Havenstar

by Glenda Larke

  ‘Stupid old biddy,’ Thirl said when she had gone. ‘As if Chantry could ever have stopped the Axe Head from vanishing. Which reminds me,’ he added, taking the opportunity to mention what was irritating him, ‘you should be working on the maps, Keris.’

  ‘You’re the mapmaker,’ she replied, knowing she sounded sullen, and not caring.

  ‘You do a better job. Listen, Keri, it’s got to be done. Why don’t you do the master charts, using Father’s notes and figures, and once you have the first one ready, I’ll start work on the copies. I’ll do all the ink work and leave the final colours and artwork to you.’

  Sheyli roused herself enough to endorse Thirl’s suggestion. ‘Your father gave his life to gather the necessary information,’ she said, her fingers fluttering over the bed covers like the fragile wings of an injured butterfly. ‘The maps must be made. Don’t let his death be a waste, Keris. He gave his life to serve Unstablers and the Pilgrimage.’

  Not quite right, that, she thought. Her father had died not because he dreamed of a life of service, but because he couldn’t keep away from the Unstable. It drew him to his death, just as he had drawn him to live dangerously for thirty years. The moth, finally consumed by the flame.

  Thirl nodded. ‘The Unstablers will be coming in to buy the new maps as usual; they’ll expect them to have been done.’

  She tried to maintain a stolid complacency. ‘That’s right. They will expect you to have done them.’ Her faint emphasis on ‘you’ lingered on into the silence.

  Thirl changed the angle of his argument. ‘People will die out there if accurate maps are not available. From the gossip I’ve been hearing from pilgrims, there’s been considerable changes in the ley lines since the autumn surveying.’

  Mother’s aged, Keris thought inconsequentially. She looks a hundred, yet she’s only forty-four. Her illness, knowing father’s dead—she looks desiccated, sucked dry of life. She dragged her thoughts back to mapmaking. Thirl was right, blast him. ‘Yes, all right. I’ll start on them.’ And then, just so he knew she saw through his righteous reasoning, ‘Although I doubt if your motives, Thirl, are as pure as you would have me believe.’

  ‘So we need the money,’ he said. ‘There, does that please you?’

  She gave him a level look.

  ‘Have you found Father’s notes?’ he asked.

  ‘I haven’t unpacked his things yet.’ I haven’t had the heart—

  ‘Do it today. Harin Markle is coming to see you later on, by the way.’

  She bent back to her task. ‘Whatever for?’ She found a flea and chased it through Yerrie’s fur with a dab of lard on her finger ready to smother it.

  Thirl waved an exasperated hand at her. ‘Because he’s interested in you, that’s why. Disorder be damned, Keris, do I have to spell it out for you?’

  ‘No.’ She flattened the flea with grease then looked up at him. ‘But maybe I have to spell it out for you, Thirl. I. Am. Not. Interested. In. Harin. Markle.’ She put the cat down on the floor and went to wash her hands under the sink pump.

  ‘Well, you had better get interested,’ he said harshly.

  She turned to face him, expression blank. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I am promoting his suit.’

  ‘Promoting his suit? What is this? Your brains are tainted, Thirl Kaylen! Have you forgotten that I still have a living parent? I may be legally under your protection in some respects, but Mother heads this family now. It is none of your business whom I choose to have court me and I can’t imagine why you have developed this sudden interest in having me wed. Nor can I imagine why Harin is interested anyway. He never used to even like me.’

  Thirl flushed slightly under the intensity of her gaze.

  ‘I’ll be tainted,’ she whispered finally. ‘You’ve told him I have a proper dowry, haven’t you?’ Fifty golds, saved by her parents over the years, to provide for her. Sheyli had insisted on it, even though other girls in the village normally brought no more than the mandatory two golds to their marriage in addition to a trousseau of the practical items listed in the Rule.

  She glanced at her mother, wishing this conversation was not taking place. Sheyli was tired and seemed swamped by her grief and the pain of her illness. That casual remark from Mistress Pottle about the baby she’d been forced to surrender to Chantry had not helped either. She was having to make an effort to listen and pearly drops of sweat glistened across her forehead.

  Thirl was belligerent. ‘So what if I have mentioned it to him?’

  ‘What’s your interest, Thirl?’

  He shrugged. ‘Harin needs capital.’

  The conversation seemed to be slipping out of her grasp. ‘Capital for what?’

  He gave an uneasy look towards Sheyli. ‘You may as well know. We are going to turn this place into a wayside tavern for pilgrims.’

  Keris stared, slack-minded, unable even to consider the ramifications of what he said.

  Sheyli struggled to raise herself, saying in pained protest, ‘But you’re a mapmaker, Thirl.’

  ‘No, I’m not. I hate maps. And I hate spending time in the Unstable. I’m not Dad. I’d be dead in my first three months out there. I’m going to be an innkeeper. And where better than this? A day’s ride from Hopen Grat and the kinesis chain. I told Harin years ago that this would be a tavern if anything ever happened to Dad.’

  ‘You are going to change your father’s shop into a pilgrim’s hostel?’ his mother asked, incredulous.

  ‘Not exactly. Into a tavern that also has rooms to rent. In partnership with Harin. Because he knows the business.’

  Sheyli was appalled. ‘A public house? You would try to seduce pilgrims away from the holy nature of their journey and into the licentiousness of a tavern?’

  Keris added her own touch of acid bitterness. ‘And my dowry is supposed to supply the capital for their seduction, it seems.’

  Sheyli shook her head. ‘It’s just not possible. You are Piers’ only son: you have to continue his trade. That’s the Rule. There has been a mapmaker’s shop on this site since—since—well, probably since the Rending. Chantry will never countenance such a change.’

  Thirl smiled thinly. ‘Mother, Mother, do you think that everyone follows the Rule to the letter? Nothing would ever get done! Anyway, this is one change Chantry will countenance because they don’t like Unstablers and I’m offering to become a good solid citizen instead of a mapmaker who spends half the year in the Unstable. I spoke to a chantor at the Rule Office of Order in Upper Kibble only today. And he is willing to grant me a dispensation for a, er, consideration.’

  Sheyli almost choked. ‘You bribed him?’

  ‘I will, yes. Don’t worry, Mother, everybody does it.’

  ‘I don’t,’ she said, with dignity. ‘And your father didn’t either. Creation above all, Thirl! Order must be maintained, and if some people pay others to thwart the Rule, then Order crumbles, and with it our safety.’

  ‘My not being a mapmaker is hardly going to disintegrate Order, Mother, any more than your frill flowers do, planted where there should be cabbages.’ He smiled at her. A smile of rueful charm. Keris didn’t wait for the rest. She turned and walked out of the room, clenching her hands in an effort to suppress her anger.

  It wasn’t fair! Anger tumbled towards tears. It just wasn’t fair. She would have given anything to be a mapmaker. Anything.

  She went to the stable, as she had always done when she was unhappy. There was something calming about the presence of the animals: the two crossings-horses standing sleepily in their stalls, the chickens scratching in the straw, the half-wild stable cat blinking as it woke briefly to contemplate if flight was necessary, then settling its nose back down into its fur. It was difficult to maintain a hot rage when Ygraine and her stable mate, the pack horse named Tousson, vied with one another for her attention, each hoping for some titbit from her pocket.

  This time, however, she was not given the time to cool down. No sooner had she walked over to Ygrain
e than the sunlight through the door was blocked by Thirl appearing in the open doorway behind her. He must have followed her out of the house almost immediately.

  She turned on him, all her tearful rage bubbling out. ‘How could you do that to Mother? You didn’t need to—not then, not now, not when she’s so sick and not so soon after Dad’s—’ The stable cat, reacting to the anger in her voice, scuttled away behind the feed sacks.

  He shrugged carelessly. ‘You’d prefer me to live a lie? Keris the dreamer, who doesn’t like to face the facts. I’m damned if I’ll be a mapmaker, and I don’t care who knows it. The shop is going to be a tavern. We’ll continue to sell maps until the end of autumn, as usual. But I shan’t be going off into the Unstable. Come winter, this place will be a public house. I’ll be calling it the Mapmaker’s Rest.’

  She was so angry she was choking on it. ‘But Mother—’

  ‘—will be dead by then,’ he said brutally. ‘A fact which she knows full well.’

  ‘Unstable take you, you’re a heartless sod, Thirl.’

  ‘Not particularly, I think. Just practical. And being practical means facing facts. I’ll never make a mapmaker and I’ve never intended to be one. Mother will be dead within weeks, if not days, and you have got to find a niche somewhere. If you want to hang around and be a housekeeper for me, well, you can—but bear in mind firstly that I intend to marry as soon as I find some pretty and willing maid, and secondly that I won’t be paying your fifty golds in dowry to just anyone.’

  ‘That money’s mine!’

  ‘No, it’s not. It was intended to be your husband’s. The moment Dad died it legally became mine, as long as I undertake to care for you and Mother. And I do. But I’m under no obligation to give you a dowry of more than two golds. I intend to have that money to help pay for the expense of refurbishing the place as a tavern. And to pay the bribe. The rule-chantor is not going to accept this for anything less than ten golds. And so I shall take the money directly, or it can come to the business, indirectly, through your dowry to Harin. I thought to help you find a husband, that’s all.’

  ‘I don’t want a husband—least of all someone like Harin!’

  ‘There you go again, being impractical. What else can you do? You can’t be a mapmaker because the Rule won’t allow it, even if anyone would buy maps from a woman, and anyway, a woman wouldn’t last a handful of days out in the Unstable alone. Moreover the Rule says you’re supposed to marry, but you show no signs of even trying to find someone. Keris, a woman who looks like you will never do better than Harin.’

  That hurt. Her fury poured out and Ygraine, unsettled, blew noisily down her nostrils. ‘He’s as slimy as a river flatworm! I wouldn’t marry him if he was willing to pay me a hundred golds for the privilege.’

  Thirl shrugged. ‘That’s your choice. I don’t care. I reckon to win either way.’

  His indifference deflated her. She took a deep breath, cocked her head on one side and considered him with all the growing wonderment of making a bitter new discovery about a familiar object. ‘Why, that’s right, isn’t it! You really don’t care, do you? I wonder why I never saw that before. There’s no feeling there inside you. You feel no grief about Dad, or Mother, do you?’

  ‘Why should I? They never asked me how I felt about anything. It was always: ‘Do this, Thirl. Do that, Thirl. Learn how to draw maps, Thirl. Carry the theodolite, Thirl. Come with me into the Unstable, Thirl.’ Well, now I’m saying no. And I feel no grief that their time is over and mine has come. No grief, and no compunction. I’m no Minion though, Keris. I’ll do the decent thing by both of you, but no more than that. No more.’

  She felt an odd fascination with his utter lack of feeling. ‘And me? What did I ever do to have you dismiss me so lightly?’

  ‘You really don’t know, do you? Didn’t it ever occur to you that a boy might resent the fact that his younger sister did just about anything one cares to name better than he did? Well, he did, Keris. He hated you when you drew more accurate maps, when you threw Piers’ knives better, when you shot arrows straighter, when you beat him swimming across the river pool… Count yourself lucky, Sis. If you’d been a boy, I might have killed you. I’ve got over that callow jealousy now, and I got good at turning on a show of fraternal affection, but don’t ask me to go out of my way to help you, because I won’t.’ He smiled lightly, carelessly, and left her. There was no real hate for her in him, just a complete lack of interest, and she wondered if that was not worse.

  She leant her head against Ygraine’s neck and choked down the ache in her throat.

  It wasn’t really all her fault he was like this, was it?

  ~~~~~~~

  Harin Markle came as he had promised. Keris was alone, working in the shop when he came to the door, traipsing in a trail of dirt from unwiped boots.

  She tried to be detached in her assessment. He was not bad-looking, she supposed, even though there was a rather large spot developing right on the end of his nose at the moment. Still, she could hardly hold that against him. No, it was not his looks she didn’t like, it was his attitude. He was so cock-sure when he faced someone he considered his inferior, yet so obsequious when in the company of those he considered his superiors. She came in the first category, she knew, while Thirl was one of the latter. With Thirl he was all smiles and flattery, couching his ideas as mere suggestions; with her he spoke with a heavy pompousness and treated her as though she were a recalcitrant horse to be persuaded out of wrongful behaviour.

  ‘Keris,’ he said, ‘Thirl tells me he’s told you of our plans for the tavern. What do you think of that, eh? Loads of money to be made because we’re bound to catch the trade coming up from Hopen Grat. Great idea, but that’s your brother all round. Always has bright ideas…’

  She tried to freeze him with a look that would have stopped a rain shower, but he didn’t seem to notice. She said, ‘I understand that the two of you have also had a bright idea about me.’

  He was not in the least embarrassed. ‘Why, yes—Thirl’s idea, actually, but it seemed a good one. I mean, you and I could hook up together and everybody benefits—’

  ‘Perhaps you’d be good enough to explain just what benefit I’d get from it?’

  He looked taken aback. ‘Why, you’d be married, of course! Otherwise you’ll end up like Old Woman Raddles, with everyone saying you’re a witch, too ugly ever to have found a man. Come on, now, Keris, it won’t be so bad. You’d be a tavern keeper’s wife, lording it over the other women in the village. As for the other side of being married, well, I know you’re a virgin, but we can get that out of the way quickly enough, and once we’ve had a couple of kids, you won’t have to worry about that sort of thing anymore, I swear.’

  She gaped at him, not knowing whether to laugh or be angry. ‘Harin Markle,’ she said a last, ‘get this into your insensitive skull: if I were to consider marrying anyone at all, you would be right at the bottom of my list of potential candidates. Is that understood?’

  Unfortunately it did not seem to be understood at all. He laughed, made several condescending remarks about women having coy natures, and of course she was pretending modesty because that was the maidenly thing to do. He would, he said, be back again, naturally.

  She gritted her teeth and refrained, with difficulty, from throwing something at his departing back when he finally left her.

  Some time later, when she had calmed herself, she began to unstrap the packs belonging to Piers that Blue Ketter had left in the shop. The first things to fall out were the throwing knives, all five of them, still in their scabbards. She pulled one free and weighed it in her hand, feeling its balance. It was true that she could throw them more skilfully than Thirl, although even she had not quite perfected the knack of judging distance accurately enough to ensure that it was always the point of the blade, rather than some other part of the knife, that ended up hitting the target. Too often the weapon would spin out wrongly and clatter harmlessly to the ground as a consequence.
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  In exasperation at Thirl’s even greater incompetence, Piers had told his son to concentrate on bow and arrow, but even there she’d proved to have more innate ability than her brother, as well as a greater interest. She might not have been able to achieve the distances that Thirl, with his male strength, could manage, but she made up for it in accuracy. It was she who spent hours practising just because she enjoyed pitting her skills against the wind and a variety of targets. She developed muscles in her arms and upper torso and calluses on her fingers that had horrified her mother when she’d noticed them, but she had just laughed and gone on practising.

  When their father had taught Thirl how to fletch his own arrows, it was she who’d learned; when he’d shown Thirl how to select wood for a bow, how to season and fashion it, it had been she who’d taken the lessons to heart and who’d finally produced the better weapon. In the end Piers had bought a bowstave from the fletcher in Drumlin for Thirl, and he’d taken that with him whenever he had gone into the Unstable with his father. In between times it hung on the wall, oiled and envied by Keris, unused and unwanted by Thirl.

  She fingered Piers’ knives, remembering the lessons, the first pathetic attempts to spin the blade through the air… The pang of those distant memories stung now, reminding her Piers Kaylen was dead, and Thirl lost to her forever.

  She laid the knives aside and delved deeper into the packs.