The Dark Ferryman

by Jenna Rhodes

  A flight of river birds took to the air at her back, and Grace turned in her saddle, watching them with a slight frown in the hazy sunlight. They were not the alna of her years along the Silverwing River, but a small, tender bird which sat in the reeds and bank grasses to eat the fat bugs along the muddy shores and hated to fly if it did not have to. Something akin to her and the gelding had set them off. She pulled rein and turned Barad into a stand of sturdy shrubs to wait and see what might be following.

  In a handful of moments, she could see a beribboned straw hat, glossy amber hair tied back, and hear the trot of a stout mountain pony headed her way. A smile tugged at the corners of Rivergrace’s mouth. She waited until Nutmeg and her pony had clearly breasted the reeds nearby, dented chamber pot and saddlebags bouncing on the pony’s withers with every trotting step before pulling Barad out of hiding.

  “And where is it you think you’re going?”

  Nutmeg hauled back on her reins. “Wherever it is you are. Did you think I’d let you go without me?” Her pony plowed to a stop and promptly dropped its head to lip and chew on whatever flowers and blades of grass it could find, opportunities of this sort never to be neglected. Mountain ponies held different equine priorities than did the hot bloods.

  “What about your nursing charge?”

  “Him?” Nutmeg curled her lip. “If he was a fledgling, I’d have kicked him out of the nest long ago. Besides, he has another nurse now and one that will be far tougher than I on his sorry hide. She carries a whip. So where is it we’re going?”

  “North,” said Rivergrace shortly, after gazing for just a moment at Nutmeg. “To Ferstanthe.”

  Nutmeg seemed to let that sink in. “The library, eh,” she answered slowly. She pursed her lips in thought a moment before remarking, “I don’t understand it. You’ve got that look on your face, and you ride after a pile of books and scrolls.”

  “That look?”

  “Aye. The face you always made when Hosmer grabbed your hair ribbons off one time too many or Garner tricked us into doing chores and we found out too late we’d been taken. That look that says you’ve had enough and you’re ready to fight back. So, I ask myself, what’s in a book of Ferstanthe?”

  The chill that had been inside Grace for days since nearly drowning in the embrace of the River Goddess felt as though it had finally begun to melt. She hadn’t quite known for sure what she intended from Azel d’Stanthe of Ferstanthe. Sanctuary maybe. A good listener with a bit of advice. Or, perhaps, something more. She straightened the reins in her hand. “I’ve lost the queen’s trust. Or maybe I never really had it. Perhaps queens take a good deal longer to decide on friendship.”

  “Lariel wouldn’t know a prize apple if it fell on her head.”

  “Be that true, I must find a way to convince her. She doesn’t think I’m Vaelinar, Nutmeg.”

  “What? Is she blind? Do pointed ears grow everywhere like leaves on trees?”

  “It’s more than the ears, I’m certain.”

  “You’ve the eyes and you can make sweet water out of th’ most poisoned brew. What more does she want?”

  “I don’t know.” Rivergrace shook her head a little. Her movement made her horse restive, and he pawed at the ground. “I have to know who I am, where I start and where I want to finish. I was unraveled, Meg, and then rewoven, but I have to know . . . I have to know what threads I’ve knotted within me, what soul is mine. And then, to fight, I have to know what I want. From her, from Sevryn . . .”

  “He’s gone daft, aye.”

  Not a question but a statement coached in confident Dweller tones. She looked up to meet her sister’s cinnamon eyes. “In a way,” Grace agreed. “They haunt us, Cerat and the River Goddess. They have their claws sunk in us, and they want . . . I don’t know. I thought we were done with them, but they aren’t done with us.”

  “Touched by a God or Demon—it leaves its mark the way a dousing with pig slop leaves its stink, even after you wipe it away.”

  Her nose wrinkled a bit as she knew from her childhood days on the farm and in the orchards just what Nutmeg meant, even as she forged ahead, adding, “But don’t you be thinkin’, Grace, that you haven’t got powers of your own. That Goddess wouldn’t have sunk herself into you, hiding behind you, if you hadn’t already been able to find sweet water and draw the poisons from it, and love the rivers the way you did. She didn’t bring that to you, you already had it. You were born with it. She couldn’t have survived in you without that.”

  “I have to know who I am, to fight her. And to help Sevryn, if there’s any way to help. There has to be an answer somewhere.”

  “In the books.”

  “Why not? We live, we dream, we think, we die. Sometimes we take a moment to put all this down on a page, to puzzle it out or leave a map for those who follow behind us, to show them the way and the traps. Don’t you think?”

  “ ’Twould be the wisest thing to do, but in my mood, I’m not about to admit there’s a man with a lick of common sense anywhere, let alone in a library. Still.” Nutmeg straightened her straw hat. “This cannot be the first time a Dweller and a Vaelinar have fallen in love, and I’d like to read the tales. I’m not all that sure a pretty word or two will help us in a fight, but it’s a place to start, and I’m right behind you if there’s a chance to set things right.” She put a heel to her pony and reined it close to Barad who snorted at the fuzz-hided beast all shaggy in his winter coat.

  Grace smiled down at her. “He’ll be sorry, you know.”

  “Tree’s root, he will! Who got to th’ villains first yesterday, eh? Me and my pot or that woman and her whip? He’ll be in a sorry state, and it’ll be his own doing.” Nutmeg settled herself in her stirrups and clucked to her pony to keep up as Rivergrace headed her horse out. They rode to the border and ridges of Larandaril, Nutmeg’s voice chattering in merry counterpoint to the thud of their mounts’ hooves. She had much more to say about dull-witted men who let their eyes be blinded with gilt and sparkles, be they Vaelinar, Kernan, Dweller, or Galdarkan, as her short-legged mount snorted and huffed to keep up with the longer-striding Barad.

  Quendius halted his horse. “It’s time we parted ways for a bit.”

  Narskap, blood clotted thickly over one ear, and with a sizable lump on his head, looked as if he wished to say something, but his thin lips remained shut.

  Quendius touched his quiver of arrows. “One failed. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Call up Cerat and ask him.”

  Narskap did not hold his words this time. “No,” he returned. “That I will not do. To invoke him, I will draw the attention of those we don’t want, and it might well loose the Demon beyond my control.”

  “So you would trade a small failure for a great one.”

  “I deem it the wiser course. You had two successes.”

  Quendius regarded his hound for a long moment, flint-black eyes sparked with a great darkness. “I did, and I shall remember that.”

  “I know.”

  “Ride, then. I shall catch up with you.”

  “They will be on the border, right behind us.”

  “And this, I know. But they won’t find me, and they had better not find you. No, I want to sit in camp a bit and see what kind of hornet’s nest we’ve stirred up. Allow me my amusement.”

  Narskap dropped his chin in agreement and turned his horse to the northeast. Quendius watched him go before he dismounted and then led his mount along the stony ridges, stopping now and then to brush away his tracks with a tree branch, and to scent the wind as if he, and not Narskap, were the hound. He camped in stealth and watched as hunting troops passed by, not catching sign or spoor of his passage and as they circled in frustration before heading back into the cloistered land of Larandaril. He preferred to be behind his troubles rather than in front of them, he thought, as he crossed the rugged land that made it near impossible to approach the favored country by more than single file, and on foot. It was natu
rally extremely difficult to invade except by the single broad pass at the river’s end, and that, of course, was always guarded. Yes, the Anderieon family had known well what it had done when it had taken up this country and made it theirs, defensible against not only those of the world they’d trespassed on but also easily held against those of their own kind. They had taken the spoils of their occupation and made a homeland for themselves.

  It was during his slow and deliberate journey overland, looking for weaknesses, that two passed him on horse and pony, alert to their surroundings yet unaware of his presence as he pulled aside and pinched his horse’s nostrils to keep him quiet, and he gathered a destination from their chatter. That road would take him north, as he needed, and then he could turn east and south again to his own badlands. As they passed him by, speaking earnestly of their plans and hopes, it occurred to him that he had not been to Ferstanthe in many, many decades and that he might find some useful knowledge there, or even that what the library contained might well be as dangerous as one of the Demon-imbued weapons Narskap so carefully crafted for him. He should look into it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  "BAD WEATHER, AND EVERYWHERE, it sounds like.” Tolby Farbranch eyed this end of Calcort, where vineyards and nut orchards and fruit groves abounded, before the rugged rock wall and ridge that protected the city gave way to even rougher scapement that any army would hesitate to boil over. The soft side of the city had gates and walls, thick and tall and brawny but they were beyond the city limits of that, and as a Dweller who liked his horizons far flung, it pleased him to live here on the outskirts. This was his vineyard and his cider house down below, with his small home, and while it was not the spread he’d held on the Silverwing, he could still be proud of it. Proud and worried.

  “It all comes round, doesn’t it.”

  Tolby patted his youngest son on the shoulder as he straightened, and dusted the soil from his hands. It drifted on the wind, fine and dry, as he would wish it didn’t. Soil should be rich and moist. He squinted at the horizon where only the faint wisps of clouds looked like they bore any rain at all. Row after row of trimmed-back vines spun away from him like spokes on a wheel. They’d be all right, for now. They were dormant till the earliest of spring, but like all life, they wouldn’t thrive on just a moment of rain or a quick answer when there were thousands of questions or one meal when a lifetime stretched far ahead of one. No, nurturing was ever ongoing and cumulative.

  Keldan said, “I’ll finish with these rows. I think I heard Garner and Hosmer scuffling in the house.”

  “Did you now? Over what?”

  “Hard to tell. It’s not like Hosmer to be off duty so early, so it might be something important.” Keldan, the youngest, the one with the farthest to go when he decided to leave, just smiled faintly and went back to turning minerals into the rows with his hoe, one step at a time, his mind far away on whatever it was Keldan thought about.

  Tolby got to the main house, at town’s end, in time to see Hosmer swing up on his horse and trot off in a huff, his left hand to his jaw. The boys had been tumbling around a bit, it seemed, and Garner looked up with a guilty start as Tolby stomped the dust off his boots at the doorjamb and came in. Tolby’s gaze swept the room and saw the pack and traveling clothes and raised his eyebrows.

  “Where do you think it is you might be going?”

  “Like father, like son,” grumbled Garner. “This is just the same discussion I ended with Hosmer.” He blew on his bruised knuckles.

  “It’s never ended. One battle breeds another. Is it something that will bring a tear to your mother’s eye?”

  “No, sir, never that.”

  “So what is it, then, you’re heading out the door to do?”

  “Word on the street is that the Oxforts are hiring caravan guards. Hosmer has been leaned on to go and join up, by way of spying on the traders and see what they’re up to. I talked him out of it, for to do that, he’d have to abandon his post with the Town Guard and his reputation, and he’s worked far too hard for that.”

  “You talked him into disobeying orders.”

  “No, Da. ’Twasn’t his commanding officer who did the leaning, but a fellow who was just curious and thought they could earn some extra merit by having an adventure. Not wise, I told him. Not wise at all.”

  “I tend to agree with you on that. Why is it better you go instead?”

  “Now this part you won’t be liking at all, but you asked,” Garner said solemnly, giving him a look from under a lock of hair hanging low across his brows, reminding Tolby not a little of their recalcitrant little mountain stallion, Bumblebee. “I gamble a bit, and have gambled with him, and have even been into him for some coin.” He held his hand up before Tolby could bite off a gruff word. “You asked, Da, so now listen. I’m not proud of it, but there it is, and that’s the way it is with gamblers. I learned. Most don’t. I gamble, but I stop when I’ve lost what I can afford, which is very little. But Bregan Oxfort has a sharp memory, swift as a trap on a fur line, and he’ll think that my wanting to get out of town quickly and with a bit of muscle around me and money in my pocket to solve my troubles will be the right of it. He’ll never suspect me of spying on him.”

  "Sound thinking.”

  “I thought so. Hosmer disagreed with me a bit, but I persuaded him.” Garner bent to pick up his pack. “I’m off, then. I left a note for Mom, and now this talk with you, and I’m done.”

  “You’ll be back when?”

  “When I know enough to be of some help to the City Guard and Sevryn.”

  “Sevryn?”

  Garner cleared his throat. “Well, now, I might have forgot to mention that he came through to put the bug in Hosmer’s ear.”

  “That’s some forgetting. Did he carry word from Meg and Grace?”

  “Nothing on paper. He said only that the queen is knotted up in plans and that we should be hearing from the girls soon.”

  “Ah.” Tolby rocked back on his heels, visibly disappointed. He had hoped for more, and his work-worn wife would be far more disappointed than he. He stuck a thumb in his belt to gather other thoughts. “He’s going with you, then?”

  “Sevryn? Not him. If you believe in being Demon-ridden, he is. He has other missions, elsewhere, and scarce took enough time to stop and talk with us. Aymaran stood tied to the rails, and blowin’ hard but Sevryn barely took notice of him. He had somewhere else to be, and quickly.”

  “And I keep you from your destiny, too, it seems.”

  “I am going, Da.”

  “I know. I guess I canna say no. You’re grown and you’ve full memory that I used to be a caravan guard myself, once. Not a misspent youth but a hard one, with hard teachers and long lessons.”

  “I know that.” Garner gave him an honest smile, reminding Tolby of the long-ago days when all his sons were just knee-high lads. He stood in the doorway, both impatient to be off and just as patient to listen to his father. Tolby would be lying to himself if he hadn’t known his son spent a lot of nights gambling, for there were days when the money Garner slipped into the family earnings were all that had kept the vineyards and cider house going in the early seasons.

  “So what lesson did you learn, son?” asked Tolby quietly.

  Garner paused, and then answered, “Don’t be catching me upside the head for this one, Da, but I learned that Bregan Oxfort is a cheat and if I’m going to play him, I need to be a bigger cheat than he is.” He gave a wink before ducking hastily out the door.

  Tolby considered the rough wooden planks before patting down his vest and finding his pipe. Smoking instrument in hand, he went out the door as well, good slow paces so as not to see his son riding down the road, and headed to his cider press. He had a bit of work to do before starting another crush; as he stepped into the building, the scent of apples overwhelmed him, beautiful crisp apples in all their hues of red and gold and even a flushed pink, waiting to be pressed and made into a drink that Tolby Farbranch could boast about. He sat o
n an overturned empty barrel and tamped down a bit of toback in the bowl of his pipe, lit it, and then enjoyed a deep draft or two while considering what he would tell his wife about their son. It was likely, he conceded, that she probably already knew as much about the affair as he did, with the exception of Garner’s actually leaving, for Lily was as wise about the children and family as any woman he had ever known. He smiled about the stem of his pipe. He couldn’t have married a finer lass, and the wonder of it was that she loved him as much as he loved and adored her. Hard as some of the years had been, still, he would not have had his life any other way.

  He smoked a bit more, thinking, and then let his pipe go cold, before putting it away and rising to work on the presses. With his whittling knife, he stooped over the workings, trying to smooth out a piece that stubbornly refused to mesh its gears with the others as well as it could, nothing that would stop it from doing its duty but still brought a clenching to his teeth when he heard it during the crush. Some time later, with the winter sun gleaming through the windows, and himself covered in fine shavings, he could hear a bit of commotion out on the streets. Curiously, he walked to the doors of the great cider house and peered out as a strident voice hawking wares reached him.

  “Gods awaken! Gods be a-listenin’ again. Buy your altars here! Prepare to hear Their guidance. Great portents and omens begin to stir! Be ready!”

  Tolby snorted as he saw the man, a priest, bedecked with poles like any street vendor, staggering a bit under the weight of his relics, children trailing him and occasionally poking sticks at his thin ankles in hopes of tripping him to raise an even greater excitement. Tolby emerged as he saw that and flapped his arms at the younguns, scolding them for their treatment of a priest, for all that he himself did not put much stock in the Kernan strain. Sandals flapping and robe dusty, the Kernan came to a halt, his poles swaying and gave him a grateful smile. “Thankee, Master, these children do be curious and feisty these days.”