by Adrian Selby
“Take a gob of our old brew and take Khiese’s with it. Drink them and run. There might be rocks, some channel you can escape in. You die here for sure, but you might not die on the brews.”
“It won’t—”
“Shut the fuck up, Teyr. Go.” He thrusts his bag of brew at me.
“It’s done, Ru. Let me lie here.”
“Fuck you, Amo, no, you get home, you go to my farm and tell Bridie I love her. I came here for you, now you pay it back. Run!”
I look up again then back at him and begin shovelling the brew into my mouth. He smiles, leans back on his hands as though he’s relaxing by some river.
I cut Khiese’s pouch from his belt, and I run, throwing off my own belts, Salia’s sword.
“Live, Teyr Amondsen! Live while the red drum beats!”
For a moment I think it might be another voice, closer than Ru as I sprint, but who else is here?
The pounding crashing hooves close, I scream and scream as the brews scorch and light me up; my heart shudders, grows, my veins thicken to ropes and I pick up speed. Still they close till my bones rattle, a run of shallower grass, I go faster still, and at the corners of my eyes the wall of buffalo edges into view. I’m spattered with saliva then as I close my eyes to die, the heat of breath coming in hard fast snorts washing over my back, hitting my neck stronger and stronger. For a moment, a nudge, a head on my back. I open my eyes as their hooves come down at my sides, see ahead a hard sharp slope rising, an outcrop of rock, thirty feet across, six high. A final step, deeper, springing up as the buffalo part for it, I hit the ridge of the outcrop with my shins and I hit the top of the rock hard, head, arms and chest. And I’m rolling down the far side. The world darkens, stones loosen as the herd moves past in its unnumbered thousands. I hold my head, try to move, but blood pours from my nose, from my black eye. I hold out my hand, convinced Sillindar will take it.
I realise I’m laughing because all of life has been shown to me.
But I am done.
Her service begins.
There’s a stillness only snow makes with the air, brings a hush. It falls on the trees above me.
A face appears. I cannot see its colour for it is dusk, but the skin of his head is shaped and sewn into ridges over the ears, though where the bare skull should be something grows, a spongy moss, pale slender roots thick around the nape and throat and running down through a huge chest and bare shoulders. A heat comes off him, dry like a baking stone. His hand slides under my head, almost the size of it, lifting it gently, bending my neck for him to hold a cup to my lips. Things live in it, wriggle in my throat, taste of yeast.
His words are for others moving around me. He shapes an exhalation, a deep whistling. A mouthpiece or has the plant in him found voice? Another stands over me briefly, a thin red shirt, dark hair, beautiful, like he comes from the south, and no colouring from plant on him I can see. Children sing in a strange language away in the trees. The beautiful one lays my head back down on the earth. There’s something like the trickle of sand tickling me as he raises his fist over my head. Whatever he smears over my face, closing my eyes with his fingers, soaks into me, bringing visions of places I cannot understand before I am swallowed by darkness.
As I slip away he leans to my ear, wraps string about one of my hands.
“Ljam.” Abra lingo.
Gift.
Part Three
Aude
Aude lives.
With each step a pain, those words are the salve for it and all else I endure in covering these wintry leagues east towards Eastmarch and the border between Citadels Hillfast and Forontir.
The Oskoro have no need of horses, so I walk, but I cannot walk properly now, will never walk properly. A smooth shaft of wood serves as a staff, and I do my best to keep my weight off my left leg, for it is misshapen, a bow in it, something the fightbrews did to the bones. I expect, I hope, I will grow used to it, once the rest of me twists and sets itself to the new shape of my movement.
I’ve seen no one since the Almet. I sleep at night clutching Aude’s amber necklace, the gift from the Oskoro, the proof he had somehow fled Khiese.
The furs have been made to fit me, for winter comes to the Circle and it rouses the ghosts of these lands, howling over the rocks, clawing like a bear. The Eastmarch is unfamiliar to me, but the Oskoro who watched over me walked me to the edge of their forest and pointed this way.
I have a fieldbelt, one of theirs. It’s unadorned but strong, skilfully made. They did their best to tell me what plant lay within the pouches, bags and pockets, little of it familiar, all of it pungent and strong.
The plains give way to emptier, meaner lands beyond the Circle, whitened with frost and ice as winter hardens itself to stone and earth, feathering silver the leaf and bark.
A standing stone, some seven feet high on a mound to give clear sight of it, has carved on it the Drunessen clan sigil, a single flame on a shield. At each theit I say his name, imitate his walk, easier in a way with my own bad leg. I take their welcome where it’s offered, find one or two who know some scraps of Common or Abra. They’re courteous enough when they see I’ve paid colour and bear still a sword—Salia’s. I thought I had lost it.
They tell me of whiteboys and the dreadful horns, though no foothold was established here, not with Khiese’s focus on Hillfast far to the west.
It’s as I scramble up a ridge to get a look at a wide valley I was told of that I see a distant figure whistling to a dog, a big one. I find myself trembling, dizzy, and it worsens as the figure straightens from some poking about in heather—the roll of his hip. If he puts his arms up in the air to stretch then rolls his shoulders it’s him.
“Aude!” I would shout for him again but I’m crying and I can’t stop myself. He turns. He must see me, see someone at any rate using their staff to help them balance as they slide down with the scree they loosen with their boots.
I fling back my hood, can’t see for tears, and I have to stop at the bottom of the slope and wipe my face, hoping I haven’t lost sight of him, that he hasn’t somehow ignored me or vanished like a wish.
The dog bounds towards me and I find some bilt from a side pocket in my pack. The dog is unsure of me. Chutters are the best breed in the citadels for sniffing work, which is what Aude must be out doing. I flick the bilt at the dog and wait, for I’m not sure if she’s been trained to protect him; most are. She jumps at the bilt however, no killer, comes over instead, tail wagging, licks my outstretched hand and then starts barking, for she’s found plant about me, and an awful lot of it.
I watch him as I wait, my heart pounding. He’s using his sniffer’s catch to walk, a steady dull chink as it hits the stone, for the bottoms of citadels catches are iron for breaking ice. He walks as I remember, an imbalance in his gait, his back straight as a polearm. He’s hooded still, and as he gets closer he seems more hesitant, more sure it’s me, I think.
Slowly he pulls back the hood of his cloak, takes the mouthpiece out that he instructs the chutter with, gives a yip for her to return to his side. Tears fill his eyes till they shine.
We are still before each other, then he puts his arms out, dropping the catch. His hair has gone; what bits are left are matted like Caryd’s was, but only a few thin threads. He’s so thin, those sharp high cheeks drawn, the skin scarred on one side of his face. You’d think I might rush as best my leg allows, but I want to look at him, this man I love and thought dead. I wonder briefly if the Oskoro are watching, that there is more to this, something to stop me from putting my arms around him.
He smiles. He has a proper beard now but this too is unkempt, patchy with whatever ails his skin. He has teeth missing, and he sees that I’m looking at his smile, his mouth, and he covers it with a hand, leaving one arm out to me still.
All too suddenly I’m holding him, my head against his chest, so little meat and warmth there as I weep into his tunic and squeeze him to me. The beard feels strange on my head, but his smell is the same
, warm soil and wool. He brings a hand to the back of my head, as he used to do when he saw me worry, scratches the bristles there in slow circles. As he does so he traces the scar from my black eye, the bark that runs across my temple and the side of my head there.
I cannot think of a thing to say as we stand there. His heart thumps in his chest. He’s had to push his fingers underneath my pack to hold me properly.
“Khiese?” he whispers.
“It’s over, my love. He’s dead.”
He breathes deeply then. I think he starts to cry but he tenses up and stills it. I squeeze him a bit more, hoping he’ll let go of his hurt, let it out, but he coughs and clears his throat.
“I’m looking for shiel and labror, last of the season,” he says. “I’m not much use at sniffing, but Flicker there, she gets enough for us both, and I’m hoping the family I’m stopping with will have a use for me through the winter at least. Will you walk with me?”
He leans back from our embrace and the scars are clearer now, the fine nose sharply broken, hooked. His eyes are miserable, they flit about. He can’t look at me. His beard is wet with tears, and he sniffs back the flem that comes with crying. His hand goes back to his mouth, seeing me watch him, then to his face where the worst of the scarring is. He steps away, puts his mouthpiece in and calls and whistles Flicker into the bushes about us.
I wait for him to say something, as his eyes follow the dog and he goes still. But he doesn’t.
“They give me this, the Oskoro, pointed me this way to Drunessen lands so I could find you.” I lift his amber necklace off and walk up to him. I want him to look at me.
“Tell me …”
“Not now, bluebell.” He looks at the necklace, the amber dangling from my hand. I drop it into his as he holds it up to feel the stone. The leather of the loop is almost like paper.
“We should find a new loop for it.”
“No. She gave me this when she had Mosa in her belly. Had been her ma’s.” He kisses it and tucks it in a pocket quickly. “I … I can’t remember how her ma came about it. But I used to know. A lot of precious things I used to know that I don’t any more.”
He rolls the mouthpiece back into place, whistles and waits again.
Flicker comes running back, a bunch of amony held gently in her jaws.
“Good girl, good girl.” He drops to his knee and gives her a snivet, cradles her chin and scratches under her ears.
“Come,” he says, holding out his hand for me to walk with him.
We say as little as we did that first time we rode out of Hillfast, having left Mosa with Tarry. And as happens with keeps been together a long time, he asks after Tarry just as I’m thinking it.
“Sorry to say he’s sick, my love. I saw his man Luddson. He bid me farewell on my coming back here.” It’s too hard for me to say any more, and so I understand his own reluctance, the sorrows that stand between us.
He squeezes my hand and we walk on, back towards a theit, where he must be a guest. It’s at the top of a long hard rise out of the valley at the far end, a path winding up that he helps me with for it’s broken in many places and prone to giving way. As the path curves around the side of the slope and beyond, in a high vale open to the sky, I see twenty or so houses, pens for reindeer and dogs, though they must be out and away. Flicker runs ahead of us to one of the larger houses, all of them here having thick and heavy stone walls, roofs bound and thatched, kept well, as they must be. A bell rings moments after we crest the slope, for no good comes of strangers out here. We approach the edge of the deer pens, two men digging out foundations for new posts, hard work in hard ground. They heft their pick and spade when they see my sword, but then they see me better, see my colour, and they go back to resting on them.
“Aude!” says one. “What did she find?”
“Good bit of amony, labror and all, though not so much of the latter, I’m sorry to say.”
“And what did you find?” says the other.
Aude looks at me. His eyes fill up again, but he tightens his lips and looks at his feet, still holding my hand.
“This is Teyr Amondsen. She’s come looking for me and has found me.”
It’s evening and I’m in the kitchen of the family he’s staying with. They’ve had to borrow a stool for me from the shed that Aude sleeps in, at the end of their kitchen garden. Jelmer and his keep Vuina sit at either end of the table as is custom for the hosts. He smokes a long clay, I’d bet a jacker in his youth for the size of him. Vuina makes a fuss of me under his approving gaze. With us around their table are their two children, girls, who I learn are Lina and Nietsa, nine and seven years and curious to look at side by side for Lina is paler by far with straight hair, white as snow; Nietsa’s hair is a very dirty yellow, and a bit more blood about her. However it seems my eye and my colouring are the entertainment for tonight, for Vuina has to hiss at them to stop staring.
“Did you steal it from a fish?” says Lina.
“Must have been a big one. What did you do with your real eye?” says Nietsa.
“Nu! Nu!” says Vuina, remembers then her bit of Common. “You don’t ask these things.” She holds her hands out, her sign of apology. I had no idea how the Drunessens felt about the Oskoro, I could not risk causing any hurt to Aude by mentioning where the eye really come from.
“Are you blind in that eye, Teyr?”
This is Vuina’s sister Ruisma, more or less the same age. She wasn’t given the lips or lashes must have got the boys of this theit out of breath for Vuina when they was girls, but she’s strong-looking, hard hands and to my eye a stillness about her, a bit of me in her, I’d like to think, not soured in any way by what their ma or da must have wanted for her, I’m sure, as she passed through her tens and into her twenties and now beyond that without a keep. She helps Vuina serve up the deer broth and pitties. Through the curling vapours of his smoking, Jelmer orders the two girls to fetch his jug of beer and some cups.
“I am blind in this eye, yes,” I says. “Nearly shot dead with an arrow, can you see?” I lean forward to the girls. Lina reaches over the table, hoping to touch the scar and bark there, but her ma yelps with a further exasperated apology.
“I’m fine to let them, Vuina-lap.” This is an Abra custom, adding “host” to names when you are a guest.
The girls reach across the table over the bowls and board of bread and they take turns to touch my face, the scars and bark there. Satisfied with that, they fetch the beer.
“Can’t say much for this beer,” says Jelmer. “Sure with your colouring you been paid coin enough to drink the finest in your prime. We brew this out here with what we can. Bloody kill myself if I couldn’t, eh.”
“Jelmer, don’t say that.” Vuina smiles, glances quickly at Ruisma, then Aude and me.
Aude is quiet through all this. He glances about him nervously again. Much of the time he’s got his hand to his mouth or runs it over his head. His other hand he keeps below the table, holding a thigh that bounces with nerves.
I put my hand on his and it stops him still a moment. Soon enough his leg starts bobbing again.
“So how did he find his way to such good and kind people?” I says, knowing that he’s not about to talk of it.
“He was walking through the valley,” says Ruisma. “No care for any danger or anything else about him, so one of the hands came and told Jelmer there was a stranger about the theit.” She looks at him. “You were in a sorry state. This must have been near two months ago. Had a few dribbles of water in a flask and you’d been eating grass. The girls wouldn’t have us move you on.”
“You have to be kind,” says Lina; “you die without kindness out here.” Must have been a saying, such words coming from a girl her age.
“You asked to work for your food if you could fix up the shed and stay a bit,” says Ruisma. He nods only slightly. “Seen better with a hammer and chisel though.” All the family laughs at this. Even Aude flashes a brief smile. Ruisma’s fond of him.
> “Then we finds out he has his letters, don’t we eh?” says Jelmer. “That give us some good straight dealings with Drunessen’s collectors, not to mention the few others we seen from the Families about. And he’s kind enough he’s going to teach the girls. We’re grateful, Aude, grateful you came here to us from whatever you had escaped.”
“He’ll teach those girls well. They’ll have their letters come spring, I reckon.” Though I said this because it was right to say, I knew it could mean he’d stay here at least that long and the thought of it hurt.
“Where might you be from then, Teyr? Who do the Amondsens swear fealty too?” says Jelmer.
“Oh Da, you should know,” says Lina, “it’s Auksens.”
“She’s right, Jelmer-lap, I’m Auksen clan, a southie.” Meaning south of the Circle.
“I thought your way of speaking was familiar,” says Ruisma. “Haven’t been over that way in ten years.”
“Clans got out of the habit of meeting and keeping a common interest.”
“That’s true, Teyr. I keep saying to Da and the others that we should look to see what can be traded west and north.”
“You’ve not said anything as I’ve heard,” says Jelmer.
“Oh, of course she has,” says Vuina.
“Where will you go from here then, Teyr?” says Jelmer. Aude looks up from his lap then.
I think about Omar, dead and strung up on the gates of Faldon Ridge. I see Mosa, kneeling.
“Hillfast, I think.” I look at Aude, but his leg starts bobbing again and he looks once more into his lap, touching his head again like there was something there or something missing.
Nobody speaks for a bit so Vuina gets the girls talking about their jobs the following day. Not used to silence I daresay in such a noisy warm house as this. I struggle to make table talk, can’t ask questions that usually get people to open up and win them over. I’m tired, more than I thought with only half a day’s walking, but I’ve been on edge these last few hours I was welcomed and introduced. I know we’ve got a talk coming, know that he’s just trying to get things done for the family while he gets used to me being here.