When he looked up again, Ammala was gone, and the cat had not moved from its nap.
What am I doing here, boarding with heretics? he thought.
But the pale sky gave no answer, so after a swig from his canteen, he swung a log onto the stump.
Exertion had always steadied him, and he looked forward to it now. He was his best when at a physical task, whether shoveling or chopping or breaking rocks. No need to think, no need to talk, just do the job consistently, correctly, for as long as needed.
It was something that no one else on either of his teams had ever learned, nor seemed to care about. The only one who had ever listened to him at camp was Weshker, and thinking about that hurt his heart now. The look on the Corvishman’s face as Darilan led him away…
He had the first log in place, the froe wedged into the wood-grain, but he brought the mallet down too hard. A shake cleaved away roughly, full of splinters. He glared at it, then at his hands, then at the log, trying to apportion blame. As always, the finger pointed back at him.
“Take a breath. Forget it all,” he mumbled. He had no direction, but at least he had work to do. It would help. It had to.
Setting the tools down, he wrenched the splintered shake off and tossed it aside, mentally dubbing it the start of the bad-wood pile. He knew that technically he should not be splitting shakes from firewood—that most of it was likely to end up in the bad-wood pile—but as the other option was to trek to the Mist Forest and chop down a tree…
That brought back the memories. He closed his eyes and tried to shoo them away, telling them that he had just come out of the forest unscathed so they and their nightmare counterparts could just leave him alone. But reason had never prevailed before, and now he saw their faces: the team he had lost in the mist.
Burned. Frozen. Caged and mutilated. Each of them had been hit by an arrow—as had the rest of the logging crew and the freesoldiers that had guarded them—but while Cob had survived the sudden frost that gripped his side, the others had died on the field. The golden arrows ignited them, the silver caused the frost, and the green struck through them and then sprouted in instants, vines and branches tattering flesh as they took root and grew into mature trees. That was how the Mist Forest advanced, he thought; seeded through the deaths of its enemies.
He remembered his team leader’s face, trapped screaming beneath a layer of bark.
The man had deserved it.
Cob wiped sweat from his brow, already knowing—hearing—what his five former teammates would have said about this place. ‘An old woman, a little boy and a farmwife? You could do whatever you want. After all, they can only hang you once, and you’ve already earned it. This place is so isolated, too. No one will find them, no one will know.’
“Except me,” he muttered.
‘And you’ll forget.’
His mouth compressed flat, because that was a lie—a line they had tried to use on him after what happened during the Fellen riots. But worse was that as an Imperialist, there were things he should be doing, things not so different from what his ‘friends’ implied. Kill the cat, for one; even if the Crays were not witchfolk, cats were anathema to the Empire and were destroyed wherever Imperial forces found them. Burn those books, confiscate the metal tools and nails for the Army, turn the women over as witchfolk since that dangling doll showed the witchy mindset, even if it was not true…
Bring the boy to one of the work-camps, where he would be set to a task like Cob had been, until he was old enough for conscription.
Dire thoughts. Useless thoughts, because he could do no such thing now. Repositioning the froe against the remaining wood, he raised the mallet and prepared himself.
Then he heard footsteps.
Glancing sidelong, he saw Ammala approaching with a wooden plate in one hand and a straw hat in the other. He set the tools down again and tried to compose himself. She did not look like what he had expected of witchfolk; the Word of Light said that witches were seductresses and cannibals, which implied something less matronly and with a larger stew-pot. But then, watching the sway of her hips, he had to admit that she was quite womanly. He had not been around many women.
“I don’t keep much for between meals,” she said as she neared. “Supper is at dusk. But you look like you ought to put something in your stomach.”
He fixed his attention on the plate as she handed it over. Crusts of bread, salted plums, soft goat cheese and a small clay pot of preserves: real food. Better than the Army. He sat down on the splitting stump and started in wordlessly.
Ammala lingered, fists on hips, and under her gaze Cob tried to eat like a person instead of a starving dog, even though the tang of salt on his tongue made him ravenous. There was a little knife for cutting and spreading. He could not remember if he had ever used something so civilized. The preserves were sour rince, a hateful fruit, but not bad with the cheese.
“So, you’re with the Army.”
He choked on bread. Ammala leaned down to whack him on the back and he found that this put her bodice at level with his watering eyes. Illanites were not laced-up prudes, and she had more cleavage than he could handle, with that red-and-grey neck-cord hanging right down the middle of it. He whipped his head away and coughed the bread into the dirt, face hot. The scars in his side twinged dully.
“That seems like a yes.”
Ducking his head, he fingered the little knife then released it. He would not do anything. If she hollered, he would just run. With the plate.
Silence drew out, and realizing she expected an answer, he sighed. “Yeah.”
“A conscript?”
He looked up to find her regarding him keenly, her face devoid of pity but also of fear. Her proximity intimidated him, but maybe this was how things were. After his mother, the closest he had been to women were the lady-medics at camp, and they were as mean as badgers.
“No, ma’am. ‘M a slave,” he said.
The furrows on her sunworn face deepened, then smoothed. The tight line of her lips eased. “I see. And how did that happen?”
“Legacy, ma’am,” he said, looking back down to the food. “M’father committed treason and was killed before he could be tried, so they slaved me in his place.”
“And your mother?”
“Gone.” He kept his voice flat. “Five years gone. Got no other family.”
A long pause. Then she touched his shoulder and he flinched but it was just a touch, not a grip, so after a moment’s tension he relaxed. Her scrutiny was unrelenting; he knew he should stare back, stare her down, but could not muster the will. His comrades would be laughing at him right now, but she had not screamed or smacked him, so maybe things were going well.
“Where are you from, Cob?”
Relief flooded him; that was an easy question. “Up north, High Country Kerrindryr. Village called Risholnis,” he said as he picked at the food again. The last bit of bread lay in the dirt. Should have spat it into my hand, he thought. Can’t retrieve it now, not in front of her. He popped the last plum in his mouth instead, relishing its tart saltiness, and chewed it off the pit quickly.
“Yet you’re not returning there?”
“I dunno, ma’am.”
She was silent a moment, then said, “So you’re not a deserter.”
Cob pulled the pit out, then gave a rueful laugh and looked off to the dry fields and the road that ran hidden through the tall grass, heading southward. It called to him but he did not want to go. “S’pose I am,” he said. “Wasn’t on purpose.”
“How can you accidentally desert?”
He tried to respond, but the thought brought back the falling embers, the glint of moonlight in Darilan’s wild eye. Nausea welled up. He swallowed it down along with the remains of the plum, but it was like swallowing his own fist. When he did not answer, Ammala sighed and withdrew, folding her arms under her bosom, and he glanced to her sidelong, half wary and half grateful for the distraction.
“How long has it been?” she
said. “Since you left.”
“What day is it?”
“Fire’s day, Sebryn the 20th.”
“Eight, then. Eight days tonight.”
A moment passed, then she said, “Should I believe you? How can I know that you’re not some Imperial agent sent to sniff at my doorstep?”
He opened his mouth, wanting to ask Why would Imperial agents care about you? but he knew the answer. Instead he set the plate on his knee and pulled up his left sleeve to expose his shoulder. The brand, shiny and stretched with age, stood out clearly against his dusky skin: a stylized mountain over his designation, KRD1184, the numbers nearly illegible.
Ammala covered her mouth with her hand.
“All I got,” he said, looking away again as she leaned down to inspect it. He was no longer ashamed of the brand, but having her that close was unsettling.
“How old were you?”
“Eight.”
“Younger than Aedin,” she murmured. “And now?”
“Seventeen.”
“By the Goddess.” Her voice sounded strained but he kept his gaze down. A thin line of ants threaded past his feet, already aware of the fallen bread, and he pretended to find them interesting.
“That enough?” he said when her shadow leaned away from him.
“It will do. Well then, let me take that.” She traded the plate for the hat and he watched sadly as she lifted the remains of the cheese away. Living on water for days meant that food was likely to come right back up as soon as it hit the depth of his stomach, but still he was hungry—hideously so. Better go slow, he told himself. He had seen men come out of the isolation cells and fairly kill themselves with camp rations.
“Rest when you must,” she said. “I expect you have some recovering to do.”
He watched the flow of her patterned skirts as she vanished around the cottage, then looked down. At his feet, the ants had arranged themselves in a professional horde, crawling over the lump of bread with antennae waving. Sadly, it still seemed appetizing.
As he rose, the world wobbled, and he locked his legs as dizzy stars glittered and faded. His hands and forearms felt leaden, but he tugged the bandana around his neck and clapped the hat on, then stooped to pull the log onto the splitting stump again. No matter what she said, he was here to work, not rest.
Redemption through service.
*****
The sun declined in the west.
Ammala sat on the step and fanned herself with her hat. Out at the road, a wagon passed, distant enough to be silent, its canvas cover cresting the grass like the back of some strange sea-creature. Far to the southwest, thunderheads hulked over the Lisalhan Sea; perhaps they would reach the sea-cliffs, or perhaps they would wisp away before they touched shore, but the air was dry and motionless here, awaiting them.
The rotten crunch of an old shingle drew her eyes upward. Another crack and she heard Cob toss it down into the sideyard. He had determination, she gave him that. Perhaps he was what he said he was.
Beside her, leaning against the stucco wall, was the stick he had brought with him. A proper Imperial would have lifted it against Nana Cray when she attacked him, no matter that she was a brittle old hag. A devout Imperial would have done more than just stare at the cat, though Cob’s fear had been enough to mark him as a Light-follower. And a true Imperial monster would have had a much different reaction to the threshold.
So he was just a man. No, not even a man; a boy.
Yet still dangerous.
Isolated though her cottage might be, Ammala was no stranger to the Imperials. Her family had been lucky to be together at home when the Army passed by. Huddled in the darkened cottage, they had waited out the snufflings and scratchings and the guttural voices beyond the walls as the Imperial hounds checked every possible entry and found them all protected. The red line, the Goddesses’ blessing, had held them at bay, but she knew well that its existence had been noted. They knew her family as ‘witchfolk’ now, as followers of the Trifold Goddess, and some day their awful Light would return.
But not today, it seemed. Not through this boy—which was fortunate, as she was bound to shelter him. The Way of the Hearth allowed no breach of the hospitality bond, not unless he broke it first.
She would have to talk with Aedin once Cob left. Explain to him the difference between a lost soul and a stray Imperial, about the danger of being so open-handed. As much as Cob’s tired eyes appealed to her as a woman and a mother, she had too much to protect.
Too much to lose, and too much that she had already lost.
The distant clank of a goat’s bell reached her through the stillness. With a sigh, she clapped her hat on and levered up from the step.
Beyond the shield of fruit-trees, the land had grown wild, the acres her husband had once plowed now gone to weed and sapling. A narrow track cut through it toward the Targams’ eastern fields and the shallow pond in between. That was where the girls took the goats every day, or up toward the edge of the woods, and though they did not have to go so far, Ammala thought they appreciated the time away from cottage and family. Izelina especially.
Now she could just glimpse their bonnets above the grass. Brushing dust from her skirts, she moved to intercept.
*****
Cob heard the ruckus from afar: a girl’s squeal, a boy’s laughter, the patter of running feet and the braying of goats. From his vantage he could not see past the little orchard, but when the clank of bells drew closer, he leaned out on his ladder to get a look.
Two girls in red bonnets and heavily embroidered dresses were penning up a handful of scrubland goats—sleek-coated creatures not much like the shaggy mountain ones Cob had tended in his youth. Ammala had a mud-covered Aedin by the ear, and though he was nodding like he was listening to her, his eyes kept following the younger of the girls, who had muddy hand-prints all over her dress. After a moment, Ammala released him, and he trudged over to take up buckets with a great sigh before darting into the fields again.
Once the goats were fenced in, Ammala steered the girls past Cob’s ladder toward the door. The little one kept her head down, picking burrs from her dress, so all Cob saw was her black braids peeking out from the bonnet, but the elder one stared straight up at him with narrowed eyes and a pinched expression similar to the crone’s.
Cob looked away, then grabbed the edge of the roof in panic as the ladder jerked. The girl strutted off with her head high.
Kicked my ladder, he thought incredulously.
“Supper soon, I expect you to wash properly,” said Ammala as she passed below. “I don’t want you in the house in your state.”
Looking down at himself, dust-caked and sweaty, he was not surprised.
Once he had stowed the tools, Ammala supplied a bundle of clothes—just as bright-colored and embroidered as the rest of the family’s garb—plus some rags and soap, and also lent him an old razor and strop. He busied himself with honing the blade, keeping his distance from the children as they washed up in the water Aedin brought. By the time they left, the sinking sun had begun to bronze the tall grass. He shaved by feel, then stripped off his old clothes and picked up the soap. The scent of lye penetrated the scar-tissue of his nose and brought back a tide of memories older than the army camp, older than the quarry, nine years and hundreds of miles distant.
He did not know why everything suddenly reminded him of Kerrindryr. Sometimes in the quarry he had felt homesick, and he had missed the mountains after being sent down to join the Army, but in his two years as a Crimson, the dull ache of his childhood had mostly faded.
Perhaps it was the goats. Nothing else about this place held any similarity; not the cottage, not the gardens, not the climate or the people. The only child of a pair of near-hermits, he had rarely been in the company of others, his one friend a mischief-minded village child who visited infrequently. Most of Cob’s time had been spent alone among the goats on the scrubby slopes above Risholnis, looking down upon the small houses and speck-like peop
le from a distance that seemed impassable.
His father had hunted and foraged the mountains, sometimes vanishing for weeks. His mother made baskets from the young plant-stems Cob gathered, and sheared the goats, spun the yarn, wove and dyed and sold what she could at the village for food and supplies. Neither of them had been talkative people.
What Cob remembered most about his father, beside the anger he felt now, were the few times that Dernyel had tried to teach him to play turnabout. They would sit there at the hatch-marked table, Cob staring at the black and white stones that served as game-pieces, with nothing but the clack of the loom and his father’s occasional suggestions to break the silence.
He never had figured out the game.
As he scrubbed, he listened to the goats in the pen, nudging and sighing and gnawing at their fence. Even they seemed like a different animal to the Thundercloak breed he had herded. As agile as sticky-footed lizards, those cliff-adapted goats would have been up a tree by now from sheer boredom. Years of chasing them across snow-freckled slopes and dragging them off ledges with his crook had made him as stubborn as them, but that seemed the only trait he still shared with his past self. The boy who had roamed free on the mountains was gone.
By accident, he scrubbed too hard at his scar and hissed as the whole length of it twinged, front to back. Though it had healed completely, it sometimes felt like the arrow-shaft was still in him, a ceaseless phantom of the attack. He touched the arrowhead on its cord but its crystalline substance was warm from skin-contact, not icy as it had been in the forest; the pain was just a pain, not a signal, not a warning.
He finished up, then pulled the new clothes on. Garishly multicolored, short in the sleeves and legs and wide around the waist, they were still better than camp clothes, and he did not bother to pull his boots on; the paths between garden plots were hard and thorn-free, and his toes appreciated the feel of warm earth.
Out among the grasses, the chirr of insects stilled.
He raised his head, suddenly aware that it was dusk. A faint white glow limned the lip of the Rift—the mother moon close to rising—but the sun had vanished over the horizon, leaving only a lingering band of orange and red.
The Light of Kerrindryr (The War of Memory Cycle Book 1) Page 7