Something very bad had happened here. Not, he was pretty sure, whatever had made the people of Wild Sign leave their musical instruments behind. Something like this did not happen in a season. Two years after the Battle of Little Bighorn, Charles had felt nothing while he’d traveled over that ground. Ten years later, the spirit had been so heavy with sorrow, he had stood alone in the darkness and cried for those who had been lost.

This darkness of spirit had been here before the people of Wild Sign had decided to make this ground into a gathering place. It would have taken more than half a year to grow darkness this deep. He wondered why a group of witches would have thought it a good idea to come here. Did they have no common sense at all? How could they not have felt this?

“There’s something bad about this place, isn’t there?” Anna asked, watching them. “I thought maybe I was just spooked because of the dead animals and the abandoned instruments.” She looked around. “I don’t like it here. What happened to these people to make this place feel so awful?”

“It’s not the Wild Sign people,” Tag said, his voice certain. “This”—he swept a hand wide—“feels like Culloden.” Interesting, Charles thought, that Tag’s mind, like Charles’s, had gone to another battlefield for comparison. “It would take a great deal of horrible to make the deaths of forty people resonate in the land.”

While Tag had been talking, Anna’s toe had sent something rolling on the ground. She’d bent down and picked it up—a recorder. Doubtless there were other instruments scattered about and hidden by a season’s growth of grasses. Absently she knocked it against her leg to dislodge the dirt.

“My da said Sherwood told him there were over a hundred people here, and everyone but Leah died,” Charles said. He wasn’t sure a hundred deaths would be enough to make the land feel as it did.

He closed his eyes, trying to get a better feel. He missed the little spirits of the woods who sometime gave him clues.

Brother Wolf said, out loud so everyone could hear it, “This feels like a place where sacrifices were made.”

Anna nodded her head. “It feels tragic.”

She lifted the recorder to her lips, almost absently. The note rose in the air, pure and clear, the stone walls behind them pushing the sound out. Like the guitar, it was a fine instrument. Unlike the guitar, it had survived somehow undamaged from its exposure.

Anna played a quick scale first, to check it for tune and playability—and to let her fingers get used to the hole placements. It was what Charles would have done with a strange instrument, too. You had to know your partner before you could make proper music.

Typically, his Anna’s first instinct was to make things better, and music was always her willing tool. She started out in a minor key, trying several songs before settling on an old Irish tune. He and Tag waited where they stood, caught by the music.

The old words sang through his head in time with her playing:

    The Minstrel-Boy to the war is gone,

In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

His father’s sword he has girded on,

And his wild harp slung behind him.

It was a song suited to this time and place, with its melancholy themes of death and beauty, war and music. Charles became aware something was stirring in response to the music—something, here and now. It made Charles uneasy. He could not tell if it was something physical or spiritual. He couldn’t tell if it was for good or ill.

He wasn’t the only one who felt it. Tag had started to sing along—had gotten as far as “in the ranks of death” before he quit singing in favor of watching the land around them with battle-honed alertness.

    “Land of Song!” said the warrior-bard,

“Tho’ all the world betrays thee,

One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,

One faithful harp shall praise thee.”

“Do you feel that?” Tag asked Charles in a soft voice that didn’t interfere with Anna’s song. “Something . . .”

Charles nodded, trying to isolate what was happening, but the twisted feel of the land kept getting in the way, tangling his senses—he could hear her sing the words. And he knew she could not possibly be doing that. She was playing the recorder; he could see her with her lips clearly closed around the mouthpiece. But even so, he could have sworn he heard her voice.

    The Minstrel fell!—but the foeman’s chain

Could not bring that proud soul under;

The harp he lov’d ne’er spoke again,

For he tore its chords asunder;

Anna turned away from him, playing to another audience, someone . . . something other than them.

“She’s singing,” Tag said, sounding worried. “Can you hear it? How is she doing that? Should we stop her?”

“Yes,” said Charles, but he made no move to do so.

    And said, “No chains shall sully thee,

Thou soul of love and bravery!

Thy songs were made for the pure and free,

They shall never sound in slavery.”

The words echoed, and the music was amplified by the natural acoustics of the amphitheater into something much more powerful than a musician should have been able to get out of a little recorder. Even a musician as good as his Anna.

Driven by the urgent feeling that something was wrong, Charles started to move toward her. It felt like slogging through mud. Only then did he realize he’d been caught in the music, too. There had been magic at work—though, he thought with grim self-directed anger, that revelation should have hit him when he’d heard, impossibly, the words of her song.

The magic had lessened when she’d quit singing, having finished all the lyrics. The sweet voice of the recorder continued as Anna played variations on “The Minstrel Boy.” He needed to get to her before she found another song; he was fairly sure when she found one, they would be caught in its spell again.

He had to free her.

“I can’t move,” said Tag tightly, berserker rage shadowing his voice, making it rasp.

“Wait there,” Charles told him with authority he hoped Tag could hold on to. In a gentler voice he said, “Anna, love, put the recorder down. The song is over, the last verse sung.”

She ignored him.

She can’t hear us, Brother Wolf told him.

He wanted to see her face. He had to wade through the sticky magic to get to her—it wasn’t only Tag who was riding an edge. Since she hadn’t responded to his voice at all, he changed tactics.

“Anna,” he barked. He tried reaching through their mating bond again; he’d been trying to touch her through it since she’d started playing. If she felt him, he could not tell.

Fight fire with fire, suggested Brother Wolf, though not in words. Instead, Charles got a vision of a backfire lit in the path of a blazing forest. Sing.

It was as good an idea as any. He chose a courting song Buffalo Singer had taught him, a song his uncle had learned from his father, who had learned it from his father before him. Like most of the songs his uncle had taught him, it had no words but plenty of meaning. It had been composed by Charles’s great-grandfather as he sought to win the hand of the shy woman who became the mother of his children. It was a song rooted in love, carrying the weight of the generations of people who had sung it.

Charles had not sung this song since his uncle had died in his arms, raving with fever.

The rich notes filled him from his chest and up through his sinuses in a way most music did not, bringing with it the memory of men singing in the dark in the world of his childhood. As with Anna’s music, the amphitheater gave depth and power to his voice—and so, in a way he did not pause to examine, did his memories.

Charles was forced to stop walking because he couldn’t keep moving and allow Brother Wolf to sing at the same time—and the song was doing something.

He closed his eyes to better sense the flows and currents of magic that were mixing, driven by his music and Anna’s trapped song. But he kept getting caught up in the voice of the tragic and broken land—he knew now why Brother Wolf thought this place had been used as a blood altar. It had that feel, layers upon layers of death.

He wasn’t sure whether the land’s twisted spirit was caught up in this or if it was something else. The not-scent he’d noticed earlier, the one that reminded him of how Leah had smelled when he’d first met her, was noticeably stronger than it had been before Anna had started singing. But he knew unraveling the magic in play was beyond his abilities right now. He’d have to go about it another way.

Brother Wolf joined in. As he did so, Charles was certain the tide of magic was about to change.

But when it stopped, it all stopped. There was no gradual defeat, no unraveling, no sense of victory. Just a sudden withdrawal of everything opposing Charles’s attempt to defeat it. The air became clear and easy to breathe, the strange scent entirely gone.

Even the darkness that emanated from the land died away until he was tempted to believe he’d imagined it. Shadow-ladened land could be healed, but only by a great shaman over a period of months or years. It didn’t just disappear.