by Shannah Jay
‘There’s not much difference, if you ask me. What’s the world coming to when women start training to fight? Mind you,’ Loral added, quite inconsistently, ‘there’ve been times when it’d have come in useful for me, but that’s beside the point. Discord’s ending now. And what I say is, you don’t need all that nonsense, Karialla. One day you’ll find yourself another husband. Oh yes, you will. It’s no use looking at me like that. Nature will out. I’ve seen it time and time again.
And then it’ll be for your husband to look after you. Men don’t want a woman who can fight back.’
Karialla hid a smile at the thought of how Loral bullied Evril—she wasn’t sure who looked after whom in that couple—then went to wash and change her clothes, ready for the evening’s influx of customers. She sighed as she tied on her server’s apron. She couldn’t imagine ever wanting to re-marry, ever finding anyone she could love as she’d loved Pavlin, didn’t even intend to try.
***
Karialla managed not to meet any of her old friends from the One Circle until she’d been in Tenebrak a few days, though she knew this couldn’t last. Circle members didn’t frequent such places as inns, because apparently the One Circle had begun to frown upon the drinking of alcohol, now that Rojan was First Elect.
‘It was always his ambition to boss people around,’ she said without thinking.
‘Oh? You know him?’ Evril asked.
She shrugged. ‘He’s my late husband’s cousin, but I can’t say I ever liked him.’
‘Well, I’m not too fond of him myself. Let alone he’s arrogant and tries to run the Council of Elders for his own purposes—’
‘He’s an Elder!’
‘Yes.’
‘But—’ She bit off what she had been going to say. You couldn’t explain to anyone how healers somehow knew whether a person was suitable to become an Elder or not. And Rojan had never been suitable. Not at all. ‘Sorry. Go on.’
‘I was only going to say it’s not ale that does the harm, it’s the fools who drink too much. And anyway, I don’t allow drunkenness in my inn! So he has no right to speak against drinking. No right at all.’
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‘I agree.’
***
One day, however, the inevitable encounter with a circle member occurred. Karialla left the inn to make a few purchases for Loral. As soon as she reached the markets, she ran into a woman she’d known in the old days, Pavlin’s other cousin. Drellis had changed and looked so much older Karialla hardly recognised her, though they were the same age. But Drellis recognised her at once and stopped dead in her tracks.
‘Karialla! It is you, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you and Pavlin come back to Tenebrak, then?’
There was no way to soften the news. ‘Pavlin’s dead, I’m afraid.’
Drellis’s face crumpled, ‘Oh, Karialla, no! I’m so sorry! How?’
Karialla had to steel herself to say the words. ‘Discord. Raiders came to the settlement while I was away doing some healing and selling Pavlin’s silver pieces. They’d killed everyone and left again by the time I got back.’
Drellis made a sympathetic tutting noise and patted Karialla’s hand. ‘What are you doing in Tenebrak, then?’
‘I decided to study for the First Cadre, so I came south again. I didn’t know the Healers’ Courts had been destroyed.
So I’m going to stay here and do the best I can to help people as a Healer of the Second Cadre. In the meantime, I’m working at the inn near the market.’
Drellis stared at her. ‘Then you’ve been here a while?’
‘Only a few days. I’m serving at the inn until I find somewhere to set up as healer.’
‘There’s no call for you to do menial work in a place like that. Why didn’t you come to us? The Circle would have found a way to help you. Why, Rath and I have a spare bedroom we’d be glad to let you have.’ Sadness twisted her face for a moment. ‘We lost our little son during a raid and I haven’t had any other children.’
‘I’m sorry about that. The wars have been hard on everyone, haven’t they?’ She tried to avoid answering the other question, but she might have known it was no use. Drellis had always been noted for her persistence.
‘Why didn’t you come straight to us?’ She clutched her companion’s sleeve as if aware that Karialla wanted to move away.
‘I wanted time to—to grow accustomed to being in Tenebrak without Pavlin.’ The tears were very near, but Karialla managed to keep them back.
Drellis’s own eyes were brimming with moisture. ‘Well, you must come to the evening gathering tonight. Everyone will be so glad to see you!’
‘I’d rather not, thank you.’ Karialla saw the other woman’s face sag with astonishment and knew that if she didn’t explain bluntly, they carry on trying to get her back into the fold. ‘Look, to tell you the truth, Drellis, I’ve lost my belief in gods. As far as I’m concerned, if there were any gods they wouldn’t have let Discord spread across the land. And they certainly wouldn’t have let a man as good and kind as my Pavlin die so horribly.’
Drellis took hold of her hand. ‘We’ll help you to find your faith again, I promise!’
Karialla disengaged her hand. ‘I think not. Let’s just leave things be, Drellis. I must be going.’ She turned abruptly and strode off down the street.
‘But where do you live? Which inn is it?’
Karialla quickened her pace and ignored the question.
A stallkeeper beckoned to Drellis. ‘If you want to see the healer, she’s living at the Market Inn till she gets settled.
Nice woman. She’s helped my old mother a lot already. We could do with more like her in Tenebrak.’
That afternoon there was a knock on Karialla’s chamber door and she opened it to find Rojan and Drellis standing there. She sighed in exasperation.
‘Little Sister!’ said Rojan, arms outstretched. ‘How sad we were to hear of your loss!’
When she moved backwards to avoid his embrace, he let his arms drop. She saw his eyes narrow for a moment and anger flicker in them, but the public smile came quickly back to his face. Without an invitation he moved into the room.
‘Can we talk?’
Stony-faced she indicated chairs, then sat down opposite the two of them on the edge of the bed, folding her arms.
‘You’re wasting your time trying to persuade me back to the circle, Rojan. I’ve never really believed in your gods. The circle was always more Pavlin’s belief than mine.’
‘So speak those who have been grievously hurt,’ he said with a hearty understanding that grated on her nerves. ‘Will you tell us how our dear cousin died?’
She didn’t wish to relive that day, but supposed she owed it to them. Very baldly she told them what she’d seen.
‘Let us pray for his soul!’ said Rojan and stood up, raising his arms as if to encompass them both. Drellis stood up next to him and then they both looked expectantly at Karialla.
No! She would not be manipulated into following Rojan. In one swift movement, she was at the door. ‘I have a
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patient to see. Close the door behind you when you’ve finished praying!’
She walked quickly out before they could recover from their shock, left the inn and hid in the garden of a nearby house until she saw them leave.
After that the members of the One Circle took it in turns to call on her at the inn, trying to persuade her to leave it, offering her their support in her bereavement. In the end, when she saw them coming, she hid and persuaded a bewildered Loral to say she was out. Since Loral sometimes went to the Circle gatherings, she knew most of its members well and didn’t like deceiving them, though she did it for Karialla’s sake.
Rojan, however, was particularly persistent and intercepted Karialla several times in the street. And the way he looked at her made her shiver. It was the look of a man who desired a woman. He had looked at her the sam
e way before she married, too.
‘Leave me alone!’ she said, or ‘Go away!’ or ‘I’m busy.’ But nothing seemed to stop him.
‘You’ll have to face your problems one day, little sister,’ he would say earnestly. ‘Let’s discuss things, you and I. I understand and share your grief for Pavlin, I most truly do.’
‘My grief is my own and I no longer consider myself a member of your circle, so leave me alone!’ she repeated.
In the end, she asked Evril’s help as an Elder. He spoke to Rojan in front of the whole Council and asked him to stop pestering the healer.
Rojan glared at him. ‘I’m merely trying to—’
‘You’re upsetting her. We don’t want her leaving town again, now do we?’
There was a chorus of agreement.
‘Better leave her alone, Rojan,’ said one of the women Elders.
‘She no doubt has a mind of her own,’ said another with a sly smile. This woman hadn’t wanted Rojan to be invited to join the Council, had protested that he wasn’t a born Elder, but in vain. Some of the male Elders were on friendly terms with him, too friendly. Well, some of them wouldn’t have been named Elders in the old days, either.
Rojan’s visits to the inn might have ceased, but Karialla was still conscious sometimes of his eyes following her down the street. It was eerily reminiscent of the way Gerrell stared at her whenever he came into town.
After she’d been in Tenebrak for a few days, she went to see Ruslith the silversmith. She found him looking thin and much older, but alive at least. He was distressed to hear about Pavlin. ‘The waste!’ he kept saying, over and over. ‘Such a great talent thrown away. If only he’d stayed.’ But Ruslith had had his own troubles, having lost some members of his family and seen his business shrink to almost nothing during the worst of the troubles. Now he was hoping to build things up again.
‘But good apprentices aren’t easy to find,’ he told her. ‘No. Not at all easy. I have one, but I need others and a good journeyman, too. I may have to look further afield for them, some must have survived, but there’s no hurry. I’ll just continue making the small pieces and wait until times are better elsewhere before I do anything on a bigger scale.’
***
Peto had become quite interested in the question of how a woman could defend herself, and he and Karialla were devising possible protective responses together.
‘Working at the inn’s a come-down for a man like me,’ he confided one day. ‘I was once head guard to a rich merchant. He had a large domain and trading post on the main Setherak road, Kethro did. Comfortable place, good companions. He’s dead now, for all his wealth, poor soul, and so are most of the others who lived there. They were attacked while I was out on the road with a special consignment. The men I’d trained did their best, took quite a few of the raiders with them, and I caught a few more raiders afterwards and made them pay for what they’d done. But those madmen set light to the trading post and killed all the family, so I had to move on.’
She could see he still felt guilty about his employer, so she laid her hand on his. ‘No one can do more than their best, Peto.’
He looked into the distance. ‘He was a kindly man, Kethro was. And honest. Didn’t deserve that sort of death.’
‘No. My husband didn’t, either.’
He held her hand for a moment, just in a friendly way, then took a deep breath and let it go. ‘Oh well, no use repining.’ He looked round without much pleasure. ‘You still have to earn your bread too, don’t you?’
‘There’s no shame in honest toil, Peto. And you’re certainly needed here.’
‘Aye, I suppose so. But maybe later, when things have settled down just a bit more, I’ll set up a school in Tenebrak and teach self-defence. It’ll be years before real peace comes to the land, so folk will need such skills as they begin to travel further afield. Discord won’t die away overnight even if the factions have been disbanded. Once a raider always a raider, I reckon.’
‘Are you sure?’ she asked, troubled.
‘I b’lieve so.’ He paused, then added thoughtfully, ‘I’m not sure true peace will ever to our world come again. It’s as if the evil has a life of its own. It may go into hiding, but it’ll still be there, waiting. Maybe I should form a Bodyguards’
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Guild too, like the Crafters’ Guild. But not yet. Not till times are more settled.’
Everyone seemed to be shelving their plans for the future, for some reason. Discord might have died down, but people didn’t yet trust that peace would last.
Karialla tried not to listen to Peto’s gloomy prognostications but his words had a ring of truth and lingered in her mind. Of course peace would come again, she kept telling herself. This madness couldn’t last for ever.
Why, Ruslith had told her only a day or two previously about a village quite a way to the north of Tenebron, a place called Netherak, that was growing into a town under the leadership of a brave man called Zuthrin. ‘He organised the townsfolk into defence groups and they drove out the last of the raiders a while ago.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘A man told me.’
‘Who? I haven’t seen any strangers at the inn.’
Ruslith gave her a tight little smile, ‘Oh, just a traveller.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘Well, a messenger on a secret guild errand, actually. We Crafters have managed to communicate with one another from time to time, even during the worst of the wars. Anyway, this messenger told me all about it. He’d been to Netherak himself, see it with his own eyes.
I know you won’t mention it to anyone, but with you being a healer, well, I thought you should know.’
The news heartened her. Yes, she kept telling herself. Reason would prevail in the end. There had been no real trouble in Tenebrak for a long time now, Evril said. Only a few minor problems, nuisances really.
But she wished that something would happen to take Gerrell away from the town, for he was becoming a serious nuisance to her, far worse than Rojan. And he frightened her, she had to admit. She could see the madness flickering in his eyes, feel the evil emanating from him.
CHAPTER 8 The Healer’s House
With an increasing number of clients, the question of finding somewhere more permanent to live and work began to concern Karialla. She would need a garden to grow or gather a range of useful herbs, and would need space to dry and store them, as well as a stillroom where she could make up medicines and salves. The herbs, roots and powders she’d brought with her wouldn’t last for more than a few weeks more, and although she’d managed to make a few potions and lotions in the inn kitchen, the disturbance that caused hadn’t sweetened Loral’s temper.
One evening Gerrell swaggered into the inn in the company of several similar brutes, his usual companions. There were more of them than usual and he had such an air of excitement about him, eyeing her so triumphantly, Karialla knew instantly he was planning mischief. She exchanged glances with Peto, who nodded reassuringly.
She debated retreating to the kitchen and leaving the serving to the other maidservant, but decided she’d probably be safer in the crowded public room, with Peto sitting in a corner and Evril to hand. And anyway, she thought with a spurt of anger, she would not cower away whenever Gerrell appeared.
He and his cronies stationed themselves in a corner by the door and she could feel his eyes following her as she took some platters of food to a nearby table of regular customers and joked with them. Peto was hovering near the rowdy group around Gerrell. Evril was standing in the kitchen doorway, torn between staying near his pregnant wife and keeping watch over the public area.
Karialla begged the other maid to tend to Gerrell’s table.
‘All right. I don’t like it, though,’ she muttered. ‘He’s a bad one, that Gerrell is.’
Karialla continued serving, but kept her dagger to hand and her eyes alert for trouble.
Down at the other end of the room Gerrell said something
that made the maid serving him turn pale and hurry away, then he stood up and banged on the table with his dagger hilt, causing the rest of the customers to fall silent and stare at him in shock. ‘I want that one serving me tonight,’ he announced loudly, pointing the dagger point towards to Karialla, ‘and no arguments—or there’ll be trouble.’
A couple of people didn’t wait to see what happened, but slipped out through the kitchen. Karialla froze where she stood. Discord was raising its head again. The memory of the dreadful sights she’d had to face in Harmony flashed in front of her eyes. Was she about to see more senseless deaths? Well, this time she’d not be a spectator and she’d not give in tamely, either.
Before she could decide what to do, Evril surprised himself and others by leading the resistance. When he moved forward, Karialla took a few deep breaths and prepared herself for trouble, then watched him walk towards Gerrell, a stern expression on his face, gesturing for Peto to come across and help.
But as Evril drew near the corner where Gerrell was standing, two more bullies, who hadn’t shown themselves before, slipped in through the street door to intercept Peto. One set a long knife at his throat before he could even touch his own dagger. Another knife-flashing lout slipped between the tables to block Evril’s way.
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Evril gulped as the knife sliced through the air near his arm. He stopped dead in his tracks, looking round for Peto.
His gasp of dismay when he saw his guard already held prisoner was audible all over the room.
More customers started to shuffle towards the door until Gerrell roared, ‘Keep still, you lot! I ent got a quarrel with you, but I will have if you get in our way.’
Loral had just come out of the kitchen with a frying pan full of hot food. As she stood by the serving counter in the corner, she saw that her husband was in danger and stopped abruptly, clenching one hand at her breast and dumping the pan down on the nearest surface. She might keep Evril in thrall with her sharp tongue, but none could doubt her love for the little man.
Gerrell smiled with the confidence of someone who holds the world in his grasp. He stared across the room at Karialla. ‘You. Come over here and serve us. We need someone pretty to cheer us up.’