by J. V. Jones
“What have we got here?” The smaller of the two hatchetmen pushed open the flap on one of Bram’s saddlebags. He was pale-skinned and black haired with part shavings above both ears. Casually he picked out items, sniffed them, tasted them, threw them away. Bram could not recall which pack contained the Dhoone cloak.
“Gentleman,” Mallin said easily. “If you’re looking for the Dhooneshine it’s in the other pack. Brown flask. The one with the label on it saying A gift from me to you.”
The hatchetman grunted. Glancing at his companion, he walked around the horse and flipped the second pack. Thrusting a hand deep, he found what he was looking for. Silent, he drew out the flask, uncorked it, sniffed and nodded. His bigger, older companion addressed Mallin and Bram.
“Straight ahead. Lead your horses. Your weapons stay here until you’re back.”
Bram thought he’d like to pick up his bedroll and spare pants from the dirt but now didn’t seem like a good time. Abandoning them, he headed for the Weasel Camp.
Tents and wood shanties had been raised around a series of small buildings that had once been a farm. A house, a wood barn, a roofed well and cattle run were still standing, though the house was black around the windows as if it had been burned. Young trees had been logged and split to make posts and big square-shaped tents had been raised on a network of tensely strung ropes. Poison pine banners were flying from every point. The brown-and-black weasel standard, the personal badge of the Weasel chief, was stretched over the large central tent.
“Weasel’s in her lair,” Mallin murmured. He seemed close to happy.
Bram reckoned the numbers. There were a lot of people here; women, children, elderly. A surprising number of warriors—more than at the Hailhouse. Women were cooking, washing, drawing water from the well. Men were eating breakfast, brushing horses, repairing leather and honing steel. Children were crying, rubbing sleep from their eyes, squatting to relieve themselves, and running around the camp. A big vat of liquid was boiling on one of the fires. It smelled like chemicals, not food.
A single warrior, dark and lean and armed with a bastard’s sword, came out of the chief’s tent to greet them. His hair, eyebrows and lips were dyed black. “You intrude upon our camp.”
“Yes we do,” Mallin agreed.
“Leave, then.”
“May I present a gift to the chief first?”
The Scarpe warrior didn’t find much to like in Mallin’s easy manner, but he couldn’t find much to object to either. “Give the gift to me.”
“I’ll let you look at it.”
Suspecting a trap the warrior sent a hand to his sword. It was exquisitely sheathed in basket-braided leather. “Go on.”
Mallin opened his mouth and pointed to his tongue. “It’s right here and it’s called information.”
The two men looked at each other as a camp full of people watched. They could not have overhead what had been said but the battle of wills was plain to see.
The warrior was no match for Hew Mallin’s confidence. He made a jerking motion with his head. “Follow me.”
Bram slipped in step behind Mallin and they were escorted to the Weasel chief’s tent.
The interior space had been partitioned and they entered a large and empty reception area. A mink rug sewn from hundreds, possibly thousands, of individual weasel hides, floored the chamber. A high-backed chair made of a solid piece of oak with carved weasels for armrests stood in the center of the rug. Low braziers burned to either side of it, smudging the air with greasy smoke. No other furniture or ornament graced the space.
Mallin looked at the chair and slid something soundlessly to Bram. “Probably best if we stand.”
Bram accepted the item, tucking it under his sleeve as he pushed back his cuff. The warrior had gone ahead into the interior of the tent and Bram heard him speak and a female voice respond.
They waited. An hour passed and then another. Mallin walked around the chair, tapped it with his cleaned and buffed fingernails, and then did something with one of the braziers. He extinguished it.
“Gentleman.” Yelma Scarpe, the Scarpe chief, stepped through the flap in the interior wall. “I have kept you waiting.”
It definitely wasn’t an apology, Bram decided, not even an observation. It sounded more like a boast. The Scarpe Chief had kept them standing in her reception room for the better part of two hours and she was pleased to have done so.
“Uriah,” she said to the warrior who followed her into the chamber, the same one who had accompanied them to the tent. “Relight the brazier. It’s gone out.” She glanced sharply at Hew Mallin, who was all innocence.
As the warrior left to retrieve whatever was needed to tend the brazier, Yelma Scarpe took her seat on the weasel chair. She was clothed in a black dress embroidered with pine cones that was tightly cinched at her scrawny waist. Her neck and hands were heavily corded with sinews and veins, and also heavily dressed with jewels. Bram had no idea what age she was. Her eyes were clear and her face was tinted with rouge and colored pastes. She could have been anything between fifty and a hundred.
“I know you,” she told Mallin.
The ranger bowed. “Hew Mallin at your service.” Unfolding a hand in Bram’s direction, he added, “And this is my traveling companion Bram Cormac.”
Hard black eyes studied him. “You’re Dun Dhoone’s brother.”
“Half-brother.”
Yelma raised an eyebrow at the force of his reply. It appeared to give her pleasure. Jewels on her knuckles glittered as her fingers drummed the weasel armrests on her chair.
Bram kept himself still. Inside his stomach had turned to liquid, but if he could just keep the shell hard no one would know. He had just denied his brother.
“So we have a half-baked, oath-breaking Dhoonesman and a ranger so old he should be walking on sticks. Is there is no end to the pleasures of this day?”
“We’ve come from Blackhail,” Mallin said.
“I know,” replied the chief.
The warrior returned from the inner room, doused the brazier coals with fuel and used a taper to transfer a flame from the second brazier. Air whumpfed as the coals ignited.
Yelma Scarpe stirred the fresh wave of smoke with her little finger. “How do you find Raina Blackhail?”
“Afraid.”
“Really.”
Looking from the Scarpe chief to Mallin, Bram realized they were playing a game. Yelma may have kept Mallin waiting two hours but she wanted very much to hear this. Why would she trust him? Bram wondered. Then he tried out some answers. Because she’d received information from Mallin in the past? Or because she was hearing something she already believed?
Bram concentrated on keeping still. The smoke was itching his throat. He had an urge to cough and had to suppress it.
He had an urge to run and suppressed that too.
Mallin looked the Weasel chief straight in the eye. “Raina Blackhail doesn’t know what’s she’s doing. She’s a fool who shouldn’t be anywhere near a chiefship. Half the people in that house want her out.”
“Yet they helped her evict us.”
“I don’t think I said that Blackhail now loves Scarpe.”
Yelma lowered her head slowly in something that might have been a nod. “She won’t strike.”
It was not quite a question and Mallin said nothing.
Suddenly Bram couldn’t help himself and coughed.
Yelma looked at him, curled her lip, and looked away. He was a clansman without a clan: he was nothing to her.
“What’s the bitch’s defenses?” It was the warrior who, done with the brazier, had come to stand at the Weasel chief’s back. There appeared to be a family resemblance.
“She’s got that big hole in her wall,” Mallin said. “And she’s planning to dispatch a company of warriors to Dregg to escort Orwin Shank and the grain she sent him to purchase back to the roundhouse.”
Both the warrior and his chief thought on this. The warrior said. “I was
there the morning Shank left. He was heading for Dregg all right.”
Yelma made a little sound in her throat.
“She knows she’ll have to send a decent-sized crew,” Mallin continued, raising his gaze to the roof of the tent, “to assure the grain’s safe passage.”
It took Bram a moment to realize that the thing stretching across the Weasel chief’s face was a smile. “Unfortunately,” she said, “there are a few new obstacles along the way.”
Like this camp. Bram started coughing again. The smoke was scratching his throat.
Mallin and the chief ignored him.
The warrior said, “When’s she going to send this crew?”
Mallin shrugged. “Soon. A few days give or take. You’ll know when you see them.”
In the silence that followed Bram tried to control his cough. And failed. His lungs were burning and his diaphragm started contracting and he just couldn’t stop.
All three were looking at him now. Bram’s face burned.
“Get the hell out,” hissed the warrior. “Control yourself.”
Mallin frowned at Bram. Bram could tell he was annoyed. “Go on,” he said impatiently. “Get yourself some water from the well.”
Bram left. The talks between the remaining three resumed even before he cleared the tent flap.
Outside everything seemed bright and busy. Scarpes stared at him. A child ran past him and poked him in the shin. A group of women standing close by found this funny and laughed. Bram rubbed his eyes and cleared the last of the smoke from his throat. He was glad to be out of the tent.
Glad to have something to do.
He went and got some water from the well.
Bram met up with Mallin a quarter later and together they walked their horses back across the field. Mallin was humming. Bram didn’t recognize the tune. It was midday and the sun was peeking through silvery rain clouds. Bram’s mind turned to his pants.
For a wonder they were still where the hatchetman had thrown them, though they were sporting extra boot marks now. Bram picked them up along with his bedroll as Mallin claimed their weapons from the hatchetmen. Both Scarpemen were drunk.
“Dhooneshine’s potent stuff,” Mallin told them without rancor. “You’re supposed to sip not gulp.”
The smaller hatchetman burped his response.
Mallin handed Bram his weapons. He had never commented on the loss of the mirror blue longsword. “Let’s get away from here,” he said.
Bram couched his weapons and mounted Gabbie, and they trotted off the field. When they reached the trapping path, Bram looked to Mallin for direction: north or south?
The ranger thought about this. “You know, I told Raina Blackhail I’d be heading for Spire Vanis. What say I keep my word?”
They headed south.
CHAPTER 28
In the Guidehouse at Clan Gray
THEY CARRIED THE body in on a stretcher woven from reeds. It was uncovered and it was clear from its pallid nakedness that it had been pulled from the water. Two Graywomen sang a death song, ululating like marsh birds. The clan guide had grayed his face, smearing it with a mask of mud and leaving it to dry. As he walked beside the body, he dropped tiny gold skullcap seeds in its wake.
Effie stood on the stairs above the Salamander Hall and watched. The corpse’s long red hair spilled over the edge of the stretcher and whipped in the air like flames. Flora, not named for a queen. Effie knew she wasn’t to blame for the the girl’s death, but she also knew she should have told someone about the girl sitting alone on the northern dock. An adult had been needed, someone motherly enough to wake Flora from her daydreams. Or someone strong enough to pick her up and carry her in the house.
Instead they had needed to haul her from the water. She had been found after sunrise by a woman in one of the reed-clearing boats. No one had mentioned how she died.
And no one seemed surprised.
Feeling a little flutter of worry, Effie glanced upstairs, toward Chedd’s room. She had tried to see him again earlier but had been refused. Bruises were forming around the rebuttal. She’d rebutted the guard quite a bit. Now she had to wait until the guard was changed to try her new, improved strategy on someone who didn’t know she was trouble.
She had managed to learn that Chedd had slept through most of the night. She took this as a good sign—sleeping through the night seemed a healthy thing to do—and she held onto this fact. Tight.
Spying the Croser girl making her way toward the kitchen, Effie thought she might as well go and speak to her. Flora’s words from last night were still on her mind. And besides, she was hungry and it wouldn’t hurt to get some food.
The mourners who had gathered to watch the body being transferred to the guidehouse were dispersing. Effie could hear the skullcap seeds popping under their boots. It sounded like shots being fired.
No one questioned her as she walked to the kitchens. Between Flora’s death and Chedd’s sickness she supposed they didn’t have time to worry that the roundhouse was sinking and no one was manning the pumps. Happily they didn’t appear to have time for food either and the kitchen was close to empty. Effie glanced out of the room’s only window, an x-shaped opening in the clinker-and-timber wall. It was a few hours after midday.
“You never told me your name,” Effie said, approaching the Croser girl who was standing over a pile of fish so fresh you couldn’t detect a smell.
The girl looked nervously to her right, where the cook was telling one of the kitchen boys the correct way to scour a pan. Noticing the girl’s gaze upon him, the cook halted the lesson to address her.
“Lissit, before you start on the fish, go to the buttery and get me a block of lard and some mustard seed—and a hand of ginger if you can find it.”
That was that then. Lissit.
“I’ll help her,” Effie told the cook as she followed Lissit out of a low alder door in the kitchen’s west wall.
If the cook told her not to do so Effie didn’t hear him. Unfortunately she made a lot of noise closing the door and that might have blocked out the sound.
Effie had never been in this part of the roundhouse before and was surprised she had to crouch to move along the low-ceilinged corridor. Light came from a series of slits in the wall. “What’s the other way?” she asked Lissit when the corridor branched out and Lissit took the fork to the left.
“Guidehouse,” Lissit told her flatly. “Sometimes we bring the guide hot coals from the oven.” The branch ended abruptly, blocked off by another alder door. Lissit turned. Her delicate face and pale hair looked wan in the dim light. “You shouldn’t have said that to Cook. I’ll get in trouble later.”
“I doubt it,” Effie replied. “They need you here. They’re dropping like flies.”
Lissit had nothing to say to this and opened the door. Good smells and a few strange ones wafted straight to Effie’s nose. The buttery was like a larder, she realized, full of things a person could eat. Following Lissit inside she looked around, deciding what to start on first. She was devising a plan to punish Clan Gray for kidnapping her and Chedd. It required eating them out of house and home.
Chedd’s special powers were needed to make it succeed.
Chedd thoughts made Effie mad and she closed the door, sealing her and Lissit inside. It was dark. The slits in the wall had been covered with canvas panels to prevent sunlight getting through. “Did you know Flora, the girl they found today?”
Lissit’s glanced jumped to the door. “A little. Everyone comes in the kitchen.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“No.”
“What about her brother?”
Lissit closed her mouth. She was wearing a scoop-necked dress and the tail of her tattoo was visible on her left breast.
Looking at it, Effie wondered how old Flora’s brother had been. She’d assumed he was her age or Chedd’s age, but what if he was older, like Raif or Drey? “What was his name?”
“Gregor.”
; Like the king. “How old was he?
“Seventeen.” Lissit looked at her feet. “Like me.”
Effie heard something in those words. It sounded like the noise made when two things stuck together were pulled apart. She said, “What happened to him?”
Muscles in Lissit’s throat moved but she didn’t speak. She was still looking down.
“Flora said the marsh took him.”
The girl looked up. Her eyes were full of water. “He paddled east and didn’t come back.”
“But what if—”
“No. They found the boat. They found one of his boots.”
Effie watched two big tears rolled down Lissit’s cheeks. They moved as if they were thicker than salt water.
“Was he trying to escape?”
Lissit shook her head.
Effie frowned. She was trying to be understanding and everything, but nothing was making any sense. The roundhouse juddered. An apple rolled off a shelf and Effie and Lissit watched it scoot across the floor like a mouse. Effie tried again. “Where were Flora and Gregor from?”
“Dregg.”
Raina’s clan. “And they both had . . . the old skills. Sorcery.”
Lissit pinched her mouth; Effie took it as a yes. Clan did not believe in sorcery and they certainly weren’t going to talk about it or admit to possessing any sorcerous abilities. “You know the children they kidnap always have the old skills? You, me, Chedd, Flora, Gregor.”
Lissit blinked a nod.
“Why?”
“I’ve got to get the lard. Cook’s expecting it.” Lissit spun on her heel, sliding a wet box from a low shelf. Chunks of lard wrapped in linen were floating in the water. The girl fished one out and set it on the counter.
“Mustard and ginger,” Effie told her. She didn’t think Lissit had the best memory.
As the girl searched for the ingredients, Effie thought about Flora. Those first days after she and Chedd had arrived, Flora had always been on the roundhouse’s main platform, looking east. The girl had probably been watching for her brother’s return. Effie could understand that after a while she might have to look in a different direction, take herself somewhere else.