by Wurts, Janny
Softened, Efflin peered through the drizzle that streamed off his drooped hat. ‘Last I saw, your simpleton was muscling casks for the brewer.’
Tarens sighed with relief. Tafe Aleman was sympathetic towards beggars. Always gave wretches who free-loaded a beer, and ones willing to shoulder a few extra chores found dry lodging inside his store shed for a halfpenny.
‘The man seemed willing. Didn’t balk at hard work.’ Kerelie blew a strand of wet hair from her lips. ‘Careful too. He broke nothing he handled. He’s likely to fare well enough.’
Dismissed, the subject lapsed into silence. The home-bound cart creaked through three more sluggish leagues, wheels sucking through dreary mud and frothed currents of run-off. Lashed in by the storm and a cruel risen wind, the lumbering ox turned at last through the painted posts of the farm-gate. The hooked lanterns swung, darkened on their chains. The cottage at the end of the lane had no cheerful aunt waiting, with a warm supper and candle-lit windows gleaming in welcome. No uncle stepped out to take charge of the reins, or hustle them inside to warm by the fire. Efflin did not pull up in the yard but drove the wagon straight through the open barn-doors and into the cavernous, hay-fragrant darkness. The ox huffed and stopped, bawling in complaint. Everyone piled out, too chilled for the burdensome chore of unloading. The barn was pitch-dark, and wax candles too scarce. The paned lamp must be reserved for emergencies, and the risk of a pine-knot torch was too dangerous in the draughts gusted through the gapped plank walls. Kerelie hefted down the hen’s wicker cage. The dry goods, the crates, and the empty coin-box could wait until tomorrow’s daylight.
Efflin squelched in filled boots to unyoke the tired ox. While he goaded its reluctant tread to a stall, Tarens dashed ahead through the downpour, with a breathless promise to lug wood from the shed. Hungry and cold, no one lingered. Battered by the frigid wind, Kerelie shoved outside and dumped the errant hen back in the chicken coop’s pen. She fed the livestock and hastened inside to scrounge crusted bread and heat soup for an overdue supper. Efflin was left to hang up the harness. Since preservative grease could not be applied before the wet leather dripped dry, he stamped after his sister and never looked backwards.
The dreary night passed, and the icy rain stopped before anyone realized the heaped tarpaulin in the wagon-bed sheltered more than the goods fetched from Kelsing market.
Tarens woke the next morning with sun in his eyes. Or so he presumed, until he squinted and found that the dazzle that blinded him glanced off three silver coins, stacked beside his crumpled pillow. Dawn was well gone, the past evening’s storm broken to a flawless blue sky. The shaft of clear yellow light through the window burnished the placed silver like gold.
He shot upright, dismayed, the oddity of the coins eclipsed by embarrassment. A selfish indulgence to have overslept, with the winter wheat-field to be tilled and sown before the frost hardened the ground. The family prankster who needled his conscience by leaving the silver could wait; but never their jeopardized stake in the croft, strung up by hard work and a thread. Tousled hair in his face, Tarens kicked off his blankets and slid out of bed. He snatched up his dropped shirt and breeches, jolted to a hissed breath as last night’s damp clothes pebbled gooseflesh over his skin.
Arms clutched to quell the violent shiver wracked through his sturdy frame, he paused in disbelief.
Downstairs, Kerelie was busy cooking.
Plain fare, sure enough, in a house plunged in debt, and still muted by the grave-seal of grief. The upstairs felt quiet as an abandoned tomb without the boisterous yells of the boys.
Tarens bit his lip. Past was past. No use to dwell on what might have been. Quickly dressed, he grabbed his dank boots and plunged barefoot down the shadowed, board stair.
He slunk into the brick-floored kitchen, braced for a facetious scold from his sister, backed by Efflin’s bull-dog bark.
Instead, Kerelie spun from her stirred pot and glanced up. As though shocked by a haunt, she dropped the ladle of water just dipped from the bucket slung by the hearth.
‘Light’s blessing, you startled me!’ she blurted. Then her round cheeks flushed pink. ‘Tarens! Lay off your quack foolery. You didn’t wake up just this minute! Or else who’s already tended the cattle and finished the chores in the barn?’
‘Efflin, of course,’ snapped Tarens, sarcastic. ‘I notice the butcher’s knife’s gone from the peg. He’ll have fumed himself black out in Aunt Saffie’s rose patch, bent on an ambush to flense me.’
Kerelie dried her chapped hands on her skirt. ‘Efflin’s knocked flat with an ugly green cold. Which is why I’m in here, stirring up gruel to coddle him.’ She retrieved her fallen implement and plunked on the hob, blue eyes wide and lips pinched with distress.
Tarens regarded her fraught state, amazed. ‘What under sky’s strapped your tongue when you ought to be yelling fit to raise the roof?’
‘You men weren’t the only ones laggard in your blankets.’ His sister shed her awkward reluctance, and admitted, ‘I snored through the sunrise, myself. We’ve all been bone-tired! I’d planned to surprise you and muck out the barn. Give your lazy bones an undeserved rest and let Efflin’s sourpuss mood have one less target to savage. He’s been such a wounded bear since our fortune’s turned. Why won’t he tell us what’s cankered him?’
‘He’ll speak when he’s ready.’ Tarens treated her angst with the same stubborn patience that had argued the sale of the bull. ‘What’s upset you, Kerie? I’m too thrashed to guess.’
His younger sister sucked a vexed breath, her pinched forehead suddenly pale. ‘Who’s moved the ox,’ she began, ‘and the milch-cow’s been taken—’
Tarens outpaced her slow explanation. Protective to a fault, he abandoned his boots, grabbed the fire tongs, and banged open the door. He charged outside, hackled to gore any thieving intruder.
First step, his brandished tool snagged a dangled wrack of frost-burned tomato vines. As dry leaves and green fruit yoked his lowered head, he yelped, ‘Light avert!’ and thrashed the pungent stems aside in annoyance.
The uprooted vegetables had not hung there, yesterday. Since Efflin slept, and with Kerelie barely shucked out of her night-rail, who had dug the plants from the kitchen patch and strung them from the porch rafters in the pre-dawn dark? Each year, his aunt had tied the yellowed stems upside down for late ripening, a last frugal harvest snatched from fate’s jaws before winter. But Aunt Saff was dead. Two months had passed since the Light’s priest settled her with the blessing of passage and torched her remains to sad rest.
Tarens shook off his wild-eyed startlement and bashed the straggle of vine from his neck. As the wrack slithered off him, he swept a frantic glance over the muddy yard but saw no tracks left by rustled livestock.
Broad daylight revealed only the pruned canes of the roses and the crude prints left by Kerelie’s pattens.
When the dry cow and the ox raised their horned heads in the field, his glare confounded to befuddlement. The animals were as they should be: routinely turned out to pasture and chewing their cuds behind the shut gate. They had not moved by themselves from the barn, any more than a garden turned over its frost-wilted rows and laid down leaf mulch by itself.
More, the broken handle on the well’s crank had been fixed, a skilled task Uncle Fiath bequeathed to his heirs by neglect.
‘Fiends plague!’ Tarens swore. No mischievous iyat visited mankind with the untoward kindness of miracles.
Thoughtful, the huge crofter padded between the mercury gleam of the puddles. Oblivious to the cold nip to bare feet, he entered the barn and paused, impatient while his sight adjusted to the dusty gloom. The fragrance told him the stalls had been mucked. The mangers also were forked with fresh hay. More, the ox harness hung set to rights on the hook, freshly oiled, and for the Light’s sake, who bothered? Even the buckles were polished! Beside the whetstone’s damp wheel, the missing butcher’s knife showed the argent shine of a whetted edge.
Footsteps at his back, and a p
rim swish of skirts prompted Tarens to task his sister, ‘The vagabond did this?’
‘Had you listened and not belted off with the poker, I would have suggested as much.’ Kerelie sighed. ‘He must have trailed us back here on foot.’ Her hateful cooking abandoned for gossip, she sniffed. ‘Or else he snuck into the wagon. The empty bird crates were loosely stacked, and nobody tidied the tarp.’
‘He’s accomplished all this?’ Tarens capped his amazed gesture with a chuckle of flat disbelief. ‘One starved little wretch? Merciful Maker! The man would’ve laboured all night!’
‘In the dark,’ added Kerelie, uneasy and shaken. ‘See for yourself. The candle stubs in the lanterns weren’t touched.’
Sure enough, the horn lamp had never been lit. No spent reek of oil and charred pine bespoke the foolhardy use of a cresset.
Tarens scratched at his stubbled chin. ‘Done us ten favours, we owe him that much.’
‘Don’t be daft!’ Kerelie snapped. ‘We can’t possibly keep him!’ Since her brother would argue, she slapped him down first. ‘I don’t care how hard the miserable wretch works. Another mouth to feed through the winter will strain us nigh onto breaking. We can’t meet the croft tax on inheritance, besides. And why should a rootless man swipe the best knife from our kitchen only for sharpening? The fellow might be quite ruthlessly mad! Touched by Darkness itself and hell-bent on slitting our throats as we slept.’
The firm line of Tarens’s sealed lips gave a twitch. His blue eyes widened and glinted. Sparked into sudden, inexplicable merriness, he stifled the laughter that would only fan his sister’s volatile fury. She looked apt, as things stood, to make a quick snatch for his poker and brain him. Ever the sort to enjoy taunting fate, he outfaced her stormy reproof. ‘I don’t think it’s our necks the bloke means to cut.’
Kerelie flounced. Heated enough to pummel the fool who played her for a dreaming idiot, she glanced over her shoulder just barely in time. Her large jaw dropped. ‘You!’ she exploded, burned red with embarrassment for her feckless outburst of unkindness.
In fact, the small fellow her words had reviled crept in silently, right behind her.
Evidently, the knife had been borrowed to shave. The barbarous straggle of beard was razed off, and the matted tangles trimmed from his raven hair. The loose ends were neatly tied up with twine, snipped from one of the lengths that had strung the tomato vines. Cleaned of wild growth and masking dirt, the features revealed showed a man in his prime, taut cheek-bones and brow line distinctively angled and nowhere ill-bred or unpleasing.
Inquisitive, piercing, his vivid green eyes surveyed Kerelie’s blanched surprise. The intensity of that fixed stare ruffled her skin into gooseflesh.
Then the vagrant glanced down, disconcerted as she.
Kerelie recovered her rattled wits. Like her brother, she noticed the man’s roughened hands. His chapped knuckles cracked from the setting of his snares, he cradled a brace of limp woodcock and a fat winter hare, hung by the hind legs from another filched string.
Then Tarens gripped Kerelie’s shoulder and gently steered her aside. ‘Sister, I believe we’re blocking his way.’
The beggarman smiled, an expression so honest with contrite apology that Kerelie gasped, lost for breath.
Quick to seize advantage, the elusive creature slipped past, light of step as a thief, or a ghost. He crouched by the sharpening wheel, hefted the knife, and industriously started to dress out his game.
‘The man will have breakfast,’ Tarens said, calm.
‘We still can’t upkeep him!’ Kerelie whispered, remorseful for the tight-fisted need to hoard their dwindled resources.
‘We’ll discuss that,’ Tarens temporized. ‘Inside.’ The cold numbed his unshod feet, and coatless, his unlaced shirt made him shiver. Time enough later to broach the matter of coins: the gifted silvers left stacked by his pillow added up to a threefold repayment, though he feared the sweet little cache had been stolen.
As though the wary thought had been spoken, the beggarman stiffened. Though the distressed reaction was swiftly curbed, the subtlety did not escape Tarens’s notice.
Recognition followed, as both men locked eyes. Then the vagabond drew an offended breath. He laid aside his half-gutted hare and gently set down the knife. Deliberate, he wiped his blood-smeared fingers clean on a twist of dry straw. Then he stood. Reproachful, his attention on Tarens’s broad features, he cocked his head to one side.
The large-boned crofter was swept by raw chills. Raked over like prey by a raptor’s inspection, Tarens tightened his grip on the poker.
But the beggarman only dug into the patch pocket stitched to his threadbare breeches. He fished out a creased paper. The unfolded sheet was offered to Tarens, distinct in respect for the threat of cold iron poised yet for a defensive strike.
Muscled enough from the plough to break oak, the blond crofter towered above him.
‘What does the note say?’ prompted Kerelie.
Tarens risked a look downwards. The inked scrawl was the brewer’s, and the words a receipt for three silvers, paid labour, with the outstanding promise for a pint of beer at the Candle Mark Tavern.
The supplicant hand was a beggar’s, the broken nails rimmed black with dirt. But the courtesy was not commonplace that tucked Tarens’s fingers over the written proof, then emphatically shoved off his fist with the voucher nestled inside.
Crisp as any statement, the stranger’s stung pride.
Shown an astringent reproof to strip skin, Tarens gaped, as awkward with shame as the sister caught aback before him.
Then the pause broke to the whiff of smoke wafted on the morning breeze.
‘Breakfast!’ yelped Kerelie. ‘Plaguing fiends take it! I’ve stupidly scorched Efflin’s porridge.’ Skirt stoutly bundled, she bolted for the cottage, still railing over her shoulder, ‘I’ll serve a fourth portion. But over my last shred of common sense, yon shifty fellow’s not coming inside!’
Tarens chose not to mention the snag, that her adamant boundary had been crossed already.
He grinned at the odd little beggar, then shared a wink of conspiracy. ‘Don’t make my mistakes, man. She barks and she bites, though you’ll find her bluster hides a soft heart.’ Just as mindfully fair, he placed his appeal for forgiveness. ‘I’ll wager your generous portion of beer that Kerelie’d bunk in the hayloft herself before she makes a destitute visitor shiver out in the cold.’
The stranger laughed, a strikingly musical sound that belied his feral appearance. Perhaps, Tarens thought, he was a born mute, until in forthright honour he touched his closed fist to his forehead. The quaint custom suggested disturbing origins. Barbarians who trapped for pelts in Tornir Peaks used the same gesture to seal their agreements.
Tarens frowned. The last dedicate purge to clear clanblood had happened before his sister’s birth. She did not share his graphic memories from early childhood: of dead men roped by the heels behind horses; or the riders, who boasted the gory tatters of scalps cut for bounty, then sewed as trophies onto their saddle-cloths. The head-hunters’ leagues still patrolled the wilds, though clan numbers had yet to recover. Everywhere persecuted by the Light’s True Sect, the secretive few who survived skulked deep in the high country. They showed themselves rarely, and only in dire hunger, when their gaunt men dared the illicit trade of raw furs to garner provisions. The penalty upon capture brought them swift execution by public dismemberment.
Tarens gripped his poker with redoubled unease. Kerelie’s fears were misdirected, not groundless: the cagy vagabond might play at speechlessness to conceal a clan accent. Certainly his practised skill with a snare suggested a forester’s upbringing.
‘How much are we at risk by your presence, my friend?’ Tarens asked, very softly. Town law on the matter was ruthless: to knowingly shelter an old blood descendant was to risk being branded as heretic, then outlawed, with the forfeit of all goods and property bound over by temple decree.
His shaken question received no reply.
Not deaf, perhaps circumspect, the odd man retired to his unobtrusive place by the whetstone. There, he bent to his diligent work, deboning the meat from his carcasses.
Tarens stayed reluctant to voice his concern on return to the warm, cottage kitchen. Amid the wax polish of Aunt Saffie’s plate cupboards, surrounded by limed brick and the comfort of the faded braid rug patched with sun through the casement, his sister’s sensible antipathy towards rootless beggary seemed uncharitable.
‘We don’t know what connection he may have with the Koriathain. Or why his own kinsfolk abandoned him.’ Determined to worry the subject to closure, Kerelie removed the tin spoon from the pot of singed oatmeal, then stomped outside in prim displeasure. She left a scorched portion slung up on the meat-hook under the eave by the threshold.
She returned with a scalded palm wrapped in her skirt. ‘Let that starveling bolt down the miserable fare with his hands. He’ll learn fast enough we can’t pay him for field work. I’d have him shove off to a wealthier croft. Surely it’s better that his earnest work should receive a fair daily wage.’
She banged the door closed, shot the bar, muttering, and flung the clotted spoon into the wash-basin. Spattered by dish-water, Tarens collected his abandoned stockings and boots. Aware he rightfully should feel relieved that his sister’s position stayed adamant, he sat at the plank table and gouged his soles with large thumbs to ease his numbed feet. Against his straight grain, he silenced his doubts, while Kerelie scooped a new measure of oats and ladled fresh water into the spare cauldron. She swung the replenished pot over the coals, stirring with fierce concentration. Sun through the window-panes lit her savaged cheek, striped by the shadows of the mulberry boughs outside the whitewashed cottage. Within, the awkward, sealed quiet extended, cut by the rasping cough that laid Efflin low in the next room.
‘Divine Light keep us!’ Kerelie snapped. Exasperated by the worry that cramped her preferred generosity, she grabbed a wooden bowl, dipped her ladle, and plonked the steaming gruel onto the trestle in front of her brother. ‘I’m not being a pinch-fist! We’ve got to recoup from our losses and heal before we sweat over strangers!’