Books
Seer's Blood
Baen July 2000 ISBN 0671578774
cover art by Larry Elmore
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Chapter 1
The world spread out before the nekfehr, the slight curve of its horizon partially obscurred by hazy clouds. Unlike the flat plains directly before the vessel--a raven, black, sleek, and intelligent--this horizon rose in a nubbled, broken line.
South.
They would go south.
It hadn't worked out well, last time; so many years, spent just in recovery. The hill folk had been waiting and ready, forewarned by their seers...seers once grown thick in that nurturing land.
The Annekteh had lost that fight--but they had made sure the next generations of the hills had no such guidance. They had burned the seers' painstaking records--generations of wisdom, lore, and observations--every one. They'd ransacked houses, stripping all charms, all the protections that could be copied and used even without a seer's understanding.
Every one.
And the seers themselves...dead. Or fled.
The raven's wings caught a thermal; the bird adjusted--a shift of feather, a tilt of wing--and the annektehr within barely noticed. That was what the nekfehr, the vessels, were for; to do the things the Annekteh could not. To see, to fly...to feel.
The annektehr--one of many, so consumed by the whole it didn't even understand the concept of individuality--stared at that bare hint of the mountains, letting the bird mind control their flight. Yes. It shared the image among the whole, among the Annekteh, even as it maintained awareness of each of its fellow annektehr at work in other vessels. Human bodies, mostly, supervising the insignificant, unTaken individuals that served the Annekteh.
Yes.
South. Where the lumber was not only abundant, but was imbued with the natural magic of the mountains--the same subtle magic of the plains, distilled and amplified and then submerged to run deep along the ridges. Magic that would protect the Annekteh, so deep that the humans barely knew it was there.
But the Annekteh knew.
And the Annekteh intended to have that magic, and that land, for their own.
Chapter Two
Blaine tugged on her soft leather boots in quick succession, her mind already in the mountains and on the newly arrived traders, the ones no one else had seen yet. Moving quietly in the near darkness of the morning, she divided her hair into sections, fingers flying to braid the insipid brown plaits, damp rawhide laces waiting on the bed to fasten them.
Usually the hills provided her escape from her cousins' taunts. Skin-to-bone! Head-tetched! You been beat with an ugly stick?
But yesterday they had given her mystery as well.
Strangers.
Only her older brother Rand knew of Blaine's frequent trips into the mountains that cradled their hollow; if anyone else ever found out, she'd be denied them. Years ago, her flight from teasing kin had turned into a true appreciation of the woods, even of the steep climbs and often treacherously slippery slopes of damp, humus-covered soil. The ribbon of level ground that wound along the ridges lured her, for there the air was free of wood smoke and the view revealed something besides the opposite hillside of Owlhoot Holler.
And there, she could ponder the remnants of the Book. There, she could sit on her favorite rock and gaze at the unfathomable patterns of rock and tree in the well-worn, close-set ridges of the Shadow Hollers community.
A deep hollow dropped between each ridge; along with the inevitable silver ripple of a creek, the bottoms held small patches of flat land. Dotted along the creek, crammed onto the flat places and even the up against the slopes, sat homesteads like her own--sparse populations that blossomed at the broadened hollow mouth where each creek met the Dewey River.
Yesterday, drawn down into Fiddlehead Holler by the conversations below--conversations held by men who must not know the mountains funneled noise uphill--she'd found that the bottom of unsettled Fiddlehead hollow held more than a creek.
Strangers. Here to trade? Must be, with the number of wagons they had along--small ones, for easier travel through the hills. Maybe they'd have books, or fine riding horses, or pretty ribbons. Maybe there'd even be a family, with a girl her own age.
She hadn't had the nerve to find out, not the day before. Not to close in on them, for even her blinder--made of sassafras, soaked in a new moon fog and painted with the slick sap of slippery elm, just of the size to fit in her pocket--wouldn't keep their eyes from her if she left the cover of the spring rhododendron patch she had found upslope of them.
Hanging onto her braids, Blaine patted the bed quilt, in search of rawhide strip--hidden in the dim, early morning light of the rough-hewn log house. There. Jerking them into tight knots around the ends of her braids and pretending not to hear Lenie's sleepy question, Blaine pulled on her jacket and hurried out onto the porch, her footfalls ringing hollow on the old planks.
Where she stopped short in dismay. How had her daddy gotten out here before her? And gotten old Prince harnessed, to boot?
But there he was. Cadell. Short and wiry, already topped by Rand's sturdy height, and blessed with a pair of blue eyes sharp enough to spot a child in mischief through a barn wall.
There would be no sneaking off into the mountains today.