Deep Water

by Pamela Freeman

  “They didn’t tell you who to expect?” he asked, smiling.

  Safred laughed too, ruefully. “No. Just that we would meet someone.” She looked quizzically at him. “Someone who would give us silver.”

  He laughed. “Oh, yes, that’s all I’m good for, I know,” he said with mock humility. “Just the treasury, that’s me.”

  He was easy to like, but he was still a warlord, Martine reminded herself.

  Safred introduced her companions by name, but with no other information. Martine nodded at him, and received a nod and an assessing glance in return, which warmed into admiration.

  “You travel with beautiful companions, Saf,” Arvid said, nodding politely to include Zel, but looking at Martine. She felt the color rise in her cheeks. The fire was getting entirely too strong for comfort.

  “I am riding to the Plantation, and then to Foreverfroze,” Arvid said. “There is a question of markets, of sending food to Mitchen for sale. The Valuers and I are combining to hire a ship, to trade down the coast.”

  “As far as Turvite?” Cael asked, edging his chestnut forward.

  Arvid looked surprised. “We hadn’t intended so,” he said with a question in his voice.

  Safred answered. “We need to get to Turvite. We were headed for Foreverfroze, to find a ship to take us there. The gods said we would find someone here today to help. I thought they meant with silver, but a ship would be even better!”

  Cael laughed at her enthusiasm and at Arvid’s long-suffering expression.

  “It seems to me that the gods use me like a banker!”

  “At least you have some use,” Martine said quietly.

  His gaze lifted quickly to meet her eyes, and this time he was the one who flushed. “Not all warlords are useless,” he said.

  “So they say,” Martine replied. She wasn’t going to give in to the fire, no matter how hard her heart beat when Arvid looked at her. This was just backwash from the ritual, and nothing personal.

  One of his men moved his horse closer, as though Martine might be a threat, and scowled at her with ferocious loyalty. “My lord is the best warlord in the Domains!” he declared. Martine saw with surprise that it wasn’t a man but a brown-haired woman of about thirty, strong and tall and flat-chested. The woman continued, “My lord shares his wealth and his power. He’s even set up a council of all the Voices in the Domain to guide his laws!”

  “Does he abide by their advice?” Martine asked, looking at Arvid.

  He smiled and answered her directly. “He does, when he can. When he can’t, he explains why and gets their agreement.”

  “Always?”

  Arvid nodded. “So far. The Voices are usually reasonable people. And an increasing number are Valuers, which makes coming to an agreement easier.”

  “A warlord who values Valuers?” Martine’s tone was skeptical, but her eyes never left his. That would be more than unusual — it would be extraordinary. Could he be that extraordinary?

  “My mother was a Valuer,” was all he said.

  Martine nodded, once, and looked away. If she maintained that gaze any longer she would drown in it. Valuer mother or not, he was a warlord and no concern of hers. The thump her own heart gave at the thought surprised her.

  “Let’s get going,” she said.

  Arvid nudged his horse into a walk and somehow managed to get it next to Martine’s chestnut. “The Plantation for the night, and then Foreverfroze,” he said companionably. Martine turned to look at him, making her eyes as unreadable as she could. He smiled, nonetheless. “I’m not a despot,” he said quietly. “Don’t condemn me without evidence.”

  She sniffed in exaggerated disbelief, but her hand went to the pouch of stones at her belt for comfort. She wished that she could cast the stones for herself, to see what he would mean to her. The last time her heart had beaten this fast for a human man was when she was a girl, with Cob. That had led to heartbreak, and he had been one of her own kind. No good could come of encouraging Arvid. But she let him ride beside her, with Safred, Cael and Zel behind, and she was aware of every movement of his thigh against the horse, every shift of his hands on the reins. She was glad when Trine took a dislike to Arvid’s horse and surged forward to kick it, because it made Arvid give a rueful shrug and move up the column to get away from her.

  Martine had heard about the Valuers’ Plantation all her life and had, as most Travelers had, imagined living here in comfort and beauty. But it was just a farm. A very big farm, admittedly, with quite a number of houses and sheds and barns, and dairies and forges and one big meeting hall.

  A tall, solid woman named Apple, with graying yellow hair, met them with a smile and arranged for them to have lunch in the meeting hall with the Plantation council, but there was no special banquet organized. The councilors came from the fields in their work clothes, and Arvid was treated the same as the other guests. Children ran in and out of the hall constantly, cajoling food from their parents and from other people, including Arvid, who sat up one end of the table with the councilors, engaged in serious discussions.

  Martine noticed that the children looked up into the adults’ eyes, instead of down at the ground in respect as they did in other places. She mentioned it to Apple as she passed a plate of ham and pickles to go with her bread.

  “They’re taught that they are the equal of all. To look up, not proud, or cheeky, because that means you are more important than the other person. But of equal value.” The words came easily to her, and it was clear this was a lesson she had recited many times to her own children.

  “Thinking you’re equal won’t stop the warlords’ men from beating you if they think you’re disrespectful,” Martine said.

  Holly, Arvid’s guard, laughed, unoffended.

  “Aye, in other places, that’s so, and we’ve all had cause to know it,” Apple answered around a mouthful of ham. “But Arvid is a Valuer himself, or as good as one.”

  “His mam was raised Valuer, just like mine,” Safred said unexpectedly. “But she stayed with her lord. She’s still alive. Almond, her name is, but they named the baby Arvid after his grandfather, instead of Cedar, like she wanted.”

  There was a brief, uncomfortable silence. Safred grinned.

  “The gods didn’t tell me that. Almond did.”

  Cael laughed and had to cover his mouth to stop crumbs flying out. Then he winced, and his hand went surreptiously to his chest, as though to ease the pain of the wound there. Safred noticed and her face tightened, but she said nothing.

  Martine turned to look thoughtfully at Arvid, who was smiling courteously at an older man as he laid down the law about something, poking Arvid in the chest with one bony finger as he spoke. She couldn’t imagine a warlord like Thegan even sitting at the same table as a farmer in dirty boots. Anyone who poked him in the chest would be poked back with a sword through the heart.

  They were parceled out among the cottagers for the night, and Martine was placed with Apple. She was grateful when Martine offered to cast the stones for her, but refused.

  “There’re questions which shouldn’t be asked, and there’re questions which aren’t worth asking, and those are the only two kinds I’ve got,” she said, smiling, but with a tightness behind the smile that told Martine she’d seen some pain in the past.

  Apple sent her son, Snow, over to stay at a friend’s place, and Martine slept in his bed, in clean sheets scented with the rosemary bushes they had dried on. The Plantation wasn’t paradise, and no doubt they had a long, cold winter of it so far north, but Martine thought as she drifted off to sleep that it was the best life she had seen so far in a warlord’s territory.

  She dreamt of Arvid. They were naked, encased in flames that did not burn, but sent impossible heat through every nerve. Her hair floated about her as though they were in water, and he tangled it in his hands and brought her head toward him, seeking her mouth as though frantic for her, as she was for him. She woke the moment before their lips touched and lay, aching, st
aring at the window, wanting him to climb through like a lover from a story.

  I must be mad, she thought. This is more than the normal backwash from the Equinox. Perhaps it’s punishment from the fire. Lord of Flames, she prayed, forgive me and set me free from this. But her skin was tender as though exposed to too much heat, and every movement of her breath rasped the sheet across tight nipples. She had to curl up in a ball, like a child, for hours before she fell asleep again.

  She dreamt of Arvid.

  Apple’s Story

  WHAT GOOD WAS it? Where was the use? I had served, worked, been loyal — for what? An empty alleyway. Yet now they expected me to go on. To serve, as if nothing had happened. As though the alleyway still led home.

  I stood with the tray in my hands, looking over at the glass table.

  “You’re lucky to still have a job,” the cook said gently, “Go on. The lord is waiting.”

  Let him wait, I thought. Let him wait until the giants eat the sun.

  I put down the tray and walked out of the hall, straight out of the fort enclosure and down the hill to the gibbet and the pressing box. The guard on the gate called out as I went, “I’ll be closing up in a few minutes, girl,” but I ignored him. I was not coming back.

  I went to the gibbet. The crows had had three days at Lidi already, and I didn’t want to look. I watched the gallows instead, and I was ready when his ghost quickened.

  Lidi came back not in midair, where I’d been expecting him, but on the platform, which meant that he hadn’t had the quick death I’d thought. He rose, slowly, knowing where he was, knowing what had happened, and I went forward so that he could see me.

  He reached out to me, and I to him, but what good was that? His hands and mine passed through each other with a chill that went to my bones. It’s a cruelty of the gods, that they let us see our dead, but not touch them.

  “They will not offer reparation,” I said, and only as I said it did I realize that I was crying, hiccuping with a tearing grief. “They never do. But don’t let them condemn you in the next life as well. Cheat them. Go onto rebirth.”

  He reached for me again, his face bereft. I put my hand up near the side of his face. He pointed at me and spread his hands as though asking a question.

  “I’m leaving,” I said. “I’m going to the Plantation.”

  He stilled and nodded, and then tried to smile. He raised his hand and blew me a kiss, and that was the hardest moment of all, I remember, because it was a thing he never did. I used to do it to him as I left for work every morning, but it was a joke between us, that he would never copy me. “It’s a girl’s thing to do,” he’d say. So he blew me a kiss and smiled and faded, gone before I could return the kiss, and I sank down at the foot of the gibbet, my legs unsteady. His body hung above me, laced in chains, three days’ dead.

  I couldn’t touch his ghost, but I could touch his body, for the last time. So I reached out and put my hand on his foot, still in the shoes he had made himself. I didn’t mean to, but I set him swinging and his chains rattled. It was like he was sending me a message, and the message was: Run! So I ran. I ran back through the alleyway to the rooms we had called home and I packed everything I could carry into his old backpack and I left, right then, no thinking about it, no planning, I just left and headed north. I spat on the road that led to the fort as I passed. They said he had withheld taxes, but the truth was that he had not bowed low enough. That he was disrespectful.

  So he was, and so he should have been. What was there on the hill to respect? I’d always said, “No, love, don’t anger them, just look at the ground as they pass by,” but now I was filled with the anger that had filled him, the anger that had pushed him too far, pushed him right to the gallows.

  So I went to the Valuers. We’d talked about it, Lidi and I, in the winter nights, snuggled under our thin blankets. We’d talked about making the trip north, to the Plantation. But I was still in tax bondage, from the bad summer when Da’s crop failed, and they would have chased me and brought me back and branded me too, like as not, if not condemned me to the pressing box. So we stayed, and worked, and saved until I had worked out my tax bondage. We were planning to go that summer. It was Lidi’s dream, not mine, but I would have gone anywhere with him.

  Now there was just me, and I was going for him.

  Well, it’s a long trip and it took me a good long while to do, and made no easier by the fact that a month out of Whitehaven I found I was carrying. I sat by the side of a stream, my road-sorry feet in the water, and took a moment to count the days. Then I realized — understood that my tiredness wasn’t just from walking so far. Lidi’s baby. Oh, gods rest him, he’d wanted a child so much. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both. I was more determined to get to the Plantation, so that Lidi’s baby would grow up without any overlord, free in mind as well as body.

  But it took a long time, and I had to winter over in Pless. I got work as a maid in the clothier’s on the market square. One of the women spoke up for me, said that I was just traveling, not a Traveler, that they should let me stay long enough to have the baby and recover. I don’t know why she did it, but it was life itself to me. Maude, her name was, she was kindness itself. Had no children, she told me, and always wanted one to fuss over, so she helped as though she’d been the aunty. She was a seamstress for the clothier and she made a whole set of baby clothes for me. So beautiful. Fit for a — I was going to say a warlord’s child, but sackcloth would suit one of those better. Fit for a prince from the Wind Cities.

  My own little prince was born in the middle of a winter storm, when the wind howled against the shutters and the snow blew sideways down the city streets. So I called him Snow, and it was a good name for he was as fair as Lidi had been. I was glad of that. I’m red-blond myself, but my great-grandmother had been a Traveler, and they say the dark hair can skip generations and appear at any time. I knew it would go harder for a child with black hair, and it had been worrying me — one of those silly worries a pregnant woman gets, yet real for all that. Life is harder for a dark-haired child, there’s no doubt. But my Snow was a tiny blond scrap with long fingers that clung to mine and a cry that went right through your head and out the other side. Oh, he was a cryer, that one! Just as well I was living at the back of the workshop and not in someone’s house, for he would have woken the dead with his bawling. But it was just colic, and he got over it after a month or so, though for that month I walked around like one dazed and the seamstresses were lucky if they got anything to eat or drink, let alone what they’d asked for. But they paid me, and I saved every skerrick.

  When spring came, I decided to head north again. Maude tried to get me to stay. “It’s a free town,” she said. “He’ll be as free here as on the Plantation.”

  Maybe she was right, but I’d promised Lidi’s ghost. So I went on, through the spring and summer. I made it as far as the North Domain just as autumn was closing in, through a small pass that the stonecaster who came to cast for the seamstresses had told me about. It was harder but faster than going all the way around to Golden Valley. I climbed steep goats’ trails that I would never have dared if I had not needed to get Snow safe to the Plantation before winter set in. I saw no one.

  On the evening of the second day after I cleared the pass, I came down from the foothills into a small, wooded valley, no more than a dale full of upright birch trees, where the first autumn colors were late appearing so that the trees seemed like green pillars with a faint veil of yellow fire at their tips. It was a beautiful place. I was glad, because I could hear a stream trickling nearby. I had slung Snow across my chest in my shawl, and now he woke and began to cry for his feed. I drank from a cup made of birch bark, and I was so thirsty I forgot to ask the tree for permission to strip the bark. I drank and sat and fed my babe and was smiling at his tiny fingers kneading my breast when I realized someone was standing before me.

  My heart thumped in surprise. I hadn’t heard any sound. I looked up but there w
as no one there. A trick of the light. I looked down to Snow and again, the figure stood in front of me.

  I had known terror, when they came for Lidi, when they killed him, but this fear was different. A holy fear. I have never had the Sight, or heard the gods, but I knew that whatever I had seen was from the other world that they inhabit.

  Snow finished and burped, loudly. I flinched and looked down at him without thinking, and again I saw the figure. This time I kept my head down. The edges of the figure were shimmering, moving yet anchored, as leaves move but the trunk stays still. It was not green, though, or any color I knew. More like a lack of color, like heat haze over rocks in the summer. I couldn’t see through it. It was solid, but — not there. Not wholly here, in this world.

  “Greetings,” I whispered.

  The figure bent and picked up the bark cup I had torn from the tree. It cradled the cup in its — were they hands, or something else? I couldn’t see, couldn’t quite make it out. It hissed, a strange sound like wind through leaves.

  I was certain that this was the spirit of the birch tree, come to punish me for stealing the bark.

  “I’m sorry, truly, truly,” I stammered. “But the baby needed to be fed and I was so thirsty, I acted without thinking.”

  The figure reached a hand toward Snow and I jumped up and pulled him away. As soon as I stood it disappeared from my sight, but not from hearing. The hissing continued.

  “It’s not his fault!” I cried. “It’s mine!”

  I lowered my head to look at the ground and I could see it, faintly, before me, its hand stretched toward Snow, but stopped, considering. Its head turned up and I realized it was smaller than I was, but its arms were much longer and, perhaps, there were more of them. I couldn’t see, and not being able to see frightened me more than I would have thought. To have the threat to my son disappear when I raised my head… It could be anywhere, go anywhere, spring out from anywhere… I kept my head down and watched it as close as I could.