The Silent Tempest (Book 2) (9 page)

They slept on the floor,
without pillows or blankets.

As the world sorted itself out, falling
into place within his head, he searched for words to reassure them. “Are you
hungry?” was the best he could manage.

The boy nodded, and Brigid whispered in
her sister’s ear. “They have to pee,” said Kate in a neutral tone.

That made sense. He felt the urge as
well. Casting his senses outward, he located Alice and Tom Hayes. They were
still downstairs. Tom sat nervously at a table while Alice was in the kitchen.

Tyrion unsealed the door and gestured
toward it, “Let’s go down. We can take care of our bladders and bellies…” The
words sounded stupid in his ears, but he had no gift of eloquence.

Kate ushered the two teens in front of her,
and they went down.

Tom greeted them with a nervous look,
making room at the table but keeping his mouth shut. After they had taken
turns visiting the outhouse they sat with him, and a few minutes later Alice brought
out several heavy clay bowls filled with warm porridge.

“Thank you,” said Tyrion quietly, the
words awkward from long disuse.

They ate in silence.

When they had finished Tyrion glanced
around the table, “I need to know their names.”

Alice, Tom, and Kate shared several
glances between them, but none of them spoke. An awkward pause grew until at
last Kate took up the challenge, “We aren’t entirely sure which ones are
yours. Some may not be yours, even if…”

“…Even if they are the right age?” he
finished for her. “I’ll list the women for you. You tell me which ones have
children the same age as Brigid and Thaddeus. Fiona Brown, Emily Banks,
Jennifer Wilson, Greta Baker, Rachel Moore, Wilma Carter, Sally Phillips,
Peggy…,” he stopped for a moment. “What was her last name?”

“Do you mean Mrs. Morris?” asked Alice.

“I think that’s her,” he affirmed.

“Let me get some paper,” she suggested.
Rising she found one of the old ledgers and returned with it and a small bottle
of ink. It took her a moment to prepare the pen, but a few minutes later she
was penning the names he had given in the margin of one of the pages.

“Laura Collins, Mrs. Price—I don’t
remember her first name…,” he admitted.

“Selma,” provided Kate.

He nodded, “Greta Baker…”

“You said that one already,” said Alice.

He continued until he ran out of names and
had begun to repeat himself.

“What about Laura Collins?” suggested
Kate, “She has a son the right age.”

“I forgot her,” he agreed.

“Vicky Jenkins?” added Alice. “Her
daughter Piper is fifteen now as well.”

Tyrion nodded, the name jogged another
memory, “Darla Long too, she lived next door to Vicky.”

“Did you just go door to door?” asked Kate
in a tone of disgust, daylight and his calm mood had erased much of her earlier
anxiety.

He ignored the question, and after Alice
finished her tally they had a list of names that was longer than he had
expected. He had lain with twenty-seven women and there were sixteen children who
showed every likelihood of being his bastards. With Haley already taken, and
Brigid and Tad being there with them, there were thirteen others whom he needed
to collect before returning.

Tyrion stood, he had been thinking while
they discussed his transgressions, “I’ll be back soon. Gather the children
here while I am gone. I want them here before noon.”

Tom finally found his voice, “You expect
us to be your accomplices?”

He returned the older man’s angry stare
with a face devoid of expression, “The other wardens are already moving. They
weren’t far behind. They will probably be here by nightfall. You will have my
offspring here for me before then, otherwise I will resort to more drastic
means to make certain that they don’t fall into the hands of the other groves.”

Tom Hayes ground his teeth, flinching
under the younger man’s wilting gaze, but apparently he had found his spine once
more. Refusing to give up he continued, “Drastic means? I don’t believe it.
I watched you grow up, Daniel Tennick. You might be sick enough to threaten
us, but I don’t believe for a second that you’d hurt your own children.”

“Really?” said Tyrion, his eyes falling on
Tad Hayes. “Stretch your arm out on the table, boy,” he commanded.

Tad stared up at him, his lip beginning to
tremble, but he didn’t move.

“Wait!” shouted Alice. “We’ll do as you say.
Please, don’t hurt him.”

Tyrion relented, “Fine.” Moving for the
door, he addressed Tom once more, “I know what you’re thinking, Tom, and if you
run it will be worse. You’d best hope that I’m the one who finds you first
then. You don’t want to know what they’ll do with your son.”

He left, closing the door behind him and
walked behind the building, taking the most direct path out of Colne rather
than walking down the main street. He kept going until he was far beyond the
edges and then circled around to follow their path from the night before. Once
he was out of sight, he stopped and sat on the side of the trail that led back
toward the house that belonged to Seth and Kate Tolburn.

His hands were shaking.

Closing his eyes, he took a long deep
breath,
I feel nothing.

Kate’s green eyes flashed accusingly at
him from the shadows in the back of his mind, and he opened his eyes again to
dispel the vision.

His parents, Kate, Seth, Tom and Alice
Hayes… and the children as well, they all held so much emotion. He could feel
it, he could see it. Fear, hope, expectation, it was in their eyes when they
looked at him. Things he had grown accustomed to not finding among the
She’Har.

The people here, their hearts were
shouting at him, projecting emotions that he was no longer capable of dealing
with. Most of it was fear, and with it came the inevitable—hatred. Even Kate,
she was the worst. Affection mingled with fear and anxiety, flashes of hope,
and then the final result, hate.

I feel nothing.

He took to his feet again and made his way
back to the small stall where he had left his horse. Saddling the mare he rode
back to the camp where he had slaughtered the wardens and their leader,
Branlyinti. He hadn’t been thinking clearly the night before. He should have
erased the evidence, but he had been overwrought.

He found Branlyinti’s body first. The
bolt had entered the body cleanly, slipping between two ribs and skewering the
She’Har’s heart. It might have shattered if it had struck bone, but it was
still intact. Tyrion carefully removed it, cleaning away the gore on the shaft
and wiping it on the dead man’s clothing. He tucked it away. It might come in
handy later.

Using the same circle he had the evening
before, he surrounded the grisly camp in a hemisphere before filling it with
flames. After a short time the air exhausted itself, and the visible flames
died away, but he kept his will on the area, driving the temperature even
higher until the dead air glowed with strange gases, and everything else was
reduced to flickering ash. The heat became so intense that he was forced to
step back in spite of the shield, until he was more than ten yards distant.

Satisfied at last he stopped heating the
area and then did his best to cool it down to a tolerable level before
releasing the shield around it.

The bodies were gone. Only white ash and
blackened, glassy soil remained. It would be immediately apparent to anyone who
happened upon the site that something unusual had occurred there.

“That won’t do,” he told himself.

The simplest thing to do would be to bury
the ashes and glass, but that would still leave an unusual area of freshly
turned soil. He wanted the site to look old and undisturbed, preferably with
grass growing over it. He could achieve such a look by spending considerable
time moving the scorched parts lower and redistributing the plants and other
flora at the margins, but it would take a lot of time and painstaking effort.

He decided to take a risk and turned his
attention over to the voice of the earth echoing slowly beneath him. It was
something he had done only rarely since his fight against the Krytek in the
arena some ten years before. He feared the She’Har discovering his hidden
talent, but even more, he feared the talent itself. His mind changed when he
opened it to the earth, or to the sky, as he had done the night before. He
became less himself, and more
other.
He had no easy way to describe it,
even in the privacy of his heart.

Crystalline calm came over him as his mind
shifted to match the heart of the world under his feet. Rocks, soil, those
things lay close to the surface, but deeper still were different things, greater
stones that went on for vast distances, and beneath those an ocean of liquid
fire. For a moment he was almost swept away, carried into the unending depths,
but he drew back, holding onto himself.

The memory of his desire returned to him
and he moved his earthen body in response to it. Soil moved and rocks shifted,
churned, and then smoothed again. Contracting he made himself small again,
until his consciousness was once again bounded by flesh and bone. It was an
uncomfortable sensation, packing himself into such a tiny shell.

This must be what dying is
like.
The words echoed through him, but he
wasn’t sure of their meaning at first. Slowly his awareness returned, and the
babbling sounds within began to make sense once more.

Tyrion blinked, his eyes feeling dry. He
must have forgotten to do that while he was listening to the earth.

The ground was smooth and undisturbed.
The grass was thinner and the soil rockier, but it didn’t look as if it had
been touched in a long time. Nothing remained of the incinerated campsite. “I
have to learn to do that without completely losing my mind,” he told himself.

Last night had been better. The
situation, the tension and hostility, those things had served to anchor his
mind more firmly. So firmly that he had almost been unable to sense the voice
of the wind. Today he had nearly lost himself completely.

He wondered what would happen if he forgot
himself.

His actions had only cost him an hour or
so, and he had more to do before he returned to Colne. Continuing along the
path, he made his way back toward the house that Seth and Kate had shared.
There were things that needed to be said, and debts repaid.

Seth was coming out of the barn when
Tyrion arrived. The barn itself was new, at least in Tyrion’s mind. When he
and Kate had been children there had been no barn, but after Seth married her
he had built it to house some of his tools and keep his livestock from freezing
in the winter.

Tyrion stopped the mare by the barn and
tied her reins to a small post there. Then he made his way directly to where
Seth stood waiting with a look of disapproval on his face.

“Where are Kate and Brigid?” asked his
childhood friend with an expression of genuine concern on his face.

“In Colne,” said Tyrion, “gathering my
children. They don’t know I’m here.”

“Oh,” said Seth, watching him cautiously.

“You said something the other night that I
thought needed to be corrected.”

Seth shifted nervously, “Listen Daniel, I
was really worked up, and I know I might have said some things that I shouldn’t
have. It had only been a few hours since they took Kate’s sister, and I felt
ten kinds of useless after they humiliated us.”

Tyrion ignored the statement, “I never had
sex with Kate.”

His old friend went still, remembering his
accusation. It was the sort of motionless that one might find in a forest
creature, when it knows the hunter is about to strike.

The fear annoyed Tyrion. “I’m not here to
kill you. I know you think I’m a crazed murderer, and—well maybe I am to some
extent. I’m not like I was, I’m not like you anymore, but I’m not going to
turn rabid on you. I’m just here to talk.”

“I didn’t believe her,” said Seth, staring
uncomfortably off to one side. “When she came back that day, after you
left—she said nothing happened, but I knew that couldn’t be true.”

“I kissed her,” said Tyrion, “that’s all,
and she wasn’t pleased with that either.” The last part was a lie. She had
kissed him, and there had been nothing innocent about it. He pointed at the
collar around his neck, “This thing, it prevents me from doing much else in
that regard.” He glanced downward, to emphasize his point. “Only my owner can
grant permission for me to—well, you get what I’m saying.”

Seth waved his hands, “Alright! I believe
you. I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Too bad,” said Tyrion. “’Cause I’m not
done. I want to know if that’s why you started hitting her.”

“Hitting? No. You’re mistaken there.
That was just once, yesterday. We started fighting after they took Brigid, and
she wouldn’t leave me be. Kept shouting for me to go after them, but I knew it
was hopeless. I couldn’t stop them, but I was ashamed of myself for not going
anyway.” Seth looked down, clenching his jaw. “Then she called me a coward
and—I just snapped.”

Tyrion nodded understandingly, “I know
just exactly how that can be.”

Seth glanced up at him, surprised at his
friend’s sympathetic response. He saw Tyrion’s shoulder tense, but the motion
was so swift that he could barely twitch before a fist smashed into his jaw.
Reeling, he stepped back, tripped and fell hard to the ground. Tyrion stood
over him.

Seth closed his eyes,
Damn, he’s going
to kill me anyway.
Nothing happened for several moments, so he opened his
eyes again. His friend was offering him his hand.

“Take it,” said Tyrion. “We’re even now.”

Seth took his hand and stood shakily. His
vision seemed slightly blurry, and it felt like one of his teeth was loose.
“You really pack a punch, Daniel.”

“Violence is about all I’m good for
anymore,” he responded.

“Kate seems to feel differently,” said
Seth somewhat bitterly.

“Did you mean what you said, about her not
coming back?” asked Tyrion seriously.

“No,” admitted Seth. “I was out of control,
but I knew I was lying even as I said it. Doesn’t matter though, she’s not
planning on coming back anyway.”

“It’s really a bad idea for her to come
with me,” said Tyrion.

Seth squinted at him, “I agree.”

“Last night I showed her a sample of what my
life is like…” began Tyrion, “…and I’m pretty sure she didn’t like what she
saw. In fact, I think she’s afraid of me now, if she doesn’t hate me
outright.”

Spitting a mouthful of blood to the
ground, Seth worked his sore jaw, which was beginning to swell. “You do tend
to have that effect on people,” he gave a half-hearted laugh as he said it, but
then stopped. He looked at Tyrion worriedly.

Tyrion laughed, and Seth joined him, but
it was an uneasy laughter.

“I’ll do my best to convince her not to
come with me,” he told his friend. “When she comes back, be kind, and try to remember
that some of what she describes about me, will have been for your benefit.”

“Are you saying you’re going to pretend to
be a frightening, murderous, asshole, just to convince her to come back home?”
asked Seth.

Tyrion shook his head, “No. I’m just not
going to hide the fact that that is exactly what I am.” He turned away and
began walking toward the house. He could sense his father and mother inside,
and he had some words for them as well.

Seth didn’t move to follow, but he raised
his voice for one more question, “Are you sure you can’t just let Brigid come
home too?”

He looked back at his friend sadly, “I
wish I could, but the She’Har will send more wardens. There won’t be any peace
until they have all of them.”

Passing through the back door of the house,
he found his mother, Helen, waiting there for him. He almost flinched when she
opened her arms, but after a moment he relaxed. Her embrace felt good, too
good; it threatened to undo the walls he had built around his weakness.

I feel nothing,
he chanted mentally, but he knew it was a lie. “Mother,” he said
aloud.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said
immediately. “Last night you seemed…” she stopped. “When your father
returned—I just couldn’t believe it.”

He pushed her out to arm’s length. “It’s
true, Mother. I’m not who I was, and it doesn’t do any good to pretend
otherwise. I’m not safe for civilized society.”

Helen frowned, “Don’t say that, Daniel.”

Hearing his old name fall so naturally
from his mother’s lips sent another shiver of pain through him. “Stop,” he
told her. “I need to see Dad, then I’ll go.”

His words hurt her, that was obvious, but
she stood aside and let him enter the small bedroom where his father lay. Alan
Tennick was bruised and swollen, his features almost unrecognizable. The old
man lay with his head turned away, staring out the window with his one good
eye.

“Father.”

“You shouldn’t have come,” said the old
man hoarsely.

Tyrion nodded, “I just wanted to check
your wounds before I leave.” His magesight was already searching, checking
Alan’s battered body for fractures or more serious wounds. He found none,
though. The wardens were good at what they did. They knew how to beat a man
senseless without doing permanent injury. They had been careful. It was a
matter of practice, refraining from inflicting deadly wounds until you knew you
were done with your prey.

Finished, he waited, staring at the man whom
he had admired for so much of his younger life. Silence filled the room, until
at last he started to leave.

“You enjoyed it, didn’t you?” Alan’s
voice broke the silence without warning.

Tyrion paused, bowing his head, “I did.”

“I thought maybe, after you left last
time—I thought maybe it was a fluke. Maybe you were just angry, or too worked
up, but last night, you proved me wrong. I’ve been a failure as a father.”

“No…”

“If I had known,” continued Alan, “back
then, what you would become.” The older man’s voice faltered. “Forgive me
son, I should never have become a father.”

Tyrion turned back, surprised. “It isn’t
your fault. You did the best you could.”

Alan was looking at him now, tears running
down his swollen cheek, “When I see you, I can see your pain, son. And that
hurts, but what hurts most, is that I wish…,” his voice broke.

Unable to help himself, Tyrion took his
father’s shaking hand and then let the old man pull him into a painful hug.
“What do you wish, Dad?” he asked, wrinkling his nose at the smell of alcohol
on Alan’s breath.

The words were almost incoherent, but he
heard them anyway, “I wish you’d never been born, Daniel.” The old man was
sobbing now, “I’m so sorry.”

His stomach twisted as he heard the words,
but he did his best to keep his body still.
I feel nothing.

He had to get away. Untangling himself
from Alan’s arms, he stood up again. He could sense his mother’s presence,
listening on the other side of the door, so he wasn’t surprised when he found
her standing there as he opened it.

“He’s been drinking whiskey for the pain,
Daniel. He’s not himself,” she began.

“I know,” he agreed, letting her hug him
one more time. Then he pushed her away and went back out the same door he had
entered.
The truth is still the truth, though.

He nodded at Seth and began walking back
toward the small road that led to Colne.

“What about your horse?” asked Seth.

“Keep her,” he replied. “I won’t be able
to make much use of her with a bunch of kids in tow.”

“You sure? She’s a valuable animal.”

So am I,
Tyrion thought with a sense of irony. “Yeah, keep her, trade her,
whatever suits your needs.” He kept walking.

Seth followed for a short distance, “You
really think she’ll come home?”

Tyrion didn’t look back, but he ground his
teeth, “I’ll make sure of it.”

***

Colne was buzzing with activity when he
returned. The tension in the air made him think of a hive of angry bees. Some
of the people who were in the streets went inside when they saw him coming. Faces
stared at him from windows.

There was a small crowd in front of the
Hayes’ store. It was composed of familiar faces, particularly the women. For
the most part, they were the ones who had borne his children, along with quite
a few unhappy spouses and some other assorted family members. The teenagers
among them all held a certain resemblance to one another.

None of them looked particularly pleased
to see him.

“What’s he doing here?!” said Brad Wilson
with a certain amount of alarm. Gasps went up from the others as they
recognized him. The quicker thinking among them began to scatter, heading as
rapidly as they could away from the area without actually running.

They came up abruptly against an invisible
wall. Tyrion was taking no chances.

“The children stay, the rest of you can
go,” he announced.

“What’s the meaning of this, Tom?” shouted
Greta Baker, directing her words at Mr. Hayes. “You said you had a way to hide
them.”

Tom’s eyes were on the ground now.

“Don’t blame him,” said Tyrion. “He knew
if he didn’t get you here I’d make sure there wasn’t enough left of him or his
family to bury.”

“The forest gods are coming for them.
Daniel is here to take them to safety, to hide them. There isn’t a better
option,” said Kate, raising her voice to be heard above the crowd.

Dalton Brown spoke then, “I wouldn’t trust
my David with him. He’s a monster.”

At that point someone near the back threw
a stone, arcing it over the crowd to bounce off of Tyrion’s personal shield. A
scuffle ensued as the wiser heads near the stone-thrower wrestled the man to
the ground.

Tyrion laughed, “I’m not here to kill
anyone today, not even stupid people.”

“Then you should leave, ‘cause you’re not
taking my daughter!” shouted Rachel Moore.

Showing his teeth he strode forward, until
he stood directly in front of Rachel. The woman almost collapsed, but he
gripped the front of her dress before she could fall. Her daughter, Abigail,
cried fearfully as she stood behind her mother.

“That doesn’t mean I won’t stoop to other
forms of persuasion,” he growled into the frightened mother’s face. His nose
picked up the scent of urine, and his magesight confirmed his suspicion, Rachel
Moore had lost control of her bladder. He released her, letting her fall
backward.

“Let the devil have them. They’re
demon-cursed anyway,” muttered someone from the crowd.

“Children to the right,” commanded Tyrion,
“the rest of you over on the left.”

Some moved to obey, others stood dumbly.
He nudged and herded those who were in shock, using invisible planes of force
to separate them.
Like sheep for the shearing,
he thought silently.
Many of the teens cried, while others glared angrily at him. Some cursed, but
he ignored them.

“Why are you doing it like this?” asked
Kate. “You’re making it worse. They might understand if you just talked to
them.”