Jimmy the Hand

by Raymond E. Feist

  It was stolen from a guard’s table while the man went to use the privy, and it was tough and black, made from mixed barley and rye and full of husks. That didn’t disturb either Rip or the young man; it was much like what they ate every day.

  ‘Sorry,’ Bram said when his mouth was free; he took a long drink of water and a bite of smoked pork. ‘Right hungry. Haven’t had much to eat today, except hard knocks.’

  ‘Bram, the old man—the Baron—said something really strange.’ Rip frowned, remembering. He couldn’t stop remembering. It played over and over again in his head. ‘And the oily man. He said you were the Baron’s son, and the Baron said not to say that, because you’d killed his lady.’

  ‘Me the Baron’s son!’ Bram laughed. ‘Baron Bram of the Barn! My lord of the Muck-heap!’ Then his face changed. ‘What did he say about a lady?’

  ‘That you’d killed her, and that was why he wanted the bag over your head.’

  Kay cut in. ‘It is like the Wicked King and the Good Prince!’ he said. ‘The evil stepmother wants to kill the Prince, and the King hates him ‘cause his mother died having him, so she puts him out in the woods, but the woodcutter finds him and fights the wolves and takes him home to raise him as his own!’

  ‘That’s just a story, youngster,’ Bram said uneasily. ‘Right now, we’re in the part before the happy ending.’

  Rip looked at him. Bram doesn’t think we will have a happy ending, he thought. But we will! Bram’s a hero!

  ‘What are they doing?’ Flora asked curiously, pointing.

  Lorrie goggled at her, and then at the field beside the road. The strong sweet scent of the cut hay drifted over to the two girls in the dog-cart, and the scythes flashed as the mowers moved down the flower-starred field. Birds burst up out of the grass before them and circled above, diving at the buzzing insects that the blades disturbed. The mowers were singing as they worked—that made it go easier, as she well knew, with memories of days at hatchet and churn and spinning wheel and hoe and rake—until one of them called a halt. He unslung a little wooden barrel he wore around his neck on a cloth sling, pulled the bung with his teeth and tilted it back until a stream arched into his upturned mouth; cider, probably.

  She could see the worn shirt sticking to his back with sweat; he looked up as he passed the little barrel on and waved at her with a grin. He’d be the farmer, the Lord of the Harvest. She knew she was right when he gave the signal to start work again a moment later.

  There were six working with scythes, five men and a woman: swinging a scythe took strong arms and back, much more than harvesting grain with a sickle. Women and girls and youths followed them, raking and turning the cut hay and pushing it into a long roll on the ground, a tad. They’d be back, of course, to keep turning it until it cured, and then to pitch it onto a cart and bring it home to go under cover and feed stock through the next year.

  ‘Why, they’re cutting the hay,’ Lorrie said, conscious of the long silence of her astonishment. ‘First cutting, but a bit late. Haven’t you ever seen hay cut before?’

  Flora shook her head, and Lorrie almost lost control of the reins as she gaped.

  They were going along at a slow trot: Aunt Cleora’s carriage-horse was a big glossy gelding, far finer than poor old Horace, but not noticeably faster. Leather slings gave the dog-cart an odd greasy sway too, not like the forthright jouncing and jolting of a farm-cart, but she had to admit it was easy on her leg, which pained her little more than it would have done while she lay on a featherbed in her friend’s house.

  ‘Never seen hay cut?’ she cried.

  ‘Well, you’ve never seen the Prince’s men parading through the streets of Krondor,’ Flora said.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t mocking you,’ Lorrie assured her. ‘It’s just . . . well, I’ve never met anyone who’s not seen haying, before. That’s all.’ She sighed. ‘That’s when Bram kissed me first,’ she said shyly. ‘At a dance at the end of a haying-day, last year.’

  ‘So you’re going to marry Bram?’ Flora asked, plainly glad to change the subject.

  ‘Well, I think he wants to,’ Lorrie said shyly, keeping her attention on the reins and the horse.

  ‘Gods of love, he’s handsome enough!’ said Flora with a giggle.

  Lorrie giggled in return. ‘He is, isn’t he?’

  She felt a spurt of happiness, absurd under the worry. He isn’t dead, she thought. He cant be dead! But if her mother and father could die, the pillars of all her life, what was safe? Resolutely she pushed that aside, enjoying the day. She looked at Flora. ‘Flora,’ she said suddenly. ‘Why are you helping me?’ Then, hastily: ‘Not that I mind! But you and your foster-brother, you’ve treated me like your own kin—and I’m just a girl from a farm with four cows and one horse, not a fine lady like you.’

  Flora had been frowning, slightly thoughtful. At that she laughed. There was an edge of bitterness to it. ‘Fine lady!’ she said.

  Lorrie blinked at her, confused. ‘Well, you are,’ she pointed out.

  The furnishings in Aunt Cleora’s house alone were worth a decade’s rent for any ten farms in her home valley, with the inn at Relling ford thrown in, and possibly the gristmill.

  ‘I’m Aunt Cleora’s sister’s daughter,’ Flora said slowly. ‘But she ran off with a baker. Ran off to Krondor.’

  ‘Ah!’ Lorrie said, understanding. ‘And your father’s Da cut him off?’

  That happened sometimes back home, too. Young men seemed made to quarrel with their fathers about the time their beards sprouted, and sometimes it grew hot. Even Bram, good-hearted and willing, butted heads with Ossrey sometimes, like rams in spring. That was one reason he had hired himself out to merchants’ caravans as a guard and wrangler now and then, besides the cash.

  ‘Right. And then the baker . . . my father proved his judgment right and my mother’s wrong when he crawled into a brandy-barrel, and stayed there.’

  Lorrie nodded. That certainly happened back home, too. ‘Ah, you’ll have had to work out,’ she said. ‘Do laundry and sewing and suchlike.’

  Vaguely, she knew that was one of the things poor women in towns did; she didn’t suppose they could hire themselves out as maids of all work or dairy-hands.

  ‘Yes, suchlike,’ Flora said shortly, then chuckled. ‘A town can be a hard place for a young girl. All alone, and everyone a stranger. I . . . came back to Land’s End, and things worked out for me, but you didn’t have anybody.’

  They drove on in companionable silence. After a while the land rose; they went through a patch of forest, cool grateful shade that reminded Lorrie painfully of her day hunting. Beyond that there was a man bent nearly double under a load of faggots, his axe on top thrust through the loop of twisted bark that held it together. The woodsman set it down as they passed, rising to rub the small of his back and look—a dog-cart and fine horse with two pretty girls in it wasn’t something that he saw every day. He took off his shapeless wool cap. ‘Missies,’ he said respectfully, bowing slightly.

  Lorrie felt embarrassed by that: if she’d been walking by the road in her own clothes and met him back home, he’d have called her ‘lass’ and waved instead.

  ‘We’re looking for a young man,’ she said.

  At the sound of her voice the man relaxed a bit; they were twenty miles from Relling and his own accent was slightly different from hers, but nobody could hear her speak and doubt she was a commoner too—perhaps a well-to-do farmer’s daughter, at most. Just as he would have placed Flora as city-born and gentlefolk, if she’d opened her mouth.

  He not only relaxed, but also grinned as he straightened. ‘Not a young man any more m’self, miss, but I could wish I were, seein’ the two of you pretty as the spring daisies,’ he said. ‘From over to Relling, are you then?’

  Flora laughed, and Lorrie felt herself smiling despite her worry.

  ‘Hard by Relling,’ Lorrie agreed. ‘We’re his kin, and we’ve a message he’ll want to hear, family matters. He would have passed through day b
efore yesterday, riding—on a good grey gelding. A young man, just seventeen, but man-tall and strongly-built, hair the shade of ripe barley and blue eyes, and a yew bow over his shoulder.’

  ‘Ah!’ the woodcutter said, rubbing his back again and stretching with both hands pressed to it. ‘Yes, I do recall; not seeing him myself, you understand, but Bessa—Bessa at the Holly Bush, just up the high road and off on Willow Creek Lane—mentioned him. No mistaking, from your telling of his looks. Fair mooning over him, she was!’

  ‘That’s my Bram!’ Lorrie said.

  ‘Ah, kin of yours, this Bram, lass?’ the woodcutter teased. ‘Lucky man, to have such sisters!’

  ‘Kin by marriage soon, like enough,’ she said. ‘We’ll ask at the inn, then.’

  The man frowned. ‘Well, I’d not do you an ill turn, so be careful,’ he said. ‘There are some rough sorts stop there.’

  ‘Drovers? Badgers?’ she said. Those who took stock on the road for sale did have a bad reputation—a man didn’t feel as restrained outside his own neighbourhood, in a place where he wouldn’t be back. Drovers and guards often caused more trouble than the money they brought justified.

  ‘Soldiers, down from the manor,’ the woodcutter said, and spat. ‘I’ll not say anything ill of the lord baron, you understand—’

  Not wanting a whipping or the stocks or your ears cropped, Lorrie thought, nodding.

  ‘—but some of the guardsmen he’s hired these last years, they’re right cut-throat, skirt-lifting bastards, and times they’ve lifted skirts will-she, nil-she.’ He winked and put his finger alongside his nose, as if making a locally recognized gesture. ‘Outsiders. Foreigners. No offence,’ he went on.

  ‘None taken,’ Lorrie said mildly—everyone back home thought of anyone from more than a day’s walk as foreign and somewhat suspicious, too.

  ‘Maybe your kinsman was thinking of taking service with the Baron?’ the woodcutter said. ‘Manor’s only a brace of miles further on. It would do the neighbourhood good to have some better-mannered boys wearing the Baron’s livery.’

  Lorrie shook her head. ‘Bram’s a farmer’s son, and badgers for caravan-masters now and then,’ she said. ‘Thanks for your time and help, gaffer.’

  ‘No trouble, talking to a pretty girl on a fine spring day. Summat to talk about, this next season!’

  Lorrie nodded thanks and they drove on, after she made sure of the directions twice; she knew how hard it could be to give good ones, when you knew your district like your own house and couldn’t imagine someone who didn’t.

  ‘We’re close,’ she said to Flora. ‘I can . . . feel Rip.’ She frowned; the sense wasn’t really very directional. ‘Back in Land’s End, I could say “northward, and a bit east” but here all I can say is “close”.’

  ‘And where Rip is, Bram will be, and Jimmy,’ Flora said. ‘And I know where we’ll be, if we want to find out anything.’

  Lorrie looked at her, and Flora gave a wry smile, seeming older than her age; she often did, to Lorrie’s way of thinking, like a woman grown. ‘Where?’

  ‘At the tavern. Where men drink, they talk.’ With a flick of her wrists, Flora moved the gelding to a slightly faster pace, anxious to get to the tavern.

  SEVENTEEN

  Plan

  Jimmy fidgeted.

  ‘Why aren’t we in there?’ Jimmy asked.

  Looking at Baron Bernarr’s mansion was boring; profoundly, deeply boring even to someone as patient and used to waiting as a thief. The big square building just sat there, amid its frowzy neglected gardens, silent save for an occasional voice or rider coming down the lane from the main road, and the eternal beat of the surf on the cliffs half a mile away. Even the vines growing up the grey granite sides seemed to have died of tedium; for they were brown and sere even though spring was well along.

  An occasional glitter of steel showed at the big iron-strapped doors, as a sentry paced. That was it. Jarvis Coe shrugged. ‘Three reasons,’ he said, holding up a hand and bending down fingers. ‘First, what’s loose in there makes anyone reluctant to go in; so we’ve been finding reasons not to.’

  He looked serious; Jimmy glanced over from behind the tree that sheltered him and stared at Coe in open-mouthed astonishment. ‘You mean we’re delaying and making excuses and you know it?’ he burst out.

  ‘Yes.’ Jarvis held up a hand. ‘It’s not procrastination. It’s magic. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference.’

  ‘Oh.’ Jimmy had no idea what ‘procrastination’ meant, but he wasn’t about to let on; besides, he thought he understood the gist of what Jarvis was saying. Jimmy shivered a little at the idea of things affecting his mind and emotions without his knowing. ‘What are the other reasons?’

  ‘Second, it’s difficult to get in—it’s a fortress, even if it isn’t a very strong one, and it is garrisoned, even if the troops aren’t very numerous or very good. There are only two of us.’

  ‘Why can’t you get . . . oh.’

  ‘Yes. Right now, Bas-Tyra has other things on his mind. By the time an official complaint went through, all the evidence would be safely buried.’

  ‘Oh.’ As I thought, the sea hides a lot of sins. ‘What’s number three?’

  ‘It isn’t quite time yet. We’ll have to strike when they’re distracted—and that means waiting almost until the time for their sacrifice.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Yes. That means risking them going through with it before I can get inside to stop it.’ Jarvis took out a stick of jerky and began chewing it. ‘That would be very bad. And the magic—the side-effects of that necromancer’s magic—is affecting our judgment.’

  I want to go home to Krondor, Jimmy thought. The wrath of the Upright Man and the menace of the secret police was looking more attractive all the time.

  ‘At least Flora and Lorrie are safe,’ he said.

  The Holly Bush wasn’t much of an inn, Flora decided as she jumped down from the dog-cart in the dying hours of the day. In fact, it was more of a farmhouse, judging by the odours of hay, turned earth, manure and mud. It had two storeys, to be sure, and was sheathed with plank which had weathered silvery-grey from many seasons without paint, but it was a thatched farmhouse just the same, with a barn and sheds behind, a field of young wheat beyond that, and an orchard still bearing drifts of blossom. The only signs of its trade were the branch of holly pegged over the lintel, the benches set outside on either side of the door, and the width of the beaten muddy path that led up from the ruts of the road and a larger-than-usual paddock for stock in which travellers’ beasts might be accommodated.

  No, I take it back, Flora thought. They’ve put half a dozen flagstones around the door, and there’s a wood scraper. Civilization!

  One of the worksheds was a smithy, not a fully equipped one, but a little farrier’s set-up with a small charcoal-fired hearth, a bellows and a single anvil: just right for shoeing horses, or doing minor repairs. A man was at work there, tapping a shoe-blank into shape with the ring of iron on iron; a youth worked the leather bellows. She waved, and he dipped the blank into a tub of water and set it aside. Then he came striding through the barnyard, the wooden pattens on his shoes keeping the valuable leather out of the mud. He went to take hold of their horse’s bridle, looking at it with respect.

  ‘Will you be staying, then, missies?’ he asked, in a burr much like the woodcutter’s.

  ‘If you’ve room,’ Flora said, and saw him perk his ears up at her Krondor speech.

  ‘Room and to spare,’ the innkeeper-cum-farmer said. ‘No merchants or travellers by right now.’

  He was a man of medium height and build, already getting summer’s tan, and knotty with the muscle of hard work. The only thing unusual about him was the tint of red in his hair, and the freckles that stood out on his face.

  ‘I’m Tael, and I keep this inn and farm. Bessa!’ he went on, turning his head to shout. ‘Bessa! Come on, take the ladies’ trap. Davy, get out here!’

  Flora moved to he
lp Lorrie down from the dog-cart, as Tael clucked at the sight of the stick she used to spare her leg. ‘Here, lean on me, miss,’ he said. ‘Bit mucky here, with the rain.’

  ‘Thank.you,’ Lorrie said shyly. ‘My name’s Lorrie.’

  A brow raised at the accent, so similar to the local’s, and quite different from Flora’s. He glanced back and forth between them; they didn’t look like kin either, though he had probably assumed they were.

  ‘We’re looking for Lorrie’s friend Bram,’ Flora said, and Tael’s face changed briefly, for an instant.

  ‘Later,’ he said crisply. ‘Come inside. Room’s three a night, and that includes the evening meal.’

  Two youngsters came bustling up; a boy like the man with fifteen years cropped off and an amazing scatter of pimples with purple rims, and a buxom young girl with freckles of her own, who took the wicker box that held their luggage.

  The innkeeper led them respectfully to a table in the main taproom, and Flora realized that she was enjoying herself. It was nice to be treated with respect—not chased out, or shaken down for a share of her earnings or personal favours on the side.

  With sunset coming on, the interior of the inn was dim and a middle-aged woman made her way around it and lit bundles of oil-soaked rag in clay dishes. These added a smoky tang of linseed oil to the cooking smells in the room; the floor had good fresh rushes on it, though, and the hearth was cheery.

  ‘Bean soup with ham,’ the woman said, calling from where she ladled two bowls full from a big iron pot hanging over the coals. ‘There’s sweet cider, hard cider, ale and small beer. Cider mulled, if you want it. You’ll be hungry, travelling far. From Land’s End?’ She set the crockery bowls down before them, and rounds of bread, butter, cheese and onions with them, and a wooden dish of sea-salt.

  ‘Yes,’ Flora said. ‘I . . . live with my Aunt Cleora, in Land’s End. Mulled cider for me.’

  Tael came back in, stepping out of his pattens, his feet crunching on the cut river-reeds that covered the floor which gave a pleasant green scent, for they’d been mixed with pungent herbs and flowers that gave off a scent of dried memory, like hay.