“What about him?” asked Ke. “The Goat King, the Witch of Cathay, the Scarlet Tiger, they were all once Glories of great nations. Benefactors. Who can say what the Green Beggar’s real purpose was?”
Talen knew all the stories about Glories who had gone mad and eaten the souls of those they ruled. Divines had all once been men. Men who were raised to wield the powers of life and become almost immortal. But those tales were of Divines who had succumbed to the whisperings of Regret, the Creator who when he had seen what he and the other six Creators had wrought, wanted to destroy it and begin anew. They were stories of Divines who lost the favor of the Six.
“What if Lumen himself ate souls?” asked Da. “Who would have known it? Nobody. Isn’t that a greater horror than some farmer’s wife who uses a little weave to bless her and her family?”
“But the power doesn’t come from the same source,” said Talen. “It’s like comparing an ale brewed using pure water with another made using swamp scum. They may look the same from a distance, but in the mouth they’re night and day.”
Nettle eyed the woods. “Are we sure we want to talk about this out here?”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” said Da. “I don’t think this has anything to do with magic. I think this is nothing more than a bunch of cowards worried about their cattle and land.”
“You don’t believe the reports?”
“I believe that men see what they want to see. And what they saw was a Koramite smith who was richer than any seven of them combined.”
Talen had seen his father’s judgment blinded before by his pride and anger. And even though it grated, the Mokaddians weren’t always in the wrong. “Maybe all you choose to see is the wrongs done to our people. To admit that one of us was evil would spoil your arguments. Wouldn’t it be better to cut out the corrupted part than let it ruin the rest of us?”
“This is why we need a Divine protecting our shores,” said Nettle.
They all looked at him.
Nettle had brought his bowl outside. He stuffed a large spoonful of porridge in his mouth. “A mere human cannot hope to unravel such mysteries.”
“That’s true,” said Ke. “But you don’t need one to know there’s no greater risk now than there was before. Let’s say Talen is right. It is no more dangerous to walk about now than it was yesterday or the day before. If there are Sleth lurking about, they were there before.”
“What kind of logic is that?” asked Talen. “If you find out there are wildcats in the woods, then you take precautions. You don’t assume they pose no danger.”
“Ah,” said Ke, “but if the wildcats always kept to themselves, are they really a danger now? Perhaps a hunt will only corner them and make them fight.”
“Yes,” said Talen. “But wildcats don’t murder whole families and devour their souls.”
“Maybe Talen’s right,” said Da. “We should take precautions. But this all leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The Fir-Noy had no authority to organize a hunt in the village of Plum. That band of armsmen today had no authority to hunt here. So even if there are Sleth, there are far more Fir-Noy eager to run a Koramite through.”
“We need to post a watch,” said Talen.
“Aye,” said Da. “There’s bound to be more than one group of idiots in the woods.”
There were more than idiots in the woods, and Talen knew it. He was going to catch whoever had been lurking about. Normally, you only masked your scent when trapping animals, but it was possible that the hatchlings had eaten the souls of some beast in an attempt to obtain its finer sense of smell. He did not have days to let the snare weather, nor did he have any urine or gall from the last deer he’d killed to mask his and Nettle’s scent, so Talen led Nettle into the fading light, down to a swampy bend in the river. He found a spot where there was plenty of rotting vegetation and dug out a pail full of mud.
By the time they hiked back up the bank and to the run between the barn and the garden, it was dark. Da had shuttered up the windows against the evening insects, and so they only had starlight and a half-moon to guide them. Talen had wanted to