by Adrian Selby
Soon enough though, night getting on, they’re all yawning and making their excuses, the duts doing what they usually do and protesting they aren’t tired but go and get all grumpy about being told they are instead. Ruisma and Vuina go and settle them in the next room. Jelmer puts the jug on the table as he stands up.
“I’d be happy for you to finish this between you. I get the sense you have a bit to catch up on. Aude, we don’t need you sniffing in the morning, but your help looking over the scrolls before the old man’s collector comes would be welcome.” He quickly knocks out his pipe on his plate, winks and leaves us. Vuina and Ruisma make their own excuses, and soon we’re alone in their main room.
“I can’t do this here, Teyr. Can we go out?”
“Of course.”
The night’s dry, bitter too of course; so we put our furs on. There’s a porch to the house, for it’s raised up to help against snowdrifts. He lights us a lantern and bids me sit next to him on a bench that overlooks the empty pens. We fill our cups from the jug and put them on the ground a moment.
“We both thought each other was dead then,” I says. “But you’re here. Beyond any hope I had for us, here you are.”
He’s not looking at me, just staring ahead as I speak. His hand goes to his mouth, his face, again and again.
“How do you feel? What happened?” I says, for all I want is him talking, to hear him and watch him speak.
“They hurt me, Teyr. I can’t tell you the things they did, but they broke me because I’m not strong like you. I couldn’t take it like you can.”
His voice is softer than it was, partly the effect of him losing so many teeth, the change in his nose and how he breathes perhaps.
“You got away though, you escaped.”
“Only because I was going to kill myself. I meant to. I and a few others were being walked along a path beside a steep drop to a ravine. I thought that would do me, make really sure of it.”
That bit makes me cry. I lean into him, and I’m grateful he doesn’t move away. He keeps on with his telling though.
“I threw myself off the edge of the path, fell hard onto the scree, rolled and broke to pieces it felt like, stones flaying my hands and face as I fell. I hit the bottom and found I still breathed. I thought then it was stones, big ones, following me down. I looked up, hoping for something to land on me, but it was a whiteboy. Not sure if he was sent down or he was risen on some plant and thought he was being brave, but he lands near enough on top of me and he’s hurt as well. They must have thought I hoped to escape, and the whiteboys would do anything Khiese asked, even something like that, but he had paid colour and he was trying to get up. My hand—I’m trying to get up as well—closes around a stone, a big one. I wanted to die so you’d think I’d let him finish the job. But I wasn’t going to let one of them do it. I had to do it. They had no right. I rolled over and hit him with it, hit his eye. He grabbed my arm—much stronger than me—but it gave me the leverage to get my other arm around his throat. His other arm’s no good, it’s landed behind his back, must have broken. He can’t stop me choking him to death.” There’s tears in his eyes now, his trembling worse, and he’s looking at his hand like it’s still got the rock in it. “It’s a hard thing to do, isn’t it? Kill a man.”
“It is, bluebell. Only madmen say different.”
He takes my hands in his, runs his thumbs over my knuckles. He’s damaged, brittle, like the marrow’s been scooped out.
“They shot a few arrows down the ravine at me, but I was obscured by rocks above me, and the falling scree had kicked up some dust. I’d hurt my ankle. I was dressed warm enough to survive the night lying there, but in a few days of hobbling along I was in a sorry state, starving. I must have passed out in the plains. I woke up with the Oskoro. The Almet.”
“They’ve given us both life and here we are. Maybe Sillindar was watching.”
He snaps at me then, angry. “Course he wasn’t, or he’d have got in the way of Khiese’s knife, wouldn’t he?”
I curse myself for it was a stupid thing to say, looking for some words to settle him when he never did have time for notions that magists come and go from the stars when we need them.
He leans down and picks up our cups of beer. We sip in silence for a bit, but I finally break, for treading around on eggs isn’t how I used to be and I’m not good at it. I’m not helping put him at ease. I’m cross with myself as well for that bit of me wishing he’d have been happier to see me, for I cannot take my eyes from him yet he can barely put them on me.
“I miss him every day,” I says. “I got no right to, have I? Everything’s gone but what I got in that pack in the kitchen there, and you sitting here with me on this bench. I want to go home, and I want you to come home with me, stand under the falls with me, sit by the fire in our socks.”
His thoughts pass clearly through his eyes, as they always had. The truth is written in them, the answer’s quivering on his lips, the one I don’t want.
“Might be this is my home, for now anyway. This might be as close as it gets.”
“Why? How is it your home?” It comes out stronger than I’d wanted.
“You want me back in Hillfast? His bed’s in our room, the wooden ships, the pictures of me and you he carved on the seat of his chair and under the table in the kitchen, they’re there, the tree he watched us from, the big branch that stretches out over the plant run by the pantry. He won’t ever be sitting on it again, and I’ll always look up at it and wish he was.”
“I know. I want to make it better and I can’t because I was always bad with finding the right thing to say. Might be we can make a start somewhere else, look after each other. I got no more desire to run a road through the Circle.” Aude’s eyes flash at this, but I go on, like the fool I am. “It was something I wanted so long as you and Mosa was there, something’d make you both proud of me and we’d build it up together. Now I found you again I just want whatever means I can be with you, whether that’s home as I thought or not.”
He drains his cup and pours another. It hurts to watch how his nerves make the pouring of it harder. He finishes that in a long gulp as well. He drops the cup and shakes his head.
“You’re giving up on the road? I’m sorry for that. He died for that road.”
“No, Aude …”
“Yes. I walk off with you now, find some theit’ll have us if not this one, or go back to that house and all those things that remind us of him. We’ll sit in our chairs in a room and make a fire and get in our cups and pipes, have Thornsen and Epny and their four children around for pie and sweetmeats, the finest Juan wine.”
“Don’t, Aude, please.”
“We’ll be doing all those things we were doing before we left on that van, only we won’t have my boy with us. So what was the point of it all?”
“Our boy, wasn’t he? Our boy?”
He pauses. Nods slowly. “Sorry, yes, our boy. Teyr, if he’s died then it should be for something.”
This last thought seems to strike him deep and it seeps into me like dye into wool.
“If he was here, Teyr, what do you think he’d tell his ma to do? What would he want?”
I stayed for three days with Jelmer, Vuina and their family. I didn’t presume to join Aude in the nights, so slept in a chair in their main room. I wasn’t much use on the runs, give a bit of advice where I could, but they got these lands under their nails and noses as the saying goes.
Jelmer’s is the Retsien Family, sworn to the Drunessen clan. He was chief of the theit and was fair with his Family right through to the hands they hired and the mouths they fed, mine and Aude’s too. It was good to see.
Aude and I talked when we could, but I had to leave him be in the days, when his conscience wouldn’t permit him to idle. He wouldn’t tell me what Khiese did to him; was difficult to ask given I too was reluctant to talk of my own suffering, but I told him something of what happened after Mosa died. He was happy to hear of the children of the Kel
ssen theit surviving, but it upset us badly as I talked of them, and it was the following night I told him the rest of it and what happened to Thruun.
That night too I told the family I was heading back west. He didn’t say anything but left the table shortly after.
On the last morning he walked with me after I said my farewells. Ruisma and Vuina both vowed to look after him. He walked with me through the valley a way, and the air was still, snow falling lightly, nothing that would settle, we reckoned, but it brought a peace to the land.
He kissed me when we come to the standing stone. It was brief and tender and it lifted me.
“Give me some time, bluebell,” he said.
Letters
467OE
For Aude
I’m writing to you from Autumn’s Gate. It might well be high summer but there’s a fucking cold wind raising whitecaps on the sea below me and it’s blowing right through my woollens. I’m in Farlsgrad of course, and wish you were here with me. The port is built on land that rises steeply, something like Citadel Argir, and the king has put me in a grand house overlooking the docks, where I sit scribbling this.
Took me a while to get back over the Circle, but that was fine with me. I did get a horse from the Auksens. Auksen was fair horrified to see me, even when I told him I killed Khiese, maybe because of that. There were no whiteboys about. He said they’d followed Khiese out of there and hadn’t come back, but those few that did to collect tithes had word of trouble and it was me that was the trouble. He said they called me War Crow, but he didn’t know it was me they were talking of. It left me cold seeing that longhouse where Khiese got us and killed the crew that was with me. I told him I just needed a horse and I’d be on my way. Time enough to reckon with Auksen, and I had no crew with me and I’m unable to fight now as you saw.
I went south to Amondell. Khiese was as his word and had not killed them. Skershe and the rest of them rushed out and cheered me and broke open kegs of what they’d had brewing to celebrate the Amondsens seeing off a warlord. The children called me Blackeye there, much as Dottke did. I went to see our bloodlands and stood over my brother’s grave. Couldn’t help thinking then, him in the ground and me standing there in the state I’m in, how it might have all been different, a wish for a different future dreamed about in the sorrow of the present, though Khiese would still have come. I remembered when we were duts, Uncle Kerrig had Thruun on his shoulders, a spoiled boy and a happy boy shining with laughter on a hot summer day, and I held hands with my ma, who sang a harmony with him, for she and her brother would sing beautifully together at gatherings. I had doubted Thruun and shouldn’t have, and so I told him anyway for he was in the land hereabouts with all our fathers and mothers.
Then I went up to the Oskoro in the Almet. They came out to meet me. I told them how grateful I was for their help against Khiese. One among them was moved so must have lost someone close in that fight. Easy to tell their drudhas, they tower over the others, and she bade me shut my own eye so I’d look on her only with the black eye. I saw then how we might speak without words. They took me into their theit, though the few lofty buildings of wood and stone I saw there were crafted to look as though they had grown naturally from the land itself, though I never saw such work as could make stone seem like weavings, with the delicacy of spun sugar. I wanted to draw it all that I might share it with you, but my eye for a picture is worse than these words and they are sadly too poor to relay the wonder of it all.
I gave them Nazz’s fightbrew, what was left of it, and asked if they could tell me what was in it. There were a few among them that put bits of the mulch on their tongue, one just rolled it in his fingers and smelled it, and they came to the same conclusions and wrote down a brew and how to prepare it. They made me a flask of it, but it smelled a bit different and they smiled, suggesting they had somehow improved it. The recipe is safe and I’ll say no more in this letter.
You’re probably asking why it is I didn’t go straight back to Hillfast. I was going to, and going to tell Othbutter what I thought of him for the shit he pulled with Nazz. I went past Faldon Ridge and saw that the Crutters had a flag flying there and it was being used as a barracks for their men. Protecting the Sedgeway, they said.
The roads we’d made were holding up however, bridges as well, and it was easier going to Tapper’s Way.
Back at Tapper’s, Fitblood was there and doing his best to feed many had come from the Circle looking for help. I was moved to see him and see he was well and we had a drink for Omar and remembered him. He hadn’t heard anything about Edma and the girls taken from Chalky. Nobody had, for the whiteboys had gone to ground or fled.
He told me that Thornsen was still running things and couldn’t wait to get word that I was on my way. But he told me also that Nazz had already come back through with his drudha and they said to him I was likely dead.
I realised that if Nazz knew I was still alive he knew that I would most likely expose him or try and go after him. He’d want me dead, and that meant Thornsen or others working for me might be in danger for Nazz runs a serious ganger operation and now he’s back with a better brew he’d be dangerous.
I knew then I’d have to go south quietly and get on a boat over here to Farlsgrad. I was in their army for many years and Salia and Yame had given their life for a Farlsgrad purse. Seemed to me I could solve a lot of problems at once coming here and telling the king what happened and where he could get the recipe and cyca. I left a message with Fitblood to send to Othbutter. I told Othbutter what I’d be doing, told him that I’d left him out of it. This would save his life. In return I expected to be recognised for that. Or he could run for it, see how far he got.
The king received me upon my landing here and I told him what had happened in the Circle. I told him the recipe for Gaddy’s Mash as the Oskoro told it to me to confirm my story and he was satisfied with Salia and Yame’s pursuit. Thornsen had been developing our interest well alongside Tarrigsen’s, and the king saw fit to ensure that we had reduced tithes for berthing and the loading gangs as well as a contract drawn up for farlswood at a reduced cost to us, which will net me a very healthy profit across the Sar in years to come. Assuming I live that long.
The only bad news during my stay here, and I embark tomorrow for Hillfast on a Farlsgrad war galley, is that Tarrigsen is quite ill, bedridden now.
I am desperate to see him. If I do I will give him a kiss from you and send your love. I fear even now it’s too late.
He was a father to us both in a way. I won’t pretend, with all that’s happened, you would feel even a smidge grateful for him having brought us together. But he helped me to have a life, for a time, that was happier than I had any right to. The same I say for you, my love.
Your Teyr
467OE
For Teyr
It was a great pleasure to receive your letter, though a crew of five well-armed men must have cost you a lot of coin for this purpose alone. I worried about you, crossing the Circle on your own like that, even though you know well from your life how to travel without being seen. You have good friends at the Almet, I believe, and perhaps they watch over you even now.
It is easier for me to write how it is I’m feeling than to say it, and still it isn’t easy. I cannot imagine the hardships you’ve endured since we were captured by Khiese. It moves me to think of you walking out of that forest with my amber necklace and coming looking for me. Nothing ever could stop you when you had a mind for it.
I’m sorry I didn’t make it easy for you. I’m sorry that I bit out at you over something as stupid as the necklace’s leather. I have a temper now where once I did not. Sleep comes and goes. Vuina puts something in my beer or my tea, I think, last thing at night. I have scared the children more than once with the dreams I have. You cannot escape them, can you. I say this yet I am forgetful among other things and I need to be alone a lot. I’m changed in many ways and not for the better. I’d be alone all the time, leave here I think if it wasn’t
for their kindness and that I couldn’t survive a day not knowing which belets I could and couldn’t eat, which seeds. But they’ve given me solitude with the chutter, and I wish to work hard and earn what goes in my mouth each day.
I’m healing. I’m glad as well that you might be, that my speaking of any sort of debt to Mosa (though I hated myself for weeks afterwards) was in fact something that would bring you back into life from that place where you sought only death. I had only hoped in saying it that he would inspire you now as he did when we were together. I know that you inspire me.
Aude
468OE
For Aude
I hope this letter finds you with better spring weather than we have here. We could drown in rain, but it seems the bridges Omar and Fitblood built are holding up to the floods at least.
You shouldn’t worry about the expense of getting letters to you. I have no better use for soldiers than that they can keep me in your mind and let me continue to talk to you.
There was quite a scene on the quays of Hillfast when six Farlsgrad war galleys anchored offshore and one sailed in to my main berth full of soldiers—and me of course. Othbutter’s roused and the bells tolled about the docks. Everyone’s come out for a look. I walk down the gangplank with Tusahl, King Crusica’s chief diplomat. She speaks for the king in all matters and betters me in wit and thought in every way. Her seal and scrolls she hands to that pathetic high cleark Tobber without so much as a word and strides past him for Othbutter’s chambers, announcing to all that are there she is here for his help in a serious matter. This calms the crowd somewhat, and the soldiers stay on board the galley of course.