‘We have a druidess with us,’ he said. ‘Maybe she can do better than Podrey.’
She was hardly listening. She knew the Krodan cure was beyond them and in her heart she’d accepted that Tad would die. She wouldn’t dare admit hope.
‘I love you, Keel,’ she said. ‘I wish to Joha I didn’t. Every day, I wake up alone. All this time … at least I had Tad. But now …’ She couldn’t finish. ‘Stay with me.’
He kissed her, because he knew she needed it, and because it was better than an answer. His hand found her breast and he pushed her back onto the bed. She was just as eager as he to forget the world. For a time, they almost managed it.
If only there weren’t any words, he thought. If only they could just be together.
If only.
53
The docks were busy beneath the steel-grey roof of the morning. Merchant vessels rocked at anchor while burly stevedores of many nations loaded them with produce. Krodan customs men roamed about, nosing into this and that, quills waggling as they scribbled down their observations. Fishing boats crept back with the morning’s catch while gulls wheeled and called overhead, and the air smelled of salt and wet wood.
Garric leaned against a warped fence, shucking an oyster with his knife. He cracked open the shell with a twist, ran the blade expertly round the inside and tipped the oyster into his mouth.
Fresh Wracken Bay oysters. Nothing tasted quite like them. If there was any place he might have called home these last thirty years, this was it. He’d never loved the town, but there was comfort in familiarity and it eased his heart to be back.
A light fog lay on the water. The north bank of the Cut was lost to sight, but the crooked silhouette of the Ghoulfort was still visible in the murk. Half-ruined, it brooded out in the channel on a lonely island of rock, a hulking pile of spikes and angles patrolled by crows. Folk called it the Ghoulfort because in high winds it howled like the undead still walked there, and they steered well clear of it. But Garric knew it by another name. Annach-na-Zuul, it was called in the harsh tongue of the urds.
It had been built in the days of the First Empire, when men were slaves and the urds ruled Embria from coast to coast. Their strongholds had mostly been destroyed during the Reclamation, torn down for materials, taking the bad memories of former masters with them. But it had been the wish of Jessa Wolf’s-Heart, left to posterity by her lover Morgen, that some strongholds should remain, abandoned. They were to be a warning from history, a plea to never relax their vigilance lest evil creep back in.
Would that we had taken more heed, Garric thought. Instead, they’d become soft and divided, squabbling among themselves while their neighbours in Kroda were reforged by the Word and the Sword. They’d become appeasers, denying the threat from the east till it was too late.
When Kroda invaded Brunland and Ozak seventy years ago, reclaiming their old territories, Ossia didn’t react. When the Krodans took Estria and the Glass University thirty-five years later, Ossia should have begun making ready for war, but the nobility were too busy with their own small struggles. All that warning, and it was still a surprise when Kroda attacked. Ossia crumbled, Queen Alissandra Even-Tongue was executed, and the Ember Blade was seized by a crafty young Krodan general called Dakken, which effectively ended the resistance.
But what would have happened if it hadn’t been seized?
The question had obsessed Garric for thirty years now. He’d turned it over and over and never found an answer he could believe with any certainty. If the Krodans hadn’t taken the Ember Blade so early in the invasion, the Ossians could have rallied. Queen or no queen, the Ember Blade might have been enough to unite the nobility. Wars had been won from worse positions.
Or perhaps he was deluding himself and it would only have extended the slaughter. The Krodans were tactically superior, better armed, more disciplined and, most importantly, they fought together for a common goal. To battle on would have cost tens of thousands more lives, and when the surrender came, they’d have been crushed into near-slavery for their efforts. Just like the brave men and women of Brunland, who refused to give up and paid the price.
Aren’s father had believed it was better to submit, to exchange a hopeless war for a merciful peace. Garric’s opinion was different.
He pulled another oyster from the string bag, stuck in the knife, twisted till its shell cracked.
Damned be all the peacemakers, he thought. Cowards by another name.
‘Laine of Heath Edge,’ said a voice at his shoulder. ‘As I live an’ breathe!’
‘Surprised to see you living and breathing at all, Ambrey,’ said Garric with half a smile.
Ambrey cackled. He was a scrawny man, muscles slack with age, his sagging face haggard with white stubble. Almost seventy years lay on his bones, and a life at sea had rubbed him ragged. He walked with a crutch under one arm, and his trousers were tied below the stump of his right leg, where a crude peg took the place of his foot.
‘Whale get you at last?’ Garric asked.
‘Ha! Hey-o! Hey-o! Stay abed, Borek!’ he sang, and gave Garric a rotted grin. ‘They won’t write a song about me, though. Rusty nail did for me foot. It started goin’ black, so off it came!’
‘You always swore you’d die at sea.’
‘Life has its turns, don’t it? Nine, the peg rubs something awful, though. What I’d give for one of them nice Malliard Limbs.’
He leaned up next to Garric and laid his crutch against the barrier, looking out across the dock.
‘Back for long?’ he asked.
‘Just passing through.’
‘Ah, probably wise. The hunt’s not what it was. Carthanians catch most of ’em these days, the bloody thieves. All the old hands are dyin’ off or turn to drink when they’re too feeble to sail. Their sons run the boats now, and bein’ young, they got to do everythin’ their own way – which, needless to say, ain’t so good as ours.’
Garric snorted his agreement and offered Ambrey an oyster. Ambrey thanked him and he shucked another for himself. The old man was easy company, a friend from his whaling days, though they’d never been close. They listened to the gulls with the salty, meaty taste of Wracken Bay oysters on their tongues.
‘There’s our lord and master,’ said Ambrey, tilting his chin out towards the water.
A boat was coming down the coast, painted in the colours of Jadrell’s house. It was his personal launch, which he used to visit other towns on the far bank of the Cut: an open boat with raised and covered decks at both ends, big enough for the Lord of Wracken Bay and a few guests to travel in comfort with a skeleton crew. Oars sculled the water to either side, for the winds and tides in the channel were too unreliable for a small craft to travel by sail alone.
‘I see he still prospers,’ Garric said scathingly.
‘He does. Primus be thanked for his wise stewardship in these troubled times.’ Ambrey’s tone was so dry, his words could have been used for kindling. ‘Most times we don’t even see him, except at a distance. Spends all his time with the squareheads.’
‘You should be more careful,’ said Garric, wryly. ‘I could be an informer.’
‘You could,’ Ambrey agreed. ‘Give my regards to our geometrically perfect overlords when you see ’em.’
Garric barked with laughter. It had the sound of a quip heard elsewhere and oft repeated – Ambrey didn’t have the vocabulary to come up with that himself – but it was a good one nonetheless.
They shared the rest of the oysters while they watched Jadrell’s boat approach. As Ambrey had said, it didn’t come into the harbour but docked further up the coast, pulling in to a private jetty at the foot of a steep slope. Three men disembarked, all wearing stiff jackets, straight trousers and boots: Krodan dress. One of them was likely Jadrell, but at this distance he was indistinguishable from his guests.
‘Our lord’s more Krodan than the Krodans these days,’ said Ambrey, catching his thought. ‘Funny thing is, the young squareheads get mor
e Ossian every year. To annoy their folks, I reckon.’ He chuckled. ‘Kids are kids wherever they’re from.’
Jadrell and his companions climbed a set of stairs up the slope towards the base of a cliff, topped by an imposing mansion which overlooked the water. The crew busied themselves with attaching thick ropes and hooks to the boat’s hull and manoeuvring it round to a wooden slipway running down the length of the slope.
‘Are they going to winch that thing in?’ Garric asked in surprise.
‘Never were much of a sailor, were you? Storms come on quick this time of year. That jetty’s no shelter, and a boat like that’s too fine to smash up. There’s a boathouse at the top of the slope, see?’
Garric saw it now, a large shed below the mansion. The crew shouted up to the boathouse and Jadrell’s craft was slowly pulled from the water, sliding up the slipway until it disappeared inside.
‘Easier to put in at the harbour, surely,’ Garric said. There was a breakwater out there, a kinked bank of piled stones reaching out into the Cut which protected the boats moored at the docks.
‘Lords and fishermen, side by side. That’s the tradition, since anyone can remember. Ain’t like that now, though. Been longaday since Lord Jadrell put in at the harbour. Too good for us.’
‘Times change,’ said Garric.
‘They do,’ said Ambrey. ‘And they’ll change again.’ He offered Garric a plug of tobacco, and when Garric refused, he popped one in his mouth and chewed. ‘Young ’uns now, they don’t know what freedom is. But we remember, don’t we? All them nobles who bent over for the Krodans, they’re on top now; but they’ll get theirs when the Dawnwardens come back.’
Garric gave him a look of vague incredulity. ‘The Dawnwardens are gone,’ he said. ‘They’ve been gone two hundred years or more, since they collaborated in the overthrow of King Danna the Moon-Touched.’
‘Pfft. You believe that?’
‘He wielded the Ember Blade, and they betrayed him.’
‘For good reason! He was a halfwit in thrall to his cousin in Harrow. He’d have signed over everything north of the Cut to those stuck-up bastards, and the rest of Ossia would’ve gone after. We’d be bowing to the Harrish now instead of Krodans, only we’d have had two centuries more to get used to it.’
‘That’s true,’ Garric agreed bitterly. ‘And if not the Krodans, it’d be the elaru, or the Durnish, or someone else. Some days I think we were born to be slaves.’
‘Pah! You sound like you used to in the Bellied Sail. Always were a maudlin drunk,’ Ambrey complained. ‘A Dawnwarden’s loyalty was to the Ember Blade, not the one who wielded it. To Ossia, not its rulers. They done right by their oath, and by the land.’
‘The king they put on the throne didn’t see it that way.’
‘He loved the Dawnwardens well enough till his own right to rule got called into question. Reckon he was afraid they might play kingmaker again, so he got rid of ’em. They’ve guarded this land since the first days of the Second Empire, since Rannis the Librarian put ’em together. Think a coward like Garam Hawkeye could tear ’em apart?’ He waved a gnarled hand and spat brown juice over the barrier. ‘They disappeared for centuries after the empire fell, but they came back when we needed ’em, and brung the Ember Blade with ’em. That’s what they do. Mark me, they’re out there somewhere, waitin’ for their chance. And now the Ember Blade returns to Ossia. If that ain’t a sign, I don’t know what is.’
Garric felt his mood blackening and the oysters turned sour in his mouth. ‘Maybe that’s our problem,’ he said. ‘Too long we’ve waited for heroes to come and save us, instead of saving ourselves.’
Ambrey took up his crutch and straightened. He pointed across the Cut to where the Ghoulfort lurked in jagged silhouette.
‘There were a sight more of us than the urds. We could’ve risen up against ’em any time, but we didn’t. We was slaves ’cause they took away our hope. Took a plague to show us they could be toppled, and even then we needed Jessa Wolf’s-Heart to get us off our knees.’ He chewed on his tobacco plug with a wet smacking sound. ‘Folk won’t fight ’less they believe they can win. She made us believe. An’ the Dawnwardens’ll make us believe, too.’
He eyed Garric closely. ‘Think I don’t know what you an’ Keel have been up to? I heard you talk when you was in your cups. I know why you left. You with the Greycloaks now?’
‘There’s no such thing as the Greycloaks,’ Garric said.
‘That’s what I’d say if I was in the Greycloaks.’ Ambrey cackled. ‘This land ain’t done yet. The blood o’ the wolf still runs in Ossian veins, same blood that built the Second Empire. You can’t cage a wolf.’
‘You can,’ said Garric. ‘We call them dogs.’
Ambrey snorted. ‘Between waitin’ for a hero and listenin’ to a cynic, I know which I’d choose. Today’s empires are tomorrow’s ashes. No one knows that like we Ossians.’
‘I never reckoned you an optimist.’
‘Gettin’ your foot sawn off gives you some perspective, I reckon.’
Garric smiled grimly at that and patted him on the shoulder. ‘It was good to see you again, Ambrey.’
‘Likewise.’
Garric walked off along the dock. When he looked back, the old man was staring across the foggy water, his eyes faraway as he gazed into white emptiness.
54
‘There.’
Aren scanned the woods. Bracken and thorn grew thick between the trees, and leaves rustled in a cool wind that smelled of salt and rain.
Fen pointed. In the distance, grazing between the trees, was a doe. She flashed him a hunter’s sign he didn’t recognise, but he got the gist. They began to sneak closer to the doe, Fen leading, Aren close behind.
A loud snap sounded beneath his boot, and they froze as the doe tensed and lifted its head. Its hindquarters trembled as it hovered on the edge of bolting, but they were some distance away and it didn’t see them. Warily it returned to grazing.
Fen looked over her shoulder with a scowl. Her voice was a harsh whisper. ‘Feet! What did I tell you?’
He made an apologetic face. ‘It’s my first time,’ he offered as an excuse.
She sucked her forefinger and held it in the air. ‘The wind’s still with us. Can you feel the direction it’s coming from?’
Aren copied her. If he was honest, all it did was make his finger cold. He decided not to be honest.
‘I feel it!’ he said with a dawning amazement on his face that was entirely fake.
It seemed to please her, anyway, for she softened. ‘Always come at them from downwind. If they smell you, they’ll run. Hunting is all about patience.’
They crept closer to the doe. Aren tried to concentrate on his feet, but he found himself sneaking glances at Fen instead. At first, he worried she’d notice him, but her eyes were fixed on her quarry and soon he was studying her openly.
He wanted to be able to see her, to understand her the way he’d done with Rapha back at Suller’s Bluff. But she was closed to him, a puzzle still. She’d offered no thanks for his help in Skavengard, nor any apology for being cold and rude afterwards. In fact, she’d been angry with him for the last few days. And yet this morning she asked him if he knew how to hunt, and when he said no, she offered to teach him.
He knew Cade would sulk when he found out. He told himself he was doing it because hunting was a useful skill to have when you were out in the world on your own. But in truth, his decision had nothing to do with that.
It wasn’t even that he thought her pretty, it was just that her features were so fascinating. Her freckles were so densely packed they’d merged into a kind of mask; he’d never seen anyone with so many freckles. The delicate curve of her jawbone held an inexplicable interest for him, as did the way her nose wrinkled when she laughed, when she really laughed. It wasn’t often she laughed like that, but Cade had the knack of making her, and Aren was surprised to find he was a little jealous about that. He took a certain childish pride in th
e fact she’d asked him to hunt with her, and not Cade.
Where’s the harm, anyway? Cade wanted us to stay, didn’t he? He’s not the only one who can make friends.
Distracted, his foot caught a stone and he stumbled against a bush with a loud rustle. Fen grabbed his arm and yanked him down into the bracken as the startled doe’s head shot up again. They crouched there, pressed close. Aren became uncomfortably, thrillingly aware of the contact between them as the doe stood trembling, ears twitching, deciding whether or not to flee. Aren knew how it felt.
Neither Fen nor Aren moved a muscle until the doe trotted a short way off and began to graze again. When she at last shifted away from him, he was both relieved and disappointed.
‘Reckon I’ll get no closer with you in tow, bumblefoot,’ said Fen. She slipped her bow from her back. ‘We’ll kill it from here. You know how to shoot?’
‘A little. Most of my lessons were in the sword.’
‘Want to try?’ she said, holding it out to him.
He gave her a rueful smile. ‘That’s got to be sixty yards through the trees. I’m not that good. We’d lose the kill and waste an arrow.’
The look she gave him was uncertain, as if she thought she’d done something wrong by offering. Then she shrugged to show she didn’t care, and slipped off through the bracken to the cover of a nearby tree. She stood slowly, nocked, drew and aimed. The doe raised its head, perhaps warned by some instinct.
Shoot! Aren urged her silently. Before it runs!
But she didn’t. She waited, the muscles in her arms beginning to tremble, till the doe relaxed and lowered its head once more. Only then did she let fly.
The arrow whisked through the leaves. The doe shied and bolted. Fen bolted with it.
Aren, surprised, was slow to follow. He hadn’t expected her to run. Had she hit it? He wasn’t sure; it had all been too quick to see. By the time he was on his feet, she was almost out of sight, chasing her target through the undergrowth. He blundered after her, but she was nimble and he couldn’t keep up. He tripped over a stone and fell, and when he picked himself up, she was gone.
The Ember Blade Page 45