood chip in a draining pool. It landed beside her body, hopped forward. No heartbeat audible; cooling flesh. Convinced, it bent its head and opened its beak.
Tara’s hand twitched up fast as a cobra and wrung the bird’s neck before it could flee. The other gathering buzzards took the hint and wheeled to safety, but one bird cooked inexpertly over a fire of dry grass and twigs was more than enough to set a half-starved girl on her feet.
Four weeks later she arrived on the outskirts of Edgemont, gaunt and sun-blasted, seeing things that did not precisely exist. Her mother found her collapsed near their cattle fence. A lot of crying followed her discovery, and a lot of shouting, and more crying after the shouting, and then a lot of soup. Edgemont mothers were renowned for their practicality, and Ma Abernathy in particular had iron faith in the restorative powers of chicken broth.
Tara’s father was understanding, considering the circumstances.
“Well, you’re back,” he said, a concerned expression on his broad face. He did not ask where she had been for the last eight years, or what happened there, or how she earned her scars. Tara would have thanked him for that had she known how. There were too many ways he could have said “I told you so.”
That evening the Abernathy family sat around their kitchen table and settled on the story they would tell the other residents of Edgemont: When Tara left home at sixteen, she signed on with a traveling merchant, from whom she learned the fundamentals of Craft. The Hidden Schools never opened themselves to her, and at last, tired of dust and long wandering, she returned home. It was a good enough lie, and explained Tara’s undeniable skill with contracts and bargains without stirring up any of the local fear of true Craftswomen.
Tara put the business card from her mind. The people of Edgemont needed her, though they would have chased her from town if they knew where she learned to use her talents. Ned Thorpe lost half the profit from his lemon crop every year, due to a bad arbitration clause in his reseller’s contract. Ghosts stole dead men’s bequests through loopholes in poorly written wills. Tara offered her services tentatively at first, but soon she had to refuse work. She was a productive citizen. Shopkeeps came to her to draft their pacts, farmers for help investing the scraps of soulstuff they eked out of the dry soil.
Over time she picked up the pieces of her childhood, hot cocoa and pitching horseshoes on the front lawn. It was easier than she expected to reacclimate herself to a country life without much Craft. Indoor plumbing was a luxury again. When summer came, she and her parents sat outside in the breeze or inside with windows shut and shades drawn to ward off heat. When cold wind blew they built fires with wood and flint. No elementals of air were summoned to fan the brow, no fiery dancers cavorted to warm cold halls. At school she had condemned such a life as simple, provincial, boring, but words like “simple,” “provincial,” and “boring” did not seem so pejorative to her now.
Once, she nearly took a lover, after a solstice dance on the village green. Staggering back tipsy and arm-in-arm with a boy she barely remembered from her days in Edgemont’s two-room school, who had grown into a young man tending his family’s sheep, she stopped to rest on a swell of ground and watch the stars in the fleeting summer night. The young man sat next to her and watched with her, but when he touched her face and the small of her back she pulled away, apologized, and left.
The days were long, and safe, but she felt something wither inside her as she lingered there. The world beyond Edgemont, the world of Craft more profound than a farmer’s spring planting and the mending of small cuts and bruises, faded and began to seem unreal. Her memories of the Hidden Schools acquired the cotton haze of dream, and she woke once or twice from nightmares in which she had never left home at all.
*
The Raiders struck at night, three months after the solstice. Swift and savage, they took little, but at dawn three of Edgemont’s watchmen lay on the field of battle, shrunken in death by a clinging curse that corroded anything that drew near. The villagers lifted the bodies on long spears of cold iron and buried them in a blessed grave. The chaplain said a few words, and as Edgemont bowed its collective head Tara watched him weave the town’s faith into a net, taking from each man or woman what little soulstuff he or she could afford and binding it close about the loose earth. He was no Craftsman, but his Applied Theology was sound as such things went.
Tara was the last to leave the grave.
“I don’t know how we’ll manage.” Father stood alone by their hearth after the funeral and before the wake, the whiskey in his glass the same color as their small early autumn fire. “They were good boys, and well trained. Held off the Raiders for years. We’ll have to hire others, but we can’t spare the price.”
“I can help.”
He looked back at her, and she saw a splinter of fear in his eyes. “You’re not a fighter, Tara.”
“No,” she admitted. “But I can do more than fight.”
“We’ll manage.” His tone left no avenue for appeal. “We’ve managed before.”
She did not challenge him, but she thought: The chaplain’s skills are antiquated. He struggles to keep the village safe. What’s the use of all I’ve learned, if I can’t protect the people I care about?
Her father turned from the fireplace and fixed her with his steady gaze. “Tara, promise me you won’t … intervene.”
Over the last few months Tara had learned that the best lies were lies not told. “Dad. Do you think I’m stupid?”
He frowned, but said no more. This suited Tara, because she would not have promised. Her father was not a Craftsman, but all pledges were dangerous.
That night she leapt from her second-story room, calling upon a bit of Craft to cushion her fall. Shadows clustered around her as she made her way to the fresh grave. Her father’s voice echoed in her ears as she unslung the shovel from her back. She ignored him. This dark work would help Edgemont, and her family.
Besides, it would be fun.
She did not use her Craft to open the grave. That was one of the few rules a Craftswoman always obeyed, even at the highest levels of study. The fresher the bodies, the better, and Craft sapped freshness from them. Instead Tara relied on the strength of her arms, and of her back.
She pulled a muscle after the first three feet of digging, and adjourned to a safe distance to rest before attacking the dirt again. The shovel wasn’t made for this work, and her hands were months out of practice, their old digging calluses gone soft. She had stolen her father’s work gloves, but they were comically large on her and their slipping against her skin caused blisters almost as bad as those she intended to prevent.
It took an hour’s work to reach the corpses.
They were buried without coffins, so the soil would reclaim their bodies faster and leech the poison magic from them. Tara hadn’t even needed to bring a crowbar. Pulling the corpses out of the hole was harder than she expected, though. Back at school, they had golems for this sort of work, or hirelings.
When she grabbed the first body by its wrists, the Raiders’ curse lashed out and spent itself against the wards glyphed into her skin. Harmless to her, the curse still stung, bad as when she chased her dog into stinging nettles as a girl. She swore.
Removing the corpses from the grave made more noise than Tara liked, but she couldn’t work inside the pit. A grave’s mouth circumscribed the night sky, and she wanted as much starfire as possible for the work at hand. It had been too long since she last stretched her wings.