Bumble had heard the commotion with her ears, but not her mind. Not until the brothers appeared in front of her did she remember hearing anything at all.

  Chera—

  The young woman trembled with a new fear as her friend hit the Stone Walker’s head again with his stick. The blow made a loud whack, but the Stone Walker didn’t get hurt. Blows couldn’t hurt it any more than they could hurt rock.

  One arm rose in the air to grab hold of the thick stick and break it like a twig, but Chera was too quick for it. He leaped back and Mindik jumped in, thwacking away at the Stone Walker’s other side.

  “Poke at its eyes,” hollered Chera.

  “Where are they?” Mindik shouted, jumping away again as the Stone Walker lunged his way.

  “Somewhere up high,” yelled Chera.

  “Oh that’s a big help,” Mindik thundered back sarcastically.

  Taking turns, they weaved around the boulder in a strange sort of dance, dashing in to hit it on the head—a hit that would have broken the skull of any other living creature—and then whisking themselves out of its way in agile bounds.

  Scrambling to get out of the way, Bumble found herself bumping against the fallen target. With wide eyes she watched Chera wallop the Stone Walker, and as she watched, she used the target to pull herself upright. The sturdy wooden circle had fallen on its side, not flat on its face. This meant it was in a position to help her stand, but only her right hand had grabbed hold of it. Her left hand was refusing to do anything helpful, and she glanced at it in frustration.

  She was still holding the bow.

  Arrow! Get an arrow!

  She didn’t know whether the thought came from her mind or the Plete’s, but it must have been the Plete’s because it kicked her shrinking mind out of the corner where it had hidden ever since she first saw the walking boulders.

  Hastily she pulled an arrow out of the target and put it on her bow though she was shaking all over.

  You can’t shoot straight if you’re shaking, she told herself tersely.

  My head hurts and I’m scared, her mind whimpered.

  “Quit whimpering,” she ordered out loud and lifted the bow, but she would have to wait until the Stone Walker was facing in her direction. It might not stay in that position long, but she couldn’t hit an eye unless it faced her.

  She had an advantage over Chera and Mindik. The two young men were prodding feverishly at the boulder’s top whenever they got a chance, but they had to hop about far too quickly to spot where the narrow eye slits opened, especially since the Stone Walker was moving constantly too, swaying from side to side as it fended off the meddlesome sticks.

  Bumble, on the other hand, knew the exact location of the eye slits. She had seen them at close range when the Stone Walkers had walked up to her and Finken. Her body trembled one more time as she thought of her uncle. Then she put everything out of her mind except for one thing.

  Hit an eye.

  Chera and Mindik had started breathing in giant gulping gasps. They were young and strong, but they had already traveled hours that day at a fast pace, and the present fight was demanding to say the least. They wouldn’t be able to keep up their antics forever.

  When the Stone Walker lunged once more toward Chera, he thrust desperately at what he hoped was an eye but only succeeded in pushing hard against solid rock. The Stone Walker got hold of the stick this time. With ease it broke the heavy piece of wood into two pieces.

  Making its grating noise it traveled in fast mode toward him, but Chera wasn’t as tired as all that. He jumped out of the way, dancing over to one side and yelling insults.

  “Rock garden. Gravel pit. Potato shape. Put some notches in you and we’ll have a stone ladder. Lean you against a wall and climb on you is what we’ll do.”

  It was doubtful if the Stone Walker understood Chera’s insults. However, the young man bet no one had ever challenged it for this length of time. The boulder opened its mouth and let out such an enormous grinding roar Chera’s ears hurt. An earthquake might have sounded like that as it formed deep under the ground.

  Taking advantage of the momentary inaction, Mindik darted in. He walloped the boulder so hard on the side of its head that his stick broke and his hands stung. The Stone Walker roared again, unfazed by the blow.

  Mindik’s face tightened.

  “Head toward the woods,” he bellowed and began to run with the vague idea of finding another stick under the trees. It wasn’t necessary.

  As the Stone Walker turned to follow them, Mindik heard a whizzing sound. An arrow flew through the air and stuck quivering near the boulder’s top. The Stone Walker reeled a step or two, raising slab arms toward its hurt head, as its fallen comrade had done. Then it fell, and its fall shook the ground.

  Nobody spoke.

  Chera and Mindik were gasping for air in great heaving gulps, but they didn’t look at each other, neither did they look at the fallen Stone Walker. Instead they stared at a young Stalli woman who was still holding her bow out in front of her.

  “I didn’t lower my bow. I forgot,” she whispered. Chera grinned.

  “Bumbly Bell, I always told you to aim and then lower your bow,” he scolded in-between gulps of air.

  “What on Tarth are you two talking about?” Mindik wheezed.

  Chera put on his lecture face. “She has a tendency to aim high,” he stated as pompously as one can while struggling to breathe normally, “and I—”

  Mindik interrupted him. “Let this be a lesson to you. Never listen to Chera,” he instructed Bumble.

  A noise from behind startled both the young men, whose nerves had not yet recovered from the stress of the day. Chera reached Bumble in four quick bounds, and Mindik spun about so quickly he almost fell, but there was no new danger. The noise had come from Faso.

  Tears flooded the old woman’s cheeks, as she tried to push herself off the ground. Mindik sprang to help her up, and Faso immediately hobbled toward the body of her husband. The second Stone Walker had fallen on top of him, leaving only one leg and a hand uncovered.

  “Does it do it when it’s dead? Kill people, I mean,” the old woman asked in a trembling voice.

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t touch it,” Mindik cautioned.

  A yellow cat stalked past him.

  Sunshine’s body had resumed a normal size, her hair lying smoothly back in place. Presumably she had groomed herself during the fight. With her most sour expression, the cat leaped onto the back of the dead Stone Walker.

  She glanced contemptuously toward Mindik. Then she picked up a hind leg and began cleaning her lower parts.

  “There you have it. Never listen to Mindik,” Chera crowed.

  Faso lowered herself awkwardly beside Finken’s leg. She patted it almost shyly.

  “I’m sorry, Finken. I’m sorry,” she mumbled.

  Suddenly Bumble sagged against Chera as if she couldn’t hold herself up any longer.

  “My head,” she whispered.

  “We need to go home,” Chera responded vaguely.

  He had just noticed the cut on his friend’s arm. The jeweler’s pick hadn’t cut her deeply, but the wound was still bleeding. As soon as he’d wrapped a makeshift bandage around it, Chera took Bumble’s arm and led her past Faso and Mindik.

  “It’s going to rain. We should go back too,” Mindik gently told the grieving woman.

  Faso didn’t respond, but when Chera and Bumble reached the path and started down it, the deluge began and she let herself be lifted again to her feet. She and Mindik followed Chera and Bumble.

  A yellow ball with outstretched legs whizzed ahead of them all. Like most cats, Sunshine didn’t enjoy getting wet. She wanted the protection of her porch and was leaving the poky humans to manage the trip home without her.

  The poky humans did take quite a while. Mindik had to support Faso, while Chera had to guide Bumble through every footstep. Her head hurt so much by now, she could barely see.

  When they finally climbed the steps of the cottage, the big yellow cat was curled up in her favorite porch chair. She lifted bored amber eyes and yawned at them.

  Eight

  Poison

  Chera and Mindik dried the two women off, guided them to their respective rooms, and eased them onto their beds. Faso was shaking with shock over her husband’s death, and Bumble’s headache had intensified to the point that she didn’t want to move any part of her body.

  Mindik ran home at once to get help but had to come back with the unwelcome news that no one was there.

  “We need Mom,” Chera grumbled. He sat with a grunt in the rocking chair, scrunching down far enough to allow his head to rest on the rocker’s back.

  “I’d settle for either Dad or Mom, but neither one of them will believe out story. Who would? It’s crazy,” muttered his brother.

  Chera brightened. “You’re right. I can’t wait to tell it.”

  “More fun to tell than live through and parts of it weren’t fun any way you look at it,” his brother disagreed.

  Mindik had not sat down. His hair was rumpled and his clothes dirty. Chera was in the same state, but he was ready for a nap, while his brother wandered restlessly around the kitchen.

  Contemplating him from the comfort of the rocking chair, Chera said, “It’s over. Have a seat and relax.”

  “I want to see Cherry,” blurted out his brother and Chera put on his lecturing face.

  “It’s about time—” he began but Mindik cut him short.

  “I know. I’ve left her too many times for too long. I wasn’t thinking,” he stated bluntly.

  “You were thinking all right, but not about Cherry. You were thinking about everything else in your life except her,” Chera told him bluntly.

  “That’s going to change,” his brother insisted.

  “Go on then. Tell Cherry I advise getting a written statement with witnesses,” Chera prompted with a lazy shooing motion.

  “I’m out of here,” Mindik tossed over his shoulder as he ran out the door and jumped off the porch, ignoring both the steps and the pouring rain.

  It was quite unlike him, and Chera would have nodded approval if he’d had the energy. However, right now his head didn’t want to do anything but rest on the back of the rocking chair. Stretching out one foot, he snagged the bottom rung of a kitchen chair and dragged it over. Then he rested both feet on the seat of the chair.

  The door had swung closed as Mindik rushed past it, which was fine, except for a sound from the porch that presented itself as soon as Chera closed his eyes. The young man moaned. He knew that sound. A series of family pets had taught him what to do when he heard it.

  He got up, leg muscles protesting, and opened the door. Sunshine paced regally in and meowed. Chera knew that meow. It was time for the cat to eat, and she saw no reason to cancel her routine. So what if Chera had run for hours and then fought an angry Stone Walker. She was hungry.

  Obediently he scrounged through the cupboards until he found three fillets of melvefish scraped clean of scales, deboned, and wrapped in moist towels to keep them fresh for supper. Without hesitation he dumped all three on a plate and put the plate on the floor.

  Sunshine stared incredulously at the young man.

  “I saw you stand up to the Stone Walker. If you hadn’t, it would have gotten to Faso and maybe Bumbly Bell.” He nudged the plate of fish closer. “You deserve it.”

  The yellow cat’s face returned to its habitual sour expression. Of course I deserve it, her body language said. Why state the obvious! Nevertheless, she didn’t go through her normal routine of hesitating as if something bad might be in the food. Taking an enormous bite, she crouched possessively over the plate.

  Chera wandered down the hall and peeked into Bumbly Bell’s room, but his friend lay without moving, and he didn’t want to disturb her in case she had fallen asleep. He came back to the kitchen and listened at Faso’s door, but he couldn’t hear anything there either. The distraught woman must have cried herself to sleep.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he returned to the rocking chair and yawned, watching through half closed eyes as Sunshine thoroughly licked the empty plate. The cat jumped onto the counter and started meticulously cleaning her entire body, but long before she had finished, he let his head fall back.

  Sunshine licked her paw one last time and rubbed it on her face. She glanced tolerantly at the young man. He had given her fish. She would excuse the loud rumbling noise that was coming from his open mouth. Stalking past the sink to her favored windowsill, the big yellow cat stretched, yawned, and settled down for a nap.

  R

  Something in Chera must have remained on the alert, because he heard the voices as soon as they came within range.

  Lurching out of the rocking chair and waking Sunshine, who hissed at him, he ran out of the cabin to waylay his parents, but they had already passed by their own cottage and were heading straight toward him.

  “We ran into Mindik and Cherry,” his father explained as he and Lynn reached the porch steps, holding borrowed jackets over their heads to protect them from the rain.

  Three other people followed them into the cottage. Barrow carried his healer’s bag and sprang up the steps as if in a hurry. Parsleyville’s two wise ones walked behind him at a more normal pace. Their faces were unusually set. Chera didn’t know how to read them.

  “Where’s Bumble?” asked Barrow as soon as he entered the cottage.

  “BUMBLY BELL is in her room. She has a bad headache,” Chera informed him with an emphasis on the correct name.

  Barrow ignored the correction. “Has she taken tonic today?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Chera answered in surprise.

  The healer rushed back to Bumble’s room, and Chera noticed deep furrows in his parents’ foreheads.

  “What’s happened?” he asked, feeling disoriented. He had expected them to be asking him that question.

  Lynn didn’t say anything, and Chera got the impression she was close to tears, which meant something of major proportions was going on. His mother wasn’t the crying type.

  His father cleared his throat.

  “Finken and Faso tried to poison your mother today,” he told Chera in a flat tone of voice.

  Chera’s hands tightened into fists. Forget the plan to conquer bad attitudes. Fatso and the Fink deserved the worst attitude he could give them.

  “Barrow called it a slow-acting poison. Lynn wouldn’t have felt anything until tomorrow. Then she would have gotten sick. She wouldn’t have died, but she would have gotten very sick.”

  Chera crossed the room in one long stride.

  “Did you take any?” he asked, putting an arm around his mother’s shoulders.

  In a low voice she said, “No. Sunshine made me feel suspicious, and I poured the tea Faso brought me into a jar.”

  When she swallowed hard, Chell took up the story.

  “We took the jar to Barrow so he could run his tests on the tea. Afterwards Lynn and Barrow went to find the wise ones, while I came back here and got the canister of tonic.”

  “What would you have done if Finken and Faso had been home?” asked Penchand, the oldest Parsleyville wise one.

  “Taken the tonic,” Chell answered briefly, and his son, who had experienced his father in a commandeering mood, didn’t doubt him. Fatso and the Fink wouldn’t have had a chance.

  Chell continued, “We waited until Barrow had tested Bumble’s tonic. He found the normal ingredients for a tonic, but he also found a low dose of laudon.”

  “They put poison in Bumbly Bell’s tonic? What were they trying to do, kill her,” asked Chera angrily.

  Mode, the second Parsleyville wise one, answered, “Laudon kills when it’s taken in high doses. Low amounts act as a sedative, though no healer uses it as such because of the effect it has on the mind.”

  As a wise one, Mode had often encountered tense situations. He’d talked to family members who had glared at him as if he were to blame when an illness or accident happened to someone they loved. The glare Chera was presently giving him ranked exponentially higher than any the man had ever received.

  He took a step backwards and wanted to take more. It was sheer will power that held him in place—will power and the knowledge that the young man’s fury was not directed toward him.

  Penchand spoke up then, and Mode admired his friend’s brave transfer of Chera’s glare to himself. He did notice, however, that Penchand stepped back two steps before he said anything.

  “At first we think Finken and Faso only meant to calm their niece’s hysterics over her parents’ death, but they must have liked the results. We are guessing they continued giving her laudon because they wanted her to do whatever they told her.”

  Lynn reached for the nearest chair and collapsed into it. Lynn does not cry, popped into her mind—another Lynn statement of all things, and one of her oldest ones. She didn’t even agree with it anymore. Crying had its place and sometimes relieved tension, though to be honest, she found it easier to accept other people’s tears than let her own flow.

  It’s just. . . I don’t; I just don’t. . . How could anyone. . .

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and knew it was Chell’s.

  “What happened to you boys today? Mindik didn’t give us details. He said you’d want to tell the story,” her husband said to Chera, and out of the corner of her eyes, she saw him cock his head in her direction.

  Lynn knew Chell was trying to distract her, but Chera didn’t get the hint. He didn’t say anything, which was such unusual behavior from their youngest son that his mother glanced sharply at him.

  “If Bumbly Bell—” he finally started in a gruff voice but couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Oh Chera,” she said, getting up to put her arms around him. “Barrow is a good healer,” she reminded him.

  “Bumble lived this long with poison in her body. She should feel much better without it,” Chell said hopefully.

  “She doesn’t,” Barrow corrected him dourly.

  The Stalli healer, in a typically quiet healer’s manner, had entered the kitchen without anyone noticing.