by Janny Wurts
Elaira fished those perilous waters with delicacy. “Where you can’t help, perhaps you may not resist my intent to seek personal knowledge. Surely I might pursue more information if I delve on my own initiative?”
The devious glint rekindled beneath the Sorcerer’s lashes though his abstracted gaze never left his gnarled grip on the crockery. “Althain Tower houses the Paravian records. Also what appertains to Mankind under the concord defined by the Compact. The uglier aspects of human affairs, and the black grimoires of deviant rites, are not stored under this roof.”
Thrown that provocative lead, Elaira said, “Kharadmon once told me the Biedar negotiated with the Paravians directly for their residency on Athera. May I have access to that chapter of history?”
“I don’t see why not.” Sethvir’s daft smile cast sunlight through the cloudy fleece of his beard. “As your host during a long convalescence, I’d be remiss not to encourage reading.”
Elaira nestled into the pillows, if not eased, at least given direction. “Later, perhaps, I’ll pay a call on Davien at his mountain sanctuary.”
Sethvir’s teeth gleamed with sharp satisfaction. “Beware of Prime Selidie’s wrath if you do.” For of course, Prince Arithon’s unsavoury study of necromancy had been rejected, first, in the library sequestered at Kewar.
Early Autumn 5923
Cross-currents
Pen back in hand, busy with scribing records, Althain’s Warden reprimands the impertinent shade just breezed in through the open casement, “Elaira’s asleep, Kharadmon, too exhausted to suffer your needling visitation, and no, given Selidie’s spite, I did not reveal our bit of damaging history behind Jessian’s legacy and that Biedar knife …!”
Informed that the bungled recapture of Elaira lands her in sanctuary at Althain Tower, Selidie Prime dismisses the set-back with chilling equanimity: “No matter. We’re now granted free rein for a just consolation. While our entrained plan proceeds without interference at Ettinmere, Arithon cannot shirk his obligation to Vivet once the winter sets in …”
As the True Sect campaign of slaughter harrows clanblood in Tysan, Saroic s’Gannley looks backwards in flight for an uncle who never returns, while The Hatchet reassigns Miralt’s suborned dedicates to Etarra to bolster the town garrison ordered to cleanse the free-wilds forests in Rathain …
Early Winter 5923
V. Misfit
While The Hatchet’s stream of dispatches armoured the marrow and sinew of war to extend broad-scale slaughter into Rathain, farther south, Ettinmere Settlement’s lock-jawed council wrestled the undigestible morsel wedged into their teeth by Vivet’s prodigal return. The shamed relatives tasked to collar Arin for his scheduled arraignment searched most of the day, empty-handed. Blind to their peril, callously broaching a near-to-desperately defended solitude, they cornered their quarry at last in the notch atop the north ridge.
The fey little outlander sat with his back turned, against the vista of scudded cloud, where the naked rocks combed the wind to a shriek. Shouts directed upslope went unheard. Forced to scramble like goats, balance yanked askew as their cloaks cracked and bellied like sails, the delegation to fetch him ascended, angry enough to rope him to heel by force if he raised an objection.
Tanuay and his brothers, grim as matched spears, brought the familial stamp of gaunt cheek-bones scattered with freckles. A pace behind panted their flaxen-haired cousins, their bony, hawk faces unsmiling. Grey eyes pinned their prey, granite hard, while more kinsmen trailed them, swaggers alike as birth siblings, but not: the indigo patterns that stippled their leggings identified a different marriage-house: which consanguinity justified curbing the outlander’s mulish defiance. Ettinmere Settlement required fresh blood, above the scorching embarrassment that marred Vivet’s status in the community.
If obstinacy caught Arin alone and outnumbered, his pursuit closed in with reluctance, their awkward confrontation thrust onto uneven ground.
The man should have heard nothing against the thunderous gusts. Nonetheless, he arose, a scarecrow too disarmingly mild to suggest warning spite. Until he turned around, and the wood shavings lofted out of his breeches pelted into the party below. The leaders swore and gouged watering eyes, while those sheltered behind craned their necks to berate their uncooperative target.
The outlander sheathed his whittling knife. Storm-crow hair tousled and green eyes intent, he regarded the visitation’s approach with corrosive nonchalance.
Feet shuffled. Cloaks flapped. Nobody cared to speak first, harmless though he seemed for the fact he went swordless. No one knew where his blade was sequestered. He declined to grant Vivet his confidence. More, his self-effacing manner antagonized. The pack dispatched to confront his delinquency bunched up in bristled unease.
“You have been summoned to audience,” Tanuay ventured at length.
The amused riposte would have hackled a stoic. “What pesky fault have you come to pick this time?”
“Not our complaint,” Tanuay snapped. Beak-nose nipped white, he elbowed back his incensed youngest brother. “We’ve cautioned you plenty! Now formal charges are levelled against you for Vivet’s discontent.”
The outlander raised his eyebrows, beyond words: had their household elders not tested his probity? Their exhaustive requirements had been answered, each count, until what skills he possessed had declared him a fit provider. That Vivet languished without his conjugal service was the stickling burr jammed behind his contempt.
Tanuay gave that testy resistance no quarter. “To our shame, this matter has gone beyond family. You’re called to task before Ettinmere’s council.”
“I see.” Arin’s smile bit frost to the bone. “Let’s not keep them waiting.” He leaped off his high perch, startled a gap in the ranks of his escort, and bestowed a wrapped bundle into the trailing cousin’s surprised grasp. “Deliver these gifts, if you please, with my compliments?”
The contents laid bare were stout wooden spoons, sized for the communal cauldrons. Sturdy implements, and useful, had satirical whimsy not carved the handles into caricatures of the matrons, eyes pinched in droll malice, and oversized mouths with salacious tongues wagging.
Someone barked an astonished laugh, while another gasped, awed, “By mayhem, I’ll stake my best shirt that Bektisha tramples Hanatha flat in the scuffle to stick a meat fork in yon foreigner, first!”
The council’s bid to quash the outlander’s insolence tweaked more than the familial tail-feathers. Upon Arin’s presentation for reckoning at the round council hall, the plank door yanked open by Tanuay’s stung pride let into disquieting gloom. An unsettled glance backwards forewarned his kinsmen. Arin watched with interest as the collective mood of vengeful authority dissolved.
“Teeah’s virgin blood,” someone murmured, afraid. “Here’s trouble.”
Tanuay’s clamped grip shoved his sister’s delinquent provider inside. Then the door whispered closed, the latch muffled behind a cousin’s uneasy hand.
No cedar fire burned to cut the bleak chill, and no candle-lamp brightened the chamber. Seated figures lurked on the darkened dais, present and waiting since dawn: the mews reek of owl filled the shuttered room. Night-bird to the vultures sent aloft by day, the disgruntled creature swivelled its head and fixed orange eyes on the disturbance. The jewel strung at its breast flashed coal red, as the baleful relatives prodded their offender towards his overdue judgement.
A bird-bearing shaman did not bode him well. More, eight of the twelve council elders sat in ceremony, a battery row of stern silhouettes swathed in the doused brilliance of their feathered mantles.
“From the sun’s fire into the pit,” remarked Arin. “I’ve seen more cheerful funerals.”
Tanuay’s sharp tug underscored his frantic whisper. “All summary judgements occur without light! Maldoers are not shown the faces of those who declare retribution for standing grievances.”
Arin twisted his wrist from the peremptory effort to steer him. “Accusation condemns a man wi
thout hearing?”
“You may speak as you wish.” The speech was not Tanuay’s but the gravel bass of the shaman. “Though bear in mind, our wasted time will weight your case with disfavour.”
A reedy voice qualified. “Excuses won’t waive just redress. Arcana was needful to quell the disharmony visited by your household upon our settlement.”
“My household?” Annoyed to sarcasm, Arin ripped back, “Tell me, how does a bearing woman and her unborn child incite widespread mischief?”
Hassock leather squeaked. Disturbed clothing rustled through the ranks of the scandalized elders.
An old woman’s waspish quaver attacked, “Arin, you have no cause for mockery. Vivet’s unhappiness has drawn iyats to plague us! A shaman had to leave the night-watch to quell them before they caused malicious damage.”
The foreigner refused to be cowed. “That’s all?”
His upstart contempt cracked tempers and tolerance. “Do you not comprehend the potential for harm? Restitution for the exposure to risk shall dock you the worth of twelve cured hides, best quality; a pair of prime goats; a grown pig; and six sacks of millet. More, for depleting the watch, and as recompense for a shamanic intervention, you’re assigned a stint of punitive labour.”
“I’ll pay nothing!” snapped Arin. “Not against losses that never materialized. I might have repelled the rank nuisance myself. Could have done so, had anyone troubled to ask me.”
The shaman’s incensed hiss sliced across the reprimand from the head-man. “We’ll not waive this infraction for an empty boast.”
The old woman preferred to deflate his arrogance. “This liar’s bluff must be called!”
“Very well,” the scofflaw agreed. “Do recall, you insisted.”
He whistled the piercing threnody a gifted bard practised for fiend bane. The owl shrieked and bated to a rampage of wings. Seated elders clapped hands over their stinging ears, while the unprepared kinsfolk caught nearest buckled onto their knees. Before their sandbagged senses recovered, Arin barged past, kicked open the door, and walked out.
The shaman was quickest to recoup his poise. He soothed his riled bird, swivelled his painted face, and directed a venomous glare towards the vacated entry. He had underestimated the outland stranger: quite failed to imagine that such evasions covered more than pigheaded ignorance. The line of rebellion had been redrawn, with Ettin’s authority dangerously upstaged. Too late, the shaman grappled the problem posed by an outsider who wielded true power. “How has a trained talent evaded our notice?”
Someone’s shaken hand lit a spill, while Vivet’s wilted kinfolk stumbled upright and talked over themselves to explain. “Arin told us he was a free singer but never presented us with any proof. Vivet admitted he carried no instrument. His claim was dismissed as a blow-hard’s remark, once we verified his skilled archery. Bards don’t, as a rule, strike a handkerchief target from two hundred paces.”
The fact this one could raised importunate questions. While the kindled flame chased the gloom and brightened the stretched hides with their patterned charms of ward and guard, the council members blinked, fidgety as broody hens discomposed by a weasel slipped into their coop.
The eldest stabbed an irascible finger at the shaman. “This problem belongs to your eldritch peers. Let them break this foreigner’s cavalier ways through menial service. New blood with the potential for talent is too rare to be squandered! Arin will share Vivet’s bed and fulfil his duty to increase her household.”
While the council fumed over the sentence, their unregenerate target sweated in dread, the threat to cage his wayward spirit too bitterly real. Huddled at the crest of a windy hill-top, Arin shivered like a wild creature shoved into a leg trap.
Below him, the settlement folded into the vale, the peaked roofs shingled with weathered cedar jumbled like dice between ragged black spruce. Rail-fences snaked across the sere meadows and edged the frayed burlap of fallow fields with their fringes of golden aspens. Industry hazed the idyllic scene in winnowed smoke from the shacks, curing meat. A dog barked, and a smith’s hammer pounded out barrel staves. Children’s laughter wove through the shrieks of a teething infant, clipped by the arrhythmic axe blows of men splitting logs into kindling.
At least one Ettinman side-stepped the diligent preparation for winter: the bard’s tuned ear picked up vindictive footsteps, bearing down from behind.
Then Tanuay’s nettlesome comment sawed into his preference for solitude. “The council has ruled upon Vivet’s complaint and declared your term of bound labour. You’re assigned, dawn to dusk, at the shamans’ compound.”
Which fatuous crow floundered into an initiate master’s walled silence. Denied a reaction, Vivet’s brother attacked. “Does a limp-cock dupe like you understand what’s required to sustain an established household?”
Arin stared back in wide-lashed contempt. “By recitation in verse, or sung a capella?” For a Masterbard’s trained tradition demanded a nuanced grasp of regional customs. Ettin law was communal: work shares determined the portion a man would receive from the harvest.
But Tanuay’s entrenched grievance trampled ahead. “You’ll know the misery of the winter hunt, Arin. While we crack nuts and drink beer by the fire, you’ll have to trap for trade green hides to fill your scant larder.”
Yet ridicule failed. Back-country hardship perversely gave Arin the vital prospect of privacy, once he contrived a plausible ploy to distance the nettled shamans. Until then, his assigned service offered a cat-and-mouse play for back-handed advantage. Let into Roaco’s viper’s nest, a trained master’s inquisitive Sight might pry into the secrets the Ettin cabal clenched to its breast.
Alarmed as well as entranced by the prospect, the Teir’s’Ffalenn masquerading as Arin smothered ironic laughter and whistled.
His spritely mood rattled Tanuay’s affront. “D’you think to blindside our shamans, wee fool? You’ll become the sap-head who reached to scruff a bagged hare and bloodied his mitt in the gob of a wolverine.”
Arin’s lilted melody paused. “Someone should warn Vivet?” Eyebrows raised, he sprang backwards as Tanuay roared and swung a fist.
He escaped the black eye he deserved only because Ettin’s alderman puffed uphill to deliver the council’s decree of punishment. The man’s hickory cane sent Tanuay’s rage packing but failed to douse Arin’s amusement. Which provocation caused the piqued official to march the foreign upstart to meet his penance forthwith.
Their path soon merged with the terraced road, the buttressed turf chopped by the recent passage of the settlement’s high-wheeled wagons. The switched-back curves accessed a higher plateau clustered with the toadstool rings of thatched huts that comprised the shamans’ compound.
A fence of black-thorn and willow surrounded the dismal, squat roofs, their rough construction at odds with a stout central hall built of half-timbered stone, and other permanent structures sited in a natural hollow inside the earth-walled perimeter. A notch bisecting the mound of an overlook fashioned the gate, shored up with rammed timbers that, to mage-trained senses, harboured no eldritch protections. The crude eyes carved into the upright posts perhaps aimed to scare meddlesome children rather than repel a malign invasion. More effective, the two burly sentries, strapped into breastplates embossed with grotesque horned beasts. Their scowls were capped by steel helms lined with sheepskin, the die-stamped resemblance of in-breeding distinguished by beards, braided with ward charms and amulets. Distrust being Ettin’s popular sport, they scowled down at the black-haired foreigner with abrasive prejudice.
Arin’s slighter stature barely topped their embellished chests. While his cocky stare measured their rigid poise, a robed woman fleshed like a barracks laundress strode from the slat shack tucked in shadow behind. Her jaundiced glance skewered the penitent like vermin, then flicked to his bothered escort. “Why wasn’t I warned?”
“The council’s just bound him over for a month of remedial service.” The alderman added, smug, “Burden him w
ith unpleasant chores till the disrespect is knocked out of him.”
“Too bad the latrines have been cleaned for the day.” The woman sized up her charge, unimpressed. “That leaves mucking the mews, provided the runt has even a stripling’s work in him.”
She waved towards several small, whitewashed buildings in a row by the edge of the compound. “There you go.” Her brisk dismissal instructed Arin to report directly to the head falconer.
Dispatched in advance of the council-hall shaman’s informed precaution, the outlander went where he was bidden.
A gnarled oldster with string hair and milk cataracts left his sunlit bench and shuffled forward to meet him. “Detailed here for chores?” His tactile survey with a blind man’s stick sized up what seemed a beardless stripling. “Young pest, eh?” Disgusted, he warned in a toothless lisp, “Bother my birds, and I’ll have you flensed and staked out on the ledge for the buzzards.”
Arin grinned in disingenuous silence. Sweet chance had enabled his keen curiosity to study the collared raptors up close. He permitted the falconer’s prod, collected the basket and rake, and dug into the noisome, ammoniac reek of droppings and soiled straw. Those perches not vacant in day-time held hooded owls, jessed in fluffed repose until nightfall. Cheerfully whistling, Arin shouldered his assigned labour until twilight shadowed the vale.
Since lamp-light increased the hazard of fire, his grumpy taskmaster dismissed him. “Dump the muck on the heap, boy! Hang the rake and skulk for home, quick. If you get underfoot at the watch change, be sure you’ll find yourself rendered for gizzard bait.”