Returner's Wealth

by Paul Stewart

  Micah surveyed the buckwheat. It swayed luminous green in the wind, rippling like the surface of a lake.

  ‘You want I should gather some up?’

  Eli nodded. He unshouldered his rucksack, stood it upright, open-topped. ‘Go ahead, son,’ he said. ‘There ain’t nothing like a shot of green liquor to ward off the bite of fullwinter.’ He pulled two empty flour sacks from the rucksack and handed one to Micah. ‘If we fill these, we’ll have enough for a two-quart batch at least.’

  Side by side, they commenced stepping through the screefields, plucking the tops of the buckwheat and dropping the green seedheads inside the sacks. After an hour or so the sacks were full and, stowing them carefully in their packs, they moved on.

  They rested up that night beside a stream that was swift and, though barely a stride across, thick with plump fish. They ate well and slept early. The wind had dropped and the thin yellow hook of a waxing moon hung over the jagged silhouettes of the distant crags.

  They added sugarcones and blackroots to the green buckwheat the next day, and Eli gathered a cluster of yellow stones he told Micah he would grind to a powder that killed scabies and lice. The day after that they spent some time up on a sandstone bluff, uprooting plant after prickly plant, to reveal the woody gulchroot that Eli was so partial to chewing.

  On the fourth day, after a night spent in the wyrmescent warmth of a shallow rockcave, they swung west and took a narrow track scratched into the base of high cliffs. It was like a graveyard, the ground littered with the corpses of wyrmes, some freshdead, others stripped and bleached: jackwyrmes and mistwyrmes that had missed their footing on the steep rocksides, pitchwyrmes that had been driven into the wall of rock by violent storms, and the occasional larger wyrme – greys, buffs and blue ridgebacks – that had stumbled over the cliff edge and plummeted to their death.

  Eli garnered what there was to garner. Bones for scrimshaw. Needlefang teeth. Skins. Claws. Some meat he considered fresh enough to salt. But the real prize was the flameoil.

  They stumbled across the body of a lanternwyrme late in the afternoon, its body lying beside a small tarn – the Claw Lake, as Eli called it, on account of its shape. The dead creature was big and old, its pelt too pitted and scarred to be of any value, its meat too tough to eat.

  ‘Yet it might still reward us,’ Eli said.

  He drew his skinning knife from his belt, and Micah watched closely as the cragclimber cut a slit in the creature’s extended throat. Then, using a hooked finger, he pulled out the knot of fibrous nodules and held it up, triumph in his pale eyes.

  ‘This is what gives the lanternwyrme its fiery breath,’ Eli said, as he decanted it into a glass jar. ‘Hottest and fiercest flame of all the lesser wyrmes.’

  With the jar carefully wrapped and stored in his rucksack, Eli set off again, heading south.

  They tramped on into the hours of darkness that evening, Eli only stopping when they had crested a sharp rise, and dropped down into the windlee on the other side. They set their packs down in deep hollows, ate sechemeat, drank loamy water and fell asleep without setting a fire. The sky was overcast. There was no moon.

  The sun broke into Micah’s deep sleep as it rose above the distant mountains and he awoke to find himself alone. He sat up, rubbing his eyes in surprise. Before him, some half a mile yonder, stood a bunch of stacks, one of them speckled white and smoking.

  ‘Eli?’ he said anxiously. ‘Eli?’

  He scanned the wide open sky.

  ‘Eli?’

  The cragclimber appeared from a behind a low ridge and strode towards him, his expression dark.

  ‘Hush up, boy,’ he told him.

  Micah swallowed and felt foolish. Eli hunkered down next to him and nodded back the way he’d come. ‘There’s tracks back a ways,’ he said. ‘Recent tracks, of five travellers. Kith. Three men, I reckon, two women.’

  He pulled his spyglass from inside his jacket, put it to his eye and trained it on the speckled stack ahead. Micah did the same. As he focused in, the blur sharpened and the tall rock stood out in stark relief against the sky; dark basalt patched with speckles of milky white.

  At the top, thin twists of yellow smoke plaited themselves together as they rose into the early-morning sky. Halfway down, the stack bent back on itself in a series of rocky ledges, like a pile of carelessly stacked books. The lower slopes were screeflecked and boulderstrewn, and as Micah’s gaze fell upon the clastic brown bedrock, his hands began to shake.

  He lowered his spyglass and reached inside his shirt to touch the scar at his chest, which had started throbbing.

  ‘Thing is,’ Eli said, his gaze still upon the stack, ‘we know that a wyrme and its kin were up there at the top. We know they killed two kith, and all but sent you off to the next world too …’ He rubbed a dry hand over a stubbled jaw. ‘That told me they were protecting a wyve.’

  Micah turned to look at Eli. The cragclimber’s blue eyes were unblinking.

  ‘See, whitewyrme wyves ain’t like no other wyves, Micah,’ Eli went on, his words ponderous slow. ‘They don’t like to be rushed. Some say they can lie hidden for years before they have a mind to hatch out. Yet once a hatching gets going, it happens fast. A light starts to glow inside the wyve, a faint glimmer first off, but intensifying as the days pass. That’s what alerts the wyrmekin,’ he added, ‘to watch over them. Then, week or so later, ofttimes during the rain season, the wyve hatches.’ He smiled. ‘Tiny little critters, fresh-hatch wyrme­lings. But they grow powerful fast, whitewyrmes, nourished by the fires that burn deep inside such rocks.’ He nodded to the speckled stack. ‘And the wyrme and its kin, they protect the wyrmeling until it’s old enough to fly.’

  ‘And you think that’s what’s happened?’

  Eli shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said, and looked at the boy. ‘When was it you were attacked, Micah? Three weeks back? Maybe the wyve has hatched and the wyrmeling flown.’ He scratched at the back of his neck. ‘I sure can’t see no sign of wyrmekin now.’

  Micah put his spyglass to his eye again and scanned the stack, the magnified image flitting over the rock surface, hovering over cracks and crevices, clumps of hagweed, screespill …

  ‘Nor kith,’ said Eli. He lowered his arms, shook his head. ‘So much for my great idea. I didn’t want to trouble you with it before we got here, Micah – seeing as this is where you came by your wound.’

  Micah turned, waited.

  ‘I had a notion there would be a fight, boy, a skirmish – and I was betting on the wyrmekin to win that fight. I expected them five kith to wind up dead, their equipment and supplies just lying there waiting to be picked over …’

  ‘Like by carrionwyrmes,’ said Micah quietly.

  ‘That’s the way it is here in the weald, son,’ said Eli, glancing down at the fine spyglass in Micah’s hand. ‘It don’t do to get too squeamish.’

  Micah nodded. ‘So where might they be?’ he asked.

  ‘That, Micah, is the question.’

  Eli snapped the spyglass shut, pushed it back out of sight in the folds of his jacket and clambered to his feet. He held out a hand and pulled Micah up.

  ‘Come on, lad, let us take a closer look. That accursed curiosity of mine won’t diminish till it’s been satisfied once and for all.’

  They headed down the steep slope, keeping downwind. Micah struggled to keep up, scanning the sky, peering behind rocks, for dangerous kin, dangerous kith. The land levelled out. They approached the deserted speckled stack, stopped at its base and looked up.

  ‘Happen they must have arrived here, found as little as we have, and left empty-handed …’ said Eli. ‘Been and gone.’ He tugged the brim of his hat and tipped it forward. ‘We might as well head back to the winter den, Micah. There’s nothing for us here.’

  He turned away, and Micah was about to follow when something caught his gaze.

 
‘What’s that?’ he breathed.

  Thirty-One

  Aseel saw the whitewyrme in the distance, climbing towards the heavens, and quickened the beat of his wings. He opened his jaws wide and from deep in his chest there came a booming call.

  ‘Ay … ell … saaah …’

  As he rose to meet her, the whitewyrme inclined her head and replied, her call as soft and susurrating as a wyrmecomb breeze.

  ‘Aah … zheeeell …’

  Aseel folded his wings and swooped down through the air towards her.

  Facing each other now, their bellies almost touching, the two whitewyrmes flew upwards in a near vertical ascent. Aseel looked into the whitewyrme’s eyes and saw a dark-red passion that mirrored his own.

  This was the whitewyrme who had been calling to him; the whitewyrme he’d known since their fledging in the colony. This was Aylsa.

  The clicking sounds in the back of her throat were almost lost in the windrush as they soared ever higher, but Aseel saw her neck tense and her nostrils flare. She could smell the taint of his kin, Thrace, upon him. Yet she did not break away.

  ‘Ay … ell … saah …’

  Her name, like a sigh, escaped from Aseel’s mouth, with a wisp of smoke that was snatched away on the wind. His gaze strayed along the length of her body.

  Like his own, it had darkened, the white skin suffused with a pearl-grey sheen that swirled with evershifting colours – gold and magenta, vibrant blues and greens – like oil on water. Her raised scales gleamed as if freshly burnished, and her fiery breath was silver-white and powerful and smelled of an intoxicating musk that drew him ever closer to her.

  ‘Aah … zheeell …’ The sound quavered at the back of Aylsa’s throat and set her tongue flickering.

  A great plume of breath billowed out of Aseel’s nostrils into the icy air, and suddenly the two wyrmes were spiralling together like a length of twisting twine in a fury of neckwinding and wingcaress. Then they were falling; tumbling down, down, their sinuous bodies locked together as they clawed and grasped at each other in a cloud of smoke and flame.

  The jagged mountain peaks came rushing up to meet them until, with a judder of ecstasy, they separated at the very last moment and rose once more on scorched wings to repeat the process again and again and again …

  They landed at last on two high crags and stood looking at each other with yellow eyes, dimmed with exhaustion. They both bore the marks of their mating – backs criss-crossed with clawmarks, wings scratched and chafed and fire-charred. Yet the pain they felt was deeper.

  Aylsa looked into Aseel’s eyes. She could still smell the taint upon him, and knew he would now return to his kin, wherever she was.

  Aseel nodded.

  Aylsa launched herself from the crag and rose up into the air. Slowly, deliberately, with steady wingbeats, she headed towards the setting sun.

  She did not look back.

  Thirty-Two

  It was a girl.

  She was lying face down at the foot of the speckled stack. Her head was turned away, and long hair, the colour of ashflecked corn, hung down over the rock. The silver grey, Micah now saw, was wyrmeskin of some sort, but finer and more silken than any he’d ever seen. A limp arm dangled forward at an angle that did not look natural.

  He stepped closer and crouched down by her side, his mouth dry and heart hammering in his chest. The gossamer-like covering encased her slim body like a second skin, the sheen gleaming at her elbows, her backbone; tight over the contour of her hip and curve of her thigh.

  She was still alive. Just. He could hear her low faltering breath, and watched as her slender back moved gently up and down.

  Behind him, Eli sucked in air between his teeth with a wet click. Micah tore his gaze away from the girl, and looked at him.

  ‘Wyrmekin,’ he said, ‘and she looks to be in a bad way. We’re gonna have to sort out that dislocated shoulder.’

  Micah turned back to the fallen girl, and his gaze fell upon the top of her back, where the bladebone was pressing up through the silver-grey wyrmeskin, sharp and angular.

  ‘Just as well she’s not conscious,’ Eli murmured. ‘For this will surely hurt.’ He cleared his throat and stepped forward. ‘I’m gonna need your help, son. I want you to do exactly what I tell you.’

  Micah nodded grimly.

  ‘We’ll have to turn her over onto her back, real gentle. You ready?’

  Micah nodded. Blood rushed in his ears, like wind through thornscrub. The muscles in his jaw tensed as he reached forward and placed trembling hands upon the girl’s skinclad body, at the top and bottom of her back. The wyrmeskin – or soulskin as Eli had called it – was smooth and soft, and he could feel the gentle rise and fall of her breathing beneath his fingertips.

  ‘Easy now,’ Eli said, taking a hold of the dangling arm and supporting it between the elbow and the wrist. ‘That’s it. Now, push.’

  Carefully, tenderly, they turned the girl over. She wasn’t heavy. She rolled onto her side with a soft gasping sigh, and Micah leaned across her, his hand cupped at the back of her neck. Her long ash-yellow hair lay across her face like a veil. Micah could smell its musky smoke-tinged scent as he laid her head gently down on the rock and straightened up.

  ‘Take a hold of her shoulder,’ Eli was saying, ‘but don’t exert any pressure. When I say so, press that jutting bone, kind of smoothing it. Firmly,’ he added. ‘But gentle. Don’t force it none.’

  Guided by Eli, Micah placed one hand at the top of her shoulder and the other just below the protruding shoulder blade, and winced as he felt the obvious dislocation of the joint. His gaze slid down her body; over the breasts that quivered with every faltering breath, across her flat stomach and down her slim legs. Slight, delicate and broken she might be, but there was also a sinuous strength in this girl – toned muscle beneath the soulskin, firm and hard beneath his fingers.

  ‘You all set?’ said Eli.

  Micah gave the slightest of nods. The cragclimber was stooping down, pulling off a boot, which he kicked aside. He placed his bare foot carefully in the girl’s armpit against her chest wall. Then, leaning forward, he shifted his grip, using both hands to hold her arm, above and below the elbow, and levered it steadily backwards. He increased his grip and twisted the arm slightly.

  The girl stirred, muttering softly, but did not wake up. Micah swallowed.

  Eli exerted more pressure, grunting with the effort of it. ‘Now, Micah,’ he said. ‘Nice and smooth …’

  Micah pressed down firmly on the protruding bone and endeavoured to ease his hand forward. His fingers shook; sweat beaded his forehead and ran down into his eyes, making them sting.

  Eli pulled the arm a mite harder. ‘Gentle but firm,’ he breathed.

  Micah felt a soft grinding sensation in his fingertips as the ball of the upper arm bone slipped back into its socket, and a low gasp of pain escaped from the girl as her body flinched, and then relaxed. Micah’s heart cramped up inside his chest, leaving him aching and breathless. He reached forward and gently parted the curtain of hair that obscured the girl’s face, and bit into his lower lip as a yawning hollow seemed to open up in the pit of his stomach.

  She was beautiful, so beautiful; but it was a strange and wild beauty. Her nose was slender and slightly upturned, yet the flare of the nostrils suggested strong passion, and a hint of disdain. Her pale lips were full and sensuous, with the faintest traces of lines at their corners; lines that spoke of determination, of wilfulness. The slight cleft in her chin looked so sweet and delicate that Micah found himself drawn to touch it tenderly with his fingertips.

  He leaned forward. Her breath was warm and aromatic, though laced with something sour. Her eyes were closed, and he longed for them to open and return his gaze. As for her skin, it was pale, translucent and flawless and, just looking at it, Micah felt the yearning to reach out and caress
it swell inside his chest.

  The rushing noise in his ears intensified. He felt hot and shivery. Transfixed, he stared at her face, open-mouthed and perfectly still, then gasped sharply as he remembered to breathe.

  He reached forward and brushed gently at particles of red dust that clung to her quivering eyelashes. He traced his fingertips round the dark semi-circles that saucered her eyes and looked like bruises, but were not, and over the real bruise, black and mottled, that smudged her high cheekbone. The skin was so soft it felt like buttered silk …

  He noticed a thread at the corner of her mouth, and his fingers closed upon it. He pulled. The thread lengthened, but then stopped. He crouched forward. He parted her lips.

  There was something there – a corner of dirty cloth, which he eased out, slowly and gently from her mouth. The cloth snagged for a moment on sharp teeth, then gave, and he found himself staring down at a crumpled square of filthy rag that glistened in the palm of his shaking hand.

  He turned to Eli. ‘We can’t leave her here,’ he said.

  Thirty-Three

  The girl’s head swam and her body felt bruised and sore, and when she tried to move, a blade of pain stabbed at her shoulder. She winced, and froze, and waited for the sharp pain to subside.

  Her nostrils flared as she sniffed at the air. It smelled spicy and dustdry. Peatmoss, she identified, and valley bracken, and her fingertips confirmed that she was lying on a soft mattress of their dried filaments and fronds. She detected another smell besides, sweet yet acrid, that she recognized as the odour of burning wood. Spit-hickory. And when she listened she heard the hissing crackle of a fire; that, and the creak and rustle of someone moving somewhere close by, trying to be quiet. The creeping footfalls sounded heavy and the breathing was low. This was a man – a young man, she judged, by the sound he made when he cleared his throat.

  Where was she?

  Tentatively the girl parted her eyelids till there was a thin crack between them. She saw walls – thick oppressive walls, constructed from large slabs of rock that had been painstakingly placed together, one on top of the other, and appeared mortared by the darkness of night that seeped between them.