No—some two-legged creature had been here.
He felt suddenly afraid, and drew his knife, inspecting the cottage.
Nothing was missing—only the disarrangement of inspection—so he sheathed his blade and went outside. He sniffed the air and found it normal—all forest smells, and that of the chickens and pigs that came rushing to him in search of food. He stared around and felt as if he were watched, but he could see no one. He paced the margins of his holding, staring at the encircling trees, but saw nothing untoward. Save he felt that odd sensation that eyes studied him, invisible behind the woodland canopy.
“Who’s there?” he called. “Shall you come out ?”
There was no answer, but still he felt he was watched. The short hairs of his neck tingled and he felt suddenly wary. He had not felt afraid before—not in the friendly forest—but now ... He wondered who watched him. Or what.
“Shall you meet me?” he called, thinking the while that perhaps he should purchase a dog. “Are you afraid of me?”
No answer: only the rustling of leaves and birdsong.
He shrugged and shouted, “So be it, then,” and set to unloading his cart.
He stored his supplies and fed rhe animals, then fed himself and settled to sleep. Rut for the first time, he bolted the door.
He woke with THE DAWN light and the birds’ song and felt afraid. He rose and went outside—as much to prove to himself that he was not afraid as for any other reason.
Sunlight wafted brilliant through the trees’ canopy, patterning the grass in dappled shades of green. The chickens clucked about their business and the pigs— those not already gone into the forest—snuffled at the ground around the cottage. All was normal.
Cullyn gathered eggs and went back inside. He made his breakfast, thinking of Elvira and Abra, and then took up his bow. Andrias had said that two more deer would buy him a horse, and the sooner he took them down, the sooner he’d be able to ride.
It was easy for him to find the deer trails. They cut through the bracken to the waterholes and grazing places, where he could follow them and wait and take what he needed, and today he decided that— no matter who or what watched him—he’d take at least one deer to buy his desired horse. So he checked his bow and oiled the string, then checked all his arrows and their fletchings, and went out into the woodland.
He felt curiously uneasy, thinking of his unknown visitor.
It was another sunny day, light drifting down through the canopy of overhanging branches to dapple the grass below with harlequin patterns of sun and shadow. A gentle breeze stirred the leaves and the ferns, so that their soft rustling was a whispered counterharmony to the trilling of the birds that filled the trees. It was a day that in other circumstances he’d have enjoyed for its beauty, but now felt somehow menacing.
He had felt watched before, but had never known the watchers to intrude on his home. That made a difference.
He shook off the feeling, intent on taking his first deer, telling himself there was nothing he could do. If the Durrym watched him, then they watched him. If they chose to show themselves, he’d face them. He had no argument with them, nor wanted any. But still, as he found fresh tracks and crouched to examine a pile of dung, he felt uneasy. It was as if the forest had changed.
He followed the trail, knowing it led to a spring, and circled around so that he approached the water with the breeze on his face.
The spring was set between outcrops of stone that thrust up from the grassy sward, birches growing silvery from between the rocks, and all the circle surrounded by stately oaks. Three deer drank there: a young stag and two hinds. Cullyn nocked an arrow and sighted down the shaft at the older hind. The stag looked up, antlers tossing as he scented the wind. He raised his head, mouth opening to bell a warning. Cullyn drew back and loosed his shaft.
The arrow flew true, taking the hind behind the left shoulder as she rose from the water. She coughed and stumbled a few faltering steps back. The stag and the other hind turned and ran even as Cullyn charged out, bow dropped and knife in hand to plunge the blade into her throat. He slew her swiftly, as she deserved, standing back as she fell, blood coming from her throat as her gentle eyes dulled. He waited until her last kicking was done and then lifted her across his shoulders and started back to his cottage.
It was mid-afternoon before he reached home and halted in amazement as he saw the horses there.
He’d seen them before: the dozen or so he’d watched riding out from the keep. Big hunters, handsomely accoutred, the riders making use of his well, and staring at him as if he had no right to approach his own home. They were, he realized. Lord Bartram's men, for they wore such gear as only keep folk owned—metal-plated leather and mail, half-helms atop their heads, swords in scabbards, even some shields slung on the saddles. He felt affronted by their imperious gaze.
He dropped the deer as a tall man, old enough to be his father, came toward him. He was grizzled gray, with lines on his face, and a long scar that ran from hairline to chin, but he was smiling, and as he reached Cullyn he ducked his head and said, “I apologize for this intrusion. I am Laurens, master-at-arms to Lord Bartram.”
Cullyn nodded, confused. “What do you want?”
“We were hunting,” the old man said, “and we came upon your cottage. The lady Vanysse and her daughter, the demizzel Abra, wished to rest, so . . .” He shrugged. “They chose to rest here. I trust. ..”
What else he might have said was cut off by the man who emerged from the cottage. Cullyn recognized him as Amadis. He was dressed in hunting gear, and carried his helm so that his long, blond hair waved free, his handsome face set in a casual smile.
“So who’s this, Laurens?” He glanced enquiringly at Cullyn, as if he inspected some prospective target.
Laurens said, “The cottage’s owner, captain. I don’t know his name.”
Amadis nodded and went on smiling. “Which is?”
“Cullyn,” Cullyn said. “And this is my home.”
Amadis shaped a mocking bow. “And I trust you’ll forgive us for making use of your humble abode, but my lady and the demizzel were in need of rest and shelter. And . . .” He gestured at the cottage, the waving of his hand making it seem somehow smaller and poorer than it was. “We found this. So ...”
“Be welcome,” Cullyn said. “The ladies are insider
“Taking their rest.” Amadis nodded.
Cullyn stepped toward his door and Amadis moved to block him.
“They’d have their privacy.”
“This is my home,” Cullyn said.
“Even so.” Amadis shrugged, a negligent hand touching his sword’s hilt.
His intention was obvious and Cullyn felt anger swelling. He realized that his own hand was on the hilt of his hunting knife, and Amadis was smiling at him as if in challenge.
Then Laurens stepped between them. “Shall I call to the ladies, Captain? They’d likely enjoy meeting their host.”
He turned before Amadis could reply and bellowed at the house.
“Mesdames, the owner is come and bids you welcome. Shall you greet him?”
Cullyn saw Amadis scowl, but the two women emerged from the cottage and he recognized them both. One was Vanysse, Lord Rartram’s wife, dressed in hunting green, her long blond hair tousled, her face flushed.
She was, Cullyn thought, beautiful, but not so lovely as her red-haired stepdaughter.
Abra wore the same tunic and divided skirt, which flattered her slender body and set off the color of her hair in different hues, like oak trunks to autumnal leaves. Her eyes were large and very blue above a tip-tilted nose and full, naturally red lips. Cullyn felt his breath catch in his throat; almost, he bent a knee.
But then she smiled and said, “Please forgive us, but we were tired,” and it was as if rhe sun emerged from behind gray clouds and bathed him in its radiance.
All he could do was nod and mumble, and say, “Welcome. My home is yours.”
Her stepmother
laughed and said, “How charming.” And glanced at Amadis before she added, “And you are?”
“Cullyn,” he said. “Cullyn ap Myrr.”
“And you live here?” Vanysse waved a casual hand toward his cottage. “Alone in the forest?”
He looked at Abra as he said, “It suits me, lady. My father built this house after the Great War. He brought my mother here, and 1 was born here. 1 have lived here since.”
“What of your parents?” Abra asked.
“They died,” Cullyn answered.
“And now you live here alone?”
He nodded, and she asked, “Is it not lonely?”
He shrugged and shook his head. “Sometimes, perhaps, but not much.”
“I doubt I could survive it,” she said, smiling at him so that his heart warmed to her as it had not to Elvira. “I think I must be too content with life in the castle. Is it not uncomfortable in winter?”
“It’s cold,” he said, “but I can build a fire.” He laughed, charmed by her easy manner and her beauty, and gestured at the trees. “I’ve enough wood.”
She smiled and he was entranced.
He asked, “And what is life in the castle like?”
But before she could answer, her stepmother interrupted.
“Enough, eh?” Vanysse glowered at her stepdaughter. “We’ve taken sufficient of his time.”
“And hospitality,” Amadis added. “So let’s be on our way.”
He reached into his sabretache and tossed two coins to Cullyn.
Cullyn watched them fall, insulted. A pig came to investigate the downfall. He kicked it away as Abra blushed. Her stepmother smiled as Amadis helped her astride her horse. He watched Abra mount, and then felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“He knows no better,” Laurens said. “Take the coin and no insult, eh?”
“He’s . ..” Cullyn struggled to find the right word.
Laurens swung astride his horse. “Arrogant? Rude? Presumptious? Name it, lad—1 know it. But take the coin—the gods know, he has enough to spend. Use it, eh? And if you ever think of being a soldier, come see me in rhe keep.”
“I don’t think,” Cullyn said, “that I'd like soldiering.”
“There are worse lives,” Laurens answered. “The gods know, but I’ve been at the trade tor forty years and more. Think about it, eh?”
Cullyn nodded and watched them ride away, all set up on great, grand horses, bound for the keep where servants would prepare them baths and set their food before them, cooked and ready to eat, and after take the plates away and clear the tables, while he must butcher the deer he’d taken and trudge afoot into Lyth if ever he hoped to own a horse.
He sighed, and earned the deer to the outhouse; it was dark before the butchering was done and he washed and settled to sleep.
Which was disturbed by the insensate notion that he was still being watched.
He WOKE UNEASY, the smell of strangers in his nostrils and the memory of odd dreams in his head.
It was as if Abra had imprinted her scent on the cottage. Then he recalled the coins the captain had so casually tossed him and found them in rhe pig-grubbed dirt outside as he went to the well. He grinned wryly as he scooped up the silver discs—they’d go some good way to buying his horse—before he drew a bucket from the well and bathed. Then he fed the animals and watered his small vegetable garden before making himself a simple breakfast; and all the while he thought of Abra and Elvira, and weighed the proven charms of the one against the untasted charms of the other, and thought that both were unobtainable.
He checked the butchered carcass of the deer and found it sound, so he took up his bow again and went out to hunt another.
He realized that he wanted to wait no longer to purchase his horse. It was as if his unwelcome visitors had started up some desire he had not previously known, so that he was now consumed with impatience. He would, he decided, take a second deer and go straight back to Lyth, not wait for the Summer Horse Fair, but buy an animal as soon as possible.
He was firm in his purpose as he stalked the deer trails through the forest, and equally uneasy, for he felt he was still watched. It was as if some shadow trailed him, unseen amidst the bracken, and although he would halt and glance around and sniff rhe breeze, he could not see his follower.
It was like chasing a dream: a thing perceived on the edge of vision, shapeless and unfocused. Sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of some shifting shape that crouched inside the tall ferns or darted behind the bole of an oak, but there was never any firm sighting. Only the sensation of eyes upon his back, as if he were the hunted.
He took a deer with a single clean shot, and as he cut the throat a figure emerged from behind a lowering oak.
Cullyn stared, grasping his bloody knife, ready to defend himself. Save the man—a Durrym, he supposed— raised opened hands in gesture of amity. He was as tall as Cullyn himself, and dressed in similar garb, save his blended better with the woodland, all motley pattemings that melded with the trees and bracken and seemed, even, to ape the shadings of the sunlight. He was slender for all his broad shoulders, and long, leaf-brown hair was drawn back in a tail from a narrow face that was simultaneously alien and handsome. He carried a bow strung across his back, and a long knife was sheathed on his hip, but he smiled in a friendly way. so that Cullyn felt a little more at ease.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am named Lofantyl,” the Durrym said. "Who are you?”
“Cullyn.”
The Durrym nodded. “I have watched you a while now. You love this forest, no?”
Cullyn nodded. “It’s my home."
“I love it, too. Almost as much as Coim’na Drhu."
Cullyn frowned, and Lofantyl added: “Our new homeland. Since you drove us out of Coim’na Hass.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what you call it.”
“Kandar,” Cullyn supplied.
“An ugly name, but no matter.” Lofantyl gestured at Cullyn’s still-ready knife. “Shall you put that blade away and we talk?”
Utterly confused, Cullyn nodded.
Three
CULLYN STARED in amazement at the Durrym, but Lofantyl smiled at him, as if this strange meeting were normal.
“I’ve watched you a while," he said, “and I think you know it.”
Cullyn nodded, and mumbled, “I sensed you there. Was it you who went into my cottage?” He wondered if he should draw his knife and attempt to kill this stranger, considered a mortal enemy by Church and State. But the Durrym seemed friendly, as if they were two chance acquaintances met by accident or, perhaps, design, and he felt no wish to fight.
Lofantyl ducked his head, shrugging a gesture of apology. “I was curious. Your ways are different, and I wondered how you lived. I had never seen the inside of a Garm’s home before.”
“Is that what you call us?” Cullyn asked,
“Garm’kes Lyn. In our language it means ‘taker,’ ” Lofantyl said. “Because you took our land. What do you call us?”
“Durrym. That means ‘exile.’ ”
“We obviously have our own names for one another,” Lofantyl said, smiling, “but 1 wonder if you and I could not be friends.”
It occurred to Cullyn that this was a most odd conversation. The Durrym were the creatures of nightmare, proscribed by the Church as godless outcasts; they were the reason the great border forts had been built after rhe war. And they, in turn, had created the Barrier to hold men from the land Lofantyl named as Coim’na Drhu. They were the ogres mothers warned their children of. Cullyn could remember his own mother telling him that a Durrym might come in the night and take him away, if he was naughty. Yet now he sat speaking with one such monster—who seemed not at all menacing.
“Perhaps,” he allowed.
“Save?” Lofantyl asked, hearing the hesitation in Cullyn’s voice.
“I…” Cullyn shrugged, his voice faltering.
“Don’t trust me?” Lofantyl chuckled, a musical sound. “Because
I’m ... What is that name you have— Durrym ?”
“No; yes,” Cullyn spluttered. “But mostly because you spied on me.”
“I wanted to know you,” Lofantyl said calmly, “before I spoke with you.”
“Do you often speak with us Garm ... whatever?”
“Garm’kes Lyn,” the Durrym supplied. “No. Sometimes we come across the river to watch you, but not often. I am considered ... odd, for my interest in you. But...”
He paused, and Cullyn sensed something behind his calm expression that was not at all calm. “What?” he asked.
“The woman,” Lofantyl said. “I’ve seen her before, and . . .” Cullyn wondered if the Durrym blushed, for surely LofantyPs face grew red as he added, “I believe myself in love.”
“What woman?” Cullyn asked.
“The young one,” the Durrym returned. “The one with the red hair, like oak leaves in the autumn. The one with the face that—”
“Abra,” Cullyn interrupted. “Lord Bartram’s daughter.”
“She’s noble bom?” Lofantyl asked.
“Her father’s a Border Lord,” Cullyn said. “Sworn to defend our land against the likes of you.”
“The likes of me?” Lofantyl chuckled. “My own father would defend our land against the likes of you."
Cullyn shrugged his incomprehension, and wondered if he were not dreaming. He sat in conversation with one of his people’s enemies, who seemed entirely friendly. Indeed, love struck; yet he found the man—he could somehow not conceive Lofantyl as enemy—most likable.
“My father is Vashinu of the Kash'ma Hall. He commands the south of Coim’na Drhu.” Lofantyl chuckled again. “Forgive me—that means that my father is what you would call a Border Lord. His fortress is Kash'ma Hall, and his duty is to hold the south of Coim’na Drhu safe against you ... What are you called?”
“Kandarians,” Cullyn said, feeling his confusion grow by the moment. “I don’t understand this.”
“It’s really quite simple,” Lofantyl said. “You drove us out, so we retreated across the river—”
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