Life and Limb Read online

  The Finest in Fantasy from Jennifer Roberson

  BLOOD AND BONE

  Life and Limb

  THE SWORD-DANCER SAGA

  Sword-Dancer

  Sword-Singer

  Sword-Maker

  Sword-Breaker

  Sword-Born

  Sword-Sworn

  Sword-Bound

  (The Sword-Dancer Saga is also available in the

  Novels of Tiger and Del omnibus editions)

  CHRONICLES OF THE CHEYSULI

  Shapechanger’s Song

  (Shapechangers & The Song of Homana)

  Legacy of the Wolf

  (Legacy of the Sword & Track of the White Wolf)

  Children of the Lion

  (A Pride of Princes & Daughter of the Lion)

  The Lion Throne

  (Flight of the Raven & A Tapestry of Lions)

  THE KARAVANS UNIVERSE

  Karavans

  Deepwood

  The Wild Road

  THE GOLDEN KEY

  (with Melanie Rawn and Kate Elliott)

  Copyright © 2019 by Jennifer Roberson.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Jacket design and photo illustration by Adam Auerbach.

  Photo elements courtesy of Shutterstock.

  Interior design by Alissa Rose Theodor.

  Edited by Betsy Wollheim.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1838.

  Published by DAW Books, Inc.

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Nearly all the designs and trade names in this book are registered trademarks. All that are still in commercial use are protected by United States and international trademark law.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780756415402

  DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

  U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  —MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN U.S.A.

  PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

  Version_1

  Dedicated to three inspiring women no longer with us

  Shera Roberson, my mother

  Molly Hardy, my aunt

  Pat Hyre, my friend

  CONTENTS

  Also by Jennifer Roberson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  His voice was rich, a much loved, clear baritone, as he handed his seven-year-old grandson a gun.

  “All right, Gabriel. First time for everything. Don’t expect to be perfect. I wasn’t. Let’s just see what you’ve got, shall we? See what we’ve got to work with.” A warm hand came down on Gabriel’s shoulder, squeezed lightly. “Don’t fret, Gabriel.”

  It was a crisp Oregon day with an afternoon rain abated but lingering in puddles and dampness as clouds receded. Tall, gray-haired Grandaddy, with neatly trimmed beard and vigorous river of thick silvering hair flowing nearly to his shoulders, had driven them out to the country in his white ’63 Thunderbird with a box of empty beer bottles in the back seat, and Gabriel remembered the weight of the weapon. How it filled both hands, how it made him tense his arms, how his fingers clung.

  How his grandfather slipped a hand under his, eased the gun slightly upward. Grandaddy didn’t hold the gun for him; he just provided a smidgen of support so that he could stop clenching his entire body with the attempt to hold the gun still. Grandaddy steadied him, just a little.

  “All right, Gabriel.” The same calm voice. “You’ve got this.”

  He was nearly breathless with want, with the need to please. To excel. “All six bottles, Grandaddy?”

  His grandfather’s laugh gusted from his chest in a quiet blurt of amusement, blue eyes dancing as the weathered skin next to his eyes creased into a spray of fretwork lines. “If you think you can, of course. But one would be a fine beginning, Gabriel. And if you don’t get it right the first time, next time will do. Or the next after that. Baby steps. Baby steps, son.”

  But at seven he had gained an inch over what he’d been at six, and he felt strong. His body sang with it. This was, he felt within his bones, a test of some kind, even if his grandfather suggested no such thing. “I’m not a baby, Grandaddy. I can do this.”

  “Perhaps you are not.” Grandaddy’s hand, once more, briefly touched his shoulder. “Then show me what you’ve got.”

  He felt his grandfather remove the support from beneath his hands, the gun. It was a measly little outdated 6-chamber .22 revolver, nothing like the 9-mil Smith & Wesson his grandfather wore in an honest-to-God holster. But it felt big. It felt heavy.

  And then it didn’t. It felt right.

  He focused. He’d heard that word before, that prompting from Grandaddy. The world narrowed. The world lost definition around the edges, refined itself in the middle. Sound attenuated, died away until all he heard was his own shallow, choppy breathing.

  He stopped it, stilled it. Sucked breath again, blew it out on a huffing stream between pursed lips. It steadied his breathing; smoothed into something akin to a comfortable anticipation. It wasn’t excitement. It was the need to do this, to please his grandfather, to prove he could do this. And an almighty certainty that he could.

  He saw six beer bottles balanced along the pitted, weather-grayed wooden fence rail, six dead little brown-glass soldiers emptied by his father, who liked to kick back after work with two or four beers; bottles appropriated by his grandfather from out of the trash. That was all that mattered. Six bottles. Six targets. Six bullets. Six opportunities.

  What he wanted to do was what he’d seen in the movies featuring badass shooters: one-two-three-four-five-six, one after another, a sea
mless string of reports as the gun fired, the popping sound of exploding bottles and the cascade of shattered amber glass. But what his grandfather wanted was efficiency.

  Precision. Results.

  One at a time. Aim. Squeeze. Take the recoil. Steady hands. Loosen elbows, shoulders, then do it all again: one-two-three-four-five-six.

  Efficiency. Precision. Results.

  He fired six times. The gun was empty.

  He let his arm drop to his side, felt the weight dragging. He was suddenly seven years old again, not remotely a badass, and even a measly .22 felt heavy in the wake of his first experience shooting the thing.

  “Well,” Grandaddy murmured, clearly startled. Then his hand yet again came down on Gabe’s shoulder, squeezed. Firmly, man-to-man. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised, with your genetics . . . I think you’re what’s called ‘a natural.’”

  Gabe looked up at his grandfather. The words just spilled from his mouth, unwilled; and it was truth. “If you don’t get it right the first time, next time may be too late.”

  Grandaddy smiled slowly, broadly, teeth showing in the thicket of his tidy beard. “Hardwired, boy, is it? All of it? Yes. You’ll do. When the time comes.” He paused, blue eyes lost in the distances. “And come it will.”

  Gabe blinked up at him. Grandaddy often went off on stuff he didn’t truly grasp, talking about “special Mendelian genetics” and “coefficients of inbreeding,” “prepotency” and “outcrossing” and any number of terms in which he staked no interest. He listened, though, because that’s what one did with Grandaddy.

  “You’ll understand, some day,” Grandaddy told him once. “For now, place your trust in me, son, and I’ll see you safe. But there is learning to do.”

  Well, Gabe liked school, so learning was okay. Loved books. Spent hours lost in worlds created by others. But he also liked to move, to do, to not be trapped at a desk in the classroom, or watching educational videos, or viewing documentaries on DVDs at home, or any number of things his grandfather asked of him when he came around. Which wasn’t often enough, to Gabe’s way of thinking. He loved his parents, loved his younger brother, but he worshipped his grandfather. Life was more interesting, was somehow brighter and louder and sharper and more real when Grandaddy came. And it didn’t matter that Grandaddy wasn’t truly his grandfather, not in blood, but an old family friend, or some weird grownup attachment he didn’t quite grasp. Grandaddy just was. Gabe knew in the deepest part of his soul that they were linked somehow.

  He was eight when Grandaddy came again, and at eight Gabe felt like he was bursting out of his skin, that he might explode were he not given freedom—and yet he knew, too, in some weird instinctive way, that he was utterly clueless. He didn’t know what he wanted. He didn’t know what he needed. He just knew that he was lacking. That he was lesser. Wasn’t badass. That he wasn’t truly whole.

  He woke up in the midst of a noisy nighttime thunderstorm and knew without a doubt that his grandfather had come. And just as he thought it, just as he sensed it, in some incomprehensible way, his grandfather opened the bedroom door and came in smiling, knelt beside the bed. Took into his broad right hand the small right hand of a boy, and stroked back the wayward locks of dark hair with his free left hand.

  “God’s bowling,” Grandaddy said, as all outdoors was loud with angry rumbling.

  Gabe stared up at him from the tangle of bedclothes. “God?”

  “He’s bowling,” Grandaddy said. “That’s what thunder is, the taking down of the pins.”

  He frowned. “No, it’s not.”

  Grandaddy’s brows rose up beneath a cascade of graying hair. “It’s not?”

  “No,” Gabe said with supreme confidence, because he knew the truth. “That’s Thor.”

  For the first time in Gabe’s brief life, his grandfather appeared to be at a loss. “Thor?”

  “God of Thunder,” Gabe replied. “Thor is cool.”

  Grandaddy smiled. “Is he, now?” And then he lost his smile, grew earnest and serious. “It’s time we had a talk, you and I. You won’t remember it, but you need to know it.” He tapped Gabe’s chest. “Bone-deep, soul-deep, you’ll know it. We’ll just let it sit in the back of your head for a while, buried behind everything else—you’ve a very busy brain, son—and one day, when it’s time, I’ll call it up in you, and you’ll remember all of it. You’ll know who you are, what you’re meant to be, and what you’re intended to do.”

  That, Gabe found intriguing. “What will I do?”

  Grandaddy said, as the thunder rolled behind him, “You’ll be a soldier, boy. Sealed to it. Life and limb, blood and bone, heart and soul. Not a soldier like others are, for it’s not the kind of war most people fight on earth. But because we’re not ‘most people,’ you and I, it will be far more important. The fate of the world will hinge upon it.”

  Gabe stared at him. “The whole entire world?”

  Grandaddy’s voice, though soft, carried the weight of thunder. “The whole entire world—and everyone in it.”

  * * *

  —

  Remi, awkward boy’s limbs asprawl in abandonment on the plank wood of the covered front porch—his father, thank the good Lord, had hung a ceiling fan out here—scooched closer to his companion, rested the back of his skull atop the soft-furred bulk of a blue merle Australian Shepherd atwitch in his sleep. The day was hot, sticky, heavy, promising no relief until nighttime, and even that was chancy. At best the house was cooled by fans of all ilk; evaporative cooling didn’t run right in humid weather, and they couldn’t afford ‘central air,’ as it was known, those big units that blew chilled air through all the rooms and gave a man a chance to breathe, to fight the moisture and dry a sweat-damp body.

  Remi was used to sweating.

  He leaned against the dog, who yipped and woofed in dog dreams, and wondered what the stars thought. That they did think, he knew; they must. They hung up there in the sky, glowering down upon the world, knowing what all men thought. Knowing what he thought: Remiel Isaiah McCue.

  Son, his Nana had said, not long before she died, You’re meant for larger things. I don’t rightly know what those things are, but you’re meant for ’em. And one day, they’ll find you.

  But when? Remi wondered. And would these things, whatever they might be, manage to find a boy in the treeless, dusty expanse that was West Texas?

  He trusted Nana. She said she saw farther than others, deeper; saw beneath the skin to the heart, and swore his was larger than most. Said there was enough soul in him for two people, if he let his light shine. That maybe he’d even share it.

  Times he felt like his bones downright itched. He couldn’t put a name to it. His skin just felt too tight for his bones, like they were growing faster than the rest of him. And it was hard to sit still, at times, like his body just needed to move, right along with his mind. That need ran like a river in full spate.

  But he got caught up in school, and Friday night football under the lights, and learning to rope a plastic steer head stuck on a straw bale, driving a tractor, crawling out of bed with his big brother in the wee smalls of the morning to open the irrigation ditches so the water might flow to the alfalfa field. He hung out behind the chutes at the local rodeos, and Nana was long dead before he recalled what she’d said about his heart and his soul, and sharing his light, so he never got to ask her what she meant.

  And then one day Grandaddy showed up and said it was time for Remi McCue to learn to throw a knife, being as he already knew how to shoot a gun.

  Well, yeah. He was a Texas country boy. Shooting a gun came early.

  Throwing a knife? Well, not so much. But by the time his old “grandfather” was done with him, Grandaddy said, Remi would understand how horn-and-steel felt in a hand, what balance was all about, and the pure seduction of letting a blade fly to its target.

  Hell, yeah. Yeehaw. Though he
wasn’t sure, then, what seduction meant. But that was Grandaddy’s way; he didn’t treat Remi like a child, or like an adult, either, when he thought about it, but just as Remi.

  He was eight when Grandaddy came again after being gone for a couple of years, and that man drove up to the house out of the maw of a big old Texas thunderstorm in his aged white T-bird with red leather seats. Gray hair remained a vigorous crop flowing nearly to his shoulders.

  Remi stood on the porch as Grandaddy came loping through the rain, head ducked against the worst. When he reached the porch, he gifted Remi with a display of bright teeth in the thicket of a trimmed beard darker than his hair.

  “God’s bowling,” he said.

  Remi shook his head. “No, sir.”

  “No?”

  “It’s Thor. God of Thunder.”

  His grandfather froze upon the step, face blank, and then he smiled. It was a broad, secret smile, with pleased laughter behind it; but not meant to be understood by any, perhaps, other than himself. “Is it?” he asked. “Thor?”

  “Bring me Mjolnir,” Remi said, envisioning the massive hammer as he raised his hand to grip an imaginary shaft, “and I’ll conquer the world.”

  Grandaddy tilted his head, as if acknowledging something. “It’s time we had a talk, you and I. You won’t remember it, but you need to know it, bone-deep, soul-deep. We’ll just let it sit in the back of your head for a while, buried behind everything else, and one day, when it’s time, I’ll call it up in you, and you’ll remember all of it. You’ll know who you are, what you’re meant to be, and what you’re intended to do.”

  “What will I do?” Remi asked, intrigued.

  Grandaddy said, “You’ll be a soldier, boy. Sealed to it. Life and limb, blood and bone, heart and soul. Not a soldier like others are, for it’s not the kind of war most people fight. But because we’re not most people, you and I, it will be far more important. The fate of the world will hinge upon it.”

  Remi stared at him. “The whole entire world?”