by Jim Butcher
Amara nodded. "Or you could be a Cursor."
Tavi wrinkled up his nose and snorted. "And spend my life delivering mail? How exciting could that be?"
The slave nodded, her expression sober. "Good point."
Tavi swallowed against a sudden tightness in his throat. "Out here, on the steadholt, crafting keeps you alive. Literally. Back in the cities, it isn't as important. You can still be someone other than a freak. You can make your own life for yourself. The Academy is the only place in Alera where you can do that."
"Sounds like you've thought about this a lot," Amara said quietly.
"My uncle saw it once, when his Legion was on review for the First Lord. He told me about it. And I've talked to soldiers on their way up to Garrison. Traders. Last spring, Uncle promised me that if I showed him enough responsibility, he'd give me a few sheep of my own. I figured out that if I took care of them and sold them next year, and saved up all of my pay from the Legions, that I could put together enough money for a semester at the Academy."
"One semester?" Amara asked. "What then?"
Tavi shrugged. "I don't know. Try to find some way to stay. I might be able to get someone to be a patron or… I don't know. Something."
She turned to look at him for a moment and said, "You're very brave, Tavi."
"My uncle will never give me the sheep, after this. If he's not dead." The tightness in his throat choked him, and he bowed his head. He could feel tears filling his closed eyes.
"I'm sure he's all right," the slave said.
Tavi nodded, but he couldn't speak. The anguish he'd been trying to keep stuffed down inside rose up in him, and the tears fell onto his cheeks. Uncle Bernard couldn't be dead. He just couldn't. How would Tavi ever be able to live with that?
How would he ever face his aunt?
Tavi lifted his fist and shoved angrily at the tears staining his cheeks.
"At least you're alive," Amara pointed out, her voice quiet. She put a hand on his shoulder. "That's nothing to take lightly, given what you went through yesterday. You survived."
"I get the feeling that when I get back home, I'm going to wish I hadn't," Tavi said, his voice choking, wry. He blinked away the tears and summoned up a smile for the young woman.
She returned it. "Can I ask you something?"
He shrugged. "Sure."
"Why endanger what you'd been working toward? Why did you agree to help this Beritte if you knew it could cause problems for you?"
"I didn't think it would," Tavi said, his voice plaintive. "I mean, I thought I could have done it all. It wasn't until nearly the end of the day that I realized I was going to have to pick between getting all the sheep in and those hollybells, and I'd promised her."
"Ah," said the slave, but her expression remained dubious.
Tavi felt his cheeks color again, and he looked down. "All right," he
sighed. "She kissed me, and my brains melted and dribbled out my ears."
"Now that I can believe," Amara said. She stretched her foot toward the water, flicking idly at its surface with her toes.
"What about you?" Tavi asked.
She tilted her head to one side. "What do you mean?"
He shrugged and looked up at her again, uncertain. "I've been doing all the talking. You haven't said a thing about yourself. Slaves don't usually wander around this far from the road. Or a steadholt. All alone. I figured that, uh, you must have run away."
"No," the young woman said, firmly. "But I did get lost in the storm. I was on my way to Garrison, to deliver a message for my master."
Tavi squinted up at her. "He just sent you out like that? A woman? Alone?"
"I don't question his orders, Tavi. I just obey them."
Tavi frowned, but nodded. "Well, okay, I guess. But, do you think you could come along with me? Maybe talk to my uncle? He could make sure you got to Garrison safely. Get you a hot meal, some warmer clothes."
The slave's eyes wrinkled at the corners. "That's a very polite way to take someone prisoner, Tavi."
He flushed. "I'm sorry. Especially since you probably saved my life and all. But if you are a runaway, and I don't do something about it, the law could come back to hurt my uncle." He pushed his hair back from his eyes. "And I've done enough to mess things up already."
"I understand," she said. "I'll come with you."
"Thank you." He glanced up at the doorway. "Sounds like the rain's stopped. Do you think it's safe to go?"
The slave frowned and looked outside for a moment. "I doubt it's going to get any safer if we wait. We should get back to your steadholt, before the storm gets bad again."
"You think it will?"
Amara nodded, the motion confident. "It has that feel to it."
"All right. Are you going to be all right, walking?" He glanced at her and down at her foot. Her ankle was swollen around a purpling bruise.
Amara grimaced. "It's just my ankle, not the rest of the foot. It hurts, but if I'm careful I should be all right."
Tavi blew out a breath and pushed himself to his feet. All the cuts and injuries twinged and ached, muscle protesting. He had to brace his hand on
the wall for a moment, until he got his balance back. "Okay, then. I guess it isn't going to get any easier."
"I guess not.' Amara let out a small, pained sound as she got to her feet as well. "Well. We make a fine pair of traveling companions. Lead the way."
Tavi headed out of the Memorium and into the chill of the northern wind blowing down from the mountains in the north and the Sea of Ice beyond. Though Tavi had kept the scarlet cloak from the Memorium, the wind was still almost enough to make him turn back inside and seek shelter. Frozen blades of grass crunched beneath his feet, and his breath came out in a steamy haze before his mouth, swiftly torn apart by the winds. There could be no more argument on the subject: Winter had arrived in full force upon the Calderon Valley, and the first snow could not be far behind.
He glanced at the slave behind him. Amara's expression seemed remote, distracted, and she walked with a definite limp, bare feet pale against the icy grass. Tavi winced and said, "We should stop before long, to get your feet warmed up. We could strip one of the cloaks, at least try to wrap them."
"The wrappings would freeze," she said, after a moment's silence. ''The air will keep them warm better than cloth. Just keep going. Once we get to your steadholt, we can warm them up."
Tavi frowned, more at the way her attention seemed fixed on things elsewhere than at what she had to say. He resolved to keep a close eye on her: Frozen feet were nothing to scoff at, and if she was used to life in the city, she might not realize how dangerous it could be on the frontier, or how quickly frostbite could claim her limbs or her life. He stepped up the pace a little, and Amara kept up with him.
They reached the causeway and started down it, but had walked for no more,than an hour when Tavi felt the ground begin to rumble, a tremor so faint that he had to stop and place his spread fingers against the flagstones in order to detect it. "Hold on," he said. "I think someone's coming."
Amara's expression sharpened almost at once, and Tavi saw her draw the cloak a little more closely against her, her hands beneath it and out of sight. Her eyes flickered around them. "Can you tell who?"
Tavi chewed on his lip. "Feels kind of like Brutus. My uncle's fury. Maybe it's him."
The slave swallowed and said, "I feel it now. Earth fury coming."
In only a moment more, Bernard appeared from around a curve in the road. The flagstones themselves rippled up into a wave beneath his feet,
which he kept planted and still, his brow furrowed in concentration, so that the earth moved him forward in one slow undulation, like a leaf borne upon an ocean wave. He wore his winter hunting clothes, heavy and warm, his cloak one of thanadent-hide, layered with gleaming black feather-fur and proof against the coldest nights. He bore his heaviest bow in his hand, an arrow already strung to it, and his eyes, though sunken and surrounded by darker patches of sk
in, gleamed alertly.
The Steadholder came down the road as swiftly as a man could run, his pace only slowing as he neared the two travelers, the earth slowly subsiding beneath his feet until he stood upon the causeway, walking the final few paces to them.
"Uncle!" Tavi cried, and threw himself at the man, wrapping his arms as far around him as they could go. "Thank the furies. I was so afraid that you'd been hurt."
Bernard laid a hand on Tavi's shoulder, and the young man thought he felt his uncle relax, just a little. Then he gently, firmly pushed Tavi back and away from him.
Tavi blinked up at him, his stomach twisting in sudden uncertainty. "Uncle? Are you all right?"
"No," Bernard rumbled, his voice quiet. He kept his eyes on Tavi, steadily. "I was hurt. So were others, because I was out chasing sheep with you."
"But Uncle," Tavi began.
Bernard waved a hand, his voice hard if not angry. "You didn't mean it. I know. But because of your mischief some of my folk came to grief. Your aunt nearly died. We're going home."
"Yes, sir," Tavi said quietly.
"I'm sorry to do it, but you can forget about those sheep, Tavi. It appears that there are some things you aren't swift to learn after all."
"But what about-" Tavi began.
"Peace," the big man growled, a warning anger in the tone, and Tavi cringed, feeling the tears well in his eyes. "It's done." Bernard lifted his glower from Tavi and asked, "Who the crows are you?"
Tavi heard the rustle of cloth as the slave dipped into a curtsey. "My name is Amara, sir. I was carrying a message for my master, from Riva to Garrison. I became lost in the storm. The boy found me. He saved my life, sir."
Tavi felt a brief flash of gratitude toward the slave and looked up at his uncle, hopefully.
"You were out in that? Fortune favors fools and children," Bernard said. He grunted and asked, "You're a runaway, are you?" "No, sir."
"We'll see," Bernard said. "Come with me, lass. Don't run. If I have to track you down, I'll get irritable."
"Yes, sir."
Bernard nodded and then frowned at Tavi again, his voice hardening. "When we get home, boy, you're to go to your room and stay there until I decide what to do with you. Understand?"
Tavi blinked up at his uncle, shocked. He had never reacted like this before. Even when he'd given Tavi a whipping, there had never been the sense of raw, scantily controlled anger in his voice. Bernard was always in control of himself, always calm, always relaxed. Looking up at his uncle, Tavi felt acutely aware of the sheer size of the man, of the hard, angry glitter to his eyes, of the strength of his huge hands. He didn't dare speak, but he tried to plead with his uncle, silently, letting his expression show how sorry he was, how much he wanted things to be right again. He knew, dimly, that he was crying but he didn't care.
Bernard's face remained hard as granite, and as unforgiving. "Do you understand, boy?"
Tavi's hopes crumbled before that gaze, wilted away before the heat of his uncle's anger.
"I understand, sir," he whispered.
Bernard turned away and started walking down the causeway again, back toward home. "Hurry up," he said, without looking back. "I've wasted enough time on this nonsense."
Tavi stared after him, shocked, numb. His uncle hadn't been this angry the day before, when he'd caught Tavi leaving. What had made this happen? What could drive his uncle to that kind of fury?
The answer came at once. Someone he cared about had been harmed- his sister Isana. Had she truly almost died? Oh, furies, how bad was it?
He had lost something, Tavi knew, something more than sheep or status as a skilled apprentice. He had lost his uncle's respect-something that he had only just began to realize that he had possessed. Bernard had never treated him like the others, not really-never shown him pity for his lack of furycraft, never assumed Tavi's incompetence. There had been, especially over the past few months, a kind of comradeship Tavi hadn't known with
anyone else, a quiet and unobtrusive bond between near-equals, rather than his uncle speaking down to a child. It was something that had been built slowly over the past several years, as he served as his uncle's apprentice.
And it was gone. Tavi had never really realized it was there, and it was gone.
So were the sheep.
So was his chance at the future, of escaping this valley, escaping his own status as a furyless freak, an unwanted bastard child of the Legion camps.
Tears blinded him, though he fought to keep them silent. He couldn't see his uncle, though Bernard's impatient snarl came to him clearly. "Tavi."
He didn't hear Amara start walking until he had stumbled forward, after his uncle. He put one foot in front of the other, blindly, the ache inside him as sharp and more painful than any of the wounds he had received the day before.
Tavi walked without looking up. It didn't matter where his feet were taking him.
He wasn't going anywhere.
Chapter 15
For Amara, the walk back to Bernardholt proved to be a long and arduous exercise in ignoring pain. Despite her words to Tavi earlier that morning, her ankle, injured during the wild landing beneath last night's storm, had stiffened and burned hideously, barely supporting her weight at all. Similarly, the cut Aldrick ex Gladius had dealt her back in the renegade camp throbbed and ached. She could barely ignore one injury without the other occupying her full attention, but even so, she had enough presence of mind to feel pain on behalf of the boy trudging along in front of her.
The reaction of his uncle had not been unkind, she thought at first. Many men would simply have commenced with beating the boy, and only after would they have had anything to say about why the beating had been delivered, if at all. But the longer she walked, the more clear it became just how deeply injured the boy had been by his uncle's words-or perhaps the lack of them.
He was used to being treated kindly, and with some measure of respect. The quiet, cool distance that the Steadholder had shown was new to Tavi, and it had hurt him badly-dashing his hopes for making a future for himself at the Academy and driving home the notion that without furycrafting of his own, he was nothing more than a helpless child, a danger to himself and others.
And here, on the wild frontiers of the realm of humanity, where life or death hinged on the daily struggle against hostile furies and beasts, perhaps it was true.
Amara shook her head and focused on the stones of the causeway beneath her feet. Though she felt some empathy for the boy, she could not allow his plight to distract her from her task, namely, to discover what was happening within the Valley and then to take whatever action she thought best to see to it that the realm was protected. She already had some facts to piece together, and her attention was best spent on them.
The Marat had returned to the Calderon Valley, something that had not happened in nearly seventeen years. The Marat warrior Tavi and his uncle had confronted could well have been an advance scout for an attacking horde.
But the growing light of day made that possibility seem increasingly remote, bringing inconsistencies to light. If they had truly encountered a Marat, why had the boy's uncle showed virtually no relief upon finding his missing nephew? For that matter, how had the Steadholder been on his feet again at all? If the wounds were as serious as the boy had described, it would have taken an extremely talented watercrafter to have had Bernard on his feet again, and Amara didn't think that anyone that skilled would live far from one of the major cities of the Realm. Surely, the injury must have been less than the boy described-and if that was true, then perhaps the incident with the Marat had been likewise exaggerated.
Put into the context of fiction, Tavi's tale of his adventures the previous day made a great deal more sense. The boy, crushed with feelings of inadequacy, could have made up the tales in order to make himself feel more important. It was a far more plausible explanation of what he had told her.
Amara frowned. It was a more plausible explanation, but the boy's courage and reso
urcefulness could not be denied. Not only had he survived the violent furystorm of the evening before, but he had also rescued her-at considerable danger to himself-when he could have taken himself to safety without risk. Such courage, conviction, and sacrifice rarely went hand in hand with falsehood.
In the end, Amara decided that she had very little information to work with, until she had spoken to the uncle as well-and he seemed to be in no mood for any kind of discussion. She would have to learn more. If the Marat were preparing to attack again, defending against them would require a major mobilization, at the end of the year and at fantastic expense to both the High Lord of Riva and the Crown's treasury. There would be resistance to such news-and if she went to the local Count with nothing more than the word of a shepherd boy to go on, she would doubtless hear endless repetitions of the tale of the boy who cried thanadent. She would need the testimony of one of the Count's trusted landowners, one of the Steadholders, to get more than a token response.
The best reaction she could hope for in such a case would be for the Count to dispatch scouts of his own to find the enemy, and even if they managed to return from such a deadly encounter, it might be with a Marat horde on their heels. The Marat could swallow the valley in one assault and ravage the lands around Riva, while its High Lord, held captive by the onrush of winter, could do little but watch his lands be destroyed.
Ideally, with Bernard's testimony, she might get the Count to mount a more active defense from Garrison, and to send to Riva for reinforcements. Perhaps even manage a preemptive strike, something that might disperse the wave of an oncoming horde before it broke upon the Realm's shores.
On the other hand, if there was no imminent invasion and the Crown's agent roused the local Legions and incurred vast expenditure on Riva, it would be a major embarrassment before the other High Lords, and the Senate. Gaius's reputation might not survive the subsequent attacks, further agitating the already restless High Lords with what could be tragic results.