Sword of Hemlock (Lords of Syon Saga Book 1)

by Jordan MacLean

  Having finished her apple and given the whole core to the grateful old woman, peculiarly enough the very one whose own basket was full of apples, she continued along her way toward Chatka’s door.

  The crowd clotted around an old, ill-kept shack of a house with a sunken mossy roof and naught but mud-daubed rubble walls to hold it up. Behind this small house lay a few acres of unplanted land given over to tall weeds and mildewed grasses, wet and paddied for rice but with no food grains growing at all. The house looked abandoned, though it could not be so. No light came from within, no fires, no candles. With the sun dropping even now below the rise of hills to the west, soon the house would disappear into the darkness completely.

  She turned, having seen through the corner of her eye a man dressed to all outward appearances like one of the farmers except that the hooded cloak he wore up about his face, though he’d taken pains to scuff it up along the roadside, was of a finer cloth than any these women could hope to weave. So he’d decided to come after all, even after the sheriff dressed him down. She’d thought he might. The young woman’s mouth curved into a grin, and she worked her way toward him.

  “Peace,” spoke the woman as he backed away from her approach. “You know this voice, Waydon.”

  At once, the disguised knight’s expression relaxed. “Gikka, praise to B’radik. I’d not dared to hope he would...”

  “Save your noise,” she hissed, looking about at the crowd. They were well away from people now, and in the din of the place, they would not be overheard. Even so, she would not have the crowd know she was there, especially not for his mindless gabbling. She saw a quick flash of steel on the edge of her vision that disappeared immediately; Chul had moved himself nearer, and the flash of his hunting knife in the torchlight was his signal that he was watching her back. Satisfied, she turned her attention back to the knight. “Chatka?” she prompted quietly.

  “Aye,” he breathed, nodding toward the hovel. “That’s the house they gave her as payment for her visions. Methinks they’d give her their very lands, an they could.” He huffed. “Then she could tell them pretty stories from dusk until dawn. There, the sun has just gone below. She should emerge presently.”

  Gikka glanced back toward the dark doorway. “Have you watched afore now?”

  He shook his head almost imperceptibly, still watching the doorway and the crowd gathered there. “Not this close; only from my own doorstep. Afraid they might know me.”

  “But not tonight.”

  He tugged self-consciously at his hood. “Nay, not tonight, not with so many others to draw their attention.”

  A moment later, the wooden door to the tumble-down house shuddered once, then again, and finally fell back into the darkness, and all those gathered fell to silence. They watched the blank doorway, each anxious to be the first to catch sight of her tonight, each wanting to be the one to raise a cheer. Another moment passed. Then another.

  Gikka looked at Chul and tapped her nail once against her hip.

  The boy’s head jerked up in puzzlement. Caution, again, but this time... He turned his head back to watch the door and looked over the heads of the crowd.

  No one moved, no one sneezed or coughed or laughed nervously. The crowd was drawn taut, a single animal being, malleable to the Verdura’s touch and barely restrained. And she had yet to present herself. Once she emerged, assuming she could wield it, the crowd would be a formidable weapon in her hands against any outsiders.

  A moment later, the witch woman shuffled from her doorway carrying a few empty baskets which she dropped one after another across her doorstep, a humble entrance for one so eagerly anticipated. While she had yet to look at the farmers directly, she seemed pleased by the size of the crowd gathered there. Gikka guessed the woman’s age to be somewhere about one hundred twenty, not so very old by Bremondine reckoning, just past middle years, yet the woman had gone to great pains to make herself appear quite ancient. Her thick hair was drawn back smooth against her head and pinned into a tight blue-black bun, and the lines of her face appeared an almost moldy webwork against her deep olive skin. Yet her eyes held something very wild and predatory. Something very Verdura, to Gikka’s eye.

  The farmers had seemed ready to cheer Chatka, but when she finally appeared, oddly enough, they had not. Instead they greeted her with taut, reverent silence, a silence more dramatic because under it, the crowd fairly burned with its own tension.

  “Bread,” cried Chatka almost painfully.

  A score of hands went up, one from each family of farmers, and each bore a small loaf of bread, no larger than the scraps of dough Greta threw to the dogs at Brannagh. One by one they dropped these little loaves into the basket and returned to their places. Yet their tension, completely unrelieved by this activity, had grown much stronger, and each jostled and pressed and tried to keep his own loaf of bread in sight, as if it were a favorite nephew at First Rites.

  Once the last loaf of bread was dropped into the basket and the last farmer had retaken his place, the old woman lifted the basket over her head and plucked one piece of bread from it. The air was charged with their breathlessness, waiting for her to set the basket down once more, that they might see whose loaf she had taken. A single low cheer rose from somewhere in the midst of the crowd where the lucky farmer’s fellows congratulated him, and the tension dissipated. Tradition blessed him tonight.

  Chatka raised the bread over her head and cracked the little loaf open. Then she brought it down and stared into it.

  “What is she doing,” whispered Sir Waydon.

  “Gathering the tenday’s bread, I’d say.” Gikka nodded with a wry grin toward the basket. “You don’t suppose she’d be giving all that bread back, now, do you?” She looked up to see him staring at her. “Course she’ll be giving them a show for it, telling them some obvious nothing as she gets from ‘reading the grains,’ but her gain is the bread.” She shook her head with a sneer. “Bloody amateur.”

  “Hear me,” Chatka intoned, and her voice trembled dramatically. Entranced, the farmers who had begun to murmur between themselves while she read the grains, fell silent. “I see again the same, that vision which, as I have foreseen, has brought so many of you to my door.”

  “Bloody charlatan,” muttered Gikka. “‘As I have foreseen,’ by Limigar...”

  “I see fields unreaped, unthreshed and dusted with an early frost. Your own fields. Yet a great threshing comes to all of Syon, and when it comes, the grain that does not shun the chaff shall be lost itself.”

  Gikka’s eyes narrowed. So she’d “predicted” the plague, aye, but any mother’s son knew by now that the priests’ disease had spread, and would spread, far and wide over Syon an the priests did not learn to cure it ere they died. But to turn the hale against them as had it, to call them unclean and unworthy chaff, this was none to the good.

  “Open gates stand locked, and the Dragon turns his eye away, for the scythe touches not his blood. Thus you stand against your fear whilst he hears only the murmur of unhallowed lips.”

  Gikka’s brow rose in surprise.

  “Touch not his feast, touch not his sin. In time, those who stand steadfast and pious shall be rewarded. When you wake from your prayers, your sacrifice will open winter’s secret stores to you, and none to pay the Dragon.”

  Sacrifice. The rotting grains afield or some other to come later? She thought of Pegrine and frowned, repeating the message to herself that she might convey it to the sheriff intact. So Chatka was speaking openly against Damerien then, and telling the farmers to abandon their fields. “There’s your proof,” she muttered to Waydon. “Now it’s but to see the cause, an she lets slip with it.”

  “Seeds!” Chatka cried suddenly, and once again twenty hands rose, each clutching seeds, and once again they filled one of her baskets. From where Gikka and Waydon stood, they could not see if all the seeds were from apples or not; surely she had not called just for apple seeds, and if such was her demand, why? Now the woman poured them
in a thick, dramatic black cascade like curdled blood flowing over the step, and then she stood back.

  Sir Waydon gasped. “Oh, no.”

  Gikka looked up at the knight sharply. “How now, Waydon?” she whispered.

  He licked his lips and drew her aside, out of earshot of the farmers who stood nearby. “When I spoke with the farmers two days ago, I asked them how they hoped to survive the winter without the harvest.”

  “Aye,” said Gikka, narrowing her eyes.

  Sir Waydon frowned. “Of answer, the farmers said only this, but to a man: ‘The gods will provide.’ Now, having heard her words, I begin to understand. Not all the gods,” he said a bit too loudly. “Didian.”

  “Keep a low tone,” she warned, looking back to see that none of the farmers had looked up. “Sure it’s not Didian; he takes his part at the Gathering.” She nodded toward Chatka. “Winter belongs to Bilkar, and He’d not feed wastrels...” Not Bilkar the Furred whose own monks may only call upon him once and pay for it with their lives.

  Waydon did not hear her. “Didian, Kanet perhaps, as well.” Sir Waydon shook his head. “‘Winter’s secret stores.’” He turned to watch the farmers in amazement. “Perhaps they hear in her words that Didian will grant them a second warm season in winter. ‘And none to pay the Dragon.’” He looked up again at Chatka. “But only if they stand steadfast.”

  “And pious,” muttered Gikka darkly. “Let’s don’t forget pious.” She looked back to see that Chatka had just picked up a handful of seeds and sniffed at them. Not even a handful, just a few that she picked up here and there among the others. No more than might have come from a single apple. Instinctively, she began to look for possible escapes. She stepped back out of the torchlight and against Sir Waydon. Then she twitched her hand toward Chul before she slipped it beneath her cloak to rest on a dagger. The boy moved at once to the outer edge of the crowd.

  “Hear me!” intoned Chatka once more, but this time her voice held an edge of excitement, of danger, and the tensions in the crowd grew once more. “I see more! A new vision comes to me!” Her black eyes glittered over the hooded crowd, searching, seeking.

  “Hear me well! Though the Dragon’s eyes and ears be open just now, his senses fool him, and he cannot help but stumble. The sun will set, and ere it rises once more, your dearest down will blow in the mountain winds, and four will again be five.” She laughed, a short barking laugh so common among the Verdura, so despised among the Bremondines. “Red and blue,” she laughed wickedly. “Red on the Lioness’s breast and blue at her gates, but not for you, not for any but those who need it not.”

  Both Chatka and Gikka watched the farmers muttering between themselves and the puzzled looks that showed from beneath their hoods. The witch had challenged them with a vision they could not decipher until it was too late, if at all, and having so vexed them, she risked losing their faith in her. But this time, her words were not meant for them; they were meant for Gikka to carry back to the sheriff, with her compliments.

  Damerien’s eyes and ears were open, aye, or at least those of the sheriff, but how could his senses fool him? An he would stumble, sure it was the Verdura’s own fault for it and no other. Those words were the least to vex her. Dearest down, and blowing in mountain wind. She shook her head. It meant nothing to her, nothing that made sense, at any rate. But four will again be five... What was it Peg had said?

  Four thousand years the Five are four

  A fifth is found and binds the shores.

  Gikka watched the old woman, watched her keen eye peering from face to face, looking for the one who would see her message, looking to see if she could spot Gikka. The witch’d say naught more of meat-and-mead tonight, not an she knowed she were watched. Besides, like as not, the sheriff would see through Chatka’s words like glass and draw answer for her from that.

  “Shall I repeat it for you, or did you hear it well enough already?” The witch smiled pleasantly over the crowd, but her eye still searched, still lingered on every cowl.

  Gikka ground her teeth. Were Renda here, she would stride forward to stand a head taller than the Verdura to pit her own grace and command against this witch’s wretched street tricks, and she would turn the farmers away from Chatka in disgust. Or the sheriff, standing a step below so as not to loom over the woman, might speak softly and reasonably, plying her words to dust before their eyes, counting upon the farmers’ own good sense to show them the truth.

  But no. Only the assassin, the Bremondine, and one who was none the witch’s better stood here, caught in the very act of spying on the farmers, and she felt no particular eloquence of speech rising in her throat.

  It was not until Gikka moved to walk away that the old Verdura finally caught sight of her.

  “Beware, Graymonde,” she called suddenly, and in the silence that followed the mention of her name, Gikka turned slowly round to see all the farmers and their families staring at her with open mouths and backing away from her. “Beware the wind and the word at your back.”

  Outside the crowd, hidden in the shadow of the abandoned bowyer’s shop, Chul stopped and stared at the old witch. She had spoken the ancient curse, not in Syonese for the benefit of the farmers, nor in Bremondine that only Gikka might understand it, but in Dhanani.

  Eleven

  “Away with you,” came a man’s voice from inside a small house at the edge of the field.

  Renda glanced at Sir Teny, the lord of the fields behind them.

  “You see, my lady,” spoke the knight quietly and not without embarrassment, “it is as I say. He will not so much as speak with me.”

  She cast a worried glance back over the hills toward Brannagh. Teny’s lands were some of the most remote of Brannagh’s fields. If Chatka’s sedition had reached this far, the situation was more dire than they’d thought.

  At her father’s request, she had ridden out at first light with Teny to try to stir his farmers’ loyalty, or if not, perhaps their shame. It was his hope to defeat Chatka’s manipulations with what Renda grudgingly allowed were their own.

  She’d met with some success. The mere sight of their smiling young war hero in full armor and mantle at their door had been enough to send Kode and his family back into the fields. Mogen had taken a bit more convincing, but in the end, he’d relented as well, offering his most abject apologies for heeding a Verdura witch’s word over that of the Sheriff of Brannagh.

  But Jero would not so much as open his door.

  She knocked at the knotty wooden door again and batted away a bit of stale straw that fell from the roof thatching. On the ground at her feet she saw where more had fallen. The man’s roof would not last through the winter storms without fresh straw––straw still holding up the grain in his fields.

  “Jero,” she called pleasantly, “Lady Renda.” When no answer came, she knocked once more. “I would speak with you a while.”

  They heard slow steps within, and the door opened a few inches to let free a great breath of stale air as of turned cheese or badly soured milk. But both Sir Teny and Renda held their expressions against the odor. Through the crack in the door, Renda could see Jero’s one good eye peering out at them as it might at a stranger, or worse. The eye was distant and bleary, and the skin sagging beneath it was stained dark with fatigue. The man’s clothes hung rumpled about his thin frame, gray with dust and ash.

  “Jero,” exclaimed Teny. He ventured a smile and stepped toward the door, expecting it to open to him. When it did not, he stared into the single eye beyond the door. “Come, don’t you know me?”

  “Aye, my lord, well enow.” The man blinked coldly and buttressed his shoulder against the door. Then he turned his distrustful gaze upon Renda. “What business has Her Ladyship with me this day?”

  Renda smiled diplomatically. “Jero,” she said quietly, though her voice held the same tones of command she had used afield. “Well I remember your faithful service to the House of Brannagh during the war.”

  The man positivel
y cringed at her words as if afraid someone might overhear. “Lost my only son in your bloody war, I’ll thank you to recall. An my lord Teny’d not set us neath your banner, Lady, he’d be here now.”

  Your bloody war, he’d said. As if she herself had started it five hundred years ago.

  Sure you’d not have it all back.

  “You forget yourself!” Sir Teny barked at him. “Had you not followed the banner of Brannagh, the whole of Syon would yet be under Kadak’s dominion, as it was for half a thousand years. You’d do well to remember that it was Lady Renda as saved us all.”

  Renda shook her head. “Sir Teny, please—”

  But the knight spoke over Renda’s protest, shaking his fist at Jero. “Do not stand in the shade of your peaceful house to begrudge the sacrifices we all made!”

  “I lost my boy,” Jero menaced. “What sacrifices made you, boy? Did you even wet your blade?”

  “Gentlemen.” Renda kept her body between them. “Your loss is bitter, Jero, but you know that the sheriff, my father, likewise lost his only son in battle. My brother, Roquandor.” At these words, the man’s shoulder sagged against his door. She lowered her voice, and at her glance, Teny moved back. “Besides, the memory of your son’s death does not keep you from your fields today.”

  “Nah,” answered Jero quietly. He looked up into her eyes and drew a slow breath. “I reckon not,” he murmured, “but…”

  “We’ve no more than a month ere the first frost comes.” Sir Teny’s voice skirled harshly over the quiet that followed, over the beginning of Jero’s answer. “No more than a month, and all your grain still stands afield while you whine and mewl and—”

  “Aye, and so it will,” returned the farmer angrily. He turned back to face Renda, and she saw that his expression had closed against her again. “We’ll none of this house come out to gather, not in service to Teny, not in service to Brannagh, not in service to no one.”