by B. V. Larson
Business was brisk on the night the Pact ended. In fact, he found he was running low on wards even before the disaster out at the Faerie mound. When he heard the news, he trebled his prices immediately. Wards flew from his shelf, and he multiplied the price by ten. His customers snarled at him then, rather than thanking him, but that didn’t bother Old Tad. What did bother him was that he ran out of stock very fast and cursed himself.
He noted the desperation in the eyes of each additional fool that came to his dirty booth, only to be turned away empty-handed. He had sold out much too cheaply. He could have demanded much more. He thought of buying back some of his stock and redistributing it to the most wealthy in town, demanding titles to land, perhaps.
It was too late tonight of course, everyone was busy barricading their doors in the midnight hour. No one would venture forth until morning, scared as they were of the Faerie. What an opportunity he’d missed! Certainly, he had the cash now to keep his jug full for two winters at least, but that could have been just the beginning. He saw this as a once-in-a-lifetime chance. If he managed to get these folks what they wanted so badly, naturally at a steep price, he could change the status of the Silure clan itself. He could build a clanhouse if he wanted, on prime property. All those snots who had looked down their long noses at his family could come begging then.
He fumed and smoked as the town shuttered down for the night.
Then an idea struck him. He smashed his fist into his palm. He stood up on his creaking porch and grinned.
He tipped Slet, his worthless grandson, out of his hammock with a rude toss. Slet scrambled up, ready to fight until he saw it was crazy Old Tad.
“The town had better be on fire,” Slet growled.
“None of that tone now,” said Old Tad. He might have slapped the boy on a different day, but not this night. He needed him. “I’ve got two silvers for you.”
Slet’s expression froze. He eyed the coins disbelievingly as Old Tad slid them under his nose. “What for?” he asked warily.
“I want you to go down to the river shore, this very minute. Take the wheelbarrow and gather me a load of flat stones, about the size of good wards.”
Slet’s eyes flicked to Old Tad’s, then to the coins that stared back at him like two flashing eyes.
“Can it wait till morning? I’ve got a headache.”
Old Tad snatched back his hand and the coins with it. “Oh sure, it can wait. But the coins will be gone by then.”
Slet blinked. “Okay then. I’ll do it, right now.
“That’s a good lad.”
“But stones like that won’t do no good. They’ve got to be natural worn with a hole for the….”
Slam! Old Tad struck him a hard one, right behind the ear. It wasn’t the first time Slet had felt such a blow. Life in his clan had delivered many such hard knocks. But he wasn’t expecting it and as far as he was concerned, he didn’t deserve it.
He got to his feet. “Look, old man—”
But Old Tad cut him off. He stopped the boy’s complaints the best and fastest way possible, by sliding out the hand again, this time with five coins on it. Slet’s voice halted.
“Two now. Three when you finish. And no questions. No word of this to anyone, not ever. Deal?”
Slet rubbed at his head. He nodded, taking the two coins Old Tad gave him. He said not a word.
“There’s a good lad. Be quick now, or maybe I’ll decide to dock your final payment.”
It took Slet nearly an hour to return, and by that time Old Tad was pacing the creaking boards of his shack with growing impatience. He had already prepared all his tools and counted out every leather cord he had. But there was only so much he could do without having the actual stones in his hands.
When Slet finally rolled up with the load, he sighed in relief, forgetting about his plans to slap him and dock his pay for slowness. Instead, he paid the boy and ordered him out of the place for the night.
Slet didn’t argue. The boy put the coins at the bottom of his only pocket that for certain had no holes in it, and left.
By morning, Old Tad had drilled and manufactured dozens of new wards. He had, in point of fact, never found a real one. He had never even bothered looking. It was simply too much work. A well-made forgery brought just as much money for a fraction of the effort. When he was found wandering down on the river shoreline, people had always assumed Old Tad was searching for more wards, but in truth he was probably drunk and staggering.
He drilled each hole carefully, as he had done in secret for years. He brushed away the dust from each hole, and made them look worn. Creating them previously had been something of an art form for him. He had long studied the way a naturally worn stone looked and had taught himself to simulate the appearance with a tapping hammer, a file, whetstone and steel brush.
He knew, of course, the wards would do nothing to stop the Faerie. But they would, he was certain, line his pockets with silver in the morning.
Whistling as he worked, Old Tad labored longer and harder than any time he could remember in his life. He argued with himself cheerfully about what price he would set. Ten silvers? Twenty? He settled on the princely sum of thirty silvers each. After the first dozen wards, he ran out of leather cords. He figured he would drop the price on those by a coin and people could just darned well make their own cords.
When dawn finally broke, he took a deep breath and smiled tiredly. People were already tapping at his shutters.
He spent the day selling his wards at grossly inflated prices. The Pact had been broken, and that might just have been the best thing that had ever happened to him.
Chapter Five
Sam’s Funeral
Brand was tired and saddened the morning after the Pact had been broken. In the morning light the remains of Froghollow looked even more dismal than it had after the fire had been put out the night before. Wisps of blue smoke spiraled into the trees and drifted there. The only building of significance that had survived the battle with rhinogs was the barn, but there was no comfort or shelter to be found there. The floor of the barn was a thatch of straw mixed with Sam’s dried blood.
They were trying to decide how to break the news to their elders when Uncle Tylag, Aunt Suzenna and Barlo had returned to the house. Corbin had to explain to his tearful parents that during the night their house had been attacked and set ablaze. Before the flames had grown too high, they had gone back into the house and saved what they could, but with the coming of daylight, it looked like a pitiful pile of belongings. Even the painting of Brand’s parents had been burnt.
Worst of all, of course, was Sam’s death. In the bright, revealing light of morning, Uncle Tylag and Aunt Suzenna began the process of burying their son. The kitchen table, made of stout oaken beams, was badly scorched, but had survived the fire relatively intact. The house had partially collapsed around it. Tylag and the grim-faced Rabing boys cleared a path through the rubble to drag the table free. Setting it in the yard beside the well, they stretched Sam’s beheaded body upon it. They set his head in its rightful place, using wads of cloth on either side so that it wouldn’t roll off into the dirt.
At first, the men had kept Aunt Suzenna from her son, but she protested strongly. “I’m no shrinking towngirl. I must be allowed to fix my boy properly,” she said.
With Telyn’s help, she did all the things her mother had taught her. With great care, she bathed the skin and the hair, hid the severed neck with a scarf from her own throat and set coins on each eyelid. To turn away merlings and worse things, she had Barlo dig up a whole clove of garlic in the ruins of the root cellar. This she placed in her son’s dead mouth, which she tied shut with a strip of leather.
Telyn wrapped a river stone ward in the palm of his hand, tying the thong to the dead, white hand. “Lest the Faerie find you,” she whispered to the corpse.
For a shroud, they used Sam’s woolen cloak, which was just long enough with the hood sewn shut and the hem cinched tight around his ankles.
In the afternoon, they began the procession as properly as they could. As they carried Sam down to the cliffs, Brand’s face was slick and wet with tears. From behind and around him, he heard a dry sobbing, but he didn’t look to see which of his relatives it was.
Gudrin and Modi, silent during the rituals, followed the procession at a discreet distance. Unlike some of the other clans, the Rabing clan traditionally held very private funerals. Outsiders were rarely allowed. The Battleaxe Folk understood this and respected it.
As was also their tradition, each of the clan members present spoke a few words, recalling Sam in life. When it was Brand’s turn, he didn’t hesitate, but told them all of catching the largest dragonflies he had ever seen with Sam, who knew so well the marshy haunts of such creatures. He described the flittering wings of the blue-greens, the largest and Sam’s favorites. As boys, his cousin had taught him to coax the insects to light upon his finger if he remained very still and held it just so.
Aunt Suzenna’s turn came last, as was custom, since she had birthed the boy. Unexpectedly, she turned to the two Battleaxe Folk. “I would ask that our guests be allowed to speak. With your blessing, of course, Tylag.”
Uncle Tylag, blinking back a tear, nodded.
Modi looked about uncomfortably. “I apologize, but I have not the craft, my lady.”
She nodded in understanding. She looked expectantly at Gudrin, who stepped forward.
“I will speak from my own experience, as is your custom,” she said, for once not consulting her book. “Although I did not know your boy, I am no stranger to grief. I was born and raised in the place known as the Earthlight, a great complex of caverns that exist beneath the blue-white peaks of Snowdon itself. There is no sunlight there. Instead, the lurid red glow of the lava flows illuminate the primary caverns. The Great Eastern Cavern was my home. Each day it is illuminated and warmed by light reflected up from the red depths of the mountain. For thirteen hours each day, the huge metalworks that work to shutter and unshutter the light from the rivers of fire stand fully open. It takes an hour each day to open and close the great vents, thus providing the Kindred an hour long dawn and dusk. The great vents were in the slow act of closing during the time which I’m thinking of.
“Thus it was in the evening dusk of the Earthlight, at the furthest edge of the Eastern Cavern, that I learned of my brother’s death. I lived then where the lava-fires were only a crimson flickering in the distance on my Uncle Hakon’s mushroom farm. We subsisted there on the frontier, far from the city of Subterran, on the edge of the eternal dark that bred the eyeless monsters of the underworld. I was raised on that farm, my Uncle’s farm, as my parents had perished soon after my birth.
“The day I recall was the day that my older brother Eirik died, my only surviving sibling. He had been killed on the distant surface, which at that time I had never seen,” here she paused, and all could see that she grieved still.
Brand noted that she didn’t mention how her brother had died, and wondered if it could have been at the hands of the Faerie, or perhaps the hands of men. Could Gudrin recall the centuries-gone wars between men and the Kindred? How old could Gudrin truly be?
“My clan members and I trudged in silence through the mushroom thickets and the rolling jambles of stonefalls from the distant roof of the cavern to the temple in Subterran. That evening the service went the long and slow way of such temple services. Each of the golden bells was rung in turn by the initiates. Twelve silver hammers were laid upon their anvils and heated to the point of incandescence by the robed and cowled priest-smiths. I was impressed by the appearance of twelve hammers. From my Uncle’s depreciative comments about the expedition that my older brother had gone on, I would have thought Eirik would have rated no more than seven, or perhaps nine hammers, at the most.
“Once the last horn had blown and the last dirge had been played, the empty urn that represented Eirik’s lost remains was hoisted up the rocky hillside toward the lava-pits. I and my Uncle carried one side of the pavilion, my Aunt Syla and my eldest cousin lugged the other. Sweating due to the intense heat of the lurid lava chamber ahead, we bore our burden silently. We stopped before a vent that spewed up heated gasses from the depths of the Earth, allowing these hot winds to instantly dry and sear our sweat-beaded brows. Uncle Hakon mumbled a memorized passage from the Teret and together we all heaved the urn into position and sent it sliding down into the fiery heart of the Earthlight.
“I lingered, despite the intense heat, to watch the urn be consumed in a plume of yellow fire. There was such power there, I could feel it. Then I followed the others back down to the temple. Soon after, tired and sullen, I and my relatives trudged back to the stone farmhouse. We carried lanterns as the Earthlight vents were now just three glimmering red lines in the distance, and even the eyes of the Kindred need some light to see by.”
Here Gudrin paused to hold her hands, palms outward, toward those assembled. “I speak these words to tell you how close are the Kindred to the River Folk. Here, you are about to cast beloved Sam’s remains from a cliff into the great flood of the Berrywine, much as I did cast my own brother’s remains into the Earthlight. We of the Kindred see the Earth and its depths as our origins and our finally resting place, just as the River Folk feel that they belong to the watery depths.”
Aunt Suzenna finally spoke then, as it was clear that Gudrin had finished. “Thank you, Gudrin. We agree that the Kindred and the River Folk are closely related peoples. Both of us, may I add, perform this type of service to keep the Faerie from performing mischief with our dead. A month ago, I would not have taken our death rituals as anything but empty gestures. Now I know such rituals are ancient wisdom.”
As everyone had finished, Suzenna looked to Tylag, and both nodded with tears in their eyes. It was time to send their son into the water for his final journey. The body, weighted now with stones, was cast into the green-white flood of the Berrywine.
As Gudrin had gazed into the Earthlight countless years earlier, Brand and Corbin lingered on the cliffs. They heard the thunder of the rapids and felt the cold gusts that blew up from the distant river.
Chapter Six
Dando’s Trick
As they were the last to leave the cliffs, they were the only ones to hear the baby’s cry. At first, Brand wondered if the family cat had followed them out on the procession. After a moment, he recognized the sounds of an infant and his eyes searched the woods. He saw nothing.
“Do you hear it too?” asked Corbin, standing at his side.
Brand’s eyes darkened with a new thought. “If this is some new trick of the Faerie, I for one do not plan to cooperate.”
Corbin’s face twisted. Brand saw a much darker emotion, that of murderous intent, on his cousin’s face. After all, it had been the Faerie who had just caused him to send his brother into the floods.
Moving with quite intensity, the two paced apart and moved into the trees in the direction of the sounds. If it was one of the Faerie having a bit of fun, they were talented. They came to a thick towering pine that rustled in the breeze from the cliffs. Each circling around the tree in a crouch, they came upon that which they least expected to find.
It was an infant, kicking and crying weakly in the dust at the bottom of the tree. The child had few clothes on. They stared down upon it, and felt pity in their hearts.
“Where did you come from?” asked Brand kneeling beside the child. It looked at him curiously.
Corbin did not kneel. He eyed the woods around them suspiciously.
Brand took off his cloak and wrapped the child in it. Could someone have abandoned it here, hoping that their family would take care of it?
“Maybe you ought not touch it, Brand,” said Corbin.
“Why not?”
“Have you thought this through? The Pact is freshly broken. Never before have we found a babe in these woods, but after a very strange night, we find our first today.”
Brand looked at him in growing concern. He jumped to
his feet. “By the River!” he shouted. “If this is a changeling, I’m shocked by how convincing they can be!”
Corbin snorted. It was his turn to kneel and study the child…if that’s what it was.
“They could hardly be successful at their business if they weren’t highly convincing,” he pointed out reasonably. He leaned forward and spoke to the thing wrapped up in Brand’s cloak. “If you are a changeling, know this, foul creature. You will regret this trick for a long while!”
He took up a stick and moved as if to prod the child.
“That will be quite enough!” said Telyn, appearing on the instant and surprising everyone. She slapped Corbin’s wrist and frowned at him. She studied the baby closely.
“He looks human enough to me,” she said.
“Where did you come from?” Brand asked her.
“Where did you get lost in the woods?” she asked. “That’s what I asked myself when I realized that you hadn’t followed us for an extended time. I came looking, and it was a good thing. Here I walk up and find Corbin about to poke an infant with a sharp stick.”
“We’re not sure—” started Corbin.
“Yes, yes, I know, you think it’s a changeling. Only, this isn’t how they usually operate, is it?”
The child, while they talked about it, took a great interest in Corbin’s stick and gripped it, chewing hungrily on the offending point.
“Think about it, Telyn,” said Brand, “is it not the perfect plan? Aunt Suzenna has just suffered the loss of her son, how better to gain her trust than to appear here now, in her moment of weakness, as a replacement child?”
At this, a tiny chuckle was heard by all of them. Everyone looked up, into the branches of the great pine.