[Terquem]

Chapter 2 part 2

“I was there,” Alan said. “I fought, as hired mercenary, beside the Baron’s soldiers. I can’t tell you exactly how many survived that battle, but I can tell you I am not this revenant. Though to be honest, I don’t really know what that is, a revenant.”

“A revenant,” Lisa said, “is a deranged spirit. A walking corpse that is driven by still not well understood magic. The revenant seeks vengeance. There has not been a revenant in these lands since before Duncan’s time, the previous Aben Moor sorcerer.”

“I am not a revenant,” Alan shook his head.

“So, you have trouble with this cult,” Lisa changed the subject. “You want my help dealing with this Cidri matter?”

“Not exactly,” Lydia said. “First, in the hope of honesty being the foundation we build on, I owe you an explanation. I’ll try to keep it short. My daughter, Gwenna, is adopted. She lost her family in the fever of forty-seven, twenty-one years ago. She was just a child then. My husband and I had been married only a year, but it seemed, at the time, we could not have children of our own. We had a small farm on the plateau, between what is now Vologna and Basconde. During those times many eshian folk were fleeing the southern parts of Ibalnd as the fever spread through the islands. Gwenna was left behind, at an inn at the crossroads in Tuellton. We took her in and raised her as our own. Her husband, Cooper, is a hunter and a free eshian, not descended from the Bascondez. He was with my husband the day he died. It is the nature of my husband’s death, and how it might be connected to Cidri, that makes me seek the Aben Moor sorceress. But, you, Lisa, you cannot be her. What are you, thirty-five, maybe forty years old? The Aben Moor Sorceress is said to be in her seventies.”

“I am the Aben Moor sorceress,” Lisa said and then laughed. “My word, I’m starting to sound like the Tower.”

“What is funny about telling people who you are?” The Tower asked.

“Nothing, naturally,” Lisa stifled her laugh.

“Show her, Fairlyn,” Lydia said.

The elf went to a large clam-shell style bag sitting on the floor by the door. The bag was made of heavy canvas dyed brown and tied to the top of it was a rolled fur. Fairlyn untied the fur and brought it back to the group. They flung the hide out, unrolling it, and then let it fall to the floor in front of the fire.

“Your husband was killed by a bear?” Alan asked. “That is a terrible way to die.”

Lisa slid off the stool and went to her knees next to the hide. She put one hand down on the thick black fur, and said, “This is not a bear. It’s a rabbit, but that’s impossible.”

“If you are the Aben Moor sorceress,” Lydia went on, “then you can tell us about this animal. I’m not convinced you are her. You are far too young.”

“I am fifty-three years old. My parents sent me to learn from Duncan Rhoanee at the age of thirteen. I became the Aben Moor sorceress when Duncan disappeared thirty years ago.”

“You can’t be fifty-three,” Lydia said. “I’ve been grey since I was thirty. I’m only forty-five years old and I know I look old enough to be your mother.”

“I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what I look like to other people,” Lisa said, and out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a surprised look on Alan’s face. “I am Lisa Wainwright, of Callinwitch, the Aben Moor sorceress. You can believe that or not.”

It finally dawned on Alan that Lisa had said the skin on the ground was a rabbit’s skin. He stood up suddenly and pointed down at the skin. “That can’t be a rabbit. That skin is a bear’s skin, and someone is mistaken. That animal was over four hundred pounds, I’m sure.”

“Four-hundred fifty pounds, dead. We weighed it in the village before we skinned it,” Cooper said. “It attacked us on the hunt and killed three men that day before we brought it down with spears and arrows.”

“The magic of the moor can sometimes cause an animal to grow two, three, even four times its size, but not twenty-five times its size, and that would be for the largest hare in the moor, the brown jackrabbit. This is not possible. This rabbit is not of this world,” Lisa said.

“Exactly,” Lydia said. “Can you tell us if this animal came to our world through a gate? Is there a possibility the believers in Cidri are actually right and our world is not what we think it is at all? Is this a thing the Sorceress can do? Can you tell where the magic of this animal comes from, if it is not the moors? I’ve heard that some magic lingers in the skin and bones, and organs of creatures with strong magic bound to them.”

She put both hands on the fur and closed her eyes. Lisa reached out with her inner mind and felt the fur on her fingers with the focus she had learned. If there was magic still in the fur, she would know it, but if she could tell where it came from, she was not at all certain.

The magic was there, and it was strong. She felt the pins and needles on her skin and the sensation of numbness spreading up her arms. It was unfamiliar magic, she was sure of that, but it spoke to her body in the same way any other lingering magic would. She could tell it was not of the moor. It was different. In her mind she saw patterns growing out of the fur and up her arms. The patterns were cubic in design, blocks and chains of connecting smaller blocks moved up, out, under, and back into her skin.

“This is not of our world,” Lisa said breaking the connection between her and the magic. She raised her arms, spoke three single syllables that came from the back of her throat, and then released some of the magic she had absorbed into the air in front of her.