Driven By Instinct

2 - Cradle

"Damming the river is what caused your problems," Vica said firmly. "Breaking the dam was the answer. When the generation before you dammed the river upstream, the water started cutting deep into the riverbed the wrong way. It killed the water plants, which killed the fish that need them. And when those were gone, everything else starved, and then they disappeared. That's why this place has been dying. It's been in its death throes these last few years."

"But now the fields -" Murmurs rippled through the rickety town hall as farmers and their wives wrung their hands and voiced their discontent. "If they flood in the spring, we could lose some of our crops -"

Vica waved her hands above her head, begging their attention. It was a moment before they all came to order, dozens of pairs of eyes staring at her with a mixture of disappointment, anger, and yet a quiet hope that she would say something to assuage their fears and make everything all right. They had trusted her, after all, and she had promised to help them. Surely she couldn't be so wicked as to condemn them all this way.

"Dig channels through your fields, and let the water flow through when spring comes. Your lives depend on that river. You'll lose a little acreage for your crops to make room for the drainage channels, but your only other choice is living on dead land. Killing the river kills everything that needs it to live - and that includes all of you. I'll charm the fields here to make sure they're fertile for the coming planting season, and then you'll see them thriving after the winter. I promise."

"Charm the fields?" someone repeated, and there was more muttering, pleased this time. "What does that mean?"

Vica heard it and jumped at the opportunity. She nodded and pointed at the direction of the door. "I'll do it now," she said quickly. "The day's early. If someone can accompany me as a guide so that I know what areas to work, I'll be done by evening."

A number of the farmers and their wives volunteered, eager to witness uncommon witchery with their own eyes. It didn't matter. If that was all it took to gain their trust and convince them to let alone the dam she had broken yesterday and to let the river flow, then it was a small price to pay. So long as they didn't interfere in her efforts today, that is. They hastily led her out of their small meeting hall and out of the town proper onto the edge of the closest fields, where they gathered around her in a rag-tag semicircle crowd.

"Back please," Vica said, rolling the sleeves of her homely green robes up her arms. "I'll need some space." She closed her eyes and remained facing forward, letting her senses expand and stretch over her surroundings. She felt the presence of the townspeople recede as they gave her the room she had requested - but not much space, she noticed dryly. None of them had ever seen magic in practice before. Their only impression of it was the hocus-pocus of the folk tales that had been passed down to them from their fathers and grandfathers, and this might well be their only chance to see it in their lifetime. They weren't going to miss it for the world.

Vica spread her arms out to the side in either direction, keeping her eyes closed. She didn't often need to make the extra effort to hone her focus, but lately, she had felt something like thick wool pressing down on her whenever she tried to cast her magic. She could feel it especially now, strangely. Closing her eyes helped, but the niggling worry that something could be wrong tugged at her nerves. But now wasn't the time, she reminded herself. She would sort that out later.

She pressed past the strange sensation stifling her mind, dug through it until she felt the wellspring of her magic. There it was, she thought with relief, and took hold of her power and guided it down to her arms, to her fingertips. Her magic rushed out of her like a furious gale, whipping her hair back out of her face. Behind her, she heard the flapping of the women's cotton dresses billowing back as well - too bad if they had wanted more dramatic theatrics like lightning and thunder; reality was far humbler.

She ignored the muffled cry of "My hat!" and focused on guiding the whirlwind energy circling around her into the earth instead. She could feel it prying open the soil, burrowing into the ground. Felt the earthworms wriggling underneath, wrapped herself around the tangled roots. She took a few seconds to right her consciousness, separating her physical body from the sensation of her magic, and then glanced over her shoulder at the townspeople behind her. In truth, she could barely see them past her other Sight - they resembled something close to ghostly impressions of themselves, faces muddled together in the backdrop of her vision.

"Show me the way," she managed to say, hearing herself only distantly as she let her mind loosen itself from the confines of her body and follow the stretch of her magic burrowing under the earth. "Take my arm. I'll follow where you lead."

The hours slipped by, from daybreak to noon to evening. Most of the townspeople had dispersed by the time the sun began setting on the horizon, but there were always at least two of the farmers to guide her from field to field. Charmed fields she had promised them, and charmed they were: she propagated the earthworms, strengthened the leftover roots of the crops that had been scantily harvested just a few months ago at the advent of the autumn season, broke and turned over the deep, compacted layers of dirt underneath them all where the farmers' hoes would never reach.

She left a trail of her raw magic too between every grain, where the dormant energy would lie in wait until they attached themselves to the roots that would reach down to them in the summer. This land would thrive, and thrive thoroughly. The restoration of the heart of this area in the river would naturally call back life, but the magic too would call to them: Vica's promise was not an empty one. Half a year would see great changes.

"For all our sakes, I hope you're right about the river," the farmer was telling Vica over his bowl of vegetable stew at the dinner table. "Three generations on this homestead, and my children's inheritance, all here. It's all we've got." He smiled wanly at her, the lines of stress worn into his face looking even starker under the flickering candle lights. "Though I guess if you aren't, we would have had to leave this place and find somewhere else to settle down anyway. It's all dying."

Vica reached over to take hold of the farmer's hand. "You'll see," she said confidently, and a warm spark of her magic drifted from the palm of her hand into his fingers. He didn't seem to notice it, but the lines of his face visibly relaxed. "Everything will be better. Just give it time."

She had insisted on sleeping in the barn in the raised hayloft again as she had the previous night, but the wife wouldn't hear of it. In the end, Vica found herself in the cozy attic room instead, and she lay down with a sigh that felt like it had come rattling from within her bones. She was exhausted. Oh, her magic could still flow, there was no mistake about that, but it was her physical body that felt battered from channeling the endless power that sprang from within her. Her flesh felt scorched and weathered, and she winced at the sheer pleasure of taking her weight off of her feet.

She would have to rise early in the morning and leave; the strange feeling of something pressing down on her had only intensified throughout the day, and the unnameable sense of dread made her anxious to get moving again. Even now she felt like she could scarcely breathe, but of course, that had to be the fatigue: she would feel refreshed in the morning once her body had recovered.

Vica folded her hands behind her head and stared up at the sloping rafters just a few feet above. This was a quiet place, Greenshire. A town only in name, it was really a small village with a humble population. Dozens had left for greener pastures in the last decade, unable to cope with its decline over the years. Perhaps they would come back next year when they heard that Greenshire was prospering.

Vica drifted off with a satisfied smile still on her face.

Her dreams were strange. She floated through darkness, partly realizing that she was not quite awake but unable to properly rouse herself. Her natural instincts told her that it was still in the dead of night when she finally found the willpower to open her eyes and force herself out of her half-sleep -

Someone was seated sideways on the bed next to her, looking down at her face.

Vica's heart leaped into the back of her throat, and she reflexively reached for her magic even as she sprang up to try to scramble away from the dark figure. But a dizzying wave of nausea was the only thing that answered her call, and despite feeling her magic fighting frantically to respond, it was as if she and it could only scrabble at each other on opposing sides of an invisible wall. Something held her back - or held her magic back, or both, and the sensation was none like she had ever experienced before.

If there existed a power that could make her heart stop beating, if there existed a power that could blind and deafen her, she imagined it would feel like this. And beneath it all, she abruptly realized that she recognized this suffocating presence: this was what had been cloaking her like a stubborn fog for days now. Even today, she had felt it more strongly than usual but had attributed it to the stress of traveling at a pace more demanding than was comfortable. But now she realized that the source of the stifling cloud was here, staring her down face to face.

He moved like a serpent. In one fluid, short motion, he grabbed her wrists and shoved her back down, pinning her hands as far above her head as they would reach. She strained against the pain that lanced through her shoulders; still intensely nauseated and disoriented by the inability to use her magic, and now shocked by the rough manhandling she was being subjected to, she couldn't even find the presence of mind to shout for help.

Somehow her mind untangled itself from its terror a second later, and she opened her mouth to scream. But the man swiftly removed one of his hands and placed it over her mouth. Before she could retaliate - though she immediately clenched her now-freed hand into a fist - the man had bent over at the waist so that he could speak directly into her ear in a low murmur.

"I'll kill everyone in this house if you make so much as a sound."

The threat chilled Vica to the bone. If only she could use her magic, she would have flayed him alive in response without remorse, but as it was, she had no way of defending herself or the farmer, his wife, and his young children. No. This wasn't right, she thought to herself, hearing her heart pounding and blood rushing in her ears. He might kill her if she screamed, but that might give the others a chance to run. If she remained silent and he killed her anyway, then the others too would die at his hand because of her selfishness -

"Don't be a hero. I'm only here for you, mage. I swear on your beautiful bounty that my only intention is to drag you out of here tonight."

The sound of her breathing mingling with his was the only thing to float through the silence for another brief moment, and she stared into the man's yellow eyes that seemed to glow even in the murky darkness of the attic room. She couldn't make out the rest of his face, but she could make out the shape of the dark cloak he wore as well as the hood over his head. If she had ever met this man, she wouldn't be able to recognize him anyway in near-pitch blackness like this.

She gathered her senses, assessed the threat. This man was no ordinary burglar. He had moved so quickly to restrain her, and while it was true that she had still been half-asleep, there was no doubt about it: he moved like an assassin. Vica had encountered a number of them both in her youth and in her travels, both those just in passing and those coming for her specifically, but she had never come across one that could disable her as this man had just done. And yet he had not killed her, which meant that he was either toying with her or she still had time before he did the deed. Perhaps he intended to kill her elsewhere; she had heard somewhere that carrying a dead body was more trouble than guiding a compliant captive.

But her priority was to get him out of the farmhouse, whatever the cost. She was not going to have the blood of the innocent lives under its roof on her hands.

She didn't dare to move even her hand that was no longer restrained, and the man made no move to remove his own hand from over her mouth. But finally she parted her lips underneath his fingers; when he fractionally moved them away, she spoke in a cracked whisper. "Please. Not here. I'll come willingly."

His response was to slowly move away, but she knew better than to believe that she could take advantage of the compromise and deceive him in any way. Not when she was this close to him, anyway, and not with the lives of the farmer and his family at stake. He kept one hand on her shoulder and helped her to rise from the bed, and then guided her quietly down the stairs. Somehow he managed to steer her clear of every floorboard that might have creaked, but she supposed that was just the talent of any assassin.

They slid out of the front door at long last, and Vica was met with the chill of late fall on her face. Had she been shaking all this time, or was it just from the cold? she wondered. Her body felt numb in dumb terror, nearly paralyzed from the persisting inability to access her arcane power. She felt naked, or perhaps dismembered.

She stumbled when the man tried to push her forward down the path; unable to see in the darkness, she couldn't navigate her way through it as well as he seemingly could. After a few more unfortunate near-tumbles, he finally stopped, brought her hands behind her to cross them at the wrists, and almost instantaneously looped what had to have been a prepared loosened knot of rope around them. He cinched it with a strong pull, jerking her backwards into him as he tested the integrity of the binds.

It happened so quickly that she didn't even have the chance to try to fight back, but then again, they were still too close to the farmhouse. By now, she had obtained a more accurate sense of the man's abilities just by being in physical contact with him - she was right to have feared the worst. Her heart thrummed in her chest.

"Don't try anything," he said flatly, speaking directly into her ear, and then spun her around to face him before bodily picking her up to throw her over his shoulder. She stifled a grunt of pain when his hard shoulder dug into her abdomen, and then suddenly they were moving so fast that she thought he might drop her and let her plummet face-first onto the ground. That wouldn't be quite so bad if she could use the opportunity to escape, she thought, but as the farmhouse disappeared into the distance, she suspected that her optimism was sorely misplaced.

The whole of her body and her mind ached; her magic waited, impotent, just beyond the barrier that her mind couldn't seem to cross. The night chill bit at her exposed skin. She had left her traveling cloak by the washroom and hadn't dared to make the detour to collect it. But of course, the cold would be the least of her worries soon enough, she thought.

Vica closed her eyes.