The Copper Promise

by Jen Williams

  A roar dragged his eyes back up to the horizon, and his nostrils filled with the stench of burning flesh. A great shadow was coming, passing over the god-peaks and covering them in a deep darkness, as though they were little more than hills in the sand. It rushed on towards him, bringing a tide of smothering fear. Sebastian shrank back, fumbling to draw his sword from its scabbard with fingers suddenly numb, but the shadow passed on and over him before he could strike. The roar sounded again, so loud that Sebastian dropped to his knees.

  ‘What are you?’ he cried, and a thousand voices answered.

  ‘We are ruin. We are your children.’

  He woke with a start, the pain in his chest fading swiftly, although the images from the dream did not. Wydrin stood over him with one boot resting on his leg and her hands on her hips. There was a strong scent of cooking eggs in the air.

  ‘If you want any breakfast, you want to move fast,’ she said. ‘Three days in this miserable forest have given me quite the appetite.’ She gave his leg another shove for good measure, and went back to the fire. Frith was bent over the battered iron pan with a fork and an expression of intense concentration on his face.

  Sebastian sat up, wondering if his colleague had spotted the way his hands were trembling. She didn’t normally miss such things, but then Wydrin before breakfast was somewhat unpredictable. In truth, he had rarely felt less like eating.

  ‘Where did we get eggs from?’

  ‘Our woodsman here found a nest,’ said Wydrin, gesturing to Frith. ‘Weird little blue-green eggs; I wouldn’t touch them, but he reckons they’ll taste fine once they’re all scrambled up.’

  ‘And that is not all I found,’ said Frith, looking up from the pan. ‘There is a small town less than an hour’s walk from here.’

  Despite the dread lining his stomach, Sebastian was glad to hear that. Since their sudden arrival in the midst of the Blackwood they had been walking, trying to find one of the numerous small villages Frith insisted populated the region. The problem was that Frith only had the vaguest idea where they’d arrived, and so far the place had been conspicuously free of landmarks. By the second day, Wydrin had taken to exclaiming wonder at each new copse of trees or pile of stones, until Sebastian was certain she and Frith would come to blows again. It didn’t help that twice now Frith’s magic had burst into life of its own accord, setting fire to a bush on one occasion, and later lighting up the young lord like a beacon and scaring scores of birds from the surrounding trees. He said there was nothing he could do to control it, and the apparently random nature of the mage’s power seemed to have put Frith in a volatile mood, particularly when Wydrin insisted on referring to it as ‘the princeling’s little problem’.

  ‘Is it a place you know?’ Sebastian seated himself by the fire, glad of its scant warmth, and Wydrin pressed a clay cup filled with tea into his hands.

  ‘If it is the town I believe it to be, then yes, I visited it once or twice in the company of my father. Pinehold. There was a tower, an inn, the usual collection of peasants.’ He shrugged. ‘We should be able to find horses there and gather supplies.’

  ‘Those eggs are starting to burn,’ put in Wydrin. Frith took the pan off the fire and wedged it in the dirt between them.

  ‘I will announce myself to the jarl in charge, and commandeer what we need. We may even be able to take a small force of men to Blackwood Keep, although I doubt I shall require them.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ said Sebastian. He took a spoonful of the eggs. They were salty and slightly blackened on the bottom, but despite his lack of appetite the taste of hot food was glorious. ‘Forgive me, my lord, but you have no way of knowing the situation in Pinehold. It could be occupied by the Republic’s forces.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Wydrin. She shovelled a portion of eggs into her mouth and spoke round them. ‘Best have a look at the situation first before you go in there all lit up like a lighthouse.’

  Frith frowned into his breakfast, obviously unhappy with this plan, but Sebastian could see that he understood the necessity of it too. What made a man so relentlessly self-reliant? It clearly pained him to take the advice of anyone. Sebastian looked up to see Wydrin wiping her mouth on the back of her hand. I suppose we are hardly the wisest of advisors.

  ‘I do not understand it,’ said Frith. ‘When we were in the Citadel the power surged through me, and all I needed to do was think, and it obeyed. I could hear the mages too, the whispers of their lost knowledge were like echoes in my head.’ He shook his head and scraped the last of the eggs from the pan. ‘Now that is gone, and the power works only when it wishes to.’ His hand tightened on the pan until his knuckles turned white. ‘Why? How can it be? Did I travel so far for nothing?’

  ‘Perhaps the remnants of the mages were an influence,’ said Sebastian in a quiet voice. ‘We know so little about them after all – their history, their methods.’ We were like children poking at a viper’s nest, he thought. What can we know about what we’ve unleashed?

  ‘No,’ said Frith to no one in particular. He threw the fork into the pan with a clatter. ‘I took the power from them, and I shall bend it to my will. It’s just a … period of adjustment, that’s all.’ He looked up at them both, his dark brows knitted together in a determined expression. ‘Do not take too long over breakfast.’

  18

  Pinehold was much as he remembered it.

  There had been a time when Frith’s father had developed a sudden and keen interest in all the small towns and villages dotted throughout the Blackwood. He had travelled to each of them, sometimes with one or all of his sons, and always with a small retinue of household servants.

  Frith remembered his father on those trips as clearly as if it were yesterday; sitting atop his grey horse in the weak spring sunshine, a small smile beneath his neat brown beard. All Lord Frith’s smiles were small things.

  Their visit to Pinehold had been marked by a sudden spring snow. Frith, in his early teens then, had clung to the neck of his horse and complained bitterly about the cold. His father, as usual, had ignored him. As they emerged from the treeline to the wide clearing that marked the edge of Pinehold, he’d gestured at the town wall with one gloved hand.

  ‘An ancient place, Aaron,’ he’d said. ‘One of the oldest.’

  ‘It certainly looks likely to fall down any moment,’ Frith had replied sourly.

  ‘Not at all, boy.’ His father’s eyes had narrowed. ‘The men and women who built these places knew what they were doing.’

  And perhaps he’d been right. The town wall, built of solid chunks of dull grey stone, was still standing much as it had been. The tops weren’t brushed with snow, but that was the only difference Frith could spot. The southern gate looked as strong as it had done ten years ago, although it stood wide open today. They could see the tops of the roofs from where they stood, and there was a thin haze of smoke from numerous wood fires hanging over the town. At the furthest edge of Pinehold a slim shape poked towards the sky, stark against the black of the trees. Wydrin pointed at it.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The Queen’s Tower.’ Frith blinked as more memories came back. ‘It was where the old jarl lived.’

  ‘Not a bad place to make your home.’

  Frith nodded. The tower was constructed of pale milk-stone, a material not found locally and very expensive to transport. At regular intervals there were wide windows, and even a balcony, although they couldn’t see that from where they were.

  ‘It was built for Queen Alynn of the Blackwood, back when they had kings and queens. The people loved her so they paid for many such monuments.’ Frith paused, remembering. ‘My father used to tell me stories of Good Queen Alynn, about how she rid the forest of bandits and fought for her people. He was very keen on history. I think those stories were his favourites …’ He cleared his throat and turned to look at the pair of sell-swords. ‘I am not certain this is the best course of action.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ said Wydrin imme
diately. ‘You can’t go in there, not without knowing who might be there to greet us. And even with the white hair someone could recognise you. And Sebastian here, well,’ she gestured at the knight’s imposing frame, and the broadsword slung over his back, ‘I’m the least conspicuous of the three of us. People very rarely notice me until it’s too late.’ She smirked, but when she caught Frith’s expression her face grew serious again. ‘I’ll go in there and have a look around, that’s all. Give me some money.’

  ‘What? I’ve already given you money.’

  ‘Which is now mine. I need coin for the furtherment of our mission, which will be coming out of your pocket.’

  ‘What for?’

  In answer Wydrin gestured at her bare arms, and Sebastian’s torn and bloody cloak.

  ‘We need some new clothes, and you need a good hooded cloak so that we can cover you up, pretend you’re a leper or something.’ Frith didn’t move, so she held her hands up, palms out. ‘Do you honestly think I’m going to scarper now? I’ll go in there, buy some supplies, find out if the town is crawling with enemies, and then I’ll come straight back. I swear it on my claws.’

  Frith sighed and passed her a coin purse from his belt.

  ‘Do not squander it. My funds are not inexhaustible.’

  She smiled, pocketing the purse, and headed off towards the town. He and Sebastian watched as she left the trees and strode along the path to the distant gate, growing smaller all the while. Frith cleared his throat, suddenly filled with unease.

  ‘She does not seem built for stealth.’

  A ghost of a smile moved over Sebastian’s face.

  ‘Then you have never seen her sneaking out the back way when it’s time for the bar bill to be paid. Don’t worry, Wydrin can be sensible sometimes. She’ll get what she needs in there and be back before we have a chance to enjoy the silence.’

  Wydrin headed straight for the tavern. A number of years exploring strange towns had given her an instinct for locating the best drinking hole. A quick pint, she reasoned, just for refreshment purposes. Refreshment, and possible information gathering. The princeling could hardly begrudge her that.

  The guards on the gate had watched her closely as she entered, but she had squared her shoulders and walked past them just as if she’d been there a thousand times before, and they hadn’t said a word. Although she had been careful not to make eye contact, she had taken note of their uniforms; decent mail and boiled black leather. They all had a strange symbol painted onto their round, wooden shields – a red oval, with two black holes in the upper half. It vaguely resembled a very simple face, or perhaps a mask, covered in blood. Was that the sigil of the People’s Republic of Istria? She couldn’t be sure, but she didn’t believe so. Sebastian would have known in a second.

  She saw more of these guards as she headed deeper in, and these ones had the look of battle-born men about them, carrying swords that looked well cared for. Wydrin was careful to appear deeply uninterested in them.

  The town of Pinehold itself was rather gloomy, thanks to the smoky rock its stones were hewn from and the dark timbers of the Blackwood. Here and there huge oak trees grew, spreading their branches in a protective gesture over the town below. Someone had hung strings of blue and white bunting between the branches to cheer the place up a bit, but recent rains had soaked the fabric through and they clung to the bark like bedraggled lovers. The people didn’t do anything to dispel Wydrin’s disquiet either. She saw men and women with baskets of bread, mothers with children hanging on their skirts, all going about their daily business, but it was impossible to miss the haunted expressions on their faces. It’s almost normal, thought Wydrin, very almost completely normal apart from the way they look at the guards, and the way they look at the tower.

  The pale edifice stood at the far end of the town, its lower half hidden by wagons full of mouldering hay. A black flag was flying from the top, embroidered with the same red mask face she’d seen on the guards. The windows she could see were wide and generous but dark, and she could not see inside. The townsfolk kept glancing fearfully up at the tower, as if they didn’t dare to look away for long. They have the look of a dog that has been beaten too often, and now lives in constant fear of its master’s hand, thought Wydrin.

  The tavern, when she found it, was called The Alynn’s Pride, and she stepped through the door gratefully, glad to be off the street. Inside it was so dark that she had to blink for a few seconds to get her bearings; chairs, tables, a bar that had seen better days, made all the grubbier by the dirty light managing to force its way through the thick leaded windows. Wydrin dragged a boot through the sawdust on the floor. It was reasonably clean, and the air smelled more of ale than of vomit. Even more encouraging, there didn’t appear to be any bloodstains on the tables. Wydrin relaxed a little. She had a long and varied history with taverns, and knew the dangerous ones on sight.

  There were a handful of townspeople inside, sipping foamy ale with their heads down. A few looked up as she entered the bar, and Wydrin saw one or two glance towards the daggers on her belt. She ignored them and stepped up to the counter, placing her hands flat on the top and beaming at the serving woman.

  ‘Mead, please.’

  For a few moments the woman looked as though she wasn’t going to move, let alone fetch Wydrin her mead.

  ‘And who might you be?’ she said eventually.

  ‘A traveller from the Stoney Sea,’ said Wydrin, readily enough. There was no use in lying, Wydrin knew she could not disguise the salt of Crosshaven in her voice. ‘Just making my way through. And you are?’

  The woman frowned.

  ‘Mead, was it?’

  She bustled off, apparently no longer interested in an exchange of information. She returned with a slightly warped glass filled with a warm golden liquid; it was the brightest thing in the place. Wydrin fished a few coins from the purse on her belt and put them on the counter.

  ‘Thank you kindly. So what’s the news from Pinehold?’

  A strange parade of emotions flickered across the woman’s face then; Wydrin saw shock, and anger, and lastly fear. The woman glanced around the tavern, as though she were looking for someone.

  ‘Just drink your mead and get out,’ she spat before walking stiffly up to the other end of the bar to refill another glass.

  Charming place.

  Wydrin took a sip. It tasted like it might have seen some honey once. Or possibly a few dead bees.

  Glancing down the bar she noticed two men nursing full tankards. Neither looked to be fighting men, and yet they both wore bloody bandages. One held his drink awkwardly, apparently missing two fingers on his left hand, and the other leaned heavily on the bar, his head half covered in bloody rags.

  Wydrin looked away hurriedly. There was trouble here, and not the useful sort that ended in a large bag of coins …

  ‘Have you travelled far, child?’ came a voice in Wydrin’s ear. It was close and soft, and very precise. ‘You appear to have rolled down a hill of thistles.’

  Wydrin turned to find a tall, older woman standing next to her. She forced down the initial surge of alarm with effort; very few people could sneak up on her so successfully, even in a tavern. The woman who had moved so silently was as thin and hard as a poker. Painfully sharp cheekbones pushed at warm olive skin, and she wore dark blue robes over worn riding leathers. The most striking aspect of her appearance were the tattoos; writing in a strange alphabet covered both her cheeks from her eyes downwards, and her arms and hands were covered in the same text. A Regnisse of Relios, then, otherwise known as a fire-priestess. Wydrin knew without having to look that the woman’s back would be covered in more of the holy writing, as well as other areas best not mentioned to a holy person. Oh, that’s all I need, she thought. A priest.

  ‘It’s been a long time since I was a child, sister.’

  ‘And I am not your sister.’

  Wydrin caught the older woman’s eye, and there passed a moment that flickered between m
utual dislike and mutual amusement. Relios was the tempestuous land beyond the deserts of Creos. Her father had said it was a place of angry gods and sharp people. The land itself would shake apart regularly, leading to huge fissures in the ground and whole cities lost in a few moments of violence. The Regnisse Accordance were made up of two groups of priests: those who studied history and ancient languages, and dedicated their lives to the spread of knowledge, and those who usually stayed within Relios and watched the trembling earth for signs from their gods. To Wydrin it sounded rather like looking up at the clouds and searching for the shape of a bunny rabbit or a castle, or listening to the sound of waves crashing against your hull and hearing voices. She’d pointed this out to a fire-priest in a tavern in Pathania once and still had a small scar on her left forearm as a memento of the occasion. Holy people they might be, but they still knew how to handle their blades.

  ‘Can I buy you a drink, Regnisse?’ said Wydrin, deciding to err on the side of caution.

  The fire-priestess glanced at the glass of mead.

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  Wydrin took another sip, playing for time.

  ‘I have travelled a long way, yes.’ She gestured at her ragged appearance. ‘I tangled with one of your bears on the way here. Nasty great brute.’

  ‘A Blackwood bear?’ The Regnisse raised one thin eyebrow. ‘If you had truly fought one of those, you would be dead.’ She glanced round at the other customers, her lips pressed together into an expression Wydrin couldn’t quite read. ‘And I wouldn’t talk about that here, if I were you. Not a good subject for general discussion, shall we say.’

  Wydrin’s small amount of patience for priests was suddenly exhausted.

  ‘Listen, I’m just here for a quick drink before I pick up some supplies and move on, so I could really do without all the cryptic warnings and veiled threats.’

  The priestess sighed.

  ‘Yes, I can see that all warnings and threats will have to be loud and possibly written down in large simple letters, if there is to be any hope of your understanding them.’ She leaned in close and lowered her voice. ‘My name is Dreyda, and I am telling you, young woman, that this is a bad place for strangers at the moment. A bad place for everyone. They let you in the gate, yes? Just walked in straight past them, yes? You will find it significantly more difficult to walk back out again, child. You can come in, but you can’t go back out again. Those are Fane’s orders.’