by Jude Fisher
With a savage vigour, Saro wrenched himself free of the contact. At once the light went out of both moodstones, throwing the chamber into such complete darkness it was as if someone had blown out the sun. He heard his father collapse onto the floor, heard his stertorous breath and a mumbled prayer: ‘Oh, Falla, oh, Falla, oh, Falla . . .’
And then another voice, pitched high with panic:
‘I’m blind! By the bitch, I’m blind!’
Twenty-two
The Seither
Time passed and Katla continued to improve. By the end of the summer she could run, and ride a pony one-handed; but everything else – climbing and metal-working, swimming and fishing; even clothing herself and visiting the outhouse on her own – had become a desperate frustration.
The burns on her legs and shoulder mended to pale scars; but her right hand remained stubbornly gnarled and fistlike, the fingers fused together in an ugly mass of red-and-white scar tissue which, though she had never thought of herself as a vain person, she preferred to conceal. Small children took one look at the wound and ran away: it was upsetting, especially since others at Rockfall had taken worse injury and not attracted such attention. Kar Treefoot – so called for the wooden peg he had attached to the stump of the leg he had lost (he claimed) to a sea monster – was certainly a local curiosity; but his wound was not on view to the world, and no longer caused comment; and Grima Kallsen had been born with a dark-red stain running across her face, but her smile was still the first thing you noticed about her. Older men had scars, from the war, from horse-fights and drunken brawls and fishing accidents, it was true: but women in Rockfall rarely carried wounds, and Katla’s story had anyway carried far and wide. Taking pity on her granddaughter, Gramma Rolfsen had adapted a number of her tunics so that a long sleeve could be gathered with a leather thong to hide the nub.
Healers had come and gone, applying poultices and administering potions to the damaged arm; but none had had any effect other than to make her retch and run for the outhouse. All the while, Gramma Rolfsen had sucked her teeth and tutted over their efforts, and then one day she had caught her daughter by the elbow and whispered something to her.
‘Festrin One-Eye!’ Bera had exclaimed. ‘You can’t be serious.’
‘Nothing else has worked: how can it hurt?’
‘But Festrin One-Eye is a seither!’ Bera hissed, glancing quickly to make sure Katla had not overheard.
Katla had. ‘A seither? Really?’
Bera whirled around, blue eyes snapping with irritation.
‘Ears like a bat!’ Gramma cackled.
Katla had never come across a living seither before, though when she was twelve she had crept into the Old Howe with several other children to see the bones of the one who lay there, as a dare. Nothing had happened, though Fent had sworn he’d seen them move when a cloud passed across the moon; and two days later the wart Tian had had on the end of her nose had mysteriously vanished, which was surely proof of some sort of magic in the place. The bones were long, Katla remembered; attenuated and yellowed and thin and very brittle, and people said the seither whose skeleton it was had been an old, old man for as long as they could remember, a result of the ancient earth-magic he wielded.
‘Besides,’ Bera addressed her mother, ignoring her daughter’s outburst and with one shoulder turned resolutely to Katla as if to physically block her from the discussion, ‘how would you know how to contact Festrin One-Eye?’
Gramma tapped the side of her nose and shot her daughter a crafty look. ‘The old have their ways,’ she replied cryptically. ‘I hear we’ll be able to greet the seither shortly.’
‘What? Here?’ Bera drew herself up to her full five foot. Her pale skin was flushed, and two red marks had appeared on her cheeks. Just like Fent, when he was angry, Katla thought. And just like her twin, her mother could be remarkably pig-headed and difficult. ‘No one has informed me of this.’
Gramma Rolfsen, who was used to her daughter’s flare-ups, merely shrugged. ‘I hear Festrin is travelling with the mummers.’
High Feast was just a few days away, and even though crops in the wild and rocky Westman Isles were not usually abundant, this year the weather in the crucial last few weeks had been perfect – a period of soft rains had been followed by unseasonably warm sunshine resulting in a late surge of growth: unusually, the wheat was shoulder-high; the barley a lush pale-green swathe; and they had to prop the branches of the appletrees in the orchards at Rolf’s Dell to save them from the weight of the fruit. The seas around the islands had not been immune to this bounty, either; lately the fishermen had brought ashore line after line of pollock and bass; shoal after shoal of mackerel and herring. The drying-racks were full, the store of salt almost depleted, and the smoking-house sent billows of fragrant fumes into the air both day and night. And the fine weather had held through harvest, too, so that the barns were stuffed to overflowing. It would be a fine feast this year, which was as well, for the mummers numbered twenty or more including the musicians; and it was Rockfall’s turn to accommodate them.
Bera frowned. ‘Why didn’t Aran tell me?’
‘Tell you what?’
Bera spun round to confront her husband, who had come in silently behind Katla. Many women would be intimidated by a man so large that his shoulders filled the doorway with barely an inch to spare on either side, but Bera planted her hands squarely on her narrow hips and glared up at him like a little fighting cat.
‘That the mummers think to bring a seither with them this year.’
Aran’s eyes darted guiltily to his mother-by-law and Katla watched her grandmother’s gap-toothed grin widen challengingly and immediately read the situation.
‘I . . . ah,’ Aran struggled. ‘I didn’t know,’ he lied unconvincingly, and Gramma Rolfsen bellowed with laughter.
‘Poor lad,’ she said. ‘Don’t blame him, Bera dear. It was my fault. You remember when he sent the messenger off to Halbo to ask Morten Danson if he’d take on a commission for the ship—?’
Bera bit her lip. ‘That ridiculous ice-breaker,’ she said grimly.
‘The very same. Well . . .’ She looked sly; but then, Katla reasoned, Gramma Rolfsen had got ‘sly’ down to a fine art. ‘I slipped a message of my own off with the lad. To Tarn Fox.’
Tarn Fox was the leader of the mummers: a well-built man in his middle years, with strikingly green eyes and a wealth of braided russet hair. Katla had thought him fine-looking, if, at thirty, a bit old. She’d only been fifteen the last time his troupe had visited Rockfall, fifteen and skinny as a spear-shaft; but that hadn’t stopped him plying her with ale while her mother wasn’t looking and trying to sweet-talk her outside into one of the barns. Her ears pricked up. This could be very interesting.
‘And?’ Bera gave her mother a hard stare, a look that had been known to make grown men quail and stammer; but Gramma Rolfsen was indomitable.
‘I suggested he might win himself some favour here if he were to bring my old friend Festrin with him.’
‘Your old what?’ Bera’s voice rose sharply.
Gramma Rolfsen chuckled. ‘I’ve lived near twice the length of your life, my dear, and not all of it as transparent to the eye as one of your beloved rockpools.’
Poking about in rockpools was one of Katla’s favourite childhood pastimes. She looked at her mother with renewed interest: perhaps there was something they had in common, other than the bones and hair . . .
Bera snorted. ‘More like a foul and muddy pond by the sound of it. Consorting with necromancers and ne’er-do-wells behind my back – inviting them into my house . . . to treat with my daughter . . . calling them friend. I won’t have a filthy seither in this hall. If the mummers bring this creature with them I will not offer them hospitality. They shall not take bread and salt at my table; no, nor fish and ale, neither!’
‘Bera!’
‘By Feya, I swear it. No neither shall not set foot over this threshold. They are abominations, and not to be tol
erated by the god-fearing.’
Aran regarded his wife with horror. ‘Wife, you cannot mean this: it is the worst of insults – you will bring shame down on all of us.’
In response, Bera merely took two steps forward, placed one splayed hand on her husband’s shoulder, pushed him firmly backwards out of the door and marched past him into the yard outside without another word.
It was three days before she spoke to any of them again.
It seemed that during this time Bera’s dangerous pronouncement must have been withdrawn, for before long everyone was making preparation for High Feast. Katla took to hanging around the harbour with Ferg – after all, there was little help she could offer in the kitchen with but a single hand. And absolutely no culinary skills, thank Sur, she grinned to herself. The club-hand had its uses when it came to avoiding such dextrous, and tedious, chores as peeling and baking, skinning and sousing and roasting; but it didn’t prevent her from swiping a chicken pie on her way out of the door on this, the fourth day she had made it her business to watch for the incoming ships. She ate it sitting on the seawall with her back against an upturned rowing boat and her legs dangling over the side. Ferg turned his nose up at the pastry – Too much soft living, my lad! she chided him – but wolfed down the pieces of savoury chicken so fast it was impossible he could have tasted them; and then he licked her good hand all over to mark his gratitude and curled up next to her on the warm stones, his eyes reduced to satisfied, gleaming slits. Together, they listened to the gulls crying overhead and watched the sun make its scintillant patterns on the water. A little while later, the hound began his sonorous snore; and a short time after that Katla, too, fell into a doze.
Katla!
She heard her name clearly; but the voice was unfamiliar. In her dream she was running, and something was pursuing her. She did not dare to turn around to check its progress for fear she would miss her footing and tumble headlong, but she could hear its roar – wintry and elemental – it was coming for her, and had (she knew, in some cold and certain corner of her heart) already consumed her family. Overhead, the skies had turned dark red, and malignant black clouds limned with crimson had swallowed the sun. She felt the first drops of rain on her cheeks. She lifted her right hand to wipe them away and found it was whole and perfect, the fingers long and thin and separate as they had always been before the fire. Mesmerised, she stared at it, and then she realised she could see her bones through the skin like dark shadows shrouded by her thin, translucent flesh, as if the sun had the power to glow right through them. And then the glow passed away and she saw that there was blood on her fingers, and when she lifted her gaze to the sky, more of it spattered down onto her face. A terrible dread gripped her then. But there was a bright light in the distance, and someone was calling her from it, and if she could only just outrun the thing that was behind her—
‘Katla!’
She came back to herself with a start and found herself standing in her brother Halli’s shadow. Behind him, the sun made a red halo of his dark hair.
‘I . . . ah . . .’ She suddenly felt terribly guilty. Was it the pie? a small voice in her mind asked; or something worse? The dream had left her with gooseflesh all down her bare arms; her spine prickled in some atavistic reaction. The hound, touched by her mood, or perhaps, in some ineffable way by the dream itself, began to whine.
Halli put his hand out to Ferg, who sniffed it warily, then settled again. He grinned at Katla, then pointed out to sea. ‘Look – the mummers’ ships!’
And there they were on the line of the horizon: two big rectangular sails dark against the blue sky, coming closer all the while.
Katla shook the remnant of the dream away from her and, craning her neck to look up at him, forced a smile. ‘Did you come to tell me that, brother, or are you here to reprimand me for my missed errands?’ Halli got older and more responsible as each day passed, it seemed; as if he were somehow stepping into their father’s boots, since Aran could talk of nothing but his mad scheme for an expedition to find Sanctuary, much to their mother’s fury. There had been angry words exchanged between them (the first Katla could remember in all her nineteen years) for several nights after he had first announced his plan – to commission the finest ice-breaking ship that could be made (which, since the coin earned by the sale of the sardonyx at the Fair had subsequently found its way into the hands of a group of mercenaries, would cost all the money the family had saved and more) and take every able-bodied man in Rockfall to search for the fabled land marked on his precious map. ‘You are not the man I married!’ Bera had stormed. ‘I chose a father for my children and a husband for myself, a man I could trust, who would provide for his family: not some madman obsessed with a legend, who carries about a scrap of paper some trickster fobbed him off with at the Allfair like Jack and his bean-seeds!’
On three separate mornings Katla had found him lying flat out on the hay in the barn when she’d been to saddle up her pony for a dawn ride.
‘No.’ Halli looked hurt. ‘I just thought—’ A pained expression crossed his face; then he sat down beside Ferg on the seawall. The old hound looked up at him reproachfully, then shifted over and laid his head firmly on Katla’s lap, where he began to drool. ‘I’m sorry, Katla. I really am.’
She frowned. ‘Sorry for what?’
He cleared his throat and looked down at his hands and his dark eyebrows became a single unbroken line, just like Aran’s when he was angry or perplexed. ‘That we didn’t save you from the fires. That . . . your arm got burned. That you can’t climb any more.’
Katla felt her throat contract and her eyes prick. ‘It was my own fault,’ she said huskily. She reached out with her good left hand and gripped him by the forearm, feeling the warm cord of muscle and the curling black hair under the pads of her fingers. ‘You did everything you could. You and . . . Tor. I saw you. You killed a man with the wood-axe.’
‘I killed three.’ He looked ill. ‘I never killed anyone before. I keep thinking about it.’ A pause fell which Katla did not know how to fill, then Halli said: ‘Fent reckons war will come soon, you know. Then I’ll have to kill again. We all will. I wanted to catch Tam Fox and his men before they get to the hall, find out what the news is from court, whether the King is calling a muster.’ He glanced up and his face was harrowed. ‘Perhaps father’s expedition is not such a stupid idea, after all.’
Katla laughed. ‘Oh, it is. But what fun, eh? Do you think he’ll let me come, Halli?’
He snorted, taken by surprise. ‘I doubt it – you cannot even row, let alone man a line – what use would you be?’ Katla’s face went stiff and still and a few seconds later Halli grimaced. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’
‘You did and it’s true,’ Katla said gloomily. ‘I’ll never get out of here again. I’ll go mad and end up like Old Ma Hallasen, living alone with my goat and my cat, talking to myself in some language no one else can understand.’
‘You’re already halfway there!’
Ferg’s head came up sharply, the ghost of a snarl in his throat; but it was only Fent, grinning widely.
‘Do you think Ravn will have called a muster?’ His eyes were bright and avid. ‘I’ll take ship back with the mummers if he has. And, Katla, that sword, the one you made last summer on a commission that was never claimed? Can I have it?’
‘The one with the carnelian set into the pommel?’
‘That one, yes. A beauty – though not as fine as the Dragon. Now that was a weapon. Slid home like a dream.’
Halli looked at his brother suspiciously; then he turned to Katla. ‘I thought Joz Bearhand bought that sword from you.’
Katla glared at Fent. Somehow it seemed very important that Halli did not know his own brother had murdered Jenna’s father. ‘He did. And, no, you can’t have it. The Red Sword is mine and I’m going to learn to use it left-handed. Ah – look – it’s the Snowland Wolf—’
The lead ship was now close enough that you could make out the great w
olf that adorned its sail, the coil of a huge serpent in its jaws. The head of the serpent loomed up over the wolf, jaws open to strike, while its tail looped in extravagant twists and nourishes in and out of the wolf’s legs to form a decorative border around the canvas. A line of colourful ornamental shields had been strapped along the outside of the gunwale and the sun glinted off the bronze bosses and studs. The Snowland Wolf was a fine sight, enough to lift the spirits of any who saw it. Tarn had always had a flamboyant streak.
The second ship, meanwhile, displayed a rayed sun on its sail and had the head of a great bear carved into its prow. Squatter and shorter than the Snowland Wolf it was nevertheless a seaworthy little vessel and Katla watched it breast the rollers appreciatively. ‘I wonder which ship Festrin One-Eye’s on,’ she mused.
Fent shot her a suspicious look. ‘What would you know of any seither?’
‘Gramma sent a message to him,’ Katla said smugly, cheerful to have acquired knowledge that Fent had failed to ferret out. ‘To ask him to look at my hand.’
Fent made the sign of Sur’s anchor. ‘That’s witchery, sister. I’d have thought you’d had enough of such at the Moonfell Plain.’
Katla glared at him. She waved the club of her hand in his face. ‘See this, fox-boy? Its only use at the moment is for thumping idiots like you: but I’m damned if I’ll live with it forever.’
‘You’ll be damned forever if you let a seither touch you.’ Fent strode off down the seawall and waited for the ships to come in, fists planted firmly on his hips.
Halli put a hand on his sister’s shoulder. ‘Whatever you need, Katla,’ he said. ‘You must do whatever you need for your poor arm. Fent’s a hot-headed fool and you should take no notice of him. I’ve come across no evil caused by this Festrin; nor indeed of any other of these magic-makers; but if Gramma thinks the seither may be able to do something for you, that’s all right with me. I’ll keep an eye on Fent, I give you my word.’ His fingers tightened on her shoulder and then he levered himself upright and went to join his brother.